Chapter Ten
It was a long day's walk through the flat, open wetlands, with the distant mountains only gradually drawing nearer. It was especially trying for Soma, for two reasons. For one, Squee was continually running ahead, sometimes even out of sight for long stretches, and when they did finally catch up to him, he'd be sitting on a creek bank, dangling his feet in the shallow waters, scowling and fretting, restless and moody in a way Soma had never known him to be in all those years together. Then, no sooner had they met him, he'd leap up again and dash off, ever onwards as if aiming his whole body at some invisible target far away. Gowdy presented an equal but nearly opposite problem. Ever since they'd left the hotel, while his body was growing clearly more youthful by the hour, his pace was slowing even more than when he was physically more aged, and he seemed increasingly preoccupied, not with the same weighty thoughts, but with others she could not discern, and he was unable, or at least unwilling, to discuss.
Time and again Soma tried to start up a conversation, remarking on the oddness of all the people and places they'd seen since emerging from the forest, but Gowdy would only nod and murmur something unintelligible. To Soma it was all a big puzzle, and her two longtime companions were now becoming additional pieces. She was not certain they had truly escaped from the prison at all. Maybe, she thought, they'd only stumbled upon a different corner of it, and the creatures in here were somehow like themselves, though perhaps in a completely different way. While she and her friends were what they called "binary-stuck immortals", these other beings seemed estranged from the human race in other particulars. Perhaps this wing of the prison had been added later, after their own confinement, since surely they'd never heard of anyone like these. And the place was not the country or world they'd been torn from. True, many many years had passed, and perhaps they were only on the outskirts, or on some island. It was hard to know. They needed more facts. They needed to arrive at some place where someone could give them answers.
That day did not bring them anywhere and eventually they settled down, well after dark when even Squee would not go on, and camped for the night. They slept soundly, undisturbed by any sounds, not even noticing the absence of insects or birds or fish or animal life of any kind. The marsh was an ecosystem consisting solely of plant-life, and even then sparsely, perhaps a hundred species of plants and grasses and flowers altogether. The next day dawned with no sign of any more life, but Squee seemed to know where he wanted to go. Perhaps he was only guessing, but he struck out as soon as he woke, with only Soma catching a glimpse of him running off. She roused Gowdy and they silently set off after him. The mountains were closer now, much more so than they'd seemed at twilight the previous evening. Soma even suspected that they had somehow been transported while they slept, as if the whole plain were riding on a buried conveyor belt. She even stopped once to see if they would continue moving, but since they didn't, she wrote if off as one more jagged, irregular piece of nonsense that was beyond fitting together. Maybe it doesn't need to, she thought. Maybe we just go on, and let the mysteries slip by like leaves on a gently flowing stream.
Gowdy was not paying attention, at least not to his immediate surroundings, but every now and then he'd turn his head and look back at where they'd been. Soma had to stop, and take him by the arm to get him going forward again. When she asked him what he was thinking, he merely shook his head and said nothing. She was beginning to grow annoyed with this new and strange Bombarda, and was missing the old curmudgeon. She tried to rally him with talk of vengeance.
"Any day now," she said, 'we're going to find the bastards who locked us away, oh yes. And when we do. Ha! There will be hell to pay. Am I right?"
"What's that?" Gowdy mildly replied. His own words so often repeated, now flung back at him by his protege, seemed to make no impression.
"Revenge!" she reminded him. "Remember the plan?"
"Oh right," he nodded, unconvincingly. "The plan. Vengeance. Yes. They'll be sorry."
Soma sighed in disgust. Her Bombarda was no longer the grizzly old coot she'd grown so fond of. His steel gray hair was now entirely blond and curly where once it hung straight. His body was lighter than ever, as skinny as a child, but toned and even tanned, as if he'd been out sunbathing for years instead of lurking in a cool dark hut in the woods. Even his teeth seemed whiter, and his eyes more blue. If only he weren't so slow, she muttered, wondering where Scratch had run off to, wondering if maybe this time they'd lose Squee for good as well.
They didn't. He came running back through the narrow path, shouting over and over about finding something. A house. And when he arrived all out of breath it took several starts to get the whole story out, about how he'd found an old abandoned house not far ahead, all broken down and rotting, surrounded by a broken metal fence, and inside there were chairs and pictures and stuff, and it looked like there used to be a barn next to the house, only now it was just a pile of boards and random slabs of cement. By the time they got there, Squee had finally tired of repeating the same report over and over again, and the other two could see that everything was just as he'd said. He had failed to mention a few details, such as the fact that the second and third stories had no floors remaining intact, so you could only gaze up at what was left of their rooms from the bottom. The house was large and still more or less in one piece from the outside. It had been neglected for long enough that all the paint was completely gone and there was no way to know what colors it had ever been. The old fence mostly served now as railings for ivy and weeds, and all of the doors and windows of the building were gone.
Soma and Squee investigated every corner of the ground floor while Gowdy stood around and didn't do much. He'd found himself drawn to an old and battered wooden trunk that occupied one corner. He studied it for some time, ignoring the squeals and shouts of the children as they loudly announced each and every discovery, from rusty old cast iron pots in the kitchen to a buried hatchet found beside the ruins of a staircase. Eventually, Gowdy knelt down and lifted the trunk's lid. If he was surprised by what he found inside, he did not reveal it. He remained on his knees leaning over the contents, occasionally reaching in with a hand before withdrawing it without touching anything. It was Soma who said out loud what Gowdy was seeing.
"Books!" she shouted, and as Squee came running over she grabbed one and lifted it high over her head.
"A lot of books!" she yelled, and now Squee was jumping at them and pulling them out one by one and stacking them onto the floor. They were all kinds of books, from hard-cover picture books to drugstore paperbacks, some illustrated children's books, several thin novels with barely enough pages to allow for a title on the spine, more robust bestsellers and even a few spiral bound cookbooks.
"Careful with those!" Gowdy instructed, and the children slowed down their pillage just enough to make it look like they were being obedient. They had none of them seen a book since their imprisonment, however long ago that had been. Soma could read, a little. Gowdy would sometimes scratch out sentences in the mud by the lake and give the children lessons, but in her excitement at seeing all these books the words all looked like gibberish to her. She tried to make herself calm down enough to spell out the titles one word at a time, but was finding it more and more difficult to breathe. The dust in the house and the dust from the books gave her such a bad coughing spell she had to go outside and rest for a bit. Squee finished unloading the trunk and then spent a little time rearranging the piles, but soon got bored with that and went outside to join her. Only Gowdy remained in the house, studying the spines and the covers. He made only the slightest sound, barely a whisper, when he read the titles of three of his own once popular books, and his full name from that former life, R.A. Gowdy.
Prisoners of Perfection - An Epic Fantasy by Tom Lichtenberg and Johnny Lichtenberg Page 10