Forever Until Tomorrow (War Eternal Book 5) (5 page)

They had stopped shooting at her. Why?

She reached up, planting a hand on the table and willing herself up. Her vision was getting cloudy, and everything was starting to spin.
 

"Michael," she said weakly, the confusion making it hard to grasp the situation.

The soldiers. They were on the ground. All of them. Four new soldiers were standing near the blown out window, still attached to their rappel wires. They were wearing similar armor, all of it black and unmarked. Their weapons raised to point at her.

The lead soldier put his hand out, and the weapons lowered. The emergency stairwell doors swung open, and people began flowing in - more soldiers and medics.
 

Someone took her by the arm. A woman.
 

"Someone get a kit and a stretcher over here, stat," the woman shouted. "It's going to be okay, Major."

"Who?" Katherine said, barely able to speak.

"Stay calm. You've lost a lot of blood. We'll get you fixed up."

"How?" she said, to confused for anything else. The world was getting hazy around her.

"Launch the Goliath," the woman said. "Find Mitchell."

"What?" She put her hand to her head, finding a slick of blood. She hadn't noticed the bullet that hit her there. "I don't understand."

"It's okay, Major. Find Mitchell."

"Who?"

Everything was getting dark, and nothing was making sense.
 

"Mitchell," the woman said again.
 

Then everything disappeared.

Reggie stared at the ceiling. He was in bed, under the blankets, trying to fall asleep. It had always been elusive. It had always been difficult. There were so many nights when he had given up completely, throwing his sheets onto the floor and rising nearly naked in the cool air, standing in the center of the room and staring at the wall.

Why?

He didn't know.
 

He knew his name wasn't Reggie. Beyond that?
 

He was in a hospital. A mental hospital. He had been there for a long time. He was sure he was supposed to be there because he was certain he was crazy. How else could he explain why he spent so much time staring at nothing? How else could he understand why the last twenty years of his life had been spent in a haze of distorted emptiness, where the only thing that seemed real were the nightmares?
 

Was he unable to sleep because he was afraid of them? Did he stare at nothing because he didn't want to face the truth of his existence?
 

He had spent twenty years asking himself the same questions. Twenty years trying to grasp at who and why he was. So many wasted days. So many sleepless nights. What good had any of it done him? He was nobody, and he had nothing.

His eyes fixed on the plain white paint, tracing it with precision, searching for the chips and cracks he knew were there. He had spent so much time staring at this wall that he knew every inch of it, every flaw. In many ways, it reminded him of himself. A blank canvas, but one with cracks that couldn't be covered over.
 

Did he stare because he saw his reflection there?

He blinked. Once. Twice. The third time, he held his eyes closed tight before releasing them, opening them like he was firing a gun. He caught sight of something in his vision, and he tried to catch up to it. A dark trailing edge to whatever it was he had forgotten. As soon as he got close enough, it danced away.

He glanced down at his arms. The skin was rough and puckered in spots, the remaining scars from a number of grafts and stem cell treatments. He could still remember what they had looked like in the beginning, the burns sinking so deep they had at one point considered amputation. The twenty-third century, and they were ready to treat him as if it were the nineteenth.

They didn't hurt too badly anymore. Or maybe he had just gotten used to the pain. The doctors had always told him that they were the reason he couldn't remember. That he had been so traumatized by whatever had caused the burns that his mind had shut it out, along with everything else. He didn't believe them.
 

There was a reason he couldn't remember, but he was certain it wasn't that. He had become so accustomed to the burning sensation in his skin, even all of these years later, that he barely ever noticed it anymore.
 

A few days earlier, he had told Father John that he was waiting. Then his mind had changed in a way he had never experienced before. His dreams, his nightmares, had entered his waking thoughts, the wall between them breaking down and all of the darkness raging in. The priest had seen it. He knew by the way he had reacted, almost falling over and killing himself to escape. Somehow, Reggie had managed to push the tide back, to force himself to calm down and breathe.
 

Slow.
 

Steady.

Father John had been back, of course. The old man was too determined to save his soul to let one episode like that chase him away. He had asked about his thoughts, and Reggie had pushed him back the way he always did. It was better that nobody else got involved. It was better if nobody else got hurt.

That was the crux of it. The bottom line of his nightmares. Death. Destruction. Everything he cared about turned to ash in silent flame.
 

And always at the center of it, a voice. A soothing, comforting voice that had turned more and more caustic over the years.
 

"Find her," it said. "You have forever until tomorrow, but not forever until the end. You'll know when the time has come."

It was a statement that had haunted him in the beginning, as he tried to work out the meaning. It had puzzled him, confused him, taunted him, agonized him. It had brought him to fits of anger and rage and frustration. It had left him sobbing on the floor.
 

In his nightmares, he was in space, surrounded by explosions and wreckage and debris. The Earth hung below him, calm and unaware. The ships sat above him, the tips of their pyramid-shaped bows pointed at her, with glowing balls of death building on the ends.
 

His brother was gone. His companion was gone. His friends and comrades were all gone. He couldn't remember their names or their faces, but he could feel them in his gut, and he could feel the punches again and again every time he saw them die.

Was it real?
 

It felt real. It felt true.
 

He was certain he was crazy.

He dropped to his hands and feet on the floor, resting his body in plank position for thirty seconds, before rising and falling, pulsing out a quick rhythm of push-ups. He stopped when he reached one hundred, standing up and letting his breathing relax. His body tingled from the exertion, but he felt strong. After thirty seconds, he repeated the motion again.
 

He had made sure to continue the routine from the time his arms had been healed enough to stand the pain. It was familiar to him; something so ingrained that he knew that somewhere, sometime, he had been trained to do it. He had to keep his body in shape. It became more important as he aged. He was still fit, still strong. He needed to be, even if he didn't know exactly why.

He had seen the news earlier. He had noticed it for the first time he could remember, as more than a buzzing in his head, as more than a distraction. His dreams of starships weren't completely insane. He knew one had crashed on the same night they found him. Maybe that was the cause of the nightmares? But that had happened thousands of kilometers away from where he was, so how could those things be connected?
 

He also knew that they had built one of their own. A starship. They were calling it the Dove, a symbol of peace for the whole world. Was the violence in his mind a warning? Was humankind not supposed to reach the stars?

"Find her," the voice had said. A young girl's voice. Who was she? "You'll know when the time has come."

The news report was about a special event where the inaugural crew of the Dove would be announced. It was supposed to be a big deal, a bright spotlight on what a combined world could achieve. It had fallen apart to violence, to a group that called itself the AIT. Anti-Interstellar Travel. Apparently, they were radical Earth protectionists who preferred that humans remained grounded and invisible to whatever had owned the ship that had crashed all those years ago, the one they had named XENO-1.

"You have forever until tomorrow, but not forever until the end."

Forever to do what? The attack had killed a number of dignitaries from around the globe and had left the plans for the Dove's launch in jeopardy. That he had even noticed the event meant something to him, and he knew it was important.
 

Reggie moved through a series of punches and kicks. He felt the coldness of his nightmares more acutely tonight, a chill in his soul that he couldn't push away. The voice had told him that he would know when the time had come, and he knew at that moment that it had.
 

It was time for him to make a decision. Either he was crazy, and all of this was nothing more than a delusion that was playing out in his mind, or he was inexplicably sane, and something very, very bad was going to happen. Something that he was somehow supposed to prevent.

It would have been easy to accept that he was delusional. It would have made sense. He could go back to bed, pull the sheets up, close his eyes, and wait for the morning. He could take his meds and sit and stare, and live with the voice and the nightmares until he finally grew old enough to die.

That was what he wanted to do. He was afraid of the other option. Afraid of the hurt and the loss and the pain, and what it meant to the world if his nightmares were real. He was afraid of the responsibility. He was also afraid of his role. Was he supposed to prevent the AIT from stopping the launch, or was he expected to help them finish the job?

"Find her."

It was too vague. By design? Why?

He looked over at his bed. He was crazy. He had to be. He was in a mental hospital, wasn't he? He should lie down and try to forget.

He looked back at the wall. He traced the cracks and the chips against the starkness of the white background. If he did nothing then, in the end, there would be nothing. Forever until tomorrow. What did that mean?

Tomorrow was almost here, and he had a decision to make. Crazy or not?

He found his clothes on the floor, gathered in a pile at the foot of the bed. He picked them up and put them on, and then walked over to the door and turned the latch. He wasn't violent, so there was no reason to keep him locked in. He slipped out into the hallway before turning around and looking back at the bed again.

It all felt too real to risk that it wasn't. If he were crazy, if he were delusional, then someone would catch up to him, stop him, and bring him back. He hoped it would happen. He wanted it to happen because at least then he would know for sure.

Until then, he was going to pretend he wasn't crazy and see where that road led.

Anywhere was better than here.

Reggie passed through the corridors of the hospital, heading toward the elevators at the end of the hallway.
 

"Reggie?" one of the nurses said, noticing him from her station off to the left.
 

He heard her, but didn't look and didn't slow.
 

"Reggie," she said again, louder this time.

"I'm leaving," he replied.

"What do you mean? Yu can't just leave."

He didn't answer again. He was close to the elevators. He heard a buzz as the nurse hit the button to lock them down.
 

"Security, can you come up to seven?" she said.

He turned away from the elevators, to the emergency stairs. They couldn't be secured, for obvious reasons.

"You can't keep me here," he said. "Not if I don't want to be here."

The nurse ran over and positioned herself in front of him. She was a small, round thing. He blinked a few times, his mind picturing her evaporating behind a wall of flame.