Had it all been a dream? He remembered so many details, but they felt distant. Wrong. He opened his phone and flipped through his photos. There was nothing that showed the vacant lot or the abandoned store.
He went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table. He tapped Clyde’s name in the list of his recent calls. On the third ring, he heard the crackle of someone answering from a moving car.
“What’s up Jim?”
“Jesus, Clyde, you’re okay?”
There was a pause. “Yeah… are you okay? You sound off, man.”
Jim smiled. “I don’t even know. But I think so. I think everything might be okay.”
“All right. I’m heading over to the office to grab something. Want to meet me there? We can go over the budget for the next month, if you want to get it out of the way. I know it’s the weekend and all but I kinda felt an urge to focus on some work.”
“I’ll get in a little later,” Jim said. “I have somewhere to go first.”
The energy that had hit Dylan and Emma as they entered the store hurt worse than anything that Dylan had ever experienced, but at the same time he was removed from the pain, as if he were feeling it from a distance.
He tried to move forward through the doorway, but the world around him was fading away, and his body wouldn’t respond to the commands he was frantically feeding it. He felt himself floating in nothingness, and in that moment he realized that he was in the true space between worlds. Whatever the Forge had been, it was something different than what he had been told.
He felt himself flipping and falling, and with a rush of sound and colors he landed in a chair at the same coffee shop where he and Emma had started their journey.
He took a second to orient himself. He opened his eyes, and saw Emma sitting across from him. She looked at him with her beautiful smile and he grinned in return.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey yourself,” she said.
“Do you remember?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. You?”
“I remember everything,” Dylan said. “I kinda feel like we aren’t supposed to.”
“I know what you mean,” she replied. “There was an emptiness. A space where I was just floating around for a while…”
“Yeah. I saw it too. I don’t know how I was able to think in that world. Or why it didn’t kill us.”
“I’m just glad we’re back.”
That made Dylan think of Matt. He looked at his phone. “Emma, look at the date!”
She looked, her eyes round and amazed. “It’s the day I first brought you to the store.”
He nodded, then sent a text to Matt. “Dude you there?”
Dylan waited, staring at the phone. Suddenly, the bubbles that indicated typing appeared. Seconds later, a response. “Yeah, what’s up?”
“He’s okay,” Dylan said to Emma. His voice was barely audible. “He survived.”
Jim left Liz a note on the kitchen table. I’m going to work for a little. Call me if you need me. I love you.
He got in the car and drove down to Butler Avenue. He made the turn and rode over the hill. His memories of the terrible experiences were fading fast, and he was grateful.
He knew that he was looking for a store of some kind. Or maybe a spot where a store should be?
He drove past a block of stores and passed the old asbestos grounds. There was something about that gated-off brownfield that tickled something in some deep part of his mind. He kept on driving. There had been a store that he was supposed to look at. Or maybe he had heard something about developers wanting a crack at the brownfield? He couldn’t remember. He and Clyde looked over so many marketing packages for properties and heard so many pitches that it all blurred together after a while.
There was nothing to see on Butler after all, it seemed. He turned the car around, considered going in to work with Clyde, then changed his mind. Work could wait. He had a wife waiting for him, and a baby on the way, and that was all that he wanted to think about.
Hours after leaving the coffee shop, Dylan and Emma sat on the floor in his bedroom. She was on her stomach, chin resting in her hands as she watched him research on his laptop. After visiting with Matt, who remembered nothing about the ordeal that had led to his own death, they had looked up Jim and Clyde. It seemed like everything was normal, though when they spoke to Jim he had claimed to have no idea who they were.
“Why do you think we remember all of it but Jim doesn’t?” Dylan asked. “I know it’s been a lot longer for him but still…”
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “Something different about us? I wouldn’t begin to know what.”
“Yeah. Hmm…there really isn’t much coming up on Google.”
“So there’s nothing about Maverick’s?” Emma asked.
“Nothing I can see,” Dylan said. “Wait. Here’s something. It says that there was a pharmacy on that block of Butler but it got shut down in the late eighties. They mention Dr. Mike. Said he was arrested for a bunch of wild charges. He served twenty years in prison. Guess he’s been out for a number of years now. Hopefully behaving himself.”
“What about the store?” she asked.
“Um…it says the store was condemned. The whole block was. They tore it all down. It’s considered a dangerous site because of asbestos and there’s a big fence with barbed wire around it.”
“Wow. What about the other stores? Helen’s and Galaxi’s?”
“Hold on. They are both there. With those names. Just at different addresses at other parts of the street. So the conspiracy theories say that there’s more to that site than the government wants people to know.”
Emma laughed. “The conspiracy theories are on to something.”
Dylan closed the laptop. “If all of this brought me to you, I’m happy with the conspiracies.”
She pulled him down and rolled on top of him. “I found you before I found the store.”
“True. Great. So it was all for nothing.”
“Hey, there were some parts of that time that I wouldn’t trade for anything.”
Dylan pulled her down to him and kissed her. “I wouldn’t either.”
They kissed again, and Dylan barely registered the sound of a car engine starting. Outside the window, a grey, disheveled man sat in the dark in the driver’s seat of a battered old Toyota Camry and watched the house, as he had watched it every night for months. Soon, everyone who had stood in the way of progress was going to pay. He smiled. Science would always triumph. He rode down the street, still grinning. Soon.
Also by Fredric Shernoff
Atlantic Island Trilogy
Book One: Atlantic Island
Book Two: Rising Tide
Book Three: Omega Protocol
The Traveler
About the Author
Fredric Shernoff is the author of the Atlantic Island Trilogy and The Traveler. He lives in Wellington, Florida with his two wonderful children.
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