by Blake Crouch
He looks at Helena. She sits beside him in the snow, staring a vertical mile down toward the city with the same thousand-yard stare she’s had for the last year, knowing this day was coming unless a miracle occurred.
Holding this new timeline up against the last, the change in Helena is disconcerting, this version of her a slight degradation from the previous iteration, most evident in the quieter moments.
Less patience.
More distance.
More anger.
More depression.
Harder.
What must that have been like for her, reliving a relationship from the beginning, with all the knowledge of its weaknesses and strengths, before it even started? How was she even able to connect with him? With his naïveté? It must have been like speaking to a child sometimes, because, though he’s technically still the same person, the perspective gap between who Barry was five minutes ago and who he is now with all of his memories is a yawning chasm. Only now is he truly himself.
He says, “I’m sorry, H.”
“For what?”
“It must have been maddening, living our relationship again.”
She almost smiles. “I did want to murder you on a semi-regular basis.”
“Were you bored?”
“Never.”
The air is heavy with the question.
“You don’t have to do it again,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“With me.”
She looks at him, hurt. “Are you saying you don’t want to?”
“That is not what I’m saying. Not at all.”
“It’s OK if you are.”
“I’m not.”
“Do you want to be with me again?” she asks.
“I love you.”
“That is not an answer.”
“I want to spend every life with you. I told you this last week,” he says.
“It’s different now that you have full memories of every timeline. Isn’t it?”
“I’m with you, Helena. We only scratched the surface on the physics of time. There’s so much more for us to learn.”
He feels his phone vibrate in the pocket of his parka. This last hike together to their favorite spot was worth it, but they should leave now. Return to civilization. Watch the world remember and then get the fuck out before the soldiers come for them, even though he’s doubtful he and Helena would be found so soon. They lived under new identities this time around.
Helena takes out her phone and unlocks the home screen.
She says, “Oh God.”
Struggling onto her feet, she takes off running in her snowshoes, moving awkwardly back down the trail.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“We have to go!”
“What’s wrong?” he shouts after her.
She shouts back, “I will leave you!”
He clambers up and takes off after her.
It’s a quarter mile downhill through the fir trees. His phone keeps buzzing—someone lighting him up with texts—and despite the massive footwear, he reaches the trailhead in less than five minutes, crashing into the hood of their Jeep, breathless and sweating through his winter gear.
Helena is already climbing in behind the wheel, and he scrambles into the passenger seat, still wearing the snowshoes as she cranks the engine and tears out of the otherwise empty parking lot, the tires spinning on the icy pavement.
“What the hell, Helena?”
“Look at your phone.”
He digs it out of his jacket.
Reads the first lines of an emergency text on the home screen:
Emergency Alert
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO MULTIPLE US TARGETS. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Slide for more
“We should’ve seen this coming,” she says. “Remember their UN statement on the last timeline?”
“ ‘Any further use of the chair will be seen as an act of war.’ ”
Helena drives too fast through a sharp curve, the tires sliding on the snowpack, the ABS braking kicking in.
“If you wrap the Jeep around a tree, we’ll never—”
“I grew up here, I know how to fucking drive in snow.”
She guns it on a straightaway, densely packed fir trees rushing past on either side as they scream down the mountain.
“They have to attack us,” Helena says.
“Why do you say that?”
“For all the reasons we talked about when I was at DARPA. Everyone’s worst-case scenario is that one country sends someone back half a century and unwrites the existence of billions. They have to hit us with everything they’ve got and hope to destroy the chair before we use it.”
Helena turns on the radio and pulls out of the entrance to the state park. They’ve already descended a couple thousand feet, and the only snow on the ground consists of melting patches in the shade.
“—interrupt this program. This is a national emergency. Important instructions will follow.” The terrifying sound header of the Emergency Alert System blares inside the Jeep. “The following message is transmitted at the request of the US government. This is not a test. The North American Aerospace Defense Command has detected the launch of Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles. These missiles are expected to strike numerous targets on the North American continent within the next ten to fifteen minutes. This is an attack warning. I repeat. This is an attack warning. An attack warning means that an actual attack against this country has been detected and that protective action should be taken. All citizens should take cover immediately. Move to a basement or interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. Stay away from windows. If outdoors or in a vehicle, head for shelter. If none is available, lie flat in a ditch or other depression.”
Helena accelerates to a hundred miles per hour on the country road, the foothills falling away behind them in the side and rearview mirrors.
Barry leans down and starts to unbuckle the straps that attach the snowshoes to his snow-encrusted hiking boots.
When they merge onto the interstate, Helena pushes the engine to its breaking point.
After a mile, they enter the outskirts of the city.
More and more cars are pulled over onto the shoulder, doors left open as drivers abandoned their vehicles in search of shelter.
Helena hits the brakes as the road becomes log-jammed across all lanes of traffic. Hordes of people are fleeing their cars, hopping the guardrail, and tumbling down an embankment that bottoms out at a stream running heavy and brown with snowmelt.
“Can you get through to the next exit?” Barry asks.
“I don’t know.”
Helena pushes on, dodging people and driving through a handful of open car doors, the front bumper of the Jeep ripping them off in order to pass. The exit ramp to their turnoff is impassable, so she maneuvers the Jeep up a steep, grassy hill and onto the shoulder, finally squeezing between a UPS truck and a convertible to reach the top of the overpass.
In contrast to the interstate, the avenue is practically empty, and she burns down the middle of it as another alert blares through the speakers.
Their lab is in Lakewood, a western suburb of Denver, in a redbrick building that used to be a firehouse.
They’re just over a mile away now, and Barry stares out the window, thinking how odd it is to see so little movement anywhere.
No other cars driving on the road.
Hardly any people out.
By his estimation, it’s been at least ten minutes since they heard the first emergency alert broadcast.
He looks over at Helena to say what he’s already said before, that he wants to do this again with her no matter what, when through her window, he glimpses the
brightest light he has ever seen—an incandescent flower blooming on the eastern horizon near the cluster of downtown skyscrapers, so intense it burns his corneas as it overtakes the world.
Helena’s face becomes radiant, and everything in his field of vision, even the sky, is robbed of color, blanching into a brilliant, searing white.
He’s blind for five seconds, and when he can see again, everything happens at once.
All the glass in the Jeep exploding—
The pine trees in a park straight ahead bending so far sideways their tips touch the ground—
Structural debris from a disintegrated strip mall streaming across the road, blown by a furious wind—
A man pushing a shopping cart on the sidewalk flung fifty feet through the air—
And then their Jeep is flipping, the scrape of metal against pavement deafening as the shockwave blows them across the road, sparks flying into Barry’s face.
As the Jeep comes to rest against the curb, the noise of the blast arrives, and it is the loudest thing he has ever heard—world-ending loud, chest-crushing loud—and a single thought rips through his mind: the detonation sound wave reached them too quickly.
A matter of seconds.
They’re far too close to ground zero to survive very long.
Everything becomes still.
His ears are ringing.
His clothing singed all over with fire-ringed holes that are still eating through fabric.
A receipt in one of the cup holders has combusted.
Smoke pours through the vents.
The Jeep is resting on the passenger side, and he’s still buckled into the seat, at a sideways attitude to what’s left of the world. He cranes his neck to look up at Helena, who’s still strapped in behind the wheel, her head hanging motionless.
He calls her name, but he can’t even hear his own voice in his head.
Nothing but the vibration of his larynx.
He unbuckles his seat belt and turns painfully to face his wife.
Her eyes are closed and her face is bright red, the left side of it covered in glass-shrapnel from the window.
He reaches over and unbuckles her seat belt, and as she falls out of the seat onto him, her eyes open and she takes a sudden, gasping breath.
Her lips move, trying to say something, but she stops when she realizes neither of them can hear a thing. She lifts a hand turned red from second-degree burns and points at the glassless windshield.
Barry nods, and they climb through, struggling finally onto their feet to stand in the middle of the road, surrounded by devastation only fathomed in nightmares.
The sky is gone.
Trees turned to skeletons and molten leaves drifting down from them like fire-rain.
Helena is already stumbling up the road. As Barry hurries after her, he notices his hands for the first time since the blast. They’re the same color as Helena’s face, and already forming blisters from the white-hot flash of thermal radiation.
Reaching up to touch his face and head, he comes away with a clump of hair.
Oh Christ.
Panic hits.
He comes alongside Helena, who’s limp-jogging now over the pavement, which is covered in smoking debris.
It’s evening-dark, the sun invisible.
Pain is encroaching.
In his face, his hands, his eyes.
His hearing returns.
The sound of his footsteps.
Car alarms.
Someone scream-crying in the distance.
The god-awful silence of a stunned city.
They turn onto the next street, Barry figuring they’re still a half mile from the firehouse.
Helena stops suddenly, bends over, and vomits in the middle of the street.
He tries to put his hand on her back, but when his palm touches her jacket, he instinctively pulls it away in pain.
“I’m dying, Barry. You are too.”
She straightens, wipes her mouth.
Helena’s hair is falling out, and her breathing sounds ragged and painful.
Just like his.
“I think we can make it,” he says.
“We have to. Why would they hit Denver?”
“If they unleashed their full arsenal, they’re striking every major city in America, thousands of warheads, probably hoping they get lucky and take out the chair.”
“Maybe they did.”
They move on, closer to ground zero by the looks of the towering cloud of ash and fire, still roiling and pluming in the indeterminate distance.
They pass an overturned school bus, the yellow turned black, the glass blown out, voices crying from within.
Barry slows down and starts toward it, but Helena says, “The only way you can help them is for us to get home.”
He knows she’s right, but it takes everything in his power not to at least try to help, even with a word of comfort.
He says, “I wish we’d never lived to see a day like this.”
They jog past a burning tree with a motorcycle and its driver blown into the branches, thirty feet up.
Then a woman staggering hairless and naked in the middle of the street with her skin coming off like the bark of a birch tree and her eyes abnormally large and white, as if they’d expanded to absorb the horror all around her. But the truth is, she’s blind.
“Block it,” Helena says, crying. “We’re going to change this.”
Barry tastes blood in his mouth, pain slowly encompassing his world.
It feels like his insides are melting.
Another blast, this one much farther away, shakes the ground beneath them.
“There,” Helena says.
The firehouse lies straight ahead.
They’re standing in the midst of their neighborhood, and he barely noticed.
Because of the pain.
Mostly because it doesn’t look anything like their street.
Every house built of wood has been leveled, power lines toppled, trees blow-torched and stripped of every hint of green.
Vehicles have been strewn everywhere—some flipped onto their roofs, others on their sides, a few still burning.
It’s raining ash and fallout that will give them acute radiation poisoning if they’re still in this hellscape by nightfall.
The only movement anywhere is from blackened forms writhing on the ground.
In the street.
In the smoldering front yards of what once were homes.
Barry feels a surge of helpless nausea as he realizes these are people.
Their firehouse is still standing.
The windows are shattered-out, gaping-black eye sockets, and the redbrick has been turned the color of charcoal.
The pain in Barry’s face and hands is exquisite as they climb the steps to the entrance and move inside over the front door, which lies cracked and flattened across the foyer.
Even through the pain, the shock of seeing their home of twenty-one years like this is devastating.
Weak light filters in through the windows, revealing a place of utter ruin.
Most of the furniture has simply exploded.
The kitchen reeks of natural gas, and in the far corner of the building, smoke trickles through the open doorway to their bedroom, where the flickering of flames is visible on the walls.
As they rush through the house, Barry loses his balance in the archway between the dining and living room. He clutches the side of the archway to stop himself from falling and cries out in pain, leaving behind a handprint of blood and skin where he palmed the wall.
The access to their secure lab is another vault door, this time in the walk-in storage closet of what used to be the home office. The door itself is wired to the rest of the house, so using the keypad
entry is out. Helena opens the flashlight app on her phone and sets the five-digit combination manually in the semidarkness.
She reaches for the wheel, but Barry says, “Let me.”
“It’s fine.”
“You still have to die in the tank.”
“Fair enough.”
He steps to the door and takes hold of the three-spoked handle, groaning with agony as he strains to crank the wheel. Nothing’s moving but the layers of skin he’s stripping away, and a horrifying thought occurs to him—what if the heat of the blast fused the innards of the door? A vision of their last day together—cooking slowly from thermal radiation in the burned-out husk of their home, unable to reach the chair, knowing that they failed. That when the next shift happened, if it ever did, they would either blink out of existence altogether or into a world of someone else’s making.
The wheel budges, then finally gives way.
The locks retract and the door swings open, exposing a spiral stairwell leading down into a lab that’s nearly identical to the one they built in the desert outside of Tucson. Only here, instead of digging into the earth, they lined the stone basement of the old firehouse with steel walls.
There’s no light.
Barry leaves part of his hand on the wheel as he pulls it away and follows Helena, corkscrewing down the stairs in the meager light of her phone’s sustained camera flash.
The lab is strangely silent.
No humming of the fans that cool the servers.
Or the heat pump that keeps the water in the deprivation tank at the steady temperature of human skin.
The phone light sweeps across the walls as they move toward the end of the server rack, where a power bank of lithium ion batteries is the only thing glowing in the lab.
Barry goes to a panel of switches on the wall that transfers power from the electrical grid to the batteries. He faces another moment of pure terror, because if the blast damaged the batteries or connectors to any of the equipment, this is all futile.
“Barry?” Helena says. “What are you waiting for?”
He flips the switches.
Overhead lights flicker on.
The servers begin to hum.
Helena is already easing down into the chair at the terminal, which has begun its boot-up sequence.
