Another Take Two

As if waking up from a dream where you were falling, Emile jolted forward as the memory of a recent yet future pain lingered throughout his body. His knees shook like a newborn fawn as his body continued to fight off the side effects of his most recent attempt. He placed a hand against the alley wall to hold himself up as he accidentally shouted, “Damn it, a truck?!” The dark alleyway echoed his frustrations towards a lady getting into her car. She flinched at the sudden noise, then rapidly fiddled with her keys as she murmured to herself, “I’m not dealing with a time junkie. Not today.” With a press of a button, her car began to hover off the ground and propel itself forward.

In the recent century, humanity discovered that time was less conceptual and more physical, able to be tapped into and altered. In nearly every country, diving backward and forwards in time without the country’s permission is highly illegal. With even the highest tech available, we could only go back no further than roughly half a year. It was mainly used to speed up scientific studies, help in medical fields, and covert operations run by the government. Of course, the rules didn’t stop the black market from getting their hands in the pot. Most items rigged up on the market allow people to go forward or backward between a few minutes to a few days. Those who use it to take up illegal jobs and bounties have been dubbed ‘Time Junkies.’

As the lady sped off in her vehicle, he couldn’t tell her she was wrong. Hell, I kind of liked the title, he had often told himself. Emile took a deep breath and pressed a button on his belt, injecting him with a compound to forcefully calm his body down after his most recent failed attempt. With a more than uncomfortable prick in his side and a tingling sensation shot throughout his body, he was able to stand straight again.

“That will be the last mistake I make tonight,” he told himself. He opened the time device on his waste disguised as a portable cassette player, named The Time Skipper, and took out the recently burnt-up battery. Without any charge, the thing just looked like an ordinary cassette tape. With time about to run out before his plan needed to take motion, he unzipped the crossbody bag on his back and tossed the chargeless battery in, clattering against other used ones. He rummaged around and brought out another charged one, with the tape inside glowing a feint neon pink, showing that it was ready to record. He placed the cassette tape into the player and closed it. He had tried this more times than he wished to count, but he knew this much. He was running out of attempts. Any more, and he would be ending on a loss for the night, so he had to get it right soon. He pressed record on the player and started moving towards the closed door in the alleyway. The door swung open as he approached, and a man in a waiter's uniform came out with a trash bag. Before the waiter could look his way, Emile covered the man’s mouth and yanked him outside, letting the trash bag keep the door propped open. With an elbow to the head, the waiter was out cold.

Emile knew he had a few minutes before a security guard came out to check on the situation, so he began to put his plan in motion. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out a water bottle and a fast-acting sleep medicine, mixing the two together. He placed it on the ground and began to use every second he had left to swap outfits with the poor guy. Through a few failed attempts and unlucky guesses, Emile had learned two things about doing the infiltration this way. The first was that the waiter, who he was in the process of hiding under some trash bags, was new there, meaning most people still didn’t recognize him too well. With footsteps getting louder, Emile pulled up his tie, combed his messy black hair, and stuffed his belongings in the trash bag the waiter had dropped. He tied the bag closed, and he picked up the bottle as the sound of a metal hand against metal accompanied the suddenly swung open door.

Standing at least a foot taller than Emile, a security guard said sternly, “What’s all the ruckus out here? Can’t even take out the trash correctly?” The second thing Emile had learned was that standing at the door was Lucille, a member of the security team who was hired the same night as Johnny, the man he had knocked out. Lucille was prone to making mistakes, so he tried acting higher than others to cover them up.

“I’m sorry Lucille, it won’t happen again. What was I supposed to work on next?” He knew that putting him in a position to make decisions also caused him to panic.

“You better be sorry! Oh… Um…” Lucile placed his fingers to his chin as if contemplating, “Oh, right! You need to take some orders!” He said with a satisfied smile.

“Of course Lucile!” Emile said with wonder, “You always know what to do! I’ll get on that right away! Here take this water, you look thirsty.”

Lucile smiled as he took the water bottle, but before he could say anything else Emile pushed past him into the kitchen.

A savory and strong spice-filled aroma he was now all too familiar with invaded his nostrils. Chefs covered pots and placed steaks into pans. Chatter between the kitchen’s workers accommodates the sizzling noises throughout the room. To Emile, this part of the plan was the hardest to act out each time. As people moved throughout the kitchen, swapping from oven to stove and from counters to the restaurant’s customers, it was easy to bump into anyone here, though everyone worked together like clockwork. The head waiter, whose name Emile hadn’t heard in any of his attempts yet, slid between, ducked under, and paused before suddenly moving chefs, all while balancing a tray covered in plates through the swinging doors to the restaurant’s dining area. Rather than smoothly dodging all oncoming chefs, he had to be careful of living up to Johnny’s clumsy reputation. The first two chefs he approached swung around with frying pans. He ducked under both pans with ease, as well as the water that was about to-

Crash!

A glass water pitcher shattered against the floor, which he successfully stopped right before. The head waiter had begun to rush back; though he wasn't on his way to help clean up. In his hand was a tray with a ring of keys and a wine bottle-shaped cloche on top. He was about to retrieve the golden goose of this heist for a customer, the $100 million bottle of wine. As the waiter approached the spill, he danced around the puddle nimbly, but not before Emile subtly nudged him into slipping on it. The waiter slid on the water and glass shards, dropping what he held, and fell straight into a boiling batch of lobsters. As he screamed in pain, other chefs and servers ran to his side, doing everything in their power to help. Emile subtly grabbed the tray, keys, and cloche and slithered his way around the corner to the wine cellar. With the right key already in hand, he unlocked the door and started his descent.

The warmth of the kitchen nearly instantly turned into a chilled and dim environment. The well-decorated walls and floors were nowhere to be seen since customers would stand no chance of ever seeing it. Each step creaked as he descended until his feet met an echoing stone floor. The walls were lined with countless wine bottles.  He knew right where to go. Due to the cost of the wine, the restaurant only ever carried one bottle of this wine at a time. In previous attempts, it took Emile multiple tries to find out where it was before someone found him. Each time he had failed here, the trigger-happy Lucile had followed him down after a minute and a half had passed and then shot him on the spot. There were two ways of activating his Time Skipper, one was to press the rewind button on the top of it. The second way was for the user’s heart to stop, causing it to automatically rewind to when the batter began its use. The latter caused most people to go mad, having to experience their own deaths takes quite a toll on most people. Emile, on the other hand, loved the thrill, though still avoided having it happen due to a rewind instantly burning up a battery.

Emile noticed the wine bottle in its glass case in the middle of the room but also knew better after falling for it once. The encased wine bottle was a model designed to cause a sleeping gas to be released by anyone attempting to open its container. He rushed through the room to the opposite side and began counting to himself.

43 from the left, 19 from the bottom. Ah! There we are.

In this spot was a bland bottle of wine, one that upon closer inspection, revealed it to be too bland as compared to the other bottles in the room. Emile grabbed onto the neck of the bottle and instead of pulling it out, he twisted it to the left. With a clicking noise, he pulled off a fake wine bottle cover to reveal a gently padded chamber that contained a well-adorned bottle of wine. Emile carefully slid the bottle out of the wall before he clicked the false lid back into place. He had seen it only a handful of times before, but it never ceased to amaze him. In his hands was a solid gold bottle of wine with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires inlaid into the bottle, with a diamond cork at the top; the clock was still ticking though, and he was almost done. Emile began to head back up the stairs, placing the bottle under the cloche on his tray. He went to the door and reached for the handle when he remembered his most recent attempt, pausing in his tracks. He placed an ear to the door and waited. While only a handful of seconds had passed, it felt like an eternity to him before-

Thud! Bang! Crash!

Emile opened the doors with gusto and went straight back to the kitchen. He walked past a break room and the manager’s office, both doors of which were wide open as everyone inside had run to the kitchen earlier. As he reached the kitchen, he saw to his left that the medicine had once again worked, causing Lucile to pass out by the doors to the dining area.  As everyone crowded around him, trying to deduce what had happened, Emile went to the right and straight back through the door he came in through. 

The cold, damp night air met his skin as the metal door closed behind him. He had only gotten this far once. Well, this far without a crowd of security guards and/or angry chefs chasing him. He ripped open the bag of trash that rested next to a still-unconscious Johnny and grabbed his belongings, stuffing the bottle into his bag. Deciding to change once he got home, he began to speed out of the alley towards his car across the street. A tingle hit the back of his neck as he exited the alleyway. The hairs on his arms stood up in unison, and a remembrance of pain shot throughout his entire body as a split-second memory popped into his mind. Emile suddenly slammed his hands into the lamppost next to him, launching himself back onto his rear.

HOOONK!

A large floating truck barreled down the street past him. He saw the line of people waiting to get into the restaurant were talking and pointing at him, though he couldn’t hear a word of what they were saying through the drums of his heart beating through his ears. Thank the stars I remembered that, he thought to himself. Looking both ways this time, he skipped across the street and got into his car. As he got comfortable, he noticed the feeling of something wet on his back. Did I get shot? No, I never heard a gunshot. What happened? When was I injured? He frantically thought to himself. As he felt around his body, he pressed his hand against his soaked back, pulling it forward to see what he could only assume to be blood in the dim night light. Panic was setting in him when an even more horrifying idea came to mind. He gave the liquid on his hand a sniff and then a taste. It wasn’t blood, it was much worse, it was wine. He desperately ripped open his bag to see a shattered bottle leaking into the car. Emile sat in the car with his fists clenched for what felt like hours before he let out a string of expletives. With a slam on the horn, Emile angrily pressed down on the rewind button on his Time Skipper.

As if slowly and gently being woken up, Emile began to blink his blurred eyes. A moment passed as he looked around the alley he was all too familiar with. He took a deep breath in before letting out a cry of pain, “Son of a bitch!” The dark alleyway echoed his frustrations towards a lady who had left the restaurant. Flinching at the sudden noise, she rapidly ran scanned through her keys as she murmured to herself, “I’m not dealing with a time junkie. Not today.” With a press of a button, her car began to hover off the ground and propel itself forward. He looked on towards her speeding away vehicle as he began to load up the cassette player with another battery. “I mean it this time,” he swore to himself, “that will be the last mistake I make tonight.”