The Time Men

A Short Story by award winning author - W.K. Rader

Some moments are meant to pass. Others refuse to.

On an ordinary autumn evening, Alisha sits at a city bus stop wrapped in her late mother's shawl, waiting for a bus that will never come. When a stranger in a charcoal coat and a fedora steps out of the fading light, looking as though he walked straight out of the 1940s. The clock across the street stops ticking, the traffic freezes, and the world holds its breath.

He calls himself a Time Man.

He claims he can fold time like tuning a dial on a radio; sliding moments forward and back, but never undoing a life or pulling a soul back once it's gone. And he has come with a warning: Alisha is threaded through a day that others are trying to rewrite, and the work she's doing on a secretive project could unravel everything. There are others like him. Some of them want her dead.

As an unseen war over time closes in around her, gunfire, falling debris, near-misses that masquerade as accidents — Alisha's only guide is a voice she thought she'd lost forever: her mother's, whispering Move. Run. Be careful. To survive, she must trust forces she can't see, defy a bargain that could save her life, and follow a thread that reaches back across generations to a wartime secret and a name she never expected to find.

Spanning a single, breathless chase and a lifetime of buried family history, The Time Men is a haunting, fast-paced tale about grief, memory, free will, and the strange ways the people we love stay with us—long after time should have carried them away.

A gripping short read perfect for fans of literary science fiction and supernatural suspense, complete with a Book Club Discussion Guide and a preview of W.K. Rader's acclaimed novel The Gathering.

<b><i>Some moments are meant to pass. Others refuse to.</i></b><br><br>On a quiet city evening, Alisha sits on a weathered bus bench wrapped in her late mother's shawl, expecting nothing more than the ride. What she gets instead is a stranger in a charcoal coat and fedora, a man who looks as though he stepped out of a 1940s photograph, and whose presence bends the second hand of the clock across the street to a trembling halt.<br><br>He calls himself a Time Man. He says she is in danger. He says her work, quiet lines of code buried inside a sealed quantum project, will rewrite more than anyone intended.<br><br>And he is not the only one watching.<br><br>As horrible coincidences start to plague her, Alisha begins to understand: someone is hunting her across the folds of time itself. Her only warnings are a stranger's whispered adjustments, a mother's voice rising impossibly from memory, and her own stubborn refusal to be predictable. But the Time Men have rules. They have deals. And they do not lose quietly.<br><br>To finish what she started, Alisha will have to trust a ghost from a war that never fully ended, and discover that the past she thought she'd buried has been reaching for her all along.<br><br><b><i>"The only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain, and the only thing that is permanent is change. " &mdash; Socrates</i></b><br><br>A taut, haunting novelette of grief, science, and the seams between moments, from author W.K. Rader