Remember tomorrow, p.13
Remember Tomorrow, page 13
I briefly glimpsed my abductor’s hulking shadow spin past, along with the backdrop of the town park’s familiar open space. Then I came down atop a thin veneer of ice, broke through it instantly, and plunged into the frigid pond. The cold squeezed my chest as though I were caught in a giant, freezing vise, then I was sinking to the bottom. The pond was likely only a few feet deep, but I was immobilized and panicked as the cold water closed over my head.
Oh, please don’t let it end like this! I flailed around, and the small amount of air I had instinctively held in my lungs was exhausted in seconds. The urge to breathe was overwhelming.
Standby for temporal shift.
Had I not been an instant away from drowning, I would have cried with relief as the awful nightmare collapsed into a singularity and I was narrowly spared a watery death.
-40-
Oct. 9, 1993
My bedroom resolved around me, and I fell hard to the floor, coughing and choking, trying to clear water out of my nose and lungs, but there was none. As previously arranged—and thank goodness I’d had the foresight to do so—Tina had reset me back to 11:30 p.m., before I’d sneaked outside on my ill-conceived mission to save Jennifer. I lay there in the security of my warm room on the carpet, gasping for breath, hands and legs free again. I could still feel the painful constriction of the duct tape and the pond’s shocking cold.
“Jason?” Mom called up the stairs. “Are you all right up there? What happened?”
“Fine, Mom,” I replied quickly. “I was getting out of bed and tripped is all.”
“Be more careful, honey. And go back to bed.”
“I will.”
I did get into bed, wrapping myself up in my blankets for a couple minutes to try to get rid of the awful chill. Even though I knew it must be purely psychological, it felt very real.
“Tina?”
Yes, Jason? She appeared beside me, sitting on the edge of the bed, or so it appeared.
“Thank you. You saved my life.” I wished she was real so that I could give her a fierce embrace.
Tina smiled. You were prudent to set up a failsafe. Unfortunately, my power reserve is running low.
My arm showed 000250 now. “Sure is. How long was I unconscious?”
I initiated the shift at 01:12:22.
“What time did he grab me?”
I noticed your pulse rate and cortisol levels spike dramatically at 00:15 hours before leveling off. They again spiked even higher immediately prior to the shift.
So he grabbed me at quarter after midnight, and I was out for nearly an hour. He must have rendered me unconscious then waited until the Turner house went quiet before making his move to abduct Jennifer.
The thought of going out there in the darkness again with that monster lurking terrified me, both the boy and the man. But I had to stop him. He obviously must have considered me a threat to warrant the drowning, breaking his pattern and exposing his presence. That must have been a mistake on his part. Why not take me out in the woods somewhere and kill me like Jennifer? Perhaps my presence had rattled him and caused him to panic.
Gathering the scraps of my shredded resolve, I finally climbed out from under the covers and donned my shoes and coat quietly so that Mom wouldn’t hear. The time was 11:53, later than I’d planned to leave, but I knew the guy’s position now, so I could stay well away. He wouldn’t make his move until at least 12:30 or so, I guessed.
Should I call the cops? I paused to consider. I couldn’t identify him, other than that he seemed huge to a terrified thirteen-year-old boy and drove a pickup with a camper shell. That narrowed it down to a few hundred locals in the area—if he was even a local. Almost surely, he would see and hear the cops approaching and be long gone by the time they got out there to search around in the darkness with flashlights. All that would do was make me look like a fool and embarrass Mom. And how would I explain lurking around outside the Turner house at this hour? Mr. and Mrs. Turner might think I was a creep and prevent me from seeing Laura again.
Jennifer’s pleading, terrified eyes tugged at my heart. If we had a gun in the house, I might’ve tried to stop him myself, but we didn’t. All I had was the trusty Louisville Slugger I’d gotten for Christmas when I was eleven, the same one that had bashed Dean’s brains out in a different timeline, but against that hulking, cold-blooded murderer out there in the darkness, the baseball bat seemed woefully inadequate.
No, I can’t risk another encounter with him. I’ll just have to scare him off so Jen is safe. I was lucky Tina saved my ass, but I can’t count on any more do-overs. I had to face the fact I was a coward, ugly truth though it might be. I was no superhero to come swoop in and nab the bad guy and save the day. I was a screwup just trying to fumble my way through this final timeline. Because of that, I was going to take the safest route I could.
The night seemed positively foreboding when I crept out the front door. Mom had fallen asleep again with the TV playing quietly in the background. Brad drove up in his little Civic while I was still on my front porch. I quickly moved into a patch of shadow and scanned for a hiding spot that would provide a view of the Turners’ backyard so I could see the killer when he made his move. Finding a likely spot, I crawled into a clump of bushes that had lost most of its leaves across from Laura’s house and watched and waited.
Brad took off, and Jennifer unlocked the door and went inside. I saw a dim light in the basement window where Mr. Turner was either watching TV or playing video games. Or he could have fallen asleep on the couch as Mom had. Old people seemed to do that a lot—on occasion, my older self had as well, I recalled dimly.
The sporadic flakes increased in intensity as I waited. The basement went dark a little while after Jennifer came home. Twelve-thirty came and went, and I was fearing I had chosen a poor location and wouldn’t be able to spot the killer after all.
Then at 12:35, the shadows under the trees where I’d hidden the first time moved. A cold rush of fear ran down my spine, and I held my breath, afraid if I made the slightest sound he’d discover me again. One massive shadow detached itself from beneath the trees and crept slowly forward, across the open span of grass where Laura and I had played fetch with Molly many times before.
Now! I’ve got to go now!
With a massive effort of will, I got my legs moving. I crawled forward, got to my feet, then darted across the street. The back of the house was obscured as I approached the front walkway. Losing sight of the killer somehow made it worse and gave me a burst of terrified adrenaline.
I pounded up the walkway to the front porch and rang the doorbell. I held it a few seconds, pressed it repeatedly several times, then held it again for good measure until I saw a light come on in the hallway. Molly was barking furiously by then, and I felt a rush of pride. Good girl, Molly.
Then I ran like hell before I could get caught.
-41-
Oct. 10, 1993
“Some dickhead rang our doorbell and woke the whole house up in the middle of the night,” Laura groused the next morning. We were walking down the street together, and she looked tired. “Should’ve heard Molly barking and going crazy.”
Molly was nonplussed by the family’s interrupted sleep, happily panting and trying to pull my arm out of its socket as I held her leash.
“What happened?” I asked innocently. “Did someone try to break in, or what?”
“Nah, Dad said it was just some pranksters. Mom was ready to call the cops, but Dad went out with a flashlight and checked around, but nobody was there. Didn’t happen again after that.”
“Molly must’ve scared ’em off,” I said.
“Yeah. You scared those punks off, didn’t you, Moll?” Laura grabbed the dog’s collar and knelt down and gave her a big hug around the neck.
Molly responded with a rapid slobbery tongue attack on Laura’s cheek that made her giggle before struggling to get free again.
It struck me then that the killer must not have known the Turners had a dog. I had been dreading that he might try again to abduct Jennifer later on, but he never did. Molly was the real hero, not me, but in the original timeline, there hadn’t been a Molly who might’ve raised the alarm because of any strange sounds in the night.
I hadn’t slept a wink the previous night either, too jazzed up on adrenaline. Hearing confirmation that all was well made me exhilarated by the past night’s success. Jennifer was safe, Laura’s family would stay whole, and I could still count her as my friend. It didn’t get much better than that. More than anything, I wanted to spill the beans and tell Laura all about how I’d saved her family from unimaginable disaster, but I couldn’t.
My success was tempered by self-recriminations over how I’d handled myself during the first, failed attempt. I couldn’t help but kick myself for not getting a description of the vehicle or a license-plate number. Man, that would’ve been perfect if I could have gotten the plate number. But I couldn’t go back and redo it, and getting captured by the bastard again was something I was positive I could not handle. In the aftermath of my harrowing escape, not only was Tina’s counter diminished, but my courage was as well.
I pushed those thoughts aside and tried not to dwell on them. Instead, I focused on all the good that had come out of the past night, and that high was more than enough to keep me motivated and in good spirits.
-42-
Oct. 11, 1993
The substance of night congealed into a ten-foot-tall horror looming behind me. I could feel it there, silent and menacing as it reached for me. I tried to scream, to will my limbs into motion, but I was paralyzed. A huge hand seized me by the throat and slammed me into a tree trunk hard enough to shake needles loose from the branches overhead. An awful, featureless face leaned in toward me, covered in a ski mask that bulged with grotesque, inhuman protrusions. The thing’s mouth opened wide, much too wide for any human being, large enough it could have swallowed my arm. Hundreds of needlelike teeth glistened inside that horrible maw. Again, I tried to scream, but just as I opened my mouth, the monster vomited up a sweet, cloying cloud of yellow fumes that enveloped my head. I struggled futilely to free myself until my lungs burned for air and I couldn’t help but take a breath. The moment I did, the toxin filled my lungs. I coughed and choked, and after a moment, all feeling drained out of my body. The monster then liquefied into an oily shadow that smothered me.
The next thing I knew, I was weightless. The shroud of darkness covering my eyes lifted enough to show the snow-encrusted ground, fat flakes drifting lazily downward. The monster watched my brief flight silently until it ended in a shock of bone-numbingly cold pond water. I instantly sank like an anchor, unable to move even as I renewed my struggles. After a moment, I noted a faint greenish glow emanating from the murky depths, where torpid scaly things dwelled. I thrashed and struggled but succeeded only in twisting myself downward, facing whatever horrors awaited in the depths.
Pale shapes grew up from the bottom of the pond like horrific plants, but they were people—women and girls, each chained by one ankle to a cinder block resting on the silty bottom. A dozen or more of them swayed gently in the current.
That was when I noticed the cinder block chained to my own ankle. An explosion of bubbles burst from my mouth and nose at the shocking realization of my impending death. Utterly helpless, I slowly sank near one of the drowned women. Her limp bluish hand brushed across my thigh, and at the touch, her eyes opened. They were totally black, without iris or sclera. Bony hands with pallid flesh peeling off in flakes seized my leg, drawing me toward her. My redoubled effort to get free had no effect, and the dead woman’s hands clutched my shirt and pulled my face toward hers. I recognized her as Jennifer Turner.
“Save us,” she pleaded. “He will never stop!”
I thrashed awake in my bed, drenched in sweat, my pulse pounding from the horrific nightmare. I listened a moment to make sure I hadn’t cried out and woken Mom, but the house was dead silent. According to my alarm clock, it was just after two a.m. For long moments, I lay there huddled under the covers until I was able to calm down. My older self knew it was just a dream brought on by my traumatic encounter with the killer, but the rationalization failed to convince my younger self, and I lay there shuddering for a very long time, filled with dread.
What an awful goddamn dream.
-43-
Nov. 2, 1993
My caffeine-and-sugar rush crashed as quickly as my good mood when a Pinehaven Press headline caught my eye. The Kit-Kat and Twix bars I’d just eaten, washed down with a Dr Pepper, all turned sour in my gut.
I’d come home with a good haul of candy after Halloween a couple days past. My teenage metabolism allowed me to get away with such gluttony even though my acne didn’t respond as well. Halloween had been a blast: Mike and I had dressed up as Beavis and Butt-Head, while Laura had gone as Daria, the dopey duo’s snarky classmate. Our costumes had turned out pretty well, with little preparation required other than me dyeing my hair blond and trying to style it like Beavis’s hairdo. I borrowed Mike’s Metallica T-shirt, and he found an AC/DC one somewhere to wear so he could portray Butt-Head. Laura wore a sweater and skirt and borrowed a pair of her mom’s old glasses to make a convincing Daria impression. Once dressed and eager to go score some candy, the three of us went around the neighborhood, laughing and doing lame voice impressions of our characters while trick-or-treating. We had a heck of a time acting stupid and probably annoying everyone around. That was a fun time—probably my best Halloween ever.
Mrs. Turner took some pictures before we left, and I made a note to myself later to try to get a copy of one of the pics as it was something I’d probably treasure forever.
Since Halloween, school had been uneventful, and I’d been in an unusually good mood the past couple days. That ended once I got home today and had my sugar binge. The newspaper on the table caught my eye and made my blood run cold, along with a sickening sensation in my gut.
Local Woman Reported Missing after Halloween Party
Krista Villari, 21, was reported missing yesterday, November 1, after departing a Halloween party Sunday night and not being seen since. Villari’s car was still parked on the street near the location of the house party, with no sign of the young woman. Witnesses report that Villari was intoxicated at the party then passed out in her car afterward. The following day, a friend called police after stopping by Villari’s apartment and finding no sign that her friend had ever returned since the party. She hasn’t been seen since.
The article went on with the usual spiel about police still investigating, and anyone with any information was encouraged to come forward. Villari’s picture looked like a high-school yearbook photo, showing a cute blond with frizzy hair and a nice smile.
I checked with Tina and discovered Krista Villari wasn’t one of the original abducted women in this timeline. She had become a target of opportunity after I thwarted the killer from taking Jennifer. Not knowing the victim wasn’t much consolation, considering the killer was still out there, going about his grim work. I felt somewhat guilty about Krista’s kidnapping since she ordinarily would have gone on to lead a normal life until I meddled and saved Jennifer.
Stop it—you saved Jen! That’s what it took to keep Laura’s family together.
I tried to take heart in that achievement even as I vowed I’d still find some way to take down the killer.
-44-
Jun. 22, 1994
The three of us were goofing around on the ball field with “Somebody to Shove” jamming on my boom box.
Summer had arrived, and we were enjoying our freedom once again. The second semester of the school year had gone by quickly, and I’d managed to pull mostly As and Bs in my classes, save for the C+ I ended up with in math. Overall, I was happy with my grades, as was Mom.
Mike was serious about trying out for the Pinehaven High JV baseball team next season, so Laura and I were supposed to be helping him prepare. He trained with his father a lot but said that wasn’t much fun since the retired army officer was so demanding.
I wasn’t a huge fan of baseball, nor was I much of an athlete in general, but simply getting out of the house and enjoying the fine summer weather was fun. And just hanging out with my friends was awesome. I’d noticed the autopilot sensation was mostly unnoticeable the longer I hung out with Laura and Mike, which was fine with me, as I took great pleasure in those spontaneous moments. Times like these seemed a special bonus to me since they were all new in my experience.
“Your turn, Jason,” Mike called as I jogged back toward the infield after retrieving the ball from his latest hit.
Laura had been lobbing easy pitches for Mike to belt into the outfield, while I fielded them.
“All right.” I tossed the ball to Laura with a smile.
“Just don’t hit me,” she warned. With her Rockies cap and hair tied back, she looked kind of boyish, but I found her adorable. She was proud of her new hat since the team had only been in existence a few months now and Rockies gear was still fairly hard to come by.
“I’ll try not to,” I replied.
Mike had accidentally hit me with a ball the past week, and I still had a nasty bruise on my thigh as a reminder.
Taking my position by home plate, I picked up my old Louisville Slugger and swung it around a few times to loosen up my shoulders. Mike had a newer, nicer bat I could’ve used, but I preferred my trusty old one.
The old ball field at the shuttered elementary school was just a few blocks from our houses. Evidently, building a whole new school across town had been more cost effective than upgrading the old one, so the facility had simply been closed down. The school building itself was boarded up and graffitied. Hardly anybody used the baseball field except neighborhood kids during the summer. The outfield grass was knee-high, the rest of the field mostly dirt. It didn’t have any actual bases other than home plate. But it was a frequent summer-hangout spot of ours, and we liked it.
