Destroyer

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I half expect to end up back in Lidia’s doorless room, but that’s not the case. Instead, we travel considerably farther back, to August 8, 1874, at 3:00 a.m.

I check the chaser’s map twice to make sure there hasn’t been a mistake. According to my device, I am just off the south coast of England on the Isle of Wight, between the towns of Newport and Cowes. More specifically, I’m in a field filled with rows of tall crops that I can’t identify that block my view. Rising on my toes, I can just get my eyes above the plants, but I barely start scanning around when Lidia yanks on my chain again.

The jump feels as if I’ve been standing in a dark room and someone has simply turned on the light. The sun beats down on rows of plants that look exactly those from the field where I’d just been. I stick my head up for a peek and am positive that I’m in the same field, though probably about ten yards south of my previous position.

I’m pretty sure we’ve just performed a textbook rewinder insert. Lidia brought us in under the cover of early morning, took a look around, and then jumped several hours forward to a position close to where she had been that would hide her when she arrived in the daytime.

Which probably means it will be some time before we travel again while she completes whatever evil task she has come here to do. I sit on the ground and finish my search through the menus, not allowing my mind to start down the worrisome road of trying to figure out why we’ve come to this place at this time.

Once I finish, there’s one thing I need to do before I can start testing combinations to get the tracker working. For any of the companion functions to work, I must reconnect the companion wires. Doing so makes me very nervous, however. While there are no trained and official companions in this time line, the box could connect to someone else, like mine did with Iffy back in late March. Also, I worry that opening the specialized area of the box might disconnect the slave mode.

I take a deep breath and then perform the task as quickly as I can. As soon as I close the panel again, I check the training functions to make sure the device is still enslaved to Lidia’s. Thankfully, it is. As for a companion, the status function under the companion menus reads UNCONNECTED.

I begin the testing phase. The initial attempts yield either error messages or nothing at all. I keep at it, though, positive that I’m on the right track.

I’ve been at it for nearly ten minutes when the screen suddenly goes dark. For a half second I fear that I’ve somehow disabled the device and I’ll be stuck here in the nineteenth century. But then it flicks back on, a map now displayed on the screen.

There are two glowing dots. One hovers over the spot where I am now. The other is in the town of Cowes.

It has to be Lidia’s chaser. What else could it be? I touch this other dot, and a callout appears beside it, containing a locator number.

If I wanted to, I could jump right to where she is, but that would mean deactivating the slave mode, a move that I’m pretty sure would alert her device that our machines were no longer tethered and allow her to make a jump I could not follow. What I can do, though, is shorten the distance between us the old-fashioned way.

Staying low, I move down the row to the end of the field, where I find a path. This leads to another and then a third, which eventually meets up with a narrow muddy road that, if my map is not misleading me, will take me to Cowes.

If we stay in this place and time for a couple hours, I should be able to reach her.

Take your time, Lidia, I think over and over as I limp down the road.

I’ve gone about a half mile when I hear the slow but steady clomp of hooves and the creak of wood behind me. Glancing back, I see a cart pulled by a pony heading my way. The driver is a middle-aged, balding man, with a gray-speckled brown beard. Stacked high in the cart’s cargo area are several canvas-covered bundles.

As he nears me, he slows his already moderate pace. “Are you lost?”

“I, um, I’m heading to Cowes.”

His eyes narrow suspiciously. “Don’t think we’ve met before.”

“No. I’m not from here.”

“Clearly. So where would you be from?”

His accent makes me think about the British Empire of my youth, and I stop myself at the last moment from saying New Cardiff. “America,” I tell him.

“You’re a long way from home.”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Headed to Cowes, you say?”

“Yes.”

“That leg of yours isn’t doing you any favors.”

I glance down at my pants, thinking they’ve become bloody like my jeans, but while there are a couple dark spots, they’re small and not obvious. It’s my limp that’s drawn his attention. “No, sir. It’s not.”

He pulls on the reins, stopping the pony. “Well, hop on then. Unless you’d rather be on your own.”

I grab the side of the cart and start to swing into the back.

“No, no,” he says. “Up here. More room.”

I pull myself onto the bench seat next to him. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

He gives the reins a shake and calls out to the pony, and the cart starts moving again.

“Here for the boats, I assume,” he says.

“The boats?”

“The regatta. Cowes Week. Why else would you be here?”

“Right, yes. The regatta. I’m here for that.” Perhaps I’m not lying about that. Though I know nothing of this regatta, there’s a good chance something connected to it is what’s drawn Lidia here.

“So what were you doing way out here?”

“Friends.”

“Played a trick on you, did they? Got to drinking a little too much and they dumped you out here?”

I smile guiltily, but say nothing to confirm his guess one way or the other. His theory isn’t the story I was going for, but I like it better.

We ride on silently for a few minutes before he nods at my lap and says, “What’s in the box?”

Instinctively my grip tightens on my chaser. “Just… my things.” I pause, then add what I hope sounds appropriate. “Pens, paper. That kind of thing.”

“You’re a writer?”

“Only letters.”

“Got a girl back home, then.”

Iffy, I think, my heart tightening. “Yes.”

“Good for you. If you love her, hold on to her tight.”

“I’m trying.”

“Sure you don’t have any tobacco in there?”

“No, sir. Sorry.”

“Oh, well. Worth a shot.”

Several minutes later, I wonder if I should have just told him the box was a time travel device. That way he’d have had something to ease his shock when I suddenly disappeared.

The jumps start blending into one another — three minutes here, ten minutes there, a few times over an hour. Thankfully, the coordinates for each stop are automatically stored in a list on my chaser. I will need them later when I undo Lidia’s messes. What those messes could be and what possible atrocities they are causing press down on me like thick sheets of lead that I’m finding harder and harder to ignore.

I’ve noted that there’s a discernible pattern to the trips. We go back several decades, hop around a little bit there, then jump forward a few years before heading even farther back, like a weird game of checkers. My guess is that the initial backward trip is where she does whatever it is she has planned, after which we move forward so she can see the results. Then repeat and repeat and repeat.

And it all makes appalling sense.

Layers upon layers, starting at the most forward point in time that she wanted to affect — either the kidnapping in Santa Monica, or, most likely, the change she caused in prewar Berlin.

See, if she were to change the outcome of World War II and then go forward to the 1950s to do the same with the Korean War, she would likely find that ripples from the first break with the time line have altered the future so that perhaps there is no Korean War. What she’s doing instead is making each change farther back in time than the last. So she could remove a world leader from the 1950s, then alter the financial collapse of the 1920s, then throw a wrench into World War I, and so on.

It doesn’t matter if the World War I change negates the financial collapse change. Once her World War I damage is reversed, then the Korean issue she created reappears. Remove C, and B comes back. Remove B, and A comes back. Only there are a lot more layers already than just three. The only way I’ll get things back to the way they should be is if I eliminate each change she’s made in the reverse order that they’ve been created.

It chills me how disturbingly well she’s thought things through. It’s an insane and admittedly brilliant plan. If I’m unable to figure out just one thing, there is the very real probability that I’ll never see Iffy or my sister again.

Each time we jump, I try to close the physical gap between us. Sometimes we stop only long enough for me to get a dozen feet. Sometimes I can go much farther. The problem is Lidia is also on the move, and every few jumps the distance grows larger instead of smaller. I’m gaining on her, though, and by the time I find myself in a wooded Kentucky wilderness in 1786, I am within a half mile of her position. We jump in this general location four separate times, my arrival spot moving up to fifty yards each trip, until finally Lidia seems to have found a place she’s happy with. If the overall pattern holds, we should be here for at least thirty minutes, and likely much more.

It’s time to eliminate the remaining distance between us.

The forest floor is covered in thick brush, and it takes longer than I like to find the path of least resistance that keeps me headed in the direction I want to go. Thankfully, I procured something to carry my chaser at one of the previous stops. It’s a burlaplike bag I found just inside the open back door of a general store. I dumped out the few bits of grain it still contained, and fashioned a strap out of the top portion. Some of its fibers are already wearing a little thin, so I keep an arm wrapped around it as much as possible in case it suddenly falls apart, but it’s better than carrying the box in the open.

I keep expecting the trees to thin and reveal a village where Lidia will be, but so far the vegetation has yet to back down. After ten minutes, I pause and check the map again. I’ve more than halved the distance between us, and know that if I were to yell out, she’d hear me. That, of course, is not something I want to do. I proceed with caution, carefully moving branches out of my way and then easing them back into position without a sound.

Three hundred yards. Two hundred. One hundred and fifty.

I stop when I hear a crunch ahead and to the left. I’m not sure if it was a footstep or something falling to the ground. What I do know is that it didn’t come from the direction of Lidia’s chaser. At least not according to my tracking map. Of course, it’s possible the map isn’t as accurate as it could be and the glowing dot is merely an approximation of her location, making me torn whether to keep moving forward or to alter my course toward the noise.

Best to stay on track, I decide after a few moments. If she’s not where the map says she is, then I’ll adjust.

I move forward in a crouch, rolling my feet from heel to toe on each step. As I do, I diligently scan the ground ahead for anything that might snap under my weight, and redirect myself around these traps.

Finally, when I’m within a hundred feet of her presumed position, I see an opening in the trees ahead. A meadow. It looks as if Lidia has stopped just short of it.

I continue creeping forward.

There are four people in the field. Two are kids, boys from their clothing, though I could be wrong. One is a man of perhaps forty. The last I think is a man, too, until he turns and I can see his face. While he has the height of an adult, he has the features of a young teenager. They appear to be clearing the area.

A father and his sons working the land together is my guess.

Lidia should be about forty feet away from me now, just a hair to the right of the direction I’ve been headed.

This is it, I think. I can put an end to her madness right now!

I adjust my path and take another slow step.

A scream, not of fear but of rage. It doesn’t come from Lidia nor those in the field, but from the same direction in which I earlier heard the crunch.

The man and his boys stop what they’re doing and look toward the noise just in time to see someone run out from the trees. A native, by the looks of his outfit and darker skin. Three others follow.

The man shouts out at his boys. The tall one grabs the arm of the brother that is closest to him in size and says something in the boy’s ear. The boy then takes off running in the opposite direction from where the natives are coming — to hide or get help, I have no idea which.

The tall one yells something to the littlest boy and then runs diagonally across the meadow to what looks like a small cabin.

The native reaches the older man, and with what looks like a single, bloody blow, drops the man to the ground. The native then turns toward the cabin, and he and his friends start after the older boy.

The small boy hasn’t moved since his brother ran away, but the attack breaks his paralysis and he races to his father, drops to the ground next to him, and shakes the man’s shoulder. There’s no response nor will there ever be again. There’s just too much blood.

One of the natives has noticed the boy and has turned toward him. I press my lips together to keep from shouting out a warning as I’m sure the boy is done for. But when the native is only a few feet away from him, the boom of rapid-fire gunshots cracks across the field.

I think at first that the tall brother has taken a shot at the native to keep him away from the smaller boy, but one of the bullets has slammed into the woodpile by the cabin that the older sibling is using for cover.

The result is the boy ducks down farther, and the natives running toward him break for the woods, scared off by the shots from an unknown assailant. Only the assailant isn’t unknown to me. The hail of bullets came from Lidia’s position. Somewhere on our journey she’s obtained an automatic rifle, a weapon over a century away from even being built. In Germany, probably.

One of the natives, though, has not fled for the trees — the one headed for the little boy.

He raises the same weapon he killed the father with over his head as he nears.

“Shoot him,” I whisper. I know that would be messing with the time line, but Lidia’s already pulled the trigger once, so who knows what’s right and wrong anymore?

But instead of shooting the native, she sends a single bullet toward the tall brother to keep him down as the native delivers to the small son the same sentence he gave the father.

I know that Lidia could have killed the boy and his father herself before the natives attacked. That would have been the efficient way, but I know none of this is about efficiency. It’s about manipulating history to do her dirty work.

I stare at the bloodied bodies, unable to move, unable to think, and barely able to breathe.

Jump.

I materialize at the edge of a group of buildings. Lidia should be in front of me somewhere, but there’s a structure between us, and I can’t see her.

All is quiet, though. It’s the dead of night. Which means we’re about to—

When the world reappears it’s daytime, though the sun is hidden behind a thick layer of clouds that foretell of rain soon to come. I’m next to a copse of trees just behind one of the buildings I had seen during the night moments earlier. I check the tracking map. Lidia is actually inside the structure.

Hearing voices coming from around the front of the building, I slip into the trees and move through the cover until I have a better view. There are maybe a dozen buildings strung along a wide central road. I’m not sure I’d call it a town. A village perhaps, if even that.

Several people are about, and others are coming into the settlement on horseback via a trail that leads from the woods. The few women I see are all wearing black dresses, while the men tend to be dressed more in work clothes, though some have covered these with black jackets. They all seem to be heading into the building where Lidia is.

I cross a short, open expanse to a group of bushes that will give me a view of the front of the structure. A man standing outside the main entrance and greeting everyone as they go in tells me all I need to know. A church, but one that’s still under construction.

Why would Lidia be in a church? I doubt she’s sitting with everyone else. A stranger would stick out in a small place like this. Besides, I’d be willing to bet some people were inside already when we arrived, and if Lidia had appeared in front of them, people would be running out of the building screaming instead of calmly waiting as others walk in.

When the preacher follows the last of the arrivals inside, I decide to move closer. After crossing to the front of the building, I peek around the edge of the door, look around, and then quickly pull back when the preacher begins turning in my direction. There are at least thirty people seated inside. As far as I could tell, though, Lidia was not among them. What dominates the room — and is obviously responsible for the mood of the crowd — are two wooden coffins sitting up front, one considerably smaller than the other.

The father and son from the meadow — why else would we be here? The town is so small I wonder how the events that took the two lives can possibly be important enough to be of interest to Lidia. And yet they had. Obviously she knew the attack was coming and that the father would die. It’s the son who is really the key here, I realize. I’m pretty sure he was supposed to live. Lidia’s meddlesome hand has kept that from happening.

The preacher begins talking. There are prayers and quotes from the scriptures and then, “… we pray for Bathsheba Lincoln and her children Mordecai, Josiah, Mary, and Nancy to find peace in knowing that their husband and father Abraham and their son and brother Thomas are now in the arms of the Lord…”

Whatever else he says becomes background noise to my thoughts.

Bathsheba Lincoln… husband Abraham.

Could it be?

Abraham Lincoln is a giant in the history of Iffy’s time line. But something’s not right. That Abraham Lincoln rises to fame in the second half of the nineteenth century. This Abraham Lincoln, if he’d been allowed to live, would still be long dead by 1850.

And it’s Thomas Lincoln whom Lidia has murdered, not Abraham.

My breath catches in my throat as a possibility strikes me. A child sees his father killed but survives the attack himself. Would it not make sense for this child to grow up and name his own son after his dead parent?

Have I just witnessed the erasing of the man who is supposed to end slavery long before he would take his first breath?

When I hear someone moving around inside, I quickly retreat back to the brush in case they come out for some air, and it’s from this hidden place, a half hour later, that I’m whisked even farther back in time.