Time Zone

By "Tom" "Lichtenberg"

This is not your father’s time travel. There’s no machine, no dial. There’s no telling where or when you’ll go. The only thing that can change is you. It will make you what it needs to make you. And if you come back, it won’t be the same you. You’re messing with the nature of things, and the nature of things does not like to be messed with. Welcome to a riddle of change and addiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: "Tom" "Lichtenberg"
• Release date: Nov 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9781452300108

"Tom" "Lichtenberg"

Author of curiously engaging novellas of the science-fiction-y, post-modern-y, absurdist variety

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Time Zone

by Tom Lichtenberg

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Tom Lichtenberg

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Time Zero

Damn, she says, he was right there. He was probably right there on the platform.

She had been running through an underground hallway, she went through a doorway and here she was, right back in her own time, and she was pissed. He was right there, she said, he was right there with me!

Cammie was in a big room, suddenly. It was nowhere she had ever been before. Somehow she had come through the dark hallway basement of the Castle, headed straight towards a large, open door, passed through it, and here she was. She had made a turn, and this room had blood red carpets and hardwood walls. It felt like a bar of some sort, a bar she had been in once before, maybe a long long time ago. it was called the red something - she didn't know what.

Several people were sitting around a long sturdy oak table. She couldn't see how many, but they were not surprised by her sudden and dramatic entrance. They even seemed to understand what she was saying about Zeke.

Okay people, Ronson said, we're in new territory now. Unmapped but not unknown. It's time travel. This is the thing. You can move in time, but every time you turn around, time is trying to pull you back to now; your own time is like a rubber band attached to you - wherever you can't be seen, a doorway, an underground hallway, time is trying to push you right back out to where you came from. Even if you don't want to come back, it'll push you out.

And don't worry about the big things. Big things like history you can't change, but little things can, and your life is one of those little things. You can die there and you turn up like an unexplained death back here. I've seen it happen before. Back there you're stabbed with a sword in a duel. Here you're hit by a bus. You just came out of nowhere, the driver says, and you did. Time pushed you in front of that bus. You weren't there, and then you were. Because you died, you had to die. Get it? Time makes a reason.

Cammie says, now we have to go back there and get him. He's still there. He doesn't know what's going on. He just got pulled in by accident, she continued. I was going back and he just came with me. We got separated, just for a second, and I lost him.

That's another thing, Ronson continued. Once you're on that path, every place is a time. You turn around, you don't know where or when you'll be. You lose contact with your partner, physical contact I mean, then you lose contact, period. It's amazing Zeke was even in the same time as you Cammie. He could have been anytime, any place, once you let go.

When you go back, you must go back together, and you must remain together at all times. At ALL times. This is no joke, people. Time will try to push you back out to now, but if it can't push you out, it's going to push you somewhere. It doesn't want you back there. Time is literally your enemy. It is literally working against you constantly. You are messing with time, with nature, with the order of things, and the order of things does not like to be messed with.

But how do we get in there? Riley asked. How do we even know where to begin?

There's a distortion, Ronson said. Now that Zeke is back there, it's there. Just look for the distortion. You're going to find it in the places he goes in this life, in this time. You have to go wherever he SHOULD be right now, right here. Find that place, and there's a distortion. You will know it, you'll feel it, you may even see it. And then, when you do, you go into the next door, the next window, down the next hall, and you may be there where he is. Not necessarily right there in the same room, but close, somewhere nearby. Or maybe not. You might just be in the next room, period. If it's a false alarm. If time doesn't let you in, because it doesn't want to let you in. it wants to keep you right here where you belong.

Make no mistake people, time is going to be actively working against us every moment. And we don't have much of it. I can't say exactly how long we've got, but time is trying to put an end to its Zeke problem, and we've got to find him first and bring him back.

How do we bring him back? Jimmie asked

Just find him, said Ronson, and get him alone with you somewhere, some place where no one else can see, and then go through the door. Time will bring you out, bring you right back here to now, but only if no one else can see it happening. Time wants you back where you belong. It's a presence, a pressure, a force. You'll know it when you feel it. Mostly we go around in time - in our own time - and never feel the pressure because we're where it wants us to be. But just try going against the grain, against the tide, you'll see.

Cammie felt like she was surrounded by friends and that maybe she was in her own place and time although she was certain she had never known these guys and had never been in this room before. I've been in places like it, she thought, and I've known people like these, but it isn't them, it's like a dream. Maybe I didn't come back to my own time, she thought. Ronson said

Come on, it's time to bring him back, and Cammie said,

How do you even know him?, and Ronson looked at her like she was a specimen in the lab.

It's dangerous, he said. Every time you go back something changes. You change. You stay too long you can't come back. You've changed too much and now you don't fit in your old life any more. You aren't who you were so you can't go back to when and where you were. Cammie, don't you know me?

She shook her head and felt a wave of despair and suddenly the realization that she didn't even know herself anymore.

Why did this happen? she asked.

Why did you go back? he countered.

She shook her head again.

I was with Zeke, she replied. We were at the donut shop, looking at donuts. I mentioned something about the history of the word. I forget which word. Zeke said it was something else. I forget what he said. We went to the old used bookstore around the corner to look it up in the big old dictionary they have there. We were walking through the stacks, we turned a corner, we were gone. That's all I remember.

Something about the word, Ronson said. It's very important. What was the word?

I can't remember, Cammie said.

It must have been something French, Ronson muttered to himself. Riley said that bookstore's only open till nine. We have to go right now and Jimmie said we can take my truck it's right out front.

They rushed out the door and into the truck and Ronson was giving instructions.

Never lose sight of your partner. We're going in by two's. Two by two. One right after the other. Like a buddy system. Each partner keeps a watch on the other. Each team keeps a watch on the other. When one goes in, the other follows. When one goes right, the other goes right. Right with you, right behind you all the way. And think of the word, he said to Cammie, think of the word if you can.

Riley and Jimmie were the first ones through the door and they moved like the veteran soldiers they were. Proceeding cautiously, watching each other's backs, silently striding through the cookbooks and the baby name books and the do-it-yourself home project books. Cammie and Ronson came next, holding hands like it was the most natural thing in the world for them to do. Cammie wondered if it was. Ronson worried that they were already too late, and wherever she had been had changed her irrevocably.

Sometimes it wears off, Ronson softly said, to reassure her. Sometimes the changes peel off like a sunburn over time, once time itself is convinced that you're really back where you belong and intend to stay that way.

He failed to mention how time might treat someone it has returned, who deliberately goes right back in again. Time would not be happy about that.

They were looking for the distortion. It might still be here, Ronson thought, though Cammie couldn't tell them exactly how long it had been. Zeke might normally be somewhere else already, and they would have to consider that. But Riley thought he felt something for he raised his arm in the alert sign, and Ronson and Cammie stopped in their tracks. Jimmie gave him the go ahead, and Riley very slowly moved around the book case into the next aisle, which housed the biography section. For a moment it looked like he was actually vanishing and Ronson held his breath. There had been