The Time-Traveling Outlaw

by Macy Babineaux

  He moved his lips down to her throat, licking the rain from her as she pulled his shirt all the way off. She went to work on his jeans next, working the buttons free. He did his part, pulling at her skirt and working it loose enough to drop to the floor. She wore bloomers underneath her skirt, soaked through, so that when Logan tugged hard at them, they fell down around her ankles with a soggy thump.

  He kicked off his boots as she began to work his jeans down around his hips, his cock springing free.

  Soon they were both naked, standing in the middle of the dark kitchen, licking the rain from each other’s bodies.

  Logan crouched down to Sally’s breasts, sucking them one at a time as he cupped her wet ass in both hands. She stroked his wet hair, relishing the sensation of his lips on her bare skin, now moving to her nipple. He sucked the rain from one nipple, then moved to the other.

  She reached down and felt for his manhood, already stiff as a board. She took hold of it in her hand, warm and wet.

  “I want this inside me now,” she said.

  “What my Sally wants,” he said, lifting her up and carrying her to the wall, “my Sally gets.”

  He pushed her against the wall, grabbing himself and guiding it inside her. She spread her legs to welcome him, feeling the knob of his head push against her wet lips.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck, lowering her head over his, dripping rain on top of him as he pushed inside her.

  Sally let out a cry. God, it felt so good. This is what ancient women must have felt when their men came home from war, she thought. Only this time, they had both gone to war, and escaped death by the narrowest of margins. That had heightened their lust to a razor's edge, and their blood simmered as they clutched one another.

  She took him into her, and he slid easily. She felt as wet down there as she’d ever been. He pushed his chest against hers, and she felt her hardened nipples, sensitive against the soft, wet hair of his chest.

  “Fuck me, Logan,” she whispered in his ear, before biting the lobe.

  By way of an answer, he thrust himself up and deep inside her.

  She let out another cry, this one of surprise and delight. He thrust so hard into her he nearly knocked the breath out of her.

  She wrapped her legs around him as he pulled halfway out, then plunged into her again. His head was between her breasts now, his wet hair rubbing against her breastbone.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh dammit, yes!”

  He pulled and thrust, jamming himself inside her roughly. This was no soft, gentle act of lovemaking. This was the carnal release of a man and a woman who weren’t sure they’d still be alive only hours before. She bucked him like a wild bull, riding his cock with reckless abandon. Sally felt as if she was fucking him as much as he was fucking her.

  They came together, clutching each other as if each were drowning, their bodies locked in a rictus of pure ecstasy. Logan buried his head deeper into her bosom, squeezing her ass as a warm bloom of his seed plumed into her. Sally threw her head back and screamed at the sky, squeezing her eyes shut so hard tears dripped out of each corner, mingling with the rain on her skin.

  He pulled out of her, lowering her down from where she had been pressed against the wall above him.

  He leaned in and kissed her deeply, cupping her jaws in his palms. She ran her fingers across his back, kissing him back fiercely. Then they pulled away from each other, looking into each other’s wild eyes.

  “I love you, Sally Macintosh,” he said.

  “And I love you,” she said.

  She moved close to him again, and he hoisted her up once more, this time to carry her to bed.

  Sally woke the next morning, her arm and leg draped over Logan’s sleeping body. He was snoring softly. The sheets were damp from the rain off their bodies, but Sally didn’t care. She was as happy as she thought she’d ever been.

  The early morning sunlight prismed through drops on the window, making little rainbows on the far wall. She felt like a completely new woman. She’d been tied in that goddamn chair for who knew how long, then she’d been set free, and the ride through the rain followed by a night of lovemaking made her feel rejuvenated and whole again.

  She climbed out of bed, careful not to wake Logan. She pulled a dry nightgown over her head and tugged on her boots. Then she walked into the kitchen and took the broom from the corner and headed outside.

  She smelled the wet dirt from last night’s rain, a good smell. Water still clung to the grass and the weeds. She glanced over at the pile of wet ash that used to be the barn, and as she did, she caught motion out of the corner of her eye.

  Maisy was trotting across the field toward the house.

  “Aww, come here girl,” Sally said, and Maisy came straight to her. Sally hugged the old horse, stroking her nose. “Poor girl,” Sally said. “You spent the night out there all by yourself? Let me get you fixed up.”

  She went back inside, where she’d kept some of the feed. She spent the next half hour tending to the horses, making sure they were watered and fed.

  Then she took the broom from where she left it on the porch and walked to the ruins of the barn. The box had been on the far side of the barn. She walked across the black mud, mushing under her boots. Then she began to poke the handle of the broom down into the ash, flipping wet chunks of it aside. It took her another fifteen minutes or so, but finally the wood of the broom clanked into something solid.

  She crouched down and dug the box up, turning her hands black. It looked intact. The latch still worked, so she thumbed it and flipped the box open. Inside were papers, the deed to the land among them. And sitting on top was the silver pocket watch Logan had brought across time on his last journey.

  “You found it,” he said.

  She jumped, let out a little laugh, then looked over her shoulder.

  He stood there in rumpled jeans and a cotton shirt, his boots blackened by the ash.

  He’d talked about going back, but she didn’t want him to. She didn’t quite know what she had intended to do this morning. Part of her was hoping the watch had been destroyed, that he wouldn’t be able to return to the future. Another part of her thought to get rid of it and tell him it had been destroyed. That would have been no way to start their life together, with a lie. But they wouldn’t have a life together if he left and never came back.

  But he had spared her having to make that decision.

  “Yes,” she said. “I guess this old box did its job.”

  “You’re worried I won’t come back,” he said. He was no fool, and neither was she. Sally knew his intention wasn’t just to save the scientist and his daughter. He had a wife there, one he loved very much. And if what he had done here had saved her life and made their marriage possible again, then what use would he have for some widowed woman far in the past?

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” she said, looking down at the watch. He knelt and picked it up, and they stood together, looking into each other’s eyes. “The thing is,” she said, “I don’t even understand how you’d get back. Didn’t you say they needed this watch to track you?”

  He slid the watch into the pocket of her nightgown and took her hands in his. “Well,” he said. “I reckon the only way my plan works is if you’ll marry me, have my children, and live a long life together here with me.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, flustered. “I mean, I want that. But I don’t see how—”

  “If I’m right, and I altered the future by what we did, then I think, I hope, that a lot of things will be different. But a man named Sam Tidwell is still going to be born. He’s still going to invent time travel. And he’s still going to send me back to you. He has to, because it already happened, right?”

  She had never tried to untangle the intricacies of moving about through time. Since Logan Carver had entered her life, she hadn’t had much time to think straight about anything.

  “I suppose so,” she said cautiously.

  “So for that
to happen,” Logan said, pointing at her pocket, “that watch has to make it into Sam’s hands at some point in the future. Over a hundred and fifty years into the future. I could try to leave it somewhere for him, bury it in a box somewhere. But then I’d need to send him a message as well. I figure there’s an easier way.”

  He looked at her while she worked it out in her head. “Our children,” she whispered. He had mentioned having children with her, but it took her a little time to make the connection.

  “Yes,” he said. “We’ll pass that watch down through our family, generation after generation, with explicit instructions to find Sam Tidwell and give him the watch when the right time finally rolls around.”

  “This makes me dizzy thinking about it,” Sally said. “You said it was easy to find people in the future. That information was at the tips of your fingers.”

  “Yep.”

  “But do you think our children…” she paused, swallowing. They were talking about generations of their own kids that hadn’t been born yet, hadn’t even been conceived. Or had they? It was way too early to feel the signs, but she and Logan had made love several times, and some instinct told her something might already have happened. “You think our children will do that? Hand down a watch to their sons and daughters, only to hand it over to some stranger a hundred and fifty years in the future.”

  He smiled. “If I’m right,” he said, “they already have.”

  Her head spun just trying to wrap itself around the idea, paradoxes that couldn’t resolve. But the one thing she understood loud and clear was that he meant to be with her for the rest of her life, and that was all she needed to understand.

  Sally threw her arms around his neck, pulled him close, and drew him in for a kiss.

  And that’s when he disappeared.

  18: Logan

  No! he thought as he was ripped away from Sally’s embrace, engulfed in white light. The sensation was different this time, softer, warmer, and less disorienting. While his mind floated between the centuries, he felt a mixture of dread and anticipation.

  What if he hadn’t changed things at all? What if the watch had somehow made it into Tidwell’s hands, but he still worked for Sturgess at the prison?

  But when the world solidified, Logan found himself sitting in a room much smaller than the dark warehouse he had first set out from. Everything was white, so bright he squinted at first. He lay in a soft, gelatinous chair that seemed to gently grip his body, but there were no actual restraints.

  And as he looked around, he saw two men there. One he recognized, though he was thinner, with no facial hair at all this time. He was still wearing the white lab coat.

  “Sam?” Logan whispered, his voice hoarse.

  Sam’s eyes grew wide. “You know me?” he asked. “Astonishing. From my perspective we’ve never met. But you’ve met me in another timeline? You’re Logan?”

  “Yeah,” Logan said, nodding his head. He looked down and realized he was clothed, the ruffled cotton shirt, jeans, and boots had come with him across time. He looked over Sam’s shoulder at the other man, at first fearing it might be Sturgess.

  But the man was young, maybe in his early twenties. He had short blonde hair and hazel eyes. He smiled nervously at Logan, looking at him with a weird intent, as if he were searching his face for signs of something.

  Sam looked over his own shoulder at the young man. “Oh,” he said. “Right. Well, of course you two have never met in any timeline. Let me introduce you to Dylan Carver. He’s your great, great…I don’t know how many greats, but he’s one of your descendants.”

  Logan felt his heart thump hard in his chest. He climbed out of the squishy chair and stood shakily on the carpeted floor. The young man, the one Sam had said was Dylan Carver, put out his hand to shake. Logan looked down at the hand, then wrapped his arms around the young man and hugged him tight.

  Dylan hugged back. “It’s good to meet you, sir.”

  Logan pulled back, gripping the boy’s shoulders. He felt tears standing out in his eyes. “You look like her,” he said.

  Dylan smiled. “Your wife?” he asked. “Sally?”

  “Yeah,” Logan said. “Though we’re not officially married yet.” He laughed at the absurdity of using the present tense to refer to something so long ago. Then it struck him. “You did it. You really did it.”

  “Oh, the watch?” Dylan said, nodding to a raised pedestal near the chair. Logan turned and saw it, the old silver pocket watch that having gone from 1861 to 2026 twice was now over three hundred years old. “I didn’t really do much, to be honest. My mother gave me the watch. She told me what she knew, which wasn’t much, actually. I just looked Doctor Tidwell here up on the internet. He was easy to find. I had no idea this was going to happen, though.”

  “Neither did I,” Tidwell said. “I thought the first time someone would time travel, I’d be sending them from this time to that, not pulling them here from there.”

  Logan looked around. This place didn’t look like a prison. “Where are we?” he asked.

  “We’re in my lab,” Sam said. “At the University of Texas at Lockdale.”

  Logan laughed. This was a pleasant change. Then he saw the computer sitting on the desk behind Sam, and he suddenly needed to know very badly what else had changed.

  “I’m sorry,” Logan said. “It’s good to meet you Dylan. And it’s good to see you again, Sam. Even if you don’t remember me. But can I use that?” He nodded at the machine. “I need to check some things.”

  “Sure,” Sam said, moving out of the way. “Help yourself.”

  Logan sat down at the computer, launched the browser, and pulled up the search engine. A search for “Natalie Carver” didn’t yield anything related to his Natalie. So he tried her maiden name, and there it was, on the first page of results, seven from the top: a wedding announcement. She’d gotten married to someone named “Holden Wescott.” He sat back in the chair in disbelief.

  He felt overwhelming relief that she was still alive, but in this timeline they’d never fallen in love, never gotten married. He shouldn’t have been that surprised. If he could change all this, was it really so shocking that his relationship with Natalie would also be changed? Maybe not, but it still hit him like a ton of bricks.

  Holden Wescott. Sounded like a rich asshole. He leaned forward again and pulled up the engagement photo. The guy didn’t look like an asshole, but Logan couldn’t help feeling jealousy rise up in his throat.

  “Who’s that?” Dylan asked.

  Logan cleared his throat. “That’s, uh…that’s someone I used to know.” He looked through the image results and saw a picture of Natalie in a nurse’s uniform. He went to the link. Dallas Presbyterian Hospital. That was where she worked now.

  He turned to Dylan. “Do you have a car?”

  “Yeah,” Dylan said.

  “Do you mind taking me to Dallas?”

  Dylan smiled, and he saw her in him again. “No problem, man. Anything for family.”

  “Good,” Logan said. “Thanks. Just let me check one more thing, and then we can go.”

  He turned back to the computer and typed in: “Holden Sturgess.”

  The first result that popped up made him smile. It was a news report about a suspect in a credit card fraud case. He’d been caught by the police with over fifty thousand credit card numbers that obviously didn’t belong to him. The story was from two years ago, but with a little more searching he found another about the court case. Accompanying the story was a mugshot. He just looked sad now, his stringy white hair in disarray, his face sunken and pale. But he still had those beady black eyes, and they looked as mean as ever.

  Sturgess had been convicted of multiple counts of fraud and sentenced to twelve years. He was serving his sentence at Wicklehut Penitentiary. A quick search for Wicklehut showed it in the next county over, instead of where he was sitting.

  “Is everything all right?” Sam said.

  “Some things are very right,”
Logan said. “But I need to visit someone. Then I’m going to need to you send me back.”

  “What?” Sam said. “You went to all that trouble to make sure I’d retrieve you from the past, and now you want to go back?”

  “I have to,” Logan said. “Or else he’ll never be born.” He pointed at Dylan. “And we’ll never be able to have this conversation. Then if I were you, I’d scrap all this and never tell anyone about it. It almost got you killed. Come on, kid,” he said to Dylan. “Let’s go.”

  They left Sam sitting at his desk with a worried, puzzled expression on his face.

  Lockdale was a two-hour drive from Dallas. Dylan’s car was a red Toyota Sempra, a model he’d never heard of. The university looked like most medium-sized colleges, with cured landscaping and modern architecture. As they got in the car, Logan smiled again at the thought of having replaced the prison where he’d spent six years with a school.

  On the ride to Dallas, they asked each other questions and tried to fill each other in on as much of their stories as possible. Dylan was a student himself, in his sophomore year, pre-med at SMU. He’d talked with Tidwell on the phone several times, and delivered the watch about six months earlier. Tidwell had called him when he thought it might actually work, that he might actually have a reading on Logan’s temporal signature, and he’d promised to wait for Dylan to drive up for the weekend.

  “I thought he was crazy, honestly,” Dylan said. “I kind of thought our whole family was crazy, too.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Logan said. “It all sounds crazy.”

  Then he told Dylan what he could, about his old life in the other timeline. About Harken Sturgess, the robbery, Natalie’s death, going to Wicklehut, and being sent back. He recounted everything he could about his time in 1861, finishing just as they entered the Dallas city limits.

  He sat there in the driver’s seat, taking it all in. “I wouldn’t believe any of that,” he said. “Unless I’d just seen you materialize in a chair back in that office.”