Lost Friday

by Michael Bronte

  Vishal took my shoulder again. “If it’s any comfort, I’ve been teleported many times.”

  I touched a place on my back. I was the only person on Earth who knew I had a mole there, and I could feel it through my clothes. Okay, the damned thing was accurate, but I still didn’t like the word replica, unless I could take one of Kelli Remington with me. As a sort of consolation, I looked Vishal in the eye, and said, “I get to remember all of this, right? That’s the deal.”

  I could tell Vishal knew what I was thinking, but he cornered me by saying, “Your story brought down the president of the United States, Mister Pappas, and you died because of it. I would think you’d want to get back as soon as possible and try to change the series of events that led up to that moment.”

  He was right. Remembering any, or all of this, would do me no good if I was dead. “Does that thing have air conditioning?”

  “First, we need to create the wormhole,” Vishal said, ignoring me.

  I’d heard the word wormhole before, of course, probably on Star Trek or something, but I didn’t really understand the concept. Vishal explained that, “Time exists in totality, as opposed to points that pass a stationary measure in analog form. As such, there is simultaneity of events, and wormholes connect these events in the time continuum.”

  “Time continuum?” I questioned.

  “The points at which events occur. Time is a function of the rotation of the Earth, you see. The Earth rotates once, a day passes. If you were to physically travel in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the rotation itself, relative time would eventually stop advancing. You could actually go back along the continuum, if you traveled fast enough.”

  I tried to grasp the concept. “What’s relative time?”

  Vishal was trying to be patient with me. “It means you would no longer be advancing along the continuum. In absolute terms, you would continue to age, but in relative terms you would not. Consider it this way: you are a very young man in the year 2194 for having been born when you were.”

  I think I understood that. “So you’re saying history happens all at the same time.”

  “That is correct. While you are here, at this point on the continuum, something else is happening at other points simultaneously. For instance, the stars you see now….” Vishal pointed upwards where a couple of twinkling points in the sky were just beginning to become visible. “That light emanated from those stars millions of years ago. It simply took that long for it to reach us. Yet we are observing it now. In essence, you are observing history from your vantage point on the continuum.”

  “And that thing sends me back faster than the speed of light?” I asked, looking skeptically at the ITD.

  “It sends information back. Essentially, it is a transmitter that sends a digital record of your body from one end of the wormhole to the other, along the continuum. In a physical sense, you don’t actually move.”

  I nodded. “So that’s why you’re doing this on the beach.”

  “As opposed to letting you rematerialize in a dangerous or unpredictable place, yes. That’s why we try to use remote locations.”

  “And the helium?”

  Vishal shrugged. “Merely a device for gathering any unwanted material inside the wormhole. We freeze it, gather it, and deposit it to keep any stray atoms from interfering with the rematerialization.”

  I stepped toward the ITD, and wondered if I could watch myself disappear.

  * * * * *

  I rematerialized a couple of hundred yards down from where the boardwalk ended. A cold wind whipped off the water, and the beach was totally deserted. Instinctively, I felt between my legs, pleased that I’d arrived per the original recipe. So far, so good, I thought. I trudged toward the glow of the boardwalk lights, wondering how much time I had before the vendors called it quits for the night. Not much, I soon discovered. It was just after 10 p.m., while my watch read 8:40. Amazing. I’d just traveled 190 years, and was only off by an hour-and-a-half. Pleased that I still had my wallet, I bought a half-price slice just as the gates were coming down at Vero’s Pizza. Munching and walking, walking and munching, I tried to spot anything out of the ordinary, but it was just the usual: a group of teenaged, zit-faced weenies pushing each other around and trying to annoy the living shit out of anyone within fifty feet; Hispanic guy with a tattoo on his neck, squeezing his girlfriend’s jiggly butt as they walked; juke box blaring from an almost deserted bar while a few end-of-season hard-cores weaved over cups of Wednesday night dollar drafts. Just as I stepped from the boardwalk and headed toward the parking areas, I stopped dead in my tracks as I came upon the Asbury Park Press plastered behind the glass of a newspaper dispenser. I remembered one of the headlines as if it were yesterday, the story being my last one before Murph’s bachelor party, which now was scheduled for tomorrow night, I suddenly calculated. To say I was getting used to reliving time I’d already lived through would hardly be accurate, but I wondered if I’d have time to lay a bet on the Giants-Redskins game coming up on Sunday, which the Redskins would win by two. I remembered that because I’d lost twenty on the game the first time around, but even if I won I’d have to be around to collect. Right now, that seemed totally out of the question.

  Okay, so now what? My car could be anywhere, I determined as I tried to think of where I was the night before Murph’s bachelor party. I’d worked till around nine that night, knowing I had a couple of stories to get in for the weekend editions, knowing further that I was going to blow Friday off as a workday due to my impending hangover. The ’Vette, therefore, was probably at my place, which was about a half-hour walk away.

  My first objective, I remembered, was to hook up with Aryeh, but I had no clue as to how to do that. Aryeh! I remembered Aryeh, and Vishal, and ITDs, and everything! Fuckin’ A. They hadn’t lied to me after all. I needed to get my thoughts down on paper, and quickly, if only for the reason that if I could document what was about to happen—meaning Lost Friday—I had a better chance of people not thinking I was some kind of whack-job. Wait, but they’d think that anyway, until it happened, but by then it would be too late, because David Robelle would be gone again. Shit. I needed to get someone to believe me, and the only person who’d be able to help me in any way was Roy. I was about the same distance from Roy’s place as I was from my own, and I started walking. Aryeh knew we were supposed to hook up upon my return, and I wondered if the Red Diamond operative he was supposed to find had sidetracked him with a bullet, or something. Ugh. I tossed my half-eaten slice into a trashcan.

  Like the boardwalk, the parking areas were almost deserted, and I couldn’t remember them ever being so gloomy. The cold wind cut right through my clothes, which were the same blue shirt and blood-stained khakis I’d been wearing since my trip to Atlantic City with Roy—which wouldn’t happen for another seven days now. The time thing was really confusing me.

  I hung a left onto Ocean Avenue and headed toward Roy’s house, the wind and mist coming directly at me. Five minutes into my trek, I decided the less time I had to endure this crap the better, so I proceeded onward at a light jog, figuring I’d cut down the time to Roy’s by half. I was wrong. The first shot whistled by so close to my ear that I thought I’d run into a wayward hummingbird, or something, but hummingbirds didn’t buzz around on cold, misty nights in late September. The second shot clued me in that someone was firing at me because a headlight on one of the parked cars exploded, and the car literally rocked with the impact of the bullet. I never heard a thing, and it was only when I turned that I spotted a couple of running Barbies motoring down on me at a rapid clip. What the…? One of the Barbies stopped running, and I spotted a laser dot slashing across my chest. I dropped like a stone, and I could feel the bullet’s impact right through the sidewalk as it ripped a two-inch gully into the concrete only inches from my head. I thought: if I didn’t get the hell out of there, I’d never make it to the company Christmas
party so that Skin Head and Bull Neck could kill me. Thinking this would be a good time for someone to be driving by to see what was happening, I rolled toward the street, hoping to find cover behind a parked car. There was no one on the street, however, which was just as well, seeing as that might have resulted in two dead Sea Beachers instead of one. Not only that, my path was blocked by two six-foot Ken Dolls, both with shoulders as wide as train tracks. With the Ken Dolls in front of me, and the Barbies in back of me, I figured this was it, history was wrong, my time had come at the hands of some futuristic Aryans to whom the expression swimming with the fishes was a nutritional term. Angry now, not worrying about the lives of millions of people but just overwhelmingly pissed, I struck a pose that must have looked as stupid as the bird pose from The Karate Kid, but I wasn’t going down like a coward. I mean, screw them. That’s when I actually heard a shot, and the first Ken Doll fell at my feet. The second one turned, and the front side of his forehead blew off as another shot rang out, followed by two more in rapid succession. The shots came from behind me, and, not finding myself dead, I turned and spotted the two Barbies lying on the sidewalk, the already-forming pools of blood beneath their skulls oozing like black molasses beneath the streetlights on Ocean Avenue.

  Aryeh came out of the shadows near one of the buildings, and said, “They knew you were coming.”

  Amazingly, I could already hear a police siren, and I guessed the local boardwalk patrol must have heard the shots. A cruiser screamed up half a minute later, and twenty minutes after that Roy stepped from his old Ford F-150 and came toward me as I concentrated on preventing myself from having an anxiety attack.

  Roy looked at the bodies, and said, “You have anything to do with this, Johnny?”

  “Sort of,” I croaked. I looked around and noticed that Aryeh had vanished.

  * * * * *

  “The entire town? You expect me to believe that?”

  I mean, Roy must have thought I’d popped some major acid, or something, but, putting myself in his shoes, I would have thought the same thing. There were a couple of things that gave him reason to listen, however. The first was that the four dead people—the two Barbies and the two Ken Dolls—looked like two sets of twins, and while Roy gave no consideration to my explanation that they were specially bred, genetically engineered human slaves, the odds on other plausible explanations seemed just as long.

  Looking at me sideways, he said, “We’ll see if the DNA report supports your theory, but even if that were true, they’re still human, they’re still dead, and someone killed all four of them. If you know who that is, Johnny, I suggest you come up with a name. And don’t give me any crap about protecting a source.”

  “All I can tell you right now is that they were trying to kill me.”

  “We’ll verify that when the crime scene people get here. There’s got to be a bullet inside that car, and when we find it we’ll see if it matches up with any weapons found at the scene.”

  “You won’t be able to test fire their weapons,” I informed him. “They’re probably DNA-activated. If I’m right, they can only be fired by their owners, who are now dead.”

  Roy’s eyes narrowed, and he walked over to one of the Barbie bodies. He’d already walked the scene and made his initial notes—mentally, of course, because now I knew that Roy was an eidetiker and never wrote anything down—but he hadn’t touched the weapons because the crime scene hadn’t been processed yet. He slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, and gingerly lifted one of the weapons off the ground with two fingers, turning it slowly in the beam of his flashlight. While it looked pretty much like a twenty-first century Glock to the inexperienced eye, it took Roy two whole seconds to turn to me and say, “I ain’t never seen no gun like this before.” I just waited for him to draw his own conclusion. He set the handgun down just as he’d found it, and yelled toward the perimeter of the crime scene tape, “I want this dusted for prints before anything else. You got it?” The officer waved acknowledgement, and Roy turned back to me. “You wanna go over that story of yours one more time?”

  After I told Roy about Lost Friday again, I said, “Two days from now, you’re going to lose three prisoners who are being transported up from the Carolinas to Jersey City. They’re going to be part of Lost Friday, but they’re not going to be returned like the rest of the population.” And I told him why.

  “I got that call today,” Roy said, his eyes boring a hole right through me. “How’d you know about that?” He took a step back and looked me up and down, expecting that maybe he’d spot a portable surveillance system sticking out of my pocket, or something. What he did spot was the circle of blood on my trousers that got there as a result of his fishing lure falling from the visor in his truck during our trip to see his hypnotist friend. “That your blood?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, telling him how it got there.

  Roy’s face went from florid to pale in a millisecond. “That lure is always coming loose. You ain’t never been in my truck before, have you Johnny?” Again, my silence couldn’t have been louder. “How’d you know about that lure?” he said again.

  “I already told you Roy. I’ve lived through this before.”

  An Ocean County crime scene van pulled up, momentarily distracting Roy. Coming back after giving his instructions to the CSIs, he said, “You know Johnny, I may look like I don’t know my ass from my elbow, but this isn’t my first county fair. I want to know what you know about these people, and I want to know now. Nobody comes into my town and turns it into the OK Corral and just walks away from it like it nothing ever happened.”

  Bewildered by Roy’s sudden reversal, I said, “Are you charging me with something?”

  “I won’t know that until this crime scene is thoroughly investigated. What I do know is that you’re my only witness, and you’re not going anywhere for a while.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Johnny. You might wanna call somebody to come down here with a change of clothes for you. We’re gonna need to analyze that blood.”

  “How long is this gonna take?” I asked, thinking I needed to get to Romano and Remington as quickly as possible.

  “It’s gonna take what it’s gonna take.”

  I sat down on the curb and tried to think. I thought I had Roy convinced, but like any good cop he was going to wait and see what the evidence told him. Despite the fact that I’d now discovered that there was so much of it, time seemed particularly scarce right then.

  “I have a friend I’d like you to talk to,” I said.

  “Does he know anything about all this?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Does this friend have a name?”

  “Yeah. His name is Aryeh.”

  “Aryeh what?”

  “Aryeh Caleb. He’s a Mossad agent.”

  Roy’s eyes got real big. “And how do we find Mister Caleb?”

  “Not sure. More than likely he’ll find me. Maybe you should be around when he does.”

  “I think that would be a good idea.”

  Chapter 24… Story By Noon

  I’d never spent a night in jail before, and I woke up with a start as if I’d just awakened from the grave. Okay, bad choice of words, but it was seldom that I had no recollection about anything that happened during the night. I mean, usually I had a dream, or took a tinkle, or flogged my mule; this night: bupkis. I fell asleep somewhere around two, and the last thing I remembered besides being grilled by Roy for the umpteenth time, was talking to Romano. I mean for me, it was one big jumble of events all tangled together in my head, despite the fact that some of them were 190 years apart. Romano and Roy both thought I’d been into the mushrooms.

  “It’s two in the fucking morning,” Romano had bellowed over the phone. “Don’t tell me you’re not going to have that story ready by tomorrow, Pappas. How many times did we go over this deadline?”

  “That’s not why I called, boss. I need Kell
i Remington’s home number. Do you have it?”

  “Remington? What the hell do you need her for?”

  He had no clue, and, as with Roy, convincing him of what was about to happen—meaning Lost Friday—was probably akin to convincing the apostles that Jesus was going to rise from the tomb before it happened. There I go with that grave thing again. Maybe I was preoccupied. Anyway, I had to think fast.

  “I get it,” Romano went on. “She can’t bail you out of this one, Pappas. She’s covering the jazz festival up in Red Bank tomorrow. I need your story by noon, you got me?”

  “It’s not the story, boss. It’s… ah… personal.”

  “Still trying to get her to polish your rocket, eh Pappas? Calling her at this hour isn’t going to score any points for you, though. She probably already thinks you’re a stalker.”

  “The number, boss. I know you have it.”

  “All right, big guy, but it’s your funeral.” Again with the death reference, but he gave it to me. “I need that story by noon, Pappas. Not a minute later.”

  I hung up in his ear thinking: eat me. I got Remington’s answering machine, and wondered where the hell she could have been at that hour. Either she was out getting her g-spot tickled, or she was screening her calls. I figured it couldn’t have been the latter because she definitely would have picked up had she seen an incoming call from the Sea Beach police department, which is where I was calling from. I had no idea, at that point, where my cell phone was, so I left a message for her to call me at the station. Finally, around six a.m., one of Roy’s men came in with a cordless phone.

  Now, up to the point where I’d gotten Remington assigned to me—which was post-Lost Friday—the only interaction I’d had with her at the Press was me trying to snuggle into her undies, and she quite successfully keeping me out of them. As such, I imagined that my frantic call to her in the middle of the night must have sounded like just another lame attempt to accomplish my usual objective.