by Gene Gant
I wanted to stop Cato because I knew there would be more. But I had to hear it. I had to hear it all.
Cato tapped the dial again, bringing up a new image. This time it was Dad. He looked older, more lines in his face, his hair grayer, his body a bit thinner. But he was smiling, happier than ever, snuggled on a sofa with a woman I’d never seen before. She was a lot younger than him, in her early thirties maybe, pretty, tan-skinned, and sporting a huge auburn Afro. They were talking and laughing. The room and the furniture around them were as unfamiliar to me as the woman, but I could see a lot of Dad’s things, including a picture of me on the table by the sofa and the big faded portrait of his mom on the wall over the sofa.
What the fuck was this?
Cato spoke up as if I’d voiced my confusion aloud. “You’re looking into the year 2021 in the timeline you changed. The woman is Leda Murrell-Goode, and she’s been married to your dad for two years. He sold his house in Detroit and bought a condo in Dearborn for his new family. As you can see, he and his wife are very much in love and very happy.”
Bang! The sudden, loud crack of a gunshot made me jump, along with Dad and his wife. Cato didn’t flinch. I watched with Cato as Dad and his wife got to their feet and rushed down the hall, stumbling and almost falling over each other, to the master bedroom. There they both cried out at the horrible sight of a four-year-old boy sprawled on the floor with a bullet wound through his neck. He looked like some life-sized doll, his arms up beside his head, his little fingers curled over his palms, his still chubby-cheeked face dotted with bright red blood. His eyes were open, his expression puzzled, as if he didn’t know why he was looking up at the ceiling. Beside the boy was a gun—the same gun Dad had carried on his job for years.
I understood then that my actions when I traveled into my past had caused ripples across the flow of time, and there was no telling how far and wide those effects would reach—had reached. As Dad rushed in to the wounded boy, I turned away from the image. I couldn’t watch any more.
“Your dad forgot to lock up his gun,” Cato said. “His stepson found it. The shot went through a major artery. The little guy bled out before the ambulance even made it to the house. Your father lived another eleven years and spent all of it blaming himself for the death of his stepson. But in the unaltered timeline, Leda Murrell never remarried after divorcing her son’s father. Her son grew up to become a lawyer who got elected to the state legislature and helped pass a law in Michigan banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. He got married to a man he loved very much, who loved him a lot, and they adopted three kids.”
He stopped, and I sensed that he was waiting for me to respond. Maybe he wanted me to justify what I’d done, taking his watch and changing the past. Changing reality. I destroyed Cato’s life and countless others. What could I say to justify that?
“Gavin, there were a lot of good things that came after you stopped that guy from shooting your dad. Do you want to see what happened to you, after your dad hired a new lawyer? You were cleared of the murder and drug charges on retrial. You got probation on the gun possession charge, graduated from high school, went to college—”
I spun around to face him. “Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me? No! No, I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to see any of it.”
He looked hurt at my reaction, turning his eyes from mine. “Okay. Then there’s one last event from the altered timeline I have to show you.” He touched the dial and a new image popped up. It was a photo on some kind of ID, a driver’s license or something; only a very small portion of the ID was visible. The man in the photo was Asian, very handsome, with short dark hair and a confident little smile. “That’s Larry Kim,” Cato said. “He worked for the FBI. He was on his way to the federal building in downtown Detroit when you got your dad to walk out of the bank.”
“Shit. He was the guy who got hit in the stomach after my dad and I ducked out of the way when Stone took that shot at us.”
“Yeah. Larry Kim died from his wounds. At the time, he was just starting to track a guy from Wilmington who’d made a couple of trips to Ukraine. Other agents at the bureau and in the CIA were also tracking the guy, but without Larry Kim’s work, it threw off the progress of their investigation. This is what happened as a result.”
He touched the dial, and then we were looking at a thick finger of land surrounded by water, covered with steel and concrete towers jutting pugnaciously into the gray-blue sky. Manhattan. I recognized it from movies I’d seen, from pictures on the Internet. Boats plowed through the rivers surrounding the land, and cars flowed along the streets. Life in the big city, going on as it always did.
An orange sun blossomed in the middle of the island, instantly spreading up and out in a horrendous, gigantic progression. A shock wave pulsed outward, racing ahead of the awful explosion, flattening everything it touched. The swelling ball of fire followed and eagerly consumed the rubble.
The glare was so great I had to cover my eyes. I never looked again at the image of the doomed city displayed by Cato’s watch. I couldn’t. But I didn’t have to look. I’d watched enough movies depicting the ground-level destruction of a nuclear detonation to know what I’d see.
The towers of Manhattan were leveled, the entire island a smashed, flaming expanse of ruin. Cars and trucks were blown away like bugs in the wind. The air was turned to fire, and the waters in the rivers were turned to steam. And the people—how many were vaporized? How many burned to death? How many were left blinded and maimed and poisoned by radiation? How many loved ones shocked and left to grieve, to pick up the pieces?
I reached out blindly and grabbed Cato’s watch, cutting off the image it projected, horrified into silence. Then I looked at him.
Cato seemed to be completely without emotion now. His voice was flat as he continued. “In 2017, a new group of terrorists formed in the United States who plotted for decades to sneak components into the country, assemble a nuclear bomb, and detonate it. Before you changed history, their successors didn’t pull it off until the year 2100, and the attack led to the United States declaring war on Iran, Iraq, and Syria after determining officials in those countries worked with the domestic terrorists. But with the changes you made, the government didn’t stop the terrorists from setting off a bomb in 2021. The CIA determined the terrorists got the bomb components from a Russian agent in Crimea, and in 2022, the US went to war with Russia. That conflict spread to involve China and most of the countries in Europe—”
“Stop! Please stop!” I yelled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anything like this would happen. I just wanted….” My chest started heaving as I broke down in tears. “I just wanted to save my dad.”
Cato put his arms around me and pulled me to his chest. “I know, Gavin, and I understand that. I understand more than you know. But you have to understand that your dad… your dad was supposed to die from those gunshot wounds. In the original timeline, he died on September 29, 2017.” That brought fresh pain, and I clung even tighter to Cato. He rubbed his hand gently up and down my back. Then, abruptly, he stopped. “And you died on September 28, 2017.”
Chapter 10
MY BRAIN and body were completely frazzled from all the emotional upheaval. “September 28? That’s tomorrow,” I said with more fascination than fear.
It was Cato who was scared. He studied my face with worry. “Gavin?”
“I’m gonna die tomorrow?”
“No, you were supposed to die tomorrow. Remember, the timeline we’re in now is different because you changed your past. Your dad isn’t hurt or in the hospital. After you showed up at the bank in your prison jumpsuit and ran off in all the confusion, he called Escanaba wanting to get details about your escape. When the guards confirmed you were in your cell, he decided to pay you a visit once you’re out of solitary. He’s going to show up tomorrow. You’ll be taken to the visitation room to see him. You’ll be away from your cell when a rupture in a gas line causes an expl
osion and fire that takes out D and E blocks.”
“Wait. You’re saying… I’m supposed to be caught in that explosion.”
“Yeah. The force of the blast and the heat were so intense that your remains were never identified or recovered.” He took my hand and held it. “Gavin, my boss sent me here to give me a chance at redemption. We have to undo what you did and restore the original timeline so it can flow the way it should have.”
“And doing that means my dad and I have to die?”
Cato looked me right in the eye. “Yes.”
I took a few seconds to let the concept sink in. “I want to fix things,” I said after clearing my throat. “I’m sorry I got you in trouble, Cato. You shouldn’t have been blamed for any of this. It was my fault, not yours.”
“No. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have told you anything. I shouldn’t have spoken to you at all. That was never a part of my mission, and it’s against regulations for a TIA agent to reveal information about the future to anyone in the past. I broke more regulations when I took you to the hospital to give you one last chance to be with your dad. I didn’t put my communicator in secure mode, something all TIA field agents are supposed to do before going to sleep. If I hadn’t broken regulations, you never would have changed history.”
And if I’d never joined the Cold Bloods, none of this would have happened. I still felt I was to blame, but there seemed to be no point in pressing the issue. I squeezed Cato’s hand. “I don’t care about dying myself. But is there any way, any way at all, we can fix things without my dad having to get killed?”
“No. Your dad getting shot to death is part of history.”
Sorrow lodged again like a lump in my throat. I swallowed. “Okay. How do we fix the timeline?”
“There are a lot of ways we could do it,” Cato replied. “But I think a simple, direct approach would be best.”
He laid out his idea, and I liked it right off.
9/27/2017
10:37 p.m.
HE WAS deeply asleep, snoring softly.
I got up from the cot slowly. Cato didn’t even stir as I moved away from him. He must have been dead tired. I stood over him, weighing everything in my mind again. No, I didn’t have any other option; it had to be done.
I carefully took his hand. The watch on his left wrist had a simple black leather band. I undid the tiny buckle, lifted the watch, and cinched it around my own wrist. The cell was dark, with only dim light filtering in from the hall, and I didn’t want to turn on the light in my cell for fear of attracting the guard’s attention. I had to hold the watch directly up to my eyes to get a clear look at it.
The dial on the thing was a featureless circle of black glass, like the screen on a cell phone. Circling the dial was a ring of gold, one that didn’t seem attached to the watch in any way. It sort of floated there. This must have been what Cato turned with his finger, but I couldn’t see how it would work. I touched the ring. A digital display lit up on the dial with the number 2017. I put the tip of my finger to the ring again and spun it just a tad to the left. The number on the dial became 2016. Years. It was displaying years. Little by little, I spun the ring to the right, stopping when the display went back to 2017.
Okay. Moving the ring around the dial changes time settings on the watch. Now what? There were no other visible control buttons or anything. How the hell did Cato get this thing to move him through time? As I stared, waiting for inspiration to hit, the number on the screen faded out and the tiny screen was black again. I touched the dial. The current date, 9/27/2017, popped up on the screen, and the time displayed below it, counting off by the second. I spun the ring to the left, and the numbers on the dial blurred. When I took my finger off the ring, the dial displayed a date, 9/16/2017, and below that a time, 0124—1:24 a.m. Instead of ticking off the seconds, however, this time display remained static, and just below it was a red button icon.
I started to touch the icon and hesitated. September 16 was several days before my dad was shot. I spun the ring to the left, and the display blurred. When I stopped, the screen displayed 9/19/17, which was the day before Dad got shot. I adjusted the watch to 9/20/2017, 1446—2:46 p.m. I didn’t know the exact time of the shooting; the news report I saw only said that it took place shortly after three that afternoon. Getting myself to the bank at 2:46 would be perfect.
Ah. The bank. I needed to move not just through time, but through space. I figured pushing the button icon would activate something that would move me to the date and time displayed on the dial. But if I only moved through time, I’d come face to face with myself in this moldy little cell at 2:46 on the afternoon of September 20, 2017. How would that work out? Could the old me and the me from this moment actually exist together in the same room at the same time, or would it be like bringing matter and antimatter together? Ugh! How could I get to the Detroit First National branch in downtown Detroit?
There had to be some control I was overlooking. I took off the watch and examined it front and back. Nope, there were no other controls visible. I secured the watch on my wrist again and stared at the date and time displayed on the screen. What else? What else was there to this fucking thing that made it possible to select a place in addition to a date and time? I touched the dial. Instantly a new display appeared, reading, “Timescan: GG-Escanaba 2017.” Then images began flitting across the screen, images of me from the moment of my arrival at the House of Hell. I touched the dial again and the display changed to read, “Timescan: DG-Detroit Receiving 2017.” Images appeared of an ambulance with its lights flashing frantically as it sped up to a hospital emergency room entrance and stopped. Two male EMTs hopped out, one from the driver’s seat and the other from the rear. Together, they hauled a stretcher out of the ambulance bearing the bloodied body of a man in a security guard uniform. This was the beginning of Dad’s treatment at Detroit Receiving.
I touched the dial once more. This time, the display read, “Timescan: DG-Detroit 1st National 2017.” Images of Dad followed as he walked calmly in his uniform through the rear entrance of the bank to begin his shift, most likely on the day he was shot. These scans involved places and events relevant to what Cato had done for me. This must have been a part of how he managed to move in and out of specific times in specific places. I spun the ring, and the display changed to, “Destination: DG-Detroit 1st National.” The red button icon appeared below the words.
Should I do this? Should I? It would change history. Cato had said changing history would change reality, an incredibly bad thing to do. But he’d also said my dad was essentially a nobody. Saving a nobody couldn’t make that much of a difference in the grand cosmic scheme. Could it? No way. It couldn’t be a bad thing to save a nobody who meant the world to me.
I reached out for the icon that would send me into the past.
Blink.
Somebody else was in the cell with Cato and me. It was… me.
Wait. Huh?
The other me looked pissed, his eyes bulging and wild with anger. I was so surprised I could only just stare at him, a statue of amazement.
“Sorry, dude,” the other me said.
The last thing I saw of him was the big dark knuckles on his fist coming fast at my face.
MY JAW hurt like hell.
I felt the pain before I even opened my eyes. It was morning; my breakfast tray was on the table next to the cot: oatmeal, milk, and an apple. I was alone. Shit. What happened?
Cato. He came to me last night, took me to see Dad. Then he brought me back here, lay down with me, and went to sleep. I took his watch, figured out how it worked, got everything set to send myself back in time. And that’s when another me showed up, decked out in the same prison orange. I knocked my own ass unconscious.
Jesus. What a crazy fucking dream.
Chapter 11
THE GUARD escorted me down the hall in E block. I wasn’t glad to be back.
It was right after breakfast. All the cells were empty. The other inmates were either in
the yard for exercise or on job details. I should have been sent out into the yard since inmates were only allowed to remain in their cells after breakfast if they were sick, and I wasn’t sick. I would’ve questioned the guard about this, but he would’ve just swatted me in the head for asking, and I already knew the answer.
Yep. Just like I figured. As the guard and I came in view of my cell in E block, I spotted Deshaun, Ross, and Mal waiting inside for me. The three of them caught sight of me at the same time, and they grinned like a bunch of hyenas catching sight of a lame zebra. Instinctively, I stopped.
The guard shoved me hard in the back, making me stumble forward. “Keep moving, Goode.”
“Triple X,” Deshaun cooed in a voice syrupy with friendliness. “We missed you.”
The guard unlocked the door to the cell. “Fellas, here’s your friend back to play with you.” He pushed me inside, slid the door shut, and walked away. I wondered what the hell DeShaun and his crew paid the guards to set up this little private meeting.
“Yeah, Triple X,” Malcolm growled at me as he got up from his cot. “Doc Burns called all of us to the infirmary a couple of weeks ago, shot us in the ass with antibiotics because ‘somebody’ told her we gave him syph. You never stop snitching, do you, sucker?”
Ross waved me forward. “Come on, bitch. Come get your payback.”