Flashback (Out of the Box Book 23)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Five – what? How?” I asked.

  “I'm already in the US,” she said, brusque and on mission. “There's a flight in one hour from Abilene and I'm going to race to catch it. Be at the airport at 3pm. You'll know me when you see me, I assume?”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling the thrill of my heart race. “And you'll know me when you see me, too. You're...” my voice seemed to catch. “You're really coming?”

  This pause may have been the longest of all, and when she answered, it was just as cool as anything else she'd said before. “I'll be there.” And she hung up without another word.

  15.

  We got milk and eggs from the convenience store, and two boxes of cereal, and went back to my mom's house to enjoy a cold breakfast. We'd blown through almost the last of the cash, paying nearly double what we would have for the same supplies from Walmart, and we ate in silence, all three of us, as though we knew this was the last supper.

  “I'll take the car and ditch it at the airport,” I said, staring at my bowl.

  “Who are you picking up?” my mother asked, not for the first time since we'd gotten back to the house.

  “I don't think I can explain it,” I said, concentrating hard on the Cheerios drifting around on my spoon.

  “Is it someone I know?” she asked, pressing harder.

  “Kind of,” I said, not looking up from the cereal.

  I glanced at mini me, who hadn't said much since the Walmart adventure. My mother had pried her off when we got done with our shopping trip in the convenience store, and we'd driven home in silence. I could feel the worry radiating off of mom. She was thinking I was calling down the thunder on her, and I kind of was. Being evasive about who was coming probably didn't help.

  “I need to know,” she said, letting her spoon fall with a clatter. “I've trusted you up until now-”

  “I am aware,” I said, muted. My enthusiasm for this conversation was...well, not at all. “I'm sorry I don't have a good answer for you.” And also that I was being a coward, because part of me almost hoped Lethe was bullshitting me, that she'd no show, and I'd never have to explain to mom that her mother was alive. Because how was that going to go? So... you remember grandma? Yeah, she faked her own death without telling you. But she's totally going to help us now. For reasons I can't explain.

  And they really were reasons I couldn't explain. If Lethe cared so damned much about her family, why fake her death and not tell mom in the first place? She certainly seemed aware that I was alive, and five, which meant she was at least keeping tabs on what was going on.

  So... why hide? Why not involve herself in my life?

  All I had to go on in answering this mystery was a roughly twenty-year-hence conversation in which she'd told me that family was important enough to her that I could call her anytime for help. Which apparently included from the past, a strange, paradoxical fact that was still kind of weirding me out.

  Thanks, Akiyama, for taking me away from one bizarrely bad situation and bringing me to another. Hopefully at some point my life would begin to make sense once again.

  But I wasn't laying any money down on that prospect given that my last week had encompassed a cartel battle, a prison riot, a war and now a time-travel adventure culminating in a blast-from-the-past battle with Full Metal Jackass in an Iowa Walmart.

  “I don't like this,” my mother said, almost a growl.

  “Being chased by Omega?” I asked. “Yeah. It's not a lot of fun as I recall. Hell, I don't even have to recall since I'm in the soup with you now and – yeah, it's no fun.”

  “You have less to lose than I do.” Her eyes were burning now.

  “Uh, no,” I said. “You lose that, we both lose.” I slid my gaze over to little me. “Unless you've forgotten who I am.”

  “I haven't forgotten who you say you are,” my mother said, slitting her eyes into a glare.

  “Oh, man, mom, you are eternally suspicious,” I said, slumping back from the table. “I feel like a teenager again.”

  “How far off of being a teenager are you?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I can't answer that.”

  “I want to know,” my mother said. She'd put aside her fork and was now about the serious business of glaring me down. “If this is in your past, shouldn't you be able to talk about it in the future? When you get back from this little excursion?”

  I could feel the danger, like a shark fin swimming by when you're up to your neck in the ocean. “I cannot tell you about the future. You get that, right? You've seen the movies, know what the consequences of screwing up a timeline-”

  “You don't think your mere presence here is 'screwing up the timeline'?” my mother asked, going meta-low. She glanced at little me, who had her head down and was eating breakfast very slowly, and without much care for the two of us and our adult conversation. “How do you think this is going to show up in your memory? Since you can't seem to remember it?”

  “I'm assuming I repressed it, given how damned traumatic watching us brawl with scary people in a Walmart aisle probably was,” I said, stealing a glance of my own at little Sienna. She seemed to be operating in a haze, zoned out and moving at 1/100th speed. If she wasn't in the middle of a bad round of PTSD, I'd eat my plate one shard of ceramic at a time. Which I might have to do anyway given that we hadn't bought much food and I was already ravenous again. I swear, my lifetime meal plan was the ultimate in intermittent fasting. At least I was still relatively trim these days.

  My mother shook her head. “This isn't a joke to me. It's not a game-”

  “You think it is to me?”

  “We live here,” she said. “This is where we were supposed to be safe.”

  “Well I hate to torpedo your little Iowa cornfield dreams, but that ain't happening,” I said. “And I didn't grow up here, anyway.”

  “Well, there's nowhere else I can go right now,” my mother said, and lapsed into a silence, looking at me sullenly over her now-empty plate.

  I thought about that for a second, too. How had we gotten the house in Minneapolis if mom was completely broke? I stole another glance at little me, who was fully awake but just seemed catatonic, a very un-Sienna state. Hopefully damage to the timeline hadn't already occurred, though I suppose I'd only know about it if Akiyama popped up and told me, and if things had gone to hell he might be too busy trying to keep the flow of time running to warn me.

  None of this made any sense except for me calling Lethe. That was literally the only part of this that clicked for me, and only because she'd been so weirdly leading in her attempt to get me to memorize her phone number back in Revelen. Everything else felt like the usual bizarre brand of Sienna making shit up as she went, with a time-travel twist I couldn't have imagined.

  I put my palm against my forehead and rested my eyes. “I don't like any of this. None of this is right.”

  “Tell me about it,” my mother said.

  “If there's something I'm not telling you,” I said, “it's for a reason. It's because it's something I don't think you know in the future.” I looked back up at her. “The identity of our helper is one of those things. I'm trying to figure out how to run this whole...disaster, frankly...without ruining the world.”

  “Do you like being kept in the dark?” my mother asked.

  “No, I hate it,” I said, “yet I frequently operate there, obviously.” And I threw my hands up to indicate the world around me. “Witness this train wreck of a mission.”

  “It feels more like a DeLorean wreck,” my mother said. “One that carries a special sort of literal time bomb with it.”

  I let a half-smile slide across my lip. “If what I say is true, you mean?”

  “I saw time skip,” she said, shaking her head, “I believe you're not from here. You're probably my daughter, though I guess you could be another relation who's a succubus.” She looked up at the ceiling. “How did you end up finding out what you were?” She looked back down, right at me. “I've been preparing
a speech for years on the assumption you'd be like me and not your father.”

  I swallowed heavily but tried to keep it to myself. How had I found out about my powers? Draining the life out of Wolfe. “It's...one of those stories,” I said. “The kind I can't tell you.”

  “This just flat-out stinks,” she said, shaking her head again. “Every part of it.”

  “C'est la vie,” I said. “Or at least such is my life.”

  “I know that feeling well,” my mother said. “So... you really can't tell me who you called?”

  “I don't think so,” I said, settling back in my chair. “If I could...I would. I'm not trying to keep you in the dark for kicks. It'd be a lot easier on me if I could just tell you everything and be done with it.”

  She nodded, slowly. “Fine. I guess I trust you after Walmart.” She tossed the keys across the table.

  I caught them out of the air, the glimmering, shiny little things. I forced a smile, and it was tough. “I won't let you down,” I said. “Either of you.” And I meant it.

  16.

  The Des Moines airport drop-off seemed different than the airport drop-offs in my day, being pre-9/11. No bollards to keep out the car bombs, no thick security presence that was starting to seem ubiquitous at MSP the last few times I'd been there, airport police toting submachine guns or assault rifles. No cops threatening to ticket you if you parked in one place for longer than the span of a butterfly's wing flutter.

  I pulled up in front of the Arrivals terminal and just waited there in my newly purloined car, windows down, against the curb, and watched the door. Heat crept in as the sun rose higher and the day got hotter. I could tell it was summer by the sweat rolling down the small of my back, and somewhere outside the city the corn was surely growing tall and strong by now.

  People were passing through, getting in cars, dragging their luggage along. The old-fashioned carry suitcase still seemed very popular, apparently the wheeled model – and common sense – not arriving in wider usage yet.

  I was wearing a couple items from my mother's wardrobe, having finally discarded the shredded clothes from Revelen that had been through a literal war. And looked like it. Dark sweat marks already stained my “new” blouse. Which looked like it was from the seventies, a fact which I'd remarked on to my mother only to get a derisive snort in response.

  My mom. Not exactly fashion forward, even in 1999.

  I drummed my fingers nervously against the door frame, keeping my eyes nailed to the reflective glass arrival doors. They kept swooshing open every few minutes to disgorge some traveling family or some business guy coming to Des Moines to deliver a PowerPoint on how this company could sell more corn if only they'd buy his thingamajig. Clearly, I had no idea what went on in corporate boardrooms, but that was my image of it. “They'll buy more corn if you have my super-duper deluxe thingamajig!”

  The sweat was working its way down my forehead now, trying to slide in under my sunglasses. Every few minutes I'd remove the dark lenses and mop my brow with my sleeve. I was starting to see the appeal of a pocket handkerchief.

  I'd messed up and stolen a car with less than a quarter tank of gas and uncertain mileage. It was a decent enough car, but because of the dearth of gas – and cash – I was afraid to run it while I waited for Lethe, lest we be stranded on the side of the highway after pickup. Fuel efficiency standards probably weren't grand on these old minivans, after all.

  Someone came walking out in front of my car on their way into the arrival gate, and I took notice of the movement against the flow of traffic. It was a tall man in a suit, impeccably dressed, and who looked like he could be one of those corn thingamajig salesmen. He even had a silk pocket square, which I was suddenly envious of, because I bet it'd feel great to mop my sweaty forehead with silk instead of a soaked sleeve, as I was currently doing.

  I tried to stretch in the car seat and tweaked that back injury that Henderschott had laid on me earlier in Walmart. “Usually the injuries in Walmart happen on Black Friday,” I muttered. I stretched, feeling the pain spike. It wasn't a break, at least not anymore, but it was still a serious pain.

  I couldn't assume that a guy crossing against traffic, who hadn't given me a single look, was immediately a servant of Omega, but I couldn't really afford not to think that, either, not after this morning's incident in the dairy aisle.

  “Come on, come on, stick together,” a woman's voice said, drawing my attention from the businessman for a second. She was clicking her way through the crosswalk ahead, pushing a stroller, three kids in tow behind her. One was older, a girl with enough years on her to have that sullen teen thing going on while she followed just far enough behind her mom to look like she was actively distancing herself. The next two kids to follow were younger, a pre-teen boy who was bopping along happily, and another boy about little Sienna's age who was scrambling to keep up with mommy and kept trying to hold her hand even though she was plainly fully occupied pushing the stroller. “Come on,” she said, sparing him a glance backward, and he ran-walked to keep up with her rather than fall behind to his older, cooler siblings.

  Bringing up the rear seemed to be her husband, a dark-haired, middle-aged man in a Polo shirt and cargo shorts, with pale, hairy legs that made me pucker in slight distaste. He wasn't unattractive, in fact he had kind of a hot dad thing going on, but those cargo shorts and pale legs with the bushy, squiggly hairs? Yikes. He either needed jeans or manscaping of the legs, and I didn't care which. It would also be fine if he just marched on, but I felt strangely compelled to watch as he walked by.

  I spared a glance for the mom at the head of the procession. She was pretty, blond hair in a ponytail, loving eyes on her brood as she hustled them across the street. “Come on,” she cajoled again, just as she reached the curb in front of the arrival door. “Don't slow down now. We're almost there.”

  What a cute little family, I thought. Some days it was easy to forget that people like this were the reason I was out here, fighting my ass off to keep the bad guys from messing up everything.

  I did the craziness I did so that ladies like this could raise their kids without metas going nuts in the streets. So that she could go work her ass off doing...whatever she did during the day and then climb into bed at night with Mr. Cargo Shorts and breathe a sigh of relief, maybe make love before drifting off to sleep secure in the knowledge that her world would turn on and the sun would rise tomorrow.

  I breathed a little sigh of my own and raised my sunglasses as I went to mop my brow again, sweat trying to find its way into my eyes to give them a little sting for the crime of being open and trying to watch stuff. I flicked my gaze back toward the door, looking for the corn thingamajig salesmen, and caught a brief glimpse of his back as he disappeared inside. “Maybe you were a real salesman after all,” I muttered as I replaced my sunglasses, eye burn momentarily averted.

  The little family had stopped at the curb, the mother rifled through her purse looking for something. She waved at the dad to take up the stroller, and he did, wheeling it a few feet before entreating the sullen teenage daughter to do something about it. She almost snarled at him, something in the vein of, “Come on, dad!” before he turned to the over-eager boy child, who was jumping up and down about getting to push the stroller. Dad, wisely, passed on that gem of an idea that would probably end in a baby being dumped out on the concourse floor after a collision with a random pillar or a bad turn, and let junior the pre-teen take up the task. The boy rolled his sibling in the stroller onward, through the arrival doors, and the overly excited preschooler followed.

  What a cute spectacle, I thought, as the mother pulled a .44 Magnum out of her purse and pointed it right at me, meta-speed.

  “Shit!” I said, diving down behind the dash, hoping that the engine block would protect me from slugs the size of my pinkie finger. The Magnum boomed, bullet embedding itself in the hood of my car as I reached for the keys to start the ignition and failed, striking them. They dangled and clattered – I'd
found them above the visor, of all places – way to be trusting, Iowa – and slipped out, falling to the floor. “Shit!” I shouted again as the Magnum boomed once more, this time breaking through engine and making the radio explode, little shards of metal showering me as I realized...

  Damn.

  I had not seen that one coming at all.

  17.

  Okay, so the first task was to get the hell out of here before I caught a Magnum bullet, and to that end I tried to reach across the passenger side and throw the door open, hoping these fine, masquerading people would think I'd lunge out in the direction I'd opened the door in. This would, of course, be a terrible idea for several reasons, least of which there'd be zero cover between me and the lady wielding the big damned gun.

  A third boom sent a shredding projectile through the passenger door, opening a hole the size of my fist in the door-mounted armrest.

  Yay. That could have been my torso.

  Wasting no time, I snaked sideways and low through the gap between driver and passenger seat, thudding into the back seat just ahead of the bench. There was only one sliding door out of this van, it being a model before they'd started commonly engineering the doors on both sides, but that was fine. I wasn't planning on going out that way anyhow.

  The floor here was flat, and the middle and back benches were mounted into it like an actual bench, on metal supports, presumably for easy removal to turn the cargo space into a... cargo space.

  That left me a relatively wide-open path to crawl back to the rear hatch. And crawl I did. Meta-speed.

  Once I reached the back, I found a small problem.

  No handle to get out.

  Cursing under my breath, I looked for spider-web cracks in the back window. They were certainly there; one of the rounds had plowed all the way through the vehicle and done a nice number on the back window, leaving it kind of a mess.