Dwayne stood on shaking legs, and the pain in his head began to fade away. His stomach settled, and the chills abated. He spat out a mouthful of bitter juice. He turned to look back the way they came. There was a cloud of cold mist clinging to the ground. The field was still open. For now.
It was late afternoon. Around four o’clock by Dwayne’s expert judgment of the bright yellow sun hanging in the west. He pressed his eyes shut once more and stood up straight for a look around.
They were roughly twenty feet beyond where the back wall of the Q-hut would stand a hundred thousand years from now. The mesa was still here and some of the same rock formations but there the similarity ended.
The slope up to the top of the mesa was now a long hill of loose rock scree sparsely covered in scrub pines gently moving in the breeze. It led down to a tree line with dense forest beyond. The trees thinned out as they reached the plateau top and the foliage changed to a thick wild grass studded with rock and stands of greasewood. The air was different, too. Thicker than the desert air. More humid. As he shook off the chill, Dwayne could feel the change in the air. It was rich with the smell of pine. Slightly cooler, too.
The only sign of animal life was the biggest damned butterflies Dwayne had ever seen, bright yellow and dappled with red. They drifted from one feathery seed pod to another atop the tall grass stalks. Each was fully the size of Dwayne’s outstretched hand.
“That was a bitch!” Renzi said. He sat up and shoved his boonie hat back in place.
“Doc didn’t say nothing about that crazy shit,” Chaz said. He was stripping off gear harness to remove the vomit-foul tunic. He wore a paper fiber t-shirt underneath.
“He didn’t know,” Dwayne said. “There’s no after-action report from the first trip through the Tube. That’s why we’re here, remember? You can complain when we get back.”
“Maybe the trip killed them,” Jimbo suggested.
Dwayne ignored that and stepped to the lip of an outcropping of shale. From the end of the rocky shelf, he looked down the slope to see a lake where the desert once was. Desert will be, he reminded himself. A spike of fresh pain behind his eyes. The lake was more like a sea or an inlet. It stretched away as far as he could see with broad beaches along its edge on either shore. It looked like low tide. Or maybe the water was receding, already turning to the bone dry bed it would be back in The Now.
The pine forest started about five hundred yards below them and covered a long slope right down to the water. Maybe two miles to the water. He couldn’t see a beach directly below their position. Maybe there wasn’t one, or maybe he just couldn’t see it from this angle. Maybe the woods ended in marshes. It narrowed the search area. Caroline, Kemp, and Phillip had to be between here and the water somewhere. Unless they went the other way toward higher ground. He knew enough about tracking to know that people in unknown territory tended to walk downhill.
Dwayne spat some more of the bile taste out of his mouth and dug out the transmitter. He pressed the send button.
“Roenbach to Tauber. Mission time zero plus five. We’re here, and it looks like the target area as you described it.”
“Tell him this ride sucks,” Renzi said. “Jimbo, can you pick up a trail?” Dwayne said. “Any sign?”
Jimbo wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and began to search the ground ahead. He waved a hand for the rest to stay where they were. Dwayne stepped off the shale to stand by Chaz. Renzi got to his feet and spat.
“I never needed a smoke so bad in my life,” he said.
“Grass is matted down here,” Jimbo said. He stalked forward, eyes fixed on the grass. “They moved downhill into the trees. Three paths joining into one.”
Dwayne keyed the transmitter again.
“We’re following a trail that leads west down toward a lake. Will report progress. Roenbach out.”
“Should we risk calling out for them?” Chaz said.
“Not just yet. Jimbo, you’re point.”
Jimbo led the way, and the other three followed behind at twenty-foot intervals. They fell into the old routines of long-range patrol that had gotten them into and out of so many bad places intact so many times before. Jimbo studied the ground ahead and the others watched all about, weapons ready. There was cawing of birds coming from the trees below punctuated by louder squawks. Not sounds any of them recognized.
They moved into the shade of the tree line. There were clumps of broad-leafed ferns carpeting the forest floor. And the trunks of the trees were thick with fungi. There were enough broken or trampled-down ferns to provide a trail. When that failed, there were places where the fungi were crumbled, like someone rested against a tree bole or touched a hand to the tree at shoulder-height. Jimbo was able to lead them swiftly down the slope on a pathway that curved steadily down and joined a gully formed by runoff from past rainstorms. It was dry as dust now, no recent rains. A good thing for the Rangers. Any sign they could find from Caroline Tauber and company would be useful, and dry ground was the perfect medium for tracking.
Long pine needles rained on Dwayne from above. He looked up to see small animals drifting from
