Tarkentower
Once and Forever
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Daniel Scott White
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
ISBN 978-0-9830541-1-5
Thanks to Diane for always being there.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 Once and Forever
Chapter 2 Welcome to Tomorrow
Chapter 3 Underground
Chapter 4 Future Earth
Chapter 5 In the City
Chapter 6 Dead Man
Chapter 7 Night Run
Chapter 8 Outcast
Chapter 9 Nowhere Bound
Chapter 10 The Ranger
Chapter 11 Relocation
Chapter 12 Across the Plains
Chapter 13 The Bog Attack
Chapter 14 Into the Kingdom
Chapter 15 Beyond the Kingdom
Chapter 16 Burning Time
Chapter 17 Tomorrow Land
Main Entry: Tarkentower Syndrome
Function: noun
Etymology: Arkady Tarkentower, Russian physician
: a personality disorder in which one attempts to solve complicated problems using complicated solutions, thereby making matters worse
: typically associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, is more common in males than females, and usually has an onset in childhood and often turns to insanity in adulthood
“There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.”
Banksy
Chapter 1 ~ Once and Forever
As I was painting the back of the hospital I was confronted by a quadrant of watchdog robots. I took a can of black paint out of my backpack and sprayed the visual receptors on one of the robots. Totally disoriented, it took a step back. And then it took another, and another. And then it fell right off the sidewalk, which kind of surprised me.
Just then, a stealth-class car came flying by, flattening out the robot like an aluminum can. Red hydraulic fluid shot out everywhere. This was a curious incident, because as far as I knew, cars almost never passed this way.
These tiny dog-bots only had three fingers on their disk-like hands, which meant they couldn’t grasp much. I sprayed another one and it scratched at its binocular eyes, but it was already too late. The paint had dried that fast.
The two other pint-sized robots began jumping up and down, waving their straw-like arms about frantically, as if they could fly or something. They had acorn-shaped bodies and weren't designed to intimidate anyone in the least. Someone had once told me that inside them was a pump, something like a heart, which could make the arms and legs straighten out by sending more fluid to them, but I didn't know much about that.
The car came to a screeching halt and an old man got out. He was dressed in white and had white hair and a white beard. He even carried a white cane, although he didn't look like he needed it. He came over and peered at the remains of the flattened robot. Then he took a step back and glanced up at my masterpiece.
He stuck his finger in my face and accused me of defacing his hospital. I refrained from laughing, explaining that my work was highly valued art. I’d just finished painting a picture of a girl I liked and I thought it matched her to perfection.
He motioned for the other robots to close in on me, and before I knew it, they had electricity pulsing from their fingertips. I'd never known they could do that before, so I jumped over one of them and took off down an alley, leaving my art behind.
A few weeks later I saw the old man's picture in the newspaper. He looked like that guy who sells fried chicken, only he didn't wear glasses. They said he was a rare breed of genius, a doctor who could cure almost any disease in the world. Ironically, his wife had died recently in a traffic jam. Although she only needed a tracheotomy, which is a thing where they put a hole in your throat so you can breathe, after you've eaten something you're allergic to, nobody who knew anything about tracheotomies could get to her in time. It was the longest traffic jam in the world, the article said.
The doctor, whose eyes looked bleary-red in the black and white picture, announced the next day that he would be closing his hospital for good. He would soon begin to work on something new. He said he was going to cure this ailing world once and forever. It was a strange choice of words, I thought, because he didn't say 'once and for all.' He said 'once and forever.'
But I soon forgot about all that. I forgot about my street art and my unfinished masterpiece. Oddly enough, I started forgetting about a lot of things. It left me feeling empty, like something had been taken out of me and left somewhere and I'd never find it again. I even forgot that I was forgetting, which I didn't realize until later, when I thought back about the experience.
Then came a long period, which I can't tell you much about. I only remember sitting in the classroom one day, with my head down on the table, pretending to be asleep. I hated school. I hated the world. I wished it all would just disappear.
I noticed the room had suddenly grown really quiet, and when I looked around, nobody was there. Thinking the bell might have rung and I hadn't heard it, I got up and walked out. But the hallway was empty, too. In fact, the whole school was empty. I wandered past lockers and the door to the gym and then stumbled out a side door and found myself in the middle of a deserted city.
“HEY, WHERE IS EVERYBODY?” I yelled, but my voice wandered off and left me all alone.
Chapter 2 ~ Welcome to Tomorrow
I knew I was in trouble about a hundred years ago, but somehow I’d forgotten about all that. Lately, I’d been forgetting about a lot of things. Now you probably think I’m really old and have a bad memory. But I’m not. I’m just a kid, like any other kid. Let me tell you the story and see if you can figure it out.
At this moment, I hated the city more than anything. Before all this starting happening, before people disappeared and the world became empty, I’d always thought wandering the streets a great way to spend my time. But hiding in the leaves, in the wet leaves, with the cold wind biting at my eyes, and not knowing if I was safe right now, it all brought home the realization that the world could be a heartless place.
Shadows had been following me all day and I couldn't find a way to escape them. They always seemed to know where I'd be next, which burned me even more. I hadn't stopped to consider what I’d do if they found me here, lying on my back, with sticks and twigs and cold wet leaves piled over my shivering frame. I only hoped they wouldn’t think to look here, in such an obvious place, because who would be stupid enough to hide right next to the street corner?
More leaves were falling from the trees nearby, colliding in the afternoon wind, as I looked up at the passing clouds. Suddenly, something bit into my leg. I rolled over on my knees and fished around in the leaves until I found a rock. Across the street a circle of a kid was staring at me, challenging me to a fight.
He squinted slightly as he bent down to pick up another rock, and for a moment, he had to take his eyes off me. I thought I could drop him, but still, I hesitated. He didn’t look that threatening.
I wiped bits of broken leaves off my face and spit tree bark back at him. A forest had grown up within the city, trees butting the sides of buildings, grass and weeds entwined together, breaking through the cracks in the pavement, the buildings themselves crumbling in the gloom. As I scanned the alleys and empty windows for another place to hide, I remember something about a girl and wished more than anything I could find her again. I took a few quick steps forward, yelling gibberish at the kid and flinging my arms around like a windmill. That's when he disappeared around the corner like a drop of water carried on the wind.
Before I could find a new placed to hide, another rock hit me in the back of the head. This time it was a girl, maybe seventeen years old, leaning against the side of a building. She wasn’t exactly the girl in my dreams, but she looked good, standing there, motioning for me to come a little closer. I smiled slightly, but when she tossed another rock in the air and caught it, I knew it was my turn to run.
“Not fair!” I yelled.
“Come on, you freak,” she said and laughed. “Show me what you’ve got!”
I took a quick sidestep into a doorway and landed in the dark, fumbling my way across a room, running into chairs and desks, until I came to a wall. I felt along the wall and found a door and threw it open. Inside, the air pinched at my lungs as I tripped over more chairs and then I smacked the bridge of my nose on a bookcase. I muffled a cry and found another doorway and ran through that. Light appeared out of nowhere and I jumped for an opening and landed out on the street again.
Expecting them to come around the corner at any moment, I crawled behind a tree to hide. I rolled myself into a ball, wrapping my arms around my knees, and closed my eyes, wishing they’d go away. I imagined I was a rock, dappled with tufts of soft moss, determined to blend into the landscape. Hunger hit me full on and my legs burned for more oxygen. A second later I heard the sound of voices approaching quickly.
“Where’d he go?” the boy asked.
“Don’t know,” the girl answered.
“I think he’s harmless.”
“You don’t know that!” the girl yelled. “Maybe he’s totally lost it.”
She planted her foot squarely into the tree I was hiding behind, sending a shower of leaves down all around me. Knowing it was now or never, I grabbed a broken tree limb leaning against the side of a building and rushed out into the street.
“Back off!” I screamed, pointing the sharp end of the stick at them.
“How’d you do that?” the boy asked.
“Hey, are you crazy or what?” the girl said at the same time.
Panic flashed in the boy’s eyes as he looked for a place to hide. In one fluid move, the girl took a step back and positioned her fist behind her head, posing to strike like a viper. I jabbed the stick back and forth between them, unsure what to do next. I knew they weren’t going to let me get away so easily this time. Mostly, it was the girl’s catlike moves that intimidated me. The boy, on the other hand, I thought I could take him.
“Wait a minute,” the boy said. “We don’t know nothing about him yet. You break his head open, and what if he’s an asset?”
“You got any skills?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” I inquired.
“Take him to see Amelia,” the boy said. “Let her do her magic on him. Then we’ll know if he’s salvageable or not.”
“Who’s Amelia?” I asked.
“She can fix your head,” he explained.
“Back off! I mean it!” I yelled and made a quick stab at the girl and then shuffled backwards to the safety of the wall behind me.
“Hey, watch it!” she said.
“Listen, we’ve been following you all day and you’re just going in circle. I bet you don’t even know where you’re at.”
I tried to picture the layout of the city and that’s when my legs disappeared below me. I saw the street rushing up to meet the side of my face. The boy ran over to see if I was all right. The girl took a step back. I hugged myself and clenched my eyes shut, wondering how I’d ever gotten here.
“What happened?”
“Uh, you passed out,” he lied.
“It would be a lot better fight if I wasn’t so hungry all the time.”
“Just leave him alone, will you?” he yelled at the girl and she turned her back.
He fished around inside his backpack and came up with an apple. I snatched it out of his hand and chomped on it viciously. I tried eating the core as well, but it tasted bitter, so I gave it to a line of ants flooding down the sidewalk. They swarmed all over the apple in seconds, and some tried to move it, but it was still too heavy for them.
“Slow down,” he said. “You eat too fast and you’ll lose it.”
He dug deeper inside his backpack and pulled out another one. I made it vanish just as fast. I was about to ask for a third when something moved inside me. I threw the core down on the sidewalk and looked for a place to bury my head. A piece of apple turned savage-brown popped out of my mouth and landed in the sidewalk.
“Trust me, Lewis, you don’t want to eat too fast on an empty stomach.”
“How do you know my name?” I bellowed in his face and then attempted to run along the sidewalk on my knees.
“What’re you doing?” the girl yelled and pushed him out into the street.
As they argued together, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Her hair was long and blonde and tied back in a leather barrette and her shirt had fallen down off one shoulder. There was something about the way she moved, as if she were dancing on water.
The boy, on the other hand, was more of a distraction than anything. He was a sad combination of mismatched clothes and sloppy reflexes. He also had the nervous habit of shifting from one foot to the other, like he was doing right now.
“All right, I’ll tell you what’s going on,” he finally said, once they’d stopped circling each other. “Amelia sent us out here and said to bring you in, if it looked like you could be an asset to the team.”
“She did what?” I blurted out, rubbing my knees.
“You want to join us?”
“Who are you, a couple inbred mutants?”
“I’m Lucerne,” the girl replied, forcing me to shake her hand. “Fat boy over there is Deon.”
I took a step away from them. Down the street emptiness waited for me. For a moment I imagined people like ghosts passing through the city, oblivious to the leaves and the litter blowing through them. I wanted to climb into one of the broken windows and hide, but the ghosts continued to impede my way. I felt nauseous and glanced back at the boy and girl watching me. They were staring at me strangely, looking where I was looking, trying to see what I was seeing.
“Is there somebody there? Are they coming this way?” Deon asked.
“We’d better move out,” Lucerne said. “We’ve got no exit strategy here if we’re attacked.”
“You got any more food?”
“Yeah, we got tons,” Deon said. “Just come with us.”
I went with them, partly curious and partly starving, just to see where they would take me. We walked past dejected-looking buildings, housing forlorn birds perched high above, peering down on us exposed; lines of cars waiting in anticipation at traffic lights that would never shine again; doors to storefronts left open and some nearly torn off their rusted hinges. The city was a ghost town, a whole generation of memories wiped off the face of the planet.
We stopped at an alley and confronted a wild dog prowling the streets in search of something to eat, its ears working, nose twitching, back legs ready to launch it forward at the first sign of prey. The dog flinched when it saw us, froze for a moment, and then skipped away. I imagined I was the dog and got down on one knee, looking along the bed of the street, inspecting every angle of it, sniffing at the air, anticipating what I might find there. A dog could run fast, probably fast enough to elude humans.
Lucerne came over and tapped me on the shoulder, waking me from my stupor.
“We need to keep moving,” she said. “No time to rest now.”
“Amelia really told you my name?” I asked as I got up.
“No, I saw it on your shirt,” Deon said and let out a laugh like a wild horse.
I pulled my shirt down and tried to read the front of it. Printed across my chest was the name Lewis Fuller and below it, the number 15. I weighed the words in my mind and came up blank. The name gave me no clue about who I was or where I’d come from.
“That’s not me. I got it off some dead guy,” I said weakly.
The shirt seemed to fit, though, and I warmed to the idea of having a name. At least it put me on the map somewhere. And it got me to thinking more clearly about where I was going.
“So you just made up all that stuff about taking me to see someone?” I asked.
“No, most of it was true,” he replied.
We passed a dark building and I slid into a doorway, fading quickly into the shadows on the other side of the room. I had no idea who they were or where they were taking me. They knew everything, and I knew nothing, and that put me in a dangerous position. Until they started telling me the truth, the kind of truth that made sense, I wasn’t going anywhere with them.
“Where’d he go?”
“So much for that,” the girl said. “Got any better ideas?”
“Yeah, why don’t you go in there and get him,” he said and pushed her.
She staggered for a moment and then regained her footing. She would have boxed him in the ears, but he ducked down, making himself even more vulnerable. She only shook her head and pushed him away.
“I’m not going in there. You think I’m crazy?”
“What set him off, anyway? What’d I say?”
“Paranoid. He’s getting paranoid now. You shouldn’t have given him so many details. Makes them run every time.”
“Whatever. You know he can’t understand what I’m saying. I just wanted to get him moving.”
I could hear them talking outside, although I couldn’t see them anymore. Yet I lost focus on what they were saying as I sensed something behind me moving. The whole room suddenly felt like it had come alive. The hair went up on my arms and I heard a slithering sound, like the wind blowing through the grass, or water flooding across a plain, as if something was sliding across the floor in my direction.
Something tapped the back of my leg and I felt a slight pin-prick, followed by a searing sensation, as if my pants had caught on fire. I ran forward and dived out the door, landing on the sidewalk in a crumpled ball. Lucerne and Deon rushed over to help me.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Lucerne said. “What made you change your mind?”
“Wait a minute,” Deon said. “What’s that?”
He grabbed my shoulders and twisted me around, eyeing a dark patch on the back of my pants. They were both silent for a moment. My skin began to itch, just below the back of my knee, and I reached down to scratch it. Lucerne caught my hand midway there and pulled it back.
As we watched, my pants started to smolder, just below the knee. Then a strange chemical-blue flame broke out of nowhere, dancing madly as it sucked up fresh air. Deon pinned me against the wall and Lucerne grabbed a handful of mud from the gutter and smothered the flame, pressing it against my leg. It hurt like anything. As soon as the fire was out, she picked up a stick and started scraping small blue particles off the back of my leg, careful not to touch any of it.
“What is that?” I asked, wincing at the pain, but she ignored me.
“Scissors,” she said and Deon reached inside her backpack.
They were shiny and clean and somewhat small, like the scissors you’d use to trim your fingernails. Carefully, but quickly, she cut through my jeans just below the knee, going all the way around. Then she made me sit down and take off my shoe. She pulled my pant leg off as gently as a surgeon might and laid it aside and then placed a pile of mud on top of the charred spot. Then she cut off the other pant leg just like the first one and laid it down on the sidewalk next to its twin.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked.
“So your pants will match. Walking around with just one leg showing would look kind of stupid, don’t you think?”
“You really care about how I look?”
“Listen, Lewis, you’re just going to have to trust us,” she said, her eyes shining crystal-blue in the warm sunlight. “I know none of this makes any sense to you right now, but believe me, we’ve both been there before. Someone found us and took in us, too. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t be here right now, helping you.”
I wanted to believe her. There was something appealing in her voice. I was confused and tired and wanted to stop running from them all the time. The truth was, Deon had given me something to eat, and she’d stopped that freaking weird blue thing from eating up my leg.
“OK,” I said. "Show me the way."
Chapter 3 ~ Underground
I'd once had a dad and mom; I'd gone to school and had friends and everything. I even remembered something about a girl, but now she was gone. They were all gone. The city was dead. I wanted to run up and down the streets calling their names, but no one lived here anymore.
The sun was going down and the threatening shadows of broken things littering the streets were growing longer with every passing minute. Whenever we crossed an intersection, each time another street block fell away, I felt like I was leaving something behind. Yet all I could think about was the promise of finding more food.
My head was spinning like a leaf blown about in the wind. I giggled a little to myself as I tried to grasp how whacked the world had become. Deon threw me a sideways glance and picked up the pace. We passed a green road sign covered in dust, one leg bent and the other about to give way, the letters splayed across the sign barely visible in the fading sunlight.
“N-E-W. C-A-R-G-O. New Cargo,” I said, just making out the words. “What’s that?”
“That’s where we are,” he said.
“This city was once called New Cargo,” Lucerne explained. “But I guess you could call it Old Cargo now.”
“Or maybe Dead Cargo,” Deon said and let out a laugh.
“What’s cargo?” I asked.
Neither one answered me. I began wondering if I’d even asked the question at all, so I said it again, being sure to breath out this time.
“What. Is. Cargo?”
No response. Panic flooded me, a feeling like I was being taken to my death and I’d never be found again. I was pretty sure I’d said it right, although there was a slightly hollow ring to my voice. I mean, it didn’t sound like me at all, but I was pretty sure I’d said it clearly and anyone would have been understood me, under the circumstances.
“Right now, you’re cargo,” Lucerne said at last. “And if you don’t shut up, we’ll never get you back to the base alive.”
“Now I’m cargo. Before, I was an asset. Actually, I’m much better at being alone.”
“Deon, I need to talk to you in private. NOW!” She grabbed his elbow and dragged him off the road.
We’d left they city behind and were crossing into the countryside. Here, the land was barren, except for a few stubby bushes dotting the plain. The wind blew across the land in gusts and when it stopped, there was no sound at all. The air felt chilly as the night set in and I shivered a little as I waited for them to stop whispering together.
“Are we lost?” I asked.
Deon turned to me and said, “Whatever happens, when we get there, you have to remember who you are.”
“I can’t even remember yesterday. Who am I supposed to be?”
“Your name is Lewis Fuller and you’re fifteen years old.”
Something caught my eye and I looked back down the road behind us. Along the black edge of the city, lights flickered and swayed, fire on torches dancing violently. Shifting shapes I could barely make out were moving in the night, dangerous enterprises coming this way.
“Someone’s coming!” I yelled.
“We shouldn’t be out so late,” Lucerne rasped.
Her eyes were pin-points of fear. I’d never thought I’d see her afraid. Whatever was happening was serious.
“Run!” Deon shouted.
We ran. Deon took the lead and Lucerne followed behind me, pushing me to keep up. I forgot all about my hunger for a moment and sprinted like the wind.
We came to a turnoff receding away from the road, two faint lines in the dirt, parallel tire tracks half-hidden below a tangle of dead grass. We darted out into the plain along this two-lane path until we came to a shelter. It was old, derelict-looking, hardly noticeable from the road, and even if someone had seen it, hardly hinting being worthy of any further investigation.
Deon pried the door open and I stuck my head inside. A surreal sky littered with stars appeared where the ceiling should have been and the floor was covered with old boards, rotting timber which had once been a part of the top of the shed. A quarter-moon climbed up the night sky, working its way through a maze of stars.
Deon shuffled across the room to the other side, treading deftly on a long flat piece of wood, careful not to fall through the gaps in the floor. I came next and Lucerne went last, stepping backwards, eyes pinned to the door in case we’d been followed.
In one corner of the room was a stairwell, going down about a dozen steps into the earth. Deon grabbed a key hidden in a recess in the wall. We went down the stairs single file, feeling our way more than seeing it, until we reached the bottom, where he unlocked a heavy wooden door.
A world of light and warmth surrounded me as I rushed inside. The smell of food cooked to perfection hit me in waves and I pushed Deon out of the way and with a strength I didn’t know I had.
In the next room I found a weather-beaten shell of a man holding a plate of steamed corn standing in the middle of a kitchen. He put the plate down on the table and motioned for me to sit down.
“What’s this?” I asked, but then started eating without waiting for an answer.
Deon sat down next to me with a plate just as full as mine and Lucerne joined us a moment later. While inhaling the stuff, I stole a look around.
The kitchen was a throwback to the age of cast iron. It contained an odd assortment of black hand-forged crude items which had seen better days. There was a stove, burning wood, and a kettle over a fireplace, and pots and pans hanging everywhere. None of it was worth anything outside a museum.
The man watched us eat in silence as he tended to the pot of boiling corn. On his shoulders were tattoos and his face looked like a roadmap for the moon.
“Who were those people?” I asked as my hunger faded for a moment.
“Trackers,” Deon said. “They were probably following you, just like we did, after the last Star Burn.”
“What’s a Star Burn?”
“You’ll have to ask Amelia that.”
“Thanks, King,” Lucerne said, after she’d finished eating.
She got up and returned her plate to him.
“Anything for you kids,” he replied, struggling to make himself heard through a rusty whisper of a voice. “Now get in there. She’s waiting.”
We left the kitchen and entered an adjoining hallway, where we lined up before a solid oak door. Deon knocked lightly, revealing a slight tremor in his hand. The door opened a little, as if pushed by the wind, and someone inside called for us to enter. Mostly out of curiosity, I walked in first.
Amelia defined seriousness. She had wrinkles and grey hair and wore clothes fashionable about a century ago. The whole room reeked of a bad classroom experience. On one side was a chalkboard, covered with a thin layer of chalk dust. On the other stood an ancient desk, buried under papers and pages of books torn out and separated into piles.
The room wasn’t that big. In the middle was a chair with just enough room to walk around it. Amelia pointed at the chair and I sat down. Deon and Lucerne took up positions behind me and I heard the bolt on the door lock as it slid shut. There was a strange smell of something burning and it made me feel dizzy.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“I’m Lewis Fuller and I’m fifteen years old,” I said, trying to sound sincere.
Her head snapped in my direction and she looked right in my eyes. The sounds of Deon and Lucerne behind me disappeared as the room lost focus. She paced around me a few times and I tried not to let me head spin in circles.
“Do you know where you are?” she asked from somewhere, but I couldn’t see her. It almost sounded like she had climbed inside my brain.
“Yeah,” I said, but flinched when she grabbed my shoulder. “No… Not really.”
“Who are you?” she asked again.
“I don’t know,” I said and let my head fall back. I thought I saw a spider walking across the ceiling but I knew it would never get anywhere.
She paused for a moment, then pulled a notebook out of her desk and wrote something down.
“Lewis sounds like a good name to me,” she said. “We’ll start with that. Do you know how old you are?”
“No.”
“You might be sixteen, but we’ll say fifteen for the time being.” She scribbled some more in her notebook.
“Can he stay?” Lucerne asked. “I think we should keep him.”
She stepped forward and put her arms around me from behind. It felt good, in ways I couldn’t explain. For a moment my mind went foggy and I lost all track of time. When the room came back into focus, she was over at the desk, looking at something in one of Amelia’s notebook. They were in the middle of a conversation and had been talking for I don’t know how long.
“Go now,” Amelia said. “He’s had enough for one day. Let him get some rest. Tomorrow we can start his re-education.”
“Uh, one more thing,” Deon said. “He ran into some of that blue stuff you warned us about. He snuck into a building before we could stop him. When he came out again, well, take a look at the back of his leg and you’ll see what I mean.”
Amelia walked over and grabbed me by the ear and pulled me out of the chair. She took a look at the burn mark on the back of my leg, just below the knee. Then she went back to her desk and opened it and took out a pair of tweezers.
She pinched off a trace of charcoal-colored residue stuck to my skin and dropped it into a thin glass jar. Then she stopped the top of the jar with a cork and wrote something on a label and stuck it to the glass. She held it up to the candlelight for a moment, as if she was attempting to fathom just what might be hiding deep inside the substance trapped there.
“Lights,” she instructed.
Lucerne blew out the candles and we all waited in the dark, until a blue glow appeared in the heart of the jar. The glow grew into a pulse, as if it wanted to be woken up or switched off, I wasn’t sure which. It was mesmerizing to watch.
“Lights,” Amelia said and the candles were lit again.
“Are you sure neither of you touched anything like this?” she asked.
They nodded in silence. She put the jar back in her desk and shut the drawer.
Then she took out another jar and opened it and poured something foul onto a piece of cloth. I shut my eyes as the odor hit me. She went to work on the back of my leg, rubbing it down until my skin was crimson and nearly bleeding. I tried not to flinch. When she had finished, she looked around the room for her notebook. She scribbled something quickly on a blank page and then shut the book and put it away inside the desk and locked it.
“Strange. The stuff must be spreading,” she mumbled to herself, then commanded: “Go now.”
Chapter 4 ~ Future Earth
I was surrounded by little blue men on every side, thousands of them, dotting the land for as far as I could see. They were soft and pudgy looking and as quiet as field mice nibbling on hay. That is to say, they made little noises of contentment and occasionally they nudged each other with their heads, and if they’d had tails, I’m sure they’d have been twitching them. When the wind blew they swayed from side to side and they smiled at me as if they were all a bit high. I tried to push some of them aside, which they didn’t protest to, but then more little blue men stepped forward and blocked my way.
While I thought the whole scenario odd, and somewhere in the back of my mind, wondered if it was a dream, because I couldn’t imagine something like this really happening, suddenly it got even stranger as the little blue men started changing colors. One minute they were all blue and the next they were green. Oddly enough, they would flip-flop in unison, synchronized in waves, from blue to green and then back again. Although I wanted to convince myself it was just a dream, something about this world seemed real, all too real, and I desperately looked for a way out.
I noticed a man walking across the landscape near the horizon, but he appeared too preoccupied with his own thoughts to be concerned about the predicament I was in. He was old and tall and wore a white suit and his hair was white and he even walked with a cane, which was also white. As he walked, he appeared to be talking to himself, making gestures with his hands, totally unaware I was watching him. I waved at him frantically and he glanced over at me in surprise, stuck in the middle of the blue men, who were now green men, and they let him pass and eventually he came closer to where I stood.
By now, he had stopped using his cane to walk and was holding it high above his head, as if he wanted to strike me down with it, if ever he got close enough. I started tossing little men out of the way as fast as I could, careless of whether they got hurt or not, but there were simply too many of them. Desperately, I picked them up, two at a time, and threw them in pairs, sending them spinning through the air like cards being tossed out of a deck at a magic show.
About the time the man came within striking distance, I noticed my heart, which was hardly beating at all, although I was moving at the speed of lightning. And then my heart paused entirely, frozen in place out of fear of what might ensue, and I breathed what I thought was my last breath. The cane in the man’s hand came down hard and fast, but it paused about an inch away from my head, at which point the man and the little people and the strange world disappeared completely…
I woke up naked and alone. I was in a cold vault below the ground, thinking maybe I’d died and would be stuck here forever. A lantern hanging on the wall revealed a dull-grey room sparsely decorated. There was a sink with a mirror above it, a toilet with a bucket of water nearby, and a low lying spring bed with a stiff mattress that I was holding intensely on to. I let go of the mattress and pulled a thin wool blanket over my narrow frame and walked over to the mirror to take a look. In the reflection was the skeleton of a boy with a hungry expression stretched across his face, but who that boy was, I couldn’t tell.
I remembered something about sinking into a wooden bathtub filled with hot water cascading out of a steaming kettle. The night before I’d scrubbed my skin with soap and a stone until it shone crimson red. My old clothes, full of holes and dirty, had been thrown into the fire that warmed the water for my bath. Even now I smelled the faint fragrance of fallen leaves hanging on my skin.
“Anybody got any clothes?” I called into the hallway, after I’d pushed the door open and stuck my head outside.
Someone stirred in one of the rooms nearby. A door opened and an old woman stepped out, needle and thread and a pair of pants in her hands. I remembered her from somewhere; maybe she had once been a teacher of mine. She looked older than before, though, much older than she should have been, as if she hadn’t slept all night. She walked with a slow dancelike movement, carefully putting each foot down in front of her, graceful, yet exhausting to watch. I could have gone to her and returned to my room by the time she reached my door, except I wasn’t wearing anything.
“Could I have a shirt, too?” I asked and put the pants on in front of her as if she were my mother.
She checked the size and smiled a little when she saw they fit. Then she went back into her room and closed the door without saying a word.
Down the hall came the sound of clinking pans. I heard a match being lit and then I smelled wood-smoke drifting my way. Someone was humming a little tune as he threw together breakfast, his double-barreled lungs resonating deeply like an old dog howling softly in its sleep. The cook stuck his head around the corner and nodded good morning to me, but still half-dressed, I went back into my room and lay down to sleep.
I closed my eyes and the world disappeared as my thoughts twirled away in a river of grey. There wasn’t much I could remember about yesterday, except eating apples and running from someone. It didn’t make any sense when I tried to put the pieces together, so I quickly gave up on it. I dozed for a while, but was awakened sharply by a fat kid who was stabbing his fingers into my shoulder, right where it hurts the most.
“Stop it!” I yelled and pushed him away.
“We got a Ranger at the door,” he explained. “Everybody needs to hit the deck.”
“Who are you? Where’s the deck?” I blurted out.
“Deon. It’s adjacent to the kitchen. Just follow the smell of food,” he said, firing the words at me in rapid succession. Then he threw a shirt at me and ran out.
A girl stopped by the door to my room and looked at me as if she wanted to say something. I couldn't help but notice her thin attire and her long legs. But then she disappeared from view and I got up and put on the shirt and went after her.
From somewhere down the hall emanated the inviting aroma of peppered eggs and grilled corn. I ran my finger along the wall as I walked towards the kitchen, my eyes half-shut, letting my nose show me the way. When I got there, the room was empty.
I was about to insert a spoonful of eggs into my mouth when someone grabbed me from behind. I was marched out of the kitchen and into the next room. The woman who’d fixed my clothes, the girl with the nice legs, and the boy who’d tried to break my shoulder were already there, facing the door. A man who I remembered as the cook pushed me into line along with the others and then stepped up next to me just as the door swung open.
A tall man wearing a dark uniform stood in the doorway. The first thing I noticed was the gun strapped to his belt. And on his shoulder were some badges, mostly the off-color of puke. He also wore pale-black boots. He was muscular and thin and exerted an air of authority as he walked in to the room.
He paced up and down our shabby little line, without looking directly at us. I licked some corn off one of my fingers and wiped my hands on the back of my new pants. The Ranger stopped in front of me, facing to my right, and paused there for an eternity. My stomach rumbled and I did a little dance like I desperately needed to go pee.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked when I couldn’t take it any longer.
The boy giggled a little at this and the girl kicked him with the side of her foot. He snapped back to attention, but already something had changed in the air. It didn’t feel so stifling any more. The Ranger cracked a sideways smile and glanced at me.
“What’s for breakfast?” he inquired.
With the ice broken, the cook and the old woman fell out of line, both speaking to the Ranger at the same time. He never had a chance to speak. It almost sounded like they were trying to out-maneuver each other as they rattled off a list of contrasting complaints.
The Ranger only nodded, showing little concern for what they were suggesting. The girl tried to appear soldier-like and the boy kept shifting his weight from one foot to the other. I snuck out the door and found the bathroom and then went into the kitchen, listening to them talk in the other room as I continued to eat.
“I’ll say it again, we’ve only the four of us at this outpost, counting myself, Amelia, Lucerne and Deon, and we have to cover the entire New Cargo region,” the old man was explaining. “Then there’s this new kid to deal with. That alone will delay us from making any real progress at mapping out this area and determining the level of sustainability here.”
“And then there’s this evidence of the Blue Stone spreading,” the woman pointed out. “The kid came in with traces of it on his leg last night. I’m surprised it hasn’t eaten its way through his immune system by now and given him a heart attack.”
“He sounds a little different from the rest,” the Ranger said. “By the way, where is he?”
Eggs and corn were disappearing into my mouth as fast as I could manage. I jumped a little when the Ranger walked in and put his hand on my shoulder. I offered him a spoon with one hand and continued ladling up more food as quickly as I could with the other. His eyes widened as he watched me stuff myself with edible content.
“Looks good,” he said. “But slow down there, partner, before your stomach does a one eighty on you.”
The other three followed him into the kitchen and King placed dishes around the table and then they sat down to eat. King forced me to step back from the stove and ushered me over to a chair. I kept my eyes pinned on the pan as he dished out more of the best breakfast I’d ever tasted.
“What’s your name?” the Ranger asked right after I’d shoved a spoon in my mouth.
“What’s my name?” I asked the fat kid.
“Lewis,” he said and rolled his eyes. “You’re Lewis Fuller and you’re fifteen years old.”
“Well, Lewis, it’s great to meet you,” the Ranger said. “Do you have any idea where you are?”
“We’re in the kitchen. Can I get some more?” I handed my bowl to King, who filled it up and returned it again all in one fluid movement.
“What can you remember about yesterday?” he continued.
“Apples,” I said.
“Apples?” he asked, squinting at me.
“Yeah, I ate apples.”
Deon smirked. He was in a jovial mood today, it seemed. Lucerne, on the other hand, remained quiet in front of the Ranger, watching every move he made, trying to imitate his serious take on life. Amelia nodded at the Ranger, approving of his line of questioning and encouraging him to go on.
“What about the day before yesterday?” he asked.
I thought for a moment. I forgot about the eggs in front of me and my hunger dissipated temporarily. Then I smelled the aroma of the food and took another bite.
“Do you remember anything about the day before yesterday?” he asked.
“Chocolate cake,” I said, making it up.
“I see. And where did you get this chocolate cake from?”
“My mom,” I lied.
My bowl was empty again. I glanced around the table and was about to accuse Deon of stealing when I noticed the look on everyone’s faces. Instantly I knew I was outnumbered. They all knew a lot more about what was going on than I did and that left me feeling worn-out and thin. My head was going fuzzy again and there was nothing I could do about it. Slowly, bits and pieces of yesterday’s events were creeping into my mind and I didn’t care much for what I was remembering.
“Where’s your mom?” the Ranger asked, his voice a distant whisper now.
“My mom? She’s at home!” I shouted. “Why do you always ask so many stupid questions?”
The room fell silent. Everyone stopped eating. Slowly I put my spoon down on the table, as if it might fall on the floor if I wasn’t careful with it. I adjusted it to line up perpendicular to the side of my bowl. It was important that I get it right. Everyone was staring at me, but I was too afraid to look up at them.
“You know what?” I finally said, smashing my fist down on the table so hard that the bowl jumped and landed on the spoon. “I really don’t know where I am right now, but I can tell you one thing. After I get enough to eat, I’m out of here!”
I started humming a tune I’d heard somewhere a time long ago and I rocked from side to side in my seat, as if I were a bird floating in time with the waves in the ocean. The room spun a little, but I kept going, changing everything around me in my mind, until I thought I could feel the waves sloshing up against my feathers. I moved my feet under my chair in an effort to paddle myself back into the direction of the oncoming water, so I wouldn’t roll over. All round I smelled fresh sea-salt in the ocean and I thought I sensed movement below me, maybe a fish passing by.
“One more question,” the Ranger said, ignoring my fragile state of mind. “Do you know how old you are?”
“I don’t know!” I yelled and picked up my bowl and threw it at a fish swimming next to his head.
“I know you’re probably not going to believe this, but you’re over a hundred years old…”
The room suddenly stopped spinning. The ocean disappeared and I lost all my feathers. I was back in the kitchen once more, not a drop of water on me. I looked at Deon and Lucerne. Then I looked at both King and Amelia. Nobody was laughing. Lucerne even looked a little sad. I held my breath. I held my breath and held my breath and held my breath. I couldn’t make turn myself into a bird again.
“Whhhhaaaatttt?” I said, letting it all out in one long rush.
“Back there, you were a kid. You were only fifteen years old. But here, you’re fifteen plus a hundred,” Amelia tried to explain, although I hardly understood what she was talking about.
“So what happened? If I’m so old, why don’t I look dead?” I asked. “If I’m fifteen plus a hundred, or whatever, then you should all be a bunch of ghosts.”
“You see,” she went on, unraveling the story, “a long time ago, someone, we don’t exactly know who, although we have a good idea who it was, this someone thought the earth was getting too crowded. And all those people were making the world a bad place, eating too much, polluting too much, and so on. You understand? Picture a million ants trying to eat just one apple core.”
“This someone,” the Ranger said, “we call him Tarkentower, but we don’t exactly know what his real name is. He was really smart, smarter than all of us in this room put together. One day he thought the world would be a better place if there weren’t so many people in it. So he made this giant machine and then he flipped it on and when he threw that switch the whole world got stuck in a loop, forcing everyone to live out the same day over and over again.”
“But when he did this, he created a future without any people,” Lucerne said. “You know, time can’t just stop like that.”
I nodded and tried to appear wise, as if I understood all the inner workings of time.
“And inside this machine,” Amelia continued, “he placed a computer to randomly pick candidates who can move forward in time. When that happens, we don’t exactly know when it will happen, but when it does happen, the sky suddenly looks like a million black and white dots swimming around together, as if you’d left the TV on late at night. That’s when we have what we call a Star Burn, for lack of a better term, because we don’t really know much about it.”
“And when this Star Burn happens,” the Ranger explained, taking his turn at telling the story again, “someone is plucked from inside the loop and pushed forward to the next day in time. They get to live like we do right now. We live in the future, you know. For people like us, the earth isn’t so crowded any more. Maybe it only feels like a short time since you got here, but this has been going on for over a hundred years now and there’s nothing any of us can do to stop it.”
“A few days ago,” Deon said, “you were stuck in the past and you were like fifteen years old. Now, it’s like a hundred years later. The sooner you get your head around it, the better off you’ll be.”
“If that’s true,” I said after a while, trying to fathom what they were saying, but not really getting it, “why can’t I remember any of this?”
“We think you have mental problems,” Lucerne said and kicked my leg under the table.
“Actually,” Amelia said, looking closely at me to see if I was following along, “Tarkentower, as the legend calls him, although he was really smart, he couldn’t foresee everything. Imagine being able to build a door in time so big that the whole world could fit through it, going around and around, revolving every day but never stopping. One thing he didn’t predict was that when people live out the same boring routine all the time, they stop being able to remember things. Without using our brains to solve problems, we lose the ability to think clearly. It’s just like when you watch the same show on TV a hundred times. You get lured into a mindless state of consciousness.”
“People who come through the gate are always a little slow at first, so don’t worry if everyone thinks you’re weak in the head,” Deon said and threw a soft punch at my shoulder.
“Every day,” Amelia went on, “we will need to re-educate you, teaching you just about everything you’ve already learned before. Mostly, though, we just have to wake up your old memories. It’s been such a long time since you’ve actually had to remember anything that your brain’s gotten a little rusty upstairs.”
She smiled faintly and I gave her a look of understanding. I liked the way she made everything sound so simple. What they were telling me made sense, in a fuzzy sort of way.
“OK, whatever. Maybe you all know a lot more about this stuff than I do. But that still doesn’t explain why I’m so hungry all the time.”
With that said, I stood up to get some more food, but then, because my bowl was on the other side of the room, I started eating right out of the frying pan.
“We think it might be the experience of tasting something new,” the Ranger said. “You’ve been eating the same thing over and over again for the past one hundred years.”
Amelia nodded but added, “Or possibly it’s a way of blocking out the past and focusing on what’s in front of you right now.”
“The feeling like you need to eat everything in sight will soon pass. Until then, I’ve got plenty of things down here for you try,” King said. “But you’ll have to learn how to cook as a part of your training. Everyone here has to fend for themselves, since we run a tight little crew in this region.”
He threw a look at the Ranger as he said this last little bit.
“Cooking would be a good place to start,” Amelia agreed.
“But remember what happened to Deon,” Lucerne objected. “When he came through three months ago, he was as skinny as Lewis is now. After King showed him the key to the pantry, he started getting flabby.”
“You’ve only been here for three months?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I’ll never be as hard-core as she is,” he threw back, passing this piece of information through my ear. “Besides, I lost a little weight this week, while we were chasing you down. I knew we’d catch you eventually, but you put up a good fight.”
“Do I need to separate you?” the Ranger asked, pointing his finger back and forth between them. “I heard there’s some room available over at the next outpost. Who wants a transfer?”
“I can handle it, as long as he can!” Lucerne said suddenly.
“It’s time to get to work,” Amelia interrupted, changing the subject. “We have a number of important issues around here that need to be addressed.”
She led us around the base, indicating things that could be improved on. The Ranger listened closely, nodding his head and taking notes and occasionally asking a question or two. The base, long ago, had been the cellar of a church. We passed row after row of vaults: some had been used as burial places for saints and some for cells where monks had lived in isolation and pondered the divine nature of the universe. By now, all the bodies were gone, but still the strange smell of deteriorating cloth and the fragrance of burned incense lingered everywhere.
In some places, the walls and the ceiling were charred black, where torches had been left burning too long. It was eerie to walk through this vast network hidden under the ground, but I stayed close to Lucerne, as she seemed to know the most about where we were going. Occasionally we came across a section of the outpost where a wall had fallen down, blocking any progress in that direction. When I listened closely, I thought I could hear whispering voices coming from behind the rubble, or maybe it was just the sound of water running on into oblivion.
I wanted to see everything, but when my stomach rumbled for more food, I left the others behind and went back to the kitchen, where King was working. He didn’t mind answering questions as I helped him clean up the morning’s mess. He had a real passion for food and I was eager to become his best student.
Download this book for your ebook reader.
(Pages 1-29 show above.)