Free Shift (ChronoShift Trilogy) by Zack Mason Page A

Lawrenceville, GA
     
    One more glitch stared him in the face.  A driver’s license.  He’d left his driver’s license behind with everything else he’d abandoned earlier in the summer.  Of course, he’d need that license to retrieve his possessions.
    It took a bit of finagling, but he reported his license stolen and got a replacement.   When he finally returned to the bank, he was twice disappointed.  First, over the past forty years, his original $10.00 had only turned into $44.67.  Goes to show you what a savings account at a bank is worth , he mused.
    The second disappointment was that his safe deposit box had long been closed out and the contents confiscated for failure to pay the annual fee for the box.  40 years of payments was apparently a little over $1,600.
    Good grief.  Why did this have to be so difficult?  You’d think making money with a time machine would be easy.
    Instead of using the safe deposit box, Mark could have just shifted from 1970 to 2011 with his Wal-Mart shares in hand, but then they wouldn’t appear to have aged at all and probably would have been treated as a forgery when he tried to cash them in.  The Securities Exchange Commission might be suspicious of someone showing up with four original Wal-Mart stock certificates that looked like they’d just been printed.
     
    Frustrated, Mark withdrew his $44.67 in 2011, shifted back to the day after he’d opened his savings account in 1970 and redeposited the money.  When he returned to 2011, his account now had a balance of $244.18.  Still not enough, but it was better.
    He contemplated doing the savings account trick again, but that would mean he would have to deposit almost 250 one dollar bills at the bank back in 1970.  Such a quantity would greatly increase the chances somebody would notice many of those bills were printed forty years after he was depositing them.  It was very likely the federal bank which maintained the cash reserves for the community banks in the area would notice and they would trace the funny bills back to Brand Bank.  It wouldn’t take Brand Bank long at all to remember who had deposited so many one dollar bills into their account.  Tellers had memories and that kind of thing stood out.
    Nope, he had to think of something else, and he had an idea that might just work.  Mark withdrew some of his savings and walked seven blocks to the closest Wal-Mart where he purchased a number of potentially very useful items.
    Ironic.  He was using Wal-Mart to make money off of Wal-Mart.
     
    ***
     
    April 16 th , 1918 – Lawrenceville, GA
     
    Mark pushed the glass door to the drugstore open and went inside.  A tiny bell tinkled overhead as he entered.  To him, the drugstore looked old-fashioned, though it was truthfully quite contemporary for 1918.  Rows and rows of antique-styled glass medicine bottles lined the shelves along one wall and behind the counter.  Other shelves and tables displayed common household items made of glass and iron, which again looked dated to him, but were correct for the period.  He guessed this pharmacy simultaneously served as a sort of convenient store.
    The floor was real hardwood, the kind of thin-slatted floor only found in older buildings, but this wood was of course not aged, did not creak, and smelled faintly of the linseed oil used to preserve it.  The style of the entire decor was early 20 th century, but none of it showed the wear and tear age brings.  Of course, this was exactly as it should be, but Mark’s mind was still assimilating the reality of the years he was traversing and the new, fresh feel of all the older-styled items still struck him as odd.
    The ambiance evoked images right out of a Normal Rockwell painting.  An elderly woman chatted with the pharmacist, who stood behind the counter.  A teenage boy sat with two pretty girls close to the soda fountain sharing some milkshakes.  It felt homey.
    The pharmacist was neatly groomed, his hair peppered