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  Having seen the damage that ammunition could render, all I wanted to know was how many chances I had left to use it. I took Darlon’s Glock, and said, “Get these nice folks out of town, Roy. I’m going to get those formulas.” I turned to David. “Where are they son?”

  David looked at his dad, who in turn looked at Roy.

  “We don’t have time to debate this, people. How many times have you been through this?” I asked David sternly.

  “This… this is my fourth,” he replied, and Jenna tried to suck another bird from the sky. “But there are people trapped in the future—” he began.

  “I promise I won’t leave anyone behind,” I said, cutting him off. “We don’t have much time.”

  David swallowed hard and looked at his dad.

  “It’s okay, son. Tell him.”

  “I… I tore the pages out of the notebook and split them up. That way, even if they found the formulas they’d have no way of knowing they were incomplete. Half the pages are in the twins’ room, taped to the back of the mirror on their dresser. The rest are stuffed into Mom’s Chinese cookbook with the red cover.”

  My eyes met Roy’s. “You think this old girl of yours has enough left in her to go two miles to the town line?” He held my gaze. “I’ll meet up with you later,” I said unwaveringly. “You can’t be in two places at the same time, and we need to make sure this David stays in this time period.” Roy didn’t say anything. “He’s a lot more important in this thing that I am,” I said, trying to get him to see the light.

  Roy glanced at the Robelles’ house. “Everybody into the truck,” he called finally. Jenna and the twins took the front with Roy, while David and Chuck climbed into the cargo bed. Remington didn’t move.

  “You think you’re going somewhere without me?” she said indignantly as she recovered her shoes from under the truck.

  “Do I have to spell it out for you?” I shot back. “You’re going with them.”

  “The hell I am. There’s no way I’m going to let you scoop me on this story, Pappas. Not after what I’ve been through. If there’s a Pulitzer coming out of this, my name better be on it.”

  Chapter 40… Where’s Roarke?

  The truck rolled off, coughing and sputtering as if the next second would be its last. I knew Roy would think of something if it didn’t make it to the town line, but what mattered now was that Remington and I found those formulas and figured out how to get further back on the continuum to before the scientists’ abductions. How we were going to do that I didn’t quite know yet, but once there we could safely destroy the formulas without having anyone trapped in the future. Of course, Remington and I would be trapped in the past, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there were some distinct opportunities that could arise out of such an arrangement.

  “When did David first start talking to the scientists in that chat room?” I asked.

  Remington dropped a look on me. If she knew what I was thinking, she didn’t seem to waver. “Wasn’t it about six months ago?”

  I detected a couple of raindrops as I tried to see past the treetops, but the night sky was so dark that I could have been looking into a black hole from which even light couldn’t escape. The breeze was steady off the ocean, bending the oncoming mist into a stream of tiny, cold needles. Remington and I were still in our usual office attire, she in skinny jeans, unsensible shoes, and man-tailored blouse, me in blood-soaked khakis and a button-down shirt. We were already injured, wet, and miserable, and we were about to get more so. I flipped open my cell phone and checked the time. It was almost one o’clock in the morning, past the time when I’d been previously hijacked away to see Roarke. Roy too, I assumed, had escaped another sojourn through time; about Anne Behari I had no clue.

  Wondering if the Synthetics inside the house were the only ones left that we had to worry about, I pulled Darlon’s Glock, and said, “I hope this is enough.”

  Remington put her hand on mine in an unusually caring way. “Why don’t we just wait for them to leave?”

  “Huh?”

  “You heard David. He separated the pages from the notebook.”

  “So?”

  “So, maybe they don’t know that.”

  “We can’t count on that.”

  “We can’t count on anything except the fact that if we go in there now, there’s a good chance we’d never come out. We don’t know how many of them there are, Pappas. That’s not a risk I want to take.”

  Indeed, even with the possibility that we’d somehow become undead at some other point on the continuum, it wasn’t a risk I wanted to take either. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll wait it out.”

  Remington wrapped her arms around herself, and said, “Let’s try to get out of this rain.”

  I noticed that the sirens had stopped.

  * * * * *

  “Roy must have run into his men,” I said as I spread a firewood tarp over us, “which means he should be able to get David and his family to the town line.” Remington and I had made our way to the edge of the Robelles’ back yard, and were huddled behind a four-foot-high wall of split firewood. Inside the house, we could see three Synthetics gathered in the dining room, but one of them didn’t look like any Ken Doll. Big, bearded, and ugly, it was Roarke, and he was doing all the talking. Moments later, they all scattered. It didn’t take long before they were back in the dining room, all smiles.

  Remington picked up on it too. “They’ve got the formulas,” she said.

  “They sure are acting like it, but I didn’t actually see anything like pages from a notebook. Did you?”

  Remington said, “Shit,” and crawled from beneath the tarp.

  “Where the hell are you going?” I said, reaching out for her and literally grabbing a piece of ass.

  “Sit tight,” she whispered. “I’m going to take a look.”

  Like there was anything I could do to stop her. I watched as she hunched down low and played sneak attack across the yard. It wasn’t until she was within about twenty feet of the house that a thunderous blast rang out and I saw someone running toward her at full gallop. I pulled Darlon’s Glock, noting instantly that Remington was like a deer in the headlights, frozen in place and awash in light coming from the windows. Instinctively, I put my finger on the trigger when, framed in light reflecting off the falling mist, I saw a motionless lump on the ground near her. Everything was happening in microseconds now, bursts of time exploding like fireworks inside my brain. I recognized the runner; it was Roy. I don’t know why this particular thought entered my head right then, but I figured Roy had indeed run into his men and David was beyond the town line and inside DiNardo’s car this time around instead of the formulas. Otherwise, Roy would still be there and he wouldn’t have made his way back to the Robelle’s house.

  He tackled Remington just as another different-sounding blast rang out, this one much like the ones that accompanied the deadly explosions in the dirt that Remington and I had dodged earlier. The downed body had to be a Synthetic, I figured, and Roy had saved Remington’s rather nice bacon. Now, seeing him lying helpless on the ground, his arms wrapped around her like a protective shield, I knew one hit from one of those massive slugs would kill them both.

  I looked into the Robelles’ dining room. The Synthetics were gone. I thought I’d seen three of them, but that didn’t mean a damned thing. The one lying on the ground thirty feet away could have been one of the three, or one of sixty that could have been surrounding me at this very moment. I knew I had no choice if I was going to save Roy and Remington, and quite possibly myself.

  I guess I was getting used to facing death every time I turned around because my hesitation-caused-by-fear instinct gave way to my its-either-they-die-or-we-die instinct. I mean, I knew what I had to do. I crawled from beneath the tarp and propped Darlon’s Glock atop the stack of firewood, not knowing from which direction any additional Synthetics would come, but
come they would. That much I knew. Roy and Remington were making like moles, and I saw something out of the corner of my eye. All I know is that it was big, dark, and anyone who was important to me had no reason to be there. Not giving it a second thought, I fired, and a huge splash of red flashed in the window light. The body went down like a stone. Either I was turning into a pretty good shot, or I was damned lucky, just as I’d been earlier when I’d managed to hit Aryeh instead of David. “Please be a Synthetic,” I prayed, hoping I hadn’t just popped one of the good guys.

  A massive dose of adrenaline surged through my body, and I knew I had to stay mobile despite my throbbing leg. I sprang from behind the woodpile and joined Roy and Remington, both of whom had crawled to a little prefab tool shed behind the garage that housed, well, tools, I guess. In the weak light, I could see that they were both slicked with mud and the front of Remington’s shirt was soaked, making it look like she was smuggling gumdrops.

  Without so much as a thanks-a-lot, Roy turned to me and asked kind of urgently, “Do you know if there were more than three of them inside?”

  “That’s all I saw,” I replied as the mist started falling harder and tracked down my face. “One of them was Roarke.”

  I saw Roy’s eyes widen. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Who’s Roarke?” Remington asked.

  “Someone you don’t want to know.”

  “So this time he’s coming to us,” Roy muttered.

  I thought about that. The same people were meeting up as this piece of history played out again, meaning it was just a different version of the event. “He’s probably still here, Roy, especially if he has to wait for a teleportation time.”

  “How many rounds do you have left?” he croaked.

  “Only six,” I said. “But they’re like howitzer shells. If I hit anything, it’s going down.”

  Roy pulled his .357 into plain sight. “If anything comes at you besides me, kill it.”

  “And where the hell are you going?”

  “To find Roarke,” Roy replied, and he was gone.

  I knew Roy well enough to know that if he wanted me along, he would have said so, but I didn’t feel good about just sitting there. Maybe he knew where Roarke was—and maybe I had my head up my ass. I mean, I trusted that Roy would never intentionally put me or Remington in harm’s way, but a hundred previous interventions could have affected this event. I could only rely on one person’s judgment right now, and that person was me. I turned to Remington, who looked like a wet rat. “Did you ever have dreams about this?”

  Her eyes centered on mine. “What the hell are you talking about, Pappas? We’re on the verge of getting wiped out and—”

  I grabbed her arm roughly. “Listen to me. If we’ve been through this before, there’s a chance the memory would manifest itself, even if we’d been put through a memory cleanse.” I let go of her arm, but held her attention. “If we haven’t been through this, there’s a good chance Roarke, and whoever else is out there, doesn’t know we’re here. Don’t you see? Even if Roarke has half the formulas, we know where the rest of them are. If we can get to him, there’s a chance we could undo everything.”

  “What do you mean, undo everything?” Her teeth were chattering.

  “Everything, Remington, terrorists coming back from the future, people being snatched, the whole stinking mess.”

  “Including the president’s participation?” she asked with a note of regret.

  “Well, yeah, that too.”

  She paused, seemingly weighing her opportunity to break the story on the president against saving her own skin. “So we get hold of the formulas… then what?”

  “Then we wait for Lost Friday to catch up with us, but instead of being hijacked by Roarke, we make sure we’re taken by the ICTO guys.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Legitimate question. “I’m not sure what will happen if those formulas end up with the ICTO,” I answered honestly, “but I know exactly what will happen if Roarke takes off with them.”

  Remington was clearly exhausted. Eyelids drooping, she was dulling out on me, and I didn’t have time to bring her around. While I had no doubt that Roarke and the Red Diamond would use ITD technology to go back and try to reshape every historical event that could be of any benefit to them, I could only speculate whether the ICTO’s motives were more altruistic. It was one side or the other, however, and I sure as hell didn’t think any organization that turned people into fish food was the one to team up with. Besides, I just didn’t like people jacking around with me.

  I looked around the side of the tool shed and asked Remington again, “Do you remember any of this in any way, dream, memory, fantasy, or otherwise? Have you ever heard the name Roarke before?” Droplets were hitting the leaves, making a background drone that covered any other sound. Both of us were thoroughly soaked and chilled to the marrow. Remington was shivering, weakening quickly. I wasn’t doing much better.

  “Remington?”

  She managed to shake her head no. Okay, it was what it was, and I had no choice but to ignore Roy and go after Roarke and those formulas. So, I thought, if I was Roarke, and I had a bundle of papers that I believed held the key to world domination, where the hell would I be?

  Chapter 41… The Last Lost Friday

  Driving down the road in the Robelles’ SUV, I finally figured out how the ICTO did it. What gave it away were the dogs. I had no idea that as many people would be out walking their dogs past midnight, but I’d seen seven dogs so far, all of them with leashes dragging while they searched aimlessly for their owners. Each time, I saw a hissing block of frozen helium nearby. As I thought about it, I concluded that the first wave of operatives was responsible for getting people off the streets, which indeed were completely barren. I figured the next group would approach specific addresses. To avoid any 9-1-1 calls, they’d start with houses with lights burning and catch any night-birds watching infomercials in the middle of the night. After that, they’d complete the sweep. They’d knock, or even just enter—probably half the houses in Sea Beach wouldn’t be locked anyway—and gather the residents, forcing everyone in the house to hold hands for a while and then, zap! Atom by atom, the residents would be teleported away, never to remember their sojourns into the continuum. What were there, maybe a thousand houses in Sea Beach? A few hundred ICTO operatives could accomplish the mission in a couple of hours. I knew the invasion was relegated to within the boro limits, and it provided me with a logical course of action. There was no doubt, now, that I had to get Remington outside the boro.

  “Not on your life,” she said.

  “Do you still think I’m in this for the story?” I shot back angrily. I was way past that. Roarke and these Synthetics were after me, not just me in the sense that I lived in Sea Beach, but me personally. If I didn’t stop him now, I knew that someday I could be walking down the street one minute, and teleported out of my shoes the next. That, or I could disappear off the face of the Earth by never even being born. Nothing doing. I just wasn’t quite sure where to start.

  “Listen, Princess, in case you don’t remember, that was me that saved your ass back there. If I wanted the story that bad, I’d have—”

  “You’re kidding me, right? In case you don’t remember, it was also you who got me into that mess, and that was after I saved your skinny, worthless neck first. What am I supposed to think? There’s no way I’m coming off this assignment.”

  “This is more than an assignment, Remington. This is about saving….” Jesus, did I dare say it?

  “What? Life as we know it? Get off your high horse, Pappas. This is about stopping a thug, and that’s how we need to think about it.”

  You know, I really didn’t have time to argue. I turned left onto Ocean Avenue, and for the first time I saw some of the ICTO operatives. There looked to be about eight of them, all hanging on the co
rner of Ocean Avenue and Sand Dune Lane, dressed in the color of night in the same ICTO uniform as I remembered Vishal having worn. My headlights seemed to catch them by surprise. One of them stepped into the street, actually smiling so as to not alarm a couple of Sea Beach residents they happened to miss on their initial sweep. I knew exactly what was coming. If I stopped, Remington and I would be forced from the truck and probably handcuffed, then forced to play hold-my-hand with one of these bozos until the next wave of teleportations was scheduled to happen. Yeah, well, hold this, I thought, and I floored the SUV, almost running the bastard over. I saw clusters of helium blocks all over the place as I barreled past the bungalows. From the looks of things, the operatives had the process down pat.

  I needed to avoid these ICTO guys until I got hold of the formulas, but I wasn’t as downright contemptuous of them as I was of the Synthetics. I realized that if the technology worked as I thought it did, these operatives had specific, individual DNA, which meant they were real humans. The Synthetics were human too, and I’m sure they felt pain the same way, and had their own emotions and all the other crap that went along with being human, but to me, a manufactured, test tube human clone wasn’t quite the same. That could have been a raging debate in the year 2194, but it wasn’t one I wanted to philosophize about right now. All I knew was: real humans, good—maybe; Synthetic humans, bad—definitely. That’s when it came to me.

  I turned to Remington who was perched forward in her seat, shivering. “They have the same DNA,” I said.

  “Who does?”

  “The Synthetics. They’ve all been bred from a set a master genes.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So if you were the ICTO, and you were planning Lost Friday, would you do it knowing there’d be Synthetics on the scene?”

  After some pause, Remington said, “No. I’d make sure they were out of there.”

  “And how would you do that?”

  “I guess somewhere along the way I’d figure out how to obtain some Synthetic DNA. Then, when I was planning something—”