I had been in therapy ever since I was in high-school, but even more often after 9/11. This time the attacks on September 11th 2001 didn't turn into an all out thermo-nuclear war, instead it was used as a premise for starting a ground war in Iraq. But I still felt depressed and very upset about it. And I was starting to have nightmares again.
After 9/11 my psychiatrist changed my medications to something that was making me sleep a lot more often. It was making me so drowsy that it was hard waking up on time for anything. Soon after that I lost my job. With me being unemployed we weren't able to afford staying at our place so we had to move back in with my uncle again.
Eventually I found a new job at a fast food restaurant. That's where I met Betty, a smoking hot blond catholic ex-school girl with a fun and sassy attitude. And Natalie, a gorgeous redhead with the cutest voice I had ever heard. I was immediately attracted to both of them. Natalie had a thing for vampires and spotted me instantly.
Natalie and I became friends right off the bat. When her older sister, May, was in a car accident and became agoraphobic, Natalie invited me to come home with her and meet her family. For a while I thought something would develop between Natalie and I. I started spending a lot of time at her house. But after a while for some strange reason she and I became increasingly paranoid of each other.
May had been running a 'home business' ever since she had developed agoraphobia and could no longer leave the house to go to work. Let's just say that it was the kind of business where the fines and penalties would get doubled for doing it within 500 yards of a school. And Natalie was very protective of her family. Her bigger sister May had always taken care of them no matter what.
After a while I was fired from the fast food place because I was still having issues waking up on time. May was going through a divorce, but her husband helped me get a job working with him at the grocery store. I would be working in the meat department, replacing Henry, May's new boyfriend.
One day around Christmas time May and I were just casually talking in her kitchen doorway when she pointed up at a twig of mistletoe hanging at the top of the doorway. I was surprised, I hadn't even seen it there, and she kissed me. Before I knew it we were upstairs in her bedroom, and what had been done could not be undone. May said she needed to keep her relationship with me a secret because her boyfriend, Henry, who was also Natalie's ex, was apparently the jealous type.
And that's not all. Apparently there was an older lady who had been abusing Natalie. And at some point I became friends with Natalie's other ex-boyfriend, Ted. And, well, you know how sometimes people joke about making their partners walk funny after a special night? I don't know what happened, but after May and I went upstairs she was unable to walk at all. She had to go to the hospital, and apparently they discovered a cyst.
Back at May's house, Natalie handed me a cup of coffee out of nowhere. It tasted horrible, but she and her family had been homeless for about half of her lifetime so I never expected her to make great coffee. Then she sat down and started to cry. It was really bad coffee. Then I started to feel bad. I started sweating heavily and my chest hurt. Then I thought I must have fallen asleep or something.
I woke up in a strange bed, in a strange room that I didn't recognize. It was unfamiliar, but nice. The blankets were clean, there were curtains on the windows, and one of the first things I noticed was a fresh clean smell in the air. At first I wanted to go back to sleep, I was very tired, but then I was aware of a sound, it was a telephone ringing.
I looked around and found the phone, it looked like a very well-made antique. I looked at the phone for a moment and then picked it up. Before I could say hello a woman’s voice spoke up, “Greetings traveler, your arrival in this time-line has been recorded and a welcoming party is currently being dispatched to your location.” A moment of panic ran over me as I realized that I was not only in an unfamiliar time-line, but also, apparently someone was coming to see me.
“Please do not leave your designated area,” the voice went on, “also be advised that you are in a tertiary universe, any changes you make to this time-line will be rolled back upon your egress.” I tried to think of something to say, but then the message began to repeat, “Greetings traveler...” I listened to the whole message at least two more times before I hung up.
Looking around again I saw that the room barely had any furniture in it, just a bed, a table, and a telephone on that table, there were no windows. I stood up and walked out the door into a long hallway. The building was enormous, there were a lot of empty rooms and hallways, but no other furniture, and no windows. In fact, I couldn't even find a way out, the whole place was like a maze.
Then I turned around and saw a girl who I vaguely recognized just standing there in a door way, we looked at each other for a moment, she had a big wide smile on her face and shouted, “Hey, I found him. He's over here!” Suddenly people were flooding into the room from every doorway. It was more people than I thought I had ever met, but somehow I knew all of them personally. I could have sworn one of them was wearing a lampshade as a hat, but I couldn't figure out where they had gotten a lampshade from. Natalie came up to me and was apologizing profusely, first for having poisoned me with that last cup of coffee, and secondly for taking so long for the party to arrive. She said it had taken them a while to find everyone.
Over the course of what seemed like days, the group and I talked about everything. They filled me in on what I had forgotten when I was little, and they told me all about various political conspiracies and evils that they insisted had really happened. It took me a while to reconcile the idea that the president had actually signed a law to allow radioactive nuclear waste to be recycled into consumer goods like silverware and baby cribs. Or that the Vice-President had ordered Norad to stand down during the 9/11 attacks, I didn't even think the Vice-President had the authority to give such an order.
All along I kept trying to ask questions like how had they gotten there, and who was in charge of the place, and how did they know all of these things. Nobody seemed to want to answer those questions though, they just said they were getting to that part. After they brought me up to speed about the past, it was time to tell me about the future. They told me that the asteroid didn't always hit Earth. And that the real threat to humanity as I knew it was something called a 'break-away civilization'.
Apparently some time during the 1900's someone cracked the solution to time travel, and ever since then nearly every government on the planet has been secretly been gathering up all the most brilliant minds while they're young. The world would have had flying cars and free energy by now if all the smartest people hadn't been working exclusively for the government, developing mind-blowing new technologies in secret to prepare for the next big war to end all wars, the war for time itself.
One particular faction in the great time war, the USA, had developed space travel early on. The American secret space program had then used that technological advantage to gain a foothold among the stars. And now the issue had become how to eliminate their opposition before the great time war escalated from a theoretical cold war into a raging hot battle for domination thrown backwards in time.
In other words the Shadow Government had completely detached itself from the rest of human civilization and was now planning to kill every person left on Earth to ensure that nobody else could fulfill the scientific prophecy of time travel before they could do it first. In their defense they could have argued that after they achieve time travel they could simply go back in time and take over the Earth before civilization even began, avoiding the cataclysmic devastation which they were planning.
However, they went on to say, that Break-Away’s plan would never work because vampires had already done it. The great time war had already been fought and won, the hard way. As a consequence of the war their faction had been attacked with a biological weapon, and even though they managed to survive it, the contagion made them all physically dependent on regular transfusions of blood to survive. Eventually they had become able to biologically engineer the virus that they had been attacked with, and over time they made it their own. In the mean while they had rebuilt civilization as they now wanted it.
The catch was, and it was a big one, that somehow I had gotten the attention of the vampires who ruled the world. And in an effort to convert me to their own, I had somehow gotten a severely weakened dosage of the virus. As a result, instead of becoming a normal vampire, my immune system worked diligently to evolve a special protein which neutralized the majority of effects that were normally caused by the vampires virus.
My only signs of vampirism were my fangs. Essentially, I had accidentally created a vaccine that could 'cure' all vampires, and the shadow government now had all the blood samples from me that they could ever need to overthrow the ancient vampires who ruled the Earth. Unfortunately, that meant that now there was nothing standing in the way of the breakaway civilization and their plan to kill everyone on the planet in their never-ending quest to dominate time and space.
It was obvious to me now that all of these people had been converted to vampires in this time-line. It made me wonder how many parallel universes the vampires had taken control of. I wanted to ask a new set of questions, like what was stopping them from simply going back in time to before I became a vampire, but then I realized that if the breakaways had time travel too then maybe things probably weren't so simple. As if reading my mind they said that I had traveled too much already, and if I attempted time travel again then the germs I had been bringing with me each time would evolve into a plague that would eventually kill all life on Earth, not just the people.
Then they told me that there was no time left. They had decided to give me one last chance to set things right. And there was one last thing I had to know, and it was that I needed to make a decision. A new time-war was about to break out and I needed to quit messing around and choose a side. Just then the man with the lampshade on his head walked past me, and I couldn't help it, I reached up and pulled the lampshade off his head. It was my father, and he was holding a pistol now. “Time's up kid.” he stated bluntly, and then he shot me.
