Scatter Read online

  Scatter

  Terry Hayman

  Fiero Publishing

  Copyright © 2022 by Terry Hayman

  Published by Fiero Publishing

  Cover elements copyright © ysbrand@depositphotos, agsandrew@yayimages, steheap@yayimages

  Cover and layout copyright © 2022 by Fiero Publishing

  ISBN: 978-1-927920-41-1

  All rights reserved.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real persons or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission of the author.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Trained for combat

  2. The people who matter

  3. An invitation is issued

  4. The crazy end of normal

  5. The trench coat stalker

  6. Set adrift

  7. The list

  8. Simple detective work

  9. Everyone’s watching

  10. Spooks and shrinks

  11. Jude’s guts and glory

  12. You can’t go home again

  13. A dark ride

  14. Zhou Wenling

  15. Rivers and oceans

  16. Assessing allies

  17. Preparing

  18. Long-distance strike

  19. The circles of Hell

  20. An extra ticket

  21. Phone call denied

  22. Lena

  23. Entangled

  24. Lipstick on a pig

  25. Words of a solider

  26. Inside an old movie

  27. Proving time travel

  28. Necessary allies

  29. We can’t lose you

  30. Seduced into danger

  31. Mr. Traine goes to Washington, nightmare version

  32. Time travel ripples

  33. The House is adjourned

  34. False spring

  35. Wheels within wheels

  36. Panic never helps

  37. The sales pitch

  38. Nothing matters, right?

  39. The early bird

  40. Choices

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Also by Terry Hayman

  About the Author

  Next up - Fuse

  Prologue

  2006

  The first third-year presenter today was Aaron Aristide. His paper was on how your memory of a face is affected by whether the face is from your own race or a different one. Aaron was born in Haiti. It made sense.

  The second presenter, who’s up in front of the class now, is Cherie Pascal. She’s tossing her blond curls and cheerfully talking about how guessing where a moving object ends up depends on something called “representational momentum.”

  Really? Relevance to anything? Why are people laughing at her jokes?

  I know she’s smart, though. Grad level research. It’s why I should probably be paying more attention, except…

  I’m next.

  Yes, you are, Jackson. And they’re going to kill you.

  No, I can do this. I’m ready.

  You’re a string bean coward, loser, nothing. You get up there and…

  Shut up! I. Can. Do. This.

  Look at their faces. They’re thugs! Like the ones who cut up your brother’s face back in Renton. Made you watch.

  This is absolutely nothing like—

  It’s exactly the same. Laughing at you. Attacking you.

  It’s not. It’s not. It’s not.

  But my fingers start to quiver, tap-tapping the cue cards rhythmically on my desk to shut out the conversation in my head. I don’t need the cards, of course. I never need cards. I have total recall without trying. But having the cards when I walk to the front of the class will make me look normal, less of a freak, less likely to get attacked. Maybe.

  Oral presentation. Half our grade.

  And I need this class.

  Cherie Pascal stops speaking. She’s done. All the students around me are applauding, even though I bet not half of them followed what she was saying. That will become obvious now when they try to ask question and…

  For some reason, Cherie looks at me like she expects me to ask something.

  My jaw clenches tight and I hold my breath. Don’t look at me! You must know I hate this. DON’T LOOK AT ME!

  I feel a hand on my arm. Jude, my one friend here, sitting at the desk beside me. He whispers, “Doing okay?”

  I nod.

  But even though it’s Jude, I can’t look at him. Can’t speak. My mouth has dried up. The sterile cream walls of this University of Illinois classroom have sucked the moisture out of me even as they’ve retained every sour particle of horny/scared/bored/tired sweat from the college kids around me.

  My own beads of sweat pop out all over my face and neck.

  This is not good.

  My PTSD expresses itself mostly in social anxiety, but never this bad.

  What’s happening?

  What’s…?

  I turn to look at Jude. His round, caring face is squinching in concern.

  My breath pushes up higher in my chest.

  Cherie finishes and the class applauds. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Professor Tavish nodding her gray-haired head and turning to look at me. They’re all looking at me. Every student in this class. Because I’ve never stood up in front of them. I just do my work. Keep my head down. I discuss things with Jude if I talk with anyone. Can’t avoid it. He’s my roomie.

  Do not go up there.

  Do not. You’ll be trapped. Caught.

  This isn’t just anxiety, Jackson. It’s death!

  And all of a sudden, I’m finding it hard to breathe. My heart is racing. My head and skin are so hot I want to scratch my way out of them.

  “Jackson?” Jude whispers beside me.

  I’m on my feet. Turning. Blinking hard as I walk from the room. Don’t run. Don’t trip.

  “Mr. Traine?” Tavish calls me from behind.

  Then I’m free of the door and running, tripping, dropping my cue cards so they go fluttering to the polished stone floors. I scrabble to my feet, gasping for air, and leave my cards behind as I run for the stairs at the end of the hall. A fire escape.

  “Aaghh. Agh. Agh,” I grunt as I run.

  I make the fire escape, go through the doors into the dank funnel of concrete and metal railings, and fight the urge to crash down here in a heap.

  No. Escape. Run. RUN!

  I pound up the stairs. One flight. Two. Three. Four… My heart’s pounding so hard now I’m sure my head’s going to explode.

  I finally make the top where there’s an exit to the forbidden rooftop of the University of Illinois Psych building, nine floors above ground level. I twist down the handle and shove. Locked!

  No, just stuck.

  On my third shove, the door grates open and I burst outside, only to get shoved back against the closing door by an icy November wind. Must have whipped down from Lake Superior in the last hour, roaring over a hundred miles of Illinois flatland to batter the campus with snow and ice. I push my skinny body off the door and stagger into that winter wind with my mouth open in a grimace, letting pellets of snow tear into my cloth coat and whip my long hair around my face, trying to blind me, blast me into a thousand pieces.

  I feel an insane urge to push through it to and throw myself onto the wide panel of windows that covers the long plunge of the open atrium.

  You didn’t catch me! I got away! I’d scream.

  I.

  Got.

  Away!

  But I can’t even force myself off the wall. My whole body feels like it’s going to burst apart. I crumple to my side
on the snowy concrete and curl up like a baby, shivering in the cold even though I’m burning up inside. My eyes are streaming. I’m blind with pain and an unidentifiable terror that is always with me, but now out in the open, all around me. Kicking me. Beating me like Dead Eyes did 44 months and 16 days ago in that chop shop after they’d cut up Kenny and dragged him away.

  I writhe and shiver on and on until the chimes from Altgeld Hall start their 11:50 chimes two blocks northeast of me.

  End of class. End of my GPA. End of my future.

  The chimes of the McFarland Bell Tower, the Eye of Sauron, start in from the south quad, clashing, blending, pounding into my head until I’m sure I’m going to puke.

  I choke out a gargling scream and try to stuff my fists into my mouth, tasting blood.

  Then I hear my name shouted by the wind, over and over—Jackson! Jackson! Come on! I’m here!—like it’s a real thing, so I have to unscrew my eyes and look…

  “Jackson! Good! You see me. Take a deep breath. Come on, buddy. Come on.”

  It’s Jude Spiegelman again. My curly-haired roomie. Only real friend in the world other than my big sister.

  He’s kneeling over me, doughy hands on my shoulders, shaking me. Patting me. Trying to bring me back. Make me breathe.

  Breathe.

  Breathe!

  Until finally I do. Finally coming down. Gasping. Unclenching. My whole body clenches and unclenches with rough, ugly sobs that scrape my whole insides on their way out.

  “It’s okay, dude,” Jude is saying. “It’s okay.”

  He pulls me up from the ground into his arms, even though I’m almost a foot taller than him. But he’s all plushy while I’m the dirty-blond ghost. Losing weight because I can’t sleep or eat right. When I close my eye lately, it’s just Kenny caught up in drugs, dumped at hospitals, carved up by Cutter.

  I’m right there! And here. Every bad place.

  I clutch Jude’s puffy coat and pull myself into his chest.

  Forty minutes later, Jude’s calmed me down and we walk down together to talk with Professor Colleen Tavish.

  With still-trembling hands, I hand her my paper so she can read it through slowly, then grill me on it. I find this surprisingly bearable because she doesn’t look at me once. She’s got thick glasses and ropy gray hair that falls around her face as she leans down to within inches of my paper to read it. It’s like I’m looking at another version of myself, someone who’s so afraid of personal connection and judgement that they’d rather curl up in a hole and hide than look into your eyes.

  And it strikes me that if she’s like this, and still got her Ph.D., published leading research on the effects of spousal abuse on cognition and emotional regulation, and can teach classes to college kids, then maybe there’s a way forward for me as well.

  I mean, until now, I’ve just pushed forward, determined to ignore my increasing PTSD and anxiety. I managed my first two years here with only a few incidents. But that was by operating in an emotional freeze, shutting most of the world out. Jude’s been the only person I really speak to. And only because we share a dorm room, half of our classes, and a lot of life interests, if not backgrounds.

  Professor Tavish is still reading, so here’s Jude’s background versus mine.

  He comes from a close Jewish family in Chicago that he still visits every weekend. His mom is Eema. His grandpa’s Saba. His aunt is Dohda. So much love.

  Me, I grew up in Renton, just south of Seattle, with a nanny and two older siblings, Kenny and Kansas. Our parents were never around because they were always traveling, looking after their building supplies franchisees.

  When I was seventeen, Kenny started self-medicating his bipolar condition with drugs and got dragged into a street gang called the Demon Monks, I think for his crazy memory as much as anything. I was always trying to pull him out. The last time, the Demon Monks’ leader, a guy called “Cutter,” made me watch while he carved a D and M into Kenny’s screaming face, one letter per cheek. Then they dragged Kenny away and beat me near senseless, promising to kill Kenny and the rest of my family if I ever talked about any of it.

  So I didn’t.

  Eventually, like my big sister and parents, I accepted Kenny was dead.

  I froze it all inside my gut, ran here to UIUC, south of Chicago, and eventually started having random pains that still affect my gait and gut, and make it hard to enjoy simple campus stuff like cruising Green Street, bowling, or watching movies on the quad. Then there’s my social anxiety. It preexisted what happened to Kenny, but blew up in a big way in the years following. So whether the trauma caused it or just made it worse, it’s all tied together, you know? PTSD is a complicated stew of clammy hands, tight guts, and now, I guess, panic attacks.

  I’ve read about all the treatments that can reduce the intensity of the flashbacks and emotions attached to them. There’s CBT, meditation, Rapid Eye Movement therapy, drugs, other stuff.

  But here’s the thing—and this is critical to understand—memories never fade or change for me. Kansas, Kenny, and I were born with crazy freak memories. When I see/feel/taste/touch/smell something, it sticks in my brain with near-perfect clarity for pretty much forever, as far as I can tell.

  Jude calls it a blessing, but—

  “What makes you discount the legitimacy of memory suppression?” Tavish growls at me without looking up from my paper.

  The lack of eye contact lets my mouth, dry as it is, work up enough moisture to unstick my tongue and speak. “I’ve put all my citations at the end.”

  “Name one and what it shows.”

  “Okay.” I think for a second and start with Elizabeth Loftus and her work on false memory syndrome. But because I recognize holes in her arguments, I continue on with the research of LL Kondora, SM Park, KS Pope, WE Hovdestad and CM Kristiansen, J Kitzinger, and a bunch more that I didn’t have room to discuss in my paper even though they illustrated the different study approaches done in Europe vs. America, implanted memories, confabulation vs. true amnesia, and the political movements that shaped how the courts have treated “recovered” memories at trial in different time periods, and…

  “Mr. Traine.”

  I stutter to a stop, blinking, seeing Jude giving me a lopsided smile and tapping his watch. Professor Tavish is still looking down at my paper, not at me. But I need to answer. “Uh…excuse me?”

  “What did you write on the third line of page four?” Tavish asks.

  I blink again. “It starts in the middle of a sentence. ‘…would be more persuasive if there was empirical evidence of disintegrating associations that…’”

  “Yes?” prompts Tavish.

  “You want me to continue with the next line?”

  “What did you have for lunch on January five, two thousand and one?”

  I frown and almost physically feel my eyes dart back and forth, which is a common human trait in someone looking to retrieve an old memory, searching for the visual image. In my case, though, it’s because I’m clicking through the age associations. That date, Jan 5, 2001, I’m fourteen years old. Kenny’s turning eighteen in another four days. Mom and Dad are out in Wyoming and aren’t expected back until a few days after Kenny’s birthday. They don’t know that Kenny just dropped out of school and is already battling a major heroin addiction. So…four days back from that awful birthday. It’s…Friday, forty-five degrees and raining outside the school cafeteria. My friend Jenelle Washington just said something about a guy called Michael Douglas Wilk who went missing on Monday, and I’m about to eat…

  “It’s alright, Mr. Traine. I was just—”

  “Leftover Kraft Dinner. I’d made it on Tuesday with all the broccoli we still had in the fridge added in, plus extra cheese and some garlic powder to make it interesting. I also had a mandarin orange. The second last one we had from the holidays.”

  There is a long beat of silence. I can hear Professor Tavish breathing. And smell it. She has coffee breath. She says, “Of course, there is no way
to verify any of that.”

  I frown and rattle of what day of the week it was, the weather, the stories and comics I remember reading in the newspaper that my parents had delivered to our house, even though they were rarely there.

  Tavish clears her throat. “Yes. Yes.” A long beat of silence. “Would you be willing to…take part in a study, Mr. Traine?”

  My heart rate, which decelerated to normal from the simple process of me focusing just on my studies and the specific memory challenges, now shoots up through the roof as I realize what I’ve done, how I’ve exposed myself to someone who can understand how truly freakish I am.

  I will not get caught like Kenny!

  Almost like I said it out loud, Professor Tavish raises her head and squints at me through her thick glasses. “Or not,” she growls quietly. “No. Of course not.” She lowers her head. “You’ve been studied before. It must be hard, living in so many realities at one time.”

  Especially bad ones! I want to burst out. But I have to work my tongue around the instantly sticky inside of my mouth to answer. “Yes.”

  Tavish nods and sighs. She pushes my paper away from me on her desk and sits back in her chair, looking into her lap almost like she wants to take a nap.

  Jude speaks. “Professor? Are things alright with Jackson’s paper? His grade?”

  She jerks her head up again, this time to squint at Jude. “Of course. Stellar work, quite apart from the…” She waves her hand in my direction but avoids looking at me. “If you ever want a referral for your graduate work, Mr. Traine, I’d be honored. You have something powerful that could change our fundamental understandings of memory and time. Do the world a lot of good.” She grimaces. “Or give us one more way to tear it apart.”

  Then she drops her chin to her chest again, and it’s clear we’re dismissed.

  That night, sitting in front of our shared TV and playing Call of Duty 2, we finish a Deathmatch multiplayer in which we each carried a decent KDR ratio of 15 and 12 for Jude and me respectively, when Jude puts down his controller and turns to me in his ridiculously battered cloth swivel chair.