Recursion

by Blake Crouch

  The rancid-smelling Diplomat is surprisingly busy, and every bit as soulless as she remembers. Barry’s badge gets the diminutive bartender’s attention. It’s the same guy she and Barry met four months from now in a dead future—an asshole with a Napoleon complex, but one who helpfully carries a healthy fear of cops. She stands next to Barry as he introduces himself, and then Helena as his partner, explaining they need access to the cellar because a sexual assault was reported to have taken place there late last night.

  For five seconds, Helena thinks this isn’t going to work. The bartender stares at her like he’s not totally buying her place in all of this. He could ask to see a warrant. He could cover his ass and call the owner. But instead, he yells for someone named Carla.

  A waitress sets a bus tray of empty pint glasses on the bar and wanders over.

  The bartender says, “These are cops. They need to see the cellar.”

  Carla shrugs, then turns without a word and heads down the length of the bar into a room of cold storage. She leads them through a maze of silver kegs to a narrow door in the farthest corner of the refrigerated room.

  Plucking a key off a nail in the wall, she opens the padlock on the door. “Word of warning—there are no lights down there.”

  Barry unzips the duffel, pulls out a flashlight.

  She says, “The man came prepared. Well, then, I’ll leave you to it.”

  Barry waits until she’s gone to open the cellar door.

  The flashlight beam reveals a claustrophobic stairwell of questionable integrity, descending into darkness. The old, pervasive dampness is overwhelming—the smell of a long-forgotten place. Helena takes a deep breath to still the frenzy of her racing pulse.

  “This is it?” Barry asks.

  “This is it.”

  She follows him down the creaking steps, which spill into a cellar containing racks of collapsed shelving and a rusted-out oil drum filled with burnt garbage.

  At the far end of the room, Barry pulls another door open with a nerve-shattering creak. They cross the threshold into an arched corridor with walls of crumbling brick.

  It’s colder down here beneath the city streets, the air dank with mildew and restless with the trickle of running water and the distant, unseen scratching of what she fears are rats.

  Helena leads the way.

  Their footsteps make echoing splashes.

  Every fifty feet, they pass disintegrating doors leading into the underbellies of other buildings.

  At the second junction, she turns down a new passage, and after a hundred feet or so, stops and shows Barry a door like all the rest. It takes a fair amount of pressure to get the handle to turn, and when it does, he forces his shoulder into the door, jarring it open.

  They move out of the tunnel, into another cellar, where Barry drops the duffel bag onto the stone floor and unzips it. Out comes a crowbar, a package of zip ties, a box of twelve-gauge shells, a shotgun, and four spare magazines for his Glock.

  He says, “Grab as many extra cartridges as you can carry.”

  Helena tears open the box and starts cramming shells into the inner pockets of her leather jacket. Barry checks the load on the Glock, removes his trench coat, and jams the extra magazines into his pockets. Then he takes up the crowbar and crosses the room toward a newer door. It’s locked from the other side. He works the end of the crowbar deep into the jamb and torques back as hard as he can.

  At first, there’s nothing but the sound of him straining. Then comes the deep splintering of wood and the shriek of metal failing. When the door cracks open, Barry reaches through the opening and pulls off a broken, rusted padlock. Then he carefully opens the door wide enough for them to squeeze through.

  They emerge into the hotel’s old boiler room, which looks to have been out of commission for at least the last half century. Threading their way through a labyrinth of ancient machinery and gauges, they finally pass the massive boiler itself, then move through a doorway to the bottom of a service stairwell that spirals up into darkness.

  “What floor is Slade’s penthouse again?” Barry whispers.

  “Twenty-four. The lab is on seventeen, servers on sixteen. You ready?”

  “Wish we were taking the elevators.”

  Their plan is to go straight for Slade, hoping he’ll be in his residence in the penthouse. The moment he hears gunfire or catches wind of anything suspicious, he’ll likely be running for the chair so he can go back and stop them before they even set foot inside his building.

  Barry begins the ascent, keeping the flashlight trained on their feet. Helena follows closely behind, trying to step as softly as she can, but the old wood of the stairs flexes and groans under their weight.

  After several minutes, Barry stops at a door with the number 8 painted on the wall beside it, and turns off the light.

  “What is it?” Helena whispers.

  “Heard something.”

  They stand listening in the dark, her heart pounding and the shotgun growing heavier by the second. She can’t see a thing, can’t hear a thing but a faint, low moan that’s like breath passing over the opening of a bottle.

  From high above, a single beam of light shoots down the center of the stairwell and slants toward them across the checkered floor.

  “Come on,” Barry whispers, opening the door and pulling her into a corridor.

  They move quickly down a red-carpeted hall of hotel rooms, whose numbers are projected onto the doors by lights in the opposing wall.

  Halfway down the corridor, the door to Room 825 swings inward and a middle-aged woman steps out, wearing a navy robe with “HM” embossed on the lapel and carrying a silver ice bucket.

  Barry glances over at Helena, who nods.

  They’re ten feet from the hotel guest now, who hasn’t seen them yet.

  Barry says, “Ma’am?”

  When she looks in their direction, he aims his gun at her.

  The ice bucket falls to the floor.

  Barry brings a finger to his lips as they quickly close in.

  “Not a word,” he says, and they push her back through the doorway and follow her into the room.

  Helena locks the dead bolt, hooks the chain.

  “I have some money and credit cards—”

  “We’re not here for that. Sit on the floor and keep your mouth shut,” Barry says.

  The woman must’ve just stepped out of the shower. Her black hair is damp, and there’s not a speck of makeup on her face. Helena doesn’t meet her eyes.

  Dropping the duffel bag on the floor, Barry unzips it and pulls out the zip ties.

  “Please,” she begs. “I don’t want to die.”

  “No one’s going to hurt you,” Helena says.

  “Did my husband send you?”

  “No,” Barry says. He looks at Helena. “Go put some pillows in the bathtub.”

  Helena grabs three pillows off the decadent four-poster bed and lays them in the claw-foot tub, which stands on a small platform with a view of dusk falling on the city and the buildings beginning to glow.

  When she walks back out into the bedroom, Barry has the woman on her stomach and is binding her wrists and ankles. He finally lifts her over his shoulder and carries her into the bathroom, where he lays her gently in the tub.

  “Why were you here?” he asks.

  “You know what this place is?”

  “Yes.”

  Tears run down her face. “I made a bad mistake fifteen years ago.”

  “What?” Helena asks.

  “I didn’t leave my husband when I should’ve. I wasted the best years of my life.”

  “Someone will come for you,” Barry says. Then he rips a piece from the roll of duct tape and pats it over her mouth.

  They close the door to the bathroom. The gas-log fireplace is putting
out a welcome heat. The bottle of Champagne the woman was apparently about to drink stands on the coffee table beside a single glass and an open journal, both pages filled with handwriting.

  Helena can’t help herself. She glances at the elegant scrawl and realizes it’s the narrative of a memory, perhaps the one the woman in the bathtub was going back to.

  It begins—The first time he hit me I was standing in the kitchen at ten p.m., asking him where he’d been. I remember the redness on his face and the smell of bourbon on his breath and his watery eyes

  Helena closes the journal and goes to the window, sweeping aside the curtain.

  Anemic light creeps in.

  Peering eight stories down onto East Forty-Ninth, she can see Barry’s car a little ways down the block.

  The city is wet, dreary.

  The woman is crying in the bathroom.

  Barry walks over, says, “I don’t know if we’ve been made. Regardless, we should go after Slade right now. I say we take our chances with the elevator.”

  “Do you have a knife?”

  “Yeah.”

  “May I see it?”

  Barry reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folding knife as Helena removes her leather jacket and rolls up the sleeves of her gray shirt.

  She takes it from him, sits down in one of the armchairs, and opens the blade.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “Making a save point.”

  “A what?”

  She inserts the tip of the knife into the side of her left arm above the elbow and draws the blade across her skin.

  As the pain comes and the blood begins to flow—

  BARRY

  November 7, 2018

  “What the hell are you doing?” Barry asks.

  Helena’s eyes are shut, her mouth hanging slightly open, perfectly still.

  Barry carefully pries the knife out of her hands. For a long moment, nothing happens. Then her bright-green eyes snap open.

  Something in them has changed. They exude a newfound fear and intensity.

  “You OK?” Barry asks.

  Helena surveys the room, glances at her wristwatch, and then wraps her arms around Barry with a startling ferocity.

  “You’re alive.”

  “Of course I’m alive. What happened to you?”

  She leads him over to the bed. They sit, and Helena removes one of the pillowcases and tears off a strip of cloth, which she begins to tie around her self-inflicted wound to stop the bleeding.

  “I just used the chair to return to this moment,” she says. “I’m starting a new timeline.”

  “Your chair?”

  “No, the one up on seventeen. Slade’s chair.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve already lived the next fifteen minutes. The pain of cutting myself just now was a breadcrumb back to this moment. It left me a vivid, short-term memory to return to.”

  “So you know what’s about to happen?”

  “If we go to the penthouse, yes. Slade knows we’re coming. He’ll be waiting for us. We won’t even make it out of the elevator before a bullet goes through your eye. There’s so much blood, and I start shooting. I must hit Slade, because suddenly he’s crawling across his living room.

  “I take the elevator down to seventeen, find the lab, and shoot the door open as Jee-woon is climbing into the tank. He starts toward me, saying he knows I would never hurt him after all he did for me, but he’s never been more wrong about anything in his life.

  “At the terminal, I log in with some backdoor credentials. Then I map a memory, climb into the tank, and return to the memory of cutting myself in this room.”

  “You didn’t have to come back for me.”

  “To be completely honest, I wouldn’t have. But I didn’t know where Sergei was, and there wasn’t enough time to destroy all the equipment. But I am very glad you’re alive.” She looks at her watch again. “You’re going to have an awful memory of all of this in about twelve minutes, and so is everyone else in the building, which is a problem.”

  Barry rises from the bed, gives Helena a hand up.

  She lifts the shotgun.

  He says, “So Slade is in the penthouse, anticipating that’s where we’ll go first—which we did the first time around.”

  “Correct.”

  “Jee-woon is already heading for the chair on seventeen, probably waiting to hear if there’s been a security breach so he can jump into the deprivation chamber and overwrite this timeline. And Sergei is…”

  “Unknown. I say we go straight to the lab and deal with Jee-woon first. No matter what, he can’t be allowed to get in the tank.”

  They head out of the room and into the corridor. Barry keeps compulsively touching the extra magazines in his pockets.

  At the bank of elevators, he calls for a car, listening to the gears turning on the other side of the doors and holding his Glock at the ready.

  Helena says, “We’ve done this part already. There’s no one coming down.”

  As the light above the elevator illuminates, the bell dings.

  Barry raises his gun, finger on the trigger.

  The doors part.

  Empty.

  They step into the small car, and Helena presses the button for 17. The walls of this elevator are old, smoke-stained mirrors, and staring into them creates a recursive illusion—an infinite number of Barrys and Helenas in elevator cars bending away through space.

  As they begin to climb, Barry says, “Let’s stand against the wall. Want to offer the smallest targets possible when the doors open. What weapon did Slade have?”

  “A handgun. It was silver.”

  “Jee-woon?”

  “There was a gun that looked more like yours by the terminal.”

  The button for each floor illuminates as they pass through it.

  Nine.

  Ten.

  A wave of nausea hits him—nerves. There’s a taste of fear in his mouth from the adrenaline dumping into his bloodstream.

  Eleven.

  Twelve.

  Thirteen.

  He marvels that Helena doesn’t look as scared as he feels. Then again, from her perspective, she’s already waded into the fray once before.

  “Thank you for coming back for me,” he says.

  Fourteen.

  “Just, you know, try not to die this time.”

  Fifteen.

  Sixteen.

  “Here we go,” she says.

  The elevator grinds to a halt at seventeen.

  Barry raises the Glock.

  Helena shoulders the shotgun.

  The doors slide apart to reveal an empty corridor that runs the length of the building, with other hallways branching off a little ways down.

  Barry steps carefully over the threshold.

  The faint hum of lights burning overhead is the only sound.

  Helena comes alongside him, and as she brushes her hair out of her face, Barry is overcome by a savage, protective impulse that terrifies and bewilders him. He’s known her barely twenty-four hours.

  They advance.

  The lab is a sleek, white space, filled with recessed lighting and glass. They pass a window that peers into a room containing more than a dozen MEG microscopes, where a young scientist is soldering a circuit board. She doesn’t see them slip past.

  As they approach the first junction, a door closes somewhere nearby. Barry stops, listening for the sound of footsteps, but all he can hear are those lights.

  Helena leads them down another corridor that ends at a long wall of windows overlooking the blue Manhattan gloom of this raw evening, the lights of surrounding buildings shining through the misty dusk.

  “The lab is just ahead,” Helena whispers.<
br />
  Barry’s hands are sweating. He wipes his palms on the sides of his pants to get a better grip on the Glock.

  They stop at a door equipped with keypad entry.

  “He may already be inside,” she whispers.

  “You don’t know the code?”

  She shakes her head, raises the shotgun. “But this worked last time.”

  Barry catches movement swinging around the corner at the end of the corridor.

  He steps in front of Helena, who screams, “Jee-woon, no!”

  Gunshots explode the silence, the muzzle flash bursting from a barrel aimed at Barry, who empties his Glock in a blitzkrieg of noise.

  Jee-woon has vanished.

  It all happened in five seconds.

  Barry ejects the empty magazine, slams in a fresh one, thumbs the slide.

  He looks at Helena. “You OK?”

  “Yes. Because you stepped in front of…oh God, you’re shot.”

  Barry staggers back, blood pouring down his abdomen, down his leg under his pants, flowing across the top of his shoe and onto the floor in a long, burgundy smear. The pain is coming, but he’s too jacked on adrenaline to register its full effect—only an intensifying pressure in the middle-right section of his torso.

  “We have to get out of this corridor,” he groans, thinking, There’s a bullet in my liver.

  Helena drags him back around the corner.

  Barry sinks to the floor.

  Bleeding profusely now, the blood nearly black.

  He looks up at Helena, says, “Make sure…he isn’t coming.”

  She peeks around the corner.

  Barry lifts his gun, which he hadn’t noticed slip from his grasp, off the floor.

  “They could already be in the lab,” he says.

  “I’ll stop them.”

  “I’m not going to make it.”

  There’s movement on his left; he tries to raise the Glock, but Helena beats him to the punch, firing an earsplitting blast from the shotgun that forces a man he hasn’t seen before back into the corridor.

  “Go,” Barry says. “Hurry.”

  The world is darkening, his ears ringing. Then he’s lying with his face against the floor and the life rushing out of him.