“Hurry.”
David pushed through. A man lay on a table, convulsing.
Blood jutted from a wound in his neck. His screams became gurgles. A woman in a nurse’s hat and blood-covered smock pressed a cloth to another injury in the man’s chest. She looked up quickly.
“Boy!” she yelled. “You must fetch Dr. Scott. Two tents down. Hurry!” Her head gestured toward the rear of the camp.
“Got it!” he said, and ran out. He hooked right and shot to the second tent over. He threw open the flap and stomped in. “Dr. Scott!” he yelled.
Men occupied six cots. Bandages covered various parts of their bodies. A nurse knelt close to one. She was holding a spoon to his lips and whispering to him. Her back was to David, but something about her sent an icy-footed centipede scampering up his spine. He froze in place, watching her try to coax the man into taking a bite.
“Dr. Scott is not here!”
The woman’s voice jarred David out of his trance. Another nurse sat on a cot on the opposite side. She held a folded cloth to a patient’s head and was staring at David.
He said, “But . . . we
need
him!”
“He left ten minutes ago,” the nurse said. “I don’t know where he went.”
He pushed out of the tent.
“Can we go now?” Xander said.
“He wasn’t there,” David said. He ran back to the tent with the severely injured soldier.
“He’s not there!” he yelled at the nurse. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know!” She closed her eyes and shook her head. When her eyes opened, they pierced David. “Try his quarters,” she said. “Last tent on the left.”
He spun out of the tent. The blanket snagged on the flap and slipped off his shoulders. He didn’t stop to retrieve it.
Behind him, the nurse yelled, “Tell him it’s Major Rawlins!”
Xander grabbed his arm. “Don’t run,” he said, and looked toward the front of the camp. A group of about ten soldiers had gathered. All of them had eyes turned on the boys.
“Great,” David said. “Stay here so it doesn’t look like we’re escaping.” As fast as he dared, he walked to the last tent on the other side. “Dr. Scott?” he said and pushed the flap aside. A man with a trimmed silver beard rested on a cot. A bloody smock lay crumpled on the dirt floor next to him. His left arm was draped over his eyes.
He said, “Go away.”
“Your nurse wants you,” David said. “A man is dying. He needs you.”
“Find Dr. Jacobs,” Dr. Scott said.
“It’s Major Rawlins.”
The arm flew off his face so fast, David didn’t see it happen. Dr. Scott rolled off the cot and pushed past David.
“Where?” he said, running. “Where?”
“There! There!” David said, running with him. “See Xan— I mean, where that boy is standing?”
The doctor beelined it for Xander.
David stopped. He suddenly felt sick. His stomach tumbled freely inside his body. A gray cloud narrowed his vision, and he became dizzy. He dropped to his knees and fell forward, catching himself with his one good arm. He closed his eyes.
A montage of images flashed in his head: faces, maps, newspaper headlines, scenes of violence and bloodshed, war . . . a bearded man on horseback taking a bullet to the chest and falling off . . .
“David!” Xander yelled. He lifted David by his shoulders.
“You all right? What’s the matter?”
David put his hand over his eyes. The images faded until only blackness remained. He opened his eyes, blinked. His vision came back. “Dizzy,” he said.
“Can you run?” Xander asked.
“Run?”
Xander pointed. The group of soldiers had grown to fifteen or more. They were marching down the camp’s center aisle, headed directly for them. At the head of the pack was the man he had imagined seeing shot off his horse: Ulysses S. Grant.
“You!” Grant shouted, pointing at David and Xander. “Stop right there!”
“Go, go, go!” Xander yelled, shoving David.
David stumbled. His vision blurred, then cleared. Xander dashed past him and stopped. He extended his hand to David, who grabbed it, and they ran.
A dozen voices rose up behind them: “There they go!” “Stop!” “Spies!”
David waited for the first shot, wondered if it would sail harmlessly by or rip a fist-sized hole through his body.
They swung around the last tent, Dr. Scott’s, and beat it for the woods—a hundred yards away at the far side of a field.
David stumbled again. He stayed up only because Xander had a firm grip on his hand.
Xander looked back. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know,” David said. “I feel like I just woke up. I can’t think straight.”
Looking ahead, Xander said, “Snap out of it! If you don’t, we’re dead.”
David inhaled, exhaled. He scanned the ground ahead of them for obstacles. He felt the muscles in his legs working— no burn yet—his feet touching down, lifting up, shooting forward.
Here we go,
he thought.
Welcome back, David.
The soldiers’ angry voices reached him. He glanced back.
They had rounded Dr. Scott’s tent and were running. Two in the lead stopped to aim their rifles.
“They’re going to shoot, Xander!” David hollered. “Jag left. I’ll go right.”
Xander released David’s hand and made a sharp jog left.
David mirrored the move in the other direction.
The rifles rang out, two in quick succession.
Xander veered right. David swung left and they crossed paths, Xander just ahead of David.
“Keep doing it,” David said.
Another shot. Bark exploded from a tree fifty yards ahead.
“You got all the items, Xander,” David reminded him. “Are they pulling?”
“Oh yeah,” Xander said. “Way off to the left, but let’s get into the woods first.”
They zigged and zagged, pushed harder.
Three more gunshots . . . another two. David heard a bullet fly past.
“Here,” Xander said. He held the rifle out behind him without looking. “For the pull,” he said. “Don’t try to shoot it. It’ll just slow you down.”
“Wait!” David said. He reached for it, touched it, and Xander let go. Instead of falling back into David’s hand, it spun forward and shot diagonally away from them.
“Hey!” Xander said.
“It just took off,” David said. “Should we go after it?”
Behind them, a soldier fired.
“No way,” Xander said. “The woods—ten seconds away. That thing’s not even close, cutting across the field like that. It was heading straight for the portal.”
Xander leaped over a bush and practically vanished in the shadows of the woods. David plowed in, no leaping necessary. They continued to put distance between themselves and the soldiers. They swerved around trees, hurdled bushes, crunched over twigs.
David threw a look back. The field was fifty yards behind them. The soldiers pressed on, but had not yet hit the tree line. He slowed and stopped.
“Xander!” he called.
David bent over and put his hands on his knees. He panted.
He dropped to his knees, then onto his side. The groundcover prickled his bare skin. He filled his lungs over and over.
He closed his eyes, wondering if he’d be assaulted by the images again. They didn’t come, but he did feel lightheaded.
He remembered learning in school about Grant’s death in the Civil War. When would that be? How many days or years from now did that happen? Wait a minute: it never happened.
Grant survived the Civil War and became the eighteenth president of the United States, after Andrew Johnson—David had to memorize the presidents in order in sixth grade. And he had always liked Grant: he was considered one of the best military commanders ever. Plus he was the president who controlled James West and Artemus Gordon in the
Wild Wild West
TV show.
But it was so clear in his memory: Grant died in battle in—he knew this—1862. That’s right, toward the beginning of the war, which ended in 1875. No! That wasn’t right. The war ended in 1865. He’d memorized a poem about it:
In 1861 the war begun
In 1862 the bullets flew
In 1863 Lincoln set slaves free
In 1864 there still was a war
In 1865 hardly a man is still alive
There were no more lines, no more years of war.
Memory
. He
remembered
Grant having died in 1862, at the Battle of Shiloh, and the war lasting until 1875.
Xander’s feet crunched over the ground, moving quickly toward him, then stopped. “Dae,” he whispered. “Dae!”
When David looked up, Xander was sitting with his back against a tree. He glanced around the tree toward the soldiers. He cast wide eyes at David. “David! They’re coming.”
David popped his head up. The soldiers had reached the tree line. Grant was twenty feet behind. He was swinging a pointing hand, positioning the soldiers an equal distance apart. Finding Xander and David was going to be an organized affair.
David rolled to a tree and sat up behind it. He said, “Xander, it worked. We changed history. I remember the way it was—and the way it is. Like Jesse. That must be why I felt sick and got dizzy. My memories were colliding. It happened right when I sent Dr. Scott to the tent, to Major Rawlins.”
Xander stared at David for a good ten seconds. David could see the wheels turning in his head. Finally he said, “We don’t have time for this.” He popped his head around the tree, pulled it back quickly. “They’re in the woods.”
“Just tell me,” David said. “I
have
to know. I need know for sure which of my memories are the
right
ones. You know, history as it is now, right now. When did the Civil War end?”
Without hesitating Xander said, “1865.”
“Did Grant die in the war?”
“David!”
“Please!”
“Your father has been a history teacher your whole life, until this year, and you ask something like that?” He sighed.
“No, he became president after the war, in 1869. Now come on! Your pasty skin is going to be like a beacon for those guys.” He pushed himself up the tree until he was standing.
David looked down at his shirtless chest. He had forgotten.
The blood Xander had smeared on his ribs had dried; it looked liked crusty ketchup. He turned toward the tree and stood. “One last thing,” he said.
“If we don’t move now,” Xander said, exasperated, “I’m going to lose the coat and kepi—
and
those guys are going to shoot us.”
David shot a glance at the soldiers. They apparently thought their quarry had gone to ground as soon as they hit the woods.
They were moving slowly, kicking at clumps of leaves and twigs, bayoneting bushes. He darted from his tree to Xander’s.
No one yelled.
Xander’s coat was fluttering, as though caught in gale-force winds, in the direction they had to travel. The kepi vibrated against his tight grip.
Dae looked up at him. “How many people died in the war?”
Xander pressed his lips together. David knew his brother wanted to deck him.
“Six hundred thousand,” Xander said. “Give or take.”
“Xander,” David said, excited. “I remember this—reading it, writing it, seeing it in a documentary, Mrs. Felton putting it on the whiteboard: the Civil War took over
two million
lives. If what you’re saying is true, that only six hundred thousand died, then we just saved . . .” He calculated. “We just saved one million, four hundred thousand people!”
FRIDAY, 8:52 A.M.
Jesse’s eyes sprang open. They jittered in their sockets, but he did not see the ceiling above his hospital bed, only the dream that had awakened him. Not a dream as much as a dream of memories. When history changed—whether at his hands or another’s—the events that had lost their place in time flooded his mind, the way a lightbulb briefly flares with intensity before blowing its filament. He liked to think of it as history-that- is-no-longer-history saying, “I was here! I was . . .”
Gone.
He never pursued
why
changed history uttered this last gasp or why
he
could sense it. He simply accepted it as the way the universe worked, a part of who he was. But he knew in his heart what it was all about. It was God’s way of telling him,
You matter. This is why you’re here.
Florescent lights above him flickered on, penetrating his eyes and dimming the images of a history that never was. He still remembered them and would continue to remember for a few hours most likely. But as life encroached and time passed, they would become like a movie projected in a theater whose house lights grew progressively brighter, until the image on the screen vanished in the glare of reality.