“I’m sure it will,” I say, and follow Arthur and Ada through the pouring rain and back inside the home that Molly grew up in.
May 22
“The pilot has turned on the seat-belt sign due to some minor turbulence we are experiencing. Please remain seated with your seat belts fastened until further notice.” The announcement jerks me from my sleep. Time Patrol is still playing on my laptop’s screen. Ellis had given me a DVD copy of the film, along with all of his other research, before I left his home outside of Palm Springs. I’d seen it maybe a hundred times since then. Knowing Jane Shelley is portraying a version of Molly, despite their obvious differences, still makes me feel connected with Molly, as if she’s speaking across space and time through the lips of this famous actress. This is the point near the end of the movie where Ray Brenner’s character betrays the colonel, the surprise villain of the film, allowing him to be sucked into the time portal that the colonel had built. After that moment, he turns to Jane Shelley’s character, and she leans over and kisses him. “I wanted to do that before we both die,” she says with a smile. And then they flee through the remaining gate, back to their secret lab, and to safety. It’s a ridiculous plot, but that moment still makes me smile every time. Knowing how much of it is true has made the film all the more enjoyable.
“Sir, put your tray table up and return your seat to its full upright position.” The flight attendant, a thin, blonde man with frosted blonde tips in his hair whose name-tag reads ‘Ray,’ pauses at my row and gives me the stink eye before leaning in to add: “Pleeeeeaaaase.”
“I’m working on it,” I say, as I snatch my laptop off of the tray and slip it in my carry on bag. My flight from Minneapolis to Chicago is only half filled. It’s one of the few times I’ve had such an empty flight since 10/18. Falling demand after the attack had forced airlines to cut down on both international and domestic flights. But that was over six years ago. We are living in a different time now.
I glance across the aisle at a middle-aged man in a suit. His face is sweaty and he looks like he’s about to puke. “I hate flying,” the man says.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Gary, from Gary, Indiana,” the man says with a strained grin. “People call me Gary from Gary.”
“Well, Gary from Gary,” I say, “I’ve lived through two different terror attacks, and one of them was 10/18. The tower almost came right down on my head. The way I see it, I’m one of the luckiest men alive. So if you had to be sitting next to anyone during a little bit of in-flight turbulence, I think sitting across the aisle from me is a pretty safe bet.” Except that my wife, who’s a time traveler, predicted that I would die in a plane crash. But I don’t say that part out loud.
“Hey, I know you. You’re that journalist who wrote those books.”
“That’s right.”
Gary manages a half smile. “I haven’t read them, but I saw you on Conan.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask.
“Good show,” Gary says.
The plane groans and shudders.
“Oh, good Lord!” Gary exclaims, looking away as his face turns pale.
“Don’t you have a barf bag?” I ask.
“I can’t use those things. Knowing what’s in the bag will just make me throw up again.”
I lean out into the aisle and look toward the front of the plane. The flight attendants have just finish belting themselves as another tremor wracks the plane.
“Here we go!” Gary says with a groan.
“Great,” I mutter. Reaching up, I press the flight attendant button and lean out again into the aisle. Ray the flight attendant catches my gaze.
“This guy’s gonna puke!” I have to yell to be heard. A few other people lean out into the aisle, glancing back at me. Ray glowers and shakes his head, making it clear that Gary would be left for the moment to whatever fate may be coming to him.
“It’s okay,” Gary says. “I think it’s passed.”
I lean back out to give Ray a thumbs up. As I do, a man near the front of the plane stands and walks back toward me.
“Remain in your seats!” Ray shouts, from the front of the plane.
But the man ignores him, rushing toward the back. As the man passes me he glances in my direction. We lock eyes and then he continues without slowing. He’s a young man in his mid-thirties with a mustache, short hair, and a hard face. Something about him is familiar. The man continues down the aisle until he reaches the bathroom, pushes the door open, and slips inside.
“That guy, he took a backpack with him into the bathroom,” Gary says.
I glance back at Gary. His face is still sweaty, but he looks calmer now.
“What’s the big deal?” I ask.
“I don’t know about you, but most men wouldn’t take a backpack with them when they go to the bathroom on an airplane. It would just get in the way.”
Gary leans out into the aisle, looking back. I follow his gaze. One of the flight attendants at the back of the plane, a young, curly-haired woman, is knocking on the bathroom door.
“You’ve got to say something,” Gary hisses.
“Why me?” I ask.
“You’re the famous one.” Gary says. “You were at the attack.”
“They’re handling it,” I say.
He leans across the aisle toward me, his face becoming firm. “If you see something, say something.”
“Fine,” I mutter. I unclip my seat belt and get up, shuffling down the aisle as the plane shakes around me.
“Hey!” Someone shouts.
Ray the flight attendant is moving toward me from the front of the plane. I reach the back and the curly-haired flight attendant pauses knocking on the door to turn to me.
“Sir,” the curly-haired woman says. “The seat-belt lights are on, please return to your seat.”
I glance at her shirt. Her name tag reads ‘Janet.’
“Listen to me Janet,” I begin. “I noticed something about that man I think you should know.”
“What about him?” Janet asks, her eyes narrowing.
I’m about to relay my suspicions when the bathroom door opens, and the man steps out. And then I remember why the man was so familiar. He’s the driver from the night of the accident. Not Daniel Gaines but the real driver from nearly ten years ago. Except he hasn’t aged a day.
The man who isn’t Daniel Gaines glances first at me and then at the flight attendant. “Is everything okay?” the man asks.
“Yes, is it?” Janet asks again, looking pointedly at me. But I don’t respond. I can’t respond, because what has just happened is too impossible for words.
“It’s okay, Janet. I’ll take care of this guy.” I spin around to see Ray the flight attendant giving me a smug smile. “Please return to your seats, gentlemen.”
The shaking increases, and the four of us grip the walls for support.
I look at the man, Not-Daniel Gaines, and notice that his backpack is gone.
Ray grabs me by the arm. “I will need you both to return to your seats, now!”
“It’s okay,” the man says, and pulls back his jacket, revealing a holstered gun with a badge clipped next to it. “I’m Agent Jeff Hauser with Homeland Security. Mr. Gardner is with me. We’ll take these empty seats back here.”
Janet and Ray exchange a look and then both nod before moving to return to their respective posts. I watch Ray as he hurries up the aisle, my gaze settling on Gary, who is staring at me with wide eyes. Did he see Agent Hauser’s badge and gun? I wonder what he must be thinking right now. Hell, I don’t even know what I’m thinking right now.
“Come on,” Hauser mutters.
I feel myself detach from my body as the so-called Agent Hauser guides me into a nearby row and gestures for me to sit.
“I know you,” I say.
“Is that right?” Agent Hauser asks, glancing at the retreating figures of Ray and Janet.
“Yeah, you’re Daniel Gaines.”
“Who?” Agent Haus
er asks. He is staring ahead, intently focused on… something other than me.
“The driver?” I hiss. “Or, the guy who was supposed to be driving.”
“What are you talking about?” Agent Hauser asks, turning to me.
I shake my head, trying to form a coherent string of words. “You were the guy driving the car the night that we had the accident. The night that our car was pushed into the East River. The night that my wife died.”
“Oh, right…” Hauser says. “Yeah, that was me.”
More turbulence rattles the plane. Hauser checks his watch.
“How’d you do it?” I ask.
“Do what?” Hauser asks.
“How did you know that truck was going to hit us? Was the truck driver also working for you?”
“He was just a truck driver,” Hauser says.
“So the ISD knew that truck was going to crash, and you made sure our limo was in the right place at the right time?”
“How perceptive of you,” Hauser says, glancing at his watch again. When he looks back up, he begins speaking quickly while keeping his eyes fixed on the front of the plane. “Listen carefully, because what I’m about to say will mean the difference between life or death in these next few minutes.”
“Are you serious?” I ask, feeling dumbfounded.
Hauser continues as if he hadn't heard me. “In ninety seconds, one of the engines is going to fail. It’s been having problems for the last ten minutes—that’s the real cause of this turbulence. After it fails, this plane will begin a controlled descent and the pilot will attempt an emergency landing on I-90, twenty miles east of Madison. But he’ll go in too steep, flipping the plane over on landing. Everyone on board will die, including you.” Hauser turns and looks at me. “Unless you do as I say.”
I grip the arm rest as I feel my mouth go dry. “This is insane.”
Hauser ignores me. “When the engine fails—and you will know when it does—I will need you to follow me to the back to the rear of the plane.”
“Why?” I ask.
Hauser looks at me for the first time. “Because we’re going to jump out of this plane.”
I’m going to die.
Cold sweat runs down my back. “What happened to the real Daniel Gaines?”
I had thought to ask about Molly, but I know what happened to her. She was recruited by the ISD and later kidnapped by a rival group of time travelers. But Daniel Gaines’ fate was still a mystery to me. Perhaps it’s my reporter instincts kicking in, not wanting to leave a story unfinished, but I realize now that this is one piece of the puzzle I still need to know.
Hauser shakes his head. “We don’t have time for that.”
There’s a bang, a lurch, and then the plane drops in altitude. I turn just in time to see Gary as he is thrown into the air, his head slamming into the cabin’s ceiling. He crumples to the ground, blood pouring from a head wound. The cabin shakes around us.
Hauser grabs me by the arm. “Let's move.”
“No,” I say, pulling out of his grasp. This may be my only opportunity for answers, and I am not going to let it slip by. “What happened to Daniel Gaines!”
Hauser glares at me. “We gave him money. A lot of it. So he’s probably living in the Bahamas somewhere.” He glances at me, noticing my expression. “Look, I don’t know all the details. It wasn’t my job. But we saved his life, just like we saved your wife, and just like we’re saving you.”
Hauser grabs my arm and pushes me toward the bathroom. He yanks open the door, and what I see makes my mind spin in confusion.
Hauser’s backpack lies abandoned on the floor of the bathroom. Four small, black devices no larger than cell phones are fixed to the back wall of the bathroom.
But that’s not right.
Because the wall of the bathroom facing the front of the plane is gone, and between the four devices, a vertical wall of water shimmers and undulates.
“What the hell?” I mutter.
“What you’re looking at is a sort of tunnel,” Hauser says. “I had to use the trackers to fix it to something solid, otherwise we’d never have been able to do this. We’re about to jump out of a plane moving at 200 miles per hour. The tunnel is able to account for a good chunk of the inertia, but not all. Which is why we’re making this jump into an abandoned pool from about twenty feet up. We’ll be coming in hot, so you’ll want to go through,” he points at the shimmering wall, “feet first.”
“Are you serious?” I ask.
“Deadly serious,” Hauser says. “And one last thing. I’ve never done this before either. Hell, as far as I know, all this is a first. So start praying.”
When I was sixteen, I jumped off a cliff at Malibu Creek in Calabasas, California from a height of thirty feet and into a pool of only twelve feet of water. The impact had sent a jolt through my body, and I remember thinking at the time that I had shattered several vertebrae. When I worked the crime beat in LA one of my colleagues—Rodrigo I think his name was—had just transferred down from San Francisco. I told him my cliff jumping story one day when we were eating lunch together, and he then felt the need to detail an autopsy he had once observed of a young woman that had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.
I remember him saying that the problem with falling from that height isn’t so much the speed as the stopping. The woman’s body had gone from 80 mph to nearly zero in the space of a second. Because the human body’s skeleton is rigid and internal organs aren’t, the woman’s internal organs had wanted to keep going while her skeleton had crumpled.
If she was lucky, then the impact would have knocked her unconscious first. If she wasn’t unconscious, then she would have been able to feel her shattered bones tearing into her spleen, liver, lungs, and heart. If the impact itself hadn’t killed, and it may not have, then she would have slowly drowned, her broken body unable to stay afloat. Drowning, of course, can still happen even if your body doesn’t maintain too much damage.
Some people occasionally jump from the Golden Gate Bridge for sport. Naturally, the temptation would be to keep your body straight when you jump, but this is the wrong idea. If you don’t go in at enough of an angle, then you sink too quickly, lose your orientation and die from simply drowning.
According Rodrigo, the key to avoid either fate—stopping too quickly or going too deep—was to jump feet first, but at a slight angle. Every couple of years someone survives a jump off the bridge, and that's how they do it.
But I don’t want to say that to Hauser for fear that he will simply push me through this insane, shimmering hole in the wall of the plane and that’ll be the end of me. Instead, I climb onto toilet with my back against the wall, and point my feet toward the tunnel.
“I’ll help you,” Hauser says. “Just keep your feet pointed that way, and as soon as you get all the way through, gravity will do the rest. On the count of three.”
I nod, feeling my throat go dry.
“One.”
I try to breath as my chest grows tight and my skin goes clammy.
“Two.”
The shaking has become an unendurable roar. It sounds as if the entire plane is about to break apart around us.
“Three.”
There’s a lurch as the plane has another drop in altitude. My body lifts up off the toilet, and at the same time, Hauser pushes me through, and—
FFFFFFUUUUUUUCCCKKKKK!
—A darkness rips through me, cold and otherworldly, as if I’d just been thrown through hell and back. For an eternity and a moment, the world turns to more colors than I can imagine, then to black and white, and back again to color, as cold consumes me.
I plunge, gasping, into ice-cold water. A shock of pain moves up through my legs to the top of my head. I open my mouth to scream, and water pours into my lungs. There’s a rush of pressure as someone else plunges into the water near me. I surge forward, reaching for the presence. The figure turns, swimming toward me. His face comes into view and I recoil from him as a memory overwhelms me
. The same man swimming out of a sinking car and pulling me away from Molly, then swimming back to find her and disappearing into the darkness. Disappearing, that is, until ten years later when he sat down next to me on a plane that was about to crash.
Hauser grabs me by the arm, then turns and swims toward the surface, pulling me along with him. Above us a shimmering light comes into view. It seems to pull at me as if drawing me toward it. I kick my legs, struggling for the surface. No longer only swimming for air, but to find the source of that light.
We reach the surface, and I gasp, choking and spitting up water as air fills my lungs. Hauser had said we would land in a pool just before he pushed me out of a plane and through… that shimmering tunnel of light.
The same light I had seen through the water.
I look up and see two large, metal arches holding a circular frame above the pool. Inside the frame, a strange light shimmers and pulses, held there as if stretched like a canvas across the frame. Through the light, I can almost see what looks like an airplane bathroom. But the image shakes as if pummeled by an unseen force.
“We’re losing the connection!” Someone shouts.
I look around, realizing that the entire metal structure is shaking as well. Dust and pieces of concrete fall from the walls and ceiling, splashing into the surrounding water. The image increases in brightness. I tense up, expecting an explosion, and then I realize that it’s sunlight, pouring into the airplane bathroom through the missing wall that had just been there before the airplane was ripped in two. I get a quick view of clouds, and the tail section of the plane spinning out of sight. That wasn’t supposed to happen I think. He said that the pilot would make a controlled descent.
“They’re through,” someone else yells. “Shut it down! Shut it down!”
A high-pitched tone, that I only now realize had been present since I’d been dragged from the water, drops in pitch and then fades into silence. As it does, the shimmering light flickers, and fades.
My shoulder hits something hard. It’s the edge of the pool. Hands grab at me, yank me up and onto a tile floor, and roll me onto my back. I blink water from my eyes as several figures appear above me. And then another sound takes the place of all the noise that had just faded away.
Incursion: Book Three of The Recursion Event Saga Page 16
