Outland (World-Lines Book 1) (26 page)

Aug 20              Matt

“Yep. This is it.” Bill looked at the GPS display. He turned to Matt, who was sitting in his pickup with the engine idling. “Let’s set up.”

Show time.
Matt signaled to his passengers, turned off the engine, and everyone piled out of the truck.

They unloaded the truck gate and the portal generator and set everything up.

Meanwhile, Bill walked around with the pole-cam, watching the video feed. In a minute or so, he stopped. “This is inside the rental office right here. Ground level is close enough. We can open up here.”

They assembled the truck gate, moved it into position, and Bill powered up the portal. There was the usual blurring, then they saw the inside of the Home Depot rental office. Bill walked around and looked at the other side of the gate, which showed the inside of the office in the opposite direction. He grinned and shook his head. “That is
so
cool!”

They’d previously discussed strategy and duties. It took less than fifteen minutes to pull everything through the gate. People returned through the gate, laden down with equipment.

On the Outland side, Matt watched people pop out of the gate from both sides, walking in opposite directions.
That’s just wrong. It’s actually
making me dizzy.

Finally, they were done. They shut down the gate, covered all of the plundered equipment with tarps, and loaded the portal hardware back onto the truck.

“This is going to take forever,” Matt commented. “We’re looking at about eight trips. And at the speed I’ll have to drive, it’ll be a half day per trip.”

One of the guys on the team walked around to the back of the pickup. “You know you have a trailer hitch on your truck, right?” he said. “Doesn’t Home Depot sell trailers?”

There was a moment of frozen, indignant silence shared by everyone, then the sound of multiple palms striking foreheads. “Right,” Matt said. “Let’s see if we can find one.” Off came the portal hardware, and the search began.

Richard would be happy to know he’s not the only
one who feels like a moron some days,
Matt thought.
I guess none of us is an expert at this.

Aug 21              Frankie

Frankie stopped to wipe the sweat from his face. Trish grinned at him and said, “Having trouble, fresh meat?”

Frankie grinned back. He liked Trish. She had a take-no-prisoners style and was enormously self-reliant.
I pity the fool who tries to push her around.

Frankie admitted to himself that if his interests had leaned in that direction, she’d be the direction he would lean. On the other hand, Alex over there was obviously leaning that way. The poor sap was going to blow it if he didn’t back off a bit. Frankie made a promise to himself to have a quiet word with Alex.
Gotta do what you can to help out young love.

They’d been putting up six-foot fencing for a couple of days now. The first group used post-hole diggers to lay out the fence line. Another group put the posts in. A third group laid on the welded wire fence. And Frankie’s group was putting up the top row of barbed wire. Frankie was pretty sure he had more holes in him than a pin-cushion by now. A very sweaty
pin-cushion. The constant light wind helped of course, but this was still far more physical labor than he was used to. Trish and Alex didn’t seem bothered at all. Their fourth member, Jerry, was sweating a bit; but unlike Frankie, he wasn’t breathing hard yet.

Frankie stretched a bit and turned to Trish. “Anything you can do, I can do better, bi-atch.” She laughed at him, which made Alex give him a nasty look, and they got back to work.

Aug 23

Joaquin

Al and Joaquin sped down the side of the road, dodging back and forth from pavement to shoulder as necessary to get around the abandoned vehicles. Joaquin was sweating profusely. Trying to keep up with Al on a motorbike was nerve-wracking.
There’s a reason they call him crazy.
Al wouldn’t slow down an iota for Joaquin, but he would stop occasionally to wait if Joaquin got too far behind. When that happened, there’d always be some comment about Joaquin’s skill. Or lack of it.

The two were on a tour of the farming communities around Lincoln, looking for supplies and equipment that would help set up an agricultural base in Rivendell. So far, all they had found were abandoned farmhouses and dead livestock. And worse. Joaquin’s eyes teared up for a moment, recalling some of the scenes that he’d never be able to un-see.

Now, up ahead, Al had turned down another long driveway. Joaquin followed at a saner pace. As he turned the corner, he glanced at the mailbox, labeled ‘Wildman’.

They got to the front of the farmhouse, killed their engines and dismounted. As Joaquin placed his helmet over his bike’s handle, he heard a soft
click
. Turning to the sound, he found himself starting down the business end of a rifle, with an angry-looking man at the other end.

“Get back on the bikes and get off my property,” the man said. Joaquin could see a woman peeking out from behind some curtains.

“Sir, we are not looters. We’re not a threat. We’re just—”

“Not interested, sonny. You’ve got five seconds to get moving.”

“Mr. Wildman, you are making a mistake. This isn’t—”

There was a muzzle flash and a bullet buried itself at Joaquin’s feet.

“Not as big a mistake as you are going to be making if you don’t get moving.”

Joaquin sighed. He motioned to Al. They donned their helmets, started the bikes, and drove towards the end of the driveway. Joaquin’s shoulder-blades itched the whole way, wondering if the man would suddenly decide five seconds was up.

Once they got to the end of the drive, they stopped to discuss the situation.

“Dude,” Al said. “Just move on. If he don’t want us, we don’t want him.”

“We’ve been at this for two days, Al. That’s the first person we’ve seen— alive, anyway.” Joaquin grimaced. “He might be the only
one in a thousand square miles. I think we have to at least give Joseph the heads-up.”

Al looked away without reply. Taking this as agreement, Joaquin pulled out the radio and prepared to report.

***

“He’s a wheat farmer, all right,” Joseph said, turning off the pole-cam. “Lots of stock seed for next year, lots of equipment. Obviously
knows what he’s doing. We can’t just walk away.”

“We aren’t about to become looters, are we?” Joaquin was not happy about the idea.

Joseph made a face. “I’m not suggesting we force him to do anything, or steal anything. But we have to get past his
circling the wagons
mindset.”

Joseph turned to the rest of his crew. “This is why I wanted to have two gates. Here’s what we’re going to do…”

***

Samuel

Samuel Wildman sat with his family at the dinner table, eating what he supposed they should still refer to as a meal. These days, anything edible was something to be thankful for.

He looked at the meager pickings on the table and worried. He was worrying a lot lately. Since the eruption and the ash, there had been very little to the good. Maggie was as strong as ever, resourceful as ever, and his heart swelled with love— and worry— as she moved about the kitchen. The two boys were holding up well too. There’d been very little complaining and he’d rarely had to prompt them to pull their weight since the eruption. He felt justified to be so proud of them.

Samuel wondered, for the thousandth time, if he’d signed their death warrants by insisting on staying put. Oh, it was easy to be logical and rational, to point to the clogged highways and dead vehicles. But you couldn’t watch your family eating what would have been thrown in the compost in an earlier time and not wonder.

Now, today, those kids on motorcycles. Had he made a mistake there too? Admittedly, the idea of looters on motorcycles was a little ludicrous. What were they going to do, strap their loot to the back seat? But they were looters or they were guests, and there was precious little of hospitality to give.

As Samuel sat mulling over his situation, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye.

***

The crew had carefully scouted out the layout of the house using the pole-cam, and had set the two six-foot gates so that they could come at the kitchen from different directions. They counted down from three, then activated the gates and rushed through in as quick and coordinated a fashion as a bunch of amateurs could manage.

As hoped, they caught the family completely by surprise. And why not? Who plans for intruders entering your house from another dimension? Before anyone could react, four men with shotguns were covering them.

The woman at the table, presumably Mrs. Wildman, looked terrified and pleaded, “Please don’t hurt us. You can have whatever you want.”

Joseph noted from Mr. Wildman’s expression that he didn’t agree with that last part.

“Ma’am, we are absolutely
not here to hurt you. These guns are to make sure Mr. Wildman doesn’t hurt
us.
He seems to be pretty free with the bullets.”

“So you’ll kill me, then?” Mr. Wildman glared at Joseph defiantly.

“If you go for a gun, I’ll have to try to wing you,” Joseph replied.

“Sonny.” Mr. Wildman briefly showed a ghost of a smile. “That’s a shotgun. At this range, there would be no
winging.
”

Joseph replied, “Then please don’t force the issue, sir. I’m not that good of a shot anyway.”

At that moment, one of the two boys at the table got a clear look at one of the gates. “Wow! Look at that!” he pointed at the apparition.

All heads at the table turned. At the end of the hall, a sunlit section of prairie showed through an elliptical hole in the air.

Mr. Wildman’s eyes widened and for the first time, he looked uncertain.

Recovering quickly, he looked back at Joseph. “Okay, sonny, maybe you could explain yourself, since you’re not looking to kill us.”

Joseph relaxed a little. “Okay, sir, here it is. We’re UNL students— most of us, anyway. We have a gateway to another Earth, one where Yellowstone didn’t just erupt. And one without people. Well, until we got there, anyway.”

Joseph paused to smile at the family. The woman looked a little less fearful. The boys were hanging onto his every word, eyes wide.

“Anyway, we’re trying to build a viable colony there, at least until this side becomes livable again. And one of the things we need most is agriculture.”

Mr. Wildman’s face clouded up. “So you’re taking my supplies and equipment.”

“No, sir, what we really
need is you.”

Mr. Wildman sat back with an expression of surprise. Joseph continued. “Equipment and stock seed are useful, of course. The aggie students have a pretty good idea of what to do with them, and a lot of us grew up on farms. But we don’t have someone with decades of experience doing this.” Joseph looked significantly at Mr. Wildman.

Wildman’s mouth twitched, and Joseph knew that despite the man’s determination to be unimpressed, Joseph had scored.

Wildman sat silently for a few seconds. Then he asked, “So what’s the deal?”

Joseph lowered the shotgun, which he realized he’d still been brandishing. The other members of the crew were still on guard. “You and your family come to live in Rivendell…”

The two boys erupted into laughter, which their father cut off with a look.

Joseph smiled at them, sharing the Tolkien joke, and continued, “…and you show us how to grow crops. Especially
wheat.”

He said, in an aside to the woman, “We find we’re kind of missing bread.” This produced the first smile from Mrs. Wildman. Mr. Wildman saw that, and his expression softened.

“Okay. Who’s in charge?”

Joseph was perplexed for a moment. “No one. There’s a committee to organize things, but you’d be on the committee and in charge of agriculture. The whole thing.”

Wildman nodded slowly and stared at the gate for a few seconds. He motioned to it. “Show me.” He turned to his sons and said to one, “Ben, go get a shovel and bring it here.”

The boy looked at the gate, then at his father in supplication, plainly terrified that he might miss something while out of the room.

Wildman glared for a moment before relenting. “Get a shovel, and you can go through and bring it to me.” That had the desired effect. Ben was gone in a flash, but now the other boy was attempting to look piteous. Wildman just sighed and shook his head.

Joseph laughed, and motioned to the gate. Wildman got up and stepped through.

The sun was going down on Outland. Of course it was going down on Earth as well, but that only
resulted in darker and darker grays, shading to black. On Outland, the sky was shading into the deep, rich purple of early dusk. As usual, there was very little in the way of reds and oranges.

Wildman looked around, took a deep breath, then looked down. He gave the ground a few experimental scuffs, attempting to move some of the prairie grass.

At that moment, Ben barreled through the gate, partly tangled up with his brother. “You didn’t tell Marcus he could come through!” Ben announced triumphantly as he handed his father the shovel.

Ignoring the sibling rivalry, Wildman stuck the shovel in the soil and took a good chunk out. It took considerable effort to do so, as the prairie grass had roots up to a foot deep, and this soil had never been turned.

Wildman bent down, rubbed the soil between his fingers, smelled it, and stood up.

Joseph looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Good soil,” Wildman declared. “Let’s talk.”

***

It took considerable discussion to determine what needed to be moved, what could be left, and what
couldn’t
be brought. Several of the larger pieces of agricultural equipment were simply too big to fit through the truck gate. Wildman was less concerned than expected, however. He explained that growing food for a couple of hundred people required a far less intensive effort than keeping a farm profitable in the modern world.

Rather than travel at night, the scavenging crew was put up in the guest bedrooms. Joseph radioed the colony to advise them of the situation, and the crew enjoyed their first sleep on mattresses in weeks.

Everyone was up early the next day. The Wildmans packed some basic necessities. Joseph was careful to make it very clear that this wasn’t a one-way trip. They could come back to their farm any time, even to stay if they decided they didn’t like Rivendell. This last statement produced looks of astonished and indignant disbelief from the two boys.

The family was placed together in Matt’s pickup. Al and Joaquin rode their dirt bikes. The rest of the crew piled onto the ATVs.

“How many children in… in…, Riverdale?” Mrs Wildman—Maggie— asked.

The two boys tittered, and Marcus said in youthful high dudgeon, “It’s
Rivendell
, Mom. It’s where the elves lived.”

Maggie smiled at him and then looked at Matt.

“I think just under twenty now, with your two,” he replied. “We’ve picked up a number of families from around Lincoln over the last month, during exploration and scavenging operations.”

“Do you have plans for a school?” she asked. The boys groaned.

Matt shook his head. “No, I think it was brought up once at a committee meeting, but Richard rolled his eyes, which is the international symbol for ‘not now dammit.’ ” Matt chuckled.

“As it happens, I used to be a school teacher, so if and when you’re ready…?”

Matt looked at her in the rear-view mirror. “Well, it’s
we
, now, and you certainly
need to mention that to the committee. Just ignore the eye rolling.

“To be honest,” he continued, “I think you’ll get more attention from your comment about making bread from scratch.
Really
from scratch.”

Maggie laughed. “We’ll need some kind of grinding wheel.”

Matt waved a hand in dismissal. “Not a problem. Bill, our engineer, can build pretty much anything.”

“Is he like Scotty?” one of the boys asked.

Matt grinned at him. “He’d love that comparison.”

***

Samuel Wildman looked out over the colony. Cattle, sheep, and horses were grazing outside the fenced area, monitored by armed guards on ATVs. Fence lines were being extended. A longhouse was being constructed, and space was being cleared for more buildings. He could see what must be a runway off to one side of the town.

He thought of his two boys, who had gone tearing off to join a pickup soccer game, and Maggie, who was already discussing the making of bread with the youngsters in charge of meals. Samuel hadn’t seen her this happy in quite a while. He looked up at the blue sky and smiled.