by Ryan Schow
“I said I wouldn’t tell anyone,” I repeat.
“Sometime in the next sixty years, you’ll tell. You won’t mean to, it’ll just come out, but you’ll tell and then I’ll be dead. Not then, now. Dead.”
Sadly, with what I now know about him, this riddle makes perfect sense.
“Ten bucks says they’ll come after me now,” he’s saying, pacing in a blind panic, almost like he’s trying to rationalize the moment. “I mean, I figured they’d try, but I didn’t know how.” He looks up at me with condemnation in his eyes. “Now I do. Now I know how they will know. Jesus, do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I…I—”
“Do you know why I’m here?” he practically shouts at me. “You’re in my head, so you have to know!” He’s a frenetic mess now. Totally coming undone. That makes his thinking all but impossible to understand.
“To save yourself?” I ask, because with the frenzy in his mind in full swing, I can’t pull one thing apart from the other.
“Not a few minutes ago, but now, yes.”
“And to save your wife.”
Now the eyes soften. “Yes,” he says, as if I’m finally getting it. The frenzy breaks and I scurry the hell out of his head. The last thing I want is to feel his love for his wife.
He asks, “What’s your name?”
“Raven.”
The clean break from his mind is me feeling a bit sane again. Sort of. I mean, a traveler? Seriously?
“I want to show you something,” he says. “It’s important.”
He heads over to his car, giving me a chance to clean the vomit off my shirt, hurrying so when he gets back he won’t be grossed out. I’m push, push, pushing it off the fabric and wiping it on the fringe of meadow grass I’m half sitting in when his car door shuts.
There’s vomit sauce and other peoples’ blood all over me and I realize it is no use trying to clean it. I hear him walking through the dirt parking lot back to me and when he gets where I am—on the far edge of the lot sitting emotionally ravaged beside a long meadow not yet mowed down—I glance up at him.
There’s a gun barrel inches from my face, pointed at my head. I see it for less than half a second before he pulls the trigger.
My head snaps backwards, breaking my neck; things once inside my skull follow the bullet outside my head, the exit wound fist-sized. Death sweeps away the darkness; it crowds out the light. Hope leaves, too, and this…nothingness sucks out the pain, the sadness and the remorse.
My body is falling backwards, and then I feel myself leaving myself.
Airy, free of anything, my soul pulls out of my blasted body, hovering ten, maybe fifteen feet over the scene. I see everything. How Jake is dragging my corpse to the weeds nearby, how he hid us both when people rushed out of the bar to see if “that loud noise was a gunshot,” how those same people were too drunk and beaten up to do anything but turn and head back inside to their beers and their UFC.
Jake pulls the keys from my pocket, gets into my beloved Audi and leaves my dead body behind like a freaking troglodyte. As I’m floating, processing the chain of events leading to this, I’m thinking, the love of my life not only killed me, he stole my f*cking car.
We’re talking not one act of supreme douchebaggery, but two.
Wow.
Soooooo not cool.
7
The night is long and full and noisy, and not without a few harrowing moments. Like when the coyotes came and gobbled up the residue of my blown out brains lying in meaty hunks in a fan of gore. Or how when they found my body in the weeds, they started lapping up the blood on my face, and the grass my lolling head is laying on.
They one who found me, the pack’s alpha who first decided to make my brains his meal, he nipped at a few of the others, then yelped at a smaller one. It was only when he sniffed flesh and blood and thought to open his mouth to tear out my throat that everything changed.
Spirit or not, the last thing I wanted was to be eaten by wild dogs. I close the distance between me and the wild mutt and with all my ethereal being, drop with spiritual weight to all fours on top of my corpse. Crouched over my body, my soul invisible but present, a force the coyotes can feel, I’m my more primordial self.
The way I feel is animalistic.
How I see myself as ghostly and growling, it startles the pack to a stop, has them sniffing the air around them. The pack’s alpha stares at the unseen, protective me with barred teeth and a low growling in the back of his throat.
He barks; my soul barks back.
He hunkers down, unable to take his mean, red eyes off the place I’m supposed to be, and growls even louder, the shackles on his back standing. Part of the pack turns and lopes off; a few stragglers slowing to steal glances over their shoulders.
With the might of my human imagination, which I realize is just my spirit self regressing into human trivialities, I shove physical pain and absolute terror into the lead animal’s head. He backs up fast, crouched low in the front, never blinking, but no longer growling.
The coyotes heading up the hill, they turn and stop to watch.
The alpha finally turns and runs off into the ink black night. I stand vigil for the rest of the night. Waiting. Watching.
It takes two days, maybe three (time has little relevance when you’re dead) for my body to complete its reconstruction. While I’m floating in the ethers, waiting, while I’m also shoeing off beetles and rats and field mice and such, the body’s eyes open. The mouth yawns.
That’s when I feel it: the tug. And then the question of whether or not I want to go back. Of course I want to go back!
As I’m preparing to reenter the body, the same notion that made me question whether or not I want to go back tells me, “You never had a choice. You will always go back now.”
The way I know this, the feeling emoted from this ethereal being, it’s melancholy. This knowledge, this hopelessness, rattles me to the core…and then I’m sucked down into that thing hidden deep in the meadow.
I slam into my body, mortified at the thought that what I’ve been feeling is right, that I’ll never die. That I’ll forever be my age. That my existence is a constant thing, a grim reality.
8
Jake no longer teaches at Astor Academy. He’s just started at the college version of my school: Freeman Private University, which is apparently just up the road from Astor. After waking from the dead, my legs carry me down a long dirt road for what seems like the last hours of night, and then I hit pavement. Moments later I’m picked up by an older woman in a beat-to-crap Chevy pickup truck.
It’s just after eight o’clock according to the woman’s stuck-to-the-dash digital clock. Her truck smells like weeds and soil and long ago smoked cigarettes, but she’s clean looking, her hair brushed and everything. Lipstick almost right. Like really close.
“You alright?” she says with the kind of gruffness you expect out of a country woman ten years younger than her. I tried to wipe most of the blood off my face.
I smile and nod. But I can’t stop looking at the weathered, fanned out wrinkles of crow’s feet around her deep brown eyes. Finally I pull away, focus on the road. I’m guessing she’s fifty or sixty, at least, but one more look has me thinking she’s a hard fifty.
“That blood on the front and back of your head?”
“Cranberry juice, I think.” I tell her my friends are Mormon, that one of them spiked the punch and we ended up at a woods party where I got beat up and had my car stolen. If I hadn’t pushed these thoughts into her head with both my mouth and mind, she wouldn’t believe me.
“Where are your friends?” she asks. I shrug my shoulders, like I don’t know. “You need some new friends,” she says with a fair amount of scorn in her voice. She thinks she knows girls like me—that’s what she’s thinking. She doesn’t know anything like me, I muse.
“That’s the same conclusion I came to,” I reply.
She drives me to Freeman P.U., like I asked. It’s eas
ier to get into than Astor, and larger, but that may change depending on who enrolls over the next few years. This is the first time I’ve been here and it is every bit as exquisite as Astor Academy.
“Didn’t even know this place existed,” she said.
“It’s new.”
I thank the older woman, who wishes me luck, then watch as she drives off. Freeman is larger than I expected, without the maturity of the landscaping Astor now possesses. Still I like it. I can see myself going here, given the right circumstances.
Strolling through campus, I render myself invisible to the busy minds of everyone I come across because, the truth is, the way I had my brains blown out and was left for dead in the grass, I’m a hell of a sight.
What I am is a reanimated corpse. Oh, wait…yep…yeah, I’m the living dead.
It takes me a minute and some mental tracking before I get a line on Jake. Turning south, I head straight for his classroom. His shut classroom door has a large enough window to see both in and out. My face and upper torso fill the glass. My purple inflamed eyes zero in on him. He’s busy talking when he sees me. His world stops.
Rather it collapses.
He just stops talking mid-sentence and his eyes shoot wide. Uh huh, he’s seeing a ghost. I almost wave. But I can’t. Crushing my open mind with waves of need is everyone’s desire to turn and see what he’s seeing, but I stop their heads from moving just by thinking it. With their wills held firmly in place, I open the classroom door and I walk inside. His heart wants to stop, he’s that freaked out. I feel him clenching his sphincter shut like it’s my own sphincter.
Standing at the back of the classroom, the weight and flex of his entire class’s will is an accumulating burden. There are twenty-eight students, all juiced with anxiousness, all dying to turn their heads, but unable to. Because I’m controlling them. Barely. Truthfully, it is almost too much for my mind to manage at once.
I’ll need practice, but for now I have a few seconds left, at most.
Jake’s face is bloodless, his mind running wild, fear sticking in his lungs. He looks the way you’d look if a child got run over by a bus right in front of you. With the last vestiges of control, I thrust these words into his head: “When you’re finished with class, don’t you dare go anywhere.”
With that, I turn and leave, and the second the classroom door shuts—the very moment I am out of sight—I release the twenty-eights students’ minds. They all turn at once, and as I exit their minds, I feel their collective disappointment at finding nothing interesting. After that, I pull my thoughts inward and wait for Jake on a nearby bench.
At nine o’clock, class is released, the hallways flood with students, and that is when I go to his classroom. He’s putting a sign on the inside of his door’s window that says his next class is canceled.
He sees me and stops. When I’m close enough to him, he says, “I killed you, so how are you still alive?” He seems harried, like he’s late for something.
“I just am, Jake.”
“Are you going to hurt me?” he asks, not like he’s afraid. He says it more like he wants to know if what I’m planning to do to him will take time, and if so would I kindly schedule it on some other occasion.
“If you try to shoot me in the face again,” I whisper, “then yes. Otherwise, no.”
“Good,” he says, “then either come with me or get out of my way.”
He’s off and I’m suddenly at his heels, trying to keep up. “Where are we going?”
“Hospital.”
He’s down a sidewalk, moving fast down a flight of stairs, checking his watch then putting on a new burst of speed.
“Someone dying, Jake?”
“Not if I can help it,” he says over his shoulder. “Keep up if you’re coming with me.”
I keep up.
In the staff parking lot, he pops the lock on my stolen Audi, asks if I want to drive. The fiery look in my eyes could lay waste to an entire city. He shrugs his shoulders, slides elegantly into the passenger side and hands me the keys when I tuck into the driver’s side.
“Can you drive?” he asks. “I mean drive drive?” He wants to know if I can go fast.
“Is a frog’s ass watertight?” I say.
“Good. We’re heading into Sacramento, to Mercy San Juan. We have exactly seventy minutes, so seriously, punch it.” I go and he enters the destination into my navigation. The car takes over route-planning from there.
“Seventy minutes before what?” I say, slapping the car into gear and roaring out of the parking lot as instructed.
“Seventy minutes before I’m born. Seventy, maybe eighty minutes before someone tries to kill me.”
“Kill you?” I ask, hardly believing I’m even having this conversation.
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“With you still alive, that’s what I’m thinking. Besides, that’s how they do it to guys like me. How they punish folks for traveling illegally.”
My mind is a flushed toilet bowl. It’s a pan of scrambled eggs. How can this be? I have seen the Terminator movies, and various other time travel films, but those are just fantasies. As in “not real.” Then again, I rationalize, I have had conversations with my best friend about being someone else, conversations with Christian who was once Atticus, conversations with an undead Nazi war criminal who gave me a new everything using killer genetics, conversations with a man who was most certainly not a man in a secret underground base where I essentially turned into an immortal something that isn’t all the way human anymore.
So why shouldn’t I have a conversation with the only man I ever gave myself to about his infant self and the fact that he came back in time to be…here?
Still, it doesn’t seem real. It can’t be. “How do you know people will try?” I ask. “To kill you as a child, I mean?”
“I already said,” he barked, his eyes straight ahead, panicked.
“This is all new, Jake.”
“Because of you. Jesus, didn’t you listen? Didn’t you hear me? Because you know all about me now, and because of what I’ve done, and what I do.”
“What have you done?” We’re speeding down highway 80, descending west out of the foothills. All of Sacramento lays before me, about twenty-five miles away.
“It’s what I’m going to do,” he says.
“Jesus, Jake, you’re talking in riddles here,” I say. I get behind a pile of slow-moving cars, slip through them with a few honked horns to boot, then drop gears and hit the gas. The monstrous V8 roar is exhilarating. I’m doing a hundred down Highway 80, still trying to make sense of what he’s saying.
“In the future, almost every child under his care dies at age fifty-seven,” he says.
The future. Yes. How am I having such a hard time wrapping my head around this? If I hadn’t crawled his mind and seen what I’ve seen, I’d think Jake Teller is certifiable, as in bat shit freaking crazy. But he isn’t. The layers of his memories, the ones I peeled back before he shot me in the head, they’re memories of a different time. I saw him happy. Married. His wife was beautiful, young looking, vibrant. There was so much love between them.
“What do you mean, his care?” I ask. “Who are you talking about?”
“Enzo Holland’s. Wolfgang Gerhard’s. Josef Mengele’s. Pick a name, he’s all the same man: a mass murderer, an immortal, a geneticist, a genius.”
“I know him,” I say. “So you’re, what? Here to…to save not just your wife, but millions of lives, too? Is that it?” I’m having a hard time looking at him, at how beautiful and distressed he looks right now. To think I gave this man my virginity nauseates me. To think I am hearing all of this crazy blather pouring like diarrhea from his mouth and I still want him, this makes me wonder if it’s not him that’s crazy, but me.
“If I can just save my wife, millions will be saved, too. I’m not trying to be a hero. I just want to save her.” He’s having a fate-of-the-world type of conversation and all I can think about is h
e was married when we…when we were together.
“Where is she? Your wife?”
“Dead, just born? What time are you referring to?”
“Both.”
“Dead five years ago in my time,” he says. “Just born in this time. Very recently. Like weeks ago.”
“And today is your birthday?”
“Yes,” he says, looking at me with a seriousness in his eyes that scares the absolute shit out of me. “Literally. So drive faster.”
I’m trying to do the math, but I swear it’s a bitch to focus with so much going on in my head. Clear your mind, I tell myself. Okay. But that’s like trying to put an unraveled golf ball back together with your fingers.
Focus!
So she’s already been born, and he’s about to be born. She died at fifty-seven and that was five years ago. That makes him…sixty-two years old!
OMFG. I’m going to be sick. What I realize, it’s like tsunami waves breaking shore in a massive killing smash-and-grab. The worst thing is, I now realize I gave my virginity to a sixty-two year old man. Oh. My. God.
“Where is she?” I manage to ask. How I can form words at this point, much less string them together to make a sentence, is beyond me.
“My wife?” he asks. I nod. “With Holland.”
“In one of the canisters?”
“No,” he says, glaring at me. “I told you, she was born only recently. In his lab. You know him? You know Holland, personally?”
“Is she a test tube child or something?”
“Her mother’s name is Rebecca. She was the first of a long line of experimental children brought to term in three months rather than nine.”
Rebecca? WTF?!?! My foot comes off the pedal. My speed falls from one hundred and ten miles an hour to eighty. Whatever I failed to vomit up several days ago in the parking lot of Ned’s bar, it’s surging fast, leaving me extra-queasy.
My Rebecca?
“What are you doing?” he says. “Speed up.”
“I’m going to puke,” I hear myself say. He might, too, if he finds out I’m Abby Swann. And he would be embarrassed at having taken advantage of a child, even though I was the child and I took advantage of him.
