The Time Rippers Book 2: Gettysburg by Pete Bertino - HTML preview

CHAPTER 3 YANKEE SPY

49

Dig had more bad dreams the night before, he was back at his old place on Cedar street. It was

January and cold, he had returned from some

drunken bender and was carrying a bottle of his favorite vodka half empty. He stumbled towards

the master bedroom, 1979 is playing softly from behind the door.

“Junebug skipping like a stone”

He opens the door to a figure lying in bed,alone, covered with a sheet. A few wisps of hair is all that’s visible. He approached and could see it was hair the color of ichor with pink strands, he stood over her and pulled the cover from her face.

“Faster than we thought we'd go, beneath

the sound of hope”

Though it was Marisa’s hair, it was Cammy’s face that looked back at him. Her eyes wide, stared

directly into his with contempt. He could see she was wearing a dark green brassier, and the

freckles in her cleavage that he used to kiss to make Cammy giggle.

“It’s your fault that I died,” she said in a voice that was Marisa’s but it was warbling like a warped

vinyl on a record player. “ You’re still a loser she said as her voice became Cammys.

He dropped the sheet from his hand with icy

fingers and released the vodka bottle from the

other, the woman sat up in bed, she wore a dirty nightshirt and pink terry cloth robe, her face was old and wrinkled her hair was gray going on white, she began laughing like his mother had when his father did something stupid. He woke up before anything else could happen, he cried a little at the thought his sub conscious mind turned Marisa into ghost.

“I turned her into a ghost.” he said to himself in the darkness of the night.

When AM had awoken at sunrise, Dig had the fire started for breakfast and was packing his saddle bag. They would most likely be done by tomorrow at the latest and had plenty of food still but Dig wanted to try and catch some fish and forget his nightmares. Usually reading relaxed him, and he had all the books he could want on the Qpad, but in the end he preferred a book printed on paper.

He liked the spicy aroma of a thick paperback, and the feel of well worn yellowing pages. They gave

him as much joy as the words on them. In the mean time a stick of birch wood and night crawlers would have too do.So far all he had managed to hook were a few runty catfish and a bass that

wasn’t much bigger than his hand, he wanted to try and finish big today.

50

He had ridden Sugarfoot almost a mile upstream

before picking a spot to fish out from. After an hour without a bite he had a tug of war with

something that felt monstrous but after finally reeling it in discovered it was a branch still

covered with leaves which broke the string as he pulled it in the last few feet. He removed his

Stetson and wiped his sweaty brow with his

sleeve.

“I wake up in the morning

And I raise my weary head”

And for the past week he had had that Bon Jovi

song stuck in his head, Dig didn’t care for Bon Jovi. Though the movie that particular song was from kicked ass in his opinion. He walked over to

Sugarfoot and pulled the Colt from his saddlebag.

He quickly turned and faced his deadly foe, a

chipmunk nibbling on the shell of a nut a few feet from where he stood.

“You hoo, I’ll make you famous.” he said aiming down the sites of the revolver at the cunning Pat Garret.

The chipmunk turned away from Dig and wiggled

its tiny wisp of a tail towards him, as if it was trying to tease him. Dig bellowed laughter causing it to scamper away into the woods. He placed the six shooter back into the saddle bag giving

Sugarfoot a stoke on his muzzle before returning to his fishing pole.

“All that for a stick and some leaves.” he said pulling the birch rod out of the ground and letting it

fall.

At least the excavation had no serious setbacks.

They had dug down almost many feet and had only had the walls collapse twice.

When they got past six feet, Dig made a step ladder with a fallen tree that wasn’t too big for the hole but strong enough to support their weight when

climbing in and out. They hit water which proved impossible to keep out at first but had managed to keep it almost water free. If the cube had been any further down though it might have been swept away from whatever waterways laid underground.

Dig stayed for another hour after fixing the pole, he hooked a catfish that was smaller than it felt while pulling it in. He unhooked it, blew a loud

raspberry at the slimy sea creature and threw it back into the river and decided to head back to camp.

51

The humid morning was turning to a muggy

afternoon when he arrived. Dig listened for the usual sounds of AM slipping around in mud or the greeting whinny of his horse to Sugarfoot, but all was quiet. He got down from his steed and saw

everything was gone, even AM’s backpack.

The few times AM had been gone was when he

went in search of wood or to gather water

upstream, but he never took his horse and usually left his pack. That they were both gone made him worry. He walked around camp for a few minutes, waiting to see if maybe he would come right back.

After twenty minutes, he called out into the

wilderness.

“AM! Yo, Abe Lincoln! Come on man, the

Confederates are storming Normandy beach!”

But his joke was met with dead silence, he stood waiting for AM to come out of the woods or come trudging along the river bank chasing his fishing pole like what happened a week ago. But his

personal things were gone as well, it looked like AM had pulled up stakes and left.

He went to the hole they had been digging and

climbed down, the cube that they had been digging out was gone.

“Shit, I hope you didn't ditch me.”

He knew that was not the case, but was dumb

founded.

“Duh!” he said with a snap of his fingers.

He got out of the hole and removed his Qpad from his pack.

“Oh magic 8-ball, where is AM?” it was supposed to be a joke to keep his spirits up, but the joke sounded hollow and lame in his ears.

He clicked on the app and saw his own signal, with a quick drag across the screen he expanded the area the cube could see to its maximum before the signal became beeps he

52

would have to follow by ear. The signal was a

green dot at least five or six miles heading west, if it got any further out he would only be able to track them with audio.

“Where the hell you going?”

Was he in trouble? He'd have to be, why else did he leave with all his things and not leave a

message? The only other cubes besides their own was the one they came here for, there was nothing else for them to search for in this dimension. With more questions than answers, Dig grabbed his pack and mounted Sugarfoot and headed west.

Ashley and Rosa were praying at the churches

wooden tabernacle adorned with a blue lace

doylie, the color of Mary Mother of God, atop it was a statute of Mary bearing the marks of the

stigmata. It was a wedding gift for Ashley’s

husbands great grandfather, from a sculptor in

Berlin, with a Latin inscription at its base.

“Verbum dei in ore mater filiorum”

Ashley’s husband had received that as well as the leadership of the church when his father died.

When Rebecca had returned with the unconscious

man Ashley quickly took him and his belongings to the schoolhouse to include Rosa whom she also

trusted. She looked closely upon the black mirror and gasped when it lit up at the touch of a finger despite Rebecca telling her it would do so.

The mirror reacted to whomever touched it, the

glass was soft and was covered with a thin

material that looked like glass but was as flexible as paper, used to protect the black glass was

Ashley’s guess. The tiny box attached to it, shone a green light when the black glass was touched.

The other box was identical to it, which was what the small man had been digging up. Ashley rubbed the sides of the cube gently, the metal felt like steel to her, another material was banded around it,

making it look like it was adorned with crosses on all its sides, which was impossibly smooth with a

deep tan color.

“What are these things, Ashley?” asked Rebecca.

53

“They’re signs from God,” Rosa said quickly.

“gifts from Him, they bare the symbol of our

Lord’s suffering. It is the miracle we have prayed for!”

Ashley caught up in what Rosa was saying,

accidentally pressed the screen with three fingers and immediately a white light as bright as the sun filled their vision. They all gasped at the pure whiteness of the light. Ashley held it up, grazing the screen with her finger the light went out.

“These are gift’s for us to deliver.” Rosa said with a her heart thundering in her chest. “We could go to Washington city, but they are not worthy of this.

Sister Ashley, this is what we need to take to

Richmond. Their government would surely give us proper status if we brought them these, they are most surely weapons. The light that emits from the mirror, we have read of it in the good book dear sister, Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by a great light. The light of God.”

Ashley was quiet for a moment. Was the miracle

she prayed for within her grasp? She had led this church since the death of her husband from a heart attack at the age of sixty three when he froze to death in an outhouse. Ashley had gotten him drunk and when he was passed out she put him in a wheel

barrow and dumped him inside without a shirt during a deep freeze. His body was blue and his skin glazed in ice, he had frozen solid to the

ground. She had left a nearly empty whiskey bottle beside him to give the impression he had been

drunk and passed out on his way relieve himself.

She became Mrs Ashley Kelpius not very long after her sixteenth birthday when she entered into marital bliss.

However the only bliss she received from the

marriage was the church. Her husband’s great

grandfather Johannes Kelpius started the church in Pennsylvania because the state’s founder was a man of religious liberty and welcomed people of all faiths.

His great grandfather had been on a supposed

mission from God to announce that judgment day

would come in the year 1694, when the end failed to come a majority of its congregation left to

discover what else the new world had to offer

them.

The Society of The Women of the Wilderness was

a society for women in name only. It , like her Southern Baptist church from childhood, cursed

Eve for original sin. It infuriated her as a child when a stiff necked preacher announced that to her

one Sunday morning as if to humiliate her for being a woman.

She and another girl had stolen chalk from the blackboard inside the room they had Sunday

school and drew a stick figure person upon a flat slate rock with a line protruding from

54

between its legs, they had giggled hysterically until the preacher had come upon them and saw.

“Such wicked children.” he said with flaring

nostrils his face red and sweaty despite the

coolness of the morning.

He had grabbed only Ashley, possibly because she still held the chalk she assumed later when an

adult, and roughly took her inside the classroom.

The other children were still playing outside

waiting for the Sunday mass to begin too afraid of the good preacher to gawk for fear of punishment.

He closed the door behind them, and shoved her

into the corner.

“Face the corner.” he said forcefully.

Ashley, terrified that he would damn her to hell for the lewd drawing, obeyed quietly, as the preacher

opened a closet door and slammed it shut,she only whimpered when she felt him draw near.

“Do you know why God cast Adam and Eve from

paradise?” he asked almost whispering in her ear.

She shuddered when whiskers from his face

tickled her ear. Maybe if I answer correctly, he’ll forgive me, she thought.

“Because they ate from the tree of knowledge.” she said hardly above a whisper.

He was quiet for only a moment, when he suddenly lifted her dress and hit her with a hard flat object in her buttocks. She let out a scream.

“NO!” he shouted in her ear. “It was because of their lust!”

He swatted her again her backside felt like it had been set on fire, tears were streaming down her face.

“It was because of lust.” he said and gave her

another swat.

55

Ashley gritted her teeth as the flames of hurt coursed down her buttocks and legs she collapsed but the preacher grabbed her up by the arm, and stood her back up.

“Why did the Lord cast them out?” he shouted into her upturned face that was swollen with tears and covered in green phlegmy snot.

“Why?” he shouted, raising the paddle again.

“Because of their lust,” she said shaking so bad she thought she would fall apart into a heap of bones.

“Do you know what lust is, little one?” he asked in furious tones but no longer shouting.

She shook her head.

“It is the temptation of man by woman. You are a born sin, you are a daughter of Eve. It is you that caused God to cast out man from Paradise.”

He finally released her, buttocks singing a high

pitch pain of hallelujah from the preacher, she quickly ran back outside. She loved God as God

loved her she thought rubbing away the pain that would leave her bruised for another week, surely she could not be a born sin.The incident stuck with her for years, the humiliation of it slowly bubbling into anger like a roast over open flames.

Men, where would they be without women? Was

not the mother of God, Mary, the reason for any churches existence? Mary,a true women of the

world. Mother of the world.

“I shall one day hold you high, O holiest of

Mothers. I shall embody your example for all mothers.” she promised herself not long after her beating.

The paddling from the preacher was not church

doctrine, it was man’s doctrine. It was man’s

doctrine for her husband to take any girl or women among the congregation hence Ashley’s arranged

‘accident’ in the outhouse. When she became head of the church she had changed the doctrine, but not into any doctrine, a women’s doctrine.

56

Now, the leader of The Society of the Women of

the Wilderness, Ashley Klepius, with a grand prize for a government that was more sympathetic to its

women than there northern counterpart, she would be the one to bring home victory to the south. They would most certainly grant her church proper

status, once she presented President Davis with this gift from the Lord Himself, and she would be at the top of it all, and they would adore her as they did Mary mother of God.

She would be one of the most powerful women in

America, when most women were seen but not

heard. She would have their attention and when

they were glued to her she would create a great stir, an extreme gesture of male defiance, maybe burning corsets in the middle of a town square, she laughed at the idea.

“Sister?” asked Rebecca feeling a little uneasy from that laugh that seemed to come from nowhere.

All of these memories and fantasies went through her mind in just a few seconds.

Ashley spoke finally.

“We'll leave for Richmond immediately.”

“What about the small man?” asked Rosa.

Ashley looked upon his still unconscious body laying on the floor with narrow eyes, perhaps he could be of use. If he was the owner of this black mirror he will know how to use it. The three of them could keep him secured quite easily,

Rebecca, a small women herself, had little trouble carrying him inside.

“Bring him, he may not answer to us but I'm sure a rebel soldier could loosen his lips.”

Within the hour, they were a few miles west, they only told one other, Missy Cypress, a senior

member of the church at the respectable age of

seventy three who would over see mass until

Ashley returned. Ashley told Missy that the church community may be leaving and in a hurry when they returned, but nothing else.

They had no exact direction in mind other than

south. But the way south would not be direct for them. They took to a course that zigged and zagged west but slowly went south in case they were being followed. It was evening when AM regained

consciousness.

57

He was tied to a tree around the waist, his hands were bound together with another hank of rope. In front of him stood a women with auburn hair and a

curvy figure that was still noticeable despite her dress which looked too big, she held a rifle at her hip that was pointing at an area on him any man would dread.

It wasn't the same women from earlier, though she was there, and a gray haired old women with a

face covered in wrinkles standing next to her, they all looked upon him with contempt.

“What is your name?” the woman with the rifle

asked sharply.

“Abe Lincoln” he said too quickly to realize that was probably a bad answer.

But the women seemed to soften, her face showed a smile. She handed the old woman her rifle. She straightened her dress and sat down across from him, still smiling. It was a lovely beautiful smile that AM didn't trust.

He looked into her eyes that were icy blue, but lost focus when she slapped him in the face. His head rocked back and hit the tree and saw stars, his lower lip began to swell.

“The Lord removes the tongues of liars and feeds them to the hounds of hell. What's your name?” she

asked with the same smile.

“I was named after him, my parents knew him

when they were young. Our families left Kentucky together.”

Her eyes studied him, unsure. It was strange to name anyone after a politician, but her being

named after a tree would probably seemed just as strange to him, she thought.

“What is this you are carrying?” she held up the Qpad.

What could he tell her that she would understand?

To tell her what it was would probably only

confuse and frustrate her. Still he had to tell her something, or she might kill him.

“Just a few relics from a bygone era.”

58

“Are you a Federal?”

“A what?”

She slapped him again with out the smile. AM

grunted and felt the taste of blood fill his mouth before he could spit it out the women grabbed his face.

“Are you a Federal?” she said in almost an

inaudible hiss.

“No. I am an archaeologist. The objects you have are of no value except to a natural history

museum.”

“I think you are lying. These boxes are not natural but a gift from the One Most Righteous.”

“Praise be to Him.” the other two women said in unison.

Ashley stood back up roughly dropping the Qpad

and the second cube to the ground. She took back the rifle from Rosa, turned back around pulling the hammer on the rifle and aimed higher on AM.

“No value?” she asked him.

“None, the cubes are junk left over from cavemen during the last ice age.” he said steadily.

“Then its of no matter if I destroy them.” she said quickly aiming the rifle at the Qpad and cube.

“NO!” he said trying to rise from the tree, but succeeded in only slamming the back of his head into the tree.

She laughed a laugh that was cruel and pitiful, she laid the rifle down behind her and kneeled down to AM’s level again. She gripped him by the ear the same way her husband had done to her when he felt she was being a akläffen Hündin. He would grip

the top of her ear between his fingers and twist, which AM was now experiencing first hand.

59

Can’t seem to keep from getting my ass handed to me, he thought as it felt like his left ear was being ripped free of his face.

“Your lies will be paid back in hell,for now I will let you live.”

She made as if she were finished talking and loosened her grip on his ear, when AM tried to

take a breath of relief from the pain, she retightend her grip on his ear cartilage two fold. AM grunted through his teeth in agony.

“Should you try to escape or do something I find inappropriate...” she said simply, letting go of his ear with fingers painted red from his blood and walked away.

Letting the silence answer for her, AM had no

doubt this woman would make him suffer more, he thought while trying to determine how bad his ear was bleeding. The top half of it felt wet and burned as if it had been coated in acid.

And the look she had given him was the kind he

read about in his uncles manuscript from the man with the pipe, they were on a mission an important one. As to who they were, he would have to listen

closely in order to find out and hope they would reveal their intentions.

“Sister Rebecca, will you warsh the pot for

supper?” asked the older one.

It was a Pennsylvania dialect, wash was

pronounced warsh. They asked if he was a Federal, though not from the south they were

sympathetic to the southern rebels. They were not very well equipped to be working for the rebel

army, the south could hardly feed and cloth their own soldiers

They went through his pack, but AM carried

nothing bearing the time he arrived from, except the Qpad and the cubes of course.

AM was looking around as discreetly as possible, but the auburn haired woman, Ashley he thought

that was her name, was studying him closely.

If he was just some farmer this woman would have killed him outright, because a small time farmer was just a loose end. He could feel that predatory stare even though he looked away, no she was too smart to believe AM came across this object by

chance, he heard them talk about God the way

Islamic extremists talked about Allah.

60

They are probably under the assumption this was ordained by God, he thought. A gift from God to vanquish His enemies, their enemies, the Federal government of the USA. AM’s blood froze when

he realized he knew where they were taking him, the Confederate States.

The only advantage AM had was Dig, they didn’t know he wasn’t alone and that he could possibly be close behind. They would probably stand guard in turns as well. They had a rifle were as Dig had

the Colt but the rifle was long range giving these women the advantage. They were eager to make

camp early it seemed from the haste they made in cooking a meal which was a few scraps that AM

did not get a share of.

61