The inevitable impact seemed to happen gradually, taking place over the space of a couple of seconds. But it felt as though it was five or six times as long, time stretching out for him, as his adrenal glands dumped their contents into his system.
He felt the potential energy building in his vehicle, the cabin begin to strum and squeal as the tension resonated through the tortured metal. Energy built furiously in those… long… drawn… out… seconds… before… the rig detonated.
His steering wheel whipped out of his hands and Byron catapulted from his seat, exploding toward the roof of the cab. An empty Coke can flew past him as he smashed into the ceiling, knocking the stored air from his straining lungs. The windshield imploded into the interior of the cabin with the sound of a million shattered bottles, broken glass showering the leather driver’s seat with diamond hailstones.
Through the newly punctured eye of his cab, he felt the numbing rush of warm air and watched the outside world spinning and tumbling, the scream of twisting metal and the cracking and splitting of plastic. It was a strange but somehow fitting anthem for this disaster.
He was heading down again, back toward the warped dashboard, as the strangely possessed steering wheel thrashed and turned, as if the driver’s seat now belonged to some invisible, deranged demon-driver.
Byron Portia: truck driver and one of the most successful serial killers to stalk the United States, plummeted towards the floor of his cab. His head smashed against the steering wheel with a sharp crack and consciousness fled instantly from him like rainwater down a storm drain.
Nine
The store he was looking for—according to the map of the mall he had consulted earlier—should be on the ground floor, on the opposite side of the mall to the exit. He found it just as the sign had said, nestled between a Sears and Radio Shack.
Barnes & Noble the sign above the entrance announced. Wow! Jim took a moment, it was a real honest to goodness bookstore. He couldn’t remember when the last time was he had seen one of these?
Jim picked his way through the literary rubble of spilled fiction, true crime, encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauruses. The occasional dropped briefcase or dumped school satchel was the only indication that the cause of the destruction both within and outside the bookstore was rooted in human panic, and not some strange weather anomaly that had run its destructive course throughout the mall.
Against the far wall of the bookstore, Jim found what he was looking for. He reached for a copy of the LA Times from the rack, not bothering to read the headline or open the broadsheet. Instead, he quickly scanned the top of the front page looking for the date: Monday, June 18th 2017. Tossing the paper aside, he grabbed a New York Times: same date, same year. One after another, he checked the remaining newspapers. All of them read the same.
There was no way in hell this could be right. He had, until what had seemed like only minutes earlier, been over two thousand miles away in New Orleans, safely hidden away from the world in a cramped but comfortable hotel room in 2042. Yet, now, somehow he found himself standing in a bookstore twenty-five years in the past. And, judging from the commotion and confusion he had witnessed since his arrival, he wasn’t the only one who had made the journey.
Goosebumps erupted down the length of his arms as a dizzying feeling of unreality washed over him. He leaned against a rack of books waiting for the queasiness to pass; hoping he would not throw up while sucking in deep gulps of air.
Although he had not been aware of it at the time, from the moment he had found himself standing in the luggage store, Jim realized he had been panicking. It had taken hold of him without his even noticing, and had driven all of his actions and pushed all of his buttons. More than the regular fight-or-flight reaction, Jim had been on autopilot, his conscious mind pushed into the background while his survival instincts had taken over. Now, as the adrenaline was finally dissipating from his body his thoughts became clearer and his personality regained some control.
He began to think through the possibilities of just what was going on here.
He hadn’t done any drugs since he was a kid, so, unless someone had slipped him something at the bar last night? No, he had bought his own drinks and never left them unattended, so this was not some kind of a drug-induced hallucination. He wasn’t tripping.
It wasn’t a dream, either. The experience was too visceral, and the throbbing in his bruised fingers that had been trodden on by the mob removed all doubt this was anything other than reality. This, whatever ‘this’ was, was actually happening.
The possibility he was suffering some kind of mental breakdown had crossed his mind, but that would not account for the panic and death that he had witnessed all around him. Maybe others were sharing his psychosis? Doubtful.
There were some very realistic virtual-reality simulations available — he’d tried a few of them — but they could not come close to truly simulating the feeling of being somewhere other than hooked up to a machine. Although incredibly realistic, there was still a certain synthetic feeling to the environment, the virtual-population seemed a little too unreal in their responses when you talked with them. It took a personal suspension of one’s belief to truly immerse yourself into the program. The kind of processing power needed to create a scenario as real as what he had already experienced was still decades out of reach.
So, what was left? That he and God-knew how many others had somehow been transported back in time into the bodies of their earlier selves.
Unbelievable! Inconceivable! Impossible!
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 left was that he was truly experiencing this event. That for some unknown reason, he and at the very least the rest of the people in this shopping mall, had been thrust back through time, twenty-five years into the past.
The implications were simply staggering.
So, if he was to accept that he had travelled back to 2017, 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 only could he smell it, he realized as he sucked in a lungful of smoke filled air, he could also 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. And Daddy was always right. You never argued with daddy, not if you valued your hide.
Portia’s eyes flickered open and he tried to force his befuddled brain to assess exactly what had happened to him. 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.