LOCKED ON TO both my substitute parental units, I chose flight over fight once again—but only so I could stage the fight in my preferred arena.
I let my mind go limp and dove through the surface of time.
Since I had a solid grip on Fake Mom and Fake Dad—not to mention their blood mingling with mine—I was able to blast back to the past and drag the two of them with me.
My destination was Kansas, of course.
I was going back in time to that fateful day when The Prayer first entered my life. Back to when I was three years old, making the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World out of Play-Doh down in the basement.
At least, that’s the time I was going to make Number 1 think I had traveled to.
In truth, I was only time-scrubbing to that day when The Prayer caught me camping in the backyard. I set my time arrival parameters on early evening, just before dinner. I would art-direct the scene to make sure it looked exactly like it had on that cursed night right before The Prayer slaughtered my entire family.
That’s why I was bringing along a few props—specifically, body doubles for my mother and father. Physically, they had been good enough to almost fool me. Hopefully, they would be good enough to fool Number 1, too.
I assumed the “omnipotent” Prayer was time-diving right behind me. Any temporal jump I could make, I knew it could match.
I sensed, however, that the forces of darkness could be blinded by their single-minded devotion to cold and calculating logic. They weren’t big on emotions like love (I had a feeling this is why they wanted to destroy Terra Firma and all the emotional earthlings inhabiting it). Creatures without a conscience or intuition—those driven only by the logical choices presented to them—are often the easiest to fool. Especially if you do something totally wacking nuts.
The Prayer would follow me down the time-warp rabbit hole because it would be a logical, predatory choice. It would not question where I was headed. The hunter would simply track its prey.
When Number 1 arrived in Kansas, I was pretty confident it would assume that I had gone back to that pivotal moment, right before both my parents were slain.
Something I’ve actually thought about doing at least a billion times since I mastered time travel.
Over and over, I’ve asked myself, What if I could go back and stop Number 1 from doing what it did?
What if I, the trained teenage Alien Hunter Daniel, could pop into our Kansas home two minutes before The Prayer showed up and, if nothing else, warn my parents that Number 1 was coming?
That would be so awesome, right?
Probably not.
Changing history has consequences. It’d be like chucking a cinder block into a calm lake. There’d be too many ripples rushing forward from that single impact point; enough turbulence to swamp the future and wash away tons of meaningful events.
For instance, all the good I had done during my dangerous days as the Alien Hunter might be undone. Several cities across the globe might be instantly wiped out by outlaw extraterrestrials because I wasn’t there to stop them if I hadn’t grown up an orphan, eager to take on my dead parents’ missions. Worse, I may have only delayed the inevitable, and the next time The Prayer struck in the past, the fiend would take greater pains to kill me when it killed my parents.
In fact, if I stopped The Prayer from killing my parents, bizarre as it sounds, there was a slim possibility that I would vanish half a nanosecond later because of whatever happened in the tsunami of history being rewritten. I might already be dead in that alternate timeline.
Seriously: you don’t want to mess with the past because it will totally scramble your future and muddle what you call the present.
On the other hand, I was more than willing to mess with Number 1’s mind, big-time.
Hey, he’d been doing it to me all along.
It was time to return the favor.