Looking back at the cabin, Carlos saw Kane standing at the threshold. The door was open and he was extending a hand toward the interior.
“Welcome to my castle,” he said with a grin.
“You’ve got a nice little set-up here,” Carlos said as he peered through the open door. The interior was furnished with a small wooden table, several rough-hewn benches, and a low bed. Books on various topics were stacked here and there on the floor. A few metal dishes, some cutlery, and two cups rested on a shelf built into a wall.
Kane lay the fish on the table. He walked to the southern wall and opened a shutter to let in the afternoon sun. He did the same to windows on the eastern and western walls. The northern wall was occupied by the chimney and had no window.
“Is this what you’ve been up to for these past few years?” asked Carlos. He slid his backpack off his shoulders and set it on the floor of irregularly shaped but evenly laid stones.
“Something like that,” replied Kane. “Mostly I’ve just been living. I came out here after that damn nonsense in the Capitol District, sorry, Liberty, when the good people of that fair city decided to butcher the hell out of each other. I’d been planning to go west across the Mississippi, but when I came upon this spot.” His voice trailed off for a moment. “I don’t know…I guess something about it kept me here.”
“Seems isolated. You have no one to talk to.”
Kane shrugged. “I talk to my ghosts. And I have plenty to read when the day’s done.”
“Back to basics, eh?” observed Carlos approvingly. “I wish I had done the same. You seem quite self-sufficient.”
“Not completely. What I don’t have, I can get from a riverboat trader who passes by here twice a week.”
“Convenient.”
Carlos studied the one-room cabin a little more carefully while Kane pulled out a cutting board from a shelf under the table. There was an old footlocker in the far corner. Above it were several pegs in the wall from which hung a heavy jacket and a dark belt. Behind the footlocker, leaning against the wall, was a sword in its scabbard.
“Linsky escaped,” said Carlos abruptly. He looked at Kane to gauge his reaction, but his host simply retrieved a knife from a tray of utensils behind him and began cleaning the fish. “He’s pulled together his old SPD thugs along with ex-Red Legs and other low-life into an army he’s calling the Storm Front,” continued Carlos. “They’re terrorizing the population and disrupting the Septemberist reform efforts. They appear, attack, and disappear without a trace.”
Kane did not look up from this work as he cut a long slit along the fish’s belly. Setting aside the knife, he reached a finger inside the animal and pulled out its liver, heart, and other organs.
“Is it true that Attika’s dead?” asked Kane.
“Yes. Linsky killed her right inside The Residence.”
Kane nodded his head but continued his work, seemingly undisturbed by the news.
“You may not know it, living out here in the middle of nowhere, but the country’s falling apart.”
“I’ve heard a little about it,” Kane replied as he splayed the fish open and began to cut it into fillets. “And you should know that just because a place isn’t on a map doesn’t mean it’s the middle of nowhere. Now, be useful and start a fire in the pit outside. You’ll find wood stacked behind the cabin.”
Carlos scoffed. “Is that all you have to say? Go get some wood? Start a fire?”
“You’ve been spending too much time with your soft-headed Septemberist friends, Carlos. Concentrate on the job in front of you. I’m hungry. You’re hungry. So right now our job is to prepare and eat a decent meal.”
“I’d forgotten how stubborn you are,” grumbled Carlos as he exited the cabin.
Ten minutes later, as Carlos added a few sticks to the growing fire, Kane emerged from the cabin with an empty sack in his hand.
“This way,” he said as he handed Carlos the sack.
Carlos followed Kane to the little garden next to the cabin where Kane pointed at a few herbs and vegetables for Carlos to pick.
“One fish and a few herbs will not be enough food for two grown men such as ourselves,” said Carlos. “There is still an hour of light left. I can shoot us a rabbit or a few squirrels before dark.”
“Rabbits? Squirrels?” said Kane with mock disdain. “Not after you’ve braved the wilds just to find me.”
Kane walked toward the smokehouse. He knocked away several thick wooden pegs and heaved opened the heavy door. He emerged moments later with a boar’s leg in his hand. He re-secured the smokehouse door and walked back to the garden where Carlos had begun picking vegetables.
“Aha!” exclaimed Carlos with delight. He pointed at the boar’s leg. “Now that is more like it!”
“I thought it would get your attention,” said Kane with a smile. “Those beets look ready to come out of the ground.”
Carlos looked at the little plants at his feet. “I don’t like beets. They taste like earth.”
“You’re very far from Liberty, Carlos. I wouldn’t be so picky,” said Kane as he walked through the cabin door. “And throw a few more logs on that fire.”
“Isolation has made you tyrannical, my friend,” said Carlos loudly. He looked at the beets and grumbled to himself before stooping down to pick the vegetables.
It was not long before the two men were sitting down at the table to a fine meal of fried fish, smoked ham, and assorted vegetables.
Then Kane raised a finger. “I nearly forgot,” he said as he stood up and exited the cabin.
Perplexed, Carlos was about to follow him outside but stopped when Kane reappeared at the door with two wooden mugs in his hand. He gave one to Carlos and grinned.
Carlos sniffed the contents.
“Is this…”
“Beer, my friend!” said Kane proudly. “Brewed to perfection.” He raised his cup. “To the good life!”
Carlos raised his cup and took a sip. He nodded his head approvingly. “This is quite good.”
As they sat down at the table once more, Carlos cleared his throat. “We may toast to the good life, but I wonder if it is. Linsky murdered Attika and now he’s tearing down everything she worked so hard to build. The country’s in chaos. People are suffering terribly.”
“It can wait,” said Kane firmly. “Right now we eat.”
“It is hard to enjoy this magnificent feast when so many others cannot do the same.”
Kane put down his fork and looked at Carlos. “Listen. You and I have done more than just about any other person alive to try to make things better. The problem is this, the Septemberists thought they’d won when the Guardians were gone and Linsky captured. It doesn’t work that way. Attika had a shiny vision of the future, but when you strip away all the rhetoric and slogans, it was just another version of Malcom Weller’s dusty old doctrines. The people know it, that’s why they don’t buy into the new regime. That’s also why they’re vulnerable to the Strom Front. If they truly believed in the Septemberist Revolution, Linsky and his thugs wouldn’t last ten minutes. They’d tear him apart with their bare hands.”
“And how do you have such deep knowledge of what is in the hearts of the people?”
“The riverboat captain,” replied Kane. “Sometimes I ride with him up and down the river – I help out in exchange for supplies. I talk to lots of folks along the route, and that’s what they tell me.”
“They tell you all of that?”
“Not in those words, but basically, yes.”
Carlos picked up his knife and fork. “Maybe you’re right. But I’ll be damned if I let Linsky back into power.” Then he greedily dug into the food on his plate.
After they had finished their meal, they cleaned the pot and dishes and threw several more logs onto the still-glowing embers in the fire pit. Kane retrieved two chairs from inside the cabin and placed them near the flames. He sat down in one chair and indicated for Carlos to sit in the other. Stretching out his legs, he re
sted his heels on one of the large stones that formed the fire ring. Carlos pulled off his boots to dry by the fire while Kane pulled two thin cigars out of his shirt pocket. He handed one to Carlos, who accepted it with a smile on his face and a gleam in his eye. They lit them using a branch pulled from the fire and blew out a mouthful of smoke, each with a satisfied look on his face.
“Okay, Carlos,” Kane said after silently enjoying several puffs, “tell me all the troubles of the world.”
Carlos studied his cigar for a moment and said, “Well, I don’t know all the troubles in the world, but I do know things are falling apart right here. If we don’t stop Linsky, we’ll get the PRA all over again, or worse. I told you Linsky killed Attika, but that’s only part of the story. I fear there is something else much more sinister at work.”
Kane nodded his head knowingly. “Yeah. You must be talking about the rumors of Harken being back. Are they true?”
“Perhaps. I know someone who told me she saw him with her own eyes.”
“Yeah? Who’s that?”
“Tyana is her name. I believe you know her.”
Kane gave Carlos a sharp look. “I do. What’d she say?”
“She told me a strange story about the manner of Attika’s death.”
“Go on,” said Kane.
“You have walked many paths, my friend. You are a close friend of this mysterious Ravenwood, a man with close relations to the Lycians. And you were there when Logan Brandt breached the walls of the Capitol District.”
Kane nodded his head slowly. “Yeah. I was there.”
“There are some who witnessed that extraordinary feat. They say he has an object which gives him strange powers, something called the Apollo Stone. They say he used it to pull airplanes and alien ships from the sky and cast them against the walls. They say he is a Navigator who can magically move great distances in the blink of an eye.”
Kane squinted at Carlos through the smoke of the cigar clenched between his teeth. “So I’ve heard.”
“Then let me tell you the story Tyana passed to me and perhaps together we can understand what happened. Linsky and several Storm Front scum somehow infiltrated The Residence and found her and Tyana in her office. According to Tyana, the bastard gave Attika a knife and fought her right there. Then he showed up, Harken, the Grand Guardian himself.”
“How?” asked Kane, leaning forward.
“According to Tyana, he literally appeared out of nowhere. He ordered Linsky to kill Attika, which Linsky did without hesitation, then they all disappeared. They let Tyana live so she could tell the story of Harken’s return.”
Kane spat into the fire and listened to it hiss. “Whatever mess Attika created, it’s beyond my ability to fix.”
Carlos frowned. “So you will do nothing to help?”
The man who some call the Traveler King looked at Carlos. His face was illuminated by the fire’s dancing flames, though his eyes remained as dark as coal. “We’re all fools, Carlos. We’ve been fighting this war in one way or another since the Impact, and I don’t see how it will end any time soon. I used to think that if we could tear down the Guardians, this land might be healed. The people would have the chance to live in peace. We almost succeeded; we got rid of the Guardians but not before the Sahiradin and the Lycians showed up. Now we’re mixed up in a war that spans the whole damn galaxy. Whatever we do here on Earth will be swallowed up by events on distant worlds. It’s beyond our ability to change.”
“In all the years I’ve known you, I’ve never heard such nonsense come out of your mouth,” said Carlos. “We’ve always fought against difficult odds, but we never gave up. It is no different now, except the stakes have risen to include not just the fate of this nation but of all the peoples of Earth. Does that mean we roll over and stop fighting? Of course not! It means we must join together and fight harder.”
“I haven’t held a sword in three years, Carlos,” said Kane with tired a sigh. “I haven’t fired a gun in anger for just as long.”
“I’m sure you remember how.”
“It’s not that simple and you know it, so spare me the ‘join the good fight to save humanity’ crap. To do the things I’ve done - all that killing - you have to be mean, wild dog mean. And you can’t ever slow down or stop to think because once you do, the shell you’ve been hiding in starts to crack and flake away. The anger that once fueled your rage and sharpened your vision turns into the fog of mingled regrets and painful memories. Faces of dead enemies and lost friends come back to you when you least expect it. You hear screams, bullets whistling through the air, metal striking metal. Every day, I live with those sounds and visions, Carlos. They’re part of me and I accept it. But I have no desire to add to their number.”
He looked Carlos in the eye. “Sorry you came all this way for nothing.”
Carlos slowly exhaled and furrowed his brow. “So that’s it?” he said. “You’re not going to help?” He angrily threw his cigar into the flames. “You’ve been out here in the wilderness too long, Kane. You’ve lost your nerve. Perhaps you have become a coward.”
Kane raised an eyebrow at this stinging rebuke from a man he’d known and respected for many years, but it wasn’t enough to change his mind. He ran a hand through his hair and laughed bitterly.
“All warriors are cowards,” he replied. “We accept the gifts of life, but we violate the terms of the bargain by exchanging another’s life for our own. With every cut of the sword or bullet fired, the rope that connects us to the person we should have become gets a little more torn, a little more frayed. I don’t have many threads left in my rope. I can’t afford to cut any more.”
“This is a just cause!” countered Carlos. “Fighting for a just cause strengthens those connections, my friend. It does not sever them.”
“Just cause, unjust cause - it doesn’t matter. You lose a little of your humanity every time you take a life.”
Carlos looked at Kane for a long moment, but Kane refused to lift his head and steadfastly watched the fire’s glowing embers. Carlos removed his wide-brimmed hat and rolled it in his hands as he considered Kane’s words.
“I’ve wasted my time coming out here,” he said. He pulled on his boots, placed his hat back on his head, and stood up. “I need to get back to the world and let the others know that the legendary Kane has crawled into a hole in the woods and refuses to come out.”
He strode toward the cabin and went inside. Moments later he reappeared with his pack on his shoulders, rifle in hand. He headed for the footbridge.
“Carlos, wait.”
The tall man in the long tan coat halted. Without turning around, he said, “What is it?”
“It’s late. There’s no point in you stomping through the woods in the dark. Stay until morning.”
“No thanks. You can go to bed. I’ve got work to do.”
He crossed the footbridge then turned left and marched east.
Kane watched as Carlos disappear into the darkness, listening to the sound of his retreating footfalls. With a grunt that was part laugh and part self-reproach, he returned his attention to the fire. He stirred the coals and stared into the glowing embers, lost in thought until a breeze passed through the uppermost branches of the surrounding trees. He looked to his right and breathed deeply as strong gusts from the southwest rolled by, bringing with them the report of distant thunder.
The wind’s promise of the approaching storm evoked in Kane’s mind the image of a swiftly flowing stream tumbling over half-exposed rocks. On the other side of the little stream was a small cabin tucked into a clearing in the forest. A young woman with corkscrew locks of brown hair stood near the cabin. Her blue and white dress billowed in the breeze. She raised her hand to her brow to block the sun’s rays as she looked toward the forest’s edge. Hearing a mocking bird singing among the branches, she smiled then whistled a few notes. The bird whistled and trilled in response. The woman and bird exchanged whistles, their combined song growing in complexity with each turn
. Below the tree in which the mockingbird was perched, a girl of about eight years was picking raspberries from a large bush and carefully placing them into a tin pale.
The vision of the cabin in the forest changed as dark, ominous clouds closed in to block the sun’s rays. A great wind suddenly rose up, violently bending the surrounding trees. The woman saw something in the distance and called out to the girl, who came running, dropping the pale and its fruit on the ground as she hastened toward the cabin. As they disappeared inside and slammed the door shut, Kane tried to turn around to see what had sent the woman into a panic. He tried again and again to turn, but his body would not obey his command. Sadly, he did not need to see what was approaching to know why the woman had fled into the cabin; he’d watched this same scene play out countless times in his mind’s eye.
He heard the sound of men’s voices just behind him. Moments later they passed by him, six dark figures slowly splashing across the creek and climbing up onto the far embankment. They wore the green and brown camouflage of the PRA military. Around their boots were the burgundy-colored leggings of the PRA’s Special Forces, Red Legs. Now they were laughing at some crass joke one of them had told. They stopped to pass around a bottle of booze in order to further blunt their minds and work up the nerve to commit the atrocities they were planning. One of them pointed a thumb at the cabin. The others nodded and laughed as they passed the bottle around one more time before continuing their advance.
As Kane watched the Red Legs walk across the clearing toward the cabin, he tried to cry out. He was desperate to warn those seeking shelter behind that thin wooden door of the approaching danger, but no sound would come. He tried to leap across the stream, but his feet were rooted to the ground. Then a wall of fire swept across the clearing, consuming the field, the cabin, everything. When the flames passed, the cabin and the Red Legs were gone. All that remained were charred bones and smoldering ashes.
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