“They aren’t yet, we haven’t even left the hospital,” Carson says.
“Oh yeah. Well they ought to be worried after what we just went through. I can’t wait to tell them this one.”
We continue down the alley, keeping an eye out for good hiding spaces for our stuff. We finally settle on an old 1950s truck that we find behind someone’s garage. The fabric cover over the truck is mildewed and dirty and one look under the canvas shows us that the truck is not likely to be moving anytime soon. We make sure no one is watching, then stuff our packs into the bed of the truck, careful to replace the cover how we found it.
We find our jump location only a couple of houses down.
“Boats work great.” Carson points to a center console fishing boat on a trailer next to a garage apartment. The layer of leaves on the floor of the boat gives away that, like the pickup truck, the boat hasn’t seen much action recently.
“Should be good for a few hours,” I say. I climb into the back of the boat and initially sit on one of the cushioned seats but then think better of it. I move to the bow and position myself so I’m balanced on the two rails. “Be careful not to be anywhere a leaf is likely to fall in the next few hours,” I caution. Carson heeds my advice and perches on the stern rail near the motor.
“I’m going to plan for five after eleven.” I set my chronometer for 0305 Zulu.
“Ready?” Carson says.
“Ready.”
A scent of smoke reaches me and I turn in the direction of the lab. Looking over the garage across the alley, I can make out the top of Quickly’s building. An orange glow is emanating from the middle windows.
I turn back to my task at hand. This time it’s me who blinks first. I push the pin and Carson disappears.
Chapter 14
“I once met a time traveler who insisted on only traveling to his own birthdays. He claimed he was over a thousand years old. I found the idea rather ridiculous, but I have to admit, he did get a lot of free drinks that way.”
-Excerpt from the journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2115
The parking garage at the hospital is quiet as we pull in. The hospital lobby is likewise subdued. The gift shop is closed and a janitor has a buffer working on the floors. Carson and I take the elevator to the third floor. The waiting room where we left our friends is deserted. I find the charge nurse at her desk.
“Excuse me. We’re here visiting Robert Cameron.”
The white-haired woman looks up from her paperwork. “Visiting hours are over.”
“I think our friends might already be in there,” I say.
“Are you with the group that was waiting earlier?” the nurse asks.
“Yes, we just had to step out for a bit.”
“Okay, your friends are still back there. Room 328. Just try not to make too much noise. Most of the patients are sleeping.”
“Thank you.”
She buzzes us through the double doors. We’re passing room 316 when I see Blake and Francesca emerge from a room ahead. They turn our direction, still talking to one another, but after a moment Francesca spots us.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” Blake responds.
“Good news.” Francesca smiles. “He’s going to be okay,”
“What happened?” Carson asks.
“The doctor said he had a minor stroke,” Blake replies. “Apparently it could have been a lot worse if Robbie hadn’t rushed him in.”
Francesca gives me a hug.
“Is Robbie still in there?” I gesture toward the room they came from.
“Yeah. What did you guys find out?” Blake says.
“That’s a pretty crazy story.”
“Stenger must have burned the lab,” Carson says.
“You saw him?” Francesca asks.
“Carson actually tackled him. He tried to kill us and take our chronometers.”
“Where was this?” Blake asks.
“Inside the lab,” I reply.
“You guys went into a burning building?” Francesca says.
“No. Not exactly.” I tell them the story of our plan to get our stuff back and how the night unfolded. We walk back through the doors and take seats in the waiting room again as I’m talking. Carson interjects whenever I leave something out.
“Wow,” Francesca says. “You guys are really lucky.”
“Yeah. Glad you’re both okay,” Blake adds. “So no sign of Quickly? Other than the younger one you ran into?”
“No. Hopefully they got out okay. I think they were planning on leaving anyway.” I tell them about the conversation I overheard before we left for the hospital. Carson leans forward to listen to this also. “It sounded like Mym was back to get Dr. Quickly and leave.”
“He did say he was only going to be in 1986 for a little while,” Francesca says.
“He didn’t even say goodbye?” Carson asks. “That’s kind of odd.’”
“No. He just asked me to check the spare tire,” I say. “It was very odd.”
“Did you check it?” Francesca says.
“No, we didn’t really have a chance. We were kind of busy.”
“What if it was a clue?” Francesca says. “What if he was trying to tell you something?”
“Why the secrecy?” I say. “Why not just tell me if he was trying to tell me something?”
“I still think you should check it,” Francesca says.
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
Robbie emerges from the double doors and we get out of our chairs. “Hey guys.”
“Hey. Is he doing okay?” I ask.
“Yeah, he’s sleeping. The doctors have him on some medication to help him sleep through the night. They said we can come back in the morning.”
“Want to head back to the house?” Blake says.
“Yeah.” Robbie nods. He looks exhausted.
As we make for the exit, Robbie inquires after our trip to the lab and I give him the condensed version of the story. “You guys are ballsy going in there like that,” he says. “Not sure I would have gone back in, knowing the place was going to burn.”
“Yeah, thanks for doing that,” Francesca says. “I’m glad you got our stuff out.”
In the garage, I grab the packs out of the back seat of the Galaxie and have Carson pop the trunk. As the trunk lid yawns open, I see nothing but carpet inside.
“Where’s the spare?” Francesca says.
“Under this maybe?” I drop the packs on the ground and tug at the edge of the carpeting. I pull it back part way to reveal the tire. It’s white-walled like the others and appears to be in good condition. I press hard on the sidewall of the tire with my thumb. “Looks like it’s decently inflated. Not sure what else he wanted me to check.”
“Maybe you should pull it out,” Francesca says.
“That’s what she said,” Carson mutters. Francesca takes a swing with the back of her hand and smacks Carson in the shoulder.
I grab the wheel and remove it from under the carpet. As I do, I hear something fall off the back and land in the wheel well. Leaning the spare tire against the bumper, I pull the carpet back the rest of the way.
“What’s that?” Blake asks, peering over my shoulder. I reach in and extract a small leather bound journal. It has a thin cord tied around it.
“This looks like the book Quickly was taking notes in when I ran into him earlier. The young Quickly.” I untie the cord and pull open the front cover. There is a quote handwritten on the front page. I read it out loud. “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1.”
“Never would have pegged Quickly as the religious type,” Carson says.
“I think there are a lot of things we might not know about that guy,” Blake replies.
I flip through a few more pages. Each is full of handwritten notes and occasional drawings. I see sketches of chronometers, both the watch type like ours, and pendants like Mym’s. I even see versions incorporated into other objects
like hats and belts. There are journal entries listing activities and dates. On one page I see a list of objects he notes as having been treated with gravitites. I pause when I notice there’s a groundhog on the list.
“Apparently there’s a time traveling groundhog somewhere.”
“He would make better weather predictions than Punxsutawney Phil,” Francesca says.
I skim to the last few pages of the journal where I find a list of names and addresses. Along with each name is a list of date ranges. Some of the date ranges are not consistent, but jump around and skip years.
“Who do you think they are?” Francesca says, leaning in close to read the names.
“I think they might be other time travelers.” I read out loud. “Martin Sambo. Anchorage Alaska, June 2002—March 2018. Valerie Terraveccia, Port Hyacinth, D76 April 10th, 2072. Wow, some of these names are pretty far into the future.”
“That’s a pretty decent list,” Blake says from behind me. “Must be a dozen names there. You think there are that many other time travelers bouncing around?”
“There are five of us just right here,” Carson says. “It figures there’d be more.”
“That’s kind of exciting,” Francesca says.
I slap the book shut and stuff it into my back pants pocket. “Let’s get this stuff where we can get a proper look at it.” I drop the spare tire into the wheel well and replace the carpet. Blake and Robbie load our packs into the trunk. Robbie meets us at the house with Mr. Cameron’s car and we unload them again in the driveway, each guy taking a pack into the house. Spartacus bounces up and down as we enter the back door. The parrots are squawking too.
“You guys missing out on some attention today?” I scratch the dog behind his ears. Spartacus follows us with tail wagging as we file upstairs to Blake and Carson’s room.
“Mind if we use your bed a minute?” I ask Carson.
“Go for it.”
I set the pack I’m carrying down on the bed and unfasten it. I ease a few of the items onto the bed.
“What are you doing?” Francesca says.
“Looking for something.”
After emptying the first pack, I grab a second one and repeat the process. I’m a third of the way through it when I find the gun. I double check the safety and hand it to Blake. “Can you unload that?”
“I’m not much of a gun guy,” Blake says.
“I can do it,” Robbie says. Blake hands him the gun and Robbie removes the clip. He then smoothly pulls the slide back and ejects the bullet in the chamber.
“Didn’t want that thing accidentally going off in one of the bags,” I say.
“That was Stenger’s?” Francesca asks.
“Yeah. We’re lucky we didn’t get taken out with it,” Carson says.
I keep unloading the bag I have on the bed. The bedspread disappears beneath a layer of knickknacks and odd pieces of junk.
“Do you guys remember which stuff was yours from your planning? We probably need to organize all this.” I shake the last envelope of photos out of the pack before tossing it on the ground.
“Think we have enough to get back with?” Blake asks.
“Oh. My. God.” Francesca holds up a stack of hundred dollar bills from the pack she’s holding. “Are we rich now?”
“Oh. Yeah. I snagged that from Quickly’s lab before it burned down. It’s his money, but I thought we might need traveling funds. It looked like it was meant for time traveling. He had it all organized by dates.”
“Oh wow,” Francesca says, kneeling and unloading stacks of bills onto the floor in front of her. “How much is this?”
“I don’t know.”
She sits down to count it while I unload more items onto the bed. It’s full before the third pack is empty, so I start using the floor.
“If you guys remember what stuff was yours, maybe we can sort out into years and see what we have to work with.”
“That conch shell is mine,” Carson says.
“That’s my trophy.” Blake reaches across the bed and picks up a figure of a golfer.
We begin to sort our items into piles and then into lines on the floor. Robbie doesn’t have any items since he wasn’t there for the planning lesson, but he helps read out dates from the photo packets and organizes them. After about twenty minutes, Francesca finishes counting the money. Her face is flushed. “We have one hundred and forty thousand dollars.” She considers the piles in front of her. “I’ve never seen this much money in one place before.”
“We should probably give it back to Quickly at some point. I wouldn’t get too attached to it,” I say. Francesca stares at the money for a few more moments and then scoops it back into the pack.
Once we have all of our items laid out in chronological order, I survey the results of our work. We’ve laid out the objects in four parallel lines on the carpet. I stand up and step to one end of the rows.
“So this is 1986. What’s the first item we can jump to? I know I have this door knocker in June of ’87.” I point to my line of items with my toe. “Anybody have anything closer?”
“My bike handle grip is from December of ’86,” Carson says.
“Okay. That’s less than a year away. That’s good,” I say. “Blake, what’s your first jump point?”
“I actually don’t have much till about 1988. I hadn’t gotten to that yet. I have a bunch of stuff from the nineties, though. Did we figure out if we can all use the same object at the same time?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I know we can definitely use the same objects but I still don’t know about the ‘at the same time’ thing.”
“Maybe Quickly has something about that in his journal,” Francesca suggests.
“Yeah. He might.” I pull the journal out of my back pocket and page through it.
“How soon are you guys thinking of trying to go?” Robbie asks. “We still have some time to plan, right?”
I look up from the journal. It’s Blake who responds. “I really want to get a move on. From what Ben said, we don’t even know if Quickly is coming back. It sounds like they were leaving 1986 all together. I don’t know that we’re going to get much more help. I think we have enough to work with. I want to get home.”
“What about my grandpa?” Robbie says. “I’m not just going to leave him in the hospital. Plus I know you guys have been doing classes with Quickly every day, but I was hoping we’d get a bit of time so you guys can catch me up to speed. I’m definitely not ready for this yet. I’ve only made a half dozen jumps.”
Blake stands up and looks at his line of jump objects. “I’m just not sure how much longer I can wait. Things are getting pretty crazy around here. I really don’t want to get stuck.”
“Yeah, you know I love Mr. Cameron too, Robbie,” Francesca says. “But the fact that there is a fire starting serial killer that has run into you guys twice now . . . that’s starting to freak me out. I want to make sure your grandpa’s okay of course, but I would really like to get back to my normal life, too.”
We are quiet for a few moments.
“I can stick around with you for a bit, Robbie,” Carson says. “I’m not that worried about Stenger, and I can teach you some of this stuff.” He shakes his arm and the chronometer wiggles around on his wrist. “It doesn’t really matter what time we all leave, right? We could all still get there at the same time.”
That’s true.
“Yeah that makes sense,” I say. “As long as we plan to meet up at the same point we’ll all be getting back to our lives around the same time. Some of us will be a little older than the others, relatively speaking, but that won’t matter too much. A couple of weeks aren’t going to be noticeable.”
“So we go first, and they meet up?” Francesca asks. “You’re coming with us, right Ben?”
I look from her questioning eyes to Robbie’s. I turn to Carson. “You think you would be okay showing Robbie the ropes?”
“Definitely,” Carson says. “It’ll be fun. Car
son’s backyard school of time travel. I may have to charge for my superior expertise though.” He winks at Robbie.
Robbie looks relieved.
“So we’ll need to divide this stuff up into two trips worth then,” Blake says.
I look at our lines of anchors. “Yeah. We can try to divvy it up so it’s fair.”
“Can we divvy tomorrow?” Francesca yawns. “It’s late.”
“Yeah. I’m bushed,” Carson says. “Saving all of your asses took it out of me today.”
Francesca lobs a pillow at him. “You’re so humble about it, too.”
I say goodnight, and after brushing my teeth, make my way downstairs. Spartacus follows, and climbs on top of me when I lie down on the couch. I try to avoid his awkwardly placed paws until he finally settles down, wedged between me and the couch cushions.
“Don’t worry, buddy. Your master will be okay.” He lays his head on my chest and I scratch him behind the ears for a bit before drifting off to the slow rhythm of his breathing.
Spartacus is gone when I wake up. I find him in the kitchen intently following Robbie’s hand as he moves it from his cereal bowl to his mouth. Robbie gently nudges the dog out of his way and makes his way to the table and sits down. “You already had breakfast, you mooch.”
“I guess he knows we’re suckers and thinks he might get more out of us without Mr. Cameron around,” I say as I open the refrigerator door.
“I think he has Grandpa wrapped around his finger, too. Or paw. Whatever you would say there.”
“Anybody else up?” I ask.
“I heard someone moving around up there recently. I’ve been up for a bit. Didn’t sleep very well. I think I’m going to head back over to the hospital pretty soon to see how things are going.”
“You want the keys to the Galaxie?”
“No. I still have Grandpa’s car.”
“We’ll probably join you in a bit. I might try to do some more organizing. You sure you’re okay with staying here without us? I don’t want you to feel like we’re ditching you.”
“No. It’s okay. Carson will be a big help. He seems like he’s pretty confident he can teach me what we need to know to get back. Plus, you never know. Quickly may show back up and I might be able to get some more lessons from him.”
In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 20