Eric Flint - Time spike

Marie didn't answer. She wrapped her arms tight against her chest.

There was a feeling-an ache-that left her feeling hollow each time she thought of home. She knew why no one ever mentioned it. It hurt too much. And everyone believed his or her pain was the worse. Kathleen, with her new baby-and her husband and three other children gone.

Barbara, with her four-year-old grandson at a babysitter's. She'd been the boy's mother, for all intents and purposes. Her daughter and son-in-law had been dead for sixteen months, killed in a car wreck.

Marie herself, with her sister living just a mile away and her two nephews waiting for her to take them to the movies next weekend like she promised. They had all been ripped away from family and friends.

She knew most the stories, including Frank's. He had lost his wife-a bride, almost. She'd been nineteen years old, a few years younger than he was. They'd been married exactly one month to the day when the Quiver turned the world upside down. They couldn't talk about it. Not yet. Maybe the not knowing would make it taboo forever. Were they the only ones ripped away? Was there just a hole where the prison had stood? Or had everything and everyone been caught up in a hurricane and dropped at random, scattered across time and the universe, dumped here and there like litter blown on the wind. Or maybe the unthinkable had happened. Everyone else in the world had been destroyed in the disaster, and they were the only survivors. "Luck for us," she whispered at the sky. *** Joe woke during the night, shivering with fever, his skin clammy with sweat. Casey Fisher was leaning over him, soothing him, using a dampened rag to cool his forehead. "I need you to…" The pathetic little cough came, followed by racking pain. "Go tell…"

The effort to talk was just too much. It exhausted him, sending him back to a sleep plagued by giant ants carrying off a picnic basket filled with his wife and sons. Barbara lay listening to Fisher moving around. She wanted to get up and help her, but couldn't. The last of her energy had left several hours back. Now all she could do was lie in the dark and wish for a sleep that wouldn't come. She had always been a bit of an insomniac, but since the Quiver, she hadn't been able to get more than a few hours sleep in any one stretch. While inside the prison, that hadn't mattered. She would sleep three or four hours, work about eight hours, then do it again. Out here, that wasn't going to work. The cave's floor was made up of a finely ground sand, something she had seen in a few of the cave tours she had taken when the kids were little. It was also dry and free of animals. When they first found it, she had been afraid it would be full of bats. She hadn't wanted to enter, but Kathleen had insisted. The C.O. figured a few rodent type creatures were a lot easier to deal with than the men at the prison, and she had been terrified they were being followed.

They weren't followed, and there weren't any bats or rats. Barbara hadn't even found any insects. That had also surprised her. She'd been sure the place would be infested with spiders. It had seemed a perfect hiding place for creatures life that. Kathleen and she had handled the trek better than she had hoped. It was Lylah Caldwell who'd had the most trouble. The R.N.'s legs had swelled and turned black. She had popped a dozen or so veins on the walk. Barbara knew Lylah had the beginning stages of congestive heart failure. She also had a touch of emphysema. They had talked about it on several occasions. The woman had intended to work just six more months and then take an early retirement. She'd planned to sell her house and move in with her sister, a widow living in Arizona. She'd been looking forward to moving. She and her sister were close and they both liked to sightsee.

They had a long list of places they intended to visit. Barbara rolled over. Joe, twenty-eight women and one baby had filled the cave to capacity. There hadn't been room for the others. Most of the women and all of the men except Joe were sleeping beneath an overhang about fifteen feet from the opening. Christopher Jordan, armed with one of the pistols they had and a whistle Marie had made from a reed, was standing guard right now. She could tell by the sounds around her that sleep was coming hard for quite a few of them. And after she dropped the bombshell she was going to drop tomorrow, it would come even harder. They were going to have to send Marie and Frank on ahead, while the rest of them stayed behind. They couldn't travel as a group to find Andy Blacklock and Rod Hulbert. That had been the plan, but she could now see that the plan wouldn't work. First, they didn't have the supplies. A lifetime of never being more than a half hour's drive from a grocery story had simply never prepared them for the reality of what life was like when you had no food and were stranded in a wilderness. Abstractly, maybe, but not in their guts. Joe had been attacked, and because of that they were going to eat for a few days.

But a few days probably wouldn't be long enough. It might take weeks to find the others and they couldn't forage as they traveled. None of them had that level of skills, except Marie and maybe Frank Nickerson.

And the two of them couldn't possibly feed seventy people while on the move. But it didn't matter anyway. There was a second reason the plan wouldn't work. Too many of them simply wouldn't make it if they tried to cover even ten miles a day, which is what Marie said was a good average for a hike. Much less do it day after day after day. Joe Schuler would die if they tried to move him even a mile. Lylah Caldwell would die if they had to travel more than a day or two at the pace they'd been traveling. Stacey White would last a little longer, but not much. Her asthma was acting up. Barbara had seen her sneak off to use her inhaler a half dozen times already. And the woman wouldn't have a refill once it was gone. There were others. Not in that bad a shape, but bad enough. They wouldn't survive too long either, in any trek through a wilderness that lasted more than a few days. She wondered how long she'd survive herself. Probably too long. Long enough to bury the only friends she had left, and then either get captured by prisoners or eaten by a predator. She lay there thinking about all the ways she had made sure she stayed in shape: the good diet, the vitamins, the exercise. She'd never smoked and used liquor very sparingly. She thought of the genes passed down to her by both her parents and grandparents, who'd all lived into their late eighties or even nineties. Strong bones. Good hearts. The tears started coming, and then came faster and faster. She finally fell asleep shortly before the sun came up.

Chapter 29 Marie shook her head forcefully. "No, Barbara.

Absolutely not." If the cave had been tall enough and hadn't been so crammed with people, her anxiety would have had her on her feet and pacing around. "I agree that someone has to go for help. I know we can't move Joe. Or Lylah, or some others. And if the rest of us leave them behind, we might as well just shoot them now." She shook her head again. "But there's no way both Frank and I go. Except for me, he's the only one here with any real outdoor skills. One of us has to stay behind or the rest of you don't have a chance of surviving until we bring back help." "I've done some fishing…" Barbara broke off, grimacing. "Okay, I always needed somebody else to bait the hook. But I'm sure there are enough of us who know enough, pooled together, that we can make it without the two of you." It would be tempting to let that argument sway her, but Marie knew it was wrong. A number of the men and a few of the women in the group thought of themselves as outdoorsmen. But their experience with "roughing it" was a commercial campground with all their gear, up to and usually including either a trailer or a camper shell on a pickup. At a minimum, they'd had a tent and sleeping bags. Hunting deer and fishing was as far as their experience went-either in a public forest or someone's private land.