Anna Thompson wanted to see her son again. Each event that pushed her further from her son got progressively worse until she ended up bleeding out on a path in the woods. There was a bullet burrowed somewhere deep within her gut. She remembered a television show she watched in high school. The show claimed a gut wound was painful and would take hours to bleed out. The painful part was true for a while. However, the pain receded away to numbness. It was like her body had some sort of defense against pain or she lost so much blood, she couldn’t feel her body anymore. The thought of death wasn’t scary or frightening. She faced her own mortality the moment she time traveled to the past.
As a woman of the twenty first century, she never really thought about death. Medical science was really good. Scientists predicted her generation would live for a 150 years. There were always some optimists who claimed medical advancements would make people immortal through tissue and organ regeneration, or even just a robot body to house the consciousness after the flesh body gave out. None of these medical enhancements would be possible for her because of a bullet from the gun of The Gold Piece Bandit.
The Gold Piece Bandit was a local hero in his own mind of a town called Underwood, Iowa where she had made her home in the last seven years. He was a bully and rode with a gang. His gang stuck with train and bank robberies from outlying areas, so the town folks tolerated his presence, but they were a rowdy and crude gang. The Gold Piece Bandit would make a show of keeping his men respectable in the city limits, but he was a vile human being. Anna could sense it. Especially the way he looked at her, with a hungry and lecherous stare. Even though she was a waitress in a whore-free Inn, he could tell he wanted her, and she feared the day when he would come take her. When the day came that his lust overwhelmed his sense of being a “respectful” member of the town, she wouldn’t go down without a fight, so she prepared herself. However, no forethought prepared her for what happened.
Before the inescapable confrontation, she tried to avoid the gang as best she could until the day they got a new member. The new guy was different. He was pudgy and his skin was burnt like he had never seen the sun until recently. There was a difference between the skin of a person who sunburned over and over, and the skin of a person who stayed indoors and was burning for the first time. On closer inspection of the new member, Anna found out that he was wearing Gucci glasses. Gucci glasses meant that he was a fellow time traveler, and if there was another time traveler, then maybe she could get back home with her son.
Her biggest fear aside from her death was not being able to help her son. He was seven-years-old, living in what felt like a Western movie, and she would not be there for him. What began as a path home after being stranded in the past became a series of unfortunate events. The biggest unfortunate event of them all was the bullet in her gut and the abandonment of her son. She could feel herself slipping away. The irony was that she was so close to home. The horn of a semi broke through the traffic noise of the nearby freeway. Not too far away were cars traveling down the interstate. Blood poured from her gut, and her mind slowly faded out of consciousness.
Time Burrito 