The girl in the boat was drenched from bleeding. The wound — if there was only one wound — looked to be a slash just above her clavicle on the right side of her neck. Whether it was nothing more than a slight cut or a slash deep into the scalene muscles neither David nor Jeremy could discern from the dock, especially not in the quickly fading light. But there was blood, no doubt, and a profuse amount of it.
“Help her out of the boat,” the teenager behind the wheel demanded. He looked no older than David did now, perhaps sixteen.
“Get a bit closer to the dock,” Jeremy instructed.
“What happened to her?” David asked. He stretched his arm out over the water to help pull the six-seater speed boat to the dock. From his end, Jeremy pulled with the rope the boat’s captain had tossed him and tied it off onto a trestle post.
Another girl in the boat, perhaps as young as twelve, kept screaming. She sat on the floor of the boat cradling the bleeding girl.
“Beth, shut up!” the boat captain demanded.
The arms of the younger girl — Beth — were also covered in wet, sticky blood from holding the girl who was injured. She struggled to stop screaming but holding it in turned her panicked screams into sobs. The bleeding girl was curled up against Beth, her arms tucked around her like a sleeping baby.
The other two passengers were slightly older, closer in age to Jeremy. One was a thin but muscularly defined man wearing sky-blue Ocean Pacific corduroy shorts and a Pink Floyd t-shirt. The other looked to be of Indian descent, with dark skin, black hair, and a thick bushy black mustache. In the squirming discord of the small boat, the Indian was the only one who made direct eye contact with Jeremy and David. His stare was unnerving.
“What happened?” David asked again.
“We found her this way,” the man in the Pink Floyd shirt said. “Out past Canasta Island.”
“In another boat?” Jeremy asked.
Pink Floyd shot the Captain a look, a quick dart of the eyes.
“On a dock,” Captain said. “Just laying there.”
“No one else around?” David asked.
“She needs help,” Beth said. She tried to stand, working her way out from under the bleeding girl who was still in her arms.
“How many of you are there here?” Pink Floyd asked.
“What?” David responded.
“Just the four of you?” Pink Floyd said, nodding at their parents now standing on the shore at the foot of the dock.
“What’s the difference?” Jeremy asked.
Pink Floyd and the Captain glanced at each other again. David looked at the Indian man still sitting silent and unmoving, his eyes expressionless.
“Help us out of the boat,” Beth said. Her whimper and screams had completely subsided, startlingly so. “Please, can you take her?”
“Hand her to me,” David said.
“Wait,” Jeremy said.
“You’ll need to come into the boat and get her,” Beth said.
David looked at the Captain and each of the passengers.
“There’s no room for me,” David said, kneeling at the edge of the dock. “Can’t you hand her over?”
“You might want to do what they say,” the Indian man finally spoke.
“What?” David asked.
“Unless you can run fast,” the man continued, “you might want to do what they say.”
“Shut up, Ishtar!” the Captain demanded.
Pink Floyd leaped then, coming out of the boat with surprising speed. He barreled into Jeremy, slamming him hard. Jeremy fell backward on the dock, his arms twirling like a windmill as he stumbled before crash-flopping into the water. He burst to the surface, splashing wildly as he floundered to reorient himself. He reached out, trying to grab hold of the wet edges of the dock.
“What the hell? Jeremy called out, sputtering.
Pink Floyd, now on the dock, brandished a switchblade from his back pocket. He ran past David and towards the shore.
David popped upright as Pink Floyd continued his sprint. As he ran, his right arm pulled back with the knife firmly in his clenched hand, its blade silver and shining. It was pointed directly at Charles and Charlotte LaGrange, David and Jeremy’s parents, who stood dumbfounded, watching this event transpire so quickly right before their eyes. And now a knife was directed straight at them in the hand of a man moving faster than any of them could process.
Ideally, if someone could travel back in time alone, one could theoretically manipulate the world to his benefit. Go back to the early 1990s and register patents for online shopping carts, MP3 devices, social networks, and artificial intelligence. Copyright the names iPod and iPhone, Amazon and Facebook. Bet on future sporting events if you’d paid attention to the scores the first time around. Ramp up early investments when Apple’s stock was in the tank.
To know the future is to control the past, to have power, prestige, and near omniscience.
But when the entire world’s population traverses timelines all at once, somehow waking up to discover an entire galaxy — right down to the alignment and flow of constellations in the sky now repeating itself — no one holds the advantage unless they take the advantage. And in a world where everyone is trying to understand how some people are dead, some people are gone, and everyone else has gone back into their bodies from forty years prior, that world’s population would undoubtedly soon lose their minds in a panic as everyone scrambled to regain even the basest sense of normalcy.
That scramble — that panic — would not commence in a few days or weeks.
That dystopia would begin instantly.
In other words, when Steve Jobs comes back to life and then travels back in time along with everyone else, and everyone else knows he was the mastermind behind iPads and smartphones, the ability to somehow cash in on time travel is suddenly wiped out.
“If I could go back in time,” is no longer a wishful dream, but a cursed reality.
And in that reality, if your life sucked before with a bad job, failed marriage, and maybe thousands of investments lost in a stock market crash, it wasn’t going to be fixed when everyone else was still experiencing their own pains in addition to trying to understand what happened.
If the future you just escaped consisted of life sentences in prison, or panhandling and begging at traffic stops, then there’s a solid likelihood that your new life in this bygone era is still going to suck the second time around. It will probably be even worse.
This realization — which some would conclude faster than others — would naturally lead to mass hysteria, reactionary violence, and the stark realization that merely repeating history was an impossibility.
So if life is going to be worse, why not take what you can while the takings are good?
These realizations had not yet entered the minds of the LaGrange family on Lake Hazelton. But for the man in the Pink Floyd shirt, it was the first thing he thought of when he woke up in this all-new reality.
By the time David could even think to react, the man in the Pink Floyd shirt already reached Charles and Charlotte and brought his knife to Mrs. LaGrange’s throat.
Well. That is such a fascinating concept…everyone time traveling gives the advantage to no one. This is a heart pounding chapter, I like it. I found only one typo:
“What the hell? Jeremy called out, sputtering.
Missing end quotation mark.