Drift pattern, p.57
Drift Pattern, page 57
In a blur, Luci revs the Vespa’s belabored engine to skim along the side of the truck. She takes a sharp breath and twists the throttle all the way back for one final thrust.
“This had better work,” she thinks in this final moment.
It does work, and for a fraction of a second, she places the Vespa directly in front of the vehicle as intended.
This position is short-lived as the high bumper of the truck swats her away.
Luci’s flying.
All sound is blocked save for the racing thump of her heartbeat in her eardrums. Like a discarded shirt tossed across a room into a hamper, the arc of Luci’s trajectory peaks, and she returns to the ground with a sickening thud. There’s an abrupt bone-snapping crunch. Her body slides across the graveled pavement and finally skids to a stop.
Time returns to its normal state with the screeching of tires in stereo on both sides of her.
She finds it odd that there’s no pain.
There’s a flash, and she’s in the back of a car. Someone is screaming—a woman. Young Luci tosses her Sudoku magazine on the seat beside her to unbuckle for a better look. “What is it, Mama?”
The scream stops. A familiar man’s voice from the front seat says incredulously, “That woman just cut in front of that truck!”
The memory doesn’t last; Luci is on the pavement again. On her side, she sees the mashed scooter a few meters from her, the front wheel spinning like a misaligned Ferris wheel.
Again, she finds it strange that there’s no pain. Shouldn’t there be a tremendous amount of pain? But there’s nothing, just blurred shapes of people rushing around and the spinning wheel of the baseball kid’s moped.
As chaotic a scene as it is, Luci is completely at peace on her side.
The front wheel of the Vespa slows to a stop. She suspects it will never be ridden again by her, by that bratty baseball boy, or by anyone.
A man rushes up, blocking the view of the motionless scooter tire. He crouches, putting his face close to hers. His words are indistinct, warped sounds fading in and out. Luci recognizes him, and her heart flutters. Papa? She wants to call out to him, but she can’t for some reason. He looks so handsome, but there’s a sadness in his eyes. Why does he look so sad? Her heart overflows with joy. How can she tell him who she is—his little “Luci-Poo,” how much she’s missed him all those years, how much she loves him? She wants to tell him how she’s thought about his death every single day since it happened. How many days has it been in real time since she’s seen his face all those years ago? She begins to work out the math of it but then pauses. She’ll do it later. She’s tired right now . . . so tired.
Another man bends beside him, also with widened eyes. Papa turns to him, speaking quickly and shaking his head. The presence of the other man is frustrating, and Luci wants him to go away, leaving only her father to her. Both stand upright, and all her field of view offers is the bottom of their trouser legs and the occasional pointing gesture. Her father crouches again. This time, she will tell him. This time, she will speak.
She’s snatched away again. The overlap memory is of her flinging a deep-burgundy graduation cap high into the air among hundreds of others. The hats return to the ground like clumsy giant confetti. She embraces her best friend, Kimberly Lassiter. Luci knows and simultaneously doesn’t know this friend whom she loves so much. What’s unmistakable is that she’s never been happier than in this precise moment.
She returns to the present. The shriek of faraway sirens pierces the noise of the crowd. Papa has taken a few steps back from her. He’s in full view on his cell phone and pacing back and forth. His eyes never shift from hers. He was always a good man, she thinks. He looks so troubled and helpless. If only she could explain to him that it’s okay, that it’s what she wanted. In this instant, it dawns upon her that she did it—she’s saved them and, by proxy, saved the world! Again, her heart is flooded with joy. This elation outshines the graduation-to-be. She thinks of Ish and smiles, knowing that she did it—they did it. The two of them traded their lives for the life of the world, for a new and better path. They have delivered a second chance to a world that had no hope.
Papa approaches and bends to her again. She wants to replace the fear in his eyes with joy. She’s never seen him afraid; it doesn’t look right on him. She wants to tell him a joke, something funny, something corny like he always came up with, to erase the grief on his face. If only she could speak, she would play his old line back to him: “The future isn’t what it used to be.” She thinks of how he didn’t know how right he was about that. Luci smiles—at least she thinks she smiles, but she can’t be sure. Whatever her expression is, it causes Papa to stop and regard her quizzically. Some of the tension in his forehead relaxes as he lowers the phone.
Coming up slowly from behind him is a cautious young girl, her eyes wide with astonishment. Luci senses a fair amount of fear in her, but it seems to be held at bay by the girl’s powerful fascination with the scene. She peeks over the top of a Sudoku magazine as if it’s a shield.
Luci knows this girl—it’s her.
Upon realizing his young daughter has snuck away from the back seat of the car, Papa frantically grabs young Luci by the shoulders to spin her around. The issue of puzzle games flies from the girl’s grip and falls to the ground. Papa shouts to someone. Mama comes into view but only long enough to snatch their daughter away from the scene. All the while, the girl fights to look over her shoulder at older Luci on the ground.
Another memory flashes. It starts with young Luci’s point of view on the bridge looking at a bloody woman on the pavement who’s been struck by a truck. It jump-shifts to “college Luci” retelling the same story in an upscale bar, explaining how that single horrifying event inspired her to go to medical school. Her three girlfriends scoff at her in good humor, reminding her that she’s studying to become a veterinarian. Luci hears this other version of herself join in with the laughter and explain, “What can I say? I like animals more than people, I guess.”
Luci is back, but the younger version is gone, and so is Papa.
A man with intensely blue eyes and bright blue hands is yelling something to her. The blue is a glove; it holds a tiny annoying flashlight that he’s shining in Luci’s eyes.
There’s another ceremony—graduating from veterinarian school. She looks out from the platform. Papa and Mama clap exuberantly, pausing only to wipe tears of joy from their eyes.
The flashlight is back; four blue gloves now, maybe six.
A handsome young man brings a well-groomed husky into the clinic for the dog’s shots. Monique at the front desk tells Luci the man’s name is “Haris—like ‘Harris’ but with only one ‘R’.”
Luci lazily gazes upward at the ceiling of the ambulance. Frantic voices shout about losing something, but she doesn’t know what they’ve lost and doesn’t care. She finds herself wondering if God, the universe, or whatever will reward her sacrifice today by allowing her and Ish to be together again somewhere.
She has a final memory overlay even more intense than the ones preceding. Twenty-six-year-old Luci’s forehead is drenched with sweat, and she can’t remember a time that she has been more exhausted than she is right now. She’s tired beyond words, but even more than that, from within her heart flows an unending waterfall of love and serene satisfaction. She holds this fragile little person, balancing his tiny slumbering body on her sweat-drenched chest. Without a doubt, he is the most amazing thing that she’s ever laid eyes upon. He is the embodiment of hope, a connection to something that will go on well beyond herself, a physical flesh-and-blood promise for the future. She wants to unwrap him and place thousands of loving kisses on his soft, unblemished skin, but the nurses have instructed Luci to keep him swaddled.
The registrar nurse asks Haris for the first name of the child. He turns with a proud smile that only a new father knows. Looking back to Luci and his newborn son, the husband says, “She wants to know his name.”
She uses her final breath to whisper what Luci Prime in the delivery room is saying as the memory begins to fade. “His name? Ish . . . Call him . . . Ishmael.”
Luci Gaudiano closes her eyes.
epilxg
A slender, dark-skinned man slowly makes his way across the deserted cemetery. This interval’s custom of inserting its deceased in the ground instead of releasing them to the sea is peculiar to him. Nevertheless, he’s grateful for the tradition, thankful to have a location to visit.
He pauses, looking down at the scrap of paper the clerk inscribed the location marker on. Paper reminds him of her, and it probably always will. She’s gone now, but the paper remains. A bittersweet smile forms as he muses on how she would’ve likely found the slot number they’ve placed her in amusing: 137, the number related to the “fine-structure constant” of quantum electrodynamics.
He approaches his destination, stepping slowing as he attempts to reconcile the emotional confusion in his heart. How do you mourn for one who still lives, albeit a younger version of themselves? He concludes that he is not mournful of her death but the death of her being with him. He’s mournful at the realization that he’s the only living soul that will ever experience the brilliant mathematical mind of Luci Ann Gaudiano, the extraordinary woman who chose to save the world twice—once from nuclear fire and once from Waleen Macer’s future abomination.
He sighs, arriving at the spot where the scrap of paper indicates her remains are laid.
It remains a mystery to him how the Carcerium had deposited him at the sports stadium a month or so ago. The best explanation is that Luci had somehow triggered the chamber to hurl the three of them across time to this non-interval point. A melancholy grin forms as he acknowledges that if anyone could do such an impossible thing, she could. He suspects that he and the body of Macer arrived exactly one thousand seconds after she’d skipped to this pre-Hi no Kawa period. Though there was no sign of the ESTA in the stadium, the skip barge was on the field a few meters from where they appeared. Its obliterated control lectern eliminated the possibility of anyone from this period reverse-engineering the tech. He toggles back and forth in his thoughts as to whether she had done this deliberately.
The one piece of Relicus City technology that did survive the leap skip is Macer’s churka, but he’s made sure that’s safely tucked away.
While doing duties for the past week in the homeless shelter, the question of what if she’d waited those seventeen minutes after she arrived has weighed heavily on his heart and mind. Would seeing him have stopped her from preventing her family’s wreck? Would he have asked her to stay in order to be with her, or would he have encouraged her to go on once she knew where she was?
It’s a question that he knows he will never be able to fully answer.
A lump forms in his throat. “Well, you set the world on a new a better path.” He wipes a solitary tear defiantly marching over his cheek. “A new and better path at least for a little while, and hopefully that’ll be enough. Hopefully, they’ll make the best of the second chance you’ve given them.”
He tears up at the sight of the Jane Doe marker and shakes his head.
“And no one will ever even know,” he says aloud in a voice on the verge of cracking.
He considers keeping tabs on the young girl and her family. Maybe one day, when she reaches adulthood, he’ll approach the woman and tell her how the Luci he knew and loved forfeited academic accolades in order to give the world a second chance. He tries to visualize how to initiate such a preposterous conversation and cannot.
“Then again, maybe it’s best just to leave it alone.”
He stares at the plaque as if waiting for it to answer back, but it’s as silent as the contents of its designation.
He looks up at the sky; it’s nearly dusk. The man turns to begin his long walk back to the shelter. He has years to decide if he’ll try to tell her.
For now, he’ll find his way in this new world he’s been thrust into, accepting that this new future’s secrets are not to be known . . . not just yet. He carries her love in his heart and decides maybe that’s enough for now.
Yes, it will have to be.
THE END
Acknowledgements
My brother, Nathan Lee Padgett, who patiently listened for an hour and a half in the wee hours of the morning back in August 2016 as I relayed nearly every plot point of this tale.
My mother, Mary, who has been a bottomless well of encouragement that I have frequently drawn from my entire life.
Shannon Winton (The Novel Nurse) for story structure guidance and so much more during a critical time of the writing of this.
A special thanks to Christian Roule: my own private quantum physics guide/instructor and time travel tale 'mechanic'.
The remainder of Team Armageddon (my beta readers and critique group) - Jason Aydelotte, Dominick D'Aunno, Erik Hailey, Hilary C. Ritz, Paige Theriot, and Chris Lewis, and editor Josh Mitchell.
And as always… my lovely wife, Sabrina for indulging me in these adventures.
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About the Author
Texas native George Wright Padgett is a multi-genre author who grew up reading science fiction and comic books. After a brief stint writing children’s picture books, he turned to darker themes. He now writes a mix of novels and short stories in sci-fi, detective, and horror categories.
His non-writing time is divided between being a husband and father of two, a jazz piano player, a graphic artist, and a playwright.
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