Chapter Text
The future location of Sikes, Louisiana.
66,038,897 B.C.
Late Summer
Daybreak.
The sky is roaring. No—the sky itself is the roar. A brief glimpse of eerie green-yellow dawn is overtaken by clouds, horizontal rain, and sailing debris as the storm moves in. This is hurricane country, and all the residents know to seek shelter. They have evolved for this, and could no more resist the urge to take cover than the urge to eat, or mate, or flee a predator. Under normal circumstances, most of them would survive. The ancient rhythm would continue uninterrupted.
Splashing through the beginnings of a storm surge are two organisms that did not evolve in this place. They belong to a dry grassland in another continent and another time, but have a peculiar habit of showing up everywhere (and, in the case of these specimens, everywhen). Both move across open ground, doing their best to stand against the wind and dodge flying tree branches, because they know what nothing else here is equipped to know: Some time before dawn today, roughly 800 miles to the south across what will one day be called the Gulf of Mexico, a rock fell from the sky.
Unfortunately for most vertebrate life on Earth, this rock was very big, and it was moving very, very fast. When it landed it threw a cloud of smaller rocks, magma, ash, and who-knows-what up to heaven, some of it all the way into low Earth orbit. In the coming months it will dim the planet’s view of the sun, killing off plants, then herbivores, then the carnivores that love them. Notably, the death toll will include all non-avian dinosaurs. None of this is immediately relevant to the two visitors running through wind, rain, and plant-based missiles. They have not been living off the land, and carry ample food of their own. To them, what’s more interesting about the rock is that it fell into a shallow sea. Before it went bang, it went sploosh. When rocks go sploosh they kick up ripples, which travel away from the impact site and keep going until they either hit something or use up their energy and settle back into the calm. The ripple from this rock is a hundred feet high, travels at the speed of a commercial jetliner, and carries the force of a billion Hiroshima bombs.
In short, the visitors alone understand that this hurricane is a distraction.
The taller one runs ahead. His extremely practical eyewear—heavy black-framed glasses, strapped to his cranium with a wide elastic band—will never be fashionable at any point in human history, but they allow him to turn his bug-eyed visage into the rain without having to squint. His short hair, nearly black, is plastered against his scalp. He wears hiking boots, khaki cargo pants, and a matching multi-pocketed vest, all of which are saturated with water. Despite those and the heavy-duty canvas rucksack on his back, he charges forward. The wind has rendered all trees hazardous, and he is heading straight for the tallest one around.
The shorter visitor pounds a dozen yards behind. Her face is bare, her cheeks red against the wind. She runs with her head down, glancing up every few steps just to see that she’s on target, then squeezing her eyes shut against the air, water, and assorted particles trying to blind her. Having chosen a different kind of practicality than her companion’s, she juts out of the landscape in high-tech running shoes, a pink camo T-shirt, and athletic pants made from a synthetic material that barely interacts with water. Her blonde hair, wet and darkened, is held back in a tight braid. Despite her obvious limp, she is gaining ground.
The man reaches the base of the giant cycad first and begins his ascent. The woman gets there moments later and follows. Both are seasoned climbers and they make rapid progress along different routes upward, pressing their bodies tightly against the massive trunk for some small protection against the deadly wind. The woman, slowed by her sprained right ankle but unencumbered by heavy clothing and bags, pulls ahead. They are three quarters of their way up, her feet level with his face, when they sense, as much as hear, a change. Both turn to face the coast only to have their fears confirmed. The water was just an opening act, and now the Water has arrived. An enormous wave breaks on the sloping shore two hundred yards away—it would be farther, but for the hurricane—and the sea surges inland as an oddly smooth and gracile force.
The preferred name is “tsunami,” of course, the man thinks as he hauls his pack further up the knobbed trunk, but this illustrates perfectly the phenomenon of massive sea waves—generated by earthquakes, asteroids, or what-have-you—taking the form of a tremendous inrushing tide, hence the now disfavored “tidal wave.” He reflects another moment. It’s a good thing she can’t hear me thinking this, or she’d—
His reverie ends as the tree begins to shudder. The wave has arrived. Thrown off-balance, he loses his grasp on a slick, wet notch in its heavily crenellated skin. He maintains his foothold, but with no handgrips in reach he begins to tip backward. Flailing arms slow his fall, but they will not stop it.
The woman above him has been watching the Water overtake their tree, and sees everything. She shouts his name—futilely, since no human voice could be audible under the circumstances—and dangles a leg for him to grab. He obliges. It is her right leg, and the sudden yank sends fire from her increasingly grapefruit-like ankle up through her spinal column. Never mind that. She wraps her arms around a large accommodating branch, offers her other foot, then feels the weight get even worse as he bear-hugs her legs together and loses his own foot grip. Hanging for dear life, she twists her legs to one side and crunches, drawing her knees (and anyone dangling by her shins) up toward her chest. She screams, her core muscles burning from the exertion, but it is enough of a boost for her climbing partner to recover and find something to hold. If we survive, she muses, that’s going to hurt for a week.
The diluvian current beneath them presses on unabated, fed by second- and third-order waves from the impact. The tree shudders and shifts violently, just a small angle adjustment at the base that is magnified by height. The tsunami is slowly uprooting it. At the top, a hand lunges onto a wooden structure barely distinguishable from a shipping crate and grabs hard on one side of the entry door. A second hand, just as wiry and muscular but missing the ends of the two outermost fingers, comes to assist, and together they haul their owner up and inside with a great violent yank. Before she can right herself, her partner’s shadow appears in the doorway. His boots are all wrong for shoving into narrow toe holds, and he hand-over-hands his way in with arm strength alone.
The world shifts again, and this time both climbers begin to feel gravity slowly re-orienting itself as their tree loses stability. The woman rolls onto her back, shimmies feet-first to the door, and squats against it with each foot braced against one side of the entrance. She sits up, her abs already filing complaints about that last bout of heroics. Crossing her arms one over the other, she reaches them to the man, who is having trouble getting his pack over the hump and through the door. He grabs her right wrist with his right hand, her left wrist with his left. She mirrors. They lock eyes and count wordlessly, with nodding heads. One. Two. Three. Now.
Just as the torrent of water digs up the last of the great cycad’s thousand-year roots—
Just as a branch torn from one of its neighbors flies with terrible speed at the entryway—
Just as a patch of sky clears for a brief moment to reveal the column of ash and fire still climbing from the impact site—
And just as their tiny abode begins an implacable tumble to the ground and the flood—
Just then, the two of them fly from one end of the box to the other, landing in a tangle. His right hand and her left clasp each other. His left hand and her partial right grope frantically for something that wasn’t there when they left, and they find it. A book. They shout in unison, they shout at speed, and they shout the top of their lungs.
“I WISH WE WERE THERE!”
Cotton falls over the cries of wind and water. The view outside loses focus. As the world around them starts to spin, the two partners quietly and utterly collapse onto the cramped floor. The woman casually tilts her head to one side, bringing her face-to-face with the man.
“Jinx.”
And then the world is quiet.
September 14th, 1996
First Journal Entry
My brother and I have our very own endocrine disorder. It’s true! It isn’t named after us because we’re “minors” and it would break confidentiality or whatever, but it’s ours anyway. Symptoms include rapid but surprisingly normal aging, crippling delusions, and short-term memory problems. Etiology unknown.
Our parents started noticing something weird around the time I was eight and he was nine: Though we’d both been on the short side of average our entire lives, we were suddenly shooting above our classmates’ heads. We were also dropping the ball on things you would expect a couple of really bright kids to be on top of, like keeping track of homework and remembering conversations from the previous night. For a while all the doctors brushed off Mom and Dad’s concerns, saying that we both seemed to be starting early (but not freakishly early) puberty, and that growth spurts and reduced executive function were to be expected. Over time, though, it got harder and harder to pretend something wasn’t up. The aging got faster—fast enough to become a social problem in school. We also got bolder about telling a few important people why we were growing up too quickly, which is when the psych evals began.
Jack and I agreed on a policy of brutal honesty. We would tell the shrinks the whole truth, and even though we knew it sounded crazy, we were sure the evidence would make our case for us. The story we both told, independently and in different rooms, matched our symptoms in a way no other could. Turns out, that was a case of youthful naïveté; adults don’t believe things just because they make sense. To be believed, a story has to fit in the little box everyone keeps in their head to remind them what can and can’t be. You need special permission to reshape the box, and a couple of late elementary school kids who claim to be in their mid-teens don’t qualify.
But this is my account, and I get to build the box. For the record, I am not sick. I’m not sure exactly how old I am anymore, but I know I’ve lived every second of my body’s age. I’ve lost track of all the fantastic things I’ve seen and done, but I saw them because they were real, not because of a mistake in my brain chemistry. I am fine—no, better than fine. My name is Anne Smith, and I am a time traveler.