Days of Future Past - Part 2: Present Tense

by John Van Stry

  I sighed and nodded back, "Assuming that they haven't moved. I'm still just surprised by all of this," I motioned again towards the water off in the distance. "There was like a half mile wide strait that the water all ran out into the bay not all that far from where I grew up."

  "You did say that the coastline looked different now, when I showed you the maps we had back home, did you not?" Sarah asked.

  I nodded, "I just wonder what could have made such a big change."

  "Well I don't think we're going to find the answer standing here. How about we start down the hill and look for a place to hole up for the night?" Heather said, turning her horse back towards the north.

  I agreed with that idea, I was still tired and hungry now as well. So Sarah and I both gave our mounts a nudge and started after Heather.

  As we descended down from the hills I couldn't see the sea anymore, it was too far away, but I could see the valley and see it rather well. It was a grasslands now, which was kind of funny when you thought about it. All of the grass in the central valley had been imported by the settlers in the seventeen hundreds. Missionaries mostly.

  But now, there was grass everywhere. It didn't really feel any more humid than I remembered it. Which was a bit strange with all that water to the north of us.

  I was also surprised that a forest hadn't grown up. But maybe the herds of deer and other animals we could see off in the distance had something to do with it? I had no real idea, forestry, or botany, or whatever it was, wasn't anywhere near anything I'd ever studied before.

  "Keep your eyes open," Heather warned, "with all those deer out there, there has to be something hunting them."

  I nodded and got my gauss rifle out and laid it across my lap. I wouldn't be surprised to find lions or something else similar here as well. Both Sacramento and San Francisco had had zoos. So who knew what might be living here now.

  When we came across one of the old water canals, it took me a moment to recognize it, because it was now empty of any water and most of it had collapsed.

  "Looks like the farmers finally got their way," I chuckled.

  "What is this?" Sarah asked.

  "Water canal. Los Angeles, to the south of us, was built in a desert, so they pretty much bought up, legally or otherwise, all the water they could in the rest of the state and build thousands of miles of canals to ship the water down, so they could live in the desert."

  "I bet that was real popular," Heather said shaking her head.

  "Yup, it definitely was," I said looking around. A lot of the canal had collapsed in on itself, from centuries of neglect, but there was a section just off to our left that was still fairly intact.

  "Why don't we camp in there?" I said and pointed to it. "It's low enough that it's sheltered from any winds and no one will see our campfire."

  Both Heather and Sarah agreed, which made me preen a little bit, usually Sarah picked our campsites.

  We rode down into the concrete gully and picketed the horses. Then while I dug out the cracked concrete to make a fire pit and Heather set up the tent, Sarah walked around us and cast a ward for the night, as well as the illusion spell she had learned from Sarellious. At least we'd gotten something useful from that stop.

  Once we had everything set up, we sat and relaxed, waiting for the sun to set before we started our campfire. The last thing any of us wanted to do right now was to give our position away with a pillar of smoke rising into the air.

  It was around then that we heard it, the thundering of hooves off in the distance, and the panicked cries of deer.

  Heather and I grabbed our railguns, and the three of us climbed up out of the canal bed and looked off over the grass to the north.

  "Oh my...." Heather started and the three of us all quickly dropped down to our bellies on the ground, to keep from being seen.

  "I can't...!" Sarah said, her speech giving off her shocked surprise.

  I shook my head; I was going to strangle Coyote, the first chance I got. Wheeling in the sky above the herds, and occasionally coming down to pick off a deer, were dragons. Well over a dozen dragons.

  "Where the hell did they come from?" Heather growled.

  "I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count," I pulled out my binoculars to take a better look. I noticed Sarah already had hers up.

  "They're all juveniles!" Sarah exclaimed, as I started to look them over.

  "How can you tell?" Heather replied.

  "Look at the one circling higher up, above them."

  We both did.

  "Damn, he's big!"

  I got him in my view and sure enough, he, or she, was a lot bigger than the rest of them.

  "So, dragon breeding grounds?" I asked.

  "Apparently, but that does not make any sense," Sarah said, and slowly started to slide back down into the dry canal as Heather and I followed. Hunkering down seemed like the best bet for now.

  "Why doesn't it make any sense?" I asked.

  "Because most dragons are not very interested in the survival of each other's offspring. They can be very territorial at the best of times and while they tolerate their own children, they usually do not tolerate others. Also," she paused in thought a moment, "feeding that many young dragons when they first hatch would be a major undertaking. Most adult dragons only raise a brood of three or four, and out of that, normally only one or two survive to even leave the nest."

  "So, someone's helping them," I stated the obvious conclusion.

  "What exactly is in that backpack of yours anyway?" Heather asked very slowly while looking sidelong at me.

  "A bomb," I sighed.

  "What can a bomb that small do against a bunch of dragons?" she asked looking puzzled.

  "It's a nuclear bomb."

  Heather's eyes got wide, "You have a nuclear bomb with you?"

  I nodded.

  "How big?" Sarah asked, eyes narrowing.

  "I'd say it weights about ten, maybe twelve pounds," I shrugged.

  "No, how big of an explosion," Sarah pressed.

  "Ten kilotons."

  "You have a ten kiloton bomb, and you did not tell me?" Sarah said, looking just a bit upset.

  "What's a kiloton?" Heather asked.

  "A thousand tons of high explosives," I said looking over at her suddenly shocked expression.

  "That little bomb is equal to," I could see her doing some quick mental math, "twenty million pounds of high explosives?"

  "About that, yeah."

  "I say we knock him out now, Sarah," Heather growled, "and then we toss him over the back of his horse and run like hell away from here!"

  I rolled my eyes, "I didn't ask you to come, not that I don't want you here, but you both volunteered, remember?"

  "But we...." Heather stopped as Sarah put a hand on her arm.

  "You should have told us, Paul." Sarah said slowly while looking at me, her accent suddenly strong. And if I thought Heather was upset, I could see Sarah was pissed. Which kind of surprised me, I thought she'd be a lot calmer about it.

  "I didn't want anyone to know about it. Well, other than Riggs, he noticed it missing, so he figured I had it."

  "And just why do you have it?" Sarah questioned.

  "Coyote told me to take it, why else? He wants me to take it to Sutter Butte."

  "Which is where these dragons no doubt have come from," Sarah stated.

  "I think that's a pretty safe bet now."

  She took a deep breath and then said in the loudest voice I'd ever heard: "Why didn't you tell us you were going to kill a bunch of dragons?"

  I was shocked, she yelled at me!

  "What are you going to do? Suicide? Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell us!"

  I started to wonder if I was going to have to hold her down, or be turned into a charred piece of flesh shortly.

  "Because I didn't know," I mumbled.

  "What?" She demanded.

  "Because I didn't know!" I shouted back. "He doesn't tell me everything,
hell sometimes he doesn't tell me anything!

  "I was told to go to the armory to get something. When I got there, I was told to take one of the warheads. Then I was told to head to the butte. I wasn't told what was there, and I wasn't told what I was going to do when I got there!"

  "And you expect us to follow you on this suicidal stunt?!"

  "Of course not! I'd never take you into something like that!"

  "Then why bring us at all?"

  "Why?" I raised my spread hands into the air, "Why do you think? If I'm going to die doing this, don't you think I want to spend my last days with the two women I love? Do you think I want to die?"

  "You're carrying around one of the most powerful weapons of the old ones left in the world today, and you have to ask that? Why would you even think of carrying such a thing?"

  "Because I was told to," I said and lowered my voice, "you saw them, you saw all of them. How long until they're full-grown? How long will Riggs' army, any army, last against that many dragons? What about your home? What about Havsue? Even if they're not adult yet! Hell, we don't even know how many there are! There could be hundreds up there!"

  I shook my head.

  "I have to do it. Even I can see that now. Do I want to? No! But I have to." I sighed, looking at my feet. "Look, I'm sorry, if you both want to go, go. Now that we know what I'm in for. I don't think it would be safe."

  "I... you..." Sarah glared at me a moment, and then got up and stalked off to the tent and went inside.

  A moment later my sleeping bag and pack were tossed out.

  "She's right you know," Heather said, sounding surprisingly calm. "You should have told us."

  "Honestly, it just never occurred to me," I shrugged. "And with everything that's gone on in the last week, I just sort of forgot."

  "How do you forget something like that?" Heather sounded rather incredulous.

  "Oh, I don't know, getting shot, watching a small war play out in front of my eyes, then having to fight for my life in a ring, being poisoned, almost dying, running into a crazed wizard. You tell me?"

  Heather laughed softly, "Okay, you just may have a point there."

  I snorted, "I thought you were the one who was going to be upset, I didn't think Sarah could get so mad."

  "Well you did just kind of read her the riot act last night, I suspect she's still a bit hurt by that," Heather said. "Sarah doesn't let her true feelings out often; she won't haul off and slap you when she gets mad. She just lets it boil."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah, oh, that reminds me," and damned if Heather didn't haul off and smack me one across the face! Hard!

  "Don't be such an ass, Paul. We're a family now, you need to trust us! Now go keep an eye on the dragons, and once they're gone, you make us dinner. I'll go keep Sarah company."

  I just rubbed the side of my face and slowly nodded. Just how did I keep getting myself into these kinds of things?

  I slowly climbed back up to the side and watched the dragons; they flew off not much longer after that having finished with their hunting. The sun was already low in the sky, so I got out our supplies and the cooking gear and once it was dark I started the fire and made dinner.

  Heather came out when I finished and took some inside for Sarah, then came back out and sat down next to me and ate.

  "She hates me, doesn't she?" I sighed.

  "No, she doesn't hate you, she's not even mad that you forced her to leave Luvon's, a place she could have stayed and learned things while you were off getting killed," Heather said with a smirk.

  "That was cold, Heather."

  "Yeah, I know, but I figured eventually one of you would ask that question, so I thought I'd go there first." Heather grinned, "She almost hit me. She didn't care all that much about him, she was just fascinated by what he knew. She just didn't realize that she had sort of ignored us in the process."

  "How do you do something like that?" I wondered.

  "Oh, I don't know, how do you ignore telling your girlfriends about a huge ass bomb that you're carrying around on your back?"

  "Okay," I sighed, "point. We're all a bit new to this commitment thing."

  "Hey, how do you think I feel? You're both making me the responsible one and I'd still be half tempted to turn you in if the bounty was high enough!" Heather gave me a wink and took a last drink of water from her canteen.

  "Well, I'm going to bed. You can sleep out here tonight."

  I nodded, "I figured that much. But what happens tomorrow?"

  "Tomorrow we go on. If we let you go do this by yourself, we both know you'll never survive. Maybe between the three of us, we can figure something out."

  "I love you, Heather."

  "I love you too," She smiled.

  "And I love you, Sarah," I said in a louder voice.

  I thought I heard a mumbled reply.

  I cleaned up the gear, and repacked most of it, except for what we'd need to eat in the morning. Then I got my sleeping bag unrolled and took off my boots. I took off most of my clothes, I didn't feel like sleeping in them, and I stuck my hand in my pocket as I did so.

  And I found Marjeera's stone. With everything that had happened, I had forgotten about that. She appeared before me then as I touched it. She was her real self, not the elf woman, not Sarah. She was as she'd shown me.

  She was also naked.

  She dropped to her knees and kissed me, "Thank you, Master! Thank you very much!"

  "It's Paul," I told her, "I'm not your master."

  "But you have my soul now. So you have me."

  "Why didn't you tell me about the stone?" I asked.

  She blushed and looked away, "If you were me, would you not be afraid to tell others of it?"

  "You have a point there," I agreed. "So now that I have it, what do I do with it?"

  She looked at me, "What do you mean?"

  "How do I free you from this sentence or this curse, or whatever it is?"

  "I cannot say, Paul."

  "Can not, or will not?"

  "Can not. I can not say."

  I was about to push the issue when I suddenly realized that if you were going to imprison someone magical, not letting them tell others how to free them might be a good idea.

  "What did you do to Luvon?" I asked instead.

  "I waited until the moment I was forced to return to my stone for the day. Then I dropped my appearance, and kissed him, and told him goodbye."

  "That doesn't sound all that bad."

  Marjeera laughed, and while it wasn't a cruel sound, it wasn't a happy one either.

  "He was crushed. He thought he had won Sarah over. Then he found that not only had he lost her, but he had lost me as well." She grimaced painfully then, "It serves him right."

  "You liked him, didn't you?"

  "What? How could you? You're my master now, Paul. It is you I like!"

  "Tell me the truth, Marjeera."

  She took a deep breath and then sighed. I moved my eyes back up from her bare chest. She definitely could sigh with the best of them.

  "Yes, I cared about him. But he didn't care about me!"

  "Are you sure about that? Maybe he just gave up on wanting what he couldn't have."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You've already professed your love for me, but do you only love me because I hold the means for your existence in my hand?" I asked holding up the stone. "So how could he know if you meant it or not? How could you even know if you meant it or not?"

  She stared at me, unmoving. A beautiful and slightly unnerving statue.

  "Why was this done to you?" I asked her.

  "Because my king wanted to sell me for gold," she grumbled.

  "No, it was because you were toying with the feelings of his son."

  "How did you know that!" She exclaimed and jumped to her feet looking down at me, "Who told you?"

  "Don't wake the girls!" I said and motioned for her to sit back down.

  "They can't hear us, I cast a spell when you summoned
me, I wanted this to be private."

  I nodded, "So what I said is the truth then?"

  She hung her head and sighed. "Yes, Master. It is the truth."

  "And now you've spent how many years having your own feelings toyed with in punishment?"

  "Thousands," she said, it was almost a whimper.

  "Sucks, doesn't it?"

  She glared at me, but nodded.

  "Kneel," I told her.

  She knelt before me, and she was gorgeous. I owned her and I could have her anyway I wanted for as long as I wanted. She could be whoever I wanted, whatever I wanted, and she'd swear she loved me just as long as I held onto her soul.

  And maybe she would love me, or maybe she wouldn't. But eventually she'd grow unhappy and do what she could to sell me out. I had no doubts that she'd done it before, just as she'd done it last night. But could I blame her?

  Not really, no.

  "Give me your hand."

  She held out her hand to me.

  "I was told that I should only give this to whoever I trust with your soul," I pressed the stone into her palm, and her eyes suddenly got very wide.

  "Please stay out of trouble," I said and leaning forward I kissed her as she pulled her hand back.

  "You, you ...."

  I watched as a dozen different emotions paraded across her face: anger, fear, happiness, sorrow and last of all, disbelief.

  "You have freed me, why?"

  "Like I said, Lincoln freed the slaves." I shrugged, "Besides, what else am I going to do? I'm already in love, I already have someone. Maybe now you can find someone too."

  She grabbed me and kissed me then, and the effect was instant and overwhelming. My whole body shuddered in response.

  "That was to let you know what you missed," she giggled and then disappeared.

  I just sat there stunned, staring off into space for a while. Coyote had been right; there was no way I could have ever ignored that, if she had turned it on me, fully.

  "Paul?" I heard Sarah's voice from the tent.

  I turned, and saw her head sticking out of the tent. "Yes, Love?"

  "Come to bed."

  "Are you sure?"

  She smiled. "Very much."

  Suddenly, Marjeera didn't matter anymore and I scrambled into the tent just about as fast as I could.

  - 9 -