Taft Ranch: A Thunder Mountain Novel Read online

  After a while, when the sky was totally dark, he had sat up and looked over the river to the north.

  No lights.

  That had been his worst fear when he had seen no crystals stacked in the room outside the door and now it was coming true.

  Joan had sat up beside him. “Something wrong?”

  “No lights,” he had said.

  “No lights from what?” she had asked.

  “From the entire Treasure Valley. Boise alone should light up the sky in that direction. It did when I was here by myself seven hundred years ago.”

  “Oh, no,” she had said.

  Oh, no was right. In the last hundreds of years something horrible had happened. And they were walking right into it.

  He had touched her arm and they stretched out again, but he only slept a little through the night. Instead he had just stared at the dark sky in the distance.

  In the morning, as the sun colored the sky orange over the ridges to the east, they both ate more nuts and drank their share of water. They had nothing they could carry water in, but they could take nuts with them.

  So when they went back up the cliff to the trees, they spent a half hour getting more nuts from cones and filling their pockets with them.

  His feet were again just dead-feeling hunks on the bottom of his ankles. He was going to need to figure out something to cover them.

  By the time they reached the road, he was really hobbling.

  Joan had him stop and she ripped some strips off the bottom of her lab coat and tied them around his feet, giving the soles of his feet far more padding than his socks did.

  “Not sure why I didn’t think about doing that before now,” she said.

  “Not sure why I hadn’t thought of it either,” he said.

  That felt a lot better, almost as if he had shoes on.

  “So where are we heading?” Joan asked as they started off down the overgrown road.

  He glanced at her. She looked refreshed and beautiful in the morning light. She was a brilliant woman, of that there was no doubt.

  “I’m thinking we try to eventually reach the institute in Boise,” he said. “Only chance we have of getting back to our own time. If the institute is still there.”

  She nodded. “What’s ahead of us today? Never been in this part of the state before.”

  “There was a bridge across the river about three miles ahead,” he said. “We’ll join a main highway shortly.”

  “I hope the bridge is still standing,” she said.

  “Yeah, me too. And beyond the bridge are a few small farming towns. I got a hunch we’ll get some answers there.”

  “And maybe find you some shoes,” she said.

  “We can only hope,” Lee said, smiling at her.

  Just over an hour later they reached the bridge. It clearly was hundreds of years old and looked more functional than anything else, made of metal and mostly flat. The main road was clearly in as bad of shape as the road they had been on, but the bridge was still standing, but not by much. Another decade or two of hard winters and high water and the rusted metal bridge would only be a memory.

  From the looks of the road, he and Joan might just end up being the last two humans to ever cross the bridge. The highway sure wasn’t passable anymore.

  A mile down the road they could see the trees and buildings of what looked like a small town.

  They were going to have some answers soon.

  Or at least he hoped they would.

  One way or another.

  THIRTEEN

  September 7th, 2728

  Snake River in Owyhee County, Idaho

  JOAN HAD NEVER felt so afraid before as they got closer to what looked like a small town.

  The morning had turned out to be a warm, but not a hot morning, with a slight breeze along the river that kept her feeling actually comfortable.

  And sadly, there were enough pine trees and scrub trees growing on and along the highway that they had stayed in the shade a large amount of the walk.

  Lee seemed to be just ignoring his feet, but he couldn’t keep doing that for long.

  “So tell me,” she said, “everything was fine in 2318, right?”

  “Yes,” Lee said. “And I never asked Duster why they didn’t keep going forward or why they had stopped at 2318. Question never came up, so maybe they didn’t and I just paid no attention.”

  “So this is 2728,” she said, trying to calm herself and make herself relax some before they walked into that town they could see ahead. “That’s four hundred years plus.”

  “Humans could have made great strides in that amount of time,” she said. “So much so that roads like this aren’t needed anymore.”

  “Possible,” he said. “But other things worry me as well.”

  He pointed to what had clearly been a very good piece of farmland to the left of the road along a flat area just above the river. Trees and brush had taken it over and completely reclaimed it.

  She nodded and looked ahead. “I don’t think I’m going to like what we are about to find.”

  “I’m kind of hoping to find a pair of old shoes,” he said, smiling at her.

  She laughed. “Yeah, that would be nice.”

  Fifteen minutes later they walked down the center of the old road between six buildings, three on each side of the road. One had been a café, one a grocery store, another some form of shop. One was a house, one looked like an old stone county office building that looked like it was built back in the early 1900s.

  They were all clearly abandoned and in bad shape.

  “This looks like it was abandoned only about a hundred years or so ago,” Lee said. “A lot of the buildings still have windows.”

  “This valley must be sheltered from storms,” she said.

  “Which building first?” he asked.

  She glanced around at the buildings. “The home. Best chance of finding you some shoes.”

  He nodded and they started toward the house. It had a flat, long feel to it, with a roof of some strange black substance and what looked to be wood siding, but she doubted it actually was.

  It had the feel of a futuristic home echoing back to a 1970s manufactured house.

  Near the front door, she stopped him. “I’m going to go in first because the last thing at this moment we need is you stepping on some broken glass or anything else for that matter.”

  She could see he was about to object, but she shook her head. “Let me look first. It’s not going to kill you to stand here, but it might kill you to go in there.”

  He nodded and she turned for the door, climbing up the three concrete steps.

  She felt like she should knock, then laughed and just tried the fake wooden door.

  It opened easily, swinging inward.

  Inside was what looked to be some sort of modern furniture like she had never seen before filling a living room to the left of the door and what she was sure was a kitchen straight ahead.

  Odd shapes, strange pastel colors, nothing like she had seen in her time. It had a sense of being lived in, though.

  Everything was covered in a thick layer of gray dust and the entire place smelled musty and dead.

  She glanced around the floor, then motioned that Lee should join her.

  “No glass,” she said. “But watch every step.”

  He nodded, then said, “Yes, doc.”

  She turned and slowly headed for what looked like a kitchen. There was a dining table to one side, covered in some yellowed papers and a few small mechanical devices of some sort or another.

  “Wow, way beyond modern,” Lee said.

  He moved carefully over to what seemed like a cabinet drawer and opened it.

  “Knives and things we can use,” he said, smiling as he held one up.

  “Medical and shoes is what we could really use,” she said.

  “I’ll keep looking here,” he said. “You try some of the other rooms.”

  She nodded and turned away from him.
Even though this home had clearly been built hundreds of years after her time, it still had the standard structure of a ranch house, with rooms down a very wide hallway. Guess no one had improved much on that basic design for human living.

  The first room to her right looked like a small bathroom. Toilet was strangely shaped, but it was clearly still a toilet.

  She moved on to the next open door on the right. A bedroom. Empty of anything but a bed and what appeared to be a closed closet.

  Moving carefully, she went to the open door on the left. This room was considerably larger and had a large bed against the far wall.

  It took her a moment to register what she was seeing in the bed.

  A human skull and hair on one of the pillows.

  And a second skull and hair on the pillow beside it.

  Her stomach twisted up into a knot. So much for humans just advancing to the place they didn’t need to be in this area.

  “Lee!”

  As a doctor, she wasn’t afraid of seeing death and had seen it many times. But seeing these two people, dead and still in their bed scared her more than she wanted to admit.

  A moment later he joined her in the wide doorway, then said simply, “Shit.”

  She moved toward the bed, moving slowly. The room only smelled musty, which meant these two had been dead for a very, very long time.

  She studied the skulls. All skin had long ago dried away. From just the hair and sizes of bumps they made in the blanket, one looked to be a man, the other a small-framed woman.

  She looked around at how the light came in and if there was any air movement in the bedroom. One window was slightly open and blinds still hung from the window.

  So there had been air movement in the room. The heat of the summer days, the dampness of the winter nights, had all had a chance to work on these bodies.

  “Any idea how long ago this happened?” Lee asked.

  “Got to be at least a hundred years would be my guess,” she said.

  “Look at this,” Lee said and pointed to a spot beside the bed.

  Curled on what looked to have been a blanket was the skeleton of a dog, its dark hair forming a pile around the bones and skull.

  “Whatever happened to the people was very sudden and killed animals as well,” Lee said.

  “And some insects,” Joan said, trying to stay in her doctor analytical mind-set. “Notice any spiders in here? And I haven’t seen a bug anywhere.”

  Lee glanced around, shaking his head. “I haven’t noticed even a single insect the entire time.”

  They stood in silence near the bed of the dead couple.

  She knew that most insects, bees, and birds were major ways that plants exchanged pollen, but the plants that required that would have died off as well a hundred years ago and only the plants that pollen was carried on the winds would have survived.

  What could have killed people and animals and insects instantly as they slept? And left everything else alone completely?

  “I think I need some air,” she said finally, turning and heading for the door. Her cold, calm scientist brain was about to slip and she could feel it.

  “I think that’s a damn good idea,” he said.

  Together, they went back out and sat on the front steps of the home, looking at the dead highway in front of them.

  She just wanted to scream. But she had no doubt that would be a worthless thing to do.

  But she still wanted to do it.

  PART THREE

  Trail of Death

  FOURTEEN

  August 7th, 2018

  Central, Idaho

  DUSTER DECIDED TO let Brice and Dixie stay in Boise instead of coming up to the meeting in the Monumental Lodge. They wanted to crunch numbers there on the big institute computer to try to figure out approximately where Lee would have ended up.

  So joining Duster for dinner in the back room of the lodge was Director Parks and Bonnie and Dawn Edwards. Dawn and her husband, Madison, were two of his closest friends. Madison also had stayed in Boise to help out there. Lee vanishing had all hands on deck.

  In the two hours it had taken Duster to drive back up to the lodge that occupied a ridgeline high in the Idaho central mountains and taken a quick shower and get into the dining room, Bonnie and Director Parks had arrived by helicopter. Dawn was already at the lodge, since she ran it and lived there all year long.

  The lodge made Duster feel at home. He and Bonnie and Dawn and Madison had built it in 1902 so many times in so many timelines, he had lost count. The huge polished log beams and log walls and the furniture original to the 1900 time period gave the place a feeling of timelessness.

  The back dining room was only used for their meetings.

  Bonnie had ordered him a steak with baked potatoes and an iced tea and the tea was already at his spot at the long wood table when he arrived.

  He kissed Bonnie and nodded to Parks and Dawn. All three of them looked very serious.

  Bonnie looked as radiant as ever, with her long brown hair pulled back. She had on a golden silk blouse and jeans. He couldn’t believe that after so many thousands and thousands of years together, they could still be in such deep love. In fact, it seemed to grow stronger and stronger. They had often spent decades apart, but when together, he felt stronger with her beside him.

  And Parks looked like he always looked, dressed in jeans and a dress shirt with his sleeves rolled up. His brown hair was cut short, as always, and even though he managed the institute over a six-hundred-year period, he didn’t seem the worse for wear. And he never seemed stressed.

  Duster had no idea how he managed that.

  Dawn also looked as she seemed to always look from century to century. She was short compared to Bonnie and kept her dark hair pulled back. She wore a comfortable cotton blouse and jeans.

  A person coming into this room would never be able to tell that the four of them were thousands of years old and had more advanced degrees than they could count.

  “So the ranch showed no signs Lee had been there in the last month or so?” Bonnie asked.

  Duster nodded and sipped the iced tea. “He hasn’t returned. So what happened to him?”

  “We sent back four people familiar with 1980s time and who would not be born until after 1990 to trail him,” Parks said.

  “He fell off his horse just outside of Cascade,” Parks said, glancing at his notes. “He was leading a second horse into a ranch there where he had made arrangements to sell the horses. From a witness at the ranch, it looked as if a snake spooked the horse and it reared suddenly.”

  “They got to him quickly,” Bonnie said, “but he had a head injury and had broken his back.”

  “They airlifted him to Boise and saved his life,” Parks said, “but he remained in a coma at the Failor Clinic for six years.”

  Duster glanced at Bonnie. “We fund that place?”

  “We do,” Bonnie said, nodding. “Even though it is a little before our time.”

  “From what we can tell,” Parks said, again glancing down at notes in his hand, “he woke up from the six-year coma the morning of his actual birthday. Brice and Dixie are trying to figure out why that happened. They figure it was some sort of time pressure.”

  Duster nodded.

  “At the moment of his birth across town in a Boise hospital, he vanished out of his bed at the Failor Clinic.”

  “But didn’t return to the institute crystal,” Duster said, nodding.

  They had always theorized that might happen to someone who tried to stay past their own birthday in a timeline. The person wouldn’t return to the timeline crystal because they had been pushed out of that timeline. Time wouldn’t let anyone be alive in the same timeline at the same moment in history.

  “Brice and Dixie think he was dumped in the caverns,” Parks said.

  Bonnie nodded. “More than likely near crystals of timelines where he didn’t exist.”

  Duster nodded. That had been their theory as to what would happen and
it seemed to be playing out.

  “But we have another problem,” Parks said.

  Duster couldn’t imagine another problem being this bad, so he said nothing and let Parks continue.

  “It seems, from what one of our people said, that Lee learned about the time and date just slightly before his birth time,” Parks said.

  Duster nodded.

  Parks actually looked embarrassed that he was about to report what happened, so Bonnie broke in.

  “He grabbed Dr. Failor,” Bonnie said. “Lee was trying to convince her that he needed to get to the institute.”

  “Oh, no,” Duster said, his stomach twisting. “He took her with him.”

  Bonnie and Parks and Dawn all nodded.

  “It’s a real mess,” Parks said.

  “We think we have it contained,” Bonnie said.

  “Major timeline changes?” Duster asked, not sure if he really wanted to know the answer.

  “Brice and Dixie are running the math on that right now,” Parks said, “as well as trying to figure out where in the caverns Lee and Dr. Failor might have ended up.”

  “How far in the future you mean?” Duster asked.

  “Exactly,” Parks said.

  “More than likely,” Bonnie said, staring at Duster, “they are a ways after the event.”

  Duster nodded and sat back, trying to make sense of what he had been told.

  Nothing about this was good. Nothing at all.

  The event was a point in time in the future when all human and animal and insect life had been wiped out by, from what they could figure out, a massive blast of some sort of energy from space.

  And now, with Lee and Dr. Failor beyond the point in time, that event, every option to rescue them might cause even more damage, if that was possible.

  And it certainly wouldn’t save Lee and Dr. Failor.

  Or at least not all of them in all timelines.

  FIFTEEN

  September 7th, 2728

  Old Highway 45, Southern Idaho

  LEE AND JOAN sat on the concrete house steps for a good fifteen minutes, then got up and went back inside the home to look for anything that might help them to survive and get to Boise.