We weren’t even on a road, but some huge, shallow bowl-shaped area that extended for miles. Vegetation and even some mountains were visible beyond the edges of this strange flat-bottomed depression, but the ground we sped over was hard-baked bald.
The engine rumbled and growled as we slowed down. With the reduced G-force, I was able to twist sideways, crane my neck around the seat back and peer out the back window.
Nothing seemed to be following us—camouflaged or not.
“We lost ’em,” Uncle Si said, visibly relieved. You can relax.“
“Who were those Predator people?” I asked, with a throat so dry my tongue didn’t want to move in the correct patterns for speech. “What just happened? Where are we?”
I couldn’t quite identify it, but noticed there was something different about my uncle’s face as he let out a deep breath before answering. “We’re on a dry lake bed. Enjoy the smooth ride, because most of the way tonight is going to be bumpy.”
Dry lake bed? That didn’t make any sense. When did we leave the road? I didn’t remember that, and my eyes had been wide open.
“Those ‘Predator people’ were the Erasers,” he added, downshifting while the engine slowed the vehicle.
“Erasers?” I repeated.
“Think of them as the angels of death,” he said. He downshifted again and our speed continued to fall off. When we reached the edge of the dry lake bed, the car lurched and bucked over rough terrain.
“Why couldn’t I see them?”
“They were cloaked.”
“Cloaked…as in a ‘cloaking device?’ Like Star Trek?”
“Not like Star Trek. Not like a stealth bomber, either. You’ll get a chance to see how it works one of these days.”
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “What were they doing with Mom and the others?”
“Killing them,” he replied, coldly. “And taking the bodies away. They were erasing your family.”
“Why?”
He sighed, heavily. “There’s a whole lot of questions I’m not gonna answer just yet. You wouldn’t believe the answers anyway, until you see and experience some stuff first hand.”
“Can you tell me where we’re going, at least?”
Uncle Si shrugged. “I’m gonna drop you at a safe house for right now. We should get there in a few hours.”
“Drop me? You’re going somewhere else?”
He nodded. “Some stuff I need to do; places to go. You’ll be safe. I’ll make sure of that.”
The car rocked and bounced onto an unpaved road, which Uncle Si followed for many miles, throwing a cloud of dust into the dimming sky.
***
Darkness fell before we reached a paved road, but Uncle Si never removed his shades. We followed that road for hours. At one point, Uncle Si pulled onto the shoulder and steered into a relatively clear path between a line of trees and some lower brush. He turned off the lights but left the engine running before getting out to take a leak. He advised me to do the same. I did.
I must have pissed about a gallon. After the resulting relief, I took notice of how warm and wonderful the air was, even at night.
When Uncle Si finished and zipped up, he walked around the car to open the trunk. He hefted two large steel gas cans out, and began pouring them into the vehicle’s tank.
“Need any help?” I asked.
“Get that M203 out of the back seat and bring it to me,” he said. “But don’t play with it, point it near me, or put your fingers anywhere near the triggers.”
I didn’t know what an “M203” was, but there could only be one item he was referring to. I crawled in back and got the weapon. It looked futuristic, yet vaguely familiar. My initial impression was that it was a small machinegun with a huge shotgun mounted over-under. But then I didn’t yet know much about modern military weapons. I brought it to him and, one hand still pouring gas, he used his other hand to take the weapon from me and place it inside the cavernous trunk only partially filled with tires, toolboxes and crates.
“Thanks,” he said. “We’ll be back on the road in a minute. Make sure you’re in the seat and buckled up by the time I shut this trunk.”
“Yes sir.” As I moved back toward the passenger door, I took a longer look at that frightening beast of a car. It was long and straight, with squared-off corners and edges—yet also some graceful, flowing curves back on the rear fenders. Shallow curves, but curves nonetheless.
As I slid into the passenger seat, I realized we hadn’t yet encountered another vehicle since landing in the dry lake bed. Aside from the stars above, there were no other lights visible anywhere.
The trunk shut behind me, Uncle Si slid back behind the wheel, and we were off.
It was a while before we encountered a vehicle, and I was dozing in the seat by then. I remember one pair of headlights growing closer, and passing us on the left. Then I drifted off again.
There were curves and turns, but not many stops. I finally stirred when we left paved road once again. I opened my eyes and looked out the window. We were on a gravel road surrounded by trees. The trees were all roughly the same size, planted in perfect rows, and a uniform distance apart.
Uncle Si rolled down his window, and warm, pleasant air rushed in, with a strong scent of citrus.
The gravel road went on for miles. I checked behind us a couple times, but nothing trailed us except dust.
In time the crude path broadened out into a huge clearing. There was a sprawling, flat-roofed house, barns, sheds, and a building which reminded me of an old-fashioned aircraft hangar.
Uncle Si wheeled around and backed up to one of the huge doors at the end of the hangar. He left the engine running as he got out and stepped around to the back of the car again. He worked at unlocking something, then raised a garage door. It wasn’t a sectional garage door which coiled up above the opening, like what I saw at some people’s houses. This one appeared to be a solid panel of painted plywood, and simply swung up in an arc, out of the way. The beast-car growled low and mellow as he eased it backwards into the dark cave. Once fully inside, he cut the engine and the night fell silent.
“Come with me,” my uncle said, opening his door and stepping out. I disembarked to join him. We went outside. He pulled the big swinging door back down and took a minute locking it. He strolled toward the huge, flat-roofed house, and I fell into step behind him.
I followed him to a side door. I heard keys jangle again. He pushed the door open and went inside. I followed. He locked the door behind us and led me along a cool, uncarpeted hallway.
The hallway opened into a large room with some delightful smells which convinced my nose to remind my brain that I hadn’t eaten for quite a while. Allyson’s party never happened, so supper hadn’t, either. Uncle Si flipped a switch, and dull yellow light spread out to reveal we were in a kitchen.
The first thing I noticed was the light bulb itself. The glass of the bulb wasn’t frosted at all. I could clearly see the glowing filament inside that round bubble. Speaking of round, the refrigerator was the oddest looking kitchen appliance I’d seen up until then. There were no corners, really. The vertical sides were flat in between the rounded edges, and the bottom must have been flat. But it had a sort of oval shape when looking at it from the front. The flawless white and chrome finish gave me the impression it was brand new, even though the style seemed older than the appliances filmed in old black-and-white movies. The sink and faucet looked weird, too. I didn’t know anything about house construction (and I’d always lived in trailers up until then), but the walls didn’t seem normal, either. I assumed they were concrete with a rough finish.
“Hungry?” Uncle Si asked, opening that strange fridge.
I nodded. He began pulling out food and placing it on the table.
A woman entered the room. She was short—not too much taller than me. She was also dark. Her black hair was braided and pulled back in a big knot atop the back of her head. Her skin was a golden brown. Her eyes were dark brown, but luminous. She wore a robe, and was wrapped in a fringed shawl over that. Her eyelids were puffy, like she’d just awoken, and she seemed surprised by our presence. She said something I didn’t understand.
Si responded, but I didn’t understand that, either.
They talked back and forth, in a language I took to be Spanish. Her words came so fast, it would have been hard to understand her even if I was fluent in Spanish. She looked at me several times as they talked. Finally, Uncle Si addressed me. “This is Hortensia. I call her Mami…you can too, I guess.”
“Hello,” I said, meekly.
Hortensia squatted, facing me. She appeared fully awake, now, and smiled at me. “It is eh-so nice to meet chu, Peter,” she said, with a heavy accent. “Please eh-sit down by table. I will make eh-something for you for to eat.”
She warmed up some leftover chicken and potatoes in the oven. (Giving the kitchen another visual once-over, I noticed there was no microwave or coffee maker, either.) I’d never eaten leftovers that tasted so good. Si and Hortensia continued to converse in Spanish while he and I ate. She glanced at me repeatedly, but watched Uncle Si with a curious, if not confused, expression.
After the late meal, Hortensia showed me to a bedroom. “Tonight, chu eh-slip here,” she said, while making the bed with sheets, a pillow and blanket that she took from the room’s closet.
The single bed had a mattress that was a little stiff, but it turned out to be surprisingly comfortable. I slept very well that night—what was left of it.
***
I slept through half of the day, also. It was my nose that woke me. Wonderful food smells wafted into the bedroom. I rose, dressed, and wandered through the house, trying to remember where the kitchen was. Bright sunlight flooded in through windows and stretched throughout the vast interior, allowing me to notice more details than were obvious at night.
Everything about this house was different. There was no carpeting—just hard tiles—though some of the big rooms had thick rugs covering most of the floor. There were no televisions anywhere I could find; no stereos; no clock radios…no clocks at all except for a tall old-fashioned grandfather clock in the same big room as the old-fashioned fireplace. Even stranger—the only telephone I found was a museum piece hanging on the wall, with a cylindrical earpiece connected by a straight cord (not coiled wire) to a big rectangular box of a device, with a bell-shaped protrusion up around where the crude receiver cradle was. The recessed, convex surface inside the flaring protrusion was perforated with a pattern of holes, leading me to assume that the microphone was behind it.
I finally found the kitchen. Hortensia was there, wearing a simple white dress and an apron, with her hair down, but in a net. When she saw me she smiled and greeted me cheerily in Spanish while giving me a hug.
The hug felt good. Despite all my bewilderment over what had happened in the last 24 hours, just that simple, short embrace lifted my spirits. I knew next to nothing about Hortensia, but I liked her.
The breakfast was like one you might order at Denny’s…eggs, bacon, hash browns, and French Toast. But it was much different than food from Denny’s. It was the most delicious meal I’d had, up to that point in my life. Hortensia set two glasses in front of me (real glasses; not plastic cups). One contained water, and the other was filled with orange juice.
She sat down with me, but ate a small plate full of leftovers.
“You didn’t make enough for both of us to eat?” I asked, pointing at the plates in front of me.
I had to repeat myself a few times, phrasing it differently, before she understood my question. “I already have breakfast these morning,” she said.
I realized that it was probably lunch time. This woman, who didn’t even know me, had gone through the trouble of cooking a spectacular breakfast for me, with nothing but the crude furnishings of this large, strange kitchen. Not only that, but she seemed to be happy doing so.
“Where’s Uncle Si?” I asked.
She frowned. “Que? What?”
“Uncle Si,” I said. “Did he already eat?”
“Uh…who is these?”
“Uncle Si,” I said. “Simon.”
“Eh-Simon?” Now she looked even more confused.
I nodded. “Yeah, Simon.”
She stared at me, curiously, for a moment. Then, haltingly, she said, “Eh-Simon is…not…here.”
I remembered he said something about dropping me off, and going to take care of some business somewhere else. That got me thinking about my situation, and what I had recently seen. By the time I finished breakfast, I was remembering the sight of my parents’ bodies, and my little brother’s corpse.
Dead. Just like that. They were gone forever.
I thanked Hortensia sincerely for the meal, but there was a lump in my throat, hot pressure behind my eyes, and my voice was choked. I found my way back to the bedroom where I’d slept, and leaned against the cool, solid wall, trying to fight back the tears.
Hortensia entered within only a few seconds, said, “Oh, Pedrito,” and pulled me into an embrace.
I lost it. I bawled and hiccupped and wailed. Salty fluid poured out of my eyes and snot dribbled out my nose.
Hortensia hugged me tighter and tighter, stroking my hair and my upper back.
My breakdown continued for what must have been an hour or more. She sat on the single bed and pulled me into her lap where she wrapped her arms around me, rocked back and forth, kissed my forehead, and spoke soft words in a soothing tone. There was a soft, warm energy from that woman that radiated into me. My soul absorbed it as I cried my eyes out. She kept me in her comforting embrace until the sobbing stopped, my breathing slowed to normal, and the tears stopped flowing. Still, she rocked me for a while, caressing my face and head.
Finally, my pride returning, I got off her lap and wiped at my face. She produced a white cloth and gently pinched my nose with it, squeezing some of the mucous out into the fabric. Then, having demonstrated its purpose, she indicated I should use it myself. I took it, used a dry part to wipe my face, then blew my nose into it.
Standing, she took my hand and led me out of the bedroom, down the hall and into a bathroom where the sink and tub were also of unusual design. We washed our hands, I washed my face, then she led me back to the kitchen. She sat me down at the table again, pulled a nice-smelling pan from the oven, scooped some of the contents onto a small plate and set it in front of me with a spoon.
Not wanting to talk or think about anything more complicated than using the spoon right then, I took a bite. It was sweet and delicious. I didn’t know what kind of dessert this was, but I was glad to shovel it it my mouth. While I ate, she left the kitchen.
When she returned, she smiled and touched my head again. “Come, Peter,” she said.
I followed her to a different bathroom. In this one, the tub was full of hot water and foamy mounds of soap suds. She mimed washing motions, showed me where the towel was, pointed to my clothes, and indicated that I should pile them in the corner by the door.
After she left, I undressed, dropped the clothes as instructed, and climbed in the tub.
I didn’t care much for baths. I took showers purely out of necessity, but experienced no pleasure from them. But there was nothing else I felt like doing at the moment, so I washed thoroughly, then just sat there soaking.
Hortensia knocked softly, asked something I didn’t understand, then opened the door and gathered up my clothes. “Chu are okay?” she asked.
I nodded. “But those are the only clothes I have…”
“Is okay,” she said, and disappeared with my clothes, shutting the door behind her.
I had no other clothes besides what I’d been wearing, so this worried me. I got out of the bath, dried off and wrapped the towel around me before trudging off to find her.
It took some exploring, but I found her in a corner room with a strange contraption on a platform with a chair slid under it. In the room were several baskets of yarn, hundreds of spools of thread, tons of different fabric either folded or in rolls, and a lot of hanging clothes—mostly dresses. As I waked in, she was using a yellow ribbon with tick marks to measure the waistband of my shorts. She smiled briefly when she saw me, but turned serious quickly as she bent down to write something with pencil on a note pad. She took a few more measurements, writing each one down, before handing my shorts and underwear back to me. Then she began measuring my shirt. I retraced my steps to the bathroom and exchanged the towel for the shorts and underwear. When I returned, she had finished with the shirt, and helped me back into it.
Still looking serious, she then used the measuring ribbon directly on me. She held it against my arm, spanned my shoulders with it, stretched it along my leg, around my waist, then measured my overall height. After each measurement, she wrote something. Once all that was complete, she smiled once again and led me to yet another room.
This room had a big mirror against the wall, no rugs, and furniture which included a dark wood chest with several drawers. She had me sit in a chair facing the mirror, then draped a sheet around me, pinning it tight at the back of my neck. She produced scissors and a comb from a drawer in the dark chest, and proceeded to cut my hair with them. Once finished, she joined me in staring at my reflection in the mirror, smiling and making some musical comments in Spanish.
After that she led me outside.
I looked around, remembering the buildings I’d noticed in the dark upon arrival. I also saw that the thousands of trees in perfect straight rows were festooned with oranges. The heat, the smells, and the feel of the air confirmed for me that we were nowhere near St. Louis. I didn’t know where this place was, but the outdoors here was like paradise.
Hortensia mimed instructions to me to bend over and buff my hair with my hands. I did, and a cloud of hair clippings floated down onto the ground. She then gestured for me to take a look around.
I was only too glad to go exploring.
I snooped around every building, then wandered through the orange tree forest. I found a pond, and a creek, but got lost. It’s hard to find landmarks when most everything is so uniform, but I found my way back to the main area before dusk.
The flat-roofed house reminded me of the houses I saw in an old Zorro movie. The walls were thick, made of the same material outside as in. Logs (presumably used to reinforce the flat roof) stuck out from the walls, high up. Above that was a balcony, and behind it, another story of the building. The walls were painted a color that wasn’t pink or orange, but somewhere on that side of the spectrum. It didn’t look bad at all on that house. The porch overhang was supported by ornamental pillars which flared out into scalloped webbing which connected them, forming a decorative, partial wall. You could see through it, and easily step through it, but it did sort of separate the porch from the greater outdoors. There were wavy red tiles all across the top of the porch overhang.
I found Hortensia over in the barnyard area. She carried a bucket in one hand and used the other to sprinkle what looked like corn crumbles on the ground. This was how she lured a flock of chickens inside a large coop, then locked them inside. I marveled at how peaceful and natural the scene was. She grinned when she saw me. “Hello, Peter. Is almost time eh-supper, no?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She reached out her hand and, without thinking about it, I just drifted right under it. Her hand came to rest on my head and she pulled me against her side as we strolled toward the house. There was something powerful about her touch. It was comforting, and welcoming, and made me feel like I was where I belonged. I had never belonged anywhere before.
While she worked in the kitchen, I explored the inside of the house some more.
I noticed something else: although the house obviously had electricity, there weren’t many sockets. And the electrical cords to the lamps and such were different. They weren’t “Siamese” rubber-insulated wires with flat plugs, as I was used to. Some sort of fabric insulation protected a single, thick cable to each electrical device, and the plugs were big, blocky objects, always with three prongs. A few rooms had some sort of electrical device plugged in. There were variations in style, but all of them had large wooden cases—sanded smooth and stained or varnished. There were switches on the side and knobs on the front. Also on the front were inlaid glass windows. Through these windows could be seen a flat background surface with neatly painted marks, a sequence of numbers which seemed vaguely familiar, and a bright colored needle in front of the surface.
After another fantastic meal, Hortensia accompanied me into a room lined with bookshelves. There were two rocking chairs, a wooden desk with a very solid-looking rolling chair, and two padded wingback chairs with foot rests before them. This room had the most electrical sockets of any I’d found in the house, and there was almost a lamp for every chair. Hortensia hummed to herself as she strode to one of the wooden-cased electrical appliances I found so fascinating. She flipped the switch on the side and something began to hum. I noticed something glowing through the vents in the wooden cabinet, and in time the humming was overlapped by distinct voices and other sounds. I made out low, spooky organ music, then a sinister laugh.
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” asked a creepy, somewhat nasal voice from a pattern of holes in the wooden cabinet. More sinister laughter, then the same voice answered its own question: “The Shadow knows!” And then he cackled menacingly again.
Hortensia twisted one of the knobs. The box buzzed and whined through a range of frequencies. The needle inside the glass window moved past the painted marks on the background as she turned the dial, and I realized that the big, wooden-cased contraption was a radio. An A.M. radio, judging by all the static and squeaking. She went past a couple stations—one with another voice talking, and one with some music I might have assumed to be country-western, but different. She stopped when she tuned in a different music station.
This music was unlike anything I’d listened to before. It was hard to pick out the individual instruments, except for drums, a clarinet, and maybe a trumpet. The other sounds were from other horns I couldn’t identify. The rhythm was appealing, and the melody had a smooth, flowing sound that was almost seductive. Hortensia danced around the room while she dusted and swept. Several songs played—some slow, some fast; and there was talking in between—though it sounded more like an announcer than a DJ. All the music seemed to feature the same instruments, though the melodies were diverse. However, only about a third of the tunes included singing. I had never heard music on the radio without lyrics being sung, except when passing through a classical station.
Once finished cleaning the room, Hortensia returned to the room where she measured my clothes. I tagged along, at first, to see if there was more strange technology yet to be observed.
There was.
She turned on the radio in that room and tuned it to the same station. Then she sat at the platform with the strange metal contraption. She pulled two pieces of sturdy cloth from atop the adjacent table, both shaped like a pair of pants. She must have cut the pattern while I was out exploring, earlier. She sandwiched them together and set them on the platform. She changed the spool of thread in the contraption, made some adjustments, then began pushing a pedal under the platform with her foot. As she worked the pedal, a pulley turned on the contraption, and a needle plunged up and down through a slot in the platform. She fed the cloth into the thrusting needle, and I realized the contraption was a sewing machine.
Fascinated by the mechanism, I watched it work for a while, really wishing I could take it apart to see the inner workings. But it was Hortensia’s sewing machine, and I wasn’t about to ask her to let me experiment with it.
“Are those gonna be pants for me?” I asked.
She stopped pedaling, cocked an eyebrow at me, then stretched one arm toward the doorway, flopping her arm up and down as if shooing a fly away. “Vamanos!”
I got the message, and returned to the other room.
The radio was still playing music. I searched the bookshelves. Most of the books were hardbound volumes, but without glossy paper dust jackets. Noticeably absent were paperbacks with illustrated covers. There were non-fiction books with words like “Quantum Mechanics,” “Fractal Resonance,” “Generations,” and “Social Anthropology” in the titles. I thumbed through a few of these, finding nothing that interested me beyond the copyright date on a moderately-worn volume about “Arrested Development” with highlighted text throughout and many dog-eared pages. I flipped to the copyright page. 2025? Must be a typo…or I was wrong about the number following the copyright mark referring to a year? 2025 was so far in the future that the O-Zone layer would be gone by then, and between acid rain and the unfiltered solar radiation, people would die going outside without protective shielding.
I slipped the book back between two others, just as I had found it.
Stacked on a small table near one bookcase were several magazines with glossy, colorful images on the covers. The one on the top had a tough-looking guy in a black trenchcoat, hat, and mask, blasting away with a pistol in each hand. I picked it up, opened it, and flipped through the pages. There were a few black-and-white illustrations sprinkled throughout, and some advertisements for strange products I’d never heard of. But most of it was text…like what you might find in a school reading book…only on gray, randomly-speckled paper—like the paper used in the old paperbacks on the tables at library sales.
I tried reading a little. In two paragraphs, I was hooked. The story I had chosen was about a girl who knew an important secret, but got kidnapped by some dirtbags who were going to kill her. But then this tough vigilante tracked her down, got in a gunfight with the dirtbags…and the story ended with a message that it would continue in the next issue of the magazine. I fully intended to dig through the stack to find that next issue, but made the mistake of taking a peek at the next story instead. This one was about a “Yankee” pilot who lived in South America. He was hired to find a team of scientists who went missing in the jungle…and I couldn’t stop reading, once I’d started.
That story, also, ended with the good guys in danger, but a promise that the story would continue in the next issue. I sat there reading, with the music playing in the background, and before I knew it I had gone through that entire first magazine.
I meant to find the next issue of that title, but a magazine cover with the picture of a warrior wielding a sword caught my eye. I just couldn’t pass that up. Lo and behold, one of the stories in it was about a character I was familiar with: Conan the Barbarian! Unfortunately, it also had a cliffhanger ending.
Hortensia entered the room to check on me when I was still poring through the magazines. Her eyes seemed to twinkle with amusement, and she left me alone again.
The next magazine had a cover featuring a muscular man wearing only a loincloth, brandishing a knife, fighting a leopard.
Before I finished that one, Hortensia returned. After much trial-and-error, she communicated to me that it was my bedtime; I communicated my desire to take one of the magazines to the bedroom, and she reluctantly agreed. She gave me another kiss on the forehead when we parted ways. Inside the room, I found the bed made with fresh sheets and pillowcase.
While reading the last story for the night, I blurted out, “I know this character, too! This is Tarzan!”
Like all the other magazines, this one was in mint condition. The cover wasn’t faded or threadbare in the slightest. There were no wrinkles or fingerprints. The interior pages, also, were as perfect as could be—considering the cheap paper. The binding was still solid, and no pages were brittle. There was no musty smell. In fact, the magazine had that fresh book smell, like it hadn’t come off the printing press that long ago.
I mention all these details because the date on the cover said “April 1934.”
UPDATE: This book is published! Click here to buy on Amazon.
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