by Rick Shelley
"Kurt McAndrews. How am I ever going to explain you people to Major Abrams?"
"Let us worry about it. Now, what we'll need most is a little perimeter security. We don't want to be mobbed while we're trying to help the sick. And we'll need some sort of doorway. Just a frame will do, two sides and a top, even if it's just three pieces of wood nailed together."
"Whatever the major says."
"He may need a little convincing. Aaron, you have a decent demonstration in mind? Ah, maybe something a little less stark than the Four Horsemen?"
"I'll take care of it," Aaron said.
We were given a clear path through the camp as we rode to the command post. People backed away quickly, but they did stare. Four men, weapons, six horses. The two claymore swords across my back would have drawn stares anywhere, if not always for the same reason.
Major Abrams met us in front of his tent. Abrams had light hair going gray. He was tanned and looked fit. At a guess, I figured he had to be Regular Army, one of the survivors.
"Lieutenant, what's the meaning of this?" Abrams demanded.
"They say they can help some of our casualties," Lieutenant McAndrews said. "The black says he's a wizard." McAndrews choked over that, and the look Major Abrams gave him would have been worth thirty seconds of canned laughter on any sitcom.
"Aaron," I whispered. I heard a quick, soft chant from Aaron and Lieutenant McAndrews started to lift off the ground, straight up.
"Don't panic," I told the lieutenant, just as he started to do precisely that. Aaron parked him ten feet up, then picked up the major the same way and lifted him to the same level.
"He says he's a wizard," McAndrews said, with more poise than I would have believed possible. "I think he may be telling the truth."
"Do you need any more proof, Major?" I asked. He didn't answer. He may not have been capable of speech at the moment.
"Set them down gently, Aaron," I said, and both officers floated back to the ground, landing with scarcely a bump.
"Major, I told Lieutenant McAndrews that we may be able to help some of the radiation casualties. I also told him what help we need to do it. May we proceed?"
The major looked at me, then at the lieutenant. Abrams nodded, very curtly.
"The dispensary is right over here," McAndrews said, gesturing to the right. We followed him over.
There were three large tents with screened-in sides, like the mess tent on M*A*S*H. Two of them were packed with people on cots and on blankets on the ground. Half of the third tent was filled like that too, with the rest given over to the people who were trying to help the casualties.
"The tent doors look like they might serve," Aaron said. "Wood all the way around."
"You want to try three different times, or just bring everyone through one door?" I asked.
He thought about it for a second. "Could get confusing directing traffic if we just do it once. People inside that tent heading out. People from the other tents have to go in before they can come out. Or the other way around."
"Lieutenant, do any of the sick people have family members here that aren't sick?" I asked. I didn't want to separate families if we could help it.
"A few, maybe," McAndrews said. "But in most cases, if one had radiation exposure, they all did."
"Well, let's make sure we've got everybody. I want to keep any families together."
McAndrew nodded. "Just what are you going to do?"
"Well, the ones whose condition isn't too bad, we'll"-I hesitated a second, uncertain how to phrase it-"we'll send them through to a place where they can get the help they need. That's why I want to make sure that any kin they have here don't get left behind."
"You're just going to take them somewhere? Where?"
"That is a little harder to explain. Let's just say that it's something like the Never-Never Land in Peter-Pan."
"I am crazy," McAndrews said.
"That's the usual reaction," I assured him. "That's even what I felt the first time I went there. Look, a few months ago, you remember hearing about Tessie, the dragon that was killed over south of Fort Knox?"
"I heard about it. I'm not sure I believed it."
"Believe it. They had the body there. I'm the one who killed it. My third dragon."
"Hey, do me a favor, please? Don't feed me any more of this. True or not, I don't think I can handle much more."
"Okay. Just get the families together for us."
He seemed glad of the excuse to get away from me.
We were drawing a crowd, and from some of the conversation I overheard, news of our original appearance had spread. There were soldiers keeping the civilians back, but we were in the center of a solid ring of people.
"Aaron, give my voice a boost. I want to talk to everybody." He nodded.
"If any of you have relatives here who are being treated for radiation sickness, please come forward. We have a way to help them, and we want to keep families together while we do it." That was a lot safer than saying we were going to evacuate just the sick and their families. The thought of evacuation might start the mob scene I was afraid of.
I nodded to Aaron to let him know that I didn't need the public address system any more, then said, "I think we'd better set this up so the people are coming out of the tents going into Varay. We do it the other way around and everyone will see that they're going to someplace really different."
"Okay. Makes no difference to me, magic-wise."
"Let's talk to some of the people inside. Make sure they want to go."
We walked through the three tents, talking to small groups of people, most of whom showed the effects of exposure to modern warfare. Some had burns. More were emaciated, dehydrated. The smells of vomit and diarrhea competed with the smells of disinfectant, sweat, and fear. I told the people that we had a treatment that would help many of them, but that it would mean going to a strange place. Despite that and my strange collection of weapons, not one of the casualties who could still talk turned down our offer.
Lieutenant McAndrews returned long before Aaron and I finished our tour. The lieutenant had the relatives waiting, not more than two dozen. Aaron asked him to match the wounded with their kin and we would get started. Then we went back to the center tent, the one with the fewest people in it. Lesh stayed outside with our horses, holding them so they mostly hid the door we were going to use from outside observation. I brought Timon inside with Aaron and me.
"Timon, as soon as Aaron opens the passage, you run through and find Baron Kardeen. Tell him what we're doing and have him get people to help take care of the casualties we send through. Then get back as fast as you can. We may need your help on this side."
Aaron opened the first doorway. A green shimmering appeared over a view of the hallway that ran from Baron Kardeen's office to the rear of the great hall. The view was enough to brings gasps and a variety of oaths from the people inside the tent. When Timon stepped through the green veil, turned right, and disappeared, the reactions were even louder, more fearful. I heard one "I'm not going through there!" that was quickly followed by "We have to. It's our only chance."
"Quickly, please," Aaron called out. He moved to the side of the doorway and held the passage open with one hand. "When you step through, this green field will neutralize the radiation you've received, but you'll have to remain on that side to get built up again and for it to keep working." That was more than half a lie, but it might stop a traffic jam of people stepping through and then trying to come right back.
The parade started slowly. I stood near the doorway, across from Aaron. The two of us encouraged the people going through, verbally, and occasionally with a hand to help propel them through the green shield. We told them to move off to the right and to make room for the others who were following them. When Timon reappeared in the corridor, he had several people along to help move the refugees off. Baron Kardeen was only seconds behind Timon. The chamberlain stood at the side of the flow in Castle Basil, and we talked through t
he doorway.
"Sorry to dump this on you without warning," I said.
"We'll manage. Timon explained. It's a good idea. That other family, the Ingelses, are doing well. They're still a little nervous, but they're adapting."
I nodded. "Tell Joy that Aaron is picking up some trace-of at least part of her family. We may have several days' riding left to reach them. Things are as bad here as I feared."
Some of the refugees could barely walk. They were helped by others, some of whom weren't in much better condition. It reminded me a little of the shots of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments. Only the scale was smaller. Once the people got through the green (which was rapidly turning orange with all the radiation it was absorbing from the people), there were plenty of hands to help, castle staff, soldiers, anyone who could be found-and more were arriving every minute.
"We're about ready to move on to the next batch," I told Kardeen. Timon slipped back across before the last of the people from the center tent crossed into Varay. "We have two more groups here, both larger than this one, in other tents. A few minutes to start the next."
I noticed a growing commotion outside the tent. After Aaron broke the first connection to Varay and we stepped outside to move on to the next tent, we could see the crowd pushing closer, agitated. They knew that something major, and strange, was up. The troops, heavily outnumbered in any case, were having trouble holding the civilians back. Our horses may have obscured the view for some people, but enough had seen all of the sick people disappear from the center tent.
"We'd better not hit any snags before we finish," I whispered to Aaron as we hurried to the next tent. "The natives are restless."
"Another display?" Aaron suggested.
"Not if we can avoid it. The way those folks are carrying on, it might backfire."
There were less than two hours of daylight left by the time we finished guiding through the last of the radiation victims. The crowd around the tents had gone from angry noise to stunned silence. There were occasional shouts, but not as concerted as before.
"That should ease the burden here, Lieutenant," I told McAndrews before Aaron broke the last connection to Castle Basil. "You want to go through? I can always use good officers."
"You?" he asked.
"Ah, yes. The place through the gate is a castle in the kingdom of Varay. I'm the king."
I feel absolutely stupid saying things like that, but I guess Me Andrews had seen too much to doubt me. He looked through the portal, then shook his head.
"I've still got family here, and my duty."
I nodded. "Duty" was a word I could understand. Aaron took his hand away from the doorframe, and Castle Basil disappeared.
"We'd better get on our way," I said. There was no way I would chance sticking around that camp after more than two hundred people had "vanished" because of Aaron's magic. We wouldn't have lasted the night. "We may need some help getting through the crowd."
"I'll see to it," McAndrew said. He still sounded a little shaky, but he had stuck right with us through it all. Major Abrams had been conspicuously absent the whole time.
When we were mounted and Lieutenant McAndrews had his squad ready to escort us out of the camp, I asked Aaron, "Which way?"
He pointed. I looked around in the direction he pointed, then back to where we had entered the camp.
"That's not the direction we were heading before," I said, and the change was a lot more than the minor corrections we had made before. "You're aiming a lot more to the north now."
Aaron looked around the way I had, closed his eyes, and after a couple of seconds, he pointed again, in the same direction he had a moment before. He opened his eyes and shrugged.
"They've moved then, or I'm just getting a stronger signal now," Aaron said.
"Lieutenant, is there a map of Illinois around?" I asked.
"There must be one at the CP. I'll send someone for it."
When the map arrived, Aaron pointed in his direction again. McAndrews produced a compass. The line Aaron said we had to take now would pass fifty miles east of St. Louis.
"Are there more camps like this one, Lieutenant?" I asked when I handed the map back to him.
"There must be dozens of them this side of St. Louis," he replied.
I looked at Aaron and shook my head. There was no way we could keep stopping and shipping crowds through to Varay at every camp. Time would run out on us. Time itself would run out on us. And I had to try to find Joy's family. 11 – The Falling Wall
The last of the field corn had been caught in the field by the war and by the rains that followed. Drying cornstalks stood in ponds while the fodder for livestock rotted. There weren't the people or machines around to harvest the grain. But then, there weren't as many animals to eat it either. It did give our horses a change from their diet of grass, though. I didn't have any hesitation about collecting enough corn each day for the animals. It would just have gone to waste.
The rains came almost daily, and they lasted for hours at a time, dirty, stinking rain that brought more filth than cleansing. One front would pass. For a few minutes or hours we would see clear sky-a reddened sun at day, the moons and stars by night… with the dimmer stars obscured by the dust in the atmosphere and the competition of four moons. Then the next bank of war-enhanced clouds would cover us like a shroud. At night, the temperatures started to approach the freezing mark, not so unusual for the latter part of October in Illinois, I guess. Three nights after we left the first refugee camp, the rain turned to snow. Little of it stuck, and the thin veneer of ice that formed on standing water thawed soon after the dawn brought a lighter shade of gray to the sky.
We had passed several other refugee camps since the first. Each time, Aaron had shielded us as soon as we saw people and we detoured around them. We passed by more hundreds, maybe thousands of people we could have helped. I felt guilty, but forced myself to ride on.
Quixotic, I thought. You help once, then pass by other sufferers, leaving them to their painful deaths. "I gave at the office." Condemn all those hundreds on the chance of saving maybe six people who happened to be related to Joy.
No wonder I had nightmares every night. The word "Hero" was beginning to leave a dirty taste in my mind.
"We don't have any choice," Aaron told me. I hadn't spelled out why I was in such a rotten mood-and getting worse all the time-but maybe it wasn't that hard to see. "Even if we weren't so rushed for time, we couldn't save the whole world, couldn't ship everybody to Varay. We've done as much as we could, maybe more than we should have. And if you don't manage to get to the Great Earth Mother in time, none of it matters anyway."
I didn't answer. I didn't say much at all during those days.
My grumpiness did have one benefit. We made better time, nearly thirty miles a day, although that wasn't straight-line distance toward the signal we were following because of the long detours we had to take to get around the refugee camps. When we made camp three nights after handing through the one batch of radiation casualties, we were east and maybe a little north of St. Louis, approaching I-70, maybe twenty or twenty-five miles west of Vandalia, Illinois. We had stayed on the same bearing, as much as we could, since leaving that first camp. If Joy's family had moved while we were rescuing sick people, they had stayed put since.
"The signal's getting a lot stronger," Aaron said while we were pitching our tents. "But then, I don't know what the maximum will feel like. They might be fifty miles away yet or just down the other side of the next highway."
"Even if it's that close, we'll have to wait for morning," I said. "We can't ride after dark, not this close to another interstate. I'd hate to stumble on another camp in the dark."
I hardly slept at all that night. Whatever the primary cause-guilt, fear of nightmares, or anticipation-I was simply too keyed up to sleep. We had several showers during the night, which kept me in my tent more than I really wanted to be. I stood an extra-long turn on sentry, then stayed up a whi
le longer after Lesh came out to relieve me. When the rain started again, I went into my tent, but I only stayed in until the rain let up again, shortly after Aaron got up to stand guard.
"If nerves mean anything, we'll find them today," I said.
"I think it's likely," Aaron said. "I feel them close. But remember, they're probably in a camp by now. We're going to have another scene like we did before."
I shrugged. "We get Joy's family through. Then we can get as many others as we can. If we can." Maybe it had been necessary to ignore all the people we could have helped along the way, but once I accomplished my primary mission, I wasn't going to just step through and ignore any people who were close enough to go with us.
"Do we go in like the Four Horsemen again?" Aaron asked.
"Unless you can come up with a better disguise, something to get us close without getting shot."
"They may have heard about us from the other camp," Aaron said. "The Army must have radio communications. And we know they have helicopters. The news has to be spreading. I'm surprised they haven't been out looking for us."
"You think anybody who wasn't there to see us will believe it?" I gave him a sour laugh. "If Major Abrams tried to report exactly what happened, they'll have him locked up, either for being crazy or for massacring all those missing casualties."
"Hey, I know what's eating you, but don't you think it's about time to lighten up? You didn't get so down when it looked like the whole world was falling right on our heads at that shrine. You think a Hero should do more. All those dead Heroes in the crypt thought the same thing. That's how they got dead. And you got work to do yet." He paused, but I didn't say anything. "Besides, you're spoiling my ninth birthday."
"Your what?"
"I'm nine years old today. Didn't you know?"
I looked at him in the flickering light of our campfire. Aaron was three inches taller than me and a few pounds heavier, and had a respectable beard on his face. None of us had shaved since leaving Varay.
"Nine years old?" And then I started laughing, almost hysterically-enough to wake both Lesh and Timon. Lesh came rolling out of his tent with a sword in one hand and his battle-axe in the other.