Against Time Read online

  And far too close for Fisher’s stomach to be happy. He had long ago lost the desire for near-misses on anything.

  If they had hit that station, they would have put a very, very large hole in it. Their screens would have kept them safe, but the station and everyone on it would have been in trouble, if not killed instantly.

  “Wow, good catch, Fisher,” Doc said. “Looks like we have a space-faring culture on this planet.”

  “Great, just great,” Fisher said. “Someone to chase us again after we almost destroy their space station.”

  Doc laughed. “Yeah, we have a way of making an entrance, don’t we?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  CALLIE FINALLY DECIDED she couldn’t just stand there at the edge of the parking lot any more. She needed to move, to do something, to get more information.

  “Let’s put our packs in the car and check out the lodge,” she said.

  “No,” Jim said, shaking his head.

  He had his cell phone to his ear and was shaking his head. “No one is answering. I’ve got to get to my wife, my kid.”

  It was Jim’s car they had come up in, so Callie actually had nothing to say about him leaving or not. Even though they were her students, they were all three adults.

  “I want to go back too,” Barb said, her voice barely holding together. She also had a cell phone to her ear. “My parents in Salem are not answering either.”

  Callie pulled out her phone and tried to call her office. She got her machine, as expected, so the phones were working. She had no family and no one else to call that she could think of off the top of her head.

  The three of them stood there for another two minutes trying everyone they could think to dial.

  Phones were working.

  No one was answering.

  That scared Callie more than she wanted to think about. She was fairly certain she didn’t want to know how far whatever had caused this had really spread.

  And she had no idea what might have caused it. She did know for certain that those bodies in the cave had died almost instantly and without any sort of trauma.

  And it had happened at least a day ago, while they were deep in the cave digging.

  And she was certain that it had been the fact that they were deep inside the cave that had saved them.

  That cave just might save her again.

  She was going to stay, even though she had no idea what was happening.

  She had come to trust her gut and her gut told her to stay put.

  “You two go,” she said.

  Then she looked Jim directly in the eye. “You drive carefully. If this is widespread, there will be wrecked cars on the road.”

  He nodded, his face completely pale.

  “And you call me from Cave Junction and tell me what you see.”

  “I will,” he said, nodding. “Be careful.”

  “You too,” Callie said.

  Barb just nodded and the two of them turned and almost ran for Jim’s car.

  Callie stood and watched them drive off down the road.

  The silence of the mountain came back in strong around her, like a very, very heavy blanket.

  The breeze flowing lightly in the trees was the only sound.

  Normally she loved the mountains, the timber, the smells of summer pine, and the silence.

  Now the silence just worried her more.

  And normally she liked being alone, living alone.

  Now being alone scared her far more than she wanted to admit.

  Ignoring the two bodies she could see, she started off toward the old lodge down the paved road.

  The lodge was a rustic three-story hotel built in the 1930s as part of the construction to put people to work during the Depression. It was a place she found stunning and wonderful.

  Everything was wood and a huge river-rock fireplace dominated the two-story main lobby. Huge wooden chandeliers hung in the open areas and a wide staircase next to the big wooden front desk led to the upper floors.

  It sat perched on the side of a very deep ravine and on the floor below the lobby was a restaurant and café that looked out over that ravine.

  In one part of the restaurant it had formal seating, while in another part it looked like an old counter-diner right out of the 1930s. When the Forest Service remodeled the place, they had kept the early look and décor and she had loved the place the first time she stayed in the old lodge a few years back.

  In the lodge she found everyone was dead as well.

  She spent the next hour keeping her panic in check and slowly working her way through the building, checking every room with a passkey, knocking on every door and calling out before she opened it.

  She counted nineteen people in the entire Lodge on all three floors. A couple of cleaning staff, a front desk clerk, two people downstairs in the kitchen, one person slumped over at the counter, and the rest in their rooms.

  All dead.

  She went back to the lobby and dropped onto a couch.

  She couldn’t think.

  She couldn’t even hardly breathe.

  Suddenly her phone rang, making her jump and sending the sound echoing in the large open space of the hotel lobby.

  She fished it out of her pocket.

  “We’re in Cave Junction,” Jim said. “We had to move some cars and push others out of the way to get down to here.”

  “Meet anyone?” she asked.

  “Everyone is dead.”

  “You all right?” she asked, knowing the question was stupid.

  “No,” he said.

  “Any sign of anything moving? Helicopters, planes, anything?”

  “No,” Jim said. “We’re going to keep going.”

  “Carefully,” Callie said. “Call me when you get to Eugene.”

  “I will,” Jim said and hung up.

  She doubted that he would. At least not for a very long time after finding his wife and daughter dead.

  She just hoped that wouldn’t happen and this wasn’t that widespread.

  But her gut told her it was.

  And that meant up here on the mountain, she was alone.

  Completely alone.

  And she was going to be alone for some time to come.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AS DOC BROUGHT them around the planet again and worked to match the orbit of the space station, Fisher scanned the planet. It felt a little like scanning his own home world from a low orbit.

  Evidence of human activity was everywhere. Large, sprawling cities on all of the major continents. Thousands of roads and smaller cities and towns.

  It looked the same, if not almost identical, as many of the Earth-type planets they had visited. Humans had clearly been seeded on every Goldilocks zone planet that they had come to at some point in the distant past. They had run across no aliens, but humans were everywhere.

  And he meant everywhere. So many human civilizations, it was startling.

  At least in this small area of the Milky Way Galaxy which they had explored.

  At last count, they had found over two hundred Earth-like planets and every one of them had either had human life on them at one point, or still did have thriving civilizations.

  And not many of them seemed very far beyond or behind Earth’s level, as if they had all started at the exact same time in history.

  That bothered him a lot and he and Doc had talked about it, but neither one of them could come up with any reason.

  Plus even stranger, all the plants on all the planets were the same as well, as were the animals. Dogs, chickens, pigs, cows, deer, everything, all the same. Clearly every planet had had some sort of terraforming in a distant past before the humans were placed there.

  Very, very strange and it had been their main topic of conversation over meals for the first fifty or so planets. Fisher didn’t know how he felt knowing that humans were alone in the galaxy, just not all on the same planet.

  And he really didn’t know how he felt thinking of himself as pa
rt of a huge galaxy-wide lab experiment, which it seemed they might be.

  But finally, after finding so many civilizations and having no obvious answers present themselves, Fisher and Doc started growing used to the idea.

  If growing used to something that was flat impossible was even possible. Fisher assumed it was.

  He and Doc didn’t talk about it much anymore.

  The human civilization on the planet below also seemed to be around Earth’s level of growth and expansion.

  But as they went around the dark side in their orbit, Fisher noticed one major problem: Nothing was moving.

  And the planet was slowly dropping silent and dark.

  Only basic recorded sounds were coming from the surface.

  In very short order the entire planet would be ghostly silent.

  And very, very dark.

  “Doc, we have a problem,” Fisher said.

  “They can’t be coming after us already,” Doc said, not looking up from his board as he brought The Lady up slowly on the orbiting space station. “We missed them, didn’t we?”

  “No one is coming after us,” Fisher said.

  “That’s good,” Doc said, still not looking up. “So what’s the problem?”

  Fisher’s fingers were moving as fast as he could get them to move over his controls to confirm what he feared, doing test and reading after reading.

  All the readings came up the same.

  Just a day or so ago something had completely wiped out almost every human being down there.

  Not all of them, but almost all of them.

  “They are dead,” Fisher said, sitting back in his chair and forcing himself to take deep breaths.

  “Who’s dead,” Doc asked.

  “Just about everyone on the planet,” Fisher said.

  At that, Doc looked up.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CALLIE SAT ON the big overstuffed couch in the grand foyer of the old lodge for two hours after talking with Jim, just thinking.

  One moment she felt so panicked, she wanted to just run, get into a car and drive. The next moment she would feel calm, working on a plan of survival until someone came.

  The survival plan eventually won over the panic. But not by much.

  She did a quick calculation.

  It had to be Thursday morning, around eleven. From her best calculations of what she saw of the bodies in the cave and in the lodge here, everyone had been dead for just over twenty-four hours.

  And if she was right on that, she knew that she was going to have to move fast if she was going to have a sane and comfortable place to stay here in the lodge.

  When in college the first time, she had started as pre-med and one of the things they forced the students to do near the end of the first year was actually smell a human body that had been rotting for a couple of days.

  It was not an odor anyone could forget. And that day she had taken three showers and still didn’t feel like she had the smell off her. That smell, along with a few other events, most notably an old boyfriend also planning on going on to the same medical school, convinced her to move to a major in paleontology, which she ended up loving with far more of a passion than she could have ever imagined.

  She loved puzzles, finding clues to history where no one else would think to look. And now she could never imagine herself as a medical doctor.

  But she knew, without a doubt, that she needed to deal with the bodies inside the lodge if she hoped to stay here until things started to clear up. And since Jim had reported the deaths were as far as Cave Junction, down in the valley below this lodge, she really had nowhere better to go.

  In the basement she had seen a large four-wheeled supply cart for bringing in supplies to the kitchen from the driveway outside. It was low to the ground and on four solid wheels. She decided she would use that.

  She borrowed some clothes, including a large yellow maintenance jacket, some gloves, and some snow pants from a maintenance storage area. There she also found two large generators set up to take over when the power went down.

  She patted one on the side, very happy to see them.

  Then, with a surgical mask on, the heavy coat, the gloves, and the snow pants, she went to work moving the bodies.

  She started in the basement kitchen area since she was going to need that area to cook and for supplies. She managed to get one body up and on the cart and wheeled out the supply door and into the driveway before she suddenly questioned what she was going to do with the poor people she was moving.

  The day was starting to heat up and that meant that the smell would get worse quickly.

  The woman on the cart was about fifty, had a wedding ring on one finger, and a hairnet on graying hair. She wore what looked to be a blue and white restaurant uniform.

  Callie had taken her keys, but put the woman’s purse and coat with her, in case down the road someone would need to identify the remains.

  But now, standing outside in the late afternoon air, Callie realized she had a real problem.

  This was more than a body on the cart, this had been a person and Callie just couldn’t dump her out onto the road for the animals to tear apart.

  She had to treat these people with respect, at least as much as she could under these circumstance. But where could she put everyone that animals couldn’t get into and that she would have enough energy to move them to?

  She knew that up near the parking lot was an old dormitory where the park rangers lived, but that would be too far for her to push the cart up that much hill.

  She left the woman and the cart near the kitchen entrance and started up the shallow-sloped driveway toward the main road.

  About halfway up she saw a medium-sized supply truck parked to one side of the lodge, tucked into a parking spot like it was going to be there for the night.

  The back of the truck was mostly empty except for some cases of canned fruits, which Callie quickly unloaded onto the ground in a shady spot beside the building. She would take those inside later.

  Then she climbed in behind the steering wheel of the truck.

  She had driven her share of large trucks on different archeological digs over the years, especially when she was a graduate student.

  She didn’t expect the keys to be in the ignition, or on top of the visor, but she checked both places. Then she checked the closed tray beside the driver’s seat. The keys were in there, along with a couple of Snicker’s Bars.

  One bar she put in the jacket pocket, the other she took a big bite out of, realizing she hadn’t eaten since an an hour inside the cave. The wonderful nuts and chocolate tasted great, far better than it should have.

  She was going to have to be careful to watch her food and when she ate. She often had a habit of forgetting to eat when she was busy.

  Or stressed.

  She managed to get the truck backed down the loading area and fairly close to the door into the supply area of the kitchen without hitting anything.

  Shutting off the engine, she again noticed the silence of the mountains around her.

  She went around to the back of the truck and quickly figured out how to lower the loading lift. She got the cart with the woman on the tailgate lift and up and into the truck.

  Callie rolled her off the cart and apologized, then laid her on her back, her hands on her chest, near the back wall.

  Then Callie went back for another poor soul who had been caught in whatever had happened to everyone.

  In one hour she had everyone out of the basement and kitchen and maintenance area and into the truck.

  One floor clear.

  She was sweating like crazy and decided to stop for a quick bite of lunch and a large bottle of water.

  She stripped off the big orange coat and the gloves and mask, letting the cool evening air take some of the sweat away. She exercised every day and had never been afraid of hard labor, but this was more than she had expected it to be. Dead human bodies were difficult to move around.

  An
d they were all starting to smell.

  She washed off her hands and face and blew out her nose, then went to work finding something to eat, even though she was far, far from hungry.

  She forced herself to eat a turkey sandwich and an apple while sitting at the old counter in the silence, watching the afternoon slowly pass on the mountains around her through the big windows.

  She felt incredibly alone, but she wouldn’t let herself think about what she was doing.

  Or even try to guess at what had happened.

  There would be more than enough time for that later. Right now she just had to act.

  She ate the second Snicker’s Bar for dessert, then she put her protective clothes back on and took the cart up the elevator like she was a bellman from hell and started to retrieve the dead bodies from the main floor, starting with the poor woman behind the desk.

  It was going to be a long, long afternoon and evening.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THEY DID TEN ORBITS over the next few hours, recording and studying everything they could.

  To Fisher there was no doubt the planet below had just gone through something horrible. Actually, the planet was fine, but vast numbers of the humans and a bunch of animal life had died very, very suddenly.

  And very recently.

  Maybe just a day ago, at most.

  There were numbers of smaller animals and some larger ones still alive, and human bodies lay everywhere, in every building, on every street.

  Not one corner of the planet had been spared.

  There were fires in most every major city, but all were minor. There seemed to have been no violence in the slightest.

  Fisher felt really, really bad for the people who had somehow survived. He couldn’t imagine what they were going through, finding loved ones dead, walking around among the bodies.

  It made his stomach ache just thinking about it.

  Something had killed a couple billion people on the planet and had done it quickly, where they stood, as they walked, as they drove cars that looked to Fisher frighteningly like cars from home.