A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL
A NaNoWriMo Challenge: Chapter 14
14
“Jesus Christ!” I said, opening my eyes. “What’s that stench?”
It was dark. I’d never been in a room that was so dark. I held my hand up in front of my face, and looked at where I could sense it being, but was still unable to see it. I dropped it back down to my lap.
“We’re in The Elephant Graveyard,” Jen said from somewhere beside me.
“What the Hell is that supposed to mean?” I said, turning to the sound of her voice. “Really, where are we?”
“Hell might actually be a good word for it,” she said with a sigh.
I sat up, banging my head on something that felt metallic, tinny almost, and lay back down again, rubbing my head. There was something that felt like a light snowfall of flakes dusting my face, except it wasn’t cold. I tried to sort things out, reaching out with my hands, feeling the ground around me until I brushed up against her leg.
“What are you doing?” she said, moving away from me.
“Where the hell are we?”
“Well—the nearest I can figure it—is that we’re in what was once a tunnel through a mountain. I don’t know where it is, or which tunnel it is, all I know is this is a tunnel. There are cars, and trucks all over the place, but they’ve all been crushed and rolled up on each other for the most part. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many there are, but I imagine there may be thousands.”
“Thousands?” I wondered if I sounded as skeptical as I felt. I’ve driven through tunnels before, and never once could I say there were even close to a hundred cars, unless the tunnel was in a major city.
“I think they were trying to escape the volcano’s blast,” she said, “and once the quakes hit, everything collapsed on top of them.”
“Quakes? You mean earthquakes? That doesn’t make any sense at all,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because if a tunnel collapsed on top of them, how could we be inside? You have to dig your way into places after an earthquake.”
“After the volcanoes blew—”
“What do you mean, volcanoes? I thought there was just the one? The big one under Yellowstone?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” she said, and for some reason, I was thinking she was shaking her head. “That was just the start of it. There’s, I don’t even know how many volcanoes around the Pacific Rim—you know what that is, right?”
“Yeah, they call it the Ring of Fire.”
“Do you know Mt. Baker? Up in Washington?”
“Sure.”
“That blew. That’s right along both the San Andreas and the Cascadia fault lines. Do you know the last time Mt Fuji blew?”
“Why would Mt Fuji blow? I thought it was extinct?”
“Just dormant. The last time it erupted was back in the 1700s. But then, you weren’t even born then, so how would you remember? But it was catastrophic. Tokyo was buried under two feet of ash. There were earthquakes. The whole country broke into pieces.”
“What do you mean it broke into pieces?”
“Exactly what I said. But the earthquakes over there sent huge tidal waves across the Pacific. The entire West coast of North America was hit. And when the quakes off the West coast hit, well, everything was wiped out. California’s gone; Oregon and Washington are pretty well gone as well. From Alaska down. ”
“Okay, I get the part about what happened; you don’t have to tell me everything. I don’t really want to hear about it. Maybe I’m not as empathetic as I thought I was; I don’t know. You’re telling my three quarters of the world’s population died, and the rest will probably die of starvation. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture in my head. I mean, the human race obviously survives if you’re here from the future. What I want to know is why we’re here? In this place.”
“Well, according to Whit, he says we can cross this and come out on the other side. I don’t believe him for a minute. I think he’s made a terrible mistake, but he won’t listen to me, and, well, frankly, what choice do I have? He says he can smell fresh air.”
“Fresh air? In this shit?”
“That’s what he says.”
“How long have you been in here?”
She was silent for a moment. “It’s hard to say. There’s no light, except for this stupid little flashlight, so I can’t really say.”
“And you say this Whit is leading the way?”
“I have to trust him,” she said.
“And then what?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“If, by some miracle, he does find a way out, then what? He must have a plan.”
“He plans to find his wife. I think your father’s with her. Well, that’s what Jimmy said.”
“You saw Jimmy?” I asked. I thought I remembered her saying something about him being lost in time. Maybe he’s another Billy Pilgrim a part of me thought, somehow, unstuck in time.
“He’s the one that told us we have to rescue Whit’s wife.”
“So we can get Helen?”
She was silent again. I wished I could see her so I could read her face. I was certain there was something she wasn’t telling me. I let the silence hang, thinking maybe she needed the time to sort out what she was going to say, as well as how she was going to say it.
“He says Whit’s wife is pregnant.”
“Pregnant? So? Jimmy’s never been one to care about that sort of thing. He was hardly excited when you—I mean the other Jenny—got knocked up. Don’t you remember?”
“This is different.”
“You mean because she’s with Dad?”
“No. He’s not the one that matters. Not anymore.”
“To who? Jimmy? I find that hard to believe.”
“Actually, it was Whit who figured it out.”
“Figured what out?”
“Everything.”
When she told me Whit’s unborn child would be the one to invent Time Travel, it sort of made sense to me; I mean, her being here; my being here; even Dad. But then, I remembered that Grandpa had been here as well, and, well, that just threw everything out of whack again. I could understand that he’d think going through the tunnel would lead us out on the other side—because we were alive in the first place. Everything Jimmy said led this Whit person to think that he’d be successful, rescue his wife, save the unborn child, and, well, basically save the day.
Still, there was something that wasn’t sitting well with me. I couldn’t figure it out, not yet. It had to have something to do with the Slavers, I thought. The first thought being, who are they selling their captive slaves to?
“What do you know about this time?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Slavers? Who are they? Or were they? Whatever.”
“There’s not a lot of information about them, which is why they sent people like me back to this time in the first place.”
“And why did they send you back to my time? My grandfather gave his bracelet to my father. You told me that, or he did. Someone did. But he had it first. How did he get his hands on it?”
“What are you thinking?”
Now it was my turn to be quiet and sort things out in my head.
“He was a Time Traveller, but he didn’t come from this time. He came from your time. He was sent back to this time, and somehow ended up in my time. He served in the War. I’ve seen pictures of him. But was he really in the War, or was he sent back to study the history of that time?”
“You’re over-thinking this.”
“No, I’m not. You came back to my time, not my grandfather’s, and not Dad’s either. You specifically came to my time. Why? It had to do with Mandy, didn’t it?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you killed her,” I said.
“I killed her because she was going to kill me. It wasn’t premeditated, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“I did it to save myself.”
“I’m still trying to sort things out,” I said. “So? Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why were you here?” I asked.
“Why should I tell you the truth?”
“Well, from what I can figure out right now, if you don’t tell me the truth, we’re going to be stuck here, in this time, because you don’t have any way of getting us back unless we rescue a kid that isn’t even born yet. Whatever the plan was before, has changed.”
“Why do you think it’s changed?”
“My grandfather died, in my time. He was bedridden for years. He had a stroke. But for years,” I repeated. “Where was he when he was bedridden in my time? He was here. But was he here, in this time, or in your time? I don’t know, maybe he’s the one who sent you back to my time?”
“And why would he do that?”
“Because he knew something no one else did.”
“And what was that?”
“He knew about the kid. I think he wanted to stop it all from happening.”
“Time travel?”
“Think about it,” I said.
“What’s to think about?”
I didn’t have an answer. Maybe she was right? Maybe I was overthinking it? My best chance right now was finding out how to get out of this guy’s head and back into my own body. I almost laughed when I thought how I didn’t know where it was; I literally didn’t know where I left my body. It reminded me of that line from the old First Edition song. I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in.