by Jim Brown
As it arced in the sky the now – crimson quicksilver blade seem to quiver with an almost sexual delight. The knife struck again and again.
Dean was close enough to hear the faint oomph as it found its mark and plunged deep. John was struggling, trying to raise his arms, trying to block another blow, but the suddenness and ferocity of the attack had left the big man defenseless. Blood bubbled from between his gritted teeth.
And all the while that maniacal laughter, the sound of the devil’s merry-go-round. Whitey Dobbs released his grip and big John dropped to the floor like a bloody side of beef.
“How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean?”
Dean froze in place. His face was less than two feet from that of his dying friend. John blinked, as if baffled by this new perspective, as if he were still standing and the world had somehow tilted. “It’s okay, John, we’re going to get you out of here. We’re going to get you help.”
Dean grabbed the table leg and again pulled himself up. His body tingled with the aftereffects of the electrical shock. Dobbs still held the blade, and Dean saw his original analysis was correct. It was quivering.
“You shouldn’t be here, you know.” Dobbs took a step toward him. The wind whipped his frosty white hair, tugged on his black and bloody leather jacket, but otherwise left him unscathed.
He knows how to walk through it. How to brace. Nothing magical here, just practice.
“Give it up, Jimmy Dean. Haven’t you figured it out yet? Science – your science – is nothing. How much more proof do you need? I’m the spawn of Satan. You can’t stop me. And unless you are on top of that hill tonight, everyone and everything you have ever loved will be destroyed.” He looked at Piper. Her eyes seemed to shimmer with electricity. “Some slower than others.”
“You’re full of shit,” Dean spit, hoping to keep the sheer terror out of his voice. “You’re no ghost. No devil. There’s nothing mystical or magical about you. You’re just a poor, dumb bastard in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Dobbs’ eyes widened.
Dean continued. “You were exposed to radiation up on Hawkins Hill. Radiation that lets you walk through time. Those portals. My portals. You’re here because of my science, you bastard.”
For the barest measurement of time a flicker of fear streaked across the face of Whitey Dobbs. Then in a flash it was gone. But not soon enough. Dean had seen it. He’s afraid of me. No. He’s afraid of my mind.
Anger contorted Dobbs’s already dark and foreboding face. “You’re a fool. But you’re right. This is all because of you. You and your damn experiments.”
He had given up the pretense of devilment. “Do you know what happens to you eleven years from now? Do you want to know? You’re the scourge of the Earth. Your little time experiment goes boom, taking half of Hawkins Hill with it. One hundred and thirty-two men, women, and children die. Not to mention what you do to me.”
Dobbs stepped over John’s body, as if avoiding a puddle. “Can you imagine what it was like lying in that coffin, thinking everyone was dead? That I was trapped? Buried alive? Then something wonderful and horrible happened. Something hit me, a wave of some kind, burning me from the inside out. For a moment I truly believed I had been sent to hell. Then I woke up, falling, dropping three to four feet from casket to a floor. A laboratory floor. Your laboratory. Ninety-nine Einstein.”
Dobbs stopped and drew his head back. He smiled, an ivory crescent of pure mockery. “You were quite surprised by my arrival, quite surprised.”
“That’s when I learned it had all been a trick. A ruse. But the trip had not left me unscathed. I was exposed to some radiation bullshit. I would be fine, sometimes for days, then I would feel my skin tingle and find myself somewhere else – somewhen else. You used me as a guinea pig. Oh, you said it was to figure out how to help me. But I know the truth. I know it was just to feed your morbid curiosity.”
“You’ve screwed up, Dobbs,” Dean yelled. “All of what you just said will never happen now.”
“So? Changing the future doesn’t change me. You told me that yourself. But it can affect the past, your past.”
Dean felt the birth of a new kind of fear, something dark and sinister. A warning, deep inside his head, was screaming he didn’t want to hear what Dobbs meant. He thought he could hold him off. “Look, I’m sorry for what we did, for what happened. You’ve got to understand, at the time John and Mason thought you had raped Judy. It wasn’t until I explained that you were in the store with me that they realized their mistake. We tried to dig you up as fast as we could, but it was too late. You were already gone.”
Dobbs laughed. This time Dean heard the sound of rusted bells. “Don’t you get it, Jimmy Dean? I did rape Judy. I had her good. Twice.”
Dean felt the world tilting. For a moment he thought he had been struck by another electrical jolt. “That’s impossible. You were with me that night.”
Dobbs threw his head back and cackled. “You’re such a fucking idiot. Fool, I went back after the burial, after waking up in the future, I went back in time and made you my alibi. While my past self was raping Judy in the parking lot, my future self with using you as a cover story.”
“So when you were in the store –”
“I had already been buried and radiated, and flickering through time like poor reception. I screwed her and you covered for me. You protected me. You’re a fool, Dean Truman, an honest-to-God fool.”
Dean felt his head reel. “You said twice.”
Dobbs grinned. “Yeah, after making you my alibi, I took another time trip. Just a jaunt, really, twelve minutes into the future and into her bedroom. I was there when she arrived home. So I had her again. Real good this time. Real good. She must have been impressed by how soon I could get it up. What was your recoup time after doing it, Jimmy Dean? Could Jimmy Dean, Jr. be raring to go just twelve minutes after popping? Yeah, I bet she thought about me a lot after that. Remembered what a real man could do to her, for her. I bet the whole time she was with you she was thinking of me, wishing it was me.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Piper implored. “He’s trying to unnerve you. He wants you rattled. He needs you alive, but he wants you mentally unstable.”
Dobbs whipped his head around, his eyes locking on Piper. “You – you little bitch. You’ve got a bit of it in you, too, don’t you, the radiation. Not as much as me but enough to see things.”
The churning wind blew a sheet of paper against his cheek. He slashed it away with the bloody silver knife. “Maybe I should just go ahead and take you now.”
Around them the holes began to throb like a beating heart, pulsing from plate size to man size. The wind picked up again.
“You don’t have time,” Dean yelled. “Your ride’s about up.” He was suddenly aware he had somehow finished the calculations in his head. At least partially. But he needed more. Much more.
A sheet of white paper stuck out of Dobbs’s left pocket. Dean took a chance. “You can’t control it without me, can you? Every couple of days the radiation builds up and you have to flicker through time to dissipate it. But without me, without my calculations, you have no control. You appear and disappear at random.”
Dobbs gritted his teeth. His black eyes, twin lasers.
Dean continued. “That sheet of paper in your pocket. That’s it, isn’t it? That has the calculations that tell you the time and place where space-time is malleable enough for you to push through.”
“Shut the hell up!” Dobbs sneered. “Yeah, so what? Just more reason for you to feel guilty. Without you, I couldn’t do anything. I guess that makes you my accomplice, my partner.”
Then Dean saw it. In some respects it was as remarkable as all the other events combined, as amazing as a person walking backward through time. Astonishing because it involved no science, no tools, no special circumstances. Just a man, an extraordinary man, too tough, to
o mean to die.Behind Whitey Dobbs, the bloody mass that was John Evans was moving.
Dean had to keep Dobbs’ attention. “You don’t have long this trip. I’ve done the math in my head, and I think the holes are about to dry up.”
John pulled himself up by the table leg. His chest was a dripping red banner. Each movement the result of his massive, incredible will. Inch by inch by inch.
“You’ve got to leave soon, in one of these holes, or you’ll wink out on your own and there is no telling where or when you will end up. And right now you want – no, you need – control.”
“Shut up!” Dobbs screamed, shaking the knife at him. The quicksilver metal was less red than before, almost as if it were consuming the blood.
“What about Elijah?”
The question struck Dobbs like the lash of a whip. “Shut the fuck up.”
Hit a nerve.
“You’re afraid of him, aren’t you? You are. I can see it in your eyes. Why? Who is he? What is he?”
The white-haired man offered a full-tooth grin. “He’s history.” He pulled a slip of paper from his coat pocket. “You are right about one thing, your future self did give me the information I needed to navigate these random time holes. You also gave me the means to free myself from this . . . hell, and you’ve inadvertently given me the method to destroy Elijah.”
John stumbled more than walked. Falling forward. Falling on Whitey Dobbs from behind. Dobbs was startled. Reflexively the knife struck, slashing deep into John’s left arm. But the big man was beyond pain. With his right hand he snatched the sheet of paper from between Dobbs’s fingers, then fell toward the nearest time hole. He had no speed. The knife found his back.
“John, no. It’s not large enough,” Dean said. The nearest time hole was too small – pulsing, expanding and contracting from the size of a serving platter to as small as a dime, in and out, in and out.
John saw it, too. It wasn’t large enough. He would never make it through. With a tremendous display of fortitude, John shoved the sheet of paper into his mouth and dove for the hole.
He disappered up to the shoulders. The hole snapped shut. John’s headless body fell to the floor, a fountain of blood pumping from a heart that didn’t know it was dead.
Whitey Dobbs laughed. Thunder roared and lightning slashed through the snow, tracing Dobbs in its electric-white glow.
“Midnight. Midnight be at the top of Hawkins Hill. No guns, no tricks. Be there or be square. And oh, yeah, there’s that thing about me killing everyone you love if you don’t show. Just a reminder.”
Dobbs turned quickly, took two steps toward Piper, then jumped into the largest of the time holes only moments before it closed. They all closed. The wind stopped. Paper fluttered to the floor like ash from Armageddon’s fire.
Two hours, less than two hours.
35
Piper slammed the gas pedal to the floor. The truck’s tires chewed snow. Energetic wipers vigorously slashed at the whiteness. She was driving faster than road conditions allowed, but there was “no too fast” tonight. Time was a small, precious, fleeting commodity. As she drove her mind fought like the wipers, trying to bat away the image of John being decapitated by the very air, of the maniac with white hair, of storms inside and out.
“You can’t seriously tell me you plan to meet him?” she had argued with Dean.
“I have to. It has to stop.”
“He’s going to kill you. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. It’s a trap. There’s a reason he wants to meet you at that location, at that time. It’s a trap.”
“I know,” Dean answered, but his resolve remained unchanged. She couldn’t decide if he was the bravest man she had ever known or the dumbest. But she no longer had doubts about her other feelings. She loved him. And in the end it was that love that made her capitulate.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I need your help.”
“Anything,” she had answered, and realized that she meant it. Anything.
And now she was racing across the county on all-but-unpassable roads, racing to the forest department substation to pick up a very specific piece of equipment that may or may not be there.
“What’s it for?” she had asked.
“No time to explain. I have to go to the hospital. I don’t know if you have time to make it back before I leave.”
“Then I’ll meet you on top of Hawkins Hill.”
He had started to object, but she stopped him with a kiss. No brush, no peck, but rather a soul-to-soul exchange.
“On top of the hill,” she had whispered.
The truck shimmed and shook but held to the road. She pushed the accelerator.
Something tingled in the back of her mind.
Incoming.
This was the danger time. The time when Whitey Dobbs was the most vulnerable. He had memorized the calculations carefully and knew there was no other way. To arrive where he wanted when he wanted, he would have to spend two hours in Black Valley and travel to the other side of the county. It was sort of like catching a connecting flight – only this connection opened up a world of possibilities. More options than he had ever had before.
It also made it possible for him to be at the top of Hawkins Hill at midnight. That was when the temporal anomalies would be at their peak. That was when his plan had the best chance of succeeding.
And to make matters worse, John had stolen his calculations. It didn’t matter. Not even Dean could decipher the handwritten sheet in time to make a difference. Could he?
A finger of panic tentatively touched his heart. He snapped it off. Screw that. After being buried alive, no way out, no hope, nothing would ever truly frighten him again – nothing.
Dobbs remembered that night with a clarity that only came from having events carved in your brain with a sharp blade of terror. The coffin was small, sufficatingly small, and shrinking by the minute. Dobbs had broken his knife trying to cut his way out, and even in the dark he could feel hot, salty rivulets of blood running down his arms and splattering on his face as he beat his hands into bloody pulp on the unyielding lid.
No way out, no way out.
Then he went to hell.
It started with a tingling, an unnerving sensation like spiders dancing on the base of his neck. Then the wave – that was the only way he could think to describe it, a wave of white-hot, electric fire that washed over his body from head to toe. It was a pain like nothing he had ever experienced, as if God had taken a soldering iron and was individually branding each and every atom in Dobbs’s body.
A pain of pure, blinding intensity. Only he wasn’t blind. He could see, and what he saw caused his already fragile sanity to shatter into jagged shards.
Light, a brilliant blue-white light, then darkness, then fire. And there was sound, too. Screaming voices, sirens, crying, explosions, laughter. Then fire again. Everywhere. Around him, on him, in him – fire. Yellow-orange and raw-heart red. Fire all about him, yet not touching him. He was inside an inferno – inside. But he wasn’t burning.
Hell. He had gone to hell.
Only it wasn’t. It would be months before he realized that for one-tenth of a second he had existed in the very heart of a raging explosion as Dean’s reactor at the core of the NxTech Research Center went critical, ignited, and spewed debris and chaos though out time and space.
But during that first moment Whitey Dobbs was sure he had died and gone to hell.
Then he was falling.
The fire was gone. The coffin was gone. Whitey Dobbs fell four feet onto a cold, tile floor. He didn’t realize he was screaming until he heard his voice echoing in the large, sterile room. Others were screaming as well. Men and women in long white coats, some carrying clipboards, others working with incomprehensible machinery, all staring at him, reflecting his look of shock and surprise.
He lay on the floor suckin
g air, breathing like a man who had just surfaced from deep-sea dive.
Where was he?
Three, four – no, five people, two women and three men, watched him with wide frightened eyes. Strangely, Dobbs took comfort from their fear. Then a face he knew but didn’t know came out of the group.
Bald and wrinkled, slightly stooped, an impossibly old Dean Truman stared at Whitey Dobbs.
Dobbs shook his head, forcing the memory back into the dark closet of his mind. He had to be alert, had to be cognizant; this was the danger time. Though he had lost his note, he still remembered the basic times and locations, if not the exact minutes and longitude. It didn’t matter. Once he was close enough, he would be able to sense the thinning.
The future Dean called it a conjunctive point. “A diaphanous location in time and space, distorted and vulnerable to ruptures.”
Screw that! Dobbs called it the thinning because that was the way it felt. Offering little more resistance than a heavy stage curtain, leaving his body tingling, with a slight metallic taste in his mouth. And on the other side? A different time. A different place.
Dobbs looked around the empty high school, where he had materialized. A school he had attended twenty-two years ago, present time – but only thirteen months ago, his time. He had never graduated. Never received his diploma.
His boots beat a sharp cadence as he hurried down the hall and out the back door. Snow covered the world in a thick, pervasive blanket. There was no traffic, no sound.
A dead world as white as my hair. Cool.
He headed across the street, behind a row of modest brick homes. A serrated wind sliced across his exposed face and hands. Within minutes he was freezing. His teeth chattered. His lips thickened and quivered. Damn. He had become so accustomed to stepping from one location to another, he had forgotten the brutal harshness of the real world. Sometimes it was easy to forget he was still human.
Human. Hell, he didn’t feel human.
The memory of those first days when he had escaped the coffin only to find himself in the future – forty-six years from the time he was buried alive, twenty-four years from the present – was still painfully sharp. Dean Truman was old and stooped. Reluctantly Dobbs let himself be examined. That was when Dean concluded that Dobbs’s body was glowing with something he called neorads, whatever the hell that was.