A Hard Rain: Book Two Of The Shift Trilogy

Chapter 25

Falls Church, Virginia

February 2013

It wasn't so bad. There were things that Chris enjoyed about this reality. Coffee for starters. He had really missed coffee. Chicory just didn't compare to the true chemically-induced lift he got from his java. Food was another perk. After half a decade of frontier Americana cuisine, to taste a variety of spices again was a pleasure. Chris found himself frequenting Thai, Middle Eastern, Tex Mex, and Indian restaurants, not to mention almost daily visits to his all-time favorite Malaysia Kopitiam. It was also nice to catch up on TV. He got to see how Lost ended, though he admitted to feeling a little jipped at the end of it all. Soft toilet paper, Advil, Downy softness...And he was returned to his family, at least some version thereof, although Rhiannon was Yorick here—the two were extraordinarily similar in looks and temperament—but there was no Baby Charles.

But no matter how many niceties there were, this wasn't his life. This place wasn't supposed to be. It was wrong, and only he knew it. This was a world that had died or was supposed to have, in any case. Its presence struck him as a false reality, a Potemkin village that cast a veil of deceit over millions of people, people who were ghosts who did not know they were supposed to be dead.

Chris was the only one who knew the truth, and yet he couldn't tell a soul, not even his wife, a woman who he trusted with his life. There was no way to prove that he came from a different reality, and there was little point in trying. Knowing that made him all the more isolated. Chris was a veteran of wars that never were, a survivor of the apocalypse that never was. Those events that never happened were crucial in forming who he thought be became. Nobody here would identify, nobody here could.

Chris found himself waking painfully early each morning, sometimes waking in terror from nightmares that came from his world. He would dream of being on the inflatable speed boat with Lieutenant Baraka, while artillery and mortar shells exploded all around him in the dark, swelling sea. Machine gun fire, screams of men dying under his command, and in the next moment, he awoke in the silence with only the light of the clock on the cable box. Although it was 2013, to Chris, waking up every morning here in this apartment was returning to the past to 2007, to the time when the demons seized him and came frighteningly close to sending him over the abyss and onto the tracks in front of a speeding Metro train. He still did not know what it was that stopped him from going through with his plans for July 12th.

Chris avoided coming home from work as much as he avoided going into work. Panic imprinted itself on both places. He remembered the way these places smelled, the way they felt. The demons owned him and familiar places served only to remind of that every day.

Chris made excuses to Meredith to leave the apartment whenever he could. Yorick needed more pull-ups, they were out of ketchup and Aidan would not eat anything without ketchup. He would run to the store just to get out of the claustrophobic apartment into the brisk night air. He would drive in his rental car—his other one having been carjacked—and listen to the radio. He just wanted to get out for as long as he could, and he trudged back up the steps to the working-class apartment now worth way less than half of what it was when they bought it nearly a decade ago.

"Hon, tell me, what's going on?"

Chris was sitting out on the balcony bundled in his overcoat listening to some post-Grunge on his iPod when Meredith's voice broke through the ear buds.

"Sorry?"

"Hon, turn off the music and talk to me."

Chris knew Meredith was upset about something. She always said something like that or gave that look when he was being a lout, and he had a propensity for being a lout even when he wasn't inexplicably transported to an alternate universe. The kids were asleep finally. Chris hoped that this version of Aidan would be an early-to-bed sort. No luck. Fortunately, Yorick was like his Rhiannon counterpart and dropped off early. Meredith had on her coat and sat in the green Rubbermaid lawn chair next to him, clasping her delicate warm fingers around his frozen knuckles. Her almond shaped brown eyes met his.