I won’t, Sergeant Collins.
“Damn straight. I won’t let you. Now what about that pretty young thing up front, what’s her name?”
Delora, Sergeant Collins.
“Ah, Delora. Sounds real nice when you say it like that. I think you in love, Private Keith.”
Maybe, Sergeant Collins.
“Well, tomorrow we gonna start training. Oh-dark-hundred we gonna run, Private Keith. We’re going to get back into fighting shape and show that Delora what an Airborne trooper looks like. I’m’a make one hundred and eighty pounds of rompin’, stompin’, death from above outta you again. And what do you think you’re doin’ smoking, Private Keith? Crush that thing and start knockin’ ’em out! You owe me some push-ups, recruit.”
Push-ups, Sergeant Collins?
“Did I stutter, Private Keith? Count off so I can hear you.” Dexter Keith lowers himself to the hot grit of the Martian stone, and for the first time in a long time, begins to exercise. It feels good.
If gravity is love in the swimming pool of the universe, and time a tender mercy in the unrelenting hell of a terrible moment, then what is Sergeant Collins?
One, two, three… one. One, two, three… two…
Sergeant Collins?
“Yeah, Private Keith?”
“Thanks.”
Perhaps a voice in the dark. Someone to hold onto in the deep end of the swimming pool of the universe.
A Word from Nick Cole
I believe that real readers are often found with a collection of short stories at hand. To me, people who read short stories are special; they do it for the love. You can tell they’re looking for that brief, whirling moment through another world, and they don’t care about passport stamps or spoons from some tourist trap. Or even a T-shirt with a LAGUNA BEACH LIFEGUARD logo stamped across it. No, short-story readers are not like that at all. Short-story readers are like scouts scanning the horizon, searching for lost cities and hidden treasures. Like dancers dancing to a song at some sudden wedding they just happened into in some unfound village of happy and good people.
No, short stories don’t make the big lists. They seldom get invited to the movies, and no one makes a miniseries out of them. Short stories are usually personal, for both reader and writer. We—both of us—do it for the love. Thank you for taking the time to read our stories.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t like the big books. The books we can sink our teeth into. The books we can settle down with, and even live and love in for a while. So, if you’d like to read some books I’ve written, they’re collected in a series called The Wasteland Saga.
In 2011 I wrote a book called The Old Man and the Wasteland, and people liked it. So, I wrote two sequels. The second book in the series, The Savage Boy, is available as a stand-alone, and the final novel, The Road Is a River, is available as part of the completed trilogy The Wasteland Saga. (It’s a pretty good deal! Three books for the price of one.) And this August, HarperVoyager will publish a brand new sci-fi novel I’ve written called Soda Pop Soldier. It’s basically Call of Duty meets Diablo.
To find all of my books, and to learn how to obtain them in your favorite format, just go to the Nick Cole page at Harper Collins Publishers.
Thank you for reading our short stories. Let me know how you like them on Twitter @nickcolebooks or on my page on Facebook. Or swing on over to my website for backstory and (coming soon) post-apocalyptic swag at nickcolebooks.com.
And I hope you enjoyed the story of Private Dexter Keith. I think things are going to work out for him.
The River
by Jennifer Ellis
2012
“How many miles today, oh exalted exercise goddess?” Paul gave her his usual sly grin as he sidled up to her in the park.
Sarah snorted and bent forward into a deeper stretch. “How could you not know? It’s in the schedule. Ten miles, of course. We’re tapering.” Her body felt taut, excited, wanting to go further—ready to rip off the band-aid and feel the pain of exertion and leave Paul aching behind her. Which of course was exactly the point of a taper. The Ironman was in a week.
“I have my mind on other things. I depend on you to know what we’re doing.” Paul jogged in place lightly. He wore a fitted white running shirt and tight navy shorts. She almost laughed at his muscled perfection and the tongue-in-cheek horseshoe mustache he occasionally sported. Every single woman they passed today, and probably some of the men, would be completely dazzled by Paul. She’d seen it happen. She, unfortunately, remained unmoved. Dead baby sisters had a way of damping the libido and emotions. Still, something in Paul’s eyes caught and held, as it sometimes did when she wasn’t on guard.
“Someday, I’m going to say screw the program and just keep running and see if you can keep up,” Sarah said.
His sky-blue eyes flashed with the challenge, but he gave her a broad smile. He’d like that, she realized with another catch.
“I’m sure you’d leave me wasted in your dust,” he said. “But I know you’d never lie, so I have no fears of that.”
“Don’t be so sure about that,” she said. She lived nothing but lies. But he didn’t know that. She turned away, dropped into the warrior pose, and remained silent for several minutes. Behaviors become habits, habits become characteristics. Negative self-talk can be overcome. Go easy on yourself. She could hear multiple therapists talking to her at any one time, but she didn’t listen to any of them.
Paul never seemed to take offense.
“So who do you think it’s going to be for the gold in the marathon—Gelana or Keitany?” Paul said, as they set off down the wide trail.
Sarah checked her running watch to ensure they were at pace. “Well, don’t count Straneo out, but after Rotterdam, I’m putting my money on Gelana.”
They automatically turned left at the trailhead to take the forest loop, away from the grasping, swirling waters of the Looking Glass River. They never took the trail that followed first the Looking Glass and then the Grand River. Sarah had said something about optimal elevation change on their first run, and Paul had never asked questions.
They completed their run quickly and efficiently, with little chatter other than to check their lap rate. Their trained, toned bodies were high on movement, flying down the path in unison. She expected him to do well in the Ironman. Not as well as her, of course. The men’s field was deeper and broader. He would never feel the victory to which she was accustomed, even though he was just as fast, if not faster, than she was.
“Our last lap was off pace,” she said. “Too fast.”
“I thought we wanted to move faster in the taper.”
“Not too fast. The idea was to get you used to a seven-minute pace. That’s your goal, remember?”
Paul grunted something inaudible and crossed one foot over the other to stretch his calves. She admired the curve of his thigh.
They were both all about the exercise. She knew he had a job, that he was in fact a physicist of some renown at Portland State University. She never asked him about it. He was her training partner, and former client. And he was younger than she was, after all. Only four years—but at their age, four years to a man was probably an eternity. She supposed he might think them friends in a way. Paul was the only person who knew she’d always wished she had gone to college. He didn’t know about Charlotte, of course.
Mostly they just trained.
“So, do you think I’m ready?” It was his first Ironman.
“Just remember,” she said. “Run your own race. Don’t get intimidated by everyone else around you. We’re not solving world hunger here. We’re just learning how to push our bodies. There will always be another Ironman, or triathlon, or race. Do your best, and just have a redo if it doesn’t turn out how you wanted.” It was her standard personal-trainer patter. She wanted her clients to feed off the exhilaration of strength, not victory.
“Absolutely, Coach.” He winked at her. “So, I was wondering if you wanted to have dinner w
ith me tonight at the new Thai place?”
“What?” she said. This was so unexpected that she couldn’t even grasp a social nicety to attach to it.
He cracked her his customary grin. “I wanted to talk to you about some training stuff, and other things. Five o’clock? I know you don’t like to be out late.”
She almost said no. It wasn’t in the routine, but the edge of nervousness in his smile changed her mind. “Fine, but let’s make it the new vegetarian place on Fifth. I need to eat clean this week.”
* * *
Sarah ran her clients through their paces. The stay-at-home moms in the morning and early afternoon gave way to the working women in the late afternoon. All chronically worried about their bodies, about how husbands and boyfriends perceived them, about aging. Few of them were really willing to push until it hurt. Few of them did it solely for themselves. They didn’t get the rush of being powerful, of muscle fatigue, of effortlessness. But they were her mainstay.
They were always hungry for advice, for just the right formula to have Sarah’s body. She watched them watching her, tracing the curves of her quadriceps and deltoids with their eyes—a scrutiny akin to lust, but not quite. Sarah didn’t know what to tell them. Eschew personal relationships, make pain your friend, and bury your emotional damage in exercise?
She showered, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and donned a warm-up suit—but then caught her image in the mirror and thought it might look a bit too severe and Soviet-gymnastics-trainer for a restaurant. She relented and put on a pair of jeans. She left her hair pulled back.
Paul was wearing perfectly fitting jeans and a checked dress shirt unbuttoned to the sternum. She almost had to look away. He ordered a beer. She declined.
He raised his beer in salute to her water, took a long draught, and then winked at her. “Screw the Ironman clean-eating regimen. I’m celebrating for one night. I had a big breakthrough in my work today.”
This tossed Sarah onto uneven ground. Face to face, they talked stretches, distances, food, races, times, and gear. Personal talk they saved for twenty-five-mile runs when they weren’t looking at each other, and even then it was limited and sketchy on detail.
“How so?” she said carefully.
Paul glanced around, as if to make sure there was nobody who could overhear, and then leaned closer to her. “I’ve invented something. Something important.”
“And what would that be?”
“A handheld time travel device.” There was satisfaction in his blue eyes, but she detected something else: a faint hint of appraisal. Why was he telling her this?
“You’re kidding. For particles, right?” Even she knew enough about quantum physics to know this.
He showed a flash of teeth. “For people,” he said firmly.
“You’re pulling my leg.” Her mind scrambled at possibilities. Did he need a test subject? One who had few personal relationships to worry about if something went wrong? Was that what this was about?
He flashed more teeth and arched an eyebrow. “Would I do that before Ironman?” he said, but then grew more serious, looking at her in an earnest way that she found unsettling. He was probably just being borderline friendly, but in her warped and solitary world, she wouldn’t know the difference between friendly and outright lecherous. “You’ve heard of the grandfather paradox of time travel, right?”
She shrugged. “Let’s say I haven’t. I’ve been fairly narrowly focused on, you know, running shoes, body fat ratios, stride length…” she trailed off, hoping this would divert him to one of their usual topics. One of their safe topics.
“The grandfather paradox is where you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, and then you cease to exist and so your time travel wasn’t possible.” Paul took another slug of beer. “It’s always been one of the main problems of time travel.”
“Why would you kill your grandfather?”
“Well, ideally you wouldn’t. That’s an extreme example. The point is, anything you change in the past could set off a string of events that changes the timeline and results in you not even existing, and therefore never traveling in time in the first place. And yet, there you are back in time, unable potentially to return, because you no longer exist. There’s also the problem of you running into—and probably scaring the bejesus out of—your past self.” Paul cast her a broad smile.
“No kidding,” Sarah said weakly. Where was this going? He couldn’t possibly be serious. She should be doing her evening crunches and jump-ups and getting ready for bed.
She watched his fingers curve around the amber beer bottle as he spoke. “Let’s just say that I’ve created a device which deals with all of that, because it only allows time travel within your own lifespan and allows for temporal merging. When you travel to your past, you simply merge with yourself until you decide to return to the future. And if you by accident change the timeline in such a way that negates your future time travel—like if you killed me, say—well then you’ve already merged with your past self, and you just have to relive your life. Potentially irritating, but not a life-threatening outcome. This avoids a lot of the uncomfortable bits associated with time travel. It essentially allows for redos.”
“Redos?”
Paul’s eyes met hers. “You can fix your mistakes.”
“Right. And it works?”
“I tested it myself this afternoon. In fact, I did our run twice today. And I’m just fine.”
“That’s overtraining,” she said automatically. Then she flagged the server and ordered a single-malt scotch.
He winked at her. “The second time I asked you out. The first time I didn’t. You don’t even remember the first time. So I changed the timeline.”
“And where do you keep this device?” she said, with a meaningful look at his shirt pocket. She kept her voice light. “If we go now, we could do a whole week of extra training for Ironman.”
He smiled. “It’s in my condo. Let’s just say it wasn’t a university project.”
She tried to make her smile friendly, flirty, and unthreatening, the way she had seen other women smile at men. “I want to see.” She downed the first scotch in a few burning gulps.
* * *
He took her back to his condo, a sleek brown and cream affair that was unusually cozy and tidy for a man. After showing her how the device worked, he started telling her about the physics of time travel and some of the glitches he was working out. He hadn’t figured out how to travel to the future yet, unless you were returning to the future from the past, but he was working on it.
Sarah tried to listen attentively, but all she could think was: Charlotte. And: Mom. The album of a local band played low on the stereo, and their cover of Madonna’s “Crazy for You” came on. Sarah rose with trembling hands, stood in the pale light that streamed in the window from the street, and asked Paul to dance. He hesitated and cocked his head at her, assessing, but then set down the device and came and slipped his arms around her. He was smaller than she had expected, and she felt the soft rasp of his stubble against her cheek as her nose met his earlobe.
He smelled like night air on a river, and she closed her eyes against the faint suggestion of tears, as the solidity of muscle, bone, and sheer intoxicating masculinity pressed against her.
It didn’t take long for her lips to find his, for their desire to unfurl. Their bodies fit together and moved in such synchrony that this seemed like the moment they had been training for, not the Ironman.
Paul seemed surprised but not unenthusiastic about her sudden ardor. The sex was vigorous, athletic, tender, and shockingly enjoyable considering she had three scotches under her belt and had sworn off men.
* * *
When he was asleep, she rose, huddled shivering in the shadows of the living room for a few seconds, and then collected the device from the coffee table. “Sorry, Paul,” she whispered as she eased her way out into the building corridor, and then she ran home in the dead of night, her hard supple legs propellin
g her easily down the dim streets. She made a mental note to drink scotch before her next race, then realized she was drunk and stupid. She collected her passport, packed a bag, sent an email to all of her clients that she would be away for a while, withdrew as much money from her bank account as the ATM limits would allow, took a cab to the airport, and got on the first available flight to Vegas. The device, a modified smartphone that raised no security questions, weighed heavy in her pocket.
Sarah checked into the MGM Grand as “Serena Parker” and slept for four hours.
Then she rose, made herself a strong coffee, and ate the Doritos and salted almonds from the minibar. No need to keep eating clean.
On any other weekday, she and Paul would be completing their morning run. Today would be a slow, seven-mile jaunt, continuing their taper. She wondered if Paul would know the schedule in her absence. She wondered if he had run on his own, knowing that she betrayed him.
She wouldn’t have predicted that she would miss Paul. She had known that she enjoyed their morning runs, but before today she would have said it was the running she enjoyed, and the comfort of knowing that she had someone who could keep up with her beside her. But now, Paul’s absence yawned before her.
He wouldn’t want to run with her anymore anyway. She had just stolen his life’s work.
He had been so excited when he’d shown her how to set the date and time on the device and simply push a button to move back and forth through time. He did it, apparently, in front of her, claiming to have moved several books from the coffee table to the kitchen counter his second time through. She hadn’t noticed. And he hadn’t vanished, but rather simply continued on, claiming to have gone back and returned. That was the beauty of it, he said. Nobody other than the time traveler will even notice anything has happened.
His eyes had been such a limpid blue when he showed her the device, and then later when he held her. The sex had been unbelievable.
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel Page 12