Flux

by Jeremy Robinson

  “The people who did this.” I motion all around, at the sky, the rain, the summertime trees. “And no, they’re not gods. They’re just men and women who didn’t know what they were mucking with.”

  Or maybe they did. Either way, I’m going to get answers.

  I stand and say, “I’m going to move fast, and straight.” I’m about to suggest anyone not up for it can wait here, but who’s to say the next jump won’t turn the clearing into a killing field. The best place for these people to be, loved ones or not, is with me. “So try to keep up.”

  “We could use your help,” my father says to Inola. He might be right, but I think his invitation has more to do with his concern for her well-being.

  She watches a purple streak of lightning carve its way across the sky, and then turns her head toward Black Creek, several miles toward the south.

  Was Black Creek built atop her tribe’s location? I wonder, and then I shake my head at the moral inadequacies of my ancestors. Of course it is. What better way to erase the past than to build on top of it?

  Inola is the first to strike out, heading uphill. When we follow, she looks back at me. “Can I go back home?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, deciding that honesty is the best course of action.

  “Can you stop it?”

  “I’m not sure.” I break into a jog. My body aches, but I push beyond the pain, focusing on the weight of the old rifle in my hands, and the deadly potential it possesses. “But I’m going to try.”

  Determination carries me for another twenty minutes, straight up the mountainside. And then exhaustion slows me to a walk. No one complains when I slow. Our clothing is saturated. All of us are carrying more pounds than we’re used to. I peel off my T-shirt and wring it out. I wipe my face with it, pressing it on my eyes for a moment. When I pull it away, I flinch to a stop and nearly spill backward down the incline.

  My father catches me with one hand while clasping a hand over Owen’s eyes.

  “What is it?” Boone asks, trudging up behind us.

  The grizzled beard and weathered face are hard to mistake. “It’s Arthur,” I say, even though I’m the only one of us to have ever met him.

  Then Inola fills in the detail I left out for Owen’s sake.

  “It’s half of Arthur.”

  23

  “Dear Lord Almighty!” Boone shouts as he stumbles back, nearly catapulting himself down the mountainside. My father would normally chide someone for using the Lord’s name in vain, but Boone’s words sound more like he’s honestly beseeching God for help. That alone says a lot. Boone’s a hard man. He shot Chafin in the head without so much as a, ‘How do ya do.’ But this…this has him rattled.

  And he’s not alone. I’ve seen my fair share of horrors and taken more than a few lives in my time, but I’ve never encountered something like this.

  Arthur hasn’t just been killed, or even simply dismembered.

  He’s been put on display.

  The top half of his body is impaled on a sturdy tree branch that’s been cleaned of twigs and leaves. I step around his body, which is dangling ten feet over the ground, trying to figure out how he was placed there. Behind him, I see that the branch forks, both prongs punched into his back, keeping him upright, even as the branch bounces in the wind. His arms flop loose. His jaw hangs open. The skin around his eyes sags.

  “What are you thinking?” my father asks. I’m surprised that he’s brought Owen back to the scene, but when I look for the boy, I find him twenty feet downhill, his back turned. Seated beside him is Inola, her hands clasped behind her, slowly shaking her head.

  “His body is still in a state of primary flaccidity,” I tell him, and when I see his confusion, I add, “Everything is loose. Means he died sometime in the last two hours. Probably in the last hour.” I point to the stretched and torn skin hanging from his mid-section. Pink droplets of rain-thinned blood drip from his body. Beneath him, the ground is stained dark red. I point to the blood-soaked earth. “They put him up there pretty quickly after killing him. And they did it recently.”

  The more I whittle down the time-table, the more tense I become. I’ve got the rifle ready to go, but still aimed at the ground, my finger resting beside the trigger.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “The rain,” I say, putting my hand out to watch the torrential downpour splash off my skin. “In a few minutes, the blood will be washed away. Means he only recently stopped bleeding out. Means this happened in the past few minutes.”

  My father snugs the shotgun against his shoulder, eyeing the forest, our home-turned-nightmare. “And it just happened to be in our path. Maybe it’s a coincidence?”

  “You don’t believe in coincidence,” I tell him.

  “No,” he says, looking into my eyes. “I don’t. And we can talk about that later.”

  He’s figured out who I am, of that I have no doubt. But unlike Owen, he’s not ready to completely accept me as his grown son. And I don’t blame him. I’m not sure what kind of man he wanted me to become. We never got a chance to have that conversation. There’s a chance I’ve fallen short of his hopes and expectations. He’s seen the violence of which I’m capable. Seen the boy by his side grown up, bringing pain into the world. He wants better for Owen, I realize, and now that I’ve met my younger self, so do I.

  But for that to happen, my father must live. Screw history and the potential paradoxes. Owen needs a father. I needed a father, and now we both have a chance to get that back.

  “Boone,” I say, waving the man over. He creeps up the hill, ducking away from the half-corpse. “Would your men do this?”

  “Heavens, no.” He wrings his hands together. “We ain’t opposed to taking a life here or there on occasion, but this man wasn’t just killed.” He glances up at Arthur and shirks away. “He was mutilated. Desecrated.”

  I find it odd that Boone feels that desecrating a dead body after the soul has left it is somehow worse than the act of killing, but he’s also right. To a point. Being impaled on the branch, displayed for all to see, is a desecration. Being torn in half… I’m pretty sure that’s just how he was killed. I don’t see any stab wounds or cuts of any kind. He was just yanked in half.

  “The horses,” I say, speaking to myself, but loud enough for my father and Boone to hear.

  “What horses?” Boone asks.

  “The man you shot. He and his men rode in on horses. A good number of them are loose on the mountain. If someone rounded two of them up, they could have done this.” It’s a primitive way to kill people—using horses to tear someone in half—but it sends a clear ‘stay the fuck away’ kind of message.

  “But why?” Boone asks.

  “Wouldn’t we all like to know,” I say.

  “I’d really rather not,” my father adds, “given the choice.” He looks a little ill, keeping his eyes turned away from Arthur’s body. What does it say about me that I can both look at him and take my time examining his wounds? It’s revolting, but whatever part of me that should want to run from this has been dulled. Just another way I’m not the man my father probably hoped I’d become.

  “It’s a scare tactic,” I say, forcing confidence. “Arthur was alone, exhausted, and unarmed. This wasn’t done out of strength. It’s an act of weakness. Two or three men with horses, probably terrified by what’s happening.”

  I run through a mental list of possible suspects, but don’t come up with anything that makes sense. Minuteman didn’t strike me as the sadistic type, and I doubt he’d hire people prone to atrocities. Boone’s men are the most likely culprits, but if he’s the hardest of that lot, I doubt any of them would have the stomach for something like this. That means there’s someone else on this mountain, but from which time?

  “We need to press on,” I tell them. “The answers we need are at the peak, and the longer we wait, the harder it’s going to get.”

  Inola, who’s been strangely silent, helps Owen to his feet, and stands betwee
n him and the body as she leads him uphill, past the grisly scene.

  The rain doesn’t let up as we continue our course uphill. I take the lead with the rifle, Owen behind me and my father behind him. Boone follows in the rear, muttering to himself, occasionally asking for a weapon that he’s not going to get from me. I don’t trust him. He might be ‘with us’ now, but the moment a better situation comes along, he’ll throw us to the wolves.

  Speaking of wolves, we’re far enough back in time now that they’re back on the list of predators we need to watch for. There are big cats, bears, wolves, and the worst of them—people.

  For a while Inola stays close to my father, but then she strikes out to the side, weaving back and forth in front of us. Hatchet in hand, low to the ground, she stalks up the mountainside, looking for signs of danger.

  She’s done this before, I realize.

  She’s moved through these woods, wary of the danger her fellow man presents. If there is any sign of danger on our way up the mountain, she’s not going to miss it. Her zig-zag path requires her to hike further and faster, but she doesn’t seem fazed by the workout. In her time, there’re no such things as couch potatoes, microwave dinners, or automobiles. She’s accustomed to being on her feet, and her stamina reflects that lifestyle. Even I couldn’t keep up with her.

  Our progress is slow, but steady. Synergy is just an hour’s hike. I try to decide what to do first—check in with my crew, get my family someplace safe, or kick down the laboratory doors and demand answers—but I decide to play it by ear. I have no idea what I’ll find. The facility could be in ruins. The scientists could be dead. Minuteman and his people might have already taken control. I doubt there is a plan I could come up with that I won’t have to abort the moment we arrive.

  So I focus on the here and now. Staying alive and reaching the peak are my current mission objectives.

  I’d like to say the forest is quiet, but the hissing rain drowns out everything, even the squelch of my wet footsteps. Visibility is crap. The only way I know we’re headed in the right direction is the constant upward slope. And it only gets worse when a thick fog settles in, as it’s prone to do in the Appalachians.

  Inola slips in and out of existence, a silent ghost moving through the fog and rain. Her presence is both comforting and surreal. When I see her, part of my brain sees a woman in costume, acting silly, but the rest of me knows that she is real. That all of this is real. I’m back in time with my father, myself, a bootlegger, and an American Indian, trudging up Adel, through lands guarded by the mutilated corpse of a man from the 1920s.

  It’s almost enough to make me laugh.

  Then I hear a bird call.

  While there are plenty of birds on the mountain, they’ve fallen mostly silent in the rain and thunder. What I heard was the call of something large. Something different. I tense for a moment, aiming my rifle toward the sound, until my father places his hand on the barrel and eases it down.

  Then he raises his hands to his mouth and performs his own bird call.

  The reply comes immediately, and this time with a sense of urgency. It’s Inola. She’s found something.

  “Hang back a bit,” I tell my father and Boone, creeping toward the sound. They keep a twenty-foot distance between us as we move toward Inola. Any further and we might lose each other in the fog.

  “Inola,” I whisper.

  “Here,” comes the reply. She’s just ahead, on the far side of a broad tree. When I see blood on the bark, I raise an open hand to the others, motioning for them to stop. Then I ease myself around the tree.

  Inola is crouched, her back to me. She glances over her shoulder. “I think I found the rest of Arthur. What’s left of him.”

  Steeling myself for the worst, I step around her and find myself totally unprepared. My stomach sours, and I turn away. After taking a moment to collect myself, managing to not retch, I return to the scene, better prepared, but sure I will have nightmares of this moment.

  Arthur’s lower half is here. His organs are strewn about, tangled in the mess of entrails. But that’s not the worst of it. His legs have been separated, the pants torn away, and the flesh…eaten. Down to the bone. Raw.

  Again, I nearly vomit, but I manage to switch off my emotions and turn on my analytical mind, as I did when we encountered Arthur’s upper half. There is still meat on one thigh, and on one calf. Preserved within that flesh are long gouges. Teeth marks. Large teeth marks.

  Arthur was eaten by an animal, and given the bite radius, I’d guess it wasn’t the mountain lion, a pack of wolves, or even a bear. Whatever it was, I don’t want to stick around to find out. “Let’s go,” I say to Inola, “and do not tell the boy.”

  She nods, eyes wide with fear that she is doing a decent job of hiding, and we return to the others. “What was it?” my father asks, squeezing Owen to his side.

  “I think…” How can I put this? “I think we jumped a bit further back in time.”

  “How far back?” Owen asks.

  To when predators were big enough to tear a man in two and peel the meat from his legs in a few bites, I think, but I say, “A lot further.”

  24

  “My legs hurt,” Owen says, after we’ve maintained a rapid pace for fifteen minutes. The moment the words have left his mouth, my father scoops him up and carries him without slowing. I forgot how strong he was. That anything could kill him seemed impossible to me then. Because of that, Owen is the least afraid of our group. Boone has sensed our fear, maintaining the pace while wheezing for air.

  My father holds the shotgun out to Inola. It’s too awkward to carry both the weapon and Owen. “Know how to use this?”

  She takes the weapon. Looks it over. “Is it a rifle?”

  “Shotgun,” he says. “Same idea, but for close range. Pull the trigger to shoot…” He points at the fore-stock. “…and yank that back to chamber a new round. You’ve got four shots.”

  “I know how to handle a shotgun,” Boone says between gasps.

  “Not a chance,” my father and I say in unison.

  The things sons pick up from their fathers…

  The rain has faded into a drizzle, but the fog remains, the moisture slowly drifting back into the sky from where it came. I wring out my shirt and slip it back on. The fabric is clinging, but cool.

  “How much further?” Owen asks.

  “Twenty minutes,” I say, thinking it’s probably closer to thirty. We’re close to where the dirt road leading to Synergy’s rear gate will be in a few hundred years, but the terrain is unfamiliar. The trees are different. Landmarks are missing. In many ways, it’s a new mountain. But up is still up, so we’ll get there eventually.

  When we reach a point where, in my time, the trees had been cut away by the mining operation, I slow my ascent. Not just because the terrain is even more unfamiliar, but because I sense something off. It’s a smell, subtle, flowing downhill. Traces of gun metal and sweat. There are people ahead, and they’re afraid. But they’re also armed.

  I duck down behind a tree and don’t have to motion for the others to do the same. When I turn around, they’ve all taken cover. Inola is by my side, shotgun in hand. She scrunches and taps her nose. She smells it, too.

  And then cutting through the forest, is a voice, booming, masculine, and electronic. “Lay down your weapons and surrender. You will not be harmed.”

  When Inola’s eyes go wide, I whisper, “He’s not talking to us.”

  Distant branches crack, grinding under something heavy. I try to get a look, but the forest is thick with trees, which no longer exist in my time, and a lingering curtain of mist. I can’t see more than forty feet, and we’re a good four hundred feet from the action. The voice is amplified, making its distance hard to peg. That we can smell the people to whom he’s talking means they’re not too far ahead.

  If they fall back, we might find ourselves in the middle of a firefight. I turn to the others. “If this comes our way, run east, along the side of the mo
untain.” Downhill is the most obvious choice for those running away from a fight. If the people above us turn tail, we’d quickly find ourselves in their midst.

  If I had to guess, I’d say the people in question are Minuteman and his men. I can’t think of a good reason for Boone’s people to head toward the peak. But the electronic voice is a mystery. There’s a megaphone in the security office, but that would sound like a man’s voice amplified. This, while masculine, sounds computer generated. Robotic. The inflections are off.

  “This is your final warning. Lay down your weapons and—”

  “Now!” A woman’s voice. Something about it is familiar, but before I can process it, gunfire erupts. I press myself into the Earth and motion for the others to do the same. The gunfire is directed uphill, but it won’t be long before the return fire begins, and when it does, every shot that doesn’t find a target, or a tree, will come blazing downhill.

  Explosions shake the mountainside. Grenades. They’re waging an all out war, and I worry for a moment that the people they’re attacking are my security team. My instincts are telling me to charge up the hill, identify the enemy and help the good guys, but there are two problems with that scenario. First, I’m not sure who the good guys are. Minuteman and his people might very well be doing the right thing. That doesn’t make my security team evil. They’re just doing their job. Second, I’m not about to abandon my family.

  When the return fire begins, my internal struggle is the first casualty. A rapid-fire stream of bullets tears through the air, buzzing even more loudly than the time flux. It’s a mini-gun, I think, before a cascade of stray bullets nearly tears my hiding-place tree in two.

  I check on the others to find all but Boone face down in the dirt. “Get down!” I hiss at Boone, but he doesn’t listen to me. The sound of futuristic combat, coupled with the fact that he’s something of a coward, spurs him into frantic retreat.

  Ignoring my advice, he runs straight downhill, standing tall in the line of fire and heading straight back toward Arthur’s dismembered body.