Doomed

by Josh Anderson

  Doomed

  Time of Death: Book #2

  Written by Josh Anderson

  Copyright © 2016 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Published by EPIC Press™

  PO Box 398166

  Minneapolis, MN 55439

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  International copyrights reserved in all countries.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark

  and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Dorothy Toth

  Images for cover art obtained from iStockPhoto.com

  Edited by Ramey Temple

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Anderson, Josh.

  Doomed / Josh Anderson.

  p. cm. — (Time of death ; #2)

  Summary: Kyle Cash comes back to an alternate version of his life barely recognizable to him. If he can, his next trip through the tunnel may give Kyle another chance to fix the past, and even a glimpse into his own future.

  ISBN 978-1-68076-065-1 (hardcover)

  1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Traffic accidents—Fiction. 3. Life change events—Fiction. 4. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 5. Conduct of life—Fiction. 6. Guilt—Fiction. 7. Self-acceptance—Fiction. 8. Young adult fiction. I. Title.

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015903987

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  To Dad,

  My trusted first reader.

  Now, and always . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  February 25, 2016

  * * *

  Two years after the bus crash

  It was her first time behind the walls of a prison, and the blond woman with the violent past actually had to break in to get here.

  She adjusted her black baseball cap, placing her silk blot down on the long table. She pulled the karambit blade from her front pocket and held it in her hand. It was a new one, a different brand than she was used to, but the mechanics of using the claw-like knife would always be the same. It was the weapon she was trained with, and for her money, a lot more effective in combat than a gun. She brought the knife close to her face and admired the virgin blade.

  She blew her blond bangs away from her face. Out of the corner of her eye, through the metal grid covering the windows, she could see that the sky was giving its first hint of morning. Hustle, she thought. Prisons wake up early.

  She grabbed the handle of the knife in her left fist and tried scratching into the stainless steel table. The blade just slid along without leaving a mark. It was no accident that a prison administration would choose tables for its cafeteria with slick, scratch-resistant surfaces.

  The blond woman heard a truck backing up outside. If anything was being delivered, it meant staff would be here to receive it. It was entirely possible that cafeteria workers would be arriving soon to get a start on breakfast. Her plan was to be in and out in less than five minutes. There’s no way, she thought, as she tried again to etch the first letter of her message into the table.

  Using both hands, she put her whole body into it and was able to finish a reasonable “K,” but she was fatigued from just doing that. As skilled as she was with a blade, this simple act of vandalism was proving to be more than she bargained for. Curves would be impossible, so her “C” wound up looking more like an incomplete diamond when she finished it a couple of minutes later. There was no way she’d be able to get a twelve-word message carved into the table before someone found her here. Twelve words was already short—about the length of the average Tweet—but she’d need to boil her message down further.

  She gave it as much elbow grease as she could, carving out the rest of the abbreviated message. Finally, after ten minutes, she finished. Not terrible, she thought, given the challenge of the table’s slick surface. It was readable, at least:

  KC: NO CLASS—2/25/16

  She hoped Kyle would recognize his initials. If he did, the two-word command would be unmistakable. At least she hoped it would.

  The blond woman heard another noise. This one was from inside the prison and it sounded close by. It wouldn’t be long before she’d have to spill someone’s blood, or worse, just so she could get back into the silk blot and get out of here.

  Picking up the knife, she saw some metallic residue from the table on its sharp edge. She couldn’t resist quickly licking each side of the blade clean. The tasteless grit in her mouth was a small price to pay for the exhilarating feeling of the sharp metal against her tongue. She spit the metallic dust onto the tile floor and closed the knife.

  As she pulled the silk blot over her head, the blond woman enjoyed one last second of cool air and steeled herself for the warmth inside the time tunnel.

  CHAPTER 2

  March 13, 2014

  * * *

  The morning of the crash

  Out of sight, around the side of the house, Kyle Cash—who had traveled through the time tunnel from 2016—watched his mother drive away. When a second silk blot appeared in his cell a few weeks after his first trip through the time tunnel, Kyle knew that this time, he had to take the risk of going back to the morning of the crash. He couldn’t depend on his father alone to stop the tragedy on Banditt Drawbridge.

  He tested the nail gun by shooting it into his mother’s planter beside the back door. The projectile nicked her favorite rose bush before burying itself in the soil.

  He picked up the first two-by-four plank of wood and nailed its right side, and then its left side, against the outside of the doorway, about head high. He nailed the next one across the doorway about six inches above the floor and then another around belly level. Finally, Kyle nailed a piece of wood between the highest one and the belly-level one. It only took him ten minutes to nail fifteen slats of wood across the front door—some straight, some at angles. There was no way his 2014 self could squeeze through and get out of the house, nor could Joe Stropoli, who was inside with Kyle.

  At this point, Kyle from 2016 walked up to the front door of the house and did the same thing, nailing enough two-by-fours across so no one could possibly get out. Someone driving by might think the house had been condemned, especially after Kyle took the large wooden boards he’d bought at Home Depot the day before, and nailed them over every window except one on the downstairs of the house.

  Once he covered that last one, there’d be no way anyone could get out of the house without possessing something like a saw—and Kyle knew there was no saw in his mother’s house.

  Kyle knocked on his mom’s bedroom window and waited. He knocked harder. He’d gotten the signal that the 2014 version of himself was locked up in the bathroom, along with Joe, where they were smoking a blunt and taking tequila shots, just as they had always done on the morning of the bus crash. But still, 2016 Kyle was afraid something could’ve gone wrong. He knew how risky it was to chance an encounter with his younger self, but this was too important.

  He was there to try again to stop the bus crash he’d caused which had killed twelve middle school students, their driver, and Kyle’s best friend, Joe. Because Kyle had gotten high and drunk with Joe before causing the crash, he had been sentenced to eight years in prison for manslaughter.

  His first trip back in time had been to 1998, a time before Kyle was born. This was done in order to protect Kyle from meeting another version of himself, which would have catastrophic results. He learned this, in 1998, when he saw his cellmate Ochoa’s head explode after he made eye contact with himself as an infant. On Kyle’s visit to 1998, he had convinced his father, Sillow, to try to stop the bus crash from happening in 2014, but the plan had failed. A mysteriou
s blonde woman in a black baseball cap showed up on the morning of the crash to stop Sillow and ensure that the crash tragically unfolded on March 13, 2014. Kyle had no idea who this woman was, or why she wanted the crash to take place exactly as it had the first time.

  Now, here was Kyle, so close to his younger self that he could toss a baseball upstairs to him. He saw the blinds over his mother’s downstairs window start to roll up and he couldn’t help but wince, afraid something had gone wrong and that he would see his own face staring back at him through the window.

  Kyle was relieved when his father pulled the window up, and started to climb through.

  “You got the phones?” Kyle asked.

  Sillow reached into the pocket of his jeans. “Right where you said they’d be.”

  “Time check?” Kyle said.

  “Eight forty-six,” Sillow answered.

  “Thanks,” Kyle said.

  “Thank me when this works. I still can’t believe I’ve done this whole thing before,” Sillow said, referring to his attempt to stop the crash the last time. “This whole time travel thing makes my head hurt.”

  Sillow had no recollection of his earlier attempt to stop the crash because, like most people, he was living in a linear timestream. This day—March 13, 2014—hadn’t happened for Sillow yet. Kyle only knew the result of their first attempt to change the past because he’d lived two years past today already.

  After Sillow finished climbing outside, Kyle nailed the last board over his mother’s bedroom window.

  Kyle heard a banging noise around the side of the house. Clunk . . . clunk . . . clunk . . . “Are you sure they’re still up in the bathroom?” Kyle asked. He walked around the house quickly, trying not to make much noise.

  Sillow followed right behind him. “Thirty seconds ago, they were.”

  It was the blonde woman in the black cap again, the same one who’d been there when Kyle went back to 1998, and when Sillow tried to stop the crash in 2014. Who is she? Kyle wondered. She was wildly swinging his mother’s snow shovel against the two-by-fours covering the front door. The shovel was plastic, and after a few hits it split, and she dropped it. She pounded her fist on one of the wooden boards and screamed out in frustration.

  She didn’t look any older than she had in 1998, so Kyle realized that she was traveling through time as well.

  The woman turned, saw Kyle, and did a double take. “You came back here?” she screamed. “You can’t do that!” She started down the steps and toward them, with a frantic look on her face. “You can’t do that!”

  Kyle was startled and started to step backwards. Sillow followed his lead.

  The woman pulled a gun out of the back of her pants and pointed it toward them as she approached. She pulled a curved combat knife from a holster on her pants with her other hand.

  “Shit,” Sillow said. “You never said anything about guns. Shit, shit, shit!”

  Kyle didn’t say a word at first. He just pointed to a black disc attached to the side of the house. He showed the woman a small remote control in his hand. “You shoot, I hit the button,” Kyle yelled. “The whole house blows up, including the people in it.” There was no time for small measures now. It was dangerous enough to be here, and he had to make sure he succeeded. Even if that meant killing himself.

  “You didn’t say nothin’ about explosives neither,” Sillow whispered as the woman walked toward them. “If you blow your younger self up in there, what happens to the you who’s standing right here?”

  “No idea,” Kyle answered. “But I bet I don’t cause a bus crash in twenty-five minutes.”

  The woman locked eyes with Kyle and didn’t look away as she got closer to them. There was something familiar about her face. She was probably in her thirties, beautiful, but with a hard look to her. “You can’t be here!” she repeated.

  Kyle held his hands in front of him. “I had no—”

  “You did have a choice. You just made the wrong one,” she said. “All it takes is a few seconds of eye contact with the other Kyle in there. Did you forget what happened to your friend?”

  “Who are you?” Kyle asked her.

  It took her a second to form an answer. Kyle could see that she was struggling with her words. “Right now, I’m your last warning. You need to get back into your silk blot, and home to 2016. Right. Now.”

  “Why do you want those kids to die?” Kyle asked. She was so familiar, but he couldn’t figure it out. His photographic memory wasn’t doing its job.

  “We don’t have time for this,” she said. “Kyle, please. You need to go.”

  “So, I leave and you just make sure the crash happens same as it always does?” Kyle asked. “I need to know why.”

  “Why is not important right now. The details don’t matter!” she said. “The result will always be the same. And the more you do to change the little stuff, the more chance of making things end up much worse. That’s how it works, Kyle Cash. The big stuff is gonna happen, one way or the other.”

  The way she said his name . . . It couldn’t be. It doesn’t make any sense, he thought. Allaire?

  “Why? How? Allaire? I can’t even . . . ” he said. “I can’t leave until I stop this crash.” The tears in her eyes confirmed it for him. Even with her eyes welling up, she looked tough and world-worn, with a couple of new scars that she didn’t have as a teenager in 1998. “I can’t believe it’s you. If you’re Allaire, then you risked seeing yourself in ‘98 too.”

  “I take that risk all the time, Kyle,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. You need to go back to 2016. This isn’t about us. This is about you making it out of today alive.”

  Kyle couldn’t believe that the girl he’d fallen in love with and said goodbye to in 1998, which for him was only a few weeks ago, had become this woman in front of him. He had more questions for her than he could even begin to list.

  “Seriously,” Allaire said. “That Kyle is going to call the cops, or find some other way out of that house, and you can’t be here when he does.”

  Sillow held up the two cell phones. “They won’t be callin’ anyone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kyle said. “I have to see this through. If you want to stop me, shoot me.”

  “I could never do that,” she said, putting the gun back in the waistband of her pants.

  Kyle bit his lip in frustration. “But you’ll let thirteen people—twelve kids!—just nosedive off of a bridge?”

  “They’re already dead,” she said. “They might as well be. How about we both get on the next bus into Manhattan? Whether your plan works or not, you still need to get out of here. There’s nothing more you can do here, but die.”

  Kyle looked at the house, boarded up like it was burnt out. Without seriously risking a run-in with his younger self, there really wasn’t much more that he could do. “You’ll stay here?” he asked Sillow. “Hold onto their phones, and do what you can to keep either of them from getting into a car?”

  “Yep,” Sillow said. “Flight back to Jacksonville ain’t ‘til morning. I’ll do everything I can until then.” Kyle knew from the last time that his father could be trusted.

  “Last time I went back, the crash happened fourteen minutes later than the original one,” Kyle said to Allaire. “I can make a difference.”

  “Small details,” she said, her tense face loosening up a bit. “Big picture is that we have to catch the bus.”

  Kyle looked at the house once more. He put his arms around his father, who tensed up for a second before hugging Kyle back.

  “Does it hurt?” Sillow asked.

  “What?” Kyle asked.

  “Going through time.”

  Kyle broke the hug. “Nope. My head just feels a little weird when I get back.”

  “Bye, son,” Sillow said.

  Kyle started to walk away and then turned around as a thought occurred to him. “Hey, Dad . . . Whatever happens, make sure to come find me in 2016. Hopefully not back in prison. Okay?”

 
CHAPTER 3

  March 13, 2014

  * * *

  A few minutes later

  “Whose car is this?” Kyle asked Allaire as they pulled into the parking lot of the Flemming bus station.

  “It’s a rental,” she answered. “I used to just steal one whenever I time weaved, but then I had to watch out for cops the whole time. Now, I just use the I-rent-they-find program.”

  “I rent, they find?” Kyle asked.

  “Yeah, I rent the car with a fake name,” she said. “And when I’m done with it, I leave it somewhere for them to find. And I just go back through my silk blot.”

  “Are they really made of silk?” Kyle asked. For all of his recent experience with time travel, he was completely in the dark about how it all worked.

  “Sort of,” she answered. “The process of making a blot starts the same way as spinning silk.”

  Kyle opened the door to the bus depot and they joined the line of people waiting to buy tickets. “Did someone just accidentally discover time travel?”

  “Time weaving,” Allaire said. “Every time you go back, you weave a new timestream into the universe.”

  “What does that mean?” Kyle asked.

  “That after you weave back, you’re never returning to exactly the same world you left,” she said. “Even the littlest thing you do in the past will have some effect and create a new timestream—a new version of time.”

  “So, you just follow guys like me around when we time weave and make sure—” Kyle asked.

  “I try to keep things tidy,” she said. “And fix things that get broken before they can destroy the future. Listen, there’s so much I can’t tell you. I wish I could, but I promise, the tunnel isn’t an accident.”

  Kyle’s brain was racing. “I need to know more . . . ”

  Allaire pulled the collar of his t-shirt and planted a kiss on Kyle’s lips. “No more questions. Let’s think about us. I’ve been time weaving for half my life. It’s my past, not my future. I want to go back to 2016 together and make a life with you.”