by Barry Lyga
“Then I suppose,” Lundergaard said at last, “I’ll have to fall back on my original plan.” He sighed.
“What’s your original plan?”
“Well, you saw the tech down in the basement. I scavenged from what was left of my time machine when I first arrived here in the 1980s. I think I’ve gone about as far on my own as I can. My original plan was to use my advanced technology to form a sort of research company.”
“Lundergaard Research,” Erasmus piped up. “We’re witnessing its formation.”
“By getting a jump start on technology with the futuristic tech at my disposal, I estimate my think tank should be able to re-create time travel technology in a reasonable amount of time.”
A reasonable amount of time! And then Kyle could go home, too!
“How long will it take?” Kyle asked.
Lundergaard shrugged and finished off the dregs of his coffee. “Probably about twenty or thirty years.”
“Why Kyle Camden?” Mike asked, clearly unhappy with the proposition.
“I know you guys don’t get along all that well —”
“It’s not that.”
“— but Kyle’s the one who taught me Morse code —”
“Not exactly …”
“— and I know he’ll still be able to read it. I’m only picking up a couple of letters. I think there’s an O or maybe two. I think I remember O. It was three long.”
“Three dashes,” Mike clarified.
“Yeah.” Mairi reached into her pocket for her video camera, miraculously intact after everything she’d been through. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t see him in the crowd at the time capsule site, but I want to make sure….” She set the video to run at double speed and watched the crowd mill and mingle and zip by as if they’d been given a fraction of Mighty Mike’s old superspeed. She knew Kyle like she knew her own reflection in a mirror — if he’d been at the burial, she would recognize him.
But after watching all of the footage she’d shot, she didn’t see him at all.
“Is this good or bad?” Mike asked.
Mairi shrugged. “I’m not one hundred percent sure, to tell the truth. It means he probably wasn’t zombified like everyone else, but who knows where he could be?”
Even as she said it, though, she thought she had the answer. Kyle would be home, of course. Home, alone. Sulking. Just like he had been ever since the Mad Mask and the Blue Freak and Ultitron attacked Bouring.
She led Mike through the open windowpane back out onto the balcony that ringed the lighthouse. From here, she could see the entire town of Bouring. All that moved were occasional batches of what she couldn’t help thinking of as zombies. Or even “bomzies,” as Mike had called them. She scanned the topography for a few minutes and then pinpointed her target.
“There,” she told Mike, pointing. “Can you carry me to that house?”
“It will be easier and faster if I don’t take you,” Mike said apologetically.
“I think I need to go anyway,” she told him. “You might need help. No offense or anything, but you’re not quite as supery-dupery as you used to be.”
“True. But you are pretty un-super-dupery yourself.” He gestured to her bleeding arm and her twisted ankle.
“Well, maybe between the two of us, we can make it work. How about that?”
Mike drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Very well, then.” With an unfamiliar grunt and a slight buckling of his knees, he swept Mairi up into his arms. And without even giving her a moment to catch her breath, he jumped off the lighthouse and into naked space.
Mairi screamed as they hit the open air, but even though they plunged rather than soared, they did so slowly, and sooner than she expected, they were riding the air currents, having only dropped about ten feet from their launch point. It was better than she’d expected.
She clutched Mike tightly. For the first time ever, she could feel sweat dampening the back of his neck and seeping through his costume. “Are you all right?” she asked, feeling stupid for even thinking the question.
Surprisingly, he said, “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. We were so high up, I’m mostly just gliding. It’s easier than flying.”
Now a million new questions flooded Mairi’s mind. Crazy questions that had nothing to do with their current predicament, but the kinds of questions she couldn’t help having anyway. Like: Was it normally difficult for Mike to fly? Even when he wasn’t “bomzie”-sapped? It always seemed so effortless, but did he strain to do it under normal circumstances? And how much did he know about his own powers? For the first time, she wondered: Was it possible Mike knew things about himself that he hadn’t told anyone?
She never got the chance to ask any of those questions. Before she knew it, Mike had unerringly glided them right into Kyle’s backyard. All was still and quiet here, but she couldn’t help looking around for zombies. There were none to be found.
The basement door was the sort made of heavy glass that slid open. Mairi looked around for something heavy to break it with. She figured if she ended up saving the world, the Camdens would forgive her. And if she didn’t end up saving the world, well, a broken door wouldn’t really matter, would it?
Mike surprised her, though, by just tugging on the door. It slid open easily.
“Mighty Strength,” she mumbled.
“No, it was just unlocked,” he said. “I barely had to pull at all.”
Together, they crept into the Camden basement. The lights were out and Mairi fumbled about for a switch. She hadn’t been down here in forever and couldn’t remember where one was.
“I see stairs,” Mike said. Of course. He could see in the dark. “Follow me.” He took her hand and led her across the dark basement, steering her this way and that. “Be full of caring, Mairi. There are strange machines and pieces of machines everywhere.”
Mairi was pretty sure all Mr. Camden kept down here was his lawn mower and some gardening equipment, but if Mike thought that was strange, whatever.
They made their way up the stairs. She could see a bit now — there was some starlight and light from the lamp-posts coming in through the windows. But all the indoor lights were out, which made Mairi wonder if Kyle really was home or not. She knew his parents had been at the time capsule burial — she’d seen them there and they’d also shown up on the video she’d shot. But if Kyle wasn’t there and wasn’t here, then where …
“Kyle?” she called softly, hoping to be just loud enough to get his attention, but not loud enough attract any zombies in the area.
“KYLE!” Mighty Mike bellowed at the top of his lungs, shaking the walls.
Mairi turned and stared at Mike, who regarded her with an innocent “What? Me?” expression.
“Mike!” she admonished.
“You were being very quiet,” Mike said. “I doubt he could have heard you.”
Mairi slapped her own forehead. Now she just had to hope and pray that nothing shambling and moaning and all zombie-ish had heard Mike’s Mighty Shout.
They sneaked around the Camden house. Mairi had been here a million times — it was practically her second home — but with no one else around, it felt like she was breaking and entering. Suddenly, Mike stopped her and cocked his head.
“I hear something,” he said. “Upstairs.”
Upstairs. The bedrooms. What if Kyle was hurt?
Mairi raced up the stairs, Mike behind her. She knew exactly where she was going, so she turned down the hall, tore past Mr. and Mrs. Camden’s room and the bathroom, and burst into Kyle’s room without even knocking.
It was empty.
Except for Lefty, angrily pulling at the bars to his cage.
“Is that what you heard?” Mairi asked.
“Yes.”
Sighing and thinking of Sashimi, Mairi opened the cage lid and stroked Lefty to calm him down. Kyle left the rabbit food and treats on a shelf above the cage, so she also refilled his food bowl and tossed him some treats. She drew
the line at emptying his litter box.
“Now what?” Mike asked, looking around. “Kyle does not seem to be here.”
“I know. I know….” She gazed around the room. The closet was partly open and she thought she could see the edge of a flat-screen TV there. Where the heck had that come from?
“Mairi?” Mike asked. “Mairi, what do we do now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. If only Kyle had been here … Where was he, anyway? Off being all emo …
Just then, she noticed: Kyle’s computer! She flipped open the laptop lid and the computer lit up. “We don’t need Kyle,” she said. “We just need a Morse code cheat sheet.”
Soon, she had a page on the Internet showing which groups of dots and dashes corresponded to which numbers and letters in the English alphabet. She grabbed a piece of paper and a pen from Kyle’s desk, then stood at his window, looking out at the lighthouse.
A long burst of light, follow by two more. Then two quick ones. Then two long. And three short.
Mairi checked her guide. “Eighty-seven,” she said. “Seven …” She blinked. “That’s it. It stopped.”
“Wait!” Mike said. “Look! It’s beginning again.”
Of course! The message would end and leave a gap of time before starting up again. Mairi watched carefully, jotting down each character long and short burst — each dot and dash — as it came up. Then, when it ended and restarted the cycle, she looked down at what she’d written and compared it to the cheat sheet. What …?
“What does it say?” Mike asked.
Mairi held up the paper so that he could see what she’d written:
LOOK IN 1987.
“So we met another time traveler,” Erasmus said, exasperated, “and he can’t help us at all.”
“At least he let us have some of his spare parts,” Kyle said.
They were back at the site of the ruined and wrecked chronovessel, where Kyle now spilled out the contents of the garbage bag Lundergaard had given him to carry the parts. “I wish I could do more for you,” the older man had said, “but I need everything else to start my company and get working on my own time travel solution. With any luck, twenty years from now, I’ll be able to return to where I belong, to your future.”
“But you’ll be twenty years older!” Kyle had protested.
“At least I’ll be back where I belong,” Lundergaard had said sadly.
Now Kyle inspected the parts laid out before him. “I think this is everything we need. Well, except for some tools to put it all together. But I know where I can borrow them.”
“Steal them, you mean.”
“No, Erasmus. I’m just going to ask nicely.”
Kyle sat in his father’s tree house, waiting for the bedroom light to come on. It was close to bedtime, so Danny would have to come in soon.
Just then, the light flicked on. Kyle had a pebble in his hand he was going to throw at the window to get Danny’s attention, but he held off. Gramps was coming into the room with Danny.
Kyle gritted his teeth. He flew to the bedroom window and hovered next to it, pressed close to the house.
“— told you!” Danny said.
“Don’t back talk me,” Gramps warned.
“Here it is. Like I said.” Kyle realized Danny was showing Gramps the recovered Walkman.
“Well … good. But you shouldn’t have lost it yesterday.”
“I didn’t lose it. I just couldn’t find it.”
“It’s the same thing,” Gramps said in an annoyed tone, a tone very close to the one he’d had the night before. “We work hard to give you nice things. You need to be responsible. If I ask to see something of yours, you show it to me, got it? If you’re not responsible, there are consequences. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Danny said.
There was a pause and then Danny said, “Dad?”
“What?” Gramps sounded farther away. He must have been leaving the room.
“You shouldn’t have called me a loser,” Danny said with the slightest tremble in his voice. Kyle couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He risked moving a bit so that he could peek into the window.
“I shouldn’t have lost the Walkman, but you shouldn’t have said that to me. It’s not right.”
Gramps breathed in deep. “Go to bed,” he said.
Danny folded his arms over his chest.
“Go. To. Bed.”
Gramps shut off the light and closed the door, leaving Danny alone in the dark.
Kyle couldn’t believe it. He was actually proud of his father.
He hated to ruin the moment, but he needed to. He sped back to the tree house and tossed his pebble. Danny opened the window. “Dore? Is that you?”
“Yeah. Can you let me in?”
Soon, he was sneaking into the basement with Danny.
“Your clothes are getting a little … ripe,” his father said.
“I just need to borrow some tools and then I’ll be out of here.”
“You’re really leaving, huh? Really running away.”
Kyle paused as he gathered up the tools. “Yeah. I wish I could take you with me —”
“Don’t. It’s okay. I’ll be all right here.”
Kyle thought about it. “Yeah. I bet you will.” He put the tools into a sack that Danny provided and told him where he could find them tomorrow.
“Wait,” Danny said. “Before you go.” He ran off and came back with a shirt and a pair of jeans. “Here. These are old. Mom won’t notice they’re missing.”
Kyle took the clothes and tucked them into the sack. “Thanks, Dad,” he said before he could stop himself.
“Dad?”
“Dan. I said, ‘Thanks, Dan.’”
“Oh.”
“He believed that?” Erasmus said into Kyle’s ear as they left. “Your father really is an idiot!”
“Don’t talk about my father that way,” Kyle said, and they headed off to the chronovessel … and to their own time.
Hours later, deep in the thick of the cold, November night, Kyle realized he wouldn’t be returning to his own time after all.
“I can’t believe it,” he said, sitting back on his haunches in the cornfield. All around him were rebuilt and reassembled components made with parts taken from Lundergaard’s workshop.
The chronovessel itself stood before him, its chassis patched to the best of Kyle’s abilities. It needed a couple of coats of paint and a ton of bodywork, but it was otherwise as good as new.
Except for one thing.
The computer.
The computer that controlled the whole thing.
They had all the pieces they needed to make the chronovessel run, but not the computer that could control it. That had been a custom-built component Kyle assembled in his basement, using parts only available in the twenty-first century. The technology to make microprocessors that small and that powerful hadn’t been invented yet.
Kyle thought of the laptop in Lundergaard’s basement. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty close. He knew Lundergaard needed it, but maybe …
“Maybe I could just borrow it….”
“It would be destroyed when we went to the future,” Erasmus said. “And anyway, how would you send it back to him from our own time?”
That was true. Kyle knew it was true.
“Go through everything else you saw in his basement,” Erasmus said, “and maybe I can jury-rig something.”
It was frustrating — before his trip through time, Kyle would have been the one to “jury-rig something.” Before the trip through time, Kyle had a perfect memory, too. Right now, just trying to recall the details of a stupid basement was taxing Kyle’s brainpower. Even though his normal intelligence was still higher than most people’s, compared to his superintelligence — compared to Erasmus — he was an idiot. He hated being an idiot.
Kyle described the basement as best he could, right down to the big flat-screen TVs on the wall and the steel door with its lock.
“If you’ve described the room to me accurately,” Erasmus said, putting an emphasis on the word if that Kyle didn’t like, “then there’s something wrong. Lundergaard said that the door concealed his reactor.”
“Right. He’s trying to generate power for time travel the old-fashioned way, with nuclear —”
“Did you see a Wi-Fi router in the basement anywhere?”
Kyle thought back. Wi-Fi routers were pretty small and not terribly noticeable. “I don’t remember.”
“Because, again, assuming you have the rough layout of the basement right … You’re sure that the steel door was to your left as you entered the basement from outside?”
“Yes, Erasmus! I’m sure!”
“Because that is where the Wi-Fi signal I picked up was coming from. It was just a few yards in that direction.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Kyle said. “Who puts their Wi-Fi router inside a reactor?”
“Unless there’s no reactor …”
Kyle didn’t pause to think. He didn’t even pause to say something snarky. He just took off right away, blasting up into the atmosphere, high enough that no one could see him, then arcing down to Thorul Court at a blistering speed. It was night by now, and unless someone looked at him at exactly the right moment, no one would see him.
“Kyle, what are you —”
“He lied,” Kyle growled. “Lundergaard lied.” He was in the backyard of Lundergaard’s house again. He could see a light on in a top-floor window, and he yearned to fling himself through the air, through that window, into whichever room Lundergaard was in, and then beat some answers out of the man.
But, no. That would come later. He still remembered the lingering pain of Lundergaard’s force field. “First, we see what he’s hiding,” Kyle murmured. “Then we confront him.”