The Paths Between Worlds

by Paul Antony Jones

  “I think I’m okay,” I said.

  He backed away but stayed close enough that I could reach out to him if needed. I took another step toward the dead swordsman. This time, I was ready for the pain and kept as much weight on my good leg as I could. I took my hand from Albert’s shoulder and walked a couple more steps, Albert shadowing close by. I smiled to myself. My hero. There was still pain but I could walk. I stood by my earlier self-assessment that I wouldn’t be doing much running for a while still, but I’d lucked out and was in better shape than I thought.

  “How you holdin’ up, over there?” Wild Bill called out to me.

  I gave him a thumbs up and even threw in an “I’m fine, pardner,” using my best Clint Eastwood voice. In return, Wild Bill gave me a bemused look before turning his attention back to undressing the archer, which I can assure you looked as weird as it sounds. My attention turned back to the body of the dead swordsman. He looked a little younger than me. His deeply tanned olive skin was already beginning to pale. His eyelids were half closed, his mouth agape showing lightly stained teeth. He had a full beard the same color as his black wavy hair. His beard was twisted into four long braids. Each braid had three colored beads (red, green, and brown) threaded onto it. Even though his eyes were half-closed, I could see they were intensely green. A light blue eyeshadow had been applied to his eyelids and swept across to each temple. The makeup was actually quite scary, creating a mask effect across the upper portion of his head. He had been a good-looking man, I would have even said he was attractive if the little bastard hadn’t tried to kill us. I unbuckled his knife belt then began to undo his armor which was a lot harder than it sounds thanks to some really weird fastenings that took both me and Albert almost a minute to figure out how to release. By the time we were done, I was looking at the body of a young man in his early twenties who would not have looked out of place lounging in a park reading the latest Steven King novel. While his sinewy body was certainly more muscular than my own, he wasn’t that much bigger than me.

  What a stupid waste, I thought.

  A question still nagged at me: why would they want to kill us in the first place? It wasn’t a stretch to think that these two men had been offered the same choice Albert, Chou, Phillip, and I had been given. So why try to kill us all on sight? It made no sense to me. And if this man, who said he was Wild Bill Hickok, hadn’t shown up...

  “Don’t forget his sword,” Wild Bill said, looking approvingly at the pile of armor and underclothes lying at my feet.

  “It’s a scimitar,” Albert said. “I’ll get it.” He quickly located the sword from the undergrowth where it had landed and carried it back and handed it to me—a little reluctantly I noted—pommel first. Surprisingly, the sword was a lot lighter than I expected. I gave it a couple of half-hearted swings in front of me. The meager light that managed to make it through the treetops bounced off the curved interior edge of the blade, glinting as I swept it back and forth.

  Yeah, I thought, I could get used to using this. In fact… I eyed the body of the dead man again; he really wasn’t that much bigger than me. I could probably fit into his armor. I resolved to give it a try once Wild Bill took us back to this garrison he had talked about and Chou was safe.

  “Albert, could you hand me the sword’s thingy, please.” I pointed at the long envelope of leather fastened to the dead man’s belt.

  “Scabbard,” Albert said, as he handed it and the belt to me. I fastened the belt around my hips and slipped the sword, somewhat awkwardly into the scabbard.

  “Why don’t you take this?” I said to Albert, holding out the dead swordsman’s dagger to him.

  The kid’s eyes lit up. “Really?”

  I smiled, extended my hand a little more. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  He took the knife, slipped it from its scabbard and moved it slowly in front of his eyes.

  “Just be careful you don’t cut your fingers off with it. Or anyone else’s for that matter,” I said, only half-joking.

  Albert nodded enthusiastically, undid the belt holding up his pants and threaded it through the two slits in the back of the scabbard. We gathered up the clothes and armor then limped over to where Chou sat. Her eyes were closed, and I didn’t like how pale her skin had turned. I could see her chest rising and falling steadily, so I decided to simply let her rest. Albert and I placed the armor we were carrying next to the archer’s armor and equipment Wild Bill had left near his horse.

  Wild Bill was working nearby. He had cut down a bunch of long low-hanging branches which he was lashing together with twine from a roll lying in arms’ reach of where he knelt. He then used the branches to build a flat triangular trellis that measured about nine feet long.

  I said, “Albert, go stay with Chou while I speak with Wild Bill.” He nodded and ran to Chou’s side, then began examining his new knife.

  Wild Bill was engrossed in lashing more branches horizontally across the trellis.

  “What is this?” I asked, looking at the mesh of branches he was working on.

  Without looking up, he said, “This here’s a travois. We’ll put your friend on it, fasten it to Brute over there, then get her back to camp. Camp’s a good four hours east of here through these trees, probably longer seeing as we’ll be taking it slow. I’d say we should make it back by early afternoon, but the hell if I know how long a day is in this place.” He finished up fastening the last branch from his pile, clasped the apparatus with both hands and shook it violently, to make sure it wasn’t going to fall apart, I guess.

  Happy with his work, Wild Bill got to his feet and announced, “There, we’re good to go. You take the other side.” He picked up the side of the travois nearest to him and waited for me to do the same with the other. Together we dragged it over to where his horse Brute waited.

  Brute gave a low huff as we approached pawing at the dead leaves and branches beneath its hooves with a long muscular front leg.

  “Careful now,” Wild Bill said, as we got closer, “that horse is nothing but fifteen-hundred pounds of hate. Don’t want to get on the wrong side of him. And let me tell you, most every side is the wrong side of this old son of a…” He cut his words short, replaced them with a shy smile.

  While I held the travois upright for him, Wild Bill used more of the twine to fasten the left and right side of the travois to the stirrup leathers on either side of the saddle. When he was sure it was securely fastened, he unfurled a rolled-up horse blanket and laid it over the travois.

  “Let’s go get your friend,” he said. We walked to where Chou still lay, either asleep or unconscious, I couldn’t tell.

  Albert looked up as we approached and smiled.

  Kneeling at Chou’s side, Wild Bill placed a hand against her forehead and said, “She’s running a nasty fever. Sooner we get her back to the garrison the better.” He gently shook Chou by the shoulder. “Hey! Wake up now, you hear?”

  Chou’s eyes fluttered open.

  “That’s better,” said Wild Bill. “Now listen, the boy’s going to go get my horse and bring him over here.” He nodded sharply at Albert. “Go on now,” he said. Albert took off to where the horse waited and began untying the reins from around the branch it’d been fastened to. “Then your friend and me are going to get you to your feet. Now I’m not gonna lie, it’s gonna hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, but if you could try and stay conscious, that’d be a big help. Okay?”

  Chou nodded and said, “Yes.”

  “You know,” said Wild Bill, turning to look at me, “for someone who says she don’t understand English she sure does understand a lot of English.”

  “Long story,” I said. I turned back to Chou, as Albert led the horse to us. “You ready?” I asked her.

  Chou nodded.

  I positioned myself on Chou’s left, Wild Bill her right, each of us taking an elbow. “Okay,” I said, “on three we lift.”

  Wild Bill nodded.

  “One… two… three…” Together we hefted Chou to her feet. C
hou grimaced but didn’t utter a word of complaint.

  Slowly, we helped Chou one painful step at a time over to the travois, my own ankle still spasming. We positioned her at the widest end which lay against the ground, then gradually lowered her down onto the blanket. She lay there with her eyes closed, panting hard, her brow covered in perspiration.

  Wild Bill took a long length of rope from his saddle and cut off a piece about six feet long with the knife he kept in his boot, then used it to tie across Chou’s chest and under both arms, before securing it to the travois framework.

  “Grab those fellas’ belongings, if you’d please,” Bill said to Albert and me, nodding to the two piles of armor. We did so, bringing the two sets of armor and assorted bits and pieces to him. He placed what he could in his saddlebags, securing the rest to the travois with more twine.

  I leaned in and took Chou’s hand in mine. “You doing okay?” She opened her eyes, looked at me and shook her head. “Something… does not… feel… right,” she whispered. She coughed once then closed her eyes again.

  Without another word, Wild Bill Hickok, a man I was sure had been murdered in a saloon over a hundred years before I was born, urged his horse in the direction of the garrison, and Albert and I followed behind.

  We had been walking for what must have been at least three hours. My ankle still hurt every time I put weight on it, and my legs felt a little tired. Apart from that, I felt good, despite the fact that for the six months before I ended up on this island, the closest thing I’d gotten to exercise had been when I left the apartment to score more pills, or I got up to pee. I should be breathless, barely able to move, but instead, I was breathing evenly and I’d hardly even broken a sweat. I began to suspect that more changes had been made to us than just the ability to understand each other’s language. I remembered the sensation I’d felt the previous night when the aurora had streaked across the sky. When it was all over, I had felt completely refreshed; like how I’d imagine an athlete who ate right, never drank, and was in bed by ten every night for a full eight hours of sleep must feel. My body was invigorated… renewed. And if Chou was right, it was all down to the pixie dust; the nanites.

  The forest had grown denser, trees and shrubs crowding in all around us to the point we found ourselves almost constantly having to adjust our course to avoid some new obstacle.

  “Maybe we should head down to the beach and follow the coast; we’ll make better time,” I suggested.

  “It’ll also leave us exposed,” Wild Bill said, without turning to look back at me. “We’ll make too plump a target for anyone who makes the mistake of thinking we’re an easy mark. Better we stay hidden in the trees for as long as we can.” He hesitated, then came to a complete stop. “Say, have either of you eaten anything today?”

  Albert and I both shook our heads.

  “I guess I must have left my manners back in Arizona,” Wild Bill said. He reached into his saddlebag and pulled out a small brown sack. From the sack, he took two long strips of something that looked like mummified hundred-year-old skin and handed one each to me and Albert.

  “It’s beef jerky,” Wild Bill said, smiling when he saw us both staring blankly at what he had given us. He pulled another strip from the bag, took a bite out of it, then raised his eyebrows in mock pleasure and said, “Mmmm! Mmmm! Mmmm!”

  I took a tentative nibble of my jerky. It was tough to the point that it took me several seconds of levering it back and forth between my tightly clenched teeth to actually tear off a piece, but it tasted not too bad. Albert started on his too, his eyes widening in obvious pleasure as he chewed. For the next twenty minutes, we did nothing but walk and gnaw our way through the jerky. By the time I was done, my jaw muscles ached from the exertion.

  Chou lay motionless on the travois. She had grown paler, her hair now stuck to her forehead by a sheen of perspiration. Her chest rose and fell slowly and steadily, and occasionally, she would let out a little moan, but at least I knew she was still alive. I asked Albert to stay back with her while I walked quickly to where Wild Bill guided his horse between the trees.

  He turned and looked at me as I drew alongside him.

  “Thanks for the jerky,” I said, by way of an ice-breaker.

  He pinched the tip of his hat and nodded at me. “You’re welcome.”

  I dove straight in with my questions. “You mentioned a camp? A garrison, right? How many of you are there? Did you all arrive here together?”

  He gave me a reproachful look. “That’s a whole lot of questions for one breath,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was being serious or not, but then his face cracked into a smile and I breathed a silent sigh of relief.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said, not really knowing what I was actually apologizing for. “I just… when I arrived, I saw probably two hundred people in the water heading for the beach. I just wondered how many you've found.”

  Wild Bill nodded solemnly, his eyes searching the ground ahead as he continued to negotiate the best route through the trees. He gave his horse a friendly stroke along its neck. “When me and Brute hit the water, we managed to swim to shore easy like. Helped as many folks as we could, but most everyone we saw was skittish as a runover ’coon. We fell in with a couple of others and, well, we just kind of started to pick people up. Found a place near the river—”

  “There’s a river?”

  “Uh huh,” he said. “We started the fixings for a camp near it.”

  “How long until we get to there?” I asked.

  “Not too much further. Look!” He pointed through a gap in the trees ahead of us where the forest had begun thinning. Through the gap, probably a quarter mile or so away, I saw the river Wild Bill had spoken of. “We just need to follow it downstream until we find the garrison. I’d guess it ain’t too far now.”

  As if Wild Bill pointing it out had suddenly made it real, the sound of the river reached us. By the time we stood on its stony bank, the trees had thinned sufficiently that we could walk in a mostly straight line.

  “So, you’re the boss of the garrison?” I asked Wild Bill.

  He laughed loudly. “Me? No, not me. I don’t have the disposition or preclusion to such a position. I’m too attracted to the more immoral of life’s ways: gambling and such.”

  “Who is then?”

  “Fellow by the name of Edward Hubbard. An Englishman; says he’s from the future. Said the last thing he remembered was being involved in some mighty war that killed so many people, they’d lost count how many exactly.”

  The idea of some futuristic warrior holding sway over the island’s population was, on the one hand, kind of enticing. If Wild Bill had no qualms about following this William Hubbard, then he must have some redeeming qualities. On the other hand, if Hubbard was from the future, then who knew what kind of deadly advanced weapons he might have. That could be why Wild Bill seemed so nonchalant; there was simply no chance of fighting and winning, so it was better to be on the winning side.

  “Did this Hubbard guy say which war he fought in?”

  “Yes, miss,” Bill answered. “Said it was the European War. Someone else said, where they came from, it was known as the Great War.”

  I exhaled a slow breath and tried to conceal the smile of relief that went with it. While I’m not exactly what you would call a history buff, I’d paid enough attention during high school history to know those were two names that would be replaced over time by the name World War I. I’d not considered that the whole of the twentieth century would be the future for Wild Bill. Same went for Albert, and anyone else from the nineteenth century, too. I’d bet my last dime that Chou was the most chronologically advanced human on this island right now, which would give our little group an advantage.

  “Look, yonder,” said Wild Bill.

  A half-mile in the distance was a clearing where several small groups of people sweated under the glare of the afternoon sun.

  “They’ve been busy while I was gone,” said Wild Bill, a note of g
enuine pride in his voice. “Come on, let’s go introduce you to the boss man.”

  Ten

  Closer to the garrison, I counted eight small structures that formed a horseshoe-shaped arc around a large campfire. A woman was in the process of stoking the fire with wood from a stack of nearby branches. A gray-black pillar of smoke rose straight up into the air, undisturbed by any breeze.

  A hundred or so steps closer and the structures resolved into lean-tos; simple shelters made of a single panel of woven branches about eight feet by ten feet, similar in design to the travois we carried Chou on. The panels were propped up at a forty-five-degree angle by two supporting branches at each corner. They wouldn’t win any design awards, but they would provide decent shelter from the elements.

  To the right of the camp, near the edge of the forest, two men stood on either side of a tall oak tree. Both held axes in their hands which they methodically swung back and forth, alternating each swing in precise time as they chopped at the tree. Suddenly, the two men scurried away, and the tree slowly toppled over, kicking up dust and debris as it crashed to the ground. The stumps of at least twenty others marked the path of the men’s progress into the forest. The lumberjacks paused to wipe sweat from their foreheads, then moved on to the next tree. Near them a pile of felled oaks waited for a group of four men and women to finish the job of stripping off the remaining branches before cutting the trees into ten-feet long sharpened stakes. The completed stakes were, in turn, being carried by two men to the outer edge of the camp where they set them into pre-dug holes to create a stockade. The stockade was already forty-feet or so long and would, judging by the number of empty pre-dug holes, enclose the entirety of the camp, save for a six-foot gap at each cardinal compass-point, which I guessed would be used as entrances.