One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  Kemp blinked. His eyes moved in his head. He moved his lips. Blood spilled in thick strands from his mouth and nostrils. Then his eyes were no longer seeing anything.

  “Dwayne,” Chaz said

  “We move for the cave,” Dwayne said. “While they’re still disoriented.”

  7

  Dr. Morris Tauber

  The flash of blue light was different than the sheet lightning that sometimes illuminated the valley floor in the hours just before dawn. The resounding boom of thunder echoed among the rocks atop the mesa and was a long time dying.

  Inside the refrigerated chamber, Tauber was watching, squinting into the thick white mist rolling from inside the Tube’s frame as the field opened again. Nothing emerged. It was two days since the team of four Rangers had walked into the array of frozen coils.

  Tauber stood for moments with his jaw clenched tight. An opening to a world he could only dream of. It was a world he populated with dark imaginings. The weeks of worry over the fate of Caroline were taking their toll.

  “Idiot,” he said. He moved quickly to the computer station, where he fine-tuned the power levels from the tower to the Tube. He moved the mouse to bring the feed into the parameters his calculations determined were the right ones for keeping the field open within the target time frame. Attuned correctly he could hold the door open for thirty minutes maximum.

  He opened the program for the wave transmitter and turned up the gain. The indicator showed that there was a recorded message coming through.

  It was Dwayne’s voice. It came from the speakers with a heavy background hiss.

  “Roenbach to Tauber. Mission time oh-one-twenty-two. We are at…formation of rock with a cave at its base…three klicks west/northwest…from…point…found an encampment of humans…bach out.”

  The transmission was faint and spotty, but Tauber could run it through audio programs later to clean it up. The message would also repeat for as long as the field was open. He’d put it all together later. As long as the transmitter kept sending fresh messages, there was hope.

  An hour and twenty minutes from their arrival? Had they found anything? He wondered what the mission time was now relative to this most recent field breach and was determined to work out some kind of program to correlate the time on the other end of the field as related to time in The Now with each field opening. Some kind of time check transmission that would update every sixty seconds.

  Back in the past, it could be an hour after Dwayne recorded the message. It could be days. It was maddening. Not for the first time did Tauber consider running into the Tube and going into the past. Just for a peek. Just for some confirmation. He could run back to the present, and no harm done. But if the field was not as stable as he thought. If it collapsed while he was in prehistoric Nevada or while he was in transit…

  No, he realized, he was useful to Caroline and the others on this side of the Tube. The men he hired were the best chance to bring his sister and her colleagues back alive. His job was here manning the controls and making sure Parviz and Quebat kept the reactor at maximum efficiency.

  The ambient noise made by the Tube faded to silence. The cloud of frozen gas thinned away to a light mist. The field was closed and would not reopen for two days when the reactor was at optimal output again. Tauber was alone with his fears again for forty-eight hours.

  The only thing for it was to stay busy. He had a full two days to worry and wasn’t going to start now. Work was the remedy. Work or fall into a blue, disabling depression. Caroline would never give up like that, Tauber told himself. He thought of making another call on the satellite phone but decided against that. No reason to let their benefactor know that the crisis continued. Tauber might need more favors, if there were still any favors to be had.

  Time and money. Money and time. One was limited in supply. The other was malleable and fluid but still beyond his ability to control with any real precision.

  He ran the last audio transmission from Roenbach through the filters and listened to it a dozen times over until he’d pieced it together. He wrote it down on a legal pad word for word.

  Roenbach to Tauber. Mission time oh-one-twenty-two. We are at a half-ring formation of rock with a cave at its base. I’d say three klicks west/northwest from insertion point. The cave opening is on the north face of the escarpment. We found an encampment of humans. Roenbach out.

  Humans? Was that possible? Were the chronometric readings off and the Tube opened a field in the wrong era? If there was an indigenous aboriginal population in the time frame that Caroline and the others entered, it would explain a lot. If only Dwayne left a more detailed message.

  Tauber thought again how his sister, Phillip, and Martin were no more than a forty-five-minute hike from where he stood, separated from safety by a gulf of millennia.

  He left the buried Tube chamber and stepped blinking in the blast of desert sun. Parviz and Quebat were exiting the reactor hut in their rad suits. Parviz turned the spigot on a faucet and began spraying Quebat with a garden hose. It was a rough and ready way of cleaning as much of the stray radiation off them as possible. Parviz, the more adept at English, constantly assured Tauber that this was adequate.

  “The rocks all around us give off as many rems as we are releasing,” Parviz would say as though Tauber were a child. “There are no worries. Hosing off a precaution only.”

  Tauber stood by waiting as they hosed each other down and then stripped off the Tyvek coveralls and dropped them into a steel oil drum. They were in boxers and t-shirts. Quebat’s shirt said What Happens In Vegas . . . Tauber didn’t approach until Parviz had ignited the discarded suits with lighter fluid and set them ablaze.

  He joined them as they walked to the community hut.

  “Any good lucks, Dr. Tauber?” Parviz said.

  He asked the same question each time.

  “Only a transmission from Mr. Roenbach,” Tauber said. “They made it through and gave me their current position. Well, relative to…” He trailed away. This whole enterprise lacked its own language. How to convey the complexities of dealing with two planes of time progressing at different rates in relation to one another?

  “They okay, then? So far so good, then?” Parviz said. That about summed it up.

  “Look, can I talk to you guys?” Tauber said. They stopped as one and regarded him. “It’s about the reactor,” he said.

  “Over breakfast, please?” Parviz said and held the door to the hut for Quebat.

  Tauber had re-heated coffee from the night before. Parviz set the table and Quebat prepared haleem, a nauseating mixture of lamb chunks and oatmeal. The two sat and adorned some kind of crusty flatbread with a thick smear of butter while their bowls cooled.

  “You had a question, Doctor?” Parviz said.

  He took a bite of the bread.

  “It’s about the re-charge time,” Tauber said and took a chair across from them. “I know we’ve discussed this before. But are you absolutely certain there’s no way to step up the process? Can we carve some time out of the forty-eight-hour regimen?”

  “The timetable was worked out by Caroline and I,” Parviz said. He took a sip of tea and continued. “Her requirements were sixty million volts at a sustained, controlled amperage of two hundred thousand amperes.”

  “Yes,” Tauber said.

  “Were you an engineer, I mean a nuclear engineer, you would understand better the balance we must achieve and how difficult it is to manage and maintain.”

  “Yes.”

  “The reactor is small, and it takes time to build to the levels necessary to activate the tower. Forty-eight hours is the very limit. The absolute minimum. As your own sister calculated based on my own findings. Pushing for higher levels in a shorter amount of time reduces the reactor’s life and refueling it is problematic to say the very least, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “We understand what hardship this is. Very anxiety-making, Doctor.”

  Quebat wiped his mouth with a
Hardee’s napkin and said something in Persian.

  “What was that?” Tauber said

  “Quebat said that you must take comfort in knowing that whatever is to happen has already occurred long ago,” Parviz said and reached for a jar of jam.

  IT TOOK TAUBER THE REST of the day to find the location detailed in Roenbach’s last transmission. He found it as the sun was setting. It was a half-circle of wind-smoothed volcanic rock with a cleft in the face at its center. It was the base of what was probably a volcanic remnant at one time, the edge of a rocky coastline. Now it was just a hump of granite and gypsum. The half-circle dotted with clumps of Joshua, brittlebush, yucca, and sage. This was it. This place is where Caroline and the others found themselves a thousand centuries past.

  The sun was sinking fast. Tauber parked the Land Rover with its rack of lights aimed at the cave opening. On hands and knees, he crawled over a hump of sand at the cave’s mouth and down a slope into the dark. A powerful handheld flash showed him the interior. The cave opened broader inside and was floored with fine silt blown in here over the millennia. Some of it probably washed in here by storm surges on the great inland sea that once lay just outside the cave opening. The sea emptied sometime in the distant past during one tectonic upheaval or another.

  The stark glare of his flashlight revealed no sign of any human habitation. That would be below him, under the silt. The floor of the cave as it was occupied by the people of the time could be twenty feet or more beneath his boot soles. He’d come back and dig. He wasn’t sure why but he knew he’d come back and dig. It was something to do other than waiting, a way of connecting to the events unseen and unknowable on the other end of the Tube.

  It wasn’t until Tauber was halfway back to the compound, driving under the light of a half moon, that he realized he’d just crawled on his belly into a dark desert cave that might have been inhabited by anything from a nest of angry rattlers to a coven of rabid bats or a pack of half-starved coyotes. He shivered at the wheel then smiled. It wasn’t fear. It was anticipation. He’d come back tomorrow. He’d have all day. Rather than simply wait for the Iranians to crank up the reactor he’d have something to do.

  The following day Tauber winched the backhoe onto its trailer and hitched it behind the Land Rover. The service road off the mesa ended at a dry wash, and this generally led west and north, so he followed that to within a quarter mile of the cave opening. From there he drove up the bank and slowly picked his way between rocks and around thick tangles of brush. It would be a long, hot walk back if he got stuck out here.

  He reached the cave and quickly had the backhoe off the trailer. He wasn’t terribly adept at operating it. Caroline and Phil had done most of the digging to cover the building that housed the Tube. But he soon had a handle on how the levers and pedals worked and spent the hottest part of the day pulling sand and rock away from the cave opening to make an easier passage.

  He created an entrance large enough to let the hoe’s arm inside the cave and carefully as he could Tauber scraped back at the fine silt within to reach the lower tiers of gravelly soil. Tauber got off the hoe and crouched to examine what he was digging up. Beneath the top layer of silt were strata of grainier stuff. He ran some though his fingers. Crushed shell and rounded stones. The sea had washed in here at some point in some long-ago storm surge.

  The cave was filling with shadows as the sun dropped behind the hump of rock above. He should have brought work lights. He could keep going under the glare of the headlamps on the backhoe, but that was asking for trouble. If he had an accident, Parviz and Quebat would have no idea where he was or even that he was missing until he’d died of thirst and been eaten by the local wildlife.

  He left the backhoe where it was and drove back in the dark to the compound. He could see the glow of the pole lamps atop the mesa from the wash and followed the light back to the service road. If there were no positive results when he re-opened the field in the morning, he’d come back and dig further. In its own way, it was a method of reaching out to Caroline that seemed more real to him right now than the promise of the Tube.

  The following day brought nothing from the Tube. Not a sound. Not a text. Not a hint of what was going on at the other end of the field.

  Another sullen breakfast with the Iranians. Tauber spooned some eggs around a plate until they were rubbery and cold.

  “Maybe you would enjoy going to Las Vegas along with us,” Parviz said. “See a show and get your mind from your troubles.”

  “Michael Buble,” Quebat said.

  “I have something I have to do,” Tauber said.

  “In desert?” Parviz said. “What is there to do for two days in desert? You were gone until after dark.”

  Tauber explained about the message from Roenbach, the half-circle rock face, and the cave. Soto voce, Parviz translated the parts for Quebat that the other man could not follow with his unsteady grasp of English.

  “We will help,” Parviz said. Quebat nodded.

  “Are you sure?” Tauber said.

  “Buble is there all month,” Parviz said.

  AT THE CAVE SITE, Parviz operated the digital wire locator they used when they were running cable from the reactor hut to the tower and back. It was a long electronic wand that used sound waves and a magnetic resonance field to show them what was beneath the ground—a high tech divining rod. It was three feet long with a broad plastic body. An arm at the top supported a digital monitor for visuals of what had been detected. There was also audio; a wide range of beeps, buzzes, and hums that alerted the user to the proximity of buried objects and their depth beneath the soil.

  The screen read nothing but a jumble of rocks beneath the scree of sand and shell, but it had an outside range of six feet. The three of them worked in the broiling sun using the backhoe. When the going got tight, they used shovels to remove more of the silt and gravel to allow the backhoe arm further access. None of them were archeologists. They were playing this by ear. The Iranians seemed to enjoy themselves. They even smiled a few times. Tauber assumed it was a relief to have a change from being cloistered with a reactor all day watching the clock. Even manual labor in the desert heat was a break for them.

  The sun was setting, so they set up bright work lights inside and out of the cave opening and kept scraping away at the silt until they had deepened the floor of the cave by ten feet. Quebat had made sandwiches for them. Lamb for the Iranians and tuna salad with lettuce for Tauber. There were cold beers on ice in a cooler and hard lemonade, a favorite of Quebat’s.

  Parviz got a ping on the locator and waved it over an area of the floor against the back wall of the cave. The digital image showed a blurry, speckled picture of what looked like human skeletal remains at a depth of four feet.

  On hands and knees, they scraped carefully at the layer of cool sand they’d uncovered. They used their fingers and the blades of trowels. It was past midnight, and there was a chill in the air by the time they found the first bones. A collection of ribs. They dug more gingerly now. It was Quebat who thought of using the melted ice from the cooler to wash the sand away from the bones. He poured the water on the cleared area and the hard packed grit began to melt away to reveal bones dried yellow and brown. There was evidence of three skeletons lying close together. They were surprisingly intact. The joints had long ago decayed and the structure collapsed but they were still in the rough arrangement that approximated how they must have looked in life. No animals had gotten to them. Perhaps they’d been buried in the silt in that long ago storm surge.

  Tauber recalled watching a special on TV about Pompeii and how the eruption of Vesuvius froze the dead in the postures in which they’d died. Perhaps the same had happened here in a sudden wash of silt and shell rather than volcanic ash.

  Parviz trained the lights on the remains and Tauber brushed sand from the brittle bones with his fingers. The sand was still discolored here from the flesh and sinew that had sloughed off the trio all those years past. It was a rusty brown
color.

  The skulls of two of the remains were broad. The teeth that remained in the jaws were unusual. They were pointed as though they’d been filed and burnished purple-black. The skeletons appeared to belong to adolescents except for the exceptionally wide scapula. Well under five feet tall. And the long bones showed signs of bumps and lesions. Tauber knew from his casual reading of archeological magazines that these were indications of a short, brutal life; typical of remains found from Neolithic cultures.

  Tauber lay on his belly in the glare of the lamps and spread sand away from the third skull of the skeleton that lay under the other two. This one was taller, the bones finer and unmarked. He whisked the sand from the visage of the skull. Its jaw was unhinged. These teeth were not filed. They were straight and unmarred and stained over time to a uniform color of dried corn.

  All but one tooth that was still a translucent white. The second molar that Caroline lost in college when a pizza crust at a sorority party turned out to have a small pebble in it.

  Tauber was gasping to breathe, and his vision blurred with tears as he brushed the last of the sand away from the skull to find a single round hole drilled in the left temple.

  The next day, two of the men he’d sent down the Tube returned from the past.

  8

  Mission Creep

  The village was ablaze. The satchel charge tossed into the bonfire threw flames over the huts. The rooftops of dry reeds turned the huts to pyres within seconds. The skinnies ran through the crazed shadow shooting and shrieking. Smoke hung thick in the air. It stung the eyes. It made it hard to breathe.

  Dwayne led the Rangers through an outer ring of huts toward the wide cave opening. The huts were arranged with no discernible pattern. The random arrangement didn’t allow for easy navigation.