Suspended by Daniel Roozen - HTML preview

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

What They Do Then

“We’ll need to get statements from both of you.” Eric looked up at Sheriff Joshua. After Heaven’s daring leap, he had checked Shem for a pulse and found nothing. The several story fall, and no doubt a hard crack of his head on the concrete, had killed the man. So he and Heaven left Shem where he was and waited on the steps for the police. No one else had come by before Joshua; the doors at the far end of the building, by the hippodrome, was the main entrance.

Before long there was a crowd of people and flashing red and blue lights. The police took care of crowd control, surrounding the area with classic yellow police tape. Joshua instructed the other officers not to touch Shem until a State team with bomb experts could come to help. They had found a blanket for Eric and Heaven. Eric held his arm around her. “You did a good thing today,” Joshua said with his hand on Heaven’s shoulder. “Both of you did. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

They nodded and the Sheriff walked off to handle other matters. “What happens now?” Heaven wondered.

“Everything goes back to normal?” Eric suggested. “No more town disappearing, or exploding.”

“And what is normal?” she said, putting her face in her hands. “Especially in this town.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, with my house destroyed and my dad gone. It’s a different world now.”

Heaven pulled her head up and looked into the distance at nothing in particular. “I think I’m going to leave,” she said. Somehow Eric had known this was coming, though he hadn’t consciously faced it. At first he felt hurt, but he wasn’t sad, he realized. Heaven looked to him. “This thing with us,” she said. “It was nice, for a while, but we both know it wasn’t meant to last. I’m not the one for you.”

Eric nodded. “Where would you go?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “To the Black Hills still, I think, and from there, who knows? I just... I can’t settle down yet. There’s so much out there for me to see and do. I can’t stay here in Mapiya.”

“I understand,” he said with a smile. “I suppose it was a little awkward, us dating. It helped, with the disaster and my dad, to forget things for a while.”

“I just, I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“I meant what I said, though.” He looked in her eyes to emphasize his statement. “I will be here for you, if you ever need me. You can count on me as a friend.”

“Thanks,” she said, returning his smile.

“But you can’t leave.” He let the thought hang in the air for a moment, as if he would stop her, then he grinned. “Your bike will barely make it past the Twin Cities. There’s no more gas; you have no way to refuel.”

Heaven dropped her face back in her hands. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Take my bike,” he suggested, pulling out his key chain.

Her head snapped back up. “Are you sure?”

“It’s the least I could do. I lost my dad and my home this week, and maybe my best friend, but you... you lost so much more, I can’t even imagine.” He shrugged and grinned again. “Besides, this way I get to keep your motorcycle. That thing is an antique.”

They laughed together and Heaven finally nodded. “Okay, it’s a deal.” Then, more quietly, “thanks.”

“You’re always welcome back here, you know,” he said.

She nodded. “I know.”

***

Sheriff Kevin Hunter sat in a hospital bed, a cold compress strapped to his head. The doctor treated his burns, had his leg that hurt scheduled for exams — they had something new, called an RIT scan — and wanted to keep him overnight for observation with his concussion. The booby trap bomb blast really messed him up, but it was worth it if they stopped the bomber. Since they were still here, no explosion, he assumed they must have.

The hospitals of the future didn’t seem too terribly different than the hospitals of 2012. Each of the doors here now slid into the wall. The bed and sheets were the same, or similar. He checked the tags; there was a new kind of plastic, presumably not made from oil, in the material. They felt softer.

He lay back against the upraised bed. He wanted to turn the TV on, but the controls were just out of reach and they had taken his holophone off his hand. They still had a little red button to call the nurse, but he felt silly pressing it to just watch TV, so he just sat there.

The door to his room slid open. “So, are you getting along well in here?” Sheriff Joshua Hunter, his great grandson, stepped into the room.

“Fine enough, I guess,” Kevin said. “For a man who had just been blasted by a bomb.”

“Concussion grenade, actually,” Joshua said. “A small one. At least it wasn’t the nuclear warhead that blew up in your face, right?” There was a hint of a smile, but it didn’t take and he returned to a flat, expressionless face. “Listen, I think we started off on the wrong foot. I think I just didn’t know how to react to the whole situation. You know, my great grandfather, come back from the past to take over as Sheriff again. So I lashed out.”

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t have been as forceful, too. It’s hard coming to grips with suddenly being 90 years in the future. And I’m sorry about breaking into the library.”

“That was you?” Joshua said, eyes widening.

Kevin nodded and took the cold compress off his head, setting it down on the table next to him. “Yeah,” he said, and explained how he, Eric, and Heaven had all gone there together, to find out where the bomb was supposed to go off in 2012. “The internet was locked down and the library was the only place where we knew where the information was. It was urgent, so we broke in.”

“Do you expect me to let you off easily?” Joshua asked.

“I was hoping the fact that we stopped a nuclear warhead from taking a chunk out of Minnesota would factor into my favor a bit.”

Joshua grinned and put a hand on Kevin’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. The kids already told me about it when they gave their statements. You guys did very good. I have something for you.” Kevin wrinkled his brow and Joshua pulled out a badge. “A job, if you’ll have it. I know for a Sheriff the rank of Deputy might be a bit of a slap in the face, but we’ve all got to start somewhere and, well, that’s all I have at the moment. It would be nice to work with you, though, get to know you a bit here, in our home town.”

Kevin smiled and took the badge from Joshua. “Deputy, huh?” He calculated in his head for a moment. He figured he’d go through the ranks in no time and have Joshua’s job in under five years. He chuckled. Well, maybe not. “What’s going to happen to South Mapiya?”

“There has been some word on that, actually. The government is stepping in. The state of Minnesota is making it into a tourist attraction.”

Kevin’s eyes went wide. “What for?”

“Think about it. A city preserved exactly as it was 87 years ago?” He held up his hands to stave off objection. “The citizens will be taken care of. They’ll be finding good homes for them. Effort will be put forward to find them jobs and re-integrate them into society. Some may even be able to stay in South Mapiya and help maintain it.”

“Well, it’s better than some alternatives,” Kevin figured.

Joshua held out his hand and Kevin shook it. “Welcome to the force.”

***

By the time Eric remembered to call Chevelle, just when the excitement of Heaven’s rooftop jump was fading, she was on the freeway halfway into St. Paul. She listened to me, he thought with a smile. He told her the crisis was averted; they could turn back and sleep in their own beds tonight. When she pressed for more information he assured her that he was okay and he would explain it all when they were back and the police let him go.

Joshua took their statements himself, then left. He had told them about finding Kevin back at Sweeny’s house and that he was going to check on him at the hospital. The state bomb squad had arrived so there was nothing more they needed him here for.

Eric watched Heaven drive away on his bike. He chuckled silently to himself again, how they still called it a bike when it had no wheels. After Heaven disappeared down the freeway he silently wished her well. He also transferred a few thousand dollars into the line of credit Heaven had received when Chevelle’s mom fitted her for a holophone the other day.

Chevelle and her parents were waiting up for him when he finally arrived home. They weren’t going to let him do anything until he explained everything. So he sat down and told them how he and Motega had figured out what it meant that South Mapiya had looked like ground zero for the last 87 years, and the Sheriff from the past had figured out that the nuclear warhead had been stolen from the 2012 armory.

He tried rushing through the part where they broke into the library and evaded the police, but Chevelle’s dad made him slow down and tell it all. They nodded along when he told them about the town disappearing again; they had seen some evidence of that themselves. Chevelle looked like she was about to rattle him when she told him about trying to talk the bomber down on the roof of the school, and having failed that how Heaven rushed him.

When he was finished, Chevelle’s parents left them alone and encouraged them to get to bed; they were going to do the same. So it was just him and Chevelle sitting alone together on the living room sofa.

“Listen,” he said, avoiding her eyes and looking at her fingers. “I have to apologize—”

“No, Eric,” she said, cutting him off. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that to you like I did, telling you I liked you. It wasn’t fair to you, especially when you have a girlfriend.”

Eric’s mouth went flat. “So that’s it, huh? Just like that, you don’t like me anymore? You know, I mean, like me like that.” It felt awkward, dancing around the word, neither one of them wanting to say, love, especially if the other person didn’t feel the same.

“What do you want me to say?” she said, eyes down, and for a moment Eric’s heart sunk, thinking it was true. They were back to the torture of being ‘just friends’. But then— “Of course I still like you, Eric. But you were right, back at the hospital. I haven’t treated you right.”

Eric smiled, and before she could say another word he wrapped her in a great hug. “I love you,” he whispered in her ear, and the nervous feeling in his chest came back as he wondered whether he was pressing too much, until she echoed the words in his ear. Still wrapped up in the hug of a lifetime, each of them cried a little.

They let go. “But friends first,” Chevelle said, tears welled up in her eyes. “That’s so important to me. I thought I lost you.”

And he had thought the same, the fear now washed away. He smiled. “Friends always.”

***

“You failed me.”

Rohon’s words echoed in Dravin’s ears. When Dravin dove away from the grenade, he narrowly avoided the brunt of the explosion. The two IIA agents assigned to watch over him immediately got on a plane with him back to Washington. His face didn’t even yet feel cooled from the burns. They marched him up to the Director of the IIA, Rohon Church, and he asked for a moment alone with Dravin.

“He brought a grenade, sir,” Dravin explained. “He had stolen a key card and knew his way right to the device. Security wasn’t tight enough there.”

“So the whole thing is destroyed?” Rohon sat back in his comfortable leather patio chair, making Dravin stand.

“The device is gone,” Dravin said. “Motega and Alina are dead. But we have his notes. The woman I brought, Cecilia, was the lab tech for their experiment. And you have me.” Dravin paused. Rohon didn’t look up from his scotch. “We can rebuild this thing.” We can have the power.

Rohon nodded. “And we will.”