Force

by A.R. Rivera

In the Interest of Full Disclosure

  THERE ARE SOME TRUTHS a person knows without having to be told. Like, you’ll burn your eyes if you stare at the sun too long. Or, men really do cry when no one’s looking. And no matter how many crayons you eat, you won’t shit rainbows.

  Recognizing these simple facts forces me to acknowledge another, deeper, yet equally obvious matter—it’s a truth buried within the most basic levels of my subconscious. A blind certainty that screams at me in the deepest hours of the night, forcing me awake when all I want to do is rest.

  The truth is... that this quest is doomed to fail. The truth is that all the positivity I was reveling in just a week ago is gone—that all that spin I placed on my ability to follow the path my father laid out for me was bullshit. The painful, bloody truth is that I’ve had it all ass-backwards because I don’t understand anything.

  I don’t know what I was thinking. Actually, I do—I was thinking of how good it would feel to kill Daemon. But to do that, I have to find him and to be able to find him I have to know where to look; a place to start, and that starting point is knowing something useful about him.

  What do I know about Daemon besides the fact that he tried to kill me and succeeded in killing my father?—absolutely nothing.

  Nada. Zero. Zilch. I couldn’t be more clueless if I were Cher Horowitz from the movie Clueless.

  I don’t know where those three stones came from or how they do what they do. All I know is that my father wanted me to use them to stop Daemon. It was his dying wish, and the task feels impossible because I can’t stop what I can’t find. And then... the stones themselves are dangerous.

  Using three mysterious and powerful rocks to travel through the ether could destroy the very fabric of the universe, or so big-brained Elijah says. He’s been studying the stones for days and is still just as confounded as ever. I mean, if someone as smart as Eli can’t figure them out, then there’s no reason to think that I can.

  I’m going to fail.

  The cruel thought hit with the force of a knockout blow and my body sinks further into the cushions of Elijah’s crappy sofa. It’s a putrid, limey green.

  During that last conversation with my father at the retirement home, he was trying to tell me something important. Sure his methods were convoluted, but that was always his way. Dad knew when he was going to die and told me so. He knew how—hell, he dressed up for the occasion. He didn’t even fight and now I’ll never know why.

  Slumping over the arm of the couch, atop the clean sheet and soft blanket, I think my father’s last message is finally taking shape.

  He was saying goodbye. In a way that would force me to do what he wanted. My having a choice in the matter was an illusion because I’d just found out he was dead. He was so spirited the last time I’d seen him, and then he was gone. And he left me these recorded messages. I missed him and there was no way I wasn’t going to watch that last disc, no matter how he tried to warn me. So, he didn’t leave me any choice, did he?

  A lifetime of his secrecy made me too curious and now I can’t unsee his murder. It plays on a loop inside my mind: that animal hunched over my fathers’ stiff body. Like a nightmare, every time I close my eyes it’s there.

  He left me here as the only who can chase his monster.

  But that last morning with him, I knew nothing. I was so used to his nagging; I ignored my fathers’ directions unless they came with a rap to the head. That morning as he told me he was going to die, I was so wrapped up inside my own shallow concerns that the obvious questions never occurred to me.

  I’ll never know how he knew, or why he was compelled to lie down and wait to be murdered. He might have told me what he hoped to accomplish if I’d only had the sense to ask.

  “No matter where you go or what you do, for the rest of your life, you will remember this conversation...” His parting words resonate in the nighttime hours.

  I answered this rare vulnerability with sarcasm, screwing myself into wasting those final moments. Knowing makes it more difficult because that part of my life is gone forever. I’ll never get him back.

  The heavy feeling compresses like a vise, squeezing my chest until every breath is a labor.

  Yes, the flaw is in my thinking. I don’t pay attention when I should. Abi always said I never listen.

  If I paid more attention to what people say, I might have caught Daemon’s slip that day—not the one about knowing my last name before I gave it. No, I mean when he asked about my family and friends across the street.

  I never mentioned anything about them and he wasn’t around when we spoke so he had to have known beforehand. He must have spied on me.

  A whole week went by after Elijah and I came back from our trip to the farmed hills of Ivanhoe where my dad buried the stones. It took seven consecutive days for me to piece together how Daemon slipped up.

  Pathetic.

  When Eli and I sat at the dining table discussing the beauty and terror of that mysterious blue, fiery, tornado-like gateway, he asked more specific questions about the conversations Daemon and I had. I told him everything about the memory loss which contributed to my belief that I wasn’t really there and trying to save my little sister, how I let selfish ambition get in the way of what truly mattered.

  Eli tried to feed me some crap about how I was only reacting the way any normal person would and how the accident would have happened no matter if I was there or not. His forehead creased as he explained. “Our dimensions exist in parallels, G. Therefore, when one is so similar to the other, the events that take place in the first are that much more likely to occur in the second.”

  I may not have a Ph.D. in Physics and Cosmology like he does, but I know when I’m being patronized. Eli’s as smart as they come and he has helped me more than I can say, but he doesn’t know everything.

  Membranes, parallel universes, time variants, strings and bubble wrap theory. Einstein’s theory of everything. All of it is theoretical bullshit.

  Nonsense.

  It was time travel to the past no matter what he says. That’s why I couldn’t stop Carrie’s accident. Because it already happened. By his own admission, Eli confirmed that the past cannot be changed. And since I did all I could to save my sister and still failed I need to believe the whole scenario was a rerun. The idea of it repeating—what that means—it churns my stomach.

  Still, on the off-chance that Eli is somewhat right about any of these ‘universal truths,’ as he calls them, I can’t let my guard down. All that’s left to do is keep my promise and move forward.

  I’ll use the three stones to take me back to what we’re calling World Two—like it’s a game of Mario Brothers—where the year is still 1996.

  I know it’s the past, but if my time there was in another plane, I have to hedge my bets and get to my alternate family. To make sure they’re safe. Because if Daemon is out to get me and everyone like me, then that means I single-handedly sought out and destroyed an entire family by leading him to them. And there’s no way I’m taking the risk of them being stalked and killed because they showed some human decency and looked out for me.

  They’ve already paid for that mistake.

  I will make the rocks take me back to before the accident happened. If I got one chance to change Carrie’s accident, why not one more? If I still can’t change what happened, then I will know for sure that it is my past. But if I do stop the accident then... any world where my little sister gets to grow up will be an amazing place.

  I watched the last two DVD’s my dad left me. There was no information about why Daemon would want to harm him, or them, or me. But he does and has. And since I’m working with such decisively limited information, I have to cover all the bases. I’m not letting that snake hurt another person I care about.

  If Daemon would go through the trouble of helping me simply to retain the pleasure of killing me himself, then I can’t afford to underestimate him again.

  That,
of course, is another reason to go back—or over. To draw on what may be my only opportunity to find him. I would never have been in the position to harm anyone if he hadn’t dragged me into his mess. Here I am no job, no car, no home, no family, and no freedom. All I’ve got in this world are three rocks and the promise to defend them with my life.

  Daemon wants them so badly he’d kill anyone who gets in his way—helpless elderly men, women, and children. I can still see the sickening appreciation on his face as he drove headlong into a bus full of people. The way he chased the impact of the first accident—what kind of psychopath does that?

  My father gave his life for those rocks. He gave his life so that Daemon wouldn’t get them.

  Daemon wants me dead, and he wants those stones bad enough to kill for them. I’m betting that all I have to do is show my face. If he’s hunting my other family in 1996, my being there should be enough to draw him out into the open where I can waste him.