The Business of Time Travel Tourism

Chapter 32: Armed and ready

July 3, 2014. Thursday

It was a busy morning at the mansion of Alfonso Duval. On this day, all security personnel hourly wages were increased twice. In turn, the gray people received double food donations. The rocket launch was planned for tomorrow, and July figured the guards needed additional motivation to be more alert.

The garden was crowded no more, there were no more ants rushing back and forth between the junk pile and the rocket. All the scaffoldings from the rocket had already been removed. Only three fuel trucks were parked in the garden. They stood in line by the massive propulsion engines, a wide hose attached to one of them.

Since the management was not as strict as it was in the army or any decent structure such as a shopping mall, the guards tended to do things for their own amusement that would not have been tolerated in previously mentioned places. Even on the double pay, they chatted when unseen by cameras, had longer breaks than it was allowed to, and were not as sharp as their employee hoped them to be.

During the night, just outside the gates of the mansion, a horror-themed amusement park had arisen out of nowhere. Besides it, by the road stretched a line of parked ice-cream trucks, their sides open to the direction opposite of the garden. Smiling ice-cream sellers stood by the windows. Through the loudspeakers, at times, they shouted, "Ice cream. Two for the price of one. The best ice-cream in Crossroad!"

Alfonso spoke with a delivery company on the phone. He instructed them to bring the container that contained 'The Book of Orders' to a particular address in Milltown. He wanted to be sure that the truck with the container would be parked at the necessary place tomorrow morning.

Kevin sat in a dark room in the lotus position. With his eye closed, he meditated and found himself in a place far away, a cold and empty place. He concentrated for the upcoming battle and inevitable encounter with the greatest opponent he had ever faced.

July trimmed the bushes in the garden, shaping them into people, animals, and different objects. Some of them were wonderful and refined, others strange and abstract, but one thing was certain: after his touch, the bush would become a piece of art that could be envied by the master trimmers.

Due to the lack of control, on their breaks, guards would slip outside to wander into the newly arrived horror park or go buy a cone of ice cream and never return. Little by little their number was decreasing. Many of the remaining in the garden already carried two or three walkie-talkies with which they covered for their missing colleagues.

The only group that was not interested in the attractions outside was the Kakamaquans. Their vigilant leader did not allow his men to wander away. Being the man of the military, Gango was mostly interested in learning how to operate the armored machine called 'a tank'. Together with a couple of his subordinates he interrogated an experienced operator of the machine, demanding him to explain the way of using it.

The guards who wandered outside to the park had quite a special experience. They would enter the park twos or threes at a time and see many people wearing spooky masks, working in different games stands, selling tickets. A few random people wandering around the place would give an illusion that the place was busy. Men wearing the usual Alfonso's guard uniform, the suit, would approach them and tell about how awesome this place is and suggest to visit the amazing 'Fire Space Shark on Drugs,' a house with a painted burning Shark on the wall and only single visible entrance. When a guard entered the place, he did not leave it. After a few minutes, another person walked out of the attraction on the other side of the building wearing the disappeared guard's clothes.

,A similar case was with the ice cream trucks. Only there, the guards would get to taste something sweet before vanishing.

Time passed, and soon the 'changed' guards began to return back to the mansion. They would walk into the garden, choose a random route, patrol it and interact with others. They would ask to see the weapons of their colleagues, toy with them a little, turn around, play some more and return the weapons back. Many new faces had arrived during the last week so no one was bothered to see the strangers. The only people guards knew as uninvited strangers were George, Max, and Sally because there were many walls and poles inside the garden on which their photos had been posted.