surrender, her transcriber falling from her meaty grasp and clattering to the pavement below. Her children screamed, latching on to their mother, their innocent little faces mirroring her terror as Connor narrowed his eyes, doing his best to look desperate and dangerous. As if he were the type of guy who shot down mothers and children in cold blood every day before breakfast.
“Please, mister,” the woman begged, fat tears streaming down her cheeks. “You can have everything. Just let us go.” She shrugged her bag off her shoulder, allowing it to fall to the ground. “There’s plenty of cash in there. Take it all. Just don’t hurt my kids.”
Connor sighed, lowering his gun. And…so much for blending in.
“It’s okay,” he tried to assure her, guilt gnawing at his insides. He’d meant to stop her from making her call, not scare her and her family half to death. “I promise I’m not going to hurt you.”
But of course he couldn’t tell her that. It would just bring up too many unanswerable questions. And he had to get a move on anyway—catalog his gear, get changed, locate the museum. Do a little preliminary scouting before introducing himself to the girl. He had a lot to accomplish in the next four months—before the Reckoning day—and, as his father would say, there was no time like the present.
Or the past, in this particular case.
He gestured to the woman’s bag with an apologetic look. “Take your stuff. Just walk away and pretend you never saw me, okay?”
Yeah, like that was going to happen. He could tell from the look in her eyes she’d remember this incident till her dying day. Her children too. But it couldn’t be helped, he reminded himself. And they would thank him if they knew the truth. They would get down on their very knees.
The woman’s face crumpled in relief. “Thank you, sir!” she babbled. “Thank you, thank you so much.” She scurried to grab her bag, then collected her cracked transcriber. “Merry Christmas,” she babbled as she gathered up her children and turned to leave. “Merry Christmas to you and yours.”
Connor had started to walk away. But the woman’s words made him pause. “Wait, what? What did you just say?” He turned back to her questioningly.
The woman whimpered, holding her hands in front of her face, as if she was afraid he was going to hit her. “Um, I just said merry Christmas,” she stammered. “Or, you know, whatever holiday you celebrate—Happy Hanukkah? Kwanza?”
“But…” Connor protested, his mind racing with sudden confusion. “It’s August.”
The woman stared at him, as if he’d lost his mind.
“It has to be August,” he repeated, panic welling up inside of him. “They told me it would be August. Four months before the Reckoning.”
“Um, I don’t know what that is,” the woman sputtered. “But it is Christmas. I promise you, it’s Christmas Eve. In fact, I was just about to take the boys over to see the tree. They’ve never seen it lit up and—”
She kept babbling, but Connor was no longer listening. He dug into the capsule again, heart pounding wildly in his chest as he searched for his transcriber. There had to be some mistake. The woman had to be lying. Because there was no way…
His hands closed around the device and he pulled it from the pod with shaking fingers. He flicked it on, waiting anxiously for the screen to illuminate, scarcely able to breathe.
“No,” he whispered in horror. “That can’t be right.”
But it was, he realized. The signs had been there from the start. August in Texas—it should have been a hundred degrees out—not cold enough to snow.
Something must have gone wrong back at the base. Someone must have pressed the wrong button, turned the wrong dial.
“I was supposed to have four months!” he cried, looking up at the woman with wild eyes. She gave him a helpless shrug, then turned and fled down the street as fast as her thick legs could carry her, her kids scrambling to catch up. Connor watched them go, suddenly feeling as frightened as they must feel. But for a very different reason.
“I was promised four months,” he whispered to no one.
With four months, he could have secured a strong link with the girl. He could have made sure the egg never fell into her hands. He could have gotten a jump on the government…
…and saved his father’s life.
Now he had exactly fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to find the museum. Fifteen minutes to retrieve the egg and the girl. Fifteen minutes to figure out a way to make this all turn out right.
Or the apocalypse that ripped apart his world would begin…all over again.
Chapter Two
If I get one more snot-nosed kid asking me if the
Sixteen-year-old Trinity Foxx looked up from her laptop in time to see her grandpa come barreling into the museum’s main office, rounding the corner too quickly and slamming into a table of fish fossils by the door. She winced as he scrambled to stop a four-hundred-million-year-old cephalopod from crashing to the floor.
“Hey! Watch the ancient artifacts,” she protested, logging out of the museum’s Facebook page and rising to her feet. “Some of them are even older than you are. And almost as brittle.”
“Thanks.” Grandpa shot her a smirk as he limped over to his desk, rubbing his knee. “Your concern is truly heartwarming, as always.”
She snorted. “Why are you giving tours anyway? What happened to Gene?”
Grandpa dumped a stack of mail onto his desk, then nearly knocked it off as he shrugged out of his suit jacket. Trinity had to dive to save it from landing in a nearby trashcan, which may or may not have been her grandfather’s intention in the first place.
“Quit right after his last paycheck bounced,” he muttered. “But really, it’s for the best. The idiot couldn’t even keep his Triassic and Jurassic time periods straight. How could he be expected to educate and inspire America’s youth?”
“Right.” Trinity sighed as she walked back over to her desk, ripping open the red-marked “Urgent” envelope at the top of the stack. This one was from the electric company, who’d been threatening to shut off power to the museum for the last three months. She didn’t know why companies bothered wasting paper on fourth and fifth notices. Just because they couldn’t afford to pay the first one didn’t mean they needed a new copy. “Well, I hope you charged the group full price, at least.”
Grandpa walked around to sit behind his desk, avoiding her eyes. “They were from a poor district in Stocktown. Mostly migrant farmer kids and illegals.”
“Of course they were.” Her grandpa’s kind heart was one of his best qualities—but it was also going to be the death of them. “And what about that history museum in Kentucky?” she asked. “The one you loaned the Ornithischian dinosaur exhibit to six months ago?” She flipped through the stack of envelopes, praying for something that resembled a check.
Grandpa waved her off. “Next week. They promised to pay me next week.”
Trinity gave up, plopping the stack of bills onto her desk. It was always next week, next month, next year. Except what Grandpa couldn’t seem to grasp was there wouldn’t be a next week, month, or year if they didn’t start finding a way to pay the bills.
Back in the day, Foxx’s Fantastical Fossils had been a famous West Texas attraction, luring tourists off the highway with exhibits that promised to rival all but the most top-tier institutions. Her grandfather’s collection of dinosaur bones from the Jurassic period alone was well worth the trip off the interstate.
But five years ago the main highway had been rerouted and traffic thinned to a crawl, the roadside
