Chapter 3

Jane woke to find that she was naked, and tied spread eagled on her bed. Panicking, she struggled to get loose for a few moments, before she realized that she wasn’t alone. Jack was seated in a chair at the far end of the room.

She glared at Jack and said, “Let me loose.”

“Nope,” Jack answered. He studied his fingernails for a moment before looking over at the woman. With a hard expression on his face, he said, “You can drop the amnesia act. I know a lot more about you than you think.”

“What are you talking about?” Jane growled. He was beginning to scare her with his bizarre accusations.

Jack answered, “I used the same tactic when I first arrived here thirty years ago. When are you from? 2060? 2070?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Jane said with a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“I know that you’re from the future. I’m pretty sure that you came back to this time to kill Ed Taylor. I have plans for him, and I can’t allow you to mess them up,” Jack said.

“He raped me,” Jane shouted returning to struggle against the ties that held her to the bed. She needed to get to free so that she could defend herself.

“No, he didn’t,” Jack said. He moved his chair closer to the bed.

“Yes, he did!”

Jack reached out and ran a hand over her naked body. Shaking his head, he said, “Total electrolysis to remove all body hair below the neck. I noticed that they kept the hair on your arms. They didn’t introduce that procedure until 2030, or there about, in my timeline. Before then, it was all hair below the neck that got removed in the electrolysis bath.”

Jane gave forth a strangled cry.

“With just about every woman having a bare pubic region, pubic hair became a real turn-on for men. To tell the truth, hair down there turns me on, too,” Jack said with his disappointment obvious when looking down at her bare pubic area.

“You’re crazy,” Jane managed to say.

His comments about pubic hair were highly accurate. The same thing had happened in her timeline. Women who had chosen not to have the full body electrolysis procedure performed were in high demand. A lot of men had developed fetishes regarding pubic hair.

“In my timeline, a lot of men got the same procedure. Many of them included their face so that they wouldn’t have to shave,” Jack said. He opened his shirt and said, “I never went for that procedure and kept my body hair.”

“Let me go,” Jane said.

“You’ve got perfect teeth. Not a single cavity,” Jack said pulling her lower lip down to look at her teeth. She tried to bite his finger. He opened his mouth and pointed to it. After closing his mouth, he said, “I wasn’t nearly so lucky. The medical sciences took a major hit in the 2020’s. There was an occasion when I had a chance to look at some pictures in some old magazines that I found. I had to wonder how it was that everyone had nice teeth. One of the first things I did when I came here, was to visit a dentist. A couple of root canals, and some oral surgery later, I ended up with a mouth that made it easy to smile.”

“Oh my God,” Jane said.

“Two puncture scars on your abdomen. What did they do ... remove your ovaries?”

Jane stared at him wide-eyed. There were no doubts in her mind that he knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Is that standard procedure for enforcing the one couple-one child laws in your timeline, too?” Jack asked.

“No,” Jane answered with a look of horror on her face. “What laws?”

“After having a child, both the man and woman would be sterilized. It was a way of controlling the population,” Jack said.

“That’s barbaric,” Jane said.

“A lot of things were barbaric in my timeline,” Jack said with a negligent shrug of his shoulders.

“Who are you?” Jane asked.

“I’m Jack Dunn. I’m a refuge from 2068. I was sent back a hundred years in time to serve as a bodyguard for a child who would become the president of the United States. The political regime of my time wanted to assure that nothing happened to the man who created the world as I knew it.”

“You were sent back to protect Ed Taylor?” Jane asked.

“No. I killed the guy who was the 44^th president in my timeline,” Jack answered with a smile. “He was ten when I strangled him.”

Horrified by his casual admission of killing a child, she knew that he would kill her without giving it a second thought. She asked, “Why on earth did you kill him?”

“You’d have to know more about my timeline to understand,” Jack answered.

“Tell me about your timeline,” Jane said. She figured that the longer that he talked the greater her chances of escaping were.

“Not until you tell me about your timeline,” Jack said. Seeing the expression on her face, he added, “Don’t worry. I know that you are a historian who specialized in late twentieth and early twenty-first century American history.”

Jane wondered how he could know that. She studied him for a moment before she said, “Ed Taylor was the 44^th president.”

“I’m glad to hear that my plans were successful,” Jack said. He paused for a second, and then said, “Or should I say that my plans will be successful?”

“You have no idea what you did,” Jane said.

“Tell me about it,” Jack said while settling in his chair to listen to her story.

“He destroyed the United States of America,” Jane declared.

“How did he do that?” Jack asked.

“He killed a third of Congress and over 16,000 employees of the Federal Government. By the time he was done, there was almost no government left,” Jane said.

“You still haven’t told me what he did that was so wrong,” Jack said with a smile that sent chills down her back.

“Didn’t you hear me? He killed thousands of people,” Jane said. “Actually, he killed more than a million people.”

“Was he a tyrant?” Jack asked.

“No. He was a butcher,” Jane said bitterly. “One of the people he killed was my grandfather.”

“I’ve known Ed for fifteen years. He never struck me as a bloodthirsty individual,” Jack said. He rubbed his chin. “I’m sure that he had a reason for killing all of those people.”

“You have no idea what Ed Taylor was capable of doing,” Jane said getting confused about verb tenses for a moment. It was hard talking about the past of her time which was the future for this time.

“So tell me about his presidency.”

“At the time he ran for president, the budget of the United States was out of control. He promised that he would get control of the budget and bring the country back from the brink of economic ruin. People voted for him thinking that he was going to balance the budget.

“The first thing he did on getting elected was to pass three entitlement bills. It was a handout to all of the major political interest groups in the country. They flew through congress like hockey pucks on ice. He signed them with a smile. The voters were totally disgusted.”

“I know Ed and how he operates. What was the catch?” Jack asked.

“Each bill had a minor amendment attached to them. The first one made treason a death penalty crime again,” Jane answered.

“Excellent,” Jack said clapping his hands together in approval.

“The second one made taking a bribe or embezzling federal funds by a government employee a crime of treason,” Jane said.

“I imagine that is why so many congressmen and federal employees were killed,” Jack said nodding his head in satisfaction.

Jane shot him a nasty look and said, “The third was to triple the staff of the IRS.”

“That’s nasty,” Jack said with a grin. “That does sound like something that Ed would do.”

“He turned all of those new IRS agents loose on federal employees. Everyone in the government was audited. It wasn’t long before people were being arrested for accepting bribes, tried as traitors, and executed like murderers. He even had some of the executions shown on television,” Jane said.

“I didn’t think of doing that, but it does sound like a good idea,” Jack said.

“As the body count grew, a lot of people started fleeing the country through Canada and Mexico. My grandfather was too slow to act. He was arrested for having received kickbacks from government suppliers, tried within a week of his arrest, and executed within a month of his conviction.”

“Sorry to hear about your grandfather. He deserved to die,” Jack said.

“It nearly destroyed my mother,” Jane said.

“I’m sure it did. She must have been devastated to learn that her father was a treasonous bastard,” Jack said.

Furious, Jane shouted, “It was only a couple thousand dollars! He should have gone to prison for a couple of months.”

“No. He was destroying this country. He deserved to die,” Jack countered hotly.

“My grandmother had to get a minimum-wage job to support her two kids. She died an early death because of it,” Jane said.

“It sucks to be her,” Jack said.

“You motherfucker!”

Jack leaned forward and said, “By 2068 this country was so corrupt that you couldn’t get anything done without paying someone a bribe. With the federalization of healthcare, you had to pay a doctor a bribe to get medical treatment. Everywhere you turned, people were holding out their hands for money. Companies were selling poisons in the stores as food and getting away with it because they were bribing people who worked in the FDA. Rotten food killed more people than cancer.

“The United States stopped being a country of law and became a country of influence. That disease spread across the entire world.”

“They could have passed laws,” Jane said.

“There were already laws in place, but no one enforced them. All it took was a little money to get people to look the other way,” Jack retorted.

“It shouldn’t have been a death penalty crime!”

“If I didn’t respect the constitution, I would argue that the crime be punished by death by torture. Someone who is supposed to support the constitution shouldn’t be selling out the people for a few damned dollars,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. Waving it in front of her, he asked, “Is this worth a human life? Is it? I’ll tell you that for this much money I could have bribed a policeman to look the other way when investigating a murder. Do you know what he would do? He’d arrest some poor slob who couldn’t bribe his way out of a conviction.”