vituperation

No entry about Fred today. Today is about you. I hope you enjoy playing.

Sunlight paints the wooded hillside in a patchwork of light and dark, green and brown, as you pick your way through the heavy undergrowth that has overrun the rarely used path. Mosquitoes hum all around in the moist and heavy air, their high-pitched whine grating on your nerves. You swipe at the sweat running down your forehead in another vain attempt to keep it out of your eyes. Do you really want to climb all the way to the top of this damn hill just to find another geocache? What will you get for your effort? Another crappy plastic kid’s toy, if past geocaching experiences are any guide.

You pant and struggle and fight your way to the top of the hill, where you’re rewarded with no kind of view. Just more trees. You check the GPS in your hand. You’re almost right on top of the waypoint. Good. As soon as you find the damn thing, you can get back home to a nice beer and an afternoon in front of the television.

Back and forth you go, working the area as a grid. You wish your GPS were a little more accurate, wish it were able to narrow down a spot better than this. A plane drones by overhead, a small one, and you look up to see if you can see it. You can’t. Your foot catches on a wedge of rock poking up out of the ground and you stumble, nearly dropping your GPS as you flail your arms to catch yourself.

You land on your hands and knees and that’s when you see it from the corner of your eye. A brilliant flash of light, like a camera going off. You turn your head. There’s something laying in the dead leaves, about five feet away. It looks like a walkie-talkie, only where you would expect to see a speaker there’s some kind of shiny crystalline surface.

Sunlight reflecting off that, you think. That’s what I saw.

You crawl over to the walkie-talkie thing and pick it up. Upon closer inspection, you decide it doesn’t really look like a walkie-talkie at all. It looks like one of those miniature TVs everyone but you seemed to have when you were a kid. Well, kind of like one of those. The shiny part looks like a screen, but there’s no antenna for reception, and there’s only a single button below the screen. What an odd place for something like this! It’s almost like someone left it here to be found.

Left it for you to find, maybe.

Maybe this is the geocache. It’s a damn good one if it is.

Knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that the thing probably doesn’t work, you casually press the button on the front of the device. The screen lights up, then fills with characters you don’t recognize. It beeps, and you jump. It beeps again, then again, faster.

Like it’s counting down.

You stare at the odd characters on the screen. You listen to the beeps coming faster and faster, and you have time for one final thought—oh God I hope this thing isn’t about to blow up—and…

The world

goes

white.

You’re standing in the middle of a concrete jungle. Heat bakes up from the asphalt beneath your feet, giving everything a shimmer. The air reeks of exhaust. Tall buildings surround you, towering over you like giants.

Holy shit, am I in New Yo–

A car horn blats right behind you and you hear the scream of rubber on road as brakes are locked. Without thinking you leap to the side, out of the path of the sliding death you sense bearing down on you. The device you’re holding slips from your fingers and falls to the ground. As the unseen car slides to a stop, you watch the device smack the asphalt, see the shards of glass explode out of it like diamond splinters, tumbling end over end in that bizarre syrupy slow-motion time seems to take in a crisis. It bounces once and lays like a dead thing.

What the hell am I doing here? How did I get here? And then, I should get a souvenir as proof I was here.

“Get outta the fucken road,” a voice belows from behind you. It jerks you from your reverie. You turn.

A florid-faced man glares sullenly at you through the windshield of a yellow taxi. A frayed toothpick pokes from the corner of his mouth and as you watch, he rolls rolls it across his lower lip to the other corner. He waves an impatient hand at you to finish getting out of his way.

“Sorry,” you call, then something beyond the taxi catches your attention. Something that makes you forget all about the pissed off man, and about the fact that less than a minute ago you were in the woods halfway across the country.

Jutting up into the clear blue sky, the twin towers of the World Trade Center sparkle in the midday sun. Their beauty takes your breath away. Something rips in your heart.

The taxi driver honks his horn.

“C’mon buddy,” he yells through the open window. “Get a fucken move on!”

You backpedal to the curb, unable to look away from the towers. People flow around you like water, oblivious to the miracle around them. They’re acting so goddamn normal that you wonder for a minute if you’ve gone crazy.

“Excuse me,” you say to some stiff in a gray suit. He looks like an accountant.

He doesn’t slow as he passes you. You try another, this time a woman.

“Can you tell me the date?” you say to her. She looks over the top of her glasses at you as if you’d just taken a dump on the sidewalk.

“September tenth,” she says, her disdain evident in her voice.

“What year?” you ask, though you think you already know the answer.

“2001,” she tells you, and gives you a look that says I have mace in my purse and I’m about two seconds away from giving you a faceful.

It hasn’t happened yet.

You realize you’re less than 24 hours from the single worst terrorist act on American soil. Less than a day from the defining point for a generation. From the event that led to American invasion of two countries and thousands of human deaths.

And you know it’s going to happen.

What are you going to do?