The Machinist: Making Time

Making Time

A Short Story set in the world of “The Machinist”

Written by Alexander Maisey

Edited by Douglas Glassford

Cover by Mark Williams with Michael Shean

© 2013 Alexander Maisey, All Rights Reserved

This is a work of fiction.  Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.  No part of this work may be reproduced without the express written permission of the author.

Scott Patton was dying—and he knew it.  The disease ravaging his body had confounded medical professionals for some time, and the only science that came close to explaining his condition was purely theoretical.  That woeful confusion prompted the judge who had presided over Patton’s case to commute the super-criminal’s sentence after only a few years.

Patton was
just under thirty years old when he first stepped foot into Blackiron Federal Penitentiary, a specially-designed prison for superpowered criminals and psychopaths who could not be held in regular facilities.  Yeah, he recalled, he had a few gallons left in the tank back then.  For a while, at least, he had been able to stand up to the cyborg neo-fascists and mutant gang-bangers that wanted to fuck with him—or just fuck him.

But then the changes started
: His bones weakened and his lungs hardened.  His skin dried up and became like leather stretched over bone.  Scott Patton’s body aged seven decades in a handful of years.  He hobbled out of the prison a decrepit, ancient husk of a man.

Patton had made arrangements to keep his illicit income safe long before he got put away
.  He had never counted the sum of his savings from the dozens of bank jobs he’d pulled, or the commissions he’d earned from doing gigs for less talented crooks.  But he knew it was quite the bounty. After getting off the bus from upstate New York, Patton bought a throwaway cellphone and began making calls as he walked down Manhattan’s cracked old streets.

Patton leaned against a mailbox after ending the last of his phone conversations
to catch his breath.  A sheet of newsprint carried by the hot afternoon breeze fluttered by on the pavement and Patton stabbed at it with his cane to halt it.  He rolled his eyes after reading the newspaper’s hyped-up headline about the superhero squad called the Titans of Liberty.  As the limousine he’d ordered pulled up to the curb in front of him, Patton wondered if the average American taxpayer knew how much of their income streamed into the pockets of these so-called heroes.  Patton’s joints creaked when he leaned down and got into the car.

That evening
the skeletal ex-con—now clad in the finest three-piece black suit that money could buy—sipped red wine in the back of that same vehicle as it journeyed southeast through the city.  He grinned as the outskirts of the East Village flashed by the limo’s windows.  The car was nearing the end of its voyage to the outer edge of the ravaged portion of New York City called The Fortress—a safe haven for perpetrators of illegal acts carved out of the city by superpowered villains during the late eighties, formerly known as Stuyvesant Village.

Patton’s conveyance
stopped outside of a dilapidated, condemned building.  The half-man, half-lion thug that Patton had hired helped him out of the vehicle and up on to the curb.  Patton knew that rolling into the city’s
de facto
supervillain territory in a fancy car and a penguin suit was an invitation for trouble, but he also knew that this day was his last on Earth.  He’d seen it in the mirror that morning.  He had decided to treat himself, and he was more than confident that his gargantuan bodyguard’s fierce visage would make most assholes think twice about making a move against them.

He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, leaning on his cane as he stared up at the tenement.  He took it all in
, a picture forming in his mind of what the building had been like years before.  A piece of plywood covering one of the windows groaned as the wind blew under it, breaking his reverie.  The only reason the building was still standing was because the cowards at the city’s Department of Public Works never came within two blocks of The Fortress’ walls.

“They delivered my equipment?” Patton asked his bodyguard
.  The chimera grunted in acknowledgement.

“Good,”
said the old man, pointing at the boarded-over door.  “Open that up and carry me to the third floor. Kill anyone that screws with us.”

The beast man nodded and smashed shoulder-first through the doorway.  The bodyguard dusted himself off as he strolled back down the three steps leading to the now-shattered entrance.  He cradled the old man in one arm like an infant and went up the creaking stairwell.  The minutes passed slowly.  A few of the stairs creaked and splintered beneath the men’s combined weight, causing Patton’s bodyguard to growl—but Patton egged his escort-slash-pack mule on, reminding the mutant of the many thousands of dollars waiting for him when the job was over.

There were no surprises
as the pair ascended the stairs—no attackers from the shadows and no walls crashing in disastrously to reveal a superhero in pursuit of them.  Patton briefly regretted offering his bodyguard as much as he had, before reminding himself that the final fate of his ill-gotten gains would mean nothing to him very soon.  He whispered to himself as they reached the third floor.  “Tonight’s the night, Scottie.”

“Apartment B,” Patton instructed.  The
massive brute set him down in front of the door in question with a grunt.  Patton tipped an imaginary hat at his escort.  “Keep the car.”

The mutant
trudged around the corner and back down the stairs.  Patton turned to the door and pushed it open.  He smiled at seeing the small box that waited for him in the center of the cobweb filled apartment.  The container sparkled in the splintered moonlight that shone through the wooden slats nailed over the room’s windows.  A cockroach skittered across the floor of the otherwise barren room and into a crack in the wall.

The old man opened the box
and gingerly removed its contents.  He chewed on his tongue as he connected cables to each other and assembled the strange machinery.  Something inside the box began to hum.

***

The young man ran panting up 3
rd
Avenue.  The weight of the messenger bag under his arm slowed his gait more than he had expected.  Cool raindrops splashed against his reddened face, sending a tingle down his spine.  Or maybe it was the adrenaline.

He was pretty sure that
he’d lost the cops when he peeled off on to East 20
th
, but he turned his head over his shoulder to check anyway.  The fat fucks were huffing and puffing a few yards behind him. 
Damn!
He was going to have to scramble to make it back to the relative safety of Brotherhood turf.  He knew the mayor’s cronies wouldn’t come within a spitting distance of The Fortress.  Not if they wanted to keep their dicks.

The
young felon picked up his pace, laughing as he stamped over puddles on the pavement.  He could see the barber shop pole up ahead.  His goal was the red brick building next to it.  He heard one of the cops yell at his partner to stop, to back the fuck up.  The kid slowed his pace and turned so he was jogging backwards, facing the winded cops.

“Annd… hee’s..,” He raised his middle finger at the
officers and yelled, “Safe!  Scottie wins again, pigs!”

One of t
he cops waved him off and slunk away, defeated.  The second one followed the first, back up the narrow street.  Scottie took a moment to stare at the façade of his building, his home.  It was a pretty nice place that he’d scored, considering how close it was to the Brotherhood of Supervillains’ base of operations.

“Hate to see you get fucked up in some super-fight,” Scottie told the building. 
He whistled a cheerful tune while he went inside and made his way up the glistening hardwood stairs.  Reaching the building’s third floor, Scottie turned his key in the door of apartment B and stepped inside.  He slammed the door behind him and kicked off his Reeboks.

“Hello,” an old man’s voice croaked from the apartment’s shadows.  Scottie jumped
like a skittish dog, sending the bag he was carrying into the air.  When it hit the floor, dozens of fifty and hundred dollar bills spilled out onto the wood.

“I—I
—,” Scottie stammered.  “I paid my Brotherhood dues, man.  We… we’re good—“

“Shut up and listen to me,” the old man said, turning on the light next to the armchair he was sitting in. 
The wrinkled skin on the man’s face was stretched tightly over his skull.  “I’m going to change your life.”

T
he strangest feeling washed over Scottie, like he’d heard someone say that before.  But he’d never seen this guy in his life.  He shivered.

How could anyone be so old?
Scottie found himself thinking.  He took in the ancient man, studying his other features—the fancy black suit, the black steel cane—and he knew that this creep was a major player.  Scottie’s eyes rested on the high-tech wristband resting on the old man’s lap.  It was speckled with tiny, glowing lights, and hummed softly.  It was strangely familiar to him, despite having never seen it before.

“
Take this.”  The old man said, wrapping the weird device over the hook of his crane and lifting it up.  “And do exactly as I say.  We don’t have much time.”

Scottie reached forward
tentatively before snatching the wristband.

The old man smiled.

***

Patton took great care to
remain cryptic in his explanations to his younger self, never giving any hint to his identity.  He focused on the tricks of the technology—how the device could move the user forward and backward through time, but not space.  He explained how to adjust the configuration to move forward one minute, and nodded his approval as the boy followed his directions to a “T.”  He found himself nodding to no one: Scottie was gone.  A smell not unlike burnt metal hung in the air.

The older Patton kept an eye on his watch,
counting the seconds that ticked by.  His breath quickened with anticipation as the fifty seconds mark came and went.  He could feel his heart pumping twice its normal rate. His left arm tingled.

S
cottie reappeared with a blinding flash of light, back exactly where he had been standing one minute earlier.  The old man smiled.  “Right on time.”

Patton
was hesitant to tell his younger self about the next trick the armband could do. He was positive it was the cause of his advanced and untimely condition.  But then he remembered all the times it had saved his life.  Twirling the cane around in his fingers, he addressed the boy.  “Show me your hand.”

The young man
put his arm out, palm down.  Patton struck it with his cane, hard.  The young Patton yelped and grabbed his wrist.  The old man’s cane had broken the skin below his knuckles.  Blood trickled out and he protested, “What the fuck—”

“Generate a low-level field and
send it forward, I don’t know, five years.”

Scottie complied.  The air around hi
s hand turned a light blue as energy crackled about it.

“Now
,” the old man leaned back into his chair, with a smirk.  “Look at your hand.”

T
he injury began to heal.  Over the course of a few seconds, the skin around it rose into a bruised welt, then the blood disappeared and the cut shrank into a small scar.  Scottie was taken aback, but the old man spoke to interrupt the younger one’s shocked gasp.

“Try not to overuse that.”  Patton said, suppressing a grimace.  His left arm was numb, and he couldn’t feel his leg on that side, either.

“Alright, cool,” Scottie nodded.  “So what can I do with this, I mean—to make money?”

Patton chuckled.  “Start simple.  Go to the bank tomorrow,
take a backpack.  Tell them you want a lockbox and want to deposit something.  When they leave you in the vault alone, you project yourself forward to 11pm.  Open up whatever lockboxes you want, dump ‘em in your backpack.  Then go back to the time you left, and walk out.”

“Holy shit,
” Scottie said.  “That’s perfect.”

“It is, isn’t it?”  Everything was going how Patton had remembered it from his own youth. 
He felt his chest tighten.  He grunted.  Scottie noticed.

“Are you alright, man?”

Patton had a vision, a revelation of what would happen next.  He remembered the old man from his own past shuddering and collapsing to the floor, and the panic that he had experienced.  He recalled burning the old man’s body in a dumpster hours later, and how the smell got into his clothes and hair. 
Fuck it
, he thought to himself.  “One more thing.”

Patton coughed loudly, and
decided he was going to go out on his own terms—and spare his younger self the next six awful hours.  If he could change something, even the smallest thing, he knew it could undo his own personal timeline.  And he would just fade away and die peacefully.  Between fits of hacking coughs, Patton struggled to think of what he could do—what he could say—to do that.  And then it came to him.  He smiled, recovering from the fit.  He came up with a way to change the past—the kid’s future—and make sure that his younger self would be better off than he had been.

“Always break into your own lockbox, too.
”  Patton said, wiping the corner of his mouth.  “That’ll keep the capes off your back a while longer.”

“Okay, cool, man—but are you all ri—”

The elder Scott Patton began to shake. His hands became translucent, then the rest of his body followed suit.  Young Patton cried out, “What’s happening?!”