Atlantis Reprise

by James Axler

  ‘Affinity says you shit fighters. Mebbe teach you otherwise if you stay calm now,’ Jak said calmly.

  Philo felt bile rise in his throat and choked it back as he nodded. He was so scared that he almost vomited. Jak wondered how he’d managed to stay alive thus far before letting him free, watching as the young man stayed hunkered down until he had, in fact, vomited away his fear. Having done that, he meekly followed when Jak indicated for him to rise and follow.

  Paris and Jason had proved just as easy for Ryan and Krysty to overpower. Both had been rooted to the spot, wondering what to do next, when they were approached from the rear. Realizing that these opponents weren’t Nightcrawlers—although being unaware of Affinity’s association with them—they were merely grateful to be allowed to live.

  Mildred and Doc felt a little slighted in the circumstances, if truth be told, with neither having the opportunity to engage with the Memphis sec. They stuck close to Affinity, and the three of them forged ahead, looking for any others who may, to the best of their knowledge, be lurking in the undergrowth.

  With the dense cover, it was momentarily difficult for the companions to ascertain how successful their mission had been, but when J.B. and Jak moved back toward the centralized position of the group, it soon became apparent that the four-man sec force had been neutralized.

  Mark was rueful and not inclined to be graceful at such an easy capture, although it soon became clear that he and Philo had been aware that the companions were no threat.

  ‘Mebbe that explains why so crap,’ Jak said, his matter-of-fact tone belying the bluntness of his words.

  Mark shook his head. ‘No, I reckon you would have had us anyway. Look at yesterday’s mission. One lost, three wounded out of eight. Not the kind of ratio that speaks of success.’

  ‘But I was not lost, Mark. I am alive, and I have possibly found us allies in our fight.’

  Mark eyed the companions. ‘They could teach us much. But you were, to all practical purpose, lost, Affinity. Can you not see that? To us, it was as though you had been killed by the Crawlers.’

  ‘I see your point, friend,’ Ryan said, adding the last word pointedly. ‘Your people were in combat, and they didn’t do as well as you feel they should. They returned without Affinity, here. If we had been these Nightcrawlers you face, then the boy would be chilled meat.’

  ‘Exactly. And we lose people every time they attack. We aren’t that populous. The longer things continue, the more we face extinction. I think your help would be like a prayer to the old ones that has been answered.’

  ‘You know, I’m getting a little tired about the way everyone sees us as some kind of holy sec force,’ Ryan commented wryly. ‘Long, long story, mebbe I’ll tell you about it sometime,’ he added on seeing the sec chief’s puzzled expression. ‘First thing we need to do is get back to your ville. Mebbe then we can settle and discuss things. We might be useful to you, and you might be to us. We’ll see.’

  With the Memphis people relieved to see Affinity still alive, and the companions glad that they didn’t have to fight so soon after the previous night’s battle, it was with a feeling of elation that the expanded party made its way to the ville. As they walked, Affinity explained to his people where the companions had come from and where they were originally headed.

  ‘That is something that I find strange,’ Mark commented when Affinity had finished. ‘The fact that you came through the exclusion zone.’

  ‘Exclusion zone?’ Mildred questioned. It was a strange, old-fashioned phrase, the like of which she hadn’t heard since before the nukecaust.

  Mark nodded emphatically. ‘Indeed. That area in which no animal life can exist has been called as such since before many generations. Part of the old legends say that our ancestors deliberately poisoned the earth in a belt surrounding the ville and the adjacent area when they knew that skydark was coming. It was intended to keep out any who may wish to intrude and take shelter or solace during the great darkness. To protect our people from outside interference. But I wonder… It is, after all, just as effective at keeping us in.’

  ‘Surely there have been others before us who have come through there, people who, like us, have stumbled upon it by accident,’ Krysty stated.

  Mark eyed her shrewdly. ‘There have been some traders who have made efforts to find new places to trade. But it takes an interesting kind of an accident to just—as you say—stumble upon it,’ he said gently.

  ‘Mebbe we just have a lot of accidents,’ J.B. muttered dryly.

  ‘No matter. This is something you can discuss with Lemur when you meet him. For even if you choose not to stay and help us, you’ll still need guides to take you to the coast. The Crawlers are everywhere. They frighten us, and we stay because we have nowhere else to go. They frighten the birds and animals, and they leave, never to return. Perhaps that will give you measure of why guidance will be necessary—’

  ‘It sure as hell explains a lot,’ Mildred murmured.

  Mark indicated agreement before continuing. ‘Of course, if you choose to assist us, then perhaps you will perforce negate the need for guides.’

  Ryan chuckled. ‘You’re not giving that one up easily. It’d be easier if you didn’t all talk like Doc, too. Right, Doc?’

  The old man looked up, his face blank, as though distracted from a chain of thought. ‘Hmm? Why yes, dear boy, of course,’ he muttered before returning to his preoccupation.

  Chapter Eight

  Their journey to the ville of Memphis proceeded with little event and few words taking place after the initial exchange. On both sides, there was much to ponder, and the companions all, in their own ways, felt that silence would be the best path until they had a better grasp of what was going on in this isolated area.

  As they approached, there were more sounds and the occasional bird or animal call to signify that there was, perhaps, a feeling of greater security surrounding the ville. Strange, given the fact that the sec chief felt his own people weren’t up to the task of defending the ville. Among themselves, the companions wondered if the wildlife was really wild or captive and bred for food.

  Memphis itself was made up of the ruins of a suburb. Mildred still maintained her feeling that it wasn’t the Trenton of which Affinity had spoken, but as they emerged to the ruins of what had once been a freeway access, now overgrown apart from a desultory run of blacktop into nowhere, its progress broken by a shift in the earth that had swallowed whatever came before, she could see why he had made this assumption. Over the top of the desolated ribbon, hanging at an obtuse angle and obscured for the most part by creeping vines and the twisting branches of mutie trees that had climbed the rusting metal structure, there was the partial remains of a lane indicator sign. The only word that was visible through the grime, heat-blasted metal and rampant foliage was Trenton. As they were in New Jersey, it may have been an announcement that the suburb was the next exit, or it may have told the weary motorists of a time long forgotten that there was a certain distance until that destination was obtained. It was now impossible to tell. But to the people of Memphis, it was a landmark that defined where they lived.

  As they left the overgrown forested area and entered the remains of the old suburb, the foliage began to recede. Yet, among the blasted and flattened two-story houses and rows of burned-out, razed shopfronts and minimalls that had once served the residents, there were many signs that a postnukecaust mutie nature had attempted to take back and remold the land. Where entire streets had fallen victim to fire, earth movement and heavy bombing, there was little sign that there had ever been anything remotely approaching civilization. The undergrowth and the strong, adapting and surviving trees had swept across the scorched earth, annexing the territory like an invading army and driving out all signs of a previous life. It could have looked this way for millennia, betrayed only by the occasional outposts of a ruined civilizations: houses and shops that had stayed upright, a strip of tar macadam road that had stubbornly resisted the forces
beneath, and hadn’t split asunder to reveal green life thrusting up from below as it had so easily with the paved sidewalks.

  The farther they traveled into the suburb, the more that civilization began to win over nature, no matter how strong and mutated. After a quarter hour of walking, the sounds of life grew louder in the surrounding silence and the buildings became firmer, stronger and better preserved.

  As they turned a corner, walking past an old shopfront that was now boarded and painted in white and red, covered with symbols that looked like some kind of pictogram, two men in robes stepped out from cover.

  ‘Mark, what is occurring? Who are these people, and—By the sacred stars, it’s Affinity!’

  The sec man’s questions were lost in a joyous greeting as he embraced the young man they had thought lost. Mark explained briefly what had occurred, and they passed on, leaving the two sec men to take cover once more.

  ‘They will be partway through their watch, and pray to the old ones that it is a quiet one,’ Mark commented.

  ‘They just sit there, they don’t patrol?’ J.B. asked.

  Mark allowed the briefest of smiles to cross his visage, as though the Armorer had joked with him. ‘You have seen the Crawlers at work, and you have seen our men. They have the best of intentions, but what do you think would work best—to aimlessly wander and be ambushed or to take up a secure position and observe for movement?’

  ‘True enough,’ the Armorer replied after barely a moment’s contemplation. ‘So how far out do you place these sec posts?’

  ‘As far out as cover will permit. Many of the buildings past that point—’ he indicated the direction from which they had come ‘—are too broken, too derelict to be of much use. All the same, it is still a fair distance from where we maintain our population.’

  Almost as if to illustrate his point, they kept walking for another four or five blocks, with little sign of life except the increasing noise. Seeing their puzzled expressions, he explained. ‘We keep our ville as secure as possible. Atlantis is better trained in combat than we, and so it suits our purpose better. Of course, it could be argued that we have done naught except to exchange one jail for another, but at least it is a jail of our own design.’

  His point was amply demonstrated as they turned another block to be confronted with a wall. One constructed of building rubble, old wags, pieces of sidewalk and roadway…anything that could have been used and taken from the surrounding ruins. It was poorly made, and constructed by people who hadn’t the time or expertise to fashion their materials. From the top of the wall, which followed the line of the streets and so disappeared around corners and out of sight, there were poles obtruding from the junkyard construction. Between the poles were lengths of wire strung with metal strips and crudely fashioned bells. Anyone who attempted to climb the wall—which was only a few yards high at its peaks—would undoubtedly attract a lot of attention to themselves.

  Mark grinned wryly as he caught their expressions. ‘Crude but effective. In Atlantis we are taught to fashion and build slowly, and with care. Aesthetically, this jars with all of us, I think, and yet it serves its purpose, which is all we require when having to build quickly, with little manpower and only the materials that come to hand.’

  Upon reflection, the veracity of this statement became more apparent. The wall was crude to look at, yet the detritus of the ruined suburb had been employed to fashion a construct that had a greater solidity than at first appeared. Each part of the junkyard defense had been slotted and placed so that the constituent elements interlocked into a fortress that had strength shot through its length.

  Its hurried and seemingly slapdash construction was further belied by the sight that greeted them as they walked around another old suburban block. Set in the middle of the wall, with the junk flowing over the top in a smoothly interlocking design, was a gateway. This showed signs of having more time spent on it and gave truth to the training that the ville inhabitants had received before their voluntary exile from Atlantis. Slabs of masonry taken from the surrounding area had been fashioned into an arch that was rubbed smooth and engraved with pictograms similar to those the companions had seen on the painted sec post.

  Within this arch had been set double doors of beaten metal, engraved and etched with another set of symbols. The stark design and simple beauty of the arch and the doors contrasted sharply with the visual clamor of the junkyard wall. And somehow they had to have a spy mechanism within them—unless somehow word had got back to the ville in another way, as the doors opened smoothly on their approach, and they were greeted by a group of men and women, all clad in the same white robes trimmed with red as those they had already met.

  ‘I don’t reckon much on their fashion sense,’ Mildred remarked quietly to J.B.

  ‘Must mean something…but what?’ he replied.

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe we’ll find out before too long.’

  The companions and the accompanying sec party were swept into the ville on a tide of goodwill, the doors being quickly closed behind them a reminder of the dangers that still lurked outside. Inside, however, was another matter.

  The ville was well ordered and clean. As they were taken through the streets, the companions noticed that the buildings and streets were well-maintained and clean. The frontages had all been painted white with red trim, and there were white walls filled with red pictograms. The lack of any other color was noticeable. In other villes, even those that were well-maintained, there were vestiges of other colors, either from decoration or merely from the materials used to make the ville. But here it seemed as though every other color had been carefully and deliberately expunged, replaced with the white and red that dominated.

  The streets were sparsely populated, suggesting that few were able to make an effective escape from the parent ville of Atlantis…and that the Nightcrawlers had been successful in snatching back some of those who were careless once free.

  ‘This is an…interesting place,’ Doc said carefully to Affinity as they walked through the streets. ‘You seem to be extremely keen, as a people on the idea of everything being red and white.’

  ‘Those are the only things we know,’ the young man replied disingenuously. ‘It is all we have been taught since first we were born. So it was only natural that we should wish to extend the motif once we found a place of our own.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Doc said, nodding blandly. In his mind he had reached a few conclusions of his own as to the meaning of the color scheme, tying up a few loose ends from the information he had elicited. There was purpose to this and he was certain that silence on his part right now would allow more information to drop with more ease than if he were to press matters.

  By this time they had reached the center of the ville, and as they approached an old shopfront that had been carefully bricked over to turn it into a dwelling, a man and a woman came out to greet them. They were a little older than any that the companions had encountered so far, and this seniority was confirmed by the deference shown to them by the sec party and Affinity.

  ‘These are the people we thought were the Nightcrawlers?’ asked the man. He had tightly cropped, curly black hair, with a beard as neatly trimmed. He was short and stocky, but the way in which he held himself made him appear taller. The woman with him had long auburn hair tied back simply from a narrow-faced, almost milk-white-pale skin. Her eyes were focused on the companions and she had a gaze that suggested intensity of purpose. Together, they seemed a formidable team.

  ‘That they are,’ Affinity said excitedly. ‘They say that they will help us—’

  ‘Fireblast! Don’t be so damn sure,’ Ryan interjected heatedly. ‘I said that we’d hear what you had to say. We have no fight with anyone unless they want it,’ he added, eyeing Mark just to make sure that the sec chief, who shot him a glance, got the message.

  ‘That seems fair,’ the stocky man said, noticing the eye contact between the two men. ‘Come, break bread with us, and I will tell you about our
ville.’

  ‘We’ve already heard something about who you are,’ Ryan said carefully, ‘but the offer of a meal will never go amiss.’

  RYAN WANTED to know more of these people. If he was headed for the coast, and the ville of Atlantis had sec men who would make this simple objective difficult, he wanted to know their strengths and weaknesses. The inhabitants of Memphis could tell him this. It would also give his people a chance to rest up, clean up, and eat something a little better than the self-heats to which they were now reduced.

  Thus it was that a few hours later the companions found themselves in the dining room of the building. It was painted in red and white throughout, with white sculptures as decoration on simple wooden tables that had, like the chairs, been stripped down to the natural grain after being carved. They were made of a variety of woods, which suggested that these people were adept at adjusting to their surroundings.

  Despite the fact that he appeared to be what passed for baron in Memphis, their host helped in the preparation and serving of the meal, and those who would in other circumstances be servants sat at table and ate with them.

  The food was simple: meats and vegetables pan-cooked in spices, with fruits preserved in spirit for dessert. They were given a choice of water or a thick, sweet wine to drink. Despite the fact that they lived in perpetual struggle, they were obviously able to farm to a certain degree. An impression reinforced when their host told them that he couldn’t remember the last time an enterprising trade convoy had tried to make it through their territory.

  When the meal was finished, their host asked them how they came to be in the territory. Ryan told him what he had told Affinity and what Mark had gleaned: the basic truth, glossing over the mat-trans and how they managed to move across vast tracts of land. In this version of the story, as with so many others, recalcitrant wags or beasts had left them on foot just before they were discovered.