Beverly laughed. To Skid, it sounded like the annoying laugh of a sitcom neighbor. “Unless it’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.’ Am I right?”
Skid’s jaws clenched. I like ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.
“And we have all those unsuspecting ghost-hunters to think about,” Dave added, ignoring her. “They have no clue what’s going on. It will serve them best if they never know.”
Delbert moaned again. “I wonder if the abusive asshole knows someone is drinking his beer,” Dave muttered.
“So, the juke box is on random,” Skid interrupted, “but songs aren’t the same length.” Her eyes grew wide, and she dropped back into her chair. “Wait a second. These waves are random. Brick and I saw the last one coming, we felt it move through us, but you’re still here. You didn’t vanish this time.”
“Oh, I did,” Dave said. “You didn’t notice because you vanished with me. We’re becoming more and more tied together.”
Brick leaned on the table. It tipped enough some of Dave’s beer sloshed onto the Formica surface. “I hate not being able to do anything.”
“It’s the Miller Waves, Brick.” Dave stuck a finger in the spilled beer and stirred. Despite the nap, he looked tired. “The waves emitting from the BAB-C are at varying strengths at varying intervals. This makes their effects, and their timing, as random and unpredictable as possible.” He lifted his finger to his mouth and licked the beer. “A wave is coming, one that will probably drop us back in the house we left. We just have to wait for it.”
“Why are they so random?” Skid asked. “If your lab successfully initiated these time, dimension, whatever waves, why can’t you control them?”
A laugh jumped from Dave. “You haven’t read much on quantum indeterminacy, have you? It’s math with a bit of guesswork to fill in the blanks. It’s the randomness in Karl’s equations that are dangerous.”
“What’s that mean?” Brick asked.
“It means some people may be sucked into the next Miller wave but not into the one after that. There’s no predicting how the next wave will work, or when.”
The sound of police sirens seeped into the kitchen through the open window. The unmistakable wail must have hit the living room, as well. Some clown yelled, “busted,” which got more laughs than it should.
“Visitors are on their way,” Skid said, her strength coming back. “We might not have that long to wait.”
“No, we don’t.”
They turned toward Brick, who stood at the open back door.
“Beverly’s gone.”
4
There were a lot of things Skid wanted right then, and to be home in a hot bath topped the list. The thing she didn’t want was a piece of missing luggage at baggage claim.
Brick tensed to move, but she stepped in his way.
“Whoa. If we’re going to stay together, we can’t leave the house. Bud Light Dave said so.”
The sound of an empty can clattering across the table came from behind them. “I don’t think I like that name.”
Brick flexed, the muscles of his arms rolled under the fabric of his flannel shirt. “I have to go get her. She’ll be stranded here.”
Come on, Skid. What are you doing? What are you doing?
“Then so will you.” She swallowed and pushed his arms down. For some reason, he let her. “I’ll go. I’m faster than you.”
“But—”
She waved and bolted out the door before he could protest, leaping down the steps and through the open gate in the chain-link fence. This is stupid, Skid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But she also knew she’d want someone to do the same for her if she lost her shit.
There were things Randall Roe wouldn’t allow his daughter to do at Roe Bros. Circus: tightrope walking, high diving and lion taming. She may have spent most of her life up to her armpits in elephant poo, but she had never had her head in the mouth of a 400-pound cat. Knife throwing and driving a motorcycle under a Russian bear dancing on top of a ramp-jumping clown car were fine, but what took up most of her time was running. Running messages, running bandages, running pizza money. Just running.
She ran now.
A figure moved clumsily under a streetlamp up the block, the old yellow lights eerie in the night. Beverly. Skid was in full sprint as a police car, an old Plymouth Fury with lights flashing, buzzed past her.
The car slowed and somebody shouted, “Hey.”
“Damn it,” she hissed under her breath and tried to keep away from the pools of yellow light, her stomach clamped in a vise.
Beverly stumbled ahead of her. Three screwdrivers in a different temporal plane will do that to a person, kind of like jet lag on Krypton. Skid caught up to her in seconds, Beverly limping on the sidewalk between a bush and a 1979 AMC Pacer. Skid didn’t try to talk with her, there was no time. She bumped Beverly like a NASCAR driver, sending the woman crashing through the bush into a shadowed yard. She slid to a stop and doubled back.
“Hey,” Beverly said, her breath coming in vodka wheezes. Skid didn’t breathe heavily at all.
“Shhh,” Skid hissed, her voice low. She grabbed Beverly’s arm.
“Ouch. Hey, stop it.”
Skid pressed a hand over Beverly’s mouth and leaned close, nose-to-nose. “You’ve put us all in danger.”
Beverly tried to shake loose but couldn’t. Skid’s arms were hammered iron.
“Do you know where you are?”
Beverly nodded.
“Really?” Skid’s grip over Beverly’s mouth never loosened, the weakness, the fear she’d felt now buried deeply, back where she liked it. Beverly pinched her eyes tight and when she opened them, they were hazy with tears.
“Do you know where you are?” Skid repeated. This time Beverly shook her head.
“You are in 1984 and if you ever want to get back to where you’re supposed to be—” She paused, choosing her next words carefully. “If you ever want to see Brick again, we have to get back to that house. Do you understand?”
Beverly’s eyes grew wide.
“Yes?”
Beverly drunkenly nodded.
“Good. Keep quiet and come with me.” Skid slowly released Beverly’s mouth and stood, pulling her to her feet. “Let’s go.”
They kept to the back yards that separated them from the Sanderson house, Skid holding Beverly’s hand so she couldn’t get away. Drunk people were unpredictable.
“How can we be in 1984?” Beverly asked, her voice as quiet as three screwdrivers would allow. “This isn’t the movies. We can’t do this kind of thing.”
Skid shushed her as they stopped at the fence of the Sanderson yard and she squatted behind a thin veil of decorative plants. She pulled Beverly down with her.
“Now,” Skid whispered, pointing toward the back door. A police officer stood in the yard, thumbs in his belt, looking over the street. “—we need to get over this fence. I’ll take care of the cop—”
“But it’s a police officer,” Beverly said in a drunk whisper.
Skid paused and took in Beverly. Past the confusion, past the annoyance, she could see kindness in Beverly’s face. Maybe that’s why Brick liked her. She helped Beverly to her feet.
“Come on. Please don’t pull this crap again.”
5
Officer Poulson had a hard time getting the handcuffs shut over Brick’s thick wrists.
“That really isn’t necessary,” Brick said, holding his arms behind his back simply because the officer told him to.
“Shut your mouth, Dan Haggerty,” Officer Poulson said as he tried again. Officer Davis had already helped Delbert Sanderson into a chair and cuffed Dave, who sat in a chair in front of a beer he could no longer reach. “And don’t step in that blood. It’s evidence.”
Tommy Sanderson had bled as much as Tommy Sanderson would bleed, leaking a pool of sticky, dark fluid staining the linoleum of dead Cecilia Sand
erson’s once spotless kitchen floor.
“We didn’t do anything,” Brick said, shuffling a step to his left as Officer Poulson finally clicked the cuffs closed.
“Ouch. That hurt.”
“Don’t, Brick.” Dave sat back and relaxed. “It doesn’t matter. Do you smell that?”
The room was suddenly awash in the odor of a giant air purifier that had just clicked on. Someone protested from the front room. Probably more handcuffs. Police were everywhere.
Dave’s eyes bore into Brick’s. “It’s coming.”
6
“I don’t feel comfortable running from the police,” Beverly said, attempting sobriety.
Skid tried to ignore her as she glanced at the back door. Officer Thumbs-in-His-Belt hadn’t moved. “Can you get over this fence?”
Beverly shrugged, gazing toward Skid with glassy eyes. “I think so.”
Great. “Remind me never to go to a bar with you.”
The sky, tinted in the flashing reds and blues of police lights, wavered in the distance. Houses in at the far reaches of Skid’s vision swelled then bowed as if they were made of sound.
“Oh, no.”
She turned to the lost, confused woman next to her. “If you ever want to see Brick, or your family, or ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ again, you’ll get over that fence, and you’ll do it the moment I signal. Now, get ready.”
In a fluid motion Skid shot up, setting a hand on the top metal bar of the fence for support and launched herself over. She landed silently on the Sanderson lawn. The officer, about twenty yards away, didn’t move. Skid stuck a hand in Beverly’s direction without looking and snapped it open and shut three times fast before taking off in a dead sprint.
Chain links rattled behind her as Beverly fell into the yard. The cop heard it too, but it didn’t matter. By the time he’d turned halfway toward Beverly’s jingle, Skid dropped into a baseball slide and took the man’s legs out from under him. The officer landed awkwardly, his face planting in the grass.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” Skid whispered as she ripped the handcuffs off the officer’s belt like she’d done it before and slapped one side on a wrist, dragging the surprised man’s arms behind his back and pushing the second cuff closed on the other wrist by the time Beverly had made it to her, huffing.
“How … did … ?”
“Come on,” Skid said, grabbing the woman’s hand and dragging her up the steps.
The policemen in the kitchen may have heard their man drop outside but didn’t show it. The Miller Wave had made it to the house, sweeping through the front room to the hallway. Brick’s eyes grew wide as it engulfed the kitchen, he and Dave dissolving into nothingness before Skid’s eyes.
She pressed Beverly’s hand more tightly in hers as they passed the threshold of the kitchen and leapt into the Miller Wave.
7
The day had melted into darkness by the time David decided he couldn’t stay at the construction site any longer. Not because of the humming, chirping, buzzing insects he was certain wanted to drink his blood, but because his leg and the side of his face throbbed. He wished he’d saved some whisky—not to drink but to pour into his leg wound, then to drink. He pictured the leg red and swollen under the thin material of his slacks, but he wasn’t going to look. It was probably even worse.
A vehicle, just one, had driven by during the time he’d leaned against the loader’s tire. A pickup with stock racks in the back and two Yorkshire pigs looking at him over dirty, wet noses. He raised his arm and waved at the farmer, who raised an index finger off the steering wheel and kept driving.
David needed help now; he knew it. A warm flush spread across his face, but whether it was from an infection fever or all the skin he’d rubbed off dropping out of the air at 25 mph, he wasn’t sure. The loader didn’t have a magic farmer’s glove compartment like the pickup he’d borrowed. A lighter would have been nice. People tend to show up when things get set on fire, even at this spot in whenever.
The highway traffic had slowed, only one, maybe two cars zipped by every few minutes on their way to and from Kansas City, but the darkness gave him something he hadn’t expected. Stars blazed in the sky this far in the country; David picked out the constellations Andromeda and Triangulum in the northeast. He hadn’t seen stars like this since college, since the night he and—
His body sensed something was wrong before his brain could catch up. Gooseflesh grew on his forearms even though the night had to be in the low 80s.
“What—” he started to say, but the realization hit him. The insects had stopped humming, chirping and buzzing; the night birds were silent. Except for the car that drove south from KC on the highway that seemed so far away, the night had fallen silent, dead. David’s guts clenched like he’d taken a punch. I’m not alone.
“Hello,” he said, his voice louder than he’d expected.
Something moved at the corner of the loader, emerging from the tall grass, something like a dog, but not a dog. The fur may have been gray, or maybe tan, but he couldn’t tell in the darkness. The beast, at least fifty pounds, bared its teeth and growled.
“Good bo—” David started to say, but a crunching in the tall drying grass to his right destroyed the moment. He slowly turned his head toward the sound. Another dog-thing, slightly smaller than the first, crouched at the other edge of the loader.
Coyotes, he thought. Those are coyotes.
Outside the Roadrunner cartoons and nature programs, David had never seen a coyote. These lean, angry beasts, their muscles rolling beneath their fur, didn’t look anything like the ACME mail-order junkie or even like the lone creatures that roamed the American West, avoiding humans. They looked too big, too dangerous.
These aren’t regular coyotes. These are super-coyotes—I’m not home.
Another coyote appeared next to the second. It began to slink forward, low to the ground, almost obscured in the grass. No, no, no. David turned back to the first, which hadn’t moved, then back to his right.
I’m going to die. A shiver ran through his body. No. I’ve traveled through time and space. I’ve been stabbed. I fell out of the sky. And I lived. I am not going to be killed by a cartoon character.
“Shoo,” he shouted.
The beast froze for a second, only a second, before it started creeping forward slowly again. David knew what would happen. He’d seen enough nature programs to understand coyote number three was probably a distraction. With the other coyote coming toward him, the big one on his left would leap at David’s back and take him down.
He stuck his hand in his pants pocket and grabbed the only thing there, pivoted on his good leg and threw overhand. The ring, with keys to his apartment, the laundry room, Toyota Camry, his parent’s house and the office of a company he hadn’t worked for in eight years, flew from his fingers and spun through the air. The jingling metal mass smashed into the coyote’s forehead. It yelped and scampered backward. The grass to his right rustled as the other wolf wannabes vanished into the darkness.
“Yeah. You better run,” David hollered into the night before he dropped backward onto the tire, his heart hammering like a drum solo.
“What the heck, man?” He pulled the sleeve of his Oxford shirt across his forehead, wiping off sweat and replacing it with hydraulic fluid. “Coyotes? What else does the universe have to throw at me?”
Another set of headlights appeared on Route C and continued under the highway to Route J; straight toward David.
“Yes,” he screamed into the night. “Yes. Come on, baby.” Not that the volume disturbed the flies that had begun to crawl on his leg and face like on those poor starving kids on the late-night Save the Children commercials.
The headlights wavered in what could have been a heat mirage if this had been Death Valley in September instead of Missouri. But this wasn’t Death Valley, and that wasn’t a heat mirage. The Miller Wave hit
David, and the field, the loader and the headlights dropped out of his reality, the night peeled away and revealed a white room bathed in fluorescent light.
His stomach lurched and almost found its way out. A bathroom? I’m in a bathroom. Wherever he was, it was better than coyote ugly. He reached a hand behind him and felt the cool porcelain of a sink. “It’s a public bathroom.” Darting looks all over the room, he identified a spring-powered door next. “There’s got to be a telephone out there.”
He released the sink and limped forward. The pain in his leg sent tears down his dirty face. A sound reached his ears, a rhythmic thumping. Music pounded through the pain. Music? David’s hand, now shaking from fear, lack of sleep, lack of food, adrenalin, it didn’t matter, gripped the door handle and opened it. He threw himself into the hallway and slammed into the wall opposite the door.
“Hey,” said a soft, deep voice from farther into a hallway full of music, the kind of thump-thump dance music that gave him a headache.
“That was some dump, huh?” said the deep voice as somewhere a door shut, lessening the pounding of the repetitive beat.
David twisted his neck to stare up at the man, the big, big man. His mouth dropped. It can’t be, although he knew that it sure as hell could be. David planted both hands on the wall and shoved himself toward the giant.
“Brick,” David wheezed.
Brick stepped away from him. “Hey, back off, now.”
He doesn’t know me, David thought. He took another step toward Brick, planting his weight on the wrong foot.
“Ooooh.” The pain doubled him over. Leg’s bleeding again, Davey boy. Bloody footprints all over this nice tiled floor. Black spots swam before his eyes, so he shut them.
“Holy shit,” Brick whispered. “What happened to you?”
So You Had to Build a Time Machine Page 12
