A Robinson Tale

Part IV

The Rabbit Hole

A squawk echoed high in the clear blue sky.

Squinting against the bright rising suns, Will tried to spot the condor-like creature. He made a slow 360 degree turn, hand over his eyes. There it was, just above the cliff. Thrilled, he took out his pocket cam and recorded the bird of prey's aerobatics.

"Wow!"

A second bird appeared, then a third.

Hadn't Mark said they were solitary predators? He had to show this recording to him.

His eye glued to the viewfinder, Will splashed into a puddle. A fourth bird, joining the others, kept his focus on the unusual spectacle high above ground. In his opinion, it was well worth dirty pants and muddy shoes.

There were five birds now. No matter how fascinating this was, something was wrong. What was causing them to gather? Maybe the fence's electromagnetic field disturbed–

A slow tremor vibrated in the forest.

"Will! Get inside the Jupiter now! Get in quick!"

The urgency in his mother's voice got his attention at once. With dread, he saw her, supported by Grant, half-running half-limping up the river bank, splashing water.

"Get in now!" His mom shouted again.

The tremor intensity increased. Will lowered his gaze and gasped.

Leaves and twigs floated all around him. That wasn't a puddle he'd stepped in. That was a flood!

At once, Will backtracked toward the ship, climbed up the ramp and skidded on the top while his mother and Grant struggled across the camp, knee deep in swirling, muddy water.

"Quick!" he shouted above an ominous roar as the bottom of the ramp vanished under the brown tide.

Judy leaped to his side. "What's going on? Oh my god!"

Will walked down the ramp and stretched his hand toward his mother but she stumbled a few feet away from the ship. The force of the stream carried her away.

"Mom!" Will shouted.

"Get back inside, Will!" His sister yelled before jumping in the growling stream. Was she crazy?! Will felt his heart skip a beat as he realized that she had attached a rope to her waist.

Holding his breath, he watched his sister and Grant get to his mother. The forest roared now. It wasn't just a flood. It was a flash flood roaring toward them. They pulled Maureen to her feet and helped her back to the ramp just before a twenty-foot high wall of water clogged with debris hit the cliff and bounced back in a giant brown wave up the bank.

Will hit the red button on the right side of the door and stared, petrified, at the ramp lifting up and trickling water and leaves at his feet.

"Mom, let me take a look at your ankle," Judy said.

"No time. We have to take off now."

Will watched, aghast, as his mother limped as fast as she could across the garage toward the main shaft while Grant dismissed Judy's concerns for him.

"What about Dad, Don, and Mark?" Will asked in one breath. He had shouted, too terrified to control his voice. They all froze for a second but Judy's tense glance was the only answer he got.

Will rushed into the shaft, climbed the ladder behind his sister, and called her as she cut across the hub to get to the cockpit.

His sister skidded to a halt and faced him. She was chewing on her lips, as she always did when she was embarrassed. But this was more serious than that right now. He repeated his question.

"Don and Mark are safe, they already were on high grounds. They'll go up the path and join us at the Fortuna's crashing site," she said. Her eyelids trembled as she pressed her lips tight together.

"And what about dad? I haven't seen him this morning. Have you?"

The deck vibrated beneath his feet. Their mother was powering the ship.

"It's going to be okay, Will. Don't worry."

"No, he won't!" But his sister dismissed his concern and resumed her way to the cockpit as the Jupiter took off.

Will felt his weight being pushed into the deck and scrambled to sit in a chair.

The flight was short this time. Not even ten minutes after leaving the swirling pool the camp had become, the Jupiter slowed down and hovered for a few seconds before the pods touched ground with a slight jolt. Will bolted out of his seat and rushed into the corridor just as his mother limped out of the cockpit, Judy once more leaping after her.

"Mom! Let me see your ankle!" she asked again. The answer was the same.

"No time." His mom grabbed his shoulder. "Will, come down and help with the chariot."

The boy made a fast turnabout as Cynthia and Grant strode out of the cockpit too, and rushed down the corridor with them.

"Maureen! I don't think it's a good idea for you to go there," Grant warned.

"I'm going."

Going where? "Where are we?" Will asked.

When nobody answered him, he wiggled out of the group and stepped into the cockpit.

"The trench..." he whispered, staring at the long artificial fault separating the desertic plain and the forest, and at the bottom of the windshield, the chariot. With that intel in hand, he dashed to his room.

"What's going on?" Penny asked, staggering out of her bedroom just as he entered his.

"The camp flooded. We had to leave it in an emergency." Will noticed her feverish eyes. "How do you feel?" he asked as he grabbed his emitter on the shelf at the top of his bed and quickly produced the three bursts.

"Meh. Been better. Where's dad?"

He didn't answer at first, too focused on spelling chariot in morse code. C was long-short-long-short. H was… what was H already? He seized his tablet and quickly found the morse code alphabet in his files.

"He was still outside when the flood hit. So were Don and Mark."

"We left without them?"

Come on, answer me dad… Will renewed the signal. "The water was about to reach the engines. Mom didn't have a choice."

Will dropped his head to his chest. Yesterday, his dad had acknowledged the reception almost immediately. Maybe his receiver was off, or he couldn't answer right away. He'd try again later.

He dashed out of his bedroom.

"Where are you going?" Penny asked, shuffling after him.

"Help mom with the chariot."

"Seriously? I can't go for a nap without the world crashing down?" His sister's voice reverberated in the shaft as he leaped into the garage.

Thin particles of dust floated in the white blinding white that poured into the garage. Will slowed down as he reached the ramp and stepped out, squinting under the blinding daylight.

His mom and Grant were uncoiling the cable from the traction tool while Cynthia and Judy held it to make sure it didn't drop into the trench. They were still arguing and their voices echoed in the desertic plain.

"This is exactly why I'm the one to go," his mom said. "I'm the only one who knows what we can salvage for my ship."

"Remember when we talked about behaving out of character to avoid being caught in a time paradox?" Grant asked. "This is the time."

"I hear you. But tell me: what makes you think that the other possible reality, the one where John or whoever is responsible for emitting the signal doesn't emit it, is better than the one we're in right now?"

A brief but deathly silence fell on the conversation. His mother opened the chariot's door and hoisted herself on the driver seat. "Now, are you coming or not?"

While the two other engineers climbed into the chariot, their mother called them.

"Will! Judy! You guys secure the zipline to one of the Jupiter's landing pods. Leave the comlink open. We stay in radio contact at all times. And lock the Jupiter. If Harris comes back, leave her outside and warn me immediately. Don't trust anything she says, whatever it is. You know how manipulative she is. She'll push your buttons to get what she wants. Don't listen to her."

"I get it, mom, we'll be fine. But you be careful out there okay?" Judy said.

The tires squeaking on the hard, desiccated ground, and soon, dust rose behind the chariot. His jaw tightening against a painful feeling of deja-vu, Will tried to contact their father once more, with no more success.

"Dad doesn't answer my signal. What if his receiver is broken, Jude? How is he going to find us?"

"Remember when we lived in Glendale? We had an emergency plan in place in case one of us would get lost in the mall."

Will knew what his sister wanted to remind him of, but that wasn't the same thing at all. "He'd tried to convince mom to make a drill but she'd always said no," he said, smiling a bit at the memory while Judy continued:

"So instead, he'd disappear as soon as she had her back turned and waited for us to find him at the locations where he wanted us to wait."

"AWOL in the mall," they said together.

Will couldn't help but laugh. "That drove mom crazy…"

Judy laughed too. "She'd made us hold his hand but he always managed to trick her somehow. I always suspected you and Penny of collusion."

"Guilty as charged." Will chuckled. They had had so much fun in that mall.

"Remember when mom convinced us to return the prank and we left him all by himself once? He found his way home."

"Soaked because of a rain storm."

Will's smile faded as a touch of sadness tainted the happy memory.

"He'd retaliated the next day, making a scavenger hunt with mom's car keys, her phone, and her shoes," Judy continued.

"But he was called up in the middle of the hunt and he didn't come back for five months." Will kicked a rock hard enough to send it flying into the trench.

"I missed him too, Will."

"Mom's better when he's around. She's more happy and relaxed. We all are. Every time he's away, I'm just scared he won't come back. I'm scared that one day, he won't find his way home..."

"I know, but he always has."

"Why did he leave us for three years then?"

His sister sighed. "It's complicated. I don't think he understands what happened either."

Will paused for a long moment.

"I read the book, the one in Penny's library about Navy Seals."

"Oh Will, why did you do that? Did Penny–"

"Penny has nothing to do with that. It was me. I wanted to understand dad, and I was curious. I wanted to know what he was doing when he was away from home." Will swallowed hard as disturbing images of war came to his mind. He sniffed and briefly averted his eyes to wipe away tears. Judy wrapped her arms around his shoulders again and dragged him into a hug but he broke it and squared his shoulders. He wasn't asking to be comforted like a child. He wanted to understand and his sister, being a doctor, must have some answers.

"Does dad have PTSD? Be honest with me, Jude. I'm way past the stage where I need to be protected from real life issues."

His question took her aback. He stared at her and insisted. She sighed again, more heavily. "I guess, yes. It's a possibility."

Will nodded, glad that for once, he wasn't dismissed. Being acknowledged in the conversation was all he needed to feel respected. "PTSD causes depression and people with depression, they tend to withdraw from their families and friends, from everyone who could help. We weren't there for him. Instead we judged him. We're responsible at some point."

"Oh god Will, don't blame dad's decisions on yourself. He didn't ask for help. Not to you, not to me, not to any of us. Besides, I don't think PTSD is the only reason why he left. He always had a strong sense of duty and things were getting worse in the world. I think he was just caught in the middle of all this chaos and lost sight of that fact that... "

"He had a family?"

"That he simply had a life. I don't think what happened is anybody's fault, Will."

"The last Christmas we spent together, I asked him what was a good day for him at work. You know what he said?"

Judy shook her head.

"He said when I come home."

Will's eyes narrowed as he remembered his father's words. "I didn't understand it back then, I thought he was avoiding the question, but he wasn't really. Stopping to come home, that was his way to call for help. And we didn't listen."

He looked down at his feet and saw the cable.

"We better fix that zip line," he said, picking it up and dragging it toward the closest landing pod. "You're right, even if his receiver is broken and he didn't get my message, there aren't many places where mom could have taken the Jupiter in an emergency evacuation. This is the first spot he'll check."

His sister nodded, and in a grave silence, they worked on securing the zipline on their side, although on the other, the clump of trees and shrubs it was attached to was charred by all the lightning bolts it had taken. Their dad would have to fix it when he'd get there.

"Hey, it's lunch time already. Why don't we go inside and grab something to eat?" Judy suggested.

"You go ahead. I'll join you in a minute."

"Don't stay alone down there too long, okay?"

Will nodded absently, his gaze attracted on the trench again and the row of giant, arrow-shaped boulders aligned like dominoes at the center of the artificial channel.

Brushing the cable with two fingers, he stepped out from under the ship's belly, walked all the way to the edge, and shuddered to see how deep it was.

What kind of civilization had built this? And for what purpose?

Having no answer, Will returned to the Jupiter.

He'd just pressed the red button to close the ramp when a metallic clash reverberated under the garage's vaulted ceiling. The deck jolted under his feet and the noise reverberated again, but this time, it was followed by a screeching, like metalic nails on a blackboard.

Will stretched his neck toward the shaft leading to the basement.

A clawed hand suddenly appeared from the shaft and clung on the deck with a loud metallic clap.

His heart drumming into his chest, he watched a robot climbing out and collapsing into the garage. The machine raised its head toward him. Silver dots sluggishly waved into its sleek face.

"Danger, Will Robinson."

End of part IV

Coming next: A Robinson Tale, Part V - Paradox