Midnight, Christmas, Somewhen Around Ypres

A Short Story

Editor’s Note:

Another entry in the P3 Christmas Series written by Zack Grafman. Two more stories will be released this week.

Enjoy,

- Frank Theodat

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Steve sat at the flickering monitor clutching a lukewarm cup of instant coffee as he glumly raged. Of course it wasn’t enough that Headquarters had made the Temporal Early Warning team work through holidays. He was also sharing the monitor closet with Howard during a bona-fide Event, a Reportable Anomaly. Visions of paperwork danced in their heads, et cetera. When Steve got this job he’d had grand visions of storming the Bastille with a full cross-time camera crew shooting a documentary. Or at least getting to ask Attila the Hun what his deal was. This, he realized with the clarity only possible in moments of Yuletide disappointment, had been stupid of him. Now he sighed and slurped while Howard burbled with self-importance befitting a United Nations delegate.

“Steve. Steve did you hear what I said? It’s an Event. They’ve stopped shooting. The manual doesn’t include this possibility branch anywhere along this timeline. We need to call this in.” Howard scribbled notes and flapped papers with such excessive noise that Steve assured himself it could only be a calculated campaign of irritation. “Steve, are you hearing me?”

“Howard, man.” Steve sighed. “Like, it’s a war. They stop shooting sometimes. They’ve been dug into those trenches for years. They’re gonna run out of ammo.” 

“This!” the tiny overweight man apoplectically punctuated his speech by flapping a hand against the monitor. “Is. Not. Normal.” His glasses began to fog through excess excitement. “Soccer games in no-man’s land are not in the Manual!”

Now Steve had to sit up. His chair protested as he tried to find a place to put his feet amid the submarine-like cramp of their tiny shared space. The monitor was not clear at the best of times, and the snow made it harder to see now. But Howard wasn’t insane whatever else he was. There was an impromptu football match in the beginning stages, the sides picked from men who had been attempting to survive each other’s steel fusillade as recently as an hour ago, Temporal Local Standard Time. Now his favorites (and of course Steve had favorites, although they had been strictly trained against parasocial relationships with anyone they observed) were jostling on the sidelines of the mud pitch and trading candy and tiny souvenirs. For a second Steve couldn’t hear his colleague’s wittering, and he tried hard to fight off the growing heaviness in his eyes and throat. 

“I said, Steven, that I need you to hand me the chain-code book so that I can start the report! We are obviously witnessing an event capable of destabilizing this timeline, with drastic effect! What if the truce spreads?!” gasped Howard as he began to run short of breath. 

“Come on, Howard, let it go man!” Steve urged as he realized that the straight-edge wonder wasn’t going to do any such thing. “These guys down there…they’re happy, man. Like, just for a moment. Let it go.”

The thought that anyone had the right or the metaphysical capability of experiencing happiness in a way that contramanded the Manual for Cross-Time Adjustment and Repair (71^st Ed.) clearly broke upon Howard’s administratively fevered brain with catastrophic force. He sat, beyond words, for fifteen entire seconds. Then a grin of unbridled glee, glee bubbling forth from a long-concealed fountain of bilious spite, oozed across Howard’s face. He positively glowed in Steve’s general direction as his hands, without need of his staring eyes to guide them, skittered across the desk to assemble the requisite forms. 

“Oh is that so, Steven. Well then. I’ll just be sending two reports in, I suppose. First, let’s stop the timeline just to prevent-”

Howard’s face, still grinning, slapped viciously against the desktop before he crumpled sideways in the tiny space and fell off his long-tortured chair. Steve looked ruefully at his mug handle, all that was left of the one thing he had enjoyed in this entire three-year career. He pitched it into the wastebasket, followed by the Manual and his nametag. Then he took a last look at the monitor, at the huddle of regular guys trying to stay warm while they learned each other’s carols, smoked each other’s cigarettes and admired pictures of each other’s girls.

“Helmut. Big Frank. Dumb Frank. Meanie. California. Glasses. Mark Zuckerkraut.”

He pulled the plug and waited for HR to show up.

“Merry Christmas, you guys.”