Tomorrow

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  “We need clothes for Freya,” I say. Most stores won’t be open for hours yet, which narrows our options. “And you need to clean up.”

  The woman eyes herself in the mirror, spitting on her hand and then dragging it down her neck. “I need something to stop the bleeding.” She brakes, sweeping her hair back to examine the tip of her ear. I saw much worse inside the house, but we both wince at the sight of her bloody flesh. “Maybe one of these houses has a clothesline,” the woman suggests breathlessly.

  “I doubt it.” The pavement’s dry now but it was raining when I was taken last night. Most people wouldn’t have had a chance to hang clothes and besides, this neighbourhood is too affluent to forego the luxury and speed of a dryer for a clothesline. On top of that, wooden fences obscure any view of the backyards. “What about a clothing donation box? There has to be one somewhere in the area.”

  The woman steers us swiftly out of the neighbourhood and we scour the surrounding streets for any sign of a charity box. Five minutes later I spot a bright blue cube marked ‘DONATE’ in an L-shaped strip mall. A realtor, fish and chips store, hairdresser, and fruit market skirt the parking lot. “On your right,” I advise, the car tilting as we take a sharp turn into the lot.

  Nothing’s open yet and no indoor lights are on, but there’s a single car at the far end of the lot. Either somebody left their car here overnight or showed up to work early. We need to do this quick.

  “Is there a tire iron in the trunk?” I ask, lifting Freya’s head from my lap so I can throw my sweatshirt back on and climb out of the backseat.

  The woman cuts the engine and gets out of the car with me. “I don’t know.” Near the rear of the car, on the driver’s side, I see where the director’s bullet hit. We were lucky—it took off a section of paint the length of an eraser but looks more like a parking lot scrape-up than something sinister.

  Next to me the woman slides the key in the trunk and pops it open. Sure enough, there’s a spare tire, tire iron, and compact toolbox squeezed into the trunk along with wiper fluid and several plastic bags full of groceries that someone must have forgotten to bring into the house with them. At a glance I notice paper towels in one of the bags—something that could help stop the woman’s bleeding.

  I reach for the tire iron and toolbox, pressing the box into the woman’s hands in case we need it. “Let’s go,” I tell her, not wanting to leave her with Freya. I don’t trust her not to change her mind and drive away—she’s so frazzled it wouldn’t surprise me if she headed straight for the U.N.A.’s Ontario base and offered Freya back to them.

  As we approach the charity box, I wish it was still pitch-dark out to offer us some cover. Unfortunately the day’s fast closing in. I size up the box, noting it’s structured like a mailbox. You can slide items in but not retrieve them. The top will have to come off.

  I go to work with the tire iron, jamming its flatter end under the box’s lid. But I need more leverage than I can get with one good hand. “Help me,” I demand. “What’s your name anyway?”

  The woman grabs on to the tire iron with me. “You can call me Elizabeth,” she says. Together we pry the nearest corner of the lid open. With our combined strength pushing stubbornly on the tire iron, the lid suddenly gives way and flies open. I jump onto the clothing slot and peer into the box’s contents—it’s full to the brim with garbage bags. I rip into one after the other, tossing usable contents for Freya down to Elizabeth: black jeans, sandals, a polo shirt, a frilly blue halter top, a pink miniskirt that Freya would hate but looks like it would fit, a white knit sweater that I’d bet has never been worn, and a mustard-coloured windbreaker.

  “That’s enough,” Elizabeth says nervously. “Passing cars are taking an interest.”

  “One second.” I ferret out a lime green headband for Elizabeth and leap down, leaving the lid open. We hurry to the car to deposit the tools in the trunk. I grab the gun from the backseat and toss it in along with them, burying it at the bottom of one of the grocery bags. Elizabeth tucks a wad of paper towels against her ear and holds it firmly in place with the headband. The lime green doesn’t exactly match what she’s wearing, but the headband’s decent camouflage.

  Meanwhile, Freya lies spread across the backseat like Sleeping Beauty, her lips parted and her face a mask of calm. The light creeping into the sky returns some colour to her skin, making her appear a shade less delicate than when we sped away from the farmhouse. Hope swells in my stomach. Maybe she’ll be all right. She remembered the truth the first time they tampered with her memories. Maybe she can do it again. Freya’s not like other people.

  I scoot into the backseat, Elizabeth burning out of the parking lot like we’re being chased. “Be careful,” I warn. “We don’t want to be stopped for speeding.”

  “I know, I know,” Elizabeth says anxiously. “Where do you want me to go?”

  “Just drive.” My mind lands on Dennis and Scott. What would they do if I showed up on their doorstep with Freya unconscious in my arms? Would they help me this time or would they consider Freya’s condition further evidence of my guilt?

  I pull the pink miniskirt up Freya’s legs—over the one-piece medical gown—and then untie the gown where it drapes around the back of her neck so I can slip it down her shoulders before guiding her head into the polo neck. Once she’s decent I reach under her skirt to tug off the medical gown. I didn’t come across any socks or shoes in the box, but I strap her feet into the sandals, relieved they’re only a size or so too big.

  Finally, I prop her into a seated position and lean her head against the window. I’d like to stay close and keep my eye on her, but for appearance’s sake I’m better off in the front seat. “I’m climbing up there with you,” I warn Elizabeth.

  She holds her arms in tight to her body and glances at me sideways as I thump down into the passenger seat, thinking over her question: Where do we go? We need money and a place to keep a low profile, but it’s impossible to focus on those things when Freya’s out like a light. People can live weeks without food but only days without water. If she doesn’t wake up, she’ll need an IV to replace fluids. And then what? Will Elizabeth be able to take care of her or will she need to be admitted to the hospital?

  But I can’t let myself think like that. She’ll wake up.

  Elizabeth’s steering us east and for now I don’t question her decision. Once Freya wakes up we could catch the ferry west to Vancouver Island and try to hide out in some sparsely populated patch of wilderness, but if they came for us there our backs would be up against the wall. Having run out of land, we’d be trapped.

  I stare over my shoulder at Freya as I say, “Isaac told me a lot of things about 2065. I don’t know which of them are true.”

  Elizabeth furrows her brow and keeps her eyes on the road. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “But you told me about the boy whose mind you shattered.”

  “Carefully and incompletely,” she qualifies. “The far future is…” she pauses, the skin under her eyes creasing heavily. “The future is strictly off-limits.”

  “What if I just ask yes-no questions?”

  She shakes her head vehemently.

  “You told me about Isaac’s virus. Technically, that’s the future.”

  Elizabeth swivels to look me in the face. In some other time and place her green headband would look comical. “Technically saying the forecast is calling for sun tomorrow would be discussing the future too, but the parameters are narrower than that.” And the parameters that would trigger a wipe would have been programmed before Elizabeth was sent through the chute, which could have been years ago. Then they wouldn’t include Minnow’s plans for 1986 so couldn’t prohibit her talking about them.

  Fifteen months ago the Ontario director told Freya that if people working for the U.N.A. begin to transmit information about the future and what they’re doing here, a wipe sequence is instantly triggered. Sharing some general information seems permissible but the U.N.A.’s existence, p
resent aims, and reasons behind their goals are out-of-bounds. As is any knowledge of the future, which leaves me largely in the dark about Isaac’s version of 2065 and 2071 events.

  “What about the virus?” I probe. “Is it still a danger to us all? Was Isaac working alone or are there others out there who could unleash it?”

  Elizabeth’s cheeks colour, suggesting the news won’t be good. “We had a difficult time with Monroe. He obviously had access to brand new grounded technology that helped him resist our methods.” Probably a drug hidden somewhere on his body, something he ingested when they dragged him out of the barn. “We’d only begun to break through his defenses,” she continues. “It was such a thorny undertaking, we were in danger of irreparably harming his mind, which would prevent us from obtaining all the information we needed. We discovered his desire to release the virus but not the details. We were forced to temporarily stop mining for information. To give him a chance to stabilize.”

  Stabilize and escape. With my help.

  “Why would he want to decimate the current population?” I ask. “He wasn’t like that, he respected human life.” Guilt pierces my skin as Isaac’s image shimmers behind my eyes, the feeling instantly driven away by his plotted massacre.

  Elizabeth remains silent. We’ve crossed into forbidden territory. Isaac’s reasons come from the future.

  When I asked him out on the Lower East Side how he could stop a 2071 nuclear disaster from 1986, Minnow told me he wasn’t trying to prevent it, simply helping people evacuate. But maybe he was trying to stop it, in some way I can’t fathom. I’m feverish at the thought, my mind twisting and turning, sliding down a chute that never ends. Maybe humanity would be better off if no one had ever discovered the chute. Otherwise people might never stop insisting on second chances, constantly trying to revise the past and creating new dangers in the process.

  “He couldn’t have come through the chute alone,” I continue, thinking aloud. “Not if he killed—or somehow got past—the people the U.N.A. must have stationed in Lake Mackay. He said he came with a team.”

  Elizabeth’s face is stony. “We know he wasn’t alone at the outset; we’re not sure what became of any others. We believe he had the most important role in potentially spreading the virus but he wasn’t in possession of it when we picked him up. I can’t say more on the subject of the lake. You have to understand, my mind is a minefield.”

  She must not be capable of discussing U.N.A. forces in Lake Mackay and therefore can’t tell me what happened there, but someone out in Australia would have informed their people in North America about what happened with Isaac and his crew. Otherwise they wouldn’t have thrown him into the van with me.

  “So you don’t really know if we’re safe from the virus,” I surmise.

  “No. We thought we’d break through Monroe’s defences in the end, that there’d be time to uncover his entire plan. There wasn’t. But I would’ve shot him myself, in the field, if you hadn’t done it first. We couldn’t let him follow through with his intentions.”

  There’s little room for regret over my actions. It had to be done. Everything happened so fast back there. I didn’t know if I could rely on Elizabeth to do the job. Minnow had proven he was good with a gun—he might have taken her out first instead. She’s a scientist, not used to armed altercations.

  And then it hits me, the realization descending with deceptive softness, like the first snowflakes of the season. My feelings of necessity are Minnow’s feelings about the virus. He wouldn’t do it unless he didn’t see any option. The things he told me about 2071 were the cruel truth. Widespread nuclear destruction that would make the planet uninhabitable for years to come. It happened once already and in 2065 we were travelling down that same path to annihilation.

  Isaac couldn’t expect to kill the Doomsday Cultists in France who launched the bombs; they wouldn’t be born yet in 1986. And preventing the birth of any single person responsible for the attack probably wouldn’t change what happened on September 19, 2071, either. But killing many, many people—billions of them—would alter human history. Losing sixty percent of the population would cripple nations. There wouldn’t be enough people to keep basic services running. Infrastructure would crumble.

  There’d be no place for an arms race in a world like that. People would be too busy trying to survive and take the first steps to putting civilization back on its feet. Carbon dioxide emissions would drop as a result of the culling, slowing global warming. I can’t know for sure this scenario is what would have fuelled Minnow’s decision, but there’s a horrifying logic to it. Killing sixty percent of the population might well keep the planet clean, preventing animal extinctions and possibly our own, for years to come.

  Ultimately we could end up making similar or drastically different mistakes regarding the earth, but there’s no way a virus of the scale Elizabeth described could fail to make a dent in humanity’s path. Minnow’s virus would bring rapid change, causing ripples that would be felt all the way to 2071 and beyond. Killing people now could save the future.

  But there’s no guarantee of that, and why should the people of today be sacrificed on a gamble? Maybe the U.N.A.’s efforts to alter the future would have generated enough change to prevent the disaster of 2071. Minnow should’ve given their plans a chance to succeed.

  He was wrong to attempt to wipe out the majority of humanity with a virus, even if his goal was to save the planet. Most of the population of 1986 would agree with me. And yet, I shot Minnow for the same reason. Does that mean only the vast number of people who would be affected by Isaac’s virus make his actions wrong?

  My eye sockets and forehead twinge, cobwebs of pain spinning out along my skull. It would be better not to know these things, not to carry these questions in my mind. I feel it trying to expand with the weight of them, and failing.

  “There’s nothing we can do about the virus either way now,” Elizabeth says, surprisingly stoic. “It will happen or it won’t. I was thinking about what you said—how you asked me what they’d expect you to do.”

  I nod bewilderedly, one of my eyelids pulsing again.

  “Maybe Monroe’s dead body will convince them you hadn’t joined forces with him. If they believe you killed him, they couldn’t believe you were involved in his plans for the virus. In that case they might leave us alone and concentrate on looking for others who are more dangerous.”

  The ones who came with him from the future, ones who might still have access to the virus.

  I don’t know how much the director saw and I say, “They might think Isaac was shot by one of your people in the house and that he bled to death in the field trying to get away.”

  Elizabeth sighs, her hands tightening on the wheel. “They could. We have no way of knowing how they’ll regard the shooting or what resources they’ll dedicate to coming after us. We need to get as far away as possible, leave the continent. We could drive across the border and fly out from the United States somewhere. They wouldn’t expect that, I don’t think. They’d be more likely to look for us at the Vancouver airport.”

  Freya and I were led to believe there are more U.N.A. personnel south of the border than there are in Canada, making it a riskier place to hide. We travelled across the entire country rather than slipping into the United States the last time they came after us. So Elizabeth could be right that crossing the border isn’t something they’d expect of us, but considering Freya’s state, what she’s proposing is just as impossible as catching the ferry to Vancouver Island. We’re only about twenty minutes from the Peace Arch crossing in Washington State, but it may as well be a thousand miles away.

  “I’m not leaving her if that’s what you’re suggesting,” I say angrily, my gaze whipping into the backseat. A lock of Freya’s hair has fallen between her lips and one of her hands is folded under her head, acting as a cushion against the window. I didn’t position it that way and my heart revs in my chest.

  Catching my expression, Elizabeth glances o
ver her shoulder at Freya. “I know you wouldn’t leave her.” Elizabeth flips her gaze back to the road, unaware of the change in Freya.

  “She’s moved.” My skin tingles as I repeat myself. “She moved her hand. That has to be a good sign, right?”

  Elizabeth nods slowly, her eyes springing back to Freya. “I hope so.” But Elizabeth’s tone isn’t as optimistic as I’d expect. I’m on the verge of cross-examining her when a horn blares from the car in front of us. There’s minimal traffic on the road and no disturbances that I can see, but for a moment the sound shakes me free of any deeper questions and sends my eyes scanning the area for the source of the driver’s irritation.

  I’m no wiser about what pissed him off when I watch him ease off his horn and push a cigarette between his lips. A body should know better than to yearn for poison but mine doesn’t. I inhale deeply as the driver flicks a lighter in front of his face, my lungs filling with imaginary nicotine and smoke.

  When I return my attention to Freya, her head’s still settled sleepily against her hand and she’s staring steadily back at me, her blue eyes pale and infinite in the early morning sunshine. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen Freya wake up in the past fifteen months. Sometimes with a yawn or bleary eyes and sometimes with the energy of a child. In all those months I’ve never once seen this strangely detached expression in her face.

  “Freya?” Joy and urgency coil in my voice. “Freya?”

  Her eyelashes flutter shut, the invisible divide between us falling into place and sealing me out of her existence.

  Sixteen: 1986

  Elizabeth whips around to look at Freya, too late to catch her moment of consciousness.

  “Her eyes were open,” I say breathlessly. “What’s going on—why is she asleep again?”

  Elizabeth purses her lips and fretfully adjusts her headband. “She must be starting to come out of it, but that could be gradual. Listen, Garren, I just want to warn you not to expect too much. Pulling her out of the process before completion could’ve caused some unpredictable results.”