Chapter 21
A NaNoWriMo Challenge
BOOK TWO
Part one 2358 ATC
—HELEN
21
“What the hell, Rickie!” I said, looking around slowly. This wasn’t the storage locker we were just in. Somehow, we were outside, in the foothills of some mountain range I’d never seen before.The sky was grey and overcast, the mountains snowcapped and beautiful, but they didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen in a book before. There was a wide river with a raft in it that looked like it had been handmade. On the riverbank, two round—well, they looked more like yurts—but tents, set away from the river, with a fire between them and three people looking at us.
One of them was holding a longbow—the bowstring was pulled back all the way and the arrow tip looked like a pointed barb that would rip right through whoever the man was pointing it at. He had a long sword and a dagger about the size of my forearm swinging in a scabbard on his left side hanging from a belt around his waist; there was a small crossbow hanging from the right side. There was a quiver hanging from a strap slung over his shoulder, and four arrows stuck into the ground in front of him.
I drew my pistol.
“No, wait!” the woman beside me said, stepping forward.
She looked around as if she’d lost something, and then looked at Jimmy.
“Where’s Whit?”
“I guess he didn’t make it through,” Jimmy said.
“What do you mean he didn’t make it through? He was wearing the bracelet I was going to use.”
I looked at her briefly before looking over at Ricky who nodded slowly. I lowered my weapon and took a step back.
“Where are we?” I said, and turned to look at Ricky. “I remember shooting the two men in the storage locker we were in—just after they came in through that hole in the wall. And then I remember another hole forming, and you screaming at me to put the stupid bracelet on.”
I looked down to see that it was still on my wrist.
What the hell’s going on?
After that, I don’t remember much of anything that didn’t feel like it was part of a dream. I don’t remember going through the hole in the air and stepping through the wall. Maybe that was a good thing? It was all short-lived, and thank God, because it was a nightmare of death and unspeakable horrors after that. And certainly not something I wanted to share with anyone. It had been too real. But I remember I was being held in a cage with several other women, and then I was taken out and brought to what looked like an old, rusted, shipping container. There were other women in there waiting—they were all young, beautiful, and scared.
And then there was the rape. I remember the rape—it was ugly, and it was painful, and it was more real than any dream I’d ever had before.
It wasn’t anything I wanted to remember, that’s for sure. And that’s the part of it that didn’t make any sense. Because the part of me that was having the sex seemed to be removed from me. It was almost as if I was in someone else’s body, and it was being done to me. But there was no feeling it happening to me. It was emotional, but it wasn’t physical. That doesn’t mean I didn’t fight back. I fought as hard as I could every time they came for me.
They beat me and raped me anyway.
“Somebody tell me what the fuck is going on!” I said.
I was starting to lose it.
I looked at the man holding the longbow.
“Can you understand me? Do you know what I’m saying?” I asked him.
He nodded; he looked as confused as I felt.
“Then put that goddamned thing down and tell me where the hell I am, because I sure as hell wasn’t here when I woke up this morning.”
“Whit,” Ricky said to the man in front of us. “Put the bow down.”
“How does he know your name?” the woman beside him asked.
Whit shook his head. “I don’t know.” He lowered the bow, but kept the arrow notched. It was for just in case, I suppose, and I decided I liked him.
“I’ll explain. But right now, we’ve got bigger problems,” Ricky said.
“What sort of problems?” the man said, aware. His hand was pulling back the bowstring. It was almost like an instinct.
There was a small tubular drone that floated in from behind him—I saw it—and Whit spun, letting the arrow go. The arrow sliced through the top part of the machine where there appeared to be a seam—it had to be something he knew about—because the drone fell to the ground with a thud.
“That,” Ricky said.
“It certainly can’t be good,” the third man standing with them said, speaking up for the first time.
There was the sound of a distant scream coming from the valley below and the man started running to the cliff side, to see what was happening. Ricky screamed at him.
“No! Don’t! If you go there, you’ll be killed.”
“I have to—”
“They’ll be coming up from behind us, in about ten seconds!” Ricky said, and I found myself drawing my gun again, drawing a bead on the small path Ricky was pointing at.
“Who’s coming?” I asked.
“Just shoot everyone you see,” he said, looking down at me.
Jimmy and the woman beside me pulled out their weapons as well, and I had to look twice when I realized that whatever they were holding, they weren’t regulation handguns.
“What’s that do?”
“Light amplification. Deadly.”
“A laser?”
No sooner did I say it than the first man showed up. He had a spear and meant to throw it. I fired. The spear fell to the ground with the man, and Ricky looked at the man standing beside the woman.
“That would’ve killed you.”
“I suppose I should say thank you, then,” the man said, running to the cliffside and looking at the valley below.
“Slavers!” he screamed, and ran for his weapons.
Another dozen men came at us. I watched the man with the bow take down four of them in the time it took me to shoot three more. The woman beside him drew her knife and threw it without hesitating. It struck one of the attackers in the throat. The man with the bow drew the sword he had at his side and ran at the remaining four. He slipped the blade into the first man as he fell to his knees, sliding on the grass and under the weapon the second man was holding. No sooner had he done that and he was up, slashing at the back of the man’s knees. He spun and drove the blade into the third man’s side and then slashed at the second man again man, half decapitating him. The other man put an arrow into the last man.
“What the fuck is going on!” I screamed at Ricky, watching the man wipe his blade on the furs he was wearing. He quietly sheathed the weapon, and retrieving the knife from the dead man’s throat, returned it to the woman. Then he pulled out all of the arrows he’d used from the dead bodies laying around us. He was quick to strip the bodies of whatever weapons they had, filling the quiver he carried, and taking a second one from one of the dead bodies. That’s when I noticed he was taking crossbow bolts from some of the bodies, filling a quiver he had strapped to his right forearm. It only held three bolts. He threw the rest in the raft.
I looked at Jimmy. He was so obviously Ricky’s brother; they shared the same deep-set eyes and thin nose. Somehow, Jimmy looked totally different—his eyes may have been deepest and brooding, but they were brown, and Ricky’s were blue. But they both moved the same way. Jimmy was taller, and heavier, and his hair was darker—and maybe there was a little grey in it—but it was easy to see they were brothers. The bone structure, I guess.
“That’s the way it was supposed to go the first time,” Jimmy said to the woman.
“What do you mean, the first time?” I said.
“Who are you people?” the man with the bow asked.
“How do you know his name?” the woman beside him asked Ricky.
“And how did you know we were going to be attacked?” the third man asked.
“You’re Whit,” Ricky said to the man with the bow. “And you’re his wife, Jaleen—”
“His what?”
“Qiza,” he said. “You’re his qiza.
“What the hell kinda language is that?” I said. “Are we still on the same planet? Have you taken me somewhere else?” I asked Ricky.
“This is still Earth,” the woman beside me said.
“And just who the hell are you?” I asked. “I don’t remember seeing you at any time during my day. And now you’re…here? Who the hell are you, and where did you come from?”
“I’m Jen? I came through with Jimmy,” she said.
She’d said her name like a question; I guess she had to assume that I might have been told about her. She’d soon find out just how much I knew.
“Jen? You mean the sister-in-law?” I looked at Ricky. “I thought you said your sister-in-law was…well…fat? This woman’s definitely not fat.”
I looked her up and down. She was enviously fit, I thought. I liked the short, red hair, so obviously dyed and cut so close to her scalp it looked like a haze in the sunlight breaking through the overhanging clouds.
“We don’t have the time,” the woman said.
“Says who?”
“Because those people down there? They’re Slavers! They’re going to wonder why their drone didn’t send a report back. And then they’re going to wonder what happened to the squad they sent up here to take us out.”
“How’d they know we were even here?” Whit said.
“That drone’s been following you for days,” Jen said.
“And you?” Jaleen asked. “Why are you here? How are you here?”
“We’re just passing through,” Jen said.
“Passing through? Passing through what?” the third man asked. “Because you just appeared out of thin air.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” I said.
“That’s Jarel. He’s her brother,” Ricky said.
How the hell does he know that?
“You see? That’s what I mean. How do you know who we are? Where did you come from, that you can say you’re just passing through? But first, tell me…how did you get here? Because, like Jar said, you just showed up—out of thin air, no less. One moment we’re running around, playing a game, and then you show up, just like that. A spark, a flash of light, and then that hole in the air—and you fell through it.”
“I’d like to know where here is,” I said. “I mean, I know where I was.”
“We’ll explain what’s happening later, right now, we’ve got to get away from here, and fast,” Jimmy said. “How long to break camp?”
“These things take time,” Whit said.
“They do?” I ran to the small rise our attackers had come up, and looked down the hill. There was a large group of men. They were dressed in a mix of hides and furs. Some had painted their faces; others had globs of clay in their hair which they’d formed into long, red, spikes. Ricky came up behind me and looked down the hill as well.
“That can’t be good,” he said.
“I think we might have a problem,” I said loud enough for everyone to hear. They all came to the rise to look for themselves.
“Jesus,” Jimmy said. He turned and looked at the three strangers. “You’ve got minutes, at best. Less, even.”
The man Whit was quick to move. He grabbed whatever he could; cut the lines for the tents and rolled them up as quick as he could, the poles and ropes swinging behind him. I could hear the younger one, Jarel, asking Whit what he thought Jimmy meant by minutes.
“Think of it as a thunderclap away,” Whit said, throwing every weapon he could get his hands on, into the raft. He loaded the tents on one of the pontoons, and the other tent across from it. He rolled it quick once, twice, and then reached over the pontoon and pulled up three lengths of rope. He lashed one rope, and then the other, into place, securing it in the middle with the third.
In the meantime, his wife had pushed every pot, pan and dish they had into one of two hand sewn packs. She was labouring with the other pack and the bedding. She was running awkwardly, tossing the packs into the raft, then helped her brother dragging the big steering oar across the campsite. She climbed into the raft as her brother jumped into the water and together they slid the huge oar into place.
“Untie it! Untie it!” Whit was screaming out to Jimmy and the woman.
“Here they come!” I said, and drew my handgun.
I felt like a sheriff in some old time Western movie, ready to face the bad guys. I took careful aim and dropped the first man with a deafening roar. I dropped four in quick succession, and the rest of them stopped briefly. That’s when Whit ran up, fell to one knee, and drove three more arrows into the ground. He drew his bow back and took down four men before they had a chance to scatter.
“Let’s go,” he said, grabbing me by the arm. He pushed me in front of him and I plunged into the icy water. I lost my footing and screamed out at the shock of cold, and was soon in over my head when the bottom gave way. There was a tug on my hair and I screamed out again, reaching up and grabbing at whatever hand was tugging on me. Soon there were more hands pulling on me—pulling me up—and I could feel myself being lifted out of the water—both half lifted and half dropped into the raft.
I sat in the bottom of the raft, shivering. The woman, Jaleen, took her fur jacket off and gave it to me. She stood in front of me with her tits out; I was staring at her because she was obviously pregnant. She told me to take my wet shirt off; she looked at me strangely when she saw me sitting with just my bra.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at my bra. She reached forward and lifted my breasts up, looking underneath. “What’s this for?”
“Support,” I said, slapping at her hands.
“Support? Support for what?” she laughed.
“So your tits don’t fall down to your knees by the time you hit thirty, or in your case, after you squat out a couple of more kids.”
“Thirty?” she said.
“Your age?” I asked her, and she shook her head.
“Age? I don’t understand the half of what you say—and even less of the other half. Nothing you say makes sense. Time? Age? Tits? What are tits? And thirty? What’s thirty?” she said.
“Time is the span it takes the sun to go from there, to over there,” Jimmy said, pointing up at the mountains where the sun was cresting a spiked peak that cast a long shadow back on itself. “Once upon a time, the day was once divided into little pieces. Let’s say, sixty heartbeats is a good place to start from. So you count your heart beats. Sixty of them. Those sixty heartbeats? We’re going to take those and add them up. We’re going to call that span of time—that sixty heartbeats—we’re going to call that a minute. Sixty heartbeats, is equal to about a minute. Take sixty of those minutes, and you’d have something different. We’re going to call it an hour. So sixty heartbeats is a minute; sixty minutes is an hour. It takes twenty-four of those hours, to make a day.
“If you count your heartbeats, and you time how long it takes the sun to reach the other peak, you have a brief concept of time. But the day is divided into two parts, for obvious reasons. Day and night.”
“Why?” Jarel asked.
“What do you mean, why?”
“What’s the point in knowing which part of the day it is? You wake up in the morning when the sun comes up. I don’t have to tell you what part of the day it is. I know. I go to sleep when it’s too dark to do anything else. You eat when you’re hungry. If you’re a farmer, you wake up and tend to whatever it is you have to do. You feed what animals you have. You see to the crops. You don’t need to know anything else.”
“You have to know when it’s the right time to hunt,” Whit laughed, leaning on the long, single paddle used for steering the raft.
“The current’s pretty good out here,” Ricky said, looking at Whit.
“Where does this river take us?” I asked.
“Down into the valley,” Ricky said.
“Into the valley?” Whit said, looking at the riverbank which seemed distant.
I looked back as I slipped on the fur jacket and stripped my bra off. It felt good taking it off. I’d been wearing it for God only knows how long. I don’t wear bras as often as I probably should. But I definitely wear one to work. The last thing I want is the guys all staring at my tits because it’s cold and my nipples are standing at attention—like they were right now.
I looked out at the water, saw large rocks and the river dropping in around them; it was easy to see we were moving faster. There were small eddies and whirlpools, and the rocks were starting to get larger. I could see rainbows in the mist and spray as the water sped up.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Jarel said, looking at the water.
“You always have a bad feeling about things,” Whit said.
“No. We don’t know this river. We don’t even know where we are,” he added.
“You’re the one with all the charts,” Whit said. “Look it up.”
“What charts?” I asked.
“Ancient texts,” Jarel said.
“Can I see one?”
Jarel reached into the small pouch he was wearing slung over his shoulder. He searched through the pages and pulled one out. I could see the Northern hemisphere and the stars. The page had been marked with ink. Some of it was faded because it was probably written a long time ago. I looked at the printing on the page. It was worn out and rubbed raw along the creases, and some of the more flimsy pieces had been torn. But I saw what I wanted, and sat back to think.
1972
“Rand McNally?” I said, handing the Star map back to him.
“Do you know him?” Jarel asked. “My father told me he was a great mapmaker. He painted the entire night sky; he even named the stars—but nobody can read them anymore.”
“What else do you have in there?”
“Land maps, but they make little sense.”
“Why not?”
“Most of the land isn’t there anymore. I haven’t been to the places it says are gone, but others have, and they’ve marked it down.”
The entire West coast had been marked as gone. Instead, there was the Great Inland Sea sitting where the Great Plaines used to be. The Sea looked like it started somewhere in the Dakotas. I had a hard time imagining what I was looking at. From Canada to Mexico, everything had changed. The Rocky Mountains were gone. I don’t know if they fell to the bottom of the Pacific, or if they were swallowed by the Earth; they were simply gone. In their place, was what some later cartographer had named The Vandals.
The Great Lakes had been redrawn, as had Hudson Bay. The rivers of my childhood had changed course. The Ohio river disappeared into the Great Inland Sea as well as the Mississippi. Where the Mississippi had once meandered through the wetlands of Minnesota’s thousands of lakes, now it was simply gone. Every city that had used the river for commerce had disappeared under massive miles of water.
“What is this place?” I asked, seeing something in the water that had no right being there. I don’t know what it was, I just know that whatever it was, it wasn’t from around here. Alligators weren’t supposed to be this far north, were they? And as near as I could see, we were somewhere in Colorado, or what was left of it.