Goldman considered the question for a moment. “I do,” he said at last. “I really do. This is the future. Or maybe it’s a possible future. I don’t know how any of that shit works. But this madness exists because of Weber and what he did back in our time. All that’s missing are a few in-between steps that get us from there to the world of the Great Ones. And if we have a chance to go back and derail those plans…I mean that’s gotta be the whole point of the magic book, right?”
“Your journal.”
“Well, yeah. I don’t know how the fuck that makes sense, but somebody used the story of my journal like an anchor point in history. Both to inform people about what went on and to bring them right back into the thick of things.”
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. But here we are. So the question now is what we do about it. And I think the answer starts on the other side of that giant wall. Assuming we can get in.”
“And assuming we can get out alive,” Lilli said.
“Yeah. That too.”
15
When morning arrived, Nathaniel gently shook his traveling companions awake. “Come. We need to make haste toward the wall.”
“Ugh, Nate,” Goldman moaned. “It’s gotta be early as hell.” He sat up and shook his head. Then, remembering the night’s conversations, “You okay?”
“Aye,” Nathaniel said. “I am fine.”
“Not sure I buy that,” Goldman said.
“If he says he’s fine, then he’s fine,” Lilli said.
“Suit yourself. What’s the plan here, captain?”
“We need to find an opening in the wall,” Nathaniel said. “I have no reason to believe there will not be one.”
“Yeah. Seems likely,” Goldman said. “Just hope we can get some more food in there. Big Bird was awesome and all, but I’m starving again.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Nathaniel said.
It took them several hours to find the wall. Nathaniel felt powerful relief that the hive mind had been correct. They drew near it and wandered along the perimeter. More hours passed. Nathaniel once again took time to marvel at his companions. They were proceeding without complaint. He decided that he preferred thinking about them and the task ahead to considering any of what he had told them during the evening.
Conjuring up all the old memories had been a mistake, he thought, if only because bringing those thoughts into the front of his mind distracted him from the mission. He remembered well the disaster that had occurred when he and Goldman had been ambushed in his home territory. That had been able to happen because Nathaniel was not paying enough attention. His awareness needed to be fully focused on the present.
Eventually, the opening presented itself as a distant imperfection.
“Oh, thank the Lord,” Lilli said. “I didn’t want to say anything, but I was starting to worry.”
The entrance was sealed, which Nathaniel had expected. He braced himself and broke open the rusty grate.
“Why wouldn’t they make it stronger?” Lilli asked.
“What do you mean?” Goldman questioned.
“I know Nate is superpowered, but he’s not at his best…no offense…and it just seems like it’s kinda pointless to lock something that the Great Ones could break.”
“It is ancient,” Nathaniel said. “Rusty. Weak.” He gave a slight smile. “Not at its best.”
“Funny,” Lilli said. “But I take your point. Someone locked these territories up tight, and figured that by the time they couldn’t keep the people in, the people wouldn’t know to leave.”
“Perhaps,” Nathaniel said. “Be careful descending. A cut from that metal would not be ideal.” He dropped into the hole, landing with a loud boom at the bottom.
“You first,” Lilli said to Goldman.
“Why me?”
“Age before beauty. And I’ll need you to catch me if I fall.”
“What about Nate? He can catch you.”
“I’m just messing around. You want me to go first, I’ll go first.”
She grabbed onto the ladder and shimmied down quickly. She dropped the last few feet and landed in a squat. Goldman followed, not as quickly.
“There’s a tunnel ahead under the wall, then another ladder up,” Nathaniel said. “We need to exercise caution at the other end. It is hard to predict what part of the territory we will be accessing.”
“Got it,” Goldman said. He rubbed at the energy weapon, as if reminding himself it was there. Nathaniel tried to promise himself that he would not let harm come to his companions, but there was a creeping doubt. He was way out of his element.
They moved along the corridor in silence, their feet echoing on the concrete. Nathaniel climbed the ladder, and paused at the top.
“What is it?” Goldman asked.
Nathaniel put a finger to his lips. He listened. He heard the wind moving through the trees, but nothing else. If there were guards nearby, they were not talking.
“I am going to open the hatch,” Nathaniel said. He braced himself on the ladder and pushed. The hatch didn’t budge. He pushed again, and felt the rung of the ladder starting to loosen. Suddenly, the hatch flew open. He heard the sizzle of a prepared energy weapon.
“Come out with your hands where I can see them,” a voice said.
Nathaniel looked down at the others, willing them to stay put. Goldman shook his head.
“I am coming out,” Nathaniel called. “I wish you no harm.”
“Any creature that emerges from hellfire speaks with a forked tongue,” the voice said.
Nathaniel poked his head above the opening and saw two guards, both with weapons pointed at him. The weapons looked the same as the one Goldman carried, but the style of the guards’ uniforms was both familiar and different.
“Let’s go,” one of the guards said. His higher voice revealed he was not the one who had spoken before.
Nathaniel climbed the rest of the way out into another familiar yet strangely different woods. The guards watched him with quickly shifting eyes, expecting him to make some kind of sudden movement.
“Allow my companions to join me,” Nathaniel said.
The guards nodded.
“Come up,” Nathaniel called. He hoped Goldman would have the good sense to appear without his weapon drawn.
Lilli came out of the hole in the earth first, then Goldman behind her. The weapon was hidden. Good. Nathaniel walked closer to the guards, keeping his palms out to them.
“Hands up, all of you,” the deeper-voiced guard said.
“Nay,” Nathaniel said. “I think that is more than enough of that.” He whirled into action, grabbing the energy weapon from one of the guards before the shocked man could react, then used the weapon as a cudgel against the head of the other guard.
Goldman pulled out his own weapon and aimed it at the remaining guard. “How bout you put your hands up, asshole?”
Nathaniel looked at the guard on the ground. He had intentionally only hit the man hard enough to stun him. Better not to take a life. He picked up the guard’s fallen weapon and tossed it to Lilli. The one he had swung still hummed, which he thought meant he hadn’t damaged it.
“You will remain here while we go on our way,” Nathaniel told the guards. “You would be wise not to follow us.”
He waited for the guards to show signs of understanding, then beckoned to Goldman and Lilli. “Let us be on our way.”
“Do you think they will stay out of our way?” Goldman asked. “Fuckers didn’t seem too thrilled when we took their mojo.”
“Perhaps,” Nathaniel replied. “They do not understand the full extent of what they face if they come after us, but they also know that we have all the energy weapons. That in itself should be enough. Still, there are likely to be more threats, unless we can stay hidden.”
They moved through the forest. Nathaniel heard the sound of water in the distance. “That sounds like the water I encountered on my trek toward the other territory,
” he said.
“It’s a river,” Lilli said. “Gotta be not too far ahead.”
“How the fuck does that make any sense?” Goldman asked.
“What?” Lilli asked. “A river? That’s not that weird.”
“It’s not weird outside the walls,” Goldman said. “In here…it’s bizarre. A flowing body of water must go under the walls somewhere. So nobody in this place ever questioned where it went?”
“You must understand the nature of superstition,” Nathaniel said. “In my territory, people did not think there was nothing beyond the walls, though they would sometimes say as much. They believed there was endless hellfire, damnation and ruin.”
“So you think people here think the river runs straight into the hellfire,” Goldman mused. “Sounds kinda awesome.”
Nathaniel shrugged. “I know not. At any rate, there it is.”
The river was magnificent. It was wider, he thought, than the one he had crossed while fleeing the wild dogs.
“Look at the boats,” Lilli marveled.
Giant floating craft went up and down the water. Nathaniel felt a sense of awe. “All of this…” he said. “All of it was right here in my world, and I never knew.”
“Not your fault,” Lilli said.
“Aye.” He shook his head. “It does not matter. We are not here to study such wonders. We are here to find the clearing.”
“You really think there will be one?” Goldman asked.
“I do. And what we find there may change everything for us.”
“How the hell will we find this place?” Lilli asked.
“When I discovered the magic book, I found my way to the center of the territory and worked outward from there based on my memories from my own territory.”
“The memories that went away for a few thousand years because the Authority hammered a spike through your skull.”
“Aye. Perhaps they never really went away, but the path to the memories was disrupted and it is like I never knew to look there until the memories bubbled up of their own accord when I was injured.”
“That’s complicated,” Goldman said. “And kinda crazy that you have such an understanding of the brain.”
“We are taught certain things about the body when we are young,” Nathaniel said. “Normals and Great Ones alike.”
“It’s like some of the science was allowed to remain,” Lilli said, “while most things were plunged back into the dark ages.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Goldman said. “Because Weber fucking dictated all of this. It’s so obvious.”
“But why?” Lilli asked. “Why box the people in?”
“Something went really wrong with the world,” Goldman said. “Wronger than we knew it, I mean. You saw the hive mind. And it’s even more clear with the muties running around.”
“So you’re agreeing with my nuclear war theory?” Lilli asked.
“Look at the world we came from,” Goldman said. “It doesn’t seem all that farfetched.”
“I understand what you explained about the hellfire. But why do this to people?” Nathaniel asked.
“It’s hard to put into words,” Lilli said. “People in our time had these weapons. Energy weapons. Like we talked about before. But the idea is they were a deterrent. They were so powerful they were practically a dark magic. And nobody used them, because nobody wanted to go that far. Does that make sense?”
Nathaniel nodded. “You believe Weber used the weapons and devastated the true world.”
“It’s the only logical explanation,” Goldman said. “At least to me, anyway. And if we put that together with what we think we know about the territories…”
“Weber used the cover of saving people to actually trap them forever,” Lilli said. “That’s insane.”
“Yeah. Maybe,” Goldman said. “There are some pieces that don’t fit nicely together. These walls would have been one hell of a project to secretly put together, and like we said before, they wouldn’t have kept out the radiation if everything all around got nuked. We would have all been messed up or killed. Well…I guess I was supposed to be killed before all of it.”
“It’s all a lot to process,” Lilli said.
“Aye,” Nathaniel agreed. “Perhaps we will learn the truth in time, but speculation drives our focus off the mark. We need to find the Central Enclave.”
They crossed the river on an impressive bridge. Nathaniel saw his companions studying the structure as they walked over it.
“What?” he inquired.
“The bridge uses design and construction concepts from our time period,” Lilli said. “But it’s clearly not that old. Anything from our time would have rusted to pieces, even without nuclear war.”
Nathaniel nodded. He understood only a little about the things Goldman and Lilli discussed. At times, it made him feel like a bit of an outsider, though that was not an entirely new sensation. All the years he had lived with Achmis and Esther, they had shared communication that only made sense to normals. Still, he wanted to understand his new companions much more than he had wanted to understand those from his past. He wondered if that had something to do with his declining health and powers, or if it was just loneliness.
They left the bridge and the river behind them and picked up the main thoroughfare, which he assumed traversed the whole territory, other than the circle of wilderness at the periphery. As in his territory, few people wandered the main areas outside the enclaves. There was simply no reason to, except on special occasions. That thought reminded him of the events surrounding his abandonment of the Great Ones and the palace.
He sighed. Telling the story of his romance with Amara had seemed like a good idea in the moment; an opportunity to bond with Goldman and Lilli and have them understand him better than anyone had understood him in centuries or more. He had achieved that goal, but at what cost? He had undone tremendous work that had repressed the painful memories. The more he had talked, the more the details of the experience had come back in. He had seen Amara’s face in his dreams over the years, and more than a handful of times in the moments before sleep came for him, but this was something different.
He did know a few things about the mind, as he had told the others. He thought that the mysterious pathways to the Amara memories had gone stale and unused, but now that he’d activated them, his great healing capability had reinforced them to a terrible degree. Perhaps that was just speculation, but the pain was real and horrible.
He missed Amara. That was the truth of it. Missed her as if it had only been days since she and their unborn child had been ripped from his life. Nathaniel had lost much over the millennia, and he had shouldered those heapings of grief with minimal complaint. But the Nathaniel who had lost his budding family had been a different man, and it was the ghost of that man who haunted him now.
He wondered about the new territory. The few people he saw looked much like the people he had always known, even if their attire was different. The villagers wore much more soft fabric, and far less animal hide than he was used to. He wondered if they did not have enough deerkin available in their territory.
He had not spent enough time in the territory of the magic book to learn about the people or the Great Ones inside the walls. It had been hard to resist the temptation to find others like him, especially once he had found Opellius and learned that he was not alone. Now there was a chance to fully explore, but that involved tremendous risk. And at the end of the day, it did not matter. Their plan was to find a way to defeat the so-called President Weber in the past, and if Goldman’s ideas were right, that might very well unmake Nathaniel’s entire existence. He found that idea strangely comforting.
“Whatcha thinking about?” Goldman asked.
“Just studying this world and wondering if any of it matters.”
“Oh, is that all?” Goldman laughed. “Don’t put so much pressure on yourself, Nate. This is our mission now. All three of us. Right, Lilli?”
Lilli nodded.
“I don’t really know how the hell I fell in with you asses, but here I am.”
“It’s really your sweetness that I enjoy the most,” Goldman said. Lilli gave him a scowl in return, but Nathaniel saw the delight in her eyes.
“Thank you for doing all of this with me,” Nathaniel said. “You are brave to risk everything.”
Goldman shrugged. “Not to downplay our amazing bravery,” he said, “but the fact is if we don’t fix things it’s all over anyway. I don’t like shitting on your world, Nate, and it’s a pretty damned fascinating place. But its existence means that things got much worse for the place I come from. And here, after thousands and thousands of years, things aren’t so great for the Great Ones. It’s all crashing down, and we need to stop it. Somehow.”
They walked in silence after that, and Nathaniel found he had a little remaining ability to shut down his nagging thoughts. The path led to the territory’s Central Enclave, as he had known it would. The enclave walls rose up in front of them.
“Well, there it is,” Lilli said. “These places really were put together according to plan.”
“Well, hopefully things are a little different here,” Goldman said. “Nate’s enclaves are places filled with suspicion and hostility…no offense.”
“There is no way to be hidden when entering the Central Enclave,” Nathaniel said, ignoring the comment. “We would need to interact with the guards. It is not necessary for us to go in just to orient ourselves toward the clearing.”
“You aren’t curious what they’ve got going on in there?” Goldman asked.
“You said yourself that the experiences in my territory were not good,” Nathaniel said. “You want to chance that kind of situation for curiosity’s sake?”
“Well, they don’t know we came from outside,” Lilli said.
“It will be hard to explain where we came from,” Nathaniel said. “Not one of us is dressed appropriately for this territory. Already, I have seen the locals eyeing us with curiosity, if not suspicion.”
“But still…” Goldman pleaded. “It’s not just a matter of curiosity, Nate. There are things we can learn that might help us. And you’re forgetting that when we ran into trouble in your territory, it was because you were wanted in your territory. Nobody knows us here.”
The Lost Enclave Page 12
