by Ben Stevens
Jon cocked his head and squinted slightly, wondering where she was going with this.
“So I’m going to see if I can easily, and without pain or problem, open a small one.”
Jon frowned, crossing his own arms, and judged by the countenances of his companions that they shared his confusion. Naturally, it was Carbine that voiced the obvious question.
“Umm, what good is that going to do?”
Maya’s eyes flashed as she spoke. “Find me something to write with.”
Before the sun had reached its zenith in the winter sky, they had scoured every bit of debris that lay atop the sand. Having been unsuccessful in their quest to find a proper writing implement, they resorted to a jagged piece of steel, which they could use as an awl to scratch a message into a piece of soft aluminum.
“I guess this will have to do,” Maya said, unable to hide her disappointment. “But it should do the trick. Miller will be worried when we don’t radio back.”
“Or return,” Carbine added dourly.
Jon shot him a “Dude!” glance and reassured Maya. “It’ll work great. What should we say?”
“Send food,” Carbine offered, smiling.
“There isn’t much room.” Maya regarded the flat square of aircraft aluminum, squinting in an attempt to compare its dimensions with her hazy memory of the last night’s small window through space. “How about: Ship crashed. All okay. Continuing on foot. Don’t worry.” Maya looked at her guardians with a hopeful expression.
Jon tried to hide a grimace, while Lucy imitated a statue. Once again, it was Carbine who stated the obvious.
“Isn’t that a little misleading? I mean, shouldn’t we mention that we’re lost? That Ratt is FUBAR. That we have virtually no supplies, and that they should send help?”
Jon hated his buddy’s lack of bedside manner, but secretly agreed with him and couldn’t bring himself to protest, even if it meant winning points with Maya.
“What good would that do?” Maya asked Carbine specifically. “Sure, it’d be the truth, but what good would it do? We are lost, that’s true. But that fact is precisely why they can’t send help. We can’t tell them where to go! All we can do is press on with our quest and give them hope. Let them know we are okay, and to not worry. To hold down the fort until we get back.”
“What about Ratt? He’s not okay?” Carbine persisted.
“I think leaving that out would fall under giving them hope,” Jon interjected, evoking a slight nod of affirmation from Maya. “She’s right, bud. We don’t want them to panic. Let them know we are okay, establish communication. Keep checking in with them. Maybe, once we know where we are, we can tell them and see about getting some help.”
“I guess,” Carbine said with a shrug. “Just seems like we might regret leaving out those details.”
“It’s settled,” Lucy announced, then took the square from Maya and plopped down into a cross-legged position to go about the scribing.
A moment later, she had finished and offered it back to Maya.
“Hang on to it for a second,” Maya said, then stood up, brushed herself off, and nodded to Jon. “Here goes nothing!”
Maya began a repeat of the previous night’s performance, although Jon noticed slight variations in both her pitch and volume. Maybe a hand or finger gesture here and there was different, but he couldn’t say with any certainty.
Jon watched with bated breath as Maya began to shape. As before, the goddess gestured and swayed as she sang. He wasn’t sure, but Jon felt that the song was going longer than before and felt a splinter of doubt begin to bury itself in his gray matter. He was just about to say something to Maya, like a sane paramedic halting the frantic and futile resuscitation attempts of someone driven by emotion, when a small patch of air in front of Maya began to warble and shimmer.
A blink of an eye later, Maya ended her song with a long note, which cut off abruptly, and the shimmering spot in the air snapped open to reveal a porthole-like window to the Underground garden.
“It worked!” Carbine shouted.
Maya turned around and treated Jon to a triumphant smile.
Gotta make the small victories count, he thought and returned her smile with one of his own.
“No time to waste,” Lucy announced. “Here!” she said, offering her lady the message-bearing square of metal.
“Right! I didn’t shape it to stay open for very long. That would have taken a lot more Strange.” Maya took the square and turned, slowly walking up to the portal, getting as close as possible to it without touching it.
“For luck!” she announced, and with a snap of her wrist, carefully aimed the message through the dimensional window. The square sailed through open air like a ninja’s shuriken, disappearing from their vicinity and landing somewhere on the other side.
“There. We’ll check back in with them later and try to establish a scheduled time to communicate face to face,” Maya said, nodding to herself. Then, stepping back, she waved her arm dismissively, closing the portal until all traces of it were gone and only the desert scrub remained.
“So now what?” Carbine asked the group.
“I guess we play it by ear. Start heading out as soon as Ratt’s okay and see what we see. If we get in a bind, like, come to an ocean, perhaps, then we regroup,” Jon said, and everyone nodded. In the back of his mind, he knew that meant going the long way around said ocean—if such a long way even existed.
After a bit of awkward silence, Jon and Lucy worked together first to build shelter, if not for a sense of security, then to at least keep the sun off Ratt, which even in the late winter was relentless in this part of the world, wherever that may be.
Ratt remained in his supernatural sleep with Maya watching over him, while Carbine joined Jon and Lucy in their quest for anything of value that might have survived the crash.
They worked until sundown, finally calling it quits when they could no longer see what garbage was versus what was valuable. Lucy wanted to continue, being able to see in the dark, while Carbine had started to suggest that she take a break. Jon placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder and advised, “Let her go. She needs to be alone for a bit.” Lucy was a very effective warrior and excelled at combat, but she couldn’t shield her real self from Jon now. Her metal shell protected her from trauma and damage, from blade and bullet, but was transparent when it came to hiding her fears. Jon knew by now that her tough act was just that.
When Jon and Carbine returned to the lean-to, they found that Maya had built a small fire. It was comforting, as the desert night was beginning to grow cold. They gave her a report of what they had managed to salvage so far: some food, very little of their camping equipment, a hatchet, and their sleeping bags had escaped unscathed; the two Hoppers they had brought had been demolished, but they’d managed to find Carbine’s railgun, salvaged from the Mini-Mech he had used during the Battle of Home. They’d even found most of its ammo, the drums scattered across the sandy dirt. While excited that the weapon was found intact, Carbine lamented the fact that he wouldn’t be able to use it, the recoil of such a weapon being too much for his human frame to bear.
The greatest disappointment had been the discovery of all four ATVs; crunched, mangled, and deconstructed in every way. They’d also found a wide assortment of bits that they could only assume belonged to the machine shop that Ratt had loaded on board. Jon had found his hammer as well as Carbine’s pistol. The rest of what they had packed was lost to them, though they discussed searching for anything else, even broken stuff that might be of value to them, in the morning.
The three of them sat in the dirt around Ratt’s sleeping form. Maya gratefully accepted a bottle of water that Jon had found and used it to dampen a bit of cloth—Jon guessed it used to be a seat cushion cover—and dabbed Ratt’s forehead with it. She tended to him with the detail and care of a geisha in a tea ceremony, while Jon watched, and Carbine stirred the embers of their fire with a bit of sturdy stick.
Jon had not
grown up camping—had never “grown up” in any way other than the rigors of an endless boot camp, with drills replacing childhood, State replacing family—and so he had never really sat around a fire before, under the starlight canopy, and smelled the rich, musky, primordial scent of wood smoke. He liked it; he liked it a lot. There was something about it that was as ancient, natural, and right as the goddess that sat across from him. He was mesmerized both by the gentle curves of her cheekbones and eyes and the dancing lights and shadows that played across them. A flush of blood filled his cheeks as he recalled their spontaneous kiss earlier. Should he bring it up to her later, in private? What was he thinking? Even if they were beginning to develop feelings for each other, Jon was her guardian, her servant. Furthermore, he was one with a very short lifespan. He didn’t have time for things like love.
Out in the desert darkness, they could hear the hunting and mating sounds of hundreds of different animals, birds, and insects. A pack of coyotes yipped somewhere off in the direction of the hills they had seen, off in the direction of the golden pillar.
Jon rummaged through the pile of stuff they had gathered and presented a freeze-dried meal to Maya, sheathed in a thick plastic pouch.
“Here, eat.”
She looked up from her ministrations, and she smiled at Jon with her eyes, their corners softening at the gesture of kindness. She folded the wet cloth into a small rectangle, placed it on Ratt’s forehead, and then took the food offered to her.
“You should eat too, and try to sleep. I know that the serum makes you neither hungry nor tired, but your body is still human, and going without will harm you. It will break you down and…”—she tilted her head slightly sideways and drew closer to him— “and I couldn’t bear to watch that happen to you.”
“Okay, Maya. I will try. You too, Carbine.” Jon dug out two more pouches of food and tossed one to his friend.
“Oh man! Ham omelet. I was hoping for stroganoff,” Carbine bemoaned, but eagerly tore into his meal-pouch regardless. The three of them ate in silence, Jon forcing himself to chew and swallow. When they had finished their meal, Jon looked over to Maya and spoke softly.
“I don’t think I can sleep, no matter how hard I try. I haven’t been able to sleep a wink ever since, you know.” Jon held up his hands and waved them slowly side to side.
Maya seemed to think about this for a moment, pursing her lips and twiddling her thumbs. Then a smile appeared on her face as sudden and bright as unexpected lightning in the sky.
“I believe I can help with that!” she exclaimed. She stood up and gestured at the boys. “Okay. Get yourselves comfy. I’m going to sing you to sleep!”
Jon felt a little embarrassed and looked over at Carbine, who had a look on his face that read, Seriously?
“Come on, silly,” she said to Carbine. “Not that long ago, you would have been pretty excited to have a private show with Lily Sapphire.” She winked knowingly at him, and he gulped, eyes wide. Jon and Maya both laughed out loud, melting the awkward ice. They puttered around for a minute, putting away odd bits, reorganizing things, and unrolling their sleeping bags.
Once they were all settled down, they lay together in the fading glow of the slowly dying fire. Having become accustomed to it, Jon could no longer smell the wood smoke or the sage-scented breeze that blew gently over his face and through the lean-to.
Jon and Carbine closed their eyes and lay still, feeling the tension, stress, and fatigue leave their bodies with every deep exhalation. After a spell, Maya began to cast hers. It hadn’t occurred to Jon before that she wove her magic web with song, but he realized now that every time she shaped Strange, she sang. It made sense to him. There is great power in music. It can reach down into deep places inside us that others can seldom find, let alone influence. It can resonate not only with our hearts but with the vibrations of the very universe. It could be said that all vibration is music—the sounds of nature, a babbling brook, the wind, the planet spinning and sailing through its clockwork tour of the heavens. Jon recalled the insights of Maya’s first revelation and remembered that throughout the history of man’s rule over the world, many governments and religions had attempted to ban music, so it would seem that even wicked men understood the transformative potential and power that music contained.
Her voice sang its song into the dark, working its magic. She sang in a language alien to Jon. He wondered briefly whether the song would sound as enchanting if he could understand what she was saying. Being unable to, he lay, spellbound by the melody and sound. He felt the familiar, though recently absent, feeling of dullness behind his eyes, eyes whose lids were growing heavy. Before she had finished her song, Jon fell asleep with the world’s most serene smile on his face.
The sleeping Strange worked well; almost too well. Jon was awakened by Maya vigorously shaking his shoulder and strenuously whispering, “Jon! Jon!” He opened his eyes with a start. He was confused for half a second—Where am I? Whu—But then his soldier instincts kicked in. He looked at Maya, propping himself up on one elbow, her dark outline hovering over him like a guardian angel.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“I heard something out there.” He couldn’t make out her features in the dark but heard the genuine concern in her voice. He sat up and she moved back a little. Clouds had moved in as he slept, obscuring what moonlight there had been, turning the night as dark and silent as the grave. He looked over his sleeping companions. Ratt hadn’t moved, and Carbine was out like a light too. Lucy had still not returned from her self-imposed solitary confinement.
“Suppose it’s just Lucy?” Jon mused out loud.
“No way,” Maya replied instantly. “If it were Lucy, I wouldn’t have heard her.”
“You’ve got a point there,” Jon admitted. He reached out and squeezed Maya’s hand. “Hang tight; I’ll take a look around.”
Just as Jon peeled back his sleeping bag, he heard it: a low, guttural growling coming from somewhere out in the black, off to his right.
Some kind of animal, most likely… hopefully.
He ceased moving to hear better and felt Maya’s hand tighten its grip. The growling stopped, but in its place came the sound of rustling, or scurrying. Jon fumbled in the dark for his hammer, which he had laid next to him before falling asleep. Finding it, he closed his fingers around the haft and stood up, gently releasing Maya’s hand. He carefully stepped over her, walked to the edge of their camp, then turned back and whispered, “It’s probably nothing.”
A figure pounced out of the darkness and hit Jon in the chest like a riot-control bean bag shot, sending him tumbling backward.
Maya screamed, Carbine stirred, and Jon ended up flat on his back with a deranged humanoid on top of him, its eyes glowing crimson in the dark. Jon felt something, sweat or drool, he wasn’t sure, drip down from the savage and land on his forehead. The form belched forth a throaty growl and menaced Jon with a display of sharp canines.
It was dark, but mottled moonlight had broken through the heavy clouds above. The smell coming off the man was unreal—somewhere between rancid sweat and two-week-old dead animals in the summer.
Jon fought back the urge to retch as he attempted to wrestle his arms into a better position and throw the man off of him. Its strength surprised him, and he found they were almost evenly matched. Unable to fling the attacker from his chest, he tucked his arms in and around the assailant’s legs that squeezed Jon’s bucking waist. The savage’s growl died, and it opened its barbaric mouth wider, lunging for Jon’s throat. Jon tucked his chin and slashed the face of his assailant with his forearm and elbow, unhinging the man’s jaw and effectively deflecting the incoming bite.
The stunning blow was just what Jon needed. He popped his waist up into a back bridge, pushing off the ground with his feet while he hooked his hands under the savage’s foul armpits and threw it off of him, sending it into a forward somersault.
Without wasting any time, Jon rolled to his side, followed through
to his knees, and leapt to his feet, pausing only to pick up his hammer.
The savage, too, had returned to its feet and turned back around to face Jon. It opened its ugly mouth and wiggled its jaw around. Jon heard a horrible popping noise and watched in disgust as the dislocated jaw moved back into place. Jon hefted his hammer into the ready position. It began to glow blue with its star pattern, casting a haunting light over the edge of the camp, illuminating the immediate environs as well as the wild-man.
Jon could now see that his foe was indeed human, or at least appeared human. What must have been clothes at one time were now only a tangled smattering of threads, his ensemble now resembling netting more than shirt and pants. His feet were bare, and his skin, darker than Jon’s, was smeared with what looked like years’ worth of dirt.
His hair was long, tangled, and disheveled. The glowing red eyes and long, claw-like fingernails told Jon that this wasn’t just a homeless vagabond.
The savage spewed out another beastly roar and charged at Jon, its dirty claw-like hands half outstretched. Jon took one long stride forward and lowered his guard, putting himself in the wild-man’s range and baiting the attack. Like a hungry fish on its long journey upriver, the brute took the bait and aimed a sloppy haymaker of a swing at Jon’s face with its jagged nails.
Jon had been waiting for it, and the savage was doing exactly what he had hoped it would do—swinging high. Jon spun to the right and collapsed down on himself. He continued the spin as he crouched and let the hammer go, the swing timed perfectly.
As Jon completed his low turn, he ducked under the incoming swipe, crouching before the man-beast. The swinging hammer caught up full circle, connecting squarely against the inside of the savage’s left knee joint with a loud, wet smack.
Jon continued to spin, rising as he did so. By the time he came to a stop, the man-beast had fallen to one knee, balancing itself with the opposing hand. It snarled at Jon, unable to stand, but not appearing to be in pain. Jon gritted his teeth and grunted back at it, then let fly his hammer again.
