Time Trails #3
Rand didn’t want to admit it to the woman, but he felt as if he’d been ripped in half.
At the moment he couldn’t care less if she shot him.
He spared a glance at her, from beneath his hat.
She leaned against the rock with her arms crossed.
She wasn’t pretty in the usual way; instead she had strong clear features and a quiet confidence that bespoke intelligence and contentment.
Her hair was strangely short for a woman.
It barely touched her shoulders and framed her face in a riot of curls that gleamed white in the moonlight.
Her left arm was covered with some sort of contraption that had tiny coloured lights on it.
He couldn’t even begin to figure out what that was all about.
She was dressed strange too, all in black with thick boots over pants that looked like a second skin, a shirt that looked like his longjohns and a short coat of the softest leather he’d ever seen.
If she wanted to draw attention to herself she’d succeeded.
The way her pants hugged the lines of her legs made him want to wrap them around his waist in the worst way, even if he did feel like the ass end of an armadillo.
She had to know something about what had happened to Tom.
It was the only logical explanation of what she was doing out here.
How she’d got here without him seeing her was another story entirely.
One he needed to think on for a bit. This was why he’d decided to lie down.
He needed to catch his breath after whatever it was had slammed him into the river.
“I’m guessing that you’re feeling pretty sick right now. Kind of nauseous and weak?” She dragged the toe of her squared-off boot through the sand.
He was. How would she know that? “Where did you say you were from?”
“I didn’t.” She looked at the thing on her arm again. Pushed a couple of the lights. Took what looked like a flask from her belt and drank from it. “The question is when did I come from.”
Just when he was beginning to think the night might make a turn for the better she had to go and get all crazy on him.
Luckily his gun was handy. Rand sat up and eased his way around to where he could grab it if need be.
Lightning flashed in the distance and he waited for the sound of thunder but none came.
The woman looked at it also, then back at her arm.
“OK. I’ll bite. When are you from?”
“I’m from 2143. That’s two hundred and fifty-some years from now if you’re counting. That blast that knocked you on your ass was caused by me getting bumped from my destination by whoever is messing around up there.” She pointed towards the lightning flashes.
“I’m going to need another drink.” He looked for the bottle.
She grabbed it off the boulder she leaned against and tossed it to him.
“So you didn’t plan on landing here?” As if anyone would come to this canyon deliberately.
Rand had learned a long time ago that it was best to humour people when they were loco, until you could get the drop on them.
The weapon she’d waved around earlier was pretty wicked-looking.
He didn’t know what it was but he was pretty sure it didn’t shoot bullets.
That whole thing about cauterization did not sound appealing at all.
“No. My plan was to land about a month before this date. In time to stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“The rips in time.”
Rand laughed. After everything else that had happened this day it was pretty much all that was left to do. He sat back against the canyon wall and let out a big whoop then took another draw off the bottle after wiping his eyes. “I haven’t had a good one like that in a while,” he admitted.
“It will more than likely be your last.” She crouched down before him. “Still feeling weak?” She took the bottle.
“Yeah. Too much sun.” Rand looked her up and down. “And way too much excitement.”
She handed him her flask. “Drink this. You’re probably dehydrated, and this—” she pitched his bottle away “—isn’t helping things.”
Rand sniffed the flask, decided that it had to be OK since she’d just drunk from it and it smelled pretty good, kind of fruity like apples and oranges.
He took a drink and was amazed at how cool it was going down his throat.
His stomach felt immediately settled although he was still weak and wanted nothing more than to stretch out and sleep for days.
If only there was a nice soft bed available.
He definitely didn’t mind the company at all. Several days in the sack with this woman would be a treat.
“Feel better?”
“A bit.” He wondered if there was something alcoholic in the flask.
Something that would make him as crazy as she was.
Still there had to be an explanation for what he saw, for what happened to Tom, and for every other weird thing that he’d seen and heard lately.
Since no one else was forthcoming with explanations he might as well listen to what she had to say. “What’s your name?”
“Shay McCoy. Captain Shay McCoy. T.T.E.A. That’s the Time Travel Enforcement Agency if you’re wondering.”
“Yeah . . . right. Rand Brock. Captain Rand Brock. Texas Rangers.”
“A Texas Ranger? I heard about you.”
“About me?”
“No. About the Rangers. You guys were legendary. Still are as a matter of fact. It should please you to know that the Texas Rangers are still alive and kicking in the future.”
“Yeah, I was worried about that.” Rand took another drink from her flask. “So why are you here again? Something about a ‘time rip’?”
She drew a long straight line in the sand. “Time is linear. One long line, year after year, day after day, hour after hour and so on. It all keeps coming, one after the next. But . . .”
“I get a feeling I’m not going to like this but . . .”
She nodded. “Someone is here, in this place, messing with time.” She drew a hash across the line.
“Every time they try to move through time they rip it. Or maybe ‘fracture’ is a better word.” She drew a couple more hash marks and then drew lines off them.
“The fractures become their own time lines. Kind of an alternate reality which messes up our realities in the future.”
“You have got to be kidding. How is that even possible?”
“There are lots of things that are possible in the future. Mostly because of things that are happening now, in your time. You call it the Industrial Revolution. In the next hundred years there are unbelievable changes that will happen, including air flight and men walking on the moon.”
Rand straightened at the mention of air flight. The driver said the attack came from the air. Maybe what she was saying did make some kind of sense. “And time travel?”
“And time travel. The problem is regulating it. There are those who think anyone should be able to go anywhere and do whatever they want.”
“Which leads to history being changed which changes the future.”
“Yes. There’s a group who think they can change things for the better. One of them, a guy named Wiley, managed to jump into time and he’s trying to corner the market on time travel by being the first to invent it. Then he can control it.”
“And offer it to the highest bidder.”
“Greed is something that’s pretty much the same no matter what time you are in.”
“What good is it going to do him in the future if he’s back here?”
“He’s hoping to keep it in the family. He can trace his lineage back pretty far and apparently whoever his ancestor is in this time was rich, smart and greedy.”
Rand rubbed his fingers over his eyes. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“It’s not me.” Shay pointed to the hash marks in the sand. “You’ve been split.”
“What?”
“There are two of you now. The blast that announced my arrival? It ripped your time line. So now there are two of you in two separate – yet parallel – time lines. It’s why you feel weak. You’re half of what you were.”
Rand staggered to his feet. The sudden movement made him dizzy and he wobbled enough so that he grabbed on to the boulder for support.
“I know it’s hard to believe but it’s true. You feel horrible because your life just got cut in half. If it happens again, you’ll be split again. Another fracture, another parallel time line.”
“How do we fix it?”
“Go to the source. So why don’t you tell me what it is that you know?”
“About time travel? Nothing. All I’ve got is a partner and a prisoner who look as if they were melted together like candle wax, a dead driver who said the attack came from the air, and lightning in the sky without thunder.
” He went to his pack. “And this.” He handed Shay the strange piece of metal. “I found this in my partner’s body.”
“They were using them to experiment on,” Shay said.
Rand’s stomach turned at the thought. “Bastards.” He had no idea what had been done to Tom, but the results of it were enough to make him think that it had to have been horrible for anyone involved. Even to a cold-hearted killer like Hank Miller.
The touch of her hand on his arm was meant to be gentle and soothing but still his body reacted in ways that were far from gentle. Rand looked into her eyes and saw gold flecks over green and a clear calm gaze that gave him no doubt that she was entirely truthful with him.
“Help me stop them,” she said.
He was so very tired. Rand let out a sigh and picked up his rig. “Beats getting drunk.”
Still no word from Topher. Her display read three hours until she could jump.
If she were able to jump. She stood on a rock by the river, hoping the added height would give her a better signal.
She really needed to get up higher. She needed to see the lie of the land.
Rand was convinced that the river held the clue since the bodies had come from somewhere upstream.