Chapter One

Sherman hated his town, he hated his life, but most of all, he hated his job. He looked across the counter at his next customer. “Would you like fries with that?”

“Ha!” The woman grinned at him and bounced on her heels. “They actually said that back then?—I mean, back now?—I mean—well, you know what I mean.”

Most customers melted into a blur to Sherman, but not this one. Underneath an explosion of dark brown curls, her brown eyes glittered with a puppy-like enthusiasm, unusual in a middle-aged woman. About his own height of five-foot-four or so, she wore denim overalls over a trim enough figure. No, it wasn’t her appearance that made her stand out; it was her attitude. She acted like she had never been in a McDonald’s before.

She looked up at the menu board again. “Wait! Can I change that order? Instead of a Filet-Zero-Fish can I have a Big Mac?”

“You mean Filet-O-Fish?” Sherman just couldn’t help but correct her this time.

“That’s an ‘O’? Whatever.” She flipped her hand as if brushing away the correction. “So, what’s on a Big Mac anyway?”

Sherman put his weight on his other sore foot. Linoleum might disguise the floor, but standing eight hours a day on it made him painfully aware it was solid concrete. “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame-seed bun.”

Her eyes widened as Sherman rattled off the tongue twister. “Oooh! Can you repeat that?” She reached into her hip pocket and pulled out what looked like a small calculator and held it in her hand.

Sherman fought the urge to sigh and repeated the burger mantra slower this time. Surely she had heard the commercials.

“One can hardly go to a real McDonald’s Hamburger Restaurant and not have a legendary Big Mac. By the way, what’s today?”

“May eighteenth.”

“1985, right?”

“Yeah?” Sherman frowned at the question.

“At least I got the date right, but I obviously missed Mount Saint Helens. Where are we?”

“Kelso, Washington.”

“That’s not too bad. Not like I hit Paris, right?”

Sherman wasn’t sure if she spoke to him or some imaginary friend, so he ignored the question. “Would you like anything else with your Big Mac and milkshake?”

“Yeah, give me some of those frenched fries, since you asked.”

Sherman poked the “Big Mac,” “Small Fries” and “Milk Shake” buttons on the cash register, and then hit “Total.” This specially designed register for morons was only one of the things Sherman hated about his job. “That will be two dollars and eighty-nine cents, please.”

The woman reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a twenty dollar bill. She held it up and studied it. Her bright face turned a little dark for a moment. “I see they haven’t removed Andrew Jackson from your money yet. Guess that only happened after James Two Horses was elected.” She shrugged and handed the bill over to Sherman.

When Sherman handed her back the change, she studied the bills like they were a new species of bug. Her eyes shone with a keen intelligence that contradicted her lack of common knowledge. “Real actual cash money. Used and everything! How many bare hands have handled these? No Monetary Virus Plague yet, huh?”

Sherman wondered if the woman was high or crazy or just putting him on. He took a foam-boxed Big Mac out from under the heat lamp, snatched the envelope stuffed with fries off the rack, filled the paper cup with frozen ooze, put it all on a paper-lined tray and handed it to her. “Have a nice day.” Sherman managed to sound polite, even if his voice lacked enthusiasm.

She looked at him as if she had never heard that trite phrase before. “Why thank you very much. You have a nice day, too!” She smiled at Sherman, then took the tray and walked over to one of the plastic tables.

The next customer in line stepped forward, then the next and the next and the next. Sherman kept glancing over at the odd woman. She slowly ate her meal, savoring every bite instead of wolfing it down like most customers. She would occasionally stop to pull out that pocket calculator, poke buttons on it and talk to herself. Or maybe it was a tiny recorder she was talking into? She would nod, stick it back in her pocket, then eat some more, chewing slowly, often closing her eyes like she was eating some rare exotic treat.

She finally finished her meal and walked to the garbage can. She started to throw her trash away, then stopped and carefully wiped out the milkshake cup and foam container. She studied the soiled placemat and greasy fry envelope a moment, gave the envelope one last sniff, then sighed and threw them away with the napkins. Reverently, she placed the tray on the rack over the can and headed for the exit, cradling the rest of her trash like it was some lost treasure.

“I got to take out the garbage, Gilbert,” Sherman yelled at the assistant manager and grabbed the plastic liner out of the garbage can behind the counter. He rushed out the door and looked around. The sky was overcast as usual. Across the street and beyond the tall weeds, he could see the semis roar by overhead on the raised bed of I-5. He spotted the woman across the parking lot, striding past the enclosed playground. Beyond the driveway sat a thirty-five foot Winnebago atop mud and Shasta daisies in the empty adjacent lot. The woman headed straight for the motorhome, and climbed in, still hugging her souvenirs. Why in the world would she park there on the muddy uneven ground, with a good chance of getting stuck, when the parking lot had plenty of empty space?

Sherman ran across the lot to get a closer look at the license plates. They were just blank. Not even dealer plates. That made no sense. Then Sherman remembered Gilbert. The image of the jerk pulling out a stop watch and timing him flashed in his mind. Gilbert didn’t actually have a stop watch, but he was always looking for something to write people up on. As much as Sherman hated his job, he desperately needed it, and jobs were scarce. He spun around and jogged to the back of the building where a detached brick enclosure sat. It did an excellent job of hiding the dumpster but not the smell when this close. He held his breath, opened the steel lid, and flung in the bag. He was already half-way to the back door when the lid fell with a ringing clang.

As soon as he returned to the counter, Gilbert shoved a bleached rag under Sherman’s nose and sent him into the “lobby” to clean up. Why didn’t they just call it a dining room? Sherman stoically suppressed a groan and went out front to get it over with. Mothers loved coming here, so their kids could have food fights someone else had to clean up. Maybe they called it a lobby because the brats lobbed food at each other.

As he swept up congealed fries and scraped dried catsup off the tables with his fingernails, Sherman kept thinking about that woman. Who was she? What was she? What was it about her that fascinated him so much? She seemed so mysterious in a flakey sort of way. Right now she had to be the most interesting thing he had seen in months. Of course, that didn’t take much in Kelso. Through the rest of his shift, spent sweating over the metal baskets in the deep fryer, Sherman couldn’t get her out of his mind. Why did she get so excited over a Big Mac?

He finally got off his shift, punched out and went out the back door, to walk the mile back to his rundown apartment. It had begun drizzling somewhere between mist and a real rain. He sighed and turned up his collar, then glanced across the lot to see the Winnebago still sitting there on the mud that was now getting muddier. He stopped, then shook his head and started again for home. He got ten feet and whirled around. He had to talk to this lady, if only to find out where she came from. At nineteen-looking-fourteen, and too short, too skinny, with horn-rimmed glasses, Sherman figured he couldn’t possibly seem like a threat to her. He walked up to the metal door, reached up and knocked.

A yelp came from inside, then the door flew open with a bang. The woman poked her head out, brown curls bouncing like Slinky toys, eyes bugging out with panic.

“Uh.” Sherman tried to look harmless. “Did—”

“Jiminy Criminy!” She grabbed his arm. “It’s already started! Get in quick before you get killed!” She yanked him inside and slammed the door shut, locking it in one swift motion.

“What?” Sherman looked around expecting to see a bed, table and tiny kitchen crammed in with them, but instead found only two bucket seats bolted to the floor. The grey metal walls did not show the windows that appeared on the outside. The room only took up eight feet of the thirty-five feet available. “How come it’s so much smaller on the inside? What’s that weird noise?” The humming got louder and louder, quickly going from annoying to ominous. It sounded like a cross between a buzz saw and his old television just before it blew up.

The woman shoved Sherman into a black leather seat and plopped into the one next to him. “Fasten your seat belt, kid, and hold onto your McDonald’s hat!” She pulled her strap over her shoulder and fastened it at her waist.

Sherman just stared at her. “Huh?”

She rolled her eyes, reached over, grabbed Sherman’s shoulder strap, and fastened his seatbelt for him. “Men. Helpless at any age.”

The wall in front of Sherman had a large white screen with geometric diagrams and strange symbols that looked like some alien language. The figures would come into view, and then blink out. Buttons poked out of the flat surface, then would recede and vanish. All around the screen swirling numbers appeared and disappeared. It was like someone trying to animate Albert Einstein’s acid trip. “Where’s the windshield?” Sherman looked around. “Hell, where’s the steering wheel?”

The whirring noise increased, and whatever they sat in suddenly jerked and then rattled like a jeep over rough terrain, an unnerving clanking adding itself to the strange hum. Only the seatbelt kept Sherman from bouncing out of his seat. He clenched his teeth to stop them from clacking painfully together.

“S-sorry,” the woman yelled over the cacophony. “I g-got to w-work on those minor g-glitches. Hope you d-don’t lose your frenched fries.”

For what seemed forever, but probably only amounted to several minutes, the terrifying machine threatened to rip itself apart and them with it. Finally the shaking and noise wound down and stopped. Silence...except for the sound of Sherman’s heart beating in his ears.

“You okay, kid?” She undid her seatbelt.

“Sure?” Sherman answered, unsure.

She stood up and stepped over to the wall in front of them. She began poking icons punched out of the screen. “Don’t get up. Got to take you back, right now! Don’t know what your being here will do. I’m all new to this; don’t want to mess up anythingor everything.”

“Mess up what?” Sherman felt too numb to move.

“Time.”

“Time?”

“Hell’s doorbells, said too much. Forget I said that.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. Zilch. Bupkis. Nic.” She poked more images on the screen and then studied the numbers coming up, while humming some senseless tune in a bad attempt to look nonchalant.

Sherman knew he did not want to go for another ride in this cement mixer. “Maybe I should go.” He unfastened his seatbelt and stood up. “I need to get home. Got to feed the cat. Yeah, the cat.” Sherman didn’t have a cat, but it sounded like a good excuse. He turned, unlatched the door, pushed and stepped out.

“No! Wait!” The woman yelled behind him.

Sherman almost missed the step down. He stumbled, and then gaped about, finding himself not in a patch of Shasta daisies, but in a huge windowless room. It was brightly lit with a light that emanated from the glowing white ceiling high overhead. Strange equipment he couldn’t even begin to identify sat on the smooth cement floor. One machine had a huge clear glass ball on top with miniature lighting dancing about inside. A spidery-looking rack of drills, raised a spindle with a bulbous eye, then backed away on rubber treads, all by itself. Sherman caught a whiff of acetone and...oranges? Had Sherman stumbled into the workshop of a mad scientist?

It was the calendar on the wall that actually made his jaw drop. Not the picture of the muscle-bound pretty-boy draped over the hood of a sports car. Not even the car itself, which was unlike any model he’d ever seen. No, it was the large number “2353” printed at the top that made him forget to breathe for a moment.

“What does 2353 mean?” Sherman asked, his stomach fluttering.

“It means I may have messed up everything.” She came out of the Winnebago to join him.

“Where am I?”

“Right where the calendar says you are.”