The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  Olivia turned away from the window to face Alvaro and a room heavy on the knotty pine and faux frontier furniture. “What day is this, what time is it?”

  He told her.

  Fewer than fifteen minutes had passed. Of course. This wasn’t time travel, no matter how disoriented she felt. With a terrible sinking of spirit, Olivia realized that in this probability she and Brian had not made it to the house in Elmhurst—which meant Brian was not vaccinated.

  She held her throbbing head.

  “You made it worse.” Alvaro hadn’t moved.

  “No.”

  “Why bother to lie? It’s obvious.”

  She pushed through a door into the bathroom, flipped up the toilet seat, and vomited into the bowl. Now her head felt like it was splitting open. Yes, she had made it worse. Instead of averting the catastrophe, her probability choice had accelerated it. Again. Preventing the boy from driving his Jeep through the checkpoint had accomplished nothing; worse than nothing. New memories rose and formed around the previous realities. Brian had been behind the wheel when NORAD alerts sprang urgently from their phones and flashed for attention. They had just passed Newville, Wisconsin.

  Standing at the sink, her throat raw, she splashed cold water on her face. The mirror framed a haggard stranger. Sweaty strands of hair stuck to Olivia’s forehead. There was something wrong with her right eye. She leaned closer. Blood suffused the sclera: the strain of a bad probability choice.

  Outside, the siren continued to wail.

  Olivia smelled cigarette smoke and turned away from the mirror. Alvaro stood in the doorway. “What’s that siren?” she asked, drying her face on her sleeve.

  Alvaro shrugged. “Everything’s crazy out there. Some fool’s probably winding up an ancient civil-defense siren.”

  Crazy out there. No shit. The pain made it difficult to think coherently. One memory scaffold tangled with another. But a single word stood out like a bright red emergency beacon: Escalation. On every news platform, in every conversation, the word had constantly come up. Escalation. The Pakistan-India-Russia triangle of denials, threats, and counterthreats. The United States pressuring Russia to help deescalate while at the same time demanding an explanation for the lower incidence of variola in the Russian Federation. Open hostility on the floor of the UN General Assembly. Accusations of Russian responsibility for creating the weaponized variola, if not actually releasing it. Counteraccusations from Russian surrogates, no doubt desperate for the vaccine everyone assumed Russia possessed.

  Escalation.

  Until . . . North Korea’s addled dictator, Kim Jong-un, seized the opportunity of international chaos and threw a sucker punch. Three Hwasong-16 intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying thermonuclear payloads aimed at targets in the midwestern and eastern United States. Brian, gripping the steering wheel as if it were the last thing preventing the Disaster from overwhelming all of them, said, What do we do? Get off the highway, Olivia had said. It was all she could think of. If one of those missiles hit Chicago . . .

  Brian had swerved toward an exit ramp too close to make at the speed they were traveling and almost rolled the car. Olivia kept saying, “Take it easy. Brian, slow down.”  They accelerated over a county road. Suddenly Brian took a hard corner and the Ford slewed onto a rutted private road that wound and plunged steeply through silver aspen toward a river.

  “Brian, stop! ”

  He stood on the brake, the Ford skidding into the brush. For a minute, he sat there holding on to the steering wheel with white-knuckled fists, breathing hard, as if he’d been running, not driving.

  “Are you okay?” Olivia said.

  Brian nodded. He looked scared and tried to smile through it. “I’m good.” He opened his hands and flexed his fingers. “Sorry, I kind of panicked.”

  A late-model SUV came up the road and passed them, wing mirrors almost kissing. A man and a woman sat in the front seat, the man scowling intently behind the wheel. Three kids occupied the seat behind them. An unhappy-looking girl of twelve or so, with a blond ponytail, stared out the window as they passed.

  “Let’s find a place to turn around,” Olivia said.

  Brian pulled forward, followed the road. Soon it split three ways. Quaint wooden signs stood next to each of the three splits: Cabin 1, Cabin 2, and Cabin 3. The Cabin 1 sign was knocked cockeyed, a fresh gouge taken out of it. There was enough room for a turn, and Brian started to do that.

  Olivia said, “Wait. We better stay off the road for now. Let’s take a look at Cabin One.”

  The gravel parking area in front of the cabin was empty.  They sat in the car watching news reports. One of North Korea’s missiles malfunctioned and broke apart over the North Pacific without detonating. NORAD defense systems tracked the remaining two and managed to intercept one.

  But the third got through.

  It landed short of its intended target, sparing Washington, DC. The warhead exploded over West Virginia, vaporizing its capital, Charleston. The firestorm also swept scores of small towns out of existence and left the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest seething in a radioactive conflagration. Now everybody was waiting to see if China would back Kim Jong-un’s play.  That was the news. And then the grid went down.

  They had sat in Brian’s car, stunned, speechless, frightened. Finally Olivia turned to Brian and said, “I have to fix this.”  The cabin was locked and unoccupied, but they found an open window. Unwashed dishes were piled in the sink; empty wine bottles and soda cans sat on the counters. On the dining table was a folder containing a copy of somebody’s rental agreement. New people were due in a couple of days, but it was unlikely anyone was thinking of a relaxing weekend on the river. “I need something,” Olivia had said. “Pot or alcohol.”

  Brian had looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “You want to get high?” he said, his words a spot-on echo from the previous probability. For Olivia it was like watching a memory externalized and seeing how she had gotten it wrong.

  “No. I have to go back into the halo, and I need something to replace the jai ba leaves they gave me after we escaped from Sanctuary.”

  They had barely started hunting through the cabinets when the sound of a fossil-burner became audible, and then tires crunched the gravel out front. Olivia and Brian had looked at each other and gone to the window in time to see Alvaro’s ramshackle pickup truck come to a stop.

  Now Alvaro stood in the bathroom doorway, his cigarette burning between the middle fingers of his right hand. “What was it this time, before you linked?”

  She groaned. The new memory scaffold stood before her. Olivia’s knees unhinged and she crumpled to the floor. Stricken, she drew her legs up, her body trembling.

  “Had there even been a missile attack?”

  She started to shake her head, but it hurt too much. “Not when I went into the halo from the motel.”

  “What motel?”

  “Near Chicago. You were there. I chewed the leaves, the whole thing. But when I came up, we were here. My memory is getting confused. The headache . . .”

  “You’re making too many choices at the same crisis point. The pain is like a fail-safe mechanism. You have to stay directly on the crisis point, not deviate. The farther you move off point, the bigger the strain on you.”

  Olivia tried to pull herself together. She pushed herself to a sitting position and leaned against the wall. “Leave me alone.”

  Outside, at last, the siren stopped.

  “You really fucked it up,” Alvaro said.

  She hated him for saying it, but his words hurt because they were true: She really had fucked it up. Again.

  Olivia struggled to get back on her feet. Alvaro flicked his cigarette into the toilet and helped her. He wasn’t rough about it. She glanced into his eyes and thought she saw a dim reflection of empathy.

  “I’ll fix it,” she said.

  “That’s what I keep hoping. But you can’t do anything for at least a day—longer, to be
safe. You’re putting a huge strain on yourself. We’ll wait here as long as we can, then you can try again.”

  “No.” Empathy for her pain or not, Olivia didn’t trust Alvaro not to force the link to migrate. And could she blame him? Things were getting desperate, and she’d willfully failed twice already. She had brought them all to the brink.

  “Why not?” Alvaro said.

  “I know where there’s a vaccine, effective vaccine.”

  Alvaro’s eyes said it all: bullshit. Olivia had seen that look before, in the previous reality.

  “It’s true,” she said. “There’s a house in Elmhurst, outside of Chicago. That’s where we were headed. In the last probability stream we made it and got the vaccine.” She explained how she knew about Javadi, annoyed at being forced to convince the same man twice, in two probabilities.

  “Nobody needs vaccine once you pick the right probability.”

  “Unless that’s impossible now.”

  Alvaro went quiet.

  “You said it yourself,” Olivia continued. “Overlapping all these crisis-point choices is hurting me. What if they’re hurting the link, too? What if I can’t make another choice? What if no one can? Variola’s everywhere. We need Javadi’s vaccine.”

  “The link won’t be damaged.” He scratched his stubbled cheek. “But you might be.”

  The outside door opened. More than one person entered the cabin. Brian’s voice came from the other room. “Liv?”

  “In here.”

  Brian appeared, followed by Dee. All of them now crowded into the bedroom. Alvaro let go of Olivia’s arm, and Brian held his open. “You look like shit.” Olivia let him pull her in, where it was impossible to escape her traitor’s thoughts. I’ll fix it. This time she understood she had no choice. And “fixing it” translated to “goodbye Brian.” A horrible memory had pursued her across all the probabilities since the first one: Brian’s lips, cold and rubbery against hers.

  Dee looked confused, then scared. “You did it, you linked?”

  Alvaro said, “She tried to save Brian again.”

  Olivia, her face buried in Brian’s shoulder, got angry. She pulled away from Brian and faced Alvaro. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

  It sounded childish even to her. Did anyone ever ask for any of the bad stuff that happened to them? The hard look was back in Alvaro’s eyes. Was he weighing his options, calculating the risk of forcing the link to migrate to him? The moment passed.

  “Let’s go,” Alvaro said.

  Dee said, “Go where?”

  “Olivia says there’s vaccine in a place near Chicago.”

  Dee looked doubtful.

  “It’s true,” Brian said. “This guy Javadi lives in Elmhurst.”

  “That’s right,” Olivia said. “He’s in a bomb shelter that nobody knows about. At least I don’t think they do.”

  Brian gave her a weird look. In this probability stream they hadn’t yet been to the Elmhurst house. “How do you know that?”

  “Take your shirt off,” Olivia said.

  “What? What for?”

  “Just take it off.”

  Brian unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off. Olivia stretched the short sleeve of his T-shirt over his shoulder. The Band-Aid was gone, his skin smooth, no sign of needle pokes. Now they were all looking at Olivia. She said, “I know because I’ve already been there. Both of us have been. But all that’s erased now.”

  And she prayed Javadi was still in the shelter with his hoard of vaccine. The stream changed only from the point of probability choice forward. There was a chance.

  If they could get to him before anything else happened.

  * * *

  They left the pickup behind and all piled into Brian’s hybrid. Traffic on the 90 was heavy in both directions. After an hour they pulled off at Rockford to look for gas. There might be a run on it later, and if the power stayed down, the charging stations for the Ford’s powerful batts would be useless. They quickly found a BP station on the rundown east side of town. The line stretched out of the station and down the street. They waited. When it was their turn, Brian handled the pump and Olivia stood on the other side of the car, looking at the sky. Her headache was bad but not debilitating. It was midmorning, the overcast feathery gray, like ash. The light was strange, or did she only imagine it was? Five hundred miles southeast, the country burned.

  “Liv?” Brian said over the top of the car. “Liv, come on. Get in.”

  She lowered herself into the front passenger seat, her post-halo migraine like a vise squeezing her head. Dee and Alvaro sat in the back. Brian pushed the start button and the electric assist rippled up. The main road was clogged with cars. He pulled into the alley behind the gas station, wove through back streets, braking hard, making sharp, sudden turns, hunting a clear path to the interstate.

  Broken glass glittered dully on the sidewalk in front of an electronics store, the iron security gate pulled out of the window frame like the rib bones of a mammoth, one end of a heavy chain still attached to the gate, and the other end to a trailer hitch bolted to the back of a beat-to-shit Escalade. Brian slowed down. A guy hunkering by the bumper, working on detaching the chain, raised his head.

  “What the hell is happening?” Brian said. “Where are the fucking police?”

  “Keep going,” Dee said.

  The chain guy stood and pulled his shirt up, revealing a handgun tucked in the waist of his jeans.

  Dee slapped the driver’s seat headrest. “Punch it, man.”

  Brian crushed the accelerator.

  Ninety minutes later, they finally rolled onto East Sherman Avenue in suburban Elmhurst.

  Four men stood in front of Javadi’s house. They all turned toward the approaching car.

  Twenty-Three

  “It’s the night watchman,” Brian said.

  “In the middle of the morning?” Dee said.

  Olivia rubbed her temples. “Neighborhood watch captain.”

  Alvaro leaned between the front seats. “We don’t care about these guys. Where’s the bomb shelter?”

  “The guys we don’t care about are standing in front of Javadi’s house,” Olivia said.

  “Keep going. We’ll circle back when the street clears.”

  “And what if the street doesn’t clear?” Olivia said. “How long do we wait? Every minute in the open we’re vulnerable to variola, or the next attack. Brian, pull up to them.”

  Alvaro poked Brian’s shoulder. “Don’t do that.”

  “Sorry.” Brian rolled up to the men and stopped.

  Olivia rolled down her window.

  “What do you want?” The watch captain studied her.

  “What’s going on?” One of the other men stepped up to the car. He was stockier than the watch captain and losing his hair. He clutched a hammer in his right hand. The hammer bothered Olivia. Hammers made good weapons if you wanted to inflict some serious blunt-force trauma. When Olivia told a cop friend of hers that she didn’t like guns, the cop suggested she keep a hammer beside her bed to discourage intruders with assault on their mind. The next day, she bought one at Ace Hardware, weighing it in her hand like a warrior choosing a weapon for close combat. She picked a twenty-four-ounce framing hammer. Too heavy to take overseas into the Disaster, but at home she kept it beside the bed. She used to wonder whether she would have the will to swing it into the head of a would-be rapist. No, that wasn’t true. She knew she possessed the will. What she wondered was how it would sound and feel when the steel head punched through the bastard’s skull, and how hard it would be to forget that sound.

  “Roy, come on,” the balding guy said. His hammer didn’t look as hefty as Olivia’s, probably only a sixteen-ouncer. “What are we waiting for? Who are these people?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know who they are.” Roy did not take his eyes off Olivia. Was there a glimmer of recognition? Could memory artifacts slip across narrow probability changes and create something like a déjà vu effect?


  “Who are you?” Roy said.

  “Friends of the people who own this house. We left some stuff in storage. All we want to do is get it and leave.”

  The watch captain—Roy—wasn’t buying it. “Friends of the owners. And who might they be?”

  Olivia had no idea. Helen hadn’t told her that.

  “So I guess we’re back to our original question,” Roy said.

  The other men, the ones who hadn’t approached the car, looked nervously at each other. Two guys in typical suburban Levi’s and short-sleeved button shirts. Neither of them had brought their tools, no ripsaws or rattail files or anything.

  The guy with the hammer said, “Let’s quit wasting time.”

  “They know about the shelter,” Roy said.

  “What? They do?”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure they do. That’s why they’re really here. But what they don’t understand is that the shelter belongs to us. This is our neighborhood. We watched the Stevensons build the thing. You understand what I’m saying to you, lady?”

  “Whatever,” Olivia said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Roy grabbed the hammer out of the other guy’s hand and swung it into the hybrid’s windshield. Olivia jumped and let out a yelp of surprise. The impact made a popping-crunch sound. The hammer’s steel head punched through the safety glass. A spiderweb crackled around it. Roy pulled the hammer free. Before he could swing it again, if that’s what he intended, Brian stepped on the accelerator and smoked down the street. “Holy shit. Are you all right, Liv? Holy shit.” He tucked into the curb a few blocks from Javadi’s house and turned to put his arms around Olivia.

  She held him off. “Bri, give me a little space.”