Winston Chase and the Alpha Machine

by Bodhi St John

  No way. They might send Shade’s family to some sort of offshore prison just to find out what they knew. Or worse, hold them as bargaining chips as a way to bring in Shade and Winston. Winston didn’t know if Shade had thought of this yet, but, despite his harsh words, Winston knew his friend was anything but stupid. He’d figure it out soon enough, and then he’d realize he was powerless to stop it.

  Would he try? Would Shade leave Winston to warn his family before it was too late? Or, if given a chance, would he trade Winston to these agents for his family?

  Winston felt ashamed for doubting his best and only friend, but he couldn’t help it. There was too much at stake, and he had to be prepared for anything.

  “I…” Shade began as he advanced toward Winston, index finger pointed at his chest, “…am not…stupid.”

  “I know.”

  “You are jumping into fire without thinking, and you don’t seem to care when you put other people around you at risk. You could’ve killed people today and not even known it!”

  “Maybe.” Winston raised his hands defensively. “But this thing we’re in is big — the biggest. It’s bigger than you or me or anybody else. If somebody else gets the Alpha Machine, who knows what could happen? What if this Bledsoe guy just decides to erase us from history — I mean all of us?”

  “That’s not—”

  “Shade. Time machine. Remember?”

  That sank in. His brow furrowed deeply and he stared down toward his feet in deep concentration.

  “So,” ventured Winston. “Are we good?”

  “Yeah,” said Shade finally. “Except for one thing.”

  For a brief moment, Winston felt his heart rise with hope knowing that his friend would stay at his side and see this through. Whatever Shade’s reservation might be, they’d get through it.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “The water,” said Shade. “It’s rising. And getting faster.”

  Winston realized he was right. When they had come down into the tunnel, the water had hit Winston around mid-calf. Now it was up past his knees. He could see it rising inch by inch and feel its steady push against him increasing. Where there had been silence before, now there was a rising burbling as the water’s mounting speed created more turbulence against the tunnel walls.

  Something hard hit Winston’s thigh, but this time it was big enough for him to spot with his flashlight: about twelve inches of a slime-slicked 2x4 board spinning slowly down the waterway. What on earth was that doing down here? Of course, people probably dumped all kinds of debris into the drainage vents, and if the water was getting faster, they were likely to see more of it.

  Then, echoing from far away down the tunnels, they heard a sudden low thump followed by a sharp grating noise, like a giant steel block being dragged across concrete. Another thump sounded, tangible through the soles of their shoes, and another metal grinding noise joined the first.

  “That can’t be good,” said Winston.

  As if answering him, the air filled with a spine-jarring screech of metal. Both boys covered their ears and cringed from the deafening sound. Winston saw Shade’s mouth move, trying to yell something, but Winston could only shake his head in incomprehension. Shade tried again, motioning with his elbow and over-enunciating the words, “LOOK…BEHIND…YOU!”

  Winston did and was momentarily confused. Two wide metal slabs rose slowly from the water, one perpendicular to the other. Then he realized that these were some sort of flow control gates built into the tunnel system. Someone was trying to herd them in a certain direction.

  Confused and scared by the water and noise, Winston only knew that the tunnel to the right was the one not being blocked, and that was the direction they needed to go anyway.

  Probably. Only one way to find out.

  With two escape channels blocked, the water quickly climbed from their thighs up past their waists. The current made each step treacherous, and Winston found himself more skating across the tunnel’s slick bottom than walking one foot in front of the other. As the pressure climbed, Winston found that the only way he could balance was to take long, loping steps and use his forward momentum. Standing still was no longer an option. Winston sensed that if he tried to stay in one place, the water would sweep his legs out from under him, and he’d likely drown under the weight of his pack.

  Imagining this in minute, gasping detail, Winston almost missed seeing the ladder emerge from the darkness.

  “Is that it?” Shade called over the water’s rising din. His flashlight bobbed and jittered over a rapidly approaching spot on the right wall. Winston saw two vertical lines and rungs leading up to some sort of hatch in the ceiling, just like the one they had descended under Old Town Pizza.

  “I don’t know!” cried Winston.

  Sensing what had to be done, Shade said, “I’ll slow down! You go ahead!”

  Winston put a little more bounce in each step. The water pushed at his back like an autumn gale, trying to topple him, but somehow he kept his balance. The ladder vanished in the darkness every time Winston got between Shade’s flashlight and their target, so Winston tried to do his best to keep his own light trained on the wall before them.

  However, the current fought to hold Winston in the middle of the tunnel. He leaned to the right, pushing off harder with his left foot, trying to force himself toward the wall. It was going to be close.

  “Get over!” cried Shade.

  “I’m trying!”

  “Try faster!”

  The ladder raced toward Winston — thirty feet away, then twenty.

  “Over!” urged Shade from behind him.

  Another hop. Ten feet.

  Winston was close to the wall, but not close enough. He was going to miss it.

  He came down on both feet, bent at the knees, leaned even more to the side, and tried to launch himself at the ladder. His left heel hit a particularly slimy patch of floor and slipped to the side. Winston overbalanced, and his right foot also shot out from under him. His whole body dropped into the water, and Winston felt fluid rush up his nose.

  He was going to drown.

  Winston’s terror caused him to let go of his flashlight and flail out. His right palm smacked into something hard, and he instinctively grabbed it. The object was round and hard in his hand — a pipe, maybe — and slick with tunnel ooze. Almost instantly, Winston felt his fingers start to slip as the stream pulled at his body. His left hand swept around the pipe and latched on. Only then, amid his panic and desperate need to cough the water from his sinuses, did Winston realize that he’d grabbed on to one of the ladder posts.

  Then Shade’s body slammed into him.

  Most of the impact fell on the back of his neck and shoulders. If Winston had known it was coming, he probably could have held on. With all his fear and disorientation, though, Winston felt the ladder slip from his hands and his body suddenly turn weightless as the current seized him.

  Something hit Winston again, but this time it was smaller. The thing smacked into his shoulder and grabbed him. Winston felt his body turn. The thing held him in place, causing the water to rush and break over him. Then Winston’s head was above the surface.

  “Grab the ladder!”

  Winston didn’t understand. He was helpless to do anything but cough and splutter.

  “Winston!” Shade yelled again, and the strain was clear in his voice. “Grab the damned ladder!”

  Strangely, hearing Shade swear was what shocked Winston back into awareness of his surroundings. Shade never swore. Mrs. Tagaloa repeatedly said that people swore because they lacked the vocabulary for more intelligent speech. Winston didn’t think that was a very generous way to talk about her husband, but he got the point. For Shade to drop even a low-yield bomb like the D-word, things must be extreme.

  He realized that Shade had a hold of the back of his shirt. With his left arm holding Winston in a bicep curl, Shade barely kept Winston’s upper body above the water as the current tried to pul
l him away. Shade had his right arm hooked around the ladder, hand still clenched around his flashlight.

  “I can’t hold on much longer!” he said.

  Winston reached up and grabbed two of the ladder rungs. He got some leverage, turning himself, and found a rung with his foot. Two more steps and he was nearly out of the water. Shade clung to the rungs below him. Both stayed there for a moment, drenched and panting. Winston realized with a certain distant gratitude that nothing in his pack had blown up or short-circuited in the water.

  “Thanks,” Winston said hoarsely.

  Shade smiled up at him. “Thank your white stripes. That was all I could see of you.”

  They both laughed at that. After all the time Winston had spent hating his freakish hair, it had finally been good for something, after all.

  “Hey,” called Shade. He held up two fingers. “That’s two you owe me, junior.”

  Winston got the Empire Strikes Back reference, no doubt an attempt to calm and distract him. He coughed again, fighting the lingering burn in his esophagus. “I’d just as soon kiss a Wookiee,” he rasped.

  “I can arrange that,” Shade retorted. He shone his light above them, focusing on the hatch above their heads. “So…is this the right place?”

  Winston examined the small doorway. It was square, just wide enough for a big man’s shoulders. With no visible hinges or latch, the hatch must open upward. Winston climbed to it and pushed against the cold, slime-slicked metal. It offered no give at all. The hatch was either very thick or buried under something very heavy. Or both.

  The dark interior of the concrete tube offered Winston no clues, and he felt despair combine with the fear and cold to set his hands and jaws trembling. What if this wasn’t the right place? He’d nearly drowned trying to get to this outlet. Winston didn’t know if he had the strength and resolve to try for another one.

  He needed to think clearly and couldn’t. In the darkness, the sound of rising, rushing water filled Winston’s mind, smothering any fragments of thought that tried to stitch themselves together. He wished Shade could magically come up with some ridiculous, magical solution, like smelling doughnuts above them. Shade had nothing to offer, though, and Winston felt utterly lost. Like a little boy, he suddenly wished his mom were here. She would know what to do.

  Or not his mom. His dad.

  Gingerly, taking each move with extra care and caution against his trembling fingers, Winston descended the four steps until his feet rested on the rung just above Shade’s head.

  “What’s wrong?” Shade asked.

  “Can you climb up next to me? I…don’t want to let go.”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Very carefully,” said Winston, “get Little e from my bag.”

  Shade tucked his flashlight into the waistband of his soaked sweatpants and made his way up the right edge of the ladder rungs. Winston felt light tugging on his pack, but Shade was careful to move with slow deliberation. After a moment, Little e appeared in Winston’s peripheral vision. His fingers didn’t want to release the rung.

  “Easy, dude, easy,” said Shade. “Just take this nice and slow.”

  Shade kept a firm hold on the device’s rod ends and waited for Winston’s wavering fingers to edge away from the ladder and slip inside the wrist guard. Winston grasped the crossbar. Immediately, he felt the metal warm and that familiar pressure of connection form in the back of his head.

  “Now the chronoviewer,” Winston said.

  “The chrono — Oh. Coming up.”

  As Shade brought the Alpha Machine piece close to Little e, its rods unwound and spread apart slightly. Sparks flitted between the tips and reflected at a thousand points from the glistening concrete walls. Face pinched with distaste, Shade set the ring over Little e’s end. Winston willed the tips to flay outward, and he felt that magnetic snap when the chronoviewer found its hover point within the bowl of rods.

  “Let go,” Winston said.

  Shade quickly withdrew and stepped down one rung. The ring began to rotate within Little e. The faster the chronoviewer spun, the more it picked up a wobble, so that its walnut-sized bulge seemed to form an endless circular wave as it danced above Winston’s hand.

  He let out a long, shaky breath and tried to forget about the tunnel. With so little light here, it was hard to tell if it was working or not. Rather than worry about that, he thought about the construction crew he had seen working on the cellar floor under Old Town Pizza. In his mind, the time in which he had seen them was almost like a physical bit of metadata, a datestamp he could feel. People had thousands of words to describe sensations, but no language that Winston knew of could capture the feeling of when something was in time-space. There was a distance to it, maybe a relative size and a tension to its place in his mind. It had an almost geometric configuration in how it slotted amid other memories and connected to the edges of his awareness, but he had no way to equate it to things like touch or sight. The memory’s position in time was a tangible thing he could reach for with the Alpha Machine.

  Above him, muted light blossomed as the tunnel’s top hatch both stood open and remained closed. Shadows flitted across the opening of that second reality, and Winston unconsciously pulled his hand backward, as if reigning in a galloping horse, trying to make time slow. He saw the ghostly form of a man above him clinging to the ladder rungs fade into and out of existence within the span of a blink.

  There, he thought. Was that…?

  He twisted Little e up slightly, unaware of how to control the chronoviewer but only following what seemed to come naturally. Did the QVs build operating instructions for these alien devices into his DNA? Or did the alien DNA itself somehow contain the seeds of instinct necessary to do these things?

  The shadow figure returned as the past scene above Winston began to flow at a normal speed. The man solidified. He wore overalls and heavy leather boots. A strap behind his back secured him to the rung before his waist. Thick gloves covered his hands, one of which clasped the front of a large, black welding mask and the other the handle of an arc welder electrode. White light erupted from a spot on the tunnel wall where the electrode touched it. Winston had to look away as sparks rained down on him without ever making contact.

  The man pulled the electrode stick away from the wall, and the light instantly dimmed. Blue splotches of afterglow danced in Winston’s vision, but he could still see enough detail in the old reality to discern that the tunnel wall lacked its present coating of black goo. In the pale light from above, Winston saw that the walls were the flat, textured gray of industrial concrete…except in one spot. In front of the welder’s chest, a small steel plate was mounted to the tunnel wall. All four bolt heads securing the plate had been melted to shapeless lumps. In the plate’s center stood a pair of concentric raised circles, with one bit of the outside loop still glowing a dull orange from the welding.

  Two circles…that formed a shape about the size of a doughnut.

  The man pushed his welding helmet up. It rocked back on its headband hinge, revealing a person in his late thirties or early forties, with a narrow face, bright eyes, and a hawkish nose. This was the man in the picture, a much younger version of the man he’d befriended and with whom he’d shared so many talks over cribbage.

  Claude Hawthorn pulled his left glove partially off his hand to check his watch. He paused for a moment, then glanced down the ladder directly at Winston. Most of his face was left in shadow, but Winston could see the smile at the corners of his mouth. His father tapped lightly on the metal plate and shifted just enough for the light to catch his features.

  In the silence of the past, his father mouthed the word, “Winston.”

  Winston’s breath caught in his chest. He knew the man wasn’t physically there before him, that he must have somehow known when and where Winston would be on that ladder in his future. He couldn’t puzzle the details out while his teeth rattled from the cold and rising water thundered beneath him, but Winston couldn’t
shake the fact that his father was there, only feet away, smiling at him, calling his name.

  “Dad,” he whispered.

  Again, the man tapped the metal plate. “Find it,” he mouthed. Then, he opened his fingers and slowly moved his hand away from the wall. “And let it go.”

  Winston cocked his head, sure he must have misunderstood.

  His father repeated the words with clear enunciation. “Let…it…go.”

  “Winston, do you see anything?” Shade asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I don’t understand.”

  His father lowered his welding helmet and touched the electrode tip to the plate. Winston closed his eyes as sparks again cascaded around him.

  Find it. And let it go.

  He had to mean let it go at some point in the future. Winston could worry about that later.

  With a mental release and relaxing his hand, the chronoviewer slowed and ceased wobbling. The vision of his father vanished, again casting the tunnel into darkness except for Shade’s flashlight. Winston’s heart sank to lose the image of his dad so soon, but he knew they had to move. He lowered Little e toward Shade.

  “Grab the chronoviewer and stuff it back in my bag.” Shade did as asked. “Now, over on the right side somewhere is my sunglasses case. Can you hand them to me?”

  Shade’s hand dug awkwardly through the pack. “Too bright in here for you?”

  “It will be. You’ll want to back up.”

  Shade found the sunglasses and passed them up to Winston, who set them atop his head.

  Winston climbed to the steel plate as Shade retreated. Spotting the welded donut shape hidden amidst the glinting black goo was easy when he knew where to look. He pulled a blue marble from his pocket and fed it into the bulge in Little e’s wrist guard.

  Winston squeezed Little e’s crossbar as he visualized his father’s arc welder. The rods unwound. In his mind, he saw the little lightning bolts dancing between Little e’s tips crisscrossing and converging on a single point in the center — a white, incredibly hot point drawn to the metal plate — and he lowered his sunglasses into place. They wouldn’t offer the same protection as a welding mask, but they might help and at least guard his eyes from flying sparks.