City of Ruins Read online

  DANGER BOY

  City of Ruins

  Mark London Williams

  Danger Boy: City of Ruins

  By Mark London Williams

  Copyright 2007 Mark London Williams

  All Rights Reserved

  Smashwords Edition

  Candlewick Press Edition 2007

  This one’s for those who came before,

  Especially the grandfolks:

  Don and Cathryn; Lil and Lionel

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Prologue

  Jerusalem 583 B.C.E

  “I wish I could be eight forever…”

  The boy keeps throwing rocks against the ruins of the palace wall, trying to hit the outline of a man he’s drawn there. The sketch looks like it was done with ash, with charcoal. “If I could stay eight, then maybe no more bad things could happen ever again. Or if I could go back to being seven, that would be better — that was before all the bad things happened. But no one can go backwards in time.”

  The rock hits the charcoal man in the head. “There. That’s for the soldier who took my parents.”

  Another rock hits the chalk soldier in the face.

  The boy remembers all the screams — remembers the men with their spears and swords and metal helmets, coming and slashing their way through his city, Jerusalem. Killing the people, and the animals, and setting fire to everything that was left.

  The idea wasn’t to “capture” the city, but to destroy it.

  The boy was small enough to hide in an empty clay jug that stood on the floor of his house. A jug used for storing olive oil.

  His bigger sister wasn’t so lucky. She didn’t find a hiding place in time.

  When one of the soldiers kicked the jug over and watched it roll away, before setting fire to his family’s house, the boy was careful not to scream, the way his parents had warned him not to.

  But he couldn’t help hearing their screams — and his sister’s — as they were taken away.

  Not everyone was killed — many were taken away to be slaves, slaves for the conquering king, who, like all kings, was looking for ways to make his empire grow larger.

  And those not killed or taken were simply left behind. The old and broken, or, like the boy, the very young. Left behind to fend for themselves in a ruined city, with no food, no markets, and no buildings, as each day grew colder, and fall turned into winter.

  There weren’t even any walls left, to clearly define where the city had been.

  But the walls were for keeping invaders out. Since they failed, what was their point?

  Who would want to invade a City of Ruins?

  Who would even want to visit it?

  That’s why this new visitor, this older boy, this young man, is so strange to the first boy, throwing his rocks.

  He would seem stranger still, if the first boy knew he was a Time Traveler.

  The Time Traveler stands, watching the boy, his lingo-spot tingling, letting him understand all the words in his own tongue.

  And with understanding comes a soft, sad, smile. He doesn’t tell the boy that as it turns out, you can go backwards in time. The thing you can’t do is stay eight forever.

  The Time Traveler remembers a time when he was younger, when he threw rocks, when maybe he wished he could be eight, or nine, or ten forever. There were no ruined cities around him then, back in New Jersey. Back in Herronton Woods, running home to a house he thought he might live in forever, with a family he didn’t think could ever come apart. He’d run, pretending to be a Barnstormer character — a monster from his favorite Comnet game — playing with his friend Andy. Andy.

  Anderson Walls.

  He hasn’t seen Andy, or heard from him in — months? Years? Or really, now that he’s become unstuck in time, become “Danger Boy,” maybe centuries. It certainly feels like centuries.

  “What’s your name?” the first boy asks. He keeps throwing rocks at the soldier on the wall. And though the burnt orange rays from the setting sun make the boy squint, his aim is steady.

  “Eli.”

  “Isn’t that the name of a priest? Were you a priest at the temple?”

  Eli shakes his head. He can understand the boy, but knows the boy won’t be able to understand his English. “No.”

  “Are you one of those prophets?”

  “No.” Another shake.

  “Then why would you come here? Did they leave you behind, too? Did you hide? Did you escape?”

  Eli just shrugs, and works on making his smile as sympathetic as possible. The boy keeps talking.

  “I mean from the soldiers. The Babylonians. They took everyone they wanted, to make them slaves. Like my mother, and father. My sister, too. There must be some reason they left you.”

  Thunk. Another rock grazes the soldier’s arm.

  Eli shrugs again — he wishes he could talk to the boy, but can’t risk sharing any of the lingo-spot, since the side effects of the substance are becoming increasingly unpredictable. Instead, he looks around for a stone.

  Thunk. This time the boy hits the soldier right in the head. The sun has shifted lower and the light becomes redder, so that the ruined wall, and the charcoal invader, look like they’re covered in blood.

  Eli holds up his own stone, letting the boy know he’d like a turn.

  Now it’s the boy’s turn to shrug, trying too hard to show he’s beyond caring about anything now.

  Eli looks at the boy, then stares hard at the wall, telling himself that the charcoal man isn’t a soldier, but a catcher, waiting for a pitch. He winds up, shakes off a signal, shakes off another one, then nods — and throws.

  “Strike!”

  A swamp zombie just swung at a third strike, for the final out of the inning.

  “You’re outta there!” Eli jerks his thumb, remembering how much fun it was when the monsters were easy to beat, but he doesn’t realize how loud he’s yelling and the boy jumps back.

  “Hey!” The boy clutches another rock in his hand, and it looks like he might throw this one at Eli.

  Eli holds out his hands and tries to explain. “I’m playing Barnstormers.”

  “I still don’t understand you…” the boy says. “Where are you really from? Why did you come here?” and Eli can see he’s shaking now, trembling all over, trying to be brave, but on the verge of tears.

  Eli steps closer. “It’s all right.”

  “I can’t understand you!”

  “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “Just stay away.”

  “I know what you’re feeling. I do.” Another step.

  “I mean it.”

  And closer still, as the red sun falls farther below the horizon, and the bloody light turns to shadow, and Eli is next to the boy, who looks up at him and says “don’t hurt me.”

  Eli takes the boy in his arms, this skinny dirty boy covered with rags, who has no food, no house, no family, and lets him cry.

  The boy’s arms go around Eli, and he starts sobbing.

  “The soldiers came,” he says.

  Eli nods. He thinks of the mobs in Alexandria. The picture of the mother and her son i
n Nazi Germany.

  Even the guards in the tunnels below San Francisco, and around his father’s lab, in the Valley of the Moon.

  The soldiers always come.

  And he wonders, now that he’s turned thirteen, if this is what it means to grow up. That you have to help soak up the tears for all the kids younger than you, and tell them everything will be okay.

  The boy keeps crying and Eli suddenly realizes he feels responsible for him. But what can he do?

  He doesn’t know anything about ancient Jerusalem, about where to go, especially where to go after the city’s been destroyed in a war.

  He’ll just have to take the boy back to see the healer woman, Huldah. Even though she told him he’d have to leave for a while, while she found out if there was still a chance to save his friend Thea.

  Or whether her slow pox was getting worse.

  Chapter One

  Eli: House of David

  February 2020 C.E.

  Ow! Even moving my eyes hurts.

  I’m trying to follow the Comnet image as it goes across the room, of a guy in a baggy baseball uniform and long hair and beard running around the bases after hitting a home run, but even the slight turn of my eye muscles moves my head a little, which pulls against all the restraints and straps and rods holding me in. Holding me still.

  When they told me “not to move a muscle,” I guess they meant it.

  The DARPA people — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — are trying to get another “particle scan” of my body, a kind of roadmap of all my atoms. They say the scan will be like a “circuit board” showing the microscopic currents flowing through me, from atom to atom. Maybe even particle to particle.

  “It’s the best we can do, since we don’t really want to break your body apart to look at your atoms. After all, we don’t want to turn you into some kind of nuclear bomb!” That’s what passes for a “joke” here at DARPA, and it was told to me by a woman whose codename is “Thirty.”

  It was the only name she’d give me, and she took it from a baseball player’s uniform, from a picture on a ’gram I was holding, back when I was a younger kid. Back when the whole “Danger Boy” thing began. I don’t actually know her “real” codename. Or her real real name.

  She’s named after a number on a shirt.

  Number 33, Green Bassett had a mysterious past that made him one of the bearded squad’s early “stars.” He was rumored to be a World War I deserter, but nobody was sure from which side. For the 3.3 years he was touring with the team, he always hit 33 home runs per season, and batted .333. He said this was deliberate, that he was trying to “use numbers to bring a message to the fans, to let them know it’s later than they think.” Although he never fully explained what he meant, he was undoubtedly referring to the fact that the House of David squad, like the community they represented, believed that the end times were near, that God would come down to Earth, and life as it was presently known would have a fiery end — and rebirth.

  Bassett later disappeared from the squad as mysteriously as he had arrived, during a trip to Oklahoma.

  So to pass the time I’m watching a Comnet documentary on the old “House of David” barnstorming baseball team.

  I found out about them when I was trying to find a “Barnstormers” game on the Comnet screen in my room, here in the old BART tunnels under San Francisco, where DARPA still keeps a secret compound. When I used the Comnet, I mostly got ACCESS DENIED messages when I tried to read the news, or see if there was any mail for me.

  But there were a few Comsites I was allowed to see. One search for Barnstormers brought me to this House of David baseball team locus, with all the guys in their baggy outfits, and all the hair and beards, because in their religion, they didn’t believe in cutting them.

  These House of David guys were playing baseball, and at the same time, trying to end the world as they knew it.

  It was one of the only times — outside of being a Yankee fan — when someone believed that the very act of playing baseball could affect not only the future of the earth, but of the very heavens themselves.

  The House of David traveling squad considered putting on baseball games for Americans who were interested in the still-new sport part of doing “good works” — making things right in the world they lived in now, and preparing the way for the world to come.

  Can the future of the Earth really be changed? Can any one person really affect it? Maybe. Because I already know that if you’re not careful, you can really mess up the past. Which means you’re changing somebody’s future, even if it doesn’t seem like your own.

  I guess the question is, can anybody — even a whole team of people who think God has a personal interest in every inning they play - really control what happens next, or are we all just along for the ride?

  Green Bassett is running out from the Comnet screen into the middle of the room to catch a fly ball, and I can’t turn to watch, not without ripping all these wires off, and messing everything up, forcing them to start my “scan” over again.

  Even the stuff I’m allowed to watch in here, I can’t really watch.

  The House of David baseball team grew out of the Israelite House of David, a religious community established in Michigan in 1903. The Colony hoped to gather what it considered “the 12 Lost Tribes of Israel” in one spot, to await the Millennium, which they also thought would bring the Messiah. The founder of the community, Benjamin Purnell, thought that playing baseball would be a good thing to do while they were waiting. A House of David team was formed in 1913, and a few years later, they were barnstorming across the country.

  I’m not a kid anymore. I’ve just turned thirteen — just had a birthday that no one noticed except for Thea. And she can’t figure out if she’s just turned fourteen years old, or maybe sixteen hundred years old, depending on whether you calculate how her life feels to her, or where it started — back in Egypt, in the Library at Alexandria, right after the turn of the…what? Fifth century, I guess.

  But even locked up here in the DARPA tunnels I can still figure some things out.

  For starters, as you grow up, you look at the world around you and think This is how it’s always been, and maybe even, This is how it’s supposed to be — these parents, this house (if you even have a house, or if you even have both parents) and you think everything that came before was designed, pretty much, to create the world just for you.

  Even the bad stuff: The endless wars, the chunks of cities blown up with suitcase bombs, the gas riots, the last of the great forests vanishing ’cause the weather keeps changing…

  However much better it was before, even the bad things had to happen, because somehow, it all led up to our birth, and well, the world was made just for us. Wasn’t it?

  I mean that’s what kids are supposed to think, to grow up happy. Aren’t they? That everything was meant to happen just for them?

  But I know different.

  Sure, I’m “special;” I’m what DARPA calls a “chronological asset.” I can move through time, become a time traveler, when I put on the San Francisco Seals cap that popped through a dimensional rift created in my parents’ lab one day. My wearing that cap creates an impossible moment: the cap didn’t exist when I was born, but when I put it on the particles in my atoms suddenly race backwards, which causes me to go backward — backward in time, traveling through the Fifth Dimension, to who knows where, or when.

  Anyway, that’s what a “chronological asset” is. I saw that phrase in the latest report in my “Danger Boy” file when they were debriefing me.

  I’m learning a lot of grownup words, lately: debrief is kind of code for “getting everyone’s story straight,” which is what DARPA had to do after Thea, Clyne, and I came back from our time with Lewis and Clark, and Thomas Jefferson, and his friend Sally Hemings. His “friend” who was also his slave.

  And in an era when African Americans weren’t allowed to play major-league baseball, the House of David team — made up o
f white, believing Christians, along with many major-leaguers who were between jobs, or finishing out a career — could be found barnstorming with Negro League teams like the Pittsburgh Crawfords, Homestead Grays, and Kansas City Monarchs. The House of David was perhaps operating on a belief that “on Judgment Day, everyone will be equal.” For many decades, major-league baseball made it clear that in their estimation, Judgment Day was very far away, indeed.

  And now there’s Satchel Paige, the great Negro League pitcher, throwing to Joe DiMaggio in an exhibition game. The ball goes straight across the room, past my face, but I can’t move to follow it. From the very corner of my eyes, I can just see a piece of DiMaggio striking out. He looks young. When I met him, in San Francisco during World War II, he looked older. But I guess when there’s a war on, everyone looks older.

  I wonder if I do? Look older, I mean? There aren’t any mirrors here. Are there usually mirrors in jails?

  I know this isn’t called a jail, but I also know that adults change the meaning of words around any way they want to—words like love and, for sure, words like time and history.

  Like me being a “chronological asset.” Which is just a fancy way of saying “a time traveler who we’re trying to put to good use.”

  That’s why I’m basically in jail right now. They don’t want me disappearing again.

  Like Green Bassett.

  Green Bassett disappeared after an experimental “night game” in Vinita, Oklahoma. In his last outing with the squad, he faced Satchel Paige, and like the great Joe DiMaggio, could only manage to go 1-for-5 against the legendary pitcher.

  Later, after Bassett had been missing for several days, his teammates didn’t recall much that was unusual, except that when they said, “See you tomorrow,” he replied, “Really? And you can still be sure when tomorrow is?”