Rewrite Redemption

by Walker, J. H.

  “How so?”

  “Over the years, there have been disasters that, in hindsight, were preventable. They felt that if we had a way to go back in time and reverse some of them, we’d have a better chance to evolve.”

  “Is our government involved in this?”

  “No. They wanted nothing to do with our government. They introduced the Hitchhiker Mechanism into a random selection of people in several of the most advanced countries. Since an Editor has to be formed from birth, the Oreonians set up the Guild to collect them when they reached adolescence and draft them into the program. They gave the Guild sensitive equipment to detect and monitor them. I don’t really know all the details of the early days.”

  “How did they get to Earth without us detecting them?”

  “Ha! You’ll love this. They’ve developed the capacity to harness the power of stars. They open a wormhole to the far side of the moon and sneak in a little ship. But they open the wormhole in the past to before we had radar. They zip down to Earth and park the ship somewhere remote. Then they travel through the trees to the present and to where ever they want to go.”

  She threw out her hands. “Who knows about this?”

  “Only Editors and now you. Guild members keep everything on the down low. Editors who leak get wiped out of the program. Then the Guild goes back in time and repairs the leaks so we’re pretty protected. Besides, who would believe it?”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m a little on the fence here.”

  “Cross my heart,” I said, making the slashes across my chest.

  She laughed.

  “What?” I asked. “I’m serious. Everything I’m saying is true.”

  “I lie—I die,” she said, making a cross on her chest.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I lie—I die.” She kind of shook her head and gave another little laugh. “It’s just this thing we did when we were little. The three of us had it pretty tough. We really relied on each other. ‘I lie—I die’ was our solemn oath. You’ve done it twice now. You didn’t say our words, but I think the sentiment is still the same. We never question it. I guess I’ll just have to trust you.”

  “Hey, I have a lot on the line here,” I said. “There’s a lot of trust coming from this side too. I lose big if this gets out.”

  In just a few hours, Lex and I had an affinity that usually comes with, well, maybe not years of friendship, but at least months. I guess we were both so committed to saving A.J., that it cut out all the games and bullshit. She didn’t flirt with me and I didn’t come on to her.

  Don’t get me wrong. She was a stone, cold fox. Admittedly I had a random thought now and then—I am a guy. But my interests lied elsewhere. And it was sorta refreshing, just being with her that way, person to person. If I couldn’t trust her, who the heck could I trust? She’d protected A.J.’s secret most of her life.

  That was good enough for me.

  Edgar’s hand gripped so tightly across my mouth, it cut my lip on my teeth, and I tasted copper. His other hand threaded through my hair and held my head hard against the tree trunk. My arms were free. But with my head in a vice, there was little I could do without breaking my neck. Struggling to breathe and shake off the dizziness, I dug my heels into the dirt and yanked with all my might to pry his filthy fingers loose. They wouldn’t budge. He just snickered and held me tighter.

  Then he ran his tongue up the back of my neck and I knew…

  Joe crept towards me, moving silently past the sleeping Indian. He was grinning, and licking his lips—like I was dinner, and he hadn’t had dinner in a long, long time.

  My insides turned to ice.

  Panicking, I scratched and clawed at Edgar’s calloused hands. It didn’t even faze him. I hung heavy on his arms, trying to use my weight to break his grip. But he was a big-ass cowboy. And I was me. He weighed more than twice what I did. And even though I was terrified, I just kept thinking about how disgusting his hands smelled, and that I would do anything to get them the heck off me…to say nothing of keeping Joe’s hands from touching my body. My heart was pounding out of my chest. I needed air. I couldn’t even scream, with Edgar gagging me.

  I had nothing.

  Still, I writhed, and yanked with all my might, trying to get away, trying to make noise, trying to wake the Indian.

  Edgar hissed at Joe to hurry up before the Indian woke up. Joe just smirked and reached down to grab my feet. I kicked out, but he quickly had a hand around each ankle. He wrenched my legs out straight, looked me right in the eye, and flicked out his tongue.

  I gagged. Adrenaline shot through me in a whip-snap streak. I yanked my legs in tight against my chest.

  Joe toppled towards me, losing his hold. The next second, he was inches from my face, hands on either side of me against the tree. His breath was hot and disgusting. Those beady eyes looked straight into mine. He smirked. And then he whispered in my ear, “We’re gonna have ourselves a little fun, Sweetheart.”

  I don’t think so, I thought—not if I can help it.

  I closed my eyes. I felt the tree behind me. Quickly, I sank into its vibration until I reached its core. I soaked up the power, pulling everything I could hold. I brought my legs in even tighter against my chest. Then, as hard as I could, I slammed my feet straight into Joe’s stomach.

  I heard a loud grunt and then a thump.

  I opened my eyes to see Joe twenty feet across the campsite, crash landing on the log by the Indian.

  The Indian was up in a flash, knife in hand, looking stunned to see Joe on the ground. The shock made Edgar loosen his grip enough for me to reach my pepper spray. I whipped it out and squirted it behind my head. The hand on my face dropped, as Edgar howled, clutching his eyes. I screamed and spit out the filthy taste.

  And then somehow, I was up the tree in two seconds flat, watching the scene from above.

  Joe lay moaning in the dirt. The Indian just stood there looking up at me with his mouth open. Edgar was screaming bloody murder and rolling on the ground.

  High in the tree, my heart pounded like a hummingbird on speed. I looked down and realized that the lowest limb had to be…ten, maybe fifteen feet from the ground. The cottonwood had drawn me up like a Slurpee straw. One moment I was on land and the next I…and how had I kicked Joe clear across the campsite? I’d hoped for a little extra strength from using the tree power, but that had been cartoon kickboxing. I couldn’t make sense of it.

  Edgar crawled for the creek, screaming curses at me. Joe staggered to his feet, but he couldn’t quite stand up straight. He held his stomach, stumbled, and then he barfed right on his own boots. The Indian stood there grinning up at me as if I was the best show he’d seen in years.

  Me? Hello…I was up a tree.

  Joe scowled at the Indian who was full-out laughing at that point. His laughter allowed my internal “terror alert” to move from red back to orange. From the way the Indian was grinning at me, I figured I was okay as long as he was around. The Gross Brothers needed him to find the gold. It would be stupid to mess with the Indian.

  Momentarily, I was out of danger. I’d won round two. But how long could I stay up there, and how was I going to get down? Speaking of which…

  “You’ll get down here, girl, if you know what’s good for ya!” Joe yelled.

  In his dreams! The filthy, lowlife, dirt bag, thinking he could just…uhhh! I flipped him off. Did they do that in the olden days? Apparently they did.

  “You get down here, you little bitch!” yelled a swollen-eyed Edgar. “Joe, get her down!”

  Joe walked around the tree and then backed up and looked at it. “How the heck did she do that?” He took a running start and leapt for the lowest branch, missing it by about two feet. He tried it again and smashed his face against the bark, scraping off pieces of skin. He fell back, swearing and swiping at the scratches on his face.

  The Indian was practically rolling on the ground, laughing.

  Joe grabbed the whip off his saddle horn and glared at
the Indian. The Indian got quiet and stood there with his hand on his knife. I climbed to a higher branch, instantly regretting flipping Joe off. That had been a stupid move.

  Joe stomped past the Indian and stood under the tree. “You can’t stay up there forever,” he yelled. “Yer gonna pay for this!”

  Joe lashed out the whip. It cracked like a sonic boom, but it didn’t come close to reaching me. A bunch of leaves and branches came crashing down on his head. The Indian started laughing again. Joe cursed, shouted, and stomped on the ground like a two-year old. Then he slumped down by the fire and bitched to a moaning Edgar about women who didn’t know their place.

  I smirked down at them. Well, my freakin place was up a tree and out of their reach…at least for the moment. I only had value if I was alive, so I didn’t think they’d shoot me down. I was stuck there till I went back home, which rocked for avoiding them, but sucked because I really needed sleep. I began to worry about how I was going to make it through the night without falling and breaking my neck. My smirk faded.

  The Indian settled back against the log, still laughing quietly to himself every few minutes. He watched me for a while, and then he nodded off again.

  Off in the distance, a pack of coyotes howled. The wind picked up a little and blew my hair every which way. I shivered and gazed longingly at the fire now too far away to do me any good. I’d lost my hat in the mad rush up the tree, but I still had my pack on. I took a few safety pins and secured my clothing together the best I could. I was safe for the moment, but it was going to be a long, cold, and creepy night.

  I climbed to a better spot—a wide, flat fork where two big limbs met the trunk. An image of Ipod lying in the hammock danced through my head. In a flash of Ipod-insight, I pulled out my sheet and ripped off about eight strips of cloth, each one about two inches wide. The ripping sound made the men look my way. I ignored them. I had a plan…at least to get me through the night.

  The two big limbs shot up in a parallel V away from the trunk, leaving a good-sized flat space at the bottom where they joined together. I crouched there with my strips of sheet. I tied each strip about four inches apart across the two limbs, until I had a row of them, like the slats on the back of a chair. I used knots Ipod taught me that got tighter with pressure, and the roughness of the bark kept them from slipping.

  I folded up the rest of the sheet into a long piece about two feet wide and eight feet long. I wove it up through the strips and then looped back it back for another flat layer on top. It was a little rustic, but it worked like a sling back hammock. It slacked enough between the two limbs to keep me from falling out in my sleep and it seemed really secure.

  Not bad…not bad at all.

  Intensely satisfied, I twirled around and leaned back with my feet against the trunk. I still believed that sometime soon, I’d go home. All I had to do was to wait it out, and now that I had a little comfort, no biggie. I could do this. I took a deep breath. I was okay.

  Sure, something really bad almost happened. But in the end, it didn’t. And the really wild thing about the whole night was that I’d kinda saved myself. I was okay for the moment.

  I knew the tree energy was giving me a false sense of security, but false or not I went with it. There’d be plenty of time to freak if and when something else happened. I pulled out what was left of the chocolate almonds and sat back munching. Safe for the moment, I allowed myself to indulge in thoughts of Constantine.

  He went well with chocolate.

  By late afternoon we ordered pizza. Apparently it was a regular deal because the delivery guy didn’t comment when he climbed the tree house ladder. Lex insisted on paying and tipped big. Or at least I assume she did because the delivery guy grinned when she handed him the cash.

  The pizza smelled incredible. I immediately snagged a hot piece, loaded with gooey cheese, and lots of pepperoni. “Excellent,” I said, stringing the cheese into my mouth.

  She laughed.

  “What? I’m starved.” I took another big bite.

  “No doubt. Why do you think I ordered pizza? I’ve been listening to your stomach growl for the last hour.”

  I shrugged. “All I had since breakfast was that Hot Pocket. I need more fuel than that to pull this off.”

  “I’ll buy you pizza for life if you bring my girl back,” she said, grabbing her own slice. “Let’s eat outside and watch the sun go down. It’s one of A.J.’s favorite things.”

  “Sounds good.” I closed the pizza box and brought it with us to the porch. I dropped into a deck chair, leaned back, and put my feet up on the rail. “This place is amazing.”

  “Don’t I know it.” She gave me a fist bump and then she climbed into the hammock.

  “It won’t be long now,” I said.

  Then we relaxed, ate pizza, and watched the sun sink slowly over the horizon. We were mostly quiet. It was nice. I liked this chick. She didn’t talk just to fill in space like some girls did. If she didn’t have something to say, she was okay just watching the sunset. I liked that.

  “Waiting is hard,” she said finally, taking her last bite. “A.J. usually just goes back to an earlier version of the tree house, but I still worry.” She got up and walked back inside. She set her plate on the counter and then flopped down on the sofa.

  I followed. “I’m sure she’s fine,” I said, with absolutely no knowledge to back it up. The critic started stressing, but I shoved him to the back of my mind and just focused on Lex.

  “Here’s what I don’t get about the whole time travel deal,” she said. She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “Why doesn’t someone go back and really change history, like kill Hitler and keep mass murders from being born and stuff like that?”

  “I wish,” I said. “First, some of that has happened, and we just don’t realize it because, well, things have been changed. The Guild does what it can to prevent disasters. It’s their primary purpose. Second, it’s not that simple. Just like there are laws of physics, there are ‘laws’ that govern time travel as well. Time isn’t that easy to change. You can only do little things. Look at it this way.”

  I moved in front of the TV and picked up the super-soaker squirt gun that was propped against the wall. I handed it to her. “Say you took this squirt gun and aimed it at the screen.”

  “How bout I squirt you,” she said grinning. She pointed the gun at me and gave it a squirt.

  I jumped out of the way. “Let’s keep this hypothetical,” I said. “If you shot at the screen, I could move in front of the water stream and block the TV from getting wet, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Now, say you switched to a garden hose. I could maybe block most of the water, but splatters would still hit the screen. If you switched to a fire hose, it would knock me right against the screen, and the TV would get soaked even though I was trying to block it. In fact those suckers are so powerful, it would lay me out and knock the screen right off the wall.”

  “Point?” she said, setting down the super-soaker.

  “Coming. If there was an ocean wave bearing down at me, there’d be nothing I could do for the TV—total destruction. Hitler, mass murderers, they’re tsunamis. The impact they had was so frickin huge, it’s just too set in time to be able to go back and move after the fact—too heavy. Make sense?”

  “I guess,” she said hesitantly, stretching her legs out on the coffee table.

  “Think of it like this,” I said, using my hands for emphasis. “The greater the impact, the wider the spread, the more difficult it is to change. Also, the farther back in time it happened; the harder it is to rewrite. Plus, there’s the multi-causal factor as well.”

  “Meaning…”

  “Twenty guns aiming from all angles…there’s probably no way I could block the screen from getting wet. The easiest things to change are the ones where there are limited causal factors—preferably just one.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you can do much,” she said, tucking her hair behind her
ear.

  “Yeah, it’s tricky,” I said, “and not as easy as it sounds. But small rewrites can have huge consequences.” I sure knew about that one.

  “So, hypothetically,” she started. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a breath. “Say something happened recently. And say it had a single causal factor. More precisely—someone’s mother selfishly shooting off her big mouth.”

  “Yeah…” I said tentatively, knowing where things were going.

  “Could you go back and change it? Hypothetically?” Her eyes filled with tears, but she held them back. They didn’t fall.

  I looked down at my hands and gave her a second to regroup. When I looked up, the tears were gone, but there was a little spot of wet on her right shoulder.

  “Hypothetically, yes,” I said, truthfully. I couldn’t help but think that Ipod was conveniently out of the way, leaving A.J. open to fall for me. That kind of worked for me. “Does this have something to do with Ipod?” As if I didn’t know.

  She nodded. “His monster of a dad—we call him the Hammer, the son of a bitch—Hulked out on him here. He probably laid into him again when he got him home. The Hammer could have whacked Ipod and buried him in the backyard for all I know. That’s just the thing. Ipod doesn’t have his phone. He hasn’t been online. He’s dropped off the grid and I can’t find him anywhere.”

  “That sucks,” I said. Part of me wanted to have A.J. to myself and part of me wanted to help the guy. The A.J. and me thing wasn’t looking so good at that point. “So you know the exact causal factor?”

  “Yes, the exact causal factor,” she said. “If this one thing didn’t happen, Ipod would be sitting right here. We need Ipod. It will just kill A.J. to lose him.”