“Whose house is this?” Liz asked for the fourth time, switching her gaze evenly between the weather-worn door and Niv’s worried face.
“A side quest,” she responded earnestly.
They had all woken very early that morning – even June who was a notorious over-sleeper – and set off into darkness. What they found in this new world was absence. The absence of humanity, the absence of safety, of normality, of happiness. The birds weren’t singing, the dogs weren’t barking. Planes didn’t fly, cars wouldn’t drive. There was nothing but the obstinate dance of the trees and the scratching of leaves as they shuffled across the barren street.
Though she was not rested, Liz had put on a brave face for her children that morning, lining them up like little soldiers and giving each a kiss for love – and a muesli bar for breakfast.
This time it was June – not Paul – who headed the line of her children. Liz walked beside her, glancing down at her gentle face every so often. She held her hand tightly, first to squeeze out the image of Tony’s death from her daughter’s mind and then to ring out the horrific sight of the incursion from her baby’s mind.
June, more than Ari or Paul, had been stirred by what she’d seen the previous day. It was June whose nightmares had filled their shared room with mournful whimpers the previous evening. It was June who had cried herself to sleep. And June who would have the longest to live in this awful reality, until death came for her, in the familiar shape of her twin.
With little fanfare, Niv had taken to the head of the procession, and before long they were all making reasonable speed toward their destination: unknown to all but Niv. Brunch had followed breakfast uneventfully, and before long the pre-lunch hour had eased itself into a crisp and dry lunch-hour. Though the world was largely stagnant, the afternoon was punctuated by the sounds of horrific screaming, proton fire, more screaming, and occasionally the insane laughter of pure relief. But that was all they encountered along their journeys. And these intermittent reminders of their peril had the very real effect of slowing everything down for the troupe.
What would normally have been a three-hour walk had soon become six hours, as each aberrant noise required them to duck, hide, assess their situation, duck again, yelp, peek out from behind some overturned car or piece of concrete, decide if the coast was clear, and eventually set out again.
Niv had taken the family, over those six hours, through the suburbs of Fairfield Heights, through Guildford, through Auburn, Lidcombe and Strathfield until they finally arrived in a suburb called Burwood. Despite everything, and before too long, they stood before an austere post-war house, on a small block, nestled between two red-brick mid-century apartments.
Number 42, Adams street.
The house was in permanent shadow, and sat tight to the footpath, giving it the appearance of an old canteen building at a sporting-oval; rather than a home.
“She should be here,” Niv knocked again with the frisson of the frantic.
“Who should be here?” Ari asked, pulling on his mum’s coat.
“The person we’ve travelled all this way to find,” Niv offered.
“You’re being vague Niv,” Liz sighed, not for the last time.
“You’re pestering me Liz. We’ve established that you and your family won’t understand why we’re here and it would be dangerous if you did. Further, what possible purpose would be served in explaining it to you all, when you’ll find out exactly who it is when she opens the door!”
“How do you know whoever is supposed to be here isn’t already dead?” Liz asked, raising her hands lazily to point in all directions. “You know, the apocalypse has arrived. Death, destruction, fear and such.”
“The person we are here to see is not dead because I wasn’t sent back to kill her. And in any case, she was well-prepared because she knew what was coming.”
Finally, after the third round of knocking, there grew louder the distant sound of footsteps from behind the door.
“Hold-up. I’m coming, I’m coming,” a small voice called.
After a few more moments, the solid but ragged-looking door swung open to reveal a familiar face.
The family gasped in unison.
“That’s…That’s you Niv,” Paul said pointing at the woman in the doorway. “But you’ve got hair!”
Mortal Niv stood tall, looking every bit of her thirty years. She had long, auburn hair, which draped over her dark, taut skin. Mortal Niv was vaguely muscular, with wide-set shoulders, long arms, and thick thighs. She held onto a weapon that by rights, she should not have had, as she beamed at them all with confident certitude. Her searching eyes fell on Paul, who she seemed to recognise immediately.
“You’re late Missy,” Mortal Niv said to Niv, handing her a cassette of some sort as she leaned in for a quick embrace.
“I thought you’d be dead by now,” Niv frowned taking the object. “So there wasn’t much point rushing towards nothing. Anyway, this is Liz, Paul, Ari and June.”
“Pleased to meet you folks,” she said smiling, then continued. “His men came for me just like you said. But your devious plan worked.”
“What plan?” Paul asked, looking over at his guide suspiciously.
“Well let’s just say this isn’t my house,” Mortal Niv replied, a smirk forming on her thin lips. “They didn’t know where I’d be.”
“But who did you think would be looking for you?” Liz asked.
“Well up until future me started talking into my head, I wasn’t worried that anyone would be looking for me. But for the last six months or so, thanks to her, I’ve been expecting The Patriarch’s henchmen to off me in my sleep…” Mortal Niv began.
“That is a story for another time. Perhaps a story for after we’ve gone inside and hidden ourselves. There are still at least a couple of Timeless looking for us. ”
“Wait… If you could communicate with the past - why didn’t you warn us about this?” Liz asked, a fury beginning to bubble inside of her.
“Warned you? I had no idea where any of you would be. Despite the enormous amounts of science to all of this, there is just as much art. And anyway that’s not really how it works… The Narrative led me straight to you, so be thankful.” Timeless Niv said defensively.
“Liz…you have to understand. All we had was a couple of scraps of information, some fuzzy faces, and a vague notion,” Mortal Niv added.
“Anyway…Enough. Inside,” Niv demanded, pushing them all beyond the breach.
…
After a long and relatively pleasant lunch – where they all got to pretend the world wasn’t finally and terribly falling apart – it was Paul who broke the delicious tedium, in which each of them, in their own way, had forgotten about the end of the world.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“So how did you know we were coming?” Paul asked Mortal Niv.
“Do you think you can understand it if I told you?” Mortal Niv asked genuinely laughing an infectious sort of laugh.
“He’s a show off, he understands everything.” Ari said, sinking into the couch.
June laughed and poked at Paul, hugging him in apology for Ari’s comment.
“Well, even though you see two of us here there’s only really one of us. The two of us share the same everything. The same cells, the same brain, the same existence, but at a different point in time. Do you know what an Electron is?”
“Yes. I watch Star Trek.” Paul said proudly.
“Well Okay Captain Picard. So you probably know that every atom in your body is smothered in a negative cloud of electric probability. That’s sort of what an electron is. But sometimes that negative cloud has a good day, and can become positive. This positive cloud is called the positron. The weird part, and this is where you have to really suspend disbelief, is that where an electron travels forward in time like you and me, the positron travels backwards in time,” at this point Mortal Niv stopped, looking between each of the children, as they looked back in complete confusion.
“Oh,” said Paul considering this. “So she sent messages back to you in time using positrons.”
“I irradiated my brain with potassium-40, poked about a bit with gamma rays and started sending thought patterns back through time,” Niv offered. “I couldn’t send them back to anyone else but myself. It’s just how the science works,” she said more to Liz than anyone else.
“So about 6 months before D-Day, I started receiving these vivid visions of the future. At first just flashes, then fully fleshed out concepts and then after a month or so, a voice in my head as clear as if she was sitting right beside me. And the crazy thing, was that the words I heard were in my own voice,” Mortal Liz said, resting her head in her hands.
“Yeah…that’s the crazy thing,” Liz responded firmly. “Actually, can we not do this in front of the kids. This is all still too wild to believe. Is it not fantastical enough that we have immortal, time-travelling murderers after us, but I don’t think we need to get caught up in your… Relative Imperial Hyper Jumps and Netball equations.”
“You mean Preferential Temporal Narrative Mechanistics and the N3T equation?”
“It hardly matters,” Liz quipped, ready for a fight.
With that Mortal Niv stood up.
“What a delicious meal, right guys?”She offered, aiming her comments at the children.
June and Ari agreed loudly.
“Dessert?” Ari asked hopefully.
“Absolutely!” Mortal Niv responded. “But you guys will only get dessert if you take yourselves to the Lounge-Room. There’re board-games and snacks, and cards in there. The adults will be in soon, after we’ve had a nip of something stronger than lemonade.”
June and Ari bounded out of their chairs, but before they disappeared into the lounge-room Mortal Niv handed June a stuffed toy.
“Sometimes I hold him when things get scary. His name is No-No.”
They left the room.
Paul didn’t move at first, but on catching his mother’s scowl, excused himself, leaving Niv, Niv and Liz to be alone and discuss the things that they weren’t comfortable to say in their presence.
After a moment it was Mortal Niv who began speaking.
“You said there would be a boy, and here you are with a whole family Niv. I thought you knew what you were doing?”
“The historical records aren’t exactly perfect. Most of what I had I’ve joined up with a few bits of data, the probabilistic genius of a super-computer, and the weird specificity of a date in space-time. There were bound to be discrepancies. Time…am I right?”
“Why him?” Liz asked earnestly. “Why Paul?”
“It’s a derivation of the N3T equation. It can track the convergence of the narrative.”
“English please.”
“He keeps coming up in the future. There are hints all around us,” Niv continued, agitated by the complete ignorance Liz seemed determined to maintain.
“Maybe I can help,” Mortal Niv said, taking the reins of the conversation away from her older self. Liz was visibly grateful at this and eased slightly.
“I wasn’t convinced either at first. But the maths, if you want to call it that, is as clear as day. Can I try an analogy on you?”
“Sure why not?” Liz said.
“Okay…Imagine if you had a couple of dice and you rolled them and hit snake-eyes. That’s two dice displaying ones. The chances of that are 1 in 36 or around 3 percent right?”
“Right,” Liz said.
“That’s not too strange but what if you rolled two ones again. Then you’re probability is less than 1 percent. And now say that you do it for a third time in a row. Well, then your odds are less than 0.01 of a percent. Much less.”
“Okay.”
“The probability of the convergence of Paul’s story. His narrative penetration I guess you could call it, is around about the probability of rolling snake eyes, every time you roll two dice, across the span of infinite time.”
“That’s rare,” Liz agreed.
“Exactly.”
“The frightening regularity of happenstance all focussed in on this one soul, is so infinitesimal that the percentage has more zeros after the decimal than there are particles in the Universe. It’s around about the same probability that the Universe is a pipless-olive, perched precariously atop an infinitely big, and quite delicious hyper-sandwich.”
“So is he famous in the future or something?”
“No Liz, he’s dead in the future.”
Liz was about to react. To react quite strongly in fact. But she didn’t get a chance.
With those words, the window to the small home (and most of the wall around it) exploded inwards in a fog of glass and wood vapour. The Farrego X Proton disruptor had left a perfectly circular void where there had been half a house.
Liz and Mortal Niv were thrown dangerously across the room, behind a sturdy table. Niv barely registered the blast, and was already aiming her weapon into the new crevice, waiting for the guilty party – or parties – to show themselves.
She didn’t have long to wait.
In the lounge - Paul reacted quickly too. He had no weapon, but he did have a cupboard. So he grabbed Ari and June by the arms and pulled them into it. He closed the door and dragged a tangle of coats and pants down over them as cover.
Niv crouched down on one knee, watching for whoever it was, to show themselves. When they did, it wasn’t two adults who slowly crept into view, but two children. If she had to guess (which she didn’t) she would have correctly estimated that they were 7 and 8 years old. And they bore a striking resemblance to Ari and June.
“We found them Juney,” Timeless Ari laughed. “Told you it would be easy.”
“Hey in there,” June laughed. “It’s your destiny knocking, and she has a big gun.” Junestrolled into the room, all four-feet of her.
Niv fired on her, but missed. Timeless June threw herself behind a load-bearing wall and Ari rolled behind the ancient television.
“Oh hey traitor,” Timeless June called from her cover. “Can you bring the little girl that looks like me out here. I promise I’ll make her death quick if she doesn’t make a fuss.”
“This is trouble,” Mortal Niv whispered to Liz as she came to. “They’re here for June and Ari.”
At hearing this, Liz was about to jump up and declare heself. But she found she could not move. She looked down to see Mortal Niv clutching onto her arm with a strength she hadn’t expected. She tried to pull away, but Mortal Niv pulled back and Liz fell on her bottom.
“She will kill you Liz. Do you understand me? She won’t hesitate because you’re her mother.”
Timeless Ari rolled from behind his cover, aimed his weapon at the table behind which the two mortals hid, and was about to fire when Niv shot him directly in the face. He was pitched outside through the hole in the wall and collided noisily with the brick wall of the adjacent block.
Mortal Liz followed, with her weapon in hand.
Timeless June took exception to Niv shooting her brother, and flung herself from her cover, ran across the kitchen, landing cat-like on Niv’s shoulders. She scratched uselessly at Niv’s eyes and yelled something about the Holy Purpose. Niv pulled June off her shoulders and swung her into the wall. She grabbed June by the face, lifted her from the ground, and slammed the back of her skull into the concrete floor.
Outside, Timeless Ari eyes opened groggily. He was stunned, something like the memory of a headache flashed in his mind. He found that he could not move. A woman, he thought vaguely familiar stood over him, pointing a Military weapon at his face.
“That won’t kill me.”
“I know. But it makes you easier to handle.”
“How do you subdue a God you idiot.”
Mortal Niv, cocked the firearm and smiled.
By then Liz had joined Mortal Liz outside.
“I can’t find the kids,” she said.
“That’s a good thing. If you can’t, they can’t.”
It was then that Liz realised who it was on the floor in front of her. Though he was a little taller, a little thinner, and his eyes were weary with time, it was definitely her boy.
“Hi mum. You look awful,” Ari muttered barely able to move his lips.
“Ari. My beautiful boy,” she said, leaning in and caressing his cheek.
“No! Liz!”
But it was too late. Ari suddenly pounced at Liz with serpentine speed. His knuckles connected with the side of her face. Liz instantly lost consciousness, and a tooth. She crumpled into an irregular mass of body parts, about three meters from Mortal Niv. Mortal Niv fired a shot off at Ari’s face and he was out like a light.
“Liz? Liz are you okay?”
She rounded on Ari’s limp body.
“You little shit. Who punches their own mother in the face?” She spat.
She retrieved a reset button from one of the many pockets in her cargo pants, affixed it to Timeless Ari’s forehead and he was gone in a flash.
She turned to Liz, whose face was already swelling at the point of impact.
“We aren’t done yet,” She said as she put Liz in the recovery position.
Mortal Niv stood up, dusted herself off and mentally prepared herself to help … herself. She feared that June would not be so easy to contain as her brother.