(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 21

We had both been silent for longer than either of us felt comfortable. But then again, neither one knew exactly what to say. Mischa was the one who finally broke the silence.
"So... is that a time travel thing?" he asked, sounding almost like a shy child not wanting to ask a stupid question. I shook my head.
"Uhm," he followed up, "are you sure? I mean, all due respect and stuff, but do you know enough about this stuff to be sure?"
He had a point. The thought of how much I didn't know bounced around my brain for a few seconds, then I just shook my head again.
"Why here?" he finally asked, sounding more asertive again. "Why Nakskov? Why not Copenhagen, or at least Aarhus? Some place that's more... more. Hell, Berlin isn't that far away, if you look at the big picture. Why here?"
"I don't know," I heard myself say, or more precisely, mumble. I was sipping a cheap soda almost mechanically, a little sip every few seconds, like clockwork, The small grill by the harbor was still open, and I had felt a dire need to not just get some sugar in my system, but to sit down. Perhaps even mostly just sit down. The sugar helped, though.
"Seriously," Mischa continued, clearly letting off some steam by just thinking out loud, "Nakskov is, like, nothing. What do we have that's so great for a bunch of time travelers and... whatever that girl was? It's a shithole. Ten thousand people gathered around a small bay. It's farmland and carpenters, for #*@!'s sake! Do their time machines run on wheat or something?"
"Maybe that's exactly why," I again mumbled. Mischa stopped his flow of words and just looked at me with those big, brown eyes, looking like a child that had just been told that maybe, just maybe, Santa wasn't actually made up.
"Wheat time machines?" he asked when I failed to elaborate.
"No. The, uhm... the shithole thing. There's nothing here."
"Right," he said, sounding as if he had simply had his complaint confirmed.
"No, I mean, there's nothing here, right? Nobody is looking over your shoulder. I mean, my mom is like this shy person most of the time, but she sunbathes topless in our backyard, because nobody really cares what people do around here. You could have a collection of human skulls stacked up out there and nobody would ever need to know! Maybe it's just a good place to hide, somewhere to be left in peace."
I looked up from my thoughts to find Mischa staring at me with a weird expression in his eyes, a strange look of horror and surprise.
"What?"
"Your mom is topless in your backyard?" he asked, sounding both terrified and skeptical, all at once.
"We're dealing with time travelers and speedrunners and I talk about a collection of skulls, and that's what you focus on?"
His mindblown expression slowly slipped off his face, and he even seemed to relax a bit.
"Well, we're not gonna find little miss speedy again, I think," he grumbled, sighing deeply in between words. "So what, we go for the guy? Check the supermarkets one by one?"
"I don't know," I said, my enthusiasm very limited. "I need to get to the time traveler house soon. It's a bit outside of town, so I..."
"Why?" Mischa asked, taking a breath as he put his own soda on the large wooden table. Shadows were beginning to stretch. Early evening. Early evening chill setting in, slowly. "Aren't you going..." He stopped himself, suddenly looking as if the gears in his head had kicked in. "Oh, the double. Or copy, or whatever. Is it even safe having it around your family? And what are you going to do about money? What about your phone?"
Groaning loudly, I hid my head on the table, underneath both hands, my long hair slipping between the wooden boards of the table and dropping down under it.
"I think my phone got busted out at the school, anyway. And I got a bit of cash on me, but after that, I don't know. But yeah, it's supposed to be safe to have it walking around. It's not an evil clone, really, just something pretending to be me so nobody will come look for me."
I was honestly a little horrified at how casually I dismissed the whole situation, as if having someone, or something, take over my life was mainly just a bit of a bother, and not the life altering thing it should be. I was tired. There were plenty of things to be horrified by.
"You could also go to the old school building. There's plenty of..."
"No #*@!ing way," I laughed, frowning. "That place is #*@!ed up. I don't even know if I ever want to go there again. We got some anti-time travel clothes, or whatever you wanna call it, so I'm good."
"There's an empty house near by me," Mischa added, setting down his now empty soda bottle. "I think they left the furniture there, for whoever buys it."
I looked at him, trying to conceal my skepticism.
"You want me to crash somebody's home for sale?"
He just shrugged, picking up my soda and taking a deep sip, nearly emptying the thing out.
"It's a home. You know, kinda. They got a key under one of those false rocks, I saw them put it there a month or so ago when they were checking up on the place."
"So they check up on it. Won't they..."
"Not in the middles of the night. Pretty sure you'll be safe."
I leaned back againt the table. I had squirmed in my seat enough that I was now looking out over the harbor, my back halfway towards Mischa and the other side of the table. My legs kept moving, twitching, like two dogs eager to go out and play. The rest of me was less energetic.
"Hmmm," I groaned, feeling very indecisive. "Well, I'll try."
A car in the nearby lot backed out and slowly joined the light traffic on the road passing us by. It was the last one close to us, the next car so far down the harbor parking strip that it was basically just a big, ocean blue blob in the distance. People were getting ready to call it a day.
"Supermarkets are still open a few hours," Mischa commented as he finished my soda for me. I nodded.

The house was small, at least by Nakskov standards. Nice, with a lush garden, driveway free of weeds. A weird little statue of a dog stood in the garden, looking absentmindedly into the air. Mischa had quickly found the hidden key, almost as if he had planned this for some time, or even done it before. No alarms went off, nobody came running. He stayed for about half an hour, looking through the house with me, just to make sure it was truly abandonned. It was, although he was right that it was fully furnished. Old people did that a lot when they sold a house, taking only a few things with them. They typically moved to smaller places, easier to maintain, and had no room for all the big things. And people apparently liked seeing a house furnished, soemeone had told me. I had no idea. We had moved once in my lifetime, and I was too young then to really think about the details of it all.
Once Mischa left, everything became disturbingly quiet. No sounds of my sister, my mom, or Peter. No friends sleeping over. No TV in the living room, mumbling in the background for whoever was watching whatever. Just the silence.
I started out trying the bed, but something felt wrong. I was in a strange house, in ome stranger's bed, and I didn't like it. The couch was a lot smaller and harder, but it fit my size, and I didn't mind the rest.
Closing my eyes, I saw flashes of people in my head, people in the streets, normal people, everyone a potential time traveler. I felt my body clench, muscles tensing up, everything becoming warm. A simple blanket, slightly rough in the fabric, was enough to make me almost boil, and it quickly went to the floor. Opening my eyes, I saw nothing. Darkness, barely any moonlight shining in. As I sat up, feeling my heart beat far too fast for someone trying to sleep, I laid out the best map of the house I could in my head. Time had passed. It hadn't been this dark when I closed my eyes. Apparently, I had slept, even if not for very long.
The kitchen was the hardest part to navigate in the dark. The moonlight, what little there was, fell mainly through a few large windows in the living room. The kitchen was on the other side of the house, only the yellow tint of a nearby streetlamp reaching through the slowly overgrowing bushes outside. Many houses looked like this in town. Nice homes, their owners now too old to maintain them well, keeping them only in good enough condition to raise their chances of selling at a fair price. More of them succeeded than people thought, but still, there were enough houses like this one around.
For whatever reason, water till worked. A handful of glasses had been left behind, the kind that screamed bulk purchase, no discerning marks on them, barely even much sign of use. I filled one tall glass with water, ice cold, likely no warm water to be had anywhere. It made me feel better about not taking a bath. There were no towels, but there were always alternatives, but without warm water, it seemed better to wait this one night out. And as a bonus, the water being so cold made it feel better to drink. My mom mocked me a bit about my dislike of water. I was a milk fan, and her comparisons to barnyard animals, although meant as friendly teasing, sometimes got a bit tiring.
Then, I froze. The water was not the cause, although it might have made the chill going through my body a bit colder. The silence was intense, the only thing having cut into it being some distant dog barking loudly, and only briefly. But in that silence, something shifted. The silence changed. I was never one to have very acute hearing, but in this perfect silence, everything, every little detail, became far clearer. The silence had a different tone, a different pitch, and I had no idea why.
Slowly, glass in hand, I took small steps towards the living room. In the faint bits of yellow streetlight, only the biggest contours of the house could be seen clearly. Door frames, sharp corners, large furniture. My bare feet felt the floor for anything I might step on, or something that could slip under my feet when I put my weight on it. Every toe became a small finger, every finger became an extra eye for me to scan my surroundings. I found nothing, the house having been cleared of nearly all minor things not left in cupboards and drawers.
"Step carefully, little girl," said a voice in the dark. Hearing it, I felt my body shake in a sudden motion, and felt cold water splash over my wrist from the glass.
"Go... away," I whispered, some part of my brain still making a big deal out of this being someone else's house.
"Why the sneaking?" the voice asked, with an undertone of irritation, and a small light turned on in the corner of the living room. Despite its size, that one lamp cast a spooky glow across the entire room. In the corner sat the woman in white.
"You're not by any chance trying to hide, are you, Ida?" she asked. Her face looked wrong, the skin not the same smooth, silken texture as what I remembered of her. Lines, faint shadows, ran across it, fine little patterns that made it seem like a children's puzzle game, the kind with only a few pieces. "What would your new friends say?"
"To what`" I asked, making sure to put a bit of defiance into my voice.
The woman reached out to touch the lamp, and its light intensified a little. The lines were very fine scars.
"To you avoiding them," she answered, acting as if it had been nothing but an honest question. "A little trouble in paradise?"
I took a careful step farther into the room, feeling oddly exposed standing in the open corner that connected it to the kitchen and hallway. She was sitting in a large recliner, opposite the couch, and looked far more comfortable than I liked seeing. She had a cane with her, a thin, sturdy-looking one. She clearly noticed that I was eyeing it.
"Yeah, your little stunt left quite a mark on me. Of course, what you did to poor Kurt was..."
"That wasn't Kurt," I said in a quick voice. "What did you do to the real Kurt?"
The woman played a bit with the cane, turning it between her fingers without lifting it from the floor.
"Kurt was very helpful. Sadly, he got too close to your friends, and bad things happened to him." Her eyes seemed a bit distant as she spoke, as if she was not that comfortable recalling what she talked about. "We made a replacement, just to ensure that his family didn't have to know what had happened."
"so, you're all humanitarian, are you?" I asked, keeping my tone as flat as possible, not wanting to sound too hostile. Except for the sarcasm, of course.
The woman turned her eyes to look directly at me, the cane suddenly still against the floor.
"You're picking dangerous friends, Ida. These people are not the kind you want to hang around. Their friends get hurt."
"Is that a threat?" I asked, almost cutting her off.
"Not really," she commented calmly. "More a warning. Don't think for a minute you're the first they use."
I said nothing in return. I felt a lot, though, such as anger, fear, some disgust at her very casual way of talking about the thing that had happened. It bothered me, seeing her talk about them as if they were almost banal.
"I, however, could use someone like you."
My mouth fell a bit open, but no sound came out. I blinked, several times, and most of the intense feelings growing inside of me vanished like dust in the wind.
"Don't be so surprised," she said, clearly spotting my reaction in the stark light of the small lamp. "You're using old clothes to defend yourself against ome of my best people. That's quite some initiative you got there."
I looked at her, squinting in a touch of confusion. No part of her body language suggested that she was joking.
"You're offering me... a job?"
A bit wobbly, she got up from the recliner, standing as if she had a few issues with balance. Once she found her footing, she looked over at me again.
"If you want it," she said, her voice sounding a bit weaker, perhaps from some strain in the leg. "We need good people, clever people. Replacements are our last resort, nearly everyone works for me freely. Most even get paid."
She smiled as she spoke the last few words, a smile that she no doubt felt was warm and friendly. In the odd lighting, the lamp now enough behind her to make her weirdly lit from one side, shadows crawling across every part of her, made every move she made seem sinister, and the smile seem like a comic book exaggeration. Combined with my imagination and feelings about her, it was hard to judge what was sincere and what was not.
"Look, I don't really want anything to do with all of this," I said, sighing a bit as I spoke. "I just want to go home to my family and..."
There was a shift in her face. She did her best to hide it, but the moment she realized I was declining her offer, her eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. In normal lighting, it would have been nearly impossible to spot, especially when not looking for it. In the strange lighting, it stood out like sharp, crisp lines. And the moment I stopped talking, I heard faint sounds from many places in the house. In the large windows, I caught the vague shape of something behind me!
In a single move, I leaped forward, towards her, my left hand moving a single obstructing chair out of my way! My right hand reached out to grab her, to hold on as I pushed myself against her with all of my might to send her back to whenever she came from. But before I even got half there, she pulled the cane up against me. It hit me in the chest with enough force to hurt, but that was clearly not what she was mostly going for.
"Oh no," she said, her voice cold and unimpressed, "we can't have that."
A small shockwave went through me, like being slapped hard all over the body all at once! It knocked the air out of my lungs, and along with the soft punch of the cane to my chest, made me stop and fall to my knees by the chair that my hand was still on. I gasped a few times, feeling suddenly out of breath. But most of all, I felt no more of that softly humming energy that I had felt as I got near her.
With the cane slung over her shoulder like some unopened umbrella, she suddenly had no problem walking right. The moment I noticed that, she also noticed that I had noticed it, and she wiggled her leg a bit, mocking me for just a second.
"Well, your replacement is already sound asleep in your actual bed, so I guess we can..."
She looked up at whoever, or whatever, was behind me, but her words got interrupted as a crackle went through the air, and bits and pieces of plastic and metal showered my head from behind, falling around me like fresh, chunky, colorful snow. All I saw was the woman in white look up at something I had no way of seeing.
What happened next was mostly a blur. Windows crashed, glass splintering on the floor seemingly everywhere, as humanoid shapes burst in from just about every direction. Some glittered, vague shapes of transparent skin, strange reflections filling them inside. The same as my copy, before she took her form. The others were very real people, or looked like it. They had oddities to them, though, marks on their skin, strange clothes, awkward movements.
"Ida, get down!" shouted a voice, one I quickly recognized as Vera! I ducked down behind the nearby couch, not even thinking before reacting to her command!
Strange pops and streaks of light filled the air, the light from them making the walls light up like a fuzzy cinema screen. I heard shouts and the clacking of more bits and pieces against the floor as Vera used whatever the device she had brought was, making the unused copy creatures burst open like pinatas.
"Ida, do your thing!" she shouted, and I turned to shout back that I couldn't, but had to duck back when lights flew by me. Even the words I managed to shout never got to her, drowned out by the noise. My heart in my throat I looked around for something, anything, that I could use to defend myself.
She more slammed into the couch than landed behind it, making an inelegant jump across the room as I saw the shadows of whatever remained move in on us. Hair and coat a chaotic mess, her 80s glasses lost somewhere on the floor, she looked on the edge of pure panic.
"Your thing, your zappy thing, use it!" she shouted, trying hard to drown out the background noise. Even with nothing to shoot at, it seemed the attackers were perfectly satisfied with firing wildly.
"It's gone, she drained it somehow!" I shouted back, seeing her eyes grow full of fear.
"I got all the artificial ones," she shouted, "but the rest are time travelers. We need your stuff!"
My heart raced, adrenaline flowing through my brain like a flash flood of useless energy. My eyes kept roaming the room, looking for anything. They finally found it!
"Cover me," I yelled, "I'm going for my socks!"
"With what?" she asked in frustration, but I was already throwing myself into the chaos. In perhaps the most impressive display of agility I had ever performed, I rolled over the top of the couch, grabbing the socks from the floor even before I landed on it myself. As soon as a foot touched ground, I threw myself to the side and around the old bit of furniture, returning to my cover within a second or two of leaving it.
Vera stared in complete confusion as I pulled my socks over my hands as improvised gloves.
"I never wear socks in bed," I just mumbled as an answer. Then I jumped out from our cover, on the opposite side that I dove back behind it.
I had spotted how the people in the room were spread out as soon as I had grabbed the socks earlier. They were mostly moving around the couch on the same end as I had, which meant that I was now on the opposite end of it from them. One of them had taken another route, and he was now the closest to me. His eyes were on the rest, though, and he only spotted me after it was too late. With a roar, just because it felt right, I jumped on the table and then onto him,grabbing his face with my sock-covered hands. When he screamed in surprise, I wasted no time and shoved one sock-hand into his mouth. His screams were completely muffled as colored dots began appearing all around his head. I didn't wait to see them finish.
Only a few of the rest realized right away that something was happening on the other side of the room. I planted a flat hand in the face of one of them quickly, not enough to cause any pain from the punch, but enough to mash the sock firmly into the face, causing the little colored dots to swarm him almost immediately! His buddy, standing behind him, suddenly had no idea what to do. He wore the same odd lines on his skin as the man that had come for Camilla, and I wasted no time throwing myself at him. He was tall, but I simply grabbed on to his leg, planting one sock in his groin and one on his ass. He screamed, very loud.
Before any of the remainders couold act, Vera stormed them from behind the now charred and hole-riddled couch. The device she had in her hand was clearly for the robot copy things, because she made no effort to use it. Instead, she bodyslammed into two of them, using the crammed space to her advantage. The three others that remained instantly turned their assorted weapons, or whatever they were, on her, clearly not expecting to deal with a two-sided attack. I planted both hands in the lower back of one of them, watching only for a second as he writhed in pain and tumbled to the floor, the colored dots basically consuming his lower back. For the other two, I had long enough arms to wrap one around a leg on either, sending their knees back to wherever they had come from. The two that Vera had bodyslammed were on their feet again, but they were not looking for a fight any longer! Scrambling clumsily to get by me and out through the broken windows, one of them stumbled close enough by for me to catch his angles. As his feet flared up with colored dots, I let go and ran for the door, avoiding Vera as I did, so she didn't get touched by the socks.
There was a strange smell on the air as I got outside. Crisp, like bacon and bonfire. It took me a moment to realize that the house had caught on fire! Vera, fumbling her way out of the house, slamming into nearly every wall an bush on her way, came out surrounded by a billowing cloud of smoke that looked like it was only starting. In the dark, I hadn't seen the smoke, and the light from whatever they had been shooting with inside still had funny lines lingering in my eyes. Even without the smoke, things looked foggy.
"Car!" yelled Vera, as she ran headlong into the little dog statue. She was off balance and seemed to have no sense of direction, flailing her arms to make sure her path was clear. Whether blinded or just dazed, she was fighting just to run.
"Car!" she yelled again, pointing off in the distance. There was nothing in the direction she pointed, but as I got to the street outside, I spotted the beat up, rusty remains of a car that she was clearly refering to, the same that she had driven me in earlier in the day. I hesitated, looking back at her as she seemed to get a better grip on where to run, fearing that she might go smack into a wall or end up in some bushes. She seemed to manage, even if just barely!
"Car!" she yelled again, as she got to the street. I was already at the car, standing by the open passenger door, but I had no idea if she even knew where I was. Shaking her head and coughing badly, she took one look behind her, then finally made a run for the car.
"I called for you," she coughed as she arrived. I had opened the door for her to the driver's seat, but she still fumbled with the door. Right before entering the car, she suddenly froze up. Then she turned around, and I could hear her either coughing really badly, or actually throwing up on the street.
"I ran to the car like you said," I answered. I tried to look her in the eyes, to see if he was even okay, but her head kept twisting and turning, and she wsa blinking and grimassing every two seconds, making any eye contact impossible.
"No, I called for a car, I needed you to..."
"Are you serious?!" I heard my self burst out, as she finally got a grip on the key and started the car. "I can't drive, I'm 13!"
As she punched the accelerator, sending a tremor through the car as if it was about to rip itself apart, she looked straight at me. Her eyes were so red it was impossible to tell if they were irritated, bloodshot, or flat out bleeding.
"So?" she simply asked, then turned her eyes to the street ahead, although she squinted and looked like she might pass out from the strain. There was a loud bump and the windshield cracked.
"What the hell was that?!" I more or less yelled at her. She looked like nothing ahd happened, still squinting and tense.
"I think we only cut through the first wave in there," she said, voice raspy and heaving. Then she coughed. In the limited light from the streets, I only saw something dark land on the hand she covered her mouth with. I turned to look behind us, and she might jut have been right. Lights were gathering above the house, lights that had a purpose of some kind. Shapes in the dark dropped down, while others could be seen in the street. The house was an orange blaze.
"I think we got away," I sighed. Turning towards her, I saw no sign that she agreed.
"We never get away," she growled, mostly under her breath, as if it was more an internal monologue that escaped her by accident, than something she actually meant to say to me.
"Buckle up," she added, in a voice more clearly meant for me. Horrified that I hadn't put on my seat belt yet, I rushed to find it. Like everything else, it was in a poor condition, scratched and scraped, as if it had been dragged behind the car rather than hanging in it.
"What about you?" I asked. She glanced briefly at me, her lips tight, on the verge of her biting them as she kept her intense focus on the road. I watched, scared stiff, as she pressed her knees against the steering wheel to hold it straight, using those precious seconds to fasten her own seat belt.
"Safety first," I heard myself mumble, before I broke eye contact to wonder why the hell my brain had spat out that dumb remark.
About a minute or so later, we were on rough road. She had yet to let the car slow down, even for a second, and in the dark, I had no idea where we were going! The last treetlight made it look like we were going out the town through smaller roads leading north, but I had absolutely no way to know. As the streetlights became fewer and fainter, I noticed that the car itself had no lights on. Once the light was all but gone, she finally let the car slow down.
In the soft light of the Moon, we finally slowed to a halt. At first, we just slowed down to a crawl, Vera looking like she was about to pass out, her head swaying and her eyes blinking and twitching in ways that hinted at nothing healthy. In the moonlight, I noticed something passing by the windows, large pillars that I eventually realized were thick trees.
"Where are we?" I asked, surprised at how calm my own voice sounded.
"Forest," she hissed, her face contorting badly as she spoke. I looked her over to see if she was hurt, but in the dark, I could only make out her greneral figure. What little light snuck in to illuminate her face didn't help all that much, either. She could simply be frowning strongly, or even be smiling in a very unusual way. I had my doubts, though.
The car finally parked. What light came through the trees suggested that we were in a small rest stop by the road, which meant that we were probably outside of town at this point, perhaps even well outside of it. My heart skipped a few beats when Vera slumped forward, leaning her head hard against the steering wheel and letting out a deep groan.
"You okay?"
"I'll manage," she said, sounding like someone about to throw up again. She then proceeded to breathe deeply a few times, very deeply, the air making a faint whistling sound as it passed between her teeth.
"Ida," she hissed, turning her head a bit on the steering wheel to look at me. "The back seat. There's a box there, can you reach it?"
I turned, unbuckling my seatbelt when it tried to hold me back. It flopped into my lap, the rollback mechanism clearly busted, though it was anyone's guess if it had happened now or long ago.
"Yeah, big metal one, right? Looks like an old toolbox?"
I nearly crapped my pants when Vera nodded and, her head still on the steering wheel, accidentally activated the horn. She flew up, looking around, then sank back in her seat with another deep groan.
"Open the backseat door without leaving the car. Then push the box outside."
I did as she asked. When the box hit the ground outside, it suddenly started to screech and rattle wildly, and Iflew back in my seat!
"Did it open?" she asked, and I shook my head. Apparently, even in the dark, she could see my answer.
"Don't leave the car," she said, her voice strained more than I liked. "Just take broom back there and push the box over. Damned thing probably landed on the lid."
Doing as she said, I found the broom, an old, wooden thing with quite a few marks in it, and got the box to roll over after a few tries. I screamed as something big ran out of it, peeking in through the backseat door, then running away, perhaps frightened by me.
"Was that a..." I turned back to look out the open backseat door. "Was that a #*@!ing rat? Did I just let a rat out of a box?!"
"Two rats," Vera gasped. "You let two very big rats out of a box. They're likely pretty pissed, too!"
As Vera started to softly laugh at the idea of angry rats, I just sat back, everything else escaping my mind for just a few seconds. She was running out of steam, but to hear her laugh, even just this little, somehow struck me as bizarre. I smiled a bit myself, mostly from reflex.
"Vera?" She didn't react, although she was still clearly awake. "Vera? Why did I jut let two big rats out of a box?"
She finally reacted, maybe just not in the habit of responding to her new name, yet. Saying nothing, she pointed out the window, at the trees and the sky. I looked. There were trees and sky.
"What am I..."
"Keep a steady eye on the stars," she whispered. A moment after she said that, the stars seemed to shift around, just briefly.
"What was that?"
She was smiling. Even in the faint light, I could see her smiling.
"They went by, right?"
I nodded.
"Her invisible ships. Their still hunting us, and they can see just about everything. Their magnetic scans probably never lost the car, and now their infrared scans saw two large shapes dart out across the forest floor. Pretty sure they can't make out the exact shapes through the trees, so they'll be hunting those rats for a little while."
Her voice coarse and raspy, she broke out in a fit of laughter, enough that she repeatedly clutched her stomach with a groan, right before she continued laughing. My heart was beating like a heavy metal drummer, but as the point of what she said sank in, the beat slowed. And then, I started laughing, too. Nothing was funny. We were in the middle of nowhere, in a car that was far closer to death than even we were, and with no clear idea what to do next. But we had sent the worst of our problems on a wild hunt.
Nothing was funny. We laughed because we were relieved.