What Happened to Rose Gonzalez?

The scene was a chaotic mess with medical personnel, a search and rescue team and three officers searching the area. The lead detective, John Maxwell found Mrs. Brook Daniels still holding her cell and staring blankly into space. He decided that he would bring her to the police station to redirect her attention.

“The police interview of Mrs. Brook Daniels, November 5, 2019,” said Detective Maxwell into the recorder.

“Mrs. Daniels could you tell us how you and Miss Rose Gonzalez came to be wandering around in a field next to Table Mountain?”

“She, Rose, picked me up this morning for our usual metal detecting excursion. We do it every weekend. My husband calls us the weekend warriors. We decided to try searching the old tailing ponds area looking for 49er coins and artifacts. Oh God, I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“Please Mrs. Daniels, continue.”

“We drove there, and Rose got her gun out of the glove compartment. She always carries that gun in case of bears. She’s very afraid of large animals.”

“And what happened next?”

“We walked with our metal detectors close to a spot near some of the left-over tailings. We thought the recent heavy rains might have exposed some artifacts. We were having a good time, getting a few hits when Rose noticed a large skull with an enormous tooth jutting out of the ground. The skull set off her machine. She bent down and carefully cleared the dirt away. Inside the skull we saw bullets. They were squashed and deformed but actual bullets. We knew that was impossible in a prehistoric skull. We searched around some more and found a gun and some casings. Rose knows her guns and says it was a 9mm Luger very similar to her own. We began really searching, Rose walked over toward the nearest pond. And the next thing I knew she screamed and slipped down the steep slope into the water. I never learned to swim. I couldn’t help her. She never came up. I called 911. I couldn’t help her!”

“That’s alright, Mrs. Daniels. If you had gone into that pond, we might be looking for two lost persons.” The detective already presumed that this was a simple retrieval of a drowning victim. The bullets in the saber-tooth tiger skull were an odd bit of information.

The water was very cold. Rose fought to rise in the slimy pond water, but it seemed to drag her down. She couldn’t understand why. Her initial scream didn’t leave a lot of air in her lungs. A murkiness quickly swept into her brain. She flayed her arms trying to grasp for anything that would halt her descent. Her arm struck a hard object. The impact echoed in the water. Suddenly, she felt a strong current sucking her into a small enclosure.

There was no water when she woke up. The area was hot and damp, like at a river’s edge. It was covered in high grass and stunted trees, which obscured her vision. She stood up and off in the distance she saw a herd of hulking beasts. They were shaggy and snorted in alarm. They were a herd of massive buffalo. As they began to stampede, she suddenly realized what had disturbed the herd. A large shape rose from the high grass. Its buff tones and massive teeth left no doubt in her mind. It was a saber-tooth tiger. Its gaze panned away from the straggling buffalo it was stalking to lock on her.

She reached into her holster and pulled out her Luger. The clip was full, a dozen bullets. The gun rocked in her hands as she fired. The charging cat kept coming on sheer momentum. She had just enough time to realize that she would not survive. The animals bulk slid exquisitely close to her, splattering blood all over her face and into her mouth. She felt the disorientation again just like she had in the pond. The cats bloody face stopped only inches from the enclosing metal. Her gun dropped to the ground as the pod closed around her.

The forensic team tested the 9mm bullets and the casings. They were corroded but matched the Lugger from the scene. The police dredged the pond for two days. No body was found. On the third day a dirty, confused Rose crawled out of an adjacent pond. She remembered very little. Detective Maxwell concluded that Rose Gonzalez must have fallen into an adjacent pond. Her friend must have been mistaken about which location. Rose must have crawled out and stumbled away, fainting in the bushes and waking up a few days later. The bullets in the skull were dismissed as an effect of the heavy rains washing the slugs into the fossil’s cranium. The gun’s condition was also considered caused by extreme weathering. The serial number was partially scraped off. Nine-millimeter Lugers are one of the most common handguns and have been around for many years. It was impossible to trace.

The hospital checked her out and found a little pneumonia, but she was pronounced relatively sound. She was happy that there was nothing to prevent her from going on her semiannual buying trip to Wuhan, China. Those, made in China, stickers didn’t just show up on the supermarket shelves. She had to procure those products. She returned to the U.S. on January 5 and died ten days later of a flu-like disease. They could only tell it was some type of respiratory virus.

Anyone would have recognized the massive, futuristic, recycling yard, even though it existed in the year 2500 and orbited high above the Earth. Its polar orbit allowing it to sweep every inch of the planet once every week. The giant machinery quickly scanned a small egg-shaped object covered in mud. An alarm sounded and two men stepped over to check the holographic projection. The flashing alarm sounded with an increasing urgency.

The first technician said, “That’s really odd. This time pod remembers being activated in 2019. And the auto return activated 10 minutes later. There is no authorization indicated.”

“Did, Time Trips Inc, lose another pod,” said the second technician?

“Retrieve it anyway, we can’t leave it on Earth. It could cause a paradox or something even worse. Besides, what could have happened in just ten minutes?”