OverTime 03: Slipping -- The Rest of It

Chapter 77: Aftermath (Lillabit)

(APOLOGIES -- working off a new computer, I seem to be losing my formatting) 

Have you ever been driving in the winter, and spun out on the ice?

If so, you may be familiar with the way something moving really fast can slooow doooown during a time of crisis. Suddenly, it feels as if you could go hours between breaths, as if the inevitable impact will never arrive. Until it does.

That's what happened to me. Just... without the inevitable impact.

The warrior was running as he thrust the lance downward, hard and true--and yet the weapon slowed, then slowed further, inches from me, then millimeters from me, its sharp point reaching my chest--

And then? Nothing.

The world just kind of tunneled, then went dark, as if sucked down a drain, or like an antique TV switching off.

Most of my brain babbled. What? and No! and Please.... But some part of me also thought, that didn't hurt anywhere near as much as I thought it would.

So this was death.

But death looked a lot like an airplane cutting the sky overhead, and it sounded like a car horn, and screeching tires. Even as I recognized my world--my old, futuristic world--several things happened at once.

I realized that I hadn't died.

I realized I'd time-slipped. Apparently, bullets aren't the only things that work.

And felt such a sudden, bone-deep sorrow at the very concept that I rejected it. Pulled my hand back from the flame. Slammed onto the brakes. Nooo! My story did not end like this. I must not leave my western life. I couldn't leave my husband.

Jacob!

I closed my eyes against the airplane, covered my ears against the sound of traffic. I concentrated with every atom of every cell on being back in Wyoming, Wyoming, with Jacob, Wyoming....

At which point, as if my ears popped, the wail of a car horn became the cries of fleeing Cheyennes. The screech of tires became gunshots. The sharp smell of gasoline and pavement became smoke and blood and black powder.

I opened my eyes, and I was still in Wyoming. Rocky ground spread before me. When I finally looked up, the sky spread above me, impossibly high, impossibly wide, cut by nothing except birds and a column of smoke.

I'd done it. Somehow, I'd stayed.

As I lowered my shaking hands, my elbow bumped against the lance, now embedded deep into the ground. The naked foot of a half-naked man lay in front of me, attached to the rest of the warrior who'd tried to kill me, now dead. Beyond him, his painted horse still piteously struggled and failed to stand, grunting and huffing.

Holy....

What had I missed?

I looked one direction and saw warriors riding away, several staring at me with wide, white-ringed black eyes. They seemed stunned, though not so stunned that they couldn't drop over the sides of their horses to avoid getting shot. Gunshots came hard and fast, sounding like the finale of a 4th of July fireworks show. When I looked the other way, toward the herd, I saw Jacob--my Jacob--standing in the distance, legs set, rifle firm to his shoulder, the same way he'd stood facing Callahan.

Now I knew what had happened to the warrior who'd tried to kill me.

I made a quick decision. Thorns and rocks dug into my knees as much as my hands as I crawled past my dead Cheyenne, and then another, before reaching Schmidty. The probably dead cook sprawled motionless on his side, worrisomely pale, but he still had his scalp...