In Times Like These Boxed Set

by Nathan Van Coops

  “You think this changes anything?” he snarls. “I’m still going to gut you.” He reaches behind him, pulls out his knife and charges me. I dodge left and block his downward thrust with my left forearm against his, hoping to hit him with a right cross as he passes. The pain in my arm from his blow makes me cringe and miss, and my punch just grazes the back of his skull. I spin away and now we’re facing each other from the opposite direction. I glance backward at the loading dock ramp. I can jump that. There’s no way he’d catch me on foot. I turn to run. I’m not fast enough. Something catches my toe and I go sprawling. I look up at Stenger looming over me. He’s smiling.

  “Time to die.”

  He raises the knife and I grab my chronometer and spin it to an arbitrary number.

  “No!” Stenger yells. The fingers of his free hand wrap around my ankle, just as I push the pin. The next moment he crashes down on top of me in a rush of wind and noise. The truck vibrates and shakes as it hurtles down an interstate highway. I grab Stenger’s arm and attempt to wrench the knife from his grasp. He fights back by elbowing me in the ribs. He clamps down on my bad wrist and twists. I yell out in pain. I catch him in the face with an elbow of my own that forces him upward, and I scramble backward to get away from him. I don’t have far to go. A few feet farther, the trailer ends in open air and hot freeway, crowded with speeding traffic.

  A pair of senior citizens, enjoying the sunshine in a convertible trailing the truck, gawk and point as I become visible to them. My fingers find the edge of trailer. I make the mistake of looking down. The highway is a blur.

  “Nowhere to run now, Ben!” Stenger yells over the din of the truck and the wind.

  The truck rattles and sways as it rounds a bend in the freeway but Stenger gets to his feet. The edge of his knife glints in the afternoon sun. Stenger must see the fear in my face because he smiles. He steps toward me and glories in his victory. That same sadistic grin he had in all his mug shots, the face of the famous killer. I realize I’m seeing him happy. But he doesn’t know what else I see. While still staring at his eyes, I reset my chronometer for a three second jump. I slam my hands down onto the top of the trailer just as the Twenty-Seventh Avenue pedestrian overpass clears the top of the cab. I close my eyes and blink.

  When I reopen my eyes, there’s nothing but blue sky ahead of me. I look behind me and see the chaos of a van and a passenger car and another tractor trailer that have all tried unsuccessfully to avoid hitting the body that fell from the overpass. Traffic behind the overpass slows to a crawl and eventually a stop, but my tractor trailer takes me away from the scene at eighty miles per hour. I work my way carefully back to the center of the trailer and lie there looking up at the sky for a few moments.

  Eventually I crawl to the front of the trailer and hang on to the front edge. I blink myself past a dozen more overpasses until the truck finally comes to a stop at a gas station north of Tampa. The driver never sees me descend. Walking to the edge of the grass near the payphone, I collapse next to an empty bag of Doritos and a couple of cigarette butts. The ground never felt so good.

  24

  “People say, ‘Time heals all wounds.’ That may be true, but relocating to an alternate reality can sure help, too.”

  -Excerpt from the journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1941

  As the truck pulls away from the gas pumps, I lift my head. I probably should have used that to get back to St. Pete. I lay back in the grass and contemplate the sky some more. I need to find Blake. The image of the blood splattering the chair comes back to me. Quickly knew somehow. He saw the blood.

  I get to my feet and walk into the convenience store. I ignore the attendant’s sideways glances at my bloody face and buy a bag of sunflower seeds. I ask him to call me a cab, then regress to the outdoors and lean against the edge of a planter. Quickly saw the blood on the chair days ago. Blake must have gone back in time when he got shot. I spit a couple of shells out near the curb. But why not tell us? Why wouldn’t he warn us what was going to happen?

  When the cab arrives, I ensconce myself in the back seat with Quickly’s journal, shutting down the cabby’s attempts at chitchat. I page through the journal for clues. There’s nothing about the fractal universe. Not even a mention of jumping timestreams. I’m about to slam it shut when I notice a torn edge of paper protruding from the binding. I examine the little triangle of paper still clinging to the threads. Somebody ripped some pages out. I thumb back through and find several more locations where there are missing sections.

  I close the book and watch the highway stream by. As we cross the Gandy Bridge, I get a view of St.Petersburg in the distance. The Sunshine City. The setting sun is lighting the buildings of downtown in gold. I check my chronometer. It’s still January 9th. I look at the clock on the cabby’s dash. 5:40. Somewhere on that horizon, Carson and I are scouring the lab for our things. Another me is hiding on the second level with Blake and Francesca. That feels like forever ago. In just a matter of twenty minutes, Blake is going to get shot.

  I lean forward in my seat. “Do you think you could drive a little faster?” The cabby accelerates, but it doesn’t help. By the time we reach North St. Petersburg, we hit a wall of traffic. We crawl along in spurts and stops.

  When we get near Thirtieth Avenue, the cabby comments sourly from the front. “Wouldn’t you know it? It’s not even on our side of the freeway, just a bunch of gawkers. Looks like they’ve had a mess on the northbound side.”

  I watch the lights of the emergency vehicles and tow trucks accumulated near the pedestrian overpass. Police are directing traffic around the shoulder. There’s no sign of the body. I close my eyes and lean my head back on the seat. After a minute, I feel the cab accelerating again.

  I killed someone.

  The thought doesn’t affect me the way I thought it would. I reopen my eyes and watch the lines of the freeway speed by.

  He killed himself.

  I direct the cabby through the neighborhood near Ninth Street, careful to steer clear of any areas where I might encounter any of my earlier selves. He drops me a block north of the lab on the opposite side from where Carson and I ran off. I pay the cabby and watch his taillights disappear around the corner before turning toward the lab.

  I approach the lab from the rear. Creeping up the alley till I have a view of the loading dock, I settle myself on a low wall behind a bush and wait. I don’t have to wait long. There’s movement in the windows above me. The backlit office offers a clear view of the occupants through the glass. Stenger has Francesca backed up almost against the pane. I can’t hear anything, but I see his expression of pain as Francesca activates the degravitizer against his thigh. A moment later, the window explodes and Stenger and I plummet out into space.

  Our impact into the trailer makes me cringe. It’s a wonder I’m alive after that. I feel my swollen wrist with my other hand. I got off easy. I watch my awkward fight atop the trailer and see Stenger stick his leg out and snag my toe with his foot just as I turn to run. His smile fades quickly as he’s forced to drop down and grab my leg. We both disappear.

  So long, asshole. Last I’ll be seeing of you.

  I step out from behind the bushes and walk toward the trailer. Broken glass litters the ground. There is the sound of scuffling still going on above me. Lillith shrieks like a Nazgul beast from a Tolkien film and I hear Francesca shouting as well. There’s a fight I’d pay to see.

  The ruckus subsides, and a few moments later, Francesca appears at the hole in the window. Her face is distraught as she searches the alley. I wave to attract her attention. Her face relaxes when she sees me, and she smiles. She looks past me down the alley.

  “Where is he?” she calls down.

  “We won’t have to worry about him anymore.”

  She nods. “What do I do with this one?” She drags a miserable-looking Lillith into view by her hair.

  “I can come up and help you,” I say.

  “Okay. You better hurry. It smells like smoke pr
etty bad up here. Actually, wait just a minute . . .” She disappears from view. When she returns, she pitches a typewriter out the window. It hits the street and breaks apart. “Oops,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I yell back. “I think I can still use it.” I examine the front plastic portion of the typewriter that’s mostly intact. “How long ago?”

  “Maybe thirty seconds?”

  “Okay.” I spin my chronometer dials to forty seconds, just to be sure, and touch the top of the typewriter. I blink and drop a couple of feet, landing in the back corner of the office. I poke my head over the cubicle wall. Francesca is still talking to me out the window. I duck around the corner of the cubicle and hide behind another desk.

  “Actually, wait just a minute.” She trails off and shoves Lillith into a chair. “Don’t you dare move.” I hear her come around the corner of the far end of the row of cubicles. She stops and enters the one I just departed. “This could work.” She yanks the cord out of the socket and strides back to the window with the typewriter. I stand up to get another look.

  “Oops.”

  I walk around the corner of the cubicle into view of Liliith. Her eyes widen.

  “Maybe thirty seconds?” Francesca calls out the window. She turns to look at Lillith and then follows her gaze to me. She smiles. I move forward and she rushes into my arms. “God, I thought you were dead when you went out that window!”

  “So did I,” I say.

  “What happened to Stenger?”

  I glance at Lillith in the chair. She’s eyeing the bag of money sitting on the conference table. She notices me watching her and averts her eyes. “I’ll tell you a little later.” I lean around Francesca. “Hey, don’t even think about it, Lillith. We can find you yesterday if we need to.”

  She scowls.

  That wouldn’t work, but she doesn’t know that. The smoke is starting to get thick. “We should get out of here,” I say.

  Francesca leads the way to the office stairs with Lillith between us where I can keep an eye on her. By the time we emerge into the alley below, emergency vehicles have begun to fill up Ninth Street. Lillith’s eyes widen but she doesn’t try to run. Looking through the array of blue and red flashing lights, I see someone waving at me. I recognize Malcolm standing near a pair of uniformed police officers. He points toward Lillith, and the two officers move toward us with hands on their gun holsters.

  “She’s the one who held me hostage in her trailer,” Malcolm says. “I can take you there if you need me to.”

  The female officer gets on her radio and transmits something I don’t catch. The other officer, a man in his mid-forties, looks at Francesca and me. “And what was your part in this?”

  “Our friend worked there,” I say. “Her boyfriend tried to burn the place down. If you search that alley back there, I’d bet you’ll find the gun with both of their prints on it.”

  “This whole thing was a set up!” Lillith shouts. “They’re the ones you ought to be locking up. This one pushed my man out a window. They’re time travelers from the future!”

  “Okay ma’am, I’m going to ask you to come with us.” The female officer says. “We’ll need to ask you some questions.”

  “I’m going to be pressing charges,” Malcolm says.

  “We’ll need to get a statement from you as well,” the male officer replies.

  As the two of them converse, the female officer leads Lillith toward some other police vehicles. I ease Francesca away from the conversation and step around a squad car. “We need to find Blake.”

  “What happened to him?” Francesca asks.

  “I don’t know. Lillith shot him, but he disappeared.”

  “She shot him?” Francesca exclaims.

  “Yeah. But I think he blinked out of there. I don’t know what kind of shape he was in but I think I know where he went.”

  “Where?”

  “You remember the day Carson noticed the blood on the chair?”

  “Yeah, that was gross . . . Wait, you think that was Blake’s blood?”

  “He crashed into that chair when he got shot. Lillith was shooting from the balcony. He must have blinked backwards a few days to get away.”

  “Why wouldn’t we have seen him? You think he’s okay?”

  “I don’t know, but we need to find Dr. Quickly. I have a lot of questions that need answering.”

  Another fire engine speeds toward the blazing front of the lab. We move farther away from the chaos and I put some more vehicles between us and the officers before they decide to question us. I lead us into the residential neighborhood and pause to consider the sign at an intersection.

  “Where are we going?” Francesca asks.

  “Quickly’s apartment upstairs burned down. If he’s still in this timestream and here today, he’ll need somewhere to sleep tonight.”

  “The house? I figured that place was just a front for his tunnel.”

  “Probably is, but I don’t know where else to look for him.”

  Francesca shrugs and we keep walking. “So tell me about Stenger. What happened when you went out the window?”

  “Well . . . we landed on a truck. We fought a little bit and then I tried to blink away, but he grabbed hold of my leg and came with me.”

  “How did you lose him?”

  “I hit him with an overpass.”

  “You what?”

  I recount the story of my fight on the Interstate.

  “Holy shit. So he’s dead?” Francesca says.

  “I didn’t stop to check obviously, but we had to be doing close to eighty when he got clobbered and knocked off the truck. Then he got hit by at least a couple of cars on the freeway, so yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and say he’s dead.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m glad he’s gone. He was so awful.”

  “Are you okay?” I consider Francesca’s slightly swollen face.

  “Yeah, I’ll be all right.” She touches her cheek. “I could probably use some ice.”

  When we arrive at Dr. Quickly’s fake house, there are lights on in the window. I’m about to knock on the door when it opens. Mym is holding the door for us. She’s older again, the one from earlier in the lab. Her eyes search my face.

  “Hey,” I manage.

  “Hey. Come in.” She opens the door wider and Francesca and I enter. Mym shuts the door and leads us into the dining room. As I turn the corner, my breath catches. Blake is at the table with Dr. Quickly. His left arm is in a sling and a bandage protrudes from under the collar of his shirt. He rises from the table and smiles. Dr. Quickly stands up with him.

  “Thank God!” I say. “The worry was killing me, man.”

  As Blake moves around the table, I clasp his good arm with my good hand and gently clap him on the back. “You had me pretty worried, too,” Blake says. “I’ve been stuck wondering for days whether you guys were going to make it out of there.”

  Francesca embraces Blake carefully. I turn to Dr. Quickly. “Hello, Doctor.”

  “Congratulations, Benjamin. You’ve had quite a night.”

  “Yeah, you could say that.”

  Mym moves around her father and takes a seat. She smiles at me, but it’s cautious.

  “So what happened to you?” Francesca asks Blake.

  “Not much to tell, really,” Blake replies. “I got shot, obviously. When I got hit by the bullet, I sort of went into panic mode. I knew she was still up there shooting when I hit the ground. She was shooting at Ben but I was still in clear view, so I grabbed at my chronometer and blinked myself out of there.”

  “You went back to a few days ago?” I ask.

  “Nights, actually. When I showed up in the lab, it was dark and I was bleeding all over the place. Luckily Dr. Quickly heard me blundering around and came downstairs to help me. He patched me up.”

  “Blake got lucky,” Dr. Quickly says. “The bullet passed through the muscles behind his collarbone, but it just grazed the bone itself. It
could have been much worse.”

  “What happened then?” I say. “Why didn’t we realize what happened days ago?”

  “I wanted to come back and find you guys as soon as the bleeding was stopped,” Blake says. “But Dr. Quickly talked me out of it.”

  “There’s a little more to this story than you know,” Dr. Quickly says. “We needed to keep Blake here to avoid altering the events that were going to happen. You may want to have a seat.”

  I look from Quickly to Mym and finally to Blake. He nods and gestures to the chairs. Francesca and I take seats. Mym shifts uncomfortably in hers.

  “So what’s the scoop?” Francesca says.

  “It’s a long story, but we’ll try to explain,” Quickly says.

  “We were hoping you would,” I say. “It seems like there were a whole lot of things that we probably should have known, that we somehow didn’t get told, especially the universe being fractal thing. We could’ve saved ourselves a whole lot of wasted energy in the wrong 2009 if we’d known that.”

  “Well, there were reasons,” Quickly replies.

  “Dad, maybe I should do it,” Mym interjects. Dr. Quickly looks to her and nods, then settles back in his chair. “This is mostly my doing,” Mym says.

  Hers?

  “Which part?” I say.

  “The leaving-you-in-the-dark part,” Mym says. “I know there were things that you needed to know that you didn’t, and dangers you would face as a result, but I had to keep it that way.”

  “Why?” Francesca says. “Why couldn’t you guys just help us get home like we asked?”

  “Because you wouldn’t have come back,” Mym says. “And I really needed you to come back.”

  I watch her face. She looks pained by what she’s saying. “I know it was selfish of me, but I had to try. I’ve tried for so long to do it on my own, and I couldn’t anymore.”

  “Do what?” I say.

  “Save my dad.”

  I sit back in my chair. “Oh.” Her eyes are welling up with tears. “But wait, when did we save your dad?”