Timescape (6 page)

If
I'm
feeling this way, imagine how David feels. He was beat
yesterday
, then all this happens. Taksidian coming at us through the closet, the showdown in the clearing, finding the ruins of Los Angeles—of humankind—and those creatures coming after us. He's younger than I am, and . . . and I'm here and he's fighting for his life on the
Titanic!
Xander, you are such a baby!

He forced himself to move. Heading for the stairs to the third floor, he glanced back and stopped. Jesse had left a mess on the floor: himself spilled out all over it . . . but something more.

Xander went back to the blood. A trail of it snaked away, running to the steps and down each one. It wasn't this that had caught his attention, however. There was something on the floor near where Xander had knelt, where Jesse's seemingly skinned hand had rested. It was a message, symbols, written in blood:

Clearly, the first one was a house . . . or a spearhead. Then the letter
T
, or an ax, followed by . . . SpongeBob's teeth? Like in
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
, their survival might depend on figuring out what the pictograms meant. Not that Xander thought for a second that there was anything fun or entertaining about the symbols: he couldn't imagine what it must have taken Jesse to draw them, stabbed, bleeding out. They must be important, even though they made no sense. He hurried to the room they had dubbed their Mission Control Center, and came back with a pad of paper and a pen. He copied the symbols, trying to be as precise as he could. He did it twice, just to be sure.

The blood on his hands was sticky. It left his fingerprints in red in the margins of the paper.

A bloodied document with cryptic symbols from a dying man
, he thought.
We're living a movie.

Two weeks ago, he would have added
Yee-haw!
But this was a story he didn't like so much, one of those films that doesn't end happily and sends the audience shuffling out with long faces.

He returned to the MCC and dropped the pad on the desk beside the computer monitor. That task completed, his thoughts returned to Dad and David. He needed to be in the antechamber, waiting for their return. He left the room and tromped over the fallen walls. At the base of the stairs, he spotted Toria helping Nana maneuver out of the crooked hallway and onto the landing. He started up, then stopped.

“Wait there,” he said. “I have to take care of something.”

“Xander,” Toria said, “Nana needs to lie down.”

“Gimme a minute. I'll be right back.” He ran back to Jesse's blood, pooled and drizzled and smeared on the floor. It would do Toria and Nana no good to see that. He darted into the bathroom and drenched a towel under the tub's faucet, then dropped it onto the worst of the blood. He swirled it around then carried it, dripping, to the tub. He squeezed it out. He remembered that in
Psycho
, Alfred Hitchcock had used chocolate syrup for blood because brown looked better in black-and-white than red did.
This
was red, and it wrenched at his guts more than any horror movie had ever done.

He went back and forth three more times, swabbing the blood from the hardwood floor. The thin layer of blood that made up the symbols had dried, and he had to scrub to remove them.

“Xander?” Toria called. She was out of sight, but closer than she should have been.

“Just a minute,” Xander said. “Stay there!”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” He tossed the sopping towel into the tub, then used another towel to wipe up the trail from hallway to bathroom.

He started back toward them. “Okay.”

They met at the corner.

Toria squinted up the hall. “What were you doing?”

“Just a little . . .” He almost said
cleanup
, but that would have led to questions he didn't want to answer. He finished by shaking his head.

“You don't look well,” Nana said.

Xander shrugged. “I'm worried about Dad and Dae.” He looked down. His hands were stained pink, his fingernails outlined in bright red. He put them behind his back.

“Where's Jesse?” Nana said. “Did Keal find him?”

“He was hurt,” Xander said. “Unconscious. Keal took him to the hospital.” Of course, they had to know
that
much.

“Jesse?” Toria said, tears instantly welling in her eyes.

“Oh,” Nana said. “How?”

Xander shook his head. “Something Taksidian did, I guess.” Their faces were more than he could bear. “I'd better go wait for Dad and David.”

He tried to smile and was pretty sure it turned out looking like he was sucking on a lemon. He brushed passed them and up the flight of stairs.

Wait for them? Is that what he'd said? He had no intention of waiting. His brother needed him. Dad too, even if he didn't know it. Xander wasn't about to sit on his butt while they drowned or froze to death because of a ship that had gone down nearly a hundred years ago.

CHAPTER
thirteen

“. . . Three!”

David and Dad jumped. The mist hanging over the water and all the darkness made David misjudge where the surface was. His feet hit it well before he thought they should. He quickly pulled in a breath, but had only filled his lungs halfway when his head plunged under. Didn't matter: the iciness of the water made his muscles contract, and he lost all his air in a single sharp exhale. He was hurting now. How far under, he didn't know, but it felt like
fathoms
. Black, icy, churning water everywhere. He needed to breathe.

Then he felt Dad tugging at him, pulling him up. He kicked, kicked, fought the impulse to release his grip on his father's life vest and paddle. Dad was doing a better job than he could do. He felt the water rushing past him as they rose.

But oh, he needed air! His chest ached as though a glacier giant had punched his sternum, crushing it.

He opened his eyes. Blackness everywhere. The ocean salt stung; he felt like someone had rubbed sandpaper over his eyeballs. Water slipped into his mouth, and he breathed it into his lungs. He coughed, tried not to breathe in more of the sea—or throw up.

He broke surface. Air! Air! But it seemed as much water went in as the sweet stuff his lungs needed. He coughed and choked. His father lifted him, let him cling to his head as David fought to get oxygen in and water out. Slowly, he caught his breath. He realized he was pushing his father under; the life vests of 1912 weren't the buoyancy rock stars they were in his time. He lowered himself down, off Dad's head, deeper into the water.

A white cloth—it might have been a tablecloth or bed-sheet—floated like a drowned ghost beside them. The little girl's doll Dad had seen on the deck bobbed up and down an arm's reach away. He felt a lot like that doll: totally helpless, at the mercy of the ocean.

“I'm freezing,” David said. It wasn't the kind of cold that was content to brush against your skin. His organs felt cold, his stomach and heart. He imagined his bones becoming brittle with the cold. Something was going to bump into him, and he would shatter.

“The water's twenty-eight degrees,” Dad said. “The average person can last no more than twenty minutes in water this cold.”

“Twenty m-m-minutes,” David chattered. Shorter than an episode of
Avatar: The Last Air Bender
. “We'd b-b-better find the p-p-portal fast.”

Dad nodded. “We have to get away from the ship before it breaks up and goes under. It might suck us down with it.”

They began kicking away.

“Stay close to me,” Dad said. “Maybe we can keep each other warm.” He blinked water out of his eyes and scowled at David's distressed expression. “What is it?”

“I d-d-don't think I have any w-warmth to share.”

“Don't worry about it. Do me a favor, slip through that buoy. Wear it under your arms.”

“Hold it for me,” David said. Without thinking too hard, because he wouldn't act if he did, he went underwater and shot up through the center of the ring, arms first. With the ring pushing on his armpits, he floated higher in the water than his father. As tight as the ring was around his chest, it was better this way: it kept water from splashing his face and allowed him to get a better grip on Dad's life vest.

Dad continued to swim away from the big ship. He stayed on his side, kicking with both feet and paddling with the underwater hand. The other hand gripped David's ring.

“How's—” Dad said, and spat out a mouthful of water.

“How's your cast holding up?”

“It's kind of crumbling,” David said. “But it's so cold my arm is numb, so I don't feel anything.”

A loud
crack!
filled the air, the sound of a thousand rifles shooting at the same time. Then the sound of crushing metal: a low
eeeeeerrrrrrrrr
.

Dad gaped over David's head at the ship. “It's breaking in two,” he said. He began kicking and paddling harder.

David watched as the boards splintered on the deck about halfway up the sloping portion of the ship that was out of the water. The part of the ship above this break began leaning back toward the water in jarring spurts. Passengers who'd been clinging to the farthest reaches of the bow lost their grips on the railings, mounted fixtures, and other people. They either fell over the sides into the water; backward over the bow, striking the propellers; or down the length of the deck, landing on riggings or vents or sliding right into the fissure.

It was like watching people jump to their deaths from a burning building.

He blinked and rubbed water out of his eyes, not believing what he was seeing. About ten feet over the deck, just below the break, a shimmering rectangle had appeared. It was probably nothing most people would even see, just a slight wavering of the light, distorting a section of porthole windows behind it. But David was accustomed to seeing it. He knew what it was.

“Dad,” David said, pointing. “That's the portal, isn't it? The way home?”

“Better not be,” Dad said. “We can't—”

Then David's mistake became apparent. It wasn't the portal home. It was a new one
from
home. Xander materialized in front of it and dropped toward the deck, feet kicking, arms pinwheeling, mouth and eyes wide open. He appeared to be wearing a white steward's coat, and held something shiny in his left hand. Before hitting the deck, he disappeared from David's line of sight.

CHAPTER
fourteen

“Xander!” Dad yelled.

The ship's bow dropped away from the break quickly now. It splashed into the water, and the entire inverted-
V
of the ship rose in the air, then settled back down. A giant wave, caused by the crashing bow, rolled toward David and Dad.

“Hold on,” Dad said. They rode the swell, rising high in the air. So high, in fact, that David could see the deck where Xander had dropped. His brother was hanging on to a rope, swinging over the wooden planks like a pendulum. The ship was seconds away from completely submerging. If Xander didn't get away, he'd ride it to the ocean floor like a cowboy breaking a steer.

“Xander!” David yelled, but the swell was gone and they were dropping down again.

The ship sank faster, abandoning all pretense of seaworthiness. The section forward of the break plunged. It slipped into the ocean like a snake into a hole.

Xander appeared at the edge of the deck, sliding on his stomach over the planks themselves. Without pausing, he sailed over the edge and fell into the churning sea.

“Get away from the ship, Xander!” Dad yelled. “Xander, swim away!”

The swells made it impossible to spot where he'd gone.

“Dad!” David said, choking on a throatful of saltwater. He coughed, coughed. Dad slapped him on the back—
Is that really supposed to help?
David thought almost automatically. He spat out water, exchanged it for air. Finally he could say, “Dad, do you think Xander knows to get away from the sinking ship?

You think he heard us?”

“He's seen
Titanic
, right?” Dad said.

“He's seen
everything
!”

Dad nodded. “It showed how people were pulled under by the suction created when the ship when down. Xander will remember. He'll swim away from it. He will.” He sounded more hopeful than sure.

They watched the spot where Xander had hit the water. Just swells and churning sea.

Beyond, the
Titanic
pulled its bow under. The rear section of the ship rose up like a hand grasping for help that wasn't there. Then it plunged straight down, disappearing in seconds.

“Xander!” Dad called.

“What's he doing here, anyway?” David said. “Why'd he—” It felt as though a hand grabbed him from below and tugged him down. Before he knew it, his head was completely submerged. Water rushed down his throat. He kicked and kicked, paddled his hands, squinted at the bubbles escaping from his nose and mouth, wanted to follow them up. Finally, cold air slapped his cheeks, and he gulped in a breath, then another. Dad grabbed him and pulled him close.