I wish I could tell you I met that thought with discipline. Badge-first. Duty-first. Country-first. I wish I could say the lawman in me rose up, slapped the grieving fool in me upside the head, and put that black pair of Satan’s goggles in an evidence bag where they belonged.
But grief is a slick road that leads into the ditch, friend. You don’t always feel yourself sliding till the ditch is already beneath you.
I stood there in my office with that cursed machine on my desk and Hannah’s name ringing around in my skull like a church bell after a funeral. Sparkwood and Route 21. One year minus one day. Last chance. It was a rotten thought. A dangerous thought. And worst of all, it was a thought with teeth in it. Once it bit down, it didn’t much aim to let go.
Mari saw it working on me. Lucas did too, though slower.
“Sheriff,” Mari said, real careful now, like she was talking to a man on the edge of a roof, “you need to back away from that thing.”
My mind fractured in a thousand directions at once “Oh, drop it, Mari. I ain’t fixin’ to steal it. I’m just thinkin’.”
“That’s exactly what scares me.”
Lucas slumped into a chair with his hat still crushed in both hands, about as tired as a whore on uncle’s day at a brothel. Dust clung to his sleeves. Smoke had gotten into his clothes so deep he smelled like a burn pile after rain. “Dallas, maybe we oughta lock it up. Just for tonight. Sleep on it. Call somebody in the mornin’.”
“In the mornin’,” I muttered. That’s the whole problem, ain’t it?
Mary Barton had drifted halfway into the doorway again, one hand flattened against the frame, curiosity wrestling caution and getting whipped by it. “I don’t like the look in your eye, Sheriff.”
“Well, join the club.”
I picked the goggles up again.
Mari made a sound low in her throat. “Dallas.”
“I ain’t going backward this time.”
“That ain’t the reassurance you think it is.”
I thumbed the frame, feeling for the little dial near the right side. The thing was still cool. Too cool. Like it had its own weather. I stared at the markings etched along the inside rim, all them neat foreign scratches laid down by hands on the other side of the world, and a thought came to me mean and sudden.
If it could show what had been—why not what was about to be?
I don’t know why that notion came over me right then. Maybe because I had found the back wall of the machine and figured every machine had another side to test. Maybe because once a man sees the impossible, he gets plumb foolish about where the impossible stops. Or maybe because the Good Lord was trying to shove a warning under my nose and knew I was mule-headed enough to need it done dramatic.
Either way, I slipped the goggles back over my eyes.
The office dimmed under that smoky glass. Blue lines woke up along the edges of my sight. The desk, the chairs, the blinds, Mari standing off to my right, Lucas by the door, Mary out in the hall—they all got skinned over with that same cold measuring grid. It looked like the machine was laying claim to the room.
I found the dial and turned it the way I had before.
The room started to peel backward.
“Hold it,” I said.
I turned the dial back to center. The image steadied.
Then, slow as a man trying not to wake a rattler, I nudged it the other direction.
For a second nothing happened. The office stayed put. My own breathing sounded too loud inside the padded seal of the goggles. Somewhere beyond the lenses I heard Mari step closer.
“Sheriff?”
Then the light changed.
Not backward. Not like before.
It jumped.
The room ahead of me skipped forward in a tiny, ugly lurch. So small I nearly thought I imagined it. Mary was no longer in the doorway. Lucas’s shoulders had shifted a fraction. The day grew slightly darker than it had been a moment before. The blinds had moved, just a touch, like a breath of wind had touched them. It wasn’t a long way ahead. Lord, no. Barely a heartbeat. Maybe two.
I froze.
Then I pushed the dial a hair farther.
The office skipped again.
A pulse thudded hard against my temple through the frame. Symbols blinked along the edge of the display. The room in front of me sharpened into a moment that had not happened yet.
Mari was turning toward the front office.
Lucas was opening his mouth.
My own hand was braced on the desk.
Then all at once the front window exploded inward.
I saw it before it happened.
Glass burst in a shining wave. The whole wall spat glitter and splinters. Muzzle flashes strobed from outside—hot white bursts in the dusk. Mary jerked backward with her hands rising, a single bullet and a splatter of blood flying in the air as the bullet peirced her dead-center in the forehead. Lucas snapped sideways, a trail of blood spurting from a new hole in his side. Mari’s mouth opened in the silent shout of the dead before the vision jolted again.
Gunfire.
Inside my office.
I ripped the goggles off so hard they near caught on my ear.
The present slammed back around me. Mary was still in the doorway. Lucas was still in the chair. Mari was still halfway between warning me and cussing me out.
My heart hit my ribs like it aimed to kick free.
“Get down!” I roared.
Ain’t nobody asks why when a lawman uses that voice. Not if they’ve got sense. Mari’s training took over and she dropped first, fast and clean, going for the floor beside the filing cabinet. Lucas ducked hard, not like a lawman but like someone who got scared by a loud bang they didn’t expect. Lucas thought better after seeing our reaction and threw himself toward the wall. Mary just blinked once, froze like a deer in headlights.
I lunged for her.
The front window blew apart.
The sound came a hair after the flash—an ugly chain of cracks so violent it felt like the whole building got punched square in the teeth. Glass blasted through the bullpen in a bright storm. Wood splintered. Papers flew. The old front counter kicked up dust where rounds tore through it.
Mary Barton screamed.
I got one hand on her blouse sleeve and yanked with everything I had. She came stumbling toward me just as another burst chewed across the doorway where she’d been standing. The wall behind her spat plaster. A framed county map shattered and dropped crooked.
“Floor!” I bellowed.
We hit it hard.
More shots hammered through the front of the office. Not pistol fire neither. This was rifles—fast, disciplined, and mean. The kind of shooting that came in tight controlled strings, not wild panicked blasting. Whoever was outside were trained to be lethal.
Lucas crawled behind the overturned visitor chairs, hat gone, face white as sun-bleached bone. “Sweet Jesus—”
“Shut up and stay low!” Mari snapped.
She was already moving on elbows and knees toward the side of my desk, hand on her sidearm, eyes hard and clear. That woman had grit. I’ll give her that till Judgment Day.
A round punched through my office door window and starred the frosted glass right over where my head had been a second earlier. Another tore into the edge of the desk and sent a spray of wood chips across my cheek. The sting of it brought me all the way into the moment.
This was no random drive-by.
They had come for the goggles.
Outside, tires screeched. Men shouted. One voice barked something sharp and clipped in a language I didn’t know, but sounded an awful lot like Chinese.
Lucas looked at me from behind the chairs, eyes blown wide. He didn’t need to ask. He had heard it too.
Chinese.
I slid Mary behind the side of the desk and pressed her down by the shoulders. She was shaking all over, her reading glasses gone, hair half fallen out of its clip. “You stay put. You hear me?”
She was in shock, so she didn’t respond. “Dammit.”
Mari reached my side. “How did you know?”
There weren’t ten spare words in that room and she knew it. Still, I saw the question burning in her. Not fear of the gunmen. Fear of me. Fear of what I had done with that machine and what it meant.
“Future,” It was the only word needin’ to be said.
Her jaw tightened. She believed me. That was the worst part.
Another burst ripped through the outer office. The coffee pot in Mary’s little station detonated in a spray of black liquid and glass. The smell of burnt coffee hit the air with the dust and cordite.
Then came a new sound.
Return fire.
Not from us.
From outside.
Shorter bursts. Angrier. Closer to the street. Men yelling over each other. One side shouting in Spanish, another in that hard clipped Chinese. Tires squealed again. Something heavy slammed into a parked car outside hard enough to jolt the front wall.
Lucas stared toward the shattered window. “They’re shootin’ at each other.”
He was right.
Whoever had come for the machine had just run headlong into somebody else who wanted it too.
And right there, crouched on the floor of my office with bullets clipping through my walls and foreign voices tearing up the evening outside, I understood something cold and final.
Lucas hadn’t brought me a strange piece of evidence.
He had brought a war to my front door.
Another muzzle flash strobed through the broken glass.
And the night came all the way in.
Tune in next week for Chapter 3 – Part B. 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.
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