Millennium Crash Read online

  MILLENNIUM CRASH

  JAMES LITHERLAND

  www.OutpostStories.com

  Copyright 2013 James Litherland

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover design by James Litherland

  Disclaimer: As should be obvious, this book is a complete work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or things is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 | Two Crashes in Two Thousand

  Chapter 2 | A Desperate Embrace

  Chapter 3 | And Then There were Eight

  Chapter 4 | The Former Farmer’s Tale

  Chapter 5 | Head over Heels

  Chapter 6 | Three Blind Mice

  Chapter 7 | The Banker’s Tale

  Chapter 8 | Ties that Bind

  Chapter 9 | Partners in Crime

  Chapter 10 | The Realtor’s Tale

  Chapter 11 | No Way Out

  Chapter 12 | The Blood-Stained Pavement

  Chapter 13 | The Former Preacher’s Tale

  Chapter 14 | Abandoned

  Chapter 15 | Destination Unknown

  Chapter 16 | The Sheriff’s Tale

  Chapter 17 | The Slow Path

  Chapter 18 | Addition and Subtraction

  Don’t Miss My Next Book

  Also By James Litherland

  About the Author

  Dedication

  To God be the Glory

  (and all criticism should be directed at the author.)

  Chapter 1

  Two Crashes in Two Thousand

  June 30th, 2000 Midtown Manhattan

  ANYA kept her eyes open as reality rapidly reassembled around her—a concrete curb beneath her feet, the back and front ends of two taxicabs parked on the asphalt ahead of her—and about thirty meters in front of her stood the tall, slim, white-haired form of Professor John. He had been standing right beside her the previous moment.

  In the few seconds it took to begin processing the new surroundings that were taking shape, Anya felt a vague sense of panic racing up her spine, an anxiety she didn’t understand. Her instinct forced her to shout.

  “Professor!”

  Anya watched as he turned toward her, confusion and disorientation plain on his face. While her brain still grasped at the nature of the jeopardy, the sound of tires screeching intruded upon everything, and a large black vehicle slammed into view—and into the professor. Reality crashed upon Anya with a vengeance.

  Suddenly her feet were free, and she dashed between the cabs and into the street, head swiveling in every direction as horns honked all around her. She saw John lying awkward across the back windshield of another cab down the road. The SUV had braked hard as it hit him, propelling the professor into the rear of the taxi, which had also screeched to a halt.

  Anya darted through the newly created parking lot to help John. Shouted swear words swelled into the continuing cacophony of car horns blasting, the overwhelming noise pressing upon her still struggling senses. The transition from the sterile, quiet conference room of a moment ago to this raging sea of stimulation was a bad jolt. The fall from a feeling of excitement for their journey to this horror deeply jarred her.

  But she was adapting quick to the new environment. Even before she reached the sprawled figure of the professor, she’d begun to suspect it was hopeless. Up close, neither the blood nor the jagged bone poking out of his thigh disturbed her. She’d seen so much worse when she’d been a nurse. What made Anya’s stomach turn over with insipient nausea was trying to digest the fact of John’s death, the sudden and violent loss of her beloved mentor.

  She wanted to freeze, to simply shut down. The whole project stood in shambles before it had even started. Her old training took over though, and the urgency of the situation prodded her into action.

  She checked his watch. It’d been broken, likely shattered beyond any hope of repair like the professor himself. She fought back the tears. She didn’t have time to worry about the destroyed device but slid the watch off his wrist and into her pocket without hesitation. She couldn’t just leave it.

  Anya didn’t want to leave the professor either, but she had no choice. She looked up and around then and realized a large crowd had gathered, staring at her. They probably thought she was robbing John’s body. Several shouted, others pointed, and some made gestures presumably rude—but no one tried to impede her flight as she ran from the street, diving heedlessly into that crowd. Something else had already attracted their attention away from her.

  At first she couldn’t fathom the lack of familiar faces—she had scanned the sea of those around her and kept looking as she passed through the people standing there. But she’d recognized no one. She’d not only lost the professor, she’d lost them all.

  Turner and Nye, at least, had been standing less than a meter away when they’d all Traveled. Anya stumbled along the sidewalk, searching. Where are they now?

  Anya herself had been standing right at John’s shoulder—almost touching—and he’d materialized quite a distance from her. A fatal separation. The others must have been similarly scattered, and Anya needed to focus on finding them. They could be in all kinds of trouble themselves.

  Her mind was spinning as she walked on, trying to think. She couldn’t deal with all the implications of the professor’s death and the destruction of his watch—not now. The critical thing was to regroup. Then they could deal with the rest. Together.

  She continued to move away from the point of arrival, the scene of the accident. She had assumed the contemporary authorities would be en route—she could not afford to deal with them, not without identification. She’d have to rely on Turner and Nye having the sense to search for her.

  Anya almost stopped dead in her tracks. She’d believed she had kept her wits about her, but clearly they were still scrambled. Worried that she hadn’t put enough distance between herself and the scene, she waited until she’d rounded a corner and walked down another half block before she ducked into a dim recess to check her watch.

  She took several deep breaths to calm herself. Only then did she lift her head and notice the actual city around her, great towering structures crammed onto this small island and thrusting so far up into the sky as to drape almost everything in shadows. What a sight. To think that humanity had once built such magnificent enclaves. No wonder.

  Anya sighed and shook herself, bringing her focus back to the matter at hand. Digital watches with varied functions were supposed to be ubiquitous in this time, so she’d no concern about drawing undue attention by activating the locator application.

  The screen didn’t show any blips to indicate another device in range, but a blinking red bar on the right edge showed the direction of her nearest helper. East. At least it should be one of hers.

  Hopefully the other research leaders had kept their heads sufficiently to be rounding up their own charges already. Or vice versa. At least they appeared to have all landed in the same time period. This geographical separation, devastating as it had been, at least for the professor, was a minor irritation compared to the disaster it would have been if they’d become lost in time.

  Anya checked her watch once more, confirming they had arrived when they were supposed to. This was the summer of two thousand and the transition from the second to the third millennium. When so much had changed. Then she left the alcove and began tracking down her misplaced helpers.

  As Anya stalked the closest of her fellow Travelers, she kept a close eye on the locator screen while trying to do the math in her head. Hard for a historian perhaps, but she’d had plenty of practice when she was a nurse. The professor had been mere centimeters from her when they�
�d left, but he had come through tens of meters distant. And the rest?

  There must be an algorithm that would account for the spatial dispersion. But she couldn’t calculate based on an unknown equation—without more data points, she didn’t even know if the progression was arithmetic or exponential. What she could and did understand was that they were separated by a considerable distance in a giant metropolis in a foreign time. And they might be trapped here.

  The research leaders’ ability to Travel was limited, certainly. Even once Anya had found the rest of her team and reunited with the other teams, they couldn’t dare make the attempt until they had some understanding of the strange and unexpected effect that had separated them. And returning home had become problematic as well.

  Two long blocks of wading through the streams of busy pedestrians and she finally saw a blip on the screen. She eased her pace and considered the results. As one of the helpers registered ahead of her, the indicator light began blinking to show the direction of the nearest device beyond her range. South.

  Anya was momentarily tempted to go traipsing after that one, since the blip on her screen remained stationary, but a pigeon in the hand was tastier than one in the sky. And once she’d found another Traveler she would no longer be alone.

  She grew irritated as her closest helper continued to stay wherever they were instead of coming to meet her. She could imagine different explanations for that, depending on which of her helpers she was tracking—when she crossed over to the next block and saw the small coffee shop snuggled into the corner of the first floor of the building, she suspected who she was about to find. Nye.

  Indeed, as Anya eased her way into the crowded space, she spotted her helper sitting on a stool at the counter with a look of rapture on her face. It must have been the aroma or the place itself, since none of them yet had any funds for purchasing anything. That included a simple cup of coffee.

  The professor had carried some contemporary cash on him from his previous trips, but he hadn’t supposed his team leaders would have any immediate need for funds—and Anya had not considered taking the wallet off his body. Now getting ahold of some of their money had become an urgent matter if they wanted to eat. I’m already getting peckish.

  Anya gritted her teeth as she waved, beckoning Nye to follow her out, away from the lure of caffeine and back outside. The girl with her big round glasses and straight brown hair and bangs hanging down across her forehead pouted. But at least she obeyed her leader.

  Once out in the open, her mouth popped wide again as she gazed around her in wonder. “It’s all so incredible. To see this city at its height.”

  Anya sighed. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity to soak it all up. Right now we have more pressing problems.”

  “But it’s so very different from digging through the ruins. The city’s brimming with life. Teeming.” It sounded as if she were already writing her dissertation in her head.

  Anya grabbed the woman’s wrist and pulled her along. “Come on, now. We’ve got to find Turner.” That should get Nye moving.

  Unfortunately, the girl did turn her attention to what her leader had been saying. “But where is the professor? Shouldn’t he be here with us?”

  Anya clenched her jaw to force back the tears, but her eyes welled up all the same. Thankfully Nye was trailing behind her and couldn’t see. “You don’t worry about the professor.” This wasn’t the time to try to deal with his death. “We must concern ourselves with locating the others.”

  Nye had to ask more questions though. “What happened? Why were none of the rest around when I came through?”

  Anya shook her head. “I don’t know. They were supposed to have tested everything so no problems would crop up when we actually Traveled.”

  “Machines always mess up. Computers are the worst.”

  Anya sighed and glanced over her shoulder at the girl. “What about the people who construct the machines? Program the computers?”

  “Of course people fail. That’s no excuse.”

  Anya almost smiled. “Well, I wish someone had considered more possibilities when they coded the locator apps. For one thing, they only indicate the eight compass directions, and the screen shows just the one plane.”

  “What do you mean?” Anya could hear the confusion in Nye’s voice. “What’s wrong with that?”

  Anya shook her head. She wondered how Nye could be so jaded and yet so unpractical at the same time. “Look up, Nye.”

  She didn’t look behind her, but nonetheless she could feel Nye craning her neck to gaze at the sky overhead. “It’s strange to see so much sky blocked out by buildings.”

  Anya couldn’t hold back a smile this time. “It’s those buildings you ought to be looking at, Nye. I know you’re used to seeing them as crushed mounds beneath you, but try seeing them as they are now.” She shouldn’t have to be telling Nye this. She wondered how an archaeologist could manage without using their imagination.

  Anya explained. “Maybe you failed to study how the Traveling works, Nye.” Or how it’s supposed to work. “But it’s possible to land above ground level, if there’s something solid to land on. So Turner, or any of the others, could have arrived on any floor of one of these buildings you see.”

  “Oh.” The wheels in Nye’s brain must have been turning by now, thinking things through. The woman was smart enough when she made the effort, and she’d likely suffered from the same initial disorientation as Anya and the professor. Though Nye did tend to get lost in her own head anyway.

  Anya checked her watch to make sure they were still moving in the right direction. “Actually, seeing how much is above ground here, chances are several of us might have materialized on some floor of one of these buildings. You didn’t, did you?”

  Nye had begun walking faster, matching Anya’s own pace. “No. I arrived right outside that coffee shop. I would have thought it was my prayer being answered except I didn’t have any money for a cup of coffee. But the aroma was amazing. That’s why I went in, to enjoy the sights and the smell.”

  Anya nodded to herself. Of course. “So despite the probabilities, that’s three of us that arrived outdoors.”

  “Three?” When Anya didn’t respond, Nye continued, “Doesn’t that argue that the rest of them will have come through outside as well?”

  “Maybe.” Not necessarily. “There’s likely a bias in favor of ground level entry, and perhaps against arriving on the inside of a structure.” Anya did not want to discuss time-travel mechanics or why landing at street level wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “The point is, if any of the others are in one of these aptly named skyscrapers, our locator apps won’t be much help since they can’t indicate up or down.” So determining what floor someone was on would be a problem. But I have an idea about that.

  Nye shook her head. “But wouldn’t anyone who arrived on the twentieth floor, for example, just go right to the ground floor. Then they’d start searching—everyone would be searching for each other on the same level.”

  It would be nice to think so. “You didn’t start looking for me at all, Nye.”

  “I knew someone would find me. If I just stayed put. And anyway, I wanted to get started with my research.”

  “Coffee?” Anya shook her head. “And if you had landed on the twentieth floor?”

  Nye’s grin was fleeting. “Come to think of it, I believe a lot of the workplaces of this time had free coffee available for employees and customers.” Her tone was wistful. “I might’ve actually gotten a cup.”

  Anya sighed as she envisioned Nye working her way down each floor in search of a caffeine fix. Then she noticed the directional bar on her locator swing back to the east as they passed one of the skyscrapers. Turner must be inside.

  She stopped and stared up at the imposing sight before her. “Well, unless he’s just standing around on the ground floor waiting to be found, like you—we’ll see how this works.”

  Nye looked up the tower of gleaming windows. “Tu
rner’s in there?”

  “Appears to be. Now to try and find him.” The great revolving glass doors of the entrance intimidated Anya, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her. She grabbed Nye’s wrist again, staring at the doors for a long moment. To make sure. “Stay right with me.” And she plunged them both into the building.

  Inside, a vast lobby with marble floors made the place seem huge, despite the walls and ceiling. And everyone around them seemed to know where they were going. A uniformed guard stood around casually as the throngs of people streamed around him, and Anya briefly considered asking him for help. I can always come back.

  First they would try to find Turner on their own, though Anya wouldn’t expect that to be simple. She didn’t expect anything to be easy anymore. Indeed, since her locator app still showed a direction rather than indicating Turner with a blip, the man had to be outside the range of the field, which was roughly a hundred meters.

  Since he had to be farther away than that and in a big commercial building like this each story would be around five meters, they should find Turner on the twentieth floor or higher. Now she could put her idea to the test. If she observed the locator screen as they moved upward and noted at what point Turner became a blip, she ought to be able to roughly estimate how many floors above he could be found. If he stays in one place.

  Anya walked straight to the middle of the lobby to a pedestal displaying a directory describing what was on each floor, dragging Nye along behind her. She noted there were forty-four floors in all. And she snapped a picture of it with her watch for future reference, because she was sick of being unprepared when everything kept going wrong.

  Now the question was how best to get to the upper floors. With at least twenty floors to climb, she discounted the stairs and headed for the far side of the lobby where a long row of elevators stood. Normally such conveniences were for the sick or infirm, but here everyone seemed to be using them. It made sense, of course, with forty-four floors. But she saw there was a staircase in each corner on either side of those elevators, so some people had to be fit enough for the climb. I am, but I don’t have the time.