Run (10 page)

She smiled, already planning her happiness.  That was what set her apart from so many others.  She had seen life, and she had seen terror.  But where many would see the cup half-empty, Fran saw the pitcher on the table beside it, just waiting for someone to start pouring.  She would not hide in her fear, but would stand and smile in the sun as long as it lasted.  And if night should come again...well, there was always another sunrise, just around the corner of the blackness.

***

Fran remembered five minutes of the trip to her new place.  And then she must have fallen asleep again. 

A moment after Fran’s head came to rest against the car window, the driver slumped as well.  So neither saw the portal open directly in their path, the disembodied doorway that allowed the van to drive through a hole in what appeared to be the very air before them. 

The gap sealed behind them, and it was as though they had never been.

DOM#67B LOSTON, COLORADO, AD 1999

3:30 PM FRIDAY

John put his key in the door of his Pathfinder.  The day was over - the
week
was over - and the strange thoughts and concerns that gripped him during the first hour of classes abandoned him soon after, leaving him alone with his students and his normal thoughts.  Or rather, what passed for normal thoughts in these days.  Loneliness clutched him for a moment as he stood beside the door, a terrifying surge that passed through him and left him weak and nauseated.  He gripped the car door and realized that he had caught himself in the act of opening the passenger side. 

For a moment, he almost believed all was right with the world.  For a brief, beautiful second he thought that he could turn around and see Annie behind him, waiting as she always did for the door to be opened.  He remembered that on their second date he had opened the door for her.  "Why did you do that?" she had asked. 

He sensed immediately that he was engaged in some sort of test.  A thousand answers passed through his thoughts as he sorted, examined, discarded possible responses before finally settling on the truth as his best answer.

He looked Annie in the eye.  "Because my mother told me that any girl I take out had better get royal treatment, or she’d come back from the grave and haunt me."

"Royal treatment, eh?" she asked, and he sensed the warmth that flashed in her eyes like a sunbeam through a winter sky.  He had passed the test. 

"Sure," he replied, heart skipping beats with every breath he took.  He opened the door, bowed low, and said, "After you, my queen."

She curtsied and got in the car, passing him in a swift cloud of sweet-smelling air.  He could still smell her, on this hot day in the parking lot.

He could almost believe she was there.

But then the moment passed, and he knew she was not.  She was not, and never would be again.

He moved swiftly to the driver’s side, opening the door and throwing a handful of computer disks over his seat, into the back seat along with a few papers.  Class work that he would grade tonight.  He reflected, not for the first time, that the beautiful thing about being a computer science teacher was the dearth of huge reams of paper that had to be taken home for grading.  Everything was on disk, and most of each class's work could be transferred to a single floppy for transport.

He heard a car door open behind him, and at the same time a deep, rasping voice chipped out at him: "Casey's?"

John didn't even have to turn around to know who it was.  Gabriel Harding – or Coach Gabe as he preferred to be called - was a thick, powerful man who looked as though God had taken a sequoia, shrunk it down to the more manageable height of six and a half feet, and put two eyes on the front. 

John turned to his friend.  As always, Gabe's whistle hung from his neck.  The man wore it with more pride than a Congressional Medal of Honor, and when he wasn't talking, he held the silver instrument clenched between his lips.  Gabe was an artist with a whistle, and there were some students on the campus who swore they had seen him use his instrument while cursing them and belittling their parentage at the same time.  It was a feat a professional ventriloquist would find daunting, and not for a moment did John disbelieve the account.

"Casey's?" John repeated to himself, still shaking off the fog of his waking vision of Annie.  He looked around.  A long line of cars filled the parking lot as parents came for their children. 

Annie was nowhere among them. 

"Sure, that sounds good," he said.

"That's what I like to hear."  Gabe got in his car and started the engine, backing his vehicle out behind John's car.  He waited for John to pull out.  He always waited, as though John were a prince and the coach his vassal, waiting deferentially a few steps behind. 

John knew why the coach – normally not the most genteel of men – would do such a thing.  Both men knew why Gabe held John in such high esteem, though neither would ever speak of the reason.  To have one person owe another his life was one thing.  That created a deep, stable bond between them.  But both men knew that to actually speak of the day that bond was created would be to erect a wall between them.  So neither spoke of it, though it was constantly in their thoughts.

For a moment, standing there in the bright sunlight, caressed ever so softly by a thin mountain breeze, John saw his friend again, as he had seen him that day: bloody and broken, a dead man who hadn’t the sense to lay down and expire.  Then the vision passed, and John found himself in the parking lot again.  His friend was not broken, but whole and unblemished.  Still, the momentary tableau that had intruded upon John’s mind left a mark.  It felt like a premonition, as though something awful was going to happen to Gabe.  He shuddered, and tried to expunge that thought from his mind.  For if anything happened to Gabe....  Then John would truly be alone.

Still trying to shake off the feelings of uneasiness that had suddenly gripped him, John turned to get back in his car.  As he did so, he saw Kaylie coming out of the school.  Her head was bowed, her hair obscuring her features, but John recognized his new student instantly.  She walked up to the curb where parents were picking up and waited as a light blue Mustang convertible pulled up.  John slammed his door shut without getting in and trotted to the sports car, hoping to see her parents, maybe schedule an appointment. 

His sense of urgency from that morning returned with a vengeance, pricking at him like a spur.  It was an uneasy splinter of fear that jabbed at him, urging him forward in spite of himself.  The trot turned into a run as he hurried to catch his student and meet her family, which he hoped would provide a key to revealing the enigma that the young girl presented.

He ran to the car and knocked on the glass.  A man - John figured it was Kaylie's father - was sitting in the driver's seat, his face turned away from John as his daughter clambered in the car.  The man did not turn, however, even as Kaylie closed the door and belted herself in.

John tapped again on the window.  The sound was sharp, almost metallic, and seemed somehow out of place on this warm day.  The man remained facing away from John, and now John noticed that Kaylie was staring at him in unabashed fear, the terror that he had sensed in her this morning no longer half-hidden, but easily visible in her eyes and the way her hands gripped the folds of her clothing. 

John raised his hand a third time to tap on the glass, and a voice in his mind screamed at him, Don't do it!  But his hand and arm seemed under someone else's control, and so against his will he saw his knuckle rap two short taps on the safety glass of the car door.  He almost expected the glass to craze beneath his fist, to hide whatever was in the car from John's prying gaze.

The glass did not shatter, however.  Instead, the car's driver slowly turned toward him.  John's mouth fell open as he came face to face with someone he'd never thought to see again.

Skunk Man
.

It was him.  The same face.  Same hair.  And he hadn't aged a day.

Forget
aging
, thought John.  You saw him
die
.

On the other side of the glass, the man's eyes widened.  Everything began to move slowly.  John saw Kaylie pull at the man's arm.  Saw the man's own hand drop to the gear selector.

You saw him die.  Blown up in a chopper in Iraq.

Then time sped up again as the man threw his car into gear and pulled away from the sidewalk.  The Mustang was an older model, from the 80's, and an automatic to boot, but it still mustered sufficient power to leap away from the curb with a squeal of rubber. 

John threw himself away from the car as it pulled away, narrowly missing being hit as the Mustang pulled out of line and began fighting its way past the one or two cars that blocked egress from the parking lot.  Angry horns blared as the other parking lot occupants manifested their disapproval of the Mustang's movements, and honked still more as the car rasped against a minivan that partially blocked its exit.

John jumped to his feet, subliminally noticing his stinging, abraded palms that had been rubbed a cherry red by their collision with the asphalt, and sprinted to his Pathfinder.

The door opened, and he jammed the key in the ignition, hardly waiting for the engine to turn over before throwing the car into gear and backing out of his parking space.  He narrowly avoided a collision with Gabe's car, which still idled behind his, as he pulled out. 

Gabe threw
his
car into reverse, pulling back a few crucial inches to avoid John's vehicle.  John saw his friend's confused expression in the side view mirror as he popped his car into first gear and wound around a few cars.  Then he was stopped by a pair of minivans several kids were jumping into.  He couldn't thread his way around them, the school was on one side and a grassy hill on the other.  Nor could he go between them.  Even if there had been room, there were too many children milling between the two vehicles for John to pass without danger of hitting someone.

John rolled down his window and leaned his head out to check where the Mustang was.  He saw it pull past the last car, then onto the street. 

John was about to lose them.

He thought for a second, then, ignoring his better sense, which was yelling at him not to be an idiot, he backed his SUV up a few feet.  It tapped into the car behind him - Gabe's car, which added to the wide disbelief of his friend's expression - signaling the end of John's runway.  It would have to do.  He gunned the motor, then let out the clutch and his car surged over the curb, up the small grassy hill, and out onto the street. 

The Mustang had a large head start, but was still on the main street.

And John was in pursuit.

CONTROL HQ - RUSHM

AD 3999/AE 1999

"We have a problem."

The words echoed in the silence of the observation pod, and then fell leadenly to the hard stone floor.

Adam halted the image on his own Control Time, ceasing his study of the bygone era, and immediately turned to face Jason.  His second in command had spoken the words from his own duty station, where he was watching one of the monitors on the wall.  His voice told him it was serious, so Adam strode immediately to the younger man. 

"Enlarge it," he said.

Jason passed his fingers through the air in front of the monitor, piercing the invisible beams that formed a grid in front of the free-pixeled plasmatic display.  The monitor threw out an image of itself, which seemed to hang in the air a moment, then floated down to floor level and expanded, becoming a three dimensional holographic image.  The virtual world shown in the display swelled in size, swallowing up the front half of the observation pod.  When it ceased its growth, a perfect cube six meters to a side stood solidly before them.  It was a window into the world beyond, and Adam stepped into the cube, entering the scene.

He instantly recognized the area: Loston.  He was standing on the main road, dust swirling along the highway.  Two vehicles barreled past him, one in hot pursuit of the other.  They passed near enough for him to touch, had they been more than holos. 

"Give me a close up on the one in back.  Center the holo on that SUV." he said, and though he couldn't see him, he knew Jason would be adjusting his controls to comply with Adam's command.  The image moved to the car in back, an older vehicle that struggled to keep up with the more powerful sports car in the lead. 

The holo kept the trailing SUV in its center, and as a result Adam himself appeared to be floating rapidly down the main street without actually moving.  Though he had done surveillance in this manner before, the effect always made him slightly queasy.  He choked back his gorge, however, and walked toward the sport utility vehicle as it barreled down the road beneath them. 

He peered into the driver side, and now his nausea resurfaced, though for a different reason. 

"John," he whispered.  Then, in a louder voice, "Who's in front?"

The image moved to the lead car, a Mustang, and Jason's disembodied voice answered.  "A nobody.  A bit."

Adam took note of the bit, observing the man’s tousled, gray-streaked hair and fearful countenance.  Then his eyes roved to the passenger, a young girl of perhaps fourteen.

"Who’s the passenger?" he asked.

He could hear the sound of Jason typing hurriedly on one of the pod computers, a soft clicking that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  The clicking stopped for a long moment, then resumed again.

"That can’t be right," came Jason’s voice.

"What?"  Each of the cars swerved to avoid a large pothole in the center of the street, and the holo bounced and jittered with them.  The swaying movement of the image was not helping Adam’s stomach.

"Records indicate...it’s his daughter."

"His
daughter
?  Bits can't have daughters!"

Jason's voice came back at him.  "I don't know what happened, sir.  The registry says it's his daughter."

Adam watched the Mustang turn off the dirt road.  "Find out who made that entry and work back."