by Ryan Schow
There’s no logic behind this, I know, but everything in me is dying to get out of this freaking wasteland. I would be stupid to return home in this condition—it’s not the responsible thing to do—but this dead world, these apocalyptic badlands, they’re not fit for me to wander.
So I will not find a cute, Steampunk battle skirt and corset to wear, and I won’t find a long gun or a cool hat and goggles like the future version of me did. Much to the horror of those who find me, I won’t wait for my hair to grow back—even though it’s coming in at less than a half inch a day now—and I won’t wait for my skin to heal.
Every breath sears my lungs, and looking around, everywhere my functioning eye sees, it’s hell with the lid pulled off.
I make the jump, landing in my NY bedroom just after I left, in a fetal position, the trip nearly killing me again. Even though I’m having a hard time staying conscious, and I know I look like absolute hell, I hear Sebastian turn and puke, and future me grumbles the words, “Nice of you to cock-block me, you gosh damn drama queen.”
When she manages to get me to the bathroom, when she looks back at the mess my damaged body has left behind, she says, “Well you fucked up our hardwood floors,” and that was that. I was out. Gone for days apparently. Future me took Sebastian to the airport while I was out, put him on a plane and didn’t go with him.
She’s been pissed off about it for too long now. She’s been telling me if I would have only healed myself in the future, I wouldn’t have run Sebastian off and she could’ve finally gotten laid. After she gets off her dick and stops giving me grief every chance she can, I tell her what happened, about how I thought I succeeded, but really I failed. It was obvious by my condition I wasn’t a screaming success, but still, I laid out the details.
She simply responded by saying, “Perhaps this will always be the fate of the planet.”
I’m not sure I disagree with her.
What changed though? I can’t stop thinking about this. Something must have changed to accelerate the timeline, I just don’t know what.
It takes me weeks to heal, to get my hair back, my strength back, and to finally make myself presentable in public. Me and future me go out to dinner, tell those who ask we’re twins, and I even drag out a smile once or twice, even though it required some serious superpowers to do so.
Honestly, inside we’re depressed.
Both of us.
Raven survived the nuclear holocaust, so we would, too; but we lost everyone, like Raven loses everyone. Didn’t we change our bodies and our identities to prevent these things from occurring? Is it possible to re-write history, but still not be able to change certain events? This is what me and future me talk about all the time now.
We’ve become damn near obsessive.
After dinner, the next morning, she says, “Sebastian text me while you were in the shower. I’m going to Huntington Beach. I’ll get my own phone down there and text you my number.”
“So you’re taking him?” I ask, incredulous.
Me and future me, we were getting along fine, and though we were both upset Sebastian was gone, she seems more upset than me. I get it.
“The way I see it, you had him before me, then you came and interrupted what could’ve been with us, so yeah, I’m taking him.”
“Did you ever meet August?” I finally ask her.
“Who’s August?” she says, and I know she knows. She’s just being difficult.
She thinks because eventually I get August, she’ll get him, too, but maybe when there are two of you in one timeline, as screwy and as impossible as this seems to fathom, life is just a multiple choice question where two of the answers are correct.
She gets Sebastian; I get August.
Except I don’t know where August is. Or who he is. Maybe I’ll never find him because I changed things. I came back roasted nearly to death. I came back too early. When one little thing changes—even the most minute of things—the rippling effect can end up being rather significant in the upcoming years, decades and centuries.
So, over time I’ll give him up. Convince myself he’s a fantasy I’ll never have, and this has me thinking of my friends. I miss them like crazy, but mostly I miss him.
I miss Brayden.
It’s when we’re standing there, me freshly showered for the evening, her in red-eye traveling clothes, that a ruckus erupts downstairs. We both look at each other. Then we look downstairs from the loft. The front door opens, then closes. Me and future me, we’re looking at ourselves, sort of stunned into silence.
Feet plod up the stairs and then we see her face. Holy shit. She’s looking like seven layers of dried up shit and future me is like, “Well screw me sideways and make it hurt.”
Me? I’m just like, “Freaking unbelievable,” but this is in my head because my mouth isn’t working right. Then it is.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” me and future me say back.
“Um, where’d you come from?” future me asks, and the girl says, “I landed on the doorstep, so I think I got something right. Which is to say, at least I didn’t fuse with the door.”
Future me looks at me, and I look at her, then both of us turn and look back at her.
Okay, uncomfortable…
The Darkness Squelching the Light
1
You never really get used to dying. There’s no right way to wake up from a slaying with any kind of grace. No right way to restart your body when it’s been stopped cold. At first, when the psychotic boy-assassin Delta 1A killed me, I couldn’t come back. I wanted to, but I needed some help. Now that I don’t need help, it’s easier.
But still not easy.
There’s pain sometimes, if it’s a quick recovery. Other times it’s painless. That’s only because when you’re dead long enough, your body starts healing itself in your stead.
This time, I wake with the memory of a sharp pain in my head. Sniper fire. The pain stood in me fast, digging its claws into my heart. Tearing at my emotions.
Daria.
My eyes won’t open up. Not easily. Feeling returns, slowly but at an even click. There’s something smashing into my face. Something hard, dirty. As feeling spreads back in my body, I find I’m turned hard at the torso. Too hard. Shoulder in the dirt, hip pressed onto blown off chunks of store front plaster and tank-crushed asphalt.
My eyes won’t open because I’m face-down in the rubble. The thing smashing my face is the ground. Somehow, I find the strength to press my palms down and push my body up. My face lifts out of the dirt and debris. Tiny pebbles rain down from my skin as I rise. My eyes crack open, blinking out the gravel. There’s still something sharp and stinging in my left eyeball, but I can’t help that just yet.
Below my face, there’s a pond of my blood, mostly dried, but still a little wet in the middle. My hair feels crusted with it. It’s caked to my face. God in heaven above, I must look like Death on a bad day.
In front of me, the door to the small store front is kicked off its hinges and a few bodies lay shot to death inside. Turning my head I see Daria, what’s left of her, and my heart jumps. I sink back down to the dirt as tears gather behind my eyes. A sob catches me, the harsh puffs of air leaving my mouth and nostrils in little dust-blowing bursts in front of me. I reach out, take her hand, marvel at how cool it feels. How lifeless.
I can’t take this. Not again.
So many people I’ve known and come to love have died. Maggie, Tavares, Arabelle, Cameron, Daria. I’ve born witness to death and devastation, much of this I created for myself, and though this feels like it takes the cake, it really doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s not hitting me extra hard.
No, I think letting go of her, crawling the details of Raven’s life was worse. In her future, everyone I ever loved had died. The righteous pain I felt in her felt like my own bitter agony, and because of this—because I’m dying not to be her—I think: no more.
Half Daria’s head is gone, but that one eye is g
lassed over, opalescent, a dozen burst blood vessels shooting out like starbursts against a bone white canvas. She knew the risk. She had to have. Yet she came for me. Stayed with me. Spilled out of her pocket is a small, leather pouch. Five or six “marbles” had rolled free of the pouch in the rubble between us.
Her time travel devices.
She could’ve gone back to wherever she was from. Maybe she could have healed herself. She could have lived.
Through the smoky air, through the fog of battle, I send my feelers out—my psychic tentacles—searching for life, for enemies around us. Around me. The battle has passed though. Part of me wonders if it’s the next day. Or the day after. Part of me wonders if the back half of the siege just walked on by me and Daria because we were clearly dead. Because we were casualties that were once people but are now a part of this devastating landscape.
That had to be it. We were two bodies among hundreds, thousands strewn about. In war, death means less than it should. In war, life is the sacrifice you pledge before you charge into chaos. Daria gave hers. Sadly, I cannot give mine.
Sitting up, scraping blood off my cheek with fingers and fingernails, I dig some of the carnage off my face, but give up quickly because…what’s the point? Gathering up the marbles from Daria, putting them with the others in her pouch, I climb to my feet. There’s dirt in my mouth. I spit it out, but it’s in there. Right now I’d pay a thousand dollars for a glass of water. Right now I’d kill for a hot shower and a bed and some clean, clean air.
I find myself wandering the war torn street, half dazed, not sure where I’m going, even less sure about what I’ll do if I see the Russians, or the Germans. Will I kill them all? My eyes see the bodies in the streets, the shell of this city in ruin. They don’t want to, but they do. In the toppled buildings, fires still burn and the smoke is stinking up the air, making it hard to breathe.
I blow my nose into my hands. It’s black with dust and soot. It’s dark red with blood. I wipe my hands on my stolen shirt, continue on. Pushing my blood-caked hair over my shoulders is useless. It keeps falling in my face. That more aggressive part of me pledges to kill everyone I see. The truth is, more than revenge, I just want a good cry.
Can I even do this?—find and kill Hitler? Or will I let the Germans kill me again? Or were those the Russians? Honestly, I’m not so sure I deserve any reprisal because what I am is worse than what they are. I am. It’s true. For what I let the Reptilian from Dulce do to make me…this creature I’ve become…the last thing that’s owed to me is my life. Or these powers. For grief’s sake, I shouldn’t even be here. In this time.
Fuck Adolf Hitler.
That short, sadistic, tyrannical weasel can do whatever the hell he was going to do before me for all I care. He’s not my problem. He doesn’t have to become it either.
My mind returns to Daria. I don’t know her, but I know Netty, and this makes me sad for what she will lose because of me. Do I ever tell her? Do I say anything? Maybe I’ll cross that bridge later, but maybe I won’t at all, that’s the funny thing about time paradoxes.
Standing in the plaza, my eyes burn. They water. I’m a solitary human in the smoldering battlefield, just standing here in a low rolling smoke, a leaden haze cloaking the city for miles around. This hot, eerie silence is disrupted every so often by the distant wailings of war. It’s coming from the direction I just came from. The final leg of the siege.
The ninth circle of Hell.
According to the new history where I kill Hitler, the Nazi war criminal has already escaped. By now he’s already traveled through the tunnels, caught a plane out of this shit, maybe even found his way to Spain, a country sympathetic to the Reich, and to Hitler. Before long he’d be in a U-boat heading for Argentina, and then to Misiones where in the jungle I would find him and behead him.
That’s the history I read about. A history this version of me doesn’t yet know.
With a snot crusted nose, a dry-as-death throat and no water in sight, I dig through Daria’s pouch of edible marbles and find one I want. I pop it in my mouth, dry swallow it and a rash of dirt, then sigh as a dashboard appears behind my eyes. Using my mind, I enter the coordinates, even though part of me is still a bit dizzy, a bit off. Did I get it right?
I think so, but I can’t be sure.
Where I’m going, I haven’t ever jumped there before. The fragment of the memory that is mine, but isn’t this timeline’s version of mine, it’s mostly clear.
Mostly.
The hell with it I think as I lock in the jump and blink out of my head and back into my conscious body. There is a soldier across the plaza from me. A young boy.
He looks at me; I look at him.
He lowers a long rifle, aims it at me. I lift my middle finger and grin the way Death would grin the second he knew you were his. The shot rang out, but I was already gone.
I’m gone.
2
I crash into the hallway just outside the front door of my New York City condo, the temporal fart slamming the side of the building with a time displacement wave, but not hard enough to crack wood or shatter glass.
Quickly taking in my surroundings, I stop and lock eyes with a bum who is standing across the street looking at me with gigantic eyes. It’s nighttime and it’s freaking cold here. Not taking my eyes off him, I struggle to my feet, stand on wobbly knees and just look at him. He looks back at me and it’s a stare off I’m about to let him win.
Using my mind instead of the house keys I don’t have (because I’ve never been here before as this version of me), I unlock my front door, stagger inside. I have no idea what I’ll find, but I’m hoping to find home. The home the Elizabeth Vanderbilt version of me owns. Did I jump timelines? Oh my God, this is so confusing!
I could be walking into a stranger’s house and wouldn’t know it at this point.
As thirsty and as dirty as I am, all I can think of is a glass of water and me scrubbing down in a scalding hot shower. After that, I want the comforts of my bed. And another glass of water. Perhaps two. Honestly, I just don’t want all this blood on me anymore, all this dirt in my mouth.
Making it up the steps takes an act of God, one He’s willing to grant me despite the unnaturalness of my being. Don’t get me wrong, He still doesn’t like me, and I’m no fan of His either. But I could be. One day I just might be.
Halfway up the stairs, I look up and see their startled faces. What comes from me is a heaving sigh of relief.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” they say back.
“Um, where’d you come from?” future me asks, and I say, “I landed on the doorstep, so I think I got something right. Which is to say, at least I didn’t fuse with the door.”
One version of me looks at the other and she looks back, then they both look back at me, blank faced, like something is obviously wrong.
Um…obviously.
“What are you doing here?” one of them asks. The skinnier version of me.
“Not killing Hitler.”
The shock of worry that crosses their faces should worry me, but I’m too tired to feel that shit.
One says to the other, “Now I think I know why the bombs came early,” and she responds by saying, “Fourth Reich?” then they both nod and the first version of me says, “Has to be.”
“Can you two please tell me what the hell you’re even talking about?”
“Remember how in 2082, when we were in Raven’s head, the UNCFE set off all the nukes at once killing most of the planet’s population?”
I muster up the strength to resume my trek up the stairs. I know there’s a shower up there. I can feel it.
“Yeah,” I say, exhausted, pushing past them, heading for the bathroom and hopefully the shower as well. I have to say, I like this place. These are some fancy digs.
“Well because you were a retarded failure,” one of them says with grit in her voice, “those bombs didn’t go off in 2082. They go off in seven years.”
That stop
s me. I turn and look at them, and then I understand why Hitler needed to be killed. Could I have just found his heart with my tethers and gave it a fatal, psychic squeeze? Most assuredly. But my mind is so weak right now. Not all that focused.
“Netty’s granddaughter traveled back in time to help us,” I say.
They both look at each other like they don’t know what I’m saying. “Daria,” I tell them, not bothering to hide the grief on my face at the sound of her name.
“Daria was Netty’s granddaughter?” one version of me says.
I nod, somber, fighting my emotions, but losing badly. That cold stab of pain in my breast has me turning away from them, then undressing in the bathroom. One version of me walks around me to start the shower while the other picks up my clothes and helps me inside.
The warm water is a blessing from God.
I stay in there, rinsing off my face and body, rinsing the dirt and grime out of my eyes and mouth. When the hot water turns Luke warm on its way to cool, I feel better than before, good enough to towel off, dry my hair and head downstairs and put away three big glasses of crystal clear water.
“So thanks for f*cking up our future,” the skinny future version of me finally says. They’re both looking at me like I’m a loser. Like it’s so sad and disappointing that I couldn’t get the job done.
“We missed the plane,” I say. “Me and Daria.”
The two of them look at each other then turn to me and say, “So did we.”
“You need to go back,” the more normal looking version of me says.
I can’t deal with this.
“Which one are you?” I ask. “I mean, how do I tell you apart?”
“Doesn’t matter, we’re not supposed to be here,” skinny future me says. “All of us, in this timeline.”
“But you want Sebastian for awhile—” normal looking future me starts to say before skinny future me cuts her off.
“And you want August, but not enough to go back into the future and get him.”