Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  “M’ not Mark,” said the woman with the smoking gun.

  Evvie goggled. How many clichés could I live through in one afternoon? Evvie thought. Barely live through — God, Gwennie!

  “W-who,” Evvie managed to stutter, and Gwennie was screaming still, furious and terrified and unable to understand, and frustrated at her own inability to articulate her terror. “W-what?”

  “The less you know, luv, the better, innit?” another voice behind Evvie added, and she turned to face it. A man this time, but he was dressed the same as the woman: all dark and durable with no loose hardware. Just tough pants, thick boots, a vest with too many pockets and straps, a blank black ball cap. No badges. No emblems. No indication of rank. Only empty Velcro fuzz where they might have sat on the top of each arm. Wind- (explosion-) blown and militaristic. Guns in hand, big and boxy. Official-looking, but without any insignia that she knew; it reminded Evvie of the Navy Seals.

  Something so (covert) dangerous they had no need to advertise.

  Their clothing freaked her out. Evvie decided to freak out as quietly as possible.

  Dry and dusty horror swept down her. She felt her cheeks get cold, the heat and adrenaline of anger and fear sliding away. Her joints seized and the bottoms of her feet itched; Evvie wanted to run, wanted to yell, wanted to cry and all she could do was stand and shake, and shake, and shake.

  Evvie tightened her grip on Gwennie and the baby didn’t seem to notice.

  The man started to lift one arm, winced, and switched to the other. He pointed at the plane-ship. “Did you see where it came from?”

  “N-no,” Evvie admitted, because she hadn’t; because she had been looking at the tired old baskets, and the thorns and the fat raspberries, now smashed and pulpy; red and black innards sprayed all over the lawn. Grotesque.

  And what the hell was it? As if real life was a movie, but nothing she had ever seen before. It was like in the commercials for that new Spielberg film with the bicycles.

  A sudden whistling sound rent the air, high and long. Silver, tinnish, dying. It hurt Evvie’s ears. They were wincing, the man and woman in black, but seemed otherwise unaffected; more concerned with catching their breath and arguing with one another than the shrill cry of the machine.

  The sound made Gwennie wave her fists and howl.

  Not happy, Mom, her squished face and watery blue eyes said. Seriously not happy.

  The air reeked in turns of burnt plastic, churned turf, and the faint, sickening tang of blood and raw meat as the wind shifted, blowing the smoke first towards and then away from the pack of too-still people. A long, thin line of blood arched over Gwennie’s smooth forehead, down her little neck. Evvie pulled her close, hiding her face, covering her ears.

  Maybe Evvie should have been more concerned about the ship, the twenty foot divot on the lawn, the noise. She wasn’t.

  Big blue baby eyes and a squall — Seriously, Mom, not happy.

  Evvie jogged her once and thought, Hush, sweetie. Let Mommy cope. We’ve nearly been killed by aliens.

  Aliens.

  There was a flying saucer in the strawberries.

  The word crashed around between her ears, echoing and squealing like icy mice.

  Aliens.

  Gwennie went silent and white, her little chest jerking with terrified gasps; something, maybe, in the tenseness of Evvie’s body as her mother clutched her close, an instinct not to fuss, not to bring attention to herself in a time of danger. But the two strangers were both staring at her anyway. The small gash on her forehead bled freely.

  The man pulled a square of gauze from the miniature first aid kit in his over-packed vest pocket. He handed it to Evvie. The kindness of the action jolted her out of her paralyzed terror, out of the vacant numbness of shock and sound.

  Evvie took the gauze. Pressed it down. Her daughter whined.

  “Oh my God,” the woman breathed, looking down at Gwennie, and why, why was Evvie suddenly struck with the thought that this woman looked familiar? The stiff soldierish facade cracked and the woman showed a real emotion for the first time, a sort of confused horror, her eyes still zeroed in on the baby.

  “I don’t get it,” the man said, without acknowledging that she had spoken. He was on a rant, too absorbed in an argument with himself to listen. It didn’t look like that surprised her. “Why?”

  Smile, Evvie thought, resisting the urge to just stare at the woman. Smile so I know who you are. I’ll know you if you just smile.

  But that was terrifying too, because who did Evvie know that could do what (kill like) this woman just had?

  “Basil — ” the woman said softly.

  “Why?” the man repeated, hands zooming around like scared birds as he tapped at something that looked like a palm-sized notebook, but had a face like a television. He gestured at Evvie, at the divot, at the sky. “Why go to all that trouble to trigger a Flash — a temporal one no less, and who knew they could do that — and, and then just…attack some random family in the middle of Nowheresville the moment you get here? I mean, if they were going back in time to, I dunno, invade the Earth or sommat before we had the technology to fight back, why balls it up by attacking some random family? Why not hide? Why not go back further? It doesn’t make sense. They’re smarter than that, the little sons of a — Kalp used to be smarter than — ”

  “It’s not random,” the woman snapped off, interrupting. “And don’t talk to me about Kalp after…” She trailed off, sucking in a breath. Scrubbed an eye with the palm of a fingerless glove, fingertips brushing along her hairline. She stopped, felt something there. Realization and cold disgust made her eyebrows caterpillar upwards. “They weren’t after the mother.”

  The mother.

  Like Evvie was a mannequin, or a chess piece.

  (Trivial.)

  “No?” Basil asked, unsure.

  He frowned, studied Evvie, his own face pale and round-eyed, with spots of colour still high on his cheeks from the exertion of shooting down the ship. He peered at her as if Evvie were vaguely familiar too, and all he needed was to get a good look.

  I know how you feel.

  Evvie tried not to roll her eyes. It took some doing.

  Mark was still in the barn with the phone. He had to be. Where was he? Had he heard any of it? Evvie’s scream? The shots? The engine, now? Had he already called the cops? Or did the thump of rotten hay falling to the floor mask every other sound? Did he hear the grinding wail of the…

  There’s a flying saucer in the strawberries.

  And finally, finally, the wailing sound began to fade, like a fan blade just unplugged still sluggishly exerting the last of its momentum. Thwip-thwip thwip…thwip…thwiii…

  Where was Mark?

  Gwennie whimpered once, mashing her face unhappily into her mother’s bicep.

  “They were after the baby, just the baby,” Basil said, realizing the truth behind what they had seen: what had happened too fast, what was too fantastic for Evvie to digest just yet. The woman got whiter.

  Evvie’s brother Gareth used to collect Asimov. But how could Evvie possibly be living it?

  Basil tapped his notebook television hard. “Why the baby? Why babies at all? Blimey, do you think they’re targeting babies?”

  “No,” the woman breathed. She took off her ball cap and crumpled it up in a white-knuckled fist. Reddish brown hair, and a tumble of unmanageable pseudo-curls — not unlike Evvie’s when the summer humidity got to it — were pulled back hastily into a clip, scrambling for freedom in all directions. The woman reached shaking fingers up, brushed the thin white scar at the edge of her hairline. On her forehead. “They’re not going after random babies.”

  She ran her nails through her hair, scratching her scalp lightly. When she hit the clip she tugged it out, angry now; she tossed it at the flying saucer. It made a sharp pinging sound where it hit the side. The engine chugged once as if in reproach, an ugly thick sound. The high-pitched whine cut
out abruptly, and Evvie felt the tension in her shoulders ratchet down a notch, fall away from her ears.

  “Dammit,” the woman hissed into the sudden, shocking silence. “They’re going after us.”

  “Us?” Basil repeated, unsure. The woman jerked her chin at the wound on Gwennie’s forehead, and touched her scar again.

  “They’re going after the Institute,” she said softly. “That’s not just a random baby, Basil. That’s me.”

  But the woman looked like she was about the same age as Evvie, so how could — but, not at all because…

  A snap somewhere in Evvie’s chest, sudden tightness in her throat because yes, yes, of course.

  That’s who she was.

  ***

  This sort of thing had never been covered by the old etiquette books. What would Miss Manners have to say about vanquished alien invaders? Meeting your own adult children decades too early? Was Evvie supposed to offer tea? Cookies?

  (Sanity?)

  Mark and Evvie had already decided not to call an ambulance; nothing was broken on either Gwennie or herself, and Gwennie’s head had stopped bleeding. Evvie’s ribs ached and her palms and knees were scraped. They stung every time she took a step or picked something up, but were otherwise ignorable. What the Piersons hadn’t agreed on, yet, was the issue of the police.

  “I’m calling the cops,” Mark said from across the kitchen table.

  “Mark,” Evvie began, but then stopped because she wasn’t entirely sure that calling the cops wasn’t an excellent idea, now that she’d had a chance to take stock of what had happened.

  “No.” Basil held out a hand. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “Take care of it how?” Mark demanded. “There’s a UFO in the backyard!”

  “We’ll bury it,” the woman who was Evvie’s baby offered. Evvie’s fingers itched to touch her, but she was occupied with baby Gwennie, and too scared that touch would make it real. “We’re way out in the country. You own this land. You won’t sell it. It flew in low; the neighbours won’t have seen it. I know that for a fact, at least. We’ll bury it.”

  “You reckon it’s as simple as that?” Mark shouted, red-faced with impotent fury.

  “Simple as that,” she said, unaffected by his anger. She was nearly insolent; practiced with his bad moods. “I’ll fetch it when I go back.”

  Evvie swallowed once. “Back? Back to the…” she said softly, clutching baby Gwennie close to her chest. She was sucking contentedly on Evvie’s knuckle, all right with the world now that she’d been hushed and patched. “Back to the future?” Evvie said the words, didn’t quite believe them, even as they came out of her own mouth. People didn’t time travel. That was not the way the world worked. Period.

  Grown-up Gwennie (Evvie’s hair, Mark’s eyes, pale like Mark’s sister) and Basil exchanged a look filled with raised eyebrows and half-hidden smirks. Had Evvie said something funny?

  “Could say that,” Basil conceded. He tapped a little more at the surface of his strange notebook. If Evvie craned her neck, she could see that he was making something happen on the screen, like changing the channel on a TV, but by touch and not with a remote. She’d never seen anything like it outside of sci-fi afternoon creature features. “Look, when I first got my hands on their tech, I expected there’d be a locational but not a temporal divide between where we were and where we are.” His free hand made chopping motions on were and are. “Then I expected that there would be a return function, but…” He held up a jumble of blackened circuitry and ridiculously small wires. A sleek black shell was half melted around them. “Looks like we’ll never know now.”

  “Is that what the Flasher does? Jesus.” The woman groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Dammit, I didn’t think of that. And there’s no Array, is there? No just calling for a lift. Just us. Here.”

  Basil, without lifting his shoulder too high, prevented again by a sharp pain that his wince broadcasted, pointed to a small piece of black plastic wedged into the hole of his ear. “Glorified decoration. Story of my bloody life,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  To the grown-up Gwennie, it did.

  “Can you use what’s here?” she asked, tapping her own piece of ear-plastic with a blunt fingernail.

  They were speaking a different language.

  Evvie understood their words, but not the way they were using them. Was this how Evvie’s mother felt when she listed to Evvie and her friends conversing? Hell of a generation gap.

  “I’m getting nothing.”

  “Of course you’re getting nothing, you great git,” Basil snapped. Evvie blinked at his condescending tone and turned back to gauge grown-up-Gwennie’s reaction, like a Wimbledon spectator. She was merely watching him blandly, not at all stung, accustomed to his sharp tongue. “That’s because it’s the year nineteen eighty…” he trailed off, looked over at Mark in askance.

  “Three,” Mark supplied with a tiny sputter, as shell-shocked by their brisk, intimate efficiency and strange vocabulary as Evvie was.

  “Nineteen eighty–three, and as such, I am only four years old, and I have absolutely no desire for you to see me in short pants and my hideous school jumper — ”

  Gwen’s smile grew momentarily, surreally natural, trying to crack through the brusque mask. “Bet you were hot,” she teased, but the light tone was strained.

  “You’re sick.” He grinned, wide and amused. Either he didn’t catch the hitch in her mood or he was ignoring it. “So, though I am a certifiable genius at any age, as of now I have yet to actually design and build the highly-advanced-even-for-two-thousand-and-twelve Communications Array for the Institute. Hence.” He lifted a sharp finger to the ceiling in emphasis, then swivelled his wrist and pointed at his earpiece. “Glorified decoration.”

  The woman sucked on her lips, amused, and poked his arm slowly and deliberately. “Let’s not talk about stuff that’s classified in front of the civvies, sweetie,” she said softly. Immediately Basil looked contrite and ducked his head, the high spots of mottled pink on his cheekbones sliding away. “So back to my original question: think you can use what’s here?”

  Basil rocketed out of the kitchen chair, happy to have a distraction, a task, and picked up the phone hanging on the wall. Basil shook it, listened to it rattle slightly, then sneered at the handset critically like it was a cockroach found swimming in the peanut butter.

  “Use it, nothing!” Basil said irritably. “Blimey, do you see this phone? I can’t use this! It’s a bloody beige brick, innit? It’ll never interface!”

  “Hey!” Mark protested. He was damn proud of that phone.

  “Sorry,” Basil said, and didn’t sound like he meant it at all. “But it’s so far beyond obsolete it might as well have been carved out of granite. The components just don’t fit.”

  “Why?” Mark asked. “Are your telephones, what, bigger in the…the future?” He tasted the word “future,” rolled it on his tongue, then made a face suggesting it was nasty.

  The woman pointed to the small black piece of plastic fitted snugly inside the shell of her ear. A tiny little microphone that Evvie had missed the first time was poking down along her jaw, delicate and as thin as a guitar string.

  “Smaller,” she corrected. “Much.”

  “And this? Is not small,” Basil said, shaking the phone to make it rattle again. “It’s bigger’n my head, Gwen.”

  Evvie sucked in a breath, and beside her, Mark did the same. He sat down heavily on the kitchen chair Basil had abandoned.

  Her name.

  Gwen, not Gwennie, turned her attention back to the Piersons. “Oh,” she said softly, as if just realizing now that they were still in the room with her. “Oh, jeeze. I’m…I’m sorry. This has got to be bizarre. I totally forgot that you have no idea…I mean, me, I’m used to bizarre, but you…”

  “Who are you?” Mark said softly, and Evvie heard equal parts anger and confusion in his voice. Warning perhaps, a little bit, as well. />
  Gwen sat up, straightened her spine and smiled at her parents, but it wasn’t the same easy smile she’d employed in chiding Basil, the one that looked like her Uncle Gareth’s. This was regimented, precise, practical. Regulation.

  She slipped a black leather square out of a pocket in her vest, flipped it open to reveal an ID card with a postage-stamp sized picture. She held a careful thumb over everything but her own face and name. “I’m Specialist Gwendolyn Pierson. That’s Specialist Doctor Basil Grey. We work for…well, I can’t tell you who we work for,” she said with a rueful little headshake. With a practiced wrist flick the ID and leather wallet vanished back into her pocket. “We’ll call it the Institute for now, because you’ve heard that name already.”

  “An’ you’re from the future?” Mark said, clearing his throat with a cough, as if that could clear his head, too. He didn’t look like the taste of the word “future” had gotten any sweeter.

  Specialist Doctor Basil Grey, already ripping the Piersons’ new telephone to pieces with a set of miniature screwdrivers that he had pulled out of who-knows-where on the vest, said, “Twenty-nine years, give or take a few months.”

  Evvie just barely resisted the urge to scrub at the bridge of her nose with the heels of her hands. Her daughter was two years older than she was.

  Mark watched with a tightly set mouth, but didn’t protest. Evvie wondered if it was because he was secretly awed by Basil’s quick efficiency and familiarity with the electronic tinkering that so befuddled her husband — the microwave clock still flashed 12:00, three years after they’d purchased it — or because he was simply steamrolled by Basil’s blunt personality.

  “And you’re…you can’t get back to the future?” Evvie asked, trying to clarify, to quantify, to (accept) understand. Gwen and Basil snorted and giggled again, respectively, and Mark narrowed his eyes, got that look in them like when he didn’t like the punks in the fields tipping the cows and let them know it. “What’s so funny?”

  “The… ‘Back to the Future,’” Gwen began, then stopped, gasping in a breath and floating it out in a chuckle. “Never mind. Classified. Sort of.”