OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) Read Online Free Page B

something rope-like.
    I turned the turkey.
    He reclaimed his rifle and hiked up the embankment to examine... I don't know what, the orange and pink remains of the sunset? That took him a while, during which I, of course, turned the turkey.
    When he finally hiked back, he glanced at my not-really-hard work, nodded at my progress, and squatted down to clean his rifle. That took a long time. After that he sharpened his knife, an extended scraping process which made me really nervous.
    The corpse began to smell like cooked turkey at last, and my stomach began to cramp from hunger. I knew I'd fasted at least half a day on only water—in fact, this Garrison guy had said he'd found me this morning , which meant I'd gone all day foodless. Who knew how long before that point I'd had my last meal? I began to glance toward him, waiting for word to stop turning and start eating.
    When he finally spoke, it wasn 't with a declaration but a question. "Ain't it done?"
    How the hell was I supposed to know? It wasn't like I had some gadget to measure how done the meat was! But I bit back my hunger-fueled annoyance and merely said, "I think so," and lifted the wooden skewer of turkey off the fire.
    He used his newly sharpened knife to slice a couple of slabs of meat off the steaming bird, onto a tin plate he 'd dug out of his saddlebags, and he handed the plate to me. The next slab that he cut off, he just left on his knife to eat.
    We dined in silence, me because I was so ungodly hungry, him because he apparently preferred everything in silence. Hunger is the best spice? I 'll admit, I wasn't about to send my dinner back to the kitchen. But it wasn't five-star cuisine, either. It had no seasoning, and I'd overcooked it in some areas and undercooked it in others. It seemed that we should have some accompanying food—stuffing, and vegetables, like at Thanksgiving. I tried to follow that snatch of memory, to visualize a single Thanksgiving dinner. At least that effort didn't make me throw up, but I might as well try to grab a handful of time. What bits of memory I had apparently weren't under my command.
    As soon as I 'd taken the edge off my near-painful appetite, I began to remember what ol' Tom had looked like while I'd plucked him, bloodied and headless. My hunger abated, and I ended up handing Garrison the remains on my plate which, after an awkward pause and a muttered, "Thank you kindly," he wolfed.
    For lack of anything better to do, I went back to watching him. Better than thinking about myself, right? I watched how the orange firelight played off the harsh planes of his face before dancing into impossibly black shadows behind him, and how it sometimes caught his eyes in a benign glitter from beneath the hang of the hat he 'd reclaimed. Crickets sang and something peeped from the creek-side trees—trees I couldn't even see anymore, just remembered were there. How could anyplace get so dark? Suddenly cold despite the mild night, I pulled my feet up beneath the coat I wore.
    Maybe Garrison, finishing his meal, noticed. In any case, he stood up and unrolled the blanket on the ground so that the saddle lay at the head of it, then shifted his weight.
    He cleared his throat, as if to make a speech. "You take the bedroll." And he turned away quickly, to go do something with the horses yet again.
    It occurred to me that we should also do something with the leftover turkey, but that "bedroll" beckoned with far more power than I and my defective brain had the strength to resist. So what if the sun hadn't fully set an hour ago? Unbearable darkness surrounded us now. My stomach felt full, and I was dizzy-tired. So I crawled onto the blanket and pulled it up around me, pillowing my head on the saddle and preparing to sleep like the dead.
    Instead, I lay there. I realized that I could make out the trees—silhouetted against the glitter of more stars than I thought existed—and occasionally, for no discernable reason, I shivered.
    I don 't think