Mindbenders (15 page)

“And I’ll be able to wake you up if there’s trouble? You’re sure?”

“I don’t see why not.” This didn’t sound real conclusive.

“Has anyone tried it? Lately?”

“You’ll be fine.”

“What if they probe again? While you’re away, are you still blocking me?”

“No, I can’t. I won’t be here. Just pretend you’re someplace you were last week or last month.” He glanced at the ceiling: I could see him trying to figure out how to explain this next thought. “Consciousness is time-specific,” he told me.

“In English, please.”

“One time the Americans had a mindbender agent locked in a dark room in Maryland. His job was to describe a site he’d never seen or heard of in California. The Agency was sending a team to the location, who also had never been there—his job was to read their minds and describe what they saw. As soon as he was given the task, he performed it, including a description of a specific routine the camp personnel performed for the team’s visit.”

“Wow,” I said, not sure what this had to do with blocking. Or time-specific consciousness. Or anything else, for that matter.

“Oh, that’s not the interesting part,” Max said. “What’s interesting is that the California team got held up by bad weather. They didn’t arrive until three hours
after
the agent finished describing their visit.”

“Huh?” I tried to wrap my head around this but ‘huh?’ was all I got.

“All time exists at once—Einstein predicted this. So the agent locked onto the people he was supposed to track and read their impressions of the site. It’s just that they hadn’t been there yet. And the things they saw—that he reported—hadn’t happened yet.” He laughed at the expression on my face. “Tauber could’ve told you all about this—they sent him back once to meet
Jesus
.” At this point, he wisely gave up trying to explain. “Okay, here’s what you need to know: if you put yourself in any other place
or
time—back with that girl in the car last night, or in Iraq again; something so vivid you’re not just remembering but really
there
, these guys’ll never be able to read you, probe you, anything. They’re looking for someone who’s here, now. And you won’t be.” He stared at me for a while, waiting.

“I’ll never figure out how to do that,” I said finally.

“But you already
have
, Gregor,” he laughed. “That’s how you spent half your time in Florida.” I hated being called Gregor. He settled into his crouch again, humming to stir the rafters.

There were still eggs left in the kitchen. I threw another muffin in the toaster and wandered around. I wanted cereal. There were Corn Flakes in the cupboard but no milk in the fridge. We had a guy at Dave’s who ate cereal with orange juice, but he wasn’t someone I wanted to be like. We had guys who blinked uncontrollably or freaked out at loud noises or picked their skin raw. If sanity was a matter of degree, eggs and a muffin were better than cereal and orange juice, as far as I was concerned.

That’s what I was thinking when I looked out the window and saw the vans coming hard up the driveway.

“Max! Come on, Max! Time to wake up Max! Now!
Now
! Max, no time for sleeping. Back to the world now! Shit! Shit shit shit shit shit!!!” He was in full trance mode, of course. I pummeled his shoulders and kicked him in the back and the butt and anyplace else I could kick him without breaking anything but he wasn’t stirring. Pulling and shaking—same result. The vans were screeching to a halt now and I could hear footsteps all around the house. I left him long enough to push a kitchen cabinet up against that door—happily, it was just a few inches. I saw dark-blue jumpsuits swarming outside the windows. Happily, the windows were where the house overhung the cliff so they couldn’t reach them to get in--yet. The front of the house—the part that faced the horse runs—had a hundred little cubby-hole windows but no big plate glass you could shatter and walk through—apparently, the owners liked their privacy. But this didn’t buy me much time—they were already smashing against the door and it was making buckling noises. I had a choice: surrender out front or dive over the cliff—suddenly this didn’t seem like such a great hideout.

And then I heard a commanding voice—deep, foreign accent, powerful, someone used to being listened to—bellowing “You said he was here! Where?”

“He
was
here! We matched his waveform from Raleigh—100%!”

A third voice: “The other one’s here.”

“Who cares? I want
Renn
! Open this door, damn you!”

And then, somehow, I knew what to do. I grabbed Max under the arms and dragged him across the floor—he was like lead, the son-of-a-bitch—to the crawlspace. I shoved his body inside and checked the door twice to make sure it closed. Then I ran like a maniac to the kitchen, grabbed the biggest carving knife I could find and ducked onto the balcony.

It was a sheer drop directly below but there were trees growing from the next ledge, about six or eight feet down—something like that, I’m no good at estimating. Too far to jump, I knew that. I was getting vertigo just peeking over the edge. I mounted the table on the balcony and scrambled up onto the awning, climbing toward the top. It was a rickety old green canvas thing that barely held my weight—I could hear the aluminum arms creaking under me as I went. At the top, the awning was tied to the roof, thick rope looped through metal eyes punched into the canvas. The metal arms below ended with four screws set into wood blocks—old moldy wood, cracked and covered with flecks of old paint.  

As I reached the top of the awning, I heard the crash of the front door splintering open and men kicking their way into the house. I had seconds left. I drove the knife down hard, hacking at the rope in two places, hoping I’d cut through both at roughly the same time. The cable was old and brittle—the strands flew apart with every swing of the knife. The awning sagged immediately, slumping down and forward over the edge of the balcony. I grabbed hunks of canvas and held on for all I was worth. Then I stretched my legs out and pushed off hard from the wall.

I failed science in school. Several times. I was good with words because they could be manipulated, played with—I could make them do what I wanted. Facts, natural law—those things don’t bend to the will quite so easily.

I’d visualized the awning ripping loose from the wall, catching the wind like a parachute and cushioning my fall to the treetops below, a relatively soft landing leaving me a head start running from the blue-jumpsuit crowd.

Of course, nothing remotely like that happened. I pushed hard enough to split the final strands of rope and carry the awning over the edge. One end did indeed rip out of the wood mounting. But the other held and the whole shrieking assembly dropped down in an arc, skittering sideways across the rock face,  scraping loud as a factory, until the bottom end hit the first tree it found and stopped dead. The impact jarred me loose instantly, ripped my hands free and I fell. I had enough time in midair, the world gone slow-motion, to understand what an idiot I was even trying something this ridiculous and to blame the movies that had convinced me I had any chance of success.

And then I hit hard and the wind went completely out of me.

I’m not sure how long it was before I could think again. It couldn’t have been very long but I drifted back to consciousness, fading in as from a dream or some potent anesthesia, to treetops swaying in the updraft and the sound of voices—not words but sound, a flat kind of music, John Cage wind chimes, which must have been what Cage had in mind in the first place.

As I came to and checked above me, I realized I’d succeeded—at least partly. My hasty plan was both to get away  and, crucially, to draw them after me. When I’d heard the commanding voice outside calling ‘Where is he!’ I’d realized that, as long as Max was in his coma, they couldn’t read him at all. Somehow they’d broken through his blocking, because they’d found us. But, while he was out-of-body traveling, he was in a different place, like he’d said—so he’d disappeared off their radar. Above me now, I saw ropes dropping over the side of the balcony and climbers starting to lower themselves over the edge, so  the second part of my plan was succeeding.

The other part, I realized, might be a bit more complicated.

If I’d managed my soft landing in the trees, my feverish plan was to climb down and hustle over to the car, two ledges below. If I could lure the bad guys after me,  Max could come to undisturbed in the crawlspace, reverse time and space and send them all packing to some other dimension for rest and recreation. Yeah, it sounds stupid now but this hope was no more outrageous than several things he’d already done and, under the circumstances, I clung to it like a raft in a hurricane.

What was—painfully—clear, though, was that the hardest part of this plan would be getting out of the tree, or maybe even just sitting up and trying to move. I was taking inventory of my body; there were parts that hurt like hell and parts I couldn’t feel at all; my suspicion was that the parts that hurt were the good ones.

I managed to roll over, just enough to take a look around—and nearly fell out of the cradle of branches I’d landed in. I managed to grab on and roll back carefully, discovering a whole new group of body parts that hurt like hell. My right ankle didn’t feel good and my cheek was all cut up from falling through pine needles—there’s a
reason
they call them needles—at about 700 miles an hour. It was encouraging in a sick sort of way—if they weren’t numb, they probably weren’t broken. I wasn’t a doctor, so my figuring didn’t count for much but at least I could be optimistic as long as I was in pain.

The branches sagged under me way out over the edge of the cliff—I had really misjudged the direction of my fall. It was a long drop below, acres of rock leading to the inevitable Wile E. Coyote river at the base of the cliff. If I was getting out of here—and I’d better get out before sag turned to collapse—the only way was to climb down the branch, slide downhill to the next shelf and beat the climbers to our car.

Oh yeah—and be somewhere else at the same time so they couldn’t read my mind.

The web of branches dipped with every move and the climbers were halfway to me. It’s amazing how much being in the crosshairs can motivate you. I told myself I didn’t care how much I hurt, took a deep breath and pushed down the branch, arching my back so as not to take all of them full in the crotch. With multiple contusions and the wind knocked out of me, I made it to the trunk in eight seconds, with the cradle of branches creaking and cracking but holding. I put one foot onto the branch below—the branch held and, amazingly, so did the ankle. I rolled over and carefully put the right one down—it burned like a stove but held too. After that, it was a scramble for the bottom. Needles pricked, branches stabbed, I wrenched my knees twice and my back. But I made it to the ground.

Touching down and digging my toes in, I nearly swooned from the pain shooting up my legs but I didn’t stop moving. I heard them shouting behind me, “There he is! There!” and I wondered how they could not know where I was—couldn’t they read me in the tree? I hadn’t been trying to block them.

And then I realized I had. All the time I was climbing down, I was already at the bottom. I’d seen myself all the way standing at the foot of the tree, worrying about my ankles, about getting away. Max said
shift into the future
and I’d done it. Now I ran towards the car, taking no precautions. If they could see me, let them follow, at least for the moment.

Just ahead, a bundle of trees, thick and tightly-placed, thrust up over the ridge, covering the view from above. When I reached that spot, I’d be out of their sight. If I could block them when I got there, putting my mind back in the rear seat of the car with Tess—she seemed plenty vivid at the moment—I could slide down between the trees to the next ledge and hopefully make it to the car before they caught up with me.  I’d let them read me once I got close to the car. If I got away with it, they’d end up in a blue frenzy, following me away from the house.

I reached the tree cover and looked over the lip of the ridge at a bed of leaves and grass, moss and mountain flowers. I looked back—no one in sight—and launched myself over the edge.

Oh, this was
easy
—a slick incline with only a few bumps, easy on the butt and the back going down. I was going to make it—if they just missed this one move, it should be enough to give me a clear shot all the way to the car.

I felt smug for about half a second. Then I saw the man standing watching me from the ridge below—a man like none I’d ever seen before, a man I was sure hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Tall and near-anorexic, with skin like a hundred-year-old saddle and white hair to his waist, he stood wrapped in some parchment-like garment from shoulders to feet. His eyes said:
Not interested
.
In Anything
. As I approached, he lifted his arm in my direction and sparks flickered off the end of his fingers. Ohhh that couldn’t be good. I kicked at the dirt and moss in front of me, trying to stop or change direction—why I thought that would do any good, I don’t know. All it did was kick a load of dirt in his face, which turned out to be a great strategy. He twitched at the dust cloud and I twisted around, not a whole lot but just enough—the lightning bolt from his finger sizzled by my ankle and slammed into the ground right beside me. The mossy earth singed smoking hot as I went by. I hit the ledge, stood and ran.

I felt no pain now. There was no sense trying to block anything, what with his footsteps right behind me, always sounding the same distance away even though I was running and he was walking. I could hear more footsteps behind and above, some of the blueshirts having reached the shelf above and others scrambling downhill behind them. Twice, I thought about jumping to the next shelf down but, each time, a lightning bolt smashed into the edge of the path and set it burning.
He’s trying to run me out of energy
, I thought,
run me till I can’t run anymore
. It wasn’t a bad plan, except for the car being just ahead. Unless he hit me with a bolt head-on, which he didn’t seem to want to do, I was going to get there first.