Ty gripped her arm and eased her back close the wall of the hotel.
“We don’t seem to be where we were,” he murmured for her ears alone.“Let’s stroll down a bit and see if we can find a newspaper with a date.”
That seemed like a good plan.They couldn’t huddle against the wall for too much longer.There wasn’t that much to see.
Around the corner, on a kind of porch there was a table with an abandoned newspaper laying on a table, it’s pages lifting from the breeze.
Ty stepped over and picked it up.Then he tipped it so she could see.The exact date didn’t matter as much as the year.
1965.
When Con showed up and invited her to take a walk, Rita had not expected it to be around the silo, though when she thought about how hot it was outside…
It was a weird and somewhat creepy place.Their steps on the metal flooring echoed, and so did their voices, as Con led her down from their level to a lower one.
“This connects with the actual silo where the missile was positioned,” Con had explained.
The dank smell grew stronger as they approached and passed through what she assumed was some kind of master control center.Rusting computer banks lined the walls and the work stations looked abandoned and derelict.
The lighting still worked, but it cast a green glow over everything and flickered uncertainly in no particular pattern.
“The silo is kind of crazy,” Con said, steering them back into a passage way.
Rita looked ahead, in the direction Con was taking them, and froze.
“We need to go back,” she said.“Something is very wrong.”
“We’ve lost Ty and Alice’s signals,” Jack said, his gaze moving between the monitors they used to keep track of each other.
Instinctively, he wanted to activate their recall, but that might be just what the opposition wanted.
They weren’t dead, he told himself.No, it couldn’t be that.Death would have triggered an auto-recall, opposition or not.But their instruments couldn’t track them through time, not even with the implanted trackers.
He turned to the bulletin board.It was low tech in every way, but was able to—oddly enough and to some extent—provide clues or hints.That it could do this, they’d discovered quite by accident.
The images and articles were more random than usual because they were trying to find the mysterious John and any more indications of planted photos featuring Rita.
But the neatly pinned pictures weren’t visible through the twisting and swirling vortex, sucking it toward some dark place at its center.
“That’s not good,” he remarked, with a calm he didn’t feel.He reached for her hand, gripped it.
For whatever reason, Mel could see more of the time disruptions than he could.He only saw them, he remembered now, when it got really bad.
“No,” Mel agreed.She glanced around.“And it’s getting worse.”She hesitated.“We need to evacuate the silo.I think it’s moving back in time.”
If it went too far, it would become dirt.Jack hit the emergency alarm.
They’d made plans for an evacuation and had emergency packs they could grab.They hadn’t planned for this though.
At least the silo was lightly manned today.Their teams were out, moving gradually in the direction of Wyoming to provide backup for Ty and Alice.
So it was just he and Mel, and Con and Rita.Where were they?What would they all find when they got up top?
Con was on Rita’s heels as they raced toward the exit, the sudden klaxon of the emergency alarm making communication almost impossible.
At a junction, Con caught Rita’s arm and pointed toward an emergency exit sign.It was a quicker way to the exit hatch, than making their way back through the main level.
Rita shook her head and pointed the direction that would take them longer.He hesitated, but the urgency in her eyes and expression had him following her.She’d seen something, he realized.This was where he proved he trusted her.
