So You Had to Build a Time Machine

by So You Had to Build a Time Machine (epub)

  Skid leaned closer. “Except what?”

  “He had some kind of wound on his leg wrapped in a dirty T-shirt. It was dripping with blood.” Brick studied the woman for a second, his head cocked slightly, giving her the impression he was a big, confused, friendly dog. Bud Light Dave didn’t have a leg wound, at least not at the time, although he’d been asking for it.

  “I—” she started, but Brick cut her off.

  “Is your name Skid?” he asked, his voice deep, flat.

  She sat back like Brick had pushed her. “Maybe. How do you know that name?”

  “Because,” Brick said, “Oilyman told me two things before he vanished in a puff of ozone. He called me Brick and he mentioned you.” He paused, trying to gauge the look on her face. Confusion? Contemplation? Constipation? A debate on whether she was going to flip the table like it was a Scrabble board? She was hard to read. “He said, ‘Skid’s going to kill us all.’”

  To Brick, it seemed like someone had let out some of the woman’s air. “He did? He used my name?”

  “Yup,” Brick said, laying page D8 face-up on the table. His big index finger landed on the news story, ‘Government Scientist Vanishes.’ “It was this guy.”

  A smiling black-and-white two-dimensional Bud Light Dave stared up at Skid.

  9

  Government Scientist Vanishes

  By Beau Branna

  KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A physicist for a United States military research facility south of Kansas City, Missouri, is missing, an Army spokesperson said Saturday.

  David Collison, Ph.D., a theoretical physicist at Lemaître Labs near Peculiar, Missouri, failed to report to work although he called into the lab under what the spokesperson reported as, “duress.”

  Collison had apparently been assaulted and robbed of his shoes in an alley behind All-National Burger, 1264 S. Manchester St., Belton, Missouri, Saturday morning, his call for help to the facility logged in at 9:04 a.m. The shattered remains of his mobile telephone were discovered at the scene. Belton Police located his shoes in the possession of Grenada Operation Urgent Fury veteran Gordon Gilstrap.

  “Yeah, dis been dang shoe thing he-ah,” Gilstrap said. “Issa blass foo gibbidy hoom.”

  Belton Police Chief Chris Donallen said he doesn’t believe Gilstrap was involved in Collison’s disappearance, but at this point anyone is a suspect.

  “It looks like Dr. Collison slept on a pile of garbage bags in the alley and Mr. Gilstrap appropriated his loafers,” Donallen said. “On the asphalt surface of the alley, there are three greasy sock prints covered in what appears to be rotted fish fillets from All-National Burger. Then, the footprints disappear. It’s like something just swooped right in and scooped the good doctor up into thin air.”

  Lemaître Labs coordinator Dr. Karl Miller said it is vital the scientist be located.

  “Dr. Collison is an important member of our team,” Miller said. “Of course, given his security level, I can’t comment anymore. He’s classified.”

  Lemaître Labs, at least publicly, designs weapons for the military.

  Collison was raised in foster care in Kansas City, Missouri. He attended college in Illinois and Ohio before earning his doctorate at Stanford.

  He has no known relatives. His surviving foster sister Susan Meek could not be reached for comment.

  Anyone with information on Collison’s whereabouts may call 1-800-555-TIPS.

  10

  The newspaper fell to the table and Cord sat back, leaning the chair onto its back legs like his mother had always told him not to. The ghost had a face, he had a name and, better yet, he had blinded Cord with science. This was it. This was beautiful. Science was reliable, ghosts were not. His face grew hot as the facts of the story crept in.

  David Collison, Ph.D., worked at Lemaître Labs, some government place outside town. Cord thought he’d read something about some super-secret lab building a supercollider, or roller coaster. For all he knew they were the same thing, one just had more buttons. But the government wasn’t working on a machine that dropped people into his hallway, were they? Why would they want to do that? It must have been a mistake. How hard was it to dial in a far-away AM station on an old radio? Finding a place for a government transporter to beam a confused scientist must be at least twice that hard. But if Doc Brown Jr. was involved in building a transporter, maybe, just maybe, Cord could buy one from him, or better yet, rent it.

  Or rent-to-own. Like places do for poor young couples who can’t afford a refrigerator or living room set.

  He could rent-to-own. All he’d have to do is work out an affordable payment plan with the scientist, because a machine that could science fiction–show zap a person from one place to another would be expensive. Like the House of Creed Bespoke Fragrance Journey he’d seen in the Christmas Neiman Marcus catalog. People would be stupid to pay $475,000 to go to Paris to sniff perfume, but for a teleportation machine? Almost a half-million dollars would be a bargain.

  Cord didn’t have half a million dollars, but he would, eventually. He knew it. The newspaper article had landed him overnight guests for the next three months so, unless jerks decided to cancel, he was looking to make at least $100 grand. Cord rested his chin in his hand and stared at the picture of David Collison, Ph.D.

  “Where are you, you beautiful, beautiful nerd-boy?”

  11

  The empty Styrofoam coffee cup that read “Dan’s Daylight Donuts” fit right over Bud Light Dave’s newspaper face. Skid didn’t want to look at him anymore.

  “He said that?” she asked.

  Brick reached out to grab the cup. A competitor’s product wasn’t good for business, but Skid snatched it first. “Yes. He said two sentences,” he lied. “He said, ‘Watch her, Brick.’ Then he told me, ‘Skid’s going to kill us all.’”

  Skid. Skid. He knew my name, she thought. Of course, he did. She froze. This isn’t funny.

  Brick studied her face. Oilyman hadn’t said two sentences. He’d said three, ‘Watch out for Skid. She’s not what she seems.’ That part Brick thought was right. If royally bombing on internet blind dates taught him anything, it’s that women are a mystery.

  Skid pinched her jaw, her face serious as a Hallmark made-for-TV movie. She stood and walked away from the table before turning back toward Brick.

  “Things are wrong,” she said, punching one hand into the other for an effect she didn’t need. “And not just Bud Light Dave disappearing and appearing again. The street name is wrong, too. It’s like reality’s wrong. You know, parallel dimensions. The Mandela Effect. That episode of South Park where Cartman had a goatee.”

  Brick started to say something, but she cut him off.

  “I know it is Tim Binnall Boulevard. I just know it. I know I worked the Doobie Brothers concert even though the newspaper says Steely Dan.” She snatched the newspaper and held it up to Brick. “And I know this asshole tried to hit on me Friday night then disappeared. Maybe something paranormal is happening. The Mothman guy, John Keel, called them Window Areas. He—”

  Her eyes grew large, like in a Keane painting. Brick didn’t like where this was going. “What is it?” he asked.

  She turned the newspaper page around. “What’s the name of the paper?”

  Watch out for Skid. “The Kansas City Star, why?”

  Skid slapped it back onto the spool table, her finger on the folio. Brick read The Kansas City Times.

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah,” she said, turning and beckoning him with both hands. “Put out your ‘Closed’ sign. We have to go talk to this murder house guy. Now. Like right now.”

  Brick didn’t move.

  “Please?”

  12

  David’s head was underwater only a few seconds. He hit the surface of the tank 138 miles per hour slower than when he’d appeared high enough in the troposphere he could have seen his house. His foot hit the bo
ttom of the metal tank in slow motion, then he shoved upward, breaking the surface and scaring the hell out of fifteen head of cattle.

  “Moo,” they lowed in unison and scattered, although cattle don’t really scatter. One starts to run, and the others follow.

  “Oh, shit,” he wheezed as he grabbed the sides of the tank with both hands, trying to steady himself. His heart pounded. “What is this?”

  The cattle, mostly polled Hereford and a few roans, forgot what startled them and began to slowly walk back toward the tank.

  David pushed himself to standing, trying to gather what breath his body would allow. He winced when he put weight on his injured left leg, then quickly shifted the weight to his right.

  “Hey, you cows,” he growled. “Why don’t you go away.”

  The lead bovine stopped and looked at David with dark, brown eyes. “Moo?”

  A farm. David had landed on a farm. Of course. Cows, idiot. A dusty red pickup was parked near the stock tank on the opposite side of a barbed-wire fence, a John Deere tractor pulling a cultivator moved in the distance behind it. David dragged air into his lungs and pushed it out slowly. This is not cool. Things began to fall into his head, the things that had happened since the waves began swooping in and dropping him all over the universe. The pig people with swords, the mushroom people, what he did to Karl, the explosion, Skid. He grimaced. This was all Skid’s fault. No, he realized. It was all Karl’s fault, everything but the pain—that was all Skid.

  There was no one there to see him, no one to ask him questions. David gritted his teeth in a painful grin. Something had interrupted his fall. Finally, some kind of misguided, misplaced, stupid luck.

  He grabbed one side of the tank with both hands, his breath still coming in hard. He lifted his right leg out of the water and swung it over the tank’s side, securing his foot on the dusty, cattle-stomped ground before swinging out his left leg and dropping it like dead meat. He groaned when his foot hit the dirt. Sticking from his thigh was the black four-inch handle of a throwing knife.

  It was at that point he decided if he ever saw Skid again, he was going to kill her.

  Chapter Four

  September IV: A New Hope

  1

  The corrugated tin wall didn’t so much open as become pudding when Dave passed through and fell onto his face. A cough shot from him when he hit the concrete floor that tasted of dust and motor oil. A spot of blood flew from his mouth and sat for a moment, just a moment, its surface tension holding the shape of a quarter-sized reddish pool before it soaked into the dirt. Dave pushed himself onto his rear and leaned backward, resting his shoulders on the firm tin that had seemed to be the contents of a dessert cup just moments before.

  “I don’t like this,” he whispered.

  This dirty tin shop, the hallway with all those people looking down at him, the bar with the pretty dark-haired girl who punched him in the face. These were connected, somehow.

  “Hello,” he said into the great empty space. His voice echoed slightly. A bird, startled by Dave’s voice, fluttered near the high A-frame ceiling, a sparrow or barn swallow most likely. Light came from the crack between the large rolling doors on three sides of the cavernous room; other light leaked in through nail holes that had long ago lost their nails. So, it was daytime, he supposed. He also supposed that, apart from the bird, he was alone.

  Come on. Take a breath. Relax, relax. He closed his eyes and breathed slowly, purposefully, trying to clear his thoughts like the corporate meditation guy brought in by Karl had showed them to do. How much money did Karl spend on that guy? He looked like Jesus. He shook his head, dislodging the thought.

  Breathe, Dave, breathe. In, out. In, out.

  Friday. Something had happened Friday. The experiment had been on track. Dave worked late every night for the past two months to make sure the collider would be online September 2, Saturday. He dotted ‘i’s, crossed ‘t’s and caught a major flaw in Karl’s math that may have shut down the whole project for another six months. And Karl was—What? Furious. Karl was furious.

  “I don’t need some kid telling me my math’s wrong,” Karl shouted at Dave during the launch meeting late Friday afternoon. “Especially one I hired just because I owed his daddy a favor.” Dave flushed at the jab. It wasn’t fair. Karl’s mistake—and it was a mistake—would send the experiment in a direction no one on the team wanted to go. Karl pounded his fist and talked about the God Particle being nothing compared to what he would discover. Then he—

  “Holy shit,” hissed from Dave like he had a leak.

  After the meeting, Karl had sent everybody home. Dave remembered grabbing his car keys and leaving without saying goodbye to Gillian, without making plans to get drunk with Oscar. He stopped at the first bar he saw on his way back to his apartment, the Happy Crappy, or Happy Slappy, or Slap Happy’s. Something like that. Then everything went wrong.

  “That idiot,” he said. The words came out slowly. “That Cheetos-smelling bastard launched the experiment without me.”

  A hum kicked on somewhere in the shop, and Dave’s eyes popped open. He lifted himself onto stiff legs and walked toward the hum. It came from a hideous, blocky avocado green 1960s model refrigerator. He turned, taking in the entire structure for the first time. Air compressor, drill press, work bench, arc welder, table saw, and the fridge—a beer fridge.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice echoing through the old machine shed. “I know this place.”

  2

  Light streamed into Manic Muffins through its plate glass windows. A shadow of the window art “Muffin Monday All Week Long!” showed on the polished original hardwood floors. The real estate agent had told Brick the building had been a general store, then a haberdashery in its early days before more modern shops like a hairdresser and “Tammy’s Tanning Oasis” moved in and covered those glorious floors with black and white tiles. He had stripped the tiles and carefully brought back the luster of the wood floors during the remodel. Brick also took down the suspended ceiling to discover pressed copper. However, when he looked up, the beautiful pressed copper from another era was now tin.

  “Come on,” Skid said, stepping away from the table, waving him toward her like he was a puppy. Brick didn’t move. “What did you say your name was? Rick?”

  “Brick,” he said, his voice soft. His eyes fell from the tin ceiling and onto Skid. “Unless you’d rather call me Chauncey.”

  “Uh, no.” Her face pinched, like she’d bitten into something sour. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Then it’s Brick.” He stood and walked behind the counter, poured himself a cup of black coffee. Skid picked up her Dan’s Daylight Donuts cup and waved it at him. Brick leaned over the display case and considered this woman, about 5’6”, who carried herself like 12 th level fighter/mage. “What do you hope to find at the murder house?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said as she walked up to the display case and set the cup in front of him. “But Bud Light Dave was there. He fell out of the air in front of twenty-one witnesses after he’d vanished from Slap Happy’s.” A look of realization swept across her face. “Right after I punched him. Do you think—”

  Brick shook his head. “Seriously?” He blew across the top of his recycled cup before snapping a plastic lid over it. “I think whatever this guy was working on at this government lab, it’s pretty important. A missing persons case doesn’t hit the press for days unless it involves a kid, but his did the next day. Although, if I were you, I’d put some thought into why he warned me not to trust you. I sure am.”

  She pried the lid off the cup and pushed it toward him. Brick stared at her.

  “I am thinking about that,” she said, taking the cup behind the counter. She turned sideways to slip behind the mass that was Brick and poured her own coffee. “I’m also thinking about why you saw the same guy, but not the same guy. Why he vanished from the bar, why he appeared bac
k in the bar—”

  “Before he even disappeared the first time.”

  “Yeah…”

  Brick nodded. “That’s what threw me off. After he disappeared from the bathroom I walked back into the bar and saw you talking to him. Then you punched him.”

  “He said something offensive.” Skid took a slow sip of coffee. “This keeps getting weirder. Why do you think he showed up in the murder house?”

  Brick shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe things are just random, or maybe he has some connection there.”

  “Uh-huh. Yeah. Maybe.” She took another sip. “Your coffee’s better than Dan’s Daylight Donuts.”

  He turned his head to look at her, expecting something to be different. Her hair, the color of her shirt, maybe she would have turned into an elf, or something. Nothing. She looked the same. “I know,” he said. “Dave uses store brand.” He noticed Skid’s eyes were bloodshot. “Not sleeping well?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Me neither. The last time I looked, my ceiling was copper,” Brick said. “Had been for probably 150 years. Now it’s tin. I don’t like this. Whatever is happening, for whatever reason, it’s not fun.”

  “Ceiling’s copper again, Brick.”

  Brick looked up. She was right.

  3

  Cord hung the newspaper in the entrance hall right next to the front door. Unlike the time he tried to build a birdhouse for his mom in eighth grade shop class, this looked just like he’d pictured it in his head. He stood, admiring the headline. Well, not the headline. The word in 48-point font read, “G-G-G-Ghost!” The editor who wrote that watched too much Scooby-Doo, although Cord knew too much Scooby-Doo wasn’t possible. He liked the subhead, “Spectral spirit spotted at Sanderson Murder House.”

  “Thank you, reporter Beverly Gibson,” He said, but the stupid grin slid from his face. He’d been too much in the moment Saturday morning. He hadn’t even asked for her telephone number.