Jackson just reached Berry in time, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him back up onto the curb. A half-second later, a delivery truck rocketed through the space that Berry would have occupied if Jackson hadn’t have pulled him back from the street.
“Jesus!” Berry exclaimed, shaken. “That truck could have hit me! How did you know it was coming?”
“Simple,” Jackson said. “I saw it hit you an hour ago, then I used the time machine I’ve been building in my basement to come back in time to save you.”
“Amazing!” Berry said. “You built a time machine? That’s truly…”
A thunderous crash of material—bricks and rivets and rebar and a wheelbarrow—smashed down into Berry, having fallen from several stories above them, as the two men were standing next to a building under construction. Berry was instantly pulverized into a splatter of goo and hair gel and bits of smashed cell phone.
“Dammit,” Jackson said.
Later, Jackson just reached Berry in time, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him back up onto the curb. A half-second later, a delivery truck rocketed through the space that Berry would have occupied if Jackson hadn’t have pulled him back from the street.
“Jesus!” Berry exclaimed, shaken. “That truck could have hit me! How did you know it was coming?”
“Simple,” said the second Jackson, putting his arms around Berry from behind and pulling him away from the first Jackson. A thunderous crash of material—bricks and rivets and rebar and a wheelbarrow—smashed down into the space Berry had been standing, cracking the sidewalk and throwing an impressive cloud of concrete dust up into the air.
“Good Lord,” Berry coughed, dust in his lungs. “That could have crushed me flat as a bug! How did you do that?”
“I built a time machine,” said the second Jackson.
“So did I,” said the first.
“Amazing!” Berry said. “You built a time machine? That’s truly…”
Gunfire erupted suddenly, and the window of a nearby bank blew out from the inside. A stray round entered the back of Berry’s skull, rattled around inside for a bit, and dropped him to the ground like a sack of wet flour.
“Crap,” the second Jackson said.
Later, Jackson reached Berry just in time, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him back onto the curb, where he was intercepted by the second Jackson, who pulled him back from beneath a tumbling mass of construction material, only to be tackled by the third Jackson, who dropped Berry to the pavement just as the window of a nearby bank blew out, and a bullet passed through the air that had until only a moment before been occupied by Berry’s head.
“Jesus!” Berry exclaimed.
“My!” said the first Jackson.
“Stunning!” said the second Jackson.
“I built a time machine,” said the third Jackson.
“Amazing!” Berry said. “You built a time machine? That’s truly…”
The manhole cover Berry was sitting on blasted up into the air, propelled by a geyser of scalding steam. After a forty-foot ride, Berry tumbled off and plummeted to the pavement, landing face-first, scalded red as a lobster, and then being decapitated by the manhole cover as it fell back to the ground.
“Shit,” said the third Jackson.
Later, Jackson reached Berry just in time, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him back onto the curb, where he was intercepted by the second Jackson, who pulled him from beneath a tumbling mass of construction material, only to be tackled by the third Jackson, who dropped Berry to the pavement just as the window of a nearby bank blew out, where he was then pulled by his ankles off the manhole cover he’d landed on just as it blew off into the sky on a geyser of scalding steam.
“Jesus!” Berry exclaimed.
“Insanity!” said the first Jackson.
“Unreal!” said the second Jackson.
“Madness!” said the third Jackson.
“I built a time machine,” said the fourth Jackson.
“Amazing!” Berry said. “You built a time machine? That’s truly…”
Berry’s head collapsed in on itself from the force of the baseball bat that cracked down onto his skull, struck from behind by the fifth Jackson, only just arrived from the future. Berry fell, dead before he hit the pavement.
“Gentlemen,” said the fifth Jackson, resting the bat upon his shoulder. “I built a time machine, and I propose that we use it for some far more fruitful purposes.”
“Like buying stock in Microsoft,” said the fourth Jackson.
“Or saving John Lennon,” said the third Jackson.
“Or killing Hitler,” said the second Jackson.
“Or asking Juliet Beasley to the junior prom,” said the first Jackson.
“Gentlemen!” said the sixth Jackson, just arriving from the future. “I’ve built a time machine, and we must go back and stop ourselves from marrying Juliet Beasley! Apparently, she grows up to be an emasculating she-beast who emotionally cripples us while draining our fortune made from Microsoft stock and selling our share of song rights to all of John Lennon’s recordings from the 1990s!”
“Good Lord!” said the fifth Jackson.
“What about Hitler?” said the fourth Jackson.
“Did we kill him?” said the third Jackson.
“Did we at least change the course of history?” said the second Jackson.
“Before our souls were crushed by a cold and loveless marriage?” said the first Jackson.
“Worse!” said the sixth Jackson. “Hitler actually sublets the loft over our garage like a Nazi Fonzie!”
“Gentlemen!” said the seventh Jackson, arriving from the future in a leather jacket with a swastika emblem on the back, with his hair done up in a greasy pompadour and a tiny brush of a mustache beneath his nose…
This week’s IndieInk Challenge came from Shelley, who gave me this prompt: “You travel back in time, to change the outcome of…” I challenged Chimnese with the prompt “A roll of film found in a dead man’s closet.”
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