Time Spent (24 page)

One after another, he saw his death
somewhere in the desert to the north. One place or another, it
didn't matter, the end was always the same. Until...

"There...." He saw a hole in the ground, a
hole he had dug himself, would dig himself. When looking into the
future, verb tenses became meaningless. "THERE!"

Carl shambled north, toward the vivid sight
of himself sucking drops of water from the dirt, devouring grubs
that tried to crawl away from his clutching fingers.

The path to victory, or at least survival,
wound ahead of him across the desert floor.

"Hello, children." Carl looked around at
them, saw the anger in their faces as they recognized him. He ran a
hand through his hair, smoothing it.

Without bidding, a rush of images flooded
his mind. He saw shapes wind away behind each of the kids from the
school bus, shapes he now realized were their pasts, unrolling
before him like a map showing where each of them had been since the
day he or she was born. The past funneled into his mind, unbidden,
unrelenting. He gasped, and clapped his hands to the sides of his
head.

Then, when every event everyone in the room
had ever experienced was finished cramming its way into his skull,
time rolled forward, and he saw the paths to the future winding
open in front of him, showing the outcome of every possible action.
Carl waited for the inevitable, the end of every road showing him
the destruction of the universe. This is what he had seen every
time he had peered into the future since the school bus crash. Or
at least, it had been when he had been here, embroiled in conflict
with those who now surrounded him.

Carl's eyes widened as the future played
itself out in front of him, a very different future than one he had
ever experienced. This future started with the appearance of a
woman: a woman with red eyes and flowing red hair. An infinite
number of possibilities exploded in Carl's mind, futures beyond
count, beyond examination, beyond his ability to comprehend.

In none of those futures, however, not one,
did the world Carl knew as home exist.

"What have you done?" He looked around at
them frantically. "...WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO THE FUTURE??"

Brandon slapped Kevin on the shoulder.
"Brent Spiner, are you freaking kidding me?? Why the hell did you
bring him here?"

"We need him," Kevin replied.

Becca snorted. "Like we need herpes, or a
sucking chest wound, maybe."

"He brought us here against our will!"
Yellow energy buffeted them from Mia's now circuitry-free hands.
"He tried to kill us!"

Simon roared. "He can't be trusted anyway.
We listened to him before and look where it got us." He leaned in
close to Carl's face, huffing air into his eyes. "Look where it got
me."

Carl crossed his legs in front of him and
remained seated on the floor. He folded his hands in his lap,
saying nothing.

"Look at him." Brandon ran a hand through
his curly hair. "He's probably figuring out how to kill us all
right now."

"I don't want to kill anyone," Carl
answered. "I only want to live. I want this world to live."

"You said this before," Kevin said. "You
said we caused the end of the world."

Carl nodded. "I saw you all together,
standing on a rooftop. The sky opened up, and all the worlds
collided together. Everything came to an end."

"The sky did open up," Brandon said. "We
were on the rooftop, together. The sky opened up, but...the world
didn't end."

Carl nodded. "I know. I saw it."

Becca kneeled in front of him. Tyler placed
a hand on her shoulder. They appeared to have a telepathic exchange
to which Carl was not privy. "So if you didn't stop it from
happening by killing all of us, why didn't the world end?"

Carl searched the floor with his eyes. "I'm
not sure."

Becca raised an eyebrow. "And you never saw
a woman? A red woman?"

"Not before, no." Carl looked her directly
in the eye. "But I have now. I think, before, she didn't know about
us. But Kevin changed things, when he took me away from this world.
I think he got her attention."

Invisible hands wrapped around Carl,
dragging him to his feet and face to face with Simon. "Tell us: who
is she?"

"The question isn't 'who is she'." Carl
swallowed. "The question is: WHAT IS SHE?"

______________________

Carl tried to huddle tighter into the
shallow shelter he had dug for himself at the base of the mountain.
The bitter cold still punished his body. At night, the temperature
dropped sharply, cold winds biting his face and hands. He tried his
best to cover them with the lab coat, but that only left other
areas exposed.

The wind picked up, and a sound reached him,
like the sound of cracks opening in ice, only a million times
louder.

Carl looked up, and there in the sky a hole
opened, a portal like the one through which he had driven the
school bus. Sparks leapt down from it, striking him.

Carl analyzed the portal, gauging its
distance from the ground and from the slope of the mountain. He
quickly clambered up and began to climb, attempting to reach the
level of the portal. If he could reach it, perhaps he could leap
into it.

He might be able to get home.

______________________

"Just go around, real quick," Davis said,
moving around the Chevrolet that had stopped on the line in front
of them. "Give each wheel a good shine." He sprayed the wheel and
wiped it down. "Make sure they look good, but you gotta move fast."
He went from one wheel to the next, shining each one in turn. "When
you done, just hit the button here, that clears it to move on."

He pressed a large green button on the
console standing a few feet from the line. There was a loud buzz,
and the car moved on down the line to the vacuum station. Another
car replaced it.

"You try it."

Carl took the spray and rag and moved around
the car from wheel to wheel, spraying and rubbing down each one as
Davis had shown him. When finished, he hit the green button and the
line moved forward.

"Good, good." Davis smiled. "There's a kinda
flow to it? You get each one lookin' good, but you don't take too
much time, so things keep moving."

"Seems pretty simple," Carl observed.

"Yeah, yeah," Davis nodded with a laugh.
"This a startin' out job, you know. You do good here, we see if we
can't move you up to one of the assembly spots. Your daddy said
you're a hard worker but you got your head in the clouds." He
laughed.

Carl felt his face heat up. He looked
down.

"Hey, don't sweat it, kid, don't sweat it."
Davis clapped him on the back. "Your daddy done worked here a lot
of years, people respect him. But he's kind of a hard ass, ain't
he?"

Carl felt the corner of his mouth turn up a
bit. "He can be."

"You gon' do just fine. It's simple, like
you said. Here." Another car was moving up the line into Carl's
post. "Sometime it's slow like that. Sometime real fast. You get to
it, I'll check on you in a couple of hours for break time."

"Thanks, Mr. Davis." He shook the affable
old fellow's hand. Davis' dark brown skin was cracked, dry and
rough to the touch. Carl was a bit embarrassed by his own soft
hands.

"Davis, just Davis," he said. "Good to meet
you, Carl."

Carl went about his work. It was tedious,
repetitive, but he expected no different from a factory job like
this one. It wasn't so bad, though, the time passed quickly, like
Davis had said there were periods where the cars came one after
another, and time passed quickly.

Occasionally, he had time to sit and wait
while cars caught up with the line, and he found himself glancing
toward the stations before and after him. The station before was
placing floor mats inside the vehicles. The station after was
vacuuming out the interior.

A young woman was working the vacuum
station. She was very pretty, with long brown hair.

Carl hadn't realized he was staring until
she waved at him. He looked down, embarrassed, then was even more
embarrassed by his own guilty reaction, so he looked back up and
waved, but she had already looked away.

"Her name Ellen," said Davis' voice close to
his ear.

Carl jumped. "Oh, I was just..."

Davis laughed long and hard, clapping Carl
on the back. "You-you-you was just! HA!" He gripped Carl's
shoulder. "You just go on up to her and say hello, on break
time."

"Oh no, I wouldn't want to bother her," Carl
said.

"Life too short, Carl," Davis said. "Life
too damn short. You don't know what's gon' happen to you, or to
her. So you go say hi, you hear? You make hay while the sun shines,
you know that old saying? You make hay while the sun shines."

______________________

The suns beat down miserably upon him as he
dug into the dry, baked earth. He had found a calculator in one of
the lab coat pockets, an item useless to his enhanced brain in
terms of calculation (he could far exceed its computational power
and speed) but useful for its hard plastic casing as a digging
tool.

Carl's arms were tired and sore, and kept
cramping up unexpectedly. Twice now he had had to stop digging and
work out cramps in his upper arm. Pain throbbed up and down his
arms, shooting into his hands, forcing him to stop and rest.

He did not have long now before he would be
unable to dig. He kept hoping for a cloud, something to pass over
the twin suns and shield him for a short time. And at first, when
the sky began to grow dark, he thought that he had been granted a
respite. He looked up, expecting to see clouds, but instead saw a
dark, hazy line had grown across the sky.

Dust storm,
he realized with a
start.

A few clouds, maybe a nice rain, those he
would have welcomed; a dust storm, however, might prove fatal.

His hands had gone on digging and digging
out of habit while he looked at the horizon. Now he heard a slosh
beneath him. Carl looked down. Dark brown water had filled the hole
under him, sloshing behind the plastic calculator casing as it
passed. The pale grubs, exposed to the sun, fought to escape it and
dig their way into the cool, wet mud.

Carl tossed the calculator down. He had
already looked forward, to make sure the water did not make him
sick. He scooped it up in handfuls, slurping it off his fingers, so
thirsty he barely noticed the thick coppery taste of mud in every
sip. Next he caught grubs between his fingers, slurping them up and
squishing them between his teeth, each one popping in a horrid gush
of foul ooze. After that taste filled his mouth and he feared he
might vomit them back up again, he began simply swallowing them
down without bothering to chew them. Their slick, wet texture made
them go down easily.

The dust cloud was moving closer.

Carl took one more sip of muddy water and
grabbed up the calculator, scrambling for the base of the mountain.
He had to find a place between the rocks where he might dig a
shelter, protecting him from the storm.

He looked forward in time, seeing the
various paths ahead, looking for one that led to one more day, one
more fight for survival. If he could just stay alive, he thought,
he might find a path that led to victory, a path that led home.

______________________

"This is all a little too familiar, isn't
it?" Carl looked around at them. "You holding me hostage,
questioning me."

Simon growled. "And we all know you're a
liar." The invisible hands tightened around Carl's chest. "So save
yourself some grief and tell the truth. WHAT is she?"

"I don't know exactly," Carl said. "Aghh.."
The hands tightened still more. "I...don't!"

"Simon, stop it!" Brandon said.

The invisible hands loosened, a bit. Carl
breathed deep. Something was very wrong. He looked around at them,
his eyes settling on Kevin. Like the others, his power didn't seem
to work on Kevin. Try as he might, he couldn't see Kevin's past. He
could, however, clearly see the future. He knew the red woman would
be arriving very soon, and in most of the possible futures he could
see, she killed them all very quickly. And Kevin...

Carl turned back to Becca. "You don't trust
me. That's understandable, I did lie to you before."

"You tried to kill us all," said Becca.

"I did kill you, Rebecca. Or, at least,
soldiers under my command did."

"Don't call me Rebecca," she said
reflexively. "You were on the bridge that night?"

"Yes." Carl projected the scene into her
mind.

They approached in absolute silence. Carl
had warned the men of the absolute need for the element of
surprise. With Rebecca Miller's ability, if she were alerted to
their approach, she could potentially destroy them all and they
would be unable to stop her. Luckily, her power was still new to
her. Preoccupied as she was by the man she was tormenting, she
might not sense them until it was too late.

Carl watched her control the man, forcing
him to remove his clothes and hurt himself on the bridge
railing.

The men moved closer, slowly, silently
creeping through the darkness, weapons raised.

A motorcycle approached from the other side
of the bridge. Kevin Lloyd stepped off, removing his helmet. He and
Rebecca exchanged words.

Carl hadn't seen Kevin since the school bus
crash. He had no idea what Kevin's powers might be, hadn't had a
chance to examine him as he had most of the others. This might be
an opportunity to eliminate two targets at once.

Carl raised his hand.

"My name is Kevin? You remember? You're
Becca, right? You were on the bus with me that night."

"SHUT UP about that!"