Taft Ranch: A Thunder Mountain Novel Read online

  “I am assuming a great deal for 2600s technology,” he said. “But better that we have something to try when the pine nuts run out.”

  She only nodded to that. Eating food prepared over a hundred years before didn’t really give her confidence, but Lee seemed to think that most of it would be fine.

  They both added three double meals to their small backpacks and then found small, light pans and a few cups and travel silverware. If they were good enough to eat, Lee figured that there would be stores like this one in Boise they could raid. No point in carrying extra. Or if they had to, they could always come back.

  “No surprise that camping gear hasn’t changed much in all the centuries,” Lee said. “Just got way lighter.”

  She had to agree with that. Even with an extra pair of shoes in her pack, it was still very, very light.

  “Changes of clothes and then someplace to sleep,” Lee said as they headed out of the store.

  It turned out that most of the clothing they found just fell apart on touch. They finally ended up with an extra pair of synthetic fiber pants each and a couple shirts each that seemed like they might hold together.

  And they found underwear and socks.

  “After the long day walking it would be nice to have a hot springs around here,” she said.

  “Yeah, that would be nice,” Lee said. “Can’t imagine the water would be working, though.”

  She shrugged and pointed to a woman’s restroom. “I need to pee, so think I’ll go find out.”

  “Good idea,” he said and headed for the men’s room.

  The restroom was huge and seemed to have small rooms for toilets instead of stalls. And actually, the rooms weren’t so small either with sliding doors that went back into the walls.

  She put her pack on the counter and went into one of the small rooms. The light came up as she entered. Water still filled the toilet basin and it didn’t look like it had been sitting there very long at all.

  She started to slide the door closed, then changed her mind and left it halfway open. No point in taking a chance of being trapped in a toilet stall.

  When she was finished, she stood up to try to figure out how to flush the toilet, but there were no handles.

  As she slid the door back completely open, the toilet flushed behind her, making her spin around and watch the water go down the drain and then the basin fill back up.

  She just stood there and watched, stunned. The water looked clean and clear. No sign of sitting in pipes for a century.

  She tried the sink, but there were no handles on the faucets and she couldn’t get water to run at all, so she grabbed her pack and went back into the mall.

  Lee looked like he had washed his face and poured water over his head.

  “The water is working,” he said, smiling.

  “Couldn’t get the sink to work in there,” she said.

  “Put your hand under where the water comes out,” Lee said.

  She shook her head, dropped her pack, and went back into the bathroom. The moment she put her hand under what seemed to be the faucet, water ran out, clear and clean and with a strong current.

  She washed her face, her neck and dampened her hair to get what dirt she could off of it. The water smelled pure and clean. Amazing, just amazing.

  She went back out to where Lee was sitting, smiling.

  “How is that possible?” she asked.

  “I’m guessing well water for the entire facility,” Lee said, “electrical self-contained for just the mall, more than likely solar. Toilets flushing and sinks running automatically at regular times so the water kept moving through everything over all the years. Won’t last forever, but clearly has lasted for over a hundred years now.”

  She felt a sense of relief. “Looks like we have a place here to retreat to if we can’t get back to our time through the institute.”

  Lee nodded, looking around at the massive mall. “Better than dying of thirst or starving, that’s for sure.”

  “So we need a furniture and bedding store next,” she said.

  Again a woman’s voice right in front of her surprised Joan.

  The woman told Joan how to find one of three furniture stores in the mall and a map appeared in front of Joan’s face.

  “Thank you,” Joan said once again.

  “You are welcome,” the voice said.

  Joan just looked at Lee, who was laughing lightly. More than likely the look on her face told him how she really felt about the voice. It bothered her a lot.

  Creepy, just damn creepy.

  NINETEEN

  September 8th, 2728

  Outside Nampa, Idaho

  LEE AND JOAN had slept on real beds in a bedding store. They hadn’t slept in the same bed, but in beds side-by-side. And for Lee, it had felt heavenly. For some reason, the beds of the future just felt like they didn’t allow a pressure point anywhere.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept that soundly.

  He woke up before Joan and lay there and stared at her. She was on her back, one arm above her head, her hair spread out over the pillow. She was beautiful, of that there was no doubt. And smart and fun to be with, even when they faced death and never getting home again.

  He had never imagined a woman like her. And he didn’t much like that he was starting to fall for her, but he wasn’t going to fight it.

  He had no idea if she liked him, but at the moment, that didn’t matter. At the moment it was pretty clear they were the last two people left alive on the planet. Lee and Joan, a very strange Adam and Eve, that was for sure.

  Finally, his bladder forced him to get up and that caused Joan to open her eyes look around at the high ceilings of the furniture store and then at him.

  “Damn, it wasn’t a dream,” she said. “I keep hoping this is all a dream.”

  Before going to sleep, he had taken off his pants and shirt, sleeping only in his underwear.

  So as he pulled on his pants, Joan crawled out of bed, yawned, and came around to his bed. She was wearing only a bra and panties and looked wonderful.

  “Let me check those feet,” she said. “Before you put on shoes.”

  They had found some sort of medicine in a back room of the furniture store and Joan knew the medical names of much of it, so she used some antibiotic cream on the sores and blisters of his feet.

  This morning she did the same, then helped him into a fresh pair of socks.

  “Your feet are looking better,” she said, standing and stretching.

  She clearly didn’t mind at all letting him see her naked or half-naked. He liked that about her and he sure enjoyed the view.

  He waited for her to get dressed, then they both headed for the bathrooms just outside the furniture store.

  They both refilled glass bottles with fresh water. To be safe, he put a disinfectant pill in each bottle. The last thing they needed was to get a stomach virus of some sort. In these conditions, that could be deadly.

  As they started for the door to the mall that they had come in, Joan said, “I wonder if the mall has an employee area with showers and a kitchen that might work.”

  Lee glanced at her. He was surprised he hadn’t thought of that. If there was a kitchen, they might be able to boil some water and try one of the packaged meals. Better than another meal of just pine nuts.

  “Mall,” he said into the air, “would you please tell me where the employee entrance is to locker rooms and showers and break rooms?”

  “The closest break room to your location is to your right just ahead,” the woman’s voice said.

  “Please open the door for us,” Lee said.

  A door that couldn’t be seen in the wall clicked and swung open.

  “Thank you,” Joan said.

  The woman’s voice said, “You are welcome.”

  It took them ten minutes of walking behind the scenes in the wide employee and shipping hallways before they found what looked to be a kitchen in a break room.

  Th
ey heated up some water to a boil and tried a beef stew package.

  It was stunningly good.

  “This tastes as good as you could get in a restaurant,” Joan said, shaking her head.

  “Well,” Lee said, smiling at her and agreeing completely. “At least the camping food improved over the centuries.”

  TWENTY

  September 8th, 2728

  Boise, Idaho

  JOAN FIGURED A twenty-mile walk was going to be difficult for them in one day, but Lee thought they could manage it if they paced themselves and took regular breaks.

  And they were getting an early start, since by the time they left the future mall, the sun was just starting to color the mountains around the large valley. Joan felt refreshed and actually full. That stew had tasted amazing and they had put what they couldn’t eat in a glass jar for lunch.

  Luckily for them, the day turned out to be cool and overcast, but it never rained. So the temperatures were comfortable and didn’t drain them.

  Around her almost nothing looked the same as her time. The valley had clearly filled up with millions more people than in her time and gone upward in many places with buildings. She couldn’t even begin to count the numbers of towering skyscrapers that dotted the path ahead.

  As they passed one forty-story building, Lee pointed at it. “Farming went vertical,” he said.

  He was right. Every floor looked to be filled with massive plants, clearly overgrown because of time.

  The future looked to have been an interesting place if everyone hadn’t died suddenly.

  The roads here were in as bad of shape as the ones in the county, and there were a lot more stopped cars with the remains of a human slumped in the back.

  There had also been some sort of very futuristic-looking metal tube that was a train of some sort that was elevated in many places along the way. All the glass cars that ran along the tube were stopped and almost all of them were full of dead humans, mostly mummified.

  At first she looked at them all, in every car, but after a while she made herself stop. The realization that they were all people who had lost their lives finally outweighed her normal doctor curiosity.

  Lee just didn’t look at any of them at all, instead keeping his gaze ahead to pick out their path through the destruction Mother Nature was doing on a once thriving civilization.

  When he wanted to, he clearly had the ability to focus. And it seemed his focus was on their survival and getting them home. She didn’t mind that at all.

  They stopped for a rest every hour and by the middle of the afternoon they were almost to where her building had been to the west of downtown Boise.

  But as they walked along what had been a very wide road, she could tell her building was gone. Completely gone and in its place was a massive skyscraper that towered a good eighty stories in the air.

  She decided to take Lee’s approach and not look as they walked past it. Her entire life’s work had been in her building, in her patients. Now they were all almost seven hundred years dead.

  By three in the afternoon they reached the far side of Boise and stopped for a meal.

  “Only a few more miles,” Lee said.

  He started a small fire in the middle of the road using kindling from a crumbling building nearby, then heated up some of their water and mixed up a pack of a chicken dish.

  It actually smelled and tasted wonderful, again as good as something she might order in a restaurant.

  They both sat, eating slowly. In the twenty miles they had barely talked and honestly she hadn’t minded. She liked being alone with her thoughts normally and clearly Lee did as well.

  But sitting on the old curb near downtown Boise, she had to ask Lee a question that had been bothering her.

  “If Duster and Bonnie and your friends know all about time and can travel at will back in time,” Joan said, “how come your friends didn’t just go back and stop you from falling off the horse when they figured out you were missing?”

  “That we were missing,” Lee said. “They would go back and watch exactly what happened. My guess is that one of the nurses waiting on me in your center was from the future. Guy by the name of Craig?”

  “I knew Craig for ten years,” Joan said, looking at Lee with a frown.

  “Remember, ten years is just over two minutes in Craig’s real time.”

  “Oh,” Joan said. She couldn’t get her mind around someone coming back from the future and working for a decade or more to just be in a position to find out what happened.

  “So if Craig was a traveler, why didn’t he stop us from jumping here?”

  Lee shrugged. “Duster told them to just go find out what happened, more than likely.”

  “So if you and I go missing and they know how it happened,” Joan said, now more puzzled than ever, “I still don’t understand why didn’t they just stop it?”

  “More than likely in an infinite number of timelines they did,” Lee said.

  She stopped eating and just stared at him.

  “There are always two sides to any decision,” Lee said. “If Duster and Bonnie decided to stop us from vanishing and me falling off that horse, there are still an infinite number of timelines that they decided not to.”

  “And we’re in one of those?” Joan asked.

  Lee just shrugged and kept eating. “No way of knowing if they even tried. We are here, this is our timeline, we play the cards dealt in this game.”

  “But why wouldn’t they try?” Joan asked.

  “Because if they did try, they would fail for an infinite number of us,” Lee said. “There is no way in time to make a decision without both sides happening.”

  “But no decision is a decision,” she said.

  He nodded. “It is the moment you make the decision to make no decision. Yes.”

  “So in an infinite number of universes, we don’t meet, and an infinite number we end up here.”

  “Maybe,” Lee said. “Time is interesting in that if a timeline makes no difference, it will fold back into the timeline it separated from.”

  “I have no idea how that will apply to us,” she said.

  Lee shrugged and then smiled at her. “As the old saying goes, only time will tell.”

  “You know,” she said, “this time travel stuff can give a person a headache.”

  “I’ve heard a lot of people say that,” Lee said, still smiling at her.

  She just shook her head and went back to trying to finish her wonderful chicken dinner.

  Around them the dead city of Boise made no noise at all.

  PART FOUR

  Decisions

  TWENTY-ONE

  August 7th, 2018

  Central, Idaho

  DUSTER AND BONNIE and Parks and Dawn sat talking quietly about the possibilities of what might happen as they ate dinner.

  The wonderful pine rafters and log walls around them kept the sound down, and the smells from their dinners filled the air.

  Duster’s steak was melt-in-his-mouth good, as always, but he barely noticed it. And the sautéed mushrooms and baked potato on his plate were mostly untouched. What they were facing was just too impossible to try to deal with. He ate the steak, but that was all he was going to get down.

  And they still needed more information.

  He didn’t want to lose his friend Lee, but there might not be a choice. Or if they made a choice to save him before they jumped, Lee and Dr. Failor still would be lost in an infinite number of timelines where nothing was done to save them.

  Impossible decision. There had to be a way to save them in all timelines, but the solution just wasn’t coming to him or Bonnie or anyone else for that matter.

  Just as he was finishing the last bit of his steak, his phone rang and he picked it up from where he had left it in front of his plate and said, “Yes.”

  “Our best calculations,” Brice said, “is that they ended up about thirty caverns deep.”

  “And what will that mean?” Duster said. />
  “If they picked the right direction and started walking at a decent pace and thirst and hunger didn’t get them, they would get into the last cavern about a hundred-and-ten to a hundred-and-fifty years after the event, depending on how fast they walked. It’s a very long distance and Lee would be barefoot because he was in a hospital bed.”

  Duster just shook his head and looked at the worried expressions on his friends around him. It was bad enough that they were in the caverns, but when they came out, they would find a world destroyed by an intense emission from an exploding star. The entire solar system took a full hit and the event killed all human, animal, fish, and insect life of the planet instantly, without warning. And it had killed all the humans on the moon and on Mars and mining the asteroids. Only plants remained that didn’t depend on insect and birds. Lower level bacteria also survived.

  Duster couldn’t even imagine seeing that world.

  “Has Lee ever been to the cavern?” Brice asked.

  “No,” Duster said. “Thanks, Brice. If you and Dixie come up with anything more, call me. But take no action unless we say.”

  “Understood,” Brice said. “We’ll keep working on it until we find a solution.”

  Duster put the phone down and looked at Bonnie. He hadn’t seen such a worried expression on her beautiful face in centuries. If ever.

  “If they can get out of the caverns,” Duster said, “and if the airlock doors still work to the mine tunnel, and if they don’t die of thirst first, they are well over a hundred years after the event.”

  “Oh, no,” Parks said.

  All of them understood the dead world Lee and Dr. Failor would find themselves in.

  “How far can we jump after the event?” Dawn asked.

  “Seven years,” Park said. “That’s all the time that has passed in regular time since we discovered the event and saved our people.”

  Silence filled the room.

  Duster knew that Lee was tough, and he knew that Dr. Failor was smart from the reports he had read when they decided to fund her work. Maybe together they could get to the institute somehow.