Ancient Fire (Danger Boy Series #1)
Page 19
Chapter Eighteen
Eli: Message in a Bottle
October 30, 2019 C.E.
LIZARD MAN IN THE WOODS!
It’s a headline in the National Weekly Truth, one of the few remaining “papers” still actually printed on paper. I see it when Dad and I are standing in line at the grocery store in Glen Ellen.
It’s been a few weeks now, and we occasionally get secondhand news about Clyne that way. The online Chronicle had its own, more serious, article called “The Return of Bigfoot,” describing footprints people had seen near here. I think they were Clyne’s. I hope he manages to stay safe.
A couple weeks ago he left an orange on our doorstep, with the word Hello carved in the peel.
Luckily, I found it before the DARPA agents did.
There are only a couple around at any given time lately. But they follow us everywhere. One is behind us in line at the grocery store now, getting ready to tail us home.
We don’t see Mr. Howe much, but he uses the agents to keep tabs on us.
His current fascination is with slow pox. The situation’s getting a little scary—a couple cities are on the verge of declaring quarantines.
As it turns out, that’s what Mr. Howe wanted with the scrolls from the library at Alexandria. He didn’t actually care what was on the scroll; he wanted the scroll itself, the parchment, the goatskin.
Most of the livestock back in Thea’s time were carriers of slow pox, and Mr. Howe figured if he could get a sample of animal skin—like the parchment—he could extract the slow pox DNA and make his own batch.
Dad wonders if maybe that’s what’s causing the outbreaks in the first place. The time stream is still out of whack. Recently another plane, this time going from Chicago to Mexico City, managed to land before it actually took off, after disappearing off the radar screen. But that was so unbelievable, it wound up in the National Weekly Truth, too, a few days before the “Lizard Man” story about Clyne.
With all the strange things happening, Dad has a strange idea of his own: He thinks maybe Mr. Howe got his strain of slow pox perfected after all, and it escaped from the lab and caused the outbreak.
Or rather, it escaped from the lab in the near future, but strains of the disease have come back in time to start infecting us now.
I hope that doesn’t mean I helped cause it by becoming unstuck in time in the first place. By messing up the time stream with my WOMPER charge. I wonder if Dad feels that way, too. Or Mr. Howe.
No, I’m pretty sure Mr. Howe wouldn’t worry about it.
Dad and I talk about that in the truck, and he tells me again and again not to blame myself. But that’s what I’ve been telling him about Mom’s disappearance, that he couldn’t have known what would happen and he can’t keep making himself miserable, not if there’s a chance to get her back. But he doesn’t buy it at all.
We get home, and the DARPA guy pulls up right behind us.
As Dad unpacks the groceries, I go to my room and check the Comnet for messages. For the first time in months, there’s one from my friend Andy:
Sorry it’s been so long. I miss having you here. Strange things have been happening since you left. Like my little sister saying she’s been talking to my great-grandma a lot lately. Except, my great-grandma’s been dead for years. Weird, huh? My parents have been taking her to doctors, but she won’t change her mind. I don’t even know what my great-grandma looks like. How have you been? How’s California?
Hey, Wall, I miss you, too, I start to write back. But I leave the reply unfinished. What can I say? That his sister will be all right once we get the fabric of time patched back up? That I’m friends with a girl who’s more than a thousand years old, and that I know a talking dinosaur, too?
How could you even tell anybody who wasn’t there?
That’s the worst part of it, really. I’ve become kind of a secret myself, like a part of DARPA. Kind of a shadow, living a different life from everyone else.
Maybe that’s what Mr. Howe meant by “Danger Boy.”
The danger is getting cut off from the world you know, because you’ve seen worlds no one else can even imagine.
But Andy’s isn’t the only message waiting for us at home.
There’s a slip of paper, stationery from some old hotel, lying on the floor in Dad’s lab, next to the time sphere.
It’s in Mom’s handwriting. It says Help.
The DARPA agent sees it, too, and he’s already on the phone to Mr. Howe, who I know will come rushing over now, and this might jump-start everything again.
“Dad, I have to go outside and take a walk,” I tell him.
“I understand.” He thinks I’m confused and upset about the note from Mom, knowing she’s back there in time and knowing she wants our help.
I am upset and confused, but not for the reasons he thinks.
I walk down the path to the spot where Thea and I came through the Fifth Dimension. I stand in front of the oak where I hid my Seals cap.
There seems to be so much left to do.
Help, Mom wrote. How? When?
I tried to go back to a “regular” life after Alexandria, but maybe this is my regular life now, moving around in time.
Maybe I am Danger Boy.
I need to ask Dad a couple things first, then I’ll be back for the cap.
And I’ll be gone before Mr. Howe gets here.