D-Day

by Bob Mayer

  “But the important ones didn’t,” Ivar said.

  “How’s that?” Havens asked.

  “Nothing,” Ivar said, but his brain was racing. How could one be sure that among those thirteen cadets who’d been expelled, there wasn’t someone who might have affected history on a large scale if they’d graduated?

  The vagaries of the variables.

  Ivar shook his head, trying to dislodge the doubts. “But I don’t understand why it didn’t work.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It would seem the Shadow would want Jeff Davis expelled, at the very least. That would be a ripple. You did what they asked. What stopped it from—”

  “We didn’t let it.”

  They were startled at the woman’s voice. She was between two trees, a slender figure dressed in a black robe, a black hood hiding her hair and putting her eyes in a dark shadow. All that was visible was the lower part of her face, smooth, unlined, and of indeterminate age. She held a book in the crook of one arm.

  Ivar and Havens popped to their feet.

  “Who are you?” Ivar asked. “Who is ‘we’?”

  She ignored him. She glided forward, her robe barely moving. She reached out with her free hand then placed it, palm open, on Benny Havens’ chest. “You have a good heart.” She gestured toward the log. “You need to rest.”

  “I am so tired,” Havens agreed. He sat on the ground with his back against the log.

  She put her hand on his head. “Rest.”

  Havens closed his eyes, his head lolled over, and he was asleep.

  “Who are you?” Ivar asked, eyeing her hand suspiciously.

  Then he saw her eyes and took a step back, almost off the cliff. They were white. Completely white, yet he sensed she was seeing him more clearly than anyone ever had.

  “My names are legion.” She smiled. “I’ve always wanted to say that. People are just too serious about everything, aren’t they? A little levity is important, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe give me one of the legion of names?” Ivar asked, not feeling the levity at all.

  “It’s time for you to go,” she said.

  “You’re not Shadow,” Ivar said. “Are you a Goddess? Like Pandora? Pyrrha?”

  She laughed. “You are amusing. Goddesses? Even they must conform to my two sisters and me in certain things. We don’t have power. We are what we are.” She tapped the book. “I just read from the book, and it is what it is.”

  “What book?”

  She held up the book she was carrying. “The Book of Fate.”

  Ivar was lost. “What about his daughter?”

  She shook her head. “She’s not in the book. I took that memory from him just now. I’ve already taken it from his wife’s. They will never miss what they never had.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “And Ivar?”

  “Yes?”

  “You are you. And your heart is just fine.”

  Chauvet Cave, Southern France, 6 June 32,415 Years B.P. (Before Present)

  Daylight tinged the opening of the cave.

  Moms shook herself awake, surprised she’d slept. Loss of blood, yes, but her brain wasn’t working right. Had they stretched her too far, sending her so far back in time? She didn’t know why she thought of it that way, stretched, but the word applied. She wasn’t all here.

  She giggled. If she wasn’t, where was the rest of her?

  “Hard to think,” Moms said out loud. She knew it was bad, talking to herself, but the words seemed to anchor her in the here and now, and she’d take what she had to in order to do that.

  There was movement, and she looked over. The boy was back with the girl, most likely his sister, her head on his lap. He was stroking her hair, cooing something to her. Very bird-like. Very caring.

  Moms got up, her body stiff, her shoulder throbbing. It took a lot of effort to walk to the artist. Moms made a noise to attract the boy’s attention and pointed at the sticks. He stared at her blankly.

  Moms picked up a stick. She went to him, found a piece of bare rock, then scraped on it. The charcoal needed to be fresh. All she made was a slight smudge.

  There was a skill to it.

  It could be done. The boy could tell others how to do it. What he had seen his father do. But why would they listen? How would they understand the concept?

  Moms stood. The boy remained with his sister. She had to make sure he made the next steps: the art and the artist.

  He had to bring people here. To see. But how could he bring other people to this place of death? How could he show them what was so important that they needed to leave their own cave?

  She still had the rest of the day to achieve something, anything. But not much of the day was left, judging by the sun.

  Moms looked down the valley. From her trip so many years ago, many millennia in the future, she knew there were a lot of caves in the valley.

  Which meant there were other humans.

  Moms sat next to the boy and watched the valley. She was rewarded within five minutes. A thin tendril of smoke drifted up about a kilometer away.

  “Come,” Moms said.

  The boy looked at her, confused, but not scared.

  These were not people to whom fear came easily.

  Moms took him by the hand. Her heart fluttered when she saw that he was clutching one of the drawing sticks in his other hand.

  “Good,” Moms said. She reached out and ruffled his hair. She gathered the other sticks.

  She led him to the trail next to the Ardèche River, toward the smoke. A narrow trail turned off from the main one, climbing up toward a cave.

  Moms halted. She knelt and pointed at the stick in his hand, then pantomimed drawing.

  He frowned.

  Moms ran her finger in the dust and snow, drawing the outline of a heart. She pointed at the sticks. Then up at the cave.

  “Go.”

  He headed up the side of the valley.

  Moms moved away, then took an overwatch position where she could see the front of the cave. The boy arrived at the flat space in front of the cave and was immediately surrounded by people. There was a commotion for a while at the arrival of a stranger.

  One of the women drew the boy aside. She gave him some food.

  Moms waited.

  So much resting on just a boy.

  The boy went inside the cave. Moms sighed. She’d tried. The cave would be found. Inhabited again by both humans and cave bears. Maybe someone would make the connection between the images on the wall and a man’s hand, and then the next connection of how to make those images.

  Maybe.

  Or had that one man, the boy’s father, been such an aberration, his mind so far out of the bell curve, that—

  The boy came out of the cave with the stick in his hand. The tip was dark with charcoal. He walked to a section of flat rock next to the entrance. He began to draw with the charcoal-tipped stick. A rough approximation of a horse’s head began to appear under the boy’s hand.

  Several men and women gathered behind him, watching. Curious.

  One of the men cried out. He pointed at the image the boy was drawing, then pantomimed something, and Moms realized he was trying to indicate a horse galloping. The others caught on, excited.

  A woman gently took the boy’s arm, the one that held the stick, then waved it about, crying out.

  Magic.

  It was magic.

  And now, it was theirs. It was in the boy’s genes, and it was in the imagination of all who’d seen. They would go to the cave eventually. The boy would lead them here. They would know what the horses were. Would make more drawings.

  Moms crept away, back up the valley. She climbed wearily back up to the Chauvet cave.

  The bodies still appeared to be asleep. She took the woman the boy had gone to and dragged her next to the father. Then she picked up the girl. Moms gently carried her over and sat down, back against the wal
l, under the horse drawing. Moms stroked the girl’s hair, slowly untangling the dirty knots. She thought how all life had a reason, even when the reason wasn’t you.

  Once the hair was untangled, Moms rocked the girl, murmuring something, some lullaby long-buried under years of despair and pain. Moms began to cry, because someone had to cry for the dead.

  She remembered his name. The man who’d taken her here, so many years ago, so many millennia in the future.

  And she continued to cry.

  The Return

  ROLAND WAS SLIDING through the tunnel of time, forward.

  To one side was another timeline, where Grendels were climbing out of dark pools, thousands of them, a plague of death against which the Danes could not stand. Then the rest of the Viking world succumbed, and the beasts spread into England, Germany, and around the world, until that timeline coalesced into a black orb of nothingness.

  Just death.

  Roland noted that timeline in his peripheral vision outside the tunnel he was traversing back to the Possibility Palace, but his focus was on the small piece of scale from Aglaeca he held in his hand.

  A trophy with which to remember a hunter.

  * * *

  Doc was tumbling in the tunnel of time, moving forward. He was spinning, disoriented, only catching glimpses of other possible timelines. Many ended in the bright flash and utter darkness of nuclear war.

  But the journey was so brief, there was little time to take it in.

  All he knew was that he felt warm, as if the radiation he and Hamid had loosed in the Core of the Containment chamber had coated his body.

  How many rads?

  How many rads had he received from the dragon’s tail?

  * * *

  Scout was sliding through the tunnel of time, forward.

  She looked about, searching for other possibility timelines sprouting off, but there was nothing. As she’d suspected, Pythagoras of Samos and his sculptures were not—

  A thin, gold line shot off above her. She tried to see what it was, what that timeline entailed, but it was so narrow and opaque. Was it even a timeline? What did it mean?

  Scout watched as it faded into the dimness of possibilities.

  Something was different.

  Who was her mother?

  * * *

  Ivar was in the tunnel of time, but not returning. Not yet. He was stuck, and for a moment, he panicked, but then he saw that while he wasn’t moving, the scene around him was. West Point was slowly evolving. A barracks torn down, and a new one being built.

  Cadets in gray scurried back and forth, faster and faster. Parades whirled across the Plain. Ivar was moving up, away, gaining a bird’s-eye view as the seasons whipped by, but then he suddenly slowed.

  A cemetery in Highland Falls, just south of the Academy, on the high ground above where Havens’s tavern had been. Cadets in a square, surrounding a grave. Distantly, echoing in the tunnel of time, the sound of deep voices sang:

  Come tune your voices, comrades, and stand up in a row.

  For singing sentimentally we’re for to go.

  In the Army there’s sobriety, promotion’s very slow,

  So we’ll sing our reminiscences of Benny Havens, Oh!

  When this life’s troubled sea is o’er and our last battles through,

  If God permits us mortals there in his blest domain to view,

  Then we shall see in glory crowned, in proud celestial row,

  The friends we’ve known and loved so well at Benny Havens, Oh!

  Oh! Benny Havens, oh! Oh! Benny Havens, oh!

  We’ll sing our reminiscences of Benny Havens, Oh!

  Ivar saw her, dressed in black, holding her book, outside the circle of cadets around Benny Havens’s grave. She looked up, as if she could see him, flicked a hand, and then Ivar was accelerating through time, back to his own.

  There were images on other sides. Other possibilities. The Stars and Bars flying over the half-finished Washington Monument, with Robert E. Lee standing in front, being sworn in as the new President of the Confederate States of America, while a U.S. flag flew over a new capital in Philadelphia.

  Another Civil War, years later, over the same issues. Deadlier, bloodier, no reconciliation.

  There were other timelines: no Jefferson Davis, a different president of the Confederacy, one who managed to draw England into the war; that one flared into red so thick, Ivar couldn’t see through.

  But Ivar knew.

  Fate.

  It is as it should be.

  * * *

  Moms was sliding through the tunnel of time, forward. To her own time.

  Her eyes were closed, her face crusted with dried tears.

  It was a long journey, and she feared what awaited. She knew, without knowing how she knew, that there was as much sadness ahead of her as that which she had left behind.

  Normandy France, 6 June 1944 A.D.

  The shouts from the German soldiers were getting closer.

  “Do you know my only wish for all these long years?” Brigit asked. “I wished to die with someone I loved. For a long time, it was enough to have Maurice, since I never thought I could love another person again after my baby and my husband.”

  “What were their names?” Mac asked.

  She whispered them in his ear. “And what is your real name?”

  Mac told her. He thought of how hard it had been for her to live the way she’d been forced to, and he knew she’d been finished for a very long time, but it had only been habit that her kept her living. Her essence of being human.

  She wrapped her arms around him. “Thank you for burying Maurice.”

  The first bullet from the approaching soldiers clipped a branch above them, showering them with spring blossoms.

  “Ah, yes,” Mac said. “For Maurice.”

  He felt her body shudder as a machine pistol chattered. She went limp.

  He could be pulled back now, Mac thought, as Doc had been, just before the firing squad, but he knew he wouldn’t be. The Fates were ruling today.

  This was his.

  He pushed the detonator, and the det cord burned at four miles per second, reaching the explosives, and the bridge was gone.

  Mac screamed at the top of his lungs in the sudden silence after that: “Maurice!”

  He held Brigit in his arms, and a peace settled over him that he’d not known for so long, and he wondered if he’d ever known it at all, and then, as he’d always hoped, everything was darkness, and all was peace.

  The Possibility Palace

  “IT IS PROTOCOL FOR US to acknowledge the death of a team member because no one else will,” Moms said. “We must pay our respects and give honors.”

  They were in their team room: Moms, Scout, Ivar, Doc, Roland, and Eagle.

  Moms’s shoulder was bandaged and her arm in a sling. Eagle had progressed past his sling, but he still had a wrap around his shoulder. Scout’s forearm was bandaged, the long wound bound; stitches decorated her forehead above her left eye. Ivar sported a large bandage over his nose. Doc was pale, shaking, and pumped full of medications to battle the dose of radiation he’d received. The prognosis was he’d recover, but they all knew that long-term, the radiation would come back to haunt his body.

  With a grimace, Moms pulled her arm out of the sling. She took Eagle’s hand on one side, and Scout’s on the other. The rest of the team completed the circle around the table.

  “He was named Mac by the team,” Moms said, “but in death, he regains his name and his past. Sergeant First Class Eric Bowen, U.S. Army Special Forces, MOS Eighteen-Charlie, Engineer, from the great state of Texas, has made the ultimate sacrifice for his country, for his world, and for mankind. We speak his rank and his name as it was.”

  They all spoke together: “Sergeant First Class Eric Bowen.”

  Scout spoke up. “As long as a name is remembered, we live on.”

  Every member of the team nodded.

  Moms continued. “We, the Time Patrol
, have seen many things and been to many places, and many times. We don’t know the limits of science, and we don’t know the limits of the soul. If there is some life after this, or some existence on a plane we can’t conceive of, then know our teammate is there, in a good place. Because that is what he deserves for performing his duty without any acknowledgement, and for making the ultimate sacrifice. If there is nothingness in death, then he is in his final peace and will not be troubled any more by the nightmares of this world, or the demons that haunted Mac.”

  Moms took a deep, shuddering breath and tried to gain the composure to continue.

  Eagle spoke into the void. “There will be no medals. No service at Arlington. There is no body to bury. He is in the past. We know he succeeded in his mission. History confirms it.”

  “All we can do,” Scout said, “is keep him in our hearts.”

  The team remained silent, then the circle broke. Eagle held up a chisel and hammer.

  “We are no longer the Nightstalkers. We’ve been the Time Patrol for a while. We have to start our own traditions. We have to own our own place. This room. That starts here. Now.” He nodded to the wall where the Badge of Merit he’d taken on his mission on the Ides was mounted on a plaque, the only decoration in the room. “The best way to do that is to remember those who went before. Since we’ve become Time Patrol, we’ve lost two teammates.”

  He put the tip of the chisel on the wooden table, then tapped the hammer, and a sliver of wood was removed. He adjusted, then tapped again. And then a third time, making a letter:

  N

  Then he offered the tools to Scout. She made the next:

  A

  Moms was next:

  D

  Then Roland:

  A

  Doc began the next name right below Nada’s:

  M

  Ivar continued:

  A

  And Eagle finished it:

  C

  Moms went to the door and opened it. Edith Frobish was standing outside, waiting patiently. She had a large cooler. Moms helped her carry it in. They opened the lid.