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.