The White Room
I didn’t so much step into the future as stumble into it.
As Amy Filewicz—not the quiet twelve-year-old girl I knew, but the beautiful blond woman that she’d grow up to become—took my hand and led me through the dark rectangular Rift in spacetime that had appeared in my dank bedroom in Haven, the Undertaker’s subterranean HQ, I tripped.
I don’t know what I tripped over, exactly. My own feet, I suppose. I tried to recover, but ended up with my cheek smacking painfully against a floor made of large white tiles. At least I’d managed to turn my head at the last second and avoid a broken nose.
At first glance, the white tile looked smooth and perfect. But then, being this close to it, I noticed lots of scrapes and cracks. There were even spots where black mildew stained the grout.
This place isn’t new.
“Are you all right?” Amy asked me worriedly.
I used to think of her as an angel, a strange entity who appeared to me after I’d been gravely injured, which happened more often than you’d think. During those brief and often frustrating visits, she always spoke in riddles, offering hints about herself and the world she came from, but very little solid information.
On the other hand, she’d also healed me on many of these occasions, and had even saved my life more than once.
You see, my life was pretty much always in need of saving.
My name’s Will Ritter. I’m thirteen, or maybe fourteen—it’s complicated—and I’m an Undertaker. That’s kind of a resistance movement, a small army of kids. Just kids. Until last night, we’d been fighting a desperate, secret war against an invasion of alien creatures who possess and occupy the bodies of the dead. We call them Corpses. They call themselves Malum.
Or, at least they did, before we defeated them.
Winning a war to save all of humanity isn’t as cool as it sounds. Trust me on this. One of my best friends died to make it happen.
Dave “the Burgermeister” Burger.
Remember that name. I know I will.
But in the aftermath of that victory, as I sat in our room and stared miserably at Dave’s empty cot beside mine, Amy appeared. And “appeared” is exactly the right word. She opened a doorway from her time to mine. By then, I’d figured out who she was and, more or less, what her occasional visits to me had been about.
To be honest, I hadn’t been all that happy to see her. The last twenty-four hours had seen too much pain and loss. I guess I just wasn’t in the mood for another round of “I can’t tell you” from my tight-lipped, if sometimes helpful, angel.
But then Amy had surprised me by freely admitting who she was, and had even offered to answer all of my questions.
But only if I agreed to come back with her.
Back to the future. And, yeah, that’s a movie reference.
So here I was, sprawled like an idiot across “tomorrow’s” tile.
“I’m fine,” I moaned, climbing to my feet. My cheeks burned, and not entirely from hitting the floor. “Sorry.”
She smiled. Amy had a very gentle smile, kind of like my mom’s. I’d always thought so.
“So,” I said, looking around. “This is the future?”
We were in what I thought of as the “white room.” I’d been here quite a few times, occasionally for long stays. Once, after getting shot in the back, I’d spent a full year on a hospital gurney in this place, though Amy and her people, whoever they were, had kept me in a coma the whole time, so that I wouldn’t wise up to what was happening to me.
I’d slept through an entire year of my life.
Now do you get the thirteen-year-old, maybe fourteen-year-old thing?
“From my perspective, it’s the present,” Amy told me.
“Sure,” I replied.
Now that I wasn’t seeing it through a haze of pain and confusion, I realized that the white room really wasn’t all that mysterious. Sixty feet long and maybe half that wide, white tile covered its every surface—walls, floor, and even the ceiling, which was really high. What’s more, these tiles seemed to glow softly. I’d always wondered where the light in here came from, since there were no windows and no visible lamps. Now I knew.
The walls themselves glowed, so gently and uniformly that it was hard to notice.
The light really does come from everywhere.
A future-thing, I supposed.
I noticed a hospital gurney, a familiar one, as well as a couple of molded plastic chairs. All were white.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“A temporal clean room,” she replied.
“A what?”
“Whenever we would pull you from the past, we always had to quarantine you. We couldn’t risk you seeing or hearing something you shouldn’t. So you stayed in here until we were ready to send you back.”
“So all the time I spent in the future was spent right here?”
“Yes.”
“On that gurney?”
“Yes.”
I looked back the way we’d come, but the bizarre doorway had gone. No sound. No cool special effect. It had just vanished. Then Amy crossed the room to a small table near the far wall and picked up a gadget. It looked like a cube, about six inches to a side and as white as everything else, which was why I hadn’t noticed it.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s called a Rift Projector,” she replied. “It opens the temporal doorway. It was programmed to shut off automatically once we returned.”
She dropped the gadget into a pocket of her white lab coat.
I said, “And … that’s what’s gonna get me home?”
She nodded, though I thought I detected a flicker of unease. Back in my room in Haven, five minutes and God-only-knew how many years ago, she’d promised to bring me back to my own time safely. Yet something in her manner, then and now, made me wonder how much of that promise I could really trust.
“What year is it?” I asked.
I expected her to waffle; straight answers had never been her strong suit. But she told me without hesitation.
It hit me like a ton of bricks.
Thirty years.
I’m thirty years in the future.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Philadelphia,” she said.
Same place we’d left. The same city where the Corpses had first invaded, the Undertakers had first formed, and the war had been mostly fought and eventually won. Familiar ground, at least. “Where in Philly?”
“CHOP.”
CHOP, or Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was a top-of-the line healthcare facility on the west side of the Schuylkill River, near the University of Pennsylvania. My mom, a professional nurse, had studied there for a while. Both my sister and I had been born there.
“Okay,” I said. “What now? And what did you mean when you told me that you’d ‘lost a bet’ when I agreed to come?”
“She meant,” said a voice, “that she owes me a dessert ration!”
A door that I hadn’t even noticed was there, now stood open. Its facing surface was completely tiled so that it blended in with the rest of the wall. Standing in its threshold was a second woman. She looked a little younger than Amy, and a little shorter. Her hair was also blond, but it was sandier, and cut short so that her ears showed.
She almost looked like—
“Mom?” I gasped. But that couldn’t be right. This was thirty years in the future, and my mom would be in her sixties. That bizarre thought filled me with a stab of alarm.
I suddenly felt way out of my depth and far from home.
The newcomer smiled. “No, not Mom,” she said. Then she came forward. There was a smile on her face, but it was a strange smile. Part welcoming and part—what? Nostalgic?
I looked at her, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
Then the penny dropped and, for a second, the room seemed to tilt. That’s how bad a shock it was.
“Emily?”
“Hello, big brother.”
Then she came over and hugged me.
The Emily Ritter I knew was a six-year-old girl. This was a grown woman, way older than me. The same age as our mother! A stranger, really. And yet so much of her was familiar. Trying to wrap my mind around it made my brain hurt. I’ve written more than once about a phenomenon that I call the “Holy Crap Factor.” It’s that bizarre moment when truth seems to turn reason on its head.
Well, my reason was doing handstands right now.
The woman pulled back and looked me over.
“This is … weird,” she remarked after a few moments.
“Tell me about it,” I croaked.
“I’ve seen you before, of course. In here, I mean. But you were always asleep … hooked up to machines that fed you and monitored your vital signs. This is the first time I’ve seen you up and around and looking like … well … you.”
Looking like me?
“Sure,” I said, though I wasn’t feeling “sure” about much of anything right them. “Um … what bet?”
Emily—hard to call her that—laughed a little uncomfortably. “Amy didn’t think you’d agree to come. She said we should have picked a later time … given that, to you, the Burgermeister had just … I’m so sorry, by the way.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling my throat close up.
She continued, “But I was afraid that, once you left Haven, it would be harder to get a lock on you. So we made this ridiculous bet. Now, given the circumstances, I feel bad about it.”
I didn’t know what to say to any of that. Frankly, I didn’t know what to think. Too much was coming at me too fast.
“Um …” I said. “Could I … get a drink of water?”
“What?” Emily asked. She looked surprised by the question, which made her face go almost comically blank. When she did that, she reminded me so much of her younger self that it was almost like a physical blow. “Oh! Of course.”
That’s when the alarm went off.
Shrill but distant, it came from somewhere beyond the open door.
Looking that way, I couldn’t see much beyond a sliver of hallway: another tiled floor, checkered this time, and a wall behind it that had been painted a dingy blue.
Emily and Amy exchanged a look I didn’t like.
“Where’s Steve?” Emily asked.
“Javelin training,” Amy replied, giving me a sideways glance.
“Steve?” I asked. “Steve … Moscova?”
They ignored me.
“He might not hear the proximity alarm from there,” my younger sister—my older sister—told Amy. Then, in a practiced move, she pulled a small radio from her belt and clicked its mike button. “Steve. It’s Emily.”
When she released the mike, a thrum of static filled the room.
“Jammed,” Amy said, sounding breathless. “This isn’t a patrol. They know we’re here.”
“Who knows?” I demanded, only to be ignored again.
Typical grown-ups.
My sister said to Amy, “You get Steve. I’ll take Will out through the south fire exit. Try to join us there if you can. Otherwise, meet us at the boat.”
“Will do,” my “angel” replied. “Be safe.”
“You, too.” To me, she said, “We need to get the hell out of here … now.”
Then she grabbed my hand and yanked me toward the open door and the hallway beyond it. As we ran, I thought to myself, Mom would be pissed if she heard her using that kind of language.
Funny what runs through your head when you’re totally freaked.