The Scarecrow of OZ (17 page)

His imagination took over and showed him a world where a select group of humans used the ancient hybrid’s weapon to subjugate everyone on the planet. It was worse than he could’ve ever imagined. It wasn’t a world united. It wasn’t heaven. It was hell.

He forced himself back to reality again. He had to do something.

How long was his body going to be frozen like this?

If they would only let him speak, he could tell them how important it was to them, and to all of OZ, that his group be allowed to keep going without interference. Precious time had been wasted already, and he was frantic to get to the Brahmastra before the humans did, now more than ever.

The wheels stopped grinding over cobblestones and fell silent. Several voices exchanged comments in that strange language before someone said something he understood.

The voice was very close, as if it’s speaker was inspecting him from only a few inches away.

“You’re right. Maybe this is the half-human half-animal creature the Oracle spoke of. Wake him up.”

Every muscle in his body constricted and knotted up. The tingling sensation started in his fingers and toes, and worked its way up through his arms and legs. His equilibrium was shot to hell and his head spun wildly. When his face felt numb, he thought about opening his eyes and he did.

He was seated, tied to a chair. His brain registered he was no longer lying down and his equilibrium reset. Once properly oriented, the room stopped spinning.

He tested moving his head by looking around the room. Slowly at first to fend off the waves of nausea that washed over him with each motion. His neck was stiff, but at least he could still move it with some effort.

Off to his right, a couple of women inspected pieces of armor that looked exactly like his.

He tilted his head down to look at his chest and legs.

It was his armor.

Fortunately, he was still dressed in the brown leather under-suit. He hadn’t been stripped naked. Of course, with fur covering his entire body, he really couldn’t be naked. Technically speaking.

Three more women were in an animated discussion on the far side of the room. And by animated, it looked like they were arguing over something. Most likely, they were arguing over him.

With feeling returning to normal, he tested the bindings that held him to the chair. While the ropes were not tight enough to restrict blood flow, they had very little play. He would not be wriggling out of them anytime soon.

One of the three women noticed him tugging on his ropes and walked over. The two with her, followed close behind.

She stood with her hands on her hips, a fire burning in her eyes. “I’d like you to give Ellis a message for me.”

He wasn’t sure what he had expected her to say to him, but this caught him totally off guard.

“Huh?”

She punched him across the face, his teeth rattling from the impact. He flexed his jaw as the heat level rose on the left side of his face.

“You tell him, the next time he sends a bomb headed directly toward my city, he will not live to see another sunrise.”

“What are you…”

She struck him again. This time, he felt his brain bounce around inside his skull. She didn’t look very muscular, but she hit like someone twice her size. Her hand flashed back across his vision and he noticed the glint of metal from something gripped in her hand.

She bent down to speak to him at eye level.

“I will give you the night to regain your strength and recover from your,” she gripped his chin in her hand and inspected her handiwork. “Accidental fall down the stairs.”

One of the two women who’d been inspecting his armor approached. He recognized her is the same one who closed his eyes immediately after they attacked. She had those same bright blue eyes with pinpoint dark pupils that were unforgettable. “Ma’am, do you think the Oracle will want to speak with him?”

The one who punched him across the face looked ready to hit Blue Eyes. “The Oracle is an idiot. We are no longer going to do what he says. I’m in charge now, and if anyone has a problem with that, my door is always open to hear complaints.”

She looked around, challenging anyone to question her self-appointed leadership. The other woman lowered their heads.

Caleb had just witnessed a shift in power. It didn’t sound like a change for the better.

She regarded him with an evil grin.

“Very well. Put him in the dungeon with the others. Tomorrow morning, we will send back just enough of him to deliver our message.”

Deep in the bowels of Center City, Caleb was pushed into a jail cell. He stumbled, but quickly regained his balance.

The bars clanked shut behind him.

The two Banshee guards whispered to each other in their strange language and laughed at their private joke as they headed back up the stairs.

Dorothy sat on the dirt floor of the same jail cell with her back against the wall. Toto’s head was in her lap and she stroked the fur along the back of his neck. He didn’t react to her attention, or to Caleb entering the cell. The electrical shock from the Banshee gauntlet must have fried his electrical circuits. Whether it was permanent, there was no way to tell. Caleb wondered if the Tin Man had fared any better.

Caleb crouched down next to her. “Are you okay?”

“I’m doing better than Toto. Where are we?”

“You don’t remember this place?”

She looked around her at the bare stone walls. “Should I?”

“We’ve been here before. We’re in the dungeon of the Wizard’s Castle. We’ve only been gone for six months, but it doesn’t seem like Scarecrow is in charge any longer. Ellis mentioned that everything has gotten worse around OZ, in just the past couple of months. I wonder what’s been happening out here since we left?”

A new voice outside the cell answered his question. “The Oracle can answer that.”

He stared through the bars of the cell into same bright blue eyes of the one who had risked standing up against the self-appointed Banshee leader. She had backed down quickly, but here she was again. And most likely breaking some rule coming to see them.

“You’re the one who kept my eyes from drying out.”

She grinned at being recognized. “My name’s Tara.”

“You mentioned this Oracle before. Who is he?”

“He is the Oracle. He looks like an ordinary man, but he fell from the sky as a gift to us from the gods. The only reason the High Priestess did not order his immediate death is that he came to us broken. It was my task to nurse him back to health so he could stand trial for his crimes.”

“What crimes?”

“It didn’t matter. He was a man in OZ, and therefore, must have committed crimes against someone, somewhere.”

This was the most absurd thing he’d ever heard in his life. And he grew up in OZ, so nothing should have surprised him. “You were going to put him on trial under the assumption he had committed a crime?”

“Children were not born in OZ until after the first few years. Reason dictates, everyone over the age of twenty was sent to OZ for committing a crime. So, logically, he had crimes he needed to be punished for. But I was able to convince the High Priestess that he was not an ordinary man. That he was a gift from the gods.”

“A gift from the gods?”

“I told you. He fell from the sky.”

“So, after you nursed him back to health he was put on trial?”

“No. He talked in his sleep through many a fevered dream and spoke of a life outside of OZ. A life that did not involve crime. And he knew things that only the creator of OZ could know. He spoke of the creator as if he knew him personally. I convinced the High Priestess that he was not here because of judgment, so we could not judge him further.”

“How did he become the Oracle?”

“He gave the High Priestess information in exchange for his life. She sent us out on raiding parties to obtain the special equipment he requested. Equipment he used to show us what was happening all over OZ, in real time. It was the Oracle who showed us your locomotive being filled with explosives last week before departing the city in the south.”

Explosives? Those must’ve been the crates he saw men unloading from the locomotive. Of course. There was no way he could have laid down the track and positioned the locomotive in such a short time. Ellis had told him to think of the track as a gun with the locomotive as a bullet. The reason he used that example was because it was a bullet. An explosive bullet they had planned to use.

But use against who?

With the exception of the siege camp, the first thing they’d come across since leaving the city was here.

At the Southern Marshal’s insistence, Ellis had re-purposed his weapon originally designed for an attack on Center City.

He shook his head. “They removed the explosives to make room for us. It was no longer a weapon.”

“They didn’t remove enough. The bomb we hit the locomotive with could never have made an explosion that big. The best we could hope for was to knock it off course, away from the city. I could tell, from how you looked at what was left of your locomotive, you had no idea of its original purpose.”

She inserted a key into the lock and swung open the cell bars.

He searched her hands for a weapon that she might be hiding in the jumble of clothes held in her arms. “What are you doing?”

“I’m taking you to see the Oracle.”

She tossed the bundle of clothes at him. “Your friend needs to put these on.”

He inspected the clothes. It was a Banshee outfit. “Why does she have to wear this?”

“If we want to make it through the city without being stopped, she has to look like one of us; and you have to be her prisoner.”

“Prisoner?”

She held up a pair of rusted shackles. “The only men within the city walls are either prisoners, or slaves. Nothing will arouse suspicion faster than you freely walking around.”

Dorothy looked down at Toto lying on the ground.

“What about him?”

Tara shook her head.

“I’m sorry. It will arouse too much suspicion if we carry the robot dog around the city. We have to leave him behind.”

As they stepped out into the street, Dorothy tugged on the chain and the shackles bit into his wrists. He grunted in pain.

She flinched and dropped her end of the chain. “Sorry.”

Tara swiftly picked up the chain and placed it back into Dorothy’s hands. “No, that was good. The more he is mistreated, the less we will be noticed.”

Caleb looked around at the people walking through the streets of the city. He saw mostly women. A few men, probably servants of the extravagantly dressed women they hurried along behind, followed with their heads bowed and eyes cast to the ground.

He had expected to see everyone dressed as Banshees. But the only two dressed like that were Dorothy and Tara.

He immediately worried they would stand out before realizing that when someone noticed them, they immediately turned their head away. Apparently, Banshees were just as feared by the people they protected as they were by the people they attacked.

Tara moved forward, the other pedestrians making a column of empty sidewalk for her almost instinctively, since none of them pretended to notice her.

They followed her through the city while Dorothy tugged on the chain a little more forcefully. “Keep moving, prisoner.”

Caleb said through gritted teeth, “You’re enjoying this a little too much.”

He couldn’t tell whether or not she smiled behind her beak shaped mask, but her eyes housed the tiny sparkle of the Dorothy he once knew. They made their way quickly through the city, ignored by everyone they came across. Tara, always a few steps ahead, scouted around each corner before motioning for Dorothy and Caleb to follow.

Tara slowed down. “Just a few more blocks. We’re almost there.”

She looked both ways across a busy street and then motioned for them to follow. They were halfway across another of the multitude of intersections they had crossed in the expansive city when Tara rushed back, shoved them into a back alley, and ushered them behind piles of rotting vegetables. The stench of decay and decomposition assaulted his nose. Right about now, it would be nice if his body was still numb so he could not smell the rot around him.

Tara was oblivious to, or just plain ignored, the smell as she peered around the corner. He sidled up next to her and peeked around the corner.

Down the street, in the direction she was looking, he saw two Banshees standing guard at the threshold of a dilapidated wooden door that looked to be the street-side entrance to the moss-covered stone house.

Caleb let out an exasperated breath. “Let me guess. That’s the Oracle’s house.”

He and Tara exchanged a look and his shoulders drooped with the realization he was right.

She studied the two guards blocking their goal. “I didn’t think you’d be noticed missing from the dungeon so quickly.”

“What makes you think they know we’re missing already?”

“The High Priestess only orders guards for the Oracle when there’s trouble. I had to take us around the city in a non-direct route, or else we would have been discovered by now. Unfortunately, it also gave her time to put them in place.”

She stared for a few more seconds before she turned around and clapped her hands on her thighs. “Doesn’t matter. We have to get in there.”

She seemed to notice the smell for the first time as a sly smile spread across her lips. She bent down, scooping up handfuls of rotting garbage before she stood up again. She held her hands stretched out on either side like a scale, as if comparing the weight of the garbage in her two hands.

He did not like the look in her eyes as she took a step toward him.

He took a step back and pulled the chain tight, Dorothy still holding the other end.

“What are you planning to do with that garbage?”

Tara never took her eyes off his. “If we expect those guards to believe we brought you to clean the Oracle’s sewer, you have to smell the part.”

She smeared the garbage into his clothes and fur. Dorothy refused to do anything except hang on to her end of the chain. He didn’t want to pull her off balance, so he could do nothing more than stand there and let Tara smear him with garbage.