Free Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine by Jw Schnarr Page B

deep into his ears and a massive hematoma, a Jupiterian shade of purple, the size of a dinner plate on his shoulder, and every twenty kills or so he puts another layer of damp washcloths over it to cushion himself for the next blast. His face is pitted with tiny, sweet burns from carbon embers and his right eye is somewhat eclipse-blind from the many thousands of muzzle flashes it has seen. There are two-hundred and seven boxes of ammunition left, bought in bulk an unremembered number of hours ago for a forgotten price. The slugs, by the gross, are stacked on his tool bench and on an abused Nautilus machine and in the cargo bed of his boyhood, yellowy-dented Tonka dump truck.
    The Time Traveler finds it weird that he is not hungry or thirsty or sleepy or particularly in pain or not in pain, except for his poor shoulder, nor hot nor cold nor even slightly ashamed of himself, just disappointed. And just a low, toothless, unangry variation of disappointment, a variation for which there is no word that he knows. The same kind one has upon the first five seconds of waking every time; the same kind one has when one remembers the gravity is still on. The Time Traveler thinks, is almost sure , that he has not eaten or drank or slept since he killed Hitler, but this can’t be true because that must be several weeks ago now, although he hasn’t kept track. He can’t recall the month, but that is partially because the names of the months keep changing and are always impermanent. It might be February or Thermidor or Five Crocodile or Shahrivar or The Month of the Sacred Plum.
    The Time Traveler thinks he might be a little insane now; he thinks undo/redo, undo/redo, undo/redo . The experiment must be negated and the universe must be dismantled and unboxed post haste. The Time Traveler has not made the world a better place, no matter how many men he has unmade. He knows he must reformat his hypothesis because the current one is incorrect.
    And, swabbing Bactine into the cratery, moon-pit burns on his cheek, The Time Traveler has his Eureka . The problem, it comes to him at once, is not men.
    The problem is man.
     
     
    The Time Traveler flips the dial, bored, and through the orange scrim of the Time Portal, It takes a while to find what he’s looking for. It takes four point five million years. The Time Traveler dismisses the Cro Magnon, the Neanderthal, the Homo Erectus, the Australopithecus Africanus. The brows thicken and the arms grow longer and the thumbs shorter, they sprout pelts and, in reverse time, extinguish their fires and scour the images of mammoths and sabertooth cats off the walls of caves.
    What a horrible people they will inevitably become , thinks The Time Traveler, me among them . Someday these monkey-children will shave the heads of their gassed-to-death cousins, and use the hair to stuff pillows and tan their flayed skins for lampshades. Those clever baby hands will invent the guillotine and the iron maiden and the disposable diaper and the F-86 Apache Gunship. Those bulbous skulls are the cocoons of monsters, they walk upright only because they know that some sunny day they will get to wear jackboots and goosestep in parade for the inspection of whichever one of them is the worst. They must be stopped at any cost. They must be prevented from contaminating the universe with the evil nougat center hidden in their dino-nucleic acid.
    At last The Time Traveler finds what he is looking for. He finds it in the Serengeti, in a copse of trees. He finds it eating thorny fruit and looking only the slightest bit human. He finds that it still has a tail, a tiny little waggly one. He finds the Missing Link.
    There you are, my pretty , thinks The Time Traveler.
     
     
    Fire rains down from heaven and apes fall from the trees like spoiled fruit. In their chirping language of hoots and barks, they ask the Sun God what they had done to anger him so and The Sun God clacks another round into the chamber.
    The dry grass of the