Lucas wasn’t the sort to rush in anywhere. He moved like most ranchers do—steady, economical, like every step oughta count for something. He was a country boy. Life moved slow in the country. Lucas didn’t rush around like city folk do all stressed and frantic. But that afternoon he hit the threshold hard, chest heaving, hat pushed back, sweat dried white along the collar of his work shirt. His face had gone the color of old paper.
That was when I first laid eyes on the blasted machine. Under one arm Lucas carried a black hard case clamped so tight it looked near fused to him.
Mari half rose from the chair by my desk. “Lucas?”
He looked at her, then at me, then over his shoulder toward the hallway like he expected the Devil himself to come boiling through the station any second.
“Sheriff,” he said, voice rough as gravel. “I need to talk to you—right now.”
I eased up from behind my desk. My mind was still stuck half in that open drawer where the divorce papers lay and half on the date staring at me from the calendar like a branding iron. But something in Lucas’s eyes shoved all that grief off to the side in a flash. I had seen men scared before. This was more than that. This was the look of a fella who had seen the world flip upside-down.
“You hurt?” I asked.
“No.” He swallowed. “Least I don’t think so.”
He patted his body with his free hand looking for any sign of being hurt. His other hand in a death vice with that black case. You woulda thought it was pandora’s box ready to unleash hell by the tension in his white-knuckled hand.
Mari stepped closer, worried. “Lord, Jesus. What happened?”
Lucas set the case on my desk with more care than a man uses settin’ down dynamite. “There was a shootout at my ranch.”
That landed in the room heavy. Even the tickin’ clock seem to shut up.
I frowned. “A what?”
“A dang war, by my reckoning. Cartel boys and some other fellas. Foreign. Chinese maybe. Uniforms on some of ’em. Clean ones. Sharp. Disciplined.” He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. “They tore across my south pasture, shot each other to pieces in my barn, and every last one of ’em died trying to get—to—this.”
He tapped the case three times hard to punctuate each word at the end of his sentence.
Mari and I traded a look.
“You call it in?” she asked.
“Naw. I came here first.” Lucas looked straight at me when he said that. “Figured if I called the state boys before I knew what I had, next thing you know half the world’d be crawling over my land askin’ questions I wouldn’t have the answers for. Sheriff, I ain’t fooling with you. I ain’t lost my marbles. There’s bodies out there and burnt metal and blood all over my place. But that ain’t even the strangest part.”
I moved around the desk. “Start at the beginning.”
So he did.
He told it plain and fast, though the plainness of it somehow made it worse. Two vehicles ripping over his land. Gunfire. One bunch dressed like cartel muscle. The other moving like trained soldiers. A crash in the barn. A slaughter. A horse kicking one of the foreigners dead before the man ever got a shot off. Then silence. Then the case hidden in the wreckage under dead men and busted timber.
By the time he got to opening it, Mari had folded her arms tight across herself like she needed the comfort. I could smell sweat and dust on Lucas even from across the desk—sun-baked earth, smoke, fear. Real fear. The kind that didn’t spook easy.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
He eyed the case, and spoke like it might hear him. “Goggles.”
Mari let out a short breath through her nose. “Lucas.”
“I know how that sounds.” His jaw tightened and he threw up his hands all mad like a wet settin’ hen. “See for yourself, Sheriff.”
He popped the latches and opened the lid slow.
Inside sat the slickest piece of equipment I ever laid eyes on. Black, narrow, smooth. It barely looked human, like it wasn’t from this world. Not hunting gear. No military issue I’d ever seen. Not some toy neither. It looked expensive in a way that made you figure twice about even touchin’ it. The thing rested in the foam like it had been laid in a coffin built special for it. Light from the blinds struck the dark lenses and slid off in blue-green oil colors that didn’t look natural to a Texas sheriff’s office. It made the room feel wrong all of a sudden. Too quiet. Too small. Like that contraption had brought some cold foreign place in with it and set it down on my desk between the coffee rings and citation books.
Lucas reached in slow and lifted the goggles out. “I tried ’em on.”
Mari muttered, “Of course you did.”
He ignored that. “There’s a dial on the side. I turned it. And when I did, I seen my barn a few minutes earlier. Not a recording, Sheriff. Not like a camera from one angle. I could turn my head and look all around like I was standin’ there inside what had already happened.”
Now, I knew Lucas Jackson well. He wasn’t prone to makin’ up fantastic stories. When he spoke, he spoke true. In fact, he was about the most trustworthy person I knew in this godforsaken town.
“You sure it wasn’t a recording?” I asked.
His eyes flashed. “Case was sealed shut in the wreck the whole dang time. Buried under debris. There warn’t no drones. No wires. No cameras. And even if there had been, it couldn’t show what this thing showed. It was the whole space, Sheriff. All of it. Like the room itself remembered.”
Nobody said anything for a second.
Then I held out my hand.
Lucas stared at it. “Dallas, I’m tellin’ you, this ain’t natural.”
“Ain’t a lot natural anymore. The whole world’s gone upside down.”
Mari turned toward me. “Sheriff—”
“Let me have a look at ‘em.” I kept my eyes on Lucas. “I best figure out what we’re in for.”
He hesitated, then handed it over.
The thing felt almost weightless. That bothered me straight off. Machinery oughta feel like machinery. This thing felt like trouble.
“Dallas—Sheriff,” Mary Barton chimed in from outside the bullpen, “are you sure you wanna be messin’ with that contraption? Maybe we should wait for the government or somebody before we start playin’ around with it.”
That was about as true to Mary as possible. She was always the cautious one. But I knew right then that I needed to understand what it was before I could decide what to do about the blasted thing. Yeah, I know. Stupid. But you know what they say about curiosity and the cat.
Ignoring Mary, I put the strap over my head and settled the goggles against my face.
Darkness at first.
Then a faint blue glow lit the inside of the lenses. Thin lines. Tiny symbols. Something like a grid, maybe. I could still see my office through it—the desk, the filing cabinet, Mari near the window, Lucas planted stiff by the chair—but it all had a skinned-over look, like the room had been translated into a language the device understood better than I did. The old wood grain of my desk sat under a faint humming lattice of light. The dust motes in the sun looked pinned in place. Even the venetian blinds over the window seemed sharper than they oughta, every bent slat and ragged cord outlined like the machine was measuring the whole world and finding it lacking.
“There’s a dial,” Lucas said softly.
I found it by touch and turned it a notch.
The room trembled.
Not for real. The floor didn’t move. But through the lenses the office started unwinding itself backward in the right order, one little thing at a time. I moved around some and looked all around at the events as they played in reverse. The coffee ring on my desk vanished after I picked up the cinnamon coffee cup and drank it backward. Steam slipped down into the lid. A drip crawled up the side of the cup and disappeared. Mari slid away from the window and back toward the doorway. The worried set in her brow smoothed itself out into the guarded look she wore before Lucas had started talking. I watched as Lucas moved in reverse, backing away from my desk with the case tucked under his arm instead of set atop it. His hand found the office door knob backward, and then he was outside my office entirely, crossing past the frosted glass as if he had not yet come in. Even the front room beyond him seemed to peel back with it—Mary settling before she had startled, chairs un scraping, motion folding in on itself till the whole place looked like time was taking back what it had just done. All of this while their voices spoke in that eerie sound of speech in reverse.
It weren’t just what I saw. It was how complete it was. I could turn my head and follow the thing in full. Mary out by the front desk with her readers low on her nose. The yellowed wanted poster by the copier. A fly lifting backward off the glass and vanishing toward the open transom. Light itself seemed different through that machine—flatter in one instant, warmer in the next, afternoon being reeled backward thread by thread. My own stomach turned over hard enough I thought I might lose that diner coffee on my boots.
I went cold all over.
Now there are shivers and there was this. Like my blood froze in my veins.
I pulled the goggles off.
Mari was right where she’d been. Lucas too.
“You saw it,” he said.
I looked at him and my blood went from cold to hot. “Confound it!”
This was trouble.
Mari studied me. “What? What did you see?”
I looked down at the thing in my hands, then up at the two of them, then past them at the office I had just watched run backward like film through a projector from hell.
“It’s a damn time machine.”
Tune in next week for Chapter 2 – Part C. Take Advantage of this limited offer from Creation Press. The first 100 free subscribers will automatically be upgraded to a paid account for one year.