I heard a loud knocking on the stagecoach door, sounding distinctly like the barrel of a gun.
The man doing the knocking shouted, “Git out!”
Since I was the only passenger inside the coach, I was the one who was expected to be “gitting” out. Dressed in dark gray suit jacket, (well worn) black jeans from the future, and a charcoal gray fedora, I kept my finger firmly placed on the button of the Capture Instrument I held in my left hand.
Slowly pushing the door open, I lowered myself down to the running board. I stepped onto the trail, equal parts sand and rock.
In front of me were two men, one tall and one short. Scruffy bandits of the Old West. The real thing, not the facsimile version acted out in Westerns made in the mid-Twentieth seen on a wall-sized VidScreen in a climate-controlled room, far in the future, 122 floors above Central Park Lake. Each of them pointed pistols and sour expressions at me. Wearing crumpled black hats, sweaty neckerchiefs, week-old beards. Clothes that no doubt hadn’t been washed in months. The dusty breeze blowing away their pungent odor was a welcome addition to the California mountain pass landscape.
The taller of the two stepped forward, pointing his Colt 45 at either my stomach or my thigh. I wasn’t sure which.
He said, “Hands up!”
Staring into his eyes, I did nothing, except grip the instrument tighter.
Predictably, he shot me.
He grazed me in the left, outer thigh. I gritted my teeth, then thanked my luck or his bad aim. But mostly I thanked my leg covering made of the same material as my bulletproof vest, doing what I’d designed it to do.
Pointing his gun more directly at my chest, he said, “You look like a smart one, maybe from back East. Even wearing a pair of those fancy spectacles on your nose. Don’t you know you’re supposed to hold your hands sky high in the air, while you’re being robbed?”
“I was about to…” I said, when he shot me a second time.
The bulletproof vest hadn’t yet been invented, so he had no idea as to why I’d fallen, shouted out in pain, yet no blood streamed from my chest.
I stood up and aimed the Capture Instrument at the two of them. Before they could even think about moving away, they were looped into a burst of sprayed plasticine expandable mesh, and a round-ish-edged square container began forming around their limbs and torsos. Practically invisible under the bright desert sun, the clear plasticine enmeshed itself to their squirming bodies, as if they were one two-headed and eight-limbed living organism stuck inside a compact portable jail cell. The mesh had been coated with a mixture of Pharma Grade liquid Codeine, and OpiumDer 49 – formulated for speedy absorption. Within minutes, their squealing turned to whimpering as a disabling grogginess settled in. The plasticine cell gripped their bodies, until they looked like nothing so much as a square box of strangely glued together human parts.
Our stagecoach driver glanced over his shoulder in a state of shock at the scene playing out beside his coach. I looked up at him and said, “Jasper, remember how much I’m paying you, and what for?”
“You betcha, Mr. Alexander,” he said, while pointing down the road. “I ain’t seeing nothing but the road up ahead, taking us to the passes we’ve got to make it through before sundown.”
“Thanks again for your discretion,” I said.
Right on time, a new turbulence was created – making the dry desert air next to the coach shimmer for several seconds, while the time continuum opened up into a compact whirling tornado. To an outside viewer, Anna would’ve appeared from out of nowhere. Only I knew she’d transported herself from Alexander Enterprises, the laboratory ten floors below our living space. Anna knew everything about what I’d begun, and was well aware of the timeline shifting implications we were working with. As if sliding off an invisible conveyer belt, two large steamer trunks emerged from the same time-stream she’d just come through, and landed exactly five feet behind her. She smiled and waved up at Jasper, who I thought might faint from an overload of novelty, but although visibly perplexed, he gripped onto the horses reins and held steady. I briefly wondered if he’d transported other time travelers, then filed the thought away in the back of my mind.
I pulled off my shirt and undid the bulletproof vest, glanced at the large bruise forming on my chest near my right shoulder. Touched it with a medium amount of pressure. It would sting for several minutes, then become a bruise that would eventually fade. After pulling off my boots, I removed my jeans to see how badly I’d been grazed. A small bloodstain was forming. The bullet had grazed but hadn’t come close to entering my leg.
Anna, stepping over to me, hiked up her corseted powder blue dress, and leaned down on one knee next to my leg. She slipped a blade from the hidden sheath sewn into the bulletproof corset. Adjusting her black hair pinned to the time-period black hat which could be found at any upscale haberdashery in San Francisco, she positioned her knife with casual precision. Anna scraped the wound to clear away any leftover shrapnel. It wouldn’t be the last time I was somewhere on a scale of glad to delighted she was a woman who loved reading medical textbooks – published anytime between the fifteenth to the twenty-second century. Reaching inside her undergarment again, she pulled out a small metal medicinal ointment container, dabbed a bit onto her finger and into the wound.
She stood up, her left hand placed on her hip and with arched eyebrow, said, “Try not to get shot again.”
Anna’s outfit would fit into any gathering place in San Francisco – from upscale mansion to backstreet bordello. Her grin was pure 2144, and her senses were buzzing due to her second time jump of the day. She bunched up the front of her skirt, gave Jasper a glance and a grin, then stepped onto the running board and slid inside the coach. I sometimes think she enjoyed the dress-up part of time travel as much, if not more than traveling through time.
Jasper saw an opening, and reminded me, again, “Got to get going. We don’t want to be out on this road come nightfall.”
“As soon as I take care of our prisoners,” I said over my shoulder.
Our would-be bandits, drugged asleep, would have no idea how they reached an abandoned warehouse, near the Barbary Coast. I affixed the transport disc into the slot on the fully formed two-person cell, and did the same for the trunks Anna had just transported with her. I set the coordinates for the dockside warehouse I’d recently purchased on the Wharf, just a few blocks downhill from what would become North Beach, the Twentieth Century haven for the heyday of mid-century counterculture, formed by Beat writers, poets reading in coffee shops, and musicians playing folk music and blues in small clubs.
After watching our prisoners disappear, I hopped into the back seat of the coach and it took off. Anna had already fallen asleep. Her head leaning against the inside window curtain of the coach, with her right hand nestled inside the front folds of her skirt. Loosely gripping the pearl handle of her six-shooter. Anna’s weapon was an identical match for a period piece Colt 45, or Colt Frontier Six-Shooter, except for one key element. It was designed to hold 14 shots rather than six, and created with a precision unknown in these here parts, as they say, back in 1875.
I'm really enjoying this Russell and looking forward to more. Well done!
Sean, Thanks for the restack !