Shifted Read Online Free PDF

sound. 
    Instinctively, Charlie leapt onto Briar, knocking her to the ground and protecting her with his body. The noise was everywhere, thunderous and violent. He knew Briar was screaming because her mouth was open, but he couldn’t hear it. 
    All around them, the clearing was calm. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t happening here. Looking around, Charlie noticed a plume of dust rising in the distance, toward the pass out of town. He jumped off of Briar’s prone body and ran toward the sound. 
    As a man, it would have taken him ten minutes to run the distance. Before the accident, of course—he would never run anywhere as a man ever again. But as a cat, it took him a third of the time, going overland through thick brush. 
    As he got closer, he could smell the change in the air. There was dirt, and dust, and cold stone, but something else as well—something tinny and chemical, like a hint of gunpowder on the air. 
    He knew this terrain, had been exploring this area since he was a boy, and he knew that something was fundamentally wrong. It was as if the air was still vibrating with the crash of noise. He bounded over a rise that should have overlooked the road out of town and found … nothing. 
    The ground that should have met his feet had disappeared. Charlie twisted in air as the world rushed by, trying to find purchase on something, anything. 
     His flailing paws caught a ridge of raw rock. He couldn’t stop his movement, his claws scraping against rock without traction, and he had no idea how far he would fall. 
    Suddenly, his body slammed into an overhang, barely big enough to hold him, but he clung to it desperately. His heart was slamming against his ribs, and his paws were scraped and tender, but other than that he seemed unharmed. 
    What had happened? Half of the mountain was gone.
     
    Cautiously, Charlie turned so he could see behind him. The road into town had been carved a hundred years ago by wagons and horses, and it wound along a ridge in the mountain that was relatively flat but bordered by a precipitous drop on one side and a steep slope on the other. When the road was paved, back when Charlie was just a baby, the WPA had carefully excavated a larger area to allow for two way traffic and added a guard rail along the west side. The Breakneck River roared by a hundred feet below, and there should have been a steep mountain face rising to the east. 
    But now, the mountain had collapsed into the road below. 
    Debris spread across the entire road. A chunk of the asphalt had been gouged out by a falling rock. It looked like a giant had ripped away a fistful of earth. A section of the guardrail was sheared off, the twisted metal hanging off the side of the mountain. The road itself was completely blocked with enormous boulders that had to be taller than a man, and piled high with smaller rocks and shifted dirt. 
    Charlie was horrified. A rockslide like this was a disaster for Independence Falls. The town was as self-sufficient as possible, but they could only survive for so long if they were cut off from the rest of civilization. 
    The isolated valley that held Independence Falls was surrounded on all sides by forbidding peaks. It was possible for a man on a horse to find an overland route to one of the neighboring towns, but it would take days. What were they going to do for food? Supplies? In the winter, they might be cut off from civilization for weeks at a time by a heavy snowstorm, but the road was going to take longer than a few weeks to repair. The river rushing by below him was no help; the rapids known as Miner’s Revenge were too dangerous for any boat to traverse. Without the thin strip of asphalt that clung to the side of the mountain, they were truly isolated from the world.
     Charlie wanted to get a better view of the damage. The ledge where he’d landed was barely big enough for all four of his paws, and after a rockslide like this the earth had to be unstable. There was a