Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (33 page)

“You’re talking to him now, aren’t you? In the After.”

“Very perceptive, Matt. Many things become possible in the After. You’d be amazed at how easy multitasking becomes once your intellect is freed from the confines of your brain.”

“What’s Bob’s plan?”

“Same as most of the others. He’s going to try and convince his younger self to change. Give up the daily quarter pounders with fries. Get an exercise regimen together.”

“And if he’s successful—like Janice—what happens to his body?”

“Since Janice didn’t actually die, her corpse then ceases to exist. Only the knowledge that it once existed, remains.”

“And you don’t care a whit about how this is affecting the timeline?”

My friend ran a skeletal finger along his now-pronounced jaw line.

“I did at first. But then I thought, why not? Why isn’t He letting everybody go back and have a second chance, anyway? I got pissed. For Him to have the power and not use it … He’s a bastard, you know. A regal, timeless, limitless bastard. Who doesn’t use His power when He should.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get caught? Get sent to Hell?”

Chris laughed.

“You of all people, Matt! A Sunday school lecture.”

“A matter of practical concern,” I said. “Every person who successfully alters the flow of their lives through the timeline, alters the present away from its original course. How far back are you going to go, and how many will you let go back? Do it enough and things will get very, very messy.”

“Don’t worry, Matt. I can’t send people back if I can’t physically touch them. So far the only ones I’ve done have been in this cemetery. All ordinary people. I seriously doubt allowing them to have another shot will disrupt things too much. Especially since their living selves won’t have any memory of the After, nor me, because they never died in the first place.”

“Then how about sending me,” I said.

The Nechronomator considered.

“Haven’t tried it on a living person. No idea what it might do to you. For all I know it might strip your soul out and scatter you insensate across the ether. Do you want to take that chance? Remoting in from the After provides me—us—with a degree of insulation I can’t guarantee if I try it on you.”

I looked down at my legs. Useless for the last forty years.

“You think I care about that now? Send me back, Chris.”

“Let me guess. To before the climbing accident.”

“Yes. You were there. You remember.”

“Yes, I do. I helped carry you to the ambulance.”

“Then do me one more favor and let me go back and fix the one fucking mistake that has haunted me worse than all the rest. Please, Chris.”

“What if your current self continues to exist alongside your young self?”

“You really think that’s a possibility?”

“I don’t know, to be honest.”

“Fine, then. I’ll deal with that when the time comes.”

• • •

I didn’t feel a thing when the Nechronomator touched my forehead. One moment his stink threatened to overpower me, the next I was sitting alone, still in the mausoleum. Only this time the smell of cigarette smoke was much more pronounced, and there was a new smell. Like recently-poured concrete.

My tires squeaked on the brand new tiles and I stared at the seals to the crypts—most of which were blank—where there had been placards before. I remembered how Janice’s corpse had flinched when she’d been sent back. Signal disruption?

For me, it’d been effortless.

I wheeled myself through the dark to the mausoleum doors, which opened easily. Outside, the late summer night air was humid and palpable, like a potter’s damp room. Crickets hummed pleasantly in the distance, and the other side of the street across from the cemetery was an empty field, not apartment buildings.

I smiled in spite of myself. Not bothering to close the door behind me, I wheeled out of the mausoleum, only coming to a halt when I realized that the ramp which had existed in 2019, didn’t exist in not-so-disabled-friendly 1979. Shit. Even in my younger days I’d not have risked a ride down the mausoleum’s front steps.

I sat there in the portico and fumed quietly for a long time.

Then a skeletal child presented herself, quiet as a ghost. I nearly fell over.

“Did Christopher send you?” I asked, heart hammering.

“Yes. He wanted me to see if you’d made it OK. I just told him you did.”

“And what will you do now?”

“I’ve got to go home and keep Daddy from backing over me with the station wagon. But first, I’m going to help you down the stairs.”

“I’m afraid I’m too heavy,” I said.

“Not when I’ve got power from the After.”

She was right. It was like being manhandled by a pint-sized wrestler.

I was wheezing by the time she got me back into my chair down at the bottom of the stairs. And I’d almost thrown up from that damned smell. They all had it, apparently.

She didn’t bother to say goodbye before she loped off into the moonlight, pursuing an objective I myself also intended to pursue. In my head I knew exactly how far I had to go. I patted the lump in my jacket where I’d put my wallet. I’d have been screwed if not for the collection of vintage bills my late wife had kept under glass on the wall of our bedroom. Nancy had admired the artistry, and collected them. Now they were my meal ticket across the country.

Roll down to the street, keep going until I found a pay phone.

Call for a cab. Hope the cabbie didn’t have an issue with gimps. Cab to the airport. Flight to Colorado …

The rest I’d have to figure out by the time I got there.

• • •

Even after all these years, I still remembered the address.

442 Pinewood, unit 15.

A ground floor condo. Fortunately for me.

I arrived via cab late into the evening, with the sun just setting. It’d been an exhausting day, and I’d almost convinced myself to get a motel for the night and tackle things in the morning. But then again, no. There was too much of a chance things could still go wrong. If I got my point across, I could rest afterward. Or not at all, depending on how temporal elasticity worked. Chris had said that Janice Kawcak’s dead self had ceased to exist the moment she went to see the doctor. What would happen to me?

I kept looking down at my legs as I gradually made my way up the sidewalk towards the first block of condos in the complex, all of them brand new 1975 construction. The fir-strip siding still smelled heavily of stain. Marijuana was also in the air. I thought I saw a couple out on their second-floor deck, passing a roach. They quickly went inside when they noticed me looking up at them.

I smiled. Nobody wanted anyone from the older generation around, especially back then. As I rolled into the hallway that lead to units 14 and 15, a shadowy shape stepped out of the laundry room into the light cast by the single lamp over 14’s doorway.

I stopped cold.

“Do you think dying made me stupid, Matthew?”

The Nechronomator wasn’t smiling. He looked murderous.

I kept my hands fastened to the wheels, taking reassurance in the solid steel.

“I don’t know
what
dying has done to you, Chris. I really don’t.”

“Your apartment is twenty blocks from here. Why aren’t you over there?”

“I think you know,” I said.

“You can’t speak to me. I won’t allow it.”

“Why not?”

“Nothing
must occur which might interfere with my ordinary progression. I lived a full life, and had a natural death. You have no right to be here.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. I let it boom out, as best as my 70-year-old lungs were able.

My dead friend flinched and waved his hands as if to shush me.

“Chris,” I said, “I think we’ve both passed the point of caring how we’re affecting the flow of events. What harm could possibly come from me having a chat with the younger you?”

“If there were no harm in it, you’d not be here. You plan to stop me.”

I looked up at the Nechronomator, his ugly gray flesh especially horrid in the dull bulb’s light.

“Not stop you,” I admitted, “but maybe talk you into thinking about a few things. I checked the papers on the way here and it’s only Friday. The accident isn’t until Sunday. Time enough to avert that, if I can. But before I rolled over to Nancy’s place—I was shacked up with her at the time, if you remember—I thought I’d stop in and see how you and Carol were doing. You should never have divorced her, you know. She was good for you.”

Christopher advanced on me, his hands looking like claws.

“You leave Carol out of this,” he hissed. “Look, Matt. You’ve got one choice. Turn yourself around and never come back this way again. If you do, I will know, and I will stop you. I sent you back once, I can send you forward too.”

“Against my will?”

“Damn right, against your will.”

“I wonder what He would have to say about that,” I said.

Just then the light for 15 popped on, and the door came open. The Nechronomator turned and watched himself saunter out of his condo, boxers disheveled and a long-necked beer in his hand.

“What the fuck?”

Young Chris’s eyes focused on his older, dead self, and it was like a silent lightning bolt passed in the air between them.

“Chris,” I yelled from my chair, “I’ve got to talk to you! You’ve got to call off the climbing trip! You’ve got to—”

The Nechronomator spun and lunged for me. I reflexively rolled my chair in reverse. Just as Chris’s dead hands reached for me, the chair caught on the curb at the end of the sidewalk and flipped over. I slammed hard on my back and toppled out, the Nechronomator hitting the chair’s legs and pitching over me. Dead, brittle bones crunched as he came down in a heap. With my arms—made strong over forty years of wheeled effort—I righted myself and ignored the pain where my head had impacted the asphalt.

Young Chris had jogged out and knelt by me.

“Are you okay, man? I should call the cops.”

“Chris,” I wheezed, “listen to me. Sunday, you and I are going on a trip up the canyon. You’ve got to call it off. I’m going to break my back when I fall. Don’t let me convince you otherwise.”

“Jesus … Matt? What’s going on? You look—”

Dead Chris rose up from where he’d fallen, left leg and arm twisted grotesquely. He shouldn’t have been able to stand at all. Whatever he was tapping from the After, it was potent stuff.

“Desist!”

Young Chris looked like he was going to throw up, and took a few steps backward.

“Oh my God, what is this,” he said.

“It’s me,” I said to young Chris. “Remember the talk we had about you and Carol? She wanted you both to be back in church. For the baby. She’s right.”

“Chris?”

Carol stood in the doorway of the condo, her nightgown wrapped tightly around her very-pregnant abdomen. Casey was about six months, give or take. I remembered that his birthday always came around Thanksgiving. Shit, he would be a handful by the time he was ten.

Young and dead Chris both looked at his current/former wife.

When Carol saw the Nechronomator, she screamed and backed into the wall behind her, hand up to her mouth.

I turned and looked up at my dead friend. His mouth had drawn open, gaping inhumanly wide. Dead eyes were rolled back into their sockets and a rising groan had begun in his throat. Not air being pushed out, but air being drawn in. His chest was expanding like a balloon, and the groan quickly rose to a howl. A satanic, hair-raising howl that made the windows rattle. I felt an electric charge flow over my skin and though the asphalt.

Something was changing. Had changed.

I waited, turning back once to see Carol clutched to Chris’s chest.

“Stay together, dammit,” I yelled as loudly as I could.

Then everything vanished at once.

• • •

It was almost midnight when Chris pounded on my door. Nancy and I had been relaxing after a good, long, end-of-the-week screw, and she was dozing on the bed. I threw on my terrycloth bathrobe and went to the door to find Chris and Carol fully-dressed and looking worried.

I invited them in, woke Nancy, and we talked over cans of soda.

I wanted to say Chris was crazy. I wanted to tell him I didn’t think the joke was very funny. Only, I couldn’t make myself believe that he was joking. And with Carol there as an eye witness—serious Carol, who had never pulled a prank in her serious life—the air was stone-cold sober.

Suffice to say, I grudgingly let us cancel the climbing trip. In fact, we never did go climbing again. Chris wouldn’t hear of it. Kept telling me how horrified he was to see me in the wheelchair.

Nancy and I were present for Casey’s baptism.

When Chris and Carol moved back east for the university job, Nancy and I followed. By the time Casey was in high school Chris and I both had tenure. We had good lives, the two of us.

Chris was a grandpa six times over when Carol finally went. Alzheimer’s. Ripped Chris in two to see her go out like that, but we were both glad when it was over. Chris had helped me through Nancy’s passing a few years before, and I wasn’t surprised to see Chris in my living room, day after day, in the weeks following Carol’s.

We talked about God a lot in those final days. A couple of odd ducks in our department at the U. I still have the photo from when Chris debated Dawkins on the quadrangle. I’d thought they were going to punch each other out, they were so angry. We wondered what it would be like, when we crossed over. If we crossed over. Neither of us spoke much of that night anymore, when Chris and Carol showed up and told me the story. Sometimes I still wonder if it wasn’t just in Chris’s imagination. But Carol had remained firmly convinced, to her deathbed. She’d said she’d never forget watching the zombie swell up like a bloated deer, then pop into nothingness with a flash like that of a camera bulb.

Disabled, older me had vanished too, though the wheelchair had remained behind. Chris still had it in his garage on the day he died, and weeks later when I went over with his kids to begin cleaning things out, I found the wheelchair.

It was covered in dust, and rusty.

Chris had died on April 22, 2016.