In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Nathan Van Coops

I grab the handle with both hands and shoulder the door. I feel it bend slightly but it doesn’t open. My heart begins to pound. I step back and kick the door hard near the knob. This time it gives way. The room inside is dark. Blake is the first through.

  Francesca finds the kitchen light switch and light streams into the vacant bedroom. Blake tries the door of the cell but it’s locked and unyielding. The sound of his fist on the steel door echoes hollowly on the inside.

  The words taste like vinegar in my mouth. “They’re long gone.”

  Chapter 16

  “I used to think thirty minutes was a reasonable amount of time to wait for a pizza. Then I discovered you could have food delivered by time traveler. My standard for freshness has been raised.”

  -Excerpt from the journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2157

  “I’m gonna kick them both in the teeth. I’m gonna pull his stupid floppy hair out and . . . and . . . kick that, too.” Francesca is storming back and forth from the kitchen to the living room. She reaches the couch again and spins around. “I’m going to . . . wait!” She stops mid-stride. She looks from Blake to me. “You guys can get them! They said they only go to weekends. You can just go to next Friday, be there waiting, and get my chronometer. You can just kick both their asses and get our stuff back!”

  I’ve resigned myself to the long end of the couch during her tirade. Blake is stewing in the office chair. The sunrise gleams through the window beside me.

  “I don’t think it’s that easy, Fresca. Believe me, I wish it was.”

  Her face is flushed with anger. “Why not?”

  “If they have any sense, they won’t go to next Friday. Most likely they would have gone to the past. In fact we don’t know which direction they were traveling in the first place. They said they went to weekends, but they didn’t say they did them in any order. They could very well be traveling backwards.”

  “But Quickly’s book said Guy goes to that bar for years,” Francesca argues.

  “He never said it was done in any particular order though,” Blake says. “Ben’s right. They could be anywhere by now.”

  “This could have been the last Friday they were there,” I say. “They could have done all the other ones before this from their perspective. I know I wouldn’t come back now if I was them.”

  Francesca slumps onto a barstool. “Damn it. You mean they’re going to get away with this? They just stole like fifty thousand dollars, and a bunch of our anchors. Not to mention my chronometer. I’m really screwed without that.”

  “I know,” I say. “I just think the odds of us catching them are pretty slim. We have no idea where they got to, and if that machine of theirs can jump ten years, they could outrace us anywhere.”

  Blake sits up a little straighter. “What if they went backward and then came back here? That could be even worse. If they wanted our chronometers, what’s to keep them from coming back with guns and taking the rest? They have all the time in the world to make it back here.” He stands up and grabs the few items of clothing he has left, and unplugs his chronometer from the wall. “I think we should get out of here.”

  He’s got a valid point.

  I slide off the end of the couch and grab my chronometer.

  “What about me?” Francesca says. “Now I’m stuck.”

  “We can still jump more than one person with these,” I say. “It was in the journal. I’m not exactly sure how that works, but we know it can be done. We can figure it out.”

  “I don’t want to end up the victim of some experiment, like Quickly’s mice.” Francesca says. “He said some of them never made it back.”

  I look her in the eyes and rest a hand on her shoulder. “We’re gonna figure it out. Don’t worry. We’re not going anywhere without you.”

  We stuff all of our possessions into our remaining pack and don our jackets. “I hate them,” Francesca mumbles. “It’s too bad they live in an apartment with other people. I would totally burn this place down.” Blake opens the door, cautiously peering down the stairwell before stepping into the hall. Despite our worry, the walk downstairs and outside is uneventful. I pull my jacket closed and zip it up against the cold.

  “Where are we going?” Blake asks.

  “Let’s just get away from here to start,” I say.

  “I need coffee,” Francesca grumbles.

  We wander a few blocks through the waking city until we find a coffee shop tucked between a closed bar and a newsstand. A few early rising customers are already reading newspapers in the cozy interior. After I get a warm chai in my hand, we retreat to the back corner of the café to a table and a few cushioned chairs.

  “What now?” Francesca says.

  I pull Quickly’s journal from my pocket and page through it till I find the section I saw about jumping multiple people. “It says doing tandem jumps is really not that much different. You have to have a chronometer that is charged enough to go the distance. And you have to have a good connection between the people. Looks like skin-to-skin contact is what it’s showing here in the drawing.” I hold up the journal to show Quickly’s sketch of a person with both hands on another person who is activating a chronometer.

  “The second person has to be infused with gravitites too, obviously. Oh. And it says you can usually only go about half as far on a charge. That makes sense I guess. You have to make up for all the additional mass.”

  “Watch it, talking about my additional mass,” Francesca says. She’s smiling behind her coffee.

  It’s good she can still smile through this.

  “But where are we going to jump to?” Blake says. “What have we got left?” I set the pack on the table and rummage through it to pull out our remaining anchors. Francesca helps line them up in chronological order on the table as I pull them out.

  When I’m certain I’ve retrieved everything from the bag, I drop it to the floor and survey our results. We have about a dozen items.

  “That doesn’t look like much to get us twenty-five years,” Blake says.

  “Yeah, and some of these are clumped together pretty closely in time,” I say. “The soup ladle and the beer bottle cap are only like a month apart.”

  “Hey, there’s something I don’t get,” Francesca says.

  “What’s that?” I shift in my seat and take another sip of my chai.

  “A bunch of our stuff got left on Mr. Cameron’s lawn, right? Because it didn’t have any gravitites in it. But these things did, so they came with us.” She picks up the silver dollar. “They obviously can move through time. How can we use them as anchors then? Won’t they just try to come with us again?”

  I pause to consider what she’s saying. “Yeah. That’s a good question. I never really thought about it like that.”

  “So wait. We can’t use this stuff?” Blake says. “This just keeps getting worse and worse.” I thumb through Quickly’s journal looking for something related to this new topic.

  “I just don’t want to get us zapped into outer space,” Francesca says.

  “No. I’m glad you said something,” I say. “I wish this thing had an index.” I flip to a page that has a sketch of someone making a jump while still plugged into the wall charger. That could be useful. A guy in a blue beanie bumps my chair on his way to the bathroom. I wait for him to squeeze by and then go back to the journal. Three pages later, I find what I’m looking for.

  “Found it. ‘Carrying jump anchors.’” I skim down the page briefly before I begin reading. “Anchors can be transported for use in times other than their original location, if they are treated with gravitites. The gravitite treatment must be reversed prior to use however. Transported anchors must be thoroughly purged of gravitites or the resultant jump may be negatively impacted.”

  “You can de-gravitite something?” Blake says. “I thought Quickly said the effects were permanent.”

  “Well he said they were permanent on people,” I say. I flip to the next page. “Oh. This is probably why.” A drawing on the nex
t page shows an object being zapped by a complex looking device. A note is scribbled near the sketch. I read it aloud. “While I have been able to successfully purge metal and some durable organic and inorganic matter, purging of biologically living matter still eludes me. Trial results so far remain discouraging.”

  “So how do we de-gravitite these?” Blake says, holding up the ladle.

  “We need one of these things.” I show him the drawing.

  “That looks . . . involved,” Francesca says.

  “Yeah. There are a couple more drawings of it. Component parts maybe. Couldn’t tell you what any of it is, though. I think we are out of our depth with this one.”

  “So we’re back to being screwed,” Blake says. “All this stuff is useless.” He gives my tortoise shell a spin and it twirls around on the table, wobbling and knocking.

  I pick up the photo of the toolbox and flip it over. It’s the one with Mym’s handwriting. May 2nd, 1989. Montana. She’s going to be in Montana.

  “Maybe they’re not completely useless,” I say.

  “Why?” Francesca says.

  “We still have the pictures of these things. And we know that Quickly and Mym were there to take these pictures at these times. What if we could find them and ask one of them for help? They helped us before. Why wouldn’t they help us again?”

  “You want to find Quickly again somewhere else?” Francesca says.

  “Yeah, well, either of them. Malcolm said we shouldn’t bother the one at the Temporal Studies Society. He never said anything about finding Quickly somewhere else. We need help from someone.”

  “Someone who won’t rob us blind,” Francesca says.

  “Yeah, and who knows? Maybe they’ll have another chronometer for you to use.”

  “Oh, that’s a conversation to look forward to.” Francesca frowns. “Hey, I know you loaned me a priceless piece of technology, and I let some sleazeballs walk off with it, but do you mind giving me another one?”

  “I’m as much to blame there as you,” I say. “I’m the one who left it on the counter.”

  “It’s the fault of those guys being assholes,” Blake says. “But, I wouldn’t mind finding someone trustworthy to help us this time. How do you plan to find them? These dates on these photos are all still pretty far away. That one you’ve got there is probably the closest, and that’s still a couple years out.”

  “I was thinking about that. This toolbox looks pretty well used, and it’s not an object people usually throw away. Whoever owns this toolbox is probably using it right now somewhere. If we find the toolbox, we can use it to jump ahead to this date in the photo. Mym was there on that date, taking the picture. If we can find her before she leaves, we can get her to help us.”

  “How do we find the toolbox?” Francesca says.

  I flip over the photo and show her the address on the back. “We go here.”

  “You want to go to Montana?”

  “Do we have any better plans?” I look from her face to Blake’s.

  “How are we going to get to Montana, if we don’t have any other anchors from there?” Blake says.

  “Well, we can’t blink our way there.” I reach into my pack and then lay one of the stacks of hundreds on the table. “But we can fly.”

  Francesca looks from the stack of bills back to my face. Blake slurps the last dregs of his coffee and tosses it into the trashcan. “Let’s do it. Anything beats doing nothing.” He grabs the photo from Francesca. “Let’s go to . . . Scobey?”

  <><><>

  The ticket agent at the counter at Logan International Airport isn’t having it.

  “You can’t fly to Scobey.” Her fingertips are slightly orange between her index and middle fingers. Her teeth are yellowed too. Despite her obvious habit, I get the impression that she hasn’t had her cigarette fix in a while. “Nobody goes there. You’ll have to pick somewhere else.”

  Francesca steps in front of me, and smiles at the woman. “Brenda. You mind if I call you Brenda?” The woman narrows her eyes but doesn’t respond. “People live in this city, yes?” Francesca waits for a reply but doesn’t get one. “So these people have to get there somehow. How do they make that happen?”

  Brenda gives Francesca a cold stare but then begins checking a list of airports in a black binder. “You could fly into Minot, North Dakota. You would probably have to drive from there, but we have a flight leaving in an hour that goes to Minneapolis. You could connect to Minot there.”

  “How far is the drive once we get there?” Blake says.

  She flips to a map of the area and considers it a moment. “Looks like it’s probably five or six hours, depending on the weather.”

  “Weather?” Francesca says.

  The ticket agent smirks at her. “I believe the average temperature in that area this time of year is about five. Bad snowstorms, too.”

  “Five?” Francesca blanches. “Degrees?”

  “Sounds great. We’ll take ’em,” I say, before Francesca has time to back out. I hold my wad of hundreds up to the counter.

  Francesca still hasn’t forgiven me by the time we’re ready to board. She sulks behind Blake and me as we walk down the jetbridge. She has pulled her scarf up over her face again and keeps it that way even after we take our seats, as if trying to store up the warmth for later. By the time we make our connection in Minneapolis to our smaller flight to Minot, the situation has not improved.

  “Cheer up, Fresca. Did you know that Minot is the geographic center of North America?” I hold up the brochure I’ve found and try to hand it to her. She has her hands buried under her coat. I settle for setting the brochure in her lap.

  Blake smiles beside me. “So, you think we can find Mym before she leaves, once we get to the right spot? It didn’t really work that way with Dr. Quickly last time.”

  I think about my fruitless search in the cul de sac. “Yeah, but this is out in the prairie of Montana, not a Boston suburb. Maybe she won’t be able to disappear so quick.”

  “Yeah. That’s true I guess.” He settles into his seat and closes his eyes. “We certainly are due for some good luck for a change.”

  The balding man at the rental car stand in Minot takes one look at the date on Francesca’s driver’s license and slides it back. “You think I was born yesterday?”

  I slip a pair of hundred dollar bills out of my pocket and place them on the counter. I set her license on top and slide them back. He considers me from over top of his glasses, before reaching his hand up and grabbing the bills.

  “I guess even the government makes typos every once in a while. What year were you really born, honey?”

  Francesca is ready. “1961.”

  “Good answer.” He smiles and scribbles her ID number on a rental form. “Sign here.”

  “You have any maps?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Where are you headed?”

  “Scobey, Montana.”

  He leans over the counter and notes our single backpack. He straightens back up and hands Francesca the keys. He addresses me. “Hope you have a warmer coat.”

  When we get to the parking lot, Francesca takes one look at the snow piled near the exit, and holds the keys out toward Blake and me. “I’ve never driven in snow before. I don’t think I’m going to start today.”

  Blake and I trade off driving and navigating duties for the next few hours as we head west on Highway 5. The expansive plains around us are seas of white, but I occasionally make out tracks and paw prints in the snow. At one point, we pass a small herd of buffalo grouped together near a fence. Their beards are gleaming with ice crystals and large swaths of snow have been cleared around them where they’ve foraged for grass. Francesca is huddled miserably in the rear seat but her eyes follow the buffalo as we pass.

  The other vehicles on the road are infrequent and most of the miles consist of long, straight expanses of nothing but snow and highway stretching toward the horizon. The few drivers of other cars we do pass, tend to wave at us.

/>   “At least they’re friendly out here,” I say, as I wave back to the tenth pickup truck we see. Blake keeps his hands on the wheel. I consult the map for the hundredth time. “This address is right off the highway somewhere. These roads don’t seem well marked,” I say.

  “Yeah. I noticed that. I don’t know if we are supposed to be looking for the road on this side of town or the other side,” Blake says.

  We come upon some buildings, and cruise through an intersection where I see a couple of men pulling an old Ford truck onto a flat bed. A few minutes later we’re back to prairie.

  “How far are we from town?” Francesca says.

  I stare at the expansive plain stretching ahead of us and then pivot in the seat to view what's behind us. I double-check the map. “Actually, I think we just passed it.”

  Blake slows down and pulls onto a dirt side road that has been recently plowed. Chunks of dirt and frozen gravel litter the drifts along both sides of the road.

  “I thought you said Scobey was a town,” Francesca says.

  “Yeah. It is,” I say. “They might have a broader definition of the term out here.”

  Blake turns us around and heads back the other direction. The men with the flat bed truck have successfully strapped down the Ford by the time we cruise back into the intersection. Blake pulls the car up next to a man bundled up in a thick, tan, Carhartt coat.

  “Excuse me. We’re looking for an address and we could use some help.”

  The man crunches through the snow and leans down to take us all in. He has snow in his beard. He looks a lot like the buffalo. I hand the photo with the address across Blake, and the man reaches out a gloved hand to take it. “Where you all from?” he asks. His dark brown eyes glide from Blake and me to the pile of clothing that is Francesca in the back seat.

  “We’re from Florida,” Blake says.

  “Oh. Long way from home, eh?”

  “Yeah. Very,” Blake replies.

  The man reads the back of the photo. “This is the Parsons’ place. Used to be Hank Parson’s ranch. I think his son’s got it now. Don’t see much of him lately, but the ranch isn’t far.” He stoops, leaning an elbow on the window seal, and points west. “You’re gonna wanna go about five miles. You’ll see the grain silo on the Farnsworth farm. It’s on the right. Can’t miss it, they painted it blue last summer. Two roads past that, you’ll hit the road to the Parsons’. Just stay on it going north. You’ll find the house eventually. Hopefully they’ve got around to plowing it. Do they know you’re coming?”