Fast Backward

by David Patneaude

  PRAISE FOR

  FAST BACKWARD

  “Fast Backward is not only a page-turning, heart-stopping glimpse into an alternate outcome to WWII, it is a thought-provoking take on choices being made in contemporary times. Cocoa is an unforgettable character, fighting hard against the current of history.”

  —KIRBY LARSON, award-winning children’s author, including Audacity Jones to the Rescue, Audacity Jones Steals the Show (2018 Edgar Award Nominee), Dash (Scott O’Dell Historical Fiction Award), Duke, Hattie Ever After, and Hattie Big Sky (Newbery Honor)

  “One July morning in 1945, 15-year-old paperboy Bobby Hastings witnesses an atomic bomb explosion and rescues a naked 16-year-girl beside the road. And that’s just for openers. The girl claims to be from the future. Says we didn’t win World War II after all. Predicts utter doom and destruction if the United States government doesn’t take action immediately. Fast Backward is a high-stakes, tense tale about two gritty young people from different centuries who take on the impossible challenge of saving the world. David Patneaude’s fast moving story involves a striking cast of characters, events, and surprises that keep the pages turning. Don’t start Fast Backward until you have plenty of time. You won’t want to put it down.”

  —DAVID HARRISON, award-winning author; Poet Laureate, Drury University (Missouri)

  “Fast Backward is a high-stakes thrill ride! I’ve long thought that we need more World War 2 stories and alternate history in young adult fiction, and this is both. Fans of The Man in the High Castle or Michael Grant’s Front Lines series will love Fast Backward!”

  —MIKE MULLIN, award-winning author of the Ashfall series

  “Imaginative, thought-provoking, and compelling, Fast Backward draws you in to a fascinating what-if: What might have happened if the Nazis got the bomb in time to win the war? And what if a traveler from the future gave us the chance to avert that disaster? Hurtling head-first into this challenge are lively, likeable Bobby and Cocoa, the intriguing girl who materializes out of thin desert air. But why should anyone believe two teenagers?”

  —DORI JONES YANG, journalist and author of Daughter of Xanadu and The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball

  “David Patneaude’s frightening ’What if?’ alternative history will have young readers turning pages to find out what happens next and also turning to history books to educate themselves about the horrors of World War II. What an accomplishment!”

  —CARL DEUKER, award-winning author of Heart of a Champion, Swagger, and Gutless

  “Past, present, and future collide in David Patneaude’s soaring new novel of courage set at the dawn of the Atomic Age. One early morning in rural New Mexico, a pedaling paperboy named Bobby encounters a lost girl named Cocoa, and his fate—and the world’s—are changed forever. Patneaude peels back the layers of history to glimpse the future—but is it bright or dark? A superb, enduring book, with lots of timely reverb.”

  —CONRAD WESSELHOEFT, former New York Times writer and author of the acclaimed novels Adios Nirvana and Dirt Bikes, Drones, and Other Ways to Fly

  “Riveting! One of the best time travel stories I’ve read in a long time.”

  —DORI HILLESTAD BUTLER, Edgar Award-winning and Seuss Award-honored author of the King and Kayla, Buddy Files, and Haunted Library series

  Fast Backward

  by David Patneaude

  © Copyright 2018 David Patneaude

  ISBN 978-1-63393-614-0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The names, incidents, dialogue, and opinions expressed are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published by

  210 60th Street

  Virginia Beach, VA 23451

  800-435-4811

  www.koehlerbooks.com

  DEDICATION

  Once more, to Judy, who long ago saw this writing thing smoldering in me and chose to give it oxygen. This is only the latest in a long parade of books, and the characters and conflicts and choices and voices within their covers, that wouldn’t have existed without her encouragement.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  Monday, July 16, 1945

  I don’t often beat Leo to the newspaper shack, even though he has to endure an eighty-minute drive from Albuquerque. But this morning is an exception; I’m early. Above the vast desert, the sky is black and moonless, but stars flower everywhere. I can practically smell them.

  I prop my bike against the lean-to and stretch out on its bench. After a sleepless night followed by seven miles of pedaling, I’m happy to rest. On the next leg of my journey I’ll be shouldering sixty-seven newspapers stuffed in my Albuquerque Journal bag.

  I’ve complained to Leo that he could’ve placed the shack closer to the base camp so I wouldn’t have as far to haul the papers. But he claims the government won’t allow civilian structures—even our slap-dash shelter—within the invisible outer perimeter of a hush-hush Army outpost. Even if the government were to make an exception, Leo says he’d have a longer drive, which means he’d use more gas. His bosses would have to ask for leniency on the gas rationing rules, which have already been relaxed so we can get the Journal to the base’s hotshot workers every day.

  Anyway, Leo says there’s a limit to how much time he can spend on the road. He has other carriers. He has another real job. It doesn’t matter how important the men at the base camp think they are or how vital it is to keep them happy while they work on their cloak-and-dagger project.

  I’m supposed to get along with my boss. Dad, who hasn’t gotten along with any of his bosses, tells me that regularly. But if my family didn’t need the money, I’d tell Leo to keep his newspapers. And his excuses.

  Breakfast is a contorted Hershey’s bar I find in my bag. I take a bite, hoping it will settle my stomach. It’s been an uneasy few days—a night-before-the-first-day-of-school knot of anticipation and dread.

  The cause is a puzzle, but I believe it’s something I’ve contracted during my visits to the base camp. For the past week or more, I’ve been exposed to increased nervous energy radiating from the men there. But whether it’s borrowed anxiety or something else, the
affliction kept me up until after midnight and prodded me awake before three thirty. Mom and Dad snored on. Even Lolly barely stirred when I stepped over him and out the door.

  The Hershey’s bar fails to calm my nerves. I breathe deep, which doesn’t help either. I inhale the smells of the desert—mesquite, sagebrush, yucca, dust, a trace of overnight dew—then close my eyes and wait for the rattle and roar of Leo’s road-weary ’39 Ford.

  I doze, but a familiar racket soon grabs my attention. Wiping drool from my chin, I stand and face the bounce and swerve of Leo’s headlights. The car stops, spewing exhaust and shedding dust. To save gas, Leo turns off the engine before he gets out to open the back door.

  “Bright and early this morning, huh, Bobby?” He grips the door handle and simultaneously pulls and lifts and jiggles. The touch, he calls it.

  “Couldn’t sleep.” The door creaks open to reveal the nine labeled stacks of papers on the seat and floorboard. Mine isn’t the tallest, but I’ve got farther to go than the rest of Leo’s crew. And although the fresh layer of asphalt on most of the local roads has made travel easier, I won’t be pedaling over city streets. Near the base, I have to get past the watchful eyes of sometimes-grumpy MPs who recently have been getting grumpier. What city boy has to do that?

  A lot of these engineer types aren’t exactly generous with the tips. When I show up at the end of each month to collect, they practically shed tears over their bill. A tip? Forget it. Other geniuses hand me cash and expect me to figure out what they owe. They can’t be bothered to look at the tab. I could tell them double and they wouldn’t squawk.

  I don’t do that, of course. They’re doing their part for the war effort, people say, and I’ll do my part by being honest.

  I often wonder what it is they are doing. Outside the maze of buildings, though, no one knows—it’s all guesses and rumor—and inside, nobody says anything, at least not so I can understand it. I’ve overheard fragments of conversations, but the soldiers, even the one who happens to be my uncle, stay mum. To my ears, the engineers could be speaking Egyptian, or Martian. Regular fellows they’re not. Their bodies are here, but their minds are elsewhere.

  There are ordinary but also tight-lipped worker bees at the camp, too. Somebody has to provide nourishment for the brains, clean up after them, drive them around, treat their ills. It’s a small town they’ve built out here. Three hundred civilians, uprooted from faraway places. I’ve heard strange accents: East Coast, and much farther; Europe, probably, Germany, possibly.

  When I stick my nose inside Leo’s car, I’m overwhelmed by the fragrances of fresh newsprint and worn mohair. As usual, my brain makes its own connection—shoe polish; wet dog.

  I plop my pile of papers on the bench. “They’re not as heavy this morning, Leo.” The darkness hasn’t let up much, and the stars are now blanketed by clouds.

  “Hitler and his crew are backpedaling. Not much to report from Europe anymore. But the Japs aren’t about to give up, so there’s still plenty of news from the Pacific. Still plenty of dying to come.” He slams the door shut. I feel his eyes on me. “But you don’t need to worry about that, right?”

  “I’m only fifteen, remember?”

  “Not talking about you, sprout.”

  I know who he’s talking about. “My cousin,” I protest, although Leo’s heard this one before. “He’s still in the Pacific . . . somewhere. The Yorktown. Torpedoes and kamikazes and shit.”

  “Your cousin,” Leo says dismissively.

  Leo lost three fingers in the Big War and two nephews in this one. A cousin on an aircraft carrier doesn’t impress him. What would impress him is if my dad weren’t a conscientious objector, a CO, a shirker, a slacker, a coward, a conchie. Leo hasn’t used any of the derogatory words around me, but I haven’t been able to avoid them elsewhere. If Dad were a soldier or sailor, Leo would give me more than forced friendliness and my allotment of the Journal.

  “And what about my uncle?”

  “He’s here,” Leo says. “What the hell could happen here?”

  “He fought in Italy and France. He’s still carrying around German lead in his leg.” A strong argument, but Leo’s a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately guy. Never mind that his last action was more than twenty-five years ago in the “War to End All Wars.”

  My uncle Pete—Mom’s brother—has a Purple Heart and a Silver Star and a job on Lieutenant Bush’s base security team. He’s a sergeant, military police. The Army sent him home, or the closest thing to home, and that’s how I got my job. Once the powers in charge decided to allow newspapers at the base camp, they wanted someone they could trust to deliver them. Uncle Pete recommended me. So far, I haven’t given away any secrets, mostly because I don’t know any secrets.

  “Happy trails, Bobby,” Leo says, shrugging. He gets back in the Ford. By the time he cranks it to life, does a U-turn, and rumbles away, I’m already rolling papers and filling my bag.

  A hundred yards down the road his brake lights flash. Soon he’s reversing and I’m wondering what he forgot. Papers? Advice? Customer complaints? Did I bounce a paper off someone’s door over the weekend? Did I miss the mess hall or one of the ranch houses or short-change a barracks?

  Leo stops and rolls down his window. Dust rises. “You didn’t ask, Bobby.”

  I realize why he’s returned. “I never do.”

  “Thirty-two,” he says.

  “Can you blame her?”

  “I thought you were on my side,” he complains.

  “I don’t take sides. But I do feel sorry for you, if that’s any consolation.”

  “Pity’s better than nothing, but I was mostly just reporting. That’s what we newspaper folks do, right? Report?”

  I can’t tell for sure, but he may be getting in another dig at my dad, who once was a reporter for the Journal, and then, until six months ago, the Socorro Chieftain. At both places, his CO status—or more accurately his outspokenness about the peace movement—eventually got him canned. Officially, he’s 1-A-O Remanded, so he wouldn’t have gotten drafted anyway. But he couldn’t just cruise along, unwanted, like most forty-something nearsighted guys. He felt—and still feels—obligated to tell people his philosophy on war, especially when they don’t want to hear it.

  Now he does odd jobs and sends an occasional article or opinion piece to The Nation and crosses his fingers that someday he can get something printed in a real publication. The editors there have given him encouragement, but nothing more. Without Mom’s night bookkeeping job at the bank we’d be eating jackrabbit and cactus.

  Leo seems to be waiting for an answer to a question he didn’t really ask. A rhetorical question. “Right,” I say. “Report the news.”

  Because I need to keep my job, I don’t mention that the position of circulation supervisor isn’t even in the same ballpark as being a reporter. And now that he’s “reported” to me that thirty-two days have passed since his wife last allowed him into her sacred underpants, I’m more than ready for him to move on.

  “Thirty-two,” he repeats, as if he can’t believe it, and drives off.

  Except for an occasional bird call, the morning returns to silence. I roll and tuck and stuff, thinking about the last time I got into a girl’s underpants—never—and realizing that I feel sorrier for myself than I do for Leo.

  Thirty-two days isn’t a lifetime. I’ve barely kissed a girl, and that was Patsy Kendall, who’d practiced on half the other ninth-grade boys—rumor has it a couple of girls, too—before she kissed me. She didn’t grade me, but I could tell that I was nothing special, that I wouldn’t be getting any further with her. Which was probably good, because I wouldn’t have known how.

  By the time I finish rolling my papers, the eastern sky is a shade lighter. I get on my bike and head off, the bag balanced on my shoulders. I hardly notice it, but what I do notice is the lack of traffic. There’s never much at this hour, but it’s rare not to exchange waves with someone heading away from the base. And the past few mornings
have been busier than usual with vehicles heading toward it.

  The solitude fuels my apprehension, like a storm is coming and this is the calm. Like I’m the last boy on earth and the surviving girls are as choosy as ever, and they’ll never choose me.

  So, I should be eager to get to the base, but a small part of me enjoys being alone and feeling unsettled and sensing the Let’s Pretend mood of the morning.

  I brake to a stop and gaze into the dimness, straddling my bike. The air crackles with lightning. I can’t see the camp, but I know it’s less than a mile away. Sentinel Jeeps, maybe even a horse or two, soldiers, guns, grim faces.

  Occasionally—guaranteed when Uncle Pete’s on duty—I’ll get a smile and maybe some conversation, but I can tell the men don’t want to be out in the middle of the New Mexico desert. There are no Nazis or Japs here; the guns are for show, or the slim possibility of trouble—some bad guy trying to get at whatever the smart fellows are concocting behind the plywood walls.

  I resume pedaling, but sleeplessness has my legs feeling earthbound. I have to concentrate to keep up a decent pace. My eyes have adjusted to the dark, but it’s mostly instinct that keeps me on the narrow road.

  Although I’m focused on the pavement, something makes me raise my eyes, slow, and glide to a stop. I feel a need to wait. For what? I’m surrounded by emptiness. Early morning murk. Behind me, sunrise is a thousand miles away.

  But it’s not.

  With no warning, the sun erupts on the horizon. But not behind me, in front of me.

  Southwest.

  Impossible.

  But it’s not the sun. It’s a giant dome of blinding light. For an instant, it silhouettes the structures in the camp and then the silhouettes fade as the dome turns into a ball that becomes a column that grows into a mushroom.

  My heart booms. Ride, it says. Turn your bike around. Ride. But I don’t. I let it drop. I stare at the vision in front of me. My eyes burn, but I can’t close them. I might miss something. The heavens are dancing, electric, purple.

  Is it the engineers’ doing? Their dream? Their nightmare? Or has something blown up accidentally? Has someone—genius or everyday Joe—made a horrible mistake?