Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Read online

  “Right,” Julie said, putting her hand to her chest. “Geez, my heart’s still racing. We were in that time for less than twelve hours and the Emperors of Time already had people out to arrest us.”

  “Sure,” Tim agreed. “So that’s clearly their plan-- to catch us-- what’s ours?”

  “Oh come on, why’s everyone looking at me?” Julie asked, annoyed.

  “You’ve been doing this time-traveling thing longer than the rest of us,” Tim said.

  “Longer by like a day. It’s not my fault that I met Hopkins before you did,” she countered. She paused, biting her lip. “But that’s what we need to do, obviously. Meet Hopkins, just like we were going to do before. Unless there were any objections?”

  “I don’t think there’s any ‘obviously’ about it,” Billy said. He shook his head. “Any world where I’m traveling through time to go meet someone from the year 2347 isn’t one where the word ‘obviously’ applies. But I agree with the plan. We’re not going to him empty handed anymore, so we have no reason not to meet him.”

  “Whoa, now,” Rose said, sticking her tongue out. “No need to argue, we’re all suggesting the same plan. Now, since I got us here at eight, my aunt and uncle won’t be in the shop yet, so we can just sneak right out, but we should already be at school, ‘cause it’s a Tuesday. Let’s go.”

  “So, wait,” said Billy. “Why does it matter so much if we’re in school already?”

  “Well, just, our past selves would be really freaked out if we ran into them. I’d probably report us to the police or something,” Julie said.

  “Oh, yeah… That makes sense,” Billy decided.

  There was no further discussion. Julie seemed happy not to be the one leading for a change. Tim had known Rose for less than two weeks, but this was the most determined that he had ever seen her, so he figured it was best not to question her. Tim guessed that Billy’s thought process was something similar.

  It was about a half hour walk between the antique shop and Julie’s house, and the four teens spent the time rehashing the events in 1916 that had led to them getting back to their own time. This was probably fair, since they hadn’t had much time to process it. After all, less than 24 hours ago, according to their own personal timelines, they had all been locked in a hotel room while a bunch of thugs in the next room worked on building a bomb that would change the outcome of the 1916 election and American history in general. But Tim was still a bit frustrated because all the chatter from his friends meant he couldn’t get much of a word in edgewise concerning how excited he was about the prospect of spending some time further in the past to correct the changes the Emperors had made to the mid-1800s.

  Downtown was deserted this time of day. In their town, downtown was just a fancy name for a couple blocks of Main Street where the eight or so main commercial offerings were. As they strolled down the streets, they seemed almost eerily empty. Once, they spotted a car coming toward them.

  “Off the road!” cautioned Rose.

  When Billy responded by raising his eyebrows, Rose shook her head as she pushed Billy off the road and down a little hill beside it. Julie and Tim followed as Rose explained, “We’re walking through our hometown where people know us, and even though we’re not being pursued by the cops anymore, we’re still truant from school. If we get caught, we’re going to have a crazy time explaining why we’re two places at once.”

  Everyone took a few steps away from the road, turning their backs to the oncoming car, hoping that no one would recognize them. The car didn’t slow down as it passed, which the teens took as a good sign. Either way, after the car passed, they were a little more alert as they continued to Julie’s house, staying further from the street and making themselves inconspicuous when a car passed. Luckily, by eight o’clock this far from Harrisburg, most commuters using this road had already made it out of town by now.

  Soon enough, they arrived at Julie’s house. They snuck around to the back, with Julie glancing nervously at the windows to make sure nobody was looking back at them. “Even though it’s a school day, I know Mikey claimed he was sick a lot in my timeline, so he was out of school a good bit.

  “What are we going to dig with?” asked Billy.

  “There’s shovels in the garage. In my timeline, my family leaves a spare key under a mat on the back porch. We’ll give it a try, and if it’s not there we’ll smash a window. It’s not like we’ll be around long enough to get yelled at for it,” Julie reasoned. “All we’ve got to do now is make sure neither of my parents stayed home with Mikey today. If there’s no cars in the driveway, we should be alright, at least assuming my father keeps the garage as messy in this timeline as in mine so that nobody could park there.”

  They snuck around to the front of the house. As Tim tried not to feel foolish crouching behind a lilac bush on the side of the house like an incompetent criminal in broad suburban daylight, he made a small but helpful discovery. “There’s a window here,” he told Julie, as he turned around and peered into it.

  “Oh, hey, that’s right. I hardly ever go into the garage, so I forgot,” said Julie. There wasn’t much light in the garage, but they were able to see enough to notice that it was overly cluttered, and there was no car in it.

  The driveway was also clear, and a quick survey of nearby houses showed that the cars were not in the driveways and the shades were mostly closed.

  So it was with confidence that she wouldn’t be seen that Julie approached the back porch. “Ah-ha!” yelled Julie triumphantly as she moved the mat and found a silver house key.

  It was a bit easier digging now than the last time they had searched for a message from Steven Hopkins, because this time Billy was there, too. Besides, the last time they had dug back here, they had been doing it with Julie’s parents’ permission, under the pretense of working on an archaeology project for social studies class, so they’d used little trowels. Now, they were taking turns wielding two large shovels. Still, Billy was definitely the most athletic of the four of them, so he was using a shovel most of the time, as the other three teens took turns with one of the shovels and occasionally relieved Billy of his.

  “So is this why you guys have me on your time-travel team? Because I’m good at digging?” asked Billy during one of the times he was taking a break.

  “Ask Julie, it was her idea,” said Tim. After Julie was recruited, she first chose Tim because he knew history, she trusted him, and they had been really close in the timeline she’d originally come from. She was from a different timeline because Hopkins had recruited her by showing her how he fixed her own timeline by ensuring that John Wilkes Booth was able to assassinate Lincoln. He knew that by the time she got back to her own time, the Emperors would have changed the timeline again to suit their needs, but he sent her back with the instructions to recruit three friends who could help her fight back against the Emperors. Rose had been Julie’s second choice, an obvious one since they’d been best friends for about ten years in each timeline.

  Julie groaned. “You two both agreed that he was a good choice.”

  “I was just kidding,” Tim said. “Of course you made the right decision. He saved our whole mission with the idea to bring stuff back to the room from the future.”

  “I just wondered why you picked me in the first place, that’s all,” said Billy.

  “Well,” said Julie, now less defensive, “I knew you pretty well in the other timeline, so I know you’re a good guy, and smarter than you let on in school. I saw you on the basketball team enough to know that you’re determined and a good team player. Plus, you’re right, it doesn’t hurt having someone who’s a bit athletic on our side.”

  “Fair enough,” said Billy. As if to demonstrate her point, he grabbed his shovel back from Rose, and started digging again.

  By nine o’ clock, they hit a small tin box, and by nine fifteen they had dug it out.

  Billy sighed with relief and said, “About time, too. I thought I was going to get a blister.”
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  “I kept telling you I’d take the shovel!” Rose replied, shaking her head.

  Billy shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Now we open it, right?”

  “Right,” Tim agreed. He grabbed the box and handed it to Julie. “It was in your yard, so you get to open it.”

  Julie glared, but opened the box anyway. All that was in the box was a postcard and a small piece of concrete. Looking puzzled by the piece of concrete, Julie took out the postcard first. On it was a picture of a city. Tim wouldn’t have known what city he was looking at if there hadn’t been text overlaid on the bottom of the picture that said, “Washington DC, April 21 1986, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr Memorial Unveiling.”

  Everyone looked at the postcard’s front for a moment before Julie turned it over. On the back were just a few scribbled lines. The four teens huddled together to read it.

  I have had a long day, and have much work yet to do, so I must keep this brief. I had to buy this postcard as a collectible in 1987, because I will not be able to change events in 1986 more than once. Now, I have written, and will bury it, and by the time you meet me, I will have traveled back to 1986 to meet you at the spot where the chunk of concrete, which I also collected in 1987, used to be. When you read this letter, jump back and we will meet.

  At about the same time Tim finished reading, Billy looked up from the postcard and groaned. “I guess I knew we’d have to time jump again to meet him, but…”

  “But I wish we could at least take a nap first,” said Julie. For the second time in a week, the four teens had skipped nighttime during a time jump, and Tim’s body was starting to feel it.

  Rose stifled a yawn. “Listen, guys, I don’t care how tired I am, I won’t be able to sleep before I talk to Hopkins. Aren’t you guys curious what the Emperors of Time are up to?”

  “They’re trying to take over the world,” Billy said. Now that Rose had gotten the yawns going around the group, they didn’t seem to want to stop, as Billy yawned, too. “Only a history geek would care exactly how they’re doing it.” Rose opened her mouth, but Billy cut her off. “But it doesn’t matter, because we need to go back now. That’s what he told us to do. He knows what he’s doing more than we do.”

  Tim had nothing to say to this, as he felt pretty much the same thing. Julie just looked around the group before saying, “Right, so… We’ve decided, then?”

  Billy sighed heavily and shook his head. “I still hate popping up in a completely different place and time. But let’s get it over with.”

  He stuck his hands out first, as Julie reached into her pocket for one of the Domini. Soon, the four teens had once again joined hands. Tim saw Billy cringe a bit before he closed his eyes. On the other hand, even Tim had to admit it was a bit jarring. Without even the blink of an eye, the Dominus took them from the bright but quiet scene in Julie’s backyard to a darker but much louder one.

  Chapter 4

  Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

  The place where the four teens now stood was much livelier than Julie’s backyard. They had not materialized into the middle of the crowd, but an endless multitude of people started about 10 feet from the space they suddenly occupied. Their abrupt appearance certainly would have shocked the thousands of people milling about within shouting distance if they weren’t all facing in the other direction.

  Tim quickly got over his initial relief at seeing nobody looking at them and became immediately curious to see what so many people were looking at. He turned in the general direction they were staring.

  He knew that the postcard had been from Washington DC. Washington was only a couple hours from the house where Tim had grown up in Southern Pennsylvania, and he had even been there a couple times. He had seen the major buildings that defined the DC skyline in his timeline, the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, and the White House, for instance. He scanned the night sky now, wondering which ones were there and which ones weren’t.

  “Well, there’s the Washington Monument,” Julie said, apparently doing the same thing Tim was. She pointed to the humongous obelisk.

  “It makes sense it would still be here. I visited it a couple years ago, and I remember construction on it started in 1848, well before the Civil War,” Rose said.

  “But where’s the Lincoln monument?” Billy wondered. Rose looked at him and cocked her head. Billy got slightly defensive. “What? I like Lincoln!”

  “Well, he wouldn’t have a monument in this timeline, would he?” Tim asked after a moment’s hesitation. “No Civil War means no Lincoln Monument.”

  “He wasn’t even president, was he?” Rose asked. “Didn’t we just find out Stephen Douglas took his term in 1860?”

  “What, so now my favorite president was never president at all?” Billy demanded. “Now we have to change the timeline back.”

  Tim wondered what building would have replaced the Lincoln monument he’d visited as a child and looked around. They were on a flat, mostly empty, plain of grass crisscrossed with a network of sidewalks. This plain had a few large buildings laid out on it, with the more developed part of the city glowing in the form of a large number of lit windows in the not-so-far-off distance. He assumed that the buildings close by were monuments.

  As Tim surveyed the scene, he remembered that the postcard had featured the “Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Memorial Dedication,” and it was for this reason that he quickly concluded that the building which was apparently the focus of everyone’s attention must be this very monument.

  The structure jutted out of the ground with sharp angles and high walls, the fresh marble glaring in the light of about a dozen large spotlights that were trained on it in the darkness of night. Tim racked his brain to think of who this Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. guy could have been to deserve such a monument, but he couldn’t come up with any kind of association. He guessed this wasn’t too surprising. They had already discovered that history in this timeline diverged from their own way back before the Civil War. It wasn’t shocking that someone who Tim had never heard of had risen to prominence in this new timeline, but Tim was still dying to know what he had done to do so.

  Someone cleared their throat behind where Tim stood.

  The teens whipped around in unison. In the dimness of a few nearby streetlights, the teens saw a harassed and tired looking Dr. Hopkins. His hair was frazzled, his clothes were wrinkled, and his eyes had bags that were increasingly visible as he approached them in the semi-darkness.

  Hopkins cracked a smile. “You look like you have had as long of a day as I have,” he said, after surveying their faces for a moment.

  “Day or days. I lost track around the third time jump,” Julie said, with a bit of a laugh in her voice. Tim was slightly surprised by how confident Julie sounded as she talked to Hopkins. Tim was still quite in awe of this man who had helped create a device that allowed people to travel through time.

  It wasn’t exactly that Julie’s response to him had been disrespectful, but it seemed flippant. On the other hand, if Julie hadn’t said something before him, Tim supposed he would have responded to Hopkins’ observation with something like, “Yes, sir.” And Tim wasn’t the sort of person who addressed people as “sir” too often.

  “Yes, that will happen when you engage in Time Travel,” was all that Hopkins said in response.

  No one could argue with that. Rose shrugged and said, “So I gather they’re dedicating that monument tonight?” She pointed at the same building that Tim had noted earlier.

  Hopkins nodded. “You gather correctly,”

  “Dedicating it to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.?” Rose prodded. Tim could tell by her tone of voice that she had never heard of him either.

  “Yes,” Hopkins said. “And you need not worry about the fact that you have not heard of him. He did not factor into your timeline much at all. He was a politician in the original timeline, the one that we are trying to get the world back to, but he was never as influential as he has become in this one.”

  “So what’d he do?”
Rose asked, impatient with curiosity. Tim was curious, too, although he was pretty sure he caught an exasperated sigh from Billy.

  “Well, people have written books about him… In both timelines, come to think of it,” Hopkins said. “But I will give you a severely abbreviated version.” Tim hid a smile. He respected Hopkins for a lot of reasons, but brevity wasn’t his strongest suit.

  Hopkins continued. “In the original timeline, he was just a Senator from Massachusetts and diplomat who had a failed run at the Vice Presidency as a Republican in 1960.”

  “I thought you’d’ve at least heard of that, Tim,” Julie teased.

  “It did not happen like that in your timeline. No, in your timeline, he was fated never even to be defeated in a run for the vice presidency,” Hopkins said, as if he felt for the man.

  “Oh,” Julie said. “Then maybe you would have heard of it, after all.”

  Hopkins went on. “In this timeline, however, he was president from 1957 to 1969. By the time he took office, the United States already owned all of North and Central America, and had a protectorate over South America. But he was the one who expanded American power into the Eastern Hemisphere by waging a long war against Russia that finally forced Russia into what they ended up calling a ‘treaty of obedience’ with the United States. It was more or less as humiliating as it sounds. Basically he made it so that, today, in 1986, the United States, Germany, and China are the only world powers worth knowing about.”

  Julie’s eyebrows were raised in what looked to Tim like a combination of curiosity and confusion. Billy’s eyes were a little bit glazed over. Rose looked like she was trying to formulate a question to ask, but Tim spoke first. “And all of this is just the latest way that the Emperors of Time have thought of to manipulate world history to force all of the world’s governments into a single-empire system by their own time? I guess it makes sense that there would only be three world powers by now.”