The Upper West Side rolled over into Harlem. Beautiful old apartment complexes flashed by on their right. They were in the 150th Street block and still headed north. Ahead they reached the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Scott’s car swerved suddenly, taking the exit ramp off the highway and vanishing for a moment on the sharp turn.
“You’re losing him,” Clayton said.
“I got him.”
Parker accelerated and hit the ramp, the lights of the Chrysler visible again in the distance. The ramp widened out, cutting along the edges of old brick buildings, the highway slowly rising in elevation until Parker felt like they were soaring out over the city. Above them flashed a sign. They were on the ramp to the George Washington Bridge, headed across the Hudson River into New Jersey.
They swept past a large sign flashing BRIDGE CLOSED. Scott crashed through the wooden gate of a toll booth, shards of wood flying through the air like confetti. The cars were gone now, the entire road empty except for the two speeding vehicles. The glorious span of the George Washington Bridge seemed to rise up before them like a castle in a dream. The Chrysler hit the bridge hard, Scott lost control, and the big car swiped the guard rail. One of the tires popped and the car began vibrating wildly, a brilliant cascade of sparks arcing out from the metal rim.
The Chrysler was losing speed. Parker accelerated, and his Dodge rammed its rear bumper, spinning Scott’s car out of control. The Chrysler twisted sideways and then, like a skier catching an edge, flipped suddenly, the roof hitting pavement and sliding twenty yards along the length of the bridge.
Just ahead, the bridge was there. And then it wasn’t. The roadway ended in a flat line in midair, a six-hundred-foot drop straight down to the Hudson. This was where the prison ended.
Parker hit the brake hard and the tires screeched on pavement. They kept skidding forward, too fast to stop in time before they reached the edge. Parker spun the wheel and the car turned. The cliff of the bridge came up fast, and the auto’s back end went over. The two men hung suspended in space, the car teetering dangerously, the back half off the edge of the bridge.
Slowly Parker eased open the door.
“Let’s move together slowly,” Parker said. “On three, we’ll jump from the car.”
Clayton nodded. Parker calmly counted down. When he reached three, they both launched themselves from the car. Their combined weight gone, the Dodge slowly pinwheeled backward off the edge of the bridge. Parker watched the car fall toward the Hudson, but just before impact, the entire vehicle disappeared. The river below flowed quietly by, the water completely smooth.
“Jesus, you guys okay?” Chan said.
“Yeah,” Parker replied. “What happened to the car? It just vanished.”
“I saw that. I’m tracking it back to the 1970s system. Hopefully it landed on a few zombies out there. I told you, there are backdoors all over this place that connect the different systems. That must be one of them. Never made it up this far to check the bridges.”
Parker heard a groan of pain. Scott slowly crawled from beneath the overturned Chrysler. He was still in his silk white and red boxing robe, fragments of glass caught in his hair. Blood streamed down the side of his face from an open gash above his temple.
“Looks like we both made it,” Scott called out. “Good. You haven’t had much luck with driving.”
Parker advanced toward Scott, pistol out, ready to pull the trigger. But something in the man’s words bothered him. “What do you mean?”
“I read about you,” Scott said. “After the trial. You were so upset over your wife’s death, you started drinking. What a fucking loser. You remember?”
“No . . .” Parker shook his head. He didn’t remember. His memories were out there somewhere, he hoped. But this one he hadn’t recovered.
“Oh man, they really fucked you up, didn’t they? Who’d you let into that little brain of yours? You have no idea the things you did.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sad little you wanders into a bar. Pounds like ten beers and shots, gets in your car, and does a head-on at fifty miles an hour with a minivan. You ever seen what that kind of wreck does to a minivan filled with a family of four? Little kid body parts were all over the road. God. It was disgusting. So in a way, I guess, you’re more of a murderer than I am.”
“That’s not true. That’s a fucking lie.”
“No, I never lie. The truth is too good in this case. Oh the judge went as easy as he could on you, being that you were in mourning and all over your dead wife. But you can’t kill a couple little kids and their parents and not go to prison. That’s not happening.”
Parker suddenly remembered the crumpled minivan on the street in the abandoned Manhattan. That had been part of his memory. A family car, with the inside streaked with blood.
“Before I went in, my father told me all about you,” Scott said. “He said there was this crew that could break me out. Best in the world. And they don’t even know why. But I do. You never wonder why you’re so good getting into these prison systems? It’s because you’re already inside. You’re already in prison. There is no real world for you. Whatever world you think you’re living in, that shit’s not real. Or should I say, it’s as real to you as this world is to me.”
No, no, no . . .
Parker was a cop.
Clayton was his partner.
The year was 1986.
That was real. That was his life. That wasn’t a computer system.
He wasn’t one of these people. He wasn’t a prisoner.
He knew what reality was. He had experienced it.
He turned toward Clayton.
Clayton looked at him uncertainly. “I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“We’re all prisoners. Every single one of us. Selberg. Charlotte. We never talk about it, but it’s true. I thought we all knew,” Clayton said. “I’ve been in and out of prison my whole life.”
“Why didn’t anyone talk about it?” Parker asked. He felt his body begin to shake.
“It’s just not something we like thinking about, I guess. You talk about the prisoners that know. The glitches, you call them. We were all glitches. Except for you.”
“But in the abandoned Manhattan, you were what, just pretending?”
“No. I had my memory wiped of everything. Same as you. I thought we were all 1930s explorers. But when I left that place, my memories came back. Now I remember. We all knew.”
“No. No. Not all of us. I didn’t know,” Parker said. “So if I put this gun to my head and pull the trigger?”
“You wake up in your prison system. 1986. That’s where you keep going back to every time. I mean, think about it, if 1986 was real, they wouldn’t have this type of technology.”
“So what’s the date? The real date?”
Clayton shook his head. “I’m not sure. Sometime far in the future.”
“But what about all those people I assassinated? All the prison breaks?”
“Sure, you got them out. But it only works if you’ve got someone on the outside. Someone to pull you out of the machine,” Scott said. “They’ve been using you for years on these breakouts. You get all your assignments by phone, don’t you? That’s because it’s easy to call into the system. It’s a lot harder to actually get a person inside. This agency you work for, how many of their employees have you actually met?”
“Dunbar. I met him. He gave me this assignment.”
“James Dunbar works for my father. They sent him into your prison system to evaluate you. Because it was the boss’s son you were going after. To make sure you could get it done. But think about your life. What you think is real. Have you ever actually left Manhattan?”
Parker closed his eyes. He remembered his apartment near the bridge. The Chinese food menu of the place in Queens. Thinking he’d never visited there. The phone numbers that never seemed to pick up. An apartment filled with stuff that he didn’t ever remember buying. The Mal
one kids always outside on the street, forever playing stickball like they were on some kind of loop.
“You don’t have anything,” Scott said, his voice sounding miles away. “When you get killed, you don’t wake up in the real world, you just move to your old system. 1986. 1953. It’s all the same. We’re all living a fantasy. At least in this one, I get to live like a king. But you know what, fuck it. You want to shoot me. Go ahead. I can go back to the real world.”
Parker took a few stumbling steps forward.
His wife had been real. Once she had existed. She loved movies and autumn. She snorted when she laughed. She made a scrapbook of precious moments and had a scar near her eye. They had built real memories together. And those memories were out there.
He turned and looked out over the bridge. Far below them, the Hudson flowed south, and in the distance, the million lights of Manhattan glittered against the black. That was the stuff of dreams. Bright lights and big dreams.
“So what’s it going to be?” Scott said. “Light me up. Let’s get it over with.”
Parker lowered the gun. He turned back toward Scott, his mind set on a course of action. He flipped the pistol around and cracked the cruel boxer hard across the jaw with the butt end. Hard wood struck bone and Scott grunted. Parker grabbed him by the neck, and then, half-choking him, half-dragging, he pulled his wife’s murderer toward the edge of the bridge. Through the blood and the haze, Scott saw what was happening and his eyes grew wide. He began to fight back. Scott was a big man and strong, but Parker was running on another level. No man on Earth could stop him now.
“No, no, wait, wait, wait!” Scott clawed at Parker’s face. He felt skin tearing, but there was no pain. “I’ve got money. Whatever you want. We can get you out of here. Back to the real world. I promise you.”
They reached the edge of the bridge. Far below them was the Hudson, the water swirling in deep eddies.
“My wife was my world. You took her from me. I don’t have a world to go back to.”
Parker hurled Scott over the edge. Scott screamed, his hands and legs reaching out wildly for holds that didn’t exist. He plummeted, shrieking the entire way, Parker watching him, adding this moment to his memory palace. And then, just before he hit the water, his wife’s killer vanished.
Gone like a memory lost in time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew B. J. Delaney published his first novel, Jinn, in 2003. Winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the novel was optioned for film by Touchstone Pictures, was featured as People magazine’s “Page-Turner of the Week,” and received a Publishers Weekly Starred Review.
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, he left a career in finance and moved from Boston to New York City to join the New York City Police Department. He has been a member of the NYPD for thirteen years, and he continues to write in his spare time.
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