Time Patrol

by Bob Mayer

But he was trying to pretend. Fake it until you make it, Eagle had advised when Nada was due two days off and was going to use it to visit his niece and mentioned that a trek to Disneyland was part of the festivities. The team had begun taking bets on how long it would be until Nada pulled his MK23 Special Ops pistol and shot Mickey and Minnie. Roland had put his money on Goofy going down first with a double-tap right between his big eyes, but had added he would be very upset if Nada shot Goofy. Mac had asked he not shoot Snow White, since Mac had a thing for her, but then again Mac apparently had a thing for anyone in a skirt.

  The team didn’t seem to have much faith in Nada’s ability to suffer.

  But there are many different kinds of suffering, and everyone has a vulnerable spot. Nada should have remembered that from SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance & Escape) Training, where participants learned everyone had a breaking point. It was just a matter of time.

  But isn’t everything?

  The teacup twirled about, Zoey putting all her energy into spinning the wheel, but they stayed relative to all the other cups twirling about.

  Nada didn’t get it. Bumper cars he could understand. But there were no crashes here, no movement other than the spin, which wasn’t dictated by the person on the ride. And most of the other adults had their phones and cameras out, recording the event. That was beyond comprehension to Nada: It was bad enough being here. Who’d want to watch a recording of being here? And if you were recording it, perhaps you weren’t altogether here to start with? A sort of remembered present?

  Nada glanced at his younger brother, dutifully recording the teacup adventure from the safety of the fence with his cell phone. His brother, Zoey’s dad, was smiling, either at Zoey having fun or Nada’s misery. If he’d been a betting man, Nada would have put his money on the latter.

  But then he noticed the woman in the next teacup. She didn’t have her hands on the center wheel. She held a baby in her arms. She had long, dark hair, flowing over the baby whom she was staring down at. Her skin was dark, exactly like Nada’s, except while his face was pockmarked, hers was smooth. And when she glanced up and saw Nada staring at her, he felt a lurch deep inside, as if a hand had clenched his heart and given it a tough squeeze. He quickly averted his gaze, but not before everything seemed to flicker for a second, as if the power that drove the universe had suffered a momentary short.

  A volcano erupted in Nada’s mind. It was the only way he could describe it. Memories poured forth, hot and scalding with the utter desolation of the awareness of the loss.

  He remembered a wife and a child.

  Here. Years ago.

  His wife and child.

  Nada cried out, the sound masked by the music piped in via speakers overhead and unnoticed in Zoey’s determination to spin their teacup ever faster. His breath was gone, and he forgot how to breathe.

  Discipline was a cornerstone of Nada’s life and he gathered himself, especially as his phone began ringing, a distinctive tone, Warren Zevon singing about “Keep Me in Your Heart,” a song the performer had written after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Nada had always thought his whole Warren Zevon thing had centered around “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” because it had been the unofficial dirge of the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) when he was a member, but now he knew how special and personal that other Zevon song had been to him.

  How could he have forgotten? How could he have no memories of them?

  Nada reached for the phone, glanced at the screen, and something passed over his face, a look Zoey caught and had never seen on it before but wasn’t too young to place: sadness, overriding the deepest kind of pain.

  The ride slowed and stopped. Zoey got up, but Nada remained seated. He put the phone away and fumbled in his pocket for something, pulling out a pack of cigarettes, trying to comprehend the memories flooding his brain.

  “What are you doing?” Zoey demanded.

  Nada pulled out a lighter and fired up the cigarette, staring out at the teacups as everyone else made for the exit.

  “We need to leave,” Zoey said.

  One of the pimple-faced attendants was herding everyone toward the exit so the next wave of youngsters and camera-toting parents could have their spin. He saw Nada smoking; his mouth opened to say something. Then a primeval sense of survival snapped his mouth shut, and he turned his head away.

  Smart kid.

  “Come on, Uncle,” Zoey said, grabbing his free hand and giving a tug.

  Nada got to his feet and numbly followed his niece. He walked over to a wooden bench and sat down on it as if suddenly exhausted. Nada finally pulled out his phone and glanced at the screen once more, actually reading the message. He gave a wistful smile. “You’d like Scout,” he said to Zoey as he put the phone back in his pocket.

  “You called me Scout at the park,” Zoey reminded him.

  “Sorry about that,” Nada said, apologizing for the umpteenth time for abandoning her during the call of duty in their last outing together.

  “What’s wrong?” Zoey asked with the innocence of an eight-year-old able to cut to the heart of the matter. Her father came over, concern on his face. He placed a protective hand on his daughter’s shoulder.

  “You okay, brother?”

  “That song,” Nada said. “The ring tone. I shouldn’t have picked it. Reminds me of someone.” As had the woman and baby in the next teacup.

  “What song?” his brother asked, but he was looking about anxiously, stoking Nada’s dark fear.

  “Warren Zevon. ‘Keep Me in Your Heart.’ ”

  A shadow passed over his brother’s face.

  Nada stared at his brother, having to ask, dreading the answer. “What did they do to me? They told you never to tell me, didn’t they? You had to be in on it. It’s why you’ve tolerated me so long, even after I had to leave Zoey at the tar pits.”

  His brother’s face crumpled in sadness also, and that confirmed it for Nada. “They said you’d be better off. Not knowing. I’m sorry.”

  Nada got to his feet and stepped close to his brother, gripping his collar tight. He whispered harshly: “They were real? What I remember is real?”

  His brother nodded.

  Nada let go of his brother and slumped back down on the bench. Then he reached under his jacket for his pistol. His brother anticipated the move and jumped on him, fighting him.

  “No!” his brother urged. “Stop!”

  Nada was a trained killer and could have tossed his brother aside and drawn the gun and ended it, ended his life as he now knew he’d contemplated many times in the past.

  The only thing that stopped him wasn’t his brother’s arms or even Zoey’s scared look, but the message on his phone. Someone needed him.

  Nada quit trying to go for the gun and his brother snatched it and tucked it into his belt, hiding it under his jacket.

  Nada slumped down onto the bench once more. “Why? Why? Why take them from me?”

  His brother sat close by his side and lowered his voice so Zoey wouldn’t hear. “They were gone. Nothing you could do to bring them back. You were crazy, man. Drinking, having all your guns around. You’d call in the middle of the night ranting. I was afraid you were going to kill yourself. Or kill someone else. They were too. Those people you work for. They said it was for the best. They asked me, and then they threatened me. Some guy with a fake eye in a black suit. He was scary, man. Really scary. But he said it was in your best interests. That it would give you peace. And it did, man.”

  And then Zoey got scared because her uncle began to cry. Not heaving sobs, but tiny little tears at the corners of his eyes and a brief hitch in his breath. As a trickle of dampness rolled down his pocked skin on each cheek, Zoey reached out and took his free hand in her tiny one.

  “Why are you so sad?” Zoey asked.

  Nada mustered a reply. “I miss some people.”

  “Who?” Zoey asked.

  Nada looked up at his brother and lied. “I promised your father nev
er to speak of it.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Zoey said. “You’re my favorite uncle!”

  “I’m your only uncle,” Nada said, forcing a smile.

  Zoey threw her tiny arms around him, almost around, because they weren’t long enough.

  But Nada knew it wouldn’t be all right because there was a hole in his heart that could never be filled, and he couldn’t figure out why the blackness that had hidden that part of his past in his mind was gone and the searing, unbearable memories were back.

  And he didn’t have to wonder too hard who had taken the memories away. A man with a fake eye might have done the dirty work, but there was always someone pulling the strings.

  His brother sat next to him and put an arm around his shoulder. “You can’t change the past, bro.”

  If only that were so.

  It changed at Area 51 deep inside the sprawling complex set in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada, because many problems on the cutting edge of science, physics, and the weird and the wonderful started at Area 51. But this time it was not in the labs where scientists tested the outer boundaries of man’s knowledge, occasionally traveling from genius to stupid at lightspeed (literally sometimes) and requiring the Nightstalkers to clean up their messes. This time it was in the repository of the results of all those tests and so much more: the Archives. If the Ark of the Covenant was indeed found by some Indiana-Jones-type character, it would have been stored here and it would have fit right in with many of the other weird and wonderful and frightening items gathered from around the world and hidden away deep under the sort-of-secret-but-definitely-most-secure facility in the continental United States.

  Even though the CIA had acknowledged the place existed (it was on Google Earth now for frak’s sake), that didn’t mean they were holding an open house any time soon.

  It changed with Ivar—or rather the sudden lack thereof, of Ivar—which, considering Ivar’s recent history and what had happened during the Fun in North Carolina, might not be as strange as it seems.

  But Ivar and Doc—who was with Ivar, at least initially—were both physicists, and they understood the law of entropy (or thought they did) and knew that when something was taken away, something was returned in kind (or thought they knew).

  Or at least they understood a distorted law of entropy, which Doc would come up with later. Sort of.

  If there was a later.

  But that’s getting ahead of the occurrence.

  Doc stood on the top rung of a ladder inside the Archives and yelled for Ivar to get ready to give him a push. It shouldn’t be that hard since it was a big walking ladder with four large wheels, all well lubricated and balanced. Plus Doc didn’t weigh much. His parents had come to the States from India when he was young, both well educated and on the academic fast track, and they’d imparted a burning desire for knowledge in their only son. Doc was slight of build, with dark hair and thick glasses—the typical science nerd, except he was the scientist for the Nightstalkers and that elevated him far out of nerddom.

  Doc was grabbing for the last box in this upper stack. It was covered in dust the way most of the boxes in this part of the Archives were covered in dust, especially those on the highest shelves, because in any stack, boxes were layered in term of inquiries. Those easy to grab, on the ground-level shelves, had been looked in, for whatever reason. Those that remained high up had most likely never been looked in or moved since being put in place.

  It gave Doc a slight thrill each time he checked one of these old boxes, shoved up here over half a century ago without anyone giving them a second thought. Doc considered each box as having the potential to reveal great insights, although most yielded boring reports of mundane activities. Regardless, he used the scanner to take a snapshot of the faded lettering on the form taped to the side, took the bar code label it printed out, and stuck the label on the side of the box.

  Information that couldn’t be accessed was useless, a Nada Yada of particular insight. So Doc and Ivar had been detailed to work on inventorying the information in the Archives in order to make it into something that could be put in a database and then the box accessed if needed. The fact they would probably never finish the job, given the size of the Archives, didn’t stanch Doc’s enthusiasm for it. He approached it as an old-time prospector might regard a mountain streambed, hoping to sift through tons of sand, trying to find a few nuggets.

  The faded writing on the sides of the old boxes had turned from a bright black to a withering, barely legible gray. Doc often thought about the men—and women—who’d written those notations on the boxes, years before he was born. Had they wondered who’d open the box next? If the box would ever be opened? Could they conceive how big the Archives would grow, from the single building deep inside this cavern in the early days, to the largest building in the world, even bigger than the Boeing factory in Seattle that builds jumbo jets?

  Yet the building was inside a cavern deep under Groom Mountain, in the midst of Area 51, and unknown to everyone except those who had the proper clearance and a need to know. Would those who had placed these books here decades ago understand that it was only Doc and his driving need to understand truth that caused him to be up here on the ladder, undertaking an inventory no one believed would ever be completed?

  Ready to move on, no nugget uncovered in this section, Doc signaled for Ivar to nudge him over to the next stack.

  “Push the damn ladder, Ivar!” Doc finally shouted, reaching for the next row and his fingers falling short of the new, old boxes. “Sleep on your own time,” he added, having noticed a bit of sluggishness in the newest member of the Nightstalkers when they’d entered the Archives this morning.

  “Ivar!” Doc yelled once more, looking down to—nothing.

  He’d been there just a few seconds ago. Had he wandered off to one of the porta potties stationed throughout the massive Archives? Surely he would have said something. Doc shivered as a wave of static electricity passed over his body. Somewhere in the distance a lightbulb exploded with a sharp pop. A rhythmic thumping that constantly rumbled through the Archives was no longer thumping.

  Utter silence.

  Doc swallowed hard. He looked back at the boxes he’d just tagged. On some the writing was no longer faded, but bright, as if done just the other day. Doc took a deep breath to steady himself. He swore he could smell fresh ink from the markings. He closed his eyes because for the moment he didn’t want to see, didn’t want to accept.

  He took another deep breath.

  Most unusual, Doc thought with the predominant rational part of his mind, as he pulled out his phone. He dialed Ivar’s cell phone number.

  Why was he not surprised when he was informed that the number had never existed?

  Ivar was gone in the deepest sense of the word.

  It changed at the Ranch, outside of Area 51 on the other side of the Extraterrestrial Highway, but still pretty much Nowhere, Nevada, known to only a few as the headquarters of the Nightstalkers.

  It was only because Eagle had a hippocampus twice that of a London cabbie, and the resultant phenomenal memory, that it was noticed at all. Noticing didn’t mean awareness though.

  Which meant Eagle was going to have to learn something new.

  If he was given the time.

  Technically, Eagle, Kirk, and Mac were not in, but close by the Ranch, in an abandoned mine. Eagle stood at the bottom of a mineshaft so deep that the surface was a distant blue spot far overhead. He was not happy.

  He watched as Mac and Kirk tried to knock each other off the wall of the shaft, coming perilously close to achieving their goal several times. They weren’t using ropes because that would be cheating (in their opinion, not Eagle’s, who had a climbing harness on and a rope ready for belay) and take away from the adrenaline rush.

  Eagle didn’t believe in adrenaline rushes anymore. He was older than the two young men clinging to the wall and everyone would agree he was smarter. They were all combat veterans, but Eagle had a scrol
l of scars on the left side of his head, marring his chocolate skin, and he liked to think he’d had some common sense burned into him when that IED had gone off in Iraq years ago.

  The truth was deeper than that though. Eagle was one of those people who’d been born old, with wisdom and common sense always far ahead of his physical age. He’d learned to read by age two, and accelerated from there. So trying to kick your buddy off the wall of a mineshaft for shits and giggles struck him as just plain dumb. He didn’t rate the actual climb itself much higher on the common sense scale, but the climb was a quarterly requirement. Who knows when they’d have to climb some rocky, vertical surface in order to achieve their goal? Eagle had pointed out, every time the test came up, that he flew their transport, the Snake. He could put them at the top of any cliff or wall they desired with no sweat.

  Such logic held little sway with Nada and Moms, neither of whom, Eagle noted, were currently with them. He filed that away because he would make damn sure they did their quarterly evaluation climb when they got back.

  Eagle hated the climb. It reminded him of the rope he couldn’t climb in ninth grade for his Presidential Merit certificate. Perfect academic scores hadn’t been enough. But maybe there had been a purpose to the requirement, because when he failed on his first attempt, Eagle worked out for six months, ate his first salads, and practiced technique until he could climb the rope in under thirty seconds and touch the ceiling of the high school gym.

  Except that he did it alone, with no one to certify the effort. That’s when he realized he sought no approval but his own. He never climbed it in front of others, even when he “failed” during gym classes and some of his fellow students called him names. He was content with his secret knowledge of his own achievement. It gave him a thrill he was sure Frasier, the Nightstalker shrink, could put some DSM-IV tag on, but Eagle had never shared that memory with Frasier, or anyone else.

  Which was why he thought Mac and Kirk were a pair of idiots trying to outdo each other just because he was there, even though he was pointedly not watching. They were both expert climbers, the ones who Nada would turn to if he needed someone to “lead” the team up a tough pitch in case they had to take down some mad scientist who set up his lair at the top of, say, Mount Everest, or more likely, a volcano. Mad scientists always seemed to put their lairs in volcanoes in the movies. Particularly active ones, which just seemed dumb to Eagle. Still, Eagle smiled as he recalled Doctor Evil’s monologue about his childhood from his volcanic lair. Word for word it ran through his brain.