Book Five, Chapter 1̷̫̫̒͝3̵̣̟͛9̴͉͊: The Many Mothers of Gabriel Cano

🔴 REC    OCT 05, 2018 15:42:11    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

The hospital burned beside me. People cried for help.

Gabriel Cano stood before me, and at first, I didn't know exactly why he was there—until he reached up and grabbed his right ear. At first, it looked like he was scratching it, but then he gave it a tug.

That was the sign.

That was the signal we had planned for when our overall strategy was to go into effect.

It was supposed to be Lila who came to give me the news. Then I thought it might be Bobby because he got trapped on the other side of time. But it turned out to be Dina’s character’s son.

Whatever. I could be flexible.

I turned to Camden and said, "I have to go."

"What? Why?" Camden asked.

"I can't explain it," I said. "I just have this feeling."

Not my best work, but I was in a hurry.

I handed him my necklace with the meteorite jewel on it, as well as the book containing the various mass death events.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"I'll see you soon," I said.

Luckily, the meteorite had not gotten close enough to activate yet. Many people would lose their lives in the burning hospital, but they hadn't died yet—or at least not most of them.

I still had time.

I ran away, following Gabriel Cano in my memories.

I knew where he was going before he led me there. With one last look over my shoulder at Camden, I put it into high gear and did my best to get around to the front of the hospital.

Everyone was panicking as the place was being evacuated. An ambulance, which had just delivered a new patient, had been sidelined, and the patient was rolled out into the parking lot instead of into the burning building.

It was a Generation Killer—the one we had seen with bullet holes in him.

He was talking to himself, delirious from blood loss.

"Not this one," he said over and over again.

I didn’t spend any time talking to him. I grabbed his meteorite necklace from around his neck and reached into his overcoat to take his copy of the book of Carousel’s horrendous history.

"Hey, that's mine," he said with absolutely no force or effect. He was too drained.

I ran back, closer to the hospital, as the jewel from the Generation Killer’s necklace started to get brighter.

As it did, I set my mind on going to the moment in time we had all pre-planned to be the finale. After all, that was what we had all decided.

Bobby had found that there was a plane crash a week or two before we discovered the tapes inside the wall that Anna had hidden there.

We decided the finale would take place shortly after that plane crash.

After all, if you had time travel, you could choose when the end of the story was.

Of course, when we made those plans, we didn’t realize how much Carousel went out of its way not to use real time travel, going as far as to create multiple different copies of Carousel on sound stages to represent different years.

But Kimberly had her Contract Negotiations trope, and we put all of our efforts into our plan.

We thought Carousel might like it. We sure had to work for it, given how much we had to improvise around the various elements of the story that we hadn’t known about. It was looking like things were about to come together.

As the fire raged, I could hear screams from inside—demoralizing screams that I never wanted to hear again.

The jewel got bright and drained the saturation from all the color around me, turning everything a dull red.

As I opened the book to the right page, I could see Gabriel in my memory waving his hands, telling me that’s not where we’re going, basically.

But if I didn’t know where we were going, how could I take us there?

It turned out Gabriel had his own methods.

He came close to me, and while I couldn’t feel him, I could see him grabbing onto my arm.

As the ground felt like it was falling out from under me, suddenly his hand became more real, and I could feel the grip as his fingers tightened around my bicep. He was still illusory, but still he seemed to control my direction.

As the world entered into the kaleidoscope and then into the impossible prism of rivers that I recognized as the shores of time, I noticed that we weren’t traveling the normal way anymore.

It honestly didn’t occur to me that I might be able to talk to Gabriel, as I wasn’t able to talk to Bobby.

But Gabriel talked to me.

“We need to go see my mother,” he said.

“Dina, right?” I asked, recovering from the shock of hearing his voice. “Dina Cano?”

He nodded.

“I read her letters,” I said. “They didn’t make a lot of sense. She says she wants to help us.”

“She does,” he said. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but didn’t “I told her what that man did to me. How he threw me to the other side of time so long ago.”

I stared at his face, making sure to capture it in frame as time passed by around us.

He had a stern look. A tired look.

“Can we fix this?” I asked. “Is there a way out?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think my mother can help.”

We stopped moving—but not in the way I was used to.

We hadn’t landed anywhere in time.

We weren’t at a mass casualty event.

We were in a living room.

Dina’s living room.

She was sitting down with a tape recorder, saying words that I couldn’t quite hear well at first because of how much they echoed. But then I recognized them.

I had seen this before—or rather, I had heard it.

“Gabriel? Gabriel, can you hear me?” she asked through garbled sounds.

She then recorded the ambient sounds of the room as Gabriel spoke.

“Mom! I’m right here,” Gabriel screamed from beside me. “I think I can help fix this. I think I can fix everything!”

As she played the tape and listened to its hissing and clicking, she seemed to understand what it had recorded.

“Oh, thank goodness,” Dina said. “After last time, I thought something terrible had happened.”

“I’ve been gone, talking to the others,” Gabriel said. “I think I know what to do.”

The recorder process repeated.

“I don’t know what to do to help you,” Dina said. “I sent letters to the museum like you asked, but nobody ever showed up. No one believes me.”

Gabriel, who was crying by this point, said, “They will receive them. Trust me.”

“I know. I believe you. I have always believed you. Can you tell me more about what you were saying before? Can you tell me about the shores of time?”

Gabriel looked at me and then said, “The shores of time are filled with broken things. Broken like me. But they can be fixed. I promise, they can be fixed. You just have to be ready when I send for you. I have a man coming to you. A man who can take you to me. His name is Riley Lawrence, and he knows how you can help.”

Dina doubled over into her hands and cried. She couldn’t see us.

Carousel really did know how to mess with time—if you knew how to ask.

“Come on,” Gabriel said. “We have more stops to make.”

~-~

And so we did—seven, maybe eight more times.

We arrived to Dina in her house alone. She would get still, as if sensing our presence. Then, she would whip out her recorder and start a conversation, and with each conversation, Gabriel would tell her to wait for me to come get her.

But these weren’t the same Dina.

Some were old, others young. Some lived in trailers, and others in mansions.

All of them had one thing in common.

They had lost their son during the collapse of a roller rink years earlier—some to death, one to time itself.

We traveled from woman to woman until Carousel had gotten enough footage to set up our plan.

■ STOP

"There," Gabriel said. "That should work. Your friend Bobby told me your plan. Hope it works out for you."

We had a lot of plans. I had a hunch of which one Bobby had told him about.

I had stopped recording, but we didn't stop moving through time.

We kept going until we found one more Dina.

A very young Dina, to my eyes.

She was lying in bed, her eyes puffy and red from crying.

Letters were spread around the sheets.

I recognized those letters and the envelopes they came in.

They were Dina's letters from Carousel—inviting her to come save her son.

And with that realization, I noticed that this Dina was different from the others.

Because this Dina was not on the red wallpaper.

Gabriel just watched, tears rolling down his face.

"That can't be," I said.

"Why not?" Gabriel asked after a moment.

"Because that's back on Earth," I said. "This is before Dina came to Carousel. This is a recreation, right?"

"Haven't you heard?" he asked. "Carousel has a bit of everything."

Our world was attached to Carousel, sure enough, but I had always wanted to believe that some things were off-limits—unless someone traveled to the Ozarks and found themselves trapped the way we had.

Dina, lying on the bed, wiped her tears on a pillowcase.

Then, suddenly, she turned around and looked at us—without seeing us.

"Sean?" she asked desperation in her voice.

Silence hung in the air as I looked at Gabriel and realized exactly how much he looked like Dina.

The smooth curves of the face. The bronze skin. The black hair.

"Are you Sean?" I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just stared down at his mother.

"We have to go," he said.

Time and space started to move around us once more.

~-~

I had never really stopped to think about it, but there always had to be another cameraman.

I filmed myself and Camden at the casino.

The Generation Killer cameraman—the one who filmed the torture scenes and the original tapes of mass death events—captured those things. And then, the Generation Killer on the other side of time captured a bunch of establishing shots and followed Anna and the others around when I wasn’t there.

But who filmed Dina?

I knew she had scenes that were happening around the same time as ours.

It turned out it was… me who filmed Dina.

Her whole entire subplot.

Gabriel guided me around as she discovered the news of her son—presumed missing in a sinkhole.

I filmed her slowly starting to realize that her son was still watching her. At first, of course, she thought it was a ghost, but then she learned to communicate with him and found out what had really happened.

I filmed all of this from the other side of time.

Strangely, I thought it was a pretty cool idea—because the audience would have no idea how they were getting such good, clear footage of this woman who didn’t seem to acknowledge the camera at all in a found-footage film.

It took days to film Dina’s whole subplot, but from the other side of time, it didn’t feel like that. My meteorite necklace kept me from being swept away, but Gabriel seemed to be another balancing force, allowing me to travel freely.

I didn’t question it.

I just did the work—filming as best as I could.

~-~

Eventually, there was no more filming to be done.

We found ourselves perched on the roof of a building outside the jailhouse, watching as the Generation Killers started to attack in the finale.

One humorous side note was that Bobby could see us as he moved around time on his own—helping the others, signaling to them, warning them.

We stood at the top of the building, just watching.

The Generation Killers started destroying pretty much everything in sight—cars, windows, parking meters. They broke pretty much everything they could.

And they did it with such glee.

From this view, there were at least a hundred of them.

I could see their stats growing from all the carnage they inflicted on passersby.

We watched in silence, Gabriel and I.

He was very contemplative. I could see him eyeing me.

Dina, when she talked about Sean, had always said he was a quiet kid.

But eventually, he did speak.

“It’s almost time,” he said.

“If the plan Bobby told you about is what I think it is, this is going to be a real drag,” I said. “It’s going to take forever.”

He shrugged. “Well, you have forever.”

🔴 REC    OCT 18, 2018 00:07:15    [▮▮▯▯▯ 40%]

I stepped out into the middle of a rampage.

The Generation Killers had been absolutely massacring everyone anywhere near the jailhouse. They had killed Michael, Antoine, and Logan.

I didn’t know who was still alive, but seeing as the end had not come, someone was. And the signal that would wipe out the Generation Killers could still be sent—if we only made it to the end of the night.

We had a couple of hours left, but time was prone to skip ahead if we finished the scene.

Around me, I surveyed the death and destruction—the very death and destruction that made it possible for me to travel there at that moment.

It was finally time.

To my left, two people appeared.

One of them was Dina Cano, carrying a familiar sawed-off shotgun.

The other one was… me.

Me from a thousand trips ago.

Quickly, that version of me disappeared again, using the very mass death event that had allowed me to travel to this moment in order to leave this moment.

To my right, two more people appeared.

This time, it was Dina Cano and me again.

She was a bit older and carried a peculiar pair of hedge shears that made a sha-shing sound when she held them up.

Soon, that version of me disappeared as well.

And then another group of me and Dina appeared.

And then more.

Me—holding onto another version of Dina Cano. Each of them had some kind of weapon—maybe a gun, maybe a knife—whatever they could find.

And so the process repeated.

A hundred times.

Two hundred times.

Five hundred times.

Until the entire neighborhood was filled with Dina Canos and Generation Killers.

She outnumbered him six to one.

The killers watched in awe as the many mothers of Gabriel Cano appeared—summoned by their beloved son from beyond the grave.

They had never been able to find justice in their own timelines.

But they would find some semblance of it in this one.

I watched as the smiles slowly faded from the Generation Killers' mouths as they realized what they were up against.

The Outsider had arrived.