“Folks, from the flight deck,” the pilot said over the loudspeaker a few seconds later. “Looks like we are having some mechanical difficulties. Shouldn’t be a big deal, but just in case, we’re going to ask that everyone take a brace position for the remainder of the flight while we do absolutely everything we can to try to bring the plane in safely.”
That was enough to send the entire plane into a panic, and confirmed everything Kyle had been worrying about for the past six hours. He looked at Allaire, who was looking up toward the overhead compartment where they’d stored their backpacks.
One of the flight attendants did an admirable job of sounding calmer than she surely was as she reminded the passengers of how to take the brace position and prepare for impact.
As everyone on the plane was buckling in and panicking, Allaire stood up and grabbed their packs out of the overhead bin, tossing one to Ayers and one to Kyle.
“Ma’am,” a flight attendant called out. “Take your seat and get into the brace position! You heard the pilot.”
Allaire got back into her seat just before a huge bump, and then a quick drop of several thousand feet, which would’ve thrown her through the cabin. Allaire opened her pack and pulled out a silk blot. “Grab a blot,” she said to Kyle and Ayers.
Young Ayers’s face was blank. He had stopped playing with his Rubik’s Cube, but now looked almost catatonic.
“Hey!” Allaire called to him, reaching over Kyle to grab his upper arm. “Get a silk blot out of your bag.”
Without saying a word, Young Ayers pulled out a silk blot, and Kyle did the same.
“If we’re going to crash, we need to get into the blot at the last possible moment,” Allaire said. Because the second we leave the tunnel again, we’re going to come out in the same geographical place. You don’t want to freefall from a few thousand feet.”
Allaire leaned over Kyle and looked out the window. The plane was descending very quickly, but the engines were still roaring, signaling that the plane was not in a freefall situation.
“If this doesn’t work,” Kyle said, “I just want you to know—”
“No!” Allaire said. “Not an option. Either these pilots are landing this plane, or we’re bailing.”
The screen in front of Kyle said they were now only a thousand feet off the ground.
“It’s going to be quick,” Allaire said. “If they don’t announce that they’ve got this covered, we need to look out the window and pull the blots over us right before impact.”
Kyle leaned over Ayers, who still hadn’t said a word since the announcement from the pilot, and looked out the window. “Did you hear her, kid?” The ground was coming up quick, but Kyle could see the airport now.
“The landing doesn’t look bad,” Allaire said. “What do you think?”
Kyle shrugged. He’d never flown and had no idea how the landing was supposed to look.
The flight tracker on the screen said they were three hundred feet above the ground now.
Kyle watched as it went to two hundred fifty feet, then two hundred. He looked at Allaire, who looked out the window. He could tell she was as undecided as he was, even though she’d flown before.
“If we bail, and we time it wrong,” she said, “we’ve got problems.”
Kyle gave one more look at the flight attendants in their jump seats up at the front of the plane. They were looking out the small circular hole in the door of the plane. Kyle saw one of them whisper to another, and then they both smiled. People who thought they were seconds from dying didn’t make jokes, Kyle thought to himself.
“Let’s stay,” Kyle said, his voice quivering with nervousness. “The landing’s going to be okay.”
Less than ten seconds later, the plane touched down on the runway to rousing applause from the relieved group of passengers.
“Thank you for bearing with us there, folks,” the pilot announced. “And thank you for flying Continental Airlines today.”
CHAPTER 16
October 31, 2015
* * *
The next day
Trying to push through the crush of people at the Halloween celebration in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood was futile. The entire crowd moved—more or less—like some multi-celled organism, flowing one way, then the next. To try to buck the flow of people and go in your own direction was nearly impossible.
Kyle, Allaire, and Young Ayers were slowly moving toward the stage at the intersection of Castro and Market, where a faux-hawked lead singer screamed a song complaining about the oppressive popular music industry.
“We want to be behind the stage,” Kyle screamed toward Allaire’s ear. “No one behind the stage was hurt in the shooting. We can sneak up on Ayers and grab him from there.
“Remember,” she answered. “We have to let the whole incident happen. Remember this bus crash . . . Anything we do to try to save lives here could result in something worse down the road.”
Kyle nodded. “I know.” He knew she might be right, but he didn’t know how he was going to watch more than a hundred people get murdered and not try to stop it. He could handle the thought of being the keeper of time travel, and of making sure the tunnel stayed clear of people trying to change the past. But this wasn’t that. They were here for a reason, and they could either watch people die, or try to intervene as soon as they spotted Ayers and the other shooters.
Young Ayers stopped for a second to pick up a zombie mask he saw on the ground. It was a cheap, plastic number that didn’t even have holes for eyes. No wonder someone had ditched it.
From the press coverage they’d seen, the shootings happened just before ten a.m., so they were only a few minutes away.
Kyle leaned down to Ayers. “Once we get there, you’re going to see if you can crawl underneath the stage to stay out of the way. I know you want to help, but it’s for your own safety.”
Ayers looked hurt. “Then why did I even come?”
He was so mature that Kyle forgot sometimes that they were dealing with a child. He’d come along because he had asked to, but Kyle knew that wouldn’t be a good enough answer. “I just need you to stay safe, and that’s the best place for you.”
They’d reluctantly gotten Young Ayers to climb beneath the wooden stage, while Kyle and Allaire knelt behind the stage, their heads peeking out, but their bodies concealed from view. It wasn’t five minutes after they’d taken their places that the singer stopped in the middle of a song, and called out, “Get off the stage, you fuckin’ jabronies.”
Kyle craned his neck and saw that four guys had jumped up on stage. From his clothing—the same gray shirt, vest, and jeans he wore the last time he saw him—Kyle could tell that the one wearing the big, rubber Justin Bieber mask was, in fact, Ayers. The other three wore masks too: a Bart Simpson mask on a guy with a three-piece suit; a Spider-Man mask on a cohort of Ayers’s wearing long, flowing robes, and finally, someone in a full gorilla suit. None of them were holding guns.
“What the hell, guys?” the lead singer whined. “Get off the damn stage.”
A few baffled security guys hopped up on stage and tried to lead the four intruders off, but the guys in masks brushed their arms away, and walked around the stage as if they were going to take over the music duties.
Then, the singer walked up to the guy in the Bart Simpson mask and tried gently pushing him in the chest toward the stairs leading off the stage. “C’mon, man. You’re fuckin’ up the show.”
As soon as he did, though, Bart Simpson theatrically looked at the crowd and shook his huge head. The crowd let out some nervous laughter before Bart grabbed the singer’s neck with one hand and held him by the throat for a second. Before security could even react, the masked man put one hand on each of the singer’s cheeks and twisted his head, snapping his neck. The crowd let out a gasp, as Bart Simpson tossed the lead singer to the concrete beneath the stage. Ayers walked to an equipment box next to the drum kit as the rest of the band hurried to vacate the stage.
One by one, Ayers pulled machine guns out of the box and handed them to each member of his group. Before most people could comprehend what was happening, the four of them stood on stage with the guns as the crowd quickly began to disperse. But there was nowhere to go. As the pushing crowd from the stage area tried to escape, they came up against the wall of people stretching in every direction down the street.
Then, as Kyle heard sirens coming from beyond the crowd, the gorilla suit guy started shooting into the crowd. As people ran, Kyle watched bodies fall to the ground, some shot, and some unlucky enough to be pushed and likely trampled. It was mass chaos.
The scene in front of Kyle and Allaire looked like something out of a war movie, as Ayers, in his Bieber mask, and his followers wearing the gorilla suit and the Spider-Man mask, joined in on the shooting too.
“I know we’re not supposed to stop it, but I can’t watch these people be executed,” Kyle said, as he saw a young woman in a tiger print leotard get cut down with a shot to the back. She fell to the ground and stopped moving within seconds.
Kyle started to vault himself up to the stage, but Allaire pulled the back of his sweatshirt. “No!” she said. Then she turned to Young Ayers, who had popped out from his hiding spot when the shooting started. “You need to get back underneath the stage. Now!” She turned to Kyle. “I can’t watch this happen either. Let’s go.”
Young Ayers didn’t move. Every second they waited, more people would die. Ayers and his cohorts were shooting completely indiscriminately into the crowd, stopping only to reload.
“It’s not a choice, Ayers,” Allaire said. “Get under the stage. Now!”
“We’ll tell you if we need you,” Kyle said. “Go!”
Allaire and Kyle each held a .45, pulled from their backpacks. As the shooters moved across the stage, facing the crowd in front of them, Kyle and Allaire lined up clear shots from behind them.
“On three,” Kyle said. “You take out the gorilla, and I’ll get Bart.”
“As soon as we do this, they’re gonna turn and the gunfire’s coming our way,” she said.
“One,” Kyle began. “Two. Three.”
Kyle began shooting at the guy in the Bart Simpson mask. After a couple of misses, he hit him in the shoulder, which knocked him forward. He dropped his gun to grab at the bullet wound. Bart pulled off his mask to reveal a guy with a nineties flattop haircut. He looked around desperately trying to see where the shot had come from.
Allaire kept shooting at the gorilla while she knelt behind the stage, trying to keep out of view. But the gorilla absorbed the hits as if they weren’t penetrating the suit. “He won’t go down. He must be wearing a vest.”
Kyle looked at how focused Allaire was on stopping the massacre in front of her. A short time ago, there was no way she’d have been willing to intervene. He knew she’d gone against all of her old ways, by trying to stop the bloodshed in front of her. But, watching her try to take down the gorilla erased Kyle’s doubts about whether he could be a new kind of Seres leader: someone who didn’t compromise human decency while protecting their great ability to time weave.
Kyle noticed six police officers running toward the stage with their guns drawn. “Get down!” he screamed, pulling Allaire completely underneath the stage just as the crossfire between the police and Ayers’s crew started. Kyle and Allaire joined Young Ayers who was huddled with his knees to his chest. Kyle could see that he was crying.
There was at least three minutes of back and forth bursts of gunfire between Ayers’s shooters and the police. Above them, Kyle heard three distinct thuds and he wondered if the gunfight might be over.
Then, the shooting began again, and Kyle imagined the shock the police officers must’ve felt as they tried to take down Ayers and he simply didn’t budge.
“We need to get him out of there before he slips away,” Kyle said.
“Gotta wait for the shooting to stop, love,” Allaire said. “I’m not letting you get killed today.” Ayers sobbed, and Allaire put her hand on his knee. “It’s okay, Ayers,”
He shook his head, and moved into a crouch. “I’m scared.”
“Listen,” Kyle said, raising his voice over the sound of the gunfire. “You’re not him. I’ve spent enough time with you to know. The person out there is not you . . . You have compassion . . . Whatever he did to you—I know it was horrible—but you aren’t him. You’re a Sere, Ayers, and I need you.”
Young Ayers nodded his head, and moved a little closer to the edge of their space under the stage. Any further and he’d be outside of the protected area where they were huddled together. The gunfire continued outside. “I’m so scared.”
“Just be brave,” Allaire said. “That guy out there may be the same in a lot of ways, but he is not your future. Kyle and I both see it.”
“I’m so scared,” he said once more. Then, after a lull in the gunfire for a few seconds, Young Ayers put on the zombie mask he’d picked up from the ground and scurried out from under the stage.
“Wait,” Kyle called out, trying unsuccessfully to grab him.
“Don’t worry,” Young Ayers said through his tears. “The gunfire can’t hurt me.” He took his backpack off and handed it to Allaire.
“What are you doing?” Allaire said. “You can’t go out there!”
“Remember what I told you,” Young Ayers said. “Kids can kick some ass too.” Then, Young Ayers just popped out from under the stage and was gone.
The gunfire started again, but Kyle and Allaire couldn’t resist leaving the safe space under the stage to see where Young Ayers was going. They peeked above the level of the stage again and watched as Ayers continued to exchange gunfire with the police, who were now moving in, riddling him with bullets that had no effect. There were more police now too. Ayers had ditched the Bieber mask, likely to help his peripheral vision as he turned real life into a first-person shooter game.
Kyle and Allaire watched as Young Ayers calmly walked onto the stage, holding the eyeless mask slightly away from his face so he could see the ground below his feet.
What had been a madhouse only minutes earlier was now a ghost town, except for emergency personnel tending to the wounded. More and more sirens filled the air from the growing contingent of ambulances and police cars.
Kyle cringed when he saw Young Ayers get hit by one stray gunshot, then another. The shots jarred him, but he kept moving, clearly having the same immunity to them now as the older Ayers, who still taking target practice at the police. The police must’ve been beyond baffled by now that no amount of bullets would take him down. The police gunfire stopped, though, and two officers raced toward the stage, likely to try to pull Young Ayers away from the firefight. Young Ayers sidestepped one cop, and ducked under the arm of another.
“They really are different,” Kyle said to Allaire.
Before the cops could reach him, Young Ayers tapped older Ayers on the shoulder. Ayers turned around and looked at the boy, still wearing a mask over his face. When Young Ayers pulled the mask away, he stared right into the eyes of his older self. Simultaneously, they brought their hands to their heads, both clearly in immense pain.
“Oh no,” Kyle said, resisting the urge to avert his eyes when he realized what was happening.
Allaire grabbed Kyle’s hand, lacing her fingers into his.
Older Ayers dropped his machine gun to the floor as he let out a deep scream.
Kyle could see older Ayers’s head slowly expanding, as if the bones underneath were stretching the skin. Young Ayers held his ears, grimacing, but his head didn’t look to be feeling the effects yet. Kyle could tell he was trying hard to keep eye contact with his Older Ayers.
Older Ayers’s face stretched on the growing skull beneath it. He looked at Young Ayers scornfully as the pain registered on both of their faces. “I protected you!” Older Ayers screamed, as he clutched the side of his head with his hands.
A few seconds later, Older Ayers’s head exploded onto the stage, his
unraveled brain rupturing violently into pieces and falling to the stage below. His body—minus his hands, which were blown off by the force of the blast—fell to the stage in a heap.
Kyle vaulted himself up onto the stage to grab Young Ayers, who stood there looking at the blood and brains in front of him, clearly in immense pain as he held his head as well. Kyle wondered: Is there a chance to save him?
“Ayers,” he yelled, running toward him. Young Ayers shook his head violently as he saw Kyle running toward him. Kyle could see the fear in the boy’s eyes. He wondered how long he’d planned to sacrifice himself.
Just as Kyle reached Young Ayers, he watched the kid’s head do exactly what Kyle feared was inevitable. His head seemed to almost throb, as the inside became larger than the outside. The kid’s brain exploded all over Kyle, splattering him with blood from head to toe.
Kyle fell to his knees and caught Young Ayers’s headless body as it fell to the ground. He wondered if Young Ayers knew all along that this was the one way to kill someone who’d nevered, or if he was simply going on a hunch like Kyle and Allaire often were.
Of course, Kyle and Allaire had both seen this before, when Kyle’s cellmate from prison, Ochoa, saw his younger self and his head exploded. Kyle thought about how little Ochoa—the sleeping baby in his mother’s carriage—survived. Perhaps, Kyle thought, it was because the baby never actually saw his older self.
Kyle put his hand on Young Ayers’s shoulder and began to cry. Although he’d done it again and again, his final act proved, once and for all, that he really wasn’t the same as his monstrous, murderous older self. Would the selfless actions of this twelve year old allow Kyle and Allaire to save the world, Kyle wondered. Would they be able to extend this timestream and allow the human race to live past this generation? Or would the tunnel continue to shrink toward the inevitable end of humanity?
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