Faces in Time (9 page)
Authors: Lewis E. Aleman
Tags: #Thrillers, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General
Edmund sees the body is no longer moving. He gives one strong kick to the back of his head.
No movement.
He turns around and throws the polyester cover onto the cell floor. With speed he grabs the body and hurls it onto the mattress. Lifting the head he slides the pillow underneath it.
He bends down to pick up the cover and feels his pants slipping at the waist. Looking at the lifeless lump in the bed, he drops the cover and begins unlatching the lump’s belt. One fast motion slides the belt out of its loops, ripping one of them and rolling the corpse over. He loops the belt around himself, rolls Rutherford facing the wall again, and tucks the polyester cover around him.
He sees the droplets of blood on the ground and the streaks in the sink and on the wall, but he knows he has to move quickly or his window for escape will close soon.
Wadding up a fistful of toilet paper, he wipes at the walls and the sink frantically. Tossing the paper in the toilet, he repeats the process even faster.
Spinning a knob, cupping water, tossing it into his mouth, swishing it around, and spitting are his final activities in the cell.
As he takes his first step into the walkway, visitor’s badge lanyard swaying with his stride, he feels as if something will grab his leg and yank him back inside his little closet-sized dungeon. The door shuts with a clang, and the lump in the bed does not move or breathe.
Looking around, no one is in the hallway of the wing, just as it was planned to be.
Scanning the area, he doesn’t see anything of note until his eyes slide over an inmate directly across the hallway from his former cell. He is sitting straight up in the bottom bunk while his cellmate still sleeps. Edmund raises a single finger to his lips, and the prisoner nods his head in agreement. Since he hasn’t made a sound yet, Edmund assumes he’ll keep his mouth shut.
Anything that would bring Edmund back to the prison would bring a tremendous amount of trouble on the sitting convict. Besides, no prisoners will lament the death of Rutherford. That is as long as none of them had an escape plan with Rutherford too. The only concern is that the man across the hall keeps his mouth shut long enough for Edmund to get a running start; it won’t matter if he talks after that. Anyway, after a short while, he wouldn’t be telling the police anything they didn’t already now, provided that he didn’t see Chapetta at Edmund’s cell. Edmund just needs about an hour or more to make a clean break.
The hardest thing is to walk slowly. Although he’s traversed his current path a thousand times over in his head, he’s rarely been down this side of the wing: once when they brought him in the first time, twice when he had to speak with the detective in Rutherford’s office, and thrice now.
The other prisoners are still sleeping. The Taser was a quiet torture, and the fight was involved but fast and localized in one cell. You also get used to sleeping heavily in prison. If you woke yourself every time someone was fighting with a cellmate; arguing with a guard; or shouting some lunatic rant about his fate in a desperate voice into the long, absorbing hours of the night; you’d never sleep. The only sound that jolts you awake is the sound of your cell door opening. That’s the sound that’ll make you leap out of bed in a nervous sweat with both fists clenched, heart thumping, and muscles twitching.
He opens a door on the left side of the hallway. It’s a closet with all of its contents pushed tightly against its walls, just as Chapetta had promised him. He quickly steps inside and gently pulls the door closed.
The next forty-five minutes pass slowly with the sounds of the prison coming alive, buzzing like a stirred-up hive. Grumbling, toilets flushing, sinks running, the metered step of Chapetta’s two routine walks down the wing: it all sounds familiar yet so different being on the other side of the bars. The noises are identical, but his ears hear them differently in the same way a member of a band hears the clamor of the music differently than those watching in the crowd.
Cracking his knuckles and neck is all that he can do to stay quiet. Sitting down is not an option. If someone unexpected opens that door, he’ll have another voice to silence, and he’ll have to dispose of the interloper without causing any alarm. Being ready to lunge at a moment is essential to handle any unwanted surprises.
The sound of feet clopping in a herd stops him in the middle of cracking his neck.
He holds his head cocked at a forty-five degree angle; ears feel as if tingling. As the ruckus moves directly in front of his door, he stands in a boxer’s stance, his fists making short little circles in the air. His chest heaves with the urge to come out swinging, to hit them before any of them have the chance to find him hiding in a maintenance closet. He clenches his fists tighter. Then, the sound of eighteen soles slapping the ground in a rhythmless chorus grows fainter.
Hand trembling as he reaches for the handle, he hopes it doesn’t squeak. Getting out the door unnoticed is the last of two steps that concern him. The other is getting past the guards at the entrance and onto the shuttle bus in the parking lot. His hand turns the handle slowly.
It does not squeak.
Still holding the handle fully turned to the right, he pushes the door open slowly. Although they were silent on the way in, he is still cautious of the hinges. Every time he’s heard the closet opened until a few days ago, it’s made a loud wail. Chapetta had taken care of the oiling a few days ahead of time to eliminate any chance of sonic metallic scraping. Despite it all, he still holds his breath pushing the door opened wide enough to get his large frame through it.
Glancing down the wing, he sees the gaggle of press at the far end. Still holding the inside handle, he steps into the hallway, guiding his broad shoulders around the edge of the door. He lets go of the handle, and it makes a clack as it returns to its original, unturned position.
With the press at the other end, there isn’t much noise in the area of the closet. The clack of the handle echoes as Edmund quickly closes the door and steps away from it.
“Looking for a mop, RE-port-uh boy? I got something for ya to mop in here?”
Laughing and cooing comes from the cells close to the inmate who just called out. None of them care that the euphemism doesn’t make much sense. A joke’s a joke between three brick walls and one of bars, and a dirty joke needs not make any sense at all, especially if its raunchiness is blatant in tone.
Edmund’s face is the color of fury, and he strains to keep his expression from knotting up in his usual scowl. As he clenches and unclenches his fist, he wonders how someone in this prison dares to talk to him that way. Except for the recent Rutherford-influenced mouthing off of Owl, no one has messed with Edmund since his first day of incarceration.
They don’t recognize him without his beard and long hair. He smiles and starts walking away, although his fists remain clenched.
Calling out from down the hall, “Hey, don’t go away mad. I’m sorry. Just come back here, and we’ll make you feel right at home, huh, fellas?”
Laughter springs forth again.
Despite his recent revelation, Edmund’s anger floods his thoughts, making it hard to even focus on the exit that is just around the corner. His rage screams for beatings on the loudmouth; his fists pulse, aching to answer the call. Hands shaking, he opens his fists, and eight quaking fingers pull back, leaving two extended middle fingers at his sides. He knows he shouldn’t raise them, but it makes him feel better that he has at least stuck them out, even though no one else can see them. A secret insolence is something of value to him while pointless and unnoticed to the rest of the world.
Grunting, he forces his fingers to release the gesture as he turns the corner, leaving the cell wing and approaching the security post at the exit. Now that his angry digits have reached their destination, he works on his sneer.
While he’s always thought his choleric emotions were justified because it was the outside world’s stupidity that heated them up, he has been aware enough to notice that most other people don’t have them. To get past the guards without suspicion, he knows he’ll have to bury them—the same tempers that have proven to be undead to him, rising to torment him again and again no matter what anyone else has tried to do to put them away.
He struggles to keep a smile on his face as he approaches the guards in the glass office by the exit.
His hands don’t want to do anything but make fists, so he shoves them into his pockets. He knows he should be more casual, but he can’t trust his hands at the moment. Telling himself that the bigger vengeance is walking out the door, boarding that bus to the penitentiary parking lot, and then running like mad; he fights the urge to pounce unexpectedly on the guards.
Forcing a hard smile, he says in a voice that is much higher than his normal speech, “I’m sorry to bother you officers, but I left my camera in the van, and I really need to go back and get it.”
The guard sitting closest to the opened door of the office responds, “Are you sure you’re gonna need it? We’re going to have to run you through security again when you come back through.”
Glancing up at the dangling visitor’s pass draped around Edmund’s neck, the guard says, “Alrighty then,” pausing while trying to remember if he’d seen someone so large coming in with the group earlier and then pushing the button for the door to open, “but make sure you get it all in one trip. We can’t be running the shuttle back and forth all day just for you.”
“Thanks,” says Edmund. As he walks through the door and into the light of early morning, he can hear the two guards arguing, fading behind him with every step.
“Why did you have to say that to him?” asks the other guard with his words wheezing out of his mouth swiftly and sopping with sibilance.
“Well, it’s true.”
“Doesn’t matter none; you know Rutherford told us to be on our best behavior with these press people. He’s gonna give you hell if he hears you’re giving them a hard time.”
“Well, let him give it to me then. This is a freakin’ prison, not some Hollywood studio. All these press people are weirdoes; that’s why they all go out to California, only weirdoes head out to California…”
Fortunately, other motorists are scarce on the lonely highway that slices a narrow scar across the desert landscape, leaving two dotted, parallel paths separated by a short median, looking like the tracks of a wounded animal trying to drag itself and its partner to safety. Their fleeing blood trail consists of faded white dashes instead of shiny crimson.
Perhaps unrequited love loses its color.
The speed and thrill of being the fastest traveler on the road makes his entire body feel charged. Watching his speedometer, he is glad he resisted the urge to replace the rear gear with a more acceleration-friendly ratio. The stock setup proves better for his highway blast across two thirds of the country.
Being that the interior has reverted itself to its original material and that the car has appeared inexplicably at the field, maybe the ring and pinion gear set would’ve reverted to its original parts even if he had changed them. To make the matter even murkier, the engine feels as if all of the hot rodding that he did to it is still in place. It certainly feels much more powerful than what its stock engine could muster.
Logic seems to be inconsequential as there is no consistency in what has stayed the same and what has reverted to its past condition. Occurrences that lie outside of scientific explanation are a troublesome prospect, especially to one who has relied on theory to take him away from his normal, safe existence on an uncharted voyage. But, if he doesn’t make it in time, it’s all for naught anyway.
While his body sizzles in excitement, his mind is a battlefield. He thinks of his love painted and written beneath red bangs and of the immediate trouble that awaits her, which causes his foot to push down harder on the pedal and add a few ticks to the speedometer.
Then he imagines blazing red and blue lights behind him that would threaten to destroy his efforts and dreams.
And what of the device?
If he is apprehended, he’ll have to make sure it is completely destroyed, either killing himself in the process or remaining alive but destroying the device, which would render him stranded and unarmed to fight for his happiness in his present time that was all too recently twenty years in his past. He has little hope in either prospect, but he is certain that anything is better than allowing his personal device to be found by anyone else. The implications that it would have on the world could be catastrophic.
How powerful could one become with access to the newspapers of the next twenty years? And, that is only a small part of the information in his device; there are all of his notes, which he dreads the idea of anyone else following his footsteps that jump backward in time and the lonely journey that it takes to gain the means to get there.
It may be a milestone for which man has reached for centuries, but it is an adventure that has a high personal cost.
He knows people would thrill to read about his eploit, desperately wanting to glean his secret over remorselessly ticking time and harness it to go back and fix mistakes that haunt them every day of their lives. The great lengths that would be taken and the deep inner yearning to gain the unwieldy power and reshape their regrets: this desperate need of many he is very aware. After all, it was what had consumed and tortured his mind for more than the last decade of his adult life until he turned down this strangely-ticking corridor. Although he is convinced there was no other way for him, he doesn’t want anyone else to believe that for oneself.
The adrenaline courses through his veins now, true, but for so long they were dormant, feeling little except the type of despair that wipes all other feeling away. The current precariousness of so much that is important to him causes his hands to shake.
All of these thoughts have left him with little more direction than a pendulum. He has decided to stay below double the speed limit as that would likely only leave him with a few citations as opposed to an arrest, impoundment, and a vehicle search.
His other resolution is to vigilantly watch the horizon and his rearview mirror for any imperial entanglements, nerves firing erratically the whole way. Despite it all, he is behaving with more certainty and courage than he has ever been able to muster, and that seems to shine as brightly as the sun on the sand.
Once every half an hour or so, he turns on the radio and smiles when he hears happier tunes. Not that he has wonderful memories attached to them, but they all symbolize a period in his life when he was still filled with dreams and the time to bring them about. Inevitably, he’ll end up singing along or getting lost in a song that he has forgotten existed, and his speed will slide up too high or he’ll realize he hasn’t checked the rearview mirror in some time. Then, he’ll flip the radio off, only hearing the sounds of the car on the open highway: the rumble of the engine, the clocklike ticking of his keychain slapping on the steering column, and the whir of tires rolling over the concrete. It all gives the feeling of being in a space vessel with numerous activities going on at once. The clock on the radio counts down the hours he has to get to her before she embarks on the path that will ruin her future.
He’s been a spectator his whole life—now he races the sun. Countless have tried to beat the celestial body and failed, but for once he thinks he is going to win.
Nighttime in the desert comes on like a ghost blanketing itself over a fire, a void eating the brightness, filling as high, wide, and deep as he can see with a darkness whose density seems all-encompassing unt a dim outline of a cactus or a street sign breaks its totality.
The interior light of his car is an electric campfire. The subtly flickering bulbs of the dash lighting appear out of place in the desert, yet more organic than the eerily precise illumination of the device’s screen.
A haze of an object darts across the highway ahead of him.
He is unsure if it is a machination of his tired eyes or if it is a coyote. He tells himself it’s the latter, because he has no intentions on resting as the first possibility would require.
Hazy creatures, a speedy iconic vehicle, and a device from the future all set against a mysterious and barren landscape: he thinks it could be a setting of an interesting book, but it would be a story like the ones he loves to read, not like the ones that he’s written. Most of his writing has been in the form of television shows, all comedies. He was baffled and relieved to find out that so many of the other staff writers were outcasts like himself, a bizarre anomaly that those who dream the best comedies are full of sadness in their hearts.
The miles peel away slowly like scales of shedding skin. Every bit of distance that he travels peels off a bit of what he used to be and years of lost opportunities, leaving him new, free, and raw, but without calluses to protect his touch. The urgency to get to Los Angeles eclipses all other considerations, having decided to not be afraid of failing until he’s arrived with enough time to try in the first place.
A trip from LA to L.A. is quite a drive, but considering his giant jaunt across time, this cross-country trek only requires a mere payment of hours and determination. And if all goes well, he should have just enough of both to get there.
The morning rays peek over the points of the mountain range behind him. Large golden fingers reach out toward his car. They flicker at him in the rearview, and he wonders if they’re stretching out to stop him or to give him a push on his way. Neither causes him to alter his speed or to keep his eyes from anxiously scanning the area.