Excerpt: Dying In The Past

Ruthie McDonald Terwilliger watched with horrified fascination at the deadly rocket that had been launched at her. Only moments before, she had been in the camp of the Army of the Potomac, commanded by General McClellan, the new dictator of the United States of America. Suddenly all that had vanished, and now she, her friend Denise Han, and her enemy Sarah Rickert were on a hillside on the edge of a forest, watching a massive army march as if into battle. Strange wheeled contraptions were lumbering along behind the ranks of armed men, and several of them had just fired rockets from long rails attached to the tops of them. One of these rockets was speeding, with deadly accuracy, straight at the three of them.
They were less than seconds from certain death, when Ruthie felt a tingling sensation in her left arm, just above the wrist. Instantly she commanded the timeband on her wrist to stop the flow of time for her, and at the same time sent out a general command for the two other timebands in range to do the same.
The rocket, with a trail of fire and smoke arching out behind it like the tail of some exotic bird, appeared to be suspended in mid-air, less than twenty yards above the three women. Ruthie looked at the other two. Sarah appeared frozen, locked in a single moment of time, but Denise turned toward Ruthie and smiled.
“Good – I got your timeband linked to mine in time,” Ruthie said. “That was a narrow escape.”
“What about Sarah?” Denise asked. Ruthie couldn’t hear her, since sound waves were frozen in time as well, but she could read Denise’s lips. “Are we going to leave her there, to be blown up by whatever that thing is up there?”
Ruthie studied the frozen figure of the older woman. “I’d like to. If the tables were turned, I think she’d do the same to us.”
“Ruthie, no! Remember, she’s the only one who knows where my son is. You can’t let her die here.”
“I know. I know we have to save her if we can. But I’m not sure we can do it. Your timeband was programmed to recognize me as an ally, and I could link with it and take control. Sarah’s timeband is programmed to block mine, and there’s nothing I can do override that. Besides, her timeband will probably come out of sleep mode in the next few moments, and with luck, she’ll be able to avoid the rocket as well. In fact, she’s probably already here, a few seconds in our future, listening to this conversation.”
“And if she can’t?” Denise asked.
“Then we’ll give her a decent burial, a better one than she deserves, and we’ll find William some other way. What else can we do? We can’t move her – with this rate of time flow, her inertia is almost infinite. We certainly can’t stop a speeding rocket. I think she’s on her own.”
Denise looked unhappy with the verdict, but she couldn’t think of anything else to suggest. But she was a physicist, and she understood the laws of physics that prevented anything from altering the inevitable collision between the rocket and the hillside they occuped. “All right. Come on, let’s get a safe distance away.”
Ruthie and Sarah retreated down the reverse slope of the hillside, taking refuge in a small hollow that would provide cover from flying shrapnel. Getting as low as they could to the ground, they could just barely see Sarah’s head and shoulders above the rise of the hill. The fiery rocket hung poised over her like some malevolent dragon.
“Ready?” Ruthie asked, then added, with not much sincerity, “Good luck, Sarah.” Then she allowed time to flow normally for them again.
The rocket smashed into the hillside and exploded. Flames, smoke, and dust shot out in all directions. Ruthie couldn’t tell if Sarah had been caught in the explosion, and she was glad that the expanding cloud of smoke obscured any severed body parts.
“Did she escape in time?” Denise asked. “I didn’t see…”