Oh Hell No! (Pulse Science Fiction Series Book 3) Read Free

opens a cabinet with firearms and retrieves a 45 and a
shotgun. He walks up to a small table and grabs a flashlight.
    “If I don’t come back in 10
minutes, call Mr. Smith.”
    “Are you sure you want to go
alone? Oh dear, please be careful!” Helen shouts from the door, as Brandt walks
toward the darkness of the night.
    Brandt can see a silhouette of two
men standing on the pasture. He is normally a calm man, but two trespassers
that don’t run away when they see the land owner is bad news. Maybe he should
have called for help after all. He stops 15 feet away from the duo and points
the flashlight.
    Brandt shouts “Whatta hell…”
    “Greetings, we come in…” Starts
one of the men. But Brandt can’t pay attention on the words as the light from
the flashlight uncovers the deformed head and bodies of the uninvited guests. A
piece of skin and hair falls off from one of the men.
    The sound of a shotgun crosses the quiet night.
    ***

The man next to Loriei is excited “All
we need is one louse to splice the gene into,” he said. “Then, we return it to
the past one more time and erase all of this. Relax. We spent a lot of time and
research selecting the wording and the timeframe. It will work.”
    Light crackled around the
platform. The shadow image of two figures showed for less than a second and
then were gone. The light dissipated like evaporating water. In its place was
left the headband with the mounted camera. The wristbands and sample container
were back. The metal on the wristbands was blistered and blackened.
    “We’re all shadows.” She
whispered.
    Engineers approached from all
sides as heat rose from the objects in squiggles of distortion.
    “Don’t touch anything.” Loriei’s
voice boomed from the railing and echoed off the hard walls of the lab. They
froze in place and she handed her notebook off to the scientist next to her.
She took the stairs and pushed through the others to reach the platform alone.
“Everyone, stay back, please. We don’t want their sacrifice to be in vain.”
    If the bands were back and the
jumpers were not, that meant that they had been lost and the failsafe engaged.
Despite knowing better, she touched the sharp blisters on the surface of the
wristbands. They were still hot enough to cook on and stung her fingertips. The
heat required to disintegrate the bodies would have been great and even more
intense if they were still standing close together. The heat also had to be
intense to destroy the bodies of their lice to prevent infestation of the past.
    Loriei rolled the canister to its
side and ran a scan of the contents. The screen indicated empty. She looked up
and saw all eyes on her. She shook her head and everyone around her exhaled.
They were all thin from the lice feeding on them, but they seemed to deflate
even further at the news.
    She lifted the headband and
accessed the camera. As she rewound the recording, one of the men behind her
said, “We’ll need to download that and transcribe to get the full story.”
    “Just a moment,” she said.
    Loriei overrode the controls and
let the sound bleed through harsh from the piece next to her ear as she let the
uneven image roll through the eyepiece in front of her. It was dark and she
could hear the heavy breathing of the time jumpers that had just arrived. The
image was dark, but then adjusted into a sickly, green tint over the night. On
the left was a field of corn. On the right were cows that were still and quiet
even after the flash of the jumpers’ entry. The jumper that wore the head band
turned his head enough to show his partner standing. Loriei could not remember
their names and she wasn’t sure she could blame that on the lice. Someone was
shouting and approaching from a house in the mid ground where the lights were
now on as the jumper looked back. The green adjusted down to compensate for the
light pouring out from the widows and porch. The jumper wasn’t holding his head
still enough for her to focus