by Gene Gant
It turned out to be the same ol’ dance, but the tune was a little different this time. The memory of my father, lying half-dead in a hospital bed because of a Cold Blood’s bullet, thundered like a jackhammer in my brain. I wanted to hurt somebody. When Ross motioned with his fingers for me to step up, I did so with my right arm shooting out in a short quick powerful jab. Shit damn! The sensation of Ross’s nose smashing flat under my fist was almost as good as the first time I had sex.
Without even a momentary pause, almost as if it were all part of one motion, I swung around and popped Malcolm a solid one right in the mouth. The blow was so hard, his tooth cut deeply into the space between my first and second knuckles, leaving a bloody mark. Then I rounded on Deshaun in a shot that landed on his nose and mouth with a very satisfying crunch. Deshaun went down as if somebody had tripped him from behind.
The element of surprise and my headful of anger threw them off at first, but they snapped back quickly. I swung out more punches, connected with a chin, an eye, a jaw before Deshaun and his crew swamped me like the front line of a football team. I got crushed to the floor. The world seemed to become a tangle of arms and legs, jabbing and twisting as I tried to cover my head and the other guys tried to beat the shit out of me. One of them kicked me just above my left ear, the blow hard enough to stun me. My vision flashed white and I went limp.
Dazed, I still fought. It was like trying to ride a bicycle while drunk. I couldn’t coordinate the movements of my arms and legs to fend them off. They got my jumpsuit open and pulled it down to my ankles. Out came the billy clubs.
At least with the billy clubs, I wouldn’t get a second dose of syphilis.
I LAY on my bed, my left arm over my eyes. It was good to have a real bed again and not that narrow ass cot you got in solitary. Deshaun, Ross, and Malcolm were in the cell, each of them on their own beds, but I couldn’t see what they were doing, not that I cared. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the prison was on lockdown because a team from some government regulatory agency was making a safety inspection.
My body seemed to hurt everywhere. The skin over both sides of my rib cage was splotched with big dark bruises, my right eye was swollen shut, I couldn’t breathe through my nose, which was also swollen, and two of my teeth were loose. There was an assortment of gashes, scrapes, and bruises decorating my arms and legs. A guard had strolled by a little while ago on patrol, but he pretended not to see me. I could have called to him and asked to go to the infirmary. With my obvious injuries, he would have had to take me even during lockdown, but I didn’t want to deal with Dr. Burns’s nasty attitude yet. I’d have to build my strength back up for that. I focused on staying still because every move I made was agony.
I dozed off. I dreamed of Cato, a stranger from another time who’d been so good to me. We were walking along a beach of fine white sand, the ocean lapping gently at our bare feet and soaking the cuffs of our blue jeans. The sun was setting, a fat brassy ball of red-orange hovering over the horizon, painting both sea and sky with an amazing array of colors. I took Cato’s hand, suddenly overcome with a wave of emotions I couldn’t quite sort out. And then I dreamed of Dad, seeing him in his hospital bed, a mannequin wrapped in bandages and tubes, only a couple of days from death. I was back in solitary again, with Cato sleeping beside me, and I took Cato’s watch. I moved through space-time to save Dad from getting shot and warped reality in the process. I ruined Cato’s life. So many people died or were never born, so much destruction. God, how could I have caused all that? It wasn’t worth it, not even to save Dad. I had to let him go. Cato told me how to fix things. I made another trip through space-time, to my cell in solitary where I knocked myself unconscious before I could make the mistake of changing history. And now I just had to make my final date in history, today—
I woke instantly, pushing up on my elbows, looking wildly around the cell. Deshaun and Ross were asleep. Malcolm was lying on his stomach, playing a game of checkers against himself. He looked up at me, a what-the-hell expression on his face.
I must’ve had a similar look on my face. An explosion. A gas line was going to break somewhere in this wing of the building. There was going to be a terrible explosion that would probably kill everyone in D and E blocks. It was definitely going to take me out.
I got off the bed in a rush, wincing at the pain but pushing my way through it. Startled, Malcolm jumped up too, crouching in a defensive stance. I ignored him, going to the front of the cell and peering anxiously with my one good eye through the bars. The corridor was empty and still, nothing happening at all. The four guys in the cell across the way were all asleep. My heart was racing, thumping hard in my throat, and adrenaline tingled through my limbs like rivulets of heat. It was just a dream. That’s all, a crazy dream, and I was awake now. Everything was fine.
But it wasn’t. I could feel that it wasn’t, the same way I could feel the smooth cold metal of the bars in my hands. We had to get the hell out of here, all of us. We had to get out now.
“Hey! Hey!” I shouted, calling out for the guard, my voice cracking. “Get us out of here! You gotta get us all out of here!”
I could hear stirring behind me as Deshaun and Ross awoke and sat up in their beds. The guys across the hall stared at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“Let us out, dammit!” I yanked at the bars, trying to pull them down barehanded and only succeeding in making my bruised ribs burn with fresh pain.
Deshaun snorted somewhere behind me. “What the fuck’s eating that fool?”
“Guard! Get us—” I broke off. No. There were situations where you fought with everything you had. This wasn’t one of them. I took a breath, closed my good eye, and rested my forehead against the bars. Let it come.
A muffled far-off thud sounded, sending vibrations rumbling through the floor and the bars. Nervous confused voices broke out around me. Boom! Boom! Boom! The explosions followed each other in rapid succession, each one louder and shaking the floor harder than the last, following the breaks in the gas line up from the basement. I knew the final main breach was going to occur beneath this block of cells.
There were screams, shouts, guys yelling and crying for help. I stood there, waiting for it, accepting. Good-bye, Dad. I love you. I felt a pair of hands suddenly clutch my shoulders from behind. It didn’t matter whose they were.
Someone leaned close to my right ear and whispered calmly, “Time to go.” Then the floor heaved violently upward in a deafening roar as the final explosion began to rip its way through E block. I was thrown into the air—
—and my body hit some solid surface and rolled along, tumbling together with another body. “Ow! Ow!” cried a familiar voice. Pain flared from all my injuries, making tears trickle down from my squeezed-together eyelids, but it didn’t feel as if I’d acquired any new wounds. It also didn’t feel as if I were dead.
I opened my good eye. About twenty feet above me was a ceiling, overlaid with a series of intersecting thin red laser beams. It was definitely not what I saw above my bed in Escanaba’s E block. A man’s face suddenly slid between me and the ceiling. He had short curly salt-and-pepper hair and deeply tanned skin. I squinted at him because it felt as if I’d met him before.
“Uh… who’re you?” I asked.
“That’s my boss.” The response came from my left. I turned my head and saw Cato lying beside me on a floor covered with gray and black tiles. He rubbed his knees with his hands, somehow managing to both grimace with pain and grin as he looked at me. “Gavin, meet Lio Kamiya. He’s the Senior Director of Temporal Recruitment at the TIA. He’s also my dad.”
I looked back at the man who was bent over me, surprised. I was supposed to be dead, but I wasn’t, and now I was meeting Cato’s father. What in the name of God was going on?
“Hello, Gavin,” said Mr. Kamiya. “Welcome to the year of our Lord 2127.”
Chapter 12
THE FIRST thing I did in the year 2127 was take a long hot bath. I hadn’t had one sinc
e I got arrested. The one I had with Cato was interrupted and didn’t count. It’s funny how much you miss something you took for granted once it’s gone.
After the bath Cato took me to the building’s infirmary, a wide sparkling white space with partitioned examination and treatment areas lining the walls. The head physician personally attended me, medicating and bandaging my torn flesh, wrapping my bruised ribs, and doping me up with state-of-the-art painkillers. I felt very good when I walked out of the infirmary, and Cato invited me to grab some lunch.
We sat at a small table in a corner of the sprawling cafeteria. The plates, glasses, and utensils were all made out of some material that was clear, waterproof, and durable but felt like cardboard. Cato swore they were both recyclable and completely biodegradable. I spent so much time being fascinated with my knife and fork that my eggplant parmesan got cold. The meds I’d been given definitely had me loopy.
“So did we do it?” I asked Cato as he chowed down on his veggie burger. “Did we fix the timeline?”
“For the most part, yes, we did,” Cato answered. “Except for a few minor glitches that aren’t really important, history has unfolded exactly the way it should have from 2017 until now.”
“But here I am, alive and well a hundred or so years after I was supposed to click off.” I hunched my shoulders to show how confused I felt.
“I know what you’re getting at, but bringing you forward in time didn’t change history. Remember, you died in an explosion that left no trace of your remains. Pulling you out of your cell before the explosion killed you wouldn’t change anything because you had no other effect on history after the date of the explosion.”
I felt a brief flash of bitterness heat my face. “Then why not do the same with my dad, bring him forward in time?”
“Your father left a body after he died, a body that was autopsied by the coroner for evidence to be used in the criminal trial against his killer. Not to mention the fact that your uncle claimed your father’s body and had a very nice funeral.” Cato put down his burger and leaned forward, giving me his full attention. “I’m a recruiter, Gavin. That’s my job with the TIA. Recruiters go back in time, grab young men and women who died and whose bodies were never recovered, and bring them into our present. Recruiting is very important because climate change has accelerated, causing a drug-resistant disease that’s drastically reducing human population around the world. Plus the US is waging war right now against three countries in the Middle East.”
“So you kidnap people from the past and bring them here to be soldiers?”
“It’s not kidnapping. Once we bring a recruit into our present, we explain the whole situation and they have the option of returning to the exact moment in time we took them from if that’s what they want. Of course, that means they’ll die once they’re returned. So far, we haven’t had anybody who wanted to go back. By the way, do you want to go back to your cell and get blown to dust?”
I smiled at him. “Man, I’d tell you to go fuck yourself if I didn’t owe you my life.”
He smiled back. “Nobody’s forced to become soldiers or anything else. We recruit people from the past to become members of our society. They’re free to become whatever they choose. Yeah, we need soldiers, but we also need doctors, scientists, teachers, cops—”
“You said you wanted to be a cop.”
“I did, but….” He looked down at his half-finished lunch for a moment as his face reddened. “Shit, this is embarrassing.”
“What?”
“I applied to the police academy in Honolulu. I was all set to join up once I finished high school. But I was in my dad’s office one day when he was going over the latest list of people from the past who’d been pegged for recruiting. I saw your picture on that list and… I sorta fell for you.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m serious. Haven’t you ever looked at a guy for the first time, and there was just something about him that made you want to take him out on a date, get to know him? Something that made you tingle inside?”
I thought about Crazy E and how, after I got past the trauma of the whole gang recruitment thing, I realized how cute he was and how much I wanted to kiss him. There’d been guys at school I crushed on for months, wishing I could get closer to them.
“Well… yeah, I guess.”
“My feelings for you got even stronger when I started watching the timescans the agency made of you. We’re a lot alike. I saw how much you love your dad, how you wanted to fight for your country, how much you love sports. You weren’t afraid to put yourself at risk and stand up for somebody getting his ass kicked by a gang. And you were sexy. God, you were so damn sexy.” His face seemed to soften, and his eyes suddenly filled with such emotion it made me shiver. His feelings for me were real and so very strong. “I dreamed about you. I dreamed about being with you, having you as my boyfriend, and I wanted to meet you. My dad had tried before to get me to be a recruiter, said I had a knack for it and the agency really needs more people they can send in to recruit teens. So I told him I’d skip the police academy and sign up with the TIA if I could get the assignment to bring you in.”
He paused, and we were quiet for several moments, looking at each other. Cato was one of the most attractive guys I’d ever seen, and I wanted him. In many ways, he’d been the prince I dreamed of when I was kid, and I’d never forget the things he’d done for me. But it just didn’t feel right that he’d fallen in love with me.
“Cato, I’m not a good person—”
“Don’t pull that again,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Okay, you made some gigantic mistakes, some very stupid decisions, because you love your father. I did a lot of stupid things because I love you. And my dad made the mistake of letting me break rules when it came to you because he loves me. Making a bad decision doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person, Gavin. It just makes you human.”
“My bad decisions got you sent to jail.” I could never forgive myself for that.
“My dad was the Secretary of Energy and the head of Temporal Mechanics. My bad decisions got him booted from the president’s cabinet and demoted. But with my dad’s help, you and I fixed the original timeline, and that counted for something. My life sentence has been commuted to time served, and once I turn eighteen, the conviction will be wiped off my record. My father may have been demoted, but he’s still able to work in the temporal field, which is what he wants to do with his life. I can never be a temporal recruiter again, but that’s fine with me because I can go to the police academy. And I’ve finally got you here.”
“Hey, I just thought of something. Doesn’t bringing people here from the past break those regulations about not changing reality? Once people like me are in this year, we start doing things. Won’t those things change history from this time going forward?”
“The future doesn’t become history until after it happens.” I gave Cato a what-the-fuck look and he laughed. “The TIA’s rules only apply to changing past events. You remember when I told you the techies have never been able to look or send anyone into any time ahead of the present day? Maybe that’s because the future, by definition, hasn’t happened yet. We determine our future by the choices we make now, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. So don’t worry about it, Gavin. You redeemed yourself in the government’s eyes by letting your life and your father’s life unfold the way they should have and putting the original timeline back in place. Now you can become anything you want to be here.”
I thought about that, which led to a troubling, depressing notion. “Everybody I ever knew is dead now. I don’t have anywhere to live. I don’t have anybody.”
“That’s not true,” Cato said quietly. “No matter what, you have me.”
He reached out and put his hand over mine. His touch made me want to cry. I wanted to cry because my dad was gone, because I was in a strange world, and because this beautiful boy was in love with me.
WE DIDN’T finish our lunch. Cato said he had
something to show me.
Holding my hand, he led me out of the TIA building, which was five stories tall and styled like a medieval castle with imposing turrets. The day was sunny and hot. Cars filled the street before us, looking like big sleek aerodynamic bubbles gliding along with virtually no engine noise. Cato hailed one of the vehicles, and it came to a near-silent stop in front of us. The digital sign on the door read Yellow Cab. The rear passenger door slid open, and we climbed in.
No driver occupied the front seat, which surprised the hell out of me.
Cato pressed the palm of his hand against a round glass screen. A moment later, a pleasant and entirely human-sounding masculine voice out of nowhere said, “Identity confirmed, account accessed. I count two passengers. Destination, please.”
“Prospero House,” Cato said.
“Destination accepted,” the car said. “With current traffic conditions, arrival at destination is expected in twenty-three minutes. Enjoy the ride.”
I stared into the front seat, amazed, as the car slid effortlessly into the stream of traffic. No steering wheel or pedals. Very interesting. Also completely freaky. A screen in the middle of the dashboard displayed the date and time and the steadily mounting cost of the ride. Even the current amount was outrageously high to me, and our trip had just begun. Inflation was a true bitch.
“Hey, Gavin, look at this,” Cato said. He raised his right arm, displaying a watch that was different from the one he’d worn when he came back to 2017. It lacked a gold ring around the dial, and the dial displayed the actual time. He pressed the tip of his finger to the dial and light sprayed upward to form a square screen. A picture of a smiling thirty-something couple appeared on the screen.
“This is Elvin and Myra Kingston,” Cato explained. “When we bring kids here from the past, we set them up with everything they’ll need to start a new life. Mr. and Mrs. Kingston want to start a family, and they’ve already agreed to adopt you. You’ll get to meet them tomorrow and see your new home. They’re great.” He touched the dial again, and an image of a sprawling single-story red brick building replaced the picture of the Kingstons. “That’s where you’ll be going to school. Obama High. Football has been banned on the high school level nationwide, but there are plenty of sports you can play—soccer, track and field, swimming, basketball, baseball, volleyball. There’s also a Junior ROTC program, one of the best in the country. After you graduate, you can do whatever you want with your life.”