Attribution Read online

  Also by

  CHRISTINE HORNER

  FICTION

  Attribution: The Screenplay

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  Wondrous Willow

  NONFICTION

  Awakening Leadership:

  Embracing Mindfulness, Your Life’s Purpose,

  and the Leader You Were Born to Be

  Awakening Leadership:

  Be the Leader You Were Born to Be

  for Millennials and TransGenerationals

  (Generations Y & Z)

  What Is God? Rolling Back the Veil

  The Gift

  CHRISTINE HORNER

  _______

  A T T R I B U T I O N

  Yugen Press

  Copyright © 2017 by Christine Horner.

  www.ChristineHorner.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-941351-29-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher, with the exception of short excerpts used with acknowledgment of publisher and author.

  Published in the United States by Yugen Press,

  an imprint of In the Garden Publishing

  Discover the Miraculous Within

  Yugen Press

  P.O. Box 752252

  Dayton, OH 45475

  www.YugenPress.com

  U.S.A.

  FIRST EDITION

  For cowboys everywhere—past,

  present, real or imagined . . .

  But especially for William.

  The writer’s job is to tell the truth.

  — Ernest Hemingway

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  EPILOGUE

  Bonus Author Q&A

  CHAPTER 1

  2033 :: Americas Sector N3-24F :: Wyoming

  Electric motorized engines off wing tips softly hummed, rotating before locking into position. Truby’s breath hitched along with the flying vehicle’s bumpy vertical descent through time and space into the abyss, a churning gut telling her there would be no more chances.

  Anxiety filled her crumpled lungs. “I’m sick!” she exhaled.

  “In a hurry, are we?” Lieutenant General Terrance Young shifted slightly in his seat to gloat.

  So, this was going to be it?

  Truby’s weary eyes burned through the darkness for a way out. In truth, the future was more frightening than the void below. And not just hers. Something was happening on a scale far more massive than the sliver of Wyoming wilderness she was to inhabit. She felt it in her bones. Otherwise, why would they have staged such a production to get her out of the way?

  “Sir, blackout sequence initiated. Night vision confirms—”

  “Yep, Captain, I know the drill,” said Truby’s persistent nimbus cloud. “Just put Tina down without scratching her this time.”

  “In a moment, sir. I’m picking up an object.”

  Truby’s throat constricted loudly behind Young’s seat. She’d gladly let loose if it meant he would suffer. But in this tight space, so would she.

  “Set her down now!” Young ordered.

  “Sir, Tina’s alerted us to an obstruction.”

  “I knew we should have taken the Patton.”

  Truby despised the man’s ever-shifting face. Despite the acid Truby felt climbing her esophagus, her fast-thinking investigative mind made her begrudgingly smirk in the encroaching darkness. No one, including the vehicle she was desperate to escape, was a stranger to her.

  Tina was Young’s pet name for his military-issued flying car. He was obsessed with the iconic Tina Turner who had lived to the respectable age of ninety-nine.

  “Those legs,” he’d reminisced. “Probably used them to kick the crap out of Ike. Tina didn’t put up with it for one minute. Nope.”

  Truby knew better. Tina had put up with it for more than a minute just like Truby herself had put up with Young for far too long. By the middle of the perpetual orange-red sunset the cloaked vehicle chased the last two hours as they moved west, she was sure Young idolized Ike Turner more than Tina. Maybe he embodied both. He was passive one moment, instantly aggressive the next like Yin’s inseparable twin Yang. Either way, this middle-aged woman knew she had come to know way too much about this prick over the years. Like Tina, she would make her escape.

  Now the man in the front, Ike, was bickering not with, but about Tina with his long-time female driver like an old married couple. The younger Captain Kovac had the mental agility to maneuver a petulant General Young without technically being insubordinate no matter how much Young dared her to cross the line.

  Grief enveloped Truby as thickly as the coming night. What she would give right now to match wits with Claire or Hemmy.

  Wedged in the back seat like a canned smoked oyster, Truby watched and waited for an opportunity. A few more bumps as they descended from flying altitude brought the queasiness on full force.

  Approaching ground level, the soft glow of the vehicle’s dash vanished to avoid detection. Blackness covered them, the last remnant of the brilliant sun all but gone. Quiet once more, the only other sounds were the colliding of moving mechanical parts, not even the high-pitched whine of engines fighting gravity. Truby’s fast-turning mind noted these weren’t the old thrusters found in the likes of noisy British Harrier jets or even quieter all-electric jet engines. This vehicle was fully equipped with the latest technology taxpayers could buy.

  No longer relying on combustive propellants or battery power, electromagnetic waves quietly fueled microwave photons that bounced back and forth in a cone-sh
aped metal cavity to create thrust. A more sophisticated version had powered the first secret manned expedition to Mars, the mission recently disclosed to the public after a successful landing in 2025.

  For the briefest moment, Truby entertained the idea that she was alone. She imagined she was about to be dropped into a mysterious black box where she could reinvent herself as if the world had never known her. Maybe the box was called Mars. Just as she began to visualize who and what she’d become in her new life, the image of a woman and two young girls socked her in the gut causing her to clutch at her stomach. A strange garbling noise erupted from her throat.

  “Goodman, do not vomit in this car! That’s an order!” the mercurial man twisted in his seat to plead before his cheeks exploded like a puffer fish.

  “The Inn is just up the road. A park ranger and a few staff are keeping up the place. Vomit there, will you?” he begged.

  The prick’s a gagger! Truby saw the makings of opportunity. “You’ve got two seconds to put me down!” She’d rather not have to puke in the car.

  Truby was about to make her next move when the starboard wing of the vehicle caught something firm, causing the left wing to tip at a dangerous enough angle to trigger an alarm that not only lit up Kovac’s panel but issued a verbal warning.

  “Christ on a crutch! What’d we hit?”

  Kovac skillfully keyed in a sequence into the control panel, “Increasing power portside. Stabilizing. That thing I tried to tell you.”

  “Let me out!”

  Truby dry-heaved, willing herself to vomit as she tore open her safety harness, activating yet another alert. She pushed on a newly lit display panel of colored lights on the back of the driver’s seat searching for any button that might eject her. A single rear seat, there were only windows each side over folding wings. Truby left her fingerprints all over those, too. The only escape was through and out the front of the flying box into a larger one.

  Young wrangled a handheld portable oxygen mask over his mouth, lifting it to smile smugly. “Slow down, partner. You’ve got a contract to finish, remember? Violate our trust again, we’ll make sure you live to regret it.”

  Her trickery a failure, Truby fell back into her seat, trapped behind the safety harness that dug painfully into her back. Investigate, her mind screamed. As Kovac worked to restage a safe landing, Truby caught sight of a flashing emergency override button still lit on the control panel in the far upper left corner of the driver’s console.

  What was there to lose? She’d already lost everything that had ever mattered to her.

  Truby lunged between Kovac and Young, her left arm stretching out ahead of her like a viper taking aim as she struck her target. A vacuum-like whoosh and both the driver and passenger doors lifted vertically issuing more alarms. Frigid wind rushed in to fill the once comfortably maintained cabin. The destabilized car wobbled precariously, falling slightly before bumping back up under the stabilizing forces of the engaged auto-safety’s increased thrust.

  Young and Kovac were now barking at each other as Truby lay half across the Captain’s small lap. Head hanging out the door, she peered into the black box she called Mars wondering how far down and how hard the surface was as if it mattered.

  What did any of it matter?

  She gathered her remaining strength to latch onto the bottom edge of the door jamb dragging her body across Kovac. She kicked someone in the head. Truby hoped it hadn’t been Kovac who was just doing her job, trying to survive this insane world like everyone else.

  Launching herself into outer space, she called out, “Regrets are all I have!”

  Merciful falling, that’s all she knew. That, and the transport vehicle carrying her only link to the outside world had just closed its doors and taken off into the freezing night with barely a sound like a phantom returning to its lair.

  When Truby awoke on her back, she saw stars, thousands of them, white and dense. Closing her eyes again, moving ever so slightly, it felt as if every bone in her body had been in a train wreck, a car wreck at least. It hurt to breathe. The burning in her throat was gone anyway.

  What if she has broken bones or worse is paralyzed?

  On cue, a creature of the night let out a protracted howl ending in conversant yips.

  “Help! Is anyone there?”

  Greeted by a koan of silence, she eased her eyes open once more. This time, her vision cleared, and she really saw stars—millions, billions of them. The most beautiful twinkling luminous points of light she’d ever seen.

  Her gaze landed squarely on the boldest within Heaven’s unending carpet. Maybe that’s Mars, though it was probably Venus. The stars were so radiant, they lit the sky in a way that revealed a bluish-purple haze filled with a line of dark clumps only viewable beyond civilization—the Milky Way galaxy. Yeah, she’d like to go there. Now would be just fine.

  “Ready to go, cowboy?”

  Truby nearly leaped out of a body gone rigid at the otherworldly voice that spoke to her from the ethers.

  How was it possible?

  “You fell eight feet.” Heavy feet, more than two, moved closer. “Get up. They’re expecting you,” said Young.

  CHAPTER 2

  2036 :: Americas Sector M4-66X :: Nevada

  “They said there t’weren’t no more. Buncha damn liars!” Leathery face etched as deep as the Grand Canyon, the old cowboy instinctively knew he was in trouble. Know the future, you not only control your fate, you control the world.

  Grumbling bitterly to himself, had Divine Providence given him a cursory glance even once, he might be a little farther ahead in life. Instead, he was left alone to do things his way.

  Maybe ten yards across the heavily patrolled sparse Nevada landscape, the last feral American Mustang’s dappled ears turned toward the man’s gravelly voice and vacuous wheeze his lungs emitted. Still, it didn’t stop the ownerless beast from pausing long enough to allow dry lips to search for moisture within a patch of brush rooted securely to the arid valley floor.

  Hunkered behind a boulder next to his worn mare, the cowboy wiped the sweat that rolled into burning eyes with the bottom of his blue chambray shirt before reseating his cowboy hat. The thought that when the sweat no longer came, he’d really be in trouble flashed in and out of his mind as quickly as a skittering jackrabbit. Then, the valley’s author of both life and death, not he, would decide his fate.

  He raised himself to stand but fell back to a knee, wiry legs not yet ready to support him. The cowboy cried out when the soft spot of his knee landed upon a sharp stone. The mustang he’d been stalking for two days nervously pricked his ears and pranced in place. A loud warning whinny escaped its mouth. The cowboy’s mare answered sympathetically with a soft knicker.

  Just then the sky darkened providing welcome relief from the relentless heat before relighting. Two red, white and yellow solar surveillance drones silently sailed onward. Equipped with infrared imaging and laser-piercing Lidar to map topography, the drones’ probing eyes captured and recorded all they saw.

  “What I wouldn’t give for some Aztec Gold from one of Willy’s farms about now,” muttered the cowboy. “Shoulda never quit that job.”

  He took a full moment to uncharacteristically rebuke youthful impulsiveness before weighing present options. With a heavy sigh, the one thing he was certain, there was no way they didn’t know he was there now. Go home or go for broke. He’d gone home broke too many times.

  There was only one way to do this, naked just like the masters before him. How else could a man feel the muscles in his body connect with the sinew of the animal beneath him? Decision made. The cowboy unsnapped his shirt as smoothly as arthritic fingers would allow. Next came his father’s wide, genuine leather belt with the rodeo-sized silver belt buckle he wouldn’t let rattle as it dropped to the ground. Boots off, he wavered indecisively before keeping his socks on to protect the soft parts of his feet. Black hat stays. Goosebumps pricked up all over his lean frame. The sun was more than warm, but the a
ir that invaded uncovered body parts hadn’t yet responded in kind.

  At first, there was but a gentle vibration to make a man question the rightness of the world. Then came the outright shaking of the hardened ground. Eyes wide, the mustang bolted with a scream of terror. The fixated cowboy gave crooked chase barely aware a much larger event was in motion. He’d be damned before he’d let his prize get away.

  Remembering he’d left his mare behind a boulder, he reversed course to hobble back to her as quickly as a stiff-jointed body would allow. The cowboy dragged his bucking horse by the reigns to a smaller rock for a step up. Delicate parts were about to connect with a rough-sewn saddle instead of a soft saddle blanket. The cowboy hadn’t planned on that, but then his plan had just been shot all to pieces.

  His left foot escaped landing in the stirrup several times as the horse seemed to fly forward and backward.

  “What’s wrong with you, Libby? Hold still!”

  Finally mounted, brittleness forgotten, the gritty man trailed after the fleeing mustang as fast as the old mare could move over top the rollicking ground. She seemed to fly like the wind by keeping her hooves in the air and off the surface as much as possible. The nude cowboy had never felt his horse run with such a light gait. He didn’t know what to make of it except he liked it. They were gaining on the mustang.

  “Steady now, girl! You can have the ‘ole boy once I catch ‘em,” he yelled to Libby.

  It may seem unfathomable to comprehend how even a seasoned man could be caught unawares he was in the middle of a major earthquake. But to the passionate cowboy overtaken by single-mindedness, galloping at nearly thirty miles per hour in the open expanse of the Nevada desert, he would have no trouble explaining it away.

  The real trouble began when the cowboy’s peripheral vision picked up activity. A ground fissure had explosively split the earth perpendicular to both horses’ beelines. Turning his head, the cowboy’s eyes flew open in surprise more than fear.

  Returning his gaze to the closing gap, he yelled at Libby to go faster. “Do it or die, honey!”

  A shadow suddenly blotted out the sun, but this time, it didn’t go away. He was too busy to concern himself with why it lingered until the man’s inside voice said to look up.