The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (27 page)

34

We raced after them through the green, humid forest, branches scratching at our faces, rain soaking our bodies, our backpacks bouncing hard against our backs. “Leave me behind,” Ron had called out between heavy breaths, but Nate had just offered him a supporting shoulder. At one point we lost sight of Dagmar and Quinn, but then we saw them ahead of us, slowed down by a thick patch of forest. All the while, the storm drew closer. The sky had darkened as if someone had thrown a cloak over the whole area, trapping us in with the storm and blocking the sunshine out. I knew that if I was back home under conditions like these, my cell phone would be beeping with tornado alerts and I would have been keeping an ear out for the sirens. Minnesota got a handful of twisters a year, nowhere near as many as the states to the south, but I knew what a sky
that
dark foretold.

“Should we try to make it back to the village to warn them?” Jacob asked. “Maybe History will let us do it—”

“
Warn
them?” Nate said, in a rare snippy moment. “I have no doubt they know the significance of those clouds just as we do. We need to find a ditch.”

This was the source of the uneasiness I’d felt since our arrival; there
was
a disaster bearing down on the village, one the carefully erected defensive palisade would be useless against.

The wind was whipping the rain into our faces with such force that the trees around us were mere shadows, engulfed by the storm’s fury. We had completely lost sight of Dagmar and Quinn, and it was all we could do to keep on our feet. Hail had started to fall, the descent of the rock-hard pellets slowed down by the forest canopy, but not enough.

Peering into the rain, Jacob said, “I could have sworn I saw…hold on…” and hurried off into the trees.

Nate turned to go after him. “We have to find a low spot and stay together—”

I grabbed his arm. “Wait.”

Lightning split the sky and for the briefest of moments we had a downhill view through the trees.

“I see it, Julia, there’s a funnel cloud—” he said, his eyes dark.

“No,
there
. Look.”

We had all fallen into the same boiling cauldron of History, our group of six, the villagers, Dagmar and Quinn—and our elusive Norsemen, phantom-like in the blinding rain. They were here, finally…and they were right in the path of the twister.

35

As the storm raged around their camp and their brown woolen cloaks billowed in the wind, the figures, tiny from where we were, worked quickly to weigh down with rocks their fur-lined sleeping sacks and other possessions. They didn’t know enough about this land to read its signs—the bruising hail, the rolling lightning, the ghostly daytime dark that had enveloped the forest. The dangers they were used to were harsh seas and cold, not this. The site they had chosen for their camp was by two Psinomani burial mounds, the landmarks mentioned on the runestone.

I knew a smattering of Norwegian, one of the words being danger (
fare!
) and I opened my mouth to call out the warning, forgetting about History, more worried about whether they could hear me over the thunder and wind whipping the tree branches.

“Julia, why are you standing there with your mouth open?” Nate shouted into the wind. “Let’s get moving.”

Quinn tapped me on the shoulder. I had no idea how or when he had joined us; there was no sign of Dagmar. “Jules, I’m as thunderstruck as you are—bad word choice, ha—but we need to get into a ditch. Now is not the time for photos.”

Somehow I had the lab camera in my hand.

“In here.” Jacob’s head popped out from what looked to be a narrow opening in a rocky overhang. “Come on,” he beckoned frantically, adding something I didn’t understand. “He waited until he was sure we had seen him. Hurry…”

The last I saw of the Norsemen was the ten of them on their feet as the black funnel cloud closed in, tearing out trees in its path and blurring the line between land and sky. And that was the photo I managed to snap just as Nate and Quinn pulled me toward the narrow opening.

Hail.

Wind.

No time—

The small shelter.

Inside, a pair of eyes stared at us from the shadows.

36

A young boy sat with his back against the dirt wall, his knees pulled up to his chin, his jet-black hair tied back and hanging long against his slender body, which was clad in breechcloth and moccasins. I absorbed all of this in an instant as we tumbled in with our heads down, soaked from the rain and dragging our backpacks. We barely fit into the tent-size space, and both Dr. B and Nate had to bend their heads. I hoped the walls would hold. Someone had made a below-ground shelter by deepening the rocky overhang and closing it on all sides with copious amounts of rock and dirt.

We might have been a strange group for the boy to behold, but he was no doubt happy to have company in the storm. We all huddled on the earthen floor and gave our attention to what was happening outside—fierce, golf ball–size hail pelted the ground, wind-driven branches and twigs flew by, and the man-made and natural walls sheltering us shook violently, although that last one might have just been an illusion. I thought I could faintly hear the shouts of the men outside, although that too might have been my imagination, for they were surely too far away. And then I heard a sound that did not belong here,
could not
belong here, one that was all too real. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought it was an approaching freight train. But I knew what it really was.

We crawled back from the opening, jamming our bodies next to the boy, against the rock wall.

I wondered how Dagmar was faring.

Then, as quickly as it had started, it was all over. The train passed and the hail slowed down and then stopped completely, leaving behind gently falling rain. Soon the thunder seemed more distant, too. We looked at each other to make sure everyone was all right, and then turned toward the boy.

He was maybe Sabina’s age, twelve or thirteen, and he didn’t seem alarmed by our presence, either because the storm was more worrisome than we were or because he had thought it over and come to the conclusion that we were neither enemies nor evil spirits. He had partly risen when we first tumbled into the alcove, and he had stayed in that half-crouched
position
, dividing his attention between the storm outside and his
visitors. O
nce the storm abated, his shoulders finally relaxed. His eyes moved from our colorful jackets to Quinn’s Hawaiian shirt, which was soaked from the rain. He reached out to touch the compass hanging on Nate’s belt; it had become cracked during the chaos of the storm.

When we filed out of the shelter, devastating destruction awaited us—a great swath of the forest was gone. It was like the deadly train I thought I’d heard
had
rumbled through the area. Trees lay on their sides, roots and all, as if they’d been tossed around by a giant’s hand, while their neighbors stood untouched. The hail had left behind a carpet of white, and the air was markedly cooler. Downhill, where the tornado track continued, trees had been uprooted all the way to the Norsemen’s camp and beyond. There was an eerie silence in that direction. I had to remind myself that there was nothing we could have done.

It didn’t help.

Cupping their hands, Nate and Quinn were calling out Dagmar’s name, but at a kind of half-yell, muted by History’s constraints. There was no sign of her.

“He made sure that I saw him and the shelter,” Jacob said again of the boy. As if to lend proof to the adage that life goes on, he and the boy squatted down and began playing some version of marbles with the golf-ball sized chunks of hail. Dr. B, looking a bit stunned, told the Tuttles in her professorial voice, as if she were giving a lecture or a workshop on the subject, “With time travel, social interaction with children is usually easier. Young people, with their limited life experience, are used to seeing unexpected things. And if they see something
really
odd like the six of us with our bright jackets and strange hair styles, their brains will deal with it by categorizing it as a day dream or a wonderful secret to be kept.”

“The boy—I think he might be on a vision quest,” Ruth-Ann said, studying the child’s dark head. “That’s a rite of passage that marks the transition to adulthood. He probably hasn’t eaten or slept in a couple of days.”

“Are we to be his vision, then?” I asked.

“Maybe, maybe not. The tornado made more of a statement than we did, I’d say.”

“I sort of wish we could bring him back with us, like you did with Sabina,” Jacob said as the boy rolled a chunk of hail and expertly struck another. “Oops, should I not have said that?” he asked with a nervous glance at the Tuttles. Dr. B already knew; it would have been hard to keep the secret from any the TTE professors.

“Not that he’d want to leave his village and family, of course,” Jacob added. “Just for a visit or something. Hopefully his village is okay.”

“Who’s Sabina?” Ron asked. “And where did you bring her back from?”

“It’s a bit of a long story. Ask me later,” I said, echoing his favorite phrase back at him.

Jacob and the boy had exchanged a few phrases as they played, with Jacob in English and the boy in ancestral Dakota. Somehow they were managing to understand each other well enough. Ruth-Ann added quietly, “Do you think I can chance a photo?”

Dr. B gave a small shrug. “Never hurts to try.”

But the camera would not work for her. “No matter,” Ruth-Ann said and took a tentative step forward. For a second I thought she might reach out and touch the top of the boy’s head, but she held off. The boy looked up and said something. Ruth-Ann blinked tears out of her eyes as he returned his attention to the game of hail marbles.

Quinn took a break from calling Dagmar’s name and turned in our direction. “Jules, aren’t you going to introduce me?”

“Quinn, this is Dr. Erika Baumgartner of the Time Travel Engineering department,” I explained. “And over there, with the Jedi sweatshirt, is her graduate student, Jacob. And they’re Ruth-Ann and Ron Tuttle, our guides to the fourteenth century. Everyone, this is Quinn. He’s a—”

“A man of many interests,” Quinn cut in, smoothly finishing the sentence for me. I was going to say that he was a wannabe reality TV star. Instead I asked, “Ruth-Ann, what did the boy say to you?”

“He said hello…and called me
thunwin
, auntie.”

Nate was still shouting Dagmar’s name hoarsely. Dr. B said, “I’ll check in that direction,” and went to help.

I turned to Quinn. “Why didn’t you bring her with you?”

“I tried, Jules. She lost all interest in getting back to STEWie’s basket or taking shelter. You can guess why.”

Ruth-Ann’s brow was crinkled in concern, “Did she go down to try to warn them?”

“She should have known that was impossible,” I said.

Nate and Dr. B came back.

“Let’s split up to look for her,” Nate said. “She may be lying somewhere injured—or worse. Ron and Jacob, you stay here and the rest of us will search.”

37

The boy took off, pausing here and there to examine downed trees and swinging Nate’s compass on its chain as he walked. I had a feeling—reinforced by my knowledge of History’s rules—that it would become a hidden treasure, not to be shared with others.

“Wait,” I said as we watched the boy’s lean figure disappear into the woods. “Did we get his name?”

“Tokala,” said Jacob.

“Tokala?” Ruth-Ann repeated, letting the name linger on her tongue. “Fox.”

I don’t know how I knew, perhaps because he had shown so little surprise upon seeing us, but I was certain that it was Tokala’s eyes that had been watching us all along. I guessed that he had first seen us the moonlit evening we arrived on Runestone Island, and perhaps had been part of the group of hunters that crossed paths with us on their way to set the fire. He must have spent much of his vision quest following us as we stumbled through the woods after our jump of three weeks.

Like the rest of us, he had made it to the other side of a ghost zone. I crossed my fingers that his village was okay. Our path home would take us some distance from it and making a side trip just to look seemed like the time travel equivalent of rubbernecking.

We couldn’t avoid seeing what had happened to the other travelers from afar.

The Norsemen’s teammates, returning as the sun edged toward the horizon in the dugout canoes they had been given as detailed in the Good Earth Woman’s ancestral story, would find their comrades’ bodies in their camp by the two mounds. They would not know what to make of the uprooted trees and the intense destruction the storm had inflicted on the land. That was the thing about a tornado—it leveled its touchdown site but left neighboring areas undisturbed. The men who had gone fishing might have spent the day in the sun only to return to carnage and destruction. I had a feeling that the Norsemen and the villagers would cross paths this very day and that the villagers would take them to the island with the black walnut trees and leave them there to make their memorial.
Ave Maria Save Us from Evil.

Dagmar had been so close to realizing her goal. But she couldn’t have known that, so she and Quinn had set about carving the stone. I was still convinced that she would have engineered an accident for him before returning home.

“I’d say it’s lucky for you that we happened to come along,” I said to him as we walked.

Quinn turned an outraged stare on me. “Lucky? Lucky, you say, Julia? Lucky would have been running into the Vikings as soon as we stepped into the fourteenth century. With that kind of footage, Dagmar and I would have become instant stars. That’s how it was in my head: I would be the team leader. Dagmar would be my consultant. And we’d be assisted by two cameramen whose faces would never be seen on the screen. Together we would solve mysteries in history—who shot JFK, did we really land on the Moon, what happened at Roswell, and so on. I mean, who wouldn’t watch that? It was a good idea, wasn’t it? But we spent days and days looking for the Vikings, so many I lost track. Three times we went back home for supplies and to do laundry until we couldn’t do that anymore because we ran out of battery power—”

Dr. B shook her head at this. “That may be what Dagmar thought, but if the Slingshot 2.0 stopped working, it was probably because our basket was already here for the last of your jumps. Did you jump to Runestone Island?”

“Yes.”

“Where from?” Nate demanded. “Did you go back to
Dr. Holm’s apartment or your hotel or what?”

“Neither. We were using a cabin as our base.”

“Whose cabin?”

“Dagmar’s family’s cabin. It has a deck overlooking the St. Croix River. We popped in and out at will.”

“Sorry,” Jacob said. “It was all my fault. I didn’t want to say anything, but I gave her the code to the lab.”

Nate eyed him. “You gave Dr. Holm the code? Why?”

A pink flush spread across Jacob’s freckled face. “She said she had mislaid it, and she was older than me and a postdoc—”

“No one thinks any of this was your fault, Jacob,” I said with a look at Quinn.

“Hey, don’t blame me either,” Quinn said. “I thought we were just here to look for the Norsemen—I didn’t know about any of this Vinland business. But we didn’t find them, and then Dagmar suggested we carve the stone ourselves, and I thought—well, where’s the harm in that?”

“And the hunting handgun?” Nate asked.

“She asked me to bring one along in case we got attacked by a bear or something. We did have a close call—like I said, one made off with a backpack in the middle of the night. Frankly, I’m a little unnerved that she was thinking of using it on me.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“Hmm. I’ll take your word for it, Julia,” Nate said, grunting under the weight of what he was carrying.

“I told you the runestone is real, Jules,” Quinn added. He was helping Nate, and there was a strained look on his face. “My grandfather may have been many things, but he was not a liar.”

“I never said he was,” I pointed out as we continued on with our grim task. About halfway between our shelter and the camp of the Norsemen, we’d come upon Dagmar’s broken body lodged under a tree trunk flung violently by the storm. There would be no race to STEWie’s basket.

It seemed wrong to leave her. It took all of us to move the heavy tree trunk with its summer-green branches, after which we wrapped her in one of the bivy sacks. We took turns carrying her body in pairs as we slowly wound our way out of the woodland in the direction of Runestone Island and home.