For the next several days, it was just me and Hortensia. At a distance I caught sight of workers trimming trees and doing other chores, but had no interaction with them. That first night, before Uncle Si left me alone with the nice Mexican woman, he had warned me to keep my distance from the hired hands.

Hortensia presented me with a shirt and pair of pants she had put together in her sewing shop. Then she took my old clothes, washed them in another antiquated contraption with her normal laundry, and hung them on a clothesline outside to dry. Each day for several days, she would present me with more homemade clothes, until I had pants and shirts for every day of the week. I tried to express my gratitude, which seemed to delight her.

I wondered if she had kids of her own. If so, I sure never caught sight of them around the farm. What lucky kids they would be, to have a mother like her!

She let me read one magazine a day after that first night, but insisted I play outside for most of the sunlight hours. I resumed my daily runs, and practiced the martial arts techniques Uncle Si had taught me, so far, not wanting to forget any of it.

Aside from the orchard workers, the only other person we encountered was a mail deliverer who arrived in the strangest looking delivery van I’d ever seen. The tires were so skinny, they almost belonged on a bicycle. The hood was a tiny, tent-shaped construction of sheet metal, with visible hinges holding the panels together. Other parts of the vehicle appeared to me made of wood!

As fascinated as I was by the mail truck, that’s how fascinated the mail man was with my sneakers.

He delivered a package, a letter, and two more of the fantastic magazines. They were brand new, yet also had dates from 1934.

Hortensia handed him a small stack of letters. They exchanged some pleasant small talk as best they could with her limited knowledge of English. He asked a few questions about me, but I was too preoccupied by the magazines to catch all that was asked and said.

There was a cow on the property, which was milked by one of the workers early every morning. Hortensia separated the cream, curds, and other parts I learned were part of dairy-fresh milk, and processed all of it herself before I had come along. Now she taught me how to churn butter, and make homemade ice cream. Aside from her being a good cook, I learned that one reason her meals tasted so good was the ingredients—like farm-fresh eggs and real butter. (I had grown up never knowing any alternative to margarine, which my mother and I called “butter.”)

Hortensia read a Spanish Bible and prayed every morning. She collected eggs every day; kept the huge house clean; washed and dried the laundry; cooked; washed dishes; sewed; knitted; and kept an eye on me. If my biological family hadn’t been murdered, I might not have felt guilty about wishing she was my mother.

Despite working so hard to keep up the home, she was generally a happy person, and at peace.

I never broke down in a crying fit after that first day, but she continued to lavish affection on me at regular intervals. That affection rapidly became mutual. I addressed her as “Ma’am” a few times, until she told me to call her “Mami” instead. She began to address me as “Pedro,” “Mijo,” and sometimes “Pedrito.”

She also began teaching me Spanish, with reserves of patience I couldn’t even appreciate at the time.

Then, one morning, Breakfast was not ready by the time I woke up.

I dressed and made my way to the kitchen. She wasn’t there, and the primitive stove wasn’t fired up. I began to worry instantly.

“Mami?” I called. No answer.

I searched the house, and finally called out for her just outside her bedroom door (which she normally left open; but was closed and locked on this particular morning).

I heard rustling, then some undecipherable response. It was her voice, so relief flooded over me. I hadn’t wanted to let the thoughts take coherent form, but images had flashed through my mind of Mami being murdered by the Erasers.

“One hour, Pedrito!” she finally called, from inside her door.

I brought in the milk and collected eggs while waiting. I also read a few stories from one of the magazines.

When Mami appeared, she was dressed much like she had been that first night I met her. But there was something different about her. Normally a cheerful person, on this occasion she was practically glowing.

And she was clinging tightly to Uncle Si.

“Hey, Sprout,” he greeted me. There was something different about him, too. One difference was that he was smiling. He didn’t do that very often.

The other difference…no, it wasn’t a difference now. The difference had been when he saved me from the Erasers. On that occasion, as weird as it might be, he seemed a little bit taller; more muscular; and his nose and teeth had been perfectly straight. This realization jarred me.

Evidently reading my confusion, he said, “Let’s go talk while Mamita gets breakfast ready.”

I followed him into the room with all the books. He sat in one of the padded chairs, and gestured for me to do likewise. I sat in the one facing him.

“Is it really 1934?” I asked. “Or am I crazy?”

He sighed, then shrugged. “You’re not crazy. We’re in the early years of the Great Depression, although…” he waved in a circular pattern, “we’re weathering the financial storm fairly well.”

“That car you picked me up in…it was a time machine.”

“What car?” he asked, squinting. “Oh. Oh, right. The car you came here in.” He chewed on his lip for a moment, gaze roaming around the ceiling. “‘Time machine’ is kind of a cheesy science fiction term. How you got here was by a process…well, if you want to call the technology by a simple name, then ‘Warp Generator’ is simple enough to say, and it’s a bit more accurate.”

My brain short-circuited. I had so many questions, I couldn’t choose one to ask first.

“Tell you what,” he said, leaning back in the chair and putting his feet up, “I’ll give you a brief overview that might answer most of your questions. Then, when you have more, you can ask those, too. And there’s no rush—we got all the time in the world.” He made a face and chuckled at his own remark.

“Works for me,” I said.

“Alright. So, first of all, the Warp Generator gives a lowly human being the ability to seriously FUBAR reality as we thought we knew it.”

“FUBAR?” I asked. “Sorry—I don’t know that word.”

He snapped his fingers. “Oh, that’s right: you still haven’t…” he rolled his eyes and twisted his lips. “Well, anyway, it stands for ‘Fowled Up Beyond All Recognition.’ Jack up. Mess up. Got it?”

I nodded.

“Good. So how many dimensions do we exist in?”

“You’re asking me?” I replied.

He nodded.

“Um, three, I guess.”

“That’s not precisely correct,” he said. “We can perceive those three dimensions: height, width and depth. We can also perceive the fourth dimension, which is time. We can perceive time. We can measure it. But we can’t define it. And, until one day in your relative future, we couldn’t break free of its linear limitations. On that day, a group of scientists is gonna figure out how to open portals through dimensions.”

He closed his eyes and, with a pained expression, made horizontal chopping motions with his hands, as if his forearms were scissor blades. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. We perceive four dimensions, but science has determined that more than twice that many exist. And human beings might exist within most or all of them, despite most of us not even realizing…or caring…that they do exist. Follow me?”

“I think so,” I said. “Sorry, but it’s confusing.”

He nodded. “It is. And the more you know about it, the more confusing it gets. So I’m trying to keep it simple. The scientists came up with a way to open dimensional portals some time before 1991. Now whoever can access such a portal can do a lot of stuff that shouldn’t be done—and that includes jumping a warp through space and time…which defies the natural limitation. The natural limitation allows linear progression, forward only, in sync with entropy. You with me?”

“Um…” I muttered.

“Hey, I’m not even gonna get into hyperspace or any of that, so relax. Now we can jump through a warp into the past or future. So, with such a capability, it would be catastrophic if it fell into the wrong hands. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

He pointed to himself. “Well, it fell into the wrong hands. Savvy?”

“Your hands,” I said. “The wrong hands? Sorry…but you’re identifying yourself as a bad guy?”

He laughed and slapped his leg, saying, “Everything hangs on perspective, doesn’t it? There’s a powerful organization that believes I’m a bad guy. And I admit, I feel kind of like a supervillain sometimes. However, from my point of view, that powerful organization represents ‘the wrong hands’ for the tech to fall into.”

I thought about this for a moment. I hadn’t yet heard of the phrase ‘moral relativism,’ but I certainly had noticed the principle in operation: Everybody assumed they themselves were right about everything. Two people, on opposite sides of any conflict or issue, were both absolutely convinced they were right and the other side wrong. They adjusted their concept of morality to fit their own actions and desires. So, the concept that both Uncle Si and someone else each thought the other was too dangerous to be trusted with a time machine…warp generator…did ring true to me.

“If you stray outside your limitations,” he continued, “you’re gonna change something. But, for instance: if someone goes back and kills your great grandparents, 60 years before you were born, you don’t suddenly cease to exist in the here and now…even though you might assume the foundation of your existence would be kicked out from under you. But what does happen, to put it into crude terms, is: it would create a split in the timestream.”

“The timestream,” I repeated, numbly.

“Right. Time is like a huge river. The current is slow, but can’t be stopped. It can be split and diverted. And, if carefully done, those separate streams can sometimes be looped back into themselves to merge, so that nobody is the wiser.”

“So, you’re saying, by going into the past and changing something, an alternate reality is created?”

He laughed triumphantly and clapped his hands. “Yup! I told you you were smart. So in one reality, everything is just like it is in your experience, and progresses from there into the future. But in the other reality, there is no you…never was…because your grandparents were killed and that preempts your conception.”

“I follow what you’re saying,” I said, pleased to not be utterly lost. Maybe I wasn’t totally dense, after all.

“Good. Now some changes are minor, meaning the split is minor. Only a little creek splits off from the vast river of time, and it hardly makes a difference. In fact, the creek probably merges back into the river soon anyway. I go find some average schmoe somewhere in this year right now; I tell him about the Internet, the moon landings, or electronic fuel injection. What happens? Most likely, he dismisses me as a lunatic and goes on about his business. Nothing really changes, other than he laughs to himself when he remembers the lunatic who pronounced some preposterous technologies of the future. Or maybe I’m a little more convincing, and for whatever reason, he tells somebody else what I told him. So they dismiss him as a lunatic, and that mucks up his life for a little while, but over time he learns to keep his mouth shut about it, and life returns to whatever is normal for him. No noticeable disruption in the timestream, unless somebody is observing that particular guy’s life.”

“Observing,” I muttered. “Sorry…but who would be observing?”

He showed me his palm. “Hold on. I’ll get to that. So me getting you into Pee Wee Football…that’s just a minor split, that doesn’t affect hardly anybody, in the big scheme of history. But let’s say I jump a warp back to ancient Rome, and I prevent the assassination of Julius Caesar…”

My mind raced, trying to place that name. I’d read it, somewhere.

“…Now something like that,” he went on, “theoretically might alter the course of world history, in a big way.”

“And an alternate reality is created,” I mused, out loud.

He nodded. “I don’t understand all the science, but there’s a Continuum Protection Bureau, which monitors this stuff. They have means to alert them when a major split like that occurs—when alternate realities begin to divert and spread.”

He sighed and licked his lips. “Let me give you a little background: shortly after a method was discovered to access the portals, the scientists organized an expedition to another solar system to mine some minerals and other stuff that’s rare here on Earth.”

“You mean they…jumped a warp…to another planet.”

“Right. The warps can bridge spatially as well as temporally—distance and/or time. You’ve probably figured out that you’re not in Missouri anymore. You’re in California. But you didn’t drive the entire distance on roads.”

It wasn’t me who drove, as he very well knew, but I didn’t see the point in nitpicking details.

“Anyway, the technology was new back then,” he said. “Instead of traveling extraterrestrially, a mistake was made; they wound up elsewhere on Earth, in our historic past, and they really made a mess. It caused a major disruption like what we’re talking about. The CPB was formed shortly after. The Bureau thought they identified how to correct the split, and sent a team back to prevent the disruption, but the second team screwed the pooch and caused another split.”

“So now there were two alternate realities,” I said.

He nodded. “Then, some agents from the CPB decided they could live better lives in one of those alternate realities, and they deserted, jumping warps into who-knows-where, and who-knows-when. Some of them were reckless, and caused further splits. One of them decided to desert, jump a warp into Earth’s history, taking a couple warp generators with him—one broken, and one functional. This guy was fairly clever, and used the broken one to reverse-engineer several more, on the down-low. He’s been careful not to cause any major splits, but he’s established several safe havens in various times and places. He’s found that the least conspicuous way to keep the warp generators handy is to conceal them in a vehicle. And he took a minor risk, out of sympathy for his nephew…by protecting him from certain incidents, and trying to teach him some stuff that should help him enjoy a better life.”

I let this sink in for a moment. “It’s you you’re talking about? You deserted, and stole the warp generators?”

“Yup. But I’m getting ahead of myself again. After those first couple splits, the CPB hired and trained a Temporal Police Force. One special branch of the TPF is specifically tasked with hunting down unauthorized warp-jumpers, removing them and everyone with an immediate connection to them, then eliminating evidence of their execution…sometimes their very existence, when possible. That branch doesn’t officially exist. I call them the Erasers.”

I recalled flashes of my family’s bodies disappearing into the invisible window—which I guess was just a cloaked cargo van from the future.

“They haven’t been able to locate me,” he said. “Obviously…or I would no longer exist in any reality. I haven’t caused any major splits that I know of, or made public the technology we use, so I didn’t think finding and erasing me was a big priority. In fact, I kind of began to assume they were going to leave me alone, if I kept a low profile and didn’t start sharing their secrets with the whole world. Something must have changed, for them to come after you when they did. They discovered our connection, somehow. They wanted to take you out way, way before you ever had a chance to…”

His gaze shifted past me, to the hallway. I turned in the chair and looked. Mami had arrived, bringing breakfast smells with her from the kitchen.

This breakfast was served in the formal dining room. Instead of French Toast, Mami had made chocolate chip banana nut flapjacks. The meal was heavenly. She had added grits, but the high point was definitely the pancakes.

Mami ate with us, sitting close to Uncle Si. She couldn’t seem to stop glancing at him, and smiling at both of us. “I mees you,” she told him, more than once. He grinned back at her. I felt like urging him to repay her affections in kind, but he only rubbed her neck once, then kissed her on the cheek when finished with his food.

When all of us were done, they spoke back-and-forth in Spanish for a while. I could recognize some words, here and there, just from what little Mami had taught me.

After Mami had cleaned the table, and was in the kitchen washing dishes, I tried to restart our conversation from before. “Why?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Why do they erase people? Why are they trying to reverse the splits?”

He wiped his face with a cloth napkin and said, “Tell me if you’ve heard this old axiom yet: ‘power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.”

I shook my head. “Sorry, no.”

“Well, there’s something you might as well learn about the filthy rich and filthy powerful, right now: when some dirtbag acquires more wealth and power than he knows what to do with, you’d think he’d be content. He’d spend the rest of his life vacationing in the tropics, playing golf, or whatever. But that’s not what happens. The prick isn’t happy being richer than everyone else—he wants to take everything other people have, too, until he has everything and they have nothing. It makes no sense, I know. But you can bank on it. And he’ll lie, cheat, steal and murder to make it happen. Well, it’s the same way for governments. No matter how much power and control they accumulate…legally and illegally…it will never be enough until they can micromanage every mundane detail of every citizen’s life. They’re not worried in the slightest that splitting streams will result in some space-time catastrophe. What they can’t tolerate is the probability that a lot of deserters will escape their control. The most terrifying catastrophe for a corrupt government is that men might find a place to live free, and find out that it’s much preferable to the safe, regulated Utopia they’ve been programmed to fantasize about. Others will notice them prospering and, unless they can be conditioned to believe individual prosperity is wrong, and that freedom is a hindrance to achieving Utopia, they’ll reject the programming and escape the hive.”

I was confused, and probably looked it.

Uncle Si shrugged. “Well, anyway…there’s more to it than that, but the gist of what I’m saying is this: the shitbags pushing the buttons are drunk on power and constantly lust for more. Losing any degree of control over us pissant serfs is just unacceptable.”

He was right: it made no sense.

“Was it you who saved me from the Erasers?” I asked, once again noticing the slight differences in appearance he had between then and now.

After a moment, he said, “Yes and no.”

I considered this for a while, before the meaning came to me. “That was you, but from an alternate reality!”

“A version of me, from an alternate timeline,” he specified. “What made you notice?”

“Your nose. Your teeth. He seemed a little more…bulgier in the muscles, too.”

His hard face softened. It seemed like he was fighting down a smile. I was sure the answer had pleased him for some reason.

“Let’s get back to the study,” he said, rising while dropping his napkin on the table.

I followed him back to the room with all the books, and we resumed our seats there.

He cleared his throat. “There’s no way to sugar-coat this, Sprout: your family is gone and the life you had in St. Louis is gone with it. There’s no going back, and all you’ve got, now, is me.”

I nodded, taking some comfort that his statement indicated he didn’t intend to abandon me.

“The CPB knows about you, obviously,” he continued. “I don’t know how much they know, but at the very least they’re now aware of your given name; who your family members were; where you lived, and so on. You need to understand that if the TPF ever finds you, they’ll probably kill you. There’s no reasoning or negotiating with them. They won’t announce themselves; explain themselves; or read you your rights. In the world they come from, individuals don’t have rights, anyway. If they draw a bead on you, you’re done. And if they can catch you completely unaware, all the better. That means they’ll shoot you in the back; slit your throat in your sleep; whatever they need to do.”

The fear from that last day at the trailer park came crawling back. “What do I do?”

“Exactly what I tell you,” he said, staring hard at me for a moment before speaking again. “We have to erase Pete Bedauern before the Erasers do it. Meh—it was never a great name anyway. And you have to keep your mouth shut. You can’t tell anybody about who you really are or where you came from. You have to be smart—don’t do or say anything that might cause people to doubt our cover story.”

“Um, cover story? Sorry, but I don’t know what our cover story is,” I said, worried I had missed that information, somehow.

“I’m working on it. For now, just stay here and don’t interact with anybody until I brief you on the game plan.”

“Um, I talked a little with the mail man. He noticed my shoes. I’m sorry.”

“What did you tell him?” he asked, voice going flat and cold.

“Nothing!” I said. “He asked if Mami was my mother. I just smiled, like a retard. He asked where I got my shoes. I just shrugged.”

He glanced at my feet. “Those sneakers do stand out. Hortensia already ordered you some shoes from the Sears catalog. But I’ll get some for you before they get here. In fact…” He stroked his chin momentarily, with a thoughtful expression. “I think today we’ll all take a trip. I want to give the little lady a night on the town. We can probably find you a shoe store before then, though.”

“I’m sorry, but…I don’t have any way to pay you back for the shoes,” I said, then ran my hands over the pants and shirt I was wearing. “Or the clothes Mami made for me.”

“I know,” he said. “Don’t sweat it.”

I chewed on my lip a second before pointing my thumb toward the kitchen and asking, “Does she know?”

He glanced in the direction I was pointing, then turned back to me. “No. I’m not sure if I’ll ever try to explain this to her. Don’t you go spilling the beans, either.”

“Okay. But she doesn’t already suspect…?”

“What? That I’m a time-traveling fugitive from a murderous future shadow regime, jumping warps between alternate realities during the week? No; I’m pretty sure she doesn’t. Did you notice that refrigerator in the kitchen?”

I nodded, confused about how the strange fridge was relevant.

“Most people don’t have refrigerators yet,” he said. “They have ice boxes to keep their food in. That particular fridge in there won’t even be manufactured for over a decade. Fully self-contained, electric, and doesn’t use the dangerous gasses that preceded Freon. I brought it in and set it up as a sort of calculated risk—to see how suspicious it would make her. Hortensia thinks it’s the cat’s meow. She’s smart enough to know something is odd, but she doesn’t grill me about it. Maybe she thinks I’m a magician, or the genius who built it, but she doesn’t assume such technology can’t exist yet. Obviously it can exist—she’s got one sitting in her kitchen!”

“What about when people come over?” I asked.

“We don’t have people over,” he said. “She doesn’t get out much. When she does, she doesn’t toss our business out on the street—that’s part of what makes her a high-caliber mate. I take her to visit her cousins now and then, and that’s enough for her. She’s content here, seeing me once or twice a week. She thinks I’m out keeping tabs on other businesses in addition to the Orange Grove…which is the truth, actually. She’s trustworthy, tight-lipped, loyal to a fault…pretty much the most you could hope for in a woman.”

“Then why…? Sorry, but does she know about PJ’s mom?”

He frowned and shook his head as if trying to sling off something clinging to his face. “First of all: quit apologizing all the time. It’s annoying. Never apologize for anything unless there’s damn good reason. And when you’re grateful about something, just say ‘thank-you’ once. Don’t keep saying it over and over, every chance you get.”

My face heated. I was embarrassed and remorseful for doing something that annoyed him, and almost apologized for that before catching myself.

He sighed. “PJ’s mom, and catching your dog that day, those were one-time deals. PJ’s mom wasn’t anything I wanted to do. It was something that was necessary, that’s all. Hortensia doesn’t need to know about it; you don’t need to worry about it anymore; and I don’t want to remember it. Okay? Just let it drop.”

I nodded, stinging a little from what I perceived as a rebuke. It had been none of my business; I just felt protective of Mami.

He rose from the chair and stretched. “So let’s get ready to roll. We’ll get you back on your training, soon. You might need it more than ever, now. Especially the mental part of it, like situational awareness.”

“Those businesses you run in different realities,” I mused, aloud, “one of them is The Warrior’s Lair?”

“Was,” he said. “I can’t ever go back to those coordinates. That business and most of my customers there…permanently burned. That’s a risk I took.”

“I’m sor…”

He cut me off with a stern glare and a vertical palm.

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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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