Borrowed Time

by Keith Hughes

  Ness tended to be a peaceful man, but having seen the wreckage of his sanctuary, he found himself ready to spill some blood. With clenched fists, he left. There may not have been murder in his eyes, but he intended at least a thorough beating.

  All ideas of retribution fled from his mind when he saw who had called him. Standing in the middle of the sea of stuffing stood someone unexpectedly familiar: the same hair, clothing, and face he saw in the mirror.

  Even though there were obvious differences, like needing a shave and a bloody rip in one sleeve, he had no doubt who faced him. Only a time machine could create this situation. Ness was about to have a face-to-face conversation with himself.

  CHAPTER FIVE: Talking to Himself

  Tuesday, September 09, 2008 9:36 p.m.

  How can there be two of me in this room?

  A long stretch of silence ensued as Ness inspected his duplicate, looking for some way it could be a scam. But he could find nothing to indicate any kind of falsehood. The partly healed scratch on the back of the double’s hand confirmed the reality of the situation. Despite himself, Ness looked at the same abrasion on his own hand. The result of scraping against a nail at a crime scene, the two wounds were the same in size, shape, placement, and healing.

  He finally broke the silence. “Okay, so how is this happening?”

  His doppelganger laughed, which sounded slightly odd coming from outside his head. Even so, that only provided further confirmation. As a former DJ at the college radio station, he was familiar with the true sound of his own voice.

  “Didn’t you get here using a time machine?” He raised an eyebrow at him.

  “I hadn’t expected to run into myself here. Did you do this?” Ness’s clenched fists ached.

  The double shook his head. “Hell, no. I’m as angry as you are. No, Glenn and his boys did this.”

  Confused, Ness asked, “If you aren’t my future self, where did you come from?”

  “Oh, I am from the future, and I’m here to help.” His copy grinned.

  “Wait, what? What the hell is going on here?” Ness’s anger rose again, this time out of frustration.

  “Man, who knew I’d freak out this much?” the double muttered.

  Ness considered the idea of being the butt of some cosmic joke. Something along the lines of “What if you met yourself and discovered you’re an asshole?” But he struggled to get his emotions under control. “All right, can you do me a favor and start from the beginning?”

  His doppelganger looked briefly exasperated before acquiescing with a small grin. “Sure thing. I keep forgetting I’ve had a little more time to assimilate things than you have. All right, from my perspective, I did Bertrand’s little tutorial trip about twenty hours ago. The trip, in fact, you are starting now.” The double paused to see if Ness understood, and Ness nodded.

  “I came here to this.” The doppelganger spread his arms, gesturing to the apartment’s devastation. “And like you, I was incensed. Easy answer, I assumed. Go back to my home time, wait for whoever does this in the next three hours, and stop them.”

  “Yeah, I had the same idea before you called me back out here,” Ness admitted.

  His copy gave him a lopsided grin. “We do tend to think alike. I’m only twenty hours older than you. Anyway, I found myself facing this stone-faced man called Glenn and two enormous thugs. They were armed and after the PDA. I knew I’d made a mistake in sticking around, waiting for them. In desperation, I ran into the darkroom and jumped into time in a faulty attempt to escape.”

  “But it didn’t work?” A tickle at the back of Ness’s mind answered the question, but he wanted to hear it from his slightly older self.

  “Nope. It’s all in the concept Bertrand shared of the home time. You are tied to the time you left on this little jaunt in the time stream. Around six thirty or so. You have to return there or face the consequences eventually.”

  Realization dawned on Ness with a dreadful certainty. “The borrowed time.”

  “Exactly. No matter what I do, if I want to live beyond my allotted twenty-four hours, I need to return to the room with the Intellisys thugs beating on the door. And if I do, it’s game over anyway.”

  “Okay, I’m following you, but how do we prevent it from happening?”

  His other self gave him a pointed look with eyebrow raised, as if the answer was obvious. “By not following me. Or to be more precise, by making different choices.”

  “So, I need to… what?”

  What else could I do against a trio of heavily armed men?

  “Get out of the apartment,” the copy responded emphatically. “I’ve had a lot of time to reconsider my plan, and the most important thing is to get to street level, where you have more room and options. Once you get there, our paths will diverge.”

  “And what will happen to you?” The sudden concern washing over him surprised Ness.

  “If all goes well, I cease to exist.”

  Ness’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

  “I mean the new future you forge by making different choices should replace this one. I will not die or suffer from the dire effects of my borrowed time expiring. Indeed, this version of us, along with this conversation, would live on only in your memory.”

  “Man, that’s heavy,” Ness muttered.

  “Just like college, discussing temporal physics with the doctor in the student center, eh?”

  Ignoring the circumstances, Ness chuckled at the memory. “I don’t remember it giving me such a headache back then.”

  The double spread his arms. “Yeah, it’s a little different having some skin in the game.”

  Ness laughed for real. “So, what else can you tell me?”

  “The guy’s name is Glenn. He’s a little shorter than us, with silver hair. I’m pretty sure he’s with Intellisys, but he doesn’t appear on any company registries. If I had to guess, I’d say he works for Paul Robbins, their director of security, but I can’t confirm it. He is likely off-book, from what I could find out.”

  “And the other two?”

  The copy shrugged. “Hired muscle, most likely. I don’t even know their names. Intellisys seems sleazy to me, and I’m surprised Dr. Bertrand would even work for them. Undisclosed sources of funding, which means military or some other secretive arm of the government. Anyone who so much as looks at their building has to sign an NDA. I wouldn’t trust anyone from there with my piggy bank, much less a time machine.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “Since I have no avenue of escape, I’ve learned what I could to pass it on to you.”

  “And that?” Ness pointed to the bloody tear in the copy’s shirt.

  The copy looked at his arm and the brownish stains in the blue material. “I got too close to Glenn and his boys at one point. I had to get away and ran into something.”

  A pounding sound grew in volume, and the copy looked at the door. He pulled his PDA from a pocket and tapped on the screen before looking at Ness again.

  “Apparently Glenn and his boys are coming back for round two. They undoubtedly left surveillance behind. You’d best be getting back yourself. Keep a sharp eye on your borrowed time. Believe me, it goes faster than you’d imagine. And find Bertrand. He can tell you more about the players than I can.”

  The copy gave him a jaunty wave and grinned. “Be seeing you.” He tapped his screen then vanished.

  The door burst open, and the intruders surprised Ness with the ferocity of their entrance. A thin man with gray hair and dead eyes regarded Ness with a feral grin. Ness pulled the PDA out of his pocket and thumbed the power button. At the sight of the device, Glenn’s sneer grew, and his gun aimed at Ness’s forehead. A quick tap on the screen launched his trip back to his home time, three hours earlier. The last thing he saw before his sight faded was the flash from the muzzle.

  CHAPTER SIX: Breaking and Entering

  Tuesday, September 9, 2008 6:34 p.m.

 
The van smelled old. The funk consisted of rust, stale cigarette smoke, and old blood. Glenn wrinkled his nose at the odor but considered it the price of doing business. The vehicle couldn’t be traced back to him or Intellisys, and that made it nearly priceless as a mobile operations center. As usual, his mission parameters required avoiding any kind of attention that could reflect poorly on the company.

  Equally as important in Glenn’s eyes was keeping his own identity separate from his work at Intellisys. He enjoyed his position as Paul Robbins’s secret operative, but it could also be perilous. Should he be caught by some form of law enforcement, local or federal, Paul would disavow him without remorse.

  He glanced into the back of the van to see the two contractors he’d chosen for the operation. Of the two, Williams displayed the most intelligence, although his penchant for acting like a ruffian still in the hood of Detroit annoyed Glenn. Mays, on the other hand, could follow directions only if they were clear and direct. When it came to reasoning on his own, the sandy-haired man held a distinct disadvantage.

  The driver’s door opened, and the third member of his little team entered. With dark hair and a black baseball cap sporting an old English “D” in the same color, Harrison represented a massive specimen of humanity. The two men in the back were much larger than average in both height and physique, but his driver looked as if he spent every spare hour in the gym. Despite his size and line of work, though, Harrison seemed to have all the killer instinct of a puppy. But his role on Glenn’s team had nothing to do with any deadly ability.

  “So?”

  Harrison glanced over at Glenn and pointed to an earbud in his right ear. “I’ve tapped his phone, and I saw his car in the garage.”

  Glenn looked out the windshield at the apartment building where Ness Relevont lived. The unusual building sat directly on Main Street. Its bottom three stories were a parking garage for its residents, and the side facing the road hosted a variety of restaurants and shops at street level. The fourth story and the several levels above contained apartments. Relevont lived on the sixth floor.

  The layout of the building provided one of the few factors in their favor. Being so high above the cracked pavement of Main Street would make it much more difficult for Relevont to slip away, and Glenn needed every advantage circumstances could provide. He had already failed to catch Dr. Bertrand’s secretary with the box. He had briefly mulled over breaking into the blue postal receptacle and stealing the package, but he did not need the kind of federal heat messing with the mail brought. Instead, he had satisfied himself with the glimpse he’d gotten of the mailing label and waited for the package to be delivered. It should have been today.

  “He’s on the phone.” Harrison pressed on the earbud. “He’s calling 9-1-1, reporting a break-in.”

  Glenn grimaced. Relevont knew they were outside. He glanced at the two men in the back. “Let’s go. Harrison, drive around back and make sure he can’t slip away from there.”

  He stepped out of the van and buttoned his gray suit coat. Glenn mainly wore it to hide his gun, but he also liked the look it gave him. The slam of the sliding door told him Williams and Mays were ready to go, and he crossed the street without looking back. The side street held access to the residents’ lobby, which mainly housed banks of mailboxes. Beyond, it provided access to a door leading to a stairwell and an elevator. Glenn pointed at the stairs, and Mays ascended the cement steps in loud, clomping strides, audible even when the steel door closed behind him.

  When the elevator arrived, Glenn and Williams entered. The panel showed stops for the upper two floors of the parking structure, as well as six stories of apartments. Pressing the button for Relevont’s floor, Williams removed his gun and held it by his leg. A firearm would have been nice, but Glenn had purposely left his in the van.

  When the elevator door opened, they emerged into a quiet hallway with several doors on either side. It took a matter of seconds to find the door belonging to Relevont, number 316. Williams took position against the wall alongside the entry, and Glenn moved to the other side. He leaned forward to put his ear against the wooden door, but he heard no movement from inside.

  The stairway door opened on the far end of the hallway, and Mays strode out. Spotting Glenn, he shook his head; no one had been on the stairs. Pulling his gun out, he stood behind Williams, ready to follow him into the apartment.

  Glenn knocked twice, and the sound seemed loud in the hushed hallway. He waited for a minute, straining to hear anything, but stillness prevailed. Finally, he gestured to Williams, who immediately stood before the door and kicked it above the doorknob, beside the deadbolt. The door splintered open, and Williams rushed inside. Mays followed closely, but Glenn waited a couple of heartbeats before entering. His two men were departing the bedrooms as he intruded upon Relevont’s living space.

  “Empty.” Mays shook his head.

  Glenn looked around. If Relevont possessed the device, he likely had it with him. Clearly, the call to 9-1-1 had been a ploy to get the police there and interfere in his operation. Their only accomplishment happened to be the break-in Relevont had called in minutes before, as if he possessed prescience. When Paul told him the PDA had the ability to act as a time machine, Glenn had doubted his boss’s veracity. But the idea likely had more merit than he had first given it.

  “Go back down and keep a lookout for Relevont,” Glenn instructed. “Check the parking garage and surrounding area. But stay out of the way of the police. They’ll be here soon.”

  Glenn shut the door behind them as best he could. The shattered wood of the doorframe prevented it from closing fully, but it provided a modicum of privacy. He spent a few minutes pulling the couch cushions off and scattering the neatly arranged DVD collection across the floor. He checked the boxes on the dining room table, and as he’d expected, Relevont had already removed the device. The faint chime of the elevator told him the police had arrived, and he got ready for a little playacting.

  After an energetic knock on the door, a stern voice shouted, “Police. Open up!”

  Glenn did as instructed, swinging the ruined door wide. He acted mildly surprised as he saw the weapons of two of Royal Oak’s finest trained on him.

  “Step out of the apartment, hands on the back of your head, and turn toward me.”

  Glenn obeyed, taking two steps forward and interlocking his fingers behind his head as he faced the officer. This man had taken a couple steps away from the door to keep a safe distance between them. As Glenn had expected, he could hear the other cop holster his weapon before grabbing Glenn by the shoulders to push him against the wall. A quick frisk revealed only his wallet, which the officer removed and examined.

  He’d prepared for such a scenario. Indeed, planning deceptions like these was the most enjoyable aspect of his job. He hadn’t been idle while waiting for the package to arrive at its destination. He’d had a fake driver’s license created with Nestor Relevont’s details alongside his picture. As a precaution, he had put the fake ID in his wallet and left his real license in the van.

  “Okay, turn around,” the officer behind him commanded.

  Glenn slowly spun in place, his hands still raised. The cop held the ID so he could compare the picture to Glenn’s face. Glancing over at his partner, whose gun still covered Glenn from the side, the officer gave a slight nod. The second cop holstered his weapon and moved forward to take the ID.

  “Sorry, Mr. Relevont. We had to be sure you weren’t the burglar.”

  “I understand.” Glenn lowered his arms slowly.

  The cop looked over at the splintered doorjamb and the visible portion of the disheveled living room.

  “So, can you tell us what happened, Mr. Relevont?”

  “I came home to find my door broken and someone had rifled through my stuff. And please, call me Nestor.” Keenly aware the second cop was still studying the ID intently, Glenn watched him as best he could through his peripheral vision.

 
The officer before him opened his mouth for another inane question before his partner interrupted.

  “I know a Relevont. Works as a forensic photographer. I’ve seen him at a few crime scenes.” The officer holding the ID peered at Glenn suspiciously. “Only, he goes by Ness.”

  The first cop gave his partner a small smile. “Oh yeah, I thought the name sounded familiar. But he’s a lot younger.”

  “What is it you do?”

  Glenn’s sighed at his bad luck. Chance had rewarded his efforts with two cops who had met Ness Relevont in real life. Supposedly sharing the same name was not damning evidence, but the conversation was taking far too much time.

  “This.”

  Glenn’s right hand shot forward to impact against the officer’s trachea with a satisfying crunch. The second officer groped for his gun when Glenn spun, crouching below the officer’s line of sight. His extended leg swept the officer off his feet. When the cop landed, Glenn drove his heel into the man’s nose at an angle, shoving the cartilage into his brain. A few remaining twitches on the floor turned out to be the officer’s final act before his life expired. His partner slowly asphyxiated, his mouth gaping as if he were a beached fish.

  Pleased with his work, Glenn dragged the men into the apartment and closed the door again. He spent the next few minutes tearing Relevont’s possessions apart using a knife one of the officers wore, but as he’d expected, he did not find the device. A quick peek through the door showed no one had taken interest in the sounds from the scuffle. He left, shutting it behind him. Instead of waiting on an elevator, he made his way to the stairs and descended quickly.

  The closer he got to street level, the more frustrated he became. They had to find a lead on Relevont’s whereabouts, or he would have to go back to Paul Robbins and admit failure. Again. Given his military background and his natural impatience, Paul was not one to opt for forgiveness. Glenn wanted to avoid his boss’s ire if possible. If not, well, he could always get a new boss.