Timestitch Ch. 00-02

"My boys... my sweet boys," Gina said as the tears streamed down. "Eddy... Joshee, I'm coming boys."

She pushed the big red button.

15:23 GMT, aboard the mission pod.

Taylor felt the kick of the ejection as a sudden reddening of his vision and then the much gentler push of the pod's tiny engine. He waited for the explosive decompression of kinetic hit from the Davidian ship. It didn't come. "Gina, you sweet darling."

"Event initiated." a light female voice said. It sounded like Sassi Patel. Taylor felt new tears for her. "Auto sequencing initiated."

The pod moved toward a nameless point in space. Somewhere in the blackness twenty seven thermonuclear devices prepared for their own destruction and to rip a hole in space time for Taylor's pod.

The pod was actually a modified civilian extreme sport reentry pod—a SunDiver IX—used by the adventurous to skip across the top of the Earth's atmosphere and make a fiery reentry. It provided complete virtual reality vision in all directions. To the pilot it appeared invisible.

Taylor was flying naked through space. He felt but could not see the Browning pistol—still hot from the shots fired—and the silver mission satchel in a net bag strapped between his thighs.

"Thirty seconds..."

Behind Taylor the Forlorn Hope and the Glorious Pain vaporized in blue fire.

"Recalculating..."

Oh shit, Taylor thought.

"Recalculating..."

"Warning! Suboptimal entry point! Suboptimal entry point in ten seconds... eighth ... seven... six... five... four... three... two... one..."

The twenty-seven warheads went off. Taylor never saw them. One point seven five nine seconds before the converging radiation could simultaneously crush and disintegrate him, the bubble of space he and the pod occupied was squeezed out of time.

The pod came spinning into the Twentieth Century one hundred and fifty-three miles above New Zealand. It bounced off the atmosphere over the Cook Islands, bounced again over a stretch of the Pacific Ocean called by geologists the Clarion Fracture Zone and finally penetrated the upper atmosphere over Monterrey, Mexico.

Taylor rode in naked, feeling like an angel cast down from Heaven, the Earth rising to receive him. Despite the pain and loss, or perhaps because of it, he whooped. "Wa-hoo! Here I come you motherfucker! I'm coming! I'm coming down on you! Shit!"

The world went red again.

7:08 PM EST, Saturday, May 25th, 1985, somewhere in rural Georgia.

"Jennifer, would you bring my binos?" Martha asked. She took her eye from the scope of her Model 25 Savage Walking Varminter rifle. She carefully pulled her finger from the trigger guard. She certainly wouldn't want to shoot that.

"What you got?" her companion and sometime lover said as she handed over the big army surplus binoculars.

"Naked man down in the flats, in the corn."

"Earl Walker got loose again?"

Martha studied the figure moving gingerly through the waist high corn. "Not unless he lost fifty pounds, got himself a really dark suntan and grew six, no make that seven inches of pecker."

"Seven... ooh, let me see!"

"Dirty girl," Martha said fondly. She handed over the glasses. "Here."

"Where are you going?"

"I'm gonna get a pair of George's old coveralls and go down and greet our guest."

"Give me a minute or two of lust and I'll pull the truck around. Bring some Bactene, that corn must be scratching him up something fierce. Dibs on soothing his wanger."

"Hello ladies," the stranger said when the two women pulled up in the battered pickup. He was holding a silver camera case or something in front of his privates. The army pistol he had been carrying was obviously behind his back. "where am I?"

"In a cornfield," Jennifer said out the driver side window.

"Jennifer!" Martha said. "You're about twenty miles outside of Athens Georgia."

"Thank you," he said. "My name is Taylor. Could you tell me the date?"

"Your army buddies play a trick on you?" Jennifer asked. "Doped you good?"

"Something like that."

"It's May seventeenth," Martha said. "I'm guessing you're one of those Special Forces fellows."

"Something like that. Nineteen Eighty-six?"

"Eighty-five." Jennifer said. "We already saw your pee-pee and your pistol, so you don't need to hide either."

"Jennifer! Excuse my friend, she's a randy old bitch." Martha hopped out of the truck and held up the overalls. "This is for you."

The man, Taylor, relaxed. This up close Martha could see he was indeed well endowed. He smiled. "I think we could be good friends but I can't visit long, I have some traveling to do."

"Where you headed?"

"Pennsylvania."