One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  “That’s beautiful in its own way. Horrible words but well-spoken,” she said and fought the urge to reach for his hand.

  “They’re not mine. They belong to my mentor. He did not write them down. I committed them to memory. He was executed for his thoughts but they live on in all he met.”

  He stood up from the table. A bar of sun was reaching across the floorboards from the street windows.

  “The shops will be open. I will take your list. Do not answer the door. I will be back with food then find the other items you will need to enable you to leave this room.”

  He left the suite without a farewell.

  Caroline rested her head against the lace antimacassar draped over the high seat back. She closed her eyes. She was exhausted, but her thoughts kept turning back to Samuel’s words.

  The man was a living paradox and, if what he said was true, her son shared the same qualities. And how those qualities would manifest themselves, she had no idea. She feared for her child even as she realized that every parent fears for their child. Only their fears were more than unfocused worries of the unknown.

  Caroline felt her anxieties were sharpened to a degree by the scant amount of knowledge she had about Stephen’s unique condition. The empty look in Samuel’s eyes as he recited those words about his world frightened her. She could only hope that the Rangers’ latest operation would alter conditions enough to prevent that eventual future from occurring. That by their actions, they would spare her child the fate that Samuel Renzi suffered.

  Here, alone in a Parisian hotel, she was overcome by a sense of isolation every bit as painful as what she suffered in a cave as a captive of man-eating primitives an epoch ago. At least, stranded though she was in prehistory, someone knew where she was; knew and cared and could come to retrieve her or, failing that, mourn for her loss.

  But here her only lifeline was a man she barely knew, who was unknowable. If something happened, if he never returned to this room, she and her child would be trapped here with no one aware of where and when they were. They would be left to lead their lives in a time that was not their own and die many years before their birthdates.

  Merciful sleep overcame her at last. With the baby breathing softly in her arms, she slipped from consciousness into a dreamless void.

  Samuel returned to the room with a sack of food. Bread, butter, cheese, a jug of milk, a slab of smoked meat, and a bottle of white wine. Also a bar of soap and a comb. He had three or four newspapers as well, one in English. Caroline awoke and set the sleeping baby at the center of the bed, surrounded by pillows. She sat at the table and ate like a truck driver. She even had a sip of the wine.

  “I could find no fresh fruit or vegetables,” he said. “The city is under siege. Food is expensive and in short supply.”

  “So, I shouldn’t ask a lot of questions about this?” she said, poking the flank of meat with a fork.

  “I am not certain I could provide more than a guess.”

  “You’re not eating?” she said around a mouthful of Brie and bread.

  “My needs are taken care of,” Samuel said.

  “Are you a vampire, Samuel?”

  His bewildered expression in response to that made her laugh hard enough to spit food across the table. It was the first time she witnessed a wrinkle in his unflappable cool.

  She munched a strip of the shoe-leather-tough meat while making him a list on a sheaf of foolscap she found in a desk. Stephen would need cloth diapers or muslin rags, should commercially-made diapers not be available. She was no expert on the history of infant care or an expert of any kind in the care of babies, for that matter.

  “I’ll need clothes and shoes. Find a dress I can wear outside. And a hat to match. It’s winter here, so I’ll need a coat and a hat. A scarf or shawl as well. Another dress to wear inside. And something for Stephen. I guess a few of those pullover dress-things. They dressed boy and girl babies the same back then. I mean, here and now.”

  “What about sizes? I have never purchased clothes for a woman,” Samuel said, taking the list.

  “I wear a size seven shoe. That’s roughly seven inches in length. Make it eight to give me some toe room. You can guesstimate the rest from my height. The clothing sizes probably won’t be that standardized even in Paris.

  “Buy some thread, scissors, and needles. I can tailor the clothes some. I have the excuse of having just given birth, so that covers any frumpiness. It’s not like we’ll be doing anything social, right? Oh, and a bassinet or something like it for Stephen to sleep in.” She handed him back the list after making her additions to it.

  “I will.”

  “Do you have the money for this?” she asked.

  “I have funds. Several million in period francs.”

  “How is that possible?” she asked. “How long did you have to plan for this contingency?”

  “My life is a series of contingencies,” he said, heading for the door.

  “Wait,” she said.

  He stopped and turned, his hand on the knob.

  “What do I do if something happens—if you don’t come back? Have you prepped for that contingency?”

  “I have left funds in the desk drawer. They should keep you indefinitely,” he said.

  “A lifetime?” she said.

  “I will be back. If I cannot return, then I have left word of where and when you can be found.”

  “With who, Samuel?”

  “With myself,” he said.

  “I suppose that will have to do, right?” she said.

  “There are worse alternatives.” Samuel departed without saying anything further.

  She pulled the desk drawer open and found a thick pile of paper money decorated with images of a seated woman wearing a robe. By it was a cloth sack of coins. She spilled some on the table. Thick, shiny discs decorated with the profile of Napoleon the Third. There were several thousand francs here. She had no idea of their current worth. Back in the present, they wouldn’t get her far. In this time, they might be worth a small fortune or be made nearly worthless by the inflation that comes inevitably with war. She spread the coins and found among them several hundred in American double eagles. What contingency did they serve?

  Caroline replaced the bills and coins in the drawer and locked it. She placed the key in the pocket of her coat. She looked over the newspapers while she finished the heel of bread that remained.

  The papers were dominated by the news of war with Prussia. Otto von Bismarck was featured in cartoons and drawings. The Prussians and their allies were closing on Paris from the north and south, taking a new French fort almost daily.

  The stories mentioned Moltke and Prince Frederick as well as General Trochu and Wilhelm, the future Kaiser whose son would command Germany in the First World War. Napoleon III had been taken captive months earlier. She knew that Germany was not a nation at this time; just a collection of kingdoms, duchies, baronies, and principalities.

  She recalled, from a required European history course years before, that this war was key in Bismarck’s strategy of “blood and iron” to unite the German people under one flag.

  She could remember bits and pieces of other facts but had no sense of the overall course of the war or details of its outcome. This troubled her, and she searched her mind for what else she knew of this current conflict. At the moment, she desperately wished she had five minutes with Google or even Wikipedia to check a simple timeline of events.

  She knew that France lost this war decisively. But what form did that take? She cursed herself for not paying more attention in required history courses or to the boring presentations of tour guides. Her area was physics. History wasn’t terribly interesting to her unless it dealt with the sciences. Now that she needed the advantage of being from the future to inform her as to what to do next, she was coming up ignorant. But she was as clueless of what the next few months held for Paris as anyone living their life out in these years.

  The date at the top of the fron
t page of Le Figaro was 4 January 1871.

  The date troubled her. Searching her mind for the source of that unease was maddening. Caroline went into the bedroom and lay down by the sleeping baby and was soon asleep.

  She awoke, startled, to the baby crying.

  Caroline was not aware at first where she was. The room was dark, and she fumbled for the switch of a lamp by the bed. Of course, there was none there. She held Stephen to her and allowed her eyes to adjust to the gloom. She exposed her breast for Stephen to nurse and held the warmth of him against her. Her breath was visible in the cold room. She would see to the stove in the next room once the baby was fed.

  Propped up against the headboard, she listened to the sounds coming through the drapes. On the street, she could hear the tramp of boots punctuated by shouted orders. The marching men would come and go with long silences between. It was after curfew, and there was no movement outside. The stillness outside was near complete. It was hard to believe that Paris lay unseen all about her. It was more like a graveyard.

  In the stretches of quiet, the faint echoes of a rumbling cadence reached her ears. She thought at first it was thunder, but it was too constant, too insistent. It was cannon fire. Was it the guns of the city’s defensive forts at Saint-Denis and Vincennes or the answering batteries of the invading army? Or was it both? The booming reached her as a leitmotif through the glass; resonant enough to cause unease, not close enough to cause alarm.

  She decided instead to concentrate on the contented grunt of her son suckling at her breast. Caroline clung to this moment. This was all that mattered, all that was real to her. The rest was a surreal dream or half-recalled movie.

  Stephen sated and burped, she found matches and lit an oil lamp. She held the baby to her shoulder and carried the oil lamp into the next room and lit some candles there. In the guttering glow, she found piles of clothing for her and the baby, along with more groceries and an open wicker basket large enough for the baby to sleep in. There was also a bundle of folded rags she could use for diapers.

  All of the clothing was meant for her and the baby. There was nothing here for Samuel. She looked for a note of any kind but found none. Still, Caroline knew he had left them alone again, and she had no idea for how long.

  She folded a blanket to make a cushion in the basket and, after negotiating a change of diapers, laid Stephen inside and covered him with a second blanket to keep out the chill. She then got a fire going in the iron stove and fed it from a fresh pile of split wood set on the hearth. Samuel had thought of everything.

  Soon the little room was comfortably warm, the baby snug in his new bed and the food that needed to be kept cold set on the sill against the icy-rimed pane of the window.

  Those simple chores completed, Caroline sat at the table and allowed herself the luxury of a good long cry.

  28

  Run and Gun

  “I almost feel bad for them,” Jimbo said, his eye near the cup on his scope.

  “I don’t,” Bat said, lying prone by his side.

  They were both sighting on the bowmen trotting over the crest of a stony hill. Long shadows stretched before the running men as the sun sank low in the sky behind. The shadows reached like fingers for a pool of darkness spreading over the land below. The road moved through more open country here. The walls of the ravine gave way to broken hills created by a massive flooding an epoch before.

  Perhaps the deluge of the Torah, Bat thought, the first of God’s promises made good. The bowman followed doggedly, never seeming to need rest even as the day wore on to darkness.

  The team could easily stay ahead of them on horseback. But the archers would eventually catch up and, following a few hours behind them, the infantry column. The slow-motion chase was distracting from the search for the wayward slave caravan. The solution was clear to all: the Pima and the Israeli would provide a rearguard to slow pursuit and even halt it entirely. If these guys, as good as they were, took enough punishment they’d give up the game.

  “Come on. You got to show respect. These guys are hard chargers. Covering twenty miles or more double-time,” Jimbo said and moved his view to follow one archer hopping down the slope from one shelf of rock to another.

  “They’re Syrians. They’re the oldest enemy of my people,” Bat said.

  “I thought that was the Philistines.”

  “Oldest living enemy. We killed all the Philistines.” She let out a long sigh and the rifle kicked back into her shoulder. On the hillside four football fields away, a man was tumbling lifelessly down the slope leaving a plume of rising dust behind him.

  A second dropped as Jimbo fired.

  “So this is like what? Retro payback?”

  “Like if you got to go back and be at the Little Big Horn.”

  “Not sure which side I’d take on that one.” Jimbo narrowed his eyes.

  “They’re still coming,” Bat hissed as she sighted on another. There were more than twenty in view.

  “Let’s stop subtracting and start dividing,” Jimbo said. “Watch what I do.”

  Bathsheba Jaffe glassed the hill and heard the crack of the Ranger’s rifle. A bowman fell to the ground near the base of the hill. He was clutching a leg. Bat could see that his mouth was open and howling in pantomime. Two archers stopped their descent to come to his aid and lift him between them.

  Bat found her own target and put a round through the hip of one of the running men. She watched as he sprawled face first and began clawing at the ground, face pinched in agony. Again distance kept them from hearing the agonized screams. Through the scope, she saw three archers carrying the man into the shadows at the base of the hill.

  Jimbo fired again and took a man skylined against the ruddy sky at the crest of the ridge. A headshot.

  The man collapsed, lifeless. Those closest to him turned around and ran back to concealment on the other face of the hill. They now had one half of the pursuing force tending to two wounded men and the rest afraid to come into view over the hilltop. Two wounded men would take another four or more out of the fight as they saw to them. The bulk of the force was isolated and pinned down, terrorized by something they could not even see to strike back at.

  “They’ll wait till full dark to try and move again,” Bat said.

  “But we won’t be here,” Jimbo said, standing. “Let’s get a few miles between us and set up again. We give them a false sense of security, let them think the dark is hiding them, then nail a few more.”

  They trotted to where they left their horses in the shade of an outcropping, slid the rifles home in their scabbards, and mounted up.

  “Giddyup,” Jimbo said with a broad smile. They led the mounts with knees and reins to roughly follow the road snaking between the hummocks of rocky land.

  “You’re enjoying yourself,” Bat said.

  “Oh, hell, yeah,” Jimbo said. “Like playing cowboys and Indians back on the rez.”

  “Who played the cowboys?”

  “I was always on the cowboy side.” Jimbo laughed. “Clint Eastwood is my main man.”

  “So, you really would be conflicted at Custer’s Last Stand.” Bat laughed.

  “You think that’s weird?” he said.

  “Not as weird as this little princess riding out to make Christianity possible,” she said.

  They trotted into a dry wash and spurred the horses to a gallop toward their next hide.

  “Clusterfuck,” Lee Hammond said under his breath. “Mother of all clusterfucks.”

  He and Chaz Raleigh lay prone in a copse of junipers watching the construction of a watchtower and ring wall a thousand yards away. It was only the hour following full dawn, and already nearly-naked guys were stacking precut stones atop slathers of mortar mixed by others in a pit and passed forward in a bucket chain. Another crew was working on scaffolds to apply more mortar to seal the gaps. Still more were hauling stone forward on two-wheeled carts drawn by oxen.

  They worked at a steady pace, and the ring wall was the
height of two men already. The stout tower was growing as they watched. There was an encampment of nearly fifty tents laid out in neat rows within an earthwork constructed about the construction site. A deep ditch filled with sharpened stakes ran around the floor of the earth wall.

  The fort sat at the foot of a steep slope that rose to a rocky summit. The summit was a kind of headland in a range of escarpments that stretched east. By the fort was a feeder road that led off the main highway and went into a gap in the escarpment toward something the Rangers could not see from their angle. Whatever was back there was the source for the building blocks the Romans were using to build the walls and tower. It had to be the quarry the Arab caravan driver had told them about.

  “They’re like goddamn beavers,” Chaz said. He moved his binoculars to take in a knot of tile rooftops surrounded by a curtain wall a few hundred yards from where the fort was going up. It was a village they had no name for. It sat along the north/south road. It appeared to be the source of water for the fort.

  All day long, camels led by boys made their way from the village carrying barrels of water that were drained into a stone-lined reservoir dug within the earthen wall. This water was used for mixing the mortar and for the legionnaires to use for drinking and bathing. Other villagers followed the camels hauling carts loaded with goods for sale to the Romans. Chaz couldn’t see what they were selling. Considering the orchards stretching south from the village, probably dates.

  “See their banner?” Lee said. “They have it set up in front of the largest tent.”

  Chaz swung his gaze back to the Roman camp. The sun gleamed off the polished brass aquilifer stuck in the ground before a bell-style tent. The figure of the trotting horse was visible atop it.

  “That’s our unit. The Twenty-third,” Chaz said.