Time Defenders Compendium: A Collection of Extraordinary Actions & Adventures

By Scott Tomasheski

August and Mrs. A battle deadly assassins in two time periods. A rogue spacecraft threatens the Earth, and only April Atherton can stop it. A pair of dangerous villains plot to disrupt the first Thanksgiving.
And there's more!!
In this brand-new collection of exciting adventures, the Time Defenders face threats from around the globe, beyond the stars, and across the reaches of time itself ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483567167

Book preview

INVITED…"

KILLING TIME ON BROADWAY

a TIME DEFENDERS™ action

KILLING TIME ON BROADWAY

a Time Defenders action

1934.

Los Angeles.

Say, waiter! Have you got any stewed prunes? asked the restaurant patron with the painted-on black mustache.

Yes, sir, replied the flustered waiter.

Well, give ’em some black coffee, that ought to sober ’em up.

The audience in the motion picture house roared with laughter, causing Professor August Atherton of the Council of Time Defense to awaken with a start from a terrifying nightmare.

The nightmare had him alone, unarmed and outnumbered, beset by a squad of voodoo-warrior assassins armed with knife-tipped fighting sticks, strangling garrotes, and poisoned blowdarts.

The nightmare stood in stark contrast to reality. So far, the squad of assassins pursuing August had proven to be armed only with knife-tipped fighting sticks and poisoned blowdarts. He had, so far, encountered no strangling garrotes.

And he found himself seated near the rear of a dark and quarter-full motion-picture theater, in the middle of a row away from the single, center aisle.

This particular theater, located on Broadway between 8th and 9th in the heart of Los Angeles’ Theater District, was coincidentally called The Atherton, and it was one of August’s favorites.

But at the present moment, he had no idea at all where he was. He looked about, slowly and carefully.

A heartbeat later, when a strangling garrote encircled his neck from behind, gripped by the expert hands of an assassin knowledgeable in the use of the garrote, or garrotte, a weapon particularly well suited to counter the Timeslip, an invaluable defensive skill, a disconsolate August was left to fight for his life and also to wonder if there was any difference at all, sometimes, between his real life and his worst nightmares.

He attempted to recall his activities and movements just prior to falling asleep, but all August could remember was that he had ducked into this theater, after what may be described as an atypical encounter on the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

He was wearing his normal attire, somewhat unusual but mostly undistinguishable from any other gentleman in his early 30’s strolling the city’s streets, but the other man had a more conspicuous personal sartorial style. He wore African-style sandals and a sort of knee-length loincloth, commonly called a sari, heavily embroidered with symbols of a black magic that August recognized; he was bare-chested but for a leopard skin mantle, loosely wrapped about the heavily muscled, intricately tattooed torso; his head was similarly bare, the smooth skin of the shaved scalp also minutely tattooed, a variety of bones and rings worn through the nasal columnae and connected via strings of tiny beads, to ears studded with dozens of similar beads and small gemstones. The look would have been conspicuous, almost anywhere or anytime, thought August, with the possible exception of a Voodoo chieftain’s lair.

Upon seeing the gentleman, whose cold stare, directed unerringly at August and no other person or object on sunny 8th Street, fairly sealed his identity in August’s mind as a henchman of the notorious Doctor Gampu, as much as his conspicuous garb and demeanor, August promptly changed direction and began walking at a reasoned pace up Broadway.

As if he needed further evidence to gainsay any doubts about this sudden danger, August saw at a glance in the reflection of a store window that the assassin was following him. Indeed, chasing him.

*************************************************

1910.

Los Angeles.

Ever since he was a small boy, August loved to go to the movies. The first motion picture he saw, at the Nickelodeon on Broadway in Los Angeles, filled him with wonder, as he had no idea what a movie was, and he had no notion at all of the nature of what he was observing.

He had engaged his great-Aunt, the esteemed and illustrious Ambassador Bartolomea Atherton of the Council of Time Defense, known to friends and admirers as Mrs. A, with a steady stream of excited questions: Where do the pictures come from? Why do they move? Who are those people? Can they see us like we see them? etc.

The good lady had kindly and amusedly brushed aside each question, knowing that the boy’s mind was moving much too quickly to process her answers, had she chosen to give any. It continued for hours, even after young August and his guardian had returned to their home in the hills north of Los Angeles.

The program at this particular Nickelodeon, part of the Broadway Avenue Emporium, in downtown Los Angeles, hard by the very location of August’s later assassin-dodging efforts, consisted of a variety of short films.

August, the novice moviegoer, and Mrs. A, the more experienced aficionado of the art form, were absorbed from the very start, as the program commenced with films of sporting events, and both viewers were extraordinarily knowledgeable and avid fans of professional and amateur sports and athletic endeavors of all kinds, from rounders to horse-racing.

Several bags of sugar-coated peanuts were consumed as the boy and his great-Aunt thrilled to an entire filmed boxing match, a four round affair resulting in a splendid knockout by the famous Jim Jeffries, allowing the champion to retain his heavyweight title and bringing the entire theater to its collective feet, including young August, and a Mrs. A who, it would have seemed to those who knew her only through her extraordinary reputation as a woman of the most perfect morals and manners, became possessed by competitive demons of some evil sort when watching or participating in any game, from cribbage to chariot racing.

Wagering was rife among the theater audience, and Mrs. A, young August, and a plump, cheerful gentleman seated directly in front of them were no exceptions to the action. At the conclusion of a filmed series of horse races from the legendary racetrack in Pillingford Downs, a beaming August regarded his account, which as a consequence of his side bets, stood toward the positive for August and the detriment of the two more experienced handicappers, at seven Indian-head pennies won from the plump and cheerful gentleman, and two bags of sugar-coated peanuts collected from his great-Aunt, who, although she had been known to wager widely and freely at any and all sporting events from the gaming tables of the Roman Emperors to the cock-fights of Sumerian peasants, nevertheless maintained a strict prohibition against monetary wagers on an intrafamilial basis.

The amount that Mrs. A had collected that day from the plump and cheerful gentleman, on the other hand, is known to have exceeded many Indian head pennies and an entire crop of sugar-coated peanuts, but would remain a mystery to August, the youngster never being inclined to make the connection between those wagers and the source of funds that would soon enable him to build and equip his very first astro-metric laboratory.

After slaking their thirsts with cups of ginger beer and refreshing their constitutions with a shared pipe of Cuban tobacco, young August and Mrs. A were transported to another time and place as a filmed play of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist unspooled in the smoky movie-house.

Although he knew the book almost by heart, the moving-picture version of the literary staple found an aghast August leaping from his seat, and running down the aisle to join the filmic quest of the youthful hero and his workhouse-dwelling friends, in support of the orphans’ plea for better nutrition and improved silverware near the beginning of the film; and sheepishly returning to sit again, amidst gales of laughter from the theater audience, beside his phlegmatic great-Aunt, to whom it would also fall in task to quiet the boy’s loud cries of protest at the courtroom injustice administered to the tragically misunderstood Artful Dodger at the story’s emotional apex.

*************************************************

1934.

Seeing the reflection of the man careening toward him, August considered his options, which were few in number.

The one he chose resulted in the man crashing bodily through the plate-glass window of Carlton’s flower shop at the corner of 8th and Broadway.

The tragedy of the shattering glass was twofold. One was that Carlton, a friend of August’s since the good old days of trench warfare in France, would need to repair a plate-glass window, painted in an ornate hand by a distant relative of the Atherton family and which, upon close inspection to the knowledgeable, would have revealed a safe route of escape from the semi-legendary Maze of Anubis, in which August‘s great-Aunt Barty and his niece, the incomparable and adored April, had fought for their lives in a timeline action, approximately 3400 years ago, by current reckoning.

The fact that the window was now shattered, and a disappointed April Atherton would, from her perspective trapped in the middle of the death-dealing gauntlet of ancient Egyptian terror, perceive nothing but a blank hole where she had hoped to find a route of escape from the peril, not only for her 16-year old self but also the 78-year old and similarly imperiled Mrs. A, would result in a great inconvenience and a tremendous raising of the odds against the survival of the two Atherton women.

The second, aforementioned tragedy of the shattering glass had to do with the fact that August had thrown his adversary against it, hoping for a bone-breaking incapacitation, dizzying concussion, or artery-shearing laceration, or some other disabling combination of those effects.

But as the broom-waving Carlton cried out in helpless alarm, August saw the gigantic body pass through the painted glass masterpiece and into the flower shop’s fresh delivery of azaleas and daffodils, then stand again without an apparent scratch, and turn to face his quarry, this time with long metallic objects, something like claws, protruding from the back of his hands, that August was fairly certain he had not seen upon the first pass.

As he regarded his antagonist through the shattered remains of the painted plate-glass, and the windowframe, August could see that the man, who had now drawn to full height, was a giant, standing near seven feet tall, and those long, wicked claws would extend the giant’s reach by a good five inches; and with the leopard skin mantle lost in the tumble, great rolling bands of corded muscle rippling across the giant’s bare chest and shoulders now revealed themselves, suggesting to August that he would be sorely tasked against this particular adversary in fair combat.

Fair combat, thought August.

He took three slow steps backward, giving the giant sufficient room to step through the window frame and out onto the sidewalk.

The man smiled an assassin’s smile, revealing rows of sharpened teeth. And he said the kind of thing assassins typically say.

I bring you greetings from your friend Doctor Gampu, the assassin coldly expressed, as he moved to stride back out onto the pavement, where there was sufficient space for the kind of death-struggle his words presaged.

But August had a different course in mind, and to that end, he drew his Strikeblaster from within the confines of his greatcoat, allowed it to charge in his grip for a split second, then fired a Temporal Crushbullet, striking the assassin squarely between the two great pendulous stones of his pectoral muscles; throwing him past the broom wielding Carlton, through the wall of the florist’s shop and into the adjacent Notary Public’s office just up Broadway; eventually coming into a supine position, arms and legs splayed out wildly, across the desk of a startled Miles D. Feinberg, CPA.

Greetings returned, snapped August.

Mr. Feinberg, noting that the man was completely unconscious if not dead, acted with demonstrable and creditable aplomb in the ensuing lull of activity, taking a moment to adjust the prone assassin’s loincloth, as he would explain later, for purposes of modesty and decorum.

Presently, August stepped through the hole in the wall to present the startled and speechless Mr. Feinberg with a card, printed in a large but unassuming typeface: Professor August Atherton, Council of Time Defense.

And Your expenses will be covered. You will be contacted shortly, and provided with instructions. was scrawled across the back in grease pencil.

But August could be imposed on to do no more than take the time to quickly examine the body of the assassin. Around the waist was fastened a weapon, which August knew was standard issue for Gampuan warriors: a two-foot long carved wooden fighting stick, with an attached steel bayonet-like blade.

August liberated the weapon and slipped it inside his greatcoat.

He did this because it could be safely assumed that this assassin had not been acting alone. And because the Strikeblaster, so effective against the first opponent, would need at least another ninety seconds to re-charge, and until then, the weapon was useless.

One way or another, August thought, he was going to have his hands full.

Mr. Feinberg saw the need for one final, minute loincloth rearrangement as August stepped back out onto 8th Avenue.

Eighty seconds more for the blaster to re-charge.

********************************************

1910.

The afternoon program at the Nickelodeon tumbled chaotically along, a hodgepodge of filmed images that the modern moviegoing audience might consider to be poorly organized and presented.

But the crowded house at the Nickelodeon, including young August, alongside his guardian Mrs. A, were thrilled by the novelty of an action-packed three-minute film of an enormous tree being felled by Canadian lumberjacks, which gave way to a filmed gunfight among cowboys that had young August squinting trying to see through the gun-smoke onscreen, in an attempt to ascertain that the action was staged for the cameras, as his great-Aunt explained was true of certain films that were made specifically for the entertainment of movie theater audiences.

For August, any trace of realism intended by the filmmakers was undercut by the fact that the boy recognized, in the background of the film, one after another of unique rock formations that he had seen on a daily basis in the hills and back-country near where he lived with his Aunt, on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles.

With his metal detector and other equipment, he certainly would have uncovered some souvenirs or other traces of this epic battle that seemed to have happened in his backyard.

The final picture, topping the bill of the program, was the one Mrs. A specifically brought her great-nephew here to see.

It was an older picture, but one that was so popular upon its initial distribution that it continued to be screened in nickelodeons for several years, and Mrs. A herself had already viewed it four times.

The film was A Trip to the Moon, produced by a Frenchman named Georges Méliès.

And August was captivated.

*********************************************

1934.

He knew that his best strategy was to keep moving, engaged as he was against a force of unknown size and position, over broken and erratic terrain filled with a matrix of moving hazards such as motor vehicles, a near-infinite number of hiding places from which to launch a sniper attack, such as windows, and an impossible number of innocents highly vulnerable to a crossfire, as was the case with the pedestrian populace of the city of Los Angeles at 8th and Broadway, on any typical weekday afternoon.

And the propriety of this mobile strategy was immediately borne out when, with seventy-four more seconds yet to expire in the Strikeblaster’s recharge cycle, the first blowdart whistled past August’s ear and clattered on the sidewalk in front of him.

He quickened his pace and changed direction. Two points in a line had presented themselves to the geometrically-inclined August, one being the terminus of the blowdart’s trajectory, on the sidewalk in front of him, the other being a point roughly one-quarter inch south-southwest of his left earlobe, and he made a quick mental extrapolation to determine the point of attack, obviously a rooftop or other high vantage point above the target. That target being himself, in this example.

With seventy two seconds until the Strikeblaster could be fired, August broke into a dead run up Broadway.

On his right, he saw the glorious movie-palace called the Atherton Theater. Built in 1919 as a multi-purpose venue, housing late-phase Vaudeville acts as well as concerts, plays, and picture shows, despite the name it had no connection to August’s family, although he and his great-Aunt had been present on opening night, and many subsequent nights, and afternoons.

And straight ahead of him, blocking his path up the sidewalk on Broadway, stood another Gampu assassin.

Not the one with the blowgun, thought August; that one was on a rooftop or in a window, and he would have had to move impossibly fast to emerge from the sea of pedestrians now before him. That meant at least two more adversaries, and they were, potentially, everywhere.

Something stung the back of his neck.

Seventy seconds.

**********************************

1910.

Young August was silent for minutes at a time at various points in the ever-changing Nickelodeon program, but he talked incessantly throughout the Méliès film. By contrast, although she had shouted and catcalled throughout the length of the boxing match, during this presentation his great-Aunt said little. The youthful cineaste would eventually learn to keep silent during non-documentary features, for each question he asked would distract both questioner and questionee from a moment of film, and if an answer was forthcoming, additional seconds of the picture would also be given less attention, by those quizzical audience members, than the filmmakers would have preferred.

He was, however, so emotionally and sensually absorbed in A Trip to the Moon that he could not help himself but prattle incessantly, to himself as well as his proud and pipe-smoking great-Aunt, and indeed, to the plump and cheerful gentleman from whom he had taken the seven Indian-head pennies at the conclusion of the horse-racing segment of the program.

The gentleman also had much to say, particularly about the technology employed by the moon-travelers and their Earthbound support team in the picture, and he freely offered his views to any and all listeners, including the highly talkative but unhearing August.

Mrs. A said nothing as she smoked, smiled, and took in the picture, breaking the rigour at only one point, and that was to assist and re-arrange an apoplectic August when the boy slipped from his seat in his excitement and fell to the Nickelodeon’s sticky floor.

*****************************************

1934.

Fingall McGroarty had saved the life of August Atherton at least twice, according to fully documented accounts in the archives of the Council of Time Defense.

But to the student of history and lore, many other stories existed. Tall tales, urban legends and the like, were often perpetuated by the stories’ principals themselves.

The late Fingall, the very first protégé trained by Mrs. A, was an astute design engineer who built several devices that would later become standard Council issue, and August, his student, a designer of no mean talent, inherited several of Fingall’s prototypes.

Of those, the construct of most relevance to the currently besieged August was his greatcoat, the deep-pocketed affair from which he had recently retrieved the Strikeblaster, and concealed the menacing knife-tipped Gampuan fighting stick.

It was made of ordinary black leather, the greatcoat was; it was an ordinary leather greatcoat, purchased by Fingall McGroarty in the stalls of Covent Garden and widely regarded as a splendid value, and a great fit for an off-the-rack piece.

But, subsequent to the purchase, Fingall had made certain alterations to the garment, the most prescient of which was to subject it to a chemical treatment of his own design, whereby the cured and dyed leather became impregnated with certain particles, bestowing upon the wearer a defensive shield of great versatility and a surprising degree of imperviousness to conventional cutting or stabbing weapons, as well as penetrating and sharp projectiles, including bullets and the like.

And so it may be said that August, the current wearer of that somewhat unfashionable but nevertheless functional black leather-and-McGroarty-Particle greatcoat, was saved from a particularly certain and instantaneous death, once again, by the great Fingall McGroarty.

As he reached into the greatcoat and drew forth the Gampuan fighting-stick, August noticed that two blowdarts were stuck in the front of the garment, adhered to the specially-treated black leather.

August managed a grim smile, but too late, he realized the assassins’ strategy was to get him to stand still, where one