With one fluid movement, he ripped open the capsule, his fingers diving for his gun. Before the woman could even grasp his intentions, he had the weapon trained on her face. “Her name is get the hell back!” he growled. “And I suggest you do as she says.”
The woman’s eyes bulged and a small squeak escaped her lips. Staggering back, she held up her hands in surrender, her transcriber falling from her meaty grasp and clattering to the pavement below. Her children screamed, latching on to their mother, their innocent little faces mirroring her terror as Connor narrowed his eyes, doing his best to look desperate and dangerous. As if he were the type of guy who shot down mothers and children in cold blood every day before breakfast.
“Please, mister,” the woman begged, fat tears streaming down her cheeks. “You can have everything. Just let us go.” She shrugged her bag off her shoulder, allowing it to fall to the ground. “There’s plenty of cash in there. Take it all. Just don’t hurt my kids.”
Connor sighed, lowering his gun. And…so much for blending in.
“It’s okay,” he tried to assure her, guilt gnawing at his insides. He’d meant to stop her from making her call, not scare her and her family half to death. “I promise I’m not going to hurt you.”
I’m the good guy, he wanted to add. The one they sent to save your world.
But of course he couldn’t tell her that. It would just bring up too many unanswerable questions. And he had to get a move on anyway—catalog his gear, get changed, locate the museum. Do a little preliminary scouting before introducing himself to the girl. He had a lot to accomplish in the next four months—before the Reckoning day—and, as his father would say, there was no time like the present.
Or the past, in this particular case.
He gestured to the woman’s bag with an apologetic look. “Take your stuff. Just walk away and pretend you never saw me, okay?”
Yeah, like that was going to happen. He could tell from the look in her eyes she’d remember this incident till her dying day. Her children too. But it couldn’t be helped, he reminded himself. And they would thank him if they knew the truth. They would get down on their very knees.
The woman’s face crumpled in relief. “Thank you, sir!” she babbled. “Thank you, thank you so much.” She scurried to grab her bag, then collected her cracked transcriber. “Merry Christmas,” she babbled as she gathered up her children and turned to leave. “Merry Christmas to you and yours.”
Connor had started to walk away. But the woman’s words made him pause. “Wait, what? What did you just say?” He turned back to her questioningly.
The woman whimpered, holding her hands in front of her face, as if she was afraid he was going to hit her. “Um, I just said merry Christmas,” she stammered. “Or, you know, whatever holiday you celebrate—Happy Hanukkah? Kwanza?”
“But…” Connor protested, his mind racing with sudden confusion. “It’s August.”
The woman stared at him, as if he’d lost his mind.
“It has to be August,” he repeated, panic welling up inside of him. “They told me it would be August. Four months before the Reckoning.”
“Um, I don’t know what that is,” the woman sputtered. “But it is Christmas. I promise you, it’s Christmas Eve. In fact, I was just about to take the boys over to see the tree. They’ve never seen it lit up and—”
She kept babbling, but Connor was no longer listening. He dug into the capsule again, heart pounding wildly in his chest as he searched for his transcriber. There had to be some mistake. The woman had to be lying. Because there was no way…
His hands closed around the device and he pulled it from the pod with shaking fingers. He flicked it on, waiting anxiously for the screen to illuminate, scarcely able to breathe.
December 24th, the device read. 7 p.m.
“No,” he whispered in horror. “That can’t be right.”
But it was, he realized. The signs had been there from the start. August in Texas—it should have been a hundred degrees out—not cold enough to snow.
Something must have gone wrong back at the base. Someone must have pressed the wrong button, turned the wrong dial.
“I was supposed to have four months!” he cried, looking up at the woman with wild eyes. She gave him a helpless shrug, then turned and fled down the street as fast as her thick legs could carry her, her kids scrambling to catch up. Connor watched them go, suddenly feeling as frightened as they must feel. But for a very different reason.
“I was promised four months,” he whispered to no one.
With four months, he could have secured a strong link with the girl. He could have made sure the egg never fell into her hands. He could have gotten a jump on the government…
…and saved his father’s life.
Now he had exactly fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to find the museum. Fifteen minutes to retrieve the egg and the girl. Fifteen minutes to figure out a way to make this all turn out right.
Or the apocalypse that ripped apart his world would begin…all over again.
Chapter Two
If I get one more snot-nosed kid asking me if the T. rex used to dine on people, I’m going to close up the museum and become a history teacher. I mean, really! What are they teaching kids in schools these days?”
Sixteen-year-old Trinity Foxx looked up from her laptop in time to see her grandpa come barreling into the museum’s main office, rounding the corner too quickly and slamming into a table of fish fossils by the door. She winced as he scrambled to stop a four-hundred-million-year-old cephalopod from crashing to the floor.