Read Online Ancient Fire by Mark London Williams - Free Book Online

all for my own good.
    “Devices like that can be tracked
electronically. We can’t take any chances.” That’s Mr. Howe again,
explaining for about the twenty-hundredth time why I have to be
bored out of my skull.
    Don’t they know I need something to distract
me? When you’ve been time-traveling…you’re left kind
of… haunted by things. Like the colors and
eerie quiet of the Fifth Dimension. Or the fact that I left a
couple people behind in Alexandria who were in big trouble…a week
ago. And who knows what shape they’re in now?
    “Here. Use these to pass the time. On us.”
Mr. Howe hands me a pack of baseball cards. I don’t know why they
still call them cards. Tradition, I guess. They’re more like small
circuit boards, with moving holograms on the front.
    Howe’s given me a “Hall Heroes” pack—in other
words, ’grams of players recently drafted into the Hall of Fame. I
got a Barry Bonds, a Ken Griffey Jr., and a Mark McGwire. Not bad.
There’s Bonds, hitting number 700 by the same bay I’m probably
being driven over right now. There’s McGwire, breaking the
single-season home run record, which Bonds would break again.
    I’ve seen old cards in collectors’ shops, of
course. They don’t move at all. With the ’grams, you get to watch a
bunch of career highlights over and over again, so you don’t get
bored quite as fast.
    Now if I can just imagine Barry Bonds as a
werewolf, I’ll have a Barnstormer game.
    They woke me up this morning to come here.
I’d been dreaming again. I keep seeing the colors spilling out from
the lighthouse. And the rhino charging the time-ship. That seems to
be another problem with time travel—you get less and less sure
where your dreams leave off and your actual life begins.
    My dad still wasn’t anywhere around. Mr. Howe
said he would take me to meet him.
    “Where is he?” I asked.
    “We can’t tell you. But you need to come with
us.”
    “Why? Are you taking me to him?”
    “It’s only an hour’s drive,” he said. But
that didn’t answer my question.
    He tried to give me what he thought was a
reassuring smile, but it didn’t sit right on his face. Instead, he
looked like someone waking up from surgery, when the knockout gas
hasn’t quite worn off. Like the smile came from outside him and
wasn’t an expression he could make on his own.
    Now we seem to be going down, driving on a
long ramp, or in an echoey tunnel. The windows may be blacked out,
but you can still feel slopes. And hear sound.
    We stop and the sliding door is flung open.
More uniformed guys are standing around. I step out, and the air
feels damp. It’s some kind of giant underground garage with rows of
lights way overhead. Lots of cement. Pipes running along the walls.
We’re walking toward what seems like a complex of offices behind a
large Plexiglas window. Why put in a window? What’s so great about
a view of a dark, damp cement garage?
    I see some more guys in DARPA jumpsuits
running around. “Where are we?”
    “We can’t really tell you,” Mr. Howe tells
me, and I’m starting to wonder why I bother asking any questions at
all.
    “It’s an old BART tunnel,” a voice says. “But
since the train doesn’t come through here anymore, it’s like our
own private station.”
    It’s a woman’s voice. I turn, and she’s
stepping out of a private train that whooshed in silently from one
of the dark tubes. She’s in a blue business suit, and her hair is
blond, streaked with gray. She wears it loose. When she smiles, at
least, it seems more real than when Mr. Howe tries it. “They had to
build several different subway tunnels after the last earthquake.
This was one of the old ones they left behind. A real fixer-upper.
But office space is so expensive aboveground. This was a steal.” I
stare at her a moment. She seems so different from Mr. Howe that
I’m beginning to think it was less strange running into a dinosaur.
“Who are you?”
    She shrugs. “Number Thirty.” She