I couldn’t find the words to answer.
“Did you bring back any supplies?” Melinda said.
Emily withdrew several cans of chili from her fanny pack. “Here we go,” she said. “I think there’s a lot more up on the corner store. It’s not as picked over as it looks. Maybe someone got interrupted while they were up there and they left plenty behind for us.”
“I’ll heat up a few of these cans,” Melinda said. “But we’re running low. If there’s more to be had in that market we should go back.”
Melinda opened a couple cans and set them on a metal grate over a camp stove. Soon I was sitting on a cinder block eating chili out of a hot can. The others had moved off, they were probably discussing my and Frank’s fitness as new recruits for their post-apocalyptic scavenger squad. “So what does your magic wand say about this place,” I whispered to Future Frank.
“It’s not working,” he said.
“Maybe you should bring up the tunnel,” I said.
“Nothing is working,” he replied.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I can’t get the gate to open.”
“You mean we’re stuck here?”
He didn’t answer.
Emily approached us. “Just so you know, everybody’s got to pull their own weight around here,” she said.
Frank grimaced and I said, “I kind of expected that.”
“Do you guys think you can help us clean out that market?” Emily said. “The fuel tanks are pretty heavy so if you guys could carry some cans or whatever, that would be awesome."
It was five of us, Melinda, Emily, Frank, Martin, and me. I didn’t ask about Brandon or Kevin. I assumed they didn’t make it. We surfaced into the glare of early afternoon and approached the market. I was shaking. Melinda had given me a sawed-off shotgun and shown me how to load it. I wasn’t sure I would be able to use it if the need arose. Frank looked pale.
“Are you sure you can’t get us out of here?” I said.
“The link to the control crystal isn’t working,” he said. A throbbing vein in his forehead telegraphed his stress. “I wonder if that happens to me when I’m anxious,” I thought. Probably. I never noticed before.
We entered the market without any encounter and started gathering up every kind of canned good we could get our hands on. Chili, potato soup, ravioli, tuna. We filled our packs. “This is going pretty well,” Frank said. He sounded relieved.
Martin glared at him and said, “Don’t jinx us.”
We went back out into the street laden with loot. Before I even noticed the smoggy quality of the air, Emily yelled, “Fog!” She ignited her flamethrower, casting a line of fire across the street haphazardly. The others fanned out, guns drawn. Frank and I followed behind. “This is definitely an eight on the anxiety scale,” I thought.
Emily sprayed fire ahead of us. It seemed to be working. There were no shapes moving around in the gathering mist. But the foul smell was strong. "Get some," Emily called as she sprayed fire before us. I couldn’t see where her stream of flame ended as the fog thickened. And I couldn’t see our way back to where we had been. My stomach was doing somersaults.
The snorting noises started nearby but no alien shapes were visible in the mist. We were all waving our guns around trying to isolate the enemy. Emily turned her stream of fire towards a threat but it was too late. Something knocked her to the ground and the spray of fire stopped. I heard more snorts nearby and moved toward Emily, shouting her name. I pulled the trigger on my gun and it blasted with such violence that I fumbled it, almost dropping it to the ground.
Emily was lying on the pavement with a bulky shadow looming over her. Martin and Melinda were coming in from the left shooting short bursts of flame into the air. Frank grabbed me and started pulling me out of the street. Martin yelled and then I heard several large bodies hustling into each other. “Where are you,” Emily yelled.
“Emily, we’re here,” I said. She didn’t answer.
I fell down beside the remains of a brick wall, the shell of some old warehouse. Frank was next to me with a satchel full of cans. I still had the shotgun in my hands but I didn’t even know what to do with it.
“You’ve got to open the portal,” I said looking up at him. His face was wet and pale. I couldn’t tell if he was crying, sweating, or having a heart attack.
“I told you, I can’t do it,” he said. There was a tremor in his voice. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? It’s like there’s nothing there. The connection is dead.”
I shook my head.
I saw a shape moving in the fog. I slowly rose to my feet. Melinda emerged, brandishing a flamethrower. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to get back to the sanctuary.”
I raised my shotgun and looked at Frank. He was nodding his head. Melinda led the way through the murky streets. She was spraying everything with fire. Whatever was left in the streets was burning. The whole world was just an orange cloud.
My feet fell one at a time in front of me like a sleepwalker. We could have been walking for an hour though I’m sure it was only a couple minutes. The beast materialized like a ghost before me. It looked skeletal, like a big cat with hard plates of bone or rock. It lunged for my face with a hideous sound. It smelled terrible. For a moment I looked into its huge chrome eyes and went limp, falling away from the spectral fingers creeping from its mouth towards me. Then it was engulfed in flame. Melinda’s gun was showering the thing with fire as I staggered back to my feet. I bumped into Frank. We tripped over the curb and collapsed onto the sidewalk. I saw his little magic wand fall in the gutter, the crystal shattering. We scrambled against the wall of some storefront and heard Melinda screaming.
“Melinda,” I called. But there was only silence now except for the whispering crackle of lingering fires. This was feeling like a ten on the anxiety scale. I looked at Frank and he looked at me.
“We’re going to die here,” I said. I thought of my mother’s face. Tears in my eyes made it even harder to see and my breathing became choked sobs.
I felt the wall fade away behind me and I rolled back in a heap. I was in the time corridor. “Frank,” I yelled. He turned and saw the doorway. I leaped to my feet and Frank ran through. It seemed the tunnel was longer. We ran down the hallway to the now-familiar room. But it wasn’t as familiar. There was trash everywhere, food wrappers, convenience store burritos, empty bottles. There were piles of little magazines with pictures of horses. There was a camp stove, an old twin mattress with a pile of blankets and old clothes. There was a pile of old comics from like 50 years ago. There was a water cooler up against the wall, a work bench with some tools scattered about, a pile of loose cash the size of my head.
There was an old man standing in the middle of all the mess. He was staring at me. “Hello,” I said.
“Oh my God,” Frank said.
The old man spoke in creaking tone. “I couldn’t let you die again,” he said.
I squinted at him. “Thank you,” I managed to say.
I looked at future Frank. He was staring at the old man with his mouth hanging open. “How old are you?” Frank said.
The old man thought for a moment, and looked up as if he was counting. He finally looked back at Frank and said, “Time has no measure here but I think I’m older than 75.”
“You’ve been living here for what 20, 25 years?” Frank yelled.
The old man narrowed his eyes and nodded. “Yes,” he said.
“How’d you get in here?” I said.
“Don’t you get it?” Future Frank said. “That’s you. That’s me. We’re going to grow old in this box.”
My jaw dropped uncontrollably and then I said, “I guess you won’t die of cancer.”
“Cured easily in the 25th century,” said the old man.
“Great,” said future Frank. “So now I can look forward to a future of off-track betting and eating out of convenience stores like a fugitive. At least I’ll have all these comic books to read.”
“There’s no escaping the time creatures,” the old man said. “Everywhere I go, they are close at my heels. I’ve been making short trips out to different years for a long time now. I think that by altering the events in the time line so much we’ve messed up the time machine. It was never designed to travel through time in the first place, not the way Xanthros did it. And we’ve done far more damage than he did.”
“God this is all my fault,” Future Frank said. “I wish that bug had never come to me.”
“If the machine is so broken how can you even go outside? We lost the portal on our machine,” I said.
The old man held up a spool of thin wire. “This line lets me find my way back,” he said. “I keep one end tied up in here and one end tied to me. It helps me maintain contact with the core.”
“There’s got to be a way to fix all this,” I said.
“I’ve tried long and hard to find Xanthros, to ask him what to do,” the old man said. “But I can’t find a trace of him. He’s been very careful to cover his tracks. I’ve given up on him.”
Future Frank cleared his throat and said, “We can’t all three of us stay here forever.”
There was a long silence. I wondered how I would go to the bathroom in here.
“I have an idea,” the old man said. “Maybe I can get you on a different course in the time spectrum. I’m not sure if it’s going to work but I think I can get you back to your time machine. I don’t know how many more jumps mine has left.”
“What do you have in mind,” I said.
“I intend to connect to your ship,” he said. “Once I make the jump, go down the corridor quickly. I don’t know if the connection will remain stable for very long.”
I looked at future Frank. He nodded and we both spoke. “Go for it.”
Old Frank approached the crystal and placed his hands upon it. At first nothing happened. Then a harsh tremor began. It increased in magnitude, rattling all the junk everywhere. The pile of money slid onto the floor and the comic book stack fell over. Then it stopped. “Go now,” the old man said.
We turned and began hustling down the hallway. “I’m sorry,” Future Frank said over his shoulder.
“I know,” the old man said.
###
The humming noise in the tunnel was deafening this time. I could barely see anything inside. I saw a blurry image of myself running away in front of me. As we emerged from the tunnel we found ourselves back where we had just left. We were in the time machine’s central room. But it was clean. There was only that central crystal glowing brightly. “Thank God, we’re back,” Future Frank said.
The room shook violently and we fell to the ground. Dazed, I looked around. “Jesus, what was that?”
“Seems like the connection with the other time machine broke,” future Frank said.
“What does the crystal say?” I said.
He squinted his eyes and said, “I’m kind of confused but I think we’re safe.”
“So do you think we’ve lost those creatures now? Maybe we left them behind in an alternate universe or something,” I said.
“No idea,” he said. “Only one way to find out.” We approached the tunnel to the outside.
We walked out into sunlight. The birds were chirping, it was a hot day in the park. Girls were cruising around in electric convertibles blasting Led Zeppelin. Well, it sounded like Led Zeppelin. Some guy popped by on a flying skateboard and he had some kind of crazy virtual reality helmet on. The sky was full of weird little helicopters. I recognized the statue of the town founder, George Diego.
“I take it this isn’t the present,” I said.
“This is my present,” he replied, “where the seas are rising and so are the sounds of the 1970’s. These people are wearing bell bottoms, big ridiculous ones. Dawning of the age of Aquarius all over again.”
“OK,” I said. “Can you contact the time machine now?”
“Yes,” he said. “Everything seems groovy.”
We wandered around the park for a while, waiting for the other shoe to drop. We found ourselves in a grove of trees away from the other strolling people and their face-implanted phones. Future Frank said, “Seems like we might be in the clear,” and produced some rolling papers and small zip-lock bag of marijuana. He rolled a joint while sitting in the grass. I nervously looked around the skies for anything that might be spying on me or targeting me with Hellfire missiles.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s legal now. Here, spark this up.”
I inhaled and felt a steady buzz right down in my bones. “This is great,” I choked out with a mouthful of smoke.
I passed him the joint and he took a deep toke. He laughed and coughed as he exhaled. He passed it to me and I took another pull.
“Never thought I’d be sitting here smoking in the park with myself,” he said with another laugh.
“Yeah it’s pretty weird,” I said, passing it back to him.
“I know I said some bad things to you back there, but I really hope you find your way now. Maybe I messed up with this whole thing. I wanted to help myself. I hope you can understand that because, well, you’re me. You should be OK. You got a lot of opportunities now.”
“If we got rid of those things, then everything is going to be great,” I said.
He nodded and said, “I don’t know if I can go back to this life. I’m making decent money at Future Health but the job sucks. I think about when I was younger.” He looked at me. “Your age. I didn’t have any fire. Whenever anything happened my brain just locked up.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“I bet you do,” he replied.
“When I’m cold-calling I feel like I’ve beaten it,” I said. “Like all I need is the script and a little confidence and I can make it. The confidence seems easy to manufacture. I wish it was like that when I don’t have a script.”
“That’s why I stuck around at the job,” he said. “I thought, ‘Hey I’m good at this, who knows if there’s something else out there I’d be good at.’ So I kept at it. And then when Brandon needed to be replaced, I was the guy for the job. I just stuck where I was, eating crappy food and playing games, and going golfing and drinking beer. I kind of adopted Brandon’s management style. ‘These people are mostly jerks, they’ll walk all over you if you let them,’ I thought. I don’t like being that guy anymore. And I don’t have a chance to change.”
“I’m just doing it until something better comes along,” I said.
“Nothing just comes along,” he said.
“Right,” I said.
We sat in silence for a few minutes under in the hot sun. I wondered if I would ever want to get married and have a family or if I would buy a sailboat and bum around the Pacific Ocean. I imagined myself on some abandoned shore looking out at my boat in the sunset, a man alone in the desolate seascape. I imagined myself becoming a father and holding my son for the first time.
I was daydreaming. For some reason, I thought of that future world of the insects. I must have fallen asleep because I was dreaming that I was there, flitting through their underground complex like a shadow. Again, in this globe-spanning city, I felt lost in their cavernous world. Some new awareness reached out to me. Something was aware of my presence here. “You do not belong here,” it told me.
I noticed row upon row of portals like the round corridor that led to the time chamber. The insects were coming in and out of them. This was their travel hub connecting a vast intergalactic insect empire. They had used the pocket universe technology to bend space itself to their will and they could travel throughout the universe like roaches through Swiss cheese.
“You should not see these things,” the strange presence said in words that formed inside my mind.
Then the fog started pouring in. I screamed but no sound came out. The fog grew thick. The shadow beasts were quick and arrived in great numbers. The insect creatures had no defense, no weapons. They ran. That seemed to be their instinct,
flee from danger and hide. Hide and survive. But they could not escape. A panic spread through me. The beasts were spreading throughout the entire network of tunnels. They were overtaking the entire civilization of the insects. It seemed like time was speeding up, as if years were passing in the blink of an eye.
Then I was alone in the fog and the world was silent. “My soldiers have overtaken this universe,” the silent voice in my mind said. “We have thirsted for millennia. We had free reign of the black void of space and its infant worlds. But the space and time of your universe curved away and we were blocked from our hunting ground. Thanks to your actions we can return.”
Everything was spinning and there was no center to hold on to.
“We will fan out across all potential universes. We have found our way to the greatness that was our destiny. We will drink our fill.”
The vision and terrible voice faded. I woke up. We were stoned. Maybe that’s why we didn’t notice the sky darkening and the soupy air encircling us. I noticed the smell and my eyes opened wide. Future Frank spoke first. “Get to the statue, that’s the nearest place I can open the portal.”
I hopped up and noticed several dark figures nearby. They were very close. Future Frank was already on his feet and about to run when he keeled over. He cried out in pain. I looked at his face and he and looked at me. His sad eyes told me to run. I did.
The dusk fled by as my feet fell like hammers. Finally the sun shone down again and I kept running until the old statue was before me. The hallway appeared and I plunged into it without slowing down. Only when I was within the inner chamber did I feel safe and I collapsed on the ground wheezing. As I lay on my back I hoped he would come breezing in, maybe injured but breathing. I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t know how to get home. Had I just let myself die? Had I seen my own fate out there?
I waited, laying on the ground, sniffling. It didn’t seem real. The creatures were still after us. I didn’t know if I was safe or if they would kill me too. Of course if they killed me I would never grow older and travel back in time and draw their attention, right?
I had to do something to stop all this. I felt faint, my vision blurred. I sat up. There was no way to make sense of these events. I screamed and put my head in my hands. I thought of my mother. Could I possibly save her? Could I save myself? Anyone?
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