by Lou Cadle
Bob didn’t comment on them directly. “What if you change your mind and wish you’d come with us? What about regret?”
“Regret is part of life, I think. It won’t be my first time feeling it. Or my last, I’m afraid. But you know something?”
“What?”
“I’m grateful for Dixie. It was going to break my heart saying goodbye to all of you. And with her still here, it will hurt a little bit less.”
* * *
They were down to their last few hours together. Supplies were checked and re-checked. Everyone but Bob was loaded down. Nari’s limp had improved markedly, so the liniment must have actually helped. Ted wore Hannah’s backpack now. The GPS was still in it, with enough charge to check for satellites another time or two. She hoped the very next time they jumped forward, he’d turn it on and find a signal, the sign that they had made it back home.
Everyone was quiet as they waited for the gate, their faces solemn. Every time someone glanced at her, Hannah smiled back, trying to ease their worries, trying to hide her sorrow.
One good thing was that she was less worried for them than she’d ever been. They were tough, they were skilled, and they were smart. With the rifle and extra gear and medicine, with her notes from the library and their hard-won knowledge from the past six months, they would have a better chance of surviving than they ever had before.
When the timegate flickered into view, and its purple and mustard yellow and magenta streamers appeared in front of the rock face, Ted led the way. He glanced back, made eye contact with Hannah, and raised a hand in farewell. When Laina said, “Now,” he stepped without hesitation into the curtain of light.
One by one, they passed into the gate, the colors swirling around them, caressing them, then taking them away. Nari was weeping openly now. Bob put a comforting hand on her back and turned one last time to look at Hannah and Dixie. Hannah managed to smile at him. She couldn’t speak.
Jodi lifted her club in farewell before she stepped through. Claire was last. She didn’t turn but moved confidently forward. She was a good leader. She’d keep them going.
Hannah sat and watched the colors fade, and then she let herself cry hard, as she’d wanted to for days now. Dixie stood quietly by her side, waiting patiently until she was done.
“Sorry,” Hannah said, wiping her face.
Her own eyes were damp. “Nothing to be sorry for. I hope they’re okay.”
“Yeah. They will be. So,” Hannah said.
“You ready?”
“I guess now is as good a time as any.” She said, “No regrets, Dixie?”
“No. I have the baby to think of. I know I’m doing what’s right for her. Or him. But I’m betting on her right now for some reason.”
They walked back to where the parking lot would be in forty more years. They didn’t have anything to carry. Every bit of useful gear had gone with the others, and they had only the clothes on their backs. They barely paused before they headed for town.
Hannah said, “Bob and I stayed in a barn. Maybe we can stay in the same one tonight.”
“Sounds good.”
The badlands cliffs filled with fossils faded in the distance as they walked. Hannah turned around and looked one last time. “I wonder about the timegate. If anyone else will find it.”
“Maybe lots of people have already.”
Hannah nodded. Then she took a deep breath and talked to Dixie about staying together. She didn’t let up for breath, just laid out her plan.
“And you’re willing to do this?”
“Absolutely, if you’re interested.” She said, “Look, even if you don’t stick with me, and not to tell you how to live your life, but you probably won’t want to say you’re a single mother. Not in this world. You’re widowed. He died in a....”
“Airplane accident.”
“Maybe too newsworthy. People might know about all of them. How about, his car stalled on a train track at night and he was hit. Train crossings don’t have many warning lights yet, I’ve noticed. How’s that?”
“Sure.”
“We’ll need to find you a cheap wedding ring. I wonder if there are pawn shops.”
“We can’t use future money, can we?”
“I don’t have any on me.”
“I guess I don’t either now. I had a five, but it was in my pack. Nari has that. What’ll we do next?”
Hannah assumed that was a “yes” about staying together. “Hitchhike to the city. Find a way to get a ride out west from there. Maybe hop a freight train with the other hobos. California, I was thinking. L.A. would be a good destination for us.”
“You sure you want me to come with you?”
“I do. You can’t do this motherhood thing alone, not easily. I figure, I work full-time in the days, and after the baby is old enough, you find a part-time job in the evenings and I’ll watch Maeve while you’re at work.”
“You will?”
“If you trust me to, I mean.”
“I do. You’re totally sure you want to do this?”
“Yes. Who else will possibly understand me and what we all went through? You need help with the baby, at least for a while, until it goes to school or you decide to timegate back.” It might delay Hannah’s plan to become middle class off stock investments, if she had to find a little apartment for the three of them when the baby was born instead of a cheaper boarding house room. Dixie, being young and pretty, might find a husband in no time, even with a baby, and want to stay here forever. However it worked out, Hannah would adapt. The last six months had taught her a lot about adapting.
“You know, we’ll probably fight occasionally, you and me,” Dixie said.
“Probably. Do you think we could stick together anyway?”
Dixie nodded, solemnly. “I do. And thank you for suggesting it.”
“I’ll tell you about some ideas I have as we make our way west. Making money and whatnot.”
“No rush. It’ll probably take a few weeks to get there, right?”
“Unless we run into incredible luck. A train would be fastest.”
“We’ll figure out a way. Compared to hunting for every meal, these are easier problems. So it’s a deal?” Dixie said.
“Deal. We’ll stick with each other for now.”
And they reached the end of the dirt road and headed, side by side, into a future that would be lived out in the past.
The End
A note to readers
This is the last book of the series. I’ve never had a problem moving on from characters before, but I’m terribly fond of these characters, and this time I did feel heart sore when I typed “The End.” And so I left some potential for more story beyond this ending while still trying to make this book a satisfying ending to a series. In the future, I can revisit this world and write more about these characters, including some from other characters’ perspectives than Hannah’s. Maybe there’s even someone else out there timegating and the potential for a spin-off series. Who knows? There might be more to read about this world one day.
I so appreciate my fans’ reviews and recommendations to your friends. Because of the ebook revolution, readers are the most powerful force in the world of books today, which is exactly as it should be. Thank you so much for taking this journey with my characters.
Other thanks go to Deranged Doctor Design and Igor Krstic for the terrific covers. Proofreading this time was by Eric Knight, Peg, and pro proofreader Nick Bowman. And without Amazon being such an innovative company and getting behind the Kindle even when it wasn’t making them any money at first, I’d never have this career, so thanks to Mr. Bezos and his team at Amazon for giving so many writers like me the chance to entertain readers we’d never have had otherwise.
Flip the page for a peek at the opening to my post-apocalyptic novel series, Gray.
Gray
Lou Cadle
Chapter 1
The midmorning sun lit her way as Coral pulled in near the cave’s entran
ce. She parked, climbed out of the cab of the motor home, and looked around the small clearing. An evergreen forest stretched down the slope ahead of her and back up to the distant mountain ridges. The woods were eerily still, not a bird singing or insect buzzing.
She shook off a vague sense of unease as she walked over a pad of fallen pine needles to the cave’s entrance. She could see inside to curved walls marked by horizontal striations, carved patterns of water cutting through the rock in centuries past. Beyond the first few feet, the darkness of the cave beckoned.
Returning to her brother’s aging twenty-foot motor home, which he kept for hunting getaways and had reluctantly let her borrow for this trip, Coral found a flashlight in the glove box, shoving it into the daypack she always kept ready on the passenger seat for spontaneous hikes. Hauling the pack with her, she crawled back between the bucket seats to the living area. In the propane-powered mini refrigerator were two one-liter bottles of cold water. She made sure the cap of one was tight and tossed it in the pack, then, thinking better of it, grabbed the other too. From the closet, she pulled her gray sweatshirt off a hook and tied it around her waist.
She had nowhere to be and no one to report to until July 1, when her summer job started. Over the past ten days, she had lost track of days and calendar dates, a loss she found made her nearly giddy with relief after the past year of a rigid and packed freshman schedule at the University of Michigan. She was pre-med, and the classes were tough. This month was her well-deserved reward for a freshman year spent working while most of her friends had spent theirs partying.
At the cave’s low entrance she stooped to peer inside. The floor was flattened by time and wear. She hesitated. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, or of small spaces. And the website had said it was a safe beginner’s cave, right? But caving alone, she knew, was a risk. Maybe she should leave a note on the windshield of the motor home, with the date and time she went in.
Then something—not a sound, but some other sense—made her look up into the sky.
A dense black cloud was boiling up in the southeastern sky. It rose high and fast, like a time-lapse movie of the birth of a thunderhead. But it was no rain cloud. Deadly black, it reached up and loomed over her, blocking out the sun.
What the—? She stood and gaped. The menacing cloud was nothing like any Coral had ever seen before. Nothing natural. Four mule deer crashed through the clearing, running to the west. They disappeared, and Coral stood alone again, staring at the coming blackness.
She had no idea what it was. It looked like some Renaissance vision of the world’s end. It looked like death itself coming, silent and swift. And damned fast, she realized. Coral’s shock turned to fear. Logical thought fled. She stooped and dove into the cave’s maw.
The sky outside went dark. Blackness covered all the world around her. A hissing wind whipped through the clearing, whistling at the cave entrance.
She dropped to the ground, covering her head with her arms. Her bare arms were stung by tiny pricks as pebbles rained down outside and bounced inside. Coral scrambled away from the barrage and farther back into the cave, scuttling like a beetle. She escaped the rain of rocks and curled into a tight ball, her eyes shut, hoping desperately she was having a bad dream.
Her panic may have lasted only a minute. It might have been as long as ten. When she forced herself to raise her head and look around, the world to her right was a bit lighter than to her left. The cave’s entrance was barely visible.
Groping to the sides, she touched a rock wall, rough and cool to her fingertips. That reassured her. Anything solid—anything normal—was reassuring. The outside world had just gone crazy, or maybe she had just gone crazy, but rock walls in a cave were a comforting link to the real world.
She dug out her flashlight, flipped the switch, and a thin beam of LED light came out, enough to illuminate the ground before her feet, to see the sloping ceiling. She crept toward the entrance, shining the beam outside. The flashlight beam reflected back at her, like headlights bouncing off fog.
Black, menacing fog.
What was going on out there? A memory pushed its way forward—a television show on Mt. St. Helens erupting in 1980, clouds of ash, a downwind town turned to twilight at midday.
Was that what this cloud was? A volcano had erupted to the southeast? Something dark and solid was falling in the sky—hanging there and falling both. Not rain. Not hail. So ash?
But the Cascades, the only collection of volcanoes in the lower forty-eight states, were far to her west. What, then, was this black cloud that had come from the southeast? Yellowstone was due east of her, so it couldn’t be that. Her mental map of the country didn’t have any volcanoes in the right direction. But couldn’t new volcanoes pop up? Maybe, but she didn’t think they popped up like this. Not in an instant, without warning, and not this vast.
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Also by Lou Cadle
Gray, a post-apocalyptic series:
Gray, Part I
Gray, Part II
Gray, Part III
Stand-alone post-apocalyptic novel:
41 Days: Apocalypse Underground
Stand-alone natural disaster novels:
Erupt
Quake
Storm
Time travel adventure series, Dawn of Mammals:
Saber Tooth
Terror Crane
Hell Pig
Killer Pack
Mammoth (February 2017)
Coming in May 2017, a pandemic thriller
Crow Vector
With more to come later in 2017
www.loucadle.com
Table of Contents
Chapter 1