by Laura Kaighn
A few more steps and the Vesar had to rest beside a dense, rusty evergreen. He panted there, feeling dizzy, while a petite red squirrel scolded him from the lower branch of a nearby tree. The creature’s tiny claws clutched the bough’s long needles as its tail danced menacingly. With an accommodating nod of apology, Vesarius craved Tundra’s bulky support and pushed on again.
Strength drained from him like a leaky balloon. Nutmeg-hued blood puddled in his left boot. It grew increasingly difficult to place his injured leg before the other. His fractured ribs battled expanding lungs. As Vesarius’ skull swayed atop his aching shoulder, the warrior fought the urge to sink into oblivion once more. His inner sense told him he would never awaken if he did so. The Vesar’s only chance was to struggle the last few meters down onto the roadway, to seek help from an Earth human.
A local hospital was sure to have someone on staff who knew Vesar physiology. He started off again. A pair of songbirds followed. They flitted about in a little blue-green sapling cheerily oblivious to his efforts. Help was just strides away...
* * *
Popping out the finished cassette of Mozart, Dorinda replaced it with one of Strauss. She then steered her Jeep off Route 28, just past Eagle Bay’s Super Duper Market, and onto the gravelly Uncas Road. With a wave to John, the owner of Adirondack Saddle Tours, she leaned back and hummed the last few strings of the “Blue Danube”. Her Wrangler bumped east on the narrow, tree-lined Brown’s Tract section near her home.
As the strings of “The Gypsy Baron” began, Dorinda pulled around two parked police cars, their hazard lights blinking. They were certainly getting an early start. “Hope they find those ornery kids.” She continued humming with Strauss. Once past the trailhead for Black Bear Mountain, Dorinda coursed around a bend.
A glinting flash zipped past her passenger-side window. There was a great pop, and her steering wheel jerked to the left. Road dust poofed around her. With a startled gasp, Dorinda instinctively clutched the Jeep into neutral. She pumped the brakes. Her vehicle skidded to a rough, gravelly stop within fifteen meters of the mishap.
Eyes closed, Dorinda expelled a long sigh. Then, relaxing her grip of the steering wheel, she snapped off the engine and grabbed her keys from the ignition. “Where’s a cop when you need one?” Groaning, Dorinda wiped her auburn bangs from her eyes with one trembling wrist. She twisted her spectacle arms against her ears. Then, sliding out, Dorinda marched to the rear of the Jeep. She needed but a single glance at the rear right tire. “Damn! Slashed good, and not even a year old.”
The road dust settled at her boots. Huffing in frustration, Dorinda smacked her blue denim thighs and stomped to the passenger door. Before she could change her tire, she needed to retrieve the lug wrench and jack from beneath the passenger seat. But first she had to wedge the groceries into the Jeep’s back bench. Next, Dorinda trudged to the rear of the vehicle to remove the spare tire. As she unlocked the security lug nut, Dorinda heard a voice. She stalled, skewing an ear. Perhaps the police were just inside the woods and had witnessed her Jeep scratch to a halt. Her hands and sweater would be saved from tire graffiti if one of the brave men in blue could assist. “Hello?”
No immediate answer arose from the woods. Then off to her right, back down the road, she heard the call again. A deep bass, a man’s voice. “I require assistance. ... Help me?” Not a policeman. Or was it? Perhaps an officer had gotten hurt or been separated from the rest of the search team. Yet the voice was strange, with an unfamiliar accent. Clutching the wrench in her right fist, Dorinda stalked along the scrub-shouldered road. “Here,” the low voice hailed, weaker this time. Dorinda saw no one. Bracken fern and sheep sorrel perched atop the shoulder-tall slope at the edge of the shadowy woods.
“Who is it? Are you hurt?” There was still no answer. Dorinda hesitated, suspicious. “I have a tire iron,” she warned. “I’ll use it.” Silence. “Are you one of those kids who was shooting off the guns?” Her nerves rattled, Dorinda debated whether to return to her Jeep and quickly fix the tire. At least she could honk the horn for assistance; the nearby police might come. Perhaps she should use her phone.
After another moment of silence Dorinda turned back. “Nejht!” She flinched and spun on that spectral plea, the wrench poised in both hands.
“Stop playing games with me!” Dorinda’s voice cracked. Then she spotted something glinting along the roadside. Flexing the lug wrench in one hand, Dorinda crept forward to investigate. With a gulp she knelt to inspect the eight-inch long, jagged-tipped knife lying upon the gravel below the ferns. Its antler handle was embedded with gold and green jewels, and the blade was emblazoned with strange symbols. Turning it in her hand she read the writing engraved along the survival knife’s blunt edge: “To a kindred spirit, M.B.C.”
A pebble bounced against her leather hiking boot. Springing to her feet, Dorinda clasped the weapon but dropped the wrench on her toe. “Ow! Damn it.” She hopped in place at the ache. “I said stop playing games.” Dorinda twisted the blade menacingly and scanned the road’s raised shoulder. “I’ve got your knife.” Something moved among the bracken. Atop that shadowy slope, Dorinda could just discern a head of loosely braided, black hair and a dark leather vest. In that moment her mind froze.
A vivid, horrible memory skirted her consciousness. Michael? “Are you hurt? I’ll get the police.” From the thick brush, the figure did not answer. Making a quick decision, Dorinda slung the lug wrench through her jeans’ belt loop, stuffed the knife into her back pocket, and surveyed a place to mount the hill. “I’m coming.” She tugged at a sapling for support. Then, grunting, she clambered over the top. Dorinda straightened catching her breath and brushing clean her palms. She cautiously approached the person prone among the ferns.
It was a man, over six and a half feet tall, his bare arms heavily muscled. Stumbling backward, Dorinda landed on her buttocks. She almost toppled down the bank. The man’s skin was a rich shade of fiery mahogany. As she sat gaping, immobilized, he raised a hand and turned his head to face her. Dorinda stifled a scream, for he had the weariest expression in his large, obsidian eyes. His thick-browed forehead, furrowed in pain, was bisected by a vertical row of bumpy, bony ridges.
“Matah-de. Please,” he groaned as his hand fell back to the green. “I will not hurt you.”
Nervously Dorinda poked at her glasses. She had seen that look before, of suffering and death. Two years of disaster paramedic training, an LPN certificate, and five months volunteer work in a home for the terminally ill forced Dorinda to her feet. This man was strange but not inhuman, and he needed her help. Silently Dorinda made a promise to try. Her tenuous voice was but a whisper. “I’m coming.”
Kneeling beside the now motionless figure, she brushed back the loose strands of hair which had fallen from his long braid. Quickly she felt for the pulse at his throat but found none. “Oh, no. Hold on. I’m here.” Searching, Dorinda found the artery at the back of his neck. Beneath the bony ridges of a dorsal crest, the stranger’s heart was racing. His skin was fiery to the touch.
Fighting her dread, Dorinda grasped his right shoulder and shoved the man over onto his back. A ragged breath escaped his lungs. His dark eyes flew open only to close again. Dorinda faltered for the wounds she saw appalled her. A thick, orangeish liquid trickled from a scorched hole in his leather tunic. The man’s right shoulder was splotchy nutmeg and black, and a fleshy gouge oozed at his upper left thigh. The deep nutmeg-colored blood had stained his chest and dried in the creases of an intricate but melted silver medallion attached to the garment. The left pant leg of his leather trousers was also saturated.
“My God. What happened to you? And where did you come from?” The stranger only moaned in reply but did not wake. “Well,” Dorinda ventured her voice trembling. “You certainly can’t help yourself in this condition. You need me.” She glanced down at the gravel road. No cars sped by. Too isolated. She considered hailing the nearby, investigative team. But the strange man – with the piercin
g dark eyes so much like Michael’s – needed medical attention immediately. I was too late to save Michael.
Trigger anxious police and the gawking stares of the shadowing media couldn’t help. Dorinda thought to hop back down to the Jeep and call for an ambulance, but St. Luke’s Memorial in Utica was over an hour’s drive away. A seaplane might be quicker, but nearby Eighth Lake was too small to make a landing. And in the dense ground cover of the Adirondacks there was no area close by or large enough for a helicopter rendezvous. Two years ago, they couldn’t save Michael. Dorinda had few choices now. With Michael I hadn’t had any choices.
Eagle Bay had nothing to help. The closest ambulance squad was in Inlet. Her cottage was just up the road, and she had the same medical training as a paramedic. I couldn’t help Michael. Maybe I can make a difference now.
Dorinda made her decision. Gathering her feet, she slung her arms up under the stranger’s armpits. But when she tried to drag him along the wood line to the Jeep, he was heavy and awkward to maneuver through the thick undergrowth and saplings. Dorinda groaned. “This isn’t going to work.” She knelt to get a better grip as finally a car coursed by below her but did not stop. Grabbing a few deep inhales, Dori tensed and pulled with all her might. She hit the ferns with a soft thud when her hands lost their hold. “Damn it,” she grumbled. “I knew I shouldn’t have quit Bally’s.” Tapping her glasses against her face, Dorinda climbed again to her boots. She re-gathered her patient in her arms then had a better idea. After laying him out perpendicular to the slope, Dorinda hopped down onto the roadway then turned to slide her arms in through the openings of the man’s sleeveless tunic. Locking her fingers together at the back of his bony neck, she mumbled, “Hope I don’t choke you.” His chin dug into his leather-clad chest as Dorinda gathered another deep breath and pulled.
Groaning at the strain and teetering backwards, Dorinda heaved the stranger from the slope. They promptly collapsed his slack bulk atop her legs. The knife poked Dorinda’s buttocks. The lug wrench banged her knee. Eyeglasses slalomed along her nose. With a grimace, Dorinda wriggled out from under the man and again locked arms through his vest. She dragged him over the loose gravel until the pocketed knife butt dinged metal fender. Dorinda knelt in the dust and let the man’s shirt slip from her grasp.
“Why do men have to weigh so much?” Panting Dorinda wiped the sweat from her brow with her sweater sleeve. Then she stumbled to her feet, tugged up her sleeves, and turned to open the passenger-side door of her cocked vehicle. Considering the narrow road space, the Jeep, and its soon-to-be cargo sprawled on the dirt, Dorinda frowned. “Now, how am I supposed to do this?” She stamped her foot. “I’m not Wonder Woman. I have frailties!” An icy chill of doubt clutched her skull. Her face softened, though, when she regarded the dark-skinned and unconscious stranger. “Any other person would have left you for dead. But part of me thinks there’s a reason you’re here.” She paused to consider the tightness in her gut. “The rest of me is scared stupid.”
Her body trembling now from strain and trepidation, Dorinda bent to right the stranger. She grabbed his left arm to jerk him the remainder of the distance to the door. His skull banged against the bump step. He groaned, head swaying sideways. Dorinda knelt beside the stranger to cradle his chiseled chin in her left hand. “Wake up. I can’t do this alone.” No response. “Wake up,” she demanded, more loudly. “Can you hear me? Wake up!” Dorinda slapped his cheek hard. The man groaned again. “Come on. Help me!” Rolling a fist, Dorinda slammed it into the man’s right shoulder just above the darkened wound.
The stranger gasped, curled into a sit, and coughed. His eyes rolled down from their sockets. Hacking again, the man raised a hand to defend himself.
Quickly Dorinda grasped it and jumped to her feet pulling hard. “Stand up. Come on. I can’t do this by myself.”
Suddenly his feet were moving, his breathing ragged and loud. Lurching forward onto his shaky legs, the mahogany man then tottered backwards. Dorinda gave him an angled shove and he tumbled onto the Jeep’s front seat, his buttocks just clearing the cushion. The stranger’s head banged the upper door frame and he crumpled.
With two more shoves, Dorinda got the man’s legs inside the vehicle and closed the door. Panting now and coughing – both from the strain and the kicked-up road dust – Dorinda wanted desperately to sit down and rest. But getting him conscious was a stroke of luck. She still had to get him home and patched up.
“Now for the Jeep.” She sighed and got to work loosening the lug nuts of her flat tire. This would only take a few minutes.
* * *
Surveying the windblown Mytoki city, Coty spied no sign of surviving Orthops. The creatures had retreated as soon as the captain had killed their leader drone, but not before it had sent Vesarius into oblivion. Coty’s mind returned to the dais before him. Both Sam Waters and Jonas Botrocelli were busy studying the Arch’s controls.
Waters huffed in frustration from where he knelt beneath the mechanism’s platform. “If an Orthop can figure this out, how come we can’t?” Standing he turned to his captain. “I don’t know, Bear. Jonas can figure the controls by their positions and sequence, but we don’t know what we’re doing. We can turn it on. We can’t run it.”
“What’s worse,” Jonas spoke, wiping the sweat from his olive-complexioned brow. “The Orthops may have known no better. They may have been playing craps too.” The engineer ran dusty fingers through his short black curls and shook his head in defeat. “It amazes me they could have even turned it on without having had time to study the machine. Maybe they’re smarter buggers than we thought.”
“Now don’t say that, Jonesey,” Coty countered. He forced a hopeful smile. “You’re worth two thousand of those cockroaches. You two have come a long way in a day. Why don’t we break for dinner?” When his men agreed, Coty followed them to the transport parked on a flat platform below the time machine. “I’ll keep watch from out here.” Michael Coty hefted his multi-phase plasma rifle in his arms. While Sam and Jonas ate sandwiches and sipped coffee in the cooler interior of the transport, Coty listened to their conversation through the open doorway.
“Maybe that’s it, Jonesey,” Sam suggested with a sip of hot Java. “We have to start thinking like cockroaches.”
Jonas grunted in good humor and answered through a mouthful of lettuce and chicken. “Two thousand of them?”
“Of course not. The Orthops seem to know what they’re doing. Let’s assume so. How do they think? Communicate?”
“We don’t know enough about them to answer those questions.”
“Sure,” Sam replied. “The Vesar know them best. But they’re too busy killing them.”
Jonas shrugged over his half-eaten sandwich. “If we could only study one, learn its language. It could teach us.” The engineer glowered into his coffee mug and harrumphed. “So far no one’s had luck with that. Orthops all die within days of capture.” Now Jonas sighed and switched his mental gears. “We could try to randomize the controls, call through the Arch. If Sarius answers, we’ve found him.” Waving his suggestion off Jonas grumbled, “Nah. That’d only work if he were still at the transport site.”
“And alive and conscious,” Sam admitted with a lowered chin. When Coty spun to march from the transport some steps before returning, Sam mumbled with regret, “Sorry, Bear.” The ship’s historian considered the companion beside him with a critical glare. “Come on, Jonesey. We’re educated men. I need to break the Mytoki codes, and you need to understand the mechanics. Turning it on will get us nowhere quick. We don’t have time for a billion variables. Maybe if Moxland-”
“Enough, Gentlemen,” Coty snapped, one foot up in the transport. “We’re going back to the ship. I’ll send a security detail down to guard the Arch. You two need to sleep on this.” The captain leaned his rifle against the pilot seat and plopped down. After strapping in, Coty powered up the engines. The captain didn’t notice behind him as Jonas and Sam exchanged sympathetic glances a
nd strapped in as well.
* * *
Dorinda steered the Jeep off the Uncas Road and onto a dirt trail just wider than her vehicle. But as she passed the white-posted mailbox which marked her property, her patient flopped against her like some sand-stuffed ragdoll. Dorinda shouldered him back over, nearly taking the Jeep with her and into a tree. She cursed her need to rush. The man’s leg wound was bleeding again, the life draining from him. I couldn’t help Michael. What if he needs a transfusion? “Don’t die on me, damn it. Not until I find out who ... what you are.”
Once a few thousand feet in from the road and past the canoe portage, she could see her squat white cottage surrounded by Michael’s beloved wild blueberries, blue spruce and stately sugar maples. The screened porch directly in front of her – attached to the right side of the cottage – was her destination. Pulling up, Dorinda swiveled her Wrangler so that the passenger side was nearest the three wooden steps.
She jumped out, slammed the door behind her and called for her dog. “Casey!” A flurry of fur bolted through an inner dog door and waggled to the entrance of the screened porch. “Hi, baby girl,” Dorinda greeted. She opened the screen door and ruffled the collie’s tan mane. In response, the dog snuffled at her sweater and blood-stained jeans obviously intent on a strange new odor. “I need your help.” After widening the opening and setting the stop, Dorinda returned to the tan vehicle and unlatched its passenger side.
Casey barked sharply and jumped between the two people before Dorinda could catch the limp stranger. With a yipe, the collie wriggled out from under the man as he tumbled from the Jeep. But the dog had cushioned his fall. Dorinda snatched at a mahogany arm to avoid yet another head impact. Then, straightening her patient’s body so that he was flat on his back, Dorinda twisted to grab her dog by the scruff of the neck.