“What’s he talking about?” Earl asked, walking around the front of the truck to meet us.
Grayson shot me a glance. “Explain it to him while I calibrate the detector. Make it quick.”
My jaw dropped.
Oh, sure. Explain the time-space continuum to a guy whose best friend is a two-headed turtle. This should only take a sec.
Earl had been in the can when Grayson explained to me how fluctuations in electromagnetic fields could represent the “fingerprints” of past wormholes and other disturbances in time and space.
Grayson had dumbed it down for me with a taco shell. Now I had to dumb it down another hundred notches for Earl.
God help me.
“Uh ... Earl?” I said, snapping my finger to get his attention. He’d picked up a handful of mud and was rubbing the black muck between his thumb and forefinger.
“Yeah?” he said, wiping the black smear on the thigh of his camo hunting pants.
I sighed.
I guess I should be glad he didn’t eat it.
“Listen,” I said. “Grayson thinks there may be a hole in time out there in the woods that people are falling into.”
Earl’s eyes narrowed. I could almost hear the rusty cogs in his brain crunching.
“You mean like in Back to the Future?” he asked, then looked up at the sky like a turkey in the rain.
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly like that. Only there’s no DeLorean required. You just walk into it. That’s why we need to stick close to each other. You know. So we don’t end up sucked up into space.”
Earl surprised me by grinning. “I think that’d be kind a cool, Bobbie.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You wouldn’t like it.”
Earl frowned. “Why not?”
“They don’t have fried chicken in space.”
Chapter Sixteen
Earl and I hiked alongside each other for about a half mile up and down the undulating slopes of Whirlwind Trail. Accustomed to Florida’s usually flat terrain, I was having a hard time keeping pace a few yards behind Grayson, who was in the lead, waiving his EMF detector in front of him like some space cadet in a low-budget sci-fi flick.
The only thing missing was the red shirt.
Back at the truck, Grayson had told us there was safety in numbers. I begged to disagree. As far as I was concerned, the fewer people who witnessed this ridiculous parade of idiocy, the better my odds were of not dying of embarrassment.
Still, a niggling little part of me worried Grayson was right. What if there really was a wormhole out there, vacuuming people up like some ravenous space Hoover?
I hedged my bet and tugged Earl along as my human shield—just in case.
Whirlwind Trail wound its way through patches of palmetto and pine flatland, interspersed with small hills covered mainly in stunted, gnarled scrub oaks. It was obvious the land had, in the not-too-distant past, undergone an upheaval of apocalyptic proportions. The terrain was hilly. And, with the exception of a scant handful of places, Florida simply didn’t have hills.
From what I’d gathered in a Google search, the hills and valleys covering Edward Medard State Park were manmade—a byproduct of decades of phosphate mining by the American Cyanamid Company. The digging had ended in the late 1960s. The company had donated the land to the county back in 1969, and the area had been revegetated with trees and shrubs.
From what I could see, since then Mother Nature had been hard at work trying to heal the damage. She was doing her level-best to make the land, well, level again. Rains like the one that fell earlier in the day were slowly eroding the man-made hills, exposing the roots of the towering oaks that had sprouted atop them decades prior.
Like the child’s fable of the little pigs who built their houses of straw, the unfortunate trees that chose to sprout on the hilltops could do nothing but watch and wait as the soil they’d sunk their roots into washed out from underneath them.
At the top of a particularly high hill, I stopped to take in the view. The grey-white sand comprising the mound was still damp from the rain, and left fairly detailed impressions of Grayson’s boot treads. Other than a few bird footprints, no other marks marred the cleanly washed trail.
I sighed. This expedition wasn’t turning into the clue-finding bonanza I’d hoped for. But on the bright side, I didn’t have to keep such a keen eye on Earl. After all, he couldn’t destroy evidence that didn’t exist, right?
Ringing the base of nearly every sandy hill we descended, dark, muddy puddles burbled like miniature moats. Leaves and twigs washed in by the heavy downpour floated on the blackish-brown surfaces of the backwash pools, making them resemble ponds of brewing tea.
About an hour into our journey, nothing out of the ordinary had yet to happen. Grayson’s gizmo hadn’t gone off. And Earl had remained unusually silent and thoughtful, making me begin to wonder if we’d stumbled into another dimension without me noticing.
I shook my head, fighting against the enticing calm of the tranquil woods. If that detector thing of Grayson’s did eventually go off, I needed to remain vigilant—my Glock at the ready. I planned to shoot that hyperactive Hoover in the nads before it could sweep us up in its cosmic vacuum hose. But then again, would that work?
“What’s Grayson doing, Bobbie?” Earl asked, sending my crazy train of thoughts colliding off their tracks.
“What do you mean?” I asked, glancing up from where I’d been kneeling, staring at my reflection in a puddle as black as slate.
Earl nodded to his left. I followed his gaze to see Grayson about twenty feet away, waving his EMF detector around the edges of a pond.
“Think he found that space hole?” Earl asked.
“I dunno,” I said. “Let’s go find out.”
“WHAT’S GOING ON?” I asked Grayson.
He looked over at us and stopped waving his EMF detector over a pond about the size of a swimming pool. He adjusted his fedora, then rubbed his chin.
“Intriguing,” he said as
