Zack was standing in front of the bathroom mirror wrapped in a towel and wiping the steam away from the glass with a sock. He got a clear view of the cleaned up damage he'd received as well as a glimpse at Cody's startled face behind him. "Yeah, he got me a little better than I thought at first," he admitted as he turned his head and saw the thin cut that arced from slightly under his cheekbone to just short of his ear.

"You've got a little cut on the back of your head, too," Cody told him.

"Huh?"

"Right here," Cody said, turning around and pointed to his own head. Zack found the spot and hissed as he pressed on it.

"I guess that's from when my head hit the wall."

"You didn't mention that part before."

"I forgot about it. A lot happened in like twenty seconds."

"You might have a concussion."

"I don't have a concussion, Cody. I'm just a little beat up, that's all. Besides, I'm still a thousand percent better right now than Aaron is. His kids are going to feel the knee I gave him."

"Still. I think you should take it easy for the rest of the night just in case. Don't move around too much or anything."

"You're smothering me again, Mom," Zack joked. "Like I said, Cody, I'm fine. But," he said as he felt an interruption bubbling up inside his brother, "I'll crash out on the couch for a while and watch what they call tv here if it'll put your mind at ease while you're in the basement messing with the box."

"You're sure you'll be okay while I'm down there?"

"Yes. If you ask me again, though, I'm going to go out and run a marathon or something. Go figure out how to get us home already." He gently shooed Cody out door.

"If you need anything-"

"I'll yell. Don't worry about me." He turned and headed back toward the bedrooms and half-expected Cody to follow him but his brother had retreated to the den after an appraising glance. Zack heard the basement door squeak open as he began drying himself.

Cody descended the steps and flicked the light switch at the bottom, squinting as the fluorescents in the ceiling came to life. He stood with his hands on his hips as he examined the box from a few paces and felt a wave of anxiety wash over him. Cody exhaled and forced himself to the table. He gingerly picked the box up and looked it over, paying attention to all the spaces he thought were screw holes.

"I can do this," he muttered as he put the box back down. "Piece of cake." Cody went over to Arwin's toolbox and gave it a gentle shove to get it rolling over to the table. He opened the lid and pulled out a set of screwdrivers and set them close by before spending the next minute moving the toolbox around until he had it exactly where he wanted it. He had wiped the area of the ping pong table he was going to use clean four times before he chided himself.

"Quit stalling, Cody. Open the box already," his inner voice said, sounding remarkably like Zack. He shooed the voice away and picked the smallest screwdriver from the set and slid it in the first hole. He twisted the handle and jumped slightly when the screw loosened. He let out the breath he didn't know he'd been holding when the box didn't suddenly crumble after his first action.

Twelve screws, meticulously set aside in a copy of their previous positions, marked his progress after almost ten minutes. Cody wiped his sleeve across his forehead before gently flipping the box right side up. He put a hand on each side of the device and ever so slightly began to pull the lid upwards. One edge moved instantly but the other hung on and Cody ground his teeth under a frown. He gave the top piece a little twist and it popped loose.

Cody didn't know quite what he was expecting to be under the time machine's hood but he wasn't disappointed in its complexity after taking his first look. Wires and leads and tons of little pieces for which he had no names were everywhere. He pushed his hair back with both hands and mouthed the word wow.

"Okay, let's do this," he said as he powered on his phone and took a picture of the way the machine was assembled from various angles. Once satisfied he'd taken enough to be able to put it back together, Cody set his phone aside and began meticulously checking each and every connection he could see, hoping to find the problem nothing more than an easily fixable loose wire.

As he poked and prodded the various parts, his mind wandered. This is a good place to be doing this. Zack is upstairs and quiet, there's no loud noises coming from the street outside, no headlights glaring through the blocked-up windows... He looked up after the last thought and set his gaze on the windows. Why were they blocked? Cody looked around and saw nothing out of the ordinary in the basement. Just the random junk that accumulated in nearly every basement he'd ever seen. Nothing worth hiding away from the world. So why were they blocked?

Cody stepped away from the box and peered around the room again. Maybe there is something worth hiding down here, he thought, and Arwin has hidden it away. He looked at the box guiltily for a few seconds before his curiosity got the better of him and he began his search. He repeated their steps from before but took more care as he examined boxes and bags and under various things.

Time passed and Cody had worked his way around the whole room and found nothing. Hmmmm...He glanced up at the ceiling tiles but none looked any different from the others or out of place. Cody pulled a large and small box to the center of the room and used them as a step stool to climb up. He pushed the tile overhead up and off its bracket and poked his head into the darkness. Unable to see anything, Cody climbed down and grabbed his phone to use as a make-shift flashlight. He climbed back up and powered it on and found nothing but spider webs and dead insects and what might possibly be a snake skin from one end of the crawlspace to the other. He shivered and shrunk away from the dried skin.

"There has to be something here," he said as he climbed down. "Blocking the windows out doesn't make any sense if there isn't something to hide. Not that much of what Arwin does makes sense anyway," he admitted. Cody crossed his arms over his chest defiantly in the center of the room, not quite ready to admit defeat. There was something down here, he could feel it, but couldn't figure out where it was.

"Where are you?" he asked quietly. "There's nothing but garbage from wall to...wall!" A grin etched itself across his face. "The walls." He moved to the nearest wall and rapped his knuckles against it and listened as the dull thud echoed back to his ears. He frowned momentarily before returning to the toolbox and selecting a heavy wrench. Cody went back to the previous spot and hit it again, memorizing the sound it made.

Around the basement he went, whacking the wrench on the wall every foot or so, hoping that the next strike would make a slightly different sound. Cody had rounded the second corner when he heard the basement door open.

"Cody, what in the hell are you doing to the box?" Zack called down.

"I'm not hitting the box, Zack."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Looking for something."

"Could you maybe look for whatever it is a little quieter? I was just about asleep."

"I'll be quieter, I promise. I'll...I'm almost done looking."

"Well, keep on doing whatever it is you're doing, I guess," Zack told him before closing the door. Cody could easily imagine Zack at the top of the stairs shaking his head like he'd done so many times before.

Cody suddenly felt foolish for wasting so much time and he hit the wall with much less enthusiasm than he had before Zack interrupted him. He should have been working on the box, not pounding a wrench on walls. He'd complained for the last few days about needing to try to fix it instead of palling around with Dad and here he was not doing it when he had the chance. How much time had he wasted doing this? Probably at least an hour. Maybe even- thock.

Cody's mind instantly stopped its recriminations when he heard the hollow return from his last strike. He stepped a few paces back and tapped the wall and listened before hitting the previous spot again. "I knew it!" he said, his earlier thoughts of wasted time gone. Cody ran his fingers along the painted cinder blocks, feeling for any difference.

Cody stepped close to the wall squinted as he tried to locate a seam between the blocks and smiled when he finally did. He stepped back and whistled at the flushness. "I'd never have seen it if I hadn't been three inches away. Now the question is 'how do I open it?'" His hands found his hips as he looked at where the wall met the ceiling. Nothing looked odd but he ran his hands along the joint to be sure and nearly jumped out of his skin when he found a barely recessed button.

"Gotcha," Cody said as a latch opened somewhere behind the wall, followed half a second later by a four-foot section of the wall swinging open slightly. He dug his fingers into the side of the hidden door and pulled, his mind awhirl with what Arwin could have hidden away inside. Maybe there's a spare time machine in here. Or maybe even robots! his mind randomly whispered as the door fully opened.

Some light from the basement spilled in but Cody fumbled around on the wall just inside the door for a switch anyway and two bulbs overhead flashed on. There were no robots or visible time machines but there was a cheap wooden desk taking up most of one side of the small room. He was looking at the empty shelves that lined most of the rest of the space when his eyes jumped back to the desk.

"What do we have here? A laptop?" he asked softly as he approached the desk. Cody opened the laptop's lid and saw a blinking blue light on the keyboard. "It has power." He pulled the laptop forward and saw its power cord trailing down behind the desk and out to the right. He stepped to the side expecting to see only an outlet but was surprised to see a bulky metal safe sitting beside the desk as well. He squatted down to examine it but stood back up after deciding it was time to get Zack.

"Zack," he said as he poked his head out from the basement door only to see his brother unsurprisingly laying on the couch in his underwear, "you aren't going to believe what I found."

"You found out how to fix the box?" Zack yawned.

"No."

"I believe that."

"That's not what I meant. I found a secret room in the basement."

"No you didn't."

"Come look." Cody motioned to the steps and Zack got up. "Maybe you could put some pants on first, though."

"Nope," Zack said with finality and slid past Cody and headed down the steps. Cody rolled his eyes and followed.

"See? I told you," he said as Zack stood in the doorway of the small room.

"You didn't touch anything, did you?"

"Well, a little. I opened the laptop up but I didn't press any keys."

"What about the safe?" Zack asked as he stood over it.

"No, why?"

"Because," Zack said, instantly going from couch potato to business mode, "if he took the time to hide this stuff, he might have rigged it."

"To blow up?"

"Maybe. Probably not, though. More likely to just erase whatever is on the computer or set fire to whatever's in the safe. I saw it happen in a few movies." Cody swallowed a snort and only nodded his head sagely.

"Should we try it?" he asked after Zack looked the computer over.

"I don't see why not. What's Mom always say? Nothing ventured nothing gained or whatever? It might not even be passworded."

"Even if it is, I might know it," Cody said proudly. "I was helping him in his office a few months ago and he tried to sign into his computer but entered the password in the user field."

"My brother, the unintentional spy," Zack snickered.

"I wasn't looking on purpose! I just happened to glance over at the wrong time."

"It'll be the right time if you can get us into this computer, Cody." He turned the keyboard so it was facing his brother and stepped out of the way. Cody pressed the blue button and it stayed lit. The sound of a drive spinning up filled the room and the blue log-in screen blinked onto the monitor.

"Here goes," Cody said as he rapidly typed and partially filled the white box. He pressed enter and Arwin's desktop popped up.

"What was his password?" Zack asked as a handful of icons slowly appeared.

"I'm not telling you!"

"Really?" Zack said sarcastically and shook his head. "What do you think is in there?" he asked as Cody began digging through the computer.

"Hopefully none of the cartoon animal porn I happened to find on yours," Cody replied, unable to help himself.

"How many times have you been on my computer?" Zack asked and Cody could see nearly every inch of his brother's skin blushing deeply from of the corner of his eye.

"One too many," he said amid a flurry of keystrokes and trackpad clicks.

"I was curious."

"Mmmhmm..."

"I probably should have hidden it better."

"Mmmhmm," Cody repeated, not looking up from the screen.

Zack went quiet and watched as Cody burrowed deeper into the computer. Windows popped up and just as quickly vanished. "What are you looking for?" he finally asked.

"I'm not completely sure, Zack. I think this is one of those cases when I'll know it when I see it."

"He should have saved us the trouble and just left a folder called the stuff Cody's looking for on the desktop."

"Aha!" Cody said after a few seconds. "He did make that folder but he called it scores and buried it deep inside the operating system. See?" Cody stood back and let Zack have a look at the screen. Six folders were centered in the screen, four labeled with one of the four major sports and another two with ncaaf and ncaam.

"It's like the bottom of the screen on ESPN," Zack said.

"Any particular folder you want to see first?" Cody asked and Zack shrugged his indifference.

"He's got every season in there!" Zack exclaimed after his brother clicked on the folder titled nba. Cody clicked a few more times at random and eventually came up with the complete box score from a Houston/San Antonio game from March of 1998. "Holy crap."

"No kidding," Cody agreed. "Looks like he took your idea of sports betting to a whole new level."

"Didn't you say that things would be likely to change the longer we, or Arwin, are here?"

"They might if the two of us or him make a big enough splash. Otherwise, things might just continue on like they were supposed to. Or did. Whatever." Cody shrugged and tried to not think about the complexities of altering the timeline.

"If it ends up working like that and we end up being stuck here, I'm never getting a job in my life," Zack announced. "We'll be stinking rich." Cody nodded his agreement.

"So should we try to crack the safe tonight or wait until tomorrow?" Cody asked as he pushed the laptop away.

"Are you feeling lucky, Cody?"

"Not particularly but I was hoping that maybe that friend of yours might have taught you a thing or two about breaking into a safe when he wasn't too busy breaking into houses."

Zack ignored the slight dig at his friend. "No, sorry. We'll have to do this the old fashioned way unless you happen to have an acetylene torch or some dynamite."

"What would he use as a combination he wouldn't forget?" Cody wondered. "His birthday? Maybe his phone number?"

"Do you know his birthday or phone number?"

"Yes and yes."

"And why do you know these things?" Zack asked with a grin.

"His number is in my phone and we went to his birthday party last year, remember?"

"Like I'm supposed to remember when Arwin's birthday is? I'd probably forget when yours was if it wasn't the same as mine." Cody laughed and retrieved his phone. He leaned against the desk while supplying the necessary numbers.

"No luck," Zack said after he tried both sets of numbers forwards and backwards. Zack sat Indian-style against the far wall as he tried to think of what else to use.

"Mom's birthday," Cody said abruptly and Zack agreed immediately.

"That's it. I know it is," he said and leaned forward. "Mom was born in May, right?" he asked as his hand hovered over the dial.

"May fourth, nineteen-"

"I know how old she is, I just didn't remember the date." He spun the dial and grabbed the handle. "Here goes nothing." A kachunk came from inside the safe and Zack pulled the door open an inch with a smile. He scooted back a bit and pushed it open all the way and whistled.

"What's in there?" Cody asked as he tried to look over his brother's shoulder.

"A bunch of papers, some little notebook, and lots and lots of money."

"Seriously?" Cody squatted down behind Zack and saw stacks of green rubber banded together. "Are they real?"

"They look pretty real to me," Zack said as he rifled through a stack of tens. "Smell real, too," he added after giving the stack a sniff.

"How much do you think there is?"

"I'd guess at least a couple of grand," Zack told him. "Look through this if you want." He absently handed Cody the small pile of documents and the notebook while he stared lovingly at the piles of cash. Cody saw the same expression on his brother's face that was usually reserved for double scoop chocolate sundaes.

"Car title, deed to the house, insurance information..." Cody said as he went through the stack. He stopped when he found a bank statement and his eyes raced down the sheet and came to rest on the last set of numbers. "Jeez, Arwin is loaded," he whistled.

"Wow," Zack mumbled after Cody showed him the paper. "Makes sense, though. I think even Arwin could manage to win the lottery if he had the winning numbers sitting in a computer. What's in the notebook?"

"I'm not sure," Cody told him as he set the stack of documents on the desk and opened it. He was silent for a few seconds as he looked it over. "Holy shit," he whispered.

Zack looked away from the money instantly. Anything that could make his brother curse had to be important. "What is it?"

"It looks like Arwin has a timetable of Mom's life."

"What?" Zack stood and Cody shared the discovery with him.

"Look. He has dates and highlights or whatever you want to call them of what Mom did or will do." Cody skimmed down a few lines and pointed. "February 1986, moved into house on Greenwood. I'm pretty sure we walked past a Greenwood on the way to the dance earlier today."

"We did," Zack muttered as he read down the page. "What's he doing? Stalking Mom?" he asked with a mixture of bewilderment and anger.

"Looks like it. Keeping tabs on her at least."

"You know, Arwin is going to be lucky if I don't beat him half to death when we get back. Messing with Dad isn't as bad since he's, well, Dad. But Mom? No way. No one gets to do that." Zack's earlier cash-induced smile had been replaced with a scowl. "How'd he even get this stuff?" he turned the page and saw information from his mother's high school years on the second page and noticed their birth amidst a bunch of other things on the third.

"A bunch of it could be from just asking the right questions," Cody replied, easily seeing Arwin filing away every slightly relevant bit of a conversation with his mother away in his mind. "The rest of it? Data mining her Facebook, maybe? Public records? I really don't know."

"All I know is that he's lucky he isn't here right now." Zack leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his bare chest as another tired yawn momentarily broke up the thunderhead that was etched on his face.

"Go to bed, Zack. This will all be here in the morning," Cody told him after a second yawn chased the first one. "You need to rest just in case you have a concussion."

"You coming too?"

"Not quite yet. I'm going to try to do a little more work on the box before I head upstairs."

Zack nodded. "Don't stay up too late, Cody. You're going to go out and get us breakfast in the morning."

"I am?"

"Yep, I want an Egg McMuffin or three tomorrow. Assuming they exist now," Zack added.

"Then why don't you go out and get them after you wake up?"

"Because I might have a concussion and need my rest," Zack said with a sly grin as he turned and walked out of the small room. Cody shook his head and couldn't help but chuckle as his brother left before returning to the time machine and picking up the screwdriver.

According to his phone, almost two hours had passed when Cody finally put the tools aside for the night and rubbed his eyes. He sighed and tried to not to dwell on the disappointment of coming up with no solid leads as to why they couldn't go home.

"Maybe I'm just too tired to see it," he said to himself as he spread a garbage bag over the partially disassembled machine. "I'll wake up in the morning and I'll see the reason it's not working right away." He stretched and gave the box one last look before walking up the stairs. He rubbed his eyes one last time and slid into the small section of the bed Zack hadn't taken for himself and was asleep almost before his head hit the pillow.

Cody's bladder woke him the next morning and he rolled out of bed quickly. He saw through crusty eyes that Zack was once again already up and out of the room. "Why can't you do that during school?" he mumbled to himself as he paced to the bathroom and took care of business. Crisis averted, he flushed and heard his brother's voice as he walked out into the living room.

"Okay, thanks anyway, bye," Zack said as he hung the phone back on the wall. "Well look who's finally awake. I was beginning to wonder if I was going to to have to settle for lunch instead of breakfast." Cody glanced at the clock on the wall and saw it was barely after nine.

"Who were you talking to?" he asked as he poured himself a glass of juice.

"Good morning to you, too," Zack laughed. "I was talking to Curtis' mom. I called over there to see how his game went yesterday but she said he left a little while ago on his bike. I guess he was as bored with the lame cartoons as I was."

"Did they win?"

"Nope, she said they got pounded pretty good." Zack headed for the den and Cody followed once he'd finished his juice and put the glass in the sink, arriving in the room just in time to see Zack flop down on the couch.

"How's your head?" Cody asked as he sat down gracefully by his brother's feet.

"I think I'm cured," Zack answered, "but you should still go get breakfast just in case. I put a twenty on the table for you." Cody tried to not smile at his brother's persistence but failed.

"You have such a one-track mind, Zack," he said.

"Get on the train, Cody. Next stop, Hungertown."

"Okay, okay, I'll go. I'd ask if you want to come with me but I'm pretty sure that would be a no since you'd have to actually put on clothes." Cody gestured to Zack's underwear and rolled his eyes.

"Hey, you should feel lucky I'm not walking around naked since Mom isn't here to see me."

"Trust me, Zack, for that I am eternally grateful. More than you'll ever know." Cody reached a hand over the side of the couch and groped around until he found his shoes. "I have to say that I never figured you to be an aspiring nudist," he told his brother as he laced up first one shoe and then the other.

"Who knew?" Zack joked as he moved around to get more comfortable.

"Not me." Cody stood up and retrieved the money from the table and shoved it deep into one of his shorts' pocket. "Just don't go from aspiring to full-time before I get back or I'll eat your McMuffins."

"Don't worry, just go before they stop serving breakfast."

"I can get there in like fifteen minutes," Cody said as he walked to the patio door. "That's plenty of time." He pulled the curtain back to scout out the backyard and dropped the first f-bomb in his entire life. Coasting to a stop on his bike a scant five feet away and looking directly at the door was his father. Cody immediately followed his first f-bomb with a second as Curtis' eyes widened instantly with surprise and recognition.

Sorry, guys and gals. It's been a crazy summer and I haven't been home much at all to work on this story. Summer is winding down now (as is this story), and it's looking like I'm going to have my free time back again to finish it up sooner rather than later.

Thanks for sticking with me on this and let me know what you think of the sudden turn of events at the end.

SI