Chapter One

Saturday, October 26, 1985
02:00 AM
John F. Kennedy Drive
Hill Valley, California

Marty McFly was racing to the empty streets of night-life Hill Valley (or Hell Valley, as he already got used to call the place which he really thought of as coming close to hell) up to the Brown garage. At first, he hadn't known where to go – there seemed no place to be really safe in this horrific world – but then he had thought of Doc's old garage. He figured that might be the place if he wanted to have some rest, before thinking about what the hell was wrong.

As Marty pulled up on the garage driveway, he saw it was next to the Biff's Chicken Paradise. "Yup, can't think of something original" he thought. When he looked at the garage, though, he was surprised to see it looked still the same. He'd expected it to be damaged, maybe even replaced, but not standing on the same site. Maybe this was indeed some sort of Hill Valley, after all. Then, the teen shrugged. Whatever. The main thing was finding Doc and having some sleep.

When the teen opened the garage door, he was greeted immediately by an un-nice smell of an old boarded up place. Yup, this was really like hell. As he entered the main room, he was stunned to see all shattered pieces of glass on the ground (he almost stepped on one) and remains of books. There was also filthy dog food for one of the dogs Doc had owned in the past – maybe Einstein, if he was even around. But the main thing was, Doc was nowhere to be seen.

This did really surprise Marty. Of course, Doc wouldn't have liked to stay in a place as hellish as this town, where Biff ruled the world and where murder seemed to be quite normal (maybe even legal, Marty wouldn't put it past Biff to legalize it). But still, Doc had to remember the short visit Marty had brought him in 1955 – and also that he would return on October 26th 1985, which was today. If so, why wasn't he at the mall, then? Was he…really…dead?

Marty shivered, thinking about how Doc pretty well could no longer be alive. With Biff ruling, he could've been shot by Tannen's thugs and dumped on some place unknown. Maybe even cremated, so there would be no identification of the body as Hill Valley's ex-scientist anymore. This could all pretty well be possible, however Marty hated the thought his best friend was no longer be alive anymore. But then, if he was living, where could he be? And why hadn't he come to the mall last night? And what about Marty's younger self, who obviously still had to be send back to 1955? Where was he?

The teenager tried to stop his mind from thinking all those weird and really horrifying thoughts, and went searching for a bed to have a nice rest. The bed, however, was in the bed room – and Marty didn't reach it without having a few injuries of the glass pieces. As he was about to go to sleep in the (empty) bed and he figured he should think about more things tomorrow, he saw something next to the bed which made him froze and made all his hears standing right into the air. Next to the bed, on a special place, was the o-so-familiar shape of the flux capacitor.

Marty was surprised – really surprised. What the hell was the flux capacitor doing here? Wasn't it supposed to be placed in the DeLorean? Or was it here because there was no DeLorean? There was no time machine at all? Stunned walked the teen over to the thing and pressed on a knob, which activated the thing. Yup – it worked. The flux capacitor worked completely. Time travel was in this reality possible as well – but there was no time machine to travel with. Well, he had the DeLorean – his own DeLorean – but there should be a Hell Valley DeLorean as well, with a Hell Valley flux capacitor in it and a Hell Valley set of time circuits connected to it. But well, maybe it was in the back, and Marty hadn't found it yet. Anyway, it was time to go to sleep. Time travel problems could come later on. Sleep was coming on the first place right now. Tired of a long day with really much problems, he fell soon asleep and went off to dreamland – which certainly was a better place than Hell Valley.

oooooooo

"Lorraine!"

Lorraine Baines looked up surprised in the direction of the call. She heard footsteps coming closer to the door, and as it was opened the owner of the voice – her husband, Biff Tannen – stepped inside. She had been having a drink – the fifth that night – and had for a second forgotten the time. But now she was completely alert again.

Biff walked down the stairs and hugged Lorraine in a hard grip. The 47-year-old didn't try to show any signs of protest – she knew that was with Biff pretty impossible. She just waited, during the filthy kisses her husband gave her, and the embracing he did with her, until he finally released her and went to sit on the bench. "Aww, day's over" he muttered. "How have ya been behaving yourself?"

"Do you have to ask?" Lorraine asked, sarcastically. Sarcasm was the only thing in which she could put a little protest against Biff's horrible regime. And, in this case, she was right completely. Her day had been awfully disgusting, as all her days were since George had been shot on that Thursday morning back in '73. "You know that this is hell." She actually couldn't think of something that she hated more than Biff Tannen's Pleasure Paradise.

She got her reply almost immediately. Biff slapped her in the face so hard that she almost fell on the ground. The drunk billionaire chuckled at his wife. "Wanna take a poke at me, huh?" he sarcastically said. "I was just asking how you were behaving yourself, not to throw another complain on me." He grabbed one of Lorraine's drinks and sucked it away happily. "You're married to the richest man in the world. We got everything we want for. You're supposed to be happy, Lorraine, and you're supposed to remember that if I want, I can throw you on the street and then you can work for your dinner yourself."

Lorraine could hardly fight against her thoughts to hit him as hard as she could with the table her drink was on. She knew that Biff would not even consider the thought of not-doing it in a minute – he was serious with her. The 48-year-old sighed, and thought about why Biff was almost the only one in Hill Valley who actually enjoyed life.

As Biff continued to suck up her drinks, Lorraine thought of her youngest, Marty. Boy o boy, she missed the kid. However she had two other kids, Dave and Linda (who she didn't see as well because they were either hanging around on the street or rotting away in prison), she had always preferred Marty. Maybe that was because his face reminded her so much of the person she'd met in 1955, before all this mess had started that turned Hill Valley into what it was, a dump place, avoided by everyone who had a bit of sense in his or her head. Most of the time, she tried to think that this wasn't true, that what Biff all had done to the city was for the better… and that she shouldn't be so hard on him, and have respect for him. After all, the guy was her husband.

Lorraine knew that there was one person that was living – at least, she hoped that he was still alive – that could make sense of all the madness. She hadn't seen him since High School, but in the short time he'd stayed in Hill Valley he'd stood up to Biff Tannen as the very first person to do so, and even now Biff Tannen was no teenage bully but the ruler of a city, he still could stand up to him… Lorraine was sure of that. That guy was Calvin Klein.

The drunk sighed. Calvin Klein. Once, he had been the love of her life, and the guy she was sure she was gonna spend the rest of her life with. Dreamy she thought back of those days, in which many teens liked her. And why did she have to end up with the worst of all? Why did the only person that she loved as a partner in her life besides Calvin have to die at thirty-five years young? George had just made the first Chapter of his novel called 'A Match Made In Space' ready and showed it to her. And she was sure he was going to make his fortune with it. They were heading towards a promising future, and however George had to do so many other things (this Chapter, having a nine thousand words, was started in late 1971 already) she knew that one day in the distant future there would be a message that George McFly had his first book published after years… maybe decades of struggling as an upcoming science-fiction writer…

But that date had never come. George was dead now, lying six feet under at the local Cemetery that had replaced old Boot Hill Cemetery since 1962. And Hill Valley had slumped off even more into a hellhole, with no rescuer like in books to save town… it could have been the subject of a tragedy. But it was the hellish truth, and there was no other solution than that one. It was all the truth.

Right then, Match – Biff's crony – blasted into the room, obviously really tired from whatever he'd done. "Biff" he muttered, unable to get himself farther than the doorway. "Biff… it's… your stepson. Marty. He's… he's back. Back in town." Lorraine was shocked. Marty was back in Hill Valley? At 2AM at night? Hill Valley was a city in which nightlife really was people's main priority, but Marty never liked that. Then why did he now? And why had he come back in the first place? This was really confusing.

Biff, however, only got angry. "WHAT?" he exclaimed. "What do you mean? What is that butthead doing here? We skipped him off to boarding school in summer '83… he can't be back again. Lorraine, your kid's an idiot. Just like his ol' man." He sighed, thinking of what could be going on with Marty. He never liked the youngest kid of McFly, especially because he was the most rebelling of the three – which was strange, as he had of all the children the less known his father he should usually be the first to see Biff as his Dad, shouldn't he? – and somehow had decided to resemble Calvin Klein, the guy Biff hated maybe even more than George McFly and Emmett Brown. Them both successfully put away – one killed on a sunny Thursday in March, other locked up in the mental institute for insane people and treated as the town's crackpot – made him convince that Calvin Klein had to die, somehow. He'd crashed Biff in manure, and encouraged McFly to stand up to him. They made his life unhappy. At least there had been the almanac to get him a rich life, but still he didn't rest until Calvin Martin Klein was six feet under. The problem was, he had never shown a sign of life again after he'd departed Hill Valley on that stormy night in 1955. And when he'd tried to get it out of Brown when he was still in the progress of being committed Brown had simply said: "Some things have to be secrets because they can be dangerous if you know them. That, and I enjoy the pleasure of you getting angry when you realise you don't know them." He truly hated the guy.

"Don't you dare to speak that way about George" Lorraine interrupted, growling at the words Biff had already forgotten in his thoughts about Crazy Old Doc Brown and Calvin Klein. "You're not even half the man he was." She truly detested Biff when he said these words. George McFly had been hundred times better than him, and if it hadn't been for his murder and her being unable to pay her debts. Finally, she had agreed to her not ending questions of marrying him, but the day she had for the last not regretted saying 'yes' to his 258th wedding proposal was a long, long time away.

"Oh I'm not?" Biff sneered. "Like you have to say that. You dated idiots like Calvin Klein. You were actually the one to wed the biggest butthead in town. And I'm not coming back at that. McFly was the biggest loser in the school back in '55, and it wasn't until that bug Calvin Klein interfered with course of happenings that he managed to stand up to me. He was the biggest butthead of the entire world, Lorraine." He pushed her on the ground and laughed. "That's what you deserve! Now get up and go to bed. I'll be with you in an hour and a half… I got business to take care of." He departed up to the stairs and left into the lift with Match.

Lorraine looked up at the lift, not able to stand up properly. She managed to crawl somehow to the bar and took a drink. She didn't want to go to bed and wait for Biff's arrival before doing whatever he wanted to do… not yet, at least. First she had to forget this kick by a nice drank. Lorraine drank a shot of whiskey and kept repeating it for herself. "I was wrong" she muttered. "He was right, and I was wrong. I had it coming. He's my husband, and he takes care of all of us. And," and this was the hardest part, "he deserves our respect." She kept repeating these lines to herself every time Biff did something to her, and it got harder every time. Sometimes, she even considered suicide a smart, suitable option. She would just get up, go to the roof and jump off it. Suicide would be nice and neat, and it would save her from continuing life up here… at least, that was if you called this life, at all.

oooooooo

Dr. Brown woke up slowly, only realising one thing for a moment – he had a headache from hell. Then he realised his surroundings – he was in the mental institute. The institute in which Biff had thrown him in more than two years ago, and from which escaping was practically no use. It was the worst place he'd ever encountered in his entire life, even with adding the Pleasure Paradise to this list, and the worst thing was that he'd been stuck in this thing without any way to escape. He'd tried everything… nothing worked with these idiot guards. If he could, he'd kill himself right away. Sure would save him from lots of problems.

Then, his eye moved to the calendar that was hanging up. And for a second, he was puzzled. The last date circled was Thursday October 24th. So he now had to circle Friday October 25th. Meant today was…

"Great Scott!"

Doc jerked up in a feeling of both excitement and fear. Today was the date his science experiment was supposed to take place in which Marty went back in time… but more important was that Marty, the one from '55, had indeed this night returned. He faintly recalled hearing some sonic booms before going to sleep, and realised what it had been… the institute was only a few blocks away from the Courthouse Square… Pleasure Paradise, he grumpy corrected. That meant Marty had ended up at the Paradise? "Holy shit, he's not going to survive this! And if he is not at the Paradise, he probably went to the mall… the kid is all worrying around about where the hell I and the terrorists are. Too bad, kid. We're not around anymore." He smirked.

How would Marty be able to survive in the world from here and now was something driving him crazy. Biff would shoot him immediately if he revealed to know information about time travel… before doing his own research. Doc began to feel a slight piece of fear. If Biff got Marty and the DeLorean and managed to make a way to travel with it… he could get plutonium easy enough, being the owner of the most toxic waste plants in the world. It was an easy piece of cake to change world so it would be even harder to live on earth. But that wasn't the biggest problem… live could hardly get worse for Dr. Emmett Brown. The worst thing was that it could create a paradox earlier on then the one they were currently heading forwards to, a paradox that would destroy the live of thousands to millions to billions of innocent people…

Doc didn't matter that he was supposed to change right now and do something useful like painting – they were really being treated like little kids up here – as he was completely concentrated on the matter with Marty. He wondered if the teen would find out about his father's bad fate. The inventor growled, as he had known for sure it was Biff from the moment he'd gotten the newspaper about author George McFly being shot dead close to Lone Pine Mall. And, unlucky enough, Biff had known that he knew… and had accused him of being a murderer. And since he was the fifty-three-year-old local crackpot almost everyone disliked, the stories were believed and lived by."Hell, I should be glad to have had another ten years before I finally was stowed away in here" Doc thought. "Life in Hell Valley was bad, but I'd take in a second another ten years in Hell Valley above another two years in here. This building really was made to be a living hell."

"Brown!" A voice then sounded from the hall. Oh no, not again. "You got an appointment at 8am, you nutcase! And it's 7:33 now! Means," the guy paused for a moment, "that you have a twenty-seven minutes left to change and prepare yourself for Dr. Michinson. He will be furious if you don't be ready in time." He chuckled. "I thought me ol' man told me that you were actually obsessed with time back in High School? Then why aren't you at least trying to be in time up here? Certainly wouldn't hurt a bit if you make some hurry… slacker." He left, watching what the rest of the hall did.

Doc stared up at the roof, wondering again why he was put in here, and why Biff had to turn out as rich as he did. Surely he could've been stopped from gaining power and wealth, and surely the police could've done something against Biff in the early sixties. It was way too late now, and the thing Doc wondered about was how it ever could've come this far. Of course the idea of being rich and powerful might've caused the police to 'turn the other side' while Biff took over Hill Valley in trade for a large amount of money. Biff sure was smarter than Doc always had thought, as he had actually managed to survive through all those years. Doc began to shiver, as he realised that Biff could pretty well be smart enough to find out how the time machine worked. If they only let him send messages out of the institute, he could maybe contact Marty and get him up here…but they didn't allow him to, so the case was a lost one.

Was it?

"Great Scott!"

Doc jumped up with joy, as he suddenly realised something. One of the guards in the institute, a man named John Statler – he was the son of the Statler auto detailer in 1955 whose shop was bought up in 1972 by Biff to make it a shop called 'Adult Toys' – was very, very corrupt and would do anything for a little money. Normally, that was something Doc hated. But if he could get the guy to track Marty down for him, and make sure that the teen got his message…

A smile appeared on the inventor's face, as he figured he actually might be able to get back on Biff. He had really wanted to do that for a long time now, and by now the time might come. If he recalled correctly, John usually arrived at work at around 10am. He could then go to the doctor he was supposed to visit and wouldn't have to make the others suspicious. Marty would sure rescue him out of this hell, he was certain, and once that happened they could together go build on the DeLorean and restore this mess…

A faint smile appeared on the scientist's face, as he thought about all of this. Maybe, his life wasn't the mess he'd been thinking of it for the past two years. Maybe, life could for one time be good.