“Who the hell are you?”
Jay lifted his head from the foul-smelling mud and looked up into the barrel of gun. The man behind it turned out to be a skinny teenager with the wispy beginnings of a mustache.
OK. So far, so good. Now he had to intrigue Polanski’s men enough so that they’d take him in for questioning. “I … er … I’m nobody. I …” He climbed slowly to his feet, trying not to alarm or threaten any of the three men pointing guns at him. The mud sucked and squelched unpleasantly as he separated himself from the road. “I just got into some trouble with those Sons of Joshua people. I think you chaps saved my life.”
“What do you reckon, Jed?” asked the first.
Jed sucked his teeth and said, “I reckon the SOBs don’t chase nobody into the Shanty unless they’re real important.”
The third one added, “Looks like you ruined a real nice suit there, Mister Nobody. Now why don’t you tell us what got them brownshirts so riled up against you?”
“Oh, you know what it’s like with those chaps; say one wrong thing and they take offense.”
“You sure talk funny,” said the first.
“Like a foreigner,” said Jed.
The third rubbed his jaw. “A foreigner in a fancy suit and the SOBs want him so bad they’d risk coming in here after him.”
“Think we should take him to the boss?” said the first.
“I’ll have him if you don’t want him.”
Jay turned to see a fourth man approaching, a short, round man in clean clothes and a cowboy hat. He felt the sudden tension in Polanski’s men, saw them firm up their grips on their weapons, slide fingers onto triggers. This new guy was trouble and these armed terrorists were scared of him. He scanned the street and found two men with rifles watching from a spot that afforded plenty of cover if they were to need it.
“With all due respect, this ain’t none of your business, Mr. O‘Dell,” said Jed. “Take him inside,” he told his companions.
“Not so fast,” O‘Dell said. “I’m curious as to what this fella did to get himself in so much trouble.”
Jay did not want the distraction of being caught up in some kind of gang war between rival slumlords, or whatever was going on. To the new man he said, “All I did was to comment that I knew a man called Joshua once who claimed to have slept with every whore in Washington, and maybe that’s why he seemed to have so many sons in this city.”
O‘Dell opened his mouth in surprise and then started to chuckle.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Jay said. “I have an appointment with these gentlemen.” He headed towards the entrance to Polanski’s labyrinth and the three guards fell in step with him. Behind him, O‘Dell’s chuckle turned into a laugh.
“Hey, Limey,” O‘Dell shouted after him. “Come and see me when they let you out. I like a good laugh.”
“Who was that guy?” Jay asked as they led him inside.
“O‘Dell? You want to stay away from him,” said Jed. “Runs the rackets round here—drugs, whores, protection. We don’t mess with him and he don’t mess with us. Where you from anyway?”
“Out of town.” He gave the wall a poke and it wobbled. “Is this place safe?” Very few of the walls looked vertical and most of them gave the impression they’d topple over if he leaned on them.
“Sure, nothing’s fallen down since the last big storm. Come on, I want to see the boss’s face when you tell him what you said to them SOBs.”
-oOo-
Sandra was in the void for exactly four tenths of a second. She had not even had time to feel the cold and vacuum start to burn her exposed skin before she arrived and fell a meter to the ground, taking the impact with knees bent like a parachutist and rolling the way her years of martial arts training made almost instinctive. The metal bar clanged to the ground behind her.
“Holy crap,” Sandra said from the bed. The guard almost fell off his chair with surprise. She had gone back just 12 hours, to the evening of her arrival, when she’d been alone with her guard and had just climbed into bed.
“It’s my brilliant escape plan,” she told her shocked and amazed past-self who was staring at her open mouthed from the bed. “We need to fix him.” Meaning the guard.
She grabbed up the iron bar and was on her feet and sprinting towards the stunned watchman in an instant. Nevertheless, he had the time and the presence of mind to raise his gun and take aim. But, unfortunately for him, the other Sandra was on him before he had the chance to fire. She laid him out with two solid blows to the temple.
The two Sandras stood and stared at each other for a moment. “Nice dress,” they both said, and grinned.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” Sandra said.
“Sometimes you meet yourself on the road before you have a chance to learn the appropriate greeting,” her past-self quoted. She looked at the meter-long iron bar in future Sandra’s hand. “You weren’t …”
“Planning to kill myself?” Sandra grinned again. Despite the dangers of the situation, she couldn’t help thinking that this was so cool. She couldn’t wait to tell Olivia when she got back. “I’d have thought you knew me better than that.”
“Ha! What then?”
“The F2 reactors. I need to smash them. If they’re broken, I can’t use them to send myself back to break them, can I?”
“Anomaly. Then what, you escape during the backwash?”
“It should bring half the block down.”
“A stiff breeze would do that.”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
Her past-self frowned. “It’s a damned shame I won’t remember any of this. I don’t, do I?”
“Sorry, them’s the rules. Everything back to how it was before the lob.”
She sighed. “Come on then, let’s start smashing things.”
Her past-self picked up the past edition of the iron bar Sandra held and they began breaking up the focus fusion reactors, which were still stacked in a bunch waiting to be assembled. They worked fast and systematically. Sandra undid the access panels and her past-self leaned in with the iron bar and pulverized the delicate photonic circuits. When they got to the very last one, her past-self removed the panel but stood in front of it, blocking her doppelgänger.
“We haven’t made a splash yet,” said Sandra.
But her twin refused to move. “I reckoned we’d be OK until the last one. Your lob was so short you could have done it with a car battery. One of these things would have been enough.”
“Damn, you’re right. I could probably have done it off the mains. Especially if I charged up the capacitors.” She did some sums in her head. “No, I’m pretty sure I’d need the capacitors. Besides, you’ve seen the wiring in this place. Trying to power a D-field generator off this junk might start a fire but it wouldn’t give me enough impetus even for a twelve-hour lob. We’ll need to smash the capacitor racks too. Just the controller boards would be enough.” She raised her bar to smash the final generator.
“Just in case,” said her past-self, still blocking her. “Just in case smashing this causes the splash, and I … Well, you know. I just wanted to take a minute.”
Sandra at last saw the fear in her past-self’s eyes.
“I don’t want to die,” her past-self said.
“You don’t. You live. Look.” She opened her arms to display the proof.
“That’s easy for you to say. You’ve never been me, not this me. We’re in a potential future that never happened to you—at the time.”
“It’s one that won’t have happened to you, either—soon. None of this will ever have happened, except to me. That is, to you, in the future.”
“I know the theory as well as you do, remember? But that doesn’t help when I think that, in a while, I’m going to start that hideous vibrating as causality starts to unwind, to unravel my life. What do you suppose that feels like?”
An empathic wave of horror ran through Sandra. She remembered the nightmares—all down to post-traumatic
stress disorder her shrink had said—after the timesplashes she’d been through sixteen years ago. No doubt her past-self was remembering them too.
“Oh God, I’m sorry,” Sandra said and hugged her copy, pulling her close and sharing her distress. How would she feel knowing she was living a brief, impermanent, stolen fragment of life, one that should never have happened and that would soon be erased from the universe?
“We should never have messed with this stuff,” her past-self said, pulling away.
“What?”
“You and me. Time travel. It’s a kind of sickness. The same old sickness. I see it so clearly now. It’s like I needed to learn to control this thing that I feared so much.”
“We don’t really have time for—”
“No, listen. This is important. When you get back home, I want you to promise you’ll get out of the time travel business.”
“But it’s my job. How will I look after Cara?”
Her past-self smiled. “You’re a bright girl. You’ll work it out.”
“But I can’t just—”
“Trust me. I know what I’m talking about. You’ll see it yourself one day, maybe. What I’ve been doing is wrong, playing with fire because it fascinates and scares me. Because, deep down, I knew one day it would kill me.”
Sandra stared helplessly at her past-self. How could she not believe her insight? How could she doubt what she could feel, on some deeply buried level, to be true? And yet …
“No,” her past-self said, perhaps seeing the rebellion in her eyes. “Just promise me. It’s my dying wish.”
Sandra felt as if she’d been punched in the gut. She responded with anger. This whole conversation was insane. She pushed her past-self aside and tore into the reactor’s innards. When she re-emerged, her past-self was standing there, watching her with an expression that might have been pity. Well, screw that!
Sandra went over to the capacitor racks and began furiously pulling out the controller boards and smashing them to fragments. She’d done most of them when the board she smashed flew back together again, then flew apart, and then together again. It had begun. She whirled around to look at her past-self, suddenly appalled that she had not said goodbye.
The other Sandra was standing still, watching her, but there was a shimmering aura around her now and her features were indistinct as her whole body vibrated at an impossible speed.
Sandra gasped in anguish. It was too late. She’d let her past-self stand there waiting for her inevitable death, frightened and alone, probably fighting the urge to stop her, and Sandra hadn’t even said goodbye.
A chunk of ceiling fell down and hung in the air, never to hit the ground. One of the reactors groaned and slumped, as if it’s own weight had become too much to bear.
Sandra ran to the door. The splash was building. It would never be the kind of acausal anarchy she saw in London or Ommen, but she could still get crushed under a falling wall if she didn’t get out of there. She jumped across a crack that ripped through the floor, flung open the door, and ran.
Chapter 18: Backwash
Before they could bring Jay to Polanski, a commotion broke out in the depths of the ramshackle building. People ran through the corridors, some towards the disturbance, some away from it, mixing up the chaos until it seemed to be all around them.
“Keep him here,” the one called Jed shouted and ran off, taking the kid with the facial hair with him. Jay and his impromptu captor kept back against the wall as men, women and children hurried past them in both directions.
“Shee-it,” his companion said. “I should be in there. Just listen to it.”
“Don’t mind me,” said Jay. “You do what you think is best. But, you know what that sounds like to me?”
“Yeah? Whaaaaaaa …” The man’s voice slowed and deepened to a bass rumble as his movements slowed to stop.
“A backwash,” Jay said. Either Jay himself was now moving at super-high speed, or time had slowed for the man beside him. Regardless, he took the opportunity to unburden the man of his machine gun, remove the clip, and empty the chamber.
“Nice knowing you.” Jay set off in the same direction Jed had taken, figuring that was most likely to lead him to the source of the trouble—which would be Sandra, if he were not mistaken.
He squinted down a corridor that stretched as far as he could see. Out of it came a dozen panicked people, racing towards him at frightening speeds. He flung himself against the wall and the wall yielded like thin rubber. He stumbled and fell, scrambling back to his feet only to fall again as the ground heaved beneath him. A small backwash could be quite fun—it was trippy and crazy outside, in an open field, especially if you were smashed out of your head on splashparty drugs. But inside a building, stone cold sober, it was just dangerous and frightening. He called Sandra’s name. His voice echoed around him. He called again, still trying to get to his feet. It was like a fairground cakewalk with the added pleasure of knowing that the roof might fall on you at any minute.
People reeled and staggered past him, all going in one direction now, away from the center of this mayhem.
“Sandra!” he bellowed, and pushed against the fleeing people, making little headway. He reached a junction and, as he clung to the corner, a big section of wall buckled and crumpled. The ceiling above it fell, trapping a dozen or so people beneath it. But because the materials from which this house of cards was built were lightweight—plywood, corrugated iron, plastic sheeting, even cardboard—he doubted that anyone was seriously hurt. All the same, he hurried over to help pull people clear of the wreckage. When he looked up through the hole above him, he saw another layer of occupation. He kept shouting for Sandra but, in that cacophony of rending, tearing, and screaming, there was little hope that she’d hear him.
Then he heard shooting, a few shots from a handgun, followed by the burp, burp of machine gun fire. He dropped everything and ran towards it.
But the building was a maze. No corridor seemed to lead in the right direction. He charged through people’s homes, trying to keep to the direction of the shots, sometimes having to kick down sections of wall when he hit a dead end. The air was full of dust. In one place, the dust shimmered in rainbow hues, in another the particles were almost immovable, filling the corridor he needed to pass through like a steel wool fog that scoured his palms when he tried to shift it.
He was almost weeping with frustration when he broke through a wall into yet another shuddering corridor and saw her. She seemed to be miles ahead of him, running towards a door that opened into sunlight. He yelled her name and she stopped, turning to look at him. The surprise on her face was almost comical. He saw her mouth his name but heard no sound. He sprinted towards her, but his legs moved too slowly and the corridor seemed to stretch out even longer, taking her farther away. He saw her shout something again and then wave her arm, urging him to follow her. She ran out through the door into the blinding sunlight.
“No, wait for me,” he shouted, pushing himself with fierce determination against whatever bizarre corruption of time and distance was slowing his body, but he couldn’t fight it. He screamed in frustration but couldn’t go any faster than a slow walk down that endless corridor.
The corridor snapped back to its proper length, his legs moved at their proper speed, and Jay, suddenly released, went sprawling across the floor. He picked himself up and ran, bursting through the open door into the light and skidding to a halt in the muddy street.
Sandra was at the other side of the road. She was being held at gunpoint by two of O‘Dell’s men. The little gangster in the cowboy hat stood to one side of them, watching Polanski’s building slowly demolish itself. Jay still had the revolver in his belt and weighed up his chances of hitting anything smaller than a warehouse with it from that distance. He decided it was safer not to shoot, but he couldn’t leave Sandra like that. He decided to charge at O‘Dell’s men and take his chances. The moment he moved his arms were grabbed from behind by a big, beefy young m
an who looked like he’d just arrived from a country pig-throwing contest.
“Don’t hurt him, Peter,” said a dark, moody man, stepping up beside Jay. Despite the chaos behind him, the newcomer focused all his attention on Sandra. “O‘Dell,” he shouted. “You’ve got something of mine.”
The rotund gangster glanced at Sandra. “What, this? I just found it in the street. These are my streets, remember.”
Jay saw Polanski’s eyes flick along the buildings opposite. He looked himself and saw armed men standing in the shadows. Polanski said, “Don’t make me come over there, O‘Dell.”
“You know what, Polanski?” O’Dell waved an arm at the disintegrating buildings. “I think you’ve got bigger problems than one little stray. What in God’s name have you been doing in there?”
Fascinating as this was, Jay had a much bigger problem than either of these men. Things were definitely not going to plan and the way things were now, he might not get back to Cara in time.
“Sandra,” he shouted and the boy, Peter, nearly broke his arms to shut him up. “Sandra, Cara’s here. She’s being held by a thug called Duvalle.”
Sandra goggled back at him in disbelief. Both Polanski and O‘Dell turned to him and said, “Duvalle?” and in that instant, Sandra whirled into action. She took down one of her captors with a single kick to the head. Before the man fell, she had grabbed his gun and fired two shots into the other man. Everybody dropped to the ground or ran for cover as Sandra took off into the rabbit warren of the Shanty without a backward glance.
Only O‘Dell, Polanski, Jay, and the muscular Peter were left standing in the street. O‘Dell whooped and danced a little step. “Man oh man! She’s a feisty one.” The death and injury of his men didn’t seem to worry him at all. Around them, people began to stand up again. “I sure wish you’d tell me what’s going on with you guys today.”
“You done spying on my place, O‘Dell? Or do I need to call the Sanitation Department to come clean up the street?”
True Path Page 17