chair toward his desk, waking his computer.
A Google search for “Marcus Slade” pulls up an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, detailing that Slade died of a drug overdose last Christmas.
Shit.
Next he searches “Jee-woon Chercover” and finds multiple hits. Chercover runs a VC firm on the Upper East Side called Apex Venture. Barry snaps a photo of the contact info off their website, grabs his keys, and rushes for the stairwell.
As he descends the stairs, he dials Apex.
“All circuits are busy, please try your call—”
He sprints through the ground-floor lobby, into the late afternoon, reaching the sidewalk of West 100th Street, short of breath, a new alert lighting up his phone’s home screen:
Emergency Alert
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO MULTIPLE US TARGETS. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Slide for more
Jesus.
While he has memories of this timeline, his identity encompasses, fleetingly, all the lifetimes he’s ever lived. Unfortunately, that multi-timeline perspective will end when the missiles hit.
He wonders—what if this is all that’s left of his life?
Of everyone’s life?
A half hour of the same endless, repeating horror.
Some kind of hell.
Fifteen floors up, in a building across the street, a window breaks, glass showering the pavement, followed by a chair and then a man in a pinstripe suit.
He crashes headfirst through the roof of a car, whose alarm begins a piercing shriek.
People are running past Barry.
On the sidewalks.
In the streets.
More men and women plummeting out of skyscrapers, because they remember what it was like to die in a nuclear attack.
A civil defense siren begins to scream, and people are flooding out of the surrounding buildings like rats and pouring into an underground parking garage to take cover.
Barry jumps into his car and starts the engine. Apex is on the Upper East Side, just across the park, barely six long blocks from his current location.
He turns out into the street, but all he can do is creep along through the hordes of people.
Barry lays on his horn, veering finally onto Columbus, which is only slightly less mobbed.
He drives against traffic and turns right into the first alleyway he comes to, speeding in the shadows between apartment buildings.
He fires his light bar and sirens and muscles his way across two more streets filled with frantic, hysterical people.
Then he’s accelerating his Crown Vic down a walking path in Central Park, trying to call Apex again.
This time, the phone rings.
Please, please, please pick up.
And rings.
And rings.
There are too many people on the path ahead, so he veers off into North Meadow, ripping across baseball diamonds where he used to play.
“Hello?”
Barry slams on the brakes and brings his car to a stop in the middle of the field and puts the phone on speaker.
“Who is this?”
“Jee-woon Chercover. Is this Barry?”
“How’d you know?”
“I wondered if you’d call.”
Last time Barry interacted with Jee-woon, he and Helena had shot him in Slade’s lab as he lunged naked for a gun.
“Where are you right now?” Barry asks.
“My office on the thirtieth floor of my building. Looking out over the city. Waiting to die again, like all of us. Are you and Helena doing this?”
“We’ve been trying to stop it. I wanted to find Slade—”
“He died last year.”
“I know. So I need to ask you—when Helena and I found Slade at the hotel, he alluded to there being a way to undo dead memories. Some different way of traveling. Of using the memory chair.”
There’s silence on the other end of the line.
“You mean when you killed me.”
“Yeah.”
“What happened after—”
“Look, there’s no time. I need this information if you have it. I’ve been on a thirty-three-year loop with Helena trying to find some way to erase the world’s knowledge of the memory chair. Nothing’s working. That’s why we keep reaching this moment of apocalypse over and over. And it’s going to keep happening unless—”
“I can tell you this, and it’s all I know. Marcus did believe there was a way to reset a timeline, so there would be no dead memories. He even did it once.”
“How?”
“I don’t know the specifics. Look, I need to call my parents. Please fix this if you can. We’re all in hell.”
Jee-woon hangs up. Barry tosses his phone into the passenger seat and climbs out of the car. Sits down on the grass, rests his hands on his legs.
They’re shaking.
His entire body is.
On the next timeline, he won’t remember the conversation he just had with Jee-woon until April 16, 2019.
If there even is a next timeline.
A bird lands nearby and sits very still,