by John Freitas
If the bands were back and the jumpers were not, that meant that they had been lost and the failsafe engaged. Despite knowing better, she touched the sharp blisters on the surface of the wristbands. They were still hot enough to cook on and stung her fingertips. The heat required to disintegrate the bodies would have been great and even more intense if they were still standing close together. The heat also had to be intense to destroy the bodies of their lice to prevent infestation of the past.
Loriei rolled the canister to its side and ran a scan of the contents. The screen indicated empty. She looked up and saw all eyes on her. She shook her head and everyone around her exhaled. They were all thin from the lice feeding on them, but they seemed to deflate even further at the news.
She lifted the headband and accessed the camera. As she rewound the recording, one of the men behind her said, “We’ll need to download that and transcribe to get the full story.”
“Just a moment,” she said.
Loriei overrode the controls and let the sound bleed through harsh from the piece next to her ear as she let the uneven image roll through the eyepiece in front of her. It was dark and she could hear the heavy breathing of the time jumpers that had just arrived. The image was dark, but then adjusted into a sickly, green tint over the night. On the left was a field of corn. On the right were cows that were still and quiet even after the flash of the jumpers’ entry. The jumper that wore the head band turned his head enough to show his partner standing. Loriei could not remember their names and she wasn’t sure she could blame that on the lice. Someone was shouting and approaching from a house in the mid ground where the lights were now on as the jumper looked back. The green adjusted down to compensate for the light pouring out from the widows and porch. The jumper wasn’t holding his head still enough for her to focus on the figure that was approaching in the frame.
“The images may need to be enhanced,” someone said behind her.
“Be quiet. I’m trying to hear.”
The slender, grey arm of the jumper waved through the frame waving the cloth for the white flag. She had forgotten the white flag. The farmer shouted back toward the house about burglars and the cows. She could not pick up on the whole phrase due either to the ambient noise in the recording or the man’s accent. The farmer had so much bulk and mass. He hardly seemed like a person, but rather like a bear charging them. He carried something long and skinny across his chest.
“Where did they land … geographically?” Loriei asked.
“Um … Ohio. Central Ohio 1955 outside of Griffin’s Pointe. There was a lice outbreak recorded there. We thought it was a good place and time to collect.”
“Shhh.” She waved a hand behind her. “Okay. Let me hear.”
The farmer said something. His eyes were wide in the half light. He breathed something about aliens. She missed most of it and was about to rewind. The flag waved in frame again. He brought the object up catching the light from the porch behind him down its barrel.
“Oh, no,” she said and shook her head. Since the image was over her eye, shaking her head did not spare her from seeing it unfold.
A piece of skin fell through frame. Loriei only had a moment to register that the jumper was molting. His lice were laying eggs and the skin was separating to make room. Loriei had just gone through it herself back in the bunker at her old home during her brief fugue. Even with the caps sealing off the actual flocks in their scalps to keep them from infesting the past, skin would fall from the forehead and sometimes the cheeks.
“Greetings, we come in peace. We …”
Both barrels unloaded and Loriei jumped as one of her ears rang from the distortion through the speaker. The other scientists in the lab jumped as well, so it must have been loud enough even through the earpiece for them to hear the report through the laboratory.
She stared down at the charred wristbands with one eye as she watched the jumper fall to the grass in the other. The blades of grass obscured the image, but she could see the other jumper holding his chest and bleeding through his fingers on the ground. The scene flared white as the inferno surrounded the bodies before the gear was snapped back to the present.
“What is an alien?” Asked Loriei. But no one responded.
The sound hummed through the blank, white image.
Loriei pulled the headband off and dropped it to the floor. Everyone was looking at her as she said, “We need a new plan.”
***
The flash of light vanished leaving Loriei standing in the nighttime wind under a waving pine tree. She found herself heaving to catch her breath from the incredible pressure of the jump. As she did, she looked up at the bows of pine needles and cones waving above her head. She had seen pine trees in her lifetime, but not recently. The ones she remembered were scrawny and yellow like everything else in the world after the plagues.
The man on her left was taller than her, but just as skinny. He wore the headband with the camera this time. They had on plain, gray suits and rubber masks that looked like the facial structures of ancient humans. In the darkness, she thought the faces looked like death masks. The masks had big dark plastic covers hiding each eye.
Her voice was muffled through her mask. “This isn’t going to work.”
The man held up his wrist showing his wristband between them. “Should we snap back now?”
Loriei shook her head. She thought she felt one of her lice move under the sealed cap. She wondered if the process of the time jump negated the sedation on the lice. She waited a moment, but there didn’t seem to be any movement. She decided it was just her imagination.
She said, “No, we’re fine.”
She turned her head and the man on her right was shorter than her and also wearing the mask giving his face a waxy, unreal quality.
She was not sure that bringing three jumpers back was the right move, but this was a different mission now and she thought it was best. All the changes were her call and the consequences were on her.
She took a moment to concentrate and to remember their names. The taller man wearing the camera was Salvo and the shorter one was Corsin. She found herself hoping against hope that she could get them both out alive.
A dog started barking and the shock of it made her heart hurt in her chest.
She cleared her throat and said muffled through the mask, “Let’s go.”
They moved forward through the grass and along a chain link fence. A double wide trailer marked the forested property. It had a brown roof designed to look like the pattern of wood even though it was clearly metal. The white sides of the trailer were ribbed in pattern. A black truck sat nose outward along one side of the trailer. Light shown through the blinds over the windows from inside. There was a pale, yet bright floodlight casting a broad beam of light on the grass, but it was on a pole on the other side of the trailer.
The dog pulled to the end of its chain on the other side of the fence. The other end of the chain not connected to the collar pulling against the dog’s muscular chest was hooked on a post in the dirt leaning sideways. The dog was agitated and seemed to be hurling its body and head into each bark for greater emphasis. Thick, foamy slobber cast off its lips as they peeled back from the animal’s teeth and black gums.
Loriei traced with her eyes a worn, dirt trail from the gate of the fence to the wooden steps of the trailer that curved out of the reach of the angry dog as long as its chain held.
In Loriei’s time, dogs roamed free in packs through some cities and out in the open wastes. The lice usually resorted to the dogs, if a human host wasn’t available. The dogs did not last as long once infected by the lice. She wondered briefly, if trying to collect a sample from the dog might work, but changed her mind quickly as the teeth snapped at her between barks. Seeing a pack of dogs usually meant the end for someone caught outside. She wondered if they were seeking revenge for the days that humans put them on chains. She shook her head. They were probably just hungry and humans were the easiest prey.
&
nbsp; She stared at the gate for a moment before raising the metal latch. It gave a light squeak and a metal on metal clink. She pushed the gate inward and the hinges gave a louder shriek. She paused after a few inches of turn and waited with her teeth gritted behind her rubbery mask.
As she listened between barks, she heard voices inside. There was music. She heard a car engine rev. A car inside? Loriei tilted her head. The dog continued barking and the sounds from inside grew gradually louder. The quality of the sound reminder her of listening to the recording through the earpiece on the headband after the last jumpers were killed. She realized she was hearing a television. She knew what they were, but the sound seemed loud to be considered any sort of relaxing entertainment. Those noises would not make her feel relaxed at all except that it meant the man inside might not hear the barking or gate which did relax her a bit.
She pushed the gate the rest of the way open with a creak. The sound of the television continued to vibrate the sides of the trailer, but the door at the top of the wooden stairs remained closed.
The dog jumped at the end of its chain still barking and snapping.
Loriei motioned with hand behind her for the other men to stay on the path out of the dog’s reach. She glanced over her shoulder to be sure they understood. The eyeholes of her mask shifted making it hard to see at that angle, but she could tell Salvo and Corsin did not need her instruction. They were hugging the side of the trailer as far from the dog as they could get.
She turned her attention back forward and stalked toward the bottom step of the stairs. Loriei kept watching for the handle on the glass and metal door to turn. If the subject came outside, that might make this easier. The site was secluded which was part of the reason they were here. It was a few weeks before the gravitational wave which was another reason she had chosen this site. It was also detailed in her notebook which was most of the reason they were walking slowly up the steps.
If he came out too soon though, then they would not be in a good position to deal with him. They needed to get to him before he came looking to see what had the dog so upset.
Loriei made the last few steps and went to her knees beside the door. She leaned out to peer through the glass. There was a metal screen on the other side of the thin glass distorting everything inside with a gritty haze. She saw light from bulbs from three different lamps in the room including one glass hood on the ceiling.
The television was flat like the monitors in the lab and sat free on top of a wooden cabinet positioned in front of a reclining chair. Crushed beer cans lined the cabinet on one side.
Loriei had expected a boxy set with the television tube inside. She supposed it was the early twenty-first century, so it made sense that the change over in technology would have happened, but in her mind she always thought of the modern technologies beginning after the gravitational wave event. There was no amount of research that prepared a person for jumping back in time.
She saw his arm resting on the scratched leather of the arm of the recliner. He had a long, blue sleeve that was unbuttoned and rolled up unevenly past the elbow. He gripped a remote control in his fist. His arm was dotted with hair. It was not thick enough to hide the skin underneath, but it was enough to appear furry like some species of animal rather than a human. She knew that technically she and others of her time were still mammals, but a lifetime of molting from the infestation of the lice had shed all remnant of their hair.
This man’s arm was thick, muscled, and hairy. That was what humans were supposed to look like without the lice and this was the state they were seeking to put humanity back into by bending time and breaking every rule that humanity still had in place. However inhuman this man might look, this was how they were supposed to be and would be again, if this mission was successful.
With the dog still barking at her back and the musical car chase blaring from the set loud enough to vibrate the glass at her face, Loriei balked at her next move. If the mission was successful, they might be erasing the timeline entirely. It was possible that they would just create an alternate timeline and a quantum division. Both timelines might exist and all her team would go on living in the world they had created while a new humanity lived in the other.
They might erase it all or create some dire paradox. It was that fear that had made the study and implementation of time travel illegal back when humanity thought they still had a chance.
They might fail. This possibility hung heaviest upon her. In a way, it was the worst of all the possibilities even though it was somehow the most simple and elegant. Time could block their success to protect itself. Their own incompetence might do the work for time by getting themselves obliterated in twenty-first century Georgia the same way they had in Ohio in 1955. Did the fact that they were still there mean that they were doomed to fail?
Loriei put her hand on the handle and paused again. She stared at the wristband. It would take her back one way or the other. The snap back could propel her back forward in time once they had the sample or needed to abort the mission. It would also cook them to ash and go back on its own, if it came to that, like before.
Her eyes focused out from her wrist and spotted the notebook on the counter that led into the kitchen area. The pages were not frayed around the edges and the cover was not yellowed and split, but it was the younger version of the same one she had retrieved from the bunker.
It was the one from the bunker she had grown up within. It was the bunker this man would one day take a family to try to hide from the coming plagues.
Loriei whispered. “Danforth … Brady Danforth.”
Salvo whispered behind her. “What?”
She put her finger over the rubbery lips of her mask as if anything could be heard over the bark of the dog and the commercial for erectile dysfunction drugs on the television. The commercial seemed louder than the car chase even though it was just an old couple in outdoor bathtubs watching the sun set. People did not get old in her time anymore, she noted. Their heads split open and they fell down dead as the lice finished feeding.
Loriei lowered her finger from her lips. “Be ready to move quickly.”
Corsin took out the syringe and held it out. He nodded, but did not say anything.
She pulled the handle down and around slowly. She felt the grinding of the latch as it moved inside the mechanism. The medicine commercial switched to one about dog treats. The camera followed from the dog’s point of view searching the house for his treats and talking. She wondered if the commercial was meant for the dog. The latch popped free of the frame and she froze again staring at Danforth’s hairy arm.
She found that she expected her ancestor to be brown-skinned like the model in the pasted page on the pavement. But Danforth appeared to be pre plague Caucasian. She knew he as a Vietnam veteran, but that was all. She wished she knew more about the details of her family history.
Loriei pulled the door open and watched the cheap, hydraulic arm extend. She held it with her open palm as the others followed her inside. Salvo stepped around her, but then Corsin lost his grip on the door. It hit Loriei in the leg and she froze.
The commercial switched to Iphones. She wondered how many of these ads played in a row. Did the show ever come back on? How many of these were they required to watch?
Corsin took hold of the door again and pulled it back open.
Danforth moved. He let go of the remote and let it thunk to the floor sounding hollow through the underbelly of the trailer. Loriei heard another can crinkle, but could not see it.
For a moment, she hoped he was asleep.
Danforth pushed down the foot platform with his socked feet – black with golden stitch across the toes. He sat up. He was balding and had broad shoulders. He scratched vigorously at the edge of his hairline as he stood. “Damn cooties …”
Brady Danforth took two steps before he turned and saw the three people standing behind his chair in his living room.
Loriei waved Corsin forward, but her partner stayed b
y the door with the syringe gripped in his hand.
Danforth screamed with a high note that made Loriei think of frightened babies. The dog redoubled its barking outside. Salvo took a step toward Danforth from around the chair.
Danforth dove for the chair. His heel hit the remote and the television turned off dropping the room into a heavy quiet. Danforth fell across the arm of the chair and something broke with a twang down inside.
He came up with a handgun and aimed over the chair at Salvo. Salvo closed both fists over the gun in Danforth’s grasp. His gloved hands looked so small over the top of Danforth’s thick fingers.
The gun went off up in the air punching a hole through the paneling on the ceiling. Loriei heard a piercing ring after that. It was so much louder than through the earpiece.
“Corsin, now.” She yelled wondering if his hearing was as stunted as hers.
He did move though.
The door swung closed. Salvo and Danforth wrestled from side to side over the chair with the gun. It went off twice more shattering the glass in the door.
Corsin pressed the syringe to Danforth’s neck. It was not immediate, but the man wavered and then collapsed backward onto the floor with an awkward thump. His back was arched and Danforth’s hands opened and closed absently as he blinked up at the hole in the ceiling.
Salvo looked at the hand gun in his grasp. He opened his hands and let it fall onto the seat of the recliner like he was afraid it might bite him. It might just do so. She wondered if every pre plague human carried one. It seemed like the world was just as dangerous before the plagues as after; at least that is what the people of the time seemed to think.
Loriei took out a canister from her belt and a small tube. She pressed the button and listened to the air suck. She had to put her finger over the mouth of the tube to test the suction since she didn’t trust her hearing. The angry dog sounded like it was miles away now.