by Ryan Schow
“Because in here, I can make sure he doesn’t do anymore damage.”
“But you killed him,” Tempest says.
“This is the soul that brought a body back to Whitechapel in the late 1880’s to kill five women.”
“Are you…are you talking about Jack the Ripper?” Georgia asks, gulping.
“The one and only.” All three of them just stare at me like I’ve got monkey butt fever or something. “I am something not-human, I have telekinetic powers, and I can time travel. But apparently I’m also some kind of super max prison for creeps like The Operator.”
“That’s his name?”
“It’s what I call him when I’m not calling him ‘asshole.’”
“But you have him now,” Georgia says. “Is that why it’s okay?”
“You met Aloysius,” I tell her. She nods. “He’s Hitler’s son.”
“Good God.”
“I was told Aloysius’s body would contain The Operator. What neither of us knew was how badly he’d fail to maintain control. Within seconds, all hell breaks loose.”
“How will he get The Operator?”
“My friend from the future transfers him in there and then he kills me. He kills my family as well, and my friends. He also kills my friend’s top elder, and that’s a problem on a much larger scale than we can imagine.”
“Jesus,” Cicely says. “Can you stop him?”
I’m not sure I can.
“I’m going to try,” I tell them. “But this battlefield we’re fighting on is not a linear battlefield and it’s not exactly contained…”
“Contained to what?” Georgia asks.
“Any particular timeline, or even this universe.”
This gets everyone quiet. Ladies and Germs, the crowd falls to a hush as everyone’s brain suddenly implodes…
“What do you mean, this universe?”
“Apparently there are millions of universes like ours, parallel universes. Billions maybe. Some people learn how to travel between them.”
“Aloysius?” Georgia says, swallowing hard, her face pale.
“I think. I mean, I don’t know much about this. But at some point, I think maybe me, too.”
“So you’ll be able to…cross over to other universes?” Cicely asks.
“Yes. In fact, one version of me from another universe crosses over first to do what my friend thinks will work to fix this.”
“And?”
“We all die by Aloysius’s hands. Well, not Aloysius. Rather Aloysius’s body, which will be taken and controlled by The Operator. The problem is, Aloysius has a rather unique…biology.”
“He’s a mutant vampire,” Georgia blurts out.
Cicely snorts out a laugh, but then catches herself before stopping.
“Wait, for real?” she asks.
“I’ve watched him tear through a dozen bodies like they’re paper mâché. He slices his mouth open with bones that punch out of his knuckles and he can drain a person inside of a minute. It’s disgusting, and a bit frightening. Which is saying something when you consider I’m not really scared of much.”
“I burned him, though,” Georgia says. “His face caught fire.”
“He came after me on the way here yesterday,” I admitted. I don’t want to scare them, but they had a right to know what was happening. Of course, I’m operating under the premise that if this all gets too heavy, I can wipe their minds again. That would be a super uncool bitch move, but if they need protecting, I’m going to protect them, even if it’s from the truth.
“You saw him?” Georgia asks, aghast.
“He stole a cop car and pulled me over because he knew I’d been pulled over for going ninety in a sixty-five. Apparently in the future it was a matter of public record. So that’s how he found me.”
“What did you do?”
“Shoved him into traffic so he got run the f*ck over.”
There is a collective gasp that sort of bothers me. With everything the three of them know about me—with all we’ve been through—I wish they weren’t so overly sensitive to matters of this caliber. This is some world ending, world saving shit we’re talking about and it requires a backbone.
“So he’s dead?”
“Not really. He’s in a morgue for now, but his body is coming back together. And when he wakes up, trust me when I tell you, it’s not going to be pretty.”
“So how do we stop him?” Tempest asks.
“I need Georgia’s help. And maybe future Alice’s help, too.”
“That girl is the devil,” Georgia grumbles. She should know better than any of us.
“Your fire is building,” I tell Georgia. “You need an outlet, and she can help you with that.”
“How?”
“She is your sister in fire,” I tell her. “A fire mage like you. She’ll be able to help you bleed out the heat.”
“Like I said…”
“She’s not the devil,” I admit, “but she is close. If it’s any consolation, with age she becomes less creepy. She’s actually someone I think I might like.”
“So I need to meet her? Like, some future version of her that’s less unnerving?”
“Exactly. But I’m going to help you bleed off the heat now.” I pull out the small satchel of time travel devices, hand one to her and say, “Are you ready?”
“For?”
“The bleed off, your first time jump.”
“I’m not doing that,” she says, stepping back from the marble-like device.
“I need you two to stay here,” I tell Cicely and Tempest. “Just in case.”
“I said I’m not going,” Georgia says, resolute.
“Aloysius targeted you,” I say. “Remember?”
“He’s targeting me because of you!”
“And now if you want to stay safe, you’ll come with me and we can cut the head off this snake.”
“By killing him in the past?”
“Not him. His father, Adolf Hitler.”
They all get really quiet again, looking back and forth from each other. “So, you’re saying you want me to come with you and burn Hitler to death?” Georgia asks.
“Yes.”
“And if I say yes?”
“Then I need to meditate, get a lock on him somewhere in time. Wherever his signal is strongest, that’s where I can catch him. But when I locate him, we’ll have to go.”
“So you’re going to meditate right now?” Tempest asks.
“I’ve never really done this before, so I don’t know how long this will take. But I need Georgia to stay here so that when I open my eyes and tell you I’ve found him, we can go right away.”
I tell her how to use the time travel device, then I get into Lotus position, close my eyes, clear my mind. I don’t exactly know how to do this, other than to thread out my psychic tethers. It takes awhile as I fight the noise in my head, the endless stream of semi-conscious thought and the occasional random musings, but then my tethers reach out into vast unknown with no limitations on either time or space.
When I finally hook onto my target, I get a vision of his time, and then I get a date and coordinates. When I open my eyes, most of the night has passed. Everyone is asleep. It takes a moment or three to get back into my body. When I feel fully connected, I stand and stretch, and then I rouse Georgia and tell her it’s time.
The other girls wake up as I’m giving Georgia the coordinates. In my mind, I feel him coming together: Aloysius.
“Don’t go just yet,” I tell Georgia. “Just hang on.”
I tap into Aloysius’s mind in this time, ride his thoughts for as long as I dare. It’s like surfing through sewage and violence and darkness. My mind is slogging through these manufactured barriers, reaching through the layers of his mental security until I find what he’s hiding: he’s conscious.
I sift through his short term memory.
After being run over on the highway, he’d managed to right his mangled body enough to drag himself into a prone po
sition. When the startled driver who first hit him got out to see about helping him, Aloysius whispered something, made a show of tilting his head up and acting distant, like he was facing the light and ready to leave this world. The woman dropped to a knee, leaned close to hear what he was saying, and that’s when he grabbed her, latched on and bled her dry in moments.
He reset his bones to the horror of those watching this odd, almost animalistic exchange. He grabbed a nearby man by the ankle, jerked him off his feet, reeled him in. Half of Aloysius’s face was blood soaked and mean looking. His jaw hung open revealing a mouth full of razor sharp teeth. Viciously, he bled this man dry as well. People were freaking out, calling the cops, keeping their distance.
When he awkwardly managed to get to his feet, he shook some of his bones back in place the way you’d shake out a wrinkle in your suit jacket or a stiff arm. A few of the bones held and healed at an alarming rate, but he needed more blood. The only problem was he was already full. Looking around, half his head still smooshed, only one eye working, he realized he needed to get out of there. At this point, some people were running, other’s barking their tires as they sped off. He staggered back to the highway patrol sedan he’d stolen, got in and haphazardly vacated the scene.
With a belly full of blood and the Fountain of Youth serum working its charms, his reset bones were mending fast. He flipped on the light bar and made his way through traffic before turning off the road into an open dusting of bare land. He bounced and bottomed out the suspension, slowing only when he’d smashed into a boulder and high centered the cruiser.
By now some of the blood was assimilating. He was still starving for more blood, his body damaged so badly. There was no one around and the thirst, matched with the healing powers overtaking him, proved to be too much.
The CHP officer he’d mortally wounded an hour ago was slumped over in the seat next to him. He drank the blood of the man like it was his last meal, but the blood was cold and congealing. He gagged, puked, pushed his way out of the car. He stood on shaky legs in the dirt and spotty weeds, a warm gust blowing over him, the sounds of nearby traffic hurting his overly sensitive ears for some reason.
He was having the worst pains in his stomach. He started walking, but he wasn’t sure where he was going because his vision was blurring at the edges and he was having the most awful feeling. It was how he imagined dying would be like. He wasn’t sure how he could fix this. It was like his soul was halfway out of the body and feeling so hollow, so empty.
Aloysius collapsed to a knee then fell over sideways, his ear in the dirt, his eyes having a hard time staying open.
It had to be the cop’s blood, Aloysius thought.
Above him, in the deep blue skies, he saw a circling of carrion birds, big and black, waiting for him to die. If they feasted on him, would they die, too? Would they turn? As he lay there feeling the last of his strength leave him, he thought it would be the most amazing thing to have a vampire bird, but then he closed his eyes and an ocean of darkness swept over him, pulling him under, dragging him out to sea.
When I come to, I’m certain Aloysius of this time won’t come after me here, at least not in the next few minutes. Popping the time travel device into my mouth, I fall back behind the travel dashboard, enter the date, time and coordinates, then pop back into what I’ve come to think of as forward consciousness and tell Georgia the same date, time and coordinates.
Georgia doesn’t look like she’s listening.
Oh, shit.
“Take it,” I say urgent, knowing I have only seconds. Right then I know she isn’t going to take it. “Dammit, Georgia—”
But then I’m sucked down into the wormhole, my body crushing and remaking and disintegrating and remaking itself over and over again through the cosmic trash compactor for like forever.
When I’m shat out on the ground just to the side of a country road, it’s to a blast of temporal energy. A circle of dust blows outward, the weeds bending. I stand and flex. It only takes a moment for confirmation: Georgia isn’t coming.
Looking around at the meadow grass that seems to stretch on forever, I realize I’m in Argentina. The Misiones Province on a hard packed dirt road cutting through the countryside. I walk for only a few minutes up the RP219, which is the name of this nearly damp lane. On the left is a series of buildings. The entire facility is cordoned off with tall fencing topped with razor sharp concertina wire. German Shepherds are charging my way, barking. I muzzle them from here, which breaks their otherwise scary offensive.
In my mind, I envision them sitting down and they obey. I stand on the other side of the chain link fence, staring inside. There are about five or six very large barns. Further into the property, nestled into a large grove of trees, is the main home. It is beautiful, but not ostentatious by any means. If anything, it blends in too well.
Up ahead, a man with a rifle at his side comes to see what the dogs were barking at. He sees me, stops, picks up a radio. I crush it in his hands with my mind. Not blinking, not taking my eyes off him, I make a hole in the chain link fence, walk through and head directly for him. On the way by the dogs, I look down at them as they sit there, muzzled and paralyzed, but whining in the backs of their throats.
There is fifty feet between the man and me, then thirty, then ten. I have his feet pegged to the ground using telekinesis, which I’ve come to have a comfortable control over. There is much more to do in terms of managing my abilities, but if I’m never going to die, then I have all the time in the world to use it.
A shot is fired and my shoulder kicks forward, my mental control lost momentarily. The man who is ten feet away from me pulls a pistol and the dogs get to their feet and race for me as I stagger forward. Behind me, the man fires a second shot, which hits my lower back, punching a hole through me. The bullet blows through my stomach enough to stagger me a bit. Before this unseen assailant can pull the trigger a third time, I imagine him turned inside out and a sound of exploding gore follows.
The man in front of me, he stops, sees what he’s seeing and that’s when the first dog hits me high on the back. I go down hard, face-first into the weeds as teeth sink into my traps. The second dog is on me just as quickly, but I refuse to kill them. I send them flying instead. I fling them fifty, maybe sixty feet away, far enough over the fence to knock them breathless in the field across the road. Using my mind, I crudely zip up the hole I made in the chain link fence.
The heat of healing hits me hard and fast, but I’ve learned to love the pain, so this kind of heat brings a wicked grin to my face. That’s when a bullet slams into the back of my head, hitting it off-center and at enough of an angle to ricochet off my skull.
Good freaking Christ, it’s like getting struck with a sledgehammer! My head bucks hard, my hair flying out in response. I feel the man whose walkie-talkie exploded kneel down before me. He takes a handful of my hair pulls my face off the ground and finds me looking back at him, eyes ink black, face translucent, a ragged smile on my beautiful, dirty mouth.
One thought and his face caves in like a time-lapsed pumpkin rotting. He falls over and I manage to get up. The dogs are barking like mad on the other side of the fence, one of them favoring his back leg.
“Not this time, doggies,” I say to them, but mostly to myself.
I feel the others. There are four more of them in the large barn. They heard the gun shots and they’re hiding. I turn and feel like crap, but just about ready for round two. My head still hurts. I’m still overheated. Creating a tear in my shirt, I look at where the bullet exited my skin and the hole is stitching itself back up.
Good.
I walk into the barn, which is a good twenty feet tall and the size of a community church, sans the steeple and the divinity. The entire inside is a giant weapons factory.
My God, I’ve hit the motherlode.
A man calls out to me, asks what I’m doing in some guttural form of Spanish. I don’t understand, so he asks again in what I know to be fluent Germa
n.
“Hitler,” I say.
He grabs a giant tool off a nearby countertop. A tool that looks like a pipe wrench but isn’t one. He comes at me, speaking to me in German again, this time faster, more intense. The other three men join him, each looking ready but not ready.
“Aloysius,” I say.
He turns, looks at his co-workers. These aren’t roughnecks. They’re scientists who were once soldiers.
“Hitler,” I say, harder, more insistent.
One of them says something and looks at my breasts and this has me rolling my eyes. You have to be shitting me, I want to say, but I don’t know German.
The four of them laugh.
“Adolf Hitler,” I say again. Then: “Arschloch,” which means asshole in German.
This gets his attention.
With his wrench at his side, he approaches me, confident he can overpower me. He comes face to face with me and I can smell some sort of meat on his breath.
It’s sour, gamey.
He starts talking sweet to me in German, and then he reaches for my hair, like he’s going to romance me before they try to rape me.
I punch him in the throat so fast no one really sees it happening. They just see him staggering backwards, gasping, grabbing at his throat. With my mind, I remove both his hands at the wrists and they fall to the factory floor, still clawed. His wrists start pumping blood onto the floor.
All that the three remaining men can do is stare at the spouting stumps and their dying friend. I open my mouth to bark his name again, but something hits me over the head so hard I literally see stars.
When I wake back up, I’m tied to a chair not with rope but with industrial chains. Chains like you’d see in a mechanic’s shop. Chains you’d use for an engine hoist. Four men are standing around me. They’re all looking at me. They’re half scared, half bewitched by my looks. Three of them have guns on me, but they don’t realize this only makes me more dangerous.
I smile. I feel the blood that rushed out of what first started out as a grizzly head wound. It’s dried on my neck; it’s soaked my shirt.
Yes, I should be dead. No, mother bitches, I am not.