Emperors of Time

by Penn, James Wilson

  “Tim!” she said, as he rushed up the steps to meet her. “We need to go… now!”

  “You can’t go anywhere right now,” Tim’s mother chastised. “Your parents will be worried about you. You should call them.”

  “Cell-phones are down,” countered Julie, shaking her head.

  “Well,” Tim’s mother said. “We have a landline, and that should still be working, even without electricity. Why don’t you call your mother on that?”

  “Good idea!” exclaimed Julie after the slightest pause. “Tim, get your coins!”

  “What?” asked Tim’s mother. “No! There will be plenty of time for Tim to show you his coin collections once the missiles have stopped!”

  “And the Tempus!” shouted Julie as Tim hustled back the hallway, trailed by his frustrated and worried mother.

  He collected his coins from the display case on his desk and shoved them into his pocket, along with the second Dominus Temporis, which he was now responsible for. He heard Julie’s voice as she spoke urgently on the phone down the hallway.

  “Yeah… Rose! Listen! You need to get Billy and meet us somewhere… Yeah… sure, the McDonald’s parking lot is fine. Have him bring that stupid betting information he was talking about, I don’t have any better idea… Yeah, all right. See you soon!”

  “You’re not going anywhere!” Tim’s mother, now more worried, proclaimed.

  “I can’t let you leave right now,” said Tim’s father gravely, blocking the door.

  Tim and Julie approached the door, but it was clear that Tim’s father was not budging. He pointed down the stairs, indicating that was where the two teens needed to go.

  This was going to be a problem, but then Tim’s sister did something that surprised him. She charged up the stairs and said, “No! I’m leaving, too!” And she rushed toward the back door, giving Tim a wink as she passed. Tim had little idea what had caused her to decide to help him out, but it worked. Her father had to leave the door to catch her.

  Tim and Julie slipped out the door as his mother tried to grab Tim’s arm and his father yelled from behind them, “Why would you choose the middle of a missile strike in a thunderstorm to be rebellious for the first time ever!?”

  They outran his mother and opened the doors to Julie’s car.

  “Sorry Mom! I’ve got to go!” Tim said as he locked the door. His mother began to pound on his window.

  Julie started the engine and began to back away from Tim’s mother. As they left the development, she stopped trying to chase the car and went back into the house.

  “What’s going on?” asked Tim, as he brushed some water out of his bangs. “You think we should leave now? We don’t have nearly enough information to fix what happened.”

  Julie took her eyes off the road for just long enough to give Tim an urgent look. “We have to,” she said.

  Just as she said the word, “have”, Tim saw a sight he had never seen before. He could not see it too well in the semi-darkness of the thundery evening, but he could see it, all the same. There was a missile about the size of a school bus making its way across the sky. He had only ever seen airborne missiles on the news. He saw this one clearly as it hit a convenience store about half a mile up the road.

  “Don’t you understand?” she asked him.

  “Understand what?” he responded.

  “They’re coming after us, somehow. You said yourself you’ve only ever been close to a missile strike a few times, right?” asked Julie.

  “Sure,” agreed Tim.

  “How close is close?” she pressed.

  “There had been about three or four in town that I knew of, before last Friday.”

  “Counting that one we just saw, there have been six in town in the last 20 minutes,” Julie informed him grimly.

  “Six?” asked Tim. He thought for a moment. “But the missile defense system is down. There are bound to be more hits.”

  “Just listen.” Julie turned up the volume on her radio. “It’s coming from down south a ways, because the stations to the north are all in the dark… One of the blasts must have hit a local power line. Anyway…”

  This radio personality was saying, “--upwards of 30 strikes in all of Pennsylvania in the last half hour, six have been within a three mile radius of George Washington High School, towards the northern end of our listening area.”

  “But… That’s us,” said Tim, flabbergasted. “The hardest hit area in the state, it sounds like, right around us.”

  Julie nodded. “It’s got to be the Emperors.”

  “They know who we are?” asked Tim.

  “I guess,” said Julie with a half-hearted shrug. “Or who I am, anyway. If Hopkins was able to find me in the first place, I must be famous enough for the Emperors to have recognized me. Maybe I had showed up on a video-camera or something in 2347. At least, that’s the best I could come up with. But they could have the place bugged, right? I mean, we have the technology to do that today. And we’re dealing with people who can actually travel through time!”

  “So, you figure we go now because…” said Tim, hesitating to say what he wanted to say next.

  “Because it could be now or never,” confirmed Julie with a slight nod.

  “Rose and Billy are on their way to the McDonalds?” confirmed Tim.

  “Yep… We should be there in… four minutes, I suppose. No traffic out here… Thanks to the raid, I guess,” Julie said.

  “Right. Most people would have pulled off to a shelter by now. There’s one every four or so miles on major highways,” Tim said.

  Julie shook her head, bewildered. “We didn’t have anything like that in my timeline. I mean, we had a war, a new round of the draft every month, but no missile bunkers.”

  “Sounds like a great place,” said Tim with a sarcastic eye-roll. Then, his eyes widened as he glanced in the rearview mirror. They had just gotten on the highway. The McDonalds was two exits down. There were no other cars in sight, except for one. “Holy crap! Is that a cop?”

  The question seemed ridiculous by the time it came out of Tim’s mouth. The lights began to flash, and the siren blared over the patter of the rain on the windshield and the sound of the radio.

  Julie stepped on the gas. “Can’t risk it,” she said, seeing Tim’s surprise at her reaction. “Remember, in 1865, the Emperors got some corrupt cops to do their bidding. If they’re here now, they might have gotten to this guy, too.”

  “You figure we can outrun him?” asked Tim.

  “We’ve got to try!” said Julie, clearly getting frustrated as the speedometer hit seventy-five and the cop was not getting any further away.

  “Do you think they know who they’re chasing?” asked Tim. He wasn’t sure whether to be skeptical or scared.

  “I don’t want to find out. We’ve got to get to that parking lot and leave right away. I think Rose understands that and hopefully she’s talking to Billy… Our stuff’s in the trunk. Since we’re breaking the law anyway, do you want to get it out of the trunk?”

  “There’s access from the backseat?” asked Tim as he took off his seatbelt.

  “No, you idiot, I want you to climb on the roof and get it!” Julie said, taking half a second out of shifting her gaze between the road and her rearview mirror to throw Tim a sidelong glare.

  “Yikes,” said Tim, as he began climbing over the armrest between their two chairs to get to the back seat. It was a tight fit and he had to keep himself from hitting his head on the ceiling as he crawled awkwardly over.

  “Sorry I called you an idiot,” apologized Julie.

  “It’s okay,” Tim replied as he pulled the seatback down to reveal the trunk behind it. “You can make it up to me another time.”

  “What? You want me to kiss you again and have you ignore it?” asked Julie testily. A glance at the speedometer showed that they were going eighty. In the rain. Without a seatbelt. Forget the missiles, Tim was starting to think he would die right now.

  “I’m sorry, I
didn’t mean--” said Tim.

  He was cut off by Julie screaming, “Holy crap!” from the front seat. “Hold on!” She pressed on the brakes and the car began to skid. There was a car a few hundred yards ahead of them, doing a reasonable forty or so miles an hour. Julie swore, let off the brakes, and swerved to avoid the car, going into the left lane. Because of the car’s high speed, she hit the median and ricocheted off of it. Luckily, the car in front of them pulled over, so Julie was able to swerve between both lanes as she recovered her bearings.

  “I didn’t mean--” Tim started again.

  “Now is really not the best time… let’s get through this first, alright?”

  “Yeah,” said Tim as Julie slowed down a little bit. The golden arches of McDonalds were already visible a little ways off the highway. Julie gripped the steering wheel hard as she broke by increments. She seemed split between the desire to outrun the cop and the need to keep at least one or two wheels on the ground while making the upcoming turn.

  “Screw it! This is going to get bumpy!” Julie cautioned. Tim had about half a second to figure out what Julie could possibly mean before she veered off the road and onto the grass. Clearly, she was trying to meet the exit road a little further along than the road pavers had intended.

  Tim, still in the backseat, got the worst of the jostling.

  “You got the stuff ready? I hope they’re already there when we get there!” Julie yelled. The car went airborne a couple of times as they sped toward the macadam.

  Tim was clutching the bundle of assorted men’s and women’s clothes from the 1910s against his chest and gripped the newspaper in his right hand.

  “Yeah… I’m ready,” said Tim, his muscles tensed as he watched the police car behind them. It was still going plenty fast, but was sticking to the road, so that was lucky at least.

  There was relative quiet for a moment while Julie focused on the road. Tim was able to catch another snippet of the radio broadcast.

  “--Two more missile strikes in the GW High School region brings the total in that area to eight in the last half hour. This is definitely an unprecedented missile event, brought on, of course, by the worst malfunction in the missile defense system since the program has gone online. Other portions of the state have been hit, mostly in larger cities, but George Washington High School is in the suburbs, indicating that the Soviets are intentionally targeting a suburban area-”

  At this point, Julie finally made it back onto the macadam.

  There was a red light coming up, but there were no cars in the intersection, so Julie didn’t bother slowing down.

  “Thank goodness for McDonalds always being right off the freeway!” said Julie as they spotted the parking lot, and… Rose’s car was there.

  The cop car was right on their tail as they pulled into the lot. Something in either the reckless way Julie was driving or the squeal of the siren clearly tipped Rose and Billy off that something urgent was happening, because they jumped out of the car and into the rain before Julie had even put the car into park.

  As soon as she did, Julie and Tim jumped out of the car.

  They hadn’t had time to think about the specifics of initiating the time jump. That was the problem, Tim guessed, with pushing your trip to the year 1916 from sometime this week to immediately on the spur of the moment. But he was the one holding the newspaper as the four of them assembled between the two cars.

  He had one of the Domini Temporis as well, so he said, “I got this.” The cop car squealed to a stop in the parking lot and turned off its siren.

  The officer got out of his car with his weapon already drawn. It crossed Tim’s mind that this was rather excessive. Sure, they had just led the cop on a high-speed chase in the middle of a missile raid and a thunderstorm, but they clearly weren’t armed. Tim had half a mind to be angry about the cop’s eagerness to point a gun at him, but he did his best to forget it as he focused his imagination on where this newspaper might have been on the morning of November 3, 1916.

  It would be morning, somewhere in the suburbs, maybe, where the newspaper could have been delivered to a family in a development on the outskirts of San Francisco. At least, Tim certainly hoped that that was where this particular newspaper had been delivered. If it had come from some newspaper vendor in the middle of the city, the four teens would have a rather difficult time explaining their appearance out of thin air in front of a newsstand.

  Tim focused on how deserted the area around the newspaper was in the early morning hours, because even if it was from a stand, there would be some time during the early morning when not many people were around. He thought about the graying horizon in the pre-dawn, just after the papers hit the pavement, thrown by some paperboy on a bicycle.

  He focused on the idea of tension mounting to find out who would be the next president. Would it be Wilson, who was famous for keeping the nation out of war? Wilson’s peace-mongering solutions irritated those businessmen who needed England and France to win the war, confused those who thought the Austria-Hungarian Empire was an outdated relic of the Middle Ages, like the Ottoman Empire fighting alongside them, and vexed those who thought the Kaiser in Germany was a petty tyrant who needed to know his place in the world.

  Tim focused on all this, hoping that his concentration on the time that the newspaper came from would make up for the fact that he had no idea where it had come from.

  And he hoped that it would work soon, because the officer was demanding that they put their hands on the top of their heads and drop whatever it was they were holding.

  Tim had closed his eyes to concentrate on his destination, so his first sign that it had worked was that the rain stopped abruptly.

  It was a perfect getaway, except for the fact that they weren’t around to see the expression on the officer’s face when they vanished into thin air in front of him.

  Chapter 13

  San Francisco

  When Tim opened his eyes, he was in a suburb of San Francisco in the early hours of November 3, 1916. The light on the horizon showed that dawn was about to arrive, but it was not here yet. The gas streetlamps lining the road provided the light Tim needed to see his friends.

  It was dry this morning in San Francisco, so the newspaper, which was now on the stoop of the house they stood in front of, was not even damp. On the other hand, the four teens’ hair, clothes, and skin, were still wet from the rain they had been standing in.

  “Just keeps getting weirder and weirder,” Billy said, shaking his hand.

  “Right,” said Julie. “Well… I hate to say it, but now’s probably not a great time to chicken out. If you need to, though, remember that we have two Domini now, so if you wanted to go back… anybody who wanted to go back… you could do it now if you need to.”

  “What, and get bombed to bits in our own time?” asked Billy. “No thanks. I’ll stay here and try to figure out how to… get Wilson re-elected? That’s our mission, eh?”

  “Yeah, although it ought to sort itself out if we can stop the Emperors of Time from setting off that bomb,” answered Rose. “But I’m still disoriented from our sudden change in plans. You really think we can figure out how to stop the bomb from here… from now?”

  “It’s our best option,” Julie said. “I don’t know how, but those missiles were definitely coming for us.”

  Rose nodded. “Agreed, but that isn’t going to make things any easier.”

  “Listen guys, let’s take this one step at a time,” suggested Billy. “Remember, we’re in the game right now… This isn’t a drill.”

  Not even Tim could misunderstand this particular sports analogy. And a simple look around was enough to confirm it was true. The funny thing was that the buildings looked normal enough on the surface. But the houses definitely weren’t cookie cutter, like the developments Tim was used to. Each one had a different style, and the one they were in front of looked downright eccentric to Tim. The roof sloped down from the third floor, all the way down to the top of the f
irst. Billy probably could have touched the lowest part of the roof, and then there were two other triangular roofs, one perpendicular to the main roof and another running parallel to it for a part of its length. There was a chimney, too, which made good sense, since Tim had heard it could get fairly chilly and damp in San Francisco. And the house had windows. Lots and lots of windows.

  “Right, well… maybe step one is changing into clothes that aren’t such an anachronism,” suggested Tim. Julie was carrying the bundle of clothes from the car, and in the meantime, they were all wearing terribly 21st century looking jeans and t-shirts.

  “Hmm… Maybe out back?” suggested Rose.

  “Sounds good,” said Julie, and they started walking around the house to the back side of the residential block they were on. At the back of the house, they were in a green space between the backs of two rows of eclectic houses. They found a place where they could press themselves against the back of the house, at a spot where there was no window, to minimize the risk of being seen.

  “I guess if we can trust each other to travel through time together, we can trust each other enough to look the other way while we change?” Tim asked.

  “Why, are you shy?” teased Julie. She giggled at Tim’s embarrassed expression. “Yeah, we can trust each other.”

  That being said, Tim was maybe a little tempted to sneak a glance at Julie, but he didn’t. After all, he would have been embarrassed if Julie had looked at him… Of course, he had been embarrassed when she had kissed him, too.

  Within a few moments, each of the teens had put on their 1916 costumes.

  Billy clapped his hands. “Right. So I’ve got my list of sports bets. Tim, you got our cash?”

  “A grand total of fifty-three cents, in my pocket,” Tim acknowledged, nodding. “I’ve got my Dominus in my pocket, too.”

  “I’ve got my Dominus… no pocket though,” Julie said. “I’ll put it in my sock!”