“We have to get out of here,” Niv begged them.
“We are going as fast as we can for Christ’s sake,” Liz retorted brashly, her face white with equal measures effort and terror.
“Mum, we are okay. We can walk faster if you need us to,” Paul said looking back at Ari and June with brotherly confidence.
“You just stay behind mummy darl. You’ll be safe there, okay baby?”
“I’m not a baby,” Paul mumbled to himself stepping back into line.
There was nothing Niv could do to make the journey eastwards any faster.
She had tried to hot-wire a few cars immediately after they’d set off – she had practised this skill in a virtual vehicle back in the future – only to find that cars no longer worked. She hadn’t factored in the complete failure of human technology. That fact hadn’t made it into the historical records - not yet anyway - and so she hadn’t planned for alternative transport.
God. Damned. Time. Travel.
In all of the available dimensions of time-space and in every branch of possible, probable and definite outcomes, there is only one civilisation – of the trillion, trillion civilisations which have ever existed – who thought it was a great idea to fill a metal can with highly-combustible irreplaceable petrochemicals and drive them around with the abandon of a lemming on a cliff’s edge.
Not only was it a terrible idea in general, it waste of long-extinct, carbon-based creatures of Earth’s past; it was also an absolutely marvellous way of quickly cooking off the surface of the planet. This is before you even begin to consider the waste of precious resources it takes to pave the roads, erect the signs, construct the electricity grid, build the bridges, affix the fluffy dice – solely to get the lazy to the mall, well within walking distance.
But still, Niv thought, cars sure look great. She’d drive one yet.
Liz had resided in Fairfield Heights her whole life. This was where she met her husband and raised her children. It’s where she’d married him. It’s where she’d lost him too. Yet she could barely recognise the suddenly alien place she was traversing.
There were hundreds of people now collecting in the streets, all of them reacting in their own unique way to the end of the world.
Some pointed upwards in disbelief at the things falling like tiny meteors in the distant sky. Some covered their ears at the awful sound of the streams opening into their reality – the pops, thwacks and slurps. Some sat in their front yards crying, as it were, in the maddening vacuum of information. The rest of them ran, without any direction but in every direction.
Miss Drury, a teacher from the local Public School was sitting in her car as they marched by like a raft of little ducklings.
“I can’t make it start Liz,” she called from the car window, pointing at the ignition. “It just keeps turning over. Can you help me?”
Liz didn’t know what to say to her. She wanted to say that nothing worked, or would ever work again. She wanted to help Ms Drury, or at least warn her what was coming for her, but she had her children to protect.
“Oh my lord, there’s Mr Tsolous! Nick! Nick!” Liz screamed.
“Mr Tsolous! Mr Tsolous!” The children yelled.
Mr Tsolous was walking away from the massing groups of people, towards the high-street and the police station. She called again and again, but he couldn’t hear her over the pandemonium. He faded into the distance.
“Will he be okay?” She yelled ahead to Niv.
“No. None of them are going to be okay. I thought I made that bit clear,” she yelled back.
They marched on quietly.
Harry Glassman, a neighbour from a few doors down held his head in his hands as though it would fall from his shoulders and roll into the gutter if he didn’t. His Nissan sportscar – a 260Z to be precise – was overturned on the nature strip. All that was left of the car was a black frame, cinders and a plume of toxic smoke.
“My car! My friggin’ car!” Harry yelled over and over again.
“Harry,” Liz began; her wits at a complete end.
“My Car Liz! My friggin car!”
“Harry forget the car, just get out of here. Can’t you see what’s going on around you.”
Niv pulled her arm and Liz fell back into tight formation.
A single fallen powerline lay on the road, inert and lifeless.
A frantic cat named Muffin hissed at Niv as she walked by the Poppin home. Muffin hissed with a ferocity none of them had witnessed in her, in the years they had known the gentle cat. Muffins was usually a pretty chill feline, as Ari would say. But today, Muffin had gotten so worked up on seeing Nivs, she lunged with claws out-stretched straight at Niv’s face.
Niv was too quick, and was able to connect the butt of her gun to the cat’s face. Muffin flew off into a bush, jostled around noisily with some branches, and having thoroughly lost that battle ran up the nearest tree in an accepted form of cat surrender.
“What the hell is that thing?” Niv screeched pointing her weapon at it.
“Don’t you dare,” Liz said, pushing the barrel of Niv’s gun up and away from Muffin.
“He’s just scared of you,” Ari cried.
“Feeling’s mutual.”
…
The thing about Muffin:
Muffin the cat knew what was coming that day in July in 1987.
Had anyone checked in with Muffin, they would have known that she was an intra-dimensional being who had witnessed all the possible, probable and definite outcomes of the Everywhen. It’s a known fact that all cats are actually intra-dimensional beings - that’s where they go when you’re looking for them. But most were lazy and stupid animals.
Muffins was neither lazy or stupid. She had been jumping between temporal dimensions her whole life. Muffins had discovered that each temporal plane there was a slightly different version of Primp Pet Cat Food and she loved them all. Sometimes Muffin would finish dinner in one plane, and hop over to the next for second, third and fourth lunch.
This is why Muffin was so fat. It was also why Muffin had witnessed a different version of this outcome months ago. She had seen the cataclysm numerous times. She was fast running out of dimensions to enjoy second lunch, let alone third or fourth. Muffin had tried her best to advise her owner, Gertrude Poppin, of the whole tragic course of events, months ago, down to the painful detail. She had tried to tell her when it would happen, their method of travel, and the complete failure of the SureEnough Alarm system. But it had all just came out as loud meows and gentle head-rubs.
Muffin had let the others of her kind know. Most had left for safer dimensions before it all began. But Muffin was a warrior, and she would remain to protect Gertrude from Her. When the end came, no matter which Universe it was, the first human to breach the fundaments of time, and set the whole terrible thing in motion, was Nieves Boru Ohio.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
The same bald, angry woman who just smashed her face with the butt of her gun.
…
There were now tens of thousands of bodies crashing through the clouds. The bodies were not so close that Liz could identify them as people, but the sounds they made…The sounds were ghastly and somehow indescribably yet undeniably human in nature.
Niv didn’t have to be a genius to see the cumulative effects all of this was having on the family. Niv suspected that Liz was as frightened of her, as of the horror around them. She understood the emotions they were experiencing – to some extent. She remembered mortality: The feeling of being small, vulnerable – a victim. The fear of death could be powerfully motivating to some and equally overwhelming to others.
Niv longed for that feeling again.
“Are you guys okay back there?” Niv asked, breaking the long silence.
“Fine. Fine. Let’s just get to where we’re going.”
Liz was completely rattled, but doing a fairly reasonable job of hiding it from her children. They shivered as the cold rain wriggled its way into every dry patch of clothing. Her bag weighed down her narrow shoulders as heavily as the realisation of this new reality. She looked at the Niv. The woman she had decided – against her better judgement – to trust. Not just trust, but follow blindly, with her family in tow, into the futuristic war zone erupting around them.
Liz wasn’t ready.
Paul, Ari and June were not ready.
Liz could admit that to herself. But she intended to try. There was nothing left to do but be the person who could handle what the world was becoming. She would make the mental effort to try.
Suddenly a flash like lightning struck to the East. It was followed by the loudest, wettest thwack they had yet heard. The body of a Timeless traveller fell from the sky, just ahead of them with the heavy assurance of a cannon-ball.
At first the group were convinced the man would hit them.
Ari ducked, June yelped, Paul pointed.
Liz screamed.
Niv raised her weapon.
But the body suddenly veered off-course in defiance of physics and hit the ground with a stubborn determination, landing one street over; on the very street they were now running towards.
“Don’t worry,” Niv assured them. “The Timeless aren’t interested in you, unless they are you. If you don’t recognise them, chances are that they will almost certainly leave you be. They may be highly stimulated, completely insane time-killers, but this is a suicide mission - not murder.”
She felt like she was trying to explain quantum superpositions to a giraffe. There was too much context, not enough time to explain it all, but she plowed ahead nonetheless. The storm was easing, and other than the distant slurps of opening time portals, they could finally hear each other.
“The Crusade that these people are on…” she said slowly, “…is viewed in my time as a Humanitarian mission. The Holy Purpose. It’s a form of euthanasia and therefore a mission of mercy. They say, they have every right to undo themselves. But they will never commit murder. Murder is considered as bad then as it is now.”
She stopped, thinking hard as she moved.
“We are nice monsters.”
Liz understood. Paul understood. Ari and June weren’t even listening.
By now, space-time was being ruptured with alarming regularity.
Each wet pop heralded the coming of another Swimmer, another Crusader with a single-minded purpose. Swimmer, after swimmer spewed into existence, in a terrifying procession; an interminable display of their magnificent power.
“We are just as dead if any of these…things land on us,” Liz said, her hair dancing an anti-gravity dance in the easing wind.
“I can’t stop the dice. All we can do is get to somewhere marginally safer than this.”
“So you can’t really help and there’s no point going so quickly. Can we just slow down for a few minutes? These are kids behind me, not immortal warriors.”
Niv finally acquiesced.
She had to agree; there was no sense rushing at this point.
Liz saddled up to Niv, finally shoulder to shoulder. Her shoes and stockings were sopping with water.
“Why was the other me trying to stop you back there… and where did you send her?”
“To your first question …let’s say I am not popular where I come from. So there may be more attempts to evict me from this time. Right now my people are too distracted to focus on me but that will change. To your second question, I sent your future self back to her time - my time. Deep, deep in the future. My friend will know what to do with her when she arrives.”
Before Liz could ask any follow up questions, a proton blast exploded in front of them.
The Timeless man who they had just seen crash land over the line of roofs, was pointing his huge weapon at another man hiding behind a car. It was actually half a car. The other half had been melted into a puddle of protons.
The two men were identical to one another.
Niv stopped dead in her tracks and put herself between the gun and Liz’s family.
The man hiding behind the car, let’s call him Mortal Tony, held a cricket bat in his hand as he crouched behind half an engine block. The other man, let’s call him Timeless Tony, held a Farrego X, Military issue, semi-automatic proton disruptor.
“Come here Tony!” The Timeless man called to his identical self, setting his sights on the part of the car Mortal Tony was hiding behind.
“What’s going on?,” Mortal Tony yelled back, swinging a cricket bat at nothing.
Mortal Tony, did not know why an identical version of himself was brandishing a strange weapon at him.He didn’t know why he was playing cat-and-mouse in the rain with a copy of himself. It was too absurd to consider. All in all, it was a very disconcerting situation. So disconcerting that he failed to attend to anything else that was going on around him, including the small crowd gathering at a safe distance.
“Trust me when I say this Tony,” Timeless Tony said, as he stalked his former, mortal self around the car. You want to die! More than anything else! Trust me!”
“No. I am fine living, thank you very much,” he said, hurling a rock at his doppelgänger from behind the cover of the car, shifting around it to remain hidden.
Nivs didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t save every mortal human from this dreaded end. Not yet anyway. And she needed to get Paul out of there. But she couldn’t move. She was transfixed. She had only ever imagined this horror, and here it was… happening in front of her.
“Get away from me!” Mortal Tony yelled.
“Someone help me please!”
That’s when Mortal Tony made his mistake. He stepped out from beneath the car to make a run for it. Unfortunately for Mortal Tony, he was quickly dispatched. The blast struck him just below the shoulders, and through his big belly.
The disruptor didn’t just kill Tony, it annihilated, dismantled, vaporised, extinguished, liquidated, razed and eradicated him. Mortal Tony’s atoms inverted. His Neutrons buckled into fine soup. His Protons packed their bags and went on a holiday into the ether. His quarks and their gluey gluons decided to go to lunch. Even the Higgs field – which gave his matter mass – whistled loudly to itself and pretended not to be there, as poor Mortal Tony and his essence ceased to be.
June screamed so loudly it startled Liz, who suddenly realised what her children had just witnessed. She took them all into her arms, and for the first time since her husband had passed, she cried.
Timeless Tony could not believe his sudden relief.
He dropped his gun, and for the first time in maybe a billion or more years, he cried too.
He didn’t just cry, he wailed, as the weight of endless torture had been lifted from his shoulders. He lay down, in the light rain as it fell on his cheeks, and considered the distant lightning, and the bobbing trees, and all of the beauty of the world again. A world that mattered because his experience of it was fleeting, ephemeral, and soon to be over.
He took out his reset button, placed it on the wet asphalt, and smashed it to pieces with the butt of his gun. Time would come for him in its own time.
He would just have to wait.
The sweet interval before Death.
Death.
The truly illusive moment denied him and his kind.
…
Liz woke up early that next morning with a start.
It was still dark, and the air of the bedroom was tight and cold. She knew immediately that she was in someone else’s bed; not her own. She would never see her bed again, she feared.
She did not want to think where the occupants of the house were. It was a beautiful colonial style home. It was strong, weather-board, clad tightly, reliable and sturdy. The room was thick with someone else’s smell. The shadows in the room were still and long and alien.
She got up, being careful not to disturb her three children who were huddled together sleeping loudly. She crept into the lounge expecting to see Niv, who had told them she would keep watch for the night. But the lounge room was empty, and the front door wide open.
Liz moved to the door quietly.
She saw Nivs staring into the night sky.
“The stars have shifted so much,” Niv said, not even turning to look at Liz.
“There are so few stars in our future; burned out or moved off. Even they abandoned us. ”
Liz joined Niv on the lawn, and against her better judgement placed a hand on her shoulder.
“So what’s your name? I forgot to ask.”
“I’m Nieves…but you can call me Niv.”
“Ok Niv. What’s the plan?”
“It’s hard to explain…umm…”
“I’m Liz.”
“Nice to meet you Liz. And the plan is hard to explain Liz.”
“Okay. Can you at least say where we are going?”
“It’s not really a where. I mean there is a where…but that’s not the point.”
“I don’t get it.”
Niv sighed. “Honestly I don’t know where to start.”
“Anywhere is good.”
“Have you ever heard of Preferential Temporal Narrative Mechanistics? Or the N3T equation?
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m looking for the main character.”
“And you think that’s my son?”
“I know it is. It has to be.”
“Are there kids in your time?”
At this Niv frowned. “No,” she said quietly. She smiled again, this time without her eyes getting involved. “I think you should sleep. While you can.”
Afterthought: The historical records of Niv’s time (the one’s that persisted), spoke of a carnage on Earth that went on for 40 days and 40 nights. Niv always thought that this was just a nice round, dramatic sounding number. Now that she was here of course she could see that this was not a clean operation. It was a planet wide game of hide and seek.