by Alex Myers
“Highwaymen? Like—“ Jack asked.
“Bandits?
“Yes.”
“Between Richmond and Williamsburg?” the deputy asked.
“Yes.”
“I knew it!” the deputy said. His eyes lit with excitement.
Jack did some quick mental calculating. He figured if he told the man what had really happened he’d be locked up and sent to a mental institution. He thought bandits were a better explanation than anything he could come up with and nodded his head in agreement.
The man looked ready to jump into action and form a posse. “Where exactly?”
He had better answer right or he’d have a bunch of questions thrust at him he wouldn’t know what to do with. “Right outside Richmond. Three days ago.” Jack had to consciously keep from squirming on the wooden bench.
“Dang.”
“Dang?”
“Dang. Too far away. What’d they get from you?”
“They took everything I had. When my horse fell, I hit my head….” Jack indicated the wound to his head and the policeman waited impatiently for Jack to continue. Finally, Jack said, “They thought I was dead, I suppose. Walked for two days.”
“I thought you said three days,” the deputy said.
“It happened three days ago. I’ve been walking for two.”
“Did you get any of them?”
“Get them?” Jack was confused.
“You know, kill them?”
“Oh, yeah. Two, I think.”
“Wow! They’ve been doing this off and on since fall. Sheriff thinks it’s watermen; my theory is they’re Chesapeake pirates.”
The deputy was looking at Jack as if he were some kind of great fighter until the man finally noticed his shoes.
Damn shoes, Jack thought, at least the color is muted with all this mud. “I’m just back from New York City,” he added quickly.
The deputy shook his head and gave a quick little smile as if this answered everything. Obviously, fashions took a while to reach Tidewater.
“Come with me,” the deputy said. “I’m going to take you to see the sheriff.”
The sheriff’s office was a block and a half away off Mitchell Street. It was a two-story, rectangular building, gray and unpainted. The building was in good repair and looked to be fairly new. Inside was a large room with jail cells lining the back walls. The sheriff was talking to a well-dressed man sitting across from him at his desk. The deputy butted right into the conversation and began recounting Jack’s story. They looked at him with sympathy, almost admiration.
The sky outside was starting to darken. As much as Jack wanted to burnish his burgeoning reputation, he figured he’d better deal with his immediate problem first—a place to stay.
“This was three days ago up near Richmond?” the sheriff asked.
“You are the first lawman I’ve seen.”
“Where were you headed, you know, before the attack?”
“Well,” Jack said, thinking of a good answer. “I was making my way from New York City, looking to make a new life here.”
“Here?”
“Yes, Hampton Roads,” Jack said.
“Hampton Roads?”
“Tidewater.”
The sheriff gave a knowing look to the man sitting across from him. It appeared that Jack’s wasn’t the first story like this that they’d heard.
“What I need is a place to stay.”
“Got any money?” the sheriff asked.
Jack patted his pockets. “They took everything I had.”
“What kind of work you do? You got a profession?”
“I’m a teacher.”
“Teacher, huh?” The sheriff looked to the well-dressed man who shook his head no. “Don’t know of any teaching jobs. Got any other skills?”
“I can do just about anything,” Jack said.
The man who’d been talking to the sheriff introduced himself as the mayor of Norfolk. He didn’t stand or make a move to shake Jack’s hand. “They’re taking on workers over at the Sanger Estate. Rough, menial labor putting in a bigger dock. You might try there.”
“Sanger Estate?”
“Frank Sanger, he owns the dry goods store—richest man in Norfolk.”
“As in the Sanger Brothers’ Bank?” Jack asked, remembering Murphy mentioning it.
“That’s right. Frank and his brother Andrew.”
“What does the work pay?”
“Oh, real well,” the Mayor said. “As much as a dollar a day, and that includes lunch.”
“A dollar?”
They also told Jack that there were rooms to let at Miss Nancy’s Boarding House and that she would be lenient concerning the rent till payday. “Miss Nancy will really like you; she’ll work with you,” the sheriff said with a wink.
And Jack knew he could work with that.
CHAPTER 6
February 1856
Am I Crazy
Jack was content to let the passage of time be his guide concerning the struggle between his competing explanations of mental illness and time travel. Every second that passed living in the world of 1856 convinced him that it was more of an unexplained physical phenomenon and less a psychological aberration. He didn’t suffer from any symptoms that would accompany severe head trauma, such as seizures, slurred speech, or loss of balance; there was no bleeding from his nose or ears. Every chance he could, he checked for discoloration below the eyes and behind the ears and for unequally sized pupils. Nothing, as a matter of fact. He felt great.
Is it ever easy to assess one’s own mental state? Paranoid? Maybe. Mood swings? Yes, but considering what he was experiencing, who wouldn’t have mood swings? Altered sleep habits? Of course, but he thought the other symptoms of mental illness such as lethargy, aggression, and difficulty in concentration were not apparent at all. If Jack ruled out mental instability though, that left him with an even more disturbing prospect.
On most nights, Jack only got about two hours of sleep. There was his hard, lumpy bed with its mattress of straw ticking at the boarding house and the fact that he shared the room with three other men. Nothing more than a curtain separated him from their conversations, snorings, and turnings, and it was not conducive to sleep. Plus he had the tossing of his own mind to deal with as well.
He was constantly bombarded with the smells of the blanket, the candle next to the bed, the sixteen-inch-wide five-foot-long strip of threadbare carpet. And if he was able to overlook all of that, there was the chamberpot. Are you freaking kidding? The whole room reminded him more of a museum than a bedroom. The frail and rickety wash stand with its limited capacity and lack of drain, its crude faucet with water piped down from an attic cistern, as well as the fact that the door to the room was located in his small portion of the shared space—such were the miseries of the Miss Nancy’s newest border.
Most of Jack’s waking moments were spent trying to speculate about the science of time travel. The more he thought about it, the more he began to accept the theory that the tremendous power generated by the supercell lightning strike had somehow created a wormhole in curved space that joined two different timelines. If this was indeed the case, or if somehow two cosmic strings had been joined to create a closed timeline curve, his chances of traveling back through the same doorway were statistically nil. In either theory, the gateway would, in all probability, have snapped shut almost the instant it opened.
In all likelihood, he was stuck in 1856.
As soon as he made a few bucks, he was going to buy or borrow a horse and go back to the field where he’d first regained consciousness. Was there something special about that area that had allowed the doorway to the past to open? Perhaps. It seemed to him that if he had somehow been transported to this time, it had to do with the place he’d landed. Maybe if he went back there…. He had to know.
He wanted desperately to tell someone, someone with authority, like the sheriff or the mayor. But maybe he’d have better luck with a college profes
sor, someone a little more open-minded. As soon as it crossed his mind to share his story with someone, the futility of it was apparent. They wouldn’t believe me and couldn’t help me if they did, he thought.
Safe in the inside pocket of his sport coat he had his cellphone, a brand new iPhone 5 with about sixty apps, four hundred songs, one hundred iBooks, and about half the charge left in the battery. Of course, he didn’t have a cell signal and the GPS didn’t work, but all of the apps did and about a third of the books he had were reference books—all of which might come in handy at some point. However, he had three major problems with the phone: He couldn’t let it be seen; he couldn’t let it be damaged; and he had only half the battery life left in it without hope of ever recharging it. He had to carry it with him at all times, because there just wasn’t a place safe enough to hide it.
At times just running his finger along its smooth cut glass and metal surface kept him anchored to the thought that the first part of his life hadn’t just been a dream.
CHAPTER 7
February 1856
The Sanger Estate Mishap
The Sanger Estate was a prosperous-looking two-story home with dozens of windows and a wraparound porch all facing the Elizabeth River, an elaborate, sprawling affair decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies. Whether the year was 1856 or 2013, it was easy to see that rich people, important people, lived here.
Jack was handed a shovel by the foreman and shown where he needed to dig. A total of sixty men were working. Ten worked on the footings for a new dock out into the Elizabeth River. Others worked on a land-locked lagoon about the size of a football field but with a narrowing extension that ran for another half mile. Thirty men were in the soupy lagoon bottom, digging and widening, while others hauled up buckets of mud and threw them on wagon carts. The men in the giant hole were ten to fifteen feet below the levels of the steep banks and had to climb in and out with ladders. It was low tide and the water level was forty vertical from the shore and about six feet below the mark at high tide.
A few men were digging a trench from the river to connect with the lagoon. Jack was in this group. Physical labor felt surprisingly good, and, half a day later, he had lathered up a nice sweat, working with his thoughts as much as the shovel. With each shovelful of dirt, he affirmed his own sanity. He didn’t seem crazy, he thought, as he thrust the shovel into the sandy mucky river bottom and stepped on it. Was this really another time? He rocked the shovel back, hoisted the load of wet sand, and threw it. But why was he here? For what purpose? He poised the shovel’s tip and stepped down hard, and the blade sank into the bank. Things certainly seemed real—the smells, the colors, the tastes.
He was so lost in his thoughts that it was a long time before he noticed a woman gazing intently in his direction. How long had she been there? She was slim, yet looked athletic and was exquisitely proportioned. She had a beauty so clean, so natural and unadorned, that he had to stop digging for a moment and catch his breath. She looked wholesome, yet strangely erotic, and he stared back unabashed. He thought of her with more than desire—it was something akin to awe. She radiated affluence, importance, authority. He had never met a woman he couldn’t live without, until now. He had to have her; he would have her.
The woman looked at him from a distance, curiously, furtively, and dangerously. Across her face flashed puzzlement, reproach, and interest. He was used to women and, for that matter, even men staring at him. It was just another fact of life, but this woman seemed surprised by what she saw. What was it? The way he was dressed? His hairstyle? He hammed it up a little, posed with the shovel, and flexed his biceps, hoping she found him strikingly handsome or at least funny. But she didn’t laugh, she didn’t even smile, she just watched him work. Screw her, he could play the cat and mouse game better than anyone. It looked as if she tried not to look, but her eyes wouldn’t obey.
Jack was going to take a break and go talk to the woman but when he looked up, she was gone.
“Move in closer to the hole,” the giant foreman commanded Jack.
Jack moved to within three feet of the big lagoon, leaned on his shovel, and surveyed the progress. There was a two-foot-wide strip of sand that separated the lagoon from the water-filled ditch leading from the river. The tide was starting to come in and cave in the sides of the ditch they’d just dug.
“You, Riggs, work on that hump. I’m tired of our work getting filled in every time the tide goes in and out. Let’s get this son of a bitch connected.”
Jack did as he was told and moved to the very edge, careful not to step in the fifteen-foot drop-off. While the banks further up had a steep angle to them, the wall here was completely vertical. Jack thought this highly curious but was thinking more about the woman he’d seen earlier. He stepped down hard on his shovel and nearly twisted his ankle—it was solid rock.
Men were called in with shovels, and removed sand from the area being cleared, leaving a twelve-inch-thick wall across the front of the lagoon. The water from the incoming tide was now five feet away from the front of the barrier. Men were standing around scratching their heads in wonder and the foreman called for picks, sledgehammer, and pry bar. “Dig down and clear the front of it. We have to get this done before the tide comes in and we lose our efforts.”
The tide was three feet away and the men had dug down enough to make the front of the thirty-five-foot wall almost five feet tall. There was something about this wall, ledge, whatever it was, that didn’t sit right with Jack. There was nothing occurring geologically that would have allowed for such a solid, tall, and thin wall of rock.
The tide was two feet away when the rock-busting equipment arrived. Three men stood on the wall and pounded with pickaxes below their feet. Two men placed the heavy metal pry bar in the middle of the wall, and Quentin Drake, a giant of a man, picked up the king-sized sledge hammer and began hitting the bar like a chisel.
The tide was a foot away and the unnatural barrier had Jack’s internal warning buzzer on full klaxon-mode. He had seen or read about something like this somewhere.
None of the men pounding on the wall were having any kind of luck even making the smallest of dents. Jack took some shovels of the incoming tide and splashed it up on the wall where the men pounded with the chisel bar. Instead of the water revealing rock, it revealed a glass-like material with rainbowed bluing, as if singed by a giant blast.
What kind of material was lying hidden beneath these shallow waters and how did it get here? Jack wondered and splashed more water, this time further away from the working men. The tide was lapping at the bottom of the wall and he got right down in the water and examined the rock closely. Jack wasn’t a geologist, but he had taken a geology class his sophomore year. This wasn’t rock—this was shocked quartz grains and impact-derived glass. It had probably happened when a fifty-mile-wide impact crater had been created thirty-five million years ago, about five miles west of the town of Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore. This impact ring was probably a broken-off piece of the comet or meteorite.
He couldn’t tell if the lagoon below was on the inner or outer side.
The tide was coming in faster and water was now standing two feet deep in front of the wall. The foreman was bellowing to the men to work harder and faster.
This was a problem.
Jack threw several shovelfuls of water on the lagoon side of the glass wall. He hopped up and straddled the rim. The water was nearly four feet high on the tide side of the barrier. A couple of the men working in the lagoon pit pointed and laughed at Jack’s frantic attempt to scrub the wall. The bluing effect was ten times greater on this side of the wall, which meant that the blast had happened on the lagoon side and radiated outward, making the tide side weak and vulnerable to cave-ins.
Especially with the added pressure of the incoming tide. Especially without the accrued sand to reinforce it. With pressure, this rock wouldn’t crumble—it would explode like safety glass.
“You men down in the hole, ge
t out!” Jack was standing on top of the wall and screaming at the top of his lungs. A few men made their way to the ladders and started out, but the majority just stared at him.
“What the hell are you doing with my men? Only I tell them when to quit. Now get down or I’ll cut your dick off.”
Jack turned back to the lagoon and managed to scream louder, “Cave in! Run for your lives!”
This got their attention. Those who couldn’t make it to the ladder ran to the gradual incline a half a mile away. Jack was watching them go when a shovel hit him in the guts. Jack fell backwards off the wall into the tide side of the water. He was completely submerged and he felt the impact of the shovel hit the top of the water. He kicked off the wall and pushed himself out toward the river.
He surfaced and Drake, the big, burly foreman, had his shovel raised over his head, ready to strike. The wall gave an ear-popping crack.
“You need to get everyone out of the water!” Jack yelled. The men all turned in his direction, shaken from the loud sound. Jack was angling toward the distant shore.
“You sons of whores. Stay where you are and keep working on that wall.”
“The wall is going to explode.” To accent Jack’s statement an even louder crack came from the glass wall that was now nearly covered in water. The men threw down their tools and started running.
“I’m going to kill you.” The foreman was in the middle and still coming after Jack. Jack reached the other bank and started running.
A sound like a giant cannon exploded. Chunks of glass the size of human heads rained down into the lagoon. The water that was being held back, shot over the edge behind it. The foreman was caught in the pull and was shot out into the rapidly filling lagoon.
Glass blocks, like large pieces of safety glass, littered both shores, especially on the lagoon side of the wall.
The lagoon had nearly been filled with the incoming tidal water. A couple of men down on the far bank moaned and rolled on the ground. Several men were swimming a hundred and fifty yards up the lagoon. Ladders, buckets, and various other debris that had been down in the hole now swirled around in the water. So did two struggling men.