Vagrants (Vagrants Series Book 1)

by Jake Lingwall

  Jeff didn’t scream or fight against the light as it took him. He was the first person in history to kill an Apostle, but his last thought wasn’t the comforting satisfaction of a meaningful death that he had hoped for.

  46 CARL

  “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, JEFF?” Carlee couldn’t help saying to herself as she pulled up in midair. The eruption in front of her was unlike anything she had ever seen. The mountain bulged, fighting against the explosion from inside for a brief moment, before the tons of rock, dirt, and trees gave way.

  She braced herself just in time for the sudden gust of wind that smacked into her like a giant flyswatter, blowing her backward through the air for almost a mile until she was able to regain control. The mushroom cloud of dust was already filling the entire sky; it loomed over the planet, making her feel small once again. It had been a feeling that she had fought her entire life.

  Rocks the size of old electric cars started to rain from the sky, putting an old barn out of its misery. She knew she should turn around, go back to Stefani and their half dozen new recruits, and focus on keeping them safe. But she couldn’t. Her path took her forward, to the heart of the mountain-shattering explosion. If she returned without Jeff, she knew Stefani would go looking for him herself, and she couldn’t let that happen. Stefani was too emotionally involved, and she did too much pressing as it was, a topic that she had delicately approached to no avail. A boulder that streamed waterfalls of dust forced her forward, and she didn’t fight the momentum.

  She didn’t get many helpful glimpses from other time lines; chaotic events like this were always difficult to understand. The slightest changes in other realities were enough to change the outcome of where a small piece of the mountain might land. But she occasionally corrected herself when she saw another time line that ended with her under a stone.

  The dust from the explosion grew so thick that she had to rely solely on her sensors and glimmers of other realities to navigate. Debris rained down on her force-field flight suit so frequently now that the individual pieces hitting her weren’t discernable. She worried about her exhaust getting clogged, but she pressed forward, toward where the explosion had happened. She wasn’t sure if Jeff would even be there, but she was certain he had called Darwin.

  It was the darkness that Jane had told her was there, a brooding that she had promised Carlee would manifest itself eventually. Carlee had thought that Stefani and her were changing him, but apparently, she had been wrong about that as well. It was cruel of him to let his passions get in the way of her friend’s happiness, a happiness that Stefani deserved more than anyone. Stefani had given so much of herself for others, had watched what happened to her mother and endured the pain of losing her brother and friends during their futile attack on Bud. Finally, she had found someone she cared for, and he had left her to do the same thing that had killed Bobby.

  She hated Jeff for it, just like she hated Bobby for the way he had left her heart shattered. But Carlee couldn’t really hate either of them. She loved Bobby, and Jeff was the first person she had met since who reminded her of him.

  Carlee found Bobby in another reality and quickly pressed in an energy weapon from his time line. It appeared in her hands a split second later, and she quickly fired four blasts into the center of the approaching debris that was too large for her to dodge. It cracked under the force and split in two, allowing her to fly through the middle of it.

  It was hard to believe that for the longest time, she hadn’t been able to press more than some marbles or ragged dolls from her childhood. She had simply never been able to connect to another time line strongly enough to do anything else, no matter how much Bobby had worked with her personally. It was a role she had settled into, being Bobby’s wife and supporter. But then he had died, and the limits on her mind were gone. She could press just about anything now, as long as it existed in a reality where Bobby was still alive. It made her feel close to him.

  Her navigation system drew her attention. She was approaching her goal, but so was a source of temurim. An Apostle was approaching at high speeds, but so far, her sensors hadn’t picked up an Apostle near the heart of the explosion. Perhaps that was Darwin coming to meet up with Jeff.

  She fought her desires to run away from the Apostle, accelerating instead. There was no way to know who was approaching, and if Jeff was still in there for some reason, she was going to get to him first. Sediment rained down on her as steadily as ever, but it seemed more violent now as she shot through it, ducking around boulders and trunks of trees.

  Carlee set her suit to search for human life, but she feared that even if someone had somehow survived the blast, there was too much happening around her to get an accurate reading. She switched her personal vision to infrared as she arrived above the center of the blast, but it was no use. The ground at the center of the newly formed crater was superheated from the explosion, blocking out any readings. She switched through her enhanced vision options, finding none of them to be particularly helpful.

  She floated in the air, moving side to side to dodge the larger pieces of the mountain that fell where she had paused, but those were growing less frequent now. She thought that Darwin had made its plan so eloquent that it would be quick and clean, but blowing up an entire mountain was anything but eloquent. She didn’t know what was going to come of this bombing, but she feared for the future.

  The Apostle was closing in from the northeast, and another had just appeared on her radar from the south. She needed to run, to get out of here as fast she could. But she needed to find Jeff. She needed to be the leader Stefani believed her to be, and she had promised to bring him home.

  But Jeff wasn’t here, and she didn’t have clues on where to look next or even if he was still alive. Looking at the absolute destruction below her, it was hard to imagine anyone surviving something like that, but Darwin had been confident. But Darwin wasn’t here either unless it was one of the approaching Apostles.

  She pushed her way through the dust and out of the crater and flew right. It seemed like the dust was never going to clear and that the impact of the explosion was endless. She shuddered to think about the people and animals with no way to escape from the aftermath of Jeff and Darwin’s sneak attack on the temurim mine. None of them would have died if he had just listened to her.

  Carlee’s sensors alerted her to a human not far away, but then the indicator disappeared a moment later. She veered in that direction, and the indicator lit up again. She moved forward faster now—the reading was weak, either from the dust cloud or because whoever it was in bad shape. Given the nature of the situation, she raced toward the flailing signal. No matter who it was, she would help.

  It was what she did. It was what kept her going. For the first months after Bobby’s death, only Stefani had kept her alive. Then she had stopped living for herself and started living for others. She owed everything to Stefani, her sister-in-law, although there weren’t any laws anymore.

  The nearest Apostle had reached the crater behind her, so it made more sense to continue to run, but she slowed as she approached the dying human. She switched to her enhanced x-ray vision built into her suit and gasped. Buried beneath a few feet of dust, a human lay, breathing weakly. A boulder pinned the arm of the dying person, whom she didn’t need to unbury to know that it was Jeff.

  He was still alive, but not by much. She pushed the rock off what was left of his metal arm and dug through the dust until she found him, choking on dirt. His breathing was weak behind a partial helmet, half of his metal leg had burned away, and his human leg had fared no better. Most of the hair on his body had melted, and he didn’t respond to her touch. He looked to have been wearing some advanced set of armor, but there was hardly anything left of it now.

  “Right back to where I found you the first time.” She delicately started to lift him from the ground, careful not to cause him any long-standing injuries from moving his broken body, but she also didn’t have the luxury of pressing or taking her
time.

  Her suit alerted her again. The Apostle at the crater was approaching them.

  “Time to get you out of here, you fool.” Carlee picked him up and set him over her shoulder; her suit beeped louder and louder as the Apostle closed in on her.

  She started to accelerate, gently at first so as to not cause Jeff more injury, but the air began to thicken around them, trying to lock her in place. She’d seen Apostles use this technology before, and she was ready for it. She found a force-field wall in a time line where Bobby had used it to stop this very attack and pressed it behind her.

  The wall blocked whatever molecular manipulation was happening, and she broke free. Jeff groaned slightly, but she had no choice but to accelerate. She had her suit display what was happening behind her in a corner of her vision, and she shuddered at the sight. The outline of a massive floating orb peeked through the thick smoke and dust. It was a profile that she knew well. Bud had arrived at its mine.

  “Sorry,” Carlee said. She pushed her suit to full speed. She shot away from the Apostle of her nightmares as fast as her suit could carry them. The g-force was likely compounding Jeff’s wounds, but if she didn’t get them both out of there, they were going to die.

  Her armor alerted her to incoming projectiles, and she simply pressed some falling rock on top of them, causing a series of explosions. She followed up by pressing in wave after wave of force fields behind her, hoping to slow Bud’s pursuit.

  In her nightmares, Bud had come for her almost every night since the day she had witnessed it kill almost everyone she had ever loved. But that wasn’t going to happen today. Carlee broke through the cloud of destruction and into the thin mountain air.

  47 HEATHER

  “PLEASE, I BEG YOU,” CARLEE said. “Tell your leader . . . Heather, I think, that I’m here. And I am in desperate need of her help.”

  “That’s her, all right. I recognize that face. One of those vagrants that brought the warlord down on us!” The man who spoke had seen hard times, but she had seen his type before. He would help her. At the least, he would allow Heather to make the decision.

  Carlee tried to smile encouragingly, but she was too tired to do it well. She was so far beyond the point of exhaustion that she could hardly stand. She leaned on the floating med bay that encased the unconscious Jeff. Whether he survived or not was still a question to be answered, but his chances would go down if she couldn’t get some rest.

  The past three days had been constant travel, looping around the mountains, trying to avoid the rush of Apostles and leeches in the area. She’d never seen anything like it before, and on several occasions, she had to press her way to safety.

  “Please, I have nowhere else to go, no one else to ask for help,” Carlee said. “I saved your leader once and helped to save your village. All I ask is for the chance to speak with Heather.”

  It was the truth. She didn’t know where else to go. Jeff had only been partly conscious for a few minutes, and all he had done was mumble something about Darwin and forgiveness. She had activated Darwin’s device, hoping that Darwin could help her out of the situation like it had promised, but it never responded. Even now it paged the Apostle, but Darwin didn’t come.

  This was the first settlement she had found that was still intact. The explosion had leveled several she had visited years ago, and leeches had destroyed the larger settlements nearby. It was the worst destruction of human communities that she had seen in years, far more than typical. She had the feeling that the Apostle retaliation was just starting, but she couldn’t focus on that yet.

  She needed a place to leave Jeff, so they could both get some rest. She couldn’t press; as soon as she did—even something as small as a pain pill—she would get alerts of incoming enemies. The Apostles were hunting the vagrants like never before. There wasn’t a secure way to call Stefani because the Apostles could decipher or decrypt even the most secure message. She would need to find the other vagrants in person, and she couldn’t do that while dragging Jeff along with her.

  But unlike Stefani, she believed in the goodness of people. No matter how many times they had chased her away, spit on her, or cursed her name for trying to help them, she believed that when the time came, humanity would respond. And she needed that time to be now.

  “I’m right here,” a woman’s voice said. She appeared from behind a tree, holding an old rifle with a mismatched scope on top of it. Carlee hardly recognized the woman; she looked vastly different from the last time Carlee had seen her lying on what would have been her deathbed.

  “Heather, thank God. My name is Carlee . . . I’m a vagrant. My companions and I were here a few months ago. You were sick and—”

  “You saved my life,” Heather said. “I remember you, believe it or not. I also hear that you destroyed half our village. Or is it you who saved what was left of it?”

  “I need your help. I need a place to rest and to keep my companion while I find my friends.”

  “Why would we help a vagrant?”

  “Because I need help. Because we’re both humans. Because I promise you that I won’t do anything to bring trouble to your people.”

  “People will call me a fool for trusting a vagrant.”

  “I’d rather be a kind fool than a heartless survivor,” Carlee said.

  Heather looked skeptical as she stepped in closer, examining Carlee at an uncomfortably close range before she turned her attention to the medical enclosure that kept Jeff alive. It had been a significant asset to press into this reality, but Carlee didn’t have any other option. He had been more dead than alive by the time she was able to treat him.

  “What happened to your man?” Heather asked.

  “He . . .” Carlee kept herself from spinning the story in a more favorable light. She was asking for these people to shelter them and to watch over Jeff while she found the other vagrants; they deserved the truth. “The explosion in the sky, I assume you saw it . . . that was his doing. With the help of Darwin, er, an Apostle, he destroyed the mine where the Apostles get temurim, the stuff they make their brains from.”

  “You know Darwin?” Heather asked. “So, he finally found you.”

  “You know Darwin?”

  “He came to our village not long after you left the first time. Told us to call him if we needed help or if we came across vagrants again. To be honest, we’ve already activated the device to call him. He may be on his way already.”

  Carlee picked up the small device from the side of the medical carrier and showed it to Heather.

  “It found us too,” Carlee said. “I activated this two days ago. I fear that Darwin is dead.”

  “An Apostle, dead?” Heather scoffed at the suggestion. “They don’t die of the sniffles. I’m sure he’ll be around soon. We all just about wet ourselves when he landed. We were sure he had come to kill us for letting you folks in the last time. But he taught us the truth—that you were our friends and that we kicked you out for no reason after you saved us. It’s been bothering me ever since.”

  “So, you’ll help us?” Carlee asked. The question sapped the rest of her strength. If Heather said no, she would sink to the ground where she was and try to cry herself to sleep.

  “Of course, I owe you my life. We all owe you our lives.”

  Stefani jumped off the transport that they had referred to as the fortress before it had even come to a stop. Carlee had slept for sixteen hours straight before flying for half a day to find Stefani.

  There hadn’t been any rest after that; Stefani had ordered the fortress in the desired direction before the words had even left Carlee’s mouth. Carlee had recounted the story of where she had found his broken body and how she had traveled with him to the village a dozen times. Every time, Stefani had asked for more details. In response, Carlee hid only the most brutal ones.

  Honestly, to Carlee, how involved Stefani was in the situation was a mix of romantic, heartbreaking, and comical. She didn’t know how, but Jeff had pressed his way
into the warrior woman’s heart. Stefani had always been stronger and tougher than Carlee. But Jeff had managed to change her somehow. It was hard to believe, and Carlee just hoped that if Jeff recovered, he was as dedicated to her as she was to him.

  “All right, everyone, wait here,” Ross said. “Until we get the signal from Coach.”

  The young man had done a remarkable job of claiming seniority over the other new recruits even though he was younger and had only been a vagrant for a few hours longer than them.

  “I told you not to call me that,” Carlee said as she walked down the steps of the fortress.

  “Sure thing, Coach. Won’t happen again.”

  Carlee laughed as a village guard tried to stop Stefani but shortly realized how impossible that task would be. Jeff was alive. The impression drifted to her from another reality, and she smiled. Stefani would be happy, and Carlee would have the chance to kill Jeff for what he had done without her permission.

  “You’re back sooner than I thought . . . and . . . with quite the ride,” Heather said.

  “We hope to take a more active role in rebuilding humanity from now on, and we needed some room to grow.”

  Heather eyed the fortress, but she didn’t comment on it further. It was an intimidating transport. It was the biggest thing Carlee had ever pressed, and it had almost reunited her with Bobby for good.

  “Jeff is stable,” Heather reported. “No changes since you left.”

  It wasn’t the best news, but it would do for now. If he had survived this long, Carlee assumed he would eventually pull through—especially if she were able to press in more advanced medicine in the future. Stable wasn’t dead, and that’s what mattered.

  “Thank you for caring for him while I was away. I appreciate it. We owe you a debt.”

  “Nonsense,” Heather said. “But I have other news for you. News that I don’t quite understand.”