Pete Cawdron - Feedback

The old man slumped against the wall of the central dome. Jason squeezed the dying man’s hand gently.

“Feedback,” Professor Lachlan said.

“Feedback?” Jason asked, his mind remembering the word he’d seen chaotically spelled out when the photos had fallen to the floor of the RV. “You mean, like a microphone getting too close to a speaker?”

“Yes.”

Jason looked up, looking at the scratchings and messages, the words that seemed so disjointed and confused.

“So all this, it’s feedback from previous iterations? These messages we see here. These are messages we’ve left for ourselves?”

The professor nodded, his breath hitching as he said, “Each message defies fate. Each etching represents a small, subtle change. Each disproves the apparent static nature of time.”

“So we can break out of this feedback loop? We can end this?” Jason asked.

“Yes.”

“Feedback builds until something gives,” Jason said, realizing what the professor was getting at.

The old man nodded, saying, “Each time, we learn more.”

“But it’s too late!”

“It’s never too late,” the professor said, struggling with those final words. His eyelids drooped. His head bowed, and his hand went limp.

Lachlan was dead.

Jason struggled to swallow the lump in his throat. Tears spilled down his face. He was overwhelmed by the loss of this man. His mentor. His friend. This man who was two men had saved his life. Jason owed him every breath. So much had been lost here. Jason barely knew the man that had rescued him from North Korea, but he knew he owed him a debt that could never be repaid.

“We should have left,” he sobbed, feeling the weight of the professor’s death because of his irrational insistence that they stay with the craft. “I’m sorry. You were right. We should have grabbed what we needed and ran.”

Lily cried. She rested her head on her father’s shoulder and sobbed, combing his thin hair with her fingers.

“You and I,” Jason said, grasping the professor’s hand and squeezing. “We have lived for thousands of years, never able to escape this prison, but this time, it will be different. I promise.”

Jason knelt beside Lily, gently rubbing her shoulders, whispering to her. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Bullets sliced through the air around them, zipping past just inches away from striking them. A battle continued to rage beneath the creature, but there was only so long Bellum could hold out. It was only a matter of time before he was outflanked. Gunmen were moving in from all sides.

In the confusion, Jason had lost sight of Vacili, but the cameraman had been there. He’d followed them onto the wing of the craft although Jason had no recollection of him jumping down from the scaffolding. A blinking red light on the camera told Jason he’d caught Lachlan’s last few moments on video.

Jason looked up at Vacili, looking deep into the dark, cold, impersonal camera lens as a bullet struck the back of Vacili’s head. An explosion of red sprayed to one side as the cameraman’s body crumpled and fell. His lifeless body slid a few feet after hitting the hide of the great animal, while the camera rolled down the sloping wing, slowly gathering momentum before it bounced off the edge and out of sight.

Lily grabbed Jason, holding on to him as though she were desperate not to fall. Jason could feel the terror in her trembling body.

On the distant scaffolding, April Stegmeyer’s body lay prone, sprawled to one side in a pool of blood.

The gunfire beneath the UFO ceased abruptly. Bellum was either dead or had been wounded and captured.

“We need to go,” Jason said, pulling Lily to her feet.

“Where?” Lily asked.

“We’ll go where we’ve always gone. Back in time.”

As the words left his lips, he realized she was going to die. He wasn’t sure whether she would die there in the nuclear reactor, within the time stream, or in the dark waters off the coast of North Korea, but there had only ever been one survivor, a boy. And that was the answer to the calculations. What was the consequence of traveling through time with a ruptured shield? The answer was that any matter that travelled through the wormhole reverted to its then current form. But that couldn’t be the whole answer. His body had retained its magnificent genetic changes, but where had those genetic enhancements come from? Were they the result of exposure to radiation while traveling through time? But surely, he thought, such radiation would be destructive. There was some other hidden element he didn’t yet understand. Some other influence swaying the course of the mighty river of time, and that puzzled him.

“We should run,” Lily said, pulling away from him, dragging him from the dome of the creature. “We need to get back to the truck. If you go back in time, this will never end. We need to get back out the way we came.”

Jason never saw the shooter, but he heard the shots ring out, echoing around the vast dome.

Lily’s body convulsed as three bullets ripped through her abdomen. Bright red blood sprayed across the dark hide of the creature. Lily sank to her knees and fell to one side clutching at her bloody stomach. She screamed in agony.

“No!” Jason cried. Crouching beside her, he raised her head and cradled her in his arms. “Oh, no. Not you too!”

“You have to run,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “You can’t go back. If you do, you’ll never escape. Your only hope is to get out of here.”

Her body spasmed, but the spasms were only from the waist up. Holding her, he could feel her shattered spine. She was paralyzed from the waist down. Blood and fluids poured from her wounds, soaking his hands.

“No, no, no,” he murmured, brushing her hair to one side and inadvertently smearing blood on her forehead. “It can’t end like this. Please, don’t let it end like this.”

“Don’t you see,” she gasped, squeezing his hand. “This has to end. You have to break out of the time loop.”

“No,” he whispered. “I can’t leave you.”

“You have to,” she said, closing her eyes as she whispered, “Run!”

Like Lachlan before her, Lily’s body went limp in his arms. Her eyes flickered open, but they stared blindly up at the vast ceiling of the reactor dome.

“Nooooo!” he screamed, arching his back and tensing every muscle in his body in a futile bid to roll back time, but there was nothing to be done for her.

Run!

Lily’s last word seemed to echo in his mind.

Run?

Sitting there, he trembled, trying not to collapse beside her lifeless body. Jason was shaking uncontrollably. Standing seemed impossible, let alone walking or running. Here he was, sitting on a time machine, unable to roll back just one minute to save the young woman. He couldn’t explain the connection he’d forged with Lily over those past few days, but it had been severed violently and abruptly, tearing at his heart.

Soldiers dropped onto the edge of the UFO. They were shouting, waving, firing their rifles. Bullets whipped by his head, passing just inches from his face.

“I’m sorry,” he said, resting her head gently on the thick hide of the interstellar beast. With two fingers outstretched, he closed her eyelids. It seemed only decent and proper. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t care. He couldn’t pretend that just moments before, her body hadn’t been animated, radiating a life he found deliriously intoxicating. The realization that Lily was dead caused a knot to form in his chest. A knife through the heart couldn’t have felt more painful, he thought.

Run!

Again, her soft admonition reverberated through his mind. She was right. He had to run.

Jason grabbed the pickaxe and ran. His legs felt weak, drained of strength, but he forced them on. Bullets whizzed by, cracking through the air as they shot past him at supersonic velocities.