What Others Are Saying About This Book:

Intriguing, entertaining and at times laugh out loud funny. Timecross'd is not easily pegged into one genre or another as anti-heroine Abby and her hero Zach loop readers into taking a rollercoaster ride where they never know where they will end up next... or when.

--Tracee Evans, reporter, KTRH Radio, Houston

Timecross'd offers something for every reader: boot-stomping action, drama, love, mystery, philosophy, hard science, history, and more all wrapped up into one neat package! The solid plot will keep you on your toes and turning the pages until late into the night. You don't want to miss this one!

-- Cheyenne Grewe, Editor, Alberta, Canada

The greatest thing about this novel is the fact that it may be the best portrayal of how time travel would truly work. For anyone who is a fan of time travel science fiction, hold on to your watch because the space time continuum is about to be thrown into the blender. The author starts you in one place and then just flips it this way, tosses it another and then finally when you think you've landed in "real time", he creates a whole new reality!

-- Michael Coppens, Houston, Texas 

A story out of time... Sean K. Thompson has taken me through a journey of excitement, danger, thrills, chills, turns and leaves the door open for the story to continue. I enjoyed reading this book from cover to cover. The narrator was a nice injection to the story and threaded the entire piece together. Wonderfully written. Kudos!

-- Trish Ruff, Writer and Producer, Houston, Texas

This book has it all: mystery, drama, comedy, and even a romance or two! It is often laugh-out-loud funny. There is some profanity, but it is not overwhelming. The various "Abbys" who were jumping around in parallel segments of time were sometimes difficult to keep track of, but eventually all became clear. Thisis an excellent book!

--Sheila Griffin, MyShelf.com 

Timecross’d

A Love Story Out of Time

Copyright © 2003 Sean K. Thompson

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 0-9710796-5-X

Library of Congress Control Number: 2003111703

First Printing 2003

Published by Filbert Publishing, Box 326, Kandiyohi, Mn, 56251, USA. 2003 Sean K. Thompson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author. 

Manufactured in the United States of America.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Contact Sean at http://www.Timecrossd.com

Timecross’d

A Love Story Out of Time

Sean K. Thompson

Dedicated to the women in my Timecross'd world:

My mother, who nurtures through thick and thin;

My sister, who has always covered my back;

My daughter, who makes me want to give her a better world;

Dee, who shows up every day;

Cheyenne, who was ruthless;

Beth, who believed;

And my wife, who one fateful night sat scross from me in a

restaurant and said, "You really need to write a novel..."

First Path

What’s past is prologue

— The Tempest

Prologue

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.”

Not a bad opening for the best-selling book in human history. The secret of telling a good Story is to grab your audience from the first sentence. Other literary first-words have come close to this one. Close, but no cigar. “It was a dark and stormy night.” Judges give a nine point three for scene-setting, but the cliché factor is through the roof. “Once upon a time, there was a fill-in-the-blank.” Classic, but boring. Too ubiquitous. It can start off any story. “Once upon a time there was an Electrolux salesman...” or “Once upon a time these two rabbis walk into a bar...”

Once upon a stormy night is all right for telling stories. But if you want to tell a Story, you have to take the gloves off.

In the beginning...Now that’s a grabber. Short. Sweet. To the point. Beginning. God. Created. Earth. Ad reps would have killed to have come up with this one. It tells you in no uncertain terms that what is to follow is a Story.

...God created the heavens and the earth. This one sentence summarizes the defining force of mankind, the question that, as physical entities with souls and minds and independent thought, we’ve asked since we crawled from the muck: what can we believe in? When the empirical evidence ends, when there are no more facts to back up the theories, how much can we take on faith?

There are two schools of thought here. One, the Peter Pragmatic Principle: “I refuse to believe that unicorns exist. There’s no evidence to prove that they ever existed; they won’t exist until I see one.” Two, the Santa Claus School of Faith: “I’ll believe in unicorns until someone proves that they don’t exist.”

Unicorns, God, it’s all the same thing.

It’s at times like this that we should celebrate the cold, hard facts of mathematics. No doubt or uncertainty here. Numbers don’t lie, and you can take that on faith without having to rely on it. One plus one equals two in any religion.

Did you know that it’s been mathematically proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is physically impossible for a man to run a mile in less than four minutes? According to the numbers and complex equations involved in putting the big rubber Logic stamp on human anatomy, it’s impossible. Can’t happen.

Take Time as another example. Einstein proved that Time is relative. According to how it’s viewed, it can be stretched, shrunk, sped up, slowed down. One plus one equals two, e=mc², God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the mathematical world. Einstein also proved, however, that Time is a one-way trip. There’s no going down the wrong way of this street, baby, forward ho and damn the torpedoes. It is unthinkable to believe you can travel backwards through Time. It’s impossible. Can’t happen.

On May 6, 1954 AD, an athlete named Roger Bannister ran the mile in three minutes, fifty-nine point four seconds. Nowadays, it’s down to around three minutes, forty-four. Even though mathematics says it’s impossible.

Can’t happen.

There’s your damned unicorn.

Chapter One

The Loop roared to life.

Abigail Ross gawked at its sudden appearance and felt the sudden tingle of its existence on her nerves. She squinted her eyes at its brightness as her raven-black hair whipped around her face. Insanely, her mind gibbered over and over, It’s alive! It’s alive! like some overly emotive Baroness von Frankenstein. Her guts lurched, only partially from the subsonic rumble that worked its way from the Loop through the ground and atmosphere itself and directly into her body.

Abby momentarily considered thanking God for the timely appearance of the Loop, then discarded the idea as being too duplicitous. She had as much use for God as He did for her, she supposed. Not a lot. Abby was a scientist in the purest sense of the word. Five senses and one brain was all she needed to live. And at the moment her entire body was being bombarded with sensory overload. Mere seconds before, she had been running down an old cobblestoned street before ducking between two brown-mortared buildings. The alley she had found herself in dead-ended fifty feet farther down. The late afternoon sun had been bright enough to illuminate the alley yet cause no real optical harm. Her raspy breathing—I have gotto quit smoking, she wheezed mentally—and echoing footsteps had been the loudest noises. All that had changed, however, with the calling of the Loop. Its brightness seemed to outshine the sun, and the accompanying windstorm pelted her with debris and pebbles from the uneven ground. Her legs and chest were stung by dozens of flying motes, felt through her silk stockings and blouse. The tight, knee-length skirt and snug jacket she wore provided scant additional protection. And on the heels of that came the thunderous sound that the Loop invoked. It stood between her and the dead end of the alley, and the enclosing, bare walls magnified the noise to eardrum-bursting levels.

Ordinarily, windstorms of this magnitude might just whirl the sound away, fill the ears with a calm like the eye of a hurricane. But the Loop wasn’t ordinary. It was energy, pure and simple. It was light, it was electricity, it was radiation. Funny how it should be so damned loud. She resisted clamping her hands over her ears for two reasons. First off, from experience she knew that the Loop’s sonics were so overpowering, so pervasive, that such a gesture wouldn’t help. Secondly, she happened to be grasping a Colt .45 six-shot pistol in her right hand and she didn’t particularly feel like blowing her brains out today.

With pulsing light and throbbing sound, the Loop beckoned her as if it were cognizant of its actions. She knew better. She had created it, she was its master. (It’s alive! It’s...) It was a non-sentient sphere of energy. It was a device, the result of science and mathematics and a buttload of money. It was intangible. It couldn’t be touched, even though you could feel its effects. On this end, the Loop’s physicality was as concrete as a flashlight’s beam.

But damned if it didn’t seem alive. Three meters in diameter, the blinding globe of argent energy pulsated and flared like a miniature sun. The pulsating seemed to increase the wind that poured out from the orb as its brightness reached near-blinding levels. And, brother, did it roar. Once, Abigail had attempted to pin down exactly what the Loop sounded like. The ankle-rattling rumble was only part of the aural experience. The word roar wasn’t a euphemism: the Loop sounded like a tyrannosaurus rex with stomach problems. Timed with the visual spin was a swishing sound, not unlike the fetal heartbeat on an ultrasound.

And, underlying all that, though she would never admit it out loud, Abigail could swear that she heard it breathing. Deep, gurgling breaths, like a giant fighting death. Or struggling to be born.

“I think I got it!”

Zachary’s voice reached her through the deafening noise. For a heartbeat she had forgotten he was standing between her and the open end of the alley. She turned her back to the Loop and almost tumbled as a particularly strong gust of Loop-wind snagged her. Her arms flailed. Either not realizing or caring that any rescue attempt might result in receiving a few ounces of terminal lead poisoning courtesy of Abby’s gun, Zach reached out with one arm and grabbed her, kept her from spilling to the cobblestones. The move threatened to jar the small metal briefcase he had precariously balanced open in the crook of his other arm. The small metal briefcase that was their only hope for salvation. The small, extremely delicate, metal briefcase.

Oh, shit, thought Abigail.

Miraculously, Zachary managed to keep his grip on both Abigail and the case. A second later, she managed to regain her balance. Fear, adrenaline, anger, and just a smidgen of embarrassment made her pull away from him and yell into his face.

“It’s about time!”

Zach blinked at her through his round metal frames. She braced herself for a verbal onslaught from him. The jam they currently were in was entirely her fault, and they both knew it.

Instead of yelling back, he gave her his usual lopsided smile (as she knew deep down that he would, damn him) followed with a self-depreciating shrug as if to actually agree that this entire mess was his sole doing.

Zachary, you are one dumb son of a bitch, she thought.

Except he had two Ph.D.s hanging on his wall back home.

He glanced down at the inside of the case he held. The durable outer shell protected the delicate innards of the Mechanism. The entire interior was cluttered with a hodgepodge of electronic components, minicomputers, and about three miles’ worth of wiring. The overall effect of the Mechanism made it look like evil-genius bomb in a spy movie. Several of the tiny LCD screens flashed red. Zachary reached in with his other hand and tapped the screen, then gingerly fiddled with a tiny knob next to it.

“Come on, baby,” he murmured under his breath. “Go, go, go...”

With the cacophony of the Loop, she shouldn’t have been able to hear him. But even as she concentrated her attention on the energy globe behind him, his words reached her. She faced him, wide-eyed, then took two steps toward the Loop.

“What, now?” she yelled back.

He glanced up from the screen. A quick visual inspection confirmed what the readouts had been telling him. The orb’s pulses grew more erratic, which signaled trouble at home. The Loop wasn’t quite ready. If she entered now, she wouldn’t live to regret it.

“No! Stop!” he suddenly cried. It was so rare that he raised his voice that Abby actually complied. “Not you! I was talking to the Loop!”

She shifted her attention from the orb to him. Her eyes were wild. “What’s wrong?” she hollered.

His eyes snapped back and forth between the Loop and the Mechanism. He didn’t like the looks of either. “They’re having trouble locking onto the beacon,” he yelled back over the din. “Thanks to you things aren’t exactly conducive at the moment to run a diagnostic. For crying out loud, Abby, I told you—”

“Jesus Christ, would you stop babbling? You’re pathetic,” she hissed.

Zach shook his head in protest. “I’m not babbling, I’m just—”

The next words locked in his throat as Abby suddenly raised her pistol and pointed it dead center between his eyes. A high-pitched squeak not unlike that of a gelded mouse slipped past his constricted larynx, and he couldn’t help but go cross-eyed as his wide, panicked stare focused on the business end of the Colt .45. The only thing that kept his bowels from loosening was the sudden tightening of his sphincter.

“Duck,” she whispered.

Zach dropped to all fours, inadvertently banging the Mechanism on the ground. He winced at the signals of pain his wrists and knees sent to his addled brain, then outright cowered a second or so later as he heard Abby fire off two rounds from her pistol toward the mouth of the alley. “Take that, you sonzabitches!” she roared.

From his vantage point on the cobblestone, he whipped his head around to ascertain the target of Abby’s bullets and war cry. The movement made his brown shaped-felt fedora slip off his head and roll a few inches on its brim. His gut hollowed out when he saw four men dressed in olive-grey uniforms skitter away from the alley’s open end. Their pursuers had caught up with them—no real feat considering the storm the Loop’s arrival had kicked up.

“They found us!” he yelped.

“No shit, Sherlock!” she retorted. “What say we go through now?”

He breathed a sigh of relief when he noted the Mechanism’s LEDs were nearly all green. Maybe when he had accidentally banged it on the ground it had fixed the signal. What the hell, it had worked on his old television back in college. The Loop had stabilized and it was time to get the hell out of here.

“Yes, now, now would be a good time,” he agreed as he latched the case shut and stumbled to his feet. “A very good time. A very, very—”

Abby wasn’t even listening. She raced toward the beckoning globe as best as she could in her high heels. Zach could fend for himself, and women’s lib be damned.

She was no more than a foot or two away from the outer field when the wall next to her spat shards of brick at her face. Instinctively, she dived to the opposite wall and crouched behind a large pile of crates. Bricks tended to not spontaneously explode, and she quickly surmised that one of the soldiers in the street outside the alley had shot at her. The roar of the Loop had masked the sound of the gunshots. Hesitant, she peered around the crates. No sign of the soldiers in view, but she caught a glimpse of a booted toe peeking from behind the wall. Squinting with one eye and sticking her tongue out in concentration, she readied to shoot the toe. Teach them to shoot at a woman, especially when she had only been about four steps from the—

She suddenly caught sight of Zach. He lay unmoving on the ground.

“Zach!” she screamed. She had to fight the impulse to go to him or risk getting shot herself. Somehow, her voice reached him, and she yipped in fright and shock when he suddenly jerked to a sitting position and looked around wildly. His hand groped for his fedora.

“Move it!” she yelled and motioned to some barrels on the opposite wall near him. He understood and scooted over to shield himself behind them.

He was babbling again but she forgave him this time. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he managed to get out between puffed breaths as he leaned his back to the wall in a crouch. “They didn’t hit me. Son of a gun if they didn’t hit me. There were so many bullets. But only one of them hit, and it hit the Mechanism,” he indicated the metal case still in his hand, “not me. The impact knocked me down. Man, oh man, if I hadn’t been carrying the...”

He trailed off and looked at the case in his hand for the first time since he fell. The shiny metal casing was marred with carbon scoring surrounding a large dent, which in turn surrounded a dime-sized hole. The Mechanism had saved Zach’s life and had paid the cost. He could hear electric crackles coming from the wiring inside, and with rising concern he saw small tendrils of grey smoke rising from the seams.

Oops.

He eyed the Loop. It was no longer a perfect, shining globe. As if it were feeling the Mechanism’s pain, it flickered in and out of existence as the roar and wind wavered sporadically. He could almost hear it groan like a car with a dying battery try to crank up.

All of Abby’s attention was focused on the other end of the alley, her back to the Loop, to keep an eye on any further danger from their assailants. “Talk to me,” she commanded through clenched teeth. Her grip tightened on the gun.

“It hit the Mechanism,” he muttered in response. He succeeded in unlatching the clasps and opening the case again. The sight and smell of fused electronics made him want to gag. The copious LEDs and computer screens flickered and blinked like the Loop itself.

Abby spared a quick glance at the electronic mess before she returned her attention to the end of the alley. “How bad?”

“Not good, not good,” he replied as he tried to lock the hysteria in his throat. “I don’t know if I can hold it together.”

For a brief moment, Abby caved in to her own panic. “Don’t tell me that, Zach!”

His own fragile grasp slipped as well. “Well, I am telling you that, Abby!” he squeaked back, then winced. His voice had the irritating tendency to crack under stress. He forced his larynx to relax. “The bullet barely missed the power source. Another two inches to the left and we’d be...” He peered up at her and saw that she was in no mood for a complete diagnostic.

Abby’s no-nonsense voice lashed at him. “Then let’s just jump through now.”

“No,” he gritted back. “The Loop’s too unstable now.” He gestured at the faltering energy globe. “We step through that now and we’re toast. Give me a second. I’ll think of something.”

She retightened her grip on the pistol butt and grimly nodded. He diverted his attention to the Mechanism and she aimed the gun down the alley again.

His eyes flicked over the electronics. Okay, that system there was shot—literally—but wasn’t necessary at the moment. He hoped. Fatalistic, he ignored the general condition of the innards. There was too much damage to even attempt to fix it all. Instead, his mind raced as he remembered the emergency drills he and Charlie had gone over back home in the Lab. Essential systems only. The Mechanism was a two-way beacon, and all he needed to do was coax it into giving the proper signal to the Lab. Ahhh, there,he saw. Reroute this little area where the bullet tore through some wiring and everything should be fine and dandy. With uncharacteristically calm fingers, he worked on the bypass.

There, he thought,that oughtta do it.

The Loop went out.

He gawked. He gaped. Abby cursed.

On the plus side, the crazy readouts and spasmodically blinking lights finally stopped. Unfortunately, everything in the Mechanism stopped as well.

The sudden stillness was overpowering. He glanced over his shoulder to confirm his worst nightmare. The Loop was gone. No more blinding energy sphere. No more roar or wind or subsonic rumbling.

No more ride home.

“Okay,” Abby grated, “this is it.” She raised up and stepped away from the crates. With an attempt to overcome the difficulty of spiked heel on damp cobblestone, she set her right foot ahead of the left for better balance. The pistol was grasped firmly in both hands. Already she could hear voices coming from the street at the end of the alley—now their only means of escape. Without the Loop, the only thing to her back now was a blank brick wall. A dead end of historic proportions. The voices resolved into shouted orders. Their pursuers had only been held back by the Loop. The silence now was practically an engraved invitation for them to charge.

This could get interesting,she thought as she braced herself.

At the first sign of the soldiers outside the alley, she squeezed off four more shots from the gun. With satisfaction, she saw them dive back around the corner. Her smile was short lived, though; she knew the only reason they hadn’t stormed the alley and mown her and Zach down was that they were merely waiting on reinforcements to arrive. Time, as they said, was definitely running out.

Meanwhile, Zach feverishly worked on the Mechanism. I amnotmechanically inclined, he muttered, and by nature he wasn’t. Apparently, the others back home in the Lab hadn’t been able to get a firm lock on the Mechanism’s signal; otherwise, they would have opened the Loop on their end and mount a rescue. He had to somehow get the electronic olio to punch through and pinpoint their location. Under gunfire. In about five seconds. Sweat made his longish brown hair hang over his eyes and he blinked furiously to clear his vision.

“Abby,” he murmured. She was the scientist out of the duo. If only she’d been holding the case, she could have had it up and running and with time to spare.

She seemed to understand his predicament. Despite the danger, she closed her eyes for a moment and envisioned the innards of the case. Her lips moved silently as she mentally pictured a rapid fix-job. Her eyes snapped open. “Blue wire on the left side. Green wire one inch to its right. Cut ‘em both and splice.”

“What? Which ends?” Zach’s voice was squeaking again.

“Do it!” she barked. The shadows at the mouth of the alley were in extreme motion and that wasn’t a good sign. She prepared to fire at the first thing she saw on two legs.

Murmuring a prayer, Zach cut and stripped the wires with his Swiss Army knife held in slippery, trembling fingers. Knowing that any pause for consideration would make him second guess himself until he was shot, he automatically grabbed two stripped ends and wrapped them around each other. Sparks flew from a nearby component and a power surge ripped through his fingers. His heart skipped a beat despite the sudden numbness in his hands, certain he had blown their only chance home. But the hotwire had worked, and the Loop returned with a vengeance.

It roared back to life with renewed vigor. The suddenness of it knocked Zach back against the wall. Only Abby’s predetermined balance allowed her to keep her own feet.

“Okay, I got it!” he whooped, his eyes jumping all over the revived readouts. The Loop flared and pulsed in greeting. On the Mechanism, a lot of the red LEDs went green. Some went yellow, and an uncomfortable number stubbornly stayed red. But a goodly portion was green. He hoped it’d be enough.

“It’s stable but I don’t know for how long,” he hollered to her over the renewed cacophony. “You go on. I’ll be right behind you.” He paused, took a breath. “Toss me the gun.” Signs of bravery from Zach were so rare that even he was taken aback by his own words. Did I really say that?

Abby, too, was struck dumb by his words. “What? Why? If we’re going through—”

One toe-dip into the courage pool made Zach decide to dive on in. “I need to cover you.”

She was still abashed at her solo run toward the Loop mere seconds before. What if she’d jumped through without him? “Are you nuts? No way. We’re a team.”

“There’s no time, Abby,” he muttered and furtively looked toward the street. He estimated they had about another ten seconds or so before one of the soldiers got brave enough to raid the alley, Loop or no Loop.

“No time?” Abby snorted, derisively. “We’ve got a freaking time machine!”

“Not for long,” retorted Zach as he brandished the damaged Mechanism in her general direction. “Now go! I’m two steps behind you.”

She had never listened to him before, so it was dimly surprising that she tossed him her pistol. He managed to catch it without dropping the Mechanism again.

“You’d better be,” was all she could bring herself to say. The nearby roar muffled her words and he didn’t hear. But the point was moot. Without another word, she pushed away from the wall and raced to the sphere. From behind his hiding spot he trained the gun at the mouth of the alley, but the soldiers were still out of view. So fast did she run that Zach barely had time to spot her before she reached the blinding orb. At the last second she leapt into it.

As her body came into contact with the giant globe she dissolved into it, became a part of it. Zach’s gaze flashed between the Mechanism’s readouts and Abby’s translation into the Loop. Like some Cheshire Cat she faded into nonexistence as it swallowed her. The roar increased, hungrily, then subsided to its usual deafening rumble as she disappeared completely. The energy sphere pulsed on like nothing had ever disturbed it.

Zach nodded to himself as the readouts tracked her progress. She was through, safe and sound, away from here. Now it was his turn. Deliberately, he closed the lid to the Mechanism and worked out his battle plan. Okay, jump up and fire off a shot or two to scare ‘em. Then hop through. No sweat. I can do this.

With a generic battle roar (Voice-squeak Scale 7.4), he surged to his feet from behind the barrels. In the split second that he was out in the open he saw that the reinforcements had finally arrived and no less than a dozen soldiers were braving the alley, twenty feet away and weapons drawn. Zach had never fired a gun in his life before, but he didn’t even think about it as he aimed high (he didn’t want to actually hit anybody) and pulled the trigger.

click.

No bang, no crack, no bucking in his hand. Not even a Click . Just a click , small c . Then he remembered.

She fired two shots. Then four more. Two plus four equals six. Six shot gun. Crap.

Before the soldiers had a chance to fire on him, he dropped the gun and whipped up both hands in the universal gesture of surrender. If he’d had a handkerchief he would have waved it for good measure.

“Ich wage zu sagen, wir hatten einen Mordsspaß!”he shouted with a grin as fake as polyester. They were close enough to both hear his words over the roar and to see the sweat that bathed his face.

His improvised Plan B miraculously seemed to work. The sight of a genial stranger standing before a blinding, roaring man-sized star, hands high in the air, was enough for them to hesitate only for a second or two. It was all the time he needed.

Zach was not, in fact, having a whale of a good time. So before they had time to react, he turned, dove into the Loop, and got the hell out of there.