Jeff looked up, then ran to his side. On the ground at his feet was his time device, identical to the one in his pocket. He bent down and picked it up, inspecting it, then compared the two. It was truly the same piece of equipment.
“If you’re going to do something, let’s do it,” Dexter said. Jeff slid the two devices in his pockets, but Dexter stopped him. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll cause a paradox. Or destroy the universe or something. If you take that device then the FBI won’t find it in the forest. They won’t know to come get you so that you can get to Russia in time.”
Jeff laughed. “I have no idea what logic you used to come up with that, but I’ll go along with you to be safe rather than sorry. Fortunately, I thought ahead.”
He pulled from his coat pocket the old rusted device that had been sitting in that very forest for a century-and-a-half. He tossed it into the leaves.
Dexter smiled. “You sneaky bastard.”
“I figured it’s going to be here anyway. Wouldn’t change too much if this is what they found instead of the good one. I’d feel more comfortable with a back-up plan. I’m not a fan of having so little control. Where’s the cell phone?”
Together they scanned the ground for the black casing of the cell phone that the woman had tossed into the woods. They found it about four feet away, just as Agent Fisher had said back in the present in the Congresswoman’s office. Dexter picked it up and slid it into his pocket.
“Don’t we want to look at it?”
“Not here,” Dexter said, pointing past Jeff up the hill. Jeff turned to see movement in the trees. Time to go.
Not wanting to risk placing themselves in the midst of any present day growth in the forest, they returned to the trail, now hearing shouting behind them. They only had twenty or thirty feet to get to the clearing, but knowing they’d been spotted it seemed like miles.
When they finally reached the trail, Jeff pulled the device from his pocket and, after a split second of reminding himself which pocket he’d put the proper device in, extended it to his friend, who grabbed it.
Suddenly they heard a gunshot and a round ricocheted off the hard ground about three feet from where they stood, causing a small cloud of dust and both of them to jump. Dexter’s hand slipped off of the device.
“Now!” Jeff said, extending his arm out further. Dexter grabbed it as another gunshot sounded from the trees.
He pushed the button and they were standing in the middle of the road, their rental car ten feet away. Each held their end of the time travel device in a death grip.
“That was way too close,” Jeff said, exhaling. He started for the car. Dexter didn’t immediately follow, so he turned back. His friend was doubled over. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m hit,” he said with a groan. He straightened up to expose a gunshot wound to his thigh, blood starting to seep through his pants into a dark red stain.
Jeff swore under his breath and rushed to his friend’s side, his mind beginning to race as to where they could find a hospital anywhere near where they were in the middle of the mountains. And what would they say when they got there. Hunting accident? “Let’s get you into the car.”
He helped Dexter limp to the passenger side of the car and got him into the seat. The blood stain was spreading and was the size of a baseball now. He circled the car to the driver’s side and rang up Dexter’s GPS, searching for a hospital. “Truckee?” he asked out loud when the device gave him a map.
“Donner Lake,” Dexter said with a half groan, half gasp.
“I have to get back to I-80,” Jeff said, then after taking a moment to get his bearings, accelerated as fast as the rental car would accelerate.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
July 18, 2015
For at least the third time, Jeff reminded himself that time was not an issue. He thought it might calm his nervousness. For a mission such as the one they were on, a gunshot wound and a trip to the hospital was a tremendous impediment to success. His top priority was ensuring that Dexter was okay, and only after the doctor came out to the waiting room to confirm to Jeff that he was did he begin to think about getting back to their present time. With nothing else to do other than sit and watch his friend sleep, resting from the surgery to remove the slug from his leg, he plotted their journey back to the East Coast. Each time he recognized himself leaning toward a natural desire for haste, he made a conscious effort to pull himself back. They would be pinpointing their return anyway, so it didn’t really matter how long Dexter would need to recover.
What was probably a stickier situation was that there were two Dexters in existence in America, one of which was in the hospital in California with a leg wound from a gunshot. Strategically, and at the same time instinctively, Jeff hadn’t offered Dexter’s name when they got to the emergency room, claiming to be a participant in a hunting party who had met him just that morning for the first time, and knew him only as “Bradley.” He said they’d been close enough in the forest for him to see Bradley take a bullet from an unknown shooter and did the first thing he could think of, which was to rush him to the hospital. By the time they got to Truckee, Dexter was delirious, which helped with the charade. Ultimately, there would have to be an exchange of information. Unless Jeff, of course, could think of a way to pay the medical bill without a paper trail. He was counting on cash to make that happen.
The doctor had told him the surgery went well, but was surprised to see that the bullet in “Bradley’s” leg was a minie ball, which to his understanding hadn’t been used in a century. He showed him the bullet in a plastic bag. It didn’t mean much to Jeff – though he knew it didn’t look like anything a modern hunter would use. Jeff dodged the question by reminding the doctor that he hadn’t seen the shooter, so he couldn’t speak to any of the circumstances as to how the shot had been fired. The doctor made some comment about calling a friend who was a Civil War buff, and then a nurse ushered him to Dexter’s room.
With the day getting away from them, he figured that he might have to spend a night in this town, Truckee. The nurse had told him that he could go – that they’d take good care of Bradley, and without complications he’d be good to leave the hospital in a day or so. Jeff told her that since no one else was able to take responsibility for him, he’d stick around. Still, visiting hours were almost over and he’d have to shuffle off soon. He was hoping that Dexter would wake up before he left, though, so that he could go over their story with him. There’d been no opportunity for them to get on the same page, and Jeff had started adding details while his friend was in surgery. If he woke up during the night and started offering up real information, they were going to have some issues getting him out. They’d talked about naming him “Bradley” in the car, but Dexter had been in so much pain it was hard to believe that he would have absorbed any of their conversation.
In his thinking, he remembered that he needed to delay the return flight to Jersey, so he stood and pulled his phone from his pocket. Wanting to let Dexter rest, he started for the door to find the post-op waiting room, but stopped himself. Seeing his own phone in his hand, he realized that in the scramble to get Dexter taken care of, they’d never had a chance to look at the woman’s cell phone that they’d picked out of the brush in the forest. Making sure no one was going to drop by the room and see him rummaging through the alleged stranger’s clothes, he sidled over to Dexter’s bag of personal items and searched through his pants pockets until he found the phone. Then he tucked everything back into the bag and headed into the hallway to find the waiting room.
He found one about seven doors down that had complimentary coffee, so he poured himself a cup and threw in two packets of sugar. The room was empty, so he sat at one end of a cream-colored sofa and set his cup on an end table. Then, despite his enthusiasm, he wanted to take care of his responsibility first, so he dialed his phone to call the airline. Up in the mountains, though, he found there was no service, so he
left his coffee there and walked back out to the nurse’s station, asking to use their land line, to which they obliged. With that out of the way, he returned to the waiting room, laid his own phone on the couch next to him, and picked up the woman’s, dreaming it might be sufficiently charged.
It was, and he powered it on in disbelief that this phone had come from the future, had been to the past, and was now in his possession. He hadn’t recognized the woman even though she had clearly brought his time travel device to 1849, and wondered how, when and where he could come into contact with her. He thought of Agent Fisher’s explanation that while Jeff hadn’t traveled back to the Gold Rush era to plant his device in the forest, he would at some point. Fisher was wrong. It was this mystery woman who somehow commandeered his device and left it there. Which also offered the question – why would she do that?
The phone finally lit up, ready, and Jeff quickly educated himself on its navigation, just the same as someone who bought a new phone but didn’t want to read the manual that came with it. Within sixty seconds, he was able to get around and pulled up the associated e-mail account to see if he could get a name that might ring a bell for him. As the screen rolled to a list of messages, a tall bearded man with a blue denim button-down shirt came in and looked at the coffee machine.
“Oh good,” he said and poured himself a cup. He yawned and nodded at Jeff. “Thirteen hours of labor so far. I drank all the coffee in the maternity waiting room.”
Jeff smiled. “Please, take as much as you need.”
“You have any kids?”
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“This is number five for us. Pushing them out doesn’t get any easier.” The man took a swig from his cup. “Oh, much better than downstairs.”
“Well, good luck to you,” Jeff said politely, though wanting to get back to his research. The hospital would be making him leave soon.
“Thanks, brother.” The man grabbed a packet of sugar and a stirrer and left the room, allowing Jeff to return to his project.
He looked through the first few e-mails and found people were writing to an “Erica,” with the e-mails addressed to “[email protected].” The subject lines and text of the e-mails seemed to suggest that she did something related to history for her career. When he found a message from a student at Stanford University asking about an assignment, he determined she was a professor, and then another e-mail from a television producer suggested that she might’ve had a show – a script for an upcoming shoot in Philadelphia was attached. He attempted to open it, but the phone was on roaming and had no data connection. Returning to the e-mail box, he was interested in the scheduling of the program, and noticed that the dates on the most recent e-mails were actually within the week. Not the week where he stood at the moment, but his actual present time.
That threw him – that this woman that he did not know would be using his time travel device within a week. How could that possibly be?
He decided to check the alternative forms of communication, and rang up Erica’s recent calls. While the calls all led up to that same date, about a week into the future, none of the numbers held any relevance for him.
Feeling like he should be back checking on Dexter, he stood and grabbed his own phone, shoving it into his pocket. He picked up his coffee with his left hand while he walked out of the room, simultaneously moving on to the next medium – text messages. When the text history window opened, though, he dropped his coffee to the floor. It splashed several feet in front of him. An orderly jumped out of the way.
The last three texts she’d received were from him.
Leaving the coffee, he quickly selected the most recent, again dated about one week into the future. It read, “I know what you’re doing and I understand. I hope to see you again in the future.”
The orderly asked him if he was okay and Jeff looked up in a trance and nodded. He thought he might have said “I’m sorry” before walking away, and if he didn’t he’d meant to, but he was lost in trying to decipher what his statement to this woman, Erica Danforth, could possibly mean. She was in possession of his time travel device, and he was offering his support for whatever it was she was doing – which was impersonating an angel and telling Joe Wilton to set up camp in a location that would lead to him being ambushed and having his gold stolen. Why?
He walked back into Dexter’s room to find his friend still sleeping, which unfairly aggravated him because there was no way he could talk with anyone else about what he was experiencing. In his own present time, he could’ve chased down Abby or Emeka to share the story, but couldn’t now. So instead of rambling, he sat down and looked at the other two texts from himself. They were nondescript – the first said “Call me when you land”; the second, “Just checking to make sure you got home safely.”
He scrolled through the rest of the incoming texts, which he found were similar to the e-mails. Notes from students and other people related to her work at Stanford. Seeing nothing else that interested him, he set the phone on the table and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes to think. At some point he must’ve dozed off because it seemed like only a moment later he heard Dexter calling him and looked up to see his friend’s eyes open, looking at him.
“You were sleeping,” Dexter said.
Groggy, Jeff rubbed his eyes and looked at his phone. It had actually been about 45 minutes. He was more tired than he’d been willing to admit. “I guess so.”
“How am I doing?”
He stood and stretched. “Doctor said you’ll be out of here tomorrow. You got lucky. The bullet just went into the fat in your leg. Didn’t hit anything important.”
“Well, that’s good.” He looked past Jeff at the table. “Did you find anything on the phone?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” he said. He leaned over and picked it up, then moved to the chair next to Dexter’s bed. He held the phone up for him to see, even though it was off. “The last three texts this woman received? They’re from me.”
“From you?”
“Yes. They’re from my number. And they’re dated a couple days into the future. Not the future now, but the future where we really come from. Couple months from now. You know what I mean.”
Dexter held out his hand. “May I?” Jeff powered up the phone and handed it to him. Dexter flicked his fingers across the screen, then stopped and read for a moment. “Unbelievable. So sometime this week you will meet this woman and develop some kind of relationship with her that’s trusting enough for you to give her your time device?”
Jeff shook his head. “I don’t see how that’s possible. Especially when I’m on my way to Russia.”
“Right,” Dexter said, then tapped his chin with the phone, thinking. “Or... You’re never going to meet her.”
“How can I send the texts then?”
The phone buzzed in Dexter’s hand, startling him, and he nearly dropped it.
“What was that?” Jeff asked, his own heart racing.
Dexter clicked the phone. “Text message,” he said, handing the phone to Jeff.
Noticing that there was now a hint of service on the phone, he touched the screen to open the message. It read, “Miss you. Can’t wait to see you 2nite.” He read it out loud to Dexter.
“For this woman, you think? Any other texts like that one?”
He shook his head. “And her name is Erica. According to the e-mails.”
“Erica,” Dexter repeated.
“Well, let’s see,” Jeff said. He typed “You might have the wrong number. Are you looking for Erica?” He hit send, then looked at Dexter. “I couldn’t get any service in here before. Let’s see if this works.”
They jumped again as the door to the room opened and the nurse entered. “Oh, you’re awake,” she said, seeing Dexter’s eyes open. She checked his vitals quickly. “How are you feeling?” she asked him.
“A little groggy, I guess.”
“Are you hungry? You want us to bring you a little
something to snack on?”
“Can I?”
She nodded. “You should be fine to eat something. I’ll bring you a little bite.” She looked up and made eye contact with Jeff. “You’re still here?”
He smiled. “Yeah. I didn’t want to leave him alone. It’s freaky waking up in a hospital when you don’t know where you are.”
She smiled and looked back at Dexter, pointing at Jeff. “You owe this guy,” she said. Then she left.
“What do I owe you?”
“Alright, there’s some bringing up to speed we have to do here,” Jeff said. “Your name is Bradley and we don’t know each other.”
“Bradley?”
“We met this morning and were in a hunting party together. You were hit by an errant shot and I was the only one around-”
The phone buzzed in his hand.
“And...”
“Just give me a minute. Let me check this.” He opened up the text window, which read, “Nope. Sorry.” He handed the phone to Dexter, who read it. “It’s not for her.”
“That confirms what I was about to say,” Dexter said, laying the phone next to his leg on the bed. “You’re not going to meet her.”
“Explain that.” Jeff sat back in his chair. He wasn’t sure what his friend’s theory would be.
“Remember how she disappeared? Her existence must have something to do with Wilton. She’s from another reality.”
“But there is no other reality. We haven’t created one yet.”
“And this one can’t be the created reality?”
Jeff smiled. He had him. He was on to something. The phone belonged to this woman, Erica – he’d seen her toss it into the forest and the messages were all to her. But in this reality, following her disappearance however it happened, the phone belonged to someone else. The phone number did, at least.
Fulfillment (Wilton's Gold #2) Page 12