A Lesson in Sacrifice
Part 1
Every leap was the same. The familiar blue light engulfed him and Sam Beckett found himself falling through space and time once again. “Please, let me leap home,” he thought without words.
Home. At times like these, when he was between time and between selves, he could almost remember where home was. Contradictory images of cornfields and desert filled his mind. Opposed smells of peach cobbler and chemicals fought to make sense in his brain. Home was in Indiana, home was in New Mexico… Where was home again? When would he see home again?
And with these thoughts that were more like feelings, Sam Beckett leaped in.
******
The world materialized around him and the first thing he noticed was music, very close to his ears. He was about to turn to where the sound was coming from when a moving object caught his eye. Red roses were flying gracefully through the air, making their way to a pretty teenage girl looking down at him from her balcony.
Two things came to his mind immediately. If he was wooing this girl, he’d better be a teen too. And if he was wooing this girl, he’d better start singing.
He tried to concentrate on the music and figure out just what the song was when he noticed that the girl had caught the flowers he had thrown up to her.
And that they were now white roses.
“Oh boy.”
*******
Max looked wildly around him in an attempt to make some sense of what was going on. One minute he was singing to Liz, the next minute he was standing alone in a blue room.
When did they take him? Who took him? What happened to Liz?
He turned around this way and that, trying to find a way out, panicking when he noticed the lack of doors and windows.
Just what the hell was going on?
He heard a hissing sound and a part of the blue wall dematerialized. An attractive black woman in a doctor’s lab coat now stood in front of him.
Max backed away from her until his lower back bumped into something. Looking behind him, he saw a table. A rather high, metallic table.
The kind of table one uses for autopsies.
He turned to face the woman again. She was speaking in soothing tones, but Max couldn’t make sense of the words. Fear and anger were fighting their way in his mind, fear finally winning the battle when he realized that the hole in the wall through which the woman had come in was now closed again. Everywhere he looked, that same smooth blue surface.
He tried to concentrate for a moment and figure out what his options were:
He could charge the woman and try to make the door reappear;
He could calm down and actually listen to what she was trying to tell him;
He could collapse and die of a heart attack before they had a chance to kill him.
He noticed absently that his sense of humour seemed to be intact when the doctor gently put a hand on his arm. The light touch sent a lightning bolt through his whole body.
But it was nothing compared to the shock he felt when he realized that the arm the doctor was touching was not his own. He looked down at himself and saw that the rest of the body was also not his.
Suddenly, he heard someone screaming. He was mildly surprised when he realized it was him.
Right now, collapsing seemed like the only logical thing to do.
***********
“ay ya ya yai, ay ya yay ai…”
Sam had figured out that the song was “Tres Dias”. How he knew that, he had no idea. Fortunately, he had leaped in the easy part of the song.
“ay ya ya yai, tu amor me va a matar“
As he was singing, a part of his brain wondered if he knew enough Spanish to get through this leap. Some words were coming back to him, but he wouldn’t know if he could carry a whole conversation until he actually had to. He heard a faint voice rise from the balcony.
“Lizzie? What the hell is going on out there?”
Ah, so the girl had a name. And the leap would be in English after all. Thank God-or-Time-or-Fate-or-Whatever for small favors.
“Is that Max again?”
Is it? As far as getting basic information, this leap was going rather well so far.
“Max, is that you again? It’s eleven o’clock, tomorrow’s a school day-“
Someone Sam figured to be Lizzie’s father came to the edge of the balcony and looked down.
“Ah geez…” he sighed.
Sam took the cue and walked away, followed by the mariachi band Max had hired to help him with the song. At this particular moment, he saw no point in having an argument with Lizzie’s dad, and get both kids in more trouble than they probably were.
He went around the building and stopped next to a Jeep parked in front of a restaurant. A giant flying saucer was crashed through the front of the building, and the words Crashdown Café were blinking on and off in multicoloured lights. As Sam looked up, the blinking stopped and the whole restaurant went dark, closed for the night.
Sam turned to look at the mariachi band.
“Um… thank you very much for all your help,” he told one of the men.
“You’re welcome,” the man replied in a thick Spanish accent.
Sam smiled and just stood there. The band didn’t move. Sam started to get fidgety. He put his hands in his pockets and just stared at the band.
One of the men cleared his throat.
“Senor… dinero?”
“Oh!” Sam exclaimed. “I’m sorry, I don’t know where my head is.”
The third man whispered to the second one something in Spanish that Sam understood as “probably up on that balcony.” He smiled to himself.
“How much had we agreed on, again?” he asked the first man, taking out Max’s wallet from his back pocket, as the two others kept on whispering about how love made a young fool forget everything else.
He paid the band, who thanked him before walking away. For some reason, Sam had expected them to take the Jeep, but they walked until they reached the corner and then took a left.
Oh well. He figured it was a pretty safe guess to assume he wasn’t there to make sure the band got home safely. As usual, Al was taking his sweet time showing up to tell him what he was actually there to do.
He leaned against the Jeep and took a look through the wallet. The driver’s licence confirmed that he was indeed Max Evans, and that he lived at 6025 Murray Lane, Roswell, New Mexico. The picture showed a serious-looking, brown-haired teen. Sam turned and leaned in to look at himself in the Jeep’s rear view mirror. His gaze was met by golden brown eyes. Dark brown hair fell in bangs on his forehead. He frowned. Oddly, the look seemed to belong on the young face. He tried a smile. The result was nice-looking. By what he could see, Max Evans was a very handsome young man. He wondered just what it was Lizzie wasn’t seeing in him for the boy to resort to playing Romeo on a school night.
He turned his attention back to the wallet. There wasn’t much in there. A few bucks, a library card and a picture of Max and Lizzie. He took a good look at it. It seemed to have been taken at a birthday party; he could see balloons over their heads. The teens were standing side by side, smiling at the camera. Max had his right arm around the girl’s shoulders. There was a closeness between them that was obvious even in this snapshot. As he took it out to look at it more closely, something fell out of the wallet and fluttered to the ground. He bent to pick it up. It was another photograph of the couple.
It was one of those pictures you get in an automated photo booth, the kind you see in every shopping mall. Lizzie, wearing a white shirt, was sitting on Max’s lap, who was wearing a blue T-shirt. The smiles were the only thing you saw on their faces. They were looking at each other lovingly.
Sam realized that he must have been wrong. These two were obviously in love. Max’s little stunt tonight was not to win Lizzie’s affection. Didn’t her father say something about it being Max again? Sam had a feeling that maybe it was something Max did on a regular basis. He chuckled softly. No, whatever he was here for, he couldn’t conceive that it had anything to do with getting Max and Liz to stay together.
There was one more thing in the wallet; the registration for the Jeep, in the name of Philip and Diane Evans. “Cool,” Sam said out loud before getting in the driver’s seat. Now he only had to find Murray Lane.
Go back to the main page