With newfound clarity, the pain in his leg was making it difficult to concentrate on anything else.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
Beverly lifted the flashlight and let it shine on her right hand, where between her thumb and first finger, she held something that resembled a microchip, specks of drying blood still caught up in the semiconductor.
“What is that?” he asked.
“How they monitor and track you.”
“That was in my leg?”
“They’re embedded in everyone’s.”
“Give it to me.”
“Why?”
“So I can stomp it into pieces.”
“No, no, no. You don’t want to do that. Then they’ll know you removed it.” She handed it to him. “Just ditch it in the cemetery when we leave.”
“Won’t they find us in here?”
“I’ve hidden here with the chip before. These thick stone walls disrupt the signal. But we can’t stay here long. They can track the chip to within a hundred yards of where the signal drops.”
Ethan struggled to sit up. He folded back the blanket to uncover a small pool of blood glistening on stone under the flashlight beam. More red eddies trickled out of an incision site on the back of his leg. He wondered how deep she’d had to dig. Felt light-headed, his skin achy and clammy with fever.
“You have something in the bag to close this wound?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Just duct tape.”
“Get it. Better than nothing.”
Beverly pulled the duffel bag over and thrust her hand inside.
Ethan said, “Did I dream you told me you came here in 1985, or did that really happen?”
“That happened.” She pulled out a roll of tape. “What do I do?” she asked. “I have no medical training.”
“Just wrap it around my leg several times.”
She started a piece of tape and then moved in, winding it carefully around Ethan’s thigh.
“Is that too tight?”
“No, it’s good. You need to stop the bleeding.”
She made five revolutions and then ripped the tape and smoothed it down.
“I’m going to tell you something,” Ethan said. “Something that you won’t believe.”
“Try me.”
“I came here five days ago...”
“You already told me that.”
“The date was September twenty-fourth, 2012.”
For a moment, she just stared at him.
“Ever heard of an iPhone?” Ethan asked.
She shook her head...
“The Internet? Facebook? Twitter?”
...and kept shaking it.
Ethan said, “Your president is...”
“Ronald Reagan.”
“In 2008, America elected its first black president, Barack Obama. You’ve never heard of the Challenger disaster?”
He noticed the flashlight beginning to tremble in her hand.
“No.”
“The fall of the Berlin Wall?”
“No, none of it.”
“The two Gulf Wars? September eleventh?”
“Are you playing some mind game with me?” Her eyes narrowed—one measure of anger, two of fear. “Oh God. You’re with them, aren’t you?”
“Of course not. How old are you?”
“What?”
“Where paradise is home. It’s something I saw on a sign on the outskirts of town when I was trying to drive out of here last night.”
“When I first woke up here, I was so disoriented and in so much pain from the car accident, I believed them when they told me I lived here. After wandering around in a fog all day, Sheriff Pope found me. He escorted me to the Biergarten, that pub where you and I first met. Told me I was a bartender there, even though I’d never tended bar in my life. Then he took me to a little Victorian house I’d never seen before, told me it was home.”
“And you just believed him?”
“I had no competing memories, Ethan. I only knew my name at that point.”