The Time Bubble Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  “Come on, all of you, run,” urged Josh, which the team did, scattering in all directions, including Doctor Francis who finally found his feet.

  “Peter!” screamed Christina, realising in her panic that they had been separated. As she looked back, she saw that the T Rex was now on the move, wading into the river, sending massive waves splashing up over the banks in all directions. The ducks were panicking, too, at having their normal tranquil waters displaced and were squawking and flying off.

  Christina was initially relieved that the dinosaur was moving away from her, but that relief didn’t last long when she saw Peter running down the riverbank in the opposite direction, towards the boathouses, with the T Rex seemingly pursuing him. She stopped, watching in horror.

  “Come on, Christina,” urged Josh, who had been running alongside her, as Hamilton and Francis ran in a different direction, straight across the centre of the park towards the buildings on the far side.

  “You can’t just abandon Peter!” she shouted at him. “You got him into this in the first place, now go and help him.”

  Josh looked back at the T Rex in the river. What could he do? Very little, but he guessed he couldn’t abandon Peter. He could distract it so it ate him instead of Peter. That would at least be a heroic end. Maybe he deserved it after all the trouble he had caused.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll go back, but you must go on, Christina. Get to the edge of the park at least.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said.

  “No you’re not. Either I go alone or I don’t go at all. Now get out of here. I mean it.”

  Reluctantly she complied, and continued running along the same route the two academics had taken.

  Josh looked back to see that Peter had taken temporary shelter behind a tree, as the T Rex paused in the water. That was possibly the best thing he could have done. Like, Doctor Francis, Josh had no real idea what the hunting skills of dinosaurs were like, it was all pure speculation.

  What he did know was that they had apparently had very small brains so perhaps if it couldn’t see Peter it might assume he wasn’t there. It may have no concept of object permanence.

  Then again, it may not hunt by vision, it may all be down to scent. If so, would it even be able to make out a human scent, having never encountered one before? Not only that, Josh imagined that the heavily polluted twentieth-century air must be quite unlike anything else the dinosaur had previously encountered.

  If it did have a highly developed sense of smell, it would be more likely to be picking up exhaust fumes from the dozens of buses trundling around Oxford than the scent of one small human. He could only hope.

  The dinosaur had paused again but it was only about ten yards from where Peter was hiding behind the tree trunk. Thankfully nearly everyone else that had been in the park had now retreated to a safe distance.

  As long as the T Rex didn’t suddenly decide to start running at thirty miles an hour right into the centre of Oxford hopefully no one was going to get killed. He didn’t even want to begin to imagine what sort of carnage could be wreaked if that happened. It wouldn’t be being eaten that people would have to worry about if that happened, surely dozens would be trampled underfoot.

  The longer the dinosaur stayed where it was, the better. The alarm must well and truly been raised by now. Surely even the two most unimaginative police officers Josh had ever met couldn’t ignore what was happening here. Help must surely be on the way, in some shape or form.

  This stalemate lasted a couple of minutes, before the dinosaur started moving forward again, right towards Peter’s position. There was nothing for it: Josh was going to have to try and distract it.

  Against his better judgement, he walked slowly towards where the dinosaur was. He was about fifty yards away at this point, and as he approached, he noticed that it seemed a little sluggish.

  Perhaps it was the climate. Josh remembered what he had learned about dinosaurs at school. They were cold-blooded and couldn’t survive in cold climates. Could that be affecting it? He wouldn’t have thought a creature of this mass could have lost that much body heat that quickly, but it was a fair wager that it wasn’t enjoying the February weather. The recent snow had melted but there was still a distinct chill in the air.

  The T Rex was now very close to the tree where Peter was hiding. As it approached, it crashed right through the next tree, uprooting it as it did so. Even if it didn’t find and eat Peter, it might very well kill him by knocking the tree down on top of him.

  As Josh inched ever closer, Peter risked a peek around the tree, spotted him and using a shoving motion with his hand gestured to him to stay away.

  Ignoring him, Josh shouted at the top of his voice.

  “Hey, Barney!” he yelled, picking up a small stone from the path and hurling at the dinosaur. “Over here.”

  Whether it was his shout or the stone he didn’t know, but the T Rex turned towards him and roared. That was all the incentive Josh needed, and he turned and ran, not looking back.

  “Come on,” he called. “Come and get me,” he yelled. “I deserve it!”

  Did he really want it to kill him, even if it was poetic justice? What about Alice waiting in 2055, or Amy, trapped in the body of a six-year-old? She would be stuck in the past forever if he didn’t get out of this.

  These thoughts were all academic because he soon realised that the T Rex wasn’t following him. Peter had taken advantage of the distraction to make a bolt for it. If Josh had been in any doubt about the creature’s ability to handle the cold, these were swiftly dispelled as it had suddenly become a lot more active and was now chasing Peter down towards the boathouses by the Thames.

  As usual it seemed his intervention had just made things worse. He looked around to see if there was any help on the way but the park was empty. If the police were sending help, they were taking their time. It must have been at least twenty minutes now since the dinosaur had first appeared.

  Josh watched as the dinosaur crashed through trees, following the route Peter had taken, but he could no longer see his friend. Was he still alive?

  Then he heard the welcome sounds of the jets screaming overhead and watched in awe as they homed in on the dinosaur, releasing the missiles that ended the prehistoric creature’s brief existence in the modern world.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It was the day of Josh’s parents’ wedding and to his relief things seemed to be going according to plan for once.

  After the incident with the dinosaur in the park, the police had finally woken up to the dangerous nature of the area and sealed off Christ Church Meadow from the public. This turned out to be a classic case of closing the stable door after the horse had bolted because the T Rex turned out to be the last creature to pass through the time bubble.

  There wasn’t a lot left of the dinosaur to analyse after it had been destroyed by the RAF but there was no denying the reality of what had happened. Too many people had seen it for the whole thing to be dismissed as a hoax.

  The popular theory remained that someone had figured out how to bring ancient creatures back to life and a full investigation was ordered by the authorities.

  With no further apparitions, and a complete lack of evidence uncovered of any mad scientists re-creating dinosaurs in a secret laboratory, the investigation drew a complete blank. Eventually, nearly two months later, Christ Church Meadow reopened and life soon returned to normal.

  As part of the investigation there had been an attempt by the Government to take away the woolly mammoth for examination.

  This was swiftly picked up by the media who had nicknamed her “Mammy”, leading to a public outcry over the possible vivisection of this unique and beautiful creature. When it was subsequently revealed that she was pregnant the name stuck and she remained at Cotswold Wildlife Park as the star attraction.

  The fortunes of the last three people to come through the bubble had varied considerably. All three had ended up detained und
er the Mental Health Act in nearby Littlemore.

  There was very little that could be done to help the Stone Age man who was simply from too far back in time to comprehend the world he was in. He was cleaned up, given modern clothes and food, but needed a huge amount of looking after. Even simple concepts such as cleaning his teeth seemed beyond him and all attempts at communication went nowhere.

  Still, the man seemed happy enough, sitting on the floor and playing with a set of kids’ wooden blocks most days. It was no doubt a far more pleasant existence than his previous life back in the Stone Age. Here he could at least live out his remaining years in comfort.

  The centre had more success with the two other historical visitors. The Roman had clearly had some education and didn’t seem at all irrational or aggressive once the initial shock of what had happened to him subsided.

  Over time, he began to learn English and the staff at the centre felt optimistic that he might one day be able to integrate into normal society, as long as he dropped his insistence that he was part of Julius Caesar’s army and that he had come to Britain two thousand years ago.

  The peasant, despite his initial incoherent ramblings, also scrubbed up well. His old English dialect was a mix of long-lost archaic words and those still in existence in modern language which made some communication possible right away and this only improved the longer he spent in the twentieth century.

  He, too, responded well to the centre’s attempts to educate him and it also looked possible that he may one day be able to live independently.

  Despite the fact that all three had turned up in a short space of time, these coincidences were dismissed by the staff, just as they had been by the police. After all they already had a man who insisted he was Napoleon and a Cleopatra at the centre, so these three were nothing out of the ordinary.

  Those who had come through the time bubble from more recent history were faring rather better. When Christina went round to Jonty’s house to check on Mary, she discovered that they had entered into a romantic relationship.

  Knowing Jonty’s reputation, Christina’s initial misgivings were that he might be taking advantage of her. She wouldn’t have put it past him to get her to cook and clean and attend to his sexual needs in some of sort of master and servant-type relationship. However, after spending a little time with them, she realised it wasn’t like that at all.

  He genuinely seemed to like her, explaining to Christina that she was nothing like the Sloane Ranger types he was used to from university. Mary was straightforward, honest and he quite simply loved being in her company.

  She had adjusted well to life in the twentieth century, assuring Christina that she knew how much things had changed from her time. She made it clear she certainly wasn’t just skivvying for Jonty and she hadn’t slept with him either. Respectable girls didn’t do that sort of thing before marriage where she came from, and that was one thing she wasn’t compromising on in the liberated 1990s.

  She told her how exciting she found the new world and had been particularly fascinated by television after Christina had introduced her to it that first day. On the evening she went round to see them, they were watching Top of the Pops together, and Christina was amused to discover that Mary had developed a liking for Guns N’ Roses!

  She was pleased for the two of them. There was no other way to say it, but Jonty had been an arsehole when Christina had first met him. He seemed like an infinitely nicer person now. Maybe they would end up getting married. It would be nice if at least someone came out of this with a happy ending after all the bad things that had happened.

  C.S. Lewis Jr, as he was now known, hadn’t wasted any time re-establishing himself at the university and was now well on his way to publishing the sixth Narnia novel, much to the delight of fans worldwide.

  Things were a little more complicated for Kevin Austin. His parents were in no doubt that he was indeed their son, and between the three of them they had reached the correct conclusion that his disappearance must have been down to time travel.

  They knew that they were going to have to concoct some sort of cover story in case the authorities started asking awkward questions about his identity. Eventually they decided to pass him off as a nephew, recently arrived from Australia after being orphaned when his parents had died in a car crash.

  This in itself was proving problematical with paperwork, the boy having no identity papers, but in the absence of anyone else having a claim on him they were hopeful of overcoming this in time.

  The time bubble team never did find out what had happened to the confused Japanese tourist. If they had they would have discovered that he did eventually make it home to Tokyo, five years after he had left. When he arrived he found that his wife had taken up with another man, having concluded that he had deserted her.

  His half-hearted attempts to protest his innocence fell on deaf ears, and they ended up getting divorced shortly afterwards. He wasn’t particularly bothered because he didn’t get on with her anyway. That was why he had gone to Europe on his own in the first place.

  Christina had caught up the term she had missed and she and Peter celebrated graduating with the rest of their class in June 1992 as originally planned. The traumatic events surrounding the time bubble had brought the two of them closer together.

  To begin with, she had merely been consoling him over Rebecca’s death, but as the weeks and months passed she began to realise she still had feelings for him.

  This left her in quite a dilemma. If she attempted to rekindle things, would she just be taking advantage of his grief? It would be like stepping into the dead woman’s shoes so she did her best to suppress her feelings.

  Ultimately it was him who made the first move, after the two of them had gone to see Howards End at the cinema at Easter. Sharing a large bucket of popcorn, they were scrambling around at the bottom for the last few pieces, when suddenly he leant across and kissed her. The film hadn’t even started at that point because she remembered that the Pearl and Dean theme was still playing in the background.

  As a couple they began to do couple-like things. This included pairing up with Jonty and Mary for double dates. If you had asked Peter his ideal selection of dinner party guests a few months earlier it would be pretty safe to assume that Jonty would not have been on the shortlist.

  Now it was all different. He had dropped his elitist sneer at those he formerly considered beneath him and had proven to be quite an entertaining raconteur. Over dinner he often regaled them with tales of the outrageous of the excesses of the Bullingdon Club, an establishment from which he had resigned his membership.

  Peter’s relations with Josh had remained distinctly cool. He still blamed him for Rebecca’s death, despite Josh’s attempts to save him from the T Rex.

  Josh had decided not to push it and concentrated his efforts into betting, using his advance information to give himself a very comfortable lifestyle. A few strategically placed accumulative bets, particularly during the Cheltenham Festival, had given him a significant bankroll. By Easter he was renting a house in North Oxford comparable in size to Jonty’s.

  Josh had more than enough money to live on and was nicely set up for the foreseeable future. Now that all the stress with the time bubble was over he was beginning to enjoy living in 1992 and considered that it would not be the end of the world if he never made it back to his own time.

  The simplicity of this pre-technological era, when people communicated face to face with each other rather than staring into screens all the time, appealed to him, but he knew this wouldn’t last much longer.

  The first mobile phone shop had opened in the Westgate Centre, and even in the few months he had been here he had noticed a large increase in the number of people using them. The internet was only a couple of years away from coming into common usage. Things were about to change massively and Josh wasn’t sure if it was for the better. To him, people seemed happier than they did in his time.

  Aside from the refreshing lac
k of technology, there were other things he had grown to love about 1992. The music scene was vibrant and exciting and he went to see several bands at the Jericho Tavern, including the legendary Pulp on 29th May.

  He even plucked up the courage to go to a rave one night to see what all the fuss was about. Both his parents had reminisced about them with misty eyes.

  It was held in a large barn near Kidlington and was remarkably basic, consisting primarily of a huge sound system at one end and several hundred people jumping up and down in unison in the rest of the barn.

  He wasn’t even sure he was going to be allowed in, being around thirty years older than the average attendee, but a few twenty-pound notes waved in the bouncer’s face soon sorted that out.

  Maybe he was too old to appreciate the music but it just seemed like a lot of noise, though when Insanity by Oceanic came on and the crowd started going crazy, he did find himself joining in and getting into the moment.

  The night was an experience but not one he had any desire to repeat. It was strange imagining that his parents used to do this. Josh preferred rock and indie music and often hung out in The Dolly. It was here where he bumped into Peter and Christina again one Saturday a few weeks before his parents’ wedding.

  Christina saw Josh come in and walk up to the bar and encouraged Peter to talk to him. She said there was no point bearing a grudge and it was time the two of them made it up. Reluctantly Peter agreed, so the two of them fought their way through the crowds of goths and rockers to the bar.

  Josh realised quite quickly from their body language that the two of them were now an item but decided against commenting on it, bearing in mind his past attempts to advise Peter on his love life.

  He knew that if the timeline stayed on track that the relationship was ultimately doomed, but what was the point of telling Peter that? He had interfered in his life enough and now he had to leave things to run their natural course.

  Josh still felt incredibly guilty over Rebecca but there was nothing he could do to change that. However, as they talked he discovered there was something good he could do to make some sort of amends. As they talked he asked Peter how Gran was, only to find out that she’d had a fall in the icy spring weather and was now awaiting a hip replacement on the NHS.