Ancient Fire (3 page)

“What are you doing here?”

She smiled at us. “There’s a storm coming in
pretty fast. I didn’t think you’d have time to make it back to the
house, so I brought the truck. You can throw your bikes in
back.”

When we slid into the front seat, I saw some
cookies there on a paper plate. Molasses cookies, which she’d just
made. They were still warm.

“Mom…” I wasn’t sure if I should be
embarrassed in front of Andy, if the cookie thing
was
too
corny.

“‘Thanks, Mom,’” she said, trying to imitate
me.

“Hey, thanks, Margarite!” Andy never passed
up a chance to have a snack.

“You’re welcome, Andy,” she said in her
regular voice, giving me a little elbow in the side.

It had clouded up by then, and right after
that the ice storm began. We watched the slush fall against the
windshield.

After we dropped Andy off, my mom got out,
grabbed a fistful of ice from off the truck, plopped back down on
her seat, and shut the door behind her.

“First snowball of the season,” she said.
“It’s not really snow, Mom.”

“That’s okay. We don’t really have seasons
anymore, either. Let’s take this home and put it in the freezer,
and we’ll use it when we get some real snow.” She set it up on the
dashboard.

We never did have that snowball fight. Some
things you shouldn’t put off. The next thing my mom said was, “Your
dad wants me to start helping at the lab again.”

It had something to do with Mr. Howe. He’d
gotten his hands on a rare particle that isn’t normally found on
Earth — it was discovered inside the air pocket of some kind of
space rock — and given it to Dad.

Dad had been wanting to create a bigger kind
of time sphere by re-creating the conditions in the early universe,
like a really tiny big bang — which is how the whole idea of time
got started anyway.

Think about it — who kept track of time
before everything was created? If nothing was there, why would you
need to? No endings to anything, no “after” — just one great big
long “before” — until the universe cooled off and there were
galaxies and places and stories to go with them.

So with the chance to use rare particles in
his experiments, Dad actually let himself get talked into something
by Mr. Howe. I guess Dad figured he could keep control of the
situation, but it didn’t work out that way.

Sandusky also needed Margarite’s help. She
was better at splitting atoms than he was. She finally agreed to do
it, so they were both getting talked into something they weren’t
sure they should do. They say kids pressure each other that way a
lot, but I don’t think it’s just kids.

It was later, when my mom was working by
herself in the lab, that the explosion happened. They never found
her. No body, nothing. She just disappeared.

My dad stopped all work on the time sphere.
Over the next few weeks, he barely talked to anybody, including me.
The weeks turned into months, then a year. And there was still no
trace of my mom. But for a long time, my dad kept acting like she
could return at any moment. Our lives were kind of frozen with the
terrible, sudden loss of her.

It was a piece of paper — a tax bill on an
abandoned winery my dad had inherited in California — that finally
helped him decide he’d had just about enough of New Jersey. The
winery was called Moonglow, because of the Valley of the Moon. I
guess I was ready for some kind of change, too. I hardly ever went
to Herronton Woods anymore, and Andy didn’t seem to come by all
that much.

When my dad and I drove out of Princeton in
our truck, there were fierce storms in the Midwest, so we weren’t
able to take a direct route to California. We headed south, and
that’s how we wound up in New Orleans. There’d been snow on the
ground for a few days by the time we got there, and I’m not sure
what it was that finally broke through my dad’s mood during
that
snowball fight. But I was glad to see
him back, at least a little bit. The way I remembered him. Kind of
the time- machine effect again.

In the motel room, I unrolled my vidpad.
Maybe Andy had sent me an e-package; we promised to try and keep in
touch when we were saying goodbye, but again, all the weather was
making it difficult for some of the messages to go through. So I
wound up playing a short Barnstormer game with some local kid with
the screen name SpudRuckus, and that’s how I hit two grand slams in
one inning.

SpudRuckus had a lot of zombies and what he
called swamp critters on his team, and no real pitching, so it
wasn’t all that hard to load up the bases and hit one out. Still, I
felt kind of proud.

When I went to tell my dad about it, he’d
already fallen asleep on the big double bed. But there was a smile
on his face. And then I remembered how my mom smiled that day in
the woods, with the ice storm coming. And I wondered if my dad was
dreaming. Maybe in his dreams, he found a way to be with my mom
again.

Chapter Three

Eli: Driving through
Thunder

June 9, 2019 C.E.

We left New Orleans the next day. One of the
museums was having a pirate exhibit that I really wanted to see,
but Dad wasn’t stopping for anything.

We ate breakfast in the truck, driving along,
with just the quiet buzz of the electric motor joining our chewing
and sipping noises as we ate beignets and drank chicory coffee.

Beignets are those special donuts they make
in New Orleans that are covered with powdered sugar and don’t have
holes in the middle.

“Your mom and I came down here before you
were born,” Dad said after a few minutes. “When we were both still
in grad school. The first morning here, we had beignets and coffee,
just like this.”

I don’t know why grownups like coffee — it’s
really bitter — but after I put enough milk and sugar in it, it
tasted okay. Actually, this was the first time I’d ever had it — to
my surprise, Dad just nodded when I asked if I could order some,
too. And hearing him then, I wondered if it was his memory of that
time with my mom that made it important to know there was still
someone around he could order a second cup of coffee with, even if
it was just a twelve-year-old kid.

“Dad? What really happened with Mom in the
lab? You and Mr. Howe told me she disappeared, but people don’t
disappear in explosions — they get hurt. Or they die.”

He stopped chewing his beignet. I could tell
Dad was getting uncomfortable.

“This was a different kind of explosion, Eli.
It was an explosion of
time
.” Now it was
my turn to stop chewing.

“It has to do with your work?”

“It’s not my work anymore. That’s why we’re
going to California.”

We were both quiet again, and Dad just kept
heading west. Eventually, he turned on the satellite scanner to
listen to a music station out of West Africa that he really likes.
I unrolled a vidpad to check messages — just ads, nothing from Andy
— and see if I could pick up another Barnstormer game.

The weather kept doing weird things, so the
Comnet links weren’t very reliable, and eventually I just read some
stuff I’d stored in one of my files, on twentieth-century minor-
league baseball teams.

The weather was pretty wild during the whole
drive; our storm siren kept going off, which meant we had about
fifteen minutes to pull over or adjust course before the next
cloudburst hit. Bad weather had been hovering over the Midwest and
was shifting south toward us, so we had to zig while it zagged.
Instead of heading straight through Texas, and then New Mexico and
Arizona, we wound up on a road my dad called old Route 66 and spent
an afternoon and part of a night in a place called Vinita,
Oklahoma.

The clouds were dark, and there were streaks
of lightning coming out of the sky when we pulled into town.

We saw a flickering electric sign that said
CABIN CREEK MOTEL
. We both ran from the
truck into the main office, and since there weren’t any other cars
around, figured that getting a room would be pretty easy.

When we stepped in, we heard a strange
tapping sound, not quite like hammering — more like somebody
knocking two small rocks together with a steady rhythm. “Shhh.
Listen to that,” my dad said, holding up a hand. “Typing.”

“Typewriter typing?” I don’t think I’d ever
seen a typewriter before, except in pictures. I know people used to
write on them, while they were waiting for computers to be
invented. Of course, hardly anybody writes on a computer anymore,
either. They usually just speak into their vidpads and print it out
somewhere later, if they still need it down on paper.

My dad just stood there listening a minute
before ringing the bell.

Eventually the tapping stopped, and a man
came out of the back. Older than Dad, with sandy gray hair and a
square jaw, he stared at us through a pair of old-fashioned
wire-rim glasses that magnified his eyeballs so that the most
casual expression on his face seemed really intense. He looked at
us like we had stepped out of a dream and he was having a hard time
believing we were there.

“It’s
you
,” he said
at last, looking right at me. Neither my dad nor I knew what to
say.

“Well, yes, it’s us,” Dad finally answered.
“And we’d like a room.”

The man nodded, and with the tiniest hint of
a smile, slid a large guest book across the counter. “You coming
here, or passing through?”

“Passing through.” My dad shrugged.

“We all pass through don’t we?” the man said
with that sudden, intense eyeball-look as he stared at my
father.

The man gave Dad an old-fashioned ink pen,
and it was Sandusky’s turn to stare — at the antique in his hand.
Then he signed us in. “Room number one,” the man said. “Right next
door.”

My dad took the key without speaking, and we
ran out into the rain and then let ourselves into the room.

Stepping inside and flipping on the light, we
could see the place was fixed up to have a Civil War theme from two
centuries back, but that wasn’t the unusual thing. At the foot of
the bed was a
TV
!

I don’t mean a wall monitor, but an old,
bulky television in its own wood cabinet, standing on four legs,
and plugged into the wall — like straight out of a museum. It even
had preprinted numbers on the dial… and it only went up to channel
thirteen!

Not expecting anything to happen, I flipped
the
on
switch, and after nearly a minute
of flickering light, a big eye-looking symbol came on, and then
there was a serious-looking man reading the news. He was showing
films of soldiers somewhere in a jungle.

My dad looked at it, then turned the dial to
a different channel. There wasn’t much on, and it was all
black-and-white. I guessed there was some local festival of old
shows on. Dad stepped away and watched the screen, then stepped up
close again and grabbed the round wire loop from the top of the
set. Suddenly, the picture got fuzzy, like when your local
satellite link goes bad.

“That’s it,” he said under his breath. “Wait
here.”

He left the room, but I went after him. Who
wants to be left alone in a strange place dressed up to look like a
nearly two-hundred-year-old war?

When I stepped into the office, Dad was
hitting the bell over and over. The typing had stopped again, and
the man with the big eyes came out from the back.

“I hear you,” he said.

“That television,” my dad said, sounding both
excited and mad, “seemed to be receiving broadcast signals through
the
air
. And there was news about the
Vietnam War. That was before I was born.”

And it was sure before I was born. Just like
the Civil War. But I’ve read about both of them in history
books.

“There were TV networks on that don’t even
exist anymore,” Dad continued, “and it was missing some that have
been around for years. What’s going on?”

I still couldn’t tell what had him so upset.
It just looked like some kind of super-retro show, though even
twentieth-century retro is pretty old-fashioned by now. Maybe it
was just some new kind of wireless device.

“You say that seems strange to you?”

“Look…” My dad walked over and picked up a
device with a numbered circle in the middle and a couple of
speakers in the handset. He listened. “An old telephone. With a
live signal.”

That
was a
telephone? It was way too big! “Television and phones haven’t
looked like this, or worked this way, in years. What is this?”

“How should a phone look?”

My dad took out his cell card and flipped it
on. “Like this.” The screen remained blank. “Nothing.” Dad looked
right into the motel guy’s magnified eyes, and the motel guy looked
right back. “What’s going on?”

“My name is Andrew Jackson Williams,” he
said, offering his hand, “and I’m pestered by visions. Would you
and your boy care to join me for dinner?”

A.J., as he liked to be called, grilled up a
couple hamburgers for himself and Dad, and I was a little
surprised, since real cow beef usually cost so much. But Dad
enjoyed it. I’d never gotten used to the taste, so instead I had a
cheese sandwich.

A.J. told us he used to be the preacher at
the First Church in Vinita. “But I couldn’t keep doing it,” he
said. “I had visions, and when I talked about them up in the
pulpit, people got a little” — he looked around, as if someone else
might be listening — “edgy.”

“What kind of visions?” Dad asked, happily
eating what was probably his first burger in years.

A.J. put his food down, then took a pen out
of his pocket. He made a drawing on a napkin — a cloth napkin — and
held it up. It was a circle.