by Ryan Schow
“Skye,” he asked, his voice small, shaky, threatening to fail him. “Is it…really you?”
She smiled.
“Yes.”
“How…how old are you?”
She didn’t have the timeless twenty-five year old look she had up until the day she died. She looked ten years older. He’d never seen her like this, with the lines of age starting around her eyes and beside her mouth. The fact that she looked older was proof that Holland changed the serum. Proof he got it right.
“I’m sixty-nine years old by a week,” she said.
His insides swam with happiness, with grief, with such a mighty longing he could hardly brace himself against it.
“You look older than before,” he said, taking her hand, “but still so young.”
“Thanks to you,” she said, touching his hair. “You’re my husband, I assume?”
“I am. Different though. I had to change, to protect myself from people coming after me. People from the future who would possibly want to stop me.”
“You are so handsome,” she said, her hand drifting to his cheek, cupping it in a show of tenderness and love. “This face and body you’ve chosen, they’re magnificent.”
He leaned in and hugged her so tight, so hard. The feel of her against him was a dream he was too scared to have. All this time, hoping to stop something from happening, praying to put an end to the serum before it had a chance to kill her, he couldn’t imagine their reunion like this. He just thought he’d pop back into the future and they would be together.
“I didn’t exactly choose my looks,” Jake said. “It’s more a random event from a donor’s DNA fusing with yours. Or mine, rather.”
“In the future, when you tell me what you did, I couldn’t believe it. I had to see this for myself. But it’s true.”
He stepped back, missing something. “What do you mean?”
“We’re not together in twenty seventy-two,” she said. “In another timeline we were, but not this one. That’s what you tell me.”
“But we’re together?”
“We first meet in twenty-one oh nine.”
“What?”
“I just came back because you sent me here, asked me to give you a message.”
“Which is?”
“It’s okay to be with her. You and I are fine, but not the way you remember us. You saved everyone, Jake. Raven is your reward in this timeline.”
“But I love you.”
“Yes, you do love me. You love me every day, but not this version of you.”
“The reason I came back was because I needed to find a way back to you, and now here you are.”
“I will be leaving in a moment, heading back to you. But in a different timeline, inside a different multiverse. On this timeline, I died. On the one I’m heading back to, I don’t die. And I am married to a different version of you, one I’ve known and loved for years.”
“But not.”
She smiled at his understanding. Then she leaned in, kissed him on the mouth, long and slow. “You’ve made my life possible. You made me possible. Thank you.”
Tears flooded his eyes, then she reached in her pocket, pulled out a small marble-shaped ball of gelatin-like substance, popped it in her mouth and swallowed. Moments later, when her eyes went blank, he knew the time travel program was accessing her conscious, awaiting travel instructions. Then her eyes cleared and she said, “Thank you,” one final time before vanishing in a suctioning pop of thin air.
Tossed Garbage
1
In the shower, I wash off the rest of Tavares’s blood, then I pack my things and go next door to where Janice is sleeping fitfully. I slide in bed beside her, and she moves over.
Why are you here?” she asks, her voice scratchy, heavy with sleep.
“I need a place to sleep. My bed’s a mess.”
In the morning, we head out in my car. Thankfully she doesn’t ask me questions. I don’t see Brayden, Caden or Damien, but in truth, all I care about is Brayden. I’ll see him again. And Janice? She wants to say good-bye to Caden, but I warn her against that.
“If you see him again,” I say, “you’ll just want to stay. But what happened here, what I did to Cameron, it’s really, really bad and you are not equipped to handle it. It’s better we just go.”
She doesn’t put up much of a fight. She’s all out of fight.
Abby Swann is officially dead, Janice is thinking as we merge onto the freeway heading east. And Janice Millworth is resurrected. If her parents would have her. She had no idea how she would explain everything.
“I can help with that,” I say, reading her mind.
She looks at me for a long time, then says, “Thanks for everything and all, but get the hell out of my head.” Except she doesn’t say “hell” because, like me, Janice Millworth is a freaking potty mouth.
2
The drive to Elko takes the better part of the day. We arrive around nine that night. The trailer park is just as I imagined it when I was trolling through Janice’s memories of days past. There are trikes and fallen over bikes, lawn chairs and squares of green turf, pit bulls on chains barking and sleeping and basically protecting their masters from having their garage-sale life stolen from them.
“This is home,” Janice says. Her aura is comfort, familiarity.
“My God,” is all I can say.
“That’s what I thought when I first entered your life.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but I’m not in awe.”
We pull up to her trailer and the lights are on. I stop the RS5, kill the engine. People are poking their heads out of the doors and peeking through windows to look at my car. Can’t say I blame them. It’s dusk though, not enough light to keep their interest. Which is good.
“Do you think he’ll come after me and my parents?” Janice asks me. The way she looks exactly like how I used to look, it’s strange talking to her. It like you’re having a conversation in the mirror, but the mirror is talking back and you have no idea what it’s going to say.
“I’ll handle Holland. You just take care of yourself.”
“He’s poisonous,” she says.
“Whatever he is,” I tell her, “I’m far worse. Good news for you, bad news for him.”
The trailer door opens up and a woman stands there in her housedress, the trailer’s porch bulb casting ugly shadows over her. She’s got a big grapefruit in one hand and a paring knife in the other.
“Mama,” Janice says as she’s getting out of the car.
She walks up to the porch and starts talking with her mother. I know I should not have done this, but I’m feeling pretty bad about myself and what I did to Cameron, so I do it anyway: I eavesdrop.
Her mother doesn’t believe her, so Janice turns to me and without requiring even a word, I step out of the car and approach the woman. When I enter into the glow of the bare porch light, she says, “Who the crap are you two really?”
Night has officially fallen. I smack a mosquito on my arm, flick the corpse off into the “street.” Janice’s mom thinks we look like supermodels, that her daughter was no supermodel. That her little baby girl is dead and we’re just rubbing it in with our ridiculous lies. Can’t say I blame her.
“She says she’s your daughter and she is,” I say, approaching the porch. “I know why it seems impossible, because the story she’s telling you is impossible. Because Janice was never this pretty. What you don’t understand, though, is there are lots of possibilities, and just because you haven’t ever seen them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“Say whatchu want, this ain’t my Janice.”
“She is.”
“Prove it.”
“I already did, Mama. I told you about when I was a kid, how we went hiking and you confessed to doing acid when you were a child. That you had a crush on Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead even though he was fat and hairy.”
“Lots of people felt that way.”
Instead of speaking, I return to
the RS5, open the door and stick my fingers in the jamb. Taking a deep breath, I slam the door on my hand. The pain is like fireworks and nuclear bombs going off in my head. I open the door, and my fingers are mangled. They’re cut and hanging at an unnatural angle. Maybe I shouldn’t have slammed the door that hard.
With starbursts in my eyes, feeling a little queasy, I walk back over to Janice’s mother and hold my hands in front of my face. Asserting my will over her, I make sure she can’t leave. She won’t even be able to blink until she sees what I’m trying to show her.
“Can’t move,” she says.
“Because she’s holding you still so you can watch what’s happening,” Janice explains.
Before her eyes, my hand starts to heal. Physically I have to set my fingers in place as things progress otherwise they might not heal right. Or maybe they will, I’m not sure.
“How’re you doin’ that?” she asks, her entire face a mask of awe.
“The same way your daughter was changed from her to me. You see, Janice failed to tell you she was kidnapped into the sex slave trade. She said she was stolen and changed. But there is a sex trafficking ring inside this country so large and so connected you can’t possibly fathom its sheer size or the caliber of people involved.” Her mother is now looking at her different, like she’s trying to decide the truth of my words. “She was taken to be part of that trade, like a lot of girls who looked like her and came from places like this. But a geneticist from the school I go to in California needed a replacement for me, which is why Janice looks the way she does.”
“But you two look nuthin’ alike,” Janice’s mother says, waving the paring knife back and forth between us, like it’s a pointer or something.
“We used to, but then I changed out of me just after she changed into me. It’s all about genetics, and you’ll have to forgive me for sparing you certain details, they’d just take too long to explain and you wouldn’t understand them or believe me anyway.”
Which was kind of the same way I feel about Jake telling me he’s a time traveler. How freaking ironic.
“So you used to look like her?” Janice’s mother asks, still using the knife as a pointer.
“Yes.”
“And what makes you so important that you needed a body double?” she asks.
Janice looks at me and says, “Show her.”
With that, I turn and extend my hand. Making the connection with the Audi is easy. It’s my baby inside and out. When I raise my hand, my car lifts smoothly off the ground, into the air about fifteen feet. I turn and look at Janice’s mother, who’s trying not to faint, and I say, “Is this proof enough that the world is full of unexplained facts?”
She nods her head, slowly, her eyes suspicious and somehow relieved at the same time, like she finally has her daughter back. She still doesn’t understand the circumstances, but really she doesn’t care about that.
“Whatever she tells you,” I say, “it’s probably unbelievable, but true. And if you need to talk, Janice, you have my number. Call me anytime.”
3
I leave the two of them behind, and hit the nearest gas station looking for caffeine and a candy bar. Anything to keep me awake for the long drive home.
Ten minutes later, with a Mountain Dew cracked open and half empty in the cup holder and a Snickers bar inside me, I’m blazing west on highway 80 headed for the California border. It’s near midnight and I’m outside Fernley, Nevada when a pair of headlights come rushing up from the darkness behind me.
The driver, he must be doing a hundred and twenty. Maybe more. Just about the time the car should be overtaking me, just when I’m thinking it’s Highway Patrol, or whatever, the headlights ride right up my ass and start flashing on and off.
My brain is too tired to crawl, and too exhausted to care. After what I’ve been through, a part of me just wants peace. Or a fight. Or maybe all I need is twelve good hours of sleep before tackling my problems.
This thing in me, this part of me that seethes, it’s got to stop. Maybe tomorrow. Because right now this guy is riding my ass like he’s got a personal beef with me.
“Okay asshole,” I’m mumbling, ready to flex my dick on this jerk. I pull over, get out of the Audi with clenched fists and a temper so short it might as well not even exist. The lights are still on and I can’t see the driver behind them, which pisses me off.
“Get out of the car!”
The car is a Dodge Challenger, matte black and dumped on big chrome rims. The beast of an engine, the Hemi, it’s rumbling like it’s got something to prove. The driver’s side window rolls down. My senses flare. I’m powering up when the lights flick out and I see the girl driving the car. Stepping back, my breath catches in my throat.
“You,” I say.
“Me.”
“Get in,” says the platinum blonde who keeps popping up in my life. I get in. She rolls up the window, looks me in the eye and says, “Are you ready?”
“Who are you and why are you following me? And to Nevada of all places?”
The girl just smiles and says, “You know.”
Before she can disappear, I open a link to her mind and slide right in. I’m in enough to get her name (April) and understand where she’s from (not here, not now), and that’s when she shoves me out of her mind. I can’t help but gasp.
“You’re not possible,” I say.
“Neither are you.”
“I don’t like what you’re thinking,” I say, my purple eyes boring into hers.
The seats aren’t as comfy as my RS5; the inside of this rig is all Detroit muscle. It smells like leather and Flower Bomb perfume, my favorite. I like it; I hate it. And this girl, she’s not as small and meek as she comes across.
“It’s the only way to set things right,” she says. Her name is April, but I get the feeling it’s not the only name she’s ever had. I fished it out of her brain, but the moment she felt me trolling, she pushed me out. Or perhaps that was the idea.
“I’m not coming with you, so you can f*ck right off with your crazy thoughts.”
April pauses, then says, “You think you only matter here. You couldn’t be more wrong.”
“You’re wrong if you think I matter.”
April says, softly, almost hypnotic, “Regardless, it’s time to go.”
“No.”
For a long time we both just sit here, sizing each other up, not giving the other an inch of ground. A light rain starts, tinkering the windshield with droplets. The temperature, however, refuses to drop.
“If you knew what I knew,” she says, “you wouldn’t be saying what you’re saying.”
“I’m not coming with you, period, dot, end of story.”
Her gentle disposition sours just the slightest bit. “You disappoint me,” she says.
“I disappoint everyone.”
After a moment, she says, “When you told me how stupid the people of this time are, I didn’t realize you were including yourself.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask. What the hell is she talking about?
“You said that in this time, everyone boils down truth to a singularity when in fact, truth is an ever expanding thing. You think you just exist here? That time is linear?”
“It’s a comforting thought.”
“But you know it’s a lie,” she says, the rain peppering the car in heavier, more intense drops. “A deception brought on by schools, religion, the media, politics, TV programming, and groupthink. Your world is so closed minded it pains me to even give it consideration.”
“And still, it’s a comforting thought.”
“But it’s not the truth.”
“What is truth anymore?” I ask. “It’s just someone’s version of reality. I shouldn’t exist, but I do. And you know what? I don’t know what to do with all this, with me. I’m not exactly a normal kid.”
“I know. Jesus, I know! Just…you just need to come with me.”
“No,” I say. “I’m going home. In this
time. I have a dead body to clean up after and a friend who’s going to have a shit-ton of questions for me, and quite frankly, the reality of those situations still hasn’t hit me.”
“Ah,” she says, “Tavares.”
“You know about him?” I stammer.
“I know about them both,” she replies. “Brayden and Tavares.”
Okay, this is creepy. Did she just crawl my mind when I was crawling hers?
“I’m here with you now,” she says, “and this is the present. But it’s also the past to me. You are my present, my past and my future, and right now, the present version of you—the you sitting right across from me now—you’re making it really hard for me to do what I need to do”
She didn’t crawl my mind, she’s a traveler.
Like Jake.
“Jesus Christ, April,” I say, exasperated, “you’re talking in riddles!”
For someone so small and so cute, she sure is stubborn as hell. And it’s getting hot in here. “Why is it so hot in here?” I ask. The windows are starting to fog.
She turns to me with dark eyes ringed with a small halo of fiery orange and says, “That’s what happens when I get pissed off. I heat up. Then things burn.” Her sweet, angelic face is no longer the gorgeous porcelain of before. It is the ever so subtle mapping of veins under the pale surface of her skin. This gives me pause.
“Who are you?” I ask, more pointed. I’ve already asked, and now I want an answer.
“Come with me,” she says, reaching her hand out to take mine. Her face softens again, but still, I can’t go. I pull my hand away. Um, no thank you.
What I left behind at Astor—Tavares’s dead body, a bewildered Jake, Cameron’s plucked head and scarred privates, an Abby Swann vacancy, the truth of who I am with Brayden—these are the things that require my attention. Not this. Not her. If I gave it a moment’s consideration, it was only so I could solidify my reasons for staying.
“What you do in the next few minutes,” she says, “is critical to your survival. I’ve been nice, Raven, but I’m not screwing around here. You seriously have to come with me.”