In Times Like These (55 page)

“W
e’ll need to get a statement from you as well,” the male officer replies.

As the two of them converse, the female officer leads
Lillith toward some other police vehicles. I ease Francesca away from the conversation and step around a squad car. “We need to find Blake.”

“What happened to him?” Francesca asks.

“I don’t know. Lillith shot him, but he disappeared.”

“She shot him?” Francesca exclaims.

“Yeah. But I think he blinked out of there. I don’t know what kind of shape he was in but I think I know where he went.”

“Where?”

“You remember the day Carson noticed the blood on the chair?”

“Yeah, that was gross
 . . . Wait, you think that was Blake’s blood?”

“He crashed into that chair when he got shot.
Lillith was shooting from the balcony. He must have blinked backwards a few days to get away.”

“Why wouldn’t we have seen him? You think he’s okay?”

“I don’t know, but we need to find Dr. Quickly. I have a lot of questions that need answering.”

A
nother fire engine speeds toward the blazing front of the lab. We move farther away from the chaos and I put some more vehicles between us and the officers before they decide to question us. I lead us into the residential neighborhood and pause to consider the sign at an intersection.

“Where are we going?” Francesca asks.

“Quickly’s apartment upstairs burned down. If he’s still in this timestream and here today, he’ll need somewhere to sleep tonight.”

“The house? I figured that place was just a front for his tunnel.”

“Probably is, but I don’t know where else to look for him.”

Francesca shrugs and we keep walking. “So tell me about Stenger. What happened when you went out the window?”

“Well . . . we landed on a truck. We fought a little bit and then I tried to blink away, but he grabbed hold of my leg and came with me.”

“How did you lose him?”

“I hit him with an overpass.”

“You what?”

“Yeah, it was crazy. We ended up on top of the truck while it was rolling down I-275. I blinked past the pedestrian overpass but Stenger didn’t see it.”

“Holy shit. So he’s dead?”

“I didn’t stop to check obviously, but we had to be doing close to eighty when he got clobbered by the overpass and knocked off the truck. Then he got hit by at least a couple of cars on the freeway, so yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and say he’s dead.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad he’s gone. He was so awful.”

“Are you okay?” I consider Francesca’s slightly swollen face.

“Yeah, I’ll be al
l right.” She touches her cheek. “I could probably use some ice.”

When we arrive at
Dr. Quickly’s fake house, there are lights on in the window. I’m about to knock on the door when it opens. Mym is holding the door for us. She’s older again, the one from earlier in the lab. Her eyes search my face.

“Hey,” I manage.

“Hey. Come in.” She opens the door wider and Francesca and I enter. Mym shuts the door and leads us into the dining room. As I turn the corner, my breath catches. Blake is at the table with Dr. Quickly. His left arm is in a sling and a bandage protrudes from under the collar of his shirt. He rises from the table and smiles. Dr. Quickly stands up with him.

“Thank God!” I say. “The worry was killing me, man.”

As Blake moves around the table, I clasp his good arm with my good hand and gently clap him on the back. “You had me pretty worried too,” Blake says. “I’ve been stuck wondering for days whether you guys were going to make it out of there.”

Francesca
embraces Blake carefully. I turn to Dr. Quickly. “Hello, Doctor.”

“Congratulations, Benjamin. You’ve had quite a night.”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

Mym moves around her father and takes a seat. She smiles at me, but it’s cautious.

“So what happened to you?” Francesca asks Blake.

“Not much to tell
, really,” Blake replies. “I got shot, obviously. When I got hit by the bullet, I sort of went into panic mode. I knew she was still up there shooting when I hit the ground. She was shooting at Ben but I was still in clear view, so I grabbed at my chronometer and blinked myself out of there.”

“You went back to a few days ago?” I ask.

“Nights, actually. When I showed up in the lab, it was dark and I was bleeding all over the place. Luckily Dr. Quickly heard me blundering around and came downstairs to help me. He patched me up.”

“Blake got lucky,” Dr. Quickly says. “The bullet passed through the muscles behind his collarbone, but it just grazed the bone itself. It could have been much worse.”

“What happened then?” I say. “Why didn’t we realize what happened days ago?”

“I wanted to come back and find you guys as soon as the bleeding was stopped,” Blake says. “But Dr. Quickly talked me out of it.”

“There’s a little more to this story than you know,” Dr. Quickly says. “We needed to keep Blake here to avoid altering the events that were going to happen. You may want to have a seat.”

I look from Quickly to Mym and finally to Blake. He nods and gestures to the chairs. Francesca and I take seats. Mym shifts uncomfortably in hers.

“So what’s the scoop?” Francesca says.

“It’s a long story, but we’ll try to explain,” Quickly says.

“We were hoping you would,” I say. “It seems like there were a whole lot of things that we probably should have known, that we somehow didn’t get told, especially the universe being fractal thing. We could’ve saved ourselves a whole lot of wasted energy in the wrong 2009 if we’d known that.”

“Well, there were reasons,” Quickly replies.

“Dad, maybe I should do it,” Mym interjects. Dr. Quickly looks to her and nods, then settles back in his chair. “This is mostly my doing,” Mym says.

Hers?

“Which part?” I say.

“The leaving-you-in-the-dark part,” Mym says. “I know there were things that you needed to know that you didn’t, and dangers you would face as a result, but I had to keep it that way.”

“Why?” Francesca says. “Why couldn’t you guys just help us get home like we asked?”

“Because you wouldn’t have come back,” Mym says. “And I really needed you to come back.”

I watch her face. She looks pained by what she’s saying. “I know it was selfish of me, but I had to try. I’ve tried for so long to do it on my own, and I couldn’t anymore.”

“Do what?” I say.

“Save my dad.”

I sit back in my chair. “Oh.” Her eyes are welling up with tears. “But wait, when did we save your dad?”

“Tonight,” Quickly says. “Tonight would have been the night I died.”

“Wow,” Francesca says. “How?”

“Elton Stenger,” Quickly replies. “He came back at the same time you did. There were others as well, but Stenger was the one that really changed things. He’s a vicious human being. He took Malcolm hostage when he met him, and found out much about what we do. It seems the knowledge only enraged him, however. In his few days here in 1986 alone, he had begun to believe himself unique. He was angry to have been deprived of the spotlight of public fame. He found solace in his new ability to know the future. I think he envisioned himself becoming famous all over again, perhaps for different reasons. I believe he saw other time travelers as a threat to that.

“Carson,” I say. “He killed Carson because he recognized another time traveler in the media.”

Dr. Quickly nods. “I don’t know all the specifics of that encounter, but it would be in line with other aspects of his motivations. He set up the trap with Malcolm in the lab tonight, to get rid of me. And it worked.”

“But why did you need us?” I say. “If you knew Stenger was going to kill you, why not just leave?”

“We couldn’t,” Mym says. “I tried that. Originally Dad had always told me that if he died, I wasn’t supposed to try to change it. He said we all have our time and it has to come to an end.”

She sniffs and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “But I couldn’t do it. I tried to just let him go. I tried, but I couldn’t forget what happened. I went back to try to stop it. I tried so many combinations of ways to keep it from happening but I couldn’t find one where everyone would survive. No matter what I did, Malcolm or my dad or someone else kept dying. I saw them die so many times.” She looks at me. “I saw you die too.” She sniffs again and looks away for a moment. When she looks back, she continues. “But then one day, when I was traveling, trying to research more information, trying to find some way to solve it, I met a man. He told me he knew my situation and that there was a way to work things where everyone survived. He told me the combination of events that needed to happen to reach that timestream. I knew it would be selfish of me to put everyone through that, but I had to try. I didn’t want to go on living in a time where I couldn’t save them.”

“How did the man know what was going to happen?” Francesca says. “Who was he?”

Mym’s eyes meet mine again.
“He was you.”

I stare into her eyes,
then look at Quickly. Dr. Quickly is studying Francesca’s face. He stands up and disappears into the kitchen. When he returns, he lays a pair of ice packs in front of Francesca.

“So I caused this,” I say. “I’m the reason we couldn’t know what we were doing.”

“If you knew, you never would’ve succeeded,” Mym says.

Francesca holds one of the icepacks to her face and nods to Dr. Quickly. I snag the other one and press it to my wrist.

“So what now?” I ask. “Is it done?”

Dr. Quickly leans onto his elbows. “It’s done for now.”

“So these other attempts you made,” Francesca says, “does that mean there are other versions of this story where we didn’t succeed?”

“Yes,” Mym replies. “There are other timestreams, but in this version, Stenger didn’t win.”

“But the Stenger that shot Carson,” I say. “That still happened?”

“We’re in a new timestream now,” Dr. Quickly says. “Stenger is dead, so Carson will live, should he decide to go to L.A. and produce rock music again, but yes, that old timestream still exists. What
happened, happened. You can never change the past. Not really. You can just choose to live in a time where things are different.”

“So that Stenger, the one who killed Carson and took his chronometer, he’s still out there somewhere,” I say.

“I’m afraid so,” Quickly says. “But he’s gone from your original timestream. When you get home, he’ll still be gone.”

“So we can go home now?” Blake says.

“Yes,” Quickly replies. “If you would still like to go back to your old lives, I can see you there safely.”

“Getting home perforated is still getting home.” Blake smiles. “Mallory will just have to be extra nice to me for a while.”

“When would we leave?” Francesca says.

“As soon as you are ready to go.”

I stare out the sliding glass doors into the dark backyard. “So the other versions of us, the ones who are still at the hospital waiting on Mr. Cameron, what happens to them now?”

“They keep on with the story,” Quickly replies. “They exist in a bit of a paradox at the moment, but if left uninterrupted, they will continue down the same path you have, eventually looping around and becoming you as you sit right now.”

“But Stenger is dead now,” I say.

“In this timestream, Stenger was dead the day you three left for Boston. You just didn’t know it, because you hadn’t come back to cause it to happen yet. But had you paid attention to the news that night, it would not just have told you about the lab burning, but it would have mentioned a pileup on the interstate as well.”

“That’s tonight,” I say. “That news program will probably be on again tonight.”

“Of course it will. It’s the same news program. Would you like to watch it?”

I look at his face. His eyes are smiling again. “The timestreams are splitting, but they’ve not separated completely yet. Actually, I can give you all a class on the physics of traversing paradoxical timestreams, if you’re in the mood.”

“That’s okay. I trust you.”

“So what about Mr. Cameron and Robbie?” Francesca says. “Will Mr. Cameron survive?”

“In this timestream, he will. If I take you home to your original timestream, he has to have always died. You won’t find him there. Robbie has a choice to make. If he would like to continue his relationship with his grandfather here, he is welcome to, but he won’t be able to go home.”

“That really sucks,” Francesca says.

“You can’t change the past
,” Quickly says, “you can only—”

“Choose where you want to live,” I finish for him.

Quickly nods. I stand up and look at Blake. “Well, I know where you want to live.”

He smiles and stands
. “Yep. There’s only one home for me. She’s got brown hair and blue eyes, and she might not be getting a diamond ring, but she’ll be getting a whole lot of me.”