Chapter 1
May 1631
Krystal was lost in the simple pleasure of an ice-cold soda and porch swing on a warm spring day when the sky lit up with fire. Confused, she slammed her feet down while she worked out what was wrong. The neighborhood was abruptly quiet. No music playing. No bathroom fan growling, porch fan swirling, or window fan buzzing. And no machines washing and drying her clothing. Everything was silent. The only sounds left were nature and cars in the distance.
She was still on the porch, talking about what might have caused the power outage and flare of light with her Little cousins and the neighbors when their mutual cousin Sam Reed (Donovan’s son who lived with his mom down in Beckley, WV) drove up. Sam’s face was paler than usual, downright pasty, and serious as he walked toward them. “Someone shot Chief Frost! I drove around a bit after I finished mowing Mrs. Flannery’s lawn for Donny, then I stopped at the high school because a ton of people were there for the wedding. I thought maybe they would know what was happening. Mr. Hobbs brought Chief Frost in and he looked pretty bad. At least everyone said it was Chief Frost. I’m not here often enough to be sure. People were almost carrying him. His shoulder was messed up. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Sam had to repeat the story about Chief Frost after more neighbors walked over, then everyone started talking and asking questions. He just shrugged a lot in reply, looking as uncertain as everyone else. “I’m just saying what I saw, that’s all. But, uh, carrying a weapon is probably a good choice right now. They said other people were shot at, and they had to kill some really bad guys outside of town. If, uh, you’re old enough to be allowed. Even the principal sounded awful nervous.” That quieted them down. No one would call Ed Piazza a Nervous Nellie.
“Boy, this is West Virginia. If you’re old enough to shoot straight, you’re old enough to carry. Everyone knows your daddy is a useless, lazy, good-for-nothing so-and-so but your great-Grandpa Eli certainly taught you that much. Might not be old enough to let the law know you’re carrying, but you’re old enough to do it.” No one disagreed, but the whole situation left them with a lot to think on.
Sam kept answering questions, like where else the power was out (everywhere) and whether the phone lines were working (they weren’t, including cell phones). Finally, everyone seemed to accept that he didn’t know anything more.
Bethel Ann (daughter of Bethel Reed Little and Raymond Little) looked worried. “Aunt Sonia and Uncle Donnie Joe were supposed to come here this afternoon and we haven’t seen them yet. Krys, have you heard from them? Will you be able to get home okay?”
Krystal hadn’t thought through the situation that far. “Uh, can I stay here? I’ll sleep on the sofa. Some of my laundry was mid-cycle and it’s soaking wet. Unless the electricity comes back on soon, there’s no way it’ll be dry tonight, even if I hang it outside to dry. And no, I haven’t heard from my parents.”
Everyone in the family knew Krystal had been born a world-class worrier, just like her mom, so Bethel Ann and Sam tried to distract her. “We all know the no-power drill: no needlessly opening the refrigerator and freezer and close them fast. Eat or cook fridge food within a day. Don’t flush if you can avoid it; keep a can of water handy to refill the toilet tank until we get power to the water pump again.”
Sam picked up where Bethel Ann left off, in a perfect imitation of their great-grandmother Grannie B. “Use food in the freezer within two days. Empty the pipes to the tub and sinks into pitchers for drinking water. Check the flashlight batteries and keep one with you. Cook outside on the grill. Not inside—outside! Heathens.” Grannie B always muttered the last comment under her breath, after someone threatened to start a cooking fire in the kitchen. “Check the dryer. Move anything in there onto the clothesline. And hope you don’t have laundry in mid-rinse.”
The neighbors laughed at his spot-on imitation, but it reminded them of chores they needed to do, so everyone headed home, and Krystal started hanging up her clothing from the dryer on the drying rack in the back yard, ignoring everything in the washer for now.
Just as the family was finishing dinner on the front porch, a pair of horses pulling a not-quite-wagon turned onto their street, headed toward the high school. After the initial shock, Krystal grabbed her newish birthday camera out of her not-so-new car. Her parents would never believe it if she told them a horse and wagon randomly went down the street in Grantville.
* * *
“Barbara Reed,” barked Irene Flannery as she charged into Barbara and Eli’s room at the Bowers Assisted Living Residence the next day. “Control your great-grandchildren.” Barbara waited calmly for the other half of Irene’s complaint-of-the-moment. “Donny Higgins was supposed to mow my grass and that lazy Tom Sawyer wannabe got his cousin Sam to do it. And that boy cut it too high. He probably didn’t think I’d notice before he went back home to his momma in Beckley, but I noticed all right.”
“Irene, you may be old, but you aren’t half as deaf as you pretend, and you certainly aren’t blind. The whole town lost power yesterday and something happened to the phones, and no one is going anywhere right now, including Beckley. With the Chief of Police being shot and armed strangers wandering around town, your lawn is nobody’s biggest problem. Not even yours. Don’t start in on your rose bushes, either. Donny never did anything to them on purpose.”
Irene sniffed. “Any foolishness Danny Frost has gotten into is none of my concern. Unlike my yard. You tell that Sam Reed to fix my grass if he expects to get paid, and not to get lazy when he mulches my roses like Donny does. Kids these days just don’t take good care of other people’s things.”
“Why are you yelling at me instead of their parents, Irene?”
“You know as well as anybody, there is no point in talking to Donovan Reed. I told you letting him marry that woman from out of town was trouble.”
“Huntington is hardly a far-off crazy-town like Hollywood, a place I recall you wanting to live once upon a time, and Michelle is a better woman than anyone expected him to end up with, even for a few years. Lord knows Sam was better off living with her in Beckley than he would’ve been living with Donovan here. Besides, you are from out of town yourself.”
“As you like to remind me, you were there when I came to Grantville from my grandparents’ home. I was an innocent wee bairn barely a week old and you hit me over the head with your doll. It’s no wonder those children are uncontrollable, Barbara Ann.”
“You pulled my hair and even your own mother never denied it. My only regret is that I didn’t have a china doll to hit you with instead of a rag doll. Maybe you would’ve learned something that way!”
Now Irene looked smug. “I went to college, unlike you, so I know plenty. Like that the people who rented your old place are not there and the house is empty, with all these criminals running around. Krystal and Sam are both in town and staying with Bethel and Raymond Little, as if their house is big enough for all those people. But I am happy to take you and Eli over to see for yourself that I am right.”
Eli slowed his walk as soon as he saw Irene Flannery heading toward their room, arriving just in time to hear her offer to take them over. “Ladies, I would purely enjoy seeing my great-grandchildren, so I, for one, will take up Miss Irene on her kindly offer. Barbara, will you join us?” After a gentlemanly bow, Eli Reed offered one elbow to his wife and the other to Irene Flannery, who was now obliged to drive them to visit their old home. “Miss Irene, you are still lovely enough to be in pictures.”
Hearing that bit of flattery, Irene perked up, a bit of her youthful flirtiness shining through for a moment. “You know, a motion picture talent scout offered me a contract back in the Great Depression, but I didn’t really want to move the whole way to Hollywood.” Grannie B rolled her eyes, safely out of Irene’s sight. “I’m not sorry I stayed here. I never would’ve married my Patrick if I had gone swanning off to star in the motion pictures. But then again, I wouldn’t be acting as a taxi service for you.” Irene just didn’t have it in her to end anything on a happy note.
“Grannie B and Grandpa Eli!” Krystal was relieved when they arrived at the Little’s house. “My parents never got here with Nana yesterday. They were bringing her over for the afternoon. Everyone is saying there’s some kind of ring around the town and we can’t get out to go home. All I have is the stuff that was in my car. Sam has a little bit he left here when he stayed before, but that’s just some odds and ends like toothpaste and a few pairs of underwear that he didn’t notice under the bed when he packed up and went back to his mom.”
Hearing Krystal greet their great-grandparents, Sam came in from the kitchen with a big Dagwood sandwich he’d made himself. Seeing Mrs. Flannery, he stiffened up and almost left the room. He didn’t live in Grantville, but she had yelled at him a lot over the years when he visited. Cautiously, “Hello, Mrs. Flannery.” With much more enthusiasm and hugs, “Grannie B and Grandpa Eli! Why are you all here? Did you hear that Aunt Sonia and Uncle Donnie Joe haven’t come back and the roads don’t seem to go anywhere anymore?”
“Mrs. Flannery told us you and Krystal were staying here with your Aunt Bethel and Uncle Raymond. We wanted to see if it was true. Folks at our place are saying no one has seen anyone who was out of town when that big flash of light happened yesterday, but folks at our place don’t exactly have reliable memories, or hearing, so we wanted to check on you ourselves. Mrs. Flannery was kind enough to volunteer to drive us here.” Seeing their skepticism, Grandpa Eli laughed. “There is something in it for her. Sam, Mrs. Flannery wants you to go cut her lawn again. She says you cut it too high.”
Sam looked angry but it didn’t stop Grandpa Eli. “Just cut it again, Sam, it’s not like you have to do it every week. You’ll probably be home before it needs cut again. As for you, Irene, next time you can check the mower height or live with it. Be glad Sam didn’t butcher your precious rose bushes like you always complain about. He helps his mom with her garden in Beckley and he’s in the 4-H, so he knows how to take good care of them. He’s even won prizes for his own roses, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.”
Unsatisfied but knowing it was the best she would get, Mrs. Flannery gave an abrupt nod and headed for her car, letting the screen door slam behind her as she stomped down the steps.
“Have you checked on your dad, Sam?” asked Grannie B.
“Yeah, I checked. Bad news, there. Donovan Reed is still in town, and still the miserable SOB he always has been. Don’t give me that look. That’s the nicest description I’ve ever heard of him, including from you. I guess Mom’s still at home in Beckley, so I’m pretty much an orphan if things don’t get fixed.” Sam’s eyes widened and he started to panic. If he really was an orphan, someone might force him to move and live with his father, and he did not want that. “If I’m stuck here without Mom, don’t make me go live with him again! Aunt Bethel and Uncle Raymond can be my guardians. Or Bethel or Krystal—they’re my cousins and both are over eighteen and I think that’s old enough. Donovan Reed doesn’t want me. You know he doesn’t!”
Grandpa Eli pulled Sam in for a comforting hug to stop the building panic. “Son, we won’t let that happen to you. Everyone around here knows enough about Donovan that they wouldn’t saddle any kid with him. If that happens, we’ll find someone you can live with. In fact, Mrs. Flannery told us that our tenants are out of town. You and Krys can go ahead and stay in our house for now because you’re right, it’s no secret that Donovan doesn’t want any kids living with him. If things don’t get fixed soon, we’ll figure out the guardian thing so you don’t have to worry about Donovan at all.” Sam looked very relieved at that. “But right now, you need to go cut Mrs. Flannery’s grass because if you don’t, even if you leave tomorrow, Grannie B and I will have to hear about it until either we die, or Mrs. Flannery does.” With that, Grandpa Eli shooed Sam out the door.
Two days later
Everyone in town went to the big meeting in the high school gym, hoping for answers. Everyone had someone they hadn’t heard from since the flash of light on top of not having power or phone service. Krystal still hadn’t heard from her parents, and she was scared sick about what had happened to them. A born worrier, she had barely eaten since dinner the first day. Grannie B, Grandpa Eli, and Sam were worried that Krystal’s parents might have been in an accident but didn’t want to mention it to her. Maybe the meeting would tell them something that made sense, like a rockslide had taken out the phone lines and blocked the passes so no one could get back home, something like that.
Krystal’s mind wandered when people got long-winded, but she tuned in again to hear, “You heard what Ed Piazza and his teachers told us. Somehow—nobody knows how—we’ve been planted somewhere in Germany almost four hundred years ago. With no way to get back.” Her face set in a hard line at that, but she stayed silent and kept listening. She wasn’t giving up on getting her parents, her Nana, and her life back that easily, no matter what anyone said.
She and Bethel Ann had both gone away to college for a reason: they had no intention of spending their lives in a backwater, hillbilly town in Appalachia. Krystal’s life, her future, was still out there, and she would find it. No one knew what had happened or why, but that meant that they couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t happen again. She was going to hang on to her hope that life would return to normal for as long as it took to get there, no matter what anyone told her.
Mayor Dreeson finally ended all the speechifying with a call to vote for Chairman of the Emergency Committee. “Under the circumstances—running unopposed and all—I think we can handle this with a voice vote. All in favor?” Of course Mike Stearns won, running unopposed and with the only one speaking out against him being a big-money, big-city CEO. Krystal thought the pictures she took for her parents captured the moment nicely.
He didn’t live in town, but Sam had spent more than a few weeks of vacation there, and every day of his vacay for years had focused on not being with his paternal unit, so he was friends with quite a few guys around his age, and their parents knew him too, from sleepovers. Since it didn’t look like he was going home soon, his great-grandparent’s house wasn’t his home, and Krystal was a moody stick-in-the-mud, he started arranging sleepovers with any friendly families he saw in the gym or around town. Krystal waved off the few friends she had in town when they tried to talk to her, completely uninterested in socializing until she could see her parents again. This nightmare had to have a reasonable scientific explanation.
When they caught up to her, Grannie B and Irene Flannery were having a “discussion” while Grandpa Eli looked on serenely, hearing aids turned off. He was fond of that old joke, “Why do men go deaf before women…Because they want to.” It got him a swat every time he told it. Grannie B said some husbands are just hard to train.
Mrs. Flannery was on a rant. “Barbara Ann, you know I have never liked Mike Stearns. That boy’s mama coddled him. I don’t care what she says, being three is not an excuse for peeing on another person’s prize rose bushes. And Mikey Stearns is a Presbyterian, whenever he bothers to go to church at all.” Sniff, sniff. “Mr. Simpson looks like the kind of person who never peed on a rose bush in his life, and an Episcopalian like him is closer to being a good Catholic than the Stearns boy is. Why would a good Catholic like you vote for someone like Mikey Stearns?”
Grannie B gave as good as she got. “Irene, first, you know good and well that my Eli and half my own children are Methodist, so I won’t hold that against anyone. Second, Mike Stearns is no boy, and you know it. He’s been a UMWA organizer for decades. He could even outmaneuver that bastard Quentin Underwood, and I know you don’t like Underwood. This Mr. Simpson is trouble. You’ve seen it enough in your life to know it’s nothing but trouble when big city types come through here trying to throw their weight around. Next thing you know, he’ll be trying to get us to do some fool thing like building a navy up in our hills and hollers. Mike Stearns was with the group who helped rescue that poor farmer while Mr. Pittsburgh, over there, stayed safe in town. It’s what the fat cats always do: have the little people take the risks and do the work while they watch from somewhere safe.”
Irene sniffed again and turned to leave. “At least Mr. Simpson and his wife look respectable and sound respectable, which is more than Mikey Stearns can say.”
* * *
Krystal almost slipped as she raced down the steps, through the living room, and around the corner into the kitchen the next morning. “Sam! Where are the car keys? I have to get to work. Sam!”
“I hid them.”
“What?”
“I hid them. It was too depressing to look at them, so I put my car and your car around back and hid the keys for all our vehicles. Even the mower.”
“WHAT?”
“We can’t drive anymore. They said ‘only for emergencies’ because there isn’t any more gas ’cause we’re in medieval times now. So, I put the keys where we can’t see ’em. I just got my license last month and now I can’t drive! I don’t want to see the keys, or my car, and I put them in there.” He gestured toward the kitchen junk drawer. “I pumped up the tires on an old bike for myself and left the pump out so you can do one for yourself.”
“WHAT?”
“I told you, no driving. It’s not that complicated, Miss Krystal Marie Reed, high and mighty college nursing student. After the meeting yesterday, that’s one of the things the new committee decided. Mrs. Flannery came over this morning, special, and told me, ‘Just because that committee says we can’t use anything with a gasoline engine except for genuine emergencies doesn’t mean you can stop cutting my grass, young man. I still have my Patrick’s old push mower, and I still have standards, even if no one else in this town does.’ I tried to get out of it. I mean, it was Donny’s job, not mine! But she just kept talking. ‘You’ll have to clean it up some and sharpen the blade, but I expect my lawn cut and my roses taken care of every week. Donny used to do it but since you know how to take care of roses and he never did, it’s your job now.’ Figures that stupid lawn would be her first thought, that, and her rose bushes. Again. Why does she care so much? Anyhow, no more cars, or trucks, or…” He trailed off, overcome by grief as only a sixteen-year-old boy with a new driver’s license can be at not being able to drive anymore.
“Sam, I don’t care what that cranky old biddy says. I’m driving my car to work today. I’ll be late for my shift if I try to bike. Maybe she exaggerated. She loves making everyone around her miserable.”
Krystal was in an extra big hurry because she needed to pick up some things for herself and Sam before she started her shift as a clerk at the drug store. Uncle Raymond said they could have some basic toiletries on the house since Krystal didn’t have any toiletries with her and Sam only had enough for a weekend trip, but there were some other things she wanted, like some make-up. When she got inside, she saw a new sign on the community bulletin board near the front door.
The Emergency Committee chaired by Mike Stearns has declared the remaining motor vehicle fuel to be a vital military resource. That means that the fuel in your tanks is all the fuel you’ve got, unless you donate that too. A bus service is being organized and there will be help for the elderly and disabled to get where they need to go, including shops as they reopen. Please contact the hospital operator, police office, or assisted living home operator if you need assistance with transportation.
That answered that. Bicycles, scooters, skates, etc. were about to become all the rage. Krystal spent most of her shift ringing up other practical people who were stocking up on basic toiletries and over the counter medications. Then there was Mrs. Flannery. Never one to let practicalities intrude overly much, she bought several bottles of her favorite bluing hair rinse, hair pins, hair spray, cold cream, baby powder, and bunion pads.
June 1631
“Krys, your Uncle Raymond, Sam, and I are all worried about you. What have you done other than your shifts at the pharmacy and sleeping since the big meeting at the high school? Anything?” Bethel was the kind of person who brought stray birds into the house to heal. Seeing her niece in such clear pain hurt her to the core. If Krystal hadn’t stopped in to do laundry after her shift at the pharmacy, she would be up-time with her parents right now. But she had, so she lost her university, her (new and seemingly not serious) boyfriend, her parents, her best friend, Julie Marie, her home… In short, everything except her car, a few bags of laundry, and her Grantville relatives. At least she had a few CDs in her car, so she had a little bit of her own favorite music.
“Nothing. What should I do? No one knows why we are here or for how long. I’m just waiting to go home. I hate living in someone else’s house, and this is definitely someone else’s house. When I go to the fridge, they have Pepsi instead of Dr. Pepper. Pepsi! What kind of person drinks Pepsi when they could have Coke?” Krystal’s strong anti-Pepsi feelings (and rants) had amused her extended family for years, but her current distress was no cause for amusement, so Bethel bit back the smile that came unbidden. “The family pictures, the books, the magazines, everything is wrong.” She looked ready to either cry or hit something.
Bethel hugged her close and let Krystal simply be young and hurting. “Krys, I know you don’t want to hear this, but we may not go back. This may be permanent. If it is, you know Grannie B and Grandpa Eli will let you keep living here, in their home.”
“I won’t accept that! We are going to go home. I will see my parents again, and Julie Marie, and my college, and my whole life! Medieval Germany is not my future!”
Bethel considered the situation while Krystal sulked. “How about this, Krys. If we are still here in July, we will pack up some of the Clevenger family’s things. They will have rented a new house by then. When they moved to assisted living, Grannie B and Grandpa Eli packed their things into the attic. You can pick through their stuff and put what you like best back out in the house, including family pictures. I have the family Christmas card your mom sent out last year. Frame that. Try trading books with other families for things of more interest to you. If things return to normal, you can always trade back.” Krystal still looked unconvinced, but she agreed, certain things would be back to normal in a month.