Strange Medicine

by Jim Stein

  STRANGE

  MEDICINE

  Jim Stein

  Legends Walk Series

  Strange Tidings

  Strange Omens

  Strange Medicine

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are purely fictitious and stem from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance or similarity to actual people, places, and events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 James Stein

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-7335629-2-8

  Print ISBN: 978-1-7335629-3-5

  First printing, 2019

  Jagged Sky Books

  P.O. Box #254

  Bradford, Pa 16701

  Cover art & design by Kris Norris

  Edited by Caroline Miller

  Dedicated to Marley the muse. Without her hard work behind the scenes there would be no Max in my Legends Walk series. Happy 10th birthday to the Greatest of Danes!

  Please consider supporting your local canine rescue organization by fostering, adopting, or making a donation. We wouldn’t trade Marley’s years of goofiness, love, and devotion for anything in the world.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to all the people who helped make my Legends Walk series a reality.

  Claudia, John, and Joncine for Beta reading and catching so many embarrassing mistakes.

  Kris Norris for the wonderful cover art on all three books.

  Caroline Miller for editing books 2 & 3.

  Melanie Billings and The Wild Rose Press for editing and producing book 1.

  All those who have jumped in to leave those early reviews so critical to new authors.

  My readers, past and future. It’s all pointless without someone to enjoy the stories. Hopefully I’ve given you a few hours away from the stresses of life.

  The Native American nations. I hope this work of fiction sparks an interest in the rich heritage, history, and beliefs of the nation’s First Peoples. Several non-profit organizations and online resources are dedicated to preserving important cultural, spiritual, and linguistic aspects of the tribes. That is where you will find the true heroes and legends.

  Visit https://JimSteinBooks.com to join my reader community, find bonus material, and sign up for my infrequent newsletter.

  Prologue

  1. Boots on Ground

  2. A Great Divide

  3. Teaming up

  4. Firespeak

  5. Dreamspeak

  6. Moving Day

  7. When Worlds Collide

  8. The Band Plays on

  9. Up the River

  10. Down on the Farm

  11. Rearview Mirror

  12. The Source of the Problem

  13. The More the Merrier

  14. Crossing Over

  15. Powerful Memories

  16. Welcoming Committee

  17. No Picnic

  18. Abide the Dark

  19. Wasting Time

  20. Glimpse the Dragon

  21. Doppelganger

  22. Guiding Light

  23. A Dying Land

  24. Mirage

  25. Helping Hands

  26. Double Dreaming

  27. Writing on the Walls

  28. Reunited

  29. A Shell

  30. The Journey Home

  31. Home at Last

  Epilogue

  About the author

  Prologue

  C

  ORRUPTION AND greed spread across the land. With a heavy heart Sotuknang came to the Spider Woman. “Take those still with songs in their heart to the river and seal them into hollow reeds. You will save them when the waters destroy this world.”

  - Excerpt from Legends of the Third World

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  1. Boots on Ground

  T

  HE HILLSIDE across from the moldering loading dock shifted and shimmered as a living carpet of muddy green flowed down the dune.

  “Here they come!” I looked to where my sister and Pete hustled the refugees onto an old school bus.

  “Everyone’s accounted for.” Pete gave me a thumbs up and scowled at the oncoming horde from beneath the mop of straw he called hair. “Ed, we’re out of here. Don’t get stung. Okay?”

  “A little water will turn them around.” I waved away his concern, but frowned as I turned back and flipped on my gear.

  Powerful bass guitar ripped from the speakers. We didn’t necessarily need external music, but it made the job more fun. Keyboard and guitar joined the opening lyrics, bringing back my smile.

  Ya wanna race me,

  I wanna race you,

  Fire ‘em up, let ‘em roll, there’s nothing more to do.

  “Now that’s music I can work with!” Quinn popped up on the other side of our makeshift enclosure.

  Her tilted brown eyes gleamed behind dark curls artistically plastered to high cheekbones. By contrast the heat and sweat turned my wavy black hair into a deranged kraken with wet tentacles attacking my neck and regal nose. Quinn’s skin was a fine Asiatic bronze compared to my sunbaked native olive. We made a good team. Cool blue magic curled around her right hand, while her left rested on the valve to the building’s fire main.

  Of course Quinn could work with one of the A-Chord’s biggest hits and her own bass beat. The crossover song focused both Fire and Water elemental spells. I had no affinity for the latter, but water would drive away the horde of green-brown scorpions.

  Most of the monstrosities that scurried, slithered, or flew in from the shifting sands were dull brown, dingy green, or black, colors devoid of joy. The dune itself swelled and shifted, propelling the nasties on a wave that devoured the street just behind the departing bus. New Philadelphia was supposed to be a safe haven from the eroding world. Set in the suburbs of its decaying namesake, it had been one since I was a kid. But in recent months our oasis had turned nightmare.

  “Let them have it!” I said.

  Scorpions didn’t like getting wet. Thanks to Quinn’s insane mother, she could control water, an ability my half-siblings and I had not inherited from Kokopelli. Unfortunately, we were running the girl ragged, and there were other…things that didn’t mind moisture. So far, Earth, Fire, or Spirit elemental magic took care of those not balked by water, but sooner or later something we couldn’t handle would make an appearance. Puzzling out where these creatures came from and how to stop them was a full-time job.

  Quinn grinned, whipped back her long chestnut hair, and opened the valve. Her power spiraled in my magical Sight, sucking up the gushing water. The stream swirled out, shooting tighter and farther than a simple firehose. The lead bugs shifted and flowed back over themselves to stay out of the stream. But rather than simply soaking the ground in front of them, the water curled up on either side, blocking all directions except a direct retreat.

  “Sending them running is just a Band-Aid,” Quinn said through gritted teeth. “I wish these little bastards burned.”

  “You and me both.”

  My hands itched to let loose with a blast of my own. Not only would the water quench my Fire spell, the damned things were resistant to the strongest element at my command. A concentrated spell would broil the poisonous critters in a second or two, but nowhere near fast enough to deal with the numbers that swarmed out of the desolate sands dividing New Philly. For now, herding them back to wherever they came from was our best solution.

  With her spell well underway, I shut down the pumping music and gathered my gear. We needed to haul a
ss back to headquarters. All too often, people lingered after one of these little encounters and found themselves cut off by shifting sand. At first it seemed only an inconvenience, since few cars had four-wheel drive, but driving wasn’t the only problem. Even when the stretch of encroaching desert was whisper thin, we’d lost people—literally lost them. Witnesses would see someone tromping out across the dune, a little blowing sand, and then nothing. Mr. Conti kept records down at the radio station and had coordinated with the far side of town until communications went down.

  “Ed?” The uncharacteristic note of panic had me dumping my equipment into the car and sprinting the few yards back to the loading dock. “We’ve got a new one!”

  “Ah crap.”

  Scorpions roiled over one another to avoid the water, but the mass split apart, leaving ten feet of open sand halfway up the dune. Something swelled beneath the surface. Long brown spikes jutted up, much like the spikey green plants that foreshadowed each wave of desert. But these shifted as they slid toward us. Quinn sent a jet of water straight into its path and the spikes slipped out of sight.

  “Water wins again!” she crowed.

  Our smiles slipped as the ground erupted in a spray of sand and dirt. Segmented armor shot upward, a dark column supporting a shining brown head topped with the spines of a lionfish. I had no doubt the bone-white tips of each dripped with venom. Black horns or pinchers bracketed either side of a flat head below shiny black eyes. I’d dealt too much with the mythical horned serpent and couldn’t say for sure if the ten-foot-tall creature was snake or centipede. Those stubby little protrusions at each seam in the armor could be legs folded flat or simply the joints between scaly plates. A bug might be just as immune to fire as the damned scorpions, but heat would cook a reptile.

  “Stop admiring it and do something!”

  I snapped my jaw shut, erred on the side of caution, and reached for Earth. Crushing this monstrosity seemed best, and music was the hammer that drove my magic. The heavy beat from Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” called to the power swirling in my core. Elemental Earth rose on the solemn beat, flowing from my outstretched hands into the shattered hole the creature emerged from. Under the sand, sturdy Pennsylvania rock softened and flowed around the lower section of the snake-insect as it rose high to strike. I clenched my hands, drawing the ring tight and slamming the stone shut to cut the thing in half. But the hide was impossibly strong. A high pitched squeal jabbed ice picks into my ears as the upper half slapped back and forth trying to get free.

  “It’s a tough one.” I dredged up more power, pulling in granite and quartz to keep it from wriggling out of my grasp. Its slick shell repelled the clinging rock. Sharp ridges formed in the thickening tunnel clamped around what now was clearly the chitin of an insect. “Get to the car.”

  I tied off the spell, anchoring it in bedrock to hold the centipede while I sprinted after Quinn. When the magic was spent or the creature broke free, the residual power would drain safely back into the earth rather than backlash on me. Earth magic in particular took a toll on the caster, and I’d learned the hard way about the pain of an ungrounded spell.

  “Go, go, go!” Quinn slammed the passenger door shut as I slipped behind the wheel.

  I slapped my ancient Toyota RAV4 into drive, and we shot through the drifts accumulating along the warehouse. Blowing sand darkened the sky and intersection ahead as the frantically whipping centipede shrank in my rearview mirror. Several humps formed behind the trapped creature as more dark heads crested the surface. I concentrated on the bit of blacktop peeking through the wind-driven drifts trying to cut us off.

  One last blast had me flipping on the headlights. The tires grabbed, and I floored the accelerator. Just like that we were clear. I took the corner too fast and lost the right mirror on a streetlamp as we bounced off the curb. The swirling maelstrom dropped behind and settled into eerie stillness now that its prey had escaped.

  The writhing creature and its companions stood out as dark strands against the sand mounded around the warehouse, a new dune claiming another block. Spiny green fronds already clustered along the rusting rail at the near end of the building.

  2. A Great Divide

  “F

  IVE HUNDRED and forty-three.” Mr. Conti shook his head. “We’re still missing so many.”

  Quinn and I found the old man hunkered over the massive city map carpeting our conference table at the radio station. Refugee housing was marked in green along the southern border. The freak desert hemmed us in between the river and ruins of Old Philadelphia. One of the bridges was still passable, but little lay on the Jersey side except the opportunity to hunt up an entirely new place to live.

  Mr. Conti managed the local news station and had been my boss—I supposed he still was. We came home from the A-Chord’s cross-country tour to find the little old Italian dealing with the impossible events transpiring in New Philly. A true believer in magic from the old country, he organized the locals as desert sprang up to cut the city in two—an event that left our small police department and town council floundering on the far side of the divide.

  “How many are on the far side?” I asked.

  “Sheriff Connolly reported nearly half again what we have here before he disappeared and communications tanked.”

  Mr. Conti’s frown brought out deep lines beneath that perpetual gray stubble. His bulbous nose had been baked dark and his eyebrows white from constant exposure to the sun, another byproduct of whatever magical storm brought the sand. We should have been pushing into winter, but the ever-present sun scorched the town by day, while frigid air swept beneath sparkling stars and crystal-clear skies by night.

  “Still no comms?”

  “Everything is down.” The station manager took the blackout as a personal affront. “All frequencies, phones, even shortwave is out. According to Billy and David, the equipment works perfectly, but something interferes.”

  “Like it or not, we might have to move after all.” Billy ducked to get his six-foot-five frame through the glass security doors and join us in Main Line Studio’s lobby-turned-war-room.

  In addition to leading the band from his keyboard, Billy was tops with the station gear and telecommunications. If he and David, our shortwave expert, were stumped, no one else was likely to come up with a solution.

  A wisp of a man with mousy brown hair neatly trimmed to the demanding specifications of a cereal bowl trailed behind the big black man. David had gone from geeky intern and ham radio hobbyist to communications expert. He and our other intern, Hassan, were as much a part of the team as any of us, except the latter had been lost in a routine rescue just last week. Not dead—we hoped—just gone. So many gone, but we can’t give up.

  “We still have three neighborhoods to pull in,” the boss said. “The sand accelerates. I dislike it, but we need to move everyone out by the end of the week.”

  “There are new monsters to deal with.” I hated bringing bad news. “Centipedes the size of an anaconda. A half dozen or so came in with the scorpions down by the old trucking terminal.”

  “Which is now Sahara central,” Quinn added.

  The doors swung open again, and the last two band members tromped in. Jinx was thirty with a shaved head and round hipster glasses sitting askew on his narrow nose. Our vocalist and lead guitarist didn’t look nearly as stylish as when on tour, especially with his normally neat red beard growing out in all directions, torn jeans, and a rumpled, sweat-stained shirt. Charles, the band’s new percussionist, wore a similar outfit, but managed to make it look tailored. His clothes hugged a trim, muscular form and there wasn’t a perspiration stain in sight. Beneath a squared-off buzz of black hair, piercing blue eyes raked the room and settled on the big clock over the receptionist’s desk.

  “We’re missing people.” Charles addressed Mr. C as he consulted his watch with a precise flick of the wrist.

  “The other leads will be here,” the boss said, then surprised me. “Edan, I want you to rec
ap our situation after the five o’clock reports. Everyone needs an update on our status and these new creatures you encountered.”

  “Sure, Mr. C.”

  Charles gave me an appraising glare that dripped disapproval. The drummer had pushed for us to use the eight am and five pm reporting structure. In the military he’d found them critical for coordination and tasking. I had to admit the meetings kept everyone on the same sheet of music. We kept them short with people standing in a loose circle so all could hear. Charles tended to dominate the gatherings, and his current expression said he wasn’t thrilled with me running this one.

  Five came and went with people trickling in. I launched the meeting at half past with roll call. We only had two recovery teams, but the meeting space overflowed. Billy represented the band; Meg was our five-foot-four dynamo in charge of operations; and Manny, with his GQ looks and gelled black hair, had elevated himself from being the band’s road manager to corporate liaison and general pain in the ass. With Charles trying to run every meeting, Mr. Conti as our overarching supervisor, and all the usual suspects, we packed twenty-plus sweaty bodies into the studio. I called for verbal reports while the stragglers handed Mr. C written notes.

  “David still has no communications.” Short dark hair slapped Meg’s round face as she shook her head. “Food’s holding out pretty well, though it’s mostly canned. The Easton farm fell to the sands early on and we haven’t heard a word from the Amish since the desert cut us off from north New Philly.”