Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (29 page)

Paitin tried to speak but only managed a convulsive swallow. He alternated seeing double and triple. Sandra tried making aggravated little movements but only chafed her flesh against the cords of the web, which tightened defensively against her.

Tarrington sat on a guest bed that Paitin knew had never been used, propping his elbows on his knees and preparing to wait. “You going to want that scan?” he said.

Paitin turned his eyes away.

Tarrington huffed. “That’s what I thought.” Then he seemed to read Paitin’s mind. He turned and stared at Sandra, then looked back and forth between them.

Tarrington was taller than Paitin, stronger, and more confident. He seemed huge as he paced the room, his footfalls grinding the grain of the varnished wood floor. “The man you killed,” he said, “was one of my informants.” He seemed to consider what this meant to him. “Not a cop, but a decent man. He trusted me.”

Paitin felt himself smoldering, the words gathered like an army behind the cage of his teeth.

“
Had his fun over here, like everyone. But he didn’t bring it home.”

A bubble of saliva passed Paitin’s lips.

Tarrington stabbed a rock-hard finger at him. “You’re going to sing his name, you piece of shit.” He took a long-bladed knife out of a thigh sheath and placed it on the floor beneath Paitin’s smoke-hole eyes. “But before we leave here, you’re going to do the same thing he did. You’re going to barber school.” And he gathered Sandra’s hair gently in his fist.

“
And if you don’t, I’m going to do something much worse. And you know I don’t give a shit about it.”

Sandra watched them both. Her coffee eyes grew and shrunk with uncertain revelation. Then she made the mistake of speaking. She whispered, “Who are you people? What do you want?”

Tarrington hadn’t expected her to talk. He stared at her quietly with his head tilted like a dog’s. Then he suddenly licked her face with a fully extended red tongue. When she strained away from the moisture on her cheek, the jealous web contracted with a sliding, snakelike movement.

Neither Tarrington nor anyone else would condescend to speak to a conditional, especially to answer a question, unless it was sport. He glanced at Paitin to make sure he was listening, then said, “The question is, who are you? And who the hell is he?”

Paitin knew the game immediately. Rage spiked in his chest. Tarrington wanted to complete his defeat and humiliation by exposing him. He wanted to torment him.

“
I’m
—I’m—”

Tarrington cupped her supple shoulder. “Nothing, darling. You’re no one at all. Except to him.”

Paitin struggled to move his fingertips, his toes. Nothing. But feeling had begun to surge in rivulets down his throat. He could feel the vibrations of distant explosions in the floor.

She said, “I’ve never seen him before.”

“
Well, he’s seen you, cupcake. A lot of you.” He turned. “How long you been coming to this house, lover boy? Three months? Always to a new…Sandra?” He made like he was going kiss her but ran his nose along her neck and collarbone instead.

Tarrington’s use of her name made Paitin blind with shame and rage. He’d regained some of the sensation in his shoulders and his upper chest but couldn’t move them yet. He dimly wondered how long before the boom arrived.

“
We,” Tarrington announced, “are from the future. You believe that? A different future. That way we can do what we want here without going home to a big mess afterwards. Let me demonstrate.”

Tarrington slipped the leather mask off the wire. It looked like a deflated balloon. Paitin was surprised when he pulled it over his head, then daintily undid the zipper over his mouth to reveal his red lips and tongue. He stared through small, piercing silver grommets like hollow dimes. “I’ve killed hundreds of you,” he stated.

Sandra appeared frozen in ice, eyes dead and gleaming.

Tarrington straightened. “You probably think I’m a sicko. But I’m nothing compared to him. He is a pervert.” He indicated the length and shape of Sandra’s body with a wave of his hand. “What else do you call someone who becomes fascinated with an animal?”

She sobbed pitifully, which seemed to enlarge Tarrington to a new height and density.

“
You see, this is probably the part he likes the best. Winning you over. Getting you to trust him.” He made little creeping spider gestures with his fingers. “Maybe he pretends to be just like you, running away with you, hiding out with you.” Then he became suddenly morose, and the mask looked comically bereft. “But we all know it ends between the sheets. That’s the only fantasy there is. He gets a last bang out of you, and then you die. Nothing but a snuff.”

Paitin found that he could flex his wrist a bit. He wondered if Tarrington knew he still had a Snap over him. Had he seen him get that good point in before hitting him?

Tarrington stood in front of Sandra, calculating the effect he had, hanging his head as if in sadness. “Because we only come to the same past once, my dear.” He cupped her buttock gently as if he weren’t the least aroused by it. “Because it’s ruined afterward.”

Sandra was so frightened that for a moment she
did
look like an animal. A rabbit, maybe. So soft and in need of protection.

“
There’s despair. Starvation.” Tarrington caressed her cheek with his index finger. “The survivors start killing each other within a couple of weeks. They turn cannibal.”

Sandra made a mournful sound. To Paitin it was terrible, withering, but Tarrington seemed enchanted by it. He suddenly became very focused on her. He angled his body to block Paitin’s view of their exchange and pressed his groin fully against her. He spoke in a new kind of gravelly voice, low, intimate, for her alone. Paitin could barely hear him. “We’ll do this a thousand times. We’ll kill you over and over again. Your world will end, and you’ll forget there was ever anything but brutality. And we’ll do it in a single weekend, so drunk we can hardly see straight. And then we’ll forget you.”

He broke from her suddenly and came to stand above Paitin.

“
Except for lover boy, here. He had to nail you so bad he killed one of his own for giving you a little haircut.” Tarrington kicked him and Paitin’s fingers coiled like a spider.

Paitin tried to snap and nothing happened. In another minute,
one minute,
he might be able to do it.

Tarrington pulled off the mask. His face was the very image of contempt. “The rest of them, out there? Just kids having fun.”

Then Paitin spoke. He sounded like a walrus barking. “Sandra.”

She froze at his call. Tarrington’s head snapped in his direction and spotted the waggling fingers of his right hand against the floor, and a terrible revelation blossomed in his face. Paitin, still unable to speak above a groan, said, “Sandra. Snap.”

Paitin saw the gummy bottom of Tarrington’s bootheel rise over his head and then smash down with crunching force on his hand. He barely felt it and went on trying to snap his mashed fingers, the bootheel coming down and down and down, slowing and finally killing the spider.

“
Snap your fingers. I’ll protect you. Swear to God.”

She looked about to do it but was distracted by sudden cackling laughter in the streets.

Tarrington had a thumb needle out of his belt and charged across the room to stick it in her neck.

Paitin managed a shout. “Snap! Snap your fingers NOW!”

Paitin didn’t hear her do it. A small explosion formed itself out of the air in front of Tarrington’s chest and hit him like a speeding car. Paitin saw his feet fly out in front of him before he was blown, doubled, through the window.

The curtains fluttered. The familiar ozone smell filled the room, and the broken window let in the wail of a hundred mournful sirens sounding the end of a civilization and the smoke of a thousand fires.

Eventually Paitin got up. He lurched to Sandra and released her from the web snare. She fell to the floor and scuttled away from him like a crab.

Paitin had to waste precious minutes speaking soothingly to her through a locked closet door. His love for her made him patient despite his desperation, and she eventually agreed to open the door wide enough to receive the objects he handed through: the minicorder, a pair of seashells, and a sealed envelope. The silence that followed seemed to stretch to eternity and back. Paitin’s heart became hollow and ready to collapse from the combination of her nearness and her distrust. He heard rumpling paper in the closet.

He’d shone a naked-ray through the envelope after she’d given it to him a month ago at his suggestion. It contained a piece of her very own stationary paper and a message penned by her own perfect little hand. It said:

Dear Sandra,

You are going to be frightened and confused when you read this, but listen to one piece of advice from your closest friend: Trust Him.

Sandra

Of course she couldn’t trust him completely. Not right away. But she would. Over the last three months, she had come to love him at least half of the time.

When she opened the closet door it was like a birth. Sandra emerged on wobbly legs with her damp hair matted to her forehead. He delivered her, holding her beneath the armpits so she wouldn’t fall, then let her collapse against him. Her body was stiff and unyielding, but that would change.

Paitin watched her. Tarrington had called her an animal, but that was ignorant. Modern civics taught that conditionals were inconsequential, but also that they gave their
consent
to the Invasion with their treatment of each other. They would have
believed
in the Invasion. Sandra’s misty civilization had already rejected liberalism. The upshot: Paitin’s lover was a human being capable of understanding him.

So who was the pervert?

He smiled and gave Sandra the minicorder again when she asked for it, holding the little screen in the palm of her hand. She watched scenes of the two of them laughing, walking along the beach (here she brought the shells out of her pocket, feeling their weight), dressing after lovemaking. She stared at her own stolen image. The emotions in her face were impossible for Paitin to sort out, but he thought he saw some grounds for hope, some allowance that it was all true, that he loved her and she’d loved him.

While she stared at herself, he stared at her. Sandra. The spectrum of Sandra, the could have, would have, politically incorrect should have, conditional perfect tense Sandra, even the metaphysical might have but did not Sandra. He never bothered to wonder which she was.

At one point she became deeply quiet and seemed to come to a hard decision. She became stiff and heavy as wood against him. Then a giant explosion brought dishes off of shelves and plaster from the walls. Sandra jumped and he seized her protectively in his arms, and she did not push him away.

He told her they had to leave, to get away from the area where Tarrington had called for the extract.

His arm was around her shoulders as they left by the front door. She still wasn’t steady on her feet. But that was normal.

Many of the buildings were burned and gutted in the aftermath of the world’s most spectacular party. To Paitin they seemed flat, truly unreal, as he’d been accustomed to think of them. He still experienced a certain visceral reaction to the red blood of the conditional perfects themselves, which made them a
little
more real. But Sandra…she’d glowed from the first.

He helped her pick her way over a spill of rubble in the street. He stood in front of her when a nude figure darted between two buildings and dove behind a garbage can. As they walked slowly and steadily, others broke cover like timid forest animals. Some of them had escaped captivity or been set loose and wore incongruous bits of costume: jester hats or bits of shackles; they had flaps torn out of the backs of their pants; some bore lash marks. The dead lay in strange contortions, embedded in four inches of cracked asphalt, eyebrows still glazed with the frost of the high clouds through which they’d fallen.

Paitin knelt to scoop his prize over his shoulder as she collapsed with a moan. It was for the best: he could hear the heavy buzzing drone of a splatterbot far down the street. He could even faintly see it. It worked away in the crisp morning, tall as a house with a swiveling torso, picking up victims and smashing them together, flinging them through the air, dashing their innards out against the blackened walls of the buildings. Where they tried to flee it stomped on them or kicked them, and the hovers followed languidly above, their passengers staring down tired and glazed from the night’s revelries. Sandra groaned.

Paitin patted her rump affectionately. “It’s alright,” he said. “Not you. Never you.”

She sagged, but Paitin felt confident she would rebound. She would never have to be a splatterbot victim or a gladiator or a sex show. He would keep her safe. Paitin clicked a button in his tooth, and a few minutes later Drew came swooping down with a hoverload full of clanking liquor bottles and stretched underwear. He came in low so that a naked man chained to the fender by his ankle would bang into the sides of buildings.

Drew stopped. He spoke without looking at Paitin as if he were ashamed. “We’re going to see the catapult, chum. Are you coming or not.”