by Ryan Schow
“Have you ever been to New Mexico?” he asks. Not waiting for me to answer, because apparently he already knows, he says, “Of course you haven’t. Not since Dulce.”
“Still…”
Neither of us say anything for the next hour. Then we’re pulling off the highway, traveling down a paved stretch of hillside up to a property that turns into a long dirt road that eventually leads us to a plot of land that looks fortified by a large metal fence. My dream boat driver of this charming slab of American muscle gets us through the gate with a remote key pad.
We drive a little further into the property and see this lovely little cottage with views of a wide valley and the mountains behind it. It’s a little fuzzy behind all the dust coating the Camaro’s windshield, but even that can’t hide the magnificence of the property and its scenery.
“This is gorgeous. It’s like a Thomas Kinkade painting.”
“You love it here,” he says, killing the engine in front of a cottage, then kicking open the car door.
I do?
The cottage’s front door opens and a woman steps out on the porch. I climb out of the car, shade my eyes from the sun and stare at the woman. She steps off the porch and walks toward me, a smile on her face, but not like a full-out, welcome-to-my-humble-abode type smile.
No, it’s more hesitant. And what the hell is she wearing?
It’s like a house dress, but moderately cute. If we’re in the eleventh hour and the apocalypse is opening its jaws any minute—and obviously they know it—why is she wearing a motherfreaking housedress?
“Hey,” she says, the sun still blasting my eyes.
“Hi,” I say, tentative, blinking.
Then she comes into perfect view and I can’t help but gasp. I’m looking at me, but in seven years. Then I’m looking at the guy and hoping to Jesus Christ that he’s my last supper. I start to wonder, though, because the way this version of me is looking in her housedress, I’m not sure I could pull the D in that kind of get-up.
“You can,” she says, reading my mind and laughing. “We did.”
Still looking at him, I say, “So he’s ours?” She nods, and I want to cry. Finally! He gives a hearty laugh, his first for me, and it’s a comforting sound.
This timeline’s version of future me stops smiling, though, a grave pain running through her eyes. “He’s ours for now, but if we don’t stop this thing in the next few days, he’s going to die like everyone else and we won’t have him anymore. We won’t have anyone.”
I look at her, then at him. He seems to know the score, and even though he’s not looking okay with it, he’s dug in. Committed to the fight.
“How do we stop it?”
“We don’t,” he says. “That’s the problem.”
“So where are we jumping to?” I ask, wanting to know. “You said you wanted to take me here, but then I was going to jump.”
“The guy who creates the switching mechanisms on the nuclear warheads, the one that allows him to generate a single, triggering signal, he’s in Romania, so that’s where we’re jumping. But we need to go now.”
“If time is that tight, why didn’t we jump already?”
“Because I needed to say good-bye, just in case,” he replies, his eyes on the housedress version of me. He goes to her and they hug. I turn around, not wanting to intrude, even though this is future me and he’s ours now.
I guess I just think that if future me who showed up at our place in New York and took Sebastian from me, if she said we fail, and my future boy-toy is certain we’re going to fail—in so many words he said we don’t stop the signal and all the warheads go off—then what he’s doing is saying good-bye because he expects to die with me. Oh my God, what must be going through my future self’s mind right now?
I’m sad for her. For him. This guy saying good-bye.
My future guy.
He turns to me and says, “Okay, then. Time to go,” and housedress me is turning around, wiping her eyes. She knows he’s going to die.
He hands me a marble, takes one of his own, and tells me the coordinates to punch in.
“Wait,” I say. He looks at me. “What are we going to do?”
“Kill the coder before he can upload the signal to the chain of nuclear weapons.” The same chain of nuclear warheads set off in 2082, in Raven’s future. The same chain that, all across the world, charred the earth and laid waste to five billion of earth’s inhabitants.
“No.”
“What?” he says.
The world is about to blow up and I can’t stop looking into his eyes, how I’m thinking I could get lost in there, how maybe I’ve already fallen in love with him and now he’s whisking us off to his death. His and so many other people’s.
Everything in me says to go with him. That we need to go. Future me from back in New York, she would’ve gone. She had to have gone with him. I mean, seriously, as dickmatized as I am with this guy right now, I’d follow him into the bowels of hell just for a kiss.
“We can’t go.”
“This is the only way,” he says. “Quit stalling, Savannah. Seriously.” He gives me the coordinates again, but I stop him.
“What’s the man’s name? The programmer?”
“Vasile Abbadie.”
“How detailed is your dossier on him?” I ask.
“Very.”
“Good, can I have it?”
He taps his head with his pointer finger then says, “It’s in here, and this is off limits to you, under strict orders from her.” He turns and points to housedress me. She just stares, her eyes still wet. Still watering.
I gaze at her and say, “All the other times, we fail. That’s what I was told before I arrived. I’m told we fail.”
She puts her hand to her mouth and I know what we lost when we traveled back to Berlin, how we took a chance on a man and he went and—
The point is, losing people isn’t easy for us, especially when we decide we’re going to love them with all our heart. I can tell she loves this guy. That future me does. That I let myself fall in love again.
“What do you suggest?” she asks me.
“I need what’s in his head.”
She looks at him, and I turn and look at him, the gravitational pull toward him both emotional and sexual. This is not the time, I remind myself.
Pull yourself together.
“Give it to her,” she says. “But just that. Nothing else.”
When I crawl his brain, it’s like a filing system, which is strange. I’ve never been blocked access from a person before. Well, actually, young Alice shut me out once. She just gave me a single red door to walk through. The rest of her memories, they were…someplace else.
With this young man, what he gave me was a file titled “Vasile Abbadie.” All the other files were his memories, but they weren’t accessible to me.
“Stop pressing,” he says, “You have the file. Open it. Take it.”
I do, then I do.
Then I gulp down the marble, put in different coordinates, wait, then return to the guy freaking out because I have his marble bag. His time travel devices. Just before I blink him out of existence, right before I’m sucked back up into the cosmic poophole, I bump off his brain and grab what I can, which is only a name. His name. But it’s enough.
Agustin Sandino, but housedress me simply calls him August.
5
The squeezing and dematerializing of my physical body through the wormhole is no less painful than before. Making two jumps so close together somehow makes the traveling so much worse. When I’m shat out on the carpet of an older house in front of a family of seven kids and all their broken things (thanks to yours truly), I’m slow to get up. Two of the girls break into tears, which quickly turns to wailing. From behind me, the blows reign down. I spin, see a harried woman beating me with a broom stick and cursing at me in Romanian.
Using my mind, I stop the mother’s arms from swinging, then I snatch the broom away from her and zing it acro
ss the room. The kids freeze, their eyes drawn back with wonder and fear. All but the two crying.
The stink of the place hits me at once. It’s a small house, floral pattern drapes, hand-me-down couches, dirty windows and, Jesus f*ck, what is that smell? I hold my nose, follow the scent trail to a pot on the stove holding two skinned bunnies.
It’s like that old movie Fatal Attraction where Glenn Close was a freaking psycho and boiled Michael Douglas’s kid’s bunny on the stove because her love had turned to scorn and then rage. But this is no movie, and these boiling bunnies aren’t part of some revenge plot as much as they’re what’s for dinner.
“Vasile,” I say, loud at first, then louder.
The kids’ trance breaks, and three of them look at the little boy who would be the boy to later create the coding necessary to trigger a hive of nuclear bombs that would nearly destroy the planet. The really shitty thing is, he’s just a kid. A cute one at that.
I’ve never killed a child before. But I have to choose: the world, or his life?
Damn. I have to kill him.
Stepping forward, every one of the kids is moving away from me but young Vasile with his cowlick of brown hair, his stained shirt and his cute little pants. He’s six years old. Perhaps I should’ve gone back in time to his birth and killed him in the womb. His mother would be devastated, but at least she wouldn’t know the loss I was about to give her.
This has me thinking of Netty and how The Operator killed hers and Brayden’s child like that and it makes me wince.
My feelers roll inside the boy’s chest. I feel his tender heart beating like it’s my own. The little thing is hammering away, giving him life, responding to his fear, causing him to sweat and worry and flood his system with adrenaline.
He stares at me, unblinking.
Paralyzed.
His bowels are almost loose enough to drain into his homemade pants because he can’t understand why I came from no where and why his mother can’t move.
I slip my invisible hands around his heart, take it, cradling it gently, feeling it beating. A dark sigh escapes me. I push back what’s left of my morality, shove it into a pit and tell myself not to feel, that this is a necessary evil (I’m evil), then start to squeeze (OMG, I can’t believe I’m doing this). His hand goes to his chest, delicate, a twist of pain contorting his once adorable face.
Good Lord, I can’t do this.
And that’s why everyone dies, I warn myself. Because you’re too much of a pussy to make the hard choices. That’s what I tell myself.
This whole time, the boy can’t tear his eyes from me. Stilled with fear, he’s not breathing right. Choking back the tears, his hand starts to paw at his shirt. He’s bending, going to a knee as I stare at him. As I’m killing him.
A mother like his, a mother who would make her own kids’ clothes and boil rabbits for a rabbit stew, she’s obviously doing everything she can. And she’s struggling. Will this be the thing that undoes her? Will all the kids suffer her inevitable collapse?
Most assuredly.
I let go of Vasile’s heart, withdraw the invisible force I stuffed inside him. Okay, so I don’t kill the kid—I was a fool to think I ever could!—but that doesn’t mean I can’t stop the bombs, this boy, the future. For a second, I just stand there. Telling myself to think. Desperate to find that other way.
Then it hits me.
Crawling his brain, I access his long term memory and insert a message into his head. It’s highly subliminal, and I drive it deep inside his mind using both words and imagery. I put the words, IF YOU WRITE SO MUCH AS ONE PIECE OF CODE, THIS IS HOW I WILL KILL YOU, into his head. He doesn’t understand the message, but he will later in life. And if he doesn’t get the message, the implanted imagery will trigger. Visuals of how Raven killed. How she massacred the wicked and the corrupt. How she could just think a body inside out and the body would turn inside out in a wash of gore.
It’s cruel, I know. But this is how he lives, how everyone lives.
My eyes rolling to inky black, the veins standing in my skin, I place a palm on Vasile’s head and shove death after horrific death into his memory banks. Raven’s many murders are beyond ghastly. They’re revolting. And this kid? He’ll likely suffer a psychotic break if he tries to write a single line of code because these memories will come flooding forth if he starts to become the man who nearly kills the world. The failsafe is, they’ll only be triggered if he sits down to a computer with the intent of coding. Otherwise, consider them long term storage.
Vasile gives a jolt the second his mind accepts the memory. His chest is rising and falling fast, like he’s hyperventilating, but then he starts to calm down. I store the imagery away. Protect him from it, for now.
After that I take a moment to consider what I’ve done, determine if it was enough, and then I use the marble I needed to return to my house in New York, to Sebastian, and instead use one of the stolen marbles to get back to housedress me and August Sandino.
Future me and August are surprised to see me, but I’m not done yet. I walk into their house, startling them both, and say, “Alright August, I need the names of all the people you have that are party to this future holocaust and I need them right now.”
They’re both taken aback that I know his name, but neither says a word. August simply rises, walks to his office then returns with detailed notes on almost fifty people.
“I need a quiet space.”
They take me to a room, which looks like a guest room, except for a lot of stuff that looks like shit you’d dump in storage. I lay on the bed, close my eyes, reach out with my psychic feelers.
On the way out, August says to housedress me, “What is she doing?” to which she replies, “She’s going to kill everyone on that list in the next few hours and pray that when she’s done, the bombs don’t go off.”
When I wake up, I feel nauseous and weak. I’m not sure how long I’ve been out, but it looks like morning and I swear to God, I feel run the hell over.
Forty seven-people were on August’s list (my kill list), but with the threats I leveled on young Vasile when he was just a boy, he never entered the picture, so things changed. Of the forty-seven people, only twenty-three were involved, but I couldn’t get everyone because this operation was compartmentalized. People didn’t know other people involved. Some knew some, but no one knew everyone.
This perfect plan was going awry. I know I missed a few.
I’m sure of it.
The problem I will keep from future me and my beau is that there are detailed constructs erected to protect each of the guilty parties from discovery, from interrogation in the case of capture, and from any of them suddenly growing a conscience.
This, of course, keeps me from being certain I’ve stopped anything. It makes me wonder if I’ve gone and screwed everything up.
When I stagger out to the kitchen, August is sitting by himself at the breakfast table. He’s staring at a bowl of uneaten oatmeal that I take from him and start eating. Housedress me joins us a few minutes later wearing jeans and a cute top and I feel bad for having judged her so harshly for yesterday’s attire.
“What do we do?” she asks me.
“Wait.”
“What time are they supposed to go off?” August asks.
“In about an hour,” I say.
An hour passes and nothing. We all just look at each other, the relief on our faces, our bodies able to breathe right for the first time since my arrival.
We’ve done it. We stopped the bombs.
I’m not sure for how long, because I know one thing about the global elite, about the hellish consortium of evil pulling the purse strings on this world, and that’s that they never give up. That’s why Raven went through eons of killing sprees. She had to root out the cancer, and she knew if she didn’t, one day they’d rise up and restart their agenda for global dominance all over again.
Two hours later, August looks at me with a smile and says, “I think you really did
it.”
Letting go, feeling pretty good about myself, I say, “Did you really ever doubt me?”
And that’s when the first nuke went off, coloring the sky a fiery orange, turning the air into an eerie, unnatural silence. Then the ground started to rumble and seconds later the shockwave hit, a rolling blast-wave of utter violence and destruction that consumed all of us in fire and the roar of catastrophic, blunt-force death.
6
It takes me a day, or perhaps a week—who knows?—to dig myself out of the rubble, far longer to heal enough to move without shivering and shaking with a pain so ferocious and so unbelievable, I swear my brain is splitting every few minutes. My skin is scorched so badly it glows a reddish orange in some parts and is charred to a blackened crisp in most others. So much of my skin is gone I can see my bones and the dirt crushed into my open wounds.
I should be dead. Really. Why am I not dead?
How is this possible?
And the pain. Oh. My. God. The pain. Everything felt white hot, like burning phosphorus on your skin. Like if you soaked yourself in gasoline and set yourself on fire then burned nearly to death for days.
Rather than crawling to wherever to heal, I go back into the smoky rubble and look for the time travel devices. I find a few scattered here and there some days later. Much of my skin has stopped burning, and it’s healing, but every breath I take is toxic. It’s so toxic even my paranormal healing abilities are stunted. Looking up with one eye that’s still foggy, I see a sky that is constant black, and powdered with ash.
I die, then come back only to die again.
Then the rains come.
Each drop is acidic, and it sizzles my sluggishly healing skin. Most of my hair is gone and slow to grow back, and my left eye finally starts to heal.
Everywhere around, the land is burning, the ground is black and sizzling orange, nothing survived but me. And maybe future me, although I haven’t seen her yet. I’m desperate to find her. Yet I can’t do anything but go back and hope the next version of me is successful where me and my past counterparts have failed.
