Winston Chase- The Complete Trilogy

by Bodhi St John

  What in the seventh level of Hell are you talking about, boy?

  My mom and I worked on it in my garage lab. She didn’t tell you about that, I take it.

  I think you’re feeding me a line, Chase. I also think it’s time for you to die.

  He fired another shot, and this one passed so close to Winston’s head that he felt the shock of its passing through the air.

  The data is on my hard drive! Didn’t your goons find it? Five files, all encrypted with 256-bit AES. It’ll take your people about ten thousand years to decrypt it — unless you’ve also figured out how to do that with the QVs.

  Winston figured he couldn’t be more than ten seconds from the ground.

  He mentally punched the time slider back to the right. The sensation of skimming over decades caused an excruciating spike through his mind. That stretching sensation suddenly grew so taut that he wondered if it could snap.

  1937. 1943. He backed off from leaning so hard on the slider.

  His hand groped for the silver chronojumper torus. Snickers bar. Flashlight. Multi-tool. Ball of socks—

  Chronojumper.

  Winston grabbed at the ring with fingers still too cold to function adequately, despite the heat he could feel radiating from the ground. He pulled it out of the pack and jammed it into place within Little e and the chronoviewer.

  1946. 1948…

  Another shot rang out as Winston stopped moving the chrono controls and noted the readout: May 7, 1948.

  Not knowing if the Alpha Machine was ready, not knowing if the system had enough power left for such a long jump, not knowing anything beyond how Bledsoe’s gun was aimed right at his face, Winston bore down on Little e with every desperation-fueled ounce of will and strength he could find…

  …and the world burst into an alabaster flare of energy, as if Winston had dropped into the center of a supernova.

  In that first split second of arriving in 1948, Winston could have sworn he heard the echo of Bledsoe’s pistol firing and saw the ghostly blur of a bullet moving through the space where his body had just been.

  7

  Disliking Hitchhiking

  No sooner did the light around him fade than Winston crashed feetfirst into the earth. He barely had the sense to keep his knees bent in an effort to absorb the impact. He collapsed, rolled forward, felt sharp stones bite into his shoulder and back, then he lay still.

  Winston realized it was nighttime. And cold. Really cold.

  He blinked several times until he could see the stars overhead and the Milky Way splashed across the heavens. The sight made his breath catch even more than the chill. The heavens were utterly black, and the stars shone like the far-away flashes of a billion diamonds. This sky was not the murky, gray dome he’d mostly ignored in the suburbs. It was dazzlingly deep, like staring down miles into the ocean. It was the sky he remembered from those nights with Shade up at the Tagaloas’ cabin.

  Winston took a deep breath as a shiver rippled through his body. His breath emerged in pale billows. The skydive had chilled him to the bone, but the fire of adrenaline had kept him warm. That fire was quickly fading into embers as he recognized that, for the moment, he seemed safe. Beyond this, the deep weariness caused by his time jump was starting to surface.

  He still wore his parachute pack, but only a few shreds of Winston’s white canopy still fluttered on the ground. His harness straps dangled loose and frayed, as if they had been ripped in half just beyond the end of his arm’s reach. He guessed that Bledsoe was now sorting through the remaining bits back in 2013.

  Winston sat up and groaned. He felt bludgeoned but not broken. After a moment, he figured out how to remove the parachute pack and its several safety straps. No doubt, the pack would be a glaring anachronism in 1948, but he had no intention of wasting time trying to bury the thing with nothing but his bare hands. Instead he set his backpack down both to stash the Alpha Machine away as well as to look for any spare clothes. All his life, he’d complained about his mother overpacking for him. Never again.

  Colonel Bauman had made him zip up his Fred Meyer discount jacket after tucking the removable hood into it, but apparently he hadn’t felt that a one-minute dive posed much risk of hypothermia. Now Winston fished out two pairs of athletic tube socks from the bottom of his pack. He tightened his lined hood and flipped up the collar on his jacket like some 1980s poser. If that weren’t embarrassing enough, he put both pairs of socks over his hands as mittens.

  Before finishing with his pack, Winston also pulled one of his last three granola bars from a side pocket and ripped it open with his teeth, keeping careful to stash the mylar wrapper back in his bag. He supposed there was an outside chance that someone in 1948 might have designed an advanced parachute like his, but coming up with mylar two decades before NASA designed it for the moon missions? Probably not.

  Winston forced himself into a jog, found the single-lane road, and headed east toward the gap between the distant bluffs. Within a couple of minutes his shivers subsided.

  From somewhere in the distance before him came the echoing howl of a desert animal, probably a coyote. The sound was high and clear and forlorn. A few seconds later, another joined to form a chorus. The pair were slightly discordant, two notes failing to merge into a chord, and the sound made the hair rise on Winston’s neck.

  He slowed. Should he risk a flashlight? Would that scare them off or draw them closer? Did coyotes even attack humans? The hungry ones probably did. And there didn’t look to be much to eat out here.

  Behind him, he heard a distant rumble and, turning, saw the approach of two small headlights.

  A ride.

  He hadn’t anticipated that possibility. Should he hide or try to hitch?

  If the base was guarded…

  He nearly laughed. Of course it was guarded. With a nuke and an alien stashed underground, it would be guarded to the hilt, but he probably wouldn’t even see the defenses until it was too late. And if he encountered a secure perimeter with armed guards and a ten-foot-high fence topped with barbed wire, how would he get through? He’d thought he might be able to slip through the bluffs and perhaps climb them to study what lay beyond in the full light of day, but if it was going to be hours until daylight, he might freeze to death out here first. He didn’t have much running left in him.

  That left the car.

  Winston quickly pulled off his makeshift gloves and stuffed them in his pack. He made sure to put Little e and the Alpha Machine on the bottom and cover them with his underwear and a dirty T-shirt. That was as much as he could do. Now he had to cross his freezing fingers and hope some kind of cover story popped into his head.

  As the vehicle approached, Winston moved to the edge of the road and stuck out his thumb in the age-old plea of hitchhikers. Was it sixty-five years old, though? Winston had no idea.

  Fortunately, it worked.

  The car slowed as it approached. Its headlights were circular and brownish-yellow with desert dust. Below the word DODGE, a rectangular chrome grill sat above a gently smiling bumper with two posts jutting up from it like goofy canine teeth on a bad underbite. A high ridge ran down the center of the hood, sweeping back down the all-black exterior to the low-domed cab. Winston couldn’t see the driver inside.

  He took a couple of tentative steps toward the car when it stopped before him, then bent over to peer inside the passenger door. All he could tell was that the driver was a man in a dark-checkered shirt. He had dark hair and leaned across a white woven straw hat on the passenger’s seat. He stretched a hand toward the door and made some odd pumping motion Winston couldn’t see. The window slid down slowly.

  Winston suppressed a smile, remembering his mom’s Civic and its seemingly antiquated manual car windows.

  With the window down, the man straightened. All Winston could see was the end of his nose and his smile.

  “Hey there,” he said. “You must be lost.”

  Something in his voice sounded familiar, but Winston couldn�
�t put his finger on it. Did this guy become famous someday?

  “Not exactly,” said Winston, desperately wishing he’d thought out a cover story in advance. “I have to find someone who works at the research base.”

  The man’s smile faltered, and he leaned back slightly. “Oh, yeah? What base is that?”

  What if this guy was a civilian? He might not have a clue what Winston was talking about.

  “I’m not supposed to say,” said Winston. “But…there’s an X in its name.”

  This time, the man’s lips pursed together. “I might have heard of something like that. Who are you looking for?”

  “My uncle,” said Winston. He swallowed and rolled the dice. “His name is Claude Hawthorne.”

  “You don’t say. Although…” The man leaned forward slightly. No, there was something about that jaw line. “Your uncle, huh? That’s funny. I thought Claude was an only child.”

  “He doesn’t tell many people,” said Winston.

  “Even his friends?”

  The man ducked down to take a good, critical look at Winston. He was thin and clean-shaven, with thick, round glasses and curious eyes that looked bloodshot in the faint dashboard light. Winston’s breath caught in his chest as the differences of two decades fell away and recognition dawned. It took all of Winston’s self-restraint not to shout Theo’s name in relief.

  “Sounds like you’ve got an interesting story to tell,” Theo said as he levered open the door handle. “Hop in.”

  Winston didn’t wait to be asked twice. He slid into the seat as Theo set his hat on the floor. Winston was careful not to crush it with his backpack, which he rested between his feet. The car leather felt deliciously soft and warm after the frigid desert night. He automatically reached for the seatbelt at his right shoulder but failed to find one. Neither was there any evidence of a lap belt. Winston made a vague attempt to straighten his jacket to cover his awkward searching. He fiddled with his fake fur-lined hood and nearly pushed it back, then decided to wait a bit, unsure if he should reveal more of his face.

  As he rolled up the window, Winston said, “Thanks so much for this. You’re a real lifesaver.”

  “Quite welcome. What’s your name?”

  “Wi—” Winston started, then caught himself. Theo from 1948 would have no idea about Claude hiding Alpha Machine pieces for future Winston. He covered his mouth and faked a cough. “Sorry. William. William…Shatner.”

  “William.” Theo extended his hand as he resumed driving. “I’m Theo Tremaine.”

  Winston shook the offered hand. “Great to meet you.”

  In the following pause, a weak, gravelly voice from the back seat said, “Apparently, I’m chopped liver.”

  Winston started in surprise and spun around. A man laid across the back seat, head against the door behind Winston and his body covered in a dark blanket. Even in the near-darkness, Winston could see that the man was quite ill. His skin appeared waxen. Dark bags under his eyes, combined with the pot on the floor near his face, indicated a terrible stomach illness. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, but there was no mistaking his eyes. Those narrow, cunning eyes.

  “I’d shake your hand,” he said with a too-familiar Southern lilt, “but you don’t want this bug.”

  In his shock, Winston could only nod.

  “Still, good to meet you, William,” said the man. “I’m Devlin Bledsoe.”

  8

  Chancing the Checkpoint

  Winston’s first thought was to wonder if Bledsoe was just as crazy and evil in 1948 as in 2013. Probably not as much. He hadn’t had all those years to gnaw on his plan for starting another world war and taking Winston’s mother as his unwilling bride.

  Theo shoved on the stick shift into gear, and the Dodge lurched forward with a spray of gravel pinging from its rear panels.

  In the awkward silence that followed, Winston said, “Nice car.”

  “It’s Devlin’s ’46 Custom,” said Theo. “If he felt better, he’d regale you with the long tale of how he got it for a steal — only thirteen hundred. And that’s with heat, taillights, radio, and clock.” He pointed to the circular dial clock set into the dash directly before Winston.

  “Wow,” said Winston. “That’s…some deal.”

  Theo shifted into second gear. They seemed to be accelerating awfully quickly considering it was dark, they had no seat belts, and the dust-crusted headlights might as well have been candle lanterns. Winston could barely see twenty feet ahead. He hoped Theo knew the road well.

  “So,” said the disconcertingly young Bledsoe. “Where you from?”

  “Vancouver.” Winston winced. That was too close to home. “Vancouver, B.C.”

  “Canada? I guess that explains the strange parka thing you’re wearing. You gonna take that off?”

  Winston fumbled over this, then he realized that his winter jacket must be completely odd to 1940s eyes. Did they even have hoods? The jacket’s ugly brown shell was polyester, which would be a dead giveaway if they got into the light.

  “Um, not yet,” he said. “I’m totally frozen.”

  “Uh huh. And Claude’s your uncle?” Bledsoe continued. “This gets better and better. Keep going, kid. Why are you looking for Claude?”

  The seed of an idea popped into Winston’s mind. “A few weeks ago, he asked me to help him with…something. Something he wanted to test. But I don’t think it’s going like he hoped. I need to tell him there’s something wrong.”

  “Wrong?” Theo took his eyes off the road to give Winston another few seconds of close scrutiny, forcing Winston to stare straight ahead so Theo couldn’t make out his features around the hood’s fuzzy lining. It took all of Winston’s self-control not to grab the wheel as they drifted toward the road’s edge. From the corner of his eye, Winston could see concern in Theo’s face. The man was surprised, but not incredulous.

  Winston chanced a glance back at Bledsoe, only to find the man’s eyes narrow with skepticism. He already had his suspicions about Claude — and more. Winston had to remember that this Bledsoe was already head over heels for his mom and frustrated that she had chosen another man. He was a rattlesnake in the desert waiting to strike.

  “Well,” Winston said while struggling to think of his next move. “I haven’t been feeling well for over a week now. And my hair. It’s starting to turn white.”

  Winston looked toward the passenger window to hide his face but pulled back the left side of his hood to expose his hair and its plainly visible white stripe. Theo studied Winston’s head in the scant light and pursed his lips. “What in the world would do that?”

  “I’m not supposed to say.”

  Bledsoe chuckled. “Kid, you’re wanting a ride to a maximum security military research facility, and you’re sitting in a stranger’s car out in the middle of nowhere. You’ve trusted us this far. You might need to trust us a little more.”

  Winston ducked his head slightly and let his voice rise a touch, just enough to make him sound a pinch younger and more scared — which wasn’t very hard under the circumstances.

  “My uncle is testing this stuff. It’s supposed to help you, make you stronger or something. I’m not…very tough. I get picked on at school. Uncle Claude wanted to test it on someone where it wouldn’t be seen, and he thought it might help me. So I said yes.”

  Theo took the bait. Winston could see it in how he furrowed his brow and stared fixedly at the road.

  “Did this stuff have a name?” Theo asked.

  Winston intentionally flubbed it to appear to know less than he did. “Quarterback.”

  “What?”

  “Well, that’s what I call it, because of the initials. I think my uncle called it QB.”

  “He gave—” Bledsoe started, then paused. Whatever misgivings the man might have had about Winston’s Canadian cover story vanished at the arrival of this new revelation.

  “I’m sorry,” rushed Winston. “I know we shouldn’t have. But Uncle Claude said to come f
ind him as soon as possible if there was any trouble after our first weekend. Will…will you guys help me? And not tell anyone?”

  Theo stole a look over his shoulder at Bledsoe. Winston didn’t want to act too desperate, so he stared at his hands, trying to seem pitiful.

  “So this…Quarterback,” Bledsoe said at last. “Did it help you at all? Make you stronger?”

  “Not really.” Winston saw Theo’s shoulders slump with disappointment. “But I do run really fast now. And sometimes I hear things, like people talking to me.”

  Bledsoe gave a short, weak laugh. “Kid, that usually means you’re missing a bolt in your propeller assembly. Remind me to tell you about my Crazy Cousin Darryl sometime.”

  “Do your parents know you’re here?” Theo asked.

  Not yet, Winston thought.

  He shook his head. “They think I’m visiting my uncle’s place for the summer, doing odd jobs and taking care of the place.”

  Winston realized his mistake immediately.

  Please don’t ask where my uncle’s place is, he thought desperately. Perhaps if the men had been less absorbed in thinking about the QVs, they would have picked Winston’s story apart on the spot.

  “How long ago did Claude give you this…Quarterback?” Theo asked.

  “Gosh…two weeks?” Winston ran a hand through his hair, feigning deep thought. “Maybe three. I had a bad fever for a while and sort of lost track of some things.”

  Winston cautioned himself to say as little as possible. Overconfidence in his storytelling would eventually backfire if he kept it up.

  The Dodge bled off speed as they approached a gentle bend in the road. Winston caught a flash of three flat-topped rocks go by, stacked in a short pile — obviously some sort of roadway marker.

  “We’re almost there,” said Theo. “Anything else you want to tell us?”

  “I’m really nervous?”

  Bledsoe laughed. “I like you, kid. Let me know if you need a second uncle.”

  Winston felt his last protein bar rise up from his stomach. The thought of Bledsoe being related was a little too close to home.