YOU LOSE, PUMPKIN BUTTER
Gibson read them, and roared till he tasted blood.
When that was done, the security camera adjusted focus, giving itself away with a tiny whirr. Gibson looked up into the lens that looked at him, knowing who was on the other end.
“You know I’m getting’ outta here, don’tcha? You know. And when I-”
There was a loud snap and a descending whine as power to the machine cut off.
Gibson noticed, wouldn’t be intimidated. “-and when I do-”
Power to the left bank of lights cut abruptly, throwing the coffin-room into bleak twilight.
“-I’m comin’ for you, ya little bitch! For Donny! And… and… for Irene!” He knew what was coming, and he met it. But the remaining lights didn’t switch off. He glanced back at them, then back at the camera.
The camera whirr-whirr-ed, shaking its head left to right. No.
Half-mad with rage and terror, he screamed, put all he had into it, as though volume might save him, or kill her.
Light vanished, and blackness devoured Randall Gibson.
Sunday, 4 July 2010. 00:01 A.M. Riverport Swimming Hall. One year later.
Jack stepped out of the time machine onto the ramp, armed and scanning.
He recognized the swimming hall. Pretty much everything was the way he remembered it from 2016, but with one difference: someone had built a concrete enclosure around the machine, and had then tore it down. The jagged track across the empty pool’s width remained.
The air smelled different, too. Like fresh laundry, and cooking. Hot, frying smells. Bacon.
Someone was living here.
The workbenches in front of the machine were still there, one now cleared of Will’s clutter. Laid across it was a neatly arranged kit: Kevlar vest, assault carbine, handgun, three magazines for each-all Monarch-issue.
Someone appeared in the doorway at the far end of the pool, equipped with the same kit that rested in front of Jack, her red hair tied in a ponytail.
She stepped into the light. It was her: Beth. But changed.
The years had left their imprint, the line of her jaw a little softer, care around her eyes etched more deeply than she deserved. She looked tired, but it was still Beth, still strong, still unbowed.
“Hey, Trouble,” she said, quavering. “Want breakfast? I got an early start.”
Jack dropped his gun and ran to her.
Half an hour later.
He had a hundred questions and she did her best to answer what she could. She walked Jack through her eleven years here-living from 1999 to 2010, the present day: the almost perpetual déjà vu, distracting herself from everything she knew by obsessively searching for things she didn’t in an effort to remain engaged with the world, to not think of it as a video game she had played before. To think of lives and events as happening to real people, and not simulations of history. She told him about Gibson and his crew, and how they had ended. She told him how she had lived for years in a hideout in the woods, keeping an eye on Jack’s younger self and Will, ensuring no threat from the present or future interfered with Will’s work. If enemy action resulted in the Countermeasure being somehow flawed, it was all over.
“Hey,” she said. “Remember what goes down this morning?”
Jack nodded. “Aberfoyle. Bannerman’s Overlook.”
“My younger self’s all grown up. She’s Zed now. Got in touch a few weeks ago, asked for some help. I obliged.”
Jack looked at her. To him, forty minutes ago, in another world, everything had been as it was. Now… forty minutes later, the woman he loved had spent eleven years without him. Had grown eleven years older than he.
Was a different person than the one he had known.
That, at least, he was used to.
His hands closed tight on hers, and he kissed her. She was still Beth.
She rested her forehead against his.
“Let’s take a drive,” he said.
Sunday, 4 July 2010. 4:52 A.M. Riverport, Massachusetts.
Bright morning light pushed through the pines and birches that blanketed the hillside sloping gently toward Riverport. Jack and Beth stood on a slanting boulder, squinting toward a channel in the woods that framed an excellent view of Bannerman’s Overlook two miles away.
“Funny thing,” Beth said. “I’m history’s only Scorpio with a birthday in March.”
Jack took a pair of binoculars from their backpack. “Say what?”
“I was born October 30… I went through the machine October 9-twenty-one days before my birthday. I came out February 28, 1999, a leap year. February 28 plus twenty-one days is March 20. So now the day that I age a year is March 20.”
Jack slung the binoculars’ strap around his neck. “And I thought what I disliked about time travel was the jetlag.”
Beth checked her watch, clicked her pen, made a note in her Moleskine pad. Jack focused the binoculars, bringing the Bannerman’s Overlook platform into sharp focus. Their twenty-two-year-old selves and Aberfoyle came into focus: Jack and Paul looking over the rail toward Riverport, Aberfoyle and Zed talking thirty feet behind them. Jack panned. Three goons, waiting with the car. Panned back to himself and Paul.
“You okay?” Beth asked.
“Sure.”
“Really? ’Cause for a second you sounded like a dog having a nightmare.”
He couldn’t look away. “I didn’t know how this would make me feel. Being back here.”
“So… how do you feel?”
“Mortal.” He lowered the binoculars. “Did you talk to her then?”
“Zed? Sure. I practically raised her. Well, I left her in the care of friends. I checked in a few times a year.”
Jack shook his head. “You abducted yourself. Gave yourself to strangers. Couldn’t you have trained her while she was still living with her folks? Your folks, I mean?”
“No, Jack. Because that’s not what happened. I also don’t have the resources or facilities to raise a child here, and how exactly do you imagine I’d go about negotiating with her parents? I’ve lived with this whole deal, every detail, my entire life. You just got here. Believe me, I’m across it.”
Jack was still twenty-eight. Yesterday she had been, too. Now, a day later to him, she was thirty-nine.
Jack reached out and took her hand, wanted to say something, but didn’t know where to begin.
“Gonna need you to keep an eye on the Overlook,” she said, taking her hand from his. “Need exact times for the detonations.”
He let it go, glanced back through the trees. Their younger selves were still in the same places; nothing had escalated yet. “But you set the explosives a week ago, right?”
“After Zed got in touch, yeah.”
“So, that trick you pulled… Zed pulled… pulls… pointing and having things explode. How do the two of you expect to get the timing exactly right? That’s a hell of a needle to be threading.”
“It’s impossible for the timing to be anything but exactly right.” Beth held up her notepad. “The timers on the explosives have been set to detonate at the exact moments required.”
“Yeah… but… that’s some really fine choreography. I don’t see how you’re gonna get it to-”
“It breaks down like this. You ready?”
“Sure.”
“Think of Zed as my Younger Self, and me as my Older Self. My Younger Self gives my Older Self the detonation times.”
“Yeah, but how did she get-”
“Hut!” Beth cut him off with a waved finger. “Hear me out. My Younger Self gives my Older Self the detonation times. My Older Self sets the bombs to those times. The bombs detonate. As they detonate my Older Self notes the exact timing of the explosions and writes them down in a new book.” Beth held that new book up. “My Older Self then gives my Younger Self this new book. My Younger Self transcribes those times into her own new book-the one that is a precise copy of the old book her Older Self gave her when she was eleven, so that she can in turn give it to her Younger Self, in 1999, when she becomes her Older Self. Then that eleven-year-old Younger Self grows and becomes that same Older Self… and here we are.”