Emperors of Time (20 page)

Julie and Tim
looked at each other.  It now seemed like a fairly good bet that there was
no surveillance in the room, but they seemingly decided silently to play it
safe anyway.  They eased the floorboard up without speaking about
it.  There was a small cardboard box inside.  It included two cans of
mace, some matches, and yes…  a taser.

Earlier that day
they had only used one of the sheets from the letter. 

Tim grabbed the
sheet with the blank back side now, along with the hotel pen.

Matches? 
He wrote.

Could come in
handy.
Julie responded. 
A small fire on this floor might keep them
from building another bomb.  Clearly they’ve got the whole floor reserved,
or the armed guards in the hallway would raise a bit of a red flag, no?

When do we do
this? 
Now?
 
Tim raised his eyebrows at Julie, too, as he
pushed the paper back to her after underlining his last word.

Well… 
the door’s locked, from the outside.  They must have added a lock. 
You can hear it click when they bring food in.  So we could maybe scream a
lot and hope they come see what’s up…  Or just wait for dinner. 
Plus, the longer we wait, the less likely it is they can recover and build
another bomb before it’s time for it to blow up.  I say we wait. 
Julie
took awhile to write this, during which time Tim looked over her
shoulder. 

Okay, we
wait, then
,
a
greed Tim.  But this was easier said than
done.  It was still before 4 o’clock, and they had no idea when dinner
would be.  They had to be ready at a moment’s notice to hear the key click
and start spraying mace at people. 

This was a
stressful situation to be in, especially if you had plenty of time… seemingly
infinite time, even… to contemplate the odds.  This was anything but a
sure thing.  They were outmanned.  Who knew how many thugs there were
available to go against the two of them?  They were certainly
outgunned.  They didn’t even have a coherent plan for how they were going
to use the matches, or at least if they did, Tim didn’t know what it was. 
Julie had kept them in her hand and started fidgeting with them, but Tim wasn’t
sure whether that was the sign of a plan or of nerves.  Either way, until
he had an idea, he wasn’t going to waste paper writing about it. 

Luckily, Julie
saved him the effort when she took the paper after a few moments of
silence.  She wrote as he looked on.

Game Plan:

When they
knock, give me 30 seconds, open the door and try to disable anyone trying to
come in.  Use a can of mace and the taser…  I’ll take the
matches.  Sound like a plan?

When Julie
offered the pen to Tim he took it and shrugged.

Best we’ve
got, anyway. 

So he took a can
of mace and the taser, handed Julie the other can of mace, and sat down on the
edge of the bed to wait, once again, for someone to knock at the door. 

“So…” said
Julie, casually, as if they weren’t about to risk their lives.  “Would you
rather go skydiving or scuba-diving?”

“Hmmm… 
skydiving, I guess.  You’re less likely to get eaten by a shark,” said Tim
as he tried to avoid thinking of the fact that he could very well be getting
shot at in an hour or two.

“Yes…  If
you were eaten by a shark while skydiving, that would be quite a news
story.  I’d rather scuba dive, though, personally.  Have you seen
some of the pictures they take down there?  All the different colors of
fish and everything.  Amazing.  Plus…  who gets eaten by sharks
while scuba-diving?”

“Well, I
mean…  I’m not familiar with the stats or anything, I’m just saying, it’s
scary,” said Tim, slightly defensively.

“Fair enough, I
guess… Okay, now you ask me one,” said Julie.

“I know how the
game works…  I’m thinking,” said Tim.  “All right…  Would you
rather live a thousand years and be bored for a hundred of those years, or live
for a hundred years and never be bored for a single minute?”

“Hmmm,” said
Julie…  “Now there’s a conundrum.  Although wait, am I not bored
because I’m always amused or entertained, or am I not bored because I’m scared
witless half the time?”

So they played
would-you-rather to pass the time. It sort of kept their minds off the problem
at hand, so Tim had to hand that to Julie at least. 

When the lock on
the door clicked at 5:30, Tim’s heart nearly stopped beating.  They had locked
the door from the inside as well, just to make sure that the folks outside
would have to knock.  They did.

Tim looked at
Julie as she struck a match.

“Just a moment,”
said Tim.

Apparently
whoever was on the other side of the door didn’t feel like waiting just a
moment, though.  This was fair, Tim guessed, given that they were
essentially security thugs, not pizza delivery men.  The door handle
turned, but the deadbolt held the door shut.

“Just a second,
I’m…  I’m not dressed!” Tim tried. 

The door handle
stopped turning for a moment.  Tim positioned himself right next to the
door, with the taser in his right hand and the can of pepper spray in his
left.  He glanced back at Julie.  She had lit one of the pieces of
paper that contained Russell’s note and tossed it onto the bed.  The sheet
didn’t seem to want to catch. 

Julie ran to the
bathroom and grabbed the roll of toilet paper.  She made a motion with her
hand that suggested she could use another couple seconds to bring the plan to
fruition.  No freaking kidding, thought Tim.  The door handle rattled
again, accompanied by a muffled voice from the other side of the door saying
something like “I haven’t got all day here, kid.”

“I’ve… I’ve lost
my pants!” said Tim.  Julie, who was currently feeding the fire scraps of
toilet paper to keep it going burst out laughing.  “So I’ll just be a
moment!” Tim said.

That was when
someone started kicking the door. 

Julie abandoned
the smoldering fire on the bed, leaving it to catch or not on its own, and
meanwhile set the roll of toilet paper itself on fire, emptied one of the
pillowcases of its pillow, and dropped the now flaming roll of toilet paper
into the pillowcase.  The bottom of the pillowcase began to smoke and soon
caught fire.

“Whoo! 
Ready!” said Julie urgently.

Tim unlocked the
deadbolt with two fingers of his left hand that weren’t occupied with holding
the mace and then stood ready for whatever was about to come.

Tim tazed the
first guy he saw, and regretted it almost immediately.  Not that the guy
didn’t deserve it or anything.  He definitely did, he was one of the thugs
who had originally brought the four teens up to the room.  But all he was
carrying at the moment was a big platter of pasta, his gun holstered at his
side.  So when Tim pulled the trigger and the two little electrodes shot
out of the cartridge and into the man’s chest, causing him to drop the pasta
and begin spasming uncontrollably, Tim could have kicked himself.  He had
forgotten that tasers like this were generally one-use deals, unless you were
holding them directly on a person, and only some tasers had that ability. 
He had no idea whether this was one of them and didn’t much have the time to
find out. 

He switched the
taser to his other hand in order to keep the trigger engaged as he stepped out
of the doorway.  There was another man in the hallway who was, luckily,
too surprised by the recent turn of events to aim the weapon he grasped in his
right hand, still held relaxed at his side.

As Tim stepped
out into the hall, the other man raised his weapon.  Tim was quicker with
the mace, though.  Thankful for the element of surprise, he sprayed the
man in the eyes.

Simultaneously,
Julie ran screaming out of the room, holding a flaming pillowcase in one hand
and a can of mace in the other.  Both the men who had been patrolling the
hallway were screaming now, too, and all the commotion pretty quickly prompted
one of the people in the room next to them to open the door. 

Julie threw her
flaming pillowcase down the hallway rather than into the room.  This was a
good choice, Tim realized, given that their goal was to cause a fire on the
floor and keep it evacuated for the rest of the day, but not so much to blow
the entire hotel building sky-high by letting fire come in contact with the
materials that the Emperors’ hired help were using.  Tim further realized
that maybe this fact was something they should have discussed before the plan
went into action, but hey…  You can’t think of everything.

Tim dropped the
taser, which stopped having an effect once he let go of the trigger, and
sprayed mace into the second guy’s eyes as well. 

In a valiant but
misguided attempt to take control of the situation, the first guy Tim had maced
let off two shots with his gun, even though he couldn’t see.  The first
bullet blew a hole in the wall of the hallway.  The second left a hole in
the arm of his comrade, who began wailing even louder than he had been and
commanded in an exclamation not sparing profanities that the other guy hold his
fire. 

Luckily, only
two bomb makers appeared.  Julie sprayed one of them in the eyes before he
had a chance to even draw a weapon. 

Tim had a brief
moment where he saw the scene from the perspective of the other guy running out
of the room.

The captives had
just escaped, his associates were blinded with a technology that he didn’t
understand (pepper-spray would not be invented until later in the century),
there was a fire developing not thirty feet from where he had been working on
making a bomb, and the guy who Julie had just maced had now taken to randomly
firing off shots from his gun. Overall, this was undoubtedly more than this guy
had signed up for, and the terror in his eyes confirmed it. 

He ran down the
hotel’s main stairs, screaming.  “Fire!  The whole building’s going
to explode!”

In order to
actually prevent that, though, Tim and Julie walked into the bomb-making room,
leaving the other three thugs (the third had finally exhausted his ammunition,
without hurting anyone other than the wall of the hallway) to grope their way
toward the staircase. 

On a table, the
bomb was almost complete.  It was a suitcase bomb, just like the one from
the Preparedness Day Bombing earlier that year. The suitcase was on the table,
not yet packed with explosives, but it soon would have been.  The
canisters filled with explosives were still open, sitting right beside the
suitcase.  A quick glance inside them showed they were packed with sticks
of dynamite and shrapnel.  Tim recalled that was the most gruesome thing
about the Preparedness Day bombing.  That it had been packed with shrapnel
to make sure maximum injury would be done to those in the vicinity.  Tim
figured that Russell could write whatever BS he wanted to in his letters about
how everything the Emperors of Time did was for the good of humanity, but he
could never agree with anyone who would do something like that, even in
imitation of an earlier bomb.

Julie grabbed
one of the canisters, looking around to make sure there were no more explosives
in the room anywhere. 

Even in the
brief time they stood looking, with Tim having picked up the second canister,
they could hear a siren coming from nearby.  This was good.  With any
luck, the floor would be sealed off and the thugs, who were hopefully the only
workers the Emperors had acquired in 1916, would be apprehended for starting
the fire.  After all, Julie and Tim would be gone by then, and the thugs
would no doubt be telling a crazy story about how they had been electrocuted,
blinded, and otherwise harassed by a couple of teenagers that nobody else could
see.  They might even be sent to a mental institution. 

The Emperors
wouldn’t want to get their hands dirty personally, wouldn’t want to risk
getting caught by the 20th century police or otherwise hurt or
implicated.  So they would run for now and try a different way of changing
the timeline. 

They had
won.  At least this round.

“Shall we?” Tim
asked, pulling the
Dominus Temporis
out of his pocket.

An unintended
consequence of their plan was that Tim and Julie were soon standing in the
middle of a nearly abandoned McDonalds parking lot wearing clothes from
1916.  Luckily, no one saw them.  There were a few cars in the
parking lot.  The McDonalds was open, but far from busy.  Tim
remembered that they had arrived in San Francisco at about six AM after leaving
home at nine pm one night.  If the same amount of time had elapsed since
they left as had in San Francisco, then it should be about 9 am on a Friday
morning now, hardly McDonalds’ busiest time. 

That small
blessing aside, they were still without wallets, cell-phones, or really
anything else useful. 

“Did it work?”
asked Tim.

“I dunno,” said
Julie.  “I mean, this McDonalds being here isn’t super-promising, but
maybe a McDonalds is fated to be here in every timeline.”

They looked
around to see if they could see any buildings they didn’t recognize. 
Unfortunately, McDonalds had always been rather the most memorable building off
this particular highway exit, so Tim couldn’t really remember whether that gym
had been across the street before or not.  And of course, Julie was new to
this timeline anyway.

“So…  I’ve
got 12 cents in Indian Head pennies…  wanna see if they’ll sell us a
mcnugget?” asked Tim.

Julie
laughed.  “It’s a shame I left my purse in another century, though. 
I am kind of hungry.”

“Well, next
time, we know we need to eat
before
saving the world.  Or trying to
save the world.  I’m still not clear on whether we’ve actually done
anything, said Tim.

Julie
frowned.  “We need to find Billy and Rose,” she said.  “How on Earth
did they operate without any of their stuff?”

“They probably
went home first,” said Tim.  “And then Billy probably called his
uncle.  They could have gotten the mace from anywhere.  Heck, they
could have taken it from a pharmacy without paying…  There’s no kind of
shoplifting like the kind where you get to travel through time to do it.”

Julie
nodded.  “You wouldn’t even have to walk through the door. 
Well…  maybe their houses would be the best place to check for them. 
Who lives closer?”

“Assuming that
their houses are in the same place…  Billy, right?” asked Tim. 

On the way out
of the parking lot, there was a dumpster full of fast-food refuse.  Tim
didn’t feel great about the idea of throwing dynamite in a dumpster, but then
he also didn’t love the idea of carrying it around, so he tossed his in as they
passed, and Julie followed suit.  They walked on foot out of the
McDonalds’ parking lot and along the side of the highway exit, looking like a
couple of anachronistic hitchhikers. 

Before they had
gotten too far, a car rolled up beside them. The person in the passenger seat
whistled at them. 

Thankfully, that
person turned out to be Rose, now wearing her normal 21st century
clothes.  “Do you historical re-enactors need a ride?” she asked
cheerfully.

Julie and Tim
got in the back of the car without actually answering. 

“Well, hello,
Timothy, July,” Rose said.

“Did it work?”
asked Julie as she buckled up.

Billy
laughed.  “Well, something happened,” he confirmed.  “We had a weird
night.  We called my uncle as soon as we got here, but that was already
midnight.  But my uncle’s weird, so he was pretty
obliging…  ‘Sometimes you just need a taser’ seems to be one of my
uncle’s life philosophies.  It’s good though, because if he hadn’t
answered his phone, we were going to have to break into his house in the middle
of the night, and I wouldn’t want to risk seeing what happens to people my
uncle finds unexpectedly in his house at night.”

Tim laughed, “Me
neither, from what you’ve said about him.”

Billy
nodded.  “But after we put the stuff in the floorboard, we’d been killing
time watching television in my basement.  About five minutes ago, the
station changed on its own.  And then I noticed my Mom was on the couch
across from Rose and me, and she
never
watches tv at nine on a weekday,
she should be at work.  She screamed when she saw us, I think for some
reason other than that we had appeared out of thin air.  She got her phone
out and started calling…  I think it was the police.  I don’t know,
though, we kind of got out of there as quick as we could.  Luckily, my Mom
still keeps her keys hanging up by the door in this timeline, which is how we
got the ride.”

They were on the
highway now.  “So where are we going?” asked Julie curiously.

“Hadn’t really
thought that far ahead yet.  The main plan was to find you guys and pick
you back up.  I will say I don’t think we should go back to my house just
yet, though,” Billy said.

“Agreed,” said
Rose.  “His Mom was definitely freaked out to see us.”

On the road
ahead of them, there was an electronic billboard, like a giant television
screen on the side of the road. 

In big red
letters at the top of the sign, it read “WANTED:  FUGITIVES FROM
JUSTICE!!”

Below the
letters, there were pictures of four faces.  They belonged to Billy, Tim,
Julie, and Rose.