Prophet's Journey, page 8
part #1 of Prophet of the Badlands Series
The raiders who’d kept her hobbled like this years ago had only held her for three months before a stronger group attacked them. Those raiders took the hobble off her, but they’d padlocked a much bigger chain around her neck instead. Only four of the first group had survived. Her new owners would have killed the other tribe to the last, but she encouraged them not to. Maybe they had gone out there and spoken of their misfortune. Somehow, the legend of the Prophet had come to include the prediction that any who mistreated her would suffer bad luck.
“Obviously.” She rolled her eyes. “Everyone who took me got attacked by different people wanting to take me. Of course they would blame it on me and say it’s bad luck.”
But even the nice villages, few and far between as they’d been, suffered attacks. One tribe carried her around on a chair like a goddess, believing that if they let her touch the ground, she would punish them.
“Ugh.” She shook her head. “I hated that.”
Even Den’s tribe had kept her in a cage for two months at the chamán’s hut until the boy had pled with his father, the chief, Braga, to trust her promise that she wouldn’t run away. The Prophet used to be an obedient captive. She’d promise never to run away, and she would keep her word.
Althea scowled, sat up, and hopped off the cot to stand. She would never again promise that to anyone.
“I’m gonna run away!”
Her first step stopped short two inches later with a click. She hung her head and sighed.
“I’m gonna tiptoe away!”
These binders didn’t have a keyhole, only the little screens and littler buttons. She squatted and squeezed at them again, setting off the loud buzzer a few more times before giving up and shuffling to the collapsed stairway. She stopped at the wall, peering up at the doorway over her head. The muscles in her legs and arms swelled slightly in response to her psionic boost, her eyes glowing a touch brighter. She crouched, then leapt straight up, grabbed the base of the doorway, and pulled herself up, clumsily getting one knee on the edge before flopping forward onto her chest and eating a face full of dust.
No, she wouldn’t make the person who put the binders on her slap themselves.
She’d make them slap themselves twice!
After the laborious process of speed shuffling to the door, she hopped outside, squatted, and relieved herself near the wall. That done, she took her best guess at west and resumed creeping along to the steady sound of plastisteel chain clicking.
“Ugh,” muttered Althea. “I feel like a clock.”
Her agonizingly slow pace made it easy to look around for food, water, or anything she might use to destroy the binders—though she didn’t have much hope of finding a tool up to the task out here. Little in the Badlands would defeat big city magic. Once, she’d seen a raider who had a magic sword. Or, at the time, she had assumed it magic. All the raiders did, too. Its blade looked like pale blue glass, but it could cut even metal with ease.
A Zero police had a similar blade, only the size of a knife instead of a sword. The woman had tried to explain it to her as being something called Nano, definitely not magic. Swords or knives shouldn’t cut metal so easily. If the big city had blades that could do that, their handcuffs would probably survive anything.
She repeatedly told herself that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life taking teeny steps. It would be stupid to think the big city people would make permanent handcuffs. They had to know a way to open them. The learning machine responded to her talking, so she stopped shuffling along and stared down at her feet.
“Get off me!”
Nothing happened.
“Get off me… please?”
The binders ignored her.
“Open? Abierta? Alejarse de mí! Go away!”
When they refused to listen, she sighed and continued walking as best she could. This place had to have been a huge city in the Before-Time. Not as big as the bad place in the west, but still massive. In the distance to the north, northwest, and south, the skeletal remains of ancient high-rise buildings still stood like the walls of an enormous room. The area right around her had been flattened, most of the buildings pulverized to dust and foundations. Likely, many, many years had passed since the destruction, as windblown dirt and silt had filled in most of the basements, reducing the buildings to mere silhouettes of rectangles or squares.
The majority of roads remained visible, providing a relatively easy to follow path.
At a mild uptick in the wind, Althea folded her arms across her chest and shivered. Her plain white dress had been comfortable back home in Querq, but here, it left her somewhat chilly. The breeze whistling in and around the distant monoliths filled the air with an eerie song of mourning.
Total desolation in all directions bewildered her. She’d never before seen such a complete absence of life. Even when roaming the desert, there had always been creatures. Squealers, millipedes, scorpions, flying insects, wild dogs… As hungry as she was, she might try to kill a squealer, despite their being adorable. Some people claimed the giant fuzzy critters had once been rabbits while others called them ‘prairie dogs from hell.’ For the most part, they left people alone unless attacked, but farmers hated them. A pack of squealers could destroy an entire crop in days.
She’d eaten lots of grilled squealer in her life, but she didn’t feel confident in her ability to kill one… especially without a weapon. Also, it bothered her to murder something cute. If someone else had already done so, consuming the cooked meat didn’t bother her since the animal was already dead.
A faint laugh seemed to come from all around, no doubt The Many found it amusing for her to pity an animal almost everyone considered a shoot-on-sight vermin. Or maybe he simply enjoyed her being angry and frustrated and lonely. Watching her struggle to travel while hobbled had to be filling him with joy.
She emitted a faint snarl and threw off a pulse of ‘go away.’ The Many always receded from her whenever she did that. No sign of him manifested, nor did any disembodied voices say a word.
For hours, she shuffled along as fast as she could tolerate, creeping past cars so old and rusted they’d disintegrated to a mere suggestion of frames. Every so often, she reached a building that remained standing, but they held only piles of debris and junk. Numerous skeletons also littered the area, many sprawled out on the ground as if they’d been running away from whatever killed them. Most had rotted to the point of dried bones, but two—both in the piecemeal armor of raiders—appeared more recently killed.
She veered off course to examine the closest body. The corpse had been there long enough to leave it unclear as to whether it had been a man or woman. A hole about four inches across went straight through the middle of the chest, the interior edges burned to charcoal.
“Eep!” She gawked. “What magic did that?”
Once the initial shock of such an unusual, ghastly wound wore off, Althea squatted beside the body and poked at the hole. She pictured Kate making a stream of fire like water out of a hose, but that would have burned his whole body—not only the inside of a big hole. That woman who could create fire out of thin air came the closest to what she could imagine inflicting a hurt like this. She prodded the area some more, thinking about the people that Aaron shot at the place called Starport. He had a strange gun that made lines of blue light in the air. That gun left wounds like this, but they’d been much smaller. That pee-hillips tool she’d found would barely have fit inside those holes.
Accepting that she would not understand this, she searched the body for anything useful. His clothing and armor had been horribly fouled. The large pouch on his belt contained small animal bones and a gummy, rancid black paste, likely the decomposed remains of baked squirrel or something similar. A broken bow lay on the street by his hand, six crude arrows in a belt quiver, and an ancient, scratched-to-hell knife in a sheath. She took the knife and tested the edge with her thumb. It didn’t have the least bit of sharpness anymore, basically a flat piece of metal.
With a sigh, she tossed it, stood, and resumed baby-stepping west.
Shortly after the sun crested the apex of the sky, she spotted a patch of green plants ahead in a suspiciously rectangular formation. Hope bloomed in time with a huge growl from her stomach. Excitement made her bunny-hop again for extra speed. Soon, she stopped at the edge of a small garden where a thick layer of rotting vegetation lay on the ground beneath out-of-control vegetables and weeds that had been left untended for years. Still, she spotted a few okay-looking cucumbers and helped herself, savaging two before wiping her mouth on the back of her arm and continuing to look around.
Like a little dog, she crouched and dug at the ground by familiar green tufts, unearthing several carrots, which she also devoured. After eating herself stuffed, she sat back to rest and rubbed her sore ankles, commanding her skin to repair itself.
Faint hissing came from deeper within the garden.
Curious, she made her way toward the sound, moving somewhat like a gorilla, crouched, using her hands as well as hopping forward. Instead of the snake she expected, the noise came from a metal pipe jutting up from the ground, made of several joints and valves bolted together. Water sprayed out from the seams as well as several valves. Three improvised hoses ran from it into the garden in different directions.
“Ooh!”
Althea hurried over, put her face by a valve port that had no hose, and twisted the handle. A modestly strong blast of water shot into her mouth. It tasted like metal and rubber, but after a day and a half with nothing to drink, she didn’t care. She eased back on the valve to slow the water from blast to flow, gulping down mouthful after mouthful. When she couldn’t drink anymore, she sat on the ground to rest. Moments later, she got the idea to smear vegetable muck around her ankle, hoping it might make her skin slippery enough to get the binders off. Alas, the metal ring had been closed too tight to fit over her heel.
“Mierda!” She huffed. “Why isn’t there anyone here?”
As if in response to her question, an odd noise arose in the distance that she’d never heard before, another unfamiliar thing like that strange burned wound. Despite its source seeming far away, the noise reminded her of a gnat flying into her ear. Her usual curiosity didn’t poke her. For no reason she could pinpoint, the urge to avoid the source of that noise came over her.
The buzzing grew louder, less like an insect and more like whirring.
Old instincts pushed Althea flat to the ground, and she crawled in among the vegetables, joining the compost and bugs. The whirring came closer and closer, eventually whooshing by at a speed like a raider buggy, only much quieter. She lay still despite bugs crawling over her face, legs, and arms. She kept herself motionless until the strange sound faded entirely away… and then for another minute.
Althea pushed herself up to kneel, brushed bugs from her body, and wobbled to her feet. She considered taking her dress off to make a bag out of it so she could carry vegetables with her, but decided against that due to the chill in the air. This place had nothing useful for carrying water, and enough food that she figured she could last several weeks. But, staying here at this garden might not help her get home. If the chance existed that someone could find her here, it would be worth waiting, since she would make much better progress being carried even if whoever showed up had no way to free her.
But… this place appeared so desolate and abandoned…
A group of huts stood a short distance farther west from the garden. Walls of old billboards, appliances, and scrap metal suggested they’d been built by Scrags or settlers more recently than the Before-Time. They, too, had hundreds of holes in them. So many, she imagined an army of raiders standing there shooting at the structures for hours. Why would anyone waste so many bullets like that? Better they wasted them on huts than shot actual people, but still… something about this destroyed village unsettled her.
Worried, she spent a few minutes shuffling over to the nearest one and pulled aside the refrigerator door serving as the home’s entrance. Two skeletons lay on the ground inside, near a primitive mattress. One of the dead still clutched a crude pipe gun, a weapon that fired one bullet at a time by means of a pull flap on the back end attached with stretchy tubes. Althea had no interest in arming herself, but seeing the gun there confused her. Raiders never left weapons behind, even bad ones like that. She crept around the shack long enough to take a big coffee can and a large metal tray, to which she tied a length of wire, turning it into a pull sled.
Over the next hour, she shuffled around the huts, gathering another coffee can and one plastic bottle with a cap, which she filled with water and set on the tray before loading it up with carrots and cucumbers. Dragging the tray along was impractical, but it beat having no provisions at all. All the huts contained bones, dead long enough for them to fall apart. In the sixth hut she checked, she discovered a hatchet.
With an eager chirp, she sat on the ground, held the hatchet up over her head in both hands, and chopped at the chain. Metal struck metal with a clack. For a second, she let out a cry of joy at the apparently severed chain… but as soon as she tried to move, she realized she’d only embedded a link into the dirt.
Annoyed, she took a swing at the band around her ankle instead. The blade glanced off and gashed a deep slice across the top of her right foot.
“Eep!” Althea gasped.
She commanded her blood-presence to stay inside, then sealed the cut, rubbing the spot for a moment while whimpering. “Okay, bad idea.” She grumbled, fidgeting at the binders. “By the time I walk home, I’m gonna be old enough for wifeing Den… or that other thing that looks like wifeing but isn’t.”
Chin on her knees, arms around her legs, Althea sat there for a little while trying to imagine how something could be ‘like’ wifeing but not awful. Eventually, she decided that maybe Father had been right after all. Perhaps she couldn’t understand it because she hadn’t grown old enough. The same way really small kids didn’t know that they needed to go to a specific spot to pee while inside a village, perhaps a girl her age couldn’t understand the ‘making love not being awful’ thing.
That made the most sense of anything, and she trusted Father’s opinion.
Overcome by a jolt of homesickness, Althea bowed her head and fought hard not to cry. It wouldn’t do any good out here. Tapping into her deep desire to go home, she sent out another psionic beacon in hopes of letting Father and Karina know she remained alive and did all she could to go home as fast as possible.
She sighed at the binders in frustration, but refused to give up. After tossing the hatchet aside, she got up and hobbled out to the pull sled loaded with veggies and water. The garden probably didn’t have as much usable food as it appeared to despite its size, considering it had been untended for so long. Staying here wouldn’t be smart. Especially with that whirring whatever.
Althea gathered the wire in her hand and turned in place, gazing out at the distant ruins of the Before-Time city. She focused on thoughts of Querq, trying to feel which way she had to go. Around and around she turned until a tingle scratched across her chest. Nothing physically touched her, so that had to be the clairvoy ants talking again.
With a smile, she faced that direction and trudged onward.
10
Riding the Ospi
Walking while taking micro steps brought Althea to the point she cried out of sheer frustration.
She’d given up being angry over her present situation, and didn’t feel particularly frightened either. But walking so damn slow irritated her like one of the super small kids in Querq yelling, “Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom,” incessantly for an hour.
At least with a two-year-old, a Suggestion of ‘stop that’ worked. Dead things—like binders—didn’t respond to psionic abilities.
Around the time the sun began to turn orange in the western sky, she encountered a relatively large building that had somehow survived whatever destroyed the rest of the area. It stood next to another, equally large but narrower building. All the windows were broken, and the walls had numerous big holes, but the two structures both looked much more intact than anything else in the area.
Accompanied by the irritating clicking, Althea crept over to the nearest of the two buildings and peered in via a hole in the wall. The place smelled of wet wood and mold. Most of the inside consisted of big open space. A wide concourse went to the left with several different counters. Straight ahead, about twenty feet of dingy brown carpet led to a short stairway down to an area full of chairs and bizarre machines. Past that, thirty long strips of shiny floor spanned the rest of the distance to the back wall. Each strip ended at a mouth-like opening, some of which had teeth, others didn’t. At the closer side of the strips, shelves held spherical objects roughly the size of a person’s head. Most were black, though a few had different colors. A big heap of white muck and rotten wood had collapsed down from the ceiling in the middle of the room.
Curious, she left her pull sled outside and hopped in the hole. First, she micro-stepped across the damp, smelly carpet, jumped down the four steps, and hopped over to the racks of strange spheres, wondering if they might be fruit. She grasped the first one she came close to and tried to pick it up, but her hands slipped off the unexpectedly heavy object. Althea tried again, this time lifting it with some effort. It weighed like stone, but had somehow become completely smooth on the outside except for three holes. Its weight made her think she might be able to drop it on the binders and smash the chain, but she chickened out. The orb was too big and couldn’t hit only the chain. She’d hurt herself if she dropped it on her ankles.
With a grunt, she replaced the strange smooth stone on the rack with the others, then crept over to one of the paths. The light brown part of the floor looked like hundreds of tiny wood strips that had cracked apart from each other, creating a rough, painful surface. At this distance, the ‘teeth’ at the far end didn’t look so much like a mouth anymore. Groups of wooden pegs stood in triangular formations inside the dark openings. A pair of rounded trenches lined each side of the long wooden paths. She tilted her head, gazing on in total confusion as to what the Ancients could have possibly done here. A drawing on the wall at the far end above the openings depicted one of those weird round stones crashing into the white pegs and knocking them over.
