Eli is tired, his feet are cold. The grey glow is low in the west. Richard stands and looks into the woods. It is dark, a tangle of sticks and trunks.
We should find a place for tonight, he says.
Eli stands. His feet are numb beneath him. He stamps them, trying to work feeling back into his toes.
We gotta try, Richard says. He leads Eli off the road into the trees.
They move under branches. Every dead tree has been bent by wind and water. Eli struggles to keep up with Richard. His back keeps disappearing behind black tree trunks, rocks slick blue with moss. Eli trips on roots, wet fingers coming out of the ground, reaching for him. He scrambles away.
They pick their way through the trees until they come across a clearing. There is a rusted car frame and a trail leading off farther into the woods. A small building, just a hut, sits down the trail. They can see it through the sparse trees.
Richard crosses the clearing to the car. He searches the inside, checking under the rotting seats. He opens the trunk and waves Eli over.
Here, he says.
Eli joins Richard and looks into the car. There are a couple of zip packets. Beans and beets.
Richard looks up at the hut, then back at Eli.
Stay and guard the food, he says. I’m going to look quick.
Eli is scared. He reaches for his brother. But Richard squats down and puts his hands on the boy’s shoulders.
Eli, Richard says, we need more food. You see? I’ll be right back.
Eli stares at Richard, he tries not to cry.
Wait here, Richard says. He gets up and walks down the path toward the hut. Eli is alone in the clearing. He thinks of the wave. He wonders if it came this far. Wonders if this place was drowned out in brownwater like the ground houses. Eli scrambles onto the hood of the car, his muddy feet sliding on the metal. He wants to get a better view through the trees but Richard has gone inside, into the dark.
Eli shivers and pulls his slip jacket tighter around him. He is alone. It is quiet, like it was in the ground houses. He thinks of the man in the doorway. He doesn’t want to be alone.
There is a great silence, stretching long, upwards into the sky over the clearing. There are no sounds of children or cars or grown-ups. No steam-wail of a factory smokestack or roar as the river surges around the great bend by the slumtop. Eli watches the trees.
There is a movement. Richard is walking back down the path, carrying something small in his hands. He crosses the clearing and smiles at the boy. He sets a pair of shoes down on the hood of the car. They are grey rubber.
You can wear these, Richard says. And there’s food over there. We’ll stay for tonight.
Eli puts the shoes on. They are too big. He jumps off the hood of the car onto the ground and looks down at his feet, the hollow shoe-space around his ankles. His feet will move around in them, but they will be fine. Maybe he will grow into them.
Richard starts walking toward the path. He turns to Eli and calls out to him.
The boy takes a step in his new shoes and follows his brother across the clearing.
RUPTURES
Jamie Mason
for Syd Ward
This is how we live now. The sector of the city that’s still cohesive is under martial law; the event horizon where the pavement disintegrates and drops into oblivion is heavily guarded. You can get within a mile or two of the misty, yawning canyon of the Abyss but the army has cordoned off the rest. They’re enforcing a strict curfew on everyone except us.
Because there aren’t enough police and soldiers to guard all the ruptures that are appearing these days they’re using rent-a-cops like me. I have a new partner named David, a high-school graduate whose primary relationship seems to be with his cell phone. He’s so entranced by its screen that he barely notices anything else – our uniform dress code, shift start times or when the aperture we’re guarding opens and closes. He’s grown up with ruptures so he’s not the least bit scared of them.
Have you put a note in the duty log? I ask.
David ignores me, focusing on his keypad as he taps out a text message. He hits the SEND button, then sits blinking at the screen for a full half-minute to underscore my triviality.
You’re not the boss o’ me, he grumbles. He takes up the binder on the ground beside his camp chair, opens it and scribbles a notation anyway. I stifle a smile and cross the deserted street to the barricades.
The rupture pulses and mutters as if breathing. It’s larger than it was when we started our shift – almost as big as the one that swallowed city hall last week – a huge, yawning electrostatically charged mouth mumbling its hymns to the Abyss. Magnetic spray arcs the maw of the quantum destabilization as it emits a low, disturbing hum. A police cordon extends for two blocks in every direction and all the buildings have been evacuated.
I check my watch. Lunchtime. Whistling quietly, I step back toward our guard post. There have been only a dozen or so fatalities attributed to this rupture. No big deal, considering. With any luck, it should close before that number climbs too high. That’s part of what I’m getting paid to ensure. Because this is how we live now.
◄ ►
Know how we learned that time has buoyancy? McLaughlin sucked his cigarette to ash, then butted the remains in the dashboard ashtray. Monkeys. Back when we had control over the ruptures we usedta send monkeys through. But they’d only be there for a short while because time is an ocean and living organisms are ping-pong balls that can submerge only so deep for so long before they pop back out. That’s buoyancy.
I checked my cell phone – a nervous habit I had whenever we were on ops. No new texts.
Then one day they opened a rupture to AD 1215 and sent a monkey through. Little rascal came back holding a banana. Now where the fuck do you get a banana in 1215? Beats me. But if anyone could find out, it’d be a monkey. And he sure did!
I knew the story. But listening to McLaughlin tell it was part of the pleasure. Older than me and a font of wisdom, Mac taught me most of what I knew about rupture chasing.
Notification came 10 minutes later. The rupture was due to materialize 15 miles southwest of our current position. We moved out. I drove while Mac kept an eye on the Chronoflux Quotient. It’s climbing, he muttered. I steered down a dirt road, squinting ahead through the darkness. Apparently, ground zero for our rupture was the middle of a farmer’s fallow hayfield. So we parked by a fence and walked.
Can you believe the new evidence handling instructions? Mac lit a fresh cigarette off the stub of his old one. Christ on a cracker! We have to record our recoveries on four separate documents now. Un-fucking-believable.
It’s a redundancy measure. (I disguised my weariness at having to explain – yet again – the newer, more streamlined corporate approach to rupture chasing.) They want to be able to cross-check the evidence and make sure we’re not boosting any before it gets logged for storage.
Where the hell do they put it all? Mac’s peeved tone persisted through the abrupt subject change. There must be… fuck. Millions of items! Hey. He tapped his wrist display. It’s coming on, amigo.
We lingered by the edge of the field as the singularity rippled into existence. Two thieves emerged – both young, one a Native kid wearing a black windbreaker, the other in a ball cap and white sneakers. I went after the Native kid but she beat me to the fence. I fumed, watching her disappear into the trees before turning and hiking back to help Mac take charge of Ball-cap.
Looks like silverware. Mac shook a pillowcase, producing a metallic rattle. Pure stuff and good for smelting down.
Nice catch. I smiled. Why don’t you take that back to the car and log it? I’ll finish up here.
Mac hesitated for a moment, trying to catch my eye as I patted down the suspect. Mac needed to ask why I wanted to stay behind. But I pretended to be preoccupied long enough that he eventually gave up and marched to the car. I heard him pop the trunk. Then his silhouette appeared in a shaft of light from our laptop.
&nb
sp; Ball-cap was terrified. I rifled his pockets and came up with a pack of Mokri cigarettes, the swastika tax label visible. What’s this? I demanded. I fished an SS notebook and a fistful of medals, including an Iron Cross with oak leaves and swords from his other pocket.
I’ll keep these, I muttered, stowing the lot. A little something for the souvenir hunters. And not a word to the old man down there or I’ll sneak into cells and kill you. I twisted his arm and added: I can make it look like an accident.
◄ ►
Hey.
I poke David. On the brink of voicing a complaint, he stops short and looks up from his cell phone at the rupture.
It’s growing.
◄ ►
I tried to be clean. I really did. But like they say: things change.
Mac had nothing to do with corrupting me, but he brought me along until I was one of the most competent chasers in our district. Pretty soon I was up for senior investigator, but they passed me over for promotion. Our new boss – a pencil pusher who was intimidated by competence – handed the job to his pet bitch, a crotch-snuffling suck-ass he hired a year before who jumped at the boss’s every little whim. Me? I had 15 years in. For a while I was angry enough to kill. Then I chilled out.
Loyalty? I figured that went both ways. So I intercepted the next sealed skid of evidence I saw, tore the shrink wrap, grabbed an item that had already been cataloged and would never see the light of day again, and stuffed it into my backpack. And continued, every chance I got.
Disposing of stolen evidence was even simpler than boosting it. Items recovered from ruptures sold for top dollar – and fast. An original Van Gogh, for instance – a previously unknown work, and so new I could smell the paint drying as I photographed it – was the sort of thing I could retire on. I received 100 bids within a minute of posting it online.
Loyalty? Fuck that. I used to believe in loyalty. Until I started believing in every man for himself.
◄ ►
Between us, Mac and I made 85 arrests that last year we chased together – a record for the district.
Time was, he said as we drove back to HQ after the silverware bust, they used to send us in there after them. He paused to listen to the radio bulletin about the U.S. president’s visit to Toronto.
Imagine working security for that zoo? I asked.
No fucking way. Mac shivered. I’d rather be ducking back into ruptures. You know the higher-ups stopped us when they figured we might do something stupid in there? Not that they give a shit about our health and safety! No, they were worried we were dumb enough to go back in time and screw up history.
The shit-rats haven’t managed to change history yet, I pointed out.
They’re never there long enough! Mac tapped my shoulder for emphasis. Besides, they’re too lame-brained.
I pondered this for a minute. You’d have to, like, step through a rupture right up next to Hitler – with a gun already pointed at his head! – to make that kind of difference. And what are the chances of that?
Even 15 seconds wouldn’t be long enough. Mac cracked a window to stream out smoke as he referenced the longest rupture on record. Buoyancy is time’s self-defence mechanism. Whenever there’s a breach between one point and another, buoyancy attacks the intruder and drives him out, like antibodies fighting a virus. If time is the immune system, then ruptures are like wounds on the skin.
Lesions in time! I intoned. Thus creating a form of theft unique in the annals of crime.
Fuck anuses. Mac rubbed his face. I’m tired and need a fucking drink.
◄ ►
David drowses beside me as I examine the pulsing rupture, now grown to the size of a locomotive.
Back when Mac and I worked together, the government was struggling to contain what it had unleashed. Stolen item recovery was deemed essential to halt the spread of the “cross-dimensional contamination” (their term). Sure, crippling the black marketeers was part of it, but the powers that be actually thought stopping the spread of items leaking in from the past might help them control the rupture problem.
It didn’t.
As I sit here now in this camp chair, my shadow thrown onto the cold cement by a nearby streetlamp, I watch the semi-sentient thing groan and rotate and flex in the night air of the deserted street. Thinking back, I reflect on how naïve we were, how little we understood.
Three a.m. I take up the duty log and make a note.
Mac’s been dead two years now.
◄ ►
There was always a ton of paperwork after a chase: statements for local police and RCMP, Canadian and UN military affidavits, reports to Crown Counsel, plus XyTech’s own online report. I spent four hours processing Ball-cap and left the office at 2 a.m. with four hours overtime. Mac was long gone. I signed out at the reception desk, then pulled up the cover on my hoodie against the rain. As I crossed the street, a stretch limo appeared and blocked me at the edge of the parking lot.
The door opened and the Native girl in the dark windbreaker I’d chased earlier that night stepped out and waved a pistol: get in.
I hesitated briefly before clambering in beside the fattest man I’ve ever seen wedged inside an automobile. Bloated from the mahogany scalp of his shaved head to the toes of his high black patent leather shoes, he gripped an oily cigar between the fleshy first fingers of his left hand. When he gestured for me to sit with his right, I noted the clutch of gold rings almost lost between rolls of brown flab encasing his knuckles.
Take a seat, he croaked. His accent was rural black from the Deep South. Jessie will ride in front with the driver, who doesn’t mind the company. My name’s Janus. You will help me with a project. The compensation for this will be substantial for you. The penalty for refusing will be massive. Think about it.
Janus hit a button on his BlackBerry. The limo glided forward and the fat man resumed delivery of his rap in a rapid, asthmatic wheeze.
You predict them. We predict them too. The ruptures. And like you, we can tell where and when they lead to. But our equipment is more sophisticated. Surprised? Don’t be. Corporations in the States have been doing R&D for years, financed by powerful criminal organizations like the one I represent.
Which is—?
None of your concern. Tomorrow at 1946 hours Pacific Standard a rupture in time will open at the corner of Canada Avenue and Second Street in Duncan. You will go through and deliver a package, then you will reemerge. For this task we will pay you $25,000 Canadian. No questions asked. Do we have a deal?
Sure.
Janus hit his BlackBerry again. The limo abruptly stopped and the girl called Jessie held open the rear door for me.
We will be in touch with the package and half the money. The rest is yours on completion. Tell anybody about this and you die. Understand?
Yeah.
Good night, then.
◄ ►
Ya know the first ruptures were silent? Mac pushed a fresh cigarette into the side of his mouth. And they were smaller, too. This was back when the military first started generating ’em. The ones nowadays are bigger – much bigger. And they make that weird low humming sound. First ones didn’t do that. They just looked like… You know how paper looks when you tear it? It looked like that. Just little rips in the air right in front of you that would glow for a minute or two before they’d close up. Well!
His lighter clinked.
They’re much bigger now. Hey. I wonder if that’s why they built the Destabilizer out west, hey? Because there’s lots of room out here in B.C. and they figured the ruptures might get bigger.
My cell phone wheeped. Notification: 25 minutes to the rupture in Duncan. We were parked in a lay-by in Cobble Hill. I drew a deep breath and released it as quietly as I could. Nerves: time to put the plan into action. I slid the car into gear and pulled onto the highway.
So Mac… you said you used to go inside the ruptures…
Yeah. Why?
What, ah, what was it like?
I felt his atte
ntion settle on me as I navigated the curve by what was once the golf course. A series of wildcat rupture openings closed it a few years before, back when the phenomenon was new and people assumed they were natural. This was before we had the statistics and the technology to predict them – long before the military ’fessed up.
Why? Mac’s repeated question dropped heavily into the silence.
Just curious. I shrugged. Janus’s package – a small black box the size of a candy bar – weighted down my jacket pocket. We coasted downhill past the turn-off to Maple Bay and made for the bridge. I kept my cool. It wasn’t until we’d crossed the river and begun hunting for downtown parking that Mac spoke.
I remember feeling this weird tingle. He frowned. You pass into the rupture and everything darkens, like it’s suddenly twilight. And I figured that’s because the past happened before the sun rose the day of the rupture. Like the night is smoke – he held up his cigarette and cracked the window – streaming backward to touch the past. The noises are softer – everything inside a rupture is always less intense, like when the volume or contrast knobs are turned down on the TV. You’re brighter and louder and more conspicuous than anything else there. You clearly see and feel everything that’s going on until it starts to darken and fade, then there’s a rushing in your ears and you pop back out into the present. But a piece of you is gone.
Like how? I turned into the public lot by the train station.
It’s – hmm. Hard to say, really. It’s like… Here’s what it’s like! Mac sat forward and tapped my knee. The president, the guy visiting Toronto right now? Remember when he got elected? His hair was blond. Seen it lately?
It’s all grey. I stepped out and locked the car. It’s always like that. Yank presidents always leave office with a head full of grey hair.
That’s because they leave part of themselves behind. When they clock out from their shift in the Oval Office, a piece of them is gone. It’s like that with ruptures.
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