"Okay," he said.
I winked. "Keep it secret. Okay, buddy?"
"Okay."
His mom put two blue cans in her cart. I turned and walked out into the bright sun. My head felt as light as a plastic bag on the wind. I went straight to the park and sat on a bench and got out my book. I even managed to read some of it before minutes became an hour and I began to doubt if I'd ever see the boy again.
A little later, a kid wandered onto the grass. I closed my book. Stephen saw me, then glanced at the swings, where a couple watched their kids. Two other families were scrabbling around on the slide and the bridge. That seemed to reassure him.
"Can I help you?" he said.
I laughed. "Got a question for you. Do you believe in time travel?"
"Like for people?"
"Yeah."
He spoke in a rush. "No because if there were time travel then people from the future would already be here."
I laughed again. "That is a very smart answer. But if there were people from the future, do you think you'd recognize them?"
Stephen frowned. "I don't know."
"Or what if you're not supposed to go back in time except under very special circumstances? Making it very, very rare?"
"I guess."
"So it could be real."
He glared at the grass. "Yeah, but then someone would know."
I raised my eyebrows. "Maybe it's a secret."
A guarded look stole over his face. "I'm not supposed to have secrets with strangers."
I glanced around the park. None of the adults were looking my way. "Then why did you come to see me?"
"Because you're kinda strange."
"That's because I'm from the future," I said softly. "I'm here to save your life. But I need your help."
He was too young to hide the expressions wrestling for control of his face. Doubt. Suspicion. Wonder. In the end, curiosity won. It usually does.
"Really?" he said. "What's it like?"
"I can't tell you. Even if I could, the future from my world is very different from this one. But if you promise to keep it secret forever, I'll tell you what I can."
He bit his lip, then nodded. "I promise."
I put my hands in my pockets and gazed at the traffic on the street past the park. "There's more than one Earth. More than one future. I'm from the only one that can travel into the past. We're not supposed to, but some people do. Bad people. Criminals. Sometimes, they go back in time where no one can see them. They hurt people."
"Are you one of the bad people?"
I shook my head. "I'm the one who stops them."
His face went sober in the way only a child's can. "Someone's going to hurt me."
"No, they're not. But I need you to help me."
"Why?"
"Because I don't know who they are."
"But you can go back." He scowled, then raised his finger like a pint-sized professor. "So you can see who it is and then you can go back again and stop them for real."
I grinned. "Hypothetically, yes. But I would have to go back and forth several times. This will take me several minutes of real-time. Meanwhile, the bad guy is back in real-time living his life in my world. So if I go back and forth to stop him for real, it will undo anything he's done since returning. Changing my world's past. And that's the one thing I can never do."
"I don't understand."
"I don't always, either," I said. "But that's how it has to be done."
"So what do we do?"
"Tomorrow at school, someone will ask you to leave with them. I don't know who. Probably a man. Probably someone you know. I need you to go with them."
He drew back. "Why do I have to go with them when they want to hurt me?"
"Because I have to catch them in the act or they'll come back and try it again. But you'll be okay. Because you'll have this." I handed him one of the walkie talkies. I'd tied and taped the talk button to always be on. "When you go to school tomorrow, I need you to turn it on. It's this little knob here. Don't let anyone see it, but keep it with you the whole day."
Stephen took it from me, clicked it on and off. "So I can tell you who it is."
"That's right. And where they're taking you. But you can't just say it. They might get suspicious. You have to be sneaky. Ask, 'Where are we going, Mr. Smith?' Or, 'What's your name?' Do you get it?"
He nodded. "I think so."
"Your parents, your teacher, your police—none of them can help you." I put my hand on his shoulder. His eyes were round and frightened. Good. "If you tell them, I can't either. Do you understand?"
He nodded again, a small gesture, as if he were afraid the motion might dislodge the tears from his eyes. "Yes, sir."
"Call me Blake." I patted his shoulder and straightened. "It'll be okay, Stephen. As soon as they take you outside, I'll be right there."
I watched him walk across the bright green grass. Everything I'd just told him was off-limits. Enough to get me suspended. Imprisoned, if they wanted to make an example out of me. You are not supposed to make contact with the victim under any circumstances. And the idea of telling them or anyone else anything remotely resembling the truth—it was enough to make me want to turn myself in.
But I hadn't had another choice. It was that or leave his fate to chance. Stephen Jaso deserved better than that. He deserved a future. Even if it meant risking my own.
I'd already taken enough risks on the day. On the way back to the motel, I stopped by the hamburger joint with the Dumpster. In my quiet room, I ate my meal, then fell asleep to the sounds of traffic past the windows.
I made myself sleep as long as I could and got all the way to midnight before my body had enough. It was all or nothing time. I wiped my hard drive, then pulled it out and stomped it open. I threw it and everything else I'd brought to the room in the garbage bins behind the motel, leaving me with my clothes, my gun, the walkie talkie, and myself.
He wasn't supposed to be taken until the afternoon, but my presence in the last week of this timeline could have altered it. For what I hoped would be the last time, I parked down the street from the Jasos. A small boy left his door and walked to the corner. A few minutes later, a big yellow bus stopped and opened its doors.
My walkie talkie hissed to life, startling me. A staticky rumble poured through the line.
"Can you hear me?" Stephen said. "I hope you can hear me because you said you'd be here but I don't see you."
But he didn't untape the talk button, so I could say nothing back.
The rumble of the bus filtered through my tinny receiver. There were doors all the way around the elementary school, burgundy-painted metal standing out from the off-white cement facades, but the killer would take Stephen straight to a car. The staff and visitor lots sat on opposite sides of the building. After deliberating, I parked with a view of the staff lot. I still wasn't 100% certain it wasn't Amsel.
Air brakes hissed through my walkie talkie. Kids laughed and thumped down steps. Lots of babble. Then the acoustics closed in, going echoey. He'd gone inside. The young voices talked a few minutes more, then the teacher began the day's reading lesson.
In a way, being able to hear his surroundings but not see them made it even worse; every time a door opened or a chair scraped, I imagined the killer entering the room or getting up to lead Stephen away. My imagination grew legs. Perhaps the attacker wouldn't talk Stephen into leaving with him. Maybe he'd grab the boy and sedate him unconscious. I'd hear nothing but the slam of a car door and the hum of an engine, steady through the walkie talkie, but growing further and further away by the moment.
Stephen answered a couple of the teacher's questions, but otherwise talked little, even when the bell let them out for first recess and the other children screamed and laughed and raced across the grass. I was a couple blocks away and I couldn't identify Stephen among the groups playing tag and four square and touch football.
The bell rang. I heard the rustle of kids moving to a new classroom. I was
concerned about the batteries. I didn't know enough about the ancient devices to know whether having the talk button pressed down all day would run its charge out too soon.
Another bell rang. Shuffling and chatter came through the walkie talkie. After a minute, it took on the hollow acoustics of a large enclosed space. Cafeteria, most likely. Confirmed when a kindly-sounding woman asked Stephen whether he wanted fries. The scrape of plastic cutlery. Trays slapping on tables. Either Stephen was eating alone, or his friends were as laconic as himself.
A door clunked, followed a moment later by the metal thump of its closure. Fabric rasped through my receiver. Kids were scattered around the playground, kept safe by the chain link fence and the bone-deep social law that they were off-limits.
"Hey!" The man's voice came through my speaker so clearly I jolted, thinking he'd crept into the car with me. "Remember me?"
"Yeah," Stephen said. "You ran into me."
"And you tore your pants. Well, I brought you some new ones to make up for it. Want to go get them?"
There was the briefest of terrible pauses. "Yeah."
"Right over here."
My nerves fritzed out. I knew the voice, but it took me a moment to place it. David Prince.
I strained my neck, but couldn't pick them out from the vast expanse of grass. A couple of grown women stood by themselves, observing the kids as they exercised away their cafeteria lunches, but I saw no sign of a grown man with a six-year-old boy. I got out of the car and ran across the asphalt.
"Where are we going?" Stephen said.
"My car. It's right over here."
More rasping fabric. The walkie talkie must have been in his pocket. I reached the staff lot. Still no sight of Prince or Stephen. I went to the chain link fence and sprinted along its outside edge.
A latch snicked. "It's right in there."
A soft thump. A hard slam. Stephen yelled. An engine started up, heavily muffled.
"It's dark!" Stephen said. "He put me in a place and closed the lid."
My heart stopped. I ran through the dirt along the fence, dust puffing from my shoes.
"It'll be okay," I said. "Hang on. It'll all be fine."
But Stephen couldn't hear me. He whimpered. Tires gritted against pavement. I got past the edge of the school, taking sight of the visitor lot just in time to see a white sedan pull into the street. I zoomed my eyelens as close as it could go but couldn't snap a plate or a make.
But he was headed northbound. General direction of his house. The noise transmitted through the receiver faded, replaced by static. I ran back to my car as fast as I could and accelerated into the street, tires squealing.
"Mr. Din?" Stephen said, voice gaining strength as I headed north. "Are you there?"
"I'm here," I murmured.
"Mr. Din?" Rodent-like scrabbling. The line went dead. I bit my teeth together. Static crackled. "I took off the tape, Mr. Din. Are you there?"
The line blanked again. I put the walkie to my mouth. "I'm right behind you, Stephen. Are you in the trunk? Can you tell me anything about the car?"
I surged through a yellow light. Someone honked. I stuck up my thumb, then remembered that meant something completely different in this age.
"Yeah, he put me in the trunk," Stephen said. "The car's all white."
"What else?"
"Um. There is a picture of a little wheel on the trunk."
"A little wheel?"
"Yeah and part of it's white and part of it's blue."
I still hadn't caught sight of Prince's car. I made a hard left, leaving the quaint downtown and entering the quiet neighborhood of old homes. I knew what Stephen was describing. Logo of some kind. Not familiar enough with the world or the time to know the brand, but I'd recognize it on sight.
I pulled up across the street from Prince's ivy-trimmed house. "Stephen? Is the car still moving?"
"Yeah," he said, the mutter of the engine undercutting his words. A bit of static. "...see me?"
"Sure. But I need you to keep talking to me. Just keep talking. It doesn't matter what you say. Do you understand?"
"Keep talk..?" More static ate up the last of his words.
"Yes. Talk. Keep talking. I'll be right there."
I pulled away. David Prince wasn't here and he was getting further away by the moment. I was losing the signal. I gassed it down the road. Stephen babbled away about his toy pirate ship, voice interrupted by static. At the end of the street, the receiver gave me nothing but unbroken white noise. I flipped the car around and drove back the way I'd come, racing past the elegant little homes.
"...a dinosaur," Stephen said. "...teeth..."
I continued east. Stephen's voice gained volume, clarity. He was telling a story he meant to write for his next classroom assignment. Something about a T. rex.
"Have you ever seen one?" he said. The line blanked. He wanted me to answer.
"Nope," I said. "The further back you go, the more energy it takes. I've never been much further back than this. Now keep talking, Stephen. Don't stop unless the car does. Then tell me everything you see."
"Okay." He resumed his story.
His voice stayed clear. I guessed that meant I was within a quarter, maybe half a mile of Prince. But that left an awful lot of town to cover. I'd have to spot him visually, and he wasn't exactly the only white sedan in town. I honed in on each one, scanning trunks and hoods for the logo of the little wheel.
I hit an intersection and lost the signal. Frantically, I turned east, knowing town thinned out in that direction—better place to get away with a screaming child—and picked up Stephen's voice as I climbed a hill and rolled down into a lightly housed stretch of open yellowed fields scattered with stray trees and pockets of low-rent houses. The yards were fenced with barbed wire, cows gazing dully from behind the spikes. At another, horses raised their long heads to watch my car flash by.
"The car just went off," Stephen said. "He's coming around to get me!"
"Tell me everything you see," I said. "I'm right behind you."
I pulled off the side of the road to give it all my focus and make sure I stayed within range. A metallic clunk came through the line.
"There's trees!" Stephen shrieked. "And a big green cage and lots of water!"
"What've you got?" Prince said, sounding far away. A scuffle. His voice neared. "Who are you—?"
I snapped off my handset before Stephen lost his hold on the talk button. The silence of my car was deafening.
Water and trees. Almost certainly the river. I didn't know what the green cage was, but I didn't have time to sit around and parse it out. If Prince was spooked, he might put an end to the game any second. I continued along the lonely road and took the first left north toward the river, swooping up and down a series of short swells, passing a few houses on both sides, farms and trailers and cozy-looking ramblers.
The houses went away. Soon, the road did, too, terminating in a T-intersection. I idled at the stop sign, glancing east and west. An embankment blocked my view of the river. To the east, a railroad bridge spanned the sky, a lattice of time-pocked green metal.
Heart racing, I cruised east. The land was undeveloped and lightly wooded. Possibly a state park. The air through my AC was heavy with pollen. The trees thickened, canopies weaving together over the two-lane road. Desolate ahead and behind. He'd hear me coming. I parked on the shoulder, checked my pistol, and jogged into the tall grass fronting the river.
I followed the rocky shoreline around a small bend. On the other side, a weathered brick outbuilding sat on pylons poking from the river. It looked at least as old as the bridge beyond it. Further down, a white sedan was parked behind a wall of trees, hidden from the road.
I zoomed in on the sedan. Empty. I shifted to the outbuilding. The windows were intact, but covered from the inside with dark tarps.
I got out my gun and held it close to my hip and slunk through the trees.
Something clinked inside the shack. I switched off the saf
ety of my pistol. He'd blocked the windows, but that meant he couldn't see out, either. I walked as quietly as I knew how to the door. Took a breath. Tried the handle. It didn't budge. I paused to listen. Furtive shuffling. A couple plinks of precise metal instruments set down on a hard surface. The low wash of the river along the broken rocks. And what might have been muffled sobbing.
I got down on my hands and knees and crawled along the damp boards out to the abbreviated dock. I'd guessed right: a door on that end, too. Metal and rusted, paint flaking in psoriatic profusion. I grabbed the handle and pulled.
Stephen was tied and gagged on top of an old metal table. The door hinges squealed. Prince whirled, pulling the boy to his chest and putting a long, thin knife against his neck.
"Put it down," I said.
"CR?" Prince caught something in my expression and smirked. "CR."
"Put the knife down. How long have you been here?"
"Long enough to fool you."
"Six months? A year? For this?"
He shrugged. "A year's not so long when you've waited all your life."
"Now you get life in prison instead." I moved the tip of the gun. "Knife down. Last chance."
"But I already did it, didn't I?" he said. "The first time. I killed him. If I hadn't, CR would never have known to send you back." He touched Stephen's cheek, spilling the boy's tears. "I had this child all to myself."
"Can you remember it? No? Because now I'm here and it never happened."
I stepped forward. He dug the knife into Stephen's neck. Stephen shrieked into his gag.
"How well can you handle that old piece?" Prince laughed. "You might know which is the trigger, but can you hit anything?"
"Find out."
"Here's my counter. We both back away. Let the Pods do their thing and we go our own ways. That's the only guarantee the kid goes home safe."
"So you can try again?"
He bunched his lips in thought. "Maybe. Maybe not. You never know what the future holds."
He was right about the gun. The old kinetics bucked like crazy. Especially this cased stuff. Twenty feet of uncertainty separated me from him. Easy enough shot when you're talking target practice. A lot less so when you're aiming an antique weapon at an armed man using a six-year-old to shield his body.
The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller Page 3
