OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) (34 page)

"That would be my problem," I tried feebly.

He glared, not about to accept that little gem of an argument. This was not a man to turn his back on his responsibilities, no matter how distasteful. And apparently he found the idea of impregnating me distasteful as hell. Romantic, huh?

Suddenly it was too damned complicated, too damned unreal for me to worry about. Too many maybe
's and what's, too few answers. And I knew where the answers lay:  Retreat.

"I
've got to go back to the doctor's," I told him, and his hard front faltered.

"Y
'ain't..." Again he leaned nearer, to be sure we weren't overheard. "I didn't hurt you too bad?"

No more than anyone else would have my first time, I assumed, and he
'd sure made up for that. But that wasn't what I'd meant. "I've got someone to talk to," I clarified, backing away from his reluctant concern. Too much of his concern, too much of his nearness, and I could get confused and end up wearing the Garrison brand. And I mustn't do that.

I really,
really
didn't belong.

He crossed the overlarge street with me, back to the City Drug Store, pretending to ignore the people on the north side of the street who solemnly stared at our return from the wrong side of the tracks.
Wrong side of the tracks, Lillabit—get it?
At first I didn't understand why he was leading me to the back of the building, until I realized how quiet this side of the street was. The saloons were still open, classical music drifting out their open doors, but the non-drinking-establishments were now closed. Not a lot of 24-hour service here.

When he reached to open the side-door, I stopped him with a hand to his arm. "I need to see him in private," I told him—and winced under his resulting glare. Scary man. Even having tasted his kisses, known his passion, I found him a scary man. "No, I am
not
going in there to conspire against you. I'm going in there to beat the crap out of a lying sack of shit. It's my own fight, and what will be said —"
including the probable foul language that will fly fast and furious
"—is my own business."

He hesitated.

"I'll try to stay out of jail this time," I promised, but couldn't quite manage a grin.

He still didn
't look especially trusting. Maybe he was remembering how I'd skipped out on him, the last time I'd had him wait outside.

"Meet me here in an hour," I coaxed. "Go ride your horse, or check on your cows, and give me some space. Please... Jacob. Just for an hour. I promise I won
't go anywhere."

"This ain
't finished," he warned, and my stomach sank at the certainty in his tone. No, obviously it wasn't.

But when he opened the door for me, and I walked into the back room I
'd left only a few hours ago, he didn't try to follow me in.

Everett Heard—yes, I remembered his last name now—lay asleep on his cot, looking like the son of a bitch he was. I seriously considered dumping him off the bed, broken leg or no broken leg. I really tried not to notice the furrow of pain on his sun-ravaged forehead, or the sheen of sweat, or how much less "medicine" he had in the bottle beside his bed than he
'd had before.

I didn
't want to be a nice person. I'd tried that for far too long, a lot longer than a week, maybe for my whole life. It made me too easy to victimize.

So I compromised with myself and kicked his bed until he woke up groaning.

"Wha—?" he protested, scrunching his eyes farther closed, then finally opening them to squint, as if the curtains weren't already drawn against the impending sunset. "
What
, already? Oh... it's you."

And he covered his eyes with an arm, dismissing me.

I kicked the bed again.

The arm came down. "
Crap!
I've got a fuckin' compound fracture, for God's sake! Set by some 1870s quack,
without
X-ray or anesthesia, or even a
cast
, and it hurts like a mother bear!
Stop it
!"

When he groped for his medicine, his hand was shaking so badly that he knocked the bottle over; even once he captured it, he had a hard time with the cork, and he took three wincing sips, in quick succession. "Goddamn," he muttered sulkily.

I knew what an X-ray was, and a cast. I knew a lot of things I shouldn't know, not here, not now. I didn't want to face it—but I no longer had the luxury of just doing what I wanted, did I? The things that I knew explained why I couldn't marry Garrison. They explained why I'd been so stupid, so awkward, for this entire week.

They started to explain, if I let them, the awful thing that had happened, to start all this.

"You lied about me being a prostitute," I told him coldly.

He lay completely still for a moment, then shuddered, sighed... and smiled. Strong stuff, whatever he was drinking. When his eyes fluttered open, they were calmer, unnaturally so, his pupils strangely small again, but no less wicked. "How long
'd it take you to figure that one out, Einstein?"

I knew who Einstein was, too. And I was beginning to accept how different that made us two from the world around us.

"You lied."

"No,
you
misinterpreted. I just went along with it. You
did
work in Client Relations. Cushy job if ever there was one."

No it wasn
't. There'd been transportation to arrange, lodgings to confirm, menus to coordinate, a bastion of executive assistants to breach daily. There'd been follow-up letters and emails and tweets and calls, conciliatory meetings, weekly battles with marketing, bi-weekly confabs with quality control, and don't get me started on our… website. I knew all the pieces... but I couldn't quite grasp the whole on my own.

It was that big.

"I need you to tell me the truth, Everett," I warned him. "If you do not tell me the truth, and I find out that you didn't, I will come back here with a baseball bat and further compound your fracture. Do you understand?"

"Yeah.
" He rolled his eyes. "Right. Tell me anoth—"

But he stopped, and whimpered, because I
'd grabbed his foot.

"No, I didn
't
used
to be the sort of person who would do something like that." Hell, if I'd once had the grit to knee him in the balls myself, instead of running to management after he'd made unwanted advances at me, none of this would be happening, would it? I knew that too. "But we aren't where we used to be, are we Everett? I'm getting just a little too desperate to let you mindfuck me any further. This is my
survival
we're talking about. So I'll do it. I might not
like
doing it, but I will do it. And considering the crap you've pulled, maybe I
would
like it!"

He nodded anxiously, holding his breath, and I let go of his foot and stared at my hand, at its healing blisters and new calluses. He gulped more medicine, shaking, and I hated the ugly person I
'd become.

But that
's how badly I needed to know.

"Where are we from?" I asked, low.

"I told you. Chicago. The Windy City. Hog Butcher for the World. It's off Lake Michigan, in Illinois."

"No! I mean... .
"
Say it, Lillabit. Admit it. It's time to admit it. "When
are we from, Everett?"

He smiled a drug-hazed smile, apparently transcending the pain to his leg. "Ding ding ding, we have a winner."

"
Damn
it, Everett,
when
are we
from
?"

And I must have looked just desperate enough, because he toasted me with his bottle and said, "We are from about a hundred and
thirty years in the future, give or take a decade."

And it was the truth.

And now, with the truth made real by words—now I remembered.

C
hapter 16 – The Truth

The avalanche of suspicion and implication and  that had been churning around me all afternoon finally stilled into a reverberating silence. Within that silence, my mind settled into a new and yet completely natural, completely familiar realignment.

I remembered. I
knew
.

My name was, as reported, Elizabeth Kathleen Rhinehart. I was born and raised in Illinois, and I was 26 years old. At least, last week I
'd been 26 years old. Today I seemed to have passed the negative century mark.

Until last week, I
'd been a Client Relations Facilitator at A Closer Look Inc., a cutting-edge, multi-media, virtual-reality-oriented educational consortium.
Looking at Yesterday and Today through the Eyes of Tomorrow!

Really.

Until last week, I'd had a one-bedroom loft condo with den, two affectionate cats named Pinky and Brain, a teddy-bear hamster named Chewey, and an aquarium with two angelfish (Cupid and Psyche), four guppies (Fred the first, second, third, and seventh), and a plecostomus named Hoover. I'd had a grandmother, Nana Connelly, whom I visited on Sundays at her retirement community, and some cousins with whom I corresponded regularly, and a very best friend named Rita who lived just four buildings down from me and who was always trying to drag me out of my shell and who could hardly believe I'd never "done it." One Saturday a month I volunteered secretarial services at a local homeless shelter. Once a year I treated myself to a beach vacation, usually with Rita. And I'd almost finished paying off my Mazda two-door.

I
'd had a life,
my
life. It might not sound like much, but I'd enjoyed it, and it was mine.

And then Everett Heard had created an increasingly hostile work environment, then  groped me in the staff room, and I reported him to
H.R., and they filed sexual-harassment charges against him... and something awful had happened.
That
, I didn't want to remember—but it was too late, because I already had, in my nightmares of the past week. Apparently the Research and Development team of A Closer Look, Inc. was doing some kind of covert experimentation on a technological breakthrough that Everett threatened to expose unless the upper management supported him against me.

Make that, some kind of covert experimentation on an
impossible
technological breakthrough. Or, as Everett now put it after another swallow of his medicine, "Time-ime-ime-ime Travel-havel-havel-havel." Then he giggled.

Except that it clearly
wasn't
impossible. We were who we were... with the return of my memories, I couldn't deny that. We were
where
we were which, after my brush with cattle drives, army forts, and 19th-century prostitution, I couldn't deny either. Mainly because Everett had been a creep with a taste for extortion, and maybe partly because I'd threatened his job instead of handling things myself, we'd both found ourselves unwilling test-subjects, putting in way too much mandatory overtime.

I must have murmured that last part.

"Too damned bad we're salaried," Everett slurred.

Oh, God. It wasn
't impossible at all. It should have been, but it wasn't, and now everything I loved, everything I'd collected and worked for, was a forever away!?

"You
're lying to me," I accused, as if my protest could make it true.

"No I
'm not. Not this time. Scout's honor." He flubbed a Boy-Scout salute—yeah, he was believable. "Not as fun as in the movies, is it?"

"How can I believe any of this?"

"You know, I have a theory about that." He tried pointing at me, but missed. "I betcha that's why you weren't firing on all cylinders when you got here. You couldn't believe it was real, so you didn't. Get it?" He giggled again. "Get a load of me. I shoulda majored in Psych."

"But
how
?"

"It has...has something..." He frowned at the flaking tip of his nose, thoughtful, and stopped talking.

I realized I'd found the chair and seated myself some time ago—could
you
stand through news like that? Now I leaned forward on it. "Everett?"

He looked back up at me. "Hmmm?"

"
Everett
!"

He winced. "Don
't! Don't... do
not
yell. Just... don't. It
hurts
when you yell. I'm tired of hurting. I'm tired of this whole stinkin' place."

Well join the club! "How is it even possible? How do you know we aren
't imagining all this?"

"Do I look like a techno-geek? All I know is, is... is they do something. With hypnosis, and 3D glasses... and drugs. Goood fuckin
' drugs. And then poof! You're here. Or maybe you aren't but everyone including you thinks you are, which maybe would mean you are. My head hurts too bad to try to play meaning-of-reality right now, 'kay?"