The Meridians (42 page)

Scott did so, not knowing what was happening or how he had been spared the vicious death that he had somehow escaped eight years ago but had been doomed to repeat since then, but trusting in what Kevin said implicitly.

He covered the girl's eyes.

***

52.

***

Lynette felt the knife bite into her, felt blood sluice down her neck in a thin trickle as the blade passed through the outer layers of her skin.

But when the end came, it did not come as she expected it. She expected to feel the warmth of her blood, followed by a widening coldness that would overtake her and fly her soul on wings of sleet into the heavens. But neither happened. She felt blood, but not as much as she expected. And then she felt...nothing.

There was a popping noise, a pressure in her ears that she recognized.

She opened her eyes -

(God, how can I even be opening my eyes?)

- and looked beside her.

Her son was still there. But he was not looking at her any more. He was looking at something else. A dark figure in the darkness, black on black in the inky shadows of the car where she should be bleeding to death but somehow was not.

The figure was not that of the gray man.

It was someone holding something. A squirming bundle of white-faced fear.

A girl. A little girl.

Her son spoke. "Witten was right," he said, for the first time pronouncing the "r" round as it should have been spoken. Then he added, "Cover Tina's eyes."

The darkness that sat beside her moved, and suddenly the little girl's face disappeared, covered by a hand. A hand that she recognized, for she had memorized its every curve and feature in the hours before this last race against death had begun. She had pondered it, looked at it, burned it into her cerebrum with indelible memory. It was the hand that had held hers during the preceding evening.

It was Scott's hand.

What's going on? she wondered. What's happening?

Then there was a sound.

She looked outside the car, through the glass, and gasped.

***

53.

***

Scott heard the gasp beside him, but did not move. Not until Kevin did, not until the boy moved, and then he followed the boy's gaze with his own, looking outside the car.

And saw unreality made real.

Two forms teetered on the edge of the porch of the nearby house. They swayed, locked in an embrace as close as that of any pair of lovers.

But they were not lovers. They were strangers, they were nightmares made flesh, they were impossibilities and unrealities that had found themselves somehow made real in this most impossible of nights.

The gray man.

Tina's father.

The two men clutched at each other. No, not at each other, Scott suddenly realized. They held the knives. Mr. Gray held the knife that he had been about to slash open Lynette's neck with, and Tina's father was gripping the haft of the knife he had been about to plunge into Scott's chest and heart.

Only instead of plunging it into Scott's heart, the knife had somehow ended up in the chest of Mr. Gray.

And instead of slashing through Lynette's throat, Tina's father now wore an extra smile, one that curved up and gushed blood in a gaping, gasping wound right below the man's chin.

Scott's breath caught in his throat. Somehow the gray man had been transported from his place in the car and had taken Scott's own place. But he had been moved in the middle of his deadly attack, and somehow that attack had still continued, ending in the imminent death of Tina's father rather than in the demise of Lynette.

And Tina's father's own attack had continued unabated by the change, the only difference being that it was Mr. Gray who was now gasping his last breath instead of Scott.

Scott's mouth opened wide. He couldn't understand -

(Kevin's eyes
.
)

- what was going on. He shook his head as though clearing it of water, of the thick membrane of unreality that seemed to be coating his mind, his body, his very existence.

Outside the car, the two men fell, still holding each other in a grim, grisly, gruesome embrace of death.

"What's going on?" asked Tina.

Scott had no answer for her.

Then there was another sound.

He looked in the other direction, in the direction of the noise, the opposite side of the car from the horrific tableau in the dust beside the house.

It was a tapping. A rapping. A knock-knock-knocking.

It was John Doe.

***

54.

***

The man was still rapping on Scott's window.

Only it's not
my
window, thought Scott. I should be outside, I should be dead in the dirt and Lynette should be dead in here. What the hell is happening?

John Doe knocked again. The old man looked unhappy for the first time that Scott had seen him.

"What's going on?" said someone beside him. Lynette. She sounded as shocked and strangely calm as he felt. Something was wrong, but more than that, something was right.

He looked at John Doe again. Looked the old man in the eyes.

Kevin's eyes.

"Hello, Kevin," said Scott.

John Doe smiled. He opened the door and gestured for Scott to get out. "You've figured it out, eh?" he said. "I'd forgotten."

Scott's world was spinning. How could this be Kevin? Kevin was sitting next to him in the car.

He shook his head again. Cobwebs, cobwebs everywhere, he thought, and not a drop to drink.

He felt like he'd blown a critical fuse somewhere. But he knew he had to go with Kevin - with this older version of the young boy beside him.

He carefully put Tina down on the seat beside Lynette and the little boy Kevin. "Untie her," he said softly. "Don't let her look out the window."

Lynette said nothing, merely nodded and began working on the knots that tied the young girl. She would have time now. They would all have time.

Scott got out of the car and the old Kevin closed it.

"What's happening?" he asked the old man.

"What do you think is happening?" responded Kevin, and there was a trace of the mirth in his eyes again, though it was still mostly masked by uncharacteristic seriousness.

"I think you have Kevin's eyes," said Scott. "I think Mr. Gray is dead. More than that, I don't know."

Kevin nodded. "I'm Kevin, all right, you have that much at least."

"From the future?"

Kevin shook his head. "No, from the other-now."

"Other-now?"

Kevin looked through the window at the occupants of the car. "So young," he sighed to himself. "Mother and me, we're so young. And Tina. So beautiful." He knuckled a tear away from his eye, then laughed at himself. "Look at me, getting all maudlin." He looked at Scott again. "I'm Kevin, but Kevin from a different dimension."

"String theory," said Scott.

Kevin nodded. "I'm from a place where time flows opposite to time here. I'm what's called a meridian: I live in a timeflow that perfectly overlaps the timeflow of my other-dimensional counterpart," he said, nodding at the boy in the car.

"Overlaps?"

"On the day Kevin is born here, that's the day I die. On the day
he
dies, I will be born. Exact overlaps of the same experiences, only moving in a different direction. As your universe cools and grows dim in its final days, ours will be birthing new planets in exactly the same sequence as yours has done."

"But how -" began Scott. He closed his mouth with an almost audible snap. How could Kevin grow up to be a man like this? How could the autistic boy speak so fluidly and fluently?

"How come I'm not autistic?" asked Kevin. Scott nodded. Kevin pointed into the car. "That's why Tina was so important," he said. "That's why you had to save her. Because she grows up to cure autism. She saves me."

Scott felt anger stir in his breast. "She saves you? Are you saying that all of this - my wife, my son dying, Lynette's husband being killed - all that was so that we could get you and Tina together and cure your autism?"

Kevin shook his head. "No. If that were all there was to it, I would never have meddled. Hell, I wouldn't have been
able
to meddle." He smiled again. "I'm a bit more than just an autistic kid all growed up. I was born with something of an unusual talent."

"What?" said Scott. He felt anger growing and growling within him. He knew that Kevin was a good kid, knew that he'd be willing to do almost anything for him. But only
almost
anything. And losing his wife to make the man's life a bit more romantic was definitely beyond the "almost."

"I'll show you," said Kevin.

He grabbed Scott's hand. He winked.

And the world, once again, disappeared.

***

55.

***

The worlds fly by. They are color and sound and fury and love.

In one of them, Scott is paralyzed, growing old and alone.

In another, he sees himself working as a garbage man. He has no family. He is alone and comes home every night and drinks until he sleeps.

In another, there is nothing of him. He is gone.

World after world, vision after vision.

In another world, the people move backwards. They are as ghosts, people moving in strange, jerky movements as they run in reverse, as they speak in reverse, as they eat and drink and copulate and love and hate - all in reverse.

"My world," says Kevin. The old man. He does something, and the worlds stop flying by. "An exact duplicate of yours, but with one difference: the timeflow. I'm moving forward according to my timeflow, but that means I'm moving backward according to your perceptions. So every time I come to you, you perceive an earlier version of me." He smiles, jolly again. "That's why I get prettier and dumber each time."

"What about Mr. Gray?"

Kevin sobers. "Mr. Gray was an accident. I was trying to save you, Scott. You're critically important, and you had to live."

Again, Scott grows angry. "
I
had to live? What about my family, you sonofabitch?"

Kevin shakes his head. "There was no universe where your family survives, Scott. They die no matter what. And it's always a horrible, painful death. If I had saved them in the alley, they would have gone on to die of wasting diseases only a few years later. Same with Tina's father. There's not a single universe where he makes it past this night in his timeflow. He either dies by killing himself after killing you and Tina, or I save you and Tina by making you and Mr. Gray switch places at the instant he was also about to kill my mother."

Scott tries to understand the words that John Doe - that Kevin, the other-Kevin - is saying. He shakes his head. "But...couldn't you do your time travel thing and find some way to save all of us?"

Kevin chuckles, though the sound is devoid of happiness. It is the chuckle of a man who has had to make too many harsh decisions for one lifetime. "I don't travel through time. I travel through the dimensions of space and matter. Time doesn't alter its flow. I couldn't just zap ahead and find a way to save you...I had to follow time's normal movements until a moment when I could move to save you by simply changing the positions of certain material objects in your universe."

"You mean switching me and Mr. Gray."

Kevin nods. He puts a hand into his pocket and withdraws something. Two very old, faded, red foam rubber balls. "These were some of the first things I ever moved as a child, discovering my talents. The first thing was a bullet, which I reached out and grabbed while still in the womb. Moving people is harder, but still doable."

"And what about Mr. Gray?" asks Scott, returning to his original question. "How was he able to do what he did...disappear and reappear? And what about his aging?"

Kevin frowns. Another world winks by as he does so. In this world, Scott is a quadriplegic. Shot in the chest and arm. History seeks to reassert itself. "Mr. Gray was an accident," says Kevin. "His name's Adrian, actually. He was a hitman, as you've figured out already. But I tried - will try, as far as I perceive it - to save you." Kevin grimaces again. "Something will go wrong. Apparently I die, and Adrian - Mr. Gray - will be pulled into my timeflow. He'll be catapulted to the moment of my birth, and exist backward for sixty two years."

Scott feels confusion welling inside, replacing the anger he felt before. "But, if Mr. Gray is sent to your time, then why is there a Mr. Gray here and now?"