This Story Isn’t About You

The time traveler told me about the end of the world over drinks.

He expounded on the harsh reality of a sudden apocalypse during appetizers. Got into politics over the main course then circled back to violence while poking at dessert. I slid my hand under the white tablecloth and gripped his thigh.

We barely made it into my apartment, pulling our clothes off and attacking each other in the hallway. Somehow we ended up on my bed, spent and panting. 

I climbed back on top.

“Tell me again about the burning buildings,” I said and then slipped him inside of me.

~

In the morning, he was gone.

This was not unusual, as men are prone to wandering. But when I walked out of my bedroom and into the small foyer of my apartment, I noticed his clothes still scattered around the hallway. I shrugged and went about making coffee, checking my email and socials.

About an hour later, he blinked back into my apartment. Naked, covered in scratches and bruises, dried blood, and with a wild, violent look about his face. He looked down at his hands and seemed surprised to find them empty.

“I stopped it again,” he whispered and then collapsed. 

~

We ordered in.

I put something gory on the TV. He laughed whenever someone got bludgeoned. Red sauce clung to his cheek where before there was actual blood. He didn’t talk about the end of the world and it was driving me crazy.

On the screen, a group of girls were heading off to skinny dip in a lake, in the dark, after a bunch of their friends were murdered the previous night. Totally normal stuff. 

The time traveler leaned forward, obviously enraptured, and that was it for me. I slapped at the remote on the table, pausing the screen right as the clothes started coming off.

He looked at me with an expression like I just shot someone.

My tone was a shouted curse foreshadowing a road-rage incident. “Well?” I said. “Are you going to say anything about last night?”

He swallowed and reached over to touch my arm. “I had a great time. Didn’t you?”

“Not that.” I slapped his arm away. “You disappeared. Then you reappeared, naked, covered in blood. You said you stopped it again, what is ‘it’?”

He glanced around as if someone was watching us. “You know …”

“No, I don’t know. Please be specific when talking about things that are supernatural or apocalyptic in nature.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I get it. You deserve an explanation.”

He started talking, spilling his guts about the end of the world, the “cyclic nature of reactive reality” (whatever that hell that was), and how he was destined to keep fighting to save the world in the future so present us could order DoorDash and watch Netflix in peace.

After an hour, I kissed him just to get him to shut up.

~

In the ultra dark hours of the night, when sleep comes easily to most, I heard him whispering. His back was to me and he paused every once in a while as if he was in a real conversation.

“Hey,” I whispered. He didn’t hear me. “Hey,” I said again and gave him a little kick. He looked at me. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

His eyes darted around, embarrassed. “I’m, um, narrating. You know, like you do.” He motioned with his head to the empty space near the bed. “I thought they would want to know about how I do it, you know, how I travel, specifically how—

“No,” I cut him off.

“Are you sure? Because it’s kind—”

“No,” I said again. “Nobody cares. This story isn’t about you. Go back to sleep.”

He made a noise, but didn’t argue, and stayed quiet the rest of the night.

~

He moved in. It just kind of happened. He was over all the time and one day I looked around and he had his clothes, newly purchased from Target, stacked up in a corner on a side table and half of the bathroom had his bottles and shaving materials.

I didn’t feel used, because he paid for things most of the time. He had a credit card. When I asked him what he did for a living, he shrugged and said, “Save the world,” and then we both laughed.

He didn’t seem to mind that I asked him about the end of the world before we had sex. He had a thousand violent anecdotes and macabre images in the forefront of his mind, ready to come out at the slightest turn, like a faucet. 

I can’t tell you what it was about those stories that did it for me. How even thinking about it gets me excited. Maybe it was the foreignness of it. The strangeness. Like the first time you hear a unique accent, it’s so fascinating. You just want more.

That is, until it becomes real.

~

We were in the middle of it, missionary, when I felt him shudder on top of me. I thought, Oh no, not this guy too, then I noticed his eyes went wide in shock and I knew it was not what I thought.

A moment later, there was a falling sensation as if the bed had been whisked away by magic. 

And then we were on some dirty floor, still entangled. He leaped off me and stared at the surroundings like a caged animal, mumbling curses. 

I stood up and took in the room. Lockers lined one wall and along the others, closed blast windows made everything dark except for some fluorescents in the ceiling.

“Shit, shit, shit, SHIT,” continued the time traveler, ignoring me.

“Hey,” I said. He didn’t respond. I shoved him in the shoulder, hard. “Hey. Where are we?”

He shrugged his shoulders as if to say Where do you think?

~

He pulled some clothes from one of the lockers. We dressed in silence. It was a one-piece jumpsuit, not flattering.

I cut to the chase. “So, what are we supposed to do here?”

He nodded, businesslike, and went over to the blast windows. He pressed a button and, with a slow grinding sound, they opened, revealing a burned landscape. The clouds were red and the ground was an unsettling black, as if it had been torched multiple times.

He spoke as he worked a panel on the wall. 

“You see that army over there?”

I didn’t. He pressed some more buttons and one of the windows zoomed in by a few hundred degrees. Then I saw them. A horde of undead. They rode alien beasts and carried every kind of weapon I’d ever seen.

“I—uh, we have to stop them.”

“How, exactly?”

He nodded again and a series of joysticks and pedals and buttons appeared below the windows. 

“This place is a weapon. It guards the one remaining colony of humans left on Earth. It’s mostly automated but requires some human input. It’s usually just me. If they breach the base, we lose. We have some time before they are in range.”

“How much time?”

He glanced at the screen. “An hour or so.”

“Enough time,” I said and started taking off the ugly jumpsuit.

His eyes were surprised, but willing. He pushed me up against a wall. Before he entered me, I grasped his shoulders.

“For the record,” I said, “I’m still mad at you.”

He grinned and got to work.

It was the best sex of my life.

~

When the battle began, it was a blur of bullets, blood, and giant rumbling cannons overhead.

The time traveler barked out orders, which was kinda sexy since he was usually so timid, and I did my best to follow. 

There was a constant stream of bullets flying out of the base, the fields in front of us awash with blood and the dismembered bodies of our enemy. Not sexy.

Then there was a great crash below us and I knew something was wrong.

“They’re inside,” he said and yanked down on a lever. One of the walls opened up, revealing a hundred different types of guns. He started grabbing and pulling at them.

“You stay here,” he said. He nodded at the incoming forces outside. “Keep them at bay. I’ll deal with our guests.”

“Wait,” I said. I squeezed his shoulder and for once, it wasn’t sexual. “I don’t know how to run this place. You do. You stay. I’ll go.”

He didn’t move. “You could get hurt.” He shook his head. “No, you don’t know anything about guns.”

I moved past him and grabbed the biggest gun I could find. “I’ve seen ‘The Walking Dead.’ I’ll figure it out.”

Another crash from below. And more rumbles from the battlefield.

“Okay,” he said, “GO!” and then went back to the windows and the battle.

I grabbed another big gun, some kind of automatic rifle, a shotgun, a gun belt already loaded with ammo, and some pistols. It was heavy, but the adrenalin in my body made me strong.

“Bye, lover,” I said, blew an air kiss, and went downstairs to, most likely, die.

~

But I didn’t. 

The base had its own internal defenses and the guns were effective in picking off the stragglers. By the time I had walked through the entire base a few times, the sounds of the battle had abated. We had won, somehow. 

I went up the stairs slowly, the weapons weighing me down, until I made it back to the control room. The time traveler was slumped in a corner, panting heavily. He looked up at me and smiled.

“Oh good. Quickly, get over—”

He didn’t get to finish his sentence. As he rose to greet me, he began to disappear. 

I rushed forward, but he was gone, his ugly, sweat-stained jumpsuit on the floor.

I dropped my guns to the ground in a clatter of metal. I studied the open wall of weaponry in front of me. I figured, if I had time, I could learn what they all did. 

When he comes back, I’m going to kill that motherfucker.