So You Had to Build a Time Machine

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

  “Shut up.”

  But he couldn’t shut up. His brain seemed to be on auto-smartass. “You know you’re supposed to put the gun in the back of your pants. If it discharges in the front you might shoot off your dick.”

  Something big pounded down a nearby hallway, slamming again and again into a wall, or a door, or the thick sheets of bulletproof glass that filled every window frame. Whatever it was, each strike sent tremors through the lab.

  A vibration, a shimmer separate from the pounding, came from underneath them and seemed to turn the floor into water, though Karl’s feet didn’t sink into it. Then the Miller Wave burst through and swept over them both, disappearing through the ceiling and out into the universes. Dave looked around. He still sat on the elevator floor pushing the broken broom handle into the door close button while Karl remained outside holding the door open, the gun in his pants. The vicious striking continued down the hall. Nothing changed. Nothing.

  “You’re an ass, Collison,” Karl said and motioned for Dave to stand. “Come with me. There’s a friend I’d like you to get reacquainted with.”

  7

  Skid had a bad feeling about the man with the black truck, but she had a bad feeling about everyone, even before the United States government won the goddamned eighth-grade science fair and sent them careening through time and dimensional space. Now she didn’t even trust the look of herself in a mirror because the one at the motel showed a strand of gray.

  With a click, the guy in the NAPA hat pulled the nozzle from the filler neck and snapped it back into place on the pump. A receipt crept out near the credit card slot, but he left it there to ripple in a slight breeze. The man did this all on autopilot, those mirrored sunglasses never leaving them.

  “You’re not from around here,” NAPA Man said through a mouthful of white teeth. It wasn’t a question. Skid didn’t know what she’d expected him to sound like, but not this. The farmer sounded like he was about ready to step into a boardroom, not a dusty pickup with an I♥BEEF bumper sticker. He moved away from the pump and around to the driver’s side door.

  “Can I give you a lift somewhere?” he asked. “There’s not a whole lot west of here but Kansas wheat fields. They’re pretty but get kinda stale after a while.”

  Where is everybody? Skid wanted to ask but didn’t. This cattle farmer in FBI shades sent claxons ringing in her head. She no longer wanted a ride. She just wanted this over.

  A hand gently grabbed her elbow and jump-started her feet into motion.

  “Keep moving,” Brick said from the corner of his mouth, not loud enough for the farmer to hear. “We’re not home yet.”

  The door to the pickup moaned as NAPA Man swung it back open and pulled himself into the driver’s seat. “Suit yourself,” he said, their backs now to him as they made their way to North Street toward Peculiar Drive, heat from the sun beginning to make the late morning uncomfortable.

  “Hey, circus is in town,” NAPA Man called after them. “Maybe you folks’ll come join us. I hear the motorcycle bear trick will make you slide off your seat.”

  Skid felt her legs stiffen, but Brick didn’t let her stop.

  8

  Something translucent and gooey covered the thick, bullet-proof glass set in the steel door that separated the Bridge from engineering. It could have been saliva, or Vaseline, or gelatin. Whatever, it was wrong.

  “I figured this would be the last place you’d take me, Karl,” Dave said, still clutching his broken broom handle but now out in the hall.

  Karl asked him to leave it, and after numerous hand gestures toward his pants and a few pelvic thrusts to drive home the point that Karl did indeed have a gun, Dave dropped the stick on the tiles. Karl swiped his key card across the sensor, and they stepped into the control room.

  The scientist looked smug. Pricks looked smug. Dave shoved his hands in his pockets and fumbled with his keys and ChapStick.

  “What’s so funny?” Karl asked.

  Dave didn’t know he’d been smiling, but yes, he had. “I was just wondering what the company head shrinker would make of you.”

  Karl set his key card on a bank of computer monitors and shut the door to the hall behind Dave. He motioned Dave toward a wall with a heavy set of sliding doors, far from the control panel.

  “I’m doing my job, Collison. I’m doing what Uncle Sam is paying me to do.” He shoved his fists into his love handles. “I’ve found a gateway to other realities. What have you done today?”

  Not waiting for a reply, Karl shifted out of his normal slouch and yelled into the room, empty except for a control panel, computer monitors and a couple of swivel chairs, “Hey, guys. Who’s the Dimension King? What? It’s me? Why yes, it is.” He pulled out the gun and pointed it limply toward the floor. “You tried to stop me, you know. On Friday. You tried to get every scientist in the lab to go against the very plan we were all here to accomplish.”

  Dave slowly raised his hand. “Yeah, excuse me there, Chief. Nobody but you knew the plan. We only knew our little puzzle piece. You filled us in on Friday and when I put the puzzle together, I knew this was going to happen. This catastrophic blending of the timelines. This travesty of nature. This, this—”

  “Brilliance.”

  “Yeah, okay. I was going to say fuckupery, but brilliance works, too, I guess.”

  Karl growled, but Dave kept talking.

  “Reality has changed.” He almost waved his hands, but the gun Karl held kept them down. “Let me repeat. Re-al-it-ee has changed. It changed, Karl. Everything’s the same, but everything’s different. Buildings look like they always did, but their names are wrong. People I knew, I didn’t know anymore. History—history, Karl—history is different. I saw my grandfather. He died when I was a kid, but you know what? I saw myself standing next to him the day he died in 1984.”

  “So?”

  “I relived that day, and it’s your fault.” Dave pulled one of the office chairs toward him and sat down. “You’re either a raving loony or an asshole. I haven’t decided which.”

  The gun pulled level with Dave’s face.

  “Okay,” Dave said. “I’ll go with both. Can I log out of the system? I kind of forgot to when I left work Friday.”

  9

  The arena under the great tent of The Roe Bros. Traveling Circus reeked of elephant shit and sorrow. A circus tried to mask all that with lights and music, sequins and misdirection, but down on the floor, the smell was impossible to miss. The night Skid woke in the hospital, the metallic scent of industrial strength antiseptic covering everything, she could still smell the circus. It was in her nostrils. She feared it was ingrained too deeply in her psyche to get free of. That night, while she suffered through stitches and the nurses stopping by to make sure her concussion wouldn’t kill her in her sleep, was the night she decided the circus was her past.

  “Circus?” The word tasted like a ghost pepper dipped in the blood of a serial killer. “You’re not getting me within a mile of that thing.”

  The black truck pulled out of the convenience store parking lot behind them and drove past, NAPA Man watching them instead of the road the way they did in movies. He pulled onto North Street, then west.

  “We might not have a choice,” Brick said, releasing her elbow as he continued walking. “He’s going our way.”

  She stomped ahead of him. Of course he was going their way. Their trip, their twenty-mile trip from Dan’s Daylight Donuts in Kansas City to Peculiar, just kept getting harder, like the levels of a video game.

  Evenly spaced white and yellow houses gave way to larger brick ones set back farther from the street, which quickly dissolved into a smattering of crappy “I only care about the dog I leave outside on a chain year-round” houses with overgrown yards. By the time they reached the highway, the houses were gone. Cornfields ran on either side of the chip-and-seal asphalt road. It was as if the town of Peculiar was an island in a
n ocean of unsustainable agriculture. About a mile down the road, the crown of an enormous canvas tent rose above the fields.

  “No,” Skid shouted, throwing her body around looking for something heavy to grab and heft as a weapon. She didn’t see anything, so pushed her hands into her belt.

  “I almost didn’t see it,” Brick said, slowing his pace.

  “The tent?”

  Brick nudged his big head toward the north side of the rural highway. The nose of the black F-150 from the gas station stuck out from between cornfields on a gravel road Skid would have missed until they were upon it. A chill, like she’d sucked down a slushy too fast, clamped her stomach into a knot and traveled up her body until her shoulders shook.

  “He’s waiting for us,” she whispered, knowing she was Miss Obvious, but she couldn’t help it, her guts where in a slushy ball.

  Brick turned her toward him, his face warm and uncomfortably confident. “We can go into the corn and lose him.”

  “Cord can’t do that,” a feminine voice said behind them. “Not with his leg in this condition.”

  Skid and Brick slowly turned to find Cord behind them, an arm slung around Carla the waitress’ shoulders. A cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth; Cord’s leg was wrapped in a blood-stained bandage.

  “Well, obviously,” Brick said like the two had been behind them all along. “Then we march on. You guys okay with that?”

  At that moment, Skid understood something. Brick really was the leader. He would take care of her whether she wanted him to or not. He was the hero of her story. Some of the weight that sagged her shoulders fell away.

  Carla the waitress took a deep inhale of filterless smoke and blew it out. “Are we getting on with this or not,” she said. “This guy owes me a drink.”

  Brick released Skid and turned west. “Okay, then. We keep going.”

  The farmer watched them through the cab window as they approached, the sun glinting off his mirrored sunglasses. He didn’t move; he might as well have been a mannequin, except for that smile. That toothy, Jimmy Carter mouthful of piano keys seemed to follow them more than the man’s mirrored eyes as they approached the gravel road and walked across its twelve-foot width before losing the truck behind them, hidden by corn.

  Moments later, the slight grinding clunk of the truck slipping into gear, followed by the crunch of tires on gravel. Then the truck hit the blacktop and all they heard was the subtle growl of the big engine.

  “He’s behind us,” Brick said. “I don’t think he’ll hit us. But don’t turn around.”

  NAPA Man was herding them toward the circus. That much, to Skid, was obvious. She stuck a fist in the air, middle finger extended.

  “Who is that guy?” Carla asked, because Cord’s smart mouth was clenched in too much pain.

  Brick opened his mouth to speak but Skid cut him off.

  “Evil,” she said.

  “Well, that’s a cheery thought,” Carla said through a mouthful of smoke.

  Skid turned and nodded to her. “I’m glad you’re here. Do you know how difficult it’s been not having another woman to talk to in this sausage fest?”

  Brick snorted. “I’ve been talking with you.”

  “It’s not the same.” Skid turned back toward the highway and kicked a loose piece of asphalt that bounced into a weed-filled ditch.

  “Why not?”

  “What you know about women could fit in the front pocket of these jeans,” she said.

  “How big is the pocket?”

  An audible sigh escaped Skid. “There isn’t one, right, Carla?” Carla didn’t answer and Skid didn’t turn around because she knew the waitress and Cord were gone.

  The truck crawled along the asphalt at least thirty yards behind them as they walked, their pace never changing. As the big tent grew closer and closer, the fist in Skid’s gut grew bigger and bigger. The tent, the lights, the noise, the crowd, the heat, the smell she knew festered under all that canvas. Blech. She never thought she’d ever experience it again, any of it; now a circus tent loomed over her.

  “I don’t care what he wants. We’re just going to walk right past—” Brick’s voice cut off mid-sentence. Skid didn’t stop; she didn’t dare to.

  The corn shook on both sides of the road and Skid’s legs faltered but didn’t stop. Visions of hundreds of angry chimps behind those stalks scraped across her mind. Maybe the imaginary locals she’d blamed for Bandy’s disappearance were out there, too, with chains to capture her and drag her back to the circus. She inhaled sharply, not realizing she’d been holding her breath. Brick put an arm around her and kept walking.

  Figures, dark at first, bled from the field as the corn parted. People drifted from the field and onto the road in steady, even steps, all heading toward the circus tent.

  “The whole town’s here,” Skid whispered.

  Brick turned his shoulders and looked behind them, but there was no escape route. The townspeople melted from the field there, too, forming a barrier behind the truck and the NAPA Man, his John Elway teeth gleaming from behind the truck’s safety glass. Brick knew they could get through them but didn’t know where they’d go. That group could easily chase them down and overwhelm them with sheer numbers.

  “They want us to go to the tent,” he said, the townspeople taking a collective step toward them to narrow their lane as if choreographed. “I don’t think we have much choice.”

  “Nope.” She pulled the sleeves of her jacket around her waist to hide the knife belt and cinched it tighter. “Let’s get this over with.”

  10

  Karl shook his head, the grin, for once, not stained orange from Cheetos. “I’m not letting you close to the control panel. I’m not stupid.”

  Dave knew the man wasn’t stupid, but that didn’t mean anything at the end of the world. Karl had brought the person who wanted to stop his insane experiment to the one place in the universe it could happen—the Bridge.

  “Then why am I here?” There was no question in Dave’s mind that Karl was in over his head. He just didn’t know it. Yet. Dave pointed toward the big red button, next to the door to engineering. “I’m here to push that button.”

  Confusion spread over Karl’s his face. He didn’t know why Dave wasn’t scared out of his mind. He lifted the pistol, not like he intended to use it. More like he’d brought it for show-and-tell.

  “But I have a gun.”

  “That you’re not going to use.” This might have been a bluff—it certainly seemed like one—but something about Karl’s body language told Dave it wasn’t. “And you’re a monologue machine.”

  Dave paused, his attention solely on his boss’s eyes. He thought for a moment Karl might cry.

  “You’re a walking cliché,” Dave continued. “The government hired you to break the universe, which you did, so congratulations there.” Anger seethed close to the surface, waiting for the last straw. Karl had engineered the most insane, most destructive force since Oppenheimer, Szilard, Bethe, Lawrence, Fuchs and the rest of the brilliant madmen in the Manhattan Project had developed the atomic bomb, and he was too Fuchsing blinded by achieving it he couldn’t see how Fuchsing stupid it was. “Now you’re walking around with a pistol you don’t know how to use and getting ready to monologue your ass off like a poor excuse for a Bond villain.”

  He jerked the pistol up to his waist and pointed it at Dave. “I know how to use this,” he said, aiming like they did in 1970s cop shows.

  Dave’s eyes narrowed as he wondered when he’d finally grown a pair. “Show me.”

  The air conditioner kicked on, blowing cold air over Karl. His hair fluttered. He reached up and tried to smooth it back into place. It didn’t work. “Okay, I will.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Yes, I will.”

  Dave leaned forward in the chair, his hands on his knees. “No. You won’t.”
>
  “Yes, I—”

  Dave shot out of the chair and gave him the finger. “Then do it. I’m right here.”

  The pistol, dull in the florescent lighting of the lab, swung away from Dave. Karl wasn’t ready to shoot him. His hand tensed around the handle, but nothing at all happened.

  “What?” Karl gripped it harder, and when that didn’t work, he hit it with his other hand. “Shoot. Just shoot you stupid thing.”

  A shadow grew in engineering. Dave could make it out in the corner of his eye, but Karl’s back was to the door.

  “That was awesome, Dr. Nope.”

  Karl swung the barrel toward Dave just as the shadow came to life, slamming into the door. A face full of sharp white teeth chewed the glass. A scream tore from Karl, and he lurched away from the Bigfoot-thing that used to be Dr. Oscar Montouez, his arms pinwheeling comically. The pistol flew from the scientist’s hand and clattered across the floor.

  The sound that began as laughter deep inside Dave caught in his throat when the floor began to shake. Another Miller Wave was coming.

  It didn’t occur to Dave to pick up the gun.

  11

  The entrance to the Big Top loomed in front of them, its flaps tied back with rope, the interior as black as a vacation photo from Tromsø, Norway, in contrast to the high late-morning sun. Townspeople lined the path in front of a pasture flattened by trampling feet and the countless cars and pickups from town around the circus tent.

  “Have you noticed something odd about these people?” Brick asked, hands wrapped in the straps of his backpack, voice betraying nothing. Skid thought he might be enjoying this.

  “You mean other than everything?” she said.

  “No. More specific than that.” He pointed toward his right to the high school marching band that formed the front line of the human fence. “They’re all wearing sunglasses.”

  “So?”

  Brick shook his big head. “I don’t know yet,” he said, walking into the tent with long, sure strides. Skid followed. The smell was something solid.