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I Live Beyond Doomsdayby Kevin James Miller
A "Love Bites" Contest Honorable Mention
Sex and murder are universal energies.
In 986 A.D., a Norse expedition sought Eric the Red's settlement on the coast of Greenland. I, a man of the distant future, was in that boat.
I wore the perfect disguise provided by my time booth, at the moment millions of miles away. I could retrieve the time booth with a thought, and keep it invisible, via the control chip buried in my brain.
A strong wind blew those of us in the boat off course. One of us spotted, in the distance, land. I knew that land would one day be the United States of America.
A shadow rolled up out of the ocean and into the boat. The shadow departed and left...her.
She wore a long black dress. Vaguely Caucasian, she was so pale as to be almost white. Her long black hair and prominent dark brow framed blue eyes. Gold flecks swam in those eyes. Her mouth and nose were delicate. The mouth cracked open to a grin displaying gleaming white teeth.
The men started to scream about monsters and ghosts.
Before anyone could react, she raised the large rock she clutched and brought it down on the head of one of the men.
She disappeared with the corpse she made, back into the shadow, back into the water.
I don’t think anyone else noticed, but as she disappeared with the dead man, she put her fingers into his crushed skull and brains, into his blood. She bent her head, a long, slippery ruby tongue starting to snake its way to a dead eye socket. Animal euphoria crossed her pale face.
A chill struck me, reaching deep into my heart.
In a few days, I slipped away, and sent for my time booth. I departed the tenth century and went back to my own age.
In my journey back, I thought back to the night with my wife, the night that led to our divorce. In the middle of making love, I reached into the open drawer of the night table and pulled out a Mayer Double B, a combination wrench and laser, essential in the maintenance of standard model time booths. I put the tool in my wife's hand.
"Cut me." I dragged an index finger across my chest. "Right across here. Go right through my heart until you kill me."
My wife dropped the tool and rolled out of bed, ran to the shower, and stayed there for two hours.
Of course we talked about it. What married couple wouldn’t talk about it?
But I had crossed a line, a line beyond the land of black hooded rubber masks with zippered mouth holes and the whips and chains that anybody could find in the midnight zone holographic ads.
A few hours after my arrival back from the tenth century, in my lab in the Institute, my supervisor, an avuncular sort with a little goatee, walked in. He liked to get his reports in person. I reported all the data I collected that would prove useful to the Institute.
"So anything unusual to report?"
The lie came easily to my lips. "No. Nothing strange at all."
My next mission was in a few days.
I was going to pursue her, the woman from the boat, and find her, for she was, I decided, mine, and I was hers, with all the beckoning vistas of pain and pleasure that promised; I expected no one to understand, and so kept my own counsel.
Two days after talking to my supervisor, I accessed the Institute's records, looking at the logs of the other time travelers. The record would show that I was just generally looking over the files of travelers doing research on the history of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. What could be more natural than for me to look over those records since my official long-term project was writing a history of North America? The truth is I was looking for her trail, for other accounts of mysterious women, women of violence.
Under "Social Issues" I found that a traveler doing field work in the 1860s was trying to confirm a rumor he picked up that the gang that did the first railroad train robbery was led by a woman.
For my next use of my time booth, I concocted some vague nonsense about wanting to focus on the American Midwest, and the middle of the nineteenth century. Therefore, I just "happened" to be a passenger on an Ohio Mississippi Railroad train on May 5, 1865.
It's a funny thing about being on a train that you know bandits are going to derail. Your mind is ready for it, but your body isn't. I was just as jostled, bruised, and shook up as everyone else when the gang swung into action when the train reached North Bend, Ohio.
The gang, cowboy hats on, bandannas covering the bottom part of their faces, Colts drawn and the hammers cocked back, went through the train.
I recognized her.
She tucked her hair up under her hat, the bandanna covered most of her face, and she wore loose fitting clothes, but I knew her as soon as I saw her. I knew because I saw her eyes, the blue eyes with gold flecks.
As I handed over the authentic 1865 money my time booth made for me, I said, "Have you killed the man in the boat yet? Or does that happen later?"
Her eyes narrowed. She eased back the hammer on her Colt, put it back in its holster with a leather gloved hand, gripped my shoulder, and pulled me to my feet.
"I'll see you back at the hideout," she shouted to the rest of the gang. "I need this one--by myself!"
She took me off the train, onto her horse, and got into the saddle with me, clutching me from
behind. She put the gun in my ear and whispered.
"Go. Go until I tell you to stop."
I rode the horse deeper into the wilderness.
After an hour, I stopped when she told me, and she took me off the horse.
She patted me down for a weapon, then stepped back, and put her gun back in its holster. She folded her arms and said, "Who are you? What are you?"
"I'm a time traveling historian from the future--the future according to 1865."
"What do you want?"
I strolled over to her, took her gun out of its holster, put it into her hand, cocked the hammer back, and pressed the gun barrel against my chest and kissed her mouth through her blue bandanna.
She shoved me.
I landed in the dirt a few feet from her.
"I apologize," I told her. "I only gave you a partial response. I can travel to points before the birth of the universe, and after its death. But I can't go farther." I paused. "I think you understand what I'm saying."
She put my face down in the dirt and spoke into my ear again. "A few days ago, I passed as some saloon tramp, and kept a pillow in some cowboy's face as he was having his way with me, kept it there until he stopped breathing, died right inside me. All this, the train, the robbery? This is just being a tourist. And now you. What to do with you? I know nothing so far except you make things more...interesting." She paused. "Chicago, Illinois. Tuesday, March 20, 2007. Onion City Theater."
Then I heard her hop back on her horse and gallop off.
On Tuesday, June 13, 2006, the Hollywood film Cassandra premiered in Chicago, at the Onion City Theater. The movie was an epic, special-effects rich period fantasy about the woman the god Apollo gifted with prophecy, and cursed by making sure no mortal would ever believe her.
Two subjective weeks after my 1865 encounter with her, on Tuesday, June 13, 2006, in Chicago's Onion City Theater, I got up from my seat after the first hour of the soon-to-be-phenomenally-popular film, and walked back up the aisle to the lobby.
A 2007 tuxedo (what I wore) was a little more comfortable than the animal skins of tenth century Norse culture, or a three-piece, 1865 suit. Nonetheless, I shifted uncomfortably in my clothes.
I went looking for her, after all. I wasn't expecting her to have invited me, to point down the road she would take and tell me, “If you’re interested, I’m going this way.”
Unless she lied. Unless she sensed how easy it was for her to manipulate me and picked an event at random so she could lose me in the maze of all time and space.
The lobby was a spectacular sight with neon lighting, a candy counter a mile long, and a huge fake reel of film made of wood and plastic and lit by hidden lights in the ceiling. Uniformed, armed security visibly bristled and tensed when I walked in from the crowded auditorium.
I wasn't the only spectator in the lobby. A few other people, in tuxedos and fancy dresses, smoked cigarettes or talked on those primitive, early twenty- first-century cell phones or huddled together in whispered conversations.
Where was she?
One of the security men, a blond man with a large moustache, developed a hacking cough.
One of his uniformed colleagues walked over to him. "Jesus, that sounds bad. You okay?"
The cougher grabbed the man who asked, and grabbed his pistol out of its holster, then tossed it at me. It landed at my feet. I stared at it for a second, and then picked it up, holding the weapon lightly in the middle.
The blond guard kissed the other man full on the mouth.
The other guards put their hands on their holsters and drew nearer the kissing.
Among those the filmmakers invited to this screening, conversation was stopped and eyes stared.
From the gasps and screams, I assume I was the only one that wasn't surprised when the guard being kissed dropped to the lobby floor, his stomach a mass of blood, and the blond guard holding an equally bloody knife.
The blond guard, her of course, in a disguise, dropped the knife and easily shot and killed the other security guards with the pistol from the holster of her uniform.
The people in the lobby in their tuxedos and their fancy dresses ran, screaming and yelling, through the front doors, into the streets of Chicago, 2007 A.D.
There were screams and yells from behind the auditorium doors, and the sound of running steps up the aisles.
A sliver of shadow popped into the lobby. Grinning, she jumped into it, and vanished.
Without thinking, in three long strides and a leap, I did the same thing, hearing shouts and curses behind me.
Wherever I was then was white. White walls, white ceilings. Only that and nothing more.
I looked for her, not helped by doorways and corridors that moved.
I found her at the end of a long hallway, taking off the wig and fake moustache.
"I don't know about you, but this is how I do it." She gestured, taking in all around her. "This is the place of short cuts, where you can sneak behind the false front of time and space if you know how to get here." She carefully set her pistol on the floor and began to take off her
clothes.
I did the same thing with my clothes and the gun she tossed to me back in 2007.
Then she took off her human skin.
Her eyes glowed with a white light. She smiled with an open mouth, and in that mouth I saw small figures, seemingly human, that writhed in obvious sensations of silent anguish. Beneath the transparent skin of her forehead swirled pockets of red and black fire and twinkling specks of green and yellow ice and diamonds. Her dark hair looked normal, even banal, but moved like snakes.
Most of her body below her neck marked her as (to my human eyes) female, but one leg was wood, and the other gleaming metal, but both appeared to be not artificial, prosthetic, made by human hands, but rather an impossible synthesis of flesh and wood, and flesh and metal.
Together we picked up our guns.
You know what we want? You can feel it?
It was her voice, her true voice, declaring inside my head.
I raised my gun.
"To be inside each other--and to pull the triggers on each other at the same moment."
The same moment, she repeated.
"No countdown, no prearranged signals," I said.
When we both feel it is time.
As for the act of physical love with something not human, close your eyes, quiet your mind, and see, hear and smell where fantastic, unimaginable terrors and pleasures meet. Describe it to yourself, in the secret dark places at your very core.
I pressed my gun against that transparent forehead.
Hard metal dug between my eyes.
I yanked my trigger finger, and she blessed me in turn with oblivion.
It didn't last.
What ever does?
What really happens after death is that past, present, and future, spin off in all directions, giving off the smell of all possibilities, and the touch of all our joys and sorrows.
I told her, back in Ohio, of my trips past the last moment of the life of the universe. I remember, on those journeys, seeing the tiny and gigantic shapes that flickered before an ebony wall, a wall spotted with snowy shimmerings.
We crashed though the wall. Together we saw the final secret lands of inversion and the kinds of shadows and lights every fate cursed every living eye never to behold.
Together, we live forever beyond doomsday.© Miller, 2007
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Editors and publishers have printed over seventy of my stories and poems in the horror, science fiction, fantasy, and crime genres. Oxymore published my “King Arthur in an Odd Land” in French in the anthology “Mythophages.” My radio drama “The Unraveling” won 2nd place in Mind’s Ear 2000 Audio Theater Competition. My science fiction novel “The Path of the Four” won third prize in the Darker Intentions Press “First Dark Novel Contest.” Publisher’s Weekly called my “Stealing Klatzman’s Diary” from the anthology “Plots With Guns” “a morbidly amusing caper with a Shakespearean body count.” “The Crazy Colored Sky and Other Tales” is an anthology from Silver Lake Publishing of sixteen of my stories.