Free Erased by Jordan Marshall

intact and her consciousness moved fluidly from Sara’s personality to her deadly alter ego. Somewhere along the way, something had gone wrong.
    It was on the roof. It had to be on that roof. But what had happened? When he figured it out, heads were going to roll.
     

 
     
     
    Chapter 14
     
     
     
    The dense Friday afternoon traffic had thwarted Sara’s efforts to lose her tail, but she’d managed to gain some distance on the Suburban as she entered the Golden Gate Bridge. At the north end of the bridge, the road narrowed into the climb towards the Waldo Tunnel. Traffic always clogged up there, even when it was light. She hoped to use the congestion up ahead to make her escape. Sara figured that she could get through quicker than the cumbersome SUV. If she could do that, she knew they’d never catch her.
    She gave the Roadrunner some gas as she spotted an opening. She pulled ahead and gained a few more yards. Then, something strange happened.
    Sara was in the center lane. There was a white delivery van to her right. To the left, a luxury sedan, and behind that, a convertible. Sara had her eye on all three vehicles because she wanted to stay ahead of them. The more traffic she put in her rear view mirror, the more her pursuers would have to muddle through when the road narrowed on the incline.
    Then, mysteriously, the cars around her all suddenly died. The van decelerated and came drifting towards her. The driver gave no warning. No turn signal, no lights, and no horn. The van simply began moving into her lane. Sara punched the accelerator and skipped into the next lane, ahead of the sedan. She glanced over her shoulder and saw the van careening across the lanes behind her, towards the inside barrier. It narrowly missed the sedan, but hit the convertible in the rear quarter. The convertible spun out and slammed into the inside barrier. The sedan rolled to a stop, parked at an odd angle across two lanes.
    All along the north end of the Golden Gate, cars began piling up. Sara swerved to miss another car that was rolling to a stop ahead of her, and then had to cut through two more as they wobbled back and forth across the lanes.
    She flew through them and sped off the bridge, flying up the hill towards the tunnel. As she headed up the slope, she glanced back at the eerie scene and saw the Suburban sitting at a dead stop near the south end of the bridge. A hundred stalled cars and several accidents lay between them. Sara frowned at the strangeness of it all. She had no rational explanation for what had happened. But she was smart enough to take advantage. She hit the gas and disappeared into the tunnel.
     
    *
     
    A sense of dread overcame Sara as she parked in front of her house. The paint on the garage was faded and peeling from neglect, and the lawn was brown and dead. Scott would never have allowed that to happen.
    The living room curtains were gone. An old blanket hung over the window. One of the window screens was torn and hanging from the frame. Sara had the eerie sensation that she’d parked at the wrong house. She even glanced up at the address just to make sure.
    Sara went inside. She called Scott’s name and got no response. The smell instantly overwhelmed her, and she almost retched. It was revolting, like a trip to the city dump on a windy day. She winced. As her eyes adjusted to the dark interior, things only got worse.
    Old, stained bed sheets and blankets had replaced all of the curtains in the house. The leather sofa in the living room was gone, in its place a disheveled orange pullout that the Salvation Army would have rejected. The flat-screen TV was gone as well. The living room walls were plastered with newspaper clippings of Fortress and his band, and Nazi propaganda. Sara staggered forward, unable to believe what she was seeing. She had the urge to start pulling everything down, but she didn’t even know where to start.
    She wandered through the house in a daze. Her home -her quaint Marin county