Death Thieves (6 page)

I jumped to my feet and ran.

Branches tangled in my hair and tore at Winter’s shirt as I shoved my way through the trees. Tag crashed through the trees after me. I tried to look down at the little screen on the time-travel thing and almost tripped.

Tag’s feet thumping behind me sounded closer. He’d catch me within minutes if I didn’t get this thing to work. An exact time and date could be a later concern; anything different from being stuck in 2058 with a kidnapper would be good. I pushed my finger against the screen. Nothing happened.

“Stupid!” I pushed it again, swirling my finger over the screen in the hopes it would change something. Nothing happened.

“Stupid! Stupid!” And with these words I went down, falling face first into the dried out leaves and dark soil. I spat out the dirt stuck on my lips and tongue. My fingers tapped at the screen desperately trying to make
anything
happen.

Tag’s face appeared through the underbrush. I army crawled while continuing to swipe my fingers against the screen. “Please, get me outta here!” The tugging-at-my-gut feeling came at exactly the same instant hands grabbed at my legs. The world spun as I kicked to make Tag let go. “Leave me alone!” I screamed. The words rolled around the bowl of the swirling funnel, echoing back to my ears again and again.

But he didn’t let go. When the world slowed to the speed of a merry-go-round, I’d grown too tired to fight him. My body felt drained and weakened with no food and little water for at least a day.
Had it been a day?
Persephone would’ve scoffed at my weakness.

Tag climbed over me as soon as the world stopped and grabbed the time-travel device. He was crazy if he thought I’d give up the device that easily. I rolled again, knocking him off balance and over to the side of me, though he still clung to a strap of the time thing. I moved to press the screen again, but stopped when my brain finally registered the world around me. We sat in a pile of
ashes
. Ash fell from the sky like snow. I would have thought it
was
snow except the smothering heat indicated otherwise. Mount Rainier was on fire.

Confused, I sat up. “Where are we?”

Tag shook his head, making the ash fall off his hair, only to be immediately replaced by more. “I’d tell you, but you won’t let go of the Orbital.” His low voice could have been a shout for all the anger it possessed.

“You won’t let go, either.” I countered.

“That’s because it’s mine. Your entire plan is to take the Orbital and leave me stranded in an unspecified time and space. I
can
not and
will
not allow that.”

As if to punctuate his declaration, the earth shuddered beneath us. Old leaves shivered off the tree branches. Impulsively, I reached out and grabbed Tag around the neck, trying to hold on to anything more stable than I felt. With my motion I yanked his hand, still holding on to the strap, back behind his head. Our faces were so close, our noses almost touched. It seemed almost like the early stages of a kiss, except, in my fear, the only thoughts in my head were ones of panic. When the shaking stopped, he looked down at me as though he might kiss me. He must’ve seen my look of revulsion because he gave himself a violent shake and shoved me away. In my moment of surprise, he nearly pulled the time device out of my grip.
Idiot
. I’d had the upper hand before, now I was stuck clinging to a corner.

He tugged sharply once more and reclaimed possession of his Orbital.

“You . . . you . . . absolute crackhead! I need to go home!” I coughed, inhaling a few flakes when drawing a deep breath to yell at him further. I lunged for Tag. He dodged and pivoted from my reach sending out puffs of ash from under his feet.

“None of the others were this difficult!” he shouted as I lunged again.

“Others? You’re a serial kidnapper?” I grunted, putting my arm over my mouth to keep from inhaling more ash. My fingers grazed over his jacket as he danced out of my way.

“I thought you wanted to know where we are. I can’t look if you’re attacking me.”

“I don’t care where we are. I just want to go home!” We circled each other, kicking up ash with more falling over us—each of us covering our mouths with our shirtsleeves. The exertion made the unbearably hot environment a lot worse. Sweat slicked between my shoulder blades sticking Winter’s shirt and my tank top to my back. The fat flakes of ash stuck to my face, where sweat streamed down the sides. I pulled Winter’s shirt as far as I could over my mouth to keep from inhaling any of the falling debris, but the shirt’s narrow neck didn’t offer much for protection.

The future boy, Tag, didn’t fare much better. He looked gruesome with the gray flakes hanging on his face like mottled skin. I advanced at the same time the earth shuddered under our feet.

The pitching ground knocked both of us to our knees—well, Tag to his knees, me to my backside. Boulders and rocks cascaded down the sides of the mountains, thundering as they smashed into one another and broke apart into smaller pieces. It came to the point that I didn’t know which was more horrifying, the shaking that felt like I was sitting on a trampoline while dozens of other people jumped around me or the noise of the mountain breaking apart and crashing all around me. When it stopped, I breathed into the sleeve of Winter’s shirt and tried not to cry.

“Summer?” Tag’s frown creased the ash on his face into wrinkles. He looked from the Orbital to the ground under us, and then up to the top of Mount Rainier, though its top was obscured by the falling ash and smoke.

Would forest firefighters be nearby? Could I try to run away again and hope that someone close battled the cause of all this smoke? I didn’t have the energy to run. Maybe I’d be better off burning up in a blaze of flame. The chances of getting the Orbital back again seemed too dismal to try to calculate.

“Summer!”

“What?” I mumbled through my shirtsleeve.

“We landed in July 2102!” He looked back toward Mount Rainier’s peak.

“So what,” I mumbled and shifted my body so I didn’t have to see him.

He jumped to his feet, his steps soft thuds in the ashes as he positioned himself directly in front of me. “Mount Rainier blows its top off this month! I was only seven when it happened, but I wouldn’t ever forget the date. All civilization was nearly lost after that. That was the year without summer!”

“Yeah. A year without me really is a tragedy.”

His eyes narrowed, the fat flakes in his eyelashes making him look as though he’d closed them altogether. He ignored my joke. “It’s a volcanic winter. When a volcano erupts, it changes the atmosphere. The global cooling that followed caused famine throughout half the world. The food shortage crisis killed a third of the population. A
third
! People died, so have some respect. My sister got so hungry, she—” He cut off, gaping at me in horror. “You landed us in the middle of a volcanic eruption! The greatest disaster known in my time!”

I shrugged. “I care? You don’t like it? Then blink us outta here, future boy. I’m done trying to be nice to you.”

“Right. Because you’ve been so charming up to now.” He tapped on the screen of his little time-warp machine “I
would
jump us out, but you broke it!”

My head snapped up. “What?”

“You broke it! And we have no idea what stage the eruption is in. How many earthquakes are left? Has the landslide already occurred? How will we get water and oxygen?” He ticked off these points on his fingers and waved them in my face.

I swiped his hand away. “Well, fix it!”

“Do I look like I have a lab with tools on me?” He threw his arms in the air, coughing with his words.

“You look like an idiot!” I stood up, my legs shaky from lack of nutrition and decent oxygen. “Give me that stupid time-warp thing!” I snatched it from his grasp.

It must’ve really been broken or there was no way he’d have let me take it.

“It’s an Orbital.”

His correction of what to call the thing fueled my fury. “If you would have just taken me home, none of this would have happened,” I muttered, trying to breathe through my sleeve and look at the time-warp thing at the same time. It didn’t look broken. It looked exactly like it did before—with the exception that instead of flashing numbers and words on the screen, the screen remained blank.

“Did you turn it on?” I asked him.

He took his turn to glare at me. “Of course I turned it on. You’re as helpful as texup.” He snatched the time-warp thing back and fiddled with it for several moments while I turned to take in the world around me. My mountain . . . erupting? How unlikely it seemed that Mount Rainier would explode. We’d had drills at school, so that we’d all run to higher ground due to the river of mud, melted snow, and lava that would bury the town of Orting. Aunt Theresa lived on a high hill overlooking the town, which gave me some comfort when I worried about eruptions after the drills. As we grew older, it became apparent to all of us that running might not do any of us any good if the eruption and subsequent mud slide took us by surprise. But the drills made the administration feel like they were taking an active part in our protection. What good would Nathan’s wild reclamation project mean if it were just going to be buried over with volcanic debris?

“I hope Nathan’s work in the cave survives this.” I uttered my thoughts out loud and instantly wanted to call them back.

Tag looked up from his precious Orbital long enough to do a raspberry with his lips, his mouth looking funny and odd, exactly like a red raspberry against the ash gray face. “I do not understand that at all.”

“Understand what?”

“You go to paint rock walls in a cave to prove that painting rock walls in a cave is wrong? What’s the difference between your graffiti and the graffiti of the generations who came before you? Nothing. That’s what.” He coughed rather violently before yanking off his backpack and finding the thin blanket I’d used before. He wrapped the blanket around his head like a turban, and then used the tail end to cover his mouth. “This is big enough for us to share if you would like.” I considered his offering before shaking my head and continuing the use of my shirtsleeve. He slipped his pack on his shoulders.

“Nathan wanted to improve the world around him. His “graffiti” returned the cave to its natural state so when people came down, they could see the stone in their original, natural colors.”

“And how does he know what they were originally? Did he have photos with him so he could replicate it?” He glanced up, the challenge evident in his eyes.

“You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, you know.” My throat caught at the word dead.
Nathan dead?
My stomach roiled with nausea again. “Especially when you could have done something to save him. By not saving him, that almost makes you a murderer.”

“Murderer? By not pulling him from that wreck, I was being merciful. He was already tainted. He had a level one infection. By allowing history to play its part, I saved you both from a hellish future of disease.”

“Oh yeah, because
this
future is so neat!” I turned in a circle motioning to the ash falling like a quiet snowfall around us.

“This future is
your
fault, not mine.” He shrugged and went back to his Orbital. I stomped a few feet away, not going too far for fear he might zap away with his time-warp thing and I’d be left here in the eerie silence of falling ash.

“I can force it to work for a few seconds at a time. I think the volcanic eruption is somehow interfering with the electrics. But I don’t know what would happen if we tried to jump and it shut off in the middle of a jump.”

“What do you think would happen?”

His eyes blinked away the ash building up on his lashes. “Bad things.”

I didn’t press him to give better detail on what bad things might be.

He muttered through his makeshift scarf, and paced around a little while staring at the Orbital thing.

The silence shattered with the ground rumbling under my feet. It felt nothing like the earthquake we’d experienced before. It was more like the grumbling from heavy machinery driving down the road. It grew and with horror, I whirled around. “Tag—Oh no!” Behind us, farther up on the slopes, it sounded as though a monster had taken a fall and was now careening down the mountainside, collecting debris, trees, and boulders as it flew past. I’d been to enough drills on what to do should Mount Rainier ever pop. I knew what that sound meant even without the air siren and the teachers leading us out of the school.

That sound meant run.

I tapped his arm as I flew past him. “Mud slide!” The rumbling had grown loud enough to drown out my yell. Tag seemed to be figuring it out without my instruction as he’d started running, too. We ran for all our lives were worth.

Tag twisted his head to look back. I didn’t look back. Those drills had taught me to head for higher ground, and we were running down. Going against all instinct, and wondering how I moved at all in my weakened condition, I changed direction and ran to the side—up the steep embankment—up to where I might find myself out of the reach of the wave of mud and debris.

Once up a good distance, I chanced looking toward where the mud slide swallowed every other noise in the canyon. My breathing through the sleeve of my shirt made it impossible to fill my lungs properly. My lungs felt like they were on fire. Things moved along with us through the haze of the smoke and ash—animals, most likely. Tag grabbed me around the waist and tucked his head into my shoulder.

“What are you doing?” I asked. He’d said the thing was broken and that if we jumped while it had a short in it, bad things could happen.

Tag didn’t answer me.

The wall of mud shoved its way to the Puget Sound. We hadn’t climbed nearly high enough. The time to run had been spent. “We’re going to die!”

As I braced myself for impact, the tug pulled at my middle and the wall of mud swirled away around me only an instant before it should have slammed into me.

When the world stopped spinning, I refused to open my eyes to look, but I could taste the sweet oxygen as it ran pure and clean into my lungs. Tag hugged me tight, laughed, and kept shouting the words, “We’re alive!” When he released me, I couldn’t move. My body ached, my lungs ached, my eyes burned.