by Geoff Jones
[ 23 ]
The woman lay in a pile of rubble with both legs pinned under a slab of concrete. A chunk of iron beam lay next to her. Blood on the beam matched the ugly black stain on her lab coat. Her eyes were dull and Callie thought the woman was dead until she saw her blink. Fresh tears streamed down her cheeks.
“Do you have any painkillers?” she asked.
Tim had led the group to the back corner of the building, where jagged beams of rebar stuck out from the wall, forming a makeshift ladder. Everyone except Helen and Buddy had climbed up and crowded around. Fallen walls and broken equipment filled most of the space. It felt more like a rooftop patio than a room. The broken remains of the exterior walls rose less than two feet in most places.
The corner directly above the café’s back hallway had collapsed, which explained the rubble blocking Lisa’s storage closet and bathroom. The edge of the wall hanging out over the river had dropped away as well, directly above the spot where Lisa had fallen in.
Callie knelt and began to examine the woman. “How bad are you hurt?”
She grimaced. “I don’t think it could be much worse.” She pulled up the side of her shirt.
Callie fought off a gag reflex. This is why I’m in psychiatry and not a practicing physician. She forced herself to take slow, deep breaths. The right side of the woman’s torso had been peeled open. She had apparently pulled it closed again. Blood congealed along the edges. Vulgar blue bruises ran across her belly and jagged ridges under the skin could only be broken ribs. Red stains darkened one cup of her bra. Callie focused on the woman’s face to try to calm down, but what she saw there hurt just as much to look at. Row after row of tear streaks ran from her eyes.
“That’s sick,” Morgan said, loudly enough for the woman to hear.
“You’re an asshole,” Hank said.
“But look at her. How is she even –”
“Morgan!” barked Callie. “Climb back down and get the aspirin bottle from Helen’s purse. Now.”
Morgan left for his errand.
The woman looked up. “Was that a T-rex?” Her voice trembled, barely above a whisper.
“Sure was,” William answered. He took the woman’s hand.
She managed a thin smile. “That’s pretty cool.” Each word came slowly, dragged out with a terrible effort.
The others all stood back, Callie noticed, horrified and unsure how to respond. The woman’s eyes were sunken and she smelled of urine and something else foul and rotten. That’s the contents of her stomach, exposed to outside air, Callie thought. She stood for a moment to get away from the smell.
Hank sometimes told her about courtroom photos of dead bodies. Some of the descriptions were gristly. This was worse. Courtroom photos did not include the fetid odor rising from this woman’s belly.
“We got to get this off you,” William said, gesturing at the slab of concrete pinning her legs. He turned to the others. “Listen up. See if you can find something we can use as a lever.” They all climbed over the collapsed walls and tumbled equipment. “Be careful,” William added.
Morgan returned with the aspirin. “Hey Hank, catch.” He tossed the bottle across the room, keeping his distance from the dying woman.
Hank unscrewed the cap and passed the bottle to Callie. “Didn’t you say earlier that aspirin is bad for clotting?”
Callie nodded slowly. “I just want to help her with the pain right now.” She raised her eyebrows, hoping Hank could read her mind. It doesn’t matter if her blood clots. The woman under the concrete slab was not going to get better and all they could do was ease her suffering.
She hoped he could tell what she was thinking. He was seventeen years older with an ex-wife and three children. Callie never believed in soul mates, or fate, or even true love, but she had never met anyone who understood her the way he did. Sometimes it felt like they could read each other’s minds.
Hank seemed to get it. “Come on, Morgan, let’s see what we can find up here. Maybe there are some spare clothes.” Callie smiled. She knew that he was sick of his t-shirt and running shorts. Hank always felt more comfortable in a suit and tie.
Callie knelt by the woman with a handful of aspirin and a plastic water bottle.
“Just give me a small sip,” the woman said. Callie dribbled water onto her lips and tongue. “Shit, that’s good.”
“There’s plenty.”
“No. My stomach’s not up for it.” She spoke in gasps, each sentence coming out in one long exhale.
“What about the aspirin?”
“Put ‘em in my mouth. I can absorb them through skin in my mouth.”
Callie placed five aspirin in the woman’s mouth. She hesitated and added two more.
“Thank you.” The woman began to crunch. “Anderson would have loved the T-rex.” Her mouth looked like it was full of chalk.
Callie could almost taste the bitterness. She gulped from the water bottle and asked, “Who was Anderson?” Questions were good. Questions would distract this woman from the pain and they might learn something useful.
“Anderson was a boy genius. Twenty-two years old. PhD in Quantum Mechanics.”
“Was he in here when this happened?”
The woman nodded almost imperceptibly. “Right over there.”
Callie scanned the room and it dawned on her that she was looking at the ruins of a lab. “You caused this didn’t you? What were you doing up here?”
The woman squeezed her eyes shut. “It wasn’t supposed to go off today. We were running a... test. The first trial was next week. Three in the morning. Just in case. When no one is around.” She stopped and winced for several seconds as a round of pain wracked her body. Callie put her hand on the woman’s forehead. It felt hot.
Morgan glared from across a pile of rubble. “I got news for you, bitch. We were around. Right downstairs, as a matter of fact.”
Lisa nodded. “You set off a time machine in the middle of downtown Denver. What the hell were you thinking?”
William held up both hands, palms out. “Easy there. That won’t help.”
The woman focused on William. “It wasn’t time travel when we started. It was invisibility.” Her lips formed a wry smile. “Anderson thought he could make you invisible.”
Lisa pushed aside a broken machine made out of several polished spheres. “Invisibility. This building wasn’t zoned for anything like that. You wouldn’t believe the hoops I’ve been jumping through just for a license to sell a few stupid glasses of wine.” Lisa’s mouth clenched up and she looked like she wanted to cry. She stared out into the jungle.
Square white tiles two feet on each side covered much of the room. Morgan began to fling them over the side of the building. “What are these, anyway?”
“Ceiling tiles,” Tim said, looking up. He squatted by a network of cables that met in a junction on the floor.
“Yeah, but there’s no ceiling. Where did they come from?” Morgan flicked one of the tiles like a Frisbee and watched it fly across the river and land on the other side.
“This room had a high drop ceiling,” Tim said. “The rest of it is still in Denver.”
Morgan grabbed two tiles, one in each hand and flung them up and backwards over his head. Underneath, he exposed a body. “Gaahh!” Morgan danced away with a high-pitched squeal and fell on his ass.
Hank and Al came over and examined the corpse. It belonged to a man with light brown skin. His face had been split apart by falling machinery.
Morgan scrambled to his feet and backed away. “What the shit. I think I just found Professor Anderson.”
“Morgan, shut up,” Hank said.
The woman under the rubble scrunched her mouth and shook her head. “Anderson was a genius, but… zero patience. We could not get him to slow down.”
“So this was an accident?” William asked her. “It wasn’t supposed to happen?” She nodded in response, allowing her eyelids to fall.
“Is there someone in Denver who can bring u
s back? Someone who knows what happened?”
She mouthed the word “No” without actually saying it and lay motionless. Callie leaned over her and felt shallow breathing on her ear.
“Keep looking folks,” William ordered. “We need a lever.”
They found two other bodies, or rather one and a half. The corpse with the split face looked good compared to the others. The second man had been burned or electrocuted before a heavy, floor-to-ceiling cabinet had toppled onto him. Every inch of skin was covered with black flakes. Foul fluids oozed between cracks in the char.
The last body had been sliced in half near the edge of the room. The slice looked like the cut on the hand they had found out front on the sidewalk. All three corpses wore white lab coats like the woman. None of them wore pants that Hank was willing to trade for his jogging shorts.
The room contained desks, computer banks, hundreds of fallen ceiling tiles, and all sorts of heavy wiring, but nothing they could use as a lever. Tim explored the edge of the building, and finally found a length of metal pipe running inside the wall. A twelve-foot section had bent outwards when the wall crumbled into the river. Tim grabbed it with both hands, put his boot on the wall below and pulled. The pipe broke free and several rows of cinderblocks fell with a splash.
They positioned the pipe under the slab, near the woman’s pinned legs. William and Hank dragged the iron beam into place to act as a fulcrum.
Al, William, and Tim lined up along the pipe, just as they had with the tree trunk on the cliff top, while Hank squatted at the woman’s shoulders, ready to drag her out. William gave a nod and they all pulled downward. As the slab of concrete began to move, barely a fraction of an inch, the woman awoke, hissing and squealing. Her eyes squeezed shut and her lips pulled back from her teeth.
“Down, down, down,” William said and they released the pressure.
Hank stood, breathing heavily through his nose. He moved away from the woman, almost out of earshot, but not quite. “She was up here the whole fucking time. Why didn’t she scream for help?”
Callie bit the insides of her cheeks to keep from snapping at him. She wished she could explain to the others why her fiancé sounded like such an asshole sometimes. Hank always wanted to save everyone, to be the hero. When he couldn’t, it made him angry. Asshole angry. “I think one of her lungs is collapsed,” she said finally. “I don’t think she could scream if she wanted to.”
William moved back to the woman’s side. Fresh tears streamed across her cheeks. “Please. Wait until the aspirin kicks in. Or maybe not. I might be better off staying like this... until we get back.”
“Get back?” William asked. “You said there was no one to bring us home. We’re stuck here.”
The woman looked more and more exhausted. She inhaled a long, slow breath and said, “No. Not as long as you stay close to the football.” Her eyes fell shut again.
[ 24 ]
William’s face grew frantic. “Wait, wait, what? What football? What are you talking about?” The woman lay silent. Her chest rose and fell in slow, uneven breaths.
“Tim, go get some food. Sugar or chocolate or something. Hurry!”
Tim nodded and set off. William realized the young man could be counted on to do just about anything he asked. He didn’t complain like the rest of them.
William stood. “Look around everyone. We got to find something that looks like a football.” The room grew quiet as the others spread out again. They were just like his sons, William noticed. As long as they had jobs to do, they didn’t bicker quite so much. He gazed around at the roofless room and tried to imagine how it looked before everything had fallen apart. A large metal structure filled one corner, with wire-wrapped tubes jutting out in all directions. It looked like a ten-cylinder engine on steroids.
“It isn’t up here,” Morgan whined. “It’s gone.” He paced back and forth along a row of shelves that leaned against one another like oversized dominoes. Each shelf was lined with bracket-mounted computer hardware and every piece was connected to the next by short, curved cables.
Tim returned with a bag of dark chocolate covered espresso beans and a tablecloth. William nodded. “Perfect.” He put one of the beans inside the woman’s lip. “Come on.”
“This is to keep the sun off,” Tim said, unfolding the tablecloth.
Callie and Hank stood in another corner next to a stack of monitors, most of which bore spider-web cracks across the front. They had found nothing resembling a football.
“Hey,” said Morgan. “What about that cabinet on top of Mister Slushy? Maybe the football is in there.”
Al moved close to give it a look, carefully stepping around the pink fluid that pooled under the body. The cabinet’s doors were face-down on the burned corpse. Al grabbed a corner and tried to lift it, but it would not budge. “I don’t think their science experiment was in a supply cabinet,” he said finally. “But if you want to come over and help me lift it, maybe we can get our hands on some extra notepads and toner.”
Morgan took one look at the charred body and shook his head.
Callie pointed to a spot near the center of the room. “Look how all those wires and cables are hanging over the edge. The experiment was there, in the middle. It must have slid into the river when the floor broke.” She returned to the unconscious woman. “Am I right? Was it by those wires? Did your football thing slide over the edge?” The woman did not respond.
Hank asked, “Is she dead?”
“No, not yet,” Callie whispered. “But I honestly do not know why not.”
Morgan picked up a keyboard. “Yeah, well that bitch needs to stay alive long enough to tell us how to get out of here. This is her fault.” He threw the keyboard over the side of the building.
Tim and William finished suspending the tablecloth above the woman. They created a canopy that blocked the sun, which had climbed over the trees and shone directly onto the building.
“Hey, look at this,” Lisa called, pulling a folder from a desk drawer. “They had a contract with the Department of Defense.” She flipped through a few pages. “This is insane. Right here in my building.” Al looked over her shoulder while Lisa read. “There’s a ton of stuff about ‘observational deflection,’ whatever the hell that means.”
“It sounds like that invisibility business,” Hank noted.
Al nodded and read an excerpt. “Yeah. It says here, ‘Bending light will render the target virtually invisible.’ There isn’t any mention of Denver. This contract is with some Silicon Valley company called ‘The Alto Group’.”
“Who the hell are they?”
“I don’t know. Venture capitalists maybe?” Al offered.
“That sounds about right,” Hank said. “A group of hot-shot scientists with easy funding and no oversight. They get sub-contracted to do research for the military. They tried bending light but they bent the space-time fabric or some crazy shit like that instead. And they didn’t bother to tell anyone. We are going to have a hell of a case against them when we get back.”
“We got to get back first,” William said. He sat in the shade next to the woman and held her hand while he spoke quietly to Tim. “You said you saw her, when we all ran from the Tyrannosaurus?”
Tim nodded.
William tried to picture how she had propped herself up high enough to be seen. “I can’t imagine how much that hurt, for her to rise up like that.”
“It did,” she whispered, without opening her eyes. “It… opened me back up. But I had to see it. A T-rex.”
Her teeth were black from the chocolate bean. William offered her another, but she refused. “I’m not going to be eating… for a while.” Fresh tears rolled down her face. “Things aren’t hooked up right inside me,” she explained, moving her hand in a circular motion over her stomach.
“Can you tell us about the football?” William asked quietly. “We can’t find it and we don’t know what to do with it.” Everyone froze and waited for her response.
“Yes,” she answered and then lay silent again. William wanted to grab her by both shoulders and shake her, but he knew better.
Tim reached over with a raised hand, just for a gentle tap, but William stopped him.
“Give her time,” William whispered.
“Time?” said Morgan. “That bitch has had all the time in the world.” He walked over and reached for her.
William sprung to his feet, grabbed Morgan’s outstretched arm and shoved it against his face, splitting open two of the scratches on his cheek. “Do not touch this woman!”
Morgan backed away. “It’s her fault.”
William stood facing him until the young man sat down on the side of an overturned desk.
“He’s right,” said the woman under the concrete. She spoke slowly and deliberately, her eyes still closed. “We did it. We made a time machine. The device is… ellipsoidal. It’s shaped like a football, but bigger. It will take us back.” More tears fell as she spoke.
Hank whispered, “Going back is not going to do her any good, is it?” Callie shook her head.
“It’s over there, just beyond that pile. It was sitting on a little stand. A tripod.” She gestured across the room to the spot Callie had identified earlier. “Dig it out or leave it. Either way, it will work. It’s tough. You don’t have to do anything. Just be close.”
Lisa and Al moved to the area she indicated. The floor sloped downward toward the river just like the section of floor directly below, in the café. Al peered over the edge into the water. “Whatever was here slid down into that river. It’s gone.”
“Nice,” said Morgan. “Good job lady.”
William thought for a moment, his eyes bright. “We can get it. We can dam the river, or divert it. Even if it takes us months.” He regretted the words as they left his mouth. The woman lying in front of him clearly did not have months. Nevertheless, he would not stop until he found it.
She shook her head slightly. The action triggered a coughing sputter. Blood welled in her mouth, changing the outline on her teeth from black to crimson. “You don’t have time. It will go off automatically after… fifteen hours.” She opened her eyes. “But it didn’t sink. It floats. We made it float because there was an inland sea back then. Back now. We didn’t want it to show up… here and sink straight to the bottom.”