Too Many Keys (2020 NaNoWriMo Practice)

 [Ahead of an inevitably bumbling NaNoWriMo attempt, I'm writing a bunch of short stories to improve my fiction-writing efficiency. They're quickly written and largely unedited, so please leave vicious critique in the comments. This was written on October 9th, 2020.]

 

There were too many damn keys on this ring. Why didn’t Mason ever split them?

“Are you okay up there?”

The voice rang through the frigid air from the driveway below.

“Just wait a second, will ya? I’ve gotta find the right key.”

“Okay, okay.”

Terrence tried a plain, silver quik-set key. Nothing. It went in, though, so it was the right brand.

“…do you need help?”

“Hey, I’m not the one that puts every damn key on the same ring.”

He thumbed through the loop to another quik-set – bronze, this time. It turned.

“Fuckin’ finally,” he muttered to himself. The cold was just starting to toughen the joints in his fingers. He shoved the ring of keys into his pocket with a muted jangle as he hurriedly plunked down the spiraling metal stairs from the rear balcony.

“Took you long enough,” his driver said. His name, supposedly, was Liam. They’d worked two jobs together at this point, and while Mason had assured Terrance he’d “warm up to the dude,” their relationship remained neutral at best.

“Look, it’s your job to drive places and it’s my job to lock doors behind us. So why don’t ya just keep your nose in your business and I’ll keep my nose in mine. I don’t yell at you when ya drive fourty-five in a fifty.”

“It was raining, and the last thing I wanted to do was lose control and wake him up,” Liam said, gesturing toward the backseat in fingerless gloves. I mean, really. How much of a stereotype can you be?

              The small figure in the back seat shifted in its sleep, almost in response to Liam’s callout. Both men up front froze until the soft snoring they were accustomed to started up again. A moment of meaningful eye contact later, Liam was backing out of the driveway.

              Terrence sighed as he started twisting the bronze quik-set off the key ring.

              “Do ya think we’ll make the next one before sundown?”

              “Our little bundle of joy back there wouldn’t be snoozing if he had somewhere for us to go. I’m driving back to the motel.”

              The roads were narrow and curvy this high up in the valley, and the plows could only do so much. High, sheer walls of snow lined the twists and turns of invisible tarmac – hidden in thick, condensed slush. Colorado sucked in March.

              Well, Colorado always sucked. Too far from the ocean. Stupid state couldn’t work out whether to be flat or hilly so it just went for the worst of both. Terrence hated central jobs.

              He took a small, brown envelope out of the glove compartment – about the size of a flashcard – and slid the key inside. He’d drop it in the mailbox at the motel.

              They drove in silence for the next forty-five minutes. Liam gripped the wheel tightly as he navigated the mountain roads towards town. The sun was about to dip below the mountain, and its harsh blue light flitted between the long shadows of trees cast from the top of the valley. The snow ate the ambient sounds of the world, so it was eerily quiet.

              Liam broke it first.

              “How many more keys on the ring?”

              “I dunno, twenty? Thirty? Not that it really matters, I’ve never finished a ring before the end of the month.”

              “We finished one on my last job.”

              “No kiddin’? Must have made the locker’s job easy.”

              “We hit fifteen doors in one day.”

              “Ho-ly shit. Really? What, was it an apartment building or something?”

              “Timeshare block in Florida. Construction had just finished. We figured it was a bunch of retirees in a pact, sharing.”

              “Downtime musta been nice.”

              “Didn’t get much, actually. The kid we had dragged us all the way up to Savannah before we were done. Five-hour drive to lock a shed door.”

              “Eh, Inter-state rings suck. Bad luck on that one.”

              “I just wish Mason would’ve warned us. I’d have rented a better car.”

              “That’s the trick, though. They tell us too much and the whole thing blows up.”

              It was dark by the time they pulled in to the Motel parking lot, empty spots barely illuminated by the soft glow of the old motel sign, built tall to advertise on a now obsolete inter-city highway. The fluorescents flickered as Liam tenderly lifted the sleeping form of the child out of the back seat, and Terrence unlocked the Motel door.

              The space heater rattled slightly as it started, but soon enough it was that little bit too warm that hotel rooms tend to be in the winter. They balled the kid in some blankets on the pull-out and crashed on the musty queen. The sheets were cold. Neither of the men said a word before they slept.

              They woke up to the scream.

              Terrence responded with a start - “Mff- SHUT UP! SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP!”

              He flailed the sheets off of him and bolted toward the couch, clapping his hand around the kid’s mouth before he could wake up the whole county. The kid whipped around and clung to Terrance’s shirt. His tiny hands had a hell of a grip. Terrance reached his non-silencing hand around to hug the kid. He hated this. He hated taking care of them. It made the whole thing suck that much more.

              The white noise of the heater fan numbed the space as the kid stopped shrieking into his hand and started to shudder with slow sobs. Terrance rubbed his hand up and down the kids back, soothingly. Liam moved quietly to sit on the other side of the couch and put a hand on the kid’s knee.

              “Is it close?”

              The kid sobbed a couple more times, and then tenderly pushed Terrance’s hand away from his mouth.

              “It’s – hic – it’s too loud!”

              Liam patted the kid’s knee, whispering gently.

              “I know, I know it is. But you’ve gotta stay quiet, okay? If people get worried, we’ll get stopped by the police, and then we’ll be late to close the doors. We don’t want that, right?”

              The kid shook his head, tears still welling from his pudgy eyes. Terrance wiped them off. This one was what, six? A bit young for the ringing to set in. Poor kid probably didn’t really understand what he was dealing with yet.

              Terrance picked the kid up and carried him toward the bathroom.

              “Hey, you go warm up the car. I’ll clean this guy up and we’ll head out.”

              The bathroom sink sputtered a couple of times before it bore fruit. Once the water was hot Terrance ran the wash cloth underneath it and wiped off the kid’s face.

              “Is it north or south?”

              The kid sniffed and rubbed his face in a towel. He pointed toward the back wall.

              “It’s that way.”

              “South. Okay, so probably up in the mountains again. Come on, Liam’ll have the car warm by now. You up for a drive?”

              The kid nodded. He was cute.

              Fuck.

              They went outside. After he settled the kid down in the back seat, Terrance tapped on the driver’s window. Liam rolled it down.

“Gimme a minute, I need to mail off the key.”

He trudged towards the office, pulled the small envelope out of his pocket, and dug around for a pen. He scrawled Colorado, March, 2056 on the back, checked to make sure the address and date Mason had printed on the front were readable, and shunted it into the mailbox.

They drove south, back into the valley they had left earlier that evening. The kid led them over a saddle and down into a small basin. They weaved through the streets, trying to triangulate the house based on the kid’s pained gesturing. Every now and then he’d wince and start crying again. Terrence could barely stand to watch. It seemed worse than usual. Selfish fucks. Why couldn’t they stay in their own fucking timeline?

There was a reason it was worse. Terrance could hear the ringing himself once they got close. They were almost too late. Shit.

He turned to Liam.

“You hear it too?”

“Just a bit.” He was clenching the steering wheel.

“You’re lucky. This one’s bad.”

The high-pitched tone shredded Terrance’s ears as they drove down the quiet street of cookie-cutter homes. The door they were looking for was at the end of the cul-de-sac. The kid started shrieking about four doors away. Liam pulled over and moved to the back seat to calm him down. Terrance stepped out of the car and started wading through fresh snow toward the house as quickly as he could.

The house was big, and he could tell it was an interior door. Fuck. He’d have to break in unless someone was home. He rang the doorbell twice and was starting to pry the windows when the light turned on. The door cracked open. Terrance whipped out his badge.

“TJPA, open up!”

“Wh- what?” The voice was groggy. “What do you want?”

“There isn’t much time, there’s a jumper coming in – I think upstairs.”

“Uh- oh! Oh! I’m sorry, come in!”

The door opened the rest of the way and Terrance burst inside followed by a frigid draft. He could barely hear over the ringing now.

“What doors have locks on them upstairs?”

“What?”

“Locks! Any locks upstairs?”

“No? Why would we-”

Terrance sprinted up the stairs before the man could finish. Fuck. No lock. He’d have to hold the door shut until the attempt was complete. Not that it’d be long given how loud it was. It was weird to use an interior door to jump back in time, typically people wanted a quick getaway. They knew it was illegal. They thought they’d have a chance to run. The fools didn’t understand why it was illegal. The brain-shredding sound spiked loudly as Terrance reached the top of the stairs. The suddenness of it made him jump. He tripped on the top step. As his face smashed into the ground, he could see the blue light from under the door at the end of the hall– fuck, it was already glowing through the border. They’d try to open it any second now.

Waves of grating sound rocked through Terrance’s mind as he tried to stumble up and towards the door, reaching wildly for the knob to hold it shut, but he was too late. The door opened.

Terrance hadn’t actually ever seen through a door to the future before. That wasn’t his job. He just made sure they were locked for the period of time they were supposed to be active. It disrupted the cycle. That was the goal, to keep them from jumping over in the first place and messing everything up. As the small door opened, he could see the light of the bootleg jumping machine flooding into the confined space of a bathroom. Building up the density of energy in the air, weakening the boundaries between the room’s position in the two timelines. With the door opened, the energy started flooding out explosively. Terrance was flung backwards down the staircase.

As he fell, he could just see the surprised look on the haggard face staring back at him. The old man’s eyes bulged as the air in the room was sucked out and he was pulled through the doorframe. A blue cloud of slightly glowing air, like a neon tube, flooded into the hallway. It tore at old man’s skin and flesh, ripping and burning until he dissolved into the cloud – flung further into time than he intended.

The glowing air dissipated, and with it the view of the room from the future. Terrance tumbled to the bottom of the stairs and lay there, moaning softly.

Out in the car, the kid stopped crying sharply.

“It- it stopped.”

Liam peered from the back seat out the windshield and saw the fading blue light in the upstairs windows of the house down the street. He swore under his breath.

“Sorry kid, we didn’t make it this time.”

“Wha- what happened?”

“Someone came back.”

“Came back from where?”

Liam paused.

“Mason hasn’t told you yet?”

“Mr. Mason said I’m too young.”

“Huh. Well.”

“Where did they come back from?”

Liam hesitated. If Mason hadn’t told him yet…

Screw it, the kid deserved to know.

“There’s… another world. Somewhere else. A lot like ours, but further ahead in time. They invented a new, cheaper method of time travel. Or at least what they thought was time travel. It’s actually just reality-hopping, not real, old-fashioned time-travel. The problem is, when someone tries to use it for anything big, like a person, the histories of their world and ours get mixed up. They get stuck here in their old forms. For inanimate objects it’s not that big of a deal, but things with brains-”

He tapped the kid’s head.

“Things with brains and electricity and energy patterns get all mixed up. The patterns interfere. The unfortunate version of them in this universe spends the rest of their lives with two histories in their head. That’s what happened to Terrence out there. It’s what happened to me. It’s what happened to you.”

The kid looked confused.

“I’m a time- time traveler?”

“You’re not. Another, older version of you is. Their history is firing off in your head now. It’ll be doing that for a long time.”

“You’re the same way?”

“Yup. Both of us. We’re past the age our other selves jumped at, so we don’t have the thoughts anymore, but we can still hear the thin parts of the border between the universes. We’re still somewhat entangled.”

“Ent- entwhat?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“What do you do with the keys?”

“Their jumping machines need a small space that existed at the time they’re trying to jump to. Once they’ve entangled the histories of the two rooms, they can open the door. As long as nothing in our history is holding it shut. When we find the right keys to lock the doors, we send them back in time with real time travel so that we know where to be. That’s why we have to be all mysterious about it, sending back too much information the real way can mess things up.”

The kid clearly wasn’t listening anymore. Mason was probably right.

“I’m sleepy.”

“I’ll bet you are. You’re going to be doing a lot of sleeping for a long time. It’s exhausting having two timelines in your head. Here, you lie down, I see Terrance coming. I’m sure we’re going to have a lot more work to do tomorrow.”