So You Had to Build a Time Machine

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

  9

  Dave finished his story from the moment he fell from the bar to the moment he saw his own grandfather at the farm. Then he looked around the kitchen table of the Sanderson Murder House. His eyes landed on Skid.

  “I know people usually preface something like this with, ‘No offense,’” Skid said, staring at Dave from across the table. “But I won’t. You stink. You smell terrible. Like beer and rotting fish sandwiches from All-National Burger.”

  Dave shook his head. “I’ve gotten used to it.” He pulled the last beer from the six-pack ring and waved it at Brick. Skid already had a Miller Lite from 1982 on the table in front of her. Cord held one as he paced from the wall near the hallway to the back door and back again, stopping occasionally to take a drink. “You want one?”

  “No,” Brick said. “It’s 10:30 in the morning.”

  Cord stopped pacing across the bad linoleum and barked a laugh. “You’re kidding, right? Did you hear him? After what he told us and all the shit that’s happened to you personally, you’re worried about having a beer too early in the day? Hell, I think I’ll start drinking even earlier and legitimize it by saying it’s 10:30 a.m. somewhere.”

  “What I want to know,” Brick said, leaning forward on his elbows toward Dave, the table groaning under his weight, “is why all this is happening.”

  The crack of the beer opening seemed loud in the kitchen. Dave fumbled with pulling the tab off the can. “I don’t know the logical scientific explanation—”

  “But isn’t that what you do?” Cord blurted, dropping into the chair between Brick and Skid. “You’re a physicist, right? You—”

  Skid slipped a hand behind Cord’s neck and pulled his face close to hers. “Shhhh,” she whispered, then nodded to Dave. “Please continue.”

  The moment seemed to have gone, Dave’s attention drifted over the kitchen. “I’ve been here before,” he said, then took a sip of beer. “A long time ago. The light fixture was different, and Cecilia would have hated those curtains over the sink.”

  He paused and looked around the table, his eyes wide. “Oh, shit. This is all my fault.”

  10

  A wet David limped from the cattle tank to the dusty pickup, the farmer out in the field oblivious to him. Pain lanced through David’s left leg as the knife ripped at the muscles of his thigh with each small step. Goddamned Skid. His right hand hit the bed behind the cab door; his left lifted the handle and pulled it open. He bit his bottom lip to muffle a scream as he pulled himself onto the driver’s seat.

  “Plan, Davey boy, you need a plan,” he said through his teeth.

  He had to pull out the knife, he knew, but there would be blood, and lots of it. What if she hit an artery? But at that moment, he didn’t care. He had work to do. Skid was a menace; he had to stop her.

  “Okay, buddy,” he said, his voice shaky. “You can do this.”

  David looked around the cab of the truck. Empty gun rack in the back window, oily T-shirt. He pulled the shirt toward him and held it up; a clean spot ringed the center. This will have to do.

  The interior of the cab started to swim in his vision. David closed his eyes to steady himself, sucking air in and blowing it out through his teeth. “Come on. Come on, man.”

  The collider was out there and in danger. The attack would happen, if not now, soon. If Skid got to the lab, everything would be over. Kaput. Boom. No matter what, he had to protect the collider.

  David slid his eyes open and reached for the glove box, trying to choke back another scream. He screamed anyway. A lighter, leather gloves, insurance card, pens with seed company logos, pliers, a half-empty box of ammo. If the farmer were anything like Grandpa Sam, this glove compartment would hold something else he needed.

  He squeezed the compartment release. Jackpot. David reached in and pulled out a half-empty pint bottle of Windsor Canadian Whisky.

  “Hello, farmer’s friend,” he said as he unscrewed the lid. “You’re going to keep me from having my leg amputated.” He took a swig from the bottle, the whisky burning as it went down, then gently tipped it on either side of the knife.

  “Shiiiit,” he moaned into the cab as the amber liquid seeped into the knife wound. The cattle that had gathered near the open door of the truck backed up a few steps.

  “Sorry, ladies,” he wheezed, “but this is going to get even louder.”

  He capped the bottle, set it on the seat and grabbed one of the leather gloves from the glove box.

  Sticking the glove into his mouth and biting down, his breath coming fast and hard around the leather, which smelled of manure, he took the handle of the throwing knife in two shaky hands and closed his eyes. “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” he mumbled through the leather between his teeth, “and I feel fucked.”

  He pulled.

  11

  “Your fault?” Cord snapped and began to stand. “What do you mean it’s your fault?”

  Brick’s hand landed on Cord’s shoulder and pushed him back onto the wooden chair. “There’s no need to get excited—”

  Cord slipped under Brick’s meat hook and backed from the table. “When would be a good time to get excited, Brick? And what kind of name is Brick, anyway?”

  “Well, I used to be a bricklayer—”

  “Well, I used to be a bricklayer,” Cord mocked, putting the table between him and the giant. He’d just met these people and he was already tired of their shit.

  “That’s cool,” Dave said underneath it all, although no one heard him.

  Skid stood. Brick stood. Dave took a drink of beer and set the can on the table. “I’m the calmest person here,” he said, “and I just time-traveled to the day my foster grandfather died.” He pulled two Ziploc bags from his Dockers pockets and laid them gently on the table. “I have summer sausage and sharp cheddar cheese from 1982. They’re kind of smashed from me falling on them, but I’m willing to share if you have more beer.”

  Jesus, Cord thought. I should be charging these people. This is gold.

  Skid sat next to Dave and pulled open the Ziploc that contained the sausage. “What did you mean when you said this was your fault?”

  “Do you know who I am?” He looked around the table and laughed. “Wow. That sounded really Kardashian. Do you know who I am? I’m so sorry.”

  Something in the air had changed. Cord sniffed, but only the smell of summer sausage wafted around the table. Brick pulled a slice from the bag.

  “Beer?” Skid said, looking up at him.

  Goddamnit. Cord stomped from the refrigerator and put a Boulevard Pale Ale in front of Dave.

  “Hey, thanks.” Dave’s eyebrows furrowed slightly like he tried to remember something he couldn’t. “I don’t think I got your name.”

  “Cord.”

  Dave smiled. “Hey. Skid, Brick, Cord, and I got stuck with Dave. I think it’s—”

  Cord opened his mouth, but Skid cut him off.

  “You’re David Collison, Ph.D.,” she said over hands gripped into a single fist atop the table. “You’re a theoretical physicist at Lemaître Labs near Peculiar, Missouri, where you’ve worked on weapons for the government. You grew up around Kansas City, got your doctorate from Stanford, and your only surviving relative is a foster sister named Susan.”

  “Hey,” Cord said, but everyone ignored him.

  Dave tried not to look directly at anyone as he took a drink of beer, Skid and Brick remained silent in the murder house kitchen.

  “Hey,” Cord said again.

  “That’s impressive,” Dave said, ignoring Cord again. “But what about Susan? Do you know her last name?”

  “It started with an M, I think,” Skid said. “Mink? Monk?”

  “Meek.” Brick drummed his fingers on the table. “I’m pretty sure it was Meek. We read about her in the newspaper story on your disappearance.”

  Dave started to speak, but Cord
cut him off. “Hey,” he said, the word coming out like it had way more syllables than it did. “Meek is her married name. She’s a Sanderson.”

  Skid and Brick looked at him.

  “I’m not an idiot.” Cord turned toward Dave. “You used to live here, didn’t you?”

  Dave took a long pull of the bottle before setting it back onto the table. “I did. The foster system moved me to a new house in 1984 after Delbert killed Cecilia and Tommy. I was staying the night with a friend.” Dave took a long breath before speaking again. “I never saw Susan again after that.”

  “Oh, wow.” Brick took another piece of nearly-brand-new-40-year-old sausage and leaned back in his chair.

  Skid stood and stepped closer to Dave. “And you don’t work on weapons.” She bent close to his ear and whispered. “You work on something that can disrupt space-time, don’t you?”

  He turned. Her brown eyes burned into his. “Yes,” he said, his voice equally as soft. “But I can’t talk about it. My work is as classified as the Roswell crash.”

  “What?” erupted from Cord.

  Dave winced. “I’ve said too much. I’ll go to prison if anyone finds out. Not just don’t-bend-over-in-the-shower prison, but Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. That’s serious.”

  Skid grabbed the back of Dave’s chair and turned him to face her. “It’s not just you. Reality is changing. Things we know to be true are now false. It’s like we’re in a choose-your-story book and some idiot is reading it.”

  His eyes dropped from hers. “You’re right. Lemaître Labs doesn’t design weapons. We have a supercollider the size of CERN’s underground.”

  “Holy shit,” she said. “You’re crashing the building blocks of the universe together practically under our feet? You’re looking for the God Particle?”

  Cord had no idea what they were talking about. He tapped the fingers of his left hand into the open palm of his right. “Hey, time out.”

  Nobody listened.

  “No,” Dave said to Skid. “We’re not.”

  “That’s a good thing.” Skid looked at Brick and Cord. “They could be creating black holes out by Peculiar. Black holes in Peculiar. Heh. Sounds like a punk band, but it could really mess with... every… thing. Oh, no.”

  “I’m sorry, Skid,” Dave said. “But we’re looking for what’s beyond the God Particle. We’re looking for the walls that keep dimensions from meeting and the magic that makes time appear to flow in a straight line. I followed my foster father’s work into physics to develop time travel. Don’t hit me.”

  Cord picked up the beer in front of Dave and took a drink. “I think I saw this on Doctor Who,” he said.

  “I left work Friday,” Dave said to no one and everyone. “Our boss Karl was pissed at me and ordered everyone on the project to leave. I’d found some problems with his math. As in, intersecting-dimensions problems. And I left.”

  “So?” Brick asked.

  Dave became as grave as a tombstone. “I never logged out of the system. It takes at least two people to log in for the machine to work. Karl must have used it after I left. For some reason I can’t pin down, he knowingly used it with the bad math.” He stopped for long enough to pry his beer from Cord’s fist. Everyone sat quietly and watched him chug the rest of the bottle. “He wouldn’t have been able to do this if he was the only person logged in.”

  Brick frowned. “Well, if this Karl used the machine, it should have affected him, too, right?”

  Dave stood and walked to the refrigerator for another beer. He drank half of it before turning back to the group at the table. “Yeah. No. I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Cord pulled out a chair and sank into it. All he wanted to do was make money in an innocent enough con then these people showed up.

  “But why are you the one popping in and out of reality and not him?” Skid asked.

  “A number of reasons. Karl’s equations totally screwed things up,” Dave said, then looked around the table. “By ‘things,’ I mean colliding realities and intersecting moments in time. If we were looking for the God Particle, we’d have sucked the Earth into a black hole of our own creation and wouldn’t be having this conversation, but what Karl did is shredding our physical existence.”

  “But why you?” Skid asked. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re vanishing and reappearing, and why we recognize reality is changing when no one else seems to notice. Why has this brought us all to this house?”

  The smile on Dave’s bruised face had no humor behind it. “I guess you haven’t been in the basement.” He nodded toward Cord. “Is the equipment still down there?”

  Cord swallowed hard. “Yeah.”

  Dave stood and walked across the kitchen floor to the basement door he hadn’t opened in more than thirty years.

  Chapter Five

  September IV: The Voyage Home

  1

  The vending machine across from the first-floor bathrooms was out of Cheetos. Karl scanned the rows of foil packages arranged inside corkscrews that moved the snacks onto a ledge and dropped them into the delivery tray like so many sacrifices to the god of saturated fat. Except on the first floor next to HR; there was no real fat. This machine held Baked Doritos, Baked Ruffles, Popchips, power bars, roasted edamame and things so void of saturated fat Karl wouldn’t put them in his mouth. The jerks in human resources were too healthy for their own good. It didn’t matter anymore since the employees of that department hunkered low in their cubicles in the open office space chittering angrily to themselves. They didn’t like the light that poured from the hallway ceiling.

  The dollar he’d slowly pulled from his wallet and smoothed on his slacks still looked iffy, especially the corner to the left of the all-seeing eye. He pressed the folded corner between his index finger and thumb to try and hold it down before feeding the bill into the money slot. The machine hummed as hidden pinch rollers grabbed the bill and pulled it in, then pushed it back out.

  “Damn it.”

  Something large rustled in the dark recesses of HR. He told himself that was a perfectly normal, human-sized sound, although he realized he might be lying. Come on, Karl. He’d intended the trip through the lab complex to be quiet. That’s why he ditched his hard-soled Oxfords for the pair of Adidas he wore when he went to the gym down by the loading docks, which was never. The Adidas were brand new.

  Come on. Come on. Karl turned the bill over and fed it into the slot the other way. The hum kicked on; this time the dollar disappeared.

  He’d lived in the lab since Friday. Oh, that wonderful Friday when the physicists and engineers went home and left him alone with the supercollider. The Karl Colossal Collider. At least that’s what he wanted to name it. The loudmouths in engineering were pushing for BAB-C. Big-Assed Bastard Collider. Not professional, but the government loves a catchy acronym.

  That idiot Dave Collison didn’t like the name either. He wanted to go with something a little more scientific, but he also wanted to put off the machine’s launch because of some “anomalies” in Karl’s computations. Prick. Karl laughed when he discovered Collison had never logged out of the system and he could launch the project alone. That was poetry. Beautiful karmic poetry. You’ll see, Collison. The experiment worked. I found the secret to everything.

  But Dave Collison didn’t come to work Monday for Karl to rub it in. Karl didn’t know if Collison was still alive. He also didn’t care; Collison was the last tie to his former life of servitude, not of his current life of conquest, the kind of conquest that would put him in a comfy office in D.C. after, only after, he gave the military what it had asked for. But all Karl cared about right now was eating Cheetos and the building was out of them. Not a bag of Cheetos in the place. If Lemaître Labs survived the next few days, things were going to change around here.

  Change. That was funny.

  Karl went back through the selections. Crunchy and cheesy. Crunchy and chee
sy. Crunchy and cheesy. The Baked Doritos were nacho cheese, but the Baked Ruffles were sour cream and cheddar. The Popchips—No. No Popchips. Karl punched E-4. Nacho Cheese Baked Doritos. They weren’t Cheetos, but they’d do. The corkscrew slowly turned and the underfilled bag of chips moved toward the edge and stopped.

  “Are you kidding me?” he said, his voice no more than a whisper. He pushed the machine and the thing wobbled slightly on its short leg, but the bag held. “Come on.”

  The chittering from HR grew louder, and Karl realized he might not be the only one hungry. He didn’t want to be around when those jerks came looking for munchies. No, no, no. He grabbed the 670-pound vending machine with both hands and shook, just like the sign on the side told him not to. It rocked forward and back, forward and back, the Doritos hanging on for one, two, three—then the bag dropped.

  Something big scuttled behind him from one cubicle wall to the next, and Karl froze. Most people—except that stupid David Collison—had reported to work today and none of them had left. They were all probably in a foul mood. Fear began to grow in him like a tumor. Karl reached into the metal flap near the bottom of the machine, grabbed his chips and turned toward the elevator. That was when a roar he felt in his own chest bellowed throughout HR.

  As Karl leaned against the vending machine, a light at the far end of the hall popped on and a massive hairy leg appeared from around a corner. Oscar was loose.

  He ran.

  2

  The stairs seemed to move slowly beneath Dave’s feet, like an escalator going the wrong way. A step moaned under his sock, the step that was always loose. He paused, but only for a moment. He didn’t want Brick to trip and fall on him.

  But Dave’s mind wasn’t fully here. The dim hole of the basement stairway had sucked his thoughts somewhere else.

  “Come on down, Davey,” Delbert Sanderson said from his workbench around 1980 or ’81, soldering gun in hand, computer hardware and wires strewn in front of him. Dave had snuck down the stairs as quietly as he could, but that one stupid, stupid step groaned under his slight weight.