by Alan Zendell
I didn’t relish the idea of defending the basement against a small army. I needed a way to keep them out. I was desperate. My brain shifted into overdrive, cataloguing what I’d looked at earlier. There’d been a couple of gallon cans of paint thinner in the room with the paint supplies. I ran and got them. One was full, the other already opened. I rushed up the basement stairs, splashing the highly flammable liquid against the door and emptying the half-full can onto the commercial grade carpet on the upper stairs.
As I pulled off my gloves to worry open the cap on the second can, Henry’s voice boomed through the Hummer’s loudspeaker. “FBI. Stand where you are and lower your weapons. The property is surrounded. Drop your weapons or we’ll open fire.”
That must have made them pause for a few seconds. They couldn’t be sure how many of us were there. The delay was long enough for me the get the second can of paint thinner open and finish saturating the carpeted stairs. Noxious fumes were filling the air. I would have been overcome without my breathing mask.
Henry’s bluff didn’t delay them for long. I heard them at the front door, and someone shouted, “Get down there and check the canisters.”
I had maybe five seconds to grab the long butane lighter lying beside the gas water heater that they must have kept there for re-starting the pilot light. I ripped the thick paper warning card off the water heater, crumbled it in my hand, and ignited it with the two-inch flame that shot out of the lighter, then ran for the stairs with my makeshift torch just as the door at the top opened. Bright light poured down the staircase followed a second later by a gun-wielding Farah Johnston. I’m not sure what she thought she was looking at, but the sight of me in my white radiation suit startled her just long enough to enable me to toss my flaming brand onto the bottom step and leap out of the way.
The vapors that had accumulated erupted into an oxygen-sucking inferno that instantly engulfed Johnston and the staircase. She must have died within seconds of inhaling her next breath, but not before she fired wildly down the stairs. My suit protected me from the worst of the heat blast, but one of the shots pierced it in two places, before and after the slug passed through my right thigh just below my hip.
The pain was excruciating. I don’t know how I kept from passing out. The bullet hadn’t hit bone; I could only hope it hadn’t severed my femoral artery. I dragged myself to the third canister as the fire raged behind me, only subliminally aware of the gun battle that had erupted outside the house. It took everything I had to focus on getting the canister to the sink, pulling myself up, and pouring its contents into the slowly setting concrete. I was able to upend the bag of concrete, which still rested on a corner of the sink, and deposit the remainder of its contents on top of the radioactive sludge. I turned the water on again until a puddle formed in the top layer of powdered concrete, then left it to harden as it would.
The radiation didn’t worry me; the setting concrete would shield a lot of it. My hands had only been exposed briefly, and the bullet holes in my suit wouldn’t make much difference. The fire was something else. The wood frame house must have ignited like a tinderbox. Air howled through the broken window as the fire turned the stairwell into a roaring chimney.
The only reason I was still alive, aside from the fact that I apparently hadn’t bled out, was that fire burns from bottom to top. I doubted that there were hydrants around. The whole structure would be consumed before it burned itself out. It wouldn’t be long before what was left of the house collapsed, and I knew the smoke was highly toxic. The filters in my breathing apparatus would help, but for how long? And then what?
I crawled as far from the fire and the radioactive concrete mix as I could, reaching the broken window, where the mini-gale prevented smoke from accumulating too badly. Knowing I’d never be able to climb to safety, my impulse was to smash the other windows to the let the smoke out, but that would only increase the chimney effect and make the fire hotter. I took my phone out my pocket. The line sounded like it was still open but there was only dead air. Where were Henry and Rod? If the fire looked the way I thought it must from outside, no one in his right mind would approach the house, but I knew that wouldn’t stop them from trying to get me out if they could. I didn’t want to consider the alternative.
My leg was killing me, and my thoughts were becoming less coherent. It might have been shock, blood loss, radiation, or the effects of the toxic smoke. I should have been terrified, but I felt oddly detached. If I lay still and let my mind drift, I didn’t hurt as much. Knowing I’d saved thousands of lives and prevented chaos from taking over New York and possibly the whole country helped mask the pain. Damn, I’d done it. Ilene would be so proud of me.
Oh, shit. Ilene. I’d promised her I wouldn’t do anything crazy. But she’d told me to do whatever I had to, hadn’t she? God, Ilene, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to end this way. I pictured her raging at me for getting myself killed here, and I cried, knowing how that would hurt her. I wanted to hold her and tell her I loved her. My phone was on the floor beside me. If my head had been functioning, I might have thought to call her, but I was too far gone, by then. I’d forgotten about it.
I cried until I was barely conscious and beginning to hallucinate. I talked to the Übermensch. Are you happy, now? Who the hell are you, anyway? Why did you pick me?
I thought about the irony of dying there, being crushed by the collapsing timbers, and it was finally clear to me. It must be God who’d been manipulating me. Wasn’t that the way He operated? Recruiting heroes and rewarding them by making martyrs out of them? Was that how I was supposed to get my message out, by being remembered for making the ultimate sacrifice? Maybe He’d even invent a resurrection myth after I was dead.
I was right about you, wasn’t I? You really are a psychopath, and an asshole to boot.
I think I smiled at having the last word.
49.
I still don’t know whether HE was God, and I have no regrets about my last words to HIM, but it turned out that the Übermensch wasn’t done with me yet. Not only did I get no appreciation for anything I’d done, but my delirium, after I finally passed out, was plagued by guilt-induced nightmares, in which I had to atone for dying before accomplishing my mission. Time was when I might have succumbed to that kind of bullshit, but I was wise to HIM now. What could HE do to me? Relegate me to one of the circles of Hell?
Not everyone thinks of Hell as a place of fire and brimstone, except maybe people who spent their last moments on Earth consumed by fire. Others, people who lived their whole lives in Seattle, for example, might think Hell was a place that’s perpetually gray, cold, dank, and miserable. If I thought that way I might have truly believed I was there when my head cleared. I certainly felt miserable. And cold. And wet. And alone. And…now that I thought of it, there was a touch of brimstone. Everything smelled like burned-over shit. And it was really dark.
Actually, after weeks of unrelenting August heat, it wasn’t all that unpleasant, except for the throbbing pain in my pelvis. I was a couple of inches from being a eunuch.
Since dead men don’t worry about having their balls shot off, I figured out about then that I was still alive. In fact, I was still wearing my radiation suit. Where the hell was I, anyway (no pun intended). I tried moving my arms. It felt like I was lying under a pile of litter, but so far, so good. I tried wiping off my faceplate. Ah, I could see again.
I unzipped my hood and pulled it up over my face. Sky. Stars. Fresh air. Well, not that fresh, the burned-over shit smell was stronger without my hood.
I may have been alive, but I wasn’t entirely well. I have no idea how much time passed, but the next thing I remember was hearing a motor approaching. Doors opened and closed, and I saw flashlight beams. Then, people starting shouting, calling my name. Somehow, I knew my throat wouldn’t work properly, so I struggled to sit up.
A woman’s voice, “There! He’s over there.” And then she was running, slipping, falling, getting up, and running again until she
dropped to her knees before me. Henry was right behind her. A minute later Rod was there getting all the smoky debris off me and shining a light on my once white suit.
“Look,” he said, pointing at my bloody thigh. He got his fingers in the bullet hole and tore at the fabric. “He’s been shot.” They laid me on my back.
Henry used his phone to call a Medivac, and then Ilene was there with tears streaming down her face in the filth and soot, with Gregg on one side of her and Marc on the other.
“How did you know he’d be here, Mom?” Marc asked. “I thought they searched all this yesterday.”
“They did,” she said, “but he wasn’t here yesterday. He probably only got here an hour or two ago.”
She silenced him with a finger pressed against his lips. “Just accept it for now. He’ll explain it when he feels better.”
***
I awoke in a hospital bed for the second time in a month. I lay there for a while thinking it all through, realizing what happened. Okay, I take it back. You’re not an asshole.
The bullet hadn’t caused fatal bleeding, and I’d flipped from Wednesday night to Friday morning before enough smoke and fumes worked their way through my air filters to kill me. They’d found me in the charred remains of Stoychko’s house at three a.m. after clean air above the rubble allowed me to assimilate enough oxygen to regain consciousness.
I’d wound up partially submerged in the char and soot pit that was left after the heat wave had finally broken with torrential rains that extinguished the flames and the fire department had soaked the glowing embers. I’d been lying in a steady rain when they found me. Fortunately, I was adrift elsewhere in the space-time continuum when the house finally collapsed.
A monitor at the nurse’s station alerted her that I was awake, and a minute later they were all beside me again. My throat was raw, but I could speak.
“Who figured it out first?”
“The fire hadn’t cooled enough to search through until Thursday morning,” Henry said. “Just to be sure, we watched firefighters dig through the remains for hours, but Ilene knew you wouldn’t be there. When they found the radioactive mass of concrete, she made us stay back and wouldn’t let anyone near the debris again until the searchers had radiation protection. Then she refused to leave. Your sons arrived, and we all had dinner. Ilene said there was no point looking for you until after midnight; she wasn’t sure when, so we just drove out there and waited.”
“What about you two?” I nodded at him and Rod. “I remember a lot of gunfire.”
“The State Police got there shortly after the house went up in flames. Stoychko and Husam al Din are in jail. Bushati and the others are dead,” he said.
“And everyone else lived happily ever after,” Rod said.
“How did the authorities react when you found me?”
“They don’t exactly know yet,” Ilene said. “The feds handled the affair just like Union Station, so there was no media attention. When we came back to find you it was just us. The Medivac crew only knew you’d survived the fire; they had no idea who you were. And when we got to the hospital Henry threw a national security cloak over everything and told the medical staff to do their jobs and not ask questions.”
“I told William and the rest of the team, this afternoon,” Henry said. “I said there’d been a pocket of open space left in the basement under a couple of tons of debris that we’d been unable to search on Thursday, and that the collapsing joists had formed a kind of lean-to that protected you.”
“They bought that?”
“I promised them a full report on Monday, but I’m not surprised that they didn’t question it. You’ve had this aura of unexplainable believability for over a month. Why would it be any different now? Sam compared it to a miraculous case of survival after a mine disaster.”
My sons still didn’t know the truth. They’d been listening and processing everything, talking softly with each other out of earshot of everyone else.
“I’ve made a decision,” I said. “I intend to go public with all this, once I figure out how to avoid getting committed to an asylum. I’ll need your help. I think I should start with William and the rest of the unit when I get out of here. But first, if you guys will excuse me, Ilene and I need to talk to our sons.”
I didn’t anticipate a problem with Marc and Gregg. I’d already explained what my life had turned into four times, and I now had compelling evidence to support my story. Ilene, bless her, had thought ahead, and brought my laptop and the flash drives with the Union Station and Yankee Stadium attacks on them. I had to remind myself that as far as the kids were concerned, the conversations I’d had with them on my Thursday night had never happened.
I started by showing them Union Station.
“What the hell is this?” Gregg said, “another movie about terrorism?”
“I downloaded this video live from the CNN website,” Ilene said. “It’s real. Just watch and listen. You promised to let us present this our way.”
Next came the attack on Yankee Stadium.
“That was real, too?” Marc asked. “That’s why you called Wednesday and told us not to come?”
Ilene nodded and he looked at me. “You knew it was going to happen ahead of time? How?” He shook his head in dismay. “I don’t get it. Did it happen or didn’t it?”
I smiled. “It happened, both attacks did – in my time line. In yours, they didn’t.”
Gregg looked at his brother. “This is going to be good.”
I started from the beginning and told it all to them. Every so often they looked to Ilene for confirmation, and she responded with her version of events. By the time they were done peppering me with questions, the nurse had come in to break us up.
“If you want him discharged tomorrow, get out of here and let him sleep.”
AFTERMATH
50.
Sunday night, I called William. “I haven’t been very fair to you,” I told him. “I owe you an apology and an explanation.”
He murmured something unintelligible, then cleared his throat. “I’m listening.”
“I’m ready to answer your questions. Full disclosure. I can have Ilene drive me downtown tomorrow morning, and meet you in your office. I know Henry’s supposed to give you a complete briefing. He won’t mind if I preempt him, and after you hear what I have to say, you won’t need it.”
William would be a good test. If I could convince him, I stood a good chance of completing the task the Übermensch had given me. Gregg and Marc hadn’t found it too hard to suppress their disbelief, but they’d known me all their lives. True, they’d suddenly learned I wasn’t who they thought I was, but they both had active imaginations and we had solid relationships based on trust. Neither was true of William.
I described everything to him, leaving nothing out. He listened intently, saying little, his quixotic temper nowhere in evidence. Several times, when he seemed about to object or interrupt, his expression and body language told me he was mentally trying to force the square peg of my story into the round hole of an unresolved question he had, finding, to his surprise, that it fit. My regard for him rose immensely.
The inevitable moment came when he stopped me and glared intimidatingly. “Henry and Rod have both known for weeks?”
“Yes,” I said, at a loss for words. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or just intensely absorbed in what I was telling him.
“Don’t worry about it. I get why you didn’t tell me, and your rapport with Henry clearly worked.”
When we got to the beginning of last week, he called Henry and Rod in and told them to close the door. We discussed the rest together. William was especially interested in the notes Henry and Rod had written to themselves on my Thursday evening.
“You didn’t question them when Dylan gave them to you, Wednesday morning?”
“I was anticipating something like that,” Henry said. “We were confident, by Tuesday, that something was going to happen Thursday night. If
Dylan had information to help us intercept them on Wednesday, we knew he’d show up here and share it with us.”
“What about both of you living Wednesday and Thursday twice?” William said, addressing Rod and Henry. “Dylan said the second time negates the first. How does that work from your point of view?”
“First,” Rod said, “it’s not something we got to vote on. It just happened, and not only to us, but to everyone except Dylan, including you. But only people like Ilene and us, whose lives were closely intertwined with his on those days, noticed. Dylan says our dual timelines merged back together on Friday, like a river flowing around an island. For a while, because of our involvement with him, we had access to both sets of memories.
“Last week,” Henry said, “Rod and I spent our second Thursday evening in a restaurant with Ilene until very early Friday morning. After we recovered Dylan, we all retained the ghost memories, as we call them. Since I was actually with Ilene and Dylan on the first Thursday evening, Ilene and I were able to reinforce our shared memories. It was quite an experience.”
“And now?” William asked.
“I recall the ghost memories the way I know things that happened when I was three. I don’t actually remember the details. I know them because my parents told me about them, and I know for a fact that I really was three, once.”
William’s questions were insightful. He turned to me next. “Tell me if I have this right. For five consecutive weeks, you fell asleep on Wednesday night and awoke on Friday morning. You passed out in that burning house last Wednesday night, close to midnight, then skipped ahead twenty-four hours to Friday morning, so you were only exposed to the toxic smoke for, what? A couple of hours? Your suit’s air filters were enough to keep you alive, and from your perspective, you were rescued less than four hours after you were shot.”
“Right.”
“Then you knew it would happen that way?”
“At some level I suppose I did, but I didn’t think about it consciously. I’m never certain of anything these days until it happens.
