Time of Fate (Wealth of Time Series #6) by Andre Gonzalez (e book reader online txt) 📗

until he realized his entire body had tensed up. His lips parted, but no words came out. For perhaps the first time in his life, Chris Speidel had no idea what to say.

A body lay on the ground, roughly thirty feet away from the rubble that was once the entrance to Wealth of Time.

“Let’s get out there!” Chris howled, his team whipping into shape and marching down the stairs that folded out from the jet. Chris followed, his legs wavering as they grew tired with each step.

The jet had stopped roughly 100 feet away, a distance that seemed an eternity as Chris dragged himself toward the body on the ground. When he approached, he found Mario still conscious, blood oozing from his abdomen in a silent stream. His eyes locked on Chris, and the faintest of smiles touched his lips.

“Mario?” Chris asked, kneeling down and placing a hand on his friend’s chest.

“They found us,” Mario wheezed, his voice much stronger than Chris expected, as the man appeared minutes from death.

“The Road Runners did this?”

Mario nodded in a slow, painful motion. He hadn’t moved so much as a finger, his body becoming a vegetable in the middle of the desert.

“They killed us all,” Mario said. “Twenty of them showed up and started shooting. Then they set the place on fire. C-can you help me, Chris?”

Desperation dripped from every word that left Mario’s lips, and Chris once more encountered the human emotions brewing within his chest. This time he felt sorrow. Mario had managed to survive a mass murder and arson attack, crawling for the slimmest chance of living beyond sunset.

Chris licked his lips, the taste of fear and death emanating strongly from his friend. Even someone he had known most of his life was not exempt from satisfying Chris’s hunger, especially under these new circumstances where Chris couldn’t quite decipher which hunger was gnawing at him more—the stomach or the soul.

He looked to the ground where the pool of blood beneath Mario’s body had already started to dry and harden. The man had been lying out here for at least an hour, which meant the Road Runners carried out this attack while Chris slept in his Idaho home. And that’s why we’re built to resist the basic needs of the human body.

“Mario, my dear friend,” Chris said. “I don’t think you’re going to make it. We’ve had a hell of a run, you and I. Thanking you would be an understatement. Are there any matters you’d like me to handle in your death?”

“Just run, Chris. And hide.”

These would be the final words spoken in Mario Webster’s life. His eyes glossed over as he gazed to the crisp blue sky above. Within hours that same sky would turn black as the Revolution faced their ultimate test.

Chris brushed his fingers over Mario’s eyes to close them and grunted as he rose to his feet. He shuffled to the remains of his infamous store. Decades of memories, rare art and collectibles, and his state-of-the-art laboratory were now crumbled remains of history. The air became still as Chris had a moment of silence in front of the building, the stench of burnt wood prominent.

They had to have covered the entire storefront with kerosene or some other flammable firestarter for the entire thing to have burned down within an hour. With enough people, that wouldn’t have been an issue, especially if they had no resistance from the Revolters who called this place home.

Though he had many accomplishments during his reign as the Keeper, the Wealth of Time store was by far his favorite. All Keepers responded differently to their dose of the sacred blood. Some facets were universal, like the ability to jump through time by simply thinking of it. And of course, the guarantee of invincibility by injecting one’s own blood into a trusted source.

A handbook of sorts was kept as the Keeper status was passed down, where each new Keeper suggested to try some of the abilities that had been learned by their predecessors, and recorded any new findings. No one had ever logged the ability to read minds, something that seemed to come and go at times for Chris.

What sparked the idea for the storefront, however, was an ability called “mirroring”, something first discovered and only used by an old Keeper of Time from the late-1700s. Keepers dealt with bending the dimension of time, but that sometimes became intertwined with other dimensions as well. Mirroring allowed a Keeper to project and reflect real life images to a different location. Wealth of Time always stood in this private location, desolate in the northern Nevada desert to never be found. Mirroring allowed Chris to recreate this same store as an illusion all around the continent, using it as a means to lure in potential recruits—and even casual passersby. Anyone who walked through those doors was fair game.

The idea had been well received by those in leadership positions, and Chris even fulfilled some requests for different types of buildings to reach other demographics of people—not everyone had interest in visiting antique shops. This all led to the most successful recruitment efforts ever implemented in the world of time travel. He could “construct” a new building within minutes and have it torn down just as fast, leaving people in the area puzzled as to what the hell had happened. In time, he learned to perform this in remote areas that wouldn’t attract as much attention and lead to speculation from the regular citizens of the continent.

Chris no longer could perform this once simple task. His special powers had grown into a sixth sense, something he could call upon without much effort. Now, a hole had formed in his soul where these abilities once were. All of his powers escaped from his body like a silent, gradual leak of air from a tire.

He closed his eyes, needing to test for good measure, and thought of the year 2000, squeezing all the effort from his brain to take him