Don't Trust the Past

As ash rains down outside the cracked window, I sigh and look at the bed where my husband lies, dying.

I can't speak another word to him, as he doesn't seem to hear me. He breathed in too much of the fumes from the war, fighting on the front lines. That's what they'd done to us–the poor people, first to be drafted and last to be let go. Unfortunately, he'd been let go too late.

Shrugging on my coat, I leave the safety of our run-down home. I have work to do.

Liza is waiting for me at the door to the lab. "You're late," she observes, entering the code to unlock the doors.

"Yeah, yeah. Didn't want to get the ash in my hair. I had hot water yesterday, so I got to take a shower. How long has it been for you?"

We share sparse conversation as we approach the machine together. I gulp.

Liza glances around, stalling. "It seems so big in here without the others. I wonder if they've found the light yet."

I look at her for a long moment, purposely not answering her; she meets my eyes, hers glimmering anxiously in the candlelight.

My lip trembles for just an instant before I force a smile. "You or me?"

She suddenly leaps at me, pulling me in an embrace. "You have John, don't you?" she whispers in my ear.

"Liza…" I say quietly, shutting my eyes tight. "He's already gone. I have to go fix this before it happens to him. You need to stay here and take care of him for me, okay?"

She pulls away, tears streaming down her face. Wordlessly, she nods.

I step into the narrow tube. She latches the grated doors shut behind me. In this post-apocalyptic world, we hadn't had much choice in materials or space. We haven't even tested the time machine yet. But at this point… I have nothing left to lose.

I give Liza a military salute, forcing my breath in and out in slow intervals. Her eyes are wide, and she stares at me for several seconds as though frozen. In slow motion, she closes her eyes and pulls the lever.

I haven't thought about where I would end up or what I would do after going through the machine. I feel like I'm being sucked down into a whirlpool. My head is spinning, my eyes are watering, and I am so, so cold. I can't tell if I'm shaking or if my body is violently tingling. My eyes feel like they're being sucked out of my skull.

And then it stops.

Blinking through tears, I gradually regain my senses. Through ringing ears, I hear hushed voices. I think whatever surface I landed on is hard and cold, but it's hard to tell. I'm having trouble raising my head off the floor.

"… could she be from…"

"… the enemy…?"

"… looks like she's not…"

My eyes are only half-open when they focus enough to register the pair of brown combat boots standing directly in front of me. I can feel that my mouth is open, my nose is running, and my face is wet from tears. Distantly, I think I might look like a big, land-dwelling human-fish. A sharp click sounds through the faded ringing still in my ears, erasing all of my thoughts.

"Identify yourself!" a gruff, male voice commands. He sounds far off, but my eyes have wandered up far enough to see that this voice belongs to the brown combat boots.

He's tall, at least half a foot taller than me. Dark, scruffy hair. Dark eyes. His facial hair is neat, but he has this rough appearance about him. And he's pointing what appears to be a magnum at me.

His eyes are so intensely hostile that I can't look away… until my vision goes black at the edges and my eyes roll back into my head.

The last thing I hear is him demanding, "Tell me who you are or I will shoot!" His voice fades into nothingness, and all of my senses die away.

"… but she is malnourished, that's for sure…"

Her voice is nearby. It doesn't sound as aggressive as the man who threatened me. I crack open my eyes and weakly grab at the soft surface I'm laying on. Rhythmic beeping makes me feel like my skull is going to crack open.

"… no identification on her person, and her clothes were essentially torn to shreds…"

My vision is blurry; I strain myself to focus them on the space I'm in. It's small, separated from what appears to be a larger space by a thin, opaque curtain. My fingers identify the surface beneath me as a thin–but soft and sturdy–bed, and I realize I'm in a hospital. It's been so long since I've been in an operative hospital…

As my ability to think starts to come back, I also realize that my clothes–a ratty T-shirt and ripped cargo pants–have been replaced by a hospital gown. There's a spare chair in the room, and next to me are a few machines with wires and IV's hooked up to me. Hence the beeping.

"Her CT scan showed something odd… It looked like ash that's built up in her lungs."

This sounds like more of a question than a statement.

"Sir, where did you say you found her?"

"Well," says the magnum guy's voice, "one minute she wasn't there at all. I looked away to the monitors, and when I looked back, she was on the ground. No one saw her get there, she just appeared. We all thought she was dead until her eyes opened."

"Honestly, it's incredible that she's not," the woman says. "Some of her vitals are normal, but most of them are way out of reference range. And that ash in her lungs–where could that have possibly come from?"

"Doctor," the man says, "how long will she have to stay here for observation? I want her in an interrogation room as soon as she can speak for herself."

I know why I came back to this point in time. It's before the gas bombs rained down on the front lines, before John and the other people suffering in poverty were drowned in chemical weapons. How long before, I don't know. It could be a year. It could be two hours. Either way, somewhere, not far from here, he's hunkered down in the bunkers, keeping an eye on monitors and radar equipment. I have to do this. For John.

"I…" My throat feels scratchy and painful. I clear it with a grimace and open my mouth to speak again, but they must have heard me, because the doctor pulls the curtain back and leads the man into the room. Suddenly, I'm too scared to speak.

Liza and I were sure that, when I came back, it would be behind our own lines. No personal threat involved. Now I realize that I don't know that for sure. And I don't know how I can prove that to them.

The doctor examines the beeping machines next to me while the man–a general?–glares at me. I try to avoid looking at him, instead watching her press some buttons and type some notes.

She finally steps back to stand next to him. The juxtaposition is astounding. Him, tall, suspicious anger clouding his face, arms crossed and chin jutted out. And her, a small woman with a slight frame, concerned curiosity shown by her furrowed eyebrows.

She speaks first. "Are you able to speak?"

"Yes," I croak.

She purses her lips, assessing me.

Before she can speak again, I take a deep breath and turn my eyes to the man. "You want to take me to an interrogation room? Take me now. I have my own things to say."

The doctor opens her mouth to protest, but the general silences her with a look. With a guarded expression, he narrows his eyes at me. "Very well."

I don't know how long we have before the bombs drop. As soon as the general sits across the table from me, I look him dead in the eyes. I imagine I'm looking into John's eyes, telling him what needs to be said.

"I came back here from the future. A future where we lost this war, where everything is broken and everyone is dead. I came back to stop that from happening."

He stares at me for several seconds before saying, "Oh, there's no punchline. Most jokes have a point."

I blink.

"We have real things going on here. Real questions," he continues. "For example: who are you and where did you come from? Did the enemy send you?"

I still don't answer him. It had taken so much strength to admit to him why I'm here. His not believing me feels like someone slapped me across the face.

He sighs and stands up. "I'll come back in a minute when you're ready to talk real-talk."

He only takes two steps toward the door before I also jump to my feet, throwing the chair across the room. "No! You want to know why there's so much ash in my lungs? You want to know why my vitals are all so messed up?"

Anger makes me bold. I stand in front of him, nose to nose. "Sometime close in the future, the enemy drops chemical bombs on the front lines. That's where it starts. My husband is out there right now. He and countless others get sick, so sick they never get better! The poor people that you guys forced to go fight a hopeless war. It only gets worse from there. Nuclear bombs, the entire world gets covered in fire and ash!"

It's the general's turn to blink in shock. For a moment, I think he's going to agree that we need to stop this.

Instead, he steps around me without a word and rushes out the door. I don't hesitate; I run after him.

He's moving quickly down the halls, taking turns left and right. He rushes past people, me on his heels, who stop and stare at us both. In my exhausted state from the time travel, I'm having trouble keeping up with him.

"Hey!" I shout, breathing heavily. "Where do you think you're going?"

He doesn't look at me as he snarls, "After this, you're next. You know too much."

Before I can demand more, we break through a code-locked door. He glides past the computers and the people sitting at them, who don't even glance at him.

He points over his shoulder at me and says, "Someone restrain her."

Two people instantly comply, grabbing my arms and holding me fast. They curiously watch him as he approaches one monitor near the front of the room.

"Sir?" someone questions as he furiously mashes at the keyboard.

I'm too out of breath to go on another tirade, but I gasp out, "You need to… do something… It's your job…"

"Yes, it is," he agrees, hitting a final button and looking up at the monitor. On the screen, some lights flash. In the corner, I see a prompt that sends chills down my spine. He presses yes.

Some of the others get up now, looking at the screen, alarmed. "Sir," a woman near the door says, "you launched the missiles? At our own bases?"

"Your bases. Not mine." He turns to look at us all with an expression of stone. Without saying anything more, he pops open a small case from his pocket, pulling out a black pill.

"Wait–"

A couple of the military members jump to restrain him, but they're too late. He slams the pill down. Almost instantly, foam gathers at his mouth and drips down. His body crumples to the floor.

The two holding me drop my arms. I don't pay attention to what they're doing. While they all focus on the traitor in their midst, my eyes are nailed to the map on the screen. Small, green markers are moving, spreading out across our nation. One of them, I know, is moving straight to John.

In this moment, I realize that I didn't change the future by going back to fix it. I would have changed the future by not going back at all.