Lynch waited as the RV approached and came to a stop several feet before him. The passenger side door swung open, and Devlin Bledsoe hopped out of the cab. Bledsoe stretched for a brief moment, then walked up to Lynch, face scowling and back rigid. Lynch handed Little e over. Bledsoe hardly gave it a second glance as the two began to talk, although Winston couldn’t hear them.
Winston wondered why he would need such a huge rig for the trip to Tillamook and could only arrive at one terrible conclusion.
Heart in his throat as he pushed into the RV, Winston saw his worst fear confirmed. Whereas most RVs had furniture and refrigerators and shelves loaded with camping goods, this one had been stripped to the walls and stocked with computing gear and medical equipment. A small hospital bed stood strapped to one wall, and a woman in blue medical scrubs sat next to it, forehead furrowed as she watched the nearby monitors, which pulsed out vital sign graphs and numbers.
A figure lay on the bed under a white blanket. Winston had to know. He moved through the cabin until he could see the face of the man resting there.
His father barely breathed. His closed eyes didn’t twitch. Winston discerned no rise and fall of his chest. If not for the slow pulse of the cardiogram, he might have taken the man’s chalky pallor as death. Worst of all, a terrible scar, still oozing blood, ran across his father’s shaved scalp, and Winston felt his stomach convulse as he realized that the top of his father’s skull had been reattached with staples.
Finally, Winston noticed the piece of paper taped to the sheet over his dad’s chest. On it, scrawled in black marker, were the words: Winston, your time is almost up. Simple deal — your pops for the pieces at midnight. Do it or he dies.
With a wrenching jolt, Winston gripped the geoviewer in his hands. The second world on which he’d been so focused dissolved in the space of one racing heartbeat.
“What?” asked Shade, picking up Winston’s urgency.
“What time is it?” Winston asked.
Shade checked his watch. “A little after eight. Why?”
“Bledsoe has my dad in that RV that just went in the hangar. There’s a note that says they’re going to kill him at midnight — in four hours.”
Shade’s jaw dropped, and his bright eyes grew large in the night. “What?! How did they know to come here?”
Winston realized the only possible answer. “They operated on my dad’s brain. Bledsoe must have gotten the information from him somehow.”
“But if he did that…and knew to come here…” Shade trailed off.
“Yeah.” As that sank in, Winston finally did strike the ground with his fist. “Agh! Then he probably knows everything. That note shows that he knows what I can do with the pieces. And he probably knows exactly where we need to go.”
“Well…does he?” asked Shade. “You just said that they’re not finding the next piece, right?”
That was true. Winston forced himself to take a deep breath and try to think clearly. The stress and exhaustion were catching up to him. He felt scattered and unable to completely control his emotions.
It’s OK, he thought. Just figure out the next step.
“Right,” Winston said. “They’re still looking.”
“So, they don’t know the when like we do.” Shade gripped Winston’s shoulder and gave it a reassuring shake. “We’re still in the game, man.”
Winston stared at him for a moment, then nodded slowly. Shade was right. “We can outflank them. In the past.”
“Outflank them. Exactly. Now…” Shade’s brow assumed the deep folds of thought. “Four hours… All the guards are armed?”
“I saw one with a shoulder holster under his jacket, so it’s probably a safe bet.”
“Armed.” Shade gazed up at the sky and wiped damp clumps of hair back from his forehead. “It’s pretty wet now. What if we forced them out with fire?”
Winston blinked at him, wondering if the sight of his father had scrambled his ability to understand. “What fire?”
“We set the building on fire.”
“Dude.” Winston shook his head. “That is your all-time worst idea. Ever.”
“It wouldn’t spread fast, and the fire department—”
“No! We’re not burning down the hangar. Next idea.”
Shade stood and began pacing. “We could call the cops.”
“FBI trumps cops. They’ll intercept the call and turn them around.”
“Well…crap. Oh, wait!” Shade spun and pointed a finger at Winston’s chest. “You go back in time a few hours, right before they close the museum. Then you wait for the goon squad to show up. Everybody is wandering around looking for the next piece, like they are now. I create a diversion and—”
“What diversion?”
A guilty expression flashed across Shade’s features. “I dunno.”
“No fire. No explosions.”
Shade opened his mouth to object, then closed it with an audible snap. “Fine. I’ll think of something else.”
“And you’re forgetting — what am I supposed to do when you distract everybody?”
Shade arched his eyebrows and raised his palms toward the clouds. “Steal the RV, of course!”
Winston laughed bitterly. “One, I can’t drive. Two, I can’t go back to a time I’ve already been in. And three, even if I could, you think I could outrun battle vans and who knows what else in that hippopotamic landmass? Oh, and I forgot to mention: My dad is strapped to a bunch of medical stuff, and he looks mostly dead. I mean, the top of his skull is stapled on. There’s a nurse in the RV watching over him. What do we do with all that?”
Shade gave an exasperated sigh. “Well, obviously, it would have helped to have that information.”
Winston shoved the geoviewer into his pack and squeezed the straps repeatedly in his fists. “It’s too bad this isn’t all happening back home,” he mused. “I’d like to give them the same treatment we gave Agent Smith when he tried to get into the Shack.”
“RIP Smith,” Shade said, then he paused and stared off into the darkness down Blimp Boulevard.
It was Winston’s turn to ask, “What?”
“We have four hours?”
Winston nodded.
“Yeah.” Shade lifted his bulging backpack and weighed it in his hand. “I can work with that. You go do 1969. I’m gonna take a little field trip in the forest.”
25
Have Duck, Will Dad
Winston felt a moment of vertigo as he let go of one layer of reality and jumped into the other. The night of October 2013 snapped into the midafternoon of January 1969. He squinted against the brightness and almost immediately began to shiver. The sky was leaden, and a misty drizzle still fell on Winston’s head and shoulders, but the temperature dropped by at least ten degrees. Winston’s breath billowed in white plumes. All the nearby trees shifted from shades of green and gold to being barren, and many of them changed positions. The industrial park transformed into an empty field.
Most notably, of course, Shade was gone. Again. In one instant, he was a few feet away, pack on his back and bike at his side, staring at Winston with a forlorn grimness, and in the next he blinked out of existence as the blue-white sheet of energy and sparks fell away.
Winston took a deep breath and grimaced. Even forty-four years in the past, the air smelled unmistakably of cow dung. As the Alpha Machine fell motionless in his hands, he settled the pieces into the bag still slung on his shoulder.
He fixed his gaze on the hangar, only to discover that it now had a twin. The identical structure, built at a perpendicular angle to its sibling, sat several hundred feet farther away. Winston didn’t know which hangar would contain his Grumman Duck, but he needed to find out before he froze to death. Using two Alpha Machine pieces and making a jump without Little e had indeed sapped much of his energy. He sensed a deep weariness that left him feeling more vulnerable than ever.
Not surprisingly, the bicycle that had been lying at Winston’s feet had not made the time jump with him. He set
out down Blimp Boulevard, glad that at least he didn’t have miles to hike.
As the hangars drew closer, Winston watched a two-seater, single-prop plane approach from the north. It settled gradually lower over the plain until it cleared the fence and skidded onto a runway near the hangars.
This wasn’t a museum, Winston realized, nor was it a U.S. Navy facility — otherwise, there would be much stronger fences and probably perimeter guards. Apparently, in 1969, the facility was a local airport. Of course. His dad wouldn’t have made him sneak into a military facility. That would have been begging to get captured. Apart from the one plane taxiing to a stop, nothing else moved on the airport grounds. This was a sleepy operation in the middle of nowhere, and that made it an ideal meeting place.
Winston didn’t feel up to running yet, despite the need to work away this bone-chilling cold, but he managed a quick walk. For psychological comfort as much as physical need, Winston fished a crushed, soggy juice box and granola bar from the bottom of his bag. He would need to stash the packages to prevent anyone from asking awkward questions.
A chain-link fence ran along the property line, further marked with a brown, clumpy grass strip where the mower missed. Amazingly, there were occasional gaps in the boundary, apparently to let people in and out as they pleased. Airport security must be very different in 1969 than 2013, Winston mused.
The shivers came on more strongly as the cold air leeched through his damp clothes. Even the new jacket didn’t prevent an icy chill from creeping up his legs and down his neck. He forced himself into a jog, nervous that rushing might draw attention, and left the road to cut straight across the field, wanting the shortest possible path to warmth. Fortunately, he only saw a few people at the airport. No one called to him. He trotted all the way across the airfield to the closest hangar.
When he crossed through the enormous main hangar door, Winston was relieved to find the place marginally warmer thanks to the sporadic placement of electric space heaters around the interior. At least forty aircraft, most of them smaller with only one or two propellers, stood arranged into two rows down the hangar’s left and right sides. A scattering of mechanics or perhaps pilots moved among the planes. Some checked their machines from below, others leaned into engines from tall ladders. No one paid Winston the slightest attention.
Except one man.
For an instant, Winston didn’t recognize him. He wore blue coveralls and had grease smudges all over his hands. His dark hair lightened to gray at the temples, and crow’s feet appeared in an otherwise smooth, narrow face when he smiled. He had been working on a white, single-propeller plane bearing a very familiar, banana-shaped pontoon jutting from its front.
He straightened from whatever he had been doing with the wing and stared for a long moment at Winston. Similarly, Winston could only stare back. He didn’t know what to do or say. He had never knowingly met his father before, and that was ignoring the fact that he wouldn’t be born for another thirty years.
At last, Claude started into motion, walking toward Winston while wiping his hands on his pants. The smile never left his face. “Well,” the man said slowly. “Words fail.”
Winston took a couple of halting steps, then fell still again. He had fantasized about a moment like this for all of his life. Despite the strangeness of the time and place and everything that had led to this moment, Winston could finally say that he had met his father — his real father, as he might have been in a happier, better world. Winston had the urge to find someone, anyone, and say, “This is my dad. My dad. I finally found him.”
Winston couldn’t stop the tears. As his father approached, Claude looked like he was about to extend his arm to shake hands, but he must have spotted the expression on Winston’s face. He stepped in closer, wrapped his arms around Winston, and something deep within Winston snapped.
“Dad!” he gasped. It was the only word he could form, and he repeated it over and over as he sobbed and rested his cheek on Claude’s shoulder.
His father pressed a hand against Winston’s neck and patted him gently. “My boy,” whispered Claude. “My son.”
They stood like that for a while, oblivious to anything around them.
“Darrel?” called a much younger man who had appeared near the plane. “You want me to finish her up?”
“If you don’t mind,” said Claude as he released Winston and gave his associate a little wave. Claude also had tear streaks on his cheeks.
He guided them deeper into the hangar and through the side doors. What became a museum lobby in the future was a visitor’s lounge in 1969, only in Tillamook their idea of a lounge was a refrigerator, a few tables, and a sink set into a long counter.
“Darrell?” asked Winston when he saw that they were alone.
Claude shrugged. “It works. Are you hungry or thirsty?”
Winston was about to say no when his father opened the refrigerator and revealed a top shelf filled with Coca-Cola bottles — tall ones with bottle caps, and not an aluminum can in sight. In Winston’s time, these glass jewels had to be imported from Mexico.
Claude followed his stare. “Ha! I see kids are still the same in the future.”
He grabbed one of the bottles, pulled a Snickers bar from a counter drawer, and put a couple of quarters into a jar on the counter beside the fridge. He set the snacks before Winston and popped off the cap with a bottle opener on his key ring.
“Should I call you Dad?” Winston asked. “I’m pretty much a stranger to you. Or…am I?”
“Nothing you would remember,” said Claude. He indicated Winston’s height. “And definitely not since you’ve gotten so big. Yes. It’s strange for both of us.”
“My friend is waiting for me,” Winston said around a mouthful of candy bar. “The FBI is after both of us. So is Bledsoe. I’m not sure if those two things are the same.”
Claude stiffened at Bledsoe’s name, but he took a deep breath and let it out. Again, his deep eyes crinkled with humor and affection. “We have time. Sort of.”
“Right.” Winston gently knocked himself in the forehead with a knuckle. “Time machine.”
The silence between them grew until Claude splayed his hands on the tabletop. “So. What shall we talk about? Is it too late for the birds and the bees?”
“Dad! Ew! We covered that in sixth grade.”
“Really?”
They both laughed, and Winston felt relieved that the tension was starting to fade.
“Should I tell you about 2013?” he finally asked.
Claude sobered quickly. “Absolutely not. No details. I’ve had a lot of time to bounce around. I’ve made a little money with investing. I’ve lost things, too.” A shadow of sadness crossed over his face as if from a passing cloud, then vanished. “Understand that the more you try to pin down events in time, the more slippery they get. I can tell you to find me on January 12, 1969, and that works fine so long as I stick around all day. But if I told you to divert my friend Steve out there from going home tonight and instead take him to a poker game where you play against him and other men for hundreds of dollars, that’s different. That’s using your knowledge and changing things, setting off ripples that will affect many people. The more ripples you make, the greater the odds of things not going as you expect.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s just how time seems to work.”
Winston tried to puzzle it out and couldn’t. He shook his head in confusion.
Claude leaned forward, his expression earnest. “The Alpha Machine exists to help us observe. It’s meant to be a tool for learning, not for gain. Bernie warned me about this, and he was right. It’s so easy to abuse, Winston, and you won’t even know you’re abusing it until it’s too late. We like to think we can control our base nature, but we’re only fooling ourselves.”
Winston nodded and found himself unable to keep from asking about the thing he prayed was possible. “I tried to see beyond 2013, and I couldn’t. It was like I hit this wa
ll, but…is it possible?”
Claude cleared his throat. His eyes were shadowed with concern. “I would rather not discuss it. There are things neither of us should say to the other.”
Winston stifled his indignation and said in a more hushed voice, “You don’t think that information could be important? Maybe useful?”
“You’ve made it a long way, Winston, but you have to understand. I wanted those pieces to stay hidden. I wanted you to stay hidden. I couldn’t wait to meet you today, but part of me hoped so much that you would never come. Because things can change. There was always a chance that you and your mom might have stayed safe and everything about Area X had just faded away.”
Winston snorted. “Yeah, that didn’t happen.”
“Giving someone the ability to go back is terrible enough, but to go forward? No. Never.”
Claude fell silent, lost in thought. The awkward silence between them chafed at Winston. He needed to lighten the mood.
“I hoped it would be like that H.G. Wells book. It might be cool to jump a thousand years, or even to the end of the world with Morlocks and all that.”
A smile flickered across Claude’s features. “Morlocks were in 800,000 AD or so. Wells described crab creatures at the end of the world.”
Winston’s heart fluttered with happiness. His dad was a sci-fi nerd, too.
“Unfortunately,” Claude continued, “you can’t go to the end of the world or anywhere near it. You know that sensation when you’re looking to where and when you want to jump? That stretching tension in your mind that feels anchored in the middle of your body?”
“The rubber band,” said Winston.
“Yes. The farther you go, the tighter it gets and the harder it is to pull even more.”
“But you could practice and maybe build up—”
The humorous moment vanished. Claude closed his eyes and cut him off. “There are costs. I am older than I look. The QVs help to heal my body, but I can feel…” He put one hand on his chest. “Inside, I feel older. Every jump takes a toll. It’s a weariness that no rest ever helps. And I’ve had to make many, many jumps.”
Winston Chase- The Complete Trilogy Page 50