The Rain of Time

The dinosaur attacked lightning-quick, and Solomon barely dodged the snapping of the jaws next to his neck. The dinosaur was small, a little taller than a human, but it made up for its lack of size with diabolical agility. Solomon jerked his pistol from its holster, simultaneously executing a pirouette worthy of the best matadors. The beast whizzed past, coasting another few meters, and turned, clawing the sand. The eyes with the vertical pupils stared at Solomon with a glassy reptile expression.

Solomon didn't wait for a second attack. He raised his pistol and emptied an entire clip at the dinosaur, half in the body, half in the head of the already falling predator. He'd read somewhere that these creatures were very tenacious, but sixteen bullets were enough for anyone. The powerful legs scraped the sand last time, and the beast fell silent.

Solomon reloaded the gun and looked at his watch. All four dials showed the same time, which was good, meaning that the local chrono-field was stable despite the recent rain. But in the west, far over the horizon, clouds were beginning to form, which meant it was time to return to the shelter.

***

Solomon walked along the faintly visible path between the dunes, and pondered the results of his foray. Of course, not about the stupid fight with the poor Jurassic creature but about the mapping of time changes. The picture was not a pleasant one. It was clear that after each storm, each rain, new areas of altered time appeared, and this disintegration of reality went further and further back in time, as the skirmish with the dinosaur had demonstrated.

Somewhere over the horizon, far to the north, a giant chronochasm was swirling, shimmering, breathing: the result of a failed experiment that destroyed civilization and turned the Earth into a crazy mixture of randomly changing pieces of the past. The neutral time fields protected the few shelters, but no one understood the physics. Solomon was one of the few who still tried to figure out what had happened.

The dunes ended, and the path turned east, skirting the ruins of an XVIII century town, a legacy of the first months of the disaster when the chronochasm had not yet gathered momentum and reality was toppling backward within a historical era.

When the ruins were left behind, Solomon turned south again. The area was once a park, but now it was a dusty wasteland strewn with the rotten remains of giant ferns, the aftermath of last year's fall rains. Only once in a while did Solomon have to wander around strange artefacts, like a rusty tank half-turned into an ancient war chariot. Beside it lay a skeleton in scraps of camouflage, pinned to the ground with a Scandinavian spear.

Solomon grinned. The tanker must have been very unlucky: to get caught in the rain shower and then run into a bunch of other unlucky guys! It seemed they survived: there were no other skeletons around. They could have ended up hiding in the gullies and ruins, like the dinosaur, looking for prey. If it rained heavily, you could get as far as a trilobite, not to mention a dinosaur.

It was still half an hour's walk to the shelter when suddenly, an alarming note squeaked subtly in Solomon's mind. All his senses were instantly heightened, and he knew at once what it was: the wind had changed sharply and intensified, and the first purple clouds ran across the sky, occasionally pierced by emerald-green flashes. The rain of time was coming.

He took his backpack off his shoulders and pulled out an oversized raincoat gleaming with a metallic cloth. Solomon put the cloak on and plugged the power cable into the connector on his battery belt. Of course, the low-powered generator of the raincoat is no comparison with the stationary one protecting the shelter. Still, even in the heaviest rain shower, it will give Solomon a few extra minutes.

Sometimes, the minutes separate disaster from salvation; Solomon knew that. A sharp blade of bitterness stabbed his heart, but Solomon pushed it away. This was no time for emotion; first, he had to get to the shelter. He looked back to see that the horizon had disappeared behind a greenish pall of rain. Solomon quickened his pace. He must get back to the shelter, to his family.

***

The cloak's time field withstood, though he saw the ruins of a former chemical plant swept with the rain heavily charged with time energy about a hundred yards to the north. A green glow enveloped the chaos of rusted metal and crumpled concrete, and it didn't hold. Its outlines melted, blurring and shimmering until the green glow revealed the old stonework, the brittle half-collapsed battlements, and the black eyeholes of the medieval castle's loopholes. The rain of time was changing reality again.

Solomon only glimpsed it. In a world where time had gone mad, the most important thing was not to be late, so when he finally saw the massive steel door in the concrete dome, with the bluish sparks of time field flickering across its rusty surface, he was out of his breath for a moment.

His family, as usual, greeted him with genuine joy and enthusiasm. Kira, his wife, and their sons, Mark and Alex, jumped up to him joyfully, humming enthusiastically and vying to look him in the eye. The familiar light smell of the menagerie hit the nostrils.

Solomon hugged and caressed each of them as best he could, making sure not to neglect anyone. After all, they were his family, the only creatures close to him on the planet. Even though Australopithecines cannot be called fully human. He will care for and love them and always make it home before it rains.

Never mind that one day they didn't make it themselves.