Future Lost

13

A gunshot rings out from somewhere above me, and the guy holding my backpack drops. I jerk free and stumble forward as more bullets rain down on the attackers. I cover my head as I run past them, ducking under a rusted table outside a former café.

I look up, searching for the source of the gunfire, and spot a woman completely covered in gray cloth, wrapped around her entire body and head except for her eyes and mouth. I can’t make out her features, especially with the sun behind her.

There’s a guttural sound behind me, and another one of those things—I’m not convinced they’re people anymore—comes lunging toward me from inside the café. I raise my gun and pull the trigger before he gets to me, shooting the guy point-blank in the forehead. Blood goes flying. The boom is deafening. But the thing finally stops moving.

The person on the roof is gone, but all the attackers are down. I slowly rise and look around, my hands trembling. Every second in this future makes me more and more worried about Adam, but if I think about what might have happened to him, I’ll scream.

Soft footsteps sound behind me and I spin around, raising my gun. It’s the woman from the roof. She approaches slowly, holding her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry I’m late. Got attacked by another group of Infected about two blocks from here.”

I recognize that voice. She’s completely covered in that gray cloth, but her blue eyes and heart-shaped mouth are familiar, although they have new wrinkles around them. I lower my gun. “Paige?”

“Did they bite you?” she asks.

I glance down at myself, quickly checking myself over, then shake my head. “No. Why?”

She rushes forward, grabbing me in a tight embrace. She smells like the desert, like dust and sun and wilderness. I hug her back, but soon realize this isn’t another of Paige’s normal exuberant hugs. This one is longer than normal, like she doesn’t want to let me go. “It’s so good to see you,” she says, her voice wavering. “It’s been so long.”

My stomach twists at her words, but I have so many other questions that are more important than my own fate. “Where’s Adam? What were those things? And what the hell is going on in this future?”

“We have a lot to discuss, but it’s not safe here,” she says. I can’t see much of her face, but her eyes look harder than in the present, and her skin seems more weathered. I can only imagine what kind of horrors she’s witnessed in the last thirty years. “The Infected will keep coming for us.”

Both of our heads snap to the north, where we hear a sound from a nearby building. She gestures for me to follow her and dashes off down the road, her movements silent and nimble. Before I met her, she was a gymnast and an Olympic hopeful, but she got kicked off the team for stealing. She’s always been graceful, but now she moves like a wraith, flitting through the desolate city like she’s a part of it.

I try to follow her, but I’m not as quick and my steps aren’t as quiet. My hand tightly grips the gun, and I find it impossible not to glance at every darkened doorway, waiting for more of those things to jump out at us. I’ve been to a lot of futures now, and some of them were pretty bad. But I never expected to walk through the aperture into something like this.

We reach Paige’s car, a big, black SUV with solar panels strapped to the top and bars over the windows. A guy on the roof of the car is covered up like Paige is, holding an assault rifle in his hand.

“About time,” he calls out.

“This is Jesse,” Paige says, nodding at the guy. “My trainee.”

I peer at his familiar eyes and mouth, the only thing visible on him. “…Wombat?”

He squints at me. “Huh?”

Seems he only had that nickname in the first timeline where we met him. “Nothing. Sorry. You look like someone I once knew.”

If Wombat—Jesse—is here, is my daughter, Ava, alive too? The two of them were dating in another future I visited, and she’d be about eighteen in this year. I start to ask but can’t get it off my tongue. Maybe because if the answer is no, I’m not sure I want to know.

He eyes my clothes skeptically. “You’re really a time traveler?”

“What did I say about questions?” Paige asks, but she grins at him as she says it. “Hurry up and get in the car.”

Jesse shrugs but hops off the roof, staring at me the entire time. We climb into the car as more of those deranged people emerge from a building behind us, like dogs following a scent. Paige starts the car, and we tear down the empty roads, darting around fallen pillars, narrowly avoiding abandoned cars and other debris. The whole city has been deserted, looted, and forgotten. There’s no power anywhere. And other than those cannibals, there doesn’t seem to be anyone else alive.

I sit back in the seat, unable to take my eyes off the once-familiar streets of Los Angeles, which have now become unrecognizable. “Paige. Seriously. What happened here?”

“The Black Friday Virus,” she says. My head snaps to her, and she offers me a grim smile. “We have a lot to catch you up on from the last thirty years.”

I rub my forehead, where a headache is beginning to grow. “How am I supposed to find Adam in all this?”

She hands me a canteen. “Don’t worry. You’ll bring him back.”

I gulp the water down, even though it’s warm and metallic. “How do you know?”

“Because I was at your wedding.” She gently pats my knee. “My past is your future, remember? That’s how I knew you’d be here today.”

A trickle of hope makes my shoulders relax slightly, but I still have so many questions. “If that’s the case, why didn’t you rescue Adam when he came through the aperture?”