CHAPTER 20
My NaNoWriMo Challenge
“Buckle up,” she said. “It looks like it might be a rough ride.”
“Buckle up?” I said, and watched as she pulled the belt beside her across her body, clipping it into a small catch. She reached across, pulling on the belt beside me, showing me how to use it and telling me to try it three more times on my own. She nodded, satisfied, and then reached down and turned the key. She looked around the interior, trying to sort things out I imagine, before grabbing the handles and pushing them forward. I could feel the machine lurching forward. She pulled the two handles back toward her, then moved the left one and we turned right; she moved the other and we turned left.
She nodded to herself, then looked at me and smiled.
“I got this,” she said.
“You got this? What does that mean?”
The machine shot forward; I looked down and saw her press her foot down on one of the two pedals on the floor of the machine. I looked out of the window and saw a big cloud of dust behind us. There was a handle on the door and I reached for it. She looked at me, but said nothing. I wound the handle and the window went down; I stuck my head outside, looking at the track spitting up dust and grit behind us. I rolled the window back up and settled into the seat.
It didn’t take long before we left the dirt and grit track, following the tracks back across smooth, rolling hills of green grass. The grass had been beaten down by the machine on its way out to the trail, and I looked at the rapidly disappearing forest behind us. We descended a long, sloping hill, and I looked out across the countryside. The sky was clear, but I could see heavy clouds to the left of us. There were wild things grazing in the distance. At the distance we were at it was impossible to see what they were, but judging from the shapes of their bodies silhouetted in the coming dawn, I thought they might be bisons.
The small box hanging under the front of the machine made a noise again, and she slowed down, listening.
“Sevi? What’re you guys doing out there?” the voice in the box asked.
“Is that us?” she asked.
“More likely the guys we left back there,” I said.
“Very funny. Did you think I couldn’t figure that out on my own?” she said. “I mean, what do you want to do about it?”
“I don’t care.”
“You will when they start sending drones out to look for this thing.”
“Why would they do that?”
“These things have stuff in them that makes it possible to track them. If the Slavers are smart enough to run these things without regular fuel—”
“What’s that?”
“These things don’t run on wishes,” she said. “Back before the world fell apart, they had machines that went up into space. They had machines on them that could track machines like this. It was an Age of Machines. It was a global system. You could track anything on the planet, anywhere.”
“And you think they can find us?”
“If they still have satellites up there, yeah,” she said.
“What do you mean, if? Why wouldn’t they still be up there?”
“Sometimes they fall out of orbit.”
“Fall? As in, falling here?”
“Usually, they would land in the oceans—”
“LOOK OUT!” I screamed, and she turned the machine hard to the right, spitting soft turf and grass, as well as a large cloud of dust. I could feel the tacks digging in hard, the machine feeling like it was going to tip and roll down the hill we were on.
He was standing in front of us, the guy from the future, or the past, or wherever he was from. Jimmy. The brother of the guy who was supposed to be trapped inside my head. He was the reason for everything, as far as I was concerned. He was bad news; bad luck; bad karma, as Zard used to say.
For a moment, I didn’t think it would’ve been such a big loss if we’d actually hit him, but then I sat back and caught my breath again, looking over at Jen. Her chin was resting on her chest; her hands were still shaking. She looked up, out of the windshield at the man who was coming toward us, looking excited.
She was having none of it.
She pushed the door open and all but ran at the man, pushing him down.
“What the FUCK are you trying to do!” she screamed at him. She tried to kick him, but he crab-walked backwards as fast as he could, narrowly avoiding her foot as it swung out at him.
“Whoa! Settle down,” he called out at her. “I figured it out!”
“You figured what out?” she said, walking back to the machine and slamming the door closed. I jumped at the suddenness of the noise.
I opened my door and stepped out, looking at the surrounding landscape. It was all green grass and rolling hills. The wind—now just a gentle breeze—was rippling the taller grass in the distance, and I could see exactly where it seemed to flow across the plains, back and forth, like a giant hand stroking a cat.
“Him,” he said, nodding at me.
“I wish I could say it’s nice to see you again, too,” I said, not even bothering to turn and look at him.
“Look,” Jimmy said, getting to his feet and brushing himself off. “From what I can see, I haven’t been gone too long.”
“Not too long?” Jen said. “That’s an understatement.”
I think the only way to describe her tone would be to say incredulous. I can’t think of another word to describe it. But as it had only been a few days, I found myself having to agree with him; just one more thing to put me into a sour mood. The fact that he’d said he figured it out, should’ve made her happy, or so I thought. Because like I said, in reality, it had only been a few days.
“However long you may think it is, I’ve been gone a lot longer than you might think I have,” he said. “I’m now what they call a Traveller.”
“Are you, now?” she said, sounding sarcastic.
“I’m sorry, okay?” he said, after a moment. “I’m sorry for all of it. For everything that’s happened, but more than that, for everything that’s about to happen—”
“Why? What do you know about what’s going to happen that we don’t?”
“I told you, I know everything.”
“So what’s going to happen?” I said, twisting around fully to look at him.
“I don’t want to tell you, because I don’t want either one of you changing things up on me,” he said. “You have to understand that time’s like water. Not the usual, flat, petrie dish kind of water where you drop a drop in it and watch it ripple. Time’s more like a stream. It’s always moving. But you have think of the water as always breaking over the rocks though, and because of that, no two splashes are ever alike. That’s what time’s like—except for one constant.”
“And what’s that?”
“If you enter a time line with a friend, and that friend dies, that person will also die in the next timeline you meet him in. Like Jarel. If we see him in the next time line, it’ll be to see him die.”
“Okay,” she said.
She seemed to have gotten control of herself again. She brushed her hair, running her fingers through them and then pulled the jacket tight before leaning against the machine, crossing her arms and looking at him.
“Okay. I think I can accept that. You wouldn’t have come here at this time, or this place, if it didn’t mean something, right? So there’s something about being here now that matters, right?”
“Well, of course. This is the point where everything comes to a head.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
They both looked at me.
“I’ve got just as much riding on this as the two of you, don’t I? Maybe even more. After all, you’re the ones that say the guy’s inside my head. So? What’s that mean as far as I’m concerned? Because I can tell you right now, I don’t like the sound of where this is going.”
“You’ll be fine,” Jimmy said to me.
“That’s reassuring,” I said, “but what exactly does that mean? This guy’s inside my head. His mind, or whatever you want to call it. How is him being in there, not going to affect me? How is it fine? You pull him out of there, am I still going to be me? And I don’t want to hear you saying fine, and dismissing me like a child.”
“Well, you have to accept what we tell you, don’t you?” Jimmy said. “We still have to rescue your wife.”
“My what?”
“Qiza,” Jen said. “We have to rescue Jaleen.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s good. So what happens now?”
“This is where it gets interesting,” he said.
“For who?” I asked.
He stepped toward me, pulling the bracelet he was wearing off his wrist. He took my hand and slipped it on. He looked at me watching him and tried to smile, reassuring me, I guess.
“This is set to my DNA—”
“What’s that? I forgot. I think Jen tried explaining it to me once, but I can’t remember anything about it.”
“You don’t have to. The man inside your head is my younger brother, Ricky. The DNA we’re looking for is his. It’s inside of you. They call it phantom DNA, because it doesn’t really exist in the physical world. None of what’s inside of you is physical. Until you go to sleep. That’s why you wake up tired sometimes. He takes over your body.”
“When I’m sleeping?”
“I told you that,” Jen said.
“I guess I was too tired to understand,” I said, and she smiled.
“I guess you were at that.”
“It doesn’t matter,”Jimmy said. “You don’t have to be asleep. It took me a long time to figure this out. I’ve been out there and beyond,” he said.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Jen asked.
“In order for any of this to work, a few things had to be set in place. One of them has to do with him,” he said, looking at me.
“Whit,” I said. “My name is Whit.”
“I know that.”
“Good, because I’ve forgotten yours,” I lied.
“Jimmy. The brother.”
“Right. The brother I don’t have,” I said.
“Right. Except you do,” he said, clasping the bracelet shut and stepping aside. “Point it over there,” he said, pointing away from where we were standing.
“What is it supposed to do?”
“Watch. It’s the last thing that happened before Ricky got stuck in your head.”
There was a bright flash of light and then sparks seemed to float as a small circle cut open the air in front of us. It grew in size, and kept growing, until we were all inside a room that was full of boxes and heaped up with old wooden frames and furniture. It looked like the ancient furnishings we had when I was a child, only not battered up and broken. There were two people in the room. They were standing and looking down at two other people who looked dead as another hole opened in the wall across from us. The man lifted up his arm and pointed at the wall across from us and pulled the woman in with him.
“Stop!” Jimmy said, and the scene froze in front of us.
“That’s Ricky,” he said to me, “and Helen, the cop. She shot those two on the floor just before we showed up. They don’t know we’re here; those two just coming in, don’t know we’re here, either. The thing we all missed, the thing that upset everything, is that one of those two people coming in, shot at them as they were leaving.”
“Shot what?” I asked.
“Doesn’t really matter, does it?” he said. “All we have to do, is step in at the same moment they do.”
“And what does that do?” Jen asked. “We’d already stepped through ahead of them. We weren’t there when it happened.”
“But we were supposed to be, remember? The whole idea, was that we were supposed to go through at the same time. All of us.”
“What about me?” I asked.
“This is the point where it gets interesting.”
“This is?” I said. “Interesting? Is that what you’re calling it?”
“If you step through with us, you exist in two different times. In the past, and in the present, which would be in the present and the future for me and Ricky. You’ll be a spectral ghost—the ghost in the machine, I think they call it—the same thing Ricky is right now. By stepping in, you step from your present, into your past of however many days ago it was, and you become you again, only in the past.”
“And I already know what’s going to happen, so I can prevent it from happening in the first place?”
“Exactly!”
“So none of this will have happened?” Jen said.
“We’ll step through into the past, your future, and Ricky’s—and the cop’s?” I said. She was the one that mattered, because she was the one that was inside Jaleen’s head—like Ricky was inside mine.
“All of us. Time will reset.”
“And Jaleen?”
“She’ll be with you in the camp.”
“And Jarel?”
“Him too.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” I said.
“Wait!” Jen called out.
I looked at her, still holding my arm up and looking at the burning hole in front of us. I didn’t know, or understand, anything about what was going on, but I could see a shadow in the distance that looked like the camp we’d made three nights before. I could see Jaleen running in front of me just as I was about to trip over my sword. I wanted everything he said to be true.
It didn’t have to make sense in order for it to work.
“What’s wrong? You’ll have your thing back,” I reminded her.
“You have to trust me,” Jimmy said, and reaching out his hand for her, stepped into the hole in the air.
The hole began to close.
“What about me?” I screamed.
There was a blinding light coming directly at me, burning through my chest, and I felt myself falling…
“Sorry Whit, but this is where your story ends.”
WHAT!
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