Paradox Bound

by Peter Clines

  Harry grabbed it. She twisted off the cup, then the lid. She pushed her nose into the opening and smelled the crisp scent of pure water.

  She threw herself at the Model A’s front. Not quite a quart, going off the weight, but at least seven or eight ounces. “It’s better than nothing,” she muttered.

  Little Eli ran after her, struggling with his pack. “What are you doing?”

  Harry stretched her arms across Eleanor’s hood and oh-so-gently tilted the thermos. The water poured in, and after a few seconds she was rewarded with the sound of water splashing into water. Just enough.

  She shook out the last few drops and sealed the fuel tank with a quick twist of her wrist. It could only turn twice. She tossed the thermos to Little Eli and ran around the front of the car. His footsteps padded behind her as she reached in to flip the switches for the ignition sequence.

  Eleanor shivered once, twice, and then sprung to life. The needle on the gas gauge trembled and went up a fraction of an inch.

  “Hey! You said you were out of gas.”

  “I said I was out of fuel,” Harry told him. “And you gave me close to a pint.”

  “I just gave you water.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You’re a lifesaver, if I haven’t mentioned that yet.”

  “Hey!” shouted another voice. Eli—her Eli—ran up the road, the spare tank swinging at the end of one arm. “How’d you get it running?”

  “Quiet!” she yelled. She ran to meet him in front of the car.

  “I couldn’t get anything, the faucet was rusted solid.” He looked at Little Eli. “Who’s the—”

  “Quiet,” she snapped again. She slapped the tank out of his hands. “Get in the car. Eyes front. Look at nothing, say nothing, do nothing.”

  Eli’s jaw sank, pulling his mouth open and stretching his eyes wide. Harry watched his eyes flit back and forth between Little Eli and the bicycle. Awareness sparked in Eli’s eyes.

  Harry whacked his arm. “Now!”

  Then they both heard it. A distant tickle at the edge of hearing.

  The growl of a big engine.

  Eli got into the car.

  Harry ran around Eleanor and slid behind the wheel. She grabbed her tricorne from Eli’s hand, slammed it back on her head, then glanced over at Little Eli. He’d followed her around to the driver’s side. Confusion and amazement filled his eyes in equal measure.

  “Hey,” she said, snapping her fingers. She pointed at his little feet. “Your mother doesn’t want you in the street, yes?”

  In the passenger seat, Eli trembled.

  In the street, Little Eli looked down, then back up, his eyes bigger than ever.

  “Get off the road and stay there,” she said. “In fact, stay there for a few minutes after we go, just to be safe.”

  Little Eli nodded and glanced at his bike. Then his gaze and expression shifted.

  Harry glanced in the rearview mirror and saw something small and dark far down the road, growing larger and louder by the second.

  “Time to go,” she said. “See you in a couple of years, Eli.”

  “What?”

  Eleanor’s tires clawed at the dirt, pushing the car onto the pavement. Harry hit the gas. The wheels squealed on the road and threw the Model A forward, knocking Harry back in her seat. She spared a quick glance in her window and saw Little Eli on the very edge of the road, waving his hands at a cloud of dust. Or maybe at them.

  And only a hundred yards past him…a Hudson Hornet.

  “Looks like only one of them,” she said. “If you have any thoughts on where we might shake him off, they’d be appreciated.”

  Next to her, Eli let out a mouthful of air. “That was me,” he said.

  “Yes.” She slid into the other lane, went wide, and took the corner at speed.

  “All this time, that was me. I was him.”

  “Yes,” she said, “and I think we avoided making a huge mess of history right then.”

  He shook his head, then turned it into a nod. “Yeah, that was it. I remember all of it.”

  The next turn put them in unfamiliar territory, but a dozen yards under the wheels and a slight bend in the road brought them within sight of the post office. “You remember that?”

  “That was when we met.”

  “No,” she said, “we met at the church when you were a young man.” They swung around another corner.

  “Believe me, I remember that whole day. I must’ve gone over it in my head a thousand times. I spent the morning biking around town, had lunch in the baseball field, spent an hour afterwards throwing rocks…” His voice trailed off.

  She glanced at him. “What?”

  “I think—”

  A bullet punched through the rear window and spun Harry’s tricorne off her head. She screamed, almost blotting out the echo of the gunshot. The hat bounced against her arm and into Eli’s lap.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Ears are ringing,” she said

  She spun the wheel as a second shot reached their ears. Eleanor made a tight turn, the rear wheels almost sliding across the pavement, and Harry saw a scattering of the local landmarks. The baseball field. The fire station. The Founders House loomed behind them.

  One more shot rang over the sound of the engine. Eleanor wobbled, and Harry felt the wheel twitch beneath her hands. She risked a glance out the side and back, glimpsed the rippling black around the spoked wheel. “Dammit,” she yelled. “They got the tire.”

  Eli looked back at the cracked rear window. “How fast can we go?”

  “I think this is as fast as we can go. Hang on.” They passed another building, she spotted a slick spot in the road, and they skidded back into history.

  Eli braced his legs against the floorboards. The wind outside the car was a good ten degrees colder. “How far?”

  “As far as she could take us.” They came out of the skid and the tires caught dirt. “At least a hundred years back,” she said.

  Eleanor lumbered across the dirt road. Most of the buildings had vanished, and Harry noticed just one church standing alone in the distance. The baseball field had reverted back to just…a field, filled with waist-high grass and surrounded by a split-rail fence. The apartment building and firehouse off to the left were gone, replaced with a large structure that might have been a barn once and found new purpose. A red carriage with a large brass water tank sat out front.

  Harry glanced over her left shoulder at the back end of the car. “We’re shredding the tire,” she said. “It’s not going to last long, and we won’t make it far without it.”

  “We don’t need to. Turn us around.”

  “What?”

  “Trust me.”

  The Model A’s engine whined as Harry spun the wheel. Eleanor fought her, but grudgingly made a wide turn in front of the old firehouse, heading back the way they’d come. The car slid for a moment, and then the tires caught the ground. A house appeared over by the church. The grass in the field grew another inch.

  Eleanor lurched again and Harry felt something slap the underside of the floorboards. A deafening rattle sprang up in the back that shook the whole car. Eli looked back through the cracked window. “I think we just lost a—”

  “Tire,” Harry agreed without looking back. She gritted her teeth as the engine coughed. “We’re done.”

  And in the distance, they heard the growl of the Hudson Hornet.

  38

  Eleanor coughed two more times. The second one sputtered off into a gargling sound. The term “death rattle” popped up in Eli’s mind.

  He reached over and pushed, twisting the steering wheel hard to the left. Harry smacked his hand away, but the wounded Model A clattered off the dirt road. One of the headlights burst as Eleanor cracked through the sun-dried rails of the fence. The car rolled over the broken wood, pushed a few feet into the tall grass, and died with a gasp.

  Eli pushed Harry’s hat at her and forced his door open before the engine went silent. “Come on
.”

  She glanced back toward the road, toward the approaching engine roar. “Do you think we can—”

  “Now! Come on!”

  She shoved her door open, followed him, caught up to him. They waded through the grass, cutting across the field in a beeline toward the church.

  Running through the tall grass felt like wading through water. Near the top, the light, bobbing tufts rippled away from the slightest touch. Down beneath, though, the thick, heavy stalks resisted each movement. They pushed back.

  Eli glanced back and, over the top of the grass, saw the Hudson Hornet spin out onto the road behind them. Its tires sprayed dirt as it lined up on Eleanor.

  “Don’t look,” he told Harry.

  They raised their knees and slogged through the grass. It slowed every step, shortened every stride. Eli guessed they’d gone a hundred feet at most.

  The heavy, hollow sound of two cars crashing together echoed over the field. Harry winced and glanced back. Her pace faltered. Eli saw her eyes and lips and could guess what had happened to Eleanor. “Come on,” he said. “We can’t stop.”

  The Hornet’s engine revved. Its tires spun. Another wooden crack echoed across the field. A new sound muffled the growl of the engine. A rustling whisk-whisk-whisk-whisk-whisk.

  Grass pushed under a bumper.

  “Move!” Eli yelled.

  In his mind’s eye, he tried to plot out the Little League field. The field he’d been in hundreds of times growing up. They’d passed the eventual baselines and had to be closing on his old position. He glanced over at the back of the Founders House, half a block away, and tried to remember how it looked from left field.

  The Hornet roared past them, flattening a wide swath of grass behind it. It plowed through what would one day be third base and swung a wide turn that would’ve leveled the bleachers. The engine revved again and again.

  “This way,” said Eli. He pointed and tugged on her sleeve. They loped through the field.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Trust me!”

  The shape appeared through the tall grass, snaking across the field like a jagged slate line. The old stone wall, not quite as old at the moment, and much more solid. Eli didn’t remember its stones being quite so dark, but maybe another century of New England weather would lighten them.

  The Hornet’s growl grew behind them, along with the whisk-whisk-whisk of grass falling beneath the car.

  Harry swung her legs over the wall without missing a beat. Eli leaped and dove over it, trying his best to make it look like a stumble that had flipped his feet into the air. The grass on the other side cushioned his landing and he rolled onto his side next to Harry. She dragged him to his feet and they glanced back as they ran.

  The faceless man hit the brakes just in time. The Hornet slid into the wall, but had shed enough momentum that the impact made a clunk rather than a crash. The wall let out a series of heavy clicks as its slabs of rock shifted. One slid off with a long, dry scrape and thudded into the ground like an ax into a tree stump.

  Zero’s mustached mask glared at them over the steering wheel. His arm stretched out the window.

  Harry tackled Eli into the grass and bullets whipped through the air above them. A few angled down to whisk through the grass. She rolled over, he pointed, and they crawled away as more bullets whipped around them.

  The gunfire stopped. The Hudson Hornet’s engine rumbled again as it backed away through the grass. Eli raised his head. “Of course it’s Zeke,” he muttered.

  “You know him,” Harry said. “Will he come after us on foot or go around?”

  Eli shook his head. “There’s an opening in the wall about thirty feet farther down. His car’ll fit through with no problem.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “He knows this place as well as I do. Maybe even better now that he’s…Zero. But we can hope.”

  Ahead of them stood a wide grove of saplings with a few full trees scattered among them, including two big pines. Some of them looked almost as thick as Eli’s thigh, but most of them had trunks the size of Harry’s wrists. Very few of them looked big enough to slow the Hornet if Zero chose to go straight through them.

  They ran for the trees.

  Eli tried to recall the lay of the land. The steep drop behind the Catholic church—where the church would be someday—had a narrow path up its slope, which always made a good landmark. Would it still be there? Would he have time to find the square rock?

  As if to make the point, the Hornet let out an angry growl from its engine. “Run, Eli Teague,” Zero bellowed. “Run while you can.”

  The grass thinned and they could move easier. Harry and Eli pulled themselves around the thin trees, swinging from left to right and back. They could almost run now.

  Another fifty or sixty feet separated them from the base of the slope. Eli couldn’t see any sign of the path through the twiggy branches and patches of leaves. If he couldn’t find the right spot, what other options did they have?

  Harry staggered to a halt against a tree and sucked in a breath. “There’s no way out, is there?” she panted. “We can’t get away from him.”

  “We’re not going to get away.”

  Her eyes opened wide.

  Behind them, the Hornet wailed out four triumphant blasts of its horn. The growl of its engine rolled across the field and through the gap in the wall. A crack echoed behind them as the big car plowed over a sapling and snapped it in half, crushing the small tree beneath it.

  “Jesus,” muttered Eli.

  They lurched back into motion, weaving between the trees. They just ran. He ran away from Zeke. Like he always did.

  Another crack echoed through the trees, and one more right after it. Zero slalomed the Hudson Hornet back and forth through the grove, smashing through the path of least resistance. Eli felt sure there was a cat-and-mouse aspect to it as well.

  “I always knew one of them would get me,” Harry panted.

  “We’re not going to die,” Eli said.

  “You just said—”

  “I said we weren’t getting away from him. Come on!”

  “What?”

  Eli cut left and raced through the trees, and Harry raced after him.

  He hadn’t come out here since he was ten or eleven, a couple of years after he’d first met Harry. He searched the ground ahead of them for the big, squarish rock he’d hung out on sometimes when Zeke and his buddies had claimed the bleachers. The rock that sat just a few yards from—

  “There!” said Eli, pointing at the stone. A few tufts of grass had disguised its shape. Which meant…“Here!”

  “What?”

  He led Harry between two narrow trees about six feet apart. He eyeballed each one and put them at maybe an inch thicker than the wooden fence posts. A few twiggy branches spread between them, and a few more as thick as his thumb.

  He stopped between the trees, then turned toward the approaching car. It plowed over another sapling. “We’ll be safe here.”

  “What? No, we won’t!”

  “Trust me.”

  Harry looked at the Hornet. It paused just over thirty yards away, engine growling, pointed right at them. She could see nothing of it but grille and windshield. “He’s got a clear shot at us,” she said. “In every way.”

  The idea dove deep into his mind. After all he’d seen and done over the past few weeks, there’d be an awful, bitter poetry to dying in his hometown a hundred years before his birth. To being killed by Zeke after all the fights and abuse and harassment. What if he’d been standing on his own crushed remains all the times he’d wandered out among the trees to…

  He reached over and grabbed her hand. “I know what I’m doing.” As he said it he glanced at the ground and pulled her back a few more steps.

  The Hudson Hornet revved its engine once, twice, and charged, crunching another tree beneath its wheels. Fifteen, twenty, thirty miles an hour.

  Harry’s fingers crushed his.
>
  The big car filled their vision.

  Harry threw herself back and—

  Time paused once more for Eli.

  The two trees framed the glossy black Hornet in his vision. He could see the red HUDSON crest set into the grille and pick out all six letters, along with the small ships and chess pieces on either side of the center triangle. The fender had seven scrapes and one deep gouge from the stone wall, and the left headlight was cracked but still held together.

  Eli could see Zero’s mask glaring at him through the glass, with its straight-line beard, wide brows, and Snidely Whiplash mustache. Even from this distance and through the plastic mask, he could see the individual wrinkles on the faceless man’s brow, the blank skin twisted into the closest it could get to a scowl but starting to flatten out. At the very last instant, Zero had recognized the spot Eli’d led him to.

  Then time got back up to speed, and the Hornet hit the trees.

  The front end slipped between the two trunks. It bounced between them. The Hornet gouged forward a few more feet and the big car went from forty miles an hour to a dead stop in one second.

  The Hudson Hornet had a big steering wheel. Zero’s body folded up and over it to slam into the windshield. The glass collapsed out of its frame. A few loose pieces went skittering across the hood. The faceless man wasn’t flung from the car like some human missile, but he had enough momentum to slide down the hood to the front of the vehicle.

  Zero tried to push himself up, slipped, and fell to the ground with a thump.

  The Hornet’s growl faded to a whine, and the engine died.

  Eli stood eight feet from the front of the car. His body shuddered, urging him to run or attack while acknowledging it was too exhausted for either. Cold sweat soaked his shirt and pants.

  He hoped it was sweat soaking his pants.

  A few feet to the side, still clutching his hand in a death grip, Harry gasped out a breath. She’d thrown up her free hand to protect herself. The hand insisted on staying up. “How…how did you do that?”

  He took in a deep breath of his own. The smell of hot metal filled the air, and he could taste oil and gas in it. He turned and took two uneasy steps toward her. “History.”