Every atom of his body screamed at him to leave, run away; get the
Hell
out of here! But he couldn't leave the driver to die. At the very least, he had to check that he or she wasn’t just unconscious.
This is madness. Sheer madness
, he thought as he began walking cautiously over to the crashed vehicles.
Two of the cars were empty, their occupants having fled the scene. The third, an unrecognizable compact, was sandwiched between the other vehicles and had sustained the most serious damage. The driver, an elderly woman with blue rinsed hair, was slumped against the wheel of her car. Her jaw hung limply open, a thick clot of congealed blood filled her mouth. Jim assumed that her severed tongue probably lay somewhere at her feet. A spider web of blood-splattered fractures radiated out from the spot where her head connected with the car's windshield. Jim was sure she was dead but he stretched a cautious hand through the open window and checked for a pulse against her throat.
Nothing. She was gone.
Jim stepped back from the destroyed vehicle and its dead driver. His left foot trod on something metallic and he almost lost his footing as the object slid out from beneath him. He blurted an expletive as he barely managed to regain his balance then looked down at what had caused him to slip. It was the crushed car's license plate, battered and dirty, torn from its fastening on the rear of the car but the white background and blue
California
state name was still visible. Kneeling down he picked up the piece of twisted metal examining it as though he held some ancient scroll or religious relic, as though it held the key to his very existence. In a way it did, he realized. Here he was wondering where he was when the answer was all around him, fastened to the hundreds of abandoned cars that sat patiently waiting for their owners to return.
Still holding the warped piece of metal in his hand, he walked across to the nearest row of parked cars. Moving from one car to the next, he checked the license plate of each in turn. By the time he reached the end of the first row of parked vehicles he knew where he was. There were a smattering of out of state license plates - Nevada and Washington, one from Idaho - but the majority had the same blue on white plates as the one he held in his hand.
California.
And judging from the blue expanse that stretched out above him, it could only be California. The sun was past its zenith and easing towards the western horizon across the cloudless canvass of the sky, but in the distance, beyond the rows of abandoned cars in the foreground, an evil black plume of smoke spiked high into the upper atmosphere, as hard and expressionless as gunmetal. At its base, Jim thought he could make out the orange flicker of flames leaping high into the air. A faint smell of burning rubber reached his nostrils.
It looked like a big fire. Jim expected to hear the sound of emergency vehicles screaming along the roads towards the inferno. There should be helicopters and camera drones buzzing around the scene of the distant disaster like worker bees buzzing around the bountiful honeypot of disaster. Nothing in the air. Nothing on the ground.
A memory began to tug at his mind. A sense of déjà vu that descended like a mist, confusing him even further. Everything
looked
so familiar; no that was wrong, everything
was
familiar.
He
knew
this place. He was sure of it.
Taking a step out onto the black top he craned his neck to read the name of the mall fixed over its recessed entrance:
FALLBROOK MALL
, in giant white letters.
The name rang a bell somewhere in his memory. He repeated the name of the shopping center over in his head a couple of times.
Fallbrook Mall, Fallbrook Mall
.
"Got it," he said, with a snap of his fingers. It was the name of the mall he used to shop at when he still lived in California; when
they
had still lived out in the San Fernando Valley. There was a great little Italian restaurant that he and Simone would eat at and a Cineplex that they used to take ... Lark.
His eyes dropped to ground level again and he began to walk towards the low brick wall bordering the building, hedging in a perimeter of sad looking flowers, wilted and dry under the sweltering sun.
From the corner of his eye, he caught movement, his head turned quickly to focus at what had drawn his attention. Someone was watching him.
On the other side of the doors, standing in the foyer of the mall, a man stared intently at Jim. Dressed in khaki pants, a white open collared shirt and a black leather jacket, the stranger looked to be in his thirties, brown hair swept back over his forehead, eyes locked solidly with his own.
Jim took a step back in surprise. The figure took a step back too. Astonishment crossed both their faces. Jim raised his left hand; the stranger mimicked his gesture. "Christ," Jim whispered as he stepped forward and placed his hand flat against the doors of the mall, reaching out he touched the face of himself echoed in its mirrored surface. The face of Jim Baston when he was thirty-eight years old.
* * *
Eight
I must have fallen asleep at the wheel.
That was all Byron Portia had time to think before the road in front of him turned into a sea of shimmering red as drivers thumped brake pedals to the floor, their vehicles’ brake lights suddenly glowing like hot coals.
This was all wrong. An instant ago he was a half hour outside of LA, his earlier plan of reaching the city by midnight delayed by an unexpected accident outside of Baker. Some fool kid with too much synth-ahol in his system or jacked-up on the latest designer drug had forgotten to turn on their car's AI, smashed into the support of a bridge and spread both their car and themselves over eight lanes of the highway. The tailback had stretched all the way back towards Vegas for thirty miles and cost him three hours of his time. He had celebrated New Year sitting in in the cab of his eighteen-wheeler. He had not bothered hurrying after that. The time was past for him to find anybody suitable for his purposes that night.
But that was all okay. Everything happened for a reason, he knew.
And so, he had contented himself with the speed limit and tried not to dwell on the missed opportunity. He understood, he was protected.
And then suddenly... this.
Night was replaced by blinding daylight and blue sky. The sparse industrialized outskirts of Los Angeles, shrouded in the comforting shadow of darkness, supplanted by the urban sprawl of ... where? He had no idea. Cars everywhere. Confusion followed by a strange sick sensation of abruptly arrested motion in his stomach.
He sucked in an instinctive gulp of air and held it as all around him vehicles began careening and skidding across the unfamiliar freeway in a slow motion ballet of chaos. Clouds of smoke erupted from tires as panicked drivers brought their vehicles rapidly down to zero and stopped dead in their tracks only to be sent careening off by others behind them who could not react quickly enough to the wall of metal that was thrown up in front of them.
He saw one car lurch awkwardly into the air, corkscrewing gracelessly over the concrete median dividing his side of the freeway from oncoming traffic. The face of its terrified driver plainly visible for a moment as the driver's side window of the airborne sedan passed in front of Byron's windshield before disappearing in a massive ball of flame as it ripped through a stalled RV, before cartwheeling away out of his view.
Byron had no chance of stopping as his foot smashed into the brake-pedal; it was instinctive, it was automatic and intuitive but it was also stupid. The big-rig he was riding wasn't a car: it took time to slow down. Gentle caressing of the hydraulic breaks was all that would bring one of these metal leviathans of the freeway to a safe stop. Hammering the breaks could only lead to one result and even as the thought slipped through his mind, he felt the dynamics of his vehicle begin to change.
The forty feet of trailer hitched behind his rig began to slide forward and his cab begin to slip off to the left, centrifugal force trying to push the two pieces of machinery together. He tried to compensate by turning the wheel into the skid, trying to avert the oncoming jackknifing of his rig but he could already feel it was too late. He was going too fast and he had hit the brakes too hard. It wasn't going to matter anyway, too many damn cars ahead of him. All he could do now was hang on.
It was gradual, taking place over the space of a couple of seconds, but it felt as though it was five or six times as long, time stretched out for him by the sudden dumping of the contents of his adrenal glands 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 freezing air and watched the outside world spinning and tumbling, the scream of twisting metal and the cracking and splitting of plastic a strange but somehow fitting anthem for this disaster.
He was heading down again, back towards the warped dashboard and the strangely possessed steering wheel that thrashed and turned as if the driver's seat now belonged to some invisible, deranged demon-driver.
Byron Portia: truck driver and the most successful serial killer the world had yet known, plummeted towards the floor of his cab. His head smashed against the steering wheel with a sharp crack and consciousness fled from him like rainwater down a storm drain.
* * *
Nine
The store he was looking for - according to the mall map 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
.
Dillon's Bookstore
the sign above the entrance announced. 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:
Saturday June 13
th
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 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, either.
Goosebumps cascaded 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.