MY DINNER tray was on the small table beside the cot, untouched, the food rapidly growing cold. I lay on my back on the cot, staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t get the image of Cato’s crying face out of my mind.
Dad was the most important person in the world to me. I’d kept him from getting shot and made sure he would be safe. But I killed a man in the process. And I did something to Cato, who’d become my only friend after I was imprisoned. He’d done more for me in the short time I’d known him than any friend I ever had. And how did I repay him for that? Cato wasn’t just afraid when he vanished from my cell. His heart was broken.
Damn.
I didn’t regret saving Dad from Stone, but guilt was eating up my insides, a fire burning on and on. I wanted to run as fast and as far as I could. I wanted to run and never stop.
Dad. If I could just talk to him. He always seemed to know what to do. He always helped me figure out how to fix a situation when I really screwed up. No, talking to Dad wouldn’t help this time. Cato was gone and Apache was dead. There was no fixing that.
A memory rose suddenly in my head, a memory of September 20, 2017. I was sitting on my cot late that afternoon with my back against the wall, eyes closed as I daydreamed about being back in school, hanging out with my friends. The outer door to solitary clanked open, forcing me to open my eyes. Then I heard the measured, unhurried approach of footsteps. Two correctional officers stopped outside my cell. One of them was the guard posted to solitary. The other I didn’t recognize. They both peered in at me as if studying a particularly odd growth of fungus.
“Inmate E-4462, Gavin Jeremiah Goode,” said the guard I didn’t know. “Is that you?”
What the hell? I sat up. “Yeah.”
“Just making sure.” The CO chuckled. “We got a call from your old man. He swears up and down you waltzed into the bank where he works an hour ago, in your little orange baby bumper there no less. Can you fly, Inmate Goode?”
“What?”
“I said, can you fucking fly?”
“No.”
“I don’t see how you could get from here to Detroit and back in an hour, unless you flew.” He laughed again. “Whatever your old man’s smoking, I want some of it.”
The other CO laughed too. “Call that man back, Jonesy, and tell him to get his fucking eyes checked.”
Lying now on the cot, I shook my head and wondered how the hell I could have a memory of something that never occurred. The part about daydreaming of being in school did happen on September 20, but no guards ever came to my cell to confirm I was in it because of a worried phone call from Dad. Or maybe they did. Maybe that was the result of changing the past. The sudden memory of the guards’ visit confirmed my trip back in time worked. Dad was definitely okay.
It was the cost of saving him that I couldn’t get out of my mind.
Tomorrow I’d be returned to gen pop, to cell block E. There, at least, I wouldn’t have so much time to think once the Cold Blood torture machine cranked up again.
“LIGHTS OUT!” the guard called, and seconds later the hall outside my cell dimmed. The guard walked past my cell as usual to make sure I was in compliance, a required part of his duties that was pointless in my case. There was a small lamp mounted over my cot, but I hadn’t turned it on even once since I’d been in solitary. I listened as his footsteps retreated and the outer door banged shut behind him. My shoulders were stiff from being propped against the wall. I lay down and curled on my side. I wasn’t sleepy, thank God. I knew if I slept, I’d dream of Apache lying on the ground, coughing up blood. I closed my eyes, wondering what Dad was doing right now, hoping Cato was okay.
“Gavin.”
I opened my eyes, surprised and disbelieving. “Cato?”
He was standing inside the cell, by the door. He looked subdued, guilty, and hurt, like a dog that had been chewed out by its master.
I got up and hugged him. “Cato,” I said again and kissed his cheek. My own guilt surged like a fountain, along with a swell of relief, making my eyes water. As I stepped back from him, I wiped a hand across my face to clear my vision. I was so glad to have him back. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
Cato sniffed. “You almost didn’t.” The watch on his right wrist looked the same, but his clothes were different from what he’d worn earlier. He had on a black twill jumpsuit and black sneakers. His hair was longer, curlier, and there was stubble on his face. Oh my God. He’d aged at least a few months since he left my cell.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“‘Failure to secure a temporal communication device, and precipitating a temporal anomaly.’” He looked at me squarely, but then his gaze wavered. “That’s what they charged me with. That’s what they convicted me of. I was kicked out of TIA and sentenced to life in prison.”
My guilt sharpened in a spasm, a knife stabbing deep into my gut.
“In my present, 2127,” Cato went on, leaving me no time to respond, “I’ve been an inmate for six months. I’m about to turn eighteen, and they’re getting ready to move me to an adult prison.”
“Cato…. Cato, I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t say it, Gavin. Come here. I have to show you something.”
He took me by the arm and tugged me back to the cot, where we both sat. He raised his watch and touched the center of the dial. Light shot up from the dial and a square image formed in the air before us.
It showed a small sturdy sharp-faced guy in a pale yellow jumpsuit who probably wasn’t much older than me. He was sitting in a small room at a table with his hands clasped together in front of him, his gaze cast down in a way that said he didn’t give a damn about anything. Seated across from him was a man in a gray pinstriped suit, old enough to be my grandfather, who was reviewing notes on an electronic tablet while he talked to the kid. I recognized the room the old man and the kid were in. I’d been in it myself. It was the interview room on the first floor of A wing at Escanaba where inmates were grilled by lawyers, detectives, social workers, doctors, and prison staff. When I was there, the walls were gray, but in this image they were painted tan. I didn’t know the sullen kid, but he looked familiar somehow.
Just as I wondered what the hell I was watching, Cato started to explain. “You’re looking at an intake evaluation in Escanaba. The year is 2026. The man is a psychiatrist who specializes in adolescent personality disorders. The boy is Louis Fielding. He’s serving the first day of his twenty-five-year sentence for second degree murder.”
“Who did he kill?”
“A guy at his high school. Got into a fight with him and shot him in the face. He’s about to solve the missing person cases of four teenage guys. He’s going to confess to the doctor that he shot those guys in the face and buried their bodies.”
“Oh damn. He’s a serial killer?”
“Yeah. A fifteen-year-old serial killer.”
A sudden chill hit me. I leaned forward, focusing on the boy’s image. “It seems that I know him.”
Cato nodded. “You met him before, when he was a lot younger. He was there the day you shot Apache.”
The chill turned into dread, closing around my throat and making me feel choked.
“Apache,” Cato went on, “aka Theo Fielding. Louis was crazy about his father. He was five when he saw you kill his dad. In a few minutes, he’s going to tell the doctor how he’s been haunted for ten years by the face of his dad’s murderer. He became a serial killer trying to wipe that face out of his mind.”
My face. My face became some poor kid’s nightmare. My face turned a little boy into a monster. I could see that boy, eyes wide, face pale with anguish, screaming his head off as he watched his father bleeding to death on the ground in front of him. I could see him look up at me, his face twisting as if I were every awful nightmare he’d ever dreamed rolled into one, and his high-pitched heartbroken screams followed me when I ran off. The memories brought more jabs of guilt to my gut.
Cato touched the dial and the image changed, presenting a snapshot of the teenaged Louis, along with five other teenaged boys. “Louis Fielding,” Cato said, naming off each boy. “Sherman James. Lander Creed. Xanadu Marshall. Kaamil Alexander. Eamon Wilson. Before the timeline changed, each of them grew up, started lives of their own, got married, had children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. With Louis in jail until he was almost an old man and the other guys murdered, there are 317 people who never got to be born as of the year 2126, and the thousands of events that came from their lives never happened. Also in the unaltered timeline, Apache walked away from the Cold Bloods for the sake of his son and started mentoring boys and girls to keep them in school and out of gangs. He helped more than a hundred kids avoid getting sucked into trouble. But with him dead, a lot of those kids wound up in gangs, in jail, in coffins….”
I wanted to stop Cato because I knew there would be more. But I had to hear it. I had to hear it all.
Cato tapped the dial again, bringing up a new image. This time it was Dad. He looked older, more lines in his face, his hair grayer, his body a bit thinner. But he was smiling, happier than ever, snuggled on a sofa with a woman I’d never seen before. She was a lot younger than him, in her early thirties maybe, pretty, tan-skinned, and sporting a huge auburn Afro. They were talking and laughing. The room and the furniture around them were as unfamiliar to me as the woman, but I could see a lot of Dad’s things, including a picture of me on the table by the sofa and the big faded portrait of his mom on the wall over the sofa.
What the fuck was this?
Cato spoke up as if I’d voiced my confusion aloud. “You’re looking into the year 2021 in the timeline you changed. The woman is Leda Murrell-Goode, and she’s been married to your dad for two years. He sold his house in Detroit and bought a condo in Dearborn for his new family. As you can see, he and his wife are very much in love and very happy.”
Bang! The sudden, loud crack of a gunshot made me jump, along with Dad and his wife. Cato didn’t flinch. I watched with Cato as Dad and his wife got to their feet and rushed down the hall, stumbling and almost falling over each other, to the master bedroom. There they both cried out at the horrible sight of a four-year-old boy sprawled on the floor with a bullet wound through his neck. He looked like some life-sized doll, his arms up beside his head, his little fingers curled over his palms, his still chubby-cheeked face dotted with bright red blood. His eyes were open, his expression puzzled, as if he didn’t know why he was looking up at the ceiling. Beside the boy was a gun—the same gun Dad had carried on his job for years.
I understood then that my actions when I traveled into my past had caused ripples across the flow of time, and there was no telling how far and wide those effects would reach—had reached. As Dad rushed in to the wounded boy, I turned away from the image. I couldn’t watch any more.
“Your dad forgot to lock up his gun,” Cato said. “His stepson found it. The shot went through a major artery. The little guy bled out before the ambulance even made it to the house. Your father lived another eleven years and spent all of it blaming himself for the death of his stepson. But in the unaltered timeline, Leda Murrell never remarried after divorcing her son’s father. Her son grew up to become a lawyer who got elected to the state legislature and helped pass a law in Michigan banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. He got married to a man he loved very much, who loved him a lot, and they adopted three kids.”
He stopped, and I sensed that he was waiting for me to respond. Maybe he wanted me to justify what I’d done, taking his watch and changing the past. Changing reality. I destroyed Cato’s life and countless others. What could I say to justify that?
“Gavin, there were a lot of good things that came after you stopped that guy from shooting your dad. Do you want to see what happened to you, after your dad hired a new lawyer? You were cleared of the murder and drug charges on retrial. You got probation on the gun possession charge, graduated from high school, went to college—”
I spun around to face him. “Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me? No! No, I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to see any of it.”
He looked hurt at my reaction, turning his eyes from mine. “Okay. Then there’s one last event from the altered timeline I have to show you.” He touched the dial and a new image popped up. It was a photo on some kind of ID, a driver’s license or something; only a very small portion of the ID was visible. The man in the photo was Asian, very handsome, with short dark hair and a confident little smile. “That’s Larry Kim,” Cato said. “He worked for the FBI. He was on his way to the federal building in downtown Detroit when you got your dad to walk out of the bank.”
“Shit. He was the guy who got hit in the stomach after my dad and I ducked out of the way when Stone took that shot at us.”
“Yeah. Larry Kim died from his wounds. At the time, he was just starting to track a guy from Wilmington who’d made a couple of trips to Ukraine. Other agents at the bureau and in the CIA were also tracking the guy, but without Larry Kim’s work, it threw off the progress of their investigation. This is what happened as a result.”
He touched the dial, and then we were looking at a thick finger of land surrounded by water, covered with steel and concrete towers jutting pugnaciously into the gray-blue sky. Manhattan. I recognized it from movies I’d seen, from pictures on the Internet. Boats plowed through the rivers surrounding the land, and cars flowed along the streets. Life in the big city, going on as it always did.
An orange sun blossomed in the middle of the island, instantly spreading up and out in a horrendous, gigantic progression. A shock wave pulsed outward, racing ahead of the awful explosion, flattening everything it touched. The swelling ball of fire followed and eagerly consumed the rubble.
The glare was so great I had to cover my eyes. I never looked again at the image of the doomed city displayed by Cato’s watch. I couldn’t. But I didn’t have to look. I’d watched enough movies depicting the ground-level destruction of a nuclear detonation to know what I’d see.
The towers of Manhattan were leveled, the entire island a smashed, flaming expanse of ruin. Cars and trucks were blown away like bugs in the wind. The air was turned to fire, and the waters in the rivers were turned to steam. And the people—how many were vaporized? How many burned to death? How many were left blinded and maimed and poisoned by radiation? How many loved ones shocked and left to grieve, to pick up the pieces?
I reached out blindly and grabbed Cato’s watch, cutting off the image it projected, horrified into silence. Then I looked at him.
Cato seemed to be completely without emotion now. His voice was flat as he continued. “In 2017, a new group of terrorists formed in the United States who plotted for decades to sneak components into the country, assemble a nuclear bomb, and detonate it. Before you changed history, their successors didn’t pull it off until the year 2100, and the attack led to the United States declaring war on Iran, Iraq, and Syria after determining officials in those countries worked with the domestic terrorists. But with the changes you made, the government didn’t stop the terrorists from setting off a bomb in 2021. The CIA determined the terrorists got the bomb components from a Russian agent in Crimea, and in 2022, the US went to war with Russia. That conflict spread to involve China and most of the countries in Europe—”
“Stop! Please stop!” I yelled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anything like this would happen. I just wanted….” My chest started heaving as I broke down in tears. “I just wanted to save my dad.”
Cato put his arms around me and pulled me to his chest. “I know, Gavin, and I understand that. I understand more than you know. But you have to understand that your dad… your dad was supposed to die from those gunshot wounds. In the original timeline, he died on September 29, 2017.” That brought fresh pain, and I clung even tighter to Cato. He rubbed his hand gently up and down my back. Then, abruptly, he stopped. “And you died on September 28, 2017.”