TimeShock
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
The road across the New Mexico desert to the site was just two dusty wheel tracks among the cactus. The old Army jeep rattled along, jostling it's two occupants and throwing up a plume of dust in its wake. "Look out!" Scott yelled, as they headed for a gully that washed across their path. "Hang on!" Brad shouted. Too late. The seat dropped out from under them as the jeep flew over the mini-gorge. Then, just as they started dropping down to meet the seat, it abruptly came up and met them. "Where the hell did you learn to drive?" Scott demanded. "On paved roads!" Brad shot back. "Where the hell do you think?" "How much farther is it?" Scott asked, as he hung on for dear life. "We're about halfway," Brad answered. They were heading for a recently discovered Anasazi cliff dwelling about forty miles northeast of Gallop, New Mexico. The other four members of their party were already at the site waiting for them. In fact, they had been there for a week. They arrived early to set up the camp. "There it is," Brad said, as he pointed to the horizon. "Finally!" Scott said, as the small canyon that was their destination appeared between two mesas in the distance. "Do you think you can get us there alive?" "Droll," Brad said. "Very droll." "Just asking." The mesas rose about eighty feet above the plain, and the end of the canyon they were approaching appeared as a crack between them. That crack, though only about fifteen feet wide, gradually opened to become a canyon nearly half a mile wide as they passed through. It slowly narrowed again to less than two hundred feet wide at their destination, a typical Anasazi site nearly a mile and a half away at the box end of the canyon. Anasazi is a Navajo word meaning "The Ancient Ones." They were the ancient inhabitants of this area, and their civilization disappeared about seven hundred years ago, long before the Navajo arrived. KC Wilson is Brad's best friend since childhood; both are six foot two with sandy hair and similar features. The main difference being that Brad is slender while KC is portly. They look so much alike that most people mistake them for brothers. KC had discovered the site two years earlier. He’d been excavating at another site that summer when one of the local Indians told him about a cliff dwelling he had found some years earlier. The man said that the area appeared to be completely undisturbed. KC's curiosity was piqued. He decided immediately that he had to look into it and asked the man if he would take him there. The man agreed and led him to this site, which was virtually undisturbed since the Anasazi left it about seven hundred years earlier. When Brad and Scott arrived at the camp, it looked like a ghost town.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
TimeShock
About the Author
Raymond "Buster" Merkel was born in Milwaukee in 1951. He attended Catholic grade and high school there, and, if you had asked any of his classmates about his chances of ever writing a book, you would have gotten a lot of laughs. Nevertheless, write he did, after completing his day job as a plumber. "I kept hearing people say, ‘I can write a book.’ Eventually, I decided I could, too, so I sat down and wrote one. Then another. Then a third. Finally, I got up nerve enough to show the first to someone. To my surprise, the reaction was, ‘This is a bit rough, but it’s good. You should publish it.’ So I hired a professional editor to smooth those rough spots, and I published it!" A fertile imagination and interest in such varied fields as history, archeology, Egyptology, travel and science fiction have aided his efforts. TimeShock is the first in a series of four novels in which his real-life characters explore these themes.