Stowaway in Time

broken down or were they about to have a picnic? She would feel silly if she had gone to all this trouble just to spy on some quality family time.
Diamond whipped out her binoculars again. Bob placed the bag on the driver’s seat and pulled a white plastic machine from it. It didn’t look like any cooler Diamond had ever seen. What on earth were they doing?
Leaving her ATV, Diamond approached them, removing her helmet and shaking her hair free. They were so involved with the apparatus they didn’t notice. Could it be a seismograph? They weren’t far from the New Madrid fault and the region was still prone to small tremors. Most experts predicted another big quake would rock the area within the next couple hundred years. A few thought it might be sooner rather than later, but no one took much notice of them except insurance adjusters. And perhaps Bob and Anne. Were they worried about another quake? Or maybe they had just brought the kid out here for a geology or history lesson. If so, they should have waited until spring.
Anne looked up as Diamond stepped closer. She grabbed Bob’s arm and cried, “Leave us alone!”
Bob fixed Diamond with a glare so fierce, her stride faltered. “Not another step, Miss Merrell, or I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Absolutely. Go home and pretend you never saw us.” He pulled something from the machine, still attached by a dangling cord.
Diamond frowned. Was it a defibrillator? She’d seen the devices at accident scenes, but never paid them much attention.
“Step back, Miss Merrill. Consider this your final warning.”
She stepped forward.
Anne said something to Bob; it sounded like “hurry.”
“Clear,” Bob replied, as if he were a doctor on a TV show.
Diamond broke into a run as he applied the paddle to the ATV. Had they broken down? Did he think he could restart an ATV like a doctor restarted a heart?
A bolt of blue energy surged through the clearing, knocking Diamond off her feet. She hit the ground butt first, but the force of the blast knocked her flat, rattling her brain and knocking the wind out of her. She struggled to breathe, to bring oxygen into her lungs, but seemed to lose the battle. She gazed up at the gray of the sky, scudded with clouds and framed by bare arching branches. A whiff of electrical current trailed through the air. She blinked and when she opened her eyes again, everything seemed grayer, darker and more distant. Slowly, her eyes closed again and this time, she couldn’t tug them open.
* * *
Diamond groaned and struggled to open her eyes. The air was cold and she was lying on a hard surface. It was dark, not full night, but evening, the stars just starting to glow in the slate gray of the sky. She stared at them a moment, admiring their brave twinkle until it occurred to her she shouldn’t be outside, at night, in the middle of winter. What the hell?
She sat up, wincing at the pain in her backside. Now she remembered. She’d fallen on her butt, knocked flat from the pulse of the defibrillator. But that made little sense. She’d seen enough TV and the real-life actions of paramedics to know that the energy emitted by a defibrillator caused the victim’s body to jerk, but didn’t blast everyone within sight. Unless it had malfunctioned?
She dropped her pounding head into her hands. Her hair was full of leaves. Yuck. She picked them out. She’d been riding the ATV. What had happened to her helmet? There, she spotted a round shadow a few feet away. She’d pulled off the helmet as she approached Bob and Anne. But that must have been hours ago. She checked her watch. Not yet six o’clock, but dark came early in January. Apparently, Bob and Anne had left her here, not even bothering to call 9-1-1. Unless they, too, were incapacitated?
She pushed herself off the ground with a grunt, swaying on her feet as a wave of dizziness hit her. Why hadn’t anyone from the rental center come looking for her?
“Bob! Anne!” She took a shaky step towards where she had last seen them, wishing she had a flashlight. No answer. It was quiet. Too quiet. The ATV place would have closed hours ago, and she guessed she was too far out in the countryside for any traffic noise. Even the stars shone brighter here, free of the competition of city lights.
She reached the middle of the clearing, about where she remembered seeing the other ATV, but there was nothing there now. No ATV. No man, woman, or child. The fading daylight and burgeoning stars provided enough luminescence for her to see that the clearing was empty, although it seemed smaller than she recalled. She walked further until the ground dropped away to the river. She gazed down into the surging darkness of the water. Was the river always this wide here? The darkness robbed the night of color and the river appeared granite-like, impenetrable and unforgiving. A gust of wind tore at her hair and she shivered. She needed shelter.
Bob and Anne had gotten away, and true to their threats, had left her out here to die. If they thought their callousness would scare her off the story, they would learn better.
Striding purposefully, since her eyes had fully adjusted, Diamond made her way back to where she had regained consciousness. Her ATV couldn’t be far away. She hadn’t gone more than a dozen yards before the blast occurred. But although she tried to retrace her steps into the woods, she couldn’t find the ATV. It wasn’t where she expected to find it. She walked about one hundred feet in either direction with no luck. She was sure she had driven nearly to the edge of the clearing, only abandoning the vehicle when she clearly saw Bob and Anne.
Had they taken her ATV? She supposed it was possible. Bob could have driven