The Unyielding Future

by Brian O'Grady

  “That is quite a story.” Now his tone was flat, and I had no idea on which side of the fence he would plant his feet. For almost a minute we watched him think. I’m sure at the time, which was before I really got to know the man, I was probably looking for smoke escaping from his ears. “I’m going to state the obvious,” he started. “A lot of weird shit has happened around here these last few months. The high school, the kidnappings, the murders, the human remains, Evan Grand and his band of neo-Nazis. Hell, throw in the bus down south . . .”

  “The bus fire,” I added and raised my wrists. That had become a point of contention with me. My official statement and those of the other witnesses had been politely discarded for the more reasonable explanation that the accident was just that, an accident triggered by the weather and an unsafe, unknown driver, who remained at large. Sharpe looked at my pink forearms for a moment. “Okay, the bus fire as well,” he conceded. “Adis or his friend seem to be around most of it. Only, where do they fit in with the kidnappings, or the threats to you?”

  I looked at Leah, and her expression made it clear that it was now my turn. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” I whispered. “Adis is not in the strictest sense human.” Now I was stating the obvious.

  “That much I gathered,” Sharpe said with more humor than sarcasm, but the trace of the latter still irked me.

  “We think that Adis and Sida are, for lack of a better term, siblings.” I couldn’t bring myself to start using sci-fi terms like beings, or entities. “Aside from a few peculiarities, they aren’t that much different from us. They are—” I snuck a peek at Leah “—guardians of our future.” I’m pretty sure I closed my eyes as I said that out loud.

  “Have a hard time believing in anything that can’t be measured or weighed?” he asked as a small dig.

  I hesitated for a moment and had to stifle my urge to respond in kind. “Yes, I’ll admit that I do, but what surprises me is that a police detective trained to think objectively would so eagerly accept such an outlandish story,” I retorted, more stridently than necessary.

  We stared at each other for a moment and I’m guessing that he too decided not to respond in kind. “From the beginning, I have suspected that Adis was something more than he seems, and after months of looking at the man from every conceivable angle I have finally concluded that he defies any reasonable, rational explanation.” He looked at Leah for a moment and their eyes locked. “Who was it that said ‘once you eliminate the probable, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth’? Was it Sherlock Holmes?” Now he turned back to me.

  I wanted to say that it really was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and that Sherlock Holmes was nothing more than a fictional character, and that was not the actual quote, but it would have sounded petty, and a little like Eris. “Well, all I can say is that you are accepting this improbable truth a whole lot faster than either one of us did.” I paused for him to comment, but all he did was shrug so I went on. “Adis and Sida, along with the rest of their family, keep humanity on the straight and narrow. Apparently, the final destiny of humanity has already been written, but written only in generalities. All of the specifics are still to be determined. Determined by people like us.” I spoke quickly, as if the words had a bad taste. I turned to Leah, in part to have her take over, but she gave me a look that told me that I would be taking it from here.

  “These specifics—” he leaned forward “—they’re what? The choices we make, like whether I get gas now or before I go to work in the morning?” Sharpe asked with a disbelieving inflection.

  “In most cases. Pretty much all cases. Rarely, someone will make a decision that will start a cascade of events that, I guess, threatens humanity. That’s when Adis steps in.” Giving voice to Adis’s ideas, or theories, or construct of the universe—I didn’t even know what to call it anymore—made me queasy. “It’s very complicated, but basically they act behind the scenes to nip things in the bud.”

  “Running into a school held by armed men is nipping things in the bud?” Sharpe asked a logical question, but I didn’t feel like delving deeper into the Adis-files, so I simply shrugged my shoulders. “So, if these guys are siblings, how did they find themselves on opposite sides?” That was a good question.

  Leah returned to the conversation. “That is the sixty four thousand dollar question. Nothing this man is doing makes sense. We think that he’s doing it for his own reasons that have nothing to do with us. It’s possible that Sida has a number of little Erises running around creating all this grief. He uses them as tools.”

  “I see,” he said, and we waited for more. “So Sida is like a control agent, running a number of operatives, and Eris is only one.” It wasn’t really a question, more of a verbal thought. “The homeless man’s murder and dismemberment. Evan Grand and his group. The high school terrorists. The kidnappings and murders.” With each statement, Leah and I nodded. “Probably the old people on the bus,” he half-pointed at me. “Maybe the children’s bus down in San Antonio. And those are just the ones we know about.” A knock on the door interrupted his tally. “I’ll be out in a minute,” he said gruffly, and the old John Sharpe that we had come to love returned.

  “Detective? It’s the chief. He just drove up,” the voice on the other side of the closed door said.

  Sharpe responded with something that should only be said behind a closed door. “I’m coming,” he said with resignation and then stood. “I need to deal with him before I get fired. I would like to talk with Adis. Can you make that happen?” he asked me, as civil as I have ever seen him. “We are getting a lot of pressure to solve these cases, and I’m under a good deal of scrutiny. I can’t be found looking into Adis and his magical buddy Sida, so if you could please keep this between us, otherwise the chief will take great pleasure in firing me.” He left my office like a man late for his own hanging.

  I looked at Leah as a burst of inspiration filled my head. “Maybe Sida wants to get fired?”

  Chapter Nineteen