Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time (16 page)

“I guess,” said Rose, hesitating.  She thought for a
moment.  “You know, there’s no reason we couldn’t just sneak out the
window, right?”

Tim thought for a second.  “Well, except that they’d
shoot us, right?”

“Yes, well, I suppose that’s the downside,” said Rose with a
small laugh.  “They probably are watching the outside as well, I
guess.  So what are you suggesting?”

“Well, let’s assume they’re lying for the moment.  What
are they trying to do, then?” asked Tim.

“Divide and conquer,” answered Rose without much
hesitation. 

“So maybe we just stick around for a bit,” said Tim.

But it turned out that Hibbard and Fuller had other
plans.  Three minutes in, they opened the door again, guns still drawn, to
check on them.

“Why are you two still here?” asked Fuller, now clearly a
bit irritated.

Before they had a chance to answer, Tim and Rose heard a
light tap at the window.  Further from the window, Hibbard and Fuller
didn’t hear it, but they definitely noticed as Tim and Rose looked in that
direction. 

Misinterpreting their body language, Hibbard said, “Don’t
think about trying to leave.”

But Tim and Rose saw the shape of a hatchet in a
window.  With his head quickly spinning, Tim realized that Billy must be
trying to signal them to get away from the window.  But he didn’t want to
tip off the congressmen, so he hoped Rose would follow his lead as he backed
slowly away from the window as nonchalantly as he could, so as not to enlighten
Hibbard and Fuller as to what was going on.

“No, of course not.  In fact, we were just about to go
back to our own time, like you suggested,” lied Rose, as she backed away from
the window, mirroring Tim.  Hibbard and Fuller seemed to believe that they
were just backing away from the window to prove that they weren’t about to
flee. 

Fuller seemed legitimately relieved, as he sighed and said,
“You’ve certainly made the right decision, because--”

But they never learned why it was the right decision,
because Fuller was interrupted by a great crash of glass pouring into the room
as the hatchet broke through the window.

The
Last Machine

Things stayed noisy on the first floor of the boarding house
as Hibbard shot wildly toward the window.  Without weapons, Rose and Tim
were only in the way as they tried their best to stay out of the path of a
clear shot, so that Julie and Billy could hit the two men with the
revolvers. 

Fuller took a shot as well, although his bullet lodged into
the wall beside the window.  As Hibbard cocked his revolver to take
another shot, he was hit by a bolt of electricity and fell to the floor. 
Fuller, though, managed to get off another shot before he was taken down. 
His shot was accompanied by a loud scream from the window, though, so as Fuller
fell to the floor, Rose and Tim ran to Julie and Billy.

“What happened?” Rose asked urgently.

“Um…  I’ve been hit,” Billy replied, in an eerily calm
voice.

“I think he’s in shock,” Julie said.

“Where’s he been shot?” Tim asked.

“By the window,” Billy explained dreamily.

“In the arm, I think?” Julie hedged.

“Do you think he can come inside?” Tim asked.

“Won’t he bleed on the carpet?” Julie asked.

“Forget about the carpet, the window’s broken and there’s at
least one bullet hole in the wall.  I just don’t want anyone outside the
house thinking it’s their civic duty to come over and investigate,” insisted
Tim.

“Right,” Julie agreed.  “Okay… well, I’m not bringing
him in through the window!”

“Good point,” Rose said.  “Where
are
our
manners?  I can let you in through the door.”

Tim and Rose sprinted out the room and to the front
door.  When they opened it, they found that Billy had apparently hopped up
from his crouched position by the window and walked over on his own power.

There was a sitting room off the entrance way, and once
Billy and Julie had stumbled into the house, all four of them went there and
sat down.

After glancing down at his arm and seeing the widening
bloodstain he was leaving on the sofa, Billy swore loudly.  “Well this
hurts like a--” he swore again.

“I would think so,” said Rose, crouching down in front of
him so she could see the wound.  “So is it…?”

“Oh yeah, the bullet’s still in there,” said Billy. 
“But I don’t think it’s stopping me losing a truly worrying amount of blood.”

“We’ve got to get you to a hospital right now,” said Rose.

In spite of the fact that his face was contorted in pain, he
nearly snorted at that last comment.  “I heard about what medicine was
like during the Civil War…  I’m not going to an antebellum hospital!”

“I didn’t mean you should go to a hospital here!” Rose
yelled, gesturing vaguely around the living room but clearly meaning ‘here’ to
be, pretty broadly, the year 1854.  “I mean we’ve got to send you
back!  I’ll come with you.”

“What?  No way!  I’ve made it this far, I’m making
sure we’re finished,” Billy said.

“They just told us that there’s only one machine left, and
unless you plan on breaking it by bleeding on it, you’re not going to be much
help,” Tim reasoned.

“Yeah, now’s really the time to argue with me!” Billy argued
sarcastically.

“All right, so we go deal with the last machine--” Tim said.

“I’m staying here with Billy,” said Rose.  “Someone’s
got to stay here and make sure this stubborn idiot doesn’t die in a 19th
century living room.”

Billy grinned a pained smile and said.  “Well, if
someone’s got to do it, I’m glad it’s you.  What happened to your tasers,
by the way?  I’ve got one, but I’ve only got a couple charges left, and I
want you guys to have more than just Julie’s…”

“Right,” agreed Tim.  “Let Rose have yours, and I’ll
pick up Rose and mine’s before we go up there…  I think my congressmen
buddies still have them.”

“Just be quick as you can, okay?  I don’t really have
any idea how much blood he’s got to lose before we’re in serious trouble here,
and I’ll try to bind it up somehow, but I can’t make any guarantees,” Rose
said.

Julie and Tim hurried back to the doorway of the room Rose
and Tim had originally entered.  They found the two congressmen still
slumped in the doorway, and Tim didn’t even have to be too aggressive searching
the pockets on Fuller and Hibbard to find the tasers.

He pocketed one and kept the other out. He didn’t bother
taking the guns, since they now knew from experience that the tazed men would
be out cold for a long time.

 “All right, you ready to go smash a mind-control
machine?” Julie asked, with a slight but noticeably mischievous grin.

“Yeah.  You saw the light upstairs when you came up, I
assume?” Tim said.

“Yep,” Julie answered as they bounded up the stairs. 
There was little need to be quiet anymore.

There were three rooms upstairs, and two of the doors were open. 
Since no green light was emanating from these doorways, they didn’t have to do
much figuring to know that the door they were looking for was the closed one.

“Ready?” asked Tim, but his hand was already on the door.

Julie nodded, pointing her taser at the door, past Tim, just
in case.  The door wasn’t locked, but what Tim saw when he opened the door
was strange enough to make him hesitate.

In the dim green light, they saw a different mode for
communicating with the mind-control machine than they’d seen so far. 
There were four men, all congressmen, tied up together.  Apparently, they
had originally put up some resistance to the perspective-opening perspective of
the mind-control machine that Hibbard and Fuller had been advocating.  But
now the four men were sleeping in a weird back-to-back sitting position, heads
fallen forward or off to one side.

“They haven’t been up here for long, according to Hibbard
and Fuller, but of course they’re liars.  Still, even if they’re telling
the truth, I don’t know how long it’s going to take before they turn hostile
toward us when we break the machine,” Tim said.

“Right,” said Julie.  “But given that they’re tied up,
it shouldn’t matter too much if they’re hostile or not, should it?”

“Guess not…” conceded Tim.  “Did you bring a hatchet?”

“I think that might be the first time I’ve ever been asked
that question in my life,” Julie pointed out.  “But no… no I didn’t.”

“Hmmm…  There’s a chair…” observed Tim, who found he
wasn’t much in the mood for subtlety, especially considering that Billy was
still bleeding downstairs.

“Go for it,” Julie suggested.

So he went over to the wooden desk chair in the corner of
the room, picked it up, and carried it near the spot on the floor where the
mind-control machine was sitting.  Tim lifted it high and then smashed the
chair down onto the machine.

The crash was satisfying and caused the machine to shatter
into three pieces on the first go.  There were sparks and crackles, but
Tim decided to give it one more whack with the chair to make sure there was no
way the mind-controlled congressmen could put it back together if they wanted
to.

Tim and Julie ignored the stirring of the tied up
congressmen as they bounded back toward the stairs.  They ran down into
the living room to fetch Billy and Rose.

Tim saw that Rose had bound Billy’s arm with what looked to
be a dish-towel.  He thought he could see a bit of the original blue color
around the edges of the fabric, but most of it was stained dark red. 
Billy’s face was pale and he didn’t look great.

“Okay, you guys ready to go?” Rose asked.

“Yeah…  I think so,” Julie said.  “Should we all
go now?  They told us there were a total of four, but do you think they
were lying to us?  They lied about you two leaving.”

“No…  I think they were telling the truth about that,”
Rose said.  “They were trying to scare us and get us to leave.  If
anything, they should have told us there were more machines than there actually
were, but they didn’t do that, right?  Plus, we’ve got no more leads now,
and I don’t think we can stick around here at this point.  If there
are
more machines, we’ve got a lot of people now who know that we’re not who we
say we are.”

“But Fuller stayed hostile even after we broke his
machine.  How do we know they’ll be back to normal by morning?” asked Tim.

“It doesn’t matter, our personas have been compromised and
people know who we are, plus I have no idea how we would convince them to turn
their backs on the Emperors before the mind-control wears off anyway. 
Hopefully it happens soon.  They wouldn’t use it every night if it lasted
for super-long.  We just have to go and hope for the best,” stated Julie
with an air of finality.

“Okay, let’s go, then,” Rose agreed.  “Billy’s bleeding
profusely here, so there’s not really time for debate.”

“Yeah.  How are you doing, there, Billy?” asked Julie.

“My arm hurts like crazy, and I’m losing a lot blood. 
But I’m hanging in,” Billy said.  Tim could see tears trailing down
Billy’s face, but figured he’d be much less stoic himself if he’d been
shot. 

“I can’t imagine how much that would hurt,” Rose said.

“I dislocated my knee once in a basketball game…  It’s
not much worse than that,” said Billy, although this still didn’t sound to Tim
like a ringing endorsement.

“Okay,” Rose said.  “Let’s all hold hands.  We’ve
got all four Domini, but we only need one.  What are we going to use to
take us back?”  Each of the teens had an object on them that had existed
in their own time, so that they could get back to their own time in a pinch.

“Um, I’ve got a coat button that can get us back to my
bedroom in our time,” said Julie.

“Good enough,” Tim said.  “Let’s go.”

They held hands and materialized into Julie’s bedroom.

Sunlight was flowing in through the window, and a look at
Julie’s alarm clock told them it was one o’ clock.  It was the middle of
the day then, which hopefully meant they had the house to themselves, since
Julie’s parents worked and her brother was in school.  Of course, it might
be the weekend, since Tim couldn’t remember what day they would be jumping into. 
They would have lost as much time in their own time as they had spent in
others, but he hadn’t done the mental math on how long they were gone, nor did
he really remember what day they left.

“All right, we’ve got to get him to a hospital right now,”
Rose said.

“Ah… wait,” said Tim.  “I just thought of
something!  The Emperors probably already know who we were impersonating
in 1854, right?  And they probably could have found out Billy was shot, if
they had a way of monitoring their people…  So wouldn’t they be looking
for someone who looks like Billy’s Cooper character to show up in our time with
a gunshot wound and look for treatment?”

Billy swore.  “He’s right.  We can’t let them
capture us.”

“Well what else are we going to do?” Rose asked
frantically.  “Raid July’s parents’ medicine cabinets for band-aids and
aspirin?”

“Julie, let me use your computer fast, would you?” Tim
asked.

“Sure,” she answered as he sat down in front of it.

“Just going to see if the Emperors have changed the timeline
again yet.  If Hopkins has managed to collect all the Domini since we
changed the timeline back… assuming we actually
did
manage to change the
timeline back…  then maybe we don’t need to worry about the Emperors
anymore.”

“So if the timeline’s the way it should be, then we can take
him to the hospital?” Julie asked.  “Do you remember enough about the
timeline we’re trying to get to to know?”

“Yeah…  I kind of memorized who the presidents were
supposed to be,” said Tim, who was now sitting at the computer.  After a
moment of working with the computer, he continued, “Hey, look, wikipedia exists
in this timeline, too.”

“Yeah, fascinating,” Rose said with an eyeroll.  She
was sitting on the floor next to Billy.

“All right, working on it, working on it…” Tim said
quickly.  “All right--  wait…  American President isn’t coming
up with any hits… um…   let’s see…  George Washington?  Oh
boy…  Nope, things aren’t back to normal.”

“Billy’s just passed out!” Rose yelled.  “He’s
unconscious!  He’s… yes he’s still got a pulse, but he’s unconscious.”

“Well, we can’t take him to a hospital here…  I just
found out George Washington was a general in the American Rebellion- an
unsuccessful rebellion against the British Empire.  And look at this, I
just got a pop-up ad that shows Cooper’s face and says he’s a wanted fugitive,
claiming he’s unstable and dangerous.”

Doing some fast logical calculations in his head, Tim
realized that this meant they had been successful in changing the previous
timeline.  If the previous timeline had still worked for the Emperors,
they wouldn’t have changed it by nixing the American Revolution.  They’d
had another successful mission, but Hopkins still hadn’t managed to collect all
the Domini.  There would need to be at least one more mission.

“Okay, wait, I’ve got an idea!” said Julie, heading over
toward her dresser.  “Look, this is weird, but my parents saved a blanket…
this blanket… from the hospital when I was born.  So we jump back there,
and they won’t be expecting us back then, right?”

“We’ll give it a try,” Rose said.  “Quickly.”

So they grasped hands, Julie and Rose grasping Billy’s even
though he couldn’t grip back, ready to jump back in time to a hospital in the
late 1990s.