Chapter 2
The Country Store
The Country Store
April 11, 1005 CE
The first thing that grabbed their attention as they drew near to the store were three people huddled together by a bisected small car. A woman and two young children. All were African-American.
Their heads turned to look at the truck as it came near. A look of relief came to the woman’s face and she started waving her arms vigorously.
After Melanie got the truck on what was left of the state road and brought it to a stop, she and Michael climbed down from the cab, followed by Shane, and went over to the woman and—presumably—her children.
“Are you okay?” asked Michael.
The woman ran fingers through her thick, black hair, and issued a little bark of a laugh. “I have no idea how to answer that. Physically, yeah, we’re fine. Not a scratch on any of us—and how the hell we managed that when that lightning strike blew half of the store away is a mystery to me.”
She looked down at the collapsed automobile. “And my trusty old Honda Civic sleeps with the fishes. Dammit. I’ve had it since my first year in grad school.” The Honda Civic was parked in the country store’s parking lot and one side’s tires were right there, where they were supposed to be. The other side was missing and the blue car looked like it had been sliced by a razor blade. About half the passenger side seat was missing, and the body of the car was angled over where it had fallen to the prairie, where there wasn’t a parking lot anymore.
Melanie looked at the two kids. They were staring at the car and looking terrified. She wanted to hug them and tell them everything was going to be all right. There were two problems with that. She wasn’t at all sure everything was going to be all right, and they weren’t her kids. About all she could think of to do was act normal and avoid turning the terror into panic.
Looking for a distraction, Melanie asked, “Did you get a degree? And if you did, what was it in?”
The woman had followed Melanie’s eyes and apparently followed her thoughts. She took a deep breath. “I have a Ph.D. in chemistry. For the last few years I’ve been an assistant professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.”
“That’s impressive. You don’t look to be any older than your early thirties.”
The woman nodded. “Just turned thirty-two. My parents were fairly well-off and supportive. So is my husband. He’s a manufacturer’s rep in the chemical industry. I met him at a professional conference and we hit it off. Three months later we were married, and it wasn’t much more than a year later that we had Miriam.”
Both of her children were clinging to her tightly. She brought up her hand and placed it on the girl’s head. “Miriam’s almost six and Norman”—the other hand came up and rested on the boy’s head—“is four and a half. Oh. I haven’t introduced myself, have I? I’m Alyssa Jefferson.”
“I’m Melanie Anderle”—her hand came out for a shake—“and this is my husband Michael.”
He extended his hand also.
Alyssa shook his hand, nodded, then hesitated for a moment. “I know this is a lot to ask, but can we hook up with you folks? We”—her voice choked—“don’t have a car anymore—even if I had any idea where to drive it. We’ve just got two suitcases and my laptop. Wherever we’ve found ourselves, I don’t think me and a couple of small children have much of a chance on our own.”
Melanie frowned at her. “Do you really think we’d leave you stranded out here?”
Alyssa didn’t flinch from the hard gaze. “With our skin color, there are plenty of people who would, Mrs. Anderle.”
Melanie’s mouth opened; and . . . nothing came out.
“She’s right, hon, and you know it,” said Michael. “Mrs. Jefferson, my wife and I have our faults, but one thing we’re not are racist assholes.”
He gestured toward the Peterbilt. “If I remember my Spanish correctly, nuestra casa es su casa. Okay, it’s a truck, not a house, but it’s one hell of a truck, if I say so myself. There’s plenty of room in there for all of us.”
“We’ve got an upper bunk, too,” said Shane. “Except ‘bunk’ doesn’t do it justice. It’s not as wide as the lower bed but it’s plenty big enough to fit you and your kids.” It was apparent that Shane had been looking at the kids too and was working pretty hard to be a calm, rational grown-up.
“We opted for a second bunk rather than the usual storage shelf,” said Melanie, thinking just keep talking like everything is ordinary. Get through this. I can panic later. She took a breath and continued. “Once we decided we’d sell our house and I’d become Michael’s driving partner, we needed to rearrange our lives. I’d had it with never seeing him for weeks at a time. Once it was almost three months.”
She smiled down at her daughter and placed a hand on her shoulder. “That left the problem of Shane. But she was okay with living with Michael’s parents during the school part of the year and living with us in the Peterbilt during the summer and school breaks.”
“It wasn’t any big sacrifice,” said Shane cheerily, but it was false cheer. Melanie could tell. Shane was trying to distract herself just like the rest of them. “I knew my mom and dad were unhappy hardly ever seeing each other and this way I got to spend one third of the year driving all over the country. I like that a lot.” Her eyes flicked to the two smaller children. “Besides, grandparents are a lot easier to wheedle than parents are.”
“Sure are,” said Alyssa, smiling. “And fathers are softer touches than mothers. Our kids each figured that out by the time they were two. They’d always hit on Jerry before they came to me.” The chuckle that followed had a sobbing undertone. Alyssa’s terror for what could happen to her children—herself, too—had kept thoughts of her husband at bay, at least partly. Now that she could start relaxing . . .
She was desperately afraid that she’d never see him again. This was so weird that she couldn’t figure out a way to get back. She wanted to climb back in her car, turn around, and go back the way she’d come in hopes of undoing whatever had happened. She looked again at what was left of her car. That wasn’t an option. It looked like her only option was to hook up with this trio of Nordic blonds. She looked at them. The man was huge and a little frightening with his short blond hair under a baseball cap that said “Peterbilt” across the front. The woman was shorter, only a little taller than Alyssa’s five-foot-six height. And the daughter, Alyssa thought her name was Shane, was shorter and thin, five two or three.
“So what do we do now?” asked Melanie, turning to Michael. Michael had been in Afghanistan. He knew about survival in a way that Melanie didn’t.
“Our first and top priority,” said Michael, “is finding a source of clean water—which means either running water or a big lake. Best would be a large creek with a rapid flow of water. We want water for sanitation purposes too, not just drinking and cooking, but also cleaning.”
He turned and pointed at the surviving portions of the general store. “There’s probably some bottled water in there, maybe even a lot of it. But however much there is, it’ll run out sooner or later. Before it does, we have to find another source.
“Our second priority is stocking up on food.” He nodded toward the remnants of the store. “We need to strip whatever store shelves are left of any food on them. Yeah, I know that means we’ll be mostly subsisting on junk food, but it’ll keep us alive until we can find other sources.”
“What about calling someone?” Alyssa asked. She didn’t know where they were, but in her experience there were always people that could be called. She pulled out her phone. There was no signal, not even any GPS signal, and there should be. Anywhere on Earth, there should be GPS and her phone had the chip to receive those signals and provide her a location. That worked everywhere except underground, so it should work here.
It didn’t. No phone signal, so no cell towers in range and no GPS so . . . So what? They weren’t on Earth? No. The plants, the sky, the sun . . . this was Earth. It had to be. “We should be getting GPS signals, even if we don’t have cell service. At least, we should be if we’re anywhere on Earth.”
“We’re not getting any signals either,” Michael confirmed. “I think for now at least we have to assume we’re on our own. Which means we need food.”
“Hunting?” said his wife. “We’ve got the guns for it—but only so much ammunition for them.” She looked around warily. “And we have no idea what sort of animals we’ll encounter out here. Some of them might be more than our guns will handle.”
“Are your guns deer hunting rifles?” asked Alyssa.
“Yeah. Michael’s got a 30-06 Remington 300 firing 180-grain bullets. My rifle’s a Winchester Model 70 .308. I prefer a lighter 150-grain round.”
Alyssa nodded. “Either one of them will take down any game in North America, although it might be a little dicey using a .308 150 grain on a polar bear.”
Michael and Melanie both stared at her. Alyssa smiled. “Chemists have a wide range of knowledge. Plus, my father and husband are both avid deer hunters. The funny thing is that I haven’t fired a gun all that often and I’m not a hunter myself. I just know a lot about them.”
“Okay. Before we do anything,” said Michael, “we need to check out that pickup over there.” It was a Ram 1500 with a regular cab.
He headed toward it, but as soon as he came around the back he came to an abrupt stop.
“Melanie. Alyssa. Keep the kids away from here.”
Naturally, that stimulated the interest of the three children, especially Shane, who started toward her father. But Melanie caught her by the shoulder and pulled her back. For her part, Alyssa gathered both of her children to her side.
“What is it, Michael?” asked Melanie.
“A corpse,” he said tersely. “Part of one, rather.”
He moved forward a few more steps and was now looking almost straight down at something at his feet. He took a deep breath and muttered, “Jesus. Talk about a land of nightmares.”
Then, after hesitating, he bent over, seemed to grab something—no one else could see exactly what he was doing because he was on the other side of the pickup—and began dragging it away toward a nearby patch of tall prairie grass. He stooped over again for a few seconds with his head out of sight. Then, arising, seemed to brace himself. With a heave, he pitched whatever it was into the grass, which shook back and forth for a few seconds.
When he came back around the pickup he was holding a wallet in his hand and looking through it. He found a driver’s license and studied it for a moment.
“The guy’s name was George Dawes. White, seventy-seven years old.” He looked back up at his wife and Alyssa. “Keep the kids here. I can search the pickup on my own.” He glanced at the bed of the pickup, which was empty except for the kind of aluminum truck toolbox that spanned the entire width of the bed and was about eighteen inches wide and high.
“On second thought, see what’s in that big toolbox. Just keep the kids away from this side of the vehicle and the interior.”
“Come on, Shane,” said her mother, unlatching the back gate to the truck bed and climbing up into it. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
While they started investigating the contents of the big toolbox, Michael opened the driver’s door of the pickup. Not more than a second elapsed before he half-shouted, “Hallelujah! He’s got a rifle on a rack in here. Looks like a Ruger Mini-14. Let’s hope . . . ”
He started searching behind the driver’s seat. This time, not more than two seconds elapsed before he issued another Hallelujah and extracted a large ammunition storage box. He set it on the ground and opened it up. “Well, our hunting capacity just went way up. I was worried about how soon we’d run out of ammunition for our rifles.”
Melanie looked over the edge of the pickup bed. “This toolbox is loaded, too. There are two smaller boxes in here holding a lot of different tools—screwdrivers, wrenches, a couple of hammers, that sort of thing—several ropes, two tie-down ratchet straps, an ax, a hatchet and a spade.”
“Good deal,” said Michael. He leaned over to reach the glove compartment from the driver’s seat. His arms were long enough to manage it.
As soon as he opened the glove compartment his eyes were drawn to the prominent object within it.
“What the hell?” He drew out a very large pistol. “Why in the world is a man in his late seventies carrying around a Desert Eagle?”
“Retired special ops soldier?” suggested Melanie.
Alyssa shook her head. “That pistol’s almost never used by military forces. It’s too heavy and the ammunition it fires isn’t standard. I think it’s the only pistol in the world that’ll fire a .50 caliber round. My uncle Jethro, who is retired from Special Forces, says it’s a weapon without a purpose. He’s pretty derisive about it. Says it’s just a gun for civilian enthusiasts who want to have bragging rights on the firing range.”
“He’s probably right,” said Michael. “We’ll take it, though.”
He put the Desert Eagle back in the glove compartment, closed the door, and headed toward the store’s remains. The first thing that drew his attention when he entered were a pair of ice cream freezers against what was left of one of the store’s walls. Walking over, he saw that they were about two-thirds full of various ice cream products.
Melanie and Alyssa came over, with Alyssa’s children in tow. Shane was off inspecting a different part of the store.
“Well, at least we get a treat for everyone,” said Melanie. “Do your kids like ice cream, Alyssa?”
“Be serious. Miriam, Norman—come pick something out from the ice cream coolers.” The two children eagerly complied.
Alyssa looked on, her mouth quirking into a wry smile. “Too bad we can’t make these a steady diet.”
“Are you kidding?” said Michael. He waved his hand dismissively. “I don’t care about the ice cream—it’s the coolers themselves. These things amount to freezers, if we can find a generator. Even if we can’t, they’ll still make good ice boxes.”
He bent down and tried to lift one end of one of the coolers. With a grunt of effort, he lifted it several inches off the floor and then set it down.
“Somewhere between one hundred and fifty and two hundred pounds, I figure. With some help, I could lift it onto something, but I’d rather not.”
He turned toward the corner of the store where his daughter was rummaging around. It seemed to be the place where large tools were kept—shovels, rakes, that sort of thing.
“Hey, Shane!” he called out. “You see anything that looks like a chain hoist?”
She looked at him, and then back down. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Dad, but there’s something here that might be one. It’s got chains, anyway.”
Michael headed that way. Meanwhile, Melanie and Alyssa started examining the shelves in those parts of the store that hadn’t been left behind by the passage of whatever force had brought them here.
“Oh, boy,” said Melanie. “Snack cakes and cookies, lots of them. Also energy bars.” She pointed at one still intact refrigerated wall unit. “That’s got some mostly processed meat, packaged sandwiches and frozen vegetables, but other than that . . . Every variety of potato chips or corn chips, packaged pastries, canned meat, canned vegetables . . . ” She stuck out her tongue. “Yuck. One bag of potato chips is nice. Day after day after day? Not so much.”
“Look on the bright side,” said Alyssa. “A lot of this stuff has a shelf life measured in centuries. Honey never goes bad. They say the same about Twinkies but I think that’s probably an old wives’ tale.”
Michael returned with a complicated gadget in his hands. “With this manual chain hoist, we should be able to handle anything. It’s not all that big, but we’re not trying to hoist engine blocks. Now what we need to find is some sort of support to hang it from. A children’s swing would be perfect.”
“I’ll look!” said Shane. She ran outside. About a minute later she was back, shaking her head. “No go, Dad.”
They wound up using two stepladders and an expanding ladder as the cross brace. That held the hoist while they pushed and tugged the refrigerator units far enough under it to lift them up enough to slide what Michael somewhat grandiosely called a “travois” under them. The “travois” was nothing more than a section of the store’s outer wall that had been sliced off by the passage of the mysterious force that had so thoroughly wrecked the place.
Michael then lowered the tanker trailer’s landing gear to disengage it from the tractor’s fifth wheel. He saw no reason to try to cross unpaved wilderness hauling the heavy vehicle. The tractor weighed a little over ten tons all on its own.
That done, he used the tie-down ratchet straps and ropes from Dawes’ pickup toolbox to attach the travois to the back of the tractor. Once again, they had to use the rather flimsy stepladder arrangement to hoist the store wall up high enough to make the contraption a travois instead of just a flat sled.
“You realize that if OSHA gets wind of any of this, the fines’ll bankrupt us,” said Melanie.
“What’s O-Sha?” asked Miriam.
“It’s the federal agency that regulates workplace procedures to make sure they’re safe,” said Alyssa.
“Spoken like a true professor,” scoffed Michael. “OSHA is the horde of guv’ment busybodies that do their best to make the daily lives of hardworking men and women miserable with their pettifogging rules.”
It was obvious even to Miriam that he was joking.
Alyssa smiled. “I take it you’re owner-operators, not fleet drivers. If you had corporate managers setting the safety rules, you’d have a kinder attitude toward government regulators.”
“Well, sure,” said Michael. With a grunt, he finished setting the travois up in place. “Guv’ment regulators are just annoying imps and goblins. Corporate managers answer directly to Lucifer himself.”
He stepped back and examined their handiwork. “Okay, now we’ve got to set up some kind of walls on either side of the travois so everything doesn’t fall off. This is likely to be a bumpy ride.”
They used larger items like generators—they found two, both intact—propane storage tanks and five-gallon water bottles tied in place with ropes for the purpose. Then, tossed anything they thought might be useful into the space thus created, after which they loaded up the bed of the pickup.
By the time they were done—which meant they had run out of space, not loaded everything they wanted—it was late afternoon.
Melanie glanced at the sun, whose orb was just beginning to touch the horizon. “You’re not planning to drive at night, I hope.”
“Hell, no,” said Michael. “We’ll start early tomorrow morning. We’ll need to make a second trip anyway, once we find a place for a permanent campsite. We didn’t get everything we wanted, not by a long shot.”
He squinted at the setting sun. “Is it just me who’s disoriented, or is the sun setting at the wrong time? If I remember where this store was positioned, we should still be in midafternoon.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re right,” said Alyssa. “Come nightfall, we can look at the stars, see where Polaris is sitting in the sky to find north.”
“Who’s Polaris?” asked Shane.
“It’s the North Star, honey,” answered her mother. “It sits right where the north pole is located. You follow a line set by the two stars at the end of the Big Dipper’s cup until you spot the star at the end of the Little Dipper’s handle. That’s Polaris.”
* * *
That night, after the last vestiges of the sunset had faded away, they went back outside to study the night sky. It was extraordinarily dark; much more so than any of them had ever encountered in their past. The moon wasn’t up yet, and there was no light source except starlight.
Alyssa looked at the night sky, then pulled out her phone. She checked the compass function. North, magnetic north, wasn’t pointing at the North Star. Not quite. “Something is a little off here,” she muttered.
“What?” asked Michael.
“I’m guessing,” said Alyssa, “but I think Polaris is in the wrong place. Not much, but the wrong place. Either that or my compass in the cell phone is off.
“It’s above the horizon, but not quite in line with where the magnetometer built into my cell phone says it should be.”
“Are you sure that you’re looking at Polaris?” Michael asked.
Alyssa gave him a look, which he couldn’t see in a night this dark. “Yes, I’m sure.” She showed him the star map on her phone.
“What does that mean?” asked Shane.
Alyssa pointed to a spot in the sky. “You see the Big Dipper and the end of the Little Dipper. Well, that star is Polaris, the North Star, but if we are where we were on the surface of the earth, it ought to be just a bit off of where it is. That could mean that we’re in another part of the world, but the grass, the animals we’ve seen, and the terrain features all suggest that we’re pretty close to the same place on Earth that we were before this happened.”
“That, in itself, is a bit strange,” Michael said. “From the beginning, I’ve been assuming that we got caught in one of the temporal displacements that Peffers and O’Connell were trying to measure. I’ve been wondering if their measuring device somehow attracted the . . . what was it they called the things . . . temporal bolide.”
“What are you talking about?” Alyssa asked.
“Shortly before this happened, a couple of scientist types asked us to carry a data-collecting device on the back of the Peterbilt’s cab. It was pretty obvious that they were looking to figure out what was going on with the West Virginia incident and the prison and the cruise ship.”
Alyssa nodded, which no one could see, then said, “Yes, I know about the temporal swaps. At least, we’ve all been assuming they were swaps. They could have been displacements. Land from the past arrives in our time, and land from our time goes into the future. The argument for that would be that if they went into the past, we should see something in the archaeological record.”
“I think they must be swaps then in spite of the archaeological record,” Melanie said, looking around. “Or else there would be a lot more light pollution. I rule out nuclear war or holocaust because if we’d gone far enough into the future for that to be it, the stars would be more different than they are.”
Alyssa had been thinking about what the Anderles had said. “Did you put the box on your truck?”
“Yes,” Melanie said. “Oh, my god. Do you think that could be what caused it?”
At that point, what Michael Anderle wanted to do was go to the back of the Peterbilt and take a sledge hammer to that “harmless box of sensors.” Or better yet, to take the sledgehammer to Peffers and O’Connell, which was impossible as well as useless. He didn’t attack the box, because he realized that if there was ever going to be any chance of them getting any help, it was probably going to be from that box. Assuming that they really had experienced what happened to Grantville, West Virginia, from the inside. Something that he was still far from convinced of. It was just the least insane theory he had for what had happened. “Okay. Assuming that we were caught in an event like what happened to Grantville, and further assuming that it was a swap, why isn’t there any archaeological evidence of Grantville arriving in seventeenth-century Germany?”
“The many-worlds hypothesis,” Alyssa said without hesitation. “The arrival of Grantville in that other history sent their timeline off in another direction.”
“Which would mean that our arrival here could send us off into another timeline,” Michael said.
“Not could. Has,” Alyssa said. “Assuming that Grantville went into the past and didn’t show up in our history, then anything, even a pebble arriving in the past, sets up a new timeline, even if it never does anything you can measure.”
Everyone was silent after that. They still didn’t know, not for sure. But it was the best theory they had.
“So, how far back?” Melanie asked.
“I have no idea,” Alyssa said. “But if I take a few more observations, measure the movement of Polaris overnight, and the distance between Barnard’s Star and its near neighbors, I might be able to get a rough estimate. Also the positions of the moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn make a sort of complicated clock. Over the next few nights, I’ll try to get a look at the planets. Jupiter has a year that’s twelve years long, and Saturn twenty-nine. Once we get a rough idea, the locations of the planets should let us narrow it down.”
Alyssa did look at Barnard’s Star and compare what she saw in the night sky to what the app on her cell phone said she should be seeing. In fact, she fiddled with her phone and let it take a five-minute exposure picture of the night sky where Barnard’s Star was located, then compared that picture with what she should be seeing. Barnard’s Star wasn’t where it was in the twenty-first century. Her best guess was that they were between five hundred and two thousand years in the past.
The distance between Mars, Jupiter and Saturn narrowed that, and by working for most of the night, she figured that they were either right around a thousand years in the past, or seventeen hundred years in the past, or just possibly four hundred years in the past.
* * *
The next morning, she explained, finishing with, “I’m not at all certain, but my best guess is sometime around the year 1005 of the Common Era, give or take a year.”
There was silence for a while. Then Shane said, plaintively, “A thousand years? We’ve traveled that far back in time?”
“Well, we have to have traveled back at least a few centuries,” said Alyssa. She pointed up at the sky again. It was daylight.
“Without the light pollution the star field was clearer and brighter than you could find it almost anywhere on the planet Earth when we lived there. That let me get images that were better than I expected. I’m pretty sure of my numbers.”
“In other words, whatever civilization is out there can’t have reached the industrial revolution,” said Michael. “So no lights at night beyond fires of one kind or another. And whatever cities might exist, most of them can’t be all that big.”
“Could we be even farther back in time than one or two thousand years?” asked Shane.
“I don’t think so,” said Alyssa. “A lot of the constellations have gotten a little distorted, but most of them are still recognizable, and Barnard’s Star simply hasn’t moved enough.
“My best guess is the year 1005. That’s pretty good news for us, actually.”
“Why?” asked Shane.
“There was a time when enormous mammals roamed North America. The Pleistocene megafauna, they’re called: wooly mammoths, giant sloths, cave bears, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, there were a lot of them. But they all went extinct by ten thousand years ago. So the only thing we’ll be facing in the way of wildlife will be pretty much the same animals we had in our time. More of them, of course. But if we need to defend ourselves, our guns will be able to handle the job. We’ll be dealing with mountain lions, not saber-toothed tigers. Grey and red wolves, not dire wolves.”
“But are we still in North America?” asked Melanie.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure we are,” said her husband. “The fact that we can recognize so many constellations means we’re definitely still on Earth.” He reached out his hand and swept it across the landscape. “This terrain looks just like what we were driving through and if that isn’t Midwest/Great Plains prairie grasses and flowers, I’d be very surprised.”
“There sure are a lot of them,” said Shane. “Hey . . . wait a minute! Aren’t there too many flowers? We’re in August. Well, we were, anyway.”
Her mother chuckled. “Honey, if we can be shifted back in time a thousand years, I figure whatever force did it wasn’t too fussy about which season it dropped us into. Judging from the number and variety of flowers we’ve seen, I bet we’re now in springtime. Probably sometime in late April or May.”
“Now that would really be good luck,” said Michael. “We’ll have half a year to get ready for winter instead of two months.
“Out of idle curiosity, Professor Jefferson, is there any subject you don’t know a lot about?”
Melanie and Shane laughed.
“Sure!” Alyssa said smiling. “I don’t know diddly-squat about cars, for instance. My husband teases me—teased me—about it.” She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Jerry liked to say that the only car part I knew the name for was Triple A.”
Another little laugh was shared by the group, even her two young children.
“We’d better get some breakfast,” said Michael. “We’ve got a lot to do today. Except you, Alyssa. You were up half the night taking star sightings. Get some rest.”
* * *
Alyssa Jefferson got into the upper bunk in the cabin of the Peterbilt, but she couldn’t sleep. She stared up at the ceiling of the Peterbilt’s cab. The ceiling she could see wasn’t metal, but some sort of fabric. It was a soft gray color, like most of the cab’s interior.
Alyssa found it soothing. The ceiling was low, but not so much as to make her claustrophobic. Taken as a whole, the cab was quite spacious, in fact. She and her children had enough room on the upper bunk to sleep comfortably. It was on the cozy side, granted, but didn’t feel cramped.
Actually, the cab’s main effect on her—and a powerful one—was to make her feel safe. Sleeping in the Peterbilt felt a lot like sleeping in a small but very strong fortress. They were high off the ground. No one, man or beast, could reach the doors without climbing up a few feet. The Anderles had carefully locked the doors.
The biggest bear in the world couldn’t break into the truck. In fact, she doubted even a Tyrannosaurus rex could have managed that—assuming the thought would have occurred to the monster, which it wouldn’t have. The Peterbilt—just the tractor alone—weighed quite a bit more than the biggest Tyrannosaurus—more than ten tons compared to seven or eight. And there was simply no comparison in terms of speed and power.
A bigger danger, of course, would be other humans. But if Alyssa was right, and she was quite confident her estimates were not far off the mark, they were now living about a thousand years in the past. If she remembered her somewhat haphazard reading on the subject correctly, the native populations in North America practiced agriculture but still relied heavily on hunting. That was because the only domesticated animals were dogs.
Their tools and weapons were mostly made of stone, wood and bone. The only metal widely used was copper, and that was almost entirely used for decoration. Tin deposits were very rare in North America, so bronze wasn’t used, and the only people who worked with iron were in the Pacific Northwest and they didn’t do any mining. They worked with iron retrieved from shipwrecked Japanese and Chinese vessels. These were usually ships that drifted ashore on currents, not ones that foundered on North America itself. Alyssa had been surprised to discover that this cross-Pacific contact almost certainly predated Columbus’ voyage.
But for all practical purposes, the people she and her companions would encounter were still in the late Stone Age when it came to weapons and tools. The likelihood that any of them could figure out how to open a modern lock was effectively nil. True, they could try to break into the cab of the truck and would probably manage that fairly soon—at which point they would encounter Michael Anderle’s Glock 23 .40 caliber pistol. And if the thirteen rounds in the Glock’s magazine weren’t enough, he’d also brought George Dawes’ Desert Eagle into the cab of the truck. There had been no extra ammunition in his pickup, but the .357 Magnum magazine had contained a full nine rounds.
So. Neolithic aggressors versus more than twenty rounds from modern pistols. And by the time Michael was out of ammunition, Melanie would have had time to bring into play either of the rifles they had hanging on a rack in the back of the cab. Alyssa could do that herself, for that matter. If she rose up a bit and stretched out her hand, she could reach both of the weapons from her position on the upper bunk.
She felt safe. Very safe, in fact. And that turned out to be a mixed blessing, because the relaxation that produced enabled her mind to focus on the one thing she dreaded thinking about most. Jerry was gone—and almost certainly gone forever. She’d lost her husband and her young children had lost their father. Alyssa was a scientist. She had a solid grounding in physics as well as chemistry. The recent temporal displacements had been the talk of the scientific community since the first one had happened back in the year 2000. No one ever came back. By now it was well known that, assuming anyone survived, they were stuck in whatever time they ended up in.
The tears finally started coming then. There seemed to be no end to them.