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

by Nathan Van Coops

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” I swing my pack off my back and squat down to fight with the latches, yanking dirty T-shirts and my water bottle out as I search for more ammunition. My hand closes on the handle of Charlie’s revolver, and the man behind me gets a sizeable hole in his chest just as he’s reaching for me. The gun has more kick than I expected and I lose my balance and end up on my backside as the body of my attacker hits the floor next to me. There is a rasping from his throat followed by a gurgling cough. Two long yellow antennae wriggle out his open mouth, followed by the thick, segmented body of the Soma Djinn.

  I roll away from the creature in disgust and collide with the legs of another host body. The heavy man falls over me, flattening me to the concrete. I lose my grip on the flashlight and it spins away, rotating to a stop with its beam aimed at the aircraft’s landing gear. I shove the man’s legs off me, but he has turned to face me. His beard retains bits of rotting things and his teeth are brown. He clutches at my head, big meaty hands fumbling at my helmet. He hisses as he frantically scratches and flails at me. Something is pulling on my left foot. I shove the barrel of Charlie’s gun directly into the mouth of the man attempting to eat me and squeeze the trigger. Chunks of skull, brains, and Soma Djinn spray into the air and rain back down with wet spattering sounds.

  My boots are being clawed and chewed on by two more hangar workers. I can barely see them in the indirect glow of the flashlight, but I can feel the tugging and hear the tearing as they claw at my space suit. I aim at the head closest to me but someone falls on me before I can fire. I barely get my finger off the trigger in time to keep from shooting myself in the gut as the heavy body drives a knee into my abdomen and then knocks my arms aside.

  This host is better fed than the others and his arm is heavy as he presses my elbow into the concrete. He leers at me with only one good eye, cocking it at me with eager intensity, a predator staring down prey. I can do nothing with the gun now and struggle to get my breath back as the man uses uncut fingernails to try to claw his way into my chest. I swing at the man’s face with my left hand and barely manage to divert his attention with the punch. He snarls at me and knocks my arm away, still keeping his weight on my other elbow. I can feel my right boot being tugged loose from the space suit, and the panic in my mind reaches a new level of terror. I’m being eaten alive.

  The man sitting astride me seems intent on tearing into my chest, and as the pressure of his fingers threatens to rip into me, I do the only thing I can think of. I grasp his collar, yanking on his neck and bringing my head up forcefully at the same time. His nose crunches into the top of my helmet and a crack radiates across my visor. It’s enough to disorient him, and I shove hard to unseat him. He falls onto my right arm and I yank it free reflexively, losing my grip on the revolver but clearing my upper body from his oppressive weight.

  I kick one of the creatures at my feet squarely in the jaw, and the resultant chaos gives me enough freedom to roll over onto my stomach. More hands and mouths arrive to claw and bite at my back and shoulders, but I concentrate on my left hand in front of me, working furiously to free the space suit glove. The yellow centipede legs of the loose Soma Djinn work in harmony to propel the creature over my left elbow and toward my face. Someone above me is wrenching at my helmet, trying to rip it from my body, but I can’t focus on anything except my wrist. I throw my glove away and concentrate on the dials on my chronometer, moving them mostly from memory since I can barely see past the mustard yellow creature boring its way through the crack in my visor. The fingertips of my bandaged hand are pressed hard to the concrete as I use my other hand to reach for my chronometer. Fifteen minutes. Be clear. Please, God, let it be clear. I close my eyes and press the pin.

  “Most time travelers are escapists at heart, constantly seeking the next adventure. With the inherent dangers we face, it’s worth considering that the next jump could always be our last, and rushing onward may only hasten our untimely end.”–Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2019

  Chapter 25

  The concrete is cool and smooth below me. A draft is blowing from some unseen vent and has mercifully kept the hangar floor dust-free. My space suit is gone. My flashlight, pack, and weapons are gone. All I have is the darkness, and somewhere to my right, the ragged breathing of a creature that would like to eat me. I can’t see even the floor below me, but I can remember the face of the woman who had been staring at the tail of the aircraft, the woman who was so curious until I shot her in the head. Will shoot her in the head.

  Fifteen minutes.

  For now, I lie still and do my best not to exist. Somewhere behind me and a little to the right is the aircraft. I try to focus and remember my bearings. It was another seventy meters to the wall: a terrifying distance in the dark. I stretch my blistered chronometer hand. My bandage is gone, left behind in the near future with my other belongings. I shift slightly and a sudden blue glow emanates from my right wrist. I clamp my burned hand over it, smothering it, hiding the oppressive ticking display on my race bracelet. It’s funny that I never noticed the faint light before. Here, in this void, it seems to burn with the intensity of a searchlight.

  I stare into the blackness and try to imagine the space. In a few minutes this place will be swarming with half-dead host bodies anxious to devour me. Without my suit to protect me, those sharp nails and eager jaws will have no difficulty separating flesh from bone. I need to be gone. The second danger lies in being discovered by myself. No paradoxes—the hard-and-fast rule of the chronothon and the sure ticket to disqualification. I have little confidence in the committee’s willingness to let me continue the race under normal circumstances, let alone as a violator of the rules. My mind goes back to Dennis and the Asian woman, hiding in their Humvee. Were they left behind in Egypt? The thought makes me envious. Egypt was a vacation compared to this.

  I tuck my right wrist into my armpit to cover up the light, and ease myself sideways, crawling as slowly as I can toward the place I remember seeing the landing gear of the aircraft. I get to my knees and then to a crouch, and finally I stand, stretching my left arm above me, feeling for the wing. My knee thuds into something solid and I freeze. I listen for the telltale signs of doom, footsteps or snarling, something to tell me that I’m now a target. For a moment I wonder if the creatures are all doing the same thing, standing and listening, trying to home in on the source of the sound.

  I drop my hand to my knee and feel for my obstacle. My fingers brush the edge of the rigid panel, a flat vertical plane with occasional bumps of rivets. I probe the darkness beyond it and touch rubber, my fingertips tracing the lines of tread in the tire. I’ve found my landing gear. I run my hand upward along the vertical gear door until its apex at the bottom of the wing and then step forward again, feeling for the side of the fuselage. My hand encounters a tube of some kind protruding from the leading edge, then it travels onward to the crook of the wing where it angles away from the fuselage. It must be here somewhere. Somehow they must climb this thing. My hand searches the side of the aircraft in slow, methodical sweeping arcs, searching for the foothold, a step or a ladder.

  I smell the creature even before I hear it. Without my helmet on, the sour stench of unwashed body and the fetid decay of its breath gives it away. The shuffling steps come next. Close. An arms length? Two? I let my fingers continue their silent search. I almost miss it, but then my hand sinks into the void, my fingertips brush the rough horizontal plane of the step, gritty and built for traction. With one step located, I have an idea where the next should be. Is this for a right or left foot? Where is the handle? My fingers find the handle at the same time I feel the creature’s rasping breath waft across me. It’s designed for a right hand. Right hand, left foot.

  Releasing my right wrist from its hiding place, tucked against my body, I reach for the handle. The dull blue light of the bracelet illuminates the yellow eyes and ragged hair of the curious woman mere inches from my face. Her eyes widen in the glow of the light and her mouth opens in
desire. I snatch the hair on the top of her scalp, forcing her head back at an angle as her jaw works open and shut. I keep her at a distance as she flails like a child in the grip of a schoolyard bully. I stretch my injured hand upward for the handle, obligated to reach across my body to grip it. My left foot inches upward for the step, while I press on the curious woman’s head to keep my balance. Her fingers scrabble at my T-shirt, and the belt loops of my jeans, but I hold her at bay until I can pull myself onto the step, shoving her away at the last moment and using the few seconds where she’s teetering to climb. The handholds come fast now and I draw my foot up and away just as her fingers scrape my calf. I kick her and send her staggering, then climb the rest of the way up to the cockpit.

  The canopy is locked, or it uses some latch that is invisible to me in the darkness. In either case, entrance is lost to me. I slide sideways and flop myself onto the aircraft’s wing instead. The surface is slick but I find a handhold in some crevice or flight control. I stabilize myself and lie prone atop the wing. There’s nothing to see beyond the tiny orb of light around my wrist and I tuck that away again as I hear distant, muffled gunshots.

  The next few minutes are surreal. First comes the banging of the doors, followed by the sweeping beam of the flashlight, hazy in the misty air. Then footsteps, clomping sounds that echo in the darkness. How did I not realize how loud I was? I lie still and listen to the approach of my earlier self, space boots thudding in the darkness, the flashlight a beacon to guide the creatures toward me. Terrance collides with the tow cable again and ratchets his way through the darkness. The woman pilot lurches from the void. When the flashlight illuminates the group eating the corpse, I’m close enough to view the scene clearly. Then the gunshots come, blinding, deafening flashes as each attacker’s death draws more from the darkness. My predecessor ends up only a few yards from my perch on the wing. The flashlight twirls its way across the floor and I’m forced to squint as it lights up the landing gear below me. As the earlier me uses Charlie’s gun to perforate the skull of the last doomed host, bits of gore rain down around me, one warm hunk landing atop my outstretched hand. I shudder, but stay silent.

  It’s almost painful to listen to the noises of the host bodies tearing and biting at the man in the suit below me. The terror is back and my heart pounds as I close my eyes, clench my fists, and wait out the horror. Finally, the earlier me makes his escape. The host bodies flail and rage, ripping and clawing at the space suit. I watch in fascination as the one-eyed man holds the empty suit aloft by its helmet and the other creatures tear it limb from limb. A wave of déjà vu washes over me and I close my eyes. Wabash was right. My nightmares are coming true.

  The commotion over the space suit attracts more of the host bodies from around the hangar. Soon, the area underneath the wing is packed thick with them. I’m despairing of ever getting down when a door opens from the far wall and a voice calls out from the glow. “TRAVERS! YOU OKAY?”

  The gruff tone of Cliff’s shout is the sweetest melody now.

  “HEY! I’M HERE!”

  The hungry bodies below look up at my shout and start pawing at the wing.

  “WHAT’S YOUR SITUATION?”

  A few of the creatures turn their attention toward the light and the shouting and begin to stagger for the doorway.

  “BAD!”

  The door closes and I’m left alone with the monsters and the dull glow of my flashlight through their teeming legs. When the door opens again, an arm lobs something into the room, away from my position, and I hear it bounce a few times into the center of the hangar. The door slams shut again and I crouch low on the wing in case it’s some kind of explosive. But once the object comes to a stop, a light begins to emanate from it, and soon a holographic projection of Jettison takes shape. He looks around the room and locates the horde of creatures near the plane, then starts waving his arms and shouting. The distraction has the desired effect. I watch one of the host bodies drop the boot she was chewing on and stumble off toward the light.

  I crawl to the end of the wing and search for my belongings. The space suit is in tatters. The Soma Djinn successfully penetrated the face shield of the helmet and there is a sizeable hole where the crack had started. I don’t see the creature anymore, but it could have fallen into the suit when the one-eyed man held it aloft. Bits of the rest of the suit are scattered all over.

  My pack appears to be mostly intact, and I spot the silver gleam of Charlie’s revolver, but can’t make out Viznir’s pistol through the darkness and shifting feet. One of the creatures kicks the flashlight and sends it spinning again, but I know the general orientation of things.

  Jettison’s decoy is getting swarmed, and I’m just considering jumping down for the gun and making a run for it when the door opens again. Cliff and Jettison are followed by Bozzle and Genesis. They have all shed their bulky space suits. The three humans have guns, but Bozzle is carrying a long metal pike with a blade on the end. They move in unison toward my position and, as they encounter their first resistance, a man in a tattered jumpsuit, Bozzle steps forward and jabs the creature cleanly through the eye. The next three attackers meet the same fate, Bozzle’s long arms and extended reach with the pike ensuring that they never even get close. The host bodies below me shift and moan and their jaws drop open in hunger as they turn their attention toward the new arrivals. As the creatures begin to swarm, Cliff and the Marsh siblings begin to unload on them, blasting anything that threatens to get close. Come on, guys. You can make it. Get me the hell out of here.

  The area around the plane has vacated sufficiently for me to have a clear path to Charlie’s gun, so I slide off the wing and drop the eight feet to the hangar floor. I land in a crouch but am up and moving immediately. The gun still has four rounds left in the cylinder chambers, but as soon as I reach my pack I locate more. I stuff a handful of the spare rounds into my back pocket and snatch up the flashlight. I do a sweep of the hangar floor, but there’s no sign of Viznir’s pistol. A short, bald man staggers out of the darkness in a zigzagging jog. Charlie’s handgun bores a hole directly though the creature’s chest and drops him on his back. The wriggling Soma’s antennae have just felt their way to the floor when I stomp on its head.

  Suck on that.

  I retreat from the mess and dash to join the others.

  “You okay? You get bit up?” Genesis asks.

  “I’m okay. Just freaking out.”

  Bozzle steps past me and cleaves one of the creatures’ heads off its body with the end of his pike. Cliff fires another blast of his shotgun at something I can’t see, then signals the retreat. We fall back to the door and I fire the rest of my rounds in the process. As soon as we’re closed off in the hallway, I stop to reload.

  “We’ve located the security system control center,” Jettison says. “The others are holed up in there.”

  “Did you find Jonah?”

  “Yeah, he’s there. And Harrison.”

  Cliff puts his hand on my shoulder. “Wabash took some heavy hits getting that kid through. He’s in a bad state. But try not to scare the kid too much. He’s pretty shaken up as it is.”

  “Is Wabash going to be okay?”

  “We’re not sure. He got stung by a Soma and those things are toxic as hell. They get some kind of neurotoxin in you before they head for your brain. He managed to kill it, but not till after he was jabbed.”

  “Did he make another jump to try to get the poison out?”

  “Yeah, eventually he did, but he was in the thick of it and had to get the kid to safety. By the time he made the jump to get it out, it was pretty late. Some likely got absorbed and gravitized by his body. It’s hard to say.”

  I fall back with Genesis and Bozzle as Cliff and Jettison lead the way to the control center. We descend another level in silence, only probing the darkness with our lights as necessary, trying to attract as little attention as possible. Jettison raps on the metal sliding door and it rolls open for us. Kara is on the other side, her gu
n at the ready.

  We file into the control center. It’s an octagonal room fitted with windows that look out over a massive abyss. Milo is fiddling with the controls at a bank of computers. The displays are fancier than anything from my time, but they seem antiquated compared to some of the technology I saw in the Academy lab.

  Kara gives me a nod and Milo shakes my hand. “It’s good you’re here, Ben. I think we’re going to need all the help we can get. How are you?”

  “Tired, but still alive. That’s saying something.”

  Milo nods soberly and gestures to one display in particular that is showing a constantly changing stream of numbers. “I’m trying to get us through the mine bay doors. The primary doors to the other sublevels have been sealed and the code-breaking program needs a little time to decrypt it. Rest a minute if you need to.”

  “Where’s Wabash?”

  Milo points through a second doorway into an attached conference room. “We set him up in there as best we could.”

  I step through the doorway into the dimly lit room. The floor is carpeted and Harrison Wabash is propped against one wall in a corner. The others seem to have built him a sort of cushion with their packs. His face is pale, but he smiles when I enter. Jonah is sitting on the floor beside him, also leaning against the wall, and Barley has his head and front paws draped protectively over the boy’s lap. The dog’s golden eyes follow me as I cross the room, but he doesn’t lift his head. All three of them look exhausted.