“Because he asks for it less,” Dad explained, as he turned up the volume a bit.
Thankfully, at that point, there was a ring at the doorbell. “Right!” said Tim quickly, nearly jumping out of his chair. “I should be back by eleven… That okay?”
“Sure,” said his mother. “And then tomorrow, you’ll be leaving around noon?”
“Yes,” said Tim, as he began to walk down the stairs.
“I’ll wake you up for breakfast at nine, then,” she said.
“Thanks, Mom. See you then,” said Tim, as he began opening the door.
“Have fun, Tim” said his Dad with a tone that suggested he was glad things would soon quiet down again.
“Bye, then,” said his Mom.
Rose was borrowing her Mom’s car for the night, so was driving. The bowling alley wasn’t far away, and they spent most of the time on the way talking about stuff that was mostly normal for kids their age. It was only mostly normal because of the two songs they heard, Julie mentioned she had never heard either of them before. It turned out that neither band existed in Julie’s timeline.
They met Billy in the parking lot of the bowling alley. As they walked into the building around eight, the most noticeable thing was the smell of smoke and the hazy quality of the air from the smoker’s section over in the far lanes.
“They outlawed smoking in public buildings in my timeline,” Julie whispered under her breath to Tim, who wished his own timeline would do the same. Cigarette smoke had always smelled unpleasant to him, and he was surprised when some people thought it smelled good.
Tim took out the twenty his mother had given him and paid for himself and Julie, remembering that Billy was supposed to believe they were dating. “Just one game for the two of you?” asked the cashier.
“Not sure yet,” said Julie. “Will we still get the discount if we come back up later?”
“Sure,” said the cashier, not at all cheerfully. Tim supposed it meant an extra transaction for her.
Billy paid for his entrance as well as Rose’s.
“You guys bowl often?” asked Billy curiously to the group at large.
“Not enough to be good at it,” said Rose. “What about you?”
“Well, I’m okay,” said Billy.
“Oh no,” said Rose dramatically. Billy looked perplexed, so she continued. “If you were really just all right, you’d say you were bad at it, to give me room to be impressed. If you say you’re okay at it, you’re probably really good. Which has potential to be very annoying.” But she smiled a bit to show that she was mostly joking.
It turned out that their lane was near two televisions. One was showing a late season basketball game between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Boston Celtics, and the other was showing the same cable news network that Tim’s father had just been watching.
Tim gathered from the news station that American troops and allies were trying to push their offensive further, taking a two pronged approach into Iran and Eastern Turkey. Eastern Turkey was a big deal, as the news anchor was no doubt pointing out - although Tim couldn’t hear because the sound was off - because Eastern Turkey was close to Armenia, which was tantalizingly close to Russian soil. Of course, pushing into Russian soil would not win the war, likely nothing would within the next couple years, according to the websites Tim read. But the anchor was probably not mentioning that, since the government would have kept that off the list of talking points.
Tim couldn’t make much sense at all of what they were showing on the screen with the basketball game, but Billy seemed pretty excited about it.
“You like Philadelphia, then?” asked Tim as they were all picking which ball to use.
Billy looked at him with his eyes a bit narrowed. “Oh! The basketball team…? Sorry, for some reason I thought you meant the city… Yeah. I like the Sixers. You?”
“Um,” said Tim, with a sideways glance at Julie. He’d decided for her sake to give Billy a chance, or at least talk to him long enough to come up with a concrete reason why he didn’t like him. So he said, “Yeah… They’re my favorite basketball team.”
“Yeah? That’s great! You know if they win this game, they’ll clinch a spot in the playoffs, right?” asked Billy.
“Yeah,” lied Tim. “But I think they’ll definitely win.”
“Well, let’s hope so… I think Casey’s still injured for the Sixers, so he won’t be playing tonight. Without him, it’s going to be hard for us to match the Celtics’ big men. But yeah… We should still hold our own, I think,” said Billy.
Tim tried to smile in a way that would not suggest that what Billy said was more confusing to him than what Hopkins had written about time travel. But his head was spinning like crazy. Tim settled on the next ball he touched and got back to where the girls were setting up the group members’ names on the bowling alley computer.
“Okay, well you’re first, Billy,” said Julie, once everything was set up.
“We put the names in alphabetical order,” Rose announced.
“On purpose?” asked Billy, who seemingly couldn’t decide whether to be impressed or weirded out.
“Well, no… but when I noticed, I had to point it out,” explained Rose.
Billy shook his head and smiled as he picked up his ball to bowl. Rose might not have been wrong about him being good. He bowled a strike on his first frame.
Rose rolled her eyes, “I can see this is going to be unbearable,” she said in a loud, dramatic voice, ensuring Billy would hear her. If she was trying to flirt with Billy, who she was supposed to be thinking about dating, Tim was amused by her style.
“You’ll learn to deal with it,” said Billy. He smiled at Rose.
Julie bowled next. After studying the basketball game, Billy announced to Tim, “Well, I was right, Casey’s out, but we’re still winning 12-7.”
Tim nodded in a way that was meant to suggest that this statement had some kind of meaning to him.
“I’ve never been into basketball,” announced Rose, without prompting. “Now, soccer, I can get behind.”
“Oh, come on!” protested Billy. “Soccer’s got no action! There’re plenty of professional soccer players who don’t score as many goals in their career as I score in a game. Soccer, you’re lucky if the score is 1-0 by the end, in basketball both teams can get over a hundred points in the game, and that’s in about half as much time.
“Wow!” said Tim, and then realized that this was information that he, as a pretend basketball fan, should probably have known. As Rose and Billy looked at him with confusion, Tim glanced over at their bowling lane. “Oh… I meant about Julie’s situation. She has a 7-10 split now.”
Rose and Billy looked over at the lane as well. “Oh,” said Rose. “Right. Well… get that spare, Julie!”
Julie smiled at the three of them and rolled the ball. Unfortunately, it went right down the center of the lane, managing to miss not just one, but both of the pins.
Rose was up next.
“So, I hear you and Tim are in the same French class,” said Julie, sitting down next to Billy, across from Tim.
“Yeah,” said Billy with a grin. “That class is a bit of a laugh, isn’t it Tim?”
“Er… I guess so,” said Tim.
“Well, of course it’s useful, what with France being our biggest foreign ally and all, but some of the activities Mr. Anderson makes us do are pretty stupid. Plus, Jimmy and Ben are pretty cool. You should work with us more often when we’re doing group work.”
They heard Rose shout a mild curse. “Sorry! Gutterball!” she added.
Tim laughed. “You guys actually do work? Doesn’t look like it in from where I sit.”
“Sure… I do, anyway. I’m pulling a 98 in that class. I guess Jimmy and Ben are pulling B’s, but they’d be doing worse if I wasn’t there,” Billy shrugged. “I’m just good at French, I guess.”
Rose came back, having managed to knock down four pins, “You’re up, Tim.”
Tim got a sp
are. Rose and Julie cheered for him, as Billy got up to bowl. “I guess I know who my competition is now.”
When Tim sat back down, the two girls were still talking about France.
“I’ve been to France, you know,” said Rose. “Me and my Mom went a couple years back. Well… England, technically, but they’ve all spoken French there for the last fifty years or so… We could hardly find anyone who could speak English with us, just a couple of old people who were alive when English was still the official language.”
This time, Billy only made a spare.
“I’ve never been out of the country,” registered Julie, as she got up for her second frame.
“Me neither,” said Billy, sitting down and looking back at the game. “Ah… Sixers down by three now.”
“Oh no!” said Tim, hoping this was the appropriate response.
“Yeah, well… Remember we still have two more games after this one. If we beat Charlotte and San Antonio, we’re in as long as Boston loses one of their next two,” said Billy.
Tim normally considered himself an intelligent person, except in math class, but he couldn’t follow this conversation at all. “Right,” he said, figuring this would at least be an uncontroversial thing to say.
Julie knocked down nine this time.
As Rose somehow managed to use her two throws to knock down the pin on the far right and the one on the far left, Tim scanned the ticker at the bottom of the screen with the news feed. Four Americans were dead in the fighting for the day, but it was anybody’s guess how many allied, enemy, and civilian deaths figured into the same amount of fighting. He made a mental note to check his internet sources later, although he wasn’t sure why he wanted to know… He knew it wouldn’t be good news.
Tim knocked down seven on his first throw and two on his second.
“He seems friendly enough,” said Rose in a hushed tone, as Billy went to take his turn.
“Told you so,” said Julie.
“I suppose,” agreed Tim.
“He’s pretending not to notice you don’t know anything about basketball,” said Rose, with a laugh.
“Is it that obvious?” asked Tim, who thought he was doing a better acting job.
There wasn’t time to get any more conversation in without Billy, though, because he rolled a strike again and came back to sit down.
Time passed pleasantly for awhile. By the seventh frame, the Sixers were up by five at halftime, which Billy was optimistic about because according to him, the Sixers were a second half team anyway, whatever that meant. Julie bought a soda for Tim and her to share, while Rose did the same for her and Billy.
It was during the eighth frame, when Julie was up to bowl and Rose was in the bathroom, that a dozen red lights along the far wall of the bowling alley began to flash. A loud, high pitched beeping rang out. Tim dropped the coke on the ground. Several bowling balls guttered or were thrown wild as bowlers were startled out of their normal steps.
It took a second for Tim to realize what was going on. The area was under missile bombardment and the anti-missile device had failed. If this had been a bigger building, like the stadium the Sixers were playing in, there would have been a backup system, but the bowling alley wouldn’t have that.
Tim wondered if there was a bomb shelter. The school had an underground bunker, but there were over a thousand people at the school every day. There weren’t more than a hundred people at the bowling alley.
The loudspeaker clicked on, and a voice could be heard above the worried chatter of the patrons and the urgent cries of the alarm. “Everyone stay calm. Get as far as you can from the windows. The tracker says the missiles are close. No time to get underground. Get under a chair if you can.”
Julie didn’t need to be told twice. She abandoned her ball in the gutter and ran back to the chairs.
Rose was standing halfway across the floor. She must have just gotten out of the bathroom when the alarm went off.
She seemed to have frozen. Tim understood. There were plenty of chairs between her and Tim, Julie, and Billy, but she looked scared. Probably she wanted to be close to her friends. Unable to decide where to go, she stayed put, which wasn’t the best decision.
“You two hide, I got her,” said Billy with a note of urgency but also a good bit of confidence.
As Billy darted across the room, first Julie, then Tim, followed his advice. From his position under the chair, Tim could see Billy gesticulating madly toward a clump of chairs near Rose. She still didn’t move.
Billy reached her as the ground shook with what could only have been a nearby missile impact. There was no reason for the Russians to target their small town, but their strategy within the last couple years seemed to be to spray missiles far and wide, figuring the defense system would fail sometimes. They knew any damage they could do would cause distress within the civilian population. On those counts, the Russians were right.
As Tim felt the rumble of the missile impact, he saw Billy wrap his arms around Rose and shove her as quickly and carefully as he could. When a second impact rocked the bowling alley, it was accompanied by a shatter and an extended tinkling of glass. Pieces of glass shone in the fluorescent lights of the bowling alley. It covered the floor and the chairs up to about ten feet from the windows. Billy was partially covered, but Tim couldn’t tell whether he was hurt.
Two more explosions rocked the floor within thirty seconds of each other, but no more damage was done to the building.
“You okay?” Tim shouted to Julie over the alarm.
“Yeah!” said Julie. “So… This really happens?”
“Only the fourth time I’ve been near a missile… First time a building I was in got hit.”
Thirty seconds passed, and the alarm was silenced. The intercom came back to life, “We’re sorry for any inconvenience, but we need to close. We’ll be handing out passes for a free game and shoe rental for when we open back up in… probably a week. Place your shoes on the desk on the way out… Insurance claims adjustors and ambulances will be on site to deal with any damages or injury.”
Rose and Billy came walking over.
“You guys alright?” asked Tim.
“I’m fine,” said Billy.
“Me too,” added Rose. “Thanks, Billy.”
“You don’t look fine,” said Julie, looking at him.
“Okay, I mean, I’m bleeding some. Maybe I’ll stick around for the ambulance. But I’m walking, right?”
Billy was wearing short sleeves, and was bleeding at a couple places from his arms where the skin was exposed.
“Geez, I didn’t realize!” Rose said. “I’ll grab some paper towels on the way to the parking lot. Does it hurt bad?”
“Nah, I’ve had sprains that hurt worse than this,” said Billy. Whether that was true or not, Tim noticed that Billy was beginning to drip blood on the floor.
“So was the building hit directly?” wondered Tim as Rose ran into the bathroom to grab towels.
“I don’t think so.” Billy held his arm at an awkward angle as he attempted to keep the blood from dripping off him. He looked around. “I bet it hit the parking lot or something. It was close enough to shake the building pretty hard.”
Then Rose was back. She dabbed Billy’s right forearm, which seemed to be bleeding the worst. “Are you bleeding from anywhere else?”
“No, just those couple little ones on my arm” said Billy, like he was still trying to convince them that it was no big deal.
“This one’s pretty bad,” worried Rose as she removed enough excess blood to uncover a deep gash.
“Nothing the medics can’t handle. But I appreciate your help,” he added hastily to Rose.
“No problem,” Rose said sincerely. “I’d be hurt pretty bad if you hadn’t gotten me to the ground. I don’t know what happened, I just froze. I’m sorry you got hurt protecting me…”
Billy shrugged and grinned. “I played football in middle-school and got hurt pretty bad protecting a quarterback who
was nowhere near as pretty as you.”
Rose seemed to be blushing. “Well… I owe you one,” she said.
They had just reached the parking lot and could hear ambulance sirens in the distance. There was a crater at the far end of the parking lot.
“Oh, wow,” pointed Billy. “That’s my car.” It was two spots away from one that had gotten banged up really bad from falling debris. He had lucked out, it didn’t even appear to be damaged.
Rose’s phone started ringing. She bit her lip and picked up the phone.
“Hey,” Rose said. “No, I’m all right.” She listened a minute. “I’ll be home soon.” Another pause. “No, not the building itself… No serious injuries… Well, one of the people I’m here with has to wait for an ambulance… A couple scrapes… No, I’ll be there soon.”
“You should go,” said Billy when she hung up. “All of you. Look, the ambulance is pulling in now.” It was indeed.
“We can’t leave you here,” Rose protested. “We don’t even know if you’re okay to drive!”
“I’m fine. I have my cell-phone, too, so I can call my parents if I need to. It’s no big deal,” Billy insisted.
“We can definitely wait,” said Julie. Tim nodded agreement.
“This has been on the news, right?” asked Billy. “You should all call your parents and get home. Look. I’ll call my parents now and they’ll insist on coming and picking me up, anyway.”
After a bit more of an argument, as well as a phone call to establish that Billy’s parents were now on their way over and were just a couple minutes away, Rose agreed to drive the other two home.
After Tim and Julie placed quick phone calls home to say they were safe and coming home, Tim, sitting in the back seat of Rose’s car said, “Well… Billy seems to be okay.”
“Definitely,” agreed Julie.
“For sure,” agreed Rose.
“He’s nice enough,” explained Tim. “And he’s good in an emergency. Now we just need to find out how he deals with time travel.”
Chapter 7
Wright’s Ferry Mansion
The next day, just before noon, the four teens climbed out of a car in a metered parking lot in Columbia, Pennsylvania, just a block down and over from Wright’s Ferry Mansion. Billy had driven them in what he had taken to calling the miracle car, since it had sustained no damage the night before. Apparently Billy’s father had driven his car home the previous night, when his mother made him come home with her. The word, “Moms…” and an eye-roll had accompanied this story when he told it to Julie, Tim, and Rose on the drive that morning.
Emperors of Time Page 6