by Rick Shelley
“We take people back, maybe we ought to look around for a head shrinker to take along to take care of them,” I said. It lightened my mood a little anyway.
Several times that morning and into the early afternoon we heard helicopters. None passed directly overhead, and we were in a thicker stretch of forest, so we didn’t stop, didn’t worry quite as much about being spotted. The route the helicopters were taking seemed to pass a little north of us.
Then, about three o’clock, we came out of the woodlands, right by the interstate highway—and a large refugee camp.
Aaron and I halted our horses without comment. Lesh and Timon moved closer to us before they stopped.
“Must be several thousand people,” Aaron said, looking out at the huddled rows of tents along the side of the highway.
“That’s where the helicopters have been going.” I pointed. One helicopter, a large military cargo carrier, was on the ground. People were unloading it. “There’s Army here.” And it was too late to turn around and melt back into the forest. Maybe they couldn’t make out any details yet, but sentries had seen us.
The back of my neck was itching now. My danger sense got very active.
“‘Into the valley of death,’” I mumbled, and I started my horse forward. “I guess we’re going to find out how good these disguises are now,” I said.
We kept the horses at a slow walk. Ahead, someone had given an alarm of some kind. A squad of soldiers came forward at the double, their rifles held at the ready. Farther back, I saw activity behind two machine guns.
“Don’t anybody reach for a weapon unless I do,” I said in a stage whisper. “These guys are going to be trigger-happy.”
The squad of soldiers came to a ragged halt about sixty yards in front of us … not on command. I guess that’s when they were close enough to get a good look at the public faces Aaron had conjured up for us.
“Aaron, if things look iffy, you think you can make their weapons too hot for them to hold or something like that?”
“Yes, but that much heat might set off a few shots itself.”
“Well, save it until that looks like a better alternative than whatever else looks ready to happen.”
“Gotcha.”
We kept riding forward, closing the gap to forty yards, then we stopped. I sat very still, the way I had when we were faced with the toll trolls at the Ohio River. I didn’t want the same kind of conclusion to this face-off. These men wore U.S. Army uniforms, and from the look of things, they wore the uniforms legitimately.
“My name is Gil Tyner. We’ve ridden from Louisville, going on toward St. Louis,” I announced. Then I started Electrum moving forward again, still very slowly.
“That’s close enough,” one of the soldiers said when we were no more than twenty yards apart. “All of you, just stay where you are. Don’t make a move.”
He took a couple of steps forward. I noted the single bar on his collar—a lieutenant. “What the hell are you?” he asked.
Behind him, one of his men whispered, “The Four Horsemen.”
“We’re no threat to anyone here,” I said. “Our business is beyond. Lieutenant, I hope that your men are disciplined enough not to start shooting without orders. I would hate to see this turn unpleasant.”
“You’re free to pass,” the lieutenant said, “but not until you’ve turned in your weapons. Only the military is permitted to carry weapons now.”
“Don’t try to force the issue, Lieutenant,” I said. “You can’t kill death.” I stood in my stirrups, stretching to my full height. I looked down at the arc of twelve men backing up the lieutenant. A few of them cringed back a little.
Come on, big-shot Hero, I told myself. It’s time for a little theater.
“Who dares challenge me?” I shouted. I guess Aaron played games with my voice, because not only did the men in the lieutenant’s squad jump, but people turned to look off in the camp, quite a distance off.
I sat back in my saddle again.
“I don’t want to make a big deal over this, Lieutenant. I’m tired and I just want to get on with what I have to do. We would appreciate any news. All we’ve heard was that there was an exchange of nuclear weapons, and we hardly needed the radio to tell us that. We’re looking for a few people, family, and we have reason to believe that they got out of St. Louis before the war. I’m assuming St. Louis was hit.”
The lieutenant nodded.
“Aaron, which way do we need to go?” I glanced his way and he pointed, straight through the middle of the camp. We could have detoured around it easily enough, but I decided to carry on with the show—no matter how much my smarter self, and the danger sense of the Hero, complained about the idiocy of the gesture.
“Shall we go, Lieutenant?” I scarcely gave him time to respond but started riding forward again, still slowly. The lieutenant took a few steps to the side to give us room to pass. His men split apart in the center. They stared at us as if they were afraid to look away. I glanced around the arc. Most of the men looked to be older than me, many in their thirties and forties, reservists or guardsmen, I guessed. Only the lieutenant looked really young.
I reined in Electrum and turned to look at the lieutenant.
“You and your men had better all stay even with us,” I said. “That way, we can keep our eyes on each other.” I grinned and I thought that the lieutenant was going to pass out. His eyes got wide, his face paled, and it looked as if his knees were trying to buckle.
I didn’t try to rush the soldiers. Electrum was a little boisterous about being held to such a slow walk, but I wanted to make sure that the men on foot had absolutely no trouble keeping pace with us. Soldiers on the flanks, us on the inside, almost as though they held us in custody—except that we were mounted and they were on foot, and we still had our weapons. Lesh and Timon moved up until they were only half a length behind Aaron and me.
“Lieutenant, just how badly did the war go?” I asked once we were all moving along together smoothly. He was about six feet to my right.
“Bad enough, I guess,” he said, glancing nervously at me with every step he took. “They don’t tell us a lot, but I think all our cities were hit. But I guess we hit the Russians just as bad. Not that it makes any difference now,” he added.
“It was the Russians, not the Chinese or somebody else?”
“Far as I know,” he said.
“We saw Louisville and Fort Knox,” I said. “There’s nothing at all left there. Where are you from?”
“Carbondale. I was home on leave when it happened. I was stationed at Fort Gordon, Georgia. I had a telegram to report back immediately, before, but I didn’t even have time to start for St. Louis to catch a flight before it all happened.”
“And now you’re part of the relief effort?”
“Little enough anyone can do. We bring in food, try to keep people from killing each other. We watch while people die of radiation sickness. There aren’t enough doctors or hospitals to treat one percent of the casualties.”
“You have a lot of those here?” Aaron asked.
“Maybe two hundred left,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve had more than that die already. It’s almost impossible to dig graves fast enough. We don’t have any heavy equipment.”
“Ah, Lieutenant, we may be able to help some of the sick—if they’re not too far gone already,” Aaron said. He looked to me, and I nodded.
“You’re a doctor?” The lieutenant’s voice couldn’t have expressed his skepticism any more clearly.
Aaron grinned and laughed. “No, I’m not a doctor. I’m a wizard.” I felt a light tingling, and guessed that he had just removed our disguises. The way the lieutenant stopped and let his mouth fall open was a pretty good clue as well. One of his soldiers finally broke and started running away from us at a pretty fair clip.
“We do have a way to help, but we’ll need a little assistance,” I said.
“I’m not in command here,” the lieutenant said. “Major Abrams i
s the CO.”
“Then let’s go see Major Abrams,” I said. “Where is the command post?”
The lieutenant pointed. We had been headed more or less toward it anyway. “By the way, Lieutenant, what’s your name?”
“Kurt McAndrews. How am I ever going to explain you people to Major Abrams?”
“Let us worry about it. Now, what we’ll need most is a little perimeter security. We don’t want to be mobbed while we’re trying to help the sick. And we’ll need some sort of doorway. Just a frame will do, two sides and a top, even if it’s just three pieces of wood nailed together.”
“Whatever the major says.”
“He may need a little convincing. Aaron, you have a decent demonstration in mind? Ah, maybe something a little less stark than the Four Horsemen?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Aaron said.
We were given a clear path through the camp as we rode to the command post. People backed away quickly, but they did stare. Four men, weapons, six horses. The two claymore swords across my back would have drawn stares anywhere, if not always for the same reason.
Major Abrams met us in front of his tent. Abrams had light hair going gray. He was tanned and looked fit. At a guess, I figured he had to be Regular Army, one of the survivors.
“Lieutenant, what’s the meaning of this?” Abrams demanded.
“They say they can help some of our casualties,” Lieutenant McAndrews said. “The black says he’s a wizard.” McAndrews choked over that, and the look Major Abrams gave him would have been worth thirty seconds of canned laughter on any sitcom.
“Aaron,” I whispered. I heard a quick, soft chant from Aaron and Lieutenant McAndrews started to lift off the ground, straight up.
“Don’t panic,” I told the lieutenant, just as he started to do precisely that. Aaron parked him ten feet up, then picked up the major the same way and lifted him to the same level.
“He says he’s a wizard,” McAndrews said, with more poise than I would have believed possible. “I think he may be telling the truth.”
“Do you need any more proof, Major?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He may not have been capable of speech at the moment.
“Set them down gently, Aaron,” I said, and both officers floated back to the ground, landing with scarcely a bump.
“Major, I told Lieutenant McAndrews that we may be able to help some of the radiation casualties. I also told him what help we, need to do it. May we proceed?”
The major looked at me, then at the lieutenant. Abrams nodded, very curtly.
“The dispensary is right over here,” McAndrews said, gesturing to the right. We followed him over.
There were three large tents with screened-in sides, like the mess tent on M*A*S*H. Two of them were packed with people on cots and on blankets on the ground. Half of the third tent was filled like that too, with the rest
given over to the people who were trying to help the casualties.
“The tent doors look like they might serve,” Aaron said. “Wood all the way around.”
“You want to try three different times, or just bring everyone through one door?” I asked.
He thought about it for a second. “Could get confusing directing traffic if we just do it once. People inside that tent heading out. People from the other tents have to go in before they can come out. Or the other way around.”
“Lieutenant, do any of the sick people have family members here that aren’t sick?” I asked. I didn’t want to separate families if we could help it.
“A few, maybe,” McAndrews said. “But in most cases, if one had radiation exposure, they all did.”
“Well, let’s make sure we’ve got everybody. I want to keep any families together.”
McAndrew nodded. “Just what are you going to do?”
“Well, the ones whose condition isn’t too bad, we’ll”—I hesitated a second, uncertain how to phrase it—”we’ll send them through to a place where they can get the help they need. That’s why I want to make sure that any kin they have here don’t get left behind.”
“You’re just going to take them somewhere? Where?”
“That is a little harder to explain. Let’s just say that it’s something like the Never-Never Land in Peter-Pan.”
“I am crazy,” McAndrews said.
“That’s the usual reaction,” I assured him. “That’s even what I felt the first time I went there. Look, a few months ago, you remember hearing about Tessie, the dragon that was killed over south of Fort Knox?”
“I heard about it. I’m not sure I believed it.”
“Believe it. They had the body there. I’m the one who killed it. My third dragon.”
“Hey, do me a favor, please? Don’t feed me any more of this. True or not, I don’t think I can handle much more.”
“Okay. Just get the families together for us.”
He seemed glad of the excuse to get away from me.
We were drawing a crowd, and from some of the conversation I overheard, news of our original appearance had spread. There were soldiers keeping the civilians back, but we were in the center of a solid ring of people.
“Aaron, give my voice a boost. I want to talk to everybody.” He nodded.
“If any of you have relatives here who are being treated for radiation sickness, please come forward. We have a way to help them, and we want to keep families together while we do it.” That was a lot safer than saying we were going to evacuate just the sick and their families. The thought of evacuation might start the mob scene I was afraid of.
I nodded to Aaron to let him know that I didn’t need the public address system any more, then said, “I think we’d better set this up so the people are coming out of the tents going into Varay. We do it the other way around and everyone will see that they’re going to someplace really different.”
“Okay. Makes no difference to me, magic-wise.”
“Let’s talk to some of the people inside. Make sure they want to go.”
We walked through the three tents, talking to small groups of people, most of whom showed the effects of exposure to modern warfare. Some had burns. More were emaciated, dehydrated. The smells of vomit and diarrhea competed with the smells of disinfectant, sweat, and fear. I told the people that we had a treatment that would help many of them, but that it would mean going to a strange place. Despite that and my strange collection of weapons, not one of the casualties who could still talk turned down our offer.
Lieutenant McAndrews returned long before Aaron and I finished our tour. The lieutenant had the relatives waiting, not more than two dozen. Aaron asked him to match the wounded with their kin and we would get started. Then we went back to the center tent, the one with the fewest people in it. Lesh stayed outside with our horses, holding them so they mostly hid the door we were going to use from outside observation. I brought Timon inside with Aaron and me.
“Timon, as soon as Aaron opens the passage, you run through and find Baron Kardeen. Tell him what we’re doing and have him get people to help take care of the casualties we send through. Then get back as fast as you can. We may need your help on this side.”
Aaron opened the first doorway. A green shimmering appeared over a view of the hallway that ran from Baron Kardeen’s office to the rear of the great hall. The view was enough to brings gasps and a variety of oaths from the people inside the tent. When Timon stepped through the green veil, turned right, and disappeared, the reactions were even louder, more fearful. I heard one “I’m not going through there!” that was quickly followed by “We have to. It’s our only chance.”
“Quickly, please,” Aaron called out. He moved to the side of the doorway and held the passage open with one hand. “When you step through, this green field will neutralize the radiation you’ve received, but you’ll have to remain on that side to get built up again and for it to keep working.” That was more than half a lie, but it might stop a traffic jam of people stepping through and then trying to come right back.
> The parade started slowly. I stood near the doorway, across from Aaron. The two of us encouraged the people going through, verbally, and occasionally with a hand to help propel them through the green shield. We told them to move off to the right and to make room for the others who were following them. When Timon reappeared in the corridor, he had several people along to help move the refugees off. Baron Kardeen was only seconds behind Timon. The chamberlain stood at the side of the flow in Castle Basil, and we talked through the doorway.
“Sorry to dump this on you without warning,” I said.
“We’ll manage. Timon explained. It’s a good idea. That other family, the Ingelses, are doing well. They’re still a little nervous, but they’re adapting.”
I nodded. “Tell Joy that Aaron is picking up some trace—of at least part of her family. We may have several days’ riding left to reach them. Things are as bad here as I feared.”
Some of the refugees could barely walk. They were helped by others, some of whom weren’t in much better condition. It reminded me a little of the shots of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments. Only the scale was smaller. Once the people got through the green (which was rapidly turning orange with all the radiation it was absorbing from the people), there were plenty of hands to help, castle staff, soldiers, anyone who could be found—and more were arriving every minute.
“We’re about ready to move on to the next batch,” I told Kardeen. Timon slipped back across before the last of the people from the center tent crossed into Varay. “We have two more groups here, both larger than this one, in other tents. A few minutes to start the next.”
I noticed a growing commotion outside the tent. After Aaron broke the first connection to Varay and we stepped outside to move on to the next tent, we could see the crowd pushing closer, agitated. They knew that something major, and strange, was up. The troops, heavily outnumbered in any case, were having trouble holding the civilians back. Our horses may have obscured the view for some people, but enough had seen all of the sick people disappear from the center tent.
