Finding
Their
Path
Copyright © 2013 by Travis Mohrman
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or to start a fire in some sort of dire situation.
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing, 2013
DeadPixel Publications
ISBN-13: 978-1492104261
ISBN-10: 1492104264
Cover Design by www.Rockingbookcovers.com
[email protected]
www.Travismohrman.com
Also by Travis Mohrman:
Down The Path
Further: Down the Path 2
To my grandmother,
thank you for giving me
the final sentence
when I was only two.
1
He watched as the blue-gray smoke lazily crept up from his mouth and into the air in front of him. He waited for the burn as it rolled in front of his eyes, but it never came. Jeep had been smoking for far too many years for it to bother his eyes. Still, he always cringed a little, waiting for the pain.
He was sitting outside the facility on the back porch, as everyone called it. From there he could see the landing strip in front of him nestled between the imposing stone bluffs, covered in their bright green vegetation, and the wide and deep portion of the river. It was much quieter in the back. The front of the facility was simply a road that headed directly into a tunnel dug into a bluff. Nobody ever hung out in the front - it was pretty abysmal.
“Hey, if they catch you smoking those cigarettes, they’ll have your ass.”
He remained seated near the river, continuing to puff away. They could yell at him all they wanted to. He was outside enjoying a smoke. Except for the folks inside that crazy ‘building’, there was nobody around for over a hundred miles.
“You hear me, Jeep?” the voice yelled again.
He had picked up the nickname Jeep way back in high school when he was the only kid with a Jeep Wrangler. His first was an old 2018 model; all banged up, with several colors of paint and mismatched doors. It was actually older than he was when he first started driving it. Due to its age, he was always tinkering with it to keep it running, so the other kids just started calling him Jeep. Somehow, the name had stuck, along with his obsession with that particular vehicle. His given name was Josh, but he far preferred Jeep.
“All of Montana hears you, Marcus.” Jeep yelled back. “And this is just dried blackberry leaves rolled up, so settle down.” He still couldn’t believe that tobacco had become illegal right after they legalized marijuana. How was that even possible?
He had smoked cigarettes for so many years, sometimes he just liked the feeling of exhaling the smoke and watching it dance in front of his face. He never did much care for marijuana, and the rules of the facility prohibited it anyway; not that plenty of others weren’t still smoking it.
Marcus had crossed over the corner of the runway and settled down on the soft ground next to Jeep. “Hey man, sorry to mess with your little Zen moment here. With the belly you do actually kind of look like Buddha, though.”
“You’re just like a ten year old boy, you know that? You know I’m a dead sexy man, with a killer accent, and you’re flirting. I’ve told you before, I like girls, just get over it.”
Marcus looked like he had just bitten into a bad jelly bean. “You are not my type, white Buddha, and black folks from the north don’t generally like southern accents...can’t imagine why.”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself, buddy.” Jeep smiled as he teased the other man. They had become fast friends as soon as they were stationed together at the Montana facility. Marcus’ sexual orientation wasn’t exactly a secret and it had become standard fare to swing back with everything he had when jokes were made about his weight.
Marcus had grown up in Washington D.C. and, as best as Jeep could discern, he had never left that area until coming here. He received several degrees in engineering at a private school on the east coast and worked for the government after graduating. His parents had divorced and moved on with their lives, apparently forgetting about their son, so Marcus took a transfer to the most remote area available at the time, rural Montana. He joked that he liked the attention of being the only gay black guy for hundreds of miles, but Jeep knew there was more to his story than Marcus he was choosing not tell.
“Seriously though, I have to turn on the blowers and clear off the strip. It’s all covered with grime again, and we have an incoming flight.” Marcus said.
Jeep looked out over the flat asphalt and metal landing pad. It was modeled after the type used on aircraft carriers, impressive really. The thing got covered up with leaves and piles of dried tumbleweeds every few days if they didn’t turn on the blower system routinely to keep it clear. He figured the landscape didn’t appreciate that runway and was just trying to take it back.
“Yeah, yeah, I have to go back underneath and run through the checklists anyway.” Jeep responded in his slow, southern drawl. Dropping what was left of his smoke, he crushed it into the ground with his boot and then released the last large plume of smoke. It furiously rushed over his lips and spread out above their heads until the wind grabbed it and dispersed it across the land.
“Who’s coming in anyway? I thought we were full on staff.”
Marcus smiled big and revealed pearly white teeth set against the dark black of his skin. He was a strikingly handsome man, especially while smiling. “This is the new shrink, replacing Caroline.”
“Oh yeah!” Jeep laughed as he said it. “I’m glad that lady got fired. Never once was she nice to me. She even fell asleep once during one of our mandatory therapy sessions. Still surprised she was caught eating… what was it again?”
“Urinal cakes! Why is it that craziest ones turn out to be psychologists? I mean, she was here to keep us all sane. Her! She was obsessively eating urinal cakes, and not new ones either.” Marcus shook his head in amazement. “Anyway, get out of here. The new shrink is coming in by chopper and we want the place to look nice.”
“If it’s a chopper, why don’t they just land in front on the road?” asked Jeep.
“It looks nicer back here. She’s a civilian, and they don’t want to scare her away with a single road leading into a dark tunnel, especially with the last shrink going crazy.”
“She was probably already crazy when she got here.” Jeep chuckled as he started walking towards the vertical access panel. The front of the facility was pretty simple, but very depressing looking. The whole thing was modeled after the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado; just a large, hollowed out bluff to protect its contents from anything and everything that might come down the pike.
The story for the press had been that it was one of ten seed storage vaults built all around the world. The first one had been in Norway and, as far as Jeep knew, was actually a real seed vault designed to protect the world’s plants in case of local extinctions or global catastrophe. Their facility in Montana was just a little more than that. Sure, it had an area to store vast amounts of seeds, but it was a very small percentage of the entire facility.
As he approached, the runway slid open in front of him, revealing the hidden steps leading to the areas beneath the landing strip.
+++
“Hello, Jeep.” said the automated voice of the computer.
Jeep hated that computer voice. Scowling, he said, “put yourself into emergency not
ification mode.” Several seconds later he heard a slight chime, indicating the artificial intelligence system would not talk to him unless absolutely necessary. He knew AI systems were common, he had even worked with several others. This AI was different. It was far too adaptive for his taste because it was constantly studying the facilities occupants to make itself more efficient. It gave Jeep the willies.
He walked along the wall in the vast underground corridor as the LED lights slowly sparkled to life all around him. He headed over to the river side of the massive garage, passing several large planes and nearly every make and model of military all-terrain vehicle he could imagine. Everything was designed to be lifted up to the surface by oversized hydraulic jacks.
Walking along the outer wall, he could feel the subtle thrumming of the massive turbines out in the river. The turbines were spun by the force of the river and generated all the power that the base needed. They had dozens of rows of the things out there, very slowly spinning, not unlike tidal generators, but far more advanced. The coastal communities had to stop using the tidal generators once the sea levels started rising dramatically. The ocean floor became highly unstable as the water level rose so sharply, and most of the generators just stopped working altogether. Many had been buried under sediment so quickly that they were never able to be retrieved.
He stopped at the row of boats nestled onto their rollers, just waiting to be lifted up and gracefully set onto the water’s surface. Jeep pulled the translucent piece of smart glass from the holder at the end of the row and it sparked to life in his hands, immediately pulling up the checklists for the boat motors.
He released a large sigh as he saw all the mundane things for him to inspect. These were the new generation hydrogen engines and they were almost entirely maintenance free. They were capable of harvesting the hydrogen from the very water the boat sat on and using it to power the craft. As long as they hadn’t been used, he knew nothing would be wrong. These things could sit here for an eternity and still be fine. The garage itself was a sealed environment.
When he had first started working for the government, it had been much more exciting. He had been a mechanical engineer, working for NASA on the new space shuttle. Then global climate change had kicked itself into high gear, and everyone wanted the government to focus on our own planet instead of other ones. It made plenty of sense to Jeep, but most still never realized that major innovations came from NASA trying to colonize other words. The only reason anyone figured out how to build a 3D printer capable of constructing a house was because of the need to build structures on Mars, before astronauts even landed there.
He couldn’t complain much about his post though; it was tedious but not stressful. Plus, he had really fallen in love with Montana once he got here. He grew up in southern Missouri, but was born in Florida, which was already halfway underwater. His favorite joke was that it looked like America had been sprayed with a cold hose, but no one ever seemed to laugh. As he was taking off the cover of one of the motors, he heard the tell-tale thumping of helicopter rotors. The new shrink had arrived. “Somebody hide the urinal cakes.” Jeep whispered to himself.
2
Kate’s skin was whiter than usual, and she was trying very hard to control her breathing. She had never liked flying very much, but this was her first ride in a helicopter, and she was not having a pleasant time. The little craft seemed to buck and hop constantly. Even though she had giant earphones on to cancel out the deafening noise, it was as if the sound was being transferred through her bones and into her ears.
Thankfully, the pilot seemed to catch on that she was nervous and had quit trying to strike up conversations with her, other than to warn her that landing would feel a little strange. So, she waited to find out exactly what ‘a little strange’ meant to a professional pilot of a small helicopter. Out her window she tried watching the rolling green hills float by beneath her. She was attempting to use every anxiety trick she knew to settle herself, but nothing was really working. Kate didn’t want to show up at her new job in the midst of a full blown panic attack. Finally, they crested a series of rocky bluffs, and she could see the river meandering its way through the countryside. The sheer beauty of the river slicing its way through the green countryside caused her to forget about her thumping heartbeat entirely.
She had heard many stories of the upper stretches of the Missouri river. How it was wide and shallow, and always chocolate brown. She had learned that the Missouri carried much of the sand down to the Gulf of Mexico, to deposit it onto the beaches. That was when the beaches were not permanently underwater, though. Now, the water in the Missouri River was starting to become clear, carrying mostly glacial meltwater as the ice caps melted at a rate far faster than any had predicted. The government had cut into the bedrock in this area to make the river artificially deep, to allow for the installation of the power generators under the current. It also slowed the current down drastically, but the man who explained it to her said something about the slower current meaning a longer lifespan for the generators. She hadn’t been paying much attention in that meeting.
Now, upon seeing all of this, she wished she had listened a little closer. You could see right where the water got deeper and everything slowed down. They hadn’t straightened the course, though; it had been left with the natural curves. The government had finally learned its lesson, after all the widespread and dramatic flooding damage that occurred downstream from every straightened length of every river that they had tried to tame.
The landscape in front of her was so gorgeous, she totally forgot about everything that had been causing her anxiety. Kate was lost in the wonder of it all. The area was so much different from her native Arizona desert. “Are those rows of shapes under the water down there the generators?” she yelled into her com device to the pilot.
“I really don’t know ma’am, I’m just the pilot dropping you off. Strap in tight, I’m gonna touch her down.”
Kate’s anxiety came roaring back as it began to feel like her stomach was moving up her chest. She felt like she was in free-fall on one of those damn log flume amusement park rides that she hated. She had never enjoyed the feeling of falling; it was as if her body opened the floodgates on the adrenalin reserve and dumped everything straight into her bloodstream. Thankfully, she was able to suppress the instinct to scream and instead just let out a little series of chirps that she hoped didn’t sound too much like whimpering.
The pilot never said a word about it; he just brought the helicopter straight down onto the middle of a large runway. The craft came to dead stop with an abrupt clunking of the skids hitting the pavement. Kate let out a huge breath she hadn’t noticed she was holding and began to try to compose herself. She knew that she must have a fairly wild appearance at that moment.
The blades of the helicopter began to grow quieter as they slowed down. She took off her headphones to discover it was still quite loud, but bearable. As she fiddled with the five point harness, she discovered she had no clue how to free herself from its tight embrace. Instead, she just looked out her little window as the pilot continued to flip switches and write down figures on his clipboard.
Even from the ground the view was beautiful. On one side, there were tall rocky bluffs that were almost staggered like a series of terraces. On the other side was the shining river with a thin band of trees growing along its banks. Looking through the middle of the helicopter and out the front windshield, she could see a small group of people standing around, and a door set right into the hillside behind them.
Realizing people were waiting for her, she tried unlatching herself again, but this time the pilot saw her troubles and came back to help. With a deft movement too quick to cause her to blush, he placed one hand beneath her and the other on her chest and the whole harness fell away. Kate tried very hard not to think of how long it had been since a man touched both of those areas at the same time.
“Sorry about that ma’am. They can be kind of tricky, but we don’t r
eally want them to come off easily.” He looked at her with a very natural and warm smile as she nodded in agreement. With a heave of his arm, the metal door slid open and bright sunshine cascaded inside the craft. “Well, I hope the flight wasn’t too bad for you.”
“No, of course not. Thank you very much.” Kate slowly stood up and exited the helicopter on legs that she hoped didn’t look as shaky as they actually were.
By the time she had crossed the distance to her welcoming party she had composed herself well, leaving the anxiety of the trip with the machine that had caused it. She noticed four people, two men and two women, and only one of them in military dress. To her surprise though, all four of them seemed very relaxed and cordial.
“Very nice to meet you Ms. Acer, we have been looking forward to your arrival.” said the woman in the military outfit. The woman introduced herself as General Macallan and then quickly stepped back, allowing everyone else the space needed for proper introductions.
She came to understand that the two men and General Macallan were part of the team of offsite figureheads for the facility. They came across as too busy to be there. The onsite director, a man named General Bahn, was currently in a meeting and she was told that she would meet with him later. The other woman, closer to Kate’s own age of 30, was a virologist named Laurel. She was a little shorter than Kate, maybe 5’2”, and had the rail skinny build of a marathon runner. Laurel also had a very inviting demeanor that served to relax Kate very quickly. She hoped she had just met her first friend at her new home.
+++
As the three other people walked back inside, Laurel turned to Kate. “Ok, the shiny shoes have other things to do. Can you believe none of them are even stationed here? They flew up for your arrival. I get to show you around, if you want? Or maybe you want to relax a bit after the ride here? I have heard those helo’s can be kind of bumpy.”
Finding Their Path (Down The Path Book 3) Page 1