The Time Travelling Taxman Series Box Set

by Rachel Ford

  “What if we don’t want to be a part of your team? Are we free to walk out of here, if we want? Or are you going to send your men with guns after us?”

  “You’re free to go, Nancy, whenever you want. I wouldn’t advise it – it’s not a friendly world out there – but you’re not prisoners. As for the ‘men with guns’….well, I’m sorry about that. We just weren’t sure who had come through, and we had to take precautions.”

  “Yeah, in case we were whoever it is you were afraid we were,” Nancy said. Her tone was nonchalant, but Alfred could see the sharp look that had come into her eyes.

  Damn. I wouldn’t want to lie to her.

  Angie seemed to see it too, because she smiled. Smiled, but didn’t take the bait. “We’re not your enemy, Miss Abbot.”

  “Who is?” Nancy persisted.

  “In here? No one. Outside these walls, predators and climate will be your enemy. But we can help with that. We built this place – it’s exactly where the Futureprise’s compound is in our time, you know.

  “You see? We even thought of that: of what would happen if anything survived. We didn’t want archeologists picking it up and wondering where it had come from.” She smiled, and there was more sorrow than mirth in her eyes. “But, we built this place to supply our research teams indefinitely. It’s almost entirely self-sustaining, and what we need we can get from the local environment.”

  “Why did you need research teams here at all?”

  Angie seemed surprised by the question. “We had a window open to the Cretaceous period, Nancy. We could observe pre-historic history in real-time.”

  “But why here exactly? Why sixty-seven million years ago?”

  She shrugged. “We needed to pick somewhere, and this period seemed like a good one, full of diverse life, with the continent still divided by the Western Interior Sea. It was intended to be the first of several such bases, of course. We were going to pick different eras, and – eventually – branch out into the multiverse.”

  “So you don’t have bases in other dimensions?” There was relief – Alfred was certain of it – in Nancy’s tone.

  Angie laughed. “No, I’m afraid not.” Then she grew more serious. “As I told you, we were – tried to be, at least – very careful. We moved slowly, with great caution.”

  Silence descended between them for a moment. The scientist stared pensively at her coffee mug. Alfred savored the flavor of a strong dark roast. Nancy, in a moment, spoke. “How many of us are there? Humans, I mean, at the base?”

  “Well, let’s see. With you two, that brings us up to…thirty-three, now.”

  “That’s…actually more than I would have guessed,” Nancy said.

  “Well, we kept a team of a dozen here at any time. Six and six: six security, six researchers. Then when – well, the accident happened – there were fifteen of us who made it across. Should have been sixteen, but Brad didn’t follow. We lost Cooper and Davis, which brought us to twenty-five. Then…well, the babies started coming.” She smiled. “We’re a resilient species; we don’t just give up and die. Eight live births, six of them who survived. Including Jackson – my and Dave’s son.

  “And now, of course, you two.” She frowned. “Which, actually, reminds me of something else, Nancy.”

  “What?”

  “Not everyone knows you arrived yet – there’s still patrols out, and so on. But I wouldn’t be surprised, if I were you, if you found yourself very popular very quickly.”

  Nancy frowned. “Me? Why?”

  “Well…” she sighed. “In a population of twenty-five adults, a new face, especially a pretty one, is going to attract attention.”

  Nancy groaned, and Alfred frowned. “I suppose we’ll both have to get used to it,” he decided. It wasn’t that he was annoyed, exactly, at being left out of this caution, but he was a new face too, after all.

  Angie threw a glance in his direction. “I shouldn’t worry about it too much, Mr. Favero.”

  “Oh?”

  “No.” Then, perhaps registering his expression, she added quickly, “Only because Nancy is one of…let’s see…five other women, including myself.” She shrugged. “So you can see how she’ll, uh, stand out.”

  “Good God,” Nancy sighed. “It’s going to be like programming classes, all over again.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Alfred hadn’t understood her meaning at the time, but as the day progressed, he quickly took it. They couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into a new face. It was always male, and always particularly interested in making Nancy’s acquaintance. Alfred, if he was acknowledged at all, was subjected to a looking over and sizing up, a kind of primal threat evaluation from one predator to the next.

  At first, it really annoyed him. But it annoyed Nancy more. “Did you see that?” she asked after a new acquaintance, a Doctor Elliot, left them.

  “How bad his flirting was?”

  “No. How he kept looking at you. I think he thought we might have been a couple. And he was making sure he wasn’t stepping on your toes.” She shook her head. “Like he’s got to check with the man to make sure what he’s doing is okay.”

  “Well,” Alfred said, “I mean, I wouldn’t want to flirt with someone else’s girl. He was probably just making sure.”

  She frowned at him. “Do you think, if we were a couple, I’d flirt with someone else?”

  “No. But you weren’t flirting with him anyway,” Alfred said.

  “Which is why he should have been taking his cues from me. Not you.”

  He wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he said only, “Oh.”

  As the day wore on, though, and the same thing reoccurred, Alfred began to find it rather amusing. He was still irritated on some level, but he channeled that irritation into amusement. “Good god,” he told her after dinner, after they’d met yet another resident of base, “what is that? Number eight? I don’t think I’ve seen that many desperate guys in one place since chess club. And that was back in high school.”

  She laughed. “Be nice, Alfred.”

  He grinned. It was good, he thought, to see her smiling. It had been a rough day, and she hadn’t had cause to smile much so far. “So,” he asked, “have you picked one yet?”

  “One what?”

  Affecting a very bad British accent, he said, “A suitor, of course, my lady.”

  She rolled her eyes, whether at the accent or the comment he wasn’t sure, and he laughed. “Why limit myself to just one? At this rate, I could start a whole harem.”

  She wasn’t far from the mark. The next morning, they took breakfast in the mess hall. It was full, and Alfred was famished. He ate quickly and decided to get rid of his tray and grab another cup of coffee. “You want one?” he asked.

  She, though, was still on her first. “I’m good.”

  “Alright, I’ll be right back.” This was easier said than done, though, as the line to the coffee pot was long.

  At last, he turned with his cup of coffee in hand, only to find his seat occupied. It was occupied by no other than their driver from the day before. Alfred had noticed him in passing earlier in the morning, sitting by himself and throwing glances in Nancy’s direction.

  The taxman was annoyed, and had half a mind to return to the seat and see the young man squirm. But he remembered his conversation with Nancy the day before, and decided he’d let her solve this problem without his interference, unless it looked like she needed help. Instead, he settled onto a stool within earshot, and watched with a measure of fascination.

  “I never did catch your name,” Nancy was saying.

  The young man flushed from the roots of his hair to his collar. “Oh,” he said. “That’s right. Sergeant Stevenson. That is, Josh. Josh Stevenson. And you’re Nancy, right?”

  “That’s right. Nancy Abbot. Nice to meet you, Josh.”

  He reached a hand over the table, and she took it. “Nice to meet you, Nancy.”

  She smiled awkwardly, he retracted his hand e
qually awkwardly, and for a moment a painfully awkward silence settled between them. Then, he said, “I wish it was under better circumstances, of course.”

  “You mean, if we weren’t stranded in the Cretaceous period?”

  “Well…yeah.”

  She smiled, and it was less forced this time. “Me too.”

  He turned his gaze from his plate to her now – not in one of the fleeting glances he’d been showering her with, but an honest-to-goodness, eye-contact moment.

  Alfred laughed inside, awarding the boy an A for effort.

  “It’s rough,” Josh was saying. “When we realized Nash wasn’t coming back, and we were all stuck here…” He shook his head. “That was tough. It took a long time to get used to. And I – I think we all did – hit a real low point for a while.” He seemed to be studying Nancy. “I mean, it’s life for us now. But you’re right at the beginning.”

  She nodded. “To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve even fully wrapped my head around it. I mean, I know it’s real, I know we’re stuck, but…I keep thinking of what I’m going to do, when I get back. And then I have to remind myself, I’m not going back. It’s like my brain just hasn’t got it yet.”

  “It takes time.” His voice was sympathetic, and some of the color was receding from his cheeks. “It’s like living a dream for the first few months. You keep expecting to wake up and realize it was all in your head, and you’re really back home.”

  He spread his hands. “But then, one day, you just don’t anymore.”

  She studied him for a moment. “What’s it like, when that happens? What’s it like, I mean, when you realize there’s no going back? What’s it like to actually live here long-term?”

  The question seemed to make the sergeant uncomfortable. “Well…uh…”

  Nancy smiled. “Be honest with me, Josh. I may be at the beginning of my stay, but I’m here for the long haul too. I might as well know what I’m up against.”

  “Well…” He hesitated. “It’s not home. That’s for sure.”

  She nodded slowly, as if there was something profound to be found in such a painfully obvious observation. Alfred frowned. Sergeant Stevenson might as well have said that water was wet for all the light he’d cast on their situation.

  “But,” Josh continued, “I’ve been in worse scrapes.”

  “You have?” She regarded him with an upraised eyebrow.

  He shrugged. “I was in the Corps. I was deployed overseas. Next to a warzone, this place isn’t too bad.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hell, you might like it after awhile.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  He smiled. “Hey, at least you don’t got to worry about IED’s.”

  “I’ve never had to worry about IED’s,” she reminded him.

  He flushed. “Well, uh, that’s true.”

  She grinned though, and said, “But I take your point. I shouldn’t be moping.”

  Alfred frowned again. She had never made conversation that easy on him.

  “Mope away,” the marine smiled. “We all had our turn of that.” Then, he glanced down at his plate. “Hey, so, uh, I wanted to ask you…you and the taxman – are you, uh, like a couple or anything?”

  “A couple?” She glanced over at Alfred now, and he, realizing that he’d been caught watching them, colored. She laughed. “No. Alfred’s barely gotten past hating me this week.”

  “Oh.” The marine seemed unsure of what to say to that.

  “Why?” Nancy’s eyes twinkled. “Are you thinking of asking him out?”

  “Him? No, I, uh…” He must have realized that she was teasing, because he trailed off, coloring to the roots of his hair. Again. “Sorry. I’m not trying to be nosey. Just…we don’t have many visitors here.”

  She laughed again. “I guess not.” Then, she grew more serious. “But to be honest, Josh, I’m still getting used to this – the place, the situation. I don’t want to think about – well, anything else right now.”

  He held his palms up. “That’s fair. Totally fair. I was just asking.”

  She nodded. “No worries. And thanks for understanding.”

  He smiled. “Of course. And, hey, Nancy, you ever need anything – someone to talk to, someone to talk about home with…hell…” He shrugged. “You need someone to carry something or whatever. You know where to find me.”

  They talked for a few minutes longer, and then he said, “Well, I’m on the job in fifteen.”

  “You barely touched your breakfast.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not that hungry. But I should get moving. Nice meeting you, Nancy.”

  “You too, Josh.”

  Alfred waited until he’d left, then ambled over. “What did he want?” he asked nonchalantly.

  “As if you weren’t listening to every word,” she scoffed.

  He flushed, offering defensively, “It’s hard to miss that much desperation.”

  She frowned at him. “He seems like a nice guy.”

  “Pfft,” Alfred snorted. “He seems like a guy who hasn’t seen a single woman in over half a decade. He was blubbering like an imbecile.”

  She shrugged. “A little bit, at first anyway.” Then, she smiled. “But it was kind of cute.”

  “Kind of pathetic, you mean.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Over the course of the next week, Alfred had the opportunity to observe Sergeant Stevenson with far more regularity. The marine – or, as he pointed out to Nancy, “former marine, turned private security contractor” – somehow managed to make himself indispensable to them.

  Stevenson had suggested to the Garritys that, now that Nancy and Alfred were part of their group, they should be put through basic firearms training. They’d signed off, and he’d delivered the news. “No one should be out here without knowing how to protect themselves. We got a range-”

  “A shooting range?” Nancy asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Wow. They did think of everything.”

  It was shortly arranged between Nancy and the sergeant that she and Alfred would take the offer of training. To no very great surprise of the taxman’s, Joshua Stevenson happened to be their trainer.

  More surprising to him, though, was Nancy’s apparent blindness to what was going on. Even when he’d point it out after their daily sessions, making some joke at the marine’s expense, she’d frown or throw a reproachful glance his way or say, “Don’t be like that, Alfred.”

  So he started to keep his comments to himself. Still, he kept an eye on the marine. He didn’t like him, and he wasn’t entirely sure why; but something was wrong with him. Something had to be, otherwise, he wouldn’t have taken such an immediate dislike to him.

  Of that, Alfred was sure. He was a good judge of character. He didn’t like people without reason. He didn’t like most people, in point of fact; but that was with very good reason. And he didn’t dislike without good reason. So, in recognizing that he did dislike Sergeant Joshua Stevenson, he concluded that there was a good reason for that dislike, and he resolved to discover it.

  His discoveries were not particularly profound. He learned that the marine could turn eight distinct shades of red around Nancy.

  He concluded that this phenomenon was most readily observable when they were in close proximity to one another, but could also occur when Stevenson would catch her eye from across the room – or even sometimes when his conversation would turn to the topic of Nancy.

  He found that his nemesis’ competency seemed to diminish in her presence. He was tongue tied, but clumsy too. He’d drop things and trip over his own feet; and then turn one or more of those eight shades of red. The perfect weapons instructor.

  He was sickeningly obliging, too. To her, anyway. “Your feet need to be shoulder width apart. Here, let me show you.” “Don’t worry about cleaning it, I got it.” “Nah, I already reloaded a mag for you.”

  Where Alfred was concerned, the marine’s teaching lacked something. His in
structions were brisker and more to the point, his patience shorter, and, frankly, his interest lacking.

  It was during the third day of target practice, when the taxman had been taking a few shots at a paper silhouette, that this was thrown into stark relief. Stevenson had been attentively monitoring Nancy’s shooting, congratulating her when she did well and offering guidance when she missed.

  “Just a hair to the right.”

  “Looks like it’s still shooting high, try bringing it down a bit.”

  “Right between the eyes! Nice shot.”

  Now that it was Alfred’s turn, though, he’d disappeared. Frowning over the barrel of the gun, the taxman took a few shots. He missed the paper the first time, and the second, but ripped a nice fat hole about three centimeters to the left of the figure printed on it. “Ha!” he said. “That was pretty good. I’m getting closer.”

  When no one responded, he glanced around, and then grimaced. No one responded, he saw, because no one was watching; Nancy and Stevenson were half a range away. She was laughing, and he was talking, looking far too pleased with himself.

  He slipped the noise cancelling earmuffs back. “I could use a little help here,” he yelled, just a hint of petulance in his tone. “This gun isn’t hitting the target.”

  That, at last, got their attention, and Stevenson’s eyes almost bulged out of his head. “Dammit Favero, point that gun down range.”

  “What?”

  “The gun – point it down range!”

  Alfred glanced down at the handgun he held, and realized that he’d turned. “Oh.” That had been one of their first safety lessons: the barrel always points down range.

  Now, the marine hastened over, first taking the weapon, then emptying it. “Jesus, Favero,” he snapped. “What was the first thing I told you? You never point a gun somewhere you’re not planning to shoot.”

  “I forgot.”

  “Forgot? If you can’t remember that, you shouldn’t be touching a gun.”