Paradox (3 page)

Zac stood entranced, staring at the baby
that was supposedly him. It didn’t make sense. It had to be a dream.

He watched as the nurse came to the window
and grabbed the cart, rolling the baby away and putting it back with the
others. The baby cried, and she smiled at it, gently touching its feet and saying
something Zac couldn’t hear.

“Sir?”
came
a
voice from behind him. Zac turned to see a man, another nurse in the maternity
ward. He was pushing another wooden cart with a baby in a plastic crib on top,
taking it back to the nursery. “Sorry. I just need to squeeze by.”

“Sure,” Zac said, backing up. He turned to
watch the nurse and realized the man that he was talking to, the one who said
his name was Daniel Ryger, was gone. “Hey,” he called to the nurse, “did you
see where that man went?”

“I’m sorry?”

“There was a man standing right next to
me,” he said, pointing down the hallway, “and I needed to ask him a question.
Can you tell me where he went?”

“Are you family?” the man asked. He paused
and nodded to another nurse through the glass. She opened the large door and
took the baby in with her.

“No,” Zac said. “Well, sort of. I mean…”

“Well, if you’re not family, I’m afraid
you can’t go back to patient rooms during these hours,” he said. “Visiting
hours
are
between ten and ten. You can come back in a
few hours if you want.”

Zac shook his head. “I need to talk to him
now
,” he said. “It will just take a minute.” He started to move, but the
nurse held out his hands to block the way.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we need to
respect our patients’ privacy, and believe me, these new moms need all the
sleep they can get right now. You’ll have to come back later.”

Zac sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks
anyway.” He turned and walked back to the elevator. Stepping inside, he pressed
the button and waited to arrive at the ground floor.

He had a thought. He could just wait down
in the lobby, sit in a chair and pretend to read a magazine or something. If
the man he talked to was his dad, he had to come back down sometime, and then
Zac could confront him and try to figure out what was happening.

He found a comfortable chair near the
lobby windows, close to the entrance. Now he could watch the door, too. From
this place, he could see anyone who left the hospital. His eyes started to
blur, and
a heaviness
fell over him. His eyes began to
close, but he tried to shake off the sleepiness.

No, he told himself. He had to stay awake.
Then again, if he shut his eyes for just a few minutes, it wouldn’t hurt. Maybe
he’d wake up and find this was all some ridiculous dream. His eyes slowly closed,
and he drifted off.

A loud crash jolted Zac
awake,
and he nearly fell out of his chair. He looked around, confused at his
surroundings, and then remembered that he was at the hospital. People were
rushing past him to see something outside, and he turned to see.

The sun was fully up now, its light
pouring into the lobby. He walked over to the entrance and saw what everyone
was looking at.

Across the street, two cars had collided.
A small silver one was smashed against the side of a brick building. It looked
like the white pickup truck had hit the other, pushing it into the wall. Zac
could see people in the vehicles, but no one was helping. Everyone was just
staring in shock like people who slow down just to look at an accident on the
side of the road. Wasn’t anybody going to help them?

Zac took a step forward. They were right
in front of the hospital, so someone would be out in a minute. But if no one
was going to run over and see if they needed help, he would. He started across
the street.

As he stepped off the curb, a hand grabbed
his shoulder. A tall male with short blond hair who was wearing all black
pulled him back with an iron grip. “Let it go,” he said.

Zac shrugged him off and wrenched his
shoulder free. He kept walking. The stranger raced around him and held his
hands in front of him, trying to hold Zac back. His hat was pulled low, the
brim hiding his eyes. “You need to come with me.”

“Let go of me, man!” Zac shouted, and
darted to his right. “Someone has to do something. Instead of pushing me back,
why don’t you come help me?”

He stayed behind as Zac approached the
vehicles. A man in a plaid shirt and blue jeans got out of the pickup truck,
dazed, but able to stand. He was groaning and holding his rib cage.

“You okay?” Zac asked. The man nodded and
walked toward the crowd. Zac moved to the silver car and looked inside. A man
in a business suit was slumped over the steering wheel, his arm extended around
his head and touching the dashboard. Zac turned to the crowd of onlookers. “Can
anybody help me get him out? He’s not moving!” Finally, three paramedics rushed
out of the hospital wheeling a stretcher.

“Stand aside, please,” they said. “We can
take it from here.” They opened the door and lifted the man onto the stretcher,
strapping him down. The crowd parted as the paramedics made their way to the
doors.

Whispers filled the air. “Is that the
mayor?” someone asked.

Zac watched the doors close behind the
paramedics and felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see the same guy who
had restrained him earlier.

“That was not a very bright thing you
did,” he said. He looked to be about four or five years older than Zac.

“It was more than
you
did,” Zac
said, taking offense.

The stranger looked around him, paranoid.
“Come on,” he said. “We have to get out of here right now. This wasn’t supposed
to happen. Someone could see you.”

“What are you talking about? All of these
people see me!”

“Exactly,” he replied. He began leading
Zac away from the crowd. “I need you to come with me.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you!” Zac
said, his voice rising. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“I’m Bryce,” he said. A van pulled up and
someone with a video camera got out. The side of the van was emblazoned with
the words
News 2
in bright red and blue. “Crap. Okay,” Bryce said, turning
to face Zac. “You have two choices. Either you can follow me now, or I’ll
make
you follow me. But it won’t be pleasant.”

“
Make
me?” Bryce was a few inches
taller than Zac, but he didn’t let that intimidate him. He’d dealt with people
like this guy enough before to know not to back down.

They heard someone yelling from the site
of the crash. “There he is,” they said. “Over there.” A man in a button-up
shirt and a necktie walked over with a camera and started taking pictures of
Zac and Bryce.

“Oh, great,” Bryce said, covering his
face, “this is
not
happening. Not now.”

The group started asking Zac questions
about the ordeal and what he saw, if he had talked to the mayor, and a bunch of
others he couldn’t make out.

Bryce leaned in and whispered into his ear
with urgency. “Ignore these people. Just follow me. I’m going to take you to
your dad.”

“My dad?”
That
grabbed Zac’s attention. “Where is he?” But Bryce was already walking, moving
away from the hospital. “Wait a minute,” he called, following and trying to
keep up. “My dad’s back
there
. We’re going the wrong way.”

Bryce led him into an alley. He looked
around the corner, searching. After a few moments, he turned back to Zac.

“Okay,” he said, almost out of breath.
“You still have that thing that looks like a flashlight on you?”

Zac dug into his pockets. “You mean this?”
he said, holding it up. “How’d you know about it?”

Bryce breathed a sigh of relief as he
rolled his eyes. “Thank God. It’s still lit up. Okay, if you want to see your
dad, you have to do exactly what I say.” He adjusted the thin black tube in
Zac’s palm and closed his hand around it, making a fist. “I’m going to count to
three. When I do, hold on to that as tightly as you can and then press your
thumb onto the top, very firmly. Think you can do that?”

“Yeah,” Zac said, nodding. “But what does—”

“No time for questions,” Bryce said. He
took a deep breath and held out a similar object to the one Zac held in his
hand. He raised his thumb above it, too. “I hope to God this works,” he said,
looking Zac in the eyes.

“Hope what works?”

“One… two…
three
!”

Zac pressed his thumb down, and suddenly
the world around him swirled into a mass of colors, blurring everything in
sight. His body trembled and his arms felt a jolt surge through them, causing
his whole body to tingle like when his foot fell asleep. A high-pitched
whirring noise pierced his ears, and everything around him turned black.

With a violent lurch, he felt his feet
strike something hard and his ears popped. His head pounded, and his eyes were
filled with a bright light. He squinted to shut it out.

He felt dizzy, and his legs felt like
spaghetti. He stumbled backward, losing his balance and fell onto his back. His
breathing was labored, and he could hear his heart thumping as it pumped blood
through his body. His hearing came back, and he strained to open his eyes,
taking in the bright blue light. The air seemed different. He heard a voice
behind him.

“Thank you, Bryce,” the voice said. Zac
moved his jaw some more, and his ears popped again. He could hear more clearly.
“I have no idea how all this happened, but I am forever in your debt.”

“Not a problem, Dr. Ryger. He’s back. But
now that he knows, I guess the question now is whether or not we should train
him.”

Zac turned to see his dad talking to
Bryce, bathed in the shimmering blue light. He looked down to see that he was
sitting on the pentagon that he had seen just a few hours earlier. Was
everything that had just happened all in his mind? Had he simply passed out?

His dad knelt in front of him, shining a
flashlight in his eyes. “Okay, this is going to sound stupid, but can you tell
me what your name is?”

Zac squinted as he looked into the light.
“Yeah, Dad.
It’s Zac. Why are you asking me—
”

“And what is your birth date?” he asked,
moving the light back and forth, watching Zac’s eyes follow it.

“September 22. Why are you asking me that?”

His dad sighed. “Sorry, Zac, but you hit
your head pretty hard and were passed out when we found you. Okay, one more
question. What year is it now?”

Zac pushed the flashlight away and stood
up. “This is stupid. I’m not going to answer obvious questions.” He stepped out
of the pentagon and looked around, surveying the concrete room. “This is all
under your building. How did you know I was down here?”

Dr. Ryger sighed. “I saw that the bookcase
was moved, so I looked behind it. I had a feeling you followed the hallway
down.”

“You didn’t know this was all down here?”
Zac asked.

His dad was silent, and he exchanged
glances with Bryce. “No.”

Bryce spoke. “Your dad was worried when he
couldn’t find you,” he said. “We searched for you, and we finally found you
down here. You must have slipped. You were passed out in the middle of the
floor, and I was able to help you regain consciousness.”

“I don’t understand,” Zac said. “My dream
was so vivid.”

“Your brain was probably just trying to
make sense of the voices you heard while you were unconscious,” Bryce said.
“That happens with dreams a lot.”

His dad came over and took him by the arm.
“We need to get home, Zac. I want you to just get some rest. You’ll be fine in
the morning.”

Zac took one last look at the room and
followed his dad up the concrete walkway toward the office. They exited through
the space behind the bookcase and Bryce nudged it. The bookcase slid back into
place.

“What are those rooms?” Zac asked.

“I don’t have a clue,” Dr. Ryger replied.
“I’ll talk to someone about them in the morning. Just go wait in the car for a
second, okay? I need to talk to Bryce for a minute.”

Zac started down the hallway but stopped
to listen. He pressed himself against the wall and strained to make out their
hushed tones.

“He’s going to start asking questions,”
Bryce said, a hint of urgency in his voice.

His dad’s voice was calmer. “It’ll all be
taken care of. We’ve already fed him what he needs to know to make sense of the
experience. You heard him—it was just a vivid dream. He hit his head.”

“But it’s more than that! I told you, he
was seen!”

“Well…” his dad trailed off. “How bad was
it? Was it significant?”

“There were cameras,” Bryce said. “He
acted. He could have changed things.”

A long silence hung in the air. Zac
stepped back toward the entrance, afraid they might find him listening. They
could come around the corner at any moment. Finally, his dad spoke.

“I doubt it,” he said. “We would know by
now.”

“Would we?” Bryce asked. “Maybe the
changes haven’t reached us yet. We need to talk to him, find out what he did.”

“That’s out of the question,” his dad
said. “He can’t know.”

“He already
does
know. He’s going to
start asking about what he saw downstairs.”

“Emilee shouldn’t have left Zac in the
room alone.”

“Regardless, you need to question him. We
need to know how he got the Wand to work. Those things only work for
one
person. And one’s never been programmed for him.”

Zac’s dad sighed. “I know,” he said. “I
have a lot to figure out tonight when I get home. But I’m not ready to start
talking about it with him. You know the first thing he’d want to do if he
figured out what we’re doing down there.”

“Yeah,” Bryce said. “You’d better go. He’s
been out there for a while, and he’ll be wondering what’s taking you so long.
If you want to keep this secret from him, you’d better get going.”

Zac could hear footsteps start down the hallway
and sprinted for the door, hurling himself outside. He raced to the car and got
in, trying to catch his breath as he saw his dad exit the building’s lobby
doors. He pretended to be dozing off as he heard the car door open. He acted
like he was startled awake.

“Sorry,” Dr. Ryger said, sitting down and
buckling up.
“Business.
I told Bryce that we need to
sort through a few details.”

Zac yawned. He still felt nauseous from
the experience earlier. “Sorry I worried you,” he said. “You seriously didn’t
know about those rooms down there?”

His dad shook his head as he started the
car and backed up. “Never saw them before.
Probably some kind
of control room for regulating the building’s conditions.
We have to
monitor lots of different variables for the work we do here. I’ll talk to
someone tomorrow to see what I can find out. They really need to tell us these
things.”

Zac didn’t say much to his dad after they
got home. He knew he didn’t just pass out and hit his head. He didn’t just
dream of seeing his dad years ago. Something else had happened. And his dad
knew something about it.

He lay awake in his bed, wondering how he
could find out. Did Emilee know? She didn’t seem to. Like his dad and Bryce had
said earlier, she left him alone, probably because she didn’t know there was
something they were trying to protect. There had to be another way. Maybe there
was something in the house, some paperwork in a briefcase somewhere.

Zac opened his bedroom door and looked
down the hallway. The house was dark except for the light they kept on at night
in the living room. He moved across the carpeted floor, taking care not to step
in the places where the floor creaked. If he couldn’t find anything himself,
he’d have to ask his dad. But even Zac knew that would just result in more
lies, more cover-up.

He came to the end of the hallway and
heard movement in the lighted room. His dad was still awake.

“…gotta be in here somewhere…” his dad
said, talking to himself. “I’d remember seeing something like that.”

Zac approached unnoticed. His dad was
sitting in a chair, a brown box with a white label resting on top of the table.
Papers were scattered everywhere.

Zac’s dad was leafing through a newspaper,
one that looked yellowed with age. He came to a page and suddenly stopped. Zac
watched as his dad propped his elbows on the table, putting his head in his
hands.

“No…” he whispered, fingers pushing
through his hair. He pushed the newspaper away and sank back into his chair.

Zac entered the room, speaking quietly so
he wouldn’t startle his dad. “Hey,” he said. His dad jumped. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither,” Dr. Ryger said. He closed
the paper and tossed it back in the box.
“Just going through
some stuff.”

“What stuff?” Zac asked, craning his neck
to get a better look.

“Oh, nothing much.”
He put his hand on the box, tapping it. “I was looking for some of your medical
records.” He hesitated. “Just in case
we
… um… needed
them because of the injury you… uh… had when you hit your head…”

You’re lying
, Zac thought.
You always stammer when you’re not
telling the truth.
“What were you reading?” he asked.

“Oh,
that
?” he asked, looking at
the paper. “I just found an old paper from when you were born. I got
sidetracked and started looking at it, reminiscing… it’s just kind of neat to
look back, I guess.” He looked at the clock. “Wow; I didn’t realize it was this
late. I’m going to turn in for the night. Hey, sorry we forgot to celebrate
your birthday. We can do it tomorrow. Turn off the light on your way out, would
you please?” He walked past Zac, not making eye contact.

Zac waited until it was clear,
then
went over to the newspaper, opening it up. It was
actually a paper from September 23. His dad had told him a while back that he
bought the one from the day
after
Zac was born because all of these stories
were about events that happened
on
the day he was born.

He flipped through it, examining the
headlines, scanning them for information. He turned the page and a picture in
the bottom-right corner caught his eye. It was the same car and pick-up truck he
had seen during his experience. The headline in the accompanying article read:
“Mayor Injured in Car Crash.”

Weird
, he thought, vaguely recalling someone pointing out the mayor on the
stretcher, right before Bryce appeared. He studied the picture, remembering
every vivid detail. Everything was the same, from the vehicles in the crash to
the brick building the car slammed into. Even the puddles of fluid spilled out
from the vehicles onto the ground in the same way.

His attention was caught by a person in the
corner of the photo.
It can’t be
,
he told
himself. He held the picture closer, focusing on the face of the individual.
Immediately he knew who it was that he was looking at in the picture; there
could be no doubt
who
it was walking toward the
vehicles at the crash site.

He was staring at a picture of himself.