by Paul Bishop
Vincent hobbles toward the river and I could use a little water with the sun baking my head. I’m barefoot now and each step sinks me lower and lower into the muck. It takes so much strength to pull my foot out and step again. My companions struggle as well, and Wendy turns to me with a pained look on her face. She’s flushed and breathing hard.
I reach her and she can barely stand, so I try to call to Vincent, as he’s ten feet in front of us. My throat is so parched I can’t make a sound. She squeaks beside me and plops on her butt and I sit next to her.
I’m able to whisper. “He’ll realize...”
She nods and eases slowly onto her back. I think about perhaps drawing my Glock and firing a shot to get Vincent’s attention but no, we might need every bullet. I look around and we’re alone out on the vast mudflat. Three pterosaurs glide over the river to my left. I don’t see any of the tyrans anymore on either shore.
Vincent finally notices we’re not behind him and shields his eyes as he peers back. He’s nearly fifty yards away and waves us forward. I wave him to come back, point to Wendy, and lean forward slowly onto my belly. The mud’s cool on my chest.
I hear him return and his voice is scratchy when he talks to her. The sun is so hot, I have my eyes shut as tightly as I can, but even with my arm draped over my head, it’s still too bright. I feel myself drift to sleep.
Thirst wakes me and I’m covered in perspiration and struggle to get on all fours. We have to get to the river. Water—we need water. Vincent is flat on his back beside Wendy who sits up and tries to wake him. It doesn’t work and I lean closer and try to use my weight to propel me. It takes a few minutes, but I manage to reach my friend, grab his foot, and twist it.
Damn. It’s his hurt leg and he squawks. I feel bad, but he’s awake.
I try to swallow but can’t. My tongue is swollen and there’s no need to talk anyway. We all manage to stand and stagger toward the water. In the shimmering light, I can’t tell how far it is and the mud sucks at my feet. I must push on and I know I can’t stop. The sun is so damn hot. I blink and feel mud against my face. I’m on my belly again and my eyes are closed and I’m too dizzy to move. A heaviness crushes me and there’s nothing I can do.
I must be delirious. I see in flashes—snapshots of sky and mud and the blue face from the waterfalls and brown water and waves and blue-green water. Everything goes black and I feel myself sinking.
Feet shuffle around me and cool air brushes my face. My eyes struggle to open. It’s too bright but it isn’t sunlight. It’s a white, cool light and there’s a ceiling above me. A face moves over me and she’s pretty—brown eyes, red lips, high cheekbones, and short black hair.
“This one’s awake now.”
I look down as she presses a stethoscope against my chest and smiles at me. She’s in a nurse uniform and I’m in a bed in a white room. From my left, Vincent chuckles at me. He’s in the next bed and Wendy stands beside him. Bright light from the two windows behind her halos her dark-red hair. She’s in a fresh white shirt and pale blue denim pants, her face made up and lips glistening with crimson lipstick. Her smile widens and my mind flashes to blue faces again as the door opens to my right and a dark-skinned doctor comes in, followed by a man in a khaki uniform. I register that he’s a Coast Guard officer with silver captain’s bars on his collar.
The doctor examines me while the pretty black-haired nurse moves to Vincent. She has a nice figure.
“Have you told him anything yet?” the captain asks.
“No, sir,” she answers.
The doctor steps between us and tells me I will be fine. Apparently, heat exhaustion on the verge of heatstroke isn’t life-threatening. “I’ll leave it to the captain to explain.” He walks out and the pretty nurse steps back with a glass and a straw and helps me to sip the sweetest, coolest water I’ve ever tasted. I try to ask her name but my throat is too constricted, and she moves out of the room. The captain bolts the door and turns to us.
“What I’m about to tell you, Professor Wendy Rosemond already knows.”
She sits on Vincent’s bed and still holds his hand.
The officer looks at me. “This information is top secret. It cannot be published, mister writer, do you understand?”
I look at Vincent, who shrugs. I mirror the gesture at the other man, who says, “I’ll take that as an affirmative answer.” He’s not tall—about five-eight—and is slim with short brown hair and deep-set eyes that are either gray or brown. He’s clean-shaven and plain-looking—the kind of face easily lost in a crowd.
“You are aware of the Indigenous Species Act?” No, not that again. The Indigenous Species Act, more commonly called the Indigenous Creature Act, outlawed hunting or killing indigenous creatures except in self-defense. The first settlers, as soon as they discovered tyrannosaurs on Octavion, organized hunting parties. That didn’t last long. Scientists won that one, but the settlers won the big one. The Right of Habitation Act guaranteed humans the right to colonize any inhabitable planet, even along the backwash of the Milky Way. We must spread our species, no matter what.
“It covers all indigenous creatures, not only dinosaurs.” He puts his hands behind his back and stands at ease, rocking a little on his feet, and says, “You were saved by the Rivers—river people. We’ve known about them for a long time. As you can guess, they are semi-aquatic. They don’t have gills and are a stone-age culture we are helping to keep isolated from humans. Thankfully, they are intelligent people—intelligent enough to know you would die on that mud bank and also where our cutter was searching the area. They brought you to us and thus saved you.”
There must be something in the drip in my arm as I feel groggy. Maybe there was something in the water the pretty nurse gave me.
Wendy looks at her watch and says, “They should be out in another five minutes.” She turns to Vincent, kisses his lips, and brushes the hair from his brow. “I have work to do and an entire culture to explore.” She kisses him again and slides off the bed. Her eyes bright, she raises her right hand, holds the thumb up, and points her index finger at him as she says, “I’ll catch up to you again someday, cowboy.”
The captain opens the door for her. She reaches it, looks back and winks at me, then looks at Vincent again. After a moment, she purses her lips, blows a kiss, and says, “Thanks for saving me.”
I turn to Vincent but it's dark already and I realize it’s the drugs as my eyes close.
I sit in another saloon, this one in Scarlet Town, with my mini-Mac propped up on the bar and my half-empty cappuccino beside it. My Overo and Vincent’s black stallion are hitched outside. I’m at the end of the first draft of my latest Vincent Daniel Adventure, Escape from Tyrannosaur Valley or Rescue of the Drop-Dead Gorgeous Redhead. The cover’s finished and I’m proud of it. I’ve captured Wendy Rosemond as perfectly as possible and my drawing of Vincent is as good as always.
He has an arm around her waist as she holds a hand in front of her face. Her mouth is open in surprise, her lips a luscious shiny crimson, and her big blue eyes are wide as she looks at the tyrannosaur on the left of the cover page. Only his snout is visible and his mouth is open with saber teeth barred. Her red blouse is torn in several places and her lacy bra shows, along with her upturned breasts. If you look hard, you can see the outline of her nipples. Sex sells and books with sexy covers sell better than better-written books with plain covers. Violence helps as well. Vincent is depicted shooting the beast with the Colt .45 revolver in his other hand. They are on the rocky cliff near a waterfall.
I type the final sentence, lean back, and stretch.
Seated on the next stool, he yawns as he puts his cappuccino down. “You left out the blue man from the waterfall, I hope.”
“I made him purple.”
“What?”
I shrug. “There are no indigenous people. The only blue in the story is the sky and some of the water.” I take a sip of my cappuccino before adding, “And Wendy’s eyes.”
“Yea
h.” He puts an elbow on the bar and cups his chin in his hand. “Wendy’s eyes. What shade of blue did you call them?”
“Cerulean-blue. A shade lighter than cobalt-blue.”
“Yeah. Cerulean. And a great body to go along with that beautiful face.”
“I wouldn’t know that.”
“You didn’t sneak a peek when we were at it?”
I look at the last lines of my book and have a flashback to a vision of the man with pale blue skin, light-brown hair, and emerald eyes. I’ve already started on a portrait from memory and want to capture the image before it fades in my memory. For some reason, it reminds me to go back and add how the young tyrans have feathers or what look like feathers on their hide.
I re-read the last paragraph of my story. In it, we three roasted on the mudflat and the tide came in. Vincent found a floating log and hauled us up on it, and we floated into the river toward the delta until the coastguard boat found us.
The last lines go like this— Wendy leans forward and her carmine lips quiver as she brushes the lips of the man who saved her—saved all of us—from the ravening jaws of the great tyrannosaurs. Vincent pulls her close and they kiss as golden sunlight streaks from the sun setting in the distant sky.”
I know. Carmine’s too much. I’ll change that to crimson. A writer can never go wrong painting a gorgeous woman’s lips crimson. Re-writing is my strength, so I have work to do on the story.
He holds his mini-Mac up and grins. “Do you want to hear about our next adventure?”
“Sure.” Why the hell not? I am a sidekick, after all.
Timestamp
By
Richard Prosch
Timestamp
At last, we had the future we’d dreamed of—flying cars, personal jet packs, and a colony on the moon.
The future we always deserved and hadn’t Darrin Chance done his part?
He turned from the morning penthouse view of proud Los Angeles with its rich blue sky and graceful airstream traffic to lean over his polished black glass desktop in the mission room.
The welcoming space was full of sunlight with its high window ceilings, rounded corners, low-slung beige furniture, and durable low-pile dark carpet. Like, he thought smugly, the interior of a great, triumphant airship cruising above the city.
Chance had done his part and more. He’d invented time travel, after all. Not alone, of course. Not all by himself.
“Matcha tea?”
Roger Alan, his second in command, came in through a dark sliding glass door. Where Chance was slender with sandy-red hair, Alan was tall and muscular with a crop of walnut-brown hair threaded with hints of gray. He was the numbers and theories man behind the company but Chance owned the time suit.
“Absolutely, I’ll have a cup,” he replied. “Amy?”
His fiancé stood beside him and held the remote control. Tall and shapely in a black company uniform with long blonde hair that plunged down her back like a deep-sea diver, her bare shoulders were tanned.
She was ten to fifteen years older than him. Fringed by lashes coated with blue-frost mascara, her eyes twinkled with warmth.
“None for me, thanks.”
“We’ll need all the help we can get today,” said Alan and poured two cups of liquid encouragement from a stainless carafe. He handed a steaming cup to the other man. “I see you have the Atkins file pulled up.”
Chance turned his attention to the holographic screen that floated above his desk.
His colleague had pushed the job for several weeks. A mystery from the past, he called it. A cold case that, if solved, could change the fortunes of powerful men—and could change the future for the company.
Roger Alan was all about powerful men, while Chance was all about the future.
Once more, their purposes seemed to align, if only barely.
He put the tea to his lips and inhaled the earthy aroma, took a sip, and turned the screen toward his companions.
The rural setting of distant trees, open fields of grass, and clear, bright sky would have seemed tranquil and inviting but for the center of attention—an oncoming cherry-red vehicle, its headlights and grill only seconds away from colliding head-on with the dashboard camera that captured the footage.
An accident waiting to happen, frozen before the fact by Amy’s hand on the remote.
Chance read the timestamp aloud.
“May 23rd, 2019. 3:02:15:01114,” he said.
“That’s a long time ago,” the other man commented.
“What are we looking at here?” she asked.
“This is the view through the windshield of an Atkins’ Company courier truck, manned by the company owner, Benjamin Atkins,” Roger explained.
“I grew up on a country road like that,” she mentioned. “Open pasture on each side and cows grazing along the shoulder.”
Her tone sounded wistful and almost longing.
Chance heard more than a trace of nostalgia in her voice and knew where the conversation was going.
“You’re not wearing the suit,” he said. “Not on this one.”
“Did I say anything about wearing the suit?” Amy responded sharply.
“You didn’t have to,” Alan interjected with one of his patented smirks.
“Now is when you tell me this job is too dangerous for me,” she said.
Chance simply shrugged and explained the scenario. “One-point-seven-five-three-two seconds after this image was recorded, the oncoming red Audi Sport, driven by Lisa Denise Hubbard, an attorney for the state of Missouri, plowed into Atkins at a speed in excess of one hundred and twenty mph. The impact shoved the truck’s engine block five feet into the cab and instantly ignited a dozen tanks of flammable liquid cargo,” he said. “Both drivers were killed instantly.”
“And a key piece of evidence in Hubbard’s car turned into so much ash,” the other man added.
“Evidence that—had it and the counselor survived—was supposed to have put some very bad people away for a very long time,” Chance said. “Instead, ninety-eight percent of everything inside both vehicles was consumed. The only reason we’re seeing this”–he motioned at the camera display–“is because the truck’s dashcam popped free and was recovered a good distance away from the inferno.”
“What kind of evidence was destroyed?” she asked.
Alan flipped open a manila folder that rested in his lap. “DNA evidence,” he said. “Obviously something that linked someone to a given place and time. My research didn’t uncover many details.”
“Fair enough,” Amy stated. “But there’s nothing more inherently dangerous about this jump than any other. It’s all merely a stroll through a waxworks museum as long as you don’t take the suit off.”
“That’s not the point.” Her fiancé smiled at her protruding lower lip.
“What happened after the wreck?” she said.
“Because Atkins had a previous reckless driving charge, his company was determined to be at fault.”
“Even though it’s not clear from the camera who was to blame?” She frowned. “Look at the display. You can’t see the center line.”
“The Atkins family is equally skeptical,” Alan explained. “That’s where we come in. Dean Atkins has hired us to go back and take a second look at the accident—up close and in person.”
Amy raised her eyebrows. “Dean Atkins? As in United States Senator Dean Atkins?”
His chuckle came from deep in his throat like he was gargling his tea. “Precisely,” he said.
Chance walked around the side of the desk and rested his hip against the corner. The other man’s cheap cologne made his nose itch and he edged closer to Amy.
“The way things turned out, the accident was a tragic catalyst for the family. Lisa Hubbard was working on a racketeering case for the state when she was killed. When Atkins was held accountable for the wreck and the loss of key evidence in the case, the company’s fortunes went south. An investigation was opened to determine whether or not
Atkins had worked for the mob.” He spread his hands. “Nothing was ever proven, but the damage was done. With their name dragged through the mud, it’s a shame the descendants still struggle to rise above.”
“Clearing the family name would pave the way for the senator,” Alan commented.
“For a presidential run.” Amy nodded her understanding.
“It’s always good to be in with a president.”
Chance wasn’t sure he agreed but his thoughts were on the mission.
“They’re hoping we find some kind of proof the wreck wasn’t Ben’s fault and record it,” he said. “Maybe the attorney was texting on her phone. Maybe one or both drivers reacted to an obstacle in the road the camera didn’t pick up.”
“Senator Atkins understands that all you can do is move around the frozen scene—unable to change anything and unable to affect the outcome or bring anything back. He knows you’re merely a first-person witness to the scene, right?” She frowned, knowing that it was something that had to be clearly explained more times than not.
“I assume so. Unless he’s been led to believe something else?” He let his gaze settle on the other man.
“I didn’t go into much detail,” Alan said. “The senator wouldn’t understand the physics of it, anyway. We barely understand it ourselves, am I right?”
“So what did you tell him, Roger?” she pressed.
“I told him we’d clear his family name.” He cleared his throat. “No matter what.”
“No matter what.” She raised an eyebrow.
“Hey, someone’s gotta pay the bills around here,” he said a little defensively.
Chance knew his partner was right, at least partially. There were considerable bills to pay but the way he wanted to pay them was wrong.