Second Chance by Chet Williamson

happened?" said Alan. His voice sounded thick, as though no words had passed through his throat in years.
    Curly barked a laugh that sounded mired in phlegm. "Before," he said. "Happened once before, you remember? A mass high. A fucking mass high is what it was. A communal zonk ."
    "Curly," Alan said in a choked but accusing tone, "what was in that grass?"
    Curly shook his head. "Nothing—just grass, I swear.”
    “Then I'm gettin' old," Sharla said. "Never thought grass would whack me out like that. I mean, I was gone."
    "We were all gone," Frank said. "I'm just glad we didn't stay. Does everybody feel okay?"
    Woody did a quick self-analysis, taking deep breaths, stretching his muscles, rotating his neck. He did feel good. His lungs seemed to fill with more air than usual, his muscles felt taut, even the extra inch of gut he had been concerned about for the past year or so seemed to have decreased, and he pulled his belt in a notch, then shrugged to indicate that he was all right, as did the others.
    "What time is it?" Curly said, stepping into the dining room to look at the wall clock. "Ah. Just a couple minutes since we started."
    "What difference does it make?" said Judy.
    "I'm just thinking that maybe there was a little opium in that shit—puts you out for what seems like a long time, but it's really only a minute or so. Maybe we got a little extra bonus."
    "What the hell?" Woody heard Alan say softly. "My watch is gone."
    "You must have forgotten it," Diane said.
    "I never forget my watch." Alan was staring at his wrist as though his left hand was missing.
    "Forget it, Alan," Eddie said. "You don't have to be anywhere but here tonight. So let's have a beer—and no more dope, if you please—and lighten up."
    "God," Curly said, shaking his head. "This'd be enough to turn me into a head again."
    "Forget it, Curly," said Frank.
    "It was just so weird," Curly said. "It was like we were all one person . . . like that other time."
    "You said that before," Woody said. "That it happened once before. What do you mean?"
    Curly frowned, trying to remember. "I don't remember when exactly, but there were a bunch of us here, and somebody had brought along some opiated hash or something equally exotic, and we all smoked it, and we all had the same kind of hallucination . . .” He trailed off, deep in thought, trying to bring back the time.
    The memory touched something in all of them, and one by one they began to nod, to remember. "We ended up in a circle," Diane said. "We shared a pipe or something, and we were all in a circle."
    "Who brought it?" said Judy. "I can't remember who brought it. It's like it was just there."
    "It was the future."
    They all turned and looked at Sharla , who was staring straight ahead at a poster on the wall.
    "We talked about it afterward," she said, as if intoning a mantra. "We thought we'd gone into the future."
    "What," said Alan. "You mean like science fiction?"
    "No. Don't you remember? It was something about our future. We saw—"
    "We saw each other older ," Judy said, as though the memory had just hit distinctly. Her face was tight with the effort to recall more. "I can't remember anything else, but it was like we were older." She gave her head a sharp, quick shake. "Damn," she said. "Nothing else comes."
    "I remember that night too," said Eddie. "Sort of," and the others nodded.
    Woody remembered it as well, just barely, like a dream dreamed long before, but one that had made a tremendous impression on the dreamer.
    Silence shrouded the room until Curly roughly cleared his throat. "Well, I'm getting a beer," he said. "I'll stick to legal drugs from now on."
    Woody joined him in his trek to the bathroom, and others followed, getting beers and walking back into the living room. As Woody sipped from his glass, he thought the beer tasted different somehow—sharper, crisper, with more of a bite than it had before. It tasted like Iron City used to taste.
    And when he sat back down on the floor,