2025 Miami - 11:47 PM
The spray paint can hissed its last breath of neon green across the side of the ICE patrol vehicle. Carlos "Tick" Mendez stepped back to admire a crude but effective middle finger to the system that had been disturbing peace of poor neighborhoods in recent months. The words "FUCK MIG PIGS" dripped down the white government sedan like radioactive tears.
Tick-tock, hermano. Time to go.
He shoved the empty can into his backpack and checked his cracked phone screen: 11:47 PM. Exactly three minutes since the patrol had parked outside the Domino's where he'd been washing dishes for cash under a fake name. Exactly forty-seven seconds until they'd finish their coffee break and discover his artwork.
Carlos had survived six years on Miami's streets by understanding one fundamental truth: timing was everything. One second too early, you're impatient. One second too late, you're dead.
Sirens wailed in the distance - not for him yet, but close enough to make his hands shake as he counted under his breath. Uno, dos, tres...
The timing was wrong. They should still be inside the restaurant for another five minutes minimum. Carlos had been watching their patterns for weeks, memorizing their routines like a prayer. Immigration cops were creatures of habit. Until tonight.
"¡Oye! ¡Stop right there!"
Mierda.
Carlos ran.
His sneakers slapped against wet asphalt as he sprinted through the maze of Wynwood warehouses, their walls covered in legitimate street art that made his petty vandalism look like children's crayon scribbles. Behind him, flashlight beams cut through the darkness like searchlights hunting for escaped prisoners.
"We got a runner! Hispanic male, approximately twenty-one, heading north toward the tracks!"
The railroad tracks. Carlos's lungs burned as he vaulted over a chain-link fence, his backpack catching on the wire for a precious second that felt like an hour. The Immigration officers were faster than him, better fed, better trained. But Carlos had something they didn't: the desperation of a man with nothing left to lose.
Thunder rumbled overhead, low and threatening. Miami's summer storms came fast and brutal, but this felt different, electric in a way that made his skin crawl. The air tasted metallic, charged with something unnatural.
"Cut him off at the overpass!"
Carlos ducked left into an abandoned construction site, concrete pillars reaching toward storm clouds like skeletal fingers. His grandmother's rosary bounced against his chest with each desperate step, the only thing of value he owned, the only thing he'd never sold for food or shelter.
Abuela, if you're watching, now would be good time for a miracle.
Lightning split the sky like God's own middle finger, illuminating the empty lot in stark black and white. For a moment, Carlos saw everything with perfect clarity: the rusted rebar jutting from unfinished foundations, the puddles reflecting the electric sky, the three ICE agents closing in from different directions.
He was trapped.
"¡Surrender now and we'll go easy on you!"
Carlos laughed, tasting blood and rain. Easy was not a word in his vocabulary. Easy was for people who had choices, who had futures that extended beyond the next meal or the next place to sleep. He was twenty-two years old and had been running his entire life - from foster homes, from gangs, from cops, from himself.
"I need more time," he whispered to the storm.
The ball lightning came out of nowhere.
It moved like a living thing, a sphere of pure electric fury the size of a basketball, dancing through the air with impossible grace. Carlos had maybe half a second to register its otherworldly beauty before it slammed into his chest with the force of a meteorite.
The world exploded into white-hot agony.
Every nerve in his body screamed as electricity travel in every direction. Time itself seemed to stutter, fracture, and collapse inward like a broken clock spring. Carlos felt himself falling through dimensions that had no names, his consciousness scattered across decades he had never lived.
Then everything went black.
Miami - October 15, 1978 - 06:23 PM
Carlos woke up to the sound of disco music.
"I love the nightlife, I got to boogie..."
His first thought was that heaven had terrible taste in music. His second was that the asphalt beneath his cheek was surprisingly warm for the afterlife. The third, as his eyes cracked open to see Art Deco buildings in various states of decay that definitely looked wrong for his Miami, was that he was still very much alive.
And very much fucked.
The abandoned lot was gone. The construction site had vanished. Instead, he lay sprawled on the sidewalk outside what looked like a forgotten corner of South Beach, where elderly people in outdated clothes sat on hotel porches like extras from a movie he'd never seen.
A some retro Chevrolet Corvette rolled past, its T-tops gleaming in the morning sun. The driver wore shirt with a collar that could double as aircraft wings. Everything looked simultaneously vintage and brand new.
Carlos sat up slowly, his head spinning like a broken washing machine. The rosary was still around his neck, but his clothes become dirty from long-running.
This is a coma, he decided rationally. I'm in a fucking coma, and my brain is making me relive every terrible 80s movie Abuela used to watch.
He stood on unsteady legs, checking his pockets. His phone was gone, probably fell out while climbing the fence. A fake ID that won't stand up to any serious scrutiny.
Most importantly, his cash was still there - $207 in fresh bills.
Okay, brain, Carlos muttered to himself in Spanish. Very creative coma dream. But I need to wake up now before those ICE cabrones actually catch me.
He tried pinching himself. Nothing.
He tried holding his breath until his lungs screamed. Nothing.
He tried every dream-breaking technique he'd learned from a lifetime of nightmares. Nothing worked.
The world stubbornly remained a neon-soaked parody of the 1980s, complete with palm trees that swayed to an imaginary rhythm and air that smelled like suntan lotion and cheap gasoline.
Fine, Carlos thought. If this is a coma, might as well explore the delusion.
He started walking toward what looked like Ocean Drive, marveling at the cars with their oversized hoods and the people dressed in wide-lapeled shirts and flared pants. Street vendors sold newspapers with headlines about President Carter and something called the "energy crisis."
The evening sun felt too bright, too surreal. Carlos needed to get his bearings, figure out what kind of fever dream his brain had cooked up. He spotted a narrow alley between two Art Deco buildings, thinking it might lead to a quieter street where he could think.
The moment he stepped into the shadowy passage, he knew he'd made a mistake.
"Well, well. Look what we got here."
Three men emerged from behind a dumpster like urban predators. The leader, a wiry guy with greasy hair and a tank top that had seen better decades, held a switchblade that caught the dim light filtering through the alley. His companions flanked Carlos, cutting off any escape routes.
Mierda.
Carlos raised his hands slowly, his street instincts kicking in. "Easy, hermanos. No trouble here."
"Hermanos?" The leader laughed, revealing teeth that would make a dentist weep. "You one of them Cuban boat people? Don't matter. Your money spends the same."
Carlos carefully reached for his wallet, moving with the deliberate slowness of someone who'd been robbed before. Better to lose the cash than the blood. "Look, I'll give you what I got, okay? Just take it easy with that blade."
He pulled out a 100-dollar bill and held it toward the leader, hoping the street tax would buy him safe passage.
The man squinted at the money, his expression shifting from greed to confusion to suspicion. "What the fuck is this supposed to be?"
Carlos looked down at the bill in his hand and felt his stomach drop. The hundred from 2025 looked quite different from banknote of old times. The future design had holographic strips, updated portraits, security features that wouldn't exist for decades.
"This some kind of joke, Cuban boy?" The leader's voice turned dangerous. "You trying to pay me with play money? Monopoly bills?"
"No, man, it's real, I swear—"
"Real, my ass." The switchblade moved closer to Carlos's throat. "You think we're stupid? Nobody disrespects us with fake fucking money."
Carlos felt the world tilting on its axis. The money was real, just from the wrong time. But how could he explain that without sounding completely insane?
"Please, I can get you real money, just give me—"
"Too late for that, boat boy."
The knife came up fast, aiming for his ribs. Carlos clutched the hundred-dollar bill in his fist, squeezing it like a lifeline, and felt a surge of desperate regret wash over him.
I wish I'd never come down this fucking alley. I wish I could go back. I wish I could go back in time—
The world exploded.
Not with light this time, but with a sensation like being turned inside out while falling through a blender. The hundred-dollar bill in his hand burst into flames that didn't burn, disintegrating into ash and memory. Reality folded, twisted, and snapped back like a broken clock spring.
Suddenly, Carlos was standing at the mouth of the alley again, staring down the shadowy passage where three predators waited behind a dumpster.
Hundred seconds ago.
His heart hammered against his ribs as he processed what had just happened. The alley looked exactly the same, but now he knew what waited inside. More importantly, he understood what had saved him.
The money. Hundred dollars had literally burned away to buy him hundred seconds.
One dollar per second.
Carlos backed away from the alley entrance, choosing a different route entirely. As he walked, he pulled out his remaining cash and counted it with shaking hands: $107 left.
One hundred and seven seconds of rewind time, if he needed it.
Holy shit.
Carlos looked down at the $107 remaining in his hand, then at the vintage newspaper a passerby had dropped that confirmed the date: October 15, 1978.
Either he was experiencing the most elaborate coma dream in medical history, or ball lightning had somehow torn him out of 2025 and dropped him into the disco-fueled chaos that was 1980s Miami.
And somehow, impossibly, he could buy time itself.
One dollar per second.
Carlos began to laugh, a sound that started as hysteria and transformed into something darker, hungrier. If this was real, if he was really here, really trapped in 1978 with nothing but his street smarts and a supernatural ability to rewind time, then maybe it wasn't a punishment.
Maybe it was an opportunity.
He looked at the homeless veteran, still staring at him with concern, and handed him a five-dollar bill.
"Keep the change, hermano. And welcome to the future."
As Carlos walked away, his fingers automatically found the rhythm that had earned him his nickname: tick, tick, tick. Counting seconds like a human metronome. In 2025, time had been his enemy, always running out when he needed it most.
But here in 1978 Miami, time was something he could buy.
And Carlos "Tick" Mendez was about to become very, very wealthy in every way possible.
The disco music faded behind him as he disappeared into the sun-soaked heart of a city that didn't know it was about to meet its newest predator.