“So…” said Julie, casually, as if they weren’t about to risk their lives. “Would you rather go skydiving or scuba-diving?”
“Hmmm… skydiving, I guess. You’re less likely to get eaten by a shark,” said Tim as he tried to avoid thinking of the fact that he could very well be getting shot at in an hour or two.
“Yes… If you were eaten by a shark while skydiving, that would be quite a news story. I’d rather scuba dive, though, personally. Have you seen some of the pictures they take down there? All the different colors of fish and everything. Amazing. Plus… who gets eaten by sharks while scuba-diving?”
“Well, I mean… I’m not familiar with the stats or anything, I’m just saying, it’s scary,” said Tim, slightly defensively.
“Fair enough, I guess… Okay, now you ask me one,” said Julie.
“I know how the game works… I’m thinking,” said Tim. “All right… Would you rather live a thousand years and be bored for a hundred of those years, or live for a hundred years and never be bored for a single minute?”
“Hmmm,” said Julie… “Now there’s a conundrum. Although wait, am I not bored because I’m always amused or entertained, or am I not bored because I’m scared witless half the time?”
So they played would-you-rather to pass the time. It sort of kept their minds off the problem at hand, so Tim had to hand that to Julie at least.
When the lock on the door clicked at 5:30, Tim’s heart nearly stopped beating. They had locked the door from the inside as well, just to make sure that the folks outside would have to knock. They did.
Tim looked at Julie as she struck a match.
“Just a moment,” said Tim.
Apparently whoever was on the other side of the door didn’t feel like waiting just a moment, though. This was fair, Tim guessed, given that they were essentially security thugs, not pizza delivery men. The door handle turned, but the deadbolt held the door shut.
“Just a second, I’m… I’m not dressed!” Tim tried.
The door handle stopped turning for a moment. Tim positioned himself right next to the door, with the taser in his right hand and the can of pepper spray in his left. He glanced back at Julie. She had lit one of the pieces of paper that contained Russell’s note and tossed it onto the bed. The sheet didn’t seem to want to catch.
Julie ran to the bathroom and grabbed the roll of toilet paper. She made a motion with her hand that suggested she could use another couple seconds to bring the plan to fruition. No freaking kidding, thought Tim. The door handle rattled again, accompanied by a muffled voice from the other side of the door saying something like “I haven’t got all day here, kid.”
“I’ve… I’ve lost my pants!” said Tim. Julie, who was currently feeding the fire scraps of toilet paper to keep it going burst out laughing. “So I’ll just be a moment!” Tim said.
That was when someone started kicking the door.
Julie abandoned the smoldering fire on the bed, leaving it to catch or not on its own, and meanwhile set the roll of toilet paper itself on fire, emptied one of the pillowcases of its pillow, and dropped the now flaming roll of toilet paper into the pillowcase. The bottom of the pillowcase began to smoke and soon caught fire.
“Whoo! Ready!” said Julie urgently.
Tim unlocked the deadbolt with two fingers of his left hand that weren’t occupied with holding the mace and then stood ready for whatever was about to come.
Tim tazed the first guy he saw, and regretted it almost immediately. Not that the guy didn’t deserve it or anything. He definitely did, he was one of the thugs who had originally brought the four teens up to the room. But all he was carrying at the moment was a big platter of pasta, his gun holstered at his side. So when Tim pulled the trigger and the two little electrodes shot out of the cartridge and into the man’s chest, causing him to drop the pasta and begin spasming uncontrollably, Tim could have kicked himself. He had forgotten that tasers like this were generally one-use deals, unless you were holding them directly on a person, and only some tasers had that ability. He had no idea whether this was one of them and didn’t much have the time to find out.
He switched the taser to his other hand in order to keep the trigger engaged as he stepped out of the doorway. There was another man in the hallway who was, luckily, too surprised by the recent turn of events to aim the weapon he grasped in his right hand, still held relaxed at his side.
As Tim stepped out into the hall, the other man raised his weapon. Tim was quicker with the mace, though. Thankful for the element of surprise, he sprayed the man in the eyes.
Simultaneously, Julie ran screaming out of the room, holding a flaming pillowcase in one hand and a can of mace in the other. Both the men who had been patrolling the hallway were screaming now, too, and all the commotion pretty quickly prompted one of the people in the room next to them to open the door.
Julie threw her flaming pillowcase down the hallway rather than into the room. This was a good choice, Tim realized, given that their goal was to cause a fire on the floor and keep it evacuated for the rest of the day, but not so much to blow the entire hotel building sky-high by letting fire come in contact with the materials that the Emperors’ hired help were using. Tim further realized that maybe this fact was something they should have discussed before the plan went into action, but hey… You can’t think of everything.
Tim dropped the taser, which stopped having an effect once he let go of the trigger, and sprayed mace into the second guy’s eyes as well.
In a valiant but misguided attempt to take control of the situation, the first guy Tim had maced let off two shots with his gun, even though he couldn’t see. The first bullet blew a hole in the wall of the hallway. The second left a hole in the arm of his comrade, who began wailing even louder than he had been and commanded in an exclamation not sparing profanities that the other guy hold his fire.
Luckily, only two bomb makers appeared. Julie sprayed one of them in the eyes before he had a chance to even draw a weapon.
Tim had a brief moment where he saw the scene from the perspective of the other guy running out of the room.
The captives had just escaped, his associates were blinded with a technology that he didn’t understand (pepper-spray would not be invented until later in the century), there was a fire developing not thirty feet from where he had been working on making a bomb, and the guy who Julie had just maced had now taken to randomly firing off shots from his gun. Overall, this was undoubtedly more than this guy had signed up for, and the terror in his eyes confirmed it.
He ran down the hotel’s main stairs, screaming. “Fire! The whole building’s going to explode!”
In order to actually prevent that, though, Tim and Julie walked into the bomb-making room, leaving the other three thugs (the third had finally exhausted his ammunition, without hurting anyone other than the wall of the hallway) to grope their way toward the staircase.
On a table, the bomb was almost complete. It was a suitcase bomb, just like the one from the Preparedness Day Bombing earlier that year. The suitcase was on the table, not yet packed with explosives, but it soon would have been. The canisters filled with explosives were still open, sitting right beside the suitcase. A quick glance inside them showed they were packed with sticks of dynamite and shrapnel. Tim recalled that was the most gruesome thing about the Preparedness Day bombing. That it had been packed with shrapnel to make sure maximum injury would be done to those in the vicinity. Tim figured that Russell could write whatever BS he wanted to in his letters about how everything the Emperors of Time did was for the good of humanity, but he could never agree with anyone who would do something like that, even in imitation of an earlier bomb.
Julie grabbed one of the canisters, looking around to make sure there were no more explosives in the room anywhere.
Even in the brief time they stood looking, with Tim having picked up the second canister, they could hear a siren coming from nearby. This was good. With any luck, the floor would b
e sealed off and the thugs, who were hopefully the only workers the Emperors had acquired in 1916, would be apprehended for starting the fire. After all, Julie and Tim would be gone by then, and the thugs would no doubt be telling a crazy story about how they had been electrocuted, blinded, and otherwise harassed by a couple of teenagers that nobody else could see. They might even be sent to a mental institution.
The Emperors wouldn’t want to get their hands dirty personally, wouldn’t want to risk getting caught by the 20th century police or otherwise hurt or implicated. So they would run for now and try a different way of changing the timeline.
They had won. At least this round.
“Shall we?” Tim asked, pulling the Dominus Temporis out of his pocket.
Chapter 21
Back Home
An unintended consequence of their plan was that Tim and Julie were soon standing in the middle of a nearly abandoned McDonalds parking lot wearing clothes from 1916. Luckily, no one saw them. There were a few cars in the parking lot. The McDonalds was open, but far from busy. Tim remembered that they had arrived in San Francisco at about six AM after leaving home at nine pm one night. If the same amount of time had elapsed since they left as had in San Francisco, then it should be about 9 am on a Friday morning now, hardly McDonalds’ busiest time.
That small blessing aside, they were still without wallets, cell-phones, or really anything else useful.
“Did it work?” asked Tim.
“I dunno,” said Julie. “I mean, this McDonalds being here isn’t super-promising, but maybe a McDonalds is fated to be here in every timeline.”
They looked around to see if they could see any buildings they didn’t recognize. Unfortunately, McDonalds had always been rather the most memorable building off this particular highway exit, so Tim couldn’t really remember whether that gym had been across the street before or not. And of course, Julie was new to this timeline anyway.
“So… I’ve got 12 cents in Indian Head pennies… wanna see if they’ll sell us a mcnugget?” asked Tim.
Julie laughed. “It’s a shame I left my purse in another century, though. I am kind of hungry.”
“Well, next time, we know we need to eat before saving the world. Or trying to save the world. I’m still not clear on whether we’ve actually done anything, said Tim.
Julie frowned. “We need to find Billy and Rose,” she said. “How on Earth did they operate without any of their stuff?”
“They probably went home first,” said Tim. “And then Billy probably called his uncle. They could have gotten the mace from anywhere. Heck, they could have taken it from a pharmacy without paying… There’s no kind of shoplifting like the kind where you get to travel through time to do it.”
Julie nodded. “You wouldn’t even have to walk through the door. Well… maybe their houses would be the best place to check for them. Who lives closer?”
“Assuming that their houses are in the same place… Billy, right?” asked Tim.
On the way out of the parking lot, there was a dumpster full of fast-food refuse. Tim didn’t feel great about the idea of throwing dynamite in a dumpster, but then he also didn’t love the idea of carrying it around, so he tossed his in as they passed, and Julie followed suit. They walked on foot out of the McDonalds’ parking lot and along the side of the highway exit, looking like a couple of anachronistic hitchhikers.
Before they had gotten too far, a car rolled up beside them. The person in the passenger seat whistled at them.
Thankfully, that person turned out to be Rose, now wearing her normal 21st century clothes. “Do you historical re-enactors need a ride?” she asked cheerfully.
Julie and Tim got in the back of the car without actually answering.
“Well, hello, Timothy, July,” Rose said.
“Did it work?” asked Julie as she buckled up.
Billy laughed. “Well, something happened,” he confirmed. “We had a weird night. We called my uncle as soon as we got here, but that was already midnight. But my uncle’s weird, so he was pretty obliging… ‘Sometimes you just need a taser’ seems to be one of my uncle’s life philosophies. It’s good though, because if he hadn’t answered his phone, we were going to have to break into his house in the middle of the night, and I wouldn’t want to risk seeing what happens to people my uncle finds unexpectedly in his house at night.”
Tim laughed, “Me neither, from what you’ve said about him.”
Billy nodded. “But after we put the stuff in the floorboard, we’d been killing time watching television in my basement. About five minutes ago, the station changed on its own. And then I noticed my Mom was on the couch across from Rose and me, and she never watches tv at nine on a weekday, she should be at work. She screamed when she saw us, I think for some reason other than that we had appeared out of thin air. She got her phone out and started calling… I think it was the police. I don’t know, though, we kind of got out of there as quick as we could. Luckily, my Mom still keeps her keys hanging up by the door in this timeline, which is how we got the ride.”
They were on the highway now. “So where are we going?” asked Julie curiously.
“Hadn’t really thought that far ahead yet. The main plan was to find you guys and pick you back up. I will say I don’t think we should go back to my house just yet, though,” Billy said.
“Agreed,” said Rose. “His Mom was definitely freaked out to see us.”
On the road ahead of them, there was an electronic billboard, like a giant television screen on the side of the road.
In big red letters at the top of the sign, it read “WANTED: FUGITIVES FROM JUSTICE!!”
Below the letters, there were pictures of four faces. They belonged to Billy, Tim, Julie, and Rose.
About the Author
James Wilson Penn has an MA in History, which he now uses in part to make convincing Alternative History Time Travel books. His second book, Fugitives of Time, is now available from Amazon Kindle. You can follow James Wilson Penn on Twitter @JWilsonPenn, and visit the website at http://weebly.com.
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