Flashback (Out of the Box Book 23)

by Robert J. Crane

  She cursed under her breath again. “We're out of food. And I don't have any cash on hand.”

  “Yikes,” I muttered. “That's not good.”

  She didn't meet my eyes, instead focusing hard on drying the plate in her hands. “Like you said...it's been a rough week all around.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, pausing in my dishwashing as I handed her a newly-rinsed fork. We were through the dishes and now on to the silverware.

  “Someone froze one of my accounts,” she said. “I found out yesterday when I tried to access it from a branch a few blocks away from the park.” Her eyes were heavily lidded, and she was looking down.

  “That's how they found you,” I said. “They figured out you accessed the money and boom – they knew you were in the area after you attempted a withdrawal.” I paused, my eyes flicking back and forth as I pondered that one. “They must have had people nearby, then, if they got to you within-”

  “Twenty minutes, I think,” she said, nodding along. “I'd promised Sienna all day that we could go to the park after mommy ran her errand. I figured...” She shook her head, blowing air between her lips. “I figured I'd have at least a few hours before anyone got into Des Moines, if this was an attempt to track me down. I used a branch bank twenty minutes from the house. Passed up two closer branches to get there. I thought we had time.”

  “If these people have agents stationed in Iowa,” I said, working it through, “and got to you within twenty minutes...this is not a small organization after you. Had you made any withdrawals here before that?”

  “We were in Wyoming until a few weeks ago. Staying with a friend. I made my withdrawals large, in cash, and the last one I did in Northern California over a year ago. I should have made another before we left Wyoming, but...” She shook her head. “I didn't want to drop any heat on my friend. Didn't want to leave a trace. And...” She looked down at the wet towel in her fingers. “I thought we were clear of all this. That...whoever these people are...that maybe everyone had finally stopped looking for me.”

  “Whoops,” I said, handing her a spoon. “I mean...that sucks.”

  She rolled her eyes, drying the spoon and sticking it in the rack. “Yeah. To say the least. But it doesn't exactly help now that I know that.” She looked right at me. “I need money, and we need food.”

  My stomach rumbled as if to emphasize that point. My flight from Revelen to the US hadn't exactly been filled with cuisine. I'd had an MRE at one point and that was about it. “Okay. Well. I can get groceries, obviously, but...there's nothing I can do about the money. I don't have a bank account in this era.” I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. “Do you have a backup bank account, maybe?”

  She sighed. “No.”

  “Wow, all your eggs in one basket,” I said. “That's very un-mom of you.”

  “I didn't have much in the way of eggs to begin with,” she said quietly. “It wasn't like the government paid well, and my mom and dad didn't exactly leave me an inheritance.”

  I felt a little heat suffuse my cheeks. “Oh?” I asked. She didn't know her mom was still alive. Or a princess.

  “No,” she said, “they pretty much left me with nothing. This was going to be the last withdrawal before I had to find some sort of work of my own to pay for...well, living.”

  “Okay, so...we're basically out of money,” I said, ticking off the problems at hand, “and there's no easy way to get more unless we want to...I don't know, rob a bank-”

  “That's not something I want to do,” she said, glaring at me through slitted eyes. “Seriously, what the hell have you been doing in life?”

  “Surviving. Would you rather starve?” I asked, then cocked my head toward the archway to the living room. “Or have her starve?”

  “We have enough for a small grocery run,” my mother said, looking behind her again to make sure little me hadn't crept into the room. “I think.”

  “How much do you have?” I asked.

  “Twenty bucks.”

  “I don't know what the price of anything is in this time,” I said, “but...we should be able to buy some milk and eggs and a ham and... I dunno, stuff...for that, right?”

  She nodded, slowly. “Some. Not a ton, though. Enough for a week or two, but it's not a long-ranging plan. If those guys that showed up yesterday are what I think they are-”

  “They're the first tendrils of a larger organization,” I said, nodding along. I had the barest suspicion about which organization it could be; there were a few possibilities, unfortunately – Alpha, the Directorate, Century, or...

  Omega.

  That last one made me quiver a little in the belly, but I ignored it. There was also the possibility that this was some other group, some group that either had ceased to be in the twenty years between now and my own time, or one that was underground that I hadn't run across yet. For all Hades's blather about staying clear of trouble in the US, this could be his doing for all I knew.

  “Too many secret clubs in the meta world,” I said, and my mother nodded along. “Too many stupid little conspiracies.”

  “Hear, hear,” my mother said, and took the last fork out of my hand and rinsed it herself, giving it a cursory dry before she let it clatter into the rack. “But there are too few of us to make a dent in that problem right now.” She looked me dead in the eye, and it was almost like looking into my own again. “I need to get my daughter out of this town. If they know we're here, they're going to keep looking. And if they catch us-”

  “Yeah, I get the stakes,” I said, nodding. “They get her...time breaks, because I'm no longer following the normal course of events.” I shook my head. “That's what Akiyama was talking about. This is why he brought me here.”

  “Great, so there's trouble for both of us if we don't get this done,” she said.

  “I'd say so.”

  “So... how do we do it?” she asked, and for maybe one of the first times ever, my mother fell silent and looked at me expectantly, as if I were the one with all the answers.

  I took a deep breath and looked out the window beyond the sink. It was covered by veiled white sheers, and the morning sun was shining in on us. The house next door was visible as a shape through the cloth, but most of the detail was blurred by the fabric. “Well...I like to tackle my problems one at a time. You know, cut 'em into manageable pieces and then manage those pieces. Which means first things come first-”

  “Mommy?” a little voice came, and my mother and I both turned to find mini-me standing at the archway, her little head down but her eyes up, beseechingly, pitifully, looking at us. “I'm hungry.”

  My mother looked at me and I nodded. “First things first,” she said, and forced a smile, turning it back toward little Sienna. “Okay, sweetie. Let's go get you something to eat.”

  9.

  “...The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round, all through the town.”

  I tried to keep my voice low on the chorus, the three of us singing along as we drove. It was just us three, none of whom was particularly good at staying on key, and all of us lacked decent pitch. Two of us were aware of it, my mother keeping her voice lower as well, trying to color within the limited lines her voice provided.

  Little me, though? She sang at the top of her lungs and gave no damns about how horrible it sounded.

  And it sounded...so bad. So very happy...but soooooo bad.

  “Well, we definitely inherited your singing voice,” I said, meta-low, as little me moved into the next verse, blissfully unaware that mom and I had stopped singing along. My mother wore a pained expression. She seemed to be experiencing the same aural discomfort I was, our metahuman hearing coupled with little Sienna's loud, off-key singing making us both grimace in pain.

  “Don't blame me for this, I quit howling last verse,” my mother said, under her breath. “This is all you.”

  “I'm a child,” I said. “I don't know any better.”

  “What about when you killed all those people
?” my mother asked, looking sideways at me, taking us into another turn without signaling. “Did you not know any better then?”

  “Well, you did train me to never hesitate,” I said, offering a light shrug. The smaller me in the back seat hit a particularly bad note and I shuddered. “Though I wish little me would hesitate instead of wading into each note like it's an enemy I have to kill.”

  My mother just cringed, and I couldn't tell if it was from the conversation or the singing. Both were worthy candidates.

  “Walmart is just up here,” my mother said. I could see from the sign it was a supercenter, the grocery and retail store combined in one glorious place where you could pick up a gallon of milk, a pair of underwear and a shotgun all under the same roof. I kind of felt like I needed all three right now, though I doubted they'd sell me the shotgun without an ID. Or the money to pay for it.

  “How are you doing for ammo?” I asked.

  My mom hesitated. “Not great.” She patted her purse. “I have a 1911 in here. Two spare magazines. In case things get...hairy. Shotgun in the trunk, twenty rounds total, five in the magazine.”

  “I had a... something...yesterday,” I said, trying to remember what I'd picked up from those guys in the park. Whatever it was, I'd lost it in the alley or before, and had no memory of what happened to it now. “Guess that's kinda useless at this point.”

  My mother nodded. “We'll make do.”

  “Improvise,” I agreed. “It's what I'm best at anyway.”

  “Does that mean you get caught flatfooted due to lack of planning a lot?” she asked, throwing me one of her ubiquitous frowns.

  “It means I deal with a lot of complex and difficult-to-plan-for situations,” I said. “As one does. Besides, you know what von Moltke said about plans and how they don't survive contact with the enemy.”

  “That sounds like excuses for failure to plan.”

  “Imagine, if you will, an army of giant Stay-Puft marshmallow men coming after you.”

  “An army of them?”

  “An army, yes. Of several-hundred-foot-tall marshmallow avatars of evil.”

  She was frowning again. “All right. What now?”

  “Plan for that. Keeping in mind proton packs aren't a real thing.”

  My mother stared out the windshield for a long moment, then sighed. “Point. I guess.”

  I pumped my fist in victory. “Yes.”

  “Sh – uh, crud,” my mother said, attention suddenly fixed on the rearview mirror.

  “What is it?” I asked and looked in the sideview mirror.

  A cop car. Right behind us, trolling along.

  I looked over at my mother's speed. 46 miles per hour. “What's the speed limit here?” I asked.

  “45,” she said.

  “Jeez, grandma,” I said, “no wonder the cop's looking at you. Probably thinks you're either drunk or heading off to do something criminal. No one drives one mile over the limit.”

  She gave me a blazing look. “Oh?”

  “No. You go at least four over. Maybe as much as nine before you start getting real attention. But not one, unless you're eighty years old or above.”

  The cop finally pulled around, speeding up as my mother slowed down. We both took a deep breath. About a hundred yards later, she turned into the Walmart parking lot, and by then the police officer had sped out of sight.

  10.

  “We need to keep this tight,” my mother said as she took mini-me's hand and slammed the back door of her car, a two-tone eighties model Buick that had seen better days. It had a slate grey paint scheme on the body, but the roof of the car and the parts that rose up from the window were all a deep brown that looked like leather. It also had a hood that went on for far too long and was a lot boxier than the cars I was used to in modernity.

  “I was thinking about this,” I said, looking around as my mom held mini-me by the wrist, wrapping her fingers around the sleeve. My younger self was skipping down the parking lot lane, extending her free hand to me so that I could take it, which I did, carefully, by the wrist and over the sleeve like my mother so as not to put a sudden end to my life's journey by accidentally killing myself in the past. As soon as I had a decent hold on her wrist – mirroring how mom was holding her – she brought her legs up to her chest and put all her weight on us, a little human cannonball that we were forced to keep from dropping. “Uhm. Anyway, I was thinking maybe I should follow you through the place rather than walk right with you. You know, provide overwatch?”

  Little me hummed something as she got her feet beneath her again and then did the same damned dead-weight thing. It took me a second to realize she was turning us into her own personal swing, wobbling a weak back and forth under our natural forward momentum. My mother didn't even seem to notice. I might not have either, since little me weighed next to nothing, but the sudden pull of her dead weight was a little annoying.

  “Anyone who sees us is going to know you're with us if you're hanging in close proximity.” She looked me over once. “Also, we should have gotten you some different clothes.”

  “Yeah, it's the nineties, I feel like I should be wearing parachute pants.”

  “That's eighties clothing,” Mom said.

  “Oh, yeah. What's the distinctive nineties clothing item?”

  “Hell if I know. I'm still living in the thick of them and don't really have the perspective it would take to judge.”

  “That's a good point,” I said, nodding along as we reached the curb. “You know, I'm not sure the nineties has a distinct look. Nor the decade after. I think we might have reached our apex of cultural distinctiveness in the eighties.”

  My mom made a face, and it wasn't because little me used us both as a swing again – probably. “I have a hard time believing that MC Hammer and the NES were any sort of cultural apex.”

  “You knew about the NES?” I asked. Reed was forever playing some stupid emulator of it.

  My mom flicked an annoyed gaze my way as we entered the store. “I needed a hobby at the agency, and your father got me one.” She shrugged. “It was...fun.”

  “Yeah, sounds like a real blast,” I said, taking up mini-me's weight and lifting her up into the shopping cart my mother had pulled out of the long rows of them in the entryway. Off to the side, a claw toy grabber machine filled with stuffed animals glowed brightly. “I mean, I don't know what you call it when you have real fun, but that sounds like-”

  “Oh, shut it,” my mother said, pushing the cart as squiggly little me pretended to faint dead away in the child seat, trying to catch my eye. She giggled when I looked at her, a thin slit of eyeball visible through her partially closed lids. She was faking dead, and a peal of laughter was my reward when I stared down at her, pretending like I was looking for signs of life.

  “Fooled you!” mini-me said, still giggling.

  “I don't ever remember being this joyful,” I said.

  “That's...sad,” my mother said.

  “I don't remember ever seeing you joyful, either.”

  “Well, I've got a few things on my mind right now,” she said, steering us past the deli and bakery. None of the fancy Walmart breads for us, no sir. We were on a budget that was literally too cheap for even those. “I imagine that's a trend that continues for the rest of your childhood, based on your crabby disposition.”

  “Hey, man, don't be talking to me about crabby disposition,” I said as we took a left into the bread aisle. “I've had a few things on my mind these last few years, too.” Mini-me pretended to faint again, then laughed to the rafters as soon as I saw her looking out through that thin slit between eyelids.

  My mother snagged the cheapest bread in the aisle and tossed it into the cart behind young Sienna, who whipped her dark hair around trying to see what her mom had just picked up. Mom had managed to get it right in the middle of the cart, which made it tough for her to really see, but as soon as she realized what it was she tried to reach back and grab it, which did not end in success, fortuna
tely for the bread. Because she was probably not going to treat it with care.

  “Okay, fine, we've both got reasons to be cranky,” my mother said, scanning the aisle as an old man with heavy jowls and droopy eyelids entered it behind us, pushing his cart very slowly. He looked like an old bulldog and seemed to take no notice of us as he began to examine the bread.

  “Well, we're busy and serious people,” I said as we cleared the end of the aisle. A giant fridge unit of red meat waited ahead, and my mouth watered just looking at it. I knew that none of that was on the menu, not at our price range, so I shook my head and turned away. “I mean, you've been busy being a mom the last few years and I've been busy...uh...kicking ass and taking names.” There. That was generic enough to keep her from discerning the truth of how my life had turned and twisted since Harmon's little kick in the ass.

  “We need ramen,” my mother said, veering down another aisle.

  “Ugh,” I said. She shot me a curious look. “Sorry,” I said. “I just...can't eat ramen anymore at this stage of my life.” Because I'd eaten it my entire upbringing. I was foundered on it, as this southern cop I'd met a few years ago said.

  “Well, it's that or almost nothing, unless you want to materialize some more money out of thin air,” my mother said, dumping a bunch of ramen in the cart. Mini-me got ahold of one, then another, and started to play with them like they were dolls, talking to one another. Who the hell was this kid?

  Oh, right, me. Before ten years of aggressive physical training involving martial arts and every weapon known to man. Kinda beats the ability to play with dolls right out of you.

  We passed a blond lady with a few wrinkles around her eyes and puckered lips as she tried to decide whether to go with Crispix or Basic 4 cereal, and my mother and I both watched her carefully for any sign she was looking at us. Her cart was almost empty, but she didn't even glance our way as she studied the nutritional information on the side of the box as though it contained the secret to removing all those unfortunate mouth wrinkles. Probably from smoking, I guessed. Smokers tended to develop those more heavily than others. Also she stunk of it as we passed, I had smelled her from five aisles away with my sensitive meta nose.