Yesterday Again

by Barry Lyga

  “Be careful,” Erasmus said as Kyle snapped off a shiny new chain and lock that had been put on the batwing door. Lundergaard had wasted no time.

  Kyle crept back into the basement. Everything was as it had been before. He licked his lips at the sight of the laptop, but then told himself, Later. First, we see what he’s been hiding.

  The steel door had a truly massive lock on it, and the hinges were triple-reinforced. It took Kyle all of three seconds to wrench the lock free from its housing, complete with a loud, screeching sound that he was sure Lundergaard could hear three stories above. But nothing happened, so he went to open the door. “This is where the Wi-Fi signal is coming from?” he asked.

  “Yes, but you do realize,” Erasmus said, “that if there is a nuclear reactor in there, there’s a chance you’ll let loose enough radiation to kill half of Bouring?”

  “I’d bet my life it’s not a reactor.”

  “It’s not your life you’re betting,” Erasmus said drily.

  Kyle paused just a moment, then he opened the door. It was a thick and heavy slab of steel — six inches at least. Heavy, but the hinges were well-oiled, and the door swung open more easily than he would have imagined.

  If it was a nuclear reactor, it was the darkest one Kyle had ever seen — the room beyond the door was utterly black. There was no way even to tell how big it was.

  Under protest, Erasmus allowed Kyle to use him as a flashlight again, and the space lit up.

  Kyle swallowed. Hard. He had imagined a lot. He had pictured many, many secrets Lundergaard could be keeping back here.

  But not this.

  A small room lurked behind the steel door, no more than six feet in any direction. More like an old root cellar, maybe. It smelled faintly of rot and dirt and sweat.

  And there was a man.

  A man chained to the wall.

  Kyle was certain the man was dead, but then he blinked and lolled his head and looked directly at Kyle and said, in a voice cracked and hollow with disuse, “Help. Me.”

  For the first time in his memory, Kyle could not move, could not speak, could not even think. He simply stood there in the tiny room, frozen in place, unable to do anything but stare into the man’s bloodshot blue eyes. Something familiar lurked in them, something that Kyle associated with pain…. It was on the fringe of his memory when Erasmus spoke up in his ear.

  “Kyle! Kyle! You’ve been silent and motionless for thirty-seven seconds! What’s going on?”

  “I … I don’t know,” Kyle whispered.

  “The Wi-Fi signal is directly in front of you. What do you see?”

  The man licked his lips and took a deep breath. “Please,” he whispered. “Please, help me. Hurry.”

  “It’s a man,” Kyle said. “I don’t —”

  “A man? What? That doesn’t make any —”

  “Oh, Kyle,” said a voice from behind him, and Kyle knew it to be Lundergaard before he even turned around. This time, he didn’t even give Lundergaard a chance to say anything else — he launched himself right at the older man at top speed.

  CRACK! Kyle screamed as the force field sparked and zapped around him, throwing him back into the small room, the room he now realized was really a prison cell for the chained man. He shook spots from his eyes and shuddered through the pain, hurling himself at Lundergaard again.

  FA-ZAMMMM! The force field did its dirty work again, and Kyle found himself writhing on the floor with pain.

  “Did you really think I didn’t have an alarm hooked up down here?” Lundergaard asked. “Did you really think I wouldn’t turn on my force field before I came down here?” He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “You really have lost your superbrain, haven’t you?”

  “Kyle!” Erasmus screamed in his ear. “Kyle, are you all right? Talk to me! Kyle!”

  “I’m … okay….” Kyle said, forcing himself up onto his hands and knees. He glared at Lundergaard with pure hate, and Lundergaard just smiled an evil smile. “It feels like …”

  And then Kyle understood. Understood everything. He looked back over his shoulder at the chained man, then whirled back to Lundergaard. “You have —”

  “It’s over, Kyle,” Lundergaard said.

  “But —”

  “I thought I could let you live. Feed you some lies, the kind of lies a child would believe, and let you go on your way. Maybe you would find your way back through time and maybe you wouldn’t. I don’t care either way. But now you’ve found my little secret. I can’t have that. I have the time capsule; that’s all that matters. Good-bye, Kyle Camden.”

  “The time capsule!” Kyle had completely forgotten. “What do you want from it? What are you going to steal —”

  Before Kyle could finish, Lundergaard lifted a hand — in it, he held the strange-looking pistol.

  “Jack!” Kyle screamed. “Jack, turn it off!”

  Lundergaard pulled the trigger and a burst of energy slammed into Kyle, hurling him back against the far wall, barely missing the chained man. Dirt exploded from the wall at the point of impact, and Kyle thought that maybe one of the chains loosened a bit. Not that it would matter. It was Jack, all right. He was sure of it. In no shape to do anything, really.

  “It’s Jack,” he told Erasmus quickly. “Try to get him to shut everything off. Especially that gun.”

  “Jack? Jack who?”

  But Lundergaard was already aiming the gun again. Kyle’s body ached in anticipation.

  At superspeed, Kyle slipped his earbuds out and slid them into Jack’s ears instead, leaving Erasmus hanging around the man’s neck, then he launched himself through the air.

  Lundergaard chortled as he pulled the trigger again. But this time Kyle was ready for it — at the last possible instant, he arced up into the air, smashing through the ceiling of the basement, crashing through the floor of what looked like a living room, and immediately dived back down through the floor a few feet away.

  It worked. He caught Lundergaard off guard, coming through the basement ceiling right behind the older man. He grabbed Lundergaard —

  ZZZZZKKKLL!

  The force field!

  Kyle spun away from Lundergaard, twisting and groaning in pain. He knew where the force field had come from. He knew why it hurt so much.

  Lundergaard spun around and fired his gun. Kyle dodged and the energy beam caught only the edge of his shoulder. Kyle grabbed a nearby table and hurled it at Lundergaard, who instinctively held up his arms to shield himself. The table wasn’t alive — it could go through the force field … and it did, knocking the gun from Lundergaard’s hand and — even better — knocking Lundergaard to the floor.

  Kyle zipped over there, but first he paused for half a second to rip the steel door out of the wall. He stood over Lundergaard, the massive door held over his head like he was ready to squish a cockroach.

  “I’m not dumb enough to try to touch you again,” Kyle said, “but I will take great joy in breaking every bone in your body with this door if you don’t start talking.”

  Lundergaard’s eyes darted back and forth in panic. “Now, Kyle, you need to —”

  “I need to give my arms a break because this thing is getting heavy,” Kyle lied. “I’m thinking about dropping it on your head. I know that force field is only keyed to a plasma-powered body. Like mine.”

  Lundergaard reached into his pocket. Kyle drew in a deep breath. He couldn’t stop Lundergaard without actually crushing the man to death with the door … and he wasn’t willing to cross that line, even for a lying, time-traveling bad guy like Walter Lundergaard. It just wasn’t right.

  Besides — he still had questions he needed answered, and Lundergaard was the guy to answer them.

  “I will squash you like roadkill,” Kyle growled in his most threatening voice.

  Lundergaard called his bluff; he pulled a gadget from his pocket and pushed a button.

  And everything exploded.

  Sirens.

  The sirens woke Kyle fr
om what had been a hard, black sleep. More accurately, a complete unconsciousness. He wondered how long he’d been out cold.

  He also wondered how long he’d been on fire.

  Kyle shouted, beating his body with his invulnerable hands to put out the fire. Flames couldn’t hurt him, but he didn’t want to be running around Bouring naked, clothes burned off. He figured even in 1987 people would frown on that.

  All around him, the workshop was in flames. Sparks spat into the air. The big TVs were melting and the air smelled like burned plastic. The lights had gone out, but the fire made the room a moving sculpture of light and dark.

  Lundergaard was nowhere to be seen.

  Kyle hit the ground and rolled to put out the last of the flames licking at him, managing to maneuver his way back into the small prison room at the same time. The fire hadn’t moved here yet, but it was only a matter of time.

  Jack — it really was Jack, Kyle was certain of it — leaned against the wall, unconscious. Kyle crawled over and reclaimed Erasmus.

  “— not sure why I’m telling you this,” Erasmus was saying, “but for the forty-second time: Jack, please turn everything off. Can you hear me, Jack?”

  “It’s me, Erasmus. I’m back.”

  “Kyle!” Erasmus actually sounded relieved. “What’s going on? There was an explosion and then three minutes went by and I kept talking to this person who never responded —”

  “Three minutes? And the fire trucks are already here? Let’s hear it for the Bouring FD,” Kyle said.

  “We need to get out of here,” Erasmus said.

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “Fire can’t hurt me, but it can hurt Jack.” He snapped the chains holding Jack to the wall and slung the man over his shoulders. “Still, we might be able to scavenge something. Even with the lights out, I can see well enough to grab a few more … Ack!”

  As he spoke, Kyle had stood up, directly into a cloud of acrid smoke that blinded him and sent him into a choking spasm. It felt like it would never end, as though he’d sucked a pound of sand down his throat and into his lungs. He doubled over and collapsed to the floor, gasping.

  He was fireproof, but his lungs, it turned out, weren’t smoke-proof. A minor detail, but an important one. Past experience had proven that Kyle didn’t need to breathe for long stretches at a time, but when he did breathe, he was just as susceptible to smoke inhalation as anyone else, apparently.

  “Kyle? Kyle, are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” He coughed and spat out a wad of something thick, black, and gross. “But I think I just need to get us out of here.”

  “Indeed. The temperature is rising. Clearly, Lundergaard wants to destroy all evidence of the lab.”

  Kyle held his breath and fumbled in the smoky darkness. He had what he needed to repair the time machine, but he wanted more.

  But he wouldn’t get it.

  Then he launched himself through the hole he’d made in the ceiling before and kept going at an angle, smashing open the ceiling of the first floor with his fist, then the second floor, then through the back wall of the house, exploding into the open air. A massive gout of flame followed him, a huge fireball roaring at him like a dragon from its cage. Kyle hovered in the night sky for a moment, wondering if he should try to put the fire out. But below him, the Bouring Fire Department was already on the scene, and Kyle knew they would extinguish the blaze before it could spread. After all, that’s how it was in his own time.

  He was starting to get the hang of being in the past.

  Under cover of smoke and night, Kyle flew away, still cradling Jack, who was breathing evenly.

  “Were you able to grab anything else from the lab?” Erasmus asked.

  “No. Just Jack.”

  “And what’s that about?” Erasmus asked. “Jack who? Why did you have me talking to him? Who is he?”

  Feeling the weight of the man in his arms, Kyle drew in a deep breath. “It’s Jack Stanley, Erasmus. It’s the Mad Mask.”

  “‘Look in 1987’?” Mighty Mike said. “What’s a 1987?”

  “It’s not a thing,” Mairi said. “It’s a year.”

  “Oh. Right. Of course.” Mike scratched his head. “I still don’t understand.” He looked at Mairi hopefully, as though assuming she could figure it out, or already had.

  Yeah, right — she wished. It made no sense to her whatsoever.

  “You’re bleeding,” Mike said, pointing.

  Mairi looked down at her arm, which still streamed with blood. In all the running and flying and racing away from zombies, she’d completely forgotten about it. “It’s not that bad,” she said, even though she knew it was. It should have stopped on its own by now.

  Mike held up his own bandaged hand. “I disagree. I think it’s probably bad. Here.” He ripped off the edge of his cape and wrapped it around her arm, tying it tightly to keep it in place. “That will stench the blood loss.”

  “Stanch,” Mairi corrected him automatically. 1987 … What in the world could that mean? Were they supposed to go look in a book about 1987? Her dad had a shelf of old almanacs in the basement — would the one for the year 1987 have some kind of information in it? And who had left this message? And why? What on earth was going on here?

  “Mairi?” Mike interrupted. “I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts or ideas …? My brain is sort of empty right now.”

  Mike’s expression was open and honest and utterly clueless. He was the most powerful kid on the planet (or had been, at least, until the zombies came), and now he was just as helpless as she was. What were they going to do? How could they get help?

  A new thought occurred to her: It was possible that she and Mike were the last non-zombified people in all of Bouring. Meaning that any help would have to come from the outside. But what if the zombies spread? What if they moved on to other towns, other cities? If Mighty Mike couldn’t stop them, then maybe nothing could stop them. And then …

  She took a deep breath and leaned against the wall to collect herself. She couldn’t panic. Not now. Not even though she really, really wanted to panic and figured she deserved it after everything she’d been through.

  “What do they want?” she murmured.

  “What does who want?” asked Mike.

  “The zombies. They were chasing me. Us. Why? What do they want?” As long as she kept talking and thinking, her arm and her twisted ankle didn’t hurt so bad.

  Mike frowned, his brow furrowed in deep thought. “I saw a documentary once,” he said, “which explanationed that zombies like to eat human brains.”

  “That wasn’t a documentary, Mike. It was a movie. It was fake. Made up.”

  Mike tilted his head like a confused puppy. “Really? Truly?”

  “Yes.”

  “It seemed very real.”

  “Trust me.”

  Mike leaned in close. “Why would someone invent something that horrible?”

  He seemed genuinely concerned, as though he just couldn’t imagine why someone would want to make a horror movie, forgetting for the moment that he was actually living in a horror movie.

  “We can talk about that another time,” she said. “Right now we have to figure out the deal with these zombies so that we can stop them. If we can figure out what they want, maybe that will give us a clue.”

  “They want people to slow down,” Mike said confidently.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I noticed right after the extrusion that the zombies all went after the people who were running away.” He shivered. “There were a lot of people running. I tried to help them all, Mairi.” He grabbed her arm — the uninjured one — and squeezed urgently. “I really tried. I tried, but I couldn’t —”

  “I know, Mike. I know. It’s all right.” She peeled his fingers away and took his hand in her own. “I know you tried. This isn’t your fault. The town would have opened that time capsule even if you hadn’t. What else did you see?”

  “Every time they caught someone, that p
erson would stop running and fall down. That’s all.”

  Just as she’d witnessed with the Great Nemesis and the sheriff. One moment, Sheriff Monroe had been moving just fine, the next — flump! On the ground.

  “And once people stopped moving, the zombies lost all interest in them,” Mike went on. “Which makes sense now that I know that they don’t actually eat brains. Before, I was confused.”

  So, Mairi thought, they stop people from moving and then move on…. But why? What are they trying to do? “None of this makes any sense.”

  “Especially since we’ve already looked in 1987,” Mike said.

  Mairi waved him away. “One mystery at a time, Mike. We’ll figure out who sent that message after we figure out how to stop the —” She broke off and now it was her turn to look confused. “Wait. What did you mean by ‘we’ve already looked in 1987’?”

  “I …” He looked like he was afraid he’d done or said something wrong. “I just meant … The capsule I opened … At the ceremony? That one? It said ‘1987’ on it. But you’re right. That’s nothing to worry about right now. The zombies are more important.”

  Mairi waved him quiet again. 1987 … The time capsule that had started all of this was the 1987 capsule. And now they were being told to “look in 1987.” That couldn’t be a coincidence. Could it?

  “It has to be connected,” Mairi said. “Someone’s sending us a message.”

  “But we already looked in 1987. That started all of this.” He gestured beyond the walls, beyond the house. Once again, Mairi wondered how many normal people — if any — were left in Bouring.

  She licked her lips.

  And then she surprised both Mike and herself when she said, “I know what we need to do.”

  “The Mad Mask?” Erasmus yelped for the umpteenth time. “Are you serious?”

  By now, they had returned to the site of the partly reassembled chronovessel. The useless chronovessel, without its supercomputer core. Jack Stanley — the Mad Mask — lay unconscious and breathing evenly on the ground, one arm curled around a cornstalk as if even in dreams the Mad Mask feared falling.