The ruminating had kept his mind occupied, and the walk into the town of Bisonfield took Andy just about half an hour. Arriving in town Andy muttered a hoarse “holy shit” as he looked around; it all looked so very different from the day before. Just as desolate but way worse, like there had been fighting and strife, but not recently. Like the church, the town looked to have been vacant and neglected for years. He found a store, a General Store so to speak, that appeared to have been looted and trashed a long time ago. Tufts of long grass sprung from cracks in the sidewalks, the lawns surrounding the few sagging houses he passed were overgrown and run to seed. Paint peeling, doors loose in their frames, porches on the verge of collapse, broken windows. He walked past the spot where he parked his truck the day before. There were very few cars on the street, but the ones he did see looked oddly modern and at the same time horribly old. Every tire on every car was flat and dry-rotted, every paintjob was faded and peeling, most of the windows cracked or broken. Bisonfield, which looked pretty bad to begin with only yesterday, looked like twenty years had passed in the space of a day, and looked like every single citizen had packed up and fled a long time ago. He was convinced. He would find no help here, not today. He wouldn’t find a store open; he wouldn’t find the sheriff or a deputy, he would not locate a working telephone, and he would not likely find any water. This place was a bust, just as he’d been afraid of. But holy shit, what now?
He continued to wander around the town; it was on the backstreets where he saw the first bodies. He had no idea how long it took a human stiff to rot itself into a skeleton, but he found quite a few near-skeletons on porches, near-skeletons in yards, stores broken into and cleaned out, bare shelves, rotten food, more almost-skeletons. Andy sat on a rickety wooden bench outside of what at one time must have been a meeting place of some kind. It took all of ten seconds for the rotting wood on which he’d rested his behind to crack and then give way completely, spilling him to the crumbling sidewalk below. Sprawled on the ground and feeling like a total ass, Andy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, or to just remain here on the dirty pavement until he died of hunger or a broken mind. Or both… he took in his surroundings, very carefully observing every little thing this time. Had he really slipped in the timestream somewhere and landed in the future? He was actually beginning to think it was his imagination, or a bad dream, or a fever from some bad chow, or something equally off the wall. But looking around himself at this moment, he knew better. He was here yesterday, had parked his truck right there, catty-corner across the street and down a block. And although this town looked neglected and empty then, it looked totally different today. Today it looked abandoned and dead. Like years, maybe decades had passed instead of 24 hours.
For the sake of having nothing better to do, and quite genuinely afraid that he really could die out here, he decided to at least feed his curiosity some. He got up slowly and brushed the detritus from the broken bench and the dirty sidewalk off of his clothing and walked to the next corner, turned right and passed by a few more ramshackle houses. By now he was a block past where he’d parked yesterday, on the corner of the next cross street and the side street that ran parallel to the main street. The street behind the main drag looked even worse, back there the plant life had nearly taken over everything.
A large blue house stood across that street, and Andy went to it. He climbed the rickety steps ever so gently, lest he not take another spill, letting himself inside through the partially open front (when is a door not a door? When its ajar…) door. The interior of the old house stank, and he found nothing of significance. Without going all the way through to what used to be the kitchen, he turned to head back out. He idly wondered if he was aging biologically while outside of his own timescape, and when (if…) he found his way back to 2024 would the same amount of time have passed there as had passed here while he was a guest. Something caught his eye on the rotting couch there, a brittle and yellowed newspaper. He picked it up, careful not to rip or shred the precarious relic, and read with dawning horror several short articles on the state of affairs as they had been on November 19, 2034.
He probed into three other houses in the next hour. On closer looks he found other papers, more articles about the current breakdown occurring through the summer and fall of 2034. He found more near-skeletons in beds and back rooms, near-skeletons in kitchens, more bare shelves, more rotten food. He went into another house and hit the jackpot; here had lived a resident who knew what was going on with not only what he called Armageddon, but also about a rumored time portal obscured in the old church. He’d kept a journal right up to the day he died in hopes that someone someday might find it. From the look of some of the items there, it appeared this house had once been the home of good old Brother Nelson Jeraboam Tindall, the last leader of the church where he’d spent the previous night.
Interlude –
Unbeknownst to Andy, the year is 2041. The time warp took him to a different date altogether, it was just random luck that it was close to the same time of year. It is actually earlier, mid-May.
The time portal, originally discovered in 1910, was kept a secret to all except for a chosen few, and passed down generationally among families, specifically the Tindall’s and the Boyal’s. It was outed more than a century later, in late 202o, during Covid. The mayor and the local law closed the town off to all but a few in 2021 because of it, and most of the population fled; of the original 308 count of the 2020 census, around 115 remained. Those who stayed turned the church to their own use. They were alchemists, and Christian Science adherents; Church of Christ, Scientist. Except for one man, who was a Jehovah’s Witness, and whom they tolerated because of his bloodline, his pedigree, if that term may please you more. Experiments began in earnest in 2022, and they might have gotten somewhere with space and time manipulation, but the end came first. In what can only be called a great celestial goof, they literally ran out of time.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses were right about the time of the end, finally; they had gotten the prophecy wrong multiple times but in the end, at the end, they were right… The sect, originally under the tutelage of Charles Taze Russell, had been crystal balling Armageddon since 1879. Their first prophecy of many pinpointed 1914 as the year when Jehovah the almighty God and Satan the Devil himself would step into the symbolic ring and go blow for blow — the ultimate throwdown.
Andy thinks he might be able to find a way back through to where he belongs, if he reads this stuff carefully. He finds and eats some old stale food; cookies and wafers as hard as those chunks of broken sidewalk by the bench he fell off of. Stupid of him, he knew it, but a starving man… you know. He gets sick on it; stumbles into what used to be the kitchen and vomits into a porcelain basin coated with dust, dirt, slime and dead bugs that used to be the sink. Sick only briefly, he then finds some water in plastic bottles, all this in somebody’s house.
Andy has begun to fear that all is lost, he navigates despair and self-pity coupled with anger and self-loathing, and then he meets somebody. He left New York City on June 9, 2024, and landed here on June 21, 2024, making today June 22. Except that now it is May 15, 2041… and there is someone here.
On his walk out of town Andy raids one more old house, and there he finally makes contact. In a different house on a different block he’s been poking around, and now he’s reading from a different journal, one that didn’t stop when the previous one did. The last entry in that other journal was November 28, 2034. That last writer had said it was all over, almost everybody in town was gone by now, except a few stragglers (him, the Colonel, a few old ladies…), and this would be his last entry. The person had written that he was going to “go downstairs and finish it up now. Forgive me God, I still cannot bring myself to call you Jehovah, I didn’t believe them. Forgive me my ignorance, and forgive me my final act, if you see fit.” Andy had no doubt that the last writer had followed through on his intended suicide, and no doubt that if he descended into the dank basement of that house he would find a smirking skeleton, either dangling from the ceiling or sprawled out on the floor. Waiting there to greet him.
But this one here, in this journal there was more, and he stood mesmerized as he read the things written. He put the notebook down and reached for another one, and then he saw that that there was another stack of notebooks and each had a year written across the cover. The one on top was 2037, the one under that was also 2037, the one under that was 2036. Jesus. Nearby was one more stack of these spiral notebooks, the number written on the top one of that pile grabbed his attention — 2041. Je-zuss… He went to reach for the notebook and…
“HALT!” a voice as sharp as steel barked from directly behind him. He whirled around and was face-to-face with a very old man, standing directly behind him.
“I… I’m sorry,” Andy stammered. “I… I didn’t think anybody was here. I…”
When he saw Andy, the shaky old fellow broke into a broad smile and held out both hands, palms up.
“It’s ok, and hi there, I’ve been waiting for you.” He coughed up a few times, cleared his throat, leaned up against a wall to steady himself.
“You,” he said, still smiling, “must be Andy!”
Of any and all the words Andy might have expected to pour out of this man’s mouth, these were not among them. Andy took two halting steps backward, stunned to silence, shocked to the bone. He quite nearly pissed his pants in this man’s house. Holy shit, this was the be-all and the end-all of this whole cataclysmic catastrophe, that which had begun as a simple cross-country road trip and morphed into this surreal episode. The final countdown, the last meshuggeneh. An apparition that actually called him by his name, now that was a new one. In a completely deserted town, in a year unknown to him, there is suddenly one old croaker who not only appears out of nowhere, but even knows his name. I’ve slid off my rocker, he thought, and I am ready for the bin… and even then the old man spoke again. Ok, not a ghost, not a spirit, not a goddam hallucination either, this was a living breathing human being.
“Sit down, Andy,” the old man said gently. “Nice chair, still good, right back behind you there.” When a dumbstruck Andy didn’t move, the old man said, “go on, now. I’m gonna tell you a story, tell you everything you want and need to know, and I don’t want you falling over or passing out. I’m too old to hoist your ass back up off the floor.”
Andy, still flummoxed, did as he was instructed. He lowered himself into the chair this old fellow had pointed out to him. The man then did the next logical thing, he introduced himself.
“Artemus Baxfelder Boyal, Colonel, Vietnam, retired. Former Jehovah’s Witness and singular Armageddon survivor. Amateur scientist. Nice to meet you again, Andy.”
Hi… hello..” Andy stammered out. “Nice… you too…” he said, then stopped. Again? Whatha… thafuck…?
“Ask me a question. I know you got a million of ‘em.”
“I do,” Andy managed to gasp out. “I mean… you know my name…”
“That’s not a question, but yes, I do. Andy.”
“You said… again. Meet you… again, you said again,” he managed to repeat himself.
“Still not a question, but yeah, I did. We’ll get to that part,” the Colonel replied.
“But how?”
“Now there’s a question, yep. Because we have met,” he said, moving a few steps closer to Andy. He continued, “because you’ve been here before. It would be, oh, yea, right around 17 years ago.”
Andy shuddered but kept his cool. “No, can’t be. No, 17 years ago, I was still in school, still living at home with my folks in Jersey. I’d never been any further west than Harrisburg.” He did a quick mental calculation. “That was 2007. My senior year at Neptune High School.”
“Actually, that was 2024. Mid-July. Now go ahead and ask me what you really want to know,” he said. “Go on, go ahead.”
“W… what’s… what is…” Andy couldn’t seem to vomit out those four little words, so he made it five. “Shit, what year is it?”
“2041,” he replied. “May 15, 2041”
Artemus Baxfelder Boyal, Colonel from the Vietnam war, the last survivor of this town, explains to Andy that he was left alive because he was a Jehovah’s Witness, but he did not follow the survivor’s directive to migrate to Allentown (renamed New Beth-Sarim), Pennsylvania because of his age.
“Migrate to Allentown?” muttered Andy, sounding as dumbstruck as he looked. “Beth who?” he added.
The two men settled in for a nice, long, and highly strange conversation.
