Save Him Page 8

  "You're cured. How?"

  "By God."

  "I don't understand."

  As he faced his sister, Rydel's mind began to question what he was seeing. This is not your sister. You are just seeing what you want to see. You are imagining this image of her.

  "You're not imagining what you are seeing, Rydel. I am healed right here in front of you now."

  "That's not possible. My mind has just created you. I wish to God you were cured, Karen. But I'm starting to understand what is happening. The doctors were right. I am worn out. I'm surprised I made it here without getting in some sort of accident. You are back at the hospital, you are dying, and I will always miss you."

  Rydel got back up on his feet and turned away from his sister. After taking three steps, the redwood tree he had been leaning against landed on each side of him, perfectly halved. One tree branch struck his lower cheek, and his cheek began to bleed slightly. The tree never made a sound; it just split perfectly in half from the ground up and fell forward.

  Body and face trembling, Rydel looked over his shoulder. Standing between each half of the tree, Karen nodded for Rydel to join her, and he did, moving closer with robotic legs he no longer controlled until he stood in front of his sister.

  "A war is coming, Rydel. One you have to help stop."

  "A war?" Rydel replied.

  Karen slowly nodded three times. "Yes. The one war that will turn the earth into a literal hell. The Other will wipe out humanity. Christ's Second Coming has to be done in His time to save us from that. We let Him die on the cross as a people. We have to save Him."

  "Save Him?"

  "The earth will burn, Rydel. Did you really believe it was just you creating Placement? God's hand was guiding you to save our Savior."

  "Placement is dangerous—"

  "It is not dangerous," Karen quickly said. "And you know it. It will save humanity…once He is saved. The message Christ was sent to deliver to the world has to be known in our time. He was crucified before He was able to finish what He was sent here to do."

  "You want me to go back in time and save Jesus Christ?"

  "You will," Karen said confidently. "God chose you to go back and save His Son."

  Karen took two steps closer to her brother.

  "I'm going to show you something important now, Rydel. Something to put your worried mind at ease." Karen stepped backward between the split redwood tree. From the ground up, the tree mended itself back together in front of Rydel.

  She was gone. Disappearing behind the tree—or inside of it—Rydel could not be sure which of the two.

  Emotionally drained, Rydel gazed almost drunkenly at the tree as a leaf drifted down and landed at his feet. He let out a sort of half-mad laugh at the leaf now resting on his dirt-caked shoe. The sound of a child giggling whipped Rydel's head back up at the redwood in front of him.

  A young girl walked out from behind the redwood and skipped over to Rydel, then stopped and stood in front of him.

  "Let's run together and explore like we did when we were kids, Rydel. One last time."

  Rydel dropped to his knees and touched the young girl's face. "My God, what am I seeing here?"

  "It's me, Rydel—it's Karen. Come on!"

  Karen, who now appeared to be about ten years old, ran off into the field. Rydel stood and took a couple of steps forward like a fawn on the day of its birth, got his legs under him, then followed after her.

  __

  Two days later at the Genesis lab, Rydel sat hunched over his desk, scribbling on a notepad, when a knock at the door spun his head around. He slipped the notepad into the desk drawer and combed back his hair with both hands.

  "Come in."

  Will entered. His eyes darted around the way they always did when he was inside Rydel's private room at the lab. He then gave Rydel a look of compassion that almost made Rydel laugh out loud.

  "Adams told me about the condition of your sister. My sympathies."

  "I'm putting in some hours—but she needs me now. After I leave today, I can't say when I'll be back working like I was before," Rydel bluntly said.

  "I understand. I have people I care about as well."

  Will took one more discreet glance around the room and gave Rydel what he thought resembled a smile, his lips barely moving. He then exited the room. The look he had given Rydel was unsettling—his face almost inelastic. They’d been colleagues for years, yet Rydel still wondered how Will could work at a place benefiting, for the most part, the quality of human life when the man clearly had no concern for humanity at all.

  As years passed, Rydel realized what was driving Will—and that was control. Will had the final say when projects got the green light. He loved having the power over whether the soldiers in the field or innocent civilians in war-torn countries deserved the benefit of the projects he supervised. Once Colonel Adams arrived at Genesis, he had stepped in a few times and disagreed with Will, but for the most part, Will had the final word.

  Sensing that Will had gone and wasn’t waiting by the door to pop back inside, Rydel slipped the notepad back out from his desk drawer. Fearing hackers, he did not want to use his computer for what he was doing.

  Rydel went over his notes one more time before finishing up for the night.

  "Two more days," Rydel whispered to himself.

  He slipped the notepad inside his lab coat and shut down his computer. Everything was falling into place for his mission that no one at the lab would ever know about.

  The Return

  Ten minutes after he returned from the past, Rydel's jumbled mind finally came back to him. For the next two hours, he sat in the back seat of another car he had rented, piecing together what he had witnessed and what he was able to find out, working on a laptop purchased weeks ago with cash. He had taken from the lab only what he absolutely needed for his mission and paid cash for the rest.

  While typing his notes, Rydel glanced at the date on the bottom-right-hand corner of the laptop. He'd only been gone just shy of five days. Good. The lab did not hear from him in that time, which would be understandable because of his sister's condition but still unusual for him. He needed to get back to Genesis soon, not wanting to raise suspicion—and to do what needed to be done. But first he needed to see his sister. She had to know what went wrong.

  In his rented Pathfinder, it took Rydel only an hour from where he had used Placement—the field where his sister showed him the miracle—to reach the hospital.

  Rydel walked down the hallway and reached his sister's room. The dying young woman lay on the bed, waiting, the miracle of being cured now gone. The only semblance of life came from her eyes, pleading to know how the journey back in time went. Rydel reached the bed and knelt by Karen's side. He held her hand and swept away a strand of hair curling down her face.

  "Rydel."

  His name sounded as if she'd been given a small glass of sand to drink. Regardless of the pain she was in, she smiled at him. How much strength did it take to smile, Rydel asked himself. He bent forward and touched his forehead to his sister's, wishing he had better news for her. Joined together by the touch, he remained that way for a few seconds with his eyes closed and then raised his head. He had to tell her what had happened in the past and what had to be done next.

  "I'm sorry. The date I told you, from what I'd learned, was wrong, Karen. He'd been crucified already. But now I know the correct time—I am leaving again."

  "Go, Rydel. Save Him."

  __

  With the moon still visible in the sky, the dawn started to outline the surrounding trees behind the Genesis lab in purple and deep orange.

  Parked in his rented Pathfinder, Rydel stared down at the lab with heavy-lidded eyes through a pair of Genesis binoculars. Three men Rydel knew by name stood waiting at the lab's entrance: Bob Clancy, Neil Mitchell, and Paul Rogers. The doors opened, and a shift change took place. Three men who had just finished their shifts walked to the parking lot, got into their black SUVs (provided
by Genesis), merged onto the road leading out, and drove away.

  Rydel's Pathfinder made its way toward the lab. As luck—or maybe destiny—would have it, today happened to be Will's one day off. Unlike Rydel, Will did not live at the lab; he had a place in town. But if Rydel had returned to the lab before Clancy, Mitchell, and Rogers were on duty, a call most likely would have been placed to Will, since Rydel was technically on leave. The three men now on duty would only ask how his sister was doing and carry on with their day-to-day routine. A couple of the projects at the lab had helped family members of Clancy and Rogers. Mitchell himself had also benefited from Rydel's work. They would say nothing to Rydel or to anyone else about him being inside the lab when he was not scheduled to be.

  Rydel had planned for only the one time out with Placement—a chip he was able to make on his own. There was no way he could make another chip without resources from the lab. He could no longer hide his intentions—he had to take what he needed from Genesis.

  Inside the lab, Rydel was met with consoling looks and words of support regarding his dying sister from scientists he worked with. Rydel entered the hallway leading to the guts of the working lab and stopped, staring at the three from security who, he was sure just shortly before, would have let him breeze on by. The men, however, now stood in a line as if waiting for him, blocking the entrance to the hallway. Rydel tried to suppress a sudden feeling of trepidation and walked toward the men.

  "Hey, guys."

  The widest of the three, Bob Clancy, glanced at the other two men with him and then looked back at Rydel.

  "Rydel, why are you here?" Bob asked.

  Rydel wasn't sure how to interpret the unemotional way Bob spoke to him, so he just kind of shook his head and replied just as flatly.

  "I have to work."

  With his intimidating form, Bob moved closer and placed a hand on Rydel's shoulder.

  "No, Rydel, you should not be here now."

  He now had a decision to make in just seconds. Before arriving, he had tucked a handgun into the back of his waistband in case something like this happened. Realistically, Rydel knew he probably could not even shoot one of these three men before being taken down. He was not a trained soldier—the three in front of him were. And in the pause Rydel had taken to consider his options, Bob spoke again.

  "You should be with your sister now, Rydel. Your work here can wait. I lost my mother while in Iraq. I should've been with her. The time you are spending here is time you will never get back with your sister."

  "Thank you, Bob. You're right. But the work I need to complete here saves lives. I cannot keep myself away from it. My sister understands. She's the one who sent me away to continue with my work—for just a little while. But like you said, I don't intend on being here long. I will be back with my sister tonight. I will not let her be alone at a time when she needs family the most."

  The three in front of Rydel glanced at one another. Bob then spoke once more.

  "You're a good man, Rydel."

  "So are you, Bob."

  __

  Rydel entered his room at the lab an hour later. After wiping out all his work on Placement on every Genesis computer, he finished placing the destination into the chip he would confiscate for his mission. He could gain access to the chips from his computer after hours at the lab if a flash of inspiration came, but he could not get to them physically; only John and Will could. However, he was able to get to the secret project Will was hiding. He couldn't destroy it. That would have attracted unwanted attention. Does the man really think I am that gullible?

  Rydel removed a clear plastic bag from his desk drawer. The bag contained what looked like a human hand. He had lifted Will's fingerprints off a coffee mug in the cafeteria weeks ago and transferred the prints onto a synthetic hand he was working on for amputees.

  Once inside the lab, security and the scanners became a bit more lax so that the doctors could move from room to room. The scanners in the lab would never know a synthetic hand was being used—the scanners could not detect liveness. He couldn't use a chip like the one John Adams had implanted to gain access to every room—that required minor surgery.

  In the hallway leading away from his room at Genesis, Rydel made his way toward the rooms inside the lab he was not authorized to enter. He already had S-7 (a drug used to control a person completely, body and mind) and a translator. No one had noticed that both had been missing for weeks now.

  They would, however, know in minutes what was taken tonight—minutes if he was lucky, Rydel knew. But it didn't matter anymore—this time out would make all the difference. Whether he made it back to this place in time or not was secondary.

  The first room he needed to get to would be the black room. Just fifty feet away, the black room was where the Placement chips were stored after he was finished working on them for the day—only Will and Colonel Adams had access to the room. Rydel had no idea why the hell they called it the black room.

  He placed the thumb of the synthetic hand on the red scanner, and the door opened. The black room was black: black walls, black desks, and black computers. A wall to the right of Rydel stretched across the room with what looked like black safety deposit boxes facing him.

  "I guess this is why they call it the black room," Rydel said to himself.

  He hurried over and touched the side of one of the black safety-deposit-looking boxes with all five fingertips on the artificial hand. A tray slid out from the wall with black pills in glass cylinders. Rydel took one of the glass cylinders and removed the pill from inside, looked it over, and placed it in a plastic baggie. He gathered up the rest of the glass cylinders, stuffed them in his pockets, and tapped the timer on his wristwatch. He knew wherever Will was tonight, the man would now know the black room had been breached because of the men monitoring everything in the Overlook. Rydel figured he had about two more minutes to reach the weapons room before being taken down. On his first attempt to save Christ, he had gone unarmed. He would not make the same mistake again. If he went back and was somehow off on the time once more—with maybe Jesus on his way to be crucified—he would need to take down anyone near Christ.

  Down one empty hallway and into another, Rydel raced toward the weapons-room door and scanned himself in using the ring finger on the synthetic hand. The weapons room, with a large white table in the middle, stored state-of-the-art weaponry inside black-tinted glass cabinets mounted on each of the four walls. Rydel was able to open most of the cabinet doors, searching for what he needed; he knew the doors were unlocked on select weapons still in development. At one of the cabinets, Rydel grabbed a new prototype Smartround rifle Will was just about finished working on, a recent handgun version of the rifle, and magazines for the guns. He placed everything on the white table, then went back and closed the glass door. After running back to the table, Rydel reached under his coat for a duffel bag and started to place the guns and ammo inside as the alarms went off. The inside of the weapons room went dark. In the darkness, Rydel slung the duffel bag over his shoulder, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out the plastic baggie. Then he swallowed the Placement pill he had programmed just minutes ago.

  The weapons room door burst open. His three friends from security rushed toward him, now dressed in black protective gear, guns drawn. The light inside the room returned as the three moved in on Rydel.

  "On the ground, Rydel! On your knees—down, down—down!"

  It sounds like Bob behind the black face mask I designed, the quick thought flashing in and out of Rydel's brain.

  Rydel did as he was told and knelt on the floor. The three moved closer, cautiously, and it was Bob behind the mask who spoke again.

  "Arms above your head, Rydel. Do it."

  Rydel started to lift his arms but then stopped his hands near his chest, his palms open and facing out.

  "Over your head, Rydel—arms up!"

  Rydel dropped his left hand to his side and made the sign of the cross with his right hand.
r />   "Rydel, don't—"

  Rydel vanished in front of the three, taking the floor tiles he knelt on with him. The sound of the tiles being pulled up from the floor and of siphoned air filled the room for a split second. All that remained of him was a small white swirling hole, which eventually disappeared. The three armed men stepped closer to where Rydel had been and suddenly stopped. With all the rumors of what went on here at Genesis, who knew what the hell just happened to Rydel. They sure as shit didn't want to be exposed to whatever just made him disappear.

  Rydel's Whereabouts in Time

  The three security men on duty at Genesis stood off to the side in the white-ceilinged, white-floored, white-walled security room at the lab, as the Overlook at Genesis was off-limits to them. Will sat behind a desk in front of thirty monitors, shaking his head as the images of Rydel popped up. The sound of footfalls and the repeated usage of the word "sir" turned the attention of the four toward the room's closed door. The door flew open so hard the knob stuck into the wall as John Adams entered. He yanked the knob out of the drywall and slammed the door shut. The colonel looked over the three security men while walking toward the monitoring desk. He stood over Will and slowly enunciated every word to him:

  "What…the…hell…happened here, Will?"

  "Rydel stole and used Placement. He's gone."

  The colonel slammed his fist on the desk, and Will jumped a little in his seat. "Where did he go?" the colonel asked quietly and intensely.

  "I don't know yet, sir."

  __

  In Colonel Adams's office twenty minutes later, Will sat expressionless in front of the colonel's desk. Colonel Adams paced behind Will, waiting for an explanation. Will blankly stared out the window behind the colonel's desk. He wanted to relieve John Adams of his revolver concealed under his black peacoat and shoot him between the eyes for actually insinuating this was somehow his fault. But he knew he would die attempting such a thing.