Eve shook her head. “No, you were well on your way by the time you came to me. You didn’t have to go looking for the Many Worlds. They’d already found you.”
I tried to let it come back to me. I pushed on my temples to think, but my brain felt starved of oxygen, unable to process. Then I realized she was right. To get to the beginning, I had to go further back. I had to return to the one place that my mind didn’t want to go.
“Wait. No. I was in the water. I made it to the surface, and I saw him on the riverbank. Me. That was the first time.”
“Then what happened?”
“I dove down for Karly, but I couldn’t get to her.”
“How did you get out of the water?”
“What?”
“How did you get out of the water, Dylan?”
“I don’t — I don’t know. The police asked me that, but I don’t remember.”
“Why are you here, and Karly isn’t?”
“I don’t remember!”
“What do you remember?”
“Nothing! Nothing at all! I was trying to get to Karly, but I couldn’t find her. That’s when — that’s when everything stopped.”
“Yes.”
“That’s when everything else began.”
“Yes.”
I backed away from Eve, feeling an electric charge travel through my whole body. I looked up at the sky, which poured down a flood of rain over my head. I felt a tightness in my chest again, and I couldn’t breathe. Blackness darkened my eyes. Something briny and dank filled my senses.
“Oh, my God.”
“See? You know.”
I did know. A curtain parted, and I saw through all the illusions. It was as if Eve were a magician, and I finally understood the trick. I knew where I’d been, while my mind passed from world to world to world. I had traveled in a circle so I could go back to the place where my story began.
“What do you want, Dylan?” Eve asked me. “What do you want more than anything else in life?”
It was a question that had only one answer. “A second chance.”
“To do what?”
“To save Karly.”
Eve twirled her umbrella with a flourish. “Then you need to hurry.”
I ran. Yes, I ran. I ran like a madman through the Chicago streets, because I finally knew where I needed to go. I knew where my life was. I knew where I was supposed to be. I heard Karly calling out to me. She’d been calling to me ever since this began, and I hadn’t listened. Her voice was muffled. The sound had to reach me through the thickness of water, because that’s where she was.
In the river.
“Come find me. I’m still here.”
Chapter 36
I had no map to guide me back, but I didn’t need directions. The river drew me with the irresistible pull of a magnet. With each mile I drove, the storm intensified, as if this final world knew I was trying to escape and didn’t want to let go of me. It threw up a maelstrom in my path. Angry branches of lightning shattered the sky, and thunder growled at me in a deep voice to turn back.
Chicago disappeared like a dream into the fog behind me. So did the suburbs. Soon I was in terra incognita, heading past open fields and deserted towns, where it felt as if I were the only person alive. I started out in daylight, but as the hours passed, night fell. No lights came on, leaving me blind as I headed deeper into the middle of nowhere. The only relief from the swath of darkness came from blinding shock waves that speared like tridents between the clouds. With each orange burst, I saw emptiness around me. Silhouettes of cornstalks in the fields. A few lonely farmhouses, devoid of light. The leafy crowns of oaks and maples. A rippled layer of clouds in the charcoal sky.
I drove and drove and drove, through flat mile after flat mile. I was a man in a bubble, hearing nothing but the drumbeat of rain and seeing only the cramped silver glow of wet pavement through the headlights in front of me. I lost track of time and distance, but eventually, the heaviness in my chest told me the river was close. I slowed down; I peered at the road ahead. I felt the way a soldier must feel when he’s about to meet the enemy.
There it was.
I was back where I started.
Among the cornfields and trees, the flood monster loomed ahead of me, rolling, tumbling, like a dragon unleashed. I stopped in the middle of the road and got out into the teeth of the storm. The pavement ended just ahead of me, and the wild river began where the bridge should have been. The mud and water had become a kind of lava, whipping debris from the fields and roads in its teeth. I saw a highway sign making cartwheels like a circular saw. An electrical pole, dangling wires. Then an entire tree, its branches grasping for the surface like the crooked fingers of a skeleton.
I ran to the fringe of the water and followed it off the road into sodden fields. I kicked off my shoes, took off my belt and my shirt, anything that would slow me down. The wind gusted with a roar, nearly pushing me over. Rain stung my eyes, and another huge branch of lightning turned night to day. Barely a second passed before thunder exploded like a bomb. The storm was right on top of me now, not moving, firing all its weapons at me. I wiped my face and tried to see where I needed to go.
Where was the car?
Where was Karly?
I couldn’t be far, but the river covered everything under a blanket of deep, frenzied rapids that wound over the land in both directions. Debris rolled past me, floating up and down on the waves, as if all the animals on the merry-go-round had been set free. I looked for some clue, something, anything breaching the surface to let me find her. A tire. A fender. The car was near me, trapped under the water along with my wife, but there was nothing to tell me where she was.
I stood there, needing help. Please!
That was when the Many Worlds sent me... myself.
Dylan Moran burst from the river right in front of me. We weren’t even ten feet apart. He rose up like a sea creature, covered in mud and slime, spitting out water and gasping for breath. It was déjà vu in reverse. I was him. He was me. This was the moment when it had all started, but now we’d changed places.
He was in the water, and I was the man on the riverbank.
When the lightning flashed again, Dylan spotted me across the surging flood. It took a moment for him to register what he was seeing. I knew the feeling, because I’d already been through it. His face twisted with confusion, just the way mine had, because the man on the riverbank couldn’t be real. But I was.
“Help me!” he shouted. My words.
The lightning faded to darkness, and he called out again: “My wife is drowning! Help me find her!”
Then he was gone, diving down into the water. With a kick of his feet, Dylan disappeared, but I knew he wouldn’t find Karly. I’d been where he was, and I’d failed. He would search and search and come up empty. He would swim into nothingness. He would swim into other worlds.
Saving her was up to me now.
I waded into the water, where the wild current knocked me sideways. My feet spilled out on the slippery ground beneath me. I landed hard on my back, and the river sucked me into a whirlpool before I even took a breath. In an instant, the rapids spun me downstream in crazy circles. I choked, rising and falling, and finally, I fought back to the surface, where I gagged out water and desperately inhaled. The river swept against me like a speeding truck, but I kicked furiously with my hands and feet to fight the flow and stay where I was.
The car had to be submerged close by, but I couldn’t see it. Once I was down below, I would be swimming blind. I was running out of time. I only had one last chance.