Back to the Future (8 page)

He pulled the pages from his briefcase. The folder showed a color head shot of Doc Brown along with a ten-page, single-spaced resume of his past activities and habits, a map of his home and work area. Sam had received the folder a week before, when it appeared that Brown might not be as reliable as the organization hoped. Confirmation of Doc Brown’s duplicity came that morning, followed by the decision to eliminate him.

Sam put the color photo on the coffee table and indicated that the others should study it.

“What’s he done?” Uranda asked. “Not that it matters. He looks Jewish.”

“We hired him to build a nuclear bomb.”

The young woman’s eyes glistened with excitement.

“We stole plutonium and gave it to him. He delayed as long as possible and gave us the weapon only when we threatened him.”

“Well?” another of the group asked.

“The bomb was nothing but a casing filled with used pinball-machine parts,” Sam said.

Uranda rolled her eyes back, but a moment later, a look of happy anticipation engaged her features.

“We’ll kill him tonight,” Sam continued. “Headquarters has decided it’s not worth it to bring him in for questioning. You two tail him for the rest of the day. Chances are he’ll end up at the garage he uses for an office or at Twin Pines Mall. He’s been spending a lot of time there recently, usually late at night.”

“Does he carry any weapons?”

“A handgun at most. An old .45-caliber revolver. It may not even work.”

Now Marty watched as the black van hurtled toward them. His terror was complete, even though he had no idea who or what was heading their way. At that inopportune moment, something terribly perverse stirred in him—he was determined to know, if this was death unfolding, who was behind it.

“Who’s in that car?” he shouted.

Doc Brown had no time for an elaborate explanation. Marty’s hand gripped his sleeve so tightly he had to spin like a top to get away. As he did so, he yelled over his shoulder: “The Libyans I ripped off!”

Marty didn’t understand but he did know that, to date, few Libyans he had heard of had been involved in anything but dark and dangerous business. The effect was of someone yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Marty believed and acknowledged that there was trouble without further investigation. Hurling his body to one side, he looked for the nearest solid object that would provide cover. The only two choices were the step-van and the DeLorean.

Doc Brown was already heading for the step-van.

“Run for it, Marty!” he shouted. “I’ll draw their fire!”

Simultaneously, he hustled into the truck and appeared a moment later with a revolver. By this time, the side door of the black van had slid open and a swarthy character resembling Yasser Arafat leaned out. He threw up an AK 47 submachine gun and opened fire.

Marty had never been shot at before, although he had once been beaned during a baseball game. The effect was vaguely similar. He seemed to move in slow motion, a helpless figure in an echo chamber of harsh reverberating sound. The horizon with its familiar objects—utility poles, lights, department stores—seemed to have disappeared, leaving him trapped in a globe of black fluid. The only two sounds—gunfire and his breathing—competed, each grossly and metallically augmented by panic.

He saw Doc Brown point the revolver at the van and squeeze the trigger. No sound or flash of fire emerged, however, as bullets splattered all around Doc at his feet and into the side of the van. Finally, dropping the revolver, Doc began to sprint for the safety of the mall, fully five hundred yards away.

The van screeched to a halt, backed up and started after Brown. Doc was no more than fifty yards closer to the nearest mall building when the black van started after him in low gear.

“No!” Marty shouted. “Doc! Wait!”

Even as he screamed the words, Marty knew it was poor advice. Were these desperate Libyans actually going to show mercy if Doc Brown suddenly surrendered and begged for his life? It was unlikely at best, but something in Marty forced him to cry for the impossible.

For one long moment, he stood still, his eyes darting from side to side, desperately searching for something that could help his friend. Then, even as he looked, a new barrage of machine-gun fire and a scream told him there was no use. He turned back in time to see Doc Brown clutch his chest, bend over sharply and pitch forward on his face.

“You bastards!” Marty heard himself yell. The voice almost seemed to come from behind him, sweeping past like a cold wind and echoing across the vast empty lot.

The black van made a U-turn, heading back toward Marty. Doc lay still, his left ankle turned at a strange angle. There was no doubt in Marty’s mind that the man was dead.

He would be, too, if he didn’t do something. For a moment, he thought of heading for the step-van. It was big and slow and cumbersome, but at least he knew how to drive it. His mind, working quickly now, rejected that as a suicidal recourse. He would never get to the edge of the mall in that pokey truck. Better to die, if such was his fate, in a burst of glory, or at least in an unmoving vehicle that had a great deal of class.

Grabbing the video camera—in case he needed evidence concerning Doc’s death—Marty tossed it into the DeLorean, then leaped inside and lowered the gull-wing door. He looked around, dazed. Lights blinked on all around him, but the starting mechanism was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, as he hesitated, the black van roared up, passing to his right from a distance of no more than ten feet. Framed in the doorway was the dark Libyan with the machine gun. Marty thought he saw the ghost of a smile as he aimed the weapon at him and pulled the trigger.

No sound came. Marty, curled into the fetal position, blinked and looked out the window. The van was already twenty feet past and slowing down, the Libyan cursing and slamming his fist against the machine gun, which had obviously failed to fire. A tirade of angry gibberish, no doubt Libyan swear words, cascaded into the night.

“Start!” Marty yelled.

He looked at the array of switches and dials on the console with frightening bewilderment. What was the secret? A button? Something in the nature of a digital code? His eyes flew back and forth, trying to locate the solution to the mystery.

When he finally solved the problem, it was so simple he almost laughed. There on the steering column, just like any other ordinary unsophisticated car, was an ignition switch and a key.

“I’ll be damned!” Marty muttered.

As he spoke and reached for the key, he heard the squeal of tires that told him the black van was on its way back to him. Starting the DeLorean, Marty threw it into gear and floored it. The vehicle’s response was even more than he’d hoped for. It seemed to surge forward as if it had been kicked from the rear. For a moment, he could see the Libyan van as a black mass in the left side of his vision, then it receded so rapidly he wondered if its presence had not been a mirage generated by his own fear.

In fact, had the Libyan driver not turned the wrong way in making his U-turn, Marty would have been an easy target for the machine gunner. But rather than turn right, the driver had swerved left, causing them to come nearly abreast of the DeLorean with the open door facing away from Marty. By the time the mistake had been rectified, the DeLorean was already in high gear and on the verge of rapidly outdistancing its pursuer.

Marty glanced out the rear-view mirror just as the machine gunner took aim. Swerving wildly, Marty saw the bullets churn up holes in the asphalt to his left and rear, but he had no time to congratulate himself. Ahead was the end of the mall lot, which he was approaching at seventy-five miles an hour. His lights struck the metal guard rail, warning him that in less than two or three seconds he would plunge through the barrier and over a steep abutment. Behind him, the bouncing lights of the black van dogged his every movement.

Marty grabbed the wheel tighter, faked a left turn and, downshifting quickly, spun the car hard to the right. The tires shrieked, kicked gravel into the guard rail and onto the windshield, but held, completing the turn and allowing Marty to roar away from the skidding van. As he did so, he floored the car again, saw the speedometer rise from 50 to 75 in one swift, almost spastic motion. But the Libyan driver was no slouch, either. Despite having less power and maneuverability, he managed to turn around quickly and accelerate to the point where he was barely twenty yards behind the sleek DeLorean.

“O.K.,” Marty whispered. “From here on out, it’s nothing but speed.”

He glanced down at the speedometer as the DeLorean roared past Doc Brown’s immobile body. It read 80. As he passed the step-van, it read 85 and the Libyans showed no sign of quitting.

“All right, you bastards,” Marty hissed. “Let’s see if you can do ninety!”

Behind him, machine-gun fire crackled, several bullets landing ahead of him, causing the road to ignite and bits of asphalt to clatter against the hood. Distracted, Marty looked to his right too late. For a split second, he had the ability to turn right, race through the entrance portals and perhaps outrun the van on the highway. That split second was now past. Ahead was the opposite end of the parking lot, another guard rail, and, he now noted, less area in which to turn.

Should he make his move now? That would give the Libyans a better angle on him, but it would also allow him to make a run for the entrance.

As he puzzled his dilemma, Marty looked at the speedometer.

It read: 88.

Behind his head, gauges and indicators began to light up, lines of digits formed and disappeared on the dashboard, and something like a siren sounded. What had he done? Blown a fuse? Driven the engine past its limits? Touched something he should have left alone?

His eyes quickly scanned the dashboard for some clue to the mystery. As he did so, he was suddenly conscious of a large object rising ahead of him, an object that had not been in his line of sight a moment before. Jerking his head up, he saw not the guard rail and arc lamps of the Twin Pines shopping mall—but the face of a scarecrow!

“What the hell—”

As abruptly as it appeared, the scarecrow disappeared, its crude head smashing against the windshield and falling away in a spray of straw. Then another object loomed—a large square building. Simultaneously, the car began to rock and pitch as if it had abruptly turned off smooth roadway onto cobblestones or a plowed field.

Thrown nearly into the passenger’s seat, his head once striking the roof, Marty could do little but hold the wheel as tightly as possible. Meanwhile, the building ahead crowded out the lighter sky behind it until everything in front was variants of black and grey. Having an instant to maneuver, Marty aimed the DeLorean at the lighter square ahead, bracing himself for the crash which didn’t come. Instead, as if falling down a well, he was enveloped by blackness on all sides. Jamming on the brakes, he felt the car decelerate until it smashed into something, causing Marty to fly against the dashboard. At the same time, something landed on the roof with a loud thump.

The air surrounding the immobile DeLorean was filled with floating saffron dust. Marty blinked, trying to orient himself with a new environment which seemed to have snapped him out of the air of the mall parking lot. Gradually objects began to take shape—vertical boards, bales of straw, a pitchfork. Everything was blinking on and off, which puzzled Marty until he realized that the hazard lights of the DeLorean had been knocked out. In the background, he heard a dog barking.

“Damn,” Marty said slowly. “I’m in a barn. How did I end up in a barn?”

The evening had not been a pleasant one for Otis Peabody. At forty-five, he usually came in after a day’s work on the farm dead tired and not at all ready for criticism and pleas from his wife and children. Mostly he just wanted to sit and relax after a good meal, read the morning paper and then drift off to sleep.

The first bad news to greet him when he walked in was that the car battery was dead.

“We can get it recharged,” he said shortly, heading for the dinner table.

Elsie, his wife of seventeen years, shook her head. “Mart Petersen says it’s shot,” she replied. “Lord, it’s been in there since we got the car six years ago, so it’s about time it went.”

“What’s a new one cost?” Peabody said.

“Well, his are expensive,” Elsie said, “but Sears has ’em on sale. A four-year battery is $14.95.”

“Ridiculous,” Peabody mumbled. “That’s too much. I wonder what the ones not on sale go for.”

“Well?” Elsie asked. “Will you be leaving the money tomorrow so I can get it?”

Peabody nodded, sighed, and prepared to sit.

Martha, his fourteen-year-old daughter, and eleven-year-old Sherman chose that moment to add their requests for the day. Actually, they had been bothering their father for nearly a month to buy a television set. Everyone else in the county had one but them, it seemed.

“Can you buy a TV?” Martha smiled. “Please, Daddy. We’ll be going to Sears for the battery anyway.”

“No,” Peabody said bluntly.

The kids were prepared for a negative reaction. Instead of backing down, they launched into a litany of wonderful programs that could be seen—Ed Sullivan, The Mickey Mouse Club, Colgate Variety Hour, The Cisco Kid, Ozzie and Harriet, an endless list.

“They’re all pap,” their father said.

“It’s not fair,” Martha cried. “Some of our teachers are assigning television-watching as homework.”

Peabody looked at her skeptically.

“It’s true. Peggy Ann McVey just took notes from the news about President Eisenhower’s heart attack and turned it in as a complete report. She got an A.”

“You can use the newspapers. Same difference,” Peabody replied.

“No,” Martha persisted. “Teachers can tell when you copied from the newspaper but not from TV. Anyway, when the teacher suggests that you watch Edward R. Murrow, how are you gonna see that in the newspaper?”

“We’ll get a television when we can afford it and not a day before.”

“I want to see the football games,” Sherman added, pouting.

Peabody started filling his plate, choosing to ignore the children until they stopped bothering him. The meal was largely a silent and sullen one, at the end of which everyone moved to different parts of the house and went to bed.