Whirlwind

  He said, “Go away.”

  “Your nurse wants you,” David said. “A man is dying. He needs you.”

  “Find Dr. Jacobs,” Dr. Scott said.

  “It’s Major Rawlins.”

  The arm flew off his face so fast, David didn’t see it happen. Dr. Scott rolled off the cot and pushed past David.

  “Where?” he said, running. “Where?”

  “There! There!” David said, running with him. “See Xan— I mean, where that boy is standing?”

  The doctor beelined it for Xander.

  David stopped. He suddenly felt sick. His stomach tumbled freely inside his body. A gray cloud narrowed his vision, and he became dizzy. He dropped to his knees and fell forward, catching himself with his one good arm. He closed his eyes.

  A montage of images flashed in his head: faces, maps, newspaper headlines, scenes of violence and bloodshed, war . . . a bearded man on horseback taking a bullet to the chest and falling off . . .

  “David!” Xander yelled. He lifted David by his shoulders.

  “You all right? What’s the matter?”

  David put his hand over his eyes. The images faded until only blackness remained. He opened his eyes, blinked. His vision came back. “Dizzy,” he said.

  “Can you run?” Xander asked.

  “Run?”

  Xander pointed. The group of soldiers had grown to fifteen or more. They were marching down the camp’s center aisle, headed directly for them. At the head of the pack was the man he had imagined seeing shot off his horse: Ulysses S. Grant.

  CHAPTER

  thirty - two

  “You!” Grant shouted, pointing at David and Xander. “Stop right there!”

  “Go, go, go!” Xander yelled, shoving David.

  David stumbled. His vision blurred, then cleared. Xander dashed past him and stopped. He extended his hand to David, who grabbed it, and they ran.

  A dozen voices rose up behind them: “There they go!” “Stop!” “Spies!”

  David waited for the first shot, wondered if it would sail harmlessly by or rip a fist-sized hole through his body.

  They swung around the last tent, Dr. Scott’s, and beat it for the woods—a hundred yards away at the far side of a field.

  David stumbled again. He stayed up only because Xander had a firm grip on his hand.

  Xander looked back. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “I feel like I just woke up. I can’t think straight.”

  Looking ahead, Xander said, “Snap out of it! If you don’t, we’re dead.”

  David inhaled, exhaled. He scanned the ground ahead of them for obstacles. He felt the muscles in his legs working— no burn yet—his feet touching down, lifting up, shooting forward.

  Here we go, he thought. Welcome back, David.

  The soldiers’ angry voices reached him. He glanced back.

  They had rounded Dr. Scott’s tent and were running. Two in the lead stopped to aim their rifles.

  “They’re going to shoot, Xander!” David hollered. “Jag left. I’ll go right.”

  Xander released David’s hand and made a sharp jog left.

  David mirrored the move in the other direction.

  The rifles rang out, two in quick succession.

  Xander veered right. David swung left and they crossed paths, Xander just ahead of David.

  “Keep doing it,” David said.

  Another shot. Bark exploded from a tree fifty yards ahead.

  “You got all the items, Xander,” David reminded him. “Are they pulling?”

  “Oh yeah,” Xander said. “Way off to the left, but let’s get into the woods first.”

  They zigged and zagged, pushed harder.

  Three more gunshots . . . another two. David heard a bullet fly past.

  “Here,” Xander said. He held the rifle out behind him without looking. “For the pull,” he said. “Don’t try to shoot it. It’ll just slow you down.”

  “Wait!” David said. He reached for it, touched it, and Xander let go. Instead of falling back into David’s hand, it spun forward and shot diagonally away from them.

  “Hey!” Xander said.

  “It just took off,” David said. “Should we go after it?”

  Behind them, a soldier fired.

  “No way,” Xander said. “The woods—ten seconds away. That thing’s not even close, cutting across the field like that. It was heading straight for the portal.”

  Xander leaped over a bush and practically vanished in the shadows of the woods. David plowed in, no leaping necessary. They continued to put distance between themselves and the soldiers. They swerved around trees, hurdled bushes, crunched over twigs.

  David threw a look back. The field was fifty yards behind them. The soldiers pressed on, but had not yet hit the tree line. He slowed and stopped.

  “Xander!” he called.

  David bent over and put his hands on his knees. He panted.

  He dropped to his knees, then onto his side. The groundcover prickled his bare skin. He filled his lungs over and over.

  He closed his eyes, wondering if he’d be assaulted by the images again. They didn’t come, but he did feel lightheaded.

  He remembered learning in school about Grant’s death in the Civil War. When would that be? How many days or years from now did that happen? Wait a minute: it never happened.

  Grant survived the Civil War and became the eighteenth president of the United States, after Andrew Johnson—David had to memorize the presidents in order in sixth grade. And he had always liked Grant: he was considered one of the best military commanders ever. Plus he was the president who controlled James West and Artemus Gordon in the Wild Wild West TV show.

  But it was so clear in his memory: Grant died in battle in—he knew this—1862. That’s right, toward the beginning of the war, which ended in 1875. No! That wasn’t right. The war ended in 1865. He’d memorized a poem about it:

  In 1861 the war begun

  In 1862 the bullets flew

  In 1863 Lincoln set slaves free

  In 1864 there still was a war

  In 1865 hardly a man is still alive

  There were no more lines, no more years of war.

  Memory. He remembered Grant having died in 1862, at the Battle of Shiloh, and the war lasting until 1875.

  Xander’s feet crunched over the ground, moving quickly toward him, then stopped. “Dae,” he whispered. “Dae!”

  When David looked up, Xander was sitting with his back against a tree. He glanced around the tree toward the soldiers. He cast wide eyes at David. “David! They’re coming.”

  David popped his head up. The soldiers had reached the tree line. Grant was twenty feet behind. He was swinging a pointing hand, positioning the soldiers an equal distance apart. Finding Xander and David was going to be an organized affair.

  David rolled to a tree and sat up behind it. He said, “Xander, it worked. We changed history. I remember the way it was—and the way it is. Like Jesse. That must be why I felt sick and got dizzy. My memories were colliding. It happened right when I sent Dr. Scott to the tent, to Major Rawlins.”

  Xander stared at David for a good ten seconds. David could see the wheels turning in his head. Finally he said, “We don’t have time for this.” He popped his head around the tree, pulled it back quickly. “They’re in the woods.”

  “Just tell me,” David said. “I have to know. I need know for sure which of my memories are the right ones. You know, history as it is now, right now. When did the Civil War end?”

  Without hesitating Xander said, “1865.”

  “Did Grant die in the war?”

  “David!”

  “Please!”

  “Your father has been a history teacher your whole life, until this year, and you ask something like that?” He sighed.

  “No, he became president after the war, in 1869. Now come on! Your pasty skin is going to be like a beacon for those guys.” He pushed himself up the
tree until he was standing.

  David looked down at his shirtless chest. He had forgotten.

  The blood Xander had smeared on his ribs had dried; it looked liked crusty ketchup. He turned toward the tree and stood. “One last thing,” he said.

  “If we don’t move now,” Xander said, exasperated, “I’m going to lose the coat and kepi—and those guys are going to shoot us.”

  David shot a glance at the soldiers. They apparently thought their quarry had gone to ground as soon as they hit the woods.

  They were moving slowly, kicking at clumps of leaves and twigs, bayoneting bushes. He darted from his tree to Xander’s.

  No one yelled.

  Xander’s coat was fluttering, as though caught in gale-force winds, in the direction they had to travel. The kepi vibrated against his tight grip.

  Dae looked up at him. “How many people died in the war?”

  Xander pressed his lips together. David knew his brother wanted to deck him.

  “Six hundred thousand,” Xander said. “Give or take.”

  “Xander,” David said, excited. “I remember this—reading it, writing it, seeing it in a documentary, Mrs. Felton putting it on the whiteboard: the Civil War took over two million lives. If what you’re saying is true, that only six hundred thousand died, then we just saved . . .” He calculated. “We just saved one million, four hundred thousand people!”

  CHAPTER

  thirty - three

  FRIDAY, 8:52 A.M.

  Jesse’s eyes sprang open. They jittered in their sockets, but he did not see the ceiling above his hospital bed, only the dream that had awakened him. Not a dream as much as a dream of memories. When history changed—whether at his hands or another’s—the events that had lost their place in time flooded his mind, the way a lightbulb briefly flares with intensity before blowing its filament. He liked to think of it as history-that- is-no-longer-history saying, “I was here! I was . . .” Gone.

  He never pursued why changed history uttered this last gasp or why he could sense it. He simply accepted it as the way the universe worked, a part of who he was. But he knew in his heart what it was all about. It was God’s way of telling him, You matter. This is why you’re here.

  Florescent lights above him flickered on, penetrating his eyes and dimming the images of a history that never was. He still remembered them and would continue to remember for a few hours most likely. But as life encroached and time passed, they would become like a movie projected in a theater whose house lights grew progressively brighter, until the image on the screen vanished in the glare of reality.

  He became aware of the EKG machine, like his heart’s radio station. Currently it was playing a quick-tempo’d oldie-but-goodie: beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep. The machine added another tone, designed to alert listeners when the station was getting too jazzy for its own good: wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa! Boring and irritating, in Jesse’s opinion.

  A nurse leaned over him. “Mr. Wagner?” She stared into his face, then turned and flicked the radio station off, severing the alarm in mid-wa!

  “Finally,” he said, surprised by the frailty of his voice.

  “Are you all right?” she said. “Your heart got a little excited there.”

  Well, of course it did, he thought. History changed. Things just got better—and almost nobody knows it.

  Whenever it happened, his heart always raced. He didn’t know if it was an emotional response from the excitement of witnessing a phenomenal event or if it was biological, the body pumping blood to the brain so it could process the clash of memories—the memories of current history tossing out the memories of history-that-is-no-longer-history. At least his body had acclimated to the assaults. No more nausea. No more dizziness. No more grogginess, as though the mind was too preoccupied with watching that brief, final flare of history to handle life as well.

  He wondered if one or more of the new gatekeepers possessed this ability. He hoped for their sake they did. It was a dormant trait, like a recessive gene, that was activated only through time travel. Even then, in some people—he thought of his brother, Aaron—it took years to kick in; in others it came quickly. He had his first flash of history-that-is-no-longer-history after his third time “going over.”

  He smiled. Going over was another term from the King kids.

  His father—and subsequently he himself—had called it jaunting. Didn’t matter—the only thing that did matter was that they were doing it. The memories now battling it out in his head proved they not only were jaunting, but that they had taken his advice: they were making a difference.

  Way to go, boys, he thought. I knew you could do it.

  “Well, it looks like everything’s all right,” the nurse said. “Just a little scare. Were you dreaming?”

  “Oh, was I,” he said. He tried to smile, but wasn’t sure he managed one. He lifted a shaking hand, feeling the tug of IV lines like a leash. “Please . . .”

  She cupped his hand in both of hers and lowered it to the bed. “What is it?” she said.

  Sweet girl.

  “I used to record my dreams,” he said slowly, “but I believe I can’t do it this time. Could you . . .” He could feel it now, his smile. “Could you write it down for me? I’ll tell you.”

  “Uh . . .” she said, frowning.

  Of course, she was busy.

  Then she grinned and nodded. “Yeah, sure. I’ll just go get a pen and paper.” She hurried away.

  When he was younger, Jesse spent countless hours in the house’s library, reading, learning, absorbing biographies, philosophy, science. But mostly, history. It had not been merely an intellectual pursuit, not when his life revolved around traveling to different times—“worlds,” as the King kids would say. He had found that the more he understood about the worlds he traveled to, the better his chance at accomplishing the mission he had been handed; the better his chances for survival. For him, cracking a book in his library was as crucial to his life as picking up a gun at a firing range was for a police officer or soldier.

  The nurse returned, pad and pencil in hand. She dragged a chair across the room, positioning it beside him. She settled in and said, “Go ahead.”

  He started: “Ulysses S. Grant died on April 7, 1862.”

  She brightened. “Oh, an alternate history story. I love those.”

  He winked at her and continued. “Earlier that day, Grant’s close friend and aide-de-camp John Aaron Rawlins sustained fatal wounds from Confederate snipers. Upon learning of Rawlins’s death, Grant flew into a fit of rage. He mounted his horse and charged to the front lines, where the very same snipers killed him . . .”

  CHAPTER

  thirty - four

  Xander gripped David’s shoulder and peered around the tree. “Ready?” he said.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Xander smiled. “That’s what I want to hear. Follow me.” He broke from the cover of the tree, running parallel to the tree line.

  David leaped in behind him.

  Soldiers yelled. A rifle cracked, and a branch shattered in front of them. A piece of flying wood struck his arm. He yelled, grabbed his bicep, didn’t slow.

  Xander did, turning to check on David.

  David crashed into him. They tumbled, rolling over leaves and twigs that poked and sliced David’s back. “Go!” he said, grunting out the word. He felt Xander struggling under his legs, saw him reaching for the kepi, which rolled away from his hand and wedged itself into a bush. It ripped through the bush and sailed away.

  Xander scrambled up. He lifted David, and they were off again—hurdling bushes, dodging trees, ducking under branches.

  Someone fired. A sound like a bat striking a tree came from right behind David. Another shot. Another. Between the loud cracks, David could hear the men stomping through the woods after them, yelling, calling out instructions to one another.

  Wouldn’t that be nice? David thought. Grant kills the boy who saved his life! He didn’t know how helping Major Rawlins ultim
ately led to saving Grant, but he knew it did. Grant and over a million others.

  Xander fell into a bush, rolled through it, and was running again before David caught up.

  “Just ahead,” Xander yelled. “Has to be.”

  They were close to the spot in the woods where the rifle would have ended up, had it continued its trajectory when David had watched it spin through the field. He could tell by how tight Xander’s uniform coat was on his back that it was pulling him forward.