by Ramy Vance
Reuben was glad Buzz had already checked the nanobot data and had gotten up to date on the timeline so that he was fully aware of all their previous discussions.
“I think Martha might be one of the déjà vu people,” Reuben told him. “You know, the ones who remember parts of the past but in a scrambled up kind of way?”
Buzz’s interest grew. “Really?”
“Yeah,” Reuben said. “I need to find a way to explain everything to her. But I don’t know how to in a way that she’ll believe.”
“What does she know so far?” Buzz asked.
“Nothing. She’s a police officer who’s experiencing a lot of ‘intuition’ that feels familiar to her. Something with a van. I told her I wanted her to meet you because you’ve studied this kind of thing. It goes directly in line with the déjà vu theory you were telling me about. So, here we are. I need your help to help me figure out how to explain it to her.”
Buzz stroked his chin. “Well, our calculations show that you tend to travel between twenty minutes to three days.”
Reuben waved his hands impatiently. “Right, we’ve covered this.”
“We can use that information to replicate the experience,” Buzz suggested. “We get her to tell you all about her last three days. Then you kill yourself and come back to this time and tell her what you know.”
“Not a half-bad idea.” Reuben grimaced. “I don’t want to kill myself again, though. Dying sucks. That said, Binnie was a nice way to die.”
Buzz’s eyes went hard. “Binnie is a treat for special occasions and certainly not for untested observants.”
“All right, all right,” Reuben reluctantly agreed. “We’ll do it.”
They arrived back in the living room, where Martha lay with her eyes closed, having found the massage feature on Buzz’s couch.
“I didn’t know that couch was a massager,” Reuben told Buzz.
“I don’t use it,” he said. “It’s just for show.”
Martha turned off the massager and sat up now that the guys had returned. “Did you boys have a nice meeting?” She sipped her drink.
“Yes.” Buzz cleared his throat, and Reuben sat next to him. “Ms. Martha, we have something we’d like to explain to you.”
“OK.” Martha looked skeptical.
Reuben started slowly. “I am in a time warp.”
“What?” Martha’s expression was one of confusion. Like she didn’t know if she should laugh or call the psych ward.
“You see, I can die and come back to life at a different time,” he said. “I’ve done it multiple times.”
Martha just sat there as if waiting for the punch line.
“Valentine’s Day, this year,” he said. “I’ve already lived it. Three times.”
Martha peered into her drink. “What’s in these things?”
“See, I told you. She doesn’t believe me,” Reuben told Buzz.
“Allow me,” Buzz said. “I have a way with the ladies.”
Reuben rose from the couch and paced the room. Why had he tried to tell her? Maybe she didn’t have the gift. Maybe this whole thing was a mistake.
“Miss Martha,” Buzz tried, “what Reuben tells you is true. I’ve verified it by scientific method.”
“Scientific method?” She raised an eyebrow. “You can’t scientifically prove that someone is in a— time warps don’t exist. That’s crazy. I don’t know what you guys are on, or what you think I’m on, or how stupid you think I am. Is this a way for you guys to make fun of me? I get enough of that shit at work.”
“No, no, no, Martha.” Reuben rushed to her side on the couch. “No one is making fun of you. Look, maybe this is all a mistake. I thought maybe you might have it, too.”
“Have what?”
“Maybe your déjà vu isn’t as déjà vu as you think,” Reuben told her.
“No.” She rose from the couch. “This is what happens when I let too many cop egos get to me. I got too eager to kiss ass and get promoted. I listened to way too many old cops drone on about intuition, and then I ended up following vans and connecting non-connecting pieces, and let my imagination go crazy. This is where that leads.”
She set the drink on the table so forcefully it splashed. “From now on, no more drinking. No more intuition. No more. I don’t even know what this place is, some sort of Peter Pan fantasyland. I don’t know.”
“OK, OK, OK.” Buzz rubbed his hands together. “This isn’t working.”
“No, it clearly is not,” Martha said. “And this room smells like weed. Do you have a permit for that?”
“Shit.” Buzz turned to Reuben. “Why did you bring a cop in here?”
“She’s an old friend. She’s cool. Right, Martha?” Reuben made eye contact with her and nodded in expectation. “Give us a chance, Martha. Please?”
“Fine.” Martha sighed and collapsed on the couch. “But you guys better start making sense.”
“Fair enough,” Buzz said. “What we’d like to do is conduct a scientific experiment to prove that what Reuben says is true.”
“A scientific experiment to prove a time warp?” Martha laughed.
“Yes,” Buzz and Reuben said in unison.
“Is this guy for real?” Martha asked Reuben.
Reuben nodded. “Just go with it.”
“I thought you said you’d start making sense?” she protested.
“Of course,” Buzz said. “What makes more sense than science?”
Martha cocked her head. “Bring it on.”
Buzz sat on the coffee table right in front of her. “What we need you to do is tell Reuben things that have happened to you in the last three days. Highly specific details. Conversations you’ve had, places you’ve eaten. Events that have happened. Once he’s compiled enough data, then he’ll kill himself—”
The color drained from Martha’s face. “I’m sorry, what?”
“He’ll kill himself and then come back to you in this timeline and tell you what you told him.”
Buzz and Reuben both stared at her, waiting for her agreement.
After a brief silence, Martha burst into uncontrollable laughter. “What the fuck? You’re going to kill yourself and then come back to life? What are you, Jesus Christ?”
“No, just immortal,” Reuben said.
Martha’s smile faded. “Oh my God. You guys are freaking serious.”
Reuben nodded in emphatic agreement. As he did, he realized he probably wasn’t helping Martha take this in. He slowed down his nods and said in as even a tone as he could muster, “Yeah, he’s totally serious.”
“OK, no.” Martha shook her head vehemently. “This is wrong on so many levels. I don’t even know where to start.”
“It’s not wrong,” Reuben told her. “I killed myself on Saturday and warped back to today.” Fuck, time warps were complicated. You needed several graphs, spreadsheets, and a supercomputer to keep it all straight.
“What?” Martha was shocked. “OK, first of all, as a member of law enforcement, I can’t condone suicide. Secondly, if this is the way you’re seeing things, you… You’re not OK. You need to see a counselor at least, a psychiatrist at best. I don’t know what you guys have been doing in here, but you can’t keep doing it.”
Buzz shook his head at Reuben and left the room.
Martha took out her phone.
Reuben tilted his head. “What are you doing?”
“I’m calling Marshall,” she announced.
“Jesus.” Reuben jumped up and grabbed the phone out of her hand. “Martha, you cannot do that. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”
“I do.” Martha tried to grab her phone, and he kept it from her. “His son just told me he’s going to kill himself. I think he needs to know.”
“He’ll have me committed. Look, I take it all back. I’m just high. I’m saying weird things, OK? Don’t pay any attention to me.”
“No, don’t try to play this off,” Martha insisted. “You and your friend are into some dark stuff, which
is one thing. But talking about killing yourself like that, that’s a whole different level. I cannot in good conscience—“
“Martha, stop being a fucking narc for once,” Reuben cut in, surprising himself with his forcefulness. “Listen, I’m opening up to you about a very personal experience, and I think you owe it to me to at least try to take me seriously.”
At that moment, Buzz came up behind them. With a loud buzz, Martha fell to the floor, unconscious.
Reuben’s mouth dropped. “Is that…”
“Taser.” Buzz tossed it up into the air, then caught it with flair.
Reuben looked down at Martha’s unconscious body. There would be hell to pay when she woke up. He just hoped they could talk fast enough. “I can’t believe you have a taser.”
Buzz grinned. “It comes in handy.”
“When?” Reuben exclaimed.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Buzz told him.
“That I am definitely aware of,” Reuben said. “What else do you have hidden in this place?”
“You have no idea.”
“Yeah. And something tells me I don’t want to know.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Martha—Friday, February 10, 12:06 a.m.
When Martha came to, the first thing she felt was the rope around her wrists. It took a minute for her vision to clear. She was in a concrete room. The nape of her neck felt like it had been burned. She tried to move, but she couldn’t.
She looked down. She was tied to a wooden chair. Her wrists were bound behind her, and her feet were bound to the legs of the chair.
“What the hell?” she gasped. Then she screamed for help.
Reuben and Buzz quickly appeared.
“What the fuck?” Martha demanded. “Let me go!”
“I’m sorry it had to be this way,” Buzz told her. “Really. But we just couldn’t risk you not completing the experiment.”
“You’re a fucking psycho!” She yelled and wriggled in her chair, then turned to Reuben. “And you! I don’t even know what to make of you.”
Angry, hot tears hit the surface, and she hated that she was crying. She choked them back and stared at her captors with cold, steely eyes. She had taken a course in her police training about being held captive. She tried to remember anything from that course.
“Martha, I know this is nuts.” Reuben knelt in front of her. “But it’s not what you think.”
“To think, I was just starting to think that—” She stopped herself, and tears of hurt welled up in her eyes again.
“Starting to think what?” Reuben asked.
“Never mind, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Why am I here?”
Reuben grabbed a gun off the counter and pointed it at his head.
She screamed louder than she knew her voice could go. The sound went nowhere in the concrete bunker. “What the hell, Reuben? You’re fucking crazy!”
“Calm down, Martha,” Buzz said softly. “It’s not as crazy as you think.”
“I don’t know why you guys keep saying that,” she cried. “But all evidence points to the contrary. Please, just let me go.”
Buzz nodded. “After Reuben kills himself, then you can go.”
Martha’s eyes widened in horror. “Oh my God. You have completely lost it. Both of you. You’re going to prison, you know that, right Buzz?”
A shadow crossed Buzz’s face, then he regained his composure. “Not when you see what we’re trying to do. Now, are you willing to cooperate?”
Martha struggled against her restraints. “Like I have a fucking choice.”
“Not really,” Buzz stated.
Reuben lowered the gun and pulled a chair in front of Martha. “Look, I know what you’re thinking. We’re crazy. But all this intuition stuff, the déjà vu. It’s your brain holding onto pieces of the time warps. For some reason, I can remember the warps. You can’t, not entirely. Buzz theorizes that things like you’re experiencing are happening because this case, this obsession, is so important to you that you’re holding onto glimpses of what you learned in those warps.”
“Reuben, we can get you help,” Martha said.
He shook his head. “We need to stop the bomb, and I believe that we can only do this if we work together. You want to stop him, right?”
Martha pursed her lips. Her childhood friend was having a psychotic break. She’d need to play along to help him. She nodded.
“Tell Reuben everything you can about the last three days of your life,” Buzz said. “Be specific. Dates, times, anything there’s no way he could possibly know.”
Reuben sat patiently in the chair with the gun on his lap.
“OK.” She didn’t seem to have a choice in playing their little psycho Russian roulette game. “Three days ago, let’s see… Oh, I was late for work because I went to do my morning workout and my gym was closed for renovations. It threw my whole schedule off. That meant I missed the morning meeting and didn’t know there would be a film crew in the station that morning. One of the officers, Sergeant Bramley, was being featured on some stupid reality show.”
Buzz and Reuben laughed.
“I mean, everyone knew he was doing it one day, but we all thought it was going to be like, months from now. But they just showed up that day. So, when I came in and the cameras were everywhere, I yelled at them for getting in my way.” She shook her head. “I made a total ass out of myself. But they didn’t stop me. All these film crew guys gathered around me like paparazzi, and they were all like, about to wet their pants with excitement. They kept egging me on to get me to say more stuff. It was horribly embarrassing. Now, I’m going to be on national TV acting like an ass.”
“This is good.” Buzz nodded. “Good stuff.”
“Yeah, you’re not the only person to say that to me this week. So then, after that, let’s see…” Martha recounted her meals and a couple of work things. “Then there’s this intern, Zach. He’s a real ass-kisser, but he does a good job. My boss will probably hire him after he graduates. I appreciate him; he’s been a real help to me. But I’m also a little jealous that he’s doing so much better at his job than I was at that stage.”
The rope cut into her wrists, and she wiggled her hands to try to massage them. They tied ropes well for a couple of computer nerds. “He does all the computer modules, which everyone thinks are about as interesting as watching paint dry,” she said. “I wonder if he can make it out in the field, though.”
She rambled on about following the white van in the cab, about going home that night, trying to buy herself some time. “I was going to go to a concert with Jenna, but it’s hard to talk to Jenna. We went to UVA together, and we were both from the city. Once we graduated, it was fun to keep up with each other and have drinks now and then, but now our lives are just drifting apart. She’s married and is on her second pregnancy. I mean, I can usually follow a woman going through her first pregnancy. I can talk to her about all the cliché topics like morning sickness and choosing a Lamaze instructor. I’ve had so many girlfriends go through it that I’ve actually got a few helpful tips. But once you get past the first-timers, then I don’t know what to talk about. I can’t talk about sleep training and GERD, whatever that is. What is the obsession with pregnancy and babies? How did I not get that gene?”
Buzz and Reuben just stared at her, dumbfounded. They both scratched the backs of their heads.
“Yeah, that’s uh…good,” Buzz said.
She sighed and moved on to relatively safer topics. She talked about going to Gigi’s Breakfast Café that morning and ordering the cinnamon apple crepe while researching Alister Pout and reading the article on him in The Scene.
“He’s a real womanizer,” she said. “That kind of guy makes me sick. I have this feeling about Alister Pout. Remember Thorne? I hated him for trying to hurt us. I hate Pout the same way. Like he was trying to hurt me. I don’t know why.”
Reuben nodded. “It may be that in one of the warps, he did hurt you. That�
��s why you have this visceral feeling about him.”
Martha didn’t know about that. But she couldn’t deny the particular brand of disgust she had for Pout mirrored her feelings for Thorne.
She went on rambling, and she looked for an escape route. It appeared the only way out of the room was through a metal door with a sensor on it. It didn’t appear to need a code to get out. She thought about staging some kind of emergency to find out if they needed a code to get out, but she couldn’t think of one and kept the rambling going at the same time.
“So, Reuben pulls up to the house,” Martha continued. She wasn’t even paying attention to what she was saying anymore. “I remember seeing the purple lilacs and wondering if they have those at the garden center near my house. I go to Frank’s Nursery and try to keep a garden going on my patio. I also noticed that the fountain outside is not well maintained. It all makes me think that this Buzz guy is rather pretentious.”
She knew she was being a jerk, but they deserved it. Besides, they weren’t going to hurt her. They needed her for their little game. But she was scared. She rambled when she was scared.
“He wants to look a certain way,” she kept going, “but he can’t keep it up. It’s all an act. When I got inside, I didn’t like the frescoes on the ceiling. The modern art design clashed with the rest of the house. Plus, I thought the artist’s technique was lacking a bit of soul. The fresco had no soul. It was like it was painted as a hollow tribute to something.”
Buzz cleared his throat and shifted in his seat.
“Sorry, Buzz.” She wiggled in her ropes. “You had to put the brutal in honesty.”
“That’s fine,” Buzz said. “It’s all for science. We need the most accurate data possible.”
“Absolutely,” she said. “So, as we rang the bell and we waited there, I thought, ‘Reuben is really turning into a handsome man.’”
Reuben pursed his lips in shock, and Buzz whistled. “You hear that? She’s into you, dude.”
Reuben and Martha both blushed, and Martha realized what she had just said. She knew it was true. It had been true for a while. Maybe since that day on the bus when he had grabbed her hand. But she was only aware of it now.