Chapters (16)
Almost in his sights, thought Chevie, and she realized that she would have to run the gauntlet to reach the pod herself. For two seconds Garrick would have a clear shot.
The longer I wait, the sooner he shoots me.
Chevie was prompted to remove her key, and the bird reappeared with a countdown in his speech bubble. Thirty seconds. Chevie had half a minute to get herself into the past.
Thirty seconds. No time to think.
“Run!” called Riley from inside the orange glow. “Run!”
She did, diving the last few feet into the belly of the pod. She noticed immediately how cold it was in there. Freezing. Her breath burst from her in clouds, then crystallized immediately. There was frost on Riley’s hair and brows.
“When do we go?” he asked. “Why are we still here?”
Chevie did not answer, just turned to face the pod’s doorway. Through the orange light she could see Garrick dragging himself down the stairs like a corpse that refused to lie down and die.
“Infernal time machine!” declared Riley, striking the bench. “Let us away!”
Garrick’s head was cocked and his skeletal face pointed their way. From the depths of sunken sockets, his eyes were locked on them, beaming malevolence into the pod.
Chevie stood and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Wake up, Victoria! Wake up and run.”
Garrick raised his weapon to fire but thought better of it, unwilling to risk damaging the WARP pod. Instead he continued his grim crawl.
The pod began to beep. The complicated series of whoops and whistles was matched by small lights on the fuselage.
Chevie suddenly remembered something from Orange’s time lecture. The tests were pretty successful, he’d said. There was a small number of aberrations, usually on the return trip, but less than one percent, so acceptable in a scientific sense.
Oh, my God, she thought. We haven’t been taking bisphosphonates. I don’t even know what those are. We could come out the other end with monkey parts or dinosaur heads.
But she didn’t say anything to Riley, because her voice had been snatched away by the orange light. She didn’t lay a warning hand on his shoulder either, because her hand was gone, whisked away as though she were made of sand.
I am sand in the wind, she thought.
As am I, replied Riley in her mind.
The last thing to go was their sight, so they completed their dematerialization watching Garrick reach the bottom step and begin his lurching hop across the floor.
He’s going to make it, thought Chevie. We’re not rid of Albert Garrick yet.
She would have closed her eyes and bowed her head, but her head was gone, and now so were her eyes.
