I hesitate briefly, then accept the blanket from her. “Um, thank you.” I don’t know what the Washoe word for grandma is, but I’m fairly certain she’s a good one, even if she’s stoned. I turn around again when Piper swings the door open. I throw the blanket over my head, stoop to a more average height for a native, then follow Piper out the door. I give the old woman one last wave before we flee.
The sun is down behind the mountains. The Ponderosa pines cast deep shadows as I lead Piper into the safety of the woods. We won’t get far on foot. I know that much. I circle us around to the edge of the riverbank where Jorge and his accomplices have parked the dirt bikes. The ATV is closest to the water, but several of the bikes have been propped up against trees at the edge of the woods. I creep towards the nearest one, Piper close on my heels.
“Wait right here,” I instruct her when we’ve reached the closest bike. “I’m going to see if I can buy us some time.” I look over the controls of the bike, then inch forward.
I duck and crawl on hands and knees to the second-closest bike. I reach behind the seat and unclip the power pack. The cylindrical tube slides up and out at an angle, and I lay it in the gravel next to the rear tire.
Jorge and the rest of the villagers still seem absorbed in the activity near the water. I creep forward and reach the next bike. The power pack slides out without resistance. I repeat this several more times. A couple of the bikes are too far down the beach to reach without being seen, but there’s a chance I could disable the ATV too. I creep forward again, keeping the vehicle squarely between me and the group at the waterside. When I reach it, I double-check that I’m still unnoticed before unclipping the first power cell. I’m about to pull it loose when a loud ringing emanates from the back of the ATV.
“Shit!” I drop to my knees behind one of the knobby rear tires and try to contort myself into as small a shape as possible. Should I run for it? I peer beneath the ATV at the crowd at the river. Jorge is looking my way, along with another dozen faces.
What now?
The ATV keeps ringing. I wrap the blanket closely around me and crawl as fast as I can back to the nearest dirt bike. I’ve left an obvious trail in the sand, but I’m praying no one has spotted me as I position myself behind the bike. Jorge and several others approach the back of the ATV, and Jorge pulls a handset from what I now recognize to be a portable tachyon pulse transmitter.
He sets the handset to his ear. “Bueno.” He listens for a moment, then grins. “She already caved, huh? Okay, I guess el jefe was right. We’re home free!” He slaps the back of the ATV. “Orale, we got this shit done, vato.” He listens again then nods at the phone. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be ready. What do you want me to do with the hostages?” He looks away toward the hut where Piper and I had been tied up. “Okay. Tell Franco it’s done.”
He slams the handset back in its cradle and whoops to the sky. “We got it made!” He turns to the men who have followed him and says something in their native language. They smile in agreement, then head up the beach toward the huts. I’m watching Jorge through the spokes of the rear wheel, hoping he’ll follow his men, but he’s now staring past the wheel of the ATV to the lines in the sand I’ve made from crawling away. His hand goes to the knife at his hip as he steps closer.
He stops when he reaches the dirt bike and finds me staring back at him from behind it.
I’m caught.
10
“Visiting your ancestors is a tricky business. In some you may find kindred spirits, but you may discover that others lived lives best confined to their photographs.” -Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1945
“Hi, Jorge,” I say.
“What the hell?” Jorge pulls the knife as I rise from behind the dirt bike. Capitalizing on his momentary confusion, I hurl the heavy blanket over him and kick the bike over. The maneuver sends Jorge sprawling to the sand beneath it. I turn and sprint for the trees.
Jorge is sputtering and yelling behind me when I reach the working motorcycle. Piper is ready. I pull the bike away from the tree and straddle it, my fingers flying over the controls to get the motor on. Thankfully someone has disabled the owner authentication software. Sometimes it pays to steal from thieves.
Piper climbs onto the bike behind me, wrapping her arms around my waist. “You know how to drive this, right?”
“Just hang on!” I shout, and gun the throttle. The motorcycle leaps into action.
The burst of energy from the bike is nearly silent but highly effective. We rocket away from the river, bouncing up and over small rises in the terrain. There’s shouting from the village and, a few moments later, a rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire. Wherever the bullets hit, it’s thankfully not close enough for us to see. I get the impression someone might be firing blindly into the trees.
There’s no clutch on the electric motorbike. That’s one less thing to worry about, but I have plenty enough on my mind at the moment.
“Where are we going?” I shout to Piper.
She fishes in my jacket pockets with one hand and finds my sunglasses for me. I don them with my left hand while still keeping the throttle going with my right. A few bumps later I’ve got them on my face and can make out the virtual breadcrumbs scattered through the woods. I’m off course.
We tear through the underbrush as I work the bike steadily uphill.
The lack of noise coming from the bike would help if I were trying to lose pursuit in any other scenario. But I have no delusions about the men who will be after us. They’ll know where we’re headed immediately. The real downside of the quiet bikes is that I won’t hear my pursuers until they’re almost on us. I hope that temporarily disabling a few of the bikes may have bought us a few extra moments of confusion, but they won’t be far behind. Not only do I need to outrun the bikes, I need to outrun their guns.
It’s only a few minutes later when I hear the shots. Climbing an especially steep hillside, our pace has slowed enough for the first of our pursuers to spot us. It’s one of the locals. He attempts to shoot as he rides, but the bullets spray wide.
My heartbeat accelerates with my bike as I crank the throttle open, giving the electric motor as much juice as it can handle. Piper squeezes me tightly, as if trying to make us smaller targets by her efforts. We reach the top of the hill without being hit, and I’m able to make up some distance on the shooter. I fly downhill and into the glade with the train tracks. There is no one near the time gate, but it also has no cover. We’ll be sitting ducks while Piper tries to get the gate open. I skid the motorbike to a stop and help Piper off.
“Get the gate open as fast as you can. I need to see if I can slow these guys down.”
“We have to go together!” Piper shouts. “I need you!”
“I’m coming. Don’t worry. Just get that thing open to a time that looks safe. I’ll make it.”
She dashes toward the gate controls as I speed away. I’ve got thirty seconds at most till the next rider will make the glade. It doesn’t give me a lot of options. I tear toward the edge of the woods that’s south and slightly uphill from where the rider will arrive. I scan the low boughs of trees and the fallen logs at their bases till I find what I’m looking for. A branch of a fallen tree is dry enough for me to snap it off. I strip the excess twigs quickly, crafting myself a makeshift lance. It’s primitive, but it’s all I’ve got.
I hold the long stick against my body with my left arm and brace it on the handlebars. That’s all the prep time I get because my quarry is flying into the glade. His eyes and gun sights are fixed on the time gate. I twist the throttle and burst out of the woods to intercept him.
I don’t know if the man on the bike is exclusively looking to shoot me, if he’s conserving ammo, or if he’s just hoping to get closer and improve his aim, but he isn’t firing at Piper yet. I’m grateful for that. I close the gap on him from an angle just outside his peripheral vision. The high grass whips my legs as I ride. I have a slight advantage since I’m racing downhill. The extra speed is enough that I�
��m on him just as he reaches the midpoint of the glade. He’s begun looking side-to-side now, aware that I’m not at the gate. He spots me just as I’m bearing down on him. He shouts, and, luckily for me, he opts to use the throttle and not the gun. He puts on an extra burst of speed, just enough to avoid our collision, but not enough to avoid my real goal.
I ram my makeshift lance through the spokes of the bike’s rear wheel.
The wood explodes into shards and splinters all around me as the stick impacts the frame of the bike and is pulverized by its forward momentum. It does the job. The back wheel of his bike locks up, sending the machine into an aggressive skid. Coming unbalanced, the rider loses control of the front end of the bike as well. He flies through the air as the motorbike tumbles, then he thuds to the grass and rolls over several times before coming to a stop.
I turn my bike around and am quick to get to his fallen gun before he can get to his feet. I scoop up the rifle, then race away a dozen yards to put myself between him and Piper’s position. The young man gets blearily to his feet, and his eyes widen when he sees me with the gun. I fire a couple of warning shots into the grass, but it’s unnecessary. He’s already running for the cover of the woods in the direction he came.
I’m smiling from my success, but my smile vanishes when I see what’s beyond him. Several more riders are pouring out of the woods, and directly behind them is Jorge in the ATV. He isn’t the one driving but is standing up, strapped into a harness so he can man the gun turret atop the machine.
That’s not good.
I raise the rifle for half a second, considering taking a shot, but I’ll never stop them all. The thud thud thud of bullets kicking up dirt around me jolts me out of my indecision, and I drop the gun, wrenching on the bike’s throttle instead and launching myself toward the time gate.
Piper is standing, waving her arms at me. The gate is illuminated, a swirl of vibrant colors washing across the opening.
“Go! I’m right behind you!” I shout, launching over the railway tracks and spitting gravel with the bike’s rear wheel as I make the turn. Piper vanishes through the time gate as bullets ricochet off the train cars. I don’t bother to slow down till my front wheel is through the blinding brilliance of the doorway. When I clamp the front brake and stomp the pedal for the rear wheel, I send the bike into a skid. It’s still not enough to stop me from hitting a mining car on the other side of the time gate. As my front wheel hits the car and sends me flying over the handlebars, I get a strange flash of clarity as if time has slowed. I fall through the air seemingly in slow motion. Then I crash into the pile of ore and go straight through the mining car’s wall.
I’m lying dazed on the ground wondering vaguely if I’m going to be paralyzed, when Piper appears overhead. She dashes up, out of breath, and looks me over. I’m partially buried with what I expected to be ore, but if so, they’re the softest, lightest rocks ever discovered. Piper picks up one of the stones and squeezes it. It crumbles in her hand.
“They’re Styrofoam.” She drops the stone and picks up another one, then tosses it away too. “It’s all fake.”
I climb gingerly off the floor and have a look at what she’s talking about.
The cavern or mine we’ve arrived in is, in fact, fake. The metal mining car I collided with wasn’t metal at all. The motorbike has caved in an entire side and is lying partially atop one end, while my ignominious crash landing has flattened the other side, simultaneously spilling its cargo of phony ore. The car itself appears to be made of a now-misshapen plastic, and even the walls around us are clearly only pretending to be stone. Someone has airbrushed more polystyrene or plastic to fit the look.
“Where on earth are we?” I mutter. I look back at the time gate we came through. Piper has already shut it off, but the hardware still adorns a fake tunnel wall with a painting of a mineshaft on it. I’m reminded of the cartoon tunnel depictions Wile E. Coyote would paint on boulders in his attempts to stop the Roadrunner.
“We good on keeping them from coming through after us?” I ask.
Piper nods. “I took the first spot on the list. If they come through, it has to be a lot of years from now.”
“Good girl,” I say, rubbing my neck and straightening up. “Where’d you learn to operate a time gate? Your mom teach you that?”
“No. You did,” Piper replies. “You said I should understand how things work so I don’t have to count on other people to fix my problems for me.”
I rub my fingers over my sore chin. “Yeah. That sounds like something I’d say. I guess I need to add time gate operation to my to-do list, huh?”
Piper smiles. “You do if you want to teach your kid someday.”
“Well, I’ll concentrate on surviving till then,” I mutter. “Let’s see if we can figure out where in the heck we are.” I pick my way over the Styrofoam and plastic rubble, then move along the narrow rail tracks toward sunlight at the far end of the tunnel. “What year did the gate say this was?”
“2120,” Piper replies.
“Did it list a timestream?”
“Yeah, but it didn’t match any of the Central Streams.”
“That’s never a good sign. We could be anywhere.”
The narrow rails lead us to a junction of more rails that head off to the left. More mining cars and fake scenery line the sides of the tracks. Abandoned pickaxes and gleaming veins of gold decorate the mine walls. I turn right and head toward the daylight. That’s when we encounter the next set of rail cars. They aren’t mining cars, however. They’re seats.
The two cars are linked together by a coupler, and in total, offer a comfortable padded ride to at least a dozen riders. Lap bars ratchet down to keep the riders secure. This place isn’t a mine. It’s an amusement park ride.
I study the ride cars for another few seconds, then follow the rails back to a boarding station. Another set of cars sits beside a platform. Metal handrails wind their way back and forth to guide customers to the ride in an orderly fashion. But there are no riders in sight. The amusement ride sits quiet and abandoned. Bits of trash line the tracks, and someone’s long lost shoe sits in the middle of the loading platform. The ride cars themselves have been tagged with colorful graffiti.
The ride is surrounded by fake mountains complete with miner shacks, artificial trees, and a few old-timey mining implements.
“Is this Disneyland?” Piper asks, her voice full of wonder.
“I sure hope not,” I say. “I have a feeling this isn’t quite the ‘happiest place on earth’ anymore.”
I lead the way out the ride’s entrance and turn around when we reach the sign. A dilapidated board reads, “Old Sutter’s Mill.” Then a smaller sign exclaims, “There be gold in them thar hills!” and below that, “Riders must be this tall to board.” The red arrow is sun faded and barely legible.
I take a few steps down the wide, paved sidewalk and look up to find the twisting steel rails and latticed frame of a wooden roller coaster. Abandoned snack carts and overturned trash bins line the walkway. I walk to the nearest bin and stoop to grab a mostly deteriorated color map.
“Welcome to Yesteryear Adventure Park” it proudly declares in moldy bubble lettering. “Where history comes to life!” It lists destinations like Frontier Town and Liberty Village, but most of the map is missing.
I let the paper slip from my fingers, back to the pile of trash it came from.
I glance up to the dingy brown sky and look for any sign of aircraft or movement. There isn’t so much as a bird.
The place is deathly quiet.
“You think we can get home from here?” Piper asks. She slips her hand into mine and holds on to my arm.
I consider the twisting walkway and the abandoned amusements. “We definitely aren’t going to need more than the day pass.”
I spot a sign that says “EXIT” on a post near a brick bathroom and tow Piper that way. “Come on. We’ll see where this place really is.” She follows me down a twisting path that says “Emp
loyees Only” till we reach a broad wall plastered with stucco to make it look like adobe. A steel door stands partially ajar in the wall. A sign on the door reads “Emergency Exit Only.” When we reach it, I swing the door open to view the parking lot beyond. My breath catches in my throat.
I step through the doorway to take in the view.
The world outside is gone.
11
“I’m frequently reminded of the scale of time, and that despite my being a time traveler, the earth will spend far more days without my company than with it. That is as it should be. Cosmic insignificance does wonders to keep an ego in check.” -Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2218.
“Are we going to die here?”
Piper is staring out at the vast parking lot awash with sand and rotting cars. There are a few lifeless trees in the barren lane dividers, but otherwise, the view is eerie and desolate. Deteriorating buildings dot the horizon, and I spot what looks to be a partially collapsed freeway overpass. Nothing is moving except the drifts of sand that exchange occasional particles in the breeze.
“I wouldn’t get too attached to this place,” I say. “We’re going to find a way out of here.”
I approach a few of the cars in the parking lot. Tires have rotted on most of them, and none look like they could be inspired to move. I manage to pry the door open on one sand-covered vehicle, but when I look inside, there are no operator controls. Whatever automated system made these things run is no longer in use. I mash a few of the emergency mode buttons, but nothing happens. I leave the door open as I walk back to Piper. She has her arms across her body, hugging herself. She seems to be studying the ground.
“What are you looking at?” I ask.
“There are no tracks,” she replies. “In the dirt. If someone else got out this way, they would have left tracks, right?”
“Hard to say. It’s pretty breezy out here. Might have been covered up.”
In Times Like These Boxed Set Page 169