Shift (ChronoShift Trilogy) (8 page)

September 16
^th
, 1890 – Lawrenceville, GA

It was an experience Mark had never imagined would be a part of his life.  Riding a horse down a dirt highway
in the 1800's.
   It was surreal to see his hometown as it existed back then.  Dirt roads ran this way and that, their pattern roughly mimicking the grid of his modern city, yet not quite the same.   Men, women, and children — all wore dated clothing.  Horses and buggies filled the streets rather than automobiles.  Instead of car emissions, the town square smelled of dust and horse manure.

The land Red had given him would have been very valuable, but there were a lot of complications to overcome in order to hold such a property for so long.  To keep it, he’d have needed to find a reliable law firm or agency that could manage the property over the next century or so, pay the taxes, etc, and that would not have been easy.  It would have to have been a law firm that would stick around for at least a century.

Or would it?  He could travel to any year he wanted.  He could transfer the management of anything from one firm to another at any time during the coming hundred years.

As with anything, the hard work was in the details.  From the center of town, Mark steered his horse down what would one day be Georgia Highway 20 toward Loganville.  After a few miles, he veered off the road into a field, guessing he was about where his subdivision would be in the future.

What he was about to do was gutsy, to say the least, but it was the easiest solution.

He shifted forward to June of 2010.

He’d had an early morning job that entire month and Kelly had always gone to work after him.  He didn’t want to try an earlier period, for many logistical reasons, and one emotional one.  He didn’t want to see his kids alive.  The thought of it nearly wrecked him inside.

5:00 AM seemed like a good hour.  He’d been off on the distance though.  He showed up in somebody’s backyard and had to walk another 500 yards to get to his own house.  He snuck around to the back of it and waited out of sight.

At about 5:30, his old car pulled out of the driveway.  Mark turned his head away.  He still didn't want to see himself.

Kelly would be getting into the shower about 6:00.  As soon as he heard the water turn on, he went to the back door and rattled it.  If you jiggled it just the right way, he knew the dead bolt would slip out of its slot. 
He should have fixed that back when Kelly had asked him to.

Sneaking into your own house in the early hours of the morning seemed oddly criminal.  He slipped into the family room, crossed it to the master bedroom, and then went to the closet.  The water was still running in the shower.  She’d be at least another ten minutes; she liked long showers.

He would need a larger backpack in the near future, so he pulled one down from the closet shelf.  He remembered he hadn’t been able to find this pack when he’d left this house for the last time a few months ago, but here it was now.  It was much more spacious than the small thing he’d been dealing with for the past few months.  He transferred all his stuff to it.

Next, he stripped to his boxers and stuffed his antique clothing into the pack as well.  He would need some modern jeans and a shirt.

He returned to the bedroom.  That water sounded
really
good.  A steaming hot shower would do him wonders.  His muscles almost ached at the thought.  That bed looked awfully good too.

Hurriedly, he pulled an outfit from his chest-of-drawers to throw it on, but he wasn’t quick enough.

Steam poured from the bathroom as Kelly opened the door.  He froze, stiff as a plank.  She let out a startled yelp.

“Mark!  You scared me.  I thought you’d already left for work.”

“I....uh....I forgot something.”

“Oh....what?”

“Uh...I...uh, spilled some coffee in the car and got it all over my shirt.  Had to come home to change.”

“Oh...okay.  Are you all right, honey?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”  He breathed easier.  She believed it was him.  Well, why shouldn’t she?  It
was
him, just not the right him.  This was weird.

“Well, I’m going to finish getting ready.”

“Okay, Sweetie.”  How awkward to call your wife “sweetie” after she’d abandoned you.  But this Kelly had not abandoned him yet.  But she would.  She closed the bathroom door behind her.

He sniffed the new clothes deeply, enjoying the fresh scent of Tide on the recently laundered shirt.  He put them on.  Felt good, felt clean.

He stole over to her dresser where she always left her wallet.  This was why he’d had to come at this time of day.  He’d never be able to get at his own wallet, because it would always be on his former self regardless of the time, except at night, and a night-time break in was not very appealing.  He owned several guns.  Wouldn’t that be the ultimate fulfillment of Murphy’s Law, getting shot by yourself for breaking into your own house.

Mark slipped her debit card from her wallet, stuffed his feet back into his shoes, and left home through the same back door he’d come in.   Well, his former home that was.

It was awfully tempting to stay.  But how could he?  Impossible.

He kept moving, circling back to the approximate place he'd left his horse in 1890.  When Kelly came out of the bathroom, she’d just think he’d gone on to work.

***

September 16
^th
, 1890 – Lawrenceville, GA

The next step would be tricky to accurately guess.  He needed to gauge the distance well so he wouldn’t pop up in the wrong place.  He walked southeast, away from the county courthouse in the town square, down Clayton Street until he reached the old female seminary building, though it wasn’t so old right now.  That was one landmark he knew wouldn't change over the next century and it was right across the street from his target in the future.  Now, he had to imagine the modern scene in his mind to see how far he needed to walk

Doing some major guesstimations in his head, Mark decided to walk another four hundred paces angled 30 degrees to the left of the Seminary building.  The father and mother of a family passing by shot him a funny look as he wandered across the street into the yards of some homes there.  He knew he looked suspicious, yet it couldn’t be helped.

The surrounding field looked nothing like it would in the future, but it had to be the same place.  It was the right orientation from the seminary.  When he felt like he was at the right distance, he stopped and set his watch to:

010000P - 05312010

May 31, 2010 was a date after his children had been killed, but before he’d really been embroiled in the lawsuits that ended up costing him everything.

He pushed the button and felt his body forced to one side as he shifted.  He must have tried to materialize in the middle of some object again.

“Hijo de mi alma!”

Mark found himself in what appeared to be the back stockroom of some business, apparently a music CD store.  A young Hispanic woman screamed at the top of her lungs, eyes wide with fear.  She fled the storeroom in a panic, yelling for help.

“Manuel!  Manuel!  Venga rapido!  Apareció un tipo ahi atras!  Socale, socale!”

Crap.  He needed to get out of here.

He shifted back to 1890.  That must have been
Discolandia
, which was an Hispanic music store located in the shopping center next to his target.

Mark retreated about a hundred feet toward the seminary and set the dial for a day earlier, May 30.  No sense in trying the same day.  Who knew if the girl would call the cops or not?  This time when he shifted, his body slid upwards, and he was forced into a sitting position.  Awkwardly, he fell back into a seat and realized he was now sitting in the passenger side of a vehicle in the shopping center’s parking lot.

Man alive.  Why did this have to be so difficult?  Hunkering down, he slipped out of the car and moved away as fast as possible.  Ever his luck though, the car’s owner just happened to be returning to their vehicle at that very moment and they let out a yell, as any sane person would who’d just seen a stranger slip out of their car.

Great.
  Again, Mark shifted back to the empty field in 1890.  Nausea came on strong and he vomited up what little food had been in his system.  This was becoming entirely more difficult than it should be.

All right.  Two strikes.  This time he wouldn’t take any chances.  He walked back to the seminary building and, laying his hand on its bricks, shifted to May 29, 2010, another day earlier.  The seminary was one building which would stay right where it was for the entire century, a safe reference point.

He was now safely in 2010, in the right clothing, and all he had to do was walk across the street to the shopping center and to his goal.  Why hadn’t he just done it this way this first time?

There it was, his objective in all its glory.  The Bank of America ATM machine.

Using Kelly's ATM card, Mark withdrew $100 from his old checking account.  He was glad he remembered her PIN number.  It wasn’t stealing if you took it from yourself, was it?  It sure felt better having a little cash in his hand again.

All of a sudden, a memory came to him.  A memory of a $100 missing from their checking account early that summer.  $100 neither he nor Kelly could account for.  She’d lost her debit card around that time too.  They’d assumed she’d just lost it somewhere and somebody else had withdrawn the $100.  The bank had sworn the correct PIN had been used though, and he vaguely remembered them thinking the withdrawal had been made before they’d lost the card.

Was he simply planting these memories in his mind after the fact?  Was it some kind of effort on the part of his subconscious to reconcile conflicts between his past and his present, or was the memory real?  Would he remember the missing $100 if he hadn’t taken it now?  Maybe taking the money actually altered the reality of his own past, or maybe his withdrawal simply triggered a memory of a forgotten event.  How could he know for sure?  The idea that his own memory might not be reliable was a concept he couldn’t allow himself to entertain.

Those were impossible questions and they’d have to keep for another day.  For now, he would stay the course as planned.

He returned to the seminary building and changed the watch setting to shift him back from 2010 to 1970.  However, pushing the button this time did not produce the all-too-familiar-yet-still-unsettling queasiness in his stomach.  Instead, the watch just beeped and flashed like it had back in the woods.  It had shut down again.

There must be a limit on how many times he could shift in quick succession.  Mentally, he counted back, recalling each shift.  He'd shifted six or seven times in the past eight hours.  He'd have to keep better track of that and figure out exactly what was going on.

So, for now he was stuck in 2010, which certainly felt a lot better than being stuck in 1890.  He was going to need a place to bed down for at least 24 hours until the watch cooled off or did whatever it did to reset itself.

He crossed town to the Lawrenceville Motor Inn and spent $30 on a room for the night.  Another $5 went to a meal at McDonald’s, which left him $65 for the next day.  At least, he’d gotten some food and a good night’s sleep.  That motel bed felt like heaven compared with Red’s bunkhouse.  He was getting downright spoiled.

***

Mark let a full 36 hours pass before making his next move.  If he was going to go around disappearing and reappearing on a dime, doing it at night would make things a lot easier.  Less witnesses.

At 1:00 in the morning, he sat himself on the historic courthouse steps in downtown Lawrenceville and set the watch to 4:00 AM, Oct. 17, 1970.  In the darkness, no immediate differences jumped out at him after he pushed the button, but then he noticed all the old, ugly storefront facades around the square were back.  The brick sidewalks were gone.  Fowler's Jewelers was in business again.  The building next to it which had burned down years ago stood once more without a lick of soot on it.  The City of Lawrenceville had done a lot of restoration work to the downtown area in the 1990's, but for him, it was all undone now.  Behind him, the brick courthouse walls were no longer their natural, rusty color, but were painted white, as they had been in 1970.

He bode his time for a few hours waiting for the town to wake up and then strolled to Edge's Café.  He bought himself a hot breakfast for $2.00 and ate it slowly, thoroughly enjoying the southern flavors and giving the business world a chance to crank up for the day.  Then, he walked to the small office building he’d been eyeing all morning.

Brett Harrington ran the investment office and served as the town’s main stock broker and financial advisor.  His eyes met Mark with wary appraisal.  Once again, Mark had forgotten to pay attention to the differing styles of dress.  His 2010 clothing might seem very futuristic, or maybe just plain odd, to a 1970's man.

“Can I help you, sir?”  Harrington was still trying to assess Mark as a person.

“I would like to purchase some shares in a company, please.”

“Have you ever traded with me before?”

“No, sorry.  Sure haven’t.”

“Well, it’s pretty simple actually.  We’ll just set up an account for you.  Do you know the stock symbol of the company you want to purchase?”

“Uh, no.”

“What company do you wish to buy shares in?”

“Wal-Mart.”

“Is that a new company?  Never heard of it.”

“Oh, you will.”  He couldn’t resist that.

The stock broker raised an eyebrow, eyeing Mark even more quizzically.  “I don’t mean to be rude, but those are some odd clothes you’ve got on.”

“I’m a bit eccentric.  Please excuse the attire.”  Mark was getting a little quicker with the off-the-cuff lies and hasty explanations, but it’d be better if he were prescient enough not to need them.