Recursion(77)
“You want to do this without me?”
“No. I want to breathe the same air as you every minute of every day of my life, no matter how many timelines I live. That’s why I found you in the first place. But this chair is my cross to bear.”
“You don’t need me.”
“That is not what I’m saying. Of course I need you. I need your love, I need your mind, your support, all of it. But I need you to know—”
“Helena, don’t.”
“Let me say this! It’s enough that I have to see the chair destroying the entire world. People throwing themselves off of buildings because of something I made. It’s another to see it ruin the life of the man I love.”
“Life with you isn’t a life ruined.”
“But you know this is all it can ever be. Stuck in this thirty-three-year loop, trying to find a way to stop this day from coming. All I’m saying is that if you want to just live your fucking life without the pressure of trying to keep the world intact, that’s OK.”
“Look at me.”
The water she dribbled on her face has beaded up on the layer of sunscreen. He stares into her emerald eyes, clear and bright in the sun.
“I don’t know how you do this, H. I don’t know how you carry this weight. But as long as it’s on your shoulders, it’s also on mine. We will find a way to solve this. If not in the next life, then the one after. And if not in that one, then the one—”
She kisses him on top of their mountain.
* * *
They’re a hundred yards from the house when the sound of a helicopter builds behind them, and then streaks across the early-afternoon sky.
Barry stops and watches it cruise toward Tucson.
“That’s a Black Hawk,” he says. “Wonder what’s going on in town.”
The chopper banks hard to the left and slows its groundspeed, now drifting back in their direction as it lowers from five hundred feet toward the ground.
Helena says, “They’re here for us.”
They take off sprinting toward the house, the Black Hawk now hovering seventy-five feet above the desert floor, the rotors roaring and swirling up a cloud of dust and sand, Barry close enough to see three pairs of legs hanging off each side of the open cabin above the skids.
The tip of Helena’s boot strikes a half-buried rock and she goes down hard on the trail. Barry grabs her under both arms and heaves her back onto her feet, blood now running down her right knee.
“Come on!” he screams.
They pass the saltwater pool and reach the patio where they had breakfast.
Thick ropes drop out of the Black Hawk like tentacles, the soldiers already descending them.
Barry slides open the rear door, and they rush through the kitchen and turn down the hallway. Through the windows that look out into the desert on the other side of the house, he sees a cluster of heavily armed and armored soldiers in desert camo jogging up through the landscaping in a tactical formation toward their front door.
Helena is ahead of him, limping from her fall.
They race past the home office and guestroom, and through another window, Barry glimpses the Black Hawk setting down on his driveway behind their cars.
They stop where the hall ends, and Helena presses against one of the rocks in the river-stone wall, which opens to reveal its secret utility as a hidden door.
She and Barry slip inside as the sound of a small explosion shudders through the house.
Then it’s just the two of them, gasping for breath in the pitch-black.
“They’re in the house,” Barry whispers.
“Can you hit the light?”
He feels around until his fingers graze the switch.
“You sure they won’t see it?”
“No, but I can’t do this in the dark.”
Barry flicks the switch. A single, unshaded bulb burns down from overhead. They’re standing in a kind of anteroom, barely larger than a kitchen pantry. The inner door is the basic size and shape of a standard door, except that it weighs six hundred pounds, is built of steel plates layered to a thickness of two inches, and when activated, shoots ten massive bolts into a jamb.
Helena is typing in the code on the keypad, and the footsteps of at least half a dozen soldiers are moving toward them down the hallway, Barry picturing them closing in on the river-stone terminus, the sound of whispered voices and boot-falls and jostling gear getting closer and closer.
A shouted voice from the far side of the house—probably in their master suite—echoes down the long hall.
“Clear on the east side!”
“Impossible. We saw them enter the house. Everyone check closets? Under beds?”
On the illuminated display, Barry watches as Helena keys in the last number.
The high-pitched whirring of internal gears becomes audible inside the anteroom, and possibly beyond, Barry and Helena holding each other’s stare as the ten bolts retract one by one like muffled gunshots.
A woman’s voice comes through the other side of the hidden door: “You hear that?”
“It came from inside this wall.”
He hears what sounds like hands running across the faux stones. Helena drags open the heavy door. Barry follows her across the threshold into another place of darkness, just as the hidden door cracks open.