Fiction and Stuff

The Pied Pipers

My informant requested and received assurances of anonymity, as certain of this team’s actions were technically illegal.

How did you get started fighting zombies?

Well, like, everybody grew up watching shows and movies and things about zombies, the zombie apocalypse, right? So when we heard there were zombies in [Big City], we’re like, “Okay, we know what to do here.”

If it’s that fungus thing, then, yeah, we’re totally doomed. Or if everybody that dies, zombifies or something, then, you know, [obscenity] doomed.

But if it’s just the standard bite‑and‑turn‑into‑a‑zombie type, we got that. But the [obscenity] government, they wanted to put everybody in a safe space. Yeah, like that’s gonna work. That’s basically ringing the dinner bell for the zombies, right? But at least they got tied up in a million miles of [obscenity] red tape, so they never got it done.

While they were busy trying to do that, we decided we’re going to protect our own town. We didn’t have any guns because they were, like, against the [obscenity] law. And no, I don’t know anybody who had any back then.

Eventually they, I mean the [obscenity] government, they did something right and let people buy guns. Except by that time, everybody in the [obscenity] State, everybody in the [obscenity] world was trying to buy guns. So there just weren’t any. And we couldn’t buy any anyway, since we were underage.

And so we’re like, “Okay, what can we do?” So we got together, me and the others from the drone team, and we’re like, “If these are, you know, regular [obscenity] zombies, then they like noise and they might like lights.”

So we rigged up some of the drones with flashing LEDs and some of them with radios. And we set the radios to a rap station, so there’d be a ton of voices and a little music, right, but a ton of voices. And then we had a third one that we set up that had a camera. So that was our spotter drone, you know, like they had in Ukraine.

And so we sent them out and kind of went up and down the highway because that’s where we figured the [obscenity] zombies would probably be most likely to come by. Turns out most of them followed the sound, but some of them liked to follow the light. So we had to do both.

At first we just, like, flew the drones in circles around the zombies so they’d stay in one spot, kind of herding them. But we still needed a way to get rid of them, you know? Can’t just keep ’em around forever.

We talked about, like, setting them on fire. But we’re like, “That’s gonna start a brushfire. And there’s not enough firemen left to go do anything about it.”

We decided what we really needed was some place where the fire couldn’t get out of. So there’s this quarry out east of town; sometimes it’s got some water in it, not very much back then. And, you know, people like to go there and drink and — but I wouldn’t know about that ’cause I’m underage.

So me and a bunch of the others, even some that were just brothers and sisters of the team, we went out with brooms and rakes and stuff, and we cleared all the stuff that would burn, like the dead grass and the dead leaves and all that junk. We threw it all down in the water that was at the bottom, so that there was nothing there that would catch except, like, the zombies.

And so then we sent more drones out to lead that [obscenity] group of zombies that we’d rounded up right into the quarry. And they’re dumb as hell, you know. They just followed the drones. So we’re sitting on the edge watching them come shuffling in.

We had to set them on fire somehow. What we really needed was Roman candles, but Roman candles are against the [obscenity] law. We got some later, but back when we started out, we didn’t have any. The statute of limitations hasn’t run on that, so, like, you’re making this anonymous, right? For sure?

Anyway sparklers were legal. So we got a bunch of [obscenity] sparklers and tied them to a drone, one of the cheap drones, you know, that we could spare. And once we got all the zombies down in there, we had to get a fire started somehow, so we just, like, tied a little bucket to this drone and put some gas in it. We’d just send the drone out to buzz over them, and they start waving their arms at it and try to jump, and they spill the gas all over the place.

[Operator] got super good at that, running the drone over them so they’d splash the gas all over the crowd and we’d get the drone back.

Anyway, after that, we’d light all the [obscenity] sparklers and send that drone just zooming, kamikaze-ing in. Boom! It hits the zombies. And, man, they went up like a bonfire. Once one of them catches, the rest of them catch, too. It was wild. So that was it for them and for that drone.

After that, we kept the drones patrolling, watching and listening for more [obscenity] zombies. All day and all night, we’d blast noise and flash lights to lure them in, round ’em up, and run them into the quarry. And then once we had enough in there, we just sent something down there to set them on fire. I mean, once we got the Roman candles from somebody, that worked better because we didn’t have to sacrifice a drone. We just sat up there and shot Roman candles at them. It was so wild.

And that’s just how it worked.

There were some fires across the West during the war.

Our fire never made it out of that quarry. There were some [obscenity] fires, yeah, but not started by us. So, I mean, yeah, technically we did some arson and the [obscenity] statute of limitations hasn’t run. But our fire never got out of that quarry.

How many zombies did you account for?

Who knows? I don’t [obscenity] know how many zombies we burned up. Thousands, for sure. And, of course, everybody else started getting the idea.

So, you know, that’s our story.

We’d rather not get, like, famous or anything because of the [obscenity] government. Not that I regret it. We did what we had to do. Those zombies were gonna get to our town if we didn’t stop them.

Mary Adams

Mary Adams doesn’t look like a zombie fighter. She’s five foot two, and does indeed have eyes of blue, but her shoulder-length hair is white and her glasses are thick. She was reluctant to talk to me at first, pointing out that Mike Tester lived just ten miles away. Of course, Mike’s story has been told a dozen times, and one expects a Marine to be a zombie fighter. A little old lady, though …

How did it start? For you, I mean.

Like it did with everybody. I heard those reports of zombies, and I thought it was one of those EAS things.

Emergency Alert System videos, right?

Yes, and podcasts. You know the ones, reporting like Yellowstone’s erupting, World War Three’s started … and zombies are loose in New York City. Then the videos came out, and, well, AI video generation has gotten awfully good. But I started to doubt, because that quality of AI is expensive. Much too expensive for somebody’s little Twitter account.

Other people were doubting, too. Not that anyone said much, but there was a run on ammo at Walmart, and plywood was sold out all over town. People were getting ready to fort up.

Anyway, we had our weekly bridge game, here in the neighborhood. Not a lot of young people play bridge — too much human contact, I guess — but we do. Some people — not naming names, here — were starting to panic, talking about fleeing to Canada, like in the books.

She shakes her head and smiles.

So I said, in the books, you end up without food or shelter, freezing and eating whoever freezes first. No thanks! Me, I’m staying right here. Anna — she lives down the street — Anna says she’s staying and Rob — that’s her husband — he’s putting plywood over the windows.

She shakes her head again.

But that won’t work, I tell them, because suburban houses like ours don’t make good forts. Too many windows, too many doors, and plywood’s just not good enough. You get a swarm of zombies pounding on your boarded-up windows, and they’re going to break in. You’ll be sitting there with your pistols while the zombies smash their way in, and maybe you’ll shoot some, but they’ll get you for sure.

That didn’t go over well. “What are you going to do, then?” they want to know. So I said, “I’m going to use my brains.” Naturally, Jason — he’s Sarah’s son, and she was hosting the bridge party — naturally, Jason was walking by the door just then, so he says “Brrainssss, brrainssss.”

She rolls her eyes.

That actually lightened the mood, you know. How can you panic over this kind of nonsense? And he kept up those stupid zombie jokes all through the war. At one point, Max — that’s his father — threatened to toss him to the zombies if he didn’t knock it off.

Anyway, getting back to the bridge party, I pointed out that zombies are people, or were, so they have people-type abilities. They can’t fly. They can’t climb your house without a ladder. So me, I’m going to pack my go-bag with food, water, meds, and ammo, and set a ladder against the house. Then when the zombies come, I’m going to be sitting on the roof with my ladder up there with me, and I’ll be sniping those zombies while they can’t touch me.

She shrugs.

It’s the same thing Mike Tester advised, “Climb up, shoot down.” But nobody’d heard of him then. We talked it over some more, and even the people who were panicking, they saw my point. We sent Jason out to round up anyone he could find in the neighborhood — the kid might as well make himself useful — and pretty soon we’d arranged for shifts of lookouts with Rob’s air horn. The thing’s ear-splitting.

We knew the city power might go off, so since I have a generator and so does Sarah, we gathered up all the extension cords we could find and set up lamps outside with wi-fi bulbs. Jason wrote a program for one of those little bitty computers so it would see when the city power went out and turn the lamps on. Not as good as the streetlights, but they would’ve given us the edge at night.

Not that we needed them, of course. Those crews at the electric company did yeoman’s work keeping the lights on. You should interview some of them.

They’re on the list. What happened when the zombies came?

They didn’t show up for three days, and everyone was on edge by then, wondering if maybe we should have run for Canada after all. “Good news is no news” for the mainstream media.

Her lip curls and her voice drips contempt as she says “mainstream media”. I hope the formidable old lady doesn’t lump me in with them.

All they reported was people getting attacked in the streets, in their cars, in their homes, and getting turned. No news about people getting ready, no news about Mike Tester, who was just ten miles from here, no news about the drone armies that were springing up all over. You should interview them, too. So we got all our news from the Internet. The bloggers, the guys on Twitter.

Anyway, the zombies showed up after three days. It was after lunch and Jack — he’s even older than me, but he was up there on the roof, taking his turn at watch — Jack set off that air horn, and I dropped the plate I was washing, I was so startled. Broke it all over the floor, but I didn’t stop to clean it up. Just like we’d planned, I grabbed my go-bag, hustled outside, went up that ladder faster than I thought these old bones could move, and pulled it up after me. I had a rope tied to it to make that easier.

I sat up on that roof with my shotgun beside me and watched. A shotgun’s not a long distance weapon, not for zombies; I planned to use it when they were in the yard. Not that I had to. We have a lot of hunters in the neighborhood, and they were up there shooting those zombies down and shouting their kill counts to each other.

The air horn and the shooting and, heck, maybe even the shouting, brought more zombies. There were only a dozen or so at first. Pretty soon there were dozens, and then more. Jack started sounding the air horn every so often, just to keep them coming. We accounted for more than a hundred that day, and not a one got within fifty yards of our homes. I never fired my shotgun. Not then, not ever, not all during the war.

What did you do about clean-up?

Oh, man, the clean-up. If I live to be a hundred — which isn’t so far, these days — I’ll never forget that smell. See, those zombies had already got up and walked when they should’ve been dead. So we couldn’t take any chances. We couldn’t bury them or just leave them to rot, but we’d heard about the Molotov cocktails in New York, so we decided to burn them.

We weren’t going to use Molotov cocktails. The grass was all wet and green because we’d had so much rain, but throwing burning fuel all over the place didn’t sound like a good idea. So we made torches. I mean real, medieval-style torches: a stick with cloth tied around the end and sprinkled with oil. Vegetable oil. Sometimes that smell reminds me …

Anyway, me and Jack took the torches, put on our heavy hiking boots and a couple of pairs of the thickest jeans we could find, wrapped wet bandanas around our noses and mouths, and we went out to burn the zombies. We’re the oldest in the neighborhood, see.

She glances at me, grins, and adopts a dramatic pose with her hand to her forehead.

We’re old, and you’re young. You have all your lives ahead of you, and the world has left us behind. We’re no loss if we get bitten.

She drops the pose when I chuckle. I don’t believe she would do anything so dramatic.

So, we went out with a couple of hunters trailing each of us and shooting anything that didn’t look dead enough. Poke a zombie with that burning torch, and they go up like you soaked them in gasoline. We burned them all that first night. We didn’t get constant swarms like some places, so we generally had time to burn them before the next batch. A few times, we had to drop everything and run for the roofs, but otherwise, it was just a stinky, disgusting chore.

And so that’s my story. There were a lot of people just like me, all over America. I’m not special.

She’s right, of course, that defenders like her sprang up all over. But maybe this little old lady was a bit special after all.

Something’s wrong.

Don stopped, toolbox in hand, and glanced back at the job site, reviewing the wiring. No, nothing wrong there. Stowing the toolbox in the back of the truck, he started for the cab.

Something’s wrong.

Don scanned around the half-built development. At six foot five, broad-shouldered and powerful, he’d never had a problem with muggers, but one never knew …No, that’s not it either. He looked up at the heavy clouds. No thunder in them, but there was snow, and soon; he had to get home before it started. With a shrug, he climbed into the cab and set out.

Rika the cat fawned around him as he built up the fire and reluctantly took out his laptop. Its vibrations bothered him, itched at his senses, scratched at memories best locked away. Still, the sense of wrongness clung to him, and he needed to find the cause.

Countries around the world were closing their borders against a new disease.  They’re scared of a disease? Again? Pah! What do they know of disease? And yet … and yet … perhaps it’s time to go home.

Finding his way at last to the airline reservations, he booked his flight. He had a passport, of course; he’d always kept the option of leaving, though it was getting harder as the United States kept ever better records on its citizens. Another reason to go home, then.

As an independent electrician, Don made his own contracts, and within days, he had closed out all accounts and was free to fly away with Rika complaining in her carrier. He could deal with his house and other property by long distance, if at all. He didn’t need the money, after all.

Oslo was sick. Don felt it as soon as he stepped off the plane. The airport was almost deserted, quiet but for coughs and sneezes and the sobs of two people huddled together beside the boarding door. As the staff struggled to understand his Norwegian, he was forced to speak English to his own people.

The masked customs agent gave his papers the most cursory glance before coughing and waving him on, and only with difficulty did he find an agent to rent him a car. She stood back, pushing the documents and keys towards him at arm’s length, not even checking the paperwork. Oslo was sick and scared, and he was glad to escape into the countryside, even in the driving rain. Far up the coast, the rental car stalled, and he could not restart it. Well, he didn’t mind the rain, though Rika did. He climbed out and picked his way down a side road to a village deep within a fjord.

The villagers welcomed Don and Rika, bedraggled though they were. Radio and television reception was poor in the fjord and the Internet had never quite made it to them, so the villagers were eager to learn what was happening in the wider world from someone who’d actually been there.

“Is it true that nobody gets better? That everyone who gets it, dies? Or they become, uh, zombies?”

Don looked around the crowded coffee shop but didn’t see the woman who had spoken.

“That’s what I heard. There’s a lot of fear — a lot of fear. The disease is everywhere.” He gestured up the fjord outside. There was a shrinking away from him as the villagers realized that he himself might have brought the disease to them. “I don’t believe I’ve been exposed. It hadn’t reached America — or at least not the part I was in — when I left.”

“What’s done is done,” said a gray-haired elderly woman from near his elbow. “If the disease is here, it’s here. Hell, I could have brought it myself.”

“No, don’t say that!” A young woman beside her wrung her hands. “You’re fine. We’re all fine.”

“There, now, don’t worry.” The woman turned to address the crowd, raising her voice to be heard over murmurs. “All right. We’ll suppose for now that the disease isn’t here. If things are that bad outside, we are on our own. We need to make an inventory of supplies, especially weapons …”

Don stepped back to listen to her marshal the townspeople like her own army. When she confirmed he knew how to shoot and assigned him to help guard as they built a fence around the village, he decided this was the place for him.

Weeks became months. Zombies ripped apart a couple gathering firewood outside the village, and the villagers had to learn to survive in this strange new world, stalked by hidden peril. Don fought alongside them; when he was bitten by something that might once have been a man, he didn’t succumb to the disease. Several others likewise survived their injuries, and the village divided into those known to be immune to the disease and those not yet exposed. And the dead, of course.

Ingelin Holmeseth was one of those not yet exposed. Though Don had thought her lazy and unmotivated when he first met her, she pitched in with a will to make the village self-sufficient. Every open area within their hastily constructed wall was soon planted with her crops, while she enlisted everyone with free time to help weed and remove pests. Don helped with every task in the village, and the survivors came to value him. It was not quite worship, but it was close.

By late Spring, Ingelin’s crops were failing. Thick clouds, pregnant with rain, hung over the village, but no rain fell. As Don weeded beside her, Ingelin looked up at the clouds, wringing her hands. “God, why doesn’t it rain? We need that rain so bad!”

“Do you pray to the Christ?”

“Uh, what?”

“You said ‘God’. You meant the Christ, did you not?”

“It’s just an expression and —”

“The Christ has failed us.” Don stood and waved at the empty houses whose residents had died, at the wall that held off the monsters, at the guards patrolling with their rifles ready. “The Christ has failed us, and magic has come back into the world.”

“Magic has always —”

“Yes, of course, in a small way.” How could he, of all people deny that? “But those monsters are magic made manifest. They are supernatural. You must see that.” As she gave the wall a fearful glance, he went on, “So it’s time for us to turn back to the gods who have not failed us. The old gods.”

“Old gods?”

“Old gods like Thor. Pray to Thor for rain, and he may answer.”

“You mean, like, ‘Oh great Thor, please give us rain’?”

“You don’t believe. Thor will not answer if you mouth the words without belief. But he hears, and if you believe, he may answer.”

“Do you believe? In Thor, I mean?”

“I have always believed.”

Ingelin looked up at the clouds, tightening her lips. After a moment, she turned to Don. “I tried the Tarot last night. Just three cards; I wasn’t centered enough for a full reading.” Don raised an eyebrow, and Ingelin shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah, maybe you don’t believe, but the cards can speak to me. I got the Hanged Man, reversed. That means rigid thinking, like maybe you’re hanging onto a fantasy that makes you a victim. Then I got the Wheel of Fortune. That was reversed, too, so it means bad luck, but maybe the bad luck will end if you adapt and begin again.” She looked around the field and then up at the clouds once more.

“And the third card?”

“The Tower,” she whispered. “The Tower is struck by lightning. It means disruption and overthrowing wrong ideas. Wrong ideas.” She looked back at Don. “The Tower stands strong in the storm. You see, the cards do speak to me!”

Ingelin’s was a pure soul, full of faith. She closed her eyes, clasped her hands, and prayed, truly prayed, “Oh great Thor, please give us rain. Our need is so great. We’ll — or I’ll, that is — worship you forever if you help us now.”

Drawing on that tendril of faith, Don closed his eyes and pulled.

The rain fell.

Don stayed for over a year, but at length he bade the villagers farewell and strode away up the abandoned and deteriorating road. Much as they hated to see him go, they would not hold him captive, though Ingelin kept Rika. The cat had produced a healthy litter of six kittens, and Don would not take those innocents into danger. Not that he himself was in danger, strengthened as he was by the faith of the village; the zombies felt his power and fled at his approach.

As he reached the old highway, he stopped to look back to the west, to distant Iceland. They had officially forsaken him a thousand years before, but old beliefs die very hard, and he’d been sustained by a trickle of half-embarrassed faith until just decades before when the last believer died, forcing him to live as a man. He would return to Iceland in time, but for now he would seek out other surviving communities in Norway.

Donar Wodansson — Thor Odinsson — had come home.

Flying is for the birds!

That’s what I thought, waking up in my dorm room two years ago, after the near-disaster of the party. And it had gone so well!

At first.

Going to college was strange and exciting. Mom didn’t want me to go; she didn’t think I could handle it. But it’s not like I didn’t know what the outside world was like; we had the Internet at home, after all. She is perfectly happy living in our little valley and only going into town once a month, but I need more human contact. Much more.

I put all the paperwork together, and I got admitted to OSU. I had to take a bunch of tests since I was home-schooled, but Mom’s an excellent teacher, and I had no trouble. So there I was: seventeen and out on my own for the very first time. I had made some friends. Not close friends, and absolutely no lovers. I’ve definitely learned from Mom’s mistakes, even though I personally am one of them.

The drinking age is twenty-one, but students pretty much ignored that. And, on a beautiful Spring evening, a group of about thirty underage students decided to have a party by the lake. I went with them as a designated driver. I can’t drink because of the risk that I might lose control.

We got out there, some kids built fires, and we all stood or sat around and talked and drank. With a new moon and not a cloud in the sky, it was very dark away from the fires, and couples were sneaking off into the surrounding woods.

I sneaked off down the road, past the woods, and into a field with the new grain just showing itself. Even without my wings, I have much better night vision and hearing than normal people, so after a careful look around, I was sure I was unobserved.

I called my wings.

My wings are glorious, beautiful. Their feathers are deep brown, barred with black and tipped with white. My wingspan is about twenty feet, which is impressive, but clearly not enough to support my weight. On the other hand, my wings come and go with my will, so they are not exactly bound by physics anyway. When my wings come, so do my enhanced night vision and hearing. I checked around again, listened to the lovebirds whispering back by the lake, and launched.

With a few wingbeats, I was up, far above the woods and the drunken students, up in the clear and beautiful air. If any of them did look up, all they might see was a few stars briefly occluded. They would have no idea what was happening.

I had not flown in six months, not since coming to college, and I revelled in the feeling, swooping and diving and twirling in sheer joy.

Until I heard the helicopter.

It was a long way off and no normal person would have seen or heard it. It took just seconds for me to recognize that it was coming my way; it was coming for me.

I power-dived to the field, straightening up just feet above the grain, and streaked for the trees. At the last moment, I flared my wings to kill my forward speed, dismissed them, and hit the ground running. My night vision lingers for a few minutes after I dismiss my wings, so I had no trouble racing through the moonless woods, leaping over downed trees and avoiding low branches. By the time the helicopter turned its searchlight on the field, I was back among the kids.

Everyone panicked. It made no sense that the police would send a helicopter to break up an underage beer bash, but that’s what appeared to be happening, and everyone ran for the cars. Jacob, Michael, and Emily had come with me; they piled into my car along with Hannah, who had attached herself to Jacob during the party. Mine was not the first car to leave, nor the second, but it was the third. I thought that put me far enough back that I didn’t appear to have superior knowledge, but also that we were unlikely to be caught.

I told the other four to duck down out of sight (Hannah and Jacob enthusiastically complied), and I drove exactly one mile below the speed limit, all the way back to the dorms. Half a dozen official-looking cars passed us, but no one stopped us and we made it back safely. We learned the next day that the last few students had been stopped and questioned about a large drone, but no one was arrested, and we were all very sober the next morning.

Flying is for the birds!

I understood what had happened, of course. The entire nation is crisscrossed with radar, especially out here in the plains and the low rolling hills, and my flight must have shown up on every radar for fifty miles. I had just thought that a big “drone”, many miles from any airport, would be disregarded. More fool I!

I could just stick to the ground, but that was a terrible prospect. Just six months without flying had made me so desperate to fly that I’d become careless. I knew I couldn’t go forever on the ground. Of course, I could go home to Mom, but that was an absolute last resort.

Don’t get me wrong; Mom’s cool. Imagine the average mother seeing her baby girl suddenly sprout wings and try to fly away. I think she’d hesitate too long, thinking she’d lost her mind. Not my mom. She grabbed me by the ankle, hauled me down, folded my wings for me, and carried me inside. (Not that I remember any of this, but she’s told me often enough.)

And if the average mother had managed to catch the kid and take her inside, she’d think she’d lost her mind again when the wings just vanished. Not my mom. She experimented, carrying me in and out (keeping a tight grip all the while), and soon concluded that my wings only appeared outside at night. She modified a dog harness to keep me from flying off, and informed the trustees that she needed a nice isolated property somewhere.

It’s nice being a trust-fund baby.

The trustees found this house in a deep wooded valley with only one road in and out, and pretty soon there we were. Keeping her baby girl leashed any time we went outside, she encouraged me to learn to summon the wings and dismiss them at will. By the time I had control of them (I was about five), we could have moved back to town, but she’d discovered that she loved the isolation for her own sake. We stayed. And I flew within the valley, staying below the lines of the hills to avoid being seen. It didn’t occur to me — then — that I was also staying below the radar.

For lack of a better idea, I stayed at the college and kept going to class. All the classes were pretty easy (Mom is an excellent teacher), but the only one I was interested in was the one on cryptids. My father must have been a cryptid, after all. Mom had an affair with him in college, and somehow the birth control failed and here I am. By the time she realized she was pregnant, it was summer, and he’d graduated and disappeared. Even the private investigators couldn’t find him.

Maybe he literally disappeared. I can’t, though. I’ve tried.

There were no reports of cryptids like him. Or like me.

Summer came, and I went home to Mom. Glorious freedom to fly! After a month, though, I was lonely. It doesn’t bother her to be out there by herself, but I just can’t stand it.

We sat down to look for some place where I could stay under the radar and still be around people.

And that’s how I came to working here, at the Palo Duro Restaurant. I’m a good waitress, and the patrons love me. The cryptid-chasers especially love me, because when I’m off duty I’ll sit with them and talk about cryptids. (That class comes in very handy.) They always ask me about rumors of the Great Owl of Palo Duro canyon, and I always tell them that, sadly, I’ve never seen it. I’ll spend hours with them going over maps of the canyon as they decide where and when to watch for it.

For all their fancy gear, they’ve never managed to spot the Great Owl.

The answer came to him in a dream. It was the old dream which he had not had for many years.

He is riding home from school on his bicycle. He knows, as he did not know then, that he must get home, must get home at once. But the street gets ever longer, and though he pedals with all his might, he has not yet reached the corner when the explosion rocks the neighborhood. Though he knows he must not, he stops as he stopped then and looks around in confusion. When he sees the flames rising above the house before him, he remembers and he rides …

He sees the house in flames, in pieces. He hits the curb, leaps off his bike, runs up the lawn, but Mr. Henderson, running out of the house next door, tackles him. “No, boy, no! You can’t go in there!”

“But my mother –“

“No! It’s too late, boy, too late!”

He jolted awake and rubbed a trembling hand across his eyes. Too late! Yes, he was much, much too late — decades too late, in fact. He snapped on the light, put on the glasses that lay on the bedside table, and gazed blankly at the key that hung on the wall. Too late! The answer came back to him then, the gossamer strands of thought that we all bring back from dreamland.

Snatching up the pen and pad from the bedside table, he began to write, frantically gathering the thoughts even as they faded. The answer was there, he knew. Grammar, spelling, nothing mattered but to get the thoughts on paper. He had three pages of notes before the memory of the dreamtime answer faded entirely. Eagerly, he began to read them … and his shoulders slumped in disappointment.

Gibberish!

He turned the pages over as if looking for enlightenment on their backs, but after a moment, turned them face up again. The answer was there if he could only find it. Collecting the pages, he rose and moved to his tiny study and his cluttered desk. Reviewing them slowly again, he saw that this statement was connected to that statement, and if you assumed that this over here could be proven, then …

He pulled out one of his reference books, one to which he had been a contributor before he retired — before he was retired, that is, a thought which still rankled. But such thoughts were irrelevant. What mattered was the answer.

The sun was shining through the west window of his study and his hand was painfully cramped when he finally came out of his trance of concentration. Massaging his hand, he looked around the study, at papers thrown to the floor, at books piled high on the desk and on the floor, at business cards that he no longer needed marking important spots in the books. Precariously balanced on one pile was an empty plate that had held yesterday’s leftovers; beside the pile was an empty pitcher and a glass. He found that he was fully dressed. He smiled wryly. Yesterday, if he had found himself dressed and with evidence of food and water, but with no recollection of dressing or collecting food and water, he would have had fearful thoughts of Alzheimer’s or some creeping dementia. Today — well, that was the sort of thing he used to do when he was deep in thought. He hadn’t done it since retirement … he cut off that thought and looked back at the handwritten sheets in front of him.

It was the answer. No question about it. It relied on some obscure findings in physics on the nature of time and it could be wrong — but it could be tested. It could be demonstrated.

I can build a time machine.

He looked around the study again. It seemed as if the world must have staggered in its orbit when he realized that, but the objects around him were quite unchanged. Only he had changed. Gathering the precious papers to him, he walked out into the living room.

Her picture hung on the south wall. Not a portrait, it was simply a candid photograph that he had had enlarged. She was looking down and to the left, smiling gently at something outside the camera’s vision. He wondered, as he had so many times, what she was smiling at: a kitten? a flower? himself? “I’m coming,” he told her softly. “This time I won’t be too late.” He thought of the key hanging in the bedroom, as one like it had hung in every bedroom since he was fifteen. It was not the original, of course — that was in a safe deposit box — but it was a good copy. He would take it with him in the time machine. He imagined how it would happen.

He would take the time machine back to an hour or so before the explosion. He would go to the house and knock on the door. Pound on the door, in fact. She would be napping on the sofa; that was what the police determined afterwards. She would be napping, and she would hear him pounding and come to the door. Or, if she didn’t hear him, he would unlock the door and go inside and get her. He would claim that he had smelled the gas and that the door was unlocked.

It was probably better that it had taken him so many decades to find the answer. If he had come for her when he was a young man, she would have recognized him and that would have been difficult. And if he had come for her when he was in middle age, she would have been afraid of a strange man. But an old man like himself? She would not be afraid. She would be thinking of the gas instead of worrying about his intentions, and they would run out together and call the gas company.

Maybe the house would explode and maybe it would not, but she would be safe. And when his younger self came up on the bicycle, he would quietly leave her and then … well, it didn’t matter what then. He would go find a shelter and claim that he was homeless and penniless and without family that would acknowledge him, all of which would be entirely true, and he would finish his life knowing that she was living out hers.

That was the good dream that had sustained him for so long. The years and the decades had worn away his memories of her; he could summon no memory of her voice or her face. This picture was all he had and all that remained of her.

Not all.

He turned slowly and with a strange reluctance to the displays on the north wall. There were three of them, collages of photographs. The center one showed his own family. The picture in the middle was the wedding picture of himself and Myra, so long ago. They had met in a physics class and she had seen something in the painfully shy and driven young man he had been. They had married three months after they met, and their marriage had endured until her death at age seventy-three, just two years ago. The time machine will not help Myra. I have no cure for cancer. Maybe someday …

Their marriage had produced three children: Christina, Marianne, and Victoria. Their pictures were part of the collage, along with the pictures of their eleven children, and their four grandchildren: just four so far, but another on the way.

He stepped closer to the picture, searching for the picture of Jodie. She was his oldest great-grandchild and had presented the collage to him. Terribly shy and conscious of the importance of the task, the five-year-old had bungled the presentation and dropped the collage on his foot, then burst into tears. Her father had then made things worse by assuring his grandfather that she was a brilliant child who was already learning to dance and read music. The mortally embarrassed little girl had fled to her mother and had not dared to approach her great-grandfather for the rest of his birthday party.

Ah, there was her picture: a sweet little girl with a nervous smile. Some kind hand had written the genealogies of each descendant under the picture to spare an old man’s memory: Josephine Sanders, daughter of John Sanders, son of Christina Sanders. He suspected Marianne’s hand; she had always been a thoughtful child.

So: Josephine Sanders, daughter of John Sanders. The family liked to call John “Doc John” because he was the only “real” doctor among them. There were eight PhDs, counting himself, but only one MD, and that was John. He and Janet had met in the emergency room when he was a student and she brought her mother in with a broken nose. When Josephine was born, her mother had sent numerous presents for the baby — and the rake that had broken her nose, sporting a large pink bow and a note reading “The luckiest rake anyone ever stepped on.”

So: John Sanders, son of Christina Sanders. Christina had married Daniel Sanders on the rebound. Her first husband — he couldn’t remember the lecher’s name and didn’t care to — had betrayed her with an unknown number of women. When she learned the truth, she had had to go through the humiliating process of being tested and treated for venereal disease. She never told her father which disease, but he knew that at least it could not have been HIV or herpes, neither of which are curable. To escape the pain and the shame, she had fled halfway across the country, fetching up in Memphis, where she took a job as a school administrator. Daniel had worked alongside her for years, patiently gaining her friendship and, at last, her love. Their marriage was still solid, he thought, looking at their wedding picture in the collage, and they had raised four good children.

His eyes went back to Jodie. She looks nervous. She should be nervous. Her great-grandfather wants to kill her.

No! Never to kill! Only to save my mother!

But part of his mind was still working on the implications.

I was planning to go into biochemistry. I never thought of physics. When my mother died, I went into physics because I wanted to study the nature of time. If she hadn’t died …

The good dream was coming back to him, but it was beginning to be a nightmare.

He would pound on the door and wake her. They would run to a neighbor’s house to call the gas company. Then his younger self would ride up and he would leave them together. She would be alive and then …

And then his younger self would never consider going into physics. He would go into biochemistry and he would never meet Myra. She would meet another young physics student and she would never know of the life she might have had. He would meet another woman and they would have children, but they would not be the same children. There would never have been a Christina, and she would never have met the lecher and never have moved to Memphis; she would never have met Daniel and John would not have been born. Janet would have brought her mother to the emergency room and some other young man would have treated her, and maybe some other family would have received the rake.

There would be no Jodie.

He continued to stare at Jodie’s picture, his mind whirling. He could tell his younger self … but even if he knew the importance of going into physics and meeting Myra, their lives would not be the same — my mother bouncing her first grandchild on her knee, that same gentle smile on her face — and they could never produce the same children. Never the same grandchildren, never the same great-grandchildren. Never Jodie. And not just his own descendants.

He tore his gaze away and looked at the other two collages, similar displays showing the descendants of his brother and sister. And besides them, how many of his students had met and married other students in his classes? How many had come to his university to study under him who might have studied elsewhere? What of their children and grandchildren?

But there will be others! There will be children who never existed because she died! What about them?

His gaze returned to Jodie. The number of possible descendants of any woman is unthinkably, unimaginably huge. Out of all those possibilities, Jodie was the one possibility that had been actualized. Did she not have the right to remain actual? Those other might-have-beens — what right had he to take away her actuality for their benefit? To save his mother would not be to kill Jodie — no, nothing like that. She would disappear back into the realm of probability. She would not die because she would never have lived. No one would even know that she ever might have lived —

No one will know but me.

He would know. He would know when he brought his mother out of the house that his children, his grandchildren, his little Jodie, were gone forever — had unhappened. He would know that Jodie would never learn to read music, would never learn to dance, would never drop a picture on his foot …

He looked down at the papers in his hand and found that they had somehow been crumpled in his fist. He laid them on the nearest coffee table and smoothed them carefully.

The Uncertainty Principle bites everyone. Even here. If these figures are correct, no time machine, not even the best of them, will ever be able to go back more than about eighty years. I would have time. Sixty years since the Explosion, maybe five years to build the machine. I would have plenty of time. If I don’t have a heart attack or something, but I’m in good shape.

He was trying not to think of the implications, but still his eyes went back to Jodie’s picture. He stared at it for a long moment and then turned back to his mother’s picture. She was the possibility that was actualized out of the unthinkable number of people that could have lived. She had had her moment of reality — too short and too painful, but she had had it.

Must I take away the reality of your descendants to spare you?

He looked down and found that the papers were in his hand, crumpled again. This time he did not smooth them.

This field is obscure. I’m the world’s leading expert in this field and I almost couldn’t get it. It might be that no one else will think of it for a hundred years.

He turned back to Jodie.

If it is not discovered again for a hundred years, it will be too late to make you unhappen. You will be safe. All of you will be safe. If it is not discovered again. If no one sees these papers.

Swiftly, not wanting to think of what he was doing, he strode to his study and hastily pushed the papers — all of them, even the scribblings of his dreamtime thoughts — into the shredder. As an after-thought, he pulled all the bookmarks out of his books and reshelved them, somehow putting them in the right places despite the tears that blurred his vision. At last it was done. He returned to the living room to face his mother.

And her smile.