American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,235

or maimed itself numerous times before.”

“It?”

“The Ganymede. That’s what it calls itself.”

“Huh. Well.” Mona sticks her Glock in her shorts (the barrel is hot, but she doesn’t care) and opens the wooden box. The pearly little rabbit skull roars at her silently from its pillow of blue satin.

She looks down at the woman in the panama hat. Her eyes have gone wide. It’s clear she realizes what Mona’s thinking.

“Dying,” says Mona. “It’s a weird idea to you all, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure it’s why your buddy in the brown sweater did such a shit job of trying to kill me. But you—you’ve killed before. I think you’ve killed plenty of times. You get it.”

“I never killed anyone,” says the woman. “It’s against the rules.”

“Mm, I’m willing to bet you killed plenty of people just by body-hopping. Which is a pretty fucked-up thing to do.” Mona takes a step forward and puts her foot on the wound in the woman’s belly. The woman grunts and tenses up, obviously pained. “You’re not as tough as you think. Now. What the hell happened back there? Whose baby was that?”

“Yours,” groans the woman.

“That can’t be. My baby died. We buried it. It was the worst thing that happened to me in my fucking life, and I can’t forget it. So whose was it?”

“Yours!” says the woman again.

Mona leans on the wound harder and lowers the box threateningly.

“It’s yours, I swear it is!” the woman shouts.

Mona eases up on the wound. “How?”

She swallows. Her lips are lined with red. “Time… is broken here…”

“Oh, God, not this speech again. I’ve heard it a million fucking times.”

“Time is broken here,” says the woman angrily, “so here you can see the alternates.”

“The alternates to what?” Mona asks.

“To everything!” shouts the woman.

Mona eases up more on the wound. She thinks, and asks, “What the hell does that mean?”

Mrs. Benjamin clears her throat. “I believe I can help with this. Time is not linear, dear—you and your kind experience it as linear, but it isn’t, not really. It branches off, spins into different directions. Some of these offshoots fade and die, some keep going. And, occasionally, these can be accessed.”

“Yes,” gasps the woman. “If the… the difference is very slight, the alternate can be breached.”

“And that’s what you did back there? Accessed an alternate… time?”

The woman nods.

“It’s not something that would occur to us on our side, since when we’re in our element we do not experience time the same way you do,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “But here it’s… different.”

Mona realizes her hands are shaking. She flexes them to try to make them stop. “So what we saw was an alternate time. Another way things could have gone.”

“Yes,” says the woman. She is white and panting now.

“And what was the difference between where we are here… and what I saw in the lens?”

“We had to have a piece of Mother that was… willing to cooperate,” says the woman. She coughs, turns her head, and burps up a significant quantity of blood.

“Yeah?”

“We had to have a piece of Her that was from both here and the other side. Our side. To anchor Her here, to pull Her in. I had… I had intended this to be you. That’s why I… called you here.”

“That’s what you tried to do to me on the highway, isn’t it? Make me Her… conduit.”

“Yes,” says the woman savagely. “But you rejected me, rejected Her. You were too old, too… resistant. So we had to find another way. You had had a child, but… it had died in this time.”

Mona’s whole body is trembling, and she knows it is not from blood loss. “So you just found a different time,” she says. “You found a time where… where my baby didn’t die. Where I had her, and she was alive.”

“Yes.”

She’s alive, Mona thinks. My God. She’s alive, and she’s real.

She remembers the look on the face of the Mona in the lens: the complete terror and disbelief when she walked into the nursery and saw the crib was empty…

The woman continues: “We had to have your blood, because… alternates are so difficult to access. The child is a part of you—she is your progeny. We had to… bridge the gap.”

“Like you’re doing with Mother now? Now that you’ve got her, she’ll bring Mother here?”

“She already is here!” snarls the woman. “It’s already happening! The breach has occurred, and the wound is only widening! You can’t stop it! She’s coming!”

She looks to Mrs. Benjamin. “Is this possible?”

“It