The Beast Beyond Time, Part One

By Andrew Coltrin

Six months after the events recounted in Larry the Horrible Time Traveler, Larry and Ishmael find themselves facing new problems and neither of them are very happy about it.

Ishmael finds himself hating his new job as Director of the Cross-Time Coordinating Agency, while Larry is force-enrolled in community college. They're both looking for a way out, but will they find it? And what's the deal with all the blue lizards that keep showing up?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Coltrin
• Release date: Aug 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005262686

Andrew Coltrin

Although he will often deny this at parties, Andrew Coltrin's fiction is not actually based on his own experiences as a time traveler. That line never really gets him anywhere at parties anyway. At various points in his life, Coltrin has worked in bookstores, coffee shops, and special education classrooms. He tends to regard various modes of rail transportation as members of his extended family and owns more manual typewriters than is absolutely necessary. Once upon a time he made zines about being abducted by terribly mundane aliens who forced him to wear polyester and sell tickets at a movie theater. Now he's too busy checking Facebook on his smartphone to play with photocopiers. Which is a shame. I hope he's proud of himself and what he's done to his family.

Book preview

Previously, in Larry the Horrible Time Traveler...

The world weary independent time traveler Ishmael stumbled across a naïve neophyte who didn’t realize the simple act of eating tacos could send him hurtling across the centuries. Soon the time cops of the Cross-Time Coordinating Agency became aware of the situation. Their director, the freakishly bulbous headed Orb, decided the best way to keep Larry out of trouble was to bind his time travel method to Ishmael’s.

Ishmael was not happy about this. He wasn’t happy about anything that messed with either his freedom or his watch, the source of his own time travel method. The Orb had effectively messed with both. He inherited the watch from his great great great grandfather Queequeg, also a time traveler, who sometimes borrows it back.

In the midst of this drama, Larry and Ishmael get drawn into an inter epoch time war between dinosaurs and robots, Larry falls in love with a tough as nails post-apocalyptic princess, and the Orb’s head explodes.

Six months later...

Part One

Lizards

Chapter One

The Only Thing Worse than Looking for a Job is Having One

Ishmael

I didn’t realize surviving the epic battle between robots and dinosaurs at the end of humanity would mean I’d get a new job. Generally, I like jobs. I like down and dirty short term gigs where I apply my expertise quickly and efficiently, get paid for my services, and still have time to hit the early happy hour.

I love that kind of job.

The kind of job that doesn’t follow you home, but you probably wouldn’t mind if it did.

This wasn’t that kind of job.

It was a desk job. The worst kind of desk job. Senior executive. It’s not only the kind of job that follows you home, it’s the job becomes your home and you can never leave it because you’re stuck in an eyeball-shaped building at the very beginning of human prehistory, and it’s the only building at the very beginning of human prehistory, so there’s no where else you could actually go to at quitting time without heading to the Jump Zone and flashing off to some other, more hospitable, point in time, but you can’t do that because no one in the organization will dare let you off the campus because they’re worried you’ll never come back.

And they’re right to worry.

I don’t know how the Orb did this. The stress alone of supervising all these hypervigilant time cops was one thing, but the cold reality that some sort of weird energy field in the HQ building designed to protect agents from bacterial and fungal infections also prevented the fermentation of grains, fruits, and potatoes was an insult to far. I really needed a drink to clear my head. I also knew I wasn’t going to be able to get one. I’d already cleaned out the Orb’s liquor cabinet pretty early into the job. There wasn’t much; a couple bottles of gin, a quarter of a jug of moonshine, and a godawful banana liqueur. In the Orb’s defense the banana liqueur was unopened. It should have remained that way.

I have to admit I missed the Orb. If nothing else, if he hadn’t died, there wouldn’t be a job vacancy at the top of the agency I’d spent most of my career trying to skirt.

I still couldn’t figure how the job had fallen to me. But here I was, running a show I had no passion or inclination for. At least I got to see a lot more of Agent Lovejoy, usually at 10:30 am, a time at which I’d much rather be sleeping under my desk. Today there was an extra bounce in her step.

Got the daily reports for you, said Lovejoy.

I never thought I’d get tired of looking at her. But, now, every damn day, she hands me a stack of paperwork that I’m supposed to read through and assess if any of it poses any real threat to how humanity conducts its own sovereign course of history.

I sighed.

From what I’d seen, and I’d seen a lot, humanity was its own worst enemy. Whichever way you looked at it, human history ended with a Big Crash and a long slow slide to oblivion. I was pretty sure there wasn’t much I could do either way to change that. The rest was details. Putting me in the top desk of an organization dedicated to preserving the historical status quo was like having Jimi Hendrix front the Jonas Brothers. It sounds pretty funny in the hypothetical, but no one sober would agree that it’s a good idea in practice.

No one was sober at the party after the big dinosaur and robot brawl. More than a few questionable decisions were made.

Lovejoy, I said, Why don’t you just pick three to investigate. Divvy them up between you, Hastings, and, I don’t know, Ellis. He looks bored. If anything turns up, let me know.

You’re not even going to skim through them, Chief?

Don’t call me Chief, I said.

Well, seeing that you are the chief ranking officer in the Cross-Time Coordinating Agency, how should I call you?

Call me Ishmael.

Well, that’s rather informal. Almost intimate, she cooed. She had taken up an unsettling habit of flirting with me lately. I couldn’t help but suspect it had to do with some events at that party I couldn’t quite remember.

Look, Lovejoy, I said, I just have a thing against titles, ranks, and pretty much anything that stinks of hierarchy. I never asked for this job, you know.

But you won the stakeholders election by a unanimous vote. One of those events at that party.

I still swear it was rigged. I don’t know who rigged it, but, considering I never wanted to have anything to do with the Agency before that, they succeeded in sucking all the joy out my life.

But you weren’t always so anti-Agency,