Then, all at once, he hit the wall.
No… the floor.
It’d been a long way down, what felt like miles. When he was all the way down, finally at rest on a solid surface, he began to curl up, knees to chest, huddling like a baby. Every inch of him hurt ferociously.
Mommy…?
She was close by. He remembered that. He tried again and again to cry out for her, but his voice wouldn’t cooperate. He was distantly aware of darkness, and cold, but that was secondary to the pain.
What…?
From some distance away he could hear music. Led Zeppelin, he thought.
“What in the world,” he heard a voice say.
Some time passed, then a different voice said, “Come away, Iris. You don’t know what the situation is. Let’s just leave this be. We’ll call the police, all right? This isn’t something you need to be involved in.”
“But it’s just a boy.”
“Never mind. Iris, do you hear me?”
He heard footsteps. He had the vague sense that someone was nearby, then that changed and he was sure he was alone, left by himself somewhere dark and cold. The pain ebbed a little after a while, and he began to pry his eyes open.
Outside.
Outside…?
But he’d been inside a house. Sweating a little, because it was hot out and they hadn’t been running the AC while the house was unoccupied and for sale. Now, somehow, it was cold. Nighttime. And he was outside. A small voice in the back of his head told him to be scared, told him that something awful had happened. That maybe he’d been unconscious until night had fallen. That maybe he’d been unconscious until it was winter.
He tried to think Fuuuuu…
The voice suggested Bomb. Then, in a jumble: ChinaNorthKoreaIrantheyhitusohmygod.
His body felt crushed, burnt and frozen at the same time, and he supposed a trip to the hospital was a good idea… wherever the hospital was. Wherever anything was. He let some tears well up in his eyes, crushed his eyes shut for a moment and let himself wallow in being scared and hurt. Then he snuffled back the snot that was filling his sinuses and set his jaw. The frenzy in his brain had quieted down just enough for him to begin to string some coherent thoughts together, and they told him he needed to do something, not just lie there. That he might be hammered into pulp, but he wasn’t dead, and he was therefore capable of helping himself. Helping other people.
Mom and Dad.
They’d been hit too. Had to have been.
Tornado??
Slowly, trying mightily to ignore the shrieking pain that wasn’t letting go of any little bit of him, he moved to his hands and knees. Then upright, on his knees.
Finally—though he wasn’t sure he could remain standing for very long—to his feet.
His stomach churned wildly, and he had to fight an overwhelming urge to vomit. The cold helped a little, though after a few seconds it made him start to shiver and he wrapped his shrieking arms around himself in a futile effort to warm up. He’d need to find a coat somewhere. A hoodie. Something.
You can do this.
You can… Mom…?
There were lights off in the distance, what looked like miles away. Maybe less; maybe his vision was screwed up. He took a wobbling step in that direction, nearly fell, but managed to hold himself upright. He sipped in some cold air, afraid of hurting his ribs by breathing deeply, standing quietly until his head had settled down some more. There would be people where those lights were, he told himself. It might be an aid station, something set up by the police, or the National Guard, or whatever.
Yes. Go there.
He tried another step, and thought of something he’d heard somewhere: The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Screw THAT. You can do this.
Another step. A small one, but it was progress.
And another.
He smiled a little, as much as his throbbing head would allow.
Then the wall hit him again.
This time he screamed. He had time to do that, because the sensation of being slammed by something went on and on. He was being carried, it felt like, and that made him think again: tornado. But there’d never been a tornado anywhere near where he lived, not in his whole fourteen years of life. He knew them only from news reports and the movies. He had what seemed like an hour to think about The Wizard of Oz and Twister and news footage of whole towns that had been flattened before something grabbed him (a hand; it felt like a hand) and once again, he was slammed to the ground.
“You!” a voice bellowed. “You’ve destroyed the RIBBON, you… you…”
Didn’t do nothing, Toby thought distantly. Because… come ON. A tornado was his fault? In what universe?
The hand pulled at him, fierce and irresistible. He was half-afraid that its owner meant to beat the crap out of him if he tried to rise, but lying on the ground seemed like a worse choice than trying to stand. Whoever it was might decide to kick him instead, and he’d seen what kind of damage a good pair of boots could inflict. The kid he’d seen that happen to… God. He’d gotten his nose crushed. Had a ruptured kidney. That information ricocheted around inside Toby’s head as he struggled to his feet and tried again to blink away his disorientation.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Do you? The extent of the damage you might have caused?”
A man.
It was a dark-haired man, wearing some kind of light-colored coveralls. He took his hand back and balled it into a fist – along with the other one – but instead of looking like he wanted to kick some ass, he looked like a little kid having a tantrum. Like he wasn’t getting what he wanted, and instead of trying to solve the problem, he was going to go on pitching a fit.
“Whaaasss…?” Toby muttered.
That was all his body could take. He tumbled to his knees, barely managing to arrest his fall by thrusting a hand out in front of him, and got rid of the Cheesy MegaBurger and fries he’d had for lunch. His stomach seized and spasmed over and over until he felt like he simply wanted to sprawl on his belly and lie there – maybe, to die there – and it didn’t matter at all that he’d be surrounded by puke. He couldn’t bring himself to care any more about what had happened; he just wanted all of it to stop.
A flicker of light caught his attention. It was his phone, lying on the ground nearby.
Phone…
That was important, but for a moment he couldn’t figure out why. When his stomach at last stopped breakdancing, he slid a hand over to the phone and wrapped his fingers around it, then dragged it up toward his face.
Not broken. That was good. He wouldn’t need to explain to Dad that he’d broken yet another phone.
“There are going to be consequences,” the guy in the coveralls said.
Toby’s brain disagreed, told him Nuh-uh. “Zis nuh broke,” he garbled. “Don’ haffa tell Dad…”
“You idiot child.”
To which Toby’s brain responded: Screw YOU, asshole.
He was scorched and frozen at the same time, every nerve ending in his body alive and screaming. He thought it was very possible his head might explode.
“Din do nun,” he mumbled.
“You didn’t do anything? Oh, that’s rich. You didn’t do anything. Do you know what you did? You’ve completely ruined an eighty billion dollar jump. Possibly, very possibly, you’ve created echoes that will rupture the entire time stream. But you didn’t do anything.”
The guy’s voice had gone steadily up in pitch through all of that, to the point that the last few words were almost a screech. It fried Toby’s tortured nerve endings so badly that tears began to pool in his eyes. He thought about wiping them away, but couldn’t bring himself to lift his hand, couldn’t decide what he ought to do with his phone so his hand would be free. It was all too much to figure out. Trembling, he shifted back bit by bit and sat down on a numbingly cold floor.
No… ground. Floor, but… ground.
Dirt?
They wer
e inside, he was pretty sure, but not in that stupid cookie cutter house Mom and Dad were thinking about buying – unless that house had a basement that was just a big hole in the ground, which Toby didn’t think was possible. There was a lot of dry, dusty, uneven dirt here, and the walls were… stone? Not brick. A collection of stones, like the old, mostly-broken-down wall out at the far end of Josie Martin’s grandpa’s field, a thing that dated back before the Civil War, according to Josie’s Gramps. This place was old, then, Toby figured. Big, and really old. That didn’t fit anyplace he was familiar with, and he had no idea at all how he’d gotten here, unless he’d been kidnapped out of that mostly empty house in Clover Greens.
“Gonna call the cops,” he whispered, struggling to brandish his phone. “Nine-one-one. It’s… onna spee’ dial.”
He hovered his thumb over the icon.
“And you think that will help?” the guy shrieked.
He was both too old and too young to be acting that way. He wasn’t a little kid, and he wasn’t some insane old person. There wasn’t a lot of light in this wherever to see by, but it was enough to tell Toby that his companion was around Dad’s age, give or take. So, in his forties. The coveralls meant he probably did some kind of manual job. Cable repair, plumbing, trash collection, something like that.
Not a lot of light, Toby thought. No windows that he could see. Just the screen of his phone, and…
That guy? He was glowing.
“Whassss…” Toby hissed.
He wanted to ask, What are you? An alien? Radioactive Man, like something out of those old 1950s sci-fi movies? Then he realized, slowly, that it wasn’t the guy himself that was glowing, it was his coveralls. Somehow, the fabric was looey… lumi…
Luminescent.
“Din mess up your… an’thing,” Toby said. “Gib it up. Weird glowy man.”
The guy’s face got considerably darker. He flexed his hands, clenched them, unclenched them.
Finally, he said through his teeth, “You’ve ruined the ribbon!”
Nutcase.
Struggling not to jiggle his head – because there still seemed like a strong possibility that it might explode – Toby moved back to his hands and knees, careful to avoid that huge puddle of puke. It took a lot of small maneuvers, but eventually he managed to stand. Once again he was grateful for the cold air around him, because it seemed to be helping him pull himself together, helping his brain reorganize itself.
Stuck in here with a nutball, he thought, though he still couldn’t imagine how, or why. The guy had escaped from somewhere, and had taken him prisoner? Maybe he’d stolen those weird glowing coveralls, because Toby was pretty sure mental patients didn’t usually wear anything like that.
He needed to call for help. Or run. Either of those options seemed okay, as long as his legs agreed to hold him upright long enough for him to get out of here.
“I din…” he started. “Didn’t. I didn’t do anything, okay? I was just waiting for my mom and dad.”
“This is completely insignificant to you, isn’t it?”
“No. Come on, man. We can deal. Okay? You and me. Sound good?”
For a moment, the guy didn’t do anything except breathe. Loudly; Toby could hear the rasp of each breath going in and out. Then the guy reached up and grabbed a bunch of his own hair in each hand.
That, too, made him look like a freaked-out little kid.
Toby glanced down at his phone, wondering if the guy would flip if he knew the police were actually coming. No service, it said. Not really a surprise, since they were in a basement. Maybe out on the edge of town, where reception was sometimes a little sketchy in spite of all those TV ads that said there was reliable service everywhere. He’d have to go upstairs, or outside, to get a decent connection.
If the guy would let him do that.
He was about to suggest that they both go upstairs when the guy said very, very softly, “We may not be able to fix this. I was young once, believe it or not. I remember deciding that most of what happened in the cosmos was of absolutely no interest to me, but trust me: this is very bad.”
“Uh-huh,” Toby said.
“You’ve broken the ribbon. You may have even severed it completely.”
Toby began to think about his parents, about how long it had been since he’d last seen them. Hours? Days? They had to be worried. Scared, maybe. In the strange pale light coming from the crazy guy’s coveralls he glanced down at himself and found himself dusty and messed up, but not hurt. He couldn’t see any blood, any cuts or scratches – which didn’t seem to agree with how much his body hurt, or that feeling of having been whirled around inside a tornado and flung into a brick wall.
Maybe his injuries were all internal. Which certainly wouldn’t be good.
“It’s, like, filthy down here,” he said in as casual a tone as he could manage. “It’s gonna bother my asthma. How ’bout we go upstairs” – he nodded toward the staircase he’d located over in the corner – “and we’ll get some fresh air?”
He smiled at the guy.
The guy, not at all helpfully, scowled at him.
Definitely not in the mood for this.
“And what do you think is up there?” the guy demanded. “What do you think is outside? Answers? Is that what you think?”
I think you need to go back where you came from, Toby thought.
At least, he needed to be in the care of someone who understood what his deal was. Like last summer, when there’d been a whole to-do in the neighborhood over Mrs. Fischer, who had Alzheimer’s bad enough that if she went for a walk around the block, she couldn’t find her house again. She’d gotten out of the house one afternoon and was missing for almost three hours. They’d found her almost a mile away, sitting in the middle of someone’s lawn, crying into her hands. She was still weeping when they brought her home, something Toby had witnessed from across the street.
You couldn’t leave someone like that on their own. Someone who needed help.
No, he wasn’t obligated to help this strange guy, but… Crap.
He saw no harm in leaving the guy down here for a little while so he could go upstairs and use the phone, since there was nothing around that he could hurt himself with. Over in the shadows, Toby could see a couple of big old wooden barrels and a stack of odd-shaped pieces of lumber. Three wooden crates were piled near the stairs. He supposed the guy could whack himself in the head with one of the pieces of lumber, but maybe that wouldn’t happen, not in just a few minutes.
“I’m going upstairs,” he told the guy, and immediately started moving toward the stairs.
To his surprise, the guy didn’t stop him.
The stairs were in pretty bad shape – really rickety, creaking badly under Toby’s weight as he climbed, even though he was a serious lightweight – he only ever hit 140 pounds on the day after Thanksgiving. Frowning, he held on to the railing as he ascended the last few steps, afraid the whole staircase would crumble before he reached the top.
It didn’t, but…
“Wow,” he said as he emerged into the building above that mess of a basement.
It was a house, clearly, one he supposed you could call a mansion. He’d come out into what had once been a kitchen, though all that was left of it was a huge, battered sink and a ruined table thrown onto its side. It was a mammoth room with a toweringly high ceiling, easily four times as big as the kitchen at home, and through the wide doorway at one end he could see into another colossal room he supposed was a dining room. There was no furniture in there at all, just what looked like a rolled-up carpet shoved off to one side.
Everything was covered with dust. Little piles of dirt, dry leaves and bits of trash had accumulated in the corners.
No one had lived here in forever, he decided.
He kept walking, a burst of curiosity overwhelming his need to find help for the whack job downstairs. He kept his hand curled around his phone, though if someone had asked him whether he was trying to protect it, or int
ended to use it as a weapon, he probably could not have said. The floor creaked and squeaked as he progressed, and he noticed he was leaving footprints in the dust.
He still had no idea how he could have gotten there.
He prowled through a huge library that still had some old books lying on some of the shelves, though it looked like they’d been attacked by mice or squirrels, torn apart for use as nesting material. One chair remained in there, a big, battered wingback with a fatal rip in its seat cushion. From there he passed into what he decided was the living room, and from there he reached a room with three walls of windows. Several of the panes were broken, which he supposed had allowed for that accumulation of leaves and trash.
His mom would like this place, he thought. It would fascinate her. She’d daydream about how she’d fix it up if she had the money.
Each room had a fireplace. A real one, not gas. He thought that meant the house was crazy old, like the wall in Josie’s grandfather’s field. That made him twitch, because he didn’t know of any such house anywhere near home. Old houses, sure, but they only dated back to around the 1920s, maybe a little older. There was nothing like this, nothing that would have been a fabulous mansion back in its day.
Nothing that…
“SHIT!”
Toby shrieked and jumped back, almost lost his balance, and pinwheeled his arms frantically to keep from flopping down into the dust. In the process his phone went flying and he watched in horror as it bounced off the brick of the fireplace.
The crazy guy was standing there looking at him. His hair was all sticking straight out from his head, as if he’d walked into some giant field of static, but his expression was almost completely blank. Like he had a migraine, Toby thought. Like he was trying to function in the midst of terrible pain.
“Don’t DO that!” Toby shrieked. “Jesus! Could you not sneak up on me like that?”
The guy looked around. It seemed like it hurt him to move his head, so he kept shifting his feet a little at a time. Bit by bit, he examined the whole room, but what he was looking for, or trying to figure out, Toby couldn’t imagine.
The Time Travel Chronicles Page 11