Monthly Short Story

Welcome! This is my monthly free short story page. Every month I will post a new story here, but it will only be up for seven days, so read it while you can!

And if you decide you like it and want a copy to keep, click the cover or the links at the bottom to buy a copy of your own.

Willie didn’t figure time travel would change anything.

Sure, he heard about the discovery on the news, same as everyone else. Thing was, he figured it didn’t apply to him. Discovery that big, no doubt the government was going to conscript and redact and twist and pontificate, until the only people who ever got to make use of the discovery were the sort who signed their lives away to government service.

Willie wasn’t a big believer in government “service.” Not since he got out. Volunteering, that was service he could get behind. Food kitchens every Saturday. Playing guitar for people on hospice every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. That was service. That was making a difference in people’s lives.

The government stuff, he’d seen enough of in his two-year stint as a grunt. Living under threat in bad conditions to shoot bullets at people over … some political disagreement or other.

Six countries in twenty-four months. Must have fired off more rounds than he earned dollars during that time. And it was during those two years that Willie did something that, well, no amount of volunteer service could ever make up for.

So, yeah, maybe time travel didn’t apply to guys like Willie.

Still.

When he heard about time travel on the noisy television up over the counter at the Gravy Caboose – his personal favorite greasy spoon because of how well they made chicken waffles with gravy fries – he had a fleeting thought that maybe, just maybe, he could go back in time himself.

Be Private Willie McTavish one more time, to set right what he did that day…

The jungle may not have been hotter than the desert was, but here the heat clung as bad as the stinky mud. Heat so damp it was like Willie woke up sweating. Like his shorts never made it into the dryer, but he had to wear them anyway, and his fatigues were even worse.

And “fatigues” was right. Damp as they were, they must have weighed ten pounds more than normal. Not something he noticed first thing in the morning, but after that afternoon march, then the firefight with the “rebels” – harsh term for people fighting for their own way of life, which Willie considered none of his business – just wearing them was exhausting. His clothes felt like lead and his pack so heavy he might have been carrying his whole platoon.

Maybe not the whole platoon. Maybe just the ones who’d died in the firefight. Hicks, Brayburn, Collins, and Devereaux.

Only eight guys in Willie’s squad still among the living when they found that burned out village. And it was a village, not a town or a city. Willie’s squad been briefed on this. There were still small tribes in Africa. Nomads mostly. Not part of any one nation, but allowed to go their own way as long as they stuck to certain restricted areas, because the muckety-mucks had decreed it. And because Uncle Sam gave the affected nations money.

There were reasons. Willie didn’t care.

All he cared about right then was a place to drop for a little while. Close his eyes. Let his heart rate get back to something like normal. Maybe get the chance to unclench his shoulders and jaw. Take a minute to think about the dead. Maybe say a prayer.

The village wasn’t much. Grass and wicker huts over a dry dirt clearing. Mostly burned away, but a few walls left to give something like shelter. More important was the dry dirt. “Dry” was like a half-remembered dream.

The sergeant didn’t want to stop. Said the villages were keep-away zones for us G.I. Joes. The ell tee overruled him. Said it was burnt out by the locals to drive the tribe away before the fighting came close. Said other things too, but by the time he got to them, the rest of the squad was horizontal and it didn’t much matter.

Mattered to Sarge.

Willie’d been the first one to drop his pack on the lovely dry ground, so Willie was the first of two named to perimeter guard. Not enough of the squad left for a proper perimeter, and they all needed rest something fearsome, so Willie got one one-eighty and Johnson got the other.

Getting back up was Hell. Holding his rifle again was worse. But worst of all, he had the one-eighty facing the jungle. Ferns and trees and flowers in wild colors. That damp, decay smell like it was all dying right in front of him, the way Devereaux had.

Every inch of it could have hidden guys who wanted nothing more than to shoot Willie. Or at least who were willing to pull the trigger at Willie for traveling thousands of miles and trying to tell them they were on the wrong side.

Willie’s arms were shaking, holding the rifle. His eyes teared up. So very tired, but his heart was pounding like it was trying to outrun stampeding elephants. Every crack and snap jerked his head, every strange bird cry raised his rifle.

Willie was going to die here. He was sure of it.

Then it happened. A face popped into view. And there was a rifle. Willie was sure he saw a rifle. Absolutely positive in the moment that just under that ink-dark face, a rifle came up like it was going to point at him in the next second or two.

Willie stopped breathing. Couldn’t hear anything but the rush of his own blood.

This was it. Him or this “rebel.” This poor soul who had nothing against Willie except that Willie was where he was, doing what he was doing. This poor bastard who had more right to shoot Willie than Willie had to shoot him.

But the instinct to survive was a powerful, powerful thing.

Willie only had maybe a second. But in that time his rifle sprang into firing position.

A burst of automatic weapon fire made the air stink of gunpowder. Made the rifle even hotter in Willie’s blistered and clenching hands.

Maybe the same moment. Maybe just after. Willie wasn’t sure, exactly. But the rest of the squad, they started shooting too.

Tore up that little patch of jungle something fierce.

Turned out, wasn’t rebels, and they weren’t armed. Villagers, where they weren’t supposed to be. Hiding from the war, instead of moving on to someplace safe.

No cameras and no witnesses. Didn’t matter. Willie confessed the whole thing right to the colonel when they got back to the base. Spent days waiting for the M.P.s. The tribunal.

Wasn’t ‘til later he found out, the ell tee and the colonel were old family friends. That the colonel buried the incident – and Willie’s report – the way the squad buried the bodies.

Deep.

Just about ninety days after the worst day in Willie’s life, he was discharged. Word was, the whole squad was, minus the ell tee, and Sarge. Honorable, according to the forms.

After Willie’d filled out those forms, two guys in black suits had come in and made very, very clear to Willie that he was never to talk about that day, or he’d spend the rest of his life in a rubber room.

Just about three years after the worst day in Willie’s life, he still woke up sweating. Still wondered what the hell he’d thought was a rifle. Branch, maybe?

And it was that incident that Willie thought of as he sat at the counter of the Gravy Caboose and watching the news segment about time travel.

Willie daydreamed about going back in time. Stopping himself from shooting, maybe. Or maybe just getting those villagers to flee to safety. He liked the latter idea better. Figured it had a better chance of making sure those poor villagers stayed safe.

Didn’t matter though, and Willie knew it. Time travel, that was for the muckety-mucks. Or maybe for the rich, and Willie was a lot of things, but rich wasn’t one of them.

So Willie tried not to get his hopes up. Tried to ignore the follow-up stories and in-depth articles and exposés and all the other segments about time travel over the coming months.

Wasn’t easy. Even the sports section talked about how time travel might affect records we’ve always thought of as set in stone. DiMaggio’s hitting streak. Cy Young’s wins. Settle questions like who knew what about the Black Sox scandal, and whether or not Rose gambled on the sport.

Just when things reached the point that Willie was ready to give up on the news altogether, the time travel stories just stopped. Maybe they actually faded away like most news stories do, but to Willie it seemed as though one day the stories were freaking everywhere, and the next the news was back to murders and politics. Business as usual.

Guy, at the counter of the Gravy Caboose, tried to make some kind of conspiracy theory about it. Got his voice all hush-hush and went on about how the government had the real thing and they were keeping it quiet and such like.

Willie didn’t see the point of the hush-hush tones. Figured it never could have been any other way. If there was time travel, of course the government controlled it.

And Willie continued to think that. Right up to the grand opening of Time of Your Life, the first time travel center in the Bay Area. Mountain View, to be exact. Dead center of Silicon Valley, of course, which made it not much more than twenty miles from Willie’s apartment down in Gilroy.

Willie tried to ignore it. Wasn’t easy, because the news did “features” and spot segments, not to mention the place did a metric ton of advertising. But Willie figured it was for the rich people. The Silicon Valley billionaires, or the venture capitalists, or just the old money Atherton types.

But then the dream came back.

Every night, Willie was back in that village. Every night he was pulling the trigger. But it wasn’t just the covering jungle he saw getting blown apart. Wasn’t just the smell of gunpowder and the chatter of his rifle. No. In the dream, he saw every face. Heard every scream. Smelled their blood and their perforated bowels.

And every time, Willie woke up screaming and sweating.

Willie survived three months of that before he couldn’t take it anymore. If it took every dollar he had, if it took the rest of his life to pay it off, Willie had to go back. He had to make things right.

He had to.

The Time of Your Life parking lot wasn’t small – the place looked like a converted grocery store, complete with plenty of parking – but it was jammed. Willie rumbled around for about ten minutes in his beat-up old Chevy S-10 pickup before he gave up and found street parking about two blocks away.

Willie’d been hoping that a Saturday morning in the spring would have been empty at a place like that. Hoped his breakfast shift at the shelter let him out early enough to beat the crowds.

Apparently he was wrong.

The inside of the place was done in blue and purple swirls of tile, and it had colorful posters of different times and places. Victorian parties. Gladiator fights in ancient Rome. The deck of the Titanic. The battle of Bannockburn. Woodstock and about a dozen other concert posters. The coronations of Queen Elizabeth II, Henry V, and others. More posters and times than Willie could begin to count.

One prominent poster, bigger than the others, showed a black and white photo of Hitler in his Nazi uniform, with huge yellow letters that read: “Kill Hitler!”

Willie did wonder how much they could charge for that, given that it could only be done once.

The cross-section of people all sitting around the huge lobby and filling out forms was amazing. Young and old, some in the latest fashions, others with clothes almost falling apart. Seemed that not only did everyone want to travel through time, but maybe, just maybe, everyone could afford it. Maybe not the Hitler package, but the chance to fix some misstep in life, to right some small wrong.

Or maybe, like Willie, some of them had a really, really big wrong to set right.

The harried lady at the counter shoved a clipboard with a form at Willie, gave him a number tag – Willie’s number was three eighty-six – and turned away to the next customer.

Willie found a seat off near the front window, next to a ficus, at the end of a row that held one big family. They all had pleasant features, well-groomed hair and clothes, and spoke in excited, hushed tones about meeting someone named Smith.

The form didn’t take Willie long. Mostly health questions and disclaimers. Willie’d filled out hundreds of forms like that in the service. Sure, on this one he had to lie in a couple of places, but that was par for the course. Truth was, Willie didn’t care if he came back broken, crazy or dead. Not so long as he saved those villagers.

Waiting for his number, that took a little longer. But waiting was another skill honed to a fine edge in the service. Rush, rush, rush, then sit on your hands for hours on end before it’s rush, rush, rush again.

Willie didn’t miss that.

Finally, though, Willie’s number was called.

It wasn’t an office, so much as a cubicle among a good dozen. That same gray cloth for the walls that Willie saw every time a delivery took him past the front desk of one company or another. This one smelled like aerosol potpourri.

In the cubicle, just a man with a keyboard, sitting in a leather executive chair. He wore a black suit – jacket draped over the back of the chair – but a vivid purple tie over his crisp, white shirt. His haircut was just as crisp. Sarge would’ve approved. He wore big glasses, the kind that had a computer HUD where he could see it and Willie couldn’t.

“Sit down, sit down,” the man said with a smile full of bright teeth. He kept talking before Willie could even sit in the red, rolling visitor’s chair. “You look like the ex-military type. Let me guess.”

He looked Willie up and down. Pointed his finger at him. “You want to kill Hitler?”

“No, I, uh—”

“Because if you kill Hitler, be sure to get the tee shirt on this visit. We don’t keep records of where you went or what you did, so after you leave there’ll be no way to prove you qualify for the shirt.”

“I’m not here for Hitler.”

“Oh. Want to try your luck with Marilyn Monroe? We don’t sell a tee shirt for this one, but—”

“No!” Willie was sweating now. His heart was pounding, and this guy wouldn’t shut up.

“Hey,” the man said, raising his hands in surrender, “we’re not talking rape here. Our historians just happened to find out about this one party where the sex goddess herself showed up looking for Mr. Right Now, and—”

“Let me talk!”

“I’m sorry,” the man said with that big smile. “It’s just that the possibilities are so endless, we want to make sure you understand your options.”

“I know exactly what I want to do.”

Willie was sitting forward in the chair now, bouncing a little the way he used to, when he knew a fight was coming. Like his body was going to make sure it was ready, whether he wanted it to or not. And he had the same loose, watery feeling in his bowels, perfect contrast to a mouth so dry he had to clear his throat before he could talk.

It was while Willie was clearing his throat that the man actually lost that smile. Got a sympathetic expression on his face. He reached down somewhere behind him and grabbed a bottle of water. Spoke in gentle tones while Willie drank.

“This is a personal thing, isn’t it? Either you want to go back for the one that got away, or you made some huge mistake that you want to fix. Right?”

“Mistake. Big one.”

“Don’t tell me any details,” the man said quickly. “Especially if it involves breaking the law. We have to report anything like that.”

“How can you send me—”

“If you’ve got something specific, something outside our usual packages, all we need are the date and location. What you do there is your business.”

Willie nodded. Pulled out his notebook with the date and the GPS coordinates, as near as he could glean the latter from the internet. He started to hand them to the man, but the man put his hands up again.

“Let me give you some advice,” the man said. He shook his head. “Don’t do this.”

“I need to,” Willie said, putting every bit of whatever soul he had left into those words.

“All the more reason you shouldn’t,” the man said. “Look, haven’t you—”

“I have to make it right!”

“Haven’t you seen the news?”

Willie shook his head.

The man sighed. “Let me put it this way. Today alone, probably two hundred people are going to try to kill Hitler. Hell, a good half of them, at least, will succeed.”

Willie was only half-listening. His lips were open now, and he knew he was panting. He was so close now. Why did this man delay him?

“Maybe half as many will try to nail Marilyn Monroe. Or Jane Mansfield. Or somebody like that. Or they’ll try to save Jack Kennedy on that day in Texas, and a bunch of them will succeed too. Why do you think so many people can do those things?”

Willie just stared blankly at the man. There was some sense in those words, somewhere, but Willie couldn’t puzzle it past his heartbeat.

“You can’t change the past,” the man said. “Time travel seems to work, but truth is it either creates one hell of a delusion, or it creates alternate timelines. The timeline version is more popular with scientists, but personally I like the delusion angle. It means we aren’t messing up whole other worlds just for our own amusement.”

Willie was stuck on one sentence there.

“You can’t change the past?”

“Nope.” The man shook his head firmly. “You could kill Hitler every day for a month, but World War II still happened, complete with death camps. You could seduce Monroe every day for a year, but she’d never leave that night pregnant, no matter how fertile you are. Hell, you could kill Lee Harvey Oswald all you like. He’ll still shoot Jack Kennedy.”

He leaned forward, his eyes boring right through Willie.

“Whatever you want to go back and change, you can’t. You said what you said. You did what you did. My advice? Forget time travel and go see a therapist.”

Willie started to get up, but stopped and dropped back down into his chair.

“Wait,” Willie said. “You said something about alternate timelines?”

“It’s just a theory.”

Willie looked at the man until he sighed.

“You can’t change our past. That’s fixed. But some of the scientists, they think that if you go back and make a change, the time stream branches off. Creates a world where whatever you changed becomes that world’s past.”

The man must have seen the light come into Willie’s eye, because he rushed to add, “Doesn’t change anything here though. You get back to the exact same world you left. Whatever you really did is still what really happened.”

“But if I” – Willie saw the man’s hands waving him to shut up – “hypothetically, went back to a time and place where I could save a bunch of lives—”

“Those people would still be just as dead.”

“Here. But in another world…”

The man sighed again. Sagged in his chair. Defeat in his voice as he said, “In another world, maybe – maybe – they’ll still be alive. If that theory’s true. You may just be fooling yourself.”

Willie gave a helpless shrug.

“That’s a chance I have to take.”

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