Chapter 1
The Peterbilt
As Michael and Melanie Anderle were leaving the diner in the Love’s Travel Stop outside of Ina, Illinois, followed by their twelve-year-old daughter Shane holding their bag of leftovers, two men approached them. Both were well dressed and middle aged.
“Excuse me, folks,” said one of them, “could you give us a moment of your time?”
Michael didn’t judge them to be any sort of threat, so he readily came to a stop. People rarely threatened him anyway—not when he stood six feet four inches tall and weighed almost three hundred pounds. Besides, the man had a definite English accent—of the upper-crust variety, not Cockney or Scouse—and Michael shared the usual American reaction to it: Must be a polite fellow. And never mind that, as a British friend whom he’d met in his first tour of duty in Afghanistan who was from Liverpool and did speak with a Scouse accent had pointed out to him, the British reputation for brawling was far worse than that of Americans.
“Sure,” he said.
“I’m Doctor Malcolm O’Connell—the doctorate is in mathematics, not medicine—and my companion here is Colonel Sam Peffers, recently retired from the United States Army. We’re with a private company that’s researching some aspects of four-dimensional space-time. To that end, we’ve developed some instruments that allow us to probe the fourth dimension while shifting constantly through the other three. Ah . . . to put it another way—”
“You’re studying time while moving through space,” said Melanie. She gave the Englishman a sweet smile at the startled look that came to his face. Michael didn’t give a damn himself, but his wife could get irked at people who assumed that a truck driver was a semiskilled Neanderthal. Neither of them had completed college, but they’d both spent time at community colleges. Perhaps more to the point, they both liked to read science fiction. Listen to it, mostly; audiobooks were a blessing to people in their line of work. Melanie’s reaction might have had something to do with the fact that she was blonde and buxom, and a lot of males tended to assume an inverse relationship between breast size and IQ.
The colonel grinned. “Right on the money, ma’am.”
Melanie made a face. “I figure I’m still at least two decades short of needing that term. I’m Melanie Anderle. The oversized fellow next to me is my husband Michael. And this is our daughter, Shane. So what do you want from us?”
“We’ve found that having over-the-road truckers carry one of our instruments is the best way, at a reasonable cost, to get the data we need.”
“Define ‘reasonable cost,’” said Melanie. She was the one who always did the dickering when money came up.
“We’ll pay you three hundred dollars a month, transferred directly to whatever bank account you choose.”
“How big is this instrument?” asked Michael. Michael considered what the colonel was saying. He knew about the event in West Virginia. By now the blogs were all over the fact that when Grantville disappeared, it was replaced with a chunk of seventeenth-century Germany. There were even reports of the government hiding Germans from that time in Area 51. The same was true of the prison that apparently went all the way back to the Jurassic. And the cruise ship. They’d found a bit of Formentera Island in the Bahamas after that one. It was clear that these guys were studying those events and possibly others like them. But Michael would confirm that before he agreed to anything.
Peffers gestured with his hand, indicating something the size of a small valise. “We have lots of ways to attach it, too.”
“I’d like to see it first, if you don’t mind.” Michael and Melanie were in the business of hauling stuff, so hauling a small case was natural enough. But before he agreed to anything, he’d know that he wasn’t hauling a bomb. His time in Afghanistan had left him very careful about what exactly he took on board.
Peffers headed off, toward a car parked not too far away. He lifted something out of the trunk and came back holding it. From the way he was carrying it, the gadget didn’t seem especially heavy.
“Open it up, please.” Seeing the skeptical look on the retired colonel’s face, Michael shook his head. “I don’t expect to understand any of the widgetry. I just want to make sure it’s actually a scientific widget.”
“He’s a little paranoid,” said Melanie.
Michael shrugged. “A couple of tours of duty in Afghanistan in a combat unit makes you twitchy about anything that might be an IED.” He nodded toward the case. “I want to see what’s in there.”
Peffers fiddled with a couple of latches and opened the top lid. Anderle leaned over and studied the innards. After a minute or so, he straightened up. “Okay. That doesn’t look like anything that could go ‘boom.’ So I’m betting you’re investigating the events that seem to be moving stuff through space and time.” He waited for Peffers’ nod, then said, “I want to know what’s been happening too. You got a deal.” And, thought Michael, the extra three hundred bucks a month will pay for some diesel.
While his wife and O’Connell worked out the financial details, Michael and Peffers went over to his vehicle, which turned out to be a Peterbilt tractor hauling a tanker trailer. The tractor was flamboyantly painted to resemble a dragon breathing fire. On the door of the cab was a logo reading:
Anderle Trucking
Evansville, Indiana
“What’s in the tanker?” Peffers asked.
“Mostly diesel. Some gasoline in a separate compartment.”
They attached the case to the back of the tractor’s cab, in a spot where it wouldn’t interfere with anything. There was plenty of space and the glue that Peffers used was impressive. It’d be easy to remove when the time came, too, since all that actually touched the cab were four little legs.
Not long thereafter, the Anderles climbed into their truck. The engine fired up, and off they went.
“Follow them?” Peffers asked, pointing to the Peterbilt containing the large blond man and his family.
O’Connell nodded. “For ten miles or so. That’ll be enough time to make sure the instrumentation’s working properly.”
* * *
Six miles from the truck center, the monitor in O’Connell’s laptop suddenly came to life—and very dramatically. From Peffers’ angle at the steering wheel, it seemed as if every light was flashing and every dial was going berserk.
“Dear God!” exclaimed Malcolm. “I think . . . Sam, I think we’re about to intersect a temporal bolide.” That was the term they used for what they postulated were objects/forces/whatever that were striking the Earth and producing the time transpositions. “I’m getting readings from the detector in the Peterbilt and the detector in our car.”
Peffers, on the other hand, had a clear line of vision in both the rearview mirror and the side mirror. Nothing was showing any indication in the three visible dimensions.
Malcolm shouted, “STOP!”
Peffers slammed on the brakes and the car swerved off the road onto a grassy shoulder. He looked at Malcolm. “What the fuck!”
O’Connell, pulling up a camera, pointed ahead where the Peterbilt was making a slight curve following the road. Directly in front of them, but no longer directly in front of the Peterbilt, was a country store.
There was a flash of light. It looked like ball lightning, but it was huge, the length of a football field. No. More! Then it was gone. So was the Peterbilt and about half of the store.
* * *
None of the occupants of the Peterbilt saw anything at all until the flash of light. Shane was curled up on the lower bunk of the sleeper portion of the cab and was playing a game on her tablet. She couldn’t have seen anything from there anyway.
For their part, Michael and Melanie were debating which audiobook they should listen to and neither of them was looking in a side-view mirror. People driving vehicles that weigh close to forty tons tend not to worry overmuch about what might be coming up on their rear. It wouldn’t have mattered. There was no indication until the flash of light.
One moment they were in the twenty-first century. There was a flash of light, and they weren’t.
There was a double bump as the Peterbilt’s left, then right, front tires climbed a six-inch step to get from the road to the prairie. The rear wheels of the Peterbilt made the transition from blacktop to prairie more easily. The front tires had converted the step into something approaching a ramp the trailer’s wheels barely noticed. But by then Melanie was already braking.
* * *
“Oh, shit,” Peffers said. The whole thing had taken a fraction of a second and as he looked ahead he realized that if they hadn’t stopped they would have been caught in the Ring of Fire.
The Peterbilt, the road, about half the store and more than half its parking lot, were just gone. There was nothing in the distance beyond a stretch of prairie where a road had been, and the land behind the store which ended not more than fifty yards past the store.
Peffers lowered his cell phone and turned off the video. Malcolm did the same with his much fancier video camera.
“Jesus wept,” said the mathematician.
“We’d better get over there and help any survivors,” said Peffers. If there are any, but he left that unspoken. He and Malcolm climbed back into their car and headed carefully across the prairie toward what was left of the store.
As they drew near, Peffers abruptly put on the brakes. “Malcolm . . . ” He pointed out the window. “Please tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”
The mathematician got out and approached the object lying on the ground a few yards away. He didn’t get any closer than a couple of yards. After studying it for a few seconds, he came back. “Green around the gills” was a pretty apt depiction of his face.
He got back in. “It’s the top part of a human body—male—that’s been cut in half just above the pelvis. The cut’s at a steep angle, from the middle of the rib cage through most of the hip on the other side. The cut looks as if it were made by a razor blade. A giant razor blade.” He stopped and took a deep shuddering breath.
“The pickup truck’s gone,” mused Peffers. “It was inside the diameter of the ring. The guy on the ground was probably its owner, coming back from putting something in the dumpster over there.”
Malcolm nodded, took another deep breath and jerked his chin toward the store, which was now about ten yards away. “Let’s keep going.”
When they reached the gutted store, Peffers called out: “Anyone here?”
A voice to their right responded “yeah,” in what sounded more like a croak than a word. Looking over, they saw the counter with the cash register that would be where people paid for whatever they’d picked up. But no one was in sight.
Malcolm stepped from the prairie onto the floor of the country store and walked over to the cash register. Sam moved around to the right, where he could get behind the counter it was on. As soon as he did so, he saw the source of the croaking voice: a young man—he might be just a teenager—sitting on the floor and clutching his knees to his chest. If Malcolm had been green around the gills, this poor fellow’s figurative gills looked gangrenous.
“Is it over?” the youngster asked.
“Yes,” Peffers said firmly. That seemed a better answer than we think so, but who knows?
Malcolm had leaned over the counter to bring the fellow into view. “You can come out now. Is there anyone else in the store?” By then, he was pretty sure there wasn’t, but that question was less likely to trigger off the boy’s terror than any corpses you know about?
The cashier rose to his feet and looked around. Then, pointed to his left. “There was a black lady over there. Next to the baked goods . . . ” He looked in the direction of the baked goods and swallowed. “Where the baked goods were. They’re gone. But she was there. Her and two little kids.”
Holding his breath, Sam went over to the area indicated and looked around. Thankfully, what he had feared seeing wasn’t there—neither corpses nor any body parts. The woman and the children, presumably her own, must have been caught fully in the ring’s passage. They would be wherever the truck was.
Probably. It wasn’t as if they really had much of an understanding of these temporal bolides and what they could or would do.
“Nobody here,” he called over to Malcolm. He turned to the kid at the cash register. “What other customers did you have before the . . . event happened?”
“Mr. Dawes had just left. He must be . . . ”
Peffers shook his head. “I’m afraid he didn’t get out in time. Anyone else?”
The cashier looked at the open space where half the store had been and shook his head.
“Just hang tight,” Peffers said in as reassuring a tone as he could manage. “The authorities will be here soon and everything will get straightened out.”
That was probably the most ridiculous statement Sam had ever made in his life. He looked over at Malcolm, who used his head to nod toward the door. Where the door had most likely been, anyway.
When they got outside, he asked the mathematician, “Did you notify the authorities?”
“Not yet. We need to spend a few minutes getting all our ducks in a row.” He’d taken out his cell phone and was tapping in a number. “I’m calling the company offices first. We finally have what we need to break through the government bureaucracy’s see no evil–speak no evil–hear no evil bullshit and get them to stop prattling about terrorists and take these bolides seriously. Dammit, something—or someone—is bombarding the Earth.”
“Malcolm,” Peffers asked, “did we cause this? Did the sensor pack we stuck in that Peterbilt call the temporal bolide?”
“We’ve done at least a dozen of these installations,” Malcolm said. “And we’ve followed every one of them for a few miles to make sure everything was working. Nothing like this has happened before.”
Peffers looked at the scientist’s face and saw a man trying hard to convince himself. It was a good point. On the other hand, the odds that a bolide would hit a specific place and time were astronomically low, which suggested that even if it hadn’t happened to the other trucks they’d put instruments on, it might have caused this one. He prayed that it hadn’t, and even more, he prayed for the Anderle family in the Peterbilt.
General Store
April 11, 1005 CE
Melanie was at the steering wheel when the flash of light blinded her, then came the bumps as the Peterbilt climbed from blacktop to prairie. She hit the brakes and the wheels tore up the soil. She hadn’t been going very fast, since they were on a secondary state road, not an interstate. Even so, a truck with a fully loaded tanker attached to the tractor weighs more than thirty-five tons. It takes a while to stop.
When the truck halted and the dust cleared away, both she and her husband stared at the road ahead of them. To be precise, the nonexistent road ahead of them. They were looking at a prairie field; an untouched one, to all appearances. In most places they could see, the prairie grasses were several feet tall.
“What the fuck?” demanded Melanie.
Michael opened the door on his side of the cab and looked out; then, down. He was looking at the same prairie.
“Wait here,” he said, as he climbed out of the cab and onto the ground. Once there, he walked to the back of the tanker. From that vantage point, he could see the last stretch of road, which ended fifty or so yards behind them.
He walked back to the cab and climbed back in.
“What is it?” asked Melanie.
He shrugged. “Damfino. The road comes to a stop about fifty yards back. From there, we were driving on prairie land.”
“Could you see the store we were passing? It was on our right.”
“Part of it’s still there,” said Michael. “Part of where it was is prairie now. And, yeah, I saw what was left of it.”
They looked at each other for a moment. During the pause, Shane stuck her head between the front seats and demanded, “What’s going on?”
“We don’t know, honey,” said her mother. “I figure we should turn around and go back to the store, Michael.”
“Yeah, so do I. But do it carefully. The prairie looks flat and pretty solid, but who knows what might be hidden under all that grass and stuff. That grass comes up to my shoulders in some places.”