The Gone World Read online

  ALSO BY TOM SWETERLITSCH

  Tomorrow and Tomorrow

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Thomas Sweterlitsch

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sweterlitsch, Tom, author.

  Title: The gone world / Tom Sweterlitsch.

  Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016049048 (print) | LCCN 2016057341 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399167508 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698142763 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Time travel—Fiction. | Criminal investigation—Fiction. | GSAFD: Science fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.W48 G66 2018 (print) | LCC PS3619.W48 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049048

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  FOR SONJA AND GENEVIEVE

  CONTENTS

  Also by Tom Sweterlitsch

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  PART THREE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  PART FOUR

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  PART FIVE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  If I have heard correctly, all of you

  can see ahead to what the future holds

  but your knowledge of the present is not clear.

  —DANTE, Inferno, Canto X

  PROLOGUE

  2199

  She had been warned she would see things her mind wouldn’t understand. In a dead forest, in winter—never-ending winter, the trees blackened from old fire and coated with ice, several trunks toppled, a lattice of charred sticks. Climbing across the field of dead pines for hours, but her space suit kept her warm, a thin-profile suit that allowed her a range of motion to keep moving. The space suit was orange, the color for trainees: this was her first excursion to a far-future Earth. Everywhere she looked, in every direction, she saw the frost-blanched sky and the snowy ground crosshatched by fallen trees. There were two suns—the pale disk of the sun she knew and the garish white radiance of the phenomenon her instructor had called the White Hole. This was once West Virginia.

  She had ranged far from base camp and grew worried about finding her way back to the Quad-lander in time for extraction. A dosimeter measured her amount of radiation exposure, a color blotch that had dimmed over the past few hours from bright green to a green the color of pond scum. She had become infected by this place, the air and soil here polluted by a vapor of metal, particles minuscule enough to pass through her suit, into her body. QTNs, her instructor had called them—quantum-tunneling nanoparticles, he had said. She had asked her instructor if QTNs were like a swarm of robots, but he said to think of them more like cancer—that they’d house within the microtubules of her cells, and once enough of them had taken residence within her, she would be lost. Not death, he elaborated, not exactly—he told her that she would see what QTNs do with human bodies, but that her intuition might reject what she was seeing, that she might be filled with revulsion, that she might feel a violent need to unsee.

  One of the burnt trees still stood, a barren pine whitened by a skin of ash—and when she passed the burnt-white tree, the landscape changed around her. She was still in the forest, in winter, but the trees were no longer burned, fallen. The pines were lush now, green, though snow-covered. Ice bent the boughs of distant pines vague through the scrim of snow. How did I get here? She looked behind her: no tracks, not even her own. I’m lost. She pushed through branches and needles, exhausted from the effort of lifting her steps from the drifts. She passed another burnt white tree identical to the first she had seen—dead, its ashen branches skeletal. Or was it the same tree she had passed? I’m turned around, she thought. Clambering over roots and stones, sliding down snow, trying to find something familiar, some land feature she could recognize, she pushed through a gap between pines and came to a clearing, to the shore of a black river. She screamed when she saw the crucified woman.

  The woman had been crucified upside down, but there was no cross; she was suspended midair, hovering above the black water. Fire burned at her wrists, her ankles. The woman’s rib cage was stretched, protruding, her body diminished, thinned to the point of starvation; her legs were striated black with gangrene. Her face was livid, purple, a pooling of blood, and her hair, pale blond, dangled low enough to touch the surface of the water. She recognized herself as the crucified woman and she fell to her knees on the shore of the black river.

  A trick of the QTNs, she thought. It was repugnant, this absurdity. They’re inside me, making me see these things—

  Panic lurched within her at the thought of QTNs accumulating in her cells, her brain—but even so she realized this was no hallucination, that the crucified woman was real, as real as she was, as real as the river and the ice and trees. She thought to cut the woman down but was horrified to touch her.

  Her meter changed from green to mustard yellow and she ran, activating her retrieval beacon, trying to remember her extraction point—but the forest surrounding the river was unfamiliar, and she was lost. She backtracked the way she thought she had come, buffeted by icy wind, slipping in snow. She passed another white tree, identical to the others—or no, it must be the same . . . a burnt pine, its bark a carapace of ash. The yellow of her meter had darkened to the shade of reddish clay. No, no, no, she thought, running again, ducking through a clutch of branches. The meter flashed brilliant red. Nausea swept over her and she collapsed, brought down by the heaviness in her blood. She crawled forward through a break in the trees and found that she had arrived again at the clearing by the shore of the black river, to the scene of her crucifixion, but there were innumerable crucifixions now, thousands of bodies hovering upside down along the length of the river, nude men and women screaming in the light of two suns.

  “What is happening?” she said out loud, to no one.

  Her vision dimmed, she gasped for breath. When she saw flashing lights in the sky, she thought she might be losing consciousness, but they were the lights of one of the Quad-landers, a module named Theseus. The retrieval beacon, she thought—I’m saved. The Quad-lander bounced in the clearing before settling onto the ice.

  “Here,” she said, her voice weak. She tried to scream: “I’m over here.”

  Two men in slim olive space suits worn by the Navy scrambled out of the hatch, and s
he saw them approach the river. “I’m here,” she said, but the men were too far away to hear her. She tried to crawl from the tree line, she wanted to run to them, but she lacked the strength to stand. She saw the two men wade into the river, hip-deep, and saw them pull the crucified woman from the air, cradle her. They wrapped the woman in heavy blankets.

  “No, I’m here, I’m here,” she said, but watched them carry the crucified woman, that other version of herself, on board the lander.

  “I’m here,” she said, “please.” Her meter darkened to muddy brown, the next color would be the lethal shade of black. She closed her eyes, waiting.

  —

  The mule kick of the thrusters shocked her into consciousness, and she recognized where she was—she was in one of the Quad-lander’s pods, she realized, her wrists and ankles strapped to the cot, her head and neck secured in a padded block. She was numb, shivering, covered in blankets that were tied down at the edges. The g-force of their liftoff abated, and she felt weightlessness.

  “Please,” she said, “go back. I’m down there, please go back, don’t leave me—”

  “You’re all right, we’ve got you now,” said her instructor, floating through the pod to her bedside. He was a much older man, with silvery hair, though his blue eyes seemed young. His hands were leather-soft when he checked her pulse. “Your wrists and ankles will be in considerable pain,” he said. “I don’t know how you were bound, but you suffered burns. You suffered from the exposure, extensive frostbite. Hypothermia.”

  “You have the wrong body,” she said, remembering that she had somehow seen herself in the orange trainee space suit crawling along the tree line. “You have to believe me, please. I’m still down there. Please don’t leave me—”

  “No—you’re back on Theseus,” said her instructor. “We found you in the woods.” He wore blue athletic shorts and white socks pulled to his knees, an NCIS T-shirt, gray. “You’re confused,” he said. “The QTNs are confusing you. They’re in your blood. You have dangerous levels of them inside you.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, trying to remember, but her mind was sluggish. “What’s inside of me? I don’t know what QTNs are.” Her teeth chattered, her body shook. Excruciating pain raked her limbs, bright shoots of nerve pain, but her fingers were deadened, and her toes. She remembered stepping from her space suit by the river, shedding her clothes. She remembered ice burning her shoulders, blistering her. She remembered fire at her wrists and ankles. She remembered that she had hung upside down over that rushing black water for hours, for days maybe. She had been praying to die when she’d seen herself appear through the pines. “I don’t understand,” she said, crying against the pain.

  “Our main concern right now is your hypothermia and frostbite,” said her instructor, floating nearer to her feet and peeling back the corner of the blanket to check on her. “Oh, Shannon,” he said. “Oh—”

  She lifted her head and saw that her feet were purple-black and swollen, the surrounding skin flaky and yellowed. “God, no. Oh, God, no,” she said, and in her shock almost felt like these feet belonged to someone else, that they were anyone’s but her own. Someone had placed pieces of cotton between her toes. Violet lines stretched up her left leg. Her instructor rubbed her feet with a damp washcloth, but she couldn’t feel the water even as it slid from the cloth over her toes and spun away like beads of glass through the air.

  “Your mind was affected, your memory may have been affected by the hypothermia,” he said. “First Lieutenant Stillwell and Petty Officer Alexis rescued you, stabilized you here. You’re not there anymore, you’re here. You’re safe now.”

  “I don’t know who they are,” she said, their names unfamiliar. First Lieutenant Ruddiker had piloted the Quad-lander, along with Petty Officer Lee—there was no Stillwell, as far as she knew. The bay window framed a view of Earth, distant now, marbled white with mists and ice. She wondered at her own body dying below in the wilderness, still in her space suit, but she could see that her space suit was locked in one of the pod closets, bright orange like a hunter’s blaze camouflage. What the hell is happening to me? Although her wrists and ankles were covered with bandages that smelled of ointment, she felt her skin burning as if she had been doused with acid.

  “This hurts,” she said. “I hurt so much.”

  “We’ve let the medics know you’re coming,” said her instructor. “They’ll be ready to treat you once we dock with the ship.”

  “What . . . what was down there? What happened to me?” she asked. “I was hanging. They all were—”

  “You saw people who were crucified, along the river,” he said. “I’ve seen them too when I’ve traveled to study the Terminus, many times—we call them the ‘hanged men.’ The QTNs crucify those people. They crucified you.”

  “You said they’re in my blood. Get them out, get them out of me—”

  “Shannon, we’ve been through this—we can’t get them out. We covered this in training. I thought you were ready. I warned you about them.”

  “No, you never did,” she said, fighting to concentrate through the pain, the throbbing burn in her wrists. Her memories were confused, muddled . . . she remembered she had traveled to Deep Time on the USS William McKinley—to the year 2199, or one of an infinite number of possible 2199s, a distance of nearly two hundred years. A pale radiance hung over the Earth when they arrived, shining like a second sun—the entire crew had been astonished. No one knew what that pale light was. No one had warned her about QTNs or the hanged men. “You said you were taking me home, that’s all you ever said.”

  “Shannon,” said her instructor, helpless. He rubbed her feet again with the washcloth. “I don’t know what to say. The hypothermia—it can cause amnesia. Maybe as you recover—”

  “Rendezvous with William McKinley. Prepare for docking,” said a voice over the loudspeaker—a voice she didn’t recognize. She remembered black water rushing beneath her. She looked again at her feet. Some color had returned to her right foot, but the toes on her left were still black, and the lines reaching up her left leg had darkened. The sight sickened her.

  “What are they? What are QTNs—what’s inside of me?” she asked, rebelling against her bewilderment. “I don’t care if you think we’ve been over this before.”

  “We don’t know where they come from, or what they want,” said her instructor. “They might not want anything. Quantum-tunneling nanoparticles. We believe they are extradimensional—they come through the White Hole, that second sun you saw. Sometime in our future. They cause the event we call the Terminus.”

  “The crucifixions.”

  “The moment humanity ceases to be relevant,” said her instructor. “No one is left alive. Not in the conventional sense, at any rate. There are the hanged men, but there are runners, too. Millions running in great packs until their bodies disintegrate or they run into the ocean to drown. Some dig holes and then lie down inside. Some people stand with their faces toward the sky, their mouths filled with silver liquid. On the beaches they line up and perform what look like calisthenics.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t understand why, or to what purpose. Maybe there is no purpose.”

  “But this is just a version of the future,” she said, imagining she could feel the QTNs like parasites in her blood. “This is just one of infinite possibilities. So there are other possibilities, other futures. The Terminus doesn’t have to happen.”

  “The Terminus is a shadow that falls across the future of our species,” said her instructor. “Every timeline we’ve visited ends in the Terminus. And it’s moving closer. We first dated the event to 2666—but the next travelers to witness the Terminus found that it had moved closer, to 2456. And the Terminus has moved closer still, to 2121. You see, the Terminus is like the blade of a guillotine slicing toward us. Our Navy and its fleet have been tasked to find a way out from that shadow, and our vocation is to support the Navy. Everything I’ll teach you, everything you’ll
see, is to help our species avoid the Terminus. We have to find our way out from the shadow.”

  “What else will I see?”

  “The end of everything.”

  PART ONE

  1997

  ONE

  Hello?”

  “Special Agent Shannon Moss?”

  She didn’t recognize the man’s voice, though she recognized the drawl on the vowels. He’d grown up around here, West Virginia, or Pennsylvania—rural.

  “This is Moss,” she said.

  “A family’s been killed.” A quaver in his voice. “Washington County dispatch logged the 911 a little after midnight. There’s a missing girl.”

  Two a.m., but the news was like an ice bath. She was fully awake now.

  “Who am I speaking with?”

  “Special Agent Philip Nestor,” he said. “FBI.”

  She turned on her bedside lamp. Cream-colored wallpaper patterned with vines and cornflower-blue roses covered her bedroom walls. She traced the lines with her eyes, thinking.

  “Why my involvement?” she asked.

  “My understanding’s that our SAC communicated with HQ and they instructed him to involve you,” said Nestor. “They want NCIS assistance. Our primary is a Navy SEAL.”

  “Where?”

  “Canonsburg, on a street called Cricketwood Court, just off Hunter’s Creek,” he said.

  “Hunting Creek.”

  She knew Hunting Creek, Cricketwood Court—her best friend growing up had lived on that street, Courtney Gimm. The image of Courtney’s face floated from Moss’s memory like ice surfacing through water.

  “How many victims are we dealing with?”

  “Triple homicide,” said Nestor. “It’s bad. I’ve never—”

  “Slow down.”

  “I’d seen some kids hit by a train once, but nothing like this,” he said.

  “Okay,” said Moss. “You said the call came in after midnight?”

  “A little later,” said Nestor. “A neighbor heard commotion, finally called the police—”