Tomorrow (17 page)

“You’re not,” the woman admits
, a hesitancy and rational alertness in her eyes that make me suspect she’s a scientist, not a security officer—someone accustomed to wiping and covering, probably, but not outright killing. Not on purpose, anyway. But she’ll either have to shoot me dead, drug me, or tie me down to get the feeders to devour me. That’s the thing about feeders; they won’t attack a moving target.

Without warning the woman lets off a shot. It flies wide
—well past Freya and me—embedding itself in the wall behind us. “Just take her and go,” she says breathlessly, squeezing the trigger a second time. “This is your chance.” The subsequent shot is wider than the first and, incredulous, I run for my gun, slide it down the back of my pants and scoop Freya into my arms. Staggering into the hall with her, Freya slips in my arms with every step, my damn wrist weak like a green branch.

We’ll never make it this way. I stop and
heave her over my shoulder, like a sack. Then I’m running for the stairs, running for our lives, my legs spinning like a windmill. Above me the hatch is open and I burst out of it with my gun in my good hand, at the ready. My heart’s exploding and my mind’s working at the speed of light.
Look right. Look left. Aim your gun ahead. Run like you’ve never run before.
Stay alive. Save Freya.

I don’t know where they’ve gone
—the director, Isaac, and whoever else is left—I just keep moving. Down the hallway and back through the living room, past the broken bodies of the elderly couple and another red-drenched form collapsed on the floor. A feeder’s already devoured the unidentified person’s head and is making quick work of the torso, incinerating as it goes. Bile shoots into my mouth at the sight.

Then I’m out the back door and careening in the opposite direction from the barn.
My eyes find only darkness but there has to be a country road here somewhere, the hope of passing traffic. Behind me, another shot punctuates the night. The sound makes me move faster still, Freya bumping up and down on my shoulder. Ahead, a parked van, Volkswagen Rabbit, and rickety-looking detached garage come into view. A garage marks the end of a dirt road, its beginning point far enough in the distance to render it invisible from here. But all roads lead somewhere, usually to other streets. Tempting as it is, following this one directly out to what’s bound to be a bigger road would make me an easier target when they come after me. I choose the long route instead, my breath growing short as I run into the long grass.

Surrounded by silence, the noise
from each of my steps is amplified. Suddenly I’m not alone. Someone else’s footfall is behind me, gaining on us. I turn to face them, holding my gun steady.

“
Garren,” Isaac says, relief sweeping into the air between us like all is forgiven. “You got her.”

“And you got out.” His face is bathed in red, his clothes torn in countless places
, and his pistol down at his side by his bleeding leg.

“
Did you get your hands on car keys?” Minnow coughs, his teeth looking like an animal’s amidst all the blood.

I
need whatever help he can give me and I shake my head, bile burning my throat for the second time in minutes. Knowing what I know, I can’t let him leave here. But he has to believe I will, that I’ve convinced myself his virus was a lie.

In another life
, we were allies. In this one, I’m forced to be his assassin. The dread of what I have to do mingles with fury at how he’s betrayed me. Seneval’s trust in him was marrow-deep and my anger sharpens as I imagine her disappointment. How could the same person who inspired her turn to a path of such destruction?

“We need to keep going,” I
mutter, veering back to my original direction. I stumble as I go, willing Freya to wake up and run with me.
If she can
. If she can even do anything anymore. If we make it out of here I don’t know what to expect. I make an unspoken vow to the universe as I stagger onward:
You can do whatever you want with me, as long as Freya comes out of this okay.

Unencumbered
, Minnow is faster, even with his injured leg. “Wait!” I call as he surges ahead of us.

“Hurry up,” he yells back.

A car engine revs from the general direction of the house. There can’t be many U.N.A. personnel left but they’re coming for us anyway. I run harder, tripping on an uneven piece of ground that sends Freya sliding off my shoulder. As I bend and turn to catch her, the pain from my wrist knocks me to my knees. A tear fights its way out my eyes as the Volkswagen slams to a halt behind me, its headlights illuminating Freya and me like stadium rock stars.

“Get in
!” a female voice yells. In my panic and exhaustion I can’t decipher the difference between a demand and a request. The woman opens the car door to show herself—the same woman who fired two gunshots past us so the director would believe her orders were being carried out. A bullet from Minnow’s pistol wings over her head, narrowly missing her. She ducks back inside, unharmed.

No matter what this woman has done for me, I can’t trust her. Isaac
, either. Both of them have saved me at least once and I can’t imagine what must’ve happened to Isaac—or the future—for him to believe setting a virus loose in 1986 is a sane plan, but I don’t have the luxury of waiting for an explanation.

There are things you can’t stop, and things you can.
I can’t allow him to set foot out of this field if it means he’ll kill billions of people.

I drop Freya to the ground and swing to aim at Isaac.
My finger squeezes the trigger and the bullet hits him square in the chest. A lucky shot. But for a second it seems to have no effect. Isaac’s face falls but his body remains stubbornly upright. Then his shirt erupts in blood and he topples to the ground like a wooden plank.

Numbly, I
haul Freya back over my shoulder and jog to the car, throwing myself into the backseat with her. As we peel into the field, gunfire crackles again. From behind us this time. Out the back window I see the director sprinting towards the car. A shot dings the back of the car but we’re farther away from her with every spin of the wheels.

“Who’s left
in the house?” I rasp, my vocal chords brittle.

The woman shakes her head. “
There were a lot of bodies. At least one of them was still breathing but he’d lost a lot of blood; I don’t know that he’ll make it.”

At least t
wo of them remaining, but maybe only one who could give chase.
I set my gun down at my feet.
As the car bumps onto the main road and races for safety, I lean back against the vinyl seat and inhale deeply, catching my breath before I bend over Freya. Resting her head in my lap, I kiss the end of her nose and caress her face. Her limbs look so thin and pale in the flimsy blue medical gown that all the oxygen is sucked from my lungs again.
I have you, Freya. Now it’s time to come back to me.

“It’s okay,” I murmur. “You’re okay. You’re okay.” My mind falls backward
s in time as I say the words.
Us in the Resniks’ kitchen, Freya leaning against the counter in only a T-shirt, reminding me who I was.
“Because the night,” she told me as the world folded in on me. “You always like this.”

I’ll remind her
, too, if she needs me to. I’ll do whatever I have to. My lips brush her forehead. I unfurl her medical gown where it’s rolled up her thighs, forcing it to cover as much of her as possible. My hands rub warmth into both her arms and then each of her hands, trying to turn the ragdoll in the backseat with me back into the real Freya Kallas.

For a long time I don’t look up; I keep my eyes on Freya, watching her breathe in and out in the darkness. “You told me she would be all right,” I say to the woman.

“The process was interrupted,” she replies
stiffly. “It’s impossible to say what the results will be now.”

I glance up at the back of the woman’s head
. Her hair’s covering the damage Minnow did with his gun—her missing bit of ear at the tip—but the side of her neck is streaked with blood. “Take your best guess.”

The woman straightens her shoulders against her seat. “
We’ve never pulled anyone out in the middle before. Give her time.”

“Why won’t she wake up?
Is she in a coma?”

“She’ll wake up,” the woman
insists, but there’s no certainty in her tone. “She’s strong and healthy.”

“She had a concussion.”
Fighting with my lame wrist, I pull my sweatshirt over my head and drape it across Freya’s chest. Outside, the light’s turning a deep purple, night fading into morning. We must be breaking the speed limit; fields hurtle by us on either side, the woman making an abrupt left that seems to come out of nowhere. Soon we’re closing in on suburbs, the spaces between houses tightening and subdivisions coming into view.

“I know,” the woman says, holding her head unnaturally still. “I
warned them that would make it riskier.”

My heart sinks.
She either outright lied when she said there was every chance Freya would’ve been all right or was just trying to make herself feel better. In reality, right here with me Freya might be farther away than she’s been in fifteen months.

“There was another boy
awhile back,” the woman continues, voice wavering. “He had a benign brain tumour that resulted in some of his memories becoming unstable.” She skips over the details, leaving them to my imagination. “He reacted badly. His cognitive abilities and memory were profoundly affected. I couldn’t risk that again.”

The other director warned Freya
wipe and covers performed in the present would be more rudimentary, that they didn’t have all the necessary technology in place to complete them as smoothly as they would’ve in the U.NA. Nausea coils in my stomach, bounding upwards as I struggle to hold it down. “You shredded his brain.”

“I couldn’t do it again,”
the woman repeats. “I was being as careful as possible but when I saw you and knew there was a chance for her…”

She took it.
I’m surprised she can reveal as much as she has without triggering a wipe and I run my fingers along a strand of Freya’s red hair and say, “Are you telling me you think it was safer to stop in the middle of the procedure rather than trying to finish the job?”

“I
n this case I think it might be, yes.”

Then why
won’t Freya open her eyes and look at me? “There must be something you can do for her.” I don’t mean to shout but the words come out loud and uneven. “You’re the expert.”

“We shouldn’t force her to wake up
,” the woman snaps. “I’m telling you, we have to
wait
.”

An overwhelming urge to hurl the woman
out of the car surges through my arms. I focus on Freya and force myself to fight it. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know.”
The woman’s arms tremble around the steering wheel. She was completely unprepared to become an enemy of the U.N.A. today and seems in danger of unravelling.

The car’
s slowing to a crawl and I point my gaze out the window, at a sleepy suburban neighbourhood composed of large, attractive houses with two-car garages. Tidy hedges separate most of the properties.

“I’m just trying to
put some distance between us and them and stay out of sight,” the woman adds. “Where do you think we should go?”

“I don’t even know where we are.”

“Surrey.” Our eyes meet in the rearview mirror. Surrey’s only a stone’s throw from Vancouver. They didn’t take us far. Somewhere in Delta or a more rural area of Surrey itself, probably.

“What would they expect us to do?”
I ask.

She should know the answer to that better than I do
, but the woman replies, “I don’t know.” One of her hands dives into her hair, twisting it at the roots. “They’ll need reinforcements to looks for us.”

Which gives us a window of opportunity
, as most of their people seem to be stationed out East or south of the border. But first things first, driving around with a gun at my feet and a half-naked girl draped across my lap is a good way to get pulled over by the police. In the short term that might keep us from being taken again, but eventually the cops would give Freya back to her mother. Then the U.N.A. would have easy access to whatever’s left of her. And I would likely be sent to prison for kidnapping.

“We need clothes for Freya,”
I say. Most stores won’t be open for hours yet, which narrows our options. “And you need to clean up.”

The woman eyes herself in the mirror, spitting on her hand and then dragging it down her neck. “I need something to stop the bleeding.”
She brakes, sweeping her hair back to examine the tip of her ear. I saw much worse inside the house, but we both wince at the sight of her bloody flesh. “Maybe one of these houses has a clothesline,” the woman suggests breathlessly.

“I doubt it.” The pavement’s dry now but it was raining when I was taken last night. Most people wouldn’t have had a chance to hang clothes and besides, this neighbourhood
is too affluent to forego the luxury and speed of a dryer for a clothesline. On top of that, wooden fences obscure any view of the backyards. “What about a clothing donation box? There has to be one somewhere in the area.”

The woman steers us
swiftly out of the neighbourhood and we scour the surrounding streets for any sign of a charity box. Five minutes later I spot a bright blue cube marked ‘DONATE’ in an L-shaped strip mall. A realtor, fish and chips store, hairdresser, and fruit market skirt the parking lot. “On your right,” I advise, the car tilting as we take a sharp turn into the lot.

Nothing’s open yet
and no indoor lights are on, but there’s a single car at the far end of the lot. Either somebody left their car here overnight or showed up to work early. We need to do this quick.

“
Is there a tire iron in the trunk?” I ask, lifting Freya’s head from my lap so I can throw my sweatshirt back on and climb out of the backseat.

The woman
cuts the engine and gets out of the car with me. “I don’t know.” Near the rear of the car, on the driver’s side, I see where the director’s bullet hit. We were lucky—it took off a section of paint the length of an eraser but looks more like a parking lot scrape-up than something sinister.

Next to me
the woman slides the key in the trunk and pops it open. Sure enough, there’s a spare tire, tire iron, and compact toolbox squeezed into the trunk along with wiper fluid and several plastic bags full of groceries that someone must have forgotten to bring into the house with them. At a glance I notice paper towels in one of the bags—something that could help stop the woman’s bleeding.

I reach for the tire iron and tool
box, pressing the box into the woman’s hands in case we need it. “Let’s go,” I tell her, not wanting to leave her with Freya. I don’t trust her not to change her mind and drive away—she’s so frazzled it wouldn’t surprise me if she headed straight for the U.N.A.’s Ontario base and offered Freya back to them.

As
we approach the charity box, I wish it was still pitch-dark out to offer us some cover. Unfortunately the day’s fast closing in. I size up the box, noting it’s structured like a mailbox. You can slide items in but not retrieve them. The top will have to come off.

I go to work with the tire iron, jamming its flatter end under the box’s lid.
But I need more leverage than I can get with one good hand. “Help me,” I demand. “What’s your name anyway?”

The woman grabs on to the tire iron with me. “You can call me
Elizabeth,” she says. Together we pry the nearest corner of the lid open. With our combined strength pushing stubbornly on the tire iron, the lid suddenly gives way and flies open. I jump onto the clothing slot and peer into the box’s contents—it’s full to the brim with garbage bags. I rip into one after the other, tossing usable contents for Freya down to Elizabeth: black jeans, sandals, a polo shirt, a frilly blue halter top, a pink miniskirt that Freya would hate but looks like it would fit, a white knit sweater that I’d bet has never been worn, and a mustard-coloured windbreaker.

“That’s enough,”
Elizabeth says nervously. “Passing cars are taking an interest.”

“One second.” I ferret out a
lime green headband for Elizabeth and leap down, leaving the lid open. We hurry to the car to deposit the tools in the trunk. I grab the gun from the backseat and toss it in along with them, burying it at the bottom of one of the grocery bags. Elizabeth tucks a wad of paper towels against her ear and holds it firmly in place with the headband. The lime green doesn’t exactly match what she’s wearing, but the headband’s decent camouflage.

Meanwhile
, Freya lies spread across the backseat like Sleeping Beauty, her lips parted and her face a mask of calm. The light creeping into the sky returns some colour to her skin, making her appear a shade less delicate than when we sped away from the farmhouse. Hope swells in my stomach. Maybe she’ll be all right. She remembered the truth the first time they tampered with her memories. Maybe she can do it again. Freya’s not like other people.

I scoot into the backseat,
Elizabeth burning out of the parking lot like we’re being chased. “Be careful,” I warn. “We don’t want to be stopped for speeding.”

“I know, I know,”
Elizabeth says anxiously. “Where do you want me to go?”

“Just drive.” My
mind lands on Dennis and Scott. What would they do if I showed up on their doorstep with Freya unconscious in my arms? Would they help me this time or would they consider Freya’s condition further evidence of my guilt?

I pull the pink mini
skirt up Freya’s legs—over the one-piece medical gown—and then untie the gown where it drapes around the back of her neck so I can slip it down her shoulders before guiding her head into the polo neck. Once she’s decent I reach under her skirt to tug off the medical gown. I didn’t come across any socks or shoes in the box, but I strap her feet into the sandals, relieved they’re only a size or so too big.

Finally, I prop her into a seated position and lean her head against the window. I’d like to stay
close and keep my eye on her, but for appearance’s sake I’m better off in the front seat. “I’m climbing up there with you,” I warn Elizabeth.

She holds her arms in
tight to her body and glances at me sideways as I thump down into the passenger seat, thinking over her question:
Where do we go?
We need money and a place to keep a low profile, but it’s impossible to focus on those things when Freya’s out like a light. People can live weeks without food but only days without water. If she doesn’t wake up, she’ll need an IV to replace fluids. And then what? Will Elizabeth be able to take care of her or will she need to be admitted to the hospital?

But I can’t let myself think like that.
She’ll wake up.

Elizabeth’s
steering us east and for now I don’t question her decision. Once Freya wakes up we could catch the ferry west to Vancouver Island and try to hide out in some sparsely populated patch of wilderness, but if they came for us there our backs would be up against the wall. Having run out of land, we’d be trapped.

I stare over my shoulder at Freya as I say,
“Isaac told me a lot of things about 2065. I don’t know which of them are true.”

Elizabeth
furrows her brow and keeps her eyes on the road. “I can’t tell you that.”

“But you told me about
the boy whose mind you shattered.”

“
Carefully and incompletely,” she qualifies. “The far future is…” she pauses, the skin under her eyes creasing heavily. “The future is strictly off-limits.”

“What if I just ask yes-no questions?”

She shakes her head vehemently.

“You told me about
Isaac’s virus. Technically, that’s the future.”

Elizabeth
swivels to look me in the face. In some other time and place her green headband would look comical. “Technically saying the forecast is calling for sun tomorrow would be discussing the future too, but the parameters are narrower than that.”
And the parameters that would trigger a wipe would have been programmed before Elizabeth was sent through the chute, which could have been years ago. Then they wouldn’t include Minnow’s plans for 1986 so couldn’t prohibit her talking about them.

Fifteen months ago
the Ontario director told Freya that if people working for the U.N.A. begin to transmit information about the future and what they’re doing here, a wipe sequence is instantly triggered.
Sharing some general information seems permissible but the U.N.A.’s existence, present aims, and reasons behind their goals are out-of-bounds. As is any knowledge of the future, which leaves me largely in the dark about Isaac’s version of 2065 and 2071 events.