Chapter Three
Eli: Driving through Thunder
June 9, 2019 C.E.
We left New Orleans the next day. One of the museums was having a pirate exhibit that I really wanted to see, but Dad wasn’t stopping for anything.
We ate breakfast in the truck, driving along, with just the quiet buzz of the electric motor joining our chewing and sipping noises as we ate beignets and drank chicory coffee.
Beignets are those special donuts they make in New Orleans that are covered with powdered sugar and don’t have holes in the middle.
“Your mom and I came down here before you were born,” Dad said after a few minutes. “When we were both still in grad school. The first morning here, we had beignets and coffee, just like this.”
I don’t know why grownups like coffee — it’s really bitter — but after I put enough milk and sugar in it, it tasted okay. Actually, this was the first time I’d ever had it — to my surprise, Dad just nodded when I asked if I could order some, too. And hearing him then, I wondered if it was his memory of that time with my mom that made it important to know there was still someone around he could order a second cup of coffee with, even if it was just a twelve-year-old kid.
“Dad? What really happened with Mom in the lab? You and Mr. Howe told me she disappeared, but people don’t disappear in explosions — they get hurt. Or they die.”
He stopped chewing his beignet. I could tell Dad was getting uncomfortable.
“This was a different kind of explosion, Eli. It was an explosion of time.” Now it was my turn to stop chewing.
“It has to do with your work?”
“It’s not my work anymore. That’s why we’re going to California.”
We were both quiet again, and Dad just kept heading west. Eventually, he turned on the satellite scanner to listen to a music station out of West Africa that he really likes. I unrolled a vidpad to check messages — just ads, nothing from Andy — and see if I could pick up another Barnstormer game.
The weather kept doing weird things, so the Comnet links weren’t very reliable, and eventually I just read some stuff I’d stored in one of my files, on twentieth-century minor- league baseball teams.
The weather was pretty wild during the whole drive; our storm siren kept going off, which meant we had about fifteen minutes to pull over or adjust course before the next cloudburst hit. Bad weather had been hovering over the Midwest and was shifting south toward us, so we had to zig while it zagged. Instead of heading straight through Texas, and then New Mexico and Arizona, we wound up on a road my dad called old Route 66 and spent an afternoon and part of a night in a place called Vinita, Oklahoma.
The clouds were dark, and there were streaks of lightning coming out of the sky when we pulled into town.
We saw a flickering electric sign that said CABIN CREEK MOTEL. We both ran from the truck into the main office, and since there weren’t any other cars around, figured that getting a room would be pretty easy.
When we stepped in, we heard a strange tapping sound, not quite like hammering — more like somebody knocking two small rocks together with a steady rhythm. “Shhh. Listen to that,” my dad said, holding up a hand. “Typing.”
“Typewriter typing?” I don’t think I’d ever seen a typewriter before, except in pictures. I know people used to write on them, while they were waiting for computers to be invented. Of course, hardly anybody writes on a computer anymore, either. They usually just speak into their vidpads and print it out somewhere later, if they still need it down on paper.
My dad just stood there listening a minute before ringing the bell.
Eventually the tapping stopped, and a man came out of the back. Older than Dad, with sandy gray hair and a square jaw, he stared at us through a pair of old-fashioned wire-rim glasses that magnified his eyeballs so that the most casual expression on his face seemed really intense. He looked at us like we had stepped out of a dream and he was having a hard time believing we were there.
“It’s you,” he said at last, looking right at me. Neither my dad nor I knew what to say.
“Well, yes, it’s us,” Dad finally answered. “And we’d like a room.”
The man nodded, and with the tiniest hint of a smile, slid a large guest book across the counter. “You coming here, or passing through?”
“Passing through.” My dad shrugged.
“We all pass through don’t we?” the man said with that sudden, intense eyeball-look as he stared at my father.
The man gave Dad an old-fashioned ink pen, and it was Sandusky’s turn to stare — at the antique in his hand. Then he signed us in. “Room number one,” the man said. “Right next door.”
My dad took the key without speaking, and we ran out into the rain and then let ourselves into the room.
Stepping inside and flipping on the light, we could see the place was fixed up to have a Civil War theme from two centuries back, but that wasn’t the unusual thing. At the foot of the bed was a TV!
I don’t mean a wall monitor, but an old, bulky television in its own wood cabinet, standing on four legs, and plugged into the wall — like straight out of a museum. It even had preprinted numbers on the dial… and it only went up to channel thirteen!
Not expecting anything to happen, I flipped the on switch, and after nearly a minute of flickering light, a big eye-looking symbol came on, and then there was a serious-looking man reading the news. He was showing films of soldiers somewhere in a jungle.
My dad looked at it, then turned the dial to a different channel. There wasn’t much on, and it was all black-and-white. I guessed there was some local festival of old shows on. Dad stepped away and watched the screen, then stepped up close again and grabbed the round wire loop from the top of the set. Suddenly, the picture got fuzzy, like when your local satellite link goes bad.
“That’s it,” he said under his breath. “Wait here.”
He left the room, but I went after him. Who wants to be left alone in a strange place dressed up to look like a nearly two-hundred-year-old war?
When I stepped into the office, Dad was hitting the bell over and over. The typing had stopped again, and the man with the big eyes came out from the back.
“I hear you,” he said.
“That television,” my dad said, sounding both excited and mad, “seemed to be receiving broadcast signals through the air. And there was news about the Vietnam War. That was before I was born.”
And it was sure before I was born. Just like the Civil War. But I’ve read about both of them in history books.
“There were TV networks on that don’t even exist anymore,” Dad continued, “and it was missing some that have been around for years. What’s going on?”
I still couldn’t tell what had him so upset. It just looked like some kind of super-retro show, though even twentieth-century retro is pretty old-fashioned by now. Maybe it was just some new kind of wireless device.
“You say that seems strange to you?”
“Look…” My dad walked over and picked up a device with a numbered circle in the middle and a couple of speakers in the handset. He listened. “An old telephone. With a live signal.”
That was a telephone? It was way too big! “Television and phones haven’t looked like this, or worked this way, in years. What is this?”
“How should a phone look?”
My dad took out his cell card and flipped it on. “Like this.” The screen remained blank. “Nothing.” Dad looked right into the motel guy’s magnified eyes, and the motel guy looked right back. “What’s going on?”
“My name is Andrew Jackson Williams,” he said, offering his hand, “and I’m pestered by visions. Would you and your boy care to join me for dinner?”
A.J., as he liked to be called, grilled up a couple hamburgers for himself and Dad, and I was a little surprised, since real cow beef usually cost so much. But Dad enjoyed it. I’d never gotten used to the taste, so instead I had a cheese sandwich.
A.J. told
us he used to be the preacher at the First Church in Vinita. “But I couldn’t keep doing it,” he said. “I had visions, and when I talked about them up in the pulpit, people got a little” — he looked around, as if someone else might be listening — “edgy.”
“What kind of visions?” Dad asked, happily eating what was probably his first burger in years.
A.J. put his food down, then took a pen out of his pocket. He made a drawing on a napkin — a cloth napkin — and held it up. It was a circle.
“Time,” he said, “doesn’t really move in a straight line at all. It moves in and around everything, and them that know, know that everything really happens all at once. Or that everything that went before is still happening somewhere else. I’m putting it all down in the book I’m writing. I’m telling people that nothing ever goes away.”
“What doesn’t?” I asked. Sometimes I just don’t know what grownups mean about anything.
“Personally,” Dad said, putting the unfinished half of his burger down, “I’d like to give time a little rest. Maybe avoid it altogether, if I can.”
“How are you going to do that?” A.J. asked.
“By going to California.”
“Might work.” He nodded, chewing thoughtfully. “It’s worked for some.” Now it was his turn to put down the burger. Then he pointed at me. “But it won’t work for the boy. He’s touched.”
“Touched by what?”
“The hidden truth about time.”
Now it wasn’t just getting weird — it was getting scary. The conversation kind of died down after that, and after Dad took a couple more bites of his food, we went back to our room. The TV was still on. It showed a man running on a beach, being chased by a giant balloon.
As we stood there, there was a knock on the door. It was A.J.
“I don’t mean to be inhospitable,” he said, “but there’s a break in the storm. This might be a good chance to move along to where you need to be.”
My dad looked back at him. “I guess it might.”
A.J. helped us get our stuff back in the car. “Hate to lose customers,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s for the best.” The full moon was reflecting off his glasses, but you could see how fierce and alive those eyes were.
“Let me pay you…” Dad took out his wallet and held out a credit card.
“You probably know that your credit and your money won’t work here.”
“I probably do,” my dad agreed. Then he did something that really surprised me; he took out a picture of my mom.
“I don’t suppose…” And he let the question hang there for a while before finishing. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen this woman anytime recently, have you?”
A.J. took the photo of Mom and squinted at it under the moon.
“I haven’t seen anyone like that lately,” he said at last.
“Lately?” Dad asked.
“It’s been a long life,” A.J. replied. Dad kept looking at him. “But I’ll keep both eyes open for her.”
Dad handed A.J. a slip of paper. “This is where we’ll be in California,” he said.
A.J. put it in his pocket without looking at it. “That’s where you’ll be,” he said. “But when will you be there?”
“Just as soon as we can.” And a minute later, Dad was steering the truck through the Oklahoma night, while I tried to stay awake in the seat next to him.
There was a lot I didn’t understand about what had happened, but there was one question I had to ask first. “Why did you show him Mom’s picture?”
“Because, honey…” Honey? He hadn’t called me honey in years. Since I was a kid. Now he was waving his hand at the windshield, indicating the night, the stars, and the moon. “I think your mother is still alive. Somewhere out there. Someplace.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think the lab accident put her somewhere else in time, Eli. Some when else.”
My stomach felt a little knotted up, like when you get bad news. But maybe this was good news. How come he never came out and told me any of this before?
“How?”
“There’s a lot to explain. Can we talk about it in the morning, son?” He never called me son either. What was with him? “It’s a long night, and I have a lot of driving to do. And you still have to get some sleep.”
“That’s not fair.” I decided to stay up and keep asking questions, but somewhere in Kansas, I let my guard down and drifted off.
When I woke up, the sun was shining — it was almost scorching hot — and we were a thousand miles down the road, ready to eat a late breakfast in Arriba, Colorado.
Ancient Fire (Danger Boy Series #1) Page 4