by Jared Millet
“Jesus, what a dump.”
Wires dangled from a blown light fixture in the ceiling. A charred stove sat against the wall, its knobs melted into odd shapes. The linoleum floor had melted as well. Broken china littered a countertop where it had fallen from the cabinet above, and scorch marks scarred what wallpaper remained. On either side of the door, the army had mounted fluorescent lights that hummed like distant insects and cast a corpse-like pallor on everyone inside.
“That was odd,” said Danson. “So we’re being bombarded right now?”
“Constantly,” said Pierce. “Everything in this house radiates tachyons. It’s bathed in them. The flow isn’t quite as strong here as in some of the dead-zones outside, but it’s much more regular.”
“How is that even possible?” asked Aaron. He and Danson had produced tachyons in collider experiments, but only in microbursts.
Dr. Pierce grinned like a schoolgirl at the prom. “Are you guys ready for this? I think this house has negative temporal momentum. It’s moving backward in time, and the tachyons are a by-product of the friction between two time streams.”
Danson threw his hands in the air and his face puffed as if holding back a shout. When it finally burst free, he ran to Aaron and grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Do you know what this means?”
An extra year on my dissertation? Aaron didn’t say it out loud. Danson had already moved on.
“Can you tell how it happened?” he asked Pierce. “Do you know what caused it?”
She shook her head. “That’s why I called. You’re the pioneer in this field. Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”
Most of the house was as damaged as the kitchen. The stairs to the second floor were too dangerous to climb, and all that was left in the first-floor bedroom was a metal frame and a pile of springs. In the study, a wall of old books had been blackened by smoke.
“I love the decor,” said Danson. “Or at least what’s left of it. When was the house built?”
“Never,” said Pierce. “In satellite photos from before the blast, this was an empty park.”
“But the layout, the paneling…”
“I know; it’s like something from Leave It to Beaver. That’s just for starters. I haven’t shown you the good stuff yet.”
The family room was the least damaged. Two sofas framed a fireplace, and on the coffee table in between sat a metal canister, three feet tall and two feet wide. Unlike everything else in the house, it gleamed as if brand new. On its side was a ten-digit keypad with an LED display, now dark. Taped next to the pad was a yellow piece of paper. Aaron leaned close to read the words.
“Hi. I’m a bomb. Disarm me. 22# 04* 17#”
“When we found it,” said Pierce, “the timer was counting up, not down.”
“Like a clock spring unwinding.” Danson scratched his bald spot. “But why? Why blow up a town of innocent people in the middle of nowhere?”
“A town plus three more,” she said. “And those weren’t killed by the bomb. There’s one last thing to show you and it isn’t pretty.”
~
“She was talking about the bodies,” said Agent Tresser.
“They were in the basement. Skeletons, really. The woman and child were intact, at least, but the man was just a pile of bones in a tub.”
“It says here that you gave them names.”
“George, Judy, and Elroy.” The family of the future. Aaron’s face grew warm. It had seemed funny at the time, but looking back he wasn’t proud.
“Whose idea was it to recompose them?”
“Danson’s, but I led him to it. That was after the fire.”
~
No one ever warned Aaron how much manual labor was involved in getting a physics degree. He spent his first two days in Camden lugging forty-pound tachyon detectors down from the base camp and arranging them around the house. Army personnel would have been just as able, but Danson insisted that only Aaron handle his equipment. At least he didn’t have to carry the generators. Cpl. Brandt (who, after the fifth time Aaron called her “Corporal,” admitted her name was Tara) arranged a work detail to move those.
They spent the third day clearing debris out of the house. Danson remained at camp to work on the data servers while Dr. Pierce strung micro-detectors of every possible stripe throughout the house. Any loose object with its own tachyon field had to be removed, so of course Aaron was drafted. Everything not nailed down was to be taken outside and cataloged, except for the bodies in the basement.
Aaron’s gut still lurched when he thought about them. The basement had suffered the worst of the blaze, so the Army shored up the ceiling with support beams to keep it from caving in. Anything not made of metal or bone had incinerated. Piles of shattered glass lay everywhere amidst scattered brackets, hardware, and unrecognizable scrap.
In the center of the room, two solid steel worktables had survived. On one lay the skeleton of an adult woman, on the other that of a boy between five and seven years old. The third set of bones were in a bathtub in the corner, half-submerged in brown resin.
A box of cutlery rattled in Aaron’s hands as he stepped through the door into sunlight. He was now so accustomed to the stutter-stop flash of the tachyon field that he didn’t even have to steady himself. He set the box down next to five cartons of blackened books and reached for a bottle of water. Not long after, Brandt came out and dropped an armful of machine parts on the ground.
“What’s that?” Aaron asked.
“Chainsaw, I think. Or a band saw. Haven’t found the blade yet, just the motor.”
From the pile of refuse, Aaron picked up an old, slightly singed baseball and pitched it at the sloped roof, catching it when it rolled back. The next time, it bounced off the ground. He wiped off the ash and pitched again, feeling like a character in a Mad Max movie, playing catch amidst the shards of civilization: the shell of a car, a busted TV, a variety of garden shears. There was one particular object that he’d mistaken for a leaf blower. Tara had had to explain it to him.
“This fuel tank straps on your back. This part here is the pressure pump for the hose, and the length of the nozzle gives you a steady stream. This is the line for the pilot light, and this piece on the end is the igniter.”
“It’s a flamethrower?”
“Well, yeah. It was in the basement with the rest of this crap. Whoever started the fire must have left it in the house. I guess it could have been Bathtub Man; it wasn’t that far from the tub.”
Aaron caught the ball off another rebound. He didn’t care to speculate on how the people in the basement met their end. He didn’t even like watching crime shows. He tossed the ball higher to roll it farther down the roof, but instead it smashed the house’s one unbroken window.
Aaron held his breath. Tara did the same. They turned to each other slowly. Boy, we’re in trouble now. He chuckled and the corporal grinned. They had just started laughing in earnest when a “whump” came from the house. A few seconds later, Dr. Pierce rushed outside.
“Fire! The house is on fire! Sergeant West is still in there.”
Brandt barked at two privates standing nearby. “Radio for suppression gear and a medic. Stone, you’re with me. Come on.”
She ran into the house with Pvt. Stone on her heels. The other spoke quickly on his handset. Dr. Pierce bent over to catch her breath. Aaron put his hand on her back, and she jumped.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what happened. We were hanging sensors in the basement. I turned one on and everything twisted, like in one of the dead zones out here. Then the sergeant knocked over a lamp and the whole place went up. It doesn’t make sense. There isn’t anything left down there to burn.”
A wall of hot air slammed them off their feet, followed by a giant’s roar. Pierce fell to her knees, but Aaron managed to catch himself from falling over entirely.
“Oh God,” said Pierce. “The house.”
The entire building was ablaze. Red light poured from every window and a great cloud of smoke started swirling overhead. But it was wrong. The smoke coalesced from the air and poured down to the house in a funnel. Ignoring his safety, Aaron ran to the door.
“Tara!”
“Get out!” she said. “We’re trapped under the stairs!”
A wave of heat pushed him back. He batted hot ash from his face as he stumbled to the ground, almost falling on the pile of junk he and Tara had dragged outside. If only there’d been an extinguisher. Didn’t houses from the future have safety codes?
Then it struck him. It was crazy, but somehow blindingly obvious. He picked up the flamethrower and ran to the door.
“What are you doing?” shouted Pierce.
“I don’t know!” From the porch, he aimed at the inferno and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
Negative temporal momentum, he thought. The tachyon field hits at the door. He mounted the empty fuel tank on his back and took a breath, maybe his last. Then he ran inside.
Hot air wrapped and strangled him. He squeezed his eyes shut. It didn’t matter where he pointed the flamethrower; he couldn’t possibly miss. If his guess was wrong, it wouldn’t matter. He’d be too dead to care. He held the nozzle high and pulled the trigger a second time.
It kicked and came to life in his hands. The tank sagged as it filled with fuel. The heat abated as a fresh wind brushed in the face.
He opened his eyes. A steady gout of fire poured into the nozzle. The flames lapped close all around him, so he turned slowly in a circle to put them out. Part of his mind recoiled as the rusted hardware inhaled the fire. A more twisted part of him giggled.
“Aaron!”
Tara was still trapped. Cursing himself for a moron, he moved down the hallway and followed the flame to the stairwell. She and Pvt. Stone had taken shelter after dragging Sgt. West up from the basement. Aaron cleared a path, then turned his attention to the stairs above them. He could actually see the boards firm up as the fire unburnt them back into shape.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” asked Tara.
“Burning down the house.” Aaron couldn’t stop smiling. “Get out. I’ve got this.”
A rumble from below shook the floor. Trusting the others to take care of themselves, Aaron made his way down the hall and around the bend. He took a moment to squirt the fire out of the study, then turned his attention to the stairs to the basement.
Curtains of red licked the walls and the floor. Smoke poured from outside and it was suddenly hard to breathe. Aaron’s eyes swam and he almost lost his grip on consciousness. He felt he was running out of time. Without waiting longer, he aimed the flamethrower down the steps and charged.
The basement was an oven. Aaron held his breath as best he could and swept his nozzle, absorbing the blaze. It cleared slowly at first, then more quickly as he advanced into the room. Ash swirled in little whirlwinds and reshaped itself into shelves, benches, a stool. Glass unshattered into gallon-size bottles that were scattered across the room. Smoke billowed into a stack of chopped wood.
The fire flew into the bodies on the tables with barely a wave of his torch. Joints connected with ligaments. Bones cloaked themselves in flesh. The bodies were still very dead. Now they looked like old Egyptian mummies without any of the wrapping.
Aaron felt like a magician. No, he felt like God. He followed the fire where it led him. It couldn’t hide anywhere. There was no escaping him now.
The last of it retreated to the bathtub. Foul green clouds now billowed across the ceiling, like a film played in reverse. The basement filled with a gagging stench like nothing Aaron had known. He willed his nose shut and breathed through his mouth, all the while begging the fire to go out.
Something boiled in the tub. It bubbled like a cauldron, a foot deep, maybe two. The last trail of smoke curled into the room and backed into the tub like a scolded puppy. The flamethrower kicked one final time and shut itself off in his hands.
The tub was now full of an awful brown sludge. Chunks of meat floated to the surface. One rolled over and stared up with empty eye sockets. There was a gash where its nose should have been and a handful of teeth in its mouth.
Aaron screamed.
~
“So explain it to me,” said Tresser. “How do you put out a fire with a flamethrower?”
“I didn’t. I started the fire. Negative temporal momentum. The house, the flamethrower, the fire, they were all moving backwards in time.”
“Okay, so what did put it out? Sgt. West knocking over a lamp? How does that work?”
“The best I can figure it,” said Aaron, “is that when you have two time streams acting against each other, cause and effect break down. Sgt. West started the fire in one direction. I started it in the other. The two must have met in the middle somewhere and cancelled each other out. Some of the fire must have been moving forward in time, since our equipment was damaged and the sergeant still got burned.”
“So by that reasoning, when the Army first discovered the bomb and entered the code to deactivate it…”
“They actually armed it and destroyed the town. At least that’s what Dr. Danson said.”
Tresser shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but was that before or after he died?”
~
After the fire the house was immaculate, if completely out of date. Lime green Formica lined the kitchen counters, and the linoleum floor was almost uglier restored than it was before it melted. The only part of the house that hadn’t repaired itself was the window Aaron broke. He didn’t care about that. All he could think of was the thing in the tub.
Despite the stench, he returned to the basement when Dr. Danson arrived. When he showed him the putrid body rotting in toxic soup, his professor covered his mouth but didn’t turn away.
“Tell me everything.”
Aaron did. Danson tapped his fingers. When Aaron finished, Danson worked the problem out loud.
“In quantum theory, a particle or an event propagates as a wave until it encounters an observer, yes? Then it collapses into a single observed state and we can say that this thing happened. This particle exists.”
Aaron nodded. For the first time in an hour, his pulse started to slow. He’d never considered the calming properties of undergrad physics. Who knew?
“But what happens,” said Danson, “when the observation precedes the event? Do you follow? Even quantum theory clings to some form of causality. So if you observe an event without a cause, is the universe then obligated to provide one?”
“I don’t see…”
“We observed a house where none should be. You witnessed a fire that started with little provocation. In order for any of this to make sense, the universe had to provide causality. In this case, it provided you and your flamethrower.”
“But the flamethrower was part of the house. It was moving the same direction in time.”
“But you weren’t,” said Danson. “Were you predestined to start the fire? Or were you just a convenient observer who was in the right place to collapse the temporal wavefront? You chose to pick up that flamethrower and put out the fire. When time flows in the wrong direction, are we free to choose the causes that create the effects we witness?”
Aaron considered for a moment. “Honestly, that’s a little hard to swallow.”
“Then let’s test it. Hand me one of those jugs.”
The nearest was the size of a gallon of milk, but heavier because it was glass. Its label carried the strongest hazard warning Aaron had ever seen.
“Oh, no. You don’t think…”
“I do,” said Danson as he took the jug. “I think this body was dissolved by acid. I think some of that acid came from this container. I think I’ll find out if I’m right.” Without further ado, he upended the bottle over the tub.
The sludge sizzled and a stream of liquid poured up. A stench of chlorine, sulfur, and rotten meat stung the back of Aaron’s t
hroat. He wanted to throw up, but was afraid of what might happen if time and gravity were acting at cross purposes. When the bottle was almost full, Danson flipped it over to catch the final drop.
“Find me a lid, will you? There’s got to be one somewhere.”
Aaron capped the bottle while Danson unpoured another one. Brandt came down to see how they were doing. Aaron said, “Get Dr. Pierce. Quick.”
It took almost two hours to undissolve the body. In that time, they drew a crowd. Even Col. Green came to watch. Cpl. Brandt arranged a security detail, and a medic stood by in case the miraculous happened and the body came back to life. Pierce assisted Danson with the process, once she got over her initial horror. Everyone gave the other two bodies a wide berth. Aaron kept to the corner of the room and tried to look busy.
Tara tapped him on the shoulder. “How are you holding up?”
He wondered if he looked as sick as he felt. “Do you think there’s something wrong with me that I don’t want to see this?”
“I think there’s probably something right. People in general may be ghoulish, but don’t be ashamed if you’re not.” She started to say more, but there was a commotion by the tub.
“What is that?” asked the colonel.
“Looks like a bullet wound, sir,” answered one of his men.
“Stay here,” said Tara, but Aaron didn’t. He followed her through the crowd to check on Danson’s progress.
The body had almost completely reformed, though its face had no skin and its guts were open to the air. An inch of acid sludge remained, but the corpse’s scalp had reattached itself, as well as a pair of burned trousers and the sleeves of a white shirt. There was a bullet hole just above the heart. Blue eyes stared from lidless sockets. In an instant of recognition, Aaron’s revulsion turned into something worse. He looked at his professor.
“It’s you.”
Danson’s shoulders sagged. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
Col. Green leaned over the tub. “Holy Christ,” he whispered. “All right, everyone clear the room. Cpl. Brandt, stay. You too, Trinh.” Dr. Pierce remained as well. Once the room was empty, the colonel let Danson have it.