Tourists of the Apocalypse (39 page)

“Dylan,” she whispers.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to see Graham when you get there?”

“I hope so,” I stammer, realizing Izzy is not the only loved one on the other end of this wire.

“Then I think you need to hear this,” she goes on. “Graham told me something you might want to know.”

It had not occurred to me that all these years with Graham might have left her with quite a bit of knowledge. If I consider the amount of information imparted to me by Izzy, then Violet might know all sorts of things. Leave it to me to assume the pretty girl is just a set piece in my story.

“I’m listening.”

“He isn’t just the
Fail Safe
on this trip,” she confesses. “He’s the only
Fail Safe
that company has.”

“What exactly do you mean?”

“Okay, hold on,” she gulps and pauses to think about what she wants to say. “He told me that he was working for the Company at the very beginning of this project. Before they knew how to send people to a specific time they would just randomly send him alone. He’d go, take notes on the date and location, then pull the plug and wind up back at the machine thirty minutes before he went.”

“Standing next to himself.”

“Right, so they would log his notes, reset the machine and send him to another random location.”

“Every time they would end up with an extra Graham,” I blurt out in shock.

“Yes, so now a version of Graham goes on every trip as the
Fail Safe
,” she explains. “They only use him and the team doesn’t know. The Company never told anyone.”

This is startling information, but I’m not sure how it’s relevant to my predicament. Violet seems to think it is so I listen. My mind reels at the thought of an entire room full of Grahams somewhere in the future. An amusing image of a teacher calling attendance in a room where all the students are Graham floats across my thoughts.

“That’s interesting, but why does it matter right now?”

“The Graham you meet won’t know you. You’re going to be trying to convince him to believe your version of events, right?”

I nod as this is the likely scenario.

“How could you possibly know his secret? His people don’t even know” she shares, eyes widening like full moons. “Thought it might come in handy.”

“Thanks,” I nod, almost certain she’s right.

“Just promise me you will be kind with my secret,” she requests.

“What do you mean?”

“Dyson Chandler,” she whispers and pauses. “You’re collecting secrets.”

“Oh,” I shake my head, not realizing it was this obvious. “I didn’t mean--.”

“It’s okay Hun,” she assures me. “Just take good care of any other Violets you run into.”

I nod in agreement, leaning forward to kiss her on the cheek. She saw right through me. I shouldn’t be surprised. Women in her line of work have to be very perceptive. Before she can say anything else I take the slack in the wire and lay it across the table. I put my hand out to push Violet as far away as the wire will reach, then pick up the small hatchet and raise it over my head.

“When you see him,” Violet begs me with a hand on my forearm. “Tell Graham I miss him.”

“He won’t know who I’m talking about.”

“That doesn’t really matter,” she whispers, and then eyes me with the confident gaze she possessed a decade earlier. “Safe travels Dylan.”

I nod, scanning around the home of my youth. There are plenty of memories, some good and some bad. The faces of Jarrod, Dickey and Jerry pass over my mind. Thoughts of my mother cooking meals for the assembled groups over the past decade bring both smiles and frowns. Violet stands in front of me a beautiful woman, but once upon a time I watched her from the porch as a twentysomething beauty queen in stiletto heels and tight pencil skirts. I washed her Porsche in what became the life changing twist in the story of my life.

“Thank you,” I whisper, bringing the hatchet down on the wire.

I expect to be immediately dissolved like a
Star Trek Transporter
, but no such event occurs. When I turn to Violet her face is twisted in confusion. I try to speak but there isn’t any air in my lungs with which to make noise. She seems to move in slow motion and growing slower by the second. I step around her and walk to the door. Fitz has turned back to the house and is mid step in a running motion.
Was there a flash of light or something? Maybe a loud crack?
As I stand there with my hand on the worn wood of the screen door my world suddenly shrinks.

As if a curtain was drawn, my world goes dark. I can hear a faint hum, but it seems to be all around me rather than in front or behind. The device in my gut becomes very hot all at once, then I get a shock that drops me to my knees, although in the dark I can’t tell what I’m kneeling on. Another shock puts me in the fetal position holding my stomach. I hear Fitz’s voice, but it’s faint like a memory more than a sound.

“Where is he? Did he go without saying goodbye?”

A third shock rolls over me and my chest feels like an elephant sitting on it. I can’t breathe as crushing pain spreads across my chest.
My heart must have stopped.
Tingles roll up my neck to my brain, which begins to experience a cottony feeling like you get at the dentist after a shot. A long ago memory of Izzy lying on the bed in a hotel room flashes across my vision. The scent of salt water and cocoa butter fills my nose. She reaches her hands over her head and stretches her arms, arching her back as she does.

The fourth shock erases that happy memory, leaving only crushing pain.

You’re not in Kansas anymore…

My eyes flutter open to bright white lights. The ceiling above me looks like a Jackson Pollack painting, a blur of red and white. I’m cold, but the tile under me feels warm. Rolling onto my side I can see it’s marble squares, some red, some white. My lungs burn and my chest feels like someone has broken all of my ribs. When I run my hand down, the line that felt like rubber cement is gone, leaving behind a fresh incision sealed with what I assume is BIC, but it’s still tacky to the touch.

“You’re welcome,” a brash female voice assaults me from behind. “And you’re late. I almost checked out.”

Rolling onto my back, then onto the other elbow, I am confronted with an odd sight. A small woman is sitting in a pile of medical waste smoking a red cigarette. All around her are medical items, the most obvious being a defibrillator. Her hair is black with bangs cut in a straight line across her eyebrows. Her hair ends just below her ears and curls up toward the front. Black framed sun glasses sit atop her head and she blows smoke to one side watching me with an annoyed expression.

“Huh.”

“You’re late,” she barks exhaling smoke out of her nose.

When I try to sit up the side with the incision aches. She watches me with amusement, as if I am an oddity. Sitting up, I notice the lower half of her legs are missing. Her pants have been cut off in a jagged line revealing two scared stumps. Aware I am gawking, she wiggles her back up to the wall, pulls a white lab jacket down to try and cover her deformity, but it’s not long enough. She seems to come to terms with it quickly, pointing her cigarette at me aggressively.

“Are you Dylan Townsend?”

I nod.

“Well, you got twenty-five minutes to get your act together,” she warns, wagging her smoke at me.

“And you are?” I ask noticing that I am naked and my skin is reddish as if I had sunburn.

“Lucy.”

“Who sent you?” I demand, scanning around the room for some pants and noticing a guy in a yellow radiation suit lying face down in a pool of blood.

“Technically you did,” she remarks, flicking her cigarette ash at the dead body.

“And him?”

“Wrong place at the wrong time. Let’s call him
Mr. Collateral Damage
.”

“And you’re suggesting I told you to be here?”

She digs a hand inside her lab coat, coming back with a yellowed envelope. It’s inside a plastic baggie, but the writing on the side facing me is clear.

“Robert,” I mutter.

“Right,” she chirps tossing it to me. “Your instructions were for one of your family members to be here in the
Catch Room
on this day. I fixed it so the powers that be think there wasn’t any
Fail Safe
today
.
This buys you twenty plus minutes to pull it together,” she lectures me pointing to what looks like a prosthetic leg in the form of a shotgun. “Take that gun, go upstairs, get the girl, kill the bad guy and get the heck out of here.”

The envelope is much thicker than I recall. When I hold it up to the light to look, Lucy smirks.

“People have added things along the way. There’s a few pages written by your son, but quite a few people over the years left you a few words. It’s almost a family tree, although the older ones seem more like friends than relatives,” Lucy explains.

“How long?” I groan, getting to my feet while still trying to cover myself with one hand. “I mean how far forward.”

“Rounding down, just about five hundred years,” she explains, pointing to a door into a room with a glass window looking out at us. “There’s a locker in there with some clothes. Pants, shirts and lab jackets probably.”

Staggering into the next room, I see chairs on which you could sit and watch the
Catch Room
. There is also an elevator door in the back next to a locker. Inside the locker are some white pants. There are stiff blue dress shirts as well. I put on one of each and then go back to my new friend, Lucy.
Apparently she’s a distant relative.

“How do I look?” I shrug, stepping back into the room.

“Like the janitor.”

I nod, but find myself distracted by the dead man in the yellow suit.

“It was unplanned, but
Mr. Collateral Damage
is wearing shoes,” she offers pointing a crooked finger at the body. “If you’re not to skittish, you can use them. Another accidental benefit is that he came down the elevator in the
Observation Room
. I didn’t think we would have access to that. This means you don’t have to go up the maintenance lift. Get the slide card off his belt and you can go right up to the fifth floor. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

This reference strikes me as strange. Not due to the five centuries between us and the game of Monopoly, but rather that Graham used it once in a while trying to keep me away from Izzy.
Is this a common saying in this time period?

“I was under the impression I would be near-dead from radiation poisoning or cosmic rays,” I suggest. “Or whatever the physics nightmare I just came through was.”

“
Einstein-Rosen-Bridge
,” she informs me.

“Yes, fine, a bridge.”

“Thus why I’m here to pull that out of you,” she explains pointing at the blood soaked device that used to be in my belly. “And to treat your condition,” she lectures me is a serious voice. “Which was grave by the way.”

“What’s on the fifth floor?” I ask, pulling the shoes off the dead man with care.

“Eight people getting ready to step back in time,” she smirks; rolling her eyes in an over the top disgusted gesture. “You might know a few. There’s T-Buck, Blister, Cain, Able, a guy they call Mr. Dibble, Graham, Lance and your sweetie Isabelle.”

“They are up there now?” I blurt out excitedly. “Izzy is in this building?”

“This is your idea,” she points outs. “Yes, Isabelle is on the fifth floor. They are the eight travelers, four security guys, two techs, a power guy and two science nerds. One of them is Ian Flynn, who runs the entire place. There are eighteen shots in the gun, minus the one I used on
Collateral Damage
, so you got plenty to spare, but don’t go wild.”

“Slow down,” I stutter, trying to sort this out in my clouded mind.

I watched Izzy die
. I watched her take a bullet in the head from Lance’s gun. If this is as advertised, she is alive and breathing above my head. Graham is also back from the dead, but this is less surprising given Violet’s disclosure. I wish it was just Izzy, but you can’t make a cake without breaking a few eggs. I tie the black tennis shoes then snatch the slide card off his belt. On the floor, Lucy looks frail and broken. Her thighs stop short of her knees, ending in twisted stumps covered in scar tissue. She peers up at me, puffing her bangs up with a breath and tilting her head.

“So, we are related?” I repeat, taking a knee to roll up the cuff of the pants.

“Separated by twenty-one generations. In your terms, you are to me as Leonardo Da Vinci would be to you,” she rambles on. “If you and Leo were related of course.”

“And our family has been waiting to send you here all that time?”

“Yes, the myth of Dylan Townsend,” she chirps. “There were times when the prophecy was discounted, but one branch or the other always kept watch over the sacred letter.”

“Prophecy,” I balk. “Sacred Letter?”

“Don’t be so quick to discount it. In your time, not everyone believed the writings of Nostradamus,” she argues. “Virtually the exact same amount of time exists between you and Nostradamus as does between us. He wrote dozens of books full of predictions, but all you wrote was one lousy quatrain,” she points out, wagging a finger at the letter on the tile. “And yet, here I sit.”

I ponder a letter written to my son when he was but days old becoming a prophecy handed down through twenty-one generations of my family.
I did write the letter hoping someone would be here
. There was no way to know what effect a letter like that might have had.
Have I somehow altered the lives of hundreds of people for my own selfish desires?
Lucy is holding up a cell phone like device and rolling her eyes as if I’m not paying attention.

“Take this,” she orders. “All you have to do is point it at any door in the place and wait for it to open. There is going to be a massive alarm in less than thirty minutes. People will start to evacuate the building. Once you get Isabelle, bring her and anyone else you decide to save to the lobby then out to the parking lot. There will have been a huge EMP pulse explosion near the building so follow the phones GPS to a blue car in the satellite lot. The car’s GPS already has the route to my parent’s house programed in. Just drive the car there and my father will fill you in on everything.”