Chase (ChronoShift Trilogy) (33 page)

The cottage was a lot like he remembered, but there had been some changes made since he last saw it a year ago.  The home was humble, yet quaint and inviting.  The thatched roof's vibrant color had dulled after months of exposure to the elements. The log walls were now covered by roughly hewn planks of wood, stacked horizontally, one above the other.  A window had also been added, and Hardy noticed a bit of blackened discoloration at one corner of it.  The charred wood told him it had probably been scavenged from one of the burned-out villages nearby.

He wasn't sure if she was home.  If not, he'd just wait.  She'd be back sooner or later.  He raised his hand to knock on the door in spite of the lack of activity he sensed.  The door swung open before his knuckles could even touch the wood.

"Hello, Hardy," she smiled.

"Hello, Abigail."

"Come in.  Have a seat.  I've already put some tea on.  Saw you coming."  She withdrew back into the house.

Indeed, she had two places set for tea, as if she'd been expecting him.  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimmer light inside.

She looked the same.  Beautiful, pure, full of life. 

"I hope I'm not intruding," he said.

"Not at all.  Tis good to see you, to be sure."

"We've got a situation in 2014.  Rialto's got us bottled up..."

"Surely you've not come to ask me to return with you," she cut him off.

"No, no," he laughed, "Relax.  That's not it.  Mark's got us locked up inside headquarters until we can mount a counterattack, and I'll go stir crazy if I have to stay cooped up.  I was hoping I could stay here for a time until we get things sorted out in the future.  I'd be no trouble, I swear."

Her laughter was light, like a bubbling brook.  "Certainly!  You are always welcome here, any of you.  It would not look right though, us living in the same house.  We'll set about building you a cabin next door right away."

"That sounds like a lot of trouble.  I don't think I'll be here that long.  I'll be shifting back to headquarters during the day and staying here at night.  Perhaps I can stay in a nearby village?"

"Nonsense.  I'll stay with a friend in the next town.  You can have my house till you've got your own place."

"I feel bad putting you out like that," he murmured.

"It must be bad — the problem with Rialto, if you're taking such drastic measures."

"It's not good.  He's got at least six time-shifters with him now, besides himself, including good ol' Randolph DeCleary.  You remember him from our little ’vacation' back in medieval England."

"I surely do."

"We're outnumbered."

"God will see Mark through, of that I am certain."  She took a long, slow sip from her cup of black tea.

"I'm not so certain Mark believes in God," Hardy replied.

"And you?"

"What about me?"

"Do
you
believe in God?  Isn't that why you're really here?  To learn about God?"

The blood rushed to his cheeks.  "I told you, I need a place to hang out."

"You're blushing.  Surely there are lots of places and times where you could hide.  Why did you come
here
?  Am I not right in what I suggest?"

"Maybe."

"Don't worry, we have plenty of time."  Her smile was soothing.

***

He spent a lot of time working on a home of his own.  He hated putting Abbie out of hers.  From time to time, he'd shift back and check in on Mark and Ty.  They were curious about where he'd been hanging out, but they didn't pry.  They knew he wouldn't do anything that would jeopardize security.

He didn't return to the future every day after all.  Sometimes, he'd spend weeks in the 1600's before shifting forward.  Yet, for Mark and Ty, he'd only be absent from headquarters for however long he wished for them to perceive.  It was fantastic.  He was on an extended vacation, if you could call frontier life a vacation.  His shifter made it possible to live two completely different lives, disconnecting centuries so they no longer progressed chronologically, at least with respect to him.

The pristine untouched Massachusetts woods were gorgeous.  The crisp air was fresh.  The sky looked bluer than any you could see in modern day.  Even the birds seemed to sing louder.  Maybe they were happier.  They certainly didn't have to put up with cars, noise, or pollution.  No cell towers, no power lines, no billboards, no trash, nothing to blemish the landscape.  And Abbie made very good company.

He felt bad about taking time off from their normal operations.  He could be out there saving people's lives and instead he was taking it easy, kicking it back in the 17
^th
century.  He needed some time off, he reasoned.  Plus, they weren't doing normal "save" operations right now in 2014, not until they sorted the Rialto mess out.

He built himself a structure which was essentially nothing more than a line shack.  It had a small fireplace, a smaller table, and enough room for a single bed.  There was no point in dedicating a lot of effort to it, as he spent most of his time visiting with Abbie in her cottage or out hunting.  Once he'd finished his shack, he threw himself into bettering Abbie's house for her.

She'd already replaced the ropes that held her roof up with less perishable iron chains, but Hardy set about building her a real roof, one that wouldn't have to be supported by chains from above.  She sincerely appreciated his efforts, but resisted when he'd expressed a desire to add rooms to the house.  She didn't need such a fancy place, she said.  So, instead, the two of them set about improving her garden, planting new vegetables, expanding its size.

At night, she would read to him from her well-worn Bible, one she'd inherited from her father when he passed.  He didn't want to admit it to himself, but that was the real reason he was so content spending all this time back here.  Well,
she
was the real reason — but the evening Bible-reading was a big part of it.

He'd never before entertained a belief in God.  Not that he'd necessarily been a committed atheist or anything, just an unofficial agnostic.  He'd always believed that if there were a God, He must have simply wound the universe up and then let it go, watching it unwind like some giant, cosmic sport.  Otherwise, he couldn't reconcile the evil he saw in the world with the possibility of God.

His parents were New England Catholics and had raised him in that tradition, but he'd shrugged off the formality of their belief system as soon as he'd hit his teens.  He’d convinced himself that if there were such a thing as God, then He couldn't be known, and He certainly wasn't like the God everyone claimed they knew.

Still, two things shook up his deeply ingrained convictions, or lack thereof.  The first was meeting a person as good as Abbie.  She was pure — truly a good person.  If he'd ever met anyone who could be called "righteous" it would be her.

He'd already met evil on the battlefield a thousand times over before Mark had found him, and since then, he'd personally witnessed it again and again burning in the eyes of countless vicious criminals before he dispatched them.  He saw it incarnate in the person of Alexander Rialto.

To meet someone like Abbie, however, was a first.  She was a direct contrast to all the selfish, evil people he'd ever met.  That blatant difference between good and evil before him forced him to recognize there was something more to the world than what he'd been willing to admit.  Maybe something spiritual
was
going on behind the scenes, motivating people, influencing events and minds in such a way people could see the effect, but not the cause.

In spite of Hardy's argumentative digs at Ty to the contrary, the second thing that had shaken Hardy's belief system was the obvious interference they'd experienced from time to time when trying to alter history.  Clearly, Mark could not save his kids.  Ty had not been able to save a few of his buddies.  None of them were apparently allowed to change any major historical event.

The operative word there being
allowed
.  Unless there was some yet undiscovered natural force of the physical universe which kicked in automatically to prevent chronological paradoxes they couldn't predict, and of which Bobby Prescott, their resident physicist, couldn't conceive, Hardy had to concede the force preventing them from changing certain things was an intelligent one.  Which could only mean that God had not just wound the universe up and let it go, but was still actively involved.

Abbie had been right.  Being restricted to headquarters in the future was just an excuse for coming back here.  He'd really wanted to spend time with Abbie, to learn from her, to learn what she believed.  His heart was hungry for answers.

Those simple hours they spent every evening reading from Scripture, the gentle intonations of her soft voice as she read, the way she answered his questions without judgment and posed pointed questions of her own at just the right moment, it was transforming him, bringing him to a new state of being.

She'd asked him the night before last if he was ready to follow Christ, but he'd deferred.  She was a dedicated Christian, but it was a big leap from admitting there was a God who was actively involved in the daily life of people to believing that Jesus was His Son.  There were still too many doubts, though Abbie was an expert at deflating his seemingly important questions with little pricks of truth.

He probably would be ready someday, he guessed.  It was likely only a matter of time at the rate he was going.  Just not yet...

Today, Hardy was worried.

Abbie had left on a hunt early yesterday and had not come home all night, nor was she back this morning.  She'd slept overnight in the forest before, but she'd always told him before she did that.  This time, she'd said she'd be back before nightfall.

Something was wrong.  Hardy loaded a knapsack, slung it over his shoulder, and headed down the path she'd taken.

Three hours later, he found signs she'd backtracked and tried to hide it.  She wouldn't have done that unless she'd thought someone was following her.  She'd done a good job of it too.  If he weren't an expert tracker himself, he never would have seen it.

He soon discovered the reason for her actions.  A couple of moccasined footprints crossed her trail a few hundred yards further on.  The natives had been following her.

She hadn’t been able to shake them and later took more drastic evasive maneuvers.  An hour further down the trail, he found a hastily constructed booby trap which had already been sprung.  She'd cut and sharpened some short sticks and tied them in series to the end of a low tree branch like spikes.  She'd pulled that branch back, hooked it on another branch, and then set a trip line across the path which would release it when kicked — into the legs of whoever tripped it.

Somebody had triggered the trap, because drops of blood ran in a line across the tops of the dried leaves, showing where her stalker had staggered on.  The outlines of the footprints matched the type of moccasin typically worn by Wampanoag, which wasn't really a surprise.  The height of the trap indicated Abbie hadn't really wanted to kill, just wound and slow down.  It had most likely struck the stalker in the thigh.

Hardy would have to be on guard against booby traps himself now.  He could end up her unintended victim if her pursuer successfully bypassed one.  Sure enough, about thirty minutes later, he spied another nasty-looking trap.

This one was more serious.  Aimed at neck level, this spiked branch was intended to maim, at a minimum.  Deftly, he undid the hazard and moved on.  He decided it would be safer to continue following on a line about ten feet to the left of the actual path she'd walked from here on out.

There were no more booby-traps, however, before he found her.  She lay face down in the dirt in a small clearing directly ahead of him, her body distended unnaturally.  An ugly arrow shaft protruded from her slender back.

He raced to her side, oblivious to the possible danger of attackers still lurking in the bushes.

None apparently were, as the afternoon air was not stirred by any new airborne missiles.

He was too late.

They'd slaughtered her mercilessly.  There was more than just the one arrow in her back.  Another jutted horizontally from her arm, and a third stuck out from her foot.  

He estimated she must have gotten off a few shots of her own because she normally kept seven to eight arrows in her quiver, and now there were only five.

It was just one more killing to the Wampanoag.  One more death in the war between them and the settlers of Massachusetts, but it was the rude destruction of a precious friend to him.

Hardy was not one in whom passion boiled easily, yet as he held her pale, limp body in his arms, its fiery stirrings titillated his blood into a fury he hadn't known before.

He vowed then and there to make them pay for this.  He would kill every last one of ’em.

He just prayed this wasn't one of
those
 cases.