Soldier’s Destiny: Timewalkers: 2 (A Paranormal Time Travel Romance)

Author

Prologue

Evening, Sir. The armed guard would serve Tim’s purpose tonight, not his commander’s, not the Department of Defense’s, and not the company’s. Tonight the guard would keep out anyone who might be able to stop Tim, but the kid didn’t know that. The young soldier was wide-eyed and enthusiastic, traits Tim admired and had once shared. But that was before, back when service and duty had meant everything to him, and to his father.

Tim hoped the poor kid would be far enough away that the blast wouldn’t kill him.

Have a good night. Tim nodded at the guard and scanned his badge for the last time. The darkness of night closed in behind him as Timothy Daniel Tucker walked into the lab building that had been his second home for the last few months.

He’d taken this job because his father insisted. Senator Tucker was a high-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and had pulled some strings to get his prodigal son into the civilian sector working in this weapons development program once his Army gig was up.

Senator Tucker was powerful, a former Army Ranger, West Point grad, and all-around badass, even at sixty-two.

He’d wanted his only son to follow in his footsteps. And Tim had tried. West Point followed by Flight School and his own command. But he’d never been able to leave his test scores and mathematics degree behind him. They’d both followed him around like skunk spray, arousing interest from very dangerous people.

His dad had gotten him this job. Tim had done what his father and his country had asked of him, until he realized that the DOD didn’t care about space travel or unlimited green energy. The people footing the bill only cared about power and control, about military superiority.

He’d warned his dad what was coming, what kind of weapon he would create. The Senator had spoken up in committee.

And then the Senator and his wife of over thirty years had died in a tragic car accident on the way home from a fundraiser.

They’d fucking killed his parents.

Tim had no proof, but the writing was on the wall. The timing too perfect. The suits that had been following him ever since? Well, they had relaxed the last few weeks.

Their mistake. Tim whispered the words under his breath as the glare of artificial lights flash bombed his pupils, much too bright after the dark outside. He ignored the cameras spaced along the sterile hallways, watching him like all-seeing eyes.

It had taken him several days to set everything up. But after tonight, no one would ever set foot in this space again. He’d make sure of it. His parents’ death would not be in vain. He’d see this through, come hell or high water. No fucking way he was going to be the obedient dog on a leash now that they’d murdered his parents.

Fuck you, pricks. Tim opened the door to his lab, stepped inside, and locked the door behind him. Standard protocol.

What he did next, was not.

Come on, baby. Time to play. Tim switched on the separate power generators and waited for them to charge. He was alone tonight, but he often worked late hours alone. He did his best thinking when the world was quiet. No red flags there.

He walked to the safe, entered his access codes and pulled out his laptop and notes. Exotic Matter. Negative Matter. The stuff had a couple different names now. It wasn’t anti-matter, dark matter, or any other variety of theoretical particle known to science. This one was new, and made by conscious choice in a lab, not born to the universe. It promised unlimited power, travel to the stars at faster than light speed, and a whole new arena in electromagnetics and quantum physics. Space travel. Time travel. Wormholes. "Beam me up, Scotty."

The metaphysical, new age, religious fanatics who’d been spouting about a mirror world for years would crow and shout in celebration. Where they’d see vindication and a new era of knowledge, he saw nothing but death.

Tim had spent every moment of his life in service to his country, practically from birth. His father had been a hardcore military man his whole life, his mother a regular rock star on the fundraising circuit, and his upbringing more about fitting their perfect mold than living a real life.

He’d kept his head down and done what was expected of him. Perfect son. Perfect soldier. Perfect scientist. This new experiment in theoretical physics had garnered him a lot of attention from a lot of very serious people.

Dead fucking serious. Tim set his laptop and notebook down at his workstation and braced himself on stiff arms, gathering his courage for what came next. This move was inevitable, the only way he could atone for what he’d done. He’d realized too late exactly how deep this rabbit hole would go.

The men in suits and sunglasses were his constant shadows now. He’d tried to quit this supposedly civilian contractor’s job months ago. They’d wheedled and cajoled him, tempted him with ridiculous bonuses and new lab equipment. He’d stayed.

Then, a few weeks ago, he’d had some success in the lab, and realized what was coming. His dad had agreed with his total end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it assessment and tried to pull the plug on the program.

And then? Dead.

Coincidence? He’d thought so the first few hours, walking around in a numb haze, trying to piece his life back together, ever loyal to cause and country.

Their deaths were the end for him, that and his success. He’d done it…created Negative Matter from nothing, measured it. Stabilized it. Done it again.

Created humanity’s destruction. The atomic bomb? Child’s play. The Hadron Collider? Anti-matter? They had nothing on this.

Jesus. I’m a one-man Manhattan Project. He rubbed his hand through the dark hair he hadn’t bothered to cut in three months. At first, he’d done it for the thrill of the chase. The challenge had been irresistible. But he was in deep shit now. The suits wouldn’t be able to comprehend the danger of weaponizing the stuff. They’d do what they were told, and trust their superiors to call the shots. It was what they all did. What they were trained to do.

Not anymore. Death didn’t scare Tim, he’d faced it too many times in the field during his Army years. Being the next human being responsible for creating a weapon of mass destruction? The sad, haunted look on Oppenheimer’s face on those interview tapes when he spoke about the atomic bomb? His haunting quotation of, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Being that guy? That scared the holy shit out of him.

He had to destroy it all. Tonight. All the pieces were in place for the colossal accident to occur. And he had to get the Casper Project off his back. That group had been investigating his past Army ops, listening to recordings. They were breathing down his neck, too, wondering how he knew what he knew, how he’d warned his team about stuff before it happened.

Tonight he’d kill two birds with one stone. This might be the most brilliant plan he’d ever come up with. Or the most stupid.

Okay, baby. Let’s do this. Tim slid his arms into the sleeves of his fire-resistant lab coat while he talked to his computer and did a visual recheck of his earlier wiring. It was still in place.

Everything he’d accomplished had been done in this room. Nowhere else. No one else knew what had happened here, or how he’d done it, and now they never would

The hair on his arms and neck rose as the magnetic energy built in the air around him. Magnetricity, that potentially unlimited power source, sparked to life in the controlled space.

Instead of monitoring the flow of power, turning it off and controlling the amount of energy passing through the experimental graphene plates, Tim let it grow.

Time to forget what you know, sweetheart. Tim pulled several highly charged magnetite blocks from a nearby cubby and laid them flat on top of his laptop’s keyboard. The screen went crazy, then black. The magnets would erase all the data on the computer’s hard drive. If anything managed to survive, what came next would be the knockout punch.

Tim reached over and plugged the laptop’s power cord into the wall. He was going to blow every breaker in this building. Hell, more likely for a half-mile radius. He had to assume the data from the vid monitors would be erased as well. They were on an automatic backup off-site, but he knew the sync schedule, and he still had a good ten minutes. He only needed two.

Here we go. Tim walked to the first switch he needed to blow, and flipped it. The small electrical explosions started on the opposite side of the room.

Crackling now with a life of its own, the energy built and jumped all around him like a giant lightning bolt trapped inside his lab. Classic arc flash, but bigger, and more powerful than most electricians would ever see. The energy was beautiful, frightening, and it did its job.

Everything blew up. His laptop jumped off the counter, smoking. The magnetite bars hit the ground and the arc flash moved on, jumping from wires in the walls, to lab equipment, to him.

The last thing he remembered was smiling as the white light jumped into his body and lifted him from the floor, throwing him backward into the wall. It hurt like hell, the right side of his head and neck burned with searing heat, and he smelled cooked human flesh, but he wasn’t dead. Yet. Guess he could thank his rubber-soled shoes and FR-rated lab clothing for doing their jobs.

More explosions followed, but Tim’s ears got fuzzy, then stopped working. He tried to follow the arc flash’s growing destruction with his eyes. The fire suppression system activated, but it wouldn’t help. Red warning lights flashed once from the ceiling, then exploded. This thing was better than an EMP. It would wipe out everything until one of the generators actually exploded, breaking the circuit.

Mr. Tucker? Sir? He heard pounding on the door as the building activated their emergency protocols and the rescue team tried to get into the lab.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. His jaw muscles were locked. It didn’t matter if he opened the door or not. Either way, they’d come in.

Every light bulb in the ceiling exploded in a rain of glass and sparks. It was beautiful. He heard cursing from the hallway, and car alarms going off outside. The camera lenses in the corners shattered and the wires started to smoke. The windows went dark as all of the building’s exterior lights exploded.

Mission accomplished.

He watched his new baby jump around the room for as long as he could before the world went black…

Chapter One

One Year Later…

Silent darkness fell from the sky over Chicago and all of her suburbs. The absolute vacuum of nothing spread over the city faster than dawn could shoot its rays of new morning light to combat it. Night hung on by her fingernails, the sun trapped behind the horizon for a precious few minutes. The early risers, those who initially believed themselves blessed to witness a miracle, gasped in awe and cried at the unearthly black space floating down over them like a galaxy without stars.

Then the screaming began as everything and everyone, nine million people, an entire city, simply disappeared, vanished into nothing. A loud boom sounded as the surrounding gases in the atmosphere raced to fill the void where Chicago had once been. It was gone now.

The once great city had simply ceased to exist.

Three Days Earlier, 5:17 a.m.

Silence hovered over the water and a few moments of peace settled over Tim like a cool mist on a hot July day. He grinned and finished tying the spinner on his line. The soft lapping sounds against the side of his aluminum boat, smell of wet vegetation, and honking geese gliding around the edges of Hendrick Lake were as far from the deserted lab, blazing heat and gunfire as he could get. Tuesday morning meant most people were back at work, leaving the lake and the best fishing spots empty…just the way he liked it.

Bandit curled up in her bed on the floor of the nine-foot boat, content to sleep for a few more hours. The tiny Pekingese mix was used to Tim’s routine. Fish. Run. Scan the news headlines every night for things he both expected and dreaded to see. He’d sit at the computer and she’d curl up in his lap. She did everything with him now. When he’d flown home to bury his parents, she’d been a four-month-old puppy he could fit inside his combat boot.

He’d been home for more than six months’ this time, told his superiors that he needed time to heal and get his head back in the game. The top brass didn’t like the fact that his research was turning up nothing but rotten eggs. Nothing was said, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know they’d hoped the death of his parents would push him deeper into their world. When the suits in sunglasses had shown up, Tim had been too damn stupid to realize it was time to get the hell out. No, he’d jumped into the deep end of the pool and realized too late that he didn’t want to swim.

That stupid mistake had gotten his parents killed.

He was sure that his parents’ deaths had been planned. The Senator’s death shut down all talks of ending the program, and served as a way to wound him, to take away his options.

But, if they’d really done their homework, they would have realized that his dad was a hard-ass, ex-military man who made life at boarding school a blessing. To his father, he wasn’t a child, he was a product for polishing and display.

His mother had been a social climber more interested in impressing the other Senators’ wives than taking care of a messy, curious, busy young boy. She’d produced an heir and considered her job done. She’d loved him, as much as she was capable, but she didn’t bake cookies, comb his hair, or generally take any interest in his life beyond making sure he wasn’t starving to death. The rest was left to the long string of nannies. He’d always been jealous of the other kids’ mothers, with their hugs and care packages, and the smell of homemade cookies.

Want in one hand, shit in the other. He could daydream all he wanted for better parents, but it wouldn’t change a thing. They hadn’t beaten the hell out of him, screamed at him night and day, or spent their lives shooting heroin. They’d simply been detached, busy living their own lives, and now they were gone. He had no siblings. No extended family that wanted anything from him but his mother’s money. He had nothing left now but a dog, a gigantic, empty house that felt more like a fine art museum than a home, more money than he could ever spend in his lifetime, and scars. Lots of scars.

Bandit hopped up and yipped at him, happily wagging her tail as if to remind him that he had her. And how dare he think he needed anything else? The princess of a puppy had been his mother’s whim and a completely spoiled lap dog. The tiny pooch had lived a life of luxury, traveling in his mother’s designer purse everywhere she went. Somehow, Tim didn’t figure Louis Viutton would approve. He’d considered giving the pup away after the funeral, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. That was a year ago. The little girl wasn’t much bigger now, a whopping ten pounds soaking wet, but she kept him company, she was smart, she liked to fish, and she was the only family he had left.

And the ridiculously expensive, diamond-decorated bag she’d spent the first few months of her life riding around in? He let her keep it, enjoyed watching the mutt drag it around the house like a chew toy. His mother was probably rolling over in her grave.

"Okay, fur ball.