Emperors of Time (7 page)

As Tim felt the
rumble of the missile impact, he saw Billy wrap his arms around Rose and shove
her as quickly and carefully as he could.  When a second impact rocked the
bowling alley, it was accompanied by a shatter and an extended tinkling of
glass.  Pieces of glass shone in the fluorescent lights of the bowling
alley.  It covered the floor and the chairs up to about ten feet from the
windows.  Billy was partially covered, but Tim couldn’t tell whether he
was hurt.

Two more
explosions rocked the floor within thirty seconds of each other, but no more
damage was done to the building. 

“You okay?” Tim
shouted to Julie over the alarm. 

“Yeah!” said Julie. 
“So…  This really happens?”

“Only the fourth
time I’ve been near a missile…  First time a building I was in got hit.”

Thirty seconds
passed, and the alarm was silenced.  The intercom came back to life,
“We’re sorry for any inconvenience, but we need to close.  We’ll be
handing out passes for a free game and shoe rental for when we open back up
in…  probably a week.  Place your shoes on the desk on the way
out…  Insurance claims adjustors and ambulances will be on site to deal with
any damages or injury.”

Rose and Billy
came walking over. 

“You guys
alright?” asked Tim.

“I’m fine,” said
Billy. 

“Me too,” added
Rose.  “Thanks, Billy.”

“You don’t look
fine,” said Julie, looking at him.

“Okay, I mean,
I’m bleeding some.  Maybe I’ll stick around for the ambulance.  But
I’m walking, right?”

Billy was
wearing short sleeves, and was bleeding at a couple places from his arms where
the skin was exposed.  

“Geez, I didn’t
realize!” Rose said.  “I’ll grab some paper towels on the way to the
parking lot.  Does it hurt bad?”

“Nah, I’ve had
sprains that hurt worse than this,” said Billy.  Whether that was true or
not, Tim noticed that Billy was beginning to drip blood on the floor.

“So was the
building hit directly?” wondered Tim as Rose ran into the bathroom to grab
towels.

“I don’t think
so.” Billy held his arm at an awkward angle as he attempted to keep the blood
from dripping off him.  He looked around.  “I bet it hit the parking
lot or something.  It was close enough to shake the building pretty hard.”

Then Rose was
back.  She dabbed Billy’s right forearm, which seemed to be bleeding the
worst.  “Are you bleeding from anywhere else?”

“No, just those
couple little ones on my arm” said Billy, like he was still trying to convince
them that it was no big deal. 

“This one’s
pretty bad,” worried Rose as she removed enough excess blood to uncover a deep
gash. 

“Nothing the
medics can’t handle.  But I appreciate your help,” he added hastily to
Rose.

“No problem,”
Rose said sincerely.  “I’d be hurt pretty bad if you hadn’t gotten me to
the ground.  I don’t know what happened, I just froze.  I’m sorry you
got hurt protecting me…”

Billy shrugged
and grinned.  “I played football in middle-school and got hurt pretty bad
protecting a quarterback who was nowhere near as pretty as you.”

Rose seemed to
be blushing.  “Well…  I owe you one,” she said.

They had just
reached the parking lot and could hear ambulance sirens in the distance. 
There was a crater at the far end of the parking lot. 

“Oh, wow,”
pointed Billy.  “That’s my car.”  It was two spots away from one that
had gotten banged up really bad from falling debris.  He had lucked out,
it didn’t even appear to be damaged.

Rose’s phone
started ringing.  She bit her lip and picked up the phone. 

“Hey,” Rose
said.  “No, I’m all right.”  She listened a minute.  “I’ll be
home soon.”  Another pause.  “No, not the building itself…  No
serious injuries…  Well, one of the people I’m here with has to wait for
an ambulance…  A couple scrapes…  No, I’ll be there soon.”

“You should go,”
said Billy when she hung up.  “All of you.  Look, the ambulance is
pulling in now.”  It was indeed.

“We can’t leave
you here,” Rose protested.  “We don’t even know if you’re okay to drive!”

“I’m fine.
 I have my cell-phone, too, so I can call my parents if I need to. 
It’s no big deal,” Billy insisted. 

“We can
definitely wait,” said Julie.  Tim nodded agreement.

“This has been
on the news, right?” asked Billy.  “You should all call your parents and
get home.  Look.  I’ll call my parents now and they’ll insist on
coming and picking me up, anyway.”

After a bit more
of an argument, as well as a phone call to establish that Billy’s parents were
now on their way over and were just a couple minutes away, Rose agreed to drive
the other two home. 

After Tim and
Julie placed quick phone calls home to say they were safe and coming home, Tim,
sitting in the back seat of Rose’s car said, “Well…  Billy seems to be
okay.”

“Definitely,”
agreed Julie. 

“For sure,”
agreed Rose.

“He’s nice enough,”
explained Tim.  “And he’s good in an emergency.  Now we just need to
find out how he deals with time travel.”

The next day,
just before noon, the four teens climbed out of a car in a metered parking lot
in Columbia, Pennsylvania, just a block down and over from Wright’s Ferry
Mansion.  Billy had driven them in what he had taken to calling the
miracle car, since it had sustained no damage the night before. 
Apparently Billy’s father had driven his car home the previous night, when his
mother made him come home with her.  The word, “Moms…” and an eye-roll had
accompanied this story when he told it to Julie, Tim, and Rose on the drive
that morning. 

“So you’re into
old things, Rose?” asked Billy as they all climbed out of the car.

“Runs in the
family, I guess,” said Rose with a nod.  “My aunt and uncle own an antique
shop.”  Tim remembered that Julie had needed to convince Billy that Rose
wanted to visit Wright’s Ferry Mansion for him to come, but he hadn’t known about
her aunt and uncle.

“Cool,” said
Billy in what seemed to be a genuine tone of voice.

As they began to
walk toward the mansion, their conversation turned once again, as it had more
than once this afternoon, to Billy’s injury.

“How many
stitches?” asked Rose, who still seemed to think of the injury as her fault,
forgetting that someone had ordered the missile to be fired in the first place.

“Just
four…  Apparently one piece of glass nicked me really good as it
passed.  And since the stitches dissolve I won’t have to go get them
removed.  So that’s cool,” said Billy.

“Were many
others injured?” asked Julie.  “We had to hightail it out of there to
avoid the wrath of Rose’s mother, so I didn’t get a count of how many were
hanging out by the ambulance.”

“Four or five
others.  No fatalities, luckily.  Actually, the emergency responders
said we were the only injuries last night.  One of the missiles hit an
office building…  If it’d been daytime, that could’ve been a disaster.”

“Oh, wow…” said
Rose in a hushed voice.  “Yeah…  it could have been just like
Cleveland.”

Julie gave Tim a
blank look.  She was the only one who wouldn’t have heard about it for
about a month straight afterwards.  He couldn’t explain it to her here
though, since doing so would have meant having to explain why she didn’t know
something so obvious.  The Cleveland missile strike had happened about a
year ago, and it happened on a Wednesday afternoon. 

The building it
hit had a private backup missile defense contractor, one that served all the buildings
in that part of the city.  These kind of private contractors were standard
in big cities.  Tim knew that in Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, State College,
Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh all had their own.  But on this particular
day, the contractor had a malfunction.  A missile blew a hole in the side
of the building, and it crumbled.  Two thousand workers were killed.

It was the worst
loss of life on American soil in five years, and tons of people were
affected.  The president even took a rare trip outside of the White House
Bunker to speak on site later that week, expressing his deepest
condolences.  Still, some people on the internet said the president
secretly wanted to send the Russians flowers for that hit.  It gave him
the votes in Congress that he needed to keep up his draft policies and saw a
spike in military recruitment like no other since the war began. 

They reached
Wright’s Ferry Mansion.

“Mansion is a
little bit of an overstatement, isn’t it?” asked Julie, looking at the
building.

It wasn’t one of
the lavish mansions that modern celebrities lived in, but Tim had no doubt that
it had given its first owners a high standard of living. 

It had been
restored recently, but assuming the microchip could work in spite of this, he
was soon going to be seeing what it had looked like in 1863. 

A wooden brown
painted picket fence stood in front of the building.  The building was
made of gray limestone bricks, some of which seemed to be growing moss. 
The mansion had three chimneys. It had five windows on the top floor and four
on the bottom, plus the window above the door.  Ivy covered the bricks on
the first floor, but hadn’t conquered the awning which jutted out from the
space between the first and second floors. 

A brown sign with
gold lettering (the brown matched the shutters, door, and fence), proclaimed
that this was Wright’s Ferry mansion, and that tours were available from April
to October.  It was early April, and a tour group was forming beside the
building right now.  Tim was trying to figure out how they would get close
enough to touch the building without anybody thinking they were weird. 

He
absentmindedly touched the microchip currently resting heavily in his
pocket. 

He and the girls
had met yesterday afternoon to decide how they would introduce Rose and Billy
to time travel.  They decided Tim should hold the Dominus Temporis, as he
could best envision the time they were heading to.  They had met at
Julie’s house again and  buried the description of where they would be by
the oak tree, just as Hopkins had asked them to. 

Tim led the
group of four toward the building. 

As they walked
around the corner of the mansion, out of sight of the tour group, Rose spoke
up.  “So, Billy…  Um…  completely hypothetical question. 
If it turned out it was possible to travel back in time, would you want to?”

“Yeah, sure,”
said Billy, in a way that made it perfectly obvious he wasn’t taking the
question seriously.

“Even if it
would make your life way more complicated?” asked Rose.

“Uh… 
yeah,” said Billy.

Tim looked at
Julie.  They had decided the afternoon before that they at least should
give Billy the option whether he wanted to be involved. 

Julie shrugged,
“Good enough.”

Rose said,
“Billy, would you hold my hand?”

“What?” asked
Billy, but Rose grabbed his hand anyway. 

At the same
moment, Julie grabbed Rose’s and Tim’s hand while Tim took the Dominus Temporis
in his right hand and placed that hand in what he hoped was a casual and
non-noticeable way, up against Wright’s Ferry Mansion. 

Nobody had a
clear view of him and his friends, so he figured that when they weren’t around
anymore, people would assume they had missed seeing them walk away.  After
all, Tim himself had taken a whole lot of convincing before he believed any of this
time travel stuff, nobody was going to believe they had seen four kids vanish
in front of them. 

He imagined the
town of Columbia on June 29, 1863, with Confederate forces advancing just on
the other side of the river.  They had been marching closer all day and
now that it was night they were close at hand.  The townspeople and the
Union troops must have been panicking, trying to figure out how to keep the
Confederate forces from coming across the river to invade Lancaster and maybe
even Philadelphia.  He touched the wall with his hand.

One second there
was a group of tourists standing around the corner, chattering about how much
of the furniture they were about to see had come from Philadelphia and was
original to the time period.  And then they were gone.

The tour group
was gone, the sign in front of the building was gone, even the trees in the
front yard had changed size and location.  The time had changed,
too.  It was almost dusk, as if they had missed the entire afternoon and
early evening.  Some of the surrounding buildings vanished while others
changed size and shape.  The mansion itself was unchanged.  The folks
who restored it had done a good job. Tim heard shouting in the not too far
removed distance, but there were no people directly at hand.  Tim imagined
they had gone to watch the commotion at the bridge.

Rose’s eyes were
wide, and Tim guessed that she, like him, had reserved judgment on whether this
time travel story was bogus until the last possible second.  That last
possible second had come.

If Rose’s eyes
were wide, it was a wonder that Billy’s didn’t pop out of his skull. 

“What just
happened?!” he asked, alarmed. 

“We went back in
time,” answered Julie calmly.

Billy looked at
her like she was crazy.  “What?  No!  Of course we didn’t. 
Was this the Russians?  Did they make everyone vanish?”

“Look, Billy,”
said Tim calmly, “I grant you that if the Russians could make people vanish, it
would be a neat trick.  They probably wouldn’t pick Columbia, Pennsylvania
to try it out, though.  And you’ve got to admit, there’s no one on Earth
who would want to create a weapon that would make 21st century Columbia look
like it did in the 19th century.”

“And there’s not
many people who would know this is what it should look like if that was their
goal,” Rose chirped.

Billy looked
around at the scenery and the three other teens.  “So you’re seriously
saying that we travelled back in time?”

“Yes,” confirmed
Julie.

“Well… 
why?” asked Billy, who seemed to be halfway between perplexed and irritated.

“To see the
Civil War!” answered Tim, nearly bouncing with excitement at this point. 
Maybe it was a bit of a weird thing to be excited about, but he had spent a lot
of time reading books about the Civil War and had never imagined that he would
actually be able to see Union and Confederate soldiers in action.  He
began to walk toward the sound of the shouting, the Susquehanna River, and the
bridge that spanned it.  The others followed.

Julie rolled her
eyes at him.  “Well, yeah…  But more importantly, we’ve got to meet
Dr. Hopkins.  He’ll be here soon.  Plus, we needed to prove to you
that time travel is real.  And Tim, make sure you stay away from
people.  We’re not allowed to change events, remember?”

“Why couldn’t
you have told me first?” asked Billy, whose emotions now seemed to be leaning
more toward irritated.

“You wouldn’t
have believed them,” said Rose in a friendly but matter of fact tone.  “I
mean, I didn’t.  This is the first time I’ve time jumped, too.  And,
I mean...  I came today because I wanted to hang out with July-- that’s
what I call Julie--, and because you and Timothy are pretty cool.  But I
wasn’t expecting anything to actually happen.”

“Besides, you
don’t actually have to do anything about it,” said Julie.  “We’re going to
see Hopkins in a bit, and then he’ll try to convert you to the whole saving the
world cause.  Seriously, Tim, I think this is far enough.”

They were within
view of the river and the bridge.  They could see a railroad station for
the Baltimore and Susquehanna line.  A bunch of people were around the
building, including men on horseback.  Some were clearly soldiers, with
guns and uniforms to prove it, while others seemed to be ordinary civilians
caught up in the ruckus.

“Yeah, we should
stay back,” Rose agreed.  “We are in nothing even
approaching
period
attire.  We could freak people out.”

“They’re already
freaked out,” said Tim.  “And no one’s paying attention to us
anyway.”  But he didn’t go any further.  They were blocked from view
by a building between them and the gaggle of civilians and militia at the
river.

“What do you
mean saving the world?  And who’s Hopkins?” asked Billy.

At that moment,
several small explosions went off.

“That must mean
it’s about seven o’ clock!” said Tim, completely forgetting not to be
noticed.  But still, no one was paying the four out-of-costume teens any
attention.

“There’s some
people in the future who have taken over their world by changing events in the
past.  This guy, Hopkins, wants us to help him change the world back to
the way it’s supposed to be.”

“Is it the
Russians?” asked Billy.  “Who take over the world?”

“No, some
American scientists, but they still shouldn’t do it,” said Julie.

There was some
smoke coming from the bridge now, but no fire.

“Good point,”
admitted Billy. 

Rose sidled up
to Tim.  “So…  what’s going on here?” she asked, as Julie tried to
explain the ins and outs of time travel to Billy.

“As it happens,
I know a lot about it now…  Just looked it up because, you know…  I
was about to visit,” said Tim.

“Right,” said
Rose.  “So spill it.”

“It’s June 29,
1863.  Confederate Troops are travelling North and the Battle of
Gettysburg, considered the turning point in the Civil War, is going to happen
about forty miles Southwest of here in a few days.  But tonight, the story
is all about that bridge.”

Tim pointed over
to the covered bridge that spanned the Susquehanna River.  There was some
damage to it, and only a little bit of smoke, but it was largely intact.

“It didn’t look
like that in our time, did it?” asked Rose.

“No, but at the
moment, it’s the longest covered wooden bridge in the world.” 

“But it’s going
to be burned soon, eh?” asked Rose.

“Yeah,” said
Tim, excited again.  There was something pretty intense about being able
to know what was about to happen.  “I think the artillery rounds that
happened at seven o’ clock were what we heard a few minutes ago.  The fire
becomes visible at eight.  I just hope we can stay long enough to see it.”

“And you say the
Union troops did it?” asked Rose.

“Are doing it,”
said Tim, enthralled.  “Like right now.  But, yeah.  They didn’t
want the Confederates to take Lancaster, so they don’t want them to enter
Lancaster County.  They’d have preferred to hold the bridge but had to
burn it rather than let the Confederates use it.”

“Wow,” said
Rose.

At that moment,
there was a loud cough behind the four teens.

Tim nearly
jumped out of his skin.  He turned around.

Behind them
stood a man whose clothes looked just as out of place in this time period as
their own.  He was holding a duffel bag that looked somehow
futuristic.  It was blue and shiny, but there was no zipper visible.