So You Had to Build a Time Machine

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

  Oscar was loose.

  “Mirrooo,” the hairy giant roared, the room filled with the deep, guttural sound.

  “No,” Karl mouthed, turning toward the room where he’d emerged.

  Oscar was faster. The Bigfoot-looking physicist burst through the doorway, launched himself over the control station and landed feet from Karl with a scream. Saliva sprayed the scientist’s face.

  “Mirrooo,” he bellowed again and grasped Karl in one gigantic fist. “Mirrooo diya. Mirrooo.”

  The arm swung like an outfielder tossing out a runner from the warning track; Karl flew from his hand into the cavern, hitting the floor and rolling toward the seething purple storm.

  “Mirrooo.” Oscar wheeled after Karl, his arms and legs flying in all directions as he ran. “Diya, diya, diya.” The beast scooped up the scientist and dove into the ring, disappearing into the churning storm.

  The three stood in stunned silence, the zap of lightning from the cavern the only sound.

  “I guess I’m in charge here now,” both Daves said.

  Clean-David pointed the gun at him. “I guess I’m in charge here now,” he repeated. “Besides.” He pulled a key from his pocket. “Karl wasn’t the only one with a key to the BAB-C, but you’re not getting this one either.”

  “Shit,” Dave hissed, but the word died when he realized Skid was laughing.

  She stood on her one good leg. An identical key hung from her fist.

  “How?” Clean-David asked.

  “You dropped it,” she said. “Or, you will drop the one you’re holding in the bathroom hallway of a shitty dance club in about—” She paused for a moment, counting back the days. “—a week ago.”

  “That’s my key?” Clean-David raised an arm toward her, the gun working its way upward to her chest.

  Skid didn’t know she was going to do what she did. It just happened, quickly and smoothly, a motion she’d practiced thousands of times. Her right hand sank to her belt and came up with the last throwing knife. It stayed in her hand for less than a second before it spun through the air and sunk hilt-deep into Clean-David’s right thigh, the pop as it sunk in like she’d opened a cantaloupe. The pistol dropped from his hand and skipped across the floor. He screamed. Not as good as Oscar’s scream, but not bad.

  The Miller ring in the cavern burped and a slight wave bubbled out, swallowing Clean-David before it faded into nothing.

  15

  The silence in the room was middle school dance awkward. Dave and Skid stood alone on opposite sides of the Bridge, staring at each other.

  “Why did he go but we didn’t?” Skid asked, breaking the silence.

  Dave shook his head. “I don’t know. I told you, quantum mechanics might as well be magic. It doesn’t behave rationally.”

  “Yeah.” Skid hopped back to the control panel. “I think I get that.”

  “What’s the weirdest thing that happened to you? You know, after I left,” he asked. His leg muscles tightened to raise him from the chair, but for some reason they wouldn’t move.

  “Godzilla Junior, zombie circus master, alien people-eating mushrooms. You know, the usual.” She shrugged. “You?”

  “I watched a giant praying mantis in a lab coat eat myself from another dimension while I sat in a comfy chair with a sack of peanuts.”

  “That’s not weird.”

  “The mantis’s name was Chet.”

  She nodded. “Okay, yeah, that’s weird.”

  “I smell bad,” Dave said.

  “Me, too.”

  That did it. The shock evaporated and his legs moved, pulling him across the floor in seconds. Dave stopped inches from Skid, afraid to reach out because she might not really be there. Stranger things had happened recently.

  “I haven’t brushed my teeth in a week,” he said.

  She closed the inches between them in a slight hop, her face suddenly hot, her stomach less full of butterflies and more full of Coke and Pop Rocks. She laced her fingers behind his neck. “Me neither.”

  He suddenly looked like a kid who’d thought up a great joke. “Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?”

  “And kept their teeth?” she said. “None that I remember.”

  Dave bent forward, his lips parted, but Skid backed away; her mouth dropped open, her eyes grew wide. Her mouth moved, but no words came out; it swung like a gate.

  “Skid?” Dave whispered and slowly turned to face the cavern. He didn’t like it. Not a damn bit.

  The raging purple storm had expanded from the dimension ring, taking up most of the cavern. A foot, like that of an enormous bear, had appeared from the ring and thudded onto the stone floor, its leg covered in scales. Lightning crackled and shot from the circle, flittering along the ceiling. The head of a great, horned lizard slowly emerged from the storm. Another followed, and another. Water sloshed from the ring and splattered onto the floor.

  “What is it?” Skid’s words were soft, her voice tight.

  Dave put an arm around her waist and pulled her tightly to him as another horned head on a long, scaly neck emerged from the storm. It was bigger than the others. Its eyes bore into them. Dave’s insides felt like ice.

  “I don’t know.” But something deep inside him did. He concentrated on the seven V-shaped, heads on undulating necks, its scales shone like silver. It had ten horns, and on each one hung a crown. “Oh, shit.”

  Skid pulled away from him and grabbed the control panel. “Come on. We have to stop this.”

  Yes, he knew what this was.

  “John told us about this.”

  “John,” she said from behind him, flipping the glass shield off the button. “Who the hell’s John?”

  “John the Apostle. And ‘hell’s’ right.” Dave began reciting. “It rose up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”

  She slid the key into its slot. “That does not sound good.”

  “No. It doesn’t. That’s from Revelation Chapter 13. I think that might be the Devil, Sk—”

  “Skid.” The voice, deep and booming, echoed through the cavern, stretching into the Bridge and turning her good knee to water. She gripped the control panel hard.

  The Devil? It said my name. In the alien mushroom world, Brick had named the dimensions they’d shifted through. Dinosaurs and Nazis, orcs and butterflies. He left out biblical prophecy.

  Her hand shot out and turned Dave around, pulling him close and crushing his face to hers. Their lips met. Dave’s eyes still closed when she pulled away. The monster over his left shoulder filled her attention. Its shoulders stretched the metal ring to the point of bursting. Lightning spat around it. She patted Dave’s face.

  “Wake up.”

  He leaned forward for another kiss and pushed him away.

  Dave’s eyelids lifted, and the face of a guy at least a six-pack in greeted her. “Huh?”

  “I hope you don’t look that stupid after sex,” she said, turning the key to the ‘activate’ position. “Are you ready?”

  He rested his hand on the red kill button. “Yeah. Did you really just say sex?”

  “She did,” came the voice from the cavern.

  She put her smaller hand over Dave’s. The demon behind her said her name again. She swallowed hard.

  “Maybe,” she said, then pushed as the Miller wave broke free of the ring and swarmed into the room. The kill switch dropped, and the purple cloud swept over them—then every molecule in the known universes shifted at once.

  The Stuff at the End

  June 27

  1

  Dice clattered across the thick wooden tabletop. One struck the dull surface of a vintage aluminum napkin holder and flirted with the table’s edge before it dropped onto the floor. The remaining three landed on five, three and two. Brick leaned over and plucked the rogue si
x-sided die off the polished hardwood floor of Manic Muffins and sat back up in his chair.

  “Sorry, Tanner,” he said, “but you’ll have to roll this one again. Floor rolls don’t count.”

  “But it was a six,” the boy protested, his face dangerously close to a pout. “Come on, Brick. Let me.”

  Brick’s forehead creased as he leaned over the table, glaring at him, the expression on his face as intimidating as a corgi’s. “Floor rolls don’t count.”

  Tanner’s mom sat at the next table nibbling a bran muffin and drinking a milky coffee. She brushed her index finger across the screen of an iPad like she’d spilled something on it and ignored them.

  “But—”

  Brick reached a huge hairy hand a few inches over Tanner’s small one and dropped the six-sided die into it.

  “Roll,” he said. “Everything is random.” But Brick knew that wasn’t true, not really. Not meeting friends, not zipping through time, not zapping through dimensions, not Skid, not thinking a man who once owned a haunted house would drop from the air with his waitress girlfriend from other-dimension 1957 and land on his couch. It wasn’t random that another haunted house would immediately come up for sale in Villisca, Iowa, and Cord would pounce on it. No. Nothing was random. Not even dice rolls. Brick knew Tanner would roll another six.

  Tanner dropped the die on the table. It danced for two, three, four clacks, then came to rest on six.

  “Ha,” he shouted, grinning in defiance. His grin quickly fell into confusion. “Now what?”

  Brick smiled. “Now,” he said, pointing at the dice. “You add the three highest numbers and write it down.”

  The boy’s mental calculations required fingers and a pencil, but he eventually jotted fourteen onto a sheet of paper marked “character sheet” filled with boxes and grids.

  “And this can go for my—” He struck each box with the pencil eraser. “Strength, dex, dex, dexterity, const-it-u-tion, intelligence, wisdom and what’s the last one?”

  “Charisma.”

  Tanner looked up at Brick, his face pinched, a mop of blond hair an untrainable mess. “What’s charisma?”

  The bell over the door rang and Brick pushed his bulk out of the chair. “It’s something you have in buckets, kid. Now, roll the dice, all four of them on the table, and keep the highest three each time. None will go higher than eighteen, at least not yet. Those abilities will be what you use to create your character, a fighter, a ranger—”

  “A paladin, a wizard,” Tanner recited. “Yeah, I know. I can do this. It’s easy math, not like fractions.”

  Brick mussed the boy’s hair, like anyone would notice, and glanced up at the new customer. It was Katie; he hadn’t seen Katie forever. “Nobody likes fractions.”

  2

  Brick poured her usual coffee before she asked for it. Large and black, no sugar and nothing milky. He set the recyclable cup on the counter and smiled as she approached. Katie hadn’t visited Manic Muffins in months, and Brick had been worried. She wasn’t getting any younger, after all. She walked to the glass case in her usual black jogging clothes and reached behind her head to tighten her ponytail, also black, but with thick veins of white.

  “Where have you been?” he asked. “I was beginning to think you dumped me for Dan’s Daylight Donuts.”

  “With his coffee? Blech,” she said, sticking out her tongue. “Not a chance.”

  She squatted in front of the display counter like few sixty-somethings probably could and eyed the muffins. The middle row held a tray with a few rectangular red ones; crumbs dotted the spaces where others had been. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “The Brick? Yeah.” He slid open the back of the display case, pulled out the tray and sat it on top of the counter. “Your pick. It’s on the house.”

  Katie scanned the five left on the tray and pointed to one in the back; the red icing seemed thicker. “Damn straight it’s on the house. They were my idea.”

  Silicone-tipped tongs pinched the red velvet cake muffin and Brick fitted it into a brown bag with a paper napkin before folding the top closed. She took it and gave him a five-dollar bill.

  “For the coffee,” she said. “Keep the rest.”

  For as long as Katie had come into Manic Muffins, she’d tipped big and acted like she knew him, and Brick didn’t know anything about her. What she did for a living, what her last name was, if she was married. He twisted the thin gold band on his own ring finger, looking for the non-existent one on hers.

  He picked up the coffee pot again and filled his own cup.

  The aluminum door that separated the kitchen from the front room swung open and Beverly stepped out with another tray of red velvet cake muffins, the bottom of the tray resting on her stomach bump. She set the tray on the counter and grinned.

  “Oh, hey, Skid,” she said. “Long time no see.”

  Brick froze.

  “Yeah.” Katie flashed a grin that looked too much like Skid’s not to be. “Dave here yet?”

  The coffee pot fell from Brick’s hand and shattered on the floor.

  Acknowledgments

  I wrote You Had to Build a Time Machine in three months. That’s average for a first draft. For those who haven’t yet written your book (as a writer I think everyone wants to write a book), there are a few misconceptions about writing I’d like to clear up. One, writing is basically word-based accountancy with more suspicious web searches. It’s quiet, solitary and self-rewarding, which is fine for the author because we’re usually socially-crippled introverts. Two, writing is the easy part. Seriously. When I’m in book-mode, I can pound out about 2,000 words I mostly like every day. That may not sound like much, but in three months it adds up. Given my off days when I produce less, travel days when I refuse to utilize my laptop’s text-to-speech function while driving, and Family Fridays when pizza and movies take precedent, that adds up to more than 100,000 words. Just enough for a nice sized novel.

  That brings us to three: the next nine months make up the hard part. Putting the manuscript in a drawer for a month or more before reading it. Editing it once, twice, three times, maybe more. Waiting for your beta readers (people whose opinion you trust and who won’t blow smoke up your butt) to return your manuscript with suggestions. Going through those suggestions, keeping the good ones and discarding the rest (it’s your baby, after all). And it’s still a piece of putty to the publisher. Your manuscript will be stretched, smushed and molded into something finer than what you sent them.

  Tired yet? Boy, I am.

  I’d like to thank the people who helped me through this exhausting process. My family, who graciously accepts my role as Daddy Writer Nerd, my beta readers Kelsey Noble, Jacob Hulsey, Gary Darling, and my lovely wife Kim, and the great folks at CamCat Books, Sue Arroyo, Dayna Anderson, Helga Schier, and Cassandra Farrin.

  I’d also like to thank podcaster and paranormal scoundrel Tim Binnall who wanted a mention in each one of my novels so he’d be part of the “Offuttverse.” Here you go, Tim. In this novel, you’re a street.

  And lastly, I’d like to thank you, kind reader, without whom I’d have no reason to put this story into print. I hope you enjoyed the novel.

  Jason Offutt

  Maryville, Missouri

  December 2019

  About the Author

  Jason Offutt writes books. This is infinitely better than what his father trained him to do, which was to drink beer and shout at the television. He is best known for science fiction, such as his end-of-the-world zombie novel Bad Day for the Apocalypse (a curious work that doesn’t include zombies), his paranormal non-fiction like Chasing American Monsters (that does), and his book of humor How to Kill Monsters Using Common Household Objects (that not only includes zombies but teaches readers how to remove an infestation of them from their home). He teaches university journalism, cooks for his family, and wastes much of his writing time trying to keep t
he cat off his lap. You can find more about Jason at his website, www.jasonoffutt.com. There are no pictures of his cat Gary, and it serves him right.