by Danny
Danny Hearn:
I wake up crying. My sobs echo loudly around me in the tiny trailer. I can feel the warm tears flowing down my face. How the hell did I get myself into such a state? Everyone I've ever known or loved is gone. Well, not gone. They don't even exist yet. They won't exist for decades. I had a life. Parents. A girlfriend. Friends. A university course I was doing rather well in. A dog named Cassidy. A favourite shirt. And now... nothing. None of it.
To all those people, I have simply dropped off the face of the earth. They don't know what happened to me. They'll never see me again. To everyone I know, I'm gone forever. I'm... dead. I'm a walking dead man. I keep crying.
Nothing here is familiar. Nothing. This place... this time... it's ancient. Damn it, I'm sleeping in an antique trailer! These things don't exist any more! Yet I'm staying in one!
I'm sorry for your loss, Danny, Hal says softly. I don't respond. I just get up slowly from my bed.
Looking out the window, I notice that it's starting to get lighter outside. It's dawn. The morning has rolled around. I'm so far backward in time. And time continues to move forward. It occurs to me that, if I live for another sixty-two years, I can meet myself as a baby. The thought amuses me somewhat, and I smile.
What time is it? I need to know the time. A clock... I need a clock... I spend a good five minutes looking for one, when a knock at the trailer door grabs my attention.
"Come in," I say, and wipe the tears from my face with my sleeve. Tobias steps in.
"We're, uh, having a team meeting," he says, "to decide how we're going to track down... whatever it is Naecken warned us about. In the big dressing room trailer across the yard."
"Right. I'll be there in a second," I reply. Tobias nods, and is about to leave. "Hey, wait a second. Do you know if there's a clock anywhere around here?" I ask him. He turns back into the trailer, and points to the wall directly in front of where I'm standing. There's a round thing covered with numbers and moving lines. "That round thing?" I say, staring at it. Tobias nods. "Wow," I say softly.
"You can't tell time on one of these, can you?" he asks. I nod in confirmation.
"Okay... the short hand," he begins, pointing at it, "indicates the hour. The longer one is how many minutes past the hour it is. The skinny one is for seconds."
"How do you know if it means a.m. or p.m.?" I ask.
"I dunno. I guess they just expect you to know whether it's night time or day time," he answers.
"Oh. So it's..." I pause, thinking for a moment, "...6:20 in the morning?" I say, hazarding a guess.
"Right," Tobias says, nodding.
"Okay. Cool. Thanks for the help."
"No problem. See you at the meeting," he says, and leaves my trailer.
I set about trying to find my shoes so I can head over to the meeting. They turn up next to the bed. I then try hard to remember how to do up the laces. They showed me how to do this the other day.