Flashback (Out of the Box Book 23)

by Robert J. Crane

  I picked up the paper and stared. “That's...really weird.” I looked up at her. “Nothing about the war, nothing about the nuclear missiles launching?”

  She cocked a single, slightly frizzy eyebrow at me. “What are you talking about? The Cold War is over, lady. We won.”

  I stared at her, she stared at me, and once again, I felt like we'd had a clear miss in our attempted meeting of the minds. I glanced back down at the newspaper, another idle thought occurring as I looked to the top, left-hand side of the page.

  Cold chills.

  Yep.

  It read, “Tuesday, September 21, 1999.”

  1999.

  “What...the hell...?” I asked.

  Jane leaned over the counter. “What now?”

  “Nothing,” I said, folding the paper and lifting it up so she could see the left-hand column. It read, “Quality of genetic testing is under fire.” “You know, I just get so...fired up about...genetic testing...quality.” I knew it sounded lame, and I didn't care. I tossed the newspaper back on the stand and started backing away. “Well, Jane...you've been a huge help. Now that I know where I am, I'm going to go...” I kinda hit a wall there, because hell if I knew what I was going to do now.

  In Des Moines, Iowa.

  In 1999.

  “Well, I'm going to go do something, for sure,” I said, and snapped my finger her at her real quick, making a fake gun. “It's been real. Later.”

  She looked at me like I was out of my damned mind. Which, maybe I was, because people did not just randomly find themselves in Des Moines in the late 90's in a sane world. “Uh...good luck, then, I guess...?”

  “Thanks,” I said, turning around and walking out the door. “I'll probably need that.” It whooshed shut behind me, leaving me in the parking lot just outside the convenience store. An old model pickup truck from the seventies rolled by, and it looked at least fifteen years newer than it should have if I'd been in the modern day. “Dammit,” I muttered under my breath. “Options.”

  Mind jacking by a telepath to take me into a fantasy world of 1999 Iowa?

  I'd been gassed to death and was now in Hell, which was, as I'd long suspected, Iowa?

  Or...

  I was actually in 1999, actually in Des Moines, in which case there was only one logical conclusion as to how I'd gotten here...

  I looked left.

  I looked right.

  Up, down, and finally, straight ahead into the green, rolling grass of the park. With a tentative whisper, I called out, then again, louder.

  “...Akiyama?”

  3.

  I didn't want to stand around in the parking lot of the convenience store, talking to the sky in hopes that a Japanese man would come popping out, so I cast a quick look over my shoulder at Jane, visible in the window, looking out at me, and waved, then quickly walked across the Des Moines street.

  “Akiyama?” I called again, hustling to avoid getting run over by an 80's model pickup truck. “Come on, Akiyama. Either this is you or I'm crazy, dead, or a telepath is messing with me. Please let it be you.”

  I stopped on the sidewalk before the park, looking around. The trees swayed in a light, warm, summer breeze. In the distance I could hear children playing.

  “Oh, come on!” I said under my breath. My brow furrowed deeply as I looked past the boughs hanging above me into the blue sky, as though he'd come dropping out of it any second if I just stared hard enough. “You can't just leave me here like this, without a word of explanation. That's not right, man. This is Iowa, okay? You don't drop people in Iowa without explanation, nineties or not. We have a constitution in this country, and there's one passage that specifically enumerates that cruel and unusual punishment is not acceptable, and I'm pretty sure Iowa qualifies in that regard.”

  I waited. The trees swayed again. A lone leaf came tumbling down in a slow twist, the smell of fresh air offset by a rumbling beater that went by behind me, spewing a black cloud in its wake that gagged my metahuman sense of smell. “Ugh. Emissions standards must have been lower back here. Come on, Akiyama. You can't just leave me in Iowa, that's cold. That's beyond cold. That's Erich-Winter-in-Minneapolis-in-January-during-the most-brutal-day-of-the-season cold.”

  I looked around. Listened. The odd car in the distance was all I heard, save for those kids playing. There must have been a playground deeper in the park, though I couldn't see it from where I was standing on the sidewalk. The rumble of a train came from somewhere far, far off, miles away, carried in the morning calm. Or was it afternoon? It was surprisingly quiet, either way. This had to be a first-ring suburb of Des Moines, or damned near to the city limits, given how far I was from downtown.

  “Fine,” I said, looking at the sidewalk, at a couple spots where old gum had been driven into it over the years, black with age and being stepped on a billion times. “This is fine. In the same way that the dog in the internet comic in the fire is fine, Des Moines is fine. Better than a government cell, I guess. Even if I don't have the first freaking clue about why I'm h-”

  A scream in the distance shattered the peaceful afternoon like a bottle breaking before a bar fight. It was loud and long and terrifying, not the laughter of a child or a shout of glee, but one of fear and horror and absolute, stark terror.

  I snapped my head around, the direction clear. It was about forty-five degrees to my left, through the park.

  Was this why I was here?

  “No one ever brings me anywhere nice and peaceful,” I muttered as I broke into a sprint, grass blurring beneath my feet and tree trunks whizzing by as I hit top meta speed, charging ahead to find out – hopefully – why I had been brought here.

  4.

  It didn't take more than a few hundred yards of sprinting before the playground came into sight. It was hidden behind a row of fat evergreens that didn't have much ground clearance at their bottoms. They were Christmas-y trees that weren't quite actual Christmas trees, being a little rounder than the kind that showed in our living rooms in December. They formed a kind of natural cordon around the playground, and the screaming was still in full force when I got there, shoving my way through tightly packed boughs, branches pecking at my exposed arms, finding the shredded gaps in my shirt and giving my skin a good brushing as I ripped through, uncaring.

  I had saving to do. To hell with my arm skin. It'd grow back anyway.

  One of the branches whipped me in the forehead, another damned near got my eyes, stinging my right eyelid and making me clench it closed. Bright sunlight shone through from the other side of the trees, and I muscled through, trying not to announce myself by screaming curse words at the top of my lungs at the indignities of being assailed by evergreens.

  Also, at the top of my lungs near a playground would probably be bad, even given the circumstances.

  About halfway through the thicket, I ran into a chain-link fence. “Oh, come on,” I said under my breath. It was getting to be a common lament today. Not wanting to waste any more time, I closed my eyes, ducked my chin down to my collarbone, and leapt.

  I burst out of the trees and came down on the other side of the thicket in a roll, landing on a patch of grass just before the playground. The merry-go-round was still spinning, kids were running in all directions, parents scooping them up and doing a little sprinting of their own as they bolted away.

  It didn't take more than a second for me to find the cause of the disturbance. It was, of course, trouble of the Sienna variety.

  Two guys with pistols out, trying to keep a mom at bay while they made to snatch a kid.

  “You assholes,” I said, and didn't waste a second charging in. They'd shot the mom a couple times; I could see the blood staining her blue blouse; a black spot on her jeans at the thigh. Her chest was still heaving up and down, her dark hair a stark contrast to the white sand that filled the playground area as it spilled across the miniature dunes.

  One of the thugs whirled on me, the little girl's arm clenched in one hand, his pistol in the other
. I was all over him like anorexia on a Paris catwalk during fashion week. He tried to bring the pistol around and I slapped it out of his hand, slamming the edge of my hand into his wrist and knocking it loose, then bringing my elbow up in a quick snap that cracked his mouth shut. He let out a sharp cry, and a little piece of his tongue came shooting out where I'd made him bite it off with my blow.

  The little girl screamed as he tugged at her wrist, and I reacted by instinct, twisting to re-chamber my elbow and ramming it into his nose. That done, I snapped my hand down onto his and heard the mighty crack of his wrist as I convinced him to let the girl go. She toppled over, and I drilled a kick into his midsection, sending him flying into the solid metal piping of the jungle gym. The snap of bones as he hit was quite satisfying.

  At least until the gunshot.

  I'd kicked the thug out of our little struggle, giving his partner a clear shot at me. Which he'd taken, the bullet drilling me in the right shoulder. It felt like an angry stab, sharp and terrifying, the sound worse at first, the pain following and taking the prize for “Worst Part of This,” a second later. I'd been shot before, and I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn't have time to stand still unless I wanted to get good and dead.

  I hurled myself forward, years of training making me dive left, forcing the gunman to readjust his aim. The pain was going to be overwhelming soon, and if he'd hit an artery I was going to black out within thirty seconds. I was already oozing blood down the front of my shirt.

  If I didn't want to die...I had to take him out before I passed out, leaving myself at his mercy.

  I rolled and came up as he tried to track me with his human reflexes. He was pretty good, bringing the weapon down to line up with my head as I bounced back to my feet-

  And caught his hands, driving them over our heads with my superior strength. I spun him into a pirouette, forcing him to go in the direction I pulled him. Once his elbows had reached maximum extension over his head, I brought a knee up into the base of his spine and savored the crack as I broke his back. He let go of the gun and tumbled to his face, and for good measure I drove the tip of my shoe into the bone behind his ear. It gave, and he went out, at least, died at worst, and I didn't care which.

  “Shit,” I said, clutching his pistol in one hand, covering him with it, and then putting a hand on my shoulder where I'd just been shot. I flicked my gaze between the two men and my hand, which came away from the wound seriously bloody. A little squirt of red came out of my shoulder with each heartbeat. “Dammit.” He'd gotten an artery.

  “Mommy mommy mommy-” the little girl said as she plowed into my leg, wrapping her arms around my waist, hugging me tight.

  “I'm not your-” I started to say...

  ...And then I looked down at her.

  Her eyes were bright and blue, with little flecks of green in them. She was fair-skinned and dark haired, and she was holding me tight as she looked up.

  She stared at me and I stared at her, and it took her a moment for her brain to sort out the little things she was seeing-

  And just like that, she detached from my leg, looking around.

  “Mommy!” she shouted, bolting past me to the woman who'd been shot, the woman who was now rising to her feet, still bleeding out of her stomach and her thigh, whose dark hair and fair skin matched her daughter, whose blue eyes were also flecked with green like…

  Like…

  Like her daughter's.

  Like mine.

  Exactly...like mine.

  I stared into the face of Sierra Nealon, some years younger than when I'd last seen her, as her daughter – only five years old – ran into her bloody arms. I stared as she scooped the little girl up, watching me all the while, tracking the threat–

  Like I do–

  -as she plotted her next course of action-

  -The way she always taught me to-

  -and I stared at her, stared, my gun still pointed away, my mouth hanging open, one word leaping out:

  “Mom?”

  She didn't answer. Didn't even seem to register my question.

  What she did was clutch the little girl in her arms-

  My God...that's me...

  I'm so...tiny...

  -and she turned, breaking into a run, as I pitched over, falling to the ground-

  I stared into the sky as I passed out, wondering if I'd reached the end of the weirdest damned dream I'd ever had.

  5.

  “Sienna...okiro.”

  I awoke to someone slapping my face. A less pleasant way to wake up I could scarcely imagine, save for maybe a punch.

  “Sienna.”

  Another slap. Pain in my shoulder like fire, like someone had driven a hot poker into it and was giving it a good twist for fun.

  “We must depart this area immediately.”

  I caught the next slap because I'd gotten conscious enough to know it was coming, grabbing the wrist of my slapper before he could bring it to my cheek. The slaps weren't particularly hard, but they were especially annoying.

  “Okay, I'm awake,” I said, forcing my eyes open against the violently blue and sunny sky overhead. A shadowed face and bald head greeted me as I nearly pried them open, taking in the lines of a familiar face. “Akiyama.”

  “Sienna,” he said, his thin mustache like a shadow on his upper lip. “I apologize for not greeting you earlier. It is taking nearly all my strength to maintain this...” He waved a hand around. “This.”

  “You brought me back to 1999,” I said, clutching my arm. “To Iowa. And... I got shot.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I looked up at him. “Well?”

  His eyes were pools of shadow thanks to the sun behind him. “Well...what?”

  “I hope you've got a damned good explanation for why I'm in Iowa,” I said, trying to muscle myself into a sitting position and failing. He was of no help, so I rolled to my belly and just cringed at the pain. “Also...how?”

  “How...what?”

  “How am I in Iowa?” I asked, cringing. Sirens in the distance were the most familiar refrain of the soundtrack of my life, and of course they were getting closer. “You're a time...guy. Not a teleporting one.”

  “It has been some time since last I saw you,” he said, putting a hand on my uninjured shoulder and helping me to my knees. “I have discovered a method of matching the time travel destination to the proper rotational position of the earth within-”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I hurt way too much for you to explain this to me right now.”

  “Perhaps I will try again when you are recovered.”

  “Then I won't care,” I said, shaking my head. “So you can teleport now. Nifty.”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “But...I can get you close, when coupled with an appropriate distance of time traveled.”

  “So you're in the DeLorean, Back to the Future business now?” I asked. Man, the shoulder. I felt like I was going to tip over any time. “Bringing me back to meet my mom?” I gestured vaguely in the direction I figured she'd run, then tossed a look over my shoulder at the two guys who'd tried to abduct...well, me. Little me.

  Holy shit. That was a hell of a trip.

  “There is a reason, of course,” Akiyama said, slipping an arm under my uninjured one and dragging me to my feet. “I will explain-”

  “Gah, I hope this doesn't set a precedent for this little tale, me getting shot this early in the game. Because I don't know if you know this, but I kinda just came out of a war and it was not easy, let me tell you-”

  “I was watching,” Akiyama said, taking up a little more of my weight and starting me forward in a run.

  “And you didn't even offer a helping hand?”

  He didn't shrug exactly, but he offered the ghost of one. “You had it under control.”

  “You cannot possibly think there wasn't a second or two in there where I couldn't have used a time freeze? Maybe a breather to take a little break? You know, you show up with some orange slices, let
me recover my stamina for a tick before throwing myself into a battle with a tank or one of the other hundred batshit crazy things that happened there?”

  “Your worldly matters are your own,” Akiyama said, dragging me into the cover of the trees as the sirens stopped a few hundred yards away at the road that ringed the park. “This, however...is a matter that I could not simply let pass.”

  “Lemme guess...it's a matter of time,” I said, cringing. “And one that directly involves me, which is why you dragged my ass...to me.”

  “Correct,” Akiyama said. “How did you guess?”

  “Because I just met myself as a child and my mother was shot, and I don't remember any of this,” I said, still stinging like crazy. The blood was not wildly pumping out of my shoulder now, though I doubted it was because it had completely clotted. More likely the angle Akiyama was holding me at was pinching the wound together. “Also, you're giving me some very legitimate reasons to hate Iowa this trip beyond just my natural Minnesotan disdain for our southern neighbor.”

  “I know nothing of what you are talking about,” Akiyama said, “but the problem I have brought you here to deal with requires someone whose head is not fully pre-occupied in keeping time from crashing forward.” He didn't even bother to cast me an accusing look. “Our acquaintance being somewhat...closer than my association with...anyone else, I assumed you would want to be involved in this. Especially considering it turns heavily upon your previous involvement.”

  “My head aches, my shoulder is weeping blood, I think you just called me the closest thing you have to a friend, and I believe you're talking about a paradox,” I said. “There's a cause and effect problem here. I remember none of this, yet we just witnessed a kidnap attempt against me that looked like it would have been successful if I – me from the future – hadn't foiled it. Talk about a time loop.”