Infinite Time: Time Travel Adventure (5 page)

This girl—Scarlet—can run fast, and she’s carrying Tora. I’m glad she didn’t ask me to carry her, but also a little guilty. I have to really work to keep up with her. I’m not the athletic type at all; that was the old Parker, who died with his dad.

Somehow I manage to not lose her in the crowd. But it’s not easy. She switches direction as suddenly as a rat in a maze, moving through streets that I don’t even see until she disappears into them. Her backpack bounces with every step. Two black metal-looking rods stick out from the bag, and I wonder what they are for.

We run for what seems like forever through the chaotic chatter of people on the streets, but is probably just a minute or two. And then she ducks into some side streets and the crowd recedes, the sudden silence almost deafening to my ears.

Scarlet slows to a walk, but in a quick pace, her spine impossibly straight as she navigates through this city that must be familiar to her.

“Where are we?”

She doesn’t acknowledge me.

I have to walk at a slow jog to keep up with her. My lungs burn. I try to control my breathing so she can’t hear just how breathless I am. It’s bad enough that I’m dreaming about some hot chick who apparently just saved me from a bad situation, but it would be way worse to let her know just how out of shape I really am.

I need to think about superpowers, and take control of the dream, just like I try to do with my nightmares. What superpower should I give myself? Speed, strength, muscles? Yeah, all of that. I concentrate hard, but nothing happens. I’m still wimpy Parker in my boxers. This sucks!

Scarlet weaves into an alley, the rotten smell of old food mixed with urine lingering in the air, nothing like the nice smell of Chinese takeout.

“I think we lost them,” Scarlet says, lowering Tora to the ground. Tora pushes down her plaid skirt and T-shirt, which must have ridden up during the run.

“Lost who?” I ask.

Scarlet looks up and down the alley. “Vandir’s men.”

“Who’s Vandir? And who are his men?”

Scarlet stops her inspection. “You’re going to meet them now. Keep Tora safe, she’s the key.”

There is no one around us. “What do you mean?”

Scarlet nudges her head, and I notice a blimp in my sight, as if there is a floating see-through puddle hovering sideways above the ground. And with a blink of my eyes, two men are standing where the puddle was. They just frigging appeared from nowhere, this is awesome!

They look like they just stepped out of the movie
Men in Black
, dressed in pressed black suits—literally men in black. Scarlet seems to know the men. They walk into the middle of the alley to greet one another.

“Hey, Clint,” Scarlet says to one of them. He squints as she says his name. He doesn’t know her, but she knows him. “How you doing? How’s your family?”

His eyebrows rise as a cautious look comes into his eyes. “My family?”

“Did they enjoy that fried chicken last night? It sure smelled good. I almost wished I had time to stick around and eat a little of it. And the mashed potatoes? Where did your wife get that recipe?”

The one she called Clint steps toward Scarlet. His eyes narrow as he stares down at her. The man towers over her, yet seems nervous around her.

“What are you talking about? How do you know all that?”

“You should have seen your daughter Annie’s reaction when I transported her. It was really priceless.”

“What did you do to her?” he demands. “What did you do to my daughter?”

“Don’t worry about Scarlet,” the other guy says, grabbing Clint’s arm. “She’s just playing with you.”

Clint doesn’t seem to hear him. He pushes his sleeve up, exposing a silver watch on his wrist.

“If you did anything…” he says before he suddenly disappears as quickly as he arrived.

What the hell?

Scarlet begins to laugh. “I love playing with the new guy.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” the other guy says.

“Chill, Hector. I was just having some fun.”

“It wasn’t funny. You scared the shit out of him. He thinks you did something awful to his family.”

“It was a joke. You need to lighten up.”

“I’ve had my fill of your childish crap.” He thrusts a finger toward her, coming within inches of shoving it into her face. “If you don’t stop—”

“What are you going to do?” she demands, standing up to him even though he’s like a foot taller than her. “You going to teach me a lesson? You and Vandir’s army are all assholes.”

She starts to turn toward me. Her eyes narrow as they fall on me, then on Tora. Tora steps closer to me, and I place my arm around her.

Hector lunges toward Scarlet, his fists balled. I open my mouth to warn her, but even as the words are forming, she spins and lifts her leg, slamming her foot into his belly. Her coat flies in the air, following her like it's her cape. At the same time, a low cry of power comes from her lips as she slams the side of her hand into his neck and kicks him again in a place no man enjoys being kicked, making me wince as if I took the kick.

It all happens in a split second. In a flash, he goes from being the aggressor to being a lump of flesh moaning and groaning on the ground.

“What the… How did you learn to—”

“Bruce Lee.”

“There’ll be more of Vandir’s men. We have to find a place to hide until we figure out what to do next.”

“More? Why are Vandir’s men after you? And who the hell is Vandir?'

Scarlet ignores me and starts down the alley, turning onto yet another back street that is pretty much abandoned. This time I make the mistake of picking Tora up. My lungs burn as I rush after Scarlet, jogging to try to keep up.

Was she serious when she said Bruce Lee taught her to do that?

Ridiculous. Bruce Lee died in 1973. Scarlet can’t be much older than I am, and I was born in 2000.

But then again, this is a dream. Anything is possible in a dream. And wouldn’t it be so cool to train with the king of martial arts? I think if I could travel in time I would train with him.

Maybe she can teach me a move or two. Wouldn’t that impress Clara? Next time Travis picks on me, I could bust out some karate moves.

After about a dozen blocks, Scarlet ducks into an abandoned warehouse.

My arms tingle as I drop Tora to the ground. It's a good thing we stopped when we did, since there was no chance I could continue carrying Tora.

“We can hole up here for a while,” Scarlet says.

“And then what?”

She shakes her head, too busy walking around the huge, nearly empty warehouse, checking the few windows that still have glass in them and checking behind closed doors to make sure no one is hiding there.

I wander around the abandoned boxes and crates scattered through the room, just to have something to do. Most of them are empty, except for bubble-wrap sheets that people wrap breakables in. I pass a sheet to Tora, since I used to like playing with it when I was a kid. She frowns and doesn’t take it. I squeeze one of the little bubbles together, releasing a pop. Tora smiles and takes the sheet, and repeats the movement I showed her.

I inspect one of the boxes, which has an address on it.

160-0021 Tokyo Prefecture, Shinjuku-ku, Kabukicho 1-20-2, Japan.

“Tokyo? We’re in Tokyo? This has got to be the coolest dream ever!”

“You’re not dreaming,” Scarlet snaps, taking me by surprise. I hadn’t even heard her come up beside me.

“Obviously I’m dreaming. How else can I be here?”

“I don’t know. You must have fallen asleep at the same time as me. That’s the only way I can explain it.”

“What?”

I look at her, a little confused. She insists I’m not dreaming, but admits that I’m asleep? Doesn’t one go hand in hand with the other?

“I take it from all these questions you’ve never traveled before?” she asks.

I shrug. “My parents used to take me to Texas, but that was years ago.”

“That’s not what I meant, dumbass. I meant time travel.”

I snort as I bite back a giggle. “Time travel? Nobody can time travel.”

“You saw Clint do it.”

“That thing with the watch? Cool dream special effects. I’ve got a video game where people can use objects to stop time, so I figured that game had just worked its way into my dream.”

Scarlet shakes her head. “It's not a game, and it's not a dream. I can time-travel. Clint can. Bruce, too, when he’s not writhing on the ground, and apparently so can you.”

She turns away from me and heads for the window that overlooks the front of the building. She’s nervous, and that’s making me a little nervous.

“So you think I can time travel?” I ask, not believing what she says, but wanting to hear more from her.

“You must be, unless…”

“Unless what?”

“You’re just a dumb kid on a family vacation and wandered out of your hotel and are lost?”

“Hey, don’t call me dumb. Like I said, I’ve not traveled for years. I’m as confused about all this as you.”

“It just doesn’t add up right,” Scarlet says, peering out of the window.

I wipe my hand over the window, removing some of the dirt that has built up over the years, and look out at the view of Tokyo. It's pretty cool. Nothing like sleepy Long Island, more like New York City on overdrive. Everyone is rushing by, hurrying from one location to the next.

Tora’s getting more and more intense as she pops the bubble wrap, breaking the tension and making Scarlet and me smile.

“Did you really train with Bruce Lee?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“How is that even possible? He died like forty years ago.”

“Forty-two.”

“But how did you—”

“Time travel is a pretty useful thing.”

Time travel. The only thing I know about time travel is what I’ve learned in the games I play. And that’s not much. It doesn’t really interest me. I prefer games that are based on how many zombies I can kill in a minute, not the kind where I have to build societies or save the damsel in distress.

“You can travel in time,” I repeat, not believing her for one second.

“It’s not a dream, Parker. The sooner you accept that, the sooner we can get on with our assignment.”

“Assignment? What assignment?”

“The reason we’re here.”

She turns and stares at me for a minute, her eyes deeply unimpressed with what she sees. I suddenly feel as naked as a newborn baby. I move around the box I happen to be standing by, hiding my Avengers boxers. I cross my arms over my chest, as if that will hide how narrow and thin my chest is.

Not.

“Look,” she says, “we’re stuck here until we complete our assignment. And if we don’t complete it, there could be real consequences on the world, in our future world where our original selves are—oh, and we could die. So you need to shut up and let me figure out our next move.”

“Why can’t you just take us back to our own time like that guy in the alley?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way. Those guys have technology that allows them to travel in time. You and I are naturals. We do it without any help.”

“How does their technology work?” The geek inside me is dying to ask Scarlet hundreds of questions.

“A very awful and painful way.” She rubs the back of her neck as if remembering something. I want to push for more answers, but feel like she will shut down on me.

“So someone has invented a way to time travel. Let me guess, Vandir?”

Scarlet nods.

“This Vandir guy—I’m guessing he’s a guy because it's always a bad guy—would have gotten like a Nobel prize or something if he had invented time travel.”

“He doesn’t want money or prizes.”

“What does he want?”

Scarlet draws a circle in the black dirt on the window. “The world.”

“How can someone work out how to time travel and not tell anyone? This Vandir really does sound crazy. He could be the richest, most famous man in the world and have everything he wants.

“Oh, wait, I get it—a man that can have anything in the world wants just one thing: to control the world. Can’t you just go back in time, like you did to take karate classes with Bruce Lee, and stop him?”

She groans, rolling her eyes up at the ceiling as though asking a higher power for some help making me understand.

“I wish there was a manual or something to give to you newbies,” she sighs.

“There are more time travelers?”

“Yeah. Sorry, kid, you’re not that special,” Scarlet tells me. Frigging great. I thought I finally had something cool about me, only to find out I’m not the only one apart from Scarlet who can travel through time. All I need is for Travis to travel back in time and kick my ass some more.

“Let’s get on with this. There are two ways that naturals can travel. One is by falling into a deep sleep—what you and I apparently did at the same exact second tonight. This one is out of our control. Destiny or something sends us where we need to go. The other is by concentrating on a place so hard that you eventually just find yourself there. That’s how I met Bruce Lee.”

“But you can’t choose where you go when you fall asleep at night.”

“No.”

I nod, pretending to understand. But I really don’t. And she can apparently see it on my face because she makes a sound that’s between a groan and a laugh.

“Newbies can never understand the complexity of time. But you’ll get it. Eventually. I hope.”

“So, if we’re traveling in time, why are we here? What is our assignment?”

“The future, idiot. We’re controlling the future. Everyone we touch now, every person we rescue now, will have an impact on the future. It’s our job to make sure it has the right impact.”

Oh.

Like surviving high school wasn’t hard enough.