Time Cadillac

 ”Please keep all hands and in feet inside the ride at all times! Please do not—“

Conrad and Lucy didn’t pay any attention. The Time Cadillac ride always started the same way. And they were too busy all over each other, submerged as deep in youthful needs as the Cadillac was submerged in deep time.  Conrad was already kissing Lucy again, breathless and with too much saliva as the slick, black car slowly rolled over a desolate landscape that would’ve fit Hell or the airless Moon than Earth. Lucy ran her hands through her boyfriends short, combed brown hair, feeling the car lurch a little. Far away came lightning flashing beneath cataclysmic looking clouds all purple, bruised, and furious looking. She glimpsed jagged landscape burbling,  saw the eerie monoliths of volcanic happenstance which poured streamers of superheated gases into impossibly thin air. For a full ten minutes they rode over different variations: fire, ice, black blistering sands— even a sea bottom, flat and dark, with a single earthwide ocean far above. 

Lucy pushed at her date for a moment and he relented, breathing hard next to her. They looked out into Archean eternity. Conrad laughed. 

“What a dump.”

But there was beauty there, wasn’t there? Oil-slick darkness smeared on ghastly shades of grey, white, crimson. It was surreal, toxic. Lucy saw huge broken mountains far away where lava emptied down their cavernous sides. Earth was young, hot. More alive than anyone in her present could truly imagine. 

Boring.

Conrad pressed a hand to Lucy’s thigh and she shivered, felt humid air over her skin as kisses pattered themselves on an exposed throat like so much intimate rainfall. This place was disgusting: impenetrable swamps dominated by huge armored vegetable spires, encrusted with moss and lichen, and haunted by sprawling insects so massive that no matter what Father Martin would say it seemed downright ungodly that any Creator worthy of worship could’ve made them. There was an omnipresent smoldering scent in the air as waves of wildfire spread, fueled by rich atmosphere and countless trees. Fingers brushed an innermost thigh, probing, just as their slow passage brought an automobile sized centipede to eye level. Arthropleura rose in undulating waves as cascades of armored legs cracked themselves against its plated sides, a dozen angry red chitinous sides. It was Conrad who yelped in fear, wide eyed and stupid, one hand thrown up against the monster of yesterday. Human hearts beating fast, beating hard. 

Apocalypse thrown across supreme desert like a deathly blanket. Lucy just saw bones— miles and miles of bones, discarded skeletons that went on across eerie dark colored dunes. Sharp, ozone tinged air took an effort to breathe. God only knew what lived here. Was whatever had survived even lucky? Could it be considered luck to live here, in this silent world, a sun scorched wasteland dominated by the silenced dead? It chilled any motion between them. They huddled close. Quiet. Would this fate befall Man, would the fatal blessing of the atom undo everything.. usher us back into a final, silent world? 

Giants sprouted up from ruin. Fast, fleet-footed things that in ample opportunity became behemoths, titans. An age of Olympian reptiles with no bounds. They grew, fought, lived, died. Mountains that walked, colorful shield-faces that battered and slammed, clubbed tails that concussed. Lucy watched the very first flowers bloom: elegant purple splashed over white petals. 

Conrad reached. 

Something buckled, something bent. No trespassing. A cosmic reprimand that even here in this imaginary space would not and could not be allowed. It all happened in a moment. The Time Cadillac protested just barely, hissing faintly. Then nothing. 

They stared. Mesozoic countryside stretched out into warm, evening sunshine. Skyscrapers redwoods loomed above ginkgos, cycads, ferns in majestic immensity, and threw thick shadows on grassless ground. Conrad felt his mouth go dry. Ancient mammalian fear rose from primordial memory. 

Something roared in the gloom.