“This was probably a bad idea, Steve, coming here,” Dawn judged.

“Yes, we know that now,” Steve said, trying to focus on the curving road so they didn’t veer into a tree.

“I would have suggested that we go to Chicago,” Gore pointed out.

“You just want to go to Chicago because you think you have an excuse to kill people on the streets.”

“I can dream, can’t I!”

“Gore, sweetie, killing someone before they can kill someone else in a street fight is a morally gray action,” Dawn pointed out, “which requires a significant amount of paperwork and bunny-based calculations to rectify, so stop suggesting street warfare as a solution.”

“Gang violence can be a solution.”

“Maybe in the past, Gore.”

“Time travel it is then! Steve, take us to the past so that I may strangle Al Capone with a tire iron.”

Steve mistook a creek bed for a different road and nearly lost control of the little sedan. As he twisted the car back into a gravel-crunching straight path, he grumbled both to himself and to Gore, “If I had a time machine I’d have never come back to Missouri.”

“That’s it?” Dawn asked.

“You said yourself it was a mistake to come here.”

“You made the decision to come here, yes. And it may have been a bad decision, but you didn’t know then. But that’s not nearly a bad enough decision to blow going back in time for.”

“We’re lost, hungry, and Burney won’t shut up about a few measly bullet wounds,” Steve said, pointing to the growing clouds of fire and dust surrounding the car. He sped forward, hoping that at the next turn he’d find a paved road or at least a sign scratched into the side of a tree with a vicious fingernail warning travelers to beware, anything to know he was still in civilization!

“And if I could go back in time I would decide to go to Chicago and get a calzone or something. Gore could be killing idiots at a Cubs game while I got a full meal,” Steve complained, striking the steering wheel hard enough it let out a sickly little honk. “But that’s pointless. Even then I’d be forced to make the same decision. Can’t change the past.”

“You wouldn’t even kill Hitler?” Dawn asked, slamming her head back in shock. She also threw her head back because Steve ran over a somewhat large rock.

“Kill Hitler? No I wouldn’t kill Hitler.”

“You can’t go back in time and not kill Hitler, Steve. No calzone is worth that!”

“No one said anything about killing Hitler.”

“You said go back in time. And that you wouldn’t kill Hitler. That’s the same conversation and you should be ashamed of yourself for not wanting to kill Hitler.”

“I would kill Hitler,” Gore noted.

“You can’t kill Hitler, Gore,” Steve scolded.

“I have impaled the pathetic mortal known as Adolf Hitler on countless occasions!” Thinking fondly of these memories, Gore leaned back with a hand held to his black armored heart. It made a clanking noise. “Last time, I ripped out his bones and made his limp body into a sock puppet.”

“See? Even Gore would kill Hitler,” Dawn noted. “Torturing him in hell is different than going back in time and killing him, of course, but his heart’s in the right place.” To emphasize this point, Dawn also patted Gore on his black armored heart. This made another, lighter clanking noise.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t kill Hitler,” Steve said, exhaling and trying to pay attention to the road.

Burney, eavesdropping, had decided to stop complaining about his bullet injuries and screamed down at Steve.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t kill Hitler, Burney!” Steve explained. “And this whole conversation is pointless because that’s the point I’m trying to make. You can’t change the past.”

Burney screamed again.

“No you can’t, Burney! It’s not that I wouldn’t want to kill Hitler if I went back in time, it’s that I couldn’t.”

“Hitler lover,” Dawn said, crossing her arms and looking out the window.

“Bring me to Hitler in the past!” Gore declared. “I shall demonstrate my sock puppet trick. It’s quite good.”

“No, Gore,” Steve said.

“You won’t let Gore kill Hitler?” Dawn asked.

“Hitler sock puppet theatre is wonderful children’s entertainment!” Gore roared.

“Look, Gore, Dawn…” Steve began before Burney screamed down at him. “Yes, you too, Burney, though I think the Burney and Hitler sock puppet children’s hour would make a terrible TV show.”

Burney, disappointed in yet another children’s television idea being rejected, screamed in disappointment.

“Look. If you went back in time, you couldn’t kill Hitler because Hitler didn’t die before he killed himself,” Steve explained. “If you went back in time, you couldn’t change anything because you’d have already done it in the past. That’s what I’m trying to say about my life. I have to live with my decision.”

“That’s how you interpret time travel, Hitler lover,” Dawn said. “I think you could fix anything if you went back in time. You changing your mind about going to shoot birds at farmer John’s? Sure. Killing Hitler? Definitely.”

“That’s a multi-linear timeline. And it requires you to throw out nearly all basic science.”

While Steve was trying to explain the chapter of a science magazine he’d read while waiting for the dentist one time, a tree just beyond the edge of sight collapsed with the weight of an unseen force. The tree fell to the side of the rural highway with a crash that no one heard, since Steve was still driving like an idiot. Amidst the cloud of flame and gravel, Burney, however, did see the movement in the trees, and searched the forest for the source of the sudden motion. When he screamed, then, it was to voice a concern rather than a complaint.

“Shut up, Burney,” Steve said, misinterpreting Burney’s scream.

“So you’re using physics to explain why you love Hitler?” Dawn asked, her arms still crossed.

“I’m using physics to explain how it would be impossible to kill Hitler.”

“You have already achieved time travel. Why not kill Hitler? I could kill Winston Churchill to make it even if you would like,” Gore suggested.

“This is a hypothetical conversation, Gore, and even hypothetically you couldn’t kill Winston Churchill.”

“Plus he wasn’t exactly a saint either,” Dawn noted.

“Ah, I love killing saints!” Gore also noted.

Once more, while the demons argued inside the car, another tree fell in the forest. When Burney screamed a warning that he’d just seen something large moving in the trees, his cries were misinterpreted as indignation against Steve’s not-killing-Hitler time traveling policy.

“So you’d save Winston Churchill but you wouldn’t kill Hitler?” Dawn asked.

“I’m starting to wonder if this conversation is serious or not,” Steve said, fighting the urge to crash into a ditch.

“Oh, it’s serious. Not killing Hitler is very serious.”

Unseen by the occupants, but seen by the screaming Burney, small trees began to burst apart. The tree line collapsed in a domino effect that was rapidly approaching the small imported sedan.

“Then seriously listen to me,” Steve said, slowing down so he could look at Dawn while trying to explain. “If you could travel back in time, you couldn’t change the past. That would change the future, which would defeat the need to change the past and make you not go to the past, trumping what you did. If we went back in time right now, we couldn’t kill Hitler or change anything at all. Everything we did would be exactly as if—”

Before Steve could finish his sentence or Burney could finish his warning scream, a World War Two-era panzer tank burst out from behind collapsing trees and roared onto the road. The German tank, iron crosses emblazoned against its camouflaged steel exterior, joined in formation alongside Steve’s car.

Steve and Dawn joined Burney in screaming in terror as Steve tried to swerve out of the way of the armored vehicle.

“You make your point in interesting ways, Steve. Let’s kill Hitler!” Gore shouted as another tank burst from the trees on the other side of the road. This second tank pinned Steve in a flying v formation in the center of the one-lane highway, and kept him barreling toward whatever fate being transformed into the meat of a Nazi-tank-sandwich would deliver.

“What’s going on?” Dawn shouted, pulling her legs up and looking like she wanted to jump out of the car.

“Everyone calm down, it’s probably just—” Steve tried to shout before the explosion of both tanks firing their main guns silenced all reasoning. The guns’ retorts nearly knocked Steve off the road, and he struggled to keep the car from getting trampled under the tanks’ swiftly-churning steel treads.

As the echo of the shots faded, Steve could see what they were firing upon. Six Sherman tanks, American army stars and stripes painted in proud red, white and blue, greeted them from a fixed position at an upcoming turn in the road.

“Huzzah!” Gore shouted, rolling down the window and leaning half his body into the dust-swirling air. “Drive us closer! I want to hit them with my sword!”

Gore swung his sword to the accompaniment of deafening explosions and cheered their apparent good fortune at finding a mid-twentieth century European battlefield in the middle of the Ozarks.

With two fire-breathing steal beasts on either side leading the compact car toward six death-answering opponents, Steve tried to turn toward whatever escape to safety he could find. Seeing no way off the road save a small gravel embankment, fast approaching, and the only way off the highway that wasn’t walled off with trees, Steve slammed on the brakes.

Gore nearly fell out of the shaking car as Steve slid into a hairpin turn off the highway. “Where are you going?” Gore shouted, pointing at the still-charging tanks back at the highway. “I told you I want to hit them with my sword!”

“I don’t want to kill Hitler anymore!” Dawn screamed as the compact bounced along the narrow, dirt-lined road.

There was no way off this new road save to go forward or back. As Steve raced along the tiny road, burning dust and the screaming Burney waving like a banner of retreat, Steve thought of nothing more than getting as far away from those tanks as the worn-out shocks of his car could carry them.

“Now who’s the Hitler-lover, Dawn,” Steve noted, straining to maintain control of the car. Thick trees made a tunnel out of the dirt road. Both sun and sky had disappeared in the enclosing embrace of an old forest. The road itself seemed to become rougher, bumpier, almost actively insisting that a car was not meant to travel upon this path.

“Bring us around!” Gore demanded. “We shall taste glory!” Because he was in the moment, Gore ignored the sensation of having his head crash through the trunk of a somewhat large cedar tree. Burney screamed a dissatisfaction that Gore would think it wise to be hanging out of a moving car with trees inches away from his face.

The sound of Gore’s head slamming into another tree either emphasized or severely weakened Gore’s further cries for turning around.

“I don’t remember reading that Hitler died from getting run over by a Japanese compact!” Steve shouted, bouncing his head against the roof as he drove over a large tree root. He had to twist so he could get his horns un-stuck from the car’s plastic-lined ceiling. This twisting motion nearly sent them crashing into the moss-lined bark of an old oak tree.

“Then we shall change history!” Gore cried, dodging branches and striking a few with his sword.

“Time travel doesn’t work like that, Gore, I told you—”

“Look! A light at the end of the road,” Dawn said, pointing to what looked like the round exit of a tunnel. Trees shrouded the road, and a bright light blinded the car’s occupants from what lay beyond.