Unexpectedly, he felt his throat tighten and tears spring to his eyes.
It’s been so long. I know you said you were ready to die, but I sure do miss you when you leave. Gotta remember that for you, Gram just died. You’re devastated, of course.
Scott gently swung his feet of the couch and sat up.
“Glad you got some sleep. I know you needed it,” Earl said as he eased into his chair. “Cheryl’s working on some dinner for us.”
And just like that, here I am once again.
A moment of panic filled him.
Wait. Can I remember everything?
There was a momentary void where all his memories about his studies had been. Then, the first page of his notes appeared in his mind and everything was there.
I made it. I’ve got everything I need. It took a lifetime to get here, but now I can get started.
SCOTT HAD METICULOUSLY planned for what he would do when he woke up again in this life. But he had dreamed it so often that actually living this life again felt slightly surreal.
The first eighteen months played out almost exactly as it had the last time through. He asked Earl to help him build a place to do his rehabilitation and spent many happy hours in the basement with his grandfather. Scott listened to him whistle tunelessly and tell him the same stories he had before. He didn’t mind hearing them a second time at all. Getting to spend more time with Gramps was a gift, and he recognized it as such.
Scott had a lot of other preparations to make in order to be ready. He knew he would want weapons with him as he went about his newfound vocation, but he wanted to avoid guns if at all possible. Guns were loud. No silencer ever worked like it did in television and movies. Plus, they left more information behind than he was comfortable with. He wanted to be as untraceable as he could be.
Finding a mail order supply house catalog for police departments, he ordered a collapsible steel baton. Small enough to easily be hidden on his body, but able to do serious damage when it was extended.
He also purchased a karambit, a weapon he had learned about in Vietnam. It was a short, curved knife with a finger ring on the end of the handle. That grip made it difficult for an opponent to dislodge the weapon during combat. Perfect for close combat, and potentially lethal.
The one question Scott couldn’t answer was, when faced with the opportunity, would he be able to actually do this thing? Could he kill someone even though they hadn’t committed the crime yet? Did he have enough faith in the way things had played out in his previous lives to actually put someone in a grave? He believed so, but he suspected that was something he wouldn’t actually know until he was faced with the decision.
In all his previous lives, he had burned his green canvas army jacket while he was rehabilitating himself—a way to forcibly separate his past. He chose not to do that this time, thinking that the jacket might allow him to blend in better in certain situations.
When his grandfather died once again, Scott knew his moment was almost at hand. While he waited for Cheryl to once again announce her engagement, he worked on getting into the best shape possible.
He bought a set of weights, set them up in Earl’s old workshop and spent several hours each day working on building up his muscles and improving his sense of balance. He also focused on his stamina. He started by walking a mile each time he went out, but by the time the wedding rolled around again in April, he was able to jog a few miles at a time.
He prepared Cheryl and Mike for the idea that he would be going on a walkabout when they returned from their honeymoon. They were once again planning the trip to Florida. The fact that their lives played out almost exactly the same, time after time, showed him how little impact he and his changing lives had on them.
Scott had taken the time to write down all the notes he had memorized. He knew they were hardwired into his brain by now, but it made it easier to sort through and plan when he could look at the specifics on the page.
For most of his previous life, he had known what his first mission was going to be.
Brock Allen Jenkins had murdered his wife and children in Waterville, Maine, on the 4th of July, 1974. It had been a horrific crime that had made headlines around the country at the time. Jenkins had gone drinking with friends at a barbecue earlier that day. He had arrived home to find his wife Sylvia and their three children sitting in the front yard.
No one ever knew what set Jenkins off, or why he did what he did, but he had killed his entire family. The medical examiner, upon examining the victims, had theorized that the deaths didn’t occur at the same time, but were spread out over a period of five or more hours.
When Scott thought of what each of the children or his wife had been thinking as they watched the rest of their family be murdered, it sickened him. In some ways, it was a carbon copy of what he had gone through when he was ten years old.
By the first week of May, 1974, he was packed and ready to hit the road. He had eight weeks to get from Indiana to Maine.
Chapter Seventeen
Scott knew that one of the keys to his long-term success would be the ability to travel anonymously. He decided that meant growing his hair out. That would help him fit in with the times.
One more long-haired guy wearing an old army jacket riding his thumb or the bus through an area wouldn’t be particularly interesting or memorable to most people.
Scott made his way on Interstate 69 north to Indianapolis. There, he turned east. He managed to pick up a ride with a sales rep at a truck stop outside of Indianapolis that took him across Ohio and into Pennsylvania.
His previous trip through Pennsylvania, he had barely nicked through the northwest corner of the state on the way to New York. This time, he caught a number of short rides that took him right through the heart of the state.
As he worked his way across Pennsylvania, he wondered how he had missed it while wandering in his previous lifetime. It was lovely—filled with small towns and a tremendous amount of history.
Scott knew he had plenty of time to arrive in Maine, so he allowed himself to take a few days off when he reached Gettysburg. He stayed in an inexpensive motel and took a guided tour of the battlefields.
While passing the time in Vermont, he had made a study of military history, reading as many books on strategy and wars as Greta had in stock at Twice Told Tales. Somehow, reading about many centuries of war helped him put his own brief battle experience into perspective.
His guided tour ended with a visit to the hill where Pickett had made his charge. As the sun set, Scott stood in the last rays of light, lost in contemplation, trying to picture the life and death struggle that had happened in that very place. Twelve thousand Confederate soldiers had run, crawled, and bled over three-quarters of a mile of empty field while the Union army rained hellfire down on them. The Confederacy breached the Union lines in a few places, but couldn’t hold their position. Eventually they were forced to retreat, with nearly fifty percent casualties. The Civil War continued to play out for several more years, but that marked the high-water mark for the South.
Years later, when a reporter asked General Pickett why his charge had failed, he answered, “I always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.”
Scott shielded his eyes against the dying rays.
There haven’t been many times in our history when we weren’t sending our young men off to fight in a battle somewhere or another. Almost eight thousand people killed right here. Forty thousand badly wounded, all in a single battle.