by Sean Platt
Contents
Resurrection
Copyright
Resurrection
Chapter 1 -
Chapter 2 -
Chapter 3 -
Chapter 4 -
Chapter 5 -
Chapter 6 -
Chapter 7 -
Chapter 8 -
Chapter 9 -
Chapter 10 -
Chapter 11 -
Chapter 12 -
Chapter 13 -
Chapter 14 -
Chapter 15 -
Chapter 16 -
Chapter 17 -
Chapter 18 -
Chapter 19 -
Chapter 20 -
Chapter 21 -
Chapter 22 -
Chapter 23 -
Chapter 24 -
Chapter 25 -
Chapter 26 -
Chapter 27 -
Chapter 28 -
Chapter 29 -
Chapter 30 -
Chapter 31 -
Chapter 32 -
Chapter 33 -
Chapter 34 -
Chapter 35 -
Chapter 36 -
Chapter 37 -
Chapter 38 -
Chapter 39 -
Chapter 40 -
Chapter 41 -
Chapter 42 -
Chapter 43 -
Chapter 44 -
Chapter 45 -
Chapter 46 -
Chapter 47 -
Chapter 48 -
Chapter 49 -
Chapter 50 -
Chapter 51 -
Chapter 52 -
Chapter 53 -
Chapter 54 -
Chapter 55 -
Chapter 56 -
Chapter 57 -
Chapter 58 -
Chapter 59 -
Chapter 60 -
Chapter 61 -
Chapter 62 -
Chapter 63 -
Chapter 64 -
Chapter 65 -
Chapter 66 -
Chapter 67 -
Chapter 68 -
Chapter 69 -
Chapter 70 -
Chapter 71 -
Chapter 72 -
Chapter 73 -
Epilogue
- Day One
- Day Two
- Day Three
- Day Four
- Day Five
- Day Four Hundred and Thirteen
Author's Note
So What's Next?
Learn the Story Behind Resurrection
Did You Like This Book?
About the Authors
Resurrection
by Sean Platt &
Johnny B. Truant
Copyright © 2016 by Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.
The authors greatly appreciate you taking the time to read our work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about it, to help us spread the word.
Thank you for supporting our work.
CHAPTER 1
The hooded figure slipped out of the village before dawn, setting off from his dwelling before most of the others had risen for their daily chores. This was saying something because the village woke early. The sun was oppressive by midday, so people worked at first light then stayed in the shade to stay cool later — or bathed in the river, or slept in their small homes with the doors open on both ends to invite a breeze.
When they did the latter, the villagers napped on cots high enough to keep the insects and snakes at bay. Superstition said that if you slept on the ground, minions from the underworld would take you for your laziness — for putting your back to the ground rather than toiling on upright legs.
But that was all bunk to the cloaked man. The idea of never resting used to be called the Puritan Work Ethic and had, unfortunately, survived the Forgetting deep in the people’s minds. And as to snakes and spiders? They weren’t from the underworld. Near as the cloaked man could guess, the Astrals had somehow preserved them and the other creatures from the Old Earth on an unknown ark — or, for all he knew or cared, created them again once the land had dried.
He passed the Dempsey house — made of better stone and larger than the rest but still surprisingly modest.
He passed the rectory, which had grown, where Mother Knight held her meddlesome meetings.
And finally he passed the outer ring, where most of the Unforgotten made their homes. Beyond them were the wilds and the desert, and as the man walked west and the sun blushed in the sky behind him, he found it fitting that The Clearing had known just how to form itself. Like a flock of birds instinctually finding its array, so had the thousands instinctually settled into their ideal configuration.
The Unforgotten — who’d taught The Clearing’s villagers so many things they didn’t question their knowledge of — didn’t usually need defense from the desert and the wilds. They knew when unwanted things were coming.
But even windows of the Unforgotten weren’t lit with candlelight as he passed, leaving the quiet of night’s end unbroken.
He crested a rise then walked down its lee side. The bluing horizon vanished for a while, restoring his world to near darkness. And so he walked that way for a while, his eyes closed because the moon was new and the stars were hidden behind clouds and seeing simply didn’t matter.
One foot in front of the other.
No worries of stepping into something. Or on something. Or going the wrong direction.
Because the true guidance was within him, on the network, when its horizons managed to remain unobscured.
After perhaps twenty minutes by an Old-World clock, he reached the monolith, less than a quarter day from the sea. It reared up before him like always: first a dark triangle above the farthest dune, then growing into something flatter and wider as he neared. By the time he was over the dune, the eastern sky had faded from dark blue to light, warming with the first hints of blood red where land met sky.
He stood before the thing, looking up. He waited. He remembered the feeling of knowing so much more than he knew now, but that was when he’d had a global mind to guide him. Now their number was trimmed, and for a while, that had seemed to brighten the feeling. But despite all his shuffling, it had been dark for a while. Until the recent, new round of sparks. This time, he swore they were different. And Clara agreed.
But today as with every day before, the monolith offered nothing.
He stayed for long enough to know he was wasting time, hoping in an all-too-human way that the solution would magically present itself. But it didn’t. There was magic, and he could make it. But the monolith was unchanging, and gave him as little as it gave the others, who believed it simply to be junk.
Before leaving, he lowered his hood and pulled three small polished silver spheres from his pocket. He held them flat in his palm, trying to feel, knowing he’d sense nothing. The spheres had given him plenty in the past. But then again, he’d felt his origin more fully before. His power had departed like memory from the others. How had he once fed back into a Reptar and destroyed it with a thought? How had he created the duplicate that lived inside? He remembered doing it all, but his how was as lifeless as the spheres. They told him nothing, only showing him his own long, lined face — the same face he’d seen in mirrors when the forgotten floods had started.
And that unchanged face told him: It feels like it’s been forever, yes. But it all might as well have happened yesterday.
He pocketed the spheres. There was still magic in them, for sure — just as there was still mag
ic in the monolith. But he couldn’t touch it. Couldn’t access it. Like a memory he almost knew but couldn’t recall. A face he knew yet couldn’t place.
He turned and headed back to The Clearing.
He arrived at his shop to find a man waiting outside. He was very tall. Very broad. His arms were as big around as a normal man’s thighs. Everyone understood the man’s build because he labored as a blacksmith — another curiously no-questions-asked skill the Unforgotten had taught the village’s population ahead of the way things were probably supposed to happen. But his size was cause, not effect. He was able to blacksmith because he was big; he wasn’t big because he smithed. And there might be another reason he smithed, it seemed: because smiths made weapons as well as tools, and a warrior would one day need weapons with which to fight.
“Sir?” said the big man.
“Yes?”
“They call you Stranger, don’t they?”
“They call me many things. Especially behind my back.”
The big man cracked a smile. Small wrinkles formed at the corners of his mouth. A tentative smile, but there.
“My name is—”
“Carl Nairobi,” Stranger finished.
“Carl Smith,” Carl corrected.
Stranger shrugged as if it didn’t matter. Then he opened his shop’s door and let Carl inside, where he indicated two handmade chairs for each to sit.
“Why is your name Smith?” Stranger asked.
“Because I am a blacksmith.”
“Were you always a blacksmith? Is that why it’s your surname?”
Carl started to speak, but Stranger cut him off before he could.
“Five years ago, were you a blacksmith?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ten years ago, were you a blacksmith?”
“Yes.”
“Was your father a blacksmith? Is that how you learned the trade?”
Carl’s mouth opened, and his whole face formed another yes, but then he stopped.
“Do you remember your father, Carl?”
“Yes?”
“You do or you don’t?”
“Yes. Of course I do.”
“What was his name?”
There was a pause. Into it, Stranger said, “If a man’s surname were Nairobi, what might that say about him? What might it say about his origins?”
“Sir?”
“You’re so polite these days, Carl. When I first met you, you tried to beat me to death. Hit me once, in fact. I remember it well.”
Carl’s face scrunched. “Have we met, sir?”
“Yes. When you went by a different name. In a different place. Look inside, Carl. Do you seriously not remember me?”
Carl focused. He watched Stranger for a very long time. It was such a tiny thing, Stranger thought as he watched Carl back, but a telling one. People used to have such a weakened attention span, but these days, stories spun for hours. People walked without hurry. And when one man studied another, it could take a minute or more, feeling no need to fill the silence with distractions.
“When do you believe we met?”
“Twenty years ago, Carl.” Then he shifted to the village vernacular, knowing “years” was a concept they never quite agreed on. “Twenty summers and winters.”
“I’d have been a young man then.”
Stranger looked him over. Carl still looked like a young man even at his current age of fortysomething. They had all visibly matured, but by the old standards it sure didn’t look like a full twenty years of aging to Stranger. The Astrals must have done something to them when erasing their memories, and it made sense. Most of humanity had perished. If the species was meant to restart from the small seed populations left around the globe, they’d have to be hearty stock — the best of the best, a bit younger than their years.
“You were. Twenty-five at the most. But no bigger or stronger than you are now, I’d wager.”
“But you,” Carl said, still studying. “You’d have been a child.”
Stranger stood. There was a silvered glass on the far wall that he used when people came to him for advice. His face was long and lined, but not with age. He didn’t consider it much, but he understood what Carl meant. Most who didn’t know him well thought he was thirtyish, and were forgetful in exactly the way people around here were. Those closer to Stranger knew he looked the same today as he had for every subsequent yesterday. Twenty years gone in this strange new world, and he hadn’t aged a day.
“Why are you here, Carl?” Stranger asked, leaving Carl to wonder. He’d been watching the node representing Carl just as Clara had suggested, and now he was starting to believe she was right. The walls were breaching, and Carl was one of those in whom the change might have already begun.
“I was sent. By a man who frequents my shop, named Logan.”
“Why did Logan send you to the town mystic?”
“Because of my dreams, sir.”
Stranger had been facing the mirror. He turned, pleased. It really had begun to fall. His own dreams — not nearly as prescient as they once were, now that he’d become so much more human — might have been telling him the truth after all.
“What about your dreams?”
Carl shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Stranger hadn’t seen the man, other than in passing, in what felt like forever. The village had grown closer to a town in two decades, but it was still small. The town mystic scared many of its occupants just as they were frightened by Governor Dempsey’s twin. Even after a global reset, the human brain recoiled from the unknown.
But still it was hard not to imagine Carl as he’d been when they’d first come to this place, when the floodwaters had receded and returned land to the Earth. He’d been angrier then, the way Kindred still was. And his speech patterns had belonged to the old world: attitude, slang, and a South African accent. Today he might be from the pages of a history book if such things still existed.
“The monolith. Do you know it?”
“I know it well.”
“I’ve been there just once,” Carl said. “Just once, because it frightened me so badly. It’s like a thing from the underworld.”
Stranger nodded for the man to continue.
“In my dream — and it’s the same every night — I’m standing outside the monolith. On the low side, where its edge has dipped nearer to the sand. There’s a door above. Between me and the door there’s a ladder. The whole thing is made of smithed metal. But not in any way I’ve ever seen or known or can understand.”
“I know its construction. Go on.”
“It’s very clear that I’ve just stepped out of the thing. And there are others with me. They’re watching me, waiting. And it’s … It’s …”
“What is it?”
“It’s as if I brought the thing to us. As if it’s my fault it’s there.”
A haunted look crossed his features.
“Is there more?”
He nodded. “Five people come from the horizon. From across the dune. Six who have come to join me and one who has come to take something away. Six friends. One enemy. And then the people who were with me when I … when I somehow brought the monolith forth … are gone, and there are only eight of us. Friends and enemy together. But no fighting or arguing. Only expectation. They look at me and say, ‘We need it, Carl. We need it, or nothing can change.’”
“Then what?”
“That’s how it ends,” Carl said. “But I don’t understand it. I don’t know what they want from me or who they are. I can’t see their faces. I have no idea what I’m expected to give them. But it’s clear that they expect me to know — as if I’ve been sent to a far village on an errand and they’ve been waiting for me to return.”
“Why does it trouble you? It’s just a dream.”
Carl shook his head. “It’s every night now. Every night I have the exact same dream. Every night I see a few more visions.”
“Like what? What kind of new visions?” Stranger repressed his emotio
ns but couldn’t help the burning curiosity. There’d been a day when he’d been able to look out on the grid inside his mind and see details as well as Clara could — as well as she used to, anyway. These days it was all lights and shadows. He’d helped build that grid of minds, in a way, but twenty years was a long time to hold a memory that the very air around them pressed him to forget.
“Me inside the monolith. Me on the sea, in this vast thing of heavy metal, somehow above the water rather than sinking beneath it. Me holding a small silver ball, in another place, finding the monolith in a new, odd land I don’t recognize and cannot understand. The ball seems to speak to me. To take me away from something and toward something else. I follow it, and people follow me. And when I reach the part of the dream where the others arrive, I’m more and more convinced that their expectant stares are right — that I truly am to blame for bringing the thing to its resting place in the sand. But I’ve never done those things, sir. I’ve—”
“Stranger, Carl. You used to call me Stranger.”
Carl’s brow furrowed. “But I don’t remember you. We’ve never spoken.”
“We have,” Stranger said, reaching into his robe and producing a small silver ball. He held it up and watched Carl’s face change. “You spoke to me once, when I gave you something like this.”
“When? Where?”
“When we were younger. In a land you once knew but can no longer recall.” He paused, then added, “But that you one day will again.”
He handed the ball to Carl, who seemed perhaps overly willing to take something that filled him with fear. But then Carl’s large mahogany hand closed on the thing, and Stranger felt the resonance. He could close his eyes and see Carl’s node in the network brighten. See the breach in the walls, where the demons kept fighting, finally fail.
They can’t fight us forever, Stranger, said a female voice inside his head.
Carl looked up. Stranger raised his eyes to meet him.
“The gods,” he said. “The black ship in the sky from long ago that people whisper about. It was real, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Carl,” said Stranger, leaning in, excitement building in an all-too-human cavalcade of emotion. “And do you remember why it came back? Why it appeared after the water was gone, after you moored the giant ship on the old shores to rust? Do you remember why the ship blackened our skies for a full season after we thought they were done with us, after their Forgetting had already started, after we were sure they’d left for good?”