The Anachronistic Code: Escape from Tomorrow

By Dwayne R. James

Two time periods, fifty years apart.
One, a dystopian future, and the other, a strategically altered past that holds the key to stopping a Global holocaust from happening again.

Escape from Tomorrow is the fourth book in the The Anachronistic Code, an epic eight-part time-travel mystery series told in dual narrative streams, each one set in a different era.

In one time stream, sixty-seven-year-old Josh Donegal is living under authoritarian rule on Prince Edward Island in 2035, and must decide whether to attempt a daring underwater escape to look for other survivors of the cataclysmic events that devastated the world a decade earlier.

Meanwhile, in 1985, another version of Josh continues to adjust to having inexplicably shifted in time into the body of his teenaged self, even as he finishes decoding a message that’s been hidden within the pop-culture of the day. This enigmatic message instructs Josh to gather other time travellers like himself and follow a series of clues that, taken together, might just have the potential to change a grim future that only they know is coming.

As old-Josh makes a move that sets both time streams on a collision course, young-Josh and his friends seek out the first of these mysterious clues in the shadow of a legendary oak tree...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dwayne R. James
• Release date: Feb 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781928015253

Dwayne R. James

Writer and watercolour artist Dwayne James lives outside of Lakefield, Ontario where he writes and paints as often as he can, that is when he's not spending time with his very forgiving family.Dwayne studied archaeology in University, and as a result learned how to write creatively. "The most important skill I learned in University," he says, "was the ability to pretentiously write about myself in the third person."With no formal art training, Dwayne has always preferred the self-guided, experimental approach. In fact, he taught himself how to illustrate archaeological artifacts while completing his Master's degree at Trent University. Said his thesis supervisor at the time: "There might not be much in the way of coherent theoretical content in Dwayne's thesis, but damn, it looks pretty!"After spending close to a decade as a technical communicator at IBM, Dwayne opted to look at their Jan 2009 decision to downsize him as an opportunity to become a stay-at-home Dad for his young twins, and pursue his painting and creative writing whenever they allow him to do so. It is a decision that continues to make him giggle with wild abandon to this very day.

Book preview

The

ANACHRONISTIC

CODE

BOOK FOUR:

ESCAPE from TOMORROW

by

DWAYNE R. JAMES

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2021 by Dwayne R. James

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Synopsis

It’s 1985, and Josh Donegal is seventeen again ... and he’s on the run.

The search for the first clue has begun, and not only isn’t it as obvious as Josh had assumed, he also isn’t the only one looking. Can he and his new allies stay ahead of those who would seek to stop their efforts to save the future?

Meanwhile, in 2035, old-Josh must decide whether to attempt a daring underwater escape to look for other survivors of the cataclysmic events that devastated the world a decade earlier.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 29: Excerpt from Josh’s Journal

Chapter 30: The Men in Plaid

Chapter 31: The Inspection, April, 2035

Chapter 32: The Trailer

Chapter 33: The Girl’s Story

Chapter 34: The Search Expands

Chapter 35: Excremental Philosophy

Chapter 36: Secrets Revealed

Chapter 37: Beltane, May, 2035

Chapter 38: The Campfire

Chapter 39: The New Assistant, June, 2035

Chapter 40: The Reunion Beneath the Oak

Chapter 41: An Unexpected Visitor, June, 2035

About the AUTHOR

Chapter 29

Excerpt from Josh’s Journal

When I was a teenager, it really felt like anything was possible. That the future was rife with unrealized potential.

At a phase in my life when my adolescent insecurities made it hard for me to see my own worth, I used to dream that others who were more powerful than me would somehow be able to sense my noble potential and single me out for it. Maybe even reward me for it somehow.

Yes, I see the irony in that now.

Anyhow, at around that time, I was a huge fan of the TV superhero show The Greatest American Hero (even if I was Canadian). The premise of the show was that aliens had gifted a goofy looking red jumpsuit to a high school teacher by the name of Ralph Hinkley that gave him superpowers when he wore it. Ralph and his partner, Bill Maxwell—a by-the-book FBI agent—were tasked with using the power of the suit to protect the people of the planet Earth, mostly from themselves.

The concept—one that admittedly wasn’t all that unfamiliar to fans of the DC comic Green Lantern—exhilarated me, and I used to fantasize that such aliens actually existed and that, one day, they would detect my worthiness, descend upon me from the darkness of space, and make all of my superhero dreams come true.

Those early teen years of mine were characterized by a sort of lonely desperation. I felt isolated a good deal of the time because I was different, and I never felt like others were willing to look past my differences and see the earnest boy inside of me. Such was the potency of my imagination at the time that I thought if my peers couldn’t see my potential, then maybe an advanced alien civilization could, so I intended to glow like a beacon that could be seen by those who knew what to look for.

That’s why, in order to help them find me, I used to go out into the dark of a winter’s night—a too-big snowsuit hanging off me—and drive my father’s snow machine in huge circles in the lonely field behind our house, circles that I’d hoped against hope would be visible from space.

This was Northern Ontario, remember, and there wasn’t any light pollution from large urban centers. So, on clear nights, there were times that the stars and the northern lights were bright enough to make the snow glow sympathetically and I could turn off the skidoo’s headlamps and make the dimly lit mounds of snow seem other-worldly. For an over-active imagination like mine, this made it easy to pretend that I had slipped out of my own world and into another one through some kind of invisible portal, and that the crest of that huge snow drift up ahead was actually the rim of an immense crater, one that was so big, it stretched to a distant horizon.

And, in the middle of this basin, I would find an alien city with impossibly tall towers, dazzling lights, and thousands of hovering vehicles gliding silently through the air towards me to welcome me home to a place I’d never been before.

It was the Great Gonzo who, in the first Muppet Movie sang a song with the lyrics: I’ve never been there, but I know the way, I’m going to go back there someday. That was how it would feel to enter this city and meet my new alien benefactors, and, when that happened, for the first time in my young life, I’d feel like I wasn’t alone.

Like Gonzo would sing later in that same song: There’s not a word yet, for old friends who’ve just met.

Years later, as I write this, I find that I have tears in my eyes at the memory of once having felt so alone in the universe that I had to invent alien friends for comfort. Even now it resonates though, because I don’t think it matters how old you are, you just want to feel like you belong somewhere.

My youth wasn’t all like this though. Lonely, I mean. Eventually, I began to find other people who shared that same feeling of impending potential.

Like Calvin, for instance.

I can still remember our very first video party (before we’d invented the video recital concept, or thought to invite others) when the two of us had rented the first two Superman movies and had watched them back to back, feeding off each other’s enthusiasm in the process.

We had both been especially blown away by Superman II, the first superhero film to feature a real battle between evenly-matched super-powered adversaries—in this case, the titular hero and the three equally-strong escapees from the Kryptonian Phantom Zone—who all clashed spectacularly on the city streets and the skies of Metropolis.

Afterwards, Calvin and I had gone for a swim in his family’s pool, and we had spent the whole time launching ourselves off the underwater walls, arms stretched out in front of us with clenched fists, pretending that we could fly. For days afterwards, we were giddy, brimming with that youthful feeling that anything was possible and that one day we’d be able to realize our dreams, no matter how ludicrous or far-fetched they may have seemed.

I lost track of those dreams somewhere along the way in my life.

Adulthood sneaks up on you. You spend so many years when you’re young wondering when you’re finally going to feel like an adult, and then suddenly, one day, you’re middle-aged, past your prime, and being told that it’s too late for your silly childhood fantasies to come true.

By then, you’re at a point in your life when magic gets replaced by science; wonder succumbs to routine, and that feeling that the options were unlimited? Well, all it takes is one health scare, and the remaining directions your life can take become about as finite as the handful of years that are left to you.

But, life has a funny way of defying your expectations, usually when you least expect it.

For me, that happened when I was living in a world devastated by disease, where even regular dreams were in short supply. There were so few of us were left by then, and a life that had once made room for childhood wishes was long gone.

Yet somehow, I had been granted mine

Where I’d spent so many years dreaming of one day being able to fly, either by an extra-terrestrial act, a radioactive accident, or a genetic mutation, I’d left the one thing off the list that could actually make the mostly forgotten dream come true: technology. And, perhaps more importantly, not a technology that was gifted to me by benevolent aliens, but something I had mostly developed myself.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I can feel the sixty-seven-year-old grandfather in me saying as I write this journal entry. You can wait in vain to be magically granted a childhood wish, or you can fulfil it yourself.

I can still remember the feeling that I had had the first time I strapped on the lighter-than-air PFD that I called Jerome and pushed off from the ground and up into the air (while singing lyrics from the theme song to the aforementioned Greatest American Hero TV show: Believe it or not, I’m walking on air…)

What I was feeling that day was a deep sense of pride at actualizing one of my grandest fantasies myself. Sure, it had taken me most of my life, but still, I had achieved it. I only wished that Calvin could have been there to share the experience with me.

And so it was, that pretty much every time I used the PFD to hover out over the algae pool of our PEI aquatic farm, I would inevitably think back on the kid I had been some sixty years earlier, staring up at the stars and wishing for an other-worldly intervention to have the power to do this very thing.

Reflecting back now though, I have to admit that this hadn’t been the only time that I’d looked to others to improve my life for me. Indeed, how many hours had I sat fantasizing about the freedom that would be mine if I could just win the lottery? How much time had I spent hoping that somebody in the seemingly endless echelon of bosses in my many workplaces would one day single me out for my ideas and reward me with a big promotion? How many hopes had I pinned to an invention that I was sure would be the next big thing? Or a song? Or a story?

How would my life have been different if, from an early age, I’d stopped waiting for somebody else to grant my wishes and had instead worked actively and forcefully to achieve them myself?

If I could go back in time, I’d tell myself to keep dreaming, but to stop expecting others to realize those dreams for me. I’d tell myself to use the dreams as inspiration and take every available opportunity to manifest them myself by bringing all of my skills to bear in whatever situation I was in.

Heh.

If I could go back in time…

Like I’ve said once already, life has a funny way of defying your expectations, and usually when you least expect it…

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Chapter 30

The Men in Plaid

When the little girl passed our table and dropped the roller skate with the message taped to it, I had assumed that she had been on the way to the washroom. It wasn’t until we’d deciphered those strange symbols that Josh had called emogees and had begun to understand the danger we were in, that it dawned on me that there was one huge problem with my assumption as to where she’d gone. I had briefly been in that same girl’s washroom back when we’d arrived in this truck stop just south-west of Saco, Maine, and there was no way that anybody could have stomached that gross little closet of a restroom for as long as it seemed this girl had.

She hadn’t come back this way. So where had she gone?

It was as I was voicing this thought out loud to Josh that I noticed the flickering EXIT sign dangling loosely above the entrance to the hallway that housed the restrooms, and the answer presented itself. As did our next move.

Well, it’s a long drive, I said loudly enough for other people in the restaurant to hear, specifically the men in plaid by the door who were—conveniently—also in the process of standing up and getting ready to leave. We should probably use the facilities first, Honey. I added in Josh’s direction.

For his part, I’m sure that Josh would have eventually suggested the same course of action, but he had this irritating habit of agonizing over options instead of just acting. That’s why I had to occasionally give him a push to get him moving.

It’s always been that way with him, long before the old man moved in and changed his eyes.

Thankfully, Josh’s face showed that he understood what I was intending, so I immediately turned in the direction of the hallway at the back of the restaurant and started forward as calmly as I could manage. A quick glance out of the corner of my eye a moment later confirmed two things: Josh was following me, but so were the men in plaid.

I reached the door at the end of the hallway first, and ran headlong out onto the sunlit parking lot behind the restaurant in the direction of where we’d parked Josh’s car.

Only it wasn’t where we’d left it.

Instead, it was sitting about ten yards beyond the exit, motor revving loudly. I’m not sure exactly what I had been expecting to find when I exited the restaurant, but a little black girl—the same girl who had passed us the note via roller-skate earlier—sitting in the driver seat of Josh’s car grinning madly as she gunned the engine hadn’t been anywhere on my list.

Of all the things that could have gone running through my mind under the circumstances, I can’t really explain why the first of them was to question how her feet could possibly reach the car’s pedals.

Get in, Andi!, the little girl yelled as she reached over and unlatched the passenger door in front of me. We ain’t got much time!

Wait! I said, even as I stepped forward reflexively to pull the door towards me. Who are you and … and how do you know my name?

The girl sighed bodily, and muttered something that sounded like Fucking reporters with their questions before quickly adding more loudly. You gotta trust me, I’m a friend of Josh’s. Now hurry!

It was an impassioned plea, but I was still hesitant. Clearly, she was another time-shifter like Josh and even seemed to know who I was, but was that enough to justify jumping into a car with her?

Before I could either say or think anything else though, there was a loud crash behind me. I spun around to find that Josh had just toppled a heavy trash can in front of the exit we had just come through, and was currently standing with his back to me watching as our pursuers were pushing the door against it. I couldn’t see how the trashcan could stop them for long though, not the way it was already shifting from the repeated and forceful slamming it was being subjected to.

Our options were dwindling.

If we didn’t get into the car being driven by the ten-year-old girl, the men in plaid would be out in a matter of moments and we’d have no place else to go.

But, I found myself considering. Just how dangerous are these guys, really?

So far, the only insinuation that they posed any kind of a threat came from a note that had conveniently been written by the same mysterious girl who was currently trying to convince us to get into a car that she’d clearly hotwired and shouldn’t even be able to drive in the first place.

Where was the proof that these guys actually meant to harm us?

Oh sure, if they were the same brand of thugs that assaulted Mademoiselle Thibodeau, then there might be cause for alarm, but we were in a very public place and there was every possibility that they just wanted to talk, and what was the…

And then I saw it.

Peeking out of the slowly widening crack of the metal door was the unmistakable muzzle of a hand gun. The moment I caught sight of it, my eyes lost focus briefly, and I fell back against the car as a cold chill shook its way violently up my spine. Then, without giving it another thought, and while leaning heavily on the open door to keep my balance on legs that had just turned to Jell-O, I turned and dropped limply into the passenger seat.

I was just about to call out to Josh and tell him to hurry the fuck up when the girl gunned the engine again. Through the window of the passenger door, I saw the confused expression on Josh’s face as he finally turned to look at the car that wasn’t where he had left it.

Then, the girl was screaming at him in what sounded like a bad Schwarzenegger impression, and Josh was throwing himself heavily into the back seat behind me just as our tiny driver stomped on the gas and released the brake, seemingly at the same time. As we peeled away from the back of the truck stop restaurant, tires squealing, the men in plaid finally pushed their way awkwardly through the obstructed door. One of them was stuffing the gun into his shirt and looking around nervously while the other one appeared to be screaming into what looked like a walkie-talkie.

I… I think they’re calling for backup, I announced shakily as the men ran towards a large black Suburban that, even at a distance, seemed to sitting on an odd angle. It was Josh who made sense of what I was seeing.

Their tires have been slashed, he said.

Figured I’d make sure we weren't followed, the girl said through a wide, gap-toothed grin as she swerved to avoid a pole, just barely squeezing the car between it and a bus full of Japanese tourists.

Nice idea, Josh said, matter-of-factly, shifting to the middle of the back seat where he had a better look through the front windshield.

It was as if the two of them were calmly discussing what to have for supper and hadn’t even heard what I’d just said. I was starting to feel like Molly Ringwald’s character in Sixteen Candles, when everyone around her had seemingly forgotten that she even existed.

Did you hear what I just said? I demanded as I belatedly fought with the seatbelt. What if there are more of them out there? When neither of them had anything to say to this either, I continued, my voice building as everything that had been bothering me about the situation that had been forced upon us came out at once. Who are those guys? What do they want? How long have they been following us? Abruptly, I switched my focus to the girl. And, just who are you anyway? AND HOW THE HELL ARE YOU DRIVING?

It came out a lot louder and a lot more shrill than I had planned, and Josh’s hand was immediately on my shoulder, its warmth and weight comforting enough to help subdue the shivering that I was just now beginning to notice. He didn’t offer any words along with the physical contact though, because, to be fair, there really wasn’t much he could have said. It was pretty obvious that, if there wasn’t enough time to stop and switch drivers, there wasn’t enough time to share our origin stories.

That guy had a gun. A GUN.

As far as I was concerned, this development made the whole sorry situation a helluva lot more serious, yet, somehow, I was the only one spazzing out at the prospect of a firearm having made an appearance.

Instead, Josh was in the process of calmly pointing out moving cars in the distance that our driver couldn’t see because of her lack of height, and the girl was doing a surprisingly good job of driving in spite of that lack of height. Even so, she wasn’t necessarily filling me with all that much in the way of confidence as we made our mad dash for the Interstate, what with the way she was hurling childish taunts in the direction of the vehicles that were swerving to avoid her.

It was as we were speeding past the bank of gas pumps (a little too closely for my comfort), that I got my answer as to whether that man in plaid had been calling for backup earlier when another black Suburban pulled off the Interstate and into the truck stop’s parking lot. Through the driver’s open window, we got a quick look at the driver and his passenger, both of whom were carbon copies of the men from the restaurant with their plaid shirts and dark sunglasses. As the vehicle raced by us on our left, the goon in the passenger seat started gesturing wildly in our direction even as he barked orders into a CB radio handset.

As I shifted in my seat so that I could keep watching the new arrivals over my shoulder, the driver brought his SUV to a screeching sudden halt, oblivious to the vehicles following him. Luckily, the pickup that was directly behind the Suburban was able to stop in time but the convertible that was next in line wasn’t nearly as lucky, and it burrowed itself noisily underneath the truck’s tailgate.

What was that? called the girl, who was too focused on avoiding the cars in front of us to check her mirrors to see for herself what had caused the sound.

Not the SUV, answered Josh. It stopped suddenly, and the two cars behind it plowed into each other.

They followin’?

Yeah, Josh answered. They’re trying to. As we watched, the Suburban executed an awkward three-point turn by hurtling itself backwards into the front end of the unfortunate truck behind it before eventually lurching forward into a wide arc, sideswiping a couple of parked vehicles in the process. They’re still well back though, and there are more cars blocking its path now.

I was just about to comment that these guys were pretty serious about catching us if they were willing to cause this much damage, when our driver spoke up first.

Hang on, Snowflakes! she said as she spun the wheel to take us off the rough pavement of the parking lot and out onto the smoother asphalt of the Interstate merge lane. Josh and I had both been looking behind us as the girl spoke, and in my peripheral vision I watched as Josh’s head whipped around so quickly towards her that it seemed as if he’d been slapped.

Now this is more like it! the girl said loudly, oblivious to Josh’s inquisitive stare, as she brought us up to the speed of the sparse freeway traffic. Turning to face fully forward, I watched as our young driver wove through the handful of cars around and ahead of us surprisingly capably for somebody who shouldn’t have been able to actually reach the gas pedal in the first place.

This got me wondering again as to how she was pulling it off so, trying not to be too obvious about it, I peered over at our diminutive driver. The answer, I discovered, was surprisingly obvious: the girl was perched on a foam pillow that was thick enough for her to see most of the way over the dash, and she was wearing what appeared to be braces on her legs.

No, not braces. Stilts.

I’d actually seen contraptions like them once before. A few years back, my father had renovated our house on the Danforth, and the contractor had used leg extensions that looked a lot like these ones to put drywall on the ceiling.

This explained why the girl’s driving style had been a little jerky in the tight quarters of the parking lot. Rather than operating both the brake and gas gradually with one foot like most drivers, she had one stilt on each pedal and she sort of had to stamp down to apply the necessary pressure.

I must have been doing a lousy job of not being obvious about looking, because the girl said, It may not be pretty, but I ain’t the driver I used to be when my legs was long enough on their own.

Shaking my head at the confusing nature of what she had just said, I muttered, Yeah, sure. That makes … um, sense.

As I went back to looking out the front window, I marveled at how accustomed I’d become to weird things in my life of late, because a contradictory admission like that, even a few short months ago, would have thrown me for a serious loop.

Josh had been unusually quiet since we’d hit the highway, but was finally breaking his silence to comment on what was going on with our pursuers. It looks like they’re finally on the Interstate, he was saying. They’re still well back, but they’re gaining ground steadily.

The three-lane freeway was quiet today, which was great in that it gave us room plenty of room to accelerate, but I was pretty sure that the vehicle pursuing us was capable of more speed than our Ford Escort. Apparently, Josh had been thinking the same thing, because, he spoke up again to ask our tiny driver, What are you planning? We don’t exactly have the horsepower to outrun these guys.

You got a better idea? the girl barked as she gripped the steering wheel to pull herself up as high as she could, as if she were watching for something on the road ahead of us.

Well, no…

I didn’t think so, she mumbled. I wouldn’t have thought of the girl’s demeanour as nervous until a moment later when an expression of obvious relief appeared on her face in the form of a sly grin.

I looked to see what had elicited this reaction in her. About five hundred meters ahead of us, two vehicles were just now coming into view around a slight bend: a black eighteen-wheeler in the middle lane and one of those new miniature passenger vans beside it on the right.

The girl saw me and, as if to confirm that we were looking at the same thing, she arched her eyebrows up and down in what might have been a Groucho Marx imitation. The only thing was, if she thought that those two vehicles offered some kind of haven from our pursuers, then I couldn’t see how. It wasn’t like we could just hide behind them or anything. No, as far as I was concerned, it would just be a matter of time until the SUV caught up to us, and then what? Theirs was the larger vehicle, and it wouldn’t take much