by Grant Pies
Regardless of why I felt this way, I knew I needed to save this person. I could not let another man be slowly tortured, burned, and bled to death. If I was to live in this time with another human, I would much rather take my chances with the unknown man tied on the ground rather than the known torturer.
I gripped the branch in my hands, and focused all of the energy left in my body. I quietly crept toward the edge of the forest clearing. When the torturer’s back was turned fully toward me, I pushed off of the balls of my feet. Just as the wolf that had sought to kill me in Yellowstone, the power travelled up through my body towards my arms and hands. I pushed through the last line of trees before the clearing, pulling the branch back over my head, and, in one swift motion, swinging it down towards the torturer’s head.
One of the knobs protruding at the end of the branch connected with the man’s head and sunk into his skull. My body crashed into his, and we both fell to the ground. I quickly got to my feet, pried the branch from the man’s head, and landed one last blow onto his head. After a muddled thud, a stream of blood sprayed up toward my face. I stood over the body of the man, and a surprising sense of triumph came over me.
The man who was tied up shuddered, and crawled away from me.
Dropping the blood-drenched branch, I said, “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.” I reached down and untied the man’s hands. He turned around to face me. I saw a ghost before me. A man who was dead years ago. His face was thin; his skin copper. He looked at me with familiar sunken emerald green eyes and reached his hand out to accept mine. His arm was thin and muscular. I helped the man up. He stood and brushed the dirt from his knees. “Powell” I said. Stunned by who stood in front of me. I stared at him like a ghost or some apparition. The man looked at me with a grin I had seen decades before. He grabbed my hand like I was an old friend. “Redford”, the man said. “But you can just call me Red.”
CHAPTER 24
5065
NEW ALCATRAZ
DAY 4
Red winced in pain as he rose from the ground. The bruises and cuts on his face and hands told a tale of the torture he suffered, and the lifeless clump of human flesh piled on the still burning ashes near Red told a tale of what awaited him had I not intervened.
This was how I met Red for the second time in my life, the first time in his. Time trapped us both in a reciprocal life-saving chain. Him saving me - me saving him; both of us saving ourselves in the process. My father’s parting words rattled around in my head. Cycles, balance and sacrifice.
“Thank you,” Red said to me, clearly still in shock.
“No problem,” I said like I just loaned him a dollar for a vending machine. “What happened here,” I asked and looked around at the small clearing.
“We were ambushed a day ago. I was with a small group and another faction came up upon us at night. My group ran and scattered. My friend and I were grabbed by this guy,” Red said motioning toward the man I killed. “Everyone else headed toward the coast, I think,” Red told me and rubbed the back of his head as he glanced around the forest, trying to orient himself. His eyes darted back and forth. With every subtle noise he halted his speech mid-sentence, and abruptly turned. He breathed heavily, and, even from a distance, I could tell his heart was still racing.
Red swiftly collected any supplies and clothes worth taking from the man whom I pummeled with the branch. Red’s fellow traveler was too badly burned to recover anything from him. The torturer’s head was opened, blood and brain oozing out of his skull. The torturer’s bald cracked head had intricate tattoos on it.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
Darting his eyes around, Red said, “I don’t know. Maybe a month; maybe two.” He guessed, keeping his answers vague.
We made our way through the forest. Neither he nor I suggested that we stick together, but neither of us objected to it either. Red led the way through the forest, and we quickly reached a point where I could see the outer edge of the treed area. Red looked back at me and he held his index finger vertically over his lips. He slowed his pace to a crawl.
The trees stopped almost like there was an invisible wall. It was as if the trees and the dry hardpan desert entered into a pact centuries ago, and neither was to encroach on the other. I could not see anyone else beyond the trees. Red paused and scanned the desert horizon, listening and focusing so as to notice any glimmer out in the desert. For the longest minute, we stood still listening to our heartbeats and the rustling leaves as a stiff wind rushed from the desert to the forest.
“We should camp here tonight,” Red whispered. “We shouldn’t travel in the dark. That is how I got into this mess.”
We both sat on the gravelly ground with our backs against the dry trees. Neither of us spoke until the sky turned red, and the sun dipped below the horizon. Red rolled the sleeves of his jumpsuit up and surveyed the many gashes he suffered on his arms. A small beetle crawled down his arm, and he plucked it up with his thumb and forefinger. He looked at the dark brown bug. Its thin wings fluttered. Red placed it back down on his arm. I looked over and saw a man who I buried decades before. Does some part of him know who I am?
“Time is funny,” he said. “This beetle doesn’t know what time it is, or how old it is. He may have a natural breeding cycle of sorts, but he doesn’t keep track of his age.” Red said all of this while letting the beetle scurry around on the palm of his hand. He stared at it, observed it almost like he was talking to it, instead of me.
“You know...back before I was sent here, I heard of a tortoise living to the age of two hundred.” Red stared off and pondered such a long lifespan. “And the mayfly has a maximum lifespan of one day. One day!” Red repeated. “But to that animal that’s its whole life. It doesn’t know any better.”
“What if I told you that you only had one day left to live?” he asked. I just sat silently, and assumed he didn’t really intend me to answer. Red twisted his wrist as the beetle made its way to the back of his hand, and then back to his palm once more.
“Humans would panic, freak out, if faced with that time line, but we would rejoice if we could live as long as the tortoise. Animals don’t know when they are supposed to die. Supposed to die?” Red said with a laugh. The phrase was as preposterous as Red made it sound.
“That mayfly doesn’t know what a day is. It is no more a tragedy if the mayfly lives for one hour and it is no more a victory if it lives for two days; at least not for the mayfly. Maybe a scientist would deem it a victory for the mayfly if it lived for two days. But the mayfly … it doesn’t know any better.
“But we do. Humans know their lifespan. We took the Earth’s rotation and divided into endless fragments of hours, minutes, and seconds. We’ve calculated the Earth’s orbit around the sun and chopped that up into months, weeks, and days.” Red adjusted his position on the hard ground, and held his ribs as he moved.
“We know when we are supposed to die. And anything short of that we consider unfair. It is only when we have lived to the end of our projected time that our friends and family can say we lived a long and good life. But usually they are only half right. If we were as ignorant as the mayfly, would we mourn the death of a child so heavily? We are the only species that projects its lifespan. We are the only species that measures time. So we are the only species that fears that we will run out of time. We invented time yet we act like it has been put upon us from some outside force.”
Red cupped the fat beetle in his hand, and in a swift motion he popped it in his mouth. Without chewing he swallowed the critter. He leaned back against a gray tree, crossed his arms over his chest, and relaxed his shoulders. “If you find any more of those beetles go ahead and eat ‘em,” he said. “Get some rest. Tomorrow we are tracking down the rest of the damned people who had a hand in killing my friend.”
CHAPTER 25
5065
NEW ALCATRAZ
DAY 5
At daybreak, I woke to Red on his knees digging a hole as deep
as his forearm into the ashy dirt inside the tree line. A pile of dirt and wet mud sat next to him. He plunged his hand deep into the earth, pressing his cheek against the ground as he reached in to scoop out more dirt. With each movement he pulled up a wet handful of orange clay mud.
“I know you’re thirsty,” he said just barely out of breath from digging. I’d had only small amounts of water from the bundles of fungus that grew on the sides of the craggy mountains, and this marked my fifth day here. My head pounded with each movement, and my muscles cramped. My tongue was large and tacky inside my mouth. I needed more than a few droplets of water if I wished to continue on. Inside the hole was murky water. When Red dug out a handful of dense clay, mud water rushed into the bottom of the hole. But it was quickly filled again with more mud that slid back down to the bottom.
Red’s shoes were already off, and he pulled one of the long tube socks, stained dark with dirt and sweat, off of his foot. He balled the sock up, dunked it into the deep hole, and pulled it out. He held the muddy dripping wet sock above him with his mouth wide open like a young bird waiting for regurgitated food from its mother. The orange water sporadically dripped into Red’s gaping mouth. Once the water stopped dripping from the sock, Red placed it firm against his lips and sucked the remaining moisture from the discolored sock.
“It’s not pleasant, but it’ll get you through the morning. Just drink enough to get you down the cliff up ahead. Too much and your stomach’ll cramp up on ya,” he told me.
I hesitantly pulled my shoes and socks off, and mimicked Red’s actions. The water was gritty and bitter. The taste was equal parts dirt and sweat, with a slight metallic taste. But my tongue had expanded inside my mouth from lack of water, and my lips were chapped and cracked. Even the dirtiest of water felt good dripping down my throat. After the first few seconds the taste was negligible. I squeezed the sock dry into my mouth, dipped it back into the hole a second time, and then a third time. Once all of the water was twisted out of the sock, I dabbed the damp cloth on my dry lips. Between my hands wringing out the sock, and the dry desert air pulling the remaining moisture out of it, my sock was almost bone dry when I went to put it back on.
We walked away from the dense dead forest. The trees behind us cast a stretching shadow out along the hot ground. With nothing but open air between us and the scorching sun, I took a deep breath and stepped out from the shade. As Red and I walked away from the only shaded forest inside a three-day walk, we traded idle banter back and forth. Maybe it was an attempt to get to know each other, or, as in my situation, an attempt to reacquaint myself with an old friend. Or perhaps it was an attempt to forget that we were both lost and stuck in an unfamiliar time.
“What did you do before you came here,” Red asked.
“ARC,” I told him. “Before that I was an engineer.”
“The ARC,” Red replied. “So this isn’t your first brush with the law.” Red didn’t expect an answer. “Me, I was a mechanic. I worked on everything from home automation systems to planes to cars to androids. If it had moving parts, I could fix it,” he claimed.
Even though he didn’t know exactly how long he had been in New Alcatraz, Red had wandered this place for much longer than I had. He told me that there were ruins of old civilizations scattered across the land. Civilizations that were old to this earth, but that were future civilizations to us. Over the course of thousands of years, cities had been demolished, or blown up, or flooded, or just forgotten, and then they had been rebuilt only to be demolished again. That cycle continued until whatever civilization remained lost interest or the ability to rebuild. Red guessed they lost interest.
Orbiting satellites died, fell thousands of kilometers, and crashed to earth. Their circuitry and metal embedded in the dirt. Beaches eroded, and land masses flooded. Trees grew where the earth was once barren. And rainforests became deserts. From what Red could tell, the moon was shattered into thousands of rocks that orbited Earth. Maybe it was just the lack of water or shelter, but Red swore that the sun was either larger or closer to the earth than it was in 2070.
After Red recounted his version of the last three thousand years, we walked in silence for a while. We stopped occasionally to dig more holes in the desert and soak up more mud water. Our bodies didn’t sweat anymore; there was nothing left for them to excrete.
“How’d you end up here?” Red asked, just as nonchalantly as if he’d asked me what year it was when we first met in the conservation zone decades ago. “Not here, in this exact area, but in New Alcatraz?” Red spread his arms out with his palms up as if to display the landscape of New Alcatraz to an audience.
I stopped in the middle of the future desert and thought about his question. I stood and stared at the grayish orange clay ground. Pictures of the murdered time anomaly agent, Emery, blinked into my mind. The glossy photos that the interrogating agent spread out on the table in front of me leapt through my head. Her empty body cavities where her organs should have been; her vacant eye sockets, and the thick blood that ran out of her body. Memories of the agent who questioned me jumped between synapses in my brain. Her smirking at me and smugly questioning me; knowing where I would end up.
In the brief moment, after Red asked me this single question, my entire trial sparked through my mind. My despondent attorney in his wrinkled suit and disheveled hair. I quickly recalled the jury foreman, and how dispassionately he read the jury verdict. They condemned me to a sure death with little thought. And I thought again of the judge; a short man with a pudgy face and rolls of fat that spilled over his collar.
“The world needs less people like you,” he had said to me from his elevated bench. “However, I am not as cruel as you are. I do not wish you to die, but I cannot allow you to live in this civilization. So you will be sentenced to temporal prison and will be dispatched immediately.” The judge’s words were coated in a righteous reverberation. My sentence was a death sentence for sure, but one that still allowed this judge to sleep soundly at night.
I thought of all of this in the moments after Red posed his question to me. I stood as these images and memories flashed in my head. Unknowingly my fists clenched and my jaw tightened. Maybe I thought of these memories so they would become altered and incorrect.
“Did you forget what sent you here already?” Red asked. I shook the thoughts from my mind and wondered how long I had stood there silent. “I don’t blame you if you don’t want to talk about it. I just figured we’ve got some time on our hands.”
I told Red the truth, and I told him only what I knew. I told him that I didn’t know what I did to get here, only what I was charged with. Red let out a gruff sound of approval and belief, and nodded his head. He didn’t question my claim of innocence. It was likely something that he had heard before.
“So why did they think you killed someone?” he asked, without a hint of sarcasm. I told him how they found my DNA at the scene of the crime. Red let out a guttural chuckle. “How do you figure that happened? A person’s DNA doesn’t just end up at the scene of a crime! Who was the victim? Did you know them?”
I tried to explain to Red what little I knew; the agent and my DNA. I still didn’t understand why I was there myself. Every fact led me to another question. Another question that Red would ask, and another question that I had already asked myself hundreds of times. All questions that I couldn’t answer for him or myself. Who was the agent? Who really killed her, and how did they get my DNA? Why me? Did someone want me in temporal prison? None of it made sense to me, and there was no need to make sense of it. I was here. Flung through time. Trapped.
The day continued on after Red asked about my alleged crimes. With every question Red asked that I couldn’t answer he became frustrated. Like it was a riddle that he wanted to solve. Eventually the void of answers became so frustrating to Red that he stopped asking questions. After a short silence Red started talking again. I didn’t ask Red, but he told me how he ended up in temporal prison. What he did to deserve a life in the in
hospitable future. Red told me about a man he once knew.
CHAPTER 26
2033
SANTA FE, NM
The man was inhabited by an unknown poison. Not a chemical poison, but a dark black cancer of the human spirit. This pollution caused the man to hate and despise all people around him. He clenched his fists and his teeth when others around him spoke. He had a broad flat nose and a mouth that ran straight across his face.
The man never smiled, but if he did he would have revealed teeth that were too close together in his mouth. His knuckles were thick with calluses and bruises. Everywhere he walked; he walked slowly and leaned slightly forward. The man served as a black hole, sucking and pulling all around him inward, and leaving nothing in its place. Despite his decaying spirit, the man managed to attract a wife.
Maybe the woman saw something in him that others could not. Maybe she saw this man as a project, a chore, or problem to fix. Perhaps her attraction to him was a noble cause. But more likely she was weak willed, and unable to pull herself free from the man’s horrible infectious spirit. She had passed over the threshold and was forever lost from that moment on.
Her body was made up of several thin sticks of skin and bone attached to a small torso. Her skin wrapped tight around her limbs. The bones of her elbow stuck out pushing through her skin. Her blonde hair was translucent and thin. It fell straight down her back. She wasn’t unattractive, but she was overlooked by most men.
