Destroyer (Rewinder #2)

by Brett Battles

  “Enough already. Get in the damn car!”

  He flicks off the tab holding his gun in place and starts to pull the weapon from its holster.

  A few times I’ve been in a situation where there are no good options, just ones that are slightly less bad than others. This is one of those times, and at the top of my current list of bad options is being trapped in the back of a police car.

  So I take off running down the street in the direction from which the police car has come.

  A gunshot rips through the night. I don’t know where the bullet’s gone. I’m just grateful it hasn’t hit me.

  I’m fifty feet from the nearest intersection when the cop shoots again. This time I actually hear the bullet pierce the air a few feet above my head and then smash through a window of the building to my left.

  Just as I reach the corner, I hear a door slam and then the engine of the cop car roar into reverse. I take the turn, hoping there’s another intersection close, but it’s a long block without any breaks. I sprint—if you can call it sprinting—knowing I will never make it to the next corner in time.

  Behind me, I can hear the cops nearing the corner. They’ll be behind me at any second. Now would be a great time for Lidia to take another jump. Apparently, though, she’s otherwise occupied.

  I scan ahead, looking for anything I can hide behind. That’s when I spot the storm drain along the curb. I don’t know if it’s wide enough for me to slip through, but I run to it, and drop to the ground beside it.

  My feet and legs go through without a problem. My waist rubs against both sides, but also doesn’t slow me. The police car’s tires squeal as it takes the corner. I’m unsure if they can see me or not, so I continue to push my way through the opening.

  It’s my head that proves to be the biggest problem. I have to turn it sideways and can feel the skin scraping off my ears as I pass all the way inside. At this point, the cops have already driven by me. I hear them screech to a halt in the middle of the next intersection, and can imagine that they’re looking in all directions, wondering where I’ve gone.

  I figure it’s only a matter of time before they decide to check the drain, so I follow the spillway into the main tunnel and then head down the tube. I randomly turn down other pipes, and don’t slow until I am well away from where I started.

  When I spot another spillway, I grab the lower lip and pull myself up so I can peek outside. The road in front of me is wide, and I can see darkened stores on the other side. While this is clearly a main thoroughfare, what I don’t see is a single moving vehicle or pedestrian. It’s as quiet as the street where I arrived.

  I try to remember if June 1, 1950, is some kind of special day in Iffy’s time line. There are a few of those in her history, I know, where the whole country seems to shut down for twenty-four hours or more. Perhaps this is one of those occasions, but if it is, I can’t remember its cause. The truth is, I should be right in the middle of America’s postwar boom, when the country was going nonstop.

  I move back into the tunnel until I come to a ladder leading up to a manhole. I know if Lidia were to jump now, the chaser’s safety buffers would deposit me at ground level, but I’d feel better just the same not to be underground when the journey begins.

  The manhole cover is extremely heavy, and I have to push up with my shoulders to unseat it. Moving the lid proves nearly as difficult. Once there’s enough room for me to wiggle around it, I do. To close the cover again, I sit on the ground and push it with my feet against until it drops into place.

  As I stand up, I notice a pair of headlights several blocks to my left—the only ones on the road—heading in my direction. There’s a fountain in front of the building on the far side of the street. I hurry over to it and duck behind the retaining wall, where the water pool would be if there were any water.

  The vehicle drives by without slowing. I chance a peek as it moves off, and see that it’s another police car.

  It’s after eight . . . you’re three and a half hours over.

  Now that I have time to process what the officer had said, it sounds like he was talking about a curfew. That would certainly account for the shutdown. I’ve read about political and social protests sparking curfews in the latter half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. Did those stretch as far back as the beginning of the 1950s? And if yes, then wouldn’t a curfew in New York City have been a major event?

  Stop it, I tell myself. It’s unimportant.

  What I need to do is finish working out how to find Lidia. Everything else is just noise.

  According to the chaser, we’ve already been here six minutes shy of an hour. I can’t imagine we’ll be hanging around for that much longer, but I feel exposed here by the fountain.

  I spot what looks like an alley a half block to the right, and I head toward it. On the way I notice that there are banners hanging from most of the streetlamps. While they are all similar, they are not the same. I give the closest one a look.

  An American flag is printed at the top, but otherwise it is all white with black letters.

  WE

  WILL

  NEVER

  STOP

  The next one reads:

  VICTORY

  IS ONLY

  POSSIBLE

  IF WE

  WORK

  AS ONE

  Wouldn’t today’s date be around the time the Korean War begins? It must be what the signs are referring to. At least that’s what I think until I read a third:

  IF HIMMLER

  AND HIS

  GERMAN MACHINE

  ARE NOT

  DEFEATED

  EVIL

  TRIUMPHS

  BUY WAR BONDS

  TODAY

  Himmler? German machine? War bonds?

  But it’s 1950. The war in Europe should be five years finished. Himmler, who I believe was one of Hitler’s closest advisors, should be dead or, at the very least, on the run. He certainly shouldn’t be in charge of Germany.

  We were in 1939 for no more than a few hours. What was there in that history book Lidia showed me that she could have used to cause this? Did she kill someone whose removal from history paved the way for the Nazis’ success? Maybe she did kill Hitler. From what I’ve learned, his ego certainly didn’t help his country in the end.

  I am still staring at the banner, dumbfounded, when I hear the sound of a car around a nearby corner. I race into the alley and huddle in the dark, hoping I wasn’t seen.

  It turns out it wouldn’t have mattered much if I had been.

  Fifteen seconds later—jump.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I half expect to end up back in Lidia’s doorless room, but that’s not the case. Instead, we travel considerably farther back, to August 8, 1874, at 3:00 a.m.

  I check the chaser’s map twice to make sure there hasn’t been a mistake. According to my device, I am just off the south coast of England on the Isle of Wight, between the towns of Newport and Cowes. More specifically, I’m in a field filled with rows of tall crops that I can’t identify that block my view. Rising on my toes, I can just get my eyes above the plants, but I barely start scanning around when Lidia yanks on my chain again.

  The jump feels as if I’ve been standing in a dark room and someone has simply turned on the light. The sun beats down on rows of plants that look exactly those from the field where I’d just been. I stick my head up for a peek and am positive that I’m in the same field, though probably about ten yards south of my previous position.

  I’m pretty sure we’ve just performed a textbook rewinder insert. Lidia brought us in under the cover of early morning, took a look around, and then jumped several hours forward to a position close to where she had been that would hide her when she arrived in the daytime.

  Which probably means it will be some time before we travel again while she completes whatever evil task she has come here to do. I sit on the ground and finish my search through the menus, not allowing my mind to st
art down the worrisome road of trying to figure out why we’ve come to this place at this time.

  Once I finish, there’s one thing I need to do before I can start testing combinations to get the tracker working. For any of the companion functions to work, I must reconnect the companion wires. Doing so makes me very nervous, however. While there are no trained and official companions in this time line, the box could connect to someone else, like mine did with Iffy back in late March. Also, I worry that opening the specialized area of the box might disconnect the slave mode.

  I take a deep breath and then perform the task as quickly as I can. As soon as I close the panel again, I check the training functions to make sure the device is still enslaved to Lidia’s. Thankfully, it is. As for a companion, the status function under the companion menus reads UNCONNECTED.

  I begin the testing phase. The initial attempts yield either error messages or nothing at all. I keep at it, though, positive that I’m on the right track.

  I’ve been at it for nearly ten minutes when the screen suddenly goes dark. For a half second I fear that I’ve somehow disabled the device and I’ll be stuck here in the nineteenth century. But then it flicks back on, a map now displayed on the screen.

  There are two glowing dots. One hovers over the spot where I am now. The other is in the town of Cowes.

  It has to be Lidia’s chaser. What else could it be? I touch this other dot, and a callout appears beside it, containing a locator number.

  If I wanted to, I could jump right to where she is, but that would mean deactivating the slave mode, a move that I’m pretty sure would alert her device that our machines were no longer tethered and allow her to make a jump I could not follow. What I can do, though, is shorten the distance between us the old-fashioned way.

  Staying low, I move down the row to the end of the field, where I find a path. This leads to another and then a third, which eventually meets up with a narrow muddy road that, if my map is not misleading me, will take me to Cowes.

  If we stay in this place and time for a couple hours, I should be able to reach her.

  Take your time, Lidia, I think over and over as I limp down the road.

  I’ve gone about a half mile when I hear the slow but steady clomp of hooves and the creak of wood behind me. Glancing back, I see a cart pulled by a pony heading my way. The driver is a middle-aged, balding man, with a gray-speckled brown beard. Stacked high in the cart’s cargo area are several canvas-covered bundles.

  As he nears me, he slows his already moderate pace. “Are you lost?”

  “I, um, I’m heading to Cowes.”

  His eyes narrow suspiciously. “Don’t think we’ve met before.”

  “No. I’m not from here.”

  “Clearly. So where would you be from?”

  His accent makes me think about the British Empire of my youth, and I stop myself at the last moment from saying New Cardiff. “America,” I tell him.

  “You’re a long way from home.”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Headed to Cowes, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “That leg of yours isn’t doing you any favors.”

  I glance down at my pants, thinking they’ve become bloody like my jeans, but while there are a couple dark spots, they’re small and not obvious. It’s my limp that’s drawn his attention. “No, sir. It’s not.”

  He pulls on the reins, stopping the pony. “Well, hop on then. Unless you’d rather be on your own.”

  I grab the side of the cart and start to swing into the back.

  “No, no,” he says. “Up here. More room.”

  I pull myself onto the bench seat next to him. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

  He gives the reins a shake and calls out to the pony, and the cart starts moving again.

  “Here for the boats, I assume,” he says.

  “The boats?”

  “The regatta. Cowes Week. Why else would you be here?”

  “Right, yes. The regatta. I’m here for that.” Perhaps I’m not lying about that. Though I know nothing of this regatta, there’s a good chance something connected to it is what’s drawn Lidia here.

  “So what were you doing way out here?”

  “Friends.”

  “Played a trick on you, did they? Got to drinking a little too much and they dumped you out here?”

  I smile guiltily, but say nothing to confirm his guess one way or the other. His theory isn’t the story I was going for, but I like it better.

  We ride on silently for a few minutes before he nods at my lap and says, “What’s in the box?”

  Instinctively my grip tightens on my chaser. “Just . . . my things.” I pause, then add what I hope sounds appropriate. “Pens, paper. That kind of thing.”

  “You’re a writer?”

  “Only letters.”

  “Got a girl back home, then.”

  Iffy, I think, my heart tightening. “Yes.”

  “Good for you. If you love her, hold on to her tight.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Sure you don’t have any tobacco in there?”

  “No, sir. Sorry.”

  “Oh, well. Worth a shot.”

  Several minutes later, I wonder if I should have just told him the box was a time travel device. That way he’d have had something to ease his shock when I suddenly disappeared.

  The jumps start blending into one another—three minutes here, ten minutes there, a few times over an hour. Thankfully, the coordinates for each stop are automatically stored in a list on my chaser. I will need them later when I undo Lidia’s messes. What those messes could be and what possible atrocities they are causing press down on me like thick sheets of lead that I’m finding harder and harder to ignore.

  I’ve noted that there’s a discernible pattern to the trips. We go back several decades, hop around a little bit there, then jump forward a few years before heading even farther back, like a weird game of checkers. My guess is that the initial backward trip is where she does whatever it is she has planned, after which we move forward so she can see the results. Then repeat and repeat and repeat.

  And it all makes appalling sense.

  Layers upon layers, starting at the most forward point in time that she wanted to affect—either the kidnapping in Santa Monica, or, most likely, the change she caused in prewar Berlin.

  See, if she were to change the outcome of World War II and then go forward to the 1950s to do the same with the Korean War, she would likely find that ripples from the first break with the time line have altered the future so that perhaps there is no Korean War. What she’s doing instead is making each change farther back in time than the last. So she could remove a world leader from the 1950s, then alter the financial collapse of the 1920s, then throw a wrench into World War I, and so on.

  It doesn’t matter if the World War I change negates the financial collapse change. Once her World War I damage is reversed, then the Korean issue she created reappears. Remove C, and B comes back. Remove B, and A comes back. Only there are a lot more layers already than just three. The only way I’ll get things back to the way they should be is if I eliminate each change she’s made in the reverse order that they’ve been created.

  It chills me how disturbingly well she’s thought things through. It’s an insane and admittedly brilliant plan. If I’m unable to figure out just one thing, there is the very real probability that I’ll never see Iffy or my sister again.

  Each time we jump, I try to close the physical gap between us. Sometimes we stop only long enough for me to get a dozen feet. Sometimes I can go much farther. The problem is Lidia is also on the move, and every few jumps the distance grows larger instead of smaller. I’m gaining on her, though, and by the time I find myself in a wooded Kentucky wilderness in 1786, I am within a half mile of her position. We jump in this general location four separate times, my arrival spot moving up to fifty yards each trip, until finally Lidia seems to have found a place she’s happy with. If the ove
rall pattern holds, we should be here for at least thirty minutes, and likely much more.

  It’s time to eliminate the remaining distance between us.

  The forest floor is covered in thick brush, and it takes longer than I like to find the path of least resistance that keeps me headed in the direction I want to go. Thankfully, I procured something to carry my chaser at one of the previous stops. It’s a burlaplike bag I found just inside the open back door of a general store. I dumped out the few bits of grain it still contained, and fashioned a strap out of the top portion. Some of its fibers are already wearing a little thin, so I keep an arm wrapped around it as much as possible in case it suddenly falls apart, but it’s better than carrying the box in the open.

  I keep expecting the trees to thin and reveal a village where Lidia will be, but so far the vegetation has yet to back down. After ten minutes, I pause and check the map again. I’ve more than halved the distance between us, and know that if I were to yell out, she’d hear me. That, of course, is not something I want to do. I proceed with caution, carefully moving branches out of my way and then easing them back into position without a sound.

  Three hundred yards. Two hundred. One hundred and fifty.

  I stop when I hear a crunch ahead and to the left. I’m not sure if it was a footstep or something falling to the ground. What I do know is that it didn’t come from the direction of Lidia’s chaser. At least not according to my tracking map. Of course, it’s possible the map isn’t as accurate as it could be and the glowing dot is merely an approximation of her location, making me torn whether to keep moving forward or to alter my course toward the noise.

  Best to stay on track, I decide after a few moments. If she’s not where the map says she is, then I’ll adjust.

  I move forward in a crouch, rolling my feet from heel to toe on each step. As I do, I diligently scan the ground ahead for anything that might snap under my weight, and redirect myself around these traps.

  Finally, when I’m within a hundred feet of her presumed position, I see an opening in the trees ahead. A meadow. It looks as if Lidia has stopped just short of it.