by Blake Crouch
The low rumble of a distant blast shudders through their bones.
“This is some kind of hell,” she says, dark. “Ready to come down to the lab and kill me again, darling?”
* * *
Barry is no longer in the subterranean lab on his and Helena’s island off the coast of Maine, but sitting instead at a familiar-looking desk in a familiar-looking room. His head hurts with a sensation he hasn’t experienced in some time—the behind-the-eyes-throbbing of a deep hangover.
He’s staring at a witness statement on a computer screen in front of him, and while there are no memories of this timeline yet, he’s realizing, with a mounting horror, that he’s on the fourth floor of the 24th Precinct of the NYPD.
West 100th Street.
Upper West Side.
Manhattan.
He’s worked here before. Not just in this building. On this floor. In this spot. And not a desk like this one. This exact desk. He even recognizes the ink stain from a ballpoint pen mishap.
He pulls out his phone, checks the home screen: April 16, 2019.
The fourth timeline anniversary of Helena dying in that DARPA lab.
What the hell?
He rises out of his chair—substantially heavier than he was in Maine, Colorado, and Arizona—and inside his jacket, he feels the heft of something he hasn’t worn in ages—a shoulder holster.
An eerie silence has overtaken the entire fourth floor of cubicles.
No one typing.
No one talking.
Just a stunned silence.
He looks over at the woman across from him—a cop he remembers, not from this timeline, but the original, before time was fractured by Helena’s chair. She’s a homicide detective named Sheila Redling, who played shortstop for their softball league. She had a wicked arm, and was the best drinker on the team. Blood is running out of Sheila’s nose and down her white blouse, and the look on her face is unquestionably that of a woman in a state of sheer terror.
The man in the next cubicle over has a bloody nose as well and tears running down his face.
A gunshot explodes the pin-drop silence on the other side of the floor, followed by gasps and shrieks rippling across the maze of cubicles.
There’s another shot, this one closer.
Someone screams, “What the fuck is happening? What the fuck is happening?”
After the third shot, Barry reaches into his jacket to pull his Glock, wondering if they’re under attack, but he can’t see any threats in his vicinity.
Just a sea of bewildered faces.
Shelia Redling stands suddenly, draws her weapon, puts the gun to her head, and fires.
As she drops to the floor, the man who shares a cubicle wall with her lunges out of his chair, grabs her gun from the pool of blood, and puts it into his mouth.
Barry screams, “No!”
As he fires and falls on top of Sheila, Barry realizes this all makes some terrible kind of sense. His memories of the previous timeline are with Helena on the coast of Maine, but these people were in the midst of a nuclear attack on New York City, where they all died or were in the throes of an awful death, after having just suffered the same fate in the previous timeline, where another nuclear attack had just happened.
Now the memories of this timeline break like a crashing wave.
He moved to New York in his early twenties and became a cop.
He married Julia.
Climbed the ranks of the NYPD to make detective in the Central Robbery Division.
He lived his original life all over again.
And it hits him like a shot to the kidneys—Helena never came to him in that Portland bar. He has never met her. Never heard from her. For some reason, she chose to live this timeline without him. He only knows her in dead memories.
He pulls out his cell phone to call her, trying to remember her number, and realizes that it can’t possibly be the same on this timeline. He has no way to contact her, and the helplessness of that knowledge is almost more than he can bear in this moment, thoughts tearing through his mind—
Does this mean she broke up with him?
Found someone else?
Finally had enough of living the same twenty-nine-year loop with the same man?
As more gunshots erupt around him and people start to flee the area, he thinks back to the last conversation he had with Helena at their home in Maine and his idea of finding Slade.
Stay focused on that. If the past lifetimes are any guide, you only have a limited amount of time before hell rains down on New York.
He shuts out the chaos and slides his chair toward his desk, waking his computer.
A Google search for “Marcus Slade” pulls up an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, detailing that Slade died of a drug overdose last Christmas.
Shit.
Next he searches “Jee-woon Chercover” and finds multiple hits. Chercover runs a VC firm on the Upper East Side called Apex Venture. Barry snaps a photo of the contact info off their website, grabs his keys, and rushes for the stairwell.
As he descends the stairs, he dials Apex.
“All circuits are busy, please try your call—”
He sprints through the ground-floor lobby, into the late afternoon, reaching the sidewalk of West 100th Street, short of breath, a new alert lighting up his phone’s home screen:
Emergency Alert
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO MULTIPLE US TARGETS. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Slide for more
Jesus.
While he has memories of this timeline, his identity encompasses, fleetingly, all the lifetimes he’s ever lived. Unfortunately, that multi-timeline perspective will end when the missiles hit.
He wonders—what if this is all that’s left of his life?
Of everyone’s life?
A half hour of the same endless, repeating horror.
Some kind of hell.
Fifteen floors up, in a building across the street, a window breaks, glass showering the pavement, followed by a chair and then a man in a pinstripe suit.
He crashes headfirst through the roof of a car, whose alarm begins a piercing shriek.
People are running past Barry.
On the sidewalks.
In the streets.
More men and women plummeting out of skyscrapers, because they remember what it was like to die in a nuclear attack.
A civil defense siren begins to scream, and people are flooding out of the surrounding buildings like rats and pouring into an underground parking garage to take cover.
Barry jumps into his car and starts the engine. Apex is on the Upper East Side, just across the park, barely six long blocks from his current location.
He turns out into the street, but all he can do is creep along through the hordes of people.
Barry lays on his horn, veering finally onto Columbus, which is only slightly less mobbed.
He drives against traffic and turns right into the first alleyway he comes to, speeding in the shadows between apartment buildings.
He fires his light bar and sirens and muscles his way across two more streets filled with frantic, hysterical people.
Then he’s accelerating his Crown Vic down a walking path in Central Park, trying to call Apex again.
This time, the phone rings.
Please, please, please pick up.
And rings.
And rings.
There are too many people on the path ahead, so he veers off into North Meadow, ripping across baseball diamonds where he used to play.
“Hello?”
Barry slams on the brakes and brings his car to a stop in the middle of the field and puts the phone on speaker.
“Who is this?”
“Jee-woon
Chercover. Is this Barry?”
“How’d you know?”
“I wondered if you’d call.”
Last time Barry interacted with Jee-woon, he and Helena had shot him in Slade’s lab as he lunged naked for a gun.
“Where are you right now?” Barry asks.
“My office on the thirtieth floor of my building. Looking out over the city. Waiting to die again, like all of us. Are you and Helena doing this?”
“We’ve been trying to stop it. I wanted to find Slade—”
“He died last year.”
“I know. So I need to ask you—when Helena and I found Slade at the hotel, he alluded to there being a way to undo dead memories. Some different way of traveling. Of using the memory chair.”
There’s silence on the other end of the line.
“You mean when you killed me.”
“Yeah.”
“What happened after—”
“Look, there’s no time. I need this information if you have it. I’ve been on a thirty-three-year loop with Helena trying to find some way to erase the world’s knowledge of the memory chair. Nothing’s working. That’s why we keep reaching this moment of apocalypse over and over. And it’s going to keep happening unless—”
“I can tell you this, and it’s all I know. Marcus did believe there was a way to reset a timeline, so there would be no dead memories. He even did it once.”
“How?”
“I don’t know the specifics. Look, I need to call my parents. Please fix this if you can. We’re all in hell.”
Jee-woon hangs up. Barry tosses his phone into the passenger seat and climbs out of the car. Sits down on the grass, rests his hands on his legs.
They’re shaking.
His entire body is.
On the next timeline, he won’t remember the conversation he just had with Jee-woon until April 16, 2019.
If there even is a next timeline.
A bird lands nearby and sits very still, looking at him.
The buildings of the Upper East Side rise above the perimeter of the park, and the noise of the city is much louder than it should be—gunshots, screams, the civil defense sirens, the sirens of fire engines, squad cars, ambulances—all blending into a discordant symphony.
A thought occurs.
A bad one.
What if Helena died in that four-year period between 1986 and 1990, before she was supposed to find him in Portland? Could the fate of reality itself really depend upon one person not getting randomly hit by a bus?
Or what if she decided not to do any of this? Just live her life and never build the chair and let the world destroy itself? It would be hard to blame her, but it would mean the next reality shift will be one of someone else’s choosing. Or no shift at all if the world successfully annihilates itself.
The buildings all around him and the open field and the trees glow the brightest white Barry has ever seen—even brighter than Denver.
There is no sound.
Already the brightness is waning, and in its place comes an inferno rushing toward him through the Upper East Side, the heat excruciatingly intense, but only for the half second it takes to burn through the nerve endings in Barry’s face.
In the distance, he sees people sprinting across the field, trying to outrun their final moment.
And he braces for the lava-colored wall of roiling fire and death to engulf him as it expands through Central Park, but the shockwave hits first, rocketing him over the meadow at an inconceivable rate of speed that’s slowing.
Slowing.
Slowing.
But not just him.
Everything.
He retains consciousness as this timeline decelerates to a standstill, leaving him suspended thirty feet off the ground and surrounded by the debris from the shockwave—pieces of glass and steel, a police car, melting-faced people.
The fireball is stopped a quarter mile away, halfway across the North Meadow, and the buildings all around him have been caught in the moment of vaporization—glass, furniture, contents, people, everything but the melting steel frames exploding out like a sneeze—and the immense death cloud rising above New York City from the point of impact is paused a mile into its ascent in the sky.
The world begins to lose color, and seeing everything frozen as the time bleeds out of it fires his mind with questions—
If matter can neither be created nor destroyed, where will all this matter go when this timeline ceases to exist? What’s happened to the matter of all the dead timelines they’ve left behind? Are they time-capsuled away in higher, unreachable dimensions? And if so, what is matter without time? Matter that doesn’t persist? What would that even look like?
He has one last realization before his consciousness is catapulted from this dying reality—this deceleration of time means that Helena might be alive somewhere, dying in the tank right this second in order to kill this timeline and begin another.
And a glimmer of joy rides through him at the possibility that she lives, and the hope that, in this next reality, even if only for a moment, he will be with her again.
* * *
Barry is lying in bed in the semidarkness of a cool room. Through an open window, he can hear a gentle rain falling. He checks his watch—9:30 p.m. Western European Time. Five hours ahead of Manhattan.
He looks over at his wife of twenty-four years, reading beside him in bed.
“It’s nine thirty,” he says.
Her last life, she climbed into the deprivation chamber at approximately 4:35 p.m., Eastern, so they’re fast approaching the fifth timeline anniversary of 4/16/19.
In this moment, Barry’s perspective is of having lived a single lifetime. This one. Helena crashed through the door of his life when he was twenty-one in a Portland bar, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Of course, he knows all about their four past lives together. Their work. Their love. How it always ends with her dying in the deprivation chamber on April 16, 2019, when the world remembers the existence of the memory chair and all the horror it wrought. The previous timeline they spent apart. She stayed close to her parents in Boulder, built the chair herself, and used it to improve her mother’s quality of life once Alzheimer’s took hold. But she never made any progress on stopping the onslaught of dead memories, which she swears will find him any moment now. She doesn’t know what Barry did with his last life, and neither does he. Yet. In this one, they continued their pursuit of understanding how the brain processes dead memories, and delved further into studies of the particle physics surrounding use of the chair. They’ve even made a few contacts at CERN, whom they’re hoping to use on the next timeline.
But the truth is, as in the past iterations of their life, they’ve made no meaningful headway toward stopping what’s about to happen. They are only two people, and the problem they’re facing is enormously complex. Probably insurmountable.
Helena closes her book and looks over at Barry. The noise of the rain pattering on the shingles of their seventeenth-century manor house is perhaps his favorite sound in the world.
She says, “I’m afraid that when your memories of the last timeline come, you’re going to feel like I abandoned you. Like I betrayed you. I didn’t spend the last timeline with you, but it’s not because I didn’t love or need you. I hope you can hear that. I just wanted you to live a life without the end of the world looming, and I hope it was a good one. I hope you found love. I didn’t. Every day I missed you. Every day I needed you. I was more lonely than I’ve ever been in my many lives.”
“I’m sure you did what you needed to do. I know this is infinitely harder for you than it is for me.”
He looks at his watch as the time changes from 9:34 to 9:35.
She’s told him everything that will happen. The headache, the temporary loss of consciousness and control. How the world wi
ll immediately begin to implode. And yet there’s still a part of him that can’t quite believe it will happen. Not that he thinks Helena is lying. But it’s hard to imagine the troubles of the world could ever reach them here.
Barry feels a glint of pain behind his eyes.
Sharp and blinding.
He looks over at his wife. “I think it’s starting.”
* * *
By midnight, he is the Barry of many lifetimes, although the previous one, in New York City, is oddly the last to arrive. Perhaps because there are so many, the memories come more slowly than any of the previous anniversaries.
He breaks down crying in the kitchen with joy that Helena came back to him, and she sits on his lap at the small table and kisses his face and runs her fingers through his hair and tells him how sorry she is, promising that she will never leave him again.
“Holy shit,” Barry says. “I just remembered.”
“What?”
He looks up at Helena. “I was right. There’s a way out of this apocalyptic loop. Slade did know how to stop dead memories.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I looked Slade up in the final moments of the previous timeline. He died last Christmas, but I spoke to Jee-woon. He said Slade had gone back and started a new timeline that didn’t cause any dead memories at the anniversary point.”
“Oh my God, how?”
“Jee-woon didn’t know. He hung up on me, and then the world ended.”
A tea kettle whistles.
Helena goes to the range and takes it off the heat, then pours the boiling water over their tea-ball infusers.
“On the next timeline, until we reach the anniversary,” Barry says, “I won’t remember any of this. You have to carry this knowledge on with you.”
“I will.”
They stay up all night, and only when day breaks do they dare turn on the news. This is the longest they’ve ever let a timeline play out beyond the anniversary point. It seems as though every nuclear weapon on the planet has been fired, and every major city in the United States, Russia, and China hit. Even the metro areas of US allies were targeted, including London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid. The closest strike to Helena and Barry was Glasgow, one hundred and eighty miles to the south. But they’re safe for the moment. The jet stream is taking fallout east into Scandinavia.
