Rebel Revealed

by Josh Anderson

  “And . . . ?” Allaire asked.

  “And, we don’t have anything else to go on,” Kyle said. “C’mon, I’ll buy everyone hot dogs.”

  “Are they good?” Young Ayers asked. “I’ve never tried one.”

  CHAPTER 11

  September 29, 1997

  * * *

  An hour later

  Allaire placed the receiver in Kyle’s ear as they stood outside of Shea Stadium, where the New York Mets played their baseball games from 1964 until 2008.

  Kyle heard the crowd cheering inside and he remembered how excited he’d been the first time his mother took him to a game when he was seven or eight years old.

  Allaire turned away from Kyle. “Can you hear me?” she asked through his earpiece.

  Kyle nodded. “Yup.”

  “How about you, Ayers?” she asked.

  “Yes, Ms. Allaire,” Young Ayers answered.

  Kyle handed Allaire a ticket, and held one himself. “Ready?”

  Allaire nodded. She looked at the tracker screen. There were now three dots. Kyle had been right again. Ayers’s red dot had reappeared as he and Sillow rode the 7-Train to Shea Stadium. Allaire had placed trackers on herself and Kyle now as well, so Young Ayers could help lead them in the right direction from his spot in the parking lot.

  “We’ll meet you right back here, Ayers, unless we tell you something different through your ear piece,” Kyle said.

  “Can I please come inside?” Young Ayers asked. “I bet I can help. I’ve never seen a baseball game.”

  “We need you to stay with the tracker, buddy,” Kyle answered.

  “But—” Ayers started.

  Allaire walked up to him, and bent down to his eye level. “Kid, your fucking head will explode if you see him. You remember that?”

  Kyle rolled his eyes at Allaire. “Real delicate way to put it.”

  Ayers cut in, “I know about my head exploding, but I still—”

  “We’ll see you in a little while,” Kyle said. “Keep in your earpiece, and let us know if you see anything strange out here.”

  Kyle and Allaire headed toward Shea Stadium’s Gate C. “This is the only baseball stadium I’ve ever been to,” Kyle said. “It doesn’t even exist anymore.”

  “I never got into sports,” Allaire said. “No one ever taught me, so it just didn’t hold that excitement for me.”

  When they got inside, they walked up the ramp toward the mezzanine deck and moved through the walkway. “Talk to us Ayers,” Kyle said, peeking into one of the tunnels leading to the seats. “Are we moving toward him, or away?”

  “It looks like you just passed him,” Young Ayers said. “He was going in the other direction.”

  Kyle and Allaire turned around and started moving in the other direction. “They could’ve ditched the hats,” Allaire said. They looked at each person’s face as they passed.

  “Now you’re behind them,” Young Ayers said, through their earpieces. “At least that’s how it looks . . . But, Mr. Kyle, is the stadium all one level?”

  “Of course not, Ayers,” Kyle said, suddenly self-conscious that he looked like he was talking to himself. There would be a time soon when people would shamelessly walk around on their telephone all of the time, but they hadn’t reached that point in 1997. “Come on,” Kyle said, starting to jog, but still looking at faces as he passed them.

  They jogged until they reached a set of ramps going up. Kyle and Allaire moved quickly toward the upper deck section and continued in the same direction moving away from home plate and into left field.

  “You’re getting closer,” Young Ayers said.

  They heard a roar suddenly as the crowd cheered for a Mets’ run-scoring play.

  They kept moving and reached the tunnel leading to section forty-four, some of the worst seats in the park—nosebleed level, and almost as far from the action as you could get.

  “You’re there,” Young Ayers said. “Your three dots are very close together.”

  When they walked through the tunnel leading to the seats, they turned away from the field and saw that the entire section was empty, as were the two areas even further from the action, sections forty-six and forty-eight. Kyle squinted from the bright stadium lights not too far above them here in the upper deck.

  Kyle turned and looked down over a railing at the field level seats. “They’ve got to be down there then,” he said.

  As they turned back toward the tunnel, something caught Kyle’s eye. “Look.”

  “Where?” Allaire asked, missing it the first time.

  Kyle pointed up to the furthest point in the ballpark to two specks in an entirely empty section—two heads barely visible above the backs of the chairs in front of them. Before Kyle could ask, Allaire had swung her backpack in front of her and was digging through. She handed him a pair of binoculars.

  Kyle looked through and saw Ayers kneeling on the ground between two rows of seats, concentrating on something, while he and Sillow spoke. Kyle’s heart sank when he saw his father nod at whatever Ayers was saying, and even smile a couple of times. He desperately wanted to think that there was no way Ayers could bring out a side of Sillow that Kyle wanted to believe didn’t exist. But the truth was, they looked like buddies.

  Allaire took the binoculars and looked herself while Kyle described the situation to Young Ayers. “Oh no,” Allaire said, handing them back to Kyle.

  Ayers was now sitting in a chair, and Kyle realized what he was putting together on the ground in front of him. “Shit. He’s got a sniper rifle. It’s got a silencer and everything.”

  “We need to get over there,” Allaire said.

  “If we try to stop him, he’ll just shoot us, and still do whatever he was planning,” Kyle said.

  “Trying to assassinate a baseball team is exactly the kind of thing he’d do, just for fun,” Allaire said.

  As they moved out of the tunnel and back into the walkway, Allaire pulled two .45 caliber handguns from the waistband of her jeans, and handed one to Kyle.

  “How did you get these past security?” Kyle asked.

  Allaire raised her eyebrows. “If people ever start frisking girls, I’ve got big problems.”

  They started moving fast through the walkway toward section forty-eight when they heard a scream behind them. “Gun!”

  Instinctively, Kyle and Allaire turned around and saw a woman pointing at them. Four stadium police officers headed in their direction now, one of them frantically calling into his walkie for backup.

  “Shit,” Kyle said, raising his hands in the air as the cops headed toward them.

  “What’s happening?” Young Ayers asked through their earpieces. “Mr. Kyle? Ms. Allaire? What’s going on?”

  “I’ll take the two on the left,” Allaire said, putting her hands in the air as well.

  “Hello? What’s happening?” Young Ayers asked again, but Kyle and Allaire were too preoccupied to answer him. “Do you need my help? Is Ayers still up there with the sniper rifle?”

  Kyle looked at her and shook his head. “Allaire, behave. We’re not gonna hurt these cops.”

  “What should I do?” Young Ayers asked through the earpiece. Again, no answer. “Please, answer me . . . ”

  Before Kyle or Allaire could answer, though, they were being wrestled to the ground by all four cops. As the cops pulled them down, and took their guns and knives, Kyle tried to tell them about Ayers’s sniper rifle. The cops were too jacked up with adrenaline, though, and just kept yelling, “Shut your fuckin’ mouth,” every time Kyle tried to speak. Both of them were pressed against the disgusting concrete of the Shea Stadium walkway and handcuffed. After being dragged up to their feet, the cops led them in the other direction down the walkway.

  “There’s a man with a sniper rifle in section forty-eight,” Kyle said calmly. “What harm is there in checking out what I’m saying?”

  “No one made it in here with a fuckin’ sniper rifle,” the shortest of the cops said. His nametag s
aid “Sturgiano.”

  Allaire laughed. “We made it in here with guns.”

  “I’m glad you think this is funny,” said the officer holding Allaire by her handcuffs. His name was Latavius, and he was chiseled. Without warning, he slapped Allaire hard in the back of the head. “Who’s laughing now?”

  “Hey!” Kyle yelled, pulling his hands away from the officer holding him. He moved toward Latavius.

  “You want some too?” Latavius asked Kyle.

  Kyle took a deep breath and tried to deflate his impulse to head butt the cop.

  A short while later, they reached an elevator and the cops took them down to the Field Level section, through a series of doors labeled “Stadium Police.” They pushed Kyle and Allaire into two hard plastic seats in a room with a desk and a couple of other cops doing paperwork.

  For a little while, Kyle and Allaire took in their surroundings. Kyle was trying to figure out whether there was any chance they could escape, but it looked unlikely.

  On a file cabinet, there was an old TV tuned to the ballgame going on right outside. The game was entering the fourth inning. All Kyle and Allaire could do was wait for whatever horrible outcome Ayers was planning.

  “Ayers,” Kyle whispered, hoping Young Ayers was still listening. “We’re in the Stadium Police office on the lowest level.”

  “We have to do something,” Allaire whispered, gesturing at their backpacks, sitting on the desk of one of the cops who brought them in. “Without our blots, we could wind up in jail here in 1997. It would be game over.”

  Kyle looked around the room. There were six cops, and he and Allaire were handcuffed, and without their weapons. He took a deep breath and pushed his back against his chair.

  They heard the rumble of the crowd above them and Kyle assumed the Mets had scored again. But when he looked at the TV to see what had happened, the screen was dark. A few seconds later, the lights in the police office suddenly went out.

  They heard the cops muttering to themselves, in the pitch-black office. One of them opened the office door and confirmed that the entire stadium had lost electricity.

  “We’ve never had a blackout here,” a cop’s voice said in the darkness. “Weird shit.”

  Allaire stood up, wondering if they could just walk out, but Kyle felt her get pushed right back down into the seat beside him.

  “Don’t you fucksticks try anything,” a voice said. It sounded like Latavius, the one who’d smacked her.

  CHAPTER 12

  September 29, 1997

  * * *

  A few minutes later

  One by one, the police officers left the room to help the crowd handle the sudden darkness. Each time the door opened, the tiniest bit of light flowed into the door of the office, which temporarily gave Kyle and Allaire back a sliver of vision for just a second.

  They sat for more than ten minutes, now guarded only by one officer. If not for being handcuffed, it would’ve been an easy call.

  “Now’s the time,” she said. “I need my bag.”

  The door flashed open and Officer Sturgiano walked back in, but sliding in right behind him, Kyle saw the outline of someone shorter and then he felt a tug on his arm. “Shh,” a voice said near his ear. “Let’s go.” It was Young Ayers.

  Kyle grabbed Allaire’s arm and let Ayers lead them to the door.

  “Wait,” she whispered. “Backpacks and weapons.”

  “I’ll get ‘em,” Young Ayers said. A few seconds later, he pushed Kyle and Allaire out the door of the Police Office and they were back out on the Field Level walkway, where the blue emergency lighting provided enough illumination to lead people out of the park.

  Kyle noticed now that Young Ayers was wearing night vision glasses. He held all three of their backpacks, while Kyle and Allaire walked with their hands still cuffed behind them.

  “Even with the blackout, we look a bit conspicuous here, guys,” Kyle said.

  “Open my bag, Ayers,” Allaire said. “Small compartment. Should be the only thing in there.”

  Ayers did as she asked, and quickly pulled out a handcuff key. He walked in back of Allaire, then Kyle, and set their hands free.

  “What don’t you have in that bag?” Kyle asked with a smile.

  “How’d you kill all the lights in the entire stadium?” Allaire asked.

  Young Ayers shrugged. Kyle could tell he was proud of himself. He’d come through for them. “I’ll tell you, but you have to say it.”

  “Say what?” Allaire asked.

  “That kids can kick some ass,” Ayers said.

  Allaire rolled her eyes, but smiled. “Kids can kick some ass . . . You happy? Now how’d you do it?”

  “I went up to the entrance and started crying,” Young Ayers said proudly. “I told a security guard my daddy was the guy who controlled the electricity for the whole stadium and he showed me to this one room . . . I stuck a gun in the guy’s face and told him if he didn’t kill all the lights in the stadium he’d never get to see his children again . . . But, there’s one more way I kicked ass,” Young Ayers said as they continued walking toward the exit. He gestured toward a man standing in the shadows behind one of the concession booths, right across from an exit to the parking lot. It was 18-year-old Sillow.

  Kyle smiled and patted Young Ayers on the back. “How did you—?”

  “It was so dark, I was able to grab him in all the commotion of the blackout without seeing Mr. Ayers,” Young Ayers said.

  “You could’ve been killed,” Allaire said.

  Sillow looked at Young Ayers with a look of recognition, but not Kyle. At this age, Sillow hadn’t met the older version of his son, the time weaver, and likely hadn’t even begun to contemplate having a child yet.

  They walked over to Sillow and he looked at them with the same skepticism Kyle remembered from the first time he approached him at the hospital where he worked. “Are you all from the future too?” Sillow asked.

  Kyle nodded his head noncommittally. “Kind of.”

  “That guy Ayers is a fucking maniac,” Sillow said, turning his bandaged forearm toward them. “You see what he did to my arm? He took a piece of my bone out. Can you help me? Can you keep him away from me?”

  “We’ll get you home,” Kyle said. “What year were you living in when you met Ayers?”

  “Nineteen ninety,” Sillow answered, which meant that this version of him was eighteen years old. “He tried to tell me we could live forever if I came with him. Said all this crazy shit.”

  “Come on,” Kyle said. “We’ll get you back home.”

  Allaire pulled out a silk blot and slid it over all four of them. Kyle wondered why the tunnel sounded like a construction zone lately, a repetitive clanging following them wherever they went. When they reached the rung for 1990, Kyle pulled out a spare blot and stuck it inside the slot leading outside of the tunnel.

  “Any chance you can forget all of this ever happened,” Kyle asked, yelling over the noise in the tunnel, “and just live your life the same way you would have?”

  Sillow shrugged. “Don’t know . . . ”

  “You might notice things about yourself now,” Kyle said.

  “What kinds of things?” Sillow asked. The scowl was never too far from his face.

  “The thing he did to you,” Kyle said. “With your arm . . . You may find that you don’t get older like everyone else.”

  “Maybe,” Allaire said. “We don’t really know.”

  “What happens instead?” Sillow asked.

  Kyle shrugged. “Nothing. You just don’t ever get old.”

  “What the . . . ?” Sillow asked. Then he smiled. “That sounds like some bullshit. Something that crazy fuck would’ve said.”

  Allaire shook her head. “You’re special, Sillow. You’ll see.”

  Sillow winked at her. “I’ll show you how special I can be anytime you want, baby.”

  “Gross,” Allaire answered.

  “Take care,” Kyle said, putting his hand on h
is father’s shoulder. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  “What’s your name?” Sillow asked.

  Kyle looked at Allaire. He wanted to tell Sillow to be a better father. “Better that we don’t share too much,” Kyle said after a long pause.

  “Oh, hey, he put this thing on my hand,” Sillow said. “Told it would help keep me safe, but I don’t believe that asshole for nothin’.”

  Allaire held her silk blot up to Sillow’s hand, and moved her face closer. She used her nail to pull the temporal tracker from his hand.

  “Guess this thing’s out of play now,” she said.

  “How ‘bout telling me who wins the Super Bowl in ’91, at least?” Sillow asked.

  Both Kyle and Allaire shrugged. Young Ayers was already on the move through the tunnel.

  Kyle watched as Sillow disappeared through the silk blot, into the slot, and back to his life in 1990.

  CHAPTER 13

  December 3 & 4, 2016

  * * *

  Nineteen years later

  The eighteen-year-old Sillow they’d bid farewell to in the tunnel was someone that Kyle didn’t know yet. Someone he wouldn’t know until the first time he wove back through time to ask his father for help in stopping a bus crash.

  The crash of Bus #17, which killed twelve children when it was run off Banditt Drawbridge, did not exist in this timestream. Instead, more than three hundred kids were killed in an explosion at Silverman High School caused by one of the children “saved” by Kyle’s efforts, which finally did stop the crash.

  Kyle’s father, Sillow, was one of the few people who knew about what was now the crash that never happened, and was partially responsible for stopping it. Kyle had sought him out for help in 1998, and then Sillow had come through in 2014 on the original day of the crash. Sillow was actually the one who drove the bus and dropped the twelve children back in downtown Flemming as the clock turned to midnight on March 14, 2014. He went back to his life in Florida right afterward, with his new wife and two young girls, and had only spoken with Kyle a few times since.