In Times Like These (54 page)

But we don’t hit the ground.

We hit a truck.

The force of the crash onto the semi-trailer knocks the wind out of me. Pain shoots up my arm as my wrist bends awkwardly. Stenger is under me, but not for long. His elbow shoots up and knocks me in the side of the head. I roll sideways, gasping.

When I look over to him, Stenger is scrambling to his feet.
Why isn’t he dead?
We were supposed to be dead
. I roll over again and get to my hands and knees. My left wrist buckles under the weight, and my shoulder crashes into the top of the trailer all over again. The side of Quickly’s building looms above us. I can see the hole we came out of. Francesca is still up there with Lillith.
I feel bad for Lillith. She’s in for a rough time.

I scan the area around us. Loading dock. Alley. The cab of the truck is behind me.
Is there a way down
? I look back to Stenger. The gun is gone.
That’s something at least
. I struggle to get to my feet. Stenger has blood trickling down the back of his neck.
Why won’t you die
? I feel something warm dripping down my forehead. I reach up to touch it and see my own blood on my empty right hand. I’ve lost the remote. I square up to face Stenger.

“You
think this changes anything?” he snarls. “I’m still going to gut you.” He reaches behind him, pulls out his knife and charges me. I dodge left and block his downward thrust with my left forearm against his, hoping to hit him with a right cross as he passes. The pain in my arm from his blow makes me cringe and miss, and my punch just grazes the back of his skull. I spin away and now we’re facing each other from the opposite direction. I glance backward at the loading dock ramp.
I can jump that. There’s no way he’d catch me on foot.
I turn to run. I’m not fast enough. Something catches my toe and I go sprawling. I look up at Stenger looming over me. He’s smiling.

“Time to die.”

He raises the knife and I grab my chronometer and spin it to an arbitrary number.

“No!” Stenger yells. The fingers of his free hand wrap around my ankle
, just as I push the pin. The next moment he crashes down on top of me in a rush of wind and noise. The truck vibrates and shakes as it hurdles down an interstate highway. I grab Stenger’s arm and attempt to wrench the knife from his grasp. He fights back by elbowing me in the ribs. He clamps down on my bad wrist and twists. I yell out in pain. I catch him in the face with an elbow of my own that forces him upward, and I scramble backward to get away from him. I don’t have far to go. A few feet farther, the trailer ends in open air and hot freeway, crowded with speeding traffic.

A pair of senior citizens, enjoying the sunshine in a convertible trailing the truck, gawk and point as I become visible to them. My fingers find the edge of trailer. I make the mistake of looking down. The highway is a blur.

“Nowhere to run now, Ben!” Stenger yells over the din of the truck and the wind.

The truck rattles and sways as it rounds a bend in the freeway but Stenger g
ets to his feet. The edge of his knife glints in the afternoon sun. Stenger must see the fear in my face because he smiles. He steps toward me and glories in his victory. That same sadistic grin he had in all his mug shots, the face of the famous killer. I realize I’m seeing him happy. But he doesn’t know what else I see. While still staring at his eyes, I reset my chronometer for a three second jump. I slam my hands down onto the top of the trailer just as the Twenty-Seventh Avenue pedestrian overpass clears the top of the cab. I close my eyes and blink.

When I reopen my eyes, there’s nothing but blue sky ahead of me. I look behind me and see the chaos of a van and a passenger car and another tractor trailer truck that have all tried unsuccessfully to avoid hitting the body that fell from the overpass. Traffic behind the overpass slows to a crawl and eventually a stop, but my
tractor trailer takes me away from the scene at eighty miles per hour. I work my way carefully back to the center of the trailer and lie there looking up at the sky for a few moments.

Eventually I crawl to the front of the trailer and hang on to the front edge. I blink myself past a dozen more overpasses until the truck finally comes to a stop at a gas station north of Tampa. The driver never sees me descend. Walking to the edge of the grass near the payphone, I collapse next to an empty bag of Doritos and a couple of cigarette butts. The ground never felt so good.

Chapter 24

“People say, ‘Time heals all wounds.’ That may be true, but relocating to an alternate reality can sure help too.”

-Excerpt from th
e journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1941

As the truck pulls away from the gas pumps, I lift my head.
I probably should have used that to get back to St. Pete.
I lay my head back in the grass and contemplate the sky some more.
I need to find Blake.
The image of the blood splattering the chair comes back to me.
Quickly knew somehow. He saw the blood.

I get to my feet and walk into the convenience store. I ignore the attendant’s sideways glances at my bloody face and buy a bag of sunflower seeds. I ask him to call me a cab, then regress to the outdoors and lean against the edge of a planter.
Quickly saw the blood on the chair days ago. Blake must have gone back in time when he got shot.
I spit a couple of shells out near the curb.
But why not tell us? Why wouldn’t he warn us what was going to happen?

When the cab arrives, I ensconce myself in the back seat with Quickly’s journal, shutting down the cabby’s attempts at chitchat. I page through the journal for clues. There’s nothing about the fractal universe. Not even a mention of jumping timestreams. I’m about to slam it shut when I notice a torn edge of paper sticking from the binding. I examine the little triangle of paper still clinging to the threads.
Somebody ripped some pages out
. I thumb back through and find several more locations where there are missing sections.

I close the book and watch the highway stream by. As we cross the Gandy Bridge, I get a view of
St.Petersburg in the distance.
The Sunshine City
. The setting sun is lighting the buildings of downtown in gold. I check my chronometer. It’s still January 9th. I look at the clock on the cabby’s dash. 5:40. Somewhere on that horizon, Carson and I are scouring the lab for our things. Another me is hiding on the second level with Blake and Francesca.
That feels like forever ago
. In just a matter of twenty minutes, Blake is going to get shot.

I lean forward in my seat.
“Do you think you could drive a little faster?” The cabby accelerates, but it doesn’t help. By the time we reach North St. Petersburg, we hit a wall of traffic. We crawl along in spurts and stops.

When we get near
Thirtieth Avenue, the cabby comments sourly from the front. “Wouldn’t you know it? It’s not even on our side of the freeway, just a bunch of gawkers. Looks like they’ve had a mess on the northbound side.”

I watch the lights of the emergency vehicles and tow trucks accumulated near the pedestrian overpass. Police are directing traffic around the shoulder. There’s no sign of the body. I close my eyes and lean my head back on the seat. After a minute, I feel the cab accelerating again.

I killed someone.

The thought
doesn’t affect me the way I thought it would. I reopen my eyes and watch the lines of the freeway speed by.

He killed himself.

I direct the cabby through the neighborhood near Ninth Street, careful to steer clear of any areas where I might encounter any of my earlier selves. He drops me a block north of the lab on the opposite side from where Carson and I ran off. I pay the cabby and watch the taillights of the cab disappear around the corner before turning toward the lab.

I approach the lab from the rear. Creeping up the alley till I have a view of the loading dock, I settle myself on a low wall behind a bush and wait. I don’t have to wait long. There’s movement in the windows above me. The backlit office offers a clear view of the occupants through the glass. Stenger has Francesca backed up almost against the pane. I can hear nothing, but I see his expression of pain as Francesca activates the
degravitizer against his thigh. A moment later, the window explodes and Stenger and I plummet out into space.

Our impact into the trailer makes me cringe.
It’s a wonder I’m alive after that
. I feel my swollen wrist with my other hand.
I got off easy.
I watch my awkward fight atop the trailer and see Stenger stick his leg out and snag my toe with his foot just as I turn to run. His smile fades quickly as he’s forced to drop down and grab my leg. We both disappear.

So long
, asshole. Last I’ll be seeing of you.

I step out from behind the bushes and walk toward the trailer. Broken glass litters the ground. There is the sound of scuffling still going on above me.
Lillith shrieks like a Nazgul beast from a Tolkien film and I hear Francesca shouting as well.
There’s a fight I’d pay to see.

The ruckus subsides
, and a few moments later, I see Francesca appear at the hole in the window. Her face is distraught as she searches the alley. I wave to attract her attention. Her face relaxes when she sees me, and she smiles. She looks past me down the alley.

“Where is he?” s
he calls down.

“We won’t h
ave to worry about him anymore.”

She nods. “What do I do with t
his one?” She drags a miserable-looking Lillith into view by her hair.

“I can come up and help you,” I say.

“Okay. You better hurry. It smells like smoke pretty bad up here. Actually, wait just a minute . . .” She disappears from view. When she returns, she pitches a typewriter out the window. It hits the street and breaks apart. “Oops,” she says.

“It’s okay,
” I yell back. “I think I can still use it.” I examine the front plastic portion of the typewriter that’s mostly intact. “How long ago?”

“Maybe thirty
seconds?”

“Okay.” I
spin my chronometer dials to forty seconds, just to be sure, and touch the top of the typewriter. I blink and drop a couple of feet, landing in the back corner of the office. I poke my head over the cubicle wall. Francesca is still talking to me out the window. I duck around the corner of the cubicle and hide behind another desk.

“Actually
, wait just a minute.” She trails off and I hear her shove Lillith into a chair. “Don’t you dare move.” I hear her come around the corner of the far end of the row of cubicles. She stops and enters the one I just departed. “This could work.” She yanks the cord out of the socket and strides back to the window with the typewriter. I stand up to get another look.

“Oops.”

I walk around the corner of the cubicle into view of Liliith. Her eyes widen.

“Maybe thirty
seconds?” Francesca calls out the window. She turns to look at Lillith and then follows her gaze to me. She smiles. I move forward and she rushes into my arms. “God, I thought you were dead when you went out that window!”

“So did I,” I say.

“What happened to Stenger?”

I glance at
Lillith in the chair. She’s eyeing the bag of money sitting on the conference table. She notices me watching her and averts her eyes. “I’ll tell you a little later.” I lean around Francesca. “Hey, don’t even think about it, Lillith. We can find you yesterday if we need to.”

She scowls.

That wouldn’t work, but she doesn’t know that.
The smoke is starting to get thick. “We should get out of here,” I say.

Francesca leads the way to the office stairs with
Lillith between us where I can keep an eye on her. By the time we emerge into the alley below, emergency vehicles have begun to fill up Ninth Street. Lillith’s eyes widen but she doesn’t try to run. Looking through the array of blue and red flashing lights, I see someone waving their arms at me. I recognize Malcolm standing near a pair of uniformed police officers. He points toward Lillith, and the two officers move toward us with hands on their gun holsters.

“She’s the one who held me hostage in her trailer,” Malcolm says. “I can take you there if you need me to.”

The female officer gets on her radio and transmits something I don’t catch. The other officer, a man in his mid-forties, looks at Francesca and me. “And what was your part in this?”

“Our friend worked there,” I say. “Her boyfriend tried to burn the place down. If you search that alley back there, I’d bet you’ll find the gun with both of their prints on it.”

“This whole thing was a set up!” Lillith shouts. “They’re the ones you ought to be locking up. This one pushed my man out a window. They’re time travelers from the future!”

“Okay ma’am, I’m going to ask you to come with us.” The female officer says. “We’ll need to ask you some questions.”

“I’m going to be pressing charges,” Malcolm says.