The Paths Between Worlds

by Paul Antony Jones

  “It could be one of the kidnappers,” Freuchen said, his jaw set. I could tell he was spoiling for a fight.

  “If that is so, we might be able to learn something from them,” said Chou. “We should approach carefully. If it is one of the people who attacked the garrison, they may still be armed.” She turned to the robot. “Silas, I want you to lead the way. Be as quiet as you can.” She looked back at me and Freuchen. “We will remain behind you.”

  We followed Silas as he picked his way carefully through the forest. “We are nearing the location,” He whispered. “Should I go ahead and ensure that there is no threat?”

  All three of us humans found cover behind the wide trunk of a Redwood.

  “Yes,” Chou whispered, crouching next to me and Freuchen.

  “Be careful,” I added, kneeling beside her.

  The robot dipped his eye-bar in acknowledgment and began to creep forward, while we all held our breath in anticipation.

  Seconds passed with only the background noise of the forest to cover our deep breathing, then Silas said “Candidate 812139, it is a pleasure to meet you. You are injured. May I be of assistance to you?”

  There was a momentary pause then an unmistakable voice said, “You come one step closer, and I’ll blow that excuse for a head right off your shoulders.”

  “Wild Bill!” I yelled, unable to hold back my relief. As one the three of us clambered from cover and rushed toward our friend’s voice.

  Silas’ huge frame stood between two trees, blocking my view. He stepped aside as we approached, and I slipped past him, the grin on my face melting away as I got a good view of the scene. On the ground ahead of me lay Wild Bill’s horse. Brute was obviously dead; several bullet wounds along his flank a testament to what had ended the beast’s life. Wild Bill lay next to his horse, pinned from the waist down beneath him,

  “Well, you all are a sight for sore eyes,” the cowboy whispered, through gritted teeth. “I thought I was a dead man, for sure.” As he spoke, he ran his hand over Brute’s mane, but his eyes did not leave Silas. “And the God’s honest truth is I ain’t convinced I ain’t dead.” He nodded at Silas “Is this… tinman with you?”

  “Silas?” I said. “He’s one of the good guys. We’ll tell you all about him later.”

  Freuchen stepped in and knelt at Brute’s head. “First thing ve need to do is get you out from under there. Silas?”

  “Yes, Peter. How may I be of assistance?”

  “Vill you help us lift Brute off Vild Bill?”

  “Of course.” Silas moved closer, his multi-jointed legs bending in a way that allowed him to slide his arms under Brute’s body. Then, in one swift yet touchingly gentle movement that did not go unnoticed by the cowboy, he lifted Brute off of Wild Bill and set the horse’s body down nearby. Silas’ eye-bar shifted in Wild Bill’s direction. “I am very sorry for your loss.”

  Wild Bill gave a curt nod of acknowledgment, exhaled a long breath that I assumed must have been relief then grimaced as he tried to move his legs.

  “How badly are you injured?” Chou asked, kneeling next to the cowboy.

  “Hard… to… tell,” Wild Bill said, through clenched teeth. “Damn legs are asleep or broken or both.” He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t respond.

  “Just take a minute,” I said, laying a hand against the cowboy’s shoulder.

  “Argh,” Wild Bill continued. “Feels like I’m being stabbed by a million damn knives.”

  Chou knelt beside him and slowly moved her hands down his left leg, then his right. “I don’t think your legs are broken.”

  “We came from the garrison. Can you tell us what happened?” I said.

  Wild Bill winced. “Four men showed up around noon today. Came out of nowhere, hollering and pointing rifles at us. They was all dressed the same, some kind of uniform. They rounded everyone up before we could do a damn thing to stop them. They lined us up like they were going to shoot us right there. Instead, they walked up and down the line checking everyone real close. Like they was looking for someone. They kept asking questions, but no one could understand them.” Wild Bill grimaced and spat. “Damn it all to hell that hurts,” he said, wracked by another spasm of pain. But I noticed his legs were moving, which I took for a good sign. “Anyways,” Wild Bill continued, “Edward said they was speaking German, what with his experience fighting them in that war he was in. Said he didn’t recognize their uniforms, and their guns were like nothing he’d seen before.”

  “German?” I said.

  “Can you describe vat they ver varing?” Freuchen said, his voice suddenly suspicious.

  “Like I said, they was all dressed identical, but they had these two lightning bolts on their tunics, right about here.” He reached up and fingered the lapel of his shirt.

  Freuchen started to say, “They sound like—"

  I finished his sentence for him, “Nazis.”

  “That’s what Evelyn called them. Nazis. Said they were murdering cowards. That they’d been responsible for some worldwide war that killed, and I ain’t sure I believe this, millions of people.”

  “She wasn’t lying,” I said.

  “How the hell did they find the garrison?” Freuchen pondered.

  “Benito led them here. They had him all trussed up like a pig ready for slaughter. Looked like they’d beaten him black and blue; poor son of a bitch could barely walk.”

  “Then they must have also captured Caleb and Tabitha, ven they left to explore the other side of the island,” Freuchen said.

  Wild Bill nodded in agreement. “Anyways, like I said, seemed to me they was looking for someone. Well, whoever it was, they didn’t find them. That’s when they made it clear they was going to march us right out of the garrison to wherever the hell they came from. Edward grabbed me, said I should make a run for it, take Brute and find you three and tell you what happened. Said you were our only hope. I wasn’t right happy about leaving them all, but it seemed like the best thing, under the circumstances.”

  Wild Bill flexed his left leg slowly, moving it back and forth a few times. He did the same with his right leg, then continued. “Edward made a play for one of the guards, and in the ensuing commotion, I slipped past them, grabbed Brute and rode hell-for-leather toward the woods. One of them Nazis spotted us and started firing that gun of his—ain’t seen nothing like it; must have fired fifty rounds faster than I could spit. I’ll never forget him, an ugly bastard, had a scar down his face.” With his index finger, Wild Bill made a slicing motion from his right temple across his nose to the left side of his lip. “Anyways, he hit old Brute here, but we kept on going till he couldn’t go no more. And we been here ever since. I reckon them Nazis must have thought they missed, and we’d got away, so they didn’t bother to track us.”

  “What about Albert?” I said.

  “He was alright, last I saw him. Holding on to Evelyn like she was his mamma.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “And Edward? Did they hurt him?” I braced for the worst, expecting nothing but bad news.

  “They beat him good, but he was alive.”

  I squeezed Wild Bill’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “I reckon I can probably walk, if you’ll help me up,” Wild Bill said to Freuchen.

  Freuchen offered both his hands and pulled the cowboy to his feet, then wrapped an arm around Wild Bill’s waist while the two men took a few tentative steps.

  “Would you fetch me my saddle?” Wild Bill asked Chou.

  Chou uncinched the saddle, lifted it free of Brute’s body, and brought it to Wild Bill.

  “I think I’m good now,” Wild Bill said, stepping away from Freuchen. “Legs feel like I spent a week in a Deadwood cathouse, but I’m pretty sure I’ll survive.” He took his saddlebags and rifle from the saddle, slung them over his shoulder, then walked to his horse. “I hate to leave you here like this, old friend, but I swear I’ll make that bastard pay for what he done.” He turned back to us and said, “I reckon th
ey got a good two-hour start. Best we be on our way if we’re going to find our friends. And while we’re at it, why don’t you fill me in on who this here tinman is.”

  We picked up the trail again, following it into the forest while we recounted to Wild Bill the story behind how we had found Silas. Perhaps it was the time Wild Bill was from, or maybe it was a symptom of this new, incredible reality we found ourselves living in, whichever, Wild Bill accepted our explanation with a simple nod and a note that he was “Glad the tinman is on our side.”

  But it quickly became obvious that while Wild Bill’s injuries were, thankfully, minimal, we weren’t going to be able to keep up the pace we had before finding him.

  “If ve’re going to have a chance to catch up vith our people before nightfall, ve have to move faster,” Freuchen said.

  “Leave me,” Wild Bill insisted. “I’ll make my own way.”

  “No,” said Chou. “We will need all of the help we can get if these Nazis are as well armed as you say they are.” She pointed at the two pistols Wild Bill had on his hip, and the rifle slung over his shoulder. “Without your weapons, we will have little chance of engaging them successfully.”

  “So, what do we do?” I said.

  “I will go on ahead and attempt to locate them,” Chou said. “Once I have found our friends, I will return. Then we can plan how best to rescue them.”

  “I’ll come too,” I said.

  Chou shook her head. “I will be faster alone.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. I’d seen how fast she could move. “Well, just be careful.”

  Chou smiled. “If I have not returned by nightfall, make camp. I will find you. If I have not returned by morning, you should consider me captured or dead.” She turned, sprinted away, flitting between the trees like a Valkyrie searching for the souls of the righteous dead.

  “When he showed up, I thought Silas was a man in a suit, like them knights of yore I heard about, all dressed from head to foot in armor. Now you’re telling me the tinman’s a machine?” said Wild Bill “How’s that even possible?”

  I did my best to explain. “I don’t really know how he works exactly, even in my time we didn’t have anything like Silas, but we had computers… machines that could imitate people so well, you thought you were talking to a real person. You should think of Silas as an artificial person. A very, very smart person.”

  “Thank you for the compliment, Meredith.”

  Wild Bill just shook his head. “All I know for sure is that if the tinman here hadn’t found me, I’d be as dead as Brute right now. So, artificial person or not, I owe you a debt.”

  As we walked, I told Wild Bill everything we had learned from Silas about the Architect, including his message to me and how the robot had been unable to recall it once he had lost power.

  “When you found me,” Wild Bill said to Silas, “you called me a candidate? Candidate for what?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Silas, “but that part of my memory is corrupted.”

  “Well, that ain’t much use,” Wild Bill said.

  “We think the Architect and the voice that asked us if we wanted to be saved are probably one and the same,” I said.

  “Makes sense, I guess,” said Wild Bill. “About as much sense as any of this can, at least. But if this Architect fellow brought all of us here for a reason, why would he bring these Nazis, too? Or the two men who killed your friend Phillip? I mean, you folks all seem like reasonable and good-natured people. Why drop you in amongst men of such low moral turpitude?”

  “Chou thinks something else, some exterior force, brought them here,” I said.

  “The same force that caused us all to land in the vater rather than on land,” Freuchen chimed in. “The same force responsible for the destruction of the building ve saw at the other end of the island.”

  I nodded in agreement. “It seems obvious from what we have all experienced and from the few gaps Silas has been able to fill for us that there was a grand plan of some sorts… and that this isn’t it.”

  “Someone or something has thrown the proverbial spanner in the vurks,” said Freuchen.

  “Yeah, exactly,” I said. “We think this other —which we call the Adversary—has caused the Architect’s plan to go off course. But even if that is true, it doesn’t help us. It just means there’s an even deeper mystery to why we’re here.”

  We fell into an almost hour-long silence.

  That silence was broken when Silas suddenly announced, “Someone is approaching.”

  Before we could even think about hiding, Chou appeared from the trees ahead of us, and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. She jogged to us, wiping away a light sheen of perspiration from her forehead with her sleeve. Wild Bill handed her his canteen of water, which she accepted gratefully.

  “I have located the Nazis,” Chou said, after drinking deeply from the canteen. “They have a camp approximately three miles ahead of us in a natural clearing close to the base of the mountain.”

  “Our people?” Freuchen said.

  “They appear safe. They are being kept with others.”

  “Others?” I said, surprised. “What others?”

  “I counted approximately fifty more captives as well as our own people. They are being held in two separate groups. There are nine Nazis in total.”

  “Nine? Damn,” Freuchen said.

  “Yes, and they all appear to be heavily armed.”

  Late afternoon shadows had begun their slow crawl through the forest. I estimated we still had maybe two hours before evening caught up with us.

  “Think we can make it before dusk?” I said.

  “Yes, if Wild Bill is able to keep up.”

  “You try and stop me,” Wild Bill said.

  We picked up the pace, walking quickly and silently. I occasionally glanced over at Wild Bill; his face was set in a mask of determination, but his pain was obvious. Back in the normal world, the damage that had been done to his legs would have meant days or even weeks of bedrest and recuperation, maybe even hospital. But here, whatever injuries he sustained would vanish when tonight’s aurora arrived. Still, his pain was obvious, and I marveled at his determination and drive. But when Chou finally held up a hand for us all to stop, I saw the relief on the cowboy’s face. He sank to the ground, soaked in sweat, gasping in pain.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him, but he waved me off.

  “I’ll be just fine once I’ve caught my breath.”

  We had stopped near to where the edge of the forest gave way to the mountain; close enough that I could see the gray scree of the mountain rising up to my right through the trees.

  “Their encampment is just beyond where the tree line ends,” Chou whispered, her hand following the curve of the forest’s edge ahead and to the right of us. She turned and pointed up the side of the mountain. “Up there is an outcropping of rock that will give us a view of the camp, but first, I need to explain my plan.”

  We gathered around her. Chou turned to face Silas. “Silas, we will need your help if we are to free our friends and the captives held with them. So, it is imperative that we carry out this plan before your backup batteries die. Are you willing to help us?”

  Silas’ eye-bar tilted upward. “Of course, but you should know that I am ethically unable to participate in any violence. Nor am I able to directly or by omission of action allow harm or do harm to any human; candidate or otherwise.” I thought I detected a note of suspicion in the robot’s tone of voice.

  Chou nodded. “I understand, but our friends and the prisoners being held captive by the Nazis are all candidates who could be murdered at any moment. And the Nazis are, as far as we can ascertain, not actual candidates selected by the Architect.”

  “Yes, that is correct,” said Silas, “but as I have stated, I am not permitted to hurt or cause to be hurt any human being. That, I am afraid, includes Nazis.”

  “But your ethical programming does not preclude you from entering the camp on our behalf t
o negotiate the handover of the hostages, does it?” Chou said, a grim smile crossing her face.

  “That is an excellent idea, Weston,” said Silas. “It would be my pleasure to negotiate a peaceful resolution to this situation and secure the release of the candidates.”

  Chou spent the next few minutes explaining to Silas how she wanted him to enter the camp. “I will leave the exact details of the negotiation to you, Silas. Now, if we can—”

  Chou’s words were abruptly cut short by the unmistakable boom of a single gunshot echoing through the forest.

  “Someone’s shooting at us!” I hissed.

  “No,” said Wild Bill, “that shot was close by, but not close enough that it was aimed at us.”

  Chou turned to the robot, “Silas stay here and alert us if you see anyone. Everyone else, come with me.”

  Chou raced away in the direction of the outcropping she said she had scouted earlier, with the rest of us scrambling behind her.

  We scrambled up the side of the mountain, clutching at boulders and vegetation, anything that would give us traction or a handhold.

  “There,” Chou said, leading us toward a slanted sheet of rock that at some point in the last thousand years had cleaved away from the rest of the mountain. Over time the rock had tilted further and further away from the mountain until it rested at an angle that created a V-shaped fissure wide enough for all of us to slip into. One after the other, we stepped in and pulled ourselves up until our heads were above the rough edge, our bodies hidden from view to anyone who might happen to glance in our direction.

  Below our hiding spot, less than a quarter-mile away, the forest gave way to a large grassy clearing. Smoke rose from several campfires. Two large groups of men and women sat or lay on the ground in the clearing, separated from each other by a hundred feet. Each group was guarded by three tall men wearing the distinctive uniforms of World War II Germans. The soldiers carried machine guns or rifles cradled in their arms as they walked slowly, almost nonchalantly it seemed to me, back and forth around the groups.