by N. D. Wilson
“Doesn’t matter,” Peter said, but his angry eyes were locked on Cindy. “We have a bigger problem.”
Sam squinted into the bright sky. “Shadow shapes?” he asked. “They could fly. And he said they could find me.”
“What?” Peter shook his head. “No. Cops, Sam. We took too many hot dogs. The police are after us. Now get down and get in the bus! We gotta roll . . .”
Sam looked down at Peter and the motorcycle under his feet. The bike had a sidecar, and it was overflowing with hot dogs in silver foil sleeves. Peter dropped back down onto the seat and started the motorcycle with one quick kick.
Laughing and whooping boys were jumping into the bus and it rocked beneath Sam as they did. Peter’s eyes were focused down the hill toward the stadium. Red and blue lights were flashing. Glory was still standing in the street looking up at Sam.
Sam felt a chill march up his back. Both snakes suddenly tensed in his arms. The gold watch slid out of his pocket and tugged at its short chain, pointing straight forward.
Beneath Sam, the bus spasmed and roared to life.
Peter revved the motorcycle engine. “I’ll distract them!” he yelled, clicking the bike into gear.
“No!” Sam screamed. “Wait!”
Peter looked up just as Sam jumped to his feet. A black crack unrolled in the air like a ribbon as Sam turned toward the stadium.
“You have to move us!” Sam yelled. “Right now, Peter! Now! Anywhere but here!”
The dark ribbon became a curtain, and the curtain began to open, pulled apart at the upper corners by two black, winged shapes.
At first there was only darkness. But as the tear in the sky widened, Sam wasn’t looking into nothingness, he was looking into a different now. Through the strange widening gateway, he could see the same water and the same ships and the same mountainous islands in the distance—but the ships were sinking and the islands were billowing black smoke and the water was churning. He could see the same stadium with the same vast parking lots full of the same cars. Outside the torn gateway, more cars shone in the sun beneath a blue sky. Inside, lava was crawling through the parking lots and every car it touched exploded.
In one present moment, seventy thousand people were cheering as men played a game with a ball.
In the other now, thousands of people were trampling one another, trying to escape a collapsing stadium, only to be met by lakes of liquid fire and armies of erupting cars.
While Sam and Peter and Glory all watched, the window into horror flew toward them, widening their view of the destruction as it approached. It rose up, revealing a sky black with smoke, and raced out and around them to each side.
It was coming for them. It would swallow them.
The binocular case on Glory’s hip was rattling, and she pulled out the hourglass, already swirling a long tornado of ghostly sand. She swung it up against the coming change of worlds, but it was smaller than a whip against the tide.
“Peter!” Sam yelled. “Move us! Move us now! Somewhere! Anywhere!”
Peter closed his eyes and raised his hands.
The seething, volcanic world closed behind him like a falling curtain.
But Peter was no longer there to see it. He was in darkness, floating between times toward a strange and unknown future.
On the shaking hill where he and Glory and Sam and the bus and the boys and the motorcycle had just been, now there was only a dancing storm of sand.
1
Now and When
GLORY KILLED THE MOTORCYCLE’S ENGINE. BECAUSE THE old sidecar—and Peter’s weight inside it—kept the bike upright, she didn’t need to lower her feet. Both boots remained firmly planted on the metal pegs.
Two thousand, nine hundred, and seventy-six hours had passed for Glory Spalding since that moment in 2013 when she and the others had been ambushed by the Vulture and swallowed up by a more brutal time stream. As lava had leapt up out of city streets and volcanic ash had burned her lungs, she had looked at her watch. Moments later, when Peter had somehow managed to leap them years into that bleak future in a harsh swirl of sand, her watch had kept ticking. Since that time, although the watch was now dead, she had logged every twenty-four-hour period in the little notebook she kept with her hourglass. It had been 124 days, and now she and Peter and the idling motorcycle were finally back in time and on the same hill they had been on when the horrors had first come. But this was nothing like those awful moments.
The small white battery-powered kitchen timer that Glory kept in her binocular case was beeping quickly. She popped the bino case open, silenced the timer, restarted it for another twenty-four hours, tucked it back into the case, and pulled out her tiny green spiral notebook and a stubby pencil.
Peter sighed, shifting his weight in the sidecar.
“You missed by centuries,” Glory said. “Again. Look around. I’m guessing 1850s.”
One more pencil tick and the notebook rejoined the timer. The bino case snapped shut.
Day 125 had begun.
Glory rubbed her hands on her faded jeans and took in the scene around them. The air was warm and the sun bright. Clearly they had dropped in on a summer day. She didn’t need the old canvas jacket she was wearing over her flannel shirt, but hopefully she would again just as soon as they moved on.
This Seattle wasn’t much of a Seattle at all. The surrounding hills were a patchwork of old timber with heavily logged bald stripes. Most of the bigger buildings—warehouses and shipyards—were down by the water, but a few cockeyed and crooked wooden buildings faced one another across the wide dirt road where Sam and Glory were sitting now. Fifty feet away, a massive team of snorting horses was stamping and straining to pull a barnacle-covered ship’s hull that spanned three large wagons. The rear wagon had collapsed and Glory could see the shattered bodies of two dead men pinned beneath it.
Which explained why she and Peter had ended up here. Deaths—the departures of souls—always left a hole, and it was easy for new souls to slip in.
“So . . . ,” Glory said. “Try, try again? This is definitely well before the Vulture blew everything up, but I don’t think we’ll find him setting traps this far back.”
Peter didn’t answer. He was watching the street ahead of them.
Men were shouting, desperately trying to use poles to lever the ship’s keel off the broken bodies. Others were fighting to calm rearing and stamping draft horses, all whinnying anger and fear. Horrified shopkeepers watched from open doors and mothers in dirty petticoats gripped the hands of small children, pulling them well clear of the straining animals and the deadly landlocked vessel.
Watching clouds of soft dust swirl around black stamping hooves, Glory tightened her long dark ponytail, and then she unzipped her jacket, releasing the excess heat. In the sidecar beside her, Peter was perfectly still . . . until his fingers began to drum on the lip of the sidecar.
“Feel free to use your words,” Glory said. “Just as soon as you have any. Where to now?”
A red bandana pinned Peter’s dark hair back, and he was wearing an old denim jacket. When he stopped finger-drumming and dangled his arms out of the sidecar, sand hissed quietly out of his sleeves onto the ground. He turned his dark face up toward the sun and shut his eyes.
“I would like 2012,” he said. “Maybe. Probably. But short distances are so hard.”
Glory watched as the first of the spectators of the boat tragedy began to take notice of the motorcycle and the girl straddling it. A woman adjusted her sun hat and squinted. A sweaty barrel-shaped man with a two-gun holster and spurs began to walk toward them. His hands were too twitchy for Glory’s taste. She’d seen more than enough old western gunfighters for several lifetimes.
“Girl!” the man yelled. “Did you do this?”
“We should move on,” Glory said quietly.
Peter opened his eyes, focusing on the approaching man. “Is this 1884?” he asked. “I’m trying to train my time sense. This tastes a little like 1884 to me.”
>
The man paused thirty feet away, dust settling onto his already dusty trousers. “Indian, you get out of that little locomotive and keep your hands up while you climb.”
Peter ignored the man’s tone and his command. “What year is it? Please.”
Glory turned the key in the ignition and lifted her right foot onto the kick start.
The man squinted. “Seventy,” he said. “1870.”
Peter turned to Glory. “I was closer. I guessed ’84, you were at ’50.”
Glory smiled. “And you were aiming for 2012? Some time-walker.”
The man took another cautious step forward. “I’m not gonna ask you two again. That machine there shouldn’t be handled by no girl, and surely no savage.”
“You’re right.” Glory gave the man a serious nod. “So you better steer clear. You’re the only savage I see. No la toca.”
Glory kicked the starter.
“Excuse me?” The man snorted.
Glory kicked the starter again, and this time the motorcycle roared beneath her, shivering and ready. A dozen already frightened heavy horses stamped and twisted against their harnesses. Not one of them had ever heard any engine like it. Neither had the people. Men shouted as the horses reared. The ship swayed and began to lean. Another wheel cracked loudly.
“Pete,” Glory said. “Now would be a good time to move.”
Peter had already raised his hands to the sky.
The barrel-chested man was drawing both of his guns.
Glory toe-clicked the bike into gear and twisted the throttle wide open. Dust rose in a rooster tail behind the rear wheel as they surged forward toward the ship and the terrified horses and the even more terrified men trying to control them.
Peter dropped his hands.
Glory shut her eyes as thousands of invisible grains of sand scraped across her cheeks. For a moment, she felt weightless, floating in darkness. And then cold air and rain replaced the warm sand on her skin. She let go of the throttle and opened her eyes on another era of Seattle, this time at night. The bike slid to a stop.
“Wrong again,” Glory said.
“Nineteen fifty-two.” Peter wiped rain from his face and leaned forward in the sidecar. “But I’m guessing.”
“No way.” Glory looked around. “I’m going 1930s.”
She and Peter were in the same street on the same hilltop, but now it was wearing shiny wet pavement reflecting old neon signs and dim golden streetlights. The road was a black garden of bouncing raindrops.
A neon motel sign buzzed above them on the left, a bright-yellow furniture-and-appliance store glowed at them on the right. The weak yellow streetlights marched away into the distance. Faintly, Glory could see the same body of water the ship had been heading for.
Steam was hissing out of bullet holes in an old-fashioned black car parked beside them. The windows were shattered and Glory could see blood on the inside of the glass. She didn’t look closely. She didn’t want to. She had learned over and over again, whenever Peter was practicing, that as they moved through time they would tend to settle into moments with fresh . . . vacancies. Often accidentally. Even old Father Tiempo—Peter as powerful as he would ever become—had found it easier to move into the gaps left in time by recent deaths. And Glory hated it. It made her feel like a crow. Or worse, a vulture.
“How many deaths happened on this hill?” she asked. “Are we going to drop in on all of them?”
Trying to ignore the bloody nightmare in the vehicle beside her, Glory focused on a cop car coming straight up the street toward them.
The windshield wipers were slapping madly, and the car itself was shaped like a rounded snow boot. Glory had seen old gangster movies. She’d seen cars just like it chasing mobsters before World War II.
“Darn it,” Pete said. “The cars are very 1930s.”
“You’re making me nervous,” Glory said. “I thought you were supposed to be getting better at this. Not worse. Will you even be able to get us home?”
“It’s the dead,” Peter said. “I can’t sense the hole they leave until after we slip right in.”
“I know how it works.” Glory blinked away a big raindrop and then wiped her wet mouth on the back of her arm.
“Do you?” Peter asked, his jaw tightening. “You know how it works?”
Glory met his gaze and refused to blink. Even in the dark, she could see the anger in his eyes. “Of course not. You’re the only one smart enough. Now put your temper away and just get us back to Sam. We never should have left him.”
The cop car lurched to a stop in the street and its lights began to flash. Two cops in blue coats with shiny brass buttons climbed out, one from each side. Both policemen drew guns and aimed them at Glory and Peter over the car’s open doors.
“Hands in the air!” the driver yelled.
“I don’t understand why it’s so hard,” Glory said quietly. “Either you can move through time or you can’t, right? So why can you drop us into the right five minutes sometimes and then miss whole centuries on the next try?”
She raised her hands and smiled through the rain at the policemen.
“If you can do better,” Peter said, “be my guest.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Glory said. “I’m not the one trying to grow up and be Father Time.”
Peter sniffed and raised his hands once again. Both policemen stepped out from behind their car doors.
“All right!” the driver said. “Step away from the motorbike.”
Peter dropped his hands.
Darkness. Weightlessness. Hissing sand.
And then the rotting stench of sulfur. Searing heat billowed around Glory. Smoke burned her nostrils and chewed its way down her throat.
Peter was coughing. Down the hill, in the ashen darkness beyond where the police car had just been, ribbons of lava leapt into the air. The football stadium was collapsing into a lake of fire.
More than 124 days had passed since Glory and Millie and Sam and Peter and all the Ranch Brothers had escaped from this exact scene of horror and destruction.
“I think we just missed us!” Peter yelled. “We can’t have been gone long! The stadium hasn’t collapsed yet. And there’s that!” He pointed at the short pencil lying in the road, the pencil Glory had thrown at Sam four months ago. Only in this moment, it had only been lying there for minutes.
Glory didn’t want to think about it. Not with her eyes burning and her lungs blistering with every breath.
“Stop talking and go!” Glory yelled. “Just go!”
The binocular case on her hip began to shiver. And then two black-winged shapes descended from the ash cloud and landed in the road.
They were women. Short, but long-necked. Small, but clothed in endless shadow. Their features were sharp and silvery, reflecting the light around them. And they were smiling.
The woman on the left slid slowly forward. When she spoke, her voice was a dagger blade. “Where is Miracle?”
“Peter,” Glory whispered. “Move us right now. Please.”
“Wait,” Peter said, and then he raised his voice. “Who are you? Do you serve the Vulture?”
Both women laughed. Behind them, a long tendril of lava snaked into the sky.
“Can death serve a single crow?” The woman on the left spread out her arms wide, draped with black shadow wings. For a moment, she was almost translucent, and then Glory saw something else. The woman was a doorway, a tunnel, and through her, Glory glimpsed the sun still shining on an undestroyed city. She was looking at a different present.
“Speak of the Miracle,” the woman said, “and you may reenter the gentler side of time.”
“She’s lying,” Peter said.
“Of course she is.” Glory gripped the bike’s handlebars tight. “Now get us out of here.”
Peter raised his hands, and his sleeves flung sand. Both women flinched, surprised.
“Sister,” said the more distant one. “They have been wandering.”
Peter
dropped his hands and the world around Glory warped and rippled, trying to move beneath her. For half a breath, she was gliding away, but then she crashed right back into the same moment, gasping like she’d been kicked in the stomach. Her vision blurring. Fading.
But she could see that Peter was floating in the air above the sidecar.
And the woman’s silver hands stretched toward him on the end of impossibly long dark wings.
“Can he really be the priest?” she heard one ask. “So young and weak?”
“Drink the spirit he has been given,” said the other. “Kill him now.”
The ground shook beneath the shadow women. The street split and the women shrieked like hawks as white-hot liquid rock leapt out of the ground.
Glory shut her eyes tight, but even through her eyelids, the bright form of the lava remained, standing in the fiery form of a boy.
“Begone,” said a voice of cracking stone.
And Glory was gone. In a hissing blink, with that single word the world of smoke and lava fell away like sand and she was back in the cold air of the right time, sitting on the motorcycle beside the pile of toilet paper and cans of chili she and Peter had collected before trying to secretly work on their time hopping.
But she wasn’t alone.
2
Bull and Dog
SOME CIVILIZATIONS TAKE THOUSANDS OF YEARS TO RISE. Some take a few thieves, some stolen brides, and a couple of decades of solid brickwork. Some grow up from tribes and others from lost explorers or colonies, and some from people who simply quit walking or paddling or climbing and decided that they were too tired go farther and that this cliff face or that island or ice floe or desert was far enough, thank you very much.
Some civilizations will never die. Some are doomed as soon as the first tent is pitched. And some grow large and ancient before they rot and collapse into a thousand little tribes if they’re lucky, and nothing more than swirling dust if they aren’t.
