Cowboy from the Future Read Online Free PDF Page A

possible.
    “I
don’t care.  I’m eating it anyway.”
    Not
entirely mollified, Deke tasted the tiniest bite imaginable.  A second later,
his eyes jumped back to Cade’s in astonishment.  For once, he didn’t have
anything dour to say.
    “You
two like cookies?”  Addy brushed a handful of shiny hair back from her face.  “I
have a whole thing of Oreos in the backpack.  You let me stay here and I’ll
give them all to you.  They’re chocolate.”
    “Chocolate?”
    “You
don’t know what chocolate is?”
    “No.”
    “You
don’t have chocolate around here?”  She repeated, like she still didn’t believe
it.
    “I
don’t think so.”  He looked over at Deke who shrugged.
    “Great. 
So, it’s official, then.”  She reached for a bottle of liquor and poured a
haphazard amount into the nearest glass.  “Worst.  Day.  Ever. ”

Chapter Two
     
    Did you
know that Mount Rushmore could well be the most enduring part of our whole civilization?
     
    It’s
true!  The heads of the four United States presidents are sixty feet high and
carved into solid granite.  Cars will rust away.  Buildings will fall.  Oceans
will reclaim great cities.  But mighty Mount Rushmore will survive for hundreds
of thousands of years.
     
    Just
imagine what future inhabitants of the Black Hills will make of such a sight!
     
     
    Brown’s
Glampling Tours Official Pocket Guide
     
    Worst days ever.  Plural.
    For
the first five of them, Addy stayed locked in her dingy hotel room.  The whole
place was freezing cold and lit with nothing but a flickering lantern.  The
mattress looked like a breeding ground for bedbugs.  All the wobbly furniture seemed
to have too many corners, not enough corners, or no corners at all, even though
corners clearly should have been there.
    …But,
everything outside the small room was even worse.
    Shadow-of-the-Gods
was some kind of Wild West slum.  As far as Addy could tell, the entire town
was one street wide and made up of flat-fronted buildings that couldn’t possibly have passed any fire codes.  It looked like the set of a John Ford film, only
dirtier and filled with animals she didn’t recognize.  Buffalo roamed by and
deer and antelope played.  But, what the hell were those big lizard-y things
that wandered down the road?
    And
“road” was being generous.  It was basically a mud puddle, traveled by
disreputable guys in bizarre, triangle-shaped cowboy hats.  They all carried
buckets and pick-axes into the hills in the morning and returned with glowing, green
rocks at night.
    They
were mining something , but damn if she knew what.  Addy certainly wasn’t
going to head out and see for herself what made the stones shine like
kryptonite.  Everything beyond the edges of town was a sea of wilderness.  She
could see that and it was enough to keep her inside.  Staring out her
window, she didn’t see a single cellular tower, passing airplane, satellite
dish, or car.
    Something
was very, very wrong.
    On
day one, Addy was in denial.  This couldn’t be happening to her.  She wasn’t
cut out for roughing it.  Nature and animals and all the rest of it was great…
she just didn’t want to be near any of it.  In kindergarten, she’d had a
panic attack about visiting the zoo.  She was the fat kid who sat in the
library during recess and who faked an ankle injury to avoid taking the
stairs.  She was supposed to be safe inside her gated condo complex, with her
collection of designer handbags and reruns of ‘80s TV shows.
    This couldn’t be happening.  Not to her.  Addy was normal , in a
drinking-nice-wines-and-going-to-Saks-after-Sunday-brunch kind of way.  It just
couldn’t. be. happening.  Very, very soon camera people would burst through the
door, laughing about how this was all a reality show prank.  She was sure of
it.
    Only
it wasn’t a prank.
    On
day two, Addy was angry.  This trip was nothing like the brochure
promised.  She was going to write Brown’s