Beneath A Diminished Sun

By Tommie Lee

Bryan Sandwater's life was almost completely unchanged after The Rift event that shook everyone in the world to their emotional core. As he wonders whether or not life is passing him by, he suddenly finds himself thrust into an incredible situation with the natives of a small island whose lives may well be in his hands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tommie Lee
• Release date: Apr 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311682529

Tommie Lee

Veteran radio personality and fiction writer in South Bend, Indiana.

Book preview

Prologue

The New World

Perth, Australia

June 3rd, 7:00 PM

24 hours after the event

He returned the picture frame to the top of the roll top desk with a sigh.

Every time he looked at the photograph he was reminded how quickly Leah had died. It had happened four years ago. It had been a hard death. A difficult death.

Leah died in misery, wracked with a pain morphine couldn’t soothe and time only intensified. She died riddled with cancer that had gone from an unknown problem to Stage Four in the space of just over eleven months.

Her diagnosis had come as a shock, during a follow-up to a routine doctor’s appointment shortly after their first wedding anniversary.

On their second, Bryan buried her.

They had only been together for a few months before their hasty wedding. They had hardly had enough time to really get to know each other before he was a widower. Hardly enough time to find a myriad of little things to love about her, or even talk seriously about children and their future together. These were all things he had been looking forward to.

After she died, he buried himself in his work.

His work was perfect for a mourning widower; tedious and repetitive. Before long, every aspect of Bryan’s life could easily be described with those same two adjectives. He liked it that way. He didn’t get close to anyone.

Sadly, Leah’s untimely death had happened a few years too early to have been reversed by what had happened yesterday.

Yesterday had been the strangest day in the history of the human race.

Bryan Sandwater had greeted the key moment of that day in his underwear, relaxing with Greta Garbo on his DVD player.

24 hours later, he thumbed his television remote and sat back to watch the news, which he was joining in mid-sentence.

"…believe we know so far. Twenty-four hours ago some sort of rift in time created seemingly impossible circumstances across the globe."

The anchor folded his hands on the desk in front of him.

"What does it mean? Why did this happen? A day later all we have are more questions and very few answers."

"It sounds unbelievable," the brunette female co-anchor said as the camera switched to her, but the Earth and everyone on it appear to have moved…physically…back in time exactly one year. As you know you appeared where you were a year prior to the time of the event last night. The same is true of everyone everywhere. For reasons no one can explain we were all transported back to relive that time…this time. Atomic clocks and astronomical observations have confirmed that, improbable as it seems, the entire planet did make the move through time. We suddenly found ourselves where we had been, doing what we had been doing, even wearing what we had been wearing.

Bryan sighed and frowned. There didn’t appear to be any new information yet, or they would have led with it rather than rehash what everyone already knew.

The other anchor’s face was a portrait of shock as he said the next.

"And the dead from the last year, as you know, have returned, including the French President and several other prominent people around the world. Babies born in the last year vanished as women all over the world found themselves pregnant once again."

"Very few official statements have been released by the world’s governments or religious lea…"

Bryan clicked the TV off again. There was nothing new there. Just more of the confusion he was trying to avoid.

Time had done something strange to the world, and yet his life had hardly been impacted at all.

The world’s news outlets, quick to label things of great consequence, had already taken to calling the event The Rift. Some sort of hole ripped open in time, plunging the Earth and everyone on it back in time exactly one year.

As if that wasn’t strange enough, it was an eerily precise movement back through time. It had been a rift in the fabric of reality that came with a number of bizarre circumstances. Chief among those was the improbable physical effect that had accompanied the occurrence.

Everyone and everything had moved back in time exactly one year. It had happened precisely at seven o’clock last night, local time. The hour had also been Noon, Greenwich Mean Time in London, England. Since that was a nice convenient time and location, it was the hour and place that much of the world was clinging to as a possible focal point, for lack of a better phrase.

Moving back a year had also been a physical activity. Everyone on the planet found themselves where they had been exactly one year earlier; doing whatever it was that they had been doing.

For a great many people, the result of all of this had been an untimely death. Some people had been undergoing surgery, and fell victim to a surprised doctor who had suddenly teleported into place with a scalpel in their hand and no idea how they had gotten there. Countless others had appeared behind the wheels of their vehicles, and died in the most horrifying seconds on the roads the entire world had ever experienced. An astounding number of people had died in the moments after the event. The news had been filled with their stories all damn day.

Bryan, like everyone else in the world, was watching a lot of news. Like everyone else, he was watching it with a stupor of disbelief.

Everyone in the world also remembered the now absent year, even though all indications in the physical world were that the year had never actually happened.

It was a constantly deepening mystery that no one had even the faintest idea how to explain.

Still more inexplicable was what the Rift had meant to the recent dead.

Going back in time in every physical way had also meant the return of everyone who had died in the past year. People who had, by their own reckoning, just died in some way were suddenly alive again, and doing whatever they had been doing at that certain moment in time that the world had returned to.

They remembered dying. They remembered how they died. But they were back now and deeply confused…some to the point of madness, according to reports.

Equally devastating was the sad truth of what had become of all children under the age of one year.

All of them were gone without a trace.

The mothers of any babies born in the first nine months of the missing year were pregnant again, waiting to deliver once more the children who were suddenly absent from their families.

This also meant that the children who were three months old or younger had yet to even be conceived, and were likely gone forever. That sad likelihood was rapidly spreading throughout the world.

Twenty-four hours of confusion had unfolded on Bryan’s television, live in terrible color. They had been hours of non-stop anger and sorrow and questions that had no answers. Everyone was speculating but no one had any real clue as to what was going on. In America, they weren’t even sure who the President was at the moment, because they’d had an election in the last year. And some country in Europe had seen their late leader come back from the dead.

The mind seemed to be the only thing unaffected by the physical move through time, and no one could hazard a guess as to why that was true. The rest of the physical world…including everything mechanical…had reset to the position of one year prior.

A year’s worth of data had vanished all over the world. A year’s worth of films, music, research papers, love letters…they were completely gone without a trace.

Bryan was a volcanologist. All of his measurements from the past year were missing. He would have to redo most or all of his research to see how the volcanoes he studied had been affected by the Rift.

This was nothing, though, compared to the data loss suffered by a close friend of his.

This development had been especially devastating for this friend, who was doing medical research in the city of Cairns.

In his university days Bryan had roomed with a Pre-Med student named Garrett Auburn. Now Garrett was referred to as Doctor Auburn, and he had been engaged for some time now in cancer research.

When the world bumped itself back, he lost every trace of his last year of progress. Dr. Auburn had been at the precipice of a major breakthrough, and now he suddenly found himself a year behind without as much as a scratched note on a piece of paper.

No such note would exist anymore, and none did. He was desperate to remember some of the details from memory, but so far he was having no luck. There was just too much of it, and all of it too intricate, for him to do that so far.

So his friend Garrett was taking this hard. Hard enough that Bryan couldn’t reach him and had only heard about this situation earlier today through a mutual friend.

The world was in turmoil, but Bryan’s life was nearly unchanged. And this sad state of affairs embarrassed him.

The parts of the world where people had been asleep were spared much of the initial shock. It had not, however, been that late in Australia. People had still been awake and moving about. People had been given plenty of opportunity to panic.

Bryan’s existence had been an uninteresting one before The Rift. It had been one of routine and research, and without any family. He lived in his labs and in the field. He had done so before the world changed, and would still be doing so after things began to sort themselves out again.

Assuming they would do so, of course.

The hackles of his scientific curiosity were just as raised as everyone else’s had been today. But Bryan Sandwater understood that his role in the universe was to let the more ambitious minds tackle the great cosmic mysteries like this Rift thing and stick to his own work. Volcanoes would still need to be poked and measured. He was the guy to do that. Bryan was perfectly happy to let someone else figure out why the universe had just hiccupped like a truck driver after a rich meal.

The leading minds of the world could not agree about why the event had happened. There was no plausible explanation for how everyone and every thing lost a full year, or why they had returned to the exact place they had been exactly one year before…memories in-tact.

On that particular June 2nd, Bryan had been sitting on his couch, in his t-shirt and underwear, dining in front of the TV at seven o’clock. It was a warm winter evening in Perth and he had been watching an old Greta Garbo movie on cable while working his way through a sandwich and a sleeve of Tim Tams.

In the moments before the event, before he reappeared in front of Greta and his pastrami…he had also been sitting in his living room eating dinner in front of the TV…in his underwear.

He flicked on the news and found everyone else in the world to be just as confused as he. Especially the cute young national news anchor on the A.B.C. who had relocated to Toowoomba this past Christmas and was now back at her old job holding a script and looking more than a little startled to be sitting there.

While he pondered the bigger questions of time, the universe, and everything…there was an underlying dread in Bryan Sandwater that focused itself on how uninteresting his life had been up to this point.

One

That Stupid Car

Northwest Australian Desert

December 1st, 2:38 PM

Nearly six months after the event

The hot light of the sun blinded him and beat down without mercy. It carried a smell, too, that stung his nostrils…overloading all of his senses as he plodded forward.

Bryan was a reader, and in this moment it was the words of T.E. Lawrence that struggled to the front of his brain.

Lawrence once said that he loved empty deserts, because they are clean.

Bryan Sandwater looked around at the stifling vista of cleanliness and decided T.E. Lawrence could kiss his sweaty arse.

Bryan’s surroundings were about as clean as they could get, if that were the case. The sprawling sands around him were undisturbed by any other human footprints. Only the tell-tale toe tracks of wild camels dotted his path, representing some of the half-million beasts that roamed the bush. They were descendants of a handful that had been brought here by Afghans nearly two centuries earlier. They found them to be the perfect animal for this untamed environment.

Bryan really wished he had one at this point. No matter what they smelled like.

There were only the surrounding cliff walls and the road he was following. That road was a hardtop river snaking through the sand, and he followed that river like a goby looking for a place to spawn.

He was out in the field but this was hardly a remote area. Australia was full of those sorts of places where being stuck without a vehicle was pretty much a death sentence if you weren’t a survival expert. This road at least saw some traffic on any given day. It just didn’t see a whole lot of it. Another car was likely to come by in the short amount of time he would spend hiking up to the facility on the horizon. Of course, there hadn’t been one yet, and he had no signal whatsoever on his phone.

His only real companion for the hike was the desert wind, which whistled a shrill song in the furnace of stillness. That wind echoed off the high red walls of the canyon that rimmed this part of the access road. As it did, it worked its way in and out of the holes in the stone overhead, treating them like the openings in a flute and filling the valley with a haunting music.

Those holes were primitive windows hewn into the rock of the canyon walls. Anyone who explored them would uncover a series of dusty, abandoned dwellings that once belonged to a tribe long since gone from this place. A people displaced or exterminated by the last eruption of the sleepy volcano at the end of the valley.

Bryan enjoyed his work, but he wished his timetable would allow him some time to explore those ancient homes. He had a passion for aboriginal cave art, and this area probably had a lot to tell if you read the walls right.

Sadly, this was supposed to be a brief outing with a specific checklist of things for him to accomplish. Taking time to spelunk around sandy old cliff caves looking for drawings was not part of the plan the university had set out for him.

Having a specific agenda for the next couple of days was certainly a change of pace for Bryan Sandwater. After the initial shock of June 2nd, his life had been both boring and stacked with plenty of free time.

Bryan was working through the tedious process of repeating every bit of uneventful research he had accomplished in the now absent last year. The year the entire world was now halfway through the process of playing out again.

This involved his trip out here in the desert. Recent additions to the play had been a quiet road, a hot sun, the overheated engine of that stupid car, and the wind dancing through the holes in the canyon walls overhead.

The strange, almost sickly-sweet music was doing a fair job of keeping him distracted from how upset he was with the rental car now sitting a handful of kilometers behind him.

He stopped walking for a moment to catch his breath. His feet were in old shoes, which were starting to split. His choices were to walk on the hot road and melt the soles, or walk in the sand by the road, and feel it sneak in through the small holes in his shoes.

The wind was a swirling companion, persistent and carrying no secrets. He began to think of it as a constant, annoying presence with nothing substantial to say…not unlike his most recent girlfriend. He listened to it anyway as he staggered between the dusty sand dunes. He was pissed-off, and it gave him something else to think about.

The air was bloody hot and his feet ached. He sweated like a bootlegger at a tax convention and tried like hell