Work Text:
mikey 14:43
don’t open the door
The message arrived to Ray’s cell phone in the middle of the afternoon one day, when Ray was enjoying a break between cleaning up after lunch and preparing for the evening’s guitar lessons. He blinked down at the message, not comprehending. Had Mikey meant to send it to someone else? He began to type up a reply asking exactly that, when there was a sharp rap on the door.
Ray jumped a little. It was silly to be spooked, of course. It was just a coincidence. Maybe it was getting to him, though, because he walked over to the door quietly and peered through the peephole before opening it.
A man stood outside. No one Ray knew, dressed in a plain black suit. The strange man shifted his weight and Ray realised that there was another man standing behind him, dressed the same way with a nearly identical haircut.
What the fuck?
Ray was still holding his phone in one hand, so he tapped out a quick message to Mikey.
Ray 14:45
What’s going on?
Mikey’s response was nigh instantaneous. He must have sent it as Ray was sending his question.
mikey 14:45
go out the fire escape
Ray 14:45
WHAT
As ridiculous as the suggestion was, Ray realised he was stepping back towards the window which led to the fire escape without having even made a conscious decision to do so. He stopped by the window. From the door came another knock, a little louder than the last. He sent Mikey another message.
Ray 14:46
You seriously want me to climb down the fire escape?
mikey 14:46
no
Oh, thank God. Maybe this had all been some ridiculous prank and things were about to go back to normal.
mikey 14:47
they probably have someone waiting at the bottom. climb up and go through a window to one of the higher floors.
Seriously?
There was another noise from the door. It was too loud to be a knock; it sounded more like someone had rammed into it. Were they going to try to break the door down?
Ray slid the window open and stuck his head through it. He took a quick look around and spotted another man standing against the wall of the building, where he was almost out of sight. The man looked up at Ray, and Ray’s heart nearly stopped.
He grabbed the ladder and began pulling himself up the fire escape, as fast as he could. He lived on the third floor, surely he could climb up at least one floor before the man caught up to him?
He paused on the landing and looked down. The other man was climbing up the fire escape behind him and the gap between them was shrinking. Ray threw himself the rest of the way up to the fourth floor and slapped his hand against the window.
A young man was inside the apartment, slouched down on the couch with the TV blaring. He jumped when Ray hit the window, and Ray felt a little bad for scaring the guy. He snatched his wallet out of his pocket and took out a $20 note, pressing it up against the glass. When this all turned out to be some stupid prank, he’d make Mikey pay him back. Yeah.
As alarmed as the young guy seemed, the money caught his attention and he opened the window. “What’s going on, man?” he asked, but Ray didn’t answer, just shoved the bill into his hand and hurried through the apartment towards the door.
The hallway was empty, so Ray hurried towards the elevators. He hit the down button and checked his phone while he waited.
mikey 14:51
don’t take the elevator
Well shit.
mikey 14:51
take the stairs down to the second floor
Well, why not? After bribing his way into some stranger’s apartment, using the stairs wasn’t a big deal. Ray paused in the stairwell and sent Mikey a quick message.
Ray 14:52
Why the second floor?
mikey 14:53
you can climb out a window at the back of the building. there’s a carport there, get onto the roof of the carport and climb down to the ground
What the fuck? How did Mikey know all of this? He knew the layout of Ray’s building better than Ray did. He considered sending another message to Mikey to question him about it, but decided not to. It would be easier face to face.
He reached the back of the building and looked through the window. From this angle, the carport looked a very long way down, and not really sturdy enough to bear Ray’s weight. He sent Mikey a quick message.
Ray 14:56
Are you serious about this, Mikey?
mikey 14:57
fuck yes i am now hurry the fuck up before they find you
Shit, okay. Ray slid the window open and stuck his head and shoulders through. So far so good. It couldn’t be that far, surely. He was only on the second floor, after all. He stuck one leg through the window and straddled the windowsill, awkwardly turning around so that he could face back towards the wall and grab the windowsill with both hands.
With his feet dangling, Ray gradually lowered himself out the window. His arms burned and the corners of the metal window frame dug painfully into his hands. He tried to look down to see how far it was, but he was too close to the wall. There was nothing for it but to let go and hope for the best.
Holding his breath, Ray pulled one hand away from the window. Almost immediately, one foot touched a solid surface. Ray yelped and quickly brought his other foot down as well, finding his balance on the slightly uneven roof of the carport. He straightened up and realised with some embarrassment that the window wasn’t so high up after all. Well, it had looked a lot further down from up there.
Ray picked his way across the carport roof as it creaked alarmingly under his feet. At the far end stood a row of trash cans, and Ray was able to step down onto one of those and from there jump down to the ground.
He took his phone from his pocket to send one last message.
Ray 15:01
I don’t know what’s going on, but there better be a really good explanation
mikey 15:01
i’ve ordered an uber for you, it should be there any minute
***
The Uber took Ray to a mall, where he found Mikey and Gerard sitting in the food court with a huge bowl of fries between them.
The drive had given Ray a bit of time to think, try to make sense of what had happened and figure out what he was going to say to Mikey when he saw him. He’d known the Ways for about six months. They were kind of weird, but in a normal sort of way. At least, that was what he had thought.
Ray took a seat at Gerard and Mikey’s small table and helped himself to a handful of fries.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded, trying to keep his voice low.
Neither of them looked particularly happy. Gerard in particular was almost glaring at Ray, which he thought was a bit rich.
“I’m really sorry we got you mixed up in all this,” Mikey said, his expression twisted with guilt.
“I just want to understand what ‘all this’ is,” said Ray.
Mikey wouldn’t quite meet Ray’s eyes, slumping back in his seat with his head down. “It’s a long story. And it’s going to sound kind of crazy.”
“I just climbed out of a second story window,” said Ray. “I really think I deserve an explanation.”
Mikey nodded. “It started about three years ago,” he said. “I started getting these weird messages. Text messages, or emails, whatever.”
“Okay,” Ray said. He couldn’t figure out where this was going at all.
“The messages would tell me to do things. Go somewhere, talk to someone, move something. Little things like that.”
“O… kay,” said Ray again. Mikey gave him a shrewd look.
“What would you do if you got a text message like that?” he asked.
“I… don’t know.”
“Yeah, you do. You’d ignore it, wouldn’t you? That’s what I did.”
“Okay, yeah,” Ray admitted. He was uncomfortably aware of the way Gerard was watching him like a hawk, as though he was waiting for the slightest sign of weakness. “I’d ignore it.”
“Right. I got this text message telling me to go to some seedy bar and give this guy a lift home. I just assumed it was a joke and deleted it.”
Mikey paused and picked a couple of fries out of the bowl, but then seemed to realise he didn’t want to eat them. He broke the fries in half and dropped them on the table.
“The next day, we saw a news story about a young mother and her kid who’d been killed in an accident. They’d been hit by a drunk driver. Some guy on his way home from that bar.”
Ray was lost for anything to say. Mikey was clearly still torn up with guilt over the whole thing, but it was so bizarre.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ray said.
“I know,” Mikey replied, but he didn’t seem very reassured. “It was so stupid. Of course I ignored the message. It seemed so random and pointless, but you know, even if it had said ‘Do this thing or two people will die’, I still might not have taken any notice. Why would I? It’s not like a text message can predict the future, right?”
“Right?” Ray said, uncertainly.
“So two days later, I got another message, and this time I didn’t ignore it. I was supposed to go to some house and knock on the door. Gerard came along, even though he didn’t really believe in it yet.”
“Mikey never showed me the first message,” Gerard said. “When he told me what had happened, I just figured it was some weird coincidence.”
“We went to this house and knocked on the door a couple of times. No one answered, but then we smelled smoke. Something had shorted out and started a fire. We called the fire department and they sent out a couple of trucks. It was fine, I think they had to repaint their kitchen. But after that was when it started to get strange.”
Mikey paused, glanced at Ray as though he was checking for a reaction. Fair enough too, because what he’d described so far had already been pretty strange. Ray raised his eyebrows and waited.
“The next day, I… remembered,” Mikey said. “I remembered… I don’t know, hearing something? Reading something? I knew that an old lady and her two grandkids had died in a house fire the day before. I said to Gerard… something went wrong, it didn’t work.”
Mikey paused and Gerard took up the story. “I told Mikey, no, we stopped the fire. There were no news reports of anyone dying in a fire. We drove past the house and it was still there. But every time we do something, change something, Mikey remembers what would have happened if we hadn’t acted.”
“How?” Ray asked, even though he realised immediately that it was a ridiculous question. Mikey and Gerard laughed, but they weren’t mean about it.
“We’ve been trying to figure that out for three years. Still not a clue.”
“Then… where do the messages come from?”
Mikey shrugged. “No idea. I wish I knew. Wish I could send a reply. I’d have a few things to say to them, whoever they are.” He sighed, and the weight which had briefly lifted seemed to settle over him again. “It started to get to me,” he said. “I’d pick up a newspaper, and read about a shooting, or an accident, or a suicide, and I’d think… why do I get messages telling me to save this person, and not that person? Maybe… I hope, it’s because I’m only getting messages about the cases where I’m likely to succeed.
“But maybe… maybe whoever’s sending these messages is making choices, deciding that this life is worth saving and this other life isn’t. There’s only so many hours in the day, after all, I couldn’t save everyone even if I tried, so why wouldn’t they pick and choose? Oh, this person’s in medical school and volunteers at an animal shelter on the weekend, but this other person just got out of prison, and Mikey can only get to one of you in time, so…”
Mikey paused for breath. Ray desperately wanted to reach out to him to offer some kind of comfort, but he didn’t quite dare. It was hard, seeing Mike look so troubled and knowing that as long as Ray had known him, he’d been carrying the weight of this responsibility. It really wasn’t the time to draw attention to his own feelings, though.
“I changed my phone number,” Mikey said. “Deleted all my email and social media accounts, everything. I felt guilty, because I should be happy to help people, shouldn’t I? But it was too much, and why couldn’t they just choose someone else? If I never changed anything then I’d stop getting those weird messed up memories and I could stop thinking about it. I just wanted it to stop.”
It was no mystery how that had turned out. “But it didn’t stop,” Ray said.
“No,” Mikey said, shaking his head. “I got messages on my new phone, and sent to my new email address. It was… there was no way out.”
Mikey fell silent, and after a moment Gerard picked up the story.
“We decided that, if Mikey couldn’t stop the messages we’d just have to make do, and be happy that we could help people. So we kind of threw ourselves into it. Tried to be a bit organised about it and really make a difference. We told a few friends what was going on, people we thought might be able to help. But then…”
Gerard’s expression dimmed and he looked down his hands, clasped together tightly on top of the table. “We thought we’d picked trustworthy people, but one of them told someone about what was happening, and suddenly we had these people after us.”
“The people who came to my place today?” Ray guessed. Gerard nodded. “Who are they?”
“Those guys? CIA, we’re pretty sure,” Mikey said.
“As far as we can tell, most of them believe Mikey is some kind of foreign agent. That he’s getting intelligence from another country, and that what he’s doing is basically espionage.”
Gerard looked at Ray’s face for a second and laughed quietly. It must have been obvious from his expression that Ray was thinking that out of all the people he’d ever met, Mikey was the least likely to be a spy. He couldn’t imagine it at all. But then, he was hearing a lot of things right now that he wouldn’t have been able to imagine before.
“I think a few of them know the truth,” Mikey said. “Or, well… a few of them believe the truth. And they think they can use the messages themselves. We’ve been on the run from them ever since, nearly three years now. Never staying in one place for too long, never getting too close to anybody. Always knowing where the best exits are everywhere we go.”
Well, that explained how Mikey had been able to guide Ray out of his apartment.
“They’ve never gone after us indirectly like this before,” said Mikey. “We wouldn’t have known until it was too late, but I got one of those messages, about you.”
He showed Ray the screen of his phone, which displayed a text message from earlier that day, saying only: ‘Ray is in danger.’ Ray shivered.
“Why would they come after me?” he wondered.
“Probably because they hoped you’d lead them to Mikey, or would tell them how to find him,” said Gerard.
“How could they have connected me to Mikey?”
“Well,” said Gerard, pulling out his phone, “because you put a photo on Facebook after one of your gigs a couple of weeks ago, and they must have found it.”
Gerard showed Ray the photo on his phone. Oh, yeah, he remembered that gig. A pretty good venue, and a nice crowd. He’d felt great afterwards and had taken a selfie with a few people from the audience, and there was Mikey, almost out of the frame and the lower half of his face obscured by a glass of beer, but it must have been enough.
“It wasn’t Ray’s fault,” Mikey murmured. “I should have been more careful to keep out of the shot.” Gerard grunted, apparently not quite willing to let it go. Well, now Ray knew why Gerard had been glaring at him when he arrived.
“What now?” Ray asked. Gerard shrugged, looking at Mikey, who didn’t seem to have much of an idea either.
“Mikey and I will have to pick up and move somewhere else again,” said Gerard. “It’s fine, we knew we’d need to eventually. This is actually the longest we’ve been able to stay in one spot for a while.”
“Once we’re far enough away, we’ll let ourselves get spotted. That way the CIA guys will know we’ve moved on, and you should be safe to go home,” said Mikey. “You should probably stay in a motel for a few days, though. Sorry. We can cover it.”
“Wait,” said Ray, “What?” That was it? Gerard and Mikey had just told him the most incredible thing he’d ever heard, and now they were just going to leave?
“We can give you some cash,” Mikey said, looking worried. “It’s just that if you use a card they’ll be able to trace it…”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” said Ray. “It’s just… you’re just going to leave?”
Mikey looked pretty glum at the idea. So did Gerard, when Ray looked over at him.
“I won’t see you again?” Ray asked, wishing he could take the words back as soon as he’d spoken them.
“We have no choice,” Gerard said. “Mikey thought you deserved an explanation, but if we’re going to keep safe we have to keep moving.” He looked around the crowded food court. “Speaking of which, we really should go.”
Mikey got up from the table with a sad little sigh, and it was that which pushed Ray over the edge. “I can come with you.”
“No,” said Gerard. “You can’t.”
Ray was looking at Mikey, though, and he didn’t seem to share Gerard’s feelings. For a second he’d even looked… hopeful?
“I can help,” Ray insisted. “And I’ll watch your backs.”
“I said no. After what happened with Craig, we decided it was better to keep this to just the two of us. It’s safer.”
Ray didn’t hear it, but Mikey must have said something, because Gerard said, “What did you say, Mikey?”
“I said, that’s not true. We didn’t decide, you decided. Because you felt guilty.”
“Mikey, you know we have to be careful…”
“Lindsay wouldn’t have betrayed us. Frank wouldn’t have betrayed us.” Gerard flinched at the second name, and Mikey murmured, “Sorry.” He didn’t back down, though, holding Gerard’s gaze until he looked away.
“Fine,” Gerard said with a sigh. “Fine.” He spun around, getting into Ray’s personal space in an instant and jabbing his finger into Ray’s chest, hard. “If you sell us out…” He paused, leaving Ray’s mind to race as he tried to anticipate what threat Gerard was going to come up with. “I will never forgive you.”
Oh. Right. Ray looked into Gerard’s eyes and thought that actually, that was a pretty good threat. He swallowed.
“Okay.”
***
“So, how do these memories work?” Ray asked. “Do you not remember what really happened?”
He’d been wondering about that since they left. Ever since he’d met Mikey, he’d seemed a little bit spacey. It made a lot more sense now, but he still didn’t really understand what Mikey meant when he said he had the wrong memories.
“No, I still have the true memories as well as the other memories,” said Mikey. “It just gets confusing because I can’t tell them apart. But it doesn’t affect the personal stuff - I remember that I watched a funny video on YouTube the other day, and I don’t have to worry about whether it really happened or not.”
“Right, because the other memories only come up when you’ve done something to change… what’s meant to happen?” Ray guessed.
“Nothing’s meant to happen,” said Gerard. “There’s no such thing as fate.”
“Right,” said Ray. It looked like he was going to need to get used to debates about this kind of stuff.
“I think the memories are from some other reality, an alternate universe where I don’t get the messages,” said Mikey. “At first, it was like you just said… the only thing that was different in my memories was caused by something we had done. But now the memories have more and more differences to our world. It’s like the two realities are gradually getting further and further apart.”
“Like the butterfly effect?” suggested Ray.
“I guess.” agreed Mikey. “It’s taken a while, but now I can nearly make a picture out of the other memories, and it’s not that nice. Sometimes I feel pretty pissed off that we have to live like this, but I don’t think that other me is having a great time either.”
Mikey and Gerard had brought their packed bags with them to the mall, having no intention of going back to their apartment. Ray, on the other hand, hadn’t been able to bring anything with him when he fled, escaping with only his wallet and the clothes on his back, and it wasn’t safe to go back and get his things. It was a wrench to leave some of it behind, like his guitar and the t-shirt he’d managed to get signed by Brian May. Ray told himself it would be alright; his parents would go and collect his things and keep them safe. He didn’t know when he’d see them again. He’d have to contact them eventually and let them know he was safe.
Mikey tried to wind down the car window and growled with frustration when it got stuck after a few inches. “Gerard, this car’s a heap of shit.”
For as long as Ray had known him, Gerard had driven a beat-up Volvo, but that had been abandoned along with their apartment and every non-essential item he and Mikey had decided to leave behind. Once they’d left the mall, they’d caught a cab to a used car lot and bought an even more beat-up Mazda. The salesman hadn’t batted an eyelid when Mikey paid in cash, and when they were safely in the car and out of earshot Ray had whispered to the others, “Guys, I think this is a chop shop.”
“Well, yeah,” Gerard had replied. “If we went somewhere legitimate there’d be a record of our purchase.”
So now they were on the run in a possibly stolen car, and Ray was working really hard at not freaking out.
Mikey’s phone chimed with a message notification, and after reading it he said, “Hey, let’s stop for gas up ahead.”
“Is it one of those messages?” Ray asked, wildly curious. “Someone we need to save?”
“Nah,” said Mikey, holding up his phone so that Ray could see the screen. “Just lottery numbers.”
Ray stared at the string of numbers on the screen, not really understanding at first. Then it dawned. “Those are… tonight’s winning lottery numbers?”
“Tomorrow night’s, but yes.”
Ray felt like he was going mad. “The jackpot’s almost forty million dollars!”
Mikey twisted around in the passenger seat to give Ray a half-smile. “We can’t just win the jackpot, Ray. That’d be like holding up a sign for the CIA saying ‘come and get us!’”
Oh, that made sense. Ray’s heartbeat slowed down a fraction.
“But we can’t exactly work a regular job. It would make us too easy to find, and we couldn’t stick to a work schedule anyway, because of…” Mikey waved his phone around to illustrate his point, and Ray nodded.
“But if you win one of the smaller prizes, just a few hundred dollars or whatever, they’ll pay that out on the spot. Untraceable, and enough to live on. We get the numbers a few times a week, and if we’re staying in one spot for a while we just have to make sure to never collect our winnings from the same store twice in a row so that they don’t remember us.”
They left the gas station with a full tank, one lottery ticket apiece, and a giant bag of barbeque flavoured potato chips because Gerard said he was starving.
“Where are we headed?” Ray asked once they were back on the road.
“I dunno,” Mikey said, shrugging and looking at Gerard. Gerard shrugged as well.
“I figured we’d keep going until about dinnertime and then find a motel for the night.”
“Oh,” said Ray, not sure what to make of this, well… calling it a plan seemed overly generous. “So you don’t really have a destination in mind?”
“Not much point,” Mikey said. “We’ll get a message eventually telling us to go somewhere or other, until that happens we’re basically just killing time.”
In fact it was only about half past four, still much too early for dinner, when Mikey’s phone received another message and he said, “Hey, Gee, stop at the next motel you see, okay?”
“What’s up?” asked Gerard
“We’re supposed to look for some kid with a dog.”
“Where?”
“It doesn’t say. Just says ‘Stop at the next motel you reach and look out for a kid and a dog’.”
Gerard seemed to take that in his stride, and Ray realised that this was what their lives were like, all the time. Earlier, when Mikey had been talking about getting really fed up with the situation and trying to get away, Ray had tried his best to understand but he hadn’t quite managed it. Now, he thought he did. It was like this. Never able to make plans, always waiting on directions from some invisible source they’d never met. Having no choice but to trust that their directions wouldn’t lead you into trouble or get you hurt.
No wonder Mikey had tried to escape.
Although Mikey had seemed pretty weary when he’d explained everything earlier, there was no sign of it now. He seemed relaxed but alert as they pulled off the interstate and parked outside a run-down motel.
Calling this place a town felt like overselling it. It was barely two streets, with a post office opposite the motel and a dozen houses and not much else. Gerard headed straight towards the motel’s reception, while Mikey hung back a little. Ray stood at Mikey’s side, feeling suddenly awkward and unsure what to say.
Ray might have stood there fidgeting and clearing his throat until the sun went down, but at that moment they heard a cry from the other side of the parking lot.
“Lucky, come back here!”
The shout came from a young girl who was chasing after a dog. The dog’s tail was wagging a mile a minute and its leash trailed behind it. The dog and the child were both heading for the road.
Mikey took off from Ray’s side, running straight for the girl. Ray put his fingers to his lips and whistled as loudly as he could. The dog looked at him and Ray crouched down, holding out his hands.
The dog bounded over to him and leaped up, trying to lick Ray’s face while its tail wagged so hard it nearly fell over. Ray did his best to pet the dog and keep it from licking his face while also trying to get a grip on its leash.
Just a few yards away an eighteen-wheeler flew past, going well above the posted speed limit. With the dog’s leash securely in his hands, Ray stood up and saw Mikey walking towards him, the girl at his side.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the leash from Ray. She crouched in front of the dog and wagged a finger in its face. “Lucky, no! Don’t run off!”
The dog licked her finger and the girl stood, leading the dog back through the parking lot towards where the rooms must be.
Only then did Ray realise how hard his heart was beating. His hands shook from adrenaline. “Man,” he said, “that scared the shit out of me.”
“Yeah,” Mikey said, although he didn’t sound nearly as rattled as Ray felt.
“Wait,” said Ray as the pieces clicked into place, “was that it? Like, was that what we were supposed to do?”
“I’d say so.”
“Fuck. If we hadn’t been here…”
“She would have been killed. Probably the dog too.”
The weight of the responsibility was overwhelming. Ray looked over and realised that Mikey was watching him with a knowing expression, like he knew every thought that was going through Ray’s head.
“How do you deal with this?”
Mikey kicked at the loose gravel of the parking lot, scuffing out a curved shape with the toe of his shoe. “Trying not to think about it too much, really,” he said, but there was a shadow in his eyes that suggested it wasn’t a very successful strategy.
“You said that in your memories, this… other reality is becoming more and more different to ours, right?” Ray asked.
“Yeah.”
“Worse?”
“Well… it’s hard to explain. Since I can’t tell the memories apart, the only way I can figure out the differences is by comparing notes with Gerard, and we can’t just sit and compare memories all day, so we’ve probably missed lots of stuff. But some of what we’ve figured out is… it’s dangerous. A lot of my memories are about people being hurt or attacked or killed, and the people behind it almost never get caught. It doesn’t even seem like anyone tries to catch them, or like people expect them to. Every news article about a murder seems to end with the phrase ‘Police say they have no leads at this time’, and everyone understands that that means they’re not going to bother investigating.
“A lot of stores have closed down or been abandoned; there are whole shopping strips which are just… empty. I mean, even in the big cities where you’d think they’d be able to survive. Even Walmart’s gone out of business; if Better Living doesn’t sell it you probably can’t get it. No one shops online anymore, because the post is too unreliable.”
“The things you’ve changed have really affected things that much?”
“Who knows. If I do something different, it might cause another person to do something else, and then another person. It doesn’t come down to just my actions anymore. But I can’t stop at this point. I tried to run away once because I didn’t know better, but now I know what might happen if I do nothing.”
It had only been a few days and the implications were already making Ray’s head swim. He realised just how remarkable it was that Mikey and Gerard had lived like this for years and still managed to care so much about other people, about doing whatever they could to help them. Ray’s fingers twitched with the impulse to reach out for Mikey, maybe take his hand or touch his face. It seemed like the moment for it, but then Gerard reappeared from the motel reception with a room key in one hand.
“Awesome,” said Mikey, walking towards Gerard. He messed up the jumbled lines he’d been drawing as he went, but Ray was careful to step around them. At least they’d be able to relax for the next few hours.
***
That set the trend for the next few days. They spent most of each day driving nowhere in particular, staying in a different motel each night with occasional diversions in response to messages that Mikey received. They called an ambulance for a man having an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting, helped a woman lift her pram off a bus, and most alarmingly, broke up a fight between a group of kids, one of whom Ray was pretty sure was carrying a gun.
The next morning, as they were eating breakfast (bacon and egg McMuffins in a McDonald's parking lot), Mikey’s message notification rang out. Ray immediately felt just slightly anxious. He couldn’t imagine ever becoming as nonchalant about the whole thing as Mikey and Gerard were.
Mikey seemed unusually tense after reading the message, though. Ray wondered whether he was imagining it, but then Gerard asked, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s an address,” Mikey said, passing the phone to Gerard. To Ray he said, “Some place in Union. In New Jersey.”
“That’s a full day’s drive from here,” said Ray, but that couldn’t explain Mikey’s reaction, could it? They were going to be driving all day anyway.
“Yeah,” said Mikey. “Union is where we were living, before… Our folks still live there.”
“Why do they want us to go back?” Gerard asked, staring at the phone.
“Who knows,” said Mikey, taking the phone back from Gerard. “Why do they want us to do any of this? It’s just a mystery, and we’ll probably never know. Come on, we need to hurry if we want to get there by tonight.”
Gerard and Mikey grew more and more tense throughout the day. Ray tried to distract them with chatter, but he had no effect on the mood at all. Eventually he gave up and stopped trying to avoid the elephant in the car.
“Do you think you’ll see your folks when we get there?”
Neither of them showed much reaction. Ray figured that they’d probably been pondering the same thing for most of the trip.
“The CIA might be watching the house,” said Gerard. Mikey nodded.
“We wouldn’t be able to explain any of this to them,” Mikey added. “They’ll want to know why we just up and left, and they won’t understand.”
Neither of them actually said no, though, so Ray figured it wasn’t actually settled.
It was dark by the time they reached the city, and they were all tired and hungry. Rather than finding somewhere to stay, however, Gerard took them straight to the address that had been sent to Mikey’s phone. Ray understood, even though he wanted nothing more than to lie down on a cheap motel bed for a nap. There was no way of knowing what the consequences might be if they arrived too late.
The address was for an apartment on the third floor of a dated but tidy apartment block. “What are we going to say?” Ray asked as they got into the elevator.
“Usually, if there’s nothing obviously going down when we arrive, we pretend we’re looking for someone and we’ve got the wrong address. Then we’ll snoop around a bit until we figure out what’s up,” Mikey explained. “Things always tend to work out.”
“Right,” muttered Ray, but he couldn’t feel completely at ease with the idea. Maybe in a few more weeks or months, he’d be as nonchalant about the whole thing as Mikey and Gerard were.
They found the right apartment and gathered together outside the door. Gerard and Mikey exchanged a nod, and then Gerard reached out and knocked on the door.
It took a moment, but then the door was opened by a short man about Mikey’s age, who stared at them all as though he’d seen a ghost.
Ray waited for Mikey to give him the story he’d mentioned, about looking for a different apartment, but Mikey and Gerard both stood as though they were frozen to the spot. Ray hoped he wasn’t going to have to take the lead himself.
“Gerard?” the man asked.
“Frank,” Gerard replied. “Uh… hey…”
“Oh, hey?” Frank repeated, his voice becoming angry. “What the fuck? You turn up out of the blue after three years just to say Oh hey?”
“Frank, who’s at the door?” called a woman’s voice. Gerard and Mikey immediately backed away from the door a little, and Frank seemed so frustrated he might explode.
“You all wait right here,” he growled. “Right fucking here!”
He closed the door and Gerard immediately said, “We need to leave.”
“Why?” Ray asked, but no one was listening to him.
“We can’t leave,” Mikey said.
“Mikey, we have to. If he tells anyone…”
“I know you don’t actually believe Frank would do that. Besides, the message said we needed to come here. There’s a reason we’re supposed to be here.”
Gerard made a frustrated noise but there was no time for him to really mount a good counter argument, as Frank returned and stepped through his door, closing it behind him.
“Let’s go talk somewhere else,” he said. “I assume you don’t want my roommate hearing about all this.”
Frank led them down to his car, rejecting Gerard’s suggestion that they take separate vehicles. “Why, so you can up and disappear again?” he snapped.
Mikey lagged a little way behind as they walked. “Frank was one of the friends who was helping us out, before,” he whispered to Ray. Ray nodded; he’d been able to figure that much out. “Frank and Gerard were kind of, uh, dating before we left. Starting to get serious.”
“Oh,” Ray murmured. “Shit, poor Gerard.”
“I guess,” Mikey sighed. “I tried to tell him at the time… I really didn’t see the need to cut all contact with Frank. Or Lindsey, for that matter. Gerard wouldn’t listen.”
Ray would have liked to press for more details, but they’d reached the car and there was no way to talk without being overheard. Frank drove them to a diner not too far away,where they quickly found a table and Ray enthusiastically ordered the biggest burger on the menu.
“What the fuck are you doing back here?” Frank asked as soon as the waitress had left with their orders and they had a little privacy.
“Sorry,” Gerard said. “We didn’t know… Mikey got a message. We didn’t know that’s where you live now.”
Frank raised his eyebrows, looking slightly alarmed. “You got a message about me? Why?”
“We don’t know, it literally just had the address and nothing else.”
“I left Jamia alone back there,” said Frank, grabbing his phone. “I swear, if something happens to her because I came out with you three…”
He made a call and tapped his fingers against the tabletop impatiently until someone answered.
“Jamia,” he demanded, “Are you okay? Has anything happened since I left?”
Ray could just make out Jamia’s voice through the cell phone speaker. “I’m fine, Frank, you only just left. What’s going on?”
“I want you to call me if anything happens, okay? Anything at all.”
“You’re freaking me out.”
“It’s fine,” said Frank, clearly making an effort to sound calmer than he really was. “Everything’s fine. Please just promise.”
“Okay,” said Jamia, sounding no less confused. Frank promised to be home soon and said goodbye, then hung up.
“So…” Gerard said, “Jamia, huh. I remember her. Nice girl.”
“She is,” Frank said, placing his phone on the table where it was within easy reach.
“You two are living together now.”
“Yeah,” Frank said, and then, clearly out of patience with Gerard’s awkward probing, said, “We’re friends. We’re not a couple.”
“Oh,” Gerard said. “Well, I mean if you were, that would be fine…”
“What about you? You’ve probably been all over the place in the last three years. Meeting interesting people, going on dates all over the country.”
“Not really. It’s kind of hard to meet people when you’re in hiding and constantly moving.”
Ray exchanged a glance with Mikey. It was awkward to be privy to Frank and Gerard’s conversation, and he wondered if it would be more polite to excuse himself for a few minutes, but the food arrived at that moment and he was too hungry to care about manners.
Gerard and Frank were quiet for a minute, but neither of them touched their food. Then they both began to speak at the same time.
“Why did you leave-”
“I’m sorry we didn’t-”
They both stopped. Gerard gestured for Frank to continue, but Frank shook his head. “No, you first.”
Now that all the attention was on him, Gerard looked cornered. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We didn’t want to leave, but it seemed like the only way to keep everyone safe.”
“That wasn’t your decision! When you’re talking about me, my life, my safety, that should have been my decision!”
“You would have felt obligated to keep helping us!”
Frank was looking more and more pissed off by the second. “I’m not a child, Gerard!” he snapped. “You should have talked to me about what was going on. Lindsey as well. You and Mikey disappeared overnight and no one had any idea what had happened to you. We were afraid you were dead, until your parents got that email a week later. Can you imagine what that was like?”
Gerard looked incredibly guilty, and Mikey too. “We didn’t… I didn’t feel like we could trust anyone,” Gerard said in a small voice.
“You trust this guy, though,” Frank observed, acknowledging Ray for the first time. Ray almost jumped in his seat, not sure whether to respond or leave it to Gerard and Mikey to figure out what to say.
Gerard kept quiet and wouldn’t meet Frank’s eyes. In the middle of the uncomfortable silence, Mikey’s familiar message notification rang out. Ray and the others watched him as he slipped his phone out of his pocket and read it.
“The message says, ‘Now get Lindsey’,” he said.
“Oh, fuck,” Frank said. “She is gonna be so pissed at you two.”
“You don’t have to sound so happy about it,” Mikey grumbled.
They paid the check and made their way back to Frank’s car. Gerard trailed behind, moping, while Frank strode ahead. Ray wandered along somewhere between them, just close enough to overhear Mikey when he approached Frank and said, “Don’t be too mad at Gerard.”
Frank grunted something in reply, too softly for Ray to make out. Mikey added, “He was just scared, and he felt like he had to protect me.”
“I know,” said Frank.
“He blamed himself for trusting Craig, I think, even though he was my friend. But it made him miserable to leave you behind.”
“I don’t care,” Frank said. Mikey fell silent, and after a moment Frank said, “How miserable was he, exactly?”
Frank drove them to Lindsey’s house, a duplex with an overgrown lawn and a chicken coop sitting at the end of the driveway. Mikey and Gerard sat in the car like they were afraid to move. Frank was the first one to get out of the car, muttering and rolling his eyes.
Frank reached the front door and then waited for Mikey and Gerard to reach him before knocking. Lindsey must have heard the car pull up, though, because she opened the door just as Gerard was climbing the porch steps. Ray could hear her gasp even though he was hanging back slightly, trying to give them some privacy for their reunion.
“I fucking know, right?” said Frank. “These assholes turned up at my front door an hour ago.”
“Three years!” Lindsey snapped. “Three years, and not a fucking word!”
“We’re really sorry,” said Gerard.
“You can take your apology, and stick it right…”
They never got to hear what Gerard should do with his apology, because Mikey’s message tone chimed and grabbed everyone’s attention.
“Right,” said Lindsey. “This is a business call then, is it?”
“Looks like it,” said Mikey, reading the message. “It’s another address, and we need to be there by midnight.”
***
The address Mikey had received was somewhere in Rhode Island, another three-hour drive away. They took Gerard’s car; it was a tight squeeze with the five of them, but neither Frank nor Lindsay seemed willing to let the others out of their sight.
It wasn’t all that far, but it had already been a long day and Ray was starting to feel tired. He kept himself awake by googling their destination on his phone. He couldn’t find much. The address seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, between a state park and several thousand hectares of farmland.
“What do you think’s out here?” Ray asked, peering through the car window at the darkness outside.
“No idea,” Mikey said. “I wish there was some way I could reply to these messages.”
“It must be something big if it needs five of us,” Gerard said. He had one hand on the steering wheel and was nervously biting the fingernails of his other hand. “That’s never happened before.”
“But it always works out, doesn’t it?” asked Ray, starting to feel a little nervous himself.
“Yeah,” said Gerard. “Well, usually.”
“What?” That wasn’t the kind of thing Ray needed to hear right now. “What do you mean, usually?”
“We’re not always successful,” Mikey explained. “We’ve never, like, been badly hurt or anything, but we don’t always save everyone.”
Ray mulled that over for the remaining two hours of the drive. By the time they reached the address Mikey had been sent he was a bundle of nerves, maybe even worse than Gerard.
They pulled up at the side of the narrow and winding road, and right on cue Mikey received another message. “It says, ‘The main driveway is monitored. Drive another half a mile and you’ll find a gap in the fence,’” he read.
To the left side of the road was a tall chain-link fence with barbed wire at the top. Ten yards ahead of them was a wide electric gate, dimly lit by a couple of lamp posts which looked strangely incongruous out here, so far from any kind of town.
Gerard started driving again and Ray stayed glued to the window, trying to see what was beyond the fence. He didn’t have much luck; it was too dark to make anything out.
“What is this place?” Mikey wondered aloud. “Why would we want to get in here?”
They reached the spot the message had mentioned. A tree had fallen on the fence, leaving a gap they could probably squeeze through. Gerard pulled the car over and sat with the engine idling for a few seconds, before pulling further off the road and parking behind a clump of bushes which hid the car from view from the road.
They got out of the car and gathered together. “It looks like we’re meant to go through there,” said Mikey, pointing out the gap in the fence.
“But why?” Lindsey asked, voicing the question on everyone’s mind.
“Not a clue. I guess we’ll find out, but… this looks serious. You don’t have to come, no one will blame you. If anyone’s having second thoughts, now’s the time to speak up.”
“No way, I’m in,” Frank said. Lindsey was slower to agree, but she nodded her head firmly.
“I’m not backing out,” said Ray. He’d made his decision days ago, when he left town with Mikey and Gerard.
They squeezed through the fence and waited just a few feet inside, relaxing slightly when there was no sound of alarms. Another message came to Mikey’s phone; the light of the screen shone on his face and made him look like a ghost. “We need to walk north,” said Mikey. “How do we even know which way is north?”
They figured it out with some help from Google Maps and began walking. After a few minutes another message came through.
“‘Check behind the Toyota’s front left tyre for a dropped security pass,’” Mikey read. “What Toyota?”
“Keep walking, maybe we’ll see it,” said Ray. They carried on through the grass and their destination came into view, a small cluster of buildings and pathways lit up like a tiny village. They continued forwards cautiously, wary of being spotted now that they were in an area clearly used by other people. It was encouraging when they spotted a Toyota Camry parked at the side of the road. The lost security pass was right where Mikey had said it would be.
“What does the pass say?” Ray asked, squinting to read it in the totally inadequate light of the nearby street lamp.
“It’s just some guy’s name and a photo,” said Frank. “I can’t see a company logo or anything like that.”
“This isn’t a military base or something, is it?” Gerard wondered, biting his nails again. “Can you imagine how much trouble we’d get into for breaking into a military base?”
“It’s not, it would have said so on the map,” said Ray. “But I think we’ll be in a lot of trouble if we get caught anyway.”
“We need to get ready,” Mikey said, looking at another message. “The power’s supposed to go out in four minutes.”
Up ahead, they could see paths and buildings which were currently lit up. They waited in the shadows, barely daring to breathe, waiting for the lights to go out.
“They’re saying that once it’s dark, we need to go for the large building at the back and take the stairs down to the basement,” said Mikey. “There’s a security guard, so we need to distract them somehow.”
“How?” asked Frank.
“Doesn’t say.”
“Fucking great,” Frank muttered.
The lights shut off abruptly, and they all began hurrying for the far building. “Two of us should stay back and keep an eye on the security guard while the other three go for the stairs,” Ray suggested. He was about to volunteer to stay back when Frank spoke up.
“That’s a good idea. I’ll stay back.”
“Me too,” said Gerard quickly, and that was that. Well, that was fine. Ray didn’t really want to let Mikey out of his sight anyway, not here where even the air tasted of danger..
They reached the building. It was dark inside, but the security system by the door was still lit and blinked steadily, probably running off a backup generator. Mikey had the security pass, but he didn’t use it.
“They’re saying to wait,” he said, looking at his phone. They paused, frozen on the spot, their breath misting in the air, until Mikey’s phone buzzed again. “Go, go,” he hissed, and they swiped through the door.
Inside it was dark, the only light coming from a flashlight beam shining from around a corner. “Security guard,” Mikey breathed. The light moved away and they looked around for the stairs. Their eyes had adjusted to the darkness but it was still very hard to see anything. At last Ray found the elevator from the moonlight reflecting off the metal door. With the power out it wasn’t working, but the stairs were next to it.
“Perfect,” whispered Mikey. “Frank, Gerard, you’ll stay here and watch out?”
“Yeah,” answered Gerard. “If anything happens, I’ll call your cell. If I let it ring once and hang up, you need to get out.”
“Got it,” said Mikey, swiping the pass again to open the door to the stairwell. He led the way downwards, Lindsey following him and Ray behind her.
“Any idea what we’re looking for yet?” Lindsey asked.
“Room B12, according to this,” said Mikey. They reached the bottom of the stairs which brought them to a small square chamber, with corridors branching off in three directions.
“Should we split up?” asked Lindsey, not sounding very enthusiastic about the idea.
“I don’t think we should,” said Ray.
“No, let’s stick together,” Mikey said. “Let’s try this way first.”
They walked down the corridor on the right, which contained rooms B16 to B20, as well as, for some reason, B5 and B8. The next corridor contained rooms B1 to B4, B6, B7 and another room which was also labelled B8.
“Did they build it this way on purpose?” Lindsey muttered.
“Maybe,” said Mikey.
Luckily, B12 was the first room on the third corridor. Mikey swiped it open and they entered a small room lined with lockers on either side. These weren’t the flimsy cheap lockers one might see in a high school. They looked solid and each one had yet another lock on it.
“We’re supposed to take whatever’s in locker 5,” said Mikey. “But this message says that when we open it, it will set off a silent alarm. We have to get into the locker and then get out of here straight away.”
They paused and thought it over. “We’re on foot,” Lindsey pointed out. “And we have no idea who’s going to be coming after us. Are you sure we can do this?”
“I don’t think they’d have sent us here if they didn’t believe we could do it,” said Mikey, but he didn’t sound all that convinced.
“What if we get Gerard and Frank to do something up there, distract the security guard and lead them away at the same time as we open the locker?” Ray suggested.
“That’s putting them at risk, though,” said Mikey, not sounding thrilled with the idea.
“Why don’t we call them, then?” asked Lindsey. “They’ve been up there for a while, maybe they’ve noticed something we can use.”
Mikey grudgingly sent Gerard a text message, just saying ‘call me asap’. Gerard called back immediately, and Mikey explained the dilemma.
“We can create a distraction, no problem,” said Gerard.
“Okay, but don’t do anything stupid,” said Mikey. “Don’t go getting yourselves hurt, or caught, or anything. Shit, if it comes down to it we can just leave now. I don’t care.”
“Don’t worry, Mikey, we’ve got this,” Gerard said. “Give us three minutes, okay? Starting… now.”
Gerard ended the call, and Ray started a timer on his own phone. He couldn’t make out Mikey’s expression in the darkness, but he could feel the tension radiating from him.
“It’s going to be okay,” Ray said in the face of all the evidence. Mikey didn’t call him out on the lie, though. It was eerily quiet, with no sign that any kind of distraction was happening upstairs. Ray’s timer counted down, far slower than he would have liked but somehow also much faster than he was comfortable with.
At last the timer ran out, and Mikey faced the locker. “Here goes,” he said, swiping it open with the pass.
It was disappointingly anticlimactic. No sirens blared, no lights flashed. The locker contained a single black briefcase. Mikey picked it up and shut the locker. “Come on, let’s get out of this place.”
They hurried for the staircase. The basement was silent, with no sign of anyone nearby. Ray kept expecting to see something in every shadow and around every corner, but there was nothing.
They entered the stairwell, and now Ray could hear some kind of disturbance happening above. It sounded like a car horn repeatedly honking - after a few seconds he realised it was a car alarm, maybe multiple car alarms.
They reached the top of the stairs and peered out carefully. There was no one nearby, but they could see flashlight beams moving around outside the windows. It looked like the security guard had gained some backup. Mikey’s phone buzzed with another message.
“They’re saying to go out the back of the building,” he said. “It’s too busy that way.”
So they headed away from the commotion at the building’s main entrance and found a smaller door leading outside on the other side. The door led to a narrow parking lot, with a pair of dumpsters sitting off to one side and a large air conditioning unit on the other. While it was quieter here than it was at the front entrance, there were still a few security guards patrolling in the gloom, the beams from their flashlights making regular circuits of the area.
“They wanted us to come this way?” Ray asked, feeling quite hopeless because if this was their best shot, they were screwed.
“Gerard just thought they’d drawn too much attention to the front of the building,” Mikey whispered. “I don’t think he realised there’d be more guards back here.”
“Oh.” So it had just been a message from Gerard, no one else. Not someone who knew things they shouldn’t be able to know and could use that knowledge to protect them from bad luck and coincidence. “Maybe we should go back.”
But from back inside the building, Ray heard voices. Too far away to make out what they were saying, but they were getting closer. Shit.
“We have to go,” said Mikey. “This way.”
He began creeping along the edge of the parking lot, staying low and pausing behind each parked car to check his surroundings. Lindsey followed him and Ray came along behind.
At the edge of the parking lot, they gathered together behind a large white van to plan their next step. Ray couldn’t see many options, though. There just wasn’t enough cover; there was a line of trees fifty yards away but it might as well have been a couple of miles for all their chances of reaching it without being spotted.
“We can make it,” Lindsey whispered.
“No way,” said Ray. “Even if they don’t see us, they’ll hear us.”
Ray heard the ominous creak of a door opening nearby. He, Lindsey and Mikey ducked down to the ground, trying to make themselves even smaller. Ray twisted his neck around, trying to see behind him. A handful of guards had exited the building and stood in a huddle.
“They didn’t come this way!” called one of them. “Come back in, we need to search the northern perimeter.”
The guards who had been patrolling outside made their way back towards the building. Lindsey flattened herself to the ground and slid underneath the van. Mikey tried to follow her but his jacket caught on something. Ray just kept as flat to the ground as he could and hoped for the best.
No one noticed them. They went back inside and closed the door behind them, and Ray gasped for air like he’d been holding his breath for a week.
“Come on,” said Lindsey. “Now’s our chance.”
She didn’t wait, just took off running towards the trees, still staying low but moving quickly. She reached the trees and ducked out of sight; Ray felt his anxiety ease slightly. Maybe they would actually get out of this after all.
Mikey took a gulp of air, clearly steeling himself, and then leaped out from the cover of the van to run towards the trees. He was looking straight ahead, directly at the trees he was heading towards. He couldn’t see what Ray could see.
From around the corner of the building appeared an armed security guard. He must not have been expecting to find anyone because his gun was holstered and he seemed pretty shocked to see Mikey. That was lucky; it gave Ray a couple of extra seconds to react.
He leaped after Mikey, straining every muscle to catch up to him. The guard was reaching for his gun. Mikey was moving pretty quick, but Ray had longer legs and extra motivation. He got within reach of Mikey and stretched his hand out, grabbing his shoulder.
The security guard was raising his gun. Ray shoved Mikey, pushing him down towards the ground and landing heavily on top of him.
The security guard fired. It was loud and made Ray’s ears ring; Mikey looked towards the security guard with huge, frightened eyes. He must have fired just a second too late, because neither of them were hit, but Ray could see the guard still there, ready to take another shot. He still had his hand on Mikey’s shoulder, and suddenly he was intensely aware of everything about it - t,he sharp point of Mikey’s collarbone under his fingers, the roughness of his shirt, the movement as he gasped for breath. Ray squeezed his eyes shut; there was no getting out of this, and he didn’t want to see death coming.
But there was no second gunshot; instead, there was the sound of a car rapidly approaching and a smack as it collided with something and came to a halt. Ray looked up and saw the security guard lying nearby and groaning, illuminated by the headlights of a jeep.
The window was open. Ray stared at it, expecting at any moment to see a gun come through the window and point at him. Instead, it was Frank, sticking his head through the window and grinning at them like he was having the time of his life.
“Wooo!” he yelled. “Come on, losers, get in!”
***
They drove a little way away and booked into a room at a seedy hotel. Mikey placed the briefcase in the middle of the bed where they could all gather around and stare at it.
“What do you think is in there?” Gerard wondered.
“The truth about who shot JFK,” Lindsey suggested.
“Photos of aliens,” said Ray.
“I think it’s full of expired Pizza Hut coupons,” said Frank, who apparently got cranky when he was tired.
Mikey sighed and turned the briefcase over. “I guess we’ll never know, since it’s locked.”
The briefcase had a small combination lock on it. The security pass wouldn’t do them much good here. Mikey looked up from the briefcase and for a second met Ray’s eyes. He quickly looked away. Ray’s heart sank. Mikey had been withdrawing from him ever since that moment when Ray had pushed him down to save him from being shot. Ray wasn’t sure why but there was really only one explanation that made sense. Somehow, at that moment, Mikey must have figured out how Ray felt about him, and he didn’t feel the same way.
Well, it couldn’t be helped. Ray tried to force himself to focus on the present. It would have been easier if the present wasn’t full of Gerard and Frank, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bed and clearly a lot more comfortable in each other’s company than they had been a few hours ago.
“We could break it open,” suggested Frank.
“Yeah, but what if we damage whatever’s inside?”
“Well, what if we just lug this locked briefcase around forever and never know why we risked our lives for it?”
Mikey grumbled and picked up his phone. “Come on,” he said, talking down at the screen. “If you can send me the winning lottery numbers every week, you can send me the combination for this lock.”
The phone was quiet for a minute, then two. Ray was starting to seriously consider lying down to get a nap, but at last a message came through.
“Got it,” said Mikey. “Nine, four, zero, five.”
Ray unlocked the briefcase, but hesitated before opening it. He passed it over to Mikey instead. Mikey lifted the lid, staring down at the contents with a perplexed expression.
“What is it?” Frank demanded.
Mikey reached into the briefcase and lifted something out. It was an odd-looking electronic device, with a screen on it about the size of a smartphone but a chunky, square body. A series of buttons framed the screen, but Ray wasn’t sure what any of them did.
“What the fuck is it?” Frank repeated.
“Do I look like I know?” Mikey retorted. He passed the object to Gerard, who examined it for a minute, then passed it to Lindsey. Lindsey passed it to Ray, and he looked at it closely.
There were no signs or markings on the buttons, nothing to indicate what they did. There was a panel on the back which slid open to reveal a battery, a large one which seemed to take up most of the space inside the plastic case. Ray shrugged and passed it on to Frank.
Frank immediately pressed the largest button, the one positioned in the middle of the bottom edge. Ray gasped, echoed by the others.
“Jesus, Frank, what are you doing?” said Gerard.
“What? We’ve got to figure out what this does, don’t we?”
“What if it was a bomb or something? We could all have been blown up!” said Mikey.
“It’s not a bomb! What kind of bomb runs on a 6 volt battery?” Frank snapped, and Mikey seemed to have no response to that.
The screen on the device lit up, and after a few seconds a logo appeared, a round smiling face with ‘BL/ind’ below it.
“It’s Better Living Industries?” Mikey asked, incredulous. “Why would they be running an operation like the one back there?”
“Branching out?” Lindsey suggested. “Maybe they got tired of selling crappier versions of whatever Kim Kardashian was wearing last week.”
Mikey didn’t bother answering, just kept watching the strange machine, and Ray watched him. The logo disappeared after a few more seconds and some kind of menu took its place.
“Destination, Text, Settings, History,” read Gerard. “Let’s try history?”
After some trial and error, they figured out that the buttons on the left side of the screen could be used to select an option, and the bottom left button could be used to confirm the selection. This took them to a new screen which read History at the top, but was otherwise blank.
“Maybe it’s never been used before,” said Mikey. “What about Settings?”
The only options under settings were to change the font size or invert the colour scheme. Frank backed out of that menu quickly.
“Text?” said Frank, selecting that option. This opened a new screen with a blinking cursor. By hitting buttons more or less at random, they figured out that it was possible to type on the device, although it used the archaic method of making several letters share the same key so that typing the letter ‘T’ required four taps. Frank exited that screen and a message popped up, asking if he wanted to save.
“What does it mean by Destination?” Frank wondered.
“Let me have a look,” Mikey said, his voice suddenly sounding tense. Frank handed the device over and Mikey selected the Destination option.
The next screen had fields where a phone number or email address could be entered. Below that were spaces to enter a date and a time.
“What is this?” asked Lindsey. “Some machine that lets you schedule your text messages in advance? We almost got shot for this?”
But Mikey looked grim and gave his head a slow shake. His phone buzzed, and he unlocked the screen, holding it up to show the rest of them the word ‘test’. He used the device to type out the same message and set the destination to be sixty seconds in the past, then hit ‘Send’.
“Oh, come on,” Gerard said. “This thing can send messages back in time? No way. That’s impossible. Time travel breaks the laws of physics, it would cause constant paradoxes…”
Mikey’s phone buzzed and he held the screen up where Gerard could see it. Gerard fell silent, and Mikey showed the message around to the rest of them.
“Time travel breaks the laws of physics and would cause constant paradoxes, which is why it can’t be done,” Ray read.
“I say that all the time, it doesn’t prove anything!” said Gerard. He looked about to say something else when Mikey’s phone buzzed again. He fell silent while Mikey read the message, but this time he didn’t show it to anyone else. He fixed Gerard with a challenging stare. Gerard lifted his chin.
“Four… billion,” Gerard said. “Nine hundred and eighty-one thousand, four hundred and forty five.”
Mikey held his phone up to reveal the message, which contained the exact number Gerard had said. They all stared.
Mikey’s phone buzzed once more, and he read the message aloud.
“Now it’s up to you,” he read. He stood up and took a step back from the bed.
“It was me all along,” he said. “Future me, sending these messages to myself. That’s how I always knew where I was and if I’d changed my phone number, because I remembered it.” He stood up abruptly, clutching the strange device in one hand and his phone in the other, gripping it so hard Ray thought it might break. “I’m going for a walk.”
No one stopped Mikey as he left the room, closing the door firmly behind him, but Ray was worried.
“It might not be safe out there,” he pointed out.
“I think Mikey needs a few minutes to process this,” said Gerard. “I’m sure he’ll be careful.”
“I can’t believe this thing can really send information back in time,” Frank said, awed. “Why didn’t Mikey tell us to invest in Google twenty years ago?”
“He’s only been using it for selfless reasons,” said Lindsey. “We could look up how to make penicillin and send the instructions to doctors in the nineteenth century.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Frank sarcastically. “They’ll just print the recipe out on their fax machines.”
Ray tuned out the bickering and grabbed a cheap notepad from the bedside table, then found a pen in the drawer. He leaned over towards Gerard. “I want to go check on Mikey,” he said. “I won’t bug him if he really wants to be left alone, but I want to make sure he’s okay.”
“Yeah, good idea,” said Gerard. “Thanks, Ray.”
Ray found Mikey at the far end of the row of motel rooms. Someone had set out some plastic outdoor furniture underneath the trees which lined the edge of the parking lot, and Mikey was sitting on one and watching the road.
“Hey,” said Ray once he was a few steps away. “Are you okay?”
It was hard to make out Mikey’s expression in the darkness, but Ray saw Mikey’s head turn towards him for a second, then back to the road. “I don’t know.”
Ray took a seat in one of the other chairs.
“It’s kind of cool,” he said. “Now you know that these messages were coming from you all along. You said you were worried about the person’s motives, but who can you trust more than yourself?”
“Yeah,” Mikey muttered, but from his tone Ray could tell he didn’t see it the same way.
“I don’t get it, isn’t this good?”
Mikey shifted so that he could reach his phone, unlocking the screen with a sigh. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “It still doesn’t make sense. If I’m the one who’s been sending these messages the whole time...How did I know any of that stuff?”
“Because… well, sometime in the future you must learn about it.”
“No, that doesn’t explain it. Think about it. Like this…” Mikey scrolled through his phone to the message which contained the combination for the briefcase. “How would I ever have come across this combination in the future? I bet those guys don’t have it recorded anywhere, and if they did they wouldn’t tell me, so how would I find out?”
“I… don’t know.”
Mikey rested the box on his knee. “I could use this right now to send that message to myself, right to the moment when I needed the combination. And… then what? Where did it come from? I know the combination now because I got the text message about it. If I send that message now, I’ll know what to put in it because I already saw the message, but where did the knowledge come from? There’s never a moment where I learn the combination from somewhere else, the information just gets sent to me, from me. That doesn’t make sense!”
“I don’t know,” Ray repeated. “You have so many memories of things you shouldn’t be able to remember. Maybe…” He paused, trying to get his thoughts in order. “Maybe it’s the version of you living in that other timeline, looking for a way to set history right.”
“Well, maybe he should worry about his own timeline instead of bugging me all the time,” Mikey grumbled, but he looked thoughtful.
Ray held out the notepad and pen. “I thought you might want to try to get some answers.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I figure, if you’re the one who’s been sending the messages, you can kind of have a conversation with yourself, now that you know. Just write your questions down and make sure to save the page. That way one day when you know the answers, you’ll have this to remind you what you wanted to know and you can just… send the answer to yourself.”
Mikey didn’t say anything but he gripped the pen tightly, sitting very still. Ray waited patiently for Mikey to figure out what he wanted to ask.
Eventually, Mikey uncapped the pen and scribbled out, ‘Is Ray right? Is there a version of me in another timeline making all this happen?’ He added the time and date, and almost immediately after he was done his phone buzzed with a message.
“‘That’s still the best theory we’ve got,’” Mikey read. “Great, so future me doesn’t even know.”
Mikey thought for a minute or two, then added, ‘Will Gerard and I get to see our family again?’
‘Yes, one day.’
‘And Ray?’
‘Yes.’
Mikey paused, tapping the pen against the paper, seeming deep in thought. Ray waited, bursting with questions of his own but not wanting to distract Mikey. At last, Mikey began to write again.
‘Now I have this machine, I’m supposed to send messages to myself in the past, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘But what’s to stop me from just… not doing that. What if I just decide that I don’t want to, and the whole thing never even starts.’
‘I don’t know what would happen if you did that. But you won’t. You already know that.’
Mikey growled with frustration and pressed the tip of the pen so hard against the notepad that the paper tore. He didn’t write any legible words, but a new message arrived anyway.
‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not much comfort, but I promise it will be worth it.’
“Ugh,” Mikey snarled, dropping the notepad and pen to the ground. He put his face in his hands for a moment, then looked sideways at Ray.
“I wish I could just - choose what to send and what not to. It’s like all these choices have been made for me already. If I do something, it’s because I already did it, and if I don’t, it’s because I never did… like I’m going around and around a track. There’s only one way to go, one option.”
“If it was up to you, what would you do?” Ray asked.
“I’d…” Mikey paused, like he was steeling himself. “I’d never have sent that message warning me that they were coming to your apartment.”
“What?” said Ray, surprised and rather hurt. “You wish you’d never brought me along? Never told me the truth?”
“You’d have been safer if I hadn’t!” Mikey said, sounding defensive. “Look at everything that’s happened to you because of me!”
“Nothing’s happened to me-”
“Because we’ve been lucky! I didn’t have a choice about getting mixed up in all this, but you could have.”
“I did,” snapped Ray. “You told me I could stay behind, remember, and I wanted to come along.”
“But-”
“You keep complaining about how much it sucks that you can’t really make your own choices, but you wanted to do the exact same thing to me! This is one choice that you shouldn’t get to make.”
Mikey didn’t look convinced, and Ray began to doubt himself. Maybe he’d just been cramping Mikey and Gerard’s style during this whole trip.
“Was it really that bad, bringing me along?” Ray asked, sounding more vulnerable than he would have liked. Mikey finally met his eyes.
“I wanted you to come with us,” Mikey admitted. “We’d never stayed in one place for so long before, and the truth is… it was because I didn’t want to leave you. And then when they came after you, I felt awful but… You said you wanted to come along and I was so happy. I didn’t even try to convince you not to. I’m selfish, you lost everything and you got shot at because I was too weak to tell you you had to stay behind.”
“It wasn’t selfish. I made up my mind what I wanted to do, and it just happened to be the same thing you wanted. That’s supposed to be a good thing!”
“It all started because of that message I got, and now I know that I’m the one who sent it in the first place, so… somewhere out there, a future version of me set things up just to make sure this would happen. Just to make sure you’d make the decision that you did.”
“Or maybe,” said Ray, “Somewhere out there, a future version of me had to have an argument with you, and convince you not to change anything.”
“Ray…”
Tired of arguing, Ray took Mikey’s hand in his, taking advantage of his momentary distraction to say, “I don’t want to live in that version of reality where you just disappear one day and I never know why. I don’t want to always wonder what could have happened between us if I’d just been brave enough to speak up.”
“Ray,” Mikey whispered, and he grabbed Ray’s arm with his free hand.
“I’ve had feelings for you for the longest time. And it sounds like you feel the same way.”
“It doesn’t matter how I feel,” Mikey said.
Ray gave Mikey’s phone a pointed look. “I don’t see any messages coming in telling you what to do,” he said. “I think future you is letting you make this call without interference. And so am I. If you tell me to leave, I will. I’ll catch a bus back home and make up some story about where I’ve been. It’ll make me miserable and I think it would you as well, but if that’s what you say, I’ll-”
Ray was cut off when Mikey grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled him close. His lips crashed against Ray’s, and it was only when Ray put his arms around Mikey that he relaxed enough for what they were doing to be considered a kiss. Ray ran one hand up the back of Mikey’s neck, his fingers slipping between soft strands of hair. Mikey sighed and Ray deepened the kiss, teasing Mikey’s lips apart with his tongue.
After a minute Mikey pulled away, although he kept one hand on Ray’s shoulder. With his other hand he picked up the strange box. “Are you sure about this, Ray?” he asked.
“I’m sure.”
Mikey unlocked the screen and typed, ‘Ray is in danger’.