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

by Nathan Van Coops

“Hey,” I whisper.

  Another sniff.

  “It’s going to be okay.”

  “I was mean.” Her voice is slightly muffled by the pillow.

  “What?”

  “The last thing I said to him. I don’t really remember what it was, but I think it was mean.”

  “Oh. I don’t remember you being mean. And I’m sure Carson would have known you were joking anyway.”

  She turns her head toward me. “I was always mad at him.”

  “Well, sometimes he deserved it.” I smile and rub her shoulder.

  “I should have been nicer. I can’t believe he’s dead. It seems like a bad dream.”

  “I know. I feel that way, too.”

  She sniffs again. “I’ve known Carson since second grade. How will we ever explain this to his mom? What are we going to do?”

  “I was talking to Blake about that. He’s downstairs. We want to try to fix it.”

  “Fix it?”

  “Yeah. Somewhere out there is the world we came from. The one where we got struck by a power line at softball and left our lives behind. We came from there, so it has to exist. We just somehow got to the wrong 2009.”

  “We can find the right one?”

  “There has to be a way. These other time travelers zip around and change stuff all the time. We just need to figure out what we did wrong.”

  “And Carson? What about him?”

  “We save Carson.”

  “How?”

  “We need to stop Stenger. If we stop him, we can keep Carson from dying.”

  “Stenger. I really hate that guy. I’ve never even met him.”

  “You don’t want to.”

  “I do now,” she says. “I want him to meet my boots with his teeth.”

  “I think that’s a fantastic idea.”

  Francesca’s tears have stopped. She sits up, but still hangs onto the pillow. There is a rap on the door and Blake pokes his head in. “You guys okay?”

  “Yeah. Come in,” I say.

  “You can turn the light on,” Francesca says.

  Blake flips the switch. The room hasn’t changed much. The little cat statue still guards the closet door. Francesca has tearstains down her face.

  I probably look terrible, too.

  Blake takes a seat in the armchair. Robbie appears at the door as well. “Hey.”

  “Hey, man.”

  “How are you guys holding up?” Robbie asks.

  “It’s been kind of a rough night so far,” I say.

  “Yeah. Rough,” Blake echoes.

  “I know Grandpa would be happy to let you stay here as long as you need to. I have to get home, but I want to make sure you’re going to be okay . . . I don’t know what happens now.”

  I straighten up and look him in the eyes. “We’ve actually been talking about that. I don’t think we’re going to stay.”

  Robbie drops his eyes a moment, but then nods and looks back to me. “What are you going to do?”

  “We have to try to fix this,” I say.

  “How do you mean?” Robbie says.

  “Carson,” I say. “We want to stop Stenger, find Carson and get home. Our real home.”

  Robbie shifts his feet and considers this. “You’re going back? Back to 1986?”

  I nod.

  “How?”

  “We haven’t figured that part out yet,” I say.

  “I have.” Francesca reaches into her pocket and removes the crystal fan fob. She dangles it from her fingers. “He said he’s coming back. I vote we hitch another ride.”

  I explain our adventures with Cowboy Bob and the Fridays in Boston and how their machines can make long-distance jumps.

  “I wish I would have known that,” Robbie replies. “It wouldn’t have been as many jumps as I thought.”

  “You can come back with us,” Francesca says.

  “Hmm. I appreciate the offer, but I think a few people here might miss me. I never planned it this way. I always thought that eventually I would get back to my old life, but as the months, and then years went by, I realized it stopped being realistic. I remember one conversation I had with Carson on one of our meet-ups after he went to Hollywood. We were in our mid-thirties then, and we joked about what it would be like to go back and try to pretend we were twenty-six again.” Robbie runs a hand over his balding head. “I think we both knew at that point that it wasn’t going to happen. We’d missed our window of opportunity.”

  “Do you miss it?” Francesca asks.

  “Sometimes,” Robbie muses. “There are times when I think about friends I missed out on seeing, and of course my family. But I had my family here in a different way. It wasn’t exactly the same, but I never felt alone. And Grandpa. He’s been amazing. He was the only one I could really talk to about all this stuff after Carson was gone. I eventually told Amy, too. Some days I still wonder if she really believes me.”

  “How did she handle finding out?” I say.

  “She didn’t walk straight out the door, so I guess that was a good sign. Grandpa helped there, too. I had at least one person to back me up.”

  “What are you going to do now?” I say.

  “I’ll be okay. I like my life here. My kids are here, and Amy. I have a pretty comfortable existence. What with the money you guys left us, and some good investments, I’m doing pretty well. And Carson was really generous when he made it big. He never forgot about Mr. Cameron and me. I coach soccer now for the school. I really can’t complain.”

  “Sounds like a good life,” Blake says.

  “It’s a great life. I mean, I was really looking forward to having you guys back in my life. But it’s been so many years. It was stressful when nothing happened tonight at the field. I wasn’t sure whether you were going to make it at all, but I was also relieved in a way. The idea of something happening tonight that was going to screw up my life, worried me a lot.”

  “I think you should be okay now,” I say.

  “But we’re going back to change things,” Francesca says. “Is that going to screw up Robbie’s life?”

  “We need to find our own time. I don’t know if that affects this one or not,” I say.

  “If we successfully stop Stenger, that has to change things here, right?” Blake says.

  “I really don’t know.”

  “You have to try,” Robbie says. “I owe Carson that. I love my life here, and I wouldn’t want it to end, but if there’s a way you can save Carson, and stop that psycho from killing more people, then I think you have to try. I’m not going to make you stay just so my life can go uncomplicated.”

  “That’s pretty brave of you, Robbie,” I say.

  “Yeah. It is,” Blake adds. “If I had my life the way I wanted it, I don’t know how I would feel about anyone attempting to screw it up.”

  “You won’t screw it up,” Robbie says. “I trust you guys.”

  Francesca slides off the bed and rummages through the top dresser drawers. “They used to keep notepads in here.” She locates one and comes back to the bed. “You have a pen?” I hand her my logbook pen and she sits down. “So this is us, right?”

  Blake and Robbie step closer to see what she’s drawing. She traces a line back from her first point and marks the other end 1986. “We go back here to stop Stenger and save Carson, but this timeline is here right now still. We’re sitting here and Carson is dead and the other ones of us never left. Does that mean we failed?”

  “You mean, since it turned out this way anyway, maybe it doesn’t work?” Blake asks.

  “Yeah. If the future versions of us are going to stop Stenger in the past, then why hasn’t that happened yet? It was twenty-three years ago.” She turns to Robbie. “Have you ever seen any other older versions of us? Have we ever stopped in before or anything?”

  Robbie shakes his head.

  “So we could die back there,” Francesca says. “What if Stenger kills us, too?”

  “There could be another option,” I say. I take
the pen back from Francesca. “We could end up somewhere else. A new timeline, or our original one.” I draw an offshoot from the 1986 marked on the paper. “It doesn’t necessarily mean we die . . . we just never come back here.”

  Robbie looks grave. Francesca pauses a moment, then steps over to him and wraps her arms around him. She stays that way. No matter how this turns out, we won’t see him again. Not this him anyway.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Robbie says, giving Francesca a squeeze. “You never know what can happen. It’s time travel right?” She just hugs him harder.

  “We’re going to go back to Montana first,” I say. “A couple of months from now. Francesca has the photo. If anything happens between now and then that makes you think we need to change this plan, will you let us know?”

  Francesca lets Robbie go.

  “Yeah, I can definitely do that. Leave me the address.”

  “Okay. I hate to leave you again so soon. I know we just got here . . .”

  “You don’t want to stay the night at least?” Robbie says. “I could bring the kids by tomorrow.”

  “We have a lot of questions that need answering,” I say. “I don’t know how much longer I can wait.” I want out of this place.

  “I don’t think I’ll be sleeping anytime soon,” Blake says.

  Francesca looks from Robbie back to us, and nods.

  I wish there was a way to keep Robbie and Mr. Cameron and just move them to our time. They don’t belong here either. My mind goes back to the conversation with Mym in the grass. “You have to choose the ones you are going to stick with.” If we ever get back to our own time, there’s no older Robbie, no Mr. Cameron . . .

  “Well,” Robbie says. “I’ll see if Grandpa wants to say goodbye.” We follow him across the hall into Mr. Cameron’s room. Samwise raises his head from Mr. Cameron’s lap as we enter, but he is asleep. My pack is still leaning against the dresser. Robbie presses a hand to Mr. Cameron’s shoulder to wake him. The cat stands up and stretches. The old man’s eyelids flutter open and he turns to look at us. Recognition takes a moment, but then he smiles.

  “Grandpa, they decided they can’t stay.”

  “Hmm. No?” Mr. Cameron straightens himself up on the pillows with Robbie’s help.

  “We have to fix some things,” Francesca says.

  “If anyone can do it, you can.” He smiles.

  This would be easier if he wasn’t always so kind. We move toward the bed.

  “We’ll come back someday if we can,” Francesca says. She takes Mr. Cameron’s hand.

  “I’m not worried, darling,” Mr. Cameron says. “You’ll see me again, and I’ll get to see your magic act one more time.”

  “Hopefully we make less of a mess of it,” Blake says.

  “You had to leave room for improvement,” Mr. Cameron says.

  The cat is purring loudly and rubs its face under Mr. Cameron’s chin. He pushes its head away from his face. Robbie picks it up and gently tosses it off the bed onto the floor.

  “Thanks again for all your hospitality,” I say. “We owe you so much.”

  “Nonsense. I’ve had a wonderful time. I owe you.”

  I pick up my pack and sling it over my shoulder. “We’d better get going.”

  Francesca pulls the photo of the fob out of her pocket and hands it to me.

  “Where is the next adventure?” Mr. Cameron asks. Francesca squats down and pulls the de-gravitizer out of her pocket and aims it at the fob.

  “We’re going back to Montana,” I say. I look at the back of Francesca’s photo. “In August.”

  “Let me get that address,” Robbie says. He grabs a pad and pencil off the nightstand and copies down the info on the back of the photo. “This Cowboy Bob sounds like a useful guy to know.”

  “Definitely,” I say. I dial my chronometer for the afternoon of August 20th as he scribbles. The light on the DG turns green and Francesca stands back up.

  “You have everything you need?” Mr. Cameron asks.

  Blake’s hand instinctively reaches for the jeans pocket where he’s been carrying the ring. His hand connects with only fabric. He sets his jaw but says nothing. I reach into my own pocket and remove the keys to Blake’s Jeep.

  “Robbie, do you mind doing us a big favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “We made a pretty big mess of Blake’s life. The other Blake. You think you could try to explain things to him? I’m sure he’ll be looking for that Jeep soon.”

  “You going to get me arrested for auto theft?”

  “Let’s hope not.” I toss him the keys.

  “I can handle it.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  “And tell Mallory,” Blake begins, “Tell her that everything I said was true. Just because I was the wrong guy . . . she still . . . well, just tell her I don’t regret it.”

  “Okay.” Robbie nods. “I will.”

  “Okay, how tall is this thing?” Blake eyes the ceiling and the fob in Francesca’s hand.

  I’m not the only one eager to get out of here.

  “It says seventy-three inches,” Francesca replies.

  “I’m 6’3”, so that’s seventy-five inches,” I say. “It would be about here.” I hold my hand to my forehead. Francesca hands me the fob.

  “I’m just going to be holding onto you, so you hold it.”

  I hold the fob lower than it is in the photo.

  “Let’s not hit our heads on the ceiling fan,” Blake says.

  “Yeah. That would suck.” I raise it slightly.

  Blake reaches his chronometer hand up and touches the crystal as well.

  “Good luck, guys,” Robbie says. “Tell Carson hi for me. Tell him we miss him.”

  “We will,” Francesca says.

  “And tell the younger me . . . tell him that everything will be okay,” Robbie adds.

  Mr. Cameron puts his hand out and pats Robbie’s arm. “That goes for me, too.”

  “You got it.” I smile.

  I watch their faces as Blake counts off. “One, two, three.”

  <><><>

  We drop an inch onto the carpeted floor of Cowboy Bob’s office. The crystal fob swings back and forth on the chain from the fan as we release it. I move to the window and look out onto the waving grasses of the prairie behind the house.

  August 2009. So this is what the future looks like.

  Francesca is staring past the gravitizer microwave in the direction we last saw Mr. Cameron’s bed. “I’m really starting to hate goodbyes.”

  I expected Cowboy Bob to be surprised to see us, but when we file into the dining room and find him seated at the head of the table, he continues chewing his Belgian waffle as if we’d been standing there the whole time. He gestures toward the other seats around the table with one hand while still holding his fork in the other. I look around the kitchen and down the hall toward the laundry room, but he seems to be alone.

  Damn. I wonder where she is.

  “Hi,” Francesca offers.

  He swallows, and I think he’s about to greet us, but then he takes a swig of orange juice instead. Once he sets it back down, he finally addresses us. “Good morning.”

  I check the clock on the wall. It says three o’clock. “Isn’t it afternoon?”

  “For some,” Bob replies. He gestures again to the other seats, and this time we find places and sit.

  “So we’re back,” Blake says.

  “I can see that.”

  “Things didn’t go according to plan,” I say.

  “Can I offer you a waffle?” Bob replies.

  “In this case I’m not sure that’s going to help,” I say.

  Cowboy Bob considers me a moment while wiping his mouth with his checkered napkin. “The syrup is from Vermont.”

  “Be that as it may, I think we’d rather talk about some of our more pressing issues,” I say.

  “There’s your first mistake.” Bob stands up and takes his plate to the kitchen and sets it near the waffle ma
ker. “You should never pass up good food just to deal with your personal problems.” The countertop is dusted with flour and batter drippings. He scoops a measuring cup into a bowl of waffle batter and pours it onto the griddle. “But since we have a minute anyway, what seems to be the dilemma?”

  “We’re in the wrong 2009,” Francesca says.

  Cowboy Bob pauses in the act of putting a finger full of batter to his mouth and then lowers it back down. “Where are you supposed to be?”

  “Well, 2009, but not this 2009,” Blake says.

  “Yeah, but which timeline are you navigating?” Bob wipes his finger off on a paper towel.

  “That’s the thing. We don’t know,” I say.

  Bob looks at each of our faces, seemingly to verify the truth of my statement. “You don’t know which stream you’re trying to navigate?”

  “No,” I say.

  “No wonder you got to the wrong time. You mean you didn’t even know the first time through, when I brought you up this way?”

  “Nobody told us we needed to know that,” Blake says.

  “Oh wow. I had no idea.” He runs his non-battered hand through his hair. “Man. Now I feel pretty bad. I should have asked you when you first showed up. I assumed when you said you wanted me to take you to 2009, that you meant in the stream we were in. Switching streams would have been a whole different process.”

  “So you can do it?” Blake says. “You can switch timestreams?”

  “Of course. You did it, obviously.”

  “I don’t think we noticed we did,” I say. “Whenever it happened, we didn’t do it deliberately.”

  “Maybe you guys should remind me again just how much training Harry gave you.”

  “How long has it been for you since we talked last?” Francesca asks.

  “A couple months or so,” Bob says. He opens a cupboard and pulls out three glasses. He walks over and sets them on the table in front of us and then moves the pitcher of orange juice to the table as well. “How long has it been for you?”

  “It’s still the same day,” Blake says. “Still the same bad day.”

  “Must not have liked home too much, huh? What’s different? Did they vote in the wrong president or something?”

  “We’re still there. Other ones of us,” I say. “We never left.”

  “Ah.” Bob nods. “That’ll do it.” He sits back down at the end of the table and continues to pick at his food. “So do you guys know which timestream you originally came from?”