by Rachel Ford
It was prefaced a fraction of a second earlier by an earsplitting explosion. Before he even had time to react, Alfred found himself tossed out of his seat. His ears were ringing, but he heard Nancy cry out beside him.
“Nance,” he called, turning for her. She’d been tossed against the table, and blood was gushing from a cut over her eye. “Nance, are you okay?”
“What the hell’s going on, Mr. Boyd?” Angie demanded.
“I’ve lost surveillance on the hanger bay. But sensors are showing a breach.”
“A breach?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Boyd, give the evac order to all non-essential personnel. I want them out of here. As for the rest of us: we’re past strategy, now, people. We either kill this son-of-a-bitch, or he kills us. If you’ve got a gun and know how to use it, follow me. If you don’t…” She glanced over at Alfred, who was trying to stem Nancy’s bleeding, “or if you can’t fight, evac now, while you’ve still got a chance.”
“Wait,” Nancy called, pushing up to her feet. “Wait, Angie. It’s you he’s here to kill. All going to him is going to do is make it easy.”
“Do you have a better idea, Miss Abbot?”
“I do,” Nancy said. “It’s a shitty idea, but it’s better than being a sacrificial lamb.”
“What is it?”
“Be the bait.”
Alfred twitched beside Nancy. She raised a finger to her lips to hush him. The trap had been set, the hook baited, and now the hunters waited.
The problem was, Alfred wasn’t much of a hunter. His courage was questionable, and his patience negligible. Not that he’d ever have admitted it out loud, of course. But, lying there in the dark, waiting for what was almost certainly his death to arrive, he acknowledged it in his mind. If it wasn’t for the fact that Nancy was committed to this madness, he’d have left with the rest of the civilians.
But she was, and though he doubted he’d be able to do much to assist, he wasn’t going to leave her to die alone. What kind of lawman, after all, would leave a lady to fight while he fled?
No, he was Alfred Favero, Senior Analyst with the United States Internal Revenue Service, and, dammit, he would die with his boots on. And she – she was Nancy Abbot, and the idea of letting her face danger alone, without him at her side, scared him more than any time traveling psycho with a bag full of weapons from the future ever could. As much, anyway.
They were laying in the crawlspace between the tiled faux ceiling and the concrete above Angie’s office. Nancy had her pistol drawn. Alfred did too, but his palms were so slick that he’d almost dropped it too many times. Now, he’d set it on one of the ceiling supports. It would be accessible when it was needed – but unlikely to fall and kill anyone in the meantime.
Angie was at her desk, waiting. The room was silent. All Alfred could hear was the rush of blood in his own ears, and his breaths coming, short and quick.
“Alfred,” Nancy whispered.
He started at the sound of her voice, as low as it was. “What?”
“I just want you to know…if we don’t make it out of here…”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad I got to know you.”
He smiled at her in the dimness. “Me too. And Nance?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry I reported your posters. And your space marine toy.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Angie’s office door opened, and a man stood in the doorway. Alfred watched through a vent, squinting at the apparition. It was David Garrity – and yet, not David Garrity.
Part of the change was age. His hair had thinned, and his skin wrinkled. It was more than years, though. Something had changed in his step, and in his eyes. There was a certainty, a hardness – a coldness – to his entire demeanor.
“Tell your friends to drop their guns, Angie,” he said, and he spoke with David’s voice. “Or I’ll kill them too. You know I will.”
Alfred exchanged a glance with Nancy, and they both gulped.
Angie only said, “Good to see you again too, David.”
Garrity called, “I’m not going to tell you more than once. Get down, or I’ll shoot.”
“I believe him,” Alfred said, his voice low.
“Me too,” Nancy agreed. Then, louder, she said, “Alright, we’re coming down.”
“Smart girl.”
They lifted a tile, and Alfred went first, dropping to his feet. He pressed his eyes closed as he landed, fully expected to be blown away by gunfire.
He wasn’t. Opening one eye, then the other, he made way for Nancy.
“You,” Garrity said. “I remember you.” He smiled at Nancy. “It was your idea for me to hide in the saferoom. Well, you made my job a lot easier.”
“Easier?”
He shrugged. “You kept my stupid, heroic self out of the way. Brought her right to me.”
Nancy gulped.
“David,” Angie said, “let them go.”
“I will,” he nodded. “I’m not a monster, Angie. Whatever you think. I don’t kill for the sake of killing.”
“Don’t you, though, Dave? How many people have you killed today alone?”
“I do what I have to,” he said, and his tone rose. “I do what you make me.”
“My God, Dave…what happened to you? Can you even hear yourself anymore?” There were tears welling in Angie’s eyes.
“What happened to me?” His tones were broken, and he shook his head. “What did you do to me, Angie? What will you do to me?”
“What, Dave? What?” She was on her feet now. He raised his gun, but she didn’t stop. She walked until she was standing a few feet away from him. “What did I do, Dave?”
“You made me watch you die,” he said, and his hand shook. “You wouldn’t let me save you. You made me watch. Watch, Angie, as you wilted away, day after day. You’ll do it to him, too, if I don’t stop you. You’ll break him. You’ll ruin him.”
Alfred noticed Nancy slip her hand into a pocket of her jumpsuit. Garrity’s attention, meanwhile, was still transfixed on his wife.
“So you’ll kill me, Dave? You’ll just kill me yourself?”
“It’ll be kinder than cancer.” His tone became hard again. “And it’ll save him. It’ll make him strong – strong enough to do what needs to be done.”
“And what’s that? What’s so important that you have to kill me for it?”
“What I was made to do. What you, with your ethics and your safety and your caution, will stop him from doing. The secrets of the universe – of our universe, and all the rest of them – are out there. But you never had the courage to reach out and take it. All your talk of contamination and collateral damage: cowardice.”
He shook his head. “Do you know what we could have achieved, Angie? Curing cancer? Easy. It would have been history. How many people would we have saved? And not just cancer. Every disease, death itself – we could have conquered it all. We could have saved you, Angie. But you…you were always a coward. You made him – me – a coward.”
“Garrity!” a voice sounded. It was David Garrity – the younger David Garrity.
Alfred blinked at the sight of the two men, the younger standing in the doorway, the elder standing with a futuristic pistol turned on his wife.
“Dave,” Angie called, and her voice was racked with tension.
The elder Garrity glowered, turning to face his reflection. “Get out of here. You shouldn’t see this. You need to be strong.”
The younger walked in. “I need her, to be strong. You know that. Our son needs her, to be strong.”
“No. You don’t, he doesn’t. That’s the lie, David. The lie you’ve swallowed.” He shook his head again. “You’ll see. Once she’s gone, you’ll understand. You never needed her.” He turned again, bringing the pistol back toward Angie.
Dave sprang, grabbing for the weapon.
“Let go, fool. Give it to me.”
A shot sounded, sounding terribly loud as it
echoed through the enclosed space. Dave the younger gasped and stumbled backwards. Angie screamed.
“What have you done? Damn you, Angie, what have you done?” the elder Garrity called. He stared at his younger self, lying on the floor in a slowly increasing pool of blood. Then he lifted the pistol again to his wife.
And now Nancy sprang. “Nance!” Alfred called. “Don’t!”
But it was too late. She was gone from his side. In an instant, she crossed the distance; and then she leapt up, bringing something – he couldn’t tell what – toward the time traveler’s gun hand.
Garrity cried out, firing a shot that missed Angie and hit the far desk. Nancy grabbed for the gun with one hand, and with the other retracted her makeshift weapon. It was, Alfred realized, the tooth – the plesiosaur’s tooth that Stevenson had given her.
Nancy pointed the gun at him. “Don’t move, you crazy son-of-a-bitch. Or we’ll see how good this future tech of yours really is.”
Angie, meanwhile, had reached her husband’s side, and gathered his bleeding form into her arms. She was sobbing. “Dave, oh Dave, what are you doing here? You were supposed to be in the safe room.”
“I…couldn’t hide, Angie. When I heard…the explosion.” His face creased with pain. “I love you, Ang.”
“Don’t die on me, Dave. Dammit, don’t you die on me.”
He smiled. “I’m sorry, babe.” His face contorted with pain, and for a moment he was silent. Then he said, “Take care of Jack. And yourself. I love you.”
“No,” Garrity cried. “No, no. Damn you, Angie, what have you done?”
“Dave,” Angie sobbed. “Oh God. I love you, Dave.”
His eyelids sagged and his head lolled to one side.
“No!” Garrity called. And then, in the blink of an eye, the old man vanished.
Nancy physically recoiled, and Alfred gasped. “What the-”
Angie’s wail, loud and heart wrenching, split the air, drawing their attention.
David Garrity the younger was dead.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The security teams reached base a few minutes later. Mrs. Garrity was taken to the medic to be treated for shock.
Stevenson sought out Nancy. “My God, Nance, they told me about your ambush plan. When they said there’d been shots…” He wrapped her in a hug.
“I’m fine, Josh.”
“You could have been killed.”
She nodded numbly. “I got Garrity killed.”
He pulled back to hold her at arm’s length and look her over. “You saved our entire base, Nance. You saved all our lives. You saved humanity from old Garrity’s madness – who knows what he would have done, free to travel through time and space.”
“It was my plan,” she said. “My plan that got David killed.”
“Angie would be dead, if not for your plan,” Alfred reminded her. “And who knows how many other people. Maybe David too. Maybe Jackson.”
“He’s right,” the marine said. “Listen, Nance, what you’re feeling right now, it’s all natural. It’s natural to blame yourself, to second guess what you’ve done. Especially when you lose men. But you got to believe me, it’s not your fault. And beating yourself up isn’t going to change that.”
Nancy’s eyes filled, and she tried to blink back the tears.
Stevenson’s eyes moistened too. “It’s okay to cry, Nance.”
She did, and her friends consoled her as best as they were able. Mostly, they stayed with her as she sobbed.
And, in awhile, her tears dried. Her face was red and swollen, but the numbness seemed to have left her expression.
“It’ll get better, Nance,” Stevenson told her. “I promise.”
“And we’re here for you,” Alfred told her. “We’ll always be here for you.”
Nancy and Angie were not the only ones to have been hit hard by the day. In addition to young Garrity, Kendall and Radcliff, one of the scientists, Jo Frazer, had been killed by falling equipment when the facility had been breached. Including the young security officer who the time traveler killed the day before, Matt Fry, that brought the colony’s casualties up to five.
But their losses went beyond the dead. The facility had been badly damaged. Garrity’s energy weapons had ripped a gaping hole into the front of the hanger bay. The team’s engineers worried that the damage had destabilized the entire area, and possibly beyond. “We’re exposed to predators now. Until we can shore that breach up, we’re at risk.”
Angie Garrity had said, an eternity ago it seemed to Alfred, that theirs was a resilient species. In the face of such a setback, the tiny colony proved it again. Workforces were formed, plans were drawn up, and repair crews assigned.
Alfred was on one of the cleanup crews. It was hot, miserable, tiring work. But he threw himself into it. It was easier than thinking – easier than worrying about their future. It was easier than worrying about Nancy, which, in those first few days after the attack, he did a lot of.
She was quieter and more pensive than she had been. The natural joy of her personality seemed to have been diminished. He wasn’t the only one to notice it; he saw his own concern mirrored in the marine’s watchful eyes.
But, as the days rolled on, the sparkle returned to Nancy’s gaze, the lightness to her step. There were moments, still, when he’d see a faraway expression in her eyes. They were fewer and further between, though.
Two months passed. The work crews cleared the rubble and built a makeshift gate in place of the breach. Angie Garrity resumed her regular schedule, working alongside the rest of the settlement.
Their dead had been buried. They were in the process of burying their grief. Hope began to return to the taxman’s heart.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Alfred groaned as a knock sounded at his door. He’d worked a long shift the day before, and his body ached all over. Not only that, it was two-thirty in the morning.
He didn’t have to ask who it was, though. “Come in, Nance,” he called, flipping on the light.
She did. “Alfred! I had an idea.”
“We’ve got to stop these two-o-clock brainstorming sessions,” he groaned. “You’ve got to learn to keep normal hours.” Since they’d arrived here, every one of her ideas seemed to have come overnight.
“Trust me, you’ll want to hear this one.”
He yawned. “Alright, alright. Did you bring coffee at least?”
“I brought something better. I brought our ticket home.”
No jolt of caffeine could have woken him up quicker than that. “What?”
She was grinning from ear to ear. “Our ticket home, Alfred. I found our ticket home!”
“I don’t understand. I thought…we were stuck here?”
She shook her head. “The thing that changed – remember how we were trying to figure out what had changed? What let Garrity get back home? It’s the key. And we had it with us all the time!”
This explanation did nothing to illuminate the matter, and he told her so.
“Do you remember this?” She pulled a gadget from her pocket. It was small and silver, a plate with jagged teeth.
He frowned. There was something vaguely familiar about it, but he couldn’t quite place it. “I’ve seen it before,” he said. “At least, I think I have.”
She was grinning again. “You have. Although, you barely looked at it. And then, you puked.”
Alfred’s eyes opened wide. “That’s the thing you pulled from Brad Nash’s ribcage.”
“Exactly, Alfred! Don’t you remember – I should have thought of it before – they said Nash was supposed to follow them. Because Nash had the key – the key to their portable generator. This is the key.
“That’s why Garrity disappeared the first time: because Nash died, and so he wasn’t able to take the key with him. The team’s way back was gone. And that’s also why he reappeared right after us. Because I had this thing in my backpack, the whole time. We had a way back, the team had a way back now; which me
ant Garrity could have gone back to our time. And future Garrity, evil Garrity, had access to the generator again.
“Until our Garrity died, anyway.”
He whistled. “Sugar cookies. You mean…if you hadn’t fished around in a dead guy’s chest, we’d be stuck in the past forever?”
Angie stared at the key for a moment. Then she rose, and walked to the safe on her wall. Punching in a code, she retrieved a small metal device.
When she returned, her hands were trembling. “May I?” she asked Nancy. Nancy nodded, handing over the key, and Angie fit the two pieces together. They locked with a satisfying click.
Josh laughed out loud, wrapping his arms around Nancy’s shoulders to squeeze her. Alfred cast annoyed eyes in the marine’s direction, wishing she had not insisted on collecting him on their way to Garrity’s office. “You were right. Again.”
Angie Garrity, though, looked closer to weeping than celebrating. She sat down, face pale and expression blank. “The key,” she said finally.
“We can use it to get home. Right?” Alfred asked.
She nodded. “We can, Mr. Favero. We can.”
And they did, but not right away. “We need to make sure we don’t do anything to contaminate the timeline,” Angie decided. “This facility was built on Futureprise’s property, so from that perspective, we should be good. But we need to account for every piece of equipment we brought over. We need to gather anything that could harm the wildlife if they get into it, or could be discovered by later humanoids. Because this facility will break down in time, and creatures – human or otherwise – are going to get in here.”
Whereas the work had seemed almost an escape before, now Alfred found these final tasks hellishly slow. Still, they worked at a fevered pace. Flammable substances were collected, toxic ones contained, and anything that could be used as a weapon either broken down or taken to be returned.
They discussed their point of return, too. The general consensus was to return to the day the first team had left. But Angie shook her head. “If we do that, we risk splitting the timestream. Nancy and Alfred might be broken apart from their counterparts six years ago – an echo of a timeline that doesn’t exist anymore, stuck in this timeline.”