Forty Leap (26 page)

“I think we need a bit more action,” Neville
said. He looked at all of us, humanity lost in time. “Are you all
scared enough? It only gets worse from here.”

Lieutenant McSwain looked on with an uneasy
confusion. As unsure as I was of the situation, my peers knew less
than I and he less than they. I imagine he felt almost completely
emasculated by the fact that he was no longer in charge of a
situation he had moments ago mastered. He almost spoke, like a
desperate man asking desperate questions in a desperate attempt to
shed his desperation. But he controlled it, years of conditioning
taking control.

Gun held out before him, Neville began to
move toward the corridor. The director got in his way, complained
that the lieutenant was right. There just weren’t the resources to
move everyone out this way.

“Then I guess it’s come to blows, eh
director? Have you got the stomach for it?”

At that moment, someone must have been making
popcorn because we could hear that it was ready. Of course, that’s
what I thought until I realized that the sound was too muffled and
no one was actually making popcorn. People were shooting. People
were being shot. I wished I had not come to this awful place. The
tension was filling inside of me, my blood running hot.

Neville continued out and we followed. Rogers
took up step next to him. We marched down the corridor, a
disorganized bunch. I had no idea where Neville thought he was
going, but the pops of gunfire became louder and less muffled the
further we went. Moments later, we ran almost headlong into a unit
of six soldiers. Their weapons came up as soon as they saw us,
their warnings ringing out sharp and clear.

But Neville was ready for them. He lifted the
gun and pressed it into Lieutenant McSwain’s scalp. “You can’t kill
me fast enough,” he shouted, mad with the adrenaline rush. I felt
what he felt. “You drop those guns or I shoot your lieutenant.”

They hesitated. But the problem wasn’t
McSwain. Their orders most likely had him dead already. They
couldn’t open fire on their prize. Twenty two time jumpers all
wrapped up in a nice neat little package.

I don’t know what the result would have been.
For a moment, it seemed like a stalemate, but I doubt that would
have lasted long. Regardless, we lost our linchpin at that moment.
Neville MacTavish, gun in hand, winked out of existence. It was the
most extraordinary thing I had ever seen. One second he was there
and the next he wasn’t. Of course, he had jumped. It had happened
to me enough times, but I guess no one had ever seen it happen to
me. Certainly I had never seen it happen to anyone else. As
unnerving as it had been to walk out of K-Mart and into a war-torn
New York City, this was worse. An involuntary shudder grabbed hold
of me.

And then they were on us. McSwain reacted
first, taking advantage of Rogers Clinton’s distractedness to free
himself. He ordered his men to infiltrate and corral us. A couple
of us, those who realized that there would be no gunfire, put up a
half hearted fight, but we were no match for them. McSwain was
shouting into a radio, taken from one of the soldiers because
Neville had absconded through time with his. The sound of shooting
continued on nearby.

“Call it off,” I whispered and no one heard.
I looked around me. We had been forced up against the wall and were
standing like statues. At the end of the row, three heads away from
me, Wil and the director stood in indecision.

“Call it off,” I said a bit louder, this time
looking down the row. “Wil, call it off!”

The mad rush I had felt had begun to wane in
the wake of Neville’s disappearance, but it was rekindling. So many
lives were at stake. So many people were going to die for a cause
that was already lost.

“Please,” I said.

Wil looked at me and so did the director.

“You can’t win. You won’t save anyone.” There
were tears in my eyes. I was enveloped by an overpowering sadness,
thinking that I was getting a glimpse of what was to be. For us,
for me, there was no escape. Neville had known. Neville had done
it. He’d made himself jump. “Please.”

Wil and the director nodded to each other and
Wil reached for his radio even as he was telling McSwain what he
was going to do. A soldier tensed, bringing his rifle to bear, but
there was no shooting. Thank goodness there was no shooting.
McSwain watched Wil carefully as he gave the GEI personnel orders.
He was telling them to cease fire and lay down their arms. As he
did so, McSwain gave corresponding orders to his people. Cease
fire. Move in. And so it was done. When the sounds of shooting had
finally faded, McSwain called for something called a
containment
team
and a unit to take us back to our quarters. The
containment team arrived first and began marking the position where
Neville had jumped. We were hauled off before we saw anything else,
but it was clear that they intended to set a trap for Neville so
that when he reappeared he would be caught. Based on what Neville
had told me about his last jump, they would have a long time to
wait. To them, it didn’t seem to matter.

As we walked, or I should say marched
quickly, through the corridors, Rogers fell into step beside
me.

“Little Mat,” he whispered. “Jump.”

I looked at him. “I don’t know how.”

He smiled. “Neville did it. You can do it.
You have to do it now, before they lock you in a cell. Then I’ll
go.”

What was he saying? Would we all arrive at
the same place? Was I misreading what he was telling me? “They’ll
set a trap for us just like they did for Neville.”

“No talking!” one of the soldiers shouted
back at us.

Rogers lowered his voice even further so that
I could barely hear him. “They’re fools. They don’t know nothin’
about what we do.”

“I can’t do it.”

His regular accent fell away. “If they put
you in your room, it’s over. You’ll be their guinea pig and they’ll
stick you and dissect you until there’s nothing left. Then they’ll
move on to someone else. You’re not a person to them. They’ll take
away even your dignity. It will be worse than being a slave.” He
continued on and each sentence described a more horrible picture, a
picture of pure torture and a life that wasn’t worth living. Would
my government actually do these things to me? Had I really been so
deceived all of my life? But as Rogers spoke, the questions in my
mind fell away. They had murdered Morty and Dr. Mason. They had
tracked me through time. The question wasn’t what would they do, it
was what
wouldn’t
they do.

And then I was in darkness. The change was so
abrupt that I bumped into something before I stopped walking. I
knew instinctively that I had jumped. I hadn’t blacked out and the
footsteps of my companions had died away in an instant. I waited in
the blackness for my eyes to adjust but they did not. The absence
of light was complete. Wherever I was, there was no light filtering
in. Cautiously, I began feeling my way around. Boxes. Shelves. A
supply closet? I couldn’t find a light switch, but I wondered…

If I had jumped, then I must have gained
several years. Perhaps… “Lights?” I asked the room tentatively.

Immediately, two strange looking bulbs flared
to life. The lighting wasn’t great, but it burned my eyes after
such a complete absence of it. I was in a supply closet. The boxes
were labeled, some holding cleaning supplies and other such items.
There was a rack with what looked like maintenance fatigues hanging
on it. Each had an ID badge attached, but the badges had no
pictures and I doubted if the stripes had been programmed. I
couldn’t know how many years I had skipped, but it had to be
considerable enough so that the technology had advanced somewhat
beyond my comprehension. Stripping quickly, I put on a set of loose
fitting maintenance fatigues. I swapped out the ID badge on the
fatigues with the GEI one Wil had given me. They didn’t look
exactly the same, but they were close enough that I might get away
with it if someone just gave it a passing glance. I camouflaged the
GEI logo under a crease of my shirt.

I opened the door a crack and peered into the
corridor. Sure enough, I was still in the GEI facility in the Rocky
Mountains. Ahead of me was the passage down which we had been
marching moments/years ago. Much of it had changed. The warm
colored paint had been replaced with a sterile looking grey coat.
Arrows pointing every which way directed personnel around the
complex; at least I wouldn’t get lost. But the most drastic change
was the apparatus that had been set up just where I had been
walking. It looked quite like a cage, but not just so. A glass
encasement had been set up. It stretched from floor to ceiling and
wall to wall. Orange symbols were painted all about it, warning
people off I suppose. There were also cameras affixed to the top.
Fortunately, all of the cameras pointed inward. Stenciled onto the
side was my name. Apparently, they were expecting me. But had they
set this up immediately after my jump or had they known I was
coming now? It seemed more likely that they had set it up right
away. I remembered Lieutenant McSwain ordering a containment team
just after Neville’s jump. Perhaps it took a containment team to
set up this apparatus.

I had no idea what I was going to do.
Clearly, the installation was still in the hands of the government,
or at least people who sought to cage us. All I could think to do
was to try and remain inconspicuous and make some observations.
Stepping back into the closet, I pulled a utility belt off of a
rack. There were various cleaning implements which fit neatly onto
the belt (a squeegee, a duster, a spritzer, a universal handle…). I
loaded up and then grabbed a broom handle and a cart with several
different heads. Lieutenant McSwain’s comment about the fake beard
stayed with me so I thought to find a way to disguise my
appearance. Who knew whether or not Mathew Cristian was instantly
recognizable in this time period? But I couldn’t take any chances.
There was no fake beard available so I had to do with mussing my
hair and streaking some grime on my face. Insufficiently disguised
and feeling very self conscious, I stepped back out into that
hallway and into two people in white coats.

I was startled and nearly jumped out of my
skin. I apologized profusely, trying in vain to disguise my voice.
They seemed perturbed, but brushed past me just the same. They did
not try to look at my ID badge. I, however, did notice theirs. They
were doctors. One was a woman and one was a man. I had missed what
they were saying beforehand, but I listened carefully as they
picked up the conversation walking away from me. They were speaking
about a “patient” who had responded badly to tests. She had not
survived.

Badly shaken, I moved off in the opposite
direction from them. They had moved left down a T-junction and I
moved right, the stem leading to what would have been my
containment. I followed the signs towards the research areas,
trying to forget what I had grown accustomed to as the old layout.
For me, it had only been a few minutes since this facility had been
a comfortable place for me and twenty one other time jumpers.
Pointing in the direction of what had once been our suites was a
sign that read,
Staff Quarters
. They had remade the place.
Amazingly, I suddenly knew that I had to find out where they were
keeping the
patients
. I didn’t know what I would do then,
but the idea of uniting with my fellows was somehow comforting.

As I moved through the familiar, yet alien
complex, I tried to steer clear of any further encounters with
other people. The building was eerily silent, sparsely populated
with doctors and soldiers and administrative staff. The few doctors
and administrators that I saw seemed far too preoccupied to notice
me. The soldiers were tougher but not much. Many of them were
joking with each other as if there was a party going on. Only the
maintenance staff seemed alert. I met one around a corner rather
accidentally and he gave me a very queer look as he asked me who I
was and what I was doing in his section. Without even an
explanation, I mumbled an apology and walked quickly back the way I
had come. I could only hope that there would be sufficient
ambivalence in the man for him to ignore the encounter. After that,
I was most careful to avoid maintenance staff. Though the rest of
the people might not care if they didn’t recognize me, the other
janitors definitely did. Fortunately, they were as absent as the
rest of the personnel.

Eventually, I found my way down to the
research sections. Moved out of our old rooms, I guessed that all
of the jumpers would have been moved close to the testing areas. I
was correct. Again there were signs clearly labeling
Patient
Compartments
. I moved quickly in that direction and stumbled
into them before I even knew what had happened. I was amazed at how
light security was. There were no doors requiring identification.
There were hardly any doors at all. Most of the corridors just
opened up into different sections. There were no guards. I was
literally able to turn a corner and see the cells that held my
fellow patients.

And cells is what they were. The time jumpers
were held in twenty foot by twenty foot plexiglass cubicles. Each
was set with its rear against a wall and there was a changing
screen that hid a toilet (I could see it from an angle). Beyond
that, each prisoner, for I could no longer think of them, of us, as
patients
, had a cot and a table and a chair. Some of the
tables had books or magazines on them, but the rooms were otherwise
bare. The door to the cell was made of plexiglass as well, with
plastic hinges. The locks were not immediately visible and there
were no handles. I imagined that the doors responded to some sort
of electronic signal and either swung in or out with a push.