November 2008
RUNNING TIME
by T.J. MacGregor
excerpt...
ArubaKincaid & McKee
“The biochip will transform life as we know it.”
- Mariah Jones, 1980
March 15, 2007
3:33 AMAlex Kincaid bolted upright, listening hard for the noise that had awakened him. But all he heard was the island’s music, that strange, rhythmic beat that played here 24/7 – wind shaking the trees like tambourines, then strumming the branches as though they were the strings of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar.
His fingers twisted around a corner of the damp sheet and he swung his legs over the side of the bed. Even though the window was open, the air conditioner was also on, his and Nora’s concession to his need for fresh air and her insistence on comfort at night. The apartment’s AC unit hummed and clattered and he had to concentrate to find the noises beneath and behind this sound and that of the wind. The soft cries of the parched earth, the sad and lonely howl of a stray dog, the crash of waves against the nearby beach, the squeal of tires against the road: business as usual.
Any messages or codes preserved within nature’s undercurrents were apparently meant for senses more sharply honed than his. The wind ruled, end of story. Just as he started to stretch out again, the dog growled, low menacing growls that signaled danger. And it was close.
Kincaid quickly joined Sunny at the window. The golden retriever’s paws rested on the sill, her ears twitched, she kept growling. He ran his fingers through her fur, which stood straight up along the length of her spine. “What is it, girl?” he whispered.
She whimpered and licked his hand and kept staring out into the moonlit field one story below. The misshapen branches of the diva-diva trees swayed in the wind like hula dancers. Off to the right stood an abandoned school bus, windows busted out, the front squashed in like an accordion. Beyond the field lay the road that looped around the island. On the other side of the road rose the first of the resort hotels, grand, sprawling places, most of them American, that were the heart of the island’s economy.
At this hour of the night, there wasn’t even a car in sight.
He started to turn away, but Sunny barked, an event rare enough so that he glanced back, frowning. “It would be so great if you could learn to speak English,” he said.
She dropped her paws to the floor and trotted over to the bed, waking Nora, Sunny’s version of a dog snub. Who needed English?
“You have to go out, Sunny?” Nora murmured sleepily.
“I’ll take her out,” Kincaid said, even though he doubted this was about a need to pee.
Whimpers, another bark, then the dog seemed to be staring at something in the hall and suddenly shot through the bedroom doorway.
Now he was spooked. Kincaid peered through the window again, and saw what Sunny had sensed, several figures making their way through the moonlight, toward the old bus.
Kids? Not at this hour.
Thieves? Possibly. But thieves would target lone houses in neighborhoods, not a cluster of apartments that catered to windsurfers.
“What is it?” Nora whispered.
“I’m not…”
Something shot through the open window, eclipsing the rest of his sentence. “Grab Sunny,” he shouted. “They’ve found us!”
Nora vaulted out of bed and sprinted through the bedroom door. Kincaid lunged toward the dresser, snatched up his and Nora’s packs, and raced after her, one hand covering his mouth and nose as a canister rolled across the floor, spraying tear gas everywhere. He kicked the door shut, ducked into the bathroom and snapped towels off the rack, then pressed them up against the crack under the door.
It might buy them a few moments.
Already, the tear gas seeped into the towels and in minutes the front door probably would burst open. Fortunately, they were in the process of moving out of Waverunner, the apartment complex where they had been living these past months, and most of their belongings were in the new place they had rented in Santa Cruz, thirty minutes inland. They also had cleared all the syringes out of the freezer and taken them inland as well. So whoever had shot the tear gas canister, he thought, was welcome to whatever remained in the apartment.
The glow of the night light plugged into the wall under the living room window provided enough illumination for him to see Nora checking the dead bolt and chain on the front door, her cell pressed to her ear. She spoke in a hushed, urgent tone, warning the others, telling them to get out of their apartments now. Sunny had found her Frisbee and carried it in her mouth as she moved closer to Nora. She knew the drill. They all did.
Kincaid swept Sunny’s leash off the coffee table and paused long enough to part the blinds with his fingers and peer outside. From here, he could see the moonlit parking lot, the lush vegetation that surrounded the swimming pool off to the left, and the row of hedges that ran along the wall on the right, marking Waverunner’s property line. The figures came from that direction, materializing from the shadows with the stealth of the assassins they were.
He counted half a dozen of them, all wearing dark clothes. No telling what agency they were from, which country, which rogue group. It didn’t matter. They ran, hunkered over, through the moonlight, crossing the parking lot and vanishing into the trees around the pool.
“Here they come,” he said, and hurried over to Nora and Sunny, both of them crouched now against the far wall. He passed Nora her pack, she slung it over her head, then adjusted it so the pack rested against her hip.
“We’ll meet them at the house three hours ago,” she whispered, and wrapped one arm across Sunny’s back.
The front window shattered. The explosion of glass tinkled like wind chimes when it struck the tile. Three tear gas canisters rolled across the living room floor. The stuff spread so quickly that within seconds, Kincaid’s eyes watered, his lungs burned, the dog wheezed, and Nora stifled a violent spasm of coughing. A heartbeat later, a fourth canister slammed into the wall behind the couch, spewing tear gas that spread quickly through the air pouring out of the AC vents.
Kincaid grasped Nora’s hand and flung his other arm across the dog’s back. “We’re outta here.”
An excruciating pressure seized his head. The darkened living room of their apartment at Waverunner vanished and the next thing Kincaid knew, his knees hit a hard surface, he fell back onto his ass, his stomach lurched, his head spun, everything listed to the right. His eyes still burned, his lungs ached. The faint stink of tear gas lingered in the air. But he also recognized the smell of fresh paint and the sweet scent of the flowers that Nora had bought at the market yesterday. Roses.
The pressure in his head eased, the fluid in his inner ears stabilized, his vision returned to normal. There, right in front of him, was the kitchen clock, hands at 12:22. The window beneath it was dark. And there, the wooden kitchen table, six chairs around it, each with a pumpkin-colored cushion that matched the color of the walls. They had bought the cushions from a local woman who made them by hand.
In a vase in the center of the table stood the roses, each one a different color. A light over the sink was on, casting just enough illumination to give the room a soft, fuzzy texture, as though it were a room in an old photograph.
His pack slipped off his shoulder, he managed to stand. He still felt weird, as though his legs were made of warm rubber, and he lurched over to Nora with the gracelessness of Frankenstein. She rocked back and forth on her heels, face pressed into her thighs. The dog was huddled beside her, breathing hard, as though she’d been running, Frisbee on the floor just in front of her. She wagged her tail when she saw Kincaid, then struggled up, weaved over to her bowl, and lapped up water.
“Rough, I know,” Kincaid murmured, and rubbed the back of Nora’s neck.
“I feel sick. Can you get me a damp towel?” She kept her face pressed to her thighs as she spoke. “With ice cubes rolled up inside it?”
“Sure.”
The sink seemed very far away, though, and he moved toward it as a snail’s pace, his hands constantly seeking something to hold onto. The back of a chair. The edge of the counter. Every transition was different, some tougher than others, but this one struck him as particularly debilitating, perhaps because of the tear gas. Or the suddenness with which they were forced to act.
He splashed water on his own face, then ran a towel under the faucet and rolled ice cubes into it. By the time he made it to Nora with the ice pack, she was sitting back on her heels, her face as pale as her hair was dark. He handed her the towel and she pressed it against the back of her neck. After a few moments, she struggled to her feet, lurched toward the fridge, opened it, and removed a bottle of ginger ale. She fought with the top, apparently too debilitated to open it quickly. She finally sank onto one of the chairs, got the cap off, gulped from the bottle.
Kincaid pulled out one of the other chairs and collapsed into it. He felt totally wasted, spent, used up.
“Who are they?” she finally asked.
“It doesn’t matter who they are. How’d they find us?”
She shook her head and pushed the bottle of ginger ale toward Kincaid. “Drink some. It’ll help.”As he grasped the bottle, even his hands felt strange to him, his but not his, fingers clumsy, joints popping. He tipped the bottle to his mouth and sipped. And sipped again. She was right. The ginger ale settled his stomach. His equilibrium seemed almost normal.
“Are we safe here?” she asked. “Will they find us? Can they trace where we went?”
He heard the anxiety in her voice, the uncertainty, and it hurt him. He felt as if he had failed her, failed all of them. Then again, they had been living with this possibility for nearly five months, constantly perched at the edge of anxiety, always alert, prepared, ready for the unexpected. They were all so paranoid after the events of last fall that everyone was suspect: the cleaning women at Waverunner, the Dutch couple who rented them the house into which they were nearly moved, the waiter at a restaurant in downtown Oranjestad, the workman who had installed their wireless system, the satellite TV guy. Their suspicion of everyone and everything was an insidious thing and had begun to infect the ways they related to each other.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
Nora rubbed her hands over her face, nodding. He didn’t know what the nod meant. Acceptance? Denial? Suppressed anger? She, like Kincaid, still wore the clothes she had slept in, gym shorts and a t-shirt. Her feet were bare, her jaw-length black hair uncombed. He remembered her best as the long-haired brunette in the Blue River College library, a graduate student in psychology who had devoured books the way other students devoured meals. Their three-year affair had been the most intense of his life, had ended through no fault of their own, and she subsequently had married Kincaid’s close friend, Jake McKee, an English professor.
It astounded Kincaid that for the five years of that marriage he had been able to keep his feelings to himself. But at some level, he had known that sooner or later McKee would slip up and Nora would see him for what he was, a bright and seductive charmer who couldn’t keep his pants zipped when it came to his young, lovely students. In fact, the day she intended to tell McKee she wanted a divorce, he was arrested, hauled away for alleged subversive activities, just as Nora’s mother had been when she was ten.
Now they knew, of course, that Catherine Walrave, mother to both Nora and her older brother, Tyler, had been disappeared by a black ops government agency, that for more than thirty years, Special Operation Temporal - SPOT - had been disappearing subversives, dissidents and other undesirables into the past. Catherine supposedly had been dropped on a deserted road in Blue River, Massachusetts, in January of 1695 and had either perished or survived.
McKee had been sentenced to Vietnam – specifically Mai Lai - but had been spared through a series of events that ultimately had brought Kincaid and Nora back together. Now here they were, six humans and one dog who had brought down SPOT and were trying to build normal lives for themselves. But normal, he thought, watching the golden retriever sink to the floor, apparently wasn’t their karma.
Tyler Walrave, Nora’s brother, and his wife, Diana, suddenly emerged near the couch in the living room. Kincaid could see them through the doorway, their heavy packs bulging from their backs like tumors. Sunny’s head snapped up, her tail started wagging, and she struggled to her feet and made her way slowly into the living room to greet them.
The dog divided her time among the six of them and apparently considered all of them her charges, as though they were sheep she was supposed to herd. Or Frisbees she was supposed to retrieve. Of them all, Sunny had been chipped the longest, since somewhere back in the seventies, when the chip’s inventor began her experiments on animals. As far as Kincaid knew, she was the only dog that was ever chipped. Her longevity brought up speculations and questions about the chip and aging that none of them had been able to answer. The biochip that made time travel possible was like the dog herself: the ultimate conundrum.
Kincaid pushed up from the chair and went into the living room. As he neared, he could see that Walrave, wearing pajama bottoms and a wrinkled t-shirt, was doing okay. But Diana’s head was tilted back, hands pressed to her nose, and blood seeped through her fingers. The sight of the blood alarmed Kincaid. He knew what it meant. Her body was rejecting the biochip.
Sunny licked at Diana’s arm, her leg, trying to comfort her, to heal her. “It’s okay, Sunny,” Diana murmured. “I’m okay. Really.”
“Keep your head back,” Walrave told her as he helped her to her feet. Then, to Kincaid: “Who the fuck were those people?”
“I don’t know.” And he was sick to death of being asked. “ Nora,” he called. “We need ice. Di’s got a nosebleed.”
“It’s not just a nosebleed,” she said, drops of blood hitting the floor. “My body’s getting rid…of the chip. Oh my God, I can feel it…moving in my sinuses.”
“That sensation will pass, hon,” Walrave said, his voice gentle, loving.
They steered her into the bathroom, where Kincaid jerked a towel off the rack and pressed it up against her nose. She took it and crouched in front of the toilet and when the towel dropped away from her face, the blood poured from her nose.
“Keep your eyes shut,” Walrave told her. “So you don’t get nauseated.”
And you won’t have to see the chip, Kincaid thought, and stepped out of the way as Nora hurried in with an ice pack.
“When did her nosebleed start, Tyler?” Nora asked.
“I’m not sure. Maybe with the first whiff of tear gas, maybe as we were emerging.”
In the moments that they spoke, Kincaid looked from brother to sister and marveled, as he always did, at their physical similarities. It was as if they were supposed to be twins – both of them six feet tall, dark haired and dark-eyed, but born seven years apart. When their mother had been disappeared, Nora had been in elementary school; Tyler had been a college freshman.
Nora knelt beside Diana, pressed the ice pack to the back of her neck, and started talking her through it – that she should breathe through her mouth, that it would be over soon, that she should try to remain calm, centered. Kincaid touched Walrave’s arm. “C’mon, Tyler. Leave her with Nora.” Once they were in the kitchen, he added, “She’s going to need a new chip.”
“She’s done with chips.” Walrave jerked open the fridge door and helped himself to an apple and a bottle of local beer. “She’s pregnant.”
“Pregnant.” The word rolled off Kincaid’s tongue with a gross unfamiliarity, as if he’d never heard the word before. “How do you know?”
“She took a pregnancy test, Alex. I’ve never seen a damn thing written about the chip and pregnancy, but I’m pretty sure that’s why her body is rejecting it. Three months pregnant, all those new hormones pumping through her, the white cells rallying around the invader, and poof, there goes the chip.”
“Christ,” Kincaid whispered.
“Yeah. It means doctors, hospitals.”
“But you were a paramedic, you’ve delivered babies.”
“Not for years.”
“But you can deliver a baby.”
“Sure, I can do that. If the birth is normal. But I’m no OB. Who the hell is going to monitor her pregnancy? I’m not qualified to do that.”
“She won’ t be the first woman to give birth, Tyler.”
“No.” He guzzled down half the beer. “But as far as we know, she’ll be the first who has been chipped for at least three months of the pregnancy. And she’ll be the first in our group to give birth. And what’s that mean, Alex? How’re we going to keep running if we’ve got a baby?”
“We’ve got another six months to figure it out.” Right now, he was frankly more concerned about how they had been found.
“But you can see what this transition just did to her,” Walrave said. “What’s it doing to the baby? What’s it going to be like when she’s six months pregnant and we have to escape?”
“Hey, we’ve been safe for nearly five months. That’s longer than I thought we had.”
Walrave pressed the beer bottle of his forehead. “I’m thinking that Di and I will pick a spot in the past, transition there, and just stay until the baby is born.”
Maybe this, maybe that, Kincaid thought. Their entire lives now seemed to be predicated on maybe, what if, suppose. “Do you have a spot in mind?”
“Not yet.” He set the bottle on the table. “We’ve pretty much been going day to day, just like you and Nora. We do the training with Ryan and Kat, study up on whatever era they want us to target, transition, get a brief taste of what the era is like, then they evaluate our precision. I mean, the whole point of this training is to get us up to speed so we can retrieve mom. But now that we know Di is pregnant, everything has changed.”
“You can still go, Tyler.”
“Sure, and Di can, too, if one of us transitions her. But I think that’s too risky. Aside from the effects it might have on the baby, it means that Di wouldn’t be able to get back unless one of us transitions her.” He shook his head. “The whole game is different now, Alex. I think you and Nora are going to have to do the retrieval by yourselves while Di and I look for a spot to live until the baby is born.”
Before Kincaid could reply, the door to the garage burst open and Kat Sargent exploded into the kitchen, her eyes stricken, her clothes bloodstained. “I need help getting Ryan inside. He’s hurt.”
Kincaid and Walrave shot to their feet. Walrave said he’d get the medical supplies and clear an area in the house for Curtis. Kincaid threw open the cabinet door under the sink and grabbed a handful of dish towels. He hurried after Kat, into the garage, where Ryan Curtis sat propped up against the floor freezer, sucking air in through his clenched teeth, his pale face bright with sweat. His left hand clutched the upper part of his right arm, where bright red blood bloomed against his t-shirt. It rolled down the underside of his arm and seeped into the long, white drawstring pants he wore.
“Bastard sliced me…just as…we…were transitioning,” he said, his voice thick and soft.
“Move your hand, Ryan,” Curtis told him. “Let me wrap the towel around it so we can get some pressure on it.”
As soon as Curtis took his hand away, Kincaid grimaced. If this were his arm, he would want to see a doctor, get an X ray to make sure the knife hadn’t struck bone, have it stitched up professionally. But when he suggested as much, Curtis shook his head.
“It’s midnight. There’s only one hospital on this island and I’m not going to ER. These guys know they sliced me. I’m betting the word has gone out to the hospital and the island doctors.”
Kincaid thought of the doctor in the Dominican Republic who had inoculated them, provided them with antibiotics, and asked no questions. In return, they donated ten grand to help build his new clinic. But before he could mention it, Curtis said, “Just help me inside.”
He and Kat propped Curtis up between them. At six five, he towered over them both, a man who had spent seven years with SPOT. In the beginning, Kincaid had hated this man. He had turned their lives upside down and inside out the day he had arrested McKee. But during their months on the island, he had come to admire and trust him.
They got him into the living room, where Curtis collapsed onto the couch, which Walrave had covered in a plastic tarp and towels. Thanks to his paramedic experience in Boston, long before he had started his computer software business, Walrave was the closest thing they had to a doctor. But he didn’t have an X ray machine, couldn’t perform any kind of surgery.
After washing up and snapping on Latex gloves, Walrave unwrapped the towel from Curtis shoulder’s and cut away the sleeve of his shirt. Kincaid nearly passed out when he saw how deep the slice was. Walrave didn’t look any too happy about it, either.
“Jesus, Ryan. I don’t know. This looks deep. If the knife nicked the bone, you’re going to need surgery so the bone doesn’t get infected.”
“The bone’s not nicked,” Curtis said through clenched teeth.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes,” he hissed. “I do. Just clean it up and stitch it shut, Tyler. Please. We have penicillin, right? I’ll need a shot of penicillin and then I’ll start Augmentin tomorrow. It’ll be fine.”
“The blade may have sliced through muscle, Tyler,” Kat said worriedly, biting at the edge of her thumbnail, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, over and over again.
“We’ve got some other problems, too,” Walrave said.
When he told Curtis why he and Di wouldn’t be part of the retrieval for his and Nora’s mother, both Curtis and Kat looked stunned. “When will the baby be born?” Kat finally asked.
“In the fall,” Walrave replied.
“How far back are you going to go?” Curtis asked.
“I don’t know,” Walrave replied. “But I think all of us should be giving some serious thought to finding a safe haven in the past where we have supplies and a place to live and established identities.”
“I thought that was what we were doing here,” Nora said as she and Diana came out of one of the bedrooms.
Diana had changed clothes and although she looked unsteady and spent, her nosebleed had stopped. “I thought that’s what this house was about,” she added.
“Whoever these people were, it won’t take them long to track us down,” Curtis said. “The island’s too small for us to hide here for very long. I’m surprised we’ve lasted this long.”
“So, we, what?” Kat exclaimed. “Run again?”
“He’s not running anywhere for a couple of days.” Walrave gestured at Curtis. “For all we know, if he transitions too soon, he could hemorrhage.” He was cleaning the cut now, squirting Betadine over it, then preparing his needle. Curtis turned his head in the other direction.
“Is that true?” Nora asked, directing her question at Curtis. He knew more than any of them about the parameters of the chip and the logistics and dangers of transitioning.
“It might be,” Curtis admitted. “With the older versions of the chip, SPOT lost Travelers who got injured in the past and died when they were trying to get home. But we’ve got the newest versions of the chip and we just don’t know enough about how it works to say that anything is certain.”
“But we just rented this place,” Diana said, throwing out her arms. “What do we do about that?”
“We’re paid up for six months,” Kincaid said. “The only people who know we’re here are the owners and they’re in the Netherlands now. We paid them in cash, they filed the paperwork. No Realtors, no middle men. We give them notice now, that gives them five months to find other tenants. For the next few days, we disguise ourselves when we go out. We shop somewhere other than Santa Cruz. We can extend our stay here long enough for Ryan to heal, for Nora and I to go back to retrieve her mother. In the meantime, Kat and Tyler can start looking for new havens. Sound like a plan?”
Sunny, sitting at the edge of the group as if she were listening to everything, suddenly barked - no growls, no teeth bared, nothing menacing.
Nora laughed. “I think Sunny just cast her vote for your plan, Alex. You’ve got my vote, too.”
“Okay, that’s three out of seven,” Kincaid said.
“Do you feel you’re ready to transition back more than three hundred years, Alex? Just you and Nora?” Curtis asked.
“We managed to live for awhile in 1968 and did pretty well for a couple of amateurs,” Kincaid replied. “We even nabbed you, Ryan.”
Curtis winced as Walrave finished stitching and began to bandage his arm. “It’s not the same thing. 1968 is recognizable, okay? We’re talking about the darkest period of Blue River’s history, when three women were executed for practicing witchcraft, where women are chattel, don’t learn to read, and are basically suspect if they aren’t married. We’re talking about the fucking Puritans, Alex. The era of Bible thumpers and hell and brimstone preachers. Can you immerse yourself in that culture? Because that’s what it’s going to take. Immersion. For a few days, a few weeks. You simply won’t know until you get there and start looking for Catherine.”
Kincaid and Nora exchanged a glance. Are we ready? his eyes asked.
Absolutely, her smile replied.
“We’re ready,” Kincaid said.
“Then your plan has my vote,” Curtis said.
“And mine,” Kat echoed.
“Ditto,” Diana said.
“Yeah,” Walrave added, and tapped an imaginary gavel in the air. “The vote is unanimous.”
©2008 T. J. MacGregor
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