Dream Tunnel

by Arby Robbins

  “Yes, Will is an honorable man.”

  47

  Crane’s limited equestrian skills were pushed to the limit on the long ride to the OutCastle. The three stopped just outside the iron fence that surrounded the castle.

  “Okay, what’s the plan?” Will asked.

  Geneva jumped in. “See the room up there with the candles burning in the window? That’s probably Frederick’s room because if he did transport Conroe, he’s expecting you, Crane. Look at that ladder—it will take you right up to his window.”

  “It looks like they’ve been doing some painting,” Crane observed. “A worker probably left it there.”

  “Awfully convenient, though, don’t you think?” Will asked. “Frederick even left the window open for you.”

  “Maybe it’s a trap,” Crane said.

  “Probably is,” Geneva agreed.

  “So, I’m gonna climb up that ladder and just step right into his trap?” Crane asked.

  “But you’ll have a trap of your own,” Geneva said. “Will and I will be waiting outside on the ladder, ready to come in at just the right moment. Then we can tie him up, and I’ll use his time travel computer to bring Conroe back. All you have to do is get him standing in front of the window with his back to us. Then we’ll sneak in behind him and grab him.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Will said.

  “Well, it’s not easy,” Geneva replied, “but it’s a plan.”

  “Let’s go,” Crane said.

  Geneva and Will followed him to the eight-foot-high iron fence.

  “What if this thing is electric?” Crane asked. “What am I saying? There’s no electricity in this world.”

  “There are no security alarms either,” Geneva said.

  Crane began climbing up the fence.

  “Of course, there could be dogs,” Will added.

  “Great,” Crane said.

  “We’ll be okay,” Geneva assured. “We haven’t attracted their attention yet. But we need to run to the ladder. The dogs won’t be able to reach us up there.”

  “But Frederick will hear them barking,” Will said.

  “That’s okay,” Geneva replied, “because he’s expecting Crane. He won’t know that we’re with him—if Crane climbs up to the window fast enough.”

  All three climbed over the fence, jumped down simultaneously, and ran to the ladder. Dogs began to bark as soon as the trio hit the ground. Will was the last one up the ladder, and one of the dogs snapped at his foot, tearing out a piece of his pant leg.

  Crane climbed up the ladder as fast as he could. If Frederick looked out his window with a lantern, he would surely spot Crane’s partners on the ladder below him, eliminating their only weapon—the element of surprise.

  When Crane reached the window, he was surprised to see Frederick sitting at a desk across the room with his back to him, looking at his time travel computer screen. He climbed in through the window without making the slightest noise—until a board creaked beneath his foot.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” Frederick said, turning his chair around to face Crane. “Although I really thought you’d be here sooner. I sincerely hope you’re not too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Crane asked. “Where is Conroe?”

  “Where do you think?” Frederick turned back around to the time travel computer.

  Crane stepped up behind him and looked at the screen. “Why did you send her back?”

  “You should have seen the look on your face when you walked out of the bathroom and she was gone. That was priceless.”

  “You were watching us?”

  “Sure,” Frederick replied. “I should have watched you two roll around in bed for a while before I popped her out of there. That would have been even more fun.”

  “You’re despicable,” Crane said. “Bring her back right now!”

  “Or what?” Frederick jumped up from the chair and held up his fists. “Are you going to fight me?” He grinned. “Let’s do it.”

  Rage began to boil up from Crane’s gut. He didn’t even attempt to get Frederick positioned with his back to the window. He forgot all about Geneva’s plan. Instead, he ran at him like a mad man, his arms flailing at his sides.

  The arrogant expression on Frederick’s face quickly turned to disconcerted fear.

  Crane ran over Frederick like a bulldozer over a fencepost, flattening him to the floor.

  Geneva and Will came in through the window.

  “What did you do, Crane?” Geneva asked. “That wasn’t in the plan.”

  “Well, it did the job,” Crane said with pride.

  Geneva knelt down to take Frederick’s pulse. “He’s still alive, but he’s out cold.”

  “That’s okay though, right?” Crane asked. “You know how to work this thing.” He pointed to the time travel computer.

  “Yes, if it’s the same as Conroe’s.” She sat down at the desk and began to press keys.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Will marveled.

  “You won’t believe the things it can do,” Crane said.

  “There she is.” Geneva pointed to the screen.

  “I recognize that road,” Crane said. “It’s close to Philly.”

  Geneva nodded in agreement. “Okay, let’s see if I can bring her back.”

  “It’s instantaneous when it’s just her, correct?” Crane asked.

  “Yes.” Geneva entered several keystrokes and waited.

  “Shouldn’t something be happening?” Crane asked.

  “What’s supposed to happen?” Will asked.

  “She should be appearing right here with us,” Crane answered.

  “Appearing?” Will asked.

  “Something’s wrong.” Geneva frowned.

  “Don’t say that,” Crane said.

  “It’s not working. I’ll try it again.” She reentered the sequence of keys.

  Nothing.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Crane asked.

  “Oh,” Geneva said. “I see what it is. Frederick has made the return perimeter smaller.”

  “Return perimeter? What’s that?” Crane asked.

  “Conroe has to be inside the return perimeter in order for me to transport her,” Geneva explained. “Normally, the return perimeter is the same as the main perimeter. But Frederick has made it much smaller, and I don’t know how to change it back.”

  “But you can still make that work, can’t you?” Crane asked. “You just need to get Conroe inside the return perimeter.”

  “The problem is that I have no way to communicate with her,” Geneva replied. “She can talk to me, but I can’t talk to her. It’s always that way.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you have a way of moving her from one place to another?” Crane asked.

  “I can only do it when she’s inside the return perimeter because when I do that, I’m actually transporting her here briefly, and then back there to a different location.”

  They heard Conroe’s voice coming through the speakers of the time travel computer. “You’ll never get away with this, Frederick. Crane will come after you. And the queen will have you hung for this. Bring me back now, and she might show mercy. Frederick? Frederick!”

  “You’ll have to send me there,” Crane said. “It’s the only way. Just show me where the return perimeter is and I will take her there. Then you can bring us both back.”

  Will pointed to the screen and asked, “What does this mean?”

  A large box in the center of the screen flashed an alarming message: WARNING - 19% POWER.

  “It means there’s not much time left,” Geneva answered, typing at the keyboard and opening a window that contained a map with a white circle in the middle of it.

  “Here’s the return perimeter,” Geneva said. “Oh, no.”

  “What?” Crane asked.

  “Look at it,” Geneva replied. “It’s only five feet in diameter. Frederick set it up this way in case we got control of this thing. He wanted to watc
h you try and fail.”

  “Well, I’m not gonna fail. What’s the exact location of this return perimeter?”

  “It’s the same place you were when I brought you back last time—while you were sitting in that truck. See? In the parking lot.”

  Crane looked more closely. “Third row, fifth slot to the left. Got it. Send me back.” He stepped away from them.

  “Okay,” Geneva said, “here we go. Good luck!”

  48

  “Conroe!” Crane ran up behind her.

  She spun around. “Crane!”

  They embraced.

  “Frederick did this to us,” she said. “It had to have been him—he’s the only one with a time travel computer.”

  “He sent you here, but Geneva sent me.”

  “Geneva?” she asked.

  “When you disappeared, I figured Frederick must have transported you, so I went over to Geneva’s house. We stopped by for Will, and the three of us rode to the OutCastle. I climbed in through Frederick’s window and knocked him out cold. Then Geneva used his time travel computer to send me here. And it’s almost dead, by the way, so we don’t have much time.”

  “Why didn’t Geneva just bring me back? Couldn’t she see me?”

  “She could see you and hear you, but she couldn’t bring you back because Frederick has altered the return perimeter somehow, and Geneva doesn’t know how to undo the change. Now it’s only five feet in diameter.”

  “What’s the return perimeter?” she asked. “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “Geneva said it’s separate from the main perimeter,” he explained. “It means that she can see us right now, but she can’t move us anywhere or transport us back until we get inside the return perimeter.”

  “That’s okay—as long as we know where the return perimeter is.”

  “I know where it is, but it’s a long way from here. It’s in that parking lot where we left the pickup truck. The place where Frederick tried to shoot you.”

  “Do you know how much power the time travel computer has left?”

  “Yes. Nineteen percent.”

  “That should be plenty,” Conroe said, “if we can catch a ride.”

  49

  Geneva and Will watched Conroe and Crane on the time travel computer screen.

  Someone pounded on Frederick’s door, startling them.

  “Frederick? Are you okay in there, son? I heard noises.”

  “It’s Opal,” Geneva whispered.

  “Frederick? Answer me,” Opal ordered. “What are you doing in there?”

  Will went over to check on Frederick. He was beginning to stir.

  “Frederick! Unlock this door!”

  Will went back over to Geneva. “How are we going to explain this?”

  “We’re not,” she said, closing the time travel computer and picking it up. “Let’s go.”

  They climbed out the window and down the ladder. The dogs had retreated, but now they were returning. Will carried the ladder across the yard and propped it against the top of the fence, creating a low-slope ramp that they could walk up.

  Geneva started up first, with Will close behind. One of the dogs followed them on the ladder, but he couldn’t keep up with their pace. The other dogs tracked them from the ground, directly underneath the ladder, snapping at their feet. They were close to the top of the fence when Geneva lost her balance. Two options flashed through her mind: first, she could regain her balance by dropping the time travel computer, knowing that the fall might destroy it and thereby eliminate any hope of bringing Conroe and Crane back, or second, she could hold tight to it and protect it from the fall with her body, and possibly break some bones and definitely be brutally attacked by the dogs.

  Will quickly assessed Geneva’s situation and placed his hand at her back to support her, helping her to regain her balance and go on.

  By the time one of the servants unlocked Frederick’s door with a master key, Geneva and Will were riding away on their horses.

  50

  “Why is nobody stopping?” Conroe asked. “A hundred cars have already passed us.”

  “I think I know what the problem is,” Crane said. “You stay here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Trust me—just stand right there.” He ran over to the ditch. “Luckily this ditch is dry.” He climbed down in it.

  Three more cars passed by.

  “It’s not working,” she said.

  “Try to look sexy and vulnerable,” he yelled from the ditch.

  “Sexy and vulnerable? You mean something like this?”

  A black Lexus pulled over in front of Conroe.

  She ran up to the passenger window.

  The driver, a mid-forties guy wearing a Stetson and a business suit, rolled down the window and shot her a big smile. “Hey, darlin’, can I take you somewhere?”

  Crane ran up and stuck his head in the window next to Conroe’s. “That would be great, sir.”

  The man rolled up the window, nearly catching Crane’s nose in it.

  They stepped back as he sped away.

  “Maybe you should have waited until I opened the door,” she suggested.

  “Yeah, I guess I blew it,” he replied.

  They heard a siren.

  Crane said, “I hope that’s not for us.”

  “Old Cracker saw me leaving, but I don’t know if she would have called the police.”

  “Let’s hide out, just to be safe.” Crane led Conroe over to the ditch.

  They hid there, waiting for the cruiser to go by. But as the siren got louder, it seemed to be moving slower. Then it stopped. They peeked out over the top of the ditch and saw the police car and the car that the cop had apparently pulled over. The officer got out and walked up beside the other car. He talked to the driver for a minute and then ordered him to get out of his car. It became apparent what was going on when the officer made the driver try to walk a straight line.

  “There’s our ride,” Crane said, climbing out of the ditch.

  “Wait,” she cautioned but then followed him.

  Crane ran around to the driver’s side of the cruiser and got in. Conroe hopped in the passenger side.

  The cop heard the car doors and turned around.

  Crane dropped the cruiser into drive and swerved around the other car, the cop, and the drunk.

  51

  Geneva and Will had been riding hard for thirty minutes.

  “We can’t keep up this pace,” she said.

  They slowed their horses to a walk.

  Geneva turned to Will. “Stop for a minute.”

  They sat quietly on their horses, listening.

  “I don’t hear anybody coming,” he said.

  “But they will be soon. We need to hide out until Conroe and Crane make it back.”

  “We can go to my house,” he suggested.

  “No, our homes are the first places they’ll look. And we can’t go to the castle either. We broke the law. Yes, we did it for a good reason, but still, we broke the law, and we can’t expect the queen to harbor criminals. Besides, there’s nothing she can do to help, so we’re better off leaving her out of it. Hopefully this will all be over by morning and everything will be back to normal.”

  “Right. And once Conroe is back, neither Opal nor Frederick would dare bring charges against us, considering the outrageous and illegal thing that Frederick did to Conroe by sending her to the past without her consent.”

  “That’s right,” she agreed.

  “But where can we go now?”

  “I know a spot,” she replied.

  Geneva led him through the woods to a shallow valley. “Conroe and I used to come here all the time.”

  They dismounted and tied their horses to a tree.

  Geneva took the time travel computer out of her saddlebag, carried it to a large tree stump, and set it down.

  They sat, side by side, on a log in front of the stump.

  Geneva flipped open the time tra
vel computer and turned it on.

  Will pointed to the screen. “Eighteen percent power.”

  “That’s good. It’s holding up.” She ran a search for Conroe and Crane. “What are they doing in a police car? If they get caught before they can get to the return perimeter, they’ll never make it back.”

  “Is there anything you can do to help them?”

  “The only thing I could do is change the code to make the return perimeter larger.”

  “Code? What’s that?”

  “The computer code is the instructions that tell the computer what to do,” she answered.

  “How do you know about these things?”

  “I’ve been studying the time travel computer manual to learn about programming. I’m not very good at it yet.” She typed a series of keystrokes. “I can open this window to see the code. This section right here controls the perimeter settings.”

  “Can you change it?”

  Geneva studied the code. “I’m afraid to touch it. If I do something wrong, I might destroy the return perimeter altogether. Then they would have no chance of coming back. Besides, it looks like they will probably make it okay—they’re getting close now. Maybe I’d better check the bridge and the tunnel code. Frederick might have altered those routines too.”

  “From what you told me, it’s always tricky making it over the bridge and through that tunnel.”

  “It is,” she confirmed. “But I wouldn’t put it past Frederick to have changed the code to make it even more difficult, if not impossible. Maybe he wanted to laugh at them struggling to get inside the return perimeter, knowing that when they did, they would die on the bridge or in the tunnel. And if that happened, there would be no way to ever prove that he had murdered them since they would have died inside the computer.”

  “I certainly hope you can do something to help them, Geneva.”

  “I’m going to try my best. Okay, here’s the code for the bridge. Let me see if I can make any sense of it.”

  52

  Crane drove the stolen police cruiser south on I-45, looking for the parking lot where Frederick had tried to shoot Conroe while they were sitting in the pickup truck.