A Beginner's Guide To Time Travel
A NaNoWriMo Challenge: CHAPTER 13
So, I FINISHED writing this today! I’ll still be putting it up a chapter at a time, even as I start the rewriting and editing process. (It came in at 83, 400 words. 170 pages single-spaced, 12 pt Times New Roman.) Please, leave comments and SHARE it with your friends.
13
The sun was high when we set out for our climb. Securing a length of rope around my waist, as well as hers, I paced out ten steps between us. I packed as much of the gear that we had and tied into a bundle, using the tusker hide. It was a simple matter of dragging it behind us, and lifting, or pulling on it, whenever my sword and scabbard snagged on the rocks. I was grateful the climb wasn’t a vertical face, and that we were able to make it to the next level quickly, and with little effort.
There was little game about, and it was a concern, but I saw berries which I told her to eat as we climbed. When we reached the trail I’d told her about earlier, we followed it for a short while. I searched the trail for any signs of game, but saw none. It was a worn out path and I could see where the water had once reached. There were high level marks that made little, or no sense, and at first, I thought they were ancient signs of the cataclysmic disaster she’d described to me earlier.
There were the soft-padded footprints of various mountain lions as well, and while not fresh, they proved to me that I’d have to be on the lookout. This was their natural habitat and they were able to move about the rock faces with the ease of a mountain goat.
The wind was a soothing, gentle breeze, that sifted through the rocks, but there were heavy clouds coming in from the West. They were dark and threatening, and while the sun bore down on us mercilessly, it didn’t take long before we were both sweating. I took off the buckskin shirt I was wearing, tying the sleeves around my waist. I noticed she had the fur jacket I gave her, loose and open, the bottom tied so that it caught the breeze like a sail and cooled her as she climbed.
So much for modesty, I thought.
There was a small puddle of brackish water and I gratefully dipped my hands in it, washing my hands over my bearded face and hair, as well as over my chest. It was only a moment before she was beside me, dipping her hands in what was left of the puddle.
“Don’t drink it,” I told her.
“How much farther do you plan to go?”
“I want to get up high enough to see the plains. We should still be able to see the dust trail from there.”
“And if we don’t?”
‘It doesn’t mean we’ve lost them. But it might mean that they’ve found an old trail, and are using it instead of walking on the plain.”
“And how will that help us?”
“I won’t. It means we’ll have to go back down and track them.”
“Why can’t we use the trail through the hills? I haven’t seen anything to say that it’s been used by anyone.”
“I don’t trust it.”
“You don’t trust it? What’s not to trust about it?”
“The weather.”
“What about the weather?”
“Those storm clouds coming in from the West,” I said, pointing behind us. She turned her head and looked at the dark clouds.
“Maybe if we follow the trail, we’ll find an empty cave and hide out in it until the storm passes?”
“I still don’t trust it,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because rain always flows downhill. If we’re down in the rocks, and it rains, we’re going to get a lot colder, and wetter, than if we get up higher.”
“That makes no sense,” she said.
“That’s because you haven’t spent most of your life battling the elements,” I said, pulling the supplies up and hoisting them on my back. I started following the trail because I thought it would be easier for her, and we might get farther. It was a compromise, I told myself. The moment the sun disappeared behind the clouds though, I determined that we’d make our way higher. Once the rain came, I wanted to be above the trail. I didn’t like how the rocks closed in on the trail.
The weather changed without warning.
The rain came down hard. I looked up at the sky as a large cloud seemed to catch hold of the hills and grind to a halt. The rain all but slid out of it. I looked up, and tried to get a hand hold on the rocks. They were already slick with rain, and almost impossible to scale.
The rain came harder and the wind picked up.
“We have to get up higher!” I screamed.
“No! Just find someplace we can hold onto,” she said.
As much as she may have thought it made sense, something inside of me told me to get up higher. It had been raining for close to three days in the Vandals. What had the weather been like down here?
“It’s not safe down here,” I finally said.
“How can it be any safer up there?”
I turned and looked at her, letting her get closer before I grabbed her by the front of her coat and pulled her toward me.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this; can you see that? Something isn’t right. When I feel that way, I tend to listen to what that little voice in the back of my head says. And right now, it’s telling me this is not the place I want to be. It’s telling me that it’s been raining too much. I see pieces of the trail that have been washed out. You might not see it, but I do. So I say we go up, and if you don’t like it, I’ll cut the rope right now, and you can take your chances on your own.”
There was a crack of thunder, followed by a brilliant flash of lightning. I could see the water on the trail puddling. Some places looked to be ankle deep already. I looked up at the rocks and saw that it was too steep. I grabbed her by the hand and all but dragged her down the trail.
I spotted a small incline up ahead. But it was getting dark. The clouds were low, dark and heavy, the kind that when they opened up would leave flooded fields and damaged crops.
I stopped and looked up the rocky incline.
“We have to get above the water line,” I said.
“What water line?”
“Those lines on the rocks?” I said, pointing at them. “That’s not something that happened ten thousand years ago. That’s recent. We gotta get up higher.”
“You’re wrong!”
I put the bundle down and pulled out my sword.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m cutting you loose. I don’t have time to stand here and argue with you. I’m climbing up above the waterline,” I said, and pulling the rope laid my sword on it, looking at her.
“You can’t leave me here!”
“It’s your choice!” I yelled above the wind.
“Fine!” she said, and looked at the incline.
“I’ll follow you,” I said, “in case you fall.”
Her boots weren’t made for climbing. She struggled, and I found myself directly behind her, my shoulder against her butt, dragging the bundle me. There was a flat ledge above and she looked down at me, slapping my shoulder and pointing to it. I saw it and nodded.
There was another rumble of thunder, only it was farther away. I waited for the flash of lightning, but it never came. That was the moment I pushed her ahead of me. She screamed out, almost lost her balance, but I’d been waiting for that. I pushed her up again.
“Hurry!” I screamed.
I could feel it vibrating underneath me; the rocks were all but dancing. I realized at that moment it wasn’t thunder that I’d heard. I pushed her up onto the ledge, pulling myself up a moment later, reaching down for the rope and pulling the bundle up behind me. It was then I saw the small crevice.
I pushed her in ahead of me, forcing myself against her as a wall of water rushed down the path. There were logs, broken trees, and branches, a wall of mud and water behind it, and I knew a dam had burst somewhere. There was a slight tug, and then I felt myself being pulled into the rushing stream. I lost my grip and plunged downward, only to find myself hanging above the rushing stream. I pulled on the rope hanging below me. The bundle had been snatched by a branch, pulling me off balance.
I looked up. I could see Jen clinging to the side of the wall, her hands holding onto the lip of the crevice, her right leg locked inside. She was screaming as she tried to hold me, and I scrambled up against the rocks, pulling the bundle up with me. She began pulling on the rope once I found my footing, and then reached down to help me as I pulled myself back onto the ledge.
“I’m sorry!” she cried. “I’m so sorry.”
She wept, and wiping the tears and rain from her eyes, threw her arms around me, clutching me, clinging tight.
*
“We have to get away from here!” I screamed above the roar of rushing water. All we needed was a tree to come down the narrow chute and sweep us off our precarious perch
She nodded.
She may have agreed with me, but I could see she didn’t like the idea of leaving the perch we’d found. I untied the buckskin shirt from around my waist and slipped it over my head, looking up. It was too dark to see any more than a dozen paces or more, but I didn’t see us having much of a choice. I hoisted the bundle on my shoulder again and followed the incline leading up; forcing her to follow me.
The rain came down harder, as if it were coming down with a spite, and I was constantly wiping my face with my hands. There was a dark hole up ahead, and I pointed at it; she simply nodded again, putting her head down in an attempt to hide from the rain.
It turned out to be a cave, and I slid the bundle ahead of me, crawling in behind it on my hands and knees. If there was anything inside, I wanted to have the bundle between it and us. I could smell the stink of death inside immediately, and quickly pulled my longbow and quiver out of the bundle. I lay on my side, trying to restring the bow, constantly watching the darkness ahead of me.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know yet. There’s something dead in here.”
“I don’t think we have to worry about anything that’s dead,” she said, and I nodded; I knew exactly what she meant.
I waited a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom. There was a rumble of thunder that felt as if it was right above us, and a flash of lightning that followed almost as soon as the last echoes of thunder died away. In that brief flash of light, I could see that the cave opened into a wide cavern.
“I can’t see anything,” she said.
“I have a light,” I said.
“A light?”
“Zard gave it to me before he died. He said it would come in handy. Apparently he was right about that. All you have to do is wind it up. It’s not very big, but it’ll do the trick,” I said, untying the bundle.
It only took a moment to find it, even though it was small and fit inside the palm of my hand—making it easier for me to hold on to. I turned the small handle and the inside of the cave opened up to reveal a large cavern—larger than what I thought I saw when the lightning flashed. I crawled ahead until I was able to stand up. The walls of the cave were smooth. They appeared man-made, and I wondered how that was possible.
“What is this place?” I said softly.
“It’s a tunnel,” she said.
“What’s it supposed to do?”
“It doesn’t do anything. They used to use them for travel.”
“Who did?”
“Before…before everything, I suppose. They had motorized vehicles—”
“Motorized? What’s that mean?”
“It’s like a cart, or a wagon, but instead of some pack animal pulling it, they had their own source of power. Look, over there,” she said, and moving my hand shone the light of into the distance where there was a mass of metal towering up to the ceiling of the cave. It looked as if some giant hand had swiped them off to the side. They were crushed and bent, most of them crumbled in on themselves, but a few of them still intact, as if they had somehow survived the passing of time.
“How come those ones are almost dust, but those aren’t?” I asked.
“The broken ones are made of metal; the others are plastics.”
“Plastics?”
She pointed to the light in my hand.
“This part, is plastic; this part, is metal,” she said, pointing at each part.
“And they made carts out this?”
“Automobiles. That’s what they were called. It had an engine—a motor—the internal combustion engine. It converted fuel into energy.”
“Fuel? What’s—oh, this is too much,” I said. “Every time you say something, you add something to it. How do you expect me to keep track of any of this?”
“You don’t have,” she said. “That’s what people like me are supposed to do. A Time Guardian not only looks after the time line, but studies the time they’re visiting. I was in the past with Bobby. That was Ricky’s brother—the guy inside your head—”
“I know, Jimmy’s brother.”
“So you have been paying attention. Anyway, I made notes about the time I was in.”
“And what time was that?”
“1989.”
“What exactly does that mean?”
“This is going to take a while, I can see,” she said. She started walking toward the edge of what was once one of the ancient trails. I shone the light on it and looked at it carefully, picking at it with my fingers. It broke apart and I smelled it. I flashed the light over it. The trail was bent and twisted, cracked in places, and totally sheared off in others.
“What is this stuff?” I asked.
“Asphalt,” she said. “It was a combination of things. They used it to make roads for the automobiles to travel on. It’s what the old trails are made of. Most of those are old highways that survived. It don’t imagine there’d be a lot, but then, I never imagined this would be here either.”
“How do you think it happened? That this is here underneath all of this rock?”
“I guess when the plates shifted, they caused great upheavals. These rocks would’ve been underneath everything. But when everything shifted, it’ll got pushed up to the top, burying everything that was on top, underneath it.”
I pointed the light ahead of us, but it was already fading. I wound the tiny crank on it and when the light brightened again, realized that I couldn’t even see the end of the tunnel. I pointed it straight up, and saw giant forms hanging down.
“Zard told me those things takes a long time to grow.”
“That’s because the things he was talking about don’t grow, they form; those things up there aren’t natural.”
“What are they?”
“Old pieces of metal.”
“So how long ago did all of this happen?”
“How can I explain that if you don’t understand the basic concepts of time?”
“Try.”
“Try…” she said, and stood silent for a moment. “Do you understand what I mean when I about the difference in the seasons?”
“The seasons?”
“The hot days, and the cold? You have long hot days, and then you have cold, short days. They come about and go away.”
“Yes.”
“When the snow comes and then it melts, and then the hot days follow, and then they cool off until the snow comes back again. That would be what we call a year. From one snow season until the next.”
“A year?”
“Yes. I’ve lived through thirty-four of those. I don’t suppose you know how many you’ve lived through?”
“I used to know,” I said. And I did. But it wasn’t something that was important to keep up with, so I simply forgot.
“All of this—” she pointed at the tunnel and all the wreckage—“happened 195 seasons ago. It was a long time ago, but not as long as the world has been here.”
“And how long will it take us to get from here, to wherever the other side of that is?” I said.
“Wait,” she said, turning to look up at me. “You can’t possibly think we can cross over that.”
“Why not?”
“With just that flashlight? What if it breaks? You don’t even know if we can get out on the other side. What if we don’t find a way out? We’d have to come back. There’s no saying we’d be able to find this tiny hole again. We could be trapped in here.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because even with all the stench, I can smell fresh air. That means there’s an opening somewhere.”