Visions of Lightning

A Tribute to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"

One of my final writing assignments from last term was to pick one of the short stories we read and re-write it from a different character's perspective... I didn't do that. Well, I sort of did-- but one of the stories we read was Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," which ended with an ambiguous cliffhanger gunshot. I wanted to explore the "man at the desk," as well as the new, President Deutscher-ruled future Eckels returned to after his time-travel dinosaur-hunting safari. The story below picks up where Ray Bradbury left off.

READER ADVISORY: This story opens with an act of suicide and contains profanity intended to deepen the corruption of the new world in which Eckels finds himself.

Visions of Lightning

After four flashes of gun barrel lightning, two men breathe the same but different room’s polluted air. Fatal bangs fired in brief succession shudder the walls. Rifles clatter, split floor tiles, and are joined by hunters who say nothing before opting out of their altered present. Travis slumps with his pale, red, hatred-stained face piercing Eckels with three eyes—two blue and lifeless, plus a self-inflicted forehead gouge.

Gunshot echoes fade in the rafters. The bodies are limp and silent. All sounds die, last of all the Time Machine’s radio static twittering as the orange-blue pulses above its steel pillars shed their pace and lumens. The two men have separate experiences of the same silence.

Eckels’ hyperventilation stalls. His horrified gaze bounces between the five deceased, trying unsuccessfully to will them back to life, to retract his fateful blunder made millions of years ago. Travis lays dead and glaring. Lesperance, Billings and Kramer lay scattered by the Machine. The beautiful butterfly remains squashed under Eckels’ boot. He cups both sides of his head with hands still tinged with T-Rex blood despite multiple washings.

Across the room, by the reception doors, away from the Machine and bizarre massacre, the man at the desk furrows his bushy black brows with his head cocked. Blood pooling on the floor makes his stomach growl and he struggles to understand the scene before him.

“What the… what’d I say?” he whispers to himself. He casts Eckels a suspicious scowl. “Is this real?”

“God, I hope not,” Eckels says.

The man almost laughs, but grows furious. “God? What filth are you talking? This is a family busin—”

In anger, haste, and hunger the man chokes and succumbs to a coughing fit. His index finger demands a moment to compose himself. One of three name placards is knocked from the desk as he grabs a fast-food cup, as red as the floor and the size of his computer screen, and gulps from the straw. The cup's haunting black logo reads, ‘Blud-A-Berger.’

The desk’s intercom chirps. A strangely excited female voice speaks. “Travis, the security system messaged me saying it detected gunfire. What happened?”

The man answers between coughs. “Th-this is—n’t, Trav…is, M-Miss Col-col—”

“What the hell's the matter with you? Who is this?”

“S-s-sor-ry. Ch-choking. I’m. Walt.” Walt swallows hard and clears his throat.

“Well, knock it off. I don’t know any Walts. Where’s Travis?” she asks.

“Ahem. ‘Scuse me. He just got back from Safari and… Some weird bullshit just happened, Miss Coleridge. Travis, Lesperance, and two clients blew their brains out all of a sudden. One client didn't, but then started babbling God nonsense. Was the darnedest thing.”

“God? You sure they didn’t pick him up in the 1600s on their way back?”

“I’m sure, ma’am, I saw him before th—”

“Shut up, Walt. It was a joke.”

“Ah. Good one, Miss Coleridge. Heh. Heh-heh.”

“You know where the Death Witness Forms are? The mops?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’ll call Corpse Removal. Cancel this week’s Safaris and get to work. I’m back from Toronto on Monday.”

“Um, Miss Coleridge? I was supposed to be off in an hour. Could I—”

“Walt, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tell me your last name, so I can get a pink slip ready. I hear bread lines are thrilling.”

“No need! No need and never mind, ma'am. Enjoy your travels. I’ll stay till dawn, if that’s what it takes.”

“Yes, you will. Make sure you clock out in an hour. Praise to Deutscher.”

“Praise to Deutscher,” Walt exclaims, then pauses. The intercom’s green ‘active’ light flickers off. “Bitch.”

Walt takes a deep breath, rubs his hands over his face, pushes his bangs out of his eyes, and grumbles a hyperbolically long groan. He shoves against the desk and his rolling chair slams into the wall behind him, but Walt is already standing and striding across the room toward Eckels, who tenses in his chair, thinking Walt intends to harm him. Eckels doesn’t relax even when Walt passes by and walks out of sight to the utility closet behind the Machine. A violent twist of the doorknob and the door slams open. A faucet squeaks and water pours into a bucket. During all of this, Eckels doesn’t know if Walt is ranting to him, himself, or the Machine.

“Two years I’ve been here. Not one sick day, I haven’t missed a second of her bullshit team meetings. Has she learned my name yet? Nope. Or maybe she has, but gets her kicks out of emasculating people— even kindhearted, hardworking ones like me. Doesn’t even pay me overtime. Acts like I wanted a bunch of idiots to bleed all over my floor. Don’t get me wrong, I love blood as much as any other Party member, but I should get paid for cleaning it up, for staying late, you know? I mean, I had plans tonight! Big plans, and expensive. I saved for ages to buy those tickets and now Anne’s gonna go without me and I’ll only see pictures and all because four assholes picked tonight of all nights to lose their minds. You know anything about this? Hey. Wake up, dickhead!”

Walt is beside Eckels with a yellow bucket full of swishing soapy water and two mops. He gives Eckels a few not-so-light pats on the cheek, unharnessing Eckels’ eyes from Travis’ damning stare.

“What?” Eckels asks.

“What’s the deal with the dead guys? You piss ‘em off or something?”

“Me? Of course not! Didn’t do a thing. They just… I guess they didn’t want to be a part of this world.”

“Why the hell not? Deutscher’s about to make this country great again, better than it’s ever been. Hey, you’re looking pretty green, man. Haven’t you seen brains before?”

“Tons. Deer, bears, coyotes. T-Rex, most recently. Never human, though. Never thought I would.”

“No one’s really an adult till they do, in my opinion, so I’ll let you have first dibs. Congrats,” Walt says. He passes Eckels a mop handle and walks the outskirts of the blood toward the reception doors.

“Wait a minute,” Eckels says. “Don’t leave me with this.”

“Relax, I’ll be back to help in a second.”

“But I don’t work here.”

“Do you want to? A couple spots just opened up.”

“No, I want to go home. I want to go back—”

“Quit whining, you have Death Forms to fill out too. You’re as stuck here as me, so you might as well help."

Walt throws open the double doors to the reception area. Fifteen clients are clustered, trying to eavesdrop, intrigued by the recent rifle blasts. Eckels notices how young they are, children mostly, with a couple parents interspersed. Nearest the door is a child Eckels estimates to be six, and she wears a sparkling tiara flashing a hologram golden halo above her head, along with the words ‘Berthday Gerl.’

She says, “Mommymommy, look! There are people chunks on the floor!”

“I see, Hannah! Isn’t it lovely? Just imagine what you’ll see on Safari,” says the mother.

“I’m sorry, folks. No more Safaris today. Please call to reschedule,” says Walt.

“But it’s my daughter’s birthday.”

“Yes, I can read her halo, lady, but our Safari Guides are a little dead.”

“But I wanna kill things! It’s my birthday!” The little girl stamps her foot.

Walt sighs deeply and kneels to speak with the girl face to face.

He pats her gently on the shoulder and says, “I understand, you little shit, but try a little compassion and understand how extremely fucking inconvenient my life has become because of the people chunks in there. I’ll be dealing with paperwork and Corpse Collectors until much later tonight, so late that I’ll have missed Sickleball Playoffs, it won’t be your birthday anymore, and this little tiara on your head—” His hand lifts from her shoulder and swipes the tiara. “—will be just another lie to carry around.”

He snaps the tiara in two and the hologram dies with a whimper. The little girl begins to cry, which makes Walt smile and he stands to address the room. “Call and reschedule or don’t, but we don’t give refunds. Figure it out. I don’t really care. Also, leave. I got work to do. Praise to Deutscher.”

Walt swivels and leaves the mother and everyone else in stunned silence, other than girl’s crying, and closes the door behind him. He groans again, but this time a pleased one. “Ohhhhhhh, that warmed my soul. Wish I had it recorded. Let’s boogie,” he says and claps his hands.

A stereo begins playing pop music of the day, a strange blend of death metal screaming over a jazzy brass section. Walt ambles over to the second mop. While they clean, Eckels eyes the rifles on the floor and fights the impulse to opt out of the world he feels he created. Instead, he takes Walt’s job offer, as Eckels knows the Time Machine is the only way to course-correct humanity. Walt shows Eckels proper mopping technique and they wait for the Corpse Collectors.

Torrential rain pelts their convoy of black hearses, each of which boasts the Party’s double-lightning insignia on every door.