So You Had to Build a Time Machine

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

  Halfway to the elevator, the lights went out.

  9

  The footsteps had become thunderous, sending Norman Rockwell prints and pictures of the stars of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best crashing to the black-and-white tiled diner floor. The cigarette machine rocked back and forth, but it and the jukebox were fastened to the wall studs by metal cables. This wasn’t Highway 71 Diner’s first rodeo.

  “That’s not good,” Brick said, an understatement, the word good coming out with a belch.

  The thing outside came from the east, the part of the diner that backed up against the motel, so there were no windows. Their first look at the monster Carla called Gorgo was through the south window, when a dark and hulking figure the height of an office building parted a patch of trees and stepped through. Tall elms and cottonwoods shattered at the trunk and fell to the ground. No one screamed. Carla stood against the counter, grabbing a red vinyl-topped barstool in each hand. Marvin said something unintelligible from the back that sounded to Cord like, “Cheese and rice.”

  “What is that?” Skid croaked as she stood, sliding from the booth and falling against the counter next to Carla. She turned toward the waitress, the woman’s face white as a vampire’s. “Where’d that come from?”

  Carla swallowed as the next tremor knocked her elbow into the pie display, throwing the door open and dumping a fat slice of coconut cream onto the floor. The monster moved into the parking lot, and a scaled, three-toed foot slammed atop the Studebaker, smashing it flat.

  It’s a—it’s a—

  “Dinosaur,” Carla said as if she said that word every day to describe whatever passed by on the highway. Buick Roadmaster, Ford truck, International Harvester tractor, dinosaur. “The A-bomb tests. These things started coming back to life. That’s Gorgo.”

  The monster paused to scratch under its chin with its little forearm before it roared. The windows vibrated. The shaker at their table tipped over, grains of salt bouncing over the Formica surface.

  Something quick and sure as a bear trap snapped in Skid’s head. It was her sanity.

  “We’re in a goddamned 1950s atomic warning science-fiction movie?” she screamed, throwing herself to her feet. “I want to go home.”

  “Skid,” Cord said, his voice tense. “Don’t do anything stu—”

  Before he could finish, she threw open the diner door. The bell on a wire above it rang as she launched herself outside and sprinted toward the monster.

  10

  Andrew Ridgeley leaned into the Wham! poster from the left, smiling like he didn’t mean it. Susan remembered tacking that poster over the head of her bed with pastel blue and pink thumbtacks that matched the splashes of 1980s colors surrounding the black and white photo of Ridgeley and George Michael. She lay with her head at the foot of the bed staring at the British pop duo, a bed she’d last occupied on August 22, 1984, the night before she drove herself to college because, “come on, Mom, I’m grown up now.” Twenty-eight days later, her father killed her family.

  No, I wasn’t grown up, Mom. Nothing happened like it should.

  “Sorry, Andrew,” she said, her voice nearly silent over ‘The A-Team’ blaring through the thin walls from Tommy’s room. “You were cute. But you were no George Michael.”

  A light rap sounded at the door. She sat up and swung her feet to the floor, the momentary flashback to eighteen gone. She now felt the sixty-something she was.

  Come in? Can I say that? Is it really my room anymore?

  She started to speak, to give someone permission to enter a place that felt familiar but was not home, when the knuckles rapped again. The door creaked open, and Muffit dashed in. The spaniel sprung onto the bed and jumped into Susan’s lap, licking her face, the short, wet darts of its tongue the most comforting thing she’d experienced all day. Tommy stuck his head into the room, keeping the rest of himself safely in the hall.

  “Hey,” he said, staring at Susan.

  “Hey,” Susan responded. Although she’d loved Tommy when she was a girl, that had changed as she grew older. He lived at home into his thirties, holding shit job after shit job, spending nights playing video games and mornings sleeping off whatever he’d drunk the night before. But now, seeing his sad, weak face looking into her high school bedroom, the anger melted. He was as lost as Dr. David Livingstone. Mom and Dad didn’t do him any favors.

  He stepped into the room, gaze still averted to the awful shag carpeting.

  “You’re Susan, aren’t you?” he asked, his voice shaking. He looked up at her. “You’re old. You’re like, older than Mom.” Tommy clenched his fists before speaking again. “But you have that scar on your chin from that time you fell off the swing. You have the same ears that don’t have the parts that hang down.”

  “Lobes,” she said, a hand instinctively reached to her ears. Her lobes were attached, Tommy’s weren’t, Mom’s weren’t. It was one of the few traits she shared with Delbert.

  “You have the same eyes as Susan,” he continued. “They’re nice. How did you get here? You’re from the future, right? If you occupied the same space as the Susan here, would the universe explode?”

  “I guess I am from the future, or something like it,” she said, the words sounding like a lie, but they had to be true. “And I know Dad was going to kill you, and Mother, and Muffit.” This time she looked away. “I don’t know about the explosion, though. Maybe it would.”

  Tommy nodded. “Yeah, maybe.” His hands, which had been fidgeting around his shirt tail, found their way into his jeans pockets. “You killed Dad.”

  “Yes, I did.” The words escaped her easily.

  He nodded again. “He said he was going to kill me, you know. He told me that a lot. He told me that’s why he didn’t fix my teeth. He wasn’t going to pay all that money when he was just going to kill me anyway. I saw him at the bottom of the stairs with all those people you brought. He had his sword.”

  A tear ran down his cheek. Tommy was still a lost little boy. Susan grabbed the pink comforter on her bed and squeezed.

  “If you’re from the future, then you didn’t know me after tonight,” he said. “I didn’t live. I didn’t get married or have kids. Now I get to do all that stuff.”

  Gasps came from the first floor, followed by a shout. Police sirens had made it into the house. The cars were maybe a few blocks away, but would be here soon.

  “Mom called the cops. You should hide.”

  11

  Cord sat in shock watching Skid run across the gravel, little tufts of dust appearing in the wake of her pink sneakers. The gargantuan creature stood on the outskirts of the lot, turning its blockish head full of sharp teeth, the thing’s body covered in green scales. But the monster didn’t see Skid, or if it did, it didn’t care. She was too small.

  “What the hell, Skid?” This isn’t happening, right? She’s not actually running across a parking lot in 1957 screaming at a radioactive dinosaur, is she? “Brick?” he said, but Brick had already gone. The bell above the door rang and Brick was outside, following Skid, the orc sword he’d leaned against the side of the building high above his head.

  “What on earth are your friends doing?” Carla shouted, her tone not fear, not anger, but disbelief that anyone would do something as stupid as what she was watching.

  Cord lifted Brick’s explorer’s pack and hefted it onto his shoulders. It was heavy. “Making my life even more difficult.” He turned toward the door but stopped and nodded at Carla just as Brick reached Gorgo and swung the scimitar. “Hey, if we make it through this, you want to go out for drink later?”

  Carla fished an unfiltered cigarette from her white vinyl purse and flipped open a Zippo lighter. “Sure,” she said, grinding the flint wheel and sucking down nicotine and tar the surgeon general was still eight years from warning caused cancer. She blew out a puff of smoke. “Why the hell not. My husband was in Peculiar when Gorgo attacke
d. Bring me a toe.”

  A grin flashed across Cord’s face before he dashed out the door.

  This is stupid, Cord, whipped across his brain. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The self-defense mechanism in his skull, the one that had kept him alive and largely intact the past thirty-five years, sat silent. Duck, run from trouble, tell the authorities, don’t jump off the bridge into the river like that moron Mike Miller did in high school even though Cord knew Miller would call him a pussy later (he did). Yeah, he’d done fine in life. So why didn’t he stop running, even when the pack threatened to slide off and give him a second to think about what he was doing? Cord pulled the straps tighter and kept his feet pumping. Skid worked the giant lizard’s left leg like Rocky on a side of beef in the Shamrock Meats freezer. Brick slammed the orc sword into the monster’s right leg, giving it no more than a paper cut. Gorgo didn’t seem to care, its eyes moved east, west and north in search of something worth eating.

  Dust flew when Cord slid to a stop near the beast’s tail, his heart pounding, his breath heavy. Skid and Brick took as little notice of him as the giant lizard.

  “What are you doing, Skid?” he managed to spit out, leaning on the monster’s tail for support while he tried to catch his breath. The radioactive flesh beneath the beast’s scaly skin was oddly warm and tingly.

  “I’m pissed,” she said, matter-of-factly and delivered a right to Gorgo’s leg.

  Cord turned to Brick. “What about you?” Brick kept hacking. “Hey, Brick,” he barked, the level of his voice surprising even him. “What are you doing?”

  The Muffin Man Cord had seen in the field of orcs paused for a moment, his eyes nearly as dark and berserker as last night. Brick shrugged and hit the monster again. “Skid ran out so, you know, I thought we were attacking it.”

  “Attacking it? Attacking it?” Skid had lost it. At least, that’s what he thought. Killing another living thing had taken something out of her; she was just trying to cope in her weird messed-up-childhood kind of way. But Brick? That bastard’s having fun.

  “This isn’t a boss fight,” Cord shouted, taking off the explorer’s pack and throwing it at Brick’s feet. “Exactly which vital internal organ were you planning to hit from down here? This isn’t Bowser. Good ol’ Gorgo doesn’t even need a Band-Aid, Brick.”

  The big man lowered his sword and looked at the pack lying in the dust. “But I thought we were attacking it,” he repeated, picking up the pack and slipping it over his shoulders. “I was knocking down hit points.”

  Gorgo’s tail twitched and Cord leapt out of the way. The bikers had decided they’d had enough. The roar of motorcycles buzzed like giant angry insects away from the diner, shooting onto the highway. The dinosaur screeched, high-pitched, whiny and nothing like in the movies, then tensed its legs to move toward the bikers racing north on the US 71.

  “Grab her.” Cord pointed at Skid as his feet churned on the gravel. Gorgo’s massive leg clipped Cord and he flew across the gravel, landing on one knee. A scream caught in his chest as the monster’s tail swept past, the tip slashing him across the belly.

  Skid screamed when Brick wrapped a thick arm around her waist and slung her over his shoulder, but she didn’t fight back. They had reached the gravel road Carla pointed out as the way to Peculiar when Gorgo blew a beam of nuclear fire from its mouth and lit the cornfields to their north on fire, chasing the bikers like a big, stupid dog.

  Cord pulled the pistol from his pants pocket and held it sideways like street thugs did in the movies. He snapped back the slide and fired the gun until he’d emptied the clip. The bullets never came close to Gorgo, but it sure as hell made him feel better. He lowered the empty pistol and dropped it onto the dusty ground before looking down at the slash in his shirt. Gorgo had barely left a scratch.

  “You’re lucky,” Brick said, his breath heaving as he swallowed his rage, the sudden loss of adrenaline causing his hands to shake. “You’re okay.”

  A small, controlled voice cut the air. “I’m not,” Skid said as Brick set her down. Her eyes were hazy with tears. “I want to go home.”

  Brick pointed west. “Then we have to make up time.”

  “Sure thing,” Skid said, her voice shaky. “I always wanted to go to Fordor.”

  “Mordor.”

  “Whatever.”

  About a half-mile later, Skid and Brick passed a rusted, scorched sign that read “Peculiar,” and realized Cord wasn’t with them.

  Chapter Eleven

  Still September 7

  1

  Skid ran through the shadows of circus tents carefully arranged along the southern outskirts of a small town in North Dakota; she didn’t know the name and it didn’t matter. All small towns looked the same after a while. The big canvas mountains shook as the men and women inside pulled down the giant wooden poles. They were animal handlers, performers and a few locals who were desperate enough to take forty bucks for an afternoon of sweat. The big top that trumpeted “Roe Bros. Traveling Circus” in big red letters would fall first, as it always did, the first tent to be packed away on the biggest tractor-trailer in the fleet. That wasn’t part of Skid’s job. Randall R. Roe told seven-year-old Skid her job was to stay out of the way. When she arrived at the traveling zoo exhibit, far away from the circus tear down, a noise pulled her to a stop. Bandy, the baby chimp, sat in small cage crying. Animal handlers had already loaded her mother onto the animal truck.

  “Hey, there Bandy baby,” Skid said, squatting next to the cage, holding onto it with her fingers. Bandy looked up at her with intelligent brown eyes and touched Skid’s fingers, the ape’s own were warm and soft. She whined. The noise, much too human, dragged tears into Skid’s eyes. “I’m sad your momma is away, but I’m sorry. I can’t let you out.”

  The small chimp, only about ten months old, released Skid’s fingers and gently grabbed the door to the kennel and shook, her moist eyes never leaving Skid’s. Bandy rapped the door to the little cage with her knuckles.

  A feeling grabbed Skid, tying her stomach like a necklace thrown into a drawer. “Oh, come on Bandy, I can’t. I really, really can’t,” she wailed. The knot in Skid’s stomach pulled tighter. “Will you promise to be good?”

  The chimp didn’t move but locked mournful eyes with Skid.

  Skid reached toward the gate latch. It’s okay. She’ll play with me, then go back in her cage. No one will know. “Dad would say you’re manip, manip, manip-u-la-tive,” she said as she released the latch and the cage door swung open.

  Bandy sniffed and lifted herself onto her hands. Skid gently waved the little ape closer. “Come on, baby.” Bandy did, knuckle-walking out of the cage and onto the grass, looking around her as if everything was new.

  Skid reached out her arms for Bandy to melt into as she had before, but that had been when circus vet Doc Caldwell squatted next to her, helping Bandy along. This time Bandy didn’t melt into Skid’s arms. She silently dashed past the little girl and disappeared into the cornfield.

  Oh, no. “Bandy,” Skid screamed after her, springing to her feet and running into the corn after the ape. Too many steps later for Skid to count, she froze. Bandy had vanished into the sea of evenly placed green stalks that loomed over Skid’s head, the bright Maya-blue sky occasionally peeking through like it couldn’t find its way in. She didn’t hear the little chimpanzee anymore; its hoots had vanished into the distance.

  She turned in a circle and realized she was lost.

  Cornfields had only held horror for her since.

  “Hey, Skid,” Brick said. He dropped a heavy hand on her shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

  She stood still, staring out over the cornfields that lined the road on either side. Her stomach didn’t feel so good. “Bandy never came back,” she said, her voice far away.

  “Who?”

  “Bandy, the chimp.” That was the last time she saw the chimpanzee, and she’d told the Doc she’d see
n townies near Bandy’s cage. “I let her loose, and she disappeared into the corn. Everything is my fault.”

  The sword made a muffled zipper sound as Brick stuck it point-first into the dirt. He grabbed both her shoulders as gently as he could. “I know you’re going through something here, but you’ve got to focus. What does Bandy the chimp have to do with Cord?”

  “Nothing.” She shook off his hands. “Let’s go find him.”

  Cord sat on the side of the road to Peculiar in the shade of the corn, not twenty feet from where it intersected with the US 71. In the distance, the field Gorgo had lit ablaze still smoldered, fingers of black smoke wound into the sky.

  “Hey, guys,” Cord said as they approached, his pants leg soaked in blood.

  2

  Dave stopped the moment the lights blinked out, the broomstick clenched in both hands, his heart threatening to jump out of his chest. You’re a bitch, Karl. A little bitch. The elevator, its door strangely dented, had only been about thirty yards down the first-floor hallway when Dave’s feet failed him, but now, he might as well be on Europa. A curtain of black fell over him, and he couldn’t pull it off.

  Come on, he thought, the words of reassurance weak, even for his standards. Keep moving. Keep moving. There’s nothing here. Keep—

  A noise from behind knocked his brain off track. A click? A crack? No. A scuttle. Something hard hit the tiles, moving across the floor from near the conference room. He tried to swallow but didn’t have enough spit.

  The scuttle echoed down the empty hall again, tap-tap-tap, scrape. Dave loosened his grip on the broomstick and realized his hands shook. The cockroaches, the man-sized cockroaches that had sniffed around the conference room windows, could smell him. Last time, he’d been tucked away nice and safe. Not anymore.