In Times Like These (49 page)

I run down the hall toward the front of the building. I make it a dozen steps when I reach a door on my right. I recognize its proximity to the kitchen and slip inside. I’m back in the room where I last saw Quickly. The trick glass mirror still shows a view of the interior of the office next door. I keep the light off and move toward the window. An exit sign beckons from the distant wall.

It’s a way out
. My hands grip the desk chair.
I could throw it through. No. The fire. I have to find Francesca and Blake before this place burns. If Blake is still alive he might be able to blink his way out. Francesca won’t have that option. If I don’t find her
 . . . I block the thought from my mind.

That woman was up on the third floor when she shot at us. Francesca is probably up there too.
I look through the office window.
Could I get through and get upstairs through the office? There’s no guarantee there would be any more of these double mirrors to get back into the lab. Stenger might hear me breaking the glass too
. I release my grip on the chair and return to the hallway door. I crack it open and peer through. It’s quiet. Slipping into the hall, I walk as silently as I can into the kitchen. I gently open a couple of drawers, flinching at every rattle of the contents. Finally, I find a butcher’s knife. I check the edge on it with my thumb.
Better than nothing
.

I move toward the far door with the knife poised to defend myself. The swinging doors at the far wall squeak a little as I squeeze
myself and my backpack through. I reach the stairwell in the next hallway without any sign of Stenger
. If he’s searching for me, he must be on a different floor.

I climb the stairs with my eyes on the floors above. When I reach the third floor of the lab, I approach the wooden doors cautiously. I’ve never been in this part of the lab before. I open the door slowly and find myself in a living room. With the exception of a small square of linoleum near the door, the floor is carpeted. A couch and a pair of recliners face a television and some bookshelves. There’s no sign of the occupants.

As I tiptoe through the room, I pass a low table of photographs. The faces of Quickly and Mym beam at the camera from exotic locations. I see pyramids and jungles; one photo shows Quickly in front of the Golden Gate Bridge that is still under construction.
Quickly must live up here.

I creep past a hallway bathroom and glimpse the kitchen, when I hear a thump from a little farther down the hall. I raise my knife. The apartment is silent again. I inch forward. A hallway just past the kitchen leads left toward a door to the main study balcony.
That must be how the snaggle-toothed bitch got out there. Francesca has to be up here somewhere.

There are three more closed doors at the end of the hallway. I reach the first one on the right and lean my head close to the doorframe. From beyond the door
, I hear another thump and a muffled grunt.
There’s someone in there.

I square myself up with the door and hold my knife ready. My heartbeat is thudding in my eardrums as I reach for the doorknob. I take a deep breath, and as I exhale, I shove the door open.

On the floor of the bedroom, a figure is sprawled sideways, duct-taped to a chair. His dark eyes are wide with fear and a muffled shriek comes from his gagged mouth. A few books lie on the ground around his head near the bookshelf where he has been struggling.

“Malcolm?” I gasp. I rush into the room. Malcolm begins to thrash around
, shaking his head. His eyes grow even wider. “Malcolm it’s me, Ben!” I lower the butcher knife as I drop to one knee near his prostrate figure. He shakes his head violently and garbles something through his gag. His thrashing suddenly stops as I hear the door click closed behind me. Malcolm shuts his eyes and droops his head.

I spin around and look at the door. The inside of the doorknob has been removed. In its place is a mass of wires and a six-inch metal box with an antenna sticking out. A light on the top of the box is blinking red. I pull the gag down on Malcolm’s face and stand back up, looking at the door.

“What the hell is that thing?”

Malcolm spits a wad of fabric and drool from his mouth. “It’s a trap!”
The little red light on the device starts blinking faster. “He’s trying to kill Dr. Quickly,” he moans.

“He was using you as bait?” I climb over Malcolm and start cutting away the ropes that are b
inding him to the chair. He grunts as he tries to pull his hands free. “What is that device going to do?”

A low hiss coming from the doorway is my response. A strip of black gel along the base of the door erupts into flame.
A similar strip around the window combusts simultaneously.

“Oh shit!” I drop the knife and leap back over Malcolm to the door. The flames race up it and engulf the entire face of the door. The perimeter of the ceiling erupts as well, joining the lines of flame spreading from the window. The substance that has been spread into the joints of the ceiling burns with a fierce white flame. The paint immediately starts to blister and peel away. I spin helplessly around, looking for a means of escape. Malcolm frees himself from the remains of the ropes and gets to his feet.

I reach for my chronometer dials. “We’ve got to blink out of here!” Malcolm shakes his head. “What? Come on!” I reach out my hand to him.

“It won’t work,” he replies. “I’m not a time traveler. I’m a constant.”

“Damn it!” I look around wildly. The flames are catching on some of the furniture and the smoke is starting to get thick.

“What’s out that window?” I yell over the roar of the flames.

“It’s four stories to the street,” Malcolm says. He crouches down to get away from the smoke. “You have to go!”

“No! I can’t leave you here!” I swing my pack off my back and dump it on the floor to get to Quickly’s journal. Anchors bounce off the carpet as they fall out of the pack. The journal lands on the floor and I drop to my knees to read it. I scan wildly through pages, trying to find anything about transporting someone without gravitites.

“You can’t take me with you, but you can still save me!” Malcolm says. “But you have to leave me here to return!” He moves to the desk and grabs an object off of it. I recognize it as his temporal spectrometer. He flips open a compartment on the side of the box and removes a DG, slightly smaller than Francesca’s. He begins pointing it at some of the anchors. The red test light illuminates. “Choose one now! I can de-gravitize it for you.”

The smoke is making my eyes water and it’s getting difficult to breathe. I look at the objects littered on the floor. Next to my foot lies my tortoise shell. I pull out the photo.
When all hope is lost.

“This one!”

Malcolm works the de-gravitizer over the shell in smooth, efficient strokes. He flips it over and repeats it on the other side. I crouch lower and lower as the flames begin to engulf the walls. The heat is getting unbearable. Looking at the photo, I dial the time into my chronometer, while squinting through the tears in my eyes.
Shit. That’s really far.

I pull aside a dresser near the bed to get to a wall outlet. I scramble back to my pack and grab my charger to plug it into the wall. The test light on the DG turns green and Malcolm shoves the shell into my hands. I stuff the photo and Quickly’s journal into my back pocket, then lay the shell on the floor and place my hand firmly on top. I plug the charger cord into my chronometer.

“I’ll be back in a minute!” I yell.

Malcolm coughs. “Better make it sooner!”

I push the pin.

<><><>

I’m crouched in bright sunlight on a dirt road. I blink the tears out of my eyes and see a vast expanse of desert stretching away from me in every direction. Scrub brush and Joshua trees dot the landscape but there’s not another living person in sight. A thigh-high boulder sits directly in front of me. I look down at my chronometer hand and see that the tortoise shell is now occupied. A pair of scaly, clawed feet are protruding slightly from under the lip of the front end. I collapse onto my butt on the road. My hands are shaking. I look at my chronometer readings. May 1990. I sprawl onto my back in the dirt and stare at the sky.

Malcolm. Blake. Francesca. That was four years ago. What have I done?
I hold my palms to my forehead.
Did I just let my friends die?
The sky is blank and holds no answers. I close my eyes and feel tears trickling from the corners of them. The heat of the sun beats down on me, but after the fire, it’s a relief. My sweat makes my clothes stick to me. I can still hear the roar of the flames in my ears and Malcolm’s racking coughs, despite the silence of the desert around me. The last image of the brilliant flames still floats across the inside of my eyelids. I notice I don’t smell of smoke anymore though. I no longer have the urge to cough either. I lay my arms back down at my sides.

No gravitites in smoke Benjamin. You only take what’s a part of you. Not smoke. Not your useless weapon. Not your useless plan to save Carson. Not your friends. What have you got left, Ben?
My fingers clench at the dirt.
Nothing. That’s what you’ve got left. You get dirt and a desert. And you get a tortoise.

I open my eyes again slowly, and roll my head over to look toward the boulder. The shell is still sitting in the shade of it, but a scaly head has now emerged and is regarding me suspiciously. We stare at each other for a bit. I roll my head back and look at the sky again.
This was a horrible idea. What on earth would possibly make me think that a tortoise shell would solve my problems? I should have chosen one of the anchors that Quickly catalogued. He might have been there to help me when I showed up. Instead, I chose the one with a barren desert. Now I’ve got no one.

The sky is empty. There are no clouds or even birds to be seen. For a few minutes I just stare into that blue void. Eventually I look back to the tortoise.

“Hey.” The tortoise watches me and eases his feet out just slightly. “Some place you got here. I like your boulder.”

I ease myself up onto my elbow. The tortoise retracts his head back into his shell but keeps his legs slightly extended. I can still see his eye watching me from the interior of the shell. I wipe a little bit of snot away from my nose with the back of my hand.

“Huh. Yeah. I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t want to be my friend either.”

I look over the tortoise’s shell. The stripes on the shell are brighter than they were on my anchor. The paint looks fresh.
“You have a big race coming up, buddy?” I lean closer to him. He pulls his feet in a little. “How did you end up with those racing—” As I lean closer still, I realize there are more than two lines on his shell. I get up to my knees and peer down at it. The two stripes that run from the back to the front are joined near his head by another V-shaped mark. “Hey those aren’t stripes, it’s . . . an arrow.”

The arrow on the shell points at the opening for the tortoise’s head.
Or it points to something beyond it.
I look in the direction of the arrow. It points along the road that trails off into the horizon of dusty hills. I sit back and cross my legs under me. “Are you trying to point me somewhere?”

I lean forward,
pulling the photo and Quickly’s journal out of my back pocket. I lay the photo on the cover of the journal and study it. I look from the photo to the tortoise and then down the road again.

“Well you’re definitely still sitting in the same spot as when this photo was taken. Other than you munching on the grass, it’s identical.”
The tortoise has poked his head back out and is eyeing me again. “Apparently I ruined your lunch.”

I tap the photo with my finger.
“So if you were sitting just like this, someone had to be here to take your picture a short enough time ago that you haven’t moved.” I look back to the tortoise. “Though it’s not like you seem highly motivated to go anywhere . . .”

The tortoise opens and closes his mouth briefly.
“So then who the hell was here to take your picture?” I flip over the photo. “Oh that’s right. It was me. I got me into this mess. So tell me this, tortoise. Why on God’s green earth was I in the middle of a desert in 1990, taking pictures of tortoises? And where the bloody hell did I go?”

The tortoise and I ponder each other in silence for a few minutes. The desert horizon around me seems to undulate in the waves of heat. I can already feel my forehead starting to burn.
“I don’t know about you, tortoise, but I can’t hang out here much longer. It’s gotta be like a hundred and five. I don’t have a nice shady boulder like you, and I’m wearing jeans.” I get to my feet. The tortoise retracts himself a little bit again, but not as far. I unplug the chronometer charger cord that’s still dangling from my wrist and wad it into my pocket. I look down at the arrow on the tortoise’s shell. “It looks like I’m going that way.” The tortoise cocks his head to look up at me. “What about you tortoise? Do you live here? Is this what you do all day? You hang out by roads, munching on dried up grass, and pointing people places?”

The tortoise opens his mouth again.
“Okay. It’s been good talking to you.” I give him a wave and start down the road. I make it a dozen yards and stop, staring at the hazy, distant horizon. I look back to the tortoise watching me from beside the boulder. I stride back and stand over him. He retracts himself completely inside, with his scaly arms blocking off his head hole.