One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  Behind them, Bohrs and the hanged man were flung back to fall hard on the broad walkway that ran into an array of black steel ovoid rings arching high over their heads. When the staccato beat of the automatic weapon died away, one of the men lay keening and kicking his sandaled feet.

  Boots moved past Caroline and Dwayne. “Stay down,” a voice cautioned them.

  The man who moved past them stood over the twitching form of Bohrs and pumped three more rounds into him from a stubby MP-5. Bohrs lay still.

  Dwayne was the first on his feet, wobbly but defiant. The man with the smoking weapon turned to him.

  “Stand down, Roenbach,” the man said evenly and lowered his weapon.

  “Who the hell—” Dwayne began.

  “A friend. One you haven’t met yet,” the man said without a trace of humor.

  Caroline rose, shivering, a hand on an ice-rimed railing. She looked at the man in dark clothing and leather gloves. He appeared calm amidst this chaos. Though he was a total stranger, his presence was as reassuring to her as it was mysterious. He returned her gaze with the most astonishing green eyes she had ever seen.

  “I’ve been looking for you two a long time,” the man with the green eyes said.

  “How long?” Caroline said, hugging her arms about her.

  “Well, that’s rather relative, isn’t it?” He rewarded her with a smile that Caroline sensed was a rare thing indeed.

  THE CHAMBER THEY were in was officially a Gallant Temporal Transference Field Generator, but it was, despite a few design elements, a Tauber Tube. Only this version was much larger than even the super-sized Mark 2 onboard the Ocean Raj. Instead of circular rings, the array was made up of ovals of metal sheathed in black ceramic of some kind. The platform was broad enough and the passage tall enough to allow passage of a large truck.

  It was all housed in a high-ceilinged, black-walled chamber that owed more to NASA than to Home Depot as the work of the Taubers did. The upgraded Tube sat in a kind of well, surrounded, on all sides by ranks of consoles and work-stations. It was far more upscale and expensive than anything Caroline and Morris had worked up. Someone had spent some cash.

  The chamber was entirely unoccupied except for the lethal green-eyed stranger who led them up out of the well to an encircling mezzanine. He offered them chairs, real chairs, to sit in and placed hot mugs of coffee in their hands. Their first instinct was to hug the warming cups to them to shake off the chill of their journey. He unwrapped protein bars for them, and cautioned both of them, to eat slowly.

  “You don’t have a lot of time,” he said and walked to a control console. “We’re not going to be alone for long.”

  Caroline’s mind was locked in option paralysis. There were too many questions in her mind jostling to be the first one out of her mouth. She popped out with perhaps the most irrelevant.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Samuel,” he said. He did not spare her a glance as his hands worked swiftly over what Caroline recognized as an upright holographic display. His fingers touched virtual controls that changed in size as he brushed them. Columns of numbers were changing on a monitor that hung above the frosted ovals of the manifestation array. It was all far more advanced than anything she or her brother worked with. Sir Neal had poured a fortune into this facility and all this tech.

  “I’m sending you both back to a time where you’ll be safe,” Samuel said preempting Caroline’s follow-up. “I can’t do more than that right now. You’ll find yourself on the coast of Lebanon near a town called Jounieh as close to the date of your initial departure as I can dial in.”

  “Wait! When are we now?” Caroline said.

  “Five years approximately from when you manifested off Nisos Anaxos the first time,” Samuel said, stepping from the virtual console, which collapsed as he moved away from it.

  “Five years. In the future,” Dwayne said to himself mostly.

  “That’s how long it took Harnesh and his tools to recreate our tube,” Caroline said. “That means five years in which they couldn’t find us. Is that right?”

  “No more questions. That’s all I can say about it. Or about me. You understand why,” Samuel said and gestured for them to rise and follow him. The mist in the array was building once again.

  “You can restore power that quickly? We have to wait days between activations,” Caroline said.

  “No more questions, Dr. Tauber,” Samuel said, standing at the foot of the walkway that led to the tube platform. “In you get. Go home.”

  Dwayne stood over the three bodies lying still on the walkway.

  “You mind if we help ourselves?” he said. “Just leave the transmitter,” Samuel said.

  Dwayne stripped the least bloodied of the cloaks from Ray-Bans and the hanged man. He took one handgun, and the purse of coins. He snaked a couple of Evians and a Snickers bar from the sack. Caroline slipped the offered cloak over her shoulders and started after Dwayne. She turned just before the freezing cloud engulfed her.

  “Will we see you again?” she said.

  “I can almost guarantee it,” Samuel said. And she was gone.

  57

  Time to Kill

  THE SKY WAS dark as they exited the mist.

  The field chamber and the building that housed it were gone now. Dwayne and Caroline stumbled out of the frigid cloud and dropped to their knees. Two manifestations inside of sixty minutes left them weak as kittens and helpless with vertigo. Caroline shook it off after a while and stood. Dwayne rose to one knee and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

  “We can’t stay here,” she said.

  “Give me five seconds,” he groaned.

  “Now, Ranger!” she shouted with more gusto than she felt.

  Together they moved across a broad concrete pad studded here and there with rebar where the support columns would one day stand. It was the construction site for the soon-to-be Gallant facility. There were earth-moving machines parked in a row. The twenty-story tower of a crane cut the sky in half. A trailer stood with lights on inside along a packed-earth roadway. All was surrounded by a cyclone fence topped with loops of razor wire. The gates were closed with loops of heavy chain.

  Caroline looked behind them. Rising from the dark were the beginnings of two enormous concrete structures. Cooling towers. That answered the question of how the Gallant bootleg time device repowered up so swiftly.

  She joined Dwayne, who was standing at the gate with his fingers gripping the steel mesh.

  “Think we can climb it?” Caroline said. The thought of it made her weariness more profound.

  “Fuck that,” Dwayne said and took her hand to lead her toward the humped shape of a gargantuan earth machine.

  He helped her climb into the cab with a hand on her ass then piloted the monster machine through the gates and along a rutted service road that ran along the coast. They left the earthmover between two boat sheds and made for the lights of a roadway. If they woke up any security, they weren’t sticking around to meet them.

  They managed to flag down a cab to take them through the sleeping town to the Hotel Belazur. The cab driver was suspicious of the gold coin stamped with the profile of Phillip of Macedon that Dwayne offered in payment. Dwayne assured him in Arabic that it was gold and bit the soft metal coin before handing it over. The cab driver did the same, and smiled broadly before wishing them the Virgin’s blessings and pulling away with enough of a tip to buy a new cab.

  The graveyard shifts that work international hotels are generally more understanding than the rigid souls who hold the same positions in the daylight hours. Caroline handled the man at the desk, telling him a story in fluent French of how they were Canadian tourists who had their rental car stolen on the road from Beirut and all of their clothing and luggage taken from them.

  The registrar clucked his tongue in sympathy but failed to see how this unfortunate story had anything to do with him especially since the key part of Caroline’s tale, for him, was that the
y had no money or credit cards. In addition, they were naked and stank and were clothed only in what looked like tattered remnants too filthy to be sold as rags.

  Ah, Caroline explained, but the thieves did not get the collection of rare coins that her husband had purchased from a dealer at a souk in Hamra. Dwayne produced a few silver coins and let them tinkle to the marble top of the counter. The registrar inspected them in the light with a practiced eye.

  “We will be able to exchange some of these for currency in the morning,” she assured him.

  “How long may I keep these to...determine their authenticity?” the registrar asked.

  “Oh, keep these samples as long as you wish.” She smiled.

  “And shall I telephone the Canadian consulate to make them aware of your situation?” he said, sharing the smile.

  “It is late. Why trouble them?” She slid an additional gold talent across the cool surface of the counter.

  “Yes. So late.” The coins vanished into a pocket of his vest.

  Despite the fact that they were both exhausted, Caroline insisted they shower before going to sleep. Dwayne threw himself back on the covers of the queen-sized bed and was snoring within seconds. Caroline ran a steaming shower, squirted fistfuls of shampoo into her hair, and scrubbed until she was exhausted. She sat down on the sculpted ledge within the shower and promised herself that she would only close her eyes for a few seconds.

  She awoke an hour later under a deluge of now-frigid water and stumbled from the bathroom without drying herself to lie down next to Dwayne and pass out.

  DWAYNE WAS UP the next morning, and showered and shaved while Caroline ordered up breakfast and two pots of the strongest coffee they could make. Yes, cream. Hell yes, sugar. And a bottle of aspirin, some toothpaste and brushes and mouthwash. Dwayne was still scrubbing two weeks of ancient dirt from his skin and carefully cleaning his sutured wounds when room service arrived with enough eggs, toast, crepes, sliced fruit, breakfast rolls, kippers, pastry and orange juice to feed the rest of the tenants on their floor. Dressed in a robe supplied by the hotel, Caroline greeted the waiter and promised that he would receive a generous tip once her husband concluded some business in town. The man sniffed and stiffly handed over the complimentary copy of the Le Monde given to all French-speaking guests.

  Caroline slathered fresh butter on a roll and luxuriated in steady munching while examining the front page of the newspaper.

  When he stepped from the steaming bathroom, Dwayne found Caroline holding the newspaper up to him with brows knitted.

  “Look,” she commanded.

  “Um...I don’t read French. Something about a banking scandal?” He squinted.

  “The date, dummy. I already called the desk. It’s today’s paper. They sounded like they thought I was crazy.”

  He squinted again.

  The date was more than six months from when he and Jimbo first arrived on Nisos Anaxos.

  They were in their own past. Their doppelgangers were even now aboard the Ocean Raj a thousand miles to the south/southwest, and unaware of all the shit they were about to go through.

  “Our guardian angel got our return date wrong,” she said.

  “Maybe he had his reasons.”

  “How would we know? We don’t even know who he is. Or why he helped us.”

  “Okay. So, we have to kill six months.” He shrugged.

  “Just like that? You’re that complacent about this?”

  “Caroline, I’m hurting, I’m tired and I just can’t think about all that right now. All I can deal with at this moment is going face down in those scrambled eggs.” He sat down on the bed and pulled the serving cart to him and began wolfing eggs with one hand and chugging glasses of OJ with the other.

  BY MIDMORNING, AFTER making love and showering again (together this time), they were adjusting. They decided that arriving home six months early was a pretty sweet deal.

  “How often does anyone get the chance for a do-over? Never. It’s like Daylight Savings Time except we’re turning the calendar back. The ultimate getaway,” Dwayne said.

  “No one knows we’re here.” She nodded. “Not even Sir Neal.”

  “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, Caroline.”

  Caroline called down to the desk and gave a clerk there Dwayne’s shirt, pants, and shoe size. Within an hour, there were socks, two t-shirts, khakis, and a pair of Nikes delivered to the room. Dwayne dressed and left the room with a dozen of the ancient coins in his pocket and a list of Caroline’s clothing sizes.

  The daytime registrar, who had been informed of the Canadian couple’s unique situation by the nighttime clerk, gave Dwayne the address of a reputable merchant down in the souk near the Fouad Chebab Stadium. The registrar said to use his name, Yusef, for the best deal as the dealer was his cousin.

  Dwayne returned to the Beluzar with shopping bags of Donna Karan knockoffs and several pairs of Adidas in Caroline’s size. He also had five thousand Euros concealed inside the sneakers in their boxes. He had given away the coins at a sacrifice price, less than their intrinsic value in precious metal. But they had more, and could strike better deals once they were out of Lebanon.

  For now, they needed some ID that would allow them to fly out of Beirut for the start of their six-month mulligan, as Caroline called it. She had been on the lady’s golf team at London University.

  They decided to wait until the graveyard shift came back on to inquire as to useable passports and visas. Things just went so much easier at night.

  AS NICOLAS MAY of Toronto and Marilynn Wagner of Calgary, they took a crowded and smelly bus north to Tripoli, where they boarded a ferry for the Turkish port of Mersin. In Istanbul, they found a dealer in rare coins who was willing to make a cash deal. They sold a few of the coins for enough to finance hotels and meals for a month or more. They’d sell the rest as they needed to.

  Caroline called American Express, using one of the identities Lee Hammond had provided her. She reported her card stolen, and requested a new one be delivered to a hotel at the next destination, Corfu.

  With a credit line and ready cash, Dwayne and Caroline spent their vacation from time sailing, swimming, hiking, and bumming their way across the isles of the Aegean. There was no place they had to be. There wasn’t even any place they should be. They were as alone in the world as they had been aboard the Lion of Ba’al. This alone-time was of their own choosing, and they were free to allow the whole world to come down to just each other for a time they both knew was splendidly unique.

  They lay back on blankets on a vast beach on Kylini listening to the gentle purr of the surf with toes in the warm golden sand.

  “Happy?” Dwayne asked. It had become a daily ritual.

  “Mm,” she murmured and took his hand in hers.

  “Sure?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t want to change a thing,” she said. “You say that now,” he said.

  58

  Rhodes Redux

  “TONY AND TYRONE?” The raven-haired girl grinned at the two men who had unexpectedly joined her.

  “I guess so.” The black man shot a glance at the one who had introduced himself as Tony, the lottery winner. His eyes narrowed as he looked past his friend to the lobby opening across the pool patio.

  “What is it?” Lee Hammond said, turning. “Someone we know,” Chaz Pierce said.

  Two figures stepped from the shadows of the lobby into the clean Aegean sun.

  Dwayne Roenbach and Caroline Tauber walked into the pool area, tanned and rested with broad smiles on both their faces at their friends’ open expressions of surprise—surprise at seeing the pair in the last place and time they expected to find them, surprise at seeing Caroline looking very pregnant.

  59

  Later in Cleveland

  SAMUEL.

  That wasn’t a name anyone in the South Pointe Hospital maternity ward could recall being given to a baby.

  Lots of Shawns and Jasons and Dereks, and a few Baracks in recent yea
rs.

  Samanthas, sure.

  No Samuels.

  That wasn’t the singular thing that made memorable the birth of Samuel Anthony Renzi early on a Tuesday morning. Hospital admin was surprised when the mother paid in advance with an envelope full of cash. Everything else about the birth was normal and resulted in the arrival of a nine-pound baby boy with all his fingers and toes and a healthy start on a full head of dark hair. What the ob/gyn and nursing staff would always remember were the child’s eyes.

  They were an unusual green that reminded the delivering doc of the surface of a pond in summer. A nurse said they looked like tarnished copper. Samuel’s grandmother said they were the eyes of an old soul who had already seen more than one lifetime of experiences.

  Avenging Angels

  Bad Times Book Three

  1

  Jerusalem, AD 31

  The sun had no mercy. It was a hammer, and the Roman fort was the anvil.

  It was noon, and invisible fire rained down from a cloudless sky. The light shone painfully off of white-washed walls and tiled rooftops. There was a feeble breeze off the surrounding hills brushing over the ramparts of the fortress the invaders built at the corner of the great temple. The zephyr was scant relief to the soldiers on sentry there. It did little more than stir the inferno. They were at least above the stink of the streets below.

  The tribune had gone indoors to enjoy the comforts of shade and so could not see centurion Aelius Sextus Antoninus removing his helmet to wipe the sweat from the band. The centurion enjoyed the momentary sensation of a gust in the sodden bristles atop his head before returning the foul-smelling leather bucket to its place.