Incidentally, the Widow Macphearson attended the same church. Tim and Julie had decided the night before that they shouldn’t talk to each other during the service, though, since it didn’t seem like it was something they would have done any other week. They would be seeing each other again soon enough, after all.
For all the differences in the church itself, Tim was a little bit surprised how much of the layout of the service was the same. They still said the Lord’s Prayer, sang hymns, and listened to a sermon. The familiarity comforted Tim a bit.
After the service, Tim went back to the boarding house and found himself exhausted after not having slept much the night before. Since he had some time to kill before he would meet the others to begin the next phase of their current death-defying mission, he figured he might as well be well-rested for the action of the night. There wasn’t really much prep work to be done anyhow. He climbed into bed unsure whether it would be any easier to get to sleep this afternoon than last night
When he woke up in the evening, he gathered the tools that he’d need for that night’s mission. He brought the taser-contraption that Hopkins had given them as well as the Dominus.
Because of the development work that the Widow Macpeharson’s husband had done for the city, there were plenty of maps lying around her house. They had already plotted the spots of all four potential Emperors’ drones on one of those, so Tim didn’t have to bring any more information with him.
Even though they had agreed the day before that there was no reason to meet before nine, Tim was antsy enough after his last meal at Peinture’s boarding house that there was no reason to stay in his own room, either. At seven o’ clock, he patted his pockets to make sure he could feel the Dominus in one and the taser in the other. Satisfied, he left the house and walked toward Macphearson’s home.
Chapter 18
Back to Cooper’s
“It’s certainly not dry out there,” complained a soaking wet Rose as she trudged into the house, closing the door that Julie had opened for her.
“We haven’t talked in so long, I almost forgot how observant you are,” Billy said.
“Don’t listen to him,” Julie said, as she tossed Rose a towel that she’d had ready. They had seen the storm begin about ten minutes before and didn’t know whether Rose would have had the foresight to bring an umbrella from her fake parents’ home.
“I never do, July, I never do,” Rose said, wiping off her face and hair.
“Good. Well… as weird as this is going to sound, I think the Widow Macphearson might have some clothes that could fit you,” said Julie.
“I don’t care if they fit or not, I’d wear Billy’s clothes right now if it meant I could get out of this soaking mess. I assume you’ve got umbrellas somewhere?”
“One step ahead of you,” Julie said, gesturing at the collection of umbrellas the three had already assembled on one of the couches. She led her back down the hallway to one of the bedrooms to change.
This left Billy and Tim alone. “Nervous?” Billy asked.
“A little,” Tim said. “You?”
“Yeah,” Billy admitted. “Not loving the weather, either. We want everybody in town to be sleeping through the night so they don’t notice the crazy stuff we’re going to be doing. We don’t need them waking up every five minutes because there’s thunder and lightning out the window.”
As if to demonstrate Billy’s point, the sky lit up at that moment. Tim waited until after the thunder rolled a moment later before he said anything else. “Yeah, but hopefully by sunrise it’ll all be over.”
“And we’ll be back to the 21st century again,” Billy finished.
“You excited?” Tim asked.
“I guess. But I’m afraid we’re just going to get sent off on another mission by Hopkins as soon as we get back. We spent, what, like two hours in our own year last time?” Billy asked.
“Yeah, but maybe next time will be the last time he needs us to go back. If there even is a next time. Maybe he’ll be able to collect all the Domini once we throw the Emperors off balance by setting the timeline straight tonight,” Tim suggested.
“Yeah, maybe,” shrugged Billy, who clearly wasn’t overly optimistic.
There was a slightly awkward silence after this, but the boys only had to deal with it for a few minutes, as the girls came back down the hallway soon.
“So July here tells me you guys might know where the last of the mind-controlly things is?” asked Rose, when she came back down the hallway in one of the widow MacPhearson’s more casual dresses.
“Yeah, we hope so,” said Tim.
“So what’s our plan, overall, then?” asked Rose.
“Well, we’re going to go to Cooper’s place first, since I’ve got keys,” said Billy. “After that, we’ll try to hit the other three places before dawn. We figure we can start over to Cooper’s place in about half an hour, so that we get there at around ten. My boarders are usually asleep by then. We sneak into Fuller’s room, dismantle his mind-control device, fight him if we have to and are hopefully out of there well before midnight, free to spread mischief elsewhere in the town.”
Rose laughed. “Sounds like a plan, if not an especially sane one.”
Billy shrugged. “I think sanity went out the window about a hundred and sixty years from now… the first time you guys made me travel through time.”
“No need to sound bitter,” Rose countered.
They didn’t really have anything productive to talk about, so they chattered about nothing for the next half hour or so, hoping that the rain would stop before 9:30 so that they wouldn’t have to get rained on the whole way there.
They had no such luck, though, so at 9:30, Julie handed each of them an umbrella from Macphearson’s closet and they got ready to take a walk in the rain.
They arrived half an hour later, soggy in spite of the umbrellas because of stepping into puddles and walking into wind and rain. By looking into the windows at Cooper’s boarding house, they could see that Billy was right about his boarders’ sleeping habits. There were no lights in the house, although they could see a faint but unnatural green light coming from one of the windows.
“Well, here we go,” Billy said, as he fumbled through his pocket and retrieved the house key. He placed it into the door.
When they got into the house, Billy took a match and a candle from a chest of drawers in the entryway. He lit the candle, seemingly noticed how little light one candle gave off in the almost complete darkness of the house, and got out two more. He handed one to each Tim and Julie and let them light theirs off his own candle’s flame.
At this point, Tim could see maybe three or four feet in any direction, with only shadows and dark shapes further than that. Billy seemed satisfied with this nonetheless and pointed toward the stairs, which Tim could intuit more than actually see at the end of the hallway.
Then, even though no one had said anything since before they walked into the house, Billy raised a finger to his mouth to demand silence before he started leading them toward the stairway. They didn’t know how much, if anything, Thomas Fuller would be able to hear while he was using the mind-control machine, but they did know that there were two other boarders in the house who they didn’t want to wake up either. So they proceeded in silence.
The weird green light seemed a bit stronger when they saw it under the door from the dark hallway outside Fuller’s bedroom. Rose and Julie each pulled out their tasers and held them in front of them as Billy felt around in his pocket for the key he would need for this door.
Tim grabbed his taser as well and held his breath as Billy turned the doorknob, not sure whether to anticipate having to blast Fuller with electricity or not. He had enough time to vaguely wonder whether they should decide which one of them should shoot him or if it would be okay to shoot him with all three bursts of electricity. After all, they didn’t want to kill him, only stun him. He was a U.S. congressman, and actually an innocent victim in all this.
The door didn’t open. Billy tried turning the knob again. The knob itself turned, but the door stay closed.
Billy turned around to the others. Tim raised his eyebrows, but Billy just shrugged. “He must’ve put a chair there or something,” he whispered.
“Well… what now?” Julie hissed.
Billy turned back and tried the door again. It stubbornly continued not to open. Billy looked around the hallway, and Tim took the opportunity to do the same. He noticed the door that had been smashed to pieces by the hatchet that Fuller had wielded only three days before. He wondered how Fuller had gotten away without being blamed for that. He and Billy must have been the only ones home at the time.
Billy held up one finger and snuck quietly back down the stairs as the other three waited in the hallway. Tim fought the urge to shiver as his wet clothes clung to his body in the unheated hallway.
Billy returned with a hatchet. Tim figured it couldn’t be the same one that Fuller had used earlier in the week, but apparently either Fuller had brought his own or Cooper had a spare. Either way, it hardly seemed like a good idea to replicate the plan.
“If he can do it, so can I,” Billy said, by way of a too brief explanation.
Julie, Rose, and Tim all three began to vigorously shake their heads no, but for the moment were too scared of being heard to protest out loud.
Finally, Rose spoke up. “You can’t,” she whispered emphatically.
“Have to,” Billy muttered back. “Don’t see any other choice.”
This was a fair point, Tim had to admit. It wasn’t like they could just walk away because the door wouldn’t open. But a hatchet to the door still seemed like an awfully reckless, not to mention loud, alternative.
Billy clearly wasn’t in the mood for rational debate, though. He handed his candle to Rose, who had no choice but to take it, lest it fall to the floor. He swung back with the hatchet. Tim debated trying to grab his arm and stop him mid-swing but decided against it. Having the four teens fighting in the hallway wouldn’t make much less noise than a hatchet anyway.
The first swing connected with a deafening crash through the quiet hallway, much louder than the distant rumbles of thunder from the storm and the rain patter on the roof. To his credit, Billy got in two more swings at the door, aiming at the spot just to the left side of the doorknob, before the other doors opened and two bleary eyed congressmen stumbled out into the hallway.
One of the congressmen, Tim thought it was Moses MacDonald but couldn’t be sure in the dim light of the hallway, spoke up. “What are you doing out here? Is that you, Cooper?”
The other tenant, Samuel Mayall, added, “We thought you were dead. And, Sage? Is that you? What are you doing here, and who are the young women?”
Although Tim couldn’t imagine what other possible consequence Billy could have thought there would have been for his decision to go after the door with a low-tech weapon, he still didn’t seem to be prepared to answer any of these questions. Tim was at a loss for words as well, and neither of the girls had anything to say either.
Billy swung and hit the door again.
“Haven’t you got a key, man?” Moses asked.
“I think he’s gone mad! Perhaps they all have!” responded Samuel. Tim would have said this line of conversation had gotten a bit dramatic, but then there was a man wielding an axe in their hallway in the middle of the night, so who was Tim to judge?
Billy stubbornly raised the hatchet and swung it again.
This seemed to be too much for Moses, who threw up his hands in frustration and yelled, “That is quite enough! I shall fetch the police! There’s a station nearby, and I won’t stand for such a disruption to the peace in my very own residence.”
Tim barely had time to register that this man even talked like a congressman when he threatened to call the cops before Rose, too, had had her fill.
“That’s it!” she yelled, and pointed her high-tech taser at Moses. She pulled the trigger and a blue ball of light shot across the room and hit Moses in the chest.
“Whoa!” said Rose. They had seen before what these tasers looked like when they fired because they had practiced with Hopkins’ great uncle Paul one day in the underground bunker until he was satisfied that they were competent to wield the things. But seeing the blue electricity light up the dark hallway was something else entirely.
Billy, who had turned around when Rose yelled the first time, was clearly impressed. “Nice shot!” he said.
Tim looked at Moses, who now lay prone on the ground, breathing but motionless.
Samuel, who had clearly taken the last moment to process what he’d just witnessed, now screamed. Rose, all business, turned to him and tazed him as well. Billy swung the hatchet once more, then put his shoulder against the door, pushed hard, and was rewarded with the sound of the door beginning to splinter and come apart.
Julie and Tim each raised their own tasers as they gained a view of the room, not sure whether or not their target, Thomas Fuller, would have climbed out the window or would perhaps be waiting for them on the other side of the door with a gun.
But it would seem that the mind-control machine had robbed him completely of his senses and kept him from waking up. There he was, still lying motionless on his bed, bathed in eerie green light.
If breaking the door in and tazing two congressmen in the hallway hadn’t woken the man up, there was no need to be quiet now. The four teens climbed over the broken door and into the room.
“So how are we going to destroy the thing?” Julie asked, looking at the machine. Tim examined it closely as well. It looked like a very complex computer, about the size of an old stereo, with a panel of controls and a spot on the top where a dancing green snake of electricity played across the still-darkened room.
In the comparative brightness of the candlelight combined with the electric green, Tim saw Billy roll his eyes before he raised the hatchet once more and brought it crashing down on the machine. It sputtered sparks of electricity around the room before falling off the dresser it had been on. Upon hitting the floor, it broke into a few large pieces, with pieces of broken glass skittering across the floor.
Only then did the man on the bed, Thomas Fuller, begin to stir.
“Well, we can’t let him wake up,” Rose said apprehensively. She, like Tim, seemed unsure how the man would behave now that the mind control machine had been broken. They had already heard about how he had reacted when he knew someone had found out about it, and now it lay in pieces on the floor.
Julie raised her taser and hesitated. “Should I?”
“Yes,” Billy said, with a hint of impatience in his voice. Julie took the shot, and Fuller stopped stirring.
Julie immediately looked slightly remorseful.
“Don’t worry about it,” Tim comforted. “We did what we had to do and he’ll be okay in the morning.”
Julie nodded half-heartedly. “Let’s just hope we are, too,” she said.
Billy kicked the machine again, causing it to break into a couple more pieces. There was now a small pile of smoldering metal on the floor, remnants of a machine made up of technology that would not be invented for centuries.
Chapter 19
Splitting Up
Breaking the mind control machine was easy, but finding Billy’s missing Dominus was not. Since they weren’t sure how long the high-tech taser would keep Tim’s fellow congressmen knocked out, three of them looked around the room while they took it in shifts which one of them was holding their taser to guard the unconscious. They searched around in their own circles of dim candlelight looking for the small metallic disc.
Tim even started to wonder if maybe Fuller had taken the Dominus to one of the other drones’ places. But they had to do their best to make sure it wasn’t there before they could go somewhere else.
It took about half an hour of searching through the room before Julie let out a strange sound of mingled victory and surprise. “I found it!”
“Okay
, good!” Billy said. “Now how are we on time?”
Tim grabbed his pocket-watch and held it into the candlelight. “Just past eleven.”
Billy swore. “This was supposed to be the easy one. How’re we ever going to hit the other three places by morning? We still have to figure out how to get into those places.”
“Three that we know about,” Rose reminded him. “It’s possible that there’d be more than four total, right?”
“I guess,” Billy said irritably. Everyone was silent for a moment before he spoke again. “I think we need to split up, hit two houses at once.”
“Wait, really?” Julie asked skeptically. “We don’t even know if the other three mind control-ees already know that one of the machines has been destroyed. For all we know, they’re on a network.”
“We’ve still got to try to try to catch them by surprise as quick as we can, in case they don’t know yet,” argued Rose. “They could all still be sleeping, and that’d be the best way to take them on. If they start coming to find us, at least we’re still armed… Besides, the longer we take, the more prepared they can be.”
“Yeah, listen,” Billy explained, “I understand the desire to have strength in numbers, I really do. But if we keep travelling in a pack, it’s going to take us about three hours just to walk to all the locations, not to mention that we have to get into the rooms and destroy the mind-control machines. We can’t stay here tomorrow, Fuller’s already onto me, and now the other two know you’re with me, Tim, and it’s only a matter of time until they figure out who the girls are.”
Tim’s head was spinning. Figuring that there were only three houses left, if that was true, they could take two hours apiece to dismantle each mind-control device and still be done by dawn. If it took about an hour to arrive at each place, that could be doable, but only if there were no major complications. They had already run into a good number of complications tonight.
Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Page 14