FutureImperfect (14 page)

He briefly wondered why the people of the present day weren't reacting to all this, but they seemed not to see, or care. Planning to figure it all out much later, Harry kept running, past the chain-link fence, up the red stone steps, and into the main courtyard. Everything inside was lit up, making the building glow in rich colors.

Beyond the front doors, below the tile mosaic of great thinkers, he could see the auditorium entrance. He flew across the courtyard, feeling concrete, dirt, and sand beneath his feet. The faces of the scientists looked down at him; Einstein, Kepler, Madame Curie, Aristotle. As he ran toward them they grew taller and taller, until they vanished into a line with the sky. Harry threw himself through the doors. He was in the entrance hallway, yards from the auditorium, thrilled to see there was practically no one in the hall. It looked like he had a clear shot.

A saddled, riderless horse galloped across his path, pounding its way toward the social studies department, while a young settler family looked in awe at the bulletin board posters for RAW's high school bands.

It didn't matter. He was here. He'd rush in and grab Siara and everything would tumble back into place. It had to. Without stopping, he headed for the auditorium.

A high-pitched whine grew louder as he stepped in. It was the prototype engine, whirring away on the stage, amplified by the room's acoustics. The place was packed, hundreds of bodies and faces. Whatever madness was going on in the rest of time and space, this room remained untouched. It took Harry a moment to orient himself, but then he saw Siara, wheeling the cart with the deadly banana.

“Siara!” he called. “The banana! You don't know what it's attached to!”

But either the whining engine drowned him out, or she chose not to hear.

He tried to sense the future around him, feel the fastest path to the stage. He could sense nothing in his way, nothing. He could run, jump, and grab the banana. He vaguely remembered the keystone, but there was no more time to look for things he couldn't see. He had to get to her now.

No sooner did he make the decision to run for it then a massive weight pushed him sideways, and someone grabbed him arms.

He hadn't seen them coming at all. They'd arrived, literally, out of nowhere.

“Our old pal, Harry Keller! What a surprise!” a familiar voice said.

“I bet I know who's looking for you!” said another.

Harry whirled and saw his captors; Didi and Gogo, the two school security officers he'd spent so much time ducking and hiding from the last several weeks.

Now
, they had to catch him?
Now?

They tightened their grip on his arms and pulled him toward the exit.

“No!” Harry said, struggling. “Banana! Banana! Banana!”

But beneath the sound of the whining engine it came out more like
babababababababa!

“Easy. Let's get you some clothes, Ba-ba,” Didi said.

“No! No! No!”

It was the keystone. He hadn't found it. What the hell could it be? He looked around frantically, saw a lighter in someone's pocket, a student with a Game Boy, a poster flapping on the wall. People shook hands, made jokes, lifted cans of juice. On stage they flipped switches, read from papers, manipulated a PowerPoint presentation.

It could be anything, anyone, something that hadn't happened, something that had, or one of a million other things he couldn't see or conceive.

And the auditorium clock was about to hit 9
P.M.,
signaling Siara's deadly snack.

By the time the enormity of the task hit him, the security guards had dragged him into the hallway.

“No!” Harry screamed.

He clawed at their arms, their faces, scratching, punching even biting, but Didi and Gogo were stronger. Having failed to catch Harry on many occasions, tonight they were earning their pay. They hauled him out into the haunted night where giant lizards roamed and dead civilizations rose, somehow oblivious to the temporal carnage around them.

“Don't you see the dinosaur?” he pleaded, pointing.

“Sure, we do, Ba-ba!” Did answered, winking at Gogo as they yanked him across the courtyard. “But it's Barney, the friendly dinosaur!”

It was only then that a sharp, deep noise rattled their chests and made them stop. A microsecond later a concussion wave, a burst of energy from a powerful explosion, hurled all three, Harry, Didi, and Gogo, off the ground and away from each other in what felt like sickly slow motion.

Harry hit the steps with his side, managing to twist toward the school to watch. He was just in time to see all the windows shatter, as if the building were a bursting balloon. Beyond the rain of glass he saw the venerable faces of the great scientists, the ones he'd longed to join, collapse into ten thousand tiny squares, each one a meaningless basic color, purposeless, pointless without the vast context of its million brothers and sisters.

The fireball came next, as if the highlight of a doomsday parade, and it did not disappoint. For its final, burning trick, it turned night into day so quickly that no one had time to scream.

No one, save Harry.

A too-late contingent of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances sped through the city night, their little glowing trails not nearly as bright as the embers of RAW High School. Their sirens wailed, mixing with tire screeches and roaring engines, the sound piercing the urban din. But it, too little and too late, was likewise swallowed by the sound of crackling flames, falling walls, and the hellish rush the bilious smoke made as it poured from the rubble and rose into the circling sky like a vast, upside-down waterfall.

“He knew about the bomb,” Didi explained to the barrel-chested police officer who put the cuffs on Harry.

No, officer, it was a banana.

Harry looked at the man as he worked, reading his life at a glance. He was honest but tired, almost a cliché of the good cop. He had two daughters, one high school age, another who would've gone to RAW in a few years. He was two years from retirement, too. He'd make it, but only because his partner would take a bullet for him during a liquor store holdup about six blocks away.

As he worked the cuffs, the cop shook his head. “I've never seen anything like this,” he said in a shaky voice.

“He was trying to get into the auditorium, but we stopped him,” Gogo put in.

The officer didn't seem to be listening, so both repeated their short story, supporting each other with nods and “yeahs” as they twice told the tale.

When they were done, the burly man asked, “How could anyone do something like this? For what?”

He wasn't looking at Didi or Gogo, he was looking at Harry. His hair was more salt than pepper, and in his hazel eyes was a plea for understanding.

What could Harry say? The truth was pointless.

“Jeremy Gronson wanted to change the past so he could join a transcendental street gang. Only, I guess it didn't work. The dinosaurs, the spaceships, and the Native Americans are gone. Everything seems back to normal.”

The cop's face, pink from nearness to the flames, wrinkled in sweaty confusion. Didi and Gogo, who knew Harry, pointed at their temples and swirled their index fingers.

“Cray-zee.”

The cop nodded. Harry was nuts. That made sense. Perfect sense. And everything had to make sense. Without any further questions, he grimly shoved Harry into the back of the police car, away from the warmth of the flame, where the cold seat stuck to Harry's naked back.

He leaned forward, peeling his skin off the vinyl interior as the car door slammed. There were no handles on the rear doors, and a metal grate barred him from the front seat.

Of course. This is a police car, I should be used to this sort of thing by now.

But Harry didn't care what they thought, or what they did. The agitated, self-conscious vibration he'd always associated with his madness was silent. He missed it, because it had been such a wonderful buffer against his feelings. But he didn't feel crazy, not anymore, just drained, hollow, full of grief. He didn't blame himself for not spotting the needle in the haystack. He just wished he had.

He even pitied Jeremy, the poor alpha boy Gronson. He'd finally managed to piss on his tree, write his name on reality's wall in a way that would never change, in a way that would ripple out, through the parents of the dead, their friends, their brothers and sisters, altering thousands of lives with waves of trauma and grief. That would be his legacy. His last score. And no one would know.

At least it hadn't been World War III. Harry could sense it in the air, in the fact that the visions of past and future no longer intruded on the urban landscape. Maybe the anachronistic images he'd seen were just the pieces of time Jeremy had built the tower from, or maybe the timeless realms hated a tragedy, or, more likely, even the storm had more to do with the way Harry's mind filtered things than with the things themselves.

But the past
hadn't
changed, so maybe the Fool was wrong, at least about that rule being just a mask. Maybe, really and truly and finally, what was done was done and Nostradamus's prophecy would remain what it had always been—a stupid bunch of words, a not-very-good poem.

Why couldn't it have been a good poem at least?

They drove him to the nearest station, where he was booked and put in a holding cell—yet another room he wasn't allowed to leave. He was thankful it wasn't white, like the lightning that killed his father, or the padded cell at Windfree, or the Fool's gloves, or the flash that took down RAW.

Nope, no whites, just shades of gray. There was a wall of gray bars and in it a door of gray bars. There was gray cinder block, and a gray barred window looking out on a gray parking lot beneath a dark, overcast sky. The only furniture was a bench, painted gray. There wasn't even a cot because probably, he figured, no one would be held here for very long.

But then they told him, “Make yourself comfortable. It'll be a while.”

So Harry sat on the gray bench. He tried leaning back against the cold wall until touching it with his back reminded him he didn't have a shirt. They hadn't even given him any clothes, just tossed him in here half naked, shoeless, until someone with mojo could take over the scene.

Maybe they'd try him for the explosion, because he didn't care anymore. Maybe he'd be convicted, but he didn't care anymore. Or maybe, for the hell of it, Harry would show them all what he could do—make a trail of coincidence in A-Time that would shatter all these walls, disarm all their weapons, lay their computer systems low, then calmly walk outside surrounded by his manufactured carnage.

He'd be like the Fool himself then, like a god.

But that would also make him just like Jeremy, wouldn't it?

None of it seemed as funny as it had when he didn't have a body, when he hadn't existed for a while. Now that he was attached to the world again, it all seemed so sad.

Especially Siara.

Harry shivered, leaned forward, looked down at his feet, at the gray floor, and let his feelings go. Tears welled in his eyes, pooled in them, and dripped to the concrete. He rubbed his eyes and looked down at his hands. More tears fell, passing through his palms and hitting the floor where they made small dark wet spots against the gray.

Passing through?

It was true. The tears were passing through his hands, as if he were a ghost. He stuck his index finger against his palm. It went straight through.

What was going on?

Harry snapped his head up. He looked around. He bit his lip and his teeth passed through what should have been the solid flesh of his upper lip. He slammed his hand against the gray paint. It passed through that, too, into the cinder-block wall, out of the wall of the room, and into the A-Time air, where his fingers felt the wind of the still-maddening storm.

When he turned back to the bench, he saw himself sitting there, head buried in hands. The square walls of the cell seemed to curve and melt into A-Time terrain.

He looked to his left and the narrative voice rose:

He wasn't in linear time. He was in a life trail. His own. How had that happened? Then he remembered. The Fool had slapped him high into the air. He must have come down in his own trail, in his own future, and mistaken it for the present.

He bolted to his feet and leapt back into the terrain. There the rushing wind nearly knocked him to the ground. The terrain had changed yet again. The past was motionless, flattened out, filled with crevices, drained of all color, making it as gray as his cell. Jeremy's edifice still remained, the center of the vortex. The future, where Harry barely stood, still roiled and wobbled.

The future. What he'd seen hadn't happened yet. Siara hadn't died! Harry had been given a second chance.

A giant in greasepaint with teeth that could crack the world like an egg laughed from inside him, from a deeper place than the Quirk-shard ever occupied.

Good one, huh? You should see the look on your face! If I had a camera, I'd take a picture.

Harry shook his head in disbelief. So it was a practice run. If he'd done things differently, the school would not have exploded. But what had he done wrong?

The keystone. He hadn't found the keystone.

“What is it?” he shouted. “What?”

But the Fool wasn't answering, and the ground only rumbled in response. The spot where Harry stood rose and fell with abandon, as if it had never wanted to be still in the first place. The event horizon, unperturbed by any shift in the A-Time weather, hissed closer to the end.

The world, this world anyway, wasn't going to tell him a damn thing.

Or maybe it was, maybe it'd been telling him all along, telling him everything he needed to know. It was, after all, the world. He just didn't know how to read it.

But what could he read? Terrain, trails—they yielded their secrets fast enough.

He looked at the imposing black column that divided time. It was made of terrain, so the answer was somewhere in there. Whatever the keystone was had to be spelled out inside the column. If Harry could get in, the events would rise in images, and he could follow the path of events back to the keystone.

He struggled across the churning trails. As he approached the tower, he felt something akin to heat radiate from its ebon surface. It burned his hand as he touched it. Didn't just burn it, he noticed when he looked, but melted it clean away to the wrist.

Harry stepped back, howling, staring at the stub at the end of his arm. In seconds, his hand re-formed.

Jeremy said it was built to funnel timeless energy, ergon, so it's probably sucking energy from me, too. Only, since I'm generated by my trail, it can't suck me dry. Even if my ergon burned up completely, I'd probably just wind up back in linear time.

He eyed the tower, tried to gauge how much it would hurt if he forced himself inside, and wondered if he could stay conscious long enough to see the keystone.

Another sacrifice for position. Worth a shot.

Harry ran at it, pushing into the ooze with his shoulder. As his body hissed and melted, he tried to ignore the pain.

Eahhjjj!

He stumbled back in anguish, looking like a piece of ice, half-melted against a burning grill. When he saw to his horror how much of him was gone, he realized he wasn't strong enough or fast enough to pull this off.

He knew from physics that force was equal to mass times acceleration, meaning that if you could get a blade of grass to move fast enough, it could bury itself in a thick piece of oak. But how could Harry ever achieve that kind of speed? He wasn't a god, he was a Harry Keller. At this point, he was just three quarters of a Harry Keller.

The Fool's words came back to him:

Points of entry are arbitrary. Let reason go, pick a partner, and dance.

Let reason go. How could he do that, with maybe a minute left to save the school? Or was that his problem yet again? Had he just been thinking, rationalizing too much? Clicking his teeth impatiently, he tried to stop thinking and let ideas just rise to his mind….

Alligator, alligator, hump-backed whale…

(didn't make any sense but he loved it)

That ride's over, want another?

(he shivered at the memory)

The sidewalk was moving. Not just moving, undulating, waving in patterns that made the asphalt crack and tear. It was just like a film he'd seen in physics of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.

(Where the heck was that from?)

Oh yeah. Part of the visions he'd had right before he first entered A-Time. The image, newly conjured now, stuck with him. Wobbling bridge. Vibrations. Resonance. Wind made the bridge wobble like a wave, until the energy built up so much that it collapsed. Solid ground acting like the sea.

He looked at the rambling future terrain. It certainly had enough waves in it, but they were all over the place. It looked like a many-headed snake that, for the life of it, couldn't decide on a single direction. A lot of power there, though, a lot of energy, if he could figure out how to direct it.

Like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

Could he? Bounce on a few trails in just the right spot, set up a resonance, send a wave in the right direction and ride it, like a surfer, toward the tower? If the momentum was strong enough, he might be able to use it to burst inside and melt in its mouth, not in its hands.

Why not?

Well, there were a million reasons, but reason hadn't worked so far, so Harry put each foot on a wobbling trail and started pumping. After a second, like a bucking horse, the trails threw him. He flopped backwards onto a third writhing trail, wrapped his arms around it to get his balance back, and finally stood on its top.

Then he rode it, bending as it went down, straightening as it went up. It was like playing on a swing in his elementary schoolyard, pumping, making it swing like a pendulum: higher, higher, higher, lower, lower, lower, but all the time, faster. Soon the whole trail was practically leaping out of the terrain.

The energy in the bucking trail was soon as high as Harry could make it and still stay on. As it crested a final time, Harry leapt toward the tower. He flew into it, as if hurled by a slingshot.

Some days you're the windshield, some days you're the bug.