Windfall

Windfall Chapter 4

Mars sat at the desk he had cleared off two days ago when he had first found this lab.  The lab had been on his maps, but it had ended up being smaller than labeled.  It was as though his maps had shown the building with extra wings on it, wings that had somehow never been built.  It didn’t really surprise him though since most maps he found had discrepancies with the world around him and even more in the books that remained.  The Wind had really scrambled things and so in one place he could find a map that was hand drawn with no exact scales while in another place he would find an atlas drawn with towns that had yet to be built in it. 

He stored all the data in his memory banks, separating time periods as best he could and occasionally making sub files for those when things didn’t quite fit together the way it should have anyway.  For example Kennedy had been shot in one timeline, but had survived another.  Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, or Leif Erickson had colonized the original Americas and his descendants had waged war with Columbus when the Italian got to the ‘new country.’  His favorite to date being that computers were banned in 2053 and nothing greater than a type press was allowed.  He would be a walking felony if computers had been banned in his timeline.

One thing that made him aware of how lucky he was to still be alive was that some of the structures seemed to have been merged with others.  He had found a row of houses that looked like someone had taken toy houses and sat them right on top of the original, then melted them together.  Thing was that they had just kind of merged, like their molecules had been joined.  It had made the houses all but impassable since a door might lead to a wall and a hallway might be blocked by an outside wall of the secondary house.  If he had been in one of those when things had shifted, or if he had landed on another person like that; it could have been ugly and lethal. 

The desk in front of him was scattered with many of the maps that he was studying.  He had always found it calming to have the hard copies in front of him.  His computer could merge them to show the closest thing to a complete map that he could get, but having the hard copies just let him come to conclusions that at times were totally random yet exactly what was needed.  Right now he was trying to find a place that might have been used as a Hunters base pre Wind.

His main base was well stocked, but it was nothing like what he had back before the Wind had stolen him away.  There were more low-lifers out in the world now than decent people, and it made him even more paranoid than he knew people usually saw him as.  He was wired to protect and there was so much to protect his small group from now.  It felt like a constant uphill battle anymore and there was never enough to do the job with.  Safety came not in empty hands, but in potentially lethal ones and he needed more.    

So far he hadn’t found any of the Hunter bases that he had wanted to raid for weapons.  He was aware of where they should be, he was part of that faction after all, but they just weren’t there.  The one he knew best was completely missing.  In its place was an open field with an airplane hangar on it.  The history he knew of that base was that there had been an old air force base there at some point, but that the Hunters had taken it over more than a century after that type of plane was no longer in use.  So far he only had the weapons that he had built or dug up and a handful of civilians to use them.  He needed backup.

It was on the tail end of that last thought that he caught the static of a message coming in on a frequency that he had only given to one woman since the Wind had hit.  He sent his scouts closer to the source to try to get a better signal.  The person sending the signal had short range capabilities at best so he doubted that it was her.  His little scouts, or spiders as he called them, would be able to act as remote transponders and bounce the message the extra distance so that he could hear it clearly.  He expected there to be one hell of a good reason for her to have given that information out when he had specifically told her not to.  It was meant for her and her alone to get in touch with him again, preferably for another dinner and a bit less larceny of his goods.  He could still feel her eyes following the curve of his lips and he certainly wouldn’t mind her lips following the same path.