Out of Time

by E W Barnes

  Jonas stood to one side of the barricade, no longer removing furniture. His eyes were down, but there was tension in his shoulders and arms. He was ready to act; but to do what, she didn’t know.

  Caelen moved through the crowd toward her. They will line him up with Miranda and Agent MacGregor, she thought apprehensively. They will threaten him, too, to get us to surrender the temporal nexus. But her fears turned to shock as he stopped next to Anna. Anna’s face warmed into a smile, and she kissed Caelen on the cheek before turning her eyes back to Sharon. Now you understand, her expression seemed to say.

  “Six minutes,” whispered Agent Diogo.

  “This is as far as we can get the doors open,” Sharon began, her voice shaking. She cleared her throat and tried again. “You know, after you blew it up. That was you, wasn’t it?” she asked the Caelen next to Anna.

  “It was,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “And the water? Did you poison the water, too?”

  He nodded. “I did. I was the one who almost kidnapped you before the old man arrived. And I sent the other Caelen into the future. It made it easier to complete my assignment without interference.”

  This Caelen did not radiate the same arrogant satisfaction as those around him. He was an agent on a mission rather than an insurgent hell-bent on taking over the world. He stood next to Anna calmly as if waiting for his next orders.

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Sharon said to Anna. “How does taking over the TPC in this world help you attain power in your universe?”

  “It should be obvious,” Natalie responded. “With the Chestnut Covin managing the TPC, we can send all needed resources to the other earth with impunity.”

  “As I help my sister-self in this world, so she will help me in mine,” Anna added.

  But there was something else in Natalie’s response, mirrored in Anna’s eyes. Natalie didn’t intend to send resources to the parallel world, and Anna knew it. Natalie was stringing her “sister-self” along and Anna was preparing for treachery. It was a crack in the veneer that Sharon could work with. She mustered a thin laugh.

  “Does she really believe you?” Sharon asked, the shake in her voice mostly gone. “She’s not really you, is she, if she can’t see that you are just using her. You’ll never help her conquer her world.”

  “That’s absurd,” Natalie responded with a glance at Anna. “I am her; she is me. I wouldn’t betray her any more than I would betray myself.”

  “Yes,” agreed Anna. “We know each other. We are each other. Who else could we trust so implicitly?”

  “Four minutes,” Agent Diogo whispered.

  “As you say,” Sharon responded. “But the Chestnut Covin’s ideology is about using time travel for personal gain, isn’t it?”

  Jonas glanced sidelong at Sharon, but she ignored the look.

  “Well, think about it,” Sharon continued. “What personal gain is there in helping you when she’s achieved what she wants? It’s not like she’s driven by ethics or some kind of moral code.”

  “We should just kill her, and everyone in the room, and secure the temporal device now,” Anna hissed. Caelen put an arm around Anna’s shoulders and whispered something in her ear.

  “Are his sweet whispers as nice for you as they were for me?” Sharon asked Anna. This time she couldn’t keep the anger out of her voice. “He’s a good actor, isn’t he? When I arrived, he really seemed happy to see me. I believed it. I’ve got to give him credit, you’ve chosen a man expert at fooling people. I just hope he’s not fooling you, too.”

  “I did my job,” Caelen responded without heat. “You were simply another element of my mission.”

  Anna smiled at him and he kissed her, after which Anna spoke to Natalie again.

  “We are done here, yes? We should kill them now.”

  “Three minutes,” came a whisper behind Sharon.

  “No, they may still be of value,” Natalie said. Yorga rolled her eyes and Anna’s eyes hardened.

  “What value? What do you think you can get from them?” Anna’s voice was low.

  “They knew a lot in this world and in yours. I would hate to eliminate an important resource without using it efficiently and completely,”

  “And yet you do nothing to use the resource, as you put it. You play games; you are like a spider in a web trying to manipulate the threads and accomplishing nothing. We have what we need. We should eliminate all threats to our plan and start mobilizing our forces to invade my world.”

  “We have time,” Natalie responded smoothly. “In moments we will have the machine that will give us all the time and resources we want. There’s no need to act impulsively.”

  “Killing them would not be impulsive, it would be efficient,” Anna responded. She turned away from Caelen to face Natalie. “Killing them would be an effective step toward fulfilling your part of our bargain.”

  Sharon’s barbs had sunk in. Natalie closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said opening her eyes and staring at Sharon. Their ice pierced her, and a cold pit formed in Sharon’s stomach. “If you need me to demonstrate my sincerity, I’m glad to oblige you. You may kill them, if you wish.” She turned her icy stare on Anna.

  Suddenly there was a shout that turned into a roar. Jonas picked up a metal chair and heaved it at Natalie and Anna, grabbing a second before the first one fell and throwing it with another roar. Natalie ducked to the floor while Caelen deflected the chair from striking Anna. The mob behind them dissolved into confusion, some trying to get away from the furniture missiles lofted by Jonas, some moving toward Jonas to stop him, others taking advantage of the tumult to turn on their captors. The technicians in the temporal nexus room leapt over the barricade and joined Jonas hurling everything they could get their hands on.

  Sharon felt a hand grab hers.

  “Now,” Richard hissed.

  The melee riveted Sharon’s attention, a cyclone of violence edging closer and closer. Eyes wide, she allowed Richard to draw her backwards until he was within arm’s reach of the temporal nexus enclosure.

  “Good luck,” Agent Diogo said as she pulled an energy weapon out from under the workstation—the last line of defense.

  Sharon was still watching the clashing figures as Richard spread his hand on the glass. The room rippled and warped. Sharon thought she saw Caelen reaching for Jonas as Natalie shouted: “Prepare to engage final measures!”

  Sharon was filled with dread as the redness of a shift to the past filled her eyes.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Last Shift

  After shifting against her will to the future and traveling across the rift between universes, this shift was easy, almost relaxing. It surprised her when they emerged into the library of her own home, next to the bookcases that housed her temporal amplifier.

  “It’s good to be home,” Sharon sighed, turning in a circle and breathing deeply the familiar scents of the room. “But why here?”

  “Because this is the only temporal amplifier not impacted by the virus,” Richard said as he pulled the bookcases away from the wall to access the control panel.

  “I thought we needed to cross the rift to travel to the past,” she said frowning.

  “Not this time,” he said as he accessed the keyboard.

  “Wait, Jonas removed my temporal amplifier—how is it still here?”

  “This isn’t your temporal amplifier,” Richard said in a rushed tone as he rapidly tapped on the keyboard.

  “I don’t understand…” Sharon began and stopped when she heard a voice.

  “Do we have enough food and water?”

  The voice was high-pitched and frantic, as was the answering voice saying words Sharon could not make out. Cold washed over her.

  “When are we?”

  Richard didn’t look up, didn’t answer her, and only muttered: “Almost done. Almost done.”

  “Richard, you need to answer me.”

  “No, I need to hurry.”

  �
�Why do you need to hurry? What’s going on?”

  Sharon heard a muffled boom. Voices outside the house screamed and cried out. The rumble was followed moments later by a strange whooshing sound and the house shuddered.

  “An earthquake? Is this the day of the earthquake? The one that destroyed my grandparents’ home?” Sharon asked.

  Richard looked away from his work to the ceiling. His face was gray and deeply furrowed.

  “No. This day is much worse.”

  Peering through a window curtain, Sharon saw people running through the street. There was a wildness in their eyes unlike anything she’d seen before. Not in an angry 1968 protest or citizens enduring the Blitz had Sharon seen people look like this.

  The frantic voice called again from inside the house.

  “Where’s the first aid kit?”

  There was another boom followed by a bright flash of light. Sharon scrunched her eyes and stopped breathing. A huge plume of dark cloud rose in the distance, mushrooming up and away from the earth, reaching to the sky and then out toward her. People on the street dropped to their knees, trees bent and swayed as the earth shook, and the house shivered again as if caught in a tornado. Sharon’s mind could not comprehend what she was seeing.

  “When are we?” she asked Richard again with a shuddering inhale.

  “January 2002,” he answered. “The first day of World War III.”

  Sharon pulled herself from the window, ignoring what her senses were telling her.

  “You’re wrong. I lived through 2002. I know for a fact that World War III did not begin in 2002. Are we in the parallel universe again? Did we arrive on the wrong earth?”

  “No, not the wrong earth; it’s the past that’s wrong. This is our earth, the earth we know. It is the Chestnut Covin’s final revenge. Natalie Johnson started World War III from two hundred years in the future.”

  “How?” Sharon gasped, her horror and bewilderment rapidly succumbing to terror. Her brain was catching up. A nuclear bomb, likely more than one, had been dropped on Los Angeles. No more Olvera Street. No more costume shop she and Caelen had visited together when he was excited about getting caught in a traffic jam. All gone, lost forever, smoking ruins and piles of rubble—like the terrifying earth of 2337.

  “When Communism failed in 1989, Natalie Johnson stole most of the Soviet Union’s stockpile of nuclear missiles and transported them to the future. She used knowledge of history she’d gained in the future and knew exactly when and where to be to snatch them out from under the noses of her former comrades. Over 4,000 warheads, each with almost 300 kiloton payloads. They were to be dismantled but instead they just *poof!* disappeared. The Russians never disclosed they’d lost the missiles. The world suspected they were missing, but they never learned the truth. Now they never will.”

  “Why would she do such a thing?” Sharon said aghast.

  Richard laughed his hoarse laugh; the raw laughter Sharon had come to realize was his way of dealing with despair.

  “Why? To win, of course. Natalie Johnson subscribes to that age-old maxim of the four-year-old: If I can’t have it, no one can. Instead of breaking a toy, she’s breaking the world.”

  “But doesn’t that mean she’s destroying the future, too? Won’t an extreme change in history like creating a war change her, too?”

  He shook his head. “She’ll cross the rift with Anna, on the pretext of helping Anna achieve world domination on her earth. But you and I know it’s only a matter of time before she tries to eliminate Anna and take her place. I wonder who will win,” he mused.

  “How do you know all this?” Sharon said. The frantic voices in the house were getting closer and Sharon lowered her voice instinctively.

  “Because I’ve seen it all before.”

  A voice was outside the door. “The flashlights are in the library, right?”

  A woman walked into the library. Her face was wild and terrified, like those on the street. She stopped, more confused than alarmed when she saw them.

  “Mom…” Sharon gasped.

  But her mother didn’t respond. Neither did she move, and they no longer heard the panic and bedlam outside the house.

  “What did you do?” she asked Richard.

  “I froze time,” he said. “But only in this room and only for a short while.”

  Sharon took a step toward her mother who remained motionless. “Observation mode,” she murmured. “And the bombs are still falling out there.” She reached out a hand. Her mother looked so young.

  “Oh, yes,” he cackled. “Natalie Johnson has enough firepower to hit every major city in the world in every decade of the 20th century and beyond.”

  It took a moment for that to sink in. “What did you say?” Sharon turned slowly back to Richard.

  “After we left 2204, Natalie and her henchmen stormed the temporal nexus room,” he said.

  “Did Nizhoni survive?” Sharon asked.

  He shook his head, but Sharon didn’t know if he was answering her or discouraging conversation.

  “They removed the virus from the mainframe and reactivated the system. She immediately used it to send waves of missiles into the past. Every 10 years from 1900 forward, missiles would suddenly appear in the skies above major cities and wipe them out. The world barely had time to recover from the devastation before another wave appeared.”

  “But why would she destroy the world over and over? Wouldn’t once be enough?” Sharon asked in angry shock, gesturing to the window where the world was ending again.

  “Did you think your time was the only one important enough for her to destroy?” His face was grotesque, a grimacing mask, his eyes burning into hers. “Right now, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries bombs are dropping on cities, triggering responses from world nations distrustful of each other, their reprisals in motion within minutes. If atomic war were to break out every 10 years for 150 years, what do you think the result would be? A future so fractured, it could never be recovered.”

  “So, she could never be stopped in any timeline—that’s her goal,” Sharon whispered.

  “Precisely,” Richard nodded. “But she has a two-dimensional view of time,” he continued. “She doesn’t understand its layers, its complexities. She thinks about it in terms of straight-line cause and effect. She can’t imagine the infinite permutations of time. That’s our advantage.”

  “What did you mean when you said you’ve seen all this before?”

  Richard grew still, so still that for a moment Sharon wondered if the time-freezing effect of observation mode had somehow included him. Then he closed his eyes and a shiver rippled through him.

  “I’ve been in a time loop, living these experiences repeatedly. I’ve lost count how many times,” he added to himself.

  Sharon pulled herself away from her mother.

  “How did you get into a time loop?” she asked quietly.

  “Not just me,” he said with a chortle. “You’ve been with me through most of it, too.”

  Sharon recoiled. “Me?”

  “The first few loops, it was just me alone,” he said, a faraway look in his eyes as he remembered shifts she knew nothing about. “I tried to stop the invasion so many times. But I couldn’t. Finally, I admitted I needed help, and you were the one I had to choose. Over and over we went forward in time, across the rift, and back here. Here is where it always ends. Here is where we either succeed or fail. And we’ve always failed.”

  “I have no memory of it,” she said.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” he answered shaking his head with another small laugh. “When the loop resets, it erases your memory. I, on the other hand, remember everything.”

  “How do you remember it when I don’t?”

  “I think it’s an effect of the temporal aberration disorder,” he answered with a wry laugh. “Who knew it could have a benefit?”

  “That’s why you always seemed to know what’s going to happen. Each loop is the same.”

  He sighed. �
��Mostly. There are variations, but they generally play out the same each time. I look forward to the day when something changes.”

  “Why do we fail?” she asked quietly.

  “Because you must make an impossible choice,” he said, his eyes full of sadness.

  Sharon swallowed with a suddenly dry mouth.

  “What choice?”

  “After the Chestnut Covin captured the temporal nexus in 2204, Natalie and Anna offered all TPC staff a chance to join with them, to become members of the Chestnut Covin, or be executed. Jonas was one of the first executed as a traitor.”

  Sharon closed her eyes.

  “Because he betrayed them by saving us,” she whispered.

  “Agent MacGregor and Director Noon were executed, too,” Richard continued. “But only after being given the chance to encourage the staff to join the Chestnut Covin. ‘You can set the example,’ Natalie Johnson suggested. When they refused, she said they could set another example by dying before everyone’s eyes.”

  Sharon took a shaky breath.

  “Most people agreed to join after that, not that I blame them,” Richard shook his head. “Natalie Johnson sent most of them across the rift to be laborers in Anna’s workers’ paradise.”

  “If they left no TPC staff in 2204, does that mean the people in 2337 ceased to exist?”

  “No, they existed,” he answered.

  “Because they were in another timeline,” Sharon said nodding.

  “Until they weren’t,” Richard said grimly. “The raiders succeeded in their attack in 2337. They breached the defenses and ravaged the community. Caelen Winters died fighting them, and they killed almost all the community members in the battle or in the aftermath.”

  Sharon sank to the floor, shuddering. Forgotten now was her mother, a statue in the doorway. Forgotten now were the kilotons of nuclear fission detonating nearby. Her future was gone. Her past was going. All that remained was this little pocket of frozen time and then she would go through it all again.