The Unnerving Silence of Infinity.

At the intersection, I could go right and head home – but turning left would take me down by the river, through the old abandoned industrial district: The scenic route. There were a couple of bars I’d heard about…

She came bursting out of one of these bars so suddenly, I thought she’d been tossed out the door, but when a man wearing an apron and brandishing a baseball bat came lumbering out after her, it was clear that their relationship was less than cordial.

She caught sight of my little car and flagged me down in desperation, her predicament so dire, what could I do but stop and unlock my doors. “It’s about time,” she snapped, as she hopped in the front seat and slammed the door.

I hitched my thumb toward the back seat. “I don’t,” I stammered. “I was just heading…”

“Take me to the convention center,” she said. “And step on it.”

I could barely process her demand in the face of the bartender’s unquenched rage. It seemed clear that he took me for her accomplice and was not interested in any kind of discussion. I figured this out just moments before he remembered he had a baseball bat in his hand, and threw it at my car as we sped away.

As I said, the bar was located on the fringes of the dankest part of town and in my haste and panic to keep my little car and face undamaged, I’d taken at least one wrong turn and was now lost. I dismissed the woman’s pleas for an entire minute as I searched for the quickest way back to civilization, but after a few unsuccessful turns, she became insistent that I pull the car over to the side of the mostly deserted street. Inept and frustrated, I finally relented. It was so dark, the only source of light was from various buttons inside the car.

“What kind of car is this?” She asked, as if everything was normal, we were just waiting for a non-existent light to change.

“It’s a Metro,” I said, “Hey, how did you—”

“Shut up and listen to me, Kenneth. I’m going to ask you to do something for me tonight, and you’re going to have to do it. And the reason,” she said, before I could ask, “is because you have no choice, the fate of the fucking planet requires you to do what I’m going to ask you to do.”

“But—.”

“And if you’re not going to do it, in other words, if you say, ‘what do I care about the rest of the fucking planet?’, then, I’ll just send someone back to kill you and I’ll grab the next likely person to DO, what NEEDS to be DONE. Do you understand?”

“Well, when you put it that way – it doesn’t seem that dark out there after all.”

“You’re not thinking of getting out of the car, are you?”

“No,” I lied.

“Good, because I can’t drive this fucking thing by myself.”

I took a deep breath and said, “You – you don’t know how to drive?”

“Where I come from, the cars all drive themselves. Alright?”

“Sure,” I said, my voice dripping with doubt. “Okay. So how do you know my name, and what’s this thing that I have to do? And why do I have to do it?”

“You have to poison some animals, Kenneth.”

A moment of silence passed as I examined the street behind us in the rear-view mirror.

“I know it flies in the face of your finely honed pro-animal ethos…”

A car had come to a stop at the intersection behind us, and then cautiously driven the other way.

“…but it looks like you’re the best man for the job.”

“Why on earth would I want to –”

“Because they’re not ordinary animals, Kenneth. They’re genetically reconstructed creatures from the ancient past.”

“And how does this--.”

“A biotechnical research firm has grown these things in one of their labs, using state of the art techniques that they don’t fully understand yet. They engineered what they think is an ancient breed of wolves, but further research, when they finally get around to doing it, will reveal that the genetic source material, the substrate they used, had strains from a much older, more violent and prehistoric species, which won’t display aggression until they’re triggered. Once they’re triggered—”

“Triggered?”

“Yeah, You know, bright lights, crowds, noise and commotion?”

“Oh,” I said, “like a ‘King-Kong effect.”

“Exactly,” she said. “And once triggered, they can’t be untriggered.”

“You’re not from PETA then, are you?”

“PETA? No. I’m not from fucking Peta, whatever that is.” She turned to face me and grabbed my upper arm. We were nearly nose to nose in the tiny car she was very sincere when she said, “We can’t know for certain what they’ll actually do, but there’s a 98 percent probability that they’ll kill half of everyone in the convention center within a few minutes of being presented to the crowd.”

I snorted. “Uh-huh. Then that’s the last place I want to be whenever that’s supposed to happen.”

“About an hour from now,” she said.

I looked at my watch, reached for the keys and started the car.

“Hear me out, Ken.”

I left the car in park, fiddled with the A/C settings.

“Here’s the thing, Kenneth. If these things aren’t eliminated—these things won’t just kill everyone in the convention center, they’ll kill millions, maybe hundreds of millions, if humanity even survives. Their jaws are more like mandibles, they breed like aphids, they hunt like raptors and have the strength of ants – these biotechnical assholes haven’t created docile wolves, as they claim, they’ve created furry, four-legged crocodile-ants.”

I heard myself ask her, “How many did they make?”

“Four,” she said.

“How much do they weigh?”

“Eighty to a hundred pounds. Each. Two males and two females.”

I think I shivered, and tried to roll the window up but it was already up. “Did you say they move like ants? You know…” I moved my fingers in front of my head like antennae.

Her face became twisted with revulsion. “No. …the strength of ants. They move like reptiles. You have no idea how—relentless, these things are.” For a moment she looked nauseous. “They share numerous, disturbingly similar traits with ants, which their ‘inventors’ refuse to acknowledge, even so, we’re still pretty sure they’re reptilian, they just don’t seem to match up with any reptiles we’ve been able to identify, genetically; not in the fossil record; anyway.”

“Hold on a second. But they look like wolves?”

She nodded.

“Are you saying this bio-tech company used the genes of alien reptiles to create fuzzy looking wolves?”

“In a word, yes. That’s an excellent way to put it. We hope that the premature deaths of their experiment will prompt more rigorous research and development, maybe legislators might pass some laws, but whatever the case, these things don’t die easily, so they must not be allowed to exist. You understand?”

I nodded.

“I wish I could be there to see the looks on their moronic faces, those idiots, when they find that their pet Frankenstein’s are dead. But I won’t be there,” she regained her former poise. “You will.”

“Yeah, okay, but—.”

“Shhhh.” She held two fingers to my lips, “Shhh. I cannot give you anything from the future.”

“Are you, did you? You are telling me you’re from the future.”

“Oh. Well, I’m not telling you that, but yeah.” For the first time her imperturbable confidence showed a fracture. “I thought you might have remembered…””

“Did you pick me at random? ‘Cause I’m not ready to die yet.”

“We’re not asking you to die. Who mentioned anything about death?”

“You did. Several times.”

“Oh. Okay. Fair point, but we’re not asking you to kill yourself, Kenneth. Death occurs from inaction, not action. When I go back, (to the future?) I will set in motion a ripple effect that will pause time for everyone but you, Kenneth, due entirely to your unshielded proximity. That’s how we’re going to pull this off without anyone getting killed. This vial, that I’m placing in your hand right now, is harmless to every species, well, that’s not true, let’s just say that it’s targeted specifically to harm these strange creatures. Just sprinkle a little in their cage, or the ventilation system of the building they’re in. A little goes a long way.”

“They’re in a cage?”

She shrugged. “Don’t know. Shouldn’t matter.”

“So then…”

“Then walk away. Sprinkle and walk away. Don’t be there when time resumes.”

I held up the vial to view it in the dashboard light. “You’re sure this won’t kill me too?”

She grabbed the vial, opened it as I gasped in horror, then tipped a small pile into the palm of her hand and licked it. “See?” She said, “We would’ve put ‘Keep out of reach of vicious, alien reptiles,’ but there wasn’t enough room on the bottle.” She screwed the cap back on and turned the vial upside down and offered it back to me, her words, the vial and the gesture were all very exclamatory.

For just a split second, I entertained dubious thoughts about the whole affair. Someone was pranking me. There’s no such thing as time-travel, reptilian ant-wolves and harmless poison. I’m probably dreaming.

She snapped her fingers in front of my face and said, “You have doubts? So do I. Get me to the convention center. Now.”

“But –.”

“Now. Next intersection, take a left, get on the crosstown parkway.” She looked at something on her wrist that was not a watch. “You’ve got fourteen minutes before I warp out of here.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that you’re from the future?”

She didn’t answer for about a minute, a long, tense minute. All I heard was the hissing of my little Metro’s tires on the sizzling asphalt highway at nine o’clock at night.

“And what would you prefer to believe?” She finally said.

As I maneuvered the compact little deathtrap through a series of concrete ramps, I said, “I think you’re a corporate spy or a desperate CEO and you’re trying to sabotage a rival company’s product. The only odd thing about the whole affair, is that the company’s product seems to be an animal.”

In a deadpan voice she said, “Wow. That’s really imaginative. You a writer or something?”

“Well, I’m trying to --.”

“You’re overthinking it. How did I make a poison that’s harmless to people? If it’s harmless, why go through all this trouble?”

We arrived at a vast and nearly empty parking area. She pointed at a distant and deserted corner of the lot. “See those car chargers, under that lamp-post?”

“Of cour--.”

“Drop me off there.”

I wheeled the car to the designated spot, and pulled to a dramatic stop. A bunch of loose items clattered and rolled about on the floorboards.

In this tipping point, between my present, our past and her future, I finally had a chance to take a good look at her: Long black hair, bronze skin, little fuzzy hairs on her cheek and forehead, sensuous lips and… “You have golden eyes,” I said.

“Contact lenses.”

She seemed familiar.

“When I get out of this car,” she said, “wait, WAIT -- until I’ve disappeared, then go to that entrance,” which she pointed at to make it clear. “Go in, get as close to the stage as possible, backstage would be even better, and open the vial, and then leave. Don’t linger in one spot, always keep moving and you’ll be nothing more than a blurry spot on the security cams. Then carefully drive yourself home and finish your story.”

“What story?”

“The story you’re writing.”

“How do you know I’m writing a story?”

She looked pained. “I know a lot more about you than you’d care to know, Kenneth.” She cocked a disconcerting eyebrow, threw her arm around my neck and hugged me. She smelled like cinnamon, soap and sunlight. “This is not the first time we’ve met. But it is absolutely the last. Be a good chap and save the planet, will ya’ Ken?” Then she slid out of the car and walked toward the charging stations under the streetlamp, without looking back.

I have nothing to gain by getting involved with a bunch of corporate nut-jobs. I put the car in gear and eased off the brake letting the car roll towards a sewer grate I’d noticed on the way in. I was holding the vial with my thumb and two fingers of my left hand, dangling it out the window, when a blinding flash of light and a bolt of energy split the air. I nearly dropped the vial.

When I turned to see if the woman was okay, she wasn’t there. She was gone. I backed up and got out of the car and looked around. No sign of her and there was no place to hide. I looked up at the streetlight, it no longer sputtered, glowed or hummed, it just emitted a stale, flat, glare. A dozen moths seemed suspended in the air around the light. The largest one, arrested in mid-swoop, hung motionless in the still night air. A bat, focused on the moths, hung in the halo of the light a foot or two from its intended dinner. That’s when it hit me, the total absence of sound. The unnerving silence of infinity.

I stuffed that vial into my pocket, parked the car and headed for the doors of the convention center.

And the rest, I should say, is not history – and never will be.