He became aware of the EKG machine, like his heart’s radio station. Currently it was playing a quick-tempo’d oldie-but-goodie:
beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep
. The machine added another tone, designed to alert listeners when the station was getting too jazzy for its own good:
wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa!
Boring and irritating, in Jesse’s opinion.
A nurse leaned over him. “Mr. Wagner?” She stared into his face, then turned and flicked the radio station off, severing the alarm in mid-
wa!
“Finally,” he said, surprised by the frailty of his voice.
“Are you all right?” she said. “Your heart got a little excited there.”
Well, of course it did
, he thought.
History changed. Things just got better—and almost nobody knows it.
Whenever it happened, his heart always raced. He didn’t know if it was an emotional response from the excitement of witnessing a phenomenal event or if it was biological, the body pumping blood to the brain so it could process the clash of memories—the memories of current history tossing out the memories of history-that-is-no-longer-history. At least his body had acclimated to the assaults. No more nausea. No more dizziness. No more grogginess, as though the mind was too preoccupied with watching that brief, final flare of history to handle life as well.
He wondered if one or more of the new gatekeepers possessed this ability. He hoped for their sake they did. It was a dormant trait, like a recessive gene, that was activated only through time travel. Even then, in some people—he thought of his brother, Aaron—it took years to kick in; in others it came quickly. He had his first flash of history-that-is-no-longer-history after his third time “going over.”
He smiled.
Going over
was another term from the King kids.
His father—and subsequently he himself—had called it
jaunting
. Didn’t matter—the only thing that did matter was that they were doing it. The memories now battling it out in his head proved they not only were jaunting, but that they had taken his advice: they were making a difference.
Way to go, boys,
he thought.
I knew you could do it.
“Well, it looks like everything’s all right,” the nurse said. “Just a little scare. Were you dreaming?”
“Oh, was I,” he said. He tried to smile, but wasn’t sure he managed one. He lifted a shaking hand, feeling the tug of IV lines like a leash. “Please . . .”
She cupped his hand in both of hers and lowered it to the bed. “What is it?” she said.
Sweet girl.
“I used to record my dreams,” he said slowly, “but I believe I can’t do it this time. Could you . . .” He could feel it now, his smile. “Could you write it down for me? I’ll tell you.”
“Uh . . .” she said, frowning.
Of course, she was busy.
Then she grinned and nodded. “Yeah, sure. I’ll just go get a pen and paper.” She hurried away.
When he was younger, Jesse spent countless hours in the house’s library, reading, learning, absorbing biographies, philosophy, science. But mostly, history. It had not been merely an intellectual pursuit, not when his life revolved around traveling to different times—“worlds,” as the King kids would say. He had found that the more he understood about the worlds he traveled to, the better his chance at accomplishing the mission he had been handed; the better his chances for survival. For him, cracking a book in his library was as crucial to his life as picking up a gun at a firing range was for a police officer or soldier.
The nurse returned, pad and pencil in hand. She dragged a chair across the room, positioning it beside him. She settled in and said, “Go ahead.”
He started: “Ulysses S. Grant died on April 7, 1862.”
She brightened. “Oh, an alternate history story. I love those.”
He winked at her and continued. “Earlier that day, Grant’s close friend and aide-de-camp John Aaron Rawlins sustained fatal wounds from Confederate snipers. Upon learning of Rawlins’s death, Grant flew into a fit of rage. He mounted his horse and charged to the front lines, where the very same snipers killed him . . .”
Xander gripped David’s shoulder and peered around the tree. “Ready?” he said.
“Let’s do it.”
Xander smiled. “That’s what I want to hear. Follow me.” He broke from the cover of the tree, running parallel to the tree line.
David leaped in behind him.
Soldiers yelled. A rifle cracked, and a branch shattered in front of them. A piece of flying wood struck his arm. He yelled, grabbed his bicep, didn’t slow.
Xander did, turning to check on David.
David crashed into him. They tumbled, rolling over leaves and twigs that poked and sliced David’s back. “Go!” he said, grunting out the word. He felt Xander struggling under his legs, saw him reaching for the kepi, which rolled away from his hand and wedged itself into a bush. It ripped through the bush and sailed away.
Xander scrambled up. He lifted David, and they were off again—hurdling bushes, dodging trees, ducking under branches.
Someone fired. A sound like a bat striking a tree came from right behind David. Another shot. Another. Between the loud cracks, David could hear the men stomping through the woods after them, yelling, calling out instructions to one another.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
David thought.
Grant kills the boy who saved his life!
He didn’t know how helping Major Rawlins ultimately led to saving Grant, but he knew it did. Grant and over a million others.
Xander fell into a bush, rolled through it, and was running again before David caught up.
“Just ahead,” Xander yelled. “Has to be.”
They were close to the spot in the woods where the rifle would have ended up, had it continued its trajectory when David had watched it spin through the field. He could tell by how tight Xander’s uniform coat was on his back that it was pulling him forward.
Movement caught David’s eye. Ahead of them and off to the left, more soldiers plowed into the woods. They had obviously come from the front of the camp and were moving to cut the boys off—or get them in a crossfire with the soldiers behind them.
“Xander!”
“I see them!”
Then David spotted it: the portal. It was ahead of them on the right. Its edges were indistinct, but it appeared to be less door-shaped than he was used to; this one was more like an elongated egg. Its rippling presence—like heated air—distorted the trees and bushes behind it. As he watched, it wavered and moved, appearing to slip farther to the right and rise.
“I see it,” David said.
“Where?”
“To your right,” David said. “You’re going to pass it!”
“No,” Xander said. “The coat—”
Shots rang out from the new soldiers. So close now. Another shot came from behind. Setting up the crossfire.
David veered out of Xander’s path. He ran straight for the portal.
“David!” Xander said behind him. “Wait!”
David turned. “Come on! It’s right here!”
Xander’s coat fluttered and tugged—pointing close to the portal, but not right at it. If the portal was at the twelve o’clock position on a watch face, the coat wanted to go to eleven o’clock. The soldiers were at six o’clock and nine o’clock— converging on the brothers, who David supposed were directly in the center.
Xander pointed. “The coat says that way.”
“Look—!” David turned. The portal had shifted again.
“The portal’s moving. The coat’s just not keeping up with it.
Come on!” He ran for the portal and heard Xander fall in behind him.
More yells from the soldiers. More gunfire.
David reached the shimmering oval, squeezed his eyes shut, and leaped.
As a foul smelling breeze blew out of the portal, instantly turning David’s stomach, Xander yelled, “Nooooo—!”
David came down hard on the floor and rolled into a wall. Xander tumbled behind him.
That smell—!
David thought, gagging in his throat and in his mind. He opened his eyes: a gray stone wall—similar to the chamber Taksidian’s pantry had sent him into. But this one was stained and filthy with muck. And here the darkness wasn’t complete; faint light flickered, making shadows jitter around on the wall.
He rolled over. Xander was lying on the floor, pushed up on one arm. His shocked eyes moved between two items that chilled David’s blood as surely as the Atlantic Ocean had done: High up on one wall a wide, rusty pair of shackles dangled from chains. On the floor below, another pair rested on coils of metal links. The shackles were hinged open, like twin serpents frozen in midbite.
The brothers were in a room about ten feet square, with stone walls on three sides. The fourth side was open, except for a grid of thick, flat lengths of metal that formed the bars of a prison cell. In the dark cloud of despair that was seeping into his consciousness, David felt a tinge of hope: the cell door was open.
A couple of matches’ worth of flames sputtered atop a torch leaning out from a wall beyond the bars.
“This
isn’t
the antechamber,” David said.
Xander’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. He squinted at the shackles and bars, as though he suspected someone of pulling an elaborate joke on them.
David pushed closer to his brother. He held his nose, said, “What is that
smell
?” It was like a litterbox that hadn’t been changed—
ever
. Mingled with that was something else, something worse. David remembered a few years before when the family had spent a weekend with friends in San Diego. They’d come home to find that the refrigerator motor had gone out, spoiling hamburger and milk and leftover chili.
This
smelled like that had, the stench of decay.
Xander scurried up and crouched in front of David. He grabbed David’s arm. “The portal in the house didn’t bring us here. I don’t know how to get home,” he whispered. Panic made his voice high, his words fast.
“Can’t—” David said. His eyes scanned over the Union army coat. “Won’t the coat show us the way?”
Xander pulled the front of it away from his chest, let it fall back. “It’s not doing anything now. What if the items don’t work when they’re not in the world they belong to?”
“But—” David’s mouth had suddenly dried up. “We
have
to get home. Xander, we have to!”
Xander nodded. “We’ll . . . we’ll figure something out.”
They stood, and Xander walked to the bars.
Just then, a siren wailed—
no, no,
David thought.
Not a siren!
It was a
person
screaming, a long wrenching howl of agony.
Xander grabbed a bar, as if to steady himself.
The scream stretched longer than a single breath, with barely a pause for the guy to pull in another. It echoed against the walls and was joined by more voices. They moaned and cried, the way a barking dog can set off a chain of baying and yapping neighborhood pets.
David slowly squatted. He wanted to shrink within himself and disappear.
Xander stepped backward away from the bars. He bumped into David, pulled him up by the arm, then shuffled him into a corner of the cell where the shadows were darkest. He said, “I’m officially creeped out.”
“Let’s . . . not move,” David whispered. He thought if he ran into the screamer or whatever was
making
him scream, he’d faint on the spot and wake up screaming himself.
“This is the last place we should be,” Xander said. “If we’re stuck in this world—”
“Don’t say that!”
Xander snapped up his hand, gesturing for David to calm down, be cool. “We’re here now,” Xander continued, “maybe just for a little bit . . . maybe longer. Either way, there’s gotta be a better place to wait it out than this.”
David lowered his gaze. He said, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Going in the wrong portal.” David’s voice was trembling.
“I just thought . . . I mean, I
really
thought that was it.”
Xander shook his head. “It’s not your fault. We’ve never seen two portals before. And those soldiers . . .
Man!
I would have done the same thing.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.” But he appreciated his brother saying it.
“Besides,” Xander said, “think about what we’re learning.
We always wondered how Mom went in one door and out another, right? And Nana said she moved around from world to world. But until now, we’d only gone over from the house and right back to it.”
David thought about it. “We still don’t know how people
find
the other portals. We just stumbled on it.”
“Who says they don’t? Or maybe it’s easy to figure out once you know what to look for.” Xander stopped to listen. The screaming had faded away, leaving only the crying and muttering of a dozen different voices. He squeezed David’s shoulder. “I have a feeling knowing about the other portals is going to help us find Mom.”