Chapter 26: What do you think of Mary?

March 19th, 2017

West lay there in the snow, alone in the woods, feeling very confused.

What just happened?

He had been shot and then-suddenly his wound was gone?

Had Cadi somehow healed him with her powers?

Shakily, the teacher stood up, leaning on a tree for support and wiping his blood off his hands and onto his pants. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, only to find out with dismay, that he had no service. He eyed the tire tracks from the van.

First thing’s first:

He had to get out of this forest.

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Rick cried the whole way back to the house. Cadi sat beside him silently, patiently waiting for the moment she could talk to him alone. She couldn’t help but notice that Harry was also crying up in the front seat. She always forgot that Harry and Emille still had feelings. It still didn’t make her like them though.

When they finally got back to the house and they were locked in their room, Cadi watched for a second as Rick plopped himself face down onto the bed.

“Rick?”

Incoherently, her brother mumbled something.

“Rick.”

Mumble Mumble.

“Rick. Rick. Rick. Rick.”

Rick finally sat up grumpily and wiped some of the tears from off his face.

“What?”

Cadi glanced at the door as if Harry and Emille would randomly burst into the room.

“Mr. Johnston is going to be alright.”

This seemed to be a hard thing for Rick to comprehend.

“What? What do you mean?”

Wordlessly, Cadi picked up his hand and held it in both of hers. The tools in the back had cut him pretty deep, and he winced when she took his hand, but he humored her nonetheless. Cadi stared at the cut, concentrating.

Sure enough, she started to feel the fast forward and the warm sensation in her stomach, and Rick’s eyes grew wide as his wound healed itself at rapid speed.

“WHAT.” the teenager exclaimed.

“Shhhh!!”

“Holy crap Cadi!!” he whispered. “When did you learn to do this?! And how did you do this?”

“Well, when Mr. Johnston got shot, time suddenly paused, and this lady named Mary showed up and helped me save him. And she also messed up our ankle things so we could use our powers.”

Rick stared at her.

“A woman named… Mary?”

“Yep.”

“Did she have long black hair with bangs?”

“Yes. She said she knew you.”

Rick looked down at the floor, furrowing his eyebrows forward.

“Y-yeah… She… she helped me get out of my coma…” Cadi looked at him with confusion.

“How did she do that?”

Rick gave her a small smile.

“Well, it’s kind of a long story. Good thing we’ve got time.”

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Cadi loved the adventures that Rick told her about going through the decades in his own head. She asked lots of questions, and interrupted a lot, but Rick didn’t really mind. Before all of this stuff started happening to them, he definitely would’ve minded, but the two of them had really gotten close. He wasn’t sure when exactly it had happened, but he knew that he had to protect her.

He had conveniently skipped the part where Mary told him that his little sister was going to die.

Knowing that they now could use their powers at will, he immediately wanted to use them to leave right that second. Cadi, however, strongly disagreed with him.

“First of all Rick, you need to rest. You just got out of the hospital. And second of all, while you were asleep in your coma, Harry and Emille developed a new thing that will keep them unfrozen even if we pause time.” Rick scratched his head, finding all of this unsettling.

“Ok... We’ll have to figure something else out then… So-what did you think of Mary?” he asked. Cadi smiled.

“I liked her. She was really nice.”

Rick nodded absentmindedly.

A few hours later, Cadi slept soundly in the bed on the other side of the room while Rick stared wide eyed at the dark ceiling, unable to sleep. He sat up when he heard talking coming out of the vent again. Curiously, he crawled over to see what he could find out.

“Do you think the weapons are ready for her?” Emille’s voice asked.

“I don’t know. We could always test them on the kids and see.” Harry responded.

“We could, but I don’t know if we have enough power to open up the time stream. Weren’t we going to use them for that?”

“Oh yeah.”

Rick felt his heart start to beat a little bit faster. Weapons? Time stream? What were they doing? Something in his gut told him that they were trying to find Mary, and that they were going to attack her. Was there some way he could warn her?

As soon as he thought that, he pushed it from his mind. Why should he warn her? She always seemed to know everything anyway. Not to mention that she did want to kill Harry… And… did they say they possibly wanted to test those weapons on him and his sister?

He didn’t like the sound of that…

“Well, how about this…” Emille offered. “We can test some of the weapons on Rick, and then save Cadi for the machine.”

“Will she survive the machine though?”

“Probably not. But it won’t matter once we open the time stream anyway. We’ll have what we want by then.”

Rick breathed in sharply.

What did they want to do?

They wanted to kill them-that’s what they wanted to do. Rick bit his lip and slunk back to his bed. He thought about what Mary had said-about seeing him on April 9th, and how if he didn’t do anything, that Cadi would die. Was this how it could happen? From this machine that Harry and Emille were building?

Rick then eyed a piece of the wall that had some water damage on it.

Well, if he was going to get them out of here, he needed to up his game. He had never done anything except pause time before, and even then, it had always been under the force of their captors.

Rick stared hard at the spot on the wall, thinking about it going back into time, back when it was new, back before it was damaged. He started to feel some kind of weird bubbling sensation in his stomach, and he squinted and pushed even harder.

Slowly, the wall started to rewind.

He stopped and panted heavily once it looked like it could have been brand new.

He had done it.

It had been really hard, but he had done it.

And on the plus side, he didn’t even get a bloody nose or a headache. For a moment, he couldn’t help but feel proud of himself, but then, that vanished once he remembered that he was running out of time. He needed to get better at this as soon as possible.

He stared hard at it again, concentrating on fast forward.

He practiced for half the night.