Rewinder (16 page)

“Stop whining,” a second man says. I recognize this voice immediately. It belongs to the policeman who chased me outside the hospital. The other voice must be his partner’s. “We’re here, so we might as well check around back.
Then
we can go. Okay?”

A sigh is followed by a resigned “Fine.”

I freeze. They’re going to find the broken window and come after me. As I hear them descend the front steps, I whip back around and hurry quietly to the fireplace. Kneeling, I stick a hand up the chimney.

“Hey, check this out!” The shout comes from the back of the house, and a moment later I hear the crunch of glass as someone lands on the shards in the basement.

I feel around, searching for my Chaser, until my fingers finally brush against its familiar shape. I hear creaks from the basement stairway, and shoot a sideways glance toward the back of the house as I tease the device off the ledge it’s perched on. When I try to pull it out, it catches on the vent. Panicked, I twist it one way and then the other before it falls free.

After activating the screen, I see that the date and time are both still set to my previous trip, here, four days before. There’s no time to change both, so I leave the date as is and input the only location I’ve ever memorized. One I thought I would never use.

“Police! Hands in the air!”

The two officers are standing in the doorway to the kitchen, each holding a gun pointed in my direction.

“Hands in the air!” the first one repeats as I disappear.

__________

T
HE MIST OF
the trip starts out silent, but right before the end, I get the hint of a companion, only it doesn’t “feel” like Palmer.

The gray is soon replaced by my good friend—the darkness of three a.m. My headache is considerable for a four-day trip but not debilitating, so I’m able to assess my surroundings right away. The location I used is the cemetery where my mother and sister are buried, nearly three thousand miles to the west of New York, at the eastern edge of the Shallows. I memorized it the first night after receiving my Chaser. But as I look around, I’m not at the cemetery.

It’s close, though. I can tell from the almost-but-not-quite-right silhouette of the hills. I’m probably no more than a mile away. I write it off as a lack of a companion, but still, I should be closer than this.

I can see several lamps down the hill from me, lighting up empty streets. Other lights scattered among the hills look like they belong to houses. Though I can’t see any of the buildings well, they appear to be fairly large and would have to belong to a caste well above mine. If such an enclave is located near the cemetery, I don’t recall it.

Looking east, I can see the glow of New Cardiff rising above the darkened hills. It seems more intense than I remember it.

I re-input the location of my mother’s grave. Since I’m close now, the jump should be accurate.

Where I end up, though, is inside a house. I double-check the coordinates. According to my Chaser, I’m within a few feet of where my mother and sister are buried.

A low growl emanates from a room to my right and a large dog appears, moving slowly as if stalking its next meal. I shove the recall button and instantly return to the hill.

The problem must be with my Chaser. Either it’s taking me to incorrect locations or to incorrect times. Maybe both.

But this is something I can check. I just need to go to a location I know well. Someplace I can use to recalibrate the Chaser.

Home.

I need to go home.

__________

T
AKING A SERIES
of small jumps, I head for the house I once shared with my father in the heart of the Shallows.

Over thirty percent of New Cardiff’s working and tradesman class live in this part of the city. It’s an area of apartment blocks and tiny homes—almost none owned by the people who live in them—where the streets are narrow and the only personal carriages one sees are pieced-together jobs that look as if they may fall apart at any moment.

I finish my final jump and look around. I’m in a residential area, but the homes are much nicer than those in the neighborhood I grew up in. Because of an abundance of tall trees, I can see no visual landmarks to confirm my location.

Instead of taking another jump, I decide to walk until my view is no longer obscured.

As I pass through the neighborhood, I see more of the same kind of strange vehicles I saw in New York. Most have names on the back that I’ve never seen on a carriage before—Honda and LaCrosse and Forrester and Chevrolet and Ford and Caravan.

I lock away the new information one bit at a time so that it doesn’t overwhelm me and make me lose sight of what I’m doing. But then I reach a wide road that allows me a better view of the area. The hills to the west and north are exactly the same hills I saw from my home every day growing up.

My Chaser isn’t broken.

I
am
in the Shallows.

I
am
home.

The date function, then. Perhaps that’s where the device has failed.

I seize on this possibility out of desperation.

The nurse in New York lied to me. I wasn’t unconscious for four days. I must have been in a coma that lasted much, much longer. Years, maybe. So, in a way, I’ve traveled into the future. I did it by sleeping my way there.

My theory is riddled with holes, such as how long would I have to be out for so much change to occur? Or why would the cemetery be replaced by houses? But I shut these out of my mind and try to convince myself that I’m right.

What I need is proof, something that will ease my mind.

I walk several blocks until I spot a sign I’ve seen before.

7-ELEVEN
.

At the one in New York, I remember seeing newspapers in a stack near the front counter. The store down the street would likely contain the same.

Sure enough, upon entering, I see a rack near the door with a sign across the top reading
LOS ANGELES TIMES
. It’s not a paper I’ve heard of, but it probably comes from the downtown district. Unfortunately, the rack is empty.

I look over at the clerk, a Spanish-looking man in his mid-forties. “Are there any more newspapers?”

“Today’s are here. Just haven’t put them out yet. If you want a copy you’ll have to pull it out of the bundle by the back door.” He nods his chin toward the rear of the store.

“Thank you,” I say, and head back.

The stack is sitting on the floor, held together by several clear straps. I have to move one to the side to see the date.

MARCH 24, 2015

It has to be a misprint.

I hurry back to the front of the store.

“You didn’t find ’em?” the clerk asks.

“What’s the date?”

“Uh, the twenty-fourth.”

“Of March?”

“Yeah.

“Two thousand fifteen?”

He looks at me through narrowing eyes. “What else would it be?”

I leave the store in a state of shock. The honk of a horn is all that keeps me from stepping onto the road and being hit. Moments later, there’s a part of me that wishes I didn’t heed the warning.

I can no longer hide the truth from myself. There’s only one answer for what happened, and it has nothing to do with a faulty Chaser.

Something in the past has changed, and the ripple has led to this.

Two words repeat over and over in my mind.

Twelve seconds.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

E
XHAUSTED, I USE
a trick Johnston taught me: find an out-of-the-way, quiet spot that shows no signs of anything having been there in a while, then jump back to eleven p.m. and stretch out. By the time my eyes crack open again, it’s already after nine a.m.

The hours spent asleep were not gentle ones. I was bombarded by dreams of my world unraveling and being replaced by different versions of what I can only describe as hell. I also saw people I know—Marie, Sir Gregory, Palmer, my mother, my father—fall past me, calling my name as they grab for my hand, but always slipping away before I can close my fingers.

And Ellie.

For a moment upon waking I feel relief, but it quickly fades. I don’t know if the world I’m in now is hell or not, but I do know the world I’m
from
is gone.

One other thing I know.

I’m the one who did it.

I can’t afford to make another mistake, so it’s imperative that I know for sure the change occurred at the Three Swans Tavern.

I need to find a library.

Pushing myself to my feet, I catch sight of my old-fashioned shirt. Before I do anything else, I should clean up, get some new clothes, and find something to eat. And money. I’m going to need some of that, too.

Using the Chaser, I skip into a series of back gardens until I find a home where the occupants aren’t home. One more time hop and I’m inside.

The house I grew up in had only a tub for washing. In this place, I find a bathroom off the largest bedroom upstairs that has not only a tub twice as big as my family’s, but also a roomy shower.

I have no idea how long it will be before the people who live here return, but I’m a mess so I strip off my clothes and step inside.

Once I figure out how to balance the temperature of the water, the shower is amazing. I don’t think I ever want to take a bath again. I look around for soap but find only several plastic bottles. One is labeled
SHAMPOO
and another
BODYWASH
. I know what shampoo is, and though the phrasing is odd, I can guess what bodywash means.

Five minutes later, I’m dripping wet but clean. I grab a large towel hanging from a nearby rack and dry off. In the bedroom, I search for clothing. I don’t like the idea of stealing but I don’t have much of a choice.

From what I find, I know a man and a woman share this room. It’s shocking to me how much clothing the woman has. Dresses and blouses and skirts of various lengths fill most of the closet. They’ve got to be Threes for sure to be able to afford this much. And shoes. My lord. Who would ever need so many shoes?

The man’s clothes are limited to a handful of jackets and pants and shirts. I pull out a shirt but immediately see it won’t fit me. The man, though probably around the same height as I am, clearly has a much larger girth.

I decide to check the other bedrooms. One of the rooms belongs to a girl, but boys live in the other two, one of whom, it turns out, is about the same size I am. I pull on a pair of pants made of a blue, rugged material, but when I zip and snap up, I find that the waist rides low, exposing the top of my butt. I search through the boy’s cabinet for a pair that has a higher waist, but all the pants are the same.

I realize I’ll have to make do, for now, with the pants I have on, as uncomfortable as they make me feel. I go in search of a shirt. In an upper drawer, I find a pullover of a thin soft fabric that feels like cotton. It’s dark gray and has a silhouette of a stylized bat printed on the front. It’s long enough to cover the top of the pants so I won’t be exposing the crack of my butt to the whole world.

In the closet, I find shoes. Not nearly as many as the woman has, but several times more than the single pair I had growing up. The ones I try on are a bit large, but they’ll do.

After dressing and collecting my things, I head down to the kitchen. There, I take two apples from a bowl on a counter and several slices of bread out of a clear bag, and then turn on the faucet and take a long drink of water. I want to look through the cupboards but I’ve already taken enough from this house, so I set a new destination on my Chaser and leave.

Though I still don’t have any money, I feel less conspicuous now. As I walk down some busy streets, I see larger vehicles that appear to be for transportation of large groups, similar to the Pub Cs—public carriages—I’m familiar with. They stop every few blocks at locations marked by signs. These usually have overhead covering and a bench where people can wait for the next ride.

It’s at one of these that I find an older woman who points me in the direction of a library. __________

T
HE SIGN OUTSIDE
reads:

LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY

WOODLAND HILLS BRANCH

Los Angeles again. Still no mention of New Cardiff.

Inside, the library is laid out not too differently from those I have known. In the history section, I decide to work my way backward through time, so I start by choosing volumes that will give me an overview of the twentieth century.

After finding an empty table hidden among the shelves, I crack the book open and begin to read. It’s not long before my heart starts to race. With the exception of location names—though not even all of those—nothing’s familiar here. It tells of “world wars”—two of them—and more individual nations than I can fathom. The British Empire is nonexistent, at least in the way I know it. Instead, a “Commonwealth of Nations” encompasses many of the territories I know as being under direct rule of the king. According to the book, those territories are now mostly independent nations.

What surprises me is that the only part of North America that belongs to the group is Canada. The part of the continent that’s always been my home is its own nation, with no direct political ties to the kingdom at all. It calls itself the United States of America.

When I come to the section about the 1970s, I feel the weight of my actions closing in on me again. In the year 1976, the US—as the book often refers to it—celebrated its bicentennial.

Two hundred years of existence means the nation was started in 1776, one year after the twelve-second error at the Three Swans Tavern.

Leaving the book unfinished, I hurry to the shelves and select a text specifically on the history of the United States of America. I don’t even make it past the table of contents before I know the truth.

A chapter entitled “George Washington” includes subsections with the titles: “The War Years 1775-1783” and “The First President 1789-1797.”