Flashback (Out of the Box Book 23)

by Robert J. Crane

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You have to keep in mind – my childhood was distinctive,” I said. “I remember being locked in a house in Minnesota until seventeen. None of this – none of Des Moines, none of this childhood – and definitely not being pursued by Omega actively, at least not until I left my house.” I settled my head back on the lumpy ground. “Everything I'm seeing here is in total opposition to everything I remember.” I drew a taut breath. “I think we may have already changed the timeline in ways I don't know that I can change back. Because none of this fits the shape of what I remember from being a kid. And it keeps getting further and further out of whack with every encounter.”

  “How so?”

  “Think about it. Wolfe just kidnapped me,” I said. “Little me. That's a seriously traumatic event. He got mom, too. You can't tell me that has no lasting effects.”

  Akiyama stared straight ahead, over me. “No. I do not know Wolfe nor Omega as well as you, but it does seem it would leave certain marks on the psyche to be handled by them in such a way.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “I don't know what to do next. And even if I did, by some miracle, track down little me and mom and rescue them...” I shook my head, and it felt heavy. “...How the hell do we restore everything to status quo ante?” I looked right at Akiyama. “How do we fix what is...completely screwed? Because that's what this is. Completely, irrevocably – it's just screwed, Shin'ichi.”

  Akiyama stood in silence for a long time, staring straight ahead over me, deep in contemplation. “I do not know,” he said, finally. “But I do know this...I have watched your adventures from outside of time-”

  “You reviewed the tape? Nice to be watched. Between this and the Revelen livestream, I'm really building my own little fandom.”

  “-and this much I know to be true.” He bent, squatting next to me, his suit flexing and a faint aroma of some lightly flowery yet masculine scent coming with him. “You solve the problems that no one else seems able to. This problem certainly seems insurmountable now. And perhaps it is. But...” He smiled, just a little. “...If there is one person on this earth who can solve the insurmountable problem...I think it is you.”

  I sighed, letting myself go slack. A sharp, short, wave of pain followed. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. But I'd really rather you just alter the timestream so that the last day doesn't happen the way it just did. How about that instead?”

  “I cannot turn back the clock any further,” he said. “What has happened...seems fated to have happened. It always went this way.” He rose to his feet. “From here...the future is in your hands. Act wisely.”

  With that, he was gone, as though he'd never been there at all.

  “'Act wisely'? Really?” I called to the swaying trees above, assuming he'd hear me wherever he was, holding back the crushing tide of time trying to rewrite itself. “That's what you've got for me? Thanks a buttload.” I tried to move and failed, the pain once more surging through me.

  I sagged back against the earth, let it pull me back to it, and closed my eyes. Only one thought came to me, and it was one of pure desperation and uncertainty. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

  There was no answer, so I settled back to wait, hoping I'd be able move again soon, because otherwise...

  Otherwise, that future that Akiyama had mentioned, the one where no one was in place to fight Sovereign, or Harmon, or to stop the meteor over Chicago or keep Hades from going nuclear...

  That future was going to arrive.

  And my world – and my life – were going to be over.

  34.

  A long groan stirred me out of a strange torpor, a half-sleeping, half-waking state wherein my body had gone into a restful phase to try and heal me. My mind had churned for a while after I'd come to the conclusion that I was properly boned, and I'd had a nice think on possible solutions and come up with absolutely bupkis. Unconsciousness had followed, thankfully, sparing me from stewing in my physical and mental misery all night long.

  My grandmother was moving now, shifting to her hands and knees, dry leaves sticking to her where the bloody gunshot wounds had scabbed over. She plucked at one now, pulling it from her chest and discarding it after looking at it blankly for a moment. “Where are we?” she asked, sounding more than a little sleepy.

  “I don't know,” I said. “I suspect we're in the woods a safe distance from the animal hospital. Probably about as far as Akiyama could drag us without losing his grip on time.”

  “Akiyama did this?” she asked, pulling another bloody leaf off herself. This one she stared at like she'd drawn an ace. Still discarded it, though.

  “Got us out of the shit soup we were in, yeah.”

  She looked around. “What about-”

  “Omega has them,” I said.

  Lethe's face tightened. “How does that affect things?”

  “Poorly,” I said, trying my hand at sitting upright. It hurt, but the wound on my belly was down to centimeters of scabbing now, and most of the internal damage was, presumably, healed. “Akiyama's keeping back the tide of rippling change through the timestream, so he's a bit...overworked at the moment, I guess.”

  “Is there a dark future waiting if he lets it go?” Lethe asked, dropping onto her haunches. She wasn't trying to stand yet, which, from my own experience, suggested to me she'd probably lost a crap ton of blood and needed a little more time to replenish it. I was guessing she was feeling the telltale lightheadedness that accompanied that condition. I knew it well.

  “Yeah, I think the darkest timeline is waiting,” I said. She furrowed her brow questioningly. “No one understands me here.”

  “You really aren't that far from being a teenager, are you?”

  “As he was kind enough to remind me, I have saved the world a time or two in my life,” I said, trying to deflect her accusation by not sounding so self-involved. I got a rueful smile. “I guess I really did have a wonderful life after all. Or at least I tried to make it possible for other people to live their own wonderful lives.”

  “Mmm, I love that movie,” Lethe said. “Kinda want to sing 'Buffalo Gals' now.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that. “That's not a side of you I've seen yet.”

  “Movies were amazing when the medium first came along,” she said, stretching. “Can you imagine? You live thousands of years and the most interesting thing you see is a play or a concert, and suddenly they can project a movie on a screen a hundred feet high, with edited scenes, telling a cohesive narrative – well, most of the time it was cohesive. I still get blown away by them sometimes. By lots of little things in the modern world.” She touched her chest. “Modern medicine would be a great example of that. Surgery is a wonderful thing.”

  “I could have used some of that to speed my recovery from Wolfe gutting me,” I said, touching my stomach. “How the hell did you stand traveling all of Europe and Asia with that guy for years?”

  It was her turn to raise an eyebrow at that. “How did you know I traveled with him?”

  I shook my head. I shouldn't have known that, but I did. I blinked a few times, took a long breath, concentrating. “I don't know. Errr, I don't know how I know. But I do...uh, know, I mean.” I blinked a few more times. “How did I come to know this?” I asked, actually sincere. Wolfe had never told me about traveling with my grandmother, at least not that I could recall.

  Which meant nothing; I'd lost memories due to Rose, memories I couldn't account for and couldn't get back. It was well within the realm of possibility – and probable – that she'd stripped the underlying memory of him telling me at some point, but left the knowledge of their travels intact, just to mess with me.

  Lethe gave me a suspicious look but didn't push it. “Uh huh. Sounds like you've had dealings with him before.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Which is why I'm suggesting that when we deal with him – and Henderschott for that matter – we can't kill them. They have to live...so I can, uh...kill the
m later.”

  Her eyebrows went way up. “You killed Wolfe?”

  “And his damned brothers, too,” I said under my breath, knowing she'd catch it.

  Lethe let out a low whistle. “You really did grow up to be a badass, didn't you?”

  “I come from good stock,” I said, clutching my stomach and pulling myself up to one knee. “Man. We've got a major problem here.”

  “Yup,” she said, similarly moving to kneeling. She cringed as she did so, leading me to believe those bullet wounds hadn't fully healed yet. Her hair curled around her head. “Got a plan for dealing with it?”

  “If we weren't locked into conducting a rescue mission, I'd suggest we just bomb the shit out of whatever Omega black site they're using as a staging area here in town,” I said. “Since we're a bit more constrained...hell if I know.” I brushed a hand through my own hair, dislodging a few leaves and finding lots of dirt and grit. “Neither of us is in peak form, and we're facing off against Wolfe, Henderschott, and whatever else Omega has in town.” I sagged, feeling a little tremble of pain roll through my guts. “We're unarmed, without a car-”

  “If we're not far from the hospital, we may still have a car.” There was a gleam of triumph in my grandmother's eye. “I had your mom park a good distance away after she dropped us off. And I had her hide the money in the trunk.”

  “Oh, good, so my shotgun to the back may not go to waste,” I said, feeling around my shoulder blades. That wound had seemingly healed. “I do so hate to be gravely wounded for no reason.”

  Lethe smirked, but it vanished almost as quickly as it appeared. “So... we need to find Wolfe and company...and then deal with them.”

  “Yep,” I said. “And without so much in the way of resources to our names. No one to help, no one to-”

  She took a deep breath, then sighed. “That's not...entirely true.”

  I frowned. “Beg pardon?”

  She took a long, deep breath. “I need to make a call.” She seemed to take a long moment to ponder this, like it was something she didn't want to do. Decided, she pushed herself to her feet, but held herself angled, as though the pain were pulling her body in a few different directions, and she wasn't fully answering the call of any. Unsteadily, she wobbled, but caught her balance and raised herself upright, offering me a hand. She looked down at me, bright of eye and serious, so serious. “We need to find a pay phone. Now. Before it's too late.”

  35.

  I didn't bother waiting at a respectful distance as my grandmother made her call, collect, to a Texas area code as near as I could tell, instead, leaning against the divider that wrapped around the phone. We'd retrieved the car from where it had been hidden, a short distance from the animal hospital, which was swarming with cops. Akiyama had dropped us in the woods about a thousand yards away, and we'd stumble-walked, using each other for support, until we'd made it back to the car. Driving had been an interesting, slightly wobbly experience for Lethe, but she'd gotten us to a nearby Kum and Go convenience store and gas station, where we now stood, at the pay phone out front, her on the phone and me listening to the ringing with my head against the rough brick facade for support.

  “Hello?” came a muted voice on the other end of the line, a Texas twang in the female voice. Felt like I'd nailed the area code.

  “Hey, it's me,” Lethe said. “I ran into a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?” the voice asked, a little rough.

  “Omega and Wolfe,” Lethe said.

  There was a long pause on the other end. “That's quite a problem.”

  “Tell me about it,” Lethe said. “We lost Sienna and Sierra. Wolfe has them.”

  Another pause. “Shit.” Sounded like sheee-ut!

  “Yeah,” Lethe said.

  “Gimme a sec.” A rustle.

  I peered at Lethe over the divider that ringed its way around the phone in a U, a tiny privacy wall that didn't really do much for privacy. “Who is this?” I asked, not for the first time.

  She shook her head at me, pointing to the phone, as though clearly, she could not answer me because she was on it.

  “I'm hearing the entire conversation,” I said, annoyed. “I know they're not talking right now.”

  She just shook her head and turned away from me. What the hell?

  “I knew I shoulda come with you,” the voice came back on the line. “I'm lining up a ride, but it'll be a couple hours if I'm being optimistic. Can you wait?”

  “Maybe,” Lethe said. “We don't even know where Omega's taken them.”

  “Okay, hold on.” That Texas drawl was a hell of a thing. I'd spent quite a bit of time in the Lone Star state and whoever was on the other end of the line, they sounded native.

  “You could at least acknowledge that you're ignoring me and keeping me in the dark on this for some reason,” I said, prompting Lethe to half turn to glance at me over her shoulder. “They're not even talking to you right now. This is just you, being rude.”

  “Wouldn't want to spoil the future,” Lethe said, then turned her back on me again.

  “That doesn't make any sense,” I said. “I'm the one from the future, not you.”

  “But you don't know who I'm on the phone with, so clearly you haven't met them yet,” Lethe said, “ergo, I'm preserving the-”

  The voice came back on the line. “There's a warehouse Omega uses as a staging area in Des Moines. Or did, about ten years ago. No idea if this info is up to date. It comes third-hand from an old Alpha report we managed to catch hold of.” She rattled off an address.

  “Thanks,” Lethe said, taking it in. She turned to me. “You get that?”

  “Yeah,” I said, hackles rising. “Thanks for including me, finally.”

  “We're going to head over there now,” Lethe said, turning away again. “If you don't hear from us, probably assume it's the place.”

  “Not sure how fast I can be there,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “Definitely hours, though, even if I manage to get the...fastest route available.”

  “Understood,” Lethe said. “We won't wait up. Time...” She looked back at me, “...is of the essence.”

  “Y'all get to it, then,” the voice said. “I'll be there quick as I can.” There was a click denoting the call ending.

  Lethe hung up. “We have any guns left in the car?”

  “Not that I saw,” I said, still leaning. “And I have to warn you – if we get into a fight with Wolfe right now, it's going to be ugly.”

  She looked me over once. “How much longer do you need to heal?”

  I probed my midsection gently. It was still tender, but not agonizing any longer. “Give me an hour, I'll be ready to go, probably at least 90%.”

  She leaned back against the divider around the pay phone. “We're going in against some deep odds, and we don't have a lot to work with. My help,” she inclined her head toward the phone, “may show up in time, may not, but we can't count on it either way. You got any ideas how to level the playing field, Wolfe-killer?”

  I tried to think back to all the ways I'd gotten torn up over the years. Wolfe had turned his skin into a kind of de facto Achilles's flesh, invulnerable to all sorts of assaults that would tear up a normal meta of his type.

  But I'd killed at least a few Achilles types in my time, and I had more experience getting heartily shredded than most average people.

  “I could maybe come up with a couple methods for effing him up on short notice,” I said, looking at the convenience store behind us. “Or at least putting a hurting on the bastard.”

  She nodded. “What about Henderschott?”

  I grunted. “He's annoying, but either one of us can put him out of the battle. He's a wrecking ball – you either have to dodge him or ping pong him out. I'm more worried about the nameless Omega guards. They're armed, and as evidence by the pockmarks peeking out from the holes in your clothes, they have willing trigger fingers and bullets to spare.”

  She nodded. “That's goin
g to be a problem. We go in quiet?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, quiet. In the middle of the day, without night to fall back on.” I looked at the gleaming blue sky overhead. “Man, talk about bad timing. How long do you think we have before they move out the captives?”

  Lethe's eyes darted back and forth. “Put it this way – I wouldn't want to wait very long. This is the last transit point we know of in the Omega chain, and it's iffy. After this...who knows where they go?” She paused. “Assuming that warehouse is still an address in use by them.”

  “Well,” I said, shoving off the divider, “I guess there's only one way to find out.”

  36.

  The Omega warehouse was everything you'd want in an illicit safe house – isolated, nondescript, tucked into an industrial district that had seen better days. An old processing plant was next door and had clearly been closed for a while. What had they processed? Hell if I knew, but there was a smell of old animal parts that lingered in the air.

  “It seems we've found the right place,” Lethe murmured. We were watching from behind the processing facility, and the smell was tickling my nose.

  Omega guards were circling the perimeter of the warehouse, dressed in black, the conspicuous bulge of guns in their jacket pockets. The poor guys had to be sweating, wearing jackets in the Iowa summer heat, but here they were. I couldn't see them dripping from here, but they were stopping to mop their brow every dozen or so steps in their patrol route.