Real World
Written by Anakin McFly
« Contents Page + Prologue
« Chapters 1.1–1.11
« Chapters 1.12–1.16
« Chapters 1.17–1.21
« Chapters 2.1–2.6
« Chapters 2.7–2.14
« Chapters 2.8–2.24
« Chapters 2.25–2.31
Chapter Thirty-One: Rescue
1st April 2004, Thursday
The Real World
Meanwhile
Frank strolled along the streets, remaining unnoticed for the most part. Somewhere along the way, he was hit with the crazy idea to just run away in any direction as far as his legs would take him, but it was stupid and he knew it. Sighing, he headed back to the hotel the way he came.
The place looked cosy and welcoming from the outside, the letters ‘Kenselton Hotel’ lit up against the night sky. The lobby looked quite full, but Frank decided to risk taking the lift. He didn’t particularly want to climb back up.
#
Meanwhile
Night time. Peaceful, dark.
No light for a long way, save the warm glow from the windows of the mansion in the distance. Marty looked towards it. Beneath his feet, a long dirt track stretched out, leading through the grass all the way to the mansion’s front door.
A light breeze ruffled through his hair as he started to walk along the path. Dark forests clung in the background, their secrets a mystery to all but those who lived within.
Silence.
Just the sounds of crickets chirping, the rustle of leaves and Marty’s footsteps one after another.
He reached the porch and looked up at the huge wooden door, mahogany with gold trimmings. Slowly, he turned the knob. The door opened, and Marty stepped in into the light. The door closed softly behind him without a creak.
A well-furnished room. The house of someone very rich, but no one was around besides him. Strains of gentle music reached Marty’s ears as he padded through the mansion’s carpeted hallways, each room lit with the same warm, homely glow.
No one else was there. No one at all. He was all alone.
“Doc?” Marty called out tentatively. “Clara?”
No reply. The teen’s footsteps took on a slightly more hurried pace. “Mum? Dad?”
No reply. He was all alone.
“Dave? Linda? Jules? Verne?”
Panicking now, Marty raced through the catacomb of corridors, each as silent and beautiful and deserted as the next.
“Anybody? Hello?”
Marty ran up and down the rooms, desperately flinging open every door he came to.
No one else was there.
He was all alone, all alone, all alone, all…
“AAAHHHH!”
Marty jolted out of bed, heart thumping. Who had screamed? It had sounded like him, but he didn’t recall… Marty hit on the bedside lights and looked over to the other bed.
Frank wasn’t back yet.
Fearing the worst, the teen jumped out of bed, opened the door, and rushed out into the hallway. Frank was on the ground, a terrified look on his face, and Keith was standing over him with his ever trusty pistol in his hand. Neo and Ted had been brought out too by the screaming, and they stood in the doorway of their room not knowing what to do.
Keith grinned evilly at the three newcomers to the scene. “Hi.”
“I thought you were supposed to leave us alone!” Frank yelled. “How about all that stuff about dimensional incompatibility and all that?”
Keith shrugged. “Change of plans.”
“So you’re just going to kill us?” Neo asked.
Keith appeared to think about it for a moment, they he shook his head. “Nah. He will,” he replied, pointing at Frank.
#
Keith beckoned down the corridor they had come from that first day – a day that now seemed so long ago, but in reality it had been less than twenty-four hours since they’d first arrived. “Move,” he said.
None of the three budged.
Keith swapped his little pistol for a more dangerous-looking one and pointed it at Frank’s head. “Move,” he said again.
They moved.
Frank was doing his best to suppress the urge to run as they made their way down the corridor. He couldn’t afford to take any chances, not when there was some psycho guy threatening to blow his brains out. He didn’t have many doubts over whether or not Keith would be willing to pull the trigger. He didn’t even think Keith considered them human in the first place.
Which was precisely the point. Keith didn’t. After all, that was what Dem had said. Clarisse hadn’t really been hurt, because she wasn’t really real. Likewise, he knew the four of them weren’t real, so he didn’t have any qualms whatsoever about killing them off if he felt like it. Dem had been fine with letting Clarisse suffer; Keith would be just as fine with letting the four of them suffer.
People killed off fictional characters all the time, after all. Writers, moviemakers, computer gamers, storytellers… He couldn’t get sent to jail for murdering four movie characters. Keith was just doing what so many others did regularly. It was just on a more 3-D level for him.
And he was enjoying himself. It all seemed so… real. Keith had always wanted to know what it was like to brutally kill somebody, and now he could do it without harming anyone at all. He grinned in a psychotic, Ford Prefect sort of way, giving Frank the unnerving feeling that he was about to go for his neck.
They turned a corner, and Keith motioned them into the room they had first arrived in. He shut the door behind them, and stood with his back to it.
“Okay,” he started. “I could just shoot you all right now, but that won’t be fun, will it? So instead I’ll give Frank here the gun, and he can do it for me.”
Frank snorted. “Oh yeah? And what makes you think I will?”
Keith smiled evilly. “Because if you don’t, I’ll make your three friends die a very long and painful death, starting with Marty. You’ve got no idea what kind of things I can do to you… So it’s your choice. You can give them a quick and painless end, or watch them suffer. And don’t even think of shooting me. If you so much as point that gun in my direction…” Keith took out another pistol. “You die. Then they suffer.”
Keith was really enjoying himself. Placing his second gun back into his coat pocket (plenty more where that came from), he took out a bunch of handcuffs. It was always good to take precautions, he thought, and he had come prepared. He definitely couldn’t afford one of the other three deciding to make a run for it or doing something else rash. Taking out three from the bunch, Keith tossed the rest aside and called out to the seemingly most harmless person in the room.
“Hey, Ted,” he said, reaching out to pass over the handcuffs. “Cuff those two for me, will ya? Then do yourself after that.”
Frank was desperately trying to think up an escape plan that didn’t involve lightsabers, weapons of mass destruction or Keith spontaneously combusting. He couldn’t think of anything. His brain didn’t seem to be working too well, possibly due to having a pistol pointed at it.
Uncertainly, Ted approached Keith and paused before the latter’s outstretched hand. The teen glanced back at Marty and Neo, looked at the gun at Frank’s head… and he made a decision.
Ted lunged at Keith and got him on the floor.
The gun went off.
Frank fell.
Marty screamed.
Liz burped.
Keith grabbed Ted’s arm and twisted it, pushing the teen away. He smirked as Ted screamed in pain.
“Who d’you think you are?” Keith whispered. “Neo?”
He kicked out and sent Ted sprawling onto the ground.
Neo rushed over and jumped Keith, and the two of them started fighting as Ted struggled to get out of the way. Ignoring them, Marty scrambled frantically over to his friend’s still form, where a small pool of blood had already begun to form.
“Frank?”
Frank groaned, and Marty gave a sigh of relief.
“I think he got my arm.”
“Yeah… looks like it… Ew, gross. I can see the bullet.”
Behind him, Keith pinned Neo against the wall and grinned. “Welcome to the real world, Neo. You aren’t so fast any more, are you? You can’t defy gravity or do any other kinds of weird stuff… Over here, Mr. Anderson, you’re only human.”
Neo glared back at him, fierce determination in his dark eyes. “So are you.”
He pushed off from the wall, and the two continued their battle in the centre of the room. Keith got Neo against the wall again and held him there, taking out his second pistol with his other hand. Keith grinned again. This was fun.
“Goodbye, Mr. Anderson,” he said, cocking the trigger… when the door flung open, and the unmistakable barrel of a 2035 model Neutrino Quartz 3000 Laser Blaster was pointed at his head. It was a futuristic gun, something infinitely more powerful and with a much more cooler name than the boring little pistol Keith had.
“Put down the gun,” the newcomer said.
From his corner of the room, Marty slowly lifted up his head and stared, not daring to believe his eyes.
“DOC!” he yelled, leaping off the ground and dashing over to Emmett, the most welcome sight he had seen in days. Emmett briefly turned his head to look at his young friend and smiled grimly, gun still levelled at Keith.
The latter just stared coolly back. “That was fast,” he muttered.
“Put down the gun,” Doc repeated. Next to him, Verne stared wide-eyed at the scene.
Keith shrugged and obeyed. Neo went forward and picked it up, then chucked it into a corner where it accidentally went off and killed a cockroach looking for a place to build its nest and raise its family.
Emmett glanced at the four in the room, then passed his Neutrino Quartz 3000 Laser Blaster to Neo. Neo hadn’t the faintest idea where the trigger was, but he figured he could cross that bridge when he came to it.
Doc walked over to Frank’s side and crouched down. “Do you think you can walk?”
Frank winced in pain. “Yeah, I think so…” Slowly, he stumbled to his feet, gripping his injured shoulder with one hand as Marty moved forward to support him.
Keith did some quick calculations in his head, eyes darting around the room. Marty and Doc were occupied with Frank; Ted was watching them; Neo was busy admiring the Neutrino Quartz 3000 Laser Blaster… and Verne was exposed.
Keith moved slowly to the side, then with one swift motion grabbed Verne, took out another pistol, and pointed it at the boy’s head.
Verne screamed.
The others looked up. Keith grinned at them, his confidence back. “Hi,” he said unnecessarily. “Change of plans again, I’m afraid.”
“You’re making a big mistake,” Doc said.
“Am I? Well, you’ll be the one making a big mistake if you don’t show me the way to the time train right now.” Keith’s finger stroked the trigger on his gun, and Verne shut his eyes.
“What…” Marty started.
“BE QUIET!” Keith yelled, glaring at him. “Don’t talk!” He motioned out the door. “Move it, old man,” he told Doc. “And the rest of you… stay put.”
Silently, the inventor obeyed. Neo waited until they were out of sight, then rushed after them in time to see the lift doors close on Keith, Doc and Verne in the lift.
Neo swore. He glanced around, and the other three looked at him expectantly.
“Take the stairs,” Neo said. Neutrino Quartz 3000 Laser Blaster in hand, he ran over to the stairwell door, opened it, and raced down the four floors, the others following somewhat more slowly behind, slowed down by the injured Frank.
“Where’d they go?” Marty asked as they exited the building.
And then a revelation suddenly hit him.
“No…” he said. “They didn’t go down… they went up! There’s no way Keith would be able to get through all those people while holding Verne hostage, and it’s a flying train… what better place to land unseen than the roof?”
Frank gave him a look of incredulity. “You mean we have to climb all the way up there?”
The four of them looked up at the building. It rose at least twenty storeys high.
“Whoa,” Ted said, deciding that the only way anyone could make him get up there would be by lift.
Marty shook his head slowly. “Is there a service elevator or something we could… Hey, where’re you going?”
“UP!” Neo yelled back, as the door to the stairwell slammed shut behind him.
The other three glanced at each other.
They glanced at the stairwell door.
They glanced at the height of the building.
They glanced at the brightly lit hotel lobby, filled with people.
They glanced at each other again.
Then the sound of three sonic booms filled the air, and they glanced up at the sky just in time to see two pairs of fire trails vanish behind the clouds.
“They left?” Marty gasped.
“Come on,” Frank said, eyes still on the sky. “They’ll be back any second; it’s a time machine, right? Ted can take the elevator, but the two of us had better use the stairs because I’m kinda dripping blood here…”
“What if they don’t come back?” Marty asked quietly as they started moving towards the hotel’s main entrance.
Frank looked at him. “Just hope they do. Go on, Ted.”
Seconds later the younger teen was walking through the hotel’s glass doors, keeping his head down as he headed towards the lifts. One lift car arrived, disgorging several people out into the lobby, and he entered it together with a relatively harmless looking thirty-something-year-old woman. She asked him what floor he wanted.
The teen scanned the buttons on the side, looking for the highest floor.
“Um… twenty-five,” he said. “Thanks.”
The doors closed, and the lift made its ascent up to the building. Ted had the uneasy feeling that the woman was staring at him, mainly because she was.
“You know, you look familiar,” she said.
Ted gave a nervous smile. “Really?” He was beginning to regret not waiting for an empty lift car.
“Yeah.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “What’s your last name?”
Ted toyed briefly with the idea of answering with “Reeves”, just to see how she would react, then decided that there was no point. “Sorry… I’m not allowed to tell strangers my name,” he said instead.
“Oh.” She looked disappointed. “All right, then.”
The lift arrived at the woman’s requested floor, and she got out. Ted hit the ‘close doors’ button with relief and waited as the lift continued its climb upwards. He got out at the top floor, and headed out into the corridor looking for a way to the roof.
He soon found a door labelled ‘Roof Access – Maintenance Staff Only’. It was not only unlocked, but also slightly ajar; evidence that Keith had probably gone through it not that long ago. Admittedly, it could also mean that some careless maintenance staff had forgotten to close and lock it, but there was no point being pessimistic at a time like this.
Three sonic booms boomed sonically through the air. They were back.
Ted was about to open the door when at the other end of the corridor, a door burst violently open and Neo hurtled out. Neo’s eyes widened as he saw him, and he stopped dead in his tracks.
“You’re fast, dude,” Ted commented.
“How’d you get here?” Neo demanded breathlessly, staring with incredulity at the teenager.
“I took the elevator,” Ted replied. He opened the door; behind it was a ladder leading up to an open hatchway.
“What? Didn’t… didn’t anyone see you?” Neo put a hand against the wall to steady himself, trying to stabilise his breathing.
“Yeah,” Ted replied in all seriousness. “So now there’re a couple of people who think that I’m Keanu Reeves’ illegitimate kid.”
“WHAT?”
Ted grinned. “Just kidding, dude.” He grasped the ladder and climbed up, leaving Neo standing at the bottom with a stunned expression on his face until he realised that he wasn’t going to achieve much from doing so.
Chapter Thirty-Two: Settling the Past
1979, 8:40 p.m.
The Real World
“Left and keep on until that tall building there, then go right.”
With no other choice, Doc obeyed. “May I ask what you intend to do?” he asked as the cloaked train turned left in the night sky. Below them, the city lights shone in the dark.
“It’s none of your business,” Keith replied, still holding the gun against Verne’s head.
“It is,” Emmett said. “This is my vehicle you’re using, and that’s my son you’re holding hostage. I have every right to know.”
There was a short moment of silence before Keith’s hesitant reply. “Ten minutes from now, my mother will be killed by a drunk driver,” he said quietly. “I’m not going to let it happen.”
The smallest of cynical smiles crossed Doc’s face. “I thought as much,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s always the case, isn’t it? So many time travel stories and movies out there have some character getting hold of a time machine in order to go back in time and prevent some past tragedy from taking place: very often, the death of a loved one. And I assume you know what happens, most of the time, to those characters who do so.”
Keith shook his head. “It won’t be like that. I’ve worked it out. I save her, the timeline changes, I vanish from here along with you and everything that’s happened since today in 1979 won’t happen. Marty and the others never leave their universes, and meanwhile the Echo Theory comes into play to ensure that an echo of me will still be present here to save my mother and change history. Nothing will go wrong.”
“That may be, but history was never meant to be tampered with. Especially when it concerns the events not only of your own universe, but so many others. Don’t think you can understand how time works. No one can. I doubt anyone ever fully will.”
Keith scowled. “Shut up and fly.”
“You can still turn back.”
“No.”
They reached the tall building Keith had pointed out earlier, and the train executed a right turn.
“So this is why you brought Marty and the others over? So I would try and rescue them, and you could hijack the time machine.”
Keith gave a small laugh. “No. I didn’t think it was possible for you to come. You’re not even supposed to exist, for crying out loud. You’re fictional, just part of some moviemaker’s story….”
“’All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’,” Doc quoted. “William Shakespeare. All our lives are stories. In a sense, you’re as fictional as I am; it’s all a matter of perspective. In my world, you don’t exist either; at least, not that I know of.”
“Land over there,” was Keith’s only reply, as he pointed at an empty stretch of grass below them.
The train put down where requested, and Doc opened the doors at Keith’s command. Releasing his hold on Verne as he left, Keith ran out into the night.
Verne watched his father watch Keith go. “You’re letting him do it?” he asked in surprise.
“Of course not!” Emmett said, getting out of the train as Verne followed. “If I’d tried to stop him earlier, he would have killed you! It’s best that he doesn’t know where we are.”
#
The place seemed different, somehow, from what he remembered. Different, yet familiar. Time had changed his memory of this night in some areas, but the main things were there. Keith remembered this road, remembered the sound of the cars whizzing by in the night, headlights sweeping the way before them.
He remembered.
And he was ready.
On the opposite side of the road, Rachel Kenselton-Fong walked out of a store, her young son tagging behind her as she counted her change. The traffic lights turned and the two of them started walking across the relatively empty street.
Keith moved in closer. Any moment now…
On the street, almost at the opposite curb, Rachel suddenly dropped her purse. Cursing mildly, she got down to scoop up the scattered coins as her son looked on.
“Mom?”
“Go on, Keith, I’ll be there in a moment.”
Reluctantly, the boy moved up onto the pavement. Ahead, a car careened unsteadily round the corner. Keith picked up his pace. He had to make it look as though he didn’t know what was going to happen, as though he was just some stranger who had taken it upon himself to prevent an impeding disaster…
Timing was everything, he thought, averting his eyes from his younger self. Timing was everything… he steeled himself and prepared to rush out onto the road…
Suddenly, a hand tapped his shoulder and Keith jumped around in shock to see a confused-looking fellow standing before him.
“Um… Excuse me, uh, sir, uh… what time is it?”
Keith blinked. “What? I…”
The sound of a resounding crash shook the street. Too late he turned, eyes widening in horror, and before he knew it he was running, running towards the accident he had been trying to erase from history, the screams of his younger self ringing in his ears, but the cars were still moving, and a blue car ploughed straight into him…
Red flooded his vision as he flew through the air and landed painfully on the road. Red, black, red again, and he was faintly aware of some commotion going on around him, but it was insignificant in the light of the pain that seared through his body.
He could feel the prickly tar on the road beneath his knees, and every second or so he caught a warped glimpse of what looked like a car tyre mere centimetres from his face. Then his vision would fizzle out again, only to temporarily return once more.
He couldn’t move much. It hurt him. His hearing momentarily cleared and he was assaulted by a mass of noise: cars honking, people screaming, sirens blaring in the distance, and the ever-present unintelligible chaos of sound that was many humans talking at once.
Ignoring the pain, Keith shifted his head slightly to view the other casualty whose death now embodied his failure.
Perhaps it was just as well. Time would go on. History was never meant to be tampered with. But all the same, he couldn’t help thinking of what could have been.
It had all come to this, Keith thought. All those years spent inventing and constructing the machine, all those plans laid out in his mind to get hold of the time train… it had all boiled down to him lying here now, about to die from a car accident of the past.
Reality’s been defenestrated, Dad, but nothing’s changed.
He smiled bitterly.
This was the end, then. The same time and place where it had all begun.
The space-time continuum was not without a sense of irony.
The last thing Keith saw were the tear-filled brown eyes of his younger self staring bewilderedly down at him; then all went black, and his story ended.
#
The young man’s voice was hollow, his face pale as he witnessed the second death of the minute. “You knew,” he chocked out, “you knew he was going to run out like that… that’s why you asked me to distract him, isn’t it? But… but it didn’t work…”
“Actually, it did,” Emmett admitted quietly. “Although not in the way we intended.”
The local’s eyes widened. “What?” he spluttered. “You wanted him to die?” He started backing off, but Emmett grabbed firm hold of his shoulder. The man yelled but could not get away.
“What’s your name?” Doc asked, not unkindly.
“R… Richard. Richard Murdoch.”
“Richard, I’m sorry we’ve gotten you into this. I can assure you that we never meant what happened to happen the way it did.”
“But…”
“What you did do was prevent something even more disastrous from happening.”
Richard wanted to ask what that was, but he was trembling too much to do so.
“All I ask you now is that you never tell anybody about this,” Emmett continued. “Do you promise that?”
Richard was still trembling. In all his craziest nightmares he had never dreamt of being apprehended by a wild-haired, wild-eyed scientist in the middle of the street who had just told him to do something which had led to another’s death. Come to think of it, he had never before seen anybody die in front of him, let alone two people in such a short interval of time.
“Do you?” Emmett asked again, more sternly this time. The young man nodded.
“Good,” Doc concluded. Then his tone softened. “I’m sorry we had to meet like this,” he said, releasing Richard’s shoulder. “But these aren’t normal circumstances. Come on, Verne.” Emmett placed a hand on his seven-year-old son and steered him back in the direction they had come, leaving Richard to regain his composure.
About a decade from then, Richard would sometimes be heard to tell about the time he once met two people who looked uncannily like Dr. Emmett Brown and his younger son from the Back to the Future trilogy. Most of these times, however, Richard would also be drunk, which mean that no one – save for his young son, Rupert – ever believed him.
Which was just as well.
Eventually he would start to wonder if perhaps he had imagined it all, and he would start to become aware of the fact that people were laughing at him and his tales. He would start to recognise those knowing grins, and realise that the seemingly serious questions of: “Seen Mr. Spock or anyone else lately?” were just other peoples’ way of poking fun at him.
And he would be mad at them, and mad at himself for believing that his little encounter with two movie characters could have been real in this world of normality.
#
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“What’re we gonna do about Keith?” Verne asked. “We can’t just leave him there.”
“I’m afraid we have to, Verne. I doubt it will be practical for us to try and remove his body in front of all those people. More likely than not we’ll end up in even more trouble.”
“Are you sure he’s dead?”
“If he’s not now, he soon will be. That car virtually crushed him. Future technology would be hard put to cure him, let alone the medical options available here.”
They arrived at the time train and entered.
“I suppose he deserved what he got,” Emmett mused as he got into the driver’s seat, “but then again… maybe not.” He pulled a lever to close the door, activated the cloaking device, then set the time circuits, got hold of the hover controls, and they blasted off back to the future.
Chapter Thirty-Three: So Long, and Thanks for All the Ice Cream
Onboard the Nebuchadnezzar
Trinity and the rest of the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar had long given up on the search parties and resigned themselves to sitting around in the Nebuchadnezzar waiting for Neo to miraculously pop out of somewhere. Suddenly, someone spotted something coming up on radar.
It was getting closer… and then they saw it, a ship with several words printed on the side.
Trinity stared. “Special Bottle Deliveries,” she murmured under her breath. “What the…”
#
21st December 1985, Saturday
San Dimas, California
Meanwhile, back at the rented house in Hill Valley, Bill Preston suddenly heard a knock on the door.
“Ted…?” Jumping off the sofa, he rushed to the door and swung it open. To his disappointment, standing there was some guy with a few crates of something.
“Hi, I’m from Special Bottle Deliveries,” the guy started, “and I was supposed to bring this order of one hundred green bottles to this address for Ted Logan…”
Bill stared. “You know Ted? Hey, where is he?”
“Well, I’ll just be leaving the bottles here for him then.” The SBD man left for his delivery truck. Bill watched him enter the driver’s seat, then ran up to him.
“Hey, wait… where’s Ted?”
The SBD man shrugged. “I don’t know, kid. I just work here.” He powered up the truck’s engine, and drove away for his next delivery.[x]
#
They were most probably never going to come back again, and Neo didn’t like the idea of wasting an opportunity he would very likely never get again. Besides, he was hungry.
Really cool sunglasses on in the hope that it would cause fewer people to recognise him, Neo walked casually into the McDonald’s across the road as the others waited with Verne in the cloaked train. Had he known, however, that a Matrix fan club was currently having their monthly meeting at a few of the tables there, he would have probably not have gone in.
As it was, the members of the aforementioned club stared open-mouthed as he entered.
Maybe the sunglasses had been a bad idea after all, Neo thought uneasily, remembering what Frank had told him.
So he took them off.
The mouths of the members of the Matrix fan club dropped open even further.
Swallowing nervously at the many stares he was attracting, Neo decided to just get to the point of his dropping by and leave as soon as possible. “Uh…” he started, “who was it that was giving out free ice cream in exchange for an autograph?”
#
“You got fourteen ice creams?” Marty asked, blinking at the tray that Neo brought in.
Neo grimaced. “I could have got more, but I ran away and they couldn’t catch me.”
The sound of running feet and people screaming gradually grew louder. Neo swore and ducked.
“What’s that?” Marty asked. He looked out of the train and saw several people brandishing free ice creams as they ran towards them.
“The fans,” Neo muttered. “Ted, get down!” he hissed, grabbing the teen and yanking him out of sight of the ice cream bearers.
“They’re just trying to give you ice creams,” Frank said, glancing out the windows.
Emmett sighed. “And how, may I ask, are we going to eat all of them?”
“I can manage three,” Verne offered helpfully like the good kid he was.
Emmett dug around the cabinets under the seat at the back of the train and emerged with a piece of cloth, made it into a makeshift sling, and passed it over to Frank before getting into the driver’s seat and activating the cloaking device.
Outside, the Matrix fans stared in astonished horror as their quarry vanished mysteriously from sight. A collective ‘whoa’ rose from the group.
“I’m taking Frank home first,” Doc announced, pressing the fourth green button on Dem’s little box. “Just in case that wound is anything serious. I doubt it, but you never know. And I think it would be much better if the bullet was taken out.”
Seconds later, a strong breeze of unknown source blew dust at the Matrix fans and their free ice creams as Doc powered up the hover circuits.
“What are you gonna say happened?” Marty asked Frank, as the ground started dropping away from the train.
“I could tell them I fell…”
“And landed on green bottles,” Ted chipped in. “A hundred of them.” He caught Marty’s eye and the teens grinned.
“Seventy-four green bottles
Lying on the floor.
Seventy-four green bottles
Lying on the floor
And if one dumb person were to kick one out the door
There’ll be seventy-four green bottles
Lying on the floor.”
Neo decided to just concentrate on his ice cream and ignore the animated singing as best as he could, though it got progressively harder as Verne joined in as well with much enthusiasm.
The train hit eighty-eight, and for a moment the song was drowned out by the sound of not three, but four sonic booms as the machine ripped through the space-time continuum and departed forever the skies of the real.
Chapter 3.1 »
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