Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (28 page)

It was midnight at home, but here the sun had just begun to set. Fuel rainbows colored puddles in the street, and everything seemed fresh and full of possibility. The explosions of the rotorcraft that rose like mayflies from the city seemed crisp and healthy.

Paitin’s posture straightened and his shuffle became a strut. He was glad he’d come. It was worth it. Didn’t it always turn out to be worth it? He was at that moment walking a world where Sandra could be found and touched.

But first came the naked people.

Gabled row houses walled in one side of the street, brick apartment buildings ranged to different heights along the other, broken by charcoal-toned alleys. Paitin had perhaps a quarter mile when he heard the rising slap and gabble coming around the corner. Then the wall of pink burst out of one of the alleys.

Around a corner and straight at him came a flailing throng, and the street was curb-to-curb with naked running people.

Paitin stopped, abashed but unafraid. He stood head and shoulders above most of them, turning slightly to let them pass, and none touched him. The nude pygmies were men and women of all ages, stampeding after being set loose from some brief but shocking captivity. The slap of their bare feet on the street and sidewalk was sharp and distinctive, the pale faces wild and bewildered. Their pubic hair formed a dark river rather close to the ground, and Paitin found it suddenly difficult to believe they could be homo sapiens separated from himself only by superstitious beliefs and poor diets.

Hover bikes followed behind them with the yuck and stutter of hard ammo guns driving them onward, keeping them senseless. The kids on the hover bikes would swarm up close, their faces blank, and throw people down by the backs of their necks. Then they’d pull off a little and strafe them with little pocks of gunfire.

Paitin’s cigarette shot out of his lips as a nude girl lost her balance and collapsed against him.When he didn’t throw her down immediately one of the hover bike kids zoomed up close and screamed, “
WHOOOOOO!
Go fer yours, buddy!
” And then resumed his position above and behind all of the flashing skin, pursuing them out of sight, guns pocking and splitting flesh like warm butter.

Paitin trapped the exhausted girl’s flailing arms and shoved her into a pile of garbage near the mouth of an alley, where she either passed out or played dead. He wiped his palms against his sides, spun in a slow circle, and walked on, chewing the end of the scrubber in his teeth.

More explosions thumped in the distance, and somewhere the crash of antique pistols briefly answered the neat little chirp and twitter of lasers and stutterguns before being silenced. Men and women burst randomly in and out of the row houses and alleyways, or they slipped in and out of dumpsters or ancient road-bound cars. Paitin felt bigger and bigger as he walked along. Warm breezes scattered paper trash and puffed memories of flame up his collar.

Half an hour later, Paitin stood before the steps to Sandra’s house. Relief overcame him, and he laughed to himself. As always, he’d harbored the fear that Sandra might not exist in this past, or that she might exist in altered form. A stranger would answer her door. This had been a subject of frequent nightmares in which she revealed, too late, a variant face; she’d once sported a large penis in one of his more disturbing dreams. But his Sandra had been in all previous pasts except one (two, including his own, the
Real
past), and as he took in the familiar flowerpots on the second-storey windowsill and the the chipped red brick of the façade, he knew he would not be disappointed. A feeling of having arrived on the edge of a far ocean washed over him, a positive feeling of floating away. He wanted to rush inside, and he wanted to creep silently away. He stood on the shore of a dream.

The destruction only seemed to add romance and a sense of destiny to his reunion with Sandra. Let the bombs burst and walls crumble around them. It wouldn’t matter. Paitin could hardly wait to hold her, to feel the hot flesh of her arms beneath his fingers. He would have to wait, of course, for her to accept him, but invasion and war had the wondrous effect of speeding everything up. He rarely had to wait long for her surrender.

For miles around, archaic war jets plummeted like rocket bombs into the sprawling city as the future’s children brought them down. It lent a breathless quality to the quiet of Sandra’s street. A cat’s feet blurred as it scuttled from one side of Chestnut Street to the other. Dead hands and feet stuck out of the pucker in the caved roof of a car where a human bomb had struck.

Paitin imagined showing these things to Sandra, looking deep into her eyes, and saying, “Not you. Never you.” And she would be his. Perhaps heaven and hell sometimes conspired to bring people together, as they seemed to do tonight.

Smiling, Paitin looked up. He saw something move in the upstairs window of Sandra’s house.

It wasn’t Sandra.

Fear and disappointment tore through him. He took a few steps backward to get a clearer look. The visage hadn’t gone, only stopped moving. When a distant fuel balloon threw a crimson glare across the darkling horizon, mingled with the fire’s reflection in the window was a leathery face criss-crossed with zippers.

No.

It had been just over an hour since the Invasion had begun.

Of all the places, the man in the zipper mask had to choose this house to have his fun. A minority of Invaders preferred private settings and elaborate rituals. They’d lay claim to a single house or building for days at a time. With so many to choose from, Paitin didn’t think he could count on Zipper to understand his need for this one.

And men like Zipper ceased to be themselves when they entered the past. Their alter egos could be territorial, aggressive. Not all of them remembered where the line was. Paitin certainly did not want to surprise this one, but he couldn’t let him ruin Sandra, not when he’d made up his mind that this Sandra was
the
Sandra for him, the one he’d stay with. He had the most powerful feeling that he’d never find another. He’d had the feeling before, but it remained as plausible as ever.

Paitin moved to the shadowed side of the stoop and paused with his back to the wall, which still gave off heat. Angry explosions lit the sky to the west. He’d need to move fast. The predator in the mask did not work quickly, according to rumor, but Paitin had no idea when he’d gotten here. He might already have found her. Probably had.

It enflamed some mingled moral and masculine sense in him. Sandra was not a modern woman. She was short, almost pygmy short, and innocent. She wore tidy little clothes she picked from paper catalogues. She was obedient and vulnerable and beautifully bottle shaped from bearing her own child. She was love.

Taking a last deep breath, Paitin swung his leg over the railing and found the door ajar. He pushed it open.

The house seemed to bulge with breathless darkness. Paitin took out his minicorder and turned it on. The camera sensed darkness and a tiny floodlight threw a cone of yellow radiance across a bannister, a closet, a small chandelier. Faint notes of creaking wood floors traveled in the walls.

What, he wondered, would this man do to another Real? What would he do in the anonymous darkness of a meaningless house? Once he’d begun his work, did he still distinguish between Reals and conditional perfects?

“
Hello?” Paitin called up the steps. “Can you hear me? I’m a Real. Hello?”

A ball dropped in his stomach as the seconds passed without an answer. He decided to bluff. “Do you need assistance? I’ve got a Rainbow.”

Silence. He took the Snap out of his pocket and slipped it over his finger. It was no Rainbow, but he pointed it ahead of him in tandem with a light beam.

“
Hey, come on. We’re all having fun, right?” He tried to control his breathing but it just kept coming deep and fast of its own accord.

A lesser weight suddenly scrabbled across a room upstairs, and the slow, creaking steps subtly changed direction. Paitin put his foot on the first stair, aiming the minicorder’s light above him.

“
Look, this is just another house to you, right? It’s not to me. I always come here. Come on, man, talk to me.”

Paitin tried to be stealthy, but the planks of the steps and the landing made it difficult. The place smelled of aging plaster and copper pipes, but was the same clean, active place he’d been dozens of times before with dozens of Sandras.

The slow creaking noises sent tremors through his body. Did he have her? Was he holding her against him, hand clapped across her mouth?

When he couldn’t stand the freighted silence anymore, Paitin called out: “Sandra!”

Following that was a silence somehow deeper than before. At the landing he shone the light down a narrow hall and into the doorway of a bedroom where the light of the streetlamps made a diffuse rectangle on the floor. Paitin swept the mini around, hoping it would be directly in Zipper’s eyes if he decided to rush out of a room. He held his Snap finger at the level of his belly, pointing it everywhere he looked.

The edge of a dark object loomed inside the doorframe of the room at the end of the hall. A man’s shoulder?

Paitin pointed at it, waited a second, and then snapped. The blast of force splinted a bureau or a chest of wood. The bits of wood seemed to take forever to settle. Then he called out, “Sorry. Hey, just playing around.”

He pointed in all directions as he moved down the hallway, one step at a time.

Sandra’s trembling voice quailed: “Help me!”

In one of the rooms down the hall, a tremendous weight shifted. Paitin squinted through the cone of light, trying to decide where the sounds had come from. He wished he really did have a Rainbow. The colorful ribbon could have sought out Zipper around a corner or beneath a door and made coiled shavings of him in a few seconds.

“
Help!”

“
Sandra! Hold on!”

He heard her crying.

Paitin worked his eyebrows against the sweat stinging his eyes. He swore he heard something scratching behind the wall to his right. He stopped and listened. The miniscule sound came again, the brush of a sparrow’s wing. He pointed his finger at the spot in the wall where the sound seemed to emanate, held it there for a second or two, then snapped.

The wall coughed inwards with a whorl of splinters and dust that filled the minicorder’s light beam. A question-mark-shaped bit of hair hung suspended in front of Paitin’s eyes before an eddy plucked it away and the last of the larger boards clattered to rest beneath a window.

Paitin did not quite put his head into the two-foot hole. He caught his cheek on the ragged edge of a lath when he turned towards the sudden charge of boots behind him.

Zipper exploded out of an open doorway on Paitin’s left. Paitin waved his arm and got a good point at him, steady, almost a full second. He felt the faint vibration of a premature lock-on but before he could snap Zipper’s shoulder slammed against his ribs, pinning his arm and knocking the mini spinning down the hallway. It brought him up crunchingly against the wall and half through the hole. The impact might have broken his ribs except that the ancient wall gave, leaving his crumpled impression on it as he slid down partway to the floor.

Paitin tried to turn and grab hold of his attacker, but Zipper held him by the shirt and put his head through the soft wall, filling his eyes with the sting of sweat and plaster dust. The bigger man pinned his Snap hand flat against the wall and yanked the sleeve effortlessly off his coiled finger. Paitin barked in fear and outrage and began again to slide to the floor, Zipper lifting him up again by the belt and breathing harshly against the inside of the leather mask. Zipper spoke: “You son of a-” He also sounded surprised and outraged, even queerly self-righteous.

Paitin palmed the man’s face with one hand and squeezed where he believed the nose and eyes to be. Zipper knocked his hand away and punched him in the mouth, mostly just a flick of the wrist, but stunning.

Then the zippered mask was rushing at his face like a brown hillside, and he saw no more.

Paitin woke and was unable to feel anything below his neck. His body did not respond to his commands, and he lay with his bloody cheek on the floor in a room of Sandra’s house. He heard a man talking in radio babble: “Two for extraction, two four extract. Suspect in custody.”

As his eyes cleared he saw Zipper standing in a corner of the bedroom, mask off, speaking into his fingernail. Pinned against the wall behind him was Sandra, the strands of a mesh web digging into her tanned skin, the zipper mask and Snap glove hanging off one of the longer strands like bits of laundry.

Must have hit me with a para
. Paitin could move his mouth and tongue, could breath, move his eyes, and that was all.

“
Confirmed,” said Zipper, then turned. He had sandy blonde hair and a strong nose. He pointed a bright light into Paitin’s eyes and said, “I’m agent Tarrington, undercover boom, twelve thousandth judiciary. Paitin Derricter, you’re under arrest for the murder of Jerrimore Trentin in conditional perfect past two-one-oh-two point one. You have the right to a culpability scan, should you desire one.” He came closer and lowered his face like a moon. “Myself, I think you did it to save this little tart, here.” His voice dropped. “You killed a Real.” It dropped further. “For
this
.”