By Hunter Perez

Holmgren walked me through unfamiliar corridors within the prison, and as we journeyed I began to develop a very bad headache. I don’t know if it was from the whiskey or if it was a crash from the adrenaline rush I felt in subduing the intruders, but the pain came on quickly. Holmgren had been talking, but in my discomfort I stopped listening to him – which I didn’t realize until he repeated a question twice without my generating an answer.

“You don’t look good – what’s wrong?” he asked.

“I feel like I’m having a migraine headache,” I said. “Do you have aspirin?”

“I don’t think it’s been invented yet,” he said. “But I have something in my kitchen that can make you feel better instantly.”

We walked out into a section of the prison grounds that I didn’t recognize. There were several small stone buildings and a few wooden sheds. A strong wind brought the scent of horse manure that betrayed the presence of the prison’s stables, which Holmgren pointed out to me.

“And the blacksmith is next door to the horses,” he said. “The low building is the barracks. The big brick house is the warden’s residence – he’s been away for a few weeks and I can’t imagine how he’s going to react when he comes back and discovers what happened. The guest cottage where you stayed is on the other side of the warden’s house. The little place with the flowers out front is Patterson’s place – he has a green thumb and can grow anything. And that sad little place next to his home is where I live.”

The description “sad little place” was not self-deprecating – it was a dreary grey stone structure with sun-faded curtains in its windows. The inside was even more depressing – the walls were bare and grimy and his sitting room furnishings consisted of a desk, a wooden chair, a club chair that outlived its usefulness, and a large hamper filled with empty liquor bottles. A small kitchen area had an old wooden table with two equally ancient chairs. He directed me to sit in the kitchen while he filled a kettle with water and lit a match to heat his stovetop. Within a few minutes, he scooped a spoonful of tea leaves into a China pot and poured in the kettle’s contents. The resulting tea was unusually black, and he added a few drops of a liquid squeezed from a tiny bottle followed by a small sugar cube. He stirred the drink quickly and put it before me.

“This isn’t 21st century tea,” he advised. “Around here, we make it pretty strong.”

“What did you put in the tea before that sugar cube?” I asked.

“Did you ever hear of laudanum?” he said, and I admitted not knowing about it. “It’s very popular and cures everything. It’s kind of bitter, so the sugar helps it go down easier. Drink that tea and I’ll put you in bed – you’ll feel better within minutes, trust me.”

I started to drink the tea and wasn’t certain how to react – I felt energized, then enervated, then calm, then anxious. I emptied the cup quickly and felt a slight band of sweat across my forehead as my breathing initially dialed up, then dialed down. Holmgren led me behind a door to a small bedroom where a king-sized bed occupied most of the space. He closed the curtains over the room’s sole window and told me to disrobe and lay down. I kicked off my shoes and peeled off my clothing, but suddenly I felt very light and a bit giddy. I didn’t feel my headache anymore, but I also didn’t feel the floor beneath my feet.

I jumped into the bed – it was big, fluffy featherbed with a heavy quilted blanked and two thick pillows. I laid on my back and Holmgren tucked the blanket under my chin.

“Just close your eyes and let the tea work,” he whispered, kissing my forehead.

“Where are you going to sleep?” I said while feeling that I was being sealed beneath the blanket.

“I have work to do,” he said. “Sleep, little baby. You earned it.”

Holmgren stepped back from me and the room became a blur. I thought I saw him walk out and close the door, but then I started to see colors that I never saw before and I felt my soul was separating from my body. I tried to call out “Johnno,” but I didn’t hear myself. The only sound I could hear was the whoosh of the tropical winds blowing off the sea.

“Come play with me,” said a voice from distance amid the crash of waves.

I walked across a sun-heated beach and found Nicky in swimming trunks building sand castles with a plastic pail and shovel. It was the 18-year-old Nicky, just as I remembered him when he was new to college, with his bare skin pale and doughy and his long hair blowing in the wind.

“Come play with me,” he said, looking up from the sand with a big smile. But his voice as I remembered it, but rather somewhat childlike in a sing-song manner.

A rush of seawater washed up to the edge of Nicky’s sand castles. “The tide is going to come in,” I said as I took his wrist and raised him to his feet. He left the pail and shovel on the sand and another wave poured in, carrying his toys out to sea.

Nicky pulled me down the beach to where a large boulder was half-buried in the sand. The boulder had four chains riveted into its surface. Nicky directed me to stand with my back to the boulder and he raised my arms, locking my wrists to the great stone in a crucifixion pose with two of the chains. The other chains were placed upon my ankles. I was imprisoned in a spread-eagle pose on the boulder.

“Prometheus,” Nicky laughed, pulling at my wrists to ensure I was chained the boulder.

“Prometheus,” I repeated.

A large wave crashed to the beach, with the cold sea water rising to my knees. Nicky walked backward into the sea, laughing at me as more waves began to wash at my lower body. Nicky extended his arms and dove backwards into the sea, disappearing beneath its surface.

Suddenly, a penetrating heat came from the chains around my wrists. The metal that imprisoned me started to turn orange as the heat intensified.

“I’m burning,” I yelled out into the air as my hands and forearms began to turn red. A greater pain occurred at my feet. I looked down to my ankles and saw the chains had turned orange and started to smoke. “I’m burning.”

Then Holmgren, looking handsome in his guard’s uniform, appeared from nowhere and stood before me. He smirked with devilish delight at my bondage before pulling out a gun and pointing it at my face.

“No!” I yelled, bolting up from the featherbed and knocking the heavy blanket from my body. The bedroom was filled a yellowish-orange hue of sunrise shining through the window. My vision was blurred as I began to realize I emerged from a dream.

“Having a nightmare?” said a voice from the far end of the room. The sunlight didn’t reach that corner of the space, which was deep with shadows, and I could barely make out a man sitting on a chair with his arms folded.

“Johnno?” I asked.

The man rose from the chair and laughed. “I should hope not,” he said as he walked out of the shadows and into the light. But even in the light he looked like a big shadow – he was wearing a black jacket, a black shirt and black pants, with a black cap on his head. I was still groggy from my sleep and tried to focus on him as he slowly approached the bed and sat next to me, pushing away the blanket to expose my nakedness.

“Don’t’ tell me that you’ve already forgotten me,” he said, smiling as he studied my body. “Granted, we’ve not seen each other in about one hundred and fifty years, but I always thought you had a good memory.”

“Nicky?” I exclaimed, and he nodded in affirmation. “What…what are you…”

“…doing here?” he said, completing my sentence. “Well, I’m here to take you home.”

I looked to the closed bedroom door. “Does Johnno know you’re here?”

Nicky ran his hand over my head and tousled my hair. “My God, you’re still cute. Of course he does – I had to beat him up and knock him out to get to you. Don’t worry, I have him bound and gagged – he won’t bother us. Damn, though, he smells of bad tobacco and whiskey. He’s become a mess – he let himself go. But you look like you’ve put on some muscle since you left the 21st century. You really slept through all the commotion we had in the next room?”

I inched back on the bed away from him. “But what about your fiancé? Shouldn’t you be looking for him?”

Nicky shook his head and laughed hard. “Some fiancé – he’s already married. If it was up to me, I would have left you guys alone, but Mr. Johannsen tricked and trapped me into doing his bidding.”

Nicky lunged forward and seated himself next to me, putting his muscular arm around my shoulders.

“This is the Cliff Notes version of what happened,” he continued. “Johnno got into a lot of trouble and needed to outrun the law. It was his idea to hide in the past, and for a price I helped him. When he vanished, there was suspicion that he used the time machine, but there was a problem – the current machine operates with blockchain technology, so there’s a record of every transmission back and forth in time. But there was no record of Johnno’s disappearance. Clever? We didn’t use the current machine, but a clunky prototype made 20 years earlier that didn’t operate on blockchain, so there was no record of when or who was using it. That’s the machine you saw. The Robinson Lab folks thought that machine was destroyed, but no one ever got around to dismantling it. Johnno and I knew it was in storage and we moved it one night from our headquarters site to the Monroeville ghost town and hid it in one of the old buildings. It still works, although it makes a racket and is slower. Think of a Model T versus a Tesla –one is primitive and the other is cutting-edge, yet both get you from Point A to Point B. A year later, I did the same thing with Harry when he needed to vamoose.”

Nicky removed his arm from my shoulder and laid his head on a pillow, looking up at me while he kept talking.

“I was one of many people interviewed by the feds when Johnno vanished,” he continued. “But we kept our affair a secret, so no one knew the depth of our relationship, and I already had an alibi planned that cleared me. And no one saw the connection between Johnno and Harry because there was no evidence they knew each other. But one year later, Mr. Johannsen was looking for distractions outside of his marriage and came upon a social media page devoted to the gay scene in New Mexico. Imagine his surprise when he saw a photo from a Valentine’s party in Santa Fe where Harry and I were among those smiling for the camera. He found the common ground between Johnno and Harry, but he had no concrete evidence that I helped them. So, he conspired to meet me and then went undercover – or, to be more precise, under the covers to seduce me with a whirlwind romance culminating in a marriage proposal. Long story short, I started thinking with my dick because I thought married couples shouldn’t have secrets, and I wound up telling him what I should have kept secret. He sprung his trap on me and I was blackmailed into helping him and his pals bring back Johnno and Harry.”

I looked at Nicky with amazement. “I don’t want to be insulting, but that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Nicky rolled out of bed and smoothed his clothing. “That is insulting, but it’s not incorrect. The damned thing is that he would have gotten away with it until someone mentioned you were in here. I was monitoring his actions in his dump when he messaged me if it was correct about a third man, and I asked him to get you. I lost contact with him after that and realized his mission failed. Who cares about him? He knew it was a dangerous mission and he took the risk. Mercifully, he’s not the only dope around here – Johnno kept the case I sent him with the tracking device, which is how I found him and you.”

“What if I don’t want to go with you?” I asked.

Nicky pulled the blanket from the bed and flung it on floor, then pulled a gun from his jacket with his right hand and pointed it at me. “I didn’t come all this way for you to turn your back on me again. You damn fucker, I’ve waited years for you to come back to me. And, to think, for the longest time I was afraid to approach you again – I didn’t want the chance for you to hurt me again, the way you hurt me when we were in school together. We wouldn’t be here in this ridiculous setting if you ever acknowledged my feelings for you. But things are different now. You are going to play by my rule. Get dressed, so we can get out of here.”

“And go where and do what?” I said. “Am I going back to my normal life? Or am I going to be trading one cage for another?”

Nicky betrayed no emotion as he pointed the gun straight into my face. I found my clothing on the floor and put on the convict’s uniform and the ratty shoes. Nicky laughed out loud at my appearance and opened the bedroom door, pointing with his gun in the direction I was supposed to walk. I saw Holmgren with his back to me slumped in a chair, his hands locked in zip-ties and his ankles wrapped to the legs of the chair with sealing tape. I ran in front of him and saw his mouth taped over while a gash in his forehead dripped blood down his face.

“I can’t leave him like this,” I yelled, turning to go into the kitchen area. Nicky moved in front of me with his gun at my chest, but I didn’t flinch. “If you want to shoot me, Nicky, then shoot. I’m not leaving him while he bleeds to death.”

“That’s not going to happen,” snarled Nicky. “He’ll be okay.”

I quickly scooted around Nicky and went to the kitchen sink, where I retrieved a water pitcher and two hand towels. He tried to block me again and I stared at him angrily.

“I said I can’t leave him like this,” I stated. “After I clean him up, I’ll go with you. Now, get out of my way.”

Nicky stood back, still pointing his gun while watching my moves. I put one towel on Holmgren’s lap and poured water from the pitcher into the other towel. I leaned over Holmgren to dab the wet towel on his forehead’s gash. He looked up at me with a pained expression as I cleaned the wound.

“Do you still have tape that I can use to attach one of these towels to his forehead?” I asked Nicky.

Nicky shook his head negatively while he continued to aim his gun at me. Unlike the trio who turned up the day before who let their guards down for my joking, Nicky was tightly wound and on-guard as he watched me clean Holmgren. I debated whether I could take him down, but he wasn’t giving me an opening to launch an assault.

I pressed the wet towel hard against Holmgren’s forehead, hoping that I could stop the bleeding, while Nicky watched impatiently. After a minute, I poured more water on the towel and then repeated my healing routine. Holmgren eyed me sorrowfully as I hovered over him.

“When are you going to be done, Florence Nightengale?” Nicky snapped as he walked behind Holmgren and pulled down hard on his bound hands. “Not such a tough guy now, is he? Tell me, beautiful, what kind of a jailer is Johnno to you? Are you his house slave, sharing his bed and his secrets? Or does he like to keep you caged up in chains?”

Johnno’s eyes widened at the pressure Nicky applied to his bound hands.

“Can you please give me some tape so I can put this other towel on him?” I said, pointing to the dry towel on Johnno’s lap.

Nicky moved around Holmgren, fished into his jacket and removed a roll of sealing tape. I took the roll, looked at the towel on Holmgren’s lap and looked at the pitcher and wet towel I was still holding. I put the wet towel on top of the pitcher and held it before Nicky.

“Do me a favor and please hold this,” I said to Nicky.

Nicky reached forward with his free left hand for the pitcher. Once he grabbed its handle, I soared a fist into the right side of his head, then quickly followed with the other fist to the left side. He dropped both the pitcher and the gun and doubled over. I gave a power drive to his gut and then a left to his jaw, sending him in a spiral that ended with his awkward collapse into unconsciousness.

“Damn, I wish Zeb could have seen me doing his bang-bang-bang-bang,” I said out loud while I grabbed Nicky’s gun and shoved it into my waistband. “You know, I really screwed up my life. I should have gone into boxing instead of working in real estate. I could have been the next Ali.”

I scratched a corner of the tape that sealed Holmgren’s mouth and yanked the tape from him, which caused him to yell, curse, then apologize for cursing. He told me where knives were in a drawer next to the sink and I returned with a steak knife to begin cutting him out of the zip-tie bondage.

“I feel like my hands are going numb,” Holmgren complained.

“Well, now you know how I feel when you and your guards cuff me tightly,” I said as I furiously sawed through the zip-tie. “I’ve put up with your crap all of this time and never once complained about the pain, let alone the indignity. All the times I sat in your office cuffed, with you making snide jokes about my situation. Tell me, Johnno, how do my shoes feel on you?”

“Then why didn’t you go back with him?” Johnno demanded. “Why are you doing this for me if you hate me?”

I came around and looked Johnno square in the eyes. “First and foremost, I don’t hate you. I hate the things that you’ve done to me, but you are not the subject of my hatred. And I wouldn’t be caught dead in a time machine with him because he’s a fucking psychopath. If I had a choice of being tormented by a fucking psychopath or a lazy sadist, I’ll go with the lazy sadist. At least I can get a couple of cheap laughs from you.”

After a few minutes, I had the zip-tie’s bond severed. I then used the knife to cut the tape that sealed his ankles to the chair legs. Johnno stood up, rubbing his wrists while staring at me with an enigmatic gaze. I held the handle of the knife out for him to take, with my fingers squeezing the tip of its blade.

“I’m not worthy to breathe the same air that you breathe,” he whimpered. “I’ve treated you like shit and you’ve twice saved my life.”

“Well,” I said. “I hope that at the very least I can get a big slice of cake with my lunch as well as with my dinner.”

Johnno took the knife handle, threw the knife aside and wrapped his arms around me while burying his face on my shoulder. Suddenly, there was extraordinary boom from outside that startled both of us.

“Are we under attack?” I asked.

“That’s not cannon fire, that’s dynamite,” Johnno said. “I didn’t give approval for blasting.”

Johnno let go of me and began to move to the front door, but his gait was unsteady. I raced ahead of him, threw open the door and ran outside as another boom filled the air. I could see a mushroom cloud of smoke rising from behind the barracks and I heard a cacophony of voices whooping and screaming in the distance. Johnno staggered to the open door and began to hobble outside.

“That smoke is near the stables,” he said. “What the hell is going on?”

Suddenly, a horse-drawn wagon came racing from the distance, stopping shortly before where I was standing. The horse reared up on its hind legs and gave out a furious cry and I recognized O’Dwyer was holding the reins while seated in the wagon’s driver’s seat. The wagon had about a dozen prisoners packed in, all looking about with wild expressions.

“Get in, lad,” O’Dwyer yelled to me. “We’re off to our freedom.”

Holmgren moved forward in slow, unsteady steps, and called out, “Get out of there, you crazy Irishman. You’ll never get away.”

O’Dwyer raised a stick of dynamite into the air and called back, “Stay back. Mr. Holmgren, or you’ll be blown into a million little pieces.”

Out of the wagon, Zeb jumped up and yelled to me, “Jesse James, over here!”

“Zeb!” I responded. “Get out of there. You’ll be hanged if they catch you.”

“No one is going to catch us,” O’Dwyer interjected. “Come on, lad, get on board. Your freedom is waiting for you.”

I turned to look at Holmgren, and he violently shook his head negatively. I then looked at O’Dwyer, who beckoned me to the wagon.

“Lieutenant!” screamed Zeb from the wagon. “Behind you!”

I turned and saw Nicky standing in the doorway to the cottage, his face bloodied and purpled from my fists, his hand clutching the knife that Holmgren threw aside. Holmgren looked at Nicky and paced backwards but stumbled and fell to the ground.

Zeb jumped from the wagon and ran with incredible speed, positioning himself over Holmgren while holding his fists up. Nicky raised the knife and stalked to Zeb. I pulled Nicky’s gun from the waistband and ran to them.

“Nicky, drop it!” I screamed while pointing the gun at him.

Nicky raced with his outstretched knife to Zeb, who responded by moving to his new opponent. I aimed the gun at Nicky and pulled the trigger.

To be continued …