Rat-A-Tat: Short Blasts of Pulp

by Russ Anderson, Jr

  “The One That Got Away, is it?” suggested the Time-Tech.

  “Exactly…”

  ***

  A week later, after much studying of all the legal mumbo-jumbo and minute details found in his Time and Again, Inc. Time Insertion Contract, Thompson was ready to ride.

  “Is this really that necessary?” asked Thompson, a bit miffed at the silvery jogging suit he was being required to wear.

  Time Tech Stanley Weiss looked like he had been insulted. “Yes, the Time-Insertion Suit, as it is called, is absolutely necessary: it protects the wearer from excessive energy flux radiation that may cross into the Time-Portal event horizon. Just a precaution, mind you... And you should also keep the special sunglasses on, going out, and also back in.

  Well, we’re all ready here. Anytime you are, Mr. Thompson, we’ll begin your journey to the past…”

  “OK, Stan. I’ve been ready as I’ll ever be… Let’s do this!”

  Standing in the exact mid-locus point of the large Hollow-Mirror-Generator room, Jay was as giddy as a kid on his first day of summer vacation. Just a fortysomething kid,wearing what looked like an alien space suit from an old Twilight Zone episode.

  “Alright, Mr. Thompson, here you go…” Those were the last words from Stan that Thompson heard, before the increasingly loud humming-and-thrumming of the room engulfed him.

  All around him it looked just like sloshing quicksilver, as if he was kayaking down a tunnel-river of mercury. He could just barely make out the proverbial bright light at the end of this tunnel that he seemed to be falling into, though that was an illusion as he felt no tug of gravity or any other outer sensations of any kind. Just breathe, Jay, he kept telling himself, over and over… Trying not to get Time Sick, as it was called.

  Before he could count to ten slowly… Thompson and the ‘End’ of the tunnel suddenly merged.

  Doing his best not to lose his balance and topple over, his eyes soon adjusted to his new surroundings. Then Thompson almost fainted.

  My God… They really did it! I’m back at the old Alma Mater… Just as I remember it. Over there, that’s where History class was, and around that corner is the cafeteria. And just past the Lunch Quad, that’s the PE volleyball courts; then the football practice field; and also the running track… Wow!

  “Excuse me, Sir, are you a new PE instructor or a running coach?” spoke a teenage, and oh-so feminine, voice just behind him. He turned around and almost fainted again.

  “They did it… They really did it…” stammered a joyful Thompson, gazing at the girl he had hoped to see. The one Big Crush from all his youthful, folly-filled days, now long gone.

  “Sir, if you mean the improvements to the PE facilities, then yes, they finally are all done now,” replied the girl. She looked to be fifteen or sixteen, blonde and lovely in a simple gym shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes. The name on her shirt, next to the school logo, read Cheryl.

  “Oh, I see… Miss?” was all Thompson could manage to stammer out.

  “Miss Cheryl Trimble… Are you feeling alright, Sir? It is rather hot for a suit like that”.

  “Oh, yes, you’re quite right, Miss Trimble. I was trying to lose a few pounds of sweat equity, and found this on the Universal-Net for sale –”

  Thompson stopped himself. Back in his high school days, the Trans-Solar Universal Internet had not even been an idea yet, and the first colonies on the Moon and Mars had only begun five years after his graduation from Cal Tech. “And to answer your earlier question, no, I am not a PE instructor… Just an alumni stopping by for a little visit, on my lunch break, if you will.”

  Instinctively, he removed the Time-Suit sunglasses, so as to better see the girl.

  “OK… Cute glasses, though,” she bandied back at him. She was obviously a bit intrigued by this older man standing before her, even in his quite silly-looking suit. She gave him an odd glance that Thompson recognized. It was the kind you give someone you think you've met before, but the exact who and when have escaped you.

  “Sir, do you have a son that goes here now? You kind of remind me of someone in my Algebra class, 2nd period. Maybe a John… James… Jay?” asked a curious Cheryl.

  “No, Cheryl, I do not have any children going here… Not anytime soon.”

  “Well, it was nice talking to you, anyways. Excuse me, as I must get going now.”

  “Alright, Miss Trimble… But just remember this small bit of wisdom. No need to be in a hurry all of the time… Like so many are... Even I was like that once, at your age…”

  Thompson did his best to get every last ounce out of this brief moment with the girl he had idolized, all those long and often very lonely years since. “Good Day, Miss…”

  “Good Day to you, too, Sir,” she responded as she gracefully sauntered away.

  As he lost sight of the girl, Thompson felt, and then saw, a slight vibration of the light spectrum, growing stronger with each passing second, all around him. He was being drawn back into the return Time-Stream, on the Mirror-Echo passage way back. Back, the same exact way he had come. Quickly, he put the special sunglasses back on his face.

  And he was gone.

  ***

  As he slipped on through the silvery-tinged Time-Stream tunnel, Thompson felt a sudden jolt. That can’t be good. What just happened?

  Back at Time and Again, Inc., all of the Time Tech staff, Stanley Weiss included, were frantically trying to get a full 100% lock on Jay Thompson. The rare total loss of a local power company transformer had caused a slight dilation to the very sensitive workings of the Hollow-Mirror-Generator. If full lock could not be established soon, it was possible that Mr. Thompson could be permanently lost in the past. Not good for him… … or The Future.

  Thompson could not be sure, as Time did not actually pass the same in the Time-Stream as in normal Time-Space-Reality… Or, at least, that was how it had been explained to him before his trip began. But it did seem to him that the return trip was taking a lot longer than the one going out.

  Then, he was sure something odd was happening… On the entire trip Out, he never saw anything but a mercury-like flow all around him. And now he swore he could see the sides of the Time-Stream tunnel lightly thinning out in intensity, more and more, until he could see there was some past History happening now, around him.

  Like a ghost, he hovered over what looked like the Oval Office of the White House.

  Wondering which President was in office at this moment, he turned and almost fainted for the third time this ‘day’. Instead of a president from his own years, he saw the nameplate on the big wooden desk read not John F. Kennedy but President Jacqueline B. Kennedy. This was not a timeline from his own past –no, it was an alternate timeline.

  Suddenly, once more, Thompson became engulfed in the slippery silver Time-Stream tunnel.

  Perhaps some minor error happened back at Time & Again, but Stan and the Techs had now corrected things, and he would soon be back to his own Future and Time?

  An even bigger thump, much larger than the first, shook Thompson and all the bright metallic-like energy swirling just beyond his Time-Suit envelope. Maybe that just now was them getting me set to rights? he told himself, desperately wishing it were so.

  Fat chance. As the edges of the Time-Stream once more evaporated around him, just enough for him to see out, he saw, to his startled amazement, that he was still hovering over the Presidential Oval Office. With a slight turn of his head to the left, he once more saw the desk of the President. But this time, the desk was ultimately much, much larger. Monstrously larger. And there was something big, sitting at that desk.

  Damn, this just can’t be… unless, this is a hallucination… Or it’s Halloween?

  For there sat, at the desk of the President of the United States… The Hulk? The big green hero-monster from the Marvel Comics that his Grandpa had collected.

  President Hulk was reading something on a tiny-looking laptop computer, wrinkling his great green brow, at something he was lo
oking at through his wire-rim eyeglasses.

  Again, without warning, came the deep, heavy vibrations, all around Thompson. He was once again swallowed up into the spinning and slip-sliding Time-Stream. This time it was much smoother, with no more knocks or thumping, for which he thanked God, for the next time he would likely vomit.

  Stanley Weiss and the other Time-Techs gave a noticeable sigh, as their almost-lost customer and time-travel seeker, Mr. Jay Thompson, once again stood at the exact cross-focus of the Hollow-Mirror-Generator room, looking just as he had left them.

  “Wow-eee, Stan, baby! That ride was one-in-a-million. I got my money’s worth… And then some!” hooted an obviously happy and very satisfied Thompson. Stan and the other staff looked quite relieved. Not just for getting their customer back, but also some relief that the customer was not likely to sue Time & Again, Inc. Or ask for his quite substantial Time-Insertion fee back.

  After a highly detailed, almost military-like, debriefing of Thompson’s eyewitness travel experience in the Time-Stream(s), he went home to his apartment for some imported brews and a super-deluxe pizza.

  Later that evening, while logging on to his personal People-Book account, he saw an Invite message. A request for contact, and perhaps friendship – or even more? This, from a very spectacular looking and quite-curvaceous woman named Cheryl Trimble.

  This cannot be her. She died in a car accident, on her way to a college athletic event…Thompson felt a slight shudder deep down in his inner being.

  Then he looked up her Bio on People-Book, and found that she did go to his old high school. She had played Varsity sports, until an injury caused by a drunken driver and was now the president of a local non-profit humanitarian organization.

  Well, well, Jay, you lucky old dog, you… Maybe there is hope for you yet.

  Changes to the pages of Time or not… Miracle or not… Thompson had no complaints.

  MERCY KILLING

  By Teel James Glenn

  Cross killed the dog first.

  He had waited for days watching the family to be sure. To all appearances they were a typical bickering suburban couple with one child.

  ‘For God’s sake, Rose, can’t you get Jimmy to pick up his toys? I almost broke my neck!”

  “If you’d set a better example, Jonny, he might. You leave your golf clubs all over the garage.”

  On and on.

  Jonny was a mob stoolie hiding in witness protection.

  The mob never forgets and so they contacted Cross, a specialist in ‘removal’ to take care of the loose end.

  He found them and watched and listened to their endless sniping.

  Cross waited on the third night of his vigil until the neighborhood was asleep. After the dog in the yard had been disposed of the alarm system was easy; the stoolie had cheaped out on an older model.

  The stairs were tricky in the pitch dark, they creaked. He had to walk softly on tiptoes near the wall joints to minimize the noise.

  The kid’s bedroom was nearest the stairs.

  The stoolie was easy to find- he snored like an elephant.

  No wonder they have separate bedrooms.

  Two bullets through the eyes.

  After the blood stopped pumping he cut out the tongue to take back with him.

  The wife was next. A pretty woman, she slept with a night mask on so he took a moment to appreciate her fine form before he put a bullet through her temple.

  Now for the kid.

  There were Star Wars sheets on the bed and spaceships and blocks scattered on the floor among discarded clothes.

  The dame was right, it’s a mine field.

  The kid had a cherub face.

  There was no specific order on the kid, no one knew he existed.

  Cross paused.

  Would it matter?

  For a moment he thought about his own life; his old man killed in Vietnam, his mother killing herself when he was about the kid’s age. Then the foster homes and juvenile courts.

  Better this way.

  He put a bullet through the kid’s temple. The little body didn’t even jump with the impact.

  It was the first killing he could recall where he felt good afterward.

  A regular mercy killing.

  He backed out of the room to head for the stairs. In the dim light the kid looked still to be just sleeping, the exit wound hidden in shadow.

  Cross turned to head down the middle of the stairs with the need for quiet gone.

  He didn’t see the toy truck he stepped on that sent him tumbling head over heels. About five steps from the bottom he felt something snap in his neck and all feeling went out of him.

  That was how the cops found him two days later, lying in his own filth unable to move.

  He spent the rest of his life wishing someone would do for him what he’d done for the kid.

  CEMETERY GAMES

  By James Bojaciuk

  The gravestones were teeth from a barroom smile, jagged and brown and oh so old. So Lel didn’t touch them with his tires or his boots. From his trunk he produced a bag, from the bag he pulled two shovels, a pick, some sort of thing with a cord and a trigger and a metal bit that twisted along like an assassin’s knife, and three hand trowels “especially designed for arthritic hands.” Or so the price-tag told them.

  “Is not thinking best for digging hole,” said Kipriyanov.

  “I dunno,” said Lel. “Asked the lady at Lowes what I need if I’m diggin a hole. A big hole. A reallllllly big hole. She shoved all that at me. C’mon.”

  They walked the gatekeeper’s path, which stitched from stone to stone to stone in circles and tendrils which ended only with memorial rows. Lel flipped up his collar. The other, Kipriyanov, blundered on in the stupid way of the grade schooler (every school has one) who eats worms for dollars. Neither heard the whispers from out of the woods, nor the clumsy press of a boot on a butterfly. Lel’s desperate clap to return some blood to his hands hid a cough, and Kipriyanov muttering—in some language that was decidedly not English, nor any language friendly to English—disguised the subtle slit of a bolt bringing a bullet to bear.

  “Hate this place. Why can’t the damn tombs be ABCitized. Stamford should come before Stamptom. Not…here. Here we go. Rutherford Stamford, chubbed down between Tennison and what’s that—Zalgo. Dammit. We should run a funeral house and hold it like a library.”

  Kipriyanov, however, said nothing.

  “Yeah. Fine. Get digging.”

  And so he did. Hours toddled by—aided, in a way, by the north winds which surrounded them—and the dirt continued to pile until Lel could see nothing but the very top of Kipriyanov’s bald head and the occasional glint of an awkward tool (he missed the seven foreign glints of eyes behind rifle-scopes).

  “Ya know, buddy, I like this job. No danger. No violence. Just us and a felony charge for digging up a dead diamond king and stealing his hair.”

  Nothing but grunting and the rape of steel against dirt.

  “You gotta talk some more, cause I’m starting to feel like Hamlet. Just blabber, blabber, blabber to myself. We should’ve brought that lady along. Then she and I could’ve talked about her daddy, and how he didn’t wanna acknowledge her, and her daddy issues, and from there to me and her in a. . .”

  The shovel, or whatever the man in the pit was using, hit something which was certainly not dirt and likely not another stone the diggers threw down for spite. He dug around down there, spreading the dirt which remained away from the roof of the casket while Lel, above, stuffed his hands in his pockets and huffed. One of the gunmen found his way up a tree and settled in among the branches: he looked down on them, a reasonably clear view of the grave-pit entirely his own. He nodded—his nod was returned from the base by a man with egregiously large eyes.

  Kipriyanov preformed the necessary acrobatics to open the lid without stepping from the grave.

  “Got his hair?” asked Lel.

  “No.” A pause, while the other fattened his g
rammar before the slaughter. “Probleming we is now.”

  “What?”

  Until this point, every rifle was aimed at them. But they were aimed in the aimless way of a man on a paycheck, who is expected to hold his rifle in a certain place without the unnoticeable strain of aiming or calculating or making good on one’s mark.

  Now every shot was prepared. Their muscles were properly tense. The guns were properly held. The shots were all properly lined and an exact 1/6th pound of pressure rested on every trigger.

  Six of them came, fingers all tight, goggles all lowered, ignoring the stone tendrils and walking over corpse and over grass in parallel lines. At the head of them, another figure who weaved a bit in his line. If he held his own gun, it was not raised.

  “Hallo! So kind of you to dig that out for us. Do you charge by the hour?”

  Lel said, “The hell?”

  The mouth was stolen from the Cheshire Cat, a dozen teeth all long, all cracked, all split to smile for them; his eyes were huge, his hands would fit in a child’s pockets. “You dug that. We needed it. Thank you.” He nodded a few times. “Men, if you would.”

  Those who followed him converged on the grave. Two remained aloof: one with his gun’s barrel for Lel’s chest, the other with a bead on Kipriyanov’s massive face. The rest scooped down hands and fists and hooks and ropes and pulled, pulled endlessly, until the coffin scraped up to the edge, held taut. Then they moved away from the stone—toward the path—and rested it at Cheshire’s feet.

  “Thank you.”

  Lel leaned, just a bit, to Kipriyanov’s baked-potato ears. “Dang if that don’t make it easier.”

  Casket down, the lifting party took places round about, one at each corner.

  Cheshire opened the coffin and held his hand aloft, a Babylonian altar. The man whose gun had aim only for Kipriyanov passed him a knife, a very fine knife, which Cheshire brought down to the corpse. He sliced for some good long while. Not the dry slice of metal against hair, but the sloppy slice of blade between slabs of preserved flesh.