Dulce Truths

The sound is loud, deafening almost in the close confines of Ellis’s quarters. Emil does a good job getting his gun up and he even gets a shot off, though it hits the wall beside the door. The figure in the doorway’s shot doesn’t miss, however, and slams into Emil with the same force and intensity as it’d slammed into Bobbie, though this time at a much closer range. The shot goes through Emil, leaving most of his chest and stomach on the back wall. Ellis watches it slide down onto his desk for a moment, then looks past Emil’s dead body on the floor — the ever-present pipe still smoking away between his lips — and to the figure in the doorway.

“Harry,” he says with a nod.

“Ellis,” General Harry Anderholt replies.

“Looks like you foiled our escape.”

Anderholt cocks his head to one side, admitting the truth of Ellis’s words. “Not that you had any idea what was going on.”

“What is going on?”

“Oh, I guess now’s the part where I tell you exactly what’s going to happen, is that it?” Anderholt says, then chuckles as he brings up the flash gun.

Ellis frowns. “Harry… why?”

“Oh, Ellis… don’t you know you can’t win? Don’t you know you can’t beat them?”

“So the answer is to join them instead?”

“I would like it if you did, Ellis,” Anderholt says, lowing the flash gun slightly, “I’d like that very much.”

“You already knew the answer to that before you came here — never.”

Anderholt shrugs. “Have it your way.”

He brings up the flash gun again, and Ellis doesn’t flinch.

BOOM!

Anderholt stands there for a few moments, watching Ellis’s insides slide down the wall and onto the desk… but only for a few.

He shrugs. “Just wasn’t your time, Ellis.”

Then with a disgusted sigh — both of relief and regret — he turns on his heels and leaves the room, closing the door on his way out.

38 — Payback

Blue Lake

Friday, May 25, 1979

6:45 AM

Chargin’ Charlie, John, Moses and David rush down the hallways of Blue Lake.

Charlie had managed to scare-up the three to aid him, and when he’d mentioned that the Grays might have a traitor in the base, well… they were all for it. Charlie did a bit of quick explaining — though he wasn’t real sure of everything that was going on himself, only what Bobbie had told him and what he knew of the Trifecta — so he was still explaining things as they ran.

“It’s a tricky little affair,” Charlie calls out as they turn down yet another of the long hallways. “First, Bobbie’s got to get to Blue Lake this morning, before the Dutchman is killed. After that we’ve got to get to the exact time that Aaron comes back from that Gray mothership that Bobbie says Mark and the others saw him on.”

“And how the hell are we gonna do that?” David calls out. Ahead of him, Moses stops dead in his tracks.

“Whoa, what the hell!” Charlie then shouts, but Moses is lost in thought. The words that Stu had told him in the hallway earlier that morning are running through his head.

“Moses, for the love of God, remember that Aaron gets back just after midnight.”

“Het gets back just after midnight,” Moses says, turning around with a smile on his face. “Aaron gets back just after midnight!”

“And how the hell you know that, huh?” David asks.

“Stu told me this morning.”

The men narrow their eyes to that, but say nothing. Strange things are happening, and if Moses knows the time, well… it’s a helluva lot more than the rest of ‘em know.

“If Stu said it then it’s good enough for me,” Charlie replies, then looks at them all. “Let’s get to the time shed.”

* * *

Blue Lake

Friday, May 25, 1979

12:02 AM

Charlie looks down at his watch, then over at Moses. “Just after midnight… now what?”

“Now we wait, what else?” David says before the pilot can answer.

Moses nods to that so Charlie does as well. The other two men just shrug and wait. They’d gotten to the time shed room by running down the hallways of Blue Lake and getting to the basement.

The room is like a storage room, and it looks the part. Boxes are piled nearly up to the ceiling against one wall, while a table pushed up against another wall is also covered with them. The only thing that looks out of place is a large, rectangular box standing at one side of the room. If it wasn’t for all the wires and tubes going into it, the men might have guessed it was some kind of shower stall, though one without a working faucet or shower head. It’s the time shed, looking old and dusty and hardly used. It doesn’t really look like a shed so much as a space pod of some sort, complete with a window on the door and a seat inside where you sat, waiting for it all to happen once you hit the controls. There was another control panel on the outside of the shed, which allowed someone to set the time destination from outside.

After that they’d all gotten into the room Charlie had switched the controls to shoot them to just before midnight that morning, or what was about 7 hours earlier than where (or when) they’d just been.