Marty’s hands trembled while they gripped her smartphone.
It was tricky operating the device with the bulbous orange gloves of the yellow
radiation suit provided by Doc, who wore a white one of the same make. Phineas
and Ferb wore their own suits; Marty still couldn’t believe they were involved
in this. Then again, they were pretty much acquainted with the use of
radioactive chemical elements. Candace would be doing backflips once she saw
all of this on the recordings.
Hearing only her heavy, unsteady breaths beneath the hood
of her suit, Marty kept her camera phone focused on Doc as she opened the
container full of plutonium, removing a 4-inch clear cylinder with a plutonium
rod within. Marty zoomed in to show that the rod was surrounded by water. Doc
then stepped over to the rear of the DeLorean and placed the plutonium cylinder
into the loading hopper. The rod dropped down into the reactor with a sharp,
muffled suction noise.
Once the element was loaded, Doc sealed the chamber shut
and removed her hood. “That’s it,” she approved. “Everything is lead-lined, so
we’re safe.” Marty took this as her cue to stop filming and remove her hood.
“Ahh, nothing’s more gratifying than loading plutonium
into a time machine,” Phineas articulated, though Marty (whose forehead was
drenched with sweat) didn’t share his sentiment. “I can’t wait to return to the
future. Who knows if everything’s even still the same as it was the last time
we were there?”
“Back to the future, eh?” Marty snickered. “How far you
fellas going this time?”
“Well, we went 20 years last time,” Phineas reflected.
“So, 30 years sounds like a nice round number this time.”
“It’ll be my first trip,” Doc elaborated as she
loaded some luggage into the frontside trunk. “I’ve always dreamt of seeing the
future – looking beyond my years, observing the progress of mankind. It’s
almost like cheating death.”
“Sounds heavy,” Marty said. “Look me up when you guys get
there. I should be 47 by that time.”
“Sure thing,” Phineas promised her.
“Roll ‘em, Marty,” Doc cued, and Marty aimed her camera
at her and the boys, as they stood beside the open passenger-side, gull-wing
door of the DeLorean. Clearing her throat, Doc commenced in addressing the
camera, “I, Doctor Emma L. Brown, am about to embark on an incredible journey
with my two young friends here, Phineas Flynn and Ferb Fletch—”
Suddenly, Doc’s phone chimed inside her radiation suit.
She unzipped it halfway down to reach inside to retrieve
her phone and briefly see who it was on the caller ID. “It’s Cornelius,” she
identified prior to answering the call. “Cornelius, where are you with that
other container of plutonium? It’s vital that we have it with us. One pallet,
one trip. We won’t be able to get back without any extra.”
She paused to listen to her son’s frantic voice on the
other line.
“Wait, wait, wait. Cornelius, slow down. Who did
you say attacked you?”
“Attacked?!” Marty repeated in concern. “What happened?”
Meanwhile, as everyone was focused on the phone call,
Ferb detected a shape far in the distance. It was illuminated by one of the
streetlights hanging over the vacant parking lot.
“Cornelius, say that again?” Doc responded. “You said it
was the pharmacist from the auction and a man in a kabuki mask?”
Ferb’s unevenly shaped eyes enlarged in alarm.
The figure he noticed in the distance fit the description
of the latter individual Doc referenced from her conversation with Cornelius.
Immediately, he tugged on the sleeve of Phineas’s
radiation suit. “What is it, Ferb?” his brother inquired, turning to see how
alarmed Ferb appeared for a boy who rarely expressed much emotion. Following
his gaze, Phineas also noticed the man in the kabuki mask. “Oh, now I
see. That is something to be worried about.”
Hearing Phineas, Doc and Marty saw what the boys saw and
panicked – especially as soon as the ground beneath the kabuki man’s feet arose
and carried him towards the group, as if he were surfing.
“What the…?!” Marty exclaimed. “Is he some sort of
earth-bender?!”
The kabuki man lifted his left arm and the ground beneath
the Brown Enterprises multi-step truck buckled, transforming into a massive
mound that overturned the truck, much to the shock of Doc, Marty, Phineas, and
Ferb.
“That didn’t come from the earth!” Doc observed. “Those
were nanobots!”
“Nano-what?!” Marty cried.
“Just take cover!” Phineas yelled, and everyone did as he
suggested, huddling near the DeLorean.
That was before Doc glanced over at the overturned truck
and realized, “deGrasse’s still in there! I have to check on him!”
“No, wait, Doc!” Marty beseeched, but Doc had already
abandoned cover.
When she went to the other side of the overturned truck,
she was suddenly cornered by a man in a lab coat. She instantly recognized him
as the pharmacist from the auction and noticed that he was aiming a modified
handgun straight at her. Doc stepped back a bit, holding her hands up.
From the DeLorean’s side, Marty and the boys could see
Doc with her hands up, as if she was being held at gunpoint. “What’s going on?”
Phineas inquired. “Is she…?”
ZAP!
In one second, Doc’s body was engulfed in a greenish hue.
And then, in the next, it was rendered into a pile of ash.
Marty, Phineas, and Ferb were mortified by what they just
witnessed.
Doctor Emma Brown was dead.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Marty screamed in rageful
grief.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time for her and the
Flynn-Fletcher brothers to mourn. The ground beneath them began to shift.
Looking down, they could see the nanobots Doc mentioned slithering all around.
“Quick! Into the DeLorean!” Phineas advised.
The three of them got in. Marty taking position at the
wheel, while Phineas and Ferb shared the passenger’s seat. As Marty closed the
door, she got one last glimpse of Doc’s ashes, which were beginning to scatter
in the wind. Tears welling up in her eyes, she slammed the gull-wing door shut
and started the engine.
The DeLorean roared off, just as the spot it was parked
on had contorted into a twelve-foot spike that nearly impaled the vehicle.
The kabuki man gave chase upon his nanobot wave,
summoning other nano-powered stalagmites of various shapes and sizes from areas
all over the parking lot in a desperate attempt at derailing the DeLorean. But
Marty’s driving was too skilled for the masked menace, avoiding each and every
pillar.
“I don’t think he’s trying to kill us,” Phineas
deduced. “I think he’s trying to destroy the time machine itself!”
“Yeah, the time machine that we’re in!” Marty
retorted.
In her frantic driving, Marty’s right elbow came in
contact with the time circuit switch. Phineas and Ferb saw the array of
indicator lights flare on, including the three readouts. The “Destination Time”
was still set for November 5, 1985.
“Uh, Marty?” Phineas said. “You may not wanna go so fast.”
Marty briefly shot him a disbelieving glare. “We got a
murderin’ freak on our tail! Why shouldn’t
I go fast?!” She glanced at the sideview mirror, noticing that the kabuki man
was dangerously gaining on their tail. “Alright, dude. Let’s see you catch us
at 90.”
Marty’s foot slammed on the gas
pedal and the DeLorean correspondingly picked up speed.
Phineas and Ferb stared at the
speedometer: 65…70…75…80…
The gauges and indicators lit up
behind the heads of Marty, Phineas, and Ferb.
…85…88…
Through
the windshield, the mall parking lot changed into an open field with a giant
haystack in the middle of it. “What the…?!” Marty screeched as they drove
through the haystack and straight into an open barn with a loud crash.
----------------------
Professor Ludwig von Drake was
in the middle of fixing his living room television set when he heard a loud
commotion reverberate from outside his farmhouse. “What was dat noise dere?
Lousy neighbors! Don’t dey realize a genius like myself must get his peace and
quiet when workin’ in peace!” It was only after the fact that the Professor
realized, “Wait a sec. I don’t have any neighbors!”
His curiosity getting the better of
him, the Professor abandoned his repair work on the television set and wandered
out of his farmhouse with a flashlight. He spotted a large hole in the front of
his barn, which only piqued his curiosity as he approached to investigate.
Peeping through the hole, he stared
in open-mouthed astonishment.
“Oum diggidy oumpapa!” he exclaimed
as he looked on what appeared to be a spacecraft of some kind, its headlights
shining through the dust. Its hatch doors rose slowly. The Professor motioned
back gradually, watching expectantly – uneasily – with an expression of
curiosity mixed with fear. “Take it easy now, Professor,” he whispered to
himself. “No need to lose your cool here.”
It was only when the spaceship’s
three occupants – the faces obscured by the hoods from their suits – stepped
out when the Professor did actually lose his cool, screaming and running
away from the barn like a madman.
Had he maintained composure long
enough, he would have heard one of the “aliens” call out to him, “Wait! Don’t
go! We’re not radioactive!”
The tallest of three “aliens” pulled
back her hood to expose her young, beautiful (albeit disoriented) face. “You
guys wanna tell me how we ended up in the middle of Hershel Greene’s creepy
farm?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell
you, Marty,” Phineas said. “You went 88 miles per hour and sent us back in
time.”
“Back?” Marty remarked in confusion.
“I thought you guys were going 30 years into the future.”
“We didn’t have time to input the
date. It was still set for November 5, 1985!”
BOOM!
The sudden explosion of the nearest
barn wall drove Marty, Phineas, and Ferb to duck. Another soon followed,
tearing through the wooden architecture. “YOU NOT GONNA PROBE ME, YA KOOKY
ALIENS!” They heard the Professor yell from outside, brandishing his
double-barrel shotgun.
“O.K., we need to get outta here!”
Marty frenetically insisted.
She clambered back into the DeLorean
with the boys and started up the engine.
The DeLorean thundered out of the
barn, creating yet another large hole in the architecture, in its drastic
escape. The Professor continued his reckless firing, missing several times. It
didn’t help his aim any with the car spinning around the barnyard. The battle
only got more personal when the vehicle smashed through a white picket fence
surrounding two newly-planted pine trees in a line, taking out one of the small
trees before finding a dirt access road.
“MY PINE!” the Professor shrieked in
horror. “YOU KILLED MY PINE!”
In
a fit of vengeance, he fired one last shot on the departing DeLorean, missing by
a whole six feet and instead destroying his mailbox (along with the dozens of
overdue bills that were still in it).
-------------------------
“Get a grip on yourself,
Marty. Get a grip. It’s all just one big dream…one very, really intense
dream. You’ll go home, go to bed, and wake up the next morning as if none of it
ever happened. Doc’s still alive, the kabuki dude wasn’t real…and, hey, maybe
you even got accepted into the Battle of the Bands on a technicality. Yeah,
that’s what’s gonna happen.”
Phineas and Ferb could only observe
Marty as she drove in wide-eyed hysteria from the dirt road onto the main road.
“She’s totally losing it, right?” Phineas consulted with his brother, who only
nodded in confirmation.
SCREEEECH!!!
Marty slammed down on the brakes
without a hint of warning to the Flynn-Fletcher brothers. They watched her
struggle out of the vehicle and stare out towards an open field. Curiously,
they stepped out to join her.
“What is it?” Phineas asked, but
Marty was too flabbergasted to answer.
He only got his answer from a nearby
billboard that advertised the construction of Lyon Estates, Marty’s
neighborhood, which had yet to see completion in 1985. Now fully understanding
her speechlessness, Phineas did what he could to comfort his friend.
“I’m really sorry, Marty,” he said.
“But it’s like I tried to tell ya. We’ve…”
“Phineas, just…” Marty whimpered,
fighting tears. “Just give me a sec, okay?”
Phineas backed off along with Ferb,
both of them returning inside the DeLorean just as they heard a beeping sound.
“Uh-oh,” Phineas uttered as he looked on the plutonium chamber indicator – the
light was flashing “Empty.” “Well, that’s not good.”
“It wouldn’t be our first time
getting stuck in the past,” Ferb noted.
