by Daniel Price
“Who the hell are you?” Jury asked.
Evan stood upright and rigid, his lip curled in sharp ridicule. “Sir! Evan Rander reporting for duty, sir!”
“Why is your hand in that cup?”
“Sir! I’m trying to start a trend, sir!”
“Why are you talking like that?”
Evan relaxed his stance. “Can’t help myself. You’re our great leader. Our stalwart commander. You whipped our sorry maggot asses into shape and turned us into a crack fighting unit. Well, except for Mia. Poor little thing.”
Jury clenched his fists, trembling with frustration. Evan exhaled in sympathy. “I know. It’s all very confusing. You want to know why my hand’s in a cup? The answer’s right there on your wrist.”
Now Jury examined his new silver bracelet, the most innocuous of all the recent anomalies. “What is this?”
“You know, I asked Azral once. I mean I know what the bracelet does, but I wanted to know how it does it. He gave me a haughty little grin and told me that any answer would be futile, like explaining a handphone to an ancient Egyptian.” Evan laughed. “Asshole, right? Well, what Mr. Snooty McFuture doesn’t realize is that even an ancient Egyptian can figure out how to break a handphone. Look.”
Evan removed his hand from the liquid. The band on his wrist was now cracked and white, as if frozen solid. He pulled the hammer from his knapsack and tapped the surface until a small section shattered. The remainder slid easily over his hand.
“Ta-da! See? If you want to ditch your own, feel free to use my mixture. It’s a special cocktail I invented. I call it the Unscrewdriver.”
Jury resumed his huddle. Evan shrugged nonchalantly.
“Suit yourself, Sarge. But you should know that there are people tracking us through these things. The Salgados will be here in two minutes to take you to their fancy building in Terra Vista. You don’t want to go there. Trust me. In six weeks, that place will be a bloodbath.”
Jury sprang to his feet, red-faced. “Shut up! For God’s sake, just shut up. I’m freaking out right now and the last thing I need is some creepy little geek who makes no sense!”
Evan’s glib smile vanished. Now Jury could see the hatred on his face. Though the policeman had fifty pounds of muscle on his new acquaintance, he raised his palms in contrition.
“Look, I’m not myself this morning. I took a drugged drink and . . . God, you wouldn’t believe the stuff I’m seeing.”
Evan fished through his knapsack with fresh cheer. “Well, why the hell didn’t you say so? Just so happens I have something that can help you.”
He carefully approached Jury, his hand still buried in the bag.
“Now, I want you to keep an open mind, okay? The thing about this—”
He plunged the hunting knife deep into Jury’s chest.
“—is that it really hurts.”
Gasping, Jury fell back against the wall, feebly clutching the hilt of the knife as he sank back to the ground.
Evan furiously stood over him, pinching a thumb and finger. “You know, I came this close, this close, to letting you live this time. I was ready to find a whole new way to screw with you, just for variety. If you were living the same five years over and over again, you’d know how crucial it is to mix things up.”
In Jury’s final moments, Evan no longer existed. The whole world bled away. All he had left were thoughts of Ofelia. He realized she may have been right after all.
“But no,” Evan continued, “you had to remind me why the world’s a better place without you. So now once again, you’ve reduced yourself to a bit role. You don’t get to play the hero. You don’t get to lead the Silvers. You certainly don’t get the big-titted love interest. Nope. So sorry. No Hannah for you.”
By the time Evan finished ranting, the last spark of life had left Jury Curado. His eyes fell shut and his head dropped back against the brick.
Evan crouched down and hissed a gritty whisper in his ear. “Rot in hell, pendejo.”
A long green van rolled to a stop at the mouth of the alley. Evan plucked the wallet from Jury’s pocket, then climbed the fire escape ladder. He smiled down from the roof as Martin Salgado and his square-headed son traced their wave signal down the alley. They squawked in fluster at the sight of Jury’s corpse.
“A little too late there, fellas,” Evan murmured.
He scurried to the front of the roof and looked down at the van. From his high angle, he couldn’t get a glimpse of Theo Maranan, the great Asian prophet. But Evan had a perfect view of Hannah.
“Come on, baby. Turn around and show me those big browns.”
Hannah twisted in the cushions and aimed a nervous glance out the window. Evan chuckled. For all her twitchy instincts, the actress had no idea what she just lost in that alley, the great and awful edit that Evan just made to her story. When left to their untampered fates, Hannah Given and Jury Curado would meet in Terra Vista and smack together like magnets—the man of absolute conviction and the woman of no conviction at all, locked in a vapid dance of physical worship and wall-piercing orgasms. It was an excruciatingly painful spectacle that Evan had suffered a long time ago, back in the days when he tried to be a good little Silver.
Fighting bitter memories, he plucked the twenty-dollar bill from Jury’s wallet and sniffed it deeply. Ah, the green, green cash of home. Funny how he’d hated his Earth so much when he lived there and now he missed it terribly. Sadly, his rewind talent stopped at the canned goods section of Nico’s store. He couldn’t jump back any further. Home was forever just a few seconds out of reach.
Now here at the start of his fifty-fifth play-through, his fifty-fifth trip through the same half decade, Evan Rander was not a fan of his adopted Earth. He knew there was only one escape from his carousel hell, and yet he couldn’t find the nerve to end himself. What else could he do then but keep on spinning? What better way to fill his endless days than by punishing the sisters and Silvers who’d wronged him?
As the Salgado van pulled away from the curb, Evan stood up and straightened his shirt. He whistled a happy tune on the way back to the fire ladder. He didn’t know where he’d heard the song before. He wasn’t even sure which Earth it came from.
TEN
Sunday was a day of rest for the Silvers. Though the physicists attended to their needs like conscientious butlers, the guests were left to wallow and mingle amongst themselves. Amanda learned that Mia harbored authorly ambitions, and had earned an academic award for the fifty-page biography she wrote about her grandmother. Hannah learned that David was a fellow stage performer, one who’d danced and crooned at high schools all around the world. His bare rendition of “Johanna” from Sweeney Todd was gorgeous enough to melt her. She spent the rest of the day uncomfortably aroused.
Zack, meanwhile, discovered that plastic was called bresin in this neck of the multiverse. He also learned that he could bend time.
He remained tensely withdrawn in the wake of his revelation, sketching tiny shapes in the corner of his pad and then erasing them with the sheer act of thought. By his thirtieth undoodling, he finally saw the prudence of Amanda’s argument. It was too much to deal with, too soon.
On Monday, the work began. The group was ushered through an eight-hour gauntlet of medical tests. To Quint’s surprise, Zack remained perfectly docile through all the pokings and proddings. This time it was David who caused the trouble. The boy refused to submit to a single examination until the scientists gave him back his heirloom wristwatch. The moment they complied, his cordial smile returned and he became fully cooperative.
On Tuesday, the guests were ushered to individual rooms and asked to recount the awful events of Saturday morning. They relayed their tales with varying degrees of detail and tears, Hannah winning readily on both counts. She was also the only one brave enough to divulge her weirdness, her strange attack of acceleration at the downtown ma
rina. The news triggered an avalanche of chatter among the physicists, forcing Quint to send a staff bitmail.
People, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to understand the basics before we get to the unusuals.
The interviews continued throughout the week, question after question about the Earth that no longer was. The Silvers were asked to name the U.S. presidents in reverse order, a task that four of them botched after Franklin Roosevelt. Only Mia, six weeks fresh from her eighth-grade history final, was able to rattle off names without pause. Her interviewers stopped her at William McKinley.
By Friday, the queries had turned from vague to specific to suspiciously pointed. One in particular had the group talking at dinner.
“‘Do you know of any historical event that occurred on October 5, 1912?’”
“Yeah, they asked me that one.”
“Me too.”
“What did you say?”
“Titanic.”
“I said Titanic.”
“That happened in April.”
“Really? Damn. I was so sure I got that.”
“Don’t feel bad,” David told Hannah. “I think they got the answer they were looking for.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re cataloging the differences between their history and ours. Trying to pinpoint the first major event that happened on one world but not the other. Given the fact that none of us know the significance of October 5th, 1912, I’d say they found it.”
While the table fell silent in heady dither, Zack scribbled furiously into his sketchbook. “This is bullshit. Quint promised us a two-way exchange of information. He hasn’t told us a thing.”
He pressed the pad to his cheek and aimed it at the ceiling camera. A large and angry word balloon pointed to his mouth. WE WANT INFO!
One floor up, Quint leveled an icy stare at his monitor. He dialed Czerny from his desk phone.
“I think our guests are in need of entertainment.”
The next day, physicists installed a sleek device in the lounge: a dark gray console the size of a pizza box. Above it, a five-foot pane of smoky black glass rested on metal stands.
The group watched Czerny with puppy-headed interest as he inserted a small cartridge into the machine. For the next two hours, the Silvers sat wide-eyed, mesmerized by their first taste of lumivision. Crystal-clear sounds filled the room from every corner. The colors popped off the screen like oil paint. Mia couldn’t spot the image pixels, even when pressing her eyes to the glass.
They were soon given a teeming box of blockbuster movies, enough to keep them busy for months. It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that the films were all space operas and fantasy sagas, nothing that would shed light on the world outside their window. Once Mia figured out the console controls, she confirmed Zack’s suspicion that the physicists blocked their access to live broadcast channels.
“It’s nothing sinister,” Quint later assured them. “We’re merely trying to limit your culture shock. Have patience. When the time is right, we’ll tell you everything we know.”
None of them were convinced, but at least now they were distracted. The Silvers gradually settled into their routine like office drones, cooperating with the scientists by day and retreating into escapist entertainments at night. By the end of July, even Zack had grown lazy in limbo. The shock of apocalypse had settled into a more enduring malaise. He wasn’t in a hurry to have his mind jostled again.
On August 6, a million angry pathogens invaded the property on the skin of a sniffling physicist, clobbering the foreign immune systems of every guest. Only David got off lightly with a runny nose. The rest were thrown deep into flu.
For Beatrice Caudell, part-time biologist and full-time germaphobe, this was Armageddon. She squeaked a litany of worst-case scenarios to Czerny—tales of viral mutation and global decimation. None of her fears came to pass. But when Hannah sneezed her way into a whole new velocity, when a fever dream caused Amanda to pulverize the ceiling, when Mia received a get-well note from her future self, and when everyone started hearing the voices in David’s head, there was no more hiding from the issue. For Sterling Quint, his physicists, and the poor beleaguered Silvers, it was finally time to address the weirdness.
—
Zack was the first to get a handle on his new peculiarity.
From the moment he grasped the temporal nature of his talent, he embarked on a cautious secret mission to study it. He retreated under his blanket with a penlight, squinting at the pencil strokes on his sketch pad until they disappeared at will. Zack found it a basic but slippery trick of concentration, like spelling words backward.
After a mere day’s practice, he was able to banish all sorts of paper-related maladies to a state of never-happenedness—crumples and smudges, rips and spittle. Anything doable was suddenly undoable, a prospect that terrified him as much as it thrilled him. He began smuggling fruits into his room to unslice and de-ripen.
On the day the flu virus invaded his body, he tried to send an orange on an accelerated journey back to its infancy. Instead he accidentally aged it rotten. To Zack’s astonishment, he could spin the clock in both directions, though it would be weeks before he gained control of his fast-forward feature.
On August 9, he warily revealed his weirdness to his hosts. Quint, Czerny, and a trio of associates eyed him from the far end of the conference table as he blew his nose into a tissue.
“Okay, this cold’s knocking the crap out of me, so I’ll keep it short. I seem to have acquired the ability to affect time. I can reverse or advance the chronology of small objects, like a sheet of paper or a piece of bread. I don’t know how or why this is happening. I just know that I’m too freaked out to keep it to myself anymore. I’ll also stab the first one of you who tries to dissect me. Questions?”
They had questions, enough for Quint to assign a dedicated team to study Zack’s new talent. The physicists observed him in a laboratory, recording and measuring as he worked his way through an endless gauntlet of test materials. Glass, metal, bresin, stone—there was seemingly nothing he couldn’t de-age. He even restored the missing leg on a wooden horse figurine, though the new limb looked bleached by comparison.
When Zack described his feat to David at their next dinner, the boy became vexed.
“That’s insane. I assume the original horse leg still exists somewhere. Did it magically teleport from its location when you restored the figurine? Or did you somehow create a duplicate?”
“The eggheads seem to think it’s a duplicate.”
David shook his head in agitation. “I can’t tell you how much that violates the basic laws of science.”
Zack had expected to see the same amount of hair-pulling from the scientists themselves, but they remained oddly placid. If anything, they seemed more interested in the biology behind Zack’s power than the physics.
Soon Zack felt daring enough to test his magic on his silver bracelet, with surprising results. Just a small bit of reversing caused the band to break apart into four even quarters, all perfectly polished at the edges.
After showing his accomplishment to Hannah, Mia, and David, he indulged their request to undo their own adornments. Mia hugged Zack with gushing relief. The bracelet had been a wasp on her wrist for days now. She thought it would never go away.
When Amanda learned about Zack’s stunt, she pulled him aside in the hallway.
“That was reckless. You could have overshot and hurt someone. You don’t know what your time stuff does to living creatures.”
The next morning, he found out. Quint interrupted Zack’s lab session to release a tiny brown mouse on the table. It had glassy white eyes, a chestnut-size lump on his left side, and several battle scratches.
“This poor fellow’s at the end of his road,” Quint told Zack. “See if you can fix that.”
All throughout d
inner that night, the cartoonist remained uncharacteristically quiet. While the others conversed, he stared ahead in vacant consternation.
Mia touched his arm. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I . . .” He stammered a moment, then let out an incredulous chuckle. “I reversed a mouse today. The thing was old and dying. And then suddenly it wasn’t. Quint says I sent it all the way back to adolescence.”
The others eyed him through deadpan faces, waiting for a smirk or some other indicator he was kidding. He stared in wide-eyed wonder at his hands.
“Jesus Christ.”
While David and Zack discussed the philosophical implications of his ability, Mia envisioned his next bombshell announcement. Today Zack rejuvenated a live rodent. Tomorrow he could be resurrecting a dead one. Hannah couldn’t help but wonder if his skill worked the other way. Could he turn a young mouse into an old one? Could he do it to a human? Would he?
It was Amanda’s thoughts that concerned Zack the most. She remained silent for the rest of the meal, and stone-faced throughout the evening movie.
At bedtime, she approached her room and noticed Zack watching her from his doorway.
“What?”
“You’ve been quiet since I mentioned my mouse trick. Did it upset you?”
“A little,” she admitted.
“You want to talk about it?”
She crossed her arms, bathing him in the same inscrutable look that had bugged him for hours.
“No. I’ll work it out.” She opened her door, then eyed him one last time. “Good night.”
Amanda skipped her hygiene and prayers and went straight to bed, her jade eyes dancing in restless bother. She’d devoted half her life to God and medicine and now suddenly this mordant atheist could heal with a flick of a finger. And what came out of her hands?
She rolled on her back and cast a contemptuous glare at her creator. Apparently, among His other faults, the Lord had Zack’s sense of humor.
—
The sisters weren’t eager to face their paranormal afflictions.