Read Online I Can Barely Breathe by August Verona - Free Book Online

away, as the wall clock informed the
guys it was set two hours fast. Passwords were required to access
the computers, just as they had expected. Carver looked at the tile
floor to find a small torn-off piece of paper. He knelt down and
picked it up.
    “What is it?” Tom asked.
    “It says, ‘Think of the craft.’ It’s
nothing.” He tossed the paper on the counter and shook his head.
“Let’s get out of here, before we get caught. There’s nothing
here.” Disappointed, they walked to the door and headed for the
elevator.
    ***
    Gary Whittier stood in an empty field. He
felt proud. The afternoon sun poured down on him; he could feel it
penetrating his gray wool sweater, as a cool October breeze lightly
pelted his pressed black pants. The field was an easy choice for
such an experiment. With a large dirt lot and forest on three of
its four sides, what could be better?
    Jon, however, was nervous, but he knew his
mission. It all seemed easy enough. And, by the time the day was
done, he would be able to call himself a true explorer. Not that he
ever strived for such a thing; his accomplishments were usually
more academic. He did, however, as a child, read books about men
exploring worlds beyond Earth. Those books, for a time, sparked in
him a need to do something truly great. This experiment would be
his one great contribution to the world. He imagined that, if the
project weren’t classified, he’d probably go down in the history
books.
    A blue-and-chrome open-cockpit hovercraft
floated silently a few feet from them. Whittier had built the craft
to replace the actual crashed UFO from 1955. It was a dumbed down
version but for their purposes it would work fine. Inside the
machine was the oval metallic time device. The four coils of alien
symbols were mostly deciphered, their translation written next to
each symbol in black permanent marker. The doctor and Jon had been
busy. The first coil represented the month; the second, the day;
the third, the year; and the fourth, the time.
    Gary had noted, just after the crash, which
symbols were already selected. He had assumed correctly that those
symbols indicated the exact time the craft had first appeared in
the sky that day, giving him the pieces of the puzzle he needed
most: a starting point.
    Once the doctor decided to think of the
craft , it occurred to him that the vessel never intended to
touch the ground, but to remain detached, with no actual contact
with Earth other than the air around it. The hint he received also
helped him see that the presumed five occupants within the
hovercraft—based on the crashed UFO’s seat count—would most likely
power the device, which would feed on their consolidated
energies.
    To replicate that energy, a large battery
was connected to the craft. He had learned the hard way, and
Sorrow’s Sky had paid the price, that if only one occupant’s energy
was transferred to the time device it failed to carry out the time
shift, bringing disastrous results that rippled out and affected
the flow of time—which caused past events to find the present.
    Jon glanced beyond the empty field to the
town, littered with giant redwood trees. He wiped his damp hands on
his blue jeans and straightened the sleeves of his black suede
jacket, then nervously adjusted the collar of his white button-up
shirt. He was as ready as he’d ever be. The clock tower’s glowing
face showed three minutes to four. “When will the time shifts
stop?” he asked.
    “I’m afraid they may continue to spread
through the town for a few more weeks, maybe a month. We really did
a number with this device. This is our chance to correct that. The
trees will be gone soon, and the townspeople will forget. Though I
did hear that a soldier came back to life at the cemetery.” He
laughed. “That probably scared the crap out of a few of the
townfolk.”
    “I heard. How is that even possible?”
    “Jon, that cut on your arm that opened up
back in the lab, where do you think it