by Cam Rogers
“I know you have feelings for that girl over there, but she’s gone. Love the memory. Okay?”
He really did.
Beth’s phone chirruped. Onscreen was a message. It was from William Joyce. It read: COMPLETED.
Jack said, “It’s happening.”
At Bannerman’s Overlook, Zed pointed to the horizon.
The first building went up in flames.
19
Sunday, 4 July 2010. 7:23 A.M. Riverport, Massachusetts.
Beth drove, her notebook propped on the dash, her phone nestled in the crook of her shoulder.
“I’d like to report a suspicious vehicle. Bannerman’s Overlook. I heard gunshots, and then a black town car tore right past me. Well, I believe I saw bullet holes in it. Yes, ma’am. As a matter of fact I did, yes. Do you have a pen?” Beth rattled off the license plate of Aberfoyle’s town car, and then hung up before the operator could ask for her details.
“I could murder for a frozen lemonade and a stuffie.”
“It’s seven A.M., for Christ’s sake.”
“Can’t get ’em in Future Riverport.”
“If your cash was printed after 2010 it’s effectively counterfeit.”
“It’s 2010, they don’t check.”
“What we’re doing is heading back to my place, sanitizing it, and then we’re going home to 2016.”
“Beth, we’re clear. Let’s take one last look around—enjoy it.”
“This might be novel for you, kiddo, but I’m done.”
* * *
The woods embraced the Joyce family home, the eastern fence line being the only side open to the world. Beth drove them to the southern perimeter, the side facing away from Riverport. The mesh fence on that side had a section that could be pulled aside. She drove the car through the gap, swept the grass upright behind her, and rolled the mesh back in place, clipping it shut.
There was a dip in the land into which she nestled the car, and a mess of camouflage netting that she threw over the top.
“Come on, this way.”
This was all Joyce land. Back in ’99 she had identified the best place for her to build a place to live while still being able to keep an eye on the house: a spot deep in the woods, but on enough of a rise that she had a good view of the property, and close enough that she could get there in a minute or two at a dead run.
A few trees had been felled strategically, and she’d limited her construction hours to when young Jack wasn’t home.
“Welcome to where the magic happens.”
At first glance he didn’t know what Beth meant. Then he realized he was looking at a shelter so well camouflaged it was almost invisible against the side of the small outcrop against which it was built. The shelter had a wide-but-narrow frontage made of pine logs, wattle, and daub. Beth flipped a latch and pulled open a handmade door camouflaged with greenery, scraping up earth and needles as it opened.
The interior was beautiful, dug into the side of the hill. The room was about thirty feet long, paved with stones that had been carefully selected for their flatness. The left wall had a long bench before a window that ran the full length of the room. Beth propped the window upward and open with a length of timber. Against the right wall was a raised stone shelf, insulated with foam matting, atop which was her bed: a good mattress, thick with covers. She had fashioned a simple four-cornered frame that she could drape mosquito netting over for the summer months.
“Paul and I used to play here,” he said. “Well, we never came in. We were scared shitless.”
“The witch in the woods,” she said. “I know. You two weren’t as quiet as you thought you were.”
“Will warned me off. Grounded me once because I wouldn’t stop poking around here.” His chest ached. “The whole time it was you.”
The sight of her bed and the earthy, floral scents of the place made his heart hurt. How many thousands of nights had she lain down here, waiting to catch up to the future? What had life meant for her here, day after day?
“Come on,” she said. “I need this place stripped and burned. Tools and such in the drawer under the bed.” Beth opened the door on the right and stepped inside. He heard gear being moved around.
A long recess was dug into the wall, home to books, a glass of water, candles. The walls were wooden on all sides. Jack noticed electricity outlets, a space heater, and against the far wall was a small fireplace and opening. A couple of colorful rugs lined the floor, a broom by the door. On the right wall, adjacent to the fireplace, was a door—leading farther into the earth.
Through the now-open window hatch on his left he had a panoramic view of the woods, sloping downward toward the south side of the house: greenhouse, garage, barn. He wondered if Will was there now.
Crouching by the bed he lifted the soft, floral covers, finding the large drawer built into the base of the shelf. Inside was a red metal tool chest, which he hefted out. Something hanging from the bed frame caught his eye as he prepared to lift the chest onto the bench behind him.
Hanging from the canopy, above the pillow, was a silver bullet on a long, thin chain. Leaving the tool kit on the rug, Jack stood up and cupped the bullet in one hand. She had inscribed it with a collection of scratches: two sets of four vertical strokes and one cross-stroke, and one single vertical stroke. Eleven. Marking off the years as she did her time here.
He rotated the bullet. She had inscribed the casing again, beneath the marks, with a single word: “Trouble.”
“I borrowed a metal detector.” She was standing by the fireplace with a gym bag in one hand. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”
He didn’t know if he was feeling joy or grief. “Why not?”
“Because it’ll make what happens next harder than it needs to be.” She put the bag down, crossed the room, and took the bullet from him, unlooping it from the frame.
* * *
It had been quick work to dismantle her home. All of the wood, rugs, curtains, netting, sacking, anything flammable they piled in a nearby clearing. Jack doused the collection in gasoline. Beth tossed the match. As they watched it burn, she reached and took his hand in hers.
“Is this what you did the first time? In 2010?” he asked.
“First rule of a good disappearance,” she said. “Zed’s burning her gear right now, at her place, which your past self will discover in about an hour.”
“Why didn’t you want me to see the bullet?”
She looked him in the eye. “When I was Zed … I never saw my future self after today. So—”
“So it means everything goes to plan. We get the Countermeasure and leave.”
“Maybe. But we need your head squarely in the game. The Countermeasure makes it to 2016. Nothing else matters.”
“Not to me.”
“Jack…”
“Knowing you changed my life. You showed me what life could be. That I could change things. I loved you for that.” He shrugged. “Take that away, that’s when nothing matters.”
Sunday, 4 July 2010. 10:10 A.M. Riverport dockyard.
“Are you sure this is all just ‘playing safe’?” Jack wore Kevlar beneath his shirt and jacket, a 2016-era Monarch-issued assault carbine slung from his shoulder. Beth was decked out paramilitary; also Monarch-issued.
A tanked shipbuilding industry meant 2010 prices for dockside real estate were mighty low. That’s how Will was able to buy and outfit a workshop for himself, away from the house and without Jack’s knowledge.
Jack and Beth were two doors down from that workshop. Parked between two large warehouses, Jack had heard his past self tear up on his motorcycle, throw open the workshop door, and immediately start shouting at Will. Accusations of stupidity, irresponsibility, neglect. Theft.
This was happening in the hour before past Jack found Zed gone and pointed his motorcycle toward the nearest Greyhound station, in the futile hope of finding her again: the beginning of a meandering four-year quest for answers.
Now Beth was besi
de him, leaning against the cooling hood of the car with a carbine in her hand, waiting for the final moments of that quest to run out.
Jack could hear his brother feebly defending himself, caught red-handed, surrounded by everything family money had bought.
There came sounds of violence: Jack remembered picking up a chair, smashing it into whatever he could find. Will shouting no no no.
He remembered an object that Will had made: a geometric sphere about the size of a volleyball. Something about the workshop told Jack that this was what all the money had gone into. So he had taken to it with a chair, smashed it once, twice …
“Stop! You’re killing the universe! Stop! St—!”
Jack’s nails bit into his palms. That was the moment his past self had punched Will in the face. Will’s dumbfounded expression—baffled, hurt, childlike—stayed with Jack for years. And then Jack had left.
Jack and Beth heard the motorcycle kick to life. Seconds later, Jack’s past self roared past the alley in which they were parked, heading for Zed’s place.
“Wait,” Jack said.
Beth stopped, threw a questioning look.
Will called Jack’s name, heartbroken. Then the sound of a car starting, and Jack caught a glimpse of his brother as he drove past.
That would be the last time he would see Will alive.
“You okay?”
He wasn’t ready to say anything. Just needed a second.
“Remember what I showed you by the river, with the revolver? I couldn’t die because it wasn’t my time, and you couldn’t have said anything to Will that would have—”
“Enough,” Jack said. “Let’s go.”
The warehouse was no small affair: two stories tall and three times the size of the family home. Beth had a key for the front door, and pulled the ten-foot-high rolling mass of steel aside. It led into a smaller anteroom with a security door. Beth punched in the code, and the lock popped.
“My birth date?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Jesus, Will. Security.”
They moved inside. They took no more than a few steps before having to stop.
The majesty of Will’s workshop made Jack believe in his brother’s genius in much the same way that Notre Dame de Paris had made twelfth-century peasants believe in God. Vast and complex, everything with a purpose, the workshop was a meticulously ordered warren of raw technology. Jack appreciated the inner workings of that place as much as he could the inner workings of a person: the incomprehensibility was as unsettling as it was astounding.
Above and around: wonder. At his feet a spray of smaller items scattered across the floor, the smashed body of a laptop—evidence of the furious violence Jack remembered inflicting.
Directly in front of them was a glass chamber, thirty feet a side, atop a three-foot-high square platform beneath which was buried a jumble of heavy-duty technology. A canopy of wires and cabling attached the transparent box to scaffolding that housed two floors of unidentifiable machinery.
The door to the box was slid aside. Inside, at the center of the glassed-in space, was a spindly stainless steel dais. Delicate upraised pincers, designed to support something delicately and precisely, held nothing. On the floor next to the dais was the chair Jack remembered using to knock a geometric sphere from the grip of those claws.
He walked around the box, checking it out from all angles. Beth trailed along behind, glancing at her watch.
The sphere—the Countermeasure—lay on the room’s insulated floor. A couple of its faces were now slightly deformed. An access panel had divorced itself from the housing.
Beth got close to the glass. “Oh Christ.”
“I didn’t know what it was.” Then: “What is it?”
“It contains a self-replenishing chronon charge powerful enough to brute-force the M-J field back into shape.”
Jack eyed the bent panels. “And what if it breaks open?”
Beth glanced at him. “Then an infinite number of your alternate selves cease to get along.” She straightened, rechecked her watch. “Catastrophically.”
She glanced at the device lying battered on the floor of the glass chamber. Something changed in her suddenly. Jack watched the tension drain from her, urgency fading.
“Beth?”
“Dr. Kim was credited with creating a self-replenishing source of power that was intended to be the heart of Project Lifeboat,” Beth mumbled. “The Regulator.”
Jack looked back into the chamber, skin flushing cold.
“Kim didn’t create the Regulator, Jack. Will did. This is it. The Countermeasure and the Regulator are the same thing.”
Something heavy thudded in the far wall: the security door was being deactivated.
“The Countermeasure doesn’t go missing because we steal it, Jack. It goes missing because they do.”
Jack grabbed her sleeve and pulled her behind the scaffolding that ran north-south between the box and the small eastern-side office.
Two people—a man and a woman—entered, the guy carrying a rubberized gym bag. With a finger on one ear the woman said, “We’re inside.”
Her counterpart muttered, “Aw no,” and moved to the open door of the box.
“Looks like the device has been damaged, Actual.”
Beth glanced at Jack and closed her eyes in despair.
Monarch.
“We can stop this,” he whispered to her.
She shook her head, frustration turning to fury. “You can’t change the past,” she hissed, softly. “It’s a fucking impossibility. We’ve lost.”
Looking through the gaps in the scaffolding, through bundles of wiring, Jack could tell the two intruders weren’t decked out in the Monarch outfits he remembered. The logo was similar but cruder, and the uniforms were cheaper, dun-colored, off-the-rack.
Jack unslung his carbine. “You want to gift wrap it for them, or are you going to help me here?”
The guy carrying the gym bag stepped into the sterile room and picked up the Countermeasure, barehanded, without precaution or ceremony. “Yeah, it’s pretty banged up.”
Beth tensed, fingers flexing on her gun. With a glance Jack understood what had to happen.
As the guy left the room with the device, Jack and Beth swept out from behind cover, weapons level.
The woman spotted them, eyes wide with shock. Beth pressed one finger to her lips. The woman screamed.
The guy, whose back was turned, leaped, saw the guns, also screamed, and ran.
The muzzle of Beth’s carbine followed him as he bolted for the door—sweeping across the woman’s head as her finger tightened.
Jack leaped in, knocked her barrel skywards with the barrel of his own, a three round burst ringing out.
Beth wheeled on him, furious.
“You can’t just shoot him!” he said.
Patience spent, Beth shouldered past the woman and out through the security door.
Bright sunlight resolved into shapes, and some of those shapes turned out to be men with guns leaning against a four-wheel-drive, startled to action by the sound of gunfire.
Beth skidded to a halt, sixty feet from them, armed, as the entire team brought their weapons up.
The guy with the gym bag kept running, straight toward them. The Monarch crew were just guys in jeans, shades, and Monarch-branded T-shirts.
The runner was in the line of fire.
The space around the four-wheel-drive snapped and froze—a shimmering dome of stuttered time.
From the doorway Jack said, “Get the Countermeasure. I’ll take care of these.”
She took off after the runner, past the security team.
Jack headed straight for the mini-stutter when a gunshot rang out and a cannonball of force took him in the torso. He hit the concrete with a disbelieving cough.
Before Jack could refill his lungs, Paul Serene was on him.
“The machine changed you, too. I knew it had.”
Paul’s face was six inches from his
own. This version of the face he knew so well was a little younger than the bastard who would kill Will in 2016.
“You’re the second you,” Paul said. “Not the one who rode away just now. You’re from 2016. Which means Will’s machine is intact. That has to be how you got here. Where is it?”
“It’s good to see you too, buddy.” He could feel the bruise forming, sharply and painfully, beneath the Kevlar, and then tickling as it quickly healed and faded.
Paul let go of Jack’s shirt. Jack noticed that both of Paul’s hands were pristine, normal … human. No sickness. So that first trip through the machine in 2016 hadn’t made him sick. What had?
“Good to see you too, Jack. I have so much I need to tell you.”
The runner had recoiled from the sight of the stutter bubble encasing the security team and kept on running. Countermeasure in hand, he pounded for the gap between the warehouses where Beth had parked the car. She didn’t like the way that gym bag was bouncing around in his hand. If the Countermeasure cracked open it’d be game over.
“Stop!” she yelled.
She raised the carbine’s barrel, cracking a warning burst over his head. The runner skidded to a stop. As he threw his hands over his head the gym bag containing the Countermeasure slipped from his fingers.
Beth recoiled, shielding her eyes as the bag hit the ground, hard.
Nothing happened.
“Stay down, Jack,” Paul said. “This’ll be over soon, and then we can talk. This is so weird, man. You won’t believe it.”
Just as suddenly Paul’s weight was off him.
Paul folded himself back into a moment, propelling himself across the open ground and past his frozen security team. In a blink Paul tore the carbine from Beth’s hands, flipped it, and jabbed her square in the forehead with the butt of her own weapon.
Beth’s head snapped back and she went down. Jack heard her cry out and began struggling to his feet, breath burning in his chest.
Behind Paul, the security team sprang back to life as Jack’s mini-stutter collapsed. Paul marched toward them, hand up, ordering them to hold fire. They were confused, but this would be a key learning experience for them. All in all, this was turning out to be a most beneficial day.