Fifty-one
Billy Trevor awakened to the sensation of a warm body
against his own. He looked up into the dark trees stirred by a summer
breeze. Crickets chirped in full stereophonic, and from a greater
distance, water raced down the rocky bed of the Silver Ridge River with a
gentle roar. The sensations and sounds and the stars and the aroma of the
wilderness helped to pin down his location in space and time, a memory
etched too deep into his soul to ever forget.
He was with Evie again. They lay together in a
sleeping bag alongside the old mill, hidden away from the prying eyes of
the world around them. The experience was like the most profound déjà vu
imaginable. The same moth as before fluttered against his face, then flew
off into the face of the moon overhead. He turned his head and saw
moonlight gleam from the roof of the nearby Jaguar sedan he had owned.
That he now owned. He shifted slightly to study the night around him in
growing excitement. Beneath him, Evie’s velvety body shifted.
But he could feel nothing from his waist down.
Past and present, coexisting.
A motor growled from further up the slope of the
valley, and the sound of banging metal and tires sliding along the ground
and bouncing off the ruts of the badly eroded path from the highway.
Headlights danced and stabbed through the trees.
Evie awakened to the sound, her fawn-like eyes
reflecting stray bits of starlight. The distant sound was of no
consequence to her in that moment of time. She smiled and squirmed,
deliberately trying to entice him into another embrace. The touch of her
hand disappeared as it ran down along his spine into numbness.
Only when the identity of the truck engine filtered
into her awareness did she jerk her head up in alarm. “Oh, my God, it’s
Lazarus! Billy, he must have seen us come down here!”
Evie rolled him aside.
She unzipped the bag and began
snatching at her scattered clothing. Billy lay helpless. Lazarus slid
the truck across the clearing and stormed out of the cab, drunk and
belligerent and bellowing obscenities, his gaunt face twisted with anguish
and his face wet with tears.
Her panic confirmed the horror stories Evie had told
him of her sick and abusive brother. Even Abe had tried to warn him.
That had been three long, nightmarish years ago. His present circumstance
was not possible, but it struck home with full sensory impact. Everything
was as real as reality could get, just as it had once happened, except
that when he tried to move, his legs refused to respond.
Billy wasn’t sure what was happening. He remembered
a man named King, and a test of resolve.
“Billy, hurry! Get up!”
The contradictions of the synthesis of past and
present swept up Evie, and she did a double take. An expression of horror
spread over her pretty face.
“I can’t!” he shouted. “I can’t move my legs!”
“Billy, no! It’s happening just like it happened the
first time!”
Another brief moment of the past replayed itself as
before. Evie raced through the glare of the truck’s headlights toward the
Jaguar, dressed only in bikini panties. He had leaped to his feet and
followed on her heels those three, distant years ago. He remembered every
terror-ridden moment that had followed—all of it to be forever altered.
He cried out to Evie to hurry and crawled a yard or
two toward her, dragging the dead weight of his legs behind him. If she
reached the car, she would be safe, if only for the time it took Lazarus
to break out the windows.
Lazarus careened from his truck, his lanky limbs
flailing as he fought to keep his balance. Three years ago, Billy hadn’t
seen the enormous hunting knife the man had clutched in his right hand.
He hadn’t known that their lives had been at stake during the struggle
than ensued.
The panic that exploded inside him was new, a
thousand times more profound than the confusion that had reigned in the
original version of events. Lazarus was going to catch Evie. She was
going to die beneath the edge of Lazarus’ blade with himself sprawled
helplessly on the ground, paralyzed by an accident that wouldn’t happen if
Evie did not survive, and if Lazarus did not drive their escaping car off
the ravine embankment running parallel to the access road.
“Evie, watch out!”
Lazarus intercepted her halfway to the car and
grabbed a handful of her long hair. Evie yanked free, but went spinning
to the ground. Lazarus caught a thrashing leg by an ankle and dragged her
to her, straddling her tiny body and bringing the enormous knife
horizontally across her throat.
Billy rolled onto his stomach, jerked his useless
legs beneath him and rose to his knees. His determination was absolute in
that instant, his resolve unthinking. His paralysis had served its
purpose. Life had taken an entirely new direction. In this time and
place, his handicap made no sense at all. He could not have driven to
this place paralyzed. He could not have made love to Evie. All of those
memories were still fresh in his mind.
He was on his feet and in motion without giving his
newfound strength and freedom a moment’s thought. He launched himself at
Lazarus. Impact lifted the blade from Evie’s throat and Lazarus from
Evie’s body, and sent them both slamming to the ground.
Billy rebounded and cart-wheeled over the man. So
did the knife, flashing several times in the glare of the pickup’s
headlight before vanishing from sight. Lazarus scrambled across the
ground, grabbed his shirt, and yanked him closer. On his knees, he
bunched a massive fist for a decisive blow to the face.
Evie leaped onto his back with a shriek of rage,
raking his eyes and face and drawing blood. Lazarus screamed and shot to
his feet, ignoring Billy in the moment it took to dislodge the girl.
Billy rolled away, and in his moment of respite he
remembered the stack of steel fence posts lying alongside the mill. He
had struck Lazarus with one in his original experience and Lazarus had
still managed to follow with the pickup and run them off the road. They
were five foot sections of folded sheet metal, weighing only a few pounds
apiece.
This time he grabbed two of them.
He whirled about in time to see Evie fall to the
ground and Lazarus rummage in the underbrush to retrieve his knife. Billy
came up from behind and swung. The fence-posts rang with resounding
impact against Lazarus’ skull, sending the man pitching to the ground atop
Evie. Evie clawed her way from beneath him and ran again for the Jaguar.
She paused at the passenger door, looking back with her eyes bright with
panic to see what he and Lazarus were going to do next.
Realities continued to separate. Billy felt a new
probability of events begin its search of its own fulfillment. The world
was the same as it had been. Only their roles within it had changed. But
the changes they would instill in this past would spread out and give
birth to a new and unique course of history. He sensed that it was like
this for every conscious decision ever made.
Billy took a moment to collect their clothing. He
tossed the bundle to Evie and then dropped to his knees alongside
Lazarus. Lazarus twitched on the ground in a growing pool of his own
blood. Billy suspected that Lazarus was not going to survive his injuries
in this new world. Medical help was just too far away.
Billy circled around the side of the Jaguar and
slipped behind the wheel. Evie watched him without interference as he
rummaged in the glove compartment for a cell phone and punched out a
number. Sarah Trevor answered from the mansion overlooking Silver Ridge.
“Mother, I have a chore for you.”
“Billy, is that you? Where have you been, young
man!”
“Call the sheriff,” he said, wondering if she would
hear the changes in his voice that maturity had wrought. “A man is hurt
in front of the old mill down by the river.”
“Billy! What in heaven’s name have you gotten
yourself into? I’ve warned you and I’ve warned you about those awful
people in town!”
“I’m going to be late getting home,” he said
wearily. “Evie’s with me. I have to get her away from Silver Ridge.”
“Billy, no! You do not associate with that girl!”
Evie heard Sarah’s tinny voice carrying in the
stillness. Distraught, she slipped into his arms and held tight. “Either
we discuss it in Boston,” Billy said, “or we’re going to have to deal with
the sheriff and the Darker brothers. We’re of age, mother. We can do
this.”
Sarah Trevor was silent for a moment. “You can’t run
from trouble, Billy. Contact Richard Welk. You’re going to need a good
lawyer.”
Billy grinned. “Yes, Mother.”
Sarah Trevor fell silent for another moment. “Billy,
is this really you?”
She had noticed the difference after all. “It’s me,”
he assured her.
“Go directly home, young man. You will, won’t you?”
“Evie and I. We’re on our way.”
Sarah sighed with exasperation and hung up. Billy
tossed the phone into the glove compartment and spent a moment staring out
into the night. “Do you remember Corin and King?” he said. “Did it
really happen?”
Evie’s tremble intensified. She held a bit tighter.
Billy slipped a protective arm
about her. “So, what happens now?”
“Drive,” Evie said. “Just keep going.”
Billy started the car. He drove up the rugged dirt
road to the highway and turned south. He kept the car’s speed beneath the
speed limit, waiting for something more to happen, hoping it wouldn’t end,
that this was a new beginning and things would be the way they should have
been first time around.
It didn’t end. The stroboscopes flashed on the
transmission towers of the Silver Ridge Nuclear Power Facility a half hour
later. With Evie close at his side, he turned east toward the distant
glow of civilization and picked up speed in the night.
