Time Storm at Tesco

Clean up on aisle five

I was shopping, feeling the residual chill in the freezer aisle at the local Tesco supermarket, when a national alert blurted out on everyone’s mobile phone at once. The unmistakable, blunt synchronised chimes rippled through the cavernous, white-walled consumer warehouse, echoing through the open space.

An elderly lady nearby fumbled and then dropped a glass bottle of pasta sauce, which shattered and splattered dramatically across the width of the aisle.

The surveillance camera operator must have caught it, and over the Tannoy came the huff of a male voice: ‘Clean up on aisle five’.

I had a half-full basket, betraying the random thoughts of a bored bachelor, with a dumped selection of unnecessary items chosen for ‘me-time’ in front of Netflix tonight. I had lost my girlfriend recently after an argument about politics and two nights of snoring loudly, so I excused my subsequent life choices in full self-pity-related hedonism. There was a large bag of extra spicy nachos, a ‘family size’ ham and mushroom pizza, and a large fridge-pack of overpriced craft beer called Savage Smoke. When I dared think about my need to overeat and overdrink, it was a little pitiful, so I welcomed the distraction of an event to worry about. It was only when I pulled out the long flat screen from my shorts pocket in curiosity that I realised my life was about to change forever.

‘Ten minutes to evacuate!’, the message flashed, complete with the exclamation mark and a danger-red background. This wasn’t a terror attack or a hurricane; it was the ultimate warning. It was a warning about a massive time anomaly.

Time storms were few and far between, but on those bizarre days when they spiked, there would always be casualties.

The most notable in my memory involved a tourist coach full of elderly Californian sightseers in Norway, glitching into the aftermath of a full-blown Viking raid. The coach party didn’t appreciate their predicament, imagining they had driven into a film set by accident. Meanwhile, the blood-smeared horde assumed Thor’s chariot had arrived to deliver to them sacrificial souls for the victorious warriors. While a few passengers were hacked into chunks with axes, as they alighted the coach with their walking sticks and fanny packs, several did make it back in one piece to tell the tale. Thankfully, the storms always spat travellers back into their origin time. It was the biggest saving grace of time-weather phenomena.

Around me, the previously slow-paced, well-mannered throngs in the Tesco superstore erupted into sheer chaos and shouting. People abandoned their stacked trolleys and dropped their baskets where they stood, and ran wide-eyed for the car park, with kids dragged behind them at arm’s reach. Mums and dads juggled their car keys frantically, telling their children there was nothing to worry about, as shrill screams cut the air in every direction.

Of course, time events being so rare and interesting meant some people, people like me, for instance, felt a little differently. I smiled quietly and remained standing, noticing a few others like me, like pillars of stone, emerging from a retreating tide of those fleeing for the exit.

As I surveyed the scene, I saw that the cashiers were running too, vaulting barriers and pushing past customers; all professional civility dropped. Like the captain on the sinking ship, the store manager bucked the trend; officious in his responsibilities. He stopped momentarily to announce a hurried customer information message on the Tannoy, to ‘run for your lives in an orderly way’, which only added to the immense sense of drama.

The handful of us standing steadfast caught each other’s eyes knowingly. We each recognised that these storms were unique opportunities to see things few could dream of. Why would you run from an epic adventure this spectacular? Besides, in some ways, as a story-hungry freelance journalist, it was my job to see it. The main reason, however, for most who made this unusual decision to endure a time travel event, was simply the tantalising promise of recognition and wealth. Time travel witnesses became overnight A-listers – that was a guarantee, with sponsorships and product endorsements, and film rights and media appearances that followed.

There was a young woman in the same aisle as me, with orange-framed glasses, a neat black bob, a pristine white T-shirt, torn jeans and blue slip-on Vans. She looked vaguely European, well-ironed and presented with a few quirks of style, like a butterfly brooch and a thick polka-dot hairband. Introductions were a good idea before navigating a time storm, because the person on your shoulder might act against you or with you, or might even save your life. I felt it was worth getting to know who was with me ‘in the trench’.

“My name’s Isaac! I am a writer,” I informed her loudly and quickly. I was grinning madly by now. It was like I was being funnelled into the main-attraction flume in a waterpark.

I put my basket down firmly on the floor and realised I looked a little unkempt in my faded polo shirt, beach shorts and black Crocs. I was aware I was unshaven; it was a day off for me, and I hadn’t expected to be talking to an attractive stranger in a grocery store in the midst of a major event.

“June, medic in training,” she replied enthusiastically and strode toward me to shake my hand firmly.

‘Jackpot!’ I thought, a medic in training, that was some luck. If I got injured, I would at least have a chance. She was undeniably attractive, which made me feel a little disingenuous in my approach.

Near the cakes’ aisle, a group of lurking teens skiving off from the local college were getting their phones ready to record, punching each other on the arms to psyche themselves, to be fully present for the experience that was promised. They pogoed on the spot, shaking out nervous energy, like boxers’ pre-fight, or thrash metal fans about to enter a violent mosh pit.

A thick-set, wiry-bearded and heavily tattooed man-mountain, who had the presence of an ex-soldier, dressed in a high-viz yellow vest, casually took a seat where a cashier had left it spinning. He had a ruthless calmness that was impossible not to admire. On his thigh-thick bicep was an inked dagger through a heart. It had a blood red lining both around the image of the weapon and the organ. I guessed he may be a psychopath as well as a store security guard.

“You ready?” asked June. Not European, I realised, just fashionable and noticeably clean and neatly presented, an unusual combination for this scruffy English market town. My biases and prejudices were peaking.

“Not really,” I replied, “But hey, this is going to be something. Look at the alert, it’s updated. They say the readings indicate it may be a long leap, maybe millions of years, or a layered mash-up event! This is going to be a one-off, I think, the longest time storms have only been in thousands of years, not millions.”

“If we survive this one, we will be on the major news channels tonight and for the rest of the year. This is it!” she beamed.

“Yeah, welcome to Jurassic Park!” I laughed, with a tangled ball of nerves to complement my big dumb grin.

I caught her looking down at the items in my abandoned silver wire basket, and my cheeks burned a little with a blush.

“That bad, eh?” she smirked, amused.

It was obvious we were both in it not just for the experience, but indeed, for the fame and fortune that would follow. This was a ticket to a payday we may never get the chance at again. All we had to do was live through it till it ended.

A town siren was now wailing outside across the rapidly emptying car park. Police were blocking the entrance to the supermarket feeder road with their long, blue and yellow striped Volvos.

“I guess you’ve never been in a time storm before?” she asked.

“No… You?”

“Almost… I ran to be honest – to just beyond its boundary… I watched the glitch – it was so colourful and weird. It only lasted a second in my time, but it was much longer for those caught inside. It was the Neolithic period… One out of the three witnesses survived, he said his partner and a stranger were skewered by someone who thought they were demons. You know, despite all that, I promised myself if it happened near me again, I would not run…”

“Fuck!” I gasped in awe. “I do remember that one on the news! You were actually there! Wild! I get you, too; you can’t not do this. It’s like magic but real.”

Time storms began about two years ago, in line with the breakthrough innovation of interstellar engines for space travel. The launch of the first galaxy explorer probe at faster-than-light speed ripped the fabric of space-time a little in its wake, creating what could only be described as sporadic incidents of time weather. It was still affecting Earth since that initial launch, in very localised regional ways.

When there were witnesses from either side of the time event, they always returned to their original time when the storm passed. The experience for those caught inside lasted for about twenty minutes. It seemed like a relief that the time we knew rarely changed by a huge degree despite these hiccups and rewritings of history. However, we were not always certain how witnessing the future in the past impacted the present, and we suspected timelines might shift in ways we were unaware of. For instance, ancient books predicted cars, buses and mobile phones in odd ways, but the thickest thread of history, right up to World War Five, seemed to be intact as before each event.

In basic terms, time travel, for me, promised the ultimate adrenaline ride and the greatest news story, more so than war zones and world politics; it was something beyond sensational.

“We can’t just be standing in the open like this. If we’re heading for this place millions of years ago, the level of the land will be different, probably lower,” I said, and she nodded, fully engaged, heightened senses sparking with energy.

The first signs of the storm’s manifestation were showing. The hairs on my arms were uncurling to attention with a static buzz, and the clouds outside were spinning in whirlpools like a fluffy vapour pulled by a powerful fan. The ground began to shake as if we were in an earthquake, so the heavily stacked products wobbled where they were placed, and then tumbled onto the floor in crashing waves of branded bottles and food containers. June held onto my arms tight, and we spread our feet to centre our balance. There was excitement in the moment, dare I say romance even. It felt incredible, fantastic, and dangerous.

The teens were whooping ecstatically nearby as the walls juddered. They were an odd bunch to behold, three scarecrow boys and one edgy tom-girl. They looked like they’d been friends forever. They rocked a grungy look, the kind with obscure metal band T-shirts beneath baggy hoodies and big belts and boots. The boys had guyliner and earrings. They were busy with a strategy, working in synchronicity without speaking to each other, creating an arch over themselves, pulling out pieces of aisle shelving and collapsing them into a kind of metal frame, like a shell around them. The brutish guy in the high-viz vest was calmly tucking himself into the passport photobooth near the exit, pushing his boots and hands against the three solid walls, effectively cocooned in a ready-made roll cage.

The air and any sense of movement seemed to arrest and then freeze, and there was a bright flash, a sense of extreme vibration, and, like the world had decided to end, the floor totally collapsed, as the large building fell into a newly opened void beneath it. The heat increased instantaneously with the tail-end of the time jump, and all the tall shop windowpanes shattered loudly as the supermarket folded in on itself in a catastrophic collapse.

Checking out

Without sharing the plan, June and I had the instinctual presence of mind to climb into a sizable freezer unit just as the corrugated roof above us began to fragment and rain down debris in shards. We curled up into the cold confined space, entangled in the products. There was no room or time to worry about personal boundaries. Pieces of metal roofing material smacked the thick freezer glass, bursting spiderwebs of cracks above us. We could sense the weight of the roof fragments as they shook the freezers. We felt a primal, uncomplicated panic that we might be buried alive in the chilled plastic bags of frozen vegetables and clutched each other tightly with claw-like fingers. It was claustrophobic, but we were at least together. It was strange how an event and strangers could mix so potently to become a moment.

The freezer dropped with the breaking floor, so our stomachs rose a little inside us as we became weightless with the plummeting warehouse. A million grocery products crashed together into an almighty riverbed of everyday ‘stuff’, a soup of commerce, sculpting an unnatural landscape from the shop’s contents. There was a decisive crunch, and we felt we had landed on the ground of the new world, or rather, the old world. The supermarket had all but finished its process of collapse and disintegration.

“We’re okay, that’s it. The worst of it, it’s done…” June gasped, staring at me in disbelief, relieved to hear our breathing, to feel our racing hearts together as we pressed against each other. She managed to crack another reassuring smile. “Can we get out of this freezer now?”

“I can push it open with my foot!” I said, almost shouting for some reason, a symptom of shock I suspected.

We climbed out and instantly surveyed the surroundings to check if any of our fellow time travellers had survived. The corners of the building and a couple of walls had mostly remained upright, but the rest was a mess of products and twisted shelves, and there was an open sky above us with no roof. It revealed the kind of pure, almost purple-blue skyscape I had not seen since the Covid-15 pandemic.

Sparks were coming from the broken remains of a wall, and I could hear the clattering sound of a generator kicking in somewhere, which must have survived the fall, somewhere at the other end of the store, feeding the exposed wires with current. I could smell acrid smoke too, I guessed it had been one hell of a rip from the foundations.

The landscape outside had changed. The car park, the multitude of lampposts and strings of telephone wires, the houses on the horizon, the row of green national flags, those boring everyday visual markers had all vanished. There were tall rocks, looping vines connecting strange trees. It was a bizarre tropical panorama where bus stops and corner shops should have been.

We scanned the hillocks of rubble and zigzagging aisles that had landed badly from a height. The dust was still falling and swirling about us from the crash landing.

I could hear coughing, groaning and complaining, but it quickly transpired that no one seemed to have been seriously hurt from those who had joined us in this misadventure. There was a little blood, but from superficial cuts and scrapes. To my surprise, the teens were giggling like a ragged pack of hyenas. ‘Everyone thinks they will survive these things’, I thought to myself; death is unthinkable when you intend to tell the story later.

June and I grappled across the rubble and mounds of packaged food and brightly branded cleaning products to join up with the circling group in the dust and dirt, for solidarity. The slightly disturbing security guard was already shuffling with them by the time we arrived. He seemed relatively calm, like a bird of prey, with a regal confidence in his status in nature.

“Hi everyone, I’m Isaac, and this is June… We just met over there… In a freezer…”

They stared at us nonchalantly. It was awkward. One, the loudest of the teen quartet, chirped into a song and dance, as if this was what he knew, like he had been summoned to perform.

“I’m Clay, this is my brother from another mother, Damon, my sister from another mister, Charlotte, and lastly, this specimen is my cousin from another cousin, Oscar….”

To which Oscar retorted with a gentle slap in Clay’s cheek. It was all a joke to them, just another wacky, crazy day to laugh off with dumb-fuckery.

“We’re influencers, you may have recognised us from the local news. We have three million followers between us. That’s right, we’re in this for the likes and comments. We’ll break ten million easy with the content today!”

He was bouncing around like there was too much electricity in the circuits of his young veins.

“I’m Jaxon…” said the large guy in contrast, with a perfunctory head nod, rubbing his arms down to rid them of grey masonry dust. The serious depth of his tone made us pause to listen. “I need the money to keep my flat. Just had a divorce. She was a bitch. So, yeah, I need the cash. This is my ticket.”

“No nonsense approach, big guy, keeping it real, if a little creepy…” said Clay. His fingers were pointing at Jaxon like a gunslinger, just in case we hadn’t realised who was talking – ‘it must be an internet thing’, I thought.

I saw Charlotte raise her perfectly shaped eyebrows in reaction to the way he had said ‘bitch’. She wasn’t happy about that at all.

“Can’t imagine why you fucked up there,” she seethed as if under her breath, yet audible.

Jaxon stared at her like he was going to murder her where she stood. It felt like a dark moment at the wrong time to fall out over words.

It was up to me to diffuse the stall in the greetings and restore our group harmony.

“Good to meet you all! Let’s stick together through this,” I announced and instantly cringed at the sound of my voice; it sounded like I had just joined some obscure trauma club in a town hall.

Of course, everyone had instantly moved on anyway.

The teens were already filming me and everything they could with their phones, which I didn’t mind, because it was at least evidence of me being here, in the heart of the time storm. I needed that for the adulation when we returned to our lives.

We could hear strange sounds around us, like birds’ alarm calls. It dawned on us all at once that we were actually here, the same place, but millions of years in the past. It took a big mental adjustment.

“Over there!” I blurted, noticing something move. I waggled my index finger in its direction. A rubbery tubular object, which seemed large and apparently organic, was twitching sporadically near the shattered displays and shelves of the pet food aisle.

“Whoa!” exclaimed Oscar, clearly excited, and the teens’ phones seemed to snap toward it in a unified sweep as if a choreographed move.

We were in the presence of a cleanly severed neck and head of an infant Brachiosaurus. I recognised the species from a childhood CGI documentary on prehistoric animals. The entrails and remains of the baby dinosaur’s body were under the rubble. We could clearly see there was a raised bump of supermarket roof parts on the ground nearby. The shop floor had materialised mid-air, a few feet above the ground in the Jurassic period, and in the process, sliced off the head of this juvenile creature as the shop manifested into existence. The floor had become an accidental guillotine for the poor baby creature.

We were each filming the spasming thick neck of the animal, our arms outstretched like we were holding crucifixes to ward off vampires, and our running commentaries grated against each other, describing the scene.

We would be offered potentially eight-figure sums for the rights to this footage; every second would have a monetary value when we returned to our own timeline. No one had ever filmed a real dinosaur before.

Jaxon grunted and then exploded into a string of profanities, glaring at his phone and hitting it hard with a palm. It was out of battery. With a yell of frustration, he hurled it in a red mist moment, losing it instantly in the jagged spine of an aisle that was battered out of shape and decorated in the colours of crushed fruit. No one said anything, avoiding confrontation with the enraged hairy-armed hulk.

He paced back and forth in the rubble as we stepped delicately around the dinosaur’s decapitated head. We glanced back at him intermittently to check his rage. He had his hands clasped behind his head tightly, as if captured by an unseen enemy, radiating his escalating anger, which seemed to throb in a rhythm.

“Give me one of your phones, now!” he raged, his arm outstretched with the loud demand, staring at us all as an entity, his expression betraying his impatience and fury.

“Hurry up, time is running out!” he shouted with a distinct edge of personal threat.

We all ignored him, which seemed to make him madder.

“I’m not playing with you!” he ranted, tilting his head as if a last warning for one of us to comply or face his visceral wrath.

The kids had far too much undiluted testosterone and irrelevance for life to take him too seriously.

“You, Sir, are a loser…” retorted Clay, filming the security guard while saying it, thinking of a TikTok video idea, ‘Ultimate fail in time storm’ or some such title.

“You can get a new phone in the phone aisle… No Clubcard needed today,” added Charlotte with playful sarcasm. It felt like I was witnessing a form of bear baiting.

Jaxon snapped. He marched toward Clay over the ragged debris between them. Clay grinned and kept the camera on his phone steady, a professional reportage filmmaker enjoying his art, aiming, unfazed, at the approaching Neanderthal-like figure. The more controversial, the more action, the more humiliation – the more engagement with his target audience.

“Witness, early man… Ooooh… What are you gonna do? Eh tough guy, become the first ever time criminal to go to jail when you get back… Not smart, got this all on film!”

Jaxon didn’t flinch to consider Clay’s words, but as he came within a few feet of his victim, in preparation to execute a jaw shattering uppercut, new noises disrupted the debris nearby. They sounded like heavy footfalls, or more precisely, very heavy feet. He turned sharply in alarm to see what it was, as did we all.

It was only then that we fully comprehended what we had fallen into: the young dinosaur, which had lost its head, had been in the process of being hunted. Three lumbering allosauruses were eyeballing us closely over jagged aisles, as we hovered like vermin over what they had considered dinner. Their heads were bowed, and their meaty haunches squatted, like they were preparing to charge. Their legs and feet reminded me of ostriches, with powerful thighs and splayed, scaly, clawed feet. They were undeniably monsters, and they were weighing up their next meals.

“Oh no,” sighed June, which seemed like a gargantuan understatement. The giant predators were taller than us by several feet, with tough brown reptilian skin and visible rows of pointed teeth from slightly parted jaws. They flicked their heads side to side like birds assessing a confrontation. We were an anomaly to them, but unfortunately for us, an edible anomaly. Each one of them must have weighed about two tonnes; their breath was rank, and their nostrils flared as they sniffed our unfamiliar scent.

Clay swung his camera at the imposing beasts to film their terrifying presence, as if the phone was a shield from reality, and for the first time in his life, he felt his hand begin to shake violently with adrenaline surges.

“This is insane!” he whispered, in case he upset the creatures with his volume. The way he said it made me realise just how naive and young he was, and my heart sank with the gravity of his sudden predicament.

One of the allosauruses stepped very carefully toward us to investigate and raised its massive skull high above us, looming over our heads. They must have been outside the perimeter of the falling building when we materialised here. They had no dust on them, and there was a curiosity about their movements that seemed a little uncertain, like trepidation.

I took that small window of opportunity, as the advancing dinosaur fixed its gaze on Clay, to gently encourage June behind a section of broken wall that led to the tatty remains of a smashed, now open-air, stockroom.

We crouched low, but June kept her phone camera just poking out at the scene so we could observe without being visible.

Clay was backing up, and his loyal friends were closing in around him for solidarity, clutching his arms to steadily draw him away while facing the giant animals, maintaining eye contact with them as if to demonstrate humans were not easy prey as a herd. It almost worked. The group banding together seemed to be enough of a deterrent to instigate further pause, as the alpha allosaurus turned its attention to the lone, isolated figure of Jaxon, whose raised fist was still clenched in apparent paralysis with fear.

The resolve evaporated in his face – his strength now paper-thin. In fairness, no one wakes up in the morning, goes to work at the supermarket and thinks they will be eaten by an allosaurus by the afternoon.

The beast switched gears and broke into a lumbering run with its fridge-sized skull low to the ground, ready to bite down. Jaxon shook himself from his frozen state and ran full pelt at the teens. He seemed to scoop up Clay in one movement, who was slight in build, like a rag doll, raising him off the floor. With great exertion, he threw the teenager sideways and directly in the path of the towering dinosaur. Clay was screaming in a high-pitched siren wail as the beast pinned him hard with its wide foot. We all heard the snaps of his ribs, like twigs under a boot. The air went out of his scream, and what was left was a pitiful whimper. The massive jaws ripped off his protesting outstretched arm, complete with the phone in his grip, to gulp it back into its barrel of a throat. The other two allosauruses joined the feast, tearing into what was left of the student’s crushed body. We watched the animals snap at each other between bites of the influencer, territorial over the meagre catch.

Regret was real. We wanted to be home immediately; it was enough horror for a lifetime. I had seen only one person die before, a red-faced middle-aged man having a heart attack in the street, and it looked infinitely preferable a demise to what we witnessed in that time-twisted pet food aisle.

An automatic advert grated from a speaker somewhere in the rubble: ‘Enjoy a range of two for one offers today on meat products. Every little helps!’

With that, one of the feeding creatures, already finished with the scraps of Clay, bore down on Jaxon. Instinctively, understanding the formula of evasion now, he pushed a loudly protesting Charlotte into the path of the creature. She rolled away as its momentum was too much to pivot, and although it turned its head, it seemed to calculate that Jaxon was easier to catch. This time, the security guard was helpless and out of tricks. He fumbled a packet of Whiskers’ kitten bites from the dust and tossed it at the massive dome of a head, but the creature didn’t flinch as the product bounced off its bony eye socket. It merely blinked at Jaxon, as if in a way of acknowledging Jaxon had at least tried, and then wrapped its dagger teeth around the divorcee’s head in a crunch of unimaginable pressure. There was a distinctive ‘pop’.

The last we heard of Jaxon was – “Fuuu….” Followed by what could only be described as a satisfied chomping sound.

Charlotte must have seen June’s phone recording the scene from the edge of the wall, because she crawled to where we were, which immediately made us feel more visible and vulnerable. By the time she was at the opening in the broken wall, the gurgling screams of Damon and Oscar indicated that both her remaining buddies had failed to find an adequate hiding place. I wondered how long it would take for their fan base to forget them back in our time, when the news broke.

I grabbed Charlotte roughly and dragged her behind the cover of bricks. She was shaking hard, and her eyes were wet and quivering with her sheer terror.
It seemed hopeless, desperate. We realised the dinosaurs knew where we were, as we listened to their thumping footsteps pounding closer. Their sense of smell must have been acute.

It felt so strange to be hunted by large creatures, to be their prey. I realised that people had totally lost that sense of fear that they could be an animal’s dinner. It was absolutely horrifying.

The air began to fizz and spark. The remains of the white wall we were hidden behind rippled with lights and colours. The hairs on my head become buoyant. Time was flipping again, but it had only been five minutes, too short compared to other recorded jumps through the wormholes of history. A high-pitched whine shot through our ear canals, and we felt sick in the pit of our bellies.

I recall having the presence of mind to look up at the last moment, watching the bulbous head of an allosaurus bear down on me from above the wall, but as it opened its huge jaws, the whole scene flushed through us as we were unwittingly dragged away into another dimension.

The blur of colour faded relatively quickly, and although we expected to find ourselves in front of TV crews and our bemused townsfolk, we seemed to arrive somewhere else, somewhere very different.

The dinosaurs were gone, the sky was gone, and around us and above us were what appeared to be amphitheatre rows of surrounding seating. Indeed, a cheer rang up from a thousand throats, but it wasn’t exactly a human cheer; it sounded different, guttural, bizarre.

Returned goods

Shaking, scared and making the weird noises people make when they narrowly escape being eaten, we stood up to take it in. Our hearts were still pounding. One of us had wet ourselves by the stench of it. Incredibly, it seemed we were in yet another foreign time.

An artificial, electronic but human voice boomed about us, like we were at a final contest of a sporting event.

“Welcome, humans. Please remain calm, we mean you no harm. We have learned your language and preserved the site of this historic time jump. We only have minutes, so let us explain. We have been waiting millions of years for you to appear in this fixed-time event. Our predecessors, a different species, colonised your world two years after you sent a space probe to the stars. Your spacecraft’s engine was badly designed; its flaws made unacceptable time ripples, which polluted space. The race that came to you first enslaved you, took your resources and unfortunately, they eventually wiped you all out. Subsequently, the alliances in the galaxy did not have sufficient time to know you as a species. That is why we waited for this unique time jump that you entered into to come to its full fruition. We are scanning your anatomy and decoding samples of your DNA, at this very moment. Be assured, we will attempt to re-engineer your species. It is a pleasure to see you, and good luck on your return. Enjoy the small amount of time you have left! We are sorry about your extinction – but know there was nothing you could have done to fight the species that came after you. They were beyond your capabilities, in every way.”

The cheering crowds were human-shaped on first glance, but they had yellow skin, black eyes, and no noses. Their clothes were beautiful and seemed to change hue or colour, with swirling patterns when they moved, perhaps communicating their feelings to those around them.

“Oh… My… God….” said June. “We’ve swung millions of years into the future!”

We stared at each other wide-eyed, Charlotte still covered in the gallon of blood that had spurted from Clay and then Jaxon.

The supermarket advert was still running… “Every little helps!” it repeated, and the crowd cheered again, standing on their feet in rapturous applause.

“Please, can you say something to our audience before you jump back to your time? We have been waiting millions of years to hear your voices?”

Hovering drone-like camera technology was descending toward us from above, at a guess, I assumed this was being beamed live worldwide, if not further.

Charlotte stood up, wiping away her tears firmly and said loudly to the anticipating crowd, “Fuck this!”

“Fuck this!” they all replied in badly copied human accents, assuming it was a strange customary greeting, and the hairs on Charlotte’s head began to straighten with electricity once again. To the audible groans of the crowd, the time-swing abruptly jarred us back into the ether.

As we tried to catch our breath, we felt our battered bodies smear like soul-mustard into our original timeline. We were finally returning home.

June and I instantly tumbled into a small storeroom basement, down a flight of stairs. We waited for a second or two, and then at last, we could hear the sounds of emergency services and the distinct chattering of onlookers, beyond the irreparable wreckage of the superstore above us.

Charlotte was nowhere to be seen. We understood what had happened quickly and felt sick with the thought of it. She had been a few feet to one side of us a moment ago, and now she was buried in the earth and pipework adjacent to us. She was instantly dead and instantly buried.

“Oh, Charlotte, not you too,” I said. It was too much.

June feebly held her mobile up again, like her hand could never release it. What she was filming, I could no longer say.

“June?” I pleaded. The prize of money and TV appearances meant nothing anymore.

“Shall we tell them?” she whispered.

“What – that everyone is about to be killed because we explored space and got noticed?”

“Yes…” she said, her bottom lip wobbling.

“Let’s not. They can’t do anything anyway, that’s what we were told. I want to go home, while it’s still there…”

We embraced in a huddle and closed our eyes tight. She dropped the phone and wrapped her trembling fingers gently around my neck for comfort.

I could hear people shouting for us: “Are you there. Hello? Did anyone survive?… Did you see any dinosaurs?!”

All I could see now was the inside of my eyelids, the darkness. Trying to master time was like trying to hold water; it just slips away faster the harder you attempt to grip hold of it. You are trapped in it, helpless to its flows; it cannot be mastered, just observed and understood.

“Come around to my house tonight,” I propositioned June. “We can have some pizza and nachos and beer… I will need to find my basket first, but let’s do that… We can have a good time,” I said.

I had lost a Croc, my polo shirt was covered in dust and blood, and I decided to let all the hurt out.

She tightened herself around me as I began to sob like a newborn.

We held each other tighter, quietly, as the rescue team drew nearer above.

The outside world promised to come crashing down the stairs at any moment; it was inevitable.

The End