I really didn’t know where I was, but it wasn’t the Earth I knew.
Then I tripped over something and saw that it was a sign. I tipped it over with my foot and read “WARNING: MILITARY INSTALLATION.” Below that were more warnings: “It is unlawful to enter this installation without the written permission of the installation commander” and “INSTALLATION COMMANDER AUTHORITY: Internal Security Act 50 U.S.C. 797.” Finally there was: “PUNISHMENT: Up to one year imprisonment and $5000 fine.”
There was another sign that had broken away, and I flipped that over with the toe of my boot. It was red and announced that “PHOTOGRAPHY OF THIS AREA IS PROHIBITED.” There was a row of numbers under it that had been riddled with bullet holes, clearly showing someone’s disdain for the authority of the signs.
Unless I was mistaken, I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and these signs showed that I wasn’t the only object that had made the trip. Furthermore, these signs looked like what I would have expected to see on the outside fence of the military installation that was my objective.
I was having a Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes moment. It was all wrapped up with Dorothy landing in Oz via the tornado method and Hank Morgan from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
“Butterfly’s butt,” I muttered.
I found the edge of a broken cement step and sat down. I finished my water. Gradually my headache faded away, and I felt almost normal. I ate a granola bar like everything was ordinary and acceptable. (Luna, the chief cook and bottle washer at Sunshine, had made these bars from scratch, and they were good.)
I tried to reason out my circumstances. It wasn’t like I was stupid; I could figure this out if I gave it enough thought. I had gone through a black door. (A portal? Apparently, those weren’t limited to the movies.) I had appeared here in this place. The military building was here, also.
Could the building have come through the black door? That didn’t seem likely. Of course, the building was in pieces, so maybe it had squeegeed through it. And the dark grove had gone the other way? Tit for tat? Grove for building? That didn’t seem very fair.
It didn’t seem logical. Meka had talked about this very subject. As a matter of fact, it had been conjectured to death by the survivors. Why did people vanish and leave all their clothing? Why did some buildings and landscape vanish and others didn’t? Why did other things pop into our Earth? Why had I gone through it and come out on the other end with all of my stuff still on me? And the question to end all questions was, Where did all of the people go?
I thought about it. No, that wasn’t the question to end all questions. The real bonus round question was, Why had it happened?
Maybe I couldn’t answer the bonus question, but I might know where they had gone. If the building was here, would I also find people? Would I find my parents? Would I find Richard Bennington III? Would I find Poppops?
As much as I liked the idea of finding my parents and my grandfather (Richard could just continue to hang out with my former best friend, Marissa.), the sneaking suspicion that I was stranded here stuck in my craw. If I couldn’t go back to the changed Earth, then I couldn’t stop Project Arrowguard. There were people that I needed to help.
Déjà vu struck me like a bolt of lightning from an aggrieved Greek god. There was something I needed to remember, and it played with my brains with its just-out-of-reach presence. “You need to figure it out,” it told me. “Just remember that little nagging thing, will you?”
I slowly glanced around. If I could figure out how to get back, I could still help. Here was the location I had sought. This was the military facility with the code keys. All I had to do was find them. I pulled out the map Tate and Theo had provided. Ariel had described the code keys and she had written a bunch about them. There would be safes, big safes that wouldn’t look like the kind a bank would have, but would be more like large gray or black filing cabinets. They would have one or two combination locks on them, and I wouldn’t have the combination to those. There were several suggestions on how to open them. Using a mechanical means would be ideal if one had access to something that worked in a non-tech world.
That made me wonder if this world was like the changed Earth.
I looked up and gauged the flickering purplish-white sun. It was three quarters of the way across the sky, and based on the brief time I had been awake, it looked like it was setting. I needed to set up some kind of shelter. The day was cooler than it had been in Utah, and that had been in the mountains, so I wasn’t going to be warm and toasty during the night here.
It took me a considerable amount of time but I gathered wood and made a shelter. I used items from the ruins until I had a rough A-frame that would hold most creatures back. I was able to use 2X4s and sheets of metal roofing. I backed it up to a cement block wall that was half standing, and I knew that I could be safe enough.
While I was rummaging through the wreck of a building I found what might have been their armory. There were dozens of military rifles, M-16s and Beretta pistols. I was able to detach a bayonet to replace Mr. Stabby, which made me feel marginally better. There wasn’t any ammo in that area, so I couldn’t try out the pistols.
When the sun came up the following day, if it came up, then I would search these ruins until I found what I needed to save the day. I would then rack my brains for the thing that was eluding me so that I could help all the people and new animals I had come to consider my family.
The alternative was unacceptable.
Chapter 24
Lulu With a Conundrum in a Strange Land
The Present – Location Unknown
Sleeping didn’t come to me easily that night, not that it was wholly unexpected. Once the sun had set, I could only think about the people I’d left behind. I worried that Landers and the others would return to the dark grove in search of me. They might where I’d dropped Mr. Stabby and think that I had been killed by the diabolical thing that was the grove. Or even worse, they might be trapped in the grove because they had gone looking for me. I know if I was in Landers’s place, I wouldn’t be thinking that Lulu must be okay in a funky pocket universe she had popped into for fun and giggles.
Besides all of the clamoring that went on in my head, there were also noises in the night that made my skin crawl. Distant penetrating howls like fingernails scraping down a chalkboard came well after the night grew into shadowy pitch. Fortunately, whatever had created those noises didn’t approach my site, but faded away as they moved off in search of God knew what.
Using my backpack as a pillow, I dozed as the night grew colder. Occasionally I would roll over and wake myself up thinking something was nearby. However, after the initial howling there were only the sounds that a typical forest might make. I didn’t have a watch, but it seemed like the night lasted a million years. By the time the sun came up I was eating another one of Luna’s granola bars and boiling stream water in a makeshift pot over a fire I’d built near my shelter. I tried to conceal the fire as much as I could so that far-flung predators wouldn’t be inclined to come and take a looksee if they saw the flames.
I was genuinely happy to see that oddly colored star peeping over the sides of the mountain. I was also happy to see stars that I didn’t recognize vanish into the lightening atmosphere. Nighttime = scariness. Daytime = goodness.
Once I finished brekky, I tasted the water and decided that it wasn’t horrible. It didn’t taste like death, and hopefully I’d killed any alien microbes and bacteria by boiling it. I didn’t know how long I was going to be here. I was optimistic but I likely wasn’t going to get bottled water here. It was a crapshoot. If Montezuma’s Revenge hit me like a runaway freight train, then I had gambled poorly.
I started searching over the rubble by using a grid pattern. It was scattered to the four winds and some of it was still whole and hidden behind the curves of the valley. It took me from the time that the sun came over the horizon of the valley walls until the time it hit dead center in the skies to find the saf
es. Surprise of surprises. There were five of them, and they were still whole. I’d been hoping that the trip had broken them up and left the goodies for me to easily harvest. But no, they were intact and partially buried by rubble.
Ariel’s notes said stuff about opening the safes or possibly not opening the safes. Her main suggestion, written under the assumption that I would be recovering the safes in a non-technological area, was to hook them up to whatever could drag them and put them on a wagon with horses and tote them back to Cheyenne Jr. There Theo’s minions would use the machine shop in the facility to open them up and get what they needed. Woohoo!
But hey, I didn’t have a wagon, any horses, or a way to get back to the doomsday device, which all meant that suggestion was poo poo.
Plus Ariel hadn’t even considered there would be five of them. (And I made certain there were only five of them.) (Who needs five safes? Really?)
There were three with double combination locks. There were two with single locks. I was going to have to open all of them. I could only wish for one of the Big Mamas and their assistance in stomping and/or dragging.
I thought of how I had opened the locksmith’s business in San Fran. I had borrowed a scissor jack from a car and used it to pop the bars on the building. I pried the bars apart with the ratcheting ability of the jack. Like that time, I was going to have to be smart.
It took me a little longer to find the motor pool because it hadn’t been all that close to the main set of buildings. Lo and behold, some of them were actually somewhat intact. What I meant by that was three walls and part of the roof actually remained. I hadn’t seen it previously because it was located down the valley and behind some of the natural gullies of the valley.
There were tools. Tools were good. Tools were great, as a matter of fact.
There were also three bent and broken Humvees. Two of them had winches. It took me a little longer to figure out that they would have to be running in order to use the winches. (The information was courtesy of Air Force TO 36A12-1A-3061-1 Operational Manual, a military how-to book conveniently stashed between the seats.) It took me a few minutes more to figure out that the vehicle didn’t require keys. Instead, it had a switch. It was pretty simple. There were three settings: ENGINE STOP, RUN, and START. A rock could have figured it out.
So I paged through the manual because it was pretty comprehensive. It was diesel, so something called glow plugs were supposed to be activated in order to heat something else up, and thusly, the engine would be ready to start. I flipped the switch to RUN, and a little light above the switch assembly turned on.
I blinked slowly to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, but the light was still on when my eyelids opened again.
“It works,” I muttered. “Electricity works here.” I could have argued that I was in another tech bubble, but it didn’t feel like a tech bubble. It felt like the whole world. It felt like Earth had felt before the change. I was in a place where everything worked. If I found ammo for the pistols, I would be armed for the interim. I could proceed along a nicely planned route.
I flipped the switch to start, but there was an odd clicking that made me think the battery was nearly dead. I frowned because I wasn’t going to get to drive for the first time in two years. It was time to come up with a better plan. I fiddled with ENGINE STOP, RUN, and START while I cogitated.
Plan A: Get the safes open, retrieve the codes, figure out how to go back, and go back. Plan B: Get the safes open, retrieve the codes, figure out that I can’t go back, and live out my life here. It was my concerted opinion that plan B sucked.
I found a box of MREs in the back of one of the Humvees, which was a plus. I wasn’t going to starve or be forced to eat purple varmints from Planet X for at least a little bit of time. (I hadn’t seen a purple varmint as of yet, although I had heard howling, so I was ever hopeful they weren’t intelligent and that they tasted like chicken and that they didn’t think I would taste like chicken.)
After eating meatballs with marinara sauce, crackers with cheese sauce, and a generic chocolate bar, I sat and stared at the Humvee. I couldn’t drag the safes to it. I couldn’t drag the Humvee to the safes. I could remove the winch, but I wasn’t sure if I could jury rig a battery to make it run the way it would need to operate in order to apply enough force to open a safe. (Truthfully, I thought I would need two winches to open one safe, and I didn’t think that was going to happen.)
So I rummaged some more. I went through all of the Humvees. Then I went through every inch of the building. I found larger tools to include a pry bar and stainless steel mallets. If I could get the end of the pry bar between the drawer and the body of the safe, then I could bang away at it with the mallet until it broke. However, it didn’t take an act of Congress to make me realize that might take hours or days to do even just a single one. It might have worked for a church pew, but it wasn’t going to work for the ever-security conscious military, and especially for one of their secrets that was so devastating it needed to be guarded decades after the fact.
The day warmed up enough so that I wasn’t shivering any longer. I continued my exploration for something that might help me out.
One of the Humvees started up when I tried it, and the abrupt sound made me jump in the seat. It was so loud and so mechanical after all of the silence, it was abnormal. I was used to mechanical sounds because I lived in Sunshine. There were tractors and other equipment that ran there on a regular basis, but in this place the isolation belied the noise of the diesel engine. I immediately turned it off. It wasn’t going to help me because half of the tail end of that particular Humvee was buried under what looked like a couple tons of rocks. Part of the valley had collapsed on the back of it.
The other Humvee was as dead as the first one. Apparently, the battery wasn’t going to sit around and wait for me for some two years.
Finally, I decided to try the pry bar and the heaviest mallet I could find. I stopped digging through the rubble because I found something else. Rather I found someone else.
His name had been Robert DeGroff. According to his military identification tags, he had no preference in religion and his blood type was B negative. He had wing-like stripes on his uniform, but the material was rapidly rotting away so I couldn’t say how many there had been, as if that really mattered. I could also tell he’d had six cavities filled and two gold caps that twinkled even in the lavender light of this odd place. The jawbone had separated from the skull and revealed more than I wanted to know about his dental history.
It looked like Robert had come to this place the same way as the building, and the same wall collapse that ruined the backend of the Humvee had done him in. That might explain why Robert still had his identification tags and his uniform on. He’d come with the building; he hadn’t been in a place where only humans vanished.
If truth be told, I wasn’t used to seeing dead bodies or skeletons. I’d seen some at Sunshine when Sophie and I had first encountered that eerie bubble, but that was about it.
“Sorry, Robert,” I murmured. Maybe he would have lived if he hadn’t been doing something in the motor pool in the middle of the night. My gaze settled on the skeletal fingers of his right hand and saw a cigarette case. It was made out of leather and metal, or else it would have been nearly gone. Robert had been out sneaking a smoke at just the wrong time of the night. Probably because all military installations were nonsmoking. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to stand outside in a mountain breeze, so he’d ducked into the garage and that had been the end of that.
But that wasn’t the really frightening part. He’d been pinned in place. He’d still been alive. A lefty, he’d used a bit of rebar to scratch a message in the brick near his left hand. “Tell J. luv her”
It was a message J. would never get.
“Crap,” I muttered. The change had sent people here. They’d been alive. The startling knowledge that there was every possibility they might still be alive was earth-shattering. (No pun intended.) My parents migh
t actually be out there, somewhere in this new world, just surviving doing whatever they had to do in order to live.
There was no time to think about that. My priority was protecting my friends in the apocalyptic now.
I quickly found a good-sized pry bar and a very hefty mallet and went back to the safes. I was systematic. I started on the right. I made a lot of dents in the safe, but I didn’t really manage to crack it open.
My arms and shoulders were getting sore, so I took a break. I needed something more than a pry bar and a mallet. I needed something like the scissor jack. I went back to the Humvees and looked at the operational manual. There was a tool kit somewhere on the vehicle that I’d missed. I’d missed it because it was missing on two of them. The third one had it, but the panel was jammed shut by the rock slide. I went back to get the pry bar and the mallet. Happily the pair worked just fine for that particular task. Voila, there was a scissor jack exactly like the one I had used on the bars of the locksmith business.
Unhappily, a scissor jack wasn’t what I needed to open the safes. I couldn’t put it in a place where the leverage would be used fruitfully. If I’d managed to pry the doors open enough to place the jack, then maybe, but that wasn’t happening.
I sat down to drink a powdered cocoa mix that came with the MRE. I mixed it with the boiled stream water and had lukewarm cocoa. Staring at the safes, I had a thought.
A remote military installation like this had an armory. The weapons I’d seen earlier were evidence of that. The military personnel had needed them to protect the highly sensitive nature of what they were doing. They had code keys to nuclear weapons; it wasn’t going to be guarded by happenstance and what-ifs and signs that said ah-ah-ah. Therefore, that conclusion and the presence of weapons meant there was ammo somewhere. There might also be big guns, too.
Forest of Dreams Page 23