by Peter Clines
Her head bobbed back and forth. “The car travels through history, yes,” she said. “But we’re not traveling through history because of the car, if that makes sense.”
“Not really.”
Her fingers tapped out another verse of something on the wheel. “You can put on fancy shoes and run,” she said, “but the shoes aren’t making you run. You aren’t running solely because you’re wearing the shoes.”
“I think I’m still missing something.”
She nodded slowly, and Eli could sense her organizing thoughts as the Model A covered more distance. “Have you ever heard people talk of a town or part of a city that’s, say, stuck in the 1950s? Or the 1920s? Or the last century? Sayings like that.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Well, sometimes, more times than you’d think…they are.”
“They are…?”
“Stuck. Trapped in history. A road or a neighborhood or a whole town where it’s still 1950. Or 1920. Or 1875.”
“You mean they never developed?”
“I mean they never left. History slipped past them and they’re still stuck in 1950. It’s been 1950 there for decades. You see, the dream was intended to allow people’s hopes and beliefs to become true. It allows people to live how they want. In some cases, it can even reshape the world.”
“How?”
“For the sake of argument,” she explained, back on familiar ground, “let us say a great number of people believe the same thing. That this town or that era is the pinnacle of how things should always be. The mindsets, the culture, the technology—they believe this is a moment which defines the very best of America. Or, in a few rare cases, the very worst of it.”
“Okay.”
“When enough of these people get together, their belief focuses the dream and it makes these things so. That point is pinned down and stuck while the rest of history moves on past it. Or piles up around it, really.
“That’s what the dream does in these places,” Harry said. “It brings things to a halt. The people there decide they don’t want things to change, so they don’t.” She paused to glance at him. “These are the slick spots. The places we can skid across history.”
Eli looked out at the desert. The sun was on the horizon behind them. Shadows covered most of the landscape, broken by a few fierce slashes of daylight. “When we drove into the town yesterday,” he said, “the car skidded on the road.”
The corners of Harry’s mouth twitched. “Not on the road. On history. As I said, the dream has created hundreds and hundreds of slick spots all over the country. You just need to know how to spot them. And if you know where these slick spots are, if you get a feel for them, you can use them. Go through them. Sometimes slingshot around them for a bit of momentum, so to speak. And they can take you anywhen in America’s history.”
“Anywhen?”
“Well, within certain limits. Geographically, the late 1700s is all the East Coast. Then there’s the Louisiana Purchase, which opens up a lot of territory for us. No Texas until the end of 1849 and no California until 1850. Alaska’s a little tricky because it’s not connected, but I know a few folks who’ve done it.”
“What about Hawaii?”
“There aren’t any roads to Hawaii. Don’t be foolish, Mr. Teague.”
“Right,” he said. “Foolish.”
“A few spots are very specific,” she explained. “There’s a street in Dallas that only leads to November of 1963, and a bus route in Montgomery that goes to December of 1955. A road in Philadelphia will take you to August of 1776. Others are more general and give a little more elbow room once you become skilled at driving them. Washington, DC’s filled with them, of course. There’s a sort of sweet spot that crops up often across the country, from 1945 to 1957, and that’s useful. The decade of ultimate, unchallenged American superiority, from some people’s view.”
“What happened in 1957?”
“Sputnik. Absolute proof another country was ahead of the United States. Kicked the legs out from under a lot of people.”
They drove for a few minutes without speaking. The pavement hummed under Eleanor’s tires. The engine purred in its coarse way.
Harry cleared her throat. “It took me a week to get my mind around it. Even when Christopher, my old partner, showed me the roads, I was convinced it was a trick.”
“It’s kind of familiar, actually,” he said.
She blinked. “Really?”
Eli nodded. “I took a couple science classes in college. Didn’t really want to, but I needed them for requirements, so I tried to find the fun ones. And one of them was an astronomy course.”
“Navigation?”
He managed a chuckle. “Not exactly. Not really my thing, but some of it was interesting.”
Harry turned her head to look at him. To judge him. “You failed the course.”
“No,” he said. “I passed. Barely.”
She snorted.
He used his hands to sketch a plane between him and the windshield. “Later in the semester the professor talked about how light and gravity and time and space were all related. He had this really great diagram of space, a huge gridded plane, and all the stars made these sort of…depressions in space. Their gravity bent space-time in places, so you’d end up with funnels in the plane.”
“I believe I’ve seen similar images,” said Harry.
“So, this time travel—”
“History travel,” she corrected.
“—it’s a space-time thing?”
“Oh, no, not remotely. But if you’re looking for a visual metaphor, that one’s as good as any.” She shrugged and the steering wheel wobbled in her hands. “This is more or less how it was explained to me.”
“More or less?”
“As I said, people talk and trade information. I’ve heard a few different versions of the story. We all have our own examples and metaphors.”
Another mile passed by.
“Okay,” he said, “I have to know.”
“Know what?”
“Why? Why are you searching for this thing? What’s the point?”
Harry turned and furrowed her brow at him. “Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“Like you said, it’s a lot to get your mind around.”
She sighed. “At a distance, with a large number of people, the dream can alter the flow of time and reshape the nation. If one person actually possessed it, held it, the entire United States—and all its people—would all be whatever that one person dreamed. They could impose their will on the whole country.”
Eli blinked. “How?”
“I don’t know the details,” Harry admitted. “I just know the person who finds the dream can do whatever they want with the country.”
“But how do you know that?”
She shrugged. “As I said, people talk. They tell stories.”
“So…you heard gossip.”
“It’s not gossip, Mr. Teague.”
He opened his mouth, looked at her expression, and closed it again.
Two miles hummed by beneath the narrow tires.
Eli shifted on the bench and rolled his shoulders. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s assume everything you’ve been saying is true.”
“It is.”
“Assuming it’s true,” he repeated, “shouldn’t this happen to lots of people?”
“What?”
“Slipping back in time. Or forward, I guess. Can you go forward?”
“Of course. Some of the slick spots extend decades into what you’d consider the future.”
“Okay, so why isn’t it happening all the time? What’s that joke—‘where are all the time travelers?’ If these slippery spots—”
“Slick spots.”
“—slick spots are all through history, then shouldn’t hundreds of people have slipped back to 1960 or forward to 2020 or where—whenever?”
Harry nodded. “True enough,” she said. “To be honest, quite a few do.”
“What?”
“As I said before, we’ve all heard the stories of the towns trapped in the past. Most motorists slip in one side and straight out the other. Then they drive home and tell their friends about the adorable town they drove through with hundred-year-old houses that still looked new.
“There’s also a limitation,” she continued. “Only American steel goes through. All those foreign cars, the imports, none of them will slide.” She reached out and rapped her knuckles against Eleanor’s dashboard.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” said Harry. She punctuated it with another shrug. “I would guess because they’re not American.”
“What about American fiberglass or—”
“I believe I was clear that a lot of this is second- and thirdhand knowledge, yes?”
He closed his mouth. “You were.”
“Thank you.”
The sun had almost vanished behind them, no more than a warm glow in the side mirrors. Ahead the sky was dark, and he could see a few bright stars in the sky making their presence known. As if hearing his thoughts, Harry reached out and flicked another switch. The headlights flickered once and then surged to life, throwing a bright oval on the black pavement in front of them.
“You said most of the people drive through,” Eli said. “What happens to the rest? The ones who don’t drive out the other side?”
She stretched one finger up, off the steering wheel, and pushed the point of her hat up away from her face. Her eyes stayed on the road, focused on the patch of light a dozen yards ahead of them. A quarter mile passed by under the Model A’s tires.
“Harry?”
“Some of them just become lost for a while,” she said, as if she’d never paused. “They spend a few hours, maybe a whole day, lost somewhere else and go home with a slightly stranger story. Some of them never find their way home, and they end up becoming searchers. A woman I know, Monica, hopped into the wrong taxicab. Got into it in 1977, stepped out in 1936.”
“And the rest?”
“The rest,” she said, “make too much noise. Too many ripples in history. So they’re removed.”
“From the slick spot?”
“From history, Mr. Teague.” She shook her head. “They’re eliminated. Killed.”
“How many people are we talking about?”
She shrugged. “Two, perhaps three hundred a year. There’s no way to be precise.”
“Three hundred people a year?” he repeated.
Harry nodded.
“Three hundred?”
“Is there a problem?”
“How do three hundred people go missing and nobody notices?”
“Of course people notice. Do you know how many people go missing in this country every year, vanished into thin air? Thousands, since the day the country was founded. Why would those people lost in history stand out more than any others?”
“So how do they explain it when their bodies are found?”
“Their bodies aren’t found. Ever. They’re removed.”
Eli shook his head, trying to make all the pieces line up with the world he’d known just that morning. “But…how? By who?”
Harry glanced at him. “I think you can make an educated guess, Mr. Teague.”
“You mean…the faceless men?”
“The faceless men,” she echoed.
14
Zeke heard movement around him. Not just him being moved past things in his wheelchair, but things moving past him as well. Shoes on carpet. Something went by with a squeaky wheel, and it made a picture in his mind of one of those little bookshelf-carts librarians pushed around.
The blindfold was soft cloth, like a T-shirt, but had enough weight to it that it settled across his eyes and cheeks. He couldn’t see through it or under it. He’d woken up with it across his face after Agent Fifteen had knocked him out back at the station.
His arms were strapped to the wheelchair, not cuffed. He’d been in cuffs enough times, for enough reasons, to recognize the feel of the double edge, even through clothes. He wasn’t as sure about the restraints on his legs, but if his arms were strapped his legs probably were too.
Who had wheelchairs with straps on them? Prisons? Psycho wards? Feds?
He didn’t hear anyone talking either. Or breathing. Even when someone moved by in a rush, he didn’t hear them gasp for air. Just the sounds of the wheelchair on tight carpet and dozens of bodies moving back and forth around him.
“This blindfold’s gettin’ really fucking old,” Zeke muttered.
“Watch your language,” said Fifteen. His iron fingers flexed on Zeke’s shoulder. “Not much longer.”
“I don’t like not seeing where I’m going.”
“That’s the point of a blindfold.”
“This some sort of black-ops thing? I see something I wasn’t supposed to?”
No one answered him.
He focused on Fifteen. The big man had a solid grip on Zeke’s left shoulder, and his voice had come from the left. But that meant someone else had to be pushing the wheelchair. Unless the big guy was doing it one-handed.
Zeke sensed a doorway around him, then felt it push through the air and heard it latch behind him. The wheelchair rolled forward a few more feet, then settled back and trembled. Did wheelchairs have brakes? He thought they did.
“Free his hand,” Fifteen said, “and take off the blindfold.”
Zeke felt a finger slide into the blindfold at the back of his head. The heavy fabric dropped down to hang around his neck like a turtleneck. He opened his eyes, blinked a few times, and forced them open again.
The office looked old. Not dusty or worn out, just…old. Like the captain’s office with all its ’70s furniture and out-of-date office phones. Except this place looked like something out of a World War II movie. A typewriter sat on one side of a creepy-clean and ordered desk. An American flag stood in the corner. An old safe with a big dial and a handle squatted against the back wall.
Agent Fifteen stepped around to the far side of the desk and opened a drawer without sitting down. His hat had vanished, but he still had the freaky plastic mask over his face. The badge, notebook, and pistol moved from his coat and vanished into the drawer. He pulled a single file folder from another drawer, centered it on the desk, and opened it to look at the pages inside.
A hand reached down from behind Zeke and unbuckled a thick, beltlike strap. He twisted around and saw another dark-suited man. This one had a feature-blurring mask with round cheeks and a smile, almost like a clown.
Clowns creeped Zeke out. He turned away just as the strap came free. The man kept his hand on Zeke’s wrist, pinning it to the wheelchair’s wooden armrest.
The wheelchair had the big wheels in the front. Dark creases marked the brown leather of the straps. Somebody’d fought to get out of this thing. Maybe a couple people.
The man released his arm and stepped back. Zeke looked at Fifteen, still reviewing paperwork.
“Who the fuck are—”
The clown-agent behind Zeke rapped his head.
“What the fuck, you—”
The knuckles cracked against his skull again.
Zeke twisted around, trying to grasp at the man with his free hand. His fingers never came close. The clown-agent never flinched.
“Officer Miller,” said Fifteen, “I trust we can carry out this process in a professional manner.”
“What the hell’s going on?” growled Zeke. “You kidnapped me. You abducted a police officer! D’you know how hard they’re going to come down on you?”
Fifteen selected a page from the file folder and set it down on the center of the blotter. “I’ll need your signature on this before we can continue.”
“Fuck you!”
The lights in the room brightened, turning everything white, and an instant later the pain hit, rocking his head forward. He took a deep breath and shook his head until his vision cleared. The back of his skull throbbed where the clown’s
punch had connected.
He glared at the agent behind him, then at Fifteen on the other side of the desk. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“We,” said Fifteen, “are the faceless men behind the government. Our office served this country before all five branches of the Armed Forces.”
He set his fingertips against the sheet of paper and spun it around. His arm stretched out and the paper slid across the desk. “Sign,” he said, “at the bottom.”
Zeke looked at the blank sheet. “What is it?”
“Your contract.”
“It doesn’t say anything.”
“It says everything it needs to. The conditions and term of your service. Requirements of your position.” Fifteen lifted a pen from its precise position alongside the immaculate blotter and held it out across the desk. “Now sign. At the bottom.”
Zeke stretched out his hand and took the pen. He could just reach the bottom edge of the sheet of paper. He looked up at Fifteen, then back at the clown-agent behind the wheelchair. He tried to make out any features, any expressions, behind the plastic masks, but they blurred into nothing, almost as if…
“What is this?” hissed Zeke, swallowing down a mouthful of fear and holding it down with anger. He retracted his arm, repulsed by the idea of what he might be agreeing to.
He twisted around to stare up at the clown-agent behind him. He couldn’t see anything behind the clear mask. The skin wasn’t blurred, it was just…blank. No eyes, no whiskers, no mouth, no—
“This is a chance to serve your country in the most honorable way possible,” said Fifteen. “Sign the contract.”
“What the fuck are you?” Another punch to the back of the head rattled his teeth. Maybe not a punch. That could’ve been a nightstick. Maybe it’d been his own nightstick.
“Sign, Officer Miller.”
“Are you going to kill me? What the fuck is this!”
The faceless man in the clown mask stepped forward and grabbed his wrist, stretching it back out to the contract. Something twanged in Zeke’s shoulder. He tried to drop the pen, to fling it away, but the man’s hand was already there to catch it and shove it back into Zeke’s fingers.
“Sign,” the two agents said in unison.
Zeke liked to tell himself he was the bravest man in town, but when the two men talked, a couple beads of cold sweat left trails down his back. “Please,” he said, “just tell me what this is all abo—”