The Unwinding House and Other Stories

by Jared Millet

  “What do you mean you weren’t going to say anything? Did you think we wouldn’t notice after a few more gallons? I want to know what you’re doing in that tub to begin with.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” said Danson. “We’re committed now.”

  “Bullshit,” said Green. “We can stop right here. We can stick this body on ice. We can bury it in the desert and all live happy lives.”

  “No,” said Danson. “There has to be a reason. Not just for this, but for everything. The house. The bomb. The people of Camden. If this is my future self, then he might be the one to tell us. Otherwise, we may never know.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Pierce, “but he’s right. That bullet wound bothers me, though. So far we haven’t found a gun.”

  “Just get him breathing again,” said Green. “Corporal, fetch back the medic.”

  It took three more bottles of acid to restore the rest of Danson’s body. Blood pooled in the tub and soaked his shirt and hands.

  “What do we do now?” Aaron asked.

  Air rattled from the dead man’s lungs. Aaron jumped, slipped, and fell. His head cracked on the concrete, and when he came to his senses there was blood on his scalp.

  “Medic!” someone shouted.

  “No, I’m fine. Just hit my head.” But it wasn’t Aaron they were shouting for. Danson and Pierce reached into the tub. Col. Green pulled them out of the way, and the medic rushed across the room with his kit.

  Before Aaron could stand, the room turned inside out. The exit telescoped away. Aaron gasped as the air stopped moving his throat.

  The body will fly from the tub, but not of its own volition. Blood will pour into the hole in its chest. The wounded Danson will try to stop the flow, to no avail. He will stumble forward and trip on Aaron as he tries to stay on his feet. He will grab Aaron’s shoulders and plead. He will speak in reverse and Aaron won’t understand him.

  Aaron will push him away. The dying Danson will flail toward the other bodies and knock them both on the floor. He will then fall into the arms of the real Danson, the living Danson, who will jerk back, his eyes wild.

  The wounded Danson goes for his throat. The other Danson’s eyes bulge and he grabs the man’s wrists. Cpl. Brandt shouts for them to stop. The wounded one screams defiance. As one, the two Dansons fall to the floor.

  Thunder shatters the air.

  Aaron’s only warning was his gut sucking in before a river of bile burned its way up his throat. He didn’t have time to breathe before a spasm blasted the contents of his stomach out his mouth.

  The medic had been reduced to a withered husk in an old, tattered uniform. Next to the tub, Dr. Pierce wept. The colonel was sprawled on the floor. Tara stood near the door, her sidearm smoking in her hand.

  Both of the Dansons were gone.

  ~

  “They both disappeared?”

  “He disappeared,” said Aaron. “It was the same person.”

  “That’s not what you said a minute ago. When the two of them struggled–”

  “It took a while to work it out. I’m getting to that.”

  “Fair enough,” said Tresser. “So what was the deal with the medic?”

  “There was a tachyon blast when Danson switched directions in time. The rest of us caught the edge of it, but the medic’s temporal momentum went to zero, like hitting a brick wall in the time stream.”

  Tresser tapped his pencil eraser and chewed his lip. “So what made Danson switch directions? And why did he try to strangle himself?”

  “Well, the change happened when Tara, I mean Cpl. Brandt, shot him. We didn’t know if that’s what caused it, but the events were synchronous. As for the second question, we didn’t have a clue.”

  ~

  Soldiers carried the medic’s desiccated body to base camp. Aaron assisted Dr. Pierce, who was nauseated the whole way back. Since a civilian had been killed, the colonel ordered Cpl. Brandt confined pending an inquiry, but Aaron overheard that there might not be any charges. Despite what happened, she had only acted to defend the “real” Dr. Danson. And besides, there wasn’t a body. Danson’s remains were heading into the past in an acid-filled bathtub to be vaporized with the rest of Camden.

  The next morning, the camp was quiet. Even those gossiping about the day before did so in hushed tones. Word came that Sgt. West died from his burns during the night. The colonel ordered that no one return to the house until he received further instructions from the Department of Defense. None of the monitoring equipment worked, and Dr. Pierce didn’t seem interested in using it anyway. Aaron found her stirring her coffee in the mess tent and staring into space. He decided to leave her alone. Asking around, he found Brandt in a room in one of the trailers. The guard let him pass with barely a nod.

  “Hey,” Tara said.

  “Jeez, don’t they even lock the doors?”

  “I’m here on my own recognizance.” She had a bunk, a window, and a newspaper. The bed didn’t look slept in. Her eyes were clear, but her face was pale. Aaron wondered if she’d eaten.

  “Brought you something.” He tossed her the baseball from the day before.

  “What am I going to do with this?”

  “I thought you’d bounce it off the walls. Like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.”

  “You’re such a geek,” she said. Aaron blushed. She threw the ball back to him. “Be careful with that. Break a window in here and you’ll have to pay for it.”

  Something kinked in Aaron’s mind. “Break a window.” He knelt and rolled the ball so that it bounced off the wall.

  “Aaron? You’re being weird now.”

  “What did you see? When you shot the professor and right after. What did you see?”

  She stiffened. “I’ve already made my statement. You don’t get to question me.”

  He grabbed the ball and presented it like evidence. “But what did you see? It’s important.”

  “I didn’t see anything. I mean, I saw the two of them. I had a bead on the one doing the strangling. I warned him to stop. He didn’t, so I fired. For what it’s worth, I was aiming at his shoulder.”

  “But what next?”

  “I don’t know. The whole room kind of twisted for a moment and I guess I blacked out, but when I came to I was still on my feet.”

  “But while you were blacked out, could someone have slipped around you?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

  He waved the baseball. “Conservation of momentum. An object can’t simply change direction. It has to be acted on by an outside force. Dr. Danson couldn’t just turn around in time. Something had to shove him.”

  “I shot him.”

  Aaron shook his head. “Irrelevant. We shoot people every day. No, I’m talking equal and opposite.”

  “Like what?”

  He showed her the baseball again. In his other hand, he curled his fingers as if he held a second one, just like the first.

  “Two identical particles move toward each other and collide.” He bounced his hands off each other. “If the transfer of energy is perfect, each rebounds with the other’s original velocity.”

  “Okay,” said Tara, “but if they’re identical…”

  “Then after the collision there’s no way to tell which is which.”

  “So what?”

  “All right. Danson from the future gets shot and boiled down to bone. The whole house burns, then gets sent backward in time with the bomb. The bomb goes off – Bam! – vaporizes Camden. Causality has ruptured. All we can observe are effects, and now the universe has to find a cause to explain them. Enter our Dr. Danson.”

  Tara started to pace. Aaron kept thinking out loud. Wherever he was going, he felt he was on the cusp of it.

  “Danson thought that we could choose that cause, just like I chose to put out the fire with the flamethrower. In the basement, he chose to reassemble the body, and he chose to keep at it even after he saw that it was himself. He chose to
be the cause of the effect. If he hadn’t, that body would still be there and he’d still be alive.”

  “Hold on,” said Tara. “If our Danson got bounced into the past, what happened to the Danson from the future?”

  “Are you sure no one slipped around you?”

  Tara straightened her uniform. “We need to speak to the colonel.”

  Thirty minutes later, Col. Green led ten men, plus Brandt, Aaron, and Pierce, back to the crater. He sent five men to scout outside while the others searched the house. It didn’t take long to find Danson. The bomb had disappeared from the family room and a humming noise came from the basement.

  Aaron, Pierce, and Brandt went in last. When they arrived below, Dr. Danson was on his knees with his hands cuffed behind him and a pair of army issue pistols aimed at his head. He’d lost some of his hair and his eyes were edged with crow’s feet. When his colleagues entered the room, he smiled.

  “Good morning, Angela. And it’s nice to see you again, Dr. Trinh.”

  “Doctor?”

  “That’s right, in this time you’re still my assistant. Are you still going by Aaron? The last time we spoke, you were Trịnh Hữu An. You dropped your American name when you married.”

  “Dr. Danson,” said the colonel. “I asked you a question. What is all this?”

  The mummified bodies had been returned to their tables and an array of equipment had been spread around them. To the side was the bomb casing, now open and gutted. Danson smiled without humor.

  “A time machine, Colonel. My counterpart from your time brought me through. If you’d please let me finish, I’d like to do the same for my wife and son.”

  “What?” asked Pierce. “You did all this, you killed all those people, just so you could travel in time?”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “People always wondered what would happen if you went back and killed your parents before you were born. That’s nothing. The only way to send something backward in time, the only way for time travel to work, is to create so huge a paradox, destroy so many lives, that cause and effect are blown to dust.”

  He turned to Aaron. “You’re lucky. You and your family die in the destruction of Hanoi ten years from now. You never see the nightmare the future becomes. There’s no practical use for time travel except as a weapon, and a time bomb is a weapon you cannot defend against. You can’t see it coming. You only find it after the fact, and if you disarm it you become the reason it was armed. All you can do is send another time bomb against whoever attacked you and try to kill them first.

  “Do you see it? Imagine a war that propagates backward in time. Billions murdered in retaliation for atrocities they haven’t even committed yet. And you can’t stop it. Time travel is a self-inventing technology. It’s a gift from the future; all you have to do is reverse engineer it.”

  “So why are you here?” asked Aaron. “If what you’re saying is true, then you didn’t come far enough back to escape your war. What did you hope to accomplish?”

  “Such a good student. Always asking the right question. I’ve jumped ahead of the wavefront. I knew that if I reached this time my younger self would be clever enough to regenerate me, if only I gave him a puzzle to solve. So I hired men to kill me, to burn me, to boil me into soup, just so the young Paul Danson would have enough breadcrumbs to divine the solution. No living person can travel in time. The shift in momentum is lethal. As far as I know, I’m the only one to find a loophole.

  “Colonel, I came to give warning. The war is on its way. Imprison me, question me, but for humanity’s sake don’t bury me. I need to be heard. And in return, I only ask that you let me activate this equipment.”

  “What’ll it do?”

  “These bodies were frozen by a tachyon burst, just like that unfortunate man earlier. I can’t help him, since his death was in the past. Because these two deaths are yet to come, I hope to recreate the tachyon field that restored me and bring them back. No one need die this time. Please, they’re innocents in this.”

  “Colonel,” said Dr. Pierce, “we can’t possibly trust this man.”

  “You should,” said Danson. “The woman is you. The child is our son.”

  ~

  “And that’s it?” asked Tresser.

  Aaron nodded. “The Colonel ordered us all out of the house. I never found out what happened to Danson or his family. Pretty soon after, I was flown here, wherever this is.”

  “You’ll find out shortly.” Tresser scribbled one last note in his file and slid it into his briefcase. “I don’t know if anyone else will apologize, so I guess it’ll have to be me. I’m sorry for the sacrifices that are going to be asked of you, and I’d like to thank you in advance for the service you’re going to give to your country.”

  Suddenly Aaron felt heavy. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re being drafted for a special project. I think you can guess what it is.” Tresser straightened his suit as he stood. “I’m afraid your PhD is on hold. One day, though, I think you’ll make quite a name for yourself. When that time comes, I’ll be happy to call you ‘Dr.’ Trinh.”

  Agent Tresser shook Aaron’s limp hand and left. Aaron sat there, numb, until a soldier came to escort him outside.

  Wherever he was, it was warmer than Colorado. The sky was gray, and beyond a razor wire fence was a forest of oak and pine. The buzz of mosquitoes filled the air. Was he in Mississippi? Alabama? The compound’s unmarked buildings gave no clue.

  His escort passed him off to another. Aaron didn’t notice until his new guide pinched his arm. He shouted in surprise.

  “Sorry,” said Tara. “You were kind of spacing out.”

  “Corporal!”

  “It’s sergeant now.” She pointed to her new chevrons. “Like you, I think I’m stuck here. They wouldn’t even let me call my mom.”

  “What do you think is going to happen? Are they going to use us in the war when it comes?”

  Sgt. Brandt’s gaze quickly skirted the area around them, then she spoke close to Aaron’s ear.

  “I heard a little more of what Danson had to say after you left. He came back from ten years in the future, but he says that we may only have two or three left before the war catches up with us. We won’t be able to stop the first time bomb, but he thinks we can draw a line in the sand. If we can contain time travel technology, develop it ourselves before it falls into someone else’s lap, we can prevent the rest of the war from happening.”

  “Or get caught in the same endless cycle.” Aaron wondered where the first bombs would hit, and what the survivors would do to retaliate. “Look, I don’t care what the government threatens me with. I’m not going to help kill innocent people.”

  “Hey, no one’s asking you to. Our mission is to stop this war, not start it. I’d think a smart guy like you would want to help out.”

  Aaron thought for a moment. If past and future were mutable, if cause and effect were multiple choice, then there might be more possible futures than the nightmare that Danson had warned them about.

  “There’s a lot we’ll have to figure out,” he said. “Two years isn’t much of a head start, but it might be enough.”

  Tara tossed him a baseball, the one from the house in Camden. One of its stitches had begun to unwind. “Come on, then, slacker. Time to get to work.”

  Fire

  Quickly, everyone, come inside. Someone bar the door behind us. This old city may be abandoned, but I think I saw a wolf a few blocks back. Where there’s one, there’s bound to be more.

  Sweet Judas on a stick, but it’s cold in here. Still, it looks safe to build a fire. That marble floor won’t catch, and if we break that upper window it will act as a chimney. Let’s just hope the furniture is wood and not plastic.

  But wait. Oh my god. Look where we are. Forget the furniture, kids, we just hit the jackpot. Look at all those shelves. All those dusty volumes. Row after row after row. I tell you what, we won’t freeze tonight.

  Did you know
that paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit? Says so in this book right here. Who’s got the matches? We should only need one. Run it across the pages. Get the kindling going, then bring some more books, quick. Places like this used to hand them out for free, you know.

  Start with the skinny ones with all those bright pictures. Fan them open on the pile. If you’re fast, you can read them before the pages curl. Hey look, it’s a banquet. Green eggs and ham. Piles of roast beast. Who’s got the cat food? Open a can. Hey, let’s celebrate. Go ahead and open two.

  What’s next? Ah, textbooks. May as well, no one ever read them in the first place. You might think the world wouldn’t have gone downhill if they had, but who are we kidding? People are people. All the history in the world couldn’t change that, much less the algebra. What’s that... trigonometry? Oh please, burn it all.

  Now this one’s funny. The Perfect Resume for Dummies. Just imagine: somebody somewhere was the last person ever to read this. What was he thinking? I guess people still had dreams, right up to the end. I wonder if he picked the “work-based resume” or the curriculum vitae. Whatever. They burn just as well.

  Now we get to the good stuff. What’ll it be, kids? Thrillers or romance? Adventures or mysteries? Comical pastoral or pastoral historical? Sorry. Shakespeare joke. We’ll get to him later, just you wait. Oh, I know. Bring the science fiction. You know, those books with the bright shiny futures on the cover. Burn the whole lot before they make me sick. The fantasy too, why not. After all, no teenage wizard’s going to fly down on a broom and save us, will he? May as well do us some good.

  That reminds me. As long as we’re on the subject, there’s another fantasy section somewhere in the nonfiction department. See if you can find it. Some of the books will have people with wings on the cover. They called those guardian angels. I wonder if one of them will protect us the next time a storm hits, or a bear steals our food. Throw them on the fire; maybe that will wake them up.