Strike

by D. J. MacHale

  “I’m sorry, Tucker,” she finally said.

  “For what?” I replied. “The list of possibilities is pretty long.”

  “For messing with your head,” she said. “For getting between you and Tori. For flirting with you. For leading both you and Kent on. It wasn’t right. None of it was.”

  “I’ll tell you what else wasn’t right,” I said. “You know I’m only fourteen, right? I know the rules of civilization have all gone out the window but some of the stuff you were doing was against the law. I mean, getting in the shower with me? Seriously?”

  Olivia looked down, embarrassed, but she smiled. “It might not have been right but it wasn’t against the law. I’m only sixteen.”

  That rocked me. I believed that the “old” Olivia might have been sixteen. She came across like a flirty, spoiled girl who was used to getting whatever she wanted. Especially from guys. But that was an act. She was a soldier. A rebel soldier. She handled herself like a seasoned fighter with the confidence that came from experience and training.

  “You look shocked,” she said.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Don’t be. Life is much faster now. I joined the Air Force when I was fourteen. That’s what happens when people only live to forty.”

  It was yet another example of how cruel and joyless the world had become.

  “Okay, well, so it wasn’t illegal,” I said. “But it was still wrong. I get that you were in a bad spot and had to play a part. But that doesn’t explain why you were messing with our heads.”

  “I know, you’re right. How I acted had nothing to do with either my mission or with trying to hide my true identity. What you see here is what I was trained to become. I’m a soldier. I can survive in the desert for weeks. I can cut down an enemy with a pulser from fifty yards. I’m better at hand-to-hand combat than most guys. That’s what they turned me into. When I was flirting with you and Kent, that was me being . . . me. The real me. Yeah, it was wrong and I was being a brat, but by doing all that it made me feel like I had a little bit of control. And I’ll be honest, it was fun. I like you guys. Kent is full of himself, but he’s totally genuine. And loyal. You, on the other hand, are a sweetheart. I loved hanging out with you all summer and going to the movies and seeing the reaction you had when I wore that bikini.”

  “Yeah, that was hot,” I said.

  “I know, right?” she said, giggling.

  For a moment I felt as though I was sitting with the old Olivia.

  “I’m sorry for causing you grief, but it was fun for me. I needed it. I needed to be that girl every once in a while or else I would have gone out of my mind.”

  “So you’re saying the Olivia I knew wasn’t a total act?” I asked.

  She shrugged and gave me an innocent smile. “Like it or not.”

  “Then I forgive you, and thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For bringing back a little normal. Oh, and for saving my life back at Area 51. I like that Olivia too. And for this apple.”

  I took a big bite. It was delicious.

  Olivia smiled, leaned forward, and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  “You’re welcome. Finish eating and get some sleep. I’ll come and get you first thing in the morning.”

  As she headed for the door she added, “Now I have to apologize to Kent and Tori.”

  “Be careful. With Kent, at least. He has no idea you were messing with me. He really does love you.”

  “I know he does, and he has no idea that I was flirting with you. I’m too good.”

  She gave me a sly wink and left.

  Her visit made me feel better. Any small sign that the world hadn’t been completely turned inside out was welcome. Learning that Olivia was a trained, competent soldier was unnerving; know-ing that she was still a flirty, hot girl made me believe that there were still some things that were right about life. It was a small comfort, but I took it.

  I finished the bowl of ick, downed the apple and the water, and stretched out on the bed. The sheets were clean and crisp. It was another tiny comfort that made me smile. I fell asleep trying to focus on those small bits of normalcy, and not on the reality that I knew would come roaring back in the morning.

  “C’mon Rook,” Kent said. “They’re waiting for us.”

  I opened my eyes to see Kent and Tori standing over my bed. Both wore the same kind of gray sweats and white T-shirt that I had on.

  Tori sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “We have to decide something first,” she said. “The three of us.”

  I rubbed my face with both hands and did my best to kick my brain into gear.

  “Okay, what?” I said.

  “Olivia said the Sounders have a plan to stop the Retros, and we’re the last piece in the puzzle. They’re going to ask us to do something. The question is how far are we willing to go?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean they may ask us to do something that one of us isn’t comfortable doing. For whatever reason. If that happens are we going to stick together? Or go on our own?”

  Kent started to answer quickly, but stopped to give it more thought.

  “I think we first have to find out what they want us to do,” I said. “After that we can decide how to handle it. But I’ll tell you this much, we came here to fight back. These people are giving us that chance. I can’t imagine anything they could ask me to do would be so horrible that it would make me change my mind about that.”

  Tori thought about my answer, nodded thoughtfully, and said, “I hope you’re right.”

  I pulled myself out of bed, put on the sneakers that were waiting for me underneath, then went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face.

  “Good to go,” I said as I left the bathroom.

  Olivia was waiting for us outside in the hallway. When I saw her, it gave me a momentary shock. She was back to wearing the full camouflage fatigue uniform of the Air Force.

  “Ready?” she asked. Her voice was all business. She had clicked back into Olivia-soldier mode.

  “Where are we going?” Kent asked.

  “To meet with the Sounder command,” she replied. “They came here just to meet you.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t disappoint them,” Tori said.

  “You won’t,” Olivia said with confidence.

  She led us down the corridor to an elevator that brought us to the basement. The place was a disastrous wreck of a building, which is probably why the Sounders picked it. Nobody would think to look for a group of people hanging out in a building better suited for rats. In another better world, the place would probably be condemned. We followed Olivia down a dimly lit subterranean corridor to the one room that had light shining from within.

  “Here we go,” Olivia said. “Relax and be yourselves.”

  “That’s funny coming from you,” Kent said.

  Olivia ignored him and opened the door.

  We stepped inside to see several people standing around, chatting. I had to catch my breath when I saw that they all wore Air Force fatigues. There were five soldiers in all. Two I recognized: Colonel Pike and Captain Sokol. There was another younger woman and two guys who looked our way. When they saw us, they visibly deflated.

  “You’re joking,” one of them said to nobody in particular. “They’re children.”

  Colonel Pike ignored him and stepped up with her hand extended for us to shake.

  “Welcome,” she said. “It sounds like you had a bit more excitement yesterday.”

  “Yeah, you could say that,” Tori said.

  The woman shook all of our hands and looked each of us straight in the eye. Kenny Sokol did the same. We had their respect. I couldn’t say the same thing about the other three Sounders, who stood back, silently appraising us. Whatever they had in mind for
us to do, now that they had seen us they were having second thoughts.

  “Please sit,” Pike said.

  There were a bunch of dirty, hard chairs scattered around that were probably made from the same recycled garbage as the rest of this sorry town. Tori, Kent, and I sat next to one another, facing the members of the Sounder command, who all stood facing us. Olivia stood behind us, a subtle statement that she was with us.

  Colonel Pike looked at her people and scowled.

  “You’re all making me nervous,” she said, half joking. “Would you mind easing up a little and planting it somewhere?”

  Sokol chuckled to himself and pulled up a chair to sit. He was the least stiff of the group. The others grumbled but did the same.

  “Better. Thank you.” Pike then directed her attention to us. “Please forgive my associates. As you can imagine, we’re a bit on edge.”

  “Join the club,” Kent said.

  Colonel Pike looked to be in her forties, which meant she was probably nearing the end of her life, based on the way things worked in the twenty-fourth century. She seemed to be in pretty good shape for an older lady. She could have passed for younger if not for her salt-and-pepper hair. When she spoke she didn’t waste words. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a military commander. Unless you were Colonel Feit, that is. That guy loved to hear himself talk.

  “Kinsey has given us a thorough briefing on you all,” Pike began. “I must say, it was quite impressive.”

  “Who’s Kinsey?” Kent asked me.

  “Olivia,” I replied.

  “Oh, right.”

  “We know all about you, but you know little of us,” she went on. “Let’s correct that. We are all career Air Force. We love our country. We took an oath to protect our flag. But the direction the government, and by extension the military, has taken is untenable. No matter what we may feel about the choices made by those who came before us, there is no jus-tification for genocide. It is barbaric. It is immoral. It must be stopped.”

  “You get no argument from us,” I said.

  “We have all been fulfilling our duties to support the mission to colonize the past. We are aware of every facet. I know Colonel Feit well. We went through the Academy together. He is, to use a word you might be familiar with, a ‘tool.’”

  I wanted to laugh, but held it in.

  “But he’s a smart tool,” she added. “He sees this mission as some sort of game. Major Bova on the other hand is a very different kind of animal. He enjoys inflicting punishment. Frankly, if he were a bit more humane in his treatment of the native workers, the colonization camp would be complete by now. But those are only two of the officers who are directing this endeavor. It is a massive undertaking that was planned and prepped for years by both the military and the United States government. The goal is both simple and brutal. Our mission is to replace the population of the twenty-first century with the population of the twenty-fourth century. It is a crime that is beyond unfathomable.”

  “So then why have you been going along with it?” Tori asked.

  “We could quit in protest,” Sokol said. “But what good would that do? Many of us want this to end, but our numbers are relatively small. We could go public and refuse to do our duty, but the machine would continue on. Public opinion supports the invasion. We are in the minority. That’s why the Sounders were born.”

  “It began with whispers,” Pike said. “A few of us started voicing our concerns to each other. Carefully. Quietly. Eventually we found others who felt as we did. We’d meet secretly, often times right here in this basement. Over time our numbers grew along with our outrage. We created an extensive network within the Air Force. There are Sounders everywhere, both here and in the past, working right alongside those loyal to the Air Force’s mission. We vowed to do whatever we could to disrupt their plans. Olivia Kinsey here is a perfect example. She was assigned by the Air Force to infiltrate Pemberwick Island. Her mission was to report back on the movements of SYLO once the invasion began.”

  “What I was going to do instead was just the opposite,” Olivia said. “I was going to make myself known to SYLO and help them with whatever information I had about the Retros. But I never got the chance.”

  Pike said, “We have medical staff at the colonization base giving care to those who Bova would rather let die. There are drone pilots who deliberately passed over targets, saving the lives of thousands of people. Construction on many of the secondary domes has gone poorly because of mysterious disruptions in the process. We have quietly done what we could to help the victims of the past—”

  “Except for the one thing that needed to be done,” I said. “Stopping the invasion.”

  “We don’t have the power to pull off a coup and overthrow the government,” Sokol said. “It’s as simple as that.”

  “So then what’s the big plan?” Tori asked. “Olivia said you’re going to try and stop the Air Force. If you don’t have the numbers, how is that possible?”

  Pike glanced back to the others as if looking to get their permission to continue. She was met with nods and shrugs.

  “Our plan is to stage a mission that involves a rudimentary military tactic that has been used effectively since the dawn of warfare,” she explained.

  “Which is?” Tori asked.

  “We’re going to blow up the Bridge,” Sokol said.

  Tori and I exchanged looks.

  “Cool,” Kent said.

  “Simple as that?” I said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Pike replied. “Though the Bridge was created over seventy years ago, the phenomenon that created the time anomaly remains a mystery. Physicists from both times have studied the Bridge and have yet to come up with a definitive explanation as to why the atomic blast created it. The one thing they can all agree on is that the explosion propelled matter faster than the speed of light, which would mean the Bridge could only have been opened to the future.”

  “So there’s no such thing as blasting open a doorway into the past?” I asked.

  “So they say,” Pike replied.

  “You’ve seen the rigid frame that was built around the bridge in both times,” Sokol said. “All that frame does is define the opening. It serves no other purpose. Our fear is that if we try to sabotage the Bridge in a conventional way, all we’d end up doing is destroying the frame. We need to be sure that the Bridge itself is sealed.”

  “So how do you do that?” Kent asked.

  “Not all of the Sounders are military,” Pike explained. “We have engaged physicists and engineers who are as appalled at the misuse of this incredible gift as we are. They have a theory, though unfortunately it is nothing more than a theory. Their thinking is that the only way to seal the Bridge is with another event that duplicates the original, only on this side of time.”

  The three of us sat there, stunned by her words.

  The five Sounders stared back at us, waiting for our reaction.

  “Do you understand what she’s saying?’ Olivia finally said.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said abruptly. “You’re going to set off another atomic bomb inside the dome.”

  “Exactly,” Pike said.

  “Wait,” Kent said. “You just so happen to have an atomic bomb lying around?

  “Several,” Sokol said with a mischievous smile.

  “Wait, what?” Tori said.

  “Kinsey tells us that you were at Fenway Park when that dome project was destroyed by the SYLO forces,” Pike said. “That wasn’t the only dome under construction in the past. There are three more going up as we speak.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “They are duplicates of the original dome here in the desert. As much as the government has decided that we’re better off living in the past, they’re hedging their bets. They plan to build several of those domes around the world, then once we have coloni
zed the past and set the world on a new course, they would duplicate the event that created the original Bridge—”

  “And blast a few more bridges to the future,” I exclaimed. “But why?”

  “You can’t change the future,” Sokol said. “This time will always be the disaster that it is now. The thinking is that once the world has been set on a more responsible course, Bridges can be opened to the future of that new and better world. Nobody here wants to live in the past forever. They want to live in a better version of their own time.”

  “Can they do that and move forward to this exact same time?” Tori asked.

  “Doubtful,” Pike said. “It isn’t an exact science but that doesn’t really matter. They want to leave this wretched time, go back to a more hospitable era, fix the mistakes that were made, and then reap the benefits of an improved future.”

  “They want to have their cake and eat it too,” Kent said. “Is it possible?”

  “In theory,” Pike replied. “But it would mean setting off an atomic device in each of the new domes.”

  “So that’s why the bombs exist,” I said.

  “You saw the heavily guarded building outside of the dome?” Sokol asked. “That’s where they are. Our plan is to smuggle one of the devices into the dome, seal the door, and set the beast off. The physicists tell us the ensuing explosion stands a very good chance of sealing the Bridge. But even if it doesn’t, the radiation released inside the dome will be enough to delay the invasion and colonization. Best-case scenario is we destroy the Bridge. Worse case is we buy time for SYLO to regroup and prepare a better defense. Either way, it’s worth the risk.”

  The room fell silent as we tried to wrap our heads around the incredible plan.

  “Any questions?” Pike asked.

  “Yeah,” Kent said. “Why are we the last pieces of the puzzle? I don’t know anything about setting off atomic bombs.”

  The Sounders exchanged uneasy looks. I had the feeling we were about to hear something we weren’t going to like.

  “As we told you, the Sounders aren’t a formidable military force,” Pike said. “Once this mission is underway, it will be next to impossible to see it through without the Air Force trying to stop us.”