“Kyle? Is that…really you?”
Teresa spoke, as Kyle looked bewildered. “Hi Sonja. You know Kyle…never on time for anything. Even with a time capsule.”
Sonja walked up to Kyle and gave him a quick hug. “Are you okay? Did you get hurt? I always knew you’d make it. I just hoped it was a little sooner than this!”
None of them could really grasp the emotions they were feeling right now. It was all very bizarre, surrealistic.
“Teresa, we have to leave. The ‘you know who’ will be patrolling the area soon. I only hope they didn’t pick up on the disturbance. You know they have been waiting for this day, too.”
Kyle was still in shock and his mouth hung open completely flabbergasted. He didn’t think anything could be more shocking. But this was only the beginning.
Teresa put her hand on Kyle’s shoulder and urged him away from the lab. Priti was unusually docile considering all the activity. As they turned to leave, a deep, distorted sound of a hundred cellos rumbled through their bodies. The capsule started to spin. Very, very slowly at first. Then it picked up speed. Electricity began snapping all around the device—something Kyle didn’t remember ever happening before. Then, in a flash of brilliant white light—the capsule disappeared.
A look of fear crossed Kyle’s face.
“It’s okay,” said Sonja calmly. “We expected that to happen.”
Kyle plopped down into a sitting position and held his head in his hands. His head was spinning. It felt like he had just gotten off the Superman roller coaster at the Six Flags amusement park.
Teresa put her hand on her brother’s shoulder again. “It will be okay. I promise.”
“Now we really need to get back to the apartment, Teresa,” said Sonja. “They will have seen that flash and we’ll be in serious trouble. We will never explain our way out of it.”
“You’re right. Let’s go. Quick!”
Kyle didn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about. He was utterly confused. Soon, it would all begin to make sense in an illogical sort of way. Even though he had become accustomed to the unexpected, his mind was in a fog. There was a lot more to time than two hands moving across the face of a clock.
He picked Priti up, to the surprise of both women, and followed them. “Okay. Lead the way. We’re right behind you. I guess.”
***
The street was dark. Kyle heard the sounds of large animals moving in the dark alleys. He assumed they were dogs—or extremely large cats knocking over trashcans. Priti kept trying to get out of Kyle’s arms, but he held her tight. She seemed to sense that Kyle was trying to protect her and stopped struggling.
They arrived at a large door painted black with a yellow circle in the center. In the center of the circle was a control box of some sort. Teresa lifted the cover on the box and put her hand in and the door opened.
“What on earth…”
“Later, Kyle. This is the most dangerous place to be right now.”
He heard a loud swishing sound coming from somewhere above the apartment building. A beam of light cut the night sky like a laser, shining from a flying craft, but he couldn’t tell what it was. The sounds it made reminded him of something, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He strained his neck out to get a better look, but Sonja grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside. He looked at her questioningly.
“You really don’t want to know…. Let’s get you a hot shower and into some clean clothes. It might be best if we rest the night and then tomorrow we’ll fill you in. Okay?”
“No argument from me. You two are the older women of the house. Me? I’m just a kid. A very tired kid,” said Kyle wearily. “I too, have a lot to tell.”
Kyle hugged and kissed his sister on the cheek. He was still a little hesitant about kissing Sonja and she seemed strangely shy all of the sudden as well. They shook hands and went to bed.
Kyle dreamed. The nightmares would soon follow, but only after he woke up.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kyle awoke to the feeling of a damp cloth slapping him across his face. As he came out of sleep, he realized it was Priti licking him. He hadn’t been dreaming after all. He really was back in the future. But where and when, he wondered.
There were no windows in the house and he found that odd. He heard the banging of pots and pans coming from outside the bedroom. The enticing smells of breakfast wafted through the air and, like a spindly finger, it beckoned him. He was so hungry he could hear growling as if there were a hungry animal in his stomach. A young growing boy still needed copious amounts of food even in the future. He was starving. Priti, too, acted as if she were hungry. Either that or she needed to go outside to “do her business.”
“Hello? Teresa? Sonja?”
He thought he heard a television, but then it was turned off.
“Out here! Are you hungry? I’ve got eggs and…sausages,” said Teresa sweetly.
“Boy, am I ever! Have you got anything for Priti?”
“Oh…yeah. I think we can scrounge up something for the little…dinosaur,” said Teresa as she looked oddly at Sonja. Sonja gave Teresa a funny look Kyle couldn’t interpret. They both giggled. As far as he was concerned, they were still girls and he didn’t understand girls any more than he understood math.
Kyle rubbed his eyes and tried to get the sleepy-seeds out. He yawned and stretched his arms out as far as they would go. His hair stood straight up like an angry field of grass that needing mowing.
Teresa piled an enormous amount of eggs on his plate along with a piece of bread that looked more like a hot air balloon. He touched it cautiously with his index finger half expecting it to explode when he did.
“Don’t worry. The bread’s Indian. You’ll like it. It’s got potatoes and stuff inside with some spices!”
Then Teresa put the biggest sausages he had ever seen on his plate: three of them.
“Holy smokes! Those aren’t Jimmy Dean’s, are they? Look more like they came from an Apatosaurus!”
“Well…not quite. I think you’ll like them, though.”
That was an understatement. Kyle devoured the entire plate seemingly without taking a breath, as far as the girls could tell. They sat there, sipped on hot coffee, and enjoyed the sight of their long lost brother.
It seemed completely dreamlike. They had been expecting this moment for decades and now that it was here, they felt strange—numb. They knew what they had to do and yet the consequences of it were still completely uncertain.
Teresa spoke first as Kyle wiped his mouth and sat back with his arms folded around the back of his neck. “Kyle, you have to go back.”
“Back? Where? You mean…what exactly is going on? You said you were going to fill me in…”
“Okay. You’re going to find this very hard to believe, but here goes…After you left, we had to fill our dads and moms in on what we did the first time. I was surprised they believed us, but they did. We described things that we shouldn’t have known. I told them you saved our lives.”
“You…said that?”
“Yes. Dad figured out that you couldn’t get back unless the time capsule was launched again. He didn’t want to send anyone back with it for fear they might not get back. He had us all put earplugs in—all except him. He told us afterward that the sound of the harmonics did something to his brain chemistry and he understood things about the universe that he didn’t know before. He thought it might be why you were able to understand so much
“One of the things he realized was that, if you came back with Priti, it would change the harmonics of the universe. It apparently is one thing to go back in time, but to take something from the past as big as a dinosaur and bring it forward to the future would shatter the equilibrium of the universe at the subatomic level.”
“Whoa. I shouldn’t be able to understand what you just said…but…I do. By taking a mass of subatomic particles away from the past, the overall harmonics of the universe was thrown into disharmony. Holy
mackerel! I get it! Priti is made up of atoms. Atoms are made up of protons, electrons and neutrons. They, in term, are made up of subatomic particles like quarks, and muons and prions and the like. I read about that stuff in books from the library. Inside those particles are the vibrating strings of electricity that should harmonize with all other matter in the universe.
“When I brought Priti back, everything after that was out of harmony. I changed the balance of the universe, didn’t I? I really screwed up! Some genius. Why didn’t I know this if I’m supposed to be so smart?”
“It wasn’t your fault. We don’t have all the answers, but so far, you’re right. Dad was right. You would understand. But when Dad disrupted the shoestring and tried to change its vibration by disrupting the subatomic structure of the shoestring, you must have launched from the past at the same exact moment in time. It threw everything out of harmony and the entire lab started to spin just like the time capsule. We…Sonja, her parents and Mom and Dad and I ran out of there as fast as we could. It was like moving in slow motion. The sound of the harmonics sounded…bizarre…low and distorted. It was like the sound of a hundred cellos all playing out of tune. It sounded…awful. It was just like we heard when the capsule launched back at the lab this time.”
“I heard that sound, too when I tried to escape. I was almost caught by a raptor!”
“How awful! That would have been terrible. When we got out of the lab, the future had changed. The entire timeline had warped. We came back to where we are now. Time isn’t what it once was.”
“Wait a minute. If Dad tried to take the shoestring out of the capsule, wouldn’t I have disappeared—forever?”
“It wasn’t like that. It was the hardest thing Dad ever tried to do…and he failed. He beat himself up miserably all his life.”
“All what life?” Kyle thought about it for a moment. He realized his sister and Sonja had aged considerably. Then he understood the implication.
“You mean, he had to live out his life while I was only in the past a few days? Do you think that happened the last time we were gone? Oh wow! That must have been horrible!”
Kyle rubbed his forehead for a moment. Then he asked, “So, where exactly are we in the stream of time?”
“It’s not that easy to explain. We’ll have to have…the professor explain it to you.” Theresa looked over at Sonja with an odd glint in her eye. “The professor is Sonja’s husband.”
Teresa acted like Kyle should have been surprised. Nothing made any sense anyway. He was still too numb from everything that was going on and it didn’t appear things were going to get any easier.
“Sonja, maybe you should turn on the television now. It might help ease the shock.”
Sonja grabbed the remote and turned it on. A picture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex chasing a futuristic-looking vehicle down and stomping it flashed onto the screen.”
“Well, at least we still have good sci-fi,” remarked Kyle.
Sonja replied, “Kyle…that’s the news.”
***
They watched as the drama unfolded on the news. The T-Rex had gotten away from its owner and run rampant through the streets. The owners were going to be charged for having a dangerous pet and not keeping it under control. It seemed the T-Rex was unregistered and had been smuggled into the city from The Forbidden Zone or TFZ, as a baby and raised in a large underground garage. The drifters were removing several other dinosaurs from the garage and placing them in quarantine until they could be shipped back to the Zone.
Kyle watched in total disbelief. “It’s like watching the Twilight Zone. What is this place called ‘The Forbidden Zone?’”
“Somehow, in ways we still do not completely understand, when you stepped into the capsule and brought Priti back to the future, the comet missed the earth and the dinosaurs survived. Humans and dinosaurs occupied the same time period after that. We walked out of the lab and found the entire planet had changed. Even the skies—the stars and planets were out of place. Our parents figured out what was going on and we were able to adapt because they were so smart. But all of the other humans…”
Sonja stopped and fought back tears. Teresa continued for her. “All of the other humans on the earth had become wicked. Everyone was out for themselves.”
“How is that different from our day? Maybe people really are that way,” remarked Kyle.
“True, the governments and politicians were ruining the earth. But here everything is controlled by the drifters.”
“Who exactly are these…drifters? Are they the police?”
“Sort of. Imagine the world filled with a group of people who are like a gang, but smarter than the rest. They make their own laws and then enforce the laws themselves. It’s like the way lawyers used to be only the lawyers are the criminals, too.”
“That still sounds like the way it used to be to me.”
“Teresa, why don’t you put on the disk the drifters sent to everyone.”
Teresa pulled out a tiny disk the size of a dime and placed it into a slit in the television. A large yellow circle filled the screen. In the middle of the circle was a bird—no, thought Kyle, that’s not a bird. A pterosaur! On the pterosaur’s back there was something or someone sitting.
The camera zoomed into the rider: a figure of a man wearing what looked like a football helmet with a shiny gold visor and holding a strange looking device. It looked like a cross between a rifle and a laser gun. The sound came on with bizarre music. It sounded a lot like rap.
A raspy voice said, “We are the drifters. You will obey us if you want to live. We are the law now. We will tell you what you can and can’t do. To disobey means extinction. You will serve only the Commissioner.” The image distorted as the man on the back of the pterosaur aimed the device at the screen and fired. A shrill sound that hurt the ears blasted from the speakers and vibrated them.
“What on earth is that all about?”
“The Commissioner wants to take over the world and enslave everyone to serve him. The drifters are his police force. They want to profit from the disharmony of this future. Their leader is an…evil man.” Teresa stopped and tears filled her eyes. Kyle didn’t understand what was bothering her so much. He waited while she regained control and continued. “They want to rule the world when they can’t even rule themselves.
“The orange box on the door is their way of controlling everybody and everything. When I stuck my hand in the box, it registered my DNA. You must never put your hand in that box or any other!”
“Why?”
“Because…they are looking for you.”
Chapter Thirty
Kyle watched the news and waited for the time to pass. It did, but far too slowly. His mind tried in vain to grasp everything that happened in the past day or so. Teresa and Sonja left and gave him strict orders not to leave the apartment. He tried desperately to follow that order, but curiosity was eating him alive. The women wouldn’t be back until later in the day. They wouldn’t tell him what it was they had to do or where they were going. They said he wouldn’t understand—just yet—but that soon they would introduce him to the Professor and he would explain everything. It only made him all the more curious.
Besides, he reasoned, Priti needed to go outside. She had soiled the floor a number of times and he was getting tired of picking it up. She was worse than his dog Toby. Kyle looked around for something to make a collar. He found a large sneaker in the closet of the where he was staying. He pulled the shoestring off the shoe and laughed to himself. A shoestring again! It almost seems that the world revolves around a silly little shoestring. Kyle hooked a belt around the shoestring, placed it around Priti’s neck, and headed toward the door.
Cautiously, he peered out across the street. The houses were all in total disrepair; paint was peeling off the sides of the houses and windows, garbage littered the streets, and the stench that assaulted his nose was worse than anything he had smelled in 65 million years. It was even worse than the smell of Priti’s “
accidents.”
“Come on, Priti, let’s go.”
Priti fought the leash. She wasn’t used to being controlled. “Come on! What is wrong with you?”
Priti suddenly started bobbing up and down and screeching loudly.
“Why don’t we just send up a balloon with my name on it? Are you trying to get us killed?”
A shadow passed by overhead. Kyle turned and looked to the sky, but whatever it was had disappeared behind the apartments across the street.
“Uh, oh. Too late. Get back in—now!”
He remembered what Teresa had said about putting his hand in the box on the door and decided not to try. Kyle scooped Priti up in his arms, ran across the street, and ducked behind a dumpster. It reeked. The odor made him cough and he put the oversize shirt his sister had given him across his face.
He heard a swishing sound overhead and this time he knew exactly what it was. His encounter with a pterosaur just the day before — at least, he thought it was the day before—was fresh on his mind. He watched as the creature swooped down beating its wings wildly to stay aloft as it settled down near the apartment.
The beast was enormous—much larger than the one that had tried to get him in the past. It looked meaner and more aggressive. Kyle wondered how it was that such a small man, sitting on the giant creature, could control such an enormous and dangerous animal.
Then he saw a wire leading up to the animal’s reins. It was coiled—like an electrical wire—and it was attached to a small leather pouch on the saddle. The saddle was more like a seat for a motorcycle than a horse or even a camel. It was black with shoulder straps for the rider. The rider—the drifter, as his sister called them—was very small; much like a jockey on a horse. There was a microphone such as one might use for a cell phone attached to the front of the helmet. The dark, gold visor covered to just above the rider’s nose.
Kyle crouched as low as he could. Priti kept trying to get away and that caught the attention of the drifter. He looked in the direction of the dumpster. Kyle could see his mouth clearly now. It was snarling as he reached for his laser gun.
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