Shift (ChronoShift Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page B

carving had clearly aged.  Were those just optical illusions?
    He glanced down at the device.  The red glow was gone.  It was back to normal.
    There was one way to settle this.
    Stopping short in the middle of the trail, he flung his backpack to the ground and altered the second setting to match today’s date, but twelve hours in the future.  He punched the button.
    Suddenly, he found himself shrouded in darkness.  The sun was gone, stars twinkled overhead and the moon was out.
    It was a time travel machine.  He had just traveled twelve hours into the future.
     Pushing the button again, he returned to the glaring heat of the midday sun.  Along with a severe case of nausea of course.
    He emptied the remaining contents of his stomach into some colorful shrubs which soon reeked of bile.  Thankfully, he hadn’t had much to eat since his last vomiting session and it wasn’t long before the peaceful, post-regurgitation calm settled in.  Then and there, Mark vowed to be more careful about how often he “shifted”.  Doing it too frequently was not much fun.  He just hoped the effect wasn’t cumulative.
    The nausea was probably part of some kind of time-travel jet lag, he reasoned.  A person could probably get a serious case of that, jumping around like he was.
    A few hours later, Mark ran into Highway 129.  He knew if he followed it to the left, he’d end up to North Carolina.  To the right led down to Cleveland, Georgia.  He turned right and started walking.
    Curiosity was picking at him again.  It had been several hours since he last used the watch.  That had to be enough time to mitigate the nausea, right?
    He twiddled with the buttons and set his target time back to the original 1890 date.  He wanted to see what the road would look like back then.
    Familiar stumble — a sense of falling about an inch. 
    The forest “shifted” as it had before.
    Slight nausea.
    The highway was now a dusty, dirt road, and it lay twenty feet to his right instead of under his feet.  They must have changed its path when they paved it. 
    Besides the road jumping around, nothing else was different.  Same Georgia woods, same sounds, same air and sky.
    Kind of unsettling actually.  In his mind, the late 1800's was life in brown sepia.  Photos of the early 1900's were always in black and white, and those of the 1800's were brown.  He knew those were just photos, but still, seeing 1890 in full color seemed weird.
    The road was barren of movement.  Just like a hundred years in the future.  It was anti-climatic in a way.  He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to see, maybe a parade of people dressed in Victorian clothing, but there wasn’t anything remarkable aside from the road.  He poked around a little bit and then pushed the button to return.
    A long, high-pitched tone sang out, and the display flashed to red again.
    Dang!
    It hadn’t made that noise before.  What did that mean?  Frantically, he punched at the button over and over, but all it did was beep and flash.
    The display had turned red before in the house, but it hadn’t beeped then, and he’d only used it a couple of times since.  He feared it might be breaking down on him.  His breathing shortened.  If he didn’t even understand how the watch worked, how could he fix it?  Its body felt warm against his skin.  Maybe it had just overheated — or something.  Would it reset itself again or was he marooned in 1890?  He had no clue.
    Broken or not, there was nothing he could do about it for now except to keep walking.
    Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead as he continued down the dirt road that would one day be Highway 129.
     

 
     
    Time goes, you say?  Ah no!
    Alas, Time stays, we go.
     
                            ~ Henry Austin Dobson
     
     
    A few hours later, he arrived in what he guessed must be Cleveland, Georgia.  The town was much smaller than the version of Cleveland he knew from his day.  Its roads were a