So You Had to Build a Time Machine

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

  All the air seemed to come out of Clean-David as he slumped into a chair. “I’ve never been eaten before.”

  Dave’s eyebrows rose. “A pity. Now, suck it up. Karl’s going to come back through the door, and we can put a stop to all this. Just turn off the BAB-C, and we see what happens. Either everything goes back to normal, or you get eaten by the lab physician.”

  “Karl really didn’t try to save me?” Clean-David looked distraught, like he’d been dumped.

  “Nope. And that was just the beginning. Time’s running out, and I’ve seen the future. Skid’s on her way here, and I can guarantee she’s the reason you got that knife in your leg.”

  A sudden burst of anger rushed into Clean-David; he sat straight and pulled the pistol in front of him, the sag in his shoulders gone, jaw set. He pulled back the pistol bolt and released it in a metallic snap. The weapon was ready to fire.

  “I’m sure she did,” he said. “But that wasn’t me.”

  A laugh escaped from Dave. He couldn’t hold it in anymore. “You and Karl are walking clichés. What’d you do? Take a Comedic Villain class together?”

  Clean-David pushed himself to his feet, sending the chair wheeling backward until it clanged against a wall. “I don’t like you.”

  3

  The man looked harmless and somewhat dazed; a trickle of blood, already thick and sticky, had run down his nose and stopped at his upper lip. Skid slipped the blade back into its sheath. The lab was full of scientists, and this guy in his J. C. Penney slacks and button-down shirt sure looked like one. Coming back late from lunch, buddy? His right cheek, flushed pink, had begun to swell. Science Guy didn’t look like the kind of person who got himself into situations to be beaten up much, at least not since high school.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, moving past Brick, her voice all preschool teacher. The man stepped back, whether from her movement or Brick starting to get ruffled, she couldn’t tell. “What happened?”

  That concern sounded fake, she thought. Yeah, definitely fake.

  The man took a deep breath and winced when he let it out. “I was jumped,” he said, his eyes never meeting Skid’s. “A couple of guys. One of them was named Dave.” He paused and took another painful breath. “Then this cloud thing came out of nowhere, and now I’m here and they’re not.”

  Dave?

  The man’s eyes wandered behind her, not toward Brick, but the building. “Where are we, anyway?”

  There was something off about Science Guy. “We’re at—”

  “Telemetrix Cosmetic Testing Facility,” Brick interrupted. He turned back to the door and swiped the other Dave’s key card. The light blinked green, and the door slid open again. “We’re protesting the use of the Barbary macaque to test tinted moisturizer and pomade hair gel. If you’re not ready to smash some cages and release members of the only population of well-groomed wild European monkeys, get lost.”

  Skid’s mouth started to move, but she shut it down. She had no idea where this was going, but Brick was selling it hard.

  “I just want to use the phone,” the man said.

  Air conditioning from the lobby of the building brushed against her back, sending a welcome chill through her shoulders. We have to ditch this guy, she thought. But we can’t leave him alone. To her, Science Guy, or whoever he was, seemed as helpless as he most probably was. “What’s your name?”

  His feet shifted. He still hadn’t looked at them. “Marty, Martin,” he stuttered. “Martin McClure. I—I sell insurance.”

  Skid slapped her hand on his shoulder and shoved him through the open door of Lemaître Labs.

  “Then, Martin McClure who sells insurance, let’s find you a telephone.”

  4

  Karl walked into the lobby behind the woman he was certain was Skid. She had to be. If she were as dangerous as that idiot Collison and his idiot double said, the knife belt was a dead giveaway. But she hadn’t stabbed him, so maybe she wasn’t as big and bad as the Collisons let on. She certainly wasn’t big, but Karl was smart enough to know size and gender had nothing to do with power. This woman could still be Darth-Thanos-Sauron and he didn’t want to stay with these two morons long enough to find out.

  Chairs and couches lay scattered in pieces around the large room. Gillian’s desk was overturned, the telephone and computer monitor she played solitaire on in pieces, crushed by something big and, given the spread of the debris, angry. Karl hoped it had only been Oscar on a rampage. The former Lemaître Labs engineer who specialized in quantum mechanics was safely locked in the engineering portal to the Bridge, looking more like Grendel than a guy who graduated top of his class at Stanford. He should still be beating on the impenetrable engineering portal to the Bridge five floors beneath him. Karl would find out soon enough.

  It could have been Doctor Hahn. After watching the Chet Hahn mantis devour one of the Collisons, Karl didn’t want to see either of them again, or anything else bigger than the lumberjack-looking man who followed him into the building. Telemetrix Cosmetic Testing Facility. Monkeys. Hair gel. Why the bull hockey, Paul Bunyan?

  The front doors slid shut behind them with a whoosh.

  “What happened in here?” Karl said from between his two guides, guards, protectors, executioners, whatever they were. He stepped over crushed lobby furniture to Gillian’s desk. Her purse lay partially under a splintered section of furniture. His breath caught in his throat—the Lemaître Labs lanyard attached to every key card issued to every employee spilled from the bag’s main compartment like purse vomit.

  Karl bent over the purse. Part of the key card peeked out. It wouldn’t get him into the Bridge—not many people had that kind of clearance—but it would get him onto the elevator, and that was all he needed. He just had to grab it. He stretched his hand out and—

  “You find something?” the big man asked.

  Dang it. Karl reached over the bag and lifted the telephone receiver from the floor. The curly cord dangled uselessly. Sell it, Karl. Sell it. His eyes slid up, finally connecting with Skid’s. They were dark, hard. He’d avoided looking into the eyes of either of these people before now because his acting skills had peaked in a dramatic sixth-grade performance based on the middle-grade Revolutionary War novel My Brother Sam is Dead. He pointed the receiver at her.

  “Did you people do this? How can I call my mother to pick me up now?”

  Paul Bunyan shook his head and walked around the room, presumably looking for a path friendlier than the dark hallway that stretched before them, but Karl was too pleased with himself to care. Mother. That was brilliant. But the key card. He needed that, or he wasn’t going anywhere. These two interlopers weren’t as smart as Karl Miller the Dimension King, but they might be smart enough to get to the lab even with the elevator off. He had to do something.

  “There’s one hallway,” Paul Bunyan said, pointing predictably toward it. Then he swept his thick arm around the room. “And a door that looks like it could be to another hallway or a supply closet—”

  It’s a bathroom, moron.

  “—or a bathroom.”

  The big man pulled what looked like cocktail napkins from his front pocket and shuffled through them.

  “Bud Light Dave’s map shows a conference room, stairs, and the elevator down the hall.”

  Karl studied Paul Bunyan’s face. Bud Light Dave? Collison?

  The big man gently pushed the napkins back into his pocket and motioned Skid toward the hallway. “Maybe we should go this way.”

  Move, Karl. His feet didn’t do what his brain told them to do, which was to do anything other than stand there like a twat waffle. A vertical tunnel was hidden in the conference room, a tunnel that wasn’t booby-trapped. Karl just needed to get to that room and down to the Bridge before these idiots ruined everything. A cough exploded from him; he hit his chest with a fist.

  “You okay?” asked the woman who may be Skid.r />
  “Yes,” he said, trying to look anywhere but the hallway. Karl could see the plan unfold in his mind. He’d let these two go into the darkness, claim he was afraid of the dark, then get Gillian’s key card. He’d follow, notice the conference room door, and say, There’s probably a phone in there. Then he’d lock the door behind him and leave them to be eaten by the HR cockroaches. He had to fight back a grin. Brilliant, Dimension King. Simply brilliant.

  “You sure?”

  “I don’t want to go in there. I—I can’t go in the dark. Can you find a phone for me?”

  The Skid woman took a step toward the dark, empty hallway. “Sure. Maybe there’s one in here.”

  These two are so stupid.

  5

  “That guy is so stupid.” Brick leaned against a tinted-glass window that spread down the darkened hallway. “No way he’s an insurance salesman. I think he’s a scientist who got locked out and Hans Grubered us to get back in.”

  “Hans Grubered?”

  If she didn’t know Brick, Skid thought his expression would make her worry for her safety.

  “You’ve never seen Die Hard?”

  Skid shrugged. Then when he didn’t respond, she shrugged 2.0. “No. I haven’t seen Die Hard. I’ve been living, Brick. Can you expertly throw a knife? I don’t think so. It takes practice, and practice takes time.” She sighed. So many things she didn’t have control over. “Who’s this Hands Bieber?”

  “Gruber.”

  “Whatever.”

  Brick pulled the explorer’s pack from his back and dropped it to the floor, then knelt beside it.

  “In Die Hard, Bruce Willis battles terrorists holding hostages in a high-rise office building. The main terrorist, Hans Gruber, runs into Willis and pretends to be a hostage himself, using a fake name because he’s trying to get his hands on something.”

  She glanced toward the empty entrance of the hall, then down its dark depths in the direction she knew they had to go.

  “So, you’re saying this guy we just met, who wouldn’t look us in the eye, who stumbled over his own name and didn’t scan the front office like someone new to a place, might have lied to us?”

  Brick set a tin box on the floor and pulled out what looked like a thin club, one end wrapped in oil-soaked cloth. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Of course he lied. Jesus, Brick. The way he said he had to call his mother? I can act better than this guy.” She fingered the one throwing knife still in her belt and looked down the hallway. “You want to leave him behind?”

  Brick shook his head. “Not really. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. We should take him with us.”

  Skid clapped her hands. “That’s great. This guy who weirds me out should follow us so we can keep an eye on him until he backstabs us.” She crossed her arms and drummed fingers on her biceps. “No. I don’t trust people who smell like Cheetos.”

  Brick’s shoulders managed a meager shrug. “Whatever. It’s your job to keep an eye out for him.” He motioned down the black pit of the hallway. “The elevator’s that way.”

  She took a few steps into the darkness. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “We need light,” Brick said, the tin box now open. He held a piece of carbon steel in one hand, a flake of flint in the other.

  “What are you—”

  Before she could finish, Brick struck flint to steel, flint to steel, flint to steel. Sparks danced onto the oiled cloth and ignited in a blaze of orange.

  Brick’s smile was Christmas morning.

  “We’re walking down dark corridors going into the depths of enemy territory, Skid. This is a dungeon. I’m actually in a dungeon.” He stood, throwing the pack over one arm, holding the torch over his head with the other. “I’ve been waiting for this moment since junior high school.”

  “But the—”

  The flames from the torch sent thick, black smoke to cover the ceiling. Moments later, the flame grew and licked the air just under a sprinkler head.

  Something clicked, and the Lemaître Labs sprinkler directly overhead, designed to put out random electrical malfunctions, human error, fires of inter-dimensional nature, and apparently medieval torches, burst, dumping forty gallons of water per minute in a heavy spray. Brick’s torch died as quickly as he’d brought it to life.

  “Damn it.”

  Skid punched his shoulder, not that he noticed.

  “Do you have a flashlight in that purse?” she shouted over the falling water.

  “It’s an explorer’s pack,” he said, staring at the dead torch.

  “I. Don’t. Care,” she shouted, punching his arm with each word. “Do. You. Have. A. Flashlight?”

  “Yeah. A Maglite. I just thought—” He held the dead stick in front of his face. “Dungeons and Dragons, you know?”

  Sharp white light sprang to life at the end of the hall. Emergency lamps triggered by the sprinkler, which was the only one on. Apparently, Brick’s torch was too small to signal a lab-wide emergency. As the heavy indoor waterfall soaked through her shirt and into her socks, Skid was relieved she could at least see somewhat down the darkened end of the hall. She turned back from where they came. Marty Martin McClure, insurance salesman, stood in silhouette at the mouth of the hall.

  Is that little bastard laughing at us?

  “This isn’t going to be a proper dungeon without a torch,” Brick moaned.

  Skid rolled her eyes like a snotty junior high girl. “Maybe we can have it both ways?”

  “Huh?”

  “Marty Martin McClure,” she said. “I don’t want him with us because he might screw us over. You want him with us because we can watch him screw us over. How about we just lock him in an office?”

  A grin crossed Brick’s hairy face. “I’ll go grab him. You open a door.”

  The big man dropped the dead torch onto the floor with a clack and walked toward Hans Gruber.

  6

  They were gone, but not gone gone. That would have been too easy. Skid and the lumberjack were standing near the door to the conference room when Karl moved away from the hallway threshold and pressed himself against the lobby wall, because that’s what people did when they were trying to be sneaky. He paused and listened.

  “The elevator’s that way,” the big man said. The next few sentences were muffled.

  “Ha,” came out of Karl like a suppressed cough. “Good luck taking that route with the power off.”

  Whatever had torn through the lobby hadn’t left much intact—chairs, potted plants, the water cooler, the portrait of the president that hangs in every government building, the bookshelves, all crushed and strewn around the room. Some scat might give a hint of what did this, or hair, if it had been Oscar. But Karl didn’t think Oscar had stomped this path of destruction. The sasquatch-looking engineer would have slammed through the door to freedom.

  An unsettling thought wormed into Karl’s mind. Unless he was hunting for me. A chill enveloped him. Oscar was still in the building, in engineering, beating on the unbreakable door, possibly ripping his hands to shreds, just to get at him.

  He moved with more urgency.

  The key card came out of Gillian’s purse intact. Karl had worried about that. Everything else in this room had been destroyed, but the key card looked untouched. He hung it around his neck and turned toward the hallway. From down the hall, the woman shouted.

  Roaches already? Not yet! He knew he had to get into the conference room before the roaches came out. “Can’t you HR people do anything right?”

  He jogged the twenty feet to the entrance of the hall, panting from the exertion. Karl promised himself he’d start using the lab’s gym, installed to keep the brainiacs from having an early heart attack.

  He found Skid and the lumberjack standing under a fire-suppression sprinkler they’d set off. Seconds later, the emergency lights at the end of the hallway popped on.
/>   “Can you stop being a nerd for five seconds?” she shouted at the lumberjack before looking up to see Karl. She said something to the lumberjack Karl couldn’t hear, but the large man began walking toward him.

  Oh no.

  A minute later, Brick shoved Karl into the conference room, the clang of an office chair being jammed under the hallway doorknob echoed.

  That was too easy.

  7

  Skid’s key card didn’t work.

  “Swipe it again,” Brick said, dripping into the puddle they’d made on the floor, the single sprinkler still spraying water down the hall.

  She wiped it over the sensor again; it beeped, but the light didn’t switch from red to green.

  Brick reached over her and swiped the key card the other David had given him from the blood-stained seat of a stolen pickup. It beeped, but nothing else happened.

  “The elevator’s turned off.” Skid’s eyes were nearly black in the spotty shadows cast by the emergency lights.

  Brick wiped his hand over a dent in the door. “This is weird.”

  “Does that matter?” Skid snapped. “We still have to get down to the control room.”

  “Dave called it the Bridge, and yes, it matters,” Brick said. He balled up his hand and put it in the dent that looked like a fist, a fist more than twice as big as Brick’s. “Does this look like a punch to you?”

  “What?” She slapped the sleek metal door and turned to look at the giant fist mark. “Yeah. That’s a punch.”

  “Dave said we couldn’t take the stairs,” Brick said. “Should we take the stairs? We might want to take the stairs.”

  She waved him off.

  “It’s booby-trapped. Poison, bloody vomit, explosive diarrhea, death, blah, blah, blah.” She stuck her fingertips into the center crack of the elevator door. “So,” she said, grunting as she pulled at the doors; Brick stuck his fingers inside and helped her force them open. The gap revealed a black pit. “Got any bright ideas? I mean, I guess we could wait here for whatever left that mark, or—”