Lucky glanced back at Charlie and said, “Charlie, it’s pretty rough out there. Now we’re both armed, but there’s a big scene of rioting, a village mutiny of sorts. I’ll let you make the call. Wanna risk stepping out into this mess or would you rather retreat while we can?”
“Lucky,” Charlie answered. “We’ve come this far – whatever you decide. I’ve never backed down from a fight. Besides, I don’t know what time period you’re seeing out there, but I doubt that many of them have seen or heard modern guns before. I’d venture to say that these things alone will create a path for us wherever we go. What say you, mate?”
Lucky nodded. “Hold on, Charlie,” he said as they stepped out of the portal and into a beautiful chandeliered room with portraits of nobility, queens and kings, being carved to shreds by an angry mob. Everything in the room was being torn down, ripped apart.
“Let’s go,” Lucky said, and he and Charlie stepped out in the room where they promptly got crammed right into the middle of a large, surging crowd, shoving and moving, taking them, unwillingly, towards the staircase leading to the upper floor. It was a groundswell, like a tide from the great ocean, moving them along the marble floor. Suddenly, Charlie found an opening and grabbed Lucky and shoved him to the side just as a large statue came slamming down from above, the victim of a cantankerous crowd. Lucky reciprocated. He took Charlie’s arm and ducked to the side of the staircase. Some members of the group were dressed as soldiers while others were in everyday street clothes. They split up, some going upstairs as others flooded the staircase and descended the steps leading to the cellar. Lucky elbowed his way to the edge of the group as Charlie followed his lead. Without discussion, Lucky began to follow the soldiers into the basement. As Charlie and Lucky stepped through the door, they heard blood-curdling screams and witnessed something unlike anything they had ever seen – soldiers slaughtering everyone in the room. In the center of the floor lay a man and a woman face down. In the corners, there were young women cowering, their hands covering their faces, arms outstretched, begging and pleading for their lives. Their words fell on deaf ears as each one fell victim to the soldiers’ knives or guns. Lucky felt sick as he watched what was unfolding before him. Charlie stood motionless; his eyes opened wide, speechless at the sight before him. All the young girls lay dead except for one. A soldier eyed her with his wild eyes. He raised his knife and started toward her with a downward plunge and as he did, Lucky fired a shot taking him down immediately and then began firing at all the other savage men in the room. “You get the left, I’ll handle the right,” Charlie said as he joined in. The mobsters, with their own guns and knives, began lunging and shooting, but their bullets seemed to be missing their targets. Meanwhile, Lucky and Charlie picked off the murderers, one by one, each of the modern men shooting and hitting with exceptional accuracy.
Lucky grabbed the lone standing, hysterical young girl by the wrist and pulled her to his side. He placed his arm around her waist, practically carrying her, as Charlie walked, gun aimed high, covering them. The three of them hurried up the stairs as they fought against the tidal wave of people rushing toward them, eager to make their way downstairs as well. Someone in the angry mob recognized the girl, began to scream, and attempted to pull her from the men, but Charlie fired one shot and they scattered. Lucky continued to plow past people, knocking them out of his way. Some other soldiers, heading for the lower stairway, suddenly spotted the young lady and they, too, began pushing people out of their way in their effort to get to her. That was when Lucky came to a screeching halt. He turned and faced the group directly, shot and hit the knee of one man and fired off another shot, stopping the soldiers and the bloodthirsty mob in their tracks. The crowd then turned into one hysterical, screaming frenzy as Charlie and Lucky’s gunshots echoed loudly off the walls of the large room. The group dove, taking cover, and scattered, fighting and scratching their way to the doors, exiting en masse, trampling each other as they did. The scene was more chaotic now than when they had arrived. The hunters were now the hunted and their flight to safety provided enough time for the men and young girl to make their way into the portal.
When they stepped out of the portal and into the darkness of the train barn, Charlie turned to Lucky and said, “I had no idea.”
“Hey, mate, you’re fine. Just provided me a little excitement – some that I don’t care to see again, but nevertheless, I know now for sure that the ole ticker works. I could see her beating right through my shirt,” Charlie said as he wiped his brow a bit.
“Everything will be all right,” Charlie kept saying as he gently squeezed the young girl’s hand, trying to comfort her using soft soothing voices, but each time, she responded in a garbled language they could not comprehend
“Stay here and watch her, Charlie. I’ll only be gone a minute. I want to take a look at where this new portal takes me.”
Lucky looked out of the portal and this time, what he saw was an entirely different scene. There was a sea of tents, almost arranged in perfectly straight lines, each open on all sides and clearly visible, with hundreds of merchants displaying their wares. There were buildings of stone being constructed. Lucky could make out the words on one sign that said, “Dentist/Barber” and, in the distance, there was a sign that said, “Rhyolite.”
Lucky wracked his brain, but could not recall a city by that name.
Chapter Eleven
At first, the young lady was hesitant to get into Charlie’s new truck. She was frightened of it, but after seeing both of the men, Charlie and Lucky, settle themselves inside with no harm, she cautiously climbed into the back seat. The truck took off, lurched as it bounced over a rock, and frightened her terribly. She grabbed onto the side strap and held on tightly and only seemed to calm down a bit when they entered the smooth concrete road. After traveling a few miles, she began to look around and take in her surroundings. It was odd, these trees and roads, so foreign, so different but yet so open and comforting at the same time.
“Wonder what it feels like to her, riding in a car, uh, a truck for the first time,” Charlie said to Lucky.
“I know. She’s probably scared half to death. I can’t imagine what must be going through her mind,” Lucky answered.
Charlie turned on the radio and the young girl jumped, almost right out of her seat. She leaned forward, staring at the source of the music. From the back seat, she reached her arm in between the men and touched the buttons lightly and uttered a few words. She was mesmerized. Lucky pointed to a button. He pushed it and a television screen popped up with the local news. She giggled with delight even though she couldn’t understand a word being said. She could not take her eyes of the screen and remained glued to it, occasionally letting out a giggle or a few foreign words in between.
Mickey greeted them at the door and curiously eyed their guest.
“Son, you missed one a hell of a show,” Charlie said. “Awfully glad we got back in one piece after all the shooting and fighting. It was sad and revolting, but oddly, the adventure of it all made me feel like a young lad again.”
“Fighting? Shooting? What the hell is he talking about, Lucky?” Mickey asked in a concerned voice.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” Lucky answered, “we ran into a little trouble and we had to take this young lady with us or she would have been killed. I’ve never seen so many crazy people in one place, at one time, in my life. Today was, well, it was up there. It’ll be hard to beat what we saw. Hard to talk about it.” But they did.
Lucky started off and he and Charlie took turns filling in the blanks for each other, relaying it all, even some of the gory details of the killings. Sam sat quietly for a while and finally asked Lucky about the girl.
“Her mother, father, and sisters were there and were some of those murdered in the basement of this building,” Lucky said. “The only things that saved us were our guns and the fact that the portal was close by, those things and the grace of God. We should not be here right now, telling this story. Thank God for modern-day fire power,” Lucky said.
“Sam, perhaps you can understand her. I know you’re trained in more languages than I am,” Lucky said. “I was stationed in Russia for two years and picked up a little Russian, just enough to make myself understood and I actually understand it better than I speak it, but this young lady is speaking a dialect that I cannot pinpoint or understand.”
“Sure thing,” Sam said.
Sam asked the girl her name, but the young lady couldn’t understand what she was saying, so Sam used sign language.
Sam pointed to herself and said, “My name is Samantha. Samantha. I am Samantha.” She then pointed to the girl. There was no response. She repeated this exercise several times until finally the girl, replied, “Anastasia.”
“Anastasia? Anastasia?” Sam asked, pointing to the girl.
“Yes,” replied the girl. “Anastasia Nikolayevna.“
At this point, Sam began to ask more and more questions and with much effort and hand movements, working together with Mickey, Lucky, Charlie, they all pieced together bits of her story. It seemed that the palace was destroyed and the royal family had moved to another palace in Siberia. The mob, upon discovering their new location, marched there to destroy them and every one of its occupants.
Charlie interjected, “We stepped out of the portal right smack dab into the Siberian Palace, into the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution. Crikey!” he exclaimed. I’ve read about that! We arrived at the palace just in time to save this young lady right as her family all around her, was being murdered. Crikey, mate, do you realize this? This is carzy,” he said looking toward Lucky.
“Crazy,” Lucky corrected.
“No mate, carzy – our version of crazy. I shudder to think what would have happened if we had gone up those stairs instead of down into the cellar.”
The room was quiet. It was powerful and all consuming. Lucky stood silently, taking it all in. Charlie was right about the revolution. He knew his history.
Finally, Charlie broke the silence. “Now that we have her, what do we do with her?” he asked.
As they began discussing their options, Anastasia calmly removed a cigarette from her pocket, pulled out a pack of matches, lit the cigarette, and began puffing on it. It surprised everyone in the room.
Later, by virtue of the Internet, it wasn’t long before a few interesting facts began to emerge about Anastasia. For example, at the age of sixteen, right around the time that war broke out, she began to smoke, secretly. With Russia's hard times and revolts becoming a constant and the tsar's popularity decreasing, her anti-stress ritual was to walk in the garden and smoke without her parents’ knowledge. Sometimes, Olga, her sister, would join her.
Anastasia enjoyed the tranquility and the safety of the ranch and she seemed to be quite comfortable with the workers, Lucky, and friends. Eventually, by hanging out with Sam, she was able to communicate that her father was indeed Nicholas II of Russia and her mother, Alexandra Fyodorovna. Her depression over the loss of her family was strong, but began to ease a little throughout the weeks as she adjusted to her new surroundings. She was a fun-loving girl, a prankster, who given her nature, could not remain depressed for long. Soon, she began to blend in and feel safe at the ranch, but the fact remained that she was still royalty from another time.
“I don’t really know what to do with her,” Lucky said to Mickey one evening. “I can’t just take her back to her own world, where she will be killed, yet I’m in a state of altering, or have already, altered history.”
Mickey just listened. Then it hit him, Lucky’s words.
“Damn, Lucky.” he said. “Geez, man, this is a pretty big deal. I never thought of it that way. Well, let’s check right now on Wikipedia and see what it says about her. Since you already changed history, it should be there, right?”
Lucky’s eyes lit up. Mickey was right. History had already been changed and it was certain to be duly noted on the internet, in history books, and in classrooms around the world. This was a big dilemma and one that he just could not handle in one evening. There was a lot to think about, another day, after a good night’s rest.
The following day, Lucky had Mickey drive Sam and Anastasia into Alice Springs to get the young girl outfitted for clothing appropriate for ranch living. They were gone the better part of the morning and when they returned, Mickey laughingly told the story of how upset Anastasia had become after eyeing the women’s bikini bathing suits and short dresses. She found them disgusting, as in her time apparently, women’s bathing suits covered the entire body from head to toes. Modesty was key, as Anastasia had explained to Sam, and was considered the epitome of class.
The boxes were placed on the table and Anastasia began to open them. Lucky got a kick out of watching her. Sam and Mickey collected the clothing and carried the items into her room. A short while later Anastasia emerged, looking and acting every bit the typical teenage girl, glowing as she paraded around the room, modeling. The group applauded as she emerged with each new ensemble, none of them being exactly what Lucky had intended for ranch life. As she walked around, proudly displaying her new handbag, she heard Charlie call from outside. She turned around to see his head peering through the door. Charlie motioned for her to step outside for a moment. Anastasia put down the purse and walked out onto the porch. Standing before her was a majestic white mare, her tail wagging and her head raised high, in an almost regal way. Next to the mare stood a towering, stallion, as black as night.
Anastasia smiled at the horses.
“Beautiful,” she said in her broken English.
Charlie was a compassionate type of man, unafraid to show his genteel side. His compassion showed as he tended his animals, the way he dealt with his hired hands and the welcoming arms that he extended to those in the community. This empathy now extended to Anastasia. He felt sorry for her having lost her family, being whisked away to a new world and he had grown fond of her – her sparkle, her spirit, her child-like wonder.