Time Spent

by J. David Clarke

  Vernon's eyes were closed, his mind blank. As she pinned him in the chair, fucking him harder and faster, her scent filled his nostrils. It covered the smell of dead flesh, gently wafting from the living room.

  Vernon never knew of the man and woman lying there, cut open from neck to groin.

  Months later, Gwendolyn carefully placed her child in the basket. She wrote the note, placed it in the envelope, and gently pinned the envelope to the baby's blankets. The words on the envelope had already been written:

  VERNON,

  HE IS YOUR CHILD. PLEASE CARE FOR HIM.

  -G

  When she reached Vernon Wells' home, she set the basket down on the porch, and leaned over it to gaze into her child's blue eyes. Her fingers teased his tuft of blonde hair.

  "GOODBYE FOR NOW, ZACHARY."

  Zachary cooed.

  "GOODBYE..." She laughed. "IT MEANS GOD BE WITH YE. BUT GOD HAS ABANDONED YOU, HASN'T HE ZACHARY? HE WON'T BE WITH YOU. BUT I WILL BE."

  Zachary felt unsettled, but did not know why. He gurgled, and began to cry.

  "I'LL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU."

  Gwendolyn stood and rang the doorbell.

  On the rooftop, Zachary recoiled from the red woman's touch.

  "No..."

  She approached him, her arms wide, prepared to embrace him.

  "No!" Zachary shook his head. "You're the...you're the Devil! You're not my...you're not...NO!"

  She drew closer, and Zachary backed up. His heel caught the edge of the rooftop, and he tumbled away from her, into the air, head over heels.

  "NOOOO!"

  He plummeted backwards through space, falling into the alley between buildings. He fell for what seemed like forever, the red woman's face above him, looking down on him with her glowing red eyes.

  Zachary's head struck the pavement with a terrible CRACK.

  Some time later, his eyes opened. He was lying on his back, rain falling into his face. He was cold, wet, and alone. Looking around, he began to stand, but then the memories flooded back. As usual he had forgotten everything after the bus crash, except that now memories of the rooftop joined them.

  Zachary backed against the wall and fell to the ground, drawing up his legs in front of him. "No, no, no. Not my momma, no." He searched around for his old Bible for a moment before remembering: it was lost, in the bus crash, lost at the bottom of the river.

  Zachary cast his eyes to the sky, rain dripping into them, clouding his vision. "God, where are you? Where are you?"

  There was no reply.

  "I have to be brave. Be brave...." He cowered against the wall, clutching his legs to his chest.

  The soldiers found him there, huddling and mumbling to himself, over and over.

  "Be brave...be brave...be brave..."

  ______________________

  "What do you mean, abandoned you?" Brandon shouted. "Get over here and help her, damn it!"

  Zachary just stood, leaning against the wall, arms wrapped around himself.

  Brandon stood and got right in Zachary's face. "Zachary, listen to me. Look at me."

  Zachary lifted his eyes.

  Brandon took a hold of his shoulders. "I don't know whether there's a God or not. I don't know whether there are aliens or not. But somehow we have these powers and I believe we have them for a reason. You believe that, don't you?"

  Zachary nodded sullenly. "To stop the end times."

  "To be heroes," Brandon said. "Right? We're here to be heroes."

  Zachary nodded.

  "Heroes don't let each other die, do they?"

  "No, but I can't-"

  Brandon cut him off. "HEROES DON'T LET EACH OTHER DIE."

  Zachary shook his head.

  "Now get over there."

  Zachary slowly nodded. He walked over and kneeled beside Mia, placing his hands on her. Nothing happened. He lifted his hands and replaced them, concentrating.

  Again, nothing.

  "Mia," he said. "It's Zachary. Can you hear me?"

  "I hear..." Mia's voice trailed off.

  "You have to do it. I can't. You have to fight it."

  "Can't..." Her head shook violently. "Energy...feeds it."

  Zachary leaned closed and peered at the circuitry. "No...your energy isn't feeding it. Your energy is fighting it. That's why when you use your energy for something else the metal wins. You have to fight it."

  "Can't..."

  "I know." Zachary leaned very close, whispering in her ear. "You feel like God has abandoned you. But he didn't. God gave you your powers so you could fight. He's with you. He's always with you." He reached down and took Mia's right hand in his. "Be brave."

  A warm glow began to rise in Zachary's chest. It passed down his arm to his hands, and when it met Mia's hand, it exploded into a ball of yellow energy, Mia's energy. The yellow energy flared and spread up her arm and into her chest. As it spread up her neck and into her face, the circuitry began to wilt and peel away.

  As the energy filled her body, the last of the metal slivers fell away and dissolved into nothing.

  Mia drew in a giant breath as the energy faded. "Thank you."

  "I didn't do anything." Zachary said. "The Bible says...the Bible..."

  He sat back and a wave of sadness and loss filled him. Tears spilled down his face. He lowered his face into his hands and wept.

  "What's wrong?" asked Mia.

  "My Poppa is gone, and I lost my Bible," Zachary said. "He gave it to me, and I lost it. I lost my Bible...and my Poppa is gone."

  When the tears had subsided, Brandon helped Zachary to his feet and took him to where Kevin lay. "Can you help him?"

  "I don't know. I'll try."

  He walked over to Kevin, still lying on the floor, twitching. Zachary sat beside him, and placed his hands on Kevin's chest.

  Instantly, Kevin's eyes opened and he sucked in air.

  "Kevin?" Brandon knelt beside him. "You okay?"

  "Yeah." Kevin sat up. "I'm okay, I think. Thanks, Zachary."

  Zachary raised an eyebrow. "But I didn't do anything."

  "We know," Becca said. "God did it." They all laughed.

  "That's not what I meant."

  Brandon helped Kevin to his feet. "Glad you're back."

  "Where is she?" Kevin looked around. "Is she here?"

  "The red woman?" Brandon shook his head. "We don't even know who she is or what she is."

  "She's the Devil," Zachary said.

  Kevin shook his head. "She's not the Devil. But she is dangerous. We need all of us together again."

  "Simon tried looking into the future, to see what she's up to," Brandon said.

  Simon growled. "Forget it. The future's too slippery. What I saw doesn't make much sense."

  "The future..." Kevin snapped his fingers. "I know who we need!"

  Brandon shook his head. "Oh no, no, what does that mean? I hate when you say that!"

  Kevin vanished.

  "Why do you hate it when he says that?" Becca asked.

  "The last time he said that he...ah...never mind."

  Becca slapped him on the back of the head. "A, I can hear your thoughts. B, fuck you."

  A crack formed in the center of the room, and through it Kevin stepped, tossing a man down to the floor in front of them, a man with white hair and a tattered white lab coat.

  The man lifted his head and looked around at them. Every one of them recognized him instantly.

  "Hello, children." Carl Macklin ran a hand through his hair, smoothing it.

  Suddenly he gasped, and clapped his hands to the sides of his head.

  "What have you done?" He looked around at them frantically.

  "...WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO THE FUTURE??"

  CHAPTER NINE

  Carl tried to bite down, but the chunk of fruitcake he had managed to saw off with his fork was impossible to chew. He set the small plate down on the lace-covered table beside him. Lifting his napkin to his mouth, he spit the cake out into it and balled it up, resting the so
ggy lump on his plate.

  He shifted uncomfortably in his suit. He hated wearing these things, but his mother had insisted upon it. The other children at his table were dressed similarly, in suits and dresses, and chattering on about one banal subject after another.

  Carl stood, and walked through the sitting room where his mother was being comforted by aunts and uncles and friends of the family. She was dressed all in black, quietly weeping on a small sofa, Carl's aunt Sofia sitting next to her, arm around her shoulders. Carl had no idea where his father was, probably drinking somewhere, perhaps the garage.

  With no desire to return to the kids' table, and no interest in having any more adults ask him "how he was doing with all this", he walked upstairs and wandered into his brother's room. None of the family had made it up here, it seemed, and a peaceful quiet pervaded the place. His parents hadn't been able to dispose of any of Terrence's things, so the room was undisturbed. A fine layer of dust lay over the shelves and night stands. Carl ran a finger through it absently, leaving a finger trail through the dust on a low shelf, pausing at a small toy plane with its landing gear out. He picked up the plane and turned it in his hands, imagining it firing its guns, perhaps wiping out the platoon of Viet Cong soldiers that had killed his brother.

  Carl tried to wrap his mind around the fact that his brother was never coming back to this room, and couldn't. He sat on the edge of the bed, the bed in which his brother would never again sleep, and stared at the toy plane as if he could personally pick his brother up in it and fly him back home.

  "What are you doing in here?"

  His father was standing in the door, a glass of whisky on the rocks in one hand.

  Carl just stared at him.

  "You don't belong in here. This isn't your room. It's his." His father took a long sip from the glass, and stepped into the room.

  Carl's voice was nearly a whisper. "Not any more."

  "What did you say to me?" His father approached the bed.

  "Nothing."

  His father sat on the bed next to him. Carl attempted to stand, but his father placed a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down. "Don't you be smart with me, Carl. Not today."

  "Yes, sir."

  His father reached over and took the toy plane from him. Carl felt protests well within him, but he knew better than to give them voice. His father turned the toy plane over in his hands, looking at it for a moment, then threw it across the room, to land in the small waste bin in the corner. Carl saw one of the landing wheels break off as the plane bounced off the wall into the bin. The wheel sailed off somewhere into the deep carpet.

  "He was gonna go to college," his father said, taking another sip of whisky. "He was gonna be an engineer."

  Carl nodded.

  "He was gonna be somebody. Not like me, working in a plant his whole life. That's for nobodies. That's what you're gonna end up doing too, just like me."

  Again, Carl wanted to protest, but didn't.

  "Not your brother, though. He had it all lined up in front of him. He was gonna be better. He was gonna be somebody."

  Carl folded his hands in his lap and stared at them.

  "He had a future."

  ______________________

  Carl opened his eyes. The scorching heat of the twin suns pressed down on him like an unfathomably hot, dry hand, pressing the air out of his lungs. How long he had been unconscious he did not know, he only knew that he was closer to death than he had ever been, and part of him was okay with that.

  As he stared upward, part of him contemplating death, another part of his mind calculated the angles of the twin suns, their distance from this strange world on which he found himself, and he found he actually did know how long he had been out: twenty minutes. Not long, in the grand scheme of things, he supposed, but when every minute carried you closer to your death, twenty minutes could be an eternity.

  It had taken him hours to pick his way down the mountain, every hand and foothold chosen with slow, deliberate precision. When the suns sank below the horizon, the world had gone pitch dark and bitterly cold. Still, he pressed on. By carefully examining the timelines in front of him every time he reached out a hand or foot, he was able to keep on through the night, choosing the placement that led him successfully down the mountain. Carl had lost track of the number of times he had seen himself tumble downward, breaking every bone in his body against the rocks. He didn't want to think about the number of futures he had seen in which he lay at the base of the mountain forever.

  Gritting his teeth against the cold, steeling his fear against the night, he had kept moving, one hand after another, one foot after another, making his way down the mountain until he had finally collapsed in exhaustion as the rock gave way to a gentler slope.

  When day came, Carl had looked out on the alien landscape and, for the first time, had known real despair. At the base of the slope, dry, cracked soil stretched away in all directions. Twin suns beamed down from overhead, cooking him in their constant heat as surely as if he were in an oven. Carl had removed his lab coat and put it over his head, trying to keep himself shaded as best he could, but looking out over the land before him, he saw no good outcome. He had begun walking, but unlike his climb down the mountain, every possible destination seemed the same.

  Now, lying on the desert floor, he knew he had reached his end.

  The paths in front of him played out in his mind, hundreds of scenarios unfolding at once, and every one of them ended the same. He saw this place, right where he lay, stretching out into forever. Carl had gradually begun to understand that he was unable to see past his own death, that every time he saw something like this, a single place unchanging forever, it meant he had died there. He understood now what the visions were telling him when he had tried to foresee the future for Kevin.

  I can't...It's just...it's just this place. Endless barren rock....everywhere...forever...

  Carl closed his eyes again.

  "I'm going to die here," his voice croaked from between his cracked lips.

  Then, he heard a very different voice. His father's voice. You don't have a future.

  Carl opened his eyes. He pressed his palms against the hot, baked desert floor and lifted himself up. His lab coat lay next to him, dusty and torn. He picked it up and placed it over his head, crawling to his feet with Herculean effort.

  "No." He cast his eyes to the horizon, searching, concentrating. "I'm going to win. There's a way out and I'm going to find it."

  He wiped the grit from his eyes and focused all his will on searching timelines.

  A sound drifted to him then, a rumbling, grumbling constant noise, followed by the feeling of something rushing over his legs. Carl looked down, and saw only his dusty shoes and the sun-baked soil.

  "What is this?"

  The sound rose, and now a vision joined it: Carl saw water rushing over the valley floor, flowing to his right, the south, away from the mountain and into the distance. Looking back upstream, he saw a world very different from the one on which he stood. He was in the midst of a river, which originated from somewhere near the north face of the mountain. Across the river were fertile lands, filled with green trees.

  Carl was baffled for a moment, but his mind began to supply him with an explanation. He was able to detect, break down and analyze differences in the atmosphere around him from the world of his vision, telling him how many millions of years ago those trees had stood. He wasn't seeing the future at all.

  "It's the past," he croaked. "I'm seeing the past."

  Rather than probable futures, his mind was rolling back the timeline of the valley, giving him a glimpse of how it had existed several million years before, when this had been a fertile river basin.

  And in that past, Carl knew, was the key to his future. If water had once flowed here, there might still be water in the underground aquifers from whence it had once sprung. Carl turned his gaze north, following the reverse flow of the river, and examined the future timelines again. />
  One after another, he saw his death somewhere in the desert to the north. One place or another, it didn't matter, the end was always the same. Until...

  "There...." He saw a hole in the ground, a hole he had dug himself, would dig himself. When looking into the future, verb tenses became meaningless. "THERE!"

  Carl shambled north, toward the vivid sight of himself sucking drops of water from the dirt, devouring grubs that tried to crawl away from his clutching fingers.

  The path to victory, or at least survival, wound ahead of him across the desert floor.

  CARL

  "I never said good bye."

  "Hello, children." Carl looked around at them, saw the anger in their faces as they recognized him. He ran a hand through his hair, smoothing it.

  Without bidding, a rush of images flooded his mind. He saw shapes wind away behind each of the kids from the school bus, shapes he now realized were their pasts, unrolling before him like a map showing where each of them had been since the day he or she was born. The past funneled into his mind, unbidden, unrelenting. He gasped, and clapped his hands to the sides of his head.

  Then, when every event everyone in the room had ever experienced was finished cramming its way into his skull, time rolled forward, and he saw the paths to the future winding open in front of him, showing the outcome of every possible action. Carl waited for the inevitable, the end of every road showing him the destruction of the universe. This is what he had seen every time he had peered into the future since the school bus crash. Or at least, it had been when he had been here, embroiled in conflict with those who now surrounded him.

  Carl's eyes widened as the future played itself out in front of him, a very different future than one he had ever experienced. This future started with the appearance of a woman: a woman with red eyes and flowing red hair. An infinite number of possibilities exploded in Carl's mind, futures beyond count, beyond examination, beyond his ability to comprehend.