A Grave Tree (10 page)

Mark managed to yelp out some sort of affirmative, checking over his shoulder as he backed up until he was almost pressed against the tiny Madrona. Russell, Jake, and the other dog seemed to be engaged in a savage game of monkey in the middle as each tried to draw the crazed dog away from the other. Blood streaked down Russell’s forearm, and Jake’s warm-up jacket was ripped.

Mark wanted to drop into a crouch and shake his head to block out the noise and chaos. He wanted to go to his safe place, or the safest place he could find at the moment. The urge was almost overwhelming. Maybe it would be better if he ran off while everyone else was busy. To the cabin, where there would be no commotion, where he could be by himself (even if he had to deal with ghosts and the clawed woman alone… although the prospect of trying to dispatch the clawed woman solo gave him some pause).

“Mark,” Sylvain snapped. “Where are they?”

Mark’s mouth was extremely dry, and it cracked as he spoke. “The boat just left Theater Falls. They’re just above the Salisbury tributary. It’s still afloat and they found Caleb.” Had they been able to get Caleb in the boat though? He was going to assume they had. Abbey and Caleb rarely failed.

Sylvain and the dog had started a vicious game of tug-of-war with the stick. “Are they heading for Salisbury Swamp?”

Mark considered. He hadn’t thought of using the river as a means of accessing the swamp, and the stones, but of course if they took the Salisbury tributary, that would take them right into the fens and then the swamp. “They didn’t say.”

The second dog had closed its jaws around Russell’s wrist, and the taller boy howled in pain. Jake kicked at the dog, trying to dislodge it.

“I’d hoped to try this later under less difficult circumstances,” Sylvain yelled as his right arm was whipped first one way and then the other, “but there’s no time. We have to get out of here.” He pulled something wrapped in a white handkerchief out of his pocket. He opened the handkerchief and dumped a small grey object to the ground in front of Mark. “It’s one of the stones from Coventry Hill.”

Mark lurched toward the stone as if drawn by some unassailable force—the stress of the situation, the pull of the stones, his need to have the noise stop. He already had one foot on the small grey slab before he heard Sylvain yell, “Me first!”

But it was too late. Mark was already being thrust through a chute of strange darkness and disorientation, leaving Sylvain, Russell, and Jake behind.

Mark found himself in a thicker and wilder (and much quieter) forest at the base of a cliff next to a small stream. He peered about.

Was he in the future?

The time travel had felt different: slower and more partial, the molecules of his body disassembling to pass through some conduit and then reassembling. He checked his hands to make sure they were still attached to his body—and that they were still hands.

The canyon he was in seemed like the Moon River canyon, but the Moon River was nothing but a tiny stream flowing between exposed rocks on a vast pebbled riverbed. The trees on the cliff edge above him were taller, denser, and of a different variety with more understory, but the curve and height of the canyon walls, and the hills around him (from what he could see anyway) matched those of the present.

He stared up at the walls of rock all around him. How had he ended up down in the canyon?

The need to throw up hit him like a rock in the gut, and he turned and expelled the contents of his stomach on the ground. He was still heaving when a figure emerged from the trees on the other side of the canyon. A figure that looked just like him, except thinner, more muscled, and somehow braver. (It was possible the braver perception was linked to the fact that the figure wore furs and hides, carried a spear and a crossbow, and had a quiver of arrows hanging from a pack on his back.)

“We don’t have much time,” the figure called down to him. “Being this close together will make us both sick.”

It was him, Mark realized. Mark from the future. Of all the people he had expected or hoped to become, this fit-looking warrior was not it.

“When the great rift happens, you’ll lose Luanne,” the figure continued. “You have to help Abbey make the right choice. You can’t seize up this time. You can’t rely on Abbey.”

Luanne?
What was Warrior Mark talking about? Luanne was the name of the person he had met online who liked maps. He supposed she was a girl, or rather, a woman, although Mark barely classified her this way (he classified people based on whether they liked maps or not, whether they were bad or not, and whether or not they were going to try to make him do things he did not want to do). Warrior Mark couldn’t be talking about the same person, could he?

But the “seizing up” comment, that he understood. That was the exactly the way he described his own behavior when he dropped to his knees, pressed his hands against his ears, and tried to shut everything out. He felt a little like seizing up right now, but the waves of nausea in his stomach were too intense to go into a crouch. He just wanted to lie down on his side on the rocky beach until the agony went away.

Warrior Mark let out a low moan and bent at the waist, one hand pressed against his thigh, looking a bit less warrior-like now that he was doubled over. “I can’t stay. I think the answer is somewhere on the fifth map. Don’t let it be destroyed this time. Someone is diverting the river. That’s new. It wasn’t diverted before. You should find out who. And Abbey wants to protect her baby.”

Then he was gone, slipping back into the trees on the other side of the canyon, leaving Mark to drop to his hands and knees and retch again, until his stomach unclenched bit by bit from its spasmodic roiling.

“I told you to let me go first,” Sylvain said in a testy tone.

He had appeared behind Mark with Russell and Jake. They were all muddy and their clothing was torn. Mark could see blood between the shredded bits of Russell’s shirtsleeves.

“Now we’re in your future,” Sylvain said.

Mark felt his arms go out from underneath him. He rolled over to his side in the fetal position. Luanne, Abbey’s baby, someone diverting the river, the fifth map? Destroyed? It was all too much.

Sylvain abruptly seemed to realize where he was and turned erratically and stared all around. “How did we—? That infernal dog.”

Then he started to look desperately around among the rocks on the beach. “The dog knocked the stone from my hand just as I traveled. I was picking it up because I thought we might need it to get home.” Sylvain enunciated his last few words slowly and clearly, and Mark sensed an inference of blame in Sylvain’s tone. “He must have knocked it off the cliff, which is why we ended up down here. Now we need to find it again if we want to go back and go to the right future. Everyone look. Mark, we need your help.”

Mark didn’t get up. He just looked around at the wide, rock-strewn beach on which he lay. There were thousands of stones, and it looked like it had recently flooded, which would mean all of the rocks would have gotten flipped around and mixed together. It was not quite a needle in a haystack, but it was close.

After circling around several times, Sylvain obviously came to the same conclusion, because gave his head a little jerk and craned his neck at the mountains in the distance, while Jake and Russell continued to walk up and down the beach, their eyes glued to the ground.

“Can’t you feel the stone?” Jake said.

Sylvain shook his head. “Not this far from the point of power. The Madrona is up on the cliff. The stone won’t be activated.” He shook his long spidery fingers in the air. “We don’t have time for this. If they’re heading to the stones at the swamp—and if I know Ian, I assume they are—then we need to get to one of the other two futures. The closest set of docks is up the valley a few kilometers away. I think we should just head there. I also have a couple of pieces of stone hidden in different locations near Four-Valley Gap, which is near the docks. I think we should collect one of them. I’d prefer to have one with us.”

Mark had closed his eyes again, but he heard the cobbling sound of stones skittering across stones as the other three presumably gathered and prepared to leave. “Mark, we need to go,” Sylvain said. “Russell needs a rabies shot and antibiotics, and we need to get to Caleb and Abbey.”

Mark heaved a deep breath, trying to get past the rank taste in his mouth. Then he rolled over and pushed himself to his feet. Sylvain had already set off upriver. Russell and Jake followed.

Mark took up the rear, his stomach now howling ferociously with hunger. Caleb had put all the food in his pack; Mark’s contained only his rain jacket, compass, flashlights, his water bottle, and his satchel, which held his hand-drawn maps of the stones and tunnels. He wanted a sandwich more than anything. He thought of his lean future self up on the cliff. He doubted that future self spent much of his time thinking about sandwiches.

When did he become Warrior Mark?

And more importantly,
how
did he become Warrior Mark?

*****

“I still really don’t get the jumpsuit thing. Why do we need them?” Caleb said as they stood in the flickering glow of Ian’s lighter in a basement beneath the future Coventry City. The contusions on his head and jaw had swelled and turned red. He also had a nasty gash on his arm that needed stitches, not that Abbey could focus much on Caleb’s injuries with her own wrist puffing up as her body tried desperately to do something about the break.

Injuries and blood had become common features in her life since discovering the stones. A few months ago, the sight of blood was almost enough to make her pass out. Now, blood seemed like a non-issue, as long as the limbs or body parts in question were still attached to their owner.

Ian had insisted that they go to Simon’s future to go to the hospital. The treatments of the future were so far advanced, he claimed, that they would be completely healed in a matter of hours. Medical care was also free here, and they wouldn’t face the challenges of finding their way through the desert as they would in Abbey’s future.

Abbey had felt like maybe Ian was a bit
too
eager to go to Simon’s future, but she couldn’t argue with his logic. After all, her own mother had been cured of a deadly illness by going to the future. Besides, the prospect of not having to wear a cast on her wrist for six weeks was appealing. And they wanted to go to the future again, didn’t they?

Caleb raised a few concerns about abandoning Mark, but he seemed to accept Ian’s argument that Mark was with Sylvain and would be fine. Abbey hoped Caleb’s ready acquiescence didn’t mean he had broken ribs or internal bleeding or something.

Maybe the pain had started to affect her judgment and senses too.

Once they were all agreed, Ian had guided the sinking rowboat down the comparatively quiet Salisbury tributary to the swamp, and then through the various ponds to the Madrona. Abbey and Caleb spent the entire time bailing water to keep the boat afloat.

Then Ian directed Caleb onto the stones first, since after Sylvain had moved Caleb’s people to Simon’s future, Simon’s future was now Caleb’s future, too. They all knew this, but none of them said anything about it. And Ian was a little cagey and strange when Abbey had asked him which future was his.

The buzz of energy that usually surrounded the stones felt remarkably dampened, and she could have sworn that when Ian came through after her it took a few seconds for the pieces of him to reassemble, like tiny grains of sand coming together to form a person, whereas before it had all been instantaneous. Ian darted a somewhat surprised look at the stones himself upon his arrival. Even Abbey’s own travel felt like an echo somehow, her body fracturing and then unfracturing in a more analog way than before.

But they made it, and proceeded through the tunnel in the cart from Ian’s house as far into town as they could, which meant as far as the branch just before the cave-in. They now stood in a musty basement, and Caleb was complaining about Ian’s insistence that they wear jumpsuits.

“Well, you know I’m the first person to try to buck the rules, especially concerning fashion,” Ian said, gesturing at his shimmery turquoise and magenta striped shirt, “and there’s a certain limited tolerance for the wayward here in Coventry, but you won’t get treatment at the hospital without a jumpsuit. The suits are part of creating the gravity field for the town, or so they say. I think that’s a conspiracy theory, and that the suits are for something far more sinister, but that’s beside the point right now.”

“Well, where are we going to get suits then?”

“We’re going to have to pay a visit to your older brother. This building is only a few blocks from his house.”

“Simon doesn’t want to be involved,” Abbey said quickly. “He doesn’t want to risk changing the future. He has children.” She thought of her own unborn babe in the future. How easy would it be to spin her and Simon’s offspring into non-existence?

“No,” Ian said, “but he’ll help us when he sees the two of you are hurt.”

It wasn’t Simon who opened the door of a modest dome house, set into the ground like all those in this new city of Coventry. A familiar-looking blond woman in a navy suit stood on the threshold, her blue eyes widening as she took them in. Abbey flicked her eyes at Caleb and Ian. Their clothing was damp, it must appear completely outlandish—Ian’s was for sure—and Caleb looked like he’d been beaten, his surly expression only adding to his thug-like appearance.

“Good afternoon, Mrs.…” Ian grasped for the appropriate salutation.

“Sarah…” Abbey breathed. Simon was married to Sarah, the most popular girl at Coventry High.

“Mrs. Sarah,” Ian continued. “We were wondering if your husband might be at home.”

Sarah took a step back, her hand flying to her throat. “Who are you?”

“Simon’s sister Abbey’s children,” Caleb said with an attempt at his usual charming smile, but it caught a little on his bruises and ended in a grimace.

“But Abbey’s gone… dead.” Sarah drew out the dead, almost in a hiss. Then a stricken look passed over her face and she lifted her fingers to her lips, as if she had misspoken. Sarah’s words sent a frisson of unease surging through Abbey’s veins. With the split futures, she supposed Sarah might think her dead. But the future Abbey was alive in the desert future, wasn’t she?