roots were all that remained where lawn and topsoil had been swallowed up by the swirling menace.
Atop the building, a huge box comprised of metal ribs and filters perched just above the door—the massive air conditioner I’d noticed the day I arrived. The AC unit shuddered and wavered, metal screaming as it torqued, its welds and bolts threatening to give at any second. For the moment, though, it held and in doing so, blocked the terrible sucking wind, leaving a clear path just in front of the open door. I looked around.
“I’ll go,” Dante volunteered, tearing off his robe.
“You’re a brave young man,” Roland told Dante, who was quite possibly several hundred years his senior. “But ’tis clearly my responsibility. I’ll go.” Roland gripped his pipe between his teeth resolutely.
“I’ll go,” Ira stepped up. “It’s what we do.”
“You throw yourself into the whirling vortex of evil?” M’Kimbi asked. He tended to be very literal.
“No. We do what’s right. And miracles. We also do miracles.”
“Nobody would even miss me,” Horace said.
Before my friends wasted any more time volunteering, I stepped in. “No. This is my fault. I bumped the lever the first day I was here and that’s when it all went wrong.”
“Time machines just aren’t what they used to be,” Seiko said grimly.
“I’m going to fix it,” I said. “And I’m going to live. Er, stay dead. Er, keep on keepin’ on.”
Tossing his fist in the air, Timothy gave me a
“But first, there’s something I have to do.” I turned to Dante. “In case I don’t make it.”
I grasped his chin, leaned up against him and kissed him on the mouth. He wasn’t a PDA kind of guy so it took him a second to get with the program, but then he wrapped his arms around me and kissed me back. I melted against him, teasing his tongue into my mouth, nearly losing myself in the kiss. I slid my hands to his waist, letting my fingers tangle in his belt loops. I pulled back just enough to draw a breath—and suddenly I really, really needed one. Go figure.
Looking deep into his eyes, I asked dreamily (but loudly, since the whirlwind was making such a racket), “Remember the day we met?”
Firming my grip at his waist, I smiled apologetically. Then I said, “I did this.”
I grabbed his scythe and shoved him roughly away from me as I had on that day in the men’s room when I’d sent him bouncing into a bank of sinks. The Velcro tab made a ripping noise audible even over the wind as his scythe tore from his belt loop. Dante sprawled on the ground still looking dazed and more than a little surprised.
I blew him one more kiss and raced toward the building.
My legs pumped hard, my heart did, too. I hated that I’d had to make what might be our last kiss a distraction and I hated more that I’d had to cut it short, but I just couldn’t afford to let him try to stop me.
Shoving regrets of love and betrayal aside, I sprinted to the relatively windless area immediately before the entrance to the time terminal.
Above me, the AC unit shifted again. If its moorings snapped now, I’d be was a goner. I’d be crushed or sucked into the vortex or, given my luck, probably both. What would happen to my unsouled body back on the Coil?
Sensing I was there, the vortex sent tentacles toward me, but something about the AC unit kept it back— maybe it blocked its view of me or maybe it had something to do with the crystal skull. Or maybe it couldn’t get a fix on me because I simultaneously inhabited two planes of existence. My bi-dimensional existence had caused the problem in the first place, after all.
No matter why, I appeared to be safe from the vortex—for the time being. Which wasn’t saying much, time being pretty conceptual at the moment.
With a deep roar, the vortex wrapped its typhoon arms around the top half of the AC unit and snapped it off. The ground behind me churned. Clods of dirt pelted against my back as they flew upward into the dark tear in the sky. My tiny circle of safety had just gotten tinier. Cut off! As Sergeant Schotz had said, one man—or in this case one woman—is an island. Nobody could get to me and I couldn’t get out again without stepping directly into the lethal whirlwind.
I stood in the clearing, about ten feet from the opening. Through the wreckage of the terminal, the emergency button taunted me, pulsing red like a bloody heartbeat, clearly visible even through the swirling debris. The metal framework of the building shrieked and shuddered a little more.
Behind me, my friends, my teammates, my boyfriend and others watched in silence.
The skull grinned up at me from the ground at my feet.
“Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio . . . not at all.”
Grasping Dante’s scythe, I thrust out my arm. I’d been told I wasn’t supposed to take another Reaper’s scythe—not even to touch it. But maybe, just maybe, if you were trying to stop the end of the world, it was worth the risk.
I activated the scythe using the button located near the top rim. I knew that now, since we’d practiced with training scythes. The handle extended upward and downward simultaneously, like the weirdest glowing purple erection with a blade at the top. I admired it a moment while I rifled through my brain, reviewing all the important things I’d learned about scythes and Hell and being a Reaper during my time at the Reaper Academy and while in Hell. Facts and figures whirled through my brain like my own personal mental vortex.
And then I abandoned all that book learning and field practice. What I needed now, I’d learned back up on the Coil.
I flipped the scythe upside-down and slammed the curved blade against the skull with every erg of power I possessed. The crystal skull shot through the door and directly at the glowing red button. With deadly accuracy, it found its target. I not only hit the button, I smashed it to smithereens! My old hockey coach would be so proud.
And behind me the crowd went wild as the vortex began to slow its churning spiral, retracting its tendrils, shrinking into a tiny black hole that managed to suck in one last time fly. A final blast of wind shot in my direction, but died to a mere breeze just before it reached me.
I fisted the air in triumph. I’d won. It’d been—
The world went blindingly, roaringly white. I fell back and hit the ground hard. If I’d been able to hear anything, I think I would have heard bones snapping—my bones. Good thing I didn’t need to breathe, because the lead weight on my chest prevented my lungs from expanding even the slightest bit. Every part of my body screamed with pain and I wished I were dead. More dead. Really dead. I lay there for an eternity. Several eternities.
The AC unit must have been teetering on its last bolt. That final blast was all it needed to fly off the roof and land on me, squashing me flat. A hero’s reward.
Then, suddenly, the pressure lifted. Someone heaved the AC unit off me. Vaguely I wondered if I looked like Wile E. Coyote after an anvil had flattened him. I felt hands on my body. Maybe on my body
Regeneration Gap
SOMEONE SHOOK ME. Someone else doused my face with liquid, which turned out to be iced tea and got my hair all sticky. I sat up, sputtering.
“Dude. You okay?”
