Survivor (Rewinder Series Book 3)

by Brett Battles

  Perhaps I’m just trying to convince myself how awful this world is so that erasing it will be easier. But I’m doing everything I can to observe with an open mind, and what I see does not fill me with hope for the future of Jovan’s people.

  Each new trip we take seems to energize Dumont more, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s getting addicted to the journeys. Which is why I’m surprised when three whole days pass without me being taken to the gray room that serves as our departure hall. Jovan, who has been assigned a job with the maintenance department, noses around where he can, but no one he talks to has seen the professor.

  The thought that keeps fighting to be heard is one I’d rather not consider, but I can’t hide from it. What if she’s decided she no longer needs my help and is now making jumps on her own? Is it possible I’ve already been in the same room with my chaser for the last time? Have I missed my opportunity to save Iffy and Ellie and make things right again?

  Two more days of nothing and I’m on the verge of panic. In the evening, Jovan brings news that Langer and Dumont were spotted leaving the compound via rotor the day after my last jump and have not returned. No one seems to know where they went.

  Did they take the chaser with them? Are they ever coming back?

  I’m in the middle of a loosely supervised walk around the compound grounds on the eighth evening since Dumont’s disappearance, trying to excise some of my tension, when I hear the faint sounds of a rotor. I search the night sky until I pick out the lights of the craft from among the stars. For a while the vehicle seems to hang almost static in the sky, but I soon realize this is because it’s heading straight for us.

  When it circles the facility a few minutes later, I see it’s a large military craft, with turrets sticking out in several places. It appears to have taken some damage in the not too distant past. I lose sight of it as it drops behind one of the buildings and touches down in the landing area. There’s no way for me to get to that part of the base so I’m unable to see if anyone gets off.

  Less than ten minutes later, a two-member escort interrupts my walk and take me to the gray room, where I’m left alone.

  When the door opens again and Dumont hurries in, I try to keep the relief off my face but I doubt I’m very successful. Langer follows a moment later, carrying the chaser container, which she sets on the pedestal.

  “My apologies if I’m interfering with your dinner,” Dumont says.

  Something’s off. She seems distracted.

  “Don’t worry about it. I haven’t even thought about eating yet.”

  “Good…good,” she says as if she hasn’t heard a word I’ve said. “I have something to show you.”

  She nods at Langer, who opens the container and pulls out not my chaser but a box that looks like it, only it’s made from matte brown, high-quality-looking plastic. Langer exchanges it with the container on the pedestal.

  “What do you think?” the professor asks me.

  “What do you mean?

  “My prototype. What do you think?”

  “Prototype. That’s a…that’s a working chaser?”

  “Not yet. But I’m confident it will be within the next few weeks.”

  She slips a finger along the upper edge and the top pops open.

  I stare, dumbfounded, at what is underneath. The buttons, the display screens, even the fastener heads are all intimately familiar.

  “I would have had it done even sooner, if…” She waves a dismissive hand in the air. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “How did you build this?”

  “All you need to build anything is a sample. And we have yours.”

  Every blood cell in my body turns to ice. Slowly, so that my words are as clear as possible, I say, “You opened the chaser?”

  To open a chaser is to render it permanently inoperable. That was one of the lessons Marie hammered into me during my training at the institute. And while I haven’t attempted to prove whether it’s true or not, I absolutely believe it to be so.

  If Dumont has opened my chaser, all is lost. Even if Dumont could get her prototype working, and I find a way to steal it, the log of Lidia’s jumps will have been destroyed. Without it, I can never hope to find and reverse all the time glitches she created.

  “There was no need to open it,” Dumont says. “I have access to the finest imaging machines in the world. I’ve seen every bit of your chaser, inside and out, and I didn’t need to remove a single fastener to do it.”

  My relief is tempered by my concern that the imaging equipment damaged the device. But even that worry disappears as I realize my fear for my chaser made me blind to the much larger terror.

  Dumont is on the verge of creating her own machine.

  Once she does that, many will follow.

  I can no longer wait for the perfect opportunity to act. I must erase this world before the prototype is operational.

  “I can see you’re impressed,” she says.

  That’s not how I would describe what I feel, but I say, “I am.”

  Pleased by my response, she places the prototype back in the container. Langer carries it out of the room.

  “I was going to wait until it was ready to show you, but we are pressed for time.” She cocks her head and grins. “Or we would be if not for your wonderful device.”

  A muffled siren wails from somewhere outside.

  As Dumont curses under her breath, the door opens again and Langer rushes in, carrying a container identical to the one she left with, and a canvas backpack over her shoulder.

  “Hurry, hurry,” Dumont barks.

  The moment the box is on the pedestal, Dumont takes the backpack and unfastens the top of the container. The chaser she pulls out is mine. She unlocks it and inputs jump information.

  Outside, the initial siren has been joined by others. I can also hear a deep, resonating thwack-thwack-thwack that I would say is coming from one of the large guns around the compound’s perimeter.

  Langer looks past me toward the door, her eyes wide with fear, but Dumont seems unfazed as she continues working the buttons.

  Thwack-thwack-thwack.

  More guns, north side of the compound this time.

  Dumont looks over at me. “Get over here!”

  I hurry to her and the three of us link arms.

  Outside, all hell is breaking loose as half a dozen guns open up at the same time. Just as Dumont pushes the go button, the ground rocks from a nearby explosion. But then the mist takes us into its grasp.

  __________

  NIGHT. DARK AND quiet and cool.

  As I’ve taught them to do, Dumont and Langer crouch with me upon arrival.

  We have traveled to February 1, 1961. The locator number means nothing to me, so we could be anywhere on the planet, but given the mild temperature and lack of snow, I guess we’re in an area rarely affected by winter, or south of the equator, where it’s still summer.

  We seem to be at the edge of a dip in the land. Spread out around us are grass and trees and, in the distance, what appears to be plowed fields.

  It takes me a moment, but I finally make out the shapes of several buildings about a quarter mile away. One is much larger than the others. A barn, I think, with a farmhouse and outbuildings around it.

  Now that we know we’re in a safe spot, I ask, “What was all that shooting about?”

  “Not important,” Dumont whispers.

  “It seemed pretty important.”

  She looks away. “No. It’s not, because it’s not going to happen.”

  My stomach clinches. So this isn’t just another research trip. Dumont intends to prevent the attack on the compound. But why come so far back in time?

  Before I can ask this, Dumont adjusts the chaser and we jump again.

  It’s still dark. According to the chaser’s display, we’ve traveled only a minute forward in time. The difference is that the buildings I saw in the distance now loom in front of us, the closest no more than two hundred feet away.<
br />
  “What are we doing here?” I ask.

  “Not your business,” she snaps, her tone meant to remind me I’m merely her consultant.

  She reaches into her tunic and pulls out a small, palm-size, pistol-like weapon.

  “What are you going to do with that?” I say.

  Instead of rebuking me for not keeping my mouth shut, she says, “Solve a problem, once and for all.” She slips the chaser into the backpack and glances at Langer. “You two stay here. I won’t be long.”

  All my instincts tell me to stop her, but I know I can’t. She’ll either shoot me or disable me with a touch of the persuader remote she always carries. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, that whatever she plans on doing won’t affect what I need to do. And yet I feel a sense of helplessness as she sneaks away.

  When we are alone, I whisper to Langer, “Where are we?”

  She shushes me, but I persist until she finally says, “Maryside.”

  I’ve seen that name somewhere. I look at the ground and try to recall where.

  The atlas. Right. When I was correlating locations between this world and the maps on the chaser.

  I didn’t memorize everything, of course, but a few places did catch my attention. Maryside was in a historical atlas, a page showing a portion of the North American west coast that included the area where I grew up—the forbidden zone—before the great war turned it into a wasteland.

  The great city of West Odessa sat in the same place where Los Angeles and New Cardiff would be. Up the coast, located between where my home in the Shallows would be and Iffy’s Santa Barbara, was the small city-state of Maryside.

  Nineteen sixty-one puts us here before the war. All the beauty surrounding us will be destroyed in only a handful of years.

  “What are we doing here?” I ask.

  She refuses to say anything further, but I get my answer two minutes later when a flash lights up one of the windows in the house. While there’s no accompanying sound, I know it’s gunfire. Seconds later, there are more flashes at another window.

  I wait for a third occurrence, but what I see instead is Dumont breaking from the building and heading toward us. She’s not even trying to hide anymore.

  “We’re done here,” she says when she reaches us. She swings her bag off her shoulder and pulls the chaser out.

  “What did you do?”

  She smirks. “You’ll see.”

  She holds out an arm, and with a sense of dread, I take it and offer my other to Langer.

  __________

  WITH THE EXCEPTION of the low glow from the chaser, we arrive in darkness.

  Dumont takes a step forward and runs into something with a loud bang.

  “Min, the lights,” she orders, pain lacing her words.

  There is more noise as Langer feels her way across the room. When the lights come on, I squint until my eyes adjust.

  We’re back in the gray room. Only it looks more like the storage space Dumont described from her initial jump into the past than the clean, nearly empty room we left. Dusty sealed boxes sit in stacks throughout most of the space, while the pedestal and the container that housed the chaser are gone.

  I glance at the chaser’s display screen. We have arrived only two minutes after we departed for Maryside. There wasn’t enough time for the room to have been filled while we were away.

  Dumont looks around, confused, and then looks at the chaser, rechecking the date. But I’m sure the date’s not the problem.

  The reason everything’s changed is directly connected to the trip we just took and the flashes of gunfire in the farmhouse windows. If you’ll pardon the paraphrase, for every action there is a reaction.

  Dumont puts the chaser back in her backpack. “Stay close.”

  She leads us to the door and opens it. The hallway is as dark as the room was when we arrived, and I sense an emptiness that’s almost chilling.

  After Langer locates the controls for the hall lights and turns them on, we head toward the front of the building.

  Dust covers everything—walls, floors, boxes, door handles—in a fine even layer, disturbed only by the footprints we create.

  Langer whispers, “W-w-what happened?”

  “Shut up!” Dumont shoots back, trying to hide her own fear.

  Unlike them, I feel an odd sense of calm. This is familiar territory. Screwing up timelines is my expertise, after all.

  We hear no other sound besides those we make. When we reach the exit, Dumont carefully pulls the door open, but instead of the outside, a sheet of wood greets us. Fortunately, it takes only a couple of shoves to push it out of the way.

  The compound is deserted. The windows and door of every building we can see are boarded up, and the few vehicles present are parked in a row, covered with tarps.

  “Where is everybody?” Langer asks.

  “They’re not here,” I say.

  Dumont whirls on me. “I can see they’re not here!”

  “What I meant was that they were never here.” I wave my arm in front of me. “Look around. No one’s been here for a long time. Years, maybe.” I stare at Dumont. “Whatever you did saw to that.”

  “What I did? How could that have changed this? That makes no sense at all.”

  “It’s impossible to predict the ripples a change to the timeline will make. Even a small one. What makes you think you could make sense of it?”

  Her gaze grows distant as she thinks it through. Finally, she says more to herself than to us, “It’s just not possible.”

  “You need to tell me what you did.”

  She hesitates before saying, “I eliminated a problem. That’s all. But there’s no reason that should have caused this. She has nothing to do…” She pauses. “Had nothing to do with Trinity.”

  “Who had nothing to do with it?”

  “Shim.”

  Shim? “She was the one who was attacking when we jumped?”

  “Who else would it have been?”

  “You were working with her once,” I remind her.

  She waves an annoyed hand in the air. “An alliance of convenience. To get to you. She had you, but Zephyrus Sum is not exactly a shining star when it comes to research.” I know Sum means district, so Zephyrus must be the name of the one Shim runs. “She needed help understanding what she had,” the professor continues. “Still, it was months before she finally came to us. She never appreciated the time it took to understand what you had brought to us.”

  “So that’s why she attacked us in Saint Jakup.”

  Dumont snorts. “She’s just a blunt instrument with no patience. When she found out you were still alive after all these months and that I had you again, she went crazy. She came after us in Tanus, where Min and I were working on the prototype. We barely got out alive. I was sure, though, that we had gotten away clean, but obviously she figured out where the research station was.”

  Something is still not adding up for me. Shim would have to be at least fifty-eight years old to be alive in the 1961 we traveled back to, but I’m sure she wasn’t older than mid-forties.

  “Who did you kill?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “When we went back. It couldn’t have been Shim. So who did you kill?”

  Dumont looks away. “It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t have caused this.”

  “Who?”

  A frown. “Her mother. I wanted to make sure Shim was never born.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. She used the same tactic Lidia had employed to prevent Abraham Lincoln’s existence. “Did she run?”

  “Run?”

  “The mother. Did she run when you tried to kill her?”

  “She was asleep. She never knew.”

  “Then why was there more than one gunshot? I saw multiple flashes in more than one room.”

  Another pause. “I killed Shim’s grandparents, too.”

  I can barely contain my horror. “But why?”

  “They would be killed in t
he war anyway. Better they died with their daughter and avoid years mourning her.”

  There is no way I can allow this woman to possess a chaser, mine or one she might create. She is as dangerous as Lidia, maybe even more so. If I can’t get mine and escape, I must at least destroy Dumont’s and any chances she has of making others.

  She looks back at the compound. “Their deaths couldn’t have closed this place.”

  “And yet they did.” My voice is as calm as I can make it. “Pull on a single thread and you risk unraveling the whole cloth. You’ve pulled on three.”

  There’s something else she hasn’t thought through. I struggle with whether or not I should mention it. If I don’t, I could grab something off the ground, whack Dumont in the head, then grab the chaser and get as far away as my gimpy leg can take me before she tries to engage the persuader. I might just make it.

  But if I do, I’ll be breaking my promise to Jovan. We’ve been friends for a year, and without him, I would have surely died or become hopelessly lost, forever losing any chance at bringing my old life back. I owe him everything.

  At the moment, however, the Jovan of this Shim-less world likely doesn’t know who I am. Who knows? He may not even be in prison. The only way I can fulfill my promise is to bring back the version of this world that includes the Jovan I know. And to do that I need to help Dumont fix the time fracture she’s just created.

  Measuring my words, I point out what she’s missed. “Without Shim, you wouldn’t have me, either.”

  “I already have you. So it doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  She stares at me, trying to figure out what I mean.

  “Do you really think your prototype still exists?”

  Her smirk fades.

  Thread unravels cloth.

  “I…I can make another,” she says. “I know what to do. It won’t be difficult.”

  “Won’t it? You’ll want to return to the Trinity facility in Saint Jakup, am I right?”

  She says nothing, but she doesn’t need to.

  “What do you think will happen when you get there and find there’s another you already present? Do you think the security forces who guard the gates will simply accept that you’re the ‘real’ Professor Dumont? Or will they throw us in cells and take the chaser away?” I let that sink in for a moment. “If you want, you can try telling them you’re a time traveler, but do you really think that will help your cause? Or how about this? What if you get there and they have no idea who you are? Maybe the Dumont in this timeline didn’t become a scientist. Maybe she’s a teacher. Or a soldier. Or maybe she’s dead.” Time for the kicker. “And consider this. With Shim gone, there’s a good chance I got away before I was ever found and have already jumped out of here.”