Paul Jones - Extinction Point - The End

He saw one car lurch awkwardly into the air, corkscrewing gracelessly over the concrete median dividing his side of the freeway from oncoming traffic. The face of its terrified driver plainly visible for a moment as the driver’s side window of the airborne sedan passed in front of Byron’s windshield before disappearing in a massive ball of flame as it ripped through a stalled RV, before cartwheeling away out of his view.

Byron had no chance of stopping as his foot smashed into the brake-pedal; it was instinctive, it was automatic and intuitive but it was also stupid. The big-rig he was riding wasn’t a car: it took time to slow down. Gentle caressing of the hydraulic breaks was all that would bring one of these metal leviathans of the freeway to a safe stop. Hammering the breaks could only lead to one result and even as the thought slipped through his mind, he felt the dynamics of his vehicle begin to change.

The forty feet of trailer hitched behind his rig began to slide forward and his cab begin to slip off to the left, centrifugal force trying to push the two pieces of machinery together. He tried to compensate by turning the wheel into the skid, trying to avert the oncoming jackknifing of his rig but he could already feel it was too late. He was going too fast and he had hit the brakes too hard. It wasn’t going to matter anyway, too many damn cars ahead of him. All he could do now was hang on.

It was gradual, taking place over the space of a couple of seconds, but it felt as though it was five or six times as long, time stretched out for him by the sudden dumping of the contents of his adrenal glands into his system. He felt the potential energy building in his vehicle, the cabin begin to strum and squeal as the tension resonated through the tortured metal. Energy built furiously in those… long… drawn … out … seconds … before… the rig detonated.

His steering wheel whipped out of his hands and Byron catapulted from his seat, exploding toward the roof of the cab. An empty Coke can flew past him as he smashed into the ceiling, knocking the stored air from his straining lungs. The windshield imploded into the interior of the cabin with the sound of a million shattered bottles, broken glass showering the leather driver’s seat with diamond hailstones.

Through the newly punctured eye of his cab, he felt the numbing rush of freezing air and watched the outside world spinning and tumbling, the scream of twisting metal and the cracking and splitting of plastic a strange but somehow fitting anthem for this disaster.

He was heading down again, back towards the warped dashboard and the strangely possessed steering wheel that thrashed and turned as if the driver’s seat now belonged to some invisible, deranged demon-driver.

Byron Portia: truck driver and the most successful serial killer the world had yet known, plummeted towards the floor of his cab. His head smashed against the steering wheel with a sharp crack and consciousness fled from him like rainwater down a storm drain.

The store he was looking for — according to the mall map he had consulted earlier — should be on the ground floor, on the opposite side of the mall to the exit. He found it just as the sign had said, nestled between a Sears and Radio Shack . Dillon’s Bookstore the sign above the entrance announced. Jim picked his way through the literary rubble of spilled fiction, true crime, encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauruses. The occasional dropped briefcase or dumped school satchel was the only indication that the cause of the destruction both within and outside the bookstore was rooted in human panic, and not some strange weather anomaly that had run its destructive course throughout the mall.

Against the far wall of the bookstore, Jim found what he was looking for. He reached for a copy of the LA Times from the rack, not bothering to read the headline or open the broadsheet. Instead, he quickly scanned the top of the front page looking for the date: Saturday June 13 th2017 . Tossing the paper aside, he grabbed a New York Times: same date, same year. One after another, he checked the remaining newspapers. All of them read the same.

There was no way in hell this could be right. He had, until only minutes earlier been over two thousand miles away in New Orleans, safely hidden away from the world in a cramped but comfortable hotel room in 2042.

Yet, now, somehow he found himself standing in a bookstore twenty-five years in the past. And, judging from the commotion and confusion he had witnessed since his arrival, he wasn’t the only one who had made the journey, either.

Goosebumps cascaded down the length of his arms as a dizzying feeling of unreality washed over him. He leaned against a rack of books waiting for the queasiness to pass; hoping he would not throw up while sucking in deep gulps of air.

Although he had not been aware of it at the time, from the moment he had found himself standing in the luggage store Jim had been panicking. It crept up on him without him noticing, driven all of his actions and pushed all of his buttons. More than the regular fight-or-flight reaction, Jim had been on autopilot, his conscious mind pushed into the background while his survival instincts had taken over. Now, as the adrenaline was finally dissipating from his body his thoughts became clearer and his personality regained some control.

He began to count off possibilities of just what was going on here.

“Think,” he said aloud. “ Think .”

He didn’t do drugs, so, unless someone had slipped him something at the bar last night? No, he had bought his own drinks and never left them unattended, so this was not a drug-induced hallucination.

He wasn’t tripping.

It wasn’t a dream; the experience was too visceral and the throbbing in his bruised fingers removed all doubt that this was anything other than real. This was actually happening.

The possibility that he was suffering some kind of mental breakdown had crossed his mind too, but that would not account for the panic and death that he had witnessed all around him. Others were sharing his psychosis? Doubtful.

There were some very realistic virtual-reality simulations available — he’d tried a few — but they could not come close to the feeling that you were truly there. Although incredibly realistic, there was still an unrealistic jerkiness to the scenery, the virtual-population a little unreal in their responses when you talked with them. The kind of processing power to create a scenario as real as what he had already experienced was still years out of reach.

So, that left what? That he and God-knew how many others somehow had been transported back in time into the bodies of their earlier selves.

Unbelievable! Inconceivable! Impossible!

But, how did that old quote go?

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth . The only remaining answer he had was that he was truly experiencing this. That for some unknown reason, he and at the very least the rest of the people in this shopping center had been thrust back through time. Twenty-five years into the past.

The next question was: Am I stuck here ? And, if he was, then for how long?

Maybe it was a localized phenomenon. Perhaps even now emergency services were sealing off the perimeter and attempting to assess the situation. Maybe somebody out there actually knew what the hell had happened. And, if somebody knew what was going on then maybe they could reverse it.

That’s an awful lot of maybes, he thought as he headed back towards the mall’s exit.