In Times Like These Boxed Set

by Nathan Van Coops

  Carson sets his two packs on the floor and puts his hand to his chronometer.

  “Toss it here,” Stenger says.

  Carson gives me a quick look, and I get the sense he’s trying to convey something to me but I don’t understand what. The next moment he grabs the doorknob of the room to the left, and vanishes.

  Why didn’t I think of that?

  Anger burns in Stenger’s eyes as he swings the gun from where Carson has disappeared and points it at me.

  “You know it’s probably easier just to take it off your body—”

  I’ve been holding the backpack in my hands in front of me as a shield between us. I toss it at Stenger’s face. He reels backward a step but stays standing. He’s about to aim the gun at me again when Carson reappears behind him and tackles him. The gun and the Rubik’s Cube both hit the ground and skid past me as Carson and Stenger crash to the floor. I jump after the gun and go down on one knee as I grab it. I spin and aim it at Stenger’s head as he lashes backward with his elbows at Carson who is holding him down with a knee in his back.

  “Stop moving!” I yell.

  Stenger sees the gun and stops. He holds his hands up ahead of him, a few inches off the floor. Carson relaxes his grip. Pounding footsteps echo from the hall that Stenger came from. I can’t see anything but it sounds like multiple people.

  Did he bring friends?

  “Come on, Carson. Let’s get out of here!”

  Carson grabs the pack I threw at Stenger and we move hastily toward the stairwell door. I keep the gun aimed at Stenger’s head till we’re through. The moment before the door slams shut, he sneers. We plummet down the stairs, jumping as many steps as we dare, and crash out into the lower hallway. Carson kicks open the alley door and we sprint for the street.

  “Shit. I forgot the car is gone,” I pant, when we reach the other side of the street.

  “What now?” Carson says.

  My hands are shaking. I find the safety on the gun and set it, then stuff it into one of the packs Carson is carrying. “Let’s get out of sight.” We cut back down the same path between buildings we used earlier. Passing the smelly dumpster, I turn left and head for the cross street. We keep up a steady jog till we reach an alley to turn down, and then I slow to a walk. “God, that was scary. Thank you for tackling him.”

  “No problem,” Carson pants.

  “Where did you go?” I say. “Before you came back.”

  “Not far. I just jumped back to about ten minutes before. I’m guessing you were still upstairs, and I would have been in the balconies. It took me a minute to figure out what to use to get behind Stenger, but finally I just used the wall. I was worried it wasn’t going to be conductive enough, but it worked out.”

  “It was brilliant.” I walk over and give him a quick hug. “You saved my life, man.”

  “No sweat, dude.” He pats me on the back. “You would have done the same for me.”

  “That was some quick thinking.” I shoulder my second pack.

  “So what’s the plan now? We still have a couple of hours till we can get the car back.”

  “I vote we stash this stuff somewhere safe, blink back to eleven o’clock and retrieve it. We can go get the car then and get back to the hospital. They’re probably worried about us.”

  “They aren’t yet, we haven’t even left the hospital,” Carson says.

  “Oh yeah. Well they ought to be worried after what we just went through. I can’t wait to tell them this one.”

  We continue down the alley, keeping an eye out for good hiding spaces for our stuff. We finally settle on an old 1950s truck that we find behind someone’s garage. The fabric cover over the truck is mildewed and dirty and one look under the canvas shows us that the truck is not likely to be moving anytime soon. We make sure no one is watching, then stuff our packs into the bed of the truck, careful to replace the cover how we found it.

  We find our jump location only a couple of houses down.

  “Boats work great.” Carson points to a center console fishing boat on a trailer next to a garage apartment. The layer of leaves on the floor of the boat gives away that, like the pickup truck, the boat hasn’t seen much action recently.

  “Should be good for a few hours,” I say. I climb into the back of the boat and initially sit on one of the cushioned seats but then think better of it. I move to the bow and position myself so I’m balanced on the two rails. “Be careful not to be anywhere a leaf is likely to fall in the next few hours,” I caution. Carson heeds my advice and perches on the stern rail near the motor.

  “I’m going to plan for five after eleven.” I set my chronometer for 0305 Zulu.

  “Ready?” Carson says.

  “Ready.”

  A scent of smoke reaches me and I turn in the direction of the lab. Looking over the garage across the alley, I can make out the top of Quickly’s building. An orange glow is emanating from the middle windows.

  I turn back to my task at hand. This time it’s me who blinks first. I push the pin and Carson disappears.

  14

  “I once met a time traveler who insisted on only traveling to his own birthdays. He claimed he was over a thousand years old. I found the idea rather ridiculous, but I have to admit, he did get a lot of free drinks that way.”

  -Excerpt from the journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2115

  The parking garage at the hospital is quiet as we pull in. The hospital lobby is likewise subdued. The gift shop is closed and a janitor has a buffer working on the floors. Carson and I take the elevator to the third floor. The waiting room where we left our friends is deserted. I find the charge nurse at her desk.

  “Excuse me. We’re here visiting Robert Cameron.”

  The white-haired woman looks up from her paperwork. “Visiting hours are over.”

  “I think our friends might already be in there,” I say.

  “Are you with the group that was waiting earlier?” the nurse asks.

  “Yes, we just had to step out for a bit.”

  “Okay, your friends are still back there. Room 328. Just try not to make too much noise. Most of the patients are sleeping.”

  “Thank you.”

  She buzzes us through the double doors. We’re passing room 316 when I see Blake and Francesca emerge from a room ahead. They turn our direction, still talking to one another, but after a moment Francesca spots us.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” Blake responds.

  “Good news.” Francesca smiles. “He’s going to be okay,”

  “What happened?” Carson asks.

  “The doctor said he had a minor stroke,” Blake replies. “Apparently it could have been a lot worse if Robbie hadn’t rushed him in.”

  Francesca gives me a hug.

  “Is Robbie still in there?” I gesture toward the room they came from.

  “Yeah. What did you guys find out?” Blake says.

  “That’s a pretty crazy story.”

  “Stenger must have burned the lab,” Carson says.

  “You saw him?” Francesca asks.

  “Carson actually tackled him. He tried to kill us and take our chronometers.”

  “Where was this?” Blake asks.

  “Inside the lab,” I reply.

  “You guys went into a burning building?” Francesca says.

  “No. Not exactly.” I tell them the story of our plan to get our stuff back and how the night unfolded. We walk back through the doors and take seats in the waiting room again as I’m talking. Carson interjects whenever I leave something out.

  “Wow,” Francesca says. “You guys are really lucky.”

  “Yeah. Glad you’re both okay,” Blake adds. “So no sign of Quickly? Other than the younger one you ran into?”

  “No. Hopefully they got out okay. I think they were planning on leaving anyway.” I tell them about the conversation I overheard before we left for the hospital. Carson leans forward to listen to this also. “It sounded like Mym was back to get D
r. Quickly and leave.”

  “He did say he was only going to be in 1986 for a little while,” Francesca says.

  “He didn’t even say goodbye?” Carson asks. “That’s kind of odd.’”

  “No. He just asked me to check the spare tire,” I say. “It was very odd.”

  “Did you check it?” Francesca says.

  “No, we didn’t really have a chance. We were kind of busy.”

  “What if it was a clue?” Francesca says. “What if he was trying to tell you something?”

  “Why the secrecy?” I say. “Why not just tell me if he was trying to tell me something?”

  “I still think you should check it,” Francesca says.

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  Robbie emerges from the double doors and we get out of our chairs. “Hey guys.”

  “Hey. Is he doing okay?” I ask.

  “Yeah, he’s sleeping. The doctors have him on some medication to help him sleep through the night. They said we can come back in the morning.”

  “Want to head back to the house?” Blake says.

  “Yeah.” Robbie nods. He looks exhausted.

  As we make for the exit, Robbie inquires after our trip to the lab and I give him the condensed version of the story. “You guys are ballsy going in there like that,” he says. “Not sure I would have gone back in, knowing the place was going to burn.”

  “Thanks for doing that,” Francesca says. “I’m glad you got our stuff out.”

  In the garage, I grab the packs out of the back seat of the Galaxie and have Carson pop the trunk. As the trunk lid yawns open, I see nothing but carpet inside.

  “Where’s the spare?” Francesca says.

  “Under this maybe?” I drop the packs on the ground and tug at the edge of the carpeting. I pull it back part way to reveal the tire. It’s white-walled like the others and appears to be in good condition. I press hard on the sidewall of the tire with my thumb. “Looks like it’s decently inflated. Not sure what else he wanted me to check.”

  “Maybe you should pull it out,” Francesca says.

  “That’s what she said,” Carson mutters. Francesca takes a swing with the back of her hand and smacks Carson in the shoulder.

  I grab the wheel and remove it from under the carpet. As I do, something falls off the back and lands in the wheel well. Leaning the spare tire against the bumper, I pull the carpet back the rest of the way.

  “What’s that?” Blake asks, peering over my shoulder. I reach in and extract a small leather bound journal. It has a thin cord tied around it.

  “This looks like the book Quickly was taking notes in when I ran into him earlier. The young Quickly.” I untie the cord and pull open the front cover. There is a quote handwritten on the front page. I read it out loud. “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1.”

  “Never would have pegged Quickly as the religious type,” Carson says.

  “I think there are a lot of things we might not know about that guy,” Blake replies.

  I flip through a few more pages. Each is full of handwritten notes and occasional drawings. There are sketches of chronometers, both the watch type like ours, and pendants like Mym’s. I even find versions incorporated into other objects like hats and belts. There are journal entries listing activities and dates. On one page I see a list of objects he notes as having been treated with gravitites. I pause when I notice there’s a groundhog on the list.

  “Apparently there’s a time traveling groundhog somewhere.”

  “He would make better weather predictions than Punxsutawney Phil,” Francesca says.

  I skim to the last few pages of the journal where I find a list of names and addresses. Along with each name is a list of date ranges. Some of the date ranges are not consistent, but jump around and skip years.

  “Who do you think they are?” Francesca says, leaning in close to read the names.

  “I think they might be other time travelers.” I read out loud. “Martin Sambo. Anchorage Alaska, June 2002—March 2018. Valerie Terraveccia, Port Hyacinth, D76 April 10th, 2072. Wow, some of these names are pretty far into the future.”

  “That’s a pretty decent list,” Blake says from behind me. “Must be a dozen names there. You think there are that many other time travelers bouncing around?”

  “There are five of us just right here,” Carson says. “It figures there’d be more.”

  “That’s kind of exciting,” Francesca says.

  I slap the book shut and stuff it into my back pants pocket. “Let’s get this stuff where we can get a proper look at it.” I drop the spare tire into the wheel well and replace the carpet. Blake and Robbie load our packs into the trunk. Robbie meets us at the house with Mr. Cameron’s car and we unload them again in the driveway, each guy taking a pack into the house. Spartacus bounces up and down as we enter the back door. The parrots are squawking too.

  “You guys missing out on some attention today?” I scratch the dog behind his ears. Spartacus follows us with tail wagging as we file upstairs to Blake and Carson’s room.

  “Mind if we use your bed a minute?” I ask Carson.

  “Go for it.”

  I set the pack I’m carrying down on the bed and unfasten it. I ease a few of the items onto the bed.

  “What are you doing?” Francesca says.

  “Looking for something.”

  After emptying the first pack, I grab a second one and repeat the process. I’m a third of the way through it when I find the gun. I double check the safety and hand it to Blake. “Can you unload that?”

  “I’m not much of a gun guy,” Blake says.

  “I can do it,” Robbie says. Blake hands him the gun and Robbie removes the clip. He then smoothly pulls the slide back and ejects the bullet in the chamber.

  “Didn’t want that thing accidentally going off in one of the bags,” I say.

  “That was Stenger’s?” Francesca asks.

  “Yeah. We’re lucky we didn’t get taken out with it,” Carson says.

  I keep unloading the bag I have on the bed. The bedspread disappears beneath a layer of knickknacks and odd pieces of junk.

  “Do you guys remember which stuff was yours from your planning? We probably need to organize all this.” I shake the last envelope of photos out of the pack before tossing it on the ground.

  “Think we have enough to get back with?” Blake asks.

  “Oh. My. God.” Francesca holds up a stack of hundred dollar bills from the pack she’s holding. “Are we rich now?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I snagged that from Quickly’s lab before it burned down. It’s his money, but I thought we might need traveling funds. It looked like it was meant for time traveling. He had it all organized by dates.”

  “Oh wow,” Francesca says, kneeling and unloading stacks of bills onto the floor in front of her. “How much is this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She sits down to count it while I unload more items onto the bed. It’s full before the third pack is empty, so I start using the floor.

  “If you guys remember what stuff was yours, maybe we can sort out into years and see what we have to work with.”

  “That conch shell is mine,” Carson says.

  “That’s my trophy.” Blake reaches across the bed and picks up a figure of a golfer.

  We begin to sort our items into piles and then into lines on the floor. Robbie doesn’t have any items since he wasn’t there for the planning lesson, but he helps read out dates from the photo packets and organizes them. After about twenty minutes, Francesca finishes counting the money. Her face is flushed. “We have one hundred and forty thousand dollars.” She considers the piles in front of her. “I’ve never seen this much money in one place before.”

  “We should probably give it back to Quickly at some point. I wouldn’t get too attached to it,” I say. Francesca stares at the money for a few more moments and then scoops it back into the pack.

  O
nce we have all of our items laid out in chronological order, I survey the results of our work. We’ve laid out the objects in four parallel lines on the carpet. I stand up and step to one end of the rows.

  “So this is 1986. What’s the first item we can jump to? I know I have this door knocker in June of ’87.” I point to my line of items with my toe. “Anybody have anything closer?”

  “My bike handle grip is from December of ’86,” Carson says.

  “Okay. That’s less than a year away. That’s good,” I say. “Blake, what’s your first jump point?”

  “I actually don’t have much till about 1988. I hadn’t gotten to that yet. I have a bunch of stuff from the nineties, though. Did we figure out if we can all use the same object at the same time?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, “I know we can definitely use the same objects but I still don’t know about the ‘at the same time’ thing.”

  “Maybe Quickly has something about that in his journal,” Francesca suggests.

  “Yeah. He might.” I pull the journal out of my back pocket and page through it.

  “How soon are you guys thinking of trying to go?” Robbie asks. “We still have some time to plan, right?”

  I look up from the journal. It’s Blake who responds. “I really want to get a move on. From what Ben said, we don’t even know if Quickly is coming back. It sounds like they were leaving 1986 all together. I don’t know that we’re going to get much more help. I think we have enough to work with. I want to get home.”

  “What about my grandpa?” Robbie says. “I’m not just going to leave him in the hospital. Plus I know you guys have been doing classes with Quickly every day, but I was hoping we’d get a bit of time so you guys can catch me up to speed. I’m definitely not ready for this yet. I’ve only made a half dozen jumps.”