“Arguing about it isn’t going to make time go any slower,” Julie pointed out. “So let’s just vote now.” The vote turned out unanimous for splitting up. Tim figured that since each of them had a taser, two in a group would be just fine for strength in numbers. Time was the real enemy.
“So who’s going with who?” Tim asked.
“Me and you go together,” Rose told Tim.
“Er… okay,” Julie said. “But, why?”
“Well… might as well have one boy and one girl on each team, in case someone wants to think about mugging us. I assume that was a thing in 1854. And July, you’re faster than me, so you can keep up with Billy better. Timothy and I aren’t as fast, so maybe you get done with your first hit faster and go to the last place. No offense, Timothy.”
“None taken,” Tim said. “Let’s just go.”
“Okay, sounds good. You go to Westbrook’s on Kentucky Avenue. We’ll go to David Disney’s house. Then we’ll meet up at Harry Hibbard’s place at Georgia and Thirteenth,” proposed Billy. “Don’t break anything you don’t have to, and don’t taze anyone you don’t have to. Remember that each of our tasers had five charges, so now Rose has three, Julie has four.”
“And… Break!” Rose said enthusiastically.
Walking with her through the rain for the next few minutes after they left the house, hoping that the comatose congressmen weren’t waking up and getting ready to pursue them or send the cops after them, Tim saw her enthusiasm begin to wane.
Mostly, they walked quickly, but not quick enough so they’d be tired when they got there. They jumped puddles and tried to angle the umbrellas so as little rain got on them as possible. They also had to spend a bit of concentration making sure no other mind-control drones were ready to pounce on them and didn’t have much mental energy left over for talking during most of the trip.
“I’m sure glad I at least wore flats,” said Rose, when they were getting close.
“What?” Tim asked, having no idea what flats were, but figuring out from context that they were probably an article of clothing.
“Oh… shoes that aren’t high-heel,” Rose replied. “I’d be dying if I didn’t switch shoes before I left the house.”
“Oh… good thing you did then,” Tim said.
“Yeah,” Rose said. “You ready for this?”
“Sure, I think so,” Tim decided. They each had their tasers in their pockets, plus Tim was carrying a hatchet that Billy had given them after finding a spare at Cooper’s boarding house.
“Sure... we got this,” Rose said.
The house they were looking for was coming into view now. Even though they didn’t have a key to the front door, Tim noticed that there was an overhang jutting out from the second floor of the building.
“Let’s strategize from under there,” Tim said, pointing at the overhang. He was eager to be able to stop walking into the rain. The umbrella still wasn’t enough to keep him dry as they were hurrying through the dark streets of Washington.
They hastened to the house and huddled together underneath the part of the house Tim had pointed to. “So… how we gonna get into this house?” asked Rose.
“Maybe an open window?” Tim asked hopefully.
“In this thunderstorm?” Rose snorted.
“Okay, point taken,” Tim said, rolling his eyes at himself. “But hey, they probably would have been opened recently.”
“So?” asked Rose.
“Well, maybe someone left one unlocked? What if we could force it open?”
“Hmmm…” Rose responded. “Maybe… But how?”
“Here, something like this,” Tim said. There were two windows under the overhang on the ground floor. Tim went over to one of them. Although it was closed, Tim shoved the sharp end of the hatchet between the wall and the window. After he wedged it in the crack there, he stepped on the wider side of the axehead and tried to get the leverage to open it. He pushed hard with his foot, but nothing budged.
“That one must be locked,” Rose said after a moment. “But I like the idea.”
Tim tried again with the next window, and it gave. After he got the window to inch open with the hatchet, he dug his fingers into the widened opening and pulled up hard. He muscled the window open.
Rose and Tim looked at each other. “Shall we go in, then?” Rose asked. They crawled into the house.
“Do you have that candle Billy gave you?” Tim asked.
“Yeah,” whispered Rose, as she took it out of her jacket and handed it to Tim. “I hope I kept it dry. And here are the matches.”
Once they got the candle lit, they looked around the first floor room they were now in. It seemed like a study. There was a desk and a few bookshelves.
“So is this another boarding house?” asked Rose.
“Oh… no,” Tim said. He had asked the same question of his own housemate, Edwin Morgan, on the pretext that he was wondering if he could canvas any other congressmen while he was making his supposed visit to check on Westbrook’s thoughts on a legislative compromise. “Turns out he lives alone with his wife, and two kids.”
In the candlelight, Tim could see Rose cringe. “Let’s just try not to have to taze any children okay?”
Tim agreed. “Quietly up the stairs, then?” Tim asked.
“Let’s do it,” Rose whispered.
So they climbed the stairs, quietly, quietly, trying not to wake anyone in the house up, until they got to the upstairs hallway. The first thing Tim did was to scan the cracks under the doors for the telltale green light. They hadn’t noticed anything from outside the house. Tim had assumed that the machine must be in a room with the window facing the other direction than the one from which they approached. But even now, Tim couldn’t see anything coming from under any door.
“What now?” Tim asked.
Rose threw up her left hand in helpless confusion, still holding the candle in her other hand. “Wait, what’s that?” She pointed to one of the doors.
He could faintly see that it looked something was sticking out from underneath the door. They got a little closer. There was a blanket blocking the crack in the doorway.
“To hide the light?” Tim wondered.
“Maybe…” Rose said. She got her taser out of her jacket with her spare hand. Tim had his out as well. They advanced slowly to the door.
“Ready?” he asked. Rose nodded and Tim put his hand on the doorknob.
And suddenly, they heard a creaking noise as the door across the hallway opened. Rose jumped, and the candlelight flickered. Still, Tim could see a middle aged woman with a horrified expression on her face.
There was no time to hesitate. Tim raised the taser and fired it at her before she even had time to scream. The thud when her body hit the floor sounded inordinately loud. Tim and Rose waited for a moment, weapons raised, to see if anyone else had heard and would be entering the hallway.
Tim thanked his good luck that the mind-control machine seemed to dull the senses of the one being influenced and make them unusually heavy sleepers. He wasn’t sure why it was that the kids hadn’t woken up yet, but he hoped it would stay that way.
Rose and he each took a deep breath. They were too paranoid to try talking again, so they communicated by facial expressions that it was time to try the door again. It wasn’t even locked.
Tim hadn’t even remembered what Theodoric Westbrook looked like, since there were so many faces to keep track of at the Capitol. He saw him now, though, lying in bed bathed in green light. If this was his bedroom, Tim pondered why his wife had been across the hall. Tim wondered if he had moved her away from the creepy green light that was controlling his mind and making him a puppet of the Emperors.
Rose closed the door softly behind herself, which Tim appreciated because now they had another wall separating them from anybody else in the house. But he still wasn’t sure what to do next.
“How are we going to break the machine without making too much noise?” Tim whispered.
&n
bsp; “You’re saying we shouldn’t pull a Billy and smash it to pieces right here?” Rose asked with a faint smile.
“Right,” Tim confirmed. The tasers hadn’t been making noise when they shot them, he remembered. “Do you think we could shoot it with the taser? It would probably short-circuit it.”
“Are you kidding?” Rose hissed. “It might make it explode, too! Then we’d have a fire on our hands on top of everything else.”
Tim nodded. “Okay, fine. Do you think we could carry it?”
“Not without disturbing Westbrook there,” Rose said. Tim remembered how Fuller had only stirred once they broke his machine.
“Then we have to put him down first,” Tim reasoned.
Rose nodded curtly. “Yeah, okay. Use your taser? You’ve got more shots left.”
“Fair enough, said Tim. He quickly tased the man and then went over to the machine. It wasn’t too heavy, maybe about fifteen or twenty pounds. He put his taser in his pocket, asking Rose to keep hers out, and picked up the machine.
Tim hadn’t really considered the possible effects of holding a still-functioning mind control machine. He remembered from Hopkins that it was a pre-programmed thing, and had assumed this meant it would only affect the person who it was programmed to. But as he trailed behind Rose, making his way back down the stairs, he started to get a bit dizzy. He also started to feel an inexplicable urge to go back to Westbrook’s room, put the machine there, and use his Dominus to go back to his own present day, forgetting all thoughts of mind control and the Emperors of Time. He fought these urges off, though, quickening his pace down the stairs so he would have less time to combat the effects of the machine. He was still dizzy.
When Rose reached the door at the bottom of the steps, she opened it. In their haste to get out of the building, they had forgotten how badly they would need umbrellas, and the rain began to drench Tim immediately.
Tim made it out of the door and several steps across the lawn before the world seemed to pitch under his feet and he fell down. He let go of the machine as he instinctively struggled to put his hands out in front of him.
The machine thudded onto the muddy ground, the green thread of electricity at its top went out, and Rose hurried back to help Tim up.
“You were starting to feel weird, too?” she asked in a low voice. “I guess you more than me, ‘cause you were carrying the thing.”
“Right,” Tim said. He was now soaking wet, and muddy, but at least the machine seemed to be out of commission. Rose jumped on it to make sure. A few sparks flew, and some pieces of it came off.
“I guess it can still affect people who it wasn’t programmed for, although I don’t know about you, but I felt more disoriented than controlled. Must be that it works best on who it was programmed for and only sort of works on anybody else,” Rose reasoned.
“I think you’re right about that,” agreed Tim.
“Should we just leave it here, or do something about it?” Rose asked.
“Let’s put it on their doorstep,” Tim said. “I bet Westbrook will at least remember enough about it that he’ll know he has to get rid of it.” Even if the mind-control carried some sort of amnesia-like effect, Tim couldn’t figure that a congressman would want to risk looking crazy by showing off a weird hunk of metal on his doorstep.
So they moved it back up to the house. Tim dropped it on the hard wooden step in front of the door, just for good measure, and the thing broke into two pieces.
“Okay… I think we’ve probably woken up the whole neighborhood by now,” said Rose. “So we should probably high-tail it out of here. We’re going to Harry Hibbard’s place, at Georgia and Thirteenth, right?”
“Yeah! That way!” Tim said, pointing. At that moment, they heard a door somewhere on the street open. Someone had clearly heard them.
“Good!” Rose said, and then began to run through the rain. Tim followed. They hustled through the storm, first in panic. But then, by the time they reached the end of that block and nothing bad happened, and no more doors opened, it just started to feel good to run through the rain. After a couple blocks they stopped to catch their breath. Tim looked over his shoulder. They weren’t being followed, but they were soaking wet, out of breath, and caught in the middle of a thunderstorm.
“Well,” Rose said. “Sure beats the pants off playing hide and go seek with my fake little brothers.” She started laughing, and Tim joined her. They’d just destroyed another of the mind-control machines. In spite of the rain and his wet, muddy clothes, he felt good.
Chapter 20
Captives
It turned out that Tim’s good mood had a short shelf-life in his soaking clothes and the pouring rain. They’d decided early on that there was no reason to use the umbrellas given that they were already soaked, but that didn’t make them feel any less wet as time wore on.
They trudged across the city toward their last destination. Tim was soaked through and, since it wasn’t warm out this evening in the first place, the cold rain made him shiver. Each new drop made him colder, and eventually he decided that he didn’t care about the logical sense of it and opened the umbrella.
At least it kept new rain from falling on him, but it made him notice the rain dripping down off his hair and clothes. He kept shivering. He felt pretty miserable.
Rose had gotten her umbrella out as well, by the time they reached about halfway to Hibbard’s house, and didn’t seem to be much happier than Tim.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Rose said. “I think that maybe being brave is sometimes less about doing epic things like traveling through time and more about continuing to take one more step in the cold rain when your clothes are soaking wet and all you want to do is take a hot bath.”
Tim laughed, but he figured she was at least partially right. “What a Rose thing to say. I’m over here wondering whether it’s cold enough for me to get hypothermia, and you’re pondering the definition of bravery. I definitely disagree with the bath thing, though. I don’t want to see water for another month. I need a heavy towel and a warm bed.”
Rose laughed. Even if he still wasn’t pleased with his situation, it was good to be able to laugh. Tim continued with a bit more pep in his step.
Tim found that talking helped take his mind a little bit off his sopping wet physical condition, so he figured maybe they should keep it up as they continued their slog through the rainy city.
Apparently Rose was thinking the same thing, because she spoke up next. “So… what’s going on between you and July, anyway? I can’t get her to talk about it.”
“Haha, neither can I,” Tim said dryly. He explained the partial conversation he and Julie had back in the underground bunker.
Rose laughed a couple times during the story, but then responded sympathetically, “Well… it really is a weird time for us all, you know? Plus, since she’s from the alternate timeline, she might even feel like she doesn’t really know you… Just be patient, you guys were made for each other.”
“Well, that’s nice of you to say,” Tim said with a sigh. He wasn’t sure whether he believed her or not, but he was glad to have something to think about aside from the puddles he was doing a lousy job avoiding. “What about you and Billy, is there something going on there?”
“Okay, so get this,” Rose said. “We’ve decided that as soon as we’re allowed to stay in our own time for an extended period, we’re going to go see a movie together and get some dinner, and that’ll be our first date. Until then, we’re just friends who kind of save the world together sometimes.”
Finally, twenty minutes later, at about two AM by Tim’s pocket watch, Rose and Tim arrived at the boarding house that Hubbard lived in. Tim was briefly surprised that it was 2 AM and he didn’t feel sleepy, but then he had taken a nap that afternoon, plus he was moving around too much to really get drowsy. Still, even if he wasn’t sleepy, his legs were getting tired from all the walking, so the house that was their final destination for the evening was a welcome si
ght for Tim.
There was a green light visible in one of the windows, so they were definitely in the right place. They even had a target to aim for within the house. There was no overhang this time, but the rain was slowing a little bit, and there was a huge tree in the yard. Tim and Rose hid underneath it to get away from most of the rain.
“Want to try your hatchet-window trick again?” Rose asked.
“Dunno,” Tim responded. “Should we wait a while to see if Julie and Billy can meet us here before we go in?”
“Well, it’s almost two o’clock now… How long can we wait before we risk meeting the dawn in there?” Rose asked. “Besides, the faster we get in and out, the faster we can get out of here and get to a place where it doesn’t rain so much.”
Tim thought for a moment. There was no reason to think they couldn’t get this done on their own. Plus, they had assumed that the other two would get there first. Clearly, something was holding them up at their house, but complications could just as easily delay them here as well. They really did want to get out before Congress met another time. Plus, there still could be another mental zombie out there somewhere waiting to be discovered.
“Okay… let’s give it a shot,” Tim agreed.
Tim couldn’t help but take it as a good omen that when they ventured out from under the tree and toward the house, the rain had finally stopped.
The first window Tim tried slipped open easily. They slid into the room like they were experienced criminals. Things were going well.
Of course, they were still dripping wet, to the extent that Tim almost wondered about whether the patter of their rainwater coming off of them would be a noise concern. A more realistic noise problem, though, was their squelching shoes.
“We’ll just have to be careful to walk lightly,” Tim whispered, as Rose dug for the candle and the matches.
“You won’t have to worry about that,” scoffed a voice in the darkness. “And don’t try to shoot me with whatever weapon it is you have, because I have my weapon on you already, Sage.”
Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Page 15