by Cam Rogers
“What made you decide they hadn’t?”
“Nobody came after me, or Paul, or Will. Had to figure you’d just vanished like the ghost you always were.”
“They say ghosts are the presence of an absence. I’m right here, Jack.”
“And who are you?”
She was going to give one of her usual sleight-of-hand answers, he could tell. His expression said don’t. Something like sadness flitted across her features. In the end, she just shrugged: I don’t know what to tell you.
“A note wasn’t an option. First rule of a good disappearance is take nothing with you, leave nothing behind.” She leaned forward, probing his expression for some small understanding. “I’ve been preparing for this moment, right now, since I was eight years old.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
It should have been matter/antimatter having her there, at his family table, a piece of another world sitting real in this one. The whole planet should have exploded because she was drinking coffee in the house where he had grown up. Alive.
“Come on,” she said, standing up. “Show me around. If there are answers here I want us to find them first.”
They hang around because we can’t let go of them.
* * *
Upstairs they stood outside the door to what had been Jack’s bedroom for twenty-two years.
“If there was anything here Monarch would have it by now,” he said. “They shot up a university. They’re not going to think much of a little breaking and entering.”
Jack had walked along this hall every morning at 5:00 A.M., then down the stairs, the low sun painfully bright through the windows as he padded to the kitchen, bare feet on cold floor. He’d fire up the stovetop, prep breakfast for two. Cereal. Coffee. Toast. Eggs. Will’s would go in the microwave, to wait for when he woke up in a few hours.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you hear anything I just said?”
“Uh…” He blinked hard, smelling scrambled eggs. “Sorry. No.”
“Monarch had Will under surveillance for a few years, but by then he had moved or destroyed most of his work. He kept nothing Monarch would be interested in.”
“They got everything they wanted out of Will.”
“Will designed more than a time machine. He pioneered an entire field of science.”
“A field that was universally discredited, yeah, I know. It’s how we almost lost the house.”
“It was intentionally discredited. Your brother was an unusual dude, but he wasn’t wrong about much. It’s essential to Paul’s plans that nobody else has this technology—or even gets curious about it. Monarch’s very effective. Shit, they managed to get a constitutional amendment passed allowing their paramilitary to operate inside our national border. They’ve insinuated the company into the fabric of pretty much everything that’s holding society together: medical, technology, weapons, charity, city planning, national policy. Freaking child care.”
Child care. “What do you mean you’ve been training for this since you were eight?”
She shook her head. “When Paul went through the machine last night, he went to the end of time, but not for good. Eventually he went back to 1999. That’s seventeen years in the past. The young man you knew lived every one of those years, right up to this point. So understand: Paul has those seventeen years on you now. Seventeen years of getting good with the powers he has, plus foreknowledge of the future has gotta be how Monarch rose so quickly.”
“And you knew all this six years ago. That’s why you were here. But why get involved with me?”
“Was this your room?”
“Uh…” Oh shit. “Yeah, but there’s nothing in there that—”
“You haven’t been here in six years. You have no idea what could be in there.”
“Wait, there’s really nothing…”
Beth turned the handle and swung the door wide. It thunked hollowly against the wall. “Well,” she said. “This is a development.”
“I liked that show. So did you.”
“We both know that’s not what I’m referring to.”
The bedroom was a cozy affair, small, with a single picture-book window looking out over the back garden and the tree line beyond. A slim bookcase held novels, a lot of them with Dewey decimal system stickers on the spines. As a kid Jack had gotten a lot of his reading material from library clearances and secondhand stores. Leaning against the weathered spines were action figures of the two of the four main Team Outland characters, the plastic turning yellow with age. “September,” the thin sniper guy, and the Team’s cute pink-haired hacker.
Beneath the window was Jack’s childhood bed, neatly made and topped with a Team Outland comforter. Pink, featuring Digit—the hacker—winking and giving an ostentatious two-handed “time out” signal. Time Out. T.O. Team Outland. There was always some message at the end of each episode about being true to yourself, taking time to think, or something.
“I still say she was the best member of the team,” Jack said, defensively.
“How did I never see this room?”
“She had smarts. She was funny. The others just swaggered and got a free pass.”
“So defensive. Gimme a skinny weirdo with a sniper rifle any day. September got all the best lines.”
“She may be the reason I make bad decisions about redheads.”
Beth cocked her hip and did a spot-on Digit impression: “Time out! Think before you act!” Wink.
“Gross,” Jack said.
Will’s old stuff had invaded corners of Jack’s room. Cabinets, coffee cans full of receipts, Post-it notes rubber-banded together with dates and labels. Stacks of Carl Sagan VHS tapes. Abstract models of things that could have been molecules made out of toy store construction kits. A twelve-sided sphere weighing down a stack of handwritten papers. Polaroids of laboratories, labeled with the names of South American universities. Jack didn’t remember any of that stuff.
He wandered over, picked up the sphere, turned it over in his hands. The papers beneath it had hand-drawn representations of it, and screeds of calculations.
“So you liked September,” Jack said.
“Huh?”
“The skinny weirdo with the sniper rifle.” Jack put down the sphere. Flipped through the photos.
“Oh, yeah, of course. He was lean, wore a lot of black, had that cool voice…”
A couple of photos looked like shots of a laser focusing on a tiny lead ball bearing. He put them back with the rest of the junk.
“… did things solo,” Jack finished for her, “nobody knew where he came from, vanished all the time, turned up at the last minute…”
“Hey, don’t be glum, chum. September may have been a loner oddball with a thin backstory but he got shit done, right? Pretty soon you’re going to appreciate what a valuable character trait that is.”
Jack wasn’t having any of it. It had been six years. Twenty thousand road miles. Fear. Grief.
She touched his hand. The contact was shocking. “Hey. I was Zed. I am Beth. If I could have spared you pain I would have. In fact, more than a few times, I did.”
Man, she had great eyes.
“C’mon, your brother was no ding-dong. There has to be something Monarch didn’t get a look at. Holy crap is that you?” Beth made a beeline for a stack of boxes in the corner, on the top of which was a framed black-and-white of the whole family. All four of them. Jack must have been about eight when it was taken. “Nice haircut.”
“Mom had a thing for Paul McCartney.”
She put the picture back where she found it. “Will went through a real Manchester phase, huh?”
“He was different back then. Before our parents died. More connected. Funny, even.”
“Their deaths hit him hard?”
“I don’t think it was the loss that snapped him. I think it was knowing that he was going to take everything they had built and spend it on his bullsh
it experiments. Like some sad addict who couldn’t help himself.”
“And then you found out.”
“A couple years later.”
“And you left Riverport.” She looked at him, choosing her words. “But the experiments, they weren’t bullshit, were they?”
This was difficult. He hated how well he thought he knew her, while accepting that he knew her not at all. “Why are you here?”
“The end of time is coming, Jack. The training, the travel, the people in Arizona … meeting you … it was all so that I could be here and do some good. I’ve said and done all the right things. I’m inside Monarch. I’m in place. I’m ready.”
The answer seemed foregone. “So, you’re from the future?”
Again that tight Bruce Willis smile. “Not yet.”
12
A few years back Will had claimed the attic as an office, the place he went to compose his articles and correspondence. Now it was mainly cardboard boxes full of nostalgic miscellanea that neither brother was able to discard.
Jack flipped one loose lid, peered inside: more papers. “There’s more stuff here than I remember.”
“Interesting.” Beth forged a path farther into the confusion of plastic crates, garbage bags, and removal-company boxes.
“How long have you been with Monarch?”
“Four years. I’m a little below mid-level. Tried out for their chronon operative program. You met a few of them at the university. I got through all of the training then tanked at the end.”
Jack frowned at this. “You…?”
“On purpose. I wanted the training, but not to be locked down to a specialist unit. Better to be underestimated and filed as generic. More room to move without being noticed.”
There was a single cot and a small writing desk with a cheap twelve-inch flat-screen bolted to the wall above it. An old-style Bakelite phone with a coiled cord hung on the wall. Maybe Will had started spending nights here.
“Ever done anything you … regret?”
“No. I’m very good at not being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Jack thought of Aberfoyle’s last moments. I believe in cause and effect.
“Which is why I’m not sweating Monarch’s interest in you yet.” Beth stepped around the rotting carcass of a recliner stacked with bundled printouts. “Does anything look out of place to you?”
Jack ran his eyes over ordered stacks of boxes, sloughing heaps of clothes-filled garbage bags. “Mr. Squishy.”
“Pardon?”
Jack waded sideways past knee-high stacks of Scientific American to fetch a fading toy elephant from the top of a corner stack of boxes. “Dad won him at a county fair when I was, like, six? I carried him around the house for years. Will used to say, ‘Squish knows all Jack’s secrets.’”
Beth blinked, made her way back, and started rapping the boxes top to bottom. Tap tap. Tap tap. Tap tap. Nothing special. She booted the bottom one with her foot. It had all the give of a concrete block. “That one.”
Together they tossed the top three boxes aside and tore open the lid of the fourth. Slotted neatly inside was what could only be the flat, hard, gunmetal-gray top of a …
“Safe.” Beth tore the box away. Short, even-sided, manual combination lock. “B-rated. Less than three hundred bucks from Home Depot. Get me a drill and I think I can crack this.”
“Seriously?”
“YouTube.”
“We kept a lot of that stuff in the barn. Sit tight, I’ll grab it.”
Beth waved him off. She removed a bulky, palm-sized device from her pocket, checked the power on it. “I got it. Look around, see what else you can find.”
Jack gestured to the hunk of black technology in her hand. “What’s that?”
“Business. Be right back.”
And, just like that, Jack found himself alone and outflanked by battalions of forgotten details in allegiance to a history he had tried to forget.
* * *
The muscles in Martin Hatch’s jaw were flexing. “I must insist,” he said once more. “Let me give the order. It can be done quickly and quietly.”
Paul extended a leather-gloved hand. A waiting operative handed him his handgun and rig. “I saw many futures for William Joyce, most of them featured him doing harm to our cause. He had to die. The path we are on now does not feature Jack being an immediate concern. There is time.”
Martin wasn’t having it. “We both know that a motivated individual conditionally exempt from the laws of causality possesses enormous potential for harm to this company—on a timeline of any length. One word from you and that variable is forever removed.”
Paul pulled on the remaining glove, concealing the light of his flesh and flexed his strange, aching hand.
Martin pressed his point. “Eliminating Joyce is an act of conscientious diligence, not only to our shareholders, but to our species. We are ten minutes from midnight, Paul Serene.”
Paul slung the shoulder rig, zipped his light woolen sweater, and shrugged into a calfskin driving coat. “No. We have attempted time and again to replicate my condition. Time and again: failure. Dr. Kim—that poor howling bastard—represents what we have condemned each one of our test subjects to becoming. Yet here is Jack, intact, sound of mind and body, manipulating time as freely as I do. We cannot simply have him killed, Martin.”
An operative pulled the van’s door aside, letting in brisk morning air.
“Not before better options have been expended.”
* * *
Inside the front door of the house Beth took a breath, focused, and moved briskly out and down the steps at a tripping gait, eyes scanning the tree line. The barn was unlocked. Once inside she double-checked the device in her hand. It was a two-inch-diameter polyurethane ball attached to a cell-phone-sized brick of tech with a one-inch monochrome display. She powered it up, cycled down the five-option menu to DISPLAY, and the screen flicked over to a white-on-black central dot. A single white-light clock-hand swung 360 degrees around the dot and vanished: the unit seemed calibrated.
She checked her watch, then scooted up the ladder to the hayloft. The hayloft doors that faced the house and the tree line beyond were closed. Sure enough the wall on either side of the hayloft doors held a few shelves, the shelves containing tools.
Beth ignored all of them and went for the hunting rifle.
* * *
Cross-legged in the dust, Jack stared at the safe. Then he looked at the towering stacks of his past. Then he looked at the stuffed elephant in his hand.
“You wanted me to find this,” he said. “What combination would you have used? What combination would you have thought I’d know you’d use?” The elephant had no answers. Jack checked his watch. He had been here for two hours. He had to go. Then, halfway to rising, he chose to sit back down. Maybe the past had something to say. “If you want to show me, show me.”
Nothing. Just dusty light and the smell of rat bait and mothballs.
Then, just as he was about to leave, the light changed. The sun through the window sank below the eastern horizon, the attic interior cycling light-to-dark over and over, faster and faster, and then …
A man came into the attic, closing the hatch behind him. Jack heard something being placed on the writing desk, the sound of two latches popping. Papers. Two latches clicking shut.
A body pushed its way toward the safe and then Will was crouching beside Jack, peering at the tumbler, rubber-banded files in his hand. “Five left,” he whispered. “Twenty-seven right…”
“Ninety left,” Jack finished for him. “My birth date.”
The safe cranked open and Will vanished.
* * *
Beth had a roll of black plastic tape in the pocket of her fatigues. Laying the rifle on the boards she placed the ball-and-box device as flush as possible against the rifle’s frame—the device’s LED screen facing toward the stock, the ball toward the barrel—and started looping the tape around the body. It held okay bu
t the thing really needed a custom mount or a Picatinny rail. This was just messy.
Beth placed a can of nails on an old camp chair, moved it to just in front of the hayloft doors, and rested the rifle on it with the ball-sensor facing toward the closed wooden doors. She checked her watch and waited.
* * *
The file inside the safe was thin, unimpressive. It contained paperwork. Property. H. G. Wells owned a swimming hall. Inside the folder was taped a single key.
That wasn’t what got Jack’s attention. Jack put the property folder back in the safe and examined a two-page document with the alarming heading of PANIC BUTTONS.
Jack scanned it quickly.
Locations: Attic, kitchen, Jack’s bedroom.
Maintenance: check the seals on the jugs at least once every six (6) months. They need to be airtight. If the seals degrade the ether will dissipate.
Attic goes first. Second-floor goes sixty (60) seconds later. If second floor fails expect the attic to collapse into the second floor after about twenty minutes.
Sensitive materials to be packed closest to the jugs in attic and Jack’s room to ensure vaporization.
Jack sat with that for a while. Then he looked to the four corners of the attic. Crap and junk were piled into all the corners. He picked up Squish, got to his feet, and investigated the farthest corner, the one stacked with document boxes. He pulled them aside, made his way through a couple of layers, and was rewarded with the sight of something that made him take a step back.
Hiding beneath it all was a glass jug—just a gallon—sitting flush against the wall with what looked like a pipe bomb lashed to it with fraying old duct tape. The gallon was full to the brim with a clear liquid and stoppered with caulk. A thick green wire led from the bomb and down through a crack in the dusty floorboards.
On the wooden shelf above the device was a folder. On the cover was a hand-drawn rendering of the twelve-sided sphere Jack had seen in his bedroom.
Jack’s phone bleeped, causing him to flinch violently. “Fuck me.” The name on the screen was NICK (CAB).
He rested Squish on the topmost box and was about to take the call when something within him pulsed. The feeling was new yet familiar. He had felt it hours prior, before the first stutter had hit. “Nick?”