And The World Went White

© Andyhm. 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons. All characters engaging in sexual relationships or activities are 18 years old or older.

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This is a flash story I wrote as an exercise earlier this year. It's a piece that I had a lot of fun writing. There's no sex, just a lot of blood and guts. Many thanks to Nora for her editing skills.

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And the world went white.

I hate fucking time travel, there I said it. I... hate... fucking... time travel. The holy grail of science fiction stories and the reality is that it hurts, it feels like some asshole is sanding your skin off and shining a searchlight at your eyes. And when things go wrong, as they inevitably do, they go spectacularly fucking wrong.

Our instructions were simple on paper. Take a quick trip back to the Cretaceous-period, because the academics need more information about Velociraptors. The last team they sent back had landed on the flank of an active volcano and only managed to bounce back seconds before their time sphere would have been enveloped by magma.

Our mission was to observe and record a group of Velociraptors hunting. We need to prove that they were far more intelligent than the academics previously thought. Get us proof that they cooperated as they hunt in packs. We can only observe and record, trying to take anything from its timeline causes the time sphere to stop working. A simple assignment then; go back, don't land on an active volcano. Find a pack, and then record them hunting down prey, it sounded so simple. Never trust simple!

Well, guess what, they do hunt in packs, and they are bloody good at it. Four of us were in the sphere for the jump. And just to prove the world hates me, my bloody ex-wife was on the team, selected for the mission.

I should have guess something was up when I was pulled into the project manager's office before the mission briefing.

"Look, I know that under normal circumstances, I'd never ask you to jump with Lindsey. But you two are the best-qualified people we have on hand for this jump, so I need you to accept the situation," the project leader told us. "You need to work together on this." And then to make a bad day even worse, I was reminded that Lindsey had seniority and would be the mission commander.

His office door shuddered as I slammed it behind me, the frosted pane of glass cracked from top to bottom. That would be the third one I'd have to pay for this year.

Simple, my ass; we lost Peter within minutes of arriving.

"Of course, you won't need to leave the safety of the pod. The landing zone has been chosen because numerous velociraptor fossils have been found in the area. You should only need to use the sphere's remote cameras and the drones." Famous last words from the mission director at our briefing, which lasted as long as it took that idiot Peter to get the million-dollar drone, stuck in a tree fern.

Lindsey was apoplectic in her rage. "I'm not going back and reporting the loss of a million-dollar drone. So as you got it stuck, you go and recover it," Lindsey told Peter, in her arrogant, condescending voice. One that she usually used, to make my life a misery. At least she wasn't shouting at me, which was a bonus.

That didn't last. I tried pointing out that our mission orders specifically instructed us not to leave the sphere, and I receive the full blast of her anger.

"If I did everything that's in our orders we'd never achieve anything. I just treat them as suggestions. So I don't give a flying fuck what you think. Peter is going to get the drone, and Janice can cover him from the doorway. You can cower in here, that all you are good for."

Well, I wasn't going to complain. I like it when my skin stays in one piece, but I was concerned about our orders. What else in them, had Lindsey ignored?

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Did you know that the skin of a velociraptor has the same properties as a Chameleon?

No.

Well, neither did we, and it was very good camouflage. It turned out that there were three of the fuckers hiding in plain sight, bare yards from the door as it opened. The first we knew was when a clump of bushes suddenly grew teeth and claws, and a screaming Peter disintegrated into his parts.

Janice was standing in the doorway, cradling a heavy-duty taser, our only weapon. We have this stupid rule that we are not allowed to kill anything in the past, unfortunately, that restriction only works one way. We are fair game to anything we encounter.

Tasers don't stop velociraptors; they don't even slow them down. I think they get a sexual thrill from the electricity. Janice was ripped away from the doorway, into an orgy of a feeding frenzy, and the outside of the sphere got a new red paint job.

Which brings us to our current situation. Spheres don't work when there is a great fucking hole in the electronics bay.

The scent of blood attracts scavengers, and as luck would have it the closest scavenger turned out to be a five-ton female Tyrannosaurus Rex. She seemed to think that the pod was a fancy big egg, and there was a juicy morsel inside. Us!

The sphere weighs two tons; the T Rex batted it about like a kitten with a ball. Did you also know that they have the patience of a saint?

That was four days ago, I'm going to die sometime soon, and my fucking ex won't stop screaming. It turns out that the other thing she thought was optional in our orders was our arrival date and location. The stupid bitch had changed the time and our landing coordinates, so our rescue team hasn't where and when we are.

The only two people alive in this godforsaken time and we have our pet T-Rex that keeps giving the sphere an occasional love tap. She loves us so much that she's building a nest for her egg next to us. I think mama is saving us up for her baby's first meal. Lindsey is in the corner, whimpering to herself.

Oh, and the reason we are divorced. Lindsey decided she needed to find himself. My ex got gender transformation surgery. Whichever way, I'm fucked.

The end.