I slowly stopped the regression of time a couple of minutes after Billy had reentered the house, this time walking into it backwards. I took a tentative step towards the house. I wanted with all my being to stop him.
I moved forward, but I didn't so much walk as float into the house. I was about a foot above the ground and I had a sickening feeling that I would be unable to affect the outcome of what had gone on in the house.
I floated through the front door and saw that Mom was already dead. He must have raped and killed her when he had first entered the house. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Mom had surprised him by waking up and tried to stop him. Regardless, I didn't want to go back and see those events.
A tremendous amount of liquid had been poured over her body and was soaking the carpet surrounding the sofa. More liquid was on the staircase. I floated upwards through the ceiling and watched as Billy got frustrated when he could not find Charlie and me in our beds. He couldn't figure out how, but he knew we had escaped. He was flinging fluid everywhere. He went back downstairs and set a primitive timing device with a lit cigarette and a book of matches. I had seen this device on a TV show once.
His technique was brilliant. Whoever he worked with must have known everything about our lives, down to the last fucking detail. Mom still smoked the occasional cigarette and any investigation would determine the cause of the blaze as smoking in bed. If there was going to be an investigation, that is.
Billy slipped out of the house and went back across the street. I hovered above the smoldering device and tried to stop the cigarette from burning, but I had no physical impact in this time shifted dimension. I followed Billy back out onto the sidewalk and wished myself back to the present — that's the closest I can come to describing what I did — and I 'reappeared' in the other dimension.
Charlie was doing a good job of holding it together but when I reappeared she lost it, crying hysterically. She was clinging to the Major so he got the full effect of her terror. I touched his hand so that we could communicate and told both of them what had happened and what I had seen.
"Are you sure it was Billy?" the Major asked. "I saw the psychological profile and his EEG after he cracked up. There was literally nothing there, nothing left of him."
"It was either Billy or his twin brother. I would have sworn it was him. Maybe the breakdown was only temporary," I speculated.
Charlie and I looked at each other. As unlikely as that would be, neither of us had any experience with the long-term effects of what I had done to Billy. If, indeed it was Billy, this was further evidence that mercy had no place on the battlefield. A live enemy was an enemy who could kill you. This was one lesson we had learned the hard way and it cost us our Mom. I saw in Charlie's eyes that this would never happen again. We would leave no survivors.
The Major got into his car and started to drive back to the farm. We got in with him.
"Tell me about this backwards time thing," he said.
"Well, it was even more different than being in this other dimension. Here, I'm sort of real. I can feel and touch other things in this dimension and I can sense and influence things in reality. Gravity even seems to work here pretty much as it does in reality, too. But when I went back in time, it was like I was a ghost. All I could do was observe what was going on. I wasn't even touching the ground and when I tried to walk, I floated. I didn't take the stairs, I just moved straight up through the ceiling, with no effect of gravity. I tried to put out the cigarette that started the fire, but I could even make the smoke move."
"Did you feel in danger going back in time, like you might not get back or that something might hurt you?" Bill asked me.
"No, not really. I wasn't really paying attention." I thought for a moment. "Mostly I felt frustrated that I couldn't affect anything. All I could do was observe."
"That's still a lot, Douglass," he said, "and it is probably a good thing we can't alter the past. There are many books written about what would happen if time travel was possible and someone changed the future by altering the events of the past. Just imagine what you can do with that ability as it is."
"I could 'do' nothing," I pouted.
"But you did, son. You now know who did this. It wasn't one of your Mom's boyfriends or someone who followed her home from the bar and attacked her. You won't make the mistake of going after an innocent person, right?" He paused for minute. "What would you feel about going back there and following Billy to where he is staying, right now? We could pay him a visit and wind this little episode up tonight."
Charlie and I looked at each other.
"I'm going with you," she said.
Again, I knew better than to argue. "We'll meet back up at the farm, OK?" I told him.
Charlie and I teleported back to the fire. Once there we went backwards in time. It was easier for me this time as I had already done it once, but I had to wait for Charlie to catch up with me a couple of times. We floated to a position above the spot where I had seen him appear the first time and we hovered there as time scrolled backwards. When I saw the shadowy figure backing towards us, we restarted time forward and floated along after him.
Billy made his way through the darkened yards of the quiet neighborhood, some lights just turning on as the sounds of the wailing sirens woke them up. Two streets over, Billy got onto a powerful motorbike and roared off, shattering the remains of the early morning quiet. We tailed him to an old building in the downtown area. He looked around for prying eyes and slipped inside a heavy metal door using a combination which both of us saw — we were floating just over his shoulder by then.
Once inside the building, he turned off the security alarm on the inside of the door. Again, we saw the combination. I was impressed with the amount of security for a building of this age and location. Billy went upstairs to the 10th floor and entered a small apartment. He dropped his clothes in a heap, took a shower and went to bed. We were just about ready to leave when Charlie motioned to me to look into the rooms on the each side of this apartment.
We drifted through the walls and went through several vacant rooms. We came back to Billy's room and went in the other direction. There was another person in the room next to his on that side, but her face was hidden behind a cosmetic mask. There was something familiar about her, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
I motioned to Charlie that we needed to get back to the farm and to the Major. She nodded her agreement and after we floated up to the roof of the building, we 'wished' ourselves back to real time. It was funny to watch the moon jump in the night sky. I figured we had gone back about 2 hours in time, maybe more. We would have to see what the limits of this new ability were, but at least this part was easy. I wondered what would happen if I processed a digital camera, if I could take that back and document some events. Wouldn't that make everyone wear brown pants for awhile, no?
We teleported back to the farm. The Major was there waiting, dressed in his combat gear. We hadn't talked about taking him with us, and it looked like the decision had been made for us. We reported what we had seen. The Major was concerned, as he was familiar with the particular building. It was supposed to be owned by the US government. Before his forced retirement, Uncle Sam was considering renovating the building for training and covert operations. In fact, the Major had designed most of the special features in it himself. That building was to have been the first of many regional facilities to house special interdiction forces to combat terrorists. The program was started right after the attacks on 9/11/01, but they lost the favor of the politicians as Bush's policies turned out to be effective at keeping the terrorists out of the US. Like him or hate him, the fact is, there were no more attacks on US soil during the remainder of his administration.
So, the Major reasoned, if this was still a US government building, then Billy could be working for the US. That could pose problems for us, and get us classified as hostile before we even got started.
This was getting too complicated for me. "Does that change what he did?" I asked. "I sure as Hell know it doesn't change what I intend to do."
"I'm with Dougie," Charlie said. "What if Uncle Sam did the renovations on those buildings then forgot about staffing them? That has happened before, where they build something but don't get the money to make it work, right?" she offered hopefully. "Could the people in there be kind of like squatters?"
"Government programs like that are half dropped more often than you know, Charlie," admitted the Major. "I know the funds for the construction had been approved, so it's likely there are more of these bunkers scattered around the country. This was supposed to be just the first one built.
"You're right about Billy, though. He's a dead man." He looked up at me. "Any chance the woman you saw was Ms. Brisard?"
"I don't think so," I said. "Lisette, I mean, Ms. Brisard is tall and slender. This woman had a shorter body and seemed kind of chunky in the hips and thighs."
"Leave it to a man to notice something like that," muttered Charlie.
"What did you think of the woman, Charlie?" asked the Major, grinning.
"I agree with Dougie," she said reluctantly. "She was too short to be Lizzy. But I wasn't the one who thought I recognized her from somewhere. In fact, I didn't recognize her, so it couldn't have been Lizzy," she ended with a smile, as if that proved Ms. Brisard's innocence.
Charlie and I had been equipping ourselves as we talked. By the time we had finished, both of us were dressed in all black and had the communicators in our ears with the throat mikes strapped around our necks. The Major was dressed in the same manner, for combat.
We decided we would take out Billy first, then go find out who the woman was. The Major held onto my shoulder and we teleported to the room where we had left Billy about two hours ago. He was still there, sleeping.
He must have sensed something as we materialized in the room, as he woke up and had a gun in his hand before we had even moved. Before he could pull the trigger, I had lashed out with my combat knife and severed his hand from his wrist. There was a look of surprise on his face at the ease with which he had been cut and then his head was rolling on the floor without his body. Charlie had her vengeance for Mom.
We teleported to the room next door. It was empty. We looked around and I suddenly remembered where I had seen the woman. The white lab coat hanging behind the door reminded me. She was the female doctor hovering around Billy in the hospital. But what was she doing here?
An alarm started to go off somewhere else in the building. The Major had told us part of the security systems was that once every 10 seconds the infra-red sensors that covered ever square foot of the building counted the number of bodies in the building. Any time there was an change without the proper clearance or code being entered, the alarm would go off, one kind for an intrusion and another to indicate and escape. It wasn't safe here for the Major any longer. He couldn't hide in the other dimension like we could. We had to get him out to safety even if the mission was only half finished.
I think it was then that both Charlie and I realized we were going to have to let him go through the process. We needed him too much and would just have to trust him. His experience on the missions was just too invaluable. But trusting anyone else was something that was hard for all three of us to do at the moment.
We teleported Bill back to the farm. We knew where the woman worked and could follow up with her later. Once Bill was safe, I jumped out to the mental institute where Billy was supposed to be. The patient roster I saw at the nurse's station said he was still in residence, but when I got into his room, someone else was lying in his bed. It had been Billy who killed our Mom and he was now officially dead.
By the time I got back to the farm, Charlie had already brought out the laser from where we stored it at the Station. Bill was watching her with a skeptical look on his face. When I popped into view he turned to me.
"You don't really expect me to get into that sphere and let you blast me with that high powered laser, do you?" he asked me, as if he was expecting this to be an elaborate joke.
"Yes," I answered.
"If this doesn't work, you know I'll have to kill you," he said lamely. It was a bad joke, but we didn't point it out to him. He was just nervous.
Then he laughed. "Those bastards spying on us with the smoke detectors will never figure this out!" He continued, "When you rewired the detectors, you shorted them out. They would have to get a copy of the tape from Billy to see what he was doing and those two assholes that were supposed to be listening in were with me in the hospital that afternoon and not watching the video feed."
So that was why he didn't trust the other two men in his hospital room. I idly wondered just how many secret agencies had been in the room that first day. My current impression was that there were up to 5 or 6 separate agencies. The leader was FBI, of that I was fairly certain from Bill's memories. The other two were Treasury and Homeland Security, at least, that was Bill's best estimate. The professor had to have been from the NSA or some such agency. And then there was the Major. I have a feeling even those other four didn't know exactly which agency he really worked for, just that when he said 'jump, ' they went through the window. For that matter, I didn't recall seeing who we were working for, either. It was a very spiffy badge and all, but pretty generic. I suppose I should ask him one of these days.
We had Bill strip down to his skivvies. He reminded us that he had a couple of metal pins in his leg and some other hardware in his arm that he was concerned about, especially with the magnets. I was pretty sure he was OK, but why take the chance? The devices in his body were the older stainless steel kind and the magnetic field would affect them. They hadn't been part of his earlier injuries in the hospital so Charlie and I hadn't tried to do anything with them then. Charlie winked out and I saw a faint glow as she worked on his leg. Two long shafts and several screws clanked as they hit the floor next to him. The smaller screws from his arm and a long plate soon joined them.
Bill's eyes were like pie plates as he stared down at the hardware. He looked up at Charlie as she winked into sight.
"Thank you," he said, flexing his arm and his leg. "You have no idea how much better that feels. I must have gotten used to the constant low level ache from all that metal and put it out of my mind. It was always there, though, in the background."
Charlie leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. "My pleasure," she said.
The man had guts, I'll give him that. Once we were ready, he wiggled his way into the sphere without hesitation. I had him crouch on the bottom beams where they crossed. I flipped on the HV generator and started the magnets when the output had stabilized. The force of the magnetic fields had Bill curled up in a fetal position, floating in the center of the sphere. All he could move was his eyes.
I aimed the laser with the HeNe beam and then fired it up. 10 minutes later and the Major was processed. He was already beginning to play around with his new invisibility and teleporting abilities like a kid with a new toy. I don't think I had ever seen him smile as much as he was then. He was enjoying this way too much.
While he was being processed, Charlie had made another shopping trip to the specialty boutique. We had long since re-paid the store and had become their best customer. I had had to get several new outfits throughout the school year due to my increased height and now Bill was going to become a customer of theirs, as well. Charlie had the sphere packed with new items and we processed these in short order.
Bill was like a kid in a candy store. Charlie and I just rolled our eyes and laughed. We took him to the Station, the hidden room we had found, and showed him what we had found there. We explained that it felt like this was our private space and we asked him to respect that. He looked around, thinking seriously. He told us there was supposed to be an old bomb shelter around on the property somewhere. He also told us there was too much history here; that some people might think we were being disrespectful of the sacrifices and lives of abolitionists and the slaves who had gone through this place. He knew we hadn't abused or moved anything and that we wouldn't think of doing anything to disrespect those people, but it might be better if we used the old shelter for our private place instead of the historical site.
Reluctantly we agreed. Of course, we would have to find the abandoned shelter first, but now that we were 'dead' in the fire, we had nothing but time on our hands and nowhere to live. We didn't want to live in the Station because of the poor ventilation. The old shelter would have ventilation and sounded like a better alternative
Graduation was a somber affair, what with the tragedy our 'deaths' and all. The top two students in the school had been killed the day before graduation and the school almost cancelled the ceremony. But Bill and Lisette convinced them to proceed and to call our name out as if we were there. He would accept my diploma and Lisette would accept Charlie's. I thought that was a pretty sneaky way of getting the diplomas for us as we couldn't be there.
Most of the students didn't give a shit about me, but most of them liked Charlie. OK, maybe I'm selling myself short, but I was 4 years younger than most of them and they looked at me like a little kid. They didn't know me and that was OK. I guess I had wanted to be accepted by them more than I realized. I would have to remember that.
Mike stood up and read my speech. He had heard me pretend to give it enough in the lab. We had gone through several versions of the speech, even though it was several months away. I had been terrified of public speaking. Mike, in his own way, helped me with that terror by having me pretend he was the crowd. He would be working on building something and I would stand on a chair and practice.
So Mike knew a lot of what I wanted to say. With his deep voice, it actually sounded better when he delivered it to the crowd. At the end he spoke a couple of words of his own, how he had come to see me as a person and as a friend. Charlie had to hold me up as I was sobbing.
I was sad that Mom wasn't there. It was just Charlie and me, now. And Bill, but, well, he wasn't family. Yeah, he was very special to us, but blood is blood. Maybe someday I'd find out about my Father, but until then it was just us.
With the coming of the Summer break, things didn't change that much. Ms. Brisard quit teaching at the high school and found a job with an international firm downtown helping with their European subsidiaries. She and Bill were spending more and more time together. Both Charlie and I had cautioned him about reading her mind. Whenever she and I had done it to each other, it was very clear to the person being read who was in their mind with them, not to mention that it was a real turn on sexually. The resulting emotion was almost like a bonding of the person to the mind reader.
Regardless, Bill was much more at ease with her and she was eventually spending more time at the farm than at her apartment. That made training a bit tougher for us, as we had to do our routines in the other dimension.
We had decided to research the female doctor, Emily Groves, MD, before we did anything else. Billy hadn't had her image in his mind identifying her as his superior, so it was doubtful she was the boss, but she could be another agent and could possibly lead us to the boss.
Charlie shadowed the good doctor during the day. The Major started extensive electronic surveillance and background checks on her as well as researching the ownership of ex-government building. I had the dubious responsibility of going backwards in time and stalking her as far back as I could.
Charlie's job was cut short when Dr. Groves was transferred to another city a couple of weeks later. She was apparently a competent doctor and well liked among the staff. Charlie reported that the farewell party was quite touching and sentimental. Everyone cried. I suspected that Charlie was misted up, as well.
The Major's efforts were not much more productive. The doctor's email, cell phone, home phone and work phone and work email were scoured and examined for codes and hidden messages. Nothing. Other than Charlie and I seeing her in close proximity to the recovered Billy, there was no evidence of her being connected or involved in any way with Billy or the group he was working for.
The Major's efforts researching the building were somewhat more productive but equally as frustrating. The government had indeed completed the bunker buildings and about 20 more of them existed in strategic locations around the country. With the reduced threat of a terrorist attack, the urgency behind staffing them died a premature death. These hidden monstrosities sat on one Agency's budget after another's, sold or a transferred at a loss each time just to get rid of the expense. Finally they hit some magic number in value. The individual buildings were broken into separate units and sold at auction. 15 of them were still available, as no one wanted them. 5 others were serving as their approximate intended purposes for the local SWAT teams. This building, the pilot building, had been purchased by a corporation whose ownership was more convoluted than a plate of spaghetti.
The Major had been gently teasing the individual strands of spaghetti from the mass, trying to follow the information of one lead to another. There were several dead ends, but one lead always seemed to at least one more lead, it not many more. It was a frustrating and tedious job but Bill seemed to think he was making headway.
I, on the other hand, had drifted back in time, going further and further back each day. It seemed there was very little resistance to moving backwards in time in this dimension and apparently no limits as to how far back we could go. It was just very boring. It took some getting used to, to see everything in reverse, people walking backward, birds flying backwards, the sun going backwards. I tried to skip back in time, but apparently it didn't work that way. I had to consciously watch it go back. I also found that when I flashed forward to the present, I ended up exactly where I was when I flashed, so I had to be careful to float to a good position.
I also learned that as soon as my mind wandered, time started moving forward again. That meant that I could not daydream or work on other problems. I found I could speed up the regression to about four hours a minute, but I couldn't follow the doctor at that speed. I couldn't 'float' that fast. Worse, when I was gone, time passed normally. I would miss anything that happened in the present when I was traveling in the past.
I followed the doctor further and further back in time. I used the fastest speed I could to go back and still followed her. After I got used to it, it was amusing to see everything going in reverse like tiny ants. I had finally gotten to the point of leaving the doctor at a certain point and then the next time going backwards very fast back to that point to pick her up and continue following her.
It was during one of these times when I had dropped the doctor off at the local park. She had made occasional visits to the park, sitting on a bench and feeding the pigeons or watching the joggers. I teleported back to the park the next day and started to run through the time at the fastest speed I could. I was back about 4 months by now and it was getting very boring.
Suddenly, I thought I noticed a pattern developing. It was an odd behavior and by only following and focusing on the doctor, I had never noticed it. I hadn't really been watching, but the doctor had come to the park several times in the past 4 months. I had been following her in time as she backed through her days. But by being in the park and waiting for the doctor, what I noticed was that just before the doctor arrived at the bench on which she usually sat, that bench was always occupied by another person, even when she sat in another bench. It was another woman occupying it before she arrived, and, from her height and gait, it was always the same one.
The first woman would arrive, read a paper or a book, and get up and leave within minutes of the arrival of the doctor. They never met and they never walked on the same path or crossed paths. The doctor would arrive, sit for a while and then go home or back to the hospital.
I was so excited I stopped the backwards regression of time and flashed back to the present. I immediately sought out the Major and asked him if he thought it meant it.
"Very good, Douglass," he said. "That helps explain why there wasn't any evidence of electronic communications."
"I don't understand," I said.
"They are using Old School techniques," he explained, as if I would know what those were.
"Huh?"
"They are using 'drops.' Drops are like mailboxes. The first person writes out a message and leaves it for the second person. By waiting until the person comes into view before leaving the seat, it helps make sure that the bench would not be occupied and lets the second person know which seat in which to sit.
"Normally, there would be more than one drop. I would guess that if you looked, you would find at least two other drops. They would normally rotate through the drops in a pre-arranged sequence and at pre-arranged times to avoid the appearance of a pattern. It was interesting that you found it by going backwards. What they are doing is almost impossible to detect."
"Oh, OK. Should I try to find out where the other drops are?"
"It wouldn't hurt, but I can't see the benefit of it either, as you can't pick up any of the messages."
"I could try to read them, couldn't I?" I asked him.
"Sure, if you wanted, but I'm not a cryptographer and it would probably be in code. Without intercepting more of their messages, it could be difficult to crack the code. I'm more curious about the other woman. Could you tell who it was?"
"You mean, was it Lisette?" I asked.
"Yeah. Was it?" asked Bill quietly.
"I couldn't tell you for sure. If I had to guess, I would say 'no, '" I said.
"You know I don't like guesswork, Douglass," he reprimanded. "I need to know for sure."
When I went backwards again, I tried to figure out the possible locations of the other drops by analyzing the Dr. Grove's habits. Most people are creatures of habit. We eat at no more than 10 restaurants, even though there are hundreds of eating places available in most cities. We go to the same stores, follow the same routes to and from work and generally do things at the same time each day, within reason.
The doctor was no exception. She visited the library and I floated ahead of her one day when I realized she was headed there. Sure enough, the mystery woman got up just as the doctor came into the second floor reading room and exited out the rear stacks. I had to watch the doctor closely but I did manage to see the tiny slip of paper she retrieved out from under the table and secreted in her purse.
Now that I knew what to look for, I found four more drops the two women used. One was in the hospital solarium where she worked, one was in a large downtown mall. Another drop was in an upscale lesbian bar close to the doctor's apartment and the last was in a 'Mom-and-Pop' grocery store located on her way home from work. The last one was the hardest to find, as she went in there every day on her way home. It was only by accident that I noticed the first woman coming out of the store one evening. The messages were slipped into a carton of eggs. Mystery woman would mark the carton with her fingernail and place it towards the back of the cooler.
After I was satisfied I had determined all of the drop locations, I started following the other woman, trying to see her face. I wanted to identify her. It was frustrating and nearly impossible to follow her. She was extremely careful and cagey. It was as if she knew I was tracking her, although that was impossible; I was in at least one other dimension, if not two, with going back in time. I was ethereal, a ghost. No one could see me or hear me. While I could see them, I could not hear anything. That was one of the reasons I couldn't stay in the past that long; the silence was deafening. It really was starting to bother me.
I was getting more and more frustrated with not being able to identify the mystery woman. I started tracking her movements more carefully, but it seemed as if she would just appear in one place, then disappear again. If I didn't know better, I would have sworn she was capable of teleporting, but I knew that only the three of us had been processed.
I kept on tracking her further and further back in time. I had finally figured out that for each of the six drops she used, at a certain point, she would travel a path that narrowed down to a 50/50 chance her point of origin. When she walked down Fourth Street by the bakery before disappearing into thin air, she was coming back from either the park or the grocery store. When she turned right on Baker Ave., in front of the Auto Repair shop and then vanished, she had been in either the hospital or the gay bar. And finally, if she turned left from Baker Ave., she had been to the mall or to the library. Normally on these days she shopped in some of the small boutiques and then vanished from a dressing room.
I was convinced she was teleporting, but I didn't see how it was possible.
I redoubled my efforts to 'catch' her. By having at least a 50% chance of correctly guessing her possible originating locations, I began to try to get 'ahead' of her, floating to one of the two possible locations. I was determined to get a look at her face, to identify her positively. Over the next couple days, I tried several times to do this, unsuccessfully, but I was determined.
Finally, one day I had seen her turn at the bakery and I floated to the park. I accelerated the time backwards, past the expected time of her arrival in the park and waited, drifting in space as time started moving slowly forward. I saw her coming down the path. I hesitated and then floated down to a point directly in front of the bench. She would have to walk right through me to sit down and I would have a direct frontal view of her face.
She came walking down the path, much more relaxed and open than I had seen her before. Her face was actually uncovered, the scarf she usually used to obscure it pushed back off her hair. As she moved close to me I drifted closer and accidentally brushed against her with a part of my ghostly form.
The woman whirled around, as if she had sensed me. As she whirled, she reached into her purse and pulled out a stick — no, it was more like a magician's wand with a white band on the end. She kept searching around for something and got closer and closer to my location. What she was doing was impossible and the very impossibility of it paralyzed me into inaction.
She looked right at me at last, got a very surprised look on her face and screeched, "Douglass Hornsby, you are a dead man!"
She raised the wand and pointed it at me. I had been so surprised by her ability to locate me I had drifted upwards about 3 feet. I have feeling that was the only thing that saved me. I saw the tip of the wand begin to glow and then I felt incredible pains in my body. If that wand had been pointed at my head, I would undoubtedly have been unable to think or to move. As it was, I wished myself back to the present. It had taken a major effort to pull myself away from the power of the wand. I found myself naked and bleeding in the park. Fortunately, it was dark in the present and I teleported to the farm.
Charlie and the Major were reviewing electronic records for the corporations that had purchased the building when I appeared in the room and collapsed to the floor, very near death. Both of them jumped to my aide, immediately going invisible and starting the healing process. The damage had been severe with the tissues of my legs pulverized.
It took many sessions of healing over several weeks, for most of which I was blissfully ignorant. The pain I was in was intense and only gradually were Charlie and the Major able to rebuild the bones of my legs and then re-grow the muscles, nerves and skin over them.
Towards the end I became coherent and was able to communicate what I had learned. The first thing I had the Major do was to tell us what had happened earlier in his life.
"I don't know what you mean, Doug. There have been a lot of events in my life," he said evasively.
"OK, I'll be more specific; our mystery woman could teleport or something damn near like it. She also had a wand or a weapon of some kind that could cross the dimensional boundaries. That's what did this to me. If I hadn't drifted upwards, that beam or whatever it was would have dissolved my head and I would have died. Oh, and one other thing, I could hear her speak across the dimensions.
"So, I'll ask you again. Were you ever involved with a project or an accident or an event during which a door or a portal to another dimension was opened?"
The Major was quiet for a long time. "Shit," he said.
"What happened, Major?" Charlie asked.
He looked at us and seemed to age in front of our faces. Something had happened in the past and he did not want to talk about it. He wanted to forget it.
"About 10 years ago I was appointed as an advisor to a group of scientists working in backwater oil-rich African country. It was a diverse group from many nations. There was the usual level of suspicion and distrust among us, especially of me and the other American representative. Everyone was playing it pretty close to the vest with their information, only sharing what they absolutely had to. The French were the worst, but they were also the best at playing this game. They had several Aces up their sleeves, it so happened.
"Apparently, one of their scientists had been building a nuclear power plant for this particular African dictator/tyrant in exchange for a discount on the cost of their crude oil. That wasn't so unusual. It had just gone 'live' and they were running through the testing. Then one day, a 'hole' suddenly appeared in the side of the reactor. No one ever said, but I suspected one of the substandard contractors had skimped a bit too much and there was an electrical fault.
"At first they thought the hole was sabotage, but the all the integrity testing they did indicated that the wall with the hole was acting as if still there, that there was no hole. But the hole was visible.
"This event created a firestorm in the small community and before the French government could put the lid on it and keep everyone else out, we were all there.
"Long story short, it appeared to be a portal of some type, but there was only a 5% chance of returning if you went in. Almost a couple dozen brave volunteers never returned and the only one that came out again was raving mad.
"After a long discussion among ourselves, mostly without the French, it was decided that it was too dangerous to keep open. The only thing for sure that we understood what the survivor had said about the other side was that there were other savage beings or monsters there and that they were very curious about the 'hole' in their world. They were also moving towards the hole and would soon be coming through.
"We didn't understand how they could be moving so slowly, but the fact that 19 of the 20 people who went in never came out, we had to believe that the other side was dangerous. We decided to close the hole.
"I was elected by our government to plant the bomb due to my expertise from my time in Special Forces. No one objected. I requested enough material to level the whole power plant and it was flown in and transported to the site over a period of months. During that time all of the other scientists were gradually 'recalled' by their governments, leaving just myself and the French contingent on site. There had been a gradual increase in the size of the French group, with decidedly non-academic types. I would have to say military, but they never let me speak with them.
"I had been planting the explosives at key spots throughout the plant as they had arrived. I camouflaged it to look like normal cement and building materials and the detonators were all buried and remotely triggered.
"The night the bomb was set to go off and collapse the power plant, the entire French contingent saddled up and headed through the hole. I had already set the timer on the primary detonator and vacated the site. The French group had let us know they were going into town to celebrate Bastille Day or something, so I was not surprised to find their camp empty and locked up. I had had to wait for two weeks for them to leave the camp. I thought they had gone into town.
"I was two miles out of the area when blast went off. Even so far away, the force of the blast still knocked me over. I rushed to the town, looking for the French group to tell them that the power plant had failed, but they were not there and hadn't been there. I found one lone assistant who had been jettisoned by the group a week before and she told me of their plans to go in as a whole group through the portal. They were insane to get all of the benefit for this discovery for themselves.
"She told me the original plan had been for the one or two of the original French volunteers to execute all of the others on the other side once they were through and to send just one person back. The problem was that the one that came back was not the one who was supposed to come back and he had come back totally deranged. The other scientists had convinced themselves that everything was OK on the other side and that the survivor was just a very good actor.
"I went back when the most of the radioactive dust had blown away and checked for survivors or for the existence of the portal. I found no evidence of either.
The Major paused here, rubbing his hands over his face. "They must have found a way out," he continued. "Or, God forbid, those idiots reopened the portal."
I lay there, stunned at his story. Charlie was speechless as well.
"It might have helped to have a bit of that information earlier, don't you think?" I asked, when I could finally speak.
"I suppose," he said. "But you can understand it was 'need to know.' Can you imagine the hysteria if people learned there was another dimension? With monsters?"
"You know, Bill, I thought I was crazy, as that woman kept disappearing into thin air. I had totally discounted the possibility that she could be teleporting, but, from what you are saying, I now understand that that is entirely possible. And not only that, it appears that they have a weapon that can cross over the dimensions. We are in great danger if they find us," I said.
"So, did you get to see her finally" asked Charlie.
"Yes," I said. "I had to go all the way back to the day before Billy tried to kill me to catch her off guard. It wasn't aware of me following her that day, the first time that had happened. You know, I just realized that that was the day before you got the shit beat out of you, too. It was the day before all of this started." I paused, thinking.
We had become our own worst enemy. I had gone back from the future and carelessly alerted our enemies that we had interdimensional capabilities. And as a result of us raising their awareness, they had tried to kill us, giving us our new abilities.
My head was hurting trying to figure out if we could beat Fate, or if we were predestined to live our lives according to some mystical plan. I decided to hold the philosophy for another time.
"Douglass," the Major finally said, "did you recognize her, did you know the woman?"
The old wives tale says that 'beauty is only skin deep.' More recently pundits have modified that saying to 'beauty is only skin deep, but ugly is to the bone.' In this case, the pundits were correct.
"Yes, I did," I said. "The woman was Ms. Bascom, my English teacher."