Written in Time (35 page)

The gun—some kind of automatic—clattered to the concrete, and Lester Matthews’ body sagged at the knees, off balance and falling.
 

Alan sidestepped and started a dash toward the Ferrari, getting two strides into the run before a blurred shape smashed into him from his right side, knocking him down. His head struck the sidewalk. Alan shook his head, trying to clear it. He pushed himself half to his feet, and something hammered the base of his skull in an explosion of pain.
 

Staggering to his feet, he reached for the throat of the man who’d knocked him down. There was still another man, something shaped like a blackjack at the end of the man’s extended right arm. The blackjack arced downward.
 

Alan didn’t feel the impact, but blackness was flooding over him. He tried dragging his right knee up and into the groin of the man with whom he grappled, but before he could tell if he’d connected or not, the blackness engulfed him.
 

CHAPTER
ELEVEN
 

Most nights, since the electrical wiring in the central room had been completed and the water-powered generator brought on-line, Elizabeth would spend an hour— rarely more or less—reading through the microfiche of Britannica III.
 

Progress was slow, because she would most times find herself reading the shorter entries in the first volumes and going to the more detailed references in the latter volumes. One really didn’t start at “A” and methodically work one’s way toward “Zwingli.”
 

This night, however, she decided to forego her usual pastime and keep Peggy company on the porch.
 

The acquisition of knowledge had not been a consuming passion for her prior to the trip backward in time. Somehow, that experience had forever changed her outlook. David’s obsession was business and the acquisition of money that could be turned into wealth. If Elizabeth had an obsession, it was to be happy. Knowledge, in this time and place, might be the needed key to that; plus, she enjoyed the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake.
 

Looking across the plain from the front porch, toward the mountains, the flashes were still visible at regular intervals. “If they are building a base here in this time,” Liz said, thinking out loud, “they can’t be accused of laziness.”
 

“What? I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
 

“I was just thinking that if those flashes are from a time-travel mechanism like the one which brought you and Clarence here, they’re not letting any grass grow under their feet. Are they?”
 

“I guess not.”
 

“Do you still want to go back?”
 

“Say again! Go back? Of course! Wouldn’t you, Lizzie?”
 

Liz shrugged her shoulders under her shawl. “I don’t know. If I do, we’ll change history, and maybe for the worse. Oh, you know what I mean! I’m not into altruism. That sucks! But what happened to us piled a lot of responsibility onto our shoulders, too. You know?”
 

“You really think I should wait to go into town until your father gets back? Tom Bledsoe’s wounds might not wait. If he’s treated improperly after a tourniquet was used, he could develop gangrene.”
 

“I’ve been praying for the Bledsoes, especially Helen, taken away by those men. There are only the two of us here, Peggy. If something happens, we’ll be hard-pressed to make a fight of it. One of us wouldn’t stand a chance. You should stay. That’s what Daddy wanted you to do. That’s what Clarence, or David, for that matter, would want you to do. What if Momma gets to Daddy, and Daddy or Marshal Blake was wounded? As a doctor, you might be the only chance either one of them would have. Please stay, and for your own sake, too.
 

“You never took to horseback riding that much,” Liz went on, “so you’d have to take the buckboard, stick to the road. It’d take a while at night, and be awfully dangerous. On horseback and dressed in men’s clothes, Momma has a chance of avoiding trouble if it’s out there. You wouldn’t. In the morning, why don’t we get out by the stream and do some target practice? You could use the practice, and we’ve got plenty of ammunition. God knows, we might need it. And if there is something going on and we’re being watched, showing whoever it is that we can shoot and have ammunition to burn might be a good idea, don’t you think?” Liz pulled her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and fussed with her apron while she waited for Peggy’s reply.
 

After several more seconds, Peggy sighed audibly, then said, “Fine. I’ll stay. At least until Ellen gets back.”
 

Liz smiled at Peggy and got up from the rocking chair, taking up the pistol and the rifle which they’d kept with them on the front porch.
 

Liz opened her eyes, the luminous face of the big Westclox windup alarm showing that she had been asleep for three hours or so. Before falling asleep, she had thought about her conversation with Peggy, about whether or not she would ever go back to her own time if she could. There, she had been purposeless, without direction. In this time, even though she was a woman and, perforce, a second-class citizen in many ways, she could do a great deal.
 

She heard a noise and realized it was the same noise that had awakened her.
 

Next to the alarm clock on her bedside table was a brace of Colt Single Actions.
 

Throwing back the covers, she found her slippers in the same instant that she stood up and the hem of her nightgown fell to her ankles. The sound she’d heard had been horses, several of them, certainly more than three. Only her mother, her father and Marshal Blake might be expected to be riding up to the house at two o’clock in the morning. No one else whose intentions Liz trusted should be nearby.
 

She retrieved the rechargeable flashlight that she found in near total darkness on the floor at the side of her bed, but didn’t turn it on.
 

Lizzie grabbed up her wrap from atop the chest at the foot of her bed. It was the size of a Welsh nursing shawl and cocooned her from shoulders to well past her hips. Shielding the flashlight within her shawl, she turned it on. From the nightstand’s drawer, she grabbed a long straight pin, its head in the shape of a cross. Closing her eyes, she turned off the light and pinned the shawl closed a few inches below her throat. She picked up the revolvers. Peggy did not sleep with a gun in her room; Clarence used a gun only with great reluctance, feeling he didn’t need one for protection and Peggy echoed his sentiments.
 

The noise was a constant in the few seconds since she had left her bed, the ever-loudening drum of hoofbeats. A half-dozen horses or more were fast approaching. Lizzie didn’t kid herself that they might be riderless. There was a double-holster rig hanging from a peg beside her bedroom door. She set the pistols on the chest of drawers near the door, took the flashlight from under her arm and did the same with it. When her father had insisted on a gun belt for her, “just in case,” she had humored him. Under the circumstances, it seemed quite practical.
 

The rig had two holsters, right and left, the holsters slid over a cartridge belt looped with dozens of rounds of .45 Colt ammo. On the left side of the belt, behind the holster, there was a sheathed knife.
 

Lizzie buckled on the gun belt at her waist, letting it settle to her hips. She holstered the revolvers, picked up her flashlight and went to rouse Peggy.
 

“This is too easy, Titus,” Jack proclaimed as he stood up. Periodically, one or the other of them would dismount to search for tracks, lighting a few matches or a candle for illumination, finding the hoofprints or dislodged stones largely by feel, the night’s overcast not helping them. “I never hunted much; had to get up too early for it where I come from,” he said honestly. “But I’ve read a great deal about reading trail sign. We’re able to follow these guys in the dark, and it’s not that tough. With kidnapping a young girl in this day and age, they have to figure there’ll be angry people chasing after them. It would be easy enough to wipe out their tracks or go to higher ground where there’s more rock and less dirt and following tracks would be a lot tougher. This is a setup, I’m thinking. You’re the professional, Titus. What do you think?”
 

“I don’t think—I jus’ know we gotta get ‘em. But the horses is plum wore out. We should take us some sleep for a few hours, I reckon, then light out after ‘em ‘fore daybreak.”
 

“Camping out under the stars; one of my favorite things, Titus,” Jack said sarcastically. He’d always liked Gene Autry’s theme song. As a kid, the part of the lyric about sleeping out every night sounded appealing. As an adult, it left a lot to be desired.
 

Ellen rubbed down her horse. The night was cool and the animal drenched with sweat from being pushed as hard as it had been. While she worked, she debated with herself about building a fire. A cold camp was unappealing, but a fire might attract the two-legged kind of predator. Yet it would frighten off many of the four-legged variety.
 

When the first raindrop touched the tip of her nose, she made a decision: a fire it would be, a sandwich from her saddlebags and a shot from the flask of whiskey. With daylight and her horse fresh, she could make better time.
 

When Tom Bledsoe had seen her father’s rough drawing for the front porch of the house, he’d asked, “Why not just rails and spindles?”
 

The drawing called for solid pieces of hardwood punctuated at varying distances and levels with heart-shaped cut-outs, the wood to be two inches thick and kiln dried, meaning that the wood had to be imported to Atlas.
 

Lizzie’s father had dismissed Tom’s query. “I always wanted a front porch that would be truly versatile, Tom, useful under a variety of conditions.” The heart shapes, her father had explained to them earlier, were firing ports, and the reason for the thickness of the wood was in the hopes of stopping or dramatically slowing the big, lazily paced lead bullets of the period.
 

Lying flat on the porch floor, elbows propped up, the barrel of a Winchester protruding through one of the heart-shaped cutouts, Liz truly hoped that her father had been right about the wood offering some protection against bullets.
 

Her father’s anachronistic pet .45 Colt Model 94 saddle ring carbine lay beside her, the rifle in her hands one of six .30-30 Model 94 Winchester lever actions. Peggy had one, too.
 

The riders had stayed back about a hundred yards from the house. Doubtlessly, her father could have hit a man-sized target at that distance, and perhaps she could have, too, but she wasn’t going to risk it.
 

The riders would have seen her and Peggy exiting the house, two women in their nightclothes, probably frightened out of their wits and, if not terrified by the mere sound of a gun going off, almost certainly poorly skilled with firearms. In actuality, from her readings, a great many women on the American frontier had developed quite satisfactory skills with a firearm, particularly a rifle or shotgun. Hopefully, these guys hadn’t heard of that.
 

“Remember, Peggy. Hold the front of the rifle so that it doesn’t beat itself into the top of the firing port when you trigger a shot. Keep the butt of the rifle solidly tucked into the pocket between your arm and your shoulder. It’ll be loud, and you’ve never heard a real gunshot without hearing protection, but don’t worry—I have. Your ears will ring. Hang tight, huh?”
 

“Right. What do they want?”
 

“Probably some of Jess Fowler’s men, and they want to kill us, or they’re some of the same gang that kidnapped Helen Bledsoe and they’ve come for us.”
 

“I wish Clarence were here.”
 

“I even wish that my brother were here! Can you believe that? But they’re not, and neither are Mom and Dad. It’s up to us. Their bullets probably can’t punch through the wood we’re hiding behind,” Lizzie declared with more confidence than she truly felt, “and they won’t expect us to offer organized resistance.”
 

“How many of them are there, do you think, Liz?”
 

“Not too many,” Lizzie returned, hoping that her tone sounded upbeat, optimistic. “Once we shoot a few of them, the rest of them will ride off,” she added, hoping that she was right, realizing that she very well might not be.
 

“I don’t know if I can take a human life. Can’t we just shoot over their heads? I’m a doctor. I’m supposed to save lives, not take lives.”
 

“You aim for the center of mass, Peggy! Don’t do anything different. Shoot into the biggest target possible. If you shoot one and he falls off his horse and starts to crawl toward us, shoot him again.”
 

“I couldn’t harm someone who was injured!”
 

Lizzie swallowed hard, keeping her voice as steady as she could. “We’re both young and try to look pretty. We’re wearing nightgowns. What do you think they’re going to do to us if they get their hands on us? If you don’t shoot at them and they overrun us, I’ll make sure that the last shot I fire kills you. And not to protect you, but to get even.
 

Be ready.” As she glanced into the distance, she worked the Winchester’s lever and added, “Here they come.” Her front sight was shaking.
 

There were thirteen of them, and Lizzie sincerely hoped that there was something to the superstition about triskaidekaphobia, at least as far as their attackers were concerned.
 

Despite the night’s heavy overcast and the soft drizzle that had started only a split second before the men began riding toward them, she was certain that she recognized Jess Fowler; she’d seen him several times when they’d lived in town, always from a distance, as now.