An Alex Hawk Time Travel Adventure (Book 1): A Door Into Time

by Inmon, Shawn

  “Look at the bright side,” Alex said. “You can stop telling people how I thrashed you now.”

  “You are such a good leader, but are wrong so often. I will take pride in telling people I was badly beaten by the great Manta-ak.”

  By early afternoon, the large group reached Stipa-ah and repeated what they had done in Denta-ah.

  The group was not nearly as large as it had been when it had marched toward Denta-ah, but its makeup was very different. Instead of being almost four hundred warriors marching as one, it was now less than a hundred warriors and many of them were injured—limping, arms in slings, bandages around heads and over eyes.

  The rest of the group was comprised of slaves freed from Stipa-ah, who now had no other home to go to, and the displaced former Denta-ah. Everyone who was healthy enough to do so carried a load of some kind with them, either pulling a small wagon or strapped to their back.

  Alex had thought they made slow time on the way to the battle. Compared to that, they now moved at a crawl. He wasn’t even sure how they would make the trip up the small mountain with the switchback trails. Then he caught himself.

  Of course I do. I do know how we’ll make it. Together, just like we’ve done everything else in this impossible mission.

  As he walked, Alex let his mind drift to a possibility he had blocked out for years. The chance to go home.

  The truth was, Alex Hawk liked life in Kragdon-ah. He didn’t miss any of the modern conveniences he had left behind. He had never once reached in his pocket for his iPhone or regretted missing a movie or television show. The slower, simpler life agreed with him.

  All that was outweighed by Amy. She had turned four on the day he had left. She would be eight now. It was hard for him to age her in his mind. When he had stepped through the door, she hadn’t even started preschool yet. Now she would be getting ready to go into third grade.

  More than anything else, he worried that she would think that he had simply abandoned her. He couldn’t bear that.

  On the hike, while others were forming new friendships and bonds, he distanced himself from everyone and was as silent as Doken-ak had once been. He knew there were questions ahead.

  He glanced down at Monda-ak, limping along beside him. He had chosen him first, but Monda-ak had long since chosen him and bound himself inextricably to him. He knew he couldn’t leave him behind, because it would be kinder to simply kill him. At the same time, he didn’t know how Monda-ak would adjust to a world with fences, leashes, and automobiles. Not to mention, how would the world react to a dog bigger than anything they’d ever seen?

  Monda-ak looked up at Alex with deep brown eyes. As always, those eyes said, I trust you. You are my human. We will always be together.

  Alex nodded to himself. There was no doubt about it. Monda-ak would always be with him and damn the consequences. With that decision made, and with the possibility of seeing Amy again, Alex’s steps grew lighter and quicker. Alex wondered if he could set out for the door the day after they returned. The idea that he could be home in such a short period of time was exhilarating.

  Even so, the march dragged on. Between the walking wounded, those who needed to be carried on litters and the various wheeled carts constantly falling apart, it was a long, slow march that ended up taking weeks.

  Like all things—even interminable things—it ended eventually. When they had gotten to the forest that ringed Winten-ah, Alex expected to hear cheerful cries of ‘Gunta!’ from the lookouts.

  Instead, the guards in the trees looked like children and were somber. As Alex and the troupe passed guard after guard, a knot grew in his stomach.

  Something has happened in Winten-ah. Were they invaded while we were gone and they were almost defenseless?

  Alex turned to Sekun-ak, who didn’t say anything, but touched his forehead in salute of the obvious truth.

  The two men picked up the pace, putting a little distance between themselves and the trailing caravan.

  They emerged into the open area. No children were running and playing. It was empty.

  There were fires burning inside the cliffside caves, but not the number they would have expected. Ahead, they saw Ganku-eh. She stood with Dan Hadaller, waiting for them.

  When they reached her, Alex thought she had aged a dozen years in the time they were gone. Her mouth was pinched and drawn. Worry and sorrow etched her eyes.

  “What has happened,” Sekun-ak asked.

  She answered quietly and without emotion. “Warriors came. Two weeks ago. Banda-ak led the older children and defended Winten-ah. The older warriors who were too sick or infirm to travel with you fought as well. Those who came were well armed and prepared to attack us. We were so badly outnumbered.”

  Alex wanted to shout, “What happened?” but he held his tongue.

  “They were all killed. They are all dead.” She pointed to another long grave that ran parallel to the cliffside. Grass was beginning to grow on the mounds of dirt.

  Finally, Alex said, “Why?”

  Ganku-eh had been staring into the distance. Alex’s question snapped her back to reality.

  “Lanta-eh. They came for Lanta-eh.”

  “The little girl?”

  “The chosen one.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The Oath II

  Alex, Ganku-eh, and Sekun-ak sat around the same fire pit where they had sat months before, when they had agreed to go to war with Denta-ah.

  There was an empty chair beside the fire—conspicuously empty. Banda-ak, who sat in a position of great authority in the tribe, not to mention being Ganku-eh’s husband, was dead.

  As Ganku-eh told the story of the attack, he had done everything possible to marshal his limited forces.

  “I never thought we would have a sneak attack against us. That’s why we have the lookouts in the trees. Somehow, these attackers managed to surprise the lookouts one by one and kill them before they could sound the alarm. I don’t know if that’s due to the skill of the attackers or the lack of attention by our lookouts. The lookouts were green, but there’s no way to know.”

  “How did it start?” Alex asked, looking for any clue as to who the attackers were.

  “The first I knew anything was wrong was when I heard the screams of the children in the field. I didn’t let them play in their usual numbers, but it was summer. I couldn’t bear to keep them up off the ground all day every day. So, each day, I picked a dozen children and let them run and play in the sunshine. It was good for them, and good for us to see. It brought a sense of normalcy to an abnormal time.”

  She stared into the small flames, no doubt remembering the scene.

  When I heard the first screams, I rushed to look down. The attackers were running in from the edge of the clearing. It was a terrible position to be in. We couldn’t pull the ladders up when the children were in the field, so Banda-ak gathered the small troop he had been training and hurried down to meet them. The attackers had reached the children by then. They killed them, but not all at once. Later, I realized they did that to draw us down.”

  “Grudu,” Sekun-ak said. It was the greatest of the Winten-ah curse words. Alex had only heard it used on two other occasions in his years with the tribe.

  Ganku-eh just put two fingers to her forehead in agreement.

  “Banda-ak fought as strategically as was possible. He had a few of the shields left from the army and he had been training his apprentices in how to use them. But, other than him, they were too small, too old, too weak. To form a shield wall against a band of warriors with children and the aged was impossible. The invaders overran them. They killed Banda-ak first, because they recognized he was the only warrior among them. I saw what was happening and ordered the ladders pulled up, but I was too late. They were so quick. They were up and killing those I sent on that errand.”

  Alex and Sekun-ak sat in silence, envisioning what had happened, knowing the horns of the dilemma Ganku-eh had found herself on, not to mention the horror of
watching her husband be overrun and killed.

  “They shouted again and again, ‘Lanta-eh, Lanta-eh!’ She was with me and she knew that I would die too before I let them take her. She went to the ladder, ran down it and presented herself to them. ‘I am Lanta-eh, what do you want of me?’ She was not afraid of them.”

  Ganku-eh did not need to finish the story. It was obvious what had happened.

  “Why would they take her?”

  Ganku-eh and Sekun-ak looked at him in surprise.

  “Why?” Ganku-eh asked. “Because she is the chosen one. Every tribe in Kragdon-ah would have taken her if they could. She is the prophecy.”

  “Did everyone know that she was here?” Alex asked. “That she was the prophecy?”

  “No. We never told anyone, because we knew this would happen if we did.”

  “How did they know?”

  “It is possible,” Sekun-ak said, “that someone who came to fight with us left and took word back to their tribe. They would have known that she was here, and that soon, we would be weakened.”

  “It was hectic when people first arrived,” Alex agreed. “I never saw any of this coming.”

  “Lanta-eh did, of course. She told me long ago that it would happen. When she was just learning to speak. It was her first prophecy. And now it has come to pass. But there is another prophecy.”

  “What’s that?” Alex asked.

  “That you were sent here to bring her home.”

  Alex bolted upright and walked away from Ganku-eh. He walked to the very edge of the cave and looked down at the field, picturing Banda-ak attempting a shield wall with inexperienced warriors.

  He turned back to Ganku-eh. “You told me that if I led your army to victory against Denta-ah, that you would let me return home.”

  Deep sorrow and pain played out on Ganku-eh’s face. “I did. And I meant it, though we would miss you greatly. But, remember Monda-ak.”

  Alex’s heart sank. He did remember how he had been given Monda-ak. He had given Banda-ak an oath. That oath would only die with Alex, not with Banda-ak.

  “I am sorry, but I must. I claim the oath you owed my husband. I need you to save Lanta-eh.”

  To be continued...

  Coming in June 2020

  Book Two of the Alex Hawk Time Travel Adventure Series:

  Lost in Kragdon-ah

  Author’s Note

  Like most writers, I was an avid reader as a child. Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham was my entry drug. It was my first literary burning question: why would the guy at least not try the green eggs and ham?

  By age ten, I discovered Jim Kjelgaard’s animal books and sports books. I devoured them by the dozens.

  At twelve, I took a step up and looked into the young adult section of the library. That was where I found Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, and Robert E. Howard. I knew I was home.

  First came the Tarzan books. I really got fired up, though, when I read the stories of Pellucidar, the prehistoric world hidden in the earth’s core. Then came Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne and Burrough’s John Carter of Mars books.

  These books, which took ordinary men and put them in fantastical situations and extraordinary worlds, fired my imagination. I began to think up my own stories set in their worlds. It was my first tentative step to being a writer.

  As an adult, at least in age, if not in temperament, I have gone back and reread those books many times. I still love them, but it’s hard to recommend them to modern audiences. They were written, for the most part, more than a hundred years ago. Literary styles change and evolve and even though the stories are still fantastic, they read stilted and dry to modern eyes.

  That gave me an idea. Why not write a similar story, but update the style and language?

  The question was, how? The heroes reached Pellucidar in a giant mole machine that dug into the center of the Earth. The heroes of Journey to the Center of the Earth reached it through a system of caves.

  We didn’t know as much about the planet then as we do now, but neither of those methods would fly in 2020. However, I’ve always loved portal fiction. Think C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or Stephen King’s 11/22/63. Someone walks into a closet, or the back of a storeroom, and voila! They are somewhere else in time and space.

  A Door into Time, then, is my own way of combining these two ideas. There is no explanation—or at least none presented in the first book—as to how the door arrived in Alex Hawk’s basement. Meanwhile, he is flung into Kragdon-ah, which is my own take on Pellucidar.

  In Edgar Rice Burrough’s story, Pellucidar is a place where humans and dinosaurs co-exist. I wasn’t ready to take my story that far, as I wanted it to be grounded in some form of reality, but I did want fantastic creatures.

  So, I set the story far enough in the future that it was possible that evolution had occurred, or even changes in the atmosphere that had led to giant-sized cockroaches, ants, bears and dire wolves.

  A Door into Time is set firmly in central Oregon, just many millennia in the future. I researched everything to make sure that the creatures in the book, or at least their ancient relatives, were part of the Oregon landscape.

  Each of my books tends to have a single theme. In this one, I wanted to look at the progress the human race has made and examine whether that progress is good or bad. Like all things, I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. I will say I enjoyed these last few months mentally living in Kragdon-ah, where there are no cell phones, internal combustion engines, or Internet. It was soothing to me to step into that world every day, even though I knew dangers lurked around many corners.

  Up next will be Lost in Kragdon-ah. I am what other writers tend to call a pantser because I write by the seat of my pants. I prefer the phrase “discovery” writer, in that I discover the story as I go along, never really knowing what is coming around the next bend. That means I only have a few basic ideas of what will happen in Lost in Kragdon-ah, but I will admit I am pretty excited by the ideas I do have. If you liked this book at all, I think you will enjoy that one as well.

  If you are new to my books, you may not know about this quirky habit I have. For each book, I pick out a single song and listen to it endlessly on repeat during my writing sessions. It becomes like an aural wall against the outside world, and also elicits a Pavlovian response in me. As soon as I hear the opening notes of the song, my brain automatically slips into the world of the story,

  For this book, I chose Hurdy Gurdy Man by Donovan. If you feel like it, please pull up a copy on YouTube or Spotify and give it a listen. The vibe of the song fits the mood of the book perfectly to me.

  Before I thank everyone, I have to share a quick story. I was in third grade in 1969. My family had moved away from the town I grew up in for half the school year, then returned. When I got back to my familiar school, a new kid named Jerry had moved in. We kind of butted heads a little bit—maybe like Sekun-ak and Alex did in this book. But, like them, we soon became fast friends and brothers.

  When it rained (which it did a lot in the Spring in Western Washington) our teacher would often let us stay inside and draw or read to ourselves. Jerry and I sat right next to each other and being young boys, we would often draw pictures of war—planes and tanks firing on unfortunate soldiers, that sort of thing.

  My drawings were the battle equivalent of stick figures. If you squinted and turned your head, you could kind of tell what they were supposed to be.

  Jerry’s, on the other hand, were small scale masterpieces. Horrified expressions on the soldiers being killed, intricate detail on the tanks and planes, etc.

  As soon as I saw Jerry’s drawings, I crumpled up my own and went back to writing stories instead of drawing them. Jerry had a natural-born ability to visualize something, then bring it to life. Over the next eight years, as we stayed best friends, I was continually amazed at the art that flowed from him.

  Fast forward quite a few decades to 2020. Jerry and I a
re still the greatest of friends and brothers. We would do anything for each other and each other’s families. We’ve passed the greatest friendship test of all—our families have gone on vacation together and still loved each other in the end.

  As I pondered the inspirations for the story that became A Door into Time, I looked through some of my old paperbacks. I noticed that some of them had cool line drawings of scenes from the book.

  I called Jerry immediately. I didn’t even get the question out of my mouth before he agreed to do it. Before he was done, he had made me the dozen pieces of art that are scattered throughout the book. I feel so blessed that fifty years after we first met, we are continuing not just our friendship, but our creative partnership as well.

  I absolutely love what he did for me and I hope you will as well.

  A few years ago, Mark Sturgell became on of my proofreaders. For my last two books, he has fulfilled that invaluable role, but has also become my graphics support person. He took all the scanned drawings from Jerry and made them into the files I was able to put into this book. Mark was a triple-threat on this book, though. In addition to proofreading and graphics support, he was also my go-to expert on firearms. He helped me in dozens of ways so that I did not make mistakes that would be obvious to other knowledgeable gun owners. I am grateful for everything he did for me on this book.

  Another issue I faced is that Alex Hawk is a military man. I never served, so I was required to write a character who had lived through things I never have. That’s where I turned to Diego DeLa Vega. In many ways, he had the same experience as Alex and served as my advisor, not just on weapons and preparedness, but on the mindset Alex might have in many situations. His contributions in advice and aid in helping me understand these things has been invaluable. He turned out to be an excellent proofreader, too!

  Debra Galvan has been my proofreader for so long, I can’t remember writing a book without her. She has those two critical skills required by every good proofreader—a sharp eye and speed. It’s not unusual for Deb to return my proofread manuscript in less than twenty-four hours. Plus, her comments in the margins often crack me up!