God's Junk Drawer, page 15
She slowed to look at the rock and recognized it as the back bumper of a car. The bumper, part of a half-rusted trunk, cracked brake lights, and holy shit was there a whole car here, buried nose down in the ground?
A deep impression marked the ground maybe two feet from the car’s taillight. Parker thought maybe someone had lifted a rock away, which made her think of the mound of stones they’d left back in the clearing. This would’ve been a big one, though, going off the size of the hole.
Then she registered the flattened pine cone in the bottom and the toe divots on one side. A footprint, crumbling on the edges, but still big enough for a basketball to sit in it. She turned her head, could see a few more prints in either direction, half hidden with old needles and twigs.
Dinosaur? Elephant? Shit, were they the tracks of some future animal that hadn’t even evolved yet from their point of view?
She took a few quick steps across the uneven ground and got caught up with the others. It didn’t take long. Noah had moved ahead, but Josh and Sam had slowed down again to wait for her.
Another change in the forest. Palm trees again. Huge, thick ones, at least fifty or sixty feet tall. She had no idea how long it took palm trees to grow that big. Waist-high ferns dotted the ground. She looked for a clear line where the new trees began, the stitches in the patchwork forest, but couldn’t find it. Just a long stretch where the trees changed from one type to another.
What time was it anyway? Almost an hour since Olivia . . . since the obelisk. Parker realized she hadn’t looked at her phone once today. She wasn’t even sure if the time it told her would mean anything here. According to Eastern Standard Time, it might be one in the morning right now. She looked up through the trees, trying to get a sense of the sun’s position in the sky, but palm fronds blocked her view.
More walking. Josh slowed the stretcher and asked if they could rest for a minute. Parker checked her phone out of curiosity. Four twenty-three in the afternoon. Back in the present, anyway. Also, her battery was at 21 percent, even though she’d fully charged it on the bus. Probably roaming, trying to find a signal. She thumbed the menu down and flipped on airplane mode. Then she shut it off. Probably a good idea to save as much life as she could.
Another half hour of walking and the light got brighter. The faint fireplace smell of wood smoke tickled her nose. Ten more minutes and the trees stopped at another clear, distinct line. Ahead of them stretched a field of tall grass, and beyond that even taller, stalky plants. A little over a hundred yards to the dense grove of trees on the far side.
Five dark lines curled up from beyond the grove. Maybe six sources, with two of them close enough that their smoke curled together into one thin column. Whatever was burning was past the distant grove. A big campground? Had Noah’s sister built a whole homestead, maybe, in the years he’d been gone?
Josh coughed into his shoulder. Nodded at the field. “You said the big ones aren’t scared of open ground, right?”
“Yep. When I was little we had a few close calls and tried to avoid all the open spaces after that. We stuck to the forests and the cliffs.”
“So this was a big no-go zone, I guess?” Parker tried to make it sound lighthearted.
Noah stared out at the field.
Sam and Josh slowly lowered the stretcher, setting Olivia gently on the ground. Sam adjusted the shirt under her head. Parker thought about helping too, but it’d be weird now for all of them to be clustered around her.
Instead, she let the backpack slide off her shoulders and moved to stand by Noah. His gaze swept back and forth across the field. A sound echoed across it, like a giant parrot letting out an epic belch. It happened again, at a higher pitch, then a third time in a weird, overlapping harmony that made her think of whales.
She glanced at him. “Any idea what that was?”
Noah glanced at her. “Triceratops, I think. Maybe two of them.”
“Really?”
“Yep. They sound a bit intimidating, but they’ve got the personality of cows. Maybe more stubborn.”
“Huh.”
The grass looked like wild wheat, maybe, and stood as tall as Parker’s neck. She could see brighter green leaves standing up farther into the field, even taller than the grass. Technically not open ground, but they’d be almost blind if they walked into it.
She looked at the tall grass again. At the heights and lines and rows. “Is this . . . a field? I mean, a farmer’s field? Like, grain or something?”
Josh looked at the tall grass, down at the base. “It . . . it does look pretty regular. Like someone spaced it out.”
Noah shook his head. “It’s not.”
Parker crouched to peer at the grass. It didn’t grow in rows, like she pictured fields on a farm, but there seemed to be a flow to it, like wood grain. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Sam grunted, stretched his arms over his head. “Didn’t you and your sister have a garden?”
“We did,” said Noah, “but the whole thing could’ve fit in a two-car garage. Nothing close to this.”
“Maybe,” Parker said, “the wormhole scooped up somebody’s farm and it grew wild.”
Sam let out a pair of gasps that might’ve been a laugh. “A farmer in Kansas walked out one morning and thought somebody had stolen his wheat field?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Or in Siberia. Or India. It had to come from somewhere.”
A slow, twangy wowl echoed across the field, pitched low enough Parker felt the sound bounce off her skin. Noah twitched as a second wowl washed over them. The third one stretched out long and stopped abruptly.
Parker waited a moment for another note. “What the hell was that?”
“I know that sound,” said Sam.
“That’s close,” she said. “I could feel it.”
Noah stretched up, trying to see over the tall grass. “Is it some kind of horn?”
Sam wobbled his head. “Maybe? It sounds like—”
“Australia,” interrupted Josh.
“Yeah.” Sam nodded in agreement.
Parker looked at each of them. “Australia?”
Josh shrugged. “Every movie or commercial I’ve ever seen about Australia has that same wohh-wohh-wohhh sound in the background. That’s what it sounds like.”
Her mind put the sound in context. “Goddamn. You’re right.”
“We can figure out what it is later,” said Noah. “Let’s go straight across.”
Josh coughed. “I thought we just said open ground was bad.”
“It’s not open ground. And it’ll be a lot faster to go straight through than to go around.”
Sam glanced down at Olivia. “Maybe?”
“It looks pretty open to me,” said Josh. “Definitely open to those T-Rexes.”
Noah waved a hand at him. “They weren’t T-Rexes.”
“Not really my point.”
“We’ll be fine. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of walking through the grain.”
“‘Beware he who walks behind the rows,’” said Josh.
“What?”
“From a movie. About how safe cornfields are.”
Noah nodded. “Great, then.”
Parker lifted Logan’s backpack. It felt like someone had slipped a few rocks into it. She got it over her shoulders again while Josh and Sam got Olivia’s stretcher back up. The two men murmured quietly to each other as they balanced Olivia between them.
Sam met Parker’s gaze. “How long have we been walking?”
“All day or since . . .” She gestured at Olivia.
“Since.”
“A little over an hour and a half, I think? Maybe two? Why?”
Josh shook his head, gave a quick nod upward. “It’s only a little after noon.”
Parker glanced up at the sun, almost directly overhead. “Fuck,” she muttered.
“Yeah,” Sam said in agreement.
She held out her hand, looked at the shadow on the ground. “How’s that even possible? It feels like hours since we woke up. Hey.”
“What?”
She glanced up again. “If the sun’s that close to directly overhead, we’re near the equator.”
“Everyone ready?” asked Noah.
“We’re near the equator,” Parker said. She wiggled her fingers, watched the shadow-digits move, then waved the hand up at the cliffs. “This valley’s in South America or Africa.”
Noah shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“The sun acts weird here.”
“The sun acts weird?” echoed Sam.
Noah turned, reached out, and spread the tall grass with his hands.
They headed into the field.
Moving through the tall grass turned out to be a challenge. Parker tried using one hand to hold the backpack in place, grabbing both straps in a fist on her chest, while the other hand went up to protect her eyes and nose from the swaying grass. The grunts behind her meant Sam and Josh were probably having the same problem. Maybe worse since they had to keep both hands on Olivia’s stretcher.
Another seedy tassel tapped Parker’s cheek and the smell danced across her nose. She had no idea what a grain plant smelled like, but one scent overwhelmed everything else here. The grass might not be a crop, but it dominated the field.
Noah pushed more stalks aside, stepped through the V he’d made, and lurched to a stop.
Parker pushed after him, battering the grass away. “What’s up?” she asked, even though she saw what was up before the words were done.
The red figure loomed over them, arms spread wide, a large gray hood covering its head. Parker felt her stomach churn at the thought of someone crucified out here in the field, but just as quickly she realized the outfit was empty. A big orange-red jumpsuit of thick cloth—thick enough it still had some heft, even with nothing in it. The dangling cuffs were frayed and torn, she could see ragged, off-color squares where pockets, or maybe patches, had been torn away, and a few slashes across the torso. A heavy, rusted zipper ran down the front from neck to crotch. The post it hung on had been driven into the ground off of a narrow path of hard-packed dirt. It divided the possible-grain behind them and the bright green stalks ahead.
She looked into the stiff, empty hood. “It’s a scarecrow.”
“It’s a spacesuit,” said Sam.
And as quick as it had gone from body to scarecrow, Parker saw the tattered, out-of-context outfit for what it was. The heavy red bodysuit with vents for hoses. The small, white helmet with a thick layer of dust on it, the visor gone and the seals rotted to thin threads. Something old-school, from early space exploration, when the goal was just to get someone into orbit and bring them back alive.
Noah took a slow step forward, stretched up on his toes, tried to reach the brim of the helmet, but couldn’t. Barely touched the top of the suit.
She heard feet shuffle behind them. Sam and Josh trying to pivot in the grass with the stretcher. Sam craned his neck to look at the scarecrow. “There’s letters above the visor, where it should be. Pretty faded and covered with crap. Looks like . . .”
“Coop,” said Josh. “Maybe it’s another call sign?”
“C-C-C-P.” Sam relaxed his neck. “It’s Russian. A cosmonaut.”
“Soviet,” Parker clarified. “Somebody’s using a Soviet-era spacesuit as a scarecrow.”
Josh let out a dry laugh. “You think this scares those little raptor-birds?”
“It’s making my skin crawl a little, so maybe?” Parker reached out, touched it. The fabric had the look and slick feel of old nylon. “How do you think it got here?”
“They probably put the pole in first. It’d be too awkward to stand it up with the suit on it.”
“No, I meant . . . y’know, never mind.”
Sam cleared his throat. “I remember reading an old conspiracy theory that the Soviets sent up a bunch of cosmonauts before Gagarin, then hushed it up when things went wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
He managed the best shrug he could while holding up one end of the stretcher. “Nobody knows. Assuming any of it’s even true.”
Parker looked up at the old-fashioned suit. “Gagarin went up in . . . April?”
“Yeah.”
“So if they’d tried someone eight months earlier, the previous September, they would’ve launched them into space just as Earth passed by the wormhole.”
“One small step for Mother Russia,” Josh murmured.
Parker checked to see Noah’s reaction to the idea. He didn’t seem to have registered any of it. He kept staring at the spacesuit.
Parker touched his arm. “Noah?”
He snapped out of whatever rabbit hole his brain had been in. Looked at her. At the others. “This is wrong. None of this should be here.”
“Beau could’ve put it up while you were gone,” said Sam.
Noah shook his head. He started to say something, shook his head again, and marched down the path, more or less in the direction they’d been heading.
Josh sighed and murmured something to himself.
Sam looked after Noah, then to Parker. “What are we doing?”
“We’re going after him.” She shrugged the backpack higher up on her shoulders. Someone had packed more stones into it. Was she this out of shape? She wasn’t a gym rat or anything, but she never thought she would’ve gotten tired this fast. Sam and Josh looked beat, too.
They headed down the path after Noah.
Now Parker could see the tassels at the top of the bright green stalks, and the tight, coarse leaves curled into cylinders and topped with silk. “It really is a cornfield,” she said over her shoulder as they trudged down the path.
“Dinosaurs, electric obelisks, scarecrows, evil cornfields,” wheezed Josh. “We’re all gonna be dead by tomorrow.”
“Why is it an evil cornfield?” asked Sam.
“Well, one, it’s a cornfield at the dawn of time. Two, it’s a cornfield. They’re all evil. It’s why they make mazes out of them.”
Up ahead, Noah had reached an intersection in the rows of corn. He stepped back, peered through the stalks at the distant cliffs, and turned left. The corn immediately hid him from sight.
“You know what else is weird?” Josh tossed out.
Parker fought the urge—the need—to roll her eyes.
“I think this is modern corn. Like, corn on the cob. Not, y’know, early, precrossbreeding corn.”
“How would you know?”
“Because it looks like corn from the grocery store?”
Parker turned the corner after Noah. The corn fell away a few dozen yards ahead to show a field of mud and low plants that stretched at least two hundred feet to the grove of trees. She could see the dark lines of smoke drifting up into the air from beyond the trees. This close she could also see how tight together the saplings were, more like a dense grove of bamboo than regular trees.
Then her vision shifted and once again she saw past the optical illusion and mentally kicked herself. She was supposed to be better than this at seeing things for what they were. Everything about this place messed with her brain.
They weren’t trees, they were logs, chopped smooth and straight. The greenery she’d thought topped them belonged to much taller trees in the distance. Most of the logs stood upright, about sixteen feet tall, and formed a wall like an old western frontier fort, complete with the pointed tops. A few of them stood out at angles, like massive spikes pointed out at the field.
“What the hell,” said Sam behind her.
Noah staggered forward, his head looking from one end of the wall to the other. Parker caught a glimpse of his face. Saw the confusion. The anger in his clenched fists.
Sam and Josh sidestepped up to her, Olivia swaying between them. Josh gaped at the wall. “Do you think they built that to keep the dinosaurs out?”
“Or King Kong.”
Josh shook his head. “Kong’s huge now. He could step right over that.”
Parker felt the overwhelming urge to respond swell up in her chest and fought it back down.
People moved at the top of the walls, but they were too far to make out more than general shapes and spots of color. And what looked like spears. Neanderthals, maybe? A tall, off-white banner stood up on a pole, hanging slightly to one side and almost looking more like a sail.
“This shouldn’t be here,” Noah said.
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “This. All of this. These fields. The spacesuit. This . . . this wall. This is all wrong.”
“Hello there,” called out a voice with a thick accent.
A tall, lean man stood off to their right, maybe a dozen yards away, his hands behind his back. The first thought that danced through Parker’s mind was stranded Tom Hanks standing on the shore of his little island. The second was the man wasn’t hiding anything behind his back. He stood—what did the military call it?—at ease. His clothes had the soft shape and faded colors that came from years of use, and his stubbly beard spoke of months away from a good razor. He wore a round, pointed straw hat, a lot like the one her grandmother used to wear when she was gardening. Tucked into his belt was a long pale stick of what looked like bamboo.
Not a Neanderthal. She didn’t think so, anyway. In fact, she was pretty sure he was white under all that tanned skin.
“English, yeah?” he said to them.
“Don’t answer,” said Noah.
“Yeah,” Josh replied with a big nod.
“I said not to answer.”
“And I ignored you. Don’t worry, I’m a people person.” Josh took in a breath, raised his voice. “We’re damn glad to see you, man. To see anyone.”
The man gave them a slow, over-polite nod. “When did you arrive?”
She noticed he made no effort to move closer. And his accent gnawed at her. German, maybe? Soft, but definitely there.
“Yesterday,” Josh answered. “Last night. We . . . we’ve had a bad day.”
Another slow nod from the man. One hand came out from behind his back, then the other. Not hiding anything, like Parker had guessed. In fact, he moved like he was trying to keep them calm. Like he was dealing with a group of unpredictable, potentially dangerous animals.
