The Endless Downfall of Bradley Longram

The afternoon sun beat down, prickling the back of Officer Bradley Longram’s hand. It was his first week, fresh out of the academy, and as a newly minted, duly appointed officer of the law in the Cedar Falls police department, he had answered the calls nobody else wanted. The noise complaints from the elderly busybodies, the cats stuck in trees, the reports of a serial defecator were the calls dispatch gave to him.

He stood in an empty parking lot, save from a brown 1991 Honda Civic. It was only a few minutes before he had opened the back door, and then emptied the contents of his stomach onto the hot broken asphalt next to the rear tire. After that, he called the ambulance. He could hear the sirens, of that ambulance, and backup.

From his position, he could still see into the backseat. For a moment, he thought he heard a wail, but stepping forward, his eyes called his ears liars, and that admonishment burned into his skull. He stood, holding his pen and ticket-pad, if for no other reason than he didn’t know what to do with his hands. He wasn’t trained for this.

A sickly sweet smell emanated from the vehicle, a mixture of milk shit that as a new father himself he knew well, and the cloying scent of burned flesh. The child in the back seat had been there for some time, hours at least. Its eyes pleaded with Bradley, begging to be held and saved from the horrific death it experienced, but he couldn’t. His failure as a father, a man and a police officer destroyed his confidence that he had felt that morning, kissing Laura on his way out. She had told him to do good today.

***

Bradley stared into that backseat. The blotched skin, the cooked flesh, the wails from the infant tormented him. The child reached for him, and each time, instead of reaching back, pulling from that charnel house, he closed the door. When it closed with a click, Bradley shot straight up, drenched in sweat.

The clock read 3:34 am. The noise of the city drifted through his window, a conveyance honking, the hum of the electric generators, an unfortunate vomiting in the street outside. His heart raced, as it did every time he had this dream. He pushed his feet out of bed, and grabbed the now warm bottle on his nightstand. It was flat, but he drank it anyway.

He sat there until the sun poked through the blinds. Today was going to be the last day that this happened. Bradley let the shower flick away his filth on the outside, leaving the dirt inside intact. “I wonder if she would come back,” he said to no one in particular. Laura left seven years ago, taking their youngest with her. The older two had long stopped speaking with him.

She said it was the drinking, and the yelling. But it wasn’t really those things. He woke each night, sometimes screaming, sometimes punching, sometimes with his piece in hand, after closing that door each time. She asked him and asked him, but he could never really say to her what he saw. Laura went from empathy, to fear, to indifference. She stopped asking, and then just stopped being there.

The glowing nu-florescent lights gave his grey hair a greenish tinge sitting in the waiting room. He waited for what seemed to be an hour, when his name was called. His “handler”, travel agent was the preferred title, stared at him with black eyes, and a small scar above her upper lip. She once was fat, but had lost much of the weight. “Mr. Longram, I hope that I have been clear up to this point.”

“Yes, you have.”

“Well I am going to go through it just one more time. We will be monitoring you. Usually, one of us would go with you, but do to your long service to the community, we made an exception. You will follow the rules, but things can get sticky with time travel. There are certain points that you can be sent back to. You aren’t to interact with anyone. These sightseeing tours work best if you keep a good distance from anyone.”

“I know, I know.”

“Anything you accidentally change will be fixed. As I said, we are monitoring you. You appear to have signed all the necessary forms, and your payment cleared. You mind me asking, why did you choose this date?”

Bradley smiled. “I kissed my wife for the first time on this date. I thought it would be nice to watch it.”

She took a drink from her Pepsi Neg, “Ah, tempting to interfere. Don’t. Just watch.”

“I will.”

She handed him his temporal pass. He put it around his neck, and walked to the back. The travel tubes lay waiting. The tech looked over his pass, nodded and pointed to the nearest tube. “Now you paid for one hour. When that time is up, we will pull you back. That means that if your pass comes back without you, we will stop you from even going. So there will be ten second countdown to allow for that before I send you.”

Bradley stood in the tube, waited for ten seconds, and closed his eyes. He suspected that they really couldn’t watch what they did, otherwise they probably would have stopped this right now. He breathed deeply, and chirping birds caressed his ears.

He was standing at the edge of a parking lot to the College Square Mall. At the far end of the lot, a man exited from a brown Civic, and began walking away. The agency made it a firm policy that no technology could be brought back, but the still functional pay phone was all he needed. He knew the number by heart.

Ring. “Office Bradley Longram speaking.”

“Officer, you need to get to S lot of the College Square Mall. There is a baby locked in an abandoned Honda Civic. He needs your help. Come now!”

“Who is this?”

Bradley hung up.

It took ten minutes for Officer Longram to arrive. He had the car door open, and the infant squalling in his arms within thirty seconds. The sirens of the emergency vehicles swelled, music to his ears. Now, everything would be different.

***

Air raid sirens roared, but Bradley Longram couldn’t care less. If a bomb hit him, all the better. The Dear Leader’s glorious war had cost him everything already. The text message was clear on that front. His last son, Jonathan, was dead. An enemy sniper. Somewhere out east.

He already gave so much for Elim Gonzalez. The Dear Leader had offered the man who had saved his life from the father who abandoned him in a hot car all those years ago a mansion, with a bunker. He turned it down. He could never say it outloud, but ever since Elim had taken power and began his great movement, Bradley wasn’t comfortable with their relationship.

That seemed like a small thing when the bomb that flattened his home came, killing his wife, two daughters and his two youngest sons. His last son enlisted immediately, to revenge himself on the far off forces that destroyed his family. And now Bradley’s failure was complete.

Was he being punished? Almost certainly. He extracted young Elim from the car, but after that he did not guide him, father him, nor mold him. They never found his father, and his mother, well the drugs never were far from her.

When the stories of the camps filtered into his hovel, he decided to act. Contacting the Resistance gave him chills, but what did it matter if they killed him? He was already dead.

A hooded man knocked on his door, a backpack bulging handing from both shoulders, coming in when Bradley opened the door. “So, you are the hero who saved him? How do you like what you did now,” he sneered.

“If you are going to kill me, kill me. My family is dead, because of him. How do you think I feel?”

“Man, I didn’t know. I was just told to come here, and bring my equipment. You might be able to stop all of this from what I heard.”

“I don’t know. I am willing to try. He took everything from me.”

The man nodded. He set down his bag, and pulled a wired device that looked like a hippy bathroom scale out. He also pulled out a pistol with silencer and handed it to Bradley. “Now, because apparently you have a node that touches the Dear Leader, we can send you back to a time where he isn’t so damn hard to kill. And no, don’t ask me how it works. It just does.”

Bradley nodded. “I’m ready when you are.”

“Just give me a moment.” There was a loud pounding on the door. “SHIT!”

“This is the police. You have a fugitive in there. You have ten seconds to surrender or lethal force will be brought to bear.”

The man looked panicked. “Get on dude! Go back, I’ll get you there.”

Bradley stepped on, and heard wood splintering as projectiles punched through the plywood. He closed his eyes, and birdsong filled his ears. He was standing in the parking lot of the College Square Mall. He knelt down behind a lamp post, and waited.

The morning dragged, and he became parched. He didn’t have any money, but that didn’t matter. He would get the job done. And then, he spotted the Honda Civic, pulling into the parking lot. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a familiar looking man standing near the pay phones.

He lost his nerve shooting a child. Bradley remembered thinking young Elim and Jonathan looked exactly alike. They could be cousins. He saw his son’s face in his mind’s eye. He couldn’t kill him.

The man walked to the phones, and picked up the receiver. Bradley remembered the phone call. He knew then what he could do.

***

The floor stank of vomit and blood. Bradley Longram lay curled up, covered in his own ejecta. Every part of his body hurt. But that was normal.

Each morning, when the fog from drinking lifted momentarily, he replayed that fateful morning in his head. The dead child, screaming from the grave at him. From that he had nightmares every night. But it was the dead man found in the bushes that broke him. On some level, he knew it was him, just older.

The department laughed at him. His bitch wife took their son and never spoke to him. Therapists, doctors, and psychics all said he was crazy. The CFPD just filed it under a john doe, and the file went to the basement. After the captain told him for the third time to forget about it, it was his badge or his obsession.

He dove into the bottle. And stayed there.

But sunlight glimmered through the brown haze. An idea formed over the years, after hearing about Timely Expeditions. He could never afford it, but he could afford a gun. He would go back, and he would know the truth. He had to.

The two security guards lay bleeding out on the carpet in the waiting room. Same for the receptionist, a fat woman with a scarred lip and two snooty men who called him smelly when he thrust the pistol into their faces. The bespectacled technician knelt in front of him, sniveling. “Please, please don’t kill me.”

“I ain’t gonna kill you, but you got to send me back.”

“You can’t go back with that. You got no pass, you got a gun. You can’t go back with a gun.”

“I’m taking the gun. Now, send me back.”

“Back to when?”

“The car, and the dead guy. Send me back!”

“I don’t know when that is. You haven’t even been scanned.”

“I don’t give a fuck. Do it, or I’m gonna kill you.”

“Oh no, please, I will do anything, don’t kill me.”

“Start working, smart guy.”

The tech crawled back to his computer, and Bradley sat on the platform, keeping the gun leveled at the tech. “I’m seeing two nodes, do you know which one?”

“No, just send me back to the car. It was twenty years ago, man.”

“Okay, I got one right at the twenty year mark, and then one a year and a half earlier. You want the twenty?”

“JUST DO IT!”

Sirens started to grow louder, and then Bradley yawned, closing his eyes. An oriole warbled, and he felt a breeze caress his face. Was he there?

He opened his eyes, and spotted the College Square Mall across the street. Bradley’s worn out heart leap up, he would finally know! He stepped off the curb, and immediately a crunch and shooting pain radiated from his leg, then his head, and then his shoulder as he flipped over a brown piece of shit car.

A child wailed in the back seat of the vehicle, and he felt his mangled body leaking onto the warming concrete. “No, no, I gotta know.” He tried to move his arms to push himself up, but nothing happened. A car door opened, and a face appeared above his. “Really?”

***

The gate opened, and Bradley Longram walked out of Anamosa State Penitentiary. Finally a free man. He was ready to make things right.

In his heart, he didn’t blame Elim. The boy’s father spent years in prison, starting with the vehicular homicide with Elim in the car as an infant. He grew up in a house riddled with drugs and abuse. He forgave Elim, after the youth and his gang broke into Bradley’s home, intent on robbery, but killing his wife, two sons, and leaving Bradley for dead.

Rage consumed him and in his own failing, he used his resources to find and enact vengeance on that poor boy. Elim went to the ground, and Bradley to the pen. And now Bradley, with love in his heart, saw it clearly. His penance would be to save Elim from the life given to him. He needed a real father.

All those lives destroyed by someone else's choices, well it now was in Bradley’s power to fix it. He spent five additional years inside for the chance to do it. He told himself that the blood would vanish along with the additional pain with success. The jumper would meet him at the halfway house, ready to send him back. All it cost him was the lives of two fellow criminals, a small price.

“Okay man, I don’t suppose you know when you are going? These things can only do so much. For some reason, they can only send people to certain dates, and you got two options.”

“What is the date that is furthest back? There is something that I need to do, and I don’t want to miss it.”

“Whatever man, I’m going to send you to that one. Let me tell you, I’m not pulling you back. You probably won’t last long anyway, the cops are usually pretty quick about jumping back.”

“You got my documents?”

“Yes, I don’t understand, but I do. You can’t hide back there.”

“I’m not trying to hide.”

Bradley stood on the pad, and a whirring sound filled his ears. The sound hurt, and he closed his eyes. A jay chirped, and cool air soothed him. A dark house stood before him. The door opened with a strong push, and he walked up the stairs to the second floor, only a squeak of his shoes on the floor boards making note of his passage.

An occupied bed lay before him, a single body snoring away. Bradley knelt before him, and placed his hand on his shoulder. A quick shake, and the man was awake. “You Bernard Gonzalez?”

The man shook his head, and coughed. “Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in my house? I’m Bernard Gonzalez!” He voice rose with each question.

“I’m sorry about this, but its for the best.” The knife he pulled from his back holster caught a bit of moonlight before he plunged it into Bernard’s throat. The clock read 3:34 am.

***

Elim was screaming, but Bradley kept his eyes on the road. He was going to meet the head of mall security for a new job, one that would keep Lena, his new wife, and his new adopted son well provided for. She had been most receptive to Bradley’s offer, since the erstwhile father of her child had vanished not long after Elim was born.

A sudden flash, and Bradley swerved away from the curb, a wild and crazy drunk man somehow coming out of nowhere, waving a pistol. The Civics's brakes squealed, but Bradley managed to not hit anyone. He turned into the parking lot, and parked near the bushes at the front.

He turned back to look at Elim, nestled comfortably in his car seat. He then looked up. That crazy man was running across the parking lot towards them. He stood up, and waved his hands in air, to get him to follow him. He started walking quickly away from the car, hoping that the man would follow him. He could hurt Elim, and Bradley wouldn’t let that happen. He could lose him and double back. He would have to.

***

Officer Bradley Longram straightened his tie and radio as he drank his morning coffee. “I think its going to be a great day, Laura. I can feel it!”

His lovely wife, blonde curls framing her sweet cherubic face, kissed him and then wiped away the lipstick. “You are my brave policeman. Go do good today!”