Journeyman

by Mark J Rose

  “You need something in your stomach,” she said. “I’ll bring you victuals.” She returned with a tin plate of beef stew, a cooked cob of corn and a hard piece of bread, and then left to go back into the house. When she finally returned, she sat across from Matt and was immediately pleased with his empty plate. “Seems even Frenchmen must eat,” she said. She had been right; filling his stomach had worked to bring him out of his daze.

  “My name’s Matt Miller,” Matt said. “I’m American.”

  “And I’m Mary Taylor,” she replied.

  “Not every hiker on the trail is from Europe,” Matt said, chuckling. She looked at him, puzzled. Matt noticed her reaction but decided to remain quiet. It didn’t seem worthwhile to try to explain his situation to this random woman. “Can I get my pack?” he asked. “I probably should be moving on.”

  “You’re ready to return to the road?” she asked, concerned. “A moment ago you couldn’t stand.” She got up before he could answer and returned struggling with the pack on her shoulder. This surprised him. He had suspected it might be hard to collect his things and be able to leave, but now, here he was, ready to go. She hefted it to him. He zipped it open and took inventory, feeling down to the bottom. As far as he could see, nothing was missing. The gun was in the bag along with the bullets.

  Matt’s paranoia wasn’t lost on the woman. “’Tis all there. We are Christian people,” she said. “My husband has your knife. You can have that when you go.” She said this like it needed no additional explanation. “Where will you travel?”

  “Probably back on the trail,” he answered.

  “Which trail?”

  “The Appalachian Trail.”

  She seemed puzzled again at the mention of the trail, and then said, “I have a meal to tend.” She turned and stepped back into the kitchen, out of sight.

  Matt reached into his pocket, pulled out his cell phone, and looked for bars. “I thought you were supposed to get service everywhere,” he said, irritated. He’d have to ask directions. Matt stood up with his phone in his hand, still looking for a signal. He felt better now and finally confident that he wouldn’t collapse. He pushed his pack behind the kitchen door and slowly walked around to the front of the house, holding the phone high. When he finally looked at his surroundings, he was surprised to see the farm was bigger than he had first observed. The barn where he had slept was directly ahead. There was a sizable horse barn to its left with a number of curious animals sticking their heads out from their stalls.

  His first impression had been that these were poor mountain people. He was now rethinking that assumption. Poor mountain people didn’t have European accents and a barn full of horses. He stuck his phone in his pocket, wandered to the barn and began to pet a towering chestnut-colored animal. The horse looked down at him through calm brown eyes, shifting his head as Matt scratched, clearly enjoying the attention.

  “His name’s Thunder,” a woman said over his shoulder.

  Matt turned to see a young woman brushing a silver horse in another stall. She had pulled-back blond hair and was dressed in a long plain blue and white dress. Matt had to look away to keep from staring; she was a radiant Nordic beauty with ice-blue eyes that hit him like a thunderbolt when he met her gaze.

  “Do you ride well?” she asked.

  “I don’t know anything about horses,” Matt replied, laughing. He followed the motion of her hand as she moved the brush with long strokes.

  “It must take ages to travel anywhere, then,” she chided.

  “I do okay,” Matt said. He had never, in his life, wanted to learn to ride a horse.

  “You may be able to find work,” she said. “It’s almost hay time and Father will be taking workers.” She went back to her task.

  “I have a job,” Matt said. “How many horses do you own?”

  “About twenty grown, ready to sell, and many younger ones,” she replied. “We are selling Patriot here. Would you purchase him?” There was a hint of mirth in her voice, as if she assumed he couldn’t afford the horse.

  “I may,” Matt replied. He caught her smirking. “Who are you?”

  “Grace Taylor.”

  “Mary’s daughter?”

  She nodded. “Thomas Taylor is my father.”

  “Who owns this farm?”

  “Father paid off the debt when I was a little girl.”

  “Why do you live like this if you have all these horses?”

  She looked at him, irritated. “It’s true that we may not live as well as some in town. We give much to maintain the church and help the poor. We choose not to live with English luxuries.”

  “What, like Range Rovers?”

  She stared at him as she brushed, but didn’t reply.

  “My name’s Matt Miller,” he said, offering his hand. She continued brushing, and he saw her demeanor change.

  “Imagine, a drunkard sleeping in our own barn,” she whispered towards the horse, loud enough for Matt to hear.

  Matt looked at her questioningly. “You think I’m a drunkard?”

  “That’s how they found you,” she said.

  “Found me drunk?”

  “Yes, lying under Bonner Bridge.”

  “Bonner Bridge?” He laughed, confident in the fact that he had not slept under any bridges.

  “Bonner Bridge,” she retorted.

  “I haven’t had a drink in weeks,” he exclaimed.

  “You do drink rum, then?” It was both an accusation and a question.

  “I’m not a drunkard!”

  A young boy appeared at the entrance to the barn, interrupting them. He was quiet.

  “What is it, Jonathan?” Grace said.

  He turned to Matt. “Father wants to know if you desire work.”

  “Tell him thanks, but I have a job,” Matt replied politely.

  “Fine,” the boy said. He lingered for a moment and then was gone.

  Grace said sharply, “I must finish my chores.”

  “I’m going,” Matt replied. He turned to leave, trying his best not to give her the dirty look he felt she deserved. He walked back to the house, rationalizing his irritation. It was probably because her appraisal was closer to the truth than he wanted to admit. It was true that he hadn’t had a drink since the night before he’d left on his trip, but there had been plenty of alcohol before that.

  In the past, he had gone hiking to give himself a mental break from his job at the lab. This time, though, the trip had been a physical necessity. Matt had forced himself to leave Philadelphia to escape a routine of partying and drinking that threatened to overwhelm him. This was more than a hiking trip; it was a three-week exile from chemical destruction. It had taken him a week of walking to begin feeling like himself again. By the end of his second week, his pants fit properly and he was no longer craving alcohol.

  Matt had planned to use the third week to sort out his future and his relationship with his girlfriend, Kylie. She was his ticket to the beautiful people in Philadelphia. Stunning in her glittering cocktail dresses, she had shown him eight months of the best houses, clothes, and liquor that money could buy. Her parents bankrolled her social life and she lived with them in a sprawling downtown apartment. They had only been home for a few days in the time that Matt had known Kylie; they spent most of their time in Europe or the Mediterranean.

  Matt was something of a curiosity among Kylie’s friends, who all seemed to be living off some sort of trust fund. It was hard for him to hide his working-class background, or the fact that he had a day job, as he struggled to keep some semblance of balance between his social life and his career. The friends had stopped offering him cocaine, which like all drugs he avoided, but he drank as much as the rest of them. His drinking, along with his beautiful girlfriend, seemed to be enough to keep him an accepted member of their club. Lately, though, Matt had started to wonder if he could continue to pay the price. He felt like his life was slowly being drained away.

  Matt’s thoughts were interrupted as
he reached the house. He headed around back to retrieve his pack from behind the kitchen door. He’d planned to grab it and start on his way, but weakness overwhelmed him and his head began to pound. He sat down in one of the wooden chairs on the porch and poured a cup of water from the pitcher Mary had left. The fact that no one was around was vaguely puzzling after what had seemed like a lot of attention. Could it be that he wasn’t the center of the world for these mountain people? He leaned back in the chair and looked up at the wispy white clouds as they floated across the blue sky, silhouetting the green trees.

  The trees are green! The last time he could remember, it was the middle of fall.

  3

  Toothpaste, Part II

  Ordinarily after such a high-profile accident, Senior Counsel Jane Schaefer would be mopping the floor with the four men around the table. She thought better of it, though, with Colonel Alan Gabriel sitting across from her. She had pulled his dossier before she left her office at the NSA, and between these documents and her own network she learned that he was respected by his peers and connected to the highest echelons of the US government. Colonel Gabriel, now forty-eight, had been in the Marine Corps since enlisting at the age of seventeen. As a young man he did three tours of duty in the Persian Gulf and was twice decorated for valor. The Marines had then sent him to be educated at MIT, after which he continued his government service, working on a multitude of classified programs. They were the kinds of programs that kept the US military far ahead of its nearest global competitor.

  But Colonel Gabriel’s presence didn’t keep her from glaring at the last tattered young man as he wandered in three minutes late and took his seat at the conference table. Jane wasn’t used to being kept waiting. By the time she was called in to deal with any situation, it had usually reached the point where it wasn’t a matter of whether people would lose their jobs, but how many. She had no problem shutting down an entire facility and had done so on more than one occasion when she felt that the reputation or security of the United States was in jeopardy.

  “Thank you all for coming,” she said, looking straight at the young man who had just taken his seat. “I’ll get right to it.” She reached down and fingered a key on her computer, and the projector screen lit up to show a map of Tennessee. A green line appeared on the map, starting at the laboratory and heading into the city of Oak Ridge, and then to the Smoky Mountains. She used a laser pointer to trace the line. “We’ve verified the path of the particle beam,” she said.

  She stepped to the screen and put her finger on the line near the laboratory. “The energy field took out one of your visiting Brit engineers, a man named Patrick Ferguson. He had been here since early spring.” She pressed a button on her keyboard to advance the slide to show a metal bridge with a hole cored from its center. She paused to gauge the reaction of the men around the table. They looked back at her with blank stares and then turned their gazes to the damaged bridge. She found their lack of emotion irritating and fought the instinct to fire them on the spot.

  Jane returned to the map and continued tracing the green line. “Then, it hit a mother and her daughter,” she said, now pointing to the center of Oak Ridge. She advanced the slide to show the black Mercedes-Benz. “Six inches of the car were neatly trimmed from the driver’s side. The engine was running when they found it.” The slide showed the circular slice taken from the car along with a matching indentation that followed into the ground. A rear tire had blown, so the front of the car was tilting towards the sky.

  “As you know,” Jane continued, “the beam then headed to Clingmans Dome and destroyed that new Q-band tower that everyone was fighting over last year.” She showed a picture of the tower. The top half of it was gone, trimmed to a half-moon shape. “If it wasn’t an eyesore before, it is now. As far as we can determine, only these three were affected before the beam headed out into space and dissipated. Campers up in the mountains witnessed a loud boom at the same time the accident occurred.” She stood there looking at them in silence, hoping for some reaction to help her assess the risk associated with leaving these men in their positions.

  “Thank you, Ms. Schaefer,” Colonel Gabriel said. “That’s all we need for the moment.”

  “The Propulsion Project is to be shut down until further notice,” she replied. She continued looking at their faces with consternation. She had expected to see more remorse on the faces of the men responsible for the deaths of three people.

  “You can assure your superiors that we’ll not be starting the reactor any time soon,” Gabriel said.

  “They were clear on this,” she said. “The reactor should be dismantled.”

  “Understood,” he replied.

  Jane knew enough to catch the dismissive tone in the colonel’s voice, but it wasn’t her responsibility to question his motives or to gauge the likelihood that he’d follow the orders. She decided to ignore the subtleties and take his response at face value. She disconnected her computer from the projector. “Thank you, sir,” she said. She stood and addressed them. “Best of luck, gentlemen.” She acknowledged the colonel’s nod and then turned and left, shutting the door behind her.

  **********

  The physicists sat there with their leader, staring and wondering who would be the first to speak. It was Colonel Gabriel. “Well, what do you think?” he asked.

  “About what?” replied Brian Palmer. He had looked up in mid thought.

  Colonel Gabriel was used to Palmer thinking out loud and knew there was nothing evasive in this young man’s nature. He took the question as genuine. “Three counts of manslaughter.”

  “I’m not saying that we didn’t screw up,” Palmer said, “but—”

  “But what?” challenged the older man.

  “These people aren’t dead,” Palmer said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “Where are they?”

  “From what we can surmise,” Jacob Cromwell piped up, “when the particles escaped the reactor, the surrounding mass collapsed.”

  “You think these people disappeared into a wormhole?”

  “Our guess is that they were propelled through it as the field collapsed behind them,” Cromwell continued. “Like being squeezed through a giant tube of toothpaste.”

  “Why did your toothpaste head to that tower?” the colonel replied.

  “We haven’t figured that out yet,” David Greer said. “We know it wasn’t random, so that’s a start.”

  “Can you get these people back?”

  “It’s possible,” Greer replied. “We have to find them first.”

  “Where?” Colonel Gabriel asked.

  “If Einstein was right,” Cromwell said, “the question should be when?”

  4

  Uncomfortable Friends

  Matt was sitting behind the house contemplating green leaves and trying to press away his headache, when a tall teenage boy interrupted him. “I’m Jeb,” he said. “Father asked if you could come help with a horse.”

  “Sure,” Matt replied. He looked again at the green trees. “I’m Matt.”

  They hurried to the opposite side of the horse barn to join Thomas. He was there with Jonathan, who was the youngest son, another older man Matt hadn’t met, and the dog. They faced a horse cornered against a fence. He was a beautiful monster with a rich black coat. “Nice horse!” Matt exclaimed.

  “Father calls him Satan…ofttimes,” Jeb replied, chuckling. As if he had heard the boy’s comment, the horse reared and backed farther into the corner. The dog barked commandingly. The horse settled briefly at the sound, but it didn’t take him long to return to his aggressive posture. He snorted, daring them to approach.

  Thomas pointed Matt to a spot that would prevent the horse from moving out into the pasture. “Stand yonder,” he instructed. “We must get him into the barn. One of his shoes has come loose.”

  Their efforts lasted for ten minutes as Thomas attempted to bring him under control. The boys and the older man weren’t much help; all three looked sca
red. No matter what Thomas tried, the horse wouldn’t let him near, and so he backed away to come up with a new plan. Matt began to grow impatient, so he walked forward. Thomas saw what he was doing and said in a monotone, “Mr. Miller, best to give him space.” Despite the warning, Matt continued to walk until he was directly in front of the animal. The stallion gazed down at him with a “Who the hell do you think you are?” expression. Thomas repeated with added urgency, “Mr. Miller, give him space.” Matt moved closer, almost as if in a trance, and reached up. As he touched the side of the horse’s head, the animal went quiet and stopped rearing.

  Matt talked to Shadow like all the animals he saw on the trail. “You’re pretty mad…take it easy. We’ll get your shoe fixed up, boy.” He had practiced this many times on the creatures that crossed his path, trying to convince them to delay long enough for him to observe. Once the horse had quieted, he reached up to his halter and began pulling him towards the barn. There was a sense of relief when he was in his stall and they had shut the gate. Matt walked back out into the pasture with the two boys. “He’s okay now. Ready to get that shoe fixed.”

  The man Matt hadn’t met yet now stood in front of him. “Well done!” he exclaimed. “I’m David Taylor, Thomas’ brother.”

  “Matt Miller,” Matt replied, shaking his hand.

  The boys still looked at Matt in amazement. “How’d you do that?” Jonathan asked. “No one but Father can go near Shadow.”

  “It felt like the right thing,” Matt replied. Thomas opened the pasture gate and they walked back to the house as a group. Matt contemplated the green leaves around him, trying to get his bearings. He couldn’t come up with a plausible explanation for why fall had turned to summer.

  “Will you be staying for dinner?” Thomas asked.

  Matt’s head was still pounding, and he was too groggy to think about an alternative. “Sure.”