Recursion(87)

Barry jumps into his car and starts the engine. Apex is on the Upper East Side, just across the park, barely six long blocks from his current location.

He turns out into the street, but all he can do is creep along through the hordes of people.

Barry lays on his horn, veering finally onto Columbus, which is only slightly less mobbed.

He drives against traffic and turns right into the first alleyway he comes to, speeding in the shadows between apartment buildings.

He fires his light bar and sirens and muscles his way across two more streets filled with frantic, hysterical people.

Then he’s accelerating his Crown Vic down a walking path in Central Park, trying to call Apex again.

This time, the phone rings.

Please, please, please pick up.

And rings.

And rings.

There are too many people on the path ahead, so he veers off into North Meadow, ripping across baseball diamonds where he used to play.

“Hello?”

Barry slams on the brakes and brings his car to a stop in the middle of the field and puts the phone on speaker.

“Who is this?”

“Jee-woon Chercover. Is this Barry?”

“How’d you know?”

“I wondered if you’d call.”

Last time Barry interacted with Jee-woon, he and Helena had shot him in Slade’s lab as he lunged naked for a gun.

“Where are you right now?” Barry asks.

“My office on the thirtieth floor of my building. Looking out over the city. Waiting to die again, like all of us. Are you and Helena doing this?”

“We’ve been trying to stop it. I wanted to find Slade—”

“He died last year.”

“I know. So I need to ask you—when Helena and I found Slade at the hotel, he alluded to there being a way to undo dead memories. Some different way of traveling. Of using the memory chair.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line.

“You mean when you killed me.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened after—”

“Look, there’s no time. I need this information if you have it. I’ve been on a thirty-three-year loop with Helena trying to find some way to erase the world’s knowledge of the memory chair. Nothing’s working. That’s why we keep reaching this moment of apocalypse over and over. And it’s going to keep happening unless—”

“I can tell you this, and it’s all I know. Marcus did believe there was a way to reset a timeline, so there would be no dead memories. He even did it once.”

“How?”

“I don’t know the specifics. Look, I need to call my parents. Please fix this if you can. We’re all in hell.”

Jee-woon hangs up. Barry tosses his phone into the passenger seat and climbs out of the car. Sits down on the grass, rests his hands on his legs.

They’re shaking.

His entire body is.

On the next timeline, he won’t remember the conversation he just had with Jee-woon until April 16, 2019.

If there even is a next timeline.

A bird lands nearby and sits very still, looking at him.

The buildings of the Upper East Side rise above the perimeter of the park, and the noise of the city is much louder than it should be—gunshots, screams, the civil defense sirens, the sirens of fire engines, squad cars, ambulances—all blending into a discordant symphony.

A thought occurs.

A bad one.

What if Helena died in that four-year period between 1986 and 1990, before she was supposed to find him in Portland? Could the fate of reality itself really depend upon one person not getting randomly hit by a bus?

Or what if she decided not to do any of this? Just live her life and never build the chair and let the world destroy itself? It would be hard to blame her, but it would mean the next reality shift will be one of someone else’s choosing. Or no shift at all if the world successfully annihilates itself.

The buildings all around him and the open field and the trees glow the brightest white Barry has ever seen—even brighter than Denver.

There is no sound.

Already the brightness is waning, and in its place comes an inferno rushing toward him through the Upper East Side, the heat excruciatingly intense, but only for the half second it takes to burn through the nerve endings in Barry’s face.

In the distance, he sees people sprinting across the field, trying to outrun their final moment.

And he braces for the lava-colored wall of roiling fire and death to engulf him as it expands through Central Park, but the shockwave hits first, rocketing him over the meadow at an inconceivable rate of speed that’s slowing.

Slowing.

Slowing.

But not just him.

Everything.

He retains consciousness as this timeline decelerates to a standstill, leaving him suspended thirty feet off the ground and surrounded by the debris from the shockwave—pieces of glass and steel, a police car, melting-faced people.

The fireball is stopped a quarter mile away, halfway across the North Meadow, and the buildings all around him have been caught in the moment of vaporization—glass, furniture, contents, people, everything but the melting steel frames exploding out like a sneeze—and the immense death cloud rising above New York City from the point of impact is paused a mile into its ascent in the sky.