Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time (14 page)

Back
to Cooper’s

“It’s certainly not dry out there,” complained a soaking wet
Rose as she trudged into the house, closing the door that Julie had opened for
her. 

“We haven’t talked in so long, I almost forgot how observant
you are,” Billy said.

“Don’t listen to him,” Julie said, as she tossed Rose a
towel that she’d had ready.  They had seen the storm begin about ten
minutes before and didn’t know whether Rose would have had the foresight to
bring an umbrella from her fake parents’ home. 

“I never do, July, I never do,” Rose said, wiping off her
face and hair.

“Good.  Well… as weird as this is going to sound, I
think the Widow Macphearson might have some clothes that could fit you,” said
Julie.

“I don’t care if they fit or not, I’d wear Billy’s clothes
right now if it meant I could get out of this soaking mess.  I assume
you’ve got umbrellas somewhere?”

“One step ahead of you,” Julie said, gesturing at the
collection of umbrellas the three had already assembled on one of the
couches.  She led her back down the hallway to one of the bedrooms to
change.

This left Billy and Tim alone.  “Nervous?” Billy asked.

“A little,” Tim said.  “You?”

“Yeah,” Billy admitted.  “Not loving the weather, either. 
We want everybody in town to be sleeping through the night so they don’t notice
the crazy stuff we’re going to be doing.  We don’t need them waking up
every five minutes because there’s thunder and lightning out the window.” 

As if to demonstrate Billy’s point, the sky lit up at that
moment.  Tim waited until after the thunder rolled a moment later before
he said anything else.  “Yeah, but hopefully by sunrise it’ll all be
over.”

“And we’ll be back to the 21st century again,” Billy
finished.

“You excited?” Tim asked.

“I guess.  But I’m afraid we’re just going to get sent
off on another mission by Hopkins as soon as we get back.  We spent, what,
like two hours in our own year last time?” Billy asked.

“Yeah, but maybe next time will be the last time he needs us
to go back.  If there even is a next time.  Maybe he’ll be able to
collect all the
Domini
once we throw the Emperors off balance by setting
the timeline straight tonight,” Tim suggested.

“Yeah, maybe,” shrugged Billy, who clearly wasn’t overly optimistic. 

There was a slightly awkward silence after this, but the
boys only had to deal with it for a few minutes, as the girls came back down
the hallway soon.

“So July here tells me you guys might know where the last of
the mind-controlly things is?” asked Rose, when she came back down the hallway
in one of the widow MacPhearson’s more casual dresses.

“Yeah, we hope so,” said Tim. 

“So what’s our plan, overall, then?” asked Rose.

“Well, we’re going to go to Cooper’s place first, since I’ve
got keys,” said Billy.  “After that, we’ll try to hit the other three
places before dawn.  We figure we can start over to Cooper’s place in
about half an hour, so that we get there at around ten.  My boarders are
usually asleep by then.  We sneak into Fuller’s room, dismantle his
mind-control device, fight him if we have to and are hopefully out of there
well before midnight, free to spread mischief elsewhere in the town.”

Rose laughed.  “Sounds like a plan, if not an
especially sane one.”

Billy shrugged.  “I think sanity went out the window
about a hundred and sixty years from now… the first time you guys made me
travel through time.”

“No need to sound bitter,” Rose countered. 

They didn’t really have anything productive to talk about,
so they chattered about nothing for the next half hour or so, hoping that the
rain would stop before 9:30 so that they wouldn’t have to get rained on the
whole way there.

They had no such luck, though, so at 9:30, Julie handed each
of them an umbrella from Macphearson’s closet and they got ready to take a walk
in the rain.

They arrived half an hour later, soggy in spite of the
umbrellas because of stepping into puddles and walking into wind and
rain.  By looking into the windows at Cooper’s boarding house, they could
see that Billy was right about his boarders’ sleeping habits.  There were
no lights in the house, although they could see a faint but unnatural green
light coming from one of the windows. 

“Well, here we go,” Billy said, as he fumbled through his
pocket and retrieved the house key.  He placed it into the door.

When they got into the house, Billy took a match and a
candle from a chest of drawers in the entryway.  He lit the candle,
seemingly noticed how little light one candle gave off in the almost complete
darkness of the house, and got out two more.  He handed one to each Tim
and Julie and let them light theirs off his own candle’s flame.

At this point, Tim could see maybe three or four feet in any
direction, with only shadows and dark shapes further than that.  Billy
seemed satisfied with this nonetheless and pointed toward the stairs, which Tim
could intuit more than actually see at the end of the hallway.

Then, even though no one had said anything since before they
walked into the house, Billy raised a finger to his mouth to demand silence
before he started leading them toward the stairway.  They didn’t know how
much, if anything, Thomas Fuller would be able to hear while he was using the
mind-control machine, but they did know that there were two other boarders in
the house who they didn’t want to wake up either.  So they proceeded in
silence.

The weird green light seemed a bit stronger when they saw it
under the door from the dark hallway outside Fuller’s bedroom.  Rose and
Julie each pulled out their tasers and held them in front of them as Billy felt
around in his pocket for the key he would need for this door. 

Tim grabbed his taser as well and held his breath as Billy
turned the doorknob, not sure whether to anticipate having to blast Fuller with
electricity or not.  He had enough time to vaguely wonder whether they
should decide which one of them should shoot him or if it would be okay to
shoot him with all three bursts of electricity.  After all, they didn’t
want to kill him, only stun him.  He was a U.S. congressman, and actually
an innocent victim in all this.

The door didn’t open.  Billy tried turning the knob
again.  The knob itself turned, but the door stay closed. 

Billy turned around to the others.  Tim raised his
eyebrows, but Billy just shrugged.  “He must’ve put a chair there or
something,” he whispered.

“Well… what now?” Julie hissed.

Billy turned back and tried the door again.  It
stubbornly continued not to open.  Billy looked around the hallway, and
Tim took the opportunity to do the same.  He noticed the door that had
been smashed to pieces by the hatchet that Fuller had wielded only three days
before.  He wondered how Fuller had gotten away without being blamed for
that.  He and Billy must have been the only ones home at the time.

Billy held up one finger and snuck quietly back down the
stairs as the other three waited in the hallway.  Tim fought the urge to
shiver as his wet clothes clung to his body in the unheated hallway. 

Billy returned with a hatchet.  Tim figured it couldn’t
be the same one that Fuller had used earlier in the week, but apparently either
Fuller had brought his own or Cooper had a spare.  Either way, it hardly
seemed like a good idea to replicate the plan.

“If he can do it, so can I,” Billy said, by way of a too
brief explanation.

Julie, Rose, and Tim all three began to vigorously shake
their heads no, but for the moment were too scared of being heard to protest
out loud.

Finally, Rose spoke up.  “You
can’t
,” she
whispered emphatically.

“Have to,” Billy muttered back.  “Don’t see any other
choice.”

This was a fair point, Tim had to admit.  It wasn’t
like they could just walk away because the door wouldn’t open.  But a
hatchet to the door still seemed like an awfully reckless, not to mention loud,
alternative.

Billy clearly wasn’t in the mood for rational debate,
though.  He handed his candle to Rose, who had no choice but to take it,
lest it fall to the floor.  He swung back with the hatchet.  Tim
debated trying to grab his arm and stop him mid-swing but decided against
it.  Having the four teens fighting in the hallway wouldn’t make much less
noise than a hatchet anyway. 

The first swing connected with a deafening crash through the
quiet hallway, much louder than the distant rumbles of thunder from the storm
and the rain patter on the roof.  To his credit, Billy got in two more
swings at the door, aiming at the spot just to the left side of the doorknob,
before the other doors opened and two bleary eyed congressmen stumbled out into
the hallway.

One of the congressmen, Tim thought it was Moses MacDonald
but couldn’t be sure in the dim light of the hallway, spoke up.  “What are
you doing out here?  Is that you, Cooper?”

The other tenant, Samuel Mayall, added, “We thought you were
dead.  And, Sage?  Is that you?  What are you doing here, and
who are the young women?”

Although Tim couldn’t imagine what other possible
consequence Billy could have thought there would have been for his decision to
go after the door with a low-tech weapon, he still didn’t seem to be prepared
to answer any of these questions.  Tim was at a loss for words as well,
and neither of the girls had anything to say either.

Billy swung and hit the door again.

“Haven’t you got a key, man?” Moses asked.

“I think he’s gone mad!  Perhaps they all have!”
responded Samuel.  Tim would have said this line of conversation had
gotten a bit dramatic, but then there was a man wielding an axe in their
hallway in the middle of the night, so who was Tim to judge?

Billy stubbornly raised the hatchet and swung it again.

This seemed to be too much for Moses, who threw up his hands
in frustration and yelled, “That is quite enough!  I shall fetch the
police!  There’s a station nearby, and I won’t stand for such a disruption
to the peace in my very own residence.”

Tim barely had time to register that this man even talked
like a congressman when he threatened to call the cops before Rose, too, had
had her fill. 

“That’s it!” she yelled, and pointed her high-tech taser at
Moses.  She pulled the trigger and a blue ball of light shot across the room
and hit Moses in the chest. 

“Whoa!” said Rose.  They had seen before what these
tasers looked like when they fired because they had practiced with Hopkins’
great uncle Paul one day in the underground bunker until he was satisfied that
they were competent to wield the things.  But seeing the blue electricity
light up the dark hallway was something else entirely.

Billy, who had turned around when Rose yelled the first
time, was clearly impressed.  “Nice shot!” he said.

Tim looked at Moses, who now lay prone on the ground,
breathing but motionless. 

Samuel, who had clearly taken the last moment to process
what he’d just witnessed, now screamed.  Rose, all business, turned to him
and tazed him as well.  Billy swung the hatchet once more, then put his
shoulder against the door, pushed hard, and was rewarded with the sound of the
door beginning to splinter and come apart.

Julie and Tim each raised their own tasers as they gained a
view of the room, not sure whether or not their target, Thomas Fuller, would have
climbed out the window or would perhaps be waiting for them on the other side
of the door with a gun.

But it would seem that the mind-control machine had robbed
him completely of his senses and kept him from waking up.  There he was,
still lying motionless on his bed, bathed in eerie green light.

If breaking the door in and tazing two congressmen in the
hallway hadn’t woken the man up, there was no need to be quiet now.  The
four teens climbed over the broken door and into the room.

“So how are we going to destroy the thing?” Julie asked,
looking at the machine.  Tim examined it closely as well.  It looked
like a very complex computer, about the size of an old stereo, with a panel of
controls and a spot on the top where a dancing green snake of electricity
played across the still-darkened room. 

In the comparative brightness of the candlelight combined
with the electric green, Tim saw Billy roll his eyes before he raised the
hatchet once more and brought it crashing down on the machine.  It
sputtered sparks of electricity around the room before falling off the dresser
it had been on.  Upon hitting the floor, it broke into a few large pieces,
with pieces of broken glass skittering across the floor.

Only then did the man on the bed, Thomas Fuller, begin to stir. 

“Well, we can’t let him wake up,” Rose said
apprehensively.  She, like Tim, seemed unsure how the man would behave now
that the mind control machine had been broken.  They had already heard
about how he had reacted when he knew someone had found out about it, and now
it lay in pieces on the floor.

Julie raised her taser and hesitated.  “Should I?”

“Yes,” Billy said, with a hint of impatience in his
voice.  Julie took the shot, and Fuller stopped stirring. 

Julie immediately looked slightly remorseful. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Tim comforted.  “We did what we
had to do and he’ll be okay in the morning.”

Julie nodded half-heartedly.  “Let’s just hope we are,
too,” she said. 

Billy kicked the machine again, causing it to break into a
couple more pieces.  There was now a small pile of smoldering metal on the
floor, remnants of a machine made up of technology that would not be invented
for centuries.

Splitting
Up

Breaking the mind control machine was easy, but finding
Billy’s missing
Dominus
was not.  Since they weren’t sure how long
the high-tech taser would keep Tim’s fellow congressmen knocked out, three of
them looked around the room while they took it in shifts which one of them was
holding their taser to guard the unconscious.  They searched around in
their own circles of dim candlelight looking for the small metallic disc.

Tim even started to wonder if maybe Fuller had taken the
Dominus
to one of the other drones’ places.  But they had to do their best to
make sure it wasn’t there before they could go somewhere else.

It took about half an hour of searching through the room
before Julie let out a strange sound of mingled victory and surprise.  “I
found it!”

“Okay, good!” Billy said.  “Now how are we on time?”

Tim grabbed his pocket-watch and held it into the
candlelight.  “Just past eleven.”

Billy swore.  “This was supposed to be the
easy
one.  How’re we ever going to hit the other three places by morning? 
We still have to figure out how to get into those places.”

“Three that we know about,” Rose reminded him.  “It’s
possible that there’d be more than four total, right?”

“I guess,” Billy said irritably.  Everyone was silent
for a moment before he spoke again.  “I think we need to split up, hit two
houses at once.”

“Wait, really?” Julie asked skeptically.  “We don’t
even know if the other three mind control-ees already know that one of the
machines has been destroyed.  For all we know, they’re on a network.”

“We’ve still got to try to try to catch them by surprise as
quick as we can, in case they don’t know yet,” argued Rose.  “They could
all still be sleeping, and that’d be the best way to take them on.  If
they start coming to find us, at least we’re still armed…  Besides, the
longer we take, the more prepared they can be.”

“Yeah, listen,” Billy explained, “I understand the desire to
have strength in numbers, I really do.  But if we keep travelling in a
pack, it’s going to take us about three hours just to walk to all the
locations, not to mention that we have to get into the rooms and destroy the
mind-control machines.  We can’t stay here tomorrow, Fuller’s already onto
me, and now the other two know you’re with me, Tim, and it’s only a matter of
time until they figure out who the girls are.”

Tim’s head was spinning.  Figuring that there were only
three houses left, if that was true, they could take two hours apiece to
dismantle each mind-control device and still be done by dawn.  If it took
about an hour to arrive at each place, that could be doable, but only if there
were no major complications.  They had already run into a good number of
complications tonight.

“Arguing about it isn’t going to make time go any slower,”
Julie pointed out.  “So let’s just vote now.”  The vote turned out
unanimous for splitting up.  Tim figured that since each of them had a
taser, two in a group would be just fine for strength in numbers.  Time
was the real enemy.

“So who’s going with who?” Tim asked.

“Me and you go together,” Rose told Tim.

“Er… okay,” Julie said.  “But, why?”

“Well… might as well have one boy and one girl on each team,
in case someone wants to think about mugging us.  I assume that was a
thing in 1854.  And July, you’re faster than me, so you can keep up with
Billy better.  Timothy and I aren’t as fast, so maybe you get done with
your first hit faster and go to the last place.  No offense, Timothy.”

“None taken,” Tim said.  “Let’s just go.”

“Okay, sounds good.  You go to Westbrook’s on Kentucky
Avenue.  We’ll go to David Disney’s house.  Then we’ll meet up at
Harry Hibbard’s place at Georgia and Thirteenth,” proposed Billy.  “Don’t
break anything you don’t have to, and don’t taze anyone you don’t have
to.  Remember that each of our tasers had five charges, so now Rose has
three, Julie has four.”

“And…  Break!” Rose said enthusiastically.

Walking with her through the rain for the next few minutes
after they left the house, hoping that the comatose congressmen weren’t waking
up and getting ready to pursue them or send the cops after them, Tim saw her
enthusiasm begin to wane.

Mostly, they walked quickly, but not quick enough so they’d
be tired when they got there.  They jumped puddles and tried to angle the
umbrellas so as little rain got on them as possible.  They also had to
spend a bit of concentration making sure no other mind-control drones were
ready to pounce on them and didn’t have much mental energy left over for
talking during most of the trip.

“I’m sure glad I at least wore flats,” said Rose, when they
were getting close.

“What?” Tim asked, having no idea what flats were, but
figuring out from context that they were probably an article of clothing.

“Oh… shoes that aren’t high-heel,” Rose replied.  “I’d
be dying if I didn’t switch shoes before I left the house.”

“Oh…  good thing you did then,” Tim said. 

“Yeah,” Rose said.  “You ready for this?”

“Sure, I think so,” Tim decided.  They each had their
tasers in their pockets, plus Tim was carrying a hatchet that Billy had given
them after finding a spare at Cooper’s boarding house. 

“Sure...  we got this,” Rose said.

The house they were looking for was coming into view
now.  Even though they didn’t have a key to the front door, Tim noticed
that there was an overhang jutting out from the second floor of the building.

“Let’s strategize from under there,” Tim said, pointing at
the overhang. He was eager to be able to stop walking into the rain. The
umbrella still wasn’t enough to keep him dry as they were hurrying through the
dark streets of Washington.

They hastened to the house and huddled together underneath
the part of the house Tim had pointed to.  “So… how we gonna get into this
house?” asked Rose.

“Maybe an open window?” Tim asked hopefully.

“In this thunderstorm?” Rose snorted.

“Okay, point taken,” Tim said, rolling his eyes at
himself.  “But hey, they probably would have been opened recently.”

“So?” asked Rose.

“Well, maybe someone left one unlocked?  What if we
could force it open?”

“Hmmm…” Rose responded.  “Maybe…  But how?”

“Here, something like this,” Tim said.  There were two
windows under the overhang on the ground floor.  Tim went over to one of
them.  Although it was closed, Tim shoved the sharp end of the hatchet
between the wall and the window.  After he wedged it in the crack there,
he stepped on the wider side of the axehead and tried to get the leverage to
open it.  He pushed hard with his foot, but nothing budged.

“That one must be locked,” Rose said after a moment. 
“But I like the idea.”

Tim tried again with the next window, and it gave. 
After he got the window to inch open with the hatchet, he dug his fingers into
the widened opening and pulled up hard.  He muscled the window open. 

Rose and Tim looked at each other.  “Shall we go in,
then?” Rose asked.  They crawled into the house.

“Do you have that candle Billy gave you?” Tim asked.

“Yeah,” whispered Rose, as she took it out of her jacket and
handed it to Tim.  “I hope I kept it dry.  And here are the matches.”

Once they got the candle lit, they looked around the first
floor room they were now in.  It seemed like a study.  There was a
desk and a few bookshelves.

“So is this another boarding house?” asked Rose.

“Oh…  no,” Tim said.  He had asked the same
question of his own housemate, Edwin Morgan, on the pretext that he was
wondering if he could canvas any other congressmen while he was making his
supposed visit to check on Westbrook’s thoughts on a legislative
compromise.  “Turns out he lives alone with his wife, and two kids.”

In the candlelight, Tim could see Rose cringe.  “Let’s
just try not to have to taze any children okay?”

Tim agreed.  “Quietly up the stairs, then?” Tim asked.

“Let’s do it,” Rose whispered.

So they climbed the stairs, quietly, quietly, trying not to
wake anyone in the house up, until they got to the upstairs hallway.  The
first thing Tim did was to scan the cracks under the doors for the telltale
green light.  They hadn’t noticed anything from outside the house. 
Tim had assumed that the machine must be in a room with the window facing the
other direction than the one from which they approached.  But even now,
Tim couldn’t see anything coming from under any door.

“What now?” Tim asked.

Rose threw up her left hand in helpless confusion, still
holding the candle in her other hand.  “Wait, what’s that?”  She
pointed to one of the doors.

He could faintly see that it looked something was sticking
out from underneath the door.  They got a little closer.  There was a
blanket blocking the crack in the doorway.

“To hide the light?” Tim wondered. 

“Maybe…” Rose said.  She got her taser out of her
jacket with her spare hand.  Tim had his out as well.  They advanced
slowly to the door.

“Ready?” he asked.  Rose nodded and Tim put his hand on
the doorknob.

And suddenly, they heard a creaking noise as the door across
the hallway opened.  Rose jumped, and the candlelight flickered. 
Still, Tim could see a middle aged woman with a horrified expression on her
face. 

There was no time to hesitate.  Tim raised the taser
and fired it at her before she even had time to scream.  The thud when her
body hit the floor sounded inordinately loud.  Tim and Rose waited for a
moment, weapons raised, to see if anyone else had heard and would be entering
the hallway. 

Tim thanked his good luck that the mind-control machine
seemed to dull the senses of the one being influenced and make them unusually
heavy sleepers.  He wasn’t sure why it was that the kids hadn’t woken up
yet, but he hoped it would stay that way. 

Rose and he each took a deep breath.  They were too
paranoid to try talking again, so they communicated by facial expressions that
it was time to try the door again.  It wasn’t even locked. 

Tim hadn’t even remembered what Theodoric Westbrook looked
like, since there were so many faces to keep track of at the Capitol.  He
saw him now, though, lying in bed bathed in green light.  If this was his
bedroom, Tim pondered why his wife had been across the hall.  Tim wondered
if he had moved her away from the creepy green light that was controlling his
mind and making him a puppet of the Emperors.

Rose closed the door softly behind herself, which Tim
appreciated because now they had another wall separating them from anybody else
in the house.  But he still wasn’t sure what to do next.

“How are we going to break the machine without making too
much noise?” Tim whispered.

“You’re saying we shouldn’t pull a Billy and smash it to
pieces right here?” Rose asked with a faint smile.

“Right,” Tim confirmed.  The tasers hadn’t been making
noise when they shot them, he remembered.  “Do you think we could shoot it
with the taser?  It would probably short-circuit it.”

“Are you kidding?” Rose hissed.  “It might make it
explode, too!  Then we’d have a fire on our hands on top of everything
else.”

Tim nodded.  “Okay, fine.  Do you think we could
carry it?”

“Not without disturbing Westbrook there,” Rose said. 
Tim remembered how Fuller had only stirred once they broke his machine.

“Then we have to put him down first,” Tim reasoned. 

Rose nodded curtly.  “Yeah, okay.  Use your
taser?  You’ve got more shots left.”

“Fair enough, said Tim.  He quickly tased the man and
then went over to the machine.  It wasn’t too heavy, maybe about fifteen
or twenty pounds.  He put his taser in his pocket, asking Rose to keep
hers out, and picked up the machine. 

Tim hadn’t really considered the possible effects of holding
a still-functioning mind control machine.  He remembered from Hopkins that
it was a pre-programmed thing, and had assumed this meant it would only affect
the person who it was programmed to.  But as he trailed behind Rose,
making his way back down the stairs, he started to get a bit dizzy.  He
also started to feel an inexplicable urge to go back to Westbrook’s room, put
the machine there, and use his Dominus to go back to his own present day,
forgetting all thoughts of mind control and the Emperors of Time.  He
fought these urges off, though, quickening his pace down the stairs so he would
have less time to combat the effects of the machine.  He was still dizzy.

When Rose reached the door at the bottom of the steps, she
opened it.  In their haste to get out of the building, they had forgotten
how badly they would need umbrellas, and the rain began to drench Tim
immediately. 

Tim made it out of the door and several steps across the
lawn before the world seemed to pitch under his feet and he fell down.  He
let go of the machine as he instinctively struggled to put his hands out in
front of him.

The machine thudded onto the muddy ground, the green thread
of electricity at its top went out, and Rose hurried back to help Tim up.

“You were starting to feel weird, too?” she asked in a low
voice.  “I guess you more than me, ‘cause you were carrying the thing.”

“Right,” Tim said.  He was now soaking wet, and muddy,
but at least the machine seemed to be out of commission.  Rose jumped on
it to make sure.  A few sparks flew, and some pieces of it came off. 

“I guess it can still affect people who it wasn’t programmed
for, although I don’t know about you, but I felt more disoriented than
controlled.  Must be that it works
best
on who it was programmed
for and only sort of works on anybody else,” Rose reasoned.

“I think you’re right about that,” agreed Tim.