CHARLES K GODFREY
Mechanicsburg, PA USA
CHAPTER ONE
Friday, July 3, 1863
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
It was a sultry 90-degree day. The sky rained hot metal down on the men crossing the Emmitsburg Road. Double canister tore through the Confederate rank and file every step of the way. Pickett’s Charge was in its final minutes as the Confederates dashed toward the stone wall at the area known as the Angle. In the oppressive heat of the day and the dense smoke of cannon fire, Armistead’s Confederate brigade passed through the two decimated brigades of Garnett and Kemper that were at the front.
With the stench of sulfur in their mouths and nostrils, the men of the Ninth Virginia Regiment headed for the stone wall, right where Lieutenant Cushing’s Fourth U.S. Light Artillery was located. Lieutenant Cushing had his men push the two cannons down to the stone wall to greet the oncoming Confederates. Sergeant Fuger was at his side and in the process of loading the guns when Lt. Cushing was hit in the groin by a piece of shrapnel. Lt. Cushing fell against the gun and slid to the ground, holding his wound.
Sergeant Fuger rushed to his side. “Lon, you okay?” He saw Lt. Cushing’s guts protruding from his wound and he called for the medical stewards. When the stewards got there, Cushing waved them off.
“Please, Fred, help me up,” Cushing asked.
Sergeant Fuger helped him to his feet and with the Confederates coming over the wall, Lt. Cushing grabbed his sergeant by the lapel. “Give them double canister.”
“Let ‘em have it!” Sergeant Fuger yelled.
Unbeknownst to Cushing, the gunners were killed before they could get the shots off. Seeing the bayonets coming his way, Lt. Cushing yelled, “Fire the damn–“
At that very moment, a Minié ball entered his mouth and blew out the back of his head. He fell from the sergeant’s arms to the ground, dead.
After witnessing the death of Lt. Cushing, Sergeant Fuger turned his attention to the Confederates coming over the wall. He pulled the lanyard. The discharge was devastating. Hell seemed to be cut loose on the remaining Confederates inside the Angle.
The smoke was so thick and the noise so loud that confusion gripped the battlefield. The two sides struggled and fought in deadly hand-to-hand combat. Men picked up rocks and threw them at each other. Cushing’s battery was overrun and the Confederate flags were going up over the stone wall.
Union General Webb, seeing the hole punched into the lines, put in reinforcements at the Angle and the tide soon turned. The Confederates were driven back. One by one, the men in butternut and gray were on the retreat.
The battle was over, but the carnage remained. Smoke boiled up from the battlefield along with the sickening stench of death that filled the air.
Wounded men from both sides begged for water, while the horses writhed in their death rattles. It was the true picture of butchery and death. Pickett’s Charge was over.
Saturday Morning, June 14, 2014
Atlanta, Georgia
Sarah Peterson, a lovely young woman of twenty-four was awakened from a sound sleep at three in the morning. Michael, her husband, woke up gasping for air. He could still hear the cries of the soldiers echoing in his mind.
“It’s okay, Michael,” Sarah reassured him. Mike had been having these recurring nightmares ever since he and his friends got back from the 150th reenactment of Gettysburg, on that fateful July Fourth weekend in 2013.
We were supposed to have a weekend of fun. Why did I have to explore that old barn? Why did I make Gordy read that spell? Mike’s guilt weighed heavily on his mind.
He could see Gordon standing beside a Union cannon and it was pointed right at me and Ray. There was fire in his eyes when he pulled the lanyard. Men dying all around.
Sarah could feel Mike’s pain and pulled him close. Mike welcomed her caresses as they cuddled. He relaxed his body, but his mind raced on.
“I heard Ray scream in pain. I saw his leg broken by a Minié ball. God help me.”
“It’s over now.” Sarah said.
“Ray was left a cripple and forced to leave the Fire Department. He blames me for the whole thing.”
“Oh, he doesn’t blame you.” Sarah held him close.
Mike was so grateful, that Sarah, being from that time period, decided to come back to the future with him and be his wife.
“You’ll see. When we get together on the Fourth of July, things will be just like old times.”
“You mean the Fifth of July,” Mike corrected her.
“That’s right, the Fifth, but I still like celebrating Independence Day on the Fourth,” Sarah said.
“Just that the South won the war on the Fifth,” Mike said.
“Can’t forget our new history, can we?”
Mike looked at her with deep concern. “I pointed my rifle at a general and pulled the trigger. We found out that it was Hancock, I think I changed the course of history.”
“You were fighting for your life. You didn’t know who he was. Besides, could the death of one general change history?”
“That’s why we’re having this party with only Gordon, his wife, and Ray. Gordy said he had some information for me about our adventures time traveling.”
“What kind of information?”
“He didn’t want to say it over the phone. He wanted to tell me face to face.”
“Sounds serious,” Sarah said.
Mike pulled her near. He liked the way her strawberry blonde hair lay softly on her shoulders.
“Might be,” he said, as he looked into her light blue eyes. Mike smelled her perfume of lavender and leaned his warm muscular frame against her fair naked body. She pressed back looking into his steel blue eyes. They embraced in a kiss. There was no need for words between them. Mike was instantly ready for her and she welcomed his advances. After the passion of love making they fell asleep.
* * *
When they awoke, the clock on the nightstand read 8:31 A.M. Sarah leaned over and kissed him.
Mike woke to see the most beautiful face in the world. “You are stunning.”
“I need to get started.”
“Started?”
“I’m going on an excursion today. My girlfriends are going to take me shopping. I’ve tried to go by myself, but the world seems too fast for me. I can’t ask directions when I’m downtown. Not with those phone thing-a-ma-jigs stuck in everyone’s ears. All they do is look down at the ground when they’re walking. They seem to talk to themselves. They’re all in such a hurry.” She spoke in a cadence indicative of the 19th century.
“Tell me how you really feel,” Mike joked.
“I’ve got to get an outfit for the party on the Fifth.”
“Use the computer,” Mike said.
“I still can’t use that thing. You show me what buttons to push, and things pop up like magic. The next day, I’ve forgotten what buttons.”
Mike laughed.
“It’s not funny,” Sarah complained.
“Oh, yes it is,” Mike said.
Sarah hit him with a pillow and got up. “How ‘bout I make breakfast this morning?”
Mike jumped out of bed and started his morning rituals. He leaned out the bathroom door.
“Do you think Ray got his invitation?”
CHAPTER TWO
Monday Morning, June 16, 2014
In Baltimore, Maryland, 23-year-old Gordon Smart had just finished a 14-hour shift at the hospital, where he was the youngest intern they’d ever had. He came to the library following a clue he received in a letter in the mail from a man who called himself “Zombie” a few weeks ago. It said:
Go to the oldest library in Baltimore. In the history section, beyond the books. The answers you seek rests betw
een the pages of the only copy of your lost history. Zombie.
Gordon went to the downtown branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. He walked straight to the history section and started looking behind the books. Tired, he took his glasses off and rubbed his fingers through his thick black hair. Then he looked around the room to see if anyone were watching him. He placed his glasses back on his face and searched another shelf. Weary from working all night and now searching for answers, he started to daydream.
Gordon had his own memories of the 150th reenactment of Gettysburg. He had one pleasant memory, meeting his great, great, grandfather, but the rest of the reenactment had been a nightmare that Gordon had thought would never end.
I was tortured, locked in a basement, and put on trial as a spy. They wanted to hang me. The thought made him shiver. I never want to go through that again. His heart was racing and his body started to perspire.
Gordon snapped out of it when he felt a wooden panel at the back of a shelf. He removed a few books and shoved the rest to the side to have a look. The panel acted as a false back. To his surprise, there was a book.
“What do we have here?” he mumbled.
He removed the book and saw that it had a label pasted to the cover that read, Lost Nation.
“Holy shit,” he said. He looked around and got quiet. He put the panel back in place and sat down. It was the history before he and his friends interrupted the timeline. He looked between the pages of the book and found a hand-written note. The heading read: Ross Winan’s Workshop.
The Confederacy won the war on July 5, 1863.
Instead of retreating from Gettysburg, the Confederates redeployed on the high ground between the Union army and Washington. They used a top-secret weapon to destroy the Army of the Potomac.
Co #27 Br #35
Si #14 U-238
V #23 Pt #78
What the hell does this mean? Gordon wondered.
Suddenly, Gordon’s iPhone vibrated. He jerked up from the book. It was his preset alarm to remind him it was time to go home.
Fast hour. Gordon got up from the table and placed the note in his pants pocket and placed the book back in its hiding place.
“I’ll figure this out later.”
As he walked toward the exit he noticed two men in gray suits wearing dark sunglasses, sitting at a table and watching him go by. They both sat on the same side of the table, facing inside the building. They reminded Gordon of two Doberman Pinschers.
* * *
Gordon got in his car and drove home. He stopped at the mailbox outside a high-rise condominium in Federal Hill to pick up the mail. Then he noticed a black car parked across the street, motor running. Remembering the two men at the library, he got the creeps. He grabbed his mail from the box, placed it on the seat, then drove into the garage and parked in his normal marked space. With his hands full, Gordon got to the elevator. He heard a scraping noise in the garage.
“Is someone there?” he asked softly.
No one answered.
Gordon went into a state of paranoia. He was searching his pockets for the keys to his apartment. When the elevator door opened. He jumped in and hurriedly pressed the button to shut the door. The door seemed to shut deliberately slow, raising his anxiety level even higher. A neighbor came from around the corner.
“Hey—hold that door!”
But it was too late. The door shut before Gordon could react. When the elevator door opened on his floor, Gordon felt bad for not opening the door for his neighbor, but he felt somewhat better that he was on his own floor. When he got to his door he fumbled for his keys. He heard a thud down the hallway. His anxiety rose, but he thought it might be the neighbor. He struggled to get his keys in the lock, dropping the letters. He bent to pick them up and noticed a letter from Mike and Sarah. Again, no one was there.
Feeling stupid for worrying over nothing, he calmed down, but still looked around to see anyone were watching him. Now skeptical of his own thoughts, he opened the door and went inside. For good measure, he locked the door behind him. He turned, and there was Jenny waiting for him in a cotton blue-and-white summer dress. “Hi, there. Hard night at work?”
“Nah, not too bad,” Gordon tried not to sound nervous. The two of them stared into each other’s eyes with affection. Jenny had beautiful green eyes, and Gordon loved staring at them.
“Being an intern and not a doctor yet, they expect a lot out of you the first year,” Jenny noted.
Gordon leaned in and kissed Jenny on her soft, supple lips. “I know they do,” he said, trying to keep his voice on an even pitch. “I stopped off at the library before coming home.”
For a while now, every time he’d try to have a conversation about time travel, she got upset. When they met at the hospital the first time, Gordon knew she was the woman for him. No way did he ever want to bring something up to drive her away. For now, he would keep the new information in the letter his little secret.
“Let me guess—time travel?” Jenny said.
“Oh, did I mention that before?”
“Yes, your full disclosure speech to me before we got married. I thought it was crazy then, and I still do. Look, I like to dress the period and reenact with the best of them, but there’s no way, by the laws of physics, that you can travel back in time.”
Gordon peered into her emerald-green eyes. “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s important for me to find out what happened.”
Jenny frowned and her bottom lip turned out. “So tell me then, why do you want to change things now? Germany is a great superpower. The world is at peace. What more do you want?”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t change a thing. I like this life, and I love you.” Gordon swallowed hard.
Jenny took a deep breath and was calm. “You’re still convinced that you and your friends, with a little help from a witch, somehow went back in time and messed up history’s timeline by having the Confederacy win the war?”
“Well, not necessarily.” Gordon’s thoughts went to the note. “There’s a possibility that something else caused the change.”
“Nothing changed our history. Trust me,” Jenny said.
“How would you know? You were born here.”
“So what’s this new theory?” Jenny asked.
“That’s why I went to the library. I was trying to find out.”
“You’ll find nothing, because there’s nothing to find.”
Gordon didn’t argue. He figured he’d better wait for the right moment to tell her about the book and show her the letter.
Jenny turned and walked into the kitchen. “Good Lord, first it’s witchcraft, now it’s... You do know there is no such thing as witchcraft?”
Gordon followed her into the kitchen. “Wait until you meet Sarah.”
“Oh, that’s right, the witch. I didn’t notice her pointy hat when I saw her at their wedding.”
Gordon smiled. “Seriously, you didn’t have a chance to really talk to her and get to know her.”
“What am I to do with you?” Jenny said, dismayed at his persistence.
Gordon placed the mail on the table. He picked up the letter from Mike and Sarah and showed it to Jenny. “You may get to know her sooner than you think,” he said with a smile, then opened it.
“Two first class tickets to Atlanta! You ready for a... Fifth of July weekend blast?” A big smile came across Gordon’s face. “Always weird when I say the Fifth, rather than the Fourth.”
“Well, it is our Independence Day,” she said.
Gordon cringed. She didn’t know. He shook it off and said, “Can’t wait to see Mike again. This is going to be great.”
“Are you going to bring up time travel at the party?”
“Not at the party on Saturday, but a few nights before on Thursday.”
“I’m married to a three-year-old.”
“So we’re going?”
“Of course.”
“Yes...” Gordon jumped with joy.
“I think you and
your friends, Mike and Ray, have wild imaginations, and I will take great pleasure in proving you wrong. You all have been playing in the sandbox much too long.”
Meanwhile, at the apartment directly across the street from them, two men wearing black uniforms watched Gordon and Jenny with binoculars.
CHAPTER THREE
Wednesday Morning, June 18, 2014
Mike found himself with Gordon. They were huddled around Ray while the barn burned like a hellish inferno all around them. He looked up at the ceiling and saw thick reddish orange and black boiling flames. The heat became so intense and the smoke so thick that Mike thought he was doomed. Then the ceiling fell like Thor himself had slammed his mighty hammer on Judgment Day.
***
Mike woke up, choking and gagging back his own bile. Then he looked at Sarah sleeping next to him. He swallowed, wiped his brow, and relaxed. He smiled at her and tried to go back to sleep.
***
Sarah woke and sat up a few moments later. She’d had her own dream. She dreamt she was in the middle of a circle of witches, being judged, but she didn’t understand why. She saw her mother and father there. This was strange because they both were dead. She was told to make a choice, but she didn’t know what the choices were.
Then a cloud of helplessness and loss descended upon her. She fell into a sea of despair and felt herself die. Gasping for breath, she woke.
Stunned, she calmed her breathing and peered over at the nightstand clock. It read 7 A.M. She rubbed her eyes, then leaned over to kiss Mike. He looks so beautiful and peaceful when he sleeps.
She had things to do around the house that day, so she slipped out of bed, pulled back the white curtains that lined the blue walls of their room, and looked out the window. Such a beautiful morning. Sarah went to the bathroom and turned on the light.
***
Mike began to stir when the light filled the room and he heard water running. With closed, sleepy eyes he reached for Sarah. When he didn’t feel her next to him, he rolled on his back and remembered his nightmare. Then he heard her in the bathroom, washing.
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