Although he had not been aware of it at the time, from the moment he had found himself standing in the luggage store Jim had been panicking. It crept up on him without him noticing, 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 count off possibilities of just what was going on here.
"Think," he said aloud. "
Think
."
He didn’t do drugs, 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 a drug-induced hallucination.
He wasn't tripping.
It wasn't a dream; the experience was too visceral and the throbbing in his bruised fingers removed all doubt that this was anything other than real. This was actually happening.
The possibility that he was suffering some kind of mental breakdown had crossed his mind too, but that would not account for the panic and death that he had witnessed all around him. Others were sharing his psychosis? Doubtful.
There were some very realistic virtual-reality simulations available - he'd tried a few - but they could not come close to the feeling that you were truly there. Although incredibly realistic, there was still an unrealistic jerkiness to the scenery, the virtual-population a little unreal in their responses when you talked with them. The kind of processing power to create a scenario as real as what he had already experienced was still years out of reach.
So, that left what? That he and God-knew how many others somehow had 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 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.
If this were one of those old horror movies he grew up with, he'd be hearing single piano notes right about now. Unable to control his irrational fear any longer, Jim grabbed a handful of pre-teen dresses from the nearest rack and ran out of the store.
* * *
There was an oiliness to the air. It stuck to his skin making it slick and dirty.
Jim’s eyes smarted painfully. He resisted rubbing them lest he get more of the crap in his eyes. The torn strip of summer dress he now wore over his mouth and nose provided a modicum of protection against the pollution but he could still smell the stench of burning rubber and felt its chemical tingle in his throat and tasted the acidic sourness in his mouth.
The thick plume of smoke that he had seen rising into the air earlier now filled most of the southern horizon. Vast clouds of smoke roiled and billowed; angry, black and purple bruises forming against the skin of the abused sky. Most of the western skyline was gone, buried beneath a black shroud of smoke, the sun a barely visible afterimage and, he realized with horror, the buildings visible earlier had disappeared behind the thick bank of smoke that rolled and crept towards his location. Jim could see unruly spires of flame leaping high into the air: the source of the Pompeian snowstorm that now fell on the city. Tendrils of smoke drifted free from the main body of the massive fire and hung overhead the mall, the advance guard of the rapidly approaching firestorm, blown by the high altitude winds.
"Christ!" he said aloud.
The sense of disquiet he felt in the empty clothes store had not entirely dissipated and as he watched the rapidly approaching storm of smoke, his uneasiness returned with a vengeance, teetering on the verge of panic.
"Get a grip," his voice muffled by the bandana over his lower face, surprised by the trace of nervousness he detected in his own voice. He just needed to reason this out, not let the panic blind him to his situation. "I must have got here somehow. There has to be a car parked somewhere out here."
Pushing his hand into his jeans' pocket, he pulled out a six-inch rectangle of green plastic, blank on one side. He flipped the piece of plastic over. On the reverse side, he saw the glittering laser etched hologram of the Ford Company.
What car had he been driving back then
- back
now
, he corrected himself, staring at the plastic ignition key in his hand as if it might be able to answer him. Of course, it was the Ford Phoenix. He'd only ever owned the one Ford; the great-granddaddy of all motor vehicle companies had gone belly-up in the late thirties, swallowed up by Nissan who immediately laid off all the subsumed company's employees and closed down all the plants.