BLOGS

I found myself sitting in my living room, with a view of my neighbors home several hundred yards away, like most Sunday evenings. Then everything changed. After blinking and rubbing my eyes, I noticed a change in scenery. My neighbors home was no longer there. My four acre estate's scenic view, however was still scenic, albeit now all wilderness. I began turning on the electronic devices that I use almost solely for maintaining a link to the outside world and as I suspected, none of them were working. Next, I ran outside to confirm my hypothesis.
I grabbed my pistol, put on my clothes and stepped out the door and walked a hundred paces in order to give myself a vantage point for a good 360. All around me save for my homestead was wilderness. A thick forest dense as if nothing could live here. That theory was disproved when the howls of animals familiar and strange cried out into the night. The fourteen breeding pairs of dogs, with their six litters of puppies, I kept in a kennel fifty yards to the rear of the house, answered their wild brethren, adding their yips and howls, to this irregular, eerie chorus of the night. Where was I?
Realizing I'd better quiet them, I went back in the house and exited through the rear. It was a necessary precaution, as walking around outside even armed, was not to be risked for the foreseeable future. Once inside the kennel, I was greeted with the relieved barks of my pack. I inspected each stall and found none of the animals harmed. I decided that I wanted all the puppies in the house with me. Both terrier pairs, one of my mastiffs, my greyhound and two of the pitbull pairs had litters. Forty two puppies out of forty five born ( I had high survival rates ), plus twelve parents., the sires would be necessary for the extra security. I couldn't keep them indoors forever, that was close to five dozen animals, but if I was where I thought I was I'd need fortifications, sturdy ones, anyway. Once those were built, they could go back outside.
First, I took the females and the puppies indoors. I didn't have much in the way of furniture in the living room, just two sofas, two recliners, a coffee table and a books shelf. There was now room for all of them as I overturned the furniture and barricaded the front door. I only used two of my five bedrooms, so I'd put one litter and mother on each room and keep the largest three downstairs, plus all the sires (who would stay in the kitchen).
"Mr. Richards," a firm contralto uttered.
"Ms. Gonzales," I answered, relieved in fact. I'd forgotten that she was here late. April Gonzales was the woman who ran the cleaning service I used. She was about a dozen years younger that my thirty nine and a smart and resourceful woman.
She owned and operated a cleaning service with twelve cleaners, the profits from she used to pay her way through college. She often bragged that here business would have a dozen branches with a dozen cleaners by the time she was my age. I believed her as the only reason she was here due to the fact that one of her workers called out and she didn't get the message until Saturday. A woman to keep her word she showed up Sunday at three. When I kidded her about her duty to God, she said that keeping her word was an important part of that duty.
A frighteningly competent woman she not only cleaned along with her staff, she did most of the admin work herself and had enough mechanical aptitude to handle the maintenance of her cleaning machines. The fact that she was here meant my chances for survival improved greatly. So I started talking about what I thought our situation was, as much for myself as for her.
"Do you now all those alternate history novels I'm reading?"
"You mean like if Robert E. Lee shot Lincoln?" she asked. This she delivered with more than a trace of sarcasm.
"Not quite, and not everyone who writes those novels is a conservative, but yes."
"So where are we?" she asked.
"I'm not sure, but this seems to prove a theory about alternate timelines I read about in a story. That theory being we travel back and forth between timelines so similar that we don't notice, save that something is out of place, like a piece of paper or a grocery item you swore you bought.
Perhaps there's even more of a difference, like someone only you remember, that all of your friends or acquaintances don't. Maybe that's because you changed timelines, but maybe that's because they changed timelines, but that goes without saying," she rolled her eyes and I continued.
"It may be possible that person went to a timeline that is very different from their homeline, like for example, a person you remember from a long time ago, no one else remembers, despite the fact, that as this theory hypothesizes, you are traveling through timelines on a regular basis. That person may have a greater flux or variable range, and tends to get sent to far away timelines, you only know them from a period of relative stability."
"You mean we're those people?"
"I hope not, but yes." I answered.
"How do you know that we're not just back in time?"
"Let's have a look at the moon," I said ushering her to the window. The moon was full and I held my finger up to measure then explained.
"The moon is away from us at a quarter inch a year."
"You measure the size of the moon in the sky regularly?" she asked incredulously.
"Well, I didn't just read the story yesterday." "You're too weird for me."
"I know, but bear with me."
"Can you figure a way out of this?"
"I'm afraid no one alive has the technical skill."
"Then let's just figure out how to survive."
That was Ms. Gonzales for you. She was a competent and able woman but not given to abstract thought. She no doubt understood every word I said and then decided not to give a hoot.
"Well, we need to protect the property. But we also have to survive the night. So grab those old wooden chairs and start breaking them down, use a screw driver and keep two legs intact. The rest we'll use to add to our supply of fire wood. I'm going to unlock the parking break on the Volvo wagon and push it to block the back door.
"Won't we be trapped in," she interrupted.
"No, I'll sleep with the keys in my left front pocket. We'll each pack a bugout bag and take them with us if the house is overrun. We'll put the motorbike on the roof of the wagon and ride it as far as we can then continue on the bike if we have to."
"Got it."
"I'm going to build a large fire to keep animals at bay. Then we'll go to sleep. Here take this," I said giving her the forty-five on my waist and a brief tutorial in it's use. The I went to get one of my other pistols, also a forty-five.
" I also want you to meet someone," I called for my house dog, a husky with one of four grandparents being wolf.
After building the4 fire. I bought in the sires. I told Ms. Gonzales to go down to the basement where there was a small range. I gave her a more thorough explanation and had her shoot for an hour then we turned in.
The next morning, our second day and first full day, I began the wall after tending to the fire. I took all the male dogs and the non-nursing females and took them to a spot one hundred paces from the home, just past the kennel. I then had every dog stand ten yards apart, forming a line of defense two hundred and twenty yards long. I stood ten yards behind them with a shovel and gave the order to dig. Once they had dug wholes twenty four to thirty six inches deep, I had them stop, then moved them over a yard and had them dig again. This process we repeated, with me going over their work. After about fourteen hours, there were post holes, adjacent to each other for a quarter mile. In between supervising the dogs work, I had dug a pit shoulder deep, twice as long as my six feet and half as wide, about four hundred and thirty to four hundred and fifty cubic yards. I covered the whole thing with a tarp and laid the largest rocks I could find on each corner.
Since it was apparently summer, we had about fifteen hours of sunlight. Which was why I built another large fire. Then I took six dogs back to the house with me ordering the remainder to stay. I hitched a trailer to my BMW and loaded some lumber I had made into poles for selling. Each was about nine feet long and about nine inches in diameter. I'd need almost sixty seven hundred, about sixty six hundred and seventy eight to cover my four acres. We'd already dug four hundred forty yards, leaving a little over twelve hundred yards exposed. I had four fifty piled near my shed and I brought thirty with me this first trip. I napped for four hours inside after loading the lumber then spent the next ten hours pounding the posts into the holes. At about two minutes per post, and a half hour to load the trailer, I'd placed a hundred and ten poles covering eighty two and a half yards of a sixteen hundred and seventy yard perimeter. I left up the lights I had jury rigged to poles and tended the second fire, I had set and headed in. Seeing that Ms. Gonzales had tended the first fire I turned in around two in the afternoon and slept until ten am on the fourth day.
Two more days of hard labor saw that we had a wall six feet high covering three hundred thirty seven yards. The rest of the wall I made of rock and dirt slightly ahead of the remainder of the perimeter. What would have taken me three weeks alone, I was able to do in eight more days of back breaking labor. In a week I'd dug post holes and began working on the posts to fill those with. In just two short weeks we were relatively secure.
April, we had since stated calling each other by first names, had taken on many responsibilities. She learned to cook the combination of human and dog food, that I tended to feed my animals over store bought. She helped to mix the concrete that I used to line our miniature reservoir and later the second larger reservoir I dug. She even poured once I was comfortable no animal could randomly penetrate our defenses. Finally, she made most of our fire hardened bricks.
Over the next few months we made a home for ourselves. I collected enough rocks, during that time to ring our house with a stone wall that was nine feet high replete with mortar made from materials that I had stored as well as scrounged. I was able to do this by clearing the forest that edged our house. I was able to do this safely by standing on a ladder near our wall and shooting anything that strayed too close. This solved our food problem and insured animals gave us a wide birth. When I wanted to chop wood or collect rocks, I had April stand on the ladder and cover me. Then the dogs helped me drag it back in.
By winter I had foraged enough wild grains, berries and nuts to see us through. So, we holed up in our new home; which I had determined through astronomy and the identification of the flora and fauna, some long extinct in our world and others as familiar as my left hand, to be roughly our time period, the second decade of the twenty first century give or take a decade.
We were so well provisioned I only went out to get firewood and train and exercise the dogs. Thus April and I spent our evenings by the fireside chatting. She was a charming Latina of African and Indigenous American parentage, out family histories were far more similar than I, a disciplined student of history ever realized. This ritual continued, even after we distilled enough alcohol to supplement the several hundred gallons of gasoline I had, making the fireplace a luxury rather than a necessity. Always attracted to her, but never overstepping my boundary as her client, I found myself conflicted when she approached me on the night we had determined was New Year's Eve.
"We may be the only humans on this world."
"We'll make more," she whispered.
"What kind of lonely existence would we condemn them to, go marry that homo erectus over there," At that she laughed.
"We both have needs."
"But we have to use these," I pulled out a condom from my robe.
"Okay."
I carried her to my...our bedroom, where we spent the night.