CHAPTER SEVEN
What Happens After
YEAR: 2099
AFTER THE EVENT
Eric jumped off the bike as soon as Heaven came to a stop. They had passed right by Chevelle at the guard station and drove on into North Mapiya. Eric directed Heaven to his house.
But there was nothing there anymore. The tornado had ripped the house from its foundation. He stood there in shock. All that remained was the concrete front step leading into the house, and an upside down car to the right of where the entrance should be.
Chevelle’s house next door was still there, maybe a few shingles blown into the yard, but everything looked in its place. Even the old maple in the front yard withstood the storm. “Was anyone in there?” Heaven asked, coming up beside him.
Eric turned his face away to hide the tears on his cheeks. He wiped them off with his shirt. “My dad... He can’t be gone,” he muttered to himself. “I saw him just this morning.”
The roaring siren of a cop car from the south brought him back. An old squad car, complete with tires and the roar of a gas-burning engine, peeled around the corner and came to a stop behind Heaven’s bike. What is going on here? Eric wondered. Where were these old vehicles coming from? And the town...
Soon after another cop car came around the corner from the north. This kind he was familiar with; it hovered about a foot off the ground, casting a low blue light on the street. When the car came to a stop it drifted gradually to the ground.
“By the way, what’s your name?”
“Heaven,” she answered. “Heaven Hope. And yes, my parents were lame.”
Eric glanced back at his house. It filled him with fear and disbelief again. This can’t be happening. Here and there in the house — though it couldn’t really be called in the house anymore, could it? — studs still stuck up, sheared off at an angle. He could see down into each room in the basement. South Mapiya back. Gas cars with rubber tires...
“What year is it?” he asked Heaven.
“What year is it?”
A man got out of each car and gazed over the wreckage apprehensively, both Eric’s house and down the block. Looking at either of them, you could tell they were both law enforcement, but there was such a difference in dress and style. The one from the hover car was decked out in black and blue, fairly tight fitting clothing, ready for action. The other looked more relaxed, wearing a tan shirt buttoned half way up.
Eric’s was the first house flattened. Farther down the block, other houses showed serious damage, as well; one had the front of the house, just the front, torn off completely, so you could look inside like a Barbie doll house. A few blocks down, where houses turned into town homes, the tornado hadn’t even touched.
“When I came into town,” Heaven said. “It was December 3rd, 2012.”
Eric did the math in his head. That was just about 87 years in the past, and exactly when South Mapiya first disappeared. “This is not right,” he said, glancing sideways at Heaven. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
Soon a fire truck and a couple of ambulances rushed onto the street. As people stepped out of the vehicles the policemen, both of them Sheriffs, it looked like, marched over and started barking orders. Eric and Heaven could hear them fighting from his driveway.
“Who do you think you are?” the first Sheriff, the one from the hover car, asked.
“I’m Sheriff Kevin Hunter, and I’m in charge around here,” the other Sheriff insisted. “Now I appreciate you being nearby and so quick to respond, but let me handle this.”
“I don’t believe this,” the first Sheriff said. “I don’t know where you and your dinosaur-wheels over there came from, but my great grandfather died almost 90 years ago. This is my town and I’ll be giving the orders.”
“Great grandfather?”
The policeman nodded. “Sheriff Joshua Hunter, servicing the city of Mapiya.”
A shrill scream pierced the air from behind and both Sheriffs snapped to attention. Eric turned around. “Beth!” His dad’s nurse, face and arms all scratched and bleeding, crawled out from behind the neighbor’s house. Eric ran over to her. “Are you all right?” She raised an arm and pointed over Eric’s shoulder. Her lower lip quivered before shrieking again.
Eric twisted his neck to look up, following Beth’s finger to a body hanging lifeless up in the maple tree. Dad?! “Dad!” He ran over to the tree and grabbed onto some bark, looking for a branch or handhold to climb up to his dad. This just can’t be happening. “Someone help me over here!”
He stepped aside for a pair of firemen. They quickly set up a ladder. One of them walked up and carefully hoisted Eric’s dad in his arms. From the ambulance two medics rolled a stretcher over and helped the fireman set the body down carefully. “How is he?” Eric said anxiously, running up to the medics. His stomach trembled looking at the body and his eyes glazed over. “Is he all right?” He has to be!
One of the medics searched the neck for a pulse, but soon confirmed his fears. Eric bent over as the medics rolled the body away and retched onto the grass, vaguely thankful he had skipped lunch. He felt Heaven come up beside him and rub her hand on his back. Standing up, she wrapped him in a hug. “It’s all right,” she said soothingly. “It’ll be all right.”
“That was some freak storm,” one of the firemen remarked as they took the ladder away.
“Please make sure everyone else is all right,” Joshua said. “Get someone to help that lady.”
Eric let go of Heaven and walked up to the two Sheriffs. “I don’t know if this is going to make much sense,” the old fashioned Sheriff, Kevin, said. “But just a few minutes ago, before the tornado, I was the only Sheriff—” his eyes flicked between Joshua and Eric “—and it was night in the middle of winter.”
“I think I know what’s going on here,” Eric offered hesitantly. He glanced at each of them in turn — Joshua, then Kevin, then over to Heaven for reassurance. She nodded, prodding him on. “In fact, I think it’s my fault.”
***
“What just happened?”
Motega ignored Alina and Cecilia, who staring at the machine, at the device that he created. He tried running through the possibilities in his head. This must have had something to do with the experiment — people don’t just appear out of thin air — but he hadn’t the faintest clue as to how. Quantum Entanglement worked on the microscopic level and had everything to do with communication, not teleportation.
Alina said something to him again, but he missed it. “What?”
“What are we going to do?” she asked again.
“We’ll take care of it,” he said. Dravin. There was no telling what he would do about this. “The two of you go see what Dravin is doing. Stay with him, and don’t let him back down here.”
Alina and Cecilia left and Motega stepped back up to the machine. “What have I done?” he said, though the room was now empty.
“That kid.” There was something about that kid, something that was different; he couldn’t quite place it. He replayed the scene in his mind. He had adjusted the dials to the precise values he calculated. He and Alina had gone over and over these calculations for the past two weeks, making sure everything was precisely accounted for. How do you account for teenagers teleporting into your lab? “His clothes.”
“What?”
Motega spun around on instinct, but recognized the voice in time. “Alina, what are you doing here?”
“Cecilia is with Dravin,” she said. “His cell phone isn’t working so he’s off trying to contact local law enforcement.”
“I need you to watch him,” he said.
“You know him, don’t you? From your past?” Motega turned back to the machine and rested his head on the door frame. What went wrong? “Motega, talk to me.”
“The boy’s clothes,” Motega said again, facing Alina.
“What about them?”
“Did you notice how they were... different? It’s no style I recognized.” He pictured the kid in his head again, every detail. He had looked as surprised as they were, but there was no hesitation when he decided to leave, that much he remembered clearly. The kid had known where he was, the door, even the stairs right around the corner. “He didn’t teleport here. He was already here.”
“Motega, what are you talking about? You’re not making any sense.”
“His hand,” Motega said. He could picture it clearly. “He had little metal strips on his hand. Alina, I don’t think that boy was from our time.”
“Would you listen to yourself? Motega,” she said, taking his hands in hers. “Stay with me, Motega.” She hesitated and glanced to the right.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” he said. “Alina, did you see something up there?”
She shook her head. “No, no. It’s nothing.”
There was more to this puzzle, he could tell. But what could the device do outside of this room? “Alina, what aren’t you telling me?”
“It’s not just the kid,” she said. Her eyes darted back and forth as she thought about it again. Motega recognized that look. She was afraid. “Everything else has changed, too.”
“Everything?”
“Well, not everything.” She looked at the floor. “The buildings are all there. The trees, the roads, but... Motega, it’s day time out there. And it’s summer; the air is so warm.”
That’s more than even teleportation. He looked back at the device, Dravin’s words echoing in his head. Think of the military aspects, Motega. A bomb could be delivered... our operatives wouldn’t have to be anywhere near it to set it off. The possibilities are endless. He closed his eyes.
“Are you all right?”
His eyes snapped open. He knew what he had to do. “I’ve got to go out,” he said, moving to the door. “Could you go over the quadratic functions again? I think the answer is in the size of the field.”
“Yeah, sure, but...”
“And whatever you do, don’t let Dravin back in here.”
***
I already told you,” Eric said.
Kevin, the 2012 Sheriff, leaned in closer. “Then tell us again.”
“Yeah,” Joshua said, folding his arms. “Why don’t you start with where you broke in to a restricted area?”
“I was doing research for a school project.” Eric looked at both of the Sheriffs. Calling it research wasn’t good enough for them. “Okay, I was goofing around.”
“How did you get in there, anyway?” Joshua said.
Heaven moved in. “Does it matter?”
Eric frowned. This wasn’t working. He looked to Heaven. “Maybe you should tell them your story.”
Heaven nodded. “I came into town this evening.” She pointed over to her motorcycle. “On that.”
“This evening?” Joshua said, incredulous. “It’s only 3:40.”
“Yes,” she said again. “This evening it was December 3rd, 2012.”
“That’s... well, that’s just not possible,” Joshua said, dropping his arm to his sides. Despite protest, his mouth gaped, clearly trying to rectify her story with events. “Maybe... you bumped your head in the storm.”
“It was the same for me,” Kevin said. “Just a minute ago it was nighttime, in the winter, and I was investigating a break in at South Campus.”
“South Campus?” Joshua stared at both of them like they had just come from the psych ward. Mapiya, at least the Mapiya of 2099, had only one High School campus.
“It’s true,” Eric said, confirming the impossible. “And it’s my fault.” He glanced at Heaven again, large blue eyes like saucers staring back. “This morning, the town you entered, South Mapiya, didn’t exist.”
“What do you mean?” she said, eyebrow raised.
“That half of the town didn’t exist for the last 87 years,” he repeated. “It was a wasteland.” He hung his head and looked to Joshua, the modern Sheriff. “I... I broke into South Mapiya.”
“Broke in?”
“Yes. A friend distracted the guard and I climbed the fence. It was nothing bad, nothing dangerous,” he said in his defense, but his conscience struck at his heart like a knife. And now my dad is dead. “Just some research for a school project,” he said, trying to push the thought away. “But I found something.”
All three of them were staring in disbelief now, no other objections left to be made. Behind them the emergency teams were searching through the debris for survivors of the tornado, but the three here were enthralled. It crossed Eric’s mind how ridiculous it must be, talking about this as people were dealing with life and death situations down the block, as his dad lay dead, but the enormity of it all hadn’t yet hit him.
“I found a device in a lab. It was still active.” He grinned a bit, sheepishly. “It had a big, well, glowing red button.”
“So you pressed it,” Joshua said, crossing his arms again.
Eric nodded. “Wouldn’t you? After that, everything changed. There were people there. Heaven, here, was one of them. And all the buildings came back. Even the air was... cold.” Everything had come back, a ghost town suddenly alive.
“That makes some sense, actually,” Kevin said.
“It does?”
“The tornado,” he said, pointing and looking up at the sky. “Look, it’s warm here now. It must be, what, mid-summer? Where I came from... when I came from, it was December. The temperature this morning...” He caught himself, readjusting to the fact that ‘this morning’ was almost 90 years ago. “When I woke up it was below zero, Fahrenheit. If we took that mass of cold air and placed it here, in the 70’s or 80’s in summer, we’d have an instant tornado from that mix.”
“So it’s true,” Eric said, hardly believing it himself. “What do we do now?”
“Well, there’s at least five families here without homes, from the looks of it, no doubt a number injured,” Joshua said, gesturing to the medics in the street. “We need to take care of the immediate disaster.”
“I think it’s worse than that,” Kevin suggested. “We have half a town, that’s probably around... 5,000 people, who will probably be without power, without water, and with no clue about what’s going on. And some of them probably had homes in North Mapiya, homes that are no longer theirs.”
“My duty is to the people of this town first,” Joshua said.
“With all due respect, Sheriff, but that town,” he pointed off to the south, “your town, needs your help, too.”
“You’re their Sheriff. Why don’t you take care of it?”
“All right, fair enough,” Kevin said, scratching the stubble of his beard. “We can use the school there, South Campus, as a temporary shelter. We can set up cots in the cafeteria and the gymnasium. I’ll find people to gather up blankets and pillows, whatever we can find. We could use some help with food and water and any power you can provide.”
Joshua nodded. “I can see about getting some teams to hook you up.”
“What can we do?” Eric said.
“Go home, son. Let the officials take care of it.” With that, each of the Sheriffs left. Joshua walked off down the street to get the status of the emergency personnel. Kevin went back to his car and drove off back to the south.
Eric turned back to his home, or rather lack thereof. “So what do I do now?”