by Mark Lingane
Michael reflected on his ordeal for a moment. “No one’s asked me that before. Obviously, I’m happy to be free, it being the human condition, but being in prison gave me a lot of time to think. The problem is that, when you think too much, when philosophizing is all you do, everything outside of your mind becomes less important. In the end, you wonder about the nature of reality, and the only thing you know to be real is your own mind. Everything else could be a dream.”
He swept his arm around them, indicating the wide expanse on either side of the track. “You could be a dream. This bike, this road, they could all be figments of my imagination. Even my own body could just be an extrapolation of the sense impulses firing in my brain. I could be a brain in a jar indulging in a mass hallucination.”
Sebastian glanced uncertainly at Michael, but said nothing.
“But then I breathe and the air hits me,” Michael continued, “and it’s so sharp and pure I know that everything’s real. The earth that I touch, the plants I see grow, the animals I can feed and care for. These are things I appreciate and respect.” Michael’s normally jovial face darkened with his somber thoughts.
Sebastian rode on in silence, letting Michael deal with his years in a prison cell.
They passed a rusted sign, indicating they were entering the town of Forgen. All was quiet. Too quiet, Sebastian thought. As they cruised down the main street, the reason became obvious. The buildings lay in ruins. Burned frames, shattered windows, and twisted frames lay in piles. The wind blew through the town, but nothing moved except the sand that would eventually claim it.
“What was this place?”
“It used to be a switching point,” Michael replied. “The trains would come through and reroute onto a different line. You can see the tracks.” Michael pointed toward the half-buried steel rails heading to the southeast.
Off to the side of the rails were several large steel containers, twenty feet long, easily a story high. There were twin steel doors at one end. Most of the containers were heavily scarred, and some were toppled on their sides with others piled up against them. Some had had their doors either ripped off or wrenched open.
“These containers look like the only things left,” Michael said. “They’ll be our best bet for safe shelter overnight.”
They looked through the containers, finding most were full of garbage. Some contained dead and decaying cyborg bodies. There were a handful of starved, infected ones, their bodies withered by the extreme heat in the steel boxes.
Sebastian struggled with one set of doors, finally freeing them. The smell of chemicals rolled over him, making him gag. The container was packed with a large wooden desk, dozens of pieces of chemical equipment, and several shelves containing test tubes. He called out to Michael, who made his way over. They went inside and examined the interior.
“This place has been set up as a research lab,” Michael said.
Sebastian examined several books on the shelves. “These are the same as the other books I found back in Three Rivers. They’re just schoolbooks.”
“You’d have to have a sharp mind to use these as reference books.”
“Or be a teacher,” Sebastian added. The thought made him laugh. “Today in school, children, we’ll find out how to turn your friends into zombies. Your homework is to turn your most annoying brother or sister into one. Unless your name is Sebastian, then you’re too awesome to do any homework, ever again.”
“I’ve found a notebook,” Michael said. “Pass me your map.” Sebastian handed over the folded paper. Michael extracted his reading glasses and examined it against the writing on the paper. He glanced over the rims at Sebastian. “It’s the same handwriting. The same person who made the map wrote this.”
“Why would someone leave a house and set up in a container?”
“Possibly something to do with the infected. Do you want to hear this?” When Sebastian nodded, he read: “‘I walked alone through the desert plains, my new home gone forever. I wandered until the water was gone, then walked on, hoping for the redemption that the eternal sleep could bring. I walked until I stumbled and fell. I looked up into the blue sky, gratefully awaiting my eventual demise. But it did not come. For days, I laid beneath the ferocious sun, surrounded by the impossible horizon.’”
Michael licked his finger and turned the page. “This is terrible prose. It sounds like a teenager wrote it.”
“It sounds pretty good to me, full of torture and drama.”
“Exactly my point.” Michael returned his focus to the page. “‘And lo’—good grief—‘I did not die. The days came and I repented for my misguided deeds. I repented to a Lord I had never believed in. I repented to a Lord and he forgave me. They came for me. They were lost and needed guidance, so they came for me, guided by a merciful Lord.’”
Michael looked up at Sebastian. “A lot of people would just consider what he’s saying coincidence, but that’s belief for you. Let’s see who ‘they’ are. ‘They gave me water, and the hallowed giver of life allowed me to fall into a deep, reinvigorating sleep. When I awoke, I found myself to be lying in a comfortable bed in a small town. They tended to me until I had recovered. Then they asked for my help. Now, being a pious man’—and a jackass—‘I could do nothing but assist. They had a church and I embraced all it offered, and I brought them into the fold. We talked and they told me I had not died because of the chemicals in the implants. They had saved me, but they were also killing me. Killing us all!’”
Michael put down the pages. “I don’t think I can go on with this.”
“Is it too dramatic and emotionally wrenching for you?” Sebastian said. “To me, it’s so realistic, like I’m sitting there next to him.”
Michael sighed and kept reading.
52
“‘THE CYBORG @GAIL79NIGHT, a-ha, cyborgs, has been helpful beyond the call of any duty,’” he read. “‘She has been my rock through these difficult days. I want to give her something to show her my appreciation and affection.’”
“I bet you do, Mr. Sado,” Michael said, and continued reading. “‘@bioMass has been causing more consternation amongst the unstable-in-mind followers, questioning my word, and in turn, the word of the Lord. I cannot see what @gail79Night used to see in him.’”
Michael looked up. “And now we’re treated to a new paragraph. ‘@bioMass has done something terrible and now we must run, take the cure, and run for our very lives!!!’”
Michael closed the small book and put it down. “That’s it. The last few pages have been ripped out.” He removed his reading glasses, delicately placed them in his pocket, and folded his arms. “Well, I’ve never read anything worse. Except for Fifty Gray Sunglasses. That was monumentally bad.”
Sebastian was smiling. “It was so touching. Do they fall in love, or will she go off with the good-looking yet tortured one who harbors dark secrets? What a dilemma. Will there be a sequel? There must be more.”
“Go off with @bioMass? He’s a loser. Nope. That’s it. They must’ve ‘run for their very lives’ out of here.”
Michael idly dusted the top of the bench, staring at the chemicals in front of him. “What did we find in that vial from the church? Was it a cure or not? It behaved like one.” He squinted as several dangerous thoughts rushed through his mind. “What if we’ve injected Melanie with an infection? Everyone could be in danger. We have to get more information.”
“How can we find out where the people in this town went?”
“They would’ve left imprints.”
“In this rubble? The sand’s covered all the tracks, including the railway.”
“No, radiographic imprints. Cyborgs are slightly radioactive, because the Hive was a great thumping nuclear generator. Cyborgs were here. They’ll have left light radiation all over the place. You, Mr. Tesla, who can sense such things, need to isolate it and follow it out. It won’t be easy, but you should be able to do it.”
Sebastian closed his eyes and relaxed his mind. His mind r
emained dark. He tried rolling out further, then closer, twisting and turning. He moved slowly, then quickly. He sat still, feeling the air. His mind caught glimpses of strange places, strange times, flashes of a blackened land… ... pale people with sharp incisors … lightning so bright and wide it drowned everything … a hideous and deformed cyborg with three arms …
“How’s it going?” Michael asked.
Sebastian sat with his eyes closed, breathing lightly. “I’m not sure how to answer that. I’m getting some strange … readings. No radiation imprints, though.”
“The radiation decay will be faint. Don’t try and look too hard.”
“You know how you say I should be able to see a trace of radiation? Well, would I be able to see anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Didn’t you say something about light?”
“Light is radiant energy. It’s electromagnetic radiation that’s visible to the human eye. What we call sight, in other words. Michael Faraday was a scientist who proved that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was an underlying relationship between the two phenomena.”
“What does all that mean?”
“How far out on the curve of fantastic do you want to go? Light is a radiation that decays. You can sense the decay, so therefore, you can theoretically sense light from the future. You know when you look at a star at night?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the light’s taken so long to get here that the star’s already dead. The light we see is a shadow of the past. And you, Sebastian, depending on how sensitive you are to radiation, could theoretically see this light from something that’s already happened.”
“Like I could look into the future?”
“Theoretically.”
“No way!”
“I said theoretically. You’d have to be the most sensitive radar on the planet. And with the speed of light and rate of decay, you might only be able to see a second or two ahead.”
“That might be enough, one day.”
“Say you had supreme control over the decay of light,” Michael said. “You could slow your image. You could move while your image stays in the same place. I don’t know if you’d have two images or if you’d be moving invisibly. That would be an interesting experiment. And along that thought line, you could bend the light waves and appear in a different place. Theoretically. It would all depend on your strength and sensory perception.”
Michael snapped his fingers. “How about if you get closer to the ground. Go on, get down, get your face in it.”
Sebastian looked sideways at him. “You want me to put my face in the dirt?”
“Yeah. The radiation will be stronger.”
Sebastian sighed. “This better not be a trick.” He lay down and planted his face in the dirt. He kept his mind blank.
Eventually he had to breathe, so he sat up, spitting sand out of his mouth. His face was covered with dirt. He wiped his palm over his face, knocking most of the sand off. He gave Michael an unimpressed look.
“No luck?”
Sebastian shook his head. “But I got something, besides a mouthful of dune. I picked up a faint imprint by the railway tracks, heading that way,” he said, pointing.
“Towards Bronwyn,” Michael said, consulting the map. He looked out at the setting sun. “We don’t have long before dark. We should camp here in the container overnight. We don’t want to be caught halfway to Bronwyn without shelter.”
“Will we be safe here?”
“Safer than out there.”
They both looked out at the old tracks leading off into the distance, the fading light reflecting off them.
53
SEBASTIAN OPENED HIS eyes, stretched his arms, and yawned widely. He blinked until his eyes came into focus. “I haven’t had such a great night’s sleep for ages,” he said. “We should definitely sleep in these more often.” He blinked a couple more times, examining the dry taste in his mouth.
He lit his lamp and looked across at Michael, who was cowering in the corner, looking upward. “What’s the matter?” Sebastian’s eyes roamed up to the ceiling.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t hear anything,” Michael said.
Sebastian examined the half dozen huge dents in the roof. To his untrained eye, it looked like someone very heavy had been jumping on the roof of the container. “What happened?”
“I’m guessing someone very heavy jumped on the roof. There was some rattling at the door and it nearly got ripped off, but then something happened and whoever it was went away.”
“When was this?”
“About four hours ago.”
Sebastian stood up and moved to the doors. He wrestled the metal bar that sealed the doors up and out of the latches, and flung the doors open. He breathed in, and then cautiously looked out. “Seems all right.” He stepped out onto the sand. Then he saw the wreckage.
“Whoa, what went on here?”
Containers, now crumpled, had been thrown around and twisted together. Huge areas of sand were charred black. Smoke drifted from a tree that had been burned to a dark stump.
Sebastian ran back inside to get Michael. Only once they had packed the bikes with lightning speed and accelerated as fast as they could away from the site did their nerves start to calm down. Within a few miles, they had found their voices again.
“Do you know what happened?” Sebastian said.
“I woke up when something heavy landed on the roof. There were several more heavy impacts, then a massive crash. There was lots of noise of metal being hit nearby and a couple of loud rumbles of thunder. Then it all went quiet.” Michael decided not to mention how, in the middle of it all, Sebastian had started to glow.
The two rode on in silence, and the miles flew past.
Sebastian was daydreaming about epic battles in the sky and generally saving the day when there was a sudden loud grinding noise from his bike and it shuddered to a halt. Michael pulled in behind him. Sebastian jumped off the bike and started to examine the rear wheel.
Michael picked up a large stick and a rock. He crept up slowly behind Sebastian, raised the rock above his head and brought it down.
Sebastian collapsed into the sand. “Ow!” he said. “That really hurt. What did you do that for?”
“I wanted to see if your power is a reflex or if it’s something you can actually control. I thought the element of surprise would be a good way to test the theory.”
“You could have just ask—”
Michael swung a large branch around into Sebastian’s side.
“Stop doing that,” he said, as he picked himself up off the ground. “I’m not sure how my power works as a protective mechanism. I can sort of sense when there’s real danger. Last-minute kind of stuff.”
Michael tapped his fingers on the branch, eyeing Sebastian suspiciously. He lunged again with the branch and Sebastian ducked out of the way. Michael leaped after him and Sebastian took off around the bikes. Michael chased him, with the branch raised overhead. After several laps of the bikes, Michael stopped, out of breath.
“I’ll get to the bottom of this,” he panted. “There has to be more to it than an involuntary response.” He threw the branch on the ground. “Let’s take a look at your bike.”
Sebastian glanced at him, uncertain. But as Michael sat in the sand and examined the bike, his defenses relaxed.
Michael shook various parts until he found the culprit. “You’ve got a bent sprocket. We can fix that when we get to Bronwyn. It’s nothing major. You’ll be able to ride, but we’ll have to go slowly.”
The two mounted up and slowly drove along the tracks.
“Sorry about the surprise attack,” Michael said. “I think I’m still a little freaked out by what happened last night.”
They eventually passed the sign for Bronwyn, and limped into the town well into the afternoon.
They pushed open the large doors of a maintenance shed and wheeled Sebastian’s bike through. Light fell t
hrough corroded holes in the ceiling, spearing down through the dust. Several birds took off from their nesting spots and flew out through the roof.
Michael searched in the many wooden boxes filled with old tools. Sebastian wandered around using the Sebastian™ method of searching, which entailed waiting for the hidden object to jump up and wave its metaphorical arms.
Michael held up a clamp and two pieces of metal. “I found what we need.”
Sebastian wasn’t paying attention. At the back of the shed, something large was hidden under a massive canvas. He untied the knots holding the canvas down and heaved on it until it started to slide. It came tumbling down and he dived for cover. When he stood up, before him stood a gleaming golden steam locomotive. Its swept-back lines, countered by the over-engineered ruggedness of the nuts and bolts, had his mouth dropping open.
“Hah! Check it out. Oh, please let it work,” he whispered.
Michael was making grunting noises as he applied a clamp to the bike’s rear sprocket and straightened out the kink. He began to loosen off the clamp when a loud claxon resonated behind him, giving him such a fright that the clamp went skyward and landed on his head.
“What on earth are you doing?” he shouted.
“I found a train.” Sebastian hung out the side of the engine’s cab and waved joyfully.
“We don’t have time for that. I’ve fixed your bike, we need to go.”
“Can I have one more pull on the horn?”
“No!”
There was another loud claxon blast.
“I said no!”
There were another two blasts.
Sebastian jumped down and ran over to Michael, his face full of joy. “That was great.”
Michael’s face did not radiate the same excitement. “Get on your bike. We’re leaving.”
“But it’s a train.”
“Haven’t you ever been on a train before?”
“Only once, but it got melted by dragons and everyone died. Except me.”
