Blow Up and Fall Down

by Josh Anderson

  * * *

  Moments later

  “Stop him!” Allaire screamed to Kyle, jumping off the pillar’s platform. “You’re letting him get away! Stop him!”

  Kyle was startled by how frantic she looked. He looked back at the place Ayers had been standing but there was nothing to be done.

  Allaire reached the main floor of the silo a few seconds later and flailed at the air like a tantruming child. “We had him! Dammit!” She got down on all fours and slapped the ground over and over, screaming. “He was right here! Right fucking here!”

  She got up a few seconds later without acknowledging Kyle. She was breathing heavy, practically hyperventilating. “Did he even take the bait?” she asked herself through gritted teeth, walking toward the stairs leading to the room with all of the monitors. “Did he even take the fucking bait?”

  Kyle followed Allaire toward the stairs. “Allaire,” he called out.

  She just headed up the stairs. Even though he’d betrayed her by leaving the last time and trying again to stop the bus crash, he hoped she could forgive him now that he’d come back. First, he’d have to get her to hear him out.

  He stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “Allaire, please talk to me.”

  “Dammit!” she called out from upstairs. “Dammit. Dammit. Dammit!”

  Kyle walked upstairs and into the surveillance room. Allaire just stared at her computer screen.

  She closed her eyes and put her head in her hands, clearly irritated with him. “Do you have any clue how hard it is to track down someone who literally knows everything you’re going to do before you do it?”

  “I’m sorry about leaving last time,” he said. “I should’ve listened to you.”

  “I don’t care about that,” she said sharply. “This isn’t about you . . . I had him! For once, I had everything lined up. And you show up and mess . . . ” She looked into his eyes for the first time as she trailed off. There was barely even a hint of the warmth from their earlier times together.

  Allaire bent down and reached toward a shelf to the right of the largest monitor in the room. She picked up a computer mouse and a pair of tweezers. She used the tweezers to try to peel something from the mouse

  Kyle wanted to ask what she was doing. He wanted to ask how he could help. But he was taken aback by her tone with him. Part of him believed she’d laugh off his naïve decision to give it one more go trying to stop the crash. She’d never treated him coldly like this before.

  She used the tweezers to pull a thin film from the mouse. The clear piece—about the size of a thumbnail—was barely visible to Kyle once she pulled it off until she moved it closer and let him see. “A silent, weightless temporal tracker, with no detectable electronic signature,” she said. “It binds to skin, and is so easily hidden that he could have had it stuck to his hand for years and he’d have no idea.”

  She took a small case for the device from another shelf. “I lured him here by planting information on this computer, but instead of even touching the controller and attaching the tracker to himself, he gets distracted by you.”

  “I’m sorry, Allaire,” Kyle said. “I had no idea.”

  She lowered her voice a bit, softening her tone. “Just . . . Just, please, leave me alone while I figure out my next move. Figuring out a reason to get him to come back here took a lot of planning and some luck, and I don’t know if I can pull it off again.”

  Allaire had always made Kyle feel special. He thought she was crazy for how openly and quickly she’d expressed her feelings for him, but she’d loved him unconditionally like no one ever had. But that love was nowhere to be found now and Kyle had no idea if he’d ever feel it again.

  He wished he’d gone through the silk blot with Ayers.

  CHAPTER 8

  July 24, 2060

  * * *

  One hour later

  Kyle was so exhausted that he’d started to doze off in a hard plastic chair, with his head laying on the matching table. He perked up immediately when he heard Allaire come down the stairs. He was relieved to see that she wasn’t furiously glaring at him anymore.

  “Hi,” she said, sitting in a chair across from him. “How are you?”

  Kyle picked his head up from the table. “Okay, I guess . . . ”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered. “Not really.”

  “I’m sorry about before,” she said. “It’s just . . . This is my life. Ayers and . . . anyway, I’m sorry.”

  Kyle wondered what she meant, but didn’t want to get put right back on the shit list by pressing her.

  “I’ve been trying to bring him in for a very long time,” she said. “So, I need you to tell me everything you talked about. Okay, sweet cheeks?”

  Her term of affection fell flat, and Kyle could see that she knew it too. “You don’t have to pretend anymore,” he said.

  “Don’t say that, Kyle,” she answered, still unconvincing.

  “Ayers told me I was special,” Kyle said. “Like him. Is it true?”

  Allaire really looked into Kyle’s eyes for the first time now, as if that’s where the answer was. “It would explain a lot.”

  “Like why I hadn’t aged in that video we watched, right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But . . . the thing is, you can’t actually be a Sere. The Seres are the ones who—”

  Kyle smiled. “The ones who make the silk blots. I know, Allaire.”

  “What did he say to you?” she asked.

  “He asked me to come with him,” Kyle answered. “He said he wanted to do something called ‘nevering.’ He said he could bring back everyone who died in the school bombing. And that he and I would live forever.”

  Allaire shook her head. It looked like part disbelief, part amusement. “Did he tell you what nevering is? How you do it?”

  Kyle just shook his head.

  “That’s because he doesn’t know! No one’s ever done it. To even try, you’d have to kill your parents, Kyle. Actually, you’d have to help him kill your parents. Did he tell you that, or did he leave that part out?”

  Kyle wasn’t sure he believed Allaire. If she was right, he’d almost made a huge mistake. But, what if, like Ayers had suggested, Allaire was just looking at everything that could go wrong again? Kyle wondered if he’d spent too much time focusing on what could go wrong, too, instead of embracing time weaving for the miracle it was.

  “Where was he going to take you?” Allaire asked. “What year?”

  “What are you going to do to him?” Kyle asked. “Would you kill him?”

  “No,” Allaire answered. Kyle thought about how little she hesitated slaughtering the Tigres in his cell at Stevenson Correctional until they were out of danger. And, he remembered how hard she’d fought to make sure twelve middle-school children stayed dead to avoid upsetting the timestream. “He’s the heir to the Seres bloodline. If I kill him before he has a child, the Seres die with him. Come on, Kyle. I have to know where he was headed.”

  What if Allaire was the one, Kyle thought, who needed to be hidden from? Perhaps Ayers was just doing what was necessary for his survival. The more Kyle thought about giving her information that would give her a leg up on Ayers, the more he wondered whether Allaire had done anything to prove to Kyle that coughing up the year “1989” was really in anyone’s best interest but her own.

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” Kyle said.

  Allaire moved closer to him. Kyle wondered whether withholding this information was all it was going to take to make him an enemy to her as well. She had fire in her eyes, and right now Kyle just wanted out of 2060. But, if he left, how could he be sure she wouldn’t be hunting him next? He needed to stick around and learn more. He needed to see if the Allaire who loved him—the Allaire he had loved back—really existed, or whether it had all been a con.

  CHAPTER 9

  July 25, 2060

  * * *

  The next morning

  Kyle sle
pt very lightly in one of the bedrooms built onto a platform in the silo. In the morning, Allaire brought him a protein bar on a plastic plate. He took a bite and almost spit it out immediately. It was the densest thing he’d ever tasted.

  “It’s called a Fifty bar,” she said. “Half the calories you need for the entire day.”

  He nodded a mild “thanks,” still working on chewing his first overly sweet bite.

  “You think that’s bad, you should try the Hundred bars,” she said. “It’s a utilitarian world out there right now. Not a lot of concern for good taste.”

  “I can tell,” Kyle said with his mouth full.

  Her face turned serious again. “The first person who had the mutation that Ayers has killed himself a long time ago. Apparently, he had no interest in staying young forever. Ayers is the second, and he’s psychotic. It just makes no sense that you’re the third. You seem to have something I thought was unique to the Seres bloodline—and yet, you aren’t one of them.”

  “Why do you say he’s psychotic?” Kyle asked. “Tell me about him.”

  “All he wants is chaos,” Allaire said. “He gets his kicks out of anarchy, violence. You name it. He doesn’t give a shit if his actions mean the end of the fucking world.”

  “Can you really say for sure that all of this, out there, is really his fault?” Kyle asked. He’d begun to view everything she said with some skepticism.

  “I can tell you that he’s the only time weaver who never came back,” she said. “There’s no one else out there who could be causing all of these issues . . . Except you, and I know everywhere you’ve been.”

  “Maybe there’s some other reason,” Kyle said. “For the earthquakes and moonfalls—”

  “And the extinction of most of the planet? A reason other than an anarchist who’s jumping from one year to another changing whatever he wants, fucking whoever he wants, and killing whoever he wants?

  “If the tiniest, most innocent little touch in the past can have a major impact on the future,” she continued, “then what do you think happens when someone’s trying to knock over the whole damn apple cart?” She paused, seeming frustrated. She looked at him again like he was someone to be dealt with, instead of someone on her side.

  She stood up from the bed and started walking down the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” Kyle asked.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said, not waiting for her OK. “What are you? Is your entire life just trying to track Ayers down?” Now that he was getting a better view, she seemed a little pitiful.

  She walked down the stairs quickly and over to the pillar. “You have no clue how much cleaning up there is to do after Ayers is done somewhere. Just to make sure things don’t get even worse than this . . . I’m sitting here alone at the end of the fucking world, screaming for help. And there’s not a soul around to listen.”

  Allaire hopped up onto the pillar’s platform. She disappeared inside for a few seconds and then popped out and jumped down, not waiting for the platform to lower her to the ground. She had a silk blot in her hand. “I want to show you something.”

  Kyle stepped closer to her. She smelled nicely familiar. He couldn’t help but want to touch her. She slid the blot over them and they were back in the tunnel.

  “Where are we going?” Kyle asked.

  CHAPTER 10

  July 25, 2060

  * * *

  Moments later

  Once they were in the tunnel, Allaire reached into the pocket of her pajama pants and pulled out a metallic red ball and a small flashlight. She shook the ball and Kyle could hear that there was another smaller one inside. Allaire pressed a small button on the ball.

  She reached into her pocket again, and handed a stopwatch to Kyle. Their fingers brushed together. It made him think of how strange it was to be around Allaire without showing any physical affection. Even the times he’d seen her focused before, she’d still found time to express her feelings for him. It was like being around a different person now.

  “Be very quiet. We need to hear when this reaches the end. Press the button on the stopwatch when I say ‘go,’” she said. “And press it again when I say ‘stop.’” She raised her arm and threw the metallic ball into the tunnel. “Go!”

  Kyle listened to the pinging sound echoing through the tunnel.

  About fifteen seconds later, there was a longer ping, and then a few more. “Stop.” A few seconds later the ball rolled itself back—uphill—landing right against Allaire’s knee.

  Allaire shined the flashlight on the stopwatch, and shook her head disappointedly.

  “What?” Kyle asked. “What happened?”

  “A long time ago,” she said, “this tunnel was endless. No one knew when it ended because no one could make it there. This ball would roll itself back to me because it ran out of batteries before it hit anything to stop its progress.”

  “And now?” Kyle asked.

  “Now, the tunnel ends here. In 2060,” she answered. “It’s been getting shorter for years now, but I check sometimes to see if maybe it’s reversed itself.”

  Kyle followed Allaire through the silk blot again and back into the silo.

  “What does that mean, if the tunnel ends in 2060?” Kyle asked.

  “Why don’t you draw your own conclusion, Kyle,” Allaire said. “Take a look around out there and tell me what you see.”

  “And you think Ayers is the reason,” Kyle said.

  Allaire nodded. “You had someone who was unstable to begin with, and then he scrambled his brain by weaving back and forth thousands of times. He thinks he has this agenda—this mission. But really, he just wants to watch things blow up and fall down. And if he really can find another person with the mutation, if he can really ‘never,’ he’ll live forever. Except he can choose to live whenever he wants. It’s the people who can’t who’ll have to deal with the droughts, and the moonfalls, and the earthquakes. I’ve spent my entire life cleaning up his messes. For most of it, I had a handle on him, but the more experienced he got, and the more angry he got, the less I could control him and the harder it was to fix what he did. Now, seeing that the tunnel ends in 2060, I know that I’ve completely failed,” she said.

  “What does nevering do?” Kyle asked.

  “If it’s real?” she asked. “It means you basically can’t be killed. I think the only way you could die would be to come into close contact with another version of yourself.”

  Suddenly, a thought occurred to Kyle which he wished hadn’t. “You said you spent your entire life chasing Ayers?” Kyle asked.

  He saw the look of recognition flash on her face. “Not my entire life,” she said. “I’m older than he is.”

  Kyle thought for a second, hoping he could find a way to answer the question for himself. To avoid having to say it. “Did you know?” he asked, finally. This time he was the one shooting daggers at her with his eyes. “Tell me the truth.”

  Allaire cocked her head. “Know what?”

  “When we met in 1998. At that restaurant. You knew I was time weaving, didn’t you?” Kyle asked. “You played me.”

  She looked away from him now, and up toward the top of the silo.

  “Did you know?” he asked again. “Say it! I need to hear you say it, so I can stop pretending that we had something real that just vanished.”

  Her eyes welled up with tears. She looked away from him, and then ran up the stairs to one of the other sleeping platforms.

  “Real nice,” he called after her.

  He was tempted again to just leave and join Ayers in 1989. To find out for himself if Allaire had Ayers pegged right. If Kyle was special, didn’t he have a right to pursue it? To see what he could do with the rest of his life—perhaps an endless one? Besides, if she had been playing him since the moment they met, she was probably playing him now.

  Kyle held a silk blot in his hand for hours, sitting in a chair just across from the pillar on the
ground floor of the silo. Every time he was about to bail, he stopped himself. Sometimes it was because he felt too angry and wanted one more confrontation with Allaire. Sometimes, it was because, even through his anger, the thought of never seeing her again was too much to bear.

  Why not live forever? Kyle thought to himself. Deep inside, he was sure that he had the special mutation, even if Allaire couldn’t explain why. She’d already admitted she didn’t understand a lot of what was happening. If the world was going to hell, why couldn’t he at least save himself?

  Allaire came downstairs and didn’t make eye contact with Kyle. It made him doubly furious that she was acting upset with him now. He was about to say something when she came up to him. “It wasn’t a lie, Kyle. When we said ‘goodbye’ that first time, it nearly broke me. I don’t know if I ever fully recovered.”

  “Do you even know who you are anymore?” Kyle asked. “Or is it just all about the chase? Whatever’s in front of you? One second, you’re in love with me. The next, nothing matters but finding Ayers.”

  “You don’t understand,” she answered.

  “Then help me to understand,” he said. “I came back here to tell you I wanted to help. If I really do have some special ability, then maybe that’s what I’m meant to do.”

  “Kyle, I’ve been chasing Ayers around for a very long time. And when I wasn’t, I was chasing around the messes he made. You, and those kids from the bus, were one of those messes. Except with you, it was different. I fell in love with you.”

  “And how do you feel now?” Kyle asked. “I know I let you down.”

  She turned away before turning back. “I do love you, but there are bigger forces at work here. If I don’t stop him soon, the timestream could get even shorter. More babies will never get to be born. More people won’t get to live their full lives. More earthquakes and moonfalls for the unlucky few who are left. It’s not good. The Seres have always protected the timestream. But, Ayers is different.”