possession.
Sally didn’t move. Her eyes were swollen shut and her arms and legs had become like Jell-O. Only her chest still moved, slowly rising and falling with each labored breath. David rifled through the small lab and quickly found the antidote. He removed the syringe from its foam protection in the silver briefcase and removed the plastic protective stopper from its tip.
He fell to his knees next to Sally, ignoring the stinging pain from his dried gashes. He took hold of her arm and held the needle above her skin. David had never given anyone an injection before. What was that they did on TV? Oh yes. David flicked the syringe twice with his finger and squirted some of the fluid out. To get the air bubbles out, he remembered. David placed the needle on Sally’s skin and “Who the hell are you?”
David looked up. It was Jake, and he was holding a gun!
Jake quickly raised the gun toward David. “David, of course, David. How nice of you to come back to us.”
David froze. Would Jake use the gun? If David didn’t inject the antidote soon, Sally would die. If he injected it now, Jake might shoot them both.
Jake walked toward David, taking in his clothing, the amount of dirt on his feet, the length of his beard. “You’ve been gone for quite a long time, haven’t you?”
“What do you want?” David asked, as he noticed a stain of sprayed blood on Jake’s clothing. “What have you done?”
Jake looked down at his clothing and smiled. “Security guards can have loud mouths.” Pointing at Sally, he added, “They saw her go back. They knew too much. Just like you… So I removed them from the equation.”
“We’ll get out of your way. We don’t want anything to do with you or this company.” David said with an honest desperation.
“It’s too late for that, David. With those watches, you could change everything. I can’t let you do that,” Jake said, as he thrust the gun at David’s head.
“Take the watches, just let us go.”
“I don’t think so,” Jake said, as he thumbed the gun’s hammer.
“Hold it, Jake.” David was relieved to hear Tom’s voice.
Jake whipped around and leveled the gun at Tom, who had Captain Roberts’s gun trained on Jake’s chest.
David saw his chance. He stabbed the syringe needle into Sally’s arm and pushed the liquid into her as hard and as quickly as he could. Now it was only a matter of time.
“Put down the gun, Jake.”
“I’ll use this,” said Jake, glancing at his gun. “Will you?”
“I’m sure you’ve seen my report. You know what happened in Zambia. You know I’ve killed before. What do you think happened to Roberts?” Tom said with a cocky grin.
Jake stood frozen for a moment, his eyes probing Tom’s. “No…no…that’s not how it happened. You couldn’t.”
Jake took a step toward Tom. He was a cornered wolverine, ready to attack.
“Slow down, Jake,” David urged. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Shut up, David,” Jake said.
David stood to his feet. If bullets started flying around the room, he didn’t want Sally being hit. Jake seemed to sense the pressure of David behind him, but didn’t dare take his gun off Tom.
Tom sensed that David was trying to move the action into the office and away from Sally, which was just fine with him. Tom backed up into George’s office, giving Jake space to move.
“Keep him coming this way,” Tom said to David in Aramaic.
“What are you going to do?” David replied in the same language.
Jake bit his lip and then shouted, “What are you saying? What the hell are you saying?”
“I brought a friend,” Tom finished in Aramaic.
Tom’s last statement was enough to push Jake right to the edge. His finger squeezed the trigger half way down. He was going to kill them all or die trying.
TWENTY ONE
Revelations
2005
Arizona
Tom backed up slowly. He could see that Jake was going to fire, but he didn’t want to have to shoot Jake-not if it could be avoided. Tom’s back hit the opposite wall of George’s office. There was no more room to move, but it might have already been enough. Just a few more feet, Jake, Tom thought.
Jake’s hand shook. His finger began squeezing the trigger. His eyes were locked on Tom as he pushed forward, aiming the gun for Tom’s head.
Tom could see he needed to give Jake time to enter the office. “How about we leave and never come back? We’ll call it even, Jake. No one needs to die here.”
“We already covered this. If I let you go now you would change things. For all I know, you might try and kill me in the past, keep all this from happening,” Jake said.
“Time can’t be changed,” Tom explained. “If we had gone back in time to kill you it would have already happened and you wouldn’t exist. You can let us go and nothing will change.”
“Nothing will change because no one is leaving,” Jake sneered. “And if time can’t be changed, what have you and David been doing all this time, sight-seeing?”
“We can’t change the past because we’re already part of it. Everything David and I did in the past was recorded in the Bible before we left, because it’s already the past,” Tom said.
“You don’t expect me to believe that you’re in the Bible!” Jake was near hysterical laughter.
“It’s true,” David said.
Jake switched from laughing to ferocity in a split second. “Shut up! Both of you!”
Jake entered George’s bland office through the door to the secret lab, holding his gun straight out toward Tom. He stared at Tom’s chest, locked on target, trying to judge which way Tom might jump. He saw Tom look to his left and wink. What is he winking-ack!
A massive hand reached out and took Jake by the throat. A second hand snatched the wrist of the hand holding the gun. Tom had instructed Lazarus on the dangers of guns and Lazarus already knew how to disarm a man. Lazarus squeezed Jake’s hand until he heard a crack. Jake would have screamed if he could breathe, but Lazarus’s monster hand held tightly to Jake’s throat.
The gun landed on the firm industrial rug. Lazarus took Jake by the shirt, picked him off the floor and heaved him into the air. Jake soared across the office, slid across George’s desk and into the black leather chair, which rolled across the floor and crashed into the wall. Jake’s body sagged in the chair and then toppled onto the floor.
Tom smiled as wide as the sun; Lazarus was amazing. Tom quickly checked Jake for a pulse. “He’s alive,” Tom said in Aramaic.
“Good,” Lazarus said. “I feared I had killed the man.”
Tom entered the lab followed by Lazarus, whose eyes sucked in the strange technologies surrounding him. David greeted them at the door.
“That was close,” David said. He looked up at Lazarus. “You all right?”
Lazarus looked stunned by the technology around him. “Yes… I think… What is all this?”
“We’ll try to explain later,” Tom said. “Right now we have to decide what to do next.”
