XII: The Life of Lesley Andrews
Still screaming in pain, the snake opened its mouth wide, unhinging its jaw. For a moment, it looked like it was trying to fit its tail back inside, but in the next instant, with a sound that numbed their very souls, a swarm of bees exited the snake’s mouth.
The bees continued in an endless cloud, thousands upon thousands of them. They were huge bees, black and yellow, with stingers the same length of their bodies and teeth, too. They flew from the snake’s mouth and circled the atmosphere of the center of the universe. When all of the bees had exited the snake’s mouth, the swarm took off through the calming clouds. The buzzing could be heard, getting only slightly softer as they gained distance.
When the last bee was no longer visible, the snake shuddered. It stopped thrashing, twisting, and hovering, and dropped to the floating land disc, dead. Dixie and Johnny backed away slowly from it, pulling their helmets down as they did. They fired up the packs and flew away. They never looked back.
Laser guns make this whirring sound when they’re primed and ready to fire. Depending on what time period you’re from, you won’t find them as dramatic as, say, an AK-47 or a cannon. Just a high pitched whir, followed by a zip and the next thing you know, the guy climbing out of the trench in front of you is cascading down in little chunks like candy from a piñata. Which is exactly what happened to me the first time I popped ahead to the end of days and tried to save the universe.
I came to light in the midst of a battle between what I later understood to be the Resistance trying to hold back a group called the Faction, which is essentially a doomsday cult intent on ushering in the destruction of the universe on the vague promise of some lunatic that whatever comes next is something more than nothing, and is better than anything that came before.
In addition to the Resistance being hopelessly outmanned, outgunned, and far less delusional, they had the added disadvantage of needing to simultaneously fight the Faction and a swarm of universe-eating bees. I ended up not far from the line the Resistance had been holding, and quickly darted behind a large pile of rocks. The air was smokey and full of debris. The sky was every shade of red you could imagine. I didn’t know where or when I was. I sat there, trying to breathe, with every inhale like a mouthful of sand and gravel.
“Come on,” a voice beside me muttered. I jumped at the sound. I hadn’t realized there was a small alcove in the rocks beside me, or that anyone was hiding there. “Anything. Just tell me anything that will help,” the voice pleaded.
“Who’s there?” I called.
“Sir?!” The voice was now shocked and ecstatic. “What have you to foretell?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied, crawling over toward the rock. In the darkness, I could make out a figure, who at that moment saw me and let out a gasp crossed with a squeal that immediately devolved into a coughing fit as he scrambled backward, pressing against the rough rock.
“I… I…” the figure stuttered. “Please don’t hurt me!”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Good, because I’m heavily armed and it would be a big mistake.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” I replied. “But assume for now that whatever side you’re on, I’m on it too. Can you come out so we can talk?” He said nothing in response, and a long moment passed. As I was about to ask again, the figure began, trembling, to make his way forward into what passed for light here in this strange world.
To say I was surprised would be an understatement. Kneeling before me was a creature who appeared to be half-man, half-pig. He was equal parts charming and grotesque, and wore a little leather Newsies cap, a stained vest, tattered pants, and on his feet, slippers that had been cobbled together from other slippers.
In his hands, he clutched something that looked like a large bell jar, lit with a soft orange light from a ring at the bottom. A creature who was clearly as old as time itself floated, or maybe it was suspended in something. I couldn’t tell. It looked like a sea creature made of autumn leaves. Or like someone had been doing a lab experiment on a fairy from an old children’s tale.
I looked from one to the other until the pig man finally spoke.
“I’m Pigman.”
“You don’t say,” I muttered. Then I panicked, worried that was insulting. “Uh, nice to meet you, Pigman.” I reached out to shake his hand. He shifted the jar to one side, resting it on his hip like you might a baby, and took my hand in his, gripping it uncertainly. “I’m Lesley.”
***
No one knows their family histories like the time displaced.
Your average family has a ton of stories, anecdotes, legends. Some are probably embellished, like a grandad telling fishing stories, or a great-auntie who claims to have single handedly ignited the Jackalope Wars. Others are pretty well documented, like your great-great-grandfather’s immigration card, or your five-times-great-nanna’s arrest for selling weed brownies to cancer patients before it was legal. You’ve seen her mugshot. She looked beautiful and defiant.
But the time displaced, “time travelers” essentially, we get to have a front row seat to some of those stories. We get to see first hand that grandad was passed out drunk in the boat that day and didn’t catch a thing. Auntie ignited the Jackalope Wars, all right, but it was because she was a hustling fur trader. And what got lost through the generations is that your nanna ended up being a legitimate kingpin.
So while everyone else in your family thinks they know the real story, you alone know the truth. Because sometimes you are able to witness it first hand.
Unless, of course, you have other time displaced people in your family. In which case things get a little muddy. Rumors turn into quests for the truth. The quests for the truth end up changing the past. The past changes the future, which might create a paradox so that the past doesn’t change anyway. And, like any family, everyone’s always blaming everyone else.
***
The first time it happens is simultaneously the best and most terrifying thing in the world. It feels incredible, but at the same time, you’re scared that you’ll never be able to control it and it’ll never stop.
I’m talking about time travel. Although if you’re time displaced, the ability does tend to manifest itself around the same time you hit puberty, so if you’re snickering at the description, it’s kind of justified.
No one really knows how you get the ability. For some people, it shows up out of nowhere. A spontaneous mutation to a chromosome you didn’t know you even had. For others, it’s passed down from a parent. At this point in our history there are multigenerational time displaced families, with the ability showing up in one or more family members each generation.
If this condition were more prevalent, you could see it creating a type of class divide, with the proud family of traditional time travelers looking down their noses at the ones who just happened to come to light off the street one day. New money versus old money, that kind of thing.
But as it stands, time displacement is so rare, so unusual, that most of us are just thrilled to meet another and would never dream of excluding them from our club. We need all the help and companionship we can get.
I myself come from a long line of time displaced people. My family can trace its lineage back seven generations, beginning with my four-times-great-grandfather, a legend of a guy called Sweaty Mulligan. No one knows who, if anyone, came before Sweaty. I’m not even sure he knows.
And it’s definitely not something he talks about, because he, like every generation that followed, was consumed by one singular task: saving the universe.
***
“This way,” Pigman said, giving me a hurry up gesture with his free hand. We had dropped down into a trench that ran through the middle of a boulder field. I was surprised to see that, at the end of all time, we’d reverted to trench warfare. “This trench leads back to our camp.”
We saw no others as we ran, although the sounds of a nearby battle were getting louder. Pigman came to an intersection of the trenches and hesitated only a moment before charging to the left.
“Aren’t we headed toward the fighting?” I asked.
“Yes, but it’s the only way. We used to hold this whole area, but the Faction has started to flank us. If we lose any more ground, we’re going to have to abandon the headquarters.”
We rounded a bend and suddenly found ourselves in the midst of an eclectic group of Resistance fighters. They were all dressed similarly to Pigman, in clothing they’d found, pieced together, or maybe even retrieved from the body of a fallen comrade. Most of the group was intently peering over the top of the trench, but a handful turned to stare at us. Pigman slid to a stop.
“This is Lesley,” he said as some of the fighters shifted uneasily and adjusted their grips on their weapons. “He’s here to help.”
I hadn’t said that, but nevertheless, I gave a little wave. “Hi.”
“Pigman,” a big guy growled. “You aren’t supposed to bring anyone into the trenches. You know that. You’re to hold them outside until we can meet and assess whether they can be trusted.”
“I trust him,” Pigman insisted. He thrust the creature in the jar forward. “See? Look at his reaction. The Becoller never-”
“Will you give it a rest?” the man spat. “That fucking thing hasn’t said anything even remotely useful for us in years.”
“But-”
“Back the way you came!” the man ordered. His look was a mix of contempt and fear. “Wait for us by the wash near the skull rock and we’ll-” but the man, too, was cut off by a commotion behind him. Amid shouts, the Resistance fighters began scrambling for their weapons. Something was happening above the edge of the trench. “Shit.”
As the rest of the fighters lifted weapons up over the edge, the man began to climb to the surface. His head rose above the ground and he gasped, then hauled his entire body out of the trench. He was on his feet for only a moment when we all heard the whir, followed by the zip and the next thing I knew we were covered in bits of him.
I wiped the blood from my face and looked up in time to see the bomb, heading right for the trench. Right for Pigman, specifically, who was standing still, in shock, dripping bits of his comrade down onto the rocks.
I don’t know what made me do it. My four-times-great-grandad Sweaty has these rules for the time displaced. Rule number three is to keep a low profile. Don’t draw attention to yourself by being a hero. And if you’ve gotta be a hero, make sure you slink off into the night before anyone sees. My dad says to just avoid heroics all together.
But I didn’t. I jumped back. Only a few seconds, but it was enough time to push everyone back down the trench. The fact that I was covered in blood and screaming convinced them to listen to me. We didn’t make it out of the blast range entirely, but no one was hit directly and the injuries were minimal. And the big guy stopped mid-climb and followed, so I saved his life, too.
When we all sat up again, Pigman was staring at me, mouth open, a look of rapture on his face. Shit. Before any of them could say anything, I climbed up out of the trench and bolted into the middle of the battlefield. I popped back to my own time before any of them could see what happened to me.
***
My first time jump was at age fourteen. It was summer vacation and I’d taken to staying up really late, watching tv in our semi-finished basement. I’d sleep until noon, eat a massive bowl of cereal, then track down my friends. We’d hang out all day, roaming the streets, looking for cute girls, maybe head to the river where there was a rope swing. Later we might go to someone’s house for dinner, or else we’d pool our loose change and eat convenience store food. It was the kind of summer teenage dreams are made of.
Anyway, one night I was watching old samurai movies on one of the local public channels. They showed them around two in the morning. Weirdly they were dubbed into English, but then subtitled in Japanese. I was watching two warriors square off in a bamboo forest when I felt a kind of buzzing through my entire body and the next thing I knew, I was in that bamboo forest, too.
I mean, probably not the same one from the movie, but I definitely wasn’t in my basement. At first I thought I was dreaming, but then I reached out and touched the trees. I could feel them. I could smell the forest. A breeze blew through, and I felt that, too. I watched as the bamboo waved back and forth. I could hear the branches.
A moment later I was back in my basement. I raced upstairs and burst into my parent’s room to tell my dad. See, while I was shocked that it had actually happened, it wasn’t necessarily a surprise, because time displacement is no secret in our family. Like I said, I’m seventh generation. I’d already met all the time displaced family members that came before me. It never occurred to me that I’d never met any that came after.
***
It takes a while to control your ability. If you have a time displaced parent, they can kind of coach you through it, but you probably won’t be able to jump on demand, and to a place and time of your choosing, until you’re in your mid-twenties. Like the puberty thing, it kind of coincides with brain development. Up until then, you’re just at the mercy of your body, and if all the other shit that’s going on with it during those years is any indication, you’re in for a wild ride.
One of my biggest triggers during those adolescent years was sadness. I was a pretty moody kid. Then, Freshman year of college I was dating this girl who I was smitten with. I mean, I really thought this was the real deal. I’d been scoping out apartments for us to move into together when she dumped me.
Next thing I knew, I was jumping timelines all over the place. Popping out in the middle of lectures, missing shifts at work. Coming to light in the dorms just wrecked from having spent a day stuck in the desert. In retrospect, all that time jumping after the breakup was nothing more than self medication, but I was self medicating with something I didn’t have a handle on in the first place.
That episode resulted in two important things, though. One is that a couple weeks later, I got absolutely obliterated and ended up with a tattoo across my heart reading “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”. It would be cringe-inducing if it hadn’t ended up being so prophetic.
The second thing is that when I left the tattoo shop that night, I stumbled to the corner and puked my guts out next to a mailbox. When I finally looked up, my great-great-grandmother backhanded me across the face.
***
“Latrinn santi, boy!” she grumbled as she pulled me to my feet. “Acting like you’re the first person ever to get dumped.”
“Choucoune,” I muttered. “Are you here or am I there?” I pitched forward then, and she managed to catch me. I’d only met Choucoune Noel Toussaint Sinard once before, and I remembered her as small. Gorgeous and tough, but small, so I was surprised that my gangly new adult build didn’t take us both to the ground.
“We’re in your time, you salop. Let’s get you home and cleaned up. The stink of vomit and pity is overpowering. I want you to try to concentrate on this time, ok? If you jump while I’m trying to drag your ass along, I’m not coming after you, konprann?”
I said nothing in response, but I did concentrate on not time jumping. It must have worked, because we made it back to my dorm room. Choucoune shoved me, fully clothed, into the shower. Fortunately it was really late, and no one else was awake to witness it and I didn’t have to explain. Oh, don’t worry about it, fellas. The hot chick in the men’s showers is just my great-great-grandmother.
I managed to get myself dried off and into bed while Choucoune made tea and instant noodles in the dorm’s microwave. She handed mine to me and plopped down in my bean bag chair. She’d eaten half of the noodles before she spoke.
“More than a hundred years and they haven’t managed to improve these things.”
“Probably because there’s still poor college students to buy them,” I said. I didn’t agree, though. At that moment, the fucking instant noodles were gourmet. “So what brings you to this neck of the timeline?”
“We’re having a bit of an all hands on deck situation,” she replied. “I know you’re not great at controlling your abilities yet. Or really anything in your life, from the looks of it. But we’re gonna need you to get good at it fast. We need all the help we can get.”
“Who’s we?”
“Your family.”
***
Choucoune left me two sets of coordinates. For the time displaced, coordinates are usually a location plus a specific time. If you have a good grasp on your abilities, you can just jump directly to a time, date, place of your choosing. But I had no fucking idea how to do that.
The next day I tried calling both my dad and my grandmother, who’s the next time displaced person in our lineage and the only other one alive in my timeline. Neither were home, which meant they’d probably already jumped to the appointed meeting. I was on my own.
I sat down at my desk, where I was supposed to be writing a paper for a class called Intellectual Heritage, and stared hard at the first line on the note. I stared and stared and the next thing I knew, I was standing outside a modest split-level house in the Minneapolis suburbs. I mean, I didn’t know for sure, but I compared the house number on the paper to the one in front of me and assumed. Damn, I thought as I made my way to the door, I’m better than GPS.
I rang the bell and waited. I heard sounds coming from inside the house, and then suddenly the door was thrown open wide to reveal a bearded man in one of those pullovers that looks like a blanket. He reached into the front pouch and pulled out an envelope, which he handed to me. Before I could say anything, he reached back into the pouch and pulled out a handful of pills, handed those to me, as well, then bowed slightly, and closed the door.
Is every time displaced person’s family this weird? Just mine? I turned and sat down on the front steps. Surely the guy wouldn’t mind. Figuring that he gave me the pills for a reason, I took them. I was still young enough to lack common sense. Then I took a deep breath and opened the letter.
Pigman says the bees are coming.
***
I came to light in a barn. It was mostly dark and smelled like cows and diesel and rust.
“Hey, he made it!” someone exclaimed. I turned and saw my dad leaning casually against a rusty tractor.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” I returned.
“It’s just that it’s your first controlled jump.” It was my grandmother.
“Also, I told them what a fucking mess you were.” Choucoune. Thanks a lot.
“Sweetheart, any girl who doesn’t want you isn’t worth wanting,” my grandmother reached up and took my face in her hands. I’m sure I turned beet red.
“What are we doing here?” I asked. “Choucoune said something about the family needing help with something?”
“I was gonna wait for everyone to get here,” said a voice coming through the barn door. I turned and wasn’t really all that surprised to see Sweaty Mulligan, all rumpled army surplus and taped up glasses. “But I think we’re just waiting on Eyrie and she’s always late, so let’s get started.”
The group gathered around, and I saw, for the first time, my entire lineage in one place all at once. Well, except for my great-grandmother Eyrie. There was my dad, Hollis Andrews, and my grandmother Birdsill, my great-great-grandmother Choucoune, my three-times-great-grandmother Bowie, and Sweaty Mulligan. Seven generations of our family, spanning over two hundred fifty years, all in one place.
“I’m not sure if any of you have noticed anything strange in your regular timelines,” he began. “Things starting to seem off, time moving at a different speed, perennials acting like annuals, that kind of thing? It’s because the universe is dying.”
“Excuse me?” Eyrie had just appeared in the barn.
“Glad you could make it,” Sweaty said. He turned back to the group. “The Ouroboros, which is the entity that maintained the circular nature of time, kept the universe going, was responsible for all things, is dead. And with it, infinity. We’re on a thousand year countdown to nothingness.”
“Well, a thousand years is a lot of time,” my dad said slowly. “I mean, we had a good run, right?”
“Sure, you could say that,” replied Bowie. “Except that, for one thing, the universe isn’t going to just blink out of existence. It’s going to die slowly, and in excruciating pain. And it’s not going to be devoid of life while it does.”
“So you want to save it?” asked Birdsill.
“I mean, I want to try.”
“Why?” asked Eyrie.
“Why? I just told you why.”
“Those two did it, didn’t they?” Choucoune asked quietly. Everyone turned to look at her. “They did it, and you feel guilty.”
“Does it even matter at this point?” Sweaty asked. “The universe is doomed and we’re probably the only people who could actually fix it.” There was a long pause.
“How?” I asked. Might as well throw the old man some support. He smiled at me.
“That’s what we’re here to figure out.”
“You don’t even have a plan?” My understanding is that this was typical Eyrie.
“I have an idea. But I want to hear what you all think.”
“Why can’t we just jump back to before the thing, what’s it called?” I asked.
“The Ouroboros.”
“To before the Ouroboros died?”
“I tried,” Bowie said. “It didn’t work.”
“How could that not have worked?” My dad asked.
“We think because the Ouroboros represents the circular nature of time itself, the beginning and the end of time, the center and the outer reaches of the universe. Its death can’t be undone by time travel. Once it’s dead, it’s always dead.”
“Shit,” Choucoune shook her head.
“So what are we going to do?” asked Birdsill.
“I have an idea that I think will work, but I need more time. Lesley,” he looked at me. I felt my stomach drop to my feet. “I need you to jump to the end times. Do whatever it takes to drag it out so we have more time to figure out our options. You’ll see what I mean when you get there.”
“Why me?”
“Because you and I are the only ones with the chops to make it that far.”
***
So I went to the end times. In my first jump, the one where I saved a bunch of Resistance fighters, I wasn’t sure I was in the right place, which is part of the reason I jumped back right away. When I walked into my dorm room, I saw that weird letter I’d gotten in Minnesota sitting on my desk. After I read over it again, I jumped back.
I must have made a big impression on the Resistance, what with magically saving a bunch of their lives, or whatever, because when I came to light there the second time I was welcomed with open arms. More than open arms, really. It was a kind of respect and admiration that I never experienced before.
I liked it. And not just because I was a self-centered twentysomething. I really liked these people. They had a cause, and it was more important to them than anything else. I mean, there wasn’t really anything else at this point in the timeline for them to have. Their fate was essentially hopeless. The conditions were awful, they had nothing but losses and hardships and struggle. It would have been really easy for them to just kind of give up. Accept their fate. But they didn’t.
I tried my best to take what inspired me about them and return it to them ten fold. Inspire them in turn. It worked, because I ended up becoming their leader.
***
Sweaty’s instructions were for the family to return to the barn in Texas in a month’s time. A month later in whatever timeline that was. I wasn’t sure when that would be, but I found that if I concentrated on just that passage of time, I was able to jump to it. It fucking ruled. At the time I remember hoping we’d be done with this business soon so that I could play around with my abilities more.
When I came to light in the barn, most of the family was there already. My dad was in the middle of explaining something about superheroes.
“I got a hold of a few, but all the good ones seem to be tied up in contracts,” he was saying. I sat down next to him and he reached out a hand and patted me on the shoulder. “I got Count Duckula, the Brave Little Toaster, and remember Bananaman?”
“No,” said Bowie.
“Well, his agent says he’s in.”
“So your plan is to get a bunch of celebrity superheroes to help?” Bowie asked. I smirked. My dad is nothing if not a child at heart.
“Well, this is a pretty big deal.” he shrugged. “I figured we needed an Avengers level assemblage.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that we’re an Avengers level assemblage?” Bowie asked. Dad looked like he was about to say something, then quickly closed his mouth when Sweaty and Choucoune entered the barn. They both looked a little rough.
Sweaty gave me a nod, then addressed us as a group. “Ok, let’s get started, we don’t have much time. First update is that we tried one thing so far and it didn’t work. Choucoune, you want to fill everyone in?”
“Our idea was that if we opened up a portal between our universe, and a parallel one, we could tether the two of them together. Our universe could then sort of piggy back on the circular nature of time in the other one.”
“Smart,” my dad said, nodding.
“Yeah, it would have been if it had worked.”
“What happened?”
“We spent an inordinate amount of time breaking into CERN in Switzerland. When we finally made it in there, we had a hard time overcoming the safety protocols.”
“Which, I guess, are in place specifically because of people like us,” Sweaty said.
“Right. So we had to force it.”
“And?” I asked.
“Shit went haywire.”
“What do you mean, haywire?”
“Uh, think like, vortexes, mini electrical storms, a lot of shaking,” Choucoune said, looking over at Sweaty.
“A series of black holes ended up opening,” Sweaty added.
“Anyway, we got a portal opened, but it wasn’t stable because of the black holes, so we weren’t able to tether anything, and we had to run before we got sucked in.” They both seemed defeated. Sweaty looked at me.
“Lesley, you have any updates?”
I told them all about what I’d been doing at the end times. We’d been able to hold off the Faction fighters more efficiently. Additionally, one of the resistance fighters had been able to modify some of the equipment he pulled off a dead Faction guy and it proved a lot more effective at killing the bees. At the mention of the bees, Sweaty looked up.
“I think I have an idea,” he said. Everyone turned, including my grandmother Birdsill, who had just appeared in the barn. Eyrie, naturally, wasn’t there yet. “The problem, in addition to time no longer being infinite, is the bees, right?”
“Yeah, they’re these big things with teeth and stuff,” I said. “They can just eat anything in their path. At the end times, mostly all that’s left is rocks, and they just swarm and devour them.”
“So without the bees, we’d only have the problem of time to grapple with.”
“We should kill the bees,” said Bowie.
“Right, but at essentially every other point in the countdown, there are just way too many. They fanned out across the universe, right? But by the end times, they’re concentrated on just the one planet that’s left. Lesley, I think you need to go back and get the Resistance to focus more on the bees, and less on the Faction fighters. Make it your priority to exterminate all the bees that are left in the universe.”
“And then what?”
“Once there’s nothing actively destroying the universe, it should just hang out, stagnant,” Sweaty said. He paused, thinking.
“A time loop,” Eyrie said. She’d entered the barn while he was talking. “If the universe is run through a time loop, it’ll keep looping as long as nothing’s destroying it.”
“Genius,” my dad said. “How do you make a time loop, though?”
“You need a wizard,” my grandmother replied. She locked eyes with Sweaty.
“You think you can convince him?” he asked.
“It’s worth a shot.”. An instant later she was gone. Sweaty turned back to me.
“Does the Resistance still have the Becoller?”
“Yeah,” I replied, surprised. “Why? How do you know about that?”
“It’s a long story,” Sweaty said. “But I think we should have another plan if we can’t get the wizard to help. And that wizard is a dick, so he might not help. The Becoller could potentially function in the same way that the Ouroboros did if we could get him to the center of the universe.”
“How?” I asked. I knew the little guy had powers, but this didn’t make sense.
“Something else I’m gonna have to explain later,” he said. Then he turned to look at Eyrie. “Go and abduct him.”
“Pigman’s not gonna like that,” I said.
“If you go back far enough, he probably won’t notice. How long do you think it’ll take you to get rid of the bees?”
“Hard to tell,” I said. And that was the truth. Despite the destruction, and the limited amount of actual physical space, it was really hard to figure out where all the bees were, especially with pretty much no technology. What I wouldn’t have given for a surveillance drone or one of those little machines that senses vibrations. But time displacement rule number four is not to bring anything with you, especially tech that would arouse suspicion. And my place in the end times is already suspicious enough.
“Give it your best shot,” Sweaty said. “Meet us back here in three weeks.”
***
And so I went back again. As far as the Resistance knew, I’d never been gone. Only Pigman looked at me suspiciously, and the Becoller fluttered a little in his jar.
I immediately assembled a team of scouts to go out and locate the largest swarm of bees. We’d start there, with a small group devoted to holding off any Faction fighters while the rest focused on killing as many of the bees as possible. If we managed to get them all, we would scout for more and move on.
I sent another team of scouts out to look for a safe place to set up our base. We had a precarious hold on our current headquarters within the trenches. I wanted us far away from the fighting, so that home felt safe, and the teams could be adequately rested. Now that our focus was no longer on destroying the Faction, we didn’t need to live in the mouth of the action.
The interesting thing about this is that no one, not one single person among the ranks of the resistance, questioned my stepping in as their leader. It’s like I’d always been the leader and always would be. And I guess, since I’m time displaced, and since my family was currently in the process of fucking with the very threads that sew time together, maybe I really was always their leader?
Another interesting thing is that, as we progressed with the plan to exterminate the bees, I also became the primary target of the Faction. Sure, they still defended the bees, and they didn’t miss an opportunity to take out a Resistance fighter whenever they could, but they seemed to be focusing an extensive amount of time and energy on assassinating me.
The first incident came not long after I popped back from the meeting with my family. I was leading a patrol through a slot canyon near the Eastern Edge, not far from where we’d made our camp. The scouts had reported an audible buzzing, and although they hadn’t seen more than a trailing few, the noise was loud enough to make them confident as to the bees’ location.
We’d just dropped down among the rocks, the sides were high above us, blocking out what little light there was. We made our way along by touch and sound, more so than sight. We moved as quietly as possible. Sometimes the bees were so focused on gorging themselves on the rocks that they didn’t hear us approach. We could slaughter whole swarms of them before they really started to react. Other times they seemed on the alert, and if they caught wind of our approach, they would simply fly away. Another downside to not having any tech.
The buzzing and grinding had started to become unbearable, the way it echoed off the canyon walls. I raised my arm and signaled for the team to stop and ready their weapons. When everyone was ready, I led us off again, expecting to encounter the swarm at any moment. We hadn’t gone far when a rumble above us, louder than the swarm, caught our attention. The team halted, with no signal from me, and looked up in time to see loose rocks from the top edge of the canyon start to cascade down.
Everyone at the rear jumped back, running the way we’d come in the hopes of escaping the rocks. Myself, a guy named McCartney who usually acted as my second in command, and two others were on the other side of the rocks and had no choice but to rush forward.
As we ran, I kept thinking that surely we’d be clear of the rock slide at any moment, but it seemed like the rocks were following us. We kept running, getting closer to the bees and farther from the rest of the team. I can’t really say that I had any specific thoughts at that point, but I knew on some fundamental level that we had been intentionally separated from our backup.
“We’re sitting ducks,” I thought, just as the blue hot stream of a laser streaked across in front of my face, sending a spray of dust as it collided with the wall of the canyon. McCartney, who was just a step behind me, tackled me to the ground with a thud, then rolled over onto his back, firing his own laser up at the edges of the canyon. I did the same, aiming for the other side. We still hadn’t seen anyone and had no idea where the shot had come from.
The other two members of our team, a woman named Sophima and a young kid called Utz, skidded to a stop and looked frantically for cover. A small outcrop provided some, and they jumped behind it, crouching back to back to cover what was ahead of and behind us. For a moment it was quiet, the only sound the incessant droning of the bees.
McCartney had gotten to his feet and was standing with his back against the canyon, watching the lip across from him. I took the position opposite and we waited. In the absence of any other noise, the drone of the bees began to sound like silence, and I found I was able to pick out distinct sounds. A faint crunch of gravel. Like someone was shifting their position ever so slightly to aim a gun over the lip of the canyon.
I fired, and in the time it took for my shot to reach the top of the canyon, the Faction fighter who had been lying in wait leaned over the edge to fire. My shot caught him in between the eyes, his head erupted like a firecracker in a melon. The man’s weapon fell to the canyon floor, but his body stayed at the top. I could hear the boots of his compatriots as they beat a hasty retreat.
I wasted no time. “Soph, Utz, head back down the canyon and see if you can find the others. McCartney, go see if there are even any bees left.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I’m going up to take a look at this guy.”
***
I scavenged everything I could from the dead faction fighter and left his naked, lifeless body where it had fallen. If the bees wanted to devour this planet, they could devour him along with it. He didn’t have much to offer, but we could always use the clothes. Inside his jacket pocket, I found a crude drawing on a thin piece of old cardboard that vaguely resembled me, and I understood then that this had been a hit.
I only told McCartney about the drawing. Our group’s confidence in themselves and their mission was a tenuous one, and I didn’t want to add any additional fear to their already heavy burdens.
“Maybe you should stop going on missions,” McCartney said as we walked back to camp. We stayed back behind the other two so we could talk without being overheard.
“I don’t want to bring down morale.”
“You mean like it would if you got assassinated?”
“Fair point.” I sighed, and for a minute, I kind of missed just being a college kid. “Maybe we just double the teams and split them in two for the missions? One covers while the other works.”
“Yeah, I can see that. We’d need to train more fighters.”
“That’s not the worst thing. Besides, the more fighters we train, the easier it’ll be to convince everyone that you don’t need me in the field.”
***
Despite these changes in protocol, there were two more attempts on my life over the next year. I think it was a year, anyway. Time has less meaning when the universe is doomed. I survived both, thanks in part to the new formation. And without it, I’m sure that not only would there have been even more shots taken at me, we would have lost more Resistance fighters, as well. As it stands, we only lost two, with one other person being injured too badly to ever return to fighting.
During that time, our numbers grew as we came across more and more survivors who had been desperately trying to live in the dying landscape. Between the lack of food, water, and breathable air, and the constant menace from the bees and the Faction, they were more than happy to join our ranks. We became a family of sorts.
The dust storms were getting more intense, though, and it was this that allowed the Faction fighters to get the drop on us. We’d been getting better at predicting storms but with no tech it was still a guessing game. The storms often changed unexpectedly. I don’t know whether the Faction had some kind of weather tech that we didn’t, or if they were just in the right place at the right time.
We’d been out destroying a swarm on the south side of the ravine. We weren’t expecting the storm until late that night, but were hurrying back to camp nonetheless when the wind picked up. In an instant the visibility dropped to nothing and the air was practically unbreathable. The particles were so big that they stung. It reminded me of the hail storms of my childhood.
The team, which had been close together, suddenly couldn’t see one another, or hear anything over the howling wind. Our plan for these situations was to stay put while one person reached out to make physical contact with the others, forming a chain so that we wouldn’t be lost in the dust. Usually it worked. Sometimes, though, someone will become impatient and decide to feel around for another fighter, and before long everyone was lost in the cloud.
As the leader, I immediately reached back and felt for a fighter named Briton. We locked arms and began to move for the next person, who wasn’t there. We reached our arms wide and stepped carefully toward where the rest of the team should have been, but found no one.
“Turn!” I screamed to Briton over the noise. We pivoted to the left and felt our way carefully forward again. Nothing. We continued this way for what seemed like ages until, in the darkness of the storm and our squinted eyes, we tripped over a boulder. On the ground, our arms separated, and when I regained my footing, Briton was gone, too.
I don’t know how long I stood, waving my arms in an attempt to feel someone, anyone, from my team. I couldn’t understand how, in an instant, Briton and I had lost one another. I was about to turn again when a sudden, searing pain like a hot knife, slashed across my chest. I looked around frantically to see where it had come from, but a moment later the deep red dust had turned into the impenetrable blackness of sleep.
***
I dreamt I was born motherless on an infinite golf course. My only companion was God. From my first day I played golf with God. I lost every time. God is God. What can you do? He didn’t even give me clubs to play with. I had to make my own out of wood and vines. I never knew, and doubt I will ever know, why it took me until so late in life to realize that I didn’t have to play. With my first joy since the day of my birth, I swore at God that I wouldn’t play with him anymore. God turned away and vanished. As I withered and died, I realized what a terrible mistake I had made.
I came to in a field. I had no idea where I was or when it was, but the field was lush and green and smelled clean and new. I sat up slowly as the fog cleared from my mind. Cautiously, I tested my arms, but the pain in my shoulder seemed to be only a memory. I looked down. I was dusty and wearing rags, but when I looked through the tear in the shoulder of my shirt, nothing but a smooth scar remained.
Shaking, I got to my feet, took a deep breath, and jumped.
***
When I came to in the barn, it was early morning and my grandmother Birdsill, and three-times-great-grandmother Bowie were the first to reach me. They rushed to me and engulfed me in their arms.
“Lesley!” Birdsill shouted. “My god honey, are you ok?”
“Where have you been?” Bowie asked. “We were worried sick.” She turned and yelled toward the door. “Eyrie! He’s back! Get Hollis!”
“What do you mean where have I been?” I asked. They helped me to a bench and looked at me intently. “I was in the end times. Killing the bees. Like we agreed. I was going to jump back once I got most of them.”
“Kiddo,” Eyrie said, crouching in front of me. “You missed the last meetup. By, like, a lot.”
“I did? How?”
“I don’t know how,” Birdsill said. “We figured you might be a little delayed, so we waited. But after a while you were really running late and we started to get worried. So worried that Sweaty went looking for you. Didn’t you see him?”
“No. I was the leader of the Resistance. I would have known if he was in camp.”
“Shit, does that mean Sweaty’s missing now?” Eyrie asked.
“So when you jumped back here, you hadn’t seen him?” Bowie asked.
“No,” I said, kind of trailing off.
“What?”
“It’s just that I didn’t jump straight back here. Something happened at the end times. There was a dust storm. I lost my team. And then I think I was shot?” Birdsill gasped and reached for my hand, gripping it. “I had this super weird dream about playing golf with God, and when I woke up from that I was in a big field. I don’t know where or when that was, but I wasn’t hurt, so I just focused and jumped here.”
“Where were you shot?” Birdsill asked. I gestured to my ripped shirt and she inspected it closely. “It’s a very faint scar. Like it healed years ago.”
“Maybe when you were shot, you time jumped because you were unconscious and couldn’t control it. If Sweaty got there after that, he’d have missed you.”
“But then why isn’t he back by now?” Bowie looked worried.
“He could still be looking for him.” We were all quiet for a while, and then the thought struck me that I was in a normal time, not the end days.
“I’m starving.”
***
Birdsill bustled off somewhere and returned with what I can only describe as a top ten grilled cheese experience. I had forgotten how good food could taste when it wasn’t stale and full of grit and dust. While I ate, they told me about what the family had been up to in my absence.
“That asshole wizard,” Birdsill said, shaking her head. “He’s one of these “oh woe is me” guys. Always too depressed to actually do anything. He’s been hiding out in Tijuana for who knows how long, always threatening to do himself in. Never does. So I said look, this is your chance to really do something for this universe. Really leave a legacy for when you finally off yourself. Know what he said?”
“What?”
“That he didn’t deserve to be remembered.”
Bowie snorted. “I can’t stand that guy. Don’t we know any other wizards?”
“I’m working on it,” Birdsill replied. “But it’s hard to find anyone with the power to actually create and sustain a time loop.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I struck out, too,” Eyrie said. She’d somehow convinced Birdsill to make her a grilled cheese, too. “I’ve nabbed that little seahorse shit at least twenty times now, and I’m never able to hold on to him during the jump.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, thinking of Sweaty’s fourth rule for the time displaced. Don’t bring anything with you wouldn’t be a rule if it wasn’t possible to do it.
“I can’t explain it. No matter what I do, when I get to where I’m going, he’s gone.”
“Why don’t you just travel regularly to the center with him, then?” Birdsill asked.
“Tried that, too. There’s this weird disc type of thing in the middle, I don’t know what it is, but I can’t seem to make it to it while I’m holding him. Without him, I’m fine. I can walk around, lay down. You can see the dead Ouroboros and everything. But if I’m bringing him along, I can’t get there. Feels almost like that thing where magnets push one another away.”
“Ok, so neither of those ideas worked. Anyone have anything else?”
“I’ve got one more idea.” We all turned to see Sweaty walk through the barn door, looking as tired and dusty as I had. Bowie jumped to her feet and threw her arms around him.
“What the hell happened?” Eyrie asked. He broke away from Bowie and sat down on the bench next to me.
“It’s a long story. I’m not sure I understand it, actually. But we’re running out of time, so I want to propose one more thing.” He looked around. “Where the fuck are the rest of you assholes?”
After a few minutes of shouting out the barn door and jumping timelines, we had the family assembled in the barn once again.
“What’s the plan, then?” Hollis asked. He’d wrapped me in a death grip of a hug when he walked in.
“We’re gonna Butterfly Effect our way into a new timeline,” Sweaty said.
“What do you mean?”
“We still need something to restore the circular nature of time, right? What if we try to create so many paradoxes that they become a kind of bubble universe? If we make enough, the paradoxes will start to create their own paradoxes, and eventually the unraveling of them will mimic the infinite nature of time. The paradox becomes the new Ouroboros.”
“Or we break the universe in two.”
“And end up in the new one,” he said.
“This sounds like the most absurd Hail Mary that I’ve ever heard,” Choucoune said. “You have no idea if this is going to work.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But if we’re going down, we may as well go down swinging.”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
Sweaty gave Choucoune a sheepish look and shrugged. “That’s all I’ve got.” We were all quiet for a while, pondering this. No one looked like they believed a word of it, but eventually I noticed my dad starting to nod his head ever so slightly.
“There’s gotta be a limit to how many paradoxes a universe can sustain, right?” He asked finally.
“I guess we’re gonna find out.”
“Look, this isn’t any worse than anything else we’ve tried. And we know paradoxes are real. Let’s try it. And if it doesn’t work, it was nice knowing you all.”
Birdsill sighed. “Ok,” she said. “I’m in.”
“Me too,” said Eyrie. Sweaty looked at the others.
“Choucoune? Bow?” They nodded. He looked at me. “Lesley?”
“Where do we start?” I asked.
“We’re gonna break every single one of my rules for the time displaced,” Sweaty said. “Bowie, you go back and bet on every horse race you can remember. Hollis, hit every timeline you can and fuck your fucking brains out,” he glanced at me, “Sorry kid. Choucoune, Birdsill, go save people from every major televised tragedy you can think of. Eyrie, go drop some cell phones off in the middle ages or something.”
“What about me?” I asked.
“Lesley, I’m afraid you’ve gotta go back to the end times.”
I liked being a revered leader, but I had to admit that I was sick of the dust and hardship. Maybe I just wanted to fuck my fucking brains out outside my timeline, too. “Really?”
“Yeah, your work there isn’t done.”
“What are you gonna do?” Choucoune asked, suspiciously.
“I’m gonna kill Johnny Go.”
There was a stunned silence for a long moment. No one quite knew what to make of that. “Why will that work?” Bowie eventually asked.
“He’s the reason I made rule number two in the first place.” Everyone kept staring. “Guys, trust me. He won’t be down for long. Now, are we ready?”
“As ready as we’ll ever be.”
One by one, each of my relatives popped out of that present time we were sharing until it was just Sweaty Mulligan and I standing in the empty barn.
“Listen,” he said. “Things are starting to get a little jumbled out there. I want you to be careful. And if anything happens, I want you to start focusing on your original timeline, ok? I know I put a huge burden on you here, and I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think you were up to it. But at the same time, it’s not worth your life.” I nodded. “Ok, get going,” Sweaty said as he turned to the barn door. “I’ll see you around.”
***
I was back at our camp at the end times. It was late, but the sky was clear, and the camp was quiet in the way it is when the fighters are out on patrol. I knew that there would be a group of other Resistance fighters waiting anxiously at the main hall for them to return. I knew I should go to them, sit with them, provide hope and support. But I felt like I needed a moment to gather my thoughts, so I headed to my cave.
What we called the main hall was just our largest tent. We used it for communal gatherings, group meals, the occasional wedding. But it was a tent, because nothing of ours in this place could be permanent.
Except the caves. The area we’d selected when we moved our camp away from the trenches was essentially in the one flat area of land between a boulder field and a wall of rocky cliffs. The cliffs contained a number of small caves, which some fighters, those more senior and those with families, were using as their homes. Just prior to the dust storm, I’d finally agreed to take one. Before that, I’d been sleeping under a small tarp in the clearing.
I made my way along the rocky outcropping and walked quietly to the mouth of the cave. As I neared it, I could hear sounds from inside. Weeping. I looked cautiously in the mouth of the cave and saw Pigman. He was kneeling beside the pile of old wooden slats that I’d been using as a makeshift bed. On top of the bed, looking like a figure made of wax, was me.
This wasn’t right.
Involuntarily, I let out a little gasp, and Pigman turned to look at me. With a quickness I didn’t think he possessed, he stood, crossed to the mouth of the cave in a few large steps, and threw himself at my feet.
The next moment, I jumped.
