Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (10 page)

“Okay. We’re going to my kin. They have a home about a two weeks’ walk from here in Magic Valley.”

I pulled out my digital notebook and brought up the map on the screen. She had never seen a map before. When she touched the screen and the map moved, she was startled.

“Well ain’t that the darnedest thing?” she remarked.

After a few minutes of explaining what the “squiggly lines and fancy colors” were, she got a sense of what she was looking at. Her description of the route she took to get here—over Beartooth Pass—would require over 200 kilometers on foot to get to the ruins of Billings, in the region known as Montana.

“If we only had a boat, we could get there a lot faster,” I surmised. “It’s 300 kilometers by river but we wouldn’t have to walk. I have a packraft—a small inflatable raft—in my backpack. But it’s only meant for river crossings. Not big float trips. And definitely not for two people.”

Thanks to the satellites and space station overhead, I had a data connection to the main library at the capital. I loaded the “Pre-Plague History” layer on the map program.

“There was an old town called ‘Livingston’ just north of the last set of hot springs. There might be a boat or something there. Maybe some supplies. If we head north for three days, we can probably float the rest of the way down to Billings.”

“’Probably’?” Rebekah asked, annoyed.

“Either we walk three days to save ten, or we walk an extra three days,” I chuckled, “It’s not like we’re doing anything else.”

She was not amused.

I felt like I could have hiked for weeks. My shoes were made of rubber and synthetic materials molded to my feet and designed to wick moisture away. My clothes were feather-light. My Norex coat repelled the occasional drizzle of rain as if it weren’t there. My pack was stuffed with a tent and other gear that hardly weighed thirty pounds on my back. It was beautiful country, and I sometimes forgot about the situation that had brought me here.

Rebekah wasn’t as fortunate. Her shoes were very old, worn animal leather, made in the style of ancient cobblers with hammered leather soles. Her feet alternated between being drenched in her own sweat or frozen by the cold of morning when we got on the trail. The soles of her feet were tough from years of rough footwear, but at night I could still see the blisters forming. She limped from her leg wound. Her linen dress and heavy canvas coat soaked up every drop of water on the trail or falling from the sky. She shivered. I offered her my coat or some spare changes of clothes. She always refused and limped along, hardly saying a word to me.

We were only thirty-six hiking hours from Livingston, but trekking over the mountain passes, and Rebekah’s frequent need to stop, made the work difficult. I had originally thought we could pull twelve hours a day, but that was reduced to eight or nine, at best.

By the end of the second day, we were rounding a bend along the river and saw steam rising from around the corner. I pulled out my notebook and saw that we were approaching the Mammoth Hot Springs, which used to be an ancient vacation spot dating back to the early 1900’s. I figured it would be a great place to spend the night and maybe soak in the warm-water pools.

We walked among the ruins of what looked like a small town. A few stone chimneys and piles of disintegrating lumber were all that remained. A herd of elk grazed on the hillside to the southwest. Wildflowers were scattered among the still-standing dead trees and brown grasses. Just slightly up the hill were the billowing steam clouds, which were our destination.

By the time we got up to them, the sun was setting over the hill. I wasted no time in getting the camp set up. Rebekah sat and watched as I set up the tent and camp stove.

“We should go soak in the pools,” I commented.

She looked at me, puzzled.

“It will relax our muscles. And we’re dirty enough…we definitely need to rinse off.”

“I don’t want you watching me,” she mumbled.

“I won’t look,” I promised.

We walked around with the lantern and found a pool that was not as hot as the others. It reeked of a sulfur smell, but the water was warm and inviting after a week without a hot shower.

“I’ll hold the lantern,” I said to her. “We’ll take turns. You go first.”

She undressed behind me and slipped into the pool. I heard gentle splashing noises and looked over my shoulder, cautiously, to see what she was doing, neglecting my previous promise.

Rebekah had her back to me and was seated in the pool which was only deep enough to rise to just below her shoulder blades. She held her chocolate brown tresses up out of the water with one hand and used the other to cup water up and over her neck and shoulders. I heard her sigh a few times as she relaxed in the water.

My arm was beginning to tire of holding the lantern, and I had fully forgotten about not peeking. I turned my head completely to watch her and felt a strange, animalistic stirring inside. I felt voracious, like a predator wanting to consume its prey. Every rivulet of spring water running down her back made me hungry. Every slightly wet tendril of her hair, dipping into the water, made me want to pounce. Four hundred years of my society trying to suppress these urges, and they welled up inside me like a gun ready to fire.

Then I heard her start to cry. It started as a few sobs, then unleashed as a torrent of tears. She dropped her hair into the water. I think she forgot I was standing there. All of the raging hormones inside me dove deep under the surface as I watched her shaking in the pool.

She had been through too much in the last few days. Rebekah had lost her whole family without so much as a good-bye. She had been forced to run off into the wilderness with a complete stranger. She was hiking across rough terrain to a town that probably didn’t exist anymore, hoping to find a boat that likely wasn’t there, to float to a town with distant relatives who might or might not take her in. Her life was uncertain, and frightening. Her silence over the last few days was indicative of mental fatigue and post-traumatic stress disorder. There was nothing I could do to help her except give her the time she needed.

“Can you hand me a towel?” she asked. “But don’t look.”

I put down the lantern and reached into my bag for one of my two microfiber towels. It wasn’t very large—definitely not large enough to cover her—but the super-absorbent fibers would soak up every molecule of water on her skin. I tried to keep my eyes closed as I scooted toward the water’s edge to hand it to her.

Suddenly, I felt myself falling as the edge of the pool gave away. I landed with a startled splash in the hot water. By the time I had wiped my eyes clear of the water and spit out a mouthful, I saw Rebekah laughing hysterically. It was the first time I’d seen her smile since before the raid. I had apparently doused her with water as I flailed into the pool, and her hair was soaking wet, but she didn’t seem to mind.

She kept laughing, forgetting she was naked in front of me—not that I could see much in the dim light without the lantern. I splashed some water on her and she splashed some back at me.

“Jerk,” she giggled. I didn’t know what the word meant, but I assumed it couldn’t be good.

“Well I guess I don’t need to wash my clothes, now,” I laughed.

She kept laughing, even to the point of crying. Her laughter kept me chuckling in the night sky.

I kicked off my shoes and threw them up on the ground outside the pool. Her laughter slowed and some concern came over her face.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I needed to take those off. They can’t stay submerged or they’ll be ruined.”

“You need to get out,” she said sternly, dropping all signs of happiness from her face.

“You don’t get to order me around,” I said with an equally stern voice.

“You don’t get to hang out in here with me. It’s not proper…and it’s not okay and it’s not…okay?”

I was still for a moment, staring at her unblinking eyes and defiant face, not knowing what to say or how to respond. Finally, I broke the silence.

“You’re all I have right now,” I said. “I probably can’t go home. I’ll probably be in real big trouble if I do go back. If I can even find my way back. So neither of us can go home. Neither of us gets the life we wanted anymore. Stop treating me like this is my fault.”

I felt angry and sad and tired and lonely all at the same time. I realized that I was under a lot of stress too. Semper’s death. Adara’s transition to warrior form. The raid on the Zionists, with all the death, blood, and carnage. Running across the wildlands, taking responsibility for a girl who I barely knew for reasons I couldn’t even comprehend.

I was out of my element. I had only ever been on backpacking trips. I had only ever camped within the glow of the city lights. I had never been so far away from home or from the safety of the Republic and all our technological advances.

She looked at me, puzzled, as I alternated between screaming and crying and swinging my fists wildly against the cruel and unforgiving world. She moved toward me in the water, and put her arms around me—slowly, one at a time. After a moment of caution and bewilderment, my arms came up around her and pulled her against me gingerly, then slowly tightening.

Neither of us made a sound. Neither of us moved. For minutes we just held each other close, recharging our emotional batteries. She breathed into my ear in long, soft motions punctuated by little ragged gasps. My lips grazed her neck and I felt her stiffen at the sensation. I started to pull away and she clenched me tightly. I could sense her confusion as she started to let me go, then pull me closer again. She then locked her arms behind me, as if to say she had finally decided I wasn’t going anywhere until she was ready to let go.

I don’t know why, but I pressed my lips to her neck again, kissing her gently. She tilted her head away from me, exposing more of her neck, inviting me to kiss her more. I did, gently—then firmly—my lips wandering over her soft, milky skin.

Rebekah turned to me in the moonlight, looking into my eyes. I could see her eyes sparkling, reflecting the glow of the moon and the twinkling of the stars wheeling overhead. Then she moved toward me slowly and pressed her lips to mine.

Our lips nibbled and tugged at each other. She parted my lips with her tongue, which danced with mine. That kiss felt like it spanned an entire age of the Earth, which wasn’t nearly long enough.

She pulled away and looked at me with an expression I’d yet to see on her face.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for saving me. Thank you for helping me. Thank you for taking care of me.”

She paused. “You’re all I have left now, too.”

We stared into each other’s eyes for another moment and then she smiled.

“Now can you please get me a dry towel?”

I slid out of the pool onto the dry bank and took off my wet clothes, down to my unds. She watched me the whole time, not even pretending to look away. I wrung my shirt, pants and socks out over the grass. I dug through my bag and found the other towel. I slowly inched closer to the pool. I didn’t want to repeat the previous fall. I stood back from the edge by a foot or two. Rebekah moved over to the edge of the pool and tried to reach up for the towel, but her modesty wouldn’t allow her to get up out of the water with me looking.

“Just drop it,” she said.

“No, then it will get wet and dirty,” I countered.

She hesitated. “Come closer.”

I shook my head, “That was fun, but I’m not falling in again.”

She sighed and stood up fully, grabbing the towel from my hand. The water had obscured everything but her head and shoulders until now. It was only the second time in my life that I’d been confronted with a naked woman.

“Do you mind?” she asked agitatedly.

“Uh…umm…I’m sorry,” I stammered, backing away from the edge and turning from her to grab a blanket from my pack.

She dried her hair and upper body and then tried to climb out of the pool, but the edge of the grass was just above her head. After tearing a few clumps of grass and mud into the water, she asked for my help. I reached out for Rebekah’s hand and pulled her up to me. She seemed much less embarrassed by her nudity now, and started to realize that we were going to see each other without clothes, and that was just a fact.

“Thank you,” she said, kissing me on the cheek and grabbing the blanket and wrapping it around herself.

She walked down the hill toward the campsite and sat on the grass in front of the stove. To my surprise, she started the stove right up, having watched me do it a couple of times.

I gathered all my wet clothes and brought them next to the little furnace that was pumping out heat into the chilly night air. They were almost dry, but they needed heat to dry fully. After arranging them around the stove, I sat next to blanket-clad Rebekah. She parted the blanket to allow me to warm up next to her. I could feel her soft, undressed skin next to mine under the blanket. We cuddled for warmth until my clothes had dried in the chilly night breeze. I turned off the stove and we retired to the tent for sleep. She curled up next to me that night, and held me tightly until morning.

The next day, we packed everything up and started the hike down the canyon toward Livingston. We had at least two days left when we came upon the ruins of Gardiner. At first I thought we might have reached Livingstone early, but after checking my digibook, I confirmed our location. I hadn’t initially seen this town on the map in my notebook, but there it was: another crumbled bygone of crumbled, bygone era.

We poked around the town for anything useful that could salvage. The old brick firearms store still had its walls standing, but the wooden roof had collapsed long ago. We found some guns, but there was no ammunition. I found a skeleton behind the counter, but didn’t let Rebekah see it.

Frustrated, we started to leave, following the highway out of Gardiner, when we saw an old corrugated metal garage that hadn’t fallen over. I pulled open the door and there was an old galvanized metal fishing boat on a trailer.

I was so excited. I dropped my backpack and climbed up into the boat. I didn’t expect the outboard motor to turn on, but I pulled the ripcord anyway and it didn’t even sputter. I hopped down and looked around the garage. There were some life vests and oars on the wall. There was also some other camping gear, including a large canvas tent and a few smelly old bedrolls, as well as some metal cookware. I threw it all in the boat.

Rebekah stood watching me as I scurried about. “How are we going to get that in the water?”

I paused. The trailer’s four rubber tires had long since deflated and were cracked. I found some old metal hedge-clippers and cut away the rubber. The trailer would be heavy, but we only had to move it a couple hundred meters to the river.

That was a harder challenge than expected. Rebekah and I rigged up some old nylon rope and pulled as hard as we could. It took nearly three sweaty hours to get the boat to the water over dirt and rocks and dried-up sagebrush, but finally, as we neared the slope, the trailer started moving on its own and rolled down the hill. We dove out of the way as the trailer picked up speed, bounced heavily, and flipped twice, throwing the boat into the water with a tremendous splash.

We climbed into the flat-bottomed boat and pushed off. Sweaty, hungry, and exhausted, we let the swift current take us downstream. Every once in a while, the boat would hit a rock or grind along a sandbar, but generally, it moved quickly and without stopping too much.

The next few days were thankfully uneventful. We floated north, then northeast, then east as the river curved. It fell away from the mountains out into a broad river valley. Livingston was a shamble of a town, and hardly anything remained at all, so we kept floating on. Occasionally the boat would take on some water in the rapids or it would get jammed in some thick tamarisk on the river banks, but it kept moving. We never saw another person. We slept at night in the tent on the shore, cuddled close against each other.

One day, while floating, Rebekah laid her head down on my lap and I stroked her hair with my fingers, much like my mother had done to me when I was small.

“So your name is Pax,” she said softly, “which is Latin for peace. What about Semper?”

“Semper means ‘always’,” I said, still running my fingers through her dark, slightly oily hair.

“So are you all Latin names?” she asked.

“No, some are named after Greek gods and goddesses, or some other pantheon of gods, or after the heroes of ancient stories. I assume all of your names are religious in nature?”

She nodded. “Most come from the Bible. A few don’t but they’re rare.”

We floated along silently for a moment.

“Did your robot girlfriend used to be pretty?”

“Who, Adara?” I chuckled. “No. Well, yes. Well, she wasn’t when we were little but now she is. Well then she was. Then she got rid of her body, I guess. Sorry for the long answer, yes, she was pretty until very recently.”

“Would you have married her?”

“We don’t have marriage,” I explained. “I didn’t even know what marriage was until a few weeks ago. We have a formal business arrangement based on logic, good genetics, pedigree, and accomplishments.”

“That sounds boring,” she groaned. “Don’t you believe in love? True love.”

Yes,
I wanted to say,
ever since I met you.

“No,” I replied instead. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“Love is when you’d die for someone,” she replied, rolling her head to look into my eyes. “Love is when God gives you the greatest gift of your whole life. Love is when you can’t eat or sleep or breathe or anything without that person being on your mind.”

I smiled at her. “Well then maybe I do know what it is.”

She blushed and hid her face as we floated on.

The gunshot wound on Rebekah’s thigh began to fester, and it was giving her a lot of pain. By the third day of our float trip, I pulled out my half-used tube of Mitocaine and applied it liberally to her wound. She withdrew, at first, from the touch of my hands on her bare thigh, but then relented and even sighed as my hands massaged the medication deep into her wound. My fingers traced up and down her leg, aching to move higher, drawn by some magnetism. I kept control of myself.

As we floated on, Rebekah became excited. She told me that she knew this place and that there was a beautiful castle up on the hill about three hours walk to the south. I laughed, but she insisted that the castle was real and she had visited the Strong family as a child. She suggested that the family who lived there might have some food to replenish our supplies. I didn’t really know what to believe, but we decided to delay for a day and head south to find food. We tucked the boat into the droopy willows at the water’s edge and hiked along an ancient road for about fifteen kilometers. The whole way she shared stories about the Strongs: an ancient family who owned all this land and were wealthy and powerful out here in the “free lands.”

Soon, we saw a well-kept village with a sign over the entrance that read “Asgard.” A few small houses surrounded a central park. A large warehouse stood a few hundred meters behind them. The “castle” of which she spoke was a huge house perched on a hill overlooking the town.

As we approached, the smell was horrifying. There were bodies splayed out in the tall grass. Rebekah approached and wrinkled her nose.

“These folk have been shot,” she grimaced. “Not demons or your robot warriors. Just evil men. Recently, too. Within the last week.”

“Let’s not stick around to see if those evil men are still here,” I suggested.

She looked longingly at the “castle.”

“What if they’re still up there?” she pleaded. “What if they need us?”

“We’re not armed,” I insisted, before grabbing her hand and nearly dragging her back to the boat, where we camped until the next morning.

That night, Rebekah woke up screaming. It was a shrieking, horrific noise unlike anything I’d ever heard before. She was sweaty and shaking, and at first pushed me away, but then pulled me close and held me until she fell asleep. I had my own issues with everything that had occurred over the last few months, but I lived my entire life burying things deep below the surface and being ashamed of emotions. She didn’t have that luxury. I hoped she would be able to come to terms with this someday, or hide the feelings away like I had.

By morning, we were back in the boat again. I was growing tired of the monotony, but the company couldn’t have been better.

“So you grow all your food indoors,” she giggled.

We had agreed
not
to talk about food, but apparently that was on her mind. Our supplies were running low and there was little to be found on the shore, so we were rationing what I had in my bag. The famine was why Rebekah’s family had abandoned Great Falls and headed into the Preserve for food. There was no game. No cattle. No fish in the river. Hardly any greenery at all as we floated along down the river toward Magic Valley. I couldn’t blame her clan for risking their lives to get a bite to eat. I’d never really been hungry like this.

“In big glass greenhouses,” I nodded, as she curled up next to me on the floor of the boat. “We can precisely control the temperature and light and grow huge harvests with minimal work.”

“How do they get pollinated?” she asked.

I was surprised that she even knew about biology like this, but I suppose someone who lives off the land would have to know at least
something
about how it works.

“They used to rely on honeybees,” I said. “Even after the wild bees went extinct, they kept hives in greenhouses. Later they perfected the robotic bee. They don’t make honey, but they can actually make sure they pollinate each flower with the right type of pollen. It’s very efficient.”

“What’s honey?” she asked.

I forgot that bees had been extinct here for centuries. Something about pesticides and hive collapse. It was covered in one of Sanders’ history lessons back at the Academy.

“It’s a really sweet sticky substance. Thicker than syrup—you have syrup right?”

She nodded and grunted.

“Yeah, so imagine the thickest, sweetest syrup,” I said. “It’s delicious.”

She looked at me strangely. “How do bees make syrup?”

“They chew up a bunch of pollen and nectar and then vomit it up,” I smiled.

“Okay,” she said, frowning. “Let’s not talk about food anymore.”

We drifted on down the river through the bleak, dusty countryside. There were a few trees along the river now, but still nothing to eat. I couldn’t have imagined that this place we were headed to would have been any better than the last three ruined towns we’d seen, but to my surprise, on the fifth day of floating, we arrived at Magic Valley, which was a real and bustling town.

Ancient canals had routed water into farmlands and there were folks out working the fields, surprised to see anyone floating down the river. Rebekah waved at them, excitedly. Great Falls had experienced a famine but just a few hundred kilometers away, it seemed that this town was a bit more prosperous.

We floated into town and tied up our boat near what could be called the downtown. There were a few hundred people milling about or rushing from place to place on horseback, and while the town was not nearly as large as the capital, it must have had as many people as my small fishing village of Valhalla.

With our gear on our backs and with grumbling stomachs, we picked along through the dusty gravel streets and ramshackle buildings. A few ancient masonry buildings had been renovated and were still standing, but most of the structures were hastily constructed out of debris or logs.

Walking through the central square was a smelly and loud affair, the likes of which I’d never seen. Merchants were shouting and hocking their wares. Scrawny cows and goats were herded down the crowded streets. The town reeked of sewage. Disheveled people were slumped against the edges of the streets, begging for food. Everyone—rich or poor—stared at me as I strode by.

We arrived at a small house on the outskirts of town where Rebekah told me to wait around the corner. She knocked on the door and threw her arms around the older lady that answered. They talked for several minutes; I couldn’t tell what they were talking about but Rebekah pointed at me and the old lady’s face dropped. She looked around, and motioned excitedly for me to come over to her. We scurried inside.

“Oh my Lord,” the old lady said, looking at me, “you’re a flesh-and-blood child of the robots? It’s like he prophesized. That is most worrisome.”

“Who prophesized?” I asked. “And hi, by the way, I’m Pax.”

“Hello Pax,” she smiled, “I’m Leah. I’m Rebekah’s great aunt. Obadiah was my brother.”

“I’m so sorry about what happened,” I said.

“No bother,” Leah said, “Death comes to us all but only in the Lord can we have new life. Obadiah now rests with him, in Heaven, I’m sure. When we grieve, it is not for those we have lost, it is because we are the ones who have lost.”

I was dismayed by her attitude. Heaven seemed to be the justification for everything in these people’s lives—why you behave properly or why dying isn’t so horrible. Our society mourned every single member who died because their passing was a tragic and permanent loss for all of us. We grieved because the dead would never get to experience all the places of wonder and majesty across the cosmos. This other, strange society shrugged off death as necessary and inevitable, to get to some place they couldn’t even prove existed.

Leah led us into the living room. There were all kinds of knick-knacks and vases and bowls adorning the shelves. No pictures or portraits like in my house. No vacuum robots or dust-repellent shelves. Just dusty and old looking, but nicer than anything I had experienced since leaving the Preserve.

Rebekah and Leah sat on one couch while Rebekah relayed the story of the warrior-form raid and the other events of the last two weeks. I sat silently, but Leah kept looking at me as Rebekah spoke. A few times, tears welled up in her eyes, but she stifled them. This old lady had lost so much of her family that I couldn’t even comprehend. Until I’d left the capital almost three weeks ago, I’d never even known a family that was more than two parents and a single child. Rebekah had lost so many people close to her in such a short span of time, and Leah, for all her long years, had seen so many of her family die as well. Some had died from diseases, some from conflicts with other groups, and almost none from old age.