by J. Thorn
We talked for hours, mostly about random things, things that don't matter to anyone. I also told him all about my past, about the war, about life in Gallowshill, London, which was the place that I lived in and where The Caff was. It was a pretty run down and miserable place to live. All the time we were talking he never told me a single thing about where he came from, or what he did.
At some point later on the two of us just stopped talking and sat there quietly. That quiet seemed to last for a long time, but I would imagine it was just a few minutes.
Then he spoke again.
"I have an offer to make you, Joseph Dean." He said, looking me straight in the eyes, "One that you should consider as a serious alternative to your current plans."
I peered at him for a moment, wondering just what he might want of me.
"What kind of offer?"
"I want you to do a job for me."
"A job? What kind of job?"
He lit up a cigarette and leaned over the bar.
"The kind of job only a man who has nothing left might be willing to do. I need you to go somewhere that you have never been and find something for me."
"Go on."
"It will mean leaving this place behind and probably never coming back. I will give you everything you need to complete the job, and I will take you there as well. At least I will take you to the place where you can start looking."
"What's the pay?"
"There is no pay."
"What you mean? No pay? Nothing?"
"Where I will take you, you won't need money. It would be of no use."
"Then what's in this for me?"
"A new start, a new goal, a new life. To find what I am looking for might take you years, maybe even decades, but I assure you that it is this most important job that you will ever have to do."
I poured myself another whiskey, threw it back, then another, and then I looked over at the hangman's noose in the middle of the room.
What else did I have?
Nothing.
I had nothing to lose, and anything that I gained had to be worth something, didn't it?
A new life a long way from Gallowshill.
"You say I won't be coming back?"
"Probably not."
"Not ever?"
"Not ever."
"Okay I'm in. Let me get my things".
Five minutes later we were standing out the back of The Caff, in the yard. I had everything of any value stuffed into an old case, my hat and my coat on and I was ready to go wherever this man was going to take me.
Sounds ridiculous doesn't it?
Of course I had no idea where it was that we were going, and if I said that I was a little surprised when he took out this small device from his pocket and pressed a button, I wouldn't be understating it.
A few yards away from us, right in the middle of the yard where the weeds were starting to grow tall, a door opened.
Yeah, I mean a door, sitting there in the middle of nowhere, not attached to a wall or anything. That sounds strange enough doesn't it boy? Strange indeed, but even stranger was what was through the door.
On our side of the door it was the middle of the night and the only light around was the dim glow of the few street lights that still worked. Through the door it was daylight, and I mean bright daylight. Not only that, there wasn't even a street through that door. It opened out onto an open plain of bright sand that seemed to stretch for miles and miles. It was a desert like none that I had ever seen.
I stood there with my jaw almost bouncing off the floor, not able to comprehend what I was looking at.
"Are you ready to go there?" Joshua asked me as he pointed towards the door, and the desert beyond.
I didn't know what to say.
"Where is that? How is that?" I blurted.
"It's another world Joe...another world."
"What? You mean like a real other world? Not Earth?"
"No. Through there is a world called Gaia."
"But, that's not possible is it?"
"Is it not? It's there, right in front of you. All you have to do is step through the door and leave this place behind, forever. You're needed there, Joe. I need you to do this for me, and I think you need to do this as well. I will give you a minute and then you can either walk back into that run down hole, string yourself up and end it, or you can step through the door, and I will follow you. Your future is waiting for you Joe, and it doesn't have a lot of time to waste."
You know son, to this day I don't know why I even had to think about it. I was standing there in the darkness out the back of my run-down cafe, where barely an hour ago I was preparing to kill myself, and I was wondering whether I should step through the door into another world or not. It was the simplest of choices, and I knew it.
My choice really did come down to dying or living.
I chose to live.
I chose to step through that door. I also turned and looked back through the door at The Caff one last time. He was right, it was a hole, a dive, but I was going to miss the old place and I took just the briefest of moments to say my goodbyes.
A moment later Joshua followed me through, pressed a button on that gadget of his and the door simply popped out of existence, leaving me standing in the sand next to a man I didn't even know, on an entirely different world.
The heat hit my like a fist. I'd just stepped from the cold and wet of England into the blazing desert of another world. I looked around and was dazzled by the sheer enormity of the land that stretched out of me in all directions
Miles and miles of burning sand.
That was when I noticed the vehicle just sitting there in the sand, nearby. It was a huge, metal monstrosity that looked like something out of the old comics. It had eight wheels and was covered in armoured plating of some kind. I turned back towards Joshua to ask him what it was, but I felt something hit the back of my head and that was me out cold.
You hungry son? I am. Open up that bag and get us out some of that pastry your mother made.
Yeah, sure, I'm getting to it. Don't you worry, I started this story and I'm going to finish it. Split that in two and pass me some. Smells good doesn't it? Your ma sure is a hell of cook.
So where was I? Oh yeah, knocked out.
I woke up, lying on a bed with a headache like I had been drinking whiskey for a whole week. I was in a small room with just a dim light up on the ceiling and the only furniture was the bed I had been sleeping on. I felt the back of my head, where I had been hit, but it was just fine. The headache came from something else. Just at the top of my neck was a small bandage. I pulled it off and felt underneath it. There was some kind of puncture wound that was healing up. It hurt.
I went for the door, deciding that I had made a seriously bad decision stepping through that doorway of Joshua's, and I needed to escape somehow. To where? I had no idea, but I wasn't sticking around. After two attempts at staggering over there, I hung from the door handle, taking deep breaths. I'd never felt so rough before, even during the war I'd never felt this bad.
The door wasn't locked and it opened out into a corridor with many other doors on it, all of them shut apart from the one at the far end, about thirty feet away. I could hear music coming from somewhere and I staggered slowly down the corridor and out into a huge hangar that looked like some kind of vehicle repair garage. It reminded me of the field camps from the war, where mechanics would work day and night.
Right in the middle of the hanger was that monstrosity of a vehicle that I had seen in the desert the moment before I had been hit, except it was in bits, well, some of it was, looked like half of the engine was sitting on the floor around it and a bunch of the armour panels were lying in a pile nearby.
"You're awake, good."
It was Joshua. I hadn't seen him when I walked into the hangar. He was sitting at a table not far away, tinkering with a pile of electrical junk. I was about to get angry with him...ask him what the hell he thought he was doing, but he spoke first.
"I apologise for the whack on the head. I thought it was necessary. There was something I needed to do and I didn't think that you would agree to it by choice."
My head was still thumping and I leaned against the wall next to me. More deep breaths as a wave of sickness swept over me.
"What did you do to my neck?" I managed to blurt out.
"I injected you with a serum."
"A what?"
"A serum. It's a fusion of antibodies and nanites."
What the hell had he put in me?
"Nanites? Anti...what the hell are those?"
"Everyone who is part of the Resistance has the injection Joe. It's something that you will depend upon in years to come."
"Resistance? What do you mean? Explain yourself."
Joshua put down his tools and took a deep breath.
"I'm a member of an organisation called The Resistance, as you are now. In particular I deal with the worlds that have already been attacked."
"Attacked? By what?"
"Nua'lath's Horde."
I hauled myself over to a chair and sat down.
"Okay who is this Nua'lath fellow, and this Horde, what is that?"
"Nua'lath is a creature of immense power and even greater evil. He goes from world to world, destroying all life or enslaving it into his armies. He doesn't leave anything behind and has murdered countless billions, on countless worlds. The Resistance has been trying to stop him for centuries. Though we haven't succeeded yet, only slowed him sometimes."
This was too much for me to take in all at once. I leant back against the chair and hoped that my head would stop spinning sometime soon. Joshua carried on talking, but I could barely make out everything he was saying, let alone make sense of it all.
"The serum that I injected into your bloodstream is a mixture of various medicines that will keep you alive. You won't die of old age, Joe. You also won't get older. In fact you may even get a little younger, at least physically you might. It also works to keep you alive and heal you much faster than your body would normally be able to. Even to the point of regenerating lost limbs if given enough time. It is a technology far more advanced than you have experienced on your home world. As I said, I apologise for the manner in which I administered it, but I felt that you might not agree to allow me to inject you, and the process afterwards is quite traumatic as your body adjusts itself. It also takes a significant amount of time. We discovered a long time ago that the best way to administer the injection was to render the recipient unconscious first. It helps speed up the recovery."
"How long have I been unconscious?"
"Two weeks."
"Two weeks? What the hell? How? I've been lying in that bed for two weeks? Why am I not hungry? I should be dead by now."
"You've changed, and that is another aspect of the serum. You won't need to eat quite as often, nor quite as much, though if you give it a few hours you will be very hungry. You may feel sick for short periods during the first few weeks after this transition, but trust me. You'll thank me for it later."
"Sure, thanks a bunch."
Trust him. The man asked me to trust him.
Yeah that's right son. That is where it all came from. The same blood that runs through your veins came from what I was given back then. Your sister's are the same and your mother, though how she got to be that way is an entirely different story, and one for another day.
I stayed with Joshua for quite a while, weeks or months. He taught me so much in that time, much more than I had learned in my entire life up until then. Survival techniques, combat, weapons, you name it and he taught me it.
He also took me out in his armoured truck quite regularly so that I could get my hand back in using guns again, though the ones that we used were very different to anything that I had ever experienced. Shredders, you know them pretty well, I know, but I had never fired a thing like that before.
We used to travel back out of the town and into the desert a few miles. There were always a few leftover Horde creatures wandering around out there without a purpose or a clue where they were. Mostly dead-walkers of different types, you know the sort I mean, you've seen them at a distance out on the town borders before.
Joshua was an endless resource of information about the Horde. He'd dealt with them his whole life on many worlds and in all their forms. Whenever we spotted something new he would tell me all about them, you know, how he thought they came to be, what their weaknesses were.
I remember the first time I ever saw a creature from the Horde, about two weeks after I had woken up in that bed in Joshua's place. It was a thing like I had never seen before. Some kind of cross between a massive dog and a panther is about the best I can give you. It had fur that stuck out all over the place and a mouth full of teeth that were far too big for its head. The eyes, you wouldn't believe the size of that thing's eyes, they were as big as my fist. Joshua said that it was called a Maw.
"It's unusual for them to be enslaved into the Horde," he said, "They originate on a planet that I visited a long time ago, and they don't succumb to any of the evil practices that Nua'lath and his creatures use to enslave. The Resistance has been on friendly terms with the Maw for a long time, but occasionally one or two are captured when they are very young and that is the only time that they are susceptible to being twisted to the Horde, when they are mere puppies that don't know any different."
He looked almost sad to see the thing growling at us from down in the sand. Now, I've learned since then that he was right about them, and they are the closest to a loyal ally that the Resistance has, but that day, looking out of the hatch on top of Joshua's war-truck, all I saw was a ravenous wild thing with eyes as bright as the sun, and it only wanted one thing, to kill us.
"If ever you see a Maw that has been turned, kill it as quickly and painlessly as possible."
Joshua used the turret on the front of truck to blow the thing apart with one shot. Damn thing wouldn't have even known it was coming.
We spent hours in the lockup, working on the truck, working on weapons. I learned how to fix and maintain pretty much everything that was there. I'd done some mechanics in the past, but nothing like this, nothing so advanced.
Eventually that had to come to an end and I had to get out there into the world and try to do the job he brought me there to do. He was moving on you see, that's what he did, move from world to world. He was a recruiter of sorts...spent his time searching for people like me. I don't know how he found them, maybe some kind of gift that was unique to him, he never said, but he had to move on all the same.
One day when I hauled myself out of bed and went to the hangar, ready to start my lessons for the day, he was gone. I could tell something had changed even before I walked out of the corridor. It was quieter than it normally was. I sped up and almost burst into the main hangar.
He'd left a note on the table that we both used to eat breakfast at. He'd even left me breakfast.
Time to begin your task.
You may not think that you are ready, but you are. One of the best students I've had in all my years.
Find out how this world ended.
Find out where the last resistance fell.
Find out why.
Find something important about this world that The Resistance can use to fight Nua'lath.
Use the device to call me when you can answer all of the above. Not before.
Stay alive.
Good luck.
Joshua.
That was it. That was what he left me. A note and a small pendant with a tiny gadget attached to it.
I looked around the hangar. The vehicle was gone and so was a lot of the junk that had covered the sprawl of tables that Joshua had used to repair kit, but on one table was a neatly arranged rucksack, two modified Shredder shotguns, some heavy duty clothing that would provide some protection from teeth and claws, and a few other essentials.
I couldn't believe he had just taken off like that and left me on my own. I di
dn't even know which direction to walk in. Now, after many years of travelling I see why he did it. He didn't know which direction to send me in, and I would probably have protested if he had tried to leave. I simply had to get on with the job at hand.
I spent the rest of the day collecting up whatever equipment I could find that might be a useful addition to what he had left me. I didn't need ammunition for the shotguns. They were modified weapons and would run off of the small cell batteries inside them for years, probably forever. As I said before, I'd spent hours firing those weapons and getting used to the strange hissing sound they made, and what range they were best at.
'Shredders' he called them, some kind of advanced weapon that was beyond my knowledge. Whoever heard of a gun that didn't need bullets? Well, there they were, and two of them, sawn off and modified shotguns, just like I had grown to like. Joshua preferred handguns and always carried four of them with him, but I still couldn't let go of the reassurance that holding a shotgun gave me. I may not have known how to build one of them, but Joshua had made me sit for hours and hours whilst I learned how to strip them down to their basic parts and put them back together. I could easily fix them if they broke, unless it happened to be the power cell, and I found a small stash of a dozen of those in a box next to the rucksack.
I slept in my room for one last night and early the next morning I stepped out of the hangar door, pushed it shut behind me, and walked out into the middle of the road. You see, after Joshua knocked me out, he drove for the best part of three days and a thousand miles before we reached the hidden workshop that Joshua stored his stuff in. He'd been using the place for years, mostly as a repair shop, but also occasionally it had played host to his latest recruit. That's right. I was one of a long list of Resistance additions that he had trained there over the years.
Joshua's place was hidden away at the back of an old gas filling station in the middle of a large abandoned town that had once been called Sellville. He said he found it a long time ago, that it was the only place he had come across that could be locked up and hidden away that had a decent collection of working machinery. It must have once been a mechanics yards or something, because there was almost everything you might need to repair, well, just about any kind of vehicle.
