Willie's Redneck Time Machine (6 page)

YOU WAIT FOR A FEW MOMENTS,
blinking and shaking your head, knowing you gotta wake up sometime.

Instead, the door shuts. The room begins shaking. You feel motion underneath your feet. You hang on to a handle on the wall as everything shudders for a minute. Then it stops again.

Uh-oh.

Maybe the magic trick is over and you’re back in the warehouse now. But the door opens
 
—and you hear wildlife outside.
Lots
of wildlife.

You peer around the entrance and find yourself in the woods. No, scratch that. This is some kind of jungle. Like the Amazon jungle with thousand-year-old trees surrounding you.

You step out and decide to find out where you are.
An inner voice says you shouldn’t, but you guess the door will close again and you might just find yourself in some other place.

You’ve been hunting before in some wild places, but nothing like this. The birds seem louder, the movement all around you more active. You see some monkeys moving just a little ways from you.

You walk for a good hour or more until you reach a break in the trees.

Then you see them.

There has to be at least half a dozen of them.

Are those called brontosauruses? What’s the other name?

You feel like you’re in
Jurassic Park
, seeing these towering dinosaurs. But they’re right there, in the field in front of you. These glorious, amazing creatures. So beautiful. So serene.

I think that one might be a brachiosaur.

You’re mesmerized and barely hear the sounds of the jungle clearing behind you. When you turn, you notice another dinosaur.

This one is a Tyrannosaurus rex.

It’s beautiful too. But angry.

Really angry.

Whoa . . . he’s coming toward you!

And the next thing you know . . .

You find yourself back in the warehouse, back holding your cell phone in your hand, back getting some love from Britney Spears.

And in one piece.

No longer an appetizer for Sir T. Rex.

THE END

Start over.

Read “The Morning Fog: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”

SO THIS IS THE YEAR 2319.
You’re still trying to wrap your mind around it. The time machine seems to have adjusted itself at some point
 
—either that or you haven’t been very observant. There’s a door you’ve never noticed before at the back of the control room. When you press a square button on the side of the wall, the door slides up and leads to a hallway lined with doors similar to the one you just passed through. They’re all marked:

Medieval Times

Skateboards and Bikes

Mongol Empire

World War II

Dystopian World Outfits and Guns

You stop at that last one.
Dystopia.
That’s like a really bad future world
 
—you learned all about it from
The Hunger Games
. Better open the last door and see what’s inside, just in case that’s the sort of world you’re in right now.

It’s a small room with futuristic rifles and handguns hanging on the wall and a couple of tables filled with matching attire. You pick out this really large cannon-like rifle with three barrels. You also decide to put on a black outfit that’s made of some heavy material. Maybe it’s flame resistant. Or bullet resistant. Or laser-death-fire resistant.

You head to the main room of the time machine and peer outside. It appears to be nighttime since you can see nothing except burning buildings in the distance and lights streaming from the skies. But your immediate surroundings don’t seem too threatening (for the moment). So you exit and start to examine where you are.

It’s definitely some kind of battleground. You pass by burned, overturned trucks every few steps. Lots and lots of wreckage can be seen. The field you’re in looks like a junkyard filled with heaps of charred metal.

You hear gunfire up ahead and try to stay down. The massive rifle you’re carrying is heavy.

When you’ve been outside for about twenty minutes, four piercing floodlights come on all around you, blinding
you momentarily. You hold your hand in front of your face and blink until you can see it again.

Then you hear a menacing voice, magnified from a distance.

“Drop your weapons and come out into the open, or we’ll detonate the car you’re standing beside. Come out
right now
.”

You realize you probably don’t have any options. Unless . . .

Wait, is this one of those moments I get to choose something?

But no
 
—it’s not.

You toss your rifle to the ground and lift your hands.

Suddenly a swarm of people surrounds you. They’re wearing helmets and metallic gear with large blaster-like rifles. Someone puts you in cuffs.

“Look, I’m not going to hurt
 
—”

Something hard slams against the back of your head. You have a hard head, but not
that
hard.

All you see is darkness.

When you open your eyes once again, you see four small walls around you. You’re seated at a table, your arms trapped in an immense synthetic-wood block that renders them immobile.

Soon the door opens and a woman comes in. She’s wearing a military outfit of some kind.

“State your name, your vital link, and the quadrant you’ve come from.”

Vital link? Quadrant?

“My name’s Willie Robertson,” you start to say, not sure what to do next.

Do you tell them the whole truth?
Go here
.

Do you try to make up a story?
Go here
.

Do you decide to make a joke?
Go here
.

YOU’RE NOT SURE
why you’d need a life jacket in the middle of a desert like this, but why not? Maybe there’s water involved in whatever challenge you’ll be facing. When you exit the time machine, rain has started to fall. You put the life jacket under your arm and start walking down the track-covered road.

After a few miles you arrive in a village unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

To call it an ancient civilization wouldn’t be right. Because there’s no civilization here. You see only archaic huts and people in strange, rustic clothing. You try to talk to them, but nobody will respond to you. They all look at you with fear and trepidation.

The rain continues to beat down, so you go underneath a small covering suspended between two trees.

You feel like you’re on the show
Survivor
.

The rain continues all night. You’d like to say that someone lets you come into their hut, but no.

The next day it’s worse. You’re shivering and wondering when the downpour is going to stop.

This is the day you hear someone talk about Noah.

“No . . . ,”
you begin, and then you say,
“ah.”

You begin to understand a little about the choices you were given.

“Where is this Noah?” you ask a big man with more hair than you.

He only mumbles and shoves you down. The woman you ask next reluctantly tells you Noah is on the boat in the hills.

“The boat in the hills. Where are the hills?”

She points in the opposite direction from where you came. “It’s too dark to see them now, but you’ll find them if you head that way.”

You wonder if your father is on that boat in the hills. Otherwise known as the ark.

You peer through the rain. Then you put on your life jacket and begin the trek toward the vessel.

You do make it to the massive boat in the hills, and it’s more spectacular and incredible than you ever could have imagined.

You’re not the only one who journeyed to the ark. As each day passes and as the voices around you cry out, only to go unheard, you feel a bit of hopelessness coming on.

As it turns out, the life jacket would be okay if you fell off a boat into the lake. But when it comes to gushing skies and turbulent, swaying floodwaters, a life preserver is like a flyswatter against Godzilla.

You end up lasting longer than you would without the jacket, but not much.

And oops . . . there you go again.

You’re in the familiar warehouse, standing again, breathing again. Wondering what just happened.

Wondering why in the world you’re soaking wet.

THE END

Start over.

Read “The Morning Fog: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”