Enigma: The Rise of an Urban Legend

by Ryan Schow

  “Jeez, girl,” she says, shaking her head. “When I went, when the situation was the same, when I was you and future me was telling me I had to go?—I didn’t act like such a pussy. I just did it.”

  “Did she tell you that you were going to fail?”

  “No, she told me billions of lives were at stake and we were made for this, so it was our responsibility to go. So I powered up and just went.”

  “And did she fail to stop the bombs?”

  Now she looks away.

  “She did, didn’t she?” I press, deeper concerns taking root inside me.

  “What bombs?” Sebastian asks.

  I look at Sebastian, draw a deep breath, then opt for the truth knowing if he cracks, I can erase his mind. “The world loses five billion people when all the nuclear warheads in the world are triggered at once. It’s an accident. A few billion people survive though. That’s in 2082. Fifteen years later, in 2097, the world learns the nukes were triggered by UNCFE, the United Nations Council for Freedom and Equality, in an attempt to cull the population. UNCFE is the world’s governing body. There are no more hard borders, no real sovereignty. In other words, this was no random accident. The global elite did this on purpose.”

  “2082?” he says, his face losing color, except for a slight greenish tinge. “I’ll be…won’t I be dead by then?”

  “That was another timeline, Savannah,” future me says, something grave in her voice.

  “What?”

  “When we flushed Raven for this version of us, we changed the timeline. We altered future events. In the future, there is no Raven de’ Medici.”

  “So the bombs still go off then?”

  “Yeah. That’s why you have to stop them. To succeed where we failed. This is our fault.”

  “When do they go off?”

  “Sooner than 2082,” she says, all her bravado gone, an ominous look on her face. She comes and crawls onto the bed with me, scooting Sebastian over, then scooting me over, too.

  “You shouldn’t touch me,” I say. “Time paradoxes and all that.”

  “We picked up future Raven when she dropped nearly dead on the hood of Alice’s car in the Nevada desert,” future me reminds me. “Did time implode? No. You bathed her, carried her back to the lab, took her to the incinerator after you…parted her out. Did we destroy the universe? No. We didn’t. So I can touch you and you can touch me. It’s fine.”

  Sebastian made to get up, but future me takes his wrist, looks at him and says “Sit,” and he sits. She says “Stay,” and he stays.

  Appraising him, her grim exterior defrosting, future me’s mouth curves into a wayward grin and she says. “Since you and I can touch each other, then maybe before you go, we can both touch him, too. What do you say Sebastian? Are you up for a threesome before you go?”

  He looks at us like we’re completely bonkers, which has future me giggling and present me squirming.

  I worked so hard to be with him, and now that I have him—had him—it’s like she’s trying to drive him away. Does she know something I don’t know? Am I being too uptight here? One look at Sebastian and I realize I’m not blowing anything out of proportion.

  “When do the bombs go off?” I ask future me again, more forceful this time.

  “Seven years.”

  I suck in a bullied breath, turn away, exhale in a long, agonizing sigh.

  “The nuclear war thing,” Sebastian says, gulping, still pale, “it happens in seven years?”

  “Unless she can stop it,” future me says.

  No pressure.

  “But you didn’t, and future, future Savannah didn’t…and now what?—I’m expected to stop it? To succeed where you couldn’t?”

  “We’ve all failed, Savannah.”

  I’m off the bed, pacing the room, breathing so high in my chest I wonder if I’m hyperventilating. “We survive this, though, right? I mean, here you are. Changed, but alive. Is that why you’re being so insensitive? Because of what you had to go through to survive it?”

  Her expression falls flat, then grows really dark with the memories. I want to bump off her brain, but I’m frightened to. So I just watch her, breathless, terrified of what’s about to come out of her mouth.

  “It’s not because we survived it, it’s because everyone we love doesn’t.”

  And there it is…the hard details of the apocalypse.

  2

  So everyone I love is going to die. Great. Freaking awesome-sauce. The sharp inhale, the hitching in my throat, how I look like I’m going to pass out, it startles Sebastian. He knows the calm, collected me. Not the scared version of me. My eyes desperately finding his, tears lining my lids, I can’t go back to a world without anyone I love. I did that after Berlin and it damn near depressed me into a coma. Finally I steady myself, then say, “Fine, I’ll do it, but on one condition.”

  “Name it,” future me says.

  “Not you,” I say, turning to Sebastian. “I’m talking to him.”

  Sebastian looks up. “Me?”

  “Stay with her,” I say, taking his hand. “Stay with future me. As much of a shit as she’s being this evening, as I’m being, she is me, I’m her, we were Raven and I know we need you. I need you.”

  For whatever reason, this makes sense to him.

  Slowly he nods his head.

  Agreeing.

  But then he’s shaking his head, no, and then yes. Like he’s coming to terms with this. Deep down, I wonder if we’re ruining him, if this is ruining him. Inside I agonize over this while looking at her.

  “And that’s why I’m being the way I am,” future me says. “Now he knows most of what he needs to know about us, and now you can go knowing when you come back, if you succeed, he’ll be yours and we’ll be his.”

  “Is dad going to get shot first? I mean, I worry about him, and Margaret…Orianna. You know what Raven saw. What we experienced as her looking inside her mind.”

  “That was another timeline. You need to stop this attack in this timeline. Succeed where the rest of us have failed, otherwise this will be our time loop.”

  I can’t help thinking of the snake eating its tail, how it goes on and on and on…no beginning, no end, just a constant, repetitive loop.

  “So you’ll be with her then?” I ask, looking down at Sebastian for the answer. Part of me is praying he says no, because then I won’t jump into the future, I’ll just hop a plane and me and Sebastian can go back to Huntington Beach and make a life for ourselves.

  But for how long? Seven years?

  “She’s you, right?” he asks me, hesitant. Like he’s starting to get it. I nod. “And you’re her?” he turns and asks future me. She nods, too. Something clears in his eyes. “Okay, then, yes. I’ll be with you. Well, her, I mean. For as long as it works. If it even works at all.”

  Satisfied, future me goes downstairs, returning a moment later with a small velvet pouch I recognize. The time travel devices. My bag of “marbles.”

  She opens it up, hands me one marble-like device, then fishes out another. I study the brilliant bands of color in each of them, almost like they’re alive, something richly organic and full of tiny, microscopic motion rather than an inanimate object. “The second is for your return trip.”

  “What’s going to happen to you?” I ask.

  “Hopefully me and Sebastian will ride off into the sunset together. Or something like that. And in seven years, if all goes well, the only burn we’ll get is from laying out on the beach too long.”

  I slowly nod my head. This is real. I’m about to go. To leave this all behind. For a second I think of making one last bid to stay, but there’s nothing I can say. Future me wouldn’t steer us wrong, would she? Would I? No. She let me know we failed. That she failed. So I won’t.

  I can’t.

  Heading to my closet, my stomach in my throat, my nerves absolutely sailing, I grab a pair of sturdy, comfortable shoes, a pair of jeans that are fairly new but stretchy in case I get into a scrap, a
long sweater over a cotton t-shirt and my favorite bra. My hair is fine, everything else is whatever.

  “We look good for the apocalypse,” future me says.

  “Easy for you to say, bitch.”

  She huffs out a little laugh, then says, “Set the date for April 15, 2024, and remember these jump coordinates.”

  She makes me memorize the return coordinates first, then she gives me the jump coordinates. Looking at Sebastian, who’s holding his breath at this point, I take the larger of the two marbles, then lose myself to the virtual dashboard inside my head. I think into existence the date and the jump coordinates; they appear in the Dashboard in my head. I’m prompted to verify said coordinates, which I do, and then I’m back in the real world seconds later, staring at future me and my lost conquest.

  He’s only lost to me for now, I remind myself.

  “Where did you go?” Sebastian asks, confusion changing the look of his face. I know from experience that a frightening, almost profound emptiness settles over the face when a person is inputting travel coordinates. To Sebastian, of course, this is all knew. He’s trying to be brave, trying to act like this is not a major thing, but the slight tremor in his voice gives him away.

  Future me takes his arm, moves him away from me.

  “There’s a travel dashboard that comes up just behind your eyes,” I say. “Which is strange. But that’s how it works.”

  All I hear before being sucked painfully into the cosmic wormhole is Sebastian saying, “What do you mean, that’s how it wo—”

  3

  Sebastian and future me blink out of my existence as I’m sucked into a bone crushing, soul tearing cosmic colon. My insides feel like they’re collapsing and dematerializing before my eyes—it starts with a lot of freaking pain, then I’m out (blackness and suffocation), and back in (I can’t see my hands, or anything about me as I’m roaring through the looping innards of time), then back out into total, excruciating nothingness before being slammed out of the wormhole and onto some random floor painfully. My joints rattle on impact so badly they feel like they’ve been run over by stampeding cattle.

  Son of a beeyatch!

  I know I’ve paraphrased—even simplified—my experience, but if I were to assign a specific amount of time to my travel, to my agony, I’d say I suffered a good twenty minutes of it. Maybe more. Perhaps less, since time seems to bend and lengthen whenever you’re enduring an excruciating amount of pain. So much so that time itself seems immeasurable.

  But now that’s over and I’m in the future.

  Hopefully.

  Lying on my side, I can’t see much. A cursory look around tells me I’m in some high tech lab. Things all around me are broken and leaking. A thin glass beaker sits half-shattered on a metal lab table that looks knocked backwards from the wormhole yawning opening then slamming shut. Above me, fluorescents are flickering, more than a few of the long tubes blown out.

  Maybe I’m a total dork (I know I am!), but the way I think about exiting the time loop is that it’s like a boisterous fart that just sort of shoots you out of thin air and breaks shit in the process. The cosmic butthole simply puffs you out then rubber-bands itself shut.

  The Enchanted Cornhole, a short story by Isaac Asimov starring yours truly. LOL.

  But not.

  Unfortunately for me, this was no soft landing. That temporal fart destroyed part of someone’s lab. And now I hear that person moving.

  Hello, 2024…it’s me, Savannah.

  There’s chaos in the air, and though I’m trying to bump off the mind of whomever is on the other side of this disaster I created, all I’m getting is mania. And a sharp, acrid smell. Like burnt…something.

  I peek my head over a rolling metal table with an overturned beaker leaking amber fluid by drops not quarts, and I see one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen. Honestly, the mere sight of him shocks my heart to a stop. I think my throat actually paralyzes.

  Then I see his gun.

  The barrel is still smoking and he’s looking right at me.

  “Get up,” he says, lowering the weapon. “We need to go. Now.” He says it with power and authority in his voice, with a warm familiarity in those eyes, and it’s like we’re supposed to know each other, but I’ve never seen him before in my life.

  Can a girl fall in love at first sight?

  Maybe if I caught him doing dishes, or being nice to animals, yes…but standing over a dead guy looking like a male stripper, but fully dressed with a good face and less sweaty?

  F*ck, yes.

  Okay, so I said I wouldn’t be censoring my f-bombs like some basic bitch, but for some reason I’m feeling all virginal around this guy. My God, what is he thinking right now?!

  “If I feel you crawling my head,” he warns me, “I’ll shoot you.”

  Okay, so there’s my answer.

  I raise my hands, like I’m under arrest, cock my head sideways and flash a mischievous grin just in time to get a clear look at the man in the lab coat laid out on the floor with a bullet hole in his forehead and buckets of blood pooling all around him.

  “Was that necessary? Killing him?”

  “Pretty sure it was.”

  “You’re not sure, but you did it anyway?”

  “Way I hear it,” he says, everything about him crackling with vitality and confidence, “most of us will be dead shortly, and this place will be a wasteland of nuclear ruin. So yeah, I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I did it anyway.”

  “Great,” I hear myself mumble, still enamored with the salacious details of this man who knows me and clearly has a few years on me. “So do you have a gun for me?”

  “Like you need one,” he says with a humored, knowing look.

  Yeah, he definitely knows me. Telling me not to crawl his brain, saying I don’t need a gun? Maybe I’d feel more cool with a gun. Like some pre-apocalyptic vigilante in the future old west saving earth from tyranny and eventual global collapse. He’s right though. I don’t need one.

  “What is this place?”

  “Nuclear fission lab. Lots of Uranium isotopes of the Uranium-235 sort, not the Uranium-238 sort. That’s why I’m here. That and to pick you up.”

  “Okay,” I say processing this. “What’s with the mention of isotopes? I don’t understand the difference, or why you’re telling me this.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  I shoot him a funny look, and he relents.

  “Fine,” he says, “but we’re practically out of time. Uranium-238 is a key component in nuclear fission, the splitting of atoms that causes the power behind nuclear power and the subsequent radioactive fallout.”

  “In other words, scorched earth.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And Uranium-235?”

  “Makes Uranium-238 feel like a gentle kiss in comparison.”

  My eyes drift back to the dead lab tech. My eyes then look beyond the lab, through a long glass window that leads to what looks like an underground subway.

  “Atom collider,” he says to my unasked question. “It’s crazy that it’s not enclosed, but whatever. Advances in quantum physics I guess. I’m not good with this shit.”

  “So what now?”

  “First off,” he says, “you look amazing. Second, we need to get going. Like right now. There’s someone you have to meet, and then you’ll jump again, but only because where you’re going, it’s in a hardened, heavily guarded military base. One you can’t just walk in. And you can’t bluff your way inside, either. But if you don’t get in, honestly, we’re all screwed.”

  “Jesus,” I hear myself saying, “I thought maybe I’d have a warm meal, some good company and a decent night’s sleep before this goes down.”

  “You want sleep?” he says practically dragging me into a hallway with half its overhead lights shot out and a floor littered with dead bodies. It smells like cordite, blood and fried circuitry. The hallway is dim, and a pair of flickering lights cast an eerie, almost haunted look over ou
r exit.

  “A little sleep would be nice,” I answer in hushed tones. “Two, maybe three hours. Four hours tops.”

  “If you want sleep, go back home,” he snaps, looking back at me. “This isn’t a fucking slumber party sugar bear, this is a war and we’re in the thick of it.”

  With that statement my skin runs cold and the anxiety spooling up inside me threatens to spin out of control near the surface.

  “Did you do all this?” I ask, looking at all the dead scientists, then at the gun at his side.

  “Yeah,” he says, moving so fast now I have to jog just to keep up.

  “Why?”

  “You know why,” he says, picking up speed. “Now be quiet and run, you’re slowing us down already.”

  4

  We work our way out of the lab, sidestepping corpses, sprinting down hallways that are sometimes lit with bright fluorescent overhead lamps and other times pure black because this super hot-hottie of a man needed cover so he wouldn’t get shot.

  I think I’ve counted forty kills so far.

  “Was this just you?” I ask, half impressed, half horrified. “You killed all of them?”

  “Stop talking,” he says as we’re running nearly full speed toward what he says is an underground parking garage.

  When we get there, I see a battle-hardened Chevy Camaro sitting sideways almost in the way of the exit, black skid marks trailing fifteen feet from the tires out, like he power braked to a sliding stop in front of armed guards (who are now dead) just outside the elevators.

  We jump in the car, he pushes a button and the muscle car’s engine roars to life. Slapping it in gear, this man who I’m now sure I’m in love with stomps on the gas and we squeal out of there, making our way up four full floors of parking before launching out of a tunneled exit into what looks like a heavily forested landscape.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “Offsite lab at the far edge of Los Alamos National Laboratory.”

  “This doesn’t look like New Mexico,” I say, speaking a little louder because the Chevy’s engine is unleashing a visceral growl. We’re heading into a straightaway and now he’s getting on it like all of hell is on our heels.