“The thing?” Mort sounded nervous. “Before you go running off at the mouth with any tantalizing explanations, I need to ask, is this a one-bourbon answer or a two-bourbon answer?” He was referring to the two bottles in his hands.
“Three,” the kid said. He flopped down on one of the sealed cardboard boxes, and buried his face in his hands.
“My kind of kid. Carry on.” Mort grabbed a third bottle of bourbon from the box on the floor. “How did we find this paradise, anyway?” Mort looked down the aisle of liquor crates in the warehouse.
“An importer I shake down once in a while,” Santini said, “for things I need. I look the other way with regard to his illegal importing. He gives me some of the illicit items I need and can’t afford.”
“And you have Gretchen to boot. I suppose it’s wrong of me to pick now to talk about how unfair life is.” Mort swilled from each of the bottles in his hands.
“Wow, that’s pretty cool.” The kid brightened, watching Mort juggling the three bottles overhead so they siphoned the liquor into his mouth. He temporarily forgot about his own problems.
“If I didn’t need three bottles to cope with this latest problem, I wouldn’t have to resort to such extreme measures,” Mort said, continuing his floor show with the three bourbon bottles.
“Stop showing off,” Santini said. “You’re distracting the kid from his story.”
“Can’t have that.” Mort desisted with the juggling.
With all eyes on him, the kid spilled. “It’s a time machine.” He sprang from the bed and got demonstrative with the hands from there as he paced. “Although, technically speaking, since you can’t actually go backwards in time, it’s a parallel-universe skipping machine. It finds the nearest possible universe to the one you’re in, and takes you to a place in it that’s the past or future relative to your present, only it looks like your past or future, because the timeline is so similar. Of course it isn’t but—”
“You weren’t lying about the three bottle explanation, kid,” Mort said, looking grave.
“How long will it take you to rewrite the equations?” Gretchen asked.
“I don’t know, a week maybe,” the kid said, shrugging.
“Perfect,” Gretchen exclaimed. “We fly to England; that uses up the first day. Then we find Coma Man; that takes us through the week.”
“Now look here,” Santini groused.
“Don’t interrupt the lady when she’s discussing my vacation itinerary,” Mort said.
“And just who is Coma Man?” Santini said.
“He’s the engineer who’s going to build Fabio’s time machine for him,” Gretchen explained.
“Fabio! That’s it,” Mort said. “I couldn’t remember his name for the life of me. Though now that I hear it, sounds more like a romance novel hero than Time Traveler Guy.”
“How did you hear about him?” Santini asked.
“It’s been all over the news,” Gretchen explained. “Was in a coma for three years. Woke up suddenly due to a confluence of unlikely events, not the least being, his telemetry dispensing the wrong medication at the right dose after the onboard computer messed up, and a nurse who was actually experimenting on him.”
“Unlikely confluence of events, huh?” Santini said. “Sounds like men in black put him in that state to begin with, and like we may have some compatriots across the Atlantic we don’t know about.”
Gretchen said, “It’s more complicated than that. The exact cocktail needed to raise him from the dead is unknown to medical science.”
“So we have another kid taking liberties with the timeline with his latest breakthrough. What else is new?” Santini said.
“Maybe,” Gretchen replied, still sounding unsettled by some mystery her gut told her was unfolding around her.
“So when do we leave?” Fabio asked.
“I don’t suppose you can pay your own way?” Mort said. “Nothing personal, but I hate tapping into my pension to cover extraneous causes, even if it’s supplied by Sister Gretchen. Someone has to look out for her so no one else takes advantage of all that generosity.”
“Relax, I’m rich,” Fabio said.
“Rich and brilliant,” Mort replied. “Finally, a decent excuse to get back to my drinking without being so melodramatic.” He took a hurl off all three bottles at once, tipping their mouths into his face, using the spill over to wash up. The grease smears, evidence of the recent car chase, still branded him with bellicose memories of yester-hour.
“Just so we’re clear,” Mort said, “we can blow up Oakland all we want. That qualifies as urban renewal. But England… I really fancy their architecture.”
“I didn’t know you could show restraint with anything,” Santini said. “That’ll be refreshing.”
“What are you talking about, I’m the image of restraint.” Mort grabbed a box of the unopened bourbon, as he walked towards the door. Seeing the sour looks he was getting, he explained, “I didn’t want anyone to trip over the box. It’s a little early for social work, I admit, but I didn’t want to lose any of the momentum from this morning.”
Santini, getting ready to leave the country, thought of Thor. They’d been separated for a time now, and soon there would be an ocean between them. He didn’t know how he felt about that. He psychically reached out to Thor to see how he felt about it. Let the dog decide. He had the best sense of the two of them how to deploy himself on the game board.
TWENTY-ONE
Settling into first class on Air France, the stubbly faced alcoholic, with a riot of reddened veins running rampant across his nose, proudly displayed his miniature bottles of Jack Daniels. Jubilant, he glanced across the aisle and caught Mort laying out his full sized bottles of bourbon. He did his best to muffle his cry.
Seeing the stewardess approaching, he whistled over to Mort, who checked the aisle behind him. Appreciating the heads-up, Mort threw his coconspirator a bottle, and stowed the rest of his arsenal inside his trench coat. Stubbly quickly stashed his under the seat. “How did you get it past customs?”
Mort said, “I said it was spirits. The health nut thought I was talking about mineral water.”
“I’ll have to remember that one.”
Thor, sprawled across two first-class seats, kept his eyes out the window, for the most part, distracted only by the miniature Doberman a society woman had in her purse, wearing a diamond collar. Every time Thor licked his lips, Society Woman protectively hugged the miniature Doberman. She said to the stewardess, “Could we please get that Bullmastiff something to eat?”
Santini hid his amusement. Just getting Thor and the other dogs this far had been quite the ordeal. England was a rabies-free island. That meant they needed their own passports, which could only be obtained by following strict guidelines for six months. So the papers had to be forged to include some acceptable country of origin. Then they weren’t allowed to travel outside of a climate controlled area in the hold, and required crating. That meant greasing more than a few palms. Apparently the lady with the miniature Doberman and Santini hailed from the same “if there’s a will, there’s a way” school of thought. They had to slip onboard with Thor prior to anyone else boarding to avoid too many prying eyes and loose mouths. And they’d be getting off last for the same reason.
***
Thor took his eyes off the miniature Doberman and shifted his attention to the plane’s window and to his psychic connection with the rest of his team. Sable was currently stowing away in the luggage compartment of the plane, having snuck past the loading guy. Brutus, who had managed to survive the brutal hits he took escaping Hartman’s estate against all stretches of Thor’s imagination, led a small party of Bullmastiffs into a cargo transport plane populated with soldiers preparing for deployment. The soldiers took one look at the dogs strapped with saddlebags and smiled.
“I didn’t know we had trained-mutts on this mission,” a young soldier said, wrapping his beefy hands around Brutus’s mug. When a fight broke out be
tween two soldiers squabbling over rack space in the background, Brutus leapt up and pinned one down by lying on top of him. Another of the pack, Hunter, did the same with her hothead. The other soldiers laughed.
“Hey, these guys are better trained than we are,” another dog-loving soldier said. And that was the end of it. Apparently soldiers were trained not to ask too many questions, and to take things as they come.
Thor was impressed. Brutus was turning into a fairly decent field-commander, despite being a little dense. Maybe shadowing Thor all that time, as they hunted across the Berkeley Oakland border from Hartman’s home, had done him some good, after all.
“We’re landing in England to refuel, guys. Hope you brought your English dictionaries with you,” the troop sergeant said to a chorus of laughs.
“No shit,” said one of the olive-skinned grunts. “Just how far you think I can get with blimey? Can I say, ‘Pass the blimey beer already, so I can get good and blimey lathered, before I gouge your blimey eyes out?’”
“Blimey right, you can,” his straight-off-an-Idaho-potato-farm sidekick said to laughs.
***
“You okay back there, kid?” Santini said, looking over his shoulder at the lad taking up two first-class seats on Air France. One seat just for his box of notebooks. He had that young, ageless look, which might last till forty-years-old in his case, considering that loving what you do acted better than Miracle Gro on plants.
“Are you kidding? I never had it so good. Spent the last few months living in a storage locker on Cedar Street, in Berkeley.”
“Cedar?” Mort said. “Nice zip code.”
“Oh, yeah,” Fabio said. “People were killing to get in there. I had to carry a gun. Some guy was real indignant that I was taking up space better suited to his antique typewriters.”
“Not everyone’s a humanitarian like me, kid,” Mort said.
Fabio went back to his scribbling. Santini stared at the equations long enough to assure himself they looked genuine, and he wasn’t carting his ass halfway around the world for nothing. Sometimes Gretchen could be blinded by her ideals.
After settling back into his seat, Santini offered Gretchen a spoonful of his pineapple yogurt. She accepted it graciously, possibly the first food she’d eaten in days. She seemed to subsist on righteousness and the cause, these days, breathing the rarefied air like some breatharian. Maybe she’d joined the sect while in Berkeley and neglected to tell him.
“How did you come by the lowdown on Coma Man, exactly, before he slipped into a coma?” Santini asked.
Gretchen explained, “Every time his wife read him H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, he stirred in his bed, and his EKG readings spiked off the scale. The first time it happened, it was a surprise. By the third time, she took to reading the book each day.”
“That’s it?” Santini was incredulous. Maybe the cause had rotted her brain the way it rots the brains of all the righteous.
“That and the fact no one just wakes up after three years in a coma by a long chain of impossible coincidences, Santini. Someone wanted him awake, and it wasn’t so he could read H. G. Wells for himself.”
“Thin, Gretchen. Very thin.” Santini shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I’m with Mort on squandering our retirement income.”
“I’m over it; I’ve moved on,” Mort said. “Besides, you meet a better class of alcoholics in first class, pardon the pun.”
“We need to expand our circle.” Gretchen folded her hands defensively. “We’re coming up with scientists faster than we can find people to protect them.”
“Thor seems to think leaving one of the Bullmastiffs with them is enough,” Santini said. “He’s studding himself out to the pack to bring the next generation on line as quickly as possible. Besides, the pack communicates with one another, and can bring in reinforcements as needed.”
“You talk to your dog?” Gretchen said. “And I thought I was losing it.”
“We seem to share a psychic connection,” Santini said.
“Funny the things you stop questioning after a while,” Gretchen replied.
“Why do you say that?” Santini was disturbed by her tone.
“I always imagined I’d be a housewife, darning socks, mixing drinks for my world-weary husband,” Gretchen said.
“You’re quite the affront to feminism,” Santini joked.
“I figure I belong in the 1940s,” Gretchen replied. Her eyes looked vacant as if history was exerting a strong pull on her even now. That thrift-store dress she was wearing didn’t do anything to deter from her argument. “I would have felt right in that decade. I guess that time machine is my ticket home.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“You would do well in the 1940s, yourself,” Gretchen said. “Mort too. I’m not suggesting we break up or anything.”
“Only that we follow you into an alternate universe.” Santini sat pensively. “Dating sure isn’t what it used to be.”
“To hell with sticking my head inside some time machine,” Mort croaked, “when a bottle of bourbon will do. Best time machine in the entire world. Even takes you to the end of time, where everything fades into oblivion.”
“That’s depression talking,” Gretchen said. “Time you face up to it.”
“You keep right on a preachin’ Sister Gretchen,” Mort said, holding up the bottle.
“In the 1940s a bottle of bourbon cost five cents,” Gretchen reassured him.
Mort pursed his lips. “Her rhetoric is certainly getting better.”
“I think you’re a depressive personality, Gretchen,” Santini said. “And I think you want to find a sad era to hide out in when most everyone is depressed, so you can feel normal. You should heed your own advice and face your depression head on, stop looking for a way to justify it.”
Mort craned his neck to address Santini the row behind him. “You go, Father Santini. You’re a little touched by the spirit yourself.” He looked over at Gretchen. “I wasn’t gonna say it, but he’s calling the zebra striped there. I don’t remember drinking half as much before you showed up. You need to stop having me carry all your pain around for you.”
“He wasn’t half as funny, either,” Santini said.
“That’s me, the weight that balances the world,” Mort said, holding up his bottle.
“Well, I appreciate your efforts, both of you,” she said, and smiled half-heartedly.
After a time staring blankly into space, Gretchen added, “I just think we may have been marooned here, out of time, that’s all. Down to the way we found one another, as if there’s something from that time period magnetizing us to one another.”
“Wouldn’t we remember being from another time?” Santini said, not sure if he was humoring her or himself.
“We could be in shock,” Gretchen explained. “The mind is fantastically resilient, and certainly not beyond fabricating all sorts of things to keep us sane.”
Mort and Santini squirmed in their seats. Finally, Mort said, “Ah, that’s just blue-collar escapism for you. Denial is the poor man’s vacation. Anything is more believable than that life could be this ugly.”
“I know, I know,” Gretchen said, on the verge of bursting. “I can’t rationally explain it. It’s more of a gut instinct, like how I know Coma Man is more than he’s letting on.”
“Why would we want to go back now?” Santini said, playing along. “This period in time is where all the action’s at. Besides, something tells me, if you want to rescue yourself from your chronic depression, saving souls is the only distraction likely to work for long.” She clenched his hand, presumably feeling apologetic that the aphrodisiac of her attraction to Santini and the blessing of his presence in her life wasn’t enough. “You could be a field-nurse on a battlefield in World War II, and not save as many lives.”
She smiled more earnestly. “I suppose.”
“And the world is a hell of a lot more complicated today,” Mort said, chiming in. “You’d never get to e
xercise your fine mind half as much in the 1940s as you do today.”
“That’s a fact,” Gretchen said, riding the comeback trail of her renewed convictions.
Stubbly Face ventured across the aisle, bringing his bottle, of course, and sat next to Mort, who welcomed him with open arms.
“I bet it’s pretty cool to be a pilot,” Mort said, pulling out an in-flight magazine from the pocket of the seat in front of him and eying the cover image of the jet in flight. Inside was everything he ever wanted to know about airplanes. “Pity my lifestyle and my pocketbook don’t lend themselves to such extravagant hobbies.”
“Just more reason to drink, my friend. I believe it’s important to give thanks and praise for each new rationalization that comes our way.”
Mort chuckled. “Hear, hear.”
For the remainder of their Air France flight to England, Mort and Stubbly Face sank into a rhythm with their tall tales and their drinking. Stubly Face seemed particularly inspired to hit the bottle hard with the images provided him from the in-flight magazine in his hand, relating the atrocities going on in Rwanda, and the genocides all across Africa, many conducted by corporate funded private militaries. The powers that be were persuing some hidden agenda in that part of the world that probably had something to do with keeping the oil flowing to them. Santini suspected the magazine had been left behind from the last passenger to sit in that seat, and not by the airline, as it didn’t exactly contribute to the soothing ambiance.
TWENTY-TWO
“You have any idea how we’re going to track this guy?” Santini said.
They were standing on the tarmac of a military airbase. They’d had to leave London’s Heathrow International airport, which didn’t permit military planes to land. And they were now waiting for—of all things—a military C-130 to touch down. Thor had psychically transmitted the message to Santini, and was quite insistent on not leaving the military base until his doggy chums arrived. Santini suggested the rest of the dogs could catch up with them later, transmitting the thought in words and images both. Thor wasn’t impressed with his logic, apparently, or perhaps his psychic abilities extended further, and he was anticipating trouble for which they would need back up.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 101
