She moved up beside him, trying to make sense of what she now saw.
The hidden founders’ cavern was still the same, but now instead of clothing for 2500, there was clothing marked going back to 1880 and clothing going forward to 2118.
“We made it,” he said, giving her a smile that she would not soon forget.
She hugged him and kissed him.
She was still over thirty years ahead of her own time, thirty years from getting to talk with Steph again, but now they had people to help them
The world wasn’t dead around them.
And she couldn’t believe how wonderful that felt.
There were bathrooms off the hidden founders’ cavern, so they went there to wash up.
Then they went to the closed door that led back out into the large supply chamber.
There was a scope Lee had found to make sure that when the secret door was opened, no one was in the other cavern. He looked through it now.
“It’s clear,” he said.
They quickly got out of the founders’ chamber, letting the door close behind them.
Joan was shocked at how many supplies there were in this room, ranging from clothing from 1880s to her era in the 1980s, to all sorts of guns and saddlebags and anything a person would need to go back from 2018 into the past one hundred plus years.
And at least in this cavern, she recognized almost everything.
Lee led the way into the second long chamber of crystals off the supply area.
He went down about halfway. “That’s the crystal I went back into 1955.”
“So they haven’t noticed you are missing yet?” Joan said, seeing that the wires were still hooked up to it.
“Not yet,” Lee said. “They would unhook that to try to bring me here if they noticed.”
Lee led her back into the supply area and over to a spot on the cavern wall. He tapped a spot and the wall slid open showing a room behind it full of all sorts of money and gold bars and what looked to be sacks of gold nuggets.
He moved to one spot and took a few piles of bills.
“Won’t they notice the money is missing?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Everyone traveling back in time is always adding to this or taking what we need. Everyone traveling in time is rich beyond our imaginations.”
She nodded. She would ask about that later. She took the two stacks of bills he handed her.
Then they went out into the supply area and found him his wallet and a driver’s license he had left there and then they found her a small pocketbook. They went to another area and he took her picture and created an Idaho driver’s license for her as well under an assumed name from a list of a hundred.
She was just stunned by it all.
“You think of everything here,” she said.
“You get enough practice,” Lee said. “Some of the founders have lived for a hundred thousand years and don’t look any older than I do.”
She opened her mouth, then shut it. Nothing about that made any sense to her at a deep level, even though he had explained it a few times.
He then printed off two credit cards for her. “That fake name has those two accounts attached, so you can get us a hotel room for tonight. I don’t dare use any of my accounts.”
“How are we going to get out of here?” she asked, looking at the name Joan Stevens on the cards before tucking them into her small purse with the cash he had given her.
“Follow me,” he said.
She followed him out of the cavern and then up just one flight of stairs to a door they had passed a number of times in the future.
He opened it and the lights came up in a long tunnel.
They didn’t talk as they went down the long tunnel that must have gone under the living room area cavern.
The tunnel ended at a staircase and she followed him up those and to another tunnel which eventually opened into a large garage.
There had to be twenty or more large cars in the garage, all white, all with a Cadillac symbol on them, but they sure didn’t look like any Cadillac from her time.
There were a couple spots empty in the garage.
Lee picked one of the cars about five deep and climbed in while she climbed into the passenger side.
“Wow, this is something,” she said, looking around at the large interior and the leather seats and some sort of small screen that came up out of the dashboard.
“Duster believes that anyone in the institute needs to ride in style,” Lee said. “These are mostly for the researchers who don’t travel in time and know nothing about the area under the institute.”
“How many actually know about the institute caverns and traveling in time?” she asked as he got the car out and along the driveway and up onto Warm Springs Ave.
“At this moment in history,” he said, “Only about thirty people, counting you and me.”
She just shook her head and watched the night lights go past. How in the world had she gotten into this? Someday, when things slowed down, she would have to figure that out.
Now, though, as they drove along, she at least recognized everything. Thirty years since her time had changed things, but not that much on the surface.
“I sure love that there are people around us,” Lee said, shaking his head. “Can’t believe I actually said that.”
“I’m just glad I’m here with you,” she said.
He smiled at her. “I feel the same way. And I think after all this, I owe you a late dinner, don’t you?”
“Not camping food, I hope,” she said.
He laughed. “Not a chance.”
They had a wonderful late dinner at Denny’s and then they checked into a suite at a hotel near the freeway where in her time there had only been sagebrush.
But the suite had a hot tub and she wasn’t sure which one of them enjoyed it more.
THIRTY-THREE
July 16th, 2018
Central, Idaho
THEY HAD DECIDED that the best way for them to actually watch when Duster and the rest discovered he was missing was in Lee’s ranch. He had told her about his secret rooms behind his home and that Duster would know better than to try to open the rooms.
So after a nice breakfast in a restaurant near the hotel, they climbed back into the large white Cadillac and headed north out of Boise.
The only difference Joan said she noticed now was that there were a lot more houses out in this direction than in her time and the road was wider.
For Lee, the drive felt comfortable. He always made this drive alone, but now, with Joan sitting beside him, he enjoyed it even more.
About two hours later they stopped in a small restaurant in Cascade and had lunch, then they bought enough grocery supplies to last them for a month or more and a couple of backpacks to carry it all. They were going to have to leave the car down near the main road because he didn’t want to take any chance Duster would see it up by the ranch house.
Lee figured that it was critical to all the timelines that everything unfold without major decision points.
They went through just below the small town of Yellow Pine and then turned up the road toward the two old mining towns of Big Creek and Edwardsburg.
The gravel road was one car wide and wound back and forth. The big Cadillac SUV took most of the bumps out of the drive and made them comfortable, even though the morning was heating up. But Lee could tell that Joan was feeling a little uncomfortable with the road.
“Never been up this way before?” he asked.
“On this adventure, I’m seeing parts of my home state I never knew existed.”
“Back in 1890 when I first built the ranch, this was not much more than a horse trail,” he said.
She looked at him for a quick second, then went back to keeping her eyes on the road. “How did you build something up here?”
“Cut one log, one board at a time,” Lee said.
Again she just glanced at him and then shook her head and went back to watching
the road.
As he reached his road, he pulled off and stopped.
“That’s my road into my ranch,” he said.
A large pine tree was down across the road, blocking it completely. He had a chainsaw up in the barn, but he didn’t dare clear the tree until after Duster showed up to try to find him.
“So what are we going to do?” she asked.
“Let’s unload the stuff here and then go hide this car,” Lee said. “This is going to help us be more comfortable.”
“The tree?” Joan asked.
“The tree,” Lee said. “Duster is going to have to walk in as well. See that small wooden plank nailed to that tree about twenty feet in the air?”
He pointed up into a nearby tree.
“The old weathered board?” she asked.
Lee nodded. “That’s hiding a camera so we can see and hear when Duster gets here and starts to walk up. I also have motion sensors along the road up to my place.”
“Never liked to be surprised, huh?” she said.
“I lived here from 1890 onward,” he said, smiling at her as he climbed out into the heat of the high mountain air. “Never knew who was coming up this road.”
He stood and took a deep breath of the hot pine scent. It was wonderful to be home.
He just hoped Joan would love his ranch as much as he did. For the first time in all the hundreds of years since he built it the first time, he was actually excited to show it to someone.
THIRTY-FOUR
July 16th, 2018
Central, Idaho
JOAN WAS STUNNED at the beauty of the high mountain valley and the heat of the midday sun as it hit her.
They quickly unloaded their supplies from the back and put them off to one side of the road in the shade near the start of Lee’s road, on the other side of the downed pine tree.
Lee had made sure that no car from the road could see the supplies.
Then they climbed back into the large Cadillac and kept going a short distance up the road.
Lee pulled the car off the main road and went up what looked to be no more than a trail.
After about a hundred yards, he turned the car around in a wide area and pulled it off into some brush, headed downhill.
“No one can see the car from the road here,” he said, climbing back into the heat.
They walked at a very slow pace back up the road to where they had left the groceries and supplies. Joan could already feel the heat beating at her and she was short of breath.
He dug into one of the coolers they had packed with ice and gave her a bottle of ice water and took another for himself. Then he indicated she should sit on the cooler.
“If you hear a car coming from either direction along the road, hide back there in the brush and stay low until it passes.”
She nodded. “Why are you going in alone?”
“I have a four-wheeler in my barn that we can haul all this stuff up the hill with. You are not used to this altitude or heat, so no point in you walking it.”
She had never seen a four-wheeler, but she was grateful that she didn’t have to walk. She wasn’t sure in this heat and high mountain altitude, if she would have made it very far. But she had been willing to try.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asked. “Your feet still aren’t healed.”
“I’m going to be fine,” he said, coming over and kissing her. “Just stay in the shade and drink water. It will take me about twenty minutes.”
“Be careful,” she said.
With that, he turned and headed up the road, carrying the bottle of water.
She watched him walk, marveling at how handsome he was from behind, until she couldn’t see or hear him anymore.
She really, really was falling in love with him. And was always surprised at how smart he was and how he thought every detail through.
Then she turned and looked around and down the road. The silence again surprised her.
Only the warm wind through the high pine trees broke the silence.
And then she heard the buzzing of a mosquito and it actually made her smile.
The silence wasn’t because everything had died.
The silence was because she was in a beautiful place high in the mountains, waiting for a man of her dreams to come and pick her up.
She was still a long ways from her home in Boise and over thirty years in the future, but she had no doubt they would deal with that problem later, if there was a solution to it.
And right now, sitting here in these beautiful mountains, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go home again. She knew that she and Lee had an entire world to save, if that was going to be possible.
But, of course, from what Lee had said, their future now depended on how well this next part of his plan went. When they tried to talk about what would happen if they were too late and Duster and Bonnie had already sent people back to stop him from falling off that horse, Lee had just gone white and shook his head.
“The mess in the timelines around us would be too much to imagine,” he had said. “I have no idea where we would end up.”
That statement had scared her more than she wanted to think about. Suddenly finding herself in those crystal caverns once had been enough.
And the last thing she wanted to do was go back to that dead world.
Or be anywhere without Lee at her side.
THIRTY-FIVE
July 16th, 2018
Central, Idaho
IT HAD TAKEN Lee just over thirty minutes to walk up to the ranch, get the keys to the four-wheeler and get back down the road. He couldn’t believe how great it felt to be home again.
And how nervous he felt about showing his ranch to Joan.
The four-wheeler had a bed in it that could carry all their supplies and Joan climbed on behind him on the driver’s seat and hugged him as they started slowly up the road.
When the cleared the trees into the meadow below his ranch, he heard her gasp.
“Is this yours?” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
He looked ahead, trying to see it through her eyes. The tall rocky peaks behind the ranch house, the wild meadow, the tall pine trees shading the house. He was so used to it that it took her statement to get him to look again.
And she was right, it was beautiful.
He pulled up in front of the porch and shut off the vehicle, letting the silence of the mountains come back in around them.
“Let me give you a tour before we unload everything.”
“I would love that,” she said, climbing off and just staring around at the view behind them looking out over the mountains.
The sun was directly overhead and everything seemed to be in sharp relief.
Together they turned and he opened his front door for her.
“Oh, wow,” she said, stepping inside.
It was still cool inside and he closed the door behind them to keep some of the heat out. He had air-conditioning in the apartment in the back, but not here in the main house. Here the cooler air of the night was what kept the house cool.
She moved around the big room, touching his table, looking at his kitchen, then moving over and touching the quilts he had folded on the back of the chair and couch.
“These are beautiful,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
She glanced back at him. “You made them?”
He nodded, realizing at that moment how proud of that fact he was.
She just stared at them, touching them gently like she might touch a pet.
“This way are bedrooms and bathroom,” he said.
Nothing had been touched since he left it. He was glad about that.
He went out the back after she looked at the bedrooms and the old-fashioned bathroom with the claw tub and all.
They walked under a covered walkway to what he called his barn.
“Horses off to that side,” he said, noting the stalls. “The other side is for tools and such I don’t need to hide.”
She nodded.
He went to the back stall.
“Pay close attention to this,” he said. “You are the only person in the world who knows how to get in here besides me.”
She seemed surprised by that, but she watched him carefully.
He pulled down on a nail on a beam, then pulled on a board on the other side of the stall.
He heard the click loudly as it echoed in the empty barn.
“Got to do them in that order,” he said.
She nodded.
An old metal box had appeared near the front of the stall when he pulled on the board.
“I have now disarmed the explosives that guard this place,” he said.
“Why explosives?” she asked, looking around, worried.
“I take a lot of modern equipment and supplies into the past to work on,” he said. “I promised Duster and the institute that the future equipment would never be discovered if something happened to me in any timeline.”
She nodded, clearly understanding.
“Remember my birthday?” he asked her, smiling.
“Now that’s a date I will never forget,” she said, turning and kissing him.
He opened a lid on the old metal box to expose a keyboard. He punched in the numbers zero, five, zero, three, eight, six as she watched.
A hidden door in the back of the barn opened with a click.
“I normally leave that door open unless I leave or know I am going to have company,” he said, then led the way through the door.
On the other side was another regular door and beyond that was his large living room area. The environmental system was holding the temperature at a comfortable seventy-two, which felt cool compared to the rest of the place and the barn.
He had fairly modern couches and chairs and numbers of screens around the room, including a big screen television on one wall.
A large kitchen was off to one side, completely modern. In every era he updated the kitchen while leaving the kitchen in the main ranch house with more of a historical feel.
“This is my office,” he said, moving to a room off the main room.
Taft Ranch: A Thunder Mountain Novel Page 11