Middle Falls Time Travel Series, Books 4-6 (Middle Falls Time Travel Boxed Sets Book 2)

by Shawn Inmon

  Like his mother before him, Joe didn’t like to go anywhere. He wasn’t agoraphobic. At least, not by a strict medical definition. He just preferred to stay inside, where surprised eyes didn’t land on his face only to flit away.

  When he was eighteen, he had scattered his mother’s ashes and told himself, I’ve got to keep on top of things, stay active. He had meant it. He had every intention of making a lifetime plan. Continuing his education, maybe. Finding a job, eventually. Getting a hobby, at a minimum.

  The fact that the royalty checks from his father’s music continued to come in, and continued to be more than he needed to live, sapped his will to do anything meaningful.

  He did find hobbies, of a sort. Not long after Chandra Hart died, cable television came to Middle Falls, Oregon, which gave him many more programs to watch. VCRs came along shortly after, which allowed him to record one show in his bedroom while he watched another show in the living room. He had never moved into his mother’s bedroom, even though it had the half-bath off it. He had, however, put shelves up in there to hold his hundreds, and eventually thousands, of VHS tapes he’d recorded.

  When video games became popular, Joe jumped on board. It became the perfect entertainment for him. Something he could do alone that challenged his mind, or at least his reflexes.

  As far as any sort of meaningful relationship with a real human being went, though, there was none. He stayed in touch with Bobby and JR for a while. They thought it was pretty cool that they had a friend with his own place where they could bring beer and girls. They played poker on Saturday nights, or came over to watch a big game if it was on, because Joe was the first person they knew who had a big screen TV.

  In May of 1980, Bobby and JR had gone camping at the foot of Mt. St. Helens. They had done their best to get Joe to come with them. He declined no matter how much they tried to convince him it would be a crazy, fun adventure that they would eventually tell their grandchildren about. Instead of that adventure, they became two of the fifty-seven people who died in the eruption. Considering the mountain’s proximity to Portland, Oregon, and other populated areas, it was a minor miracle that number wasn’t bigger.

  The loss of fifty-seven people was a loss for everyone. It hit Joe a little harder. For him, it meant his last two connections with the outside world were gone, and he was truly alone.

  Over the next twenty-four years, cable TV kept adding channels, the televisions got bigger and thinner, and the video game systems got better graphics and games.

  None of that really enhanced Joe’s life, but if he didn’t stop to think about it much, he could pretend like it did.

  Joe died on his birthday, December 1st, 2004. Not everything in Joe’s life was a bookend, but on three occasions, it had happened that way.

  He died a foolish death, as so many do.

  Joe had seen a special on television about carbon monoxide poisoning. He immediately ordered two carbon monoxide detectors, one for his bedroom and another for the living room. He ordered them in July. That December, the detectors still sat unopened on his cluttered kitchen table. They needed a 9V battery, which he didn’t have, so he had never installed them.

  He celebrated his birthday by ordering a pizza from Mama Z’s Pizza, which had taken over the Shakey’s building when it had closed down. Unlike Shakey’s, Mama Z’s delivered—a boon to shut-ins and recluses everywhere. Ordering the pizza wasn’t much of a celebration, as he did it at least twice a week, but he did splurge and add jalapenos, though he knew he would pay for it later.

  After devouring half the pizza, he made himself comfortable on his couch to watch a college football game. While he watched, his gas furnace—which he had neglected to maintain just like many other appliances in his home—stopped burning the natural gas properly. This resulted in carbon monoxide filling the house, including the kitchen where the uninstalled detectors were, and the living room, where Joe lay on the couch, becoming more and more drowsy.

  Joe fell asleep.

  Joe died.

  Chapter Five

  Joe opened his eyes, stretched, and sat up. His shirt clung to him and he was bathed in sweat. “Crap, it’s hot in here. Did I leave the furnace turned up that high?”

  For the first few moments, he didn’t notice anything was awry. Holy hell, how long did I sleep? It was already dark. Don’t tell me I slept all the way through the night?

  He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and gawked at the television set. His 55” plasma TV was gone, replaced by an old 27” set. Bright sunshine poured in through the living room windows.

  Joe closed his eyes, held them shut for a few seconds, then opened them. He closed his left eye, squinted his right and turned his head at an angle, like a dog hearing a distant whistle. No matter what he did, the scene remained the same. He was definitely in his own living room, where he had spent the majority of his life, but everything was wrong.

  Did I really sleep that soundly? Did someone break into the house while I was passed out and steal the television? No. No way. If they did, why would the bother replacing it with this old hunk of junk?

  The old television was on. The quality wasn’t nearly as good as what he had been watching as he had fallen asleep, but he could still see it was a show he knew—The Carol Burnett Show. It was the episode that parodied Gone with the Wind. Carol was making her entrance down a grand staircase with a curtain rod across her shoulders.

  Without a conscious thought, Joe reached out for the cable remote. His hands closed on a small black device, but it wasn’t the remote he was expecting. This remote only had five buttons—power, volume up and down, and channel up and down. The long silver cable remote with its dozens of buttons was nowhere in sight.

  He pushed the power button and the picture shrank down to a single white dot, which lingered for several seconds before fading to black.

  Joe stood and walked to the window where the improbable sunshine poured in. The backyard was right where it was supposed to be, but there was freshly-turned soil with beautiful blooming flowers planted in it.

  “Nope. No way. I stopped worrying about those flower beds twenty years ago. Not to mention that flowers don’t bloom in December. So, unless someone is pulling the greatest practical joke ever, something monumentally weird is going on here.”

  He turned around and saw that he had woken up, not on the couch he had bought from Coleman’s furniture, but on the old floral couch his mother had died on. An open can of Spaghetti-O’s with a spoon standing up inside was sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch.

  Joe swiveled his head from side to side, looking for a camera, wondering who was punking him.

  Except, no one would punk me, because no one knows I exist.

  He walked down the hall to his VHS room to discover it was just his mother’s bedroom. All his mother’s clothes, which, admittedly, wasn’t a lot, were still hanging in her closet. His eye was caught by a white t-shirt with a green frog sitting on a lily pad.

  She loved that shirt. I always kind of regretted giving that one away.

  “But I did give it away,” he said aloud. His voice sounded hollow and lifeless in the quiet bedroom. He repeated himself. “I did give it away. So, how is it hanging right here in front of me?”

  The room, which was stiflingly hot, still smelled of the thousands of cigarettes that had been smoked there.

  He hustled himself out of Chandra’s bedroom and down the hall, straight to the kitchen table, where he kept his laptop.

  The laptop was gone. In fact, all the clutter that had been on the table when he had sat down to watch the football game was gone. Two placemats, still set for a dinner that would never be eaten, were there, but the rest of the table was empty.

  He ran his hands through his hair. What the hell? I went to sleep in my living room and woke up in The Twilight Zone.

  His hair was long and shaggy, hanging down across his face. He reached behind him and found more hair cascading over his collar. That’s not right eithe
r.

  He sprinted through the house to the bathroom and shoved his face into a mirror. The reddish-purple birthmark was the same, but that was the only thing. Forty-four-year-old Joe Hart stared open-mouthed at his teenage face. He ran his hands through his hair in a characteristic gesture that he had forgotten as he gotten older and cut his hair shorter. It fell back over his face.

  He poked and prodded at his skin. The wrinkles around his eyes were gone. His skin was firm again. When he had hit his mid-thirties, Joe had begun to put on a few pounds—an inevitable result of a diet that often included pizza and cereal for dinner and no exercise to speak of. Now, that weight was gone.

  Come on. Come on! This is absolutely impossible.

  He turned the water on and splashed it on his face.

  I’ve gotta be trippin’.

  Slowly, he backed away from the impossible image he saw in the mirror and walked down the hall. Now, he walked softly, like he didn’t want to disturb a fragile image that he was living inside. He picked up the wall phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  “Middle Falls 9-1-1, what is your emergency?”

  “I think I’ve gone crazy. I went to sleep and when I woke up, someone had come in and replaced all my stuff with old crap.”

  “Are you reporting a burglary?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so. Someone stole my laptop and my plasma TV, and I don’t know what all else.”

  “Excuse me, your what?”

  “My, uhh, TV, and my computer.”

  “You have a computer in your home? Sir, this number is for emergencies. Making crank calls to this number is a crime, and can be punished by up to a year in jail.”

  “Sorry. I’m just not sure what to do.”

  “If you are in need of mental health counseling, I can send an ambulance to pick you up.”

  Of course. Rubber room. Straight jacket. Sunshine piped into me. No thanks.

  “Sorry, I’ve made a terrible mistake.” Joe hung up the phone and looked around the strange-yet-familiar surroundings. Crap. They can trace those calls, can’t they? I should be expecting a wellness check from the cops in a few minutes. And what, exactly, am I going to tell them?

  Joe sat on the couch, not moving, not making a sound. Thinking. It wasn’t productive thinking, where he took a set of facts, digested them, and arrived at a logical conclusion. It was the type of thinking that most resembled a dog chasing its own tale.

  Fifteen minutes later, right on schedule, a sharp knock sounded on the door.

  Joe sighed and stood up, smooth and easy. Haven’t been able to stand up without saying ‘oof’ in a long time. Everything is out of whack.

  He took one step toward the door when it burst open and two gangly teenagers came piling into the living room.

  “JD? Bobby? What the hell?”

  As soon as they saw Joe, the two boys sobered up. “Hey, sorry, Joe. Didn’t mean to surprise you. We knocked!”

  “Surprise me? I’d say so. You guys are dead.”

  Chapter Six

  Bobby comically reached over and pinched JD’s arm, then his own. “Nope, sorry bud. Not dead. Slightly stoned, maybe.” That cracked him up, which in turn elicited a semi-stoned cackle from JD.

  Joe remained unmoved. “I’m not joking. You guys are dead. You died in 1980. What is this, like A Christmas Carol, and you’re coming back to get me to change my ways?”

  The two boys grew quiet, then serious. “You feeling okay, man? You said 1980, like it was in the distant past. You do know it’s 1978, right?”

  Joe just stared at them. Well, that would certainly explain a damn few things, but how am I supposed to believe that?

  “Okay, you guys say you’re stoned, but sit down. I’ve gotta tell you something.”

  “Sure, sure,” JD said. He sat on one end of the couch, while Bobby dropped down cross-legged on the floor.

  Joe sat down, too, and took his time trying to think of what to say.

  “So, you guys say this is 1978, right?”

  JD and Bobby both nodded.

  “What if I told you I already lived through 1978? That I lived through the eighties and the nineties, and there was this big furor when we got to the year 2000, because everyone thought all the computers were gonna crash, and then some terrorists from the Middle East flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, and, well—a lot of shit happened.”

  Joe turned from JD’s face to Bobby’s. Both looked at him levelly.

  Finally, Bobby said, “Are you, like, super-high, man?”

  Joe drew a deep breath, let it out in a rush, and said, “Yeah, I guess I am. Pretty good story, huh?”

  I notice they’ve skipped right over that whole part about me knowing they were dead. No one wants to talk about their own death.

  JD gave a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh, but more an expression of relief. “Yeah, pretty good story. So, we still good to watch the game here?”

  “The game?”

  “You must be high, brother. Game Seven of the NBA finals. The Sonics against the Bullets.”

  “Oh. Uhh... sure.”

  Let’s see. If it’s 1978, then the Sonics lose Game Seven tonight at home, and that breaks the home fans’ hearts. But, they’ll come back and beat this same Bullets team for the championship next year. I guess I won’t spoil their fun and I’ll just try to act disappointed when Seattle loses.

  “So, whaddya say? Pizza on the menu?”

  Joe had eaten a Mama Z’s pizza what felt like just a few hours before, even though both that pizza and that restaurant were apparently several decades in the future.

  “Sure, I guess so,” Joe said.

  JD and Bobby stood looking at him. JD’s head bobbed along to some internal music. For a long moment, no one said a word.

  Finally, Bobby raised his eyebrows, as though Joe was forgetting some unspoken agreement. “You buy, we fly, right?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” Joe said. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. It was his wallet, but it sure wasn’t the wallet he had in his back pocket when he had gone to sleep. That had been a black tri-fold wallet with credit cards, his debit card, and not much else. The wallet that he held in his hand was blue vinyl, and had a zipper around it.

  Surreal.

  He unzipped the wallet to see what was inside. No credit cards, of course. What eighteen year old kid had a credit card in 1978? No debit card, because the banks hadn’t thought of that faster way to suck money out of your account yet. Instead, he found his driver’s license, set to expire on his birthday in 1979. The photo showed Joe looking uncomfortably off to the side, burningly aware of how obvious his birthmark would be to the camera. Aside from the license, there wasn’t much in the wallet. A five, a few singles, and a couple of twenties.

  Joe grabbed one of the twenties. Is twenty bucks enough to get pizza for three of us? If this is actually 1978, then yeah, with enough left over to fill up JD’s gas tank, which he just might do.

  Joe handed the bill to Tommy and it disappeared into his front pocket like a magic trick. “Beauty. If you want to call it in, it’ll be ready to go by the time we get there, then we can make it back in time for tip-off.”

  Joe nodded vaguely at their retreating backs and the closing door.

  He sat at the kitchen table and stared at the phone. It was black and heavy, with a thick, curled cord attached to the handset. He knew it hadn’t been there just a few hours ago.

  This is real. I’m like Rip Van Winkle in reverse. I went to sleep and woke up twenty-six years earlier.

  There was a thin phone book with curling edges beside the phone. He picked it up and looked in the yellow pages under “Pizza,” then “Restaurants,” but there was no listing for Shakey’s.

  Right. There wouldn’t be. In 1978, it was too new to have made it into the book. How the hell did we call information? Did we just dial zero, or was it 4-1-1, or what?

  His eyes fell on a small magnet, designed to go on a refrigerator. It had the Shakey’s logo and a
phone number across the bottom. The magnet hadn’t made it to the kitchen yet, but long-ago Joe or Chandra had laid it next to the phone in case of a pizza emergency.

  He dialed the number and heard a cheery, urgent voice on the other end say, “Shakey’s! We’ve made a deal with the banks. We don’t cash checks, and they don’t make pizzas. Do you want to place an order?”

  Even in his confused state, Joe chuckled a little. He ordered two large pepperoni pizzas—no jalapenos, this time—and told them someone named Bobby or JD would be in to pick it up.

  He hung the phone up and sat staring off into space, waiting for the missing piece of the puzzle to fall into place, or, maybe, to wake up suddenly back in 2004. Neither happened, and he was still sitting, chin in his hand, when the door burst open half an hour later.

  JD and Bobby burst in, each carrying a large pizza box. “Dude, are we having a party? This is enough to feed us for a week!”

  “You guys mentioned you might be in need of munchies, so...”

  “Hold on, be right back!” JD said, putting the pizza box on the coffee table and running back outside

  Thirty seconds later, he was back, brown grocery bag in hand. Reaching inside, he started to pull packages out. “Doritos. Red licorice. Ding Dongs. A half rack of beer that a guy I know bought for us. I think we’re set for the game now. It killed your twenty, though. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Joe shook his head. Food only a teenager’s metabolism could love. “That’s cool. What channel’s the game on?”

  Chapter Seven

  A few hours later, they had plowed through many thousands of calories, watched the Sonics go down in their inevitable defeat, and Joe had one more piece of the puzzle. He knew, at least when it came to this one sporting event, the world as he knew it was recreating itself.

  Will that hold true? I’m sure I’ve already done things differently than I did in my first life. So, won’t that cause changes, which will cause changes, which will cause changes? The butterfly flapping its wings in Singapore and causing a hurricane in Middle Falls, or something like that.