Dispersion: Book Two of the Recursion Event Saga

by Brian J. Walton

  Vic only shakes his head, his eyes searching.

  “You still haven’t said what you want me for.”

  He looks up at me and nods. “That’s right. You and me, we’re going to walk Phaedrus out of that Station and let him escape.”

  I look from Vic to the two unconscious ISD spooks. “You’re trying to stop her. She wants to kill him and you’re trying to stop her. Why do you think I would help you do that?”

  Vic leans forward, his eyes narrowed. “Because right now, your father is down there in that ISD Station.”

  He lets that sink in.

  “You asked me if you could trust Jane. Here’s what I think,” he takes a breath. “I’ve loved Jane as both a sister, and a daughter. I’m closer to her than anyone I’ve ever known, even my own parents. I think you can trust Jane as much as you can trust any eighteen-year-old who has been through more than anyone should ever have to go through. She’s been ruined and now she wants to watch the world suffer for it. Fine. But Jane is also not like most eighteen-year-old girls. She’s a girl out of time. And wherever she goes, time is going to wrap around her like a little whirlwind, drawing people like you and Jim into the storm. But with what she’s got planned tonight… she’s going to turn that whirlwind into hurricane.”

  “That’s the plan,” I say. “She knows what she’s doing.”

  Vic shakes his head. “She’s not going to get what she wants.”

  “If she kills Phaedrus, he never kidnaps her. She’s not a girl ‘lost in time’ anymore.”

  “No,” Vic says. “It doesn’t work that way. And you don’t know this, but I’ve told her the same thing a hundred times. Hell, a thousand times. The past doesn’t want to be changed. If she kills Phaedrus, it’s not like there will be some flash and the sky and we’ll all end up back where we started. It’s not like the movies. We’ll keep going on. All of us. And history will simply reform around us. The universe knows how to deal with contradictions, kid. And sometimes it deals with them by just letting them be.”

  “Like that town in France,” I say. “The one that never heard of the war.”

  “We’re all going to keep going on, just like that town.”

  “Shit.”

  Vic nods.

  I run a hand through my hair, then look up at Vic. “So, maybe none of it changes. She still gets vengeance. We’ve all got a reason to want to hurt Phaedrus and the ISD. What gives you the right to take this from her? From us?”

  Vic looks down for a moment, then back up at me. “You have no idea what we’re capable of.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

  Vic hesitates. “If I tell you this, you have to swear to me that you will take it to your grave. Do you swear?”

  I look at him, deep into his eyes, past that horrible scar. I see honesty there. I nod my assent.

  “You must know by now how Molly became part of the ISD.”

  “It was in one of the film reels,” I say. “In one of Jane’s therapy sessions with Aleisha.”

  This takes Vic by surprise. “Jesus, they filmed those sessions.” He shakes his head. “Well, you know that she was a in a car accident. She and her husband were forced off a bridge into the East River and Molly was sucked into a tunnel.”

  I nod.

  “Here’s what you don’t know. What Jane doesn’t know. What Molly doesn’t know. We caused her car to crash that night.”

  I hesitate. “The ISD?”

  Vic nods.

  “We knew she was different. We didn’t know how or why, but we could tell. And the best way to watch her was to recruit her. And that’s how we did it.”

  “What the fuck…” I mutter.

  Vic nods. “That’s how we recruit people from time to time. If someone is supposed to die, we can… fake it. If you make people believe that person is dead, then you can avoid a Recursion Event. Molly was supposed to die that night.”

  I shake my head.

  Vic leans forward, his face earnest. “I know it sounds messed up. But this is what you have to know. When Molly grabbed Jane’s hand back in 1955 and created that Recursion Event, it changed more things than we’ve ever seen. Do you want to know what I’ve been doing these last few years?”

  I hesitate, then nod. “I found Molly.”

  “The Molly from 1955?” I ask.

  “That’s right,” Vic says. “I found where she ended up. She’s dying, you know. Fading out of existence. The more Jane moves away from the life she was supposed to lead, the more Molly fades away. She can be an anomaly, but it won’t last forever. The only way to let that Molly live—the only hope we have of fixing this—is to take Jane home.”

  “I thought that was impossible,” I say.

  “It’s not,” Vic says. “We can’t change everything. She’ll still have been missing this whole time. But I’ve found a way to get her back. I just need your help.”

  I think back to the film reels I watched. The hours of interviews. She had talked about the crash at length. There were two things she clearly believed: that it was an accident, and that her husband was dead. “Did her husband—did Jim really die in that crash?”

  Vic closes his eyes, then shakes his head slowly. “No.”

  I lean back against the side of the van, regarding Vic. He stares back at me, eyes cold and unblinking. The eyes of a killer. Could I refuse him even if I wanted to? I close my eyes and breathe. The world slowly fades around me and the ironies of the past night—hell, the past week—come into a sharp focus. Just as I had become intent on facing the reality of what my father had done to me, that chance was snatched from my grasp in a random pick of the cards. But now that chance was back again. And my father? Here? I open my eyes.

  But I couldn’t do this for myself. I had made promises, after all.

  “You think this is best for Jane?”

  “I want nothing less for her,” Vic in a low whisper.

  I turn and look at the two spooks lying on the ground. Both have stopped twitching. They look almost dead.

  God help me…

  I turn to Vic. “Let’s do this.”

  “Good, now come over here.” Vic gestures for me to join him next to the first spook’s body. “Place your hand in the neural hijacker, like so.”

  He demonstrates for me, then removes his hand. I take in a breath and lean down, fitting my hand into device. It fits like a glove. I wait, bracing myself for, well, anything. “Nothing’s happening.” I say.

  “Let me see.” Vic kneels down and guides my hand further into the contraption.

  “Should I give it a whack?” I say, and then something sharp presses into my palm

  An explosion of lights across my vision. An invading presence floods my body. A terrible noise. A breaking of reality. A thunder. A fury. An expansion of vision. My god, my god, my god, my—

  I open my eyes and see my eyes looking back at me.

  My prone body lies slumped against the side of the van, and I am no longer myself. Vic reaches down, closing my—his—it’s eyelids.

  I look down at this strange new body. The skin is darker than my own. Well trimmed nails. The suit feels more comfortable than it looks. But everything feels disconnected, foggy, distant. Like an unclear television signal.

  “This feels weird,” I say.

  Vic removes the device from it’s—his—my hand. “That’s normal,” he says. “It’s an imperfect connection. But just so you know, there is now a microchip implanted at the base of your palm just under your thumb that won’t even be recognizable technology for another eighty years or so.”

  I feel my pulse raise, beating through unfamiliar veins. “This isn’t right,” I say.

  Vic slips his hand into the contraption like a glove. He glances at me and gives nod. “You’re right. As far as I’m concerned, this technology may be one of the worse things that our future comes up with. Second maybe to the tunnels themselves. But sometimes you’ve gotta fight fire with fire.”

  He puts his glo
ved hand around the second spook’s head. His eyes roll back. Vic’s body jerks. Every limb begins to shake.

  “Vic!” I shout, my voice sounding strange in my ears. Was this what happened to me? I don’t remember. Pain still throbs through my head.

  Vic’s body jerks. I stumble forward, grabbing him as he slumps over, unconscious. And then, as if shocked awake, the ISD agent opens his eyes.

  I stifle a shout and stumble backwards against the side of the van.

  “It’s okay,” the agent says. “It’s me. It’s Vic.”

  “Oh hell,” I gasp. “How could you ever get used to that?”

  “You don’t,” Vic says.

  An ISD field agent’s choice of car in 1974, I’m disappointment to find out, is a Ford Pinto. Vic pulls his van off the road and backs it up behind a cluster of trees, parking it next to the ISD agent’s car.

  Vic glances at me. It’s eerie as hell seeing him in another man’s face. I look in the side mirror. Even eerier is seeing my own face. It’s a narrow face. Clean shaven with close-set eyes. His eyesight is better than my own as well.

  I turn to face the back of the van. Our bodies are laid out the floor of the van. A neural hijacker—odd, how quickly I’ve taken on the lingo—is still wrapped around each of our hands.

  “Will we be okay like this?” I ask.

  Vic looks back as well. “Should be, as long as I can make it back to the van before morning.” He pauses. “If I can’t, then we’ve got bigger problems.” Vic takes off his seatbelt and turns to me. Come on.”

  We get out of the van and climb into the agent’s Ford Pinto, Vic behind the wheel and myself in the passenger’s seat.

  The clock on the dash reads 9:34. Longdale, Jim, and Connie would be coming back to the cabin soon, if they haven’t already.

  Vic starts the car and pulls out onto the dark mountain road. I crack the window, needing air. “So, what’s the plan?” I ask.

  The car roars as Vic lays on the gas pedal. Patches of snow, scrubby bushes, and the twisted silhouettes of old California Live Oak trees blur past us.

  “Phaedrus’ short detainment at the LA Station is very well known by ISD agents. He was the first Interloper we had captured that we verified was not from our time. But what people remember the most is how he escaped.”

  “How did that happen?” I ask.

  “Phaedrus was brought into the LA station late on the 16th. He was detained and questioned over night. By morning he was gone.

  ‘Gone” I ask.

  “Jesus,” Vic mutters and shakes his head. “How do you make a plan when you know absolution nothing.”

  I glare at him. “Are you going to answer my question or not?”

  “The next morning, Phaedrus was walked out of there by one of the agents, in plain view of security. It was agency lore for decades. Still is. The agent who walked him out was found days after, wandering around in the mountains asking people what year it was and saying that he couldn’t remember his own name. No one had a clue how this guy did it. But now that I know about the neural hijackers, I’m guessing that’s what he used.”

  “The ISD agents who brought him in would have searched him.”

  “That’s right,” Vic takes a turn in the road at high speeds and I clutch at the seat’s armrest. “Which means?”

  I roll up the window to block out the roar of the wind. “It means he had help.”

  “And it clearly wasn’t the agent that walked him out of there.”

  “So who was it?” I ask.

  Vic raises an eyebrow in my direction.

  “What, me? I’m going to walk him out of there?”

  “Ha!” Vic barks out a laugh. “I’ll take care of him. I wouldn’t let you near that guy, no offense.”

  “But it wasn’t you that did it before,” I say. “You said yourself that you weren’t there.”

  Vic shakes his head. “Do I look like myself right now? Do either of us?”

  I shake my head, feeling stunned. “But what if you’re wrong. What if there’s someone else there. One of this Phaedrus’s agents? You said the past doesn’t want to change.”

  “You’re right. The past doesn’t want to change, but pieces can be interchangeable. Let’s say that you’re meant to die tonight.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  “It’s just an example. So, you’re meant to die. The thing is, anyone can pull the trigger. The when and how of your death don’t matter nearly as much to the universe as the outcome. If you were supposed to die in a car accident, but the ISD needed intel from you, we could apprehend you, get our intel, and arrange for the car crash to happen the next day.”

  “Arrange?” I say.

  Vic glances over at me. “We rarely do that.”

  “I don’t find that comforting.”

  We come to a break in the trees and, for a moment, the San Bernardino Valley is spread below us. Lights glittering more abundantly than the stars in the sky. The lights stream past behind Vic as he continues to speak. “Maybe it was someone else. Maybe he has one of his own people in there. Or… maybe it was always supposed to be us. In the end, it doesn’t matter. You can’t put a square peg into a round hole, right?

  “Right,” I say.

  But if you see that hole is round, you can go make yourself into a round peg.”

  “We’re the round pegs?” I ask.

  “That’s right,” Vic says.

  “Okay, so you’ll take care of Phaedrus. But what do I do?”

  “You’ll have to get Jane and the others out of there.”

  “And go where?” I ask.

  The reservoir comes suddenly into view. Unlike Lake Arrowhead, Silverwood Lake Reservoir is all state land, surrounded by campgrounds and public swimming area.

  Take this road back to the cabin, but stop at the first cabin and move back into the trees. Go to the first house you can find and call the police. Say your car was stolen. Just give them the description of the car you actually used to drive up here.”

  “That won’t work. That car is back at the house, which is now a smoldering wreck.”

  “The car isn’t there,” Vic says.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I rolled it into the lake before I came in looking for you.”

  I turn in my seat. “Why the hell did you do that?”

  Vic shakes his head. “If we want to get you all back safely, a stolen car story is a hell of a lot more plausible than anything else you’re likely to come up with.”

  “Huh,” I say. “It must take a profoundly disturbed mind to decide that rolling a car into a lake is the simplest possible solution to a problem.”

  “Don’t ever question me again,” Vic responds.

  Vic turns onto a gravel road that winds down along the side of the dam. I had just been here a few hours before, dropping off Jane, Vance, Quincy and Aleisha. Now I’m going after them with a man who, only a few days ago, had made promises to kill me under no uncertain conditions. Our plan is to infiltrate one of the United States Government’s most secretive bases and escort an insurgent from the future outside to safety and freedom.

  How the hell did I get here?

  We stop at a low, concrete building with a small parking lot in front. There are a handful of cars there.

  “Here we go,” I mutter.

  Vic and I climb out. A security guard strolls over to us. Vic reaches into his pocket and pulls out an ID badge. He glances at me and I do the same. The guard shines his flashlight at our badges and nods.

  “Getting cold out here, huh?” The guard says, making chit-chat.

  “I never much minded the cold,” says Vic.

  The guard leads us into the building, which is set up against the wall of the dam. There is a single elevator door. Vic presses the button and it opens immediately.

  “Have a good night,” Vic says to the guard, The man grunts a response before returning to his desk.

  We step inside the elevator and the doors close behind us.

&nb
sp; I look down at the elevator’s panel. There are only two buttons. Up and down.

  Vic starts by hitting the down button twice, three presses of the up button, and two more presses of the down button.

  The elevator lurches. But instead of going up, it begins a slow, rumbling crawl downward.

  February 17

  White rooms with padded walls. Well, the walls aren’t actually padded, but that would be an improvement. I lean back in the chair letting my head fall against the hard concrete for the hundredth time. It has hurt slightly more with each impact, but the experiment will be to see how long I can continue this without blacking out. I knock my head against the concrete again, this time seeing an array of stars flashing into my vision. But I still have consciousness. It’s the little things in life, really.

  “Would you stop that?” Vic whispers.

  “How long are we going to be in here?” I whisper back.

  “As long as we need to be.”

  I look down at my watch. 12:43 AM. It’s been at least two hours since the elevator ride down into the base below the dam.

  I had expected to see a massive room full of control panels and crowded with people, much like Jane had described it to us from her dreams. Instead, the elevator opened up to a long white hallway with a desk at the end and bored soldier who told us to wait in the adjoining room. And so here we wait.

  “Do they always keep you waiting like this?” I ask.

  “You wait for the word,” Vic says quietly.

  I lean my head back on the wall, but this time I feel something different. “Do you feel that?”

  “Feel what?” Vic asks.

  I turn, pressing my hand flat against the wall. “Vibrations.”

  “That’s probably just the water intake in the pipes,” Vic mutters. But the look in his eyes make his statement less convincing.

  An open door on the opposite side of the room leads back into the hallway where we had come from. A soldier is stationed there behind a desk. He has a ledger open in front of him and is carefully making entries.

  Another tremor moves through the concrete structure. I glance over at Vic, expectantly. But he doesn’t respond. Turning, I make eye contact with the soldier stationed on the other side of the doorway. He is surveying the structure as well, a concerned look in his eye.