by Jim Brown
But what he couldn’t explain was how Dobbs had gotten that way. Or how Dobbs had been able to survive time travel. “So far, we’ve only been able to transport inanimate objects,” he explained.
“Wait a minute. You did this to me?” Dobbs, who could still feel the electric fire whenever he closed his eyes, felt his anger rising.
“No, no – at least, not intentionally . . .”
It got a bit nasty after that. Dobbs learned he was in a place called NxTech and NxTech, had guards, big guards. Still, it took four of them to pull him off Dr. Dean.
Less than three days later Dobbs felt his skin began to burn and itch; sparks flashed between his fingers, his vision fuzzed, and then – he was somewhere, somewhen, else.
That was when he realized the severity of his situation. That second hop had been a bitch. He appeared somewhere in the past – far, far in the past. A time before there was a city or a settlement. No roads, no trails, no help. He had made a fire by sparking rocks – like a freakin’ Boy Scout. And lived off berries, crab apples, and wild onions.
The wildlife was abundant. Too abundant. He saw a bear and heard a mountain lion. This was before he had fixed his knife. He had no weapon, no way to defend himself.
By his calculations, he had been there for a little less than three days when he again felt the sparks between his fingers, the tingling of his skin. He appeared in 1948 in a service station garage, scaring the hell out of a guy working beneath the hood of a ‘46 Plymouth. He had threatened the mechanic with a tire iron, took his money, then hurried away.
Hunger got the best of him. He was eating in the Downtown Daily Dinner when a cop walked in. But Whitey was gone before a confrontation. Over the next month, his time, he appeared in fourteen different locations, never staying much more than three days, sometimes less than a minute.
It was hell. Pure, undiluted hell.
When he found himself back in the future, shortly after his initial appearance, he begged Dean Truman for help. Begged. Stupid asshole, it was his fault. But Whitey was quiet. Silently agreeing to an array of different tests.
Dean, who still didn’t understand how Dobbs had gotten radiated, had devised a way of siphoning off the excess neo-whatchamacallits – enough to keep Dobbs from flickering away every three days or so. But there was a catch, a big catch. He had to use the machine three times a day and he was confined to Black Valley. Anytime he tried to go more than thirty-seven miles from the NxTech building, he would disappear in time.
For eight months Dobbs played their game, pretending to be a good solider, listening to Dean make promises of a permanent cure, feeling like the world’s biggest lab rat. Eight long months.
And each day his urge for revenge grew a little stronger, burned a little hotter.
That was when he made the modifications to Switch, his knife. It was the first of many improvements.
The wind picked up now. Whitey Dobbs felt as if his feet had been replaced with cinder blocks. Screw that. He saw a pickup truck behind the grocery store. He smiled.
Dean used one gloved hand to apply pressure to the jaws, while prying the mouth open with the other. Jerry stood behind him watching, grimacing.
On the stainless-steel table sat the severed head of their longtime friend. It had been stored in a refrigeration unit. Frost clung to his short-cropped hair, eyebrows, cheeks, and nose. The skin was sallow. The eyes were open but sightless.
The mouth made a slurpy pop as it opened. Congealed mucus covered the maw, as if a diligent spider had been at work spinning a particularly thick, gummy web. Dean noticed a small nick on the lower left corner of John’s chin. He must have cut himself shaving. Had John noticed that? If he had, then he would have known he was going to die today. But he had said nothing. As silent in life as he now was in death.
Six feet away, draped in a hospital-green shroud, lay the corpse, dead only a quarter as long as the head.
Working with a pair of long stainless-steel tweezers, Dean reached into the open cavity and slowly pulled out a wadded sheet of paper. The mucus webbing snapped. Other strands clung to the paper and were pulled thin before breaking.
Dean placed the paper in a tray to his left.
“That what we’re looking for?”
“That’s it.”
Dean mercifully covered the head, then turned to the paper. He straightened it with his still-gloved fingers and studied the results. It was a small slip of paper torn from a pocket-size notebook, the same kind Dean always carried with him. The same kind he had in his pocket now. It was written in ink. He recognized the handwriting as his own. But . . .
Dean felt his heart drop, an elevator without a cable. The paper was nonsensical, a series of numbers and letters arranged in algebraic fashion but meaning nothing. Even what should have been the most basic equation was meaningless.
If Dean had written this, if some future version of himself had written this, then why couldn’t he read it? Was he wrong? Had someone else provided Dobbs with the calculations? Was someone else responsible for the time problem? The idea carried the faint odor of relief, release from responsibility – but it was quickly replaced by the realization that if he couldn’t translate the equation, and quickly, then everything he held dear was in jeopardy. Still, regardless of who the author was, numbers were numbers, and these numbers literally did not add up.
The phone brayed, jerking him like an electrical shock. He removed the glove from his right hand and picked up the receiver. Piper began without introduction. “He’s back.”
“What? He can’t be back. It’s too soon. Are you sure?”
“No, no, I’m not sure. I’m still trying to get a handle on it. But I just had another one of those feelings.”
“More debris?”
He could hear the roar of the truck engine competing with the pinched stress in her voice. “I don’t think so. I’ve been trying to quantify the sensations. This feeling has been consistent with . . . with somebody dying.”
Dean checked his mental clock. “It’s too soon.”
“Time doesn’t matter to him. Remember?”
Jenkins Jones sliced the cardboard with a box opener, then rapidly began removing the cereal, tagging it with a price gun, and stacking it on the shelf. The store was brimming with customers, all pushing heavily laden carts, stocking up on whatever they deemed necessary for survival.
The rush had started shortly after the mayor’s statement confirming that both the mountain pass and the Willamette Bridge were out, effectively stranding residents in Black Valley. Folks were preparing for the long haul. Products were being snatched from the shelves as quickly as he put them out. He had called in all of his workers. A third couldn’t make it, stranded by the storm, but those that had were working at full capacity. It was like the day before Thanksgiving. A madhouse.
Business was great. Except? With no roads, supply trucks couldn’t get in. Once his shelves were empty, there was no way to restock them.
“Maybe I should ration it out,” he mumbled.
“Excuse me?” asked a woman with an infant. She was pushing a shopping cart filled to overflowing with boxes of hair-care products. This is what she deems necessary to live?
“Nothing,” he said.
The woman wheeled away. He returned to his urgent task of restocking the shelves.
“Humph.” It was weird how some people thought.
Jenkins was far more practical than most. When he learned the bridge was out, he had hurried back to the store, being sure to stop by the state liquor store for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, then the drug-store for a new box of condoms. Just in case.
“It could happen,” he told the cereal boxes.
He finished the crate, then headed back to the storeroom. He was counting his supplies when out the back window he saw a white-haired stranger climbing into his pickup truck.
; Mason sat in a thinly padded faux-leather chair. He had no emotions. His nerves, like wires forced to carry a tremendous load, were burned out. Tina was in the hospital. The doctor had given her something to make her sleep. They had successfully reattached her finger but couldn’t say if it would ever work again.
John was dead – his big, indestructible cousin. And Whitey Dobbs, the devil incarnate, was back. Alive. Unchanged. Unstoppable.
He sat in the sheriff’s department conference room like a gargoyle on a building cornice. Watching, waiting, wondering. He had heard this was their staging area. This was where they would plan their next step. And when they did, Mason would be waiting, to help in whatever way he could. All he asked was a chance to kill the white-haired bastard.
Maggie looked across the room with questioning eyes. A phone, obviously working for the moment, was cradled on her shoulder. The room was virtually empty, save for a few office assistants and part-timers. She’s looking for a cop, Mason guessed. The fact that she hadn’t called on a part-timer meant it was important.
Mason stood. He met her gaze. “What?”
She stared at him for a half breath, then shook her head dismissively.
He took a step closer, casting her in his shadow. “I’m ready. Let me help.”
Perhaps it was desperation, perhaps his similarity to his cousin John, whatever the reason, she nodded. “It’s Jenkins Jones. He says someone is trying to steal his truck. A guy with white hair. If you could find a couple of regular deputies, maybe Jerry Niles, he could – Mr. Evans? Mr. Evans?”
Mason left the room at a run.
The door was unlocked. The truck cab was as lavish as a luxury car, with real leather seats, tinted windows, and a console that looked like it belonged in a 747.
“Sweet.”
Click.
Flip.
He leaned beneath the steering wheel and popped the cover off the bottom of the drive column. Whitey Dobbs found himself staring at a confusing array of wires and circuit boards. “What the hell?”
He suddenly realized his knowledge of cars, specifically how to hot-wire them, was twenty-two years out of date and virtually useless in the age of computerization.
“Get the hell out of my truck,” a gravelly voice demanded from behind him.
Dobbs rose and found himself staring down the barrel of a wobbling .45 caliber-revolver.
“Get out. Now. You drugged-up, freak,” said the old man. His red-and-white name tag identified him as JENKINS.
“Your truck?” Dobbs asked, then smiled. “Cool.”
This was it, Jenkins realized. An honest-to-God, real-life, drugged-up hippie freak. His hair was white, freakishly white, and his eyes as black as coal shards. And when the son of a bitch smiled – Jenkins felt his testicles shrink. Jesus, that smile.
The drugged-up hippie freak blinked. Tiny blue sparks snapped between his eyelids.
“What the hell?” Jenkins drew back. The .45 waived anxiously in his hand, seeming remarkably heavy and remarkably small at the same time. He bit his lower lip and steadied his aim. “Raise your hands and get out of the truck.”
“I don’t think so,” The white-haired man said, pointing at him with a knife. “Give me the keys.”
“What?” Jenkins blinked in disbelief. “The drugs done fried your brain,– boy? This here is a forty-five-caliber Smith and Wesson. Blow the nose right off your face. I got a gun. You only got a knife. I’m the guy in control here.”
The drugged-up hippie freak scratched his chin with his fingers. “Think so?” He leaned forward, knife extended. He moved like a snake, moving before Jenkins could react. The knife flashed in the cold air. Striking the gun.
Strrreenng.
It was an odd, almost musical sound.
Jenkins stared as the gun barrel gun fell to the asphalt.
“The keys.”
Jenkins dropped the ruined weapon.
“The keys.”
He unclipped his key ring from his belt and handed it over. The keys jingled like little bells.
The man fished through them till he found one that matched the truck. He stuck it in the ignition. The motor roared to life. Jenkins Jones mumbled.
“What?” asked the man with the knife. “Speak up.”
Jenkins was shaking so hard, he could barely speak. He forced the words out. “I said, I – I got condoms in my desk drawer.
36
A feeling of impotence. As if someone had used an ice cream scoop to remove his brain, replacing it with a double handful of anxious spiders. The numbers, the numbers – his friends, his secret language. Now, when he needed them most, they had deserted him.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Dean said, shaking the small sheet of paper dappled with figures and symbols.
“It has to make sense,” Nathan moaned. He had been sent to retrieve supplies they would need if forced to play Dean’s desperate endgame. He had succeeded only to learn that the crucial information, the information John Evans had died for, was indecipherable. “It’s based on your theory.”
He was right. Then, why can’t I read it?
Think, think. Dean ordered the spiders to behave. Come on. Put one thought next to another. What was the purpose of the paper? He felt sure this was a list of time fractures, sites which could be used as control points for Whitey Dobbs. A means of traveling without the random factor Dean theorized had been Dobbs’ primary state. The sheet was filled with information front and back.
He was convinced there were two kinds of fractures – overt, like the visible, swirling holes in space-time that appeared in his classroom; and covert, weaknesses in the field that couldn’t be seen but could be breeched by someone doused in sufficient amounts of radiation. It was the latter, he felt sure, that Whitey Dobbs was using to go from one place and time to another.
Dean looked for dates, equations, codes. Nothing made any sense. Nothing.
“You can figure it out, Dr. Truman,” Jerry said. His young face was taut. He looked as if he had aged ten years in the last hour.
“Sure he can. You wrote it, or at least you will.” Nathan Perkins shook his head. “Time travel gives me a headache. Everything is ass-backwards.”
Backward?
“What did you say?”
Nathan rubbed his temples with the tips his fingers. “I said time travel gives me a headache.”
“After that.”
He stopped his temple massage. He thought carefully. “I said everything is ass-backward,” he repeated tentatively.
Dean smiled. Could it be? Could it really be that simple?
Then he remembered something he hadn’t thought of in more than twenty years. “Whitey Dobbs. He had a learning disability.”
“Yeah, he was smart as whip but dismissed as stupid earlier on. Wasn’t until he came to Black Valley that the teachers figured it out.”
Dean snatched a sheet of paper from a yellow pad and began to write. “His disability?”
“Dyslexia,” Nathan said.
Jerry’s eyes widened. “Is that it?”
Dean wrote frantically. “Yes, yes. Dyslexia. It means he reverses numbers.”
“So if you wrote the note for, Dobbs . . .” Nathan said.
“Then I would have written it backward.”
Ten minutes later Dean had filled the yellow sheet with newly translated calculations. It was all there – time, place, longitude and latitude.”
Dates.
Dean recognized one of the dates now revealed. His mind bounced from point to point, each assumption of logic building on an assumption before it. No time to test, no time to question. He worked quickly, efficiently, counting on his own brainpower and intuition.
He stopped and looked up at Nathan and Jerry.
“What? What is it?”
He smiled. “Our bes
t chance. According to these figures, to make the connection to Hawkins Hill at the time he specified, Whitey Dobbs will have to spend two hours in Black Valley and travel from one set of coordinates to another. Piper’s right. He’s here. Now.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
“No. Don’t you get it? He’s here now. And he’s vulnerable. If we move fast, we can be waiting at the conjunctive point – set up an ambush and catch him off guard.”
Jerry grinned. “Can you tell where he’s going to be?”
Dean nodded. “I’ve got the coordinates. I need a map.”
“Come on. There’s a map in the squad car.”
Whitey Dobbs started the truck. Old man Jenkins stood outside the cab shaking, knees knocking like castanets. Dobbs put the truck in gear, looked at Percy Street and, for the first time noticed the orange-and-white barricades.
“Damn construction.” He had planned on taking Percy to the old Beal Highway, a back road that would take him where he wanted to go with very little traffic, decreasing his chances of getting caught. “What’s the quickest way to get to Beal?”
The old man blinked, mouth agape.
“Beal? Beal?” Dobbs repeated. “Talk before I cut out your tongue.”
Jenkins Jones pointed, his arthritic joints making his finger look like knotted pine. “Take Agate to Pearl. It’s a one-way street while they expand Percy.”
Dobbs slammed the door closed, thought a moment, then powered down the window. “Why did you tell me you have condoms in your desk?”
“In case you make me do the nasty with one of my cute clerks.”
Whitey Dobbs cackled, his voice sharp like the crack of electricity.
“It could happen,” Jenkins said. “It could happen!” he screamed as the truck pulled away.