After I paid Miss Jean, I headed back to the Jeep and helped Danetta lug the money case to our room door. I heard the river mumbling and gurgling in the darkness. I pulled out the room key, a piece of metal with jagged teeth about the length of my pinky finger. A piece of plastic, bearing the room number, was attached to the key by a small metal ring.

“That’s a weird plasti key,” Chura asked.

“That isn’t the key,” I said. “This is.” I held up the metal key. I inserted it into the lock and tried to turn it. I jiggled it and tried again, this time with success. As I pushed opened the door, a musty smell hit me.

“So, if the power grid goes down, we can still unlock the door?”

“Yep.”

We set the case on a small table near the window. I saw a climate control unit there and figured out how to make it blow cool air.

A bit prematurely, we agreed on sleeping arrangements. They insisted that I take one of the beds, while Chethra and Danetta claimed the other. Chura got the floor by default, because she was the youngest. I pulled the BFG 3000 out of the back of my pants and laid it on the nightstand, then flopped on my bed. After I bounced a couple times, I lay there only a second before sensing the bed’s effort to suck me into its middle. I gave in and just moved to that spot. Chura, sitting next to Chethra at the table, flipped through a Bible that said it was placed by the Gideons.

Danetta pulled two bills from the case. “Falcon, why don’t we go look for some era clothes while you get cleaned up?”

“I’d rather nobody go out there until we have to.” I looked at my mud-smeared clothes. My shirt had a rip in the right shoulder from debris thrown by Glock and Speel’s errant skyporter blast. Snags ran up the front of my pants, the aftermath of briers while riding Theo’s ATV. “I guess I can’t put these back on, though.”

“Wish us luck,” Danetta said. Chura and Chethra stood up and followed her to the door.

“All three of you are going?” I asked.

“Safety in numbers,” Danetta said. She opened the door. “Bye.”

They would be gone a while. For the first time in years, I was going to take a bath. With hot enough water and a little imagination, I could transport myself back to my flat’s hot tub.

I soaked myself into almost feeling human. I scrubbed everywhere, then scrubbed the important parts again. I hummed a tune whose title escaped me, and longed for one of Theo’s cigars. I only indulged in such contraband when I was with him. A glass of wine would have been nice, too. Instead, I settled for water from the tap, in a squat glass with a strange, wavy exterior.

My glass held high, I said, “Here’s to you, Theo, you sumbitch.” I took a swig. “And here’s hoping I don’t make you an invalid next time.”

I rested my head against one end of the tub while watching my toes play with the water faucet on the other end. Bored with that, I put my feet back in the water and closed my eyes. Stillness and my occasional sloshing of the water helped clear my head before I thought more about what we were doing.

Was there any possiblity of success? Tampering with the timeline almost always results in problems, and going back for a second effort usually makes things worse. Havoc doesn’t discern between good and bad intentions.

I climbed out and grabbed a towel from the wire shelves, then saw in the mirror a man I wasn’t sure I knew. The hair was the same, the face familiar, but inside was a feeling of uncertainty both frightening and invigorating. Besides a few exciting jumps in my past, life was fairly predictable before I met Danetta and her girls. Get up, go to work, collect a fee, provide a service, come home. On that day, I had done all those things and much more. Tomorrow, I would check off only the first thing on that list, and what came next was anybody’s guess.

Wrapped only in my towel, I turned on the room’s display device. It was called a “Zenith.” The image was mottled with white spots and an annoying hiss droned just below the level of the dialogue. I made out one line — “Not the craw, the craw!” — which brought laughs from an audience, then turned it off.

I heard a key working at the door, then saw the knob turn. As the door opened, I checked my towel to make sure all vitals still were covered.

Danetta peeked in. “Oh, good, you’re not completely nude.” She pushed her way in and Chura and Chethra followed.

“Barely,” Chethra said.

Chura bounced her gaze around the room.

“I see you have something there. Those for me?”

“And for us. But it’s pretty hard to tell the difference,” Chura said.

They had found the local general store manager locking up and flashed money to convince him to extend his hours.

“He gave us no trouble at all about our skin color,” Chethra said.

“Great. Maybe we’ll have good luck tomorrow, too,” I said.

I accepted a red, plaid flannel shirt and a pair of bib overalls, along with a pair of waterproof, steel-toe boots. Except for the shirt colors, the ladies’ outfits were identical to mine. I retreated to the restroom to change. When I returned, we no longer looked like we had stepped back in time; we looked like we belonged there.

Chura turned on the Zenith and worked to find a replay that was watchable. Chethra studied the map we had pulled from the Jeep’s dashboard compartment.

“Hey, Falcon, can you come outside with me so we can talk?” Danetta said.

“Sure.”

We walked down to the river’s edge. Its sound was much more relaxing than the splashes I made in my bath. Without a word, we both sat on a large rock perfect for that purpose and for several minutes watched the moonlight dance on the water.

I broke the ice. “So, do you think we can do this?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes. We have to, Falcon. I can’t be responsible for all those deaths, but I can’t give up what we made better, now that I’ve seen it.”

“I understand.” I leaned over to pick up a flat rock. “What I can’t understand is why you didn’t keep working on change in our time.”

“Some of our members were talking about using eco-terrorism. Driving tillers over golf course greens, blowing up factories that pollute the air –”

“Planting fast-growing, rogue trees that drip sap on your enemies?”

“Joke all you want. They wanted to do some stupid things that would have got us shut down.” She tucked a few straggling hairs behind her left ear. “I just can’t believe I ended up causing so many deaths, after all the grief I gave them.”

I flung the rock, skipping it half way across the river. “You chose names for yourselves. Why did you choose Danetta?”

“It’s Hebrew for ‘God is my judge.’”

“Oh.”

“I know. Don’t say it.”

(continue to Part 15)