His arms fell to his sides as she reached the light, and that’s when she saw the blood.
It was everywhere.
Streaking his forearms, his pants, even the side of his face.
Juniper froze.
All around her, the smell of death rose, thicker and thicker until the air itself choked on it. She couldn’t breathe, could hardly see.
The light beckoned. Was this insanity, then?
“Don’t—any closer.” The words were garbled, passing to her as if from a great distance. The man repeated them, and this time, as Juniper concentrated on his mouth, they sounded a little clearer. “Don’t come any closer. We don’t want you here.”
“You don’t want me here?” she shouted back. “This is a private beach. You’re the one who doesn’t belong here!”
His eyes widened. She couldn’t see his features clearly enough to judge his age or whether he was handsome. Shadows swallowed his dark skin and the strange light that surrounded him never illuminated his face.
“You can hear me?” he yelled.
She nodded, stepping closer.
He raised his bloody hands. “No! Don’t walk through. Please.” His voice wavered, and she missed his next words, all but one: kill.
“What did you just say?” Unease twisted her stomach. What was happening? They were steps away from each other and she could barely see or hear him. And there was a ring of freaking light. And the smell of bodies.
And the blood.
Maybe he was a murderer. He was killing her and she was having some kind of out-of-body experience.
The man looked away for a split second as another faint voice yelled something. Juniper glanced in the same direction, but all she saw was rocky beach and sickly trees. When she looked back, the stranger was gone. She was tempted to go after him, his warnings be damned, but the stench and the undulating light made her nauseous, and she still wasn’t sure if she was suffering from some psychotic break.
On second thought, she was sure.
She had to be.
There was no other explanation.
Juniper trudged back up the beach, hot sun pouring lava on her shoulders, choked by the stench of her grief.
* * *
“You’re quiet tonight.” Juniper’s father studied her over the heap of lettuce and quinoa on his plate. His eyes, the pale blue of sea glass, held a question so clear he may as well have said the words.
“I’m fine, Dad.” Sometimes Juniper wished she could hate her father like the rest of the town did. Then she wouldn’t have to defend him. She wouldn’t feel torn between having a family and having a life.
“’Fine.’ The classic teenager response.” He scooped up a bite of salad. When she didn’t respond, he added, “Come on, kid. You look troubled. Are you sure there’s nothing bothering you?”
For the first three months after Juniper’s mother died, he’d put his head in his hands and said things like “your mom would know how to ask” or “she’d know what to do” when Juniper wouldn’t tell him what was wrong. That had ended in tears too many times.
Juniper spun her fork in little half circles against her plate. She wanted to spill it all…tell him about how she’d skipped school, the bullying, the man on the beach. The light.
But if she told him about the bullying, he’d do something that would make life in this town even more difficult for her. Calling out any of the students or teachers would just make the others worse. And she couldn’t tell him what had happened at the beach. Not unless she really was ready to be sent to an institution. She wondered what she would have said if the figure had actually been her mother’s ghost.
“Juniper.”
His voice startled her, and her fork fell onto her plate with a clatter. “It’s nothing. I just…I saw something weird on the beach.” She stabbed a blueberry and forced it to her lips. “No big deal.”
Her father went still, the outward energy of his movements turning to a suppressed current, rushing beneath the surface. “Where on the beach?”
Juniper cleared her throat, thrown off by his sudden intensity. “Uh, I don’t know…down around the first bend in the cove, I guess. Why?”
“What about it was weird? What exactly did you see?”
“Dad, you’re being weird,” she said. She wished she’d never said anything. Why did he even care? Maybe he knew it meant she was crazy. She swallowed.
“Was it a sort of circular light? Or maybe a starburst?” He leaned forward. “Was it a light, Juniper?”
She nodded slowly. “How did you know?”
His eyes lit up with excitement, even as his attention turned inward. “It’s here already,” he mumbled, obviously to himself. “I wasn’t expecting…months, maybe. Not so soon.”
“What is it?” She stared at him, thoroughly confused. But if the light was something, something her dad was aware of, that meant she wasn’t crazy. Probably. Then again, with the way her father was acting, maybe her mental health wasn’t the only one in question.
How could that weird, unnatural light be something her father had expected?
With a jerk, he stood up, rattling the table. “Show me,” he said. He didn’t answer her questions.
With a frustrated sigh, Juniper led him through the silent, empty rooms of their house and out onto the deck that overlooked the ocean. In the hours since she’d last been down to the rocky beach, the tide had come in, slurping over the seaweed-slicked rocks, hiding the dying starfish.
“What’s that smell?” Juniper’s father asked, covering his nose.
“I don’t know. It smells like that out here sometimes. It started a few weeks ago.” The scent of death was fainter than it had been earlier in the day. The sun slunk behind the trees, and a breeze kicked up off the water, as if trying to wash the air clean. “Please tell me what’s going on.”
Her father concentrated on picking his way across the hazardous rocks and said nothing.
Juniper couldn’t stand the silence. “I thought it was a ghost. Mom’s ghost. I thought I was going crazy.”
He didn’t look at her, but his sigh was audible, even over the ruffling waves and hissing wind. When he did speak, it was a story she’d heard before. “With our jobs, your mother and I were aware, long before the general public, that the Earth had become a ticking bomb.”
“’Humans have orchestrated our own extinction’ – I know. The whole world knows now.” It wasn’t like it changed anything. As far as Juniper could tell, there were only a few differences in her small town. A lot more people went to church now. Some of the girls at her school had gotten married. Everyone was having a lot more sex, if the gossip in the halls was to be believed. And they all still hated her dad.
A few years ago, some entrepreneurial citizens down south had started suing politicians and companies that had “willfully ignored evidence of climate change and other threats to our planet.” Most of the lawsuits had been dismissed.
She, like most of the rest of the world, was still hoping for a last-minute Hail Mary solution. But in the end, her geographical location and her father’s wealth would probably only buy her some time. Estimates put the Earth at levels untenable for human life within the next ten to thirty years. Two billion people had already died.
Her mother used to say that everything came with an expiration date. Even the Earth.
But she’d never once said it without tears in her eyes.
Her father continued his lecture. “Some of my colleagues believe they’ve found a way to preserve the human race.”
“Send us all into space?” Political leaders all over the world had invested billions of dollars into large-scale spaceships, but as of yet, no country had launched its citizens into the black beyond.
Her father shook his head. “It’s an escape, of sorts. But…but not outward.”
Juniper shook her head. Not outward. What did that even mean? Before she could ask, she caught a flash of light and pointed.
Halfway down the cove
, a blue glow flickered against the trees. Her father stopped and stared, slack-jawed. Then he hurried closer.
Juniper looked for the strange man she’d spoken to, but no one appeared beyond the pulsing circle of light. She was a few steps behind her father now, and for some reason, the closer he got to their destination, the more her stomach roiled.
When he reached out, she couldn’t help it. She screamed.
“Don’t touch it, Dad!”
He turned to look at her. “It’s perfectly safe.”
She shook her head. She had no idea what it was, but she knew it wasn’t safe. “No. I don’t think it is.”
That stranger had been covered in blood. He’d begged her not to move. He’d acted like it was dangerous.
Her father picked his way back to her side. “Juniper, this is our escape.”
She sat on the nearest flat rock, with her back to the weird light. “How can that be an escape?”
He sat beside her. “My colleagues found a way to open wormholes and, more importantly, keep them open. They’re working on opening them all over the world.”
Juniper stared at the place where the darkening sky touched the sea. “Wormhole to what?”
“The past.” Her father’s voice held a smile. “They’ll send us all back. To a time when the Earth was safe. We’ll live out our lives centuries before the planet dies.”
She whipped her head to glare at him. That was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. That was the last-minute solution? “So, what? We can overpopulate the planet sooner? We can kill it faster? So we can disappear before the end and let our children deal with it?”
“No.” His smile faded, replaced by a terrible sadness. “The wormholes all go back to the same day in 1996, before things got really bad. So we can fix our mistakes before it’s too late.”
“How will we know if it works?” she asked, her voice softer. Out of the corner of her eye, the swirl of blue and pink beckoned.
He leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. “I’m not sure. Maybe one day we’ll wake up and the future will stretch before us, unblemished. Our history books will be rewritten, talking of how the problem of the dying Earth was fixed two centuries ago. Or maybe things will change in small ways, each day a new triumph shared with the world.” He took a breath, staring out over the ocean as if the answer called to him. Just like in Juniper’s dreams, when her mother called to her.
“Maybe we’ll leave before the world is fixed, and we’ll never know for sure.”
Juniper shook her head. “What did you do, Dad? Pay your colleagues to open a wormhole here?” Would it be yet another thing the town hated them for? Or would their attitudes change, once they knew there was an escape route so close?
“I helped fund their research. I’ve been funding them for twenty years. This is one of the first, but there are wormholes elsewhere already. People have already begun the exodus. Scientists first. A few politicians to help appeal to the leaders in control of policy.”
“Why has there been nothing on the news?”
He shrugged. “I’m sure there will be soon. I thought they were months away from expanding the program. There probably hasn’t been time to get the approvals to announce anything yet.”
Juniper glanced back at the swirling light. Shadows moved, but she couldn’t tell if they were the shadows of trees in the here and now, or the trees beyond. In the past, if her father was to be believed.
Soon night would swallow the beach, the wormhole, everything.
She thought of the blood covering the stranger’s hands. “What if I don’t want to go?”
Her father met her gaze, his expression hidden by the lengthening shadows. “Now that you know, it will be a leap of faith either way.”
* * *
The next morning, Juniper returned to the beach. When she asked her father when he planned to use the wormhole, he’d given her no specific answer. “When we need to,” was all he said. She didn’t know if that meant days, weeks, months…or hell, the moment the sky scorched the Earth and they were left running from the last toxic rays that would kill them all.
She brushed away the histrionic thought. No one thought the world would explode in a burst of light or anything like that. The weather would keep getting more extreme, the earthquakes and storms and climate less and less tenable for human life. Resources would disappear, and people would keep killing each other for food and water until nothing and no one was left. Some areas would survive years longer, but the march of destruction was inexorable. Inevitable. Most of Africa and South America had already been abandoned, now peopled only by ghosts.
When Juniper reached the wormhole, she stopped exactly where she’d stood when she’d seen the man the day before. She studied the slice of beach and trees visible through the circle of light. Looking closely now, she could tell the beach wasn’t quite the same. The trees were scrubbier, shorter. The beach had sand instead of rocks.
The smell wasn’t as bad today, but she could still catch eddies of death every time the wind shifted.
“Hello?” she called, her voice a nervous warble.
Nothing moved except the trees, ruffled by the faintest breeze.
For a long time, Juniper looked at the swath of beach and wondered if that tiny slice of the past would be her future. Just the thought made her head ache. How would this scheme not end in disaster? No one had traveled through time before. Surely the scientists didn’t even know how long the wormholes would stay open. What if this was one of those times, rife in human history, where a well-meaning genius created something he didn’t fully understand, only to expose the world to an even greater danger?
The gun.
The nuclear bomb.
Genetic modification.
The Internet.
How could time travel be the right answer?
Then a garbled voice came out of nowhere. “Hello?”
Juniper screamed.
Slowly, the man materialized before her. He wore the same shirt, the same faded pants.
Something – maybe the angle of the morning light – made his features a little clearer. He had dark, shaggy hair, deeply tanned skin like a fisherman, and a skinny, wiry body.
“Don’t come any closer,” he yelled. “We don’t want you here.”
“Who are you?” Juniper asked. She held her hands up to show him she wasn’t moving closer.
His eyes widened. “You can hear me?”
Her hands trembled a little as she lowered them. Had he said the same thing to her yesterday? Why did this conversation feel so familiar?
“My name is Juniper Young. Who are you?” She stepped a little closer, just to hear him better. His voice still sounded distant, filtered through…well, filtered through years, she supposed.
“No! Don’t walk through. It’ll kill you.” The man’s eyes were wide with terror.
“Why do you say that?” she asked, yelling too. Maybe he hadn’t heard her other questions. “It’s supposed to be safe. It’s our escape route.”
“You have to find a way to stop it!” he said. A shout echoed behind him. “All the bodies….they just keep coming. People pouring through the nothing gates, screaming as they fall. I don’t know if you’re aliens or what, but you can’t come here. It’s killing you!”
Juniper’s feet shifted, as if the world itself rocked instead of her own shock, driving her to her knees. Her lungs worked madly, but she could hardly catch a wisp of air.
“It’s killing us…? No.” She shook her head. It couldn’t be. As nuts as it was, this was supposed to be the solution. She glanced up at the man. He was still standing there, but he kept glancing to his side. In the distance, she thought she could hear the screams. “Has no one survived?”
He didn’t say anything, but she could see the answer in his eyes.
* * *
The world hadn’t changed yet because no one had survived. The truth roiled through her veins, as hot and hopeless as poison.
So many
people crossing that line of light with hope in their hearts, only to be torn apart. The scientists and politicians….the bright minds that were supposed to fix the Earth before any of this was even necessary, and they were all dead.
Juniper sat at the edge of the water, clasping her shaking hands to her chest. She had to tell her father. She had to warn him. They couldn’t let another person cross the threshold to certain death.
There is no escape.
The Earth would die, and the human race with it.
For the first time, as Juniper stared at the horizon, she felt the flood of adrenaline as her body fought against the truth. They would die. She would die.
Her heart beat faster, so hard she could feel it fluttering within her chest. Her breath heaved in and out, each sip of air a gift, precious as her mother’s soft hands on her face. The sun – the deadly sun – burned against her forehead, illuminating everything.
Maybe…
Maybe.
She stood up on trembling legs, the pebbled beach slipping under her feet like the minutes, hours, the few short moments she had left. Even years would feel like moments when they were the last she’d have.
But maybe…
She took her place on the other side of the wormhole.
“Hey!! Hello there! Anyone?” she shouted. Over and over. As loud as she could.
Eventually, the same man returned. This time, his arms and shirt bore streaks of blood.
“We’re not aliens!” she screamed. “We’re people, just like you. We’re your descendants, and we’re trying to escape before the planet dies.”
The man stared at her, lips parted. She couldn’t tell if he’d heard. But she kept talking, babbling really, a sense of urgency driving her words.
“Humans kill the Earth. We kill ourselves. Can you hear me? Our one chance to stop it, to save this future, is to go back. All of those people trying to get through…they want to help you turn the tide. They’re trying to change the future.”
The Time Travel Chronicles Page 30