It wasn't me. It was just a test.
An alarm went off blaring, swirling yellow lights flashed, and teams men and women in their cute little military suits rushed down the hallways, jogging in jody-singing cadences. The facade door whirred open, revealing the much thicker real door behind it. Thousands of scientists held an assortment of recently invented weapons at the opening, everything from phasers to ghostbuster contraptions. Behind the guys in white cloaks stood another twenty thousand troops brandishing heavy machine guns, sitting stout aboard tanks, shouldering grenade launchers, and even one aiming a surface-to-air tomahawk missile— just in case.
They were ready for me, or so they thought. Every measure had been taken. Humans for miles had built fallout shelters with plenty of food stocked. The Air National Guard patrolled the skies. NASA had satellites that could track anything that stepped through that portal. The NRA started donating guns to all tax payers. Parents signed up for Tae Kwan Do classes. Survivalist guides were flying off the shelves. Entrepreneurs were making a killing on aluminum foil and toilet paper. Teens across the country stockpiled condoms. And they all huddled around their TV sets as the men and women on the front line—that is, the football-field sized laboratory that created the portal—aimed their gun barrels at the circular gateway.
Of course it wasn't me, it was just a test. But the leaders of the country felt satisfied with their efforts, and after broadcasting their satisfaction for weeks with subsequent televised interviews, everyone else did too.
Unfortunately, a week later, the portal pulsed with urgency. This was actually just a blip in the space-time continuum, merely random feedback from a fifth-dimensional loop that humans could never comprehend. Yet the lab coat eggheads dressed in figurative witch doctor garb and took it to mean that the portal was ready to open. The time was nigh. The portal would open today. The scientists and troops would gather in the massive stadium sized room once again and point every secret military grade weapon available in '84 towards whatever unspeakably monstrous entity that dared walk through the time-folded gates to 36 years in the future. They had theorized that it could be anything from mutated zombies from a nuclear explosion, to invaders from another planet whom had subjugated earthlings to their superior technology, to rampaging hordes devolved by post apocalyptic landscapes, to pure fire and brimstone following the rise of hell on Earth.
After the facade door whirred to a halt, the thicker, real door ground open behind it. A young girl and her mother, both bearing red baseball hats with crude white all-caps lettering on them strolled into the lab. The duo's complacent air was immediately struck from them upon imbibing their instantly altered surroundings. One of the quick gasps that followed caught itself dryly on the back of the little girl's throat. It was then that I took my cue, catching a small coughed projection of spittle out into the open air of the 1980s, alighting nimbly on an old scientist's nose and then expertly summersaulting down onto his bottom lip.
They were ready for me, or so they thought.
