“Cool? Are you crazy? We’re trapped in the past, years before you were even born. How are we going to get back?”
Kyle paced, gnawing at his bottom lip as he thought. His superbrain wasn’t working right, but his plain old human brain was no slouch and it was working just fine. “Don’t worry about it. Here’s what I’m thinking: You have the schematics for the chronovessel on your hard drive. You can walk me through rebuilding it here and zip — back to the, you know, the present.”
“Right. Because the first time we used it, we just zipped to exactly where we intended to go. We could end up overshooting the present and wind up in the year 3279.”
“I wonder what it’s like in 3279. Do you think they still talk about my triumph over Mighty Mike that far in the future?”
“Oh, Kyle …”
“They would have to. It’s going to be a seminal moment in human history, after all. The moment when a human being stands up to the world’s first alien invader and kicks his extraterrestrial —”
“Kyle! I just realized something!”
“Settle down. What is it?”
“My charger! My charging cable is still back in the future. The present. Whichever it is. If my battery runs down …”
“I can probably put together a charger for you. I’ll have to find some stuff. In the meantime —”
“Maybe you should shut me down. To conserve my battery.”
“Right.” Kyle’s fingertip hesitated for a moment at the power button. Was Erasmus maybe … afraid? Was he worried that Kyle would turn him off and then — for one reason or another — never be able to turn him back on?
Kyle figured he would be afraid. And that meant Erasmus probably was, too.
“I’m going to turn you back on,” Kyle said. “I’ll build a charging cable for you and turn you back on soon. I promise.”
“I know,” Erasmus said quietly. “I believe you.”
Kyle pressed the power button.
He was alone.
Alone in the past.
Kyle listened to the quiet. Bouring wasn’t a hub of activity even in his own time, but the twentieth century version of the town was even more deadly dull than the twenty-first-century version. How was that even possible?
He patted his pocket, where Erasmus nestled safely. He wished he had his journal with him — when he couldn’t talk to Erasmus, writing in his journal usually helped him organize his thoughts. And organizing thoughts was really, really important to Kyle. One of the side effects of being so super-incredibly brilliant was that it was easy to get distracted. Talking to Erasmus or writing helped him stay focused. Heck, if he couldn’t have Erasmus or the journal, he would take Lefty — Lefty was great to talk to because he didn’t talk back. But this was 1987. Lefty hadn’t been born yet. Lefty’s parents hadn’t even been born yet.
In fact, given the breeding speed of lagomorph generations, Lefty’s great-great-great-great-great-grandparents hadn’t even been born yet.
That was sort of a depressing thought.
Even though his hometown was right in front of him, Kyle felt very, very alone.
He hid the chronovessel deep in the cornfield, wrapping it first in a plastic tarp he found near the landscaping equipment, then burying it in a shallow ditch. Then he walked along the one-lane road toward the center of town. He realized now that this little road would someday be widened into an extension of Major Street. As he walked, he tried to imagine the buildings and cars that would — more than twenty years from now — exist here. Holding two completely contradictory thoughts in his mind at once was taxing, even for him.
Overhead, the night sky was almost fully dark; he had arrived in 1987 at the same twilight time as he’d left his own time period, but after figuring things out and talking to Erasmus, night had fallen. Kyle ambled down the road, not sure exactly where he would go. He figured he would start at his house — get on the Internet there and find the best place in 1987 to steal some electronic components so that he could recharge Erasmus and repair the chronovessel. And then …
He sighed and watched his sigh dissipate in the air. Erasmus thought that he couldn’t change the past. Or, if he could, that it wouldn’t be useful. Kyle disagreed. There were several possibilities. Sure, Erasmus could be right (although Kyle would never admit it to the AI’s “face”), but there was also the chance that Kyle could rescue Mairi in the past, could change the details of his adventure with the Mad Mask. Could make it so that she was never kidnapped, so that she never saw his mask ripped away, so that he never had to erase her memory….
And in that case — if it never happened — then wasn’t there also a chance that Kyle would forget, too? That Kyle would finally be able to let go of this guilt …?
Just then, he noticed a figure — a man — standing in the shadows, near the Bouring Middle School sign. When the man realized he’d been seen, he started to sidle away. Suspicious, Kyle was about to step closer when a voice cried out from behind him:
“Hey! Hey!” the voice rang out. “Hey! Give it back!”
Kyle snapped around in time to see two older kids — teenagers — running straight at him, their faces lit with perverse glee. Behind them, making good time, but unable to catch up, was a kid around Kyle’s age, lanky and lean, with long legs that ate up the ground.
“Stop!” the chasing kid yelled. “Stop them!”
“Bite me!” one of the runners shouted and put on a burst of speed, giggling as he ran past Kyle.
Kyle wasn’t sure whether or not he should interfere. But something in the anguish in the younger kid’s voice jostled his sympathy. The first runner was too far now, but the second one had just come even with Kyle, so Kyle stuck out his foot and tripped the kid.
“Ooof!” he complained, sprawling flat on his chest.
“Not that one!” the younger kid said. “Stop him!” He pointed to the other runner, who was now quite far away, though his laughter floated back to them.
It would be no trick at all for Kyle to grab the kid at superspeed, but he wasn’t about to reveal his powers. “Sorry,” he said instead.
Frustrated and clearly winded, the younger kid fumed and shook his fist at the retreating teenager. “I know you took it, Maxwell Monroe! I’m telling on you!”
On the ground, the other teen snorted laughter and pushed himself up. He said something, but Kyle didn’t hear it — he was in shock. Had the kid said Maxwell Monroe? As in Sheriff Maxwell Monroe? Had Kyle just seen one of his future enemies as a kid?
“— not afraid of you or your parents,” the teen said, scrambling to his feet. “So watch it.” He rounded on Kyle and pointed an aggressive finger at him. “That goes for you, too, chump. You mess with the Monroe brothers, you get trouble, got it?”
Brothers? The sheriff had a brother?
“Later, ladies.” Monroe #2 laughed and trotted off in the same direction as his brother.
“Oh, man,” the kid Kyle’s age said, and kicked the ground. “Oh, man! My parents are gonna kill me!”
“Why?” Kyle asked.
“They just bought me that Walkman! They just bought it, like, yesterday, and now Max stole it. Sheesh!”
Walkman … Walkman … Kyle tried to sift through the vast storehouses of information stockpiled in his significant brain, but he got lost in a welter of web pages and images and text. The information was all still there, apparently, but he couldn’t fixate on any particular bit. Well, at least his mental hard drive hadn’t been erased entirely.
“What’s a Walkman?” he finally asked.
The kid stared at him. “Are you kidding me?”
“Let’s say I’m not.”
“It’s a little thing…. You carry it around and put music in it and listen with headphones.”
“Oh!” Erasmus was settled in Kyle’s pocket. “Oh, like an iPod.”
The kid raised an eyebrow. “A what?”
Wow. Go figure — only in a town as tiny and useless as Bouring would there actually be someon
e who didn’t know what an iPod was!
“Hey, are you from around here?” the kid asked. “You don’t look familiar.”
“I’m, uh, new in town.” Kyle stuck out his hand. “I’m … Theodore.” It was the first alias that popped into his head; Kyle forced the image of the Mad Mask out of there.
“Danny.” They shook. “Do people call you Theo?”
“Not really.”
“Ted? Teddy?”
“Nope.”
Danny’s nose scrunched up as he thought. “What do they call you, then? Dore?”
Kyle gave up. Danny seemed determined to give him a nickname. “Sure. Call me Dore.”
“Well, thanks for trying with the Monroe brothers, Dore.”
“Sorry I got the wrong one,” Kyle said.
Danny shrugged. “Story of my life. The Monroes are always playing pranks on people.”
Kyle’s jaw dropped. Sheriff Monroe? Playing pranks? No way! How many times had Monroe threatened to arrest Kyle, usually for some prank he couldn’t connect to Kyle at all? Too many to count.
“You all right?” Danny asked.
“Oh. Yeah.” Kyle shook his head to clear it. “Look, I’m, uh, new to town —”
“You already said that.”
“Right. Anyway, is there somewhere where I can get online?” In his own time, there was an old Internet café on Major Street, but Kyle didn’t know if it had been built in 1987 or not.
“On line?” Danny wrinkled his nose. “Do you mean in line?”
“No. I don’t want to get into line. I want to …” A thought occurred to him. “Never mind. I’ll just go to the library.”
“Oh! That’s where I’m going. That’s where I was when the Monroes grabbed my Walkman.”
Together, they walked into town. At the town line was the billboard welcoming anyone dumb enough to come here. In Kyle’s time, it read YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER THE TOWN OF BOURING! IT’S NOT BORING! which was both a pun and a lie at the same time. But in 1987, the sign said WELCOME TO BOURING: THE TOWN FOR “U.”
Ugh.
Kyle half listened as Danny chattered on and on (mostly about how depressed he was about losing the Walkman) and checked out the town. It was like seeing a photograph with some spots worn away. Certain buildings and roads were nearly identical to Kyle’s own time, but there were also missing buildings, missing floors of buildings…. Roads that were too narrow or went only one way instead of both … And the town itself was smaller, more constrained — where housing developments and mini-malls had once been, Kyle could see only endless fields.
And there was a column of blackish smoke that rose on the horizon, blacker than the black night sky.
The coal mine. It was still active in 1987.
Kyle felt like he was in the Wild West. If a stagecoach had thundered by, chased by a posse of deputies firing six-shooters, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
“Here we are,” Danny said, opening a door and gesturing.
The library in Kyle’s time was a big, modern, well-lit building at the end of Gordon Road. The 1987 version was a tiny storefront on Major Street. As Danny held open the door, Kyle thought it must be a joke, but a small sign read BOURING PUBLIC LIBRARY — EST’D 1955.
As soon as they went inside, Danny dropped his voice to a low whisper. “I’m gonna get my book bag,” he said, and went off toward the back of the building.
Kyle just stood in the entrance for a moment, taking it all in. This was a library? In Kyle’s time, the library was open and airy. Modern. All bright furniture and chrome accents. There were skylights for natural lighting. A coffee bar. But this place … It was small and cramped with old, rickety bookshelves and murky lighting that yellowed the dusty air. A musty smell hung over everything. An old woman stood behind a counter off to one side, but other than that, the place was empty.
“Hey!” Kyle called out to Danny. “Where —”
“Young man!” the woman called sharply. When Kyle looked at her, she pressed her lips together tightly and laid a finger along them.
Was she kidding him?
Danny had vanished into the darkness of the stacks, so Kyle instead approached the old woman, who he assumed was the librarian. In his own time, the librarian was a young, pretty woman named Barbara.
“Can you help me?” he started, and she glared again. Still too loud? Really?
He lowered his voice to a bare whisper. Feeling like an idiot, he said, “Can you help me?”
“Of course,” she whispered back. “That’s what I’m here for.”
“Where are your computers?”
The librarian glowered at him with a pure outrage Kyle had rarely seen in his life. (Well … maybe the time he made all of the clocks at school run backward.) “Computers?” she asked, as if he’d just inquired as to where they kept the dead puppies. “Computers? Young man, this is a library. We have books here. If you want to play games, I suggest you do so at home.”
Oh, so she was one of those adults! “But I need to look something up —”
“Of course,” she interrupted, and pointed off to a wall of what looked like tiny pull-out cabinets, each the size of an index card. “That’s what the card catalog is for.”
Kyle didn’t know what a card catalog was or what it was good for, and he didn’t really care. He just needed to track down some electronics and get out of 1987 as soon as possible.
“Look, just tell me where I can get on the Internet,” he said.
The librarian blinked rapidly and cocked her head, her lips set in a grim, prissy little line. And then she said:
“What on earth is an ‘Internet’?”
Mairi squeezed her eyes shut so tight that they hurt, so tight that the skin around them hurt. But she didn’t want to see the zombies as they did whatever it was zombies did to their prey. She figured it was going to hurt plenty; she didn’t need to see it, too.
After a few moments, the pain started moving back toward her ears. It felt like two tiny but strong men were squatting behind her ears, pulling all the skin on her face backward.
A few moments later, she thought, This is getting ridiculous! The zombies had been practically on top of her before. What was taking them so long?
She tried counting to distract herself, but by the time she reached one hundred, she was more annoyed than distracted. What were they waiting for?
Finally, she let one eye open just a sliver.
A zombie stood directly in front of her. Mairi couldn’t be sure, but she thought it might be Mrs. Clark, the owner of Clark’s Bakery. She always threw in a couple of extra cupcakes when Mairi’s mom bought big boxes of them for one of her lighthouse fundraisers.
Mairi opened her eyes. Yes, it was Mrs. Clark.
Standing right in front of her.
Staring right at her.
Mairi couldn’t move.
After an eternity of that torture, Mrs. Clark shuffled to one side and walked away.
Mairi didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath. She let it leak out slowly.
She counted fifteen zombies on the roof, all of them shuffling around listlessly, as though someone had neglected to tell them what to do once they got up here. Occasionally one of them would wander close to Mairi or look in her direction, but it was as though she was invisible to them.
Were they just not interested in her at all? Was she immune to them somehow?
No, that couldn’t be it. They had chased her in the street, chased her into the store, up the stairs, onto the roof. And then nothing.
Why?
More important, was it safe to move? To make a dash for the ladder?
She thought not.
But how long could she stay here, on the roof? With the coming night, it was getting cold up here. Was she going to have to choose between freezing to death and, and … whatever it was the zombies did?
She thought again of Sheriff Monroe, of the way he had just collapsed. Was he even alive? What had the Great Nemesis done t
o him?
“Mairi!” a familiar voice shouted.
Mairi couldn’t help herself — at the sound of Mighty Mike’s voice, she sat upright and turned around. The zombies — of course! — chose that moment to notice her again. They all made a sort of Ahhh! sound at the same time and began moving toward her; she tried to stand, collapsing against the parapet as her twisted ankle barked with pain.
“Mairi!” Mike yelled. “Jump!”
She didn’t know where he was. Couldn’t see him. But the zombies were almost on top of her now, so Mairi didn’t think, didn’t cry out, didn’t pause. Instead, she pushed off with her good leg, hauled herself over the parapet with straining shoulders, and dropped over the edge into thin air.
Kyle sat on the steps outside the library, his chin in his hands.
No Internet? Really? No Internet?
This wasn’t the 1980s — it was the Dark Ages! Bouring had always been a backward sort of town, dull and out of step with the exciting world beyond its borders, but this was ridiculous. For no one to have heard of the Internet?
Or maybe … maybe it wasn’t the whole town in 1987. Maybe it was just that crabby old librarian, the one obsessed with everything being quiet. Book dust had saturated her brain and made her useless. As useless as her superquiet, dark, cramped little place stocked with just books. No computers. No DVDs. Certainly no coffee bar. And Kyle could use a nice, steaming cup of hot chocolate right about now.
What was he supposed to do? He needed the Internet in order to track down a place where he could — ahem! — “borrow” the materials needed to fix the chronovessel. And then he would skedaddle from this insane time period and never, ever come back.
He glanced up and down the street, hoping for a nice, juicy electronics store. Or an Internet café. But all the stores were closed, the lights out. All Kyle saw was a shadowy figure loitering at the intersection of Major Street and Moldoff Drive. Was it the same guy he’d seen before, near the Bouring Middle School sign? The lamp-post there was burned out, so he couldn’t be sure, but —
The library door opened just then and Danny came out, a weathered book bag slung over one shoulder. “Are you still here?” he asked Kyle.