Forty Leap

by Turner, Ivan

  Over the course of a week, I also learned how the Movement operated. This headquarters was one of several. There were nine, actually, just in New York alone. None of them was as big as ours, of course. In fact, they were often referred to as safe houses. Across the world, others had been set up as well. People were leaping in and out of time in all regions. I myself had leaped from New York, Colorado, and Wisconsin. In fact, it was a downright miracle that I had found my way back to New York so that I could join Rogers Clinton in the Forty Leap headquarters. Or was it? With the knowledge afforded us by the Map, it made sense that Rogers would set up shop in Manhattan.

  There were not new leapers coming in every day. I saw only three new people in the week. Reports were sent in via telephone and what I could only approximate to email. These reports came from the safe houses and detailed arrivals. People coming back into the world could be moved to other states or other countries in some cases, but most stayed where they were, joining the cause in helping to ease other Forty Leapers into the twenty second century.

  Rogers was busy all of the time. He worked tirelessly, spending most of his time in the Map Room. That was his central hub. He even took his sparse meals in there so as not to interrupt his work. Whatever could be said about him and his motives, he was fully dedicated to his cause. During the first couple of days, I was awestruck by that dedication. Soon, though, I chalked it up to a symptom of his fanaticism. He led by example and the example preserved that leadership.

  On the morning of the seventh day, Wednesday the 27th of November, the complex was a flurry of activity. I exited my room without noticing, showered, went back, dressed… My usual routine. It was on my way back to my suite that I noticed the quickened pace of the people. There was a dark look appearing on most faces. Everyone was very busy and everyone was very upset.

  The edge of dread creeping into my gut, I grabbed my journal and made my way to the Map Room. Rogers was there, of course, on the phone with someone. I caught sight of Rupert as well. He was standing at the far side of the room and inspecting rifles that had been stacked on a cart. A young woman, tender of the cart, stood nearby and watched. Standing close to Rogers, looking extremely agitated, was Gerry Bensing.

  “Can’t anyone get out?” Rogers was saying into the phone. “We’ve got people out on assignment who need to be warned.” He paused, listening. “No,” he said. Then, “Not likely.” He repeated, “No.” Then he said, “You’re kidding!” Finally, “Get it done.” And then he hung up the phone.

  He noticed me then, standing in the doorway, looking, I assume, stricken.

  “You’d better grab a rifle,” he said. I could feel my expression warp and he must have seen it clearly because he quickly told me never to mind as if he’d suddenly had a voluntary change of heart. Ushering me over, he began to explain the situation. I glanced over at Rupert, who spared me a glance of his own and then went back to his work.

  “The day has come, Little Mat.” In the past week, he had gone back and forth between calling me Mathew and calling me Little Mat, which is how he had referred to me in the Rocky Mountain facility. Though I always preferred to be called Mathew, I was never one to care too much about the way people addressed me. With Rogers, though, I knew that he was exercising his greatness when he called me Little Mat. Back in the twenty first century, the moniker had been part of his lunacy. Now it was a way of demonstrating superiority over the legend. Remarkably, it didn’t irk me. Now I was too on edge to even worry about it. You see, I knew what he was talking about. It was just what we had discussed. There was only one resolution to this war.

  The military had discovered the location not only of our installation, but many of the others across the country, across the world. Rogers didn’t know how long they had been compiling data, but they had chosen to launch a mass attack on all of the installations at once. Some of the others had already fallen. Signals had come across the gulf in a panic and been abruptly ceased.

  Bensing looked over to where Rupert was completing his inspection of the guns and then back at Rogers with a grimace. He virtually ignored me. Apparently my status did not grant me any special consideration when it came to strategy.

  “We can’t hope to stand up to them in a straight fight,” Bensing began. “They’ll come through every port and wipe out anyone who’s waiting. Even if we manage to hold them off for a while, they’ll send in fresh gunners while ours will tire out and get careless. All of the exits have been blocked so there’s nowhere for us to run.”

  “What about leaping?” Rupert joined the conversation with a look that mirrored Bensing’s.

  Rogers shook his head. “The short leapers probably couldn’t manage it.” Short leapers were people whose leaps were still restricted to weeks or less. “Even if they could, they would just leap into a situation that was no better than the one they left.”

  Bensing looked thoughtful. “What about assigning the short leapers to fight and let the long leapers jump?”

  I must have made a visible reaction because all three looked at me curiously. Frankly, the idea repulsed me. Essentially he was suggesting that we make cannon fodder of those people who couldn’t leap on demand.”

  Rogers echoed my sentiments. “We will all fight together.”

  “Rogers,” said Bensing. “I’m not heartless, but these people will die anyway. They can do it saving the few who can survive.”

  “It won’t matter,” I muttered. “We’ll be scattered to the four corners of time and the movement will be dead.”

  “Then we fight as a people,” Rogers confirmed.

  “What about surrender?” I asked.

  It was Rupert who shook his head. “The order is for annihilation, mate. There’s no such thing as surrender.” He thrust one fist into the other hand. “But how did they find us?”

  Rogers shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. They are here.”

  “It does matter,” Rupert said.

  “We have a large network, Rupert. Anyone could have informed on us for any reason.”

  Rupert bowed his head in frustration and bewilderment. I felt sorry for him.

  The three of them ceased their conversation and looked at me.

  “You want that gun now?” Rupert asked.

  I shook my head.

  Rogers seemed perturbed. He was allowing himself to become excited. “You may not want to fight with us, Mathew Cristian. But you will die with us.”

  He turned and walked away, giving orders. Bensing also moved away, but Rupert stayed nearby. As he did, people grabbed up rifles from the rack and began moving about. The Map was carefully rolled up and taken from the room. As they were doing this, I was thinking they should destroy it. All of the leapers who had gone since its creation had their leaps recorded. The Map could lead our enemies straight to each and every one of us. It would spell the complete annihilation of a people that had been struck ill and experienced far more suffering than the illness could dispatch on its own.

  I saw men and women move through the room. Each of them grabbed a rifle off of the cart and, when it was empty, another cart came through. Rupert moved away from me and inspected this new cart. His inspection was rushed and incomplete, though, because people were grabbing the weapons and taking them away as he counted. What did it matter, I wondered? How organized did you have to be to make a last stand? Some people looked at me as they passed. They wished me luck and I said nothing. Luck was not a factor. Rogers was right. This was the end.

  He reappeared, moving to a computer console and punching keys. The large monitor in front of him switched views. It displayed what appeared to be a schematic of the headquarters. I looked carefully and, for several moments, couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Finally, I was able to identify the Map room, where we were. I traced out some of the corridors from that position and was able to locate my room and a handful of the barracks. There was the dining hall. Using his finger, Rogers was marking up the schematic. He consistently moved back to a color tablet
situated on the side of the screen. In several of the center sections, he made green marks, presumably indicating Forty Leapers ready to fight. I traced his motions to the extremities of the schematic and found entrances. There were nine in all, the one into which I had passed a week before readily identifiable. He placed a large red X over it. I don’t know what that indicated. Suddenly, his fingers were moving too fast for me to follow. He was marking up the schematic at blinding speed and then unmarking it just as quickly. Gerry Bensing was next to him, also marking up the screen, making suggestions, following Rogers’ lead. I caught sight of Awen Mohammed, a face from long ago that had not changed at all.

  Finally, the entire place shook with the force of an explosion.

  The explosion was not near us. All indications were that the enemy had penetrated one of the entrances. I don’t know what Rogers had done to seal them up, but I guess it wasn’t enough. Of course it wasn’t enough. The end was near.

  Rogers looked away from the monitor and scowled. He pulled a radio from his belt and spoke into it. I caught a few of the words but they were meaningless to me. I caught even fewer words from the returning signal and they were even more meaningless. What was not meaningless was the gunfire I heard in the background.

  I was frightened.

  Rogers went back to work on the schematic and I lost interest. I was wondering how I wanted to spend the last few moments of my life. In the back of my mind, I felt this overpowering shame. I looked at the empty rifle cart; a third had not been brought in. The Map Room was virtually empty. It was just Rogers and Bensing and me. I don’t even know what happened to Rupert. I had chosen not to fight. I wanted to believe that it had nothing to with cowardice. I don’t think I’m a coward. Neville’s riot had put me off of ever lifting a weapon against another human being again. I could still feel the impact of the broom handle against the back of the soldier’s head. It made me sick to my stomach. How would the impact of a bullet fired from a gun in my hand feel? I could not do it. There was always another way.

  In this case, however, the other way was death. While my peers fought futilely for their lives, I had accepted my fate. No. That’s not right. I can’t say I accepted it. I don’t know if a person can ever accept death. Perhaps it’s because it’s unknown or perhaps it’s because it’s perceived as the cessation of all awareness, but death is alien to the human being. So I guess I held out hope even as I knew, rationally, that there was none.

  I left the Map Room then, and started to make my way back to my quarters. My journal was stuffed deep into a pocket and I fingered it absently. It was a record of my adventure and I thought, maybe, it could serve a purpose. If it were found, if it were read, then perhaps they would understand better what we were going through.

  The sounds of action intensified. Some were close and some were far away. My body jerked every time I felt that it was very close. Someone shouted. They were in the complex. All entrances were breached. The Map Room was almost dead center. I wondered how long it would take them to reach it. How long had it taken them just to break in? How long had I been lost in my reverie? How many people were already dead?

  I heard running footsteps behind me and turned to see a group of men and women come rushing around the corner. They were armed and stopped up short when they saw me, tensions high. They were Forty Leapers, though I didn’t know any of them. They all seemed so young. Good fighting bodies for the movement.

  “Stick with us, Mr. Cristian!” one young man shouted as they started past, but I didn’t and they didn’t turn back to find me.

  I must have stopped moving then. In fact, I’m sure of it. It still nagged at me in the back of my mind. Why was I heading toward my room? Was there something there that I wanted? There wasn’t, of course, but I didn’t get a chance to reconcile that. I just stood in the middle of the corridor, listening to the sounds of gunfire and shouting. Some of the shouts were warnings. Others were shouts of anger. Some were cries of pain or cries for help. It was a dreadful concert.

  More footsteps reached my ears, closing. These were in front, not behind, but I still didn’t move. I must have expected that I was still deep enough into the complex that there was no way I would see the enemy yet. But again, time had slipped away from me. I had not leaped. That’s not what I mean. I just sort of zoned out, my mind on the sounds of battle and the implications. When the man came around the bend, I was startled. He was very young. I wouldn’t even swear that he was out of his teens, his chin was so clean. There was a helmet on his head with a protective visor extending down to his nose. The visor was tinted, but I could still see his wide clear eyes. He wore a grey uniform that almost but didn’t quite match the predominant color of paint in the complex. When he saw me, he froze for a moment, then leveled his rifle.

  I raised my hands above my head but did not surrender. Instead, I asked, “What did we ever do to you?”

  Surprisingly, he did not play the part of a mindless grunt. Yet another misrepresentation of the future by science fiction. The man before me was not a genetically engineered soldier with a programmed objective. He paused, as if considering my request, then lowered his rifle.

  “It’s Cristian,” he shouted over his shoulder. “I’ve got him.”

  Then again…

  Four more soldiers rounded the corner and looked at me, the oddity, with my hands in the air. One moved ahead of the others and looked me over a bit, just to be sure. Then he pulled a funny pistol with a flat barrel from his belt and aimed it straight at me. I suppose he would have shot me with that funny looking gun if Rogers hadn’t intervened. I must assume that the man’s cry brought Rogers to me, although I don’t expect the opportunity to ever find out. Rogers fired straight away and there was a splatter of blood. I don’t even know where the soldier was hit.

  After that, all was chaos. Several more leapers piled into the corridor and opened fire. Someone grabbed me by the arm and pulled me backward, bruising me badly. I was out of the line of fire in a second and pushed back through the crowd. I caught a glimpse of Rogers, leading the assault. Two people escorted me back the way I had come. One of them was Otis, the man we had met on the way in on that first day. Another was a small man with bare wiry arms and deep set features.

  “This way,” said the small man. “We’ll keep you safe.”

  I looked at Otis and he looked back at me. There was no such thing as safe. The firing behind us ceased abruptly, replaced by a shrill cry from Rogers to keep moving. So we kept moving. I didn’t resist and I had lost all sense of apathy. It’s one thing to face one’s death from afar, but now it was right up in my face. I ran with the others. More Forty Leapers joined us at a junction and we went for the Map Room. This was where we, or should I say they, would make our final stand. I was urged inside while some others took up positions in the corridors and by the door. Furniture was thrown about and weapons were readied for the coming fight. I marveled at the difference between this seemingly organized maneuver and what I had experienced in the Rocky Mountains. Neville’s plan had always been to cause chaos. I realize now that the only way he could possibly reach a helicopter, which was his ultimate goal, was to sow bedlam. He had been past the point where lives mattered. It wasn’t about hurting his tormentors or freeing his fellow captives. It was about getting out. It was about organized panic. Here, though, the people were resolved. They were fighting and dying for a cause. Though I had openly scoffed at the cause and think it foolish still, I recognized and respected their resolve. Whatever I might say about Rogers Clinton, and I might say a lot, he had strung together a straggling bunch of sufferers and granted them dignity.

  The next person to come down the hall was Rogers Clinton himself. He was sweating and bleeding from the temple. There was a rifle in his hands, another slung over his shoulder. The look on his face was almost indescribable. He was a man who had exercised calm for years and years and now that calm was gone. All of that vigor that he had swallowed had been released, adrenaline pumping through his bo
dy until his veins were ready to burst. He barked orders and physically maneuvered men and women into position. No element of his motion betrayed his age or any weakness whatsoever. When he was done, he moved deep into the room, close to me, and aimed his rifle at the door. I stood next to him, feeling naked and useless.

  “No bad feelings between us, Mathew Cristian,” he said. “We part as friends.”

  I didn’t even have a chance to reply as the sound of gunfire erupted outside the entrance. Waiting, we listened to the fighting outside, our faces growing tense. A man positioned right by the door winked out of existence, the action too much for him. I was startled, but Rogers took it in stride, moving into his position. When the first of the soldiers came through, the big man, slave turned leader, didn’t even waste a bullet on him. He butted him with his rifle. The man fell back. The battle was joined.

  To say that I could not follow the action was an understatement. I didn’t even know where to begin. I remember once, when I was a kid, my father took me to a hockey game. I didn’t care for hockey and my father didn’t care for me, but we were both trying to forge a relationship. I sat there, an eight year old boy with little or no understanding of the game, people around me cheering. And I growing more and more frustrated. I don’t want to say that my father was a hard or cruel man or that he didn’t love me. He, like much of the rest of my family for most of my life up until my days of leaping, tolerated me as a family member but never quite understood me. Though my father could never grasp the fact that I didn’t really want to be at a hockey game, he did recognize my frustration and he put his arm patiently around me, leaned in, and whispered, “Just follow the puck.” So I did. And I was soon able to comprehend the action. I won’t say that I became a hockey fan, but I never forgot the way he eased my tension on that day.