Just in Time

A Story by Kyle

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"Woah, that was a crazy dream," I thought to myself as I woke up and began to walk downstairs for breakfast.

"Morning, Mom."
"Good morning, Justin. How'd you sleep?" My mother responded.

My mother was a loving one. She drove me places with my friends, made most of my meals, helped out with my teenage problems; she made life easy.

"Good," I answered. "I had a really crazy dream."
"Could you tell me about it?" She asked as she placed my bowl of Fruity Pebbles in front of me.
"Maybe later, me and Kyle are gonna walk up to BestBuy in a half hour and I still have to shower," I informed her.
"What for?" she inquired.
"I need new headphones," I told her.

And with that, she fled to the living room to watch her TV shows, shows I had never had any interest in.

I ate my cereal in about three minutes flat, ran upstairs, and turned on the shower.

Now about me. I'm only 15, still young. If you were to ask my friends about me, they'd say I'm a somewhat comical guy, average intelligence, but all around fun.
My best friend was Kyle. He has been since 4th grade. No special story on how we met, we were just in class and we sat next to each other, so like any normal kids, we talked. We shared many interests, and soon we were doing just about everything together. Now, we see each other nearly everyday. He lives 4 houses down the street, so it would be quite difficult not to see him this much. About 1/8th of a mile from his house is BestBuy, so we go there a lot, even when we don't really need anything.

Anyways, after getting in the shower for ten minutes, I was ready to get out. I grabbed my towel from the towel rack and dried off. When I finished getting dressed and brushing my teeth, I texted Kyle, who said he was ready to go. I walked over to his place, then we started towards BestBuy.

Since we both were going to get headphones, we talked anout what kinds we were each going to get and what color they would be and so on.
We made it to the BestBuy parking lot fairly quickly and stopped talking as we walked inside. The reason we stopped talking? It was what we saw. A man in all black with a ski mask holding what I am certain must've been a gun.

The gun was in his right hand, and on his hand was a tattoo of a weird design along with a scar going up into his sleeve.

Everybody else was on the floor in shear terror. We messed up, we messed up big time. Right away, we got down.
There was a big shelf of miscellaneous electronic gadgets at the entrance of the store. We would've ran out, but the criminal already knew we were there. He couldn't see the ground where we were, as the shelf covered it, but he could still see the door moving closed.

"Who's there!?" he shouted.

Obviously, we didnt answer. I pointed towards the back of the store where they had an abundance of inventory.
I figured we could find a hiding place in there or at least something hard to hit this guy with in a surprise attack. I took the lead as we began to crawl.

"I know you're here, damnit!" We heard him shout as we reached the back.

He sounded much closer to us than we expected, so we had no choice but to hide in this strange contraption that we saw. It was an unusual looking thing, barely enough room for me and Kyle. It was a large cylinder with a door, the door having a padlock. Fortunately for us, the door was already open. But we didnt actually know if the padlock worked, so we might have just walked right into our deaths.

We could tell this lunatic was getting closer to us. It was fairly obvious because we could actually see him approaching. For some reason the machine had an almost clear stained glass window on the door of it. We couldn't see details of this man, but the tattoo and scar were sketched in my mind for some reason.

Even though we knew we couldn't go anywhere, we still backed up. My life wasn't flashing before my eyes like they say it does in movies, all I was thinking about was why we were so unlucky. Backed up as far as we could go in the machine, we heard a strange sound. A sound sonewhat like keys jingling.

"Thanks for always being there for me, Justin," Kyle managed to spit out.
"You've been a great guy to me all these years," I replied, making nothing of the key sound.

But then, something unimaginable happened. We couldn't explain the feeling, but something began to cause both of us immense pain. I couldn't handle the pain much longer when it suddenly went away. Just like that. We then looked back out the stained glass window, awaiting the man who would end our lives. But at that moment, we saw no movement. We saw no color. We saw white.

"What the hell just happened?" I whispered to Kyle, not sure if I was just messed up from something related to the sharp pain I had experienced just moments earlier.
"I have no idea, but I don't think we're in the same place anymore."

Kyle began towards the handle. In my mind, I thought about pulling his hand away. But something was up. We both knew something just happened, except we had no idea what is was. Having trust in him, I watched as he opened the door to a place I had never seen.

"I can't believe this," we said in unison, as if we had practiced it hundreds of times before.

It was all gone. The robber, the innocent victims and bystanders; BestBuy itself was gone. My first thought: are we in Heaven? It seemed like it would be a weird Heaven considering it was a freshly paved parking lot, but we had just escaped a near death situation. Or did we?

We had many thoughts running through our minds, but we both managed to speak the same words.

"Where are we," we said as one voice once again.

"We've gotta get outta here," I said.
"Out of where? We have no idea what just happened," Kyle said back.
"Well, lets explore. Maybe we'll recall this place," I decided.

The place had a sense of familiarity, somewhat like the neighborhood Kyle and I lived in before this whole mixup.

"Kyle, do you think it's possible that we went back or forward in time?" I pondered. I had seen many SciFi movies, so that was the first thing to pop into my mind.
"I don't know, man, I just can't comprehend any of this," he replied.
"Well if we did, then that house right there is mine," I said, pointing at a house about 50 feet away from us.

But then I saw something, something I couldn't forget. I saw someone being taken out of my house in a casket. Or at least what I was thinking was my house. Since I believed it was my old home, I also believed that I must know who it was being taken away.

In fear of who it was, I slowly walked towards the men carrying the casket.
"Um, excuse me sir," I asked, trembling." I hope this isn't too forward, but may I ask who it is that has passed?"
I faced one of the men, waiting for an answer. He looked about 30 years old or so.
"Ah, I think it's something like Tames. Yeah, Sabrina Tames," the man spoke.

At that moment, I lost it all. I fell to the ground, tears already filling my face. The men, figuring I must have known this lady, said their condolences to me. Kyle was also getting tearful. We were both in complete awe by this.

Sabrina Margaret Tames, or as I called her, Mom, was gone. I had no idea what world we were in or what time period it was, but all I knew was that my mom was gone. Kyle managed to ask a question that I had been thinking about for a while, since I was down on the ground with tears that would never stop flowing.

"Sir, I know this is weird, but what year is it?" Kyle said to the same man who delivered the bad news to me.
"We'll it's May 28, 2036. 10:47 A.M. to be exact," the man answered.

The men began to load the casket into a car, and soon drove away. Just like that, and I didn't even get the chance to see my mother one last time.

But an even weirder thing had happened. The man said that it was 2036. An even weirder thing about it, thought, was that it was the same day and time we went to BestBuy. What we had stepped in was clear to us now. It was a time machine.

Ch./Pt. 2

After a half hour of my crying, I realized that I still had a chance to see my mother again. If we could figure out how to work the time machine, we could go back to our normal time. But could I ever live life normally again knowing the exact day of my mother's death?

We made our way back to the time machine, shocked by what we found.

A very poor looking man was beating it with a hammer.
"Pure evil!" he shouted.
"What's your deal!?" Kyle yelled in a very angry tone.

The man took a few more huge smashes at it before running off. I became very weak.

Kyle opened the door. We still weren't sure if the padlock ever worked, but we were sure it didn't now after that crazy old hag.

There weren't many controls inside the time machine when we first entered it at BestBuy, but now they were all clearly damaged. There was a button, a small screen with a keyboard under it, and nothing else.

The keyboard was broken, 100% smashed. The button was gone, we figured the old guy stole it. Both Kyle and I thought about how to make this thing start up and take us home, but We had no idea how this thing worked, so we sat down for about an hour trying to figure out what just happened and how to fix it. Still in pain from the recent news of my mother's passing, I was sad. And realizing that the only way we would make it back to our normal time was with the time machine that was now destroyed, I lost it. I began screaming, shouting, and doing anything possible to show my anger off to the world.