Mojave Incident by Ron Felber

Author:Ron Felber
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781569808009
Publisher: Barricade Books

8:00 a.m.

THE DESERT SUN splashed into the camper shell from the windows and truck’s open tailgate. Somewhere the distant sound of a single engine prop plane could be discerned as it passed overhead; the first conventional sound the Giffords had heard in more than twelve hours.

Tom stirred, the remembrances of the night before so vivid that even before his eyes opened, he bucked up in the bed as if awakening from a nightmare. Tired and feeling mentally blunted, he doused his face with bottled water.

Elise awakened a few moments later feeling that same mixture of lassitude and anxiety. She sat up in bed, groggy. Her body lunged forward as she gasped, then caught herself at the morning’s first recollection of what had transpired only hours before.

Her panicked eyes shot to the windows reflexively.

“They’re gone,” Tom offered. “No sign of them anywhere. The valley’s empty. Not a cloud in the sky.”

Elise took a gradual account of herself and their situation.

“Thank God,” she muttered.

Still dressed in the jeans and work shirt he’d gone to sleep in, Tom left the camper to search the desert and surrounding wash for any physical evidence that may have been left behind.

Elise shook herself from out of her stupor, then joined him, hopping out of the camper and into the cab where she turned on the radio, then fished across the AM and FM bands for news of what had happened.

“What day is it?” she called out to Tom.

He glanced first to his wrist, but his watch had stopped; then up to the sun.

“It’s 8:00 a.m., or near to it,” he answered on hands and knees as he scoured the area around the mesquite tree. “And it must be one day later; the morning after they left us.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she yowled back, frustrated at her inability to find news of the event. “I mean, how do we know what day it is? Or what year; or decade for that matter. Everything’s been turned around. For all we know, World War III might have happened and we don’t even know it!”

He approached the cab, wiping his hands clean on the sides of his jeans.

“Nothing. Not a thing. Camper’s untouched. So far as I can tell, not a twig around it’s been broken; not a grain of sand moved. Nothing!” He looked to her, vexed. “How about the radio?”

Elise turned the volume up on WFLG, a local country station, where Randy Travis crooned “Diggin’ Up Bones”.

“Hear for yourself,” she said disgustedly. “No mention of anything even vaguely related to what happened. Not even on the news channels!”

Tom grimaced.

“Move over.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘Move over,’” he repeated.

She did, watching as he jumped into the driver’s seat, then turned over the ignition.

“Where are we going?” she asked leerily.

He took the truck up the rugged mountainside leading out of the valley.

“To find witnesses,” he answered, racing the Ford pick up onto one of the unnamed trails they’d travelled the night before.

They drove six miles on Black Canyon Wash before coming upon another campsite.

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