Flux

by Jeremy Robinson

  “More like a few thousand of them.” I turn the phone around in his hand so he can see the logo on the back. “Same company, though.”

  “Can you call someone on it?” my father asks.

  “If there was still someone we could call. And it won’t work without a series of cell towers. They’re like antennas, broadcasting the signal. So I can’t call Synergy, either. It’s mostly useless, unless you need a calculator or Pac-Man.”

  Owen gasps, retaining his childlike fascination despite our circumstances. “This has Pac-Man?”

  I was a resilient kid. I suppose that’s how I survived my entire family’s passing and still turned out okay.

  Boone on the other hand, is about as resilient as a bag of feathers in a tornado. His face slowly morphs into a kind of outraged horror, eyes locked onto the glowing screen. “It’s the Devil’s work!”

  I have a good chuckle at his expense while looking for signs that anyone has come through these woods. “There was a time when gunpowder was magic.”

  “In our time,” my father says, “people have been to the moon.”

  “On the moon?”

  My father is blowing his mind, even more than the phone.

  “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” He smiles. “I saw it on television.”

  “What’s a television?” Boone asks, looking torn between the urge to flee, screaming madly, and fascination. Having seen the iPhone, he can’t deny I’m from when I said. I doubt he can make any sense of it. I barely can. But he’s coming around to the basic concept.

  “Like this,” my father says, motioning to the phone in Owen’s small hands. “But bigger. When I was a child, they were black and white. Most folks in these parts didn’t have ’em, but we had family friends who—”

  “Whoa, it has a camera,” Owen says, working his way through the intuitive icons, menus, and options like a true child, unafraid to experiment with technology. His first venture onto the Internet is still several years away, when he and ten other boys manage to download a pixelated photo of Christie Brinkley in a bikini. The image came from one of the boy’s home computers, but we felt like we’d jumped into the Wargames movie and were paranoid the government would come looking for us.

  Young Owen holds the phone out, “Look! There I am!” I crouch down beside him, feeling a strange kind of affection. He’s separate from me, but also me. It’s been a long time since I heard this iteration of my voice, but it’s triggering all sorts of memories, old emotions, and a sense of wonder I’ve long since lost.

  When my head is next to his, I realize the similarities between our faces is noticeable, even with my aging and facial hair. Before I can move, he snaps a photo and then starts laughing. In the background is Boone’s ridiculous-looking wide eyes and gaping mouth.

  “Tarnation,” he says in a hush, leaning forward to look at his own image. He rubs his cheeks. “I need a bath.”

  “Need a lot more than that,” I tell him.

  “Which one of you is his father?” Boone asks. “Cause I thought it was this feller,” he gives my father a backhanded whack on his shoulder. “But I’ll be damned if he isn’t your spitting image.”

  “You know what they say about the Appalachians,” I say. “Not a very big gene pool.”

  Boone’s face screws up. “A what-pool?”

  “You married to your cousin?” I ask.

  “Ayuh.”

  “That’s what it means.”

  Owen’s chuckling puts a smile on my father’s face, but his scrutinizing gaze turns me away. I pluck the phone from Owen’s hands. “Gotta save the battery. Just in case.”

  “Aww, for what?” Owen asks.

  I tap on the flashlight. “In case night comes around.”

  My father’s firm grip on my shoulder stops me in my tracks. I’m sure he’s about to confront me about who I really am, but he motions for silence, and then for everyone to get down.

  Distracted by the younger me, I missed the shift in terrain, from sloped to level, and the glow of a clearing ahead. Beyond the whoosh of wind slipping between budded tree limbs, there’s something else.

  A growl.

  Two growls.

  Staying low to the ground, we work our way forward, moving from tree to tree until we’re gathered behind a fallen oak, gazing into a clearing that is still present in my time.

  Owen and I whisper at the same time, “The Indian graveyard.”

  Except the Indian in this graveyard is very much alive. As is the mountain lion she’s staring down.

  20

  “What in tarnation is an Injun doing on my mountain?” Boone asks.

  His indignation annoys me, in part because Adel isn’t his mountain in any time, and if anyone has a right to be here, it’s the Cherokee nation, who lived in Appalachia for thousands of years before being forced to follow the Trail of Tears westward. At the same time, I understand his confusion. There hasn’t been an official Cherokee tribe in Kentucky since the early 1800s.

  We’ve jumped back another sixty years. Maybe more. The question of when we are needs to wait, and honestly, I’m not sure it’s really important. The mystery isn’t when we are, but how the hell we’re getting here, and how we can undo it.

  The Indian woman is dressed in a wraparound deer-skin skirt and a poncho-style blouse. Her straight, black hair hangs to her shoulders, decorated by a single braid hanging over her forehead, interlaced with feathers. Moccasins cover her feet. In some ways, she’s what I imagined a Cherokee woman to look like, but she’s more real and less stereotype. Her brown eyes burn with fearless defiance of the cat’s superiority, despite the fact that she is armed only with a hatchet.

  “We need to help her,” my father says, his hand on my shoulder. Owen stands beside him, wide-eyed at the scene playing out in the location we both remember as the Indian graveyard.

  “Intend to,” I say, raising the Winchester, feeling right at home looking down its sights.

  I line up the cat, slip my finger around the trigger and…the cat bolts toward the woman. Hitting a moving target isn’t easy. I can do it, but it takes time to lead the target and account for vertical motion. With only twenty feet between the pair, I don’t have time to adjust and fire without the risk of putting a bullet in the woman.

  But it’s not necessary. The cat leaps, paws spread wide, claws extended. The woman dives to the side, swiping her hatchet out. She strikes the cat, drawing blood.

  It’s hardly enough to kill the beast, but the wound makes it think twice. The dance between predator and prey is always a matter of life and death, but it’s not always the prey who dies. A good kick from a zebra can crush a lion’s skull. A buck can put an antler through the eye of a grizzly. Even a bite from a frenzied rabbit could get infected and lead to death. That’s part of why predators focus on the sick and the weak. They’re not only easier prey, they’re also safer.

  The cat holds its ground, hissing at the woman while testing its weight on the now bleeding forelimb. Weight tested, the cat decides it’s hungry enough—because I kept it from eating the dead bodies, and apparently, it never ran into Arthur. I track it with the rifle, but the woman is between us.

  The Cherokee woman is clearly a skilled fighter. This might not even be her first time squaring off with a big cat. But that doesn’t mean she’s going to win this fight, and I haven’t seen a mountain lion bigger than this one, though I suppose they’re probably quite common in this time period. At least in the Appalachians. Maybe. We could be in the 1700s or the 500s. Life for the American Indians was largely unchanged for thousands of years before European colonizers—my ancestors—wreaked havoc on the land and its people. I’d like to think I’d make different choices than they did, that I wouldn’t be party to genocide in the name of God, but being from the twenty-first century has allowed me to see the world with different eyes.

  I raise the rifle skyward and squeeze the trigger. Once again, the cat flinches, snaps its eyes toward me, and glares. Then
it bolts, tail snapping as it vaults out of sight.

  “Stay here,” I tell the others, but I’m mostly concerned with the first impression Boone might make. I step into the clearing as the woman spins around to see who fired the shot. She’s immediately suspicious of me, maintaining her defensive stance and wielding the hatchet.

  I hold the rifle out to the side and raise my other hand, open palm in a universal, ‘I mean you no harm,’ gesture. She doesn’t react, so I step closer. “Are you hurt?”

  She squints at me, but I can’t tell if she’s sizing up my character or my physical prowess.

  “You’re safe. I won’t harm you.” I stop ten feet away, standing in the center of the clearing, surrounded by foot-tall grass that must have sprung up the moment the winter fled. The air fills with the sound of birds and the scent of some fresh-blooming spring flowers.

  My guard drops, and it’s the moment the woman has been waiting for. She lunges forward, swinging hard with the hatchet, aiming for the center of my forehead.

  I swing the rifle up, gripping it in both hands just in time to block the hatchet from splitting my head in two. The impact is harder than I was ready for, but my defense does the trick.

  “Stop,” I tell her, but I’ve left myself exposed, and she takes advantage of it.

  Her kick to my gut is solid and well executed, spilling me back. While she caught me off guard, I do the same by yanking my hands up as I fall. The combined force of my fall and pull is enough to wrench the hatchet from her hands and fling it behind me.

  I drop to one knee, sucking in a deep breath. The woman takes an aggressive step toward me, but she stops when I turn the rifle on her.

  She knows what it is, which narrows down the time period to sometime between the late 1600s to early 1800s.

  “Please,” I say. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “All you know is hurt,” she says, her command of English perfect, her accent all Cherokee.

  By ‘you,’ I understand she means Europeans. Her disdain makes me think we’re closer to the early 1800s, when the natives were forced from their lands. But that’s probably a few years off, or she wouldn’t be here.

  “I saved you,” I tell her, motioning to where the lion fled.

  “I did not need saving.”

  She’s as obstinate as she is powerful. She reaches behind her back and draws a three-inch blade.

  “Seriously?” I say, but I regret my tone. I don’t know what this woman has endured at the hands of men who look like me. It’s possible she’s the last of her people. She might be here to mourn the passing of some relative slain by white men.

  Her reply is a snarl, then a lunge. When I don’t shoot her, a confident grin spreads across her face.

  She thinks I’m out of ammunition.

  “I got ’er!” I turn toward the sound of Boone’s voice, knowing it leaves me open to attack, but that the woman will have to push past the rifle to put her knife in my side. It won’t be much warning, but it should be enough.

  When I see Boone cock back the woman’s hatchet and heave it toward her, I forget all about her. “No!” I shout, swinging the Winchester out and knocking the small ax to the ground.

  I don’t have three inches of metal sticking into me, so I assume saving her life—again—made an impression. When I turn around, she’s holding her ground, but looks more confused than angry.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” I say, and I drop the rifle at my feet. Then I hitch a thumb toward Boone who looks even more confused than the woman—because why wouldn’t you just kill a stranger on sight?—and I say, “Him, I want to hurt.”

  A slight grin says I’m making progress. She says, “Tell your friends to come out.”

  “So we’re straight,” I say, once again motioning to Boone. “He is not my friend.”

  “Why is he with you?”

  “It’s complicated.” When I see that’s not nearly answer enough, I add. “His men, of which there are many—” She scans the forest behind me. “They’re not with us. Some of them are hunting down my actual friends, who, like me, don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  “Even though you are capable of it?”

  I’m not sure if she is referring to my skill as a fighter, or the fact that I have a rifle. Either way, anything other than honesty isn’t going to fly with this woman, who I’m darn sure is a good judge of character. “Very capable.”

  Her smile spreads a little further. “I have known men like you.” She waits for me to react with a smile of my own, then she adds, “All died violently.”

  I don’t ask why. I suspect it’s a wound not worth picking at. Not right now, anyway. Instead, I agree with her, but include her. She’s as much a fighter as anyone I’ve known. “That’s often how things end for people like us.”

  She nods at the strange compliment, and I motion for my father and Owen to join us. “Come on out.”

  The pair slip out of the woods. My father glares at Boone, aiming the shotgun toward him and motioning for the man to join us. Boone is far from our ally, but since experiencing the time shift, and learning when we’re from, I haven’t sensed any hostility from him. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to kick his ass and send him on his way, but for now, I need him to diffuse the situation with his men…if we can ever find them.

  I offer my hand, wondering if people in this time period shake hands in greeting. “I’m…” Shit…what name did I give my father? I can’t remember the first name, so I just use the last name. “Dearborn.”

  She takes my hand in hers, giving it a curt shake. “Inola,” she says and then she translates. “Black Fox.”

  “You are all dressed strange. Are you hunters?” she asks.

  “Not exactly,” I tell her. “I was a soldier, long ago. Now…honestly, now I’m just lost.”

  She looks from me to my father and then to Owen. Her eyes flash with recognition. “You are family?” She motions between my father and me. “Brothers?”

  I shake my head and attempt to redirect the conversation. I’m sure it will come up. My father already suspects. I can see it in the way he looks at me. But there are enough problems to deal with and enough mysteries to solve right now. “This is Owen,” I say, pointing to my young self, and then to my father. “And this is William, his father.” Then to Inola. “Are you a hunter?”

  “Trader.” She closes her eyes and gives her head a shake. “Used to be. Now, like most of my people, I am saying goodbye before leaving our ancestral lands.”

  A little bit closer to the Trail of Tears than I thought.

  “Payin’ respects to who?” Boone asks. “This really an Injun graveyard?”

  Owen tugs on my father’s arm. “Did you know this was a real Indian graveyard?”

  My father just looks stunned by everything, slowly shaking his head.

  Inola points to a mound of earth at the center of the clearing that is not there in my time, or in my father’s time. It’s fourteen feet long, four feet tall, and five across. A little large for a burial mound…unless it’s a whole family, which I suppose could be the case given the time period.

  “Tsul’Kalu,” she says.

  “Is that a relative?” my father asks.

  Inola’s face screws up like even we should recognize Tsul’Kalu’s name. When none of us shows any hint of understanding, she grunts in frustration, or maybe disgust, muttering something in her native language before explaining. “Tsul’Kalu. God of the hunt.”

  “A god is buried on my mountain?” Boone says, sounding amused and intrigued.

  “Adelvdiyi belongs to no man,” Inola says.

  “Then who does it belong to?” Boone asks, expecting his question to somehow stump her.

  In answer, she turns her head toward the burial mound.

  21

  I step closer to the massive burial mound, which probably contains a tall man who convinced the locals he was a god—which still happens in the modern world. My father told me stories about the Indian bu
rial ground, about how the spirits of long-since-dead natives walked the forest at night. I’m pretty sure the stories were intended to keep me from wandering off in the woods alone. Maybe I’ll ask him. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that Inola’s parents and grandparents conjured similar tales to keep their children out of the endless forest.

  But Inola is no child. Best guess, she’s over thirty. While her tan face is free of wrinkles, there are a few strands of gray on her head, betraying her age. That she thinks a god’s remains lies in the dirt means the Cherokee nation as a whole believes the legend of this site.

  If you ask me, it’s just a mound of dirt covered in grass. That it’s missing in my time is a bit odd, but its presence here is just another story. Over the years, Adel has seen its fair share of tall tales, though I am coming to realize that most of them are true, and few of them were exaggerations. The mountain really has seen its fair share of historical drama, a good portion of which we’ve managed to whisk away into the past.

  Layers of history co-exist on this mountain now, and eventually, I fear it’s going to get a little overcrowded. I hadn’t noticed before, but the forest is absolutely brimming with bird songs. Some I don’t recognize. They must be from species that went extinct before the 1980s. Where there was an occasional call in my time, there is now a chorus of chirps, as generations of birds gather together and enjoy the sudden spring. How many other populations are growing with each jump? How many predators? How many people? We’ve come across a lot of people already. Could there be more? Will they be dangerous like Chafin and Boone, or kind like my father and, I think, Inola?

  When I peel my eyes away from the burial mound and turn to Inola, I notice her arm is covered in streaks of blood. Seems the cat managed to cut her as well. “You’re hurt.”

  She looks at the scratch and shrugs.

  “That needs to be cleaned and dressed,” my father says, reaching out for her arm. She yanks her arm out of reach, tensing. My father raises his open hands. “I only mean to help. It could get infected.” He turns to Owen. “The first aid kit.”