Oh, no.
3
Karl came in at 6:30 in the morning. Dave knew this because Karl shouted it.
“It’s 6:30 a.m., sleepy boy.” Dave’s boss stepped into the conference room like he’d had a great night’s sleep and set a cup of coffee on the table in front of Dave. The vomit on Dave’s shirt didn’t seem to bother him. “Drink up to celebrate. The Army sent a squad into a wave yesterday to recruit some new non-human soldiers. They should be back today.”
Dave took a sip of coffee. It was stronger than he liked, but whatever.
“There were cockroaches in the hall,” he said, “Big ones.” The words sounded strange to him because they were. “They were like bears with exoskeletons.”
Karl lifted his own cup, a picture of Lex Luthor next to the words “World’s Second-Best Boss” painfully visible.
“That’s HR. They turned like that in the first wave. I find them loathsome, but then again, I always did. They can stay that way for all I care.” He sipped from Lex, the slurp too loud to be accidental.
“I’m not hung over,” Dave said, then shook his head again. “That doesn’t bother me.”
“Pity,” Karl said. “Would you like to leave?”
Well, yeah. Who wouldn’t? “My breath’s awful. Got any gum?”
Karl’s right hand waved in front of his face. “No, and I don’t care.” His eyes focused on Dave’s, and they were bat shit. “Would. You. Like. To. Leave?”
He’s going to kill me. If I say ‘yes’ he’s going to kill me. I have to get to the Bridge and shut this thing off. “No.” He forced a natural smile. “I would like some more peanuts.”
4
A crowd of ghost hunters had gathered around Delbert’s unmoving body by the time Cecilia made it out of her room.
“What happened?”
“Who’s this?”
“Oh, my God. Call an ambulance.”
“I don’t have any bars.”
Susan’s mother stepped into the hallway tying the waist of her purple robe, her long, auburn hair disheveled. “Del—” she started, then saw Susan. Susan’s stomach lurched. Those were the clothes Cecilia had worn the day she died, hacked to death by the dead man in the downstairs hallway.
Cecilia stopped, her hands still on either end of the terrycloth belt, her face awash in confusion. “Susan?”
“Hey, Mom,” Susan said.
“But—”
“It’s me, Mom.” My mother is alive. Muffit bounded back up the stairs and licked Susan’s hand. The volume of Tommy’s television increased to drown out the noise.
Cecilia’s eyes grew wide. Her head involuntarily shook. “No. No, you can’t be Susan.” She took a step back toward the bedroom she shared with Delbert. “You’re old. Older than me.” Cecilia glanced at the stairs but didn’t dare look down them. “What did you do to my husband?”
Susan opened her mouth to speak, but someone screamed downstairs, cutting her off. The people had moved away from Delbert’s body like death was a disease they could catch, all but the nurse, Connie. She hovered over the body of Susan’s father, trying to find a pulse in the man’s neck.
“He’s dead,” said the woman who’d brought her son. “He’s—oh my god, he’s dead.”
When Susan turned back toward her mother, she was gone.
“She’s calling the police,” Susan mumbled. The police. The police are coming, and I’ll be arrested.
She stood and calmly walked past Tommy’s door and stopped at hers, pushing it open and flipping on the light switch without looking. Posters of Wang Chung, Wham! and Culture Club covered the walls.
“Hi, guys,” she whispered and shut the door, but it didn’t shut out the screams.
5
“For a dollar, I can get fruit, three eggs, boiled, fried, scrambled or poached, or dry cereal with cream, and toast. Not milk, cream. My drink choices are tea, Postum, coffee, matte or milk.” Cord held the menu for the Highway 71 Diner attached to the Highway 71 Motel where they’d spent the past six hours wrestling with sleep. Cord, Brick and Skid sat at a booth on maroon vinyl seats, their elbows on a white table dotted with cigarette burns, a stainless-steel napkin dispenser, salt and pepper shakers, and a chipped glass ash tray pressed against the wall under a long, plate-glass window. Brick’s explorer’s pack leaned against the booth. He’d left his sword outside.
“What’s Postum?” Brick asked, looking at his own menu, typewritten in Pica on an 8x10 slice of poster board stained with coffee. “Or that other one.”
“Matte?”
“I think you’re pronouncing it wrong.”
Skid stared through the window that overlooked a dusty gravel parking lot. The Studebaker was still parked in front of a motel door, but the family in the DeSoto had taken off before any of them woke. The motorcycles in front of two rooms leaned on their kickstands like the cool kids in a 1950s teenybopper movie. Skid took them in and quickly looked away, past the lot and out over a cornfield that grew on the other side of the highway; a gravel road intersected it and continued west.
“How are you supposed to pronounce it?” Cord asked.
“I don’t know,” Brick said. “I don’t even know what it is.”
Skid hadn’t slept when she stumbled into her room, at least not right away. She peeled off her sweat-stained clothing, the blood-splatter not visible on the black material, and washed each article one-by-one in the sink, hanging them wet in front of the open bathroom window. The world changes had been a tough to make sense of, but then again everything was. The time slips and dimensional jumps were just new twists in a life full of fuckupery. She’d handled the little changes, like Bud Light Dave disappearing, the street names, and the annoying synchronicity of Brick. But the orc she’d faced in the Otherworld, that was different. She’d killed it. It would never come back. For the first time, she wondered if the monster with the pig nose and six-foot hammer had children. Skid cried as she sat in the rust-stained bathtub, and again later, naked and dripping in the darkly decorated room with a tacky painting over the bed. Then she cried herself to sleep.
Now these people were arguing about tea.
“It’s pronounced MAH-teh,” she said, her gaze never leaving the parking lot. A sudden breeze sent a dust devil careening toward the highway.
“I think it’s MAY-Tuh,” Brick said.
Cord slapped his menu onto the table. “How do you know?”
The big man batted his eyes. “I’m not just a pretty face.”
“It’s pronounced MAH-teh,” Skid said again, louder this time. She picked her menu off the table studied it. “And it’s spelled wrong on the menu. There’s only one ‘T’. It’s a type of South American tea.”
She frowned at Brick and Cord, who sat opposite her, and lifted her menu.
“I’m getting the omelet with cream minced chicken, the chilled grapefruit, bacon, rye toast with orange marmalade and a pot of coffee.” She ticked off each choice on her fingers. “That totals one dollar and twenty-five cents. You got that covered, Cord?”
When they woke the night desk clerk and he told them two rooms, one single and a double, would be thirty dollars, Brick pulled out two twenties and the man laughed. “What you tryin’ to pull here, captain? That’s play money.” Cord quickly took out his wallet and flashed a thick stack of ones, making a joke about the bills Brick held. “That’s funny, right?” he said, flashing the car salesman smile. “My friend’s hilarious.” Cord plucked a twenty from Brick’s hand and ripped it in half, then counted off thirty one-dollar bills, the only style of bill that hadn’t changed since 1957.
“Yeah. Just like the rooms, miss ‘I need my privacy’,” Cord said. “I can cover breakfast, and Flo’s tip.”
“Why do you have so many one-dollar bills, Cord?” Brick asked. “I mean, I know it’s for strip joints. I just think you should clarify things for our lady friend.”
&
nbsp; Cord cleared his throat. “What you call a strip joint I call my ongoing effort to support young mothers and college students.”
A truck drove by on the highway, the flatbed covered in wire cages, feathers from the chickens inside drifting in its wake.
“Just stop,” Skid said. “What are we going to do?”
“I say those motorcycles are a nice option,” Cord said. “Slip the friendly bikers some cash and we’ll be at the lab in no time, then we can forget this every happened.”
The thought of getting back on a bike—even without Jimm-Jimm and Svetlana flying overheard—sent a shiver through her.
“No motorcycles,” she said, her tone hard and unmoving.
Cord lifted his menu again. “Then I don’t care. I’m ready for breakfast,” he said, wincing as Brick jabbed his ribs with an elbow.
The waitress, an attractive woman with sad eyes, approached the table with glasses of ice water to set in front of them. She pasted on a smile. “What can I get you folks?”
Brick slowly spread his menu on the table in front of him. “One of everything.”
“Oh, come on,” Cord said.
The woman, whose nametag read Carla, scratched it down on her order pad without looking back at Brick. She turned to Cord. “And you, hun?”
“Uh, sausage, a short stack and coffee.” He looked at Brick then back to Carla. “How much does ‘one of everything’ cost?”
“Deal with it, Cord,” Skid said and told Carla her order.
“I’ll be back with your coffee in a jif—”
A thum sounded from somewhere outside, sending a ripple across the surface of the water glasses. Carla grabbed the back of the booth seat over Skid’s shoulder, the fake smile dropped from her face.
“What the hell was that?” shot from Cord.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s just one of the monsters,” escaped Carla in a strained, awkward giggle. “I’ll have that coffee right out.”
6
Karl left almost as soon as he’d come. “Get your own damn peanuts,” he said, and stomped into the hallway, trying to slam the door behind him, but the pneumatic dashpot wouldn’t let him. The door closed slowly and quietly. Dave watched his boss disappear down the hall, slipping and almost falling, probably because of a piece of giant cockroach shit. Dave knew he should have followed Karl out the door and run. Freedom was just down the hall, but he was close to the Bridge and he knew he’d get closer. That Cheetos-smelling bastard would take him there himself. His ego was too big not to.
What did Karl want from him? The man had watched with almost lusty enthusiasm as the praying mantis he called Dr. Hahn ate the other David inch by inch. He wanted Dave to have a breakdown, and he wanted to be there to watch. Dave laughed and went to the refrigerator to grab another juice. Karl wouldn’t see a breakdown, because it had already happened.
What did he say? Soldiers had gone into a wave to bring something back? What they hell could they bring back? Then he remembered what Karl had said. Giant praying mantis and Bigfoot.
“That’s mad scientist kind of stuff,” he said into the empty room, knowing full well Karl probably heard every word he said.
What if the soldiers didn’t do what they were supposed to? Or worse, what if they did? Karl’s muffler was already tied on with loose wire. One more bump, and it would fall off. And when that happens—
I’m dead. I have to go, today, now.
Dave Collison walked into the bathroom connected to the conference room by a short hall. He wanted to clean up before the next Miller Wave hit or Karl shot him with one of the guns that had to be lying around the lab complex. It was a military instillation after all. “It’s important to be clean. You never know who’ll see you in your underwear, Davey,” Cecilia Sanderson had told him in the short time she was his foster mother.
You had that right, Momma C.
7
The coffee was black, strong and hot.
“This is better than the coffee at Dan’s Daylight Donuts,” Cord said, setting his cup back on the table filled with plates, some empty, some not. Brick had made his way through half the menu and didn’t look like his pace was slowing.
“Dan’s Daylight Donuts coffee sucks,” Brick said through a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
Skid toyed with her omelet, the cream minced chicken not as odd as she’d hoped. The impact tremors from whatever Carla’s “monster” was came at regular intervals. Like steps. Something’s walking out there. Something big. Then the tremors stopped for a while before starting again. The monster must have had an itch or was just really out of shape.
“We’re not home,” she said. “This isn’t even the same reality as ours. It’s close, but you know, monsters.”
Brick looked up from the plate of breakfast fish and fried potatoes, a piece of cod flopping on his fork. “How bad could it be?” he asked. “Our waitress talked like it was no big deal.”
Skid’s personal pot of coffee filled her thick American white porcelain cup about halfway before it emptied, drips slowly falling as she held it steady, staring at the waves the droplets made across the surface. Then the thums began again and the impact waves grew bigger. A pull, one that started in her stomach, threatened to bring the tears back. Skid took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds before letting it out through pursed lips.
“It’s not a big deal to her,” she said slowly, softly. “She lives here. But she’s frightened of it, too. Didn’t you see her face when she told us about the monsters? She laughed, but she didn’t mean it.”
Cord and Brick glanced at each other. Brick shook his head, and Cord said, “No.”
Skid sat her cup heavily on the table. “Boys are dumb.”
Carla brought their ticket after Brick had finished his last plate and stretched as far back as the booth allowed. The impact tremors were heavier now, Brick’s stack of plates and silverware rattled with each step.
“Thank, you,” Carla said, laying the bill down and topping off coffees. “You folks here long?”
“We could be,” Cord said, his voice as smooth as Colt 45 malt liquor claimed to be in the ’70s. “It really depends on when you get off wor—”
“No.” Skid cut him off with a word, then turned to Carla. “We’re not. We’re going to Peculiar. Are we close?”
Carla’s face dropped; she shifted her feet but didn’t move. “You can’t do that,” she whispered, trying not to look at any one of them directly. “It’s—it’s—it’s—” Her eyes pinched shut for a moment. When she opened them, the concern had vanished, her smile was back. “It’s gone,” she said flatly, then pointed out the plate-glass window down the gravel road to the west. “It used to be over there, but Gorgo stomped it flat back in—”
Carla shouted over her shoulder. “Hey, Martin. When did Gorgo eat all those people in Peculiar?”
“Fifty-five,” Martin called from the kitchen. “No, no. Wait. It was ’54. Linda was still in high school. Yeah, ’54.”
Carla lifted more of the plates from the table. “You folks can’t even have friends or relatives from around here if you don’t know that. Why do you want to go to Peculiar?”
Before Cord could answer, his stupid mouth sliding open to say something Skid knew he’d regret, the floor beneath them shook, and a chair fell over.
“Oh, no,” Carla hissed. “He’s coming this way.”
8
The wooden handle unscrewed from the broom head easily. It took Dave twelve hits against the bathroom sink to realize he didn’t need to break the handle to take it off. The tiny janitor’s closet in the restroom held some interesting choices for self-defense. The aerosol cans would make a decent fire deterrent for the giant insects, but Lemaître Labs was a “smoke-free zone” except for the military brass whose rank was so high they only cared about what they wanted to care about, so they smoked in the conference room. If the janitors smoked,
they kept their Bic lighters in their pockets instead of storing them with the supplies. The cans of furniture polish and air freshener wouldn’t do much to keep the cockroaches off him without fire. He didn’t know how Karl was able to stroll out into Roachville, but Dave wasn’t stepping into that hallway without something deadly, or at least annoying. The broom was the only viable striking weapon. He briefly considered sharpening the end to a point, but he couldn’t find anything to sharpen it with, and he didn’t think he had the heart to stab a living creature anyway. Even if it was icky.
Dave walked from the bathroom using the broom handle like a staff, his face and hair washed, dirty underwear in the trash bin, teeth brushed with a paper towel and liquid soap, and shirt armpits blasted with lavender air freshener. Date night in Roachville. The girl cockroaches will be lining up for sure.
The ambient light from the hallway had brightened some, but not much. He took a deep breath, walked to the door and tried the handle. It moved. Still not locked. What’s your scheme, Cheetosman? Dave pulled on the door and it swung slowly open.
Any sign of the man-sized cockroaches from earlier was gone.
Did I dream that? No. He knew he hadn’t. There were enormous insects capable of surviving an atomic holocaust loose in the lab. He’d seen them, and Karl had said it was the human resources department. The people who handled his health insurance and conducted irrelevant programs about civility in the workplace were now cockroaches. The face of the creature that slammed into the glass in the night flashed across his mind. Eww.
The hallway was empty. The white walls must reflect the ceiling fluorescents effectively enough to ward off the roaches. He knew he wouldn’t have to worry about them with the motion-activated lights. Dave stepped out of the conference room, looking left and right like a cop in a 1970s TV show. Still nothing. Zombie-apocalypse silence engulfed Dave as he made his way toward the elevator. He’d told Skid and Brick at that doughnut shop with the terrible coffee not to use the stairs. The stairs were booby-trapped. Use the elevator, and that’s damn well what he was going to do.
So You Had to Build a Time Machine Page 21