Note: I actually started writing this over a year ago, before I ever started writing my Animorphs Fanfic. The forum it was on before no longer exists. I found it this morning while working on my hard drive, and decided to put it up here, just for the heck of it. This is not a fanfiction, it is my own story, my own character(s)
Chapter One
“If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow, and which will not, Speak.” Banquo – Act I Scene III
Death comes to all those who wait, riding a pale horse across the boundaries of the netherworld. Life, however, needs to take a bus and she might just miss you completely if she happens to fall asleep and miss her stop. She will then spend twenty minutes arguing with the driver of said bus to turn around, get kicked off the bus for insulting his parentage, and then hike eighteen miles to get back to where you were supposed to be only to see the coroner zipping you up.
This is of course the scene that I find myself in, standing in the crowd of onlookers and gawkers while wishing I could just leap over the caution tape and lay on hands that sucker back to life. Or, you know, whatever semblance of such he had before his girlfriend cut his throat with a steak knife. Because well, all other things aside, if your girlfriend buys a new set of cutlery for the sole purpose of killing you with it, not only have you apparently made a few mistakes in your life, but you also have horrible taste in girlfriends.
As I stood in the crowd and tried to think of how to fix this little hiccup, I sighed. It was supposed to be an easy job. Just in and out, stop this guy from dying and move on. Wham, bam, thank you Macbeth. That would be my name, not the play. My parents were huge Shakespeare enthusiasts. They were not, however, big fans of common sense. Out of every play he wrote and with every female character in those plays, they chose to name their daughter Macbeth.
As much as I wanted to go right in front of the crowd and turn ‘dead guy’ into ‘decidedly less dead guy’, it doesn’t work that way. Dead is dead. I can help everything up to the point you cross the line, but there’s no real coming back from that. Besides, I work in secret, and the ten o’clock evening news is whatever the exact opposite of secret is.
I realize that I should explain that I’m not insane. Or, well, I might very well be by this point, but that doesn’t make what I’m saying any less true. If I start rambling about French monkeys with purple trumpets doing hula while planning the Nazi revolution, you can safely close the book and rest assured that I’ve completely lost my mind and there is nothing further of use for you.
Anyway, while being able to play Jesus resurrecting Lazarus and winning instant recognition of everyone in the world might be fun for about ten minutes, it would really kill this whole secrecy thing.
The coroner’s van began to drive off, and I turned to find a phone booth so I could figure out where the morgue was. As I moved, a pale blue glow distracted me. The glimmer surrounded a young boy no older than ten, and I winced. This couldn’t be fun to experience, but I reached out and pushed my hand through the blue light to touch the boy’s shoulder. A single moment of focus later, and I felt the connection snap into place.
Abruptly, I was seeing through the eyes of this ten year old boy. A tennis ball slipped from hand to hand while I looked again to the crowd of people with all the boredom a young boy can muster in the face of a group that isn’t paying attention to him. My sigh was audible, and my mother gave me a distracted angry look that propelled me away from the crowd.
I started bouncing the ball against the nearest wall and catching it. Bounce… catch… bounce… catch. Finally, I threw the ball hard enough that I missed the rebound. It bounced into the street and I charged after it.
The thing rolled across the road, and I lunged. Even as my fingers snagged the runaway ball, I felt a dark shadow fall over me. A scream from my mother tore my attention that way, just as the moving truck slammed into me, instantly snapping my neck from the force and breaking almost half the bones in my small body.
The pain was so intense and real that when I snapped back into my own self, I reeled. The boy was already bouncing his ball against the nearest wall. I shook my head. Not right now. Nobody was dying right here just after I had failed to save the guy I was supposed to.
I briefly considered telling his mother to pull him back to her, but that… usually didn’t end well. Telling a parent they weren’t doing their job never really goes the way you mean it to. Well, okay, sometimes it does, but it never really helps.
Finally, I just sighed and jogged that way. At the last second, as the ball started to bounce past the boy, I snatched it out of midair and started to hand it back to him. The blue glimmer stayed where it was, so I paused even as the boy reached for it. The glow continued to brighten, so I took the ball back. He started to complain, and I turned away. Under the scrutiny of the group of adults as the boy yelled at me, I ran off.
As I ran, I looked back over my shoulder. Just as I reached the corner, the blue light disappeared from the boy, and I let out a sigh of relief. For now, the immediate danger was past.
I slowed to a walk and rolled the ball between my hands. Maybe the boy would die tomorrow from food poisoning. Maybe his mother would lose her mind and kill him herself. Maybe he would last six more years and then be killed the first time he took his brand new car out the day after getting his license.
He was safe right now though, and that’s about all I could manage. I’m not God, after all. I was just a twenty year old college dropout with two dollars and seventy eight cents, a small backpack with a couple books and other things, and a Cubs baseball cap. I love the Cubs. What can I say? I have a certain affinity for the underdog.
Chapter Two
“Things without all remedy should be without regard: what's done is done.” Lady Macbeth – Act III Scene II
Two dollars and thirteen cents later, and I had a double cheeseburger and a spicy chicken sandwich from McDonalds. So my stomach was full, or something resembling that, but now I was down to sixty five cents. Oh yeah, and I still didn’t know how to fix my dead guy problem.
Leaning on one hand and twirling a loose lock of dark blond hair around a finger while idly flicking my other hand against the stray wrapper from the cheeseburger, I seriously considered a new line of work. It wouldn’t be so hard. All I’d have to do is say that I didn’t care about the fate of humanity. You think that sounds bad, but you spend half an hour watching the typical fast food patron and see if you don’t consider it an option.
You think McDonalds is depressing? Try eating there after you kill a guy by oversleeping. I mean, chicken nuggets may be a lot of things, but I don’t think they’ve ever been directly responsible for the destruction of what amounts to an entire time line of the human race.
Maybe I should back up. But I just compared fast food to genocide, and you’re still here. So either you’re a borderline psychotic health nut thinking this is some other book, or I’m mildly entertaining. Either way, we win.
I think I can say it started when I was a freshman in college. That would be about two years ago. I wasn’t anything special up to that point. My grades were so-so. I had a few A’s, a few B’s, a couple C’s in classes no one cares about. I took drama one year, and did a year of girl’s softball, followed by a year of soccer. We won a couple more games than we lost. I broke my ankle in junior year and my boyfriend dumped me two weeks before the prom so I went with a boy I barely knew. So, like I said, completely average.
That is, average up to that third week in college. That was when my life became so bizarre that it would take an entire season of Twilight Zone episodes to fully comprehend.
I was just leaving my last class of the day, a science credit that was more to please my parents than for anything I thought I’d need, when a strange feeling hit me right in the pit of my stomach. It felt like that sudden dropping sensation you get when going down on a roller coaster, where your stomach tries to float up into your lungs.
While my hand grasped out to clutch the wall so that I wouldn’t fall, a name floated up into the forefront of my consciousness. It escaped my lips in a gasped whisper. “Carter Tavelli.” The name was an incredible pressure on my brain, and I said the name again, because saying it seemed to release some of that force. I said the name a third time, and then the address came to me. “Carter Tavelli… Seventeen thirty-seven Oceanic Breeze Avenue West. Zero Two One Zero Four, Boston. Apartment Seventeen.” The address was a pounding sensation within my mind that refused to let up until I had repeated it several times.
A name, address, zip code, and city had popped directly into my mind with such force that my head had felt like it would explode if I didn’t speak them out loud several times, and I had literally no idea who this person was. I had been to Boston a couple of times, considering my college was only a couple of towns north, but I had absolutely never heard of a Carter Tavelli up to that point. However, there was also no doubt whatsoever that he was a real person, and that he lived right there. I didn’t just believe it, I knew it.
The moment the name and address had cemented themselves in my conscience, I felt a violent spurt of nausea rising within me, and I shoved away from the wall, sprinting the short distance to the restroom. Once inside, I threw myself into a stall and fell to my knees, hurling while clutching the walls.
After losing the lunch I never should have eaten in the first place, I caught sight of my reflection in the seat of the toilet. My eyes… they were green, but they were supposed to be blue. Green, why were my eyes green? I found myself staring into these strange eyes, caught up in my own confusion.
Before I could understand this sudden difference, as I lost myself in these blue eyes, I was suddenly pulling back from a mirror. I wanted to blink in confusion, but I was busy shaving. Wait a minute, shaving? The image I saw in the mirror was that of a grown man, maybe in his early forties.
I… or rather, he finished shaving and ran a hand over the newly smooth skin before turning away from the mirror. I or he walked from the bathroom, passing a rather unkempt bedroom. From a dresser in the hallway, we collected a belt with a pistol holster and then a badge. A badge… I couldn’t recognize what type, but it was clipped to the belt and then we pulled a jacket from a hook on the wall and shrugged into it before walking out the door.
We were just out the door when we heard the muffled cry from down the hall. Turning on a dime, we paused for only a moment. A thump and a heated whisper of a threat made us walk closer. The noise was coming from two apartments down. A dried up wreath adorned the door, and an old welcome mat belied the whimpered pleas that could be heard just beyond that door.
Time seemed to stand still for a moment, and then we stepped forward and put a hand on the knob. A very brief test later found it unlocked. Stupid of the person inside, but good for us.
We stepped quietly into the apartment, pulling the gun from its holster on our hip at the sound of a shotgun ****ing from the next room over. Heavy footsteps thumped our way, and the man that entered the room was dragging a pretty black girl by the hair. At the sight of us, the man started to yank the girl in front of him while raising the sawed-off shotgun. Our hand with the gun was already rising, and a moment later the man fell with a bullet lodged just off center from his left eye, and the girl was on the floor screaming but unhurt.
We stepped over to help the girl to her feet, and as her eyes met ours, I had another sudden flash. This girl, she was going to go on and in four years time, she would become a teacher. As a teacher, she would positively touch the lives of most of her students, and one in particular would go on to become a doctor where he would be directly responsible for saving thousands of lives through revolutionary techniques that he would develop.
I saw all of this in the span of a few seconds, and I was as certain of it as I have ever been of anything. It would happen, and the world would be better for it.
A smile had just come when we were suddenly back at the door of that apartment, looking at the wreath and hearing the cry from inside. This time, instead of trying the knob, we stepped away from the door and drew a radio. We called for back-up, and just as the acknowledgment came, the wreathed door was kicked open. Our hand went for the gun on our belt, but the man with the shotgun was faster. There was a sudden explosion, and I felt the man that I was within die, blown away by the twin barrels that erupted with a violence and fury that I had never truly witnessed before.
I felt the man die, and I felt with a certainty that the girl would also die shortly thereafter as the man panicked. She would die and never grow to teach the boy who would have grown into a remarkable doctor and saved so many. Thousands of lives could end before they were meant to because this girl wasn’t saved from death.
A cough and shocked gasp later left me back in my own body, heaving for breath as I stared into the back of the toilet. I was myself, but my mouth formed the words of the man’s name and address once more, and this time I was able to add. “Seventeen hours.”
I knew, deep within my soul with no doubt whatsoever that this would happen in seventeen hours. This girl had that long to live. This world had that long to decide between two time lines, one in which thousands would be saved in due time, and the other in which they would not be. All based on one man’s actions.
One man… who I had to talk to. I pushed myself up from the stall and turned to leave. The name and address came to me again, and I repeated them before leaving the restroom.
I didn’t know what was happening, or why this had happened, but I knew with an utter certainty that simply calling would not work. I had to get there. I had to talk to this man in person. I had to make him choose the right path.
The only problem was that I had no way of getting there.
