by Kailin Gow
I laugh. “I’m from the future, Dr. Cook. I know what’s going to happen. I know who I am there too. I’m the most powerful person on the planet. Trust me, I need to be there when we try this, and if Hammond won’t listen… well, we’ll find another way.”
Jack nods and heads out of the door, obviously going for the helicopter. I start to follow, but Grayson stops me. He kisses me, his lips jamming against mine in an embrace that’s almost bruising in its intensity.
“Stay safe,” he says. “I don’t think I could stand it if you… if things didn’t go well.”
“I’ll be fine,” I promise. “Just concentrate on getting everyone you can into the shelters.”
He nods, kissing me again. “I will. I’m going to make sure that your parents and your brother are in one. Johnny too, even if I have to go to Location Ten to do it.”
The earnestness with which he says that is almost heartbreaking. Will I really see him again? With the danger of what I’m about to do, I just don’t know. “Make sure that Sebastian, Jonah, and I guess even Lionel make it too. The world is going to need them, whichever way this goes. And Grayson?”
“What?” he asks, and it looks like he knows what I’m going to say.
“Make sure you’re there too. If I’m not back in time, if I don’t manage to stop this, then you need to make sure you survive. You need to find a way back through to the future to try to help there. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Grayson takes hold of my shoulders. “You’re coming back,” he insists. “If you don’t, then I’ll find you, wherever you are. Whenever you are. I love you. I always have. I always will.”
I kiss him then. I can’t help it. “I’ll always love you too, Grayson.”
I run for the helicopter. Jack is waiting for me, looking impatient. He can probably guess what has taken me so long. He doesn’t complain though as we set off.
“Where are we heading?” I ask. “The White House?”
Jack shakes his head. “He won’t be there yet, thankfully. He hasn’t been sworn in. My guess is that he’ll be busy celebrating at his campaign headquarters with everybody else. That, or at his home. We’ll find him, wherever he is.”
“Will we find him in time though?” I ask.
Jack sighs. “I hope so.”
We head for Virginia, and I know the countryside we’re flying over, because we’ve been over it once already.
“We’re heading for the town where his headquarters is?” I ask.
Jack shakes his head. “The next town over. That’s where his campaign headquarters is, along with his official home. I guess it’s close enough that he could make a dash for the bunker if he needed to.”
I look out of the helicopter, trying to work out when that will be. The clouds around us are strange, roiling and twisting even though there doesn’t seem to be any sign of a storm. Worse, the sky has taken on an orange cast, like the setting sun, only it’s too early for that. Far too early. I reach out to touch Jack’s arm.
“It’s starting.”
“We might still have time,” Jack insists. “We have to believe that, Celes.”
“What I don’t get is how Hammond is even causing this,” I say. “I mean, this might not be normal, but it looks like a natural disaster, not something man made. And he’s only just become president or rather president elect. It’s not like he has access to the country’s weapons or anything yet.”
I’m distracted by things that burn across the sky, falling to Earth in a blaze and seeming to explode when they do so. Meteorites. Ones that glow with energy so brightly I can see them even from up here. I can’t help thinking back to the rock we found out in Switzerland.
“How?” I ask. “How can Hammond cause this?”
Jack looks over at me. “You know how this can happen, Celes. At least, you did in the future. These effects are all signs. Signs that Hammond is the one…”
“The one?”
“The The One to Bring the End Days. Like I said before, the details are in plenty of mythologies, but when you look in the bible, in Revelations, it’s so clear. Someone rises during the End Days and charms his way to a position of great power.”
“Like the Presidency.”
“He promises peace,” Jack says, “but he brings death and destruction. Supernatural occurrences surround him, so that he appears to some people to be a god, but he isn’t. He’s an agent of evil instead.”
That’s a lot to take in. “So all this…” I wave a hand as more meteorites come flashing down, seeming to burn the sky as they go “…you’re saying that Hammond is controlling this?”
Jack nods “‘And it does great signs and even makes fire to come down out of heaven upon the earth before men’. That’s from Revelations Thirteen."
I don’t want to believe it. It all seems far too fantastical. The idea that the end of the world could be coming now, exactly as set out in the bible… it’s too much. Yet Jack’s right. The signs are there, and Hammond is right at the heart of what is going on. With that going on around us, we don’t have time to waste.
“Hammond’s just a part of what is going to come, Celes,” Jack says. “There are so many signs in the Book of Revelations, and we know from our research that they happened. They will happen, I should say. The false prophet, the Serpent, acquires followers. He brings fire upon the Earth, he takes away religious freedom to force everyone to worship him. He promises prosperity, but just brings plague instead. Hammond has begun to fulfill that role. If we leave it much longer, we’ll be too late.”
I can’t help shuddering at that thought. “We have to stop him, Jack. Whatever it takes.”
Jack nods. “That’s the plan. That was always the plan. Succeed or die. Either we stop the Apocalypse, or we’re caught right in the middle of it.”
We’re close now. The helicopter pilot brings the craft in for a brief landing, letting us scramble off near a building so covered in campaign banners and posters that it’s obvious that we’ve found the right place. There are people running out of it, along with the buildings on each side. Some of them are pushing, shoving, screaming, so that the chaos of it all isn’t far from turning what should be an evacuation into a riot.
Jack and I fight against the flow, making it to the door. There are still people rushing out, and Jack manages to catch the door before it closes, letting us in. It’s almost too easy. Hammond might not be sworn in as president yet, but he should have protection around him by now. He should have better security than this. There’s something very, very wrong about how easy it has been to get in here, though when I mention it to Jack, he shrugs.
“People are panicking. Panicked people don’t remember to do things like locking doors.”
Maybe that’s it, though it doesn’t feel like it. The office around us is mostly large and open plan, with tables set out with phones on them where volunteers have been helping with the campaign. There are signs of a party around us too, with fallen plastic cups and old style party streamers scattered here and there. There’s another office towards the back.
“We should check it,” Jack says, “but I don’t think Hammond is here. Now that things have started, there’s a good chance he’ll have moved to his shelter. I was hoping to get here before this.”
I nod in agreement, but we move forward anyway, opening the office door as silently as we can. We slip inside, finding a small office with a heavy oak desk and leather chair, with TVs set up, all tuned to the news. Hammond is there too. The newly elected president is standing to one side, so that we don’t spot him straight away. Just standing there, silently, watching us.
And he’s holding a gun.
NINETEEN
Hammond levels the gun at us, then with his other hand, he pulls out a cell phone. He calls a number without saying a word to either of us, the expression on his face not changing even slightly while he does it.
“Honey, something has come up, so it looks like I’m going to be late for the celebratory dinner tonight.
You know how these things are just after an election. No, I don’t know what time I’ll be back, so why don’t you go ahead and start without me. I’ll get over there when I can.”
He hangs up, and now his expression changes, but still not by much. He looks more calmly curious than angry or dangerous, though the gun doesn’t waver.
“So,” he says, “I doubt that the two of you have come here to congratulate me. How did you get out, anyway?”
I try for my most authoritative tone, aiming for the kind of voice I remember from my dreams, where I’m the one who’s president, not Hammond. “Senator Hammond…”
“I think you’ll find that it’s Mr. President now, young lady.”
“President Hammond,” I say, “you have to stop. You can’t go through with becoming president. You have to step down.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Really? Why? Oh, don’t tell me, you think that I’m some kind of evil monster set on taking over the world, right?”
I force myself to look him squarely in the eye. “That’s exactly what I think you’re going to try to do, yes. And I think that in the process, you’re going to end up doing more damage than you could possibly believe.”
“So you want me to step down?” Hammond says. “All on the word of a teenage girl with a knack for setting light to things? Whatever you can do, you don’t have any right to ask that of me, and you aren’t even old enough to vote, let alone decide what’s right for everyone around you. Why should I listen to you?”
“Because I know what is going to happen,” I say. “Jack and I aren’t from this time. As hard as it might be to believe, we’re from the future. Far in the future. We know what you end up doing here, and we know how much damage you cause. We’re here to stop you. To show you exactly what you’re about to do.”
“I think he already knows that,” Jack says, and Hammond smiles slightly. “You do, don’t you? You said it when you were going to fade Johnny. You needed him to forget what you were going to do, so you must know exactly what is going to happen. Even your safe house… unless you knew, why build it?”
I realize that Jack is right. I’d been hoping that the newly elected president might not understand the consequences of what he’s doing, but if that’s the case, why build a shelter to protect his family and friends from those consequences? He knows.
“Yes,” Hammond agrees. “I know enough about that to guard against the consequences. Further out… well, I don’t have a crystal ball, but I do have Johnny. He gave me plenty of information. Enough to know that we would have dangerous visitors. Visitors like you. I’ve known it for a long, long time.”
“How long?” Jack asks. I can see him glancing around the room, obviously looking for a way to deal with the situation. Hammond obviously sees it too, because the gun moves from me to Jack.
“Long enough to get the Others started,” Hammond says. “When they were a government division, they were very useful in hunting down your kind. Making sure that meddling visitors couldn’t do too much damage. They were so useful, in fact, that when they lost their funding, I was only too happy to use my fortune to fill that gap.”
“You mean that the Others work for you?” I say. I hadn’t expected that. I’d known they were connected, but this seems insane.
“Oh, most of them don’t know it,” Hammond explains. “They just know that they have a benefactor who supplies them with money, information, and occasional bits of technology.”
“And in return, you just make a few requests?” Jack guesses.
Hammond laughs. “Hardly. By supplying the right information, I don’t have to ask for anything. The Others do what I want them to, and they think that it’s their own idea. It’s a far more effective way to run an organization like that, in the long run. If I tried to control them directly, they would only fight against me. Like you.”
“We’re trying to save people,” I say. “President Hammond, I don’t care what happens to me and Jack here. This isn’t our time. I know though that if you take office, a great disaster will occur in this time, and the knock on effects will affect our time. People will die here, but in the future…” memory floods back to me. Memories of the sick and the dying, the comatose and the faces of the doctors who can’t help.
“In the future,” I say, “there aren’t many of us left. We’ve developed so far, we can do so many things, but we’re sick.” More memories come to me. Memories of visiting the hospital. Of seeing the children dying. “There’s a fever, and we can’t stop it. All we could do was look back for the cause, hoping to prevent it at the source. The cause is this moment. The moment when you become president. You bring about changes.”
“What kind of changes?” Hammond asks.
I shake my head. “I’m not going to tell you. I’m not going to risk giving you a blueprint to follow. The point is that you have to stop this.”
Hammond stands there and shakes his head. “It’s too late for that.” Then he reaches down to the sleeve of his gun arm, unbuttoning it and pulling it up. There, on his forearm, sits an elaborate tattoo. It’s of a dragon, coiled around his forearm like it’s clinging to him. “My course has been set for a very long time. It’s in me, and I know what I am. For a long time, I wanted to stop it, but now? Now, I know the truth. There is no stopping it. Things are going to be how they were always meant to be for me. But you…”
He stares at me, and I don’t know what he sees there, but there’s something almost terrifying about his gaze. It’s not that it’s mad, or evil, or anything like that. It’s that it’s so calm. So utterly calm as he shifts to point the pistol at me.
“It’s not too late to stop you. I think you’ll be even more dangerous than I am. I’m sorry.”
He pulls the trigger.
As he does so, Jack is already moving, but even he isn’t fast enough to stop the bullet that slams into me. I feel the moment when it hits me, passing through flesh like it isn’t there. I fall to my knees, pressing my hand over the wound to try to stop the blood that is already coming from it. In theory, if I don’t die, then I’ll heal, but how quickly? Quickly enough to stop the blood?
Jack is on the new president in an instant, grabbing the gun and twisting it aside, his hand going over the top in a hard punch. Hammond, amazingly, doesn’t go down, but starts fighting back, wrestling for the gun while swinging punches with his free hand. Jack has to duck his head down behind his shoulder to stop them, coming back with knees and elbows.
One gets through, a vicious upward elbow strike that catches the former senator on the point of the jaw. He crumples as the blow thuds home, and Jack wrests the gun from him, hitting him with the butt of it so that Hammond falls to the floor, unconscious.
Jack looks over at me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “I think… I think the bullet went straight through, and I haven’t died, so I should be able to heal. What about Hammond?”
Jack cocks the gun and points it at the new president’s recumbent form. “I came here to do a job. Whatever it takes.”
I know in that moment that I can’t let him do it. I thought that I would be able to, but here, with him standing over Hammond’s unconscious body, I can’t. I just can’t.
“Jack, wait!”
“Why?” Jack demands, his surprise obvious. “This is what we came here to do, Celes. This is the only way to stop the Apocalypse from happening.”
I shake my head. “It can’t be. It isn’t a solution. You saw Hammond. You heard him. The Serpent is a part of him, but it isn’t him. Kill him, and how do we know that it won’t just move on? How do we know it won’t just move on to someone else and use them to take over the world? Hammond is just another pawn here, Jack.”
“That isn’t what we decided back home,” Jack says. “Whatever the Serpent does afterwards, it’s in Hammond now. We can’t worry about anything else.” He sighs. “I’m tired, Celes. I just want to do this and go home.”
A thought occurs to me then. One so
terrible that I can’t bear to think of it. “What if there’s no home to go to, Jack?”
“What?”
I swallow as the implications of Hammond’s death start to sink in. “Are we sure that I came back to help you? Are we sure I didn’t come back to stop you?”
“What?” Jack sounds confused. I can’t blame him. “Why would you do that?”
“Because… what if we do change the future, Jack? What does that do to you, to me? To the future we come from? Does it cease to exist? All those people we’re trying to save in our time. What if we aren’t saving them? What if we’re making it so that they never exist?”
“So we just let all this happen?” Jack asks. “Celes, you can’t be serious. You’re saying that unless we let the Apocalypse happen, you’re worried about whether our time will still exist?”
“I thought I came back just to follow you,” I say, “but doesn’t this make sense too? Are you saying I’m wrong?”
Jack hesitates, but then shakes his head. “It could be a better world in the future though,” he says. “One with plenty of people. One where they don’t have to adapt the way we have.”
“One where everyone we’ve ever known is never born,” I point out.
“I know that!” Jack replies hotly, but then stops himself. “This is what we sent people back for, Celes. Are you telling me that you don’t want me to do it now? If you are…”
“Yes?”
Jack nods. “I’ll do what you want. Whatever that is. I trust you.”
The question is, what do I want to do? Jack puts the gun down on the table, and while he does it, I try to think. Does the Apocalypse in this time have to happen? If it does, doesn’t that mean the inevitable destruction of our world anyway? The sickness? Maybe someone like me will be born in the future anyway if we change things. Maybe someone like Jack will, too. The trouble is, I can’t see a way that they’ll meet there. Not the way we did.
