Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (8 page)

I woke up late that night with a horrible crick in my neck. I could have pulled out my camp pillow from my bag at any time but had forgotten until now. I fumbled around in the dark for my light, switched it on, and looked into my backpack for the compressed inflatable pillow. I found it, and then peered over into the corner where Semper sat sleeping. He was gone.

I got up quickly and wandered through the maze of overturned tables and broken glass until I got outside. I could see Semper sitting on a large rock out in front of the tattered building. I walked over and sat next to him.

“It’s 0530,” he said quietly. “What are you doing up?”

“Oh, I just woke up with a sore neck and wondered where you went,” I replied.

“I only need four hours of sleep,” Semper muttered. “The rest of the time I get to think.”

“What are you thinking about now?” I asked.

“I was just staring at the full moon. I was looking at the different craters and checking their names against the map of the moon in the Central Library.”

I peered up at the bright white disk in the sky and could only see some of the largest craters. I could see other bright lights on the surface from the robotic lunar mining colonies.

“Semper,” I whispered, “you’ve got such a gift. If you want, you can go there. Tomorrow even. You can ride up to GEO and catch a shuttle over to Port Luna and walk on the surface of the Moon.”

“No, I can’t!” he shouted. “No, I can’t! I screwed it all up. I’m gonna get shut down if they ever find me. I’m a dead man.”

“Semper, you’re hurting,” I said. “You need their help to make this okay.”

“I DON’T WANT THEIR HELP!” he screamed, then quietly repeated, “I don’t want their help.”

“The president said that when they find you they’ll take you back to the hospital and work with you to make this right.”

“You talked to the president?” he asked.

I nodded.

“And you believe him?”

I couldn’t come up with an answer. I had simply trusted Sandstrom.

“Oh no,” he mumbled. “They must be tracking you.”

“What? What? No,” I stammered.

“Your digibook: do you have it?”

“Well, yeah,” I responded.

“Go. Get it now. Turn it off. Now!” he shouted.

I ran inside, slipping on some broken glass as I dodged through the cafeteria. I found my backpack against the wall in the office, reached in, and withdrew my digibook.

I powered it down when I found Semper standing behind me.

He said, “That’s not good enough. You need to break it and throw the battery away.”

“No!” I protested. “I need this.”

“You’re gonna get me killed.
Us
killed. Give it to me.” He reached out his hand for it.

“No,” I said firmly. “I have a hex driver in my bag. I’ll take the battery out. You may have a link to the great beyond, but I’ve got nothing without that computer.”

It took me about a minute but I withdrew the battery so the tablet would be untraceable.

“We’re gonna have to move,” he growled. “It’s only a matter of time before they trace your last known location and then follow us.”

“Hey, mister,” I said frustratedly. “You could just as easily be traced with that psychic connection of yours.”

“No, there’s a hardwired firewall between me and them so they can’t access anything.”

“Yeah, but they can triangulate on your signal,” I posited.

“Then why haven’t they?” Semper said testily.

That was a good question—one neither of us had the answer for.

“Let’s get going,” he said calmly, “just to be safe.”

I stuffed a few things into my bag and followed him into the dark woods. I could hear the sounds of rushing water getting closer and closer. The sun was starting to rise in the east and I could see that we were walking along the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The dusty yellow canyon walls dropped precipitously almost a kilometer to the raging white water below.

We walked for a few hours and stopped around lunch time. While I rehydrated a lunch pack, Semper closed his eyes. I asked him what he was doing and he said that he was just trying to quiet everything down.

Suddenly, a rock crumbled off the cliff and crashed down the canyon wall behind us. Semper snapped around and rushed between me and the source of the sound.

“Go,” he whispered over his shoulder.

I stood there motionless.

“I mean it, Pax,” he whispered again. “Go. Hide.”

I scurried into the deeper woods where it was dark and the underbrush was thick. I found a hiding place and looked back to where I’d left Semper. I could see him standing there, unmoving.

“What are you waiting for?” he yelled. “I know you’re out there.”

Two camouflaged and helmeted police officers emerged from the brush a few hundred meters away from him and crept toward him with taser rifles drawn. Each one could shoot a bolt of lightning that would disable both human and robot.

Semper backed closer to the edge of the cliff.

“What now?!” he yelled at them.

Semper stood at the edge of the gorge, looking at the rushing water a half-kilometer below. The police stood in front of him, tasers drawn, ordering him to get on his knees. If they shot him here, he’d fall to his death. If he submitted to the police, who knew what fate could befall him?

I stayed crouched in my hiding place, shaking with fear. I wondered if there was something I could do to stop the police, or distract them. I had come so far to help him, but if I did anything to interfere, I would be exiled or killed.

Just as I felt ready to spring from the thicket of trees, Semper looked straight up into the sky and yelled out “I can’t live like this anymore! I want out of here! I’m leaving! I love you, brother!” He outstretched his arms, and leapt off the precipice.

I felt like someone had just kicked me in the stomach. I wanted to run, but felt frozen. I wanted to scream, but my throat closed tight. I got dizzy. I threw up.

I instantly knew that the smell of my vomit would alert the police and their hypersensitive olfactory sensors, so I ran. They were too busy looking over the edge of the cliff, so they didn’t give chase. I scurried through the dense foliage and edged close to the cliff face. I paused briefly to see if Semper was clinging to the edge or had survived at the bottom. There was a bright neon-pink streak from the maintenance fluids where his body had been smashed on the dusty yellow rocks. I scanned down the river and saw pieces of his crumpled body floating in the swift current.

He was most certainly dead. An organic human can live six minutes without oxygen to the brain, but an enhanced form will suffer nearly instantaneous brain death with a catastrophic loss of fluids. It takes a lot to kill an enhanced human. There were stories of enhanced forms being struck by fast-moving trains and surviving with only cosmetic damage. Apparently the body had limitations, and Semper had found them.

I resumed running. I didn’t know how far behind the police might have been, but I didn’t want to find out. Maybe they didn’t know I was here. Maybe they were distracted or stunned—after all, they are still only human. If they had wanted to catch me, they could have overtaken my meager strides in a matter of minutes. They didn’t. So I ran north.

I followed the cliff as it ran through the preserve. A grey dropship swooped in from the south and began scanning the length of the river. I dropped into a small gully and hid while I waited for it to leave. The ship buzzed as it hovered in place for a minute and then dropped low over the trees; it rose back into the air with the two camouflaged officers leaning out the side door.

I knew I was safe now that the officers were gone. Clearly they weren’t looking for me. I wondered for a minute if I’d broken any laws. I hadn’t aided his escape. I’d never provided him any material support. I’d simply found him and pleaded with him to go home to make things right.

I lay there in the gully, shaded from the sun by the pine trees. I had no idea what to do next. I started to cry. At first it was just a drip and a sniffle, but then it became a torrent. My best friend was dead. Really dead. His body was washing downriver, out to sea, and I’d never see him again. I never really got to say good-bye.

My tears ran down my dirty cheeks and made muddy streaks on my chin. I wiped the tears way with the back of my hand and then realized I could leave this all behind. I never had to cry again. I never had to be afraid. Semper’s life was over, but mine still had so many years left in it. Infinite numbers of years.

I regained my composure while I contemplated my next step. My options were limited. I could head back to the Outpost and maybe catch the next train home. I could stay here a while. I had enough supplies to last me a week. Maybe a camping trip would help me sort things out. I still had to decide if I was going to go home and undergo the procedure.

As much as Semper’s experience had deterred me, the call of space and exploration was too great. With his new revelation that I’d be directly tied in to the whole compendium of human knowledge, I was more excited than ever before to possibly experience that. After hours of deliberation, I decided that I would go home and still undergo the surgery. Semper had gotten impatient. He was reckless and impulsive. I was more logical and more methodical. I could still do this.

I reached into my bag and pulled out the digibook. I attached the battery and closed the backplate, then flipped it on. I saw my parents were online and called them.

Dad’s face appeared on the screen.

“Pax,” he smiled, “how are you, son?”

“I’m okay, Dad,” I replied. “They found Semper. He killed himself.”

I briefly detailed the train ride, Semper saving me from the wolves, the lodge, and then his near-capture and suicidal evasion of that capture.

“Oh…oh my… I’m…I’m so…sorry to hear that, Pax.” He looked like he could have cried himself. “I know what he meant to you. He meant a lot to all of us.”

“He made his choice, Dad,” I said softly. “I know he wasn’t strong enough to handle it. I tried to get him to go home and get the help, but he wouldn’t have it. He wanted out.”

Dad shook his head, but said nothing.

“I’m coming home and I’m having the surgery,” I announced, much to my father’s amazement. “The rewards are still so much greater than the potential costs. I want to walk on different worlds. I want to be so much more than this irrational bag of bones and flesh.”

I expected a smile from my father, but got nothing in return.

“If that’s what you want,” he murmured.

“You don’t approve?” I asked.

“I always imagined that if I had the chance,” he said solemnly, “to do things over, I’d say no to the surgery. I’d strike out on the land and live my life the way nature intended. But I want what’s best for you, not what’s most romantic and carefree for me. I only want you to be happy.”

I was speechless for a moment. My mind raced.

“Dad, I’m gonna stay out here for a few more days. I’m going to enjoy the Preserve, go camping and hiking, and soak in some thermal pools. Just relax. When I come home, I’ll probably still undergo the procedure.”

He nodded.

“And we’ll be proud of you, son. No matter what you choose.”

“I love you, Dad. I’ll call you back in a few days when I get ready to leave.”

“We love you, too.”

He kissed two fingers and placed them on the camera. I did the same and then powered down the digibook.

I moved deeper into the woods for several hours until the sun started slinking below the horizon. I feared the return of the wolf pack, so I found a place on the edge of a clearing with some defensible space. I lit an actual fire, the first real fire I’d made in a decade, and then sat in front of it, clutching my pepper spray as I assembled my tent and set up camp.

It was a long, dark night, with clouds veiling the full moon and hiding the stars from view. Looking up, I might as well have been home in Valhalla. I heard the howling of the wolves in the distance and took solace in the fact that they were far, far away.

I climbed into my tent and cuddled into my sleeping bag. As I extinguished my headlamp, the glow of the dying fire outside still slightly illuminated my surroundings. When the world got dark, it seemed to lose all of its color. Everything seemed a dull shade of grey except for the yellow-orange light of the tiny flames flickering outside my tent. I settled in for a deep sleep filled with dreams of dropships and falling.

The sun was bright and warm inside my tent when I jumped awake, startled. I heard branches cracking and I peered out of my tent. There was something rustling on the other side of the berry bushes just north of my location. Maybe it was an animal. I had only a small utility knife and my pepper spray with me. I withdrew the blade and sat there wondering if I should try to kill the animal for food. Maybe it was a predator and it would eat me. It was making too much noise to be stalking me, so it must not have known I was there.

Whatever was making the noise was upwind from me, so I took advantage of my position to leave the tent and get closer. I found a path through the brambles and caught my first glimpse of the intruder. It was a girl.

She was wearing a white bonnet over her hair, and a dirty blue dress embroidered with flowers that covered her to her wrists and ankles. She was on her knees, putting berries into a wicker basket. I still couldn’t see her face, so I moved in slowly.

A branch cracked loudly underneath my feet, which startled her. She looked up in my direction and I could see her face. She was stunning. She had tendrils of long, dark brown hair framing her sweaty face. Her eyes were a vivid hazel. A few freckles kissed her nose and cheeks. I couldn’t have imagined her to be any older than sixteen or seventeen.

“Hello?” I yelled.

She gathered her bucket and ran in the opposite direction.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I yelled, and then started after her. “I’m not going to cause any trouble.”

“Then why are you chasing me?” she yelled at me over her shoulder.

“I’m…just…trying…to talk to you!” I gasped.

She stopped and turned to face me. I stopped in my tracks, a half dozen paces behind her.

“Hi,” I panted. “I’m Pax.”

“That’s a weird name,” came the soft reply. “I’m Rebekah.”

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” she said, annoyed.

“I’m…uh…well…uh…it’s a long story,” I stammered.

“One I probably don’t have time for,” she replied testily, and with a slight drawl to her voice. “What house are you from?”

“House?” I asked.

“Yeah, what house?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I replied.

“Tribe, stupid,” she said angrily.

“I…uh…don’t have a…uh…tribe. Did you say tribe?”

We stared at each other, both confused for a moment.

“You’re a robot,” she said, alarmed, and started running again.

“No, wait!” I yelled, running after her again. “I’m not a robot. I’m a boy. Umm, I mean a man. I mean. Will you please just stop?!”

She stopped and turned again. “Prove it.”

“I have a pulse. Come here and feel it.”

“Is this a trick?” she asked hesitantly.

“No,” I assured her. I kneeled and put my hands up behind my head.

She put her bucket of berries down and walked over to me. She stepped around me, circling at a distance like a lion waiting for the kill. She approached, her fingers outstretched. They found my neck, and pressed against my carotid arteries a little too tightly, and felt the throbbing of my racing pulse. I swallowed hard.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked her again.

“I’m out collecting berries while my family is off hunting. We live in the Great Falls and we came up here to hunt. We’re of the house of Obadiah, the tribe of Daniel. Where are you from?”

“I’m from Valhalla, in the Republic,” I replied, as if I expected her to know what that meant. Clearly we weren’t getting anywhere except that she knew I wasn’t a robot.

“Are you a zombie?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “I’m a child of God. Just like you. I thought the Republic was full of robots.”

“And I thought the Plaguelands were full of mindless, bloodthirsty zombies,” I replied.

There was silence for another minute.

“Come with me,” she said. “My grand-daddy is Obadiah, the leader of our house. He’ll know how to help.”

She walked over to her bucket and started walking away.

“Are you coming?” she shouted over her shoulder.

I started following her again, for about a kilometer or so, until we came to a camp. There were old canvas tents that had been patched up countless times. The camp had about a half-dozen women, each of whom was either washing clothes, tending the fire, knitting, or some other domestic duty. I didn’t see any men.

She led me to one of the tents, tidied up her hair under her bonnet, and pushed aside the entry flap. A bearded old man sat on a stump inside the tent. I had never seen a long beard like that before, as all of the men in our society were clean shaven, and even Pirate King Ebenezer was only just scruffy.

“Grampa Obadiah,” Rebekah announced, “I found someone outside of camp.”

He jumped to his feet when he saw me, and drew an old revolver off his hip, pointing it straight at me.

“No, Grampa!” she shouted, jumping in front of me. “He’s a boy, a real one. He’s got a heartbeat.”

“But he’s wearing those robot garments!” the old man shouted.

“Grampa, put your gun away, and come shake his hand. It’s warm.”

The old man inched toward me, sizing me up. I was a few centimeters taller than him, and definitely more muscular. I could understand his hesitation. He reached his hand out toward mine, and took it, shaking it twice. Then he looked me up and down.

My bright, synthetic fabrics must have looked odd to him. He wore an old, patched-up flannel shirt with a missing button. His pants were dingy rugged canvas.

“What are you doing out here, boy?” he asked.

“Well, sir, I was up at the Preserve, to see a friend of mine. I had to run away. Some bad things happened. My friend is dead.” I didn’t know how else to explain it.

“Fascinating,” he mumbled. “I didn’t know they had children. Not flesh and blood children, to say the least. I don’t think anyone knew that.” He continued to examine me. “Fascinating,” he repeated.

“Where do you folks come from?” I asked. “I didn’t know there were other humans outside of the Republic. They tell us there are only mindless zombies east of the Rockies that eat flesh and blood.”

“Oh, there’s those too,” Obadiah responded. “Vicious creatures. Still human, but barely. They’re farther east, in the Heartland. Sometimes they’ve raided as far west as Magic Valley, but ever since Highway Bridge, usually they don’t come farther east than The Faces.”

“The Faces?” I asked.

“Yeah, the great leaders of the ancient times, carved in stone for all eternity. Mocking us for our pride and defiance of the Lord.”

“Wait…‘The Lord’?” I said, curious. “So you’re not zombies, but you worship the Space-God?”

“Space-God?” Obadiah laughed. “Boy, I think we’re talking different languages, but we’re saying the same thing. We believe in one God, the almighty Father who reigns from Heaven. He sent the Great Plague upon us to condemn us for our wickedness, and only when we are worthy of His favor will He restore us to better times and rid us of the metal and demon scourges. We, that is my house and my tribe, are Zionists: we seek to move West and reclaim the lands once held by our ancestors to build God’s paradise on Earth.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at him. The Bible, as we had studied it, was no more than a fairy tale, a collection of stories put together more than six thousand years ago by a group of primitive mystics and false prophets. The strict adherence to that book had killed more people than any other cause throughout all of history. It had prevented science, reason, and logic from taking over the planet. For thousands of years, religion had been the cause of humanity’s hopelessness.

I kept laughing until Obadiah slapped me hard across the face with the back of his hand. A trickle of blood washed into my mouth from where my teeth had pierced my lip. I had never been hit before. Ever. I didn’t know how to react. Instinctively, I raised my own hand to hit him back, but I caught a glimpse of his gun in his hand.

“You will not blaspheme before the Lord,” he said sternly. “That is punishable by death, but since you haven’t received His word or love, you cannot be condemned for not knowing of His laws.”

I was absolutely stunned. Speechless.

“You may stay here tonight, boy,” he stated gently. “You should learn of the true history of mankind and of the goodness of the word of the Lord. What is your name?”

“I’m Pax,” I replied. “It’s an ancient Latin word for peace.”

“Peace?” the old man chuckled. “Boy, your people know nothing of that word.”

Rebekah grabbed my hand and led me out of the tent.

“I am SO confused,” I said quietly as we walked toward the fire. “Our society teaches us that those who worshipped the Space-God are mindless zombies who destroy and kill. But you’re not. You’re weird, but not evil.”

“Well, you’re pretty weird to us too, Pax,” she said. “We’ve been raised our whole lives to believe that the problems of the world were caused by your people. That you abandoned God and gave up humanity. You challenged God to be immortals. That the Plague was cast upon us because of your actions and that the truly worthy ascended to Heaven, while those left behind still had to prove themselves before the Lord to rise to his palace forever.”

“You believe that there’s a palace in the sky where the Lord dwells?” I asked, incredulously.

“Yes, I do,” she answered, unwaveringly. “And when I die, if I’ve been worthy, I’ll live there with my ancestors who were worthy of eternal life.”

I was becoming upset. “So when my people seek eternal life, it’s evil and worthy of a plague, but when your people do it, it’s okay?”

“Such things are not ours to give, but to be bestowed by the Lord for a life of faith and righteousness,” she answered.

They seemed like good people. Misguided, absolutely, but not evil. I was confused by a childhood filled with tales of mindless zombies and how worship of the Space-God was the reason for their existence. Clearly there were two sides of the story, but with all of my analytical prowess, I’d never considered that.

Rebekah and I walked back to my camp, where I packed up my tent and camping gear. She was perplexed by such things as my top-fuel camp-stove and my compass watch with the built-in altimeter and barometer. She couldn’t even contemplate things like satellites and space travel, laughing as if I was telling a joke.

We returned to the camp just as the men were returning from their day’s hunt. All of them had long beards like Obadiah’s. A few of them carried large game bags filled to the brim with bison meat. They must have shot the animals in the Preserve, which meant that they had unwittingly committed a crime against the Republic. I hoped they had escaped undetected.

At night, during dinner around the fire, they were all both wary and curious of me. They asked questions about where I came from. Most of them had never seen the ocean, so describing that was difficult. None of them had ever been west of the Rocky Mountains. None of them had seen tall pines or giant glaciers. None of them had ever been to a city. None of them had ever seen electricity until I flicked on my lantern, much to their startled amazement.

I was a spectacle for them to behold, a curiosity who represented the menace that they feared. But I did find out a lot about them and the rest of the world in the process.

There were four families that belonged to this group, the house of Obadiah. They were all inter-related by marriage or blood, but their Biblical adherence to rules over mating kept genetic problems from arising. Rebekah’s father, Zed, and a few of her brothers, had died at “The Battle of Highway Bridge,” but no one would talk about that event any further. Her mother had died during childbirth with her younger sister, who didn’t survive the ordeal.

Apparently there were thousands more people like them in other communities on the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains, but they were all being pushed West by an incursion of people more closely matching my childhood description of zombies. These Zionists had left the northern town of Great Falls in search of more game and had been thrilled to find the large roaming herds of elk and bison along the edge of the preserve. I tried to caution them against killing too many of the animals, but Obadiah scoffed at me and said they had faith that the Lord was guiding them to a better fate, and that all was transpiring according to His plan.

The long discussions around the fire were interesting and intellectually stimulating. We had different words for different things. What we called “bison,” they called “buffalo.” What we called “elk,” they called “deer.” What we called “space,” they called “heavens.” Sometimes I had to ask for explanation, but sometimes I used the context clues to figure it out for myself.

All the while, Rebekah sat close to me and hung on my every word. When some of the other girls got too close or attentive, she got possessive and catty. She looked at me the way Adara had looked at me a few times: with that animalistic desire to possess and control. Rebekah is a beautiful woman, and I can’t deny that I was feeling similar things toward her, but having grown up in a society that forbade such thoughts and actions, I didn’t even know where to start.