Lost Friday

by Michael Bronte

  Johnny didn’t respond as Roy’s voice resonated through the bullhorn once again. “Throw down your weapons. We have you….” Another blast covered up any other words.

  “Pappas!” Remington screamed from the living room.

  I took the hint and bit onto the apple magnet. I tried to mumble get up to Johnny, but he was already in place next to me. I dropped to my knees, magnet wedged between my teeth, and I approached the magnetic manacles around Johnny’s wrist.

  “Brace yourself,” I tried to mumble just in case another man-made lightning bolt stabbed through his body, but the words were just a slur.

  “Just do it,” Johnny said.

  I moved closer, feeling the pain from the blistered skin on my wrists and knowing that another zap like that might blind me. I moved closer, and closer still, six inches, three inches, one, I touched the magnetic tape with the magnet and, miraculously, it fell off, just like that, a little piece of metallic ribbon that could have gone onto a Christmas package. God bless Remington for thinking on her feet, so to speak.

  Johnny turned in a flash, took the magnet from between my teeth, and I was free a moment later. I looked at my wrists. The skin was charred black, and the pain was excruciating. “Go,” I said, motioning toward the back door.

  “But—”

  “No, Johnny. Go, now. If you can’t find Chief Mulroney, then find a spot where no one in the world could ever find you, and hide there. I’ll come and get you when this is all over.” He hesitated, and I answered his unasked question. “Believe me, I’ll know where you are.”

  Johnny took a last look at me, and swung around to face Remington who was sitting on the floor nearby, chest heaving, waiting for me to come to her with the magnet. He grinned and said, “Let me know how it turns out with you two,” and then he was gone, hopping over the prone Synthetics, out the kitchen door, and into the darkness beyond.

  I started toward Remington, but stopped when Roarke appeared in the doorway behind her.

  “Going somewhere?” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m on my way to a funeral… yours.” Evidently he didn’t think it was funny.

  Roarke pulled Remington to her feet, and said, “Sit down, Mister Pappas. It’s obvious that there’s only one life in this entire fiasco that’s important to you, and now she’s mine.” Instead of pointing his DNA-controlled Glock at me, he put it to Remington’s head.

  “If you’re planning on using her to chicken-shit your way out of this, it won’t work Roarke. No one gives a crap about her.” A flash of resentment sparked in Remington’s eyes.

  “Except you,” he said, motioning with the Glock. “Now do as I say and sit down, right where you are. Trust me, her life means nothing to me.”

  “I wouldn’t trust you if I were the one holding that gun.”

  “A wise assessment indeed,” Roarke replied, “but you have no choice. Now turn around and lie down on that floor, face down. Spread your hands so that I can see them.”

  He was right. I had no choice if I wanted to keep Remington alive. As for myself, there had to be a reason Roarke was keeping me alive. I just didn’t know what it was. I guess that was reassuring, in a strange sort of way, but there was no way I was going to sacrifice Remington’s life for mine. Besides, I had to believe I was toast once the teleportation took place, for clearly that’s what Roarke was waiting for. The time and the place to stop Roarke from stopping me, was here, and now.

  “Lay down next to him,” I heard him say, and I could hear Remington stumble across the floor and fall down next to me.

  “Turn around and face the other way,” he said to Remington, to which she responded with a fabulous, “Fuck you, asshole.” That only got her a kick in the ribs.

  “Keep fighting,” I whispered, hoping she could hear me above her own sobbing.

  “Screw you, Pappas. I’m done listening to your brilliant ideas.”

  I looked up and saw that my hand was covered in blood, blood that had oozed from the bodies of the two dead Synthetics only a few feet away. “Remington,” I whispered, “You need to—” My words were cut off when Roarke’s boot crashed into my ribs, breaking more than one of them.

  “What are you going to do with us?” Remington sobbed.

  “You’ll know in exactly four minutes and nine seconds,” Roarke replied. “Prepare for teleportation. You know the drill. Skin touching, please.”

  I could barely breathe, the pain in my side overwhelming. I coughed, spitting up gobs of blood, and knew that my lung was punctured. “Water,” I croaked. “I need water, please.” I coughed. More blood. I started to crawl toward the refrigerator. “Please,” I begged. Blood was pouring out my nose.

  Coming over and sitting me upright so that I wouldn’t drown in my own juices, Roarke propped me against the fridge. “Water,” I said, pawing the refrigerator door. “I need water.”

  Roarke looked at his timepiece rather anxiously. “Drink your water, Mister Pappas, but if you’re not in teleportation position in one minute, I’ll kill you both, and there won’t be anyone coming back to reshape this event. Do you understand?”

  I don’t think Roarke was bluffing, and I nodded as I spit more blood and opened the refrigerator door. Slowly, calmly, I pulled out a jug of iced tea that just happened to be there, and took a long swallow. Slowly, calmly, I put the cap back on and reached into the fridge to put it back, back with the same hand that was covered in blood, Synthetic blood, blood with the DNA that would fire the Glock I had put in there earlier. My hand came out holding that DNA-controlled Glock, and when Roarke was done looking at his timepiece, I fired.

  Chapter 46… The Road To Normal

  Romano didn’t live in Sea Beach, had not been part of Lost Friday, and had ever been teleported. He looked at us rather uneasily, and asked, “Are you’re sure it has to be me?”

  “We think so,” Roy said tentatively.

  “Think? That’s the best you can do?”

  “The rest of us are replicas, Paul. We don’t think it will work unless an original goes back.”

  Romano shot a plainly unfriendly stare at Vishal. “How do I know I can trust that one?”

  Vishal bristled coolly and nodded to his traveling companion, who dropped a future edition of the Asbury Park Press on Romano’s desk. It was a ploy we’d all grown to hate, but it was effective. “I’ll remind you of the events,” he said.

  I was behind Romano, and had no trouble seeing the Press’s own account of the tragic accidental deaths of one of its editors and two of its reporters. I got nauseous just standing there.

  “You really have nothing to lose,” Vishal went on dispassionately, “unless you plan on changing the course of history within the next eight weeks.” He smiled at his own cleverness, knowing that Romano really could change the course of history by going along with what we were proposing.

  You see, after I shot Roarke that night in the Robelles’ bungalow, I managed to stop shaking long enough to wonder if the body I was looking at was the same Roarke who’d been with me in another event, that being the one where he took the formulas David had torn out of his notebook. I mean, I was making stops on the continuum as if I were riding a continuum bus, why couldn’t it have been the same for Roarke? I asked myself: if I were Roarke, and I’d just discovered the formulas to ITD technology—which I’d been searching for forever, and considered to be the key to world domination—what would I do with them? I would hang on to them, is what I’d do with them. I’d have them on me, and I wouldn’t trust another person in the entire universe to take them from me. So, I searched the body and, voila, there they were, folded up in two separate bundles, no less. Roarke did indeed have all the formulas, and now I had them, which meant it was no longer necessary to prevent David’s parents from making David. I was probably too late anyway, I found out later. Roy had actually gone and found them at their honeymoon suite at Bally’s, and somehow found out that Jenna was in her cycl
e and they’d been trying to get pregnant for the last week. That only confused me more as to how Roarke was trying to reshape the last event, but that was all water under the bridge now. Our objective now was to not go off that bridge after the Christmas party.

  Seemingly trying to talk himself into it, Romano said, “So, I go back previous to when the scientists were abducted, you’re telling me.”

  “Previous to when David even started corresponding with them,” I corrected. I mean, I was on top of this sequence of events like nobody’s business.

  “Right,” said Romano. “And when was that?”

  “About six months before Lost Friday. I’d send you back eight months just to be safe.” I could see that Romano wasn’t pleased with that statement, but, hey, like I could care, right?

  Romano rubbed the back of his neck, making sure he was clear on what we were asking him to do. “That would make it the end of January.” He looked up as if he’d just made some grand discovery. “That means I’d have to relive the last eight months of my life.”

  “Is that so bad?” Remington actually had the nerve to ask. “I mean, in view of the alternative?”

  She meant Romano’s December dive into the Manasquan River, of course, and her voice went up as she asked the question, a clear sign that she knew her future depended on Romano’s decision, as did mine. I didn’t say anything, though; I could sense that Romano was negotiating with himself, hopefully trying to talk himself into the deal.

  “Won’t there be two of me?” he asked. “How would that work?”

  Okay, a legitimate question. Normally, all eyes would have turned to David for the answer, but he was nowhere to be found. Until the formulas were destroyed, the Robelles decided that David and Chuck would disappear, not even telling Jenna where they’d gone. The idea was that if David fell victim to a DNA lock-on, he wasn’t going anywhere without Chuck. I pictured them in a Canadian wilderness somewhere, fishing for salmon.

  “There is a solution,” Vishal interjected. Everyone’s eyes turned to him in unison with an unspoken O…o…ooo…kay. “We have your DNA,” he went on, plucking a hair off Romano’s head. “We could put a DNA lock on you in that time period.”

  Romano got the message right away. “And do what with him… I mean me?”

  “That’s for you to decide.”

  It only took Romano a second. “We’re only talking eight months difference, right? Maybe we could trade places. I could even set it up with him… me… us—together. We’d have to set it up together.”

  “It could be done,” Vishal confirmed, “but it would all have to take place before the formulas were destroyed. Everyone, including me, would have to be back in their original time periods—or the time periods of their choosing—before that happened.”

  “What if there were Red Diamond operatives scattered on the continuum when the formulas are destroyed?” I asked. “What if there were some there, in that time period?”

  “They’d be no different,” Vishal replied. “If the formulas are destroyed and ITDs ceased to exist, the operatives would be trapped in whatever particular time period to which they’d been teleported. There’d be no escape, unless we warned them.”

  Vishal’s tone indicated that was out of the question. After a while, I guess the Red Diamond operatives would just assimilate into their surrounding society, but I got chills just thinking about it, knowing they were out there like those Japanese soldiers who were still fighting World War II thirty years after it was over because no one had told them it had ended. “Wouldn’t it be possible that they’d cease to exist?” I asked. “After all, couldn’t their creation in the first place be a direct linkage to the creation of the formulas?”

  “It’s possible,” Vishal answered, “but at this point it’s almost impossible to determine if that would be the case, or not.”

  Romano got up from behind his desk and started pacing. We were in his office, shades drawn. The day: Wednesday, September 15th, nine days before Lost Friday, the last date during which Romano had been touched by a Lost Friday event, although it was not the last chronological calendar date.

  My thoughts drifted as he pondered his options, and I remembered that all kinds of things were scheduled to take place today, including Darlon trying to kill me. I wondered how the events were going to twist and turn as they tried to play themselves out with all of us hunkered down in Romano’s office.

  “So,” Romano said, bringing us back to the discussion at hand, “First, I’d have to go back and convince myself that I wasn’t a total nut job. Then, I’d have to convince myself to travel through time trade places with myself.” He dropped a look on me, and added, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Join the club,” I said. “Now you know how I feel.” That caused a bit of a stir, seeing as we were trying to convince Romano to basically change his life as he knew it, but I was getting a little torqued off with the whole thing. I mean, I never volunteered to have my furry ass teleported back and forth like a freaking Greek ping-pong ball, and I was the one who had someone lined up to kill me later in the day. Romano needed to just suck it up and deal with it. I thought I’d paint a rosier picture for him.

  “Just think of it, boss, the stories: time travel, futuristic terrorists, a compromised president of the United States. Think Pulitzer. No, make that Pulitzers, with an s. Hell, even if you zap back eight months, there’s a good chance the Red Diamond has already contacted President Richardson, and you’d know what was coming. Just think of the investigative series you could launch on that. You’d have more than an inside track, boss, you’d be the only person on the planet outside the Oval Office who’d know the truth. You wouldn’t have enough reporters to go around.” That would mean some juicy assignments for me too, I thought briefly. I waited for all of it to sink in. I knew Romano had recently separated, so I added, “You might even find a way to patch things up with your wife.”

  Romano just stood there, mulling. Eventually, he said to Vishal, “Can we bring me from there to here, first?”

  “Of course,” Vishal replied, “but we shouldn’t take too long to decide if we’re going to do this today. The events for this date are already in motion, and once we get caught up in them it may not be possible to complete this mission as we intend now.”

  Romano responded with, “I still don’t understand why it has to be an original that destroys the formulas. Won’t I be a replica as soon as I go back?”

  Good question. I didn’t get that one myself.

  Vishal said, “You will be, but we think that one teleportation back in time won’t be prevented or overturned by the linkage of events.” Seeing some confusion, Vishal explained further. “Many events may lead to a replica being created from another replica, and the more often that happens, the more events have transpired during those recreations, hundreds, even thousands of them, all over the continuum. If the linkages get too far out, there is no guarantee that any events that occurred as a consequence of the formulas themselves being created in the first place, will happen again. The linkages could lose their strength. Depending on how far out they go from the epicenter event, the events could cease to happen entirely merely because a single link may have changed in the many links that lead to every event.”

  I think I understood that, maybe. It was the same logic he’d just used in explaining why any Synthetics present might or might not cease to exist.

  “So it’s still no guarantee,” Romano concluded quickly.

  “For any of us,” Vishal replied. “All of us who are multiple replicas are in this together. There’s a possibility that we could all cease to exist once the formulas are destroyed. It’s a very tiny possibility, of course, otherwise we would not be recommending this course of action, but the possibility exists nonetheless.”

  Romano took a moment to review his instructions, which were quite simple. The scientists from NASA were the first to be abducted; we knew that. A
s such, Romano was to go back, make sure the scientists were present at that point on the continuum, and destroy the formulas. We all figured that burning the formulas was the way to go. Then, Romano was to find David, fill him in on what happens in the future as a result of his creating those formulas, and convince him to not commit to paper what was undoubtedly already in his head. We figured that should take, what, a day, maybe two at the most? If after that length of time, if Vishal did not reappear before our eyes, we’d know that ITDs ceased to exist, and time travel was no longer possible. If Vishal came back to us after forty-eight hours, we’d know that Romano had failed, and we’d have to try again with a different original. We had no idea who that could be, so we were really counting on Romano to come across. I know I was, and, looking at Remington, I think she was too.

  I think she certainly felt some anxiety. She’d been looking over her shoulder the whole morning, knowing that if Romano failed, she’d be taking an ice bath in the Manasquan. Looking at her, I thought, yessiree Bob, she was a replica all right, but all the equipment was to original specs, no substandard parts on that chassis.

  “And all these?” Romano asked, indicating copies of other future newspapers lying on his desk, the ones with the headlines FUTURISTIC TERRORISTS INVADE, PRESIDENT TAKES BRIBE, and BETRAYED!

  “Boss,” I said sorrowfully. “These all go away unless you can recreate them with some other angle at the other end.” I glanced at Remington, knowing it was her byline on those pieces. Oh well, more assignments for me, I thought again.

  “Shame,” Romano muttered as he shifted his gaze to her. “You’re a good writer, kid, something I’ll be sure to remember when I go back.”

  Remington lit up, her smoky blue eyes glistening. “Thanks boss. I appreciate it.”

  I thought: what the fuck was that? What about me? Then, I thought: Oh, I get it. Romano was going to go back and try to score some strange from Remington! You know, there’s always a freakin’ angle. With Romano knowing what he knew now, I figured he’d go back and take her off the local news desk, promote her, and probably move me over to do the fishing report. The bastard. There was some gratitude for you. “Forget it, boss,” I said. “She’ll never go to bed with you, not even in your dreams.”