STRANGE CREEK · A SHORT STORY SERIES
Tuesday Keeps Happening
In which an atmospheric anomaly traps the Dairy Queen in a time loop, Eli gets a curfew violation he technically didn’t commit, and Cole has the same conversation with Dr. Vance three and a half times.
The first sign that something was wrong with the Dairy Queen was that Pauline Marsh ordered a large Oreo Blizzard at 11:14 a.m. on Tuesday, watched it get made, paid for it, walked out the door, and walked back in fifteen minutes later to discard her empty cup, Tyler Fitch, the cashier, was waiting for her to order with no memory of the previous transaction.
Pauline was a materials engineer with twenty years of experience and a very specific relationship with Oreo Blizzards. She ordered it again. Tyler made it again. She walked out again.
She came back a third time and stood just inside the door, watching Tyler, who watched her back with the polite attentiveness and welcoming smile of someone who knew you and was familiar with your daily order habits but hadn’t seen you yet today.
“I need to call someone,” Pauline said.
“Sure,” said Tyler. “Can I start a Blizzard for you while you do that?”
◈
Cole got the call at 11:47. By the time he and Deputy Cruz arrived, there were four people standing in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen in a loose semicircle, all of them having independently reached the same conclusion: that something was wrong with the door. Or the building. Or, more precisely, with approximately a thirty-foot radius of the space-time continuum surrounding the Dairy Queen’s primary entrance.
“Walk me through it,” Cole said to Pauline, who had taken charge of the group with the natural authority of someone used to managing project teams.
“You go in, you do a thing, you come out, and the thing un-happened. It’s localized. The parking lot seems fine. Just inside the threshold.”
“Tyler’s okay?”
“Tyler has made me a Blizzard four times and remembers none of it. He seems happy. He has no idea what’s happening.” She paused. “I want to say the Blizzard is very good, if that’s relevant.”
“It isn’t,” Cole said. He looked at the building, which ‘looked’ back at him with the complete innocence of a building that has never done anything unusual in its life. “Cruz. Get Dr. Vance.”
“Already texted her.”
“Good.” He looked at the small crowd. “Anyone go in more than four times?”
A man in a Prometheus Lab fleece raised his hand. “Seven.”
“Why?”
“I was testing the boundary conditions.” He seemed slightly defensive about this. “Scientifically.”
“And?”
“The loop resets every time someone exits through the main door. The side exit seems clean. Whatever it is, it’s door-specific.” He pulled out his phone to show Cole a note. “I’ve been logging timestamps. The interval is consistent to within about two seconds.”
Cole looked at the man. Then at the log. Then back at the man. “Name?”
“Dr. Farooq. Atmospheric physics.”
“Does atmospheric physics put this within your area of expertise?” Cole said as he waved in the general area of the Dairy Queen.
Dr. Farooq appeared slightly offended at the thought that it wouldn’t. “Of course it does,” he stated unequivocally.
“Of course,” repeated Cole.
◈
Dr. Vance arrived nine minutes later, which Cole was beginning to understand was her baseline response time for incidents that required her personal attention as opposed to a phone call. She had the tablet, the jacket, and the expression of a woman who had been briefed by Cruz en route and was organizing the problem into actionable categories.
“Localized temporal reset,” she said, studying the building. “Not a full loop. Just a pocket. The interior resets; the exterior doesn’t.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Probably. I need to know which of my researchers was running an atmospheric field experiment this morning.” She was already typing. “We had three scheduled. Two of them are straightforward. The third…” She trailed off in a way that Cole had come to recognize as the scientific equivalent of a wince.
“The third what?”
“The third was Dr. Tamboli’s ionospheric resonance calibration. He’s been trying to stabilize a localized field for the past month. If the resonance coupled with the Dairy Queen’s refrigeration compressors at the right frequency—” She stopped. “Actually that’s almost elegant.”
“Nora.”
It was the first time he’d used her first name. She noted it and filed it away without looking up from her tablet. He noted that she noted and also said nothing.
“Right. Fix first, elegant later.” She typed something. “I need forty minutes, and I need everyone out of the parking lot.”
“The guy inside—”
“Tyler will be fine. He’s in the loop. He’ll reset with it. When we collapse the field, he’ll have a mild headache and no memory of the past three hours, which, honestly, is the better outcome here.”
Cole considered this. “Is the ice cream machine still working?”
Vance looked up from her tablet for the first time. It was a brief look, but it contained some level of surprise. Cole briefly congratulated himself on rendering her speechless. “I genuinely don’t know why you need to know that,” she finally said.
“Morale,” Cole said. “It’s always morale.”
◈
The forty minutes became ninety, which Vance blamed on Dr. Tamboli’s calibration having drifted farther from baseline than expected, and which Cole spent doing three things: keeping the crowd back, fielding calls from the mayor (who was technically the town administrator and technically answered to the lab director and was therefore not sure who to be upset with), and trying to reach Eli.
Eli did not pick up.
This was not unusual. Eli was thirteen and in possession of a phone primarily as a device for not answering it when his father called. Cole left a message that said “call me back” which meant “I am tracking your location on the family app and you are still at the school, so this is not an emergency, but call me back.”
Somewhere around the one-hour mark, Cole crossed the parking lot to check on Vance’s progress. She was standing twenty feet from the entrance with her tablet, running what appeared to be a calculation that was not going the way she wanted it to.
“How’s it looking?”
“Tamboli’s baseline drifted. I need to recalculate the collapse frequency or we risk a hard reset instead of a clean one.” She didn’t look up. “A hard reset would be fine for Tyler but less fine for the structural—” Her phone buzzed. She glanced at it and her expression shifted into something that was all business. “I have to take this. Tamboli’s on the line.”
Cole took a step back. “Go.”
She was already walking, phone to her ear, the tablet tucked under her arm, the problem reorganizing itself inside her head in real time. Cole watched her go and then turned back to the parking lot.
Half a conversation. He made a note of it, professionally.
Eli called back at 1:15.
“Eli.”
“Hey, Dad.”
“You see the thing with the Dairy Queen?”
“Kind of. Madison and I walked over to look at it from the parking lot. You were there.”
Cole turned and looked at the parking lot, which had been cleared. “When was this?”
“Maybe twelve thirty? You told us to stay back and then you went back to talking to Dr. Vance.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“You were pretty focused on the, uh, the thing.” A pause. “Dr. Vance is pretty.”
Cole absorbed this with hard-earned military discipline. “She’s my colleague.”
“I know, I’m just saying.”
“Is Madison’s mother aware she’s not in school?”
“It’s lunch. We’re allowed off campus for lunch. We walked back. We’re at school.” Another pause, slightly more careful. “We got Blizzards first. Through the side door. Tyler didn’t know anything was wrong and they were fine.”
Cole closed his eyes for approximately two seconds. “Eli.”
“The side door was clear. Dr. Farooq said so. He’d done seven trials.”
“The man did seven trials, and I’m supposed to be reassured by that?”
“We were very careful.”
“We are going to have a conversation about the words ‘we were very careful’ being a sentence you should never say to me after the fact.”
“Noted,” Eli said, in the tone of someone noting something in a way that doesn’t necessarily indicate future compliance. “The Blizzard was really good though.”
Cole said nothing.
“That’s probably not helpful,” Eli said.
“Call me when school’s out.”
◈
The field collapsed at 2:23 p.m. It did so quietly, which Vance said was a good sign, and which produced a faint shimmer in the air above the Dairy Queen’s entrance that three people photographed and that Cole expected would be on the town’s internal message board by evening.
Tyler came out of the side door eleven minutes later, blinking in the afternoon light. He had a mild headache, no memory of the past three hours, and appeared rather unbothered when Cruz explained in general terms that there had been an atmospheric anomaly.
“Was anyone hurt?” Tyler asked.
“No,” Cruz said.
“Did anyone get their orders?”
“Some of them multiple times.”
Tyler thought about this. “Am I okay? This is really weird, kinda cool, but kind of a freak-out, you know?” Then, “What caused it?”
Cruz glanced toward the lab building on the horizon, then back at Tyler. “The short version? One of the researchers was running a calibration experiment and your compressors were on the same frequency.”
Tyler considered this the way you consider news that is alarming in theory but doesn’t change anything practical about your afternoon. “So the Dairy Queen did it.”
“In a sense.”
“Huh.” He seemed, if anything, mildly pleased. “I’ll comp the next round for anyone who comes back in.” He considered further. “Is the machine still running?”
It was.
◈
Cole filed the incident report at 4:45, which involved more checkboxes than he felt were appropriate for a situation of this nature. He had invented two new checkbox categories since arriving in Strange Creek. He suspected he would invent more.
Vance knocked on the open door of the marshal’s office at 5:10. She had swapped the lab jacket for a regular one, which meant she was off-duty in some technical sense, though Cole had begun to suspect that Dr. Vance did not have a strong relationship with the concept of off-duty.
“Tamboli’s calibration parameters are adjusted,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. “It won’t happen again. This specific configuration, I mean. I’m sure something else will happen.”
“That’s very reassuring.”
“I try to be accurate rather than comforting.”
“I’ve noticed.” Cole leaned back in his chair. “You said it was almost elegant. The coupling.”
She seemed momentarily surprised that he recalled this. “The refrigeration compressors run at a frequency that happens to be a harmonic of Tamboli’s resonance field. The Dairy Queen was essentially acting as an amplifier. A very cold, very Oreo-forward amplifier.”
“You’re going to put that in the report.”
“I am going to put a considerably more technical version of that in the report, yes.”
Cole almost smiled. It was a near miss. “Eli and his friend got Blizzards through the side door during the loop.”
“I heard.” She didn’t seem alarmed. “The side door was clean. Dr. Farooq confirmed it before anyone went in.”
“You knew?”
“Cruz mentioned it. I figured you’d handle the parental side.” A pause. “He asked good questions, from what Farooq said. About the boundary conditions.”
Cole thought about Eli — he listened to someone explain complicated things and could understand them — if he was interested. He was certainly interested in the girl. “He’s got an eye for detail when something actually interests him.”
“Strange Creek tends to be interesting.”
“So I’m finding.”
There was a comfortable pause of the kind that doesn’t require filling. Outside, the last of the October light was going orange reflecting on the diner windows across the street. Down the block, presumably, the Dairy Queen was running normally, and Tyler was comping Blizzards for the time loop ‘survivors.’ Somewhere in the school’s after-hours common room a thirteen-year-old was doing homework next to a girl who wanted to be a neuroscientist, or a marine biologist, or possibly both.
“Same time tomorrow?” Vance said, meaning the job — the town — whatever Strange Creek would produce next.
“Probably earlier,” Cole said with another near smile. He paused. “For what it’s worth, I count today as three and a half.”
Vance looked at him.
“Conversations,” he said. “You had to take Tamboli’s call.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I’ll finish it next time.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
She pushed off the doorframe. “Good night, Marshal.”
“Good night, Nora.”
He said it easily this time. She left without noting it, which was its own kind of answer.
Cole finished the incident report, invented a third checkbox category, and drove home to make dinner for his son.
It had been a Tuesday. Maybe more than one Tuesday.
— End of Episode —
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