Jim Ware - Canyon Quest

Canyon Quest

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Legend of the Desert Bigfoot

Escape from Fire Lake

Terror from Outer Space

Canyon Quest

2004, 2021 Focus on the Family. All rights reserved.

A Focus on the Family book published by Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188

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ISBN 978-1-64607-050-3

Build: 2022-01-19 10:28:22 EPUB 3.0

Ambrosia1994

S EVENTY-NINE, EIGHTY, eighty-one, eighty-two ... eighty-three.

Mike Fowler stopped counting and looked at the money where it lay spread out across his cowboy-patterned bedspread. Beside it sprawled a wrinkled Greyhound bus schedule and a Triple-A road map of the Midwestern states. Mentally he added it up again. $53.83 in change and single bills. His entire lifes savings. Not a lot, he thought. But enough.

Once more he checked the contents of his backpack: two changes of clothes; a water bottle, an orange, three Snickers bars, and a packet of dried fruit snacks; and the leather-bound pocket Bible and compassa big, beautiful, hand-sized compass in a shiny brass casement with a pure glass crystalthat his dad had given him the last time they were together for his birthday.

11:42 p.m. The numbers on the digital alarm clock glowed a fuzzy red in the soft darkness. It was the eve of his twelfth birthday, and while the rest of the household slept, Mike sat huddled on the bed with his flashlight, pinning down the final details of a plan that had been taking shape in his mind for years.

A plan to get out of Ambrosia.

Mike hated Ambrosia. He hated the hot, dry winds and the barren landscape that hemmed the town in on every side. He loathed the monotonous cactuses and yucca and the endless flatness of the Arizona deserta flatness interrupted only by the few arid red buttes and mesas that rose starkly out of the shimmering waste like the cracked and eroded bones of long-forgotten primeval monsters. He cringed at the sight of the searing sun, the unyielding blue of the daytime sky, and the oppressive swarms of winking stars at night. He hated every last bit of it.

Once more Mike consulted the bus schedule for late-night departure times. There was a coach leaving for Columbus at 1:38 a.m. every morning. Perfect.

He sat back on the bed, ran his fingers through his brown hair, and went over the plan in his mind. He pictured the dingy Greyhound station down on Ambrosias drowsy main drag. Main Street, Ambrosia: once a busy stopping point along historic Route 66, now a dilapidated relic, bypassed completely by the newer Interstate 40. He couldnt bear the sight of its peeling storefronts and cartoonish neon signs, blinking garishly in the purple desert twilight. He winced every time he passed the Wig-Wam Motor Lodge, a tacky cluster of concrete teepees huddled together in a narrow space between two crumbling sandstone cliffs at the east end of town.

Yes, thought Mike. Ambrosia had everythingeverything boring and repulsive. Like the Galaxy Drive-In, a crater-based outdoor movie theater, which was one of the ugliest things hed ever laid eyes on. Its futuristic marqueefuturistic for the 1950swas like something out of an episode of The Jetsons. He fingered his money and told himself that he couldnt wait to get away.

Ambrosia wasnt anything like home. Home, in his memory, was a green and fragrant paradise: a land of gently rolling hills, thick-boughed, broad-leafed trees, and shady lanes lined with snug wood-frame houses, each with a white picket fence, brick walk, and trim green lawn.

If he closed his eyes, Mike could still smell the damp brown earth and the fresh green grass of home. He could feel the damp itchiness that came from tumbling and wrestling with his dad on the lawn during long summer evenings, when tall, puffy clouds, full of night rain, hung thick and gilded and pink above the western horizon.

He could remember sitting out on the front porch with his dad, memorizing psalms and verses out of the Bible, while the sprinklers hissed and filled the air with a gentle mist. People didnt have lawns in Ambrosia. They had rocks or gravel or xeriscapespatches of spiny, spiky, scrawny plants that looked like they came from another planet and reminded you of the kind of place where a horned toad might feel at home. Mike hated xeriscapes.

What made all of this even more unbearable, he thought, was the fact Jamie Fletcher didnt live in Ambrosia. Jamie had been Mikes best friend back at home. Hed never been able to find a friend like Jamie out here in the desert. He hadnt even tried. He didnt want to.

Mike still liked to talk to Jamie on the phone as often as he could wheedle his mom into letting him call. But that didnt happen very often. Mikes mom didnt have a lot of money for long-distance phone bills. Neither did Pop and Grandma Fowler.

So Mike hated Ambrosia. He hated everything about it.

Everything, that is, except the B-17.

The B-17 belonged to Pop. It was a real Flying Fortressthe same plane he had piloted over France during the Second World War. Now it sat on display out in front of the Last Chance Gas and Diner, the family business where Mom kept the books and waited on tables, and where Mike spent a lot of time hanging around with Pop and wiping windshields.

No question about it. The B-17 was the one thing about Ambrosia that Mike definitely did not hate. It was sleek and silvery and wonderful. Just looking at it stirred his imagination and filled him with dreams of being a pilot himself somedaylike Pop and his dad.

During his time in Ambrosia, Mike had spent hours upon hours poring over the picture books of airplanes and aircraft hed discovered in his bedroomthe same room his dad had occupied as a boy. Hed memorized every model in Janes Pocket Book of Major Combat Aircraft and Janes Pocket Book ofHelicopters. Hed have given anything for a look inside the B-17. But hed never had the chance. The B-17 was off-limits. Pop had put padlocks on the doors to keep kids, vagrants, and curiosity seekers out. So the B-17 didnt really do Mike a whole lot of good.

At any rate, he told himself, even the B-17 couldnt change the very worst thing about Ambrosia. Because the very worst thing about Ambrosia was the thing that had brought him to the hot, dusty little town in the first place. It was a thing that had shaken his whole world and changed his life forevera thing Mike couldnt put out of his mind if he lived to be a hundred.