Blow Up and Fall Down Read online

  “Are those bags in there?” Kyle asked.

  Allaire stood up. “Bags?”

  “The grocery bags Ayers was carrying when he came inside from his car,” Kyle said. “They’re not in the kitchen or living room.”

  She bent down again to the hole in the door. “Nope. Not that I see.”

  “Come here,” Kyle said, walking over to the other door. Kyle knocked. “Hello?”

  He heard shuffling again, and the sound of a television. There were footsteps coming toward the door.

  CHAPTER 19

  April 12, 2005

  * * *

  Moments later

  “Hello?” Kyle said again, a little louder. He knocked again.

  “Is there more?” a delicate voice asked through the door. “I’ll count to ten before coming out, okay?”

  “Open up, please,” Allaire said, pounding hard on the door.

  “Who’s there?” the voice asked. It sounded like a child. “Is it safe? Where’s Mr. Ayers?”

  “He had to leave,” Allaire said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Where is he?” the voice asked, sounding concerned.

  Kyle gently moved Allaire to the side a bit and leaned into the door. “Don’t worry, he’s fine. Can you please open the door?”

  “Are you sure he’s not here,” the voice asked.

  “Positive,” Kyle answered.

  A few seconds later, they heard both deadbolts turn and the door slowly opened. Everything that would’ve normally been used to furnish the entire apartment had been stuffed into this bedroom.

  A young boy looked up at Kyle and Allaire. He peeked behind them, checking the halls. He was eleven, maybe twelve, Kyle figured. They walked into his room.

  “Oh my god,” Allaire said, a look of shock on her face. Seeing the boy had rattled her, but Kyle didn’t know why. “How long has he kept you here?”

  “What’s going on?” Kyle asked. He examined the room from floor to ceiling. It was stuffed with books, DVDs, cereal boxes, action figures. There was a refrigerator and a hot plate. A huge rear-projection television took up almost an entire wall. It looked like someone could live in here and never leave, which may have been the point, Kyle thought to himself.

  As they were looking around, the floor began to shift back and forth beneath their feet. Kyle knew immediately it was an earthquake. All three of them stopped for a second and looked around as the entire building shook. A few seconds later it was over. Nothing in the room had shifted much.

  “That was a small one, right?” the kid asked.

  “Yeah,” Allaire answered, completely in another world.

  The kid sat down on his bed—the only place in the room with any space to take a load off. “Good,” he said. “If it’s a big one, I’m supposed to go in the closet and hide.”

  “Why did he do this?” Allaire asked impatiently. “When is he coming back?” Kyle gave her a look, wondering why she wasn’t being softer with the kid, but he wasn’t sure it would do any good.

  Kyle walked over, knelt into a catcher’s stance, and extended his hand to the boy. “I’m Kyle.”

  “You’re Kyle?” the boy answered. “Kyle Cash?”

  Kyle looked up at Allaire, surprised. “How do you know that?”

  Allaire didn’t look surprised at all. “Tell him your name,” Allaire said to the boy knowingly.

  The room started to shake again, this time more violently. Kyle held onto the ground for balance. Allaire moved over to a wall and put her hands against it. The kid got up and moved carefully toward his closet door. When the shaking stopped, he looked at Kyle and Allaire with his hand on the doorknob. “That was a big one, right?” the kid asked.

  Kyle and Allaire looked at each other.

  “It was medium, maybe,” Kyle said, his instinct being to try to make the kid less scared.

  “Well . . . Mr. Ayers said if it’s a big one, I should go to my closet,” the boy said.

  “What’s your name?” Kyle asked.

  The kid giggled. “You’re in my house, but you don’t know my name?”

  Kyle grinned. It was hard not to be disarmed by his sweet smile.

  “I’m Ayers,” the boy said.

  Kyle looked at Allaire, who just raised her eyebrows. She’d known from the second they came in. “But . . . ?”

  “We’re both Ayers, me and Mr. Ayers . . . And you’re Allaire, aren’t you?” the boy asked.

  She nodded.

  “I’m supposed to be careful around you,” he said, “I think I should go to the closet now.” Kyle saw that the closet had a couple of deadbolts too, which locked from the inside.

  “Wait,” Kyle said. But before he finished his sentence, the shaking began again. This time, there was no denying it was a major earthquake and they watched the younger Ayers open his closet door and pull a silk blot off the wall. Books and food started falling from the shelves all around them. Young Ayers began to pull the silk blot over his head just as an even stronger wave of the quake lurched all of them into the air and off their feet.

  Young Ayers was thrown out of his closet, face-first onto his belly.

  “Come on,” Kyle said to the younger Ayers, thinking about how shoddy the building looked from the outside. “We need to get out of here.” Kyle looked over his shoulder at Allaire, who was still in a daze. She was still looking around the room, as if she were trying to make sense of it. “Come on!”

  “I’m coming,” she said, even though she wasn’t moving yet, and was just holding onto the wall for balance. “I’m coming.”

  Kyle took the twelve-year-old Ayers by the hand and they ran through the apartment together. The world was still shaking when they reached the front door and Kyle could see the dicey looking wooden stairs ping-ponging back and forth from the vibrations.

  He looked back into the apartment. “Allaire, come on!” he screamed.

  The shaking seemed to lessen for a moment, and Kyle led the boy by the hand down the stairs. “Are you okay?” he asked when they reached the bottom. They moved into the parking lot, and saw that an electrical pole had already fallen.

  The boy looked scared. “I’m supposed to go into the closet and into a silk blot if there’s a big earthquake.”

  “We’re not going back inside,” Kyle said.

  “But I need a silk blot,” young Ayers said to him. “Mr. Ayers said to always keep one close to me. I don’t think I should be out here.”

  The violent shaking started again, and Kyle felt bad seeing how scared the boy looked.

  “Well, you can’t go in there,” Kyle said, gesturing to the apartment over the Chinese restaurant.

  The kid was Ayers, but he wasn’t a time traveling mad man yet. Kyle put his hand on Ayers’s shoulder firmly enough to help him stand through the quake. He noticed older Ayers’s BMW was still sitting with its trunk open. “Let’s go in there,” Kyle said as he watched another telephone pole wobbling in the sky above them. He turned back to look up at the apartment again, wondering why Allaire was still inside. “Allaire!” he yelled.

  Kyle and young Ayers made it to adult Ayers’s car, just as the violent shaking got even worse.

  “We’ll be safer in here,” Kyle said as he opened the rear door for young Ayers, and then got into the driver’s seat.

  Kyle locked his eyes on the front door of the apartment, hoping he’d see Allaire soon. He worried that something had gone wrong. The series of earthquakes was so jarring that it felt like someone was holding the entire planet and shaking it with both hands, trying to jar loose anything and everything from its place. The car jumped around as if they were driving on a bumpy highway, even though they were standing still.

  “I don’t like this,” young Ayers said from the passenger seat.

  “Me, neither,” Kyle said, as he watched the steps they’d just come down collapse to the ground. “Buckle up, please.” He noticed that the building was listing to its side as well. All of the employees of the Chinese restaurant underneath
the apartment ran out into the parking lot now. Kyle feared that the whole building would collapse.

  Finally, Allaire appeared in the front doorway of the upstairs apartment. For a moment, he thought she was bleeding, but then he realized that the huge purple splotch on her shirt was wine.

  She stood in the doorway, but there was nowhere to go. There were no stairs there anymore. She looked down at the empty space in front of her, and Kyle got out of the car and moved closer to her. He could see that she was contemplating whether to jump. It was at least fifteen feet down. He wanted to help. He could catch her. Or at least help break her fall.

  She turned around and went back into the house before Kyle could get her attention. Kyle wondered how she was planning to get out. There might be windows she could jump from, but why use those if she didn’t want to jump from the doorway. There was no question that she’d have to jump to get to safety. And if not, then what was her plan? Kyle wondered. He worried about her mental state now that she’d been betrayed by Yalé. Would she fight as hard to save herself as she would’ve yesterday? he wondered.

  The entire building swayed from side to side now, as the violent shaking hit them sporadically. It looked to Kyle like the building was made of popsicle sticks. He stepped back and held onto the car as he watched siding fall off the building. The entire sign for Great Oracle Wok crashed into the street.

  Over and over, a few seconds of rest, and then a jarring jolt.

  Kyle saw the entire building collapse in on itself, and he raced toward it screaming, hoping Allaire had found another way to get out before being crushed. It had been upright one second, and a pile of junk the next. He ran around the perimeter of the wreckage as the employees of the restaurant did the same thing, although with less panic than him.

  “Allaire!” he screamed. “Allaire! Are you in there?”

  He ran around the entire perimeter again, looking for a way inside the rubble. His eyes filled with tears. He had come back to save her, and he had. But, now this . . . There was smoke everywhere, and the collapsed pile of materials was ten or fifteen feet tall. He kept screaming her name, but there was only silence until the air filled with sirens.

  Kyle looked down Main Street and saw that much of the tiny college town was either destroyed or on fire, which meant that he couldn’t count on any of those emergency vehicles coming their way any time soon. Kyle climbed onto the rubble himself, grabbing hold of a piece of roofing, and then tossing it to the side.

  “Allaire!” he screamed.

  As Kyle began to dig through the rubble himself, a few of the employees of the Chinese restaurant hopped up onto the pile as well and started doing the same thing. Kyle nodded his thanks and kept going. He gave a quick look to the car where he saw young Ayers, with the window open, looking out at him. Young Ayers waved at Kyle and gave him a big smile as if he didn’t have a care in the world—now that the world had stopped shaking.

  CHAPTER 20

  Somewhere in time

  Ayers turned over in bed, moving from sleeping on his right shoulder to his left. He extended his foot behind him and felt a smooth leg in bed with him. In his half-asleep state, he tried to remember who he’d brought back to the hotel last night. He couldn’t. The more he wove through time, the worse his short-term memory had become. Her name didn’t matter. Tomorrow, he could be sleeping with her grandmother, or her daughter, for all he knew. He’d be someplace else. In another era altogether.

  The dream that had woken him up had been intense. It felt more like a . . . Ayers’s eyes opened wide as he realized that his dream hadn’t been another fiction fed to his brain by his subconscious. It was actually a collection of new flesh-and-blood memories.

  The recollection hit him like a club to the back of the head. He was twelve then, and he had no idea at the time that the people rescuing him from the earthquake at the Chinese restaurant would hunt him one day. No idea that they’d become his enemies and his greatest obstacles.

  Ayers sprang up in bed to a sitting position and let out a deep, guttural scream.

  TO BE CONTINUED . . .