by Jeremy Finn
"Well, has it worked?" Noal asked not because he believed the story, but because he found it curious.
"Sure seems like it," Davis answered. "It has been months now and not a sign of him. Few others would agree with me, but there is some advantage to living in a place where the temperature never rises above freezing. Any living thing left out there for more than a few hours freezes solid."
"So then you think your monster is frozen out there somewhere?" Noal prodded.
"No, he's too smart for that," Davis chuckled dryly. "He's probably just at the edge of the temperature range waiting - freezing some nights but always thawing out within a few days just in case I move south. I guess I could fly south and visit for a little while. It would take him some time to travel, but I just don't want to take the risk. Better to be here where I can sleep at night knowing for sure the prehistoric reptile will not come crashing through my window. It does still give me the creeps sometimes, though, to know that cursed animal is down there somewhere with its snout pointed straight at me, just waiting. And should I ever venture anywhere else, I will know he is coming closer, ever closer with each minute that passes.
Insight
The idea for this story came from my son. He was talking about watching Peter Pan in school and the part that seemed to stick in his head was when the alligator came after Captain Hook. I only saw bits of the movie myself, but I do remember the alligator in constant pursuit. So, I wondered, what would it be like to be pursued by a beast like that, especially if it was virtually unstoppable? What would I try to do to stop it? How would it change my life? Could there be any escape? Silly, but interesting.
THE YEAR THAT WASN'T
It was a normal Monday evening the day the year that wasn't began for Ashley Phillips. She first noticed it when the microwave failed to signal the end of three minutes as it heated her wedge of stiff lasagna. The light was still on and the time froze at fifty-two seconds remaining. It was just that kind of Monday for Ashley, so she just assumed the broken microwave was another mark in her stream of bad luck until she flipped on the television to keep her company while she ate around the edges of the still cool center of the pasta. The first channel she turned on was frozen - a news reporter stared at her with his mouth wide open in mid-speech.
Odd, she thought and flipped to the next channel. Same thing - a dog suspended in mid-air leaping over a fence, two wrestlers locked in an endless effort to push the other down. On and on it went until she turned off the TV in frustration.
Frustration turned to the beginning of fear, though, when she brought her dishes to the sink and glanced out the window at the street. A car was stopped in the middle of the road with the driver staring straight ahead. The neighbor’s dog was in hot pursuit, but he too was motionless despite the fact that all four of his legs were off the ground as he sprinted toward the unwelcome vehicle.
Ashley dropped her dishes in the sink and raced outside. At first she allied her fears by reasoning it was some kind of prank. Maybe she was being filmed for one of those hidden camera shows. However, when she knelt down next to the dog and slowly passed her hand under his paws, nothing stood between the suspended dog and the pavement two inches below. She retracted her hand as if touching a hot stove and the fear grew in her breast.
It is not necessary to describe all the other things she did that evening. You can imagine yourself what you might do in such a case. She did the same. Eerily, the evening never turned to night. The sun remained behind low clouds casting an orange burst over the crisp late summer sky for hours. Finally, too tired to be scared anymore, she slumped into her bed and hoped she would wake up to find this was all some unusual dream.
Instead, she did have a dream, or maybe it wasn't a dream. She was visited by a voice - God, aliens - she never really found out for sure. The voice did not introduce itself. Rather, it merely gave a brief explanation for the state of things and oddly listed a set of rules for Ashley to live by. When she attempted to ask questions in return, it did not answer. The conversation was fairly one-sided and, excepting minor protests and unanswered questions from Ashley, went something like this:
"Ashley, time has frozen for everyone on earth except you. This condition will last for a year. Do what you will with the time. It is your choice. Anything you alter will instantly alter when time resumes. Any living thing you kill will die when time resumes, but any injury to you will not remain. If you desire to end this year before it is complete, kill yourself. The act will cause time to resume and you will find yourself exactly where you were, in good health, when time froze. This will also be the result if you accidentally die."
That was it. No "good luck" or "the reason why this is happening is...” It was just that and the voice was gone. The dream ended and Ashley woke well rested but at the exact same moment she had gone to sleep.
Understandably, it took a good week before Ashley finally came to terms with her situation and stopped arguing with no one in particular about the impossibility of the scenario. Then, it took another week yet for her to build up the courage to start thinking of ways to take advantage of the situation. She remained in her house this whole time reading books, cleaning and doing anything else she could think of to pass the time and keep herself sane.
A good question has probably come to you already - how did she keep track of the time? She didn't, really. She began to count the days as a factor of when she would get tired and sleep. Each time she woke, she added a day as a tick mark in a little notebook she took to carrying around.
Once she had accepted the impossible, she started to scheme about the best ways she could take advantage of this anomaly. Many ideas occurred to her. Though she dismissed them quickly, several were sinister. Wouldn't you see that side of things too, if only for a moment? For several weeks she used her time performing good works like cutting the neighbor's grass or dropping a little gift off at a friend's house right in front of her frozen body so when time eventually began again, it would appear as if a gift popped out of thin air for her. She even took a trip down to the capital and left a message for the President as he sat signing a memo in the oval office. Even these good works and pranks became tedious after a while, though.
Eventually, it was loneliness that drove Ashley to contemplate something bolder, and boredom that pushed her to action. She began with a trip to the West Coast. Her parents lived in Seattle and she decided it might help to just see them, maybe even spend a little time with their frozen bodies. So, she packed up her car and headed out on a road trip. She had quickly discovered machinery and such still worked when she animated it. It was only frozen until her body caused it to join the separate continuum she appeared to inhabit. Thus, the car worked, the gas pumps pumped and soda machines produced tasty carbonated beverages for her with the swipe of her credit card.
The trip itself took almost four times as long as it should have because she spent endless miles weaving around cars frozen on the highway and could rarely reach the speed limit. It was also quite annoying having to drive into the sunset eternally. She did not have to break windows to stay in hotels. Rather, she just walked around a hotel until she found a room with the door open or someone in the process of going in or coming out. This meant she had to sleep with others in the room at times, but she shook off the eerie feeling that they might suddenly move when she wasn't looking. In fact, after about two months of the static world, Ashley began to see it as the norm. People didn't seem like people anymore. It was like living in a vast department store full of mannequins.
When she finally made it to Seattle, it took two weeks to locate both her parents. At the moment time froze, it was midafternoon on the West Coast, so her father was still at work and her mother was off shopping. She was lucky enough to find a note in the house and a coupon clipping that eventually led her to the right shopping mall. Although Ashley spent days hanging around her parents' bodies, it did little to alleviate the increasing sense of being completely alone. Something inside her could sense th
e life within their statuesque forms, but all her senses warred to silence this intuition.
As she sat next to her mother in the bookstore one day flipping through her one-hundred and fifty-sixth book (her mother would be quite surprised to suddenly find a castle of stacked books around her little table), an idea struck her. She had always had a penchant for Japan and was paging through a travel guide. She was wishing she would have the money and time to visit someday when she realized how nearsighted she was being. Why not go there now? Granted, she would not be able to fly herself there, but she could drive up to Alaska, maybe find a boat to commandeer and cross over the Bering Strait. Then it would be a long drive and another boat ride to the Land of the Rising Sun. Yes, it would be dangerous, but in the worst case she would be killed and this whole madness would end as she snapped back to her home in Maryland at the instant this all began. Why not give it a try?
She gave her mother a peck on the cheek, slipped a note into the fold of the book she held continuously before her and went out to find an RV. Her morals were declining as she began to very slowly see the world as a set of inanimate things revolving around her and her desires. So, it did not bother her much to wedge the man out of the driver's seat, deposit his wife and children next to him on the curb and take off with their RV. They would eventually find out it was in western Alaska, and it would be a great story for them to tell.
The drive north was long and monotonous. There was much less traffic, though, so she made it in decent time. The land was beautiful and the sky grew brighter as she continued on. She lingered a bit enjoying nature and made it to the sea with about five months under her belt in the world where the clocks never ticked.
The crossing of the Bering Strait was far less difficult than she imagined. Once she was able to find a boat big enough to hold the fuel it would take to cross, all she had to do was figure a compass heading and then keep the boat steady on the azimuth. Since the currents, wind and waves were immobile, nothing affected her direct course. When she grew tired, she just turned off the engines and the boat would not drift an inch while she slept. Things went so well, she decided to keep to the boat even after reaching the eastern extent of Siberia. Fortunately, she found a small harbor with a fueling station. She filled her boat's tank and managed to roll several barrels of fuel and crates of canned foods on in case she could not find another port in the near future. She spent a long, very boring month like this following the coastline east then south. If not for the changing features along the coast to vary her view, she would have gone stark mad. More than once, she even considered testing the voice's assurance that ending her life would end the year of stasis.
Finally, Ashley reached a point where she judged a turn east across the open sea would bring her to Japan. It had grown darker as she moved west and south. Now she was in the gray haze of night just before dawn touched the sky. It made navigation along the coast difficult, but when she finally came upon the western shore of Honshu, she could see the shoreline lights from miles away. It was a joyous moment ruined only when she realized she could share it with no one. At long last, more than halfway through her year, she had made it to the land she had always hoped to see. Unfortunately, she would see every part of it in the dark, but best not to focus on the negatives.
Though she found a dock big enough for her fishing boat, she had little experience and wound up nearly destroying the wooden structure before she was able to jump off onto its remains and reach the shore. She left the boat adrift, but with no tide and no motion in the water whatsoever, it remained stationary beside the dock.
There was a little town nestled up to the narrow rocky beach. Despite the early hour, it was bustling with static activity as fishermen and fishmongers went about their early morning routines. Ashley wandered into a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with four tiny tables and a cook behind a counter along the wall. She grabbed a steaming bowl of rice topped with sea urchin roe and salmon eggs off a serving tray and noted the steam remained frozen in midair over the tray. This was her first meal prepared by someone else for weeks since she had to live off canned and dry goods while on the wretched boat journey. It was absolutely delicious despite the strong brine flavor.
Ashley decided to spend the night, or her body's biological night, in the town, and spent a few hours equipping herself for her planned journey across Japan. Since she had little exercise while confined aboard the boat, she decided to borrow a bicycle and wind her way through the mountain roads toward the east coast and then possibly borrow a car to drive down to Tokyo. She always wanted to see the capital city and planned to spend weeks exploring its frozen vastness before heading south to Kyoto.
With a backpack bulging with camping gear and ramen noodles, Ashley began to peddle her way toward the mysterious towering mountains not far from the village. It was not long before her calves burned from the effort. Her body was unaccustomed to physical exertion, but she was in no rush and took her time, stopping at curious little brooks and outlooks offering majestic views of mountains rolling through the pre-morning fog like sea serpents undulating through a vast gray ocean.
It did not seem like long at all before the ups and downs became a steady stream of downs culminating in flat roads running for miles through geometrically segregated rice fields. The land was mostly flat, but rose and fell in moderate swells. As she reached the top of one of these about seven months into her bizarre year, she caught a glimpse of the eastern sea beyond. She made it her goal to reach the shore before settling down for the day. Though she made it, the trip was longer than expected and she came to a patch of tightly packed buildings lining a river that opened broadly to meet an intrusion of the sea into a port city. Like many of the Japanese coastal cities, and unlike the usual Western stereotypical image, it was industrial and dirty. Ashley knew she would not find a beach or likely anything that really interested her, so she considered taking a car and driving south a bit to find someplace more picturesque to bed down. Then she saw something unusual. Granted, living in a frozen world often presents unusual sights, but this was something new. It seemed from her vantage point on a slight rise in the land that a line spread across the city close to the sea. It was hard to tell from this distance, but it looked almost as if cars, houses and other random junk rose above the carpet of low houses and buildings like a wall of debris holding the ocean at bay.
Despite her exhaustion, Ashley could not suppress her curiosity and decided to check out the oddity. She did opt for a car nearby, apologizing to deaf ears for removing the driver and setting her safely on the edge of a rice paddy.
A short fifteen minute drive brought her through congested streets and very near to the wall of junk before she had to abandon the vehicle. She made sure to park it where it would not cause an accident when time reengaged, which was not difficult since all the traffic seemed to be on the other side of the street. She then wound on foot through a narrow street crowded with morning market booths. Oddly, no one tended the booths. In fact, it struck her that the closer she came to the wall, the less people were engaged in normal activities. There were people on this street, but all of them were running opposite her approach.
She rounded the block and could see the wall now. Every person in her field of view had expressions of terror frozen on their faces. Many of them were locked in the midst of panicked screams. She approached the wall hesitantly, fearing it would somehow suddenly come crashing down on top of her and her immobile companions. It was a bulging mass of darkness speckled with particles of wood, plastic and metal, and bearing on its massive arms objects as large as cars and house roofs. This far east, the red glow of the sun peeking above the ocean reflected off glass windows and touched the fringe of the monstrosity before her.
When she came close enough, she realized all the rumble was held together by a thick glue. She touched it and recoiled in understanding. It was wet. It was water. This was a massive wall of the sea extending inland where it was not meant to be - a tsunami.
Then
she saw a man suspended upside down in the mass about a foot from the surface. She carefully reached in and grabbed his arm. It took her a few seconds to garner the courage, for she was afraid she would somehow spring a leak in the watery bulge, but she finally heaved and dragged the man out of the wave. He landed on the ground at her feet. His body kept its unnatural position and the water around him splashed on the sidewalk, but a hole remained in the wall where his body was. The water did not rush out or drop to fill in the void. She bent down over his body and examined it closely. There was water in his open mouth. How was she to know if he was dead or alive? She couldn't check his pulse. She put her hands on his chest and began to lean in a thrust with both hands, but then noticed the deep gash in his neck exposing a thick artery crimson with blood waiting to escape. This man was as good as dead if not already gone.
She rolled off his body and onto her knees. Tears began to fall uncontrollably as the tragedy of the situation came to bear on her. So many people were dead. Worse yet, so many were alive around her but inevitably doomed to death. They were frozen for a year in a strange mercy they would never know when their bodies would leap forward again and allow them their final seconds on earth.
Ashley wept bitterly for some minutes and began to have thoughts of suicide. Why continue this when she could launch herself back to her home, back to normality? She knew she could not enjoy touring frozen Japan when in the back of her mind these terrified faces would haunt her all along.
Then, something caught her attention and gave her hope. A boy, likely under the age of ten, was caught mid-stride as he ran from the wave. One of his legs was sunk into the dirty water. The rest of his body reached wildly forward in a last futile lunge away from certain death. She could save them - the ones who were still alive but certain to die. She knew immediately she could not save them all, but she did have somewhere around five months left. Perhaps she could save all the children. She grabbed the boy and carried him to a nearby car. The door was open as the driver must have abandoned it to flee on foot. She threw the child in the back seat and then scoured the street for others. It tore at her heart to take children from their parents - to have to pull a mother's hand from her daughter's desperate grasp. But she knew it was what she had to do. She did not have the strength to carry adults and she was sure the parents would want their children saved even if they could not go with them.
