The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

But then it closed again. Then another opened up somewhere else. Then another. It was as though the veil was thinning in places, taunting me, making me think I could reach through to the real world, before slamming shut again.

  I floated, watching, waiting. Idly, I wondered if I had died, if the transport had gone wrong and killed me, if this was the afterlife. Good Lord, an eternity of this?

  Just as I had convinced myself that this was Purgatory and begun attempting a rough mental tally of my history of sins to estimate how many eons of penance I could realistically expect, I heard Carter calling my name. His voice was muffled, as though he were underwater, and with a shock I realized that at some point we had let go of each other.

  I fumbled around in the darkness, limbs heavy and slow like I was moving through molasses, desperately trying to reach out for Carter’s hand. But I couldn’t find him.

  Panic set in. Somehow, inside the Slipstream, Carter and I had become separated. I screamed out his name, once, twice, three times, and waited for a response, but heard only a thick silence.

  Then out of nowhere I felt a brutal jolt, like a steel cable wrapped around my waist had been tied to the back of an airplane that suddenly took off at thousands of miles per hour. It knocked the wind out of me, so that when I finally crashed through the Slipstream and felt solid ground beneath my feet, I doubled over, breathing heavily for several moments before I looked around to see where I was.

  My relief at surviving whatever the hell had just happened inside the Slipstream and emerging unscathed was short-lived. I was, as I had anticipated, standing in the Bureau transport lab, on the same platform where I had stood what felt like a lifetime ago to jump into 1972. But this was not the place I had left. Something was very, very wrong.

  The room was clearly the same room. I had grown up here, I knew it like the back of my hand. But the control panels were covered with a thick layer of grimy dust. Chairs were overturned. The curtains around the wardrobe changing station had been pulled down.

  Two of the four central consoles had been completely smashed in. And inexplicably – even though the equipment had somehow functioned well enough to transport me in – the machinery was dark and silent. No lights flashed. No servers hummed. Not even the telltale red blinking of the “TRANSPORT COMPLETED” light above the door. It was a ghost town. But the worst was yet to come, as I looked all around me and realized with a sinking heart that Carter was missing.

  I was standing in the silent, lifeless remains of the Time Travel Bureau, and I was completely alone.

  BONUS MATERIAL: PART 2.5 of THE REWIND FILES

  The Sharpeville Hearings

  Read the transcripts of the Time Travel Committee

  as they investigate the death of Agent Leo Carstairs.

  Go to www.retrofitpublishing.com and to get a FREE download.

  Or email editor@retrofitfilms.com to be sent your pdf or ebook file.

  The Rewind Files Part III

  The Wayward Traveler

  "The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite,

  That ever I was born to set it right!"

  --WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

  Sixteen

  Ghost Town

  Silence.

  Something was wrong.

  I stepped down from the transport platform gingerly, with only the smallest of movements. The heavy, dusty hush of the deserted room frightened me in a way that I didn’t want to disturb, and I suddenly realized it was a room in which I had never before experienced silence.

  If there is personality in a room, then the lab’s personality included noise. Lots of noise. The climate controls, lights, transport equipment, elevators – they should all hum constantly, the way they always have, to say nothing of the bustle of the building’s seven thousand inhabitants walking, talking, and breathing.

  The Bureau is alive twenty-four hours a day. To arrive on the platform and find the lab – not merely empty, but utterly still – meant that something was very, very wrong.

  The impossibility of the emptiness baffled me as I walked slowly around the room, stepping over broken equipment and shattered glass covered thickly in dust, straining to understand how I could have been brought back here.

  Somebody had stood at these controls.

  Somebody locked onto my vitals.

  Somebody jumped me.

  Yet whoever that person was, they were long gone. Which was not possible.

  My heart sank as I completed my inspection of the room and realized there was still no sign of Carter. Whatever had happened to me inside the Slipstream, Carter hadn’t come through with me. I was alone in the abandoned transport lab. No Carter. No Calliope. No Mom.

  Just me.

  I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “Okay, Reggie,” I said to myself in a soft voice. “Don’t panic. You’re okay. You just need to make a plan.” I didn’t have a partner anymore. I was going to have to figure this out on my own.

  What would Katie Bellows do?

  “GC coordinates,” I said aloud. “You know where you are, but not when.” I cleared the dust off the console’s controls in order to pull up the home coordinates, but the equipment stayed dark, no matter what I did. “Okay,” I said, “we’ll do it old school. Get out of the lab, into the office, and find anything that will help narrow down the date.” I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and pushed open the door.

  Everything was deserted.

  The sinister hush from inside the lab extended out here too, and I floated through the 20th-century department like a ghost, afraid to touch anything or make a sound. The hallway stretched from the transport lab to the main elevator bay. To my left were rows of senior agents’ private offices, and to my right a sea of cubicles for apprentices and techs.

  All were entirely abandoned. Computers were missing and file cabinets empty, their drawers jutting out haphazardly like mouths with missing teeth. Office doors hung open, revealing empty desks. Nobody had worked here in a very long time.

  I wandered from hall to hall, from office to office, hoping against hope that some sign of human life would reveal itself. But everywhere I went was the same. The building was a ghost town.

  I stopped short at the desk in front of me and reached a trembling hand out to pick up the coffee mug sitting on top of it, next to the empty space where a computer screen had once been. A standard office mug with the Bureau logo printed on it in dark blue. The bottom of the cup was thick with the dark, hard, glossy crust of what had once been coffee.

  My coffee.

  The coffee Calliope had pressed into my hands the night I went to Ohio to search for Grove.

  I had set this cup down when we ran to the transport lab, and I had gone from the transport lab to Ohio, from Ohio to sickbay, from sickbay to my mother’s office – then office to home, home to 1972, and from 1972 to here – without ever being back at this desk long enough to make coffee again and remember to wash out the mug.

  It was still right where I had left it.

  Which meant that whatever had happened here, it had happened so soon after I left for 1972 that nobody had touched my coffee cup. And that was when I realized the thing that I had missed.

  Everyone’s personal effects were still here.

  Sweaters. Picture frames. Potted plants, now long dead. All of it, still in place. From my desk I could see into Calliope’s cubicle, where her private stash of expensive loose-leaf Darjeeling and little yellow teapot still sat neatly on their glass tray. Across the hall, Grove’s office door was open, and I could see his framed diplomas all hanging on the wall, dusty but untouched.

  Every single piece of equipment was gone, from computers and Comms to files and documents – everything, in short, that was technically the property of the U.S. Time Travel Bureau – but everyone’s personal possessions were right where they’d left them, including mine.

  If you ignored the missing computers, and the layers of dust on every surface, it looked as though everyone had just stepped away from their desks
for a minute and would be right back.

  “What happened here?” I murmured aloud, running a fingertip over the layer of dust on Calliope’s desk. What made her leave in such a hurry that she wouldn’t – or couldn’t – take her coat with her? Who came in afterwards to take her computer away?

  And, more importantly, why?

  I fought down rising panic. “Plan B,” I said, keeping my voice quiet, pretending like Carter was standing next to me – where the hell was Carter? – and that I was speaking to him. “We need to get out of this building.”

  And then I realized, with dread, what that meant – what the first step was to getting out of here undetected implied. I swallowed hard, turned left, and pushed open the door to the bathrooms.

  I set my bag down on the counter in front of the mirror and rifled through it, praying I hadn’t misremembered, then breathed a triumphant sigh of relief when my fingers brushed against it: the travel cosmetic case Mark and Mrs. Graham had sent with me to 1972, packed in this bag so I could fix my makeup on the train.

  But this time, I didn’t need the lipstick.

  I needed something sharp.

  I pulled off my shirt and tossed it aside, then ripped off a strip from the bottom of my camisole, knowing I’d need it shortly. I opened the cosmetic case and pulled out the thing that would maybe, just maybe, save my life.

  The metal nail file.

  Which I was about to plunge, unsterilized and without anesthetic, into my own skin, to dig out my tracker.

  I held it in my hand for a long moment, stalling, willing any other possible solution to come to me. But none did. I had to get out of this building. And in order to do that safely, I had to be untraceable. Subdermal trackers couldn’t be turned off except from sickbay, and even then they could easily be switched back on again.

  No, I had to get it out of my body and leave it here. That way, if by some chance it were detected – if anyone was even watching this godforsaken deserted building – they’d think I was still here.

  “For Christ’s sake, just do it,” I snapped at myself, and gritted my teeth. “Just get it over with.” I took one last deep breath, swallowed hard, and plunged.

  It was all I could do not to scream. Even under the best of circumstances, I have a pretty low pain threshold – my mother says I used to cry as a kid when she tried to brush my hair – and as painful as I ever imagined it might be to stick a piece of metal into my shoulder blade, reality was a thousand times worse.

  The edges of the file were rough and ridged, turning every attempt at a gentle prod into a sawing motion. Tears stung my eyes. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and had to continue on nearly blind from the pain.

  I let go of the file – its length sticking horribly out of my flesh – and palpated the open wound to try and coax the tracker closer to the opening. It moved just a fraction of an inch, but it was enough. I shifted the angle of the file, felt it clink against the tracker, and slowly levered it out, soaked in blood.

  The second it was out, I felt my knees give way beneath me, dizzy and faint from pain. Blood smeared everywhere. I reached for the water faucet, and to my utter astonishment, hot water poured out. What had happened here, I wondered, where every human being had disappeared and every piece of technology had gone with them, but somebody – somewhere – was still paying the water bill?

  I washed my hands and cleaned out the wound as best I could – wincing at the stinging pain as hot water touched open flesh – then tied the makeshift bandage around it. It wasn’t enough. The blood soaked through it almost immediately. I needed gauze or cotton, something soft and clean that would soak up the excess blood while the wound scabbed over.

  On a whim, I dashed back out to the hall and into Grove’s office, whose door was wide open. Oh please oh please, I prayed, as I pulled open the drawers one by one until my gamble finally paid off.

  They had left behind everything that wasn’t Bureau property. Which meant that in the small upper left drawer of Grove’s desk, his private stash of monogrammed, old-fashioned linen handkerchiefs were still there. I sent him a silent apology, grabbed the whole pile, and ran back to the bathroom to retie the strip of silk as best I could, pressing the stack of small white squares against the wound.

  It worked.

  I mopped up the blood all over the bathroom as best I could, pulled my sweater back on, and left. I debated flushing the tracker down the toilet, but then decided that if it survived the trip and they tracked it to the sewage system, they’d know what I had done. Better to leave them thinking I was still in the building, and get myself out as fast as I could.

  I returned to my desk and placed the tracker inside one of the drawers, then made my way to the elevator bay, where a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows opened out onto the city below. Seven stories down, the streets spread out beneath me.

  Washington itself looked the same. If I wasn’t back in the Timestream I had left, I was at least close enough that I recognized my own city. There were birds in the sky, cars on the street, and lights in the surrounding buildings. The view from these windows was the view I remembered. I was so comforted by this fact that it took me a minute or two to catch the thing I should have noticed immediately.

  The building was deserted on the outside too.

  There were no people nearby. Nobody hurried in and out of the lobby doors, nobody relaxed outside on the plaza benches in the sun, no cars or trucks idled out front in the short-term parking zone, no one even strolled down the street on this side. The city was full of people – I could see them from up here – but they were all giving the Time Travel Bureau a remarkably wide berth.

  All of them, that is, except for the heavily-armed guards that were blocking my only way out of this building.

  So, I couldn’t transport out the way I’d come because the equipment was dead and I had no way of setting my own coordinates without knowing my location. Plus, there were at least four guns between me and walking out the front door. I was just about to try and figure out what Plan C might be when a sudden gentle whirring sound cut through the deep hush.

  There was a soft “ding!” behind me. My blood ran cold and I watched as the black screen over the middle elevator door ticked from “L” to “1.”

  Somebody was coming.

  Call it panic, call it intuition, call it being a total chickenshit. Call it anything you like. But the fact remained that as the elevator slowly ticked its way up from the lobby, I felt the cold chill of impending danger close around me. Whoever was on the other side of those metal doors was unlikely to be an ally, and I did not imagine they would be pleased to see me in this place where I so clearly didn’t belong.

  So I did the only thing I could think of.

  I ran.

  I flew like a bat out of hell back down the hall – shoulder screaming in pain – bypassing the transport lab (the most logical place I would go to look for me, if I were them) and veered left, down the corridor that led to my mother’s office. It was too much to hope that I’d find some sign of her presence; but if fate were on my side, I might at least find a better place to hide.

  The door to the executive wing was wide open, another disconcerting sign. I slipped inside, past the anteroom containing the desk of my mother’s tech Yasmina, her computer missing like all the others – and into the lush, carpeted corridor behind it where four mahogany doors with brass plates faced each other. On my right were the office of the Director and the adjoining Council Chambers; on my left, my mom’s office and the private executive elevator – which, without a password, was as useless to me as a cardboard box.

  Mom’s office door was open, and I slipped inside. The curtains were drawn and the lights off, leaving the room midnight-dark even though the sun blazed outside, so it took me a second for my eyes to adjust and realize what I was seeing.

  While outside, in the agent cubicles, there were coats on coat hooks and framed photos on walls and other signs of former life, my mother’s office had been strippe
d completely. There was a desk, and a chair, and nothing else. Every other trace of Katherine Bellows was gone. Had she done it herself? Or had they done it when she went on the run? Either way, I felt a chill prickle the back of my neck. It certainly did not look as though, no matter what I did, Deputy Director Bellows was ever coming back.

  Footsteps thudded, the sound dull, muffled, and there was a low murmur of voices in the distance – still far away, but jarring in that heavy dusty silence – and I realized that I was exposed. I couldn’t close the door without running the risk of someone noticing it. There was only one place to hide – behind the desk – and it was risky, both because it was so obvious (the first and only place they’d look if they knew I had come through this way) and because I wouldn’t be able to see what was going on.

  And it was then, as I crawled into the roomy cave of the desk’s kickspace, surrounded on three sides by solid antique wood, wondering how long I’d have to hide here and wait for the coast to clear, that I remembered there was more in this bag than just my cosmetic kit. I had all my tech with me.

  Just a few weeks (and technically a hundred-odd years) ago, hiding in another office building, I had spied on the Watergate burglars with my Microcam. If I could hook it up to transmit on a closed circuit to my own handheld, instead of syncing back to Calliope’s screen, I could monitor the hallway from the safety of this desk, without being spotted.

  The footsteps moved at a leisurely pace, which reassured me. It didn’t sound like I was being chased. It didn’t appear, in fact, as though anyone had flagged my tracker yet. I rifled through the bag until I found my handheld, pulled it out and set it to the Microcam’s channel, then synced it to my earpiece so only I could hear. I didn’t have a pencil to tape the Microcam to this time, so I took my chance and – slowly, gently – tossed it across the carpet as close as I could get it towards the door.