The Chaos Loop

by Peter Lerangis

  “Well then,” Stanislaw said with a laugh. “Do I look that bad?”

  Corey took a deep breath, eyeing the masses of deep-red stains that were growing together. “Honestly, you’re a mess.”

  Stanislaw smiled. “No. No, Corey,” he said. “I am the luckiest man in Germany.”

  33

  Stanislaw was in such poor condition, Corey was surprised the hospital allowed a visitor.

  The girl looked confused, and so fragile Corey was afraid she’d fall apart if she touched anything. Her eyes were hollow in their sockets, her hands spindly. If the doctors hadn’t told him she was ten years old, he would have thought her to be a grandmother.

  It felt rude to stare at her. She reminded Corey of someone. Maybe a younger version of some actress, he wasn’t sure. He turned away. Like the girl, he stared at Stanislaw’s motionless body.

  The nurse who had ushered her into the hospital room asked Corey something in German, but he shrugged and said, “American.”

  “Ah.” With a nod, she fell silent. But she didn’t leave. Instead she stood protectively by the girl’s side.

  Stanislaw was moving in the bed now. He had been in a long, drugged sleep, his head and his left arm wrapped in fresh bandages, his leg suspended above the bed with a winch. As he turned, his eyes blinked for the first time in hours. “Grrrommmm . . . wieder saaberrroff . . . nnnnngahh.”

  Corey was sure that bore no relationship to German or English. But at the sound of his voice, or maybe at the sight of his battered features, tears began rolling down her cheeks. When she finally spoke, her voice was tiny and meek.

  “Hallo?” was all she managed before choking back sniffles.

  With a grunt, Stanislaw tried to sit up, but instead fell back into the mattress. “Owwwww . . . der Schmerz . . .”

  “This means, the pain,” the girl said, her voice barely over a whisper.

  Corey glanced at her in surprise. Her English was refined, British sounding. “Thanks,” he said. “I thought so.”

  Now she stepped closer to Stanislaw. With a slow gesture, graceful and sure, she touched his hand. His eyes were clenched, but the lids seemed to relax a bit.

  “Du siehst ganz schön aus, Bruder,” the girl said.

  Stanislaw’s eyes blinked open like they were on a spring. “Helga?” he said. “Bist du wirklich da, oder träume ich?”

  Corey didn’t know what any of that meant. But he recognized the only word he needed. A name.

  Helga.

  Helga Meyer, his mom had said, as she smiled at the old black-and-white photo of Mutti and her family, before she became Helga Velez.

  “You’re . . .” Corey said, but the words choked in his mouth.

  The girl gave him a startled glance.

  “You’re my grandmother.” The words left Corey’s mouth before he could stop them. “What are you doing here?”

  “Excuse me?” She flashed a frightened, unsure glance at Corey. “I—I was brought here. By the Resistance. They told of two heroes, who held off a Nazi attack. One, they told me, was an escaped prisoner. When they mentioned the name, Stanislaw . . .”

  Corey nodded. The girl kept talking, but his thoughts were drowning out the words.

  He knew this story. Helga—Mutti—had lived it. That was what his mom had said. Thin and weak, she was smuggled away by the Resistance, to a border town in Austria. From there they managed to smuggle her out of Europe entirely, to South America. That same day the Nazis ambushed the village, killing everyone. Blessedly Mutti was on her way to Brazil and then eventually to Puerto Rico. That’s where she met Papi, where he was stationed in San Juan. It was love at first sight.

  Kurtstadt was the border town.

  Corey thought hard about Stanislaw’s story. Mom hadn’t mentioned a village. All she said was that Stanislaw had almost reached civilization, before he’d been killed by Allied soldiers in disguise.

  But it made sense now. It wasn’t a coincidence that Helga and Stanislaw ended up in the same place. Helga was smuggled to an Allied-controlled former Nazi border village. The Nazis were taking prisoners there, thinking the same village was under their control. How many possible sites were there? This had to be the one!

  In the old story, Helga had never known that her brother died in the woods. Now she was here with him. Because Stanislaw hadn’t been killed. He and Corey had intercepted the Nazis. And that had tipped off the village. Which had not been ambushed.

  “Hello, how is our patient doing?” The voice interrupted Corey’s thoughts. He looked up to see Dr. Feder entering the room.

  “Dr. Feder,” Corey said, “how many people are in Kurtstadt?”

  She smiled, cocking her head at the odd question. “Ten thousand, I believe?”

  The Nazis ambushed the village, killing everyone, his mom had said.

  “Uncle Stanislaw saved ten thousand lives . . .” he murmured.

  Stanislaw let out a wheeze that sounded like a laugh. “It was you, Corey,” he rasped. “You did this. Helga and I thank you.”

  The sight of his little sister seemed to make Stanislaw’s pain magically lift. He began talking, haltingly at first, and then a torrent of German words, spilling over one another. The girl’s face seemed to grow redder, more radiant. She laughed and gave him answers that made him laugh, too.

  Corey could not stop staring at the girl’s face. He could see the resemblance of this smiling, smooth-face girl to the papery old woman bound to a wheelchair. Before Mutti’s mind had begun to weaken, when she was married to Papi, she had smiled just like this girl. A broad, goofy smile that made her eyes shrink to crescent-moon slits. The way Helga was laughing, right now—the soft hoo-hoo-hoo—that never changed. Corey had grown up loving to hear that laugh.

  It made him very happy now.

  “This is my sister, Corey,” Stanislaw said, his eyes rimmed with tears. “She was not home when the Nazis came for our family. One of the neighbors hid her for months. They were poor and could barely feed her. When the Resistance found out about her, they smuggled her to the closest safe village. Here.”

  “I know,” Corey said.

  Helga smiled. “My brother tells me you saved his life. If not for you, I would not have found him here.” Now she took Corey’s hand in hers. It must have been frail and cold, but to Corey it felt warm and thick. To him at that moment it had the fragrance of Mutti’s favorite perfume. It held the promise of dinners with mofongo and schnitzel, gifts from Puerto Rico and Germany, where she and Papi traveled every year. “How can I ever repay you?” she said.

  The words caught in Corey’s throat. “You . . . you will. Many times.”

  “Maybe you give me a list? I will do everything on it.”

  Corey smiled. “Tell your brother to come to New York,” Corey said. “I have a feeling that if he does, you two will see a lot of each other.”

  “Yes,” Helga replied. “Yes, I will!”

  “And both of you, the minute you hear about a company called Apple, buy stock,” Corey said. “Promise?”

  Helga gave her brother a wry glance. “This boy is very strange. I like him.”

  “Me, too,” Stanislaw said.

  Corey burst out laughing. One by one, the others in the room joined him.

  Laughter, he realized, was infectious. And some infections were helpful in a hospital.

  It was great to have something to look forward to.

  34

  The back of the hospital stank so badly Corey nearly ran away. He held his breath, hiding behind a dumpster full of hospital waste. This was the only place where no one would see him. The streets of Kurtstadt were still chaotic after the morning’s action.

  Corey fished the coins out of his pocket and squeezed hard. He was a little afraid about returning to the present. Leila would be mad at him. But he was excited, too. When he returned to the present, everyone’s memory will have adjusted. They would know who Stanislaw was. Mutti would never have grieved over her beloved brother. Maybe she would n
ot have sunk into the depression that haunted her for so long.

  In the meantime, Kurtstadt did not fall to the Nazis. Thousands of lives were saved.

  Corey took a deep breath. He wanted more.

  He looked for the hundredth time at his hands and feet. He touched his cheek. He had no symptoms at all.

  Being a Throwback, he realized, meant helping the world one step at a time. Artifacts were all over the place. You had to keep going back. If you chose where to go, if you knew your limits, you could do it. You could avoid the chaos loop.

  Corey knew he was not finished with Hitler.

  But he was definitely finished with these dumpsters.

  Squeezing his coins, he closed his eyes tight.

  Owwww.

  Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.

  Tight. So tight. Confined like a size two straitjacket on a size twelve body.

  This was different.

  This was not like any time hop he’d experienced.

  He wanted to scream. He wanted to get back to Kurtstadt and try again. What was happening? What had gone wrong?

  He felt stuck. His body seemed to disintegrate and then snap together, again and again in microsecond bursts. He was surrounded and stranded, people and cities rushing by. Whirring machines engulfed him and disappeared in nanoseconds, and he spun among vast networks of orbiting globes like molecules. Buildings passed right through him at rocket speed, as howls high and low assaulted his ears. He sensed his brain separate from his nose, his arm light-years away from his chest, his feet in a different era than his eyes. He felt like he could tap a butterfly in the Jurassic Age and kick his feet onto George Washington’s desk.

  He felt squeezed in the limbo between past and present, the place where flesh and spirit were never meant to go.

  Stop!

  He hadn’t questioned time travel. It had always just happened. Papou had described it to him as like bending space. Like closing the gap between distant galaxies. But what if you went too far? What if you were caught at the edge of space-time? What was there—a black hole?

  Was this what death felt like?

  Like you were exploding out into the universe, spinning away from your own soul, atom by atom?

  He didn’t want to die like this. Why wasn’t it working this time?

  Corey opened his mouth to scream, but everything went black.

  35

  When Corey’s eyes opened, he was in a room.

  Somehow he knew where this place was. But everything looked weird. Elongated. Too clear. It was as if his eyes had expanded to include the views from either side of his head.

  It was Leila’s room. Or some fun-house-mirror version of it.

  Corey tried to sit up, but he couldn’t. He was facedown, and all he could manage was a kind of modified push-up.

  “Leila!” he called out. But his voice sounded muffled and odd, and about an octave too low.

  He took a deep breath and called her again, louder.

  He heard footsteps padding in the hall. He backed away from the door and looked up. The door unlatched and slowly opened. For a moment he saw Ms. Sharp’s friendly smile, and it made him feel warm and welcome after the crazy trip.

  “Is Leila here?” Corey asked.

  But she looked down, startled. Her eyes grew wide and her jaw dropped. It was pretty exaggerated, like a scene from a horror movie, and for a moment Corey wondered if he was supposed to laugh.

  But her shriek was loud. And real.

  She slammed the door. Corey could hear her racing down the hallway, screaming about 911.

  Corey walked to the door, but before he could try the knob, it opened again and Leila rushed in.

  “Oh. Dear. God,” she said, putting her hand to her heart.

  “Hey,” Corey said. “What’s up with your mom?”

  She came into room and slammed the door behind her. “Corey. Don’t say anything. We need to go, before Mom has a heart attack.”

  Before Corey could reply, Leila grabbed the blanket off her bed and threw it around him. Corey felt himself rising off the floor. She was lifting him—completely lifting him into her arms. “How are you doing this?” he cried out. “Put me down!”

  He tried to shake loose, but Leila cried out, “Stop that!”

  “Will you please explain what’s happening?” Corey asked.

  “For God’s sake, Corey,” she replied. “Look!”

  She flung the blanket off Corey’s head, enough so that he could see the mirror on the back of Leila’s door.

  At first he thought it was a trick. Leila was cradling what looked like a real gray wolf.

  A memory jammed its way into his brain. His mom’s story about Corey’s grandmother:

  “She lost all her family . . . when they were taken by the Nazis. . . . She was smuggled away by the Resistance . . . out of Europe entirely, to South America . . . and then eventually to Puerto Rico. That’s where she met Papi, where he was stationed in San Juan. It was love at first sight.”

  But Mutti hadn’t lost all her family! Her brother Stanislaw had survived. He was there to take care of her, at a small Resistance village near the Austrian border. A village that was supposed to be destroyed shortly after they sent her away.

  The breath caught in Corey’s throat.

  Of course. Stanislaw was there to protect her. Which meant she never had to sail across the Atlantic with total strangers.

  Which meant she never went to San Juan.

  Never met the handsome, heroic Puerto Rican soldier named Luis Velez.

  And never had a daughter.

  Who never married a Greek-American man named Vlechos, aka Fletcher.

  Who had never given birth to a son named Corey.

  When the genes are confused by time travel, Papou had said, they shift.

  Corey’s face was covered again. He felt himself moving in Leila’s arms, down the wood floor of the Sharps’ apartment. He heard earsplitting, panicked screams from Leila’s mom. He felt himself bumping downstairs, and then the cold of the New York City night.

  As the sounds of the street gave way to the quiet of Central Park, Corey began to squirm. “Hold still,” Leila demanded. “This is weirding me out.”

  “You? How do you think I feel?” Corey asked.

  “Look, I’m not supposed to know you,” Leila said. “I mean, to me, you should be a stray wolf in New York City. I should be scared like my mom. But I know that you are Corey, who lives around the corner from me. Even though technically you weren’t born and I never met you.”

  “Your memory . . .” Corey grunted. “It didn’t adjust.”

  “Exactly,” Leila said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know!” Leila said. “So I’m taking you to Smig. And Auntie Flora. They are much smarter than me. They’ve been through this. I will make them solve this problem. I will get back to you if I die doing it.”

  Corey saw the trees and the grass. His eyes focused on the dogs at the end of their leashes, the mother raccoon and her cubs in the hollow of a tree, a family of rats scurrying into a hole in the road.

  He threw back his head and let out a loud, pitiful howl.

  About the Author

  Photo by Joseph Lerangis

  PETER LERANGIS is the author of more than one hundred and sixty books, which have sold more than six million copies and been translated into thirty-four different languages. These include the five books in the New York Times bestselling Seven Wonders series—The Colossus Rises, Lost in Babylon, The Tomb of Shadows, The Curse of the King, and The Legend of the Rift—and two books in the 39 Clues series. Peter is a Harvard graduate with a degree in biochemistry. He has run a marathon and gone rock climbing during an earthquake—though not on the same day. He lives in New York City with his wife, musician Tina deVaron, where they raised their two sons, Nick and Joe. In his spare time, he likes to eat chocolate.

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  THROWBACK: THE CHAOS LOOP. Copyright © 2020 by Peter Lerangis. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  Cover illustration © 2020 by Levente Szabo

  Cover design and hand lettering by Joe Merkel

  Digital Edition MAY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-240643-9

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-240641-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957887

  2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321

  FIRST EDITION

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