by Paul Jones
The name rang a bell somewhere in his memory. He repeated the name of the shopping center over in his head a couple of times.
Fallbrook Mall, Fallbrook Mall.
"Got it," he said, with a snap of his fingers. It was the name of the mall he used to shop at when he still lived in California; when they had still lived out in the San Fernando Valley. There was a great little Italian restaurant that he and Simone would eat at and a Cineplex that they used to take ... Lark.
His eyes dropped to ground level again and he began to walk towards the low brick wall bordering the building, hedging in a perimeter of sad looking flowers, wilted and dry under the sweltering sun.
From the corner of his eye, he caught movement, his head turned quickly to focus at what had drawn his attention. Someone was watching him.
On the other side of the doors, standing in the foyer of the mall, a man stared intently at Jim. Dressed in khaki pants, a white open collared shirt and a black leather jacket, the stranger looked to be in his thirties, brown hair swept back over his forehead, eyes locked solidly with his own.
Jim took a step back in surprise. The figure took a step back too. Astonishment crossed both their faces. Jim raised his left hand; the stranger mimicked his gesture. "Christ," Jim whispered as he stepped forward and placed his hand flat against the doors of the mall, reaching out he touched the face of himself echoed in its mirrored surface. The face of Jim Baston when he was thirty-eight years old.
* * *
Eight
I must have fallen asleep at the wheel.
That was all Byron Portia had time to think before the road in front of him turned into a sea of shimmering red as drivers thumped brake pedals to the floor, their vehicles’ brake lights suddenly glowing like hot coals.
This was all wrong. An instant ago he was a half hour outside of LA, his earlier plan of reaching the city by midnight delayed by an unexpected accident outside of Baker. Some fool kid with too much synth-ahol in his system or jacked-up on the latest designer drug had forgotten to turn on their car's AI, smashed into the support of a bridge and spread both their car and themselves over eight lanes of the highway. The tailback had stretched all the way back towards Vegas for thirty miles and cost him three hours of his time. He had celebrated New Year sitting in in the cab of his eighteen-wheeler. He had not bothered hurrying after that. The time was past for him to find anybody suitable for his purposes that night.
But that was all okay. Everything happened for a reason, he knew. And so, he had contented himself with the speed limit and tried not to dwell on the missed opportunity. He understood, he was protected.
And then suddenly... this.
Night was replaced by blinding daylight and blue sky. The sparse industrialized outskirts of Los Angeles, shrouded in the comforting shadow of darkness, supplanted by the urban sprawl of ... where? He had no idea. Cars everywhere. Confusion followed by a strange sick sensation of abruptly arrested motion in his stomach.
He sucked in an instinctive gulp of air and held it as all around him vehicles began careening and skidding across the unfamiliar freeway in a slow motion ballet of chaos. Clouds of smoke erupted from tires as panicked drivers brought their vehicles rapidly down to zero and stopped dead in their tracks only to be sent careening off by others behind them who could not react quickly enough to the wall of metal that was thrown up in front of them.
He saw one car lurch awkwardly into the air, corkscrewing gracelessly over the concrete median dividing his side of the freeway from oncoming traffic. The face of its terrified driver plainly visible for a moment as the driver's side window of the airborne sedan passed in front of Byron's windshield before disappearing in a massive ball of flame as it ripped through a stalled RV, before cartwheeling away out of his view.
Byron had no chance of stopping as his foot smashed into the brake-pedal; it was instinctive, it was automatic and intuitive but it was also stupid. The big-rig he was riding wasn't a car: it took time to slow down. Gentle caressing of the hydraulic breaks was all that would bring one of these metal leviathans of the freeway to a safe stop. Hammering the breaks could only lead to one result and even as the thought slipped through his mind, he felt the dynamics of his vehicle begin to change.
The forty feet of trailer hitched behind his rig began to slide forward and his cab begin to slip off to the left, centrifugal force trying to push the two pieces of machinery together. He tried to compensate by turning the wheel into the skid, trying to avert the oncoming jackknifing of his rig but he could already feel it was too late. He was going too fast and he had hit the brakes too hard. It wasn't going to matter anyway, too many damn cars ahead of him. All he could do now was hang on.
It was gradual, taking place over the space of a couple of seconds, but it felt as though it was five or six times as long, time stretched out for him by the sudden dumping of the contents of his adrenal glands into his system. He felt the potential energy building in his vehicle, the cabin begin to strum and squeal as the tension resonated through the tortured metal. Energy built furiously in those ... long ... drawn ... out ... seconds ... before
... the rig detonated.
His steering wheel whipped out of his hands and Byron catapulted from his seat, exploding toward the roof of the cab. An empty Coke can flew past him as he smashed into the ceiling, knocking the stored air from his straining lungs. The windshield imploded into the interior of the cabin with the sound of a million shattered bottles, broken glass showering the leather driver’s seat with diamond hailstones.
Through the newly punctured eye of his cab, he felt the numbing rush of freezing air and watched the outside world spinning and tumbling, the scream of twisting metal and the cracking and splitting of plastic a strange but somehow fitting anthem for this disaster.
He was heading down again, back towards the warped dashboard and the strangely possessed steering wheel that thrashed and turned as if the driver's seat now belonged to some invisible, deranged demon-driver.
Byron Portia: truck driver and the most successful serial killer the world had yet known, plummeted towards the floor of his cab. His head smashed against the steering wheel with a sharp crack and consciousness fled from him like rainwater down a storm drain.
* * *
Nine
The store he was looking for - according to the mall map he had consulted earlier - should be on the ground floor, on the opposite side of the mall to the exit. He found it just as the sign had said, nestled between a Sears and Radio Shack.
Dillon's Bookstore the sign above the entrance announced. Jim picked his way through the literary rubble of spilled fiction, true crime, encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauruses. The occasional dropped briefcase or dumped school satchel was the only indication that the cause of the destruction both within and outside the bookstore was rooted in human panic, and not some strange weather anomaly that had run its destructive course throughout the mall.
Against the far wall of the bookstore, Jim found what he was looking for. He reached for a copy of the LA Times from the rack, not bothering to read the headline or open the broadsheet. Instead, he quickly scanned the top of the front page looking for the date: Saturday June 13th 2017. Tossing the paper aside, he grabbed a New York Times: same date, same year. One after another, he checked the remaining newspapers. All of them read the same.
There was no way in hell this could be right. He had, until only minutes earlier been over two thousand miles away in New Orleans, safely hidden away from the world in a cramped but comfortable hotel room in 2042. Yet, now, somehow he found himself standing in a bookstore twenty-five years in the past. And, judging from the commotion and confusion he had witnessed since his arrival, he wasn't the only one who had made the journey, either.
Goosebumps cascaded down the length of his arms as a dizzying feeling of unreality washed over him. He leaned against a rack of books waiting for the queasiness to pass; hoping he would not throw up while sucking in deep gulps of air.
Although he had not been aware of it at the time, from the moment he had found himself standing in the luggage store Jim had been panicking. It crept up on him without him noticing, driven all of his actions and pushed all of his buttons. More than the regular fight-or-flight reaction, Jim had been on autopilot, his conscious mind pushed into the background while his survival instincts had taken over. Now, as the adrenaline was finally dissipating from his body his thoughts became clearer and his personality regained some control.
He began to count off possibilities of just what was going on here.
"Think," he said aloud. "Think."
He didn’t do drugs, so, unless someone had slipped him something at the bar last night? No, he had bought his own drinks and never left them unattended, so this was not a drug-induced hallucination. He wasn't tripping.
It wasn't a dream; the experience was too visceral and the throbbing in his bruised fingers removed all doubt that this was anything other than real. This was actually happening.
The possibility that he was suffering some kind of mental breakdown had crossed his mind too, but that would not account for the panic and death that he had witnessed all around him. Others were sharing his psychosis? Doubtful.
There were some very realistic virtual-reality simulations available - he'd tried a few - but they could not come close to the feeling that you were truly there. Although incredibly realistic, there was still an unrealistic jerkiness to the scenery, the virtual-population a little unreal in their responses when you talked with them. The kind of processing power to create a scenario as real as what he had already experienced was still years out of reach.
So, that left what? That he and God-knew how many others somehow had been transported back in time into the bodies of their earlier selves.
Unbelievable! Inconceivable! Impossible!
But, how did that old quote go? When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. The only remaining answer he had was that he was truly experiencing this. That for some unknown reason, he and at the very least the rest of the people in this shopping center had been thrust back through time. Twenty-five years into the past.
The next question was: Am I stuck here? And, if he was, then for how long?
Maybe it was a localized phenomenon. Perhaps even now emergency services were sealing off the perimeter and attempting to assess the situation. Maybe somebody out there actually knew what the hell had happened. And, if somebody knew what was going on then maybe they could reverse it.
That’s an awful lot of maybes, he thought as he headed back towards the mall’s exit.
* * *
Ten
Byron Portia could smell something burning. Not just smell it, he realized, he could taste it. Thick, acrid and cloying, it seared his throat with every breath he took as he struggled towards consciousness.
If there's smoke, then there's fire. That’s what his daddy used to say. Daddy was always right. And you never argued with daddy, not if you valued your hide.
Portia’s eyes flickered open and he tried to get his befuddled brain to assess exactly what had happened. There was a large gap in his memory. He had been on his way to Los Angeles, he remembered that much. It had been nighttime and then, suddenly, it had been day and he could not remember what had happened in the blank space between dark and light. Of course, that was the least of his problems, he realized.
His world had turned upside down - literally. He was laying on his back on the ceiling of his cab, staring up at the floor. Where the windshield had been there was now nothing but a few loose pieces of shattered glass hanging from the windshield's surround like rotten teeth in an ancient mouth. He could feel a cool breeze flowing through the space into the cabin. The breeze was pulling in smoke with it too - it was starting to fill the wrecked cab. Grey-black fumes that snaked over the inverted dashboard and flowed towards him like morning mist down a hillside.
There was little sound. He could hear a creaking, squeaking noise that sounded like a rusty weather-vain or the unoiled wheel of an old bicycle. There was another sound too; a crackling, popping noise and it was getting louder. As the crackling grew, so too did the smoke; becoming thicker and blacker, slowly filling the cab.
Fire!
Byron's short-circuited brain finally made the connection, realization shot through him. He was going to burn to death - or choke to death, if he was lucky - if he didn't get out of this cab.
Tendrils of fear wrapped themselves around his heart and he sucked in a deep lungful of the choking black smoke. His eyes itched painfully; tears welled up in response to the smoke, blurring his vision even further.
He had to get out.
Byron reached his arms out, placed his hands palms up against the body of the cab and pushed. Pain coursed up his left side and struck his heart, paralyzing him with its intensity. A mewling whimper crawled from between his lips and he collapsed back onto the ceiling, sucking in great puffs of stinking air between clenched teeth that made him choke and want to vomit.
The air was becoming less and less breathable by the second, and through the swirling smoke that now filled most of the cabin he could make out yellow flames flickering. He could hear the flames growing in intesity. Terror sent adrenaline coursing through his body - he was not going to let himself die here, not like this - and with a snarl, he pulled himself up into a sitting position.
The pain was horrendous. His vision swirled and darkened and the urge to vomit was almost unstoppable this time, but if he blacked out now he knew that that would be all-she-wrote; it would all be over for him, he would lose consciousness and choke to death on his own vomit.
“But I'm chosen,” he whispered.
With an almost super-human exertion of will he fought back the darkness, pushed it away from him until finally the interior of the overturned truck swam back into view.
He was upright, his left hand braced against the inverted back of his driver’s seat and his right hand holding the rim of the shattered windshield. His right foot was jammed in what was left of his trucks steering wheel. It had snagged through the gap between two of the wheel’s spokes and was caught up against the dashboard and the steering column. The steering wheel had folded over on itself in the impact and trapped his foot in a clam-like vice. His foot, bent at a right angle to the ankle, felt numb, and as he strained his neck to get a better look at it, he could make out white bone jutting through the skin of his ankle. The ragged point of bone protruded through the bloody torn skin, an amateur carver's attempt at whittling a spear point.
Portia strained to reach his foot but the angle was too obtuse and the pain from his ruined ankle too intense. His stomach muscles began to twinge and shudder with the strain of holding himself in this awkward position, until finally and with a frustrated yell of despair, his body collapsed back to the floor.
The shroud of smoke swallowed him, leaking into his nostrils, draining down his throat into his lungs. Oxygen depleted, his brain struggled vainly to remain alive but succeeded only in ordering his lungs to suck in even more of the poisonous fumes that were killing him.
Finally, consciousness began to leave him and he knew he was going to die.
A hand thrust through the empty space where the windshield once was, groping blindly through the smoke. It grabbed Portia’s trapped foot and wrenched it free of the buckled steering wheel. The pain was incredible, overwhelming his nervous system, paralyzing every nerve to the point he couldn’t even scream,
The last thing that Byron Portia’s dying mind registered, was the hand of God as it reached down through the swiftly approaching blackness to claim him.
* * *
Eleven
Jim Baston exited the mall and stepped into the car park.
There was no police cordon or sudden rush of emergency personnel hurrying to greet him with thermal emergency blankets in hand, concern stitched across their faces and a thousand questions about his well-being waiting on their lips
. No cadre of reporters thrusting microphones at him, asking if he had any idea what had happened, the lights from their cameras blinding him.
Instead, greeting him was what he first took to be snow. Holding out a hand, he allowed a flake to settle gently onto his palm. It was ash. Gray evanescent ash, falling in a flurry from the leaden sky, settling lightly on the hot concrete and bringing with it a reek of burning rubber laced with the campfire smell of wood and turpentine. Together they produced a sickly, syrupy odor that clogged his nostrils like tar, burning the back of his throat with each intake of breath.
Rummaging through the pockets of his jeans and jacket, he found nothing that he could use to block the choking smoke. Placing his hand over his mouth, Jim jogged back inside the mall, headed for a kid’s clothing store near the exit.
The doors shushed efficiently open as he entered the air-conditioned shop, the clean air a soothing relief to his already raw throat. Child shaped mannequins showed off the season's latest styles, scattered around the store in various frozen poses. The place seemed eerie without the presence of human staff and customers - as though he had stumbled into the lair of the medusa and that at any moment he might catch a glimpse of her snake-tressed hair and be instantly turned to stone.
If this were one of those old horror movies he grew up with, he'd be hearing single piano notes right about now. Unable to control his irrational fear any longer, Jim grabbed a handful of pre-teen dresses from the nearest rack and ran out of the store.
* * *
There was an oiliness to the air. It stuck to his skin making it slick and dirty.
Jim’s eyes smarted painfully. He resisted rubbing them lest he get more of the crap in his eyes. The torn strip of summer dress he now wore over his mouth and nose provided a modicum of protection against the pollution but he could still smell the stench of burning rubber and felt its chemical tingle in his throat and tasted the acidic sourness in his mouth.
