Forty Leap (41 page)

“It’s Cristian,” he shouted over his
shoulder. “I’ve got him.”

Then again…

Four more soldiers rounded the corner and
looked at me, the oddity, with my hands in the air. One moved ahead
of the others and looked me over a bit, just to be sure. Then he
pulled a funny pistol with a flat barrel from his belt and aimed it
straight at me. I suppose he would have shot me with that funny
looking gun if Rogers hadn’t intervened. I must assume that the
man’s cry brought Rogers to me, although I don’t expect the
opportunity to ever find out. Rogers fired straight away and there
was a splatter of blood. I don’t even know where the soldier was
hit.

After that, all was chaos. Several more
leapers piled into the corridor and opened fire. Someone grabbed me
by the arm and pulled me backward, bruising me badly. I was out of
the line of fire in a second and pushed back through the crowd. I
caught a glimpse of Rogers, leading the assault. Two people
escorted me back the way I had come. One of them was Otis, the man
we had met on the way in on that first day. Another was a small man
with bare wiry arms and deep set features.

“This way,” said the small man. “We’ll keep
you safe.”

I looked at Otis and he looked back at me.
There was no such thing as safe. The firing behind us ceased
abruptly, replaced by a shrill cry from Rogers to
keep
moving
. So we kept moving. I didn’t resist and I had lost all
sense of apathy. It’s one thing to face one’s death from afar, but
now it was right up in my face. I ran with the others. More Forty
Leapers joined us at a junction and we went for the Map Room. This
was where we, or should I say they, would make our final stand. I
was urged inside while some others took up positions in the
corridors and by the door. Furniture was thrown about and weapons
were readied for the coming fight. I marveled at the difference
between this seemingly organized maneuver and what I had
experienced in the Rocky Mountains. Neville’s plan had always been
to cause chaos. I realize now that the only way he could possibly
reach a helicopter, which was his ultimate goal, was to sow bedlam.
He had been past the point where lives mattered. It wasn’t about
hurting his tormentors or freeing his fellow captives. It was about
getting out. It was about organized panic. Here, though, the people
were resolved. They were fighting and dying for a cause. Though I
had openly scoffed at the cause and think it foolish still, I
recognized and respected their resolve. Whatever I might say about
Rogers Clinton, and I might say a lot, he had strung together a
straggling bunch of sufferers and granted them dignity.

The next person to come down the hall was
Rogers Clinton himself. He was sweating and bleeding from the
temple. There was a rifle in his hands, another slung over his
shoulder. The look on his face was almost indescribable. He was a
man who had exercised calm for years and years and now that calm
was gone. All of that vigor that he had swallowed had been
released, adrenaline pumping through his body until his veins were
ready to burst. He barked orders and physically maneuvered men and
women into position. No element of his motion betrayed his age or
any weakness whatsoever. When he was done, he moved deep into the
room, close to me, and aimed his rifle at the door. I stood next to
him, feeling naked and useless.

“No bad feelings between us, Mathew
Cristian,” he said. “We part as friends.”

I didn’t even have a chance to reply as the
sound of gunfire erupted outside the entrance. Waiting, we listened
to the fighting outside, our faces growing tense. A man positioned
right by the door winked out of existence, the action too much for
him. I was startled, but Rogers took it in stride, moving into his
position. When the first of the soldiers came through, the big man,
slave turned leader, didn’t even waste a bullet on him. He butted
him with his rifle. The man fell back. The battle was joined.

To say that I could not follow the action was
an understatement. I didn’t even know where to begin. I remember
once, when I was a kid, my father took me to a hockey game. I
didn’t care for hockey and my father didn’t care for me, but we
were both trying to forge a relationship. I sat there, an eight
year old boy with little or no understanding of the game, people
around me cheering. And I growing more and more frustrated. I don’t
want to say that my father was a hard or cruel man or that he
didn’t love me. He, like much of the rest of my family for most of
my life up until my days of leaping, tolerated me as a family
member but never quite understood me. Though my father could never
grasp the fact that I didn’t really want to be at a hockey game, he
did recognize my frustration and he put his arm patiently around
me, leaned in, and whispered, “Just follow the puck.” So I did. And
I was soon able to comprehend the action. I won’t say that I became
a hockey fan, but I never forgot the way he eased my tension on
that day.

Today, though, there was no puck to follow.
My eyes darted to and fro, searching for some anchor that would
help me understand what was going on. Now I realize that Rogers was
the puck. He was the center of attention. He drew the action to
him.

I think the fighting lasted several minutes.
The man who had dropped out before dropped back in again, which was
even more startling than his exit. He was disoriented, despite the
short jump, and suffered for it. As more and more of us began to
lose our lives and our grips on the time stream, Rogers Clinton’s
frustration spiked. With an ear-splitting battle cry, he sprayed
his weapon across the entrance. I don’t know how many soldiers he
killed and wounded. They wore body armor and so were protected from
penetration by the bullets, but they fell back like bowling pins.
Those of us who remained rallied around Rogers and, for just a
brief moment, they pushed forward into the corridor. Then the big
man’s aggression got the better of him and he leaped amid a storm
of bullets.

It took the fight out of them. At first they
were stunned by his disappearance. Despite the reality of their
affliction, I guess they couldn’t accept that Rogers himself had
not mastered it completely. It was the end of the revolution for
sure. It was as if a veil of hopelessness settled upon them. Some
lost their focus. Others just stopped firing completely. I was
dumbstruck by the effect of it.

Though I could feel the quickening of my
muscles, I was not sure that I would leap in time. I felt truly as
if my death was imminent.

Someone tugged on the back of my shirt and I
whirled around but no one was there.

“Up here!”

I looked up and there, her small frame
stuffed into a ventilation shaft, was Natalie. She crawled out,
still unnoticed by the soldiers engaged in slaughtering her
fellows, then crawled back in again, head first. Feeling ashamed at
abandoning those who had futilely protected me for so short a time,
I crawled in after her. As I put my back to the conflict, I felt
exposed. I expected to be shot at any second.

“Are you ready to leap?” she called back as
we moved through the tiny shaft.

“I can feel it,” I said.

“Good.”

She said nothing else, just crawled on. Every
once in a while, she would call back to make sure I was following.
We went on that way for close to ten minutes. As we went, I could
feel myself calming a bit. My muscles eased up and I wondered if I
wouldn’t leap after all. Based on what I had learned, however, once
the enzyme had been manufactured and released, there was no way to
stop it.

At last, we came out of the vent into a
darkened corridor. It was damp here and I could tell that this was
a part of the complex that was not often used. It was quiet, too. I
could still hear the battle behind us, but it wasn’t nearly as
pervasive. The booming gunshots sounded like crackling bacon in a
pan. The cries of the men and women who were killing and dying were
drowned out entirely. Travelling through the vents had robbed me of
any possibility of keeping track of my position within the complex.
Natalie threw her rifle to the ground and began feeling along the
dark wall. Suddenly, a panel moved inward revealing a small room.
There was barely enough room inside to sit comfortably and no room
to stand.

Natalie handed me a flashlight.

“They won’t find you in there,” she said.
“They
can’t
find you.”

“Why? Why are you protecting me?”

“Because I was wrong about you,” she said.
“Rogers gave me what I wanted, gave me a war to fight. But he
really had no idea. You know how to help us. Maybe in two hundred
years, you’ll be able to pick up the pieces of Rogers’ war and
finally save us.”

I stood and stared at her, half in awe of
what she had admitted, half doubting the whole of it. Even if she
were attempting to trap me, there was little I could do to stop
her.

“Rupert?”

She shook her head sadly. Again, I didn’t
know what she meant. Was she telling me that she hadn’t seen him or
that he was dead. I decided not to ask.

Despite her words, I could hardly think of
myself as a savior, but I went into the little room anyway and let
her slide the panel shut behind me. I turned on the flashlight, but
there was nothing to see so I turned it off again. Encased in
complete darkness, I sat and listened to the now very faint sounds
of the battle going on. A tremendous weariness overcame me and I
slept.

You might think it funny, falling asleep when
I knew that others were fighting and dying. But there was nothing
to do in the room. Whenever I let my mind wander, I knew that I
courted utter panic. In that case, I would have had to bolt from
the room, quite probably to my death. What Natalie had given me was
the chance that Bensing had been talking about. Leap out a couple
of hundred years and maybe it would be safe.

So I slept.

It was not a deep or restful sleep. I don’t
even know how long I was sleeping. Somewhere along the way I had
stopped wearing a watch. Imagine. Time had become so abstract a
concept that it held almost no importance to me anymore. If I
leaped two centuries or ten it would make no difference. I need not
worry about who might be alive because everyone I had ever cared
about was long dead. And the Leapers that I had met had either been
slaughtered or jumped into different parts of the time stream.

All was quiet. I listened carefully for a
long time but I could detect no signs of the battle. Even if it was
over, that didn’t mean it was safe. Of course, I couldn’t remain
huddled inside that little cubby hole forever. Despite my sleep, I
felt exhausted. Both my body and my brain were slow to respond to
impulse. I needed to get out of that room and find some food and
water.

Switching on the flashlight, I searched the
interior for a catch or a release. It was difficult to move about
because of the size of the room. My legs were tucked up underneath
me and stinging badly from poor blood flow. It took all of my will
power to get them to move over and out of the way. Finally, I found
a small grey lever on the floor. I had to pull it while pushing
outward with my weakened legs. The hinges were rusty and the door
opened with a vicious squeal. I froze instantly, waiting for
someone to come rushing around the corner but no one did. I doused
my light. For several moments, I stood in the blackened corridor,
listening for any sounds of life but found none. Switching the
light back on, I began to move.

Since we had taken the ventilation shafts, I
had no idea where I was in the complex. Factoring in the darkness,
I became utterly lost. I wasn’t terribly worried. I had seen much
of it and knew that eventually I would find my way into a familiar
area. At worst, I could always backtrack to my hiding place and use
the vents to get back to the Map Room. I was confident that I could
at least negotiate them. As I moved through the passages, I began
to relax. The battle was certainly over. The place had a feel to it
that told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was alone. It smelled
musty and I kicked up dust with my feet. It began to dawn on me
that the battle wasn’t just over. It was long over.

The air remained stale as I walked deeper and
deeper into the complex. There were no lights so I was pushing
energy cells on my flashlight by keeping it on incessantly.
Fortunately, it didn’t operate on simple D batteries. Of all of the
technological advancements I had glimpsed over my passing through
the years, the most notable had been the efficient use of
energy.

Finally I began to recognize some of what I
was seeing. Despite the years, and I expected that many decades had
passed, the place had changed very little. The paint had flaked and
was responsible for some of the dust. The ground felt strange.
There were obvious signs of disrepair. The air went from stale to
foul. The musty smell I had been inhaling abruptly changed to one
of decay. Now I became nervous. Over my travels I had seen my fair
share of death. There was a time when I thought that anything that
became familiar became tolerable. But this was not the case. My
familiarity with death only served to increase my revulsion. The
thought that I would once again have to view dead bodies, more to
the point dead bodies that smelled like
that
, welled up such
a panic in me. I felt the adrenaline rush into my veins but knew
that it would do me no good. Having just leaped, I would be unable
to do so again for some time.

I pressed onward.

Now I was into the complex proper. Natalie’s
escape had taken me much further away than I had originally
thought. I was passing an alcove that led from an entrance hall to
a staircase. The entrance hall was fairly large, larger than the
one through which I had first passed. The staircase, behind a door,
led to the building’s proper basement. I had never actually climbed
that staircase, but Rupert had been good enough to give me a full
tour on two occasions. He had stressed the importance of knowing
the exits. While I felt that I should explore the rest of the
complex, I was desperate to be out of there. There was no way for
me to know the dangers of going out into the world. The outcome of
the battle had been predetermined, but it was also more than a
century old. For all of that time, this place had been left
undisturbed, hidden from the world like some ancient Egyptian tomb.
I chose to exit.