John Gone (40 page)

He reached for the tarnished, silver handle
on the door and pulled on it. It wouldn’t open. He lifted his right
hand, clad in a tightly fitting black leather glove, and knocked
heavily on the door. Eventually, there was an answer.

A four-foot elderly woman opened the door
wearing a black, silken sleeping blindfold pushed above her
eyebrows. She reached a finger into one of her eyes and rubbed as
she looked at the thin tree of a man standing before her. Slowly,
she arched her neck upward to his old, shaggy face.

“
Ich suche eine Frau
.” the man said,
“
Groß, Braunes Haar, Amerikanisch. Ihr Name ist Karen
,”

“
Es ist zwei Uhr!
” she replied.

“
Die Frau, bitte
,” he answered.

“
Es gibt keine Karen hier
,” she said,
closing the door.

The man placed a soggy boot between the door
and its frame, preventing it from shutting. He removed his hat and
placed it underneath his arm.

“
Tulip? Tulpe? Braunes Haar,
Amerikanisch
,” he tried.

“
Tulpe
,” the woman repeated, nodding
her head. “
Zwei-B
,” she said.

“
Herzlichen Dank
,” the man said,
giving the woman a slight, respectful nod. He pushed the door
slowly open and made his way inside.

The small older woman turned toward the
stairs in the back and pointed her finger upward. The man nodded
and headed toward them. She stopped him with a touch to his side
and moved an upward-pointing finger to her lips. “Shhh,” she
said.

The man nodded again and made his way up the
short, creaking wooden stairs. The ceiling above the stairway was
low, and the man was forced to duck down to pass beneath it. He
found room Zwei-B immediately, the second door from the top of the
stairs.

Quietly, he tried the knob. It was unlocked.
He twisted it slowly and pushed the door open, craning his neck
around its edge. He looked to the inside of the dormitory. It
appeared vacant.

The man finished opening the door, ignoring
the loud creaks of its hinges, and slowly stepped into the room,
his boots insufferably sloshing with each step he made. A bed
beneath a window was in front of him, unmade and empty. He leaned
toward it before feeling a hard metal cylinder press against his
spine between his shoulders.

“Stop,” a woman’s voice whispered. “Tell your
partner to head back into the hallway, and close the door.”

“I don’t have a partner,” the man
answered.

“No use lying,” she said. “I know you always
work in twos. Do it now, before I
end
you.”

The man turned his head back to face his
assailant. Their eyes met, and a loaded gun dropped harmlessly to
the floor between them.

He knew that she must have aged in their time
apart, just as he had. He knew that she must be wrinkled and
showing grey amidst the chestnut. His brain told him that her skin
must have loosened, that her veins must be showing. Thirty years
had passed since they’d seen one another, yet he could see nothing
but the way she’d looked back then, giggling at his jokes and
watching his work with all that amazement and curiosity glimmering
in her eyes. All he could see was the girl he’d met by the silo
that day in the desert, as beautiful and as radiant as he
remembered her to be.

“Felix,” the woman whispered in shock.

“Hello, Karen,” he answered, turning his body
to face her.

“How did you find me?” she asked.

“It took a long time,” he answered, closing
the door behind him. “I--”

Her lips closed on his, immediately
interrupting the words he’d been forming. They kissed and spun
round toward the bed behind them. Her passion was furious, and
Felix did nothing to fight it. Behind them, the rain thundered past
the window above the bed, drumming loudly against the hostel’s
walls.

Felix shed his long, wet coat to the floor
and found Karen’s soft hands lightly lifting the shirt underneath
it from his body soon after. She fell with him to the bed, kicking
off the jeans she wore and impatiently fighting the boots from
Felix’s feet. She kissed him again, forcing her tongue against his.
He cautiously moved his hands down her waist, finding her fingers
on top of his soon after, lowering them to below her hips.

She deftly removed the rest of her clothing
while kissing him, trying not to laugh as Felix fumbled with his
own. Soon they were naked, and Karen laid on top of him, still
pushing her lips against his, her hands sliding manically up and
down the sides of his face.

Felix let his hands explore her and felt his
way past each contour of her body. He kissed her mouth, an empty
orchard at sunrise. Her tongue rolled past his, a morning tide
washing back and forth against the shore. He poured past the atlas
of her body, his touch finding peak and dale, verdant and vital.
Her body was the entire world to him, his freedom, the sun. One
year after reaching the surface, Felix was finally out of the
lab.

As they joined, the room changed and shifted.
They were in the leaves beneath the cover of a forest, on the
sidewalk behind an auditorium; they were on Linus’ desk, and in a
well-furnished elevator dropping downward at two meters per second.
And then they were there, in that moment, in that tiny room in
Germany. He lifted his lips from her and looked at her face. She
looked then as she should have, older, as she was. She was still
the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. For the first time in over
thirty years, he knew could live again.

Hours passed as minutes, then they were
still, lying together in each other’s arms, watching the moon glow
past the raindrops through the small window in the wall.

“You found me,” she said.

“I had to,” he answered.

“How did you escape?” she asked, taking his
arm and embracing it across her chest.

“I have the Diaspora. The rogue one I gave to
you,” he answered. “It’s there in my coat pocket.”

Karen sat up and looked at him with scientist
eyes. “How did you get it? I thought ... ”

“There was a boy. He found it in the sand on
a little island in Florida,” he answered. “Speaking of which, how
did it get there?”

“Florida?” she repeated. “I don’t know. I was
living in Corsica when I finally got the watch off. It took me some
time before I dared do anything with it. When I first got out of
the facility that night, it took me to a small burned house in
Massachusetts.”

“So it’s still there?” he asked, turning onto
his side and propping his head up on his arm. “I would have thought
they’d rebuild it or knock it down, or do anything with it by now
other than leave it a charred mess. That was the house I grew up
in. Well, sort of grew up in.”

“Where were your parents?” she asked.

“Which ones?” he answered. “My birth parents
were gone before my memory starts and my last ones died in that
fire you saw the ashes of in Massachusetts when I was ten. That’s
why I had the watch set to go there that night. It was the only
place I could think to escape to.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t. I’m not going to mourn the past. Not
after today.”

Karen lay back down on the bed’s
uncomfortable mattress. “When I got there, I panicked. I didn’t
know if the company would be after me. I never learned how to set
coordinates in the watch, so I just changed the time randomly and
let myself jump again on a lark. That’s how I ended up in Corsica.
I wish I had known the numbers to your lab.”

He smiled. “I set that code as a special
combination. Six o’clock, four minutes, twelve seconds, setting the
hands counterclockwise,” he said.

She thought for a moment. “Six, four, twelve
... no, I get it. Six, three, seventy-two. June 3rd, 1972. The day
we met.”

Felix nodded.

“Fifteen years ago, there was a knock at my
door,” she explained. “I saw two men in suits through the peephole.
I don’t know who they were, if they were actually Advocates or not,
but I leapt through my back window that day. That’s when I
dedicated myself to finding a way to remove the watch from my arm,
and six months later, found success.”

“How did you finally do it?”

She giggled. “I electrocuted myself with a
1973 Volkswagen car battery while initiating the jump sequence,”
she said. “It wasn’t the most elegant solution.”

“No,” Felix said with a laugh. “But genius in
its own right.”

“Thank you,” she said smiling, bowing her
head. “But it had an accidental consequence. I was able to get the
watch off my arm, but it jumped anyway. Without me.”

“When did you say this was?” Felix asked.

“About fifteen years ago,” Karen said,
pulling the sheet over her body and curling into it. “You said a
boy found it?” she asked.

“Yes, but ... ” Felix looked confused and
trailed off.

“Felix?”

“Yes,” he said, snapping out of it, “but he
found it just a year ago. That leaves fourteen years unaccounted
for.”

“Oh, well,” she said, “at least it made its
way to you eventually. How did the boy who found the watch find out
about you anyway?”

“There’s a communicator in the device,
originally installed for receiving field commands. If you pull the
knob one click, it activates the function. I had a holographic
imager attached to the computer in my lab.”

Karen placed a hand over her mouth. “Oh, my
God, if I had known!”

“For awhile I thought you were dead,” he told
her. “I thought that’s why I hadn’t heard from you.”

“I was terrified of the device,” she said,
lowering her hand. “I played around with it as little as possible.
I was worried that I might accidentally trigger something that
would let the company know I was alive, and worse, where to find
me.”

“I understand,” Felix said. “In your
situation, I would have done the same.”

Felix lowered himself onto his back and
crossed his arms behind his neck. Karen lifted her head and rested
it on his chest.

“So who is this boy?” she asked.

“His name is John,” Felix said. He couldn’t
contain the sigh that followed.

“Something wrong?”

“It’s not something I’m proud of.”

“What isn’t?”

“The boy, John, we had to change places for
me to leave. The device can’t transport more than one
bio-signature. It’s just not possible.”

“So he’s ... ”

“Yes.”

“Oh, my God, Felix. Did he know that was
going to happen when he went down there?”

“He didn’t have a choice. The Diaspora was
stuck in some sort of untested introductory user protocol. The
taxation on his body was killing him. He had to get it off his
wrist, and my lab held the tool.”

“Surely you could have come up with
something,” she said.

“Maybe I still can. I haven’t forgotten about
him.”

“How long has it been?”

“About a year now,” Felix said. “That’s how
long I’ve been searching for you. I haven’t tried to build another
device, not that I’m even sure I could. I’ve just been looking
everywhere for you instead. I had to find you, Karen. This is how
it had to be to make that happen.”

“But that’s terrible,” she said, lifting her
head from his body and looking at him with two familiarly sad
eyes.

“What was I supposed to do? It was he or I
being stuck down there. Surely you can understand.”

“I do,” she said softly. “But now that you’ve
found me, you’ll devote your time to freeing him?”

“Soon,” he said, lifting her hand and kissing
it. “First, there’s one more item on the list.”

“What’s that?” Karen asked.

“Revenge, to put it bluntly,” he answered. “I
have to make the company pay for what they’ve done to you, to me,
even to John. We have to stop everything, stop the predator from
luring any additional minds to its lair. Stop it from ruining
anyone else’s life.”

“I’m sure it was a difficult decision,” she
said, trailing off. “You’ve left a kid down there.”

“You’re not angry, are you? I thought you’d
understand.”

“You were right, I actually do understand,”
she said. “I understand completely.”

“We’ve got to consider the greater good,” he
told her.

“That’s what they told me, too,” she said
quietly.

Felix couldn’t hear the soft words. “What?”
he asked, turning his face toward hers.

“Nothing.” She took his face with both hands
and drew it in close to her own. She kissed him, leaving her lips
pressed against his for a long time. Eventually she moved back and
looked into his eyes.

“This is a terrible love story,” she said to
him. “If you think about it, we barely even know each other.”

“And yet, you’re all I’ve thought about for
more than half of my life,” he answered.

“You’re all I’ve thought about, too,” she
said. “And as if by some strange miracle, now you’re here.”

“What do we do now?”

“Let’s talk about it in the morning.”

Karen wrapped his arm around her body and
pushed in close to him. She closed her eyes. Felix lay behind her,
staying awake for an hour more, looking at the back of her head and
listening to her breathe.

He thought about her words and about that
dumb kid he stranded in his laboratory. Each time he’d thought
about contacting him through the watch or visiting, he’d decided to
wait just a little while longer, feeling too guilty to see the
boy’s face or hear his voice. Felix had been sure that the guilt
would fade with time; he’d been sure, and waiting, for a year
now.

None of that matters
, he thought,
looking down at Karen as she slept.
I’ve found her. That’s all I
ever wanted.
Slowly, Felix drifted off to sleep.

The next morning he woke to find a pillow
beneath his arm where Karen had been. He jolted up from the
mattress, ran across the small room to the door, and looked both
ways down the hallway. She was gone.