Planet Urth: The Savage Lands (Book 2) (21 page)

“Yep, that’s right,” he replies and takes a step back causing our arms to touch again. 

“And there aren’t any Urthmen in there?” she asks, her brows gathered in concern.

“Nope.” Sully shakes his head.

“You sure?” June persists. 

“I am,” Sully says confidently. 

“Wow, you have your own house,” June marvels. 

“Everyone should have a place to call home, one that isn’t under constant attack,” he says earnestly.

“What must that be like?” I hear myself say without thinking.

“What, you never had that?”

“I guess we did for a while,” I say absently.  “But the monsters that come out at night in the forest found us, and once they find you,” I allow my voice to trail off, but Sully finishes my sentence.

“They never stop,” he says and a chill races up my spine. 

A pause spans for several beats.  Will has taken Riley and Oliver to relieve themselves with Jericho covering them.  I am alone with June and Sully.

“
So you rigged this place with all the wires and explosives?”

“
That’s right.  Knowing this place is equipped with trip wires and bombs helps me sleep at night.” 

“
Sleep,” I say ruefully.  “I miss that.”

Sully grips my upper arms and turns me so that I face
him.  His expression is intense as his piercing eyes bore straight into my soul.  “Tonight, you will sleep, I promise you that.  Everything will be okay.”  He holds me with both his hands and his gaze, but oddly, I do not feel nervous or uncomfortable.  To my surprise, I am calm.  It has been a long time since anyone has taken care of me in even the slightest way.  Sully has saved my life three times; first in the arena, second when he stitched my wound, and third when we came upon the convoy.  Being saved is foreign to me, but pleasant all the same.

“She needs it, Sully,” June says softly and breaks the powerful eye contact.  “Avery is the best fighter there is.  She’s killed boarts, Urthmen, spider-monsters, crazy humans who wanted to use her to breed more humans, and a bat.  And that’s just in the last five days.”  June frowns.  Her eyes well up with tears.  “She saves everybody all the time.  She needs sleep.  She need
s someone to take care of her for once.”

Hot tears singe the backs of my eyelids.  They appear suddenly, along with June’s
stark observation.  Her words have touched a nerve I did not anticipate was so raw. 

“Wow,” Sully says and releases my arms.  He turns his attention to June.  “Sounds like your sister is something special, not that that surprises me or anything; I knew she was the second I saw her in the arena.”  He pokes the tip of her small nose.  “And as long as she’s with me, I’ll give her a break, okay?  I’ll take good care of her.”

June looks as if she may explode.  Emotion is fairly bursting from her.  Her eyes are wide and a grin stretches across her face.  “Good,” she says.  Her single word is so laden with excitement I have trouble suppressing my own smile. 

“Come on.”  Sully reaches out a hand to her.  “Let’s go inside.  I’ll show you around.”

The soft swish and rustle of leaves and the snap of twigs means Will and his siblings are back. 

“Whoa, you have a truck and a camper?” Will says as soon as h
e sees the parked vehicles.  “Do they work?”

“I’ve rebuilt the engine and transmission.  As far as I know
, everything works.  Only problem is, we don’t have gasoline.”

“Gasoline?” I ask.  “What’s that?”

“It’s the liquid that was used to run vehicles in the past.  But it’s scarce now.  What little is left is fiercely guarded by Urthmen,” Sully says.  “We’ll talk about all that tomorrow, though.  Come on.  Follow me around back so we can go inside.”

We file behind Sully, June leading the way, and follow him around the side of the house, past the camper and the truck to the back of the house.  But to my surprise, he does not climb the short, rickety looking flight of steps.  Instead, he begins separating long, reedy weeds until a door, placed flush against the earth, appears.  He pulls a key from his pocket, unlocks a padlock looping through two metal hoops and opens the door. 

“Wow!” June exclaims. 

“It’s an old bomb shelter,” Sully tells her just before he turns and begins descending a ladder.  “Come on down.”

June does not hesitate. She climbs down immediately. I follow, then Will, Oliver, Riley and Jericho come afterward.  Jericho shuts the door behind us and engages a lock from the inside. 

I expect to be submerged in darkness. 
But peculiar, ashen light fills the space below me.  It intensifies when I am standing on a hard floor.  My eyes scour the room and I stop mid-breath when I see rectangular screens with pictures within them.  The picture changes continually, and appears strangely familiar.  

“What is,” I start, but I cannot form a sentence.  I am riveted by the image, transfixed by what I think I am seeing.  “Is that the wooded area we just came through?”

Sully smiles slyly.  “It is.”

“So those are,” I begin, but I dare not utter the word. 

His dark eyes brim with anticipation.  “Go on,” he urges me as if we are the only two people in the underground bunker. 

“Picture boxes,” I ask more than I say. 

Picture boxes are the stuff of legend, they are fabled stories Will and I heard as children and now share with our young siblings.  Never in my wildest imaginings did I ever believe I would see one for myself.  I thought they’d always be objects my mind’s eye conjured.  But here they are, in Sully and Jericho’s lair, and right before my very eyes. 

“Picture boxes, television
s, they’re both just names, but yes, that’s exactly what they are.”  Sully’s words snap me out of my trance.

It is all so surreal, so magical.  I swallow hard then ask one of the many questions blazing in my brain. “But how are we seeing the woods we were just in?”

“Cameras,” Sully answers and I feel my jaw drop.  I know I must look like a buffoon, standing as I am with my mouth agape.  But I am flabbergasted.  Cameras are devices used long ago that transmitted live images for digital recording or viewership.  Until today, I considered them even more elusive than the picture box. 

Another question plagues me, one that involves both the picture boxes and the camera.  Long ago, a power source was necessary to keep things like them functioning.  “What’s powering the camera and the picture, uh, I mean televisions?”

The children’s heads bounce between Sully and I, in awe, as they follow our interaction.  Now, they are watching him, waiting for his response.  I am too, as it turns out. 

“Solar power,” he answers.

“What’s that?” June asks.

“Well, it means we use the sun’s rays to power a generator
that powers the television and the cameras.”

“Whoa, cool!” Oliver exclaims. 

“Wow,” Riley adds.

“How did you learn to do such a thing?” June asks, her voice quiet and reverent.

“He knows how to fix things,” Jericho’s voice rumbles like distant thunder and sends our attention his way.  A small chuckle rolls from deep in his chest.  “I told you before, Sully can fix anything.” He shrugs his enormous shoulders and flicks his hands to the sides. 

“The technology existed long before the War of 2062.  I just gathered materials along the way and tweaked them,” Sully says matter-of-factly. 

“What about the guns?” I ask, intrigued beyond measure.  “How did you get them?  And what about the bullets?”  I fire the questions in rapid succession, my mouth working in time with my brain. 

The corners of Sully’s mouth hook upward to a sneaky smile.  He narrows his eyes at me and again,
a playful glint gleams in his eyes.  “I rebuilt the guns from old parts I found through the years.  As you can imagine, I found a lot. Urthmen are dumb as stumps.  They wouldn’t know what to do with any of the stuff I came across, so they left it, right Jericho?”

“Th
at’s for sure,” Jericho agrees.

“As for the bullets, well, I got luck
y with that one.  Years back, I found a bullet press in a bomb shelter, completely intact.  All I needed to do was search for scrap metal to make the jackets and formulate the propellant.”

“The what?” I can’t help but ask. 

“The stuff inside the actual bullet,” Sully answers. 

“O
kay
,” I reply and do not hide that I am confused.

“It’s really not that big of a deal.  I find sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter.”

“Salt who?”  I stop him again.  “Now you’ve totally lost me.”

Sully laughs.  It is a pleasant sound.  “Now that’s even less of a deal than the other stuff.  Salt peter is harvested from decomposed manure.  It’s also found in caves, but manure is easier to come by.”

“Manure?  You mean poop?” June asks and is barely able to keep from giggling. 

“
Yep,” Sully nods with a naughty expression on his face.  “I mean poop, old animal poop to be exact, but poop all the same.”

June and Riley are overcome by a fit of giggles.  Even Oliver can’t resist and joins in.  I smile and so does Jericho.  Will, however, is not amused in the least, a fact that is not lost on Sully.  He frowns and looks between Will and I.  I shake my head slightly and close my eyes.  Will watched his parents die and is now responsible for his two siblings.  Laughing at the word “poop” is not at the forefront of things he needs to do. 

“Does anyone else live here with you two?” I ask and steer the conversation back to the host of questions rattling around in my head. 

“Nope, just Jericho and I,” Sully answers.

“We have freed many humans, but none have stayed,” Jericho adds.

“No one ever stays and fights.  They all want to hide and live,” Sully says. 

“Well we’re not going anywhere.  We’re with you.  We want to fight.”  I hear the words spill from me; know that I have spoken for all of us when it is only me who feels that way.  I cannot imagine jeopardizing June’s safety, or Will, Riley and Oliver’s for that matter.  Yet, I cannot imagine leaving either.  The life we led was no life at all, running and hiding, living in constant fear of how we would defend ourselves when the time came, and it always would.  Finding Urthmen in the forest was not some random improbable occurrence we could chalk up as an isolated incident.  It meant that the moment we feared had finally come. 

I know that Will
is displeased by what I have said.  He looks at me harshly, as if I have either gone mad or betrayed him in some monumental way. 

“We,” Will says emphatically and points among he and his siblings, “Would like to live in peace.”

I part my lips to speak, but Sully beats me to it. 

“There will be no peace until we kill them all.”

His words resound in my bones, in every part of me, for they are words that express my exact sentiments.  As long as Urthmen live, we will be hunted, and we will never live freely, in peace. 

“And we are now in big trouble,” Sully emphasizes the word “we” as Will did.  “That fat Urthmen we killed in the convoy was the king’s son.  As soon as word gets out, which I am sure it has already, Urthmen will flood this area in search of us.”

“There’s a king?” Oliver asks.

“Yes, King Leon rules the world.  He’s the leader of the Urthmen,” Will replies. 

Will balls his fists.  Rippling muscles flex and bulge down the length of both arms as he does.  His anger is barely harnessed; bubbling beneath the surface of his skin so volatilely it is practically visible.  “Did you know that fat Urthman was the king’s son beforehand, before you decided we were going to attack?”

“No,
not when we bombed the convoy.” Sully answers.  “I knew he was royalty because of the crown, but I didn’t know it was King Leon’s son until he told me as much, and by then it was too late.  If I’d known the convoy was carrying Prince Neo, I would’ve thought twice.  I never would have jeopardized all of us like that.  Now they are going to come here.  Even with the wires and cameras, we’re not safe here.” 

At his words, June immediately rushes toward me and wraps her arms around my waist.  I do not groan about the soreness the contact causes.  She is frightened, and for good reason.  Once again, we are holed up in an unsafe shelter.  True, this one has sophisticated technology that may give
us advance warning.  Some Urthmen would likely be killed in the process, but not all.  The ones that survive would pursue us. 

The gravity of what has happened, of what will happen, crystallizes fully.  But I am too fatigued to wrap my mind around what needs to be done.  I am tired, so very tired.  Being captured and caged
, then winding up in an arena where I was slashed by a behemoth Urthman more monstrous than any other, and witnessing the fall of Prince Neo and his minions has taken its toll on me.  I am drained on all fronts.  Exhaustion sinks it teeth into me and devours me completely.  My legs feel as if they’re made of spongy moss and my arms feel like stone.  My body wavers.  I feel as if a dense mist has settled all around me, dizzying me, disorienting me.