by Alan Averill
“My God,” says Samira, as the lights dance across her face. “My God, Tak, it’s perfect. It’s the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen.”
He opens his mouth to respond, but whatever he was going to say is cut off by the sound of the elevator doors collapsing. The thing in the shaft utters an annoyed caw and begins to tear at the remaining metal in an effort to extract itself. Seconds later, the entire works come crashing to the ground, and a new noise rings out: the unmistakable sound of claws scraping across tile.
Samira knows that she should be scared, but she can’t tear her eyes away from the Machine. Behind her, Tak sprints across the room and plants himself in front of a long black table, the top of which appears to be an LCD screen. As soon as he touches it, the screen to spring to life, revealing a mind-boggling display of numbers and graphs and mathematical symbols that leaves Samira reeling. He moves his fingers across a nearby keyboard and types furiously as he talks.
“We don’t have time,” he mutters, as the table projects an equation onto his sweat-covered forehead. “Christ, I don’t think we have enough time.”
“Time for what?” asks Samira. Her attention is fixed rapt on the Machine, and her question comes out in a voice barely above a whisper.
“It’s not like the briefcase. You can’t just click in a set of numbers and go. First, you have to actually locate the timeline you want, then you have to set a return point. If we just come back here, we’re fucked, so I need it to bring us as close to Seattle as possible. But I have to make sure it’s somewhere open so we don’t materialize into the side of a building or whatever.”
He finishes typing and hits the enter key. The numbers on the screen spin around like jackpots, then turn into bright red zeros. “Fuck!” screams Tak. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“What?” asks Samira as the sounds of the creature grow closer. “What’s going on?”
“I can’t find a timeline! They’re all gone!”
“What do you—”
“I mean they’re gone! They’re all gone! That fucking bird collapsed them all!”
Tak slams his fist down on the screen, an action that causes the Machine to glow a brilliant yellow. He reaches into his hair and pulls with such fury that a handful of strands come out between his fingers. When he turns to look at Samira, the expression on his face is one of utter surrender. “We can’t do it,” he says. “We’re done. We’re gonna die here.”
“What about the Beautiful Land?”
“What?” says Tak.
“The timeline. The one in my head. Can’t we go there?”
Tak stares at her for a moment, then grabs her by the side of the head and plants a kiss on her lips. Before she even has a chance to return it, he lets her go and pops open a small panel on the side of the table. “Of course! Of course, of course! I don’t need to find a timeline, I can just download it from you! Samira Moheb, you are a motherfucking genius.”
“I try,” she says, as the feeling of Tak on her mouth slowly fades.
“Okay, I’m gonna have to plug some wires into your head, and it’s going to hurt. A lot, I think.”
“Do it,” she says. “If I scream, just keep going.”
He pulls a bundle of wires from the panel and unrolls them, then pushes Samira down in a nearby chair. Fear tries to claw its way into her mind, but she pushes it back. I’m getting better at that, she thinks, as Tak spins her around and lifts her hair. I think this whole stupid adventure might make me a better person in the end…. I mean, if something doesn’t kill me first.
There is a sudden, terrible pain in the back of her head, then her brain goes cold. She feels a tingling from somewhere deep inside her mind, followed by a horrible sensation of something essential being sucked away. It’s an awful feeling—worse even than when Yates put the wires into her skull. All she can think to do is curl up into a ball and sob, but even that simple action is more than she’s currently capable of.
Samira’s world becomes a confused jangle of images and noise. She hears a dinging from the table next to her, then a terrific roar as the Machine cycles on. It takes her a moment to realize that Tak has picked her up and is half-carrying, half-dragging her over to the Machine, the front of which has opened to reveal an interior shimmering with uncountable lights and colors. She is slowly lowered to the floor, which seems more unsteady than a floor should be, then left alone as Tak runs back to the table and starts punching on the keyboard once again.
Suddenly, she sees a shape materialize out of the darkness behind Tak. It’s the bird, she screams in the confusion of her mind. Oh God, Tak, run! Run!
But it’s not the bird—or at least not the bird she was expecting. It’s different somehow than the one they found in the abandoned timeline. Where that creature was impossibly tall, this one is little more than six feet high. Oddly enough, it’s dressed in the tattered remains of a white lab coat and an argyle sweater. The skin is a soft, milky white—not transparent—and the eyes are small and round and contain a hint of color. Tufts of black feathers jut out in various directions, but far fewer than were on the previous creature. The more she stares at it, the more it doesn’t look like a bird at all. It looks like a person and a bird if they had been somehow merged together.
The thing shuffles closer to Tak, who is absorbed in work and doesn’t seem to hear. Its mouth—a tiny beak torn through a pair of lips—moves up and down a couple of times as if looking for its voice. After a couple of tries, the thing manages to cough out a single word:
“O’Leary…”
Tak spins around and stares at the creature advancing toward him. Its small arms wave at the air as if searching for purchase. One tiny wing flaps and flutters ineffectually. And as Samira watches, she suddenly realizes what she’s seeing. It’s not a bird—at least, not like the other ones. This is something else. Something much more horrible.
“Oh God,” says Tak as he stumbles backward. “It’s Yates. It’s fucking YATES!”
The Yates-bird opens its mouth and screams, the sound all the more terrible for the humanity buried within. It reaches toward Tak and tries to seize him, but its legs are still small and weak, and it goes tumbling to the ground. One clawed hand reaches out and grabs Tak’s ankle, but he kicks it away and scampers around to the other side of the table. Rather than try to turn around, Tak just leans over and types backward on the keyboard. As the monstrosity on the floor struggles to rise, Tak punches in his final few commands and slams the ENTER key.
The light of the Machine grows even brighter as Samira’s world begins to lose cohesion. She has a brief fear that Tak is doing something incredibly stupid, that he’s going to try to sacrifice himself for her, but then she sees him run across the room and leap into the open door of the Machine. The Yates-bird rises to its feet and shuffles toward the Machine, but it’s too slow. Before it can even get halfway across the room, the Machine cycles to full power. Samira sees the creature raise one hand above its head and begin to scream, but then the world dissolves to a familiar, welcome wall of white.
chapter twenty-six
The room smells of rot. It contains a steel table, a wooden chair, and a rusted drain cut into the middle of the floor. A young man with panic in his eyes is tied to the chair with thick coils of rope. Fresh blood leaks from his nose and mouth, shimmering softly in the light of a pale overhead bulb.
Oh no. Oh no no no no no.
Sam?
No no no no no. Please no.
Sam, what is this?
A blond man with a shaggy mustache shimmers into existence behind the chair. He has something long and sharp in his hand, which he holds up to the prisoner’s eye as he begins to speak.
“Where are the others? Tell me.”
Someone to his left repeats the question in Arabic. It’s a thin, trembling voice that seems terribly out of place amidst the severity of the room. Though the voice’s owner is hidden in the darkness, Tak recognizes it instantly.
Sam? Jesus, is that you?
&nbs
p; Tak, no. Don’t watch this. Please stop. Oh God. Oh my God.
The prisoner says nothing. The blond man repeats his question, then motions toward the darkness, where Samira asks it again. When the man in the chair maintains his silence, the mustached man takes his blade and makes a swift motion across the other’s cheek. A gout of blood flies from the wound as the prisoner starts to scream.
“You will tell me, or I will kill you. Do you hear me?”
“Vaallaa bekhodaa nemeedoonam!” screams the prisoner.
“He says he doesn’t know anything,” says Samira. Her voice seems on the edge of breaking. “He…He means it. He doesn’t know.”
“Fuck him,” says Mustache. “He knows. He knows everything.” He leans in to the prisoner and pulls up on the lid of his eye. “I’m going to kill your family,” he says with cold clarity. “If you don’t tell me what I need to know, I will kill your wife and kill your child and burn your life to the ground.”
He pauses for a moment. When nothing happens, he looks over at the darkness with an annoyed expression. “Translate that,” he says.
“I…I can’t. Please, don’t ask me to—”
“Translate the fucking message!”
Samira speaks again, her words halting and faint. When he hears them, the man in the chair begins to sob. “Toro bekhodaa baavar koneed,” he says through his tears. “Be hazrat-e Abbas nemeedonam.”
“He doesn’t know anything!” screams Samira. “He doesn’t know, all right? Now leave him alone!”
The blond man rises from his crouch and looks into the darkness with disgust. Then he takes the blade and drives it violently into the other man’s throat, where it penetrates the neck and comes to a halt in the wooden back of the chair. Thick, gurgling sounds come from the prisoner as the man with the mustache turns and walks away. Seconds later, Samira begins to scream.
• • •
oh shit.
No no no.
Oh shit, they made you do that?
No no no no.
Sam?
No no no no no no no.
Whoa. Sam, come on. Stay with me. You need to stay with
• • •
an older man with a shaggy grey beard sits at the end of a small kitchen table with his hands balled into fists. Across from him, a teenager rests with arms folded and a sneer on his face. Even through the haze of memory, the tension in the room is palpable.
Oh, hell. I remember this night.
“You are going to cancel your flight,” says Tak’s father in a barely controlled voice. “And tomorrow, you’re coming with me to the job site, and we’re gonna see about getting you licensed.”
“No, I’m not,” says Tak. His voice is thick and slurred from alcohol; the scent of it is everywhere. “I’m getting on a plane, and I’m leaving. I’m nineteen years old and I have a passport and I can do what I want.”
“We’ve been a union family since my great-grandfather. We fought the Pinkertons. We fought the scabs. Your grandfather—”
“Yeah, I know. He was killed in a labor riot with the Wobblies.”
“He was a goddamn Wobbly!” cries the older man as he slams his fist on the table. “Jesus Christ, are you really that thick? Or just that drunk?”
“Fuck you!” screams Tak.
Tak’s father leaps up, sending his chair clattering to the floor, and Tak does the same. They stare at each other, neither one willing to break the standoff. Somewhere in the house, an old clock ticks softly, the only noise in an otherwise deathly stillness.
“What am I supposed to tell your mother?” says the older man at last. “That you left? Just hopped a plane and took off for Papua, New Guinea, so you could show the world how big your dick is? That she should get ready for her only child to come home in a box because he got killed by fucking dysentery?”
“Tell her whatever you want.”
“You’re only doing this to piss me off.”
“Yeah,” Tak laughs. “You would think that.”
“You won’t last a week.”
“I’ll last a month. I’ll last longer than you ever could.”
His father shifts on his feet and runs a hand through his thinning hair. “If you weren’t my son, I’d knock you on your fucking ass.”
“Go ahead!” screams Tak, extending his chin toward his father and motioning at it with a single finger. “Come on, old man! Do it! Just hit me and get it over with and then let me go!”
Tak’s father pulls his fist behind his head, but before he can move it any farther, a thousand tiny cracks appear in the surface of the memory. They run across it like raindrops on a pane of glass before the entire vision explodes into a dazzling white blur.
• • •
…guess you’re not the only one with a bad past, huh, Sam?
No no no.
Sam?
No no no no no no no no.
Oh shit, Sam, come on. Come on, you can’t do this. Don’t go crazy on me now. Not when I just got you back.
• • •
samira sits in a chair and cracks the knuckles on both hands. When they no longer make any noise, she takes the ragged ends of her fingernails and begins raking them back and forth across the tops of her arms. One especially jagged piece catches on a flap of skin and tears it open, leaving a trail of nine tiny red dots in its wake. The rest of the memory is a blank wall of nothing; when her psychiatrist begins to speak, the sound comes from a slightly darkened blur somewhere in the distance.
“Samira?” asks the blur. “Do you need me to prescribe you something?”
“No,” she whispers. “No, I’m fine.”
“You don’t appear to be fine.”
“Yeah, well, I’m as fine as I’m ever going to be.”
The blood turns a deep, rich red against the empty white backdrop of Samira’s mind. Soon the rest of her begins to vanish, until all that remains is a pair of disembodied voices and nine small dots that slowly grow as the conversation progresses.
“We need to trust each other if we are going to make progress,” says the blur.
“I know,” says a small, scared voice.
“Can you trust me?”
“I don’t…I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. Perhaps it will come in time.”
“…Doubt it.”
• • •
tak clears a patch of snow from a rotting log and takes a seat. He is cold and shivering and miserable—his seven-year-old body only beginning to learn the wilderness survival techniques that would later become his entire life. To his left, his father cuts into the steaming body of a brown bear not five minutes dead. Tacky blood sticks to the arms of his coat and drips from his gloves, pooling into a puddle at the feet of the animal.
“Takahiro,” he says. “Come here, son.”
The young boy slides off his perch and shuffles over to his father, who tugs at the insides of the bear. After a moment, he slides his knife over to the younger boy with a piece of something dark and red perched on the edge of the blade. “It’s the heart,” says his father. “Go on.”
Tak shakes his head and backs away, fear blazing a trail across his face. His father smiles a bit beneath his massive winter beard and holds out a hand for his son. He waits like that for a minute or more, patiently, until the boy finds the nerve to scuffle back to him.
“We use every part of the animal, Takahiro,” begins his father as he wraps one arm around his son’s shoulders. The knife and its contents seem to hang in the air as if by magic. “We use every part, but the heart is special. The heart contains strength. The heart reminds you what it means to be alive. Do you understand?”
Tak nods as a few flakes of snow begin to drift across his long, dark lashes. His father holds the knife out to him yet again, and this time he takes the small piece of meat balanced on the end. As he turns it over and over in his fingers, a wisp of steam rises, then vanishes into the tiny opening of the boy’s mouth. The muscle is tough and sour,
but he manages to chew until he can force it down.
“That’s my son,” cries the older man as he enfolds Tak in his wiry arms. “That’s my boy.”
Tak smiles at the attention as the snow continues to fall. They stay like that for a while, father and son, holding each other in the shivering cold. Soon, the weather begins to blur with the edges of memory, until the entire scene is consumed in a blizzard the color of an old dry bone.
• • •
i killed him.
You what?
I killed him. I killed him. I could have said something, I could have saved him, but instead I got him killed.
Sam, you couldn’t have done anything.
I want to die.
Don’t say that!
I hurt so much. I hurt everywhere. I want to die.
Goddammit, Sam, don’t you fucking
• • •
a blond girl with short hair pops into view at the foot of Samira’s bunk. “Hey,” she says. “I hear you’ve got patrol tonight.”
“Huh?” asks Samira. She’s busy picking at a small piece of skin on her thumb and didn’t hear the question. Her fingers and hands have become more ragged lately, and she’s a little bit worried. Two months into your first tour of duty is a little early to start developing nervous tics.
“I said, you’ve got patrol tonight.”
“Oh. Yeah, I…I guess.”
“Listen, do you want to switch? I’ve got the morning, but I’m going to try and call my husband before he goes to work.”
“Um…yeah. Yeah, sure.”
“Great! I’ll clear it with command, but I’m sure it’s fine. They don’t care who the hell translates, right?”
“Yeah, no. They don’t seem to.”
The memory suddenly lurches forward like a broken movie. Samira has a brief glimpse of the girl with a massive hole in her stomach and a terrified expression on her face, but then the image cracks apart and dissolves into a thousand little pieces.