Travel Bug by David Kempf Page B

into one of them. Father Hitchens waited for the birth of the beast within.

5
    The Rapture woman or the white haired witch as we came to know her haunted my dreams or rather my nightmares.
    “Who the fuck are you, asshole?” asked Detective Warner.
    “I’m…”
    He struck me very hard on the top of my head with his ashtray. I reached up at my forehead and found my hand quite bloody.
    “Take it easy, damn it,” said Detective McDowell.
    “Good cop, bad cop.”
    “Shut the fuck up!” screamed Warner.
    “Who are you?” asked McDowell.
    “I’ve already told you guys, my name is Andrew Godley and I’ve come in search of the Rapture woman.”
    “Who is that?” asked Warner.
    “Jezebel…… Eden…”
    “Sounds like an alias,” said McDowell.
    “It is, I don’t know her real name, and no one does.”
    “Bullshit,” said Warner.
    The Rapture woman did an awful lot of damage to me in my otherwise sheltered, obscenely lucky and profitable life.
    “Why did you kill her?” asked McDowell.
    “She’s gone mad, ever since… she saw… what she saw…”
    “What did she see?” asked Detective Warner.
    “I don’t know…”
    “So you’re a time traveler?” asked Detective McDowell.
    “Yes.”
    “Where is your time machine?” asked McDowell.
    “I don’t have one, you see…”
    “Then how do you travel through time, H.G.?” asked Warner, very sarcastically.
    “I eat the meat of a prehistoric bug…”
    “Jesus Christ,” said Warner.
    “Calm down, Warner” said the good cop.
    He didn’t exactly calm himself. He picked me up and kicked me in the nuts so hard that I fainted for a few minutes.
    “Christ, you’re going to get us sued and you’re abusive ass is headed for jail, you know that?” asked McDowell.
    I was trying hard to wake up.
    “Do you get the last laugh because you’re a time traveler?” asked Warner.
    “I don’t know, detective. You didn’t want to hear me out,” I said to him.
    “No, I didn’t,” Warner said.
    “Do you wish to press charges against Detective Warner?” asked McDowell.
    “No,” I answered.
    “Why?” Warner asked.
    “What do you want then?” asked the good one.
    “I want to try and explain…”
    “Do you really?” the bad cop asked me…
    “My name is Andrew Godley; I come from one of the wealthiest families in the United States of America. I came here in search of the Rapture woman or the woman to end her life. I came here of my own free will and I killed her so she could not go evil…… There is a prehistoric monster, a beast, an ancient bug whose meat contains the power to cheat time.”
    I was in deep trouble then I woke up from the dream. When I woke up, I realized I was still in deep trouble!
    “Andrew, are you alright?” asked the old man.
    “Yes,” I answered him.
    “Bad dream?”
    “Sure was.”
    “You had one… about…… her?”
    I couldn’t answer my great grandfather. I was speechless.
    “What did she see, Harold?”
    “Son, I honestly don’t know.”
    “That’s the key to this whole crazy thing…”
    “Yes it is,” Harold said.
    We were kindred spirits in a world gone mad. I was no coward; I would die to save the world.
    “We need to eat some more bug meat,” said Harold.
    “Harold?”
    “Andrew?”
    “Are we the good guys or the bad guys?”
    “Oh, what the hell, let’s just assume we’re the protagonists, the good guys.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    “I mean we never killed anyone, son,” said Harold.
    “Good point.”
    “Andrew, it is a good point.”
    “Yes, every great movement and crazy fucking religion always assume that it’s coming from the side of righteousness.”
    “Good call,” he said to me.
    “So who is the antagonist?”
    “Who do you think it is?” he asked me.
    “The Rapture woman, that’s what you meant.”
    “Yes,” he said, sounding relieved I finally got it.
    The devil was in the details or at least the opposite side of the one you were on. Still, my stories or