Circles of Displacement Read online

  Wanda felt a diffuse fear seep into her body. What were trees doing in the middle of a highway? Why hadn't the truck driver seen them in time? It was a puzzle. One thing for certain, though, there was no going forward. The only thing she could do was go back to the nearest filling station or town and call for help. Or maybe someone else would come along. She walked back past the beams of her headlights and looked in the direction from which she had come. Strangely, she could see no headlights approaching. But it is late at night, she thought, striving for normality. Well, nothing else to do but go back. She climbed into the driver's seat and turned the Cherokee around. Something, some fear she was beginning to feel at a visceral level, made her drive slower. Therefore, she was able to stop in plenty of time when another line of trees burgeoned up across the highway and stopped her progress in that direction as well. Startled almost into a gibbering panic by now, she got out of her vehicle again and stared blankly at the coiling vines and tree trunks blocking her progress. What in hell was going on?

  A scream, not human at all, split the darkness, ascending into a wail of terror that was choked off abruptly. Sounds of underbrush moving in the night like something being dragged away came to her ears, as if a predator was hauling off a kill. The noises scared her back into the Cherokee. She locked the doors and pawed at the glove compartment for her pistol. The old .45 Army automatic felt comforting in her hand. She shivered and decided to wait until daylight before venturing out again.

  * * * *

  Michael Wronsen was caught on a lonely stretch of highway 190 between Livingston and Huntsville. He managed to stop his old Explorer, but just barely, and now he was pacing fearfully back and forth between where the highway stopped and forest began, trying to make sense of his predicament. Where am I and how in hell did I get here, he wondered, as bewildered as a toddler in a funhouse mirror maze. This just can't be highway 190, not with monster oaks and pines blocking both ends of the stretch of pavement. Typically, he put his mind to work and began reviewing the past few hours, trying to pinpoint some moment in time where he might have had a memory loss. He had been driving from Texas A & M for a visit to his parents, and possibly, to go job hunting. He was a professor of physics at the college, but the academic life had begun to pall. Michael was smart enough to realize that he was a very mediocre physicist and would probably never contribute much originality to the field. His former wife hadn't understood that fact. She became dissatisfied at his lack of advancement beyond assistant professor and finally left him for greener pastures. She also left him with a load of debt incompatible with his salary.

  A friend with the Compaq Computer Corporation in Houston had invited him out to tour the plant during his visit and he was seriously considering applying for a job there. He felt as if a change from teaching and desultory research might lead to a brighter outlook on life, especially if the money was good. His free spending ex-wife had never let him accumulate any, and that lack kept him from pursuing some of his other goals. His interests were wide-ranging and he loved to read and dabble in other fields, especially politics, sociology and history. Although he didn't know it yet, that self-acquired knowledge was going to be more beneficial to him in the coming days than physics ever would. Right now, though, that was the last thing on his mind. None of his thoughts explained his present predicament.

  The only incongruity he could come up with had been that sudden flash of light and clap of thunder, coming abruptly out of a clear, starry night. The light had momentarily illuminated a bank of huge trees seemingly bisecting the highway. As the light faded, the edge of his high beams picked them up again in time for him to slow and stop, and here he remained. Like Wanda, he had turned around and tried to retrace his path, but trees blocked him there too. It has to have been that thunder and light, he told himself. Either that or I've gone slap dab crazy. Wait. Maybe the radio would have something on it. He climbed back into the Explorer and flipped the key. There was only static. He got back out and paced some more. Thunder and lightning. Well, light, anyway. Could that have ruined the radio? Possibly, but that didn't put him any nearer to solving the problem. Eventually, he felt a tiredness in his legs from the constant walking back and forth. How much time had passed? Hours, it must have been. He noticed a faint brightening in the east. Almost dawn. Wait until daylight, he thought, then hike out of here and find out where I am. The decision somehow brought little comfort.

  * * * *

  Approximately fifty miles to the west of where Wanda Smith was holding her pistol like a talisman to ward off demons, and from where she was separated by only a few miles from Sheila Holloway, who was going peacefully to sleep, a forbidding red brick building squatted in the very center of the city of Huntsville. Inside that building, known as “The Walls” to city folk and prisoners as well, an execution was being prepared.

  Dawson Reeves was already strapped to the gurney, immobile, prepared, but certainly not ready, to receive his lethal injection. Not much further away, several dozen men rested in their cells on death row, contemplating their own ultimate fate. Guards watched them and numerous other hard-core prisoners over black and white monitors; other guards were more or less alert in outlying portions of Texas’ most secure prison facility. Here they kept the men considered too dangerous for other facilities or too recalcitrant to be let out for work details under guard.

  The Walls contained other facilities: a dispensary for convicts with real or imagined ills staffed on the early night shift by two female nurses, an armory locked away but ready for access in case of rioting prisoners, a gym, a day room, and many, many cells, inhabited by miscreants, hard core drug dealers, murderers who had dodged a death sentence, recidivist thieves, strong-arm men and a rare innocent, caught in the coils of an overburdened justice system.

  Dawson Reeves was certainly not an innocent, but he raged nevertheless, not at the justice of his sentence, but at his own mistake in being caught. If only he hadn't gone back for that girl. Damn the bad luck, how was he to know that the fucking cops had a description and were staking out that apartment? And damn it, he should have moved sooner; there was too much evidence of his previous rapes and kills left lying around in his apartment. That was what had ultimately convicted him, and he cursed the day he had ever let that little teen-aged sweetie slip from his grasp. He should have left then, taking the evidence he jacked off to with him, or destroyed it maybe, burning it up like Jews in an oven. But no, he hadn't tied her tight enough, nor noticed how intently she stared when he removed his mask; and she escaped, the damn ungrateful bitch, and here he was, strapped to a table like his mother had strapped him down when he was bad and wet his pants. It just wasn't fair. If he ever got another chance, he would never, never let one of the bitches get away again.

  The lights in the death cell blinked out. At the same time there was a clap of thunder and a diffuse bright light flared and died. Dawson blinked at the after images, wondering what was happening. Suddenly he noticed that the tension of the restraints holding his right arm and leg had relaxed. At the same time, he felt wetness at his right hip, and a pain just beginning there. He flexed his right arm and was startled when it came free. The padded restraint was still attached to his wrist, but somehow it seemed to have come loose from the underpinning beneath the gurney.

  In the darkness, Dawson had no idea of what was going on; he only knew that his arm was free. He scrabbled at the buckles on his left arm, got them loose, then sat up and freed his left leg. From out of the darkness, there came a chorus of shouts and screams, heard faintly from the isolation of the death cell, but he paid them little attention, nor did he wonder where the two attendants who had been in the death room with him had gone. By some wild chance, he was free, at least from the gurney, and little else mattered. He stood upright and felt ahead of himself in the darkness, looking for a way out.

  The floor dropped out from under him as if he had stepped on a trapdoor, and he fell, screaming into the black night. He crashed to the ground one story b
elow. One of his outstretched arms crumpled, sending a searing pain up through his shoulder as the bones of his lower arm shattered.

  A gunshot sounded, closer than he wanted to hear. He scrambled away from the sound, thinking that the guards were coming for him, to strap him back to the gurney and plunge the syringe of lethal drugs into his arm.

  A tangle of vegetation and tree trunks, closer to the walls than he remembered, impeded his progress, but it served to hide him as well. He crouched in the darkness, listening as more shouts and gunfire rang out in the night. He need not have worried about the guards. They were up to their ears in alligators.

  Eventually, the gunfire died away. He listened closely to exuberant voices and concluded that they belonged to triumphant convicts. It gave him little consolation. In the feudal-like strata of prison society, he had no status at all; his kind were at the bottom rung, right down there with the crazies, child molesters and deviants.

  Finally satisfied that he wasn't being pursued, he crept away into the dark jungle, cradling his broken arm. He had no sense of direction, wanting only to get away from the prison. Had he gone west, the jungle would have soon thinned, but his progress led him southeast, where, if it had not almost entirely disappeared, he would eventually cross US Highway 59, in the same general area where Sheila Holloway was sleeping peacefully and Wanda Smith had returned to her Cherokee and locked all the doors.

  The edge of the time bubble that cut Dawson's bonds and shaved a small chunk of meat from his right hip continued in a perfect circle around the rest of the prison. It was pure chance that where portions of the old brick building disappeared from the new environment, it took most of the guards with it.

  The armory was left, and the dispensary, and a goodly portion of the cells. The auxiliary generator disappeared as well, leaving the cell doors unlocked, and what few guards remained were in total disarray.

  Over the next hour or two, the guards and convicts fought a number of confused and nightmarish battles in the darkness, but the issue was never really in doubt. Dawn revealed a prison, with a perfect arc cut from it and replaced by forest, where the former convicts were firmly in control.

  The arc went on to form a circle hundreds of yards in diameter; enclosed within the circle were shops, service stations, streets and a few private dwellings, all surrounded by forest. The remainder of the Walls' unit sat on the northern perimeter of the circle. As the sun came up, the convicts moved out to secure the rest of the area, gathering in those few civilians who hadn't broke for the new forest when they saw armed convicts moving around.

  Let it be said that cons do have their own code of honor, of sorts; a hierarchy of ranking as rigid as a feudal system. Had Dawson Reeves been seen, he would have been eliminated as ruthlessly, and with as little compassion as a gardener kills a snake, but he had already taken refuge in the forest adjoining his former place of confinement, still nursing his broken arm and a slowly building exhilaration at his freedom.

  Dawn revealed another aspect of the changed circumstances in the remains of the prison. As it happened, some of the hard-core whites had been closer to the armory, and had seized the opportunity. One of them, a big, hulking brute, a weight lifter by the name of Burley Simpson, a convicted cop killer, had seized the first arms and directed their distribution and the ensuing fight. Burley was on his third incarceration, and so far as the authorities believed, his last. He would not be eligible for parole until he was well into his eighties, and at that he had been lucky; only a technicality had prevented him from receiving a death sentence. He was already prejudiced when he first entered the prison system; by the time of his second sentence, he became rabidly racist. Now, in the Walls, he ran a white brotherhood gang, a body of convicts devoted to white supremacy within the prison system. He had distributed the newly acquired arms accordingly. Daylight brought the revelation of his fondest dreams. The whites were armed; the blacks were not. He seized the day like Napoleon getting a second chance at Waterloo, especially when he was made to understand that the prison had somehow been displaced from the bounds of a society he had never had much use for in the first place.

  * * * *

  Wherever the balls of time energy touched down, whatever was within the confines was displaced backwards in time to primeval forest eastward from their center in Huntsville, and to scrub and plains westward. Most of the changes never affected humans directly except here and there, but wherever the time fields touched down, a circular area of the twentieth century landscape was replaced by areas of flora and fauna from the past and displaced backwards, willy-nilly, to cope as it could with an environment not seen since the late Pleistocene.

  * * * *

  On a ranch somewhere well north of Houston, cattle were suddenly without the supervision they had been bred for. A few died in the night, others in days or weeks ahead, pulled down by animals such as earth had not seen for thousands of years.

  * * * *

  In the Lake Livingston area, about eighty miles north of Houston, several portions of the huge lake were transported in the blink of an eye. Unconfined walls of water, dozens of feet high and hundreds of feet in diameter, collapsed down across the land, drowning strange creatures and familiar alike, along with a few humans who never had a chance to know what hit them. It flowed and sluiced and washed where the hand of man had never been seen, scouring new paths to old rivers and streams.

  * * * *

  A Texas farmer slept the sleep of the just, having put the kids to bed, made love to his wife, then got back up to watch the late news and weather. He believed in weathermen about as much as he believed in politicians’ promises, but there was corn to plant the next day, and he wanted to see what the weather radar was showing. He would make his own prediction from that. He fell asleep in his recliner while he was waiting, and never awoke even when the clap of thunder and bright flash of light stole Maude and his three children from him. They were replaced, unfortunately, by a set of huge, dog-like animals. He was torn to pieces before he even became fully awake.

  One capsule of altered time struck the center of the small town of Goodpasture on Highway 59, located a few miles south of the city of Livingston, which was built on the shores of the lake. This displacement took only a few teen-agers and their pick-up trucks into the past, along with a deputy sheriff and a few inhabitants of homes near the town's center.

  The kids were intent at that hour only with driving past the downtown shops and impressing their peers. One or two crashed gently into the wall of trees suddenly surrounding their environment; the others slowed, stopped and wondered, unable to comprehend immediately what vast changes had come into their lives.

  * * * *

  At a roadside rest area, a mixed bag of truckers and travelers spending the night there suddenly found themselves confined to a section of highway that began and ended a hundred and fifty yards on either side of them. As dawn brightened into full sunlight, they gathered in disparate groups to try to make sense of their predicament but soon enough, the vending machines emptied, the toilets overflowed and no one came to rescue them.

  Some of the truckers began quarreling. Darla Cranston, a schoolteacher from Tyler on her way to a seminar in Houston, sidled back to her Toyota Camry and furtively tucked her twenty-two-caliber revolver into the pocket of her jacket.

  Brent Sampson, a salesman with a slight physique belying his name did the same, only his weapon was slightly higher powered, a .25 automatic. Neither of them trusted the four truckers parked there, and the truckers didn't even trust one another. It was a situation made for trouble.

  * * * *

  All in all, there might have been several hundred—or perhaps even several thousand—people who were displaced backward in time on that early summer night in east Texas. No one will ever know. Many of them never made contact with their fellows, and many more fell prey to an environment they had no preparation for coping with. It was a new world, sparsely populated and the selection had been entirely random, isolating in
dividuals here, cutting families apart there, and nowhere was there a rule of law such as the displaced individuals had been used to and grown up with. The same sun they had been accustomed to all their lives came up just as usual the next morning, but many of them never lived to see it set that night.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  Sheila Holloway woke up to the sounds of birds chirping and calling out to each other. It was not an unfamiliar sound, given that the farmhouse was a quarter mile removed from the black top traffic, but it did sound louder than usual this morning, and somehow, not quite the same cheerful sounds as she was used to. Not only that, there seemed to be more of them, as if all the birds in the neighborhood had congregated right outside her window and brought their neighbors along as well. She shook off the covers on the bed and headed for the bathroom, shucking her nightgown as she went.

  The two beers she had drank the night before had left a nasty taste in her mouth, and she turned on the faucet to get a drink of water. It ran for a moment, then sputtered and quit. She blinked her eyes open and remembered that the power had gone out the night before. The early morning sunlight streaming through her bedroom window and into the bathroom had caused her to forget. Oh well, power outages never lasted long, unless there had been a hurricane or something, and it was probably too early in the year for that. She dry brushed her teeth then opened the closet door, flicking the light switch by habit, laughing at herself when nothing happened.

  She pulled out fresh jeans and a bright yellow blouse and took them back into the bedroom. There was quite enough light to let her rummage in the dresser for bra and panties. It was Sunday, so she gave no thought to the lack of any other sounds in the house. Mom and Dad must have really stayed out late last night, playing dominoes with the Marlins, she thought.