“What?” Anything. She’d do anything.
“The calculator. Destroy it. Terrible things... because of it. Your work.”
“What?” She clutched the knife more tightly, its handle cool in her palm. “No...” she whimpered.
“Thousands of people. Dead. Satellites falling. All because of... Destroy it. You’ve got to,” he begged.
“What?” Shivers coursed through her. What had—or would—she do?
“Do it!”
Tony’s choked words, the pain he had to be in, tore at her. She gulped. “All right.”
“Promise.” His voice shook.
“I promise.” The calculator didn’t matter. Her work didn’t matter. She snatched his hand and curled his fingers around the knife handle. “Don’t let them take you. It’s Hades on earth, I’ve seen—”
“Better me than you,” he said through clenched teeth. “I can’t. Let them do that to you.” He straightened his fingers and pulled his hand away. The knife slid to the ground. “I love you. Even if you lied to me. Even if you betrayed me. Even though I should hate you...”
Charlotte gazed down upon his broken body, took in the pool of blood forming beneath his hip. It had soaked through his knickers and his strange, stretchy shirt. If he lived, the Society would subject him to unspeakable torture, trapped inside his own mind. He was hurt. But not badly enough to insure the speedy death that would send him to his own time.
Theodore ran along the wall, another man close behind. Clouds had slipped back over the moon, and he hadn’t seen her yet, but she didn’t have long.
There was one thing she could do to save Tony. “You have a family. People who love you. I have no one, let them take me...” She snatched the knife off the gravel and gripped it in both hands. “P- please forgive me,” she sobbed, and plunged the knife into his belly, forced it up under his ribs. Pushed harder. His screams rang in her ears, yet were muffled as if he lay in a deep pit. Heavens, she’d never have guessed how tough the human body was, she thought with an odd detachment. Blood spurted as she drove the knife upward. His flesh ripped with a sickening resistance. The metallic scent of his blood stung her nose, then sticky, warmth burned down the front of her dress as his screams dwindled into a gurgle.
“I do,” he choked as he gasped his last breath.
“Charlotte!” Theodore leaned over the retaining wall, lifted a leg over.
Her mentor’s words faded as she stared down at Tony’s body. The blood bubbled out of the slash in his stomach more slowly now, and his eyes glazed over. Shouts from one of the other men drifted from the wall, then she turned back to Tony’s body. Good Lord, she’d killed. Her thoughts seemed strangely distant as if they weren’t her own but came from somewhere outside herself. She’d murdered a man. Not just any man, but the one she loved more than anything. Nausea gripped her. She curled into a ball and vomited. Nothing came up but bile. She hadn’t had anything to eat since a piece of toast for breakfast. She dry-heaved again, then something flickered at the edge of her vision. Tony’s form grew indistinct, as if drawn on rice paper with pencils. Shimmered like a mirage. The dizziness of someone jumping slammed her. She wobbled as she yanked the knife from his stomach, then his body faded completely.
He’d gone home. She’d accomplished her purpose. Killed the man she loved. And in doing so, she’d freed him.
She hoped.
The only indications he’d been there were black speckles of blood on the gravel, their edges blurring in the rain. Dark stains soaked her dress.
“He’s gone!” one of the men yelled.
“She let him get away again!”
“I’ll take care of her!” Caruthers’ bellow bore a threat beyond the treatment. Theodore slid down the grassy slope of the river bank as Caruthers clambered over the wall.
She leapt to her feet and ran down the gravel along the river’s edge, toward home. Once she destroyed the calculator, let them do to her what they would. Her life was over.
She cast a glance behind her. Caruthers slipped on the dewy grass, and slid into Theodore with a curse. She forced her legs to pump harder and didn’t look back again.
A fall of dead trees came into view, and she stopped running to grab onto a protruding branch, used it to pull herself up the slippery riverbank. She should be close to her house, if she could make it to the top. She let go of the branch, clutched a clump of grass, and pulled herself up, until she reached the retaining wall.
She heaved herself over, gulped for air, then paused. Caruthers’ shouts drifted from the river, then Theodore’s, and another man she didn’t know.
The back of the Paulson’s garage loomed in front of her. She bolted to the alley, then her feet pounded the gravel until she stopped behind her house. “She’s going home!” Caruthers yelled. Closer.
She yanked open the side door and scrambled down the steps. Had to get the calculator before they got her. It didn’t matter that once the Society got hold of her, she’d no longer be a threat, would no longer own the mental capacity to care for herself much less invent anything.
But she’d promised Tony.
The light still burned over her workbench. She snatched the calculator, flipped it over in her hand. Her dreams, shattered. Soon she wouldn’t remember—or would she? The treatment—
“Charlotte!”
Theodore. Outside. She had to do it. Now. She gripped the little machine in both hands and tried to break it. The thing was surprisingly tough. Slowly, the hard, metal back and brushed metal face started to bend—
Upstairs, the doorknob rattled, then a squeak as the door swung open. “Charlotte, my dear,” Caruthers called. “I’m most disappointed in you...”
Footsteps. The stairwell door flew open and light spilled down the stairs. Mutters from Theodore.
Her eyes flitted over the workbench. If only she’d brought the knife! Better that than—
Concrete. Images of a row of six huge, round pilasters holding the bridge up over the street before her, the roar of traffic overhead, the rumble of a big truck...
The future. She’d gone there before. She could do it again. Maybe it was certain death to jump into the future, but it was far better than the life she’d have in the Society. If there was a chance, however small, she could be with Tony... She gripped the calculator, squeezed her eyes shut, and concentrated on the scene she’d stumbled into with him...
Fluttery in her head. She could do it. She dropped the calculator into her pocket and pulled her quarter out of her dress, stared at its silvery surface between her bloodstained finger and thumb. George Washington. The astronaut. The Wright Flyer. In God We Trust. 2002. Spinning, whirling... nothing existed but her and the quarter, and endless motion, and everywhere, nothing but gray...
HE WASN’T DEAD. DEATH DIDN’T HAVE fluorescent lights above. Death didn’t smell like antiseptic and bad institutional food, did it?
And surely death didn’t have the mother of all heartburn.
A tinny voice squawked somewhere in the distance, paging Doctor-somebody to the nurses’ station.
Death didn’t have a paging system, did it?
Tony squinted at the ceiling, trying without success to focus. Things behind him dripped and clicked in time to the beat in his head. A giant fist clamped around his chest. He couldn’t pull enough air into his lungs. His whole body ached.
He wasn’t dead. The dead didn’t feel pain.
With that thought, Tony Solomon allowed himself to slip back into welcome oblivion.
Tony reached through the hospital bed rail and gripped Bethany’s hand. “Does your car have a steering wheel?” His voice sounded throaty. But decent for someone who’d just woken from time travel recovery an hour ago. Someone who’d suffered a stab wound in the gut.
Stab wound? He started to shove the sheet down to look—
“Huh?” Bethany squinched up her nose, making it wrinkle across the bridge.
He’d check his stomach later. “Does your car have a steering whe
el?”
“What kind of question is that?” She cocked her head.
“Just answer me.”
“Ye-es,” she said in a long, drawn out inflection.
“What about July third?”
“What about it?”
That sounded positive. “What’s July third?” he asked.
She lowered her chin and looked at him from under her eyelashes. She enunciated each word, as if he wasn’t mentally competent. “The day before the fourth?”
Tony’s head flopped back against his pillow. It never happened.
“Where’s Lisa?”
Bethany gave him another well-duh look. “Probably at work.”
“At the base, right?”
She half-turned and regarded him from the side of her eye. “Last I heard. Are you sure you’re all—”
“Thank God.” Relief washed over Tony like a swim in a cool stream on a blazing summer day. He didn’t care if Bethany thought he was drugged, messed up, or just plain stupid. Everything was fixed.
“You’re like, totally not making sense,” she said. “They must’ve given you some good drugs.” She glanced at the clock. “I have to go.” She rose and gathered up her purse. Tony recalled she’d gotten a summer job in the mailroom at LCT. “I think Mom’s coming by after she gets off work.” She leaned over and kissed him, a cool, blessed spot of moisture on his cheek. He told her goodbye and he loved her, then she was out the door.
It was over. All done. Bethany was alive. Lisa was alive. No SpaStar. No sixteen thousand people dead because of him.
He pushed the sheet down until he could grasp the hem of his hospital down and pull it up. There, under his fingers. A short, bumpy ridge maybe an inch and a half long. Already healed, no need for a bandage.
He lifted his uninjured, right arm and touched his neck. Instantly he felt the rough, raised scar. The one from the ancient Mayans’ huge, stone axe.
He’d warped back into the other timeline. The right one.
When he got out of the hospital, he’d look up Charlotte Henderson on the Internet, just to make sure, but he suspected all he’d find was her great-niece’s genealogy web site with its scant information and notation that Charlotte disappeared in 1933, presumed dead.
Charlotte. Dead.
Or worse. The sheet beneath him grew clammy. A drop of moisture trickled down the scar on the leg he’d broken when he’d jumped off the bridge—like the stab wound, already healed, in his return to the present. Had Pippin gotten to her, given her the punishment intended for him?
She killed herself. She’d had that knife. He had to believe that, couldn’t bear the thought of Charlotte a zombie with a mind empty of anything but pain and misery.
She’d done it for him. Without regard for what they’d do to her. She loved him so much she’d killed him.
He turned his head to the side, crushed his face into the pillow. Wished he could suffocate himself in it.
The pillow grew wet beneath the side of his face. His mom had been there when he’d first come out of recovery. She’d told him a second-shift janitor at Sinclair Community College had seen him in the river and called the cops.
Why couldn’t the guy have just gone on his way and let him die? Without Charlotte—
She’d given him this. Given him Bethany, by telling him how to warp within his own life. Given him the chance to fix everything he’d fucked up. He’d make what he could of his life, riddled with holes as it was.
Rumble. Buzz. Whooshing sounds. Charlotte opened her eyes and took in her surroundings as the dizziness subsided. A car passed on the street in front of her. The superhighway bridge Tony had told her about cut a darker swath across the night above, punctuated by misty-circled, orange-tinted streetlights. Something pressed into the hand she held at her breast. She unclenched her fists. Her quarter in one.
The calculator in the other.
She gasped, and it clattered to the concrete. For a long moment, all she could do was stare. Slowly, she picked it up.
She’d promised Tony she’d destroy it. Was taking it out of 1933 altogether enough?
She dropped the calculator into her pocket, but snatched her hands away at the wetness on her dress. Dark stains blotted out the beautiful violet print. Blood. Tony’s.
Lightness burst through her. She’d made it to Tony’s time. She’d jumped into the future, alive! Her eyes darted from side to side, searching for him. He’d be hurt, probably unconscious. She had to find him, fast. The jump would heal the worst of his injuries, but he’d still need medical attention.
She wandered across a vast plain of concrete and sadness sliced her. Everything she’d known, gone. Her home, and all those around it. She swallowed. Except for Tony. He was—fear whisked away her sorrow—in the river.
She had to go there, face the water and the danger and deception it concealed, and get him out of the river before he drowned.
She trudged across Robert Boulevard—now Robert Drive, according to an enormous green sign above the road. It was nothing more than a strip of deserted pavement. No homes. No more beautiful park in the median. Fear threatened to immobilize her. She fought it and tottered across another expanse of concrete, toward the retaining wall still atop of the riverbank. At least the foot she’d sprained no longer hurt, thanks to the jump. She had to get to Tony. Gripping the low, cement wall, she leaned over.
The black ribbon of the river flowed smoothly below. Decades later, the only difference was that more streetlights cast speckled reflections on its surface.
Enough light she should have been able to see Tony lying on the graveled shoal near the bridge support. Dread coursed down her gullet and bound her ribs as surely as if she’d been tied with rope. Had he come forward only to drown?
She had to go down there to make sure. Had to go into the water that would suck her under, steal the air from her lungs. Never mind the river was only a few feet deep, that was enough to be dangerous, Tony could be drowning while she stood there being scared.
She pushed aside her fear and stumbled down the dewy grass to the river’s edge.
She crept along the water, peering in where Tony should have been. The contours of the graveled areas had changed, but not so much he would have wound up under water. He should be—she followed the lines of the bridge supports into the river—Right there. On that little, grassy rise.
She picked her way over rocks, discarded bottles and a tire, squinting at the grass and weeds.
No blood. No indentation where a body might have lain.
But where? He had to be there somewhere.
She paced up and down the water’s edge, searching for any sign Tony might have been there. Blood. Footprints.
She stumbled along the rocky shoreline. So tired... She’d forgotten jumping sapped her energy so. She was beginning to slip into recovery. Had to find Tony. Before she collapsed.
“Tony?” Her voice was small and weak. Where was he? How could he have moved in his condition? She had to get away from the water. Wouldn’t be much help to him if she fell in and drowned in recovery. “Tony...” she called. It was useless. Her voice was muffled, darkness was closing in on her. What if something had gone wrong, and he wasn’t there?
Or maybe the jump had healed him more than she thought, and he’d managed to climb the riverbank. Mustering the last reserves of her strength, she did the same, Tony’s image in her mind the only fuel spurring her onward.
But no body lay near the retaining wall. No one hid between the enormous supports for the highway. No Tony.
Barely able to stand, she sagged against one of the massive pylons. “Tony?” Maybe he was in that parking lot over there, hidden among those parked cars that looked like spaceships.
Wobbling, she pushed herself off the column and staggered toward the parking lot as fog descended over her mind.
Her hand met with something smooth and chalky. Metal. She blinked. Heavens, she was already losing consciousness. A truck, its red paint oxidized. And she’
d wind up face down on the pavement if she didn’t lie down soon.
And what of Tony?
Nothing she could do, not with recovery about to overtake her. If he was still in the river, he was already dead.
She tipped her face up as tears threatened. He couldn’t be dead! If he was, wouldn’t his body be lying on the shore?
She blinked until her vision cleared. He must have somehow managed to get away.
Phone the police. Yes, that’s what she’d do. If someone had picked up Tony, they’d know. Surely there was a telephone somewhere in one of those big concrete buildings down the street, where a massive, cement sign read Sinclair Community College.
She could make it. If she rested a moment, maybe she could stave off recovery long enough to go there and ring the police.
She glanced at the truck she was leaning against. A pickup truck. With its tailgate down, leaving the way open to a nice, flat, relatively clean place to lie—
Bed...
Charlotte, think! You can’t just lie down in someone’s truck! She pushed herself off the truck, but listed to the side and grasped it again to keep from falling.
Why not? her weary mind argued. Just for a minute.
It couldn’t hurt. One hand on the tailgate, she grabbed the side of the truck bed with the other hand, and pulled herself up and over. She slid to the metal bed with a thunk.
Violet hesitated at the door to Tony’s hospital room. She hadn’t seen him in over two months, ached to see his handsome face, but wouldn’t it seem funny for her to visit?
It wasn’t strange in Mexico.
But then, she’d been with him when he was hurt. Natural curiosity, a reason to care.
She had to see him. Needed to, ever since his picture was on the news last week, when he’d been found half dead in the river. A shudder coursed through her. She didn’t know why, but the river—any water bigger than her bathtub, but especially the Great Miami—had always scared the wits out of her. At least it had, as long as she could remember. And to think Tony had almost died there. She couldn’t shake the feeling she had something to do with it.
Time's Enemy: A Romantic Time Travel Adventure (Saturn Society Book 1) Page 35