Winston Chase- The Complete Trilogy

by Bodhi St John

  “Please put it out of your mind,” said Claude sternly. “You do not understand how dangerous it is. Believe me, I’ve learned that the hard way.”

  “And you’re not going to tell me about it?”

  Claude shook his head. “I’m sorry. The danger, especially to you, is unacceptable. Your focus needs to be on your mother.”

  “What if I don’t have enough tools or skills or whatever to save Mom? And what about saving you? I just found you, Dad, after a lifetime of dreaming about it!”

  With no other way to express his feelings, Claude wrapped his arms around his son and held him tight. Winston understood what the gesture meant — that there was no hope of saving his dad. He refused to accept that. Anger welled up in him. He needed this more than anything he’d ever experienced, and it was so close. How dare his father get him right to the edge of finally having a complete family, only to let it slip away in the most horrific manner?

  “Winston,” Claude rumbled near his ear, and he could feel the vibration of that voice through his chest and into his bones. “You’re racing after an illusion. You have everything you need. I wish I could give you more, believe me. But you’re a young man now, and I couldn’t be more proud. Now, go do what is right.”

  With that, Winston’s outrage gradually melted away, and he finally did return his father’s embrace.

  I couldn’t be more proud.

  The words echoed over and over in Winston’s mind, and each repetition was like a small block rebuilding the foundation of his confidence. This time, he knew there was more to his tears than grief.

  “I don’t know what to do, Dad,” he whispered.

  Claude patted Winston’s back and said, “Of course not. None of us do. We can only give our utmost and take our best guess.”

  Eventually, Winston leaned back and wiped his face dry. “I thought grown-ups were supposed to have all the answers.”

  Claude smiled. “Grown-ups are only fourteen-year-olds with more experience and wrinkles. We learn what we can.”

  “Well,” said Winston. He stood and stretched, trying to change the mood and work up some courage. “That’s disappointing.”

  They both laughed, and, in that moment, Winston knew that he hadn’t found all that he wanted, but what he’d received might be enough.

  27

  Cozy Fires and Blazing Tires

  Winston made his way into the kitchen and set about rinsing dishes in the sink, partly out of habit and partly to procrastinate the discussion that he knew was only moments away. Claude allowed him this brief rest, and never in his life had Winston been so glad to scrub a pan. He worked at the grease and scorch marks as his father stood by, towel in hand, watching him toil away. Not knowing what else to fill the time with, Winston told Claude about his robotics project, the Stadlerator 7000, and how he’d first discovered his blossoming abilities while trying to troubleshoot it.

  Claude practically glowed with pride.

  This is how it should have been for all those years. Doing dishes. Just chatting. Telling my dad about school. It can’t be over. It can’t.

  When quiet fell between them, Claude took it as his cue.

  “So,” he said all too soon. “Do you have a plan?”

  Winston’s pan banged against the side of the sink as he turned it over and over, looking for any blemish he might have left.

  “I need to get Little e back. I should also make sure Shade is safe.”

  Claude reached over and turned off the faucet. “I think it’s clean, son,” he said gently. “Time to focus.”

  Winston let out a long sigh as he dried his hands. He tried to smile. “Thanks for the dinner. And…I know you’re right. Let’s scope things out. Shade would kill me if I just hopped back without doing some proper reconnaissance.”

  They returned to the couch. Winston dug into his backpack and fetched the chronoviewer and geoviewer pieces. He gripped the former and placed the latter within it. That now-familiar magnetic force snapped the smaller ring into place, where it slowly began to turn end over end within its slightly larger, silver companion. With each use, Winston found himself growing more comfortable with starting and controlling the pieces.

  “It’s so strange seeing them again,” said Claude. “I just spent years getting rid of them. And yes, you should see what is waiting for you. Be cautious and ready.”

  Winston felt that tug in the back of his brain as it connected with the Alpha Machine. His vision dimmed slightly, and the small iconic readouts for time and space navigation appeared in the bottom corners of his field of view. He closed his eyes and concentrated.

  First, he imagined shifting his point of view across Tillamook. He mentally nudged the zoomed-in spherical map until he knew he was close to the blimp hangar. As he let go, his spectral self instantly teleported to his new position outside the hangar’s side door.

  Even though it was still the same gray, frigid day in 1969, suddenly shifting from a comfortably dim living room to outdoor daylight without moving continued to be disorienting. Gathering himself, Winston pushed into the building until he was back where he had arrived, in the middle of the hangar surrounded by airplanes and that dizzyingly vast, repetitive web of wooden supports arching overhead.

  Once in place, Winston turned his attention to his time controls. He mentally pushed the slider all the way into 2013, feeling almost no resistance as the Alpha Machine sought to drag him back to his true present. When he was close enough, the chronoviewer snapped him into his own time. It was 11:42 at night. The hangar’s lights had all been turned on, giving the cavern a white, unnatural brightness against the dark beyond the outer door. Bledsoe’s six agents continued to scan the hangar, obviously without success.

  Things had not improved with his father. Claude’s bed now rested about ten feet from the RV. Claude lay atop it without so much as a sheet to guard him against the chill night air that must be blowing in. The bed’s back had been elevated so that Claude sat nearly upright. Medical monitors and displays surrounded the bed, one of which showed a countdown timer in large red digits. 17:51…17:50…

  Claude’s hands and feet were clamped to the bed rails with leather cuffs. His shaved and bloodied scalp had been removed again, and it now rested in his lap, staining his thin, light-blue smock with blood and iodine. His brain lay exposed to the open air, and a plethora of impossibly thin fiber-optic cables emerged from electrodes implanted within his brain's folds. The fibers cascaded from his head, down the back of his bed, and, as a zip-tied bundle, ran off into the RV, where Winston assumed they fed into the servers he’d seen before. The largest monitor standing just behind Claude displayed a jittery landscape of black-and-white static.

  Claude’s head rested against his mattress. His eyes remained closed, and hopefully he was drugged asleep and thus unaware of his situation’s horror. Beside him, Bledsoe stood impatiently, arms crossed, with a gun in one hand. His eyes continually roved around the hangar, and Winston guessed the man was searching for him.

  “Oh, God!” Winston choked. “He can’t do that!

  “Is it Bledsoe?” asked a disturbingly calm, distant voice.

  Winston looked about the hangar, trying to see who had asked the question, then he realized that the voice was his father’s in 1969. He opened his eyes and saw the expression of concern on younger Claude’s face.

  “Yes,” Winston gasped. “It’s Bledsoe, and he’s got a gun, and he’s just standing there over you, waiting for me to—”

  “Don’t!” Claude interrupted. “Don’t tell me. Whatever has been set in place needs to run its course.”

  Winston couldn’t hold the information inside any longer. “But he’s going to kill you! God, look at your head!”

  Fear. The strain of using the Alpha Machine. The terror of seeing his enemy mutilating and preparing to shoot his father. It was all more than Winston could bear. Fresh tears ran down his face, and his lungs burned with the need to get away from all the weight and tension crushing him
.

  “Slow down, Winston,” Claude said in a low, soothing voice. “You still have time left, right?

  Winston checked the countdown again. He nodded. “Seventeen minutes.”

  “Then use it to think,” said Claude. “Study what’s happening. Study Bledsoe. Study me. Think about what needs to be done.”

  Winston felt his throat constrict as he tried to speak. “I can’t get you,” he choked. “Even if I walked up to you and grabbed you and I used the Alpha Machine to get us out of there, you would die. I can’t rescue you! I don’t know what to do!”

  In his first reality layer, Winston saw his father move and step around behind him. Arms wove around Winston’s shoulders. Hands clasped over his heart and pulled inward as Claude embraced him. Winston felt his father’s cheek on the back of his head and heard his voice, low, soothing, and melodic, in his ear.

  “Sshhh. It’s going to be fine, son. Trust me…as I trust you.”

  Winston couldn’t take his gaze away from the other Claude’s exposed brain and the trickles of blood that crept down his neck in a dark echo of Winston’s own tears. The old man’s face was incredibly pale under the harsh floodlights. If not for the slightest rhythmic movement of the smock’s creases over his belly, Winston would have assumed that this was a ruse and Claude was already dead.

  “Think,” whispered Claude. “Use your eyes. Ignore the impossible and think about what can be done.”

  Winston tried. If he landed directly in front of Bledsoe, he might be able to drop the Alpha Machine and land the first blow, but he already knew that Bledsoe was physically stronger. If being struck by a police cruiser hadn’t disabled him, Winston’s scrawny arms sure wouldn’t do much damage.

  Unless he was armed. A knife? Another gun? Winston tried to imagine killing his enemy at point-blank range, feeling Bledsoe’s hot blood spatter across his face and hands, and his stomach clenched with revulsion. No, he couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.

  Not even to save Mom? Shade? Alyssa? Not even to save the world?

  Something inside Winston knew that if he took away one life to save others, then there was no telling how he might use the Alpha Machine to serve his own desires in other ways.

  Ignore the impossible.

  Right. So, a face-to-face confrontation with Bledsoe was out of the question, especially with all those armed agents nearby. What else?

  Winston moved into the RV. The nurse still sat there in what had been her bedside chair, staring out at Bledsoe and Claude, her mouth locked in a deep, tight frown. She obviously disapproved of this arrangement, but Winston guessed she was in no position to fight it. And even if she would help, they would have to move Claude and his heavy bed back into the RV.

  11:44.

  Winston tried to slow his breathing. He fought to focus his attention on the problem, but no matter where he looked, all he saw was his father dying, cold and humiliated at Bledsoe’s hands. Rationally, he knew that was Bledsoe’s entire plan, that he was feeling and acting exactly as Bledsoe wanted. Nevertheless, with each passing moment, his sense of dread and alarm ratcheted to a tighter level.

  Then a flash of orange-white light appeared in the dark hangar opening behind Bledsoe. Winston couldn’t hear what was happening, but by the sudden, shocked expressions on every agent’s face and the way their bodies jumped and recoiled, he could guess.

  Shade had just blown something up outside.

  Bledsoe glanced about with alarm. He started to step away from Claude, then caught himself. Instead, he shouted a series of orders at his agents.

  Winston quickly pushed his spectral self out of the hangar and into the parking lot. There, he found the FBI’s nearest black van morphed into a pillar of flame. Its undercarriage broiled in a spreading pool of gasoline. The vehicle sent black plumes of smoke billowing into the night. Turning about, Winston saw that smaller fires burned in the cabins of two other black vehicles, the other van and a long sedan much like the one Winston had skidded across seemingly so long ago. Just as the first agents, guns all drawn and radiation scanners abandoned, ran around the corner of the hangar to investigate, one of the sedan’s windows shattered, allowing oxygen to rush into the closed compartment. The smoldering driver’s seat bloomed into a hungry conflagration.

  More agents arrived in the parking lot just as the second van’s windshield caved in. One agent tried to rush toward the van, but another held him back. Flames began to billow from under the vehicle, escaping from the wheel wells. Something in the undercarriage exploded in a burst of white. It wasn’t the engulfing orange mushroom cloud Winston had grown to expect from movies but more like a tabletop chemistry experiment gone horribly wrong. Still, it was enough to make the agents recoil and keep their distance.

  Winston noticed another small fire emerge beyond the nearby cars. These flames were unlike the others, though. They started from a small point about a hundred yards away from the hangar, in the main parking lot. Fire crept quickly along the ground in a jagged line, then began to veer into strange looping patterns. Without wondering whether he could or not, Winston willed himself upward for a better view and found that his spectral self floated free from the ground.

  Despite his fear and panic, a sense of exhilaration flooded through him, and he gasped.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Claude, releasing Winston’s shoulders in worry.

  “I’m flying,” he breathed.

  Once he was twenty or thirty feet in the air, he could see the fire forming two short words: EAT THAT.

  “Nice, Shade,” Winston muttered to himself. “Keeping it classy.”

  Beyond the main parking lot and fiery writing, a tiny blinking light caught Winston’s attention. He barely made out a small shadow moving in a straight line toward the tree-blanketed hills, accented by a single red light that winked randomly on and off. It was a reflector, Winston realized. That would be Shade on his bike. At first, Winston couldn’t fathom why the detail-driven Shade might have forgotten to remove his rear reflector. Then, once the first agent pointed out the red blinking to his comrades, Winston understood Shade’s strategy. He wanted them to follow him, just not that quickly. And he’d found a way to slow them down and defy Winston’s no-explosions request, all with the same distraction.

  He had to admit, his best friend never ceased to impress.

  As Winston’s spectral form slowly descended to the ground, one agent talked into his radio. A moment later, he addressed his fellows. Four of them set off at a jog after Shade. The remaining two began a sweep of the hangar’s perimeter. Apparently, Bledsoe wanted no more surprises.

  Winston realized that this was his only chance to get Bledsoe alone. He had no plan. If he was honest, he had no hope, either. But it was now or never.

  Winston quickly pushed back into the main hangar until he stood a few steps away from Bledsoe. The man wore a slight smirk, his eyes narrow and glittering like obsidian in the harsh lighting.

  The on-screen clock showed 11:52:38. Nevertheless, Bledsoe seemed to know that this was the time. He understood what drawing away the agents meant. He took a deep breath and put the barrel of his gun against Claude’s temple firmly enough to turn the dying man’s head.

  Claude’s eyes fluttered open and, seeing Bledsoe, filled with the fear of a man who knew he was about to die.

  28

  Parting for Punctuality

  Winston gripped the chronoviewer suddenly, as if grasping for a life ring near a sinking ship. The geoviewer, still spinning within it, rapped painfully against Winston’s knuckles before coming to a halt.

  “I have to go!” he cried as he turned to face his father. “He’s — just, I have to go. Right now.”

  Claude took a gentle but firm hold of Winston’s shoulders and looked hard into his eyes. “Son, take a breath. Try to think.”

  Winston broke away, shaking his head, and all but lunged for his backpack. He barely noticed that the fire had dimmed and the wind outside had fallen quiet. Smoke from the fireplace
clouded the room. The smell made Winston think of those burning FBI vehicles. Those agents would be desperate for revenge, and now they were chasing Shade.

  Winston seized his two remaining Alpha Machine pieces. When he brought the two tori together, they melded, metal flowing through metal like liquid. The two shapes passed through one other then resolidified, becoming two links of a chain. Winston wanted to pause in wonder as the scientist side of him stood dazzled by this strange technology, but there was no time. The connected pair snapped into position within the geoviewer, completing the device. Winston quickly settled his pack on his shoulders.

  “Winston!”

  Claude gripped his arm, this time more forcefully.

  “Dad, I’m sorry. I have to go. This is for you.”

  “Winston. This is about your mother. I. Don’t. Matter.” He enunciated the words with slow precision meant to calm Winston, but they only served to make his worry more frantic.

  “Yes, you do!”

  Winston raised his hands between them and set the Alpha Machine to spinning again. This forced Claude to step aside, but he kept his hold on Winston’s arm. With the other hand, he cupped Winston’s cheek and turned his face so that they gazed at each other.

  “You need to have a plan,” he said quietly.

  “I need to have a father!” Winston cried. “All my life, Dad! Every day, every year, all I wanted was you. I wanted my whole family. I wanted to find you. I wanted to be a scientist like you. I—” The words choked him. “I’m not letting this happen.”

  Claude’s face grew ashen as the Alpha Machine pushed that second reality back into Winston’s vision. Perhaps because of the focus of his intent or the recency of his last use, Winston didn’t begin in his present position. His spectral self went immediately back to the hangar, back to facing Bledsoe pressing his gun barrel into the older Claude’s temple.

  Winston could feel exhaustion building deep inside himself, but the fear and adrenaline kept it in a cage. The Alpha Machine spun faster. Tinnitus flared suddenly in both his ears, a pair of pulsing, high-pitched tones almost like someone running wet fingertips around crystal wine glasses. Winston imagined that he could almost make out a rhythm within the sounds, a code perhaps, but he had no interest in listening.