by David Holley
As the Sinclairs walk toward the boarding area, Mia pulls Max aside. “I need to talk to you about something very serious, and I can’t be around Mom and Dad when I tell you.”
“Whoa, ease up sis. I haven’t slept in three days and I’m checking out as soon as I get on board.”
“Like hell you will! I’ve got to talk to you about this now. It’s important, Max, and you have to believe me!”
Max glances in confusion at his wild-eyed sister, as they slowly trudge through the line. “What the actual fuck, Mia?”
*************
Already onboard, in the tail section of the shuttle, Noah and Evelyn sit next to each other. Evelyn rests comfortably in her flight station, clutching her husband’s arm and studying his face as he stares out the window. She looks radiant in her form-fitting aubergine dress while Noah wears charcoal woolen trousers and a light grey dress shirt.
With all of the passengers finally seated, the flight crew prepares the cabin for liftoff. As the engines ignite, the deafening roar of the rockets sends Noah back to a place and time he can’t forget.
The medevac copter lifts off into the night under a hail of gunfire. He lived through the full retreat from the ambush that obliterated his ranks, but all of his soldiers are wounded — at least the ones who are still alive. Everyone except Noah. He doesn’t have a scratch, although he is covered in his squadron’s blood. He holds the near lifeless body of Corporal Harry Leach as precious blood pours out from his neck. Noah tries to put as much pressure as he can on the wound, although he knows Harry, age twenty-four, will die in a matter of seconds. Noah takes inventory inside the chopper full of dying and dismembered soldiers. The high-pitched roar of the engines can’t block out the agonized screams of young men and women whose flesh and bones have been gored by hot metal.
Suddenly the corporal grabs Noah’s arm, squeezing it as hard as he can. “Sir?” gurgles Harry.
“Yes, Corporal.”
“Make sure you get them, sir… kill ’em… kill ’em all!” He coughs hard and blood splatters on Noah’s flak jacket. “Promise me, sir!” He clutches Noah’s arm so hard that it feels like his flesh will tear from the bone.
Noah nods his head. “I will Harry. I will.” The moment passes, as does Corporal Leach. The pain in Noah’s arm slowly fades away.
Evelyn, gazing at Noah’s reflection in the window, can see that he is a thousand miles away from her, battling the demons of war. The pain in his eyes is palpable, and her heart aches for her battle-weary husband. She makes a faint attempt to break the silence. “It will be nice to see Randall again.”
After a long pause, Noah responds, “Yes, it will. It’s been too long. So much has happened.”
And so much has changed. “Yes, too long,” Evelyn agrees, noting that it has been three long years since the last time, a somber occasion. I can only hope that Randall will help him sort out whatever it is he’s going through.
“His fortress should be complete by now,” says Noah.
Dungeon, more like. “Yes, I would think so.”
Evelyn loves Randall like family but she thinks he has grown a little batty in his old age. Doomsday prepper is how Noah has labeled him. Evelyn has a different name for it. “We should see your mother after our visit with Randall. What do you think?”
“Yes, we should absolutely do that. I’ll make arrangements after we land.” He attempts a weak smile, but Evelyn has already looked away.
“It’s settled then!” Evelyn reclines her seat for a long in-flight nap.
*************
The Sinclair family is seated in Section One of the shuttle, the parents in the first row with the twins directly behind them. Mia is still working out the finer points of how she will break the news to Max, who has headphones in place and sunglasses on. She looks at her derelict brother with his wild, greasy hair and notices his fly is gaping. He reeks of booze and some whore’s cheap perfume, but she can’t help but laugh at his depravity. Max is rugged and handsome, she allows; he takes after their father with the dirty blonde locks and those big brown eyes, while Mia has the look of her mother, who is of Armenian and Israeli descent.
Even though they are twins, they look and act nothing alike. While she is quiet and painfully shy, Max is the loudest person she has ever known and he strives to be the center of attention at all times. She is a loner, tried and true, preferring the company of books and animals, while Max is social and engaging. She has often wished she could be more like him — blissfully unaware, without a care in the world. If only he knew what I do. She is certain his outlook would not be so rosy.
She patiently waits for the signal allowing movement about the cabin, as she has had to endure a three-day wait for this moment to speak to her brother. With the liftoff now complete and before the shuttle reaches orbital altitude, the signal sounds, and Mia leans close to her brother’s ear. “Follow me.”
The direction goes unacknowledged. Undeterred, Mia raises her voice. “Max, come on!” Again her urging falls on deaf ears. She realizes that he is asleep, dead asleep. She grabs his arm and shakes it hard.
“Max!” she snaps. Her patience has worn thin, and she can feel heat building in her head as if it’s about to explode. She releases her shoulder harness, stands from her station and places both of her hands on his shoulders, resisting the temptation to put them around his neck. She shakes him violently. “MAX! WAKE THE FUCK UP!”
The outburst rouses their mother, who stands from her station and frowns. “Mia, knock it off! Can’t you see your brother is sleeping?”
Mia turns sharply to face her mother. “I know he’s sleeping, Mom, but I need to talk to him about something very important.”
“We’re going to be together for the next three weeks. Whatever it is you need to talk to him about can wait.” With that, Mrs. Sinclair drops back into her station and sets it to full recline.
Defeated, Mia throws herself back into her seat and stares at the ceiling, cursing under her breath. Always the outcast in her family, she tries to imagine a life in which she would actually be considered normal. She scoffs inwardly at the notion; she knows more than anyone that there is nothing normal about her. She has always been misunderstood, labeled the troubled one, while her brother was the family messiah, incapable of doing wrong. A chill runs through her, and she pulls the cover over her head and zips her black ruffled hoodie to her neck. Sliding on a pair of black sunglasses, she sulks in the dark. If they only knew, she thinks as she closes her eyes and tries to come up with a plan.
She unwillingly drifts into a deep sleep.
When Mia finally wakes, she finds that hours have passed. Startled, she reaches for her COM and checks the time. Fuck, I slept over five hours. She looks over at her brother who hasn’t moved from the position she last saw him in and concludes that he must have had some bender. She looks at her flight console and realizes she has slept through the orbital; they are nearing the descent phase of the flight, but she still has three hours before they land. Plenty of time to talk to Max, if only she can wake him. An evil smile forms on her face as she pushes the button for the flight attendant.
A young man, not much older than her, comes to her aid. “Yes miss, my name is Jacob. How can I help you?” His hair is a dark chestnut, shiny and perfectly coifed, and his deep-set smoky blue eyes twinkle when he smiles.
“A cup of hot tea, please.” Mia brandishes her devilish smirk at the handsome fellow.
“Right away.” Within moments he places the cup of tea on Mia’s serving tray.
“Thank you,” says Mia, inspecting the tea. It’s much too hot, and she will need to let it cool before unleashing her plan. She lets several minutes pass before she places the tip of her index finger in the cup. Just right. She sets the cup of tea on her brother’s console and unlocks his harness, which pulls slowly back from his shoulders and disappears behind him. She then takes his left hand and places two fingers in the cup of warm tea.
Within moments, her bro
ther jumps out of his chair with so much force that he bangs his head against the overhead compartment. “What the fuh…?” Max looks at his sister with equal parts shock and rage. She beams back at him, holding her finger up to her lips.
“Shhhh… RELAX!”
“RELAX? Mia, I am going to kill you!” Gritting his teeth, he leans over and glares into her eyes. “I just pissed my pants, you jackass!”
Mia laughs uncontrollably as she stands up from her station and grabs her brother’s hand, leading him to the back of the shuttle. When Max exits the lavatory a few minutes later, he notices Mia is in a window seat in Section Two. She looks at him with a wry smile and pats the station next to her. “Sit boy. Sit!”
“Seriously Mia, this better be good!”
She winces and shakes her head. “Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re going to like anything I have to tell you.”
Max rolls his eyes and slumps his shoulders. “Shocking, coming from you.” He plops in the station and turns to face her. “Okay, let me have it.”
Mia takes a deep breath as she finds the courage. “Alright,” she starts. “But before I tell you this, you must promise to believe everything I say, okay?”
Max ponders this and sees that his sister is serious. In fact, his sister has always been serious. He is the jokester in the family, not she. “Okay,” he agrees.
Mia lowers her voice dramatically and speaks slower in the hope that she won’t have to repeat anything and, more importantly, so no one else can hear her. “Remember that night, years ago, when we were living in New York and you snuck out of the house to meet up with your friends?”
He shoots her a bewildered look. “Of course I remember. You saved my life that night. That’s not something you just forget.”
That wasn’t the only time. “You’re right, I did....” she pauses. “But I never really told you the truth about that night.”
Max lets that remark sit for a few moments as he considers her revelation. She’s right, she never gave me a proper explanation. “Well, you have my attention, now.”
Mia and Max were thirteen years young and lived in a sprawling modular mansion surrounded by dense forests in Pittsford, New York. Their house, designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was a perfect sanctuary for the reclusive Mia and an endless backyard of wonder for her adventurous brother. It was the place they grew up and the only house they ever truly considered home.
Almost nightly, Max would sneak out, after his parents had gone to bed, to meet up with his friends at an abandoned cabin deep in the woods. The dilapidated dwelling had long been vacant; its walls were stained yellow and the plank floors were splintered and rotted. It was quite possibly the best place a teenage boy could find; a true home away from home, where boys could be boys. They spent countless hours smoking cigarettes and drinking beers stolen from their parents. Sometimes, they would even try their hand at night fishing in the nearby stream.
Max never took the same path twice to get to the cabin. He delighted in finding circuitous and sometimes challenging courses to get there. On a bitterly cold evening, far into the woods with only his flashlight and his penchant for adventure, Max lost his footing and tumbled down a hill, rolling and sliding feet first into a narrow ravine. The slippery terrain was accompanied by a low hanging fog that hugged the ground like creeping death. Max’s overconfidence had landed him in the middle of the wet mud that ran deep across the floor of the crevasse. Conscious but shaken, he noticed that his left ear was burning and he knew that the metallic, salty liquid filling his mouth could only be blood. He spat out a large mouthful and used his tongue to probe his bottom lip for the source of the bleeding. He no longer had his flashlight and could barely see the outline of his hand when he held it to his face. When he tried to pull his feet from the mass of water and cold sludge, he couldn’t move. Literally stuck in the mud, with nothing to grab onto, he began to tremble. Worse, when he tried to wiggle, he only sank further into the muck. Panic surged through him. “HELP!” he screamed into the deafening silence.
He screamed again, more out of anger this time, knowing it was pointless. The realization dawned that he was too deep into the woods and too far away from his friends for anyone to hear him. His fear had reached a fever pitch and tears began to form, when suddenly a flash of light dipped across the long ravine. Max snapped out of his despair as he looked toward the glorious shining light that beamed so brightly that he had to raise his forearm to shield his eyes from the miracle.
“Max!” A familiar voice rang out, a voice he has known his whole life.
“Oh my God, Mia! Is that you?” he asked, astonished.
“No, it’s your fairy godmother!” Then after a long pause, she added, “Yes, it’s me. Are you okay?”
Max was so happy to hear his sister’s voice that he started laughing, even as he wiped away the tears on his cheeks. “That’s awesome, Mia… that’s awesome. How did you find me?”
“Don’t worry about that now. Here, grab hold of this.” The end of a rope dropped from above.
“You brought a rope?” His voice was incredulous.
“Just take it and pull yourself up. I have it tied around a tree.”
Max placed both hands around the rope and slowly pulled himself out of the mud, losing a shoe in the process.
As he pulled himself toward Mia, she grabbed him and pulled him close, allowing him to plant his feet and release the rope. He hugged her so hard that she started flailing her arms against his back. “You’re hurting me!” she squealed.
“Oh, sorry. I’m just so relieved. Mia, you saved my life!”
Mia pointed the flashlight under her chin and deadpanned, “You owe me bro… BIG TIME!” Her smile went south when she noticed her brother bleeding from the ear and lip. “You’re hurt!”
“It’s nothing, just a nick or two,” he dismissed. He grabbed his dropped flashlight, which Mia had retrieved along the way, and inspected the rest of his body. Covered in mud, soaking wet, and sans a left shoe, he was fine, remarkably, other than a bruised ego.
“Let’s get you home and out of these wet clothes before you catch your death!”
Max laughed. “You sound like Mom!”
Mia, realizing that he was right, bit her lip and shrugged. “Whatever, follow me.”
Mia led him through the dark in silence until Max asked again, “So… how did you find me? I mean, I never even went that way before tonight.”
Mia went silent for what seemed to be a long while before she suddenly answered. “Look! I know you’ve been sneaking out with your friends in the middle of the night, and I decided to start following you, okay?”
“You followed me? It’s the middle of the night and we’re in the woods! Why would you do that?”
“Because I was mad that you were going out, and I was planning on blackmailing you after I had enough evidence,” Mia snapped.
“Oh…. So now what?”
“So now nothing.”
“So you’re not going to tell Mom and Dad?”
Mia sighed. “No, Max. I won’t say a word. Hurry up though, I’m freezing!”
Max remembers how cold it was that night and how terrified he felt. All alone, deep in the woods, he hopes against hope that he is never in a situation like that again. He rubs his earlobe and can still feel the faint scar he earned that night.
He shrugs. “So what did you mean by that, the truth?”
“The truth is… I didn’t follow you into the woods because I was mad at you and I wanted to get you in trouble. You had been sneaking out for months. If I wanted to rat you out, I could have done it long before then. Now this part is really complicated, so just hear me out. I knew you were going to be in trouble that night before you did. I don’t know how I know these things, but I do. And that’s why I had the rope with me.”
“Wait… what?” Max is now utterly confused.
“Sometimes I can see events in the future. I’ve been able to for as long as I can remember. They c
ome to me like dreams, even when I’m not sleeping. It’s maddening. They’re like puzzles in that they’re hardly ever linear and it’s only a few seconds of the future. A lot of the times I don’t even know what they mean or how far into the future it is. It’s like I get this feeling of déjà vu.”
“Déjà vu?” asks Max.
“Yeah… you know what that is right?”
“Yeah, I mean, I think so. It’s like when I started seeing that girl Suzy Myers we went to school with at St. Andrews. She acted so cavalier when we first met and then as soon as we had sex she started acting just like my ex-girlfriend Lauren with the clingy, naggy bullshit….”
“Okay, stop!” Mia interrupts not wanting to hear another word. “Nihilo sanctum estne?” she mutters under her breath, as she often does when talking to her brother. How in the world could we have come from the same womb?
She tries again: “When I experience déjà vu, it’s far different from what most people describe. First, I get this moment of nausea, like when I get sick in the car sometimes. And that’s when I realize it’s happening. It’s like a vision or a dream while I’m awake. In this vision I can see the future. It’s just a glimpse, but it’s enough to know what will happen after that initial moment, as if I’m watching the future in the past. Are you following?”
Max’s mind is blown. His head is bent toward his sister, as he hangs on every word, trying to keep up, but wanting to ask questions. Mia’s revelation is causing pieces to fall into place, so many things that have been a mystery to him for so long. Like the time his family was set to go to Lake Tahoe for their yearly ski trip and how skittish Mia was for several weeks prior, finally demanding that they go somewhere else, anywhere else, but there. Though vexed, the Sinclairs eventually caved, and they instead went to London to visit their grandparents.
It would end up being the endless vacation. They hadn’t been home since.
“Max?” she asks again. “Are you listening?”
