Fixer (40 page)

“How do I help?” she shouted. “Tell me what to do!”

He was mouthing something. He was looking right at her and mouthing something. She edged closer—expecting any second to get attacked by another invisible Kilroy—to figure out what it was.
What are you saying?

It was harder to read his lips because he was busy being strangled and seemed to be losing some motor control. But eventually she got it.

Shoot me
.

Hoping quite fervently that she’d gotten that right, she pulled her gun from her coat pocket, said a quick prayer, and aimed at his chest.

“Hope you know what you’re doing,” she muttered.

*  *  *

Now +

“Hope you know what you’re doing,” the Echo said.

Caught up in his bloodlust, Kilroy Prime of the River Tribe Kilroys had almost forgotten there was another Echo in the area. He’d forgotten because Kilroys only rarely thought of Echoes at all. The sounds they made were just a part of the cacophony of background noise/buzz that each Kilroy as far back as when they were child-things just learned to ignore. But this Echo had said something that Kora-gan thought was important. The Prime could tell, because Kora-Gan had stopped struggling.

The Prime looked over his shoulder and saw. The Echo was holding a gun machine/device.

“No,” he muttered.

“Yes,” Kora-gan said.

*  *  *

The Alpha Kilroy realized he’d fallen into a trap and was trying to pull free, which would not do—not with Maggie aiming for Corrigan like he’d told her to.

To keep him still, Corrigan slapped his hands on either side of the Kilroy’s head, pulled him as close as he could, and held on for dear life. They were easily close enough now for the creature to try taking a bite out of Corrigan, but Kilroy wasn’t thinking about that any more. His motions got increasingly frantic, and as Corrigan was fighting to hold him still with the help of two broken fingers, it hurt like hell.

“You’re not . . . going anywhere,” he whispered.

“Seemust . . . mercy,” Kilroy said, his eyes widening. He knew he’d run out of time.

“Not a chance,” Corrigan said.

In her own present, Maggie Trent fired the gun, and then something strange and a little awful happened.

Corrigan felt the bullet hit him in the chest. It happened to the version of him that occupied her present, but he had little understanding of that distinction given he’d just been shot. The bullet impacted his breastbone and fragmented, hitting various internal organs, including at least one lung. He gasped and fell backward against the tree, but perhaps quixotically at this point, still held onto Kilroy’s head.

Maybe she’ll try again,
he thought,
before I die.

But then her future self caught up with the present he and the Kilroy shared, and the gun was fired a second time.

Two things happened at once. First, Kilroy shrieked, his back arching as if he’d touched a live wire. Second, the blackness came, and for just a second Corrigan thought
this is me dying.
But it wasn’t that. It was the same world-shattering, reality-tearing agony he’d gone through earlier when Maggie had ducked. Added to the pain from the gunshot, Corrigan fervently hoped it would all be over soon, because death would hurt less.

And then the darkness receded, and the pain went away. All of the pain. He patted his chest where the round had struck him and found no damage. A deep breath confirmed that all was well, internally.

What the hell just happened?

“Seebringvoid,” Kilroy said. Corrigan realized he was lying on the ground next to the tree, so he sat up and looked around until he found the Kilroy on the ground nearby. Corrigan crawled over to him, not altogether certain what he would do if the creature hadn’t been mortally wounded.

He needn’t have worried. The bullet that had hit Corrigan’s past self dead center had instead struck the Kilroy around where his heart should have been.

“Void,” the Kilroy repeated. “Hailbringer . . .” His head sagged over.

Corrigan sat still, holding his breath and waiting for the creature to spring back to life. He didn’t.

“Well,” he said. “Thank goodness for that.”

“Corrigan, are you okay?” Maggie asked. She was kneeling next to him.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at her. “Nice shot.”

Then, not knowing what else to do, he lay back down. Aside from the two broken fingers, broken nose, broken ribs, and the gigantic bruise his body had become overall, he had no idea how to get back to Maggie’s time. But that could wait. What he really wanted was to get some sleep. 

“Well done, my little fixer,” he heard Harvey say.

“Thanks, Harvey.”

He closed his eyes.

Epilogue

Now ++

The street itself seemed solid enough, but everything that moved around on it was fuzzy. No, that wasn’t quite the right word for it.
Foggy,
he thought. People who were only partly there walked along the sidewalk, some well-focused, but most only lightly represented misty ghost-figures. The whole effect was jarring, like slipping on a pair of 3-D glasses halfway through the movie. Probability had been introduced as a dimension.

Corrigan looked around for street signs and other identifiers and found he was standing on an island in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue, having just stepped off a subway train that was blurred to slight indistinctness by several possible arrival and departure times in its future. It was pulling away from the aboveground landing beneath his feet. Various phantom representations that had meandered off the train stood waiting for a walk signal.

Okay, now I know where I am. Why am I here?
 

Not seeing anything obvious, he joined the crowd and crossed the street to the waiting sidewalk. Everybody there was too ghostly—or in Calvin’s words,
temporally uncertain
—to be the subject of his appointment. But he was close.

He started walking uphill, alongside a block of tall red brick buildings that tended, more often than not, to house students, as they were within walking distance of Boston College. In the summer, the apartments were largely unoccupied, and it was still a couple of weeks too early for the caravan of moving trucks that heralded the commencement of the fall semester. So it seemed unlikely that Corrigan was looking in the right place.

But it
felt
right. And this was one of those times when feel was all he had to work with.

He’d come to a stop at building 317. An indistinct woman walked an indistinct dog on an indistinct leash past him, and a honking imbroglio had broken out on the street, where someone who had nearly run a red light almost ran into someone who had jumped the green light. Both cars came to a blurry stop inches from their faint bumpers. Corrigan studied their interaction, could see no layers of future-fog wherein the two cars collided, and decided to ignore them. It would be, at worst, a minor fender-bender
.

Corrigan looked at his own hand. When he’d gotten off the train he had been nearly solid, but now he was much fainter. This told him he was very likely to come this far, but less likely to stand on the street like this. Somewhere, he had diverged.

There was a loud
clang
. It was louder than the honking or anything else going on around him. This was not because it was
actually
a louder noise. It was a more
certain
noise, and so took place in almost all of the time-possibles Corrigan was standing in the midst of. He turned to locate the source and spotted a window screen falling to the street, closely followed by the animated body of a young man.

The young man screamed. He looked almost perfectly solid, and his cry of shock was piercingly loud. The scream was prematurely appended by his violent impact with the ground. Corrigan looked at his watch. It was 4:02 in the afternoon.

Various foggy people ran up to his partly smeared body lying dead on the sidewalk. Corrigan ignored all of them—and the semi-noises they made—even when a few brushed past him. This was an odd sensation, like running the back of your hand over a bowl of cold oatmeal. He looked up instead.

Okay, where’d he come from?
There was only one window in the path of descent that was open and had no screen. It was on the fourth floor.

Running up the steps inside, he soon reached apartment seven, which looked to be the right floor on the correct side of the building. The door was ajar—a big time-saver—so he just pushed his way in.

The window through which the kid had gone was in the living room. A young woman was standing at it and screaming.

“What happened?” he asked her.

“FellGodjustfellheleanedwhoarewhatcallhelp?” she said.

Fuzzy people, he’d learned, almost never spoke in logical sentences. What he was getting was pieces of an untold number of possible sentences she might speak. But he’d gotten pretty good at piecing these together.
He leaned on the screen,
he thought.

Stepping up to the window, he examined the groove where the screen had rested. It didn’t look damaged or bent, so he checked the window next to it.

Screens are the wrong size
, he thought.
That’s the problem.

Leaving the confused and still shouting fuzzy woman in the living room, he went to the victim’s bedroom and rifled through some of his things until he came across a pile of opened mail.

Tom Harrison,
he read.
Tom Harrison in building three seventeen, opposite the T-stop on Comm Ave. 4:02.

Mark it down.

*  *  *

Now

Corrigan awoke with a start, sat straight up, and let out a little yelp.
Bedroom,
he thought.
I’m still in bed, I’m still in bed . . . 

Repeating this, he got his heart rate to slow down to something like normal and convinced himself he was where he thought he was.

In a lot of ways, the old method was easier. The waking up part, for instance, never used to be so disorienting. It also felt like he’d gone through a whole day already, even though he’d been asleep the entire time. But, no more hauntings. It was hard to beat that.

He reached for the notepad on the nightstand and jotted a page worth of notes before he forgot all of it, then climbed out of bed. It looked like it was going to be another hot, sunny day. He resolved to find some time in the week for a trip to the beach. It was a small step, but he had to do this in small steps. His hope was to be able to work in an entire vacation week sometime, maybe to go down to the Cape to visit Violet and her new husband. He had never been down there. She’d like that.

Heading down the hall to the bathroom, he passed his office, which no longer had a map on the wall, and where the computer hadn’t been turned on for almost a month. He was thinking of turning the space into a guest bedroom if he found the time and a guest or two who might like it. That would involve developing a more nuanced social life, but he was confident that such a thing was within his grasp, for perhaps the first time ever. Again, small steps.

Back from the bathroom a few minutes later he found Maggie had woken up and was looking over the top page of his notepad. She’d been staying over more often of late. He wasn’t sure exactly why that was but was reluctant to broach the subject for fear it would cause her to stop coming over.

“Busy day,” she said.

“Not so bad,” he answered, slipping into a pair of sweats. “And the last one’s not too time-sensitive.”

“Tom Harrison?” she asked, struggling to read his handwriting. Two of his fingers were still taped together, and his penmanship suffered for it.

“Yeah. He’s scheduled to fall out of his window at 4:02. I’ll show up early, tell him to stay away from the window. That should do it.”

“Yecch,” she grimaced, making a face. She put the list back down on the nightstand and stretched out in the bed, managing to do so in the most erotic way possible. 

“I still don’t really get it,” she admitted, ignorant of his ogling.

“What?”

“This, with the notes.”

“I’m going into my own future,” he said. “It’s complicated.” This was a phrase he was getting used to hearing from Calvin and one which he found himself repeating on occasion.

After he’d passed out in the park near the hospital, Maggie fetched an ambulance and got him a bed at Mount Auburn. He’d woken up bandaged, rested, and otherwise well ministered to, almost two days later. Shortly after that, once he’d checked out and returned to his ghost-free life, he began having very interesting dreams. As the dreams appeared to be conveying to him the same information he used to wake up with before—only now in a much more accessible format—he’d been understandably confused. He knew of only two people he could talk to in the interest of an explanation. 

Erica Smalls was whom he’d gone to first. Unfortunately, Erica wasn’t quite conversant enough on the subject of Corrigan Bain to offer any solid theories—although she was glad to see him, and he promised to keep in touch. She’d recommended he speak to Calvin.

And Archie Calvin had been up to the task. According to him, Corrigan had “breached the wall beyond the limits of the
chronoton
.” In English, it meant that in his sleep he was occupying his future self. Years ago, Harvey had said he could go further into his own future if he wanted to, provided he was very relaxed. Corrigan had thought at the time that Harvey was just bragging. Now he understood. 

When Corrigan explained this to Ames, who he was seeing regularly now, the doctor had added that this was something Corrigan had probably been doing from the outset, but he had unconsciously blocked most of. Which was why he had always gotten only partial information before. For whatever reason, that block was gone, and Corrigan couldn’t be happier about it. 

“I know it’s complicated,” Maggie said. “But . . . okay, look. You’re going to visit Tom Harrison this afternoon and save his life, right?”