“Shit!” he yelled.
This time it was really dead. After grinding for a minute, Marty was unable to generate the slightest hint of renewed power. And as he continued to grind, he looked up and saw the familiar terrorist van cruising down the street and around a corner.
Horrified, he leaped from the car.
“The terrorists!” he yelled.
Then he was running, through Town Square and all the way down 2nd Street toward the mall. Arriving at the entrance, he noticed that it was called Lone Pine Mall and was decorated with the image of a single pine tree instead of two. Otherwise everything was the same. But the stalled DeLorean had cost him valuable time; the terrorist van was already on the parking lot, chasing Doc Brown while the lone figure of Marty McFly watched in horror.
Marty stood frozen, horrified and amazed. “Oh, no!” he gasped. “I’m too late!”
The scene blew his mind. There was Doc dying again while he looked on. Then, as the hail of bullets sent Brown falling to the ground, Marty saw himself leap into the DeLorean and race off. He had already experienced the scene once in the flesh but he watched again, fascinated by the replay seen from a different point of view.
Just as before, the terrorist van turned and pursued the DeLorean, which executed a neat U-turn and raced to the opposite end of the parking lot. It continued to accelerate even as it was shot at until being enveloped in a blinding white glow.
Losing control of their vehicle, the terrorist van driver was forced to swerve into a Fox Photo stand on the edge of the parking lot. The vehicle fell over and landed doorside down, trapping the terrorists inside. In the distance a police siren wailed.
“Jeez,” Marty whispered.
Suddenly remembering Doc Brown, he turned and ran toward the sprawled figure, still lying face down on .the asphalt. There were tears in Marty’s eyes as he turned his friend over.
“Doc…” he said softly. “Doc…please don’t be dead, Doc…”
“Well, all right, if you insist,” the apparently dead man replied, opening his eyes and smiling.
“You’re alive!” Marty shouted.
“Of course I’m alive.”
“But you were shot—I saw it!” Marty cried. “I saw it twice!”
“On instant replay, as it were?” Doc smiled again. Marty nodded.
“The explanation is simple,” Brown said.
He ripped open his radiation suit to reveal a bulletproof vest.
“It’s the latest fashion in personal protection,” he explained. “Guaranteed to stop a slug from an elephant rifle at thirty yards.”
“Were you wearing that all along?” Marty asked.
“Sadly, no,” Doc Brown replied. “The first time around, I must have been taken by surprise. No, my boy, it was your warning that saved me.”
With that, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the letter that Marty had written in 1955. It was yellow and brittle, the Scotch tape holding it together withered and ready to fall apart.
Marty smiled and shook his head. “What a hypocrite,” he said. “After all that lecturing about screwing up the spacetime continuum…”
“Yeah, well, I figured what the hell…”
Nearby, the police had poured out of their cars and were busily rounding up the terrorists.
“Let’s get out of here,” Doc Brown said. “This is going to be impossible to explain.”
“I’m with you,” Marty said.
Together, they ran toward the mall core and disappeared in the shadows just as even more police cruisers turned the corner into the mall.
As they sped away in the step-van, the two men discussed their adventures. “I guess I did screw things up a little,” Marty said at the entranceway to the mall.