The Summer It Came for Us

by Rix, Dan

  “This article that only you saw,” Jace muttered.

  “What do you mean, this dimension?” Malcolm said, watching me with narrowed eyes.

  “What if we’re in the land of the dead?” I went on, despite the growing heat my cheeks. “Isn’t that was Zoe said? Maybe we died in the car crash, and now we’re wandering the earth as ghosts, and we only think we’re interacting with people, but we’re not . . . and the reason Vincent isn’t here is because he survived the crash.”

  Malcolm and Jace exchanged uneasy looks, and that scared me more than anything.

  I’d hoped they would deny it, laugh at me, prove me wrong.

  Not believe me.

  And I hadn’t even gotten to my most convincing argument.

  “Ever since the crash,” I said softly, “haven’t you guys had this feeling that everything’s a little off? Like we don’t belong here?”

  Jace leaned back, drumming his fingers on the table. “What about the Glipper?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I think the Glipper—that thing, whatever it is—it’s like the boatman in Greek mythology; it’s taking our souls down to the underworld.”

  “To hell,” said Jace. “You think it’s taking our souls down to hell?”

  I swallowed the knot in my throat. “Yeah.”

  “And right now we’re in, what, purgatory?”

  I nodded, then stole a glance around us for shadows that didn’t belong. We’d chosen a booth right by a sunny window. With the morning sun streaming in and bathing everything in its yellow glare, there were few shadows unaccounted for, and those I kept my eye on.

  Ever since last night, I’d been checking for the Glipper constantly, and imagining it everywhere.

  Malcolm ran his hand down his jaw, thinking hard. “But I saw the Glipper before the flash, before we even crashed.”

  “Dude, that makes sense according to her theory,” said Jace. “You see the Grim Reaper before you die.”

  “Or maybe it was the flash that killed us,” I said. “If we got a high dose of radiation or something.”

  “Jesus, you could be right,” Malcolm muttered. “A matter-antimatter annihilation event could easily produce enough gamma rays to kill everything in its path.”

  When I said it, it felt like a crackpot theory.

  When Malcolm said it, it sounded frighteningly possible.

  With all that had happened, I’d almost forgotten—both Vincent and the homeless guy had mentioned an annihilation event.

  Vincent, in whatever dimension he was, must have figured it out on his own.

  And the homeless guy . . .

  My eyes widened with a realization. The homeless guy!

  I jolted forward into the table, rattling the dishes and startling Jace.

  “Guys, don’t you think it’s odd a homeless guy even knows what a matter-antimatter annihilation event is? No one else knew what he was talking about, only you did, Malcolm. And Vincent. And why would he even be out in those woods? There’s nothing out there. Isn’t that an awful big coincidence?”

  Malcolm’s face flashed with the same realization, and he yanked out his cell phone. “Bingo.”

  Jace poked his own arm. “Guys, I doubt we’re dead.”

  “No, we’re not dead. Not yet, at least.” Malcolm dialed a number and pressed the phone to his face.

  A second later, I knew who he was calling.

  “Officer Schapiro, it’s Malcolm,” he said. “Listen, that homeless guy we talked to on Sunday—yeah, the witness—did you get any personal info on him? Name, date of birth, employment record, that kind of thing?”

  I leaned over the table, trying to catch the faint voice speaking on the other end.

  “Uh-huh . . . Peter Gibbs, uh-huh . . .”

  I gave up and sat back down, fidgeting while I waited.

  “That’s all I needed . . . thanks, officer.” Malcolm hung up and gave me a meaningful look. “You were right.”

  “About what?”

  “Peter Gibbs,” he said, a gleam in his eyes, “used to be a janitor at the Shasta-Trinity Supercollider complex. He was laid off in 2006 when they shut the place down.”

  So it wasn’t a coincidence.

  “So that’s where he heard all that stuff? About the matter and antimatter?”

  He nodded. “And I think it proves the collider did have something to do with it.”

  Jace poured blueberry syrup into a spoon. “Dudes, we’ve been through this. Place was shut down ten years ago.”

  “Yeah, but why?” said Malcolm. “We still don’t know why.”

  “Look, unless they found a way to send a bunch of antimatter ten years into the future, it couldn’t have been the collider.” He raised the spoon to his lips, while I watched in horror.

  “Jace, please don’t tell me you’re going to—

  He downed the syrup in one swallow.

  “—eat that.” I grimaced.

  “Mmm.” He grinned, and he looked like one of those iguanas with the blue tongues.

  “Here, have some more, dipshit.” Malcolm tipped the syrup into Jace’s coffee.

  “Aw, come on,” Jace groaned, while I giggled, “I was going to drink that.”

  “You ready to focus?”

  Jace and I sobered up.

  “Both of you get on your phones.” Malcolm snapped his fingers at us as he slid out of the booth. “Find out why they shut it down ten years ago. I want an answer in five minutes.”

  “Bossy, bossy,” I muttered, pulling out my phone. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to call the DIA.”

  So while he paced outside the diner, looking all hotshot on the phone with the DIA, Jace and I googled the supercollider. I tore my eyes off Malcolm and opened the first link to a Wikipedia page. Scrolling down, I paused at a section that caught my eye.

  Safety of high-energy particle collision experiments

  The experiments at the Shasta-Trinity Supercollider sparked fears that the particle collisions might produce doomsday phenomena, involving the production of stable microscopic black holes or the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets.

  “Jace, listen to this,” I said, reading it aloud.

  “Yeah, I’m reading that, too,” he said. “Looks like that’s why they shut it down, because of that risk.”

  “What are strangelets?” I asked.

  They sounded kind of cute.

  “No idea, but you know what a black hole is, right?”

  “Er . . . yeah, of course, duh,” I said.

  He must have picked up on my uncertainty, because he explained anyway. “It’s when you have too much mass in too small an area, and gravity makes it all collapse in on itself. They’re like holes in the fabric of space-time.”

  “But how would a particle collider create a black hole? Aren’t particles tiny?”

  “Hang on, I’m reading about that,” he said. “It’s the energy. They shoot them at each other with so much energy that when they hit, the energy gets turned into mass, and a tiny little black hole forms. They’re supposed to vanish really quickly, but sometimes they start gobbling up stuff and get bigger and bigger and bigger.”

  I shuddered, wishing he hadn’t told me. “Then I’m glad they shut it down.”

  Malcolm came back in and planted his fists on our table. “We have a new development.”

  Jace folded his arms, looking pleased with himself. “Yeah, I know. They shut it down because of the risk of creating black holes.”

  “That’s not why they shut it down,” Malcolm said. “They shut it down because in 2006, there was a radiation leak. It was hushed up, but the DIA’s known about it this whole time. One of the scientists brought her son to work, and the little boy wandered off into a contaminated area . . . and later died of radiation poisoning.”

  “Vincent,” I breathed, covering my mouth.

  Malcolm nodded. “His accident. That’s why everyone thinks he died ten years ago. T
hat’s why they shut the place down ten years ago.”

  Chapter 21

  Staring slack-jawed at Malcolm, I suddenly had a weird sense of vertigo, as if the world was dropping out from underneath me.

  The flash, the car crash, this whole alternate history with Vincent—could it be that it all tied back to his accident?

  None of us had put it together.

  The supercollider had closed in 2006; the date on Vincent’s gravestone was 2007.

  I’d assumed they were unrelated.

  “But the dates,” I murmured, “the dates didn’t match . . .”

  “Radiation poisoning kills slowly,” said Malcolm. “He must have been hospitalized for a while, slowly withering away. They would have known he was a goner.”

  “It’s like the last ten years got reset,” I mused in astonishment, “all the way back to Vincent’s accident, and the only thing that changed was, this time, Vincent died in that accident. In the timeline we remember, he lived.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Jace. “Now we’re talking about time travel? First it’s a government conspiracy, then it’s Bigfoot, then it’s aliens, then we’re in the land of the dead, and now it’s time travel?”

  “You said it first, numchuck,” Malcolm said. “You’re the one who talked about them sending antimatter into the future.”

  “Oh, you think that’s what happened?”

  “You got a better theory? How else do you explain us remembering Vincent when he was sixteen, when clearly he never made it past six?”

  To that, Jace had no response.

  I was still struggling to comprehend it, eyebrows pinched.

  There was something just out of reach here, something obvious, that my brain couldn’t quite grasp.

  “So . . . there must have been something significant about the accident,” I said, “if it made a fork in the timeline.”

  I wished Zoe were here, to see her theory had been right all along—she’d been the first one to suggest his accident might be the cause—but the moment she crossed my mind, I felt a terrible pang of sadness.

  Was she dead? Was she in some nightmarish underworld? Would we ever know what happened to her?

  “What I want to know,” said Malcolm grimly, “is how do we switch it back to the other version? The version where he lived.”

  I looked up. “It’s the accident . . . the accident is the key. Something must have happened that day that caused an alternate timeline, and there must be some record of it. That’s what we need to figure out.”

  “But it was all a cover-up,” said Jace, “and that was ten years ago. Who could we talk to that would even remember?”

  We looked at each other, and our eyes widened at the same time. “Vincent’s mom!”

  Of course! She’d once worked at the Shasta-Trinity Supercollider. That had been so long ago, and Vincent never talked about it—we hadn’t even thought to ask her.

  “It’s Wednesday,” said Malcolm. “She’ll be at work right now.”

  So we quickly paid our bill and—me feeling hopeful for the first time in ages—jogged to the town’s other diner, Annie’s Country Kitchen, where we found her waiting on an old retired couple, looking supremely bored.

  Given the cynical, reclusive black woman we knew, it was hard to imagine she’d once been a brilliant high-energy physicist. But of course, that’s where Vincent got it all from. All his smart genes.

  I could only imagine how much Vincent’s accident must have shaken her up, that she’d never gone back into science.

  Malcolm stepped forward to take the lead, but I caught his eye and shook my head. Given her cold reception last time, I thought it would be better if I led this time. His eyes probed mine, gauging whether I was up to the challenge, and then he inclined his head and stepped aside, giving me a rush of pride . . . followed instantly by my nerves screaming at me not to screw up.

  “Mrs. Ferguson,” I said sweetly, forcing down a swallow, “can we . . . can we ask you a science question?”

  Her eyes narrowed to slits.

  “You used to work at the collider, right? Before it closed down?”

  She eyed me impatiently. “Mm-hmm.”

  “Well, could it, like, cause a branch in the timeline? Like, maybe one thing was supposed to happen, right? But then there’s an event, like a trigger—say an accident—and then everything takes a different branch instead?”

  She rolled her eyes and stormed back toward the kitchen.

  “Try not leading with the crazy next time,” Malcolm muttered behind me.

  “Mrs. Ferguson, wait!” I cried, hurrying to catch up. “This isn’t about Vincent—I mean, it is—but now our other friend’s missing, too, the pretty blonde girl—I know you saw her on the news—”

  “What do you want from me?” She spun around in the kitchen doorway to glare at us. “I loved my boy, I loved my little Vincent, but that was a long, long time ago . . . what do you want from me?”

  Her words made my chest tight.

  “I am so, so sorry about what happened to Vincent,” I whispered. “I lost someone too. My little brother committed suicide nine months ago, so I know how it feels. Please, we just need your help. We think what’s happening now might have something to do with Vincent’s accident ten years ago.”

  She continued to glower at me. But right when I thought she would scoff at me, her expression softened, and I knew I’d gotten through to her. “Wait outside, I need to get someone to cover me.”

  “Um . . . Mabel, Mabel,” a tiny bald man with glasses ran out to stop her, “your break’s not for another twenty minutes!”

  “I’m aware of that, Peter. I’m switching with Mimi.”

  “Mabel, we talked about this.”

  “Then I’ll clock out. Whatever you want.” She breezed past him, heading into the back.

  He watched her go and, just loud enough so she could hear, muttered, “Lazy nigger.”

  She halted in the doorway. “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah, you heard me.” His voice dripped venom.

  For a second, I just stood there, my mouth hanging open, shocked at the amount of hate coming from a man who, on first glance, looked innocent . . . a man who could be one of our dads. Who might actually be someone’s dad.

  What a frightening thought.

  Then my hackles went up, and all the warning sirens went off in my brain. If I’d learned anything, it was that bullying could only happen when bystanders did nothing.

  “Sir,” I called loudly, “how dare y—”

  Out of nowhere, Malcolm lunged in and punched the guy in the face. His glasses flew across the restaurant, and he crashed into the counter, toppling ketchup bottles and menus.

  “Malcolm!” I gasped, clamping my hand over my mouth.

  But Malcolm wasn’t through. He grabbed the guy by the collar, wrestled him all the way onto the counter, and in a calm voice said, “This is California, bitch . . . you’re a long way from whatever backwater shithole you crawled out of.”

  The guy raised his palms in surrender, mumbling pleas through a bloody lip.

  “Well, now that y’all lost me my job,” said Mabel dryly, shucking off her apron, “I guess we got all day to talk, don’t we?”

  “If he fires you for that,” I said, “you can sue him for discrimination. He insulted you, and then he got himself punched by a customer who wasn’t affiliated with you. Technically, you didn’t do or say anything.”

  “You don’t want to work here, anyway,” Malcolm said, hurrying us out. “Time to go. Jace?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll talk him out of pressing charges, just . . . go.” With a sigh, Jace approached the man and helped him up, as the door shut behind us.

  Ugh, I was so sick of this racist town, full of old white misogynist men. Honestly, you’d think they all would have died off by now.

  Mabel led us into the alley behind the restaurant, where she turned to us with a stern look and folded her arms. “All right, here I am, ask your damn
questions.”

  “So . . . Vincent . . . when Vincent had his accident,” I started hesitantly.

  “Mm-hmm,” she said.

  “It was radiation poisoning, right? That’s what he died from?”

  She nodded.

  I pressed on. “I guess—what we’re asking is—was there anything that happened around the time of his accident that seemed strange to you or—I don’t know—significant?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Significant?”

  I had no idea what I was asking, whether we were even following the right lead.

  Without the details, I had no idea where to even start.

  I cleared my throat and tried again. “Okay, basically, we believe Vincent’s death was pivotal. He was supposed to survive the accident, but something intervened so he didn’t—fate or something—and now we’re living a false version of the last ten years where he died. For some reason, we remember the true version.” I managed a dry swallow. “Mrs. Ferguson, I saw your son five days ago. He was sixteen years old.”

  Now her eyes narrowed.

  I was making no sense.

  I looked to Malcolm for help, but he merely nodded for me to continue.

  Jace came out a moment later and socked Malcolm on the shoulder, “You so owe me one.”

  Malcolm shushed him.

  “Mrs. Ferguson, I think what we’re trying to say is—”

  “It wasn’t radiation that killed my Vincent,” she said suddenly. “It wasn’t radiation.”

  “It wasn’t?” I stammered. “Then . . . then what was it?”

  “That was the DIA’s story. They were investigating a phenomenon . . . if the truth got out . . .” She lowered her eyes, blinking away tears. “When we found his body, when we found my baby, he was . . . he was all scratched up” —she sniffled, her face a mask of pain—“like he’d been clawed to death by an animal.”

  “It was the shadow of a man, about nine feet tall,” Mabel Ferguson explained, once she’d collected herself and wiped the tears from her eyes. “It showed up in the control room right after we fired up Shasta-Trinity, after we started pulling the real high-energy runs, the game changer kind of stuff.”

  The three of us gathered around her, listening in rapt silence.