by Daniel Price
Suddenly the esteemed physicist erupted in a low and untimely chuckle. The Pelletiers watched him with furrowed bother.
“Did you not understand what—”
“Oh, I got it,” Quint said, still chortling. “I may be many things, Azral, but I’m not stupid.”
Esis eyed him warily. “And yet you laugh in the face of your own demise.”
No one was more surprised than Quint, a man whose whole life had been an upward climb, filled with endless battle. Now after fifty-five years, there was nothing left to do. No one left to fight. The revelation was . . . liberating.
“I’d explain it,” he said, through dwindling snickers. “But I doubt you’d understand. If the two of you represent the future of mankind, then this is an excellent time to stop progressing.”
Azral and Esis exchanged a stony glance, then bloomed a matching set of grins.
“Oh, the pride of the ancients,” said the son.
“Truly a sight to behold,” said the mother.
Their condescension cracked the walls of Quint’s serenity. He shot a wrathful glare at Azral.
“Just get it over with already, you stretched stain. You chalk-faced bowel. If I have one regret, it’s that I won’t get to see all your plans crumble right on top of you. Don’t think it won’t happen. You’re clearly not as smart as you think you are.”
Expressionless, Azral rose from the desk and approached Quint. The physicist smiled.
“It’ll be even more amusing if your grand design gets foiled by the very people you brought here. The great Azral Pelletier, brought low by an actress, a cartoonist, and all their little friends. It’s a shame I’ll miss that. Talk about a sight to behold.”
With a soft and solemn expression, Azral rested a gentle hand on Quint’s scalp.
“I thank you again for your help, Sterling. Your work here is done.”
Quint closed his eyes in anticipation of pain, but he felt nothing more than a faint and bubbly tickle under his skin. He peeked an eye open.
“What—”
He dropped through the rug as if it were nothing more than mist. Down he fell, through the floorboards and wires, the lobby chandelier. He passed through all objects like an apparition but he plummeted like a stone.
When he reached the underground parking lot, Quint finally screamed. He disappeared through the concrete and then continued in darkness. By the time he succumbed to suffocation, he’d already descended an eighth of the way into the Earth’s crust. His body kept on falling, all the way to magma.
Grim-faced and silent, the Pelletiers exited the complex. The moment they reached the front yard, Azral turned around and closed his eyes in concentration.
A dome of piercing white light suddenly enveloped the building—a bubble of backward time moving at accelerated speed. Inside the field, corpses vanished, plants shrank, mice perished as zygotes. The hint of past life appeared in split-second intervals, like aberrations in a flip-book.
By the time the dome disappeared, the entire structure had been reversed fifty-two months, reverted to the failed hotel that Quint had yet to purchase. Every file, every photo, every mention of the Silvers was now erased from existence.
Esis peevishly crossed her arms and addressed Azral in a foreign tongue, a byzantine blend of European and Asian languages that was still over two millennia away from being invented.
“I warned you not to overlook our ancestors, sehgee. You should have listened to me.”
“I know.”
“You and your father both.”
Azral held her hands, his sharp eyes tender with affection. “Just forgive us, sehmeer, and embrace the new course.”
Esis heaved a wistful breath and fixed her dark stare at the blooming sun.
“I can’t help but worry for those children. There are so many futures open to them now. So many strings.”
“There’s only one outcome that matters,” Azral insisted. “They go east. To Pendergen.”
“Assuming they don’t fall on the way.”
Azral wrapped his arms around Esis and cast a soulful gaze down the driveway.
“They will not fall,” he assured her. “Not the important ones, at least.”
—
Nobody knew where they were going, least of all Zack. His only goal now was to avoid looping back into police search paths. Every chance he got, he drove east into the rising sun.
Twelve miles from the site of their standoff, the engine fell to sickly whirrs. Zack veered onto a narrow forest road and pulled over to the dirt. He felt relatively good about ditching the van here in a desolate area, under the thick canopy of trees. He could only assume that the police hunt had extended to helicopters or whatever they used here to make pigs fly.
He gave everyone five minutes to gather their wits and scant belongings, but Amanda insisted on ten. She’d discovered a sterilized pack of sutures at the bottom of Czerny’s med kit and was determined to close Theo’s wound before they all proceeded on foot.
While the others exited, she remained with Theo in the back of the van. She saw him wincing with every stroke of the needle.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m an oncology nurse. I don’t do this very often.”
“You’re doing fine.”
Theo studied her as she made her final stitches. Her expression was tight and unsettled, like crumbling stone.
“They have those healing machines,” he reminded her. “Anything you did to those cops will be undone.”
“Not if I killed them.”
“I don’t think you did.”
Amanda didn’t think so either, but she couldn’t escape the grim possibilities. She’d pinned those men down with the hands of a giant. Another ounce of thought and she could have crushed them like eggs. It had taken her years to accept cancer as part of God’s great plan. She didn’t even know where to start with tempis.
Twenty feet away, Mia paced the side of the road, kicking tiny stones with vacant bother. She couldn’t shake the tickle from her cheek, the strip of skin that the policeman’s bullet had kissed with hot air. Someone just fired a gun at her face. And yet somehow she was still standing.
David chucked acorns at the treetops, startling numerous birds.
“What’s going on in that head of yours, Miafarisi?”
“I was just thinking how you saved my life back in that building. I never even thanked you.”
David shrugged as if he’d merely lent her a nickel. “No worries. Just glad we’re all still breathing.”
He caught his oversight and turned to Mia in hot remorse. She threw her dismal gaze inside the van, at the blanket-draped corpse of Constantin Czerny.
“Shoot. Mia, I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant,” she told him. “I just feel bad leaving him like this.”
“We can’t bury him,” David said. “There’s no time. No reason. The police will only dig him up.”
Mia didn’t think she had any tears left in her, and yet her eyes welled up again.
“He was nice.”
David pulled her into a soft embrace, resting his chin on her scalp. Such a sweet thing, this Miafarisi. Such a sweet child.
Zack leaned against the driver’s door, nervously tapping his foot. Between all the traumas of the recent past and all his worries about the near future, he found the energy to mourn the sketchbook he’d left behind in Terra Vista. It was the last surviving relic of his old life. Now he had nothing left but memories.
Hannah emerged from the woods, red-faced and puffy-eyed. She’d gone into the trees to vomit, but it turned out all she needed was a few good minutes of unabashed weeping. She wiped her eyes and rested against the van.
“You okay?” Zack asked.
“Yes. Thank you. You’re still an asshole.”
He’d already apologized t
wice for making her run after the van. She didn’t care. She was suffering the second-worst morning of her life and she needed to be irrational about something.
He took her hand and pushed a small silver disc into her palm. “There.”
“What’s this?”
“Restitution. I found it in the cup holder.”
Hannah studied the coin. It was twice the size and value of a standard quarter, and bore the side-profile portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. She found the inscription under his head—We Persevere—to be ominously cryptic. She could only guess it had something to do with the Cataclysm.
“That’s all the money you found?” she asked.
“That’s all the money we own.”
She pocketed the coin. “Fifty cents. Lovely.”
A red sedan turned a sharp corner onto their road. Hannah tensed up and squeezed Zack’s arm. He squinted at the approaching vehicle.
“It’s okay. It’s not a cop car.”
Loud country-rock music blared from within as the vehicle rolled to a slow stop beside Zack and Hannah. The young driver turned off his radio and leaned over to the passenger side, whistling in wonder at the dilapidated van.
“Hoo-EE! I’ve seen some threeped-up rides in my time, amigos, but that is one unhappy son-of-a! You folks doing all right here?”
The man was slight in stature, but he dressed and acted to compensate. Beneath his wide gray cowboy hat were a pair of sunglasses large enough to qualify as novelty shades. His red denim shirt was garnished with rhine-stones. The man practically drowned his new acquaintances in his proud Southern drawl.
“We’re fine,” Zack assured him. “Bought a clunker. Clipped a deer. You know how it goes.”
“I hear that. Sure as hell do. Sometimes life just grabs you by the jangles and gives it a good ol’ squeeze!” He tipped his hat at Hannah. “If you’ll pardon the expression, ma’am.”
Even with his absurd shades, Hannah could tell he was aggressively unconcerned about her delicate ears and quite interested in the goods beneath her tank top. She crossed her arms uncomfortably.
“Sure I can’t help?” asked the cowboy. “I’m mighty handy with a wrench.”
Zack shook his head. “No thanks. We’re fine. We appreciate it though.”
The man kept smiling, his high cheer peppered with a hint of wry amusement.
“All righty. I’ll just mosey on along then. But if you’re ever feeling blue, just remember: it’s a brand-new day and the sun is shining bright. Yes, sir!”
He lowered his shades and offered Hannah a quick wink that was creepy enough to distract her from all her recent woes. Zack was intrigued by the “55” tattoo on the back of his right hand. He wondered if the significance of the number was cultural or personal.
For Evan Rander, it was very personal.
He revved his engine, then offered his two fellow Silvers a final preening smile.
“Y’all take care now. Keep walking.”
“Keep walking,” Zack repeated.
He and Hannah continued to watch the car as it disappeared to the east. Zack could have sworn he heard laughter over the loud, noxious music.
Hannah kept her gaze on the car’s dust trail. “Why’d you say ‘Keep walking’?”
“American expression. Means ‘Be well.’ ‘Stay strong.’ That sort of thing.”
“Oh.” She vaguely recalled the pony-haired girl at the supermarket saying the same thing. At the time, Hannah had taken it as a rude brush-off. Guess the kid was being nice.
Once Amanda finished Theo’s bandage and the last of the van’s useful items were collected into bags, there was little else to do but move on. The Silvers gathered at the side of the road.
Amanda watched Hannah caress her aching hand, then grabbed it for inspection.
“What are you doing, Amanda? I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You keep rubbing it and wincing.”
“Well, you’re not making it better by squeezing it.”
“Just let me check, okay?”
“Ow! Goddamn it!”
Amanda dropped Hannah’s arm. “We’ll have to wait and see, but I don’t think it’s fractured.”
“It is now!”
“Yes, thank you for yelling at me. That’s just what I need right now.”
Mia watched their exchange with dark fascination, then looked away when Amanda noticed her.
Zack pointed to the elevated highway in the distance, stretching deep into the sunrise. “I don’t know the name of that road, but it runs east. I say we travel underneath it until we hit the next town. Along the way, we can figure out what to do about money and food and all that. Is everyone okay with that idea?”
In slow succession, they all nodded. Zack studied their grim and weary faces.
“All right then.”
The group took a final mournful look at Czerny, then slowly proceeded down the road. Two by two, they traveled east—rarely talking, frequently yawning.
Soon a commuter aerotrain crossed high above them on invisible tracks. The bottom of each car sported glowing white struts that varied in formation from trailer to trailer. From below, the whole thing looked like a giant string of dominoes.
The group stopped in place, craning their necks until the final car passed from view.
“They have flying trains,” Hannah uttered. “Did anyone else know they had flying trains?”
From the blank expressions of the others, it was clear that they didn’t.
“Jesus.”
Amanda rubbed her back. “Come on.”
With a deep breath, the actress picked a pebble from her sneaker and then joined the others. The Silvers followed the road to the elevated highway, and then kept walking.
SIXTEEN
September 6 was a bad day to be a morning commuter on Highway V. A tempic police cordon blocked all northbound lanes at Terra Vista while bright lumic arrows diverted vehicles to the nearest clogged exit. The ghosted image of a U.S. flag slowly rippled above the barrier. A glimmering overlay asked drivers to be patient and kind to their fellow Americans.
Beyond the cordon, twenty state and local policemen gathered to investigate the odd standoff that had occurred here ninety minutes ago. The Terra Vista police chief scratched his jowls in confusion as he processed the testimony. He was a fat and hairy man of churlish disposition. No one had cause to find humor in the fact that his name was James Bond.
The chief was in a particularly foul mood this morning. Two of his men had been banged up in a high-speed road chase that went bizarrely awry. Another two were laid up with cracked ribs and punctured lungs. They rested on stretchers, waiting for the court recorder to arrive. Before their wounds and memories could be undone by revivers, they had to give their sworn statement about the woman who hurt them—a tall and skinny redhead who’d discovered a bold new way to resist arrest.
Everyone glanced up as a pair of ash-gray aerovans appeared above the treetops. The doors of each vehicle were garnished with the familiar golden logo of a spread-winged eagle, perched behind a large number 9. With a pair of steamy hisses, the vans unfolded their rubber tires and descended to the pavement.
Just as the chief expected, the Deps had come out to play.
The Bureau of Domestic Protections was formed in 1961, at the peak of the New Simplicity. The government’s goal was basic: to consolidate their national law enforcement agencies under one umbrella, with clear delineations of purpose between each of the eight new divisions.
In 1988, the Bureau created a ninth department to tackle the growing crimes of high technology. In addition to chasing down the new and savvy breeds of cracker (hacker), jacker (pirate), ripper (scammer), and creeper (pervert), DP-9 was tasked with curbing the felonious misuse of temporis. Each new method of bending time created at least a dozen new ways to break the law. T
he most common infractions involved swifting (causing mayhem in a speedsuit), rifting (accelerating only part of a victim’s body), clouding (vandalizing the sky with lumic projections), and tooping (using rejuvenators to create illegal copies of objects).
When the preliminary report of the morning’s altercation reached the federal wire, two words—weaponized tempis—raised eyebrows at DP-9 headquarters in Washington. A team was quickly dispatched from the Los Angeles office.
The policemen watched with cynical interest as eight agents emerged from the vans. Six of them were merely boys in suits, technicians with badges. Their leader was a gray-haired shellback with an Old West mustache and enough leathery experience on his face to ease the chief’s mind.
The final Dep was something else entirely.
While her companions were pasty, her skin was a smooth cocoa brown. She wore a short red skirt over stockings and a sleeveless white blouse that flaunted every curve of her sculpted arms. Intricate brass earrings dangled from her lobes like chandeliers. Most intriguing of all were her twelve-inch dreadlocks, finger-thick and scattered like fern leaves. It was an alien hairstyle in this country, even among the odd folk.
A dozen stares followed the woman as she surveyed the scene. She was certainly easy to look at, but between her strange hair and features—her overpronounced cheekbones and near-Asian eyes—she seemed far too exotic to be an agent of the Eagle.
The seasoned Dep-in-charge noticed the chief and approached him. They traded a firm handshake.
“Andy Cahill. Supervising Special Agent, DP-9.”
“James Bond. Poe-Chief, Terra Vista.”
“We hear six of your men came across some interesting sinners.”
“Four of my men,” the chief corrected. “The cycle jocks are State Patrol.”
“They get hurt too?”
“A few broken fingers each. Apparently some queer-looking swifter knocked the guns right out of their hands.”