Chapter 32

I was up first the next morning, and the girls seemed to want to sleep in so I dressed and walked outside to see if we'd had any damage from the bad weather last night. I didn't see any damage, but something was dreadfully wrong and I could almost feel a deep burning pain in my side. We damned sure weren't where we'd gone to bed. I walked over to the picnic table, took a seat in a chair, and started looking around.

After a few minutes I got up, built a fire, and put on a pot off water for some campfire coffee, you know, the kind you boil. I stayed with it until it the water was boiling and then opened the coffee and put a big handful into the pot and pulled it off the fire after five more minutes. I let it sit for a few minutes and then pulled it off the fire, poured in a cup of cool water to settle the grounds and then poured me a big cup, putting the plastic lid on it to keep it hot and then took my first sip - then I took my second. No matter how much coffee I drank though I knew things weren't going to look any better.

We weren't up on the side of even a small mountain any longer though, and I knew for damned sure we had been moved. I just didn't know how it had been done or where we were now. Visions of Eric Flint's 1632 flashed through my mind more than once, but it wasn't like that at all really. The area we were in hadn't been moved, but we had been moved, and all out things had come with us.

Everything was still here, but it was a different here. Everything we had brought was still in place and best I could tell it was all still in the same spatial relationship as it had been when we went to sleep. Even the electric fence horse pen we'd put up looked about the same. The horses and mules were still enclosed in it and the water hose to the pumping station I'd assembled was still in place. The only trouble there was no river by the pump.

Our trucks were all still parked in line neatly and the damned helicopter was still right where Jan and Sharon had put it down last night. Still where was relative though. It was still near the front of the trucks, but it obviously wasn't where it had been. The terrain was nothing like where we had been.

In the first place we weren't in a mountainous region or even a hilly region any longer. The ground around us was pretty much flat. It was almost desert like in appearance too. Oh, we weren't in a bunch of sand dunes, but the vegetation was sparse. There was one large hill near us, but it was mostly plopped down on flat ground, or it appeared to be. I got up and walked to the other side of the trucks to take a better look at it.

Damned if it didn't look like there was a big cave in it. I walked over to the mouth of it and sure enough it was a big cave, as in massive. The entrance was easily big enough to drive the trucks into and it looked like there was plenty of room in it for all of them. Hell, if we backed them in toward the rear wall there would be enough room to put the helicopter in front of them and have it all within the cave. To me it seemed way to coincidental to be real.

Jerrilyn came out of the tent then and she didn't calmly walk over to the fire for a cup of coffee.

"What the hell is going on, Tommy?" she asked.

"Damnifiknow. I've been sitting her trying to make sense of it myself. We ain't where we went to bed though."

"I can see that, but how did we get here?"

"My best guess is the spacemen moved us while we were asleep."

"What God damned spacemen?"

"That is the next question all right, but I don't have an answer. You'd better come over and get a cup of coffee while we try to figure it out," I said, and she headed for the pot.

"This doesn't make any sense, Tommy. If that storm had blown us here it wouldn't have put everything down so nice and neat," she said.

"Even I know that."

"Well how did it happen?"

"That's something I don't know. I am pretty sure nothing on Earth could have done it though, especially without waking us up."

"I know you're right. I slept soundly after the wind died down, but no one could sleep that soundly. Hell, it didn't even upset the horses and mules. Even that damned donkey looks like nothing is wrong. Where are we?"

"I don't know that either and I doubt we'll even have a clue until Jan and Sharon get in the air and look around."

"Maybe we can find out from the Blackberry. It has GPS built in," she said, and headed right back into the tent for it.

I had my doubts it would tell us anything. Things were just too weird for it to be that simple. I hoped it would tell us, but I had serious doubts. Turned out I was right too.

"I can't believe this. The damned thing keeps saying no signal. How can that be?" she asked, after she came outside with it.

"I can only think of one thing it can mean and it's exactly what it says. It isn't getting the signal from any of the GPS satellites. I don't know any place on Earth it could be in that shape with a clear sky like we have here."