Age of Mystics (Saga of Mystics Book 1)

by Chris Walters

  With nothing of note to the north, he spent most of the next half hour watching the five Tigers head south. He had not given credence to the more than a foot of snow on the ground that the men had to walk through. This changed his view of the men heading their way. Those men were moving with a speed that was greater than the Tigers. The two groups met up roughly half way between where Eric had sent the Tigers, and the place he had first seen those approaching. He waited for the flag, but none came. Instead, without much hesitation, the group started heading his way again.

  “Fall in!” He yelled out, “We are headed south to see about this new threat.” He saw the confusion in the ranks, but refused to explain himself. He just trotted his mount over to the other side of the ranks and led them toward the oncoming group. Eric guessed their size at forty to forty-five men, nothing his force could not dispatch.

  Within ten minutes, he was close enough to see that the Tigers walked with them, having fallen in line behind some leader. Another few minutes showed him that the leader was none other than one of the men he had left in charge at the compound, Chief Summers.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Eric yelled as they approached.

  The small man looked around at the force, “Good morning, Shogun. May I speak to you in private?”

  Did the man really think he could get Eric Fine alone and deal with him? Eric could see what this was, it was mutiny. “You may speak to me here, Chief. Why have you interrupted my operation? Who is watching over the compound?”

  Summers looked around and seemed to resign himself to speaking in front of everyone. “The compound is no more, Shogun.”

  Eric didn’t know what the young man was trying to say. “What do you mean, ‘no more’?”

  Summers exhibited genuine sadness. “It burned two days ago, everything. We tried to stop it, but didn’t have the means. People had lit fires to protect them from the cold, there was trash and refuse everywhere, it fueled the fire. It started in the Inner Circle, and then went to the Outer Circle. People broke through the barricades to escape. Other people from the Inner Circle escaped inward. When we put some of them down, they began to riot and intentionally burned the Tower and the outer buildings. We couldn’t put it out.”

  Eric took all of this in. Summers was clearly not making this up, but there were things he still wasn’t saying. “Is Colson watching over the rest of the people?” There was a long pause, “Summers, where is Colson?”

  “Mister Colson fooled me, sir. He left the compound with all of the people from the Outer Circle, to dispose of them. He took some of his people to help him out. I believed him, he was one of us. That was only two days after you left. They headed south, we haven’t heard from them or seen them since.”

  “Who is watching the rest of the people?” Eric asked in bewilderment. The fear and shame in the young man’s face as he looked up at his leader was difficult to see.

  “This is it, Shogun. Forty-Two men. None of the women made it, none of the villagers, just us.” He paused for a moment, “I have failed you, Shogun.”

  For the first time since this all began, Eric had someone before him who understood his role. Eric was short-handed right now, so Summers would not be an example. “You have, Chief, that you have. But this is not the time for recriminations; this is the time for action. Add your men to the ranks of soldiers. We are all one now. Come with me and let us make a new plan. This changes everything.”

  Summers gave his men orders, while Eric thought on what he had just learned. He had nowhere to bring Jenny Martinez to; he saw more snow falling and the dense clouds moving back in over the front range. There was a reason why ancient armies went to war in the spring, and not in the winter. He would train this young man to be a leader, beginning with their first move.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

  Kyle, Natalee, Ted, Kin and a newly invigorated Kim led a small group out to meet the army that was waiting for them. A much larger force than they had first expected was marching up the road to the ground gates. Ted had no idea where Major Fine had found an army of this size, but his group could not defend itself against them. There had to be a couple of thousand soldiers heading their way. Ted had already determined that he would try to leverage his own sacrifice to save his family and friends, when he saw the four people break off from the group and trudge through the growing snow toward them.

  There was a moment when the snowfall broke and it looked like the little over a foot they had already on the ground would be all the snow they would see in this storm. But much like the rain of the summer, it did not look like this snow was done. The wind wasn’t a problem, and it wasn’t quite as cold as it had been, so Ted was thankful for the small things. As the four came close, their leader looked up and ted was surprised to see one of his own council members, Commandant Britton Casco of the Academy.

  “Rumor has it you need some help,” Casco said with a large grin.

  Ted smiled and walked toward him, but Kyle ran in front of him and embraced the other man in a large bear hug. It held for quite a while before they broke off and Kyle gave a smaller hug to the woman standing at Casco’s side, who turned out to be Jessica.

  Casco looked up at Ted, “We have a lot to talk about, but right now, we have something else to deal with. Shall we go meet your foe?”

  Ted liked the young man immensely, and his manner only improved that affection. Rather than giving himself up, Ted would be meeting Eric army with a force ten times its size. They turned and began to walk back down to where the Academy Army was waiting.

  “Who did you leave to watch the Academy?” Ted asked.

  “No one, this is everyone. I was going to wait, but I guess we can talk about it as we march.” A group of about two hundred cadets were passing them to take up a guard position at the ground gates, they saluted Casco as they passed and he returned the salute with a smile. “As you know, the flu killed many people and weakened even more. This is all we have left, about twenty-six hundred. We are mostly former cadets, since the locals were released by the old Commandant to go to their families. We have a few of the old instructors, but the rest are cadets. Many of those killed were the professors, since they were older, their bodies did not adapt to the virus and they went just like the Commandant. After some discussion, we think it unwise to remain tightly packed like we were at the stadium. Also, the Academy was made for a different kind of defense. It isn’t a great place to defend with this kind of warfare. We need higher ground.”

  Ted could not argue with the Commandant’s logic. He just listened intently.

  “So, I want to propose merging our groups and making a true community.”

  “It sounds great, Britton.” Ted began, “But where are we going to house your twenty-six hundred and our fifty or so?”

  “Funny you should ask. Kyle and I spent many hours looking over maps of the area and we talked a bit about maybe someday building up Red Rock Bluffs.”

  Ted looked at him with confusion, “What the hell is that?”

  Casco laughed, “I can tell you weren’t in town long before this all happened. It was in the paper, online, every hour or so you would hear a commercial for the newest gated community, a planned community on a bluff over cliffs even higher than the Hillside’s that had one entrance, a narrow road they built up with a bridge over a chasm. They had not yet built any of the houses. From what I understood, they built the infrastructure and laid out the street. They built the bridge and the gate, but had not yet built the houses. We would have to figure out this winter, but then we could have a real community. It was designed for two hundred and seventy homes, well really mansions. We could build a lot more for our people.”

  Ted loved the idea. “Where is this place?”

  Casco pointed to their left as they round a corner, “Right against the mountains there.” He pointed to a place just south and up higher, where the cliffs were a little more west, just barely north of the Garden of the Gods Park. “Also, one of the reasons that they h
adn’t built house yet, is that in laying the ground work, they found natural springs of the kind about which this city made its name.”

  Ted had heard these stories before, of the springs that gave towns like Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs their names. But those springs had all dried up more than a hundred years ago. Ted’s thoughts on this were interrupted by the sight of charred ground and charred corpses.

  They came to the place where Nat and Kim had taken on a hundred men with flame and fists. It was a bit gruesome, even for someone like Ted who had seen his share of war.

  “Commandant!” the call came from the point up ahead. Ted and Britton moved quickly forward.

  “Meyer,” was all that Ted could get out. His former colleague was stuck to a tree with a samurai sword through his throat. “Let’s get him down from there. We will bury him with the rest.”

  Casco made a small nod, but it took three cadets to get the sword out of the tree, it was embedded so deeply. They moved on, leaving a group of twenty behind to bury the bodies that they could find. Ted looked up and saw one of his daughter’s dogs, it whimpered and ran off to the west. Ted followed as quickly as he could until he found Jenny balled up under a tree, her head in her hands.

  Ted kneeled next to her. “Hey, Jenny, you okay?”

  She looked up, tears in her eyes, and shook her head.

  “Were you here for this?” he asked, pointing back to the corpses.

  “Just the fat man, and the guts guy, and the headless one.” She said, trying to sound funny, but it only caused her to tear up more.

  “Aw, kid, I am so sorry you had to see that.” Ted put his arm around her shoulder, “Who did it?”

  “You know that homeless guy I told you about, the one that Cliff called the Hermit?”

  Kin happened to be standing nearby and walked closer, “My brother has a vivid imagination, there is no Hermit.”

  “Tell that to those guys!” Jenny almost shouted at Kin.

  They helped her up, but she demanded to go on to the battle with them, no matter how much Ted encouraged her to get help form Erica back at the Hillside. In the end, Ted made the decision to let her have her own way, saying it was the freedom that defined their group.

  The army marched on, and within fifteen minutes, they found Eric Fine’s camp. It was totally abandoned.

  “Ted?” Casco called out and Ted walked to a rock onto which he had climbed. Far off to the south, they could just make out a few hundred men moving away from their location. The snow was picking up, but it seemed that they had sent their foe packing. Ted put a damper on any celebration, instead encouraging the group to retreat to the safety of the Hillside. They needed to rest, to recuperate, and the Council had some decisions to make.

  THANKSGIVING

  “a time of friendship and unity, a time of peace” – Unknown, a thanksgiving folk song

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

  Ted, Commandant Casco, and the rest of the council stood at gates overgrown with brush, staring through the bars at the long rows of well-planned plots for the community that was never finished, to which were laid brand new roads. The pre-construction work must have been done right before the Event (the name all were calling the world’s change now). It was perfect. The road to this gated entrance, the only access point to the high bluff, was a long and windy dirt road that wound up the mountain north of the Hillside and planed them here just south and west of their base camp.

  Anyone coming up the road would be so visible, for so long, that the thought of attack would be unthinkable. They shook the gates, but they were locked solidly. The humor of these locks was not lost on their party. Ted turned to Kayla, with a grin.

  “My love?” He said.

  Kayla stepped forward and put her hand on the stone archway. “It isn’t real stone; it is a façade.”

  “I guess we will have to remedy that.” Ted said, and let out a soft Kiai as he settled into a stance and hit the middle of the gate with an open palm.

  The gate bent inward and the lock shattered. Wind had blown the snow away from the gates, and the last couple of days of sunshine had melted some of it, but the plateau was still knee deep in snow. The lack of brush or trees was mostly due to pre-construction work, and the plateau had been completely flattened on top to make room for houses. They could see the steam rising up from a few places and knew that was where they wanted to go. They all headed out in different directions to answer questions of their own about the space.

  Ted thought back to the last week and a half. They had cleaned up the bodies, and had mourned their own, including a special ceremony Rich had performed for Princess. Eric and his minions had not come back, though they all doubted they had seen the last of Eric Fine. After the snow storm broke, they had made the decision to check out Red Rock Bluffs and see if it was conducive to the move they planned. As they walked around the grounds and took in its size, it was a huge planned community, Kyle approached. He had taken Tom Barrett’s place on the council when Tom was killed while fighting the Tigers alongside the cadets and Max’s dogs. Natalee had taken over the training of all people who showed power for fighting, a special and necessary type of kinetic ability.

  “You were right, Britt,” Kyle called out, “hot springs, at least three of them. There are also two creeks and a pond that flow from a natural spring in the center of the bluff. It has what we need.”

  “Okay,” Casco said, “let’s get everyone together.”

  Kyle called out to the others and they all made their way to a spot near the center of the bluff where the Natural Spring created a deep pond that sprouted the two streams of which Kyle had spoken. They all stood there taking it in.

  “Thoughts?” asked Ted.

  “Everyone knows mine.” Casco offered.

  “The Terras and I can work with this, but it will take time,” Kayla followed, “We would be in tents most of the winter. It is going to be cold, there is no wind break up here right now.”

  Ted nodded; he had thought much the same thing. Kyle just said, “I like it, I approve.”

  “It is safer than even the Hillside,” Jenny replied.

  Beth just nodded, trying to get Cooper to take a bottle with some formula they had found in a house while foraging. Kate also gave a curt nod.

  “I think you all know what I am going to say,” Emma began, “It is perfect for planting fields, especially here near the springs. The flat land works out great, but I will need seeds. To Kayla’s concern, some of the cadets are showing promise with plants. We might be able to grow some brush or small evergreens to work as a wind break, there are plenty of graft materials in the plants that are natural to the area.”

  Ted considered that for a moment. Now that everyone was beginning to show abilities, they would need to categorize them for best use. But, that was a conversation for later. Rich had still not given his assessment. “Rich?” Ted asked.

  “Well,” drawled out the incredibly likeable southerner, “This seems like a Godsend. I think this will do nicely, but I have a question.”

  Rich waited for Ted’s nod to continue.

  “Ted, I know how you feel about the faith, but a lot of us count on it. I would like to build a church, for services for those who wish to partake of them, for ceremonies and such, for meetings. Would that be something I could do here?”

  Ted looked around, but everyone was looking at him, waiting for permission. “You are a good man, Rich. As long as the center is open to different beliefs and it is not mandatory to attend, you won’t get an argument from me.”

  “Well, since we have moved off of the move, which I think we are all agreed on,” Ted started, getting nods around the group, “Kate wanted to say something.”

  Kate was looking down. “Yeah, I think I need to resign from the council. Before you try to talk me out of it, I have thought about it and Ted and I have talked about it. I want to finally grieve the loss of my husband for a bit. If we end up being safe here, I can begin that. Also, I believe we are
underrepresented on the council in the healing ability. I would like to nominate Adam to take my place.”

  Rich cut in, “I am not sure Adam has any interest in that position. He enjoys healing and teaching the newbies how to heal. He doesn’t want to be a leader.”

  Kate thought for a moment, “What about Erica?”

  There were smiles all around as the Council approved greatly of the young woman.

  Ted concluded the meeting with something to think about on their walk back to the Hillside. “We have come through the end of the world as we knew it, into a new kind of existence, one of power and treachery, or beauty and of danger. I can’t wait to make this new home, but it must be a choice, and we must have a purpose. I would love for all of us to consider this; I think that purpose lies in making the world a better place. It lies in healing, in protecting, in teaching and in challenging. I have some ideas on how we could make that happen, but we are a team. Let’s decide together what our new world looks like, and how we move forward.”

  As they walked out the front gate, Kate turned and dropped a small diamond into the dirt at its base and the gate disappeared from view behind a large boulder, an illusion to keep wandering eyes away from their new home.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

  Leaving behind the burnt-out shell of his former fortress, and before that the most famous resort in the area, Eric had led his small band back to Manitou. When they first returned to the Compound, his anger burned and he took the group after Colson and the refugees. That size of a group was not hard to track, he had seen that the group had regularly split, there had been fights (they found bodies), and it looked like some headed south, some east and a small band of maybe a couple of hundred had headed up the back route to Pikes Peak. The snow storm had taken care of many of them. Whenever Eric came across any, his band would deal with them immediately. But now, sadness fell on him like a wave.