After and Again (6 page)

  We all sat in silence for the hour that it took us to get to the site. There was no road out where we were and we had to bounce along slowly with the four-wheel drive engaged. There was something….something primal, no that’s not right; something
instinctual
in all of us that knew that we were about to witness something of monumental proportions. We could no longer see any signs of the blasts, the rolling hills looked like they had for a millennia outside of the strange black mark ahead of us. We stopped the car a hundred feet or so from the site. We all exited the vehicle and without a word between us walked toward the floating blackness.

  It was about twelve feet tall by eight feet wide but not symmetrical, a bit wavy, and it was wider at the top than the bottom but the edges were not well defined; they seemed to fade from the deepest black imaginable to nothing. The blackness appeared almost viscous, as if you put your hand in it would come out covered in the stuff. Paul Nesbitt, the man who had been my boss in our previous life broke the silence by saying, “Back away if you want to,” and picked up a rock and tossed it into the blackness. I immediately begun to walk around to the back side giving the edge a wide berth and was momentarily stopped; when I passed a certain point it simply disappeared. If I walked back a couple of steps it would re-appear. It really boggled the senses. Once I got behind it I could see Paul, although he was standing in front of it, I asked Paul to toss another rock—which he did—and I reflexively stepped aside because it appeared that he was throwing the rock at right at me. Then nothing, the rock was simply gone.

  The next obvious test was to send something in that we could retrieve. We chose a rubber sandal that belonged to Marjorie as she had somehow lost the other one anyway. We tied the sandal to a length of nylon rope and tossed it in. After a few moments we simply pulled it back, there was no accompanying sound, no black goo stuck to it, and it was negative for radiation. The next move came pretty naturally to inquisitive minds such as ours. We drew straws….well, sticks anyway, we didn’t have any straws, and yours truly drew the short one and had to touch the black. I walked up to the thing and did not hesitate lest I lose my nerve and stuck my arm in all the way to my elbow. There was a strange sensation that made me draw back immediately but I was unharmed. It felt like an extremely low voltage electric shock. Having survived the test, I turned briefly to my cohorts, held my breath, and walked into the black.

  There was that spilt second electric shock feeling and I was standing in a forest, my face a mere inches from a very large tree. I suddenly felt extremely faint and sat down hard on my backside. I had just passed through to another place, and I was so completely overwhelmed that for a moment my mind felt stretched to its limit. After a moment I had gotten hold of myself and took a look around with a scientist’s eye. It was a deciduous forest, and dawn, not past noon like where I had just been. Interesting but not very informative, it was time to tell the others. I stood up and turned back toward the blackness and walked through—and was sitting in the Land Rover where we had just parked upon arrival at the site! I was confused and elated and sick to my stomach all at once. I pushed my way out of the vehicle and promptly vomited on my shoes. After I had composed myself somewhat, I explained everything to my companions who immediately thought me mad. By spending roughly one minute on the other side of the blackness, I had traveled
back in time
one hour! Now to my cohort’s credit, they
wanted
to believe me, but you must understand, it was an extremely difficult idea to take on faith. So even though I explained to them the results of the initial experiments they insisted on doing them anyway.       

  Meanwhile I was attempting to puzzle out what had just transpired. I had
changed
things by going back in time. We had performed the experiments once, and I had led them. Now, they were performing the same experiments again headed by Paul Nesbitt—and none of them remembered having already done them, because they really hadn’t done them yet! I went into the past and changed the future!” Well, naturally the ramifications began flooding my mind: I had gone through at precisely one eighteen p.m. now, if someone
else
went through after these repeated/not repeated experiments, at say one fifteen p.m. then we again would be back in the Land Rover, just approaching the site, and
I
would have no memory of everything that I just explained and
I
would be thinking the other person mad who was trying to convince me that
they
had just traveled back in time.” The man paused for a moment and breathed heavily as if catching his breath, then continued.

  “I convinced the group to humor me and wait an extra hour before someone else went through. There were a few half-hearted jokes accusing me of a ruse to try and get out of drawing straws, but I think deep down everyone knew that I was telling the truth. The hour made sense not only so that I would remember, but that the rest of them would remember that I told them about it. So with the initial tests repeated and the agreement that Paul Nesbitt would be the one to go through, we all sat in the grass and waited until two twenty p.m. When the time arrived, he stood up and without preamble, walked through. The next thing that I knew Paul was sitting in the grass in front of me telling us all that he had done it. And I tell you dear stranger, that had I not had the memory of doing it myself, I would not have believed him, because to the rest of us, we had all just sat down to wait the extra hour and Paul was there with us the entire time. It was most disconcerting.

  We stayed at the site for awhile, did several more runs through and discovered that there was an unpleasant side effect to time travel. Somewhere in your consciousness the memories of each trip still lived, including the things that you experienced while someone else was in the rip. Even after someone else went through and changed the future you would have flashbacks of memories, memories that, technically speaking, never even happened. There were never tangibles; just foggy things like half-remembered dreams that would come out of nowhere and leave you feeling drained and confused. This side effect was only present in those of us that had traveled to the other side. John Stoddard and William Hendershot never entered the rip, and never had these ghost memories, even though their futures had been changed repeatedly. It was  as if traveling through the rip changed something fundamental in our brains that caused us to
perceive
that things had been altered. When we returned to our lab, the others who had stayed behind had experienced nothing strange either. The entire mechanism was so far beyond any of our capabilities to understand that it seemed almost like magic.”

   Zack fiddled with the buttons on the device and listened to this last part repeatedly and still only had a vague sense of what it all meant. After several reviews, he let the man’s voice continue. “We decided for the time being to leave the time-rip alone, to move on and see what else we could discover. We surmised that there was likely a blast somewhere within a thousand miles northward and we wanted to locate it, and find out if there were anymore of these phenomenon before we ran out of supplies, most particularly gasoline.

  A few days after we had returned to our base, Marjorie Joinner, Paul Nesbitt and I had gone out to forage, a task that was taking longer and longer every trip. We made it a point to stay away from the larger cities on the outskirts of the blast areas. The word was that people were killing each other for scraps. It turned out that the cities weren’t the only places.”

After a long pause, the man continued, his voice thick with emotion.

  “When we returned from our outing we found every single one of our colleagues—our friends—murdered. The facility was ransacked, everything useful was stolen, even the generator was somehow taken. Imagine, managing to survive the most catastrophic event of all time just to be murdered for your food and a few comforts. We buried our people and took what water we could and left.”

  We traveled around in the Land Rover. Paul Nesbitt slowly went mad and ran off about three months after we abandoned the facility.  It was my belief then, and still is today that his mind simply cracked under the weight of the flashbacks. I still experience the confusing waking/dreaming states and fortunately am still sane. I wonder though what would happen if one spent a great deal of time on the other side.

  Marjorie Joinner died here in this very cave only two days past. She and I found this place not long after Paul left us. We have been slowly collecting things these past years…books mostly, but other things too. Artifacts of a dead era, a history of things that were, for someone like yourself to come along and find. I myself am leaving today. We abandoned the Land Rover two years ago and replaced it with a motorcycle as it was getting extremely difficult to find gasoline.  I am going to try and right this horrible wrong. I am going to do what I should have done years ago and go back through the time-rip where I will try to survive for two and a half months. When I return it should be roughly two years before the bombs annihilated nearly everything. If I do not go mad then I will try and convince the right people that I have seen their future. It will be difficult to convince them but I must try. I have taken photographs, hundreds of photographs, of the aftermath, and whether or not electronic devices can pass through the time rip without damage we never tested, but I will try to bring my camera with me through the rip as well.  If I succeed then no one will ever hear this recording. It will have never existed anywhere but in my memory.”

  Zack turned off the device and clipped it back onto his pack. His first thought was that the man had obviously failed or he would not have been able to listen to the man’s story. It occurred to him briefly that the story might not be true, that it was a made up story like
The Wizard of Oz
; no, he thought, it was real all right. With the man’s story running through his head, Zack slept.

  Zack awoke with the sun and rekindled the campfire. He filled the tin cup that the Martins had supplied in the stream and drank deeply. He then re-filled the cup and balanced it on a couple of sticks over the fire and added coffee from the small hide pouch that the Martin’s had also provided. Grace was off a little ways from camp grazing again. He watched the mare fondly and thought about the man’s story. It had fascinated him deeply but he was also a pragmatist and decided to push it aside and concentrate on rescuing his mother, Emily, and whoever else might be held by the gang of marauders.

  He drank his coffee while readying his gear then tossed the dregs and rinsed the cup. He called to Grace who came immediately and stood still while he saddled and packed her.

  They were off before the sun had risen much above the horizon and Zack thought that it would be hot again. His plan, that was just beginning to come together in his mind was to catch up to the gang that night and just watch—unless a really perfect opportunity arose—and then wait until the following night or even the next to attempt the rescue. They would be in the foothills by then and there would be more cover, and they could always make for the mountains where it would be easier to elude men on horseback when he and whoever was with him were likely to be on foot. He had a hope that he may be able to steal horses for whoever he rescued but wasn’t going to count on it.

  He again started the mare slowly and worked her up to a run. The great green plain rolling out before him gave him an inkling of what the ocean must look like. He imagined The Emerald City from
The Wizard of Oz
shimmering in the distance, and though he had lived his entire life on this plain at the roots of the mountains, he was realizing its beauty for the first time that day.

  Zack saw the dust just before noon. Ahead of him, but how far he didn’t know, he wasn’t that kind of a tracker and distance on the plain could be deceiving. He had slowed Grace down to a trot to cool her off before stopping for lunch and he wanted to get a better look at the dust cloud in the distance. “There they are, Grace,” he said to the horse, leaning forward and patting her neck. “We’ll get a look at those bastards tonight I think.” A knot had formed in his stomach at the thought but he knew that he wouldn’t falter. If his people were there, he would rescue them or die trying.

  Grace whinnied and Zack looked up from his lunch of smoked pork and dried apples. The wolf was about a hundred feet away staring at Zack and the mare by bobbing its head slowly between them. Zack was wary but not afraid, there was plenty of game in the area and wolf attacks on people were almost unheard of. Besides, there didn’t seem to be any others, he took the wolf for a loner. Grace was just behind Zack and stamped nervously a few times, Zack on the other hand thought that the creature was magnificent and he slowly stood up holding out a piece of the pork while making a clicking noise with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Here big fella, want something to eat?” he asked the wolf softly, while really having no idea whether it was a male or a female. The wolf tensed at the movement but didn’t run off. Zack said, “Here you go,” and tossed the piece of pork toward the wolf who immediately turned and ran. Zack stared after it for a few moments and then turned to the mare, “Well, Grace, I guess
you’re
not disappointed.”  He stowed the rest of the pork back in the saddlebag and mounted the horse. He was no more than two hundred yards away and looking in the opposite direction when the wolf appeared out of the grass and ate the offered meat.