by Jacob Gowans
“Hello?” he called out in a subdued tone. Toad stirred nearby, but Sammy heard no other sounds.
In his weary, lazy state, Sammy wanted to pass the event off as just some rubbish blowing in the wind. He lay on the floor, comfortable for the first time in a long while, wondering if he should investigate the noises.
Just when he decided he didn’t need to, footsteps crunched some debris across the room, alerting Sammy instantly. His movement roused Toad, who sat up like a jack-in-the-box released from its prison.
“Butterscotch!”
A gun went off in the darkness, but the bullet struck somewhere unseen. Sammy moved into a crouching position, using both hands to shield himself.
“Get behind me!” he told Toad.
The crunching steps came closer until Sammy could see puffs of breath briefly warming the air far across the room.
“Stop where you are!” Toad cried out with plenty of fear in his voice. “Okay? You don’t know what you’re doing. My friend here is deadly . . . and—and pretty crazy. Okay? It’d be best if you just turned around and left us alone.”
Into the firelight came a grizzled man dressed in a worn button-up shirt and patched jeans. His boots showed parts of his socks. He wore finger-less gloves, and both hands were clutched tightly around a small pistol. Sammy had already decided to kill him. The darker half born of Stripe was firmly in control.
He stood up and walked toward the man.
“Hold it right there now, boy!” The man’s voice wavered as he took a tenuous step backward. “I didn’t mean to fire a shot earlier. Wasn’t trying to hurt no one . . . I’m just looking to see if you have anything valuable.”
“Put the gun down or you’re going to get killed!” Toad screamed.
Sammy had one hand outstretched, generating a blast shield protecting him from any gunshots.
“I’m serious!” Toad said. He got to his feet and moved toward Sammy, but Sammy sensed this and gently blasted Toad back to the floor with his other hand. “Listen to me! Sammy, don’t kill him!”
“Stop there, kid,” the grizzled man warned. He cocked the hammer back and licked his beard-covered lips. “I ain’t messing around. Like I said, I just come to see if you have anything of worth. I got grandkids who need to eat. Can’t grow everything in a garden.”
Sammy ignored all this and kept walking toward the man who now appeared quite uncertain of his position of power. The man cursed and lowered his gun, but Sammy didn’t care. He meant to kill. Toad was yelling at him. The shabby-looking thief was now retreating like a cowardly dog. Sammy only had to decide if he should use blasts to incapacitate or just use his bare hands . . .
Just then something struck him in the back of the head. He turned and saw a small block of spare wood rolling along the floor. Toad raised another block, waiting for Sammy’s next move. Sammy turned back but the thief had fled. He glared at Toad, who glared right back.
They tried to sleep, but Sammy’s rest was fitful at best. Anytime he closed his eyes, he saw Stripe and creams and spinning lights. Then he had to fight down the urge to track down the thief and kill him slowly. On top of all that, a dull ache emanated from his stomach.
The sun had barely risen when they decided to push on. Sammy spent several minutes watching out the windows to make sure no one was waiting around the house. The early hours of the morning were quiet and still. The only sounds came from their own feet and Toad’s occasional sniffs. When they climbed out of the house and hit the ground, Toad noticed a little picnic basket in the grass.
Sammy was certain it hadn’t been there the night before. Cautiously, they approached it. Sammy used a well-aimed blast to open the lid. Inside was four slices of bread, a small square of cheese, an apple, and a plastic bag containing two strips of dried meat—about enough food for one modest meal. Taped to the underside of the basket lid was a note.
I am sorry.
“See?” Toad said with a giant grin. “When you don’t kill people, God helps you.”
They ate half the food right away. Toad compared it to manna from heaven.
Using the map as his guide, Sammy steered their route away from the highways, away from the ghost towns, away from any more delays. Wichita. All that mattered now was Wichita. The Thirteens wouldn’t matter there. The hunger wouldn’t matter, either. He just had to get to Wichita. The small meal and the thought of Wichita kept his mind off his stomach for most of the day, but as night fell, the hunger set in again—and set in deep.
After an hour or so, it went away, only to return again more vicious and demanding. Fatigue hit him hard that night. After munching on a few noodles, he fell asleep in a ditch covered up by an old curtain.
He woke feeling sicker than he’d ever felt. He was sure someone had come along in the night and scraped out his midsection with a spoon because the word hunger now had a new meaning. It was also the first thing Toad mentioned when Sammy shook him awake. As they munched the last of their noodles for breakfast, Toad went on and on talking about how much he wanted to eat the rest of the food in the picnic basket.
Sammy cut him off. “Did you hear me take off in the middle of the night to hunt for food? It’s all we have left. We can’t eat it yet.”
Their pace slowed. Sammy just didn’t have the energy to push it. By noon, they had to stop and take a long break. They each got a slice of dry bread to eat.
Sammy stared at the map blankly, thinking only about how much farther they had to go to Wichita.
“You know anything about wild plants we can eat?” he asked Toad.
“I know we can eat wild pizza,” Toad said dryly. He stared until Sammy got the joke.
All they could muster was a weak chuckle.
Fresh water from a stream helped revived them a little, but the day went on slowly. Twice, Toad asked if they could stop again, but Sammy forced them onward. His mind had reverted to daydreaming for comfort.
Wichita. The resistance. Returning home to headquarters in glory.
The only part of him grounded in reality was his feet. That was why Toad noticed the freeway first.
“Look!” His shouted tore Sammy’s mind away from Capitol Island and onto a six-lane road running north to south.
After fumbling with the map, Sammy saw where they were headed. “That’s I-35. If we follow it, we’ll head straight into Wichita.”
Thirty meters up the road was a sign. From their vantage point, Sammy could just barely read it: Wichita 89 km/55 miles
That’s about two days’ walk, Sammy told himself. We can do that. If we keep finding water, we can do that.
So the journeyers stumbled on, slowly going through the last of the food. Toad and Sammy often had to encourage each other with kind or stern words, other times with a hand literally pushing on the other’s back. Although he’d never admit it, Sammy realized what a blessing Toad had become.
“You’re the one who’s supposed to have all this extra energy,” Sammy complained to his friend. “How can you be tired?”
“I’m not a solar panel!” Toad retorted.
They stayed less than a kilometer east of the freeway not wanting to be seen by any passing cars or trucks. Sammy thanked whatever higher powers controlled the weather for a warmer night as they curled up in the grass and slept soundly.
His legs felt like two thick logs when he woke. His head buzzed like a thunder cloud had been shoved inside his ears. They stopped at a stream for water three times, just so their stomachs would feel full. Pacing themselves as best they could, they finally came to the outskirting neighborhoods of Wichita in the early evening. After passing several streets, Sammy stopped.
They were on the corner of a little shopping center. A gas station with a repair garage stood on one corner and a coffee shop on another. Across the way was a five-store strip mall painted in a ghastly pink.
Empty suburbs, no cars, no electricity anywhere . . .
Wichita was a ghost city.
Panic and depression filled Sammy’s
mind. How can the resistance be operating in a ghost city? With no power or running water or anything?
Dark thoughts of failure welled up in his mind. His eyes stung as tears began to form.
“So how do we find Sedgwick C. or Plainpal?” Toad asked, cutting through the fog in Sammy’s head.
Sammy held his stomach. He was weak. Tired. Helpless. “I don’t know.” His voice sounded like a drone. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Don’t you even know what this Plainpal is? I thought you at least had a clue!”
“It was the best thing I had to go with!” Sammy shouted.
“You walked all the way up here not even knowing what the heck for?” Toad yelled right back.
Sammy would have snapped right then. He would have given into the darkness inside him and done who knew what damage and hurt to Toad, but his energy tank was empty. No fumes. No spare liter in the back. Bone-dry empty. He collapsed onto the sidewalk, hitting his knees, then his hands.
His chest heaved as he breathed.
“Are you okay?” Toad asked.
With great effort, he spoke. “We should try and find . . . a tourist office.”
Toad sniffed and sat down. “Why a tourist office?”
“Because whatever a Plainpal is, I’m sure not every city has one.”
Toad stared at Sammy like he was the world’s dumbest person.
“What?” Sammy asked.
“There’s one across the street,” he said gesturing to the closest pink store with a large glass window. Painted in large letters at the very top: “VISIT WICHITA!”
“Huh.”
After a feeble attempt at forcing the lock on the shop, Sammy blasted the window apart. He felt even more drained after doing it. If I don’t get food soon . . .
“I still think that’s wicked cool,” Toad said with a particularly loud sniff. They grabbed all the brochures they could find of the city and left. Neither of them wanted to stay in a building they had broken into, even if the city was deserted.
Using the last of the sunlight, they spread the advertisements out around on the sidewalk and searched them. There were dozens of brochures for museums, restaurants, parks, but mostly literature about airplanes.
“Okay, I had no idea Wichita was the Air Capitol of the World, did you?” Toad asked.
More brochures. Night clubs, sports teams, more museums.
Sammy swore as he threw down another brochure. “Who cares about all these stupid museums?”
Toad picked it up curiously.
“Plainpal . . . Plain pal . . .” Sammy grumbled over and over again, looking at his tenth pamphlet. “You gotta be kidding me. It’s not in this one, either.”
“You’d think it’d be a little more prominent if someone made a specific reference to it. Wait a min—” He stopped short and stared hard at the pamphlet that Sammy had chucked.
“What?” Sammy asked, “Did you—?”
Toad put a finger up to silence him, and sniffed several times in a row. Sammy waited in silence until Toad showed him the pamphlet with his finger pointing at something. “Palace of the Plains,” he announced proudly.
A huge smile broke out across Sammy’s face, and a feeling of peace came over him. “Downtown. It’s downtown. We have to check it out.”
Downtown was, in fact, over two hours away. Not wanting to call attention to where they’d been, they put the pamphlets back in the store and grabbed a city map. The sun disappeared as they headed for the historical district of Wichita where the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum sat, also known as the Palace of the Plains. The giddiness gave him energy for about two kilometers, but soon enough, every step took effort. His legs tingled and his shoes skimmed the pavement of the sidewalks as he moved. Toad seemed to notice this because he stayed abnormally close to Sammy, probably to catch him in case he fell. Several times Sammy felt his head get light and fuzzy, but he forced the faintness away.
Finally there it was. The Plainpal.
Sammy had lost track of days and time, but he’d wandered through a good chunk of a continent to get here. The Plainpal. He had made it. Tears leaked down his cheeks from happiness and exhaustion.
It looked like a castle, still in excellent condition. In the pale hours of early night with a big half moon shining down on them, they saw the tall stone building standing proudly. Its four corners reached skyward in symmetrical cone-topped towers. In the center of the roof, pointing high above the four towers was a single clock tower. A blend of doubt and hope swirled as he led Toad to the building.
From across the street Sammy heard a grumble and instinctively readied himself for battle. Toad turned, too.
A middle-aged man lay slumped in the doorway of a tall white office building across the street. His clothes were rags, and he had a large frayed red hat pulled over his face. His right hand rested on his chest, while his left clutched an empty bottle. He mumbled something again, smacked his lips, and fell silent.
Sammy and Toad exchanged a wary look. The homeless man was the first person either of them had seen since the thief. If there was anywhere the Thirteens would post a guard, it would be outside an old resistance center. A surge of pain throbbed up Sammy’s leg as memories of Stripe intruded on his thoughts. He fought the urge to glance down and see the crocodile mauling his leg.
“What should we do?” Toad whispered.
Sammy shrugged. He was now very used to nothing coming to his brain when asked these kinds of questions. He didn’t like it, but he hated being frustrated as he waited for something that simply wasn’t coming. Combined with his state of exhaustion, it was hard to worry about anything more. If he was to go on any longer, he needed food.
“It’s too convenient that he’s right there,” Sammy said.
“Okay, except he’s dead drunk.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw my neighbor like that at our block parties. Looked exactly the same. I say ignore him.”
Sammy shook his head “What if he’s one of them?”
Toad sniffed, and Sammy wanted to smack him to make him stop.
“What if it’s a trap?”
Toad chewed on his lips as he thought. Sammy felt himself teetering.
“You know what?” Toad stated. “It might be a trap. But you’re gonna die if we don’t get food.”
Toad’s decision made Sammy nervous. After all, wasn’t Toad the impetuous one? “Just a second.” Sammy tried to grab Toad’s shirt and hold him back, but Toad had already moved out of range. “Let’s play it safe for a minute.”
“We’ve walked hundreds of kilometers, and now you want to play it safe. I’m starving! You’re dying! If there’s nothing here, we’re going to die anyway.” With that, Toad crossed the street to the Palace, walked right up to the main entrance, and stopped in front of the arched threshold.
Mustering the last of his energy, Sammy walked the same path and joined him at the sidewalk. He looked behind them. The drunken man stirred in his sleep, just enough to keep his face pointed toward them.
Sammy reeled again as he put his hand on Toad’s shoulder. “Please . . . let’s wait . . . until we’ve thought this through.”
But Toad wouldn’t hear it. He grabbed Sammy by the wrist and yanked him into the archway. Sammy turned back wearily to see the drunken man sit up sharply. Immediately he knew it was a ruse, but before he had time to react, solid metal bars sprang out of the arch and locked into the cement. The trap was sprung.
19. Palace
March 21, 2086
THE QUEEN HAD SPENT the last few days in Topeka following various leads, including two at nearby juvenile detention centers. So far, everything had been a waste of her time. She had just begun planning to expand her searching radius when she received a call from Diego.
“I put one of our northern cells in charge of watching the drones and satellite feeds on your investigation,” he told her. “They’ve found some things you might want to check on. I’m s
ending it to you now.”
She accessed the data via her com, sifting through pictures and video feed.
“I see you, Sammy,” she muttered as infrared from drones and satellites displayed images of two figures in the middle of the woods in Mid-American Territory. They were clearly headed north.
He’s following I-35, but to where?
Perhaps he intended to walk all the way to Topeka following the freeways. She wasn’t certain. But for now she had a starting point, and that was more than enough.
* * * * *
With their last ebbs of energy, Sammy and Toad threw themselves against the thick bars, but the cage didn’t budge. Fear of being tortured again exploded into Sammy’s brain conquering every other thought and emotion. In a trance-like state, he held onto the bars with a vice-like grip and slammed his shoulder into them over and over again, screaming incoherently. His muscles ached and throbbed, but he paid no attention.
The bum slumped in the doorway swiftly crossed the street toward them. Both the bottle and pretense of drunkenness had been discarded. Now he carried a fully automatic pistol only partially concealed beneath his shabby coat. He aimed it at Sammy, but his eyes went back and forth between both prisoners.
At the sight of the gun, Sammy stopped attacking the bars. He didn’t have the strength to blast—to stop bullets. He fell to his knees. Toad curled into a corner with his hands over his head, trembling and crying. The man came within two meters and held his weapon at the ready.
The man looked at Sammy with a calculating stare. He had a scruffy chin and neck, but clear brown eyes. No red around the pupils like the Thirteens. Judging by the lines around his face, Sammy put him at mid-forties to early fifties. He had an oval-shaped face and a crooked nose.
“Who are you?” His voice reminded Sammy of cowboys and horses.
Sammy didn’t answer. Instead, he searched wearily into the depths of the man’s eyes, looking for the cold, dark places that he’d seen in Stripe’s.
“Who are you?” the man repeated with much more force.