The Gone World
Page 37
“Patrick,” said Nicole. “Please.”
“I can’t let you in here,” said Mursult. His eyes were cold when he spoke to Nicole, and Moss realized that the burgeoning emotions that would one day lead to their affair were dead to him in this moment of decision. He’d kill her, thought Moss, as easily as he’d kill any of them.
“Drop the gun, Krauss,” said Remarque, and Krauss let her rifle float aside. “We’ll talk about this,” she said. “You think you’re doing the right thing—”
“Karl’s coming,” said Mursult, “and he’ll kill you. He wants to be the one. He wants to cut your fucking head off with his ax.”
“Mursult,” said Moss. “Damaris, she—” But her words failed. She was light-headed, so much of her blood lost.
“Who is that?” asked Mursult, his cold eye finding Moss. “She shouldn’t be here.”
Moss tried to speak, choked on blood. She took a deep, wet breath. “I come from another time,” she said. “I’ve seen how this all plays out. You have a wife, named Damaris. You have a daughter, she’s five years old. You’ll have another, a son not yet born, and another daughter. This doesn’t end well, what you’re doing. They all die . . . because of this. They always die . . .”
Mursult pointed the gun at Moss’s heart. No hint of emotion, no hint of reckoning.
“You can give her a future, Patrick. Your daughter. Marian.”
She saw the moment emotion broke through, at the sound of his daughter’s name. Mursult lowered his weapon. “Go. I’ll hold them off as long as I can, but they’re coming.”
Nicole carried Moss through into the engine room, Remarque and Krauss following. The B-L drive was the center of a blue corona that shimmered like the reflection of light on water, the room stinking of electrical fire. Krauss shut the main portal door, barring it closed. Moss heard gunfire, outside in the passageway, short bursts before the sound died away. They’re here.
Remarque opened the control locker for the B-L drive. Moss saw blood in the air and thought of treasure chests at the bottom of fish tanks, how their lids flipped open and bubbles raced upward. My blood, she thought. Blood soaked through her long johns and spilled from the gaping wound in her thigh, bubbles propelling from her thigh and spreading around her and Nicole. Bubbles in a fish tank. Moss looked at the B-L drive, its eerie blue light flickering outward in concentric rings.
A sizzling sound, an explosion, and the portal door blew from its hinges in a rush of fire. No, thought Moss as Hyldekrugger glided through into the engine room. Krauss shot with her rifle, but Hyldekrugger’s followers fanned out through the room, returning fire. Nicole was hit, a spray of mist and ropes of blood gushed from her chest and formed into wobbling spheres. Another sting zipped through Moss’s leg, her stomach. The pain settled deep within her. No—
“We have it,” shouted Remarque, blue light appearing like a halo around the B-L, an intense plasma light, an arc.
Krauss was sprayed with bullets, and her body spun like a knot of shredded rags. Remarque screamed, but Moss heard her voice as if underwater. We are all underwater, she thought. Bodies floating, blood escaping her intestines in quivering globs and rushing squiggles that formed into circles as they rose.
Hyldekrugger was a young man. There was nothing of the devil in him, not yet. He was just scared and selfish. He placed the barrel of his gun against Remarque’s temple and fired. Blood sprayed from the exit wound, and Moss watched as it misted and as it fell. Her own blood mingled with Remarque’s, a rising stream pulled toward the gravity of the B-L drive. The failing engine flooded the room with blue, and Moss saw a speck of perfect black within that light. The black expanded, a perfect circle, and soon the perfect circle bent everything around it, smearing the world toward it. Moss saw all of time written out in that black circle, everything that was and everything that will be, the first oblivion and the last. As the circle expanded, all of existence diminished. Libra and the winter woods, the evergreens and the Terminus, the world covered with snow. Moss felt herself held in this gravity before she, too, was enveloped by the black hole. All thinking ceased, all suffering. She slipped into that darkness, no longer a body but a wave of light.
EPILOGUE
January 28, 1986
Heavier snow now. The way it hangs in front of streetlamps and looks like glitter. She didn’t want to drive in this, so we walk. Cut through the neighbor’s, down through their thatch of pines. She pulls on the branches, and I’m covered.
“Oh, bitch! Oh, you bitch!” I’m screaming, snow down the neck of my coat, shaking it from my hair. She’s laughing. I ball up snow and throw it, but it powders in the air. She’s laughing in a way I haven’t heard for a while.
“As long as I grow up to be rich,” she says. “Or marry rich. That’s all I want.”
We watch for wrecks in town. “You ever hear how a car crash sounds like plastic?” she says. She’s smoking Camels from a hard pack, and I take one, down to her last few. She taps hers on the box, taps mine for me. She lights hers, and I lean in to catch the fire from her tip. Plenty of fishtailing, but no one hits. I’m shivering, I only brought my dad’s Navy coat. She’s in her Michael Jackson jacket, zippers on the sleeves. A car goes past and blares the horn, and Courtney flips them off, and someone laughs. Maybe they knew us.
Seven Hills on Euclid, Courtney’s favorite place because the woman at the counter never checks IDs. Courtney buys cigarettes. I get a hot chocolate from the machine.
“Gimm,” says the woman, “let me see it.” She says, “Jesus fucking Christ,” when Courtney lowers her turtleneck to show the scar. It’s bright white, will always be there because some fuck lunatic slit her throat. The scar’s jagged—you can see where the knife went in, how it dragged. The woman gives over the hard pack of Camels and says, “On me. Least you should get is a pack of cigarettes out of something like that.”
“Hell’s bells,” says Courtney.
“We were at Pizza Hut, serves her right,” I say.
“I’m smoking my last one, I’ll be outside.”
“One sec.”
I buy the hot chocolate and a Clear Blue test, and the woman just rings me out. All she says is, “If you don’t like what it says, get a second one before you freak out. It won’t hurt to try more than once.”
—
We lie together on her bedroom floor. Enough room for us if we kick our legs up to her bed. She’s smoking her third, but I’m taking mine slow, blowing smoke at her ceiling fan, watching the fan stir the smoke and blow it back to me. Powerage, side B. We aren’t talking, and I’m all right because Courtney’s told me I’m her only friend good enough not to talk to. When the record ends, I ask if her brother’s coming home tonight.
“He’s at Jesse’s,” says Courtney.
Damn. I couldn’t feel it before we went to Seven Hills, but it’s like I can feel it now, like there’s a butterfly in my stomach, fluttering its wings. Courtney gets up to change the record, puts on Back in Black. I’m touching my stomach. She has a new way of touching her neck, absentmindedly like she’s touching a necklace. When she comes back to the floor with me, our faces are so close I feel heat coming off her skin.
—
Three a.m. I wake up but let her sleep. Thinking of the blue cross that appeared when I pissed on the stick. Thinking of how I’ll tell him. I creep down the hallway to his room and check his bed, but he’s not here. I wish he was here, the bed of the sister, the bed of the brother. What would it be like if Courtney was my sister? Best friends, but closer. If Davy does the right thing, she would be my sister. I drift through the downstairs rooms. The curtains are open on the living-room French doors, enough moonlight reflecting off the snow to fill the house with silver. I look out at their backyard, at the snowfall so smooth on the lawn, so smooth on the pines, so perfect, undisturbed, except for a circle of footsteps. A perfect circle of footsteps, but I can’t see footsteps leading to or from it, like someone dropped from the air, walked in a circle, and disappe
ared. My mother believes in omens, but never in good ones.
How will he ask me to marry him? Right then, when I tell him? No, he’ll do it right, someplace romantic, someplace over dinner. I have pictures left over from freshman year I can give him. I’ll give him a picture when I tell him so he can think of me when he’s away, think of us. He says he’s joining the Navy to see the world, but Courtney says it’s because he can’t get into college. He says he’ll see maybe Germany, maybe Egypt, maybe Japan. I imagine what he’ll do when I tell him. I imagine his eyebrows going up like they do. He’ll ask me to marry him, and we’ll get married at St. Pat’s, Courtney as my maid of honor. I’ll pray at St. Pat’s every day that he’s away. I’ll pray for my father, I’ll pray for my husband, both at sea. I imagine Davy in an eternity of water praying to a star he’s picked out and named for me. Shannon, he’ll pray, oh, Shannon Star. And he’ll point out his star, our star, and he’ll make sure I can pick it out from all the others, and he’ll say that he’ll look at that star and think of me, and he’ll ask me to do the same. And on nights like this, I’ll kiss our child asleep and head outside to mark our star, and I’ll know he’s safe, I’ll know that starlight bathes him as he swings from the rigging on the deck of his ship, as he looks out over the sea at night, as the steel hull cuts the swells. I’ll know he’s lit with starlight, I’ll know he’s safe, I’ll know he’s thinking of me, of us, and I’ll know that no matter how far he sails, he’ll one day sail for home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my brother-in-law, Special Agent Peter O’Connor, who sparked the idea for this book over hamburgers at Five Guys when we talked about time travel.
Thank you to Neill Blomkamp and Jonathan Auxier, whose insights into this book were critical to its development.
Thank you to Laura Leimkuehler, Dr. Barry B. Luokkala, J. J. Hensley, Jen Latimer, and Dan Moran, all experts in their fields who generously shared their knowledge with me.
Thank you to David Gernert and Andy Kifer at the Gernert Company. Thank you to Sylvie Rabineau at RWSG Literary Agency.
Thank you to Mark Tavani, Sally Kim, and the entire team at Putnam.
Thank you to my family.
And thank you to my wife, Sonja, and daughter, Genevieve. You are the loves of my life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© Michael Ray
Tom Sweterlitsch, author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow, has a master’s degree in Literary and Cultural Theory from Carnegie Mellon and worked for twelve years at the Carnegie Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and daughter.
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