Vortex of Evil (9 page)

“I was thinking how great it would be to go fishing here.  If we were on vacation.  It isn’t the same when you have to catch fish to live on.”

“Why not?  Is there some rule we can’t learn to enjoy the life we have been handed?”  She raised her eyebrows and smiled.  “Besides, in our time there were a lot less fish.”

Tom turned to look at Megan.  The wind was tossing her hair as well as his, but where it made Tom look messed up, it made her look like a model in a commercial for a Canadian brand of canned salmon.  Tom thought they could call it “Red Beauty.”  Fortunately he didn’t share that thought with Megan since she might have found his imagery a bit misguided.

“Are we going back to the camp?”  Megan noticed that the canoe were going parallel to the island but not getting any closer to shore.

Tom got up and went over to the Chief.  “Can you drop us off by the camp?  We need to get back to see how Doug is doing.”

The chief didn’t turn to look at Tom right away.  When he did, he had the stern look on his face.  “Can you be sure it is safe for my people to go back to that place?  If that disk of flying death returns, I may lose the rest of my people.  I think we need to get away from this place as quickly as possible, don’t you?”

Tom got a sinking feeling in his stomach when Flying Raven said that.  He hadn’t considered that the Chief might not want to risk another encounter with pirates who were armed with machine guns, or with the hover vehicle that was armed with something much worse.  Even if the last encounter had worked out ok in the end, the Chief had suffered the greatest losses.  With the hover vehicle still in the area, and the risk of pirates, the chief was clearly reluctant to go any closer to the shore.

“Why don’t you come with us to our homeland.  You will be much safer there.  I can send back a war party to get Doug and the woman.”

“We might want to do that, Chief, but we can’t leave Doug and Ying behind.  Doug was badly wounded and needs our help.”  Tom was rapidly considering his options.  He did not think there was a way to convince the Chief to take them all the way to the shore, so he tried “closer to shore” as an option.  “Can you go a little closer to the point up ahead and let us swim from there?  We cannot go with you beyond that and still get back to help Doug.”

Tom made up his mind.  While the Chief turned to look, Tom grabbed Megan by the arm and together they jumped over the side and started swimming for the shore.  It was closer than where the Haida had rescued them, but it would still be a tough test.  Tom knew that Megan could do it after her last swimming event when John was shooting at them.  He just hoped he could keep up.

“Hey, what are you doing?”  The Chief yelled at them and had an angry look on his face, but he did not change course.  He had his people to think about and he realized that Tom had taken this rash course of action to avoid the Chief having to say no to his request.  He appreciated Tom’s bravery, but questioned his sanity.  The Chief would have left Doug to fend for himself.  He didn’t need any help in the Chief’s eyes.  He was a survivor and he had Ying to help him.

Megan swam with slow and steady strokes once she got over the shock of yet another dunking with Tom.  This was the fourth time in two days.  “I supposed there was a really good reason for pulling me out of that perfectly good canoe to go for another marathon swim.”  Megan yelled back over her shoulder as Tom was plowing through the waves trying to catch up to her.

“Flying Raven wasn’t interested in being our water taxi.  He didn’t feel safe going back to the camp.  I thought about trying to talk him into it, but I knew it wouldn’t work.  He has the safety of his people to think about.  Can you make it to shore?”

“Sure.  Let’s just keep it slow and steady.  We will be fine.”

“Slow and steady it is.  Save me a spot on the beach.”

Megan was glad the shore was closer this time.  It took about twenty minutes but they were on the rocky beach before they knew it.  Both were breathing hard from the long swim, but they had a sense of accomplishment.  In the distance they could see the Haida canoe slowly making its way south.  Tom imagined he saw the Chief wave at them, but without his binoculars he couldn’t be sure.

They had come ashore north of the camp in a small quiet cove that was surrounded by forest.  “This would be the spot to build our cabin if we lived here.”

Megan laughed as she wrung out her pants as best as possible.  “So you are scouting real estate now, huh?  It does have a nice view and is a bit sheltered on this side of the island.  I’ll bet the fishing is good.”  She thought about how she wished that their only challenge was to find a nice place to settle down.  She felt so drawn to Tom that it was an appealing thought to just find a spot and stay there.  No pirates, no time travel and nobody to interrupt their time together.

She walked over to Tom who was pouring water out of his boots.  “Tom.  We really should go over there in the trees and get out of these wet clothes.  Give them a chance to dry a little.”

Tom didn’t look up and was distracted by thinking about the hike back to the camp.  “We need to get back to Doug and Ying.  They probably wonder . . .”

Megan knelt down behind Tom and put her arms around him and whispered in his ear.  “We need to go over there and get out of our clothes so they can dry.  Don’t you agree?”  She leaned forward and kissed his ear.

Somewhere in Tom’s distracted mind, bouncing around between the struggle of the swim and the attack of the hover vehicle, a small light came on.  He turned he head slowly toward Megan and smiled.  “I guess it couldn’t hurt to have slightly drier clothes for the hike.  How much do you think they will dry in an hour?”

“We may not be drying them for that long.”  She kissed his cheek and walked towards the thick undergrowth.  Tom grabbed his wet boots and was right on her heels.

Chapter 11

Erin was speechless.  Even with all the events of the past week, nothing prepared her for emotional shock of meeting the person she saw in front of her.  In the cell that Dara had taken her to, sitting on the edge of the bunk, was a woman who was in her late forties.  She had bright eyes and long red hair with just a few gray strands.   Her hair was tied back in a pony tail and she was wearing a very well-worn Red Sox cap.  She stood up gracefully and walked across to the door.  She was thin but not emaciated and seemed to be very healthy.  She was smiling broadly.

“I never thought I would ever see you again.  It has been a long time.  And even if I had a mirror, the image I see now would be different than it used to be.  Would it be immodest for me to say how very beautiful you are?”

Erin wanted to ask how this could be possible, but she knew exactly how it was possible.  Dara and the insect man-robot had taken her from the cell she shared with Peter and Gaby and brought her to this meeting.  A meeting that turned out to be with a future version of herself.  The older model must have been living on the island and then brought back to this time by one of the time rifts caused by the vortex weapon.  Unless Dara had done it.

“May I go in and talk with her?”  Erin turned to Dara with a hopeful look on her face.  The time for resisting her captivity could be delayed.  She had to get Dara’s cooperation so she could talk to this woman.  She had to.

Dara paused long enough to make Erin wait and realize who was in control of the situation. Then she acquiesced with a simple nod.  Insect man opened the door of the cell just wide enough for Erin to go in.  She stood there, three feet from this woman who looked so much like the image she saw in the mirror.  The two of them looked at each other, acutely aware of the weirdness of the situation, but also fascinated by the opportunity to exchange thoughts across the mists of time.

“Come here and hug me.  You remind me so much of my daughters.”

Erin wasn’t at all prepared for that comment.  It never occurred to her that there would be a story of her future that involved children.  She put her arms around the older woman and hugged her, thinking how much she wanted to watch the entire movie of this woman’s life.  Her life in many ways.  At least one possible version of it.

The older Erin smiled and said, “Let’s go sit down.  You probably have some questions to ask me.”  The two women, still very similar in appearance despite nearly twenty years difference in their ages, sat on the lower bunk and got comfortable.  Erin wondered how long Dara would allow them to talk so she decided to ask a few key questions quickly just in case they were cut short.

“We may only have a few minutes.  How did you get here?”  Erin still felt the waves of disbelief flooding over her but she made up her mind to focus on the reality of what was right before her eyes.  And make the very most of the opportunity.

The older woman leaned forward and spoke softly.  “I was gathering some eggs when their flying saucer came after me.  Katelyn and Alannah were not with me so these bad people didn’t capture them.  Dara and the insect man don’t know about them, so this is the last I will speak of them.  For now anyway.  They are my daughters.  One is almost eighteen and the other one is fifteen.”

“Who is the father?”

The older Erin smiled.  “Who do you think?  Some Viking?”

“Where is he?  Where is Doug? Ah, the older version of Doug.  Your Doug.”

There was a long pause while the two women looked at each other.  One afraid of what she might hear and the other afraid of having to say what she had to say.

“He died two years ago.  He was fishing and must have slipped, hit his head and fell into the water.  We never found his body.  We tried and tried but I figured the waves just took him.”

There were tears in the eyes of both women as the thought about this ending for Doug.  “He was a wonderful partner and a great father to the girls.  We had a difficult life here but he made it worthwhile.  He was the love of my life and I wouldn’t have changed a moment of it.  I think of him every single day.”

Erin was speechless again as she leaned forward and hugged her older version.  This woman seemed like her mother in so many ways.  And yet she also was showing Erin the chapters of her story that had yet to be written.  What if her Doug had been killed by the energy burst and she would never have a life with him like this older Erin had.  Were their realities linked somehow?  Could her own story match this woman’s?  Would she have daughters?  With Doug?  Somehow hearing about this vision of the future, a possible future, was causing her as much pain as it was intriguing her.  

“Don’t worry, Erin.  You can’t be expected to grasp all this right away.  Doug and I talked many times over the years about the possibility that we might run into different versions of ourselves.  It isn’t like it hadn’t happened before.  Since the weapons testing here caused temporal rifts, they could occur at any time in our lives as we went from day to day, year to year.  We had a long time to consider what had taken place and come to grips with it.”

Erin’s mind was racing.  Almost to the point she couldn’t form a coherent set of questions for this Future Erin.

“Did you ever see Dara or the Insect Man when you were my age?”

“No.  Yesterday was the first time we saw them.  Doug and I survived an attack by the pirates all those years ago.  I am guessing your version of that attack would have just happened since Dara said something about a pirate attack on the group before that took you.  The pirates attacked us just before sunset.  The helicopter came in shooting at everyone while the rest of them came at us from the forest.  Before he was wounded, Tom shot down the helicopter with a small missile.  With Peter’s help, we managed to kill most of the pirates.  After that, Doug, Peter, Gaby and I went to Peter’s old camp.  We were looking for some better medical supplies for Tom.    He was too badly wounded to travel, so Megan and Ying stayed behind to look after him.  We stayed at Peter’s camp for two days and when we returned to the main camp by the shore, Tom, Megan and Ying were gone, along with all the zodiacs.  And we never saw them again.”

“You never saw them again?  What do you think happened to them?”

“We never had a clue.  In nearly twenty years, we have no more idea now than we did at the time.  They just disappeared into thin air.  We don’t know if they were taken by pirates we didn’t know about, or if they had to leave for some reason.  The day we found out they were gone was the saddest day I experienced on this island until the day Doug was lost.”

The story of her possible future was provoking strong emotions in the younger Erin and she felt a tear running down her cheek again.  “Quite a story, Erin.  Did you notice any of the vortex events recently?  That might explain why you ended up here in this reality.”  Erin tried to change the tone so they could both have an emotional break.

The older of the two women thought for a minute.  “Something happened yesterday that changed our world and I assume that is the event you are referring to.  It must have happened when we were asleep.  When we woke up, there were other items in our camp.  Food, bottled water, guns, ammunition.  All our stuff was there but the new things were there also.  It was as if the past and future versions of the place had been merged.  The really weird part was that in the morning there were more trees around our camp.  Did I mention that we still live in the shelter where Peter and John had set up their camp?”

Erin looked at her with surprise.  “Then there is a chance that Doug or Tom may be meeting your daughters any time now.  They planned to visit that camp.  If my Doug is still alive.  He was hit by a beam from the insect guy and it knocked him down.  He was trying to stop them from kidnapping me.”