Gods junk drawer, p.11
God's Junk Drawer, page 11
They glared at each other.
Parker stepped forward. Not between them, but close enough to get their attention. “It’s been thirteen years, Noah. Maybe your sister moved.”
“She wouldn’t leave the cave.”
“What if something happened to her?”
“Nothing happened to her.”
Olivia sighed. The only thing worse than backing up Logan would be backing up her nemesis, but if it ended all this stupid dick fighting . . . “It doesn’t matter. The smoke’s pretty much the same direction as your cave, isn’t it? We make a small detour, see what it is, and then keep going if we need to.”
“Not a small detour,” murmured Josh. “Maybe three miles out of our way.”
“Give or take a mile?”
He shrugged. “Maybe?”
Barnes stared out at the valley. At the flock of flying shapes. At the thin curls of smoke. At the faraway cliffs of the valley wall.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We should be able to go there and still be at the cave before night.” He turned and headed back down the rocky hill.
Parker started after him without a word. Kyle went two steps before he called out, “Wait, what?”
Barnes clapped his hands. “Like you said, there might be someone there. Let’s go.”
They all fell in line behind him again. Olivia’s boots slid a little bit on the downward slope but caught quickly. Sam wasn’t as lucky. Fell on his butt twice. Josh seemed to know what he was doing. His fancy boots slid, but he kept his balance and made each slip almost look deliberate.
The trees rose back up around them. Barnes reached the bottom of Lookout Hill, oriented himself, and headed into the forest. They all followed.
Olivia tugged at her borrowed shirt as they walked. She’d worn a few of Logan’s shirts before, so she’d accepted it this morning when he offered. She’d had it on for maybe half an hour when she realized she usually wasn’t wearing anything else when she wore them over at his place. Hell, most of the time they didn’t even stay on that long. After a few minutes of trying to make it sit right, she grabbed a handful of fabric, twisted it tight, and tied it into a knot.
A few quick steps carried her back up toward the front of the line. Away from Logan, closer to Barnes and Kyle. And Parker.
“I admit,” Barnes said, “some things seem a little off. Not quite how I remember them.”
“You were a little kid,” said Sam.
“Not that little,” Parker said. “I have a niece who’s ten. She’s sharp as hell.”
Barnes nodded. “Exactly. Thing is, I know the valley’s six miles across. I remember when we mapped it out.”
“Maybe it’s changed,” said Parker. “Landscapes change all the time. Erosion. Forest fires. Landslides.”
“He said it’s only been thirty years,” Olivia pointed out. “It’s not going to change this much in thirty years.”
“It could.”
“Meteor,” said Josh. “Or maybe a bomb? Maybe someone set off a nuke and we’re in the crater?”
Parker rolled her eyes. “And all this grew back in thirty years?”
“It could.”
“It hasn’t been thirty years,” Noah said. “Not here. It’s been thirteen.”
“Still could’ve been a meteor,” Josh insisted. “That’s what killed the dinosaurs.”
“Except the dinosaurs here aren’t dead,” said Sam.
“And what about everything that wasn’t destroyed?” asked Olivia. “The castle-tower-place or the monuments and the other landmarks.”
“What about them?”
“If there was a meteor or a bomb, how are they all standing? Did they grow back too?”
“Hey, did you forget the force field around the obelisk thing?”
“It only stopped people,” said Parker. “Or things people were holding. Wouldn’t stop a meteor.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t, but it fits what Noah’s told us.”
Josh shrugged. “Look, I’m just trying to brainstorm, okay? Isn’t that what scientists do?”
“You’re not a scientist.”
Kyle cleared his throat. “What are you, anyway, Mr. not-a-real-guide?”
Olivia glanced back, saw Josh fiddle with his Adam’s apple in a familiar way as he walked. Reaching to adjust a tie he wasn’t wearing. “I’m in marketing. Sales and marketing.”
A few groans passed through the group. “Are you a telemarketer?” asked Sam.
“What? No. I’m in charge of regional marketing and sales for a pharmaceutical start-up.”
“Start-ups have regional marketing?” asked Logan.
“Some do. Mine does.”
“So why are you out here?”
“I needed some time off. Job stress. All that.”
“You got fired,” said Kyle.
“No, I didn’t. It’s more like . . . unpaid leave. I needed to get out of town for a few days, so I filled in for Skip, like I told you. That’s it.”
“Why did you need to get out of town?” asked Sam.
“Some folks I work with . . .” Josh waved his hands in the air to erase his previous words. Found a new starting place. “Okay, I’m part of a speculative business venture, a sort of partnership. They’re the manufacturing side of it, I’m sales and marketing. I made a few risky decisions I thought would open up new revenue streams for us and the risk didn’t really pay off. I ended up losing all the product the manufacturing guys had entrusted me with. The head of manufacturing wasn’t happy. He forwarded his displeasure to the complaints department and there’s a conflict resolution team looking for me right now. The situation called for a certain cooldown period, Skip was sick, and so I covered for him and led all of you out into the middle of nowhere. Which seemed perfect at the time. And here we are.”
Olivia spun all the words around in her head. “When you say lost, you mean . . .”
“I was scammed.”
“Uh-huh. And when you say product, you’re taking about drugs?”
“In simple terms, yes.”
Sam tapped his fingers together. “So you’re a drug dealer on the run.”
“No!” Josh straightened up and wagged a finger in the air. “I am not a drug dealer. Drug dealers are guys who wait on street corners and do their business through car windows. I offer a designer pharmaceutical experience to a select, high-end clientele.”
“I see,” said Parker, looking back over her shoulder. “And how many designer pharmaceuticals were you scammed out of?”
Josh twisted his lips. Tried to look casual. “About seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth.”
“Holy shit!” gasped Kyle. “Seven hundred and fifty?”
“Yes.”
“Seven hundred and fifty thousand? You owe someone three-quarters of a million dollars?”
“Well, of course it sounds like a lot when you say it like that.” He frowned at their expressions. “It’s a tough business. Ever since they legalized pot, designer pharmaceuticals have taken a real hit.”
“Thanks for coming clean,” said Olivia.
Josh nodded. “No real point in keeping it secret, I guess.”
Another cat dashed through the trees, rustling leaves as it sprinted across the forest floor. A big black one. It ran alongside them for a moment, then veered off deeper into the trees.
“I think it was chasing something,” Olivia said.
“Anyway,” said Josh, “I dropped in to lay low with Skip for a week or three. He was sick, told me he had this gig, I offered to fill in for him. And then, you know, hike, fall through time and space, dinosaurs.”
“Is that why you’ve got the tuxedo jacket?”
He tugged the lapels. “It’s a casual business blazer. You want layers at night and this was the only coat I had handy.”
No one responded, and they walked in silence for a few minutes.
Olivia looked up through the trees. Every now and then she’d catch glimpses of the valley walls. On her left they were soft and blurry with distance, but they loomed on her right. She was pretty sure their path took them away from the massive cliffs, but they were so big it was hard to get “away” from them. She studied them whenever she could, wondering if she’d spot another jet or who knew what embedded in the wall.
“Hey,” she said. “Can you climb the valley walls? Is that a way out?”
Barnes glanced back at her. “No.”
Now Logan peered up through the trees. “No, you can’t or no, no one’s ever tried.”
“Beau tried climbing it once. The Castaway told her she’d get out of the valley, and she figured maybe that’s what they meant.”
“How far did she get?” asked Josh.
“Maybe six hundred and fifty feet. Close to halfway. Our dad was pissed. Didn’t realize until later how worried he must’ve been.”
Olivia looked over and up at the valley wall. “That’s kind of badass.”
“She is. It wasn’t a brutally hard climb, lots of ledges and handholds, but it was still over six hundred feet."
“Too exhausted to go further or . . . ?”
“Exhaustion. Too much wall. After a certain point she said it felt like the top never got any closer.”
“That’s a solid climb,” said Josh. “She did it with no equipment?”
“Yep. Just barehanded. Six hours up, three down.”
“Badass,” Olivia said again.
Kyle shrugged. “I used to do climbs like that.”
“What about the flying dinosaurs?” asked Parker. “Do they ever fly out?”
“No idea. Maybe? I’ve never seen one fly over the edge.”
Sam took a few quick steps, put himself alongside Barnes. “Do you think we might see any of the lizard people?”
“The what?”
“The lizard people. They’re nocturnal, right? Don’t like sunlight or bright light.”
Noah sighed. Kicked at an oversized pine cone. “There aren’t any lizard people. Whatshisname made them up for his book.”
“Oh.”
“You read that one, too?”
“I read all of them.”
“You didn’t think lizard men in ancient temples sounded a little odd?”
“I mean, yeah, I thought it was weird they didn’t show up in any other books, but he said he’d talked with you a lot when he was working with you at the, while you were at . . .”
“The psych hospital.”
“Yeah.”
Olivia’s stomach dropped. She glanced at Logan and Kyle. They both had the same expression, and she was pretty sure it was the one she had.
Barnes looked back at them. “It’s not like I spent six months in a straightjacket or anything. It was trauma care to get over my ‘kidnapping.’ Daily sessions to talk through stuff after I got back.”
“Oh.”
“And if you look the guy up, he wasn’t even a doctor there. He was a janitor.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep. He got fired for eavesdropping on group sessions. Fell down a big conspiracy hole ten years ago. Nowadays he rants online about stolen elections, vaccine microchips, the deep state, and, well, lizard people.”
“Wow. I didn’t know any of that.”
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
“Oh yeah,” muttered Kyle. “We’re stuck a few million years in the past, our lives are ruined, but the real tragedy’s finding out the dinosaur book you read as a kid was all made up.”
“Shut up,” said Sam.
“You shut up.”
“Both of you shut up,” Olivia said.
They walked in silence for few more minutes. Then Parker slowed her pace slightly to walk alongside Sam. “So how many books are there about him?”
“Seven. Two of them are complete nonsense. Worse than the one with the lizard men. Even as a kid, it was pretty clear they were real Discovery Channel–type things. They try to tie Billy—Noah’s story to every pseudoscience theory out there. Alien wildlife preserves, Stonehenge, ley lines, mokele-mbembe, all that sort of stuff.”
Olivia rolled the word on her tongue. “Mik-coley . . . ?”
Sam nodded, looking back and forth between them. “It’s an early twentieth-century urban legend. Basically a bunch of old white guy explorers insisted they’d found that there were still dinosaurs living in Africa. Brontosaurs, or maybe apatosaurs, hanging out in the jungle. One of the Dino Boy books tried to say there was probably an entrance to the valley somewhere in the Congo River Basin and the dinosaurs could wander back and forth. That’s why they kept getting seen, but also how they could vanish if you went looking for them.”
Parker smirked. “Quantum dinosaurs. Only there when you’re not looking for them.”
“Pretty much.” He looked ahead at Barnes, dropped his voice. “One of the other ones goes deep into the idea the Gathers were kidnapped by some Southeast Asian gang they claimed his dad was involved with. Crime and construction, bribery, permits, that sort of thing. Plays up the sex-trafficking angle about him and his sister.” Sam waved a hand at the forest around them. “How he imagined all this as some mental escape from reality.”
“Fuck,” said Olivia.
“Yeah, it’s pretty messed up. I didn’t realize how much until I was . . . until years later.”
She looked at the back of Barnes’s head. He’d pulled a bit ahead of them. “You remember a lot of this stuff.”
“I was really into it. You have no—as a kid the idea of vanishing from the face of the earth was appealing.”
“Why?” asked Parker as she ran into Barnes’s backpack. Sam weaved to avoid hitting both of them. Olivia looked up in time, sidestepped, and found herself next to the professor.
“That’s odd,” said Sam.
Three rocks, maybe small boulders, sat in a rough line in front of them. One the size of a beach ball, one a little bigger than her desk back at her apartment, the last one a few feet away and maybe the size and shape of a really big suitcase.
Past the three rocks, the forest was all palm trees again. Big, solid trees, with scaly trunks a few feet around. The pines all stopped right at the line of rocks. Even the ground past the line was different, fewer needles and more knee-high grass and ferns.
Sam crouched by the middle stone. Touched it. Turned his head to look at the suitcase-rock. “Check this out,” he said.
“What’s up?” asked Kyle. The stragglers had caught up and gathered around the line of boulders.
All three rocks had been cut flat, all along the same vertical plane. Olivia crouched at the far end, closed one eye, and lined them up. A perfectly straight line, like someone had taken a giant sword and cut through all three boulders at once. She tried to get closer to the edge and it was so goddamn straight they all blurred together. Logan moved to the far end of the line. Closed one eye. Stared back at her.
She touched the stone plane. It felt like glass. Like her granddad’s tombstone, all polished and glossy.
“Is it me,” said Parker, “or does the whole forest change on either side of the line?”
Olivia looked at the ground. The division did seem to run right along the flat edge of the boulders. Not as clean, but it did seem to be the same line.
“It’s not you,” Kyle said.
“Is this the cut rock?” Sam asked Barnes. “That’s real, right? It’s in most of the books.”
“Please stop,” said Barnes. “And I don’t know. These look like little versions of it. The cut rock’s huge. And it should be closer to the cave, between the mushroom forest and the swamp. It marked the start of Neanderthal territory.”
“So many fucked-up things in that statement,” Kyle said.
Logan let his fingertips slide back and forth on the smooth surface of the middle stone. “What’s the cut rock?”
Barnes glanced at Sam, but the younger man had his mouth shut tight. “There’s a rock here in the valley, a landmark. It’s this big boulder. Perfectly flat on one side. Size of a garage door and smooth as glass. And no sign of the other half of it.”
He waved a hand at the ground. Parker dragged her foot in front of one of the stones, looking for anything buried. Logan brushed aside some pine needles. Neither of them found anything.
“Okay,” said Olivia. “So, your rock broke apart into little rocks.”
“Maybe when the meteor hit,” Josh added.
“Jesus, dude, give it a rest.”
“And all the pieces fell in a perfectly straight line?” Parker shook her head.
Logan made a chopping motion with his hand. “Force fields, maybe?”
Kyle pressed both hands to his head. “Jesus fucking Christ, not you too?”
“This isn’t the cut rock,” said Barnes. “They’re the wrong color and they’re in the wrong place.”
“So what are they?” asked Olivia.
He looked at the three boulders. “I don’t know. Rocks.”
“I mean, it’s some kind of boundary between parts of the forest. Clearly.”
“Maybe, but I don’t know what they are. I never saw anything like this before.”
Logan brushed the smooth surface again. “You said the other one marks the start of Neanderthal territory?”
“Yep. But not like this. It’s a landmark, not a . . . not an actual line.” Barnes waved them on and they headed into the palm trees.
“So, there’s a whole tribe of Neanderthals, right,” said Sam. Less of a question, more looking for eager confirmation. So much eager fan light burning in his eyes. “The Pakka.”
“Yep,” Barnes said. “Five of them when I was a kid, but who knows how many there are now.”
“At least one,” said Kyle, touching his bandaged arm.
Parker appeared on his other side, matching his pace. “Could you communicate with them?”
“Sort of. Beau figured out a hundred or so words of their language, but it took months. They weren’t very friendly.”
“Hostile?” asked Josh.
“I’d say so,” Logan murmured.
Barnes shook his head. “No, just . . . not friendly. They helped us a few times, when they had to, but even as a kid I got the sense they didn’t like anything that wasn’t another Neanderthal. Sort of like a broad, inherent xenophobia. There’s been some study of their skulls and brain impressions recently—back in our time—that back it up.”
