Emperors of Time (13 page)

“Yikes,” said
Tim, as he began climbing over the armrest between their two chairs to get to
the back seat.  It was a tight fit and he had to keep himself from hitting
his head on the ceiling as he crawled awkwardly over.

“Sorry I called
you an idiot,” apologized Julie.

“It’s okay,” Tim
replied as he pulled the seatback down to reveal the trunk behind it. 
“You can make it up to me another time.”

“What? You want
me to kiss you again and have you ignore it?” asked Julie testily.  A
glance at the speedometer showed that they were going eighty.  In the
rain.  Without a seatbelt.  Forget the missiles, Tim was starting to
think he would die right now.

“I’m sorry, I
didn’t mean--” said Tim.

He was cut off
by Julie screaming, “Holy crap!” from the front seat.  “Hold on!” 
She pressed on the brakes and the car began to skid.  There was a car a
few hundred yards ahead of them, doing a reasonable forty or so miles an
hour.  Julie swore, let off the brakes, and swerved to avoid the car,
going into the left lane.  Because of the car’s high speed, she hit the
median and ricocheted off of it.  Luckily, the car in front of them pulled
over, so Julie was able to swerve between both lanes as she recovered her
bearings.

“I didn’t
mean--” Tim started again.

“Now is really
not the best time…  let’s get through this first, alright?”

“Yeah,” said Tim
as Julie slowed down a little bit.  The golden arches of McDonalds were
already visible a little ways off the highway.  Julie gripped the steering
wheel hard as she broke by increments.  She seemed split between the
desire to outrun the cop and the need to keep at least one or two wheels on the
ground while making the upcoming turn. 

“Screw it! 
This is going to get bumpy!” Julie cautioned.  Tim had about half a second
to figure out what Julie could possibly mean before she veered off the road and
onto the grass.  Clearly, she was trying to meet the exit road a little
further along than the road pavers had intended. 

Tim, still in
the backseat, got the worst of the jostling.

“You got the
stuff ready?  I hope they’re already there when we get there!” Julie
yelled.  The car went airborne a couple of times as they sped toward the
macadam.

Tim was
clutching the bundle of assorted men’s and women’s clothes from the 1910s
against his chest and gripped the newspaper in his right hand. 

“Yeah…  I’m
ready,” said Tim, his muscles tensed as he watched the police car behind
them.  It was still going plenty fast, but was sticking to the road, so
that was lucky at least. 

There was
relative quiet for a moment while Julie focused on the road.  Tim was able
to catch another snippet of the radio broadcast.

“--Two more
missile strikes in the GW High School region brings the total in that area to
eight in the last half hour.  This is definitely an unprecedented missile
event, brought on, of course, by the worst malfunction in the missile defense
system since the program has gone online.  Other portions of the state
have been hit, mostly in larger cities, but George Washington High School is in
the suburbs, indicating that the Soviets are intentionally targeting a suburban
area-”

At this point,
Julie finally made it back onto the macadam. 

There was a red
light coming up, but there were no cars in the intersection, so Julie didn’t
bother slowing down. 

“Thank goodness for
McDonalds always being right off the freeway!” said Julie as they spotted the
parking lot, and…  Rose’s car was there.

The cop car was
right on their tail as they pulled into the lot.  Something in either the
reckless way Julie was driving or the squeal of the siren clearly tipped Rose
and Billy off that something urgent was happening, because they jumped out of
the car and into the rain before Julie had even put the car into park.

As soon as she
did, Julie and Tim jumped out of the car. 

They hadn’t had
time to think about the specifics of initiating the time jump.  That was
the problem, Tim guessed, with pushing your trip to the year 1916 from sometime
this week to immediately on the spur of the moment.  But he was the one
holding the newspaper as the four of them assembled between the two cars. 

He had one of
the Domini Temporis as well, so he said, “I got this.”  The cop car
squealed to a stop in the parking lot and turned off its siren.

The officer got
out of his car with his weapon already drawn.  It crossed Tim’s mind that
this was rather excessive.  Sure, they had just led the cop on a
high-speed chase in the middle of a missile raid and a thunderstorm, but they
clearly weren’t armed.  Tim had half a mind to be angry about the cop’s eagerness
to point a gun at him, but he did his best to forget it as he focused his
imagination on where this newspaper might have been on the morning of November
3, 1916.

It would be
morning, somewhere in the suburbs, maybe, where the newspaper could have been
delivered to a family in a development on the outskirts of San Francisco. 
At least, Tim certainly
hoped
that that was where this particular
newspaper had been delivered.  If it had come from some newspaper vendor
in the middle of the city, the four teens would have a rather difficult time
explaining their appearance out of thin air in front of a newsstand.

Tim focused on
how deserted the area around the newspaper was in the early morning hours,
because even if it was from a stand, there would be some time during the early
morning when not many people were around.  He thought about the graying
horizon in the pre-dawn, just after the papers hit the pavement, thrown by some
paperboy on a bicycle. 

He focused on
the idea of tension mounting to find out who would be the next president. 
Would it be Wilson, who was famous for keeping the nation out of war? 
Wilson’s peace-mongering solutions irritated those businessmen who needed
England and France to win the war, confused those who thought the Austria-Hungarian
Empire was an outdated relic of the Middle Ages, like the Ottoman Empire
fighting alongside them, and vexed those who thought the Kaiser in Germany was
a petty tyrant who needed to know his place in the world. 

Tim focused on
all this, hoping that his concentration on the time that the newspaper came
from would make up for the fact that he had no idea
where
it had come
from.

And he hoped
that it would work soon, because the officer was demanding that they put their
hands on the top of their heads and drop whatever it was they were
holding. 

Tim had closed
his eyes to concentrate on his destination, so his first sign that it had
worked was that the rain stopped abruptly. 

It was a perfect
getaway, except for the fact that they weren’t around to see the expression on
the officer’s face when they vanished into thin air in front of him.

When Tim opened
his eyes, he was in a suburb of San Francisco in the early hours of November 3,
1916.  The light on the horizon showed that dawn was about to arrive, but
it was not here yet.  The gas streetlamps lining the road provided the
light Tim needed to see his friends. 

It was dry this
morning in San Francisco, so the newspaper, which was now on the stoop of the
house they stood in front of, was not even damp.  On the other hand, the
four teens’ hair, clothes, and skin, were still wet from the rain they had been
standing in. 

“Just keeps
getting weirder and weirder,” Billy said, shaking his hand. 

“Right,” said
Julie.  “Well…  I hate to say it, but now’s probably not a great time
to chicken out.  If you need to, though, remember that we have two Domini
now, so if you wanted to go back… anybody who wanted to go back… you could do
it now if you need to.”

“What, and get
bombed to bits in our own time?” asked Billy.  “No thanks.  I’ll stay
here and try to figure out how to…  get Wilson re-elected?  That’s
our mission, eh?”

“Yeah, although
it ought to sort itself out if we can stop the Emperors of Time from setting
off that bomb,” answered Rose.  “But I’m still disoriented from our sudden
change in plans.  You really think we can figure out how to stop the bomb
from here…  from now?”

“It’s our best
option,” Julie said.  “I don’t know how, but those missiles were
definitely coming for us.”

Rose
nodded.  “Agreed, but that isn’t going to make things any easier.”

“Listen guys,
let’s take this one step at a time,” suggested Billy.  “Remember, we’re in
the game right now…  This isn’t a drill.”

Not even Tim
could misunderstand this particular sports analogy.  And a simple look
around was enough to confirm it was true.  The funny thing was that the
buildings looked normal enough on the surface.  But the houses definitely
weren’t cookie cutter, like the developments Tim was used to.  Each one
had a different style, and the one they were in front of looked downright
eccentric to Tim.  The roof sloped down from the third floor, all the way
down to the top of the first.  Billy probably could have touched the
lowest part of the roof, and then there were two other triangular roofs, one
perpendicular to the main roof and another running parallel to it for a part of
its length.  There was a chimney, too, which made good sense, since Tim
had heard it could get fairly chilly and damp in San Francisco.  And the house
had windows.  Lots and lots of windows.

“Right,
well…  maybe step one is changing into clothes that aren’t such an
anachronism,” suggested Tim.  Julie was carrying the bundle of clothes
from the car, and in the meantime, they were all wearing terribly 21st century
looking jeans and t-shirts.

“Hmm… 
Maybe out back?” suggested Rose.

“Sounds good,”
said Julie, and they started walking around the house to the back side of the
residential block they were on.  At the back of the house, they were in a
green space between the backs of two rows of eclectic houses.  They found
a place where they could press themselves against the back of the house, at a
spot where there was no window, to minimize the risk of being seen.

“I guess if we
can trust each other to travel through time together, we can trust each other
enough to look the other way while we change?” Tim asked.

“Why, are you
shy?” teased Julie.  She giggled at Tim’s embarrassed expression. 
“Yeah, we can trust each other.”

That being said,
Tim was maybe a little tempted to sneak a glance at Julie, but he didn’t. 
After all, he would have been embarrassed if Julie had looked at him…  Of
course, he had been embarrassed when she had kissed him, too.

Within a few
moments, each of the teens had put on their 1916 costumes. 

Billy clapped
his hands.  “Right.  So I’ve got my list of sports bets.  Tim,
you got our cash?”

“A grand total
of fifty-three cents, in my pocket,” Tim acknowledged, nodding.  “I’ve got
my Dominus in my pocket, too.”

“I’ve got my
Dominus…  no pocket though,” Julie said.  “I’ll put it in my sock!”

Rose laughed at
Julie’s excitement..   “Don’t ask me what made me think of bringing
this, but I have mace.  Although I also have no pockets and I don’t think
it’d be super accessible in my sock.”

As if to
demonstrate the point, Julie hiked up her skirt several inches to gain access
to her own sock, where she placed the Dominus before letting the skirt drop
again.  Once she did, the sock was hardly visible at all, let alone the
slight bulge from the coin-sized microchip.

Rose held the
container of pepper spray out to Billy. 

Billy
grinned.  “Oh, good.  Because I’m a great shot with a can of mace,
let me tell you.”

“Have a lot of
experience, do you?” asked Julie.

“Not really, but
I’ve got confidence in my ability…  That’s what counts right?” asked
Billy.

Rose shook her
head, laughing.  “There’s really nothing to it,” she said. Then she
thought for a second.  “Well, of course, you want to make sure you’re
pointing it away from yourself.  You see that little opening there, yeah?”

Billy
nodded.  “Yeah, I think I’ll be fine.”  He paused.  “Anyway,
that’s what we have.”

“And it’s not
much,” added Julie, supplying the thought that Billy apparently had the
delicacy not to say out loud.

“Right,” said
Tim.  “And fifty-three cents won’t cover our food money for the next
couple days.”

“I doubt I can
do more than triple it with betting…  I mean, I know the exact scores that
the games are going to be, but I don’t want to end up being right too often or
too precisely or people will get angry.  Suspicious gamblers are not
something I want to have to deal with,” Billy pointed out.

“Right,
so…  That would give us $1.59,” said Julie. 

“Yeah…  It
may be enough if we sleep outside and don’t eat too well.  Still, it’d be
nice to be able to use public transportation and whatnot.  I’ve always
wanted to ride on a trolley, and at this point it could be practical for us,”
said Rose. 

Billy
shrugged.  “Well, let’s take this one step at a time.  Betting is
supposed to happen in The Tenderloin District, so we probably want to get
there.  But first we need to stash our clothes.”  He extended his
hands to collect the clothes Tim, Julie, and Rose had just changed out
of.  Even the boys, who had pockets, gave up their 21st century wallets,
phones, and keys, since it would be best not to be caught with this
stuff.  After he took their stuff, Billy walked over to a tree in the
backyard, grabbed a low-hanging branch, jumped, and deposited the rolled up
ball of clothes in a place where several main branches met.  The clothes
could still be visible if you were looking for them, but hopefully no one would
be. 

They made their
way out to the road and stood beside the street-car track.

“So which way do
we go?” Rose asked nobody in particular.

“Well the good news
is,” Billy pointed out, “that San Francisco is on a peninsula, so we can only
get a certain amount of lost before we hit the ocean and know we have to turn
around.  The even better news is that I think downtown is over there, and
the Tenderloin is basically downtown, just one district over from city hall.”

Billy pointed to
a small cluster of skyscrapers dimly visible several miles away in the
brightening dawn light.

“Good you’re
here, then.  I did a little bit of research and found out that city hall was
just finished last year, 1915.  But I had no idea that the Tenderloin
District was anywhere near it,” admitted Tim.

“Yeah, seems
like you really did your homework,” said Rose with a smile.

“Well… 
yeah,” confirmed Billy.  “I guess I see a lot of incentive to study when
the test is surviving after being sent a century into the past.”

“Don’t forget
the part about saving the world,” cautioned Julie with a tone of overemphasized
earnestness. 

“I would never
forget that,” Billy answered with an eyeroll.  “Shall we, then?”  The
others nodded, and they set off on the road in the vague direction of the
buildings they could see in the distance. 

They walked
briskly, anxious to get to the next goal and make some positive action. 
They chatted nervously about a number of things on the way into the city,
covering everything from hushed whispers about whether the people who passed
them on the street could tell they didn’t belong, to whether or not following a
road toward a great big city on the horizon reminded anyone of the
Wizard of
Oz
.  Julie brought it up and Rose agreed that the comparison was apt,
but Billy insisted it was because each of the girls liked to think of
themselves as Dorothy.  Tim registered that this was fine, so long as he
wasn’t the scarecrow, and they all laughed, even though precious few other
people in the city of San Francisco that day in 1916 would even have understood
the reference.  The
Wizard of Oz
had only been published as a book
sixteen years before and would not become a musical for another couple of
decades.

The four of them
walked together for over an hour without saying a word about how they were
going to find the bomb in time, or how they were going to turn fifty-three
cents into enough money to support them for a long weekend in San Francisco and
have enough money left over to fund some detective work.  But Tim figured
each of them just needed to talk and laugh with friends for a little bit, to
take a break from how strange reality had become.

It didn’t matter
that only a week ago, Tim was still surprised that Julie was his friend. 
Neither did the fact that, only a week ago, Tim had never met Rose and would
never have voluntarily talked to Billy.  Time had a way of changing
people, whether it was a week forward or a century into the past.

Then, out of
nowhere, when they were practically in the shadow of the skyscrapers, Billy got
them back on track by saying, “So, if we’re approaching downtown from the west…
which we are because the sun just rose from behind the buildings… then the Tenderloin
should be to our right.  Because it’s to the south.”

“Right… 
speaking of the Tenderloin--  Do you think it was named for the piece of
meat, by the way?” asked Rose.

“Maybe… 
That wasn’t really the focus of my research,” said Billy with a shrug.

“Oh well,” said
Rose, shrugging as well.  “That wasn’t my real question anyway.  Do
you think they play poker there?”

“Well, yeah…”
said Billy slowly.  “Definitely.  I’m actually only about 99% sure
that I’ll be able to find someone there to bet me on college football, but I’m
sure people there play poker. Unfortunately, it’s not like we can predict the
outcome of a poker game, so it doesn’t help us.  Why?”

Rose smiled
coyly.  “Because I’m good at it.”

Billy shook his
head.  “You can’t seriously be suggesting that you want to try to play
poker in the Tenderloin, are you?  That’s a no-go.”

“Why?” asked
Rose.

“Because we
can’t control it,” said Billy.  “And because I can’t imagine very many
1916 poker players are going to take too kindly to losing to a seventeen year
old girl even if you do win.  I mean, I know we have a can of mace, but
that’s no match for a bar full of angry men, which is what we’d be looking at
if you made someone angry.”

“What do you
guys think?” asked Rose, turning to Julie and Tim.

There was a
pause.  “Well…  how good are you?” Tim asked, mostly because he could
think of nothing else to say. 

Rose gave that
shifty smile again, “Like, really good.  My Mom taught me, and she plays
with the other attorneys she works with.  And they’re lawyers, so they
cheat.  But she wins anyway.”

“Still sounds
awfully risky,” Julie stated.  “We need to be focused on the mission,
though, and at this point fifty-three cents helps us almost as little as
nothing would.  That’s really the only reason I’m even letting us bet on
the football games, but I don’t know if a buck fifty is enough either.” 
Nobody questioned her use of the word “letting”.  They all knew she was
the one who Hopkins had contacted first, and the reason they were all there.
 She was the only one Hopkins had said was destined to do some great thing
they couldn’t even predict yet. 

“So what’s the
verdict on the poker?” asked Rose.

“I…  don’t
know yet,” said Julie.  “Let’s just get there first.”

The idea that
the topic was now out of their own hands relaxed Billy and Rose, which led to
something that Tim hadn’t really been expecting.  The two of them were
walking beside each other, in front of Julie and Tim, since Billy was the one
who theoretically knew where they were going.  Because of this, Tim and
Julie had a pretty good view of Rose reaching out, grabbing Billy’s hand, and
holding it.  Or maybe it was the other way around, with Billy grabbing
Rose’s hand.  Even with the good view, it was difficult to tell. 

It didn’t last
long, though, because Julie groaned and said, “Let’s keep the public displays
of affection to a minimum, shall we?”

Billy and Rose
both almost jumped at this, like neither of them had quite realized what they
were doing.  The four of them walked on without mentioning anything about
it again.