Stories
Around the campfire, looking out in to the dark
Around the campfire, looking out in to the dark
Books and films: it's how we live lives vicariously. Lives we cannot or don't want to live ourselves.
Among our talents as humans above those of the remainder of the animal world, our stories are our greatest treasure. In the past they have been used to pass along and down vital knowledge regarding survival, then they became vehicles of introspection once written language became available. They still hold our hearts and a good story can move you in ways day to day activities simply cannot.
I'm going to post some short stories of mine on here. I want to see what they look like.
The Endless Pines
Another beautiful day in the Pacific Northwest: sunshine, enough relative humidity to prevent me getting electric shocks from my buildings’ door handles after walking a block or driving, a few clouds in the sky to provide a counterpoint to the blueness, the river burbling in its bed; the pine trees stretching seemingly endlessly over the hills and valleys.
Hollywood loved these villages for their rustic seeming-simplicity, the homeliness, the lack of big city ways. The reality was more one of honest manual labour, less-than-Hollywood haircuts and a more robust view on modern absurdities than Hollywood preferred to portray.
The river continued to flow, but the village was quiet this morning. No one in Pete’s café could quite place why until Johnny, our 15-year-old, mad keen on bicycle exploration, burst in and interrupted the only decent cup of coffee in the village to announce breathlessly “there’s no cars on the highway”. His discarded bike lay, rear wheel still spinning, at the foot of the café steps.
As one, Pete’s entire clientele, that is most of the village who assembled mid-morning for coffee, Pete’s excellent croissants, a plate of Bolulla beans and a bit of the social cohesion our village was known, if not famous for, looked out of the windows, past the bike and down the hill to the two-lane blacktop that wound its way between the café and the river.
Normally it would be thick with traffic: retired accountants on Harley-Davidson’s too big and too heavy for them re-living their Easy Rider youth and falling off or breaking down far too often; over-manicured 50-something blonde ladies in open-topped Mercedes with almost-immobile faces, bodies they thought made them look attractive and young but in reality screamed ‘scrawny’ and ‘too much work done’, paid for by rapacious divorce settlements from husbands or partners too stupid to see it coming; hyper-active young men with complex facial hair and over-developed upper bodies in white T-shirts and crew socks driving pseudo-sports cars, but mainly trucks: the big articulated trucks that are the backbone of America’s transport arteries, moving everything from iPads to paintbrushes, cement to nuclear precursors, from anywhere to anywhere.
But not today. Not a single vehicle.
Flies buzzed around some unidentifiable roadkill on the median marker. The mid-morning heat haze shimmered above the smooth black top. But nothing disturbed the quiet.
“It’s not Sunday, Simon?” asked Sheila, toying cautiously with her coffee cup and teaspoon. Thirty-four years of wielding scissors in the service of varying local hairstyles down the years had ruined her back and her knuckles, her gnarled hands moving with care. We could all see the little winces; the local “tomato plants” she grew in the shed helped, but the tremors were getting worse now and she’d need more than that soon.
Pete, the grizzled sometime-alcoholic who ran the café pointed his trusty remote at the wall-mounted TV usually tuned to some inane ball-game channel. But there was nothing. None of the channels gave anything, not even static.
“Nope. Let’s see what the radio says”
He turned to the old Curtis Mathes radiogram behind the counter. Hissing radiated from the dusty old speakers up in the suspended ceiling void, doubtless disturbing the wildlife that lived up there occasionally dropping unidentified objects into our coffees, adding protein and taste.
He ran the heavy tuning flywheel up and down the FM band, but only mush came from the speakers. A clunk from the resolutely analogue tuner announced his rejection of the modern frequency-modulated world in favour of the old faithful amplitude-modulated world. The hissing rose in pitch but remained determinedly free from human noises, even those high-speed morse stations so beloved of X-Files fantasists who believed they were the CIA sending instructions to their agents.
In reality these were remote solar-powered water level monitors running simple AM transmitters for a central monitoring station, but that was insufficiently conspiracy theory for Mulder and Sculley.
From where I was sitting, I could see his pockmarked fingers twisting the knob hard, so it ran fast up and down the frequencies.
“Well, I’ll be damned. Antenna must’ve come down”
But I could see it from here and it was most certainly still there in all its ramshackle 1970’s Radio Shack glory.
In an unplanned but entirely co-ordinated exercise in simultaneous movement we all looked down at our phones.
“Where’s my 4G?” Rachel, the ever-lovable town drunk, who had already surreptitiously slipped brandy into her coffee, squeaked. “I can’t get my Instagram” she wailed, releasing a blast of brandy-scented halitosis across the café.
And indeed, there was no 4G. Which was a little weird. Because it was working when I had left my little cottage just behind the cafe.
Pete had not quite got with the whole fibre-optic powered Gigabit Ethernet WiFi6 multiple-base unit 5GHz WiFi thing (or indeed any technology later than his beaten-up 1980’s Monte Carlo SS), so there was no WiFi either.
A babble broke out, citing several possible explanations including “that damned phone company again”, chem-trails, a nuc-el-ar spillage and (I waited, but didn’t have to for long), aliens.
Pete, being the techno-Neanderthal that he is, picked up the reassuringly heavy receiver of his trusty wall-mounted AT&T phone and pushed the buttons several times before announcing “no dial tone, neither”
Of course they volunteered me, the youngest and most mobile of them all, to go and investigate.
I was sure it was nothing, just a phone outage, but Johnny and I walked his bike back to the cottage, hopped in the V6 Grand Am and drove down the hill to the highway, waving at the faces pressed against the café window glass as we passed.
Right was Seattle, eventually. Left was Spokane, eventually, but between here and the next towns, or indeed anything at all, were pine trees.
Lots and lots of pine trees.
Johnny suggested ‘right’, randomly, as he clicked his seat belt in to place and we barrelled off down the road, fully expecting to find the Sheriff’s cruisers dealing with some crash a few miles out of town causing the lack of traffic, a truck having slewed across the median or similar, but no.
As the miles of twisting blacktop sped past and the village receded, I started noticing potholes I didn’t remember seeing. They slowly got worse, the yellow centreline markings got intermittent, and the road surface started to look, well, old.
I weaved in and out of the deteriorating bits but had to go slower and slower to make progress. A few fallen pines that looked as though they had been there for a long time intruded on to the road surface and soon I was weaving in and out of them. The crash barriers looked older and older and soon disappeared entirely, then the tarmac had missing bits, then there was no tarmac and we were driving along a narrow, muddy path.
I had the lights on by now so was not endangered by the huge tree trunk that lay across the road, but it did preclude further forward motion. What was more deeply concerning was that beyond the tree there was simply no path; no evidence of human activity at all.
“Johnny, where did I take a wrong turn?” I asked as I slowly backed-up towards the better going.
A few hundred yards back I could do an 18-point turn and slowly the road improved until a few miles outside town normality returned. But we had not made a wrong, or indeed any, turn. This was getting a bit odd.
We returned to the café group, who had appropriated Rachel’s brandy by now and roundly accused us of heading off down some logging track by mistake.
So, Pete came with us and we went the other way.
An hour later, a considerably more sober Pete reported back to the jury in the café that indeed the road really did peter out in that direction as well. There was no one point where we could say it definitively ended; it just slowly deteriorated until further progress became impossible.
By this time James, our retired ex-military near-neighbour who considered himself the local mayor in all but name, had arrived bemoaning the fact that even his phone didn’t work. He had settled for a café latte and a croissant and now listened with amusement to our weird adventures.
It did require a re-run of the first road with Pete, Johnny and I in his big 4x4 to persuade him something really was amiss.
He had the big pine trunk blocking the road chain sawed up and winched clear in a few minutes, but a few hundred yards later even he was forced to admit he didn’t know which direction the road was meant to go. It wasn’t that the road had deteriorated, it just had never been there.
He forced a U-turn out of a small clearing and followed his own deep tire tracks through the mud back to the road.
“I know another way, up the hill and over the pass to Druze Valley. Jeremy Walker lives up there; he’ll know what’s going on”
Taking a side road up near the village we climbed the hillside, our vantage point affording greater views over the seemingly endless trees. Everything looked normal, and although the tarmac stopped the road didn’t start deteriorating and I was thinking I really had screwed up my navigation until James suddenly stopped.
The road ended at a turnout against a sheer rock face.
“No, that’s not right. What the hell is going on?”
He turned the truck in a flurry of gravel, and we shot off back down the hill. A mile or so later he stopped and got out.
“Simón, this is really weird. The road normally forks here”
He waved into the woods. There was no sign of a track.
We all looked at each other. I was utterly baffled, the engineering part of my brain trying to generate scenarios while pretending the deeper, lizard brain wasn’t broadcasting increasing fight or flight messages.
“Johnny, it’ll be OK”
But he was bright enough to know we were rattled.
James cursed, jumped back in, and said, “Let’s go up the rail line instead”
Returning to the main road we barrelled through the village, waving at the café group pressing against Pete’s never quite clean windows as we passed; a mile or so later at the level crossing down by the river he turned on to the rail line. It was rarely used nowadays, but sometimes I did hear the mournful whistle, the diesel grumble and the tolling of the level crossing signals and felt the faint subsonic vibrations of an ore train coming through at night, so I knew it was still viable.
James jumped out, twisted the hub locks and selected permanent 4x4 low range. Unlike many American-manufactured SUVs this heavy-duty vehicle was designed to not only go into the jungle but to come out the other side.
The rail bed was rough, but there was a maintenance track alongside, and we bumped along through the potholes and the puddles.
As the ground rose around us the rail cutting grew darker and more forbidding: finally, the maintenance track petered out and James drove up on to the rail bed, which was much bumpier.
The mouth of the tunnel loomed in front of us; James’s KC Daylighters took care of the gloom, and we bounced along in unnatural brightness through the long, soaking, tunnel carved out of the rock by sweating Chinese labourers 177 years ago in pursuit of the first, or maybe the second Transcontinental rail link.
I worried about approaching trains, Pete worried about the café group paying their bills, James cursed and then Johnny asked me what Mum would have done had she still been with us.
Which floored me.
Janice had been bright, perhaps too bright. We had met at University; she was studying Physics and from the first time I saw her I just knew she was the one. We had had a great life, but I had noticed her deteriorating mental condition five years previously: the tremors, the mood swings that may or may not have been menopause, the need to blame, the slow withdrawal from reality. She wouldn’t accept help, even from me.
Especially from me.
The Marriage Counselling, the ever-lengthening depressive and uncommunicative periods, the SRRIs that gave her blinding headaches and worsened her tremors all seemed to make things worse. Our marriage had become like a ship increasingly full of holes, weighed down by the axe blows she kept inflicting on it.
I had tried quietly lacing her tea with “tomato” leaves, which produced giggles and uncontrollable cake eating, but there was something more going on. We discussed parting ways, but she said she still loved me and hated herself for what she was doing to the three of us but couldn’t stop it.
After her midnight tumble into the path of an eighteen-wheeler there wasn’t enough left for the mortician to determine if she had had a developing brain tumour; but maybe deep down she knew.
Johnny was devastated; at that age it was hard for him to accept the deepening changes. You normally believe at that age your parents are if not perfect certainly immortal. Only at a later adult stage do you come to terms with them as imperfect human beings.
When I finally did get home to Police cars in the drive and the news, we both blamed ourselves for not having done enough, clinging to each other like flotsam and jetsam on a stormy sea, a relationship at odds with a normal father-son relationship, only strengthened by the Police’s stubbornness in refusing to accept my lack of involvement, despite the note she’d left: “Sorry”
My meeting with Microsoft in Salt Lake City had been sufficient as an alibi, but they found it hard to accept I had not been a contributing factor. The uncertainty and the possibility that I could suddenly be incarcerated was a millstone around our necks. The unsatisfying conclusion that they “would not be pursuing their enquiries any further at this time” failed to significantly lighten the mood, which was having massive effects on my professional life as well, so Johnny and I made the decision to cut and run, selling the business and retiring here, to this rural idyll.
Janice had been gone two years, and life was at last starting to settle into some semblance of normality. Johnny had settled into school in Dointon via the inevitable yellow bus schedule and even had a new girlfriend. I was unprepared for him to be considering a physical relationship but an evening chat with Sheila straightened me out with respect to the youth of today.
I knew Sheila would have preferred a closer relationship with me, but I wasn’t ready. Janice had caused a lot of emotional damage, and the Police suggesting strongly that I had had a hand in her demise hadn’t helped my emotional scars at all. My lingering feelings of guilt that I could have done more were a barrier I was not yet ready to tackle.
“I think she would have told us to do anything to survive and stay together, Johnny”
I fought back the tears. I’d lost her, I wasn’t about to lose him. We’d get through this together.
At length, the tunnel became brighter, and we emerged into a small valley on to a trestle bridge over a babbling stream.
At the end of the bridge the rails just stopped a few feet from a rock face, like a tunnel was supposed to be there but had never been built.
The cliff had been cleared, and the shape of the future tunnel had been marked out on the rock by some kind of marking device, but no attempt had been made to dig it.
James ran his hands over the markings and looked at us.
“What the fuck is going on? I know this track is used. I don’t like the look of this. One bit. I know this area, let’s have a little hike”
We all grabbed our kit, such as it was and started walking around the bluff. A narrow path followed the contours, and we were soon out of sight of the Toyota.
“From the other side of this bluff you can see the Comms mast up behind the old military base at Van Eff” James stated, with some confidence I didn’t feel. I had a very bad feeling about this.
After half an hour of steady hiking we reached a view over a second valley. James squinted into the distance, and I waved my iPhone in the air. Nothing but trees.
“Well, I’ll be damned. The railroad tunnel ends about….here”
He made a circle with his hands, and indeed there on the hillside the rock had been cleared, and we were standing on a ledge. But, unlike the previous valley, no bridge. Just a single shovel, leaning against the rock.
“Fuck. Thought I could see Van Eff. I’m gonna settle this, once and for all”
James was in decisive mode. We traipsed back to his 4x4 and he unlatched a big alloy box bolted to the cab, withdrawing his big, commercial drone. Next, the controller, four meaty batteries and a telescoping antenna he clipped to the cab and extended in sections to probably about 150ft.
Johnny’s eyes were huge.
“Wow, that’s cool kit”
“This is the real deal, mate”
James asked Johnny to help him with the drone, which they assembled some way from the Toyota. All four batteries went in, he hit the power and whilst it self-tested, beeped and experimentally ran rotors and camera he looped the controller over his shoulders. We could see on the big display the Toyota, a bit skewed, our legs and a lot of gravel.
“Unable to connect GPS. Flight Limited to 100ft vertical, 300ft horizontal” the controller bleeped.
James shrugged and selected menus with his controller buttons.
“GPS failure override y/n?”
James toggled and selected. The error cleared. He grumbled “damned Corporate liability lawyers” and hit “Take Off”
The drone thrummed and rose. James hovered it at our head height and rotated it so we could see ourselves waving, then he pushed the toggle and it rose into the blue sky until we couldn’t see it.
The display showed 3,007ft when he finally slowed it and rotated it.
“Still can’t see Van Eff. That’s just ridiculous”
I couldn’t see anything but green pines, but as it rotated Johnny shouted “there” and pointed at the screen. Looking closely, we could see the village. James brought the drone back down and ran it over the whole village, then down the road until we could see it disappearing into the trees.
“Aren’t you worried about it going out of range?” I asked.
“Not with this” he gestured at the antenna. “Ten mile range, no worries”
We watched him range across the village then back over our heads and further along the rail line. Watching the monotonous pines slide under the drone I began to worry about how he would know where to find us again.
“Automatic Return to Base. Don’t worry” and he pressed a button. The controller beeped. “Return unavailable”
“Oh. Well, we know what direction we sent it”
He scanned the screen for the compass. A tiny note said “compass unavailable”
He panned the view around in increasing desperation. Nothing but trees in all directions. He looked at me.
“You’re the Engineer. Any ideas?”
“Check the track log?”
He was very quick on the menus.
“Track log unavailable. No GPS. Battery 30%. Return to Base”
We looked at each other. He climbed it as far as he could, squinting at the screen to see us, or indeed any break in the trees indicating where us, or the village was. Even at 5,000ft there was just nothing.
The controller beeped. “Battery 20% Initiate Auto Return?”
“Yes, Dammit” he hammered at the screen.
“Return unavailable”
“Battery 10% Initiate Auto Return?”
“Fuck. Stupid thing”
“Descend it. See if you can soft land it in a clearing”
The last thing the screen showed were the approaching pines. They went all blurred and the picture froze.
“Contact Lost”
“FuckityFuckity Fuck. Sorry, Johnny”
He dropped the antenna and threw the controller in the box without even bothering to turn it off.
We all jumped back in the Toyota and retraced our tracks back into the tunnel, down the hill, back to the maintenance track and through the level crossing, through the level area where the town station used to be 100 years ago before Henry Ford put a stop to all that and along the side of the river where we all went to fish.
The railway followed the river further than any of us had ever travelled before turning away and climbing on to an embankment and then back towards the river. At the rivers edge was a brick abutment…… but no bridge.
On the other side of the river there was simply a low expanse of open fields, no matching abutment, no tracks, nothing.
We all looked at each other.
James looked at the river for a long time. Then he turned to us and said “this is not normal. We’ll starve or go all Lord of the Flies if we stay here. We need to get back”
Back at the café the entire village population was now enjoying Pete’s coffee and pie, there being little else to do. Pete’s till rang as he settled all the tabs, but he couldn’t make the chip and PIN work. A pile of IOUs and cash filled the till.
We all agreed we might starve, as the nearest general store was at Tolbrooke, a few miles up the valley and whilst Pete’s pies might stave hunger off for a while it was generally agreed that someone needed to reach the outside world.
“What about your boat? The river is still running. That water is going somewhere” James suggested.
I had an aluminum dinghy with an outboard I used for fishing up at my house on a trailer.
Leaving Pete tending to his till James, Johnny and I went up the hill to my house, backed the Grand Am up to its trailer, grabbed some extra fuel cans from the barn and went down to the jetty.
Reversing the trailer into the stream James helped me disengage the boat and we started the outboard. There seemed little point in pulling the trailer up the jetty again, so I simply left it there with the keys in. I somehow doubted anyone would want to move it today.
“Upstream just goes into the mountains. Downstream there are bigger towns”
Well, that was my theory. My boat, my theory.
James shrugged and agreed. He’d brought his hunting rifle, which we both thought sensible. I suppose it would be an accurate analysis of the American character that every time anything felt amiss, we reflexively reached for our guns.
The stream swept us along and I only needed to use the outboard to keep us away from the banks. After half an hour or so we reached the end of the railway and stopped for a look at the bank opposite the truncated bridge.
Weirdly, there was an area cleared and some foundations dug but no bricks, no abutment and no bridge. Walking away along the line the railway would have taken revealed some marks that swiftly faded in to the flat, tussocky grass.
It was almost like a railway line was planned to come through here, but they hadn’t finished building it.
Returning to the boat we continued downstream. Soon the hills crowded in on the river, the peaks growing higher and the light darkening. Eventually the river started going into a canyon and rapids began to appear.
My boat was unsuitable for this sort of water and whilst we were OK for a while it was obvious that the river was going to become a lot more dangerous up ahead. James turned to me, his finger on an old County sectional he had dug out of the glove box of his 4x4 along with a large amount of rifle ammunition.
“This lot isn’t on the map”
He made a face and we turned round.
He shouted over the roar of the outboard as we battled against the current.
“You ever played video adventure games? Whenever the game makers don’t want you to go somewhere because they haven’t written the code, they do stuff like this. Rapids, unfinished tunnels, roads that just peter out. This always means “there is no value in pursuing this avenue, the way forward in the game is elsewhere. That’s what this feels like”
Johnny and I couldn’t help but agree: we’d played lots of Lara Croft and Myst on my PC back in the day; this was how it felt. We were headed the wrong way.
But this was real life, not a video game.
“I agree, so there’s got to be a way out. We’ve just got to outsmart the programmers”
We finally made it back to the trailer, locked the boat on and pulled the combination up on to the road and back to the café.
By this time the entire population of our little village was crowding out the café: Pete was doing excellent business and folk had spilled out on to the sidewalk. Everyone had a theory: unsurprisingly most of them involved aliens.
As the three of us filed in a spreading pool of silence engulfed us. James stood on a chair.
“Our village appears to be completely cut off from the outside world. Everywhere we go, everywhere we look, the pine forest seems to go on for ever. None of us can understand why. That’s all we know at the moment”
Faces showed disbelief, surprise, anger and amusement. The volume rose rapidly, I heard “aliens” several times and we were all badgered for more detail.
Sheila sidled up to me and asked about her Doctor’s appointment the following day, Johnny asked about school and then a posse went off down the road in several cars.
An hour later they were back, with mud stains and long faces. They had confirmed our findings and most looked pretty frightened.
We asked everyone to come up with some sensible theories that didn’t involve guns. That shut most of them up, but it was Johnny who finally came up with something none of the rest of us had even given a second thought to.
“What does Pete use to heat the coffee machine? And run the TV? And the radio?”
“Electricity, of course” It was out of my mouth before I could stop it. “And it’s not generated here”
They all went silent.
“Where does it come from, Simon? It must come from outside somewhere”
They looked at me.
I used to work for Con Ed before I did all the computer stuff, so maybe I was the best person to ask.
“We must still be somehow connected to the world, or we’d have no power, and we can’t be in a video game”
Johnny stated the obvious, however increasingly bizarre that was beginning to feel.
Of course, being the electrical engineer I have always been, even if that had been overlaid by software knowledge, then business knowledge and people management knowledge, I knew where the local power lines and substations were.
The big step-down transformer that supplied the whole village was up the hill behind my house, in the woods on one of the only available flat areas back there. Con Ed had worked hard to upgrade it recently as everyone was buying electric cars and recharging them.
I had got to know the team, especially the lead Engineer who was a trainee way back when I was running cables.
He had showed me the village power distribution map showing the main incoming cable running up into the hills behind James’s house and over them in to the next valley, over the river there then up the valley, through the pass and down in to the big distribution yard at Dointon, about 15 miles away.
The supply load was shared between the big natural gas plant at Shendon and the old nuclear facility at Med Rock down on the coast. The two local hydro-electric plants also fed Dointon, I’d seen the yards there and the main control centre. So yes, I knew exactly where to go.
There was a rough and ready maintenance track under the lines, rarely used now the lines were inspected by drone. It wasn’t well-maintained but I thought James’s truck should be able to follow it. The river crossing would be another issue.
I borrowed James’s sectional and traced the lines. He looked at it thoughtfully.
“OK, let’s get some spare diesel from my garage and we’ll go take a look. If the trail peters out like the road and the rail lines, we’ll have to think again”
We decided James, myself and Johnny plus Mike, who ran the local lumber yard and knew the hills would go.
We stopped by his place for his big chainsaw, 2 stroke gas cans and some pry bars for moving rocks, James’s place for diesel and some sand ramps, then headed on up to the substation yard.
The big yard was flat, gravelled and covered in transformers, distribution cables and spare gear plus some of the old 1980’s gear they hadn’t yet got around to scrapping. The fence was covered with the normal over the top warning symbols. We could see the big 32KV line arching up the hillside. Lower down on the poles were the 480V feeders for the remote properties up the hill.
“How do we get up there? It’s behind the fence?”
Johnny looked confused.
“This is a shared use gate” I explained and pointed to the row of padlocks on the main gate. “The Parks Service, Con Ed and the FAA need access, there’s a big aviation beacon up over there.
Plus, Con Ed haven’t changed their keys for forty years, so mine should still work”
I hopped out and tried my old 577 key, which after a bit of jiggling opened one of the padlocks, and I waved them through before closing the gate again.
Johnny loved the shiny kit, the humming transformers, the glistening insulators and the neatly laid out and labelled distribution gear.
He quickly identified our house feed cable and, engineer in training that he is, was able to tell me which cables ran which voltages and what they were used for. He’ll go far, I’m sure.
We got back in the Toyota and headed up the hill, following several sets of overhead lines.
“How do you know which is the supply cable?” asked Mike.
“The tallest ones are the supply, the others are going to farmhouses and the beacon”
The road got steeper and rougher, James dropping in to 4x4 mode and easing us over the lumps. Twice the road was blocked with trees. Mike made swift work of them, and we all used pry bars to clear a huge boulder, roll it off the track and into the woods. Its crashing and thumping sound as it rolled off down the hill could be heard for several minutes.
An hour later, high in the hills the cables started separating. We could see them heading off down narrow corridors in the trees. Something weird caught my eye and we got out of the Toyota and walked over.
A hundred yards or so up the corridor the cable ends were hanging down; the ends were coiled up neatly and terminated. And the corridor ended soon afterwards. The pines beyond them stretched endlessly towards the horizon.
“That’s Fred’s farm over the hill. I know he has power, so this isn’t right”
We continued on, the additional cables disappearing down similar truncated corridors, their numbers slowly diminishing until we reached a small clearing. The last cable entered an ugly looking flat roofed building sporting an exhaust pipe on the side.
A side track took another cable from the building off down a side track and away into the trees.
“That’s the nav beacon. There’s a generator in there for when the power goes out. There’s a legal requirement for it to run for a month with no input power”
As we drove past, I could see the huge half- buried diesel tank.
“Actually, James, can we have a look at the beacon?”
James nodded and turned on to the side track; we bumped and jostled our way further up the hill until the clearing at the top came into sight.
A circular collection of vertical rods supported a large metal structure.
“That’s a VOR beacon. Airliners use it to get to SeaTac. Interesting that it’s still here”
We returned to the main track and followed it over the hill, now following just the high voltage cables.
The track started downwards and diverged from the cable run to go around an outcrop the cables ran high over. For a moment we lost sight of the cable run and when we rounded the rocks and headed back towards the cables we stopped. Instead of an uninterrupted line of poles with shining cables, we saw just poles running off into the distance, no cables and a few poles later even they just stopped. An endless sea of virgin pines stretched into the distance.
“Well, that’s buggered our theory” Mike spoke for all of us.
The diesel idled as we cogitated. They all looked at me.
“Well, the village isn’t getting power from anywhere else, and that generator wasn’t running so these cables must be Live. James, just humour me for a moment, please: turn us round, drive us back to where we left the cable run?”
“Sure: no problem”
We soon returned to the cable run. We hopped out and climbed up the hill where the cables ran. Topping the hill, we could now see the cables running off into the distance, shining and finished.
Mike scratched his head. “Ay? What’s going on? I’ll swear we just saw unfinished cables down there?”
“Tell you what, let’s climb down, take the truck to where we saw the unfinished cables, I’ll stay there, you come back here and if you see me, wave”
They dropped me off where I could see back up to the top of the hill where we’d been standing, then they roared off. I didn’t see them again until they roared back round the corner 30 minutes later.
“We could see the road where you’re standing, but you must have moved”
“I’ve been standing here the whole time, looking at the pines”
“We need to drive the truck over the hill close to the power line”
We drove back to where the track diverged, but this time James turned the Toyota up the hill, and we bounced and jumped up the rough ground and over the top of the hill and down to where I’d been standing a few minutes before. In front of us stretched the lines and poles.
“Well, I’ll be damned” Mike scratched his head.
“I can’t be sure, but I think our reality only exists near the power line”
I didn’t really know if this was true, but it seemed to fit the observed reality.
We drove in silence down the hill towards the river. Here the poles suddenly changed from timber to double-galvanised steel and got taller to cross the river. Under the lines was a shallow ford the Toyota made short work of and then we were headed uphill once more towards the pass.
The track got rougher as we climbed; a lot of rocks and more downed trees and then we popped out at the head of the pass and my phone binged.
“What the hell?”
I looked at the screen: it had signal bars but also a message “SIM not recognised” and no 4G.
“I know I paid the bill. What the hell is going on?”
Within a few seconds the others all got the same or similar messages from their providers.
No amount of the old IT trick of turning them off and back on again would work. Our phones were not working.
Mystified, James drove us further up until we could suddenly see Dointon, the whole valley with houses, wooded slopes, industrial units, chimneys, roads, traffic and the wonderful sight of civilisation.
Driving down the track towards the substation yard we could see the track ran alongside the yard: no key required here. But also in the yard were a load of Con Ed vans and a team working on something in the yard near where our cable terminated.
I asked Mike to stop the truck and hopped out. Walking up to the fence I shouted to the team “hey guys, what you doing? You’re not going to cut us off, are you?”
The Chief, with his hard hat and tie, came over.
“Hi, I’m Dan: Dan DeLetto. I’m the Chief Engineer for this area. We’ve been having some weird oscillations on this circuit. We’re going to change the output transformer, that usually fixes these.
It’s going to take us a day or so to mount the new one, then we’ll cut over to it. There will be a short outage, but very few people live up there: just the nav beacon and a few farmers up in the hills. They have all got their own backup generators, and the beacon has too.
The only other place is the village up there, but it’s only the level crossing lights and the overhead lights at the boat ramp; no one lives up there anymore”
That brought me up short. There may not be many of us in the village but there were enough for AT&T to pull a dedicated broadband fibre up the road a few years ago to supply us.
“Hang on, there are quite a few of us up there”
He looked at his clipboard.
“I know most of the people up there, I’ve been working this area for years. I don’t recognise any of you, are you in one of the farms?”
“No, we all live in the village. Johnny and I, we live next to Pete’s café, you know it, by the bank. James lives up the hill in the big red brick house and Mike, he’s in the lumber yard down by the slipway”
“You’re talking about the wrong Drilford. There aren’t any houses, no café, no bank and no lumberyard. You’re thinking of somewhere else”
I got my phone out, flicked to Photos and showed him the café, the lumberyard, my house and so on.
He scratched his head.
“The only bit I recognise from that is the café building. But that’s only a concrete slab, there hasn’t been a building on that site for 80 years or more. All the other houses I’ve never seen. But show me that slipway again?”
I flicked back to it.
“Where are the lights, and what’s that building next to it? And where are the level crossing lights?”
“I think we need to drive round by road. Thanks for your help. When’s the power going off?”
“Day after tomorrow, is my best guess. They drilled the mounting holes wrong for the new one, we’ve got to get a bigger drill and re-drill them”
“OK. I’m Pete, by the way. I used to work with Geoff, is he around?”
“I know everyone around here and we’ve got no Geoff’s on the staff; haven’t had for years. Are you sure you’re in the right place?”
“No, I’m not. Everything is wrong. Thanks anyway”
Walking back to the car, I explained the weird conversation to the others.
“I think we need to drive back round to Drilford by road. But let’s get some diesel first”
We drove out on to the road, joined the main highway and found the local Ez-Gas station. James went in, and after a few minutes returned with a strange look.
“My bank cards, all of them, got bounced. Even my Visa credit card and my AmEx. Had to pay by cash in the end”
He plugged the diesel hose in and the pump whirred.
“Our phones, my bank cards, your missing Con Ed friend. It’s like Civilisation has never heard of us”
“I hate to say ‘Parallel Universe’, but if the facts fit…. Let me just try one more thing. The gas station has free WiFi. I’ll try to connect to it”
My phone saw the WiFi and hit ‘Connect’. It seemed to take a very long time to connect, but eventually the fan at the top of the phone flicked to full strength. I opened Chrome and the world flowed into my phone.
“OK, so that’s working. Let’s try e-mail”
But I couldn’t log on to any of my addresses, each provider simply told me the mailboxes didn’t exist. the others tried, with the same result. My own personal vintage HiFi equipment web site didn’t exist, either.
The pump clicked off and James returned the nozzle to its holster.
“I don’t think we exist in this world” Mike had become morose.
“It’s my sister’s birthday tomorrow, and she’s quite famous. Well, if you’re in to murder mystery novels. But I’ve just Googled her and she doesn’t exist”
We drove off in silence. Even Johnny’s Steam account wouldn’t work, and he was really unhappy about it.
It took us nearly an hour to work our way round the hills and up to Drilford. As we came round the last bend, we couldn’t believe what we saw: no village, no houses, no bank, just a bare hillside, a slipway with lights and a lit level crossing going over four rail tracks. The lights were flashing, and a big Amtrak passenger train was rolling through.
James pulled off next to the concrete pad that would normally hold Pete’s café and we watched the traffic stream across the tracks.
“Oh, we are so fucked. Has someone put acid in our water supply or something?”
Mike started shivering.
“Pull yourself together, Mike. This is a physics problem; we need a physicist. And I know just where to find one”
At that point I was just impressed James was still functioning. My brain refused to accept the fact that somehow, we had slipped into a parallel universe where it was becoming increasingly apparent, we did not belong.
Putting the Toyota into gear James shot off across three lanes of stationary traffic, across the roadworks where they were building the new bridge over the railroad tracks, across the median strip and back towards Dointon.
Navigating Dointon’s grimy and industrial streets via the endless and unsynchronised traffic lights in search of the freeway to Spokane James suddenly muttered “don’t look round, but we’re being followed. Black sedan, three cars back, he swaps with a grey hatch every few minutes”
“Well, we haven’t done anything wrong, and amazingly for once James you’re not even speeding, so why?”
“They’re not Police, they’re too disciplined to be crime, I’d guess at some alphabet soup Government Agency. But what could they want with us? Seatbelts, I think, Gentlemen”
Johnny snorted “very Hollywood, James”
James waited for just the right traffic light and made it look accidental that he was the last person through as the orange turned to red, forcing the black sedan to stop. As it disappeared in the mirror he suddenly braked and pulled off into an alley, out the other end and up a minor road.
“Hollywood would have us screeching tyres and doing doughnuts but shaking a tail is far better done quietly and discreetly” James lectured, the rest of us contemplating how he knew all this.
Google Maps recalculated for us and an hour and a half later we were in Spokane approaching the Department of Theoretical Physics.
The Receptionist looked at us as if we had two heads.
“You want what? A professor to come with you to investigate spatial phenomena? Are you completely out of your minds? Our professors are far too busy lecturing to do field trips with complete strangers”
James pulled a face. “Well, I used to know one or two members of the Faculty, but apparently neither of them exist here anymore”
Addressing the bored and harassed looking Receptionist again he said “look, are you sure you don’t know Primel Sabran Gupta? He’s one of your Professors; I’ve known him for fifty years….”
“He’s dead; he died of Yellow Fever when he was twelve” a voice from halfway up the stairs declared. We all looked over.
A man stood there, of Indian descent: tall, dignified and carrying an iPad.
“Who the hell are you to say his name? His death tore my family apart: he had one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever known, and I’m Head of Department here”
James looked sad. “I’m so sorry: I….. I knew him, or maybe I didn’t, for so many years. He told me of his childhood in Almora, the pine trees, the childhood poverty, of school buses rolling down hillsides, of landslides, children going to school along the slipped earth hillsides, how his brother had slipped and fell into the river a thousand feet below. How they couldn’t find his body. His name was….. let me remember… Chalmandra Islay Gupta. He was….”
“Stop. I am Chalmandra Islay Gupta. I did slide down the mountain, but my brother Primel Sabran Gupta saved me by hanging on to a root and holding me out of the water until help arrived. I owe him my life…. But two years later he died. I grew up wishing I was him, came to America after I graduated from Mumbai and… are you trying to scam me?”
“No; your beloved mother had a withered arm, and your poor father wrote very bad poetry…”
He stepped down from the stairs, his eyes full of tears. “Call me Chal. Come up to my office and tell me all about my brilliant brother who died so young”
Over tea in Chal’s cramped office James spoke about their time in the Air Force and how Prim was always one step ahead of the other radar technicians, how the Air Force had reluctantly let him escape into academia and of his subsequent rise in the Department.
Chal was thoughtful.
“He would have done all that, and more. I am but a dull penny compared to him. Something is very amiss; you must tell me your story and what you want from me?”
Two hours and a blackboard littered with equations later Chal sat back, stroked his beard and said “there are two possibilities: the Drilford you know is a pocket universe anchored to our universe by Con Ed’s power line; or you’re all talking crap and you want to lure me out in to the wilderness to kill me”
We all laughed, nervously. He did have a point: we did rather come across as a strange bunch with a very strange story.
“You should know I am not an easy man to kill: the Army taught me a few things, and I will ensure the Department will know where I am at all times. I will take a Starlink router and video camera with me and Fiona outside, with her hand on the phone ready to call the cops, will monitor and record our progress. But I will come: I’m curious, and coincidentally Con Ed has asked me about some spurious signals they’ve been having in that area, so maybe we can kill two birds with one stone?”
“Does the name Dan DeLetto mean anything to you?” I asked.
He stared at me. “Yes, he’s the guy who asked me over. I’ve been very busy, but he’s been insistent and apparently Con Ed will pay for the trip, so let’s go. I’ve got a Jeep Buckaroo out the back, we’ll grab some kit and some provisions. I spend far too much time with this blackboard anyway. Fresh air might unblock some of my theories”
An hour later our convoy of two was back on the road to Drilford. Google Maps showed pretty much what we’d driven through earlier minus the new bridge works but with a two-track river bridge further down and the river very much not heading into rapids further downstream.
Chal had a good look at Drilford and took a lot of photos, especially of Pete’s café slab before we escaped the traffic and headed back to the Dointon substation.
Dan was expecting Chal and had already met us, so we chatted for half an hour while the big magnetic-clamped drill chewed its way through the baseplate of the transformer. Dan nodded towards the noise and the cutting oil smell: “bloody Babcock, couldn’t read a drawing, can’t ever get anything right. We have to rework virtually everything they send us. Damned Millennials: can’t read a drawing properly…”
Chal pulled some recording gear out of his truck and set it up near the old transformer. Dan’s men, wearing thick rubber gauntlets and boots connected cables up between the gear and the old transformer. Chal manipulated his gear. After a while he looked thoughtful.
“I’ve never seen readings like this. We’ll leave it running and link it to Starlink so we can monitor it as we drive…. OK, let’s go”
Dan waved us over as we headed up the track. “We’ll be done tonight; switch over will happen at 7:00am, that gives us time to test everything and still not annoy anyone”
“Thanks, Dan”
James nudged me. “Don’t look, but grey sedan by that warehouse. Binoculars, two men”
“What did you do in the Army, James?”
He chuckled. “I looked out for things like this. Let’s go”
I rode with Chal and as we topped the rise I told him he would lose 4G as we dipped down into the valley. “Starlink will stay connected, won’t it Fiona?”
I could see her nodding on the dashboard video link and telling Chal about her plans for the weekend when she suddenly cut off. Chal braked to a stop and Mike’s Toyota stopped behind. Dust drifted across both vehicles.
“That can’t happen”
Chal typed furiously at his console, then got out and waved Mike alongside.
“I’m going to go back a bit; just hold on here?”
He reversed a hundred and fifty yards and Fiona’s concerned face re-appeared.
“What’s going on? Are you OK? I was about to call the cops”
“Fiona, there’s something very weird going on here I don’t think the Police are equipped to deal with. Please don’t call them unless you don’t hear from me in the next 24 hours. You can see where I am….”
“Hang on guys, if my assumption is right, you’ll have a brief window to talk in about 90 minutes”
“OK, thanks Simon: we’ll try for that but Fiona I’ll be recording and the Starlink will dump it all to you if it gets to reconnect, otherwise as I say don’t worry.”
Chal hopped out and together we rolled a log in to place at the side of the road exactly where the satellite link cut out. We rolled forward again and the Starlink cut out like before, then continued down the valley, over the ford and up the other side to our promontory.
“Chal, you can see the cables and poles going up that steep bit, but the track goes off to the side?”
“Yes”
“This first time we’re going round the track”
The cables on the hillside vanished from sight as the hillside occluded them and Chal’s Starlink sprang into life. We could see Fiona’s desk with her in the distance chatting to a couple of students. I was half expecting some phone signal, but James laughed. “Out here, really? This is dial-up country, bud”
Chal looked at me and I motioned him to carry on. We rounded the promontory and returned to the line of the cable, Fiona’s background chatting continuing.
As we drove under the line, I asked Chal to stop again, and I spread an orange hi-viz on the ground.
“Photograph it and it’s surroundings please?”
He did so.
“OK: Let’s turn round and go back”
We did so, Mike smiling as we drove away. When we had returned to where the diversion started Fiona cut out once more.
“OK: now drive up where those wheel marks are, up by the wire please?”
It was tough going in the Buckaroo, but soon we topped the hill and headed back down towards the track now visible in the distance.
“Where’s the Hi-viz, then?”
Chal braked as we bounced on to the track. We both got out, and Mike’s crew joined us.
“It was right here, in the middle of the track.”
We compared photos and reality. Chal looked at me.
“You wanna go back, Chal?”
“This is either an elaborate hoax, or we have a big problem, guys. Topological physics describes this as a theoretical possibility but like so much in physics you never actually think you’re going to see it in… well, in reality. Onwards?”
“Onwards”
Coming down the hill into the substation I used my key to open the gate again. I left it open this time: I figured no one was going to complain.
Chal’s eyes widened as we drove in to the square, the empty main road, Pete’s café and the single-track level crossing, the additional houses and our friends greeting us home.
“What the Hell is going on? Who are you people? Am I being kidnapped? Are you aliens?”
He looked frightened and his hand crept towards a side pocket.
“Chal, we mean you no harm. We’re as frightened as you are. We’re just after some help”
James was adopting what I knew was his classic ex-military talk down tone of voice and body language: all relaxed, palms out, big smile. Chal was surely armed and James just needed to defuse what could be a pretty dangerous situation.
“W..what help could you p-possibly want from me?”
He was looking around, increasingly scared.
Pete stepped forward holding a phallic-looking copper cooking tool: “well, we’ll start with the anal probe, of course…” and grinned maniacally.
I thought Chal would explode. Then he started laughing, as did we all. Pete certainly knew how to break the ice.
“Come on, my man, we all need a drink”
“Oh, thank God for that” Chal relaxed, we all went inside and Chal gulped a decent belter of Kentucky’s finest.
We all wanted to know what was going on but poor Chal was a bit overwhelmed, so we backed off and just James and I settled him down at a window table.
Everyone wanted a blow-by-blow account of our adventures so we told them as best we could. When we’d finished, it all went very quiet.
Chal finally spoke up.
“It’s all a bit much to take in, but from what I can see your village is a pocket universe attached to our universe via your Con Ed cable. But when Dan cuts that link tomorrow this universe will either collapse entirely or will unlink entirely from our universe. If it collapses you all die, if it unlinks you all die slowly from starvation or cold.”
“Holy shit. We all die? What do we do, y’all?” Pete finished his own shot glass and refilled it.
“Steady on, Pete. On the other hand, give us all one….”
A clatter of shot glasses and whisky bottles commenced, Pete waving away any payment.
James spoke, thoughtfully: “There are enough 4x4’s for us all to reach Dointon before morning. But here’s the thing: everything that stays here disappears from our lives. And we don’t exist in that other world. Our phones, our bank accounts, our houses, our Social Security numbers, everything. They don’t exist. We’re all going to be scientific curiosities, prodded and poked by some agency in a hole somewhere. Or at best, penniless refugees with no valid documentation. Good luck with that in modern day America”
That sunk in.
“How long have we got?” Pete asked.
“Dan’s going to cut the power at 7:00 tomorrow morning”
James smiled, a wicked smile I’d seen a few times before.
“Nothing we do here has any repercussions in the real world, yes? It’s all going to disappear tomorrow?”
Chal answered “yes. Why do you ask?”
“Our dollars work. We can all be rich. There’s a bank next door. I know they keep a lot of cash in the vault to pay the miners up behind Dointon. We’ve got all night to rob it”
That also sunk in.
Mike piped up “but that would be stealing….” and was shouted down.
Johnny said “but the alarm will go off, the Police will come”
James replied “the alarm most certainly will go off, but the Police won’t come”
Everyone thought about that for a while. We were all, with the possible exception of Sheila and her tomato plants, upstanding citizens and the thought of actually robbing a bank required a moral journey James had clearly already made.
“How?”
It took Mike and James an hour to pull the front doors off the bank with big chains and the truck. The alarms went wild and we all half-expected Police sirens, but nothing happened and ten minutes later James and Mike had killed the noises with wire cutters and Mike’s shotgun. We let the blue lights run.
The vault door was imposing. I smacked the cold, blued steel with a hand. It sounded and felt solid.
Mike laughed. “thirty minutes, I’d guess?”
James’s big gas-powered angle grinder made short work of the door hinges, the smell of boiling metal and carbide grinder wheel mixing with billowing smoke. They weren’t being subtle. The rest of us watched in numb fascination from the main doors.
As the door slumped from its molten hinges, we could see leather bags of coins and shelves of dollars. The whole thing felt more like Breaking Bad than real life.
James and Mike pry barred the huge door off on to the floor; the whole building shook as it landed, and James stepped up on to it. I noticed he now had a sidearm in a holster. The smell of money seeped from the vault with the remaining wisps of smoke.
“Listen up. I suggest we each aim to take $10 million in low denomination notes; there are 42 of us here; that will pretty much clean out the vault. If you want to take more, then sure, but only after everyone has enough to comfortably restart their lives. There’s no point in leaving anything here; it will all be gone in the morning”
“I’m having no part of this; you’re all disgusting. This is a con, I’m going to stay here, you’re all going to jail. When the power comes back, I’m calling the cops; I know who you all are!” Sheila stood, elbows out. People drifted away from her, creating a space.
James did his calm, reassuring voice. “Sheila, that’s fine. You do that. If anyone else wants to stay, you’re welcome to, no one is going to force you to do anything. But please, don’t try to hold us up”
Several muted conversations started in the crowd, but Sheila ended up the only one opting to remain.
I took her to one side. “We’ll leave your share, you can change your mind, but at 7:00am you’re on your own, sorry”
She looked thunder at me and stalked off into the darkness.
Amazingly, no one got greedy and we stuffed and stuffed until we all had suitcases full of notes. One or two struggled with bags of coins but all realised it was a lot of weight for not much money. We tended to avoid the high denomination notes as they would surely gather attention.
Once we had ransacked the vault we ended up with nearly $14m each, enough we felt to adequately compensate for the loss of our houses and possessions.
We reconvened in the café, all considerably wealthier. Pete was simply serving everyone whatever they asked for, and it had become quite a party. I noticed everyone was keeping their suitcases close to them.
Chal, James and I sat in a corner where we were a little private. James sipped his coffee thoughtfully.
”Chal, I need to ask you a difficult question. Please don’t think I am in any way racially profiling you, and please don’t be offended, but I need to ask. Once we are in Dointon we’ll all be undocumented, won’t we? Do you, or anyone you know, happen to have contacts with anyone who can help us get good quality birth certificates that will allow us to get documented? As you know, money is not going to be an issue. These people are all old, they’re going to need hand holding to get set up”
Chal thought long and hard. I could see he was really uncomfortable with the whole thing. We were basically, asking him to help us break the law.
“I don’t know anyone. But I do know of someone who may be able to help. The fact that, bluntly, you’re all white, rich and old really helps. Please excuse the racial profiling. The document guys are only really looking for Hispanics so I think you will be OK”
James looked visibly relieved.
“Once we all have those we can bootstrap up to Social Security numbers, bank accounts, credit scores, IRS accounts and even drivers licences. Quite what he charges isn’t important, our $14m should cover it”
James and I had made sure Chal got an equal share. Honour among thieves, I called it. But now he did owe us a favour.
Suitcases full of cash and small, valuable possessions in hand we assembled around 2:00am in seventeen 4x4s. Mike and Chal took the lead; Johnny drove Pete’s Discovery while he snored off his brandy in the back; James and I brought up the rear in his Toyota.
Through the substation yard, up the hill we made good progress, but some of the less experienced drivers struggled with the terrain. Mike and I ended up driving 3 of the 4x4s over the promontory and walking back.
We hit the ford at 4:15am, one 4x4 getting drowned despite our best efforts. We all decided that while James and I could have winched it out we just didn’t have the time.
We all got wet rescuing the passengers into Mike’s Subaru, but we hit the top of the pass at 5:56am, the pre-dawn orange of the sky lightening by the minute.
Fiona’s office reappeared on the dashcam and Chal’s camera dumped video to her server. I could just see on the monitor the night security guard doing his rounds in the background, scratching his balls thoughtfully as he walked up the stairs.
Descending the track, I could see Dan’s workers clustered around the transformers. He waved us over as Chal and his team worked to disconnect Chal’s kit. James and I watched the last of the 4x4s round the bend heading for Dointon’s Shoneys.
“Quite a crew you’ve got there. What’s the story?”
“We were camping: corporate team training, everyone’s got to get back this morning, hence the early start”
“We’re nearly done here. Chal’s kit is almost off, then we’ll run some baseline tests and swap at exactly 7:00am. Chal’s going to stick around to test the new transformer with us”
“Great, we’ll head out. Chal, will we see you for breakfast at Shoneys at 8:00?”
“Perfect. Thanks guys” he waved and turned back to his screens.
“Are we going to be OK when Dan cuts that power?” James asked.
“I don’t see why not, but I’d like to be here when he does. Why don’t you go on to……”
At that moment a black Lincoln Town car slid to a stop on the gravel, broadside and blocking the track. Two suited men leapt out, drew pistols and pointed them at us.
“Hands where we can see ‘em!”
“Whoa, hold on. We’ve done nothing wrong!”
We raised our hands anyway.
“Down on the ground! Federal Agents!”
We knelt down. Mike looked at me and mouthed “bank?”
We were briskly handcuffed before being dragged to our feet again.
“OK, you two arseholes. I’m agent Kins and this is Agent Juff. We’re from the NSA. You’ve been using illegal MAC addresses in contravention of the Digital Information Act. You tripped our monitoring systems. Where are your phones?”
Mike and I just looked at each other. Not the bank, then.
“Inner pockets”
They made us look at the phones to unlock them and started rummaging around in the settings.
“Some badges, please? We’d like to see some badges. You could be anyone” James asked.
The other agent drew a night stick and clubbed him in the kidneys before he could respond. James collapsed to the ground with a sob.
Agent Kins turned to me. “What’s in the trucks?”
“Our stuff. We’ve been camping”
Before I could say any more the night stick hit my kidneys and I was lying on the floor. The pain was so bad I could barely breathe.
From my viewpoint on the ground I saw them rummaging in the back of my truck. I heard my suitcase open.
“What the fuck? There must be $5m in here”
I was dragged to my feet, sobbing and drooling.
“Explain yourself, arsehole. You got a meth farm up there, huh? And some weird-arse electronics. You scamming people, got a little boiler room up there with illegal aliens telling people they can claim on diesel emissions? You came through here yesterday, we sent up a drone to follow you, but your car just disappeared. You got some form of camouflage up there?”
And they dragged us to their Town Car. We were unceremoniously dumped in the back, my suitcase was thrown in the trunk, and they took off up the track with us bouncing on our handcuffed hands, which were rapidly going numb.
Agent Kins turned to me from the passenger seat, waving a small pistol.
“Where is it, you morons?”
James mumbled something and Agent Kins hit him with the pistol butt. Blood dribbled from his chin.
“OK. Please don’t hurt us anymore. It’s just up here past the top. There’s a log by the side of the road. Stop right there.”
And he did. Turning the engine off Agent Juff turned round. “Where?”
“Behind those trees”
“Waste them, Kins. We’ll keep the cash. Fucking arse…..”
I had closed my eyes. Now I opened them. The world was brighter. The front of the car, from just forward of the seat squabs was simply gone. I felt warmth on my legs and looked down. An arm still clothed in a dark suit sleeve clutching a gun lay there, warm and quietly bleeding into my lap. With a creak the part of the car we were sitting in arched backwards and settled on the rear fender. I could smell gasoline. I could also see up the track.
I had a strong suspicion it was 7:00am.
The rear doors, bereft of their hinges dropped away from the car and we climbed out, slowly and painfully. I shook the dismembered arm off me. It lay seeping blood in the dirt. Both of us threw up.
“My God. What the Hell just happened, Simon? They’re gone, aren’t they? Dan pulled the power”
“I think so. James, they were going to kill both of us. Just out of hand; they didn’t care, they just wanted the money”
“You’re right. Now how the Hell do we get the handcuffs off?”
I looked into what was left of the car. A neatly dissected piece of suit jacket cloth contained a pocket with the keys. It took James and I half an hour of painful back-to-back manipulation before my handcuffs clicked open, and then less than 30 seconds before we were both free, nursing our swollen hands.
Rescuing the suitcase and the pistol we started off, limping, blood and vomit-stained, down the track back towards the substation. For some reason my left hiking boot was leaking small rocks into my sock; when I looked more carefully, I could see a section at the the very front had been neatly removed. I showed James.
“We were damned lucky not to lose our legs”
A few hundred yards later Chal’s 4x4 scrunched to a halt in front of us.
“Where are those arseholes?”
He leaped out of the truck brandishing a really nasty looking pistol with a silencer. “I saw what they did to you”
“They’re gone, I think. And I don’t just mean ‘ran off into the woods’ gone…”
We climbed back into Chal’s truck and re-visited the Town Car.
“Dan will have the power back on about…. Now” he said, pointing the gun at the empty space where the front of the car had been.
But nothing happened.
“They’ve been trapped. I’d do anything to see their expressions”
“We’ve got to check” he said and put the truck in to gear. Fiona’s office remained steady on the dash cam as we descended into the valley, across the river, up and down the promontory, through the once again locked Con Ed gate and into the busy roadworks, bustling traffic and empty concrete pad of Drilford.
“It’s gone; they’ve gone. And one of them is missing an arm.”
“I wondered what the hell the blood was? You both look like shit”
Chal was thoughtful.
“I’ve been doing some calculations. Their universe is now locked off from ours. They’ll be able to access your village, and Sheila, but nothing else. If they wander off, they’ll just find pines. They’ll be the only ones there. They’ll starve, eventually, once they’ve exhausted all the food. Unless Agent one arm dies from blood loss first.”
“Who were they anyway?”
NSA, FBI, CIA, who knows? I know they were going on about us using illegal MAC addresses that tripped some monitor somewhere. I don’t know, they clearly didn’t want to show us their badges, and the badges are in the other universe now”
“I’d guess at NSA but rogue. I worry that one day they’ll find this half of the car with their DNA on it and start wondering. I don’t think we should linger, and I do suggest we burn the car”
The smell of gasoline made that easy and a few minutes later we retreated from the burning shell.
“What next?”
“Breakfast at Shoneys, and all of you get appointments with my Birth Certificate friend.”
“Chal, I can’t thank you enough”
At Shoneys everyone was having huge breakfasts: they all looked hugely relieved and excited.
Johnny took one look at my exhausted, bloodstained appearance, burst in to tears and hugged me. “I’ve been so worried. Dad, are you alright? We lost Mum, I’m not losing you as well”
“No. But I’m alive, which is not what I expected a few hours ago”
James and I had had a chat on the way over, and I stood up and shushed them all to silence. I explained about our difficulties with the rogue agents.
“Every one of you has a smart phone or tablet or laptop, or all of them. These must all be destroyed real get now. Each of them has a unique code in its WiFi chip and for laptops another one in its network socket called a MAC address. The ones we have are illegal here and my use led the agents to us. Please, right now, turn them off and pass them here. I will have to destroy them. I have bought you all new burner phones that are legal, to get you going. Tablets and laptops we’ll go and buy, I’ll help you transfer data across, then I’m afraid the old ones need to be destroyed.
The NSA will find the car; they will find the burned remnants of an arm. They may get DNA from it. So, we need to disappear from here. Once we have documentation, we need not to be anywhere round here. Florida is nice….
By the way, if anyone feels like telling the cops, no one will ever believe you”
Six months later we had social security numbers and bank accounts, passports and drivers' licences, new phones, and new cars.
We dribbled our cash into bank accounts as if we were earning, paid for everything else cash and slowly reestablished ourselves in this new world. We took a great deal of care not to arouse any suspicions from the authorities and slowly the others drifted away into new lives.
I lost touch with most of the others, but James and I bought a seaplane business in Seattle. Johnny became a trainee seaplane pilot in his spare time while he worked his way through his Physics Degree.
This universe has its quirks: somehow Mango the phone and computer company became Apple; Tennessee Fried Chicken became KFC and America’s universal habit of chewing Bolunna beans doesn’t seem to have caught on. I can’t even find Bolunna beans anywhere. A business opportunity, perhaps?
Also, come on now, what in tarnation is ‘jaywalking?’ The rest of the world is laughing at the US. And ‘no drinking till you’re 21’? In my universe it was like the rest of the world: 16 with a meal, 18 without. Who pulled 21 out of a hat? Johnny is furious. And since when was Washington DC the capital? I’m still discovering things, even now.
But suddenly three years later I got a phone call from Chal. He sounded excited.
“Simón, can you come up to Spokane? I’ve got something to show you”
Our latest acquisition, a Cirrus Jet got me up to Spokane International in a morning, and he met me in the Arrivals Lounge. As he drove me away in his old Buckaroo, I teased him about being able to afford a new one now. He leaned over conspiratorially. “Have you ever wondered what I did with the readings from the Con Ed transformer?”
“Well yes, I suppose I have”
“It’s taken me a while, but that data filled a hole in my theory. I believe we may be able to view your pocket universe. Ah, here is my colleague J.C. She’s been helping me with the analysis”
I knew that gait. I knew that face, I knew the slightly crooked smile, the curve of her nose, the way she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear when she was nervous.
“Hi, I’m JC. Chal, that vacuum pump is making a weird noise again?”
She had a small recent scar on her hairline. She touched it reflexively. “You must be Simon. Chal’s told me about you. Sorry about the scar, I’m told it will heal. A tumor, apparently. Chal made me go for a scan. They said it would have made me unstable and possibly suicidal. It was benign but growing. Gone now”
And then she did the smile thing I could never resist. And I fell in love with her all over again.
Chal’s viewer showed us the village, the power lines, the front half of the Town Car, and three bodies. One of them must have been missing an arm, but the resolution wasn’t that good.
“We’ve tried panning around; those pines truly are endless. We’ve panned thousands of miles in each direction, just pines. We did find your crashed drone, though”
I saw the film last week “They live among us”
Yes, we live among you. But you’d never know it.