Lost Sentinel: Post-Apocalyptic Time Travel Adventure (Earth Survives Series Book 1)

by R. R. Roberts

They turned to face the yawning entrance of the Time Bore, ignoring the growing signs of widening destruction, the ever-increasing vibrations that had to be snaking through the entirety of Cloud Rez in wave after wave.

  “Seven.”

  Coru squeezed Payton’s hand. His brother was in for a world of hurt if they didn’t arrive together. Life buried in books would do little to prepare Payton for the reality of life on Surface, no matter how well acquainted he was with the histories.

  “Six.”

  This was why they would go together. Coru was good at this. He was the tough guy, the one who could be counted on to act without reserve when called upon to do so. He took no offense at a lifetime of being branded as the brawn and never the brains of the family. It simply was how it had been all his life.

  “Five.”

  He knew, and his father knew, that he would protect Payton. It was for this reason alone their father had agreed to follow Payton’s plan. Coru would stand between the favored Wisla son and any danger they would encounter.

  “Four,” Keyes shouted, his tone more frantic this time, his fingers flying across the control board. “May the gods protect you both!”

  Coru glanced back at his father, their gazes locking for a long, telling moment.

  “Three.”

  Cyprian reached out to him. “Coru. Son. Remember your promise.” He bit back what more he might want to say and let his hand drop to his side. Coru almost staggered at the affection he saw in his father’s eyes. He made himself look away to focus on Keyes’s tense face.

  “Two!” Keyes’s voice cracked.

  My father cares about me?

  “Now!” Keyes yelled out.

  Coru and Payton ran toward the hungry black mouth together; Coru leaving behind the first evidence of affection he’d ever seen from his father.

  They leapt together—disappeared inside the Time Bore—together.

  2

  RAVENS

  (June 24, 2046 - Remote Cabin - Northern British Columbia, Canada)

  Wren’s personal slippery slope began at finding she was down to her last can of tuna. Since it was her only option, she clamped the can opener onto the rim of the can, felt the metal give way with a faint pop and cut off the lid. She rummaged in the cutlery drawer, turned to lean against the counter and forked tuna from the can, eating quickly. Had tuna always tasted this good?

  The truth was, out here everything tasted good. There were fish aplenty a short stroll through the woods to the river, but unless a nice fat trout could be enticed to leap into her arms based on a wink and a nod, she was stuck with tinned tuna and now a trip into town.

  The empty pantry was her own fault, of course.

  Her first mistake had been to invite her father out to her acreage to share her dream of living permanently here in the woods. He’d embraced the idea with his usual zealot gusto, immediately drawing detailed plans, basically crapping all over her ideas, shoving his own at her so hard it was as if she were back living with him in his completely unnecessary gazillion-roomed mansion erected on the hills towering over Rushton.

  “Whose land is this?” she’d finally demanded, then dredged up the words her mother had spat at him the day she’d finally left, “This is my life, not yours.”

  His expression had grown cold. This was not new; it was an expression he wore with ease and familiarity. But then it had changed to hurt, and that’s what threw her. She had the power to hurt her father? When had that happened?

  She’d made her second mistake when she discovered her father down at the boat launch, dozing in a chair by the river absorbing the early spring sun. He’d looked so frail, so vulnerable, she forgot her resentment, broke her promise to never listen into his thoughts, and lowered her shield to better understand the man. She was shocked to learn he was being systematically ostracized within the scientific community, his work criticized, vilified, and he was drowning in despair. This was not the Charles Wood she knew. Surprised, she stepped back awkwardly, dislodging a river rock, setting off a domino effect of shifting rocks that telegraphed her presence.

  Her father had turned at once. Seeing her expression, he knew instantly what she’d done. Staggering from the chair, he charged at her, his face red, yelling, “Get out of my head, you freak!”

  And there went her sympathy, in a puff of smoke.

  To say she and her father had parted immediately and badly was an understatement. He’d gone back to Rushton in Jack Findlay’s helicopter that very day and they hadn’t spoken to one another these last three months. Still, she couldn’t forget his expression as the chopper had taken him away so abruptly. For a moment, their eyes had met through the glass and instead of the anger she expected, she saw only confusion. He’d looked beaten. It haunted her.

  When Jack Findlay reappeared in April with her monthly supplies she’d asked him about her father, then dipped into Jack’s thoughts to get the real story. Instead of an update on her father, she was repulsed to find Jack’s imaginings of what might occur between the two of them out here in her remote forest. Dirty old man. As if she’d ever! Naturally, she’d fired him on the spot.

  Thus, the single can of tuna.

  If she’d just kept her worries about her father at bay; if she’d just kept her shield up, she’d never have known Jack’s perverse fantasies. In happy ignorance, she could be enjoying a full pantry, lots of paints, and a whole wonderful summer of uninterrupted freedom to fill as many canvasses as she wanted. But no, she’d needed Jack’s take on her famous father, hadn’t she?

  So today she had to travel into Rushton and load up supplies herself. Ugh. This was why she was better off alone in the bush, free to relax her mind with no fear of hearing anyone’s thoughts.

  It was six-ish, she guessed. She could make it into Rushton by nine, crash at Samantha’s, then tomorrow get her supplies and be back to Drop Out Acres by early evening. She hated traveling into civilization with the tap-tap-tap of people’s random thoughts, like flies battering a glowing back porch light after dark, constantly knocking to get inside her head. They assaulted her brain with mundane thoughts: lists of chores to complete, appointments to remember, petty complaints about the neighbor’s dog or a slow bank teller, the continuous loop of song lyrics stuck on the brain, sexual innuendos—no shortage of those—snide sidebar comments, secret hatred of a spouse’s ‘use to be cute but now infuriating’ little habits. It was exhausting; it filled her head with ugly; it filled her life with despair.

  Out here on her 1000-acre parcel of unstructured land set along the rambling Peace River, purchased with money she’d inherited from Gran, she had literally found peace of mind. Here she could leave her mental shields down and allow nature to flow into her very soul. Here on the Peace, she felt whole, normal, no longer a freak of nature. Until her father showed up and reminded her.

  Finished with the tuna, she pulled on her boots and shrugged into her thick coat and wool hat against the quickly cooling day and went out to where her two vehicles were nestled into the forest. They were fully charged. She was religious about it, always prepared to travel in case of emergency. The huge Beast, a tranny suitable for heavy jobs and the smaller Beastette, a light ATV now delegated strictly for zipping around the trails in search of painting subjects. With the “Beast”, she had enough power to get to town and back ten times over. It was an older all terrain tranny her father passed along due more to his swift departure than generosity toward his freak of a daughter.

  His gift was unexpected considering the circumstances of their parting, but she was grateful just the same. Having the Beast out here was a very good thing and much more powerful than her little puddle jumper. The first thing she had done when she’d gotten the Beast was paint it camo-style to match Beastette - a fun way to make it her own. She’d had a carefree day splashing random shapes onto the bulky vehicle’s body, the pay-off two-fold. One, she was using up paint too old for serious canvas work and two, she was creating a future ‘Wren Wood Original’ all in one
afternoon. Win-win.

  She disconnected the Beast’s solar panels, folded and stashed them in the cargo space, shoving aside the stacks of tablets her father had left behind. She might stop by his house and return them, though they couldn’t mean much to him if he’d left them here with her for over three months. Or maybe he dreaded having to deal with his strange daughter more than he wanted his tablets back. Should she reach out to him?

  She’d leave it open - see how she felt by the time she got into town. Climbing in, she pushed the start button, the Tranny humming to life like a contented kitten, belying its size and power. This was what she loved best, how quiet it was, almost as if it was aware of the remote sacred place she was trying to preserve.

  She drove across the open meadow, past her second, broke-down cabin, to her fenced-in orchard and newly planted garden and stopped to admire her hard work. Would it be okay with the still lingering morning frosts when tender shoots began to rise? Mona had assured her this was the time to plant … It’s good, she decided. Mona hadn’t steered her wrong yet. All she needed now was to pray for rain.

  Rounding the fenced off garden, she turned away from the river and up what she called Dewdrop Hill to the narrow road that bisected her land, and through the first of two gates, this one barring entrance into the homestead. She didn’t bother to lock it. No one ever made it this far.

  She turned right, traveling east for seven kilometers up an old logging road that wound through the tangle of trees. Tall, dark old growth giants mixed with newer, tender saplings hung over the narrow-rutted road from both sides, the slanting late day sunlight hitting them just right, creating a brilliantly lit tunnel. Beyond the tunnel and on her left, was a silvery-surfaced beaver dam, surrounded by mounds of fresh greenery that provided a whole ecosystem for local wildlife. Just around the corner she traversed the huge mudslide that had covered about a kilometer of road this spring.

  Here was nature in action, reducing in minutes man’s puny efforts. Just like that—no more road. Yes, she had money left from her inheritance to live on, but money enough to rebuild the road? Not so much. She knew she should be worrying, saving, planning, but… For now, the Beast did the job. The fact was, for her, the mudslide was still passable and that was okay. She liked being alone.

  At the top of the road was the second gate, this one so well-shielded from the public that hardly anyone even knew it existed.

  The bonus was this entrance was at the back of Mona and Dan Thacker’s farm and only she had permission to drive through their farm to get to it. Still, she did lock it before climbing back into the tranny, traveling at a slower, respectful speed through the Thacker’s farm so not to disturb them or their animals.

  The yard was deserted, except for a dozen or so bright white, red-combed chickens scratching and pecking in the dirt. Unusual for this time of day. Mona always had them shooed into their run by now. She slowed as she passed Mona’s garden space and stopped at seeing Mona hadn’t planted hers yet.

  Oh, no! She had planted too early! Well, geez. I’ll have to buy all new seeds, tomato plants, seed potatoes, onions sets… Wren mentally tallied her garden losses. How did I get it so wrong?

  She twisted around to face the tidy white farmhouse again, tooted her horn and waited a moment. But there was no beckoning wave at the kitchen window, no excited bark from Ol’ Henry. Only silence. Too bad. She wouldn’t have minded a quick chat with Mona today about the garden.

  After leaving the Thacker’s farm she picked up speed along the better graded country road, passing the odd farmhouse from time to time, each seeming quieter than the last. Today, there was no one to witness her emergence from the bush, no one to track her progress along Drury Road apart from a sturdy gray mule lazily flicking its tail as it grazed. Except for missing Mona, she kind of liked it.

  Reaching the highway, she turned north. It was still mentally quiet and pretty along here, the highway groomed back several feet on either side to help keep the truck-moose collisions down to a minimum. Instead of old growth forest, the highway was lined by finer, faster growing birch and poplar. Each clean straight white trunk held out slender dark arms enrobed in fresh pale green leaves that fluttered in the breeze. Pink and white wildflowers bloomed profusely along the boulevard, framing the rolling highway ahead.

  Beyond the trees stretched thousands of acres of cultivated farm land, all freshly planted. She recognized some as alfalfa. This is what must be the self-seeding crop she had growing in her homestead meadow. Time would tell. What she did know was she might soon have deep curly green alfalfa in her fields which was supposed to be ambrosia to a cow and she did not have a cow. What she would do with a field of alfalfa, she had no idea. Maybe moose and deer liked alfalfa too? She didn’t mind sharing.

  The agriculture that stretched across the north of British Columbia had been a surprise to her when she first arrived five years ago to escape the city. This was oil and gas country, and she’d imagined fields of pump-jacks, not hundreds of summer fields filled with brilliant yellow canola blossoms next to the hazy blue-green fields of rye. She’d pictured cattle, but saw buffalo and elk operations, too. Then last fall she’d met ol’ man Spencer while hiking the remote countryside one Sunday. It turned out that Jacob Spencer was looking to sell off some land, and after touring the trails with Jacob, she was hooked. The deal to buy his place - ‘Slice of Heaven’ Jacob called it - was done on a handshake that very afternoon. Wren knew Gran would be pleased with how Wren had used the trust fund she’d left for her granddaughter. And there was still plenty of money left to have her cabin built and to live on, if Wren was smart about it. Surely Gran had been guiding her from above the day she met Jacob Spencer.

  Then she’d become friends with Mona, who’d given her all sorts of good advice. She also gave Wren a battered old book entitled Boreal Herbal. The good news was some of the plants from the book were beginning to appear around her cabin and in the surrounding woods, just as Mona had predicted. Now that would be an adventure for a city girl born and raised in Vancouver. She imagined a sunny day, and herself with bonnet and basket in the forest wild crafting, picking mushrooms, gathering herbs for valerian tea, making rosehip jelly… So romantic. The grinding of dandelion roots as a coffee substitute? Not so much. She’d pick up a pound of the real stuff in town. And some chai tea.

  “Radio on,” she said, looking for some music for the long trip. She hadn’t heard anything beyond her own podded music for months. She searched for a station, found nothing across the dial and snapped it off in disappointment. “You worked perfectly when I got you. I’ll stop in at Carlson’s and have them take a look.”

  What she needed was a pet; someone to talk to so it didn’t look odd when she talked to herself. Not that anyone was watching. Maybe she’d drop by the shelter and see who needed rescuing. A nice dog would be perfect, a mixed breed - young and energetic. A shepherd lab mix was always good; any lab mix for that matter. She’d want a dog who could come inside with her at night, sleep by the fire. A dog to take along for hikes. Maybe two dogs. This was bear country, and a couple of dogs was a good thing in bear country. There were coyotes and wolves aplenty as well, though she never saw them, just heard their yips and howls at night. At first it had creeped her out, honestly, but now, she welcomed the sound as confirmation all was right with her world.

  As the Beast ate up the miles, her mind wandered from future pets, to replanting her garden and the possibility of jarring up some applesauce in the fall if the apple trees produced well enough, to maybe picking up a fishing rod to try her hand at fly fishing in the river. Jacob had even left an old-style fridge that he’d converted into a smoker. She could smoke fish - if she ever caught one …

  It was about an hour into her trip and she was almost at Rushton when she first realized she was not seeing any traffic coming from the north down her way. She hadn’t even registered crossing the Rushton Bridge, a metal-grid bridge which always shook her whole body and rattled her teeth when she did. Had s
he zoned out and passed vehicles without registering them? She couldn’t have traveled all this time and not crossed paths with at least someone traveling the Alaska Highway. It was a popular highway, always busy with tourists headed up or back from Alaska, or crews out to work the rigs and northern pipeline, and people living on the patchwork of farms and ranches. There should be plenty of cattle and buffalo in the pastures, but there weren’t. Surely, she’d passed them without noticing.

  She started paying attention now, searching the surrounding countryside for people, and animals. There were none. It was like the land was a game board and someone had lifted it up and shaken all the game pieces back into the box, playtime over. How weird was this?

  The usual tap-tap-tap she experienced when she was getting close to people was absent as well. No little flies tap-tap-tapping on the glass to get inside her head. No flood of expletives, grumbling remarks, whiny complaints, cruel rebuffs, boring list recitals, droning song lyrics?

  “Come on folks, lay it on me.” She raised her mental shield then lowered it again.

  Nope. Nada.

  Maybe being out in the bush in a remote cabin for months had somehow freed her from telepathic torture. Was it the pure spring water? A steady diet of tuna? She snorted at the thought. Yeah, that was it - mercury laden tuna, the new cure for your average, twenty-five-year-old mind-reader.

  Then she allowed herself a cautious question. Could it be that she had somehow found a way to shield herself permanently? She was almost scared to even acknowledge the possibility; it would change her life so completely.

  She rounded the first sweep of the double hairpin curve before Rushton to the sight of a wall of tree and wrecked vehicles rushing toward her. She shot back in her seat, stood on her brakes. The tranny skidded across the pavement like a bucking bull, jerked to one side with a neck-snapping turn and rolled. With a mighty thwack, it landed on the roll bars and slid with a screech of metal against asphalt. Wren hung from her seatbelt, sparks flying all around. She wanted to cover her face with her hands but could not claim ownership of her arms or legs. She squeezed her eyes shut, and rode out the tranny’s trajectory, waiting for the inevitable crash into the barrier erected across the highway. Something caught, and suddenly the Beast righted itself, its deep treaded tires digging and gripping into the soft grasses of the boulevard with another head-snapping jolt. Stars of sparkling, blinding light filled Wren’s vision so brightly she saw nothing else, then faded into black.