So You Had to Build a Time Machine

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

  The woman in the pink shirt raised her hand.

  “Yes, Danielle.”

  Already got her name, Skid thought. This guy is smooth.

  “If this is where he washed off the blood,” she said, pausing to bite her lower lip. Skid made barf face behind her. “Aren’t we going through the tour backward?”

  Skid watched for any crack in Cord’s armor. No chance.

  “Why yes we are,” he said, then addressed the entire tour packed into the kitchen like a boring family dinner. The smile he wore would sell anyone a car.

  Yep. My father would hire you in a second.

  “Would you all like to see where it began?” A few murmurs of yes came from the group. “Would you like to start with the first murder?” The murmurs turned into a smattering of applause.

  Brick didn’t clap, but Beverly did.

  “Okay then.” He motioned for everyone to follow and started to walk toward the hallway when the walls began to swim.

  Skid’s hand shot out and grabbed the cabinet. Her eyes flashed to Brick. “You feel that?”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah.” Beverly grabbed Brick’s arm.

  An air freshener smell grew thick in the kitchen, the same smell that had accompanied Dave’s fall into the hallway.

  “Brick?”

  “Yeah, Skid.”

  “Do you see the walls moving?”

  “Yeah, Skid.”

  Beverly tugged Brick’s arm. “What’s happening?”

  He gently rested a hand over hers. “I don’t know. I—”

  A wall of what felt like water pushed past, engulfing them, then moved on, leaving them standing quietly in the still kitchen.

  Beverly’s nails bit into Brick’s arm as she tugged. “I don’t want to be here anymore. Can we go?”

  “That was weird,” Brick said, then closed his mouth. We? A dog barked from somewhere upstairs.

  “Oh, no.” It came from Skid.

  He turned toward her. Beverly no longer pulled at him; her hands now clutched his. “What?”

  “The curtains are different,” she said, her voice shaking. She pointed to the thin green drapes at the window over the sink. Guernsey cows formed its border. “Dave said Mrs. Sanderson wouldn’t like Cord’s curtains.”

  Someone laughed from the hallway and conversations began, quietly at first.

  “Whoa.” Brick released Beverly’s hands and leaned back into the refrigerator door. The blocky harvest wheat-colored unit leaned with him. “Do you think we’re there? Do you think this is the night the murders happened?”

  “No.” Beverly had stepped away from them, her arms folded across her chest. “No. That’s not possible.”

  Skid resisted an urge to look outside; she didn’t want to know what was out there. “Neither is a burned house that never burned.”

  The dog barked again. “What—” A yelp stopped her, then the dog fell silent.

  “The Sanderson guy killed the dog, too,” Brick said, standing up. The refrigerator thunked back into place. “He’s going to murder his family. Tonight. Now. We gotta stop him.”

  Skid stepped in front of Brick. “We can’t do that.”

  “He’s going to kill two people,” Brick shouted. Someone from the hallway cheered.

  “No. He killed two people. Past tense.” Skid held her hands in front of her. “We can’t change what’s happened. He already killed them.”

  Brick’s meathooks grew into fists. “No, he hasn’t. They’re still here. They’re alive.”

  A woman screamed from upstairs.

  “Okay,” he continued. “Maybe he has. But there’s still Tommy. We have to try and save him.”

  Someone in the hall screamed as footsteps thundered down the stairs. Skid, Brick and Beverly stepped toward the scream.

  “Tommy,” a man shouted from upstairs. “This is why I never got your teeth straightened.”

  “No,” came from a different voice as feet landed in the hallway. “Get out of my way.”

  A light flashed as someone in the hall took a picture of 32-year-old Thomas Sanderson, squat and cushy, his wet eyes seeming to see nothing. Tommy pushed through the ghost tour as he moved toward the kitchen.

  “Hey, it’s Tommy,” someone shouted.

  “Why are you people in my house?” Delbert Sanderson had reached the hallway, the blood of his wife and dog Muffit glinting in 100-watt light off the samurai blade he held. “Tommy,” he bellowed and ran past the tour members, who pressed themselves against the walls while still hissing delightedly at one another, Can you believe how real this is?

  Tommy reached the kitchen seconds before his father.

  Skid stepped in front of Brick. This is wrong. The whackjob killed Tommy in the hallway.

  Tommy looked at Skid. Confusion filled his face before he turned toward his father.

  “Dad, please,” escaped his mouth before the blade came down on his neck, blood spraying the refrigerator and cow curtains. Delbert Sanderson pulled the sword back and struck again, sinking it into his son’s chest. Tommy dropped to the floor gurgling. The cold Japanese steel slid out effortlessly, like Delbert had cut a sandwich.

  Cord yelled, “Holy shit,” from somewhere down the hall. Someone else cheered.

  “Get out of my house,” Delbert screamed, his eyes wide and jiggly, like a cheap doll’s. He lunged toward Skid, who jumped out of the way. Beverly screamed behind her.

  Skid’s body tensed. Her body on full-automatic. She kicked Delbert’s left knee out from under him as a giant fist flew from above her head and crashed into the madman’s face. Delbert flew backward and crumpled into a pile; the sword clinked on the linoleum.

  Cord appeared in the kitchen. “Holy shit,” he said again. “This just happened. This just happened. Holy shit.”

  “We could have stopped this,” Brick barked at Skid. “We could have—” Then his voice dropped to a whisper. “Oh, no. No.”

  Skid turned. Beverly sat on the floor, grasping her arm. Blood ran from between her fingers. No. No. No.

  “Beverly?” The word came out of Brick like it didn’t want to.

  “Come on.” Skid grabbed a dish towel from the counter and dropped to her knees. The sword had barely nicked Beverly. Skid wrapped the towel around her arm. “She’s going to be okay.” She smiled at Beverly. “You’re going to be okay. It’s just a surface wound.”

  “We could have stopped this,” Brick said again.

  A weight seemed to drop on Skid. “I need you to be here with me, big guy,” Skid said, popping to her feet, pulling Beverly up by her good arm. She reached up and grabbed Brick’s hairy chin, turning his face to meet hers. “I can’t do this alone.”

  “Uh, guys.” Cord stood looking out the window over the sink. A man stood in the window of the house next door holding a telephone receiver to his ear, the pigtail of wire trailed behind him. The man had dialed “0,” Cord knew, because on Friday that man told him so. Cord held up a hand and waved at a decades-younger Olan Wanker.

  “Uh, guys. Somebody get the scientist,” Cord said. “We gotta get out of here.”

  “What’s the matter?” Skid asked.

  “That guy over there,” he said, pointing. “He’s calling the cops.”

  Chapter Six

  September IV: The Quest for Peace

  1

  “My phone doesn’t have any bars,” someone said from the hallway.

  Skid ignored him and moved away from the cabinets, skirting the bloody corpse of Tommy Sanderson.

  “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” she tried to say to those on the ghost tour who had wandered toward the kitchen, but her voice caught in her throat. She coughed, trying to clear it. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” she said again, louder. “We’ve had a—” She stopped, the faces from the hallway filled with excitement, or horror. Her voice caught again.

&n
bsp; Cord stepped next to her. “We’ve experienced a major temporal anomaly,” he said, his voice calm, steady, comforting. “This is the kind of thing you paid for, folks. Just please move down the hall to the front room. I’ll be there in a moment to discuss what happened.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and held it up for them to see. “The anomaly disrupted cell service, so you may be out of contact with loved ones or your favorite pizza place until the universe normalizes.”

  He walked into the hallway, herding the ghost tour away from the carnage. A man in the back took a picture of the bloody mess before Cord rested a hand on his shoulder and turned him toward the living room.

  “Also,” he said into the crowd. “If anyone’s thirsty, the Sanderson Murder House offers whatever pop is in the fridge for only $2.50 a can.”

  “He’s incorrigible,” Beverly said, holding onto her wounded arm.

  Skid went to the sink and turned on the cold water, splashing it on her face. When she looked up, Olen Wanker was staring at her. She pulled the cow curtains closed, shutting him out; the neighbor was still on the phone. The darkening sky and tungsten lights had intensified the bloody painting of the kitchen to a vivid red.

  “Okay,” she said, her normally tight-fitting mental armor beginning to unravel. “There’s been a double homicide here tonight and, according to Cord, the Gladys Kravitz type over there has called the cops.” She focused on Brick. “We need a plan.”

  “We need to leave before the police show up,” Brick said. “How do we explain this, us, everything?”

  “We can’t leave.” Dave stood outside the open door to the sunroom, a hand on the frame to steady his unsteady legs. The bodies of Delbert and Tommy Sanderson drew his attention. “The sad thing is, this might not be the worst day of my life.”

  “Who is this?” Beverly asked.

  “David Collison, Ph.D.,” Skid whispered. “And why can’t we leave?”

  “The missing scientist?” Beverly stepped away from everyone and moved closer to the back door. “Did you kidnap him?”

  Dave laughed a dull “ha,” his expression lifeless, like he’d just woke up from a bad dream and realized he was still in it. “I wish. That would be a heck of a lot more fun than this.”

  “Why can’t—”

  Dave released the door frame and walked to the table, plopping into a chair. He used his heel to roll Delbert onto his side and out of his way, then paused to consider Beverly. “I don’t know you, but you look like a nice person. Would you please get me a beer from the fridge? There should be at least half a case of Old Milwaukee on the bottom shelf.”

  Not knowing what else to do, she moved to the refrigerator.

  “I am aware we’re stuck in a house with three dead bodies,” Dave continued. Delbert moaned; his body shifted slightly. “Two dead bodies. But the thing you all need to understand is that what we did on the BAB-C was run quantum physics experiments. Cord called it a major temporal anomaly, which is surprisingly accurate.”

  Beverly stepped over Delbert and set a beer on the table in front of Dave.

  “Thank you.” The crack of a pull-tab was unusually loud in the kitchen. “You look confused.”

  “Dave, this is Beverly, and I’ll catch her up,” Brick said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “Keep talking.”

  “On Friday, our project leader Karl Miller ran an unauthorized experiment that has ripped open every conceivable dimension and point in time. Those are now slamming together at random speeds.” Dave took a swig and set his drink down, holding it in both hands. “Every insane thing any of us can think of not only can happen, it probably will. When we get home, or as close to home as it matters, we have to get to my lab. We have to shut off the Big-Assed Bastard.”

  “But why can’t we leave right now?” Skid asked.

  “Because when the next Miller Wave crashes,” Dave said, “if we’re not in the same place we were when the last wave crashed, we may never get home.”

  2

  David threw the empty whisky bottle across the bench seat and out the open passenger window of the farmer’s pickup. It hit the dry, brown grass on the shoulder and skidded into a ditch. Nope, officer. No whisky bottles here.

  Dusk descended on the day hard and fast like an ambush when the tall sign for the Flying J Travel Center appeared on the horizon. There might not be more whisky there, but there would be a telephone. He had to call Karl, to warn him of the visitors who’d be coming sometime soon.

  He put on his right turn signal out of habit, not necessity. Traffic on U.S. 71, both ways, had dried up. Where is everybody? he wondered, but really, he knew. It was Monday night in the Midwest. Everyone was home having family dinner or watching football. But that didn’t explain the lack of trucks. Maybe the missing vehicles were his fault, too.

  He slowed as he pulled the pickup onto the off-ramp and stopped at the bottom, the dusty stop sign riddled with bullet holes.

  “Owww,” he shouted to no one, his wounded leg screaming in pain.

  He considered calling 9-1-1 at the truck stop but quickly pushed that thought from his head. Police would come, and they might be looking for a stolen pickup, one with his fingerprints, his blood. There’s a facility at the lab, Davey boy. You’re close. So close. County routes J and C intersected under the highway. C ran into East State Route YY that led to the lab, but he couldn’t just show up at the lab unannounced. He’d given Brick his card key.

  The signal tock-tocked when David turned left and pushed the accelerator, gritting his teeth at the pain he knew was coming. The speedometer grew to 25 mph by the time the truck reached Route J, the lights of Flying J already flooding its parking lot.

  Almost there. Just gotta call Karl, tell him to get Med Services ready. Tell him—

  The air inside the cab became still, static. David’s eyes shot to the rearview mirror. A ripple bent the rural highway behind him, twisting the asphalt out of shape and dropping it back in place behind it.

  “Oh, no.”

  The electric connections to contract David’s muscles enough to mash his foot into the accelerator began to fire when the wave slammed into the truck and David’s world melted around him.

  He no longer drove a truck.

  Oh god never had the chance to escape his mouth. His shoulder hit the grassy ground, not like an action hero throwing himself into a shoulder roll and coming up swinging, more like when a Chevrolet Suburban hits a deer.

  He didn’t know how far he rolled and didn’t care. He was still alive. David lay on his face in the grass. When he moved his fingers and toes, new pain flared through the knife wound in his leg. He was sure it had started to bleed again. The side of his face throbbed, but he could still move his jaw.

  I’m okay, he lied to himself, then opened his eyes.

  He lay in a field, the buzz of traffic on U.S. 71 behind him, and started to laugh. I was in a truck. My body is caught in a temporal, possibly dimensional, shift cycle and I’m stupid enough to be inside a moving truck. “Unbelievable.”

  Wherever he was, the light from the truck stop didn’t exist. Day was swiftly dropping out of sight. Let’s go, Davey boy. Now you can call an ambulance. He took in his surroundings. He lay in a field, yes, but it wouldn’t be one for long. A yellow bulldozer rested about thirty yards away, awaiting its role in the work on what would one day be the Flying J’s parking lot. A dump truck was also parked in front of a crumbling sign identifying the ruins around it as the “Highway 71 Motel: Best sleep in the Midwest.” But the loader grabbed his attention. It stood right where the entrance to the truck stop would be. David had rolled to within a foot of the front tire.

  Get up. You need a doctor. As David pushed himself to his knees, the searing pain in his leg almost dropped him back on his face. Suck it up. His left hand reached above him for something, anything to grab. It fell on some kind of tube covered in rubber. A cord? A cable? Or it might have been a hose. At th
is point he didn’t care. David tightened his grip and pulled. Whatever it was, it held.

  He reached out with his right hand and found the wheel hub. He pushed, dragging both legs beneath him. You got this. You got this. His breath came in quick bursts through his teeth as he regained his feet. Yeah. I got it.

  Then something snapped and the cord came loose. He thrust himself forward, throwing both hands onto the tire to keep his feet as a thick, cold liquid poured over his shirt, the smell that attacked his nostrils familiar. Hydraulic fluid.

  3

  Laughter and applause echoed from the front room. Cord was starting to impress Skid and she didn’t like it. Not at all. “We may never get back to our exact timeline, but there’s always a chance we’ll get to a timeline close enough it won’t really matter,” she said, moving from the table to the hallway, her Hello Kitty sneakers all but silent. She turned back to the people gathered in the kitchen. “But this will be irrelevant when the cops show up. Police of any time don’t look kindly on people at a murder scene. They tend to call us ‘suspects.’”

  “I knew there was a reason I sat by you Friday.” Dave had finished his beer. He asked for another, but nobody moved closer to the refrigerator, so he got up and did it himself. “But we don’t have to worry about the police, because the next Miller Wave should put us somewhere we won’t have been arrested.”

  Skid rested fists on her hips. “Miller Wave?”

  “I didn’t name them, Karl Miller did.”

  Brick had moved away from Beverly to loom over Delbert, who was slowly regaining consciousness. Beverly now sat on the counter where Skid had perched earlier. She’d found Cecelia’s pitcher of screwdrivers in the refrigerator and drained two Care Bears Pizza Hut Funshine Bear glasses of it. She was on her third.

  “And what,” Skid said, “did good ol’ Karl do to us?”

  “The universe, or universes, are normally static, by which I mean they stay separate and don’t intersect,” Dave said. “At least not often. But now they’re like a bar jukebox on random. We have to suffer through some god-awful pop songs, but the juke box will eventually play the tune we like. But to enjoy it, we have to be in the same bar when it plays.”