spookyspaghettisundae

[spookyspaghettisundae]

No Lesser Evil

Beeping. Lazy repetitive beeping filled the sterile room.

Glaring sunlight flooded in from the large windows, and the only artificial lights were tiny, blinking on the countless medical devices that surrounded Chloe Grant.

The fog lifted from her consciousness, and she connected the beeping to those medical devices and tiny blinking lights. To the cables and diodes on her, and the IV drip attached to her arm. The lazy beeping belonged to the system monitoring her heart rate.

Her body ached, sore from lying in bed for too long.

A long sigh escaped her.

And as she twitched, her movement stalled, and searing hot pain shot through her side like lightning.

She pawed at the hospital gown and pulled it up to find a clean bandage beneath her ribs, and like the sunlight flooding in, shreds of memories flooded back, washing over her. The creature’s deadly claw had cleaved through the air and sliced her side open.

Without even removing the bandage, flashes of memories invaded her mind through a distant haze—memorizes of slipping in and out of consciousness, and riding the razor-thin edge between life and death—of latex-gloved hands, and a needle and thread stitching her up. Of masked doctors and nurses looming over her as they scrambled and rambled to keep her alive.

A chair at the side of her bed stood in a way where a visitor could have been sitting and speaking to her.

A visitor she vaguely remembered.

A woman. A woman with long, fire-red hair.

Loretta Corsino—she had been saying something to Grant while she was slipping in and out of her delirium. Another shredded memory that sank into a foggy oblivion.

Still, the monitor lazily beeped. Lights blinked.

The sunlight from outside felt warm on her skin. Pleasant.

Better than the throbbing underneath the bandage.

Grant knew better than to rip the IV drip out or leave hastily.

She stared at the button hanging over her bed, dithering on whether or not to buzz for a nurse. Doubtful that Celava’s sweeper team would have delivered her to a common hospital in Rome after her encounter with the Apex Predator they had kept contained in Intellitech’s basement.

The more awake she became, the more Grant’s side hurt, and the more that buzzer tempted her. The relief that pain medication might bring if she only asked.

Something told her: she only needed to press that button.

And ask.

Grounding her, her throat felt like burning desert sand. A glass of crystal-clear water on the bedside table tempted her even more than the buzzer and the prospect of pain meds.

She surrendered to that lesser temptation.

Grant grabbed the glass and sipped. Sipped again.

How good the water tasted to her now.

She winced as another jolt of pain shot through her side from all the movement.

The damned Predator had cut her. A deep wound.

It was a nice hospital. Too nice to be of the public sort.

Probably private, and most definitely under the corporate auspices of Celava.

Which only left one big, glaring question.

Why?

She had broken into their premises, and entered the country with a false identity. With the amount of resources and pull they had, Celava’s agents could have ferried her away to some black site, or simply disposed of her corpse and covered up any trail leading to them as culprits.

Any investigations into her disappearance would lead nowhere.

So… why were they keeping her alive? Nursed back to health?

She cursed under her breath and another twitch triggered another jolt of pain in her side.

The entire mission had been a failure. She had failed to get the data dump out of the building to Ruiz—so they were none the wiser on what Celava’s game truly was. And now she was sitting in one of the lion’s dens.

Left to wonder how hungry the lion was.

At the very least, Grant hoped, Ruiz had gotten away, and only she herself had been compromised.

Dark thoughts swirled once it dawned on her how little leverage she held in any upcoming interrogations, which she inevitably expected Celava agents to put her through. There probably wasn’t much they didn’t already know about Future Proof’s operations, but there was no telling how much it would take to satisfy them and let her go.

If they let her go.

The door to her hospital bedroom opened. A nurse in bright pink scrubs wheeled in a sleek black stand, crowned by a flat-screen television set.

The nurse gave Grant a weary smile. Tired, exhausted, perhaps even marked by pity—the nurse’s kindly face was hard for her to read.

“Dinner will be served soon,” she said, with heavy Italian accent. “I hope you are feeling better now.”

Grant nodded.

The oddity of it all dispelled all the dark thoughts. It all felt like she had fallen through the cracks of reality into another, parallel world.

After all—after traveling through the Anomalies, and seeing time re-written, again and again—that was the case, wasn’t it?

The nurse plugged in the TV, switched it on, and left the room with swift steps, flashing Grant another weary smile before closing the door behind herself.

The screen was on, but stayed a dark gray, with only green letters in the top corner indicating it was set to receive a signal. A tiny webcam topped the device. The shiny black bead of its camera stared back at Grant with utter coldness.

She steeled herself, prepared to see a familiar face, but not the one that winked onto existence on screen in vibrant color.

A prowling lion of a man stared at her through the television screen. Silver hair in a crew cut framed a roadmap of wrinkles, speaking volumes to a life of hard-earned power and dignified prestige. His gaze burned as it rested squarely upon Grant, as stern as the rest of his entire expression, barely distracting from a shaven jaw so sharp that it could cut glass.

Muscles on his crossed arms bulged within the confines of a dark blue three-piece suit.

Grant recognized him from the photos: Malcolm Wright. The CEO of Celava himself.

Conan the Barbarian in a designer suit, as Danielle had put it.

“Miss Grant,” he addressed her through the screen, authoritative gravitas to match his appearance. British accent, though different from the Operator’s Cockney—sounding more sophisticated and theatrical, like David Attenborough. “Welcome back to the world of the living. I hope these accommodations are agreeable, despite the unusual circumstances of our meeting.”

Though dryness still plagued her throat, she knew not what to say.

All of this—these circumstances—all of this was a far cry from whatever she had been expecting.

She took another sip of water instead of replying, and he kindly picked up the slack.

“The dossier on you has been growing quite quickly since your visit to the Intellitech premises. You must have questions.” He clenched his jaw and stared at her through the screen, reading her closely through that cold, dead lens atop the TV set.

Collecting intel on her, they likely only had data and secondhand accounts to interpret in gauging her and her motives. The less she spoke, the more he needed to rely on blind assumptions—and the more likely she might have ended up finding something useful to leverage in the interrogation she expected to follow their exchange.

Therefore, she took another sip of water. Stayed her tongue.

Wright smirked.

He continued after the prolonged pause, and the absence of any reply from Grant.

“From what I gather, you must be quite the asset to Future Proof. But with what happened at the Rome office, I’m sure that all of that has changed. The bad news is, Malachi might not see you as favorably as he once did. On the bright side, I have a job opening to a woman of your talents. There is a future in Celava for you.”

A sales pitch. And a clever move to match. The better they took care of her here, the more likely she had been compromised by the rival company—limiting her options, rendering her a persona non grata with Future Proof, and rendering her more vulnerable to whatever was bound to spill next from Malcolm Wright’s lips.

Rather than an interrogation… this was a job offer.

“I’m impressed,” she finally said. She needed to exert an air of authority of her own. Stand her ground, and angle for the best conditions. “For a moment, I thought I’d wake up on some volcano island, surrounded by sharks and lasers, while you monologue your dastardly plan at me. Well, Mister Wright, here’s your chance to show me you’re Mister Right, and not some run-of-the-mill lunatic, or… some deluded jackass who’s going to ruin the world for profit margins and a golden parachute.”

Wright smirked again.

“How very American. I admire audacity,” he said, with the last word riding on a gravelly growl. “If any of my reputation precedes me, then you know I am not one for petty formalities, nor do I give a hoot about false-hooded flattery. I’ll do both of us a favor and cut to the chase. I don’t want nor need you to act as a double agent on the inside of your former employer’s organization. I don’t need nor care about whatever insipid experiments Malachi and his lackeys are cooking up next. It’s now clear to me—we are already years ahead of the competition. The future, Miss Grant, is ours to shape.”

He had meant that quite literally. The gravity of his words echoed in her mind like rolling thunder.

The future, Miss Grant, is ours to shape.

She took another sip of water.

None of this was the kind of play she had expected. Then again, it fit the opinion pieces she had read about Wright.

Eccentric, confident, and deeply impatient. Like most in the tech industry, he believed governments and laws were posing unnecessary restrictions on brilliant and creative minds such as his own. Unlike most, he had lifted Celava up from obscurity and turned it into a successful company, though not as successful as those who cut corners or played loose with their ethical standards.

He certainly wasn’t the kind of man to suffer sycophants nor fools, and he wasn’t going to tolerate her dancing around the matter at hand.

Thus, she decided to play his game. To match the ante and call any bluffs.

“What exactly do you need me for? And would the price tag outclass whatever Spencer was paying me?”

“I’m aware of the dangerous field work you engaged in, and your excellent track record prior to employment in Future Proof. I will double whatever he was paying, all benefits included, and then some.”

She almost choked on her sip of water.

This was no idle offer.

So what was the catch?

He answered her unspoken question. “It would be the most dangerous, deadly, and rewarding work in your entire life. I can only use the smartest, the fastest, and the strongest in my entourage. You would be leaving your life behind to start anew—turning your back on the modern day as you know it, where corruption and weakness are endemic to our so-called civilization. But I assure you—you would be writing history, and your name would go down in the books with mine as the intrepid, as the warriors and explorers and scientists who went on to create a better world.”

He meant every word he was saying.

His convictions ran deep, rooted in every fiber of his being, and the zeal in his voice lent uncanny credence to his speech.

She washed it all down with another sip, hoping to finally dispel the cotton feeling in her throat.

Radiance.

Even through a screen, he radiated with the sunlight of his convictions, shining with charisma.

He meant every word. As naïve as it sounded, he was being sincere with her.

Where even in the world was he? No—when in the world was he?

Was he speaking to her through the Anomalies somehow?

Then she remembered the wasteland she had glimpsed of the future, past the Anomalies in the Crossroads she had traveled.

The doomed future Spencer had predicted, and pinned upon Wright’s back.

“You,” he said, and that single syllable placed a heavy weight on her sore shoulders. “You would lead with others of your caliber. You are educated, capable, and physically fit enough to face the challenges you would be tasked with dealing with. And you would challenge me. All I demand is loyalty, and unwavering courage.”

Another sip.

She asked him, “What if I say ‘no’? What if I want to just, you know, walk away from all of this?”

His eyes narrowed. The rest of his expression turned stony and cold.

“I would be very disappointed, and our conversation would end right here. But you are free to walk away. I will not press charges, I will not pursue you any further for your invasion of Intellitech’s privacy, though you may suffer the consequences should you choose to cross me again.”

The words sank in.

Once she walked away, back to Future Proof, Spencer and all the others would forever question her loyalty to the company. She would forever be considered a potential traitor, a double agent.

She could have asked for more details, but knew better. He also knew better, and would never divulge anything that risked the success of his operations. He wouldn’t open up about anything that might endanger… well, whatever he was plotting.

Beeping machines filled the silence between them until Wright spoke again.

“Think about it, and think carefully. I am not asking you to simply relocate to a different office in a different city, I am asking you to leave your entire life behind, and build a new world with your own two hands. It will be difficult, and there will be blood, and sweat to shed along the way.”

Building a colony out of time, deep in the past.

That was how Spencer had phrased it—what he believed Wright was up to. And with what Wright had just said, the puzzle pieces were all falling neatly into place.

“But I sense it—I sense the thunder in your heart,” he said. “Once you have made up your mind… call me. I await your response, Miss Grant, and I have a feeling you will not disappoint.”

He had leaned closer to the camera, having grown on the screen before her.

The image of Wright went dark, and with that, consigned his appearance to the digital void.

Was he already in his Promised Land, in a prehistoric era, manipulating their future from the distant past?

All dark thoughts now mingled with uncertainty and something else—with curiosity.

Some part of his offer excited Chloe Grant.

Mulling over his offer, she worried about those she might leave behind—her mother, Danielle, her friends, and her colleagues at Future Proof whom she had come to like. Even the memory of the late Max Carter and all his grumpy swearing surfaced in those swirling thoughts of those she’d leave behind.

Grant rubbed her temples, unsettled that this meant she was considering Wright’s offer in all earnest.

Some part of her was… tempted.

That part of her kept growing by the second. Like a blooming flower, blossoming in her mind.

Such warm sunlight on her skin.

What was it that kept her here? In this life? It wasn’t the money, though the pay didn’t hurt.

Was she so different from Wright? Didn’t she sometimes dream of something resembling his vision?

And could she really trust Spencer and his speech of Wright being responsible for some nebulous doomsday in the future? Or was Spencer the one who would be to blame for that horrid apocalypse, and the Apex Predators?

Then again—one of those creatures had been kept in Intellitech’s basement like a leashed hound. And her side throbbed where the Predator had almost cut her open to bleed out.

Then, yet again—she knew too little beyond whatever narrative either man was spinning. Two rival CEOs, two rival companies, all toying with the fabric of reality and time itself, by toying with the mysterious Anomalies.

And here she was, between them, at a fork in the road.

She needed to decide, and nothing would make this decision any easier.

There was no lesser evil. No certainty in doing the right or wrong thing.

Her mother would be fine. In her disappearance, Future Proof’s life insurance payout would kick in, and provide for her mother for life, beyond a shade of any doubt.

Her friends would move on. It wasn’t like their lives hung in any balance. She’s miss some of their scheduled appointments by the end of the month, and they would find out that Chloe Grant had gone missing, though her disappearance would be covered behind so much red tape that they would have no other choice but to move on.

And as much as she enjoyed the company of her colleagues at Future Proof, she felt no personal attachment to any of them. She barely knew them outside of their work life together.

That only left… Danielle.

Danielle, who had moved in with her.

But Danielle had been involved with a Chloe Grant of this timeline, while this Chloe Grant still felt alien to herself, and the timeline she returned to. Though they were the same Chloe Grant, somehow, learning of her past and actions and relationship to Danielle still felt like hearing another person’s story.

Like fiction.

And even if Wright was truly responsible for the doomed future that Spencer had predicted—could Grant not have had the best chance at changing that all by getting so close to Wright that she could literally get her hands on his throat?

He had to be there.

Then.

In his colony, in the prehistoric past.

The heartrate monitor still emitted lazy beeping, though the pace had picked up.

Reflecting her growing excitement. Anxiety, perhaps.

The sunlight from outside felt warm on her skin. Kept her calm.

Everything was falling into place somehow. Not puzzle pieces, but chess pieces. Maybe she was one of those pieces on the board, with Spencer playing against Wright. Or maybe she had the chance to become the player.

Maybe this was the right thing to do.

Grant clenched her jaw.

This was her chance to change the future.

“Wright?” she asked out loud. “I have made up my mind.”

The screen stayed dark, though the green letters in the top corner indicated it was still on.

Transmitting and receiving.

She had her answer.

Wright was going to like it.

He was the kind of man who liked winning.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Breaking In Was the Easy Part

Shadows kept what shadows veiled.

The security guard’s shoes clapped against shiny, marbled floors. He stopped by one of the tall windows, overlooking the glittering skyline of Rome by night.

He stared outwards. Sniffed. Scratched his butt.

Hiding in the shadows nearby, where this oblivious guard ran risk of glimpsing her from the corner of his eyes, Chloe Grant held her breath. Frozen, still, like a statue, she waited in the dark.

The guard remained oblivious. He continued staring out into the night. He stood there for so long that Grant’s lungs began to ache from holding her breath, and a frustration, welling deep down, started budding into anger.

She had already broken into the building without him noticing. Now, he just needed to get the hell out of her way. Preferably before she needed to gasp for air, or the anger bloomed into fiery rage.

In the drop of a hat, she could have switched his lights off, just like that. The silenced pistol in her toolkit had a bullet with this guy’s name on it. She wasn’t one to snuff out some rent-a-cop if she could avoid it, but he was taking his sweet time.

The temptation to go for the gun rose while the burning in her lungs blossomed alongside her frustration.

Finally, the guard walked on. Disappeared around the next corner of the corridor, descending deeper into the bowels of IntelliTech.

Every shuddering breath hurt as Grant’s lungs flooded with desperately needed oxygen. All her frustration waned as fast as any pain subsided. After all, this guard knew nothing. Probably lived his days and nights, working security here, oblivious to the true nature of IntelliTech.

It was just one of many shell companies used by Celava worldwide. They fronted this IT provider, but all of Spencer’s intelligence pointed to IntelliTech serving as a data hub for the multinational energy corporation.

And this one, single, useless guard—well, he was just doing his job. Not well enough to have noticed the woman who infiltrated the building that night, but doing his job nevertheless.

He’d probably get fired if Grant’s invasion was eventually noticed, but that was very low on her list of concerns.

Once the guard had moved far enough out of earshot, she whispered into her headset.

“Hammy’s gone. What’s it look like out there?”

“Coast is clear,” responded Ruiz via their radio, with a soft crackle of static. “Pretty sure it’s just the one guy on-site.”

“Keep your eyes peeled. I prefer ‘definitely’ over ‘pretty sure’.”

Grant snuck out of the alcove, slipping past one of the ornate alabaster sculptures of Roman deities. She weaved her way past the other divinities, heading in the opposite direction from the security guard who had missed her intrusion.

Much to her relief, most of the building’s rooms and hallways featured clear labels. Big, black print emblazoned on brushed gunmetal plates. She followed their lead, drawing her spiraling path ever closer to the building’s server room.

Minutes ticked as she moved with the quietude of a cat. She kept her eyes peeled for security cameras, shimmying underneath any when their cold, glassy lenses looked the other way.

Ruiz asked via radio, “And you, uh, you don’t think anything’s… off? These guys got a lot of valuable data to keep private here, and security’s a little bit on the sad-sack side, don’tcha think?”

Grant paused, ducking behind a towering potted plant to wait.

To listen.

The guard was long gone, on the opposite side of the building, and unlikely to hear her.

Ruiz wasn’t wrong in his observation. She had thought the same thing.

“Yes and no. I’m guessing there’s some extra bells and whistles we haven’t noticed yet. Some less-than-obvious stuff. All the windows are bullet-proof, and some of these doors are magnetically locked with steel reinforcements. A lot of the premises are labeled, but then there’s some big mystery doors. My guess is, they have something else underneath this building—something that ain’t just plain little ol’ IT, if you catch my drift.”

A long pause.

It felt strange how this liminal space was swallowing all her whispers.

Silence filled the vacuous hallways of IntelliTech.

“You think they’re holding some specimens down there,” Ruiz said.

Grant snuck on. Set her jaw. Through clenched teeth, she replied.

“Almost a one hundred percent chance.”

Another long bout of silence followed from Ruiz. He broke it with a short and ominous remark.

“Switchin’ to point-fifty.”

She paused again, just outside a sealed door, labeled—

SERVER ROOM.

“Jesus. You gonna ready some AA missiles to go with that?”

Grant guided a stolen keycard through a reader next to the door. A red light on the device turned green and the gadget emitted a soft beep, with a loud click-CLANK to follow, as the magnetic seal on the door released, and the door slid open with a soft whoosh.

“Ain’t takin’ no chances tonight. If they got a specimen down there as a watchdog, you just line it up, and I’ll take it down.”

Grant slipped into the server room, where the hum of hundreds of fans filled the air. The whole room vibrated, and the array of server racks, all encased in metal and glass, looked like something straight out of a science fiction flick.

The door automatically slid shut behind her.

She needed access—soon—because all her movements in the building, such as opening these mag-locked doors, were likely being recorded in some sub-system. And registering it to the guy whose card she had stolen.

It had to be a matter of time.

Now locked inside a room where she was permitted to make more noise, she ripped open the zipper on her backpack. Locating the nearest server, she whipped out the device Singh had provided them with for the mission, hooked it up to the system, and booted up the sleek black laptop.

Instead of an operating system’s stock screen to greet her, a sinister-looking and slow-moving loading bar progressed on-display, while the device brute-forced its digital tendrils into IntelliTech’s—or rather, into Celava’s—data hub.

Minutes flew by to the steady whispering hum of computer fans in the room, while Singh’s hacking device worked its magic, and Grant awaited its completion with bated breath.

“How’s it goin’ in there?” crackled Ruiz’s voice via headset, now with heavier static interference. “Security guard’s out on a smoke break. Coast is still clear. If anybody knows what’s up, they ain’t showin’ jack for it.”

Grant shot a glance at the screen.

It had changed already, which she had missed because it looked almost the same: the progress bar now indicated how far the device had gotten in vacuuming up all the data it could access from this data hub.

She didn’t want to envision how expensive the unseeming sleek laptop and its hardware must have been. Then again, Malachi Spencer was footing the bill, and Future Proof’s pockets seemed to run as deep as the Mariana Trench.

“Almost done,” she replied.

79%.

She wished she could scour the data gathered here while she waited.

Grant wondered if Spencer’s suspicion would prove to have been right.

Whether or not Celava was truly funneling personnel and natural resources through the Anomalies, all with a singular and terrifying purpose: to build a colony in the distant past, in some era before the dinosaurs went extinct.

In the here and now, however, Grant only glimpsed a black screen with a white progress bar. Racking up all the data.

93% complete.

Just before her patience could wear thin, a monitor on the wall winked on, flashing brightly with electronic life.

The monitor flickered, yet refused to display any image, staying a darker shade of gray—revealing it had turned on, without casting much light. Speakers behind the device emitted a soft ringtone, like a call or message had just come in.

Then a booming voice spoke to her.

“I am the Operator, and you are very naughty,” spoke a mysterious man’s voice from the monitor’s speakers—with a playfulness to his tone, and a strong British accent. “Cease what you’re doing now, or I’ll be forced to release the hounds. And, fair warning, I do not mean electronic countermeasures.”

She played it smart. Offered no response. Nothing she could be recognized by. Like the ski mask concealing her face, a voice could lead to identification. For now, she preferred to maintain her image as the nondescript cat burglar.

96% complete.

“Not talkative today, hm? You know, the hounds usually make intruders far more chatty. Or, well, screamy. I suspect it will be the latter with you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

He sounded young and mischievous. How much of the threat was empty?

A smirk crept across Grant’s face.

Was this guy for real?

“Hah. Have it your way then. Your screams of terror will probably make for a great feature on our next instructional video. I do love authenticity. Nice never having known ya, I suppose. Ta.”

The monitor deactivated again. The gray glow vanished as its electronic life disappeared.

And nothing else happened.

Asked Ruiz on the radio, “What the hell was that?”

In case anything was being recorded in the server room, Grant stayed quiet. She looked around for bugs, microphones, cameras, anything.

She found nothing.

99%.

A man’s scream reached her, muffled through the mag-locked door into the security room.

Her only way out.

The scream endured, shifting through varying stages of surprise, agony, and horror. It didn’t end as abruptly as it started, instead petering out with indecipherable pleading in Italian, and cutting off after a bout of gurgling noises.

The security guard?

100%.

Keeping her eyes locked on the door, Grant yanked Singh’s device away from the server rack, careless of the cable she blindly ripped out of its socket in the process. She stuffed the sleek laptop into her small backpack and neared the door again.

THUMP.

Something had hit the door, leaving Grant frozen, while her heartbeat raced at a pace of a thousand miles a minute, felt all the way up into her neck, and accompanied by the rushing of blood in her ears.

There was something out there.

Silence. The shuddering breath she dared to take could not have eclipsed any sounds out there, but she felt a presence. The vicinity of something dangerous.

Of something deadly.

There were no other ways out of the server room. The only other door led to a dead end, where Grant frantically looked through, only to find a bunch of clutter in form of cardboard boxes, spare cables, a sink fastened to the wall, and other useless junk.

“Talk to me, Goose,” said Ruiz. “Can’t see anything out here. Guard went back inside, and you’re in a blind spot for me.”

She waited at the mag-locked door. Couldn’t sense any presence there now.

The deadly silence remained.

She swiped the keycard down the mag-lock reader. The device only emitted an obnoxious beep and its red light blinked.

“Uh-uh-uh,” said the Operator from the TV speakers with a mocking, singing tone to it. “I locked down everything. Consider it me doing you a favor, magpie. A sweeper team is on its way to arrest you. They’ll return the hound to its cage before you’re ripped to shreds, and you’ll get to have a nice, lovely chat with a security detail, and then some corrupt police officials, I wager. One day, you might even get a chance to look back at all of this and have a good laugh—that is, from behind prison bars, of course.”

The Operator chuckled with sadistic glee.

Grant’s anger almost gave air to a single swearword, and instead exploded into a strike of her knuckles against the metal door.

The Operator was making perfect sense. Having worked in counter-intelligence herself, she would have run the same kind of ship. Issued the same kind of intimidation and taunts as he was.

She knew better than to succumb to fear, or spiral into inaction, and knew exactly what to try next.

The Operator had responded to her attempt at opening the door with the keycard—he clearly had no eyes on the server room, only on whatever any device was ever telling him. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he could remotely open and close any mag-locks throughout the building.

She was boxed in now. And she wasn’t going to wait for some sweeper team to capture her.

Thus, Grant acted quickly. Whipped out the tiny toolkit she had brought along for analog intrusion.

She had already been detected, and something was out there—according to the Operator, ready to slash her to ribbons upon contact—so subtlety had just flown out the window. And the poor security guard guy, well, he had probably lost more than his job just now.

Her foldable crowbar snapped into full length after she retrieved it from her kit, and she used it to jimmy open the mag-lock reader.

“You need to get the hell outta there,” said Ruiz, nervous tremors swinging fiercer with every word. “There’s an Apex fuckin’ Predator in those halls. It’s trailing blood all over the place, and I think it’s lookin’ for you. That security guard is toast, and I got no eyes on the AP. It’s too fast, moved into some room. I think it loops around to where you are. Repositioning.”

Metal sheets bent and splintered until she stopped prying at the reader with the crowbar, and ripped off the metal casing. Dexterous, Kevlar-gloved fingers started eviscerating the card reader, splaying out its thin wiring, and trying to make sense of its design.

Closed system. Not anything she could simply override.

Fuck.

The swearword echoed in her brain.

She backtracked into the backroom and pursued plan B.

Her boot crashed down on the ceramic sink with a heavy kick. Upon first impact, a long crack appeared on the wall behind it.

The whole place’s design for doors and locks and computerization was modern—but being situated in the center of Rome, the building must have featured some parts that had never been modernized by its newest owners.

Another kick shattered the sink and water started trickling from a bent pipe.

She grunted and gritted her teeth as she kicked and punched at the wall until she could jam the crowbar right into the growing fissure she was creating, busting her way through the wall.

Her tiny flashlight clicked. She shone its light into the fissure.

Luckily, none of it was solid concrete. Just a bunch of old bricks behind thin plaster and white paint.

“Do you know how to play chess, magpie?” asked the Operator from the adjacent room. “If you’re smart enough—and I truly hope you are—then I’m sure you can play it in the theater of the mind. Or draw on the floor for all I care. I’m sure it’ll buff out, even if you use a permanent marker.”

He didn’t know what she was up to. No eyes on the backroom. No electronics to spy on.

Lucky.

She gritted her teeth again and pulled at the drain pipe in the wall with all her might. The metal squealed, then finally bent before snapping away where it broke. Grant grunted again and yanked a portion of drain pipe from the wall, then used it as a blunt instrument to break through the wall entirely.

She struck and struck away, widening the hole, and hammering the gap. When it found purchase and dug deeper into the fissure, she used it like a cruder crowbar to widen the hole.

The Operator rambled on in his musing, mocking tone. “I’ll even give you the luxury of making the opening move. White pawn on F-7 moves to F-5. You know… a little IT joke on the side?”

There was no way she was going engage.

“Come on, it’s funny!”

Grant continued hammering and striking away, tearing away chunks of red brick and artificial rubble till her black gloves had turned a chalky white, and until the hole had grown wide enough. A different light poured in through a hole on the other side of the fissure.

The ski mask and black attire was soaking up her sweat. She must have lost minutes already. If there was a sweeper team on its way—and she suspected the Operator had been telling the truth—she didn’t have a lot of time left.

Ruiz hadn’t spoken in those minutes. She hoped he had kept his cool, and stayed on position of the eagle’s perch a few buildings away.

She needed the sharpshooter to shoot sharp if it came down to it.

Breathing heavily, she only perceived a deceptive silence from the adjacent room.

Every further attempt at tearing open the wall came easier than the last, with all its integrity having been demolished by her incessant and systematic destruction. Whole bricks clunked down and the rest crumbled, and the drain pipe clanked and clattered when she chucked it aside to climb through the hole, clambering into an open office space.

The Operator was still talking, babbling about Chess moves and other inane tomfoolery, but her own panting, and the noises of fighting her way out of the backroom into the office drowned it all out.

Pressed up against the wall next to the office’s door, she waited again, hoping to hear something—anything—that might reveal the presence of the “hound” the Operator had warned her about.

But… nothing. Not a sound.

This was going to end badly.

She had seen those monstrosities in action before. Silent, agile, fast, and built to kill grown humans in the blink of an eye. Evolved beyond natural evolution, and as Burch had later theorized—maybe designed by genetic engineering.

The Apex Predator was lurking. Hiding. In position to ambush her.

Seconds passed, melting into what felt like an infinity. Time—a luxury—she didn’t have.

Time.

Grant considered retrieving her silenced pistol from her pack, but decided against it. Nine millimeter rounds weren’t going to do much against such a beast.

She opened the office door and crept outside.

Sprays of blood had painted the walls with gruesome splatters. The body of the security guard wasn’t even nearby. Crimson marked where the creature had dragged it along the marbled floors, around the next corner.

Grant scanned every nook and cranny, keeping in mind every single thing that Mischchenko had taught her about predatory wildlife.

Watch for the shadows. Watch for vectors along which an animal can leap. And if it can fly, or climb—such as these Apex Predators could—always look up.

And just as she looked up, following the cue of those teachings, she almost regretted it. Her heart skipped a beat. The gangly, mottled-gray body of the Apex Predator hid just beneath the high ceiling, perched atop one of those statues of a Roman deity.

“Oh no,” said the Operator, pressing out the second word with vicious sarcasm, and his voice now coming from unseen speakers in the hallway. “Quite the pickle you’re in, aren’t you? Wish you would have stayed and played some Chess now, eh?”

Bloodstained claws clicked against the sculpture’s shoulders. A guttural growl from its closed, toothy maw sent shivers down Grant’s spine. It hissed.

The Apex Predator stared at her through its spider-like array of eyes. The brain implant exposed on the top of its skull glowed with a singular red light.

A spiderweb of cracks appeared on the nearby window, and the Predator’s head whipped around, as it snarled at where the glass cracked.

“Run! Now!” shouted Ruiz via headset.

He had shot the window, and the glass withstood his .50 caliber.

Grant needed not be told twice. She dove into the next alcove behind a statue, and the Predator flew past her. Then she zigzagged the opposite way, towards where the Apex Predator had leapt from in its deadly lunge at her.

The creature screeched—turning into an alien and ear-piercing howl—as its claws scraped against marble, and it skidded along the smooth, blood-splattered floor.

Running for her life, she dove around the next corner, and the Apex Predator followed. She leapt over the dead security guard’s mangled corpse, just in time to hurtle through the next door on her way back out, and slam it shut behind her.

The Predator would have caught her, had it not slammed into that same door with the momentum of a speeding truck, and broken the door’s surrounding frame in the process—everything bent upon impact, metal deformed.

Another blood-curdling shriek pierced the night as the Predator pried its way through the door, tearing through the feeble obstruction in its pursuit of the fleshy human in the Kevlar catsuit.

Grant fled through the building, retracing her steps with little thought, and panic driving her running stride.

Glimpses over her shoulder only accelerated her footsteps and supercharged her terror, as the ferocious mutant quickly closed the distance once it had clawed its way through the door, only to crash into the next one she slammed shut in between them.

“Fuck,” Ruiz shouted. “Move!”

Her boots clanked up the metal stairwell as she fled upstairs to the rooftop from which she had gained entry into the building.

And finally, making her heart sink, Grant’s mad dash ended at the mag-locked door she had opened with the stolen keycard.

The red light on the card reader glowed a menacing red, mirroring the red glow on the Apex Predator’s brain implant.

She was trapped.

“Oh, Magpie,” spoke the Operator. “See, I could open that door for you, and set you free… but then I’d also set our little doggy free, free to roam the city of Rome, and feast upon—well, I’m not actually sure how many people it would rip apart in its rampage before we put it down—”

Metal squealed as the Predator pried the door to the stairwell open. The creature peered up to her and shrieked.

With feral fury.

“I’m sure you’re regretting your life choices now, aren’t you. Well, you can’t blame—”

“Get away from the door,” growled Ruiz on the headset radio.

“No!” shouted Grant. “We can’t let this thing out!”

The Predator stormed up the stairs with leaping bounds, skipping entire floors as it flew up the center of the spiraling stairwell.

“Oh, how very noble of you. I tip my hat, missy!”

“Down!” yelled Ruiz.

He was going to do it, one way or another—

She ducked.

The door exploded. Then it exploded again. Two of Ruiz’s rifle shots had blown football-sized holes through it. Funny how the glass withstood more punishment.

Before any dust could settle, the Predator flew over the stairwell railing and its claws cut deep. Grant’s own blood sprayed, shedding DNA that could be traced—the least of her worries now, as the blood drained from her head, and she lost all feeling in her left arm. An arm and hand that refused to obey when—

She ripped the broken door open, and fled onto the rooftop, into the sea of night, where glittering lights sparkled on Rome’s city skyline. The streets bustled with life—life that was threatened to be ended by the creature right behind her—

Grant fumbled and retrieved the pistol from her pack, just in time for the growling creature to follow onto the rooftop where she had emerged. Its brain implant glowed red like a malevolent, cyclopean eye.

It prowled towards her while the pistol slid perfectly into her grip, and she aimed at the Predator’s head with practiced precision.

It had smelled blood, and it was poised to leap again.

To kill.

The pain in her arm screamed as it hung lifelessly from her side, while she stayed silent and aimed with her right.

She aimed.

To kill.

To pull the trigger, as it leapt.

The bullets she released didn’t stop it. Couldn’t stop it. Probably even hit.

The next thing she knew, the smoking, silenced gun was on the rooftop next to her, and she was holding her side, where claws had left a deep wound, and all the warmth escaped her, pumping wet and slick and deathly.

The Predator crumpled to the ground, and echoes of Ruiz’s dampened shots were so loud that she could still hear them, several rooftops away.

Like the .50 had blown holes through the door, it had turned entire chunks of the Predator into a fine red mist. Killed the damned thing dead outright before it could kill her.

Well, almost.

Almost.

Grant slumped from her knees onto the ground, splayed out and with all strength escaping her like the blood.

Ruiz was talking to her all the while. The Operator, less audible from out there, also continued babbling.

Darkness enshrouded her field of vision until shadow swallowed all. And blinking never dispelled it fully. The starry night blended with the darkness of death.

Breaking in was the easy part. Always was, wasn’t it?

Getting out, unnoticed, unscathed—that was the hard part.

Everything hurt.

Guess this is what dying is like.

Losing consciousness, losing time, she didn’t know how long she took to fade away, in and out, until a silhouette rushed to her rescue, towering over her, and joining the darkness in blotting out the glittering night’s sky.

Not the silhouette of Ruiz, that is, but many figures. Men in black jumpsuits, armored, and armed to the teeth with firearms and batons. They sported ski masks like her own, with eyes covered by night-vision goggles.

A whole strike force of hired guns crowded around her.

They lifted her up. Not a damned thing she could have done about it.

They carried her away. Over the crumpled carcass of the Apex Predator.

All the pain went away, flared up, went away again.

Away.

They carried her away, into a blinding bright light.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Ain’t Gonna End Well

Blood circled the drain.

This time, it wasn’t someone else’s blood. Pinching her nose only proved that it came from her own nostrils.

Though Chloe Grant wanted to chalk this up to dry air, stress, or a whole host of other common things, she wondered if it wasn’t related to her experiencing reality itself warping around her. Changing around her with every alteration of the timeline.

There had to be side effects. Right?

Enshrouded in the heat and steam of her shower, she watched in stunned silence as the drips of blood mixed with water like a cloudy red mist on their way down the drain.

The doorbell rang. She cursed.

With a swipe of her hand, the water’s flow cut out and she pawed at a towel outside the spacious shower cabin.

The doorbell rang soon again, well before she had any realistic chance at getting dressed. Watery footprints marked her way out of the bathroom, and her wet hair would soon soak the back of her shirt.

Her pulse began to race. Not out of frustration or fury, but something else. Something that didn’t fit. A strange anxiousness, or even a creeping sense of dread—the same heart-pounding anticipation that had accompanied her upon her last crossing of time, the same uncertainty over what lay beyond an Anomaly. Like something else had wanted to cross over. Like it had always wanted to cross over and enter the past, or present, or future. And change whatever was supposed to come.

After a long and patient wait, the doorbell rang a third time.

Like destiny itself was knocking at her door.

By the time she had slipped into pants and a shirt, the doorbell hadn’t been rung again. As if the visitor had left already.

She paused in the hallway to the entrance. The floor was cold.

A shadow awaited outside the front door.

Her heart pounded.

When the doorbell rang a fourth time, she shuddered. Neared the door. Opened it.

A familiar motorcycle was parked in the driveway. A familiar, handsome face awaited outside—and her pulse began to calm at the sight of Valentín Ruiz and his symmetrical visage. He pulled the black beanie off his head to reveal a crop of short dark hair, and nodded in greeting.

“Grant,” he said. His big brown eyes scanned her down and up, registering the absence of socks or shoes, and the pearls of water on her flushed skin. He thrust a thumb back over his shoulder and asked, “Should I come back later?”

She shook her head and ushered him inside.

On the way into the kitchen, she spotted a note from Danielle on the counter:

JOB INTERVIEW @ TI, BACK FOR LUNCH W/ SURPRISE!!!

Dan had drawn a smiley face underneath the note.

Chloe Grant suppressed a grin and resisted the urge to crumple it up before Ruiz might read it, too.

“Can I get you anything?” asked Grant, flicking on the stove to heat up a kettle of water.

Ruiz grimaced and shook his head.

“Nah, I’m good. Just came to talk. Got some stuff to talk about, need to get it off my chest.”

Her heart skipped a beat.

He scratched the back of his head. Rolling his jaw, he looked like he was chewing on the words before he uttered a single syllable. Then his admissions flooded out without further warning.

“Shit, I don’t even know where to start, but I guess I’ll start at the top. You might wanna sit down for this.”

He gestured to an empty corner, looked around, and almost looked exasperated at the absence of chairs in her roomy kitchen.

It only now dawned on Grant that this was the roomiest house she had ever lived in. It had somehow gotten bigger in the last time shift. She wondered if Future Proof’s paychecks hadn’t also gotten bigger in this timeline.

“I know it ain’t my fault that Carter’s… dead, but I can’t help but feel like I should have done something, or more, or sooner. You know?”

She needed to marry the events of conflicting timelines. In a previous one, Ruiz’s actions and affiliation with Celava as a spy harbored a very clear connection to Carter’s death. In the current reality, however, she struggled to see the connection between Carter’s death and Ruiz.

Then again… had the Apex Predator and its biomechanical implant anything to do with Celava and Ruiz’s industrial espionage for them?

Her nostrils flared and she pinched them again.

No blood on her fingers.

The conflicting timelines were messing with her head.

What even were memories anymore? Just more confusion to wrestle with in therapy?

“I know what you’re thinking, but I came to you ‘cause I got a good feelin’ about you, Grant. I’m gonna to tell you something, confide in you, and I can only hope you hear me out to the end, and don’t jump to any conclusions. Please?”

His husky voice cracked on the last word.

She tilted her head. Her lips curled into a weary smile. The mere thought of having to repeat conversations because of temporal anomalies somehow exhausted her on a level she had never even considered before.

The tea kettle on the stove began whistling.

She talked over it.

“You leak Future Proof’s information and data to a red-haired woman named Loretta Corsino, whom you sometimes meet at a café downtown. I know.”

His chin dropped, leaving a mouth wide agape.

“You… know? How?” He snapped his mouth shut, upon which his otherwise trademark confident grin took shape. “Shoulda known. That is what Spencer hired you for, huh? Counter-intelligence? So, have you been keepin’ tabs on me since day one?”

“No, man. I spied on your spying in a different timeline—without Spencer telling me to—and you came clean when I confronted you about it. Hell, I might know more than you do at this point.”

Staring at her, he squinted. The grin faded.

The kettle’s whistling reached a fever pitch. She switched off the stove and removed the kettle. Pouring herself a cup of tea, she looked up at him. Pink color from the tea bag swirled like mist in the hot water, reminding her of her own blood circling down the shower’s drain.

“Though I don’t know what all has changed. Maybe your motivation’s different in this timeline, maybe you’re playing me, or angling for something. Wouldn’t that be a doozy?”

“God damn it, Grant. Were you going to tell me, or what?”

“Hey, I confronted you last time. The time you don’t remember because… well, it… never happened, because, well, hell, I don’t know why the hell not.” She stopped rambling into mumbling and then punctuated it all with a sigh.

She softly lifted and dunked the tea bag in her mug. The reddish mist still swirled, with all the water turned pink.

“Okay, well, what do you know that I don’t?”

She shrugged.

“Actually, not that much. Corsino plays at working for the feds, but she is actually in the private sector. Works for a UK-based company named Celava—Celava Semi-Conductors. Energy, reactors, particle accelerators, real high-tech. The works.”

“Shit. That’s more than I could figure out.”

“I can’t really take all the credit for it. Dan did the legwork. I just tailed you and Corsino a lot, didn’t learn half as much in twice the time as she did.”

“Is she… Bennett, is she still digging on us? On all of this?”

Grant licked her lips.

Dan, in fact, wasn’t. In fact, Danielle Bennett wasn’t having any of this—any of the espionage, counter-espionage, the research and development, let alone the dangerous field work and specimen containment that Grant and Ruiz and the others were conducting for Future Proof.

She could still hear Dan in her mind, urging her to quit the job. Yesterday.

“No, man. She’s outta the game.”

And Grant had been thinking about doing the same.

Indeed, she had just been thinking about it again, under the shower. Both before and after the nosebleed.

She pinched her nostrils again. No blood.

Good.

Ruiz stared at the mug between them and scratched his head again. Shook his head again.

Clearly, it was taking a bit to wrap his head around everything. His expectations had crashed face-first into Grant’s surprise knowledge.

“Celava, huh? You think they made those things? Those… Apex Predators, from the future?”

Grant shrugged.

“Might not even be from the future, for all we know.”

She said those words out loud before ever having thought them. It sent a shiver down her spine.

It’s from 2,000 years into the future. I have no earthly idea how anything on our planet would evolve this fast.

Burch’s words echoed in her mind.

Ruiz had nothing.

“It’s not your fault,” she told him. “Even assuming Celava sicced that thing on us as a hit against FP personnel, well…”

The words died before she finished uttering the rest.

Funny how Ruiz hadn’t been there when disaster struck.

His eyes glistened, glittering with sadness. Yet a hint of suspicion flashed within her mind.

Sending another shiver down her spine.

Enough with the paranoia.

She shook her head, silently arguing against herself.

“You’re dubious of Spencer, I get it,” she added. “So am I. Sometimes, at least.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. I hoped for the good in you, hoped I wasn’t makin’ a mistake by talking to you, telling you all this. Honestly, I’m glad you already knew. Makes things almost easier, I guess. Though… I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I have a family to support.”

Family?

He didn’t have a family to support before the time shift.

Ruiz continued, “I thought I could just walk away if push comes to shove. Corsino didn’t seem like the type to get me iced with wetwork, but after the thing with Carter? Shit, with what I heard about what happened down there, I’m surprised only he was killed. That thing on the autopsy table is no run-o’-the-mill dino, that thing is a fuckin’ monster. If someone from Celava or another corpo team was behind that, if they wanted people dead, shit, then I just… I just don’t know anymore.”

Grant bobbed the tea bag in her mug. Squeezed it out with a spoon, then put it aside.

She didn’t know what to say.

She didn’t think he was wrong about anything he was saying.

His waterfall of words continued. “Shit, Grant, I don’t care, but I feel like I could have at least done something. Or done somethin’ sooner. That kid didn’t deserve to clock out like he did. I don’t know—it feels like I have his blood on my hands.”

In some ways, Ruiz did. In another time, in another world.

But if she understood the changes in reality correctly, then those times and worlds had ceased to exist. Recursive changes that rippled forward through time, evolving into a new and singular reality.

In other ways: Ruiz was innocent, as far as she was concerned.

“Tea?” she asked, extending the mug to him like a peace offering.

Ruiz graciously took it. The pink liquid’s surface shimmered as it shook, as the mug shook in his hand.

He had the shakes in this timeline, too. Seemed like some things were inescapable.

She said, “Fuck it. Just quit. Dan’s right—we can’t keep doing this kinda work forever. Job’ll kill us, one way or another. If you opt out now, they’re not gonna have a lot to lord over you.”

He gripped the mug in both hands, suppressing the tremors.

She turned and prepped herself another mug of tea.

“And, no, before you ask—you can’t smoke in here.”

“How’d you—never mind.” He sipped his tea. His nostrils flared as he inhaled the steam from his mug. “I can’t just up and leave.”

He turned his back on her, to stare out into the backyard lawn of her new home.

The grass outside was perfectly trimmed, the tall fence obscured any features of the neighboring houses in this patch of suburbia, and it now looked and felt all so deeply artificial to Grant.

“I can’t,” he repeated. “I can’t. I take responsibility for my actions. We can only stop this machine from the inside. Whether it’s these Celava kooks, or Spencer and his own legion of mad scientists, I think this time Anomaly shit and messing with it is going to doom us all. Real apocalypse shit. You know that lady on the board—”

“One of the corpo horsemen of the apocalypse? Yeah, I know who.”

He scoffed with the hint of a chuckle.

“Yeah, that one. You know her cronies are engineering some kinda new bio-weapon for us to use on the specimens in the field? You know as much as I do, that ain’t gonna end well.”

Ever so slightly, the world darkened around her at the thought.

“Mhm.”

“Are we the bad guys? I think we’re the bad guys if we don’t do anything about all this shit.”

He turned. Locked stares with Grant.

His eyes glistened still, wet with a sheen to suggest tears being held back.

“I just don’t know anymore,” he said. “On good days, I’m thinking Spencer might be the good guy in all this. You know he might be from the future, right?”

A feather dropped. It shattered the mirror of reality in Grant’s mind, and she fell through it—

Something she had never considered, yet—

Ruiz added, “Corsino told me some stuff about him. I looked into it myself, and some things are pretty fuckin’ odd. Guy appears outta nowhere in the business world, all his history is so vague that nobody can really confirm it, and he ends up building an international corporation, with an HQ literally built around an Anomaly that connects the present to the future. Oh, and, uh, if you look at how he made a killing on the stock market, you’d think he knows shit before it even happens. Motherfucker invested in all sorts o’ tech companies before they got big, like some motherfucker who knew the numbers to win the lottery multiple times over.”

Another sip.

She hadn’t looked into this, but with what she knew, it checked out. For now, it made sense.

In her mind’s eye, she sat across from Spencer at the CEO’s desk, in the clinically cold corner office he occupied atop the towering skyscraper.

The man shaped like a knife shook her hand and welcomed her on board.

Malachi Spencer had always had a strange air about him. More than a sense of superiority. It was like he knew everything.

Grant jolted as if she had been shocked—the doorbell rang again. Like she had sensed it before it happened. The hairs on her neck stood on end.

An overwhelming sense of dread filled every fiber of her being.

Ruiz squinted again. He sniffed, took another sip of tea, and washed away any deeper emotions before they could fully surface. Saved by the bell.

“You expecting someone?” he asked.

“No…”

Grant wandered back down the hall, heading towards the door.

The sense of dread grew as she sensed an overwhelming presence, and spotted three shadows through the milky glass of the front entrance.

Her feet were ice cold by now.

She opened the door.

Malachi Spencer stood there, dressed in a brown winter coat, looking as sharp as ever.

Two taller men in suits flanked him—sporting sunglasses and earpieces, towering hulks of bodyguards she had never seen in Spencer’s company before.

Then again, as it now dawned on her, she had never met Spencer outside of Future Proof’s skyscraper.

“Miss Grant,” said Spencer, enunciating every syllable with a sharpness to match his exterior. “We need to speak.”

With a curt wave to his hired muscle, he directed them to wait outside and invited himself in. Grant stepped out of the way without thinking, though her ears flushed with heat, with anger welling up deep down over the audacity of him just barging in like this.

She closed the door and followed him into the kitchen—

Had he known?

Upon laying eyes on Spencer, astonishment crossed Ruiz’s face.

The words spilled out of Spencer’s lips with absolute authority and precision. “Before either of you ask—I knew you were here, and we need to speak as well, Mister Ruiz.”

Spencer straightened the collar of his coat yet didn’t deign to remove it, despite the warmth indoors. He exchanged a glance with them both.

Ruiz asked, “Did you chip us or something when we signed up?”

Spencer glowered.

“No, Mister Ruiz. You’re carrying around cell phones. It’s dead simple to know where my employees are at all times. I just need to ask Singh to trace you, and you may be found without fail.”

The expression on Ruiz’s face faded from astonishment into vexation, like he had just been punched in the face.

“Sorry,” Grant said with a tremor to the word, suggesting she wasn’t sorry at all. “But what are you doing here?”

Spencer arched a brow.

“I know enough to guess what this meeting between the two of you is about. There are rogue elements in Future Proof,” Spencer said. He raised a slender hand to shush them before either Ruiz or Grant could interject. “I know about your espionage for Loretta Corsino, Mister Ruiz, and I encourage you to keep doing what you’ve been doing. I am counting on it.”

Ruiz and Grant exchanged another glance.

It really was as if he had known everything already.

“Keep it on the downlow, though,” Spencer continued. “You two are not the rogue elements I am concerned about. I trust you both to continue doing your work inside and outside the company to the best of your abilities, and to the full extent of your conscience. That extends to Bennett.”

He peered down at the pink liquid in Grant’s second mug.

“Your tea is growing cold.”

She didn’t care about her tea right now. Pinched her nose again.

Still no blood. She hoped she had seen the last of it.

Something about Spencer felt like he was about to unload more on them. Before he could, Grant cleared her throat to get some words in.

“Well, if you’re going to play with an open hand today, how about you go all-in? The more we know, the better we can operate. At this point, I think we all know a bit too much to the point of being a liability, but not enough to really sniff out these rogue elements. I’m guessing that’s what you want us to do, right?”

“Correct. Like you, Miss Grant, I remember other timelines. Mister Sears—yes, I remember him—was one such rogue element. I wiped him from existence,” said Spencer with a clarity, honesty, and brutality that pummeled Grant in the gut like an avalanche of stones. “I discovered his trail and connection to Celava, and all the skeletons in his closet that he put in there to undermine us. I made sure he would never exist.”

She could feel the blood draining from her own face.

“Woah, woah, hold up. You’re saying you killed Sears? You—you what, you scrubbed him from the timeline? Are you insane?”

Ruiz said nothing. Sipped his tea. His hand no longer shook.

He answered instead of Spencer, saying, “No. He’s just cold as ice, and reminding us of what he’s willing to do if we mess with his well-laid plans. Ain’t that the truth, Mister Spencer?”

Spencer’s absence of a reply weighed heavier than any verbal threats he could possibly utter.

His silent, deathly stare drilled into Ruiz, then swept back to Grant.

“The important part is that we are on the same page. I am from the future, and there is a disaster that I am trying to prevent, but have not yet found out how to. Celava and its lackeys are the engineers of humanity’s destruction, and you just had a taste of that with the Apex Predator ending Carter’s life in Containment.”

Grant’s nostrils flared again, as she held back her sigh, hot air escaping through her nose.

She jutted her chin out, feeling defiant, and shook her head.

“You gotta give us more than that. I am about one push away from walkin’ away from this job.”

A lie.

More than ever before, Chloe Grant felt a sense of responsibility. A deep-rooted sense of duty. She wasn’t even sure towards what, or whom, but she felt responsible for everything that would follow from here on out.

Despite everything she had just told Ruiz about not feeling guilty over Carter’s death, she wondered how many deaths she would cause if she simply walked away from everything now.

How many lives were hanging in the balance.

But she wanted the truth. She wanted to hear it from Spencer’s mouth.

“Very well. Everything eventually points to Malcolm Wright, owner and CEO of Celava, building a colony out of time, deep in the past. He wants to control Earth’s timeline by altering events, natural resources, and even the genetic makeup of biological organisms. Worse, he is using tech that he steals from governments and organizations like our own, hoping to master the Anomalies. He is inviting disaster, more than I could ever threaten by wiping out a single rat in our organization. I’ve seen all the evidence I need, and the underhanded attack of the Apex Predator in our headquarters was the final piece of the puzzle.”

The mug was still lukewarm.

Grant chucked the teabag into the sink and took a long sip of tea.

Needed to gulp it down. Needed more time to process.

Time. Oh, what a joke.

Of course, there would be no way she could easily digest everything Spencer was dropping on them now. She’d have to slowly piece it together… and hope he was telling the truth. The whole truth.

“There’s more I will share, but for now, I want you to prepare for my next task for you. The two of you will be flying to Rome, using false identities. I need you to invade Celava’s offices there, and dig up any dirt you can. Your plane is leaving tonight. Expect a generous raise for your efforts, and all expenses are paid for.”

Ruiz squinted again. The sharpshooter’s eyes sought out contact with Grant’s again, like he was looking for someone to tell him what to do next.

Then he just grinned, like he had been told a really stupid joke.

Grant chewed on her lip.

Not because she was unsure, but because she knew exactly what she was going to do.

She was going to fly to Rome.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

The Impossibility of It

Chloe Grant could hear the thunder of rotors through the soundproof glass on the twentieth story of Future Proof’s headquarters.

A black unmarked helicopter, landing atop the skyscraper, had captured her entire attention.

Or it happened to be a convenient distraction from the conversation at hand. An uncomfortable conversation that Grant had sought out herself, and also been dreading all the while.

“Would you rather reschedule?” asked Rebecca Chao. She couldn’t quite finish the sentence without a hint of sarcasm.

Grant chewed on her lip until she spotted Chao observing her nervous tic, then made a conscious and forced effort to stop doing that.

She peeled her gaze from the vista of Austin’s skyline. The chopper had landed, though the noise of its thundering rotors still reverberated through the panes.

“No, uh, no,” Grant stammered out, sighing in between, “Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to waste your time.”

Chao folded her hands on her lap. She stared at Grant with a perfect poker face.

“We’re not wasting any time here. Not to step on your toes, but I think you were long overdue for a session. There’s only so much mental stress our field operatives—or really anybody—can tolerate before it starts affecting their—our—private lives.”

Grant sighed again.

At this point in time, she wasn’t sure what her private life even was.

With the way reality kept shifting with each change of the timeline, her own life felt alien to her.

The corners of Chao’s lips twitched with the hint of a smile.

“Maybe you could… inspire Mister Carter to see me, too.”

Grant scoffed. Smiled fully.

That would be the day.

“I’m afraid you won’t get Carter in here unless you mandate therapy sessions for field ops.”

Chao’s lips curled and her eyes narrowed.

“Now, there’s a thought.”

Her pen clicked. The doctor scooped her notepad off the desk and scribbled down a note.

“It’s just… I know who I am, but I am not the me who this world used to know before I returned to it through the temporal Anomaly… if that makes any sense. Everybody must have gone through life knowing another me, and although our experiences should mostly match, I… I keep running into these… differences.”

“Like your intimate relationship with Miss Bennett?”

Grant only nodded in response.

“I wish we had more concrete insights into how the Anomalies and temporal disjunctions truly work. We are, together, exploring terra incognita here. A weak solace, perhaps, but in some ways, you are a pioneer.”

“Well,” Grant said, clicking her tongue, “I did sign up for it, didn’t I? I could just quit, couldn’t I?”

Chao stared at her. Instead of answering those questions, she scribbled down another note on her pad.

“I’m quite—not—I’m not quitting,” Grant stumbled over her words. “No, there’s lives at stake.”

“But your own life is a concern. There’s no shame in self-preservation. We all need to protect ourselves.”

Grant pinched the bridge of her nose. Felt a headache coming on.

This wasn’t what she hoped to hear in the session.

“Are you worried you are dissociating?” Chao asked. “I am very sorry—it must be difficult to negotiate the differences between the life you knew before the temporal shift.”

The helicopter on the rooftop had quieted. The ensuing silence in Chao’s office became almost ghostly as a consequence. Grant now almost yearned for the distraction of noise.

Chao’s question lingered in the air like a phantom, haunting Grant, floating around the back of her head.

Chao broke the silence and said, “As I was saying, this is terra incognita for all of us. You are under no obligation to perform as the Chloe Grant people expect you to be. You only owe it to yourself to be who you want to be. And if that’s more in line with the timeline you come from, then that is who you are.”

Though Grant found a shred of comfort buried within her words, she pursed her lips, and part of her instinctually rebelled against Chao’s advice.

“What are you… are you suggesting I should break up with Dan?”

Chao’s eyes widened and her brow furrowed.

“I was not suggesting any such thing, no. Not even close. I—”

The phone on Chao’s desk buzzed with obnoxious volume. An incoming message.

The doctor shot a glance down at the small device’s now-glowing screen.

Grant said, “No, it… it feels right, I think. Like it was going to happen anyway? The more I think about it, the more I can see it, or could have seen it, or whatever. Uh—”

In stark contrast to the rest of the session, it was almost like Chao hadn’t listened to a single word she said since the phone’s buzzing. The doctor just stared at the text message on her phone’s screen.

“Doctor? Am I… interrupting something?”

The furrow on Chao’s brow arched even higher. She looked up from the device to meet Grant’s gaze, then shook her head.

“No, I am sorry, I apologize. It’s… please forgive me. I should answer this.”

Chao picked up the phone and her thumbs tapped away at a reply.

Grant stifled a sigh and stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The sun was setting on the horizon, painting the city in pink light.

Chao put the phone back down, then asked, “Now, where were we?”

Grant shook her head. “No, it’s… nothing. I think I’ll manage. Just talking has helped. A lot. That was Spencer, wasn’t it?”

The corners of Chao’s lips twitched again.

“Yes, but he can wait.” Her glance to the silent clock on the wall telegraphed her next statement. “We still have fifteen more minutes.”

On cue, the phone buzzed again. Chao’s gaze darted back down to it, locked onto the screen, reading the next message intently.

It was also fifteen minutes before the end of office hours.

But their unusual line of work here had a habit of sneaking up on them and saddling them with overtime. All the time.

Grant grinned through her final sigh of the day, as if she had run out of breath for it.

“Shall we?” she asked Doctor Chao.

Chao’s entire expression hardened. It had to be something serious.

She nodded at Grant.

“In fact, yes, we are both being called to join a meeting. Downstairs.”

A chill ran down Grant’s spine.

Like a premonition of terrible things to come.

They packed up and left the doctor’s office, cutting the session short. Grant wouldn’t be losing sleep over it. She hadn’t been lying or exaggerating about how the talking had helped somewhat, though she was skeptical if anybody could help her at all.

If anybody could even understand—truly understand—what all of this felt like.

The CEO, Malachi Spencer himself, had summoned Doctor Chao to the basement levels. Riding the elevator down with their top-clearance keycards, Grant learned that Spencer had summoned her, as well. She only missed the summons because she had switched her phone to airplane mode for the therapy session.

Spencer probably knew about the therapy now. There was no point in asking how Chao handled confidentiality. The normal rules didn’t really apply around here.

Future Proof tended to play fast and loose with morals and ethics.

To sleep at night, Grant told herself that this was in humanity’s best interests.

The two women exchanged no words as they marched down the long and harrowing hall through Containment’s sub-level.

Their taciturn walk delivered them into a forcibly sterile medical examination room. In deeper solemn silence, they slipped into HAZMAT suits. Donned the visored helmets. Ensured everything was sealed airtight.

White clouds enshrouded them, hissing, as they crossed through the airlock. Electronic seals beeped and clicked, and they entered the quarantined room.

Even with only the smell of plastic to meet her senses, Grant thought of rotten meat upon seeing the body on the metal examination slab.

That thing wasn’t human.

It wasn’t saurian, either. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she had seen such a thing before—

In the Crossroads of Anomalies. Chasing the man in ancient armor.

The sight of it up close stunned her so deeply that she failed to notice all the faces staring at her upon her entrance into the examination room.

The creature was only vaguely humanoid, featuring almost twice the body mass of a grown man. Its arms were longer than its legs, and all its limbs were wiry with hidden power, tipped in freakishly long fingers, and deadly claws. Mottled gray flesh reminded her of aliens from outer space, especially with the head’s strange form and toothy maw, and a metal, futuristic device crowning its skull—with wires and hooks clearly protruding from the flesh, attached to the organism’s head.

It had been riddled with bullets. A surgeon had extracted all of them.

“Doctor Chao,” said Spencer, every syllable cutting like a knife. “Agent Grant. Good of you to join us. We’re brainstorming here and all red-clearance personnel is encouraged to weigh in with any theories they can come up with.”

Grant sidled up to the autopsy table and stared into the exposed insides of the carcass’s open torso. Stretchers kept tissue peeled apart, and the organs reminded her of what one might find among a human body’s innards.

She asked, “What are we looking at here? Where did you find this… thing?”

Stantz, their PR manager, was among the people gathered around the table.

The HAZMAT suits they were all wearing made it hard to tell everybody apart, but Grant immediately recognized his smarmy tone.

“I pulled some strings. United States special forces, led by a certain Captain Dariel Rose, as you all know, took down this specimen with extreme prejudice. Unlike the wise foresight of Future Proof here, Rose and his men gunned it down, butchered it in some truck or back alley, and only handed it off to us after we, uh, twisted some screws on his thumbs.”

Grant wasn’t interested in the specifics. Especially not with Stantz’s delivery thereof. The rest of the gathering had probably already discussed it to death, anyway.

Doctor Solomon stood at the head of the autopsy table, just next to a tray harboring a scalpel and other sharp implements. He wiggled his fingers like he was antsy to cut the specimen some more.

And he said as much. “Yes. This would be the second autopsy performed on the specimen, though not by us. I appreciate the almost Victorian theatrics of having an audience.”

Doctor Burch shuffled awkwardly where she stood next to him. She stared at Stantz, expecting him to share something more about their new specimen on the table, or about the circumstances on how it ended up here.

Spencer and Stantz stood by the clawed feet of the abominable creature. Stantz’s arms stayed crossed, like he was protesting something. Meanwhile, Spencer exuded the same presence as he always did—a knife in human shape. Even wearing awkward-looking HAZMAT gear instead of his usual expensive tailored suits did little to diminish Spencer’s domineering energy.

His deathly glare swept across his employees before locking onto Solomon.

“Feel free to bring Doctor Chao and Agent Grant up to speed with your theories so far.”

Solomon shrugged and gestured in the round, urging the others to speak up.

Carter stood across from Solomon, on the opposite side of the table. He looked tired and grumpy, as usual. His gaze bounced back and forth between Grant and Mischchenko, as if he was expecting either of them to say something.

Standing right next to Burch, Mischchenko tilted her head and shot Grant furtive glances. She then cleared her throat, muffled by the HAZMAT suit, and repeated what she must have already said earlier.

“It combines physical traits of simians, felines, humans, and—this is the weird part—a shark. Note the teeth,” she said, pointing two yellow-gloved fingers at the creature’s toothy maw.

Grant leaned over the body’s head to take a closer look. Indeed, rows of teeth lined the mouth, and they looked as jagged and triangular as those of vicious, serrated sawblades.

Though the creature had no fur, she could vaguely see the resemblance to apes and wildcats both—especially with what she had seen of the creature in its living form, darting between the Crossroads’ Anomalies.

Unable to stop scanning the creature’s odd features, she asked, “Well, is that really that odd? Something from the far future could… evolve into this, on our planet. Right?”

“I said the same thing,” Mischchenko muttered with a hint of resignation. She then nodded to Burch.

Burch continued in her stead, saying, “It’s from 2,000 years into the future. I have no earthly idea how anything on our planet would evolve this fast.”

Another cold shudder shook Grant’s spine.

2,000 years into the future.

The impossibility of it arrived in waves.

“Wait,” Chao interrupted. “How do you know it’s from 2,000 years into the future?”

“Allow me to answer that,” Spencer said, cutting in. “The very Anomaly that this building was built on top of harbors a connection to that specific time. This is not the first of these specimen that we examined. Burch carbon-dated a dead one we retrieved from the future, and this predator—we dubbed it the Apex Predator—is native to that time.”

“That specimen wasn’t sporting this, though,” Solomon said, using his scalpel to tap the metal device attached to the creature’s skull.

Chao’s face twisted. She looked as insulted as Grant felt—even at their clearance level, secrets had been kept. Some people had been in the savvy about certain dealings at Future Proof, while others, like them, had been kept in the dark.

Solomon still tapped the metal device with the scalpel.

Grant jutted her jaw out at it and asked, “What the hell is that?”

Solomon shrugged.

“Some sort of bio-mechanical implant. Perhaps a cerebral augmentation, or something to control the specimen. It’s not transmitting or responding to Wi-Fi signals, however, so your guess is as good as anybody’s. Once we extract it, I’m excited to pick it apart and find out what makes it tick.”

He smiled.

Mischchenko said, “I’m more concerned about what it suggests, because it—”

Spencer cut in again. “The future of our planet looked bleak on every one of our early expeditions through the Anomalies, Agent Grant. Apocalyptic, one might say. And this implant on the specimen’s head, suffice to say, it tells us beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is someone in the future who is experimenting on these feral animals. A perplexing outlook, given that that the future is arguably unsuitable for human life.”

Early expeditions? Again, with the secrets—Grant couldn’t stop a frown from surfacing.

She asked, “Why isn’t any of this on record anywhere? Why weren’t we briefed about these… things?”

Was this why Ruiz was leaking information to Corsino and Celeva?

She glared at Spencer. The fire in his eyes matched hers, yet ever so coldly.

Carter arched a brow. He had been thinking what she said out loud. He locked onto Spencer with shades of the same burning intent.

Spencer fired back, “Everything we do is on a need-to-know basis, and now you need to know.”

Grant almost spat her words out. “As I reported in my last debrief, and described to the best of my ability, this is exactly the kind of specimen I sighted in the Crossroads. Would have been good to know about these things, you know, before they kill us. This thing, how powerful is it?”

A dark chuckle escaped Carter and he nodded at Stantz. “Bozo over here says it managed to gut three ex-Marines like fish before they took it down with a couple hundred high-caliber rounds.”

“Not how I put it,” Stantz said, “but I am neither a pedant nor do I feel like correcting the talent.”

Carter leered at him with a toothy grin. Though he stared at Stantz, his grumbling was directed at Spencer when he asked, “You rethinkin’ that no-exploring-beyond-the-Anomalies rule now, boss? Seeing as you used to send people through, all willy-nilly. Or did I misunderstand that just now?”

All he garnered was a thin-lipped smirk from Spencer. The CEO spared him no remark.

“Though my curiosity is overwhelming,” Solomon said, “curiosity, as we all know, killed the proverbial cat.”

Spencer broke eye contact with Carter to fixate on Solomon next. “You? You out of all people are now recommending against Anomaly expeditions, doctor?”

Solomon gingerly placed the scalpel back down onto the tray and shook his head.

“No, not at all. Though the consensus is—and I’m inclined to agree with Doctor Trémaux on this—that anything we do beyond the Anomalies could bear disastrous consequences for the present. Disastrous. I don’t think we can stress this enough.”

“Duly noted, doctor. The—”

“Hey,” Mischchenko interrupted them.

Everybody’s gaze followed where her index finger was pointing.

To the tiny, blinking red light on the creature’s cranial implant.

“It was doing that,” Grant said. “The one I saw in the Crossroads.”

Then it all happened so fast.

Yelled someone, “Restrain it!”

But the thrashing had already begun. All reactions followed too late to prevent disaster from unfolding in their midst.

The creature—despite its open chest cavity—began lashing out.

It was alive. So deadly, and alive.

Spindly limbs, ending in sharp claws, thrashed about. People fell, stumbled backwards, raised arms in defense, only to see the yellow-suited material on their arms get slashed to ribbons. And blood sprayed.

Blood sprayed everywhere.

Shouts of confusion and agony and panic all competed for attention, and all of them lost that competition in the explosive chaos.

The yellow of Doctor Solomon’s HAZMAT suit was splashed crimson from the chest down. The head of engineering screamed at the top of his lungs.

Before Grant could even blink twice, Carter was on top of the monstrosity, catching it by its thick neck in a powerful chokehold. His other gloved, meaty fist pried at the strange cranial implant, like he was trying to rip it off the creature’s skull by hand.

On instinct, Grant had shoved Chao out of the way, sending her flying into Stantz and Spencer, sending them all crashing into the floor like a set of human domino pieces. Lucky for them that she has acted without thinking, because clawed feet had threatened to slice their bellies open in the creature’s thrashing rage and rampage.

Carter’s swearing was cut short as something slit his throat—

It all happened so fast.

Instead of intelligible words, he emitted guttural choking while he choked out the creature, and yellow-gloved fingers, stained red, slipped from their grip on the monster’s cranial implant.

He staggered away from it, unable to hold on any longer.

Burch stumbled away with the horrifically injured Doctor Solomon, pulling him away from the specimen, while Mischchenko sprung into violent action. She yanked a heavy microscope off a nearby table, and slammed it down on the creature’s head. Two blows was all it took, cleaving the red-blinking device from the Apex Predator’s skull, to the tune of tearing flesh and cracking bone.

She ducked away before a flailing claw could eviscerate her.

The heft of her blows had torn off what Carter had been trying to rip away by hand, and the bloodied piece of mysterious tech clattered onto the floor, spraying puddles of blood and scattered brain matter. Then the tiny red light atop the device winked out. Went dead.

The Apex Predator thrashed around one final time, then its deadly body fell limp on the metal slab again.

Carter had landed on his ass, gripping his neck, and Grant was quickly upon him. She applied pressure, but it all happened so fast—the blood pumped out between her gloved fingers at an alarming rate.

His wide eyes—piercing blue eyes—stared into Grant’s. Then they stared through her as the life faded from them more and more, fading more with every pumping squirt of blood from his neck.

Though the circumstances had changed, she watched Carter die.

Again.

Not in Midland’s desert. In the basement levels of Future Proof.

And as she’d admit in her next session with Chao, she dreaded the thought that it wouldn’t be the last time she’d watch him die.

At the very least, she would see him die in her dreams.

Over and over again.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Too Afraid to Protest

With a twist of the keys, the lock clicked into place.

Evening’s growing dark turned the window panes of the store’s front door into reflective surfaces. Maisie Williamson, owner of Amazing Maisie’s Beauty Salon, lost herself in the mirror image of her store.

It looked great. She looked great, too. Felt a way to match.

It had been a good day.

Little did she know what awaited her that eve.

She flipped the sign on the storefront windows.

WE’RE CLOSED.

Maisie’s feet were killing her, despite her feel-good comfortable sneakers. A short night’s rest and a long day had been making her eyelids as heavy as lead for the past hours since noon. Oh, how she yearned for a hot bath and her cozy bed.

The tips they had earned all day made up for the toils. The words of encouragement, the good news she had heard for herself and others… it had just been a great day all around.

She shuffled about her empty store, ensuring everything was in its proper place. Words from conversations and compliments still echoed in her mind.

With a smile on her lips, she wrapped up her last chores, locked up all cash in the safe, and finally slipped on her winter jacket.

In the back office, where she paused, her hand hovered over a pack of cigarettes on her desk. Habit made this motion natural, but she resisted the temptation.

Maise had been keeping that unopened pack around to keep resisting that temptation. It had been working out well enough.

Instead, she grabbed her pack of spearmint chewing gum, and popped a stick into her mouth, before rolling up the wrapper between her fingers.

The smile on her lips still, she shuffled on out to the back of her store, shutting off all lights along the way, until the entire salon had gone dark.

Time to go home.

Just as she reached the salon’s backdoor, she froze. The balled-up wrapper from her chewing gum reminded her—she needed to take out the trash, as Lily had probably forgotten to do that.

Again.

With a sigh, she turned around and to the other door nearby.

The door to the basement.

Its brass knob was cold to the touch.

It was always cold down there.

The brass knob squeaked. The old door creaked. She descended into darkness.

The fluorescent tubes downstairs flickered to life, with significant delay after flicking the light switch, while she thumped down every wooden step, with a cheery rhythmic bounce to it all.

Maisie was eager to go home. That the previous tenants of the building had believed it was haunted, well, that was the farthest thing away from her mind in that moment.

She was in such a good mood, she didn’t even harbor any resentment for Lily forgetting to take out the trash. Maisie snatched up the tied-up two plastic bags and swiveled, ready to leave with the same fluid motions that had taken her down into this cold, cold basement.

Those movements ceased. All happy thoughts of that bath and warm bed vanished in the blink of an eye.

Her heart skipped a beat.

A wave of alien warmth washed over her. As that surge of sudden warmth clashed with the cold of this basement underneath some Seattle city building, the colliding temperatures flushed her body with uncomfortable heat.

Yet Maisie froze.

Her lips stopped smacking from chewing gum. This time, she was frozen in shock. From a mouth agape, the wad of chewing gum fell onto cold, concrete floor.

A shimmering orb of brilliant light had appeared in the middle of her salon’s basement.

Hovering inches off the ground, it was made of pure light. Like she was looking into the shattered splinters of the sun. Floating triangles, refracting the light, circled in the clustered shape of a large sphere.

And the strange phenomenon, it… chimed. A beauteous melody, accompanied by a steady hum that thrummed all the way down to Maisie’s marrow—the sphere chimed. A mystical music emanated from the sphere, as breathtaking and serene as the apparition itself.

Maisie stared into the light of this… Anomaly.

It flashed brighter yet as a man’s silhouette appeared. He stumbled into the basement from the sphere’s blinding light. An unfamiliar shape that defied instant recognition, as she would only register later on what she was looking at.

He wore armor. Ancient armor, with shoulders shielded by metal pauldrons, and a breastplate articulated in rings to guard the man’s chest and belly, all the way down to feet clad in strapped sandals.

From head to toe, he was covered in blood. His eyes bulged, wide with terror. And a seething rage curled his lips.

When he lunged at Maisie, she screamed at the top of her lungs.

Her scream did nothing to stop the man. The trash bags dropped from her hands and she flailed helplessly against his iron grip. The man in ancient armor, covered in blood, wrestled Maisie around, and her sneakers scraped against concrete as he dragged her, pulling her away from the glowing sphere.

A hand as coarse as sandpaper clamped down over her mouth, and the taste of grit and copper soon admixed with the flavor of spearmint on her lips.

Only now did she recognize the sword in his hand—tipped by a crimson-caked blade, now raised to her neck, a silent threat to what he might do to her throat if she didn’t stop screaming or struggling.

On instinct, she went limp in the ancient warrior’s grip, and he dragged her farther yet away from the glowing orb in her basement, pulling her into the shadows behind a set of shelves, where even the fluorescent tubes failed to shine. He dragged her down with him, and they cowered in the gloom, seeing the gleaming sphere only through the little spaces afforded by items lining the shelves.

Her heart pounded with dread. The impossibility of this all had long shut off all conscious thought. The man held her tight. Squeezed her mouth again, as if to remind her not to scream another time.

Yet he lowered the blade in his hand, retracting its deadly edge from her neck.

Just when another figure emerged from the glowing sphere.

This new, second silhouette looked nothing like a human. The shelves between them only further obscured its strange shape.

To the beat of her pounding heart, its bulbous head jerked around. Against the backdrop of shimmering light, a ferocious maw opened, and revealed rows of shark-like fangs. Glistening until that maw snapped shut like a bear trap.

Spindly limbs contracted and flexed, then the creature’s back arched violently.

It screeched at the ceiling.

A raged screech. A horrific, alien screech, nothing like any animal was capable of emitting, at least not in Maisie’s imagination. So hateful and deeply twisted that it froze the very blood in her veins.

On the creature’s forehead, something blinked. Blood-red.

Not an eye but a light. A lamp, or a lantern. It pulsed.

Was it attached to its head somehow? Or part of it?

The red light pulsed as the creature emitted guttural sounds, pouncing on cardboard boxes, and spraying their artificial insides all over the place. Bottles of makeup and glitter exploded where the beast thrashed around in the basement, in search of its human prey.

The man in ancient armor stayed still. Kept his hand clamped around Maisie’s mouth, and she knew better now than to struggle anymore—he was hiding from his beast, and may have saved her life in doing so.

That was the only coherent thought she could form in those breathless, horrified seconds.

The beast’s thrashing claws tore through the basement, destroying more boxes, knocking over cans, and obliterating a different fixture of shelves like it was nothing against the monster’s raw power. The shelves’ contents flew all around, and stray debris shattered a fluorescent tube, followed by spraying sparks from exposed electric conduits.

The monster emitted another guttural sound in response.

Then it sniffed. Sniffed the air.

The man’s arms tensed, but the grip of his hands on Maisie loosened.

The world exploded into chaos again as she was sent flying—shoved aside, thrown almost. She tumbled against the wooden steps of the stairs, their sharp edge digging into her lower back with painful impact.

The beast swiveled to face its prey. Its misshapen head darted back and forth between the woman prone against the stairs, and the ancient man covered in blood, brandishing his sword against the monster. Another ear-piercing screech escaped its toothy maw. The man in ancient armor yelled in fury—indignant rage—with his sword raised, and defiant of the creature’s sheer monstrosity.

In the shimmering light of the glowing sphere, it was clear now: the monster was twice his size and mass.

No thought guided Maisie as she scrambled, slipped, tripped, fleeing up the stairs with reckless abandon. Acting on pure survival instinct, she ran, thumping back all the way up, skipping several steps as she escaped.

The last thing she saw of the man in ancient armor was him leaping at the monster with his sword’s tip pointed at the creature. The creature in turn had far more reach with its spidery limbs, all ending in razor-sharp claws, and lunging at the man with dreadful speed.

Without ever looking back, the wet sounds of blood splattering blended with shouts of fury and screeches of feral rage, as the ancient man and the horrid creature clashed in Maisie’s basement.

She slapped and cursed and finally ripped the backdoor of her darkened salon open, fleeing into the back alley, where—

Light.

Blinding light engulfed her. The cacophony of helicopter rotors deafened Maisie, and drowned out any noises of carnage echoing up from the bowels of her salon’s basement.

People shouted at her. Flashlights shone into her eyes, forcing her to alternate between squinting and screwing her eyelids shut. The shadowy figures of people dressed in black overwhelmed her entirely.

She tried to run past them, past the silvery rifles pointed at her, but someone seized her in another hold like the man in ancient armor, wrestling her around, then shoving her past, where she tripped, and another person caught her before she fell, only to shove her farther along.

Before she knew it, she was being evicted from the premises. An uncomfortable gloved grip around her arm squeezed and tugged and pulled her along, past thumping jackboots and jingling metal.

Under the floodlights from a helicopter hovering above Seattle’s buildings, casting the alleyway behind her salon in bright light, amidst a small army of figures in modern black armor and terrifying masked helmets, Maisie was shoved one way, then the other, unable to parse what anybody was telling her.

Yelling at her.

“Move!”

“Get her outta here on the double! Secure the neighboring buildings!”

Soldiers in black ushered her away. Others stormed past, jackboots tromping as they marched in a jog, futuristic weapons raised, and flooding into her salon’s backdoor.

“Go-go-go!”

Before she knew it, she was shoved yet again, forced down into the backseat of an unmarked, black van.

A beautiful red-haired woman, dressed sharply in an expensive-looking navy-blue three-piece suit, stared Maisie in the eyes with a smoldering intensity that stood at odds with her otherwise calm demeanor, and a fearsome smile—a sharp contrast to the chaos she had just been whisked away from.

“Hi there.”

A soldier slammed the van’s backdoor shut, muffling the noise of helicopter rotors and militaristic orders being barked back and forth outside.

What would follow Maisie’s questioning was a series of unpleasant instructions.

Maisie needed to forget whatever she had just witnessed.

Or there would be consequences.

Serious, serious consequences. For herself, and the rest of the world alike.

For now, and the days to follow, she was far too afraid to protest.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

The Only Thing Unraveling Is You

Reality had shifted again.

Chloe Grant had not dared to ask anybody about any details. The drive home from the inner city was a blur. A dizzying fog of broken memories, offering her no way to glue the shards of her shattered reality back together.

She had rushed straight out of her debriefing at Future Proof’s headquarters. Shrugged everybody and everything off. Someone had even asked if she was alright. Only an hour ago, she didn’t even remember who had asked that. Shrugged that off, too.

She had been feeling sicker and sicker by the minute of spending any time in that glossy tower of glass and computers and steel.

Unlike in the previous timeline she had known, Danielle Bennett no longer worked at Future Proof. She had quit her job a few weeks prior. Rida Singh now filled Danielle’s shoes, heading the communications and IT department in the corporation—as if he had never been imprisoned under suspicion of national treason.

The whole incident in Midland, Texas, must have played out differently somehow. Grant was too confused, reeling with the staggering realization of all that had changed in the timespan of a few minutes, just by having passed through several Anomalies to lure the pterodactyls out of present-day Appalachian woods.

And Max Carter was alive again.

Part of Grant wanted to be happy about that. About all of this.

It was good to know that Singh wouldn’t be rotting in prison, or Carter could still show up to work to be his usual grumpy self. He had shot her a few dirty looks for all her incredulous staring—it wasn’t easy to see him alive again, after having watched him die to bullet wounds in a desert.

On the other hand, it felt like her head was going to explode with all the changes in reality that had occurred. She couldn’t even begin to understand how luring the pterodactyls into some apocalyptic future had caused all… this.

And as if it all hadn’t already felt sickeningly alien, she now returned home to find it looking different, too.

The front door was painted red rather than white. She had double-checked to ensure she parked in the right driveway, at the right address.

Somebody else was inside her house.

Lights were on, and the shadow of a figure moved around in the den.

Grant’s hand, holding her key, hovered in front of the lock. She wasn’t even sure if the key would still fit.

Before another wave of nausea could make her knees buckle, she shoved the key into the lock. The key fit. Clicked into place.

She twisted it and the door yielded.

It made sense, given that she had left her keys at HQ, before even flying out to the Appalachian mountains. If reality had shifted during her time travels—or because of them—then this only made sense. The keys had to fit, because the keys would have shifted along with the rest of reality.

At least something made some semblance of sense.

The only thing that didn’t make sense was…

Herself. It was like Grant herself was out of place. Out of time. Making no sense.

With how hard her heart was pounding, her heart felt like it was a few beats away from breaking free from her chest. The rushing of blood in her ears dampened all noises coming from the stranger in the den, save for the loud monotone sound of a running vacuum cleaner.

Chloe Grant neared the shadow and vacuuming noise.

A feminine shape, a head framed by long, straight hair.

Steeling herself to meet this stranger, Grant rounded the corner and faced the person in her home.

Their home?

Danielle Bennett was busy vacuuming a particular spot on the carpet. She gasped and almost leapt away from Chloe, as if she had seen a ghost. Lids soon fluttered, blinking, as widened eyes normalized, and Dan turned the vacuum cleaner off with the tip of her socked foot.

“Hey! You’re home early,” Danielle said. The expression of shock had given way to something brighter, cheerier. Happy to see Chloe. That sentiment faded fast, turning into visible concern. “Somethin’… happen? Are you okay?”

Chloe Grant wasn’t okay.

It was too much for her.

The last straw to break the camel’s back. The last straw being Chloe Grant’s capacity to interpret how things had changed, and the camel’s back being her ability to cope with it. That last straw carried the weight of the world, because she didn’t know who to talk to about it with.

Or even what to say.

Right there and then, Chloe broke down. She ended up on her hands and knees, turning into a sobbing mess.

It would take a while for her to recover. The next thing that really sank in was them sitting on the couch, with a mug of tea in Chloe’s hand that had turned cold, a pile of used tissues on the coffee table, and Danielle cuddled up to her with a fuzzy blanket.

It was all so alien. So soft.

Some of it felt right. But not remembering how it had all turned out this way—that part felt wrong. Chloe Grant felt like she didn’t belong. Neither in the here nor in the now.

And there was no going back.

Danielle deciphered most of Chloe’s speech and broken thoughts despite her sobbing breakdown. In broad strokes, Chloe had told her what happened, and Dan now shouldered part of the burden again, like she had in the previous timeline, with helping Chloe uncover Ruiz’s espionage for corporate rival Celeva.

All of that was news to Danielle—the Danielle of this new timeline, which would beg the question—had Ruiz even come clean to Grant in this timeline?

Dan did her best to catch Chloe up on what she had missed. They had been in a relationship for the past month, kept secret from their colleagues at the company. Dan had quit Future Proof. She had been trying to convince Chloe to do the same.

The danger was too big. “That place is going to unleash hell on Earth,” was how Dan put it.

Helicopter pilot Sears remained absent from the timeline, and this version of Dan knew about that from Chloe. And, although Future Proof now had ten times the amount of field operatives on the payroll as opposed to what Chloe remembered, a dozen of them had been killed on the job—mauled by prehistoric animals, murdered, EMD malfunctions, and one person was even cleaved in half when an Anomaly closed on them while they were crossing through a Flicker.

Too many deaths for Dan’s taste.

With a shuddering breath, Chloe Grant took stock of the new reality she now occupied.

There was no going back. Deep down, she knew it.

Dan’s eyes sparkled, just shy of tears, holding back from urging Chloe again to quit the job.

Dan sensed this was not the time. And Chloe sensed that she sensed it. This gave rise to a warmer, fuzzier feeling behind the nausea. A welcome reprieve.

Another shuddering sigh escaped Chloe, softly, as Dan gingerly brushed hair from Chloe’s face, and caressed her cheek with a gentle touch.

Chloe let her eyelids fall shut, and leaned her head onto Dan’s.

She had been moments away of celebrating success after ridding their timeline of the pair of aggressive pterodactyls, only to find the timeline completely altered.

The blur continued. The warmth within triumphed, providing some solace, yet the fog remained.

She woke up that night, to a dark room bathed in silver moonlight. Sweating, the blankets were cast aside.

Dan slept peacefully on the bed next to her.

“The only thing unravelling is you.”

Like a whisper outside of reality, those words echoed forwards and backwards through time. Like a sense of déjà vu, Chloe wasn’t sure if she had thought those words before she ever heard them spoken aloud. But she would hear them, eventually, and remember them.

She couldn’t quit Future Proof. Not yet.

She wasn’t even sure about being in a relationship with Dan. It pained her, seeing Dan sleeping so peacefully in the bed, beside her. Like neither of them deserved this—Dan didn’t deserve to be hurt by someone from another timeline replacing the person she liked, and this Chloe hadn’t earned her affection at all.

Chloe felt betrayed—like destiny itself had betrayed her. Like she had never had any choice in the matter. Like it had never been her, like she was some kind of impostor, some alien, just passing as Chloe Grant.

She spent a lot of time staring at her own reflection. She looked the same as ever, though that gaze in every window and mirror had turned vacant, and more alien than ever before.

As morning dawned, she spent time sitting in her car outside the café downtown.

Ruiz was meeting with his red-headed handler from Celeva—the woman named Loretta Corsino.

Chloe took a deep breath, still sorting out how this reality had shifted. Or rather, how she needed to shift her memories to fit into this new reality.

To understand what she even needed to do. It was like she was just going through the motions of whatever she was expected to do in the previous timeline she had come from. While, now, she questioned her motives, and wondered if they deviated from the Chloe that this timeline had known all her life. Her life.

Who was she?

She caught herself staring into her own eyes in the rearview mirror. The sound of Ruiz’s motorcycle engine roaring up served to snap her out of her trance.

She didn’t know what she needed to do. Time, fate—whatever forces were at work in this universe, they had conspired to screw her over. Royally.

Why couldn’t time have changed her memories alongside everything else? Why did she have to remember the timeline that existed before?

Her mind was threatening to splinter.

This all made her think of the very image of the Anomalies themselves—glowing orbs of light, hovering, chiming brightly, like tiny suns, that had exploded into shimmering shards of cosmic glass.

That’s what it felt like now. Shattered.

Another shuddering sigh escaped her throat.

Corsino vanished into a black stretch limousine. Ruiz on his motorcycle was already long gone, likely headed to the office.

Chloe Grant readjusted her rearview mirror, fired up the engine, and did what she thought she was expected to do.

She drove to work. She drove to Future Proof’s HQ.

Her blurry trance took her down into the basement levels, where security systems beeped sharply, and red lights glowed in recognition of her clearance card.

She wandered down the eerie, cold halls of Containment Section, till she reached Doctor Solomon’s laboratory.

The head engineer and Doctor Trémaux stood together in a floating sea of light. They waved around themselves, wearing AR command gloves, pointing at the virtual objects around them, rearranging a…

“What am I looking at, here?” Grant asked.

The sight of this maze of lines and lights, projected as a hologram into the open, three-dimensional space of the room, was so engrossing that it yanked Grant right out of her trance. The fog lifted just enough for her to realize that she was witnessing the two scientists as they wrote a new chapter in human history.

Trémaux whipped her gray mane back, and waved her AR-gloved hands in the air like a sorceress, rearranging some of the floating strands.

“This is our current theory of the Tangle,” said the quantum physicist with the faintest hint of a French accent. Her gaze was locked onto the virtual construct she was busy building with Solomon. She pulled one virtual thread, bringing it closer to another, then fusing them into a glowing node with a double tap of her index and middle fingers. “This, here, for instance, would be an Anomaly.”

Solomon smiled with the excitement of a little boy playing with his favorite toys. The man in his early fifties said, “We have enough data for this model, now. Still some kinks to iron out, but it stands to reason… well, I don’t want to make any false promises. Let’s just say Spencer is bound to be thrilled about this breakthrough.”

“Augy is being modest,” Trémaux said, “because this may very well be a major milestone for Future Proof. If our calculations are right, we will become able to predict the opening of Anomalies before our detection system even pings their locations.”

Grant stared into the maze of threads, mouth agape.

Had she done this somehow? Had her interference in the timeline also somehow caused… this?

She dared not think about it too hard. Dared not dwell on it. She almost felt another wave of nausea, creeping up behind her.

Grant chewed on her lip and let their explanations stew.

Solomon chuckled, misreading Grant’s expression as stunned curiosity.

“Doctor Trémaux, how about you share your theory with Agent Grant? It’s quite the doozy.”

Trémaux ignored Solomon’s prompt. She pointed to another glowing node, fused between floating threads in the 3D-model. With a mid-air tap of index and middle finger, an array of text and data popped up, attached to the node.

Too much at once for Grant to quickly parse.

To Grant, Trémaux said, “This here is probably an Anomaly that occurred in the 200s, A.D., during the time of ancient Rome. What are the odds that people saw a dinosaur back then and… thought it was a dragon? Or a demon?”

Grant reeled. She steeled her stomach. Took another deep breath.

Was there a way to map out the Anomalies? To travel through time and make precise changes?

Where was this research headed?

“This… is… this a lot,” Grant muttered. “What… theory are you talking about, now?”

Solomon chuckled again.

Trémaux frowned.

“When I tried to explain it to your colleague, Mister Carter, he had less flattering words to share about it.”

“More like verbal flatulence,” Solomon said, still chuckling. “Please, Lucille. Your theory. I am certain Miss Grant is more receptive to it.”

Trémaux shook her head, then obliged anyway. She paused from manipulating the network of holographic threads. She turned to face Grant, and her eyes flashed with something fierce, and determined.

“I liken the timeline to a ball of yarn. Time would be like the string of yarn laid out, unraveled from the ball, with a definitive beginning and end. However, the string is not laid out flat nor straight, the yarn is all… balled up.”

Solomon chuckled again.

“Very mature, Augustus,” she said, though the corners of her lips twitched with the hint of a smile. Trémaux pointed to a glowing node in the three-dimensional network of threads—the ball of yarn. “Whenever anybody or anything tugs at different points in the string, the string throughout the ball is subject to friction. And where friction happens, the strings are touching, that is where the Anomalies occur, connecting different points along the string, even if only for a short time.”

Trémaux flicked a node with her AR glove, dissolving it. The thread parted there.

Grant tried to make sense of this. She tried to relate her brief experiences of time travel through the Anomalies, and how that all translated into wiping people or events from existence, or altering the world in other, unpredictable ways.

“What—what about, say, a time paradox? Let’s say we, I dunno, went back in time, killed Hitler before he rose to power, and changed the course of history. How would that fit in with this… uh… would this unravel, the, uh…”

“Yarn ball,” Solomon said with a straight face. He no longer chuckled.

He stared at Grant with burning curiosity.

As if sensed there was more behind her questions.

Doctor Trémaux pursed her lips. She pondered Grant’s question.

“I don’t believe there is a such a thing as ‘paradox’, as such would imply that time itself is an entity that defies change. However, any changes in the past would be cascading, both backwards, and forwards through time.”

The only thing unraveling is you.

“So, to extend your example, let us say you kill Hitler in the 1920s. If you return to your time afterwards, you would find that history played out differently, and only you would remember how it was before you killed Hitler and change the history you knew. You might have never been born as a consequence, therefore nobody would know you, yet you would continue to exist because you were born in a different version of reality. You may call that a paradox, but it is the only logical consequence I can envision, with all that we know. You remember Mister Sears, and you alone.”

“So, what you’re saying is—in theory—it would be possible to wipe out humanity by committing a single mistake in the prehistoric past.”

Trémaux shook her head.

“Not just the past, Miss Grant, even in the future. The ‘Crossroads’ you discovered behind the Anomaly in the Appalachian has shown us this quite clearly. There, Anomalies to past and future were open in close vicinity of one another. It is difficult to grasp, but the future has been affecting the past for longer than we realize. If the future is connected to the past in different ways,” said the physicist, pointing at a glowing node between threads again, “then any change in the future can also affect the past. Cascading. A waterfall of consequences.”

Now Grant shook her head in return.

“I don’t get it, though. What if you stopped whatever… whatever caused all the Anomalies to appear? To even happen in the first place? Do we even have any idea what caused this?”

“Nope,” Solomon said with strange enthusiasm and an energetic shrug. “Not a clue.”

“An interesting thought,” Trémaux said.

Grant asked, “What’s stopping the ball of yarn—what’s stopping time from unraveling?”

“I do not know,” Trémaux said, pursing her lips again. The pause that followed only filled a short beat. “All I know from yours and other previous accounts, such as that of Mister Sears vanishing from time altogether while none of us remember him having ever existed, is that time does not unravel. The thread has a beginning and end, and the Anomalies are persistent. Arguably, the only thing unraveling is you. Witnessing reality change as you travel through Anomalies should be against protocol, in my opinion. And, please forgive me if this sounds, eh… offensive? But perhaps you should check in for psychological counseling. The mental stress you must be undergoing must be quite significant.”

The last word carried the most of Trémaux’s French accent. The rest of her words echoed in Grant’s mind like a deafening series of explosions.

Had she thought them, lying in bed next to Dan, before she ever heard Trémaux say them out loud?

The only thing unraveling is you.

Grant’s blank stare burned through the void. The holographic display of the timeline’s tangled thread glowed in a cold blue, with the Anomalies bright white, all burning themselves into her retinas.

How long had she been staring blankly, rooted in place like a statue, in stunned silence?

Probably more than long enough—long enough for concern to color Trémaux’s tone.

“Not to add to any pressures, my dear, but we must be aware of our responsibility in dealing with the Anomalies. Humanity has only existed for a very short period of time in Earth’s history. It would be very easy to wipe us out entirely by accident. As such, I think it is of utmost importance that you as field operatives are in top physical and mental condition. I think you should see Doctor Chao as soon as possible, for psychotherapy. Again, I mean no offense.”

Chloe Grant wouldn’t remember the rest of their exchange that day. In a daze, she replied to Trémaux, somehow. Saying something.

It all rang hollow.

A ball of yarn.

Seeing Doctor Chao for a long conversation and an unspecific amount of therapy sessions started sounding like a good idea to her. A great idea, even.

The only thing unraveling is you.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Teeth Glistened in the Gloom

Large, leathery wings flapped. Every flap thundered with tremendous force. Every flap produced a gale, whipping up chunks of frozen earth and pine.

The pterodactyl screeched again, having mounted its prey on Appalachian soil.

Mischchenko’s arm broke. A bone’s audible crack blended into the cacophony caused by the prehistoric creature. Then the woman’s pained scream joined the choir.

It all happened so fast. In the blink of an eye, their relief over having survived a swarm of mutant insects was erased by the big winged beast attacking them.

Both Chloe Grant and Valentín Ruiz acted on pure instinct. Former soldiers, drilled and disciplined as they were, they responded in kind to the animal’s brute force. The futuristic, silvery rifles in their hands flared up, discharging electric blasts. The EMD batteries whined after every shot.

One, two, three, with a deliberate delay before the fourth blast. Grant and Ruiz pelted the pterodactyl, causing it to stagger and stumble, backing off its prey while its body jiggled and jittered from the havoc the EMD’s were wreaking upon its muscles and nervous system.

Mischchenko was crawling away from the animal as the shots landed, and the beast reeled.

Then, like a dark angel, the menacing silhouette of a second pterodactyl swooped down upon them from the mist and the treetops.

Their EMD rifles had been set to low power output, to conserve energy and slow the onslaught of the insect swarm prior. Now, those settings were too low to incapacitate either pterodactyl outright. As Carter once put it, until they readjusted settings, the two field operatives were currently wielding glorified cattle prods.

The winged dinosaur on the ground shook its head, as if to regain its bearings in a very human fashion. It was far from unconscious, only somewhat stunned, and that sensation would wear off soon.

Its wings spread with a menacing span, matching that of the one swooping down.

All in the blink of an eye.

How was it that time ever stretched into infinity when things were unbearably slow, while being contracted into painful shortness whenever pressure was at its worst, and the danger overbearing?

Ruiz was caught off-guard, busy adjusting his rifle to maximum output. Grant saved his hide by taking a potshot at the second pterodactyl, in the split-second before it could pounce on him in its crashing descent.

This, too, was not enough to stop the beast outright. It wasn’t even enough to change its trajectory. The only good thing that came from her shot was how it alerted Ruiz to the pterodactyl in the nick of time.

He ducked. Shouted in pain. His EMD rifle went flying in a different direction than the creature as it curved back upwards with another mighty flap of its wings, another gale from the leathery thunderclap. The pterodactyl had winged him, but he had been more fortunate than Mischchenko, emerging from the hit without any broken bones.

Mischchenko’s crawling had taken her to retrieve her own EMD rifle. Unfortunately, her now broken right arm afforded her only poor aim. The shot she took at the ascending pterodactyl missed, singing the firs around their clearing.

Ruiz dove for his rifle while Grant carefully lined up a shot at the same time. The pterodactyl’s deadly shadow circled high above in the fog.

He pulled the trigger first, fast. Then he uttered a string of profanities—as sparks flew from his EMD instead of a shot, and the weapon fizzled and crackled with electricity from its short-circuiting. The dinosaur had damaged it on impact, rather than breaking his bones.

“Ground team, come in,” Pruitt spoke on the radio. Alarm shook his voice. “We lost you there for a while, what’s going on down there? Over.”

Too high and far away to understand the gravity and danger of their situation, and too distant to offer them any immediate help, answering Pruitt needed to wait.

And Grant was too high on adrenaline, too driven to survive.

Where Mischchenko missed and Ruiz was prevented from shooting altogether, she shot the flying pterodactyl. Her rifle still only had the output of a cattle prod.

The flying dinosaur therefore flinched. Once, twice, then it screeched in a pitch so high as to pierce the heavens above the wintry Appalachian forest, while completing another circle with another flap of its thundering wings.

“We need backup,” Ruiz spat in response, “Mischchenko needs evac on the double, and Spencer fucking needs to hire more personnel! Over, motherfucker!”

More shots from Grant’s EMD caused the flying creature to circle around with another angry flap of its wings, and it served to draw its ire. Yet another circle, and it screeched again.

She felt that screech, deep down, shaking the marrow in her bones, and curdling her blood.

The pterodactyl was not deterred. Its killer instinct had focused on her.

And the other one on the ground, it flapped its wings again—no longer so stunned, it responded to the flying one’s screech, and spread its wings, preparing to pounce—

Grant ran. She ran to Doctor Solomon’s Anomaly locking device.

She wasn’t thinking clearly, but could imagine no other way. She punched in the three-digit security code, and the device’s locking system shut down.

The nearby basketball-sized floating orb exploded into a big sphere of glittering light. It chimed mysteriously, slowly rotating, inches above the ground… the Anomaly once more connecting two periods in time.

The portal of the Anomaly was once again open.

Worst case scenario, even worse things could now come through. The mutant insect swarm could potentially return. Maybe the ancient warrior covered in blood, with the mutant beast chasing him, would dash through. Maybe a raging wooly mammoth would arrive, or perhaps a hungry T-Rex.

Best case scenario, Grant was going to send these dinosaurs elsewhere.

Elsewhen.

She shot at the pterodactyl in the air, then at the one on the ground, alternating between her EMD’s shots at them both. One, two, three, and a fourth shot to fully anger both “big birds”, drawing their attention towards her.

It worked without fail.

The shadow in the misty sky flew at her with deadly trajectory. The other made two leaping bounds, frozen grounds crunching after every jump. Both screeched in unison as they descended and lunged.

She had already turned. Ran.

Right into the open Anomaly. She dove into the shimmering sphere and tumbled down a sandy hill—

A sandy hill?

What had happened? A minute prior, this side of the Appalachian Anomaly had been a grassy hill near an idyllic beach in an undetermined era.

The crossroads of Anomalies, with dozens over dozens of Anomaly spheres, still hovered all above the ground here, now…

But the environment had changed. A different biome welcomed Grant on this side of the Anomaly.

She had no time to dwell on this new phenomenon. Grant had witnessed such a shift or paradox before—history changing in the blink of an eye—simply by traveling back and forth through another Anomaly. Airlift pilot Sears had entirely ceased to exist the last time it happened, and only she remembered him ever having existed.

In the new here and now, Grant rolled down the sandy dune of a hill, with neither grass nor ocean in sight. Only dust and bleached stone and cracked earth surrounded her in this new Crossroads of Anomalies.

She grunted at the final impact of her rolling descent when she crashed into a boulder and it knocked the wind out of her lungs. Further robbing her breath, a gale swept over her as one pterodactyl flew over her on this side of the Anomaly, its wings spread with frightening majesty. The other stumbled past her, then tumbled down the other side of the dune as it lost its footing after its leap through the Anomaly, emitting a pained screech when it fell with as little grace as Grant had.

The other already began circling, high above the glittering spheres of the manyfold Anomalies here.

Time froze for Grant. The look she took at her environs was short-lived yet rich in detail.

A jagged rock jutted out of the sand near the Anomaly they had crossed through. A chunk of it was broken off, dragged down with the pterodactyl that had tripped over it.

And the trails they both left in the dune’s sands pointed her in the direction of the Anomaly. Her only way back home. The trails would help tremendously in choosing the right way to go.

Time was no longer frozen and she needed to act.

Pain flared up all over her body from her many falls. The pain only centered her and spurred her on, granting her greater speed. She ran for another Anomaly—any would do, really—but she chose one that flagged in its chimes, with a flickering light that faded in and out as its stability waned.

A Flicker.

A deadly stunt to be sure, as it could trap her with the pterodactyls in a time stranded beyond humanity, but it was the only way she saw to keep these two dinosaurs out of her town time.

She charged into the Flicker, not even wasting time to check if the pterodactyls continued their pursuit of her. She gambled on it. Needed to act quickly. That Flicker could close any moment now.

She crossed the flickering, blinding light into another time.

With a pounding heart, and gasping desperately for breath, she barely managed to take in any thorough glimpse of her new environment, this new world.

Its apocalyptic vision would haunt her with nightmares beyond nightmares.

A city of ruins. Empty buildings, missing all windows, surrounded her. The street she stood on was only recognizable as such from the rusted husks of overgrown cars dotting its length.

Everything in this era was blanketed with creeping vines, and lush with abundant green. And utterly devoid of all human life wherever she could see. This was a world, a time after people.

Grant scrambled away from the glowing sphere, and without fail, one pterodactyl flew through the Anomaly, chasing her into this apocalyptic future. Its flight corrected course before it threatened to crash into a crumbling wall, swerving upwards into a dreary gray sky at the last second.

She clambered up half a wall and rolled through a window. Remnants of glass shards cracked and crunched where she landed.

The other pterodactyl followed, now flying again. It screeched—no longer in pain—but with wrath ringing in its piercing tone.

The hunter’s wrath.

Grant ducked behind the wall, staying in cover, knowing very well the first pterodactyl would locate her and pounce if she made one wrong move.

The Flicker flickered. Her heart skipped a beat. The Flicker was about to close, and she needed to dive back out, and run for it, across the overgrown street, underneath the pterodactyls circling above.

Then something howled. A blood-curdling howl, more terrifying than the two pterodactyls’ screeching in its sound.

Grant had heard it before… in the other wasteland past another Anomaly of the Crossroads. In that barren, ghastly wasteland, even more apocalyptic than these city ruins.

She had no intention of finding out what kind of future mutant creature could make such a sound.

The Flicker flickered again. Almost collapsed. The Anomaly was on the verge of closing.

Counting the breaths she suppressed, she waited till a silent number five crossed her mind, then she made her move. No second too soon, as her fear came true, and she witnessed the creature that had howled its horrific howl in these apocalyptic times.

Spindly limbs displayed uncanny strength, supporting a powerful and muscular body. Its every digit ended in deadly claws, piercing the very stone of the wall above her, roosting on the ledge, and capable of leaping down. Everything of this mutant’s body screamed one message clearly: it could and would tear her limb from limb if it caught up to her.

A strange, gray-splotched head with too many unblinking eyes crowned the future mutant’s slender frame, and a maw of jagged teeth, like a sawblade, opened.

Those teeth glistened in the gloom.

Grant glimpsed this future predator only long enough before new hell and chaos broke loose. It leapt—not at her, but at one of the pterodactyls circling above the building’s crumbling wall. It leapt with such staggering force that the two creatures crashed into a wall on the other side of the overgrown street.

And the other pterodactyl screeched in response, high above, kept out of Grant’s sight by the canyon of crumbling, overgrowing city blocks.

The Flicker flickered. The Anomaly’s subtle chimes faded.

She would not stay to witness more, to learn more. In the shadows beyond a broken wall, the future predator flew with feral ferociousness as its claws mangled the pterodactyl’s flailing wings. Blood sprayed everywhere. They screeched and shrieked and howled and thrashed.

Grant fled. She ran towards the Flicker. It flickered and blinded her as she ran through it, back through the Anomaly.

Black spots clouded her vision, but a wave of relief washed over her as her environment had changed. The Flicker flickered, the Anomaly collapsed behind her.

The relief died as the Flicker’s chimes were snuffed out with its vanished light.

She no longer stood in a desert among the Crossroads of Anomalies.

“Fuck!” she yelled into the void of this new world.

Trees swallowed any echo.

No longer grassy hills by an unknown ocean, nor was she standing among a desert’s barren dunes, either.

She stood in a jungle, teeming with life, and glowing with the light of the dozens of Anomalies all around. The Crossroads persisted, but the world had changed again.

Almost drowning out the chiming sounds from the glowing Anomalous spheres, chirping, chittering, and rustling assaulted her senses. Her heart almost leapt from her chest as she dreaded the return of the mutant insect swarm. Though the Flicker had separated her from the future predator and the pterodactyls, all manner of new danger awaited her here, now.

Nearby, another Anomaly flickered, then closed. Her heart skipped another beat, a dreadful reminder that she may become stranded in this everchanging Crossroads.

Certain death, by all her accounts.

There were no trails in the sand to guide her, no jagged rock.

Between the trees of this fresh green hell, she glimpsed no clues as to where to go.

Time froze again. Despair awaited.

Before despair could overwhelm her, a familiar figure stepped through an Anomaly. Though the helmet on his head concealed his face, she recognized his movements, his shape: Valentín Ruiz stood in the jungle, emerging from an Anomaly. He waved to her and shouted.

“Come on!”

She did exactly that.

Grant pushed past dense foliage, nearly tripping here and there, and followed Ruiz through the blinding light. She stumbled back into the Appalachian forest.

No longer were these woods foggy. Fir trees almost glowed in bright sunlight.

“God damn, am I glad you made it!” Ruiz said, EMD rifle in hand. The weapon didn’t look damaged anymore. To Mischchenko, he waved and then shouted, “Quick, lock it down!”

Mischchenko punched in the three-digit security code, and the spiky orb topping Solomon’s device clicked and clacked and reconfigured its form, aligning to seal the Anomaly. The glittering sphere of the chiming Anomaly froze, then collapsed, shrinking back into the basketball-sized orb, floating immobile, several feet off the ground.

The generator chugged, the Anomaly Locking Device hummed, and the other—

This place, this time—it too, had changed.

A sinking feeling brought Grant’s stomach low, and the world started spinning around her with an incoming onslaught of sudden nausea.

More Future Proof agents surrounded them. Unfamiliar figures. Since when did they have so many operatives to field? Dozens of spotlights were set up, other generators hooked up to power this new camp. Silvery tents had been pitched in a matter of time impossible for the short amount of time Grant had been away in the Crossroads to shake the pterodactyls, and dozens of researchers in winter jackets and Future Proof ID cards clipped to their chests now swarmed this camp that had seemingly sprung up out of nowhere.

And Mischchenko’s arm… it wasn’t broken. She had used her broken arm to operate the Anomaly Locking Device, as if the pterodactyl had never broken her arm. Mischchenko extended her now-healed-or-never-before-broken arm—to point at Grant.

“A round of applause for Agent Grant! That was one hell of a stupid move! But a bold one, and I can’t say I ain’t glad it worked out.”

Half a dozen black-armored Future Proof agents lifted their EMD rifles, no longer aiming at Grant and the Anomaly.

Grant didn’t know what to say.

Was the very fabric of time unraveling all around her?

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Crossroads

Chloe Grant saw stars.

Their blind leap of faith rewarded her with a coppery taste of blood in her mouth. It was, as is said, not the fall that kills you, but the landing. In their case, the landing itself didn’t serve to kill anybody, though, it just hurt like hell. The kind of fall that would cover you in green and blue spots.

To escape the living tide of a swarm of dog-sized insects surrounding them, they had backed up and ran through the blinding light of the Anomaly. Mischchenko gasped in surprise, Ruiz shouted in pain, and Grant herself felt the world spinning all around.

The Anomaly, connecting two different points in time, failed to offer them stable footing on the other side. In the Appalachian mountain woods of 2024, the glowing orb of light had been hovering inches off the forest grounds. On the other side, the Anomaly must have been hovering several feet above the ground, because their combat boots found no solid footing after their leap of faith, and the three field operatives from Future Proof immediately tumbled down a grassy knoll.

That’s why Grant saw stars. Bit the inside of her cheek. Black-gloved fingers tore up loose earth and turf where she grabbed the ground in a futile attempt at braking her fall.

The bright spots and blinding light refused to subside. She not only saw stars, but something far more breathtaking.

Light. Everywhere.

All around them, orbs of light shimmered… scintillating, glittering, blinding. Spinning, hovering, glowing, flashing, flickering. Some of them flared up, growing brighter. Others dimmed. One of the Anomalies flickered and vanished, and another opened seconds after, like an exploding sun.

Dozens and dozens of Anomalies surrounded the agents. So many Anomalies that their combined light engulfed the world around them.

The trio had landed on some kind hilly grasslands. Something resembling a blue sky almost shone through the brilliant curtain of anomalous luminescence. The light drowned out anything beyond their immediate environs.

Even their black body armor and jumpsuits looked bright gray under such brilliance.

The sights were stunning and invited Grant to ponder what this meant. Mischchenko cut those ponderings short as she yanked at Grant’s arm, helping her back up.

The three operative scrambled.

Just like the light, noise also surrounded them. Even through the helmet, the Anomalies sounded like they were singing. Like a choir of wind chimes. Amplified by their numbers in close to proximity to one another, and… eerily pleasant to the ear.

Through that soundscape, the skittering and scuttling sliced through. The swarm of mutant insects poured through the anomaly atop the hill down which the agents had tumbled. Chitinous bodies with flightless wings scampered and poured out like pulsating waves of black tar, flowing down the hillside.

Acting on instinct, Grant and Ruiz fired more shots. Their futuristic EMD rifles hurled bright blue electric blasts at the small creatures—and the Anomalies reacted. Lightning arced between the blasts and Anomaly orbs, crackling and flashing ever brighter. A pulse of pure pressure pushed the agents and insects both backwards, away from the reactions, staggering and stumbling the agents and dispersing the front rows of the living flood of insects.

Then the mad chase continued.

Ruiz swore.

The dog-sized bugs hit by blasts immediately fell, only for the living tide to wash over them and sweep them up in pursuit of the three human agents.

The volley of shots had accomplished nothing but a strange chain reaction—

Mischchenko yelled something at them; something about conserving their batteries, though her words were otherwise incomprehensible—static crackling and fuzzy clicks almost eclipsed the speech Grant heard in her headset.

The agents turned tail and ran.

They ducked past another Anomaly, swerved past yet another, and the tide chased them. The humans had no idea where to go, avoiding the Anomalies on instinct. They were just trying to outrun the insect swarm. Its horrid buzzing mixed in, tainting the pleasant chimes of the Anomalies.

The coppery taste of blood only grew in Grant’s mouth, coating her tongue in a terrible film. She wanted to spit, but couldn’t because of the helmet. And she suppressed her instinct to unload her EMD’s battery for more suppressing fire against their pursuers, as another survival instinct kicked in. Having seen the chain reaction between EMD discharge and the Anomaly cluster was almost like…

Touching the stove. She still had the scars to show from touching a hot stove as a kid.

The chain reaction now resembled that hot stove, so she wasn’t going to place her hand on it.

She was going to keep her hands off it. And like that, she stopped her finger from squeezing the trigger.

Ruiz and Mischchenko must have shared that sentiment. Their run took them outside the cluster of hovering, star-like orbs, though black spots remained in Grant’s vision, long before and after she screwed her eyes shut.

The grassy hills sloped down to a wide and serene beach of bright white sands, with no signs of humanity or life otherwise.

The mutant insect swarm chased them from the cluster of Anomalies. Their hundreds over hundreds of black bodies glistened in the broad daylight of this age—wherever, whenever they were now.

The creatures looked like a crossbreed between locusts and wasps. Sleek, deadly, and with snapping mandibles, their flightless wings glistened in beautiful rainbow colors. Had they come from the future to feast?

Once they had gained distance from the cluster of Anomalies, Ruiz decided to belay Mischchenko’s previous order. He took more potshots at the swarm, downing another handful of insects. It wasn’t even close to making a dent in the unstoppable onslaught on their heels.

All those snapping mandibles, working together, could probably strip the armor from their bodies in seconds, then eat the flesh from their bones even faster.

Mischchenko shouted, “What the hell did I just say?”

Ruiz stopped firing.

“This way!”

The team curved away from the Anomalies, running for the beach.

Without mercy, without stopping, the insects changed direction in perfect harmony, like a well-drilled army. They honed in on the three agents without fail. The living tide curved in the exact same direction, giving relentless chase.

“Water! Get… get in the water,” Mischchenko shouted, losing more and more wind as they ran and ran from the unyielding swarm.

Grant didn’t hesitate. Didn’t question it. Her mind was too busy imagining the swarm, all around her, suffocating her. Eating her alive. Thus, she ran. Mischchenko’s orders were as good as any others to secure their survival now.

The soaking sensation inside her combat boots immediately turned her socks into sponges, while water splashed up to their waistlines. In a frenzied charge into the ocean waves, the agents sloshed and splashed, all holding their EMD rifles up high to secure them from exposure while backing up from the swarm. Even so, even with how useless the weapons seemed against this menace, they all aimed at the big bugs.

The ocean afforded them time to breathe. They panted in their helmets. And their labored, winded breathing still fizzled with static.

This swarm would not follow them into the water. The living tide had stopped just short of entering the watery waves where they lapped against bright white sand. The locust-wasps scuttled up and down the beach, searching for a way to reach or find their prey, and always shying away, backing up from the wet waves like frightened animals.

The tide shook Grant, but its waves weren’t strong enough to sweep any of the agents away.

Against the coppery taste in her mouth, she had never been so glad over the stinging scent of saltwater, burning in her nostrils.

Still, the insects refused to wade into the water like the humans had.

The three field agents waited. Watched.

The insect swarm flooded up and down the beach, visibly confused over having lost their free lunch.

This finally afforded Grant some glimpses of the Anomalies. So blinding was their combined light, and so erratic their patterns of flaring up, flickering, and dimming, that Grant gave up on counting after thirty orbs.

One of the Anomalies flickered, then vanished entirely. Grant suppressed the urge to swear out loud, in case that had been the one they fell through to get here—potentially stranding them in a time millions of years ago. Or thousands of years in the future? Who knew?

Yet the many Anomalies remained.

Where did they all lead? How was this even possible?

None of the records she had pored over at Future Proof could have prepared her for this. And Grant sensed the same air of fascination from her colleagues, who, like her, stood in stunned silence.

They stood in the ocean waves of this alien beach, waiting as minutes passed them by like the elements, and the briny water soaked them, while the mutant-insect swarm slowly changed direction, dispersing, turning, and eventually leaving. They had given up on their prey.

The flood of creatures poured back uphill, heading towards the Anomalies. Were they responding to the sounds?

Only once the swarm was far out of sight, did anybody speak up.

“Good thing they don’t like water, huh?” Ruiz mumbled into their radio intercom.

Mischchenko cackled. Without doubt a stress response. Grant followed up with her own: a litany of profanities without rhyme or reason, just venting into the void of their closed radio comms, as they were stranded somewhere in another era of Earth’s history, or somewhere in Earth’s future.

The swarm crawled its way back up the grass hills, pouring into an Anomaly at the edge of the cluster, until the last ones of them vanished. Even the ones that had been stunned by EMD shots were gone, dragged along by the living avalanche. Perhaps devoured.

Hard to tell.

“I hope one of you got an idea which Anomaly we just exited from,” Grant grumbled, “because I sure as shit can’t tell them apart.”

Ruiz said, “On the bright side—sorry, pun not intended—those bugs went in a different one, right there at the edge of the Anomaly… crossroads? This is like a crossroads, huh?”

Mischchenko emitted a shuddering sigh.

“We better not waste any time—get back to those Anomalies—start knocking on different doors till we find the one back home. I don’t know about you two, but I am not getting stuck here, wherever ‘here’ is. I got family to get back to.”

Dripping with oceanwater, they slowly marched back up the beach, then the hills. Their advance started cautious, slowed by the weight of their drenching. Then courage or fear drove their pace, swifter steps into the blinding jungle of light.

The rest of the landscape around them looked so familiar and yet so alien. So untouched by mankind, so distant, yet so vibrant—its grass glistened bright green in the sunlight and the light of Anomalies.

Grant’s mind reeled with the possibilities, as to what time they had wound up in. What if there was a way to navigate these wormholes?

And she wondered how it was even possible for so many Anomalies to appear in a single spot like this. Connecting different eras, bridging disparate worlds that had existed and would exist on their planet. Crossing all through time.

Crossroads.

On cue, halfway back up the hills, an Anomaly flared up brightly. A man ran from it.

He wore armor. Ancient armor. In his hand, he clutched a sword, and sandals clung to his bloodied feet. Cloth on his body was dyed in a bright blue, while the rest of him was covered in a slick, dripping crimson. Whose blood it was would have been impossible to say, leaving no space for examination, for this stranger from the past ran headfirst into the next Anomaly, vanishing as abruptly as he had appeared.

A monster followed. Chased him.

Its appearance froze the blood in Grant’s veins. And all three field agents from Future Proof froze where they stood, standing rooted to the grassy grounds like statues.

At the size of a horse, the terrible creature chasing the ancient warrior featured four long, stalky limbs, all ending in deadly claws. Its upper torso was hunched and the silhouette of its gaping mouth revealed long, jagged teeth that could mangle and entrap their prey. This predatory beast crossed the hills in frightening, leaping bounds. It vanished into the next Anomaly that the ancient man in armor had run into, gone again as fast as it had appeared.

A streak of crimson amidst the blinding light, from the blood that had coated its gray and slender body.

“Holy what the hell?” Grant blurted out.

“My word,” Mischchenko said with trembling voice, “my cue. Let’s get the hell outta here!”

Neither Ruiz nor Grant needed to be told twice.

With EMD rifles raised, ready for any threats to leap out at them from the Anomalies, they waded into the maze of glowing orbs, seeking one atop a hill.

The eerie singing chimes welcomed them like a heavenly choir. Now, though Grant’s heart pounded like a drum, she sensed a deep resonance between these Anomalies.

A hum. A thrum, resonating with her own pulse, all the way down to her very bones.

It was both menacing and soothing somehow. Awesome in the original sense of the words. Like standing in the presence of something divine—something that could wink you out of existence by accident, and very prone to such mishaps.

“This one, I think,” Ruiz said.

“Wait,” Mischchenko answered.

Too late. Ruiz walked into an Anomaly atop a hill.

“Shit.”

They followed him in.

No crossroads awaited them on the other side of the blinding light. The resonance also felt weak here.

Fierce winds howled all around them, strong enough to shake them in their boots, and cold as ice. The sky was red and bleak, drowning in clouds of dust on the wind, and ominous thunder rolled in the distance.

Only a desert of rock and sand yawned all around them.

A monstrous shriek echoed across this wasteland.

Mischchenko shook her helmeted head and was first to back right out, returning through the Anomaly to the crossroads. The others followed.

“One down, huh,” Ruiz muttered, “how many more to go, now?”

“Shut up,” Mischchenko said, leading them to the next hill, with confidence and dread alike in every stomping step of her stride.

EMDs still raised in anticipation of the worst, they walked into blinding light.

Grant’s heart fluttered. She stifled a shuddering sigh of relief at the sight of Solomon’s new Anomaly Stabilizer, the upgraded Anomaly Locking Device.

They were back in the foggy Appalachian woods. The generator attached to the ALD chugged with merry rhythm. And no insect swarm in sight.

“Shit, I can’t believe it,” Ruiz said. “Holy shit.”

“Stay on your damned toes,” Mischchenko said. “Ruiz, you and me, quick sweep. Grant, you lock that Anomaly now.”

Wait—

Something inside of Grant screamed to rebel, to resist. She could barely believe what she herself was thinking, yet it couldn’t be helped.

They had stumbled upon something incredible. If Future Proof’s R&D department—or really anybody among humanity at large—if anybody could study all of what they had just experienced, who knew what revelations awaited them?

Grant finally gave her protest a voice. “Wait, wait, what—what about—what about the pterodactyls, putting them back, or stabilizing this Anomaly? I mean, we got everything recorded on helmet cams, but I think R&D should investigate this place.”

“Grant,” Mischchenko sighed. Shades of disappointment, grief, and despair turned her next words sharp, sharper than Spencer had ever spoken to her. “Are you out of your damn’ mind? Do you realize how dangerous that place is?”

A crossroads of Anomalies.

“Yeah,” Ruiz butted in, “you wanna hear my two cents, I say we send the big birds to containment, get this bad boy locked up. I’m with Mischchenko on this.”

“Thank you,” she replied to him.

Grant shook her head. She was torn. She agreed with them, and every fiber, every survival instinct in her was screaming at her to just lock up the Anomaly.

Yet she could not help but wonder what they might lose by losing their connection to that crossroads.

She turned to stare at the Anomaly. Much fainter than with the resonance amplified between the many of them hovering together in a cluster, the one’s solitary presence here still emitted an eerie, pleasant chime, nearly inaudible, though Grant now almost felt more sensitive to it.

A nervous laugh escaped Mischchenko’s throat. Then she said, “Shit, whatever, I know how you’re feeling, Grant. I wanna know more, too, even if it’s just so we can deal with these things more safely, hell, save more lives, maybe. And, hey, like you said, we got it all on headcams. Trémaux’s going to have a field day with it, let’s—”

Burch had warned them about the pterodactyls.

That it might only be at the last moment when the beating of their wings heralded their presence.

In line with the warning, a huge flap echoed across the mountain woods like a thunderclap, and a winged beast descended upon them.

Mischchenko was the first to react, but her EMD’s shot missed, hitting only a pine tree.

The pterodactyl screeched in response.

Right when it pounced on her.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

High Noon, All In

Valentín Ruiz leaned against the kitchen counter. He slipped his leather jacket open, exposing the holstered gun on his belt, like a gunslinger in a Western movie showing his opponent he was armed and a force to be reckoned with. His gaze swept over Chloe Grant’s belongings, stopping on another cardboard box in the corner, and locking onto the contents he could spot in its open topside.

She had still been unpacking. Still moving into this new home. The knife block sat at the top inside that box, still wrapped in newspapers. Both of them could see hints of knife handles through the crumpled paper.

He peeled his sight away from the open box, and their gazes met. He scratched the stubble on his chin, then sighed. A long, weary sigh.

Though she remained speechless, Grant’s most prominent thought echoed like a scream inside her mind.

Her gun was upstairs. His was right at his hip.

It wouldn’t have looked good for him if he were to shoot her in her own kitchen, but they both had sophisticated military backgrounds, and both had been working in private sectors, shrouded in secrecy. To some extent, they both had the skills and knowhow of spies, and could make each other vanish from the Earth without a trace if they just tried hard enough.

Grant considered herself a good judge of character. But in a situation like this, all bets were off.

Their previous banter, paired with the flirtatious glint in his eyes, could have meant anything. Maybe he was always just like that, using it to disarm situations and make friendly. Or maybe he was a good actor, using it all to conceal more nefarious intentions, allowing the wolf to creep closer before it pounced. Or maybe it was entirely genuine.

She found Ruiz hard to read now. His poker face gelled well with his model’s face.

Eyes still locked onto her, he finally broke the awkward silence by saying, “I never asked, did I? You aren’t from around Texas.”

“Nope,” she said, popping the single syllable like a balloon. “You never asked indeed.”

He emitted something that died halfway between scoffing and a chortle. He chased that with a wam smile.

“Okay, well, are you from Texas? Or not?”

Grant’s phone buzzed. A short message. She hesitated to check.

Instead, she countered his question. “You said the job and HQ can wait, you needed to talk. Almost had me convinced it was something serious, but now we’re small-talking in my sorry excuse of a kitchen?”

She leaned against the other counter, opposite Ruiz, and crossed her arms. She sold her words with a crooked smirk.

He bought it.

“I’m from Cali,” he said, “and figured you were too, based on how you talk. Or maybe it’s Nevada?”

Her smirk transformed into a genuine smile.

A good guess.

He was good, after all.

“Yeah. L.A. You?”

Another half-chortle, half-scoff.

“Same. People say it’s a small world, but a city like that’s big enough for us to never meet before this job a couple o’ states over. How about that, huh?”

The phone buzzed again.

“Maybe we just got around a lot,” she said, her smile fading. “Is this… going anywhere?”

His sunny demeanor also faded. With a thumb hooked into his leather pants’ pocket, his right hand hovered dangerously close to his pistol all the while.

“What? I thought you wanted me to ask you out for drinks, off the job, sometime. Wasn’t that what you implied at Carrington’s?”

“I didn’t imply anything, I flat-out said it. But tell me something, now. You go to a lady’s home first to ask her out for drinks? Is that how you roll, cowboy?” Her lips twitched until they formed another crooked smile—keeping her cool, trying to lure his motives out into the open. “How’d you find this place anyway? You following me around now? Are you stalking me?”

He tilted his head, then shook it, averting his eyes. Like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he played it off with natural charm. A wide smile revealed a perfect set of teeth, just adding to the pleasant image. And he employed a soft, smoky chuckle to punctuate it all, to downplay everything.

Her phone buzzed again.

“Yeah, okay, I admit, I followed you here from Carrington, figured I wanted to ask in private,” he said. He was good. She had not seen his motorcycle on her tail for the entire ride. Offering Grant a sliver of relief, he unhooked his thumb, removing his hand from the vicinity of his gun, to wag a finger at her—to point at the phone in her jacket, specifically, just as it buzzed yet again. “You gonna get that?”

She grinned and grimaced both.

“You know, it’s work. Our work. I’m surprised your phone isn’t blowing up right now, too.”

He shook his head, still wielding that charming smile. “I prefer to keep it off when I have more important people to see.”

Oh, he was good. If he suspected that she knew anything about his espionage at Future Proof for Corsino, he was burying it under mountains of flirting.

Under other circumstances, it might have worked.

She slowly fished the phone out of her pocket, and it buzzed for the umpteenth time, now in her hand.

New messages flashed on-screen.

“We should be getting to HQ, saddling up already. And if you’d been paying attention to our employer, you’d know. We’re headed to the Appalachian mountains? Gonna be a long ride. So, I’m flattered you rate this…” she paused, using a gesture to bounce between the two of them, “as more pressing than your seriously lucrative job, but… I, for my part, would like to see those fat paychecks keep rollin’ in.”

He raised his hands like she had him in a stickup, palms facing her in surrender. With a nod of his head, he encouraged her to check her phone.

11:59, said the display.

High noon.

She fought the urge of looking up, to keep an eye on his right hand and the holstered gun.

As expected, messages from HQ were flooding her lock screen. Two of them in between had come from Danielle Bennett—from her own private number, not work.

Where ARE you? —Dan, 11:57

Grant held up a hand before Ruiz could say anything else. He shrugged in response. She took a moment to reply to Dan’s message.

Her heart was racing, but not because Ruiz was such a heartthrob. The silvery iron on his hip still kept her nervous enough, the subterfuge put all his flirting into question, and she still considered finding a way to elegantly excuse herself, to retrieve her own piece from upstairs.

For all she knew, she was about to take a bullet. Or ten.

Grant permitted none of this to surface in any shape or form. She bit her lip and answered Danielle, not HQ.

Had to make it snappy. Had to word it just right.

Her thumbs raced at a pace to match her heartbeat, tapping out a swift reply.

If anything happens to me, he’s at my place right now, and he’s got a private semi-auto 45 ACP, not issued by FP.

Message sent.

Grant quickly stuffed the phone back into her pocket. It soon buzzed more with a flurry of incoming messages. She knew they were all sent by Dan.

Without commenting on the flood of texts that kept her phone abuzz, Ruiz only arched a brow.

He stared into her eyes.

“Listen,” he said. A deep, shuddering sigh escaped him. The sheer power of it stunned her, and made her racing heart skip a beat.

He pulled off his beanie cap and ran a hand through dark hair, ruffling it as he visibly struggled to find the right words.

That sigh had blown away all flirtatious air about him. He shifted uncomfortably where he stood, still leaning against the counter. The hand so dangerously close to his pistol, it joined the other, folding in front of him and guiding his sight to the checkered floor between them.

“I am a spy,” he said. Each soft word landed like thunderclaps. “I work for an industry rival of FP’s.”

Her stomach knotted. The pause he allowed to follow only fueled her paranoia.

Was this another play?

Was he fishing for something else? Was he onto her, trying to find out who knew that she knew, to find whom she answered to?

Her mind flashed to Danielle Bennett, an innocent face on the surface of a sea of secrets.

Emotions started bubbling up from the depths.

Social engineering and confidence plays were tricky business, and whether this was a play of his or not, it had worked wonders in robbing Grant of her cool. She couldn’t think of any cards to play, and the sheer possibility of him being this stupid made her angry. It also somehow made her angry that his flirting might have all been hot air all along.

“What the hell?” she blurted out. “Why would you tell me that? Why me? Are you stupid?”

Another sigh escaped him.

He avoided eye contact.

Between her simmering sources of anger, and the very surprise of it all, she struggled to sense any deception. It was either a very good, aggressive bluff on his behalf, or her instincts were right, and he was coming clean to her in earnest.

Still, the question lingered. It compelled her to repeat it.

“Why? Why me?”

Another sigh from Ruiz now shuddered with gravity. He finally met her gaze again. The wet glitter of sorrow in his eyes hinted at a deep ocean of its own, an untapped well of tears, and a conflicted man hidden behind it all.

Everything he’d say would feel so very, deeply honest.

“When Spencer hired you, I… convinced Singh to let me get my eyes on your file. And when I saw that, I figured you were hired to ferret out any potential leaks or whistleblowers or spies in the organization. That’s kind of your specialty, isn’t it?”

Grant clenched her jaw so hard that her teeth almost started hurting from the pressure.

The look in his eyes reminded her of a puppy dog.

This, she hated. She really didn’t like dogs, not even in such an abstract sense.

“Well, I didn’t really sign up for that,” she snapped, “but I can see why you’d arrive at that misconception.”

Averting his gaze again, he shook his head.

“You know, I used to think it was the right thing to do. Everything about our company is shady. It’s shady as all hell,” he said. The words he used somehow dulled the edge. Maybe it was the softness in it, the sense of vulnerability he projected. His gravelly voice cracked, if ever so briefly. “Who’s the good guys, really? Who’s the bad guys? Sure, the extra pay didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt one bit. But I was convinced it was better for this to be out in the open somehow, that it might be dangerous if Spencer held all this power in his hands, all this knowledge. Y’know?”

It was a lot to process. If this was a play, then he had gone all-in, put all his chips on the table, and asked to see Grant’s hand.

She had nothing. Nothing to match it.

It didn’t even feel like a play. It was probably more apt to understand it as someone who was quitting the game altogether.

Where she failed to reply, he continued speaking.

“Now? Carter was shot. Dead. We buried him after some gung-ho military asshole shot him, and I think it’s my fault—no—I know it’s my fault. And Singh’s behind bars, and this fucking shake—”

He raised his hand. His left hand—the one she had not been watching as closely, as it had been farther away from the holstered gun on his hip—now that she focused on it, she could see that it shook.

Tremors shook it.

Ruiz balled his hand into a fist but the tremors remained. His eyes sparkled brighter.

“This fuckin’ shake doesn’t go away anymore. I fucked up, Grant. I want you to turn me in or whatever, or just hear me out. Fuck. I don’t even really know you. I’m sorry I’m dumping all this horseshit on your lap. I just… I need someone to talk, I guess.”

His words fell the softest he had ever uttered. He rubbed his forehead, hiding his eyes behind his hand.

It was the least rehearsed thing she had ever felt coming from him.

This player had quit the game. He was on the verge of breaking down in her half-furnished house, in her sorry excuse of a kitchen.

She bit her lip. The ball of anger dissipated into a much milder frustration, a tinier pit, churning in her stomach.

In that moment, she decided to take him at face value. She could have gone on and continued questioning his motives and his every action, but the puzzle pieces fit into their rightful places.

Grant didn’t really know him either, but… this…

This felt honest.

“Shit, man,” she muttered, stirring as she broke free from her quiet shock, “this is so, so much to take in right now. You have no idea.”

It was her turn to release a deep sigh. Part of it was relief. She didn’t want to be cynical.

“Can I—do you mind if I smoke in here?” he asked. He blinked many times, blinking away the glitter in his eyes before he’d dare show any tears.

“Yeah, I mind. There’s no smoking in my house,” she answered with firmness.

He wiped his lips with those trembling fingers.

The gun at his hip no longer exuded a tangible threat. It just rested there. Just like the gun upstairs, in her bedroom. She would fetch it later, after he left.

“Shit, man, we got a lot o’ shit on our plate as it is. Now you come to me with… this? Like I said, it’s gonna be a long ride to the Appalachian, we need to get to HQ, and I need to think about what you said. I’ll tell you this, though, I wasn’t hired for counterintelligence,” she said, omitting the part of her having been doing that without being asked to. And as much as she disliked dogs, the look he then cast her way made her think of a kicked puppy. She swept her hair back, suppressed a groan of frustration, and the harsh tone faded from her voice altogether. Everything softened. “We’ll talk about it more, okay? But we also need to do our job—the Anomalies, the specimens and incursions—people’s lives are on the line, and we gotta hustle. See you at HQ, okay? Let’s talk shop after we get back from the field. Okay?”

Instead of tears, he broke out into another hybrid between scoffing and a chuckle. There wasn’t anything flirtatious or playful about it, instead having turned into something resembling relief.

He’d soon leave. She’d soon have packed and left as well, heading downtown to Future Proof’s towering skyscraper. And soon after that, they’d be en route to Kentucky.

They exchanged furtive, secretive glances during briefings in the boardroom and briefings in R&D, and between every step of travel where they looked each other’s way.

Grant now shared the burden of his secret. They did not speak about it at all. She felt watched all day, all night, all flight.

The tremor in his right hand remained, visible to her despite all attempts at hiding it. On the final stretch of flight into the Appalachian mountains, only Grant saw it.

Mischchenko chewed over their field operation orders from Spencer while they performed a final check on their EMD rifles. Pruitt was busy piloting the airlift chopper.

Max Carter was conspicuously absent. It felt like he should have been there. Instead, there was just an empty spot on the bench next to Ruiz.

That conversation in the kitchen had been haunting Grant all the while, all journey long. Everything else since had flowed past her in a blur. The most she remembered was trying to calm Danielle down, saying they’d sort things out soon enough.

She went through all the necessary motions. Kept to herself otherwise.

Grant kept her masked, helmeted head down, and followed Mischchenko’s instructions. Checked and re-checked her EMD rifle. Their battery packs whined as they powered their weapons up.

By the time the black, unmarked chopper swooped down over foggy Kentucky woods in the middle of nowhere, it was noon again.

The Anomaly glittered below.

That terrible, beautiful globe of splintered, slowly spinning lights, like glass shards shining with brilliant reflections of the sun…

Reports indicated pterodactyls in the area as a primary threat in the incursion. Burch confirmed the veracity of the images, and Stantz was busy having Bennett and their other minions scrubbing all video and image footage from the ‘net.

For the operators on site, the helmet visors concealed their faces. This kept the warmth inside their body armor, and it also hid all their facial expressions.

Even so, Ruiz’s stare lingered on Grant every now and then.

And she thought back to the kitchen, and how he had played his final hand, laying all cards out on the figurative table between them. It made her think of the blue-white checkered floor.

Would she tell Spencer? They needed to make a decision. A very cautious decision.

Some part of her related deeply to Ruiz. In all honesty, she didn’t trust Spencer herself. The power of these Anomalies, the power to affect time itself…

On the ground, she looked up at the Kentucky Anomaly in awe. It shimmered where it revolved mid-air, hovering inches above the frosted forest floor. This scintillating sphere was big enough to let another T-Rex escape from the past into their present.

Mischchenko was busy handling Doctor Solomon’s new variant of the ALM—what he had been so excited to share with the class. His new “innovation”.

This new variant could not only lock the Anomaly to prevent things from passing through the breaches in time—it could alternatively enforce stability. They could effectively stabilize a Flicker, what the R&D team had labeled an unstable Anomaly, which would work wonders if they ever needed to herd dinosaurs back through a Flicker again.

Ruiz returned from a sweep of the perimeter.

“No eyes on our big birds,” he reported. “But you’d think we’d hear ‘em make big shrieks to match.”

The ALM refused to lock the Anomaly. Mischchenko jiggled a cable. Slapped the side of the futuristic device.

She answered with frustration ringing in her voice—not over Ruiz’s report—but the ALM’s refusal to obey. “Burch said they’d be more silent hunters. Might not hear big wings until it’s too late.”

“These woods are pretty quiet today,” Grant remarked.

And with that, Mischchenko froze. The helmet kept her face as unreadable as everybody else’s, but Grant sensed the sudden shift in her superior’s air.

“You’re right,” Mischchenko said. “And now that you mention it, it’s too damn quiet. Keep your eyes peeled.”

Her movements turned hasty. She slapped the ALM’s metal case again, this time prompting lights to flare up on its top. The spiky sphere at its front starting spinning, and the Anomaly reacted—

The mighty, scintillating ball of light collapsed, compacting, shrinking from a huge, spinning sphere into a suitcase-sized orb, frozen and immobile mid-air.

The ALM hummed in chorus with the chugging generator wired up to it.

“Shit,” Ruiz muttered, so quiet that Grant only heard it over the radio bud in her ear. “I only now got what you mean, Mischchenko. Something’s wrong. We should be hearing… I don’t know what. It’s too damn quiet out here. I don’t hear Jack or shit.”

Mere seconds later, the chirping started. Chittering and scuttling sounds, drawing closer, ever closer. Shuffling, squeaking, and above all, chirping.

Not the chirping of birds.

Chirping of things on the ground. Buzzing.

Wings, far tinier than those of pterodactyls.

The mist around the Anomaly’s site roiled. Things emerged from it. Many, many things. Things that caused that symphony of buzzing and scuttling and chirping.

A living flood neared from every direction around them. The forest grounds teemed with life. Insects, the size of dogs, swarmed those frozen grounds.

Their three-person team was surrounded.

Ruiz shot first. Then the two women followed suit. Their EMDs flared up, discharging bright bolts of energy into the crawling swarm of weird locusts. The earth crackled with electricity, and those bugs were slowed, sometimes stunned… but the rest of the living tide swarmed every closer.

And quickly.

“Open the Anomaly back up,” Grant shouted between shots into the swarm. Then, as Mischchenko failed to comply, she repeated herself. “Open the damn’ Anomaly!”

Mischchenko stopped shooting and swiveled. She backed up, then hammered the device, shutting down the ALM.

The locked orb of the Anomaly exploded, expanding back into the brilliant, rotating sphere it had formed before.

The three field operatives continued firing shots in a futile attempt at stemming the tide, but they would never stop it like this—only slow it down, at best. Backing up all the while, shooting into these alien hordes of insect-like mutants, the light of the Anomaly engulfed them.

Pruitt was shouting over the intercom for a sitrep, but he would receive none as they shouted at each other in their desperate retreat, then all communications died.

The team vanished into the Anomaly, and the swarm followed.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

None the Wiser

With walls so white that fluorescent lights made them blinding, Chloe Grant soon started seeing bright spots everywhere. Ghostly echoes danced about her field of vision, around her own reflection in the bulletproof glass surface. Instead of bars, clear windows separated visitors from the inmates in their cells, with thick glass plates reaching from floor to ceiling, and tiny breathing holes that wouldn’t even permit anybody to poke as much as a finger through.

Automatic lights turned on everywhere they wandered. Stern-faced and square-jawed guards kept close watch, sporting glossy body armor, and electric stun batons hooked onto their belts. Doors here never opened to traditional keys, their magnetic locks only yielded to plastic cards with RFID chips. Electric buzzing came muted and quiet from those devices, with tiny red lights turning green, and dim touchscreen interfaces flanking the sides of every cell.

Low ceilings swallowed all echoes and suggested floors upon floors of other tracts, and the overall oppressive atmosphere made it less inviting to say anything than in a church during a sermon.

Though security here was as high as it got, this whole place felt less like a prison, and more like a strange sanitarium, transported from a dark past into an even weirder future.

On the way in, Chloe Grant had half-expected to see a real-life Hannibal Lecter standing inside one of the bright chambers, bound in a straitjacket, goading them to step closer.

Instead, Singh paced back and forth inside his cell. Dark rings underlined his haunted eyes, and every joke the thin man cracked to lighten the mood felt forced.

Grant recognized this brand of despair. Their former colleague was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

“I’d love to tell you more,” said Doctor Solomon. The corners of his lips twitched with a hint of a smile, like a child who could barely contain himself. “But I believe everything we say here is recorded and gathered, and for the sake of our continued paychecks, I must keep our upcoming innovations confidential.”

The eccentric doctor and lead engineer in their company was doing his best to cheer up Rida Singh. It wasn’t working. Still, Singh’s face featured a brief flash of recognition over Solomon’s noble effort.

Ruiz scratched his five o’clock shadow and nodded. They all knew what Solomon was trying, so Ruiz offered his best attempt towards the same end.

“Can we get you anything in here? Everybody’s being sketchy about visiting times, and rules, and the likes.”

Singh shook his head and coughed.

“No. This place is only temporary anyway. Lawyer said, uh, I’m being transferred to some other facility next. Before the trial, yeah?”

Grant hedged so many unspoken questions for Singh. Why he had pulled the move he had to land himself here, what he had hoped to accomplish, and if he realized that his stunt had effectively gotten Carter killed.

It wasn’t the time nor place. She held her tongue.

She had almost expected Ruiz to pose those questions, anyway given he seemed to have been closer to Carter and Singh and a spy for… another agency? Company? Who knew? Bennett was still digging.

Ruiz was playing it cool. Playing the concerned colleague all the way.

Or maybe he wasn’t even playing at all.

The most convincing liars rarely lied. They drew their confidence from the naked truth, letting deceptions fall unnoticed through the cracks.

She had been watching him for the past days. She had noticed the shake in his hand. At Carter’s funeral, Ruiz had tried to hide the shaking. Not even smoking could do it.

And the man’s eyes had welled with tears at the funeral. His loss appeared profound and honest. Carter and Ruiz had been working closely together for over a year.

Grant’s inner monologue drowned out whatever superficial things the three men were talking about now.

Singh’s eyes wandered her way and she felt pressured to say something again. So she did.

“Whatever you do, don’t say anything without Spencer’s legion of lawyers to sand it down.”

He smirked. Scoffed.

“Man, I am really,” Singh started. Pausing, he ran a hand through his frazzled hair and sighed. “I don’t know, I’m just really disappointed in Spencer. He’s leavin’ me hanging here, man.”

Grant sympathized. With both Singh and Spencer.

The CEO needed to keep the ship running. The lights on, the bills paid, the progress made.

Meanwhile, Singh had only been doing his job, and if things had worked out, he might have been celebrated for his actions. Instead, Carter was dead, the US government’s team had killed the T-Rex and taken its remains, and Singh, their former head of IT, now sat in federal prison, awaiting a trial that could put him in a cell for life.

“Yeah,” she replied. Sighed. She hated that this was the best she could muster in response. “Wish we could do more.”

Singh cracked another feeble smile. He appreciated her own miserable attempt at giving him any shred of courage.

He continued pacing back and forth in his cell.

“Don’t worry old chap,” Doctor Solomon told his junior colleague. Despite the oppressive gloom of this brightly-lit prison, the elderly man beamed. “Chin up. Spencer’s a cold fish when you shine a light on him, but he rewards your loyalty when you least expect it. And speaking of fish, Bernie’s taken care of—I have him in my lab and he’s only being fed the best money could buy.”

Solomon tapped the window between them twice and gave Singh a reassuring nod.

Singh exhaled sharply and he smiled the first honest smile since their arrival.

“Thanks. Owe you one, Doc. Just, uh, don’t do anything funny with Bernie, okay?”

“I would never dream of it,” said Solomon. Then he tilted his head. “Unless you give me consent to experiment on him? See, his species would make him a good specimen for tests relating to the Devonian—”

“No. N. O,” Singh said, spelling out his denial and emitting a nervous chuckle.

None of them were sure when Solomon said things like that.

“In all seriousness,” Ruiz said, “I bet you, Spencer got Bennett and whoever else diggin’ on what really happened out over in Midland. You’ll be out in no time, then the first drink’s on me, amigo.”

Grant wasn’t convinced.

How much did Ruiz know? How much of it was in his hands? Could something he knew set Singh free?

She flashed Singh a smile so feeble that they may as well have been looking into a mirror, rather than through a glass window.

“Stay frosty and see you soon,” she said. A deep breath, and part of her composure returned. She winked at him. “And don’t bite too hard when you get any cake, might just be a file hidden in there.”

His smile widened, replete with warmth.

The three visitors remained quiet on their way out. Down the claustrophobic corridors, past the tiny blinking lights, and doors that only guards could open with their mag-lock keycards. Before long, the trio found themselves back out on the parking lot of the Carrington Federal Correctional Institute.

High fences topped with razor wire surrounded them. Only few other vehicles stood parked on the visitor’s lot.

The shadows of visors concealed the watchful eyes of prison guards, all observing their every move as the trio shuffled about on the parking lot.

The three stopped and stood in silence, all grappling with what to say next, before they inevitably scattered in the winds.

Uncomfortable in this environment, Solomon was first to speak and first to leave. He straightened the collar of his gray jacket. “Oh, well, don’t let any of this eat at you. I’m confident Spencer can pull some strings and get Singh released soon enough. He’ll be back to annoying you on comms before you know it. On a lighter note, I’m excited to share with you the details on our newest achievement. Not here, of course. I’ll see you two back at the office. Bring beverages, the briefing might take a while.”

The head engineer disappeared into his old blue Charger and drove off, leaving Ruiz and Grant behind.

Ruiz was smoking a cigarette, leaning against his motorcycle. Grant hadn’t even noticed him light up his cancer stick.

His eyes narrowed, studying one of the fence’s watchtowers. Like a sharpshooter, observing his mark, staring back at a guard up there. When he spoke, it almost looked like he was talking to the faraway guard, but the words were aimed at Grant.

“Why did you come here, anyway?”

Her heart started pounding like a huge drum. It wasn’t even like she felt caught—the question offended her somehow.

“Excuse me?”

Ruiz took a long drag from his cigarette. “You’re still pretty new to FP. I never figured you and Singh to have been close.”

This left her speechless. He must have known how his words would hit. But why? And why now?

He answered unspoken questions, answering for his offense unprompted. “Sorry. Just curious. Trying to get to know you better. You know what, though? I ain’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. ‘Preciate you’ve been here—been to Carter’s funeral, now, this—good having you… havin’ you on the team.”

Ruiz’s gaze wandered from the watchtower to Grant, locking onto her eyes with a burning stare. He took another drag. His eyes glittered something strange. His model shape looked stunning in this sunlight.

She swept her hair back, stewing on his speech, looking for the right words to counter it with.

“Don’t mention it. Least I can do.” She bit her lip. Maybe the easiest way to keep tabs on him would be to… “I know you offered Singh a drink when he’s out, but how about you offer me one sometime?”

She got into her car while he stood there, staring after her, smoking.

“Careful,” he said. Every syllable billowed out like smoke. “Don’t wanna get us into hot water for fraternizing too closely outside of work.”

Ruiz nodded, as if agreeing with himself on what he had just said. He stood still where he leaned against his motorcycle, posed like the languid statue of a post-modern deity, rivaling famous underwear models in his attractive poise.

She shot back. “Hold them horses cowboy, it’s a just a drink or two.”

His lips curled into a smile. He performed a mock salute with two fingers.

She took off, pulling the car around and driving away.

Grant shot furtive glances in her rearview mirror as she left the prison’s parking lot behind. Ruiz continued staring after her as she drove away. Then he stamped out his cigarette on the Tarmac, mounted his bike, and slipped the black helmet over his head, visor flapped down.

Then, as Grant’s car trailed around the curving road, lines of tall trees swallowed Ruiz and the prison whole.

She had a lot to think about, and she had a long drive ahead of her. Visiting Singh here was quite out of the way, and he would be transferred even farther for the trial.

Things weren’t looking good for Singh, and she wondered if she could get him off the hook… if only she gathered enough evidence on Ruiz’s espionage, and the mystery redhead he worked with—that suspicious suit he had been meeting at the café in Austin.

He had met with that redhead more than once since Grant started following him around. Grant had been stalking Ruiz, always careful not to tip him off to his tail.

She used rentals, taxis, and even set up in any inconspicuous locales where she could watch the roads he frequented throughout the city.

Grant even knew where Ruiz lived now. Downtown, fifth story of an old building that looked fit for gentrification in the near future. She wondered what his place looked like inside.

Endless minutes later, her phone buzzed, piercing the mind fog. Danielle Bennett was calling.

Grant plugged in an earbud and tapped her phone to take the call.

“What’s up, Danielle?” she asked Bennett.

“Where are you? Driving?”

“Mhm. On my way back from visiting Singh in Carrington.”

“Did he—you know what, tell me later. You’ll have to step on the gas, we got another incursion to deal with. The operative C2A is about to go out any minute now.”

Grant clicked her tongue. “Where?”

Bennett’s fingers hammered away at a keyboard with incredible speed.

“Kentucky. Appalachian mountains.”

Grant sighed. “Guess my book needs to wait. Again. I’m on my way.”

Her finger hovered near the button to hang up. More words from Danielle followed, stopping her from pressing it.

“What are you… you know what? Tell me later? Uhm,” Bennett paused for a long beat. More click-clacking at her keyboard followed. “I didn’t just call about the incursion, I, uhm, I got more on… you-know-who.”

She sounded as mousy as she usually looked. Grant knew exactly who Bennett meant.

The redhead Ruiz had been holding his clandestine meetings with.

Grant kept her eyes on the road. Traffic on the highway drifted in slow motion despite her car accelerating. “You sure this is the right channel to talk about it? The walls have ears, and all that?”

Bennett gasped. A frustrated gasp. Grant immediately regretted posing that question.

“Hey, I’m no newbie here. If I don’t want to be seen or heard, then I won’t be seen or heard.”

Grant smiled, stifling a laugh. “Okay, okay. I know. Just… we gotta be careful, okay?”

They still hadn’t informed anybody yet. As far as Grant knew, nobody knew that she and Bennett knew about Ruiz’s espionage on Spencer’s boardroom meeting. Or about the redhead.

“Do you wanna hear it, or not?” Bennett asked.

“Sure thang. Hit me.”

Bennett simmered in another long pause. The furious typing at her keyboard stayed absent for several beats, for so long that Grant almost asked if everything was alright, just before Bennett started hacking away again.

“Her name is Loretta Corsino. She is in no shape or form affiliated with the American government. She’s a consultant in the private sector. Harvard, attorney, squeaky-clean record, can’t find dirt on her anywhere.”

Grant snorted. This surprised her. Another private firm, butting into FP’s business?

It made enough sense. For now. Still, some pieces of the puzzle were missing. Frustratingly so.

“Huh.”

“She works part-time in cybersecurity at a US branch of a British company named Celava Semi-Conductors.”

“Huh,” Grant said again. “So they’re IT?”

“A little bit more than that. Get a load of this,” Bennett said. “They’re kind of a pioneer in the field of high-energy physics, developing new forms of semi-conductors, shielding, and other components for use in nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, and other high-tech projects.”

Grant’s heart started racing again. Celava sounded like competition. A rival for Future Proof. This wasn’t good.

They knew. The had to know what Future Proof was dealing in.

“The plot thickens…”

“No kidding! CEO’s a guy named Malcolm Wright, a real Conan the Barbarian-looking guy in a suit,” Bennett’s typing ceased. Her syllables drawled out as she was reading something off a screen before continuing. “Celava used to be trumpeted by the British government as an example of how their national industry was ‘moving into the future’, but then Wright caused a rift between the government and his company.”

Now, Grant was intrigued. She said nothing. Bennett continued uninterrupted.

“A year ago, there was an accident at Celava’s main research facility. Two scientists died. According to official accounts, there was some kind of explosion of super-heated steam when a faulty valve blew. The families of the two dead scientists there were given generous compensation—and, curiously, made to sign an agreement that both funerals would be held immediately, with closed coffins and no viewing of the bodies.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. You thinking what I’m thinking? This also sound very cover-uppy to you?”

“Yeah.” They knew. The Anomalies, the dinosaurs from the past, the mutants from the future, and the secret operations to keep these things from the public. “Yeah, they sure as hell know.”

“Good, glad we’re on the same page. You gotta be careful, okay? No telling how deep this rabbit hole really goes. It’s a whole other can of worms if the spy’s working for someone else in the private sector.”

“I know, I—”

“I mean it. I know you know. I know you’re going to tell me that this is the kind of rabbit hole where people disappear and wind up dead, or in closed coffins with no viewing of the bodies. I know you want to tell me to be careful, too. I know.”

“Okay. Yeah, let’s just,” Grant took a deep breath. “Let’s just play it cool, keep our cool. Keep working like we’re none the wiser. I’m starting to think we need to go to Spencer about all this, sooner than later. We, uhm. Speak soon, Danielle, I’m stopping at home before hitting the HQ for airlift. I’ll be a few minutes late.”

“You… call me Dan.”

Grant smiled.

“Okay, Dan. See you soon.”

They hung up.

Half an hour later, Grant pulled into her new driveway. Gravel crunched underneath her sneakers on the short way from the garage to her front door. The fresh coat of paint looked good.

It was a nice place.

Even with all the cardboard boxes inside, cluttering the entrance foyer, and the living room, and the kitchen, and the—

The doorbell rang. It startled her. She froze, heart racing again, in the middle of packing a bag to exchange her laundry at Future Proof’s city HQ. Just as she zipped up her duffel bag, the doorbell rang a second time.

A shadow awaited her outside. Still, calm, and looming, the tiny windows obscured everything about her visitor but the shadow.

She opened the front door.

The shadow turned out to have been Ruiz. He was standing out there.

Ruiz thumbed his lip as their gazes met.

How did he know where she lived?

“Hey,” he said. Husky, smoky, and stern. “I needed to see you. Speak to you. It’s urgent.”

What? About what? How—

She almost voiced her doubts unfiltered, then found her cool, thinking back to what she had told Danielle earlier—to keep their cool. “Is this about the incursion, or about the drink?”

Ruiz smirked. His eyes glittered something strange again. Flashing with something seductive.

“No. Getting to HQ for the job needs to wait, too. I need to speak to you. Alone.”

Taken off-guard, Grant rubbed the back of her neck, and considered her options.

He gave her no space to think.

“Can I come inside? Talk in there?”

“It’s… quite a mess. I’m still moving in,” she fired back.

“I ain’t fussy,” he said. His eyes flashed again. Narrowed. Drilling into her, scanning her up and down.

Did he know? Did he know what they knew?

“Okay, sure. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya. Let’s chat.” She stepped aside and invited him in with a sweeping gesture.

He stepped inside, swerving past the stacks of cardboard boxes, looking for a place to talk.

Grant licked her lips.

Her gun was upstairs.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Only Echoes Remained

The dark of night was still hours away. Even so, the pine trees in these Appalachian woods conspired with a thick fog and gray skies to suffocate the light, coating their world in a gray mist.

Despite the wintry cold trapped inside the car, and the stench of cigarettes caked into every piece of fabric, Braylon Turner was sweating bullets. Leroy had told him to keep the old car’s lights off while they drove through the woods, up a meandering and narrow path into the dark heart of Bumfucksville, Nowhere.

Leroy was also sitting on the backseat with Jimmy “Changa” Chance, keeping the muzzle of a revolver jammed into the spot where Jimmy’s jawbone connected to his wiry neck.

Gun metal had scraped the skin raw there, turning it a deep and uncomfortable red. The skin around it glistened with sweat, just like Braylon’s creased forehead.

Whenever Braylon met Leroy’s gaze in the rearview mirror, Leroy looked cool. Cold as ice.

Grim in his expression, Leroy mostly stared ahead, as if he was driving the car himself, while he kept that gun close to Jimmy, keeping the smaller man in a one-armed bear hug. He not only lorded twice the body mass over their hostage, he had something Jimmy didn’t: Leroy used to work as a gun-thug for one of the local gangs.

Now, coal from the mines had turned the edges of his fingernails black. Like the fingernail on his index finger, curved around the pistol’s trigger with skill and grim certainty.

Certainty that he could squeeze that trigger, and certainty that he had no qualms of painting the backseats red with Jimmy’s insides, whatever consequences be damned.

Leroy carried all that in his aura. A darkness. He had shot and maimed and killed people before.

The car slowed. Its old brakes squealed as the vehicle stopped.

At a crossroads.

“Where to next?” Braylon asked.

“Right,” Jimmy squeezed out.

Braylon stepped on the gas and they continued on.

Jimmy started whining again. “Look, guys, you might not give a shit about how much trouble I’ll get in by doin’ this? But you don’t know who you’re fuckin’ with if you wanna go—”

“We know and we don’t give two shits, you lil’ rat-shit weasel,” said Leroy. “We better be there soon, like you said, or I’m about to give this lil’ gun a test drive on separating your brains from your brainpan.”

He gave a painful shove of the gun’s muzzle into Jimmy’s neck for emphasis.

“Okay! Okay! Jesus, fuck, calm down, man! You’ll get your money back, okay?”

Braylon flinched. He didn’t care about the money. He cared about the twitch in his fingers, the sickness in his stomach, and the yearning for his next fix.

The money had always only ever paved the way. The goal had always only ever been the sweet release of the soaring heights beyond that.

Leroy, on the other hand, fundamentally disagreed. He growled. The former gun-thug might have genuinely wanted to hurt Jimmy.

“Our money,” he growled. A strange way to put it, as it had been, at this point, Leroy’s money that Braylon had smoked. “You, what—you get your rocks off on squeezin’ some poor assholes for all their savings while they kill themselves?”

Jimmy protested much and pointed at the rearview mirror to accuse Braylon. “Look, man! Look! You tried to sell some o’ that product, like every other two-bit junkie, and here—”

Leroy jammed the gun into Jimmy’s neck again and sneered.

“Shut the fuck up, weasel. You gonna complain now about dogs be eatin’ dogs? You’re lucky if I let you walk outta all this alive. I put other shit-kickers six feet under for less.”

Braylon slowed. The curves of the dirt road were treacherous, the path littered with muddy ditches—one mistake, and they’d get the car stuck, stranding them in some backwater woods for days. According to Martha, there was a clan of cannibals living out there, too.

Dirt and grit from the coal mines marked Braylon’s fingernails just like Leroy’s. Shaky hands danced between the weathered old steering wheel and the stick shift as he switched gears, making the car snake more slowly through the forest.

Leroy hissed at him.

“Don’t fuckin’ slow down now, man. We got places to be.”

“Why’d you… why’d you d-do this, anyway?” Braylon stammered out.

Leroy didn’t answer. He glowered into the rearview mirror, meeting Braylon’s gaze.

“Keep your eyes on the road, man.”

Braylon knew better. He did as Leroy said.

Part of Leroy just wanted his money back, but they were friends. They had been digging coal together for the past two years, drinking together sometimes, and sharing their grievances and grief in all the quiet moments in between.

Leroy had given up on his old dreams of big money. Whatever he was doing now, with Jimmy in his iron grip, he was doing all this for him.

His meaty fist dwarfed the silvery pistol in his clutches, just like he dwarfed the spindly Jimmy in his grip on the backseat.

Braylon licked his salty lips, hungry for some kind of freedom, hungry for the impending release he envisioned to be awaiting him at the end of this road.

That’s why he did as Leroy said. He kept his eyes trained on the prize, on wherever the dirt road curved around the trees and frosty mounds. He pictured himself inhaling those poisonous clouds of smoke, and finding the release from his lousy life that it always brought him, however ephemeral, however temporary—however harsh the crash back into reality ever followed. Time bled from future into past.

He’d soon be doing that, sitting on a porch, inhaling toxic smoke. Flying high, on strange wings, all horrendous pain be damned.

And then, they were there.

A small, old cabin awaited them in these woods, separated from a smaller shed. A rusty old pickup truck stood parked in the driveway. Ice had turned old leaves and pine needles into spiky clumps of dirt all around.

Even the snow stayed away from these grounds.

A bald, old, and grizzled-looking man stepped onto the cabin’s porch, sporting a stained apron and foggy plastic goggles strapped over his eyes. His silvery beard looked unkempt, but long, and speaking volumes of a long life to boot.

His rubber-gloved hands held nothing. His whole posture portended a quiet power, a certainty to rival the grim reaper’s very own image. The old cook stood still like a statue, staring at their car as they arrived, pulling onto his sorry lot.

The goggles and his stony expression masked whatever the old cook might have been feeling or thinking while he watched the three men emerge from the car.

Braylon, a sweaty and haggard mess he had never seen before in his life.

Jimmy “Changa” Chance, another sweaty mess, whom Leroy had beaten bloody enough to not kill him outright, but just bloody enough to make a point. Was his nose broken? He had sure complained about it enough on the long ride over.

And Leroy, of course—a mountain of muscle and bad attitude, exuding a cosmically dark aura, yet dressed simply in a plaid jacket and dirty jeans, like he had just crawled out of the coal mines where he worked with Braylon.

“Jimmy,” said the old cook, drawling out the name with deliberate contempt. Slowly, deliberately, he started removing his rubber gloves. Even slower than that, he said, “Never a pleasure to see your dumb ass ‘round these parts. Now, to what do I owe this dishonor? Thought I had made myself clear about our… business arrangement.”

Jimmy scoffed. It almost surfaced as a laugh, cut short when Leroy shoved him, forcing him down onto his knees, where the frozen dirt crunched.

Leroy answered in his stead. “Listen up, and listen carefully. I don’t give a shit whatever the hell your old business arrangements were, ‘cause we’re here for a different kind o’ business. The business o’ gettin’ our money back, and the business o’ getting my good friend here some o’ the product he’s owed after this little rat-shit right here kept fleecin’ ‘im for the shirt on his back.”

The old cook lifted his goggles, revealing a steely, cold gaze. He studied Leroy. Then he scanned Braylon up and down, piercing his soul whenever they made eye contact, however brief.

The cook didn’t even spare Jimmy another glance.

He didn’t offer any words in answer.

Leroy squinted.

“You hear me, or are you hard o’ hearin’ in your venerable age?”

The old cook smirked, scoffed.

“Hear you loud an’ clear, stranger,” the old cook grumbled. “I can offer you product, but I can’t offer you money. Ain’t got nothin’ here. I put my money in the bank, just in case some yahoos like you show up, tryin’ to rob little ol’ me.”

Fear bubbled up in Braylon’s gut. His attention bounced back and forth between Leroy and the meth cook, losing hope in them winning whatever kind of match this was.

Leroy wiggled his nose and frowned. He shook his head.

“And by ‘bank’, you mean that mean son of a bitch over in that holler we passed on the way here, ain’t that right?”

The meth cook slowly nodded, eyes locked onto Leroy. He grunted in the affirmative.

“Tom, man, come on, man,” Jimmy started babbling. He slapped his hands together, and still being on his knees, looked like he was praying to Old Tom Reed, the meth cook, like he was praying to God alimighty. “Come on, man! Give ‘em somethin’! Give ‘em whatever they want, I’ll make it up to you, okay? You ever hear about what this guy here did? This is Leroy Morin, he—”

Leroy kicked Jimmy in the hollow of his back, sending him his knees down deeper, face-first into the dirt, where new streaks of blood soon seeped out of fresh scratches.

“Shut the fuck up, rat-shit, I ain’t in the mood. I’m only gonna say it one more time, then I’m sendin’ you to your maker.”

Leroy cocked the hammer of his revolver to underline his words.

Jimmy complied. He didn’t even dare to get up from his knees, staying there on the ground, with stray pine needles flaking with the dirt from his leather coat.

The cook slowly bunched his gloves together in a fist, pursed his lips, and nodded.

“Sure,” he said, yet he locked his gaze onto Braylon instead of the gun-toting man he was answering. “I don’t want no trouble, and I ain’t gonna seek no quarrel with y’all. My daddy ain’t raised me that way.”

It was like he could sense the disease in him. Not just the addiction, or the visible discomfort that rode in alongside the pestilent horseman of withdrawal. But the greater sickness, the one deep within, the creeping death…

Did he know?

Asked the cook, Tom Reed, with the gravity of an executioner, “You wanna sample my product, son?”

Braylon licked his lips.

Was the meth cook going to try anything funny?

It didn’t feel that way.

That stony gaze, that grave-like certainty. Tom Reed exuded a darkness even more misty and overwhelming than Leroy’s presence.

Braylon shot Leroy a glance. His friend returned a cold stare.

Leroy almost sang when he threatened the old cook. “No funny business, Tom. Give him his fix, and we talk shop. Ain’t nobody else need to get hurt today.”

Then it all happened so fast. Anticipation contracted all time, compacting it into a tiny cube. The addiction drove Braylon, carrying him atop the waves of his dreamy haze.

Agreements were made, though nobody shook hands. The tiny flame of the lighter was cold, so cold, but the smoke burned so good.

Before long, the smoke from the pipe rose to join the gray mists in the Appalachian woods, as Braylon sat on Tom Reed’s porch, inhaling his favored poison, and it began to cloud, and eclipse everything. The smoke and its poison ate away at the frayed edges of time, fraying them even further—

Twilight turned brighter, the voices of the men speaking turned sharper, clearer, and that clarity all spilled, washing over into Braylon’s consciousness.

The air out here had never been fresher. Why, why did he hate his home state so much? Even between the skeletal trees in winter, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by supposed cannibals, and backwater gun-thugs, Braylon now saw beauty in everything. A fleeting insight, but a powerful one nevertheless.

Another hit. He was soaring. His mind was soaring. He felt so alive, and all the shit in his life felt so far behind him, like it had never even mattered to begin with.

Braylon even embraced the beauty in the death awaiting him. The uncertainty of it entered his consciousness—how much had he spent on the meth when he could have saved up to have a doctor find out if he really had the cancer that haunted his nightmares?—yet his mind painted it all with beautiful strokes, vague and emotional, filled with love, and self-destruction in equal parts. Ethereal, spectral, human.

Sacred dirt. Frozen, crunching underfoot. Flying high. Men and insects were all alike under God’s vast sky, Braylon reckoned.

Another hit, and he was swimming. An ocean upon an ocean, floating on the waves above darkest depths, riding a high so high that he was inches away from touching God in the heavens with his very own fingertips.

Or his brain was bleeding on the inside.

Then the demons attacked.

Winged shadows, huge, swooping down from silver skies as shadowy streaks of death, cutting through the peaceful forests with their braying cries, and their tearing claws, and beaks shaped like swords of unholy judgment.

The men screamed, scrambling inside, and the unreality of Braylon’s trip admixed with the horrible reality of their situation.

They cowered inside Tom Reed’s cabin, hidden from those hell-beasts.

And whatever clarity Braylon had imagined to perceive from the others talking all around him, he now barely grasped whatever they were saying until a new panic gripped him—all his skin slick with sweat, and dripping with the stink of his terror—and Leroy’s meaty fist gripping him by the fabric on his shoulder, shaking a shred of sense back into him.

“What the fuck,” Jimmy blubbered. “W-w-what in the ever-loving fuck are those things?”

“Demons,” breathed Braylon, firm with belief. Harbingers of doom, arriving on their leathery wings to drag him to hell.

Drag him down for all he had done, to his wife and son, to his neighbors, and even, to some extent, to his only friend left, Leroy.

Had he said that all out loud, or just thought it?

“Shut up. You’re high as a fuckin’ kite,” growled his friend. Leroy added, “You got any guns in here?”

The question wasn’t meant for him.

Tom, the old cook, shook his head in response.

“Don’t need ‘em, don’t need more risks of blowin’ my place sky-high when I got—”

Leroy snarled, “You fuckin’ kidding me? I only got this six-shooter, I don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to take down even one o’ those things. They are gargantuan!”

Tom Reed peered out a window, hiding in the shadow of the corner nearby.

The old man kept his voice down, but failed to mask any hint of irony when he said, “I’d say ‘gargantuan’ is an exaggeration, but each of ‘em is about as big as your car, I reckon.”

By contrast, there was no exaggeration in his description. One of the two beasts had pounced on Braylon’s old Dodge, crushing the metal and blowing all windows out of their frames. The creature unfurled its massive wings to a frightening span, creating a menacing silhouette perched upon the car’s wreckage.

The other beast screeched from atop the cabin’s roof. More dust rained down when it pounded against the wood, thumping around, seeking a way inside.

“No, seriously though, what the fuck are those things?” Jimmy asked again. His voice shook like someone stuck in a powerful earthquake. “Lemme go! We can make a run for it, lemme go!”

His cheek smooshed against the dirty floors of Tom’s cabin, as Leroy kept Jimmy buried underneath him with all his weight and mass, pinning him down with his gun still leveled at Jimmy’s neck—as if he had to fear Jimmy running away more than the terrible creatures outside.

Braylon himself, he couldn’t make any sense of it. He curled up into a fetal position underneath a table, as if that would help anybody.

“Christ, man,” Leroy snarled, “get a grip.”

Time had stopped contracting. Now, it expanded, stretching thin, reaching into a dark infinity. Was this death? A different death than he had always envisioned for himself, a quiet darkness instead of the beeping devices all around him while he rested on a hospital bed?

Even so, Braylon had not seen how Leroy got up, releasing Jimmy, or how they had argued, screaming at each other, while more dust rained from the ceiling, because the beast trampled upon the roof, flapping its furious wings.

When the tears had started streaming, and clouding Braylon’s vision, he would never be able to say with certainty, for he screwed his eyes shut more than once in despair, clouding his sight entirely, turning everything into the senseless blur and cosmic joke that reality had descended into.

Jimmy ran from the cabin’s front door after their screaming match, panting in panic as he ran towards the trees, hoping to evade the winged beasts by seeking other cover.

“Idiot,” Leroy had muttered, peering outside after his lost hostage, mere seconds before the carnage.

The beast that had trashed Braylon’s car pounced on Jimmy—he didn’t even make it halfway to the trees. Claws shredded him, and a long, blade-like beak picked away at his insides. Thrashing human limbs turned limp. Mighty wings flapped; once, twice, always beating like thunderclaps, as the flying monster lifted off again, carrying Jimmy’s mangled corpse into the misty air.

Blood still splattered to the ground with red chunks before the creature disappeared with him.

“That’s a dinosaur,” Tom Reed muttered, wagging a finger at the foggy window, and taking fearful steps back away from it.

“Bull-shit,” Leroy drawled out in a snarl.

His eyes flashed with horror. The horror of helplessness, of not knowing what to do, or how to escape their predicament. They were under siege by these two beasts.

The pistol in his hand never looked tinier.

His eyes also flashed with knowing, with recognition. A glance he shot Tom’s way only confirmed that he believed what the meth cook had just said, even if he claimed the opposite. Even if he repeated it.

Tom didn’t bother disagreeing. He kept his eyes on the space outside.

The stretch to his old pickup truck. Short enough to make the run, but so far away that the creature on the rooftop could snatch any of them like the other had taken Jimmy.

Then more dust rained from the ceiling, and the wood of it began to groan and crack. The silhouette of that sword-beaked beast painted itself against the gloomy gray sky where its claws tore open a hole to the outside, and it screeched—

A screech so blood-curdling, so high-pitched, it made Braylon’s blood boil. He burned with dread, and he grew wings, wings to carry him away.

The haze never helped him, it never truly had. Like all other addicts, it was more convenient to believe the contrary, though. He always ran from his troubles, soared higher above the highs that he inhaled from his meth pipe, thinking that those troubles all looked so small and insignificant from the loftiest of heights.

His wings, they carried him outside. The high made him feel faster, stronger, luckier. Happier. Maybe if he just believed hard enough, the imagination would become a truth.

He remembered his son’s smile as he ran from Tom’s cabin. Braylon ran despite Leroy’s shouts, despite his only friend trying to stop him from running out into the woods.

Alone.

Some part of Braylon understood everything, but the high eclipsed the low. It was almost like he could see himself from the outside, a little man, a loser running away, running for his life. Pathetic, yet capable of survival.

He ran like hell and he made it. Unlike that little rat Jimmy, Braylon made it to the trees. And beyond.

The last he saw of Tom’s cabin was a glimpse of that winged hell-beast, rampaging on the cabin’s rooftop, shredding wood and sending splinters flying in every direction. The firecracker’s clap of Leroy shooting at the beast from inside the cabin. And the creature, high on its own bloodlust, perhaps distracted by a bullet, didn’t even notice Braylon running away.

And the silhouette of the other, carrying Jimmy’s corpse into misty hell, was long gone. Had he imagined it? Was all of this just a nightmare he was about to wake up from?

Braylon’s lungs screamed at him.

How long had he been running? Moments, minutes, or hours? His sides hurt, his feet barked, and fresh blood coated his hands wherever he had scratched and scraped his leathery palms on the dry, cold wood of the infinity of trees around him.

The woods spun in endless circles, and dizziness set in.

Had he truly gotten away, or just slipped into another purgatory, descending ever closer to hell?

The high was gone. Reality kicked him in the back, and the stomach, and the teeth.

Braylon was hurting all over, and his lungs would not permit him to run any farther. Guilt gripped him, and wind cut like a knife against the cold sweat on his forehead, all squeezing him down to his heart—

He had abandoned his only friend. He had abandoned Leroy.

As much as the world spun around him, he spun around in the opposite direction, lost in the woods, recognizing nothing, oblivious as to where to go.

He wanted to run back, to Tom’s cabin, to find and help Leroy, so they could both get the hell out of there. Or was he just selfish again? Knowing he couldn’t make it on his own?

How the hell could he have left him behind like that? What kind of monster was he?

“The pathetic kind,” he muttered to himself, in the middle of nowhere, crashing down onto his knees, sorrier than ever before in his sorry life.

More moments or minutes passed, and clarity crystallized with the same cutting coldness as the wintry winds howling all around him.

That’s when the chittering and scuttling sounds began. The shuffling, the squeaking, the chirping.

Buzzing.

Wings, far tinier than those of the pterodactyls that had attacked Tom’s cabin.

Swarms of them.

The forest grounds teemed with strange life. Insects the size of dogs covered those frozen grounds, swarming, chittering, chirping, and closing in on Braylon. From every side.

They vaguely reminded him of locusts with their sleek green limbs, but also of wasps for their slender, and deadly-looking shapes. Sticking to the ground, they scuttled and swarmed towards him.

And in that moment, Braylon felt no more panic. Only resignation. He knew deep down his time had come.

Still dizzy, he spun around, seeking for another way to run, and quickly giving up, surrendering to the bleak reality of his situation. The inevitability of it engulfed him.

It was almost liberating. With no decisions left to make, he only tasted his own sickness, and accepted defeat. He still hurt all over, and there was no way he could fight and win against these… things. There were so many of them.

He would try— just like a final gasp escapes the dying lungs—he would thrash and fight back, powered by the same animal instinct that drives any creature under the sun to fight back in the face of their impending doom. Future and past melted into present, coalescing with growing clarity.

Before the inevitable fight to delay his death, he saw no escape. The swarm of these huge locusts was all around him, offering nowhere to run to, no possibility of getting past the living flood of buzzing wings and snapping mandibles.

They were so fast as they scuttled towards him. He never could have outrun them, not even in the wildest dreams that came with his highs.

“I’m so sorry,” was the last thing he managed to utter.

Braylon wasn’t even sure whom it was meant for.

Everybody, probably.

Then the swarm converged on him and buried him alive. Started eating him alive. Snapping mandibles tore at flesh. The buzzing drowned out everything but the screams.

His own screams eclipsed his every thought for the next few minutes until he could scream no longer, and only echoes remained, coupled with the burning sensations of pain that accompanied him in the final moments of his gruesome death.

Echoes through time.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

All Other Eyes Be Damned

The walls had eyes. Tiny cameras dotted every corner of Future Proof’s headquarters. Every stream of data ran through security systems, monitored by a combination of ever-churning algorithms and vigilant human attention. Every employee offered another set of eyes and ears in the hivemind, witnesses to any wrongdoing or espionage.

If they noticed such a thing happening. If.

Working previous jobs in corporate cybersecurity, that network of eyes used to feel like an extension of herself. Beady plastic eyes with electronics for innards, connecting to the eagle-eyed observers at the center of the hivemind.

Filled to the brim with loyal worker bees and cutting edge infrastructure, a towering skyscraper like Future Proof’s would have offered her a treasure trove of tools in her previous occupation.

Now, Chloe Grant was a grunt again. A well-paid mercenary on the frontlines, but a field operative. Her job was to contain and send dinosaurs coming through temporal Anomalies back into their proper eras.

Her job description did not include monitoring potential spies or ensuring the general public never learned of Anomalies or dinosaurs. The CEO, Malachi Spencer, had not hired her for that. And it wasn’t like she missed that line of work, either. Counterintelligence was always a dance on the razor’s edge—doing your job just good enough to make sure the oiled machine kept running without a hitch, yet never drawing so much attention to yourself that you became the subject of suspicion.

Yet here she was. Every step she took down the hallway towards Communications was going to make her look like she might be a spy herself. She had no reason to go there.

The walls had eyes. Those beady plastic eyes with electronics for innards watched her every move.

Now, she felt all those burning eyes on her. As she walked down the hallway, she had to wonder who would be sitting behind a desk and watching her every move from a security monitor. Wondering who’d sound the silent alert if she stepped out of line, or started acting overly suspicious.

After his arrest, Singh was out of the picture. That only left dozens of other people in the company who could be gunning to take down someone like Chloe Grant for a quick win.

Someone could have been composing a note on her in that very moment. For all she knew, Spencer might be reading that kind of memo by the end of his meeting in the boardroom, and activating everybody to get her fired, and entangled in lawsuits going deep enough to keep her impoverished for life.

Paranoia flared up as brightly as the burning fires of those tiny red dots on all the security cameras, the myriads of eyes all around.

She paused by the door to Communications. One such eye’s tiny red dot glowed above the door. Grant caught herself staring at it longer than she should have. Long enough to catch the attention of anyone behind a security desk and monitors.

Snapping out of this trance, she waved a hand, and the door slid open with a soft hydraulic hiss.

Danielle Bennet sat in the main hub of Communications, on a sleek swivel chair, illuminated by the cold blue glow from a wall of curved monitors. Only few of Bennett’s screens displayed security camera feeds from on-site premises—her main focus centered around myriads of dashboards accruing staggering amounts of data, camera feeds from other cities worldwide, and a show on YouTube where a young woman was talking at the screen.

Bennett hadn’t heard Grant nor noticed her enter Communications. A steady stream of chatter from two tiny earbuds plugged into Bennett’s ears likely occupied her entire attention, or served as white noise that conspired with the data she was monitoring on the screens to distract her entirely.

The other desks were currently unoccupied. With Singh absent and any other personnel out of office, Bennett sat alone in Communications.

Grant almost sighed in relief. She shoved all the creeping paranoia down into a dark hole, then slammed the hatch shut, and locked it. She pursed her lips and regained her composure, then approached Bennett from behind, giving her new colleague two light taps on the shoulder.

Bennett gasped and clutched her chest with a slender hand.

“Oh my f—Chlo—uh, Miss Grant. What can I do for you?”

Bennett forced a smile so nervous that it looked painful. With a flick of her wrist, she blindly closed the YouTube video she had been watching. And catching how Grant spotted that interaction with a furtive glance, Bennett’s cheeks flushed red with embarrassment.

“Hi,” Grant said. She paused while she silently struggled to find the right words. She bridged the gap with a question. “Do you have a moment?”

“Yah, uhm, yeah. W-what’s up?”

Grant was a tall woman, easily standing over a head taller than Bennett when next to one another. With Bennett sitting at the hub’s desk and Grant standing next to her, she must have towered over her the same way Future Proof’s HQ overshadowed the surrounding city buildings. A dizzying difference in heights.

Grant leaned in and cleared her throat, ready to drop her volume to a conspiratorial murmur. Bennett flinched and her cheeks turned a darker shade. Her eyes glittered with apprehension.

“I… need your help. This needs to stay in this room, between the two of us,” Grant said.

Bennett blinked. Blinked again. Rendered speechless, she stared at Grant, doe-eyed.

Grant chewed on her lip before continuing, knowing she needed to be more specific.

“I think there’s a spy in Future Proof, and we need to make sure. I think there’s someone spying on Spencer and the stakeholders as we speak right now. What do you say? Help me out, okay?”

Bennett blinked again. It was taking her too long to absorb the gravity of their situation.

Grant waited patiently, even as every second of time painfully ticked, and her chance at learning what she needed to know slowly slipped away. She needed Bennett’s help, but she couldn’t force her hand. Not now.

Not yet.

“Wh—uh-uhm, o-okay,” Bennett sputtered out. With a hasty gesture, she swept her hair back behind an ear and her gaze blanked. The gears were beginning to grind. The blank gaze hardened and then focused on Grant, locking onto her with a serious expression. “What do you need exactly?”

Grant nodded.

“I think there’s a bug planted in the boardroom. I need some way to intercept the signal, to listen in on it or to trace where it’s transmitting to. I know we can do that, I’m no newb to electronic warfare. Question is, can we do that really quickly somehow?”

Bennett narrowed her eyes. The gears behind her forehead continued to grind. Her brain was visibly running through a million calculations at once, chief among them a burning question: was Chloe Grant the actual spy in this scenario, engineering a situation where she could gain access to information she shouldn’t be getting?

Some part of Bennett must have navigated that maze of a million calculations fast. To go out on a limb here. She nodded in response to Grant’s question.

“Yeah, I got an idea, but, shit. Miss Grant—”

“Call me Chloe.”

She flashed Bennett a small smile.

The Communications operator’s cheeks flushed red again.

“Okay, Chloe, well, I have an idea but, shit, Singh just got into serious trouble, he’s—”

“I know Singh’s in hot water. But he’s in hot water with the federal government, not with Future Proof’s management. I haven’t been here long, but it’s clear we need to act before things get even worse. We all know the Midland disaster was the result of sabotage, right? Come on—think about it. Call’s coming from inside the house, Bennett.”

Grant clenched her jaw. Bennett stayed silent, stunned by this waterfall of conspiratorial assumptions. Some of them had struck a chord.

Grant softened her tone and asked, “Danielle?”

Bennett broke eye contact and rubbed her temples. Staring into the sea of data as it continuously churned on her wall of screens, she continued rubbing her temples while she processed everything.

“I can rig one of our portable Anomaly detectors to single out the signal from all the other noise and then trace it. Are you…” Bennett sighed. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Sure as dino shit,” Grant said, ringing powerfully with confidence.

She almost believed it herself.

Bennett switched gears and practically jumped out of her swivel chair. She zipped around Communications like a fluttering fairy. Within a matter of minutes, she cluttered her desk with tiny tools, grabbed one of the spare PADs, gutted its electronic insides, and rewired the device entirely.

Grant still felt watched. Even in here, an artificial eye was watching their every move. Systems continuously recorded everything. If anybody ever started digging, the hivemind would know what had  happened in this room. There would be uncomfortable questions.

She had to keep telling herself she was acting in everybody’s best interests, so this wouldn’t get her or Bennett into trouble. Hell, if everything worked out, it was bound to make her more popular with Spencer.

Even so, she licked her lips with a dizzying sense of apprehension, almost as if she was standing at the edge of a steep cliff. Stretched this thin with time ticking away, Grant’s patience waned. The longer they waited, the sooner the CEO’s meeting in the boardroom on the top floor would end. The sooner someone could remove the bug and dash any hopes of tracing it back to the spies.

All those eyes. Everywhere. Yet so many of them stayed blind.

Bennett beamed with triumph. She presented the modified PAD to Grant, quickly ran her through how to adjust the tracker to different Wi-Fi and radio signals, and proudly techno-babbled about how she had already filtered out all frequencies and signals commonly present and used throughout the building.

Finally, she handed Grant the earbuds.

“Once you’ve singled out the signal, the PAD should display any video feed, and you can listen in on whatever audio it’s transmitting. If it’s neither one or the other, it’ll just be a bunch of noise, but it’ll be recording everything on this puppy.”

“You are a wizard. I owe you one,” Grant said with a genuine and warm smile.

Before she could register any response to that, or truly absorb how Bennett kept blushing in her presence, Grant stormed out of Communications. The artificial eyes in the walls could continue watching her for all she cared.

Courage and vigor renewed, confidence swelled in her gut as Grant sensed she had found an ally in Danielle Bennett. She quickly dismissed a tiny spark of paranoia that Bennett might be involved in the espionage herself, and leading her into a trap within traps.

Riding the elevator up, Grant’s pulse started racing again. Time slowed, colors brightened, and her awareness sharpened.

Her wristwatch revealed she had lost fifteen minutes already. She hoped Spencer and the stakeholders would be filling a scheduled hour-long meeting in the boardroom.

People as important as the “Three Horsemen of the Corporate Apocalypse” had other places to be. Things to do. Lives to ruin elsewhere, more millions to shovel into shell corporations and off-shore bank accounts.

Worst case scenario, they were already done talking up there.

Grant muttered at the elevator’s level display, urging it to hurry up in its ascent, as if that would help accelerate anything.

The elevator dinged and its doors swished open.

She ducked past two people she had seen before but forgotten the names of, two office worker bees from the top floors. One of them was Spencer’s personal assistant. They chattered about coffee. They also largely ignored Grant.

The PAD in her leather jacket pocket weighed a ton. Cold sweat gathered in her palm around the small device she kept clutched in there, hidden.

She turned a corner to get out of sight from other human beings, and switched the detector on. Its screen winked to life. First, the display of Future Proof’s logo glitched out with graphical distortions, then replaced by plain text and numbers of Bennett’s hacked tracker superseding the PAD’s installed programming.

Grant plugged in the earbuds and started searching. Meandering around the top floor of HQ, adjusting the tiny dials on the device, and thumbing through Bennett’s new settings. She quickly passed by the main offices and glimpsed the boardroom through its sound-proofed glass walls—Spencer, Cole, Jae, and Romero were still in there, speaking to each other.

Good.

“I see you,” Bennett said, words arriving with a hint of static in Grant’s ears by way of the earbuds. However insecure Bennett may have seemed earlier, she now spoke with authority, and a sing-song in her tone. “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. I figured you could use some backup. Say hello to the audience at home.”

Grant spotted the nearest camera in the corner of the hallway. All eyes were on her, after all. Though her heart still raced—with excitement, and a creeping sense of dread—part of her was relieved that all those eyes were Bennett’s right now.

She greeted the camera with a timid wave.

Bennett answered with cheer, “Yep, that’s me. Hi!”

Grant flashed the camera a crooked smile. Had little time or space to appreciate Bennett’s sense of humor. So, she continued searching. Tweaking the PAD’s settings.

Then she swore when a sharp metallic whine eclipsed the soft white noise from her earbuds. Almost ripped them out of her ears, but then the whine died down before she could act upon it.

The PAD’s screen flashed with a red alert.

She had traced the signal. And more than that…

NO VIDEO, said the screen with a small error icon.

AUDIO DETECTED, it added beneath that, with a button prompt she could press to start playback.

Grant’s thumb hovered over that on-screen button. Her paralysis wouldn’t last long.

Curiosity won out. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but Grant had always hated comparing herself to animals, anyway.

Human through and through. She tapped the button.

While she raised the PAD to continue tracing the signal’s path, speech from inside the boardroom filled her ears.

Spencer spoke as sharply to the stakeholders as he did to his employees.

“…and you don’t think it’s convenient that our satellite imaging and the ADS were offline up until Captain Rose and his team were precisely on top of the incursion?”

The ensuing silence in the boardroom was deafening. Someone clicked their tongue in frustration.

Spencer continued. “What makes the world go round, Mister Jae, is cold, hard cash. You represent the ITC but there’s more than one way to secure the necessary funds, and we might need to consider those alternatives if you cannot ensure our systems are running at full operability worldwide. Let alone in our backyard.”

Another long stretch of silence followed. Grant followed the signal all the while. It led her down a corridor she had never seen before.

Bennett asked Grant, “Should, um, should we be listening to this? This, uh, uhhh—”

“Focus. Never mind what they’re saying,” Grant replied. Tremors rocked her voice, echoes of her racing heart. “Let’s focus on the facts. Someone’s eavesdropping on the boardroom meeting, and we need to find out who.”

Kim Jae finally broke the silence and answered Spencer. His every syllable dripped with venom. “What’s the point in shifting the blame around here, hm? You know better than anybody else that we’re not interested in some government goons meddling with your work. It affects our bottom line as much as yours. Which is to say: badly.”

Grant stopped. The signal was leading her up. This was the top floor of the building, so that left only one conclusion for her to draw.

The signal was being sent from the boardroom to the skyscraper’s rooftop.

“You think they’d be using an on-site antenna to bounce the transmission?” Grant asked Bennett.

“Well, no, I doubt it. Risky move to pull if anybody started looking too closely,” Bennett said.

“We do have a lot riding on this,” Romero chimed in. Her words carried no audible venom, but reminded Grant more of the slithering of a rattlesnake through tall grass. “And do not forget this, Malachi. As much as you can replace us, a corporate entity like yours can be replaced as well. A fancy logo and a glass house filled with a bunch of drones are easy to build. Just takes another yahoo with enough drive to sneeze at a new startup and we’d have another face to work with. Remind yourself of that before you even consider threatening us again.”

The boardroom’s silence, again, was deafening.

Grant stepped into the emergency exit stairwell. She followed the steps upstairs. The detection hack confirmed her suspicion, the on-screen flashing continuing to grow in its intensity. She was getting closer to wherever the bug was transmitting to.

Was Ruiz on the rooftop himself? He couldn’t be that bad of a spy, right? Or was he just that ballsy?

“Uh, Gr—Chloe. Please, I really don’t think we should be hearing any of this,” Bennett spoke into Grant’s ear. “It’s making me feel preeetty uncomfortable.”

Grant had no reason to keep listening. Yet she couldn’t help herself. Curiosity had killed the cat. Curiosity had also killed people before. If she was a cat after all, she probably still had a few lives to spare, right?

She yielded no response to Bennett.

Spencer’s words cut like knives again. He spoke with a gravelly gravity to match a death threat.

“Do I sound like I’m threatening you, Lena?”

More awkward silence.

Grant could almost picture Spencer in front of her: hands folded with an eerie calmness before him as he sat at the head of the table, with his usual stony and cold expression. His eyes resembling those of a predator in the wild, unblinking, piercing in their murderous gaze.

Unmoving, unflinching. While poised to pounce.

She pushed through the door. Violent gusts of wind swept over the rooftop, whipping Grant’s hair around.

The signal was close. The display on the PAD offered her a sense of direction. It flashed brighter and brighter and as she neared the receiver, pinging with subtle beeps in her earbuds that kept growing louder with every step.

“Almost there,” she muttered.

“Can barely hear you with all that wind,” Bennett replied, raising her voice.

“Listen, baby,” Kim Jae said, punctuated by a long groan. “We’ll figure out who was fuckin’ around with the Midland op. Call it an act of goodwill or whatever you want, but we’re as vested in seeing who’s fuckin’ around with you as you are. There’s some problems you wanna, y’know, nip in the bud? Before they grow into more serious problems. Like I said, we’re all sweating a bottom line.”

Grant reached the edge of the rooftop. The screen flashed with a direction indicator pointing to her right.

Past a long, precarious stretch. She backtracked, looked for another way.

There was no other way.

Cole spoke up. “And I can pull some strings. Find out who’s behind Rose and his team, and get them off your back. You have enough burden to bear as it is. Your efforts are not going unnoticed.”

Romero closed. “We all have a lot to lose. Big investments we poured into Future Proof, returns we’re all expecting to see down the line. You keep doing what you’re doing, and the imbeciles who think they can cut into us will pay. Your deliveries to the FIP task force are about to yield first fruits, I’ll have you know.”

More silence.

Grant wasn’t afraid of heights, but the vista from up here was enough to make her stomach churn. It looked like the city beneath the tower was a million miles down. Coated in bright pink by the setting sun, the skyline glittered and its streets teemed with streams of ant-sized cars and microbial people.

She needed to tear her gaze away from the dizzying depths, and focus on the PAD’s tiny screen. It still flashed, still indicating the source was located to her right.

About twenty paces along a narrow, precarious ledge. That’s where the bug was transmitting to.

What she spotted there was not a receiver.

“It’s a fucking relay,” she hissed.

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Bennett responded. “I don’t even see you on any of the cameras. Keep in mind, if you grab the relay now, or disrupt the signal in any way, they’ll know someone knows about it.”

Spencer said, “Please enlighten us then, Lena. What are you cooking up overseas?”

Grant had never seen Lena Romero smile, but she could envision it. Like the rest of the people in that boardroom, they could have all served as villains in a James Bond movie. Therefore, Grant imagined Romero to be showing a devious, confident smirk.

Romero said, “Bio-weaponry, and it may prove to be more effective than that old EMD tech you have been using to neutralize, herd, and capture specimens.”

A shudder ran down Grant’s spine. The heights added to her dizziness, threatening to turn into full-blown nausea. Everything Romero had just said had sounded all kinds of wrong. Red flags and warning lights had all flared up in Grant’s mind.

And she had no time to dissect it properly.

The winds howled around her on the skyscraper’s rooftop.

If she wanted to get to that relay in time, she had to balance along the narrow ledge. The walls and a vent offered some handholds she could grip to secure her way across, but a single violent gust of wind risked her sailing off the building’s edge.

“The Containment department might appreciate such developments,” Spencer said. The crooked grin on his face surfaced in his tone. “There will be no sneak peek, I presume?”

Grant committed another mistake of looking down. She rattled down a whole string of disjointed profanities.

“You okay?” Bennett asked.

Grant grunted in approval while she shimmied her way along the ledge. “Mhm.”

“Of course not,” Romero responded to Spencer. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up if something doesn’t… pan out. I don’t want to make any false promises.”

Another gust of wind whipped hair into Grant’s face. She gripped a vent’s grate so hard that her knuckles turned sheet-white. The thin sheet of metal whined and started to deform, bending to her body’s weight.

She envisioned herself slipping, dropping from the edge, falling to her death.

Cole asked Romero, “You wouldn’t be keeping such developments to yourself now, would you, my dear?” He chuckled. That chuckle contained something dark, mirroring his colleague’s verbal poison.

Just a few more steps of shimmying. Grant’s leather jacket scraped and scuffed against rough concrete walls as she clung to the edge of the building with all her might. It crossed her mind how fearless Ruiz must have been to plant the relay in such a dangerous place.

Romero laughed a rehearsed laugh. Hollow, courteous, and disingenuous. “Why, of course not, love.”

Grant reached the relay. A small black chunk of plastic, an unassuming electronic device with a long antenna unfolded from its side—no screens, no blinking lights, nothing noteworthy but a small button. A spidery mess of Velcro appendages from its back kept it fastened to another metal ventilation grate.

Spencer guffawed. “If that is all, then I believe our meeting is adjourned.”

Someone clapped their hands a single time in the boardroom.

Grant needed to hurry.

She cursed again as she fumbled, trying to detach the relay device with a single hand. The other hand was tied up in holding on for her dear life. Another cold and cutting gust of wind threatened to rob her of her balance, reminding her of the deadly drop, above which the heel’s side of her boots freely hovered.

Howling wind almost drowned out a flurry of meek words from Bennet’s end. “Hey, Chloe, if this is too dangerous, maybe we should… I don’t know. Just be careful, okay? I’m up here with you, got your back.”

“I got it, I got it,” Grant lied. Her heart pounded so hard that it wanted to escape from her chest.

Shuffling sounds filled the boardroom. Hands were probably being shaken. A door opened.

The Four Horsemen of the Corporate Apocalypse were leaving. Meeting adjourned.

The Velcro straps tore. Grant hissed in triumph as she clutched the freed relay, and made her way back across the ledge—just twenty paces that could have just as well been two thousand.

Forcing herself not to look down again, for every glance downwards only added to her sense of gravity, as if each glance kept adding more weight to her body, making it harder to hold, to not fall. Every cruel gust of cutting wind reinforced this notion, as if the grim reaper itself was flying closer, ever closer, ready to pounce and pull her down.

With white streaks on black leather, where she had scuffed her jacket and pants on concrete walls, Grant gasped with relief as soon as she stumbled back onto safer grounds upon the rooftop.

Bennett was standing there, awaiting her, with both hands folded over her mouth to suppress any gasps. Wide-eyed, she removed her hands and her eyes flashed with a relief to mirror whatever euphoria Grant now felt flooding her insides, as if she had experienced the same adrenaline second-hand.

Grinning stupidly, Grant shared her triumph with Bennett. She held the relay up high and repeated, “I got it, I said I got it!”

“Okay! Okay,” Bennett said. She smiled and stepped up to Grant, then snatched the relay from her hands. “Let’s have a look.”

Grant dropped down into sitting, catching her breath. Everything was catching up to her, and the breathtaking vista of the pink horizon and glittering skyline around her started spinning. Her lungs screamed from all the breath she had been shortening during her death-defying balancing act.

Winds still howled where they swept over the rooftops.

Bennett knelt beside her, enraptured by her laptop, and the relay device sitting next to it while she run diagnostics and scans on the signal.

Scanning.

A small window on her screen kept flashing with those words, repeating.

SCANNING.

Adrenaline and euphoria both faded.

Grant wondered what this all meant. Was Ruiz a spy for competition? For the government? Someone else entirely?

The conversation in the boardroom was over. The bug was still capturing silence and transmitting it into the earbuds, drowned out by howling winds and the hurried tapping of Bennett’s fingers on laptop keys.

“Almost got it,” Bennett said. “The receiver, tracing.”

Another window on-screen zeroed in on a satellite imaging map. It zoomed in with big leaps, first on the globe, the USA, on Texas, and then all the way down into Austin.

Grant scooted over and clapped Bennett on the shoulder.

“You are a wizard. This is amazing.”

Bennett blushed. She asked, “What are we going to do with this, what’s next? Do we tell Spencer?”

The on-screen window zeroed in on a small café. Zoomed in until its outdoor tables and chairs and umbrellas gained definition. Blocky pixels turned precise, drawing a clearer image. Text nearby spat out an exact address.

Grant shook her head.

“No. Sit tight, hold onto this stuff—do not tell anybody,” she said. She used her phone to take a snapshot and pointed at the satellite image of the café on screen. “I’m going to check that place out.”

Bennett uttered no protest. Grant soon left the building, rushing past security guards and metal detectors, and slamming her car’s door shut.

She clocked several miles per hour over the speeding limit as she stepped on the gas. The city flew by while her heart pounded again with a mixture of fear and excitement.

Night had yet to fall. The setting sun still painted the city in bright orange and pink hues, with lights glittering all around, forming streaks as Grant’s car sped down streets, swerving through traffic. Neon signs flickered to life, and storefronts lit up. Faces in the crowds melted away, swallowed in the sea of streaking lights, both natural and artificial.

By the time she arrived at the café, Ruiz was mounting his motorcycle by the curb, slipping a helmet onto his head. Ready to go.

A beautiful red-headed woman in a three-piece suit was sitting at a table nearby, watching him leave. Grant had never seen her before.

Contrary to what she had told Bennet, she didn’t know what to do next.

Two trails to follow, and she now had more questions than answers to show for it.

Only now did it cross her mind: What if Spencer knew? What if Grant was sabotaging something he knew about, something he was accounting for? After all, he wouldn’t have been the first CEO to sell out his own company, to make off with a golden parachute once the ship started sinking.

The Four Horsemen of the Corporate Apocalypse had gathered in a boardroom—a nest of deadly vipers.

Whose eyes were on Chloe Grant now?

And who would her own eyes follow?

Stewing in such uncertainty, she felt as dizzy as she did when she had been shooting glances off the rooftop of Future Proof’s skyscraper. Feeling the weight of gravity growing with every look.

Ruiz’s motorcycle rumbled as he ignited its engine, then the vehicle roared. He drove away.

Grant stayed put. She could always figure out how to find Ruiz, though she’d miss his next steps, and those might have been crucial to understand his motives or allegiances.

Instead, she watched the redhead. The unknown unknown. Hoping to answer more questions than following her might raise.

She was going to tail her. See who this was, what she was up to, with her own two eyes.

All other eyes be damned.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

The Three Horsemen in the Boardroom

The thunder of spinning rotor blades slowed to a crawl. Artificial thunder deafened the world to Chloe Grant, drowning out any shouting on radio comms, and the shouting of U.S. military operatives as they coordinated all around her like she wasn’t there. It even drowned out her own heartbeat.

“It’s your mess to clean up, Future Proof. We were never here.”

Every word he said pounded her skull like a jackhammer in slow motion. Captain Dariel Rose pulled up his ski mask, slipped his goggles back on, and joined his forces in their controlled retreat.

Metal cables screeched in the pulleys as they dragged the tremendous weight of the T-Rex carcass into its designated black container. Heavy doors slammed shut.

And Max Carter stayed on the ground. Destined for a depth six feet under. His blood had drenched the dust and dirt beneath his lifeless corpse, besides which Grant now sat.

Though her own blood still pumped, kept inside her body without a single injury to note, she sat there, almost as lifeless as Carter. The statue of a sitting, thinking woman, garbed in a black jumpsuit and body armor, and peppered with dust. But she was not thinking a single thought.

The unmarked helicopters gained altitude as soon as all black ops had clambered back inside them. Two soldiers rode inside the container with the dinosaur carcass.

Dust in the artificial windstorm devoured the bright blue sky.

This was the darkest sunny day Grant had seen in years.

Looking back, she wished for it to stay the last.

People’s panicked words shot from her helmet’s headset, but they all fell upon deaf ears. Grant recognized the voices, registered the chorus of upset tones, and wallowed in a confusion which she only fed by not responding.

She always thought before she spoke, so she had nothing to say for now.

Without a sense of how many queries went unanswered, Grant turned her radio off.

Dust settled around her in silence. The clouds of loose dirt kicked up by helicopter rotors finally descended upon the abandoned oil rig where she sat, in the middle of nowhere, thoughtless and speechless in some Midland desert, unable to locate without some map.

The dust settled on everything, layers of it, turning even the T-Rex’s pools of blood a brackish brown.

Grant waited without knowing what for.

A nagging voice in the back of her mind said she needed to be professional. That internal voice told her she needed to be cool, to get her shit together, switch that radio back on, and do what Future Proof expected her to do.

Damage control.

The U.S. soldiers had just absconded with the specimen’s carcass. Carter was dead. And Stantz had pretty much offered up Singh on a chopping block for the government to hang out to dry for hacking their comms.

Grant’s weary head bobbed once, then twice, then she peered over to the unconscious boy, who lay lost, sleeping uncomfortably in the brush nearby.

She had shot him in the back with her EMD rifle. Just thinking back to her snap decision, her impulse to pull the trigger and stop him from running away—the one step of damage control she had contributed for the day—it all elicited a sigh from the deepest and most depressed depths of her lungs.

The kid would survive. Grant herself had once volunteered to take a shot from the EMD rifle back in Future Proof’s headquarters, just to see what it felt like. To know for sure.

To guarantee to herself that it worked. Carter had claimed it could take down a mammoth with sufficient shots, and it had worked on the T-Rex.

Tested on herself, it hurt like hell. Grant had spent a day in agony, wracked with muscle spasms whenever she wasn’t trying to sleep it off in a delirious haze brought upon by painkillers.

The kid, Aiden, was going to get to know that same world of hurt like she had, though he hadn’t signed up for it.

Aiden was still caked in the blood of his family and the dirt of Midland’s desert. The stains upon him would never be washed off in his life. Filthy, miserable, and bound for a future filled with therapy. Over the course of a day, this young boy had witnessed a T-Rex kill his mother and brother, destroy his home, and chase him through the wasteland. To add insult to injury, the people who had just promised to protect him ended up shooting him in the back.

Literally.

On top of it all, Captain Rose’s grim expression still lingered in Grant’s memory, haunting her thoughts like a cruel ghost. Would things have turned to the same disaster if the soldiers hadn’t showed up?

It probably wouldn’t matter to the kid, and eventually, Grant would have to live with it all.

“I’ll pretend we didn’t tango like we did, and we go our separate ways,” Rose had told her.

Generous words, considering it felt like Grant had broken his nose in their struggle against each other on the ground. Then again, Rose’s team ended up shooting Carter and not her, likely because Rose had been Grant’s living shield amidst the chaos.

She understood why they shot Carter—he opened fire in a Mexican standoff. Though he had only taken shots at the waking T-Rex, to prevent disaster, they responded as anybody would in an armed negotiation.

The only difference was, they had been using live rounds, the kind that made human beings very dead, very quickly. Rose’s team had killed both Carter the dinosaur. They only took the latter.

Carter still lay on the ground with Grant, dead. Aiden lay crumpled in a bush, shoulders heaving with every breath. Rose’s team hadn’t given a damn about them.

It’s your mess to clean up, Future Proof. We were never here.

She gripped her helmeted head. Squeezed, as if it helped in any way. Grant had lost fellow soldiers before. Attended funerals of former colleagues. Her history in the military and the private sector was a path paved with corpses, the eternally resting bodies of allies and opponents alike.

“You’re the strongest person I know,” her mother had once told her. “Compartmentalize, meditate, mediate—you, girl, you’re Zen, Girl-Buddha, I sense it. You ain’t a bad person just ‘cause you keep your cool. You ain’t cold ‘cause you’re smart, y’know? Me, I can barely function when some ass-wipe cuts me off on the road, honey. What you got is a gift, not a curse.”

Grant sighed again. It was time to clean up the mess.

She clapped Carter’s shoulder twice, as if to motivate him, to get back up.

As expected, his body stayed lifeless on the ground while she groaned and rose to her feet.

She switched the radio back on.

A new chaos of chatter engulfed her already cloudy mind.

She found that Zen her mother had spoken of, compartmentalized, got to work. Barked sitreps, called in sitreps, pat the dust down. Cuffed the kid, carried him away. Rendezvoused with the others.

Hours later, the job was done. Mischchenko and Ruiz had performed a clean sweep elsewhere. They had somehow managed to herd the injured Hadrosaurus back to the Anomaly, sending it back to its rightful time and place. They even locked it before the glowing hole in the space-time continuum vanished again.

Spencer himself had shown up in the Midland deserts. He won whatever pissing contest there was to be won against Captain Rose’s superiors, and Future Proof laid claim to the other dead Hadrosaurs strewn around the farmstead where Aiden had lived.

The unconscious boy was sent to HQ, where he received better medical attention than his family could have probably afforded in a lifetime, though he would be barraged by incessant brainwashing for the ensuing days. Following Marcus Stantz’s guidelines for media control, Future Proof’s best HR agents would be schooling little Aiden not to tell the wider public about dinosaur incursions or mysterious glowing orbs that connected different eras of Earth’s history.

All the while, Chloe Grant avoided human contact as much as she could.

She filed her report, kept everything above deck, by the book. Checked in with communications, medical, therapy, accounting, Stantz, R&D, Solomon, Containment—the works.

One day, she caught herself frozen, paralyzed, as she stood outside Singh’s office, now empty. He was the first person to give her a tour in Future Proof after Spencer had hired her.

The door to his office now stood wide open. Nobody but cleaning personnel had been inside there since his arrest. Grant stood there frozen, till the sound of a phone ringing in the offices helped her snap out of her trance.

The last she had seen of Singh, he was staring at the floor, sneakered feet shuffling listlessly, while intelligence agents escorted him out of the Future Proof building—in handcuffs, with his designer varsity jacket draped over his wrists to conceal the shackles.

The days melted away without light. Sunny, each and every one of them, but darker than ever.

Grant accepted the invitation to Carter’s wake—least she could do for her colleague. Another name to add to her list of people she buried.

She filed more reports, studied more protocols, fell back into safe routines. She stared at her computer screens and phone and always let calls bounce to voicemail, which she answered in texts, and she answered all emails just timely enough to conform with company policy.

Showers took her longer than usual. She found herself staring into the drain every time, where water spiraled downward, and the steam and heat and the wet engulfed her, muting every other sense, and washing away the imagery of carnage and chaos in the Texan desert.

She skipped every nonessential meeting and only read the minutes that Danielle Bennett gathered in her absence. Grant scoured the notes that R&D had gathered, and frowned when she learned that something had been disrupting their Anomaly Detection System.

Had the government done this? Was that why Rose’s team was on-site so quickly?

She didn’t want to think about it. The likelihood was high, but Grant didn’t care to pull the trigger on that. Spencer and the rest were calling the shots, she would only speak up if she had anything important to add.

Eventually, all reports had been processed and evaluated. The CEO of Future Proof himself drummed up everybody, had them all gather in the glossy, windowed boardroom atop the towering skyscraper.

Debriefing.

He chewed everybody out. Made the T-Rex look like a kitten.

Malachi Spencer never swore. He never even came close to uttering a single syllable of profanity, yet every one of his words cut with a vicious sharpness to match his knife-like appearance. It felt like getting cut down to the bone, and having every pound of flesh carved away until he was done.

With everybody. He was done with everybody. Yet nobody was fired.

Nobody received compliments.

He had a whole plan of action mapped out for them. Next steps for every single person in the boardroom. Future Proof’s intel matched Grant’s hunch. The government was behind the ADS disruption. Someone was out to sabotage them.

Singh’s actions were under a microscope, nobody understood why he had hacked comms, or what the hell he had been thinking at the time. And the NSA was holding him in custody without offering Future Proof any means of contacting him. Rida Singh’s actions would remain a mystery for now.

Through the dreamy haze of those past days and all the detachment Chloe Grant felt throughout the lengthy debrief, she picked up on things she hadn’t picked up before.

Valentín Ruiz’s hand was shaking the entire time, not just when Spencer looked his way.

A subtle shaking. Like she had seen with other traumatized veterans. The type they usually suppressed with drugs or booze in their downtime.

She wondered if Ruiz and Carter had been close, friends, anything. Ruiz spent most of the meeting staring at the surface of the table, scanning monitor displays and briefs without paying much attention.

A subtle shake. The sharpshooter and tracker was a smoker—sure—but she had never noticed this about him in their past weeks of working together. He had gone hours without lighting up a cigarette and never displayed any such tics before.

And when Spencer wasn’t looking his way, Ruiz did something even weirder. A weird hand movement.

Didn’t fit.

Only Grant clocked it. Ruiz didn’t notice that she had.

It didn’t even really sink in until after the debriefing, after the whole main team shuffled back out of the meeting room.

It didn’t fit.

Outside, three new faces awaited. Grant had seen them on photos on the internet, but never in person before.

Three of the most important stakeholders in Future Proof’s business. The people representing the people who were footing the astronomic bills behind the mercenary company.

Roger Cole—a wispy little man with thick-rimmed glasses and a mop of curly hair, clad in an unseeming tweed suit. Looked like a nerd, but he was serious money, backed by weapons manufacturers worldwide. He offered Grant a faint and fake smile as she passed him by like the rest of the team.

Kim Jae—a liaison to the international telecom committee, sat on a leather couch as black as his leather attire, with his expensive shoes up on the coffee table like he owned the place. He was so buried in the screen of his tablet that he didn’t even spare anybody a glance while the crew filed out of the boardroom.

And last, but not least, Lena Romero stood by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, with the grace of a stoic empress, gazing out into the skyline of Austin. The mature-looking woman in the dark blue suit and pencil skirt was a liaison to the FIP, the International Pharmaceutical Federation.

These three figures were just one head short of the corporate world’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, all gathered here on the top floor of Future Proof, ready to meet with Malachi Spencer.

The CEO stayed behind in the boardroom, folding his glasses and then steepling his fingers as he waited. The Future Proof team had all poured out, riding elevators down, taking the stairs, all dispersed. Opening the stage for the Three Horsemen.

Grant gazed through the moving mass of people, watching the Three Horsemen join Spencer in the boardroom.

That’s when she understood what Ruiz had done.

He had stuck a bug underneath the table where he had been sitting. A tiny little black device, so small that nobody would notice unless they checked. She couldn’t even spot it from here, but she knew the movement, the motion of his hand, how it hadn’t fit.

A bug. A spy.

Ruiz thumbed his lips and patted himself down on the way out, looking for his pack of cigarettes in his pockets. The man with the looks of an underwear model shot Grant a sideway glance, then he shot her a flirtatious smirk.

Waiting for the next elevator down, she kept her cool. Kept her poker face up. It wasn’t really like her to respond to such a smirk, especially not from a guy who in all likelihood was a huge womanizer.

Ruiz’s eyes flashed and his entire expression fell, stopping just shy of something sad. Maybe, aside from whatever espionage he was embroiled in, Carter’s death still weighed on him.

Ruiz pushed through the doors and disappeared into the stairwell.

Grant’s haze had lifted. Replaced by something else, something creeping; something that sent a tingling sensation down her entire spine.

She was back in her element, and it offered a whole buffet of distractions from any darker thoughts. After all, Spencer had hired her out of the private sector, with a history of counterintelligence and cybersecurity.

Grant was going to find out what was going on. What the hell Ruiz was up to.

The next elevator arrived. She stepped inside.

Roger Cole, Kim Jae, and Lena Romero had gathered in the boardroom. Cole and Romero took seats left and right of Spencer, while Kim Jae paced around the room like a stag in heat.

Whatever they were talking about, Ruiz had planted a bug that would allow him to listen in.

Grant wanted to know what that was he was listening in on. And why.

The elevator doors slid shut.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Make Sure You Pay

The T-Rex slept. Its giant chest heaved with every slow breath, accompanied by deep, low growls. The sounds made Chloe Grant’s teeth vibrate in her skull.

There was something almost pleasant about the sensation. Yet a creeping dread overshadowed it, a constant unease of envisioning how this mighty beast might rise from its involuntary slumber.

How its maw might kill again if the EMDs failed to knock it out.

That’s why she sat still by the sleeping dinosaur’s body. The EMD rifle in her hands was ready, and a constant, soft vibration from its battery pack traveled through her black gloves, felt all the way into her bones. The dino-stunning weapon’s active battery slowly drained while she waited for backup. Not fast enough for her to worry she’d be stuck without juice to shoot the T-Rex again, but still adding to her general sense of unease.

She hadn’t been working that long for Future Proof, but Grant had spent some time studying all the field manuals and briefs on company protocol.

She awaited backup alone. Alone with a Class-LL specimen and a small, defenseless boy.

None of this was standard procedure.

The boy sat between heaps of scrap metal outside the abandoned oil rig. Dirt and dried blood still caked his face, and he sat with his arms wrapped around his knees in what had to be the most pitiful image Grant could have ever fathomed.

It reminded her of her tours abroad.

She kept her weapon trained on the T-Rex, then caught herself stealing glances at the kid, and wondering what horrors would haunt his future nightmares. His family had been slaughtered by this dinosaur, the blood on his face not his own, and he would be trained to tell lies about how they died, just so the public never caught wind of the Anomalies nor the dinosaurs spilling out from them.

And now, Aiden needed to wait with Grant until reinforcements arrived to haul this deadly creature away. To hide what should not exist. Not here, and not now.

The boy just rocked, back and forth, where he sat in the dust. Pitiful. Desolate.

Grant wasn’t good with kids, or at least, that’s what she told herself. She figured she’d do more damage than she could offer any consolation to this traumatized child.

So, she kept waiting.

Carter was on the way. Also moving alone.

Singh and Solomon had finally bypassed whatever had been disrupting their tech. Future Proof now had satellite images allowing them to locate the nearby Anomaly, several clicks away from the abandoned oil rig where Grant now waited.

The only snag in this was the other dinosaur still rampaging, headed towards Midland.

Spencer had ordered Mischchenko and Ruiz to track down the injured Hadrosaurus, and stop it before it could reach the city. Even though this other dino was a Class-LH specimen, it was “one big son of a gun”, as Burch had phrased it—its size would likely inflict more collateral damage, and its presence was guaranteed to cause a full-blown panic.

No amount of spin would stop shaky phone cam recordings of a dinosaur circling the internet, especially not if any reputable reporters got in on it.

Neither Future Proof nor government would be able to contain this situation for much longer unless either of them could contain it. Quickly.

And that dirt-caked, blood-spattered boy sitting on the ground, rocking back and forth, well, Grant had an inkling of where he was headed once they had put a lid on the situation.

The kid was going to spend a lot of time in a secret facility before they released him back into the world of regular people, back into a world of the unsuspecting, the oblivious, and the people who knew nothing about the temporal anomalies.

Future Proof’s team was spread critically thin. Grant loathed babysitting, and she doubly disliked this situation. But this was how the dice had fallen. Ruiz was their expert tracker, and Mischchenko their animal control specialist for field ops—they were the most suited to track down the Hadrosaurus, while the person watching the T-Rex and the kid only needed to be fast on the draw.

Grant sighed into her helmet. Even through its black visor, she could taste the dust of these barren fields outside Midland. She felt tiny in this maze of old and abandoned pumping stations and dormant derricks.

Her index finger, stretched out over the EMD rifle’s trigger, twitched.

This was the darkest place she had ever found herself in, despite the shining sun, and a clear blue sky wherever she gazed into the horizon.

And that murderous tyrant lizard—its chest still heaved. Breathing.

Beneath the taste of dust, she sampled a hint of death.

Gravel and dust crunched underneath boots.

Max Carter approached. His hike across the old oil fields had finally taken him to their position. His heavy EMD rifle hung from the sling over his shoulder, and he nodded to Grant as he arrived.

He tapped the side of his helmet and reported in.

“Rendezvoused with Grant, the specimen, and the kid. I’m on site.” Grumpy. Carter sounded like someone who had just gotten up on the wrong side of bed, only to find out someone had pissed in his coffee.

Grant nodded at him in response.

Carter paused. Tilted his head. Even with the visor concealing his face, he clearly locked his gaze onto the dazed boy.

Aiden still rocked back and forth. Didn’t say a word.

Grant’s mind raced, searching for something to talk small, to break the ice. But she found nothing to latch onto, nothing tactful enough to say out loud with the boy nearby, and she still wasn’t sure what Carter thought of her.

He grumbled, “Boss, you really need to hire more personnel for field ops.”

The radio message was meant for the CEO, Malachi Spencer.

Everybody on their shared airwaves stayed silent.

Carter guffawed, sighed, and dropped a heavy duffel bag. He readied his Type-3 EMD rifle, and stood guard with Grant.

They waited in silence.

Two operators on every objective at all times, at a minimum. This was protocol. A small relief in Grant’s mind. Part of her worried Spencer or Stantz might issue an order for her to stun Aiden if the kid suddenly ran off. Another part of her worried that she was primed to do exactly that on instinct, without even thinking.

Because that’s what protocol also dictated: incapacitate panicked witnesses for processing. A last resort, but a resort nevertheless on a checklist of possible actions and reactions.

They didn’t have enough people to look after the boy until the dinosaurs and Anomaly had been taken care of. And nobody on staff was a trained psychologist, which only now occurred to Grant as a worrying circumstance.

Whatever Mischchenko and Ruiz were busy with right now, they, too, kept quiet on the radio all the while. Probably tracking the Hadrosaurus, still.

Waiting was always the worst part of any gig, Grant reckoned. The fucking worst. Despite a disgusting number of zeroes on her yearly salary, Grant now hated that her new job had brought her back to such grunt work.

The boy still rocked back and forth where he sat. Then he froze. Looked up.

He heard it before they did. Probably because the helmets muffled some noise.

The thrum of helicopter rotors sliced across the heavens.

Two black, unmarked choppers transported a huge container, hanging from steel wires, attached between them. A feat of human ingenuity, paired with incredible skill from the pilots.

“About fuckin’ time,” Carter growled.

Grant’s blood froze in her veins before Singh even replied.

“Yo, those ain’t ours,” Singh radioed. “I repeat, that is not Future Proof Containment department.”

Carter swiveled. Grant also rose from the broken metal girder she had been sitting on.

“Shiiieeet,” Carter drawled. “That the feds? Stantz, how about a heads up next time?”

“Most likely,” Singh responded. “Play it cool. Stall ‘em, please. And, yeah, Stantz, what’s the sitch, man? Thought you wanted to talk to these guys.”

Carter grumbled, “Man, fuck that. Where in my job description did it say I needed to play nice with the fucking feds? I thought the God-damned president was footing our bills?”

Malachi Spencer’s voice cut in on the radio. His words carried the same sharpness as his overall appearance, and it sent an unpleasant tingling sensation down Grant’s spine, like the tip of a knife trailing down her skin.

Their CEO must have been listening in all along.

“Curb all this conversation. Immediately. Stick to the facts, and occupy Captain Rose’s team. Containment division is on the way as well as reinforcements. I will join you shortly to take point. Now, where the hell is Stantz?”

The question hadn’t been directed at them—Spencer’s patience was wearing audibly thin.

Though they had incapacitated the T-Rex, it felt like their whole operation was teetering on the brink of disaster.

Nobody offered up an answer for Spencer. It only now occurred to Grant that Stantz hadn’t said anything since he went out to rendezvous with Captain Rose’s team, to run damage control with the government agents.

The ground shook when the helicopters’ freight touched down. The black metal container thumped onto dirt, and the whirlwinds from the rotors kicked up violent clouds of dust all around them, obscuring the crystal-blue sky in a muddy haze.

The thunder of rotors deafened all other sound but the chatter of Future Proof agents on the radio.

Aiden squinted and cupped his tiny hands over his ears, while the visored helmets allowed Grant and Carter to stand like statues, unflinching as they watched the arrival of the helicopters like gargoyles, their EMD rifles lowered, but ready for action.

Grant kept shooting glances by way of the T-Rex, concerned the bedlam might somehow wake the beast. But the dinosaur still slept.

Soldiers in black jumpsuits rappelled down from the helicopters. They bore a frightening resemblance to Future Proof’s field operatives. Instead of visored helmets, they wore dark goggles, and black ski masks hid the rest of their faces.

And instead of the futuristic EMD rifles, they carried traditional assault rifles and sidearms, geared up like one would expect from government troops.

Carrying live ammunition. And various types of grenades.

Even though she had seen active combat in her tours abroad, the military’s presence instilled uneasiness in Grant, seeping into the very marrow of her bones, and making her stomach knot. She even felt something similar emanating from Carter like a dark aura—her colleague’s entire pose was rigid and unnatural, like he was poised to shoot these men.

In a different world or in a different time, the Future Proof field operatives might have been working together with these government soldiers.

Now, they were practically enemies. That sense of enmity hung in the air like the dust that kept whirling around them in unsteady clouds.

Grant only hoped this situation wouldn’t escalate. She chewed on her lip.

Some part of her was ready to take aim and negotiate at gunpoint.

But they had to play it cool. Spencer had just said as much.

Aiden, looking like a cornered, frightened animal, huddled between the debris. Two black-suited soldiers stepped up and flanked the boy, filling his every fiber with a fear that would keep him from running away—his thousand-mile stare had made way to a wide-eyed terror. From the freezer of sitting in a daze after losing his family, he now sat like a prisoner between these towering troopers.

A third helicopter landed, one not attached to the huge container. Someone dropped out the hatch, landing on his knees in the dirt and sputtering dust, soon flanked by more soldiers, all emerging from the same chopper.

Stantz, in his fancy blue three-piece suit, scrambled back up from his knees onto his feet, now with dust clinging to all the fabric he wore. At second glance, Grant spotted the white plastic of cable binders tying his hands behind his back.

One of the soldiers shoved Future Proof’s PR man ahead of them, pushing towards the gathering or other soldiers all around the T-Rex.

“Found Stantz,” Grant reported. “In custody of Captain Rose’s team.”

Upon reaching them, Stantz furrowed his brows, projecting annoyance, more than anything else. If he was intimidated by being held captive by these U.S. government soldiers, he was doing a fantastic job at hiding it.

A soldier shoved him again and he stumbled the last few steps into earshot of Grant and Carter. Stantz shot a dirty look over his shoulder at that same soldier.

The other trooper flanking him stepped up, lifted his goggles, and glared the Future Proof operatives.

His eyes sparkled with authority. A stern gaze, drilling into them with unblinking stares. He pulled down his ski mask to show some face: a grim expression made his lips curl downward, framed by wrinkles of seniority and duty.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the esteemed Future Proof LLC,” shouted the soldier over the noise of helicopter rotors. “I am Captain Dariel Rose. We are here to take that animal into custody of the United States government, and you are hereby cordially invited to sit your asses down and wait till we have done our job to full completion. Any failure to comply will result in serious legal repercussions.”

Though they had no way of seeing each other’s eyes, Grant and Carter exchanged a glance.

Carter shouted back at him, “How ‘bout you cordially go fuck yourself?”

Grant wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but Carter had verbalized exactly how she felt.

In turn, Captain Rose stared daggers at Carter. Then his grimace yielded a crooked smirk.

Behind him, the other soldiers were busy tying steel wires to the T-Rex’s neck, tail, and limbs, binding it to the insides of the black container, and readying rigs to pulley the creature inside their big black box.

“Gentlemen,” Stantz started babbling, “let’s please keep this—”

Rose’s hand shot up—not to hit anybody, just raising an open palm. This sufficed to silence Stantz, who flinched like a beaten dog, immediately falling silent next to the military captain.

Rose shouted back at Carter, “There will come a day when you thank me for taking this problem off your hands, merc.”

Spencer cut in again via radio.

“Do not let Rose seize that specimen. Our team is securing the Anomaly, and Containment will soon be on-site to offer you support. I am tapping every channel, do not worry about the fallout.”

Grant wanted to ask how on Earth Spencer imagined them to be stopping over a dozen elite soldiers, outnumbering them six to one, all armed to the teeth.

She splayed her digits, wiggling them. Trying to stop her trigger finger from twitching.

That very motion caught Rose’s attention. He arched a brow, then squinted through the dust clouds kicked up by helicopter rotors.

It was almost like he was expecting a fight. Eager for it. Like he wanted it to happen.

“I got this,” Singh sang on the radio. “You just take control once I work my magic, ‘kay?”

Grant almost asked what the hell he really meant, but the unreality of her situation finally dawned on her, and robbed her of any speech.

Seconds slowed to a crawl, as if time itself froze again. The helicopter rotors made another thundering revolution, then all hell broke loose.

Tiny screeches exploded from the headsets of the government soldiers. Whatever shreds of the noise Grant could perceive through her helmet, the pained expression on Captain Rose’s face looked like his head was about to explode. The other soldiers nearby also stumbled around, keeled over, or cringed and pawed helplessly at their headsets.

Paralyzed by a high-pitched sound.

Singh had done something to the soldiers’ comms.

And Grant fell back into old patterns. Acted without thinking.

Carrying out orders.

She lodged her Type-2 EMD pistol’s muzzle at Rose’s neck, seizing him in a headlock—all in one fluid motion of grappling with him, kicking him in the hollow of his knee, and holding him at gunpoint.

Carter reacted the same way, following the same drill and ice-cold discipline. His heavy EMD was pointed at the other soldier on the ground, long before the rest of Rose’s unit even had any chance to recover.

Only one problem with all of this happening: now the T-Rex stirred.

A steel wire snapped, torn from the winches inside the black container. Metal whined where it scraped across dirt, the T-Rex dragging the container several steps. A huge claw smashed into the ground, kicking up more dust and making everybody’s knees buckle from the small earthquake.

What dreadful timing.

The dinosaur emitted an odious growl, powerful enough to compete with the noise of helicopter rotors, and the screams of soldiers still reeling from the artificial screeching in their headsets—

Carter yelled, “Fuuuck!”

Rose snarled at Grant, “Let go, you idiot!”

She kept him clutched in her grip, while paralyzed with inaction of her own.

The T-Rex had thrown a wrench into everything. The deadly wildcard they had stopped worrying about. None of her training and experience had have ever prepared for a situation like this.

The dinosaur’s towering silhouette rose from where it had been slumbering. Lumbering, its claws crashed again, and it stumbled back and forth as it regained its deadly bearings.

Gripped by a panic, the young boy Aiden started running. Into the desert.

Shit.

Grant acted again, not thinking. Objectives were all that filled her mind, split-second decisions that she could regret later. She shot the kid with a low-powered blast from her EMD pistol, and the boy flopped into the dirt, rolling once, twice, then stopping, immobile. Knocked out cold in the dried brush of the badlands.

Captain Rose elbowed Grant in the stomach, knocking all the wind from her lungs, and using that same moment to break free from her grip. They both scrambled, fighting each other on the ground with every close quarters technique they knew, wrestling, while the T-Rex rose to full height behind them.

The helicopters swayed. One of the carrier cables snapped, whipping past a ducking soldier, and slicing a withered old bush in half.

The beast roared. Its terrible majesty shook everybody to the core, even more than its quaking footsteps.

Carter was first to break free from the paralysis of shock. After all, this wasn’t his first rodeo with the dinosaurs.

He opened fire on the beast, EMD discharging blast after blast. And the government soldiers opened fire as well. The cold and cruel staccato of assault rifles roared in deadly rhythms of bursts, pumping countless bullets into the dinosaur.

And some of those bullets went into Carter. Some of the soldiers had only seen their commanding officer in peril, and responded by acting on the same instinct and trigger discipline as the mercenaries from Future Proof.

Carter stopped shooting the dinosaur while three soldiers neutralized him to the tune of thirty rounds.

The ground shook again when the T-Rex fell, bleeding from numerous gaping wounds. One of its eyes had been blown away by a high-caliber bullet, weeping with gore.

Carter crashed into the dirt next.

The dinosaur’s massive tongue lolled out, flopping into the dirt, like the boy Aiden just had, though all the more lifeless. Carter rolled onto his side. Black-gloved fingers curled, gripped at dirt, finding no purchase. A final groan, a dying growl escaped the toothy maw of the predatory giant.

The T-Rex’s chest heaved one last time while more bullets continued to pelt its scaly flesh. Carter’s chest also heaved, erratically, like someone struggling to breathe. Blood seeped out from underneath his helmet’s visor.

A split-second of shock was all it took to freeze Grant. A split-second of weakness that Captain Rose seized upon immediately, wrestling with her on the ground until he buried her under his weight, twisting her arm behind her back until it felt like he was about to snap it apart at the elbow, and a knee digging into her lower back.

“Carter! Talk to me,” she choked out. She thrashed around but Rose kept her pinned on the ground. She ignored the captain and yelled, “Carter!”

The voices on Future Proof radio descended into a swirling chaos, but Grant could no longer make any sense of it nor tell anybody apart. She saw red even though she had barely known Max Carter. Her fellow operator lay on the ground, bleeding out, every second rapidly diminishing his chances of survival.

The T-Rex bled out behind him, no twenty steps away.

Even Stantz looked shocked, barely back up on his knees with his hands still bound behind his back, staring with dread at the dying Carter.

Everything blurred.

The T-Rex was dead. Would this change the timeline too?

Now wasn’t the time for Grant to wonder this. She didn’t even think about it yet. It would hit her much later.

She wondered how long she would have to watch Carter die out here, in some dusty field outside of Midland, Texas. Not mauled by a dinosaur, not killed in the line of duty for his country, but shot by some gung-ho soldiers.

The armor Future Proof wore was meant to mitigate tissue damage from claws and bites. It offered little protection from 5.56×45mm NATO rounds.

The weight lifted from Grant’s back only to shift, a knee pinning her down by her neck. Rose waved to the choppers hauling the black container. Soldiers shuffled around, running damage control of their own.

Stantz smirked at Rose with a coldness in his eyes.

His words cut through the cacophony, even reaching Grant through the haze of confusion. There wasn’t really anything she could do anymore.

She just stared at Carter’s lifeless body, eclipsing the dead T-Rex beyond.

“I just need to make one phone call, and you are done,” Stantz threatened Rose. “Done! You hear me? Future Proof can end all your careers right here, right now, over what you just did! You ever dream about life in prison? Well, I can make that happen, motherfucker! Untie me now!”

Grant was in a daze. Rose released her and stood, approaching Stantz.

Nobody stopped Grant as she wound up on her knees, feeling light-headed. Empty.

Captain Rose stood above Marcus Stantz, his rifle at the ready but held lowered, not aimed at the man in any way. Perhaps some of their spin doctor’s threats rang true with the captain.

If he felt threatened in any way, Rose’s tone failed to betray that. He spat back, “This one is on you, and I don’t think I need to tell you what happens if this ends up in a courtroom. If you hadn’t hacked our comms—”

Stantz gritted his teeth and yelled. With fury. “Bullshit! And you know it! You can hold our employee accountable for all we care, but you disrupted an operation that is backed by the U.S. government and several multinational interests! What kind of authority do you think you have here?”

All of it rang hollow to Grant. It failed to register as relevant.

Carter was dead.

His chest no longer heaved. Grant crouched beside him. Lifting his visor only revealed a blank stare. Eyes emptier than those of the boy.

The boy. She swiveled and spotted Aiden. The boy still lay unconscious in the brush. The soldiers didn’t care one bit about any of them.

Grant returned her attention to Carter. To his empty gaze. All she saw in there was her own reflection, the black-suited mercenary, caked with white dust, a shadow against the bright blue sky.

Rose kept his cool. Ignored Stantz’s threats, waved to soldiers. They all scurried about, hauling the T-Rex’s body into the black container. Others fixed the cable that had detached from the second chopper. Winches whirred and whined, the carcass thumped where its head hit rock and metal on the way into the container.

The captain glared at Stantz and thrust an index finger at him, with more weight behind it than a loaded gun. “I don’t give a God damn who’s bankrolling your ops. You’re a private company, so the people who sent us are gonna make sure you pay.”

Grant patted Carter down, looking for anything personal on his body, now acutely concerned that the government might steal his corpse away as well.

But he had nothing on him. No cigarettes or playing cards, like Ruiz. No locket or nice wristwatch like Mischchenko.

Just like Grant, Carter had nothing on him except his ID card and his Future Proof keycard. And they sure as shit didn’t wear dog tags at Future Proof.

She didn’t even know if he had family who would miss him.

“What happened,” Ruiz asked on the radio. “We’re almost on top of the Hadrosaur over here. What happened? Is Carter wounded? Yo!”

Grant didn’t know what to say. Stantz continued arguing with Captain Rose.

The world was spinning around her at light speed while Ruiz repeated his question with more gravelly gravity.

“Spencer,” Grant finally asked into the void of their radio network. This was his company, so he needed to answer. She needed him to answer. Even so, she spoke as if in a delirium. Her words poured out like pudding. “They’re gonna pin this on Singh, didn’t you just hear that? You can iron this out, right?”

Ruiz stopped posing questions. Everybody else stayed silent on the radio.

Or if anybody had responded, the thunder of helicopter rotors drowned it all out. The shouting behind her eclipsed all.

The lifelessness in Carter’s blue eyes haunted Grant. Blue as the sky, and empty as the clouds.

Gone.

What was worse? Being erased from the timeline like Sears, or meeting an end like Carter?

“Right? Spencer! Say something, God damn it!”

Spencer would not answer.

Not yet.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

What He Signed Up For

The EMD’s battery whined. Green, yellow, and red bars glowed on the side of the futuristic weapon, set for maximum power output.

A measured response to a Tyrannosaurus Rex. A mighty dinosaur in the flesh. Its deafening roar curdled Chloe Grant’s blood and shook her to the core. Their previous encounter with a Purrusaurus had haunted her nightmares with memories of the giant crocodile, but it paled in comparison to this tyrant lizard and its towering appearance.

The earth quaked with every step the beast took. Despite its frightening mass, it displayed an even more terrifying agility. The T-Rex ducked underneath metal girders connecting different parts of the oil rig. Gigantic claws crashed down and kicked up clouds of dust, suffocating the crystal blue sky behind it.

Mischchenko shot first. Electric blasts discharged into balls of lightning where they struck the giant lizard. It roared in pain. Its roar petered out into an angry growl—a single shot from the EMD, even at full capacity, was not enough to knock the dino out.

Grant flipped her internal safety switch. Stopped thinking. Acted on that dread that had been paralyzing her at the sight of the T-Rex, and now acted like she used to in the field, as a soldier. How different could it be from shooting at a tank?

Two blasts from her EMD hit the T-Rex in its snout, dead center. It roared again, reared back, and metal squealed where the lizard’s body smashed through the oil rig’s girders.

From the flanks, more EMD shots sliced through the air, three in number. Ruiz, crouched upon an old blue container shell, sniped at the T-Rex from his elevated position. His first shot sent the beast reeling, stumbling back another few thundering steps. Static crackled around the scaly beast’s body. It shuddered, barely staying standing. Before it could recover, a second and third shot elicited a strange mewling sound from the T-Rex’s maw.

Mischchenko ducked. In doing so, she covered the dirt-caked boy in the blue container behind them. The boy shivered behind her, whimpering, cowering at the sight of the T-Rex. Small hands covered eyes, screwed shut in terror.

Grant stepped farther out from the container, aiming down her EMD’s scope at the beast. It stumbled back another step.

Ruiz’s voice on intercom crackled, tinny, commenting with coldness.

“Careful now. I ain’t carrying that big-ass lizard back to any Anomaly.”

The T-Rex looked disoriented. Its toothy maw opened and clamped shut, and its massive claws kicked up more dust, tearing up ground around the abandoned Midland oil rig.

Grant muttered into the intercom, “How the hell did nobody spot this thing on satellite image? Yo!”

Mischchenko skipped the answer to her question. She barked, “We need a location on the Anomaly! Yesterday!”

The T-Rex lurched forward and the ground shook again.

Murder flashed in reptilian eyes.

“We aren’t getting anything here!” Singh whined across the airwaves. “Not even a visual! Where are you?”

Grant kept her gun’s muzzle trained at the dinosaur’s head. She clicked her tongue.

The T-Rex reared back another thundering step. Its tail whipped around and tore a chunk of metal out of the old rig’s body. Metal bars bent and groaned and screeched where unstoppable saurian force tore them apart.

Huge legs buckled. The EMD shots always hurt.

“It’s going to run,” Burch said over the radio. It dawned on Grant that Burch could see everything they were seeing at the oil rig, as their helmets were continuously transmitting visual feeds. Burch repeated, with more urgency, “It’s going to run!”

Mischchenko took a step forward, Ruiz stayed as still as a statue, and Grant’s finger curled around the trigger.

Time slowed to a crawl. A single second turned into an eternity.

No thoughts. Only action.

Grant shot first, then Ruiz, then Mischchenko. Five more EMD discharges total, and the T-Rex emitted another mewling groan. It stumbled again. It crashed. A living earthquake, shaking their world. Flakes of rust snowed down from every metal girder, and the blue containers rocked. All metal groaned.

The three field operatives breathed steadily, keeping their weapons lined up for more shots.

The T-Rex’s tail slapped the ground, whipping up another violent cloud of dust.

There was almost a tragic beauty in how the dust broke the rays of broad daylight in this Texan desert.

Nobody else on the team commented. Stunned, they watched what the helmet feeds transmitted.

The T-Rex no longer budged. Its maw closed with slowness. Eyelids fell shut.

The dinosaur slept off its stupor. The EMDs had taken it down. For now.

“Specimen incapacitated,” Mischchenko confirmed. “We need eyes on the Anomaly, damnit!”

Nothing. The huge cloud of dust surrounding the T-Rex still settled, slowly. Ever so slowly.

Doctor Solomon broke the silence. “Working on it. I think something’s interfering with our detectors. And something else is affecting the satellite images. Standby, please.”

Ruiz sighed. “We ain’t got all day, and we’re gettin’ spread thin. Wasn’t there another dino out here we need to worry about? And the federales team?”

Stantz replied via radio. “Me, I’m on the military, don’t worry about it. We need to find out if there’s more damage I need to control. Carter—you should regroup with the rest of field ops. Two o’ ya keep your eyes on the T-Rex, two start sweeping the area. How hard can it be to find another big lizard and a big glowing orb of energy?”

“Doctor Trémaux would beg to differ.” Doctor Solomon interjected. “It’s not simply energy, it’s—”

“I don’t care, man,” Stantz cut in. “You eggheads worry about quantum physics or whatever it is you do, I worry about keeping the lid on things.”

“No objections from me,” Carter growled. “Except the part where you’re the media guy, and not our C.O., Stantz. That being said, I got no arguments about our next steps. On my way to rendezvous with y’all, Mischchenko. Sit tight.”

Ruiz hopped down from the blue container. He lifted his helmet’s visor to reveal symmetrical features and a three o’clock shadow on his face. Brown eyes sparkled as he stared daggers at the downed T-Rex.

In a fluid motion, he produced a crumpled pack of cigarettes from a pocket, then brought one of those cigarettes to the corner of his lips.

Mischchenko cleared her throat. She emerged from the blue container with the small boy, helping the child to climb out.

“Not concerned about setting a bad example?” she asked Ruiz.

He shrugged and lit up his cigarette with a blade-like flame from a storm lighter.

Mischchenko sighed. She lifted her visor and hunkered down next to the boy, meeting the child at eye level, and resting a gloved hand on his shoulder. In hushed tones and a soothing voice, she spoke to the kid, soon learning his name was Aiden, and telling him that he didn’t need to be afraid of any dinosaurs as long as they were around.

Figuring Mischchenko had that situation handled, Grant shouldered her EMD rifle and sauntered up to Ruiz.

While he smoked, they kept watch on the unconscious T-Rex.

The dinosaur’s sides heaved with an almost peaceful tranquil. Breathing steadily.

Part of her wanted to approach it. Part of her imagined removing a glove, running her fingers over those scales, to learn what it felt like.

The rest of her body and instincts screamed at her. She was as close as she needed to be, and didn’t even want to imagine what would happen if that beast bit anybody.

Instead of approaching it and sating that lethal curiosity, Grant stood still as a statue, a sentry.

Ruiz scratched his chin and smoked, eventually peeling his attention off the T-Rex, and meeting Grant’s gaze.

Smoke billowed from his nostrils and he chortled. “Well, would you look at that. Feels like yesterday when Carter was complaining about walkin’ into a T-Rex on a mission, huh?”

Grant forced herself not to study his handsome face. He looked like an artist had chiseled a perfect likeness of a man into the shadow of his helmet.

Ruiz must have picked up on it. A smirk played around the corners of his lips, framed by a subtle twitch that he wrestled back into a stoic expression.

Grant had no idea what Ruiz knew. He knew why Future Proof’s team had missed the Anomaly, and still had no visual on the T-Rex. Or them, for that matter.

Just that morning, the mystery woman with the red hair had briefed him on it. Briefed him on it all.

* * *

“We’re about to leak this intel to Future Proof,” said the mystery woman. Loretta Corsino.

If Ruiz’s smirk bore self-confidence, then Corsino’s smirk was smug.

This morning, however, long before Future Proof’s team arrived in Midland, Ruiz wasn’t smirking at all.

He was frowning.

Flipping up and down the brief on the tablet’s screen, its contents were painting the frown on his face.

Corsino’s group, the nebulous company who was wiring obscene amounts of money to Ruiz for his espionage work at Future Proof, had finally gotten a leg up on them.

The screen displayed grainy satellite images of dinosaurs on the loose in the dusty outskirts of Midland. And satellite images of an Anomaly, a glittering, glowing orb in a wasteland.

Ruiz scrolled past a picture of Captain Dariel Rose—bearded, dark, carved with wrinkles from black ops abroad, staring into the camera with a grim expression—acting head of the military operations team en route to secure the specimens.

He scrolled past number crunching, cold mathematics. Corporate language, callous in its specificity, with all the fluff cut out for clarity. Ruiz scrolled past it all. He wasn’t interested in the details. The specifics made his stomach churn and knot.

The stats summed up a preliminary death toll, measured in civilians. They weren’t doing a damned thing.

Ruiz wasn’t liking any of this. It wasn’t what he had signed up for.

The tablet, dropped from his hand in frustration, clattered on the café’s table between them.

Loretta Corsino still smirked at him. Maybe she was just sadistic enough that his reaction amused her. Impossible for him to read. Hers was a beauty to rival his own, and her role in all of this… it frightened him.

Valentìn Ruiz thumbed his upper lip and stifled a sigh.

“What am I supposed to do with this, now?” he asked, throwing up his hand in frustration.

Corsino’s eyes sparkled in the morning sun. She took a timid sip from her cup of coffee, and the smirk never faded from her lips.

“You do your job, Mister Magician. Show up to work, play dumb, and be our eyes and ears at Future Proof. We want to see if Doctor Solomon can beat our new toy before we pull the plug. If this works out right, we’ll always be a step ahead of Future Proof from here on out, and you can expect another big, fat paycheck for your good work.”

Ruiz almost muttered “fuck me” with another sigh. Almost.

Instead, he took a deep breath and sipped his coffee. Suppressed the shake in his hand.

Almost like the shakes he used to have, back in the day of work as a sharpshooter. First Recon. The shakes had gone away after he left the service, went private. Didn’t even need booze or drugs to take off the edge.

And here it was again, the shakes, threatening to return.

What had it all even meant?

The coffee cup almost rattled against the saucer when he put it back down.

Corsino still smirked at him.

He needed to play it cool, always. But the shakes were coming back.

* * *

His hand shook as he smoked while standing next to Grant outside the abandoned oil rig. Ruiz suppressed it again, taking a long, deep drag from his slim cancer stick.

Grant shook her head, staring at the downed T-Rex.

“Seriously, though,” she said. “How does a bunch o’ trained pros miss a damn T-Rex on live sat imaging?”

Ruiz shrugged again. Blew out smoke.

“Who knows,” he growled. “That lizard snuck up on us, too. Maybe something about the oil fields, tech that’s interfering?”

“Unlikely,” responded a voice on their intercom. Doctor Solomon. His voice crackled with static. He added, “Unlikely the energy companies out here had tech like that in place, let alone leaving anything like that behind when they shuttered operations out here. But—not impossible.”

Carter also growled on the radio. “Speakin’ o’ which. Should we be worried about EMDs settin’ off fires, with the oil around here, and stuff? Seen some—”

“Yes,” replied Doctor Solomon. “Yes, Mister Carter, you should be worried about that. I advise caution whenever wielding your EMDs. I saw several puddles of leakage on the airlift. And given how dry the flora out here is this time of year, one misplaced shot could be a recipe for disaster.”

Carter groaned.

Grant and Ruiz both stared at the cigarette cinched between Ruiz’ black-gloved fingers.

He shook his head, dropped the cigarette, and stamped it out, grinding it under his heel into the dust.

Mischchenko joined them. Her EMD rifle hung from her shoulder by the sling. With her free arm, she held hands with the boy.

“This is Aiden,” she introduced them to the kid.

Aiden only shot them furtive glances. His stares lingered on the futuristic rifles they bore, and he stole glimpses of their fearsome black armored jumpsuits, and the name tags emblazoned on their chests.

“Hey, Aiden,” Grant said. Her voice cracked.

She had a problem with dogs, but not with kids. Immediately felt sorry for this boy, and that sentiment only deepened by the minute.

His was a thousand-mile stare. Blank, hollow, piercing outward from a face caked in dirt and dried blood spatters. Grant had only overheard fragments of Mischchenko’s conversation with the boy.

His family was probably dead. Probably definitely dead. Killed by stampeding dinosaurs. Eaten alive. Traumatic shreds of descriptions had bled through his stammering earlier. Grant hadn’t listened to all of it, and didn’t particularly care for the details. She shuddered at the thought of growing up like Aiden would have to grow up now.

She couldn’t even begin to fathom what kind of therapy he would need. She only found solace in the thought that her work here at Future Proof might ensure her own family never met such a fate.

“There we go,” Doctor Solomon said on the radio, every syllable vibrating with confidence. “The figurative fog has lifted, and we can start reconstructing tracks on satellite visuals. Burch? Burch, come, look at this.”

“Once Max gets here,” Mischchenko told Aiden, “We’ll escort you back to camp. You’re safe now.”

Someone grumbled on the radio. Likely Max Carter. Grant gathered he didn’t care for kids.

Aiden stared blankly up at Mischchenko. His tiny hand in her gloved palm looked feeble. Lifeless. She squeezed, to punctuate her words with earnestness.

Ruiz cleared his throat, and nodded.

“Just listen to whatever Missus Mischchenko here has to say, okay? We’ll take care of the rest.”

He took a knee and rested his Type-3 EMD rifle on his palms in front of the kid, like a knight, presenting his sword to a small king. Ruiz spoke with a surprising calm. Also made Grant wonder if Ruiz had experience with kids, or just younger siblings.

Ruiz said, “It’s lighter than it looks. Go ahead, won’t break easily. Maybe you’re gonna do this kinda work one day, too.”

Aiden hesitated. His eyes flashed. The thousand-mile stare focused on the silvery rifle in Ruiz’s hands.

Slipping out of Mischchenko’s grasp, two small hands shakily grabbed the EMD rifle.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

One Less Headache

A red light flashed. An annoying beep cut through Chloe Grant’s sleep. An alarm.

Not the kind of alarm she set on a clock to time her napping, but an alert. It had been weeks of onboarding at Future Proof, with several drills and exercises to drive home how headquarters operated.

Sleep remained an ethereal haze while the beeping continued. A remnant of a dream floated on the boundary between her mind and reality. Every time she opened another drawer to look for a corkscrew, she kept finding only more kitchen knives. Her dinner date was getting impatient while she searched each drawer, and only found more useless knives. It was as annoying as the beeping alarm, bleeding into the dream somehow.

The alert. An alert so subtle when it resounded in the offices. It barely reflected the loud klaxons and red flashing lights that must have been going off underground at the same time, in the bottom levels, shielded by layers of earth and metal.

Alert. Chloe Grant stopped searching drawers for a corkscrew. The dinner date in her dream could wait. She snapped out of her haze and sat up on her office’s couch. The date and the drawers and everything else hadn’t been real. Only the beeping.

Red alert. Her computer’s screen flashed. It had reactivated itself.

Red alert. All hands on deck.

Consciousness cut through the haze, dispelling the last of its unreal imagery. She slipped into her sneakers and rushed out of her office.

She ran into Rida Singh on the elevator down. His hairdo looked like she felt, like the alert had also risen him from slumber in his own office. On second glance, however, both avoiding eye contact with each other, she noted the sheen of hair product, and how his messy ‘do appeared to be deliberate in its styling.

Grant sighed, lifting a foot to smooth out the crease in her sneaker—it had been smooshed from hastily donning the shoes, now fitting snugly around her heel.

“It’s gonna be something big,” he muttered with a sidelong glance.

“Huh?”

“Gonna be something big, Grant. Haven’t had an alarm like this since, well, uh… I’ll shut up now, you don’t have a frame of reference, do you?”

He shook his head, staring at the silvery doors of the elevator in front of them.

The ride down was long, and slow. The ready room for such emergencies awaited deep down from the upper-level offices, deep underground, which only the top echelon of personnel ever accessed with their black-tier keycards.

Grant arched a brow and said, “Come on. I’ve had nothing to do but study docs on previous field ops all week. Odds are, I know what you’re referencing.”

Singh swallowed. Cast another furtive sideways glance at her.

He licked his lips and said, “’Kay. Well, last time we had a sitch like this was when Air Force One—"

“Pterodactyls. And the US government is breathing down Spencer’s neck ever since.”

“Yup.” Singh furrowed his brows and sighed. “Haven’t had a red alert like that since.”

DING, the elevator sang. Minus two. Silvery doors whooshed open.

Red lights flashed on the walls and klaxons blared, just like her unconscious mind had put together, drilled into Grant’s mind by repeated drills in recent weeks.

Grant and Singh stormed out with hasty steps, soon arriving in the ready room, which Carter had referred to as “the war room” to Grant.

Speaking of which, Max Carter leaned against a wall on the side of the room where they entered. Most of field operations had gathered there: Mischchenko stood by the table with crossed arms, flanked by Pruitt, who had a toothpick sticking out of the corner of his mouth. They both nodded at Grant in greeting.

Ruiz was absent.

All heads of R&D had also assembled in the ready room: Doctors Burch, Trémaux, Chao, and Solomon all stood on the side opposite the field operators.

At the head of the long table, Danielle Bennett from IT and Marcus Stantz, the company’s resident spin doctor, flanked Malachi Spencer. The CEO himself stood there like a gargoyle. Dressed in another one of his expensive three-piece suits, the tall, knife-shaped man stared daggers at Singh and Grant for arriving late.

He unhooked his thumbs from his pockets, then gestured to the array of screens projected onto the table’s surface.

“Good, you’re all here. Please direct your attention to—”

“Ruiz still on vacay?” Carter grumbled.

Pruitt nodded, nobody else commented. Spencer glared at Carter. The burly, bearded young man shrugged in response, seemingly without caring if he offended the CEO himself.

Bennett thumbed on her phone with blind routine. The klaxons stopped blaring outside the ready room.

“We have a situation here in Texas.” Spencer got right to the point. He always got the point, as sharply as all his syllables dropped. He waved a hand over the screen in front of him on the table, enlarging satellite images and photography of the area. “This is Midland. A Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Hadrosaurus are currently rampaging across the outskirts of the city, near old, abandoned oil fields.”

The briefing washed over Chloe Grant in a blur. Waves of concern, lapping at her from every side, both from the people in the ready room, and from within the wells of her own thoughts.

Flashes and glimpses of the on-screen data kept coming back to her while she and the field operations team geared up in the locker rooms, arming up with their EMD rifles and soon rushing to the helipad.

Spencer displayed no hectic during the briefing. He informed them of the problems at hand. Grant had a pit in her stomach with every subsequent sentence, because it wouldn’t only be their operators in the field this time—Stantz, Singh, Doctor Burch, and Doctor Solomon would be joining them for this mission.

Civilians.

Grant loathed the idea of having to babysit these four, all of them clearly untrained in combat. Carter even voiced his protest thereof, speaking what Grant felt brewing in her gut, but Spencer immediately shut him down.

PR needed to act on-site immediately to prevent a news media meltdown. They’d need Singh to operate as a forward IT relay for Bennett in the field if they needed to hack any systems. Burch, the head paleontologist, was in demand to assess handling the dinosaurs, and Solomon as the chief of engineering needed to ensure their tech worked without a hitch this time, unlike the last op.

It all caught up to Grant as she zipped up her black armored bodysuit.

She had a terrible feeling about how this was going to go.

The T-Rex had already claimed several lives in Midland. Carter swore under his breath, and the blank stares from Mischchenko and Pruitt spoke their own volumes of shock.

Worse, the US government had dispatched a black ops team to the area. Though parts of the administration were aware of the true nature of the situation—of the Anomalies, and the dinosaur incursions—Future Proof now needed to expect the military entangling the private company in a pissing contest.

This shit had hit the fan in their own backyard of Texas, and the president of the USA had questions as to why the corporation’s Anomaly Detection system hadn’t raised any alarm any sooner.

That’s why some elite hardcases, led by a Captain Dariel Rose, were now scouring the area—and bound to get in their way.

Solomon had no explanation for the Detector’s failure, and Spencer didn’t care for excuses. He limited the briefing to a matter of minutes before sending the entire staff scrambling, racing off in every direction. Damage control was their top priority.

The EMD whined in Grant’s hands as she powered the futuristic rifle up on the way to the airlift.

Her haze dissipated by the time she sat inside the chopper, clumped up with her fellow operators and civilians alike.

Another helmeted, black-suited field operative joined them at the last second.

Ruiz.

Under the deafening noise of rotors, Ruiz hopped up to the chopper while it was already taking off, pulled up the last step by Carter, just as the airlift parted from the ground.

Nervous faces surrounded Grant. Carter swallowed all jokes about finally running into a T-Rex—Grant could sense it.

“Up to speed?” Mischchenko asked Ruiz.

He nodded without losing a word.

Grant’s digits tingled. She splayed her fingers, then curled them into fists. Ruiz displayed almost the exact same thing with his shooting hand, wiggling his fingers, like a guitarist loosening up before a performance.

Their gazes met through blackened visors, invisible to one another. Burning.

She wondered if he harbored the same uncertainty. Ruiz had been working this job for far longer than her.

Sweat beaded on Singh’s forehead. He was too much of a man to protest being sent into the field, though Spencer had communicated something clearly in sending him over Bennett to Midland.

Singh was expendable. Bennett wasn’t.

The docs on previous operations revealed as much to Grant. Every other one read like an obituary. None of the current team of operators had worked with Future Proof’s earliest crew of ex-soldiers on the payroll. And in some occasions when Spencer had civilians tag along, they wound up dead.

The generous insurance benefits now started making a lot more sense to Grant.

To her surprise, Marcus Stantz looked as calm and collected as ever. He rode the chopper in a fancy blue suit, looking eerily comfortable about their situation—even though he must have been aware of their track record—or despite knowing it. Even the headset over his ears looked like it belonged. It occurred to Grant that Stantz must have accompanied previous missions on-site before, and the fact that other dinosaur incursions had stayed out of the news spoke volumes of his skill.

Alisha Burch was the opposite of Stantz. The mousy black woman stared at the tips of her shoes for almost the entire ride. Like Singh, she had little to no field experience, and records indicated she had spent most of her time in Future Proof behind a desk and whiteboards, burying her nose in classified research on the specimens they contained downstairs.

Doctor Solomon looked almost excited. Nervous, but not in a bad way. He smoothed out the collar of his gray suit.

The team stayed almost silent on the cross-state flight. The hour felt like a day, yet somehow flew by like the landscape. The haze had lifted, the soup in Grant’s mind congealed into a solid state.

Instinct. Like back when she used to play basketball.

Feel—don’t think.

Act.

The chopper touched down, she yanked open the hatch, and hopped out first, securing the landing site with Carter and Ruiz. The rest of the team filed out after them.

Pruitt, piloting the helicopter, lifted off the very moment everybody else stood on the ground. He was their eye in the sky.

Another black helicopter circled the horizon—likely the US military’s.

The pit in Grant’s stomach never loosened.

There was one more hitch in planning and operations they had to pay attention to: the oil fields themselves. Any sort of fire could result in disaster, and they were already dealing with a Class-3 incursion.

It bordered on a miracle that local news hadn’t reported on dinosaurs rampaging in Texas yet. Before takeoff, Stantz remarked the whole city and region’s media was blacked out—quite literally, as Spencer had pulled strings with Shareholder Cole of the military-industrial complex, and gotten local authorities to shut down the area’s entire power grid.

Singh looked even more nervous after landing than he had on the flight over. He hastily set up shop in an old shack while Ruiz and Carter got a generator running to power his equipment, and Singh kept fumbling with cables and objects. He uttered a string of profanities as he repeatedly failed to plug in a USB cable.

Part of him looked grateful when Grant picked up a thermos can he knocked over in his frantic motions. She gingerly handed it back to the nerd, and he flashed a nervous smile at her expressionless black-helmeted mask.

Another part of him looked like a fish out of water. Like he was surrounded by aliens in an alien world. His face carried an air of torment, and he soon poured all his attention into portable computer screens, while he chattered away via headset with Bennett in HQ, establishing connections and setting up on-site monitoring of any camera feeds, satellite imagery, and other data streams they could intercept.

No sign of a T-Rex or Hadrosaurus. This only tightened the knot in Grant’s stomach.

How on Earth could such huge dinos evade detection like this?

Before Mischchenko could drop an order for the operators to roll out into the field, Pruitt radioed in with them.

“Got a kid running across the fields out here. Covered in blood. Over.”

“Copy that,” Mischchenko replied. “Grant, Ruiz, you’re with me. Carter, you stay put, keep watch with comms down here.”

“Fuuuck,” Carter growled. “You’re making me babysit these fuckin’ geeks?”

Stantz chortled and helped himself to a sip of coffee from Singh’s thermos, Singh was fully absorbed by Bennett’s voice on his headset and the myriads of data on-screen, Solomon muttered something of which only the word “compliment” was intelligible, and only Doctor Burch glared at Carter’s black-helmeted face upon hearing his comment.

“What, do you wanna babysit an actual kid in the field?” Mischchenko fired back.

This elicited muffled chuckles from Ruiz and Grant.

“Eh, fuck it, fair point. Have fun playing twenty questions with the kid,” Carter growled back. He shrugged and shouldered his heavy EMD rifle.

“Scanners operational,” Solomon commented from the side. “But there’s some kind of interference, maybe why we’re not detecting any Anomalies.”

“Just locate it,” said Stantz. He gulped another sip of Singh’s coffee. “The sooner we clean up this shitshow, the better.”

Carter stood guard outside the shack while Burch searched the horizon with binoculars, and the rest of field ops followed Pruitt’s directions to the fleeing child.

Minutes melted away as the ex-soldiers jogged through dusty fields.

Crops hadn’t grown out here in a long time, all wild and abandoned like weeds. Old ranches looked like graveyards. Broad daylight painted this world in yellow and brown hues.

Withered old plants, dry as a bone, swayed in the cold breeze of their spirited charge. Dirt and gravel crunched underfoot wherever the field agents stomped down in their jog, and they sloshed through ankle-deep sludge, leftovers of brackish water and oil from old, decaying derricks and their leaks.

It felt like chasing through an apocalyptic wasteland.

Zoning out while keeping quiet, Grant glimpsed flashes of such a bleak future in her mind’s eye. A future wiped out, where humanity and its dizzying towers of glass and steel all crumbled away under a dying sun, all chewed upon by storms, savaged by beasts from the future and past alike, and buried under mountains of dust and debris.

They jogged past an old farmhouse—it looked like a wrecking ball had torn straight through the premises. When Ruiz commented on that being the work of dinosaurs, Pruitt responded on the radio.

“Yo, you should see some of these other places. The dinos reeeally went to town out here.” Then, moments later, he reported something even more unsettling. “Some Hadrosaurus carcasses out here, but the military’s black ops and some peeps in HAZMAT suits are swarming all over them like ants. Orders?”

A chill ran down Grant’s spine, mere seconds before someone answered Pruitt on the radio. Someone whose voice she had not heard since leaving Future Proof’s HQ.

Malachi Spencer.

The CEO said, “Stantz, take Burch and Carter and visit our friends.” He drawled out that last word with such contempt that it sent another chill down Grant’s spine. “It’s imperative they don’t remove any specimens or field data we could salvage for research. Make it quick.”

“On my way,” Stantz replied over the radio.

Mischchenko clicked her tongue. “Where the hell is this kid? Any eyes on him, Pruitt?”

“Negatory, ground team. Only got two eyes to spare up here. Can’t do all the work for ya now, can I. Over.”

“No sweat,” Ruiz said. “I think I know where the kid went.”

For emphasis, he pointed the muzzle of his EMD rifle at a container building. They had reached the edge of another oil-drilling field. Everything left behind here was caked in rust and dust. The last vehicles to leave tracks out here had not been operational in years. Brackish sludge rested in every groove of the earth.

Grant took point, catching her breath, and creeping closer to the rusty blue container outside the drilling rig. Mischchenko followed.

They flicked the flashlights on their EMD rifles on, and shone light into the hollow bowels of the blue container.

From between mounds of old trash, a boy peered back out at them. His face mirrored the desolate ruins around him, caked in dirt and dried blood. Grant couldn’t have told if it was the kid’s own blood, or someone else’s.

He was shivering. Wide-eyed. Terrified.

Staring at his own horrified face, distorted in a reflection on Grant’s black visor.

“Found ‘im,” Ruiz reported.

The boy wouldn’t hear it, but Stantz uttered the most callous thing she had heard since signing up with Future Proof.

“At the risk of sounding messed up, it’s kind of a shame the kid didn’t get eaten—woulda been one less headache for me.”

Without a single shred of amusement, Carter’s tinny voice on the radio chided Stantz, “You are one sick puppy, aren’t cha?”

Mischchenko spoke up, softer than she had ever uttered anything before. It made Grant wonder if her colleague had kids of her own.

“It’s all gonna be okay, we’re here to help,” said the hunter. She lowered her rifle to no longer blind the child, crouched down, and waved a hand at him, inviting him to approach them. “What’s your name?”

Grant stepped away, behind Mischchenko, also lowering her rifle, and scouring their environs for any other threats. Ruiz also kept lookout with her.

“They’re dead,” whispered the boy. Hissing, he repeated himself. “They’re all dead.”

He refused to budge from his dark hiding spot.

His eyes flashed like those of a wounded, cornered animal.

Grant shuddered.

She didn’t like where this was headed.

Then the T-Rex roared.

The ground shook with violent tremors. Giant footsteps neared.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Ripples

The ground shook. Water rippled.

Aiden, a twelve-year-old kid, froze. Stopped juggling. He gazed into a brackish puddle. Tremors continued to cause ripples. Like a giant’s footsteps, making the ground quake, they grew stronger.

Closer.

The boy rose from where he was kneeling, peeling his gaze off the puddle and its ripples. He stared into a horizon of blue over yellow, where wind fans lazily churned in the distance, and the carcasses of rusty old oil rigs slept.

The tremors neared. More ripples. And with them, a moving silhouette drew closer.

Duck-billed, giant, and saurian. The kid recognized its frame. Though he couldn’t remember the name of this genus, he recognized it from artistic renditions in books on dinosaurs: a Hadrosaurus. This living, breathing specimen of the creature bobbed and weaved between green trees on the ranch.

Closer. Stronger tremors matched the motions of its nearing, matching the rhythm of powerful legs, scaled trunks stomping down onto dry earth. Its gait was lumbering, erratic. Wounded.

Dark fluid dripped from its neck.

Blood dripped from its neck.

The boy fled.

He ran all the way back to the farmhouse. His small feet and bright red shoes thumped up wooden steps onto the porch, and carried him inside, though his weight was nowhere near enough to cause those ground-shaking tremors, nor those ripples in the puddle in the field outside.

The kid’s mother and brother were in the kitchen. Aiden’s mom, busy kneading dough in a chromed bowl on the counter, hummed while Aiden’s little brother, Baz, sat at the table, tapping thumbs away at his portable video game, complete with the bleeps and bloops the small device was continuously producing.

Oblivious.

Both of them were oblivious to the giant lizard approaching their house.

They both looked up when Aiden stormed into the kitchen, gasping for air. His breathless cries for attention made no sense to them.

“Dinosaur! There’s a dinosaur coming here!”

All the while, Aiden felt those tremors—in his blood, in his bones, and in his skull, ever thumping. Closer, ever closer.

“Honey, the dinos have gone extinct, a very, very long time ago,” his mother said with a soft laugh.

Baz’s eyes returned focus to the screen of his game and he continued tapping buttons, then whined. A little musical cue punctuated his complaint when he said, “Aw man, you made me die!”

Aiden shook his head and flailed his arms for attention. To no effect. “That earthquake, don’t you feel it? That’s a dino, it’s coming closer!”

His mother stared into the bowl where she kneaded the dough, wrists sprinkled in flour. She laughed again.

“Aiden, honey, please. That’s probably just another one of those silly companies prospecting for oil out here, drilling. You know?”

Ripples.

Aiden saw them in his mind’s eye. Ripples on the water, brought there by the tremors. By the quaking footsteps. Now… just outside.

“No, it’s not poss-specters, it’s a dinosaur, Mom!” he whined in response.

He turned to see how close the Hadrosaurus had gotten.

Dust rained from the ceiling now. He could feel the tremors in his teeth. A giant silhouette passed by outside the fly door.

Aiden’s mouth agape, he stood there, dumbfounded. Stared.

“That does feel like it’s getting closer, though, dagnabbit,” his mother said with a back turned to the horrific spectacle, with a hint of alarm now entering her tone. “What on Earth are they thinking?”

The dinosaur cast a hulking shadow through the windows of the living room it passed by next. Aiden’s blood curdled. With bated breath, he watched the Hadrosaurus circling around the building.

Thundering footsteps. Glass and ceramics rattled in the kitchen cupboards. Glass was just another liquid, and the ripples now sliced through everything. Rattling, clattering, rumbling, thundering.

His mother muttered, mouth ending as agape as Aiden’s. “What the—”

Quaking. Shaking. Rattling glass.

The portable video game in Baz’s hands emitted another little death tune for another virtual life lost. The nine-year-old looked up at his glass of milk on the table, and the ripples inside of it, now unsteadily shaking—the glass of milk was almost hopping atop the covered table’s surface.

Then the world exploded. Wood cracked, splintered. Thousands of shards of glass flew everywhere, blanketing the area like a rain of sharp shrapnel, and a skeletal architecture groaned under the strain of raw, crushing force. The backside of the farmhouse yawned wide open where a giant had torn through its side, unleashing an explosion of chaos and destruction.

Of screaming. A scream from Aiden’s mother, cut off as mountains of debris crashed down and buried her. An ongoing, blood-curdling scream from Baz, slicing high-pitched through the bedlam of collapsing house. And screams of terror, which Aiden eventually understood were coming from his own throat.

A strange and alien roar of the Hadrosaurus, almost more like an animal whine, drowned out the humans with its deafening cry of anguish.

Powerful legs, thick as tree branches, stomped around, shattering floors and turning the venerable home into a ruin.

Worlds collided as the dinosaur crashed sideways through the building. A piece of second-story floor jutted down like a jagged blade of wood, and nearly decapitated Aiden, cut short by the massive boards getting lodged on other debris. The boy’s voice died with his screams, choked out by gasps, and a growing, silent panic.

Blood splattered everywhere. Whose blood? The dinosaur’s blood? His own? His—

An even greater giant emerged from this chaos, towering over the house, and the Hadrosaurus.

A Tyrannosaurus Rex, as it lived and breathed. A living tower of death. A maw of death. A maw that could swallow Aiden whole, widening to show rows of teeth like knives, stained with blood.

Unlike the wounded Hadrosaurus, the T-Rex did not roar. It…

It sang. An alien, reptilian song, forgotten across the span of billions of years on this Earth. Now brought here through a fissure in time.

The Hadrosaurus whipped around and demolished another wall with its tail—almost decapitating the invisible Aiden in the process. Failing architecture crumbled and collapsed, braking the tail’s momentum, and stopping it from stopping the T-Rex that loomed over them.

The T-Rex lunged and its giant head rammed through twisting wood and metal, tearing through the structure like it was a toy house. Walls and floors groaned again as they bent and wobbled and deformed in every wrong direction, and the Hadrosaurus stumbled through the building’s midst, crashing and staggering out the front door’s side.

The T-Rex’s giant, clawed foot smashed down onto debris—where the boys’ mother was buried?

Baz screamed.

The T-Rex’s reptilian eye widened, and its maw gaped again.

Another lunge from the monolithic beast.

And Baz was gone. Aiden would remember the tiny limb and little red shoe sticking out from between the teeth like a gruesome toothpick. The crunch of breaking bones, a scream first muffled, then falling silent with abruptness.

And the beast chewed twice, and swallowed, and Baz was gone.

Paralyzed, Aiden stayed frozen like a statue, blending into the debris around him like a chameleon.

In the distance, the Hadrosaurus whined again, gaining distance.

Water in the brackish puddle outside continued to ripple with each thundering footstep. Tremors repeated as the prey Hadrosaurus fled, and the predator T-Rex gave chase.

And in the ruins of that farmhouse, a shellshocked Aiden remained. Nestled between the rubble and wreckage. Too terrified to move. Too horrified to grasp how he had lost his mother and brother, too paralyzed to even gasp for the air his lungs were screaming for, holding his breath as if it would help prevent him from being devoured.

Ripples continued. Ripples in the water. The T-Rex stomped away, chasing the Hadrosaurus with single-minded determination. With bloodlust.

Ripples reached through time. A single point, from which the waves moved outwards in every direction, past and future both. Pasts preserved—futures destroyed. Melting back together into the same body of water between every ripple.

Elsewhere, far out in the fields, an Anomaly glittered and gleamed in broad daylight. A hovering, orb-like light scintillated there—a connection between the eras, from which the dinosaurs had arrived.

The T-Rex chased the Hadrosaurus into the old oil fields of Midland.

Aiden fled in the opposite direction. Covered in dust, dirt, and blood—whose blood? His own?

The boy fled from his ruined home.

Hope was the last thing on his mind. Ripples consumed all.