“It’s in the files,” I hiss back at him. “A UIED with a countdown. No one knows how to disarm it. My dad thought it was connected somehow to the bodies.”
He lets go of my arm, and I pull it away from him and lean back as Barclay starts to flip through the files. I’m tempted to say something about his unnecessary use of force, but I don’t. Instead I sit still and quiet and try not to let on how much my arm hurts from the way he grabbed it.
I knew what I was getting into when I decided I wanted to play with the big boys.
I’m trying to think of something to say to him, some way to right the scales of control again, so I’m the one with the upper hand, when I have that sick feeling again, and there’s a quick jerk beneath me, like a car just ran into the building.
Barclay’s beer falls off the table and shatters on the floor. A collection of screams go up through the store, and I hear a rumbling—products shaking and vibrating against the floor.
“Shit,” I say. It’s an aftershock. Not as strong as the earthquake this morning, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just emphasizing the fact that this is a colossal waste of time. I think of Jared, and I know I should be with him, or at least be around when he gets home, to make sure he’s okay.
I look down and grab my backpack, pulling a twenty out of my wallet for the food. Any more conversation with Barclay is a waste of time. “This is a sign,” I mutter to myself.
Apparently, a little too loud. “A sign of what?” Barclay asks.
“The apocalypse.”
The asshole laughs. “The apocalypse apocalypse? Like four horsemen, pestilence, all that?”
And because I’m frustrated and I hate how helpless I feel—like I’m wasting what are potentially the last precious moments of my life sitting here with one of the biggest jerks I’ve ever met—I just tell him the truth. “I was thinking two universes colliding and effectively destroying each other. How about that?”
And then I get up and walk out. I need to go. I’ll wait at home for Jared. Hopefully Alex has had better luck.
It takes me about fifteen minutes to walk home, but when I’m there I find a package in front of the door. It must have been delivered before the earthquake.
It’s addressed to my dad.
My legs feel like Jell-O, and I just have to sit down. So I do—right there on the worn WELCOME TO EARTH mat that my dad bought forever ago. I hold the box, and for a second I don’t know if I’m actually going to open it. Not because it’s technically illegal to open mail that doesn’t belong to you, but because I’m not sure I want to know what’s inside.
But I only hold on to it for a second. Because I have to know.
Using my keys to cut through the tape seems to take forever, and the only thing I can hear is the ripping of cardboard as I pull it open.
When I see what’s inside, I realize I’ve been holding my breath, and I lean my head back against the door with a thud and close my eyes to keep from crying. It’s for Jared. It’s a Firefly poster, signed by each of the cast members. The inscription at the top reads “To Jared.” And then Nathan Fillion’s signature is at the bottom. It’s perfect.
My dad has—had—an eBay addiction. Sometimes the strangest things showed up on our doorstep because he’d been mildly interested in something listed for a penny, and then he’d gotten so caught up in winning the bidding war that we had some ridiculous toy from the 1980s that cost over a hundred dollars.
I don’t know how much this poster was, but I know it’s a Christmas present. It doesn’t matter that it’s only September. My dad never rushed out to buy presents on Christmas Eve. He bought us presents year round and stored them in odd places we’d never think to look. It made opening presents that morning that much more exciting, because each present came with a story—where he found it, how long he’d had it, where it had been hiding.
It occurs to me now that we’re not going to have that this year.
I take a deep breath and try to wipe the emotions away from my eyes. Because I wonder how long I’ll be finding random Christmas presents he stashed all over the house. And I wonder if it will feel this devastating each time.
Another deep breath and I get up and put the keys in the door. When I get inside, I drop the backpack and the Firefly paraphernalia next to the door—not much chance of Struz dropping in until this whole earthquake thing is more under control—and head for the kitchen.
And the hits just keep coming.
07:23:12:54
My mother is sitting at the kitchen table, wearing my father’s FBI sweatpants and his West Point sweatshirt. She has an empty mug in front of her and a bag of Earl Grey on the table.
“Did you want some tea?” I ask, because Earl Grey has always been her favorite. She used to brew it every morning when I was little.
Only when I get closer, I realize there’s something wrong with her hands.
They’re red and swollen.
I can’t help thinking of the unidentified bodies burned beyond recognition from radiation poisoning.
Her hands aren’t like that, but they’re burned.
“What happened?” I rush toward her. She doesn’t respond, just holds her hands out to me, and I look at them without touching them. Maybe second-degree burns. Maybe third.
I grab her, pulling her out of the kitchen chair and over to the sink, and I turn on the water and push her hands underneath the stream.
The steel teapot is in the sink, and I glance to the right and notice one of the burners of the stove is still on. Like she started to make herself tea and somehow it went terribly wrong.
“Stay right here,” I tell her as I reach for the phone.
I could be a good daughter, treat the burns with aloe vera, wrap them up, and put her back to bed, but this is my limit. I can’t watch her all the time and make sure she doesn’t hurt herself, and I certainly can’t do it for the next few days. Not if I’m also trying to stop this countdown and figure out who killed my dad.
So I tell myself, these are her hands, and if they don’t heal right, anything she wants to do in the future—painting, baking, playing the piano—will be a nightmare. I call 911. Then we sit at the kitchen table, the two of us, for ninety-seven minutes before the ambulance actually shows up.
If I have any luck, the fact that they’re probably overrun dealing with injuries will mean she’ll be there longer, and I’ll have a night or two to not worry about her. My chest tightens with guilt—part of me can’t believe this is what’s crossing my mind. But a bigger part of me is just relieved. And tired.
And worried about everything else.
07:18:47:39
“You’re sure it’s the same guy?” I say, looking at the blurry picture of the back of a guy’s head on Elijah’s phone. I try to keep my voice down because Jared is upstairs in his room, hopefully sleeping.
“Of course it’s fucking him,” Elijah says, reaching for the phone, but I hold on to it, pulling away and looking at it as closely as possible.
The guy could be the same height and build as alias Mike Cooper, and he’s got that high and tight military haircut, but really it could be anybody. It just so happens he’s walking into a Staybridge Suites close to both the pawnshop and the pool supply store on University Avenue.
I’m not sure whether it’s good luck that Elijah just happened to see him and take a picture or it’s us trying too hard to put the pieces together.
I guess it’ll depend on whether or not this is really the guy.
Alex takes the phone from me and hands it back to Elijah. “Okay, assuming it really is him, what’s the next play here?”
“You mean we’re not going to just send Janelle after him with a gun, demanding answers?” Elijah asks.
“You’re hilarious,” I say, even though our options are running pretty thin at this point. We can’t just ask him if he’s opening portals to another universe. But I can’t run in there with a gun, because who knows who this guy is and what I’d need to do to scare him into
talking.
“Maybe this is the point where we should go to Struz,” Alex says.
“We’re not going to the FBI,” Reid says at the same time Elijah says, “Fuck, no!”
“Let’s stake him out,” Ben offers.
I shake my head. “We don’t have time to follow him around and try to catch him in the act. And even if we did, what would that do? We’d still be in the same position we are now. With no authority.”
“I don’t mean stake him out and try to catch him in the act,” Ben says. “We stake him out for a day at the most, figure out which hotel room is his, wait until he leaves—”
“And then we go in and toss that shit and see what he’s hiding,” Elijah says. “I like it! Call your people, I’ll call my people, we’ll both say we’re staying at Reid’s tonight, we’ll grab some shit from the house, and we’ll check him out.”
“Wait a minute,” I say, because I’m not sure about this plan—and I am sure we shouldn’t be rushing into anything.
“This is a bad idea,” Alex says, looking at me. And I can tell from the look that this is an argument we’re going to have later.
“We’re not going to the FBI,” Reid reiterates.
“Yeah, I got that, I’m just trying to make sure there isn’t another option better than breaking into a potential terrorist’s hotel room. How will you even know what you’re looking for?” My eyes meet Ben’s, and he shrugs.
“If he’s opening portals, he’ll have some of the same things I’d have. But at least this way we can find out who he really is and get more information.” I don’t like the idea, but I don’t exactly have a better one, either. “If he’s not our guy, whatever information we get, you can turn over to the FBI,” Ben offers, as some kind of truce.
I look at Alex, who asks, “How are you going to get into his room?”
“What, you think this’ll be the first hotel room I’ve broken into?” Elijah laughs.
“Right,” Alex says. “And please tell me you have something better than some half-baked movie-inspired plan. Calling room service for every room and trying to keep an eye on who opens the door isn’t exactly an effective method of finding out which room he’s in.”
Elijah doesn’t even dignify that with a reply. He just keeps laughing.
“A hotel like Staybridge Suites doesn’t have room service,” Ben says.
“What he was trying to ask was if you guys have a plan,” I say, because I’d like to know what that plan is, if possible.
Elijah shrugs and gets up from the table. “Of course we have a plan. Don’t worry your pretty little head, I’ll make sure to keep Ben safe.” Then he laughs, and Reid and Ben both follow him out. I watch Ben leaving, hoping he’ll look back, hoping we can at least acknowledge the discussion we had after the earthquake, but he doesn’t.
“I gotta get home,” Alex says, packing up his stuff. “And for the record, I’m going to say again, I think this is a bad idea.”
“I know.” Because I do.
“We should go to Struz,” Alex says.
“He won’t believe us,” I say.
“We’re seven days from something big—whether it’s a terrorist attack, worlds colliding, or something we haven’t even thought of. We’ll make him believe.”
I shake my head. “We’ll give them a day, and then if I still don’t have a better plan, I’ll go to Struz.”
Alex leaves, and I can tell by how loudly he slams the door that he’s pissed off. And then I’m alone, with copies of my father’s case files and too much that I don’t understand.
I grab the folder with the crime-scene photos from the house. There’s nothing in there that I want to see ever again, but that’s all the more reason I should look at them one more time. I don’t want to have missed something just because I’m being squeamish.
The first picture is the one of the man slumped in the back hallway. I skip that one because the image of it has been burned into my retinas.
His eyes are red, like they were bleeding when he died, and when I take another couple of steps to see him at a better angle, I see it’s not just his skin, but also his bones that look melted—because I can see his skeleton, and the bones look like they’re dripping—like this is some kind of Salvador Dalí painting come to life.
I take a deep breath, refocus, and flip to the picture of the body in the kitchen. Based on her clothes—pants, a blouse, a cardigan, and an apron—I wonder if she’s the wife of the guy I saw, the woman who lived in this house. She has her hand around a frying pan, only her hand and the handle of the pan look like they’ve melted together, almost to the point you can’t tell where one ends and one begins. The skin from her face is all but gone, and she looks like just a misshapen melted skeleton from that angle.
I have to look away. Up at the ceiling or something—just away from that image. I know the trick is that I have to stop thinking of her as a person, and just focus on the fact that this is a case, and I’m trying to solve it. That’s how agents who work on cases like this don’t go insane. Their brain has to separate the horror of the crime from the humanity of the victim.
I can’t seem to do it. I just keep wondering what she was doing with the frying pan—cooking, washing the dishes, what?
In the grand scheme of things, I guess that says something about me, that I’m not a sociopath or whatever, which is great, except…
I need to be able to do this. I need to look at these pictures for clues instead of getting so hung up on who these people were. Because this is one piece of the case that doesn’t seem to quite fit with everything Ben has told me. Even if someone else is opening up the portals, even if we’re only seven days now from Wave Function Collapse, there’s no explanation for what happened at this house.
I turn back to the picture in time to jump when I feel a hand on my shoulder. “What are you looking at?”
I leap to my feet, pushing Jared back in the process, and scramble to turn all the pictures over and shut the files so he doesn’t have to see any of that.
“God, I was just asking,” he says as he turns to leave the room.
“No, Jared, it’s not that I don’t want you to see,” I say, following him into the living room. I opt to go for partial truth on this. “It’s one of Dad’s cases, the one he was working on when he died. I’m trying to figure some of it out, that’s all.”
“Why can’t I help?” he asks, folding his arms across his chest. “You think I don’t want to help figure out how he died?”
“No, it’s not that. I know you do, it’s just…”
“Just what? That I’m too young? That I don’t know anything? What?”
I shake my head, even though it is that he’s too young. “Jared, I’m too young for this. Trust me, I don’t know anything either. But I still have to try.”
“Then why can’t I try too?”
I don’t have an answer for that, and he sees it on my face and shakes his head. Then he turns around and leaves me here with these nauseating pictures I don’t understand.
And I let him.
06:01:10:48
Life is supposed to have returned to normal.
It’s Friday. School started back up today—but only about half the student body actually showed. Jared tried halfheartedly to get me to let him stay home, but the truth is, during aftershocks, we’re probably safer at school than we are in the house.
“How can they suspend people for something that happens when there’s no school?” Jared says, as Alex pulls into the pool’s parking lot. They’ve been talking about why half the football team was walking around looking beat up today—apparently part of life returning to normal is that a bunch of guys decided to get into a brawl over a few traded insults. “It’s bullshit.”
“We’re living in a social world these days,” Alex says. “Next thing you know we’ll have no freedoms and it’ll be like Total Recall or Enemy of the State.”
“Oh my God, stop with the bad action movies.”
“Hey, I liked Enemy of the State,” Jared says, opening his door. Then he looks at me. “Will you come pick me up tonight?”
“Maybe,” I say. “If it’s not me, I’ll call Struz and ask him to do it.”
Jared frowns, and I’m overcome with guilt. “Okay,” he says, shutting the door behind him.
Both Alex and I are silent as we watch Jared head down the steps and into the gate, and then we’re driving again, pulling back onto the street, heading home, and the silence seems to stretch miles between us.
It’s not like I don’t know what he’s mad about—I do. He wants me to go to the FBI with the information about the alternate universes. Alex knows the silent treatment is the easiest way to make me give in to whatever he thinks is best, but this time is different. The stakes are higher.
Finally I can’t stand it anymore. “Please tell me you have something better than a bad Arnold movie planned for tonight.”
“Don’t do that,” he says.
“What?”
“Act like everything’s just fine and we can joke around like we always do.”
“Alex, I’ve told you,” I say with a sigh. “I can’t tell Struz. He’s not going to believe me anyway.”
“Why not?” Alex says.
“You didn’t believe me at first either.”
“At first,” Alex says. “But I do now—or at least I’m willing to consider it an option. Struz will be too.”
I shake my head. “This is too weird, Alex. This is stuff that shouldn’t be possible. Alternate worlds. It’s crazy.”
And that’s a big part of it. What’s going on—what I’ve chosen to believe—is crazy. I don’t want Struz to think I’ve cracked under the loss of my dad and the pressure of taking care of my family. Not when mental disorders run in my family.
“You need to tell him,” Alex says again.
“I can’t. Not yet.”
“That’s bullshit, J,” he says back. “We’re sitting on this huge secret, and it doesn’t make any sense for us to be running around playing junior detective when the FBI doesn’t know what the hell is going on. They have resources and we have nothing!”