Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition Read online

  “You sort of stunned me,” she said, again smiling at him, “when you started banging on my door with that ax.”

  He watched as she twisted the knife in her hands. Crap, he had left the ax out in the hallway.

  She went on. “Clearly, you’re from some point in the future. What year is it where you came from?”

  “2259.” His voice sounded high and he swallowed the dryness.

  “What month and day is it for you now?”

  He had to think for a moment and do a little calculation, since he hadn’t thought of what day it was back in the future, in his real time, for a while. “August twenty-first.”

  That time he managed to keep his voice normal and level, even though he was having an impossible conversation with a woman twisting a knife in her hands.

  She nodded. “Two more years and twelve days. That’s what I figured.”

  “Until what?”

  “Until I get out of this jail,” she said, waving the knife around at the apartment. “I’ve been here for six years, 353 days. Nine-year sentence in this instant in time, living in this stupid apartment that a woman by the name of Donna created.”

  Suddenly Nick understood exactly what had happened. He had broken into a prison cell.

  After time travel had been discovered and the realization that nothing could be affected in the past, society had started dumping criminals into the past, letting them live in contained time bubbles in an instant in time, isolated, unable to hurt anything or anyone until their sentence was up.

  It was fantastically cheaper than prisons. He had read studies on it. No guards, self-replicating food, and no need to even bother with keeping track of the prisoners. Their locations and instants of times in the past were always kept a secret, thus they would be impossible to find.

  This woman was a criminal and this was her cell.

  Somehow, when he had traveled back in time, he had ended up in the same instant of time she was in. Against all odds, but more than likely the time travel machines used a bunch of the same settings and that’s how they had both ended up in this same instant in the same area.

  The thinking went that there was so much room in the past, there was no real reason to spread out the criminal over too wide a number of time moments.

  The woman stared at him for a moment, clearly shocked at his stunned reaction. “You weren’t looking for me, were you? You stumbled in here by accident, didn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  She shook her head, clearly sad about something. Then she brightened. “Well, this is one for the record books.”

  Again, all he could do was nod. More than likely this little accident would help the sales of his book, but at the moment that was the least of his worries. The knife in her hand bothered him a lot more.

  “So, you want some pizza or not?” she asked, moving with the knife toward the couch. “I think it’s still warm.”

  “So, what did you do?” he asked, trying his best to make his voice stay level and his tone conversational, like he was asking her the time of day.

  “Stabbed a man,” she said, smiling as she held up the knife.

  This time the smile got to her eyes and he knew she was kidding.

  She laughed and then said, “Drugs. Smuggling the most recent designer drug from a modeling assignment into the wrong country. Stupid.”

  The realization hit him as to who he was looking at. Her name was Nancy. Nancy Robinson, a supermodel convicted and sentenced back when he was still working on his third novel. Her face had been all over the world net, and they had even filmed her disappearing back into time to serve her sentence.

  Now, after the six years, she had aged slightly, but was still a stunning beauty.

  “So, who are you and what the hell are you doing here?” she asked, picking up a piece of pizza.

  She bit into the pizza, watching him with her intense, green eyes.

  “My name’s Nick,” he said. “I’m a writer here researching a new book on the secrets of people living in this building. Including Donna Hayman, the woman who was supposed to be living in this apartment at this point in time.”

  “Welcome to her apartment,” Nancy said, looking disgusted. “Trust me, she’s not home and she has no real secrets, unless you call dying her hair and being behind on her credit cards a secret.”

  Then she laughed, the sound husky and odd in a weird way. She indicated that he should sit down and have some pizza. “Might as well get comfortable. It does look like you stumbled on a really big secret in this apartment.”

  He smiled and let himself relax a little. “It does, doesn’t it?”

  He took the offered piece of rich-smelling pizza and carefully bit into it. It tasted even better than it smelled, if that was possible.

  For the next thirty minutes, while they finished off the pizza, they talked and laughed about all sorts of things, and he got the short version of the events that put her in this jail cell.

  All he kept thinking was how fantastically beautiful she was, how lucky he was to have found her, and how much more enjoyable the last few weeks of his research trip was going to be. He should have started at the top floor instead of the bottom floor. He would have found her ten months ago.

  After he told her about a few of the other residents in the building, she smiled and sighed. “I like you, Nick. It’s going to be good to have company for the last two years of my sentence.”

  “I only wish,” he said, laughing. “I’ve only got two weeks left on my research time, although I might be able to extend it a month or two before hitting my recall button.”

  The emergency recall button, and the main one in his time bubble in the lobby, were the only way anyone from his present could track him to this moment and bring him back. He had been warned that if something happened to those two buttons, there would be no finding him.

  She looked at him, a puzzled frown wrinkling her wonderful face. Then sadly she shook her head. “You don’t understand, do you?”

  She pointed to the door. “Your recall button is blocked in here. Go ahead, try to leave.”

  He stared at her, again trying to absorb her words. He then glanced back at the shattered wooden door that he had stepped through and the hallway beyond. There were two other shattered doors he had gone into earlier in the week.

  “This is a prison, remember,” she said, softly. “No one leaves here until they call me back when my time is up. It is why I never crashed through that door and explored the city.”

  “You don’t have the special implants to do so,” he said, pushing the panic he was feeling down. Suddenly the pizza wasn’t settling so well in his stomach. “You would not have been able to move through the air out there.”

  “Of course I have them,” she said, sadness filling her eyes. “Every prisoner has them just in case something goes wrong with the bubble. We also have special recall buttons that will only go through the bubble when our time is served.”

  He shook his head and stood and headed for the shattered front door to the apartment. She couldn’t be right. She was just pulling some sort of sick joke on him.

  As he reached the door, he started to step through the opening and his leg banged into what felt like a very hard surface. Pain shot up his leg and he grabbed his knee for a moment. There didn’t seem to be anything in his way, yet there was something there.

  “Force field around the bubble,” she said from behind him, her voice soft. “A prison far more effective than any cell invented. And it will remain in place for just over two more years.”

  “Sorry, got to go,” he said, his voice again high and showing the panic he felt. He pushed his emergency recall button and waited for the tingling feeling of the time travel kicking in.

  Nothing.

  He just stood there, with a former supermodel staring sadly at him. He clearly wasn’t going anywhere, at least for two years and twelve days.

  But at least he had a beautiful supermodel to keep him company.


  ***

  Six months later, he was still sleeping on the couch.

  Day after day of those six months he had stared at that stupid sign on the gumball machine.

  Wait for the Coin to Drop.

  He had come to find the secrets of the residents of an apartment building. And he had done just that.

  It seemed the resident he had ended up trapped with had enough secrets to fill a dozen books. To start off with, she was bulimic, with no desire at all to help herself do anything else. In the small three-room apartment, the sounds of her forcing herself to throw up after every meal soon went from worrisome to completely revolting.

  She had told him, on the second night, when he made a pass at her, that she had once been a man, had had the operation, and now hated everything to do with men. In fact, during the second month of his time with her, she had told him that he disgusted her.

  It seemed that everything about her was fake. She took off her small breasts every night and hung them with her blonde wig on the wall beside her bed.

  Worst of all, she was the most shallow human being he could have ever imagined in even a horror novel. The only topic of conversation that was allowed was her looks and her career and if she could save her career when she returned. She wondered if the world will have forgiven her “little mistake” as she called it.

  She had quit school in the tenth grade and seemed proud of that fact. She had brought nothing to read and claimed that she had never read a book, ever, in her entire adult life. And there wasn’t a thing he could use to write on in the entire prison cell. What little bit of writing he managed to do was to fill the last of his notes in the pad he kept with him each day before it ran out of power.

  Every day Nancy spent hours and hours and hours in the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror.

  Three small rooms filled with secrets. They had become impossibly small within the first week and downright tiny by the end of the first month. Plus he had no clothes to wear besides what he had been wearing, so his main chore was to cook himself something to eat twice a day and do laundry every third day.

  The rest of the time he just lay on the couch and stared at the sign on the gumball machine sitting beside the open door that promised his freedom, yet never brought it.

  The gumball machine became the symbol of his life.

  Wait for the Coin to Drop.

  He was trapped in a moment in time with the secrets he had uncovered, the same type of moment that existed when a child waited for the coin to drop in the gumball machine to deliver the promised reward.

  Introduction to “Nice Timestream Youse Got Here”

  Lee Allred relishes time travel and alternate history. His classic novella, “For The Strength of the Hills,” is a Sidewise Award Finalist. Rookhouse Books has just reprinted it in a standalone volume. He’s sold a lot of short fiction and has written for comics for DC and Image.

  When Lee heard that I was editing a time travel volume of Fiction River, he wrote a short story immediately. It was the first I purchased for this volume, and it is one of the most memorable.

  Nice Timestream Youse Got Here

  Lee Allred

  “Say, you know what the hardest part of being in the Agency is, Vince?” Maizie asked me as she slid her little square of butter off its waxed paper backing and scraped it across her toast.

  Her voice carried easily over the clatter of plates and clatter of voices in the crowded Brooklyn diner. Breakfast rush, the joint was crowded, but not so crowded I couldn’t keep watch out the window for our collar.

  I didn’t answer. The dingy chrome trim in the diner was brighter than Maizie.

  “Keepin’ track of things,” she said like I’d answered back anyways. She wasn’t looking for conversation, she was what they call waxin’ philosophical about the job again.

  In this racket, it don’t pay to get philosophical about the job. Get in, get done, get out. There’s a reason why I’m the number one troubleshooter for the Agency and it ain’t cuz I wax any which way, philosophical nor other type wise.

  “Like rememberin’ what things is called what where,” she went on. She held up another papered square of butter. “Like this here. They call it a ‘pat’ of butter here. That guy at the counter looked at me like I was some kind of creep asking for a flop of butter like a regular person.”

  She waved the butter square like it offended her delicate sensibilities, not that she had any. “This ain’t no pat of butter. It’s a flop. A pat is what comes out of the other end of the cow.”

  “Sure,” I said around a forkful of eggs. “Like youse know about cows. The closest youse ever came to a cow was walking past the milkman’s cart at 2 a.m.”

  I bit into my own slice of toast. “So theyse call it a pat here in this neighborhood,” I said, swallowing and chasing it down with a cup of black coffee. “So what? So maybe theyse call the other end a cow flop? Who cares? You see me in an uproars just cause they got ‘scrambled eggs’ printed on the menu ‘stead of ‘stirred eggs?’ I made myself understood like, didn’t I? Got my order the way I like, didn’t I? Shaddap and eat. You’re givin’ me the pepto.”

  She shadapped and ate. For two whole minutes anyways.

  Now, some of my other partners have got to waxin’ philosophical about the job, and let me tell ya, brother, nothing good ever comes of it. Givin’ themselves the pepto about who just got in the White House, who just won the World Series, who just got their ugly dead political mug plastered all over the face of a coin by an Act of Congress.

  Who cares?

  Life goes on, don’t it?

  Mugs in the Agency who worry about that kind of stuff don’t last too long, and I’m one of the reasons they don’t. I ship ’em back upstream without their paddle, they start waxin’ philosophical.

  Unless of course their name is Maizie. Her, I don’t ship back.

  I know what you’re thinking, and it ain’t like that. And don’t start smirking like there’s something wrong with me neither, or I’ll butter your necktie. I’m just as red-blooded as the next regular Joe.

  Yeah, so it might not look it from the way I act all calm and collected and disinterested around her, but trust me, I know better than anyone else how Maizie’s put together. You’ve seen those newsreels about Our Boys At Sea and all them mighty battleships and whatnot heaving and rolling and yawing and pitching on the high seas? Well, bub, when Maizie walks down the street, you better believe it’s Naval Appreciation Day, and let me tell ya, brother, the fleet’s in.

  Trust me, I know. I gotta work with her all day long. And that’s just what I do and that’s all I do.

  See, I got to be the one stuck with her as my partner because the Chief he knows I’m his one guy in the Agency who’s smart enough not to sink her battleship if you catch my drift.

  He knows I wouldn’t touch her with a ten foot canoodle on account of a) she’s the Chief’s daughter; and b) I gotta listen to her yammer day in, day out, all day long—you think I wanna listen to her all night, too, once I get home? And I wouldn’t be able to do nuthin’ to shut her up neither on account of c) she’s the Chief’s daughter.

  So me and Maizie, we’re strictly business. I’m the Brains and the Muscle of the team, and she’s the Distraction. Boy, is she ever. Kewpie doll face. Kewpie doll voice. Kewpie doll brain. And her very own pair of Sink-The-Bismarks that no Kewpie doll nowhere has ever had.

  So I sat there and just let her yammer on about this, that, and some other fool thing while I finished up my eggs and bacon. The way the Agency keeps us on the road, I don’t get many chances to eat a real breakfast in a real New York diner like a civilized person—you should see some of the joints I gotta eat at ‘cuz of this job—so I was going to enjoy this breakfast, come Maizie or highwater.

  Besides, I knew this chump we was tailing was buying his own Kosher breakfast two delis up the street. No hurry. Mister Regular Routine, he was.

  Anyways, I like making a collar after we’ve both had our bre
akfast and our morning coffee and our blood sugar is nice and level. They’re less likely to try something stupid on a full stomach, and I’m less likely to blow their fool heads off from them givin’ me the pepto.

  Little touches like that is why I’m the Chief’s Number One and got the New York beat, not makin’ the rounds in, say, Racine, Indiana. Or Wisconsin. Or wherever Racine is.

  So therefore on account of my advance planning, a few minutes later I’m sitting there leaning back in my chair and just finishing my fifth cup of coffee when I see our pigeon go walking past the window. I slap a silver dollar down on the table to cover the bill, grab my hat, and yank Maizie (“Hey! I ain’t finished yet, Vince!”) by the wrist and drag her out the door after him.

  Like they say, time and tide don’t wait up fer no man, even if youse work for the Temporal Protection Agency an’ got all the time—and timestreams—in the world.

  ***

  We followed our prize chump down two blocks and over another block to the crummy little brownstone he was rooming at.

  Now, us guys in the Agency got all kinds of fancy augments embedded and gene-spliced and nano-grown and what have you inside us. Some of dese help make us stronger and faster—Maizie could benchpress Joe Louis wit’out breakin’ a sweat—and others just help us get the job done, like the gizmo we got that lets us track a time traveler by them chrono-sumpthin’s he gives off, him not being a native of the here-and-now.

  That’s not even counting all the extra augments I’ve picked up over the years from here-and-there-and-then that the Agency don’t know I got (and I ain’t telling ’em I got). If youse gonna be the A-Number One, youse gotta have a hole card, ya know?

  But I didn’t need all that schmanzy stuff to trail this bird. All I needed was my own eyeballs. He was wearing his fedora like he ain’t never worn a hat in his life, and also he couldn’t figure out hows to cross the street wit’out there being no streetlight. Even Maizie could spot him just by looking.