FutureImperfect

by Stefan Petrucha

  Seeing him, Harry scrambled to his feet, feeling woozy as the earth continued to tumble beneath him. He felt strongly that Jeremy should also be seeing Harry, but he didn’t seem to. He was just standing there in his cool black robes, the wind making them ripple.

  “Jeremy?” Harry called.

  He didn’t answer. There was something wrong with him. Something different about his face. He wasn’t angry at all, not anymore. Harry tried to take a few steps closer. Jeremy stood stock-still as the terrain rose and fell around him, as though he were mounted on a wall like a prize fish, or hanging from a string. He looked…surprised.

  As he neared, Harry could see that Jeremy’s head was too high up from his chest. His neck was extended too far. His wide shoulders were slumped. The thick arms twitched slightly, sending small ripples through his robes that Harry had mistakenly thought were caused by the wind. When the trails dove low for an instant, he could see that the tips of Jeremy’s feet were floating inches above the ground. He was being held up by something.

  Once, when Harry was a boy, he came upon a hawk that had grabbed a squirrel by its shoulders and tried to fly off with it. At first, it seemed like one big creature, half fur and claw, half wing and brown feather. But when Harry saw the look of ultimate surprise in the squirrel’s eyes, the knowing that it was about to be food, he realized exactly what was going on.

  Jeremy looked like that squirrel.

  “Jeremy, what is it? What’s going on?”

  Harry squinted, trying to make out what was above him. Then he saw it, the scruff of Jeremy’s neck pinched between two enormous white-gloved fingers.

  The face appeared next—or rather, Harry felt like he was being allowed to see it—the field of white, the red lips, the blue circles around the wide eyes, the forest of orange hair, and the gnashing teeth that now looked hungry.

  When the Fool first appeared to Harry, it was a devastating, soul-consuming experience, but in comparison to the face that the archetype revealed now, it had been kind. The creature grinned and spoke.

  “Hey, thanks!” it said.

  “For what?” Harry asked, hoping it wouldn’t hit him again.

  “Don’t you get it? You got him to give up his plan. As long as he was all about that plan, all about order, I couldn’t touch him. But you, you drove him crazy, bit by bit, got him to stop caring about it. There’s a thin line between intense order and total chaos. He crossed it, and my dad says I can keep him,” the Fool said.

  Harry didn’t want to know who its dad was; he didn’t even know whether to feel proud or disgusted. In either case, Jeremy moaned, then started shrieking. He shrieked so loudly he no longer made words, just vowel sounds punctuated by random consonants. Some sounded like Keller, some sounded like please, but really, they were meaningless. In them, though, in the tone, Harry could hear Jeremy’s mind unpeel.

  As Harry watched, the Fool lifted Jeremy higher and higher, up and over his open mouth. Then he began to eat him, bit by bit, peeling off the robes, the arms, the torso.

  As the crying, sobbing alpha male’s handsome, genetically selected head finally disappeared between the huge gnashing teeth, Harry caught a glimpse of something not so ha-ha in the Fool, something dark and deep. For a brief flash, Harry’s gargantuan benefactor didn’t look so much like a playful planetary-sized puppy, or even a clown anymore.

  He—it—looked like the Devil.

  Harry shuddered. At the same moment, the Fool’s meal disappeared. The bad boy was now in its belly.

  A strange quiet ensued. The Fool was still there, as was the tower, as was the deadly storm, but all the shrieking was gone.

  He scanned the sky, the future, made black by the tower. It wasn’t at all like the darkness Harry had seen when he was dead, or nonextant, or whatever he was. That was peaceful, this malevolent. Colors burst from its ebon hues, but only in flashes that were sucked back into the storm. The event horizon was still moving toward the dark edifice; Siara was still about to toss the banana and blow the school up.

  There was still a world to save. Maybe it was just a pretend world, but what the hell.

  Harry leapt onto Siara’s trail again and tugged at it, but the oozing stuff of the tower had seeped into it, and wherever Harry touched, it burned. He fell backward off the trail, grabbing his hands in agony, and saw the Fool look curiously down at him.

  “Can you help?” Harry begged. “Can you stop the chaos?”

  The Fool laughed. “Why would I want to do that? I am chaos!”

  And then, as if their old game of question-and-punch were still in effect, the Fool swatted Harry into the air. When he came back down, he crashed through the surface of the terrain and found himself in something even more familiar.

  Harry’s eyes snapped open. He was back in the alley a few blocks from school, near where the truck had dropped him off, shivering from the cold and feeling nauseous from the smell of rotting garbage.

  It was night. He didn’t hear any sirens or large explosions, so he figured there was still time. He raced into the street, pushing his way past shoppers and pedestrians like the madman he was. The funny shoe bags from Windfree slowed him, so he shed them and felt cold asphalt press into his bare feet.

  There’s a chance, a chance, a chance….

  As he approached the corner, a woman wheeling a baby carriage blocked his path. He leapt over the baby, landing in a puddle, almost falling. As he picked up speed again, he heard the woman’s outraged cries behind him. He hit the crowded street, barely ducking out of the way of a truck. He heard two cars crash behind him.

  But he kept going.

  He huffed and puffed, expecting his lungs or legs to give out, but miraculously, neither did. Nothing slowed him in the least until he crossed another street and found himself charging along a long row of department store windows.

  He happened to glance inside at what looked like an early Thanksgiving display that seemed more appropriate to a museum than a store. It was too somber, too realistic for the holiday season. Grim Native Americans sat around a roaring campfire. An elder in ceremonial garb reverentially held a small stone between his fingers. On it was a small crude drawing of a coyote. From a tree, an eagle watched, its head twisted sideways. Beyond this scene were distant hills and an evening sky that seemed to go on forever.

  Despite its expert realism, Harry wouldn’t have given it a second glance had the great bird not jumped off the fake tree, spread its wings, and started flying alongside him.

  The window shattered as the bird flew through it. Harry felt a cool wind from the store that smelled of winter coming. He hesitated, but realized he was running out of time and had to keep going. As he did, to his right, he saw, quite clearly, what was once a fake eagle soar high into the city sky. To his left, past the window, he swore he saw the Native Americans move, but it was little more than a fleeting shadow.

  A trick. A trick of the light mixing with his panic, he figured. It must be.

  Trying to forget it, he kept going until the familiar brick-and-white-stone edge of RAW High School was visible in the distance. Though he thought he could run no faster, he picked up speed until a vast rush and the feeling of something huge and heavy above his shoulders made him turn again to the sky.

  Whoa!

  This was no bird, real or otherwise. It wasn’t even the Fool. A vast white belly, rounded in the center, hovered in the air, with most of the structure unseen beyond it. Though it was a hundred yards straight up, Harry could see rows of rivets in it, indicating that whatever it was, it had been made.

  A ship. It was some kind of ship. The sleek metal craft looked as if it had flown straight out of a science-fiction movie, its enormous engines glowing gold as it floated above him, blocking nearly all the stars.

  What was it? What was going on? For the first time in his life, Harry knew he wasn’t going crazy—the world was. The A-Time storm caused by Jeremy’s sculpture was causing the filter of time to unravel completely, bits and pieces of past and fu
ture coming loose, popping into the present. Harry staggered as the ship sailed above him.

  The one chance, the only chance, would be to find the keystone and stop Siara.

  Harry lurched forward and ran again. He was on the same block as the school, passing the fenced-in courtyard, heading toward the familiar main entrance, when something large growled. Across the street was another giant, this one of flesh and blood. Taller than the glowing lamps, it stood fifteen to twenty feet high, and, from the tip of its nose to its tail, at least forty feet long.

  Its massive jaw had clamped around Mr. Kaufmann’s Honda Accord, its teeth ripping through the roof, shattering the glass windows. Harry knew what the large reptilian carnivore was, but even in his mind, he stuttered on the word.

  T-t-t-t-t-t-t…

  Beyond it, on a hill in the field, hooded men pulled on a dozen ropes tied to a great gray rock. Harry had read about the ancient megaliths that had been dug up near the school, but he had no idea who these guys were, and he didn’t particularly want to know.

  He briefly wondered why the people of the present day weren’t reacting to all this, but they seemed not to see, or care. Planning to figure it all out much later, Harry kept running, past the chain-link fence, up the red stone steps, and into the main courtyard. Everything inside was lit up, making the building glow in rich colors.

  Beyond the front doors, below the tile mosaic of great thinkers, he could see the auditorium entrance. He flew across the courtyard, feeling concrete, dirt, and sand beneath his feet. The faces of the scientists looked down at him; Einstein, Kepler, Madame Curie, Aristotle. As he ran toward them they grew taller and taller, until they vanished into a line with the sky. Harry threw himself through the doors. He was in the entrance hallway, yards from the auditorium, thrilled to see there was practically no one in the hall. It looked like he had a clear shot.

  A saddled, riderless horse galloped across his path, pounding its way toward the social studies department, while a young settler family looked in awe at the bulletin board posters for RAW’s high school bands.

  It didn’t matter. He was here. He’d rush in and grab Siara and everything would tumble back into place. It had to. Without stopping, he headed for the auditorium.

  A high-pitched whine grew louder as he stepped in. It was the prototype engine, whirring away on the stage, amplified by the room’s acoustics. The place was packed, hundreds of bodies and faces. Whatever madness was going on in the rest of time and space, this room remained untouched. It took Harry a moment to orient himself, but then he saw Siara, wheeling the cart with the deadly banana.

  “Siara!” he called. “The banana! You don’t know what it’s attached to!”

  But either the whining engine drowned him out, or she chose not to hear.

  He tried to sense the future around him, feel the fastest path to the stage. He could sense nothing in his way, nothing. He could run, jump, and grab the banana. He vaguely remembered the keystone, but there was no more time to look for things he couldn’t see. He had to get to her now.

  No sooner did he make the decision to run for it then a massive weight pushed him sideways, and someone grabbed him arms.

  He hadn’t seen them coming at all. They’d arrived, literally, out of nowhere.

  “Our old pal, Harry Keller! What a surprise!” a familiar voice said.

  “I bet I know who’s looking for you!” said another.

  Harry whirled and saw his captors; Didi and Gogo, the two school security officers he’d spent so much time ducking and hiding from the last several weeks.

  Now, they had to catch him? Now?

  They tightened their grip on his arms and pulled him toward the exit.

  “No!” Harry said, struggling. “Banana! Banana! Banana!”

  But beneath the sound of the whining engine it came out more like babababababababa!

  “Easy. Let’s get you some clothes, Ba-ba,” Didi said.

  “No! No! No!”

  It was the keystone. He hadn’t found it. What the hell could it be? He looked around frantically, saw a lighter in someone’s pocket, a student with a Game Boy, a poster flapping on the wall. People shook hands, made jokes, lifted cans of juice. On stage they flipped switches, read from papers, manipulated a PowerPoint presentation.

  It could be anything, anyone, something that hadn’t happened, something that had, or one of a million other things he couldn’t see or conceive.

  And the auditorium clock was about to hit 9 P.M., signaling Siara’s deadly snack.

  By the time the enormity of the task hit him, the security guards had dragged him into the hallway.

  “No!” Harry screamed.

  He clawed at their arms, their faces, scratching, punching even biting, but Didi and Gogo were stronger. Having failed to catch Harry on many occasions, tonight they were earning their pay. They hauled him out into the haunted night where giant lizards roamed and dead civilizations rose, somehow oblivious to the temporal carnage around them.

  “Don’t you see the dinosaur?” he pleaded, pointing.

  “Sure, we do, Ba-ba!” Did answered, winking at Gogo as they yanked him across the courtyard. “But it’s Barney, the friendly dinosaur!”

  It was only then that a sharp, deep noise rattled their chests and made them stop. A microsecond later a concussion wave, a burst of energy from a powerful explosion, hurled all three, Harry, Didi, and Gogo, off the ground and away from each other in what felt like sickly slow motion.

  Harry hit the steps with his side, managing to twist toward the school to watch. He was just in time to see all the windows shatter, as if the building were a bursting balloon. Beyond the rain of glass he saw the venerable faces of the great scientists, the ones he’d longed to join, collapse into ten thousand tiny squares, each one a meaningless basic color, purposeless, pointless without the vast context of its million brothers and sisters.

  The fireball came next, as if the highlight of a doomsday parade, and it did not disappoint. For its final, burning trick, it turned night into day so quickly that no one had time to scream.

  No one, save Harry.

  15.

  A too-late contingent of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances sped through the city night, their little glowing trails not nearly as bright as the embers of RAW High School. Their sirens wailed, mixing with tire screeches and roaring engines, the sound piercing the urban din. But it, too little and too late, was likewise swallowed by the sound of crackling flames, falling walls, and the hellish rush the bilious smoke made as it poured from the rubble and rose into the circling sky like a vast, upside-down waterfall.

  “He knew about the bomb,” Didi explained to the barrel-chested police officer who put the cuffs on Harry.

  No, officer, it was a banana.

  Harry looked at the man as he worked, reading his life at a glance. He was honest but tired, almost a cliché of the good cop. He had two daughters, one high school age, another who would’ve gone to RAW in a few years. He was two years from retirement, too. He’d make it, but only because his partner would take a bullet for him during a liquor store holdup about six blocks away.

  As he worked the cuffs, the cop shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said in a shaky voice.

  “He was trying to get into the auditorium, but we stopped him,” Gogo put in.

  The officer didn’t seem to be listening, so both repeated their short story, supporting each other with nods and “yeahs” as they twice told the tale.

  When they were done, the burly man asked, “How could anyone do something like this? For what?”

  He wasn’t looking at Didi or Gogo, he was looking at Harry. His hair was more salt than pepper, and in his hazel eyes was a plea for understanding.

  What could Harry say? The truth was pointless.

  “Jeremy Gronson wanted to change the past so he could join a transcendental street gang. Only, I guess it didn’t work. The dinosaurs, the spaceships, and the Native Americans are gone
. Everything seems back to normal.”

  The cop’s face, pink from nearness to the flames, wrinkled in sweaty confusion. Didi and Gogo, who knew Harry, pointed at their temples and swirled their index fingers.

  “Cray-zee.”

  The cop nodded. Harry was nuts. That made sense. Perfect sense. And everything had to make sense. Without any further questions, he grimly shoved Harry into the back of the police car, away from the warmth of the flame, where the cold seat stuck to Harry’s naked back.

  He leaned forward, peeling his skin off the vinyl interior as the car door slammed. There were no handles on the rear doors, and a metal grate barred him from the front seat.

  Of course. This is a police car, I should be used to this sort of thing by now.

  But Harry didn’t care what they thought, or what they did. The agitated, self-conscious vibration he’d always associated with his madness was silent. He missed it, because it had been such a wonderful buffer against his feelings. But he didn’t feel crazy, not anymore, just drained, hollow, full of grief. He didn’t blame himself for not spotting the needle in the haystack. He just wished he had.

  He even pitied Jeremy, the poor alpha boy Gronson. He’d finally managed to piss on his tree, write his name on reality’s wall in a way that would never change, in a way that would ripple out, through the parents of the dead, their friends, their brothers and sisters, altering thousands of lives with waves of trauma and grief. That would be his legacy. His last score. And no one would know.

  At least it hadn’t been World War III. Harry could sense it in the air, in the fact that the visions of past and future no longer intruded on the urban landscape. Maybe the anachronistic images he’d seen were just the pieces of time Jeremy had built the tower from, or maybe the timeless realms hated a tragedy, or, more likely, even the storm had more to do with the way Harry’s mind filtered things than with the things themselves.

  But the past hadn’t changed, so maybe the Fool was wrong, at least about that rule being just a mask. Maybe, really and truly and finally, what was done was done and Nostradamus’s prophecy would remain what it had always been—a stupid bunch of words, a not-very-good poem.