I'm Nine Again

I had no time to think. I stepped out beside her as she raised the gun. It was now a life or death situation. Cameron looked up in surprise and reached around for his weapon.

BANG!

Alice fired the gun and a burst of dust shot off the ground from just next to Cameron"s boot. Even with the gunfight happening in the valley below us, the atmosphere was oddly quiet enough to hear a pin drop.

"Next one is in your head!" she yelled, "You, over there by the cliff. Let go of the rifle!" she demanded.

Gil slowly pulled his arms out to his side and then collapsed them behind his back, Cameron, shocked from the bullet that just barely missed his foot, slowly started to raise his arms to chest height.

"Who are you?" Cameron asked, "Are you, preservationists?"

"We are going to ask the questions here!" she yelled. "Sean, go and get the gun off him."

I nodded my head and slowly inched my way towards Cameron as he bent his head down forward.

"Sean, come at him from the side, I want a clear shot on him if he tries anything funny." She said.

Not knowing what to do I continued towards Cameron, following Alice"s orders. Cameron bowed his head slowly as I made my way towards him. The strong smell of chemicals almost burned my nose as I got closer. I came from his side and grabbed the strap of his a.s.sault rifle and slowly started lifting it away from his body.

"That"s right!" Alice said, "Just stay still or I"ll shoot!"

I pulled the rifle off from around Cameron"s shoulders slowly then quickly hopped backward to stand next to Alice. I looked over the rifle quickly, making sure it was loaded and that the safety was off before holding it in front of me. I wasn"t able to aim it well, because it was too heavy for my small body so I held it tucked under my shoulder by my chest.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"My name is Gil and this is Cameron," Gil said still lying on the ground with his back to us, "We"re your friendly local time travelers."

"Shut up!" Alice bit, "You asked us if we were preservationists which means that you clearly aren"t them. Are you another faction? If so, what one?"

"You two must be new here," Cameron said, "We"re the New World Order."

"Shut up Cameron!" Gil said, "Don"t go giving them information!"

"NO, YOU SHUT UP!" Alice said, shaking.

Gil slowly rolled over and sat up, facing us and away from his rifle.

"Look at you girl, you"re shaking. Have you ever even shot a gun before?" he asked.

"DON"T MOVE!" She screamed again.

"I"ll take that as a no," Gil said, "You don"t know what it"s like to kill a man, do you? To play G.o.d and decide who lives and who dies!"

"I SAID SHUT UP!"

"YOU DON"T HAVE IT IN YOU TO PULL THAT TRIGGER!" Gil yelled.

He quickly reached around to his belt and ripping a pistol out from his side. He started to raise it towards us. Some people say that time slows down in moments of adrenaline. This felt the exact opposite. Everything went so fast. One minute he was sitting there talking to us and the next second, millisecond no, the next very moment in time there was a firearm being quickly raised toward us.

BANG!

"AHHHHGH!" Alice screamed.

Gil slumped into the ground as the blood from his face splattered along the cliffside.

"f.u.c.k YOU f.u.c.k YOU f.u.c.k YOU!!!" Alice screamed breathing heavily, her whole body moving with each breath. Every breath would raise her body by almost half a foot and every breath out lower it.

"GIL!" Cameron called out. He jumped up and started running towards us with a knife in his hands.

"NO!" Alice screamed, "f.u.c.k OFF!"

BANG!

A second shot came from Alice"s gun. Cameron dropped to the ground in the middle of his sprint, rolling as he collapsed into a heap.

"No," Alice whimpered, "No, no, no, no!"

She slowly started crumbling to the ground. Tears were pouring out of her eyes like a waterfall. The gun dropped out of her hands as she fell to her knees and she started wailing. After she had screamed, she began talking to herself.

"I didn"t mean to do it," she said still crying, "I wasn"t going to shoot them. I didn"t want to shoot them!"

I dropped my gun and ran over to her, dropping beside her and holding her in my arms.

"Alice," I said softly.

She looked up to me with tears streaming down her face, struggling to breathe with her uneven intakes of air through the crying.

"Sean I"m sorry," she cried, "I didn"t mean to shoot them. I didn"t want to kill them. I"m sorry."

"Alice it"s okay!" I said, "Alice."

"Sean they were running at me, why were they running at me?" She asked in desperation, "He was pointing a gun at me, Sean. He was going to shoot me! Why was he going to shoot me?"

I had no words. I didn"t know how to comfort her. Thunder rolled in the distance and the gunfight in the valley below raged on. The smoke plume from the fire now rising high into the sky.

"Sean I don"t know what to do," she said, "I wanna take it back! I"m sorry. I won"t do it again, I didn"t want to kill them!"

"Alice," I said looking down at her in my arms as she cried, "Alice we need to get moving. The fire is going to spread up here in a few hours."

"Sean I don"t want to do this anymore," she said, "I just want to go home. I want to go into work tomorrow and answer phone calls and send emails and then come home and watch TV. I want to go out to the bar with my friends!" she continued crying, burying her head into my shoulders, "I want to go home and hug my mum!" she cried, "I miss my mum."

I sat there with her in silence. I let her cry into my chest and hold my arms tightly. Sometimes painfully tightly. I had no idea what she was going through. She just killed two men, their bodies lying lifeless just meters away from us. The smoke from the fires started to take over the area. Eventually, as we sat there in the light haze, Alice had stopped crying and stood up. The gunfire still echoing though the hill from the fighting in the valley below.

"We knew we were going to have to fight," Alice said, "I"m sorry, I didn"t have a plan. I was just hoping that I could point a gun at them, and they"d stop making the bomb. It wasn"t very well thought out."

I stood up next to her, "It was pretty crazy," I said, "But we did what we had to. Now we need to get out of here. We"ll go down the mountain, tell Matthew and Rachel about the bushfire, then drive out of here and go home. We can work it out from there."

"Saving the world is going to be a lot harder than I thought," she said.

"Yeah," I agreed, "It looks like we can"t just change the future. There are going to be people fighting against us the whole way."

"This is our duty," she said, "That"s what you told me when we were talking on the balcony. We were given this opportunity to save the world from the future that we came from. Save it from global warming, from the second cold war with Russia. We can make a difference and if we have to fight for it then that"s what we"ll do."

Alice walked over to the cliffside and pulled the rifle away from the corpse of Gil. She went through his pouches and took his ammunition as well. "Take the bullets of that other guy as well," she said, "We don"t know how many more of them are out there."

"Who did they say they were? The New World Order. Like the conspiracy, right?" I asked.

"Maybe," Alice said, "I don"t really know."

We gathered the materials off the dead bodies of Cameron and Gil. Their cold, dead eyes staring blankly as we rustled through the gear on their corpses. We picked off what we needed to and started walking back down the mountain.

"What about their bodies?" I asked, "And the car."

"They will probably burn in the fires," she said.

"Do you think we made a difference today?" I asked.

Alice breathed out heavily, "Probably not. We had no idea what we were up against. We didn"t even think that any of the factions would be interested in a forest fire in a remote part of the mountains."

We continued walking in the sweltering heat as the sounds of gunshots, explosions and thunder rained down in the distance behind us.

"Thank you, Sean," Alice said, "For holding me and staying with me." She was silent for a moment as we kept walking before she whispered under her breath, "and for giving me a purpose."

"I couldn"t hear sorry," I said, "What did you say?"

"It was nothing," She responded, "Do you need any water?" She asked, "Make sure you are drinking enough water. We don"t want you dropping of heat exhaustion."

We picked up the pace to a slight jog and ran for a few hours back towards the lodge. At one point, stopping to hide on the side of the road as a bunch of armed men started running up the mountain. We waited until they pa.s.sed and kept running. After about an hour of running, we were caught surprised as we rounded a corner past a rock in the mountains and there were three more people running up towards us with guns in hand. We saw them and they saw us, we were only 50 meters apart. Confused looks were exchanged by all of us and without thinking, I raised my gun.

"DROP YOUR WEAPONS!" I yelled.

One of the men started to raise his gun at us. BANG! Alice had shot the man and he dropped his gun, clasping his shoulder which had been hit. The other two started to raise their weapons and I pulled the trigger and held.

RATATATATATATATAT.

This time, time slowed down. I could see the light coming from the barrel of the gun as the bullets came out one after another. Slowly moving the gun from left to right as I reigned bullets down upon them. The gun stopped firing when it ran out of ammunition and down the sights, I saw three bodies piled onto the ground. While I was shooting, I could also hear Alice"s pistol firing off shots as well. Smoke started to rise from the end of the barrel as I looked down upon the chaos I"d just inflicted.

I stood there stunned as I stared at the now lifeless corpses in front of me. An hour beforehand I had no idea how to help Alice. What I could say to make her feel better. Now I was in the same situation. I had just killed three men. With the simple movement of my fingers, I had played judge, jury, and executioner as I stole the lives away from three other people. I murdered them, and their future, their past, their memories. I had stolen away their dreams and ambitions. I had simply stopped their experience. This fleeting thing that we call life. I had taken that all away from these three men. All with a small movement of my finger.

Alice grabbed a hold of my face and pulled me to look at her, "We are fighting Sean!" she said, "Remember that we are fighting for our lives and a better world. I"m sorry that I can"t hold you as you held me, but we need to keep going. I"m sorry."

She walked over to the bodies and lifted searched through the bodies. I slowly reloaded my gun, trying to work through my thoughts about the lives I had just taken.

"Sean!" she called.

She was right, we had to keep moving. I ran down to her and took a magazine of ammunition that she was holding out for me.

"It looks like the same gun," she said, "This should work in yours."

"Yeah," I said sheepishly, "Yeah, it should."

We continued running down the hill towards the lodge. Talking as we made our way down the mountain.

"What do we do about your parents!?" I asked, "If we have people up here shooting at us. Are we going to keep this secret?"

"I don"t know!" she said back to me, "I think we might need to at least stop hiding our actions."

"Won"t they know that you"re not their daughter then?" I asked.

"I don"t know what to do Sean!" she said, "I don"t know what the best course of action is. I don"t know what we need to do to keep them safe. Whether we reveal our selves to be time travelers, that I"m not their real daughter. Or that we just, I don"t know Sean, I just don"t know!"

"Whatever we do, we need to get out of here as fast as we can," I said, "The fires are coming as well as all of those people with guns. We"re just going to have to wing it, Alice. I don"t know what else we can do!"
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"Go in with guns?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said, taking a moment to try and rush through the mult.i.tudes of ways that would go down, "Yeah, go in with guns. It"s too much of a risk not to."

A man jumped out from behind a tree and started shooting at us, bullets impacting the ground near our feet and sending dirt flying up into the air. Alice pulled her to the side and raised her gun to aim at the man in the trees only 20 meters away from us.

RATATATATATAT

The man dropped to the ground and she stood back up and turned to me.

"Come on, we need to keep going!" she yelled, "This is getting to dangerous."

We continued running down the mountain and soon enough the lodge came into view. It was an out of place modern building made purely from stone with a pool stretching out from the center of the outside. The building was shaped like a C with gla.s.s windows running all around the outside of the structure, designed to allow it"s occupants to take in all of the nature around them. Matthew and Rachel were standing by the pool. Matthew was fully dressed and Rachel in a bikini as he held her tight. She turned her head to see us and called out.

"LAURA! TRAVIS!"

Her look of a parent who had just located her lost child to a look of horror. From her eyes, she would have seen two children running down the mountain with a.s.sault rifles in their arms dirt all over their faces and clothes. As well as the blood. There was blood on our clothes as well, picked up from when we were searching the bodies of the NWO faction soldiers. Her expression turned to pure horror. Matthew turned and his expression skipped right to the point of horror.

"KIDS!" he yelled, "What"s going on? We are hearing a lot of gunshots!"

"GET TO THE CAR!" I yelled.

"MUM, DAD, WE HAVE TO LEAVE!" Alice also yelled.

We both made it to the pool and both Rachel and Matthew ran up to us. They stopped just short of a few meters as we, two children, stepped forward brandishing a.s.sault rifles.

"What"s going on!?" Matthew asked, "Why are you kids running around with guns?"

"There is no time to explain Dad," Alice said, "We need to get in the car, and we need to leave," she said.

"Laura!" her mother cried, "Oh Laura are you, okay sweetie," she said, dropping to her knees to wrap her arms around Alice. Alice pushed her backward and started walking towards her father.

"Dad, get the keys we need to get out of here!" she demanded.

Alice turned back to her mother and then looked up at me before her jaw dropped in horror.

"EVERYONE GET DOWN!" she screamed.

RATATATATATATATA!

The bullets at first seemed to come from nowhere. I turned my body to see where the shots were coming from and dropped to the ground. One man had started running towards us, limping as he was moving forward with blood-soaked clothing. I remembered his face. He was the one Alice had shot in the shoulder. He must have been pretending to be dead when she searched his body. We didn"t make sure he was dead before leaving.

RATATATATAT! Toooonnnggg!

I heard the distinctive sound of the ammo in his gun, running out. Alice must have heard it too. I looked back at her. Her mother and father had both dropped to the ground. Alice was standing up and raising her gun. I turned back to the man and started to stand up as well. Almost simultaneously, we both started to fire our weapons, unloading an entire magazine into the man running at us. He dropped to the ground, throwing his weapon away from him as he did. His blood flowed fast from his body staining the dirt track in a large puddle around him.

In the short silence after the gunfire, we heard a vehicle rapidly approaching form the road down the hill.

"EVERYONE INSIDE!" I yelled.

Alice reached her hand down and helped in what way she could to get her father back to his feet. I ran over to Rachel and tried to lift her off the ground. She was almost paralyzed in fear but eventually stumbled to her feet.

"GUYS!" Rachel screamed, "WHAT"S GOING ON!?"

"TRAVIS! LAURA! WHAT ARE YOU GUYS DOING?" Matthey yelled, "WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AROUND WITH GUNS!?"

"Dad, there is no time to explain, we need to get inside and get inside now!" Alice said with a bite.

"I am your father!" Matthew said in a desperate attempt to gain control of the situation.

Alice took a deep breath in and then yelled, "I AM NOT YOUR DAUGHTER!"