Taft Ranch: A Thunder Mountain Novel

  Duster Kendal knows something must be wrong when a tree blocks the road to the Taft Ranch. Turns out Lee Taft failed to return from his last trip into the past.

  Duster fears the worst, that time kicked Lee into a distant and inhospitable future with no hope of return. And no hope of rescue.

  A story of survival through centuries of time.

  USA Today bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith takes readers once again into his fan favorite Thunder Mountain time travel series, but this time into the distant future instead of the near past.

  “Thunder Mountain by Dean Wesley Smith is one of those reads that defies genre classification. Take some romance, throw in a little bit of historical fiction and add a dash of time travel and science fiction and you have the basis for this interesting story. … The premise for Thunder Mountain is intriguing and will appeal to fans of both historical and science fiction. This is an easy, light read, and I am interested in revisiting these characters on their future adventures.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  For Kris

  PART ONE

  Missing

  ONE

  August 7th, 2018

  Central, Idaho

  THE ROAD WAS blocked, but it shouldn’t have been.

  Duster Kendal climbed out of his white Cadillac SUV and stared at the narrow-tracked road that wound up a steep valley between rocks and pine trees.

  A tree was down across the road now, and had clearly fallen at least a few weeks back.

  No sign at all that anyone had tried to clear the tree or even parked in front of it and walked around it.

  Lee Taft lived in a wonderful ranch up that road. When Lee got back from the past each time, he always came in here to work and be away from the world and get lost in his math, as he liked to say.

  But now the road was blocked. Duster had driven that narrow road a hundred times and ridden on horse up it even more.

  Lee, if he was here, would not have allowed that road to be blocked for more than a day.

  The air around Duster was warm, even at eleven in the morning, and a light breeze brought him the scent of hot pine and sagebrush.

  Duster had left his usual long oilcloth coat and cowboy hat in the back seat of the car and wore only jeans, a thin white dress shirt, and cowboy boots. But if it got much warmer, he would put on both the coat and the hat. It was amazing how that long oilcloth coat kept him cooler, especially combined with the wide cowboy hat that kept the mountain sun off his face.

  He stared around at the high rock-covered mountains that towered above the narrow valley, turning slowly to take it all in.

  The road he had come into the area on was a single-lane dirt and gravel road which headed down a valley toward the two old Idaho mining towns of Big Creek and Edwardsburg, Idaho. He was still about twenty minutes from their locations.

  Duster had stayed last night up at the Monumental Summit lodge, which looked close to this spot on a map, but it had still taken him almost two hours after a late breakfast to go down the mountain to the small town of Yellow Pine and then turn on the gravel Big Creek road to get to where he was now.

  He knew he was in the right location.

  This was Lee’s road.

  The Taft Ranch was in a wide area of the valley a mile up the narrow canyon. The ranch house itself Duster had helped build numbers of times back in 1890 and he loved the place.

  Lee Taft, one of the best mathematicians to come along, and a good friend, built and lived at the ranch, both when he was back in history and in the present time.

  And in all the times Lee was a regular at the Monumental Summit Lodge during the summer months. It was his absence from his regular visits to the Lodge this summer that had worried Dawn Edwards, another historian who worked and partially owned the lodge, and she had mentioned it to Duster who said he would go check on Lee.

  Duster had figured Lee had gotten busy on some research and hadn’t allowed himself time away from the ranch.

  But the tree down meant that Lee was either sick up at the ranch or had never returned to the ranch for some reason.

  Duster turned and went back to the car, taking out the satellite phone he kept in the car when in the Idaho central mountains. Regular cell service up here was just a laughing matter.

  He called Dawn at the lodge. When she answered, he said, “There is a tree blocking the road going into Lee’s ranch. He is either really sick or he clearly hasn’t been here since he left to go into the past.”

  “What?” Dawn asked.

  “It feels as if something has gone wrong, very wrong. I’m going to hike into the ranch house site and see if Lee is there. But first I want you to get a hold of Bonnie and also Brice and Dixie and Director Parks. I want all four of them to go together into the crystal cavern Lee was using to travel back into time. I’ll wait here for what they find before heading up the valley toward Lee’s place.”

  Dawn was silent for a moment, then said, “I’ll be back with you quickly.”

  Duster closed the car door and turned on the air-conditioning. He had a horrid feeling about what they might find. But he didn’t want to think about it until they actually went into the crystal room under the Institute in Boise.

  It was those crystals that allowed them all to travel into other timelines and effectively the past.

  He just sat staring down the road toward Edwardsburg for over ten minutes until his phone rang.

  It was his wife, Bonnie.

  She didn’t even say hello.

  “One of the machines was still hooked up to a crystal and had been now for at least a month. Maybe longer. The crystal record has Lee’s name on it.”

  Travel into the past only took two minutes and fifteen seconds of present time. No exception. No crystal could be hooked up for longer than that time.

  At least until now.

  “When was it set for?” Duster asked.

  “May 2nd, 1955,” Bonnie said.

  It was exactly what Duster had feared when he saw the blocked road going into Lee’s ranch.

  “We unhooked the crystal,” Bonnie said. “And marked it.”

  “No Lee, I assume.”

  “No Lee,” she said. “Nothing happened at all.”

  He took a deep breath and nodded to himself. Lee was no longer in that timeline.

  “All four of you get ready to fly into the lodge for an early dinner tonight. I’m going to hike up to the location of Lee’s home and see what I can see. I’ll call you from there.”

  “Okay,” Bonnie said. “Be cautious.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I will.”

  With that he climbed out of the SUV, put on his cowboy hat and long duster coat, and then with a bottle of water in each pocket and the satellite phone in another, he headed into the brush around the fallen tree and up the narrow canyon, following the old road he remembered.

  His stomach twisted for the entire hike, worried about what he might find.

  And he honestly had no idea what that might be.

  And he had no idea what might have caused Lee to not return to the present in the normal two-minute time.

  But he had a hunch.

  And that hunch scared him more than he wanted to think about.

  TWO

  September 14th, 1980

  Central, Idaho

  DR. LEE TAFT loved his ranch.

  He loved everything about it, from the towering rock peaks behind it to the beauty of the valley spread out below it. He loved the rustic, log-hewn barn that was dug into the side of one hill. That was where he kept his two horses and all the feed they would need.

  His ranch house was partially dug into the hill as well just above th
e barn and protected by large, water-smoothed rocks. It was also made of thick logs and thick, hand-cut wooden shingles that kept the house cool in the summer and warm in the long winters.

  He had cut every log himself, every shingle, every post and beam. Duster had helped a few times, but most of the times Lee had done it all himself.

  And got the logs and beams into place himself. At six-one, Lee had gained his strength and love of the outdoors from his father who had taught Lee from a little child to camp and work hard, both physically and with his brain.

  Lee loved the large living room in his ranch home with two comfortable cloth couches, a large reading chair, and a massive stone fireplace against the far wall, now blackened from so many years of daily fires. Thick quilts he had made himself were always tossed haphazardly over the backs of the chairs or two couches.

  The kitchen sat off to the left of the living room, with the large wood dining table separating the two. He usually kept that table covered with notebooks full of his calculations.

  He had built the ranch in the remote Idaho central wilderness in the summer of 1890, the first time to do research on the mathematical impact of time-traveler events on timelines. The remote location and doing the work himself was his way of trying not to impact the very thing he was studying.

  He was thirty-two when he built the ranch and had left it in 1920 when he was seventy-two. He had put everything into his secret back room and sealed it against any access.

  Then he became thirty-two again in 2018 and reset the same timeline crystal and came back again in 1925, pretending to be his own grandson who had inherited the ranch. He stayed at the ranch until 1950 when he was fifty-seven. Then he left, went back to 2018 and became 32 again and came back again in 1955, pretending to be his own son.

  He didn’t leave the ranch again in 1980, one hundred years after he had built it.

  He loved that pattern so much, he kept repeating it, timeline by timeline. And when he got back to the future, he always fixed the place up again.

  So far he had built the ranch in 1890 thirty-six times and couldn’t imagine tiring of doing it again.

  He had studied thirty-six timelines and patterns were starting to emerge as to how timeline travelers like him caused ripples over many timelines. His math was getting more and more complicated with each lifetime in the past.

  Usually between each leg of the trip he spent time in 2018, working with other mathematicians who knew about timeline travel, and meeting with Bonnie and Duster Kendal about his work since they were two of the most brilliant minds in all of mathematics.

  All of them were excited about his work and wanted him to keep going. Lee needed no such encouragement. He was excited as well.

  He hated being away from the seclusion of the ranch and the remoteness of the past longer than that. The seclusion allowed him to really think clearly and the physical work of first building the ranch and then keeping the ranch in shape helped keep him healthy and feeling young.

  The next time back he planned on bringing back to the secret room in the back of the ranch a new, smaller, far more powerful computer system from 2118, run from solar power. The secret room buried in the hill behind his ranch house was protected from any intruders with alarms and explosives that would destroy everything unless he disarmed it.

  Bonnie and Duster hated taking anything from the future back into the past, but had given Lee special permission since his work on timelines and the influence of future travelers was making such great progress.

  The new computer would allow him to crunch the massive numbers of equations he needed to work through.

  The ranch was so isolated that he couldn’t tell much difference from the 1890s time and the 1980s time. Just how he got his regular supplies changed as the years went by.

  Duster often stopped by in different time frames. Lee considered Duster one of his only friends and their conversations on historical events and mathematics were always fascinating and often led to Lee working along a different line of research.

  But when it came right down to it, he loved being alone to do his writing and his research. And in living now for hundreds of years of time, it had never crossed his mind to be lonely or even wish for companionship.

  His work was his companionship, his ranch his true love.

  THREE

  May 3rd, 1986

  Boise, Idaho

  DR. JOAN FAILOR was deep in thought on an important chapter in her new book on coma states when the phone on her desk rang.

  She felt like she had suddenly been returned from a great distance to her office and slapped at the same time.

  Around her the plush furnishings of the private office seemed to almost tilt, then settle as the adrenalin surge of the surprise passed and was replaced by annoyance at the interruption. Steph, her secretary, knew better than to bother her.

  Joan had been sitting in her favorite reading chair. Behind her the window was letting in orange light from a promising warm spring day.

  Her office had a large leather couch against one wall and her reading chair sat in front of the window that looked out over the tree-filled park that was part of the grounds of her building. Her large mahogany desk dominated the room and at the moment was covered with fewer papers than normal.

  The wall behind her desk was built-in mahogany bookcases filled with books, many of them she had written or contributed articles to. At thirty-five, she was already one of the most respected authorities on the brain and on deep coma sleep in the nation.

  The phone rang again and she laid aside her pad filled with notes and stood, getting to the phone on the corner of her desk before it rang again.

  “I was not to be disturbed.”

  “I’m sorry, doctor,” Steph said. “But I was convinced you would want to know he was awake.”

  Steph was not only Joan’s secretary, but she was also Joan’s best friend. In the office and around the patients, Steph was all business. But away from the office the two of them had been known to knock down a few cocktails in their time.

  Joan stood five-ten, kept her blonde hair cut short and styled, and seldom went anywhere in the building without her white smock to show authority. She owned the place, after all. Under the smock she always had on jeans, usually a light silk blouse, and comfortable shoes.

  Steph always dressed the part of an expensive secretary. She kept her long blonde hair pulled back and wielded more power around the building that Joan did at times. She had master’s degrees in both business and office management and an MBA. No one crossed Steph.

  Joan couldn’t imagine doing this job without Steph at her side. They had been friends since college.

  “Who’s awake?” Joan said, trying to get herself focused and out of the work she had just been doing.

  “Lee Taft,” Steph said.

  Joan just couldn’t accept what Steph was saying. That wasn’t possible.

  “What do you mean he’s awake?” Joan asked, trying to get her balance. “Why the hell would he wake up suddenly now?”

  “He just blinked, woke up and asked for a drink of water,” Steph said.

  “Not possible,” Joan said, hanging up on Steph and heading out the door at a fast run. “He shouldn’t even be able to talk for days.”

  Steph joined her as they both left the office suite together, heading for the elevator to go down four floors in the big building where Lee Taft had been in a coma for the past six years.

  There were over fifty patients in this building in different states of comas.

  Lee Taft had been a man in his late fifties when he was bucked off a horse just outside of Cascade, Idaho, and hit his head and severed part of his spinal cord. That back injury had paralyzed him from the waist down. How he had survived that accident was beyond Joan, but he had.

  She had first met him after he was stabilized. He was in a deep coma, but his brain clearly had activity and seemed to be functioning fine. Only they couldn’t wake him up.

  After ten w
eeks in the hospital, she had had him transferred to her building for long-term care, since he had no family or even friends anyone could find. It seemed he had lived alone on a family ranch in the central wilderness area for twenty-five years.

  As his medical guardian, she had had the ranch put in a trust for when he woke up, if he ever woke up. And he had become one of her most important cases of study.

  A healthy man, a mostly healthy body, a brain injury that kept him in a coma, even though it seemed that brain activity didn’t slow down in the slightest. And the actual injury to the brain had healed.

  At times she had people reading to him and everyone just called him Lee when around him, treating him with respect. Over the years his hair had turned even grayer and more lines had formed on his face, but they had managed with exercise to keep his muscles very healthy. All but his legs.

  It seemed to Joan to take an eternity to get down to the second floor and off the elevator. Joan was almost shaking and Steph seemed to be bouncing. Steph had really come to like Lee, even though he had been in a coma. She looked at him as a grandfather she had never had.

  Actually, everyone on the staff liked Lee, even though he had never said a word or even blinked an eye.

  Joan made it to the familiar room that she had visited hundreds of times over the last six years. They had decorated Lee’s private room in western decorations, from pictures of horses to men in cowboy hats. The furniture even had a wood and cloth décor more suited for a farmhouse than a long-term care facility.

  The machines monitoring his vital signs were tucked away in a cabinet that was now open. Joan glanced at the machine as she entered. It was clear Lee’s heart and breathing were completely normal for an awake person.

  This room was part of what Joan did for those in her care. She tried to put them in surroundings that they might feel comfortable with if they ever woke up. It also made the patients feel more human to the staff working around and on them.