Chapter 13

She’d neither ate nor drank since 10:00 PM in Gary’s basement. Ignoring the intervening years, she’d gone less than six hours without food or water. So why did she feel like a sailor adrift in a life raft ten days after a shipwreck? Adrift in more ways than one.

“What do we do?” she muttered. She liked being in Bill’s arms, held snug against his chest. The top of her head barely reached his sternum, though. What a mismatched pair, she thought. In so many ways.

“We go back, intercept Older-Bill as planned, and put an end to this nonsense.”

“Will he believe our story?”

“It’s our job to make him believe. Question is, do we do it alone, or reenlist Maggie and A-hole?”

She laughed softly. “Why would they want to? Considering that either of them would forgive us in the first place. I’m sure that Maggie wouldn’t reenlist. She’s too smart for that.”

“It’s just us, then.”

She murmured, “Mmmm” against his chest. Thirty seconds later she shook her head and said: “It’s not our decision to make. Wrong as it is, they need to say yes, or no themselves. Maggie was in it from the start--I wouldn’t be here if not for her. Gary would convince her, I think.”

She stepped back to look up at him. He continued to hold her by the biceps. So many things to go wrong, she thought. So many things to trip them up. Time travel gave her a fucking headache.

Grabbing her coat, she asked: “Want your heavy coat from the hall closet?”

“Forget that!” he answered with a shudder.

She watched him snatch up his black leather jacket and shrug it on. She didn’t blame him at all; she wanted nothing from this world accompanying her back to the past. The memories were bad enough. Checking her pockets for the gloves and knit cap, she caught him carefully adjusting the ridiculous black fedora before the dusty hall mirror, getting it just so. “Can I convince you to leave that here?” she quipped.

He blinked, giving her a puzzled look in the mirror.

She laughed. “Never mind. My prejudices showing through, is all.” She snugged the cap over her hair and asked: “Back to the same moment we left?”

“Behind them. I don’t want Gary barreling into us full tilt.”

Camilla raised her hand and asked: “You got that, Mr. Remote?”

Bill wrapped an arm around her shoulders as the remote double-beep-flashed. “You know the drill, then. Back to Marshall, blah, blah, blah.”

With a start, Maggie whirled and stared at Camilla and Bill with her arms clamped over her chest. Behind her, Gary slowed and came to halt where Camilla and Bill had just vanished. He cursed loudly, stamping a foot on the pavement.

“Where did you go?” Maggie demanded.

Startled, Gary spun about, nearly losing his balance. His chagrined expression was almost comical looking in the dim light. He slapped his right thigh, and then stomped back toward Maggie, muttering curses under his breath. Halfway, he raised his right hand and pointed accusingly: “I knew you were up to something! How long were you gone?”

Camilla and Bill reached Maggie at the same time as Gary.

“It’s my fault,” Camilla said. “I freaked out over the steps. Blame me.”

Rather than the hateful glare she half-expected, Maggie fixed her with a wry smile. “I’m pretty freaked out over those steps, too. They shouldn’t have been there.”

“No, they shouldn’t,” Bill agreed. “Let’s walk. I’ll fill you in as we go.”

With Maggie and Gary walking ahead, Bill gave a mostly unabridged account of their discoveries in 2019. Or tried to. Gary interrupted so often that Bill yanked off his fedora after ten minutes and swatted him on the head.

“Will you shut up? This shouldn’t take until my next birthday, Kensington! Jesus!” Miffed, he jammed the hat back onto his head and yanked it down to his ears.

The recitation took ten minutes longer to complete, by which time they had reached the bottom of East Palmer. Glancing down Hubbell Street, which they’d cross at the light and proceed for a block to reach Canal Street, Gary complained: “Older-Bill knew all this stuff, dammit! He experienced it at sixteen, just like you’re doing now. So why is he here, trying to stop the assassination?”

Bill paused and glanced at Camilla, who nodded. “Until today, I looked at time as a rigid structure. If someone travelled into the past and changed something in, say 1901, then that change had always occurred, written into the framework of time. The past was immutable, couldn’t be altered. Conundrums like going back and shooting your grandfather in the head with a blunderbuss are bullshit. They don’t happen because they can’t happen. The past is locked in.

“Despite what King wrote in 11/22/63, I still believe that’s true. But what we’ve experienced in the past eight hours suggests that certain events can fracture reality and create an alternate timeline, one that diverges at the point of impact. The two futures flow side by side, a branching space-time river. Jumping to the opposite branch is theoretically possible, but you need something like Camilla’s shiny black gadget to make the jump. We did that tonight, jumping to Lisbon Falls.”