Reversion (The Narrows of Time Series Book 3)

by Jay J. Falconer

  CRASH! CLANG! BONG!

  Masago flinched. “What was that?”

  “It came from outside,” Lucas said, hurrying to the window. He looked outside. A man wearing coveralls and a flannel shirt was struggling to carry three, full-size metal garbage cans with lids past the manager’s office on the first floor.

  One of the dented lids fell to the ground and tangled with the man’s feet, sending him tumbling on top of the other trash bins sitting nearby. The closed container caught his belly at the midpoint, serving as a fulcrum, keeping his well-fed figure off the ground. His hands and feet flopped wildly, moving in opposite directions from one another, keeping him centered and balanced on top of the bin.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I now give you the flying Kleezebee,” Lucas said, laughing.

  She giggled. “The professor?”

  “Yep. My boss. Mister coordinated.”

  “You don’t see that every day.”

  Kleezebee grabbed the sides of the garbage can and managed to roll himself off without falling. He stood upright and looked around, then ran his hands across the front of his clothes before replacing the lid on the receptacle. He stacked all three cans next to the door to the manager’s office and went inside.

  “He could’ve really hurt himself,” she said.

  “Damn lucky,” Lucas said, checking the rest of the area he could see from the window. “I don’t see anyone else. Let’s head down and have a talk with him. I’m thinking we should probably not mention we witnessed his belly flop trapeze act.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Lucas and Masago were standing in front of the manager’s office on the ground floor. Lucas made a fist and was about to knock on the door but stopped when he heard a man’s voice inside, yelling a series of questions with silence between each phrase. It was Dr. Kleezebee and he sounded upset.

  “He did what? . . . Why? . . . That’s no excuse. When did this happen? . . . Is he going to press charges?”

  Lucas took a step back from the door and spoke to Masago in a whisper. “We should come back later. Let him cool down. It’s never wise to interrupt my old professor when he’s pissed.”

  She grabbed his arm and pulled him back to the door. “We’re not leaving until you do what you came here to do.”

  Lucas wriggled out of her grip. “All right, all right. I know you’re trying to help, but I need to do this a certain way. He’s my boss and I know what makes him tick.”

  Masago nodded, folding her arms across her chest. She tapped her foot.

  Lucas bent forward, pressing his ear against the door.

  Kleezebee continued his one-sided tirade. “Is he there with you? . . . Put him on the phone. . . . Yes, now! . . . Do you have any idea what you’ve done? . . . I don’t care what he said, you just can’t go around assaulting people anytime you feel like it! . . . Look, it’s too late for apologies. You poked the bear and there will be consequences. I can only protect you from him to a certain extent.”

  Lucas looked at Masago and back at the door. “I don’t know what to say to him. He was dead last time I saw him, and then he wasn’t once I arrived here.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t lead with that.”

  “No, probably not. I also can’t tell him his wife didn’t wait for him to return from an alternate universe and moved on without him, marrying someone else.”

  “You’ll figure it out. Just take it one step at a time.”

  “I’m not sure this is such a great idea. Ripples in time are changing everything. Anything I tell him could make the situation worse and I can’t be responsible for—”

  Masago cut him off by beating her hand against the door. THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

  “See how easy that was?” she said with attitude.

  Lucas put his ear against the door.

  “Hang on,” Kleezebee told the caller on the phone. “Someone’s here.”

  Footsteps approached and the door opened, revealing Dr. Kleezebee, who was holding a wireless office phone in his hand. The professor’s eyes flared, then he glanced at Masago and back at Lucas. He swallowed hard and brought the phone up to his ear. “Um, I’m going to have to call you back. Something unexpected just came up.”

  He went to tuck the phone into his shirt pocket but missed. It hit the floor with a crack, then bounced to the right.

  Masago gave the professor a hug. “Nice to finally meet you, Professor Kleezebee. I’m Masago Fuji.”

  He didn’t reciprocate.

  She stepped back.

  “Who the hell are you?” Kleezebee asked.

  “I told you, I’m Masago Fuji. Weren’t you listening?”

  “Not you,” the professor answered. He pointed at Lucas. “Him!”

  Lucas took a second before responding, working his way through the confusion. Had he caused so many changes to the timeline that his boss no longer knew who he was? If that was true, he was totally fucked.

  “Um—I’m—Lucas Ramsay? Your longtime friend? Drew’s foster brother?”

  “I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing here, but I can tell you with absolute certainty and clarity of thought, you’re not Lucas Ramsay.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “It’s not possible. I was just talking with him on the phone. You can’t be in two places at once. You’re one of the insurgents from the mountaintop. One of the lookalikes.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, pointing at Lucas’ chest. “And I recognize that suit you’re wearing, too.”

  “What? This?” Lucas said, tugging at his open shirt collar. He pulled it closed to cover up as much of the suit as he could.

  “It’s some type of advanced meta material,” the professor answered, holding his hands out as he stepped back from the door to reveal office furniture covered in plastic and crates scattered about the room. He grabbed a long-handled screwdriver from the top of one of the crates and held it in a defensive position, like a knife. “Stay back. I don’t want any trouble.”

  “You know about the Smart Skin Suit?”

  “That’s what you call it?”

  “Look, we’re not here to harm you,” Masago said. “We need your help.”

  “Who’s she?” Kleezebee asked Lucas, pointing the screwdriver at the girl.

  “My friend.”

  Masago flared her eyes at Lucas and smacked him on the shoulder.

  “Uh, I mean, my girlfriend.”

  Kleezebee aimed the makeshift knife back at Lucas. “Lucas Ramsay doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Well, this version of him does, thank you very much,” she said.

  “In fact, he doesn’t have any friends at all.”

  “Hey, wait a minute. That’s not true. I have friends.”

  Masago stood next to Lucas, wrapping her arms around him.

  “Why are you here? What do you want from me?” Kleezebee asked, looking at Lucas.

  “I need your help.”

  “For what?”

  “To help me fix everything that’s happening. I just need to contact my friends back home—”

  “Home? Where?”

  “The future.”

  Kleezebee paused. “Come again? I don’t think I heard you correctly.”

  “The future.”

  The professor’s eyes blinked rapidly. “What are you saying? Time travel?”

  “Yes, Professor,” Lucas said, unbuttoning his shirt down to his beltline, exposing a large section of the suit. “This suit is part of an Incursion Chamber System that you helped me build in the future with a friend of ours. I came back in time to set things right. To fix the timeline.”

  “Bullshit. Time travel isn’t possible.”

  “Yet, here I am.”

  “What about the others? The others like you?”

  “Pulled here by mistake from alternate dimensions.”

  “Do you really expect me to believe any of this?”
<
br />   “He’s telling you the truth,” Masago said. “He really is from the future and needs your help. Otherwise, we’re all going to die.”

  “I seriously doubt that, young lady.”

  “I can prove who I am and where I’m from,” Lucas said, unwrapping Masago’s arm from his body. “Just give me a chance to explain. But I need you to put the screwdriver down so nobody gets hurt.”

  Kleezebee looked at his hand for a few moments, then back at Lucas. He shook his head. “I’m no fool.”

  Masago laughed. “That’s not what it looked like when you landed on top of the garbage can earlier.”

  Lucas sneered at her. “You’re not helping.”

  “He’s starting to piss me off,” she snapped back.

  “Your girlfriend has quite the temper,” Kleezebee said.

  Lucas stared at the screwdriver, trying to decide how best to defuse the situation. “Can we come in? You can stand in one corner and we in another. There’s no threat here. I just need a minute. That’s all.”

  Kleezebee backed away, moving to the far side of the manager’s desk, still holding the tool.

  Lucas entered first, then Masago. Lucas stood ten feet in front of his boss with the desk between them.

  “That’s close enough. Now, let’s hear it. You’ve got exactly one minute before I call the authorities,” Kleezebee said, putting his hand into his shirt pocket. A moment later, his face lit up with panic.

  “Looking for this?” Masago said, holding the office phone in the air. “Your aim sucks, Professor.” She shook it, holding it against her ear. “Hmmm. Sounds like a few loose pieces inside. I wonder if it still works after you smashed it against the floor.”

  “I need that back.”

  Lucas put out his hand, palm up, shaking it in front of Masago. “The phone. Please.”

  She shook her head.

  “Trust me on this.”

  She hesitated, then gave it to him.

  Lucas turned to Kleezebee. “The professor I know would never call the cops or involve anyone from the government. He’d call his longtime friend and BioTex replica, Bruno. Or one of his BioTex guards who survived the crash of the starship Trinity way back in the nineteen sixties just outside Chicxulub, Mexico. I also know the secret of Gene Roddenberry and the Star Trek franchise, and about the BioTex activator enzyme.”

  The professor lowered the screwdriver a bit. His face seemed to freeze.

  Lucas continued, “I know you’re building a second reactor in one of your silos, much like the reactor my younger self and Drew are building in the science lab. Only your reactor isn’t for changing the laws of gravity. It’s to communicate with your people back home, in your universe. I know about the E-121 power modules, the rift-slipping device, and the sadistic Krellian Empire, who’ve been hunting for you ever since you accidentally crossed dimensions and landed here, on my Earth.”

  “Krellian Empire?” Masago asked.

  “I’ll explain later,” he told her quickly, never taking his eyes from his boss.

  Kleezebee lowered the weapon a few more inches.

  “I know about your longtime desire to get back to your wife, Caroline, and your son—your first son. Not the surrogate son who works with the younger me in the lab and who’s been forced to live his life in a wheelchair. I know about the network of underground bases and the jump pads, and how you seem to know exactly what to invest your money in, and when. And last but not least, there’s Styx, and your love of classic rock. As you can see, Professor, I know everything. And we both know there’s only one way for that to be true.”

  “Lucas?” Kleezebee said, pulling the office chair under his body and sitting down. He put the screwdriver on the desk in front of him.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Your face is different.”

  “Battle scars from what happens next. At least what happened in the previous future.”

  “How is this possible?”

  “It’s a very long story,” Lucas said, putting the phone on the edge of the desk and sliding it to his mentor. “But I don’t have time to go into it all, so I’ll need you to take a leap of faith and trust me. The future of humanity depends on it.”

  The professor hesitated, obviously running through everything he’d just heard. Then the emotion wilted from his face and his eyes focused. “Okay, what do you need?”

  24

  Bald Lucas took a running start and rammed his shoulder into the Plexiglas door of the holding cell in the basement of the Micro Matter facility, ignoring the faint reflection of his smooth head looking back at him. The hinges held firm, sending his body back across the cell the way it came. He tried again, this time hurtling his body into the air, but the door never budged.

  “Do you know what the definition of the word ‘insanity’ is?” Dr. Charles Starling asked him, moving a step closer, limping on his right leg.

  “Don’t patronize me,” Lucas said, rubbing and flexing his shoulder.

  “Repeating the same procedure over and over and expecting a different result.”

  “A quote from Albert Einstein. So what’s your point?”

  “Unless you intend to sprout horns and morph into a creature with fifteen hundred pounds of body mass, you’re not going to deliver sufficient kinetic energy to breach that door. I designed our cells to be escape-proof.”

  “Nothing is escape-proof.”

  “Trust me, these are.”

  “I think the bigger question is, why would a biochemical research facility need holding cells in the first place?”

  “Yes, why indeed?”

  “Eleven of them, no less.”

  Starling pulled at his handlebar mustache, twisting it with his fingers. “Yes. It appears that I may have overestimated the need. Interesting.”

  “I have an idea. Why don’t you step inside and join me. I’d be more than happy to knock those sunglasses off of your face, then take that Yankees hat and shove it up your ass,” Bald Lucas said, pacing the floor. “Then again, maybe that’s why you designed this prison with Plexiglas doors instead of bars. That way, your detainees can’t reach through the bars and grab a hold of that cheesy Wyatt Earp mustache of yours and rip the damned thing from your face! You do know those went out of style back in the eighteen hundreds, right?”

  “Now, there you go, answering your own question. Never underestimate the temper of a Ramsay.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Starling,” Lucas snapped. Then he thought about Starling’s comments and realized what the man was hinting at. “Are you saying you built these cells specifically for me and my crew? Expecting eleven us of to be caught breaking and entering into your facility?”

  “Certain outcomes can be predicted, given the accumulation of a sufficiently large enough data set. And the proper warning.”

  “You couldn’t have anticipated we’d end up here and then had enough time to build holding cells for all of us. Hell, we didn’t know until an hour before we arrived, so how could you? We only picked this place because of its proximity to campus and the expected technology assets that might allow us all to build something we could use to—” Lucas said, stopping himself from telling the man any more.

  “Get home,” Starling added. “Home to your respective universes.”

  Lucas was stunned. Starling knew. How could he? “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “Sure you were.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “You should have a little more respect for the person responsible for putting a stop to the general’s Protocol 5 injections. I just saved your life.”

  “A soldier is always prepared to die in order to save his men.”

  “That’s true, but we both know you’re not a soldier.”

  “How the hell would you know? You don’t know me. You don’t know where I’m from or what I’m capable of doing. Shit, I could be a paid assassin for all you know.”

  “Oh, but I do know, Lucas Ramsay. I suspect that I know you better than you kn
ow yourself.”

  “Now you’re just trying to piss me off.”

  “I did just save your ass.”

  “Yes, you did. But why, exactly? Why didn’t you just let me die along with the rest of my team?”

  “Do you prefer death?”

  “Yes, anything is better than rotting away down here with only your ugly mug to look at. No food. No water. No place to take a shit. What kind of a fucking moron builds a jail cell like this?”

  “Lucas, you really need to temper your anger. It will be your undoing.”

  “My temper is just fine, thank you very much. Sometimes a man needs to marshal his inner demons when the circumstances dictate the need for it. Like now. So, I ask again, how about coming inside and facing me man to man?”

  “You should’ve told Alvarez what he wanted to know. He never would’ve continued with the injections, leaving your team alive.”

  “There’s was nothing to tell. I guess I could’ve simply fabricated a lie.”

  “That would’ve been one solution. But then again, I know as well as you do, there are more of you.”

  “You mean the rest of my crew? They’re all dead. You were there. Alvarez made sure of that. Melting them from the inside out with that compound.”

  “No, the others who are still unaccounted for after the incursion on the mountaintop.”

  Lucas didn’t know what to say.

  “We know there are several others like you. What are their plans? Where do they intend to strike?”

  “How the hell should I know? I guess your sufficiently large data set doesn’t provide you with all the answers, now does it? You arrogant prick. So, tell me, Starling, why would a sadistic fuck like you stop another sadistic fuck like Alvarez from injecting me to finish the job?”

  “Perhaps I have a deep respect for human life.”

  “I seriously doubt that. What kind of sick, twisted asshole invents something like Protocol 5? You’re a scientist, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s primary use is for the treatment of cancer cells. Something I’ve been focused on for decades.”

  “That’s a load of crap. It’s a weapon. That’s what it’s designed for, plain and simple. It’s men like you that give science a bad name,” Lucas said, shaking his head, trying to contain the hate fuming inside his gut.