The Hero King

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The Hero King Page 9

by Rick Shelley

Once Joy was sure that I was going to do something to find her family, she was calm. We sat in the private dining room, ate, and waited. Grabbing a couple of hours of sleep might have been smarter, especially for me, but there are times when you have to forgo things like that.

  Parthet came wandering in about dawn.

  “There really is a chance to save quite a lot,” he said, more subdued than he had been before. “While you’re gone, I’ll try to get some of my memories written down. It’s important that I do that as soon as possible.”

  “When we get through this, you can tell me all the stories over Old Baldy’s beer. That’ll be even better.”

  He shrugged. “Who can tell what time there will be, especially at times like this.”

  “You been skipping meals?” I asked, puzzled at his sudden melancholy.

  He smiled and shook his head. “I’ve not come to that yet. It’s just that you brought back so much that I had forgotten for so long.” He stopped and shook his head more vigorously. “I’ll tell you when you return and we know where to find the Great Earth Mother.”

  “We’ll have to pop back to Cayenne for a moment before I head out,” I said, more for Joy’s benefit than Parthet’s. “Going back to the real world, my guns will work at least.” There would likely be call for all the weapons I could carry. “And I’ve got to tell Harkane that he’s in charge awhile longer.”

  “He’s going to want to go with you,” Joy said.

  “This time, he has other duties, like running Cayenne and keeping an eye out for you. Or do you want to move into the royal apartment here before I get back?”

  “I’ll stay at Cayenne. I was just starting to get used to living there.”

  And even before that, I had to give Baron Kardeen a few more instructions about our Russian visitors. That was difficult, but I went out of my way to keep emotion out of it. “Have someone explain that there is a glitch in our communications with the real world. They are our guests in the meantime, and that’s the way I want it played. Watched but not too closely. Nothing hostile.” I just hoped that I would be able to play it that way after I came back from seeing the destruction.

  Sunrise arrived. It would be midmorning back in Kentucky. The detour to Cayenne took only ten minutes. We got everything set to go.

  There were some minor inconveniences we knew we would have to work around right at the start. We were taking horses. Horses don’t take to stairs easily, but none of the doorways leading from Castle Basil to the basement in Louisville were at ground level. And getting the horses up the stairs from the basement in Louisville was going to be another problem. At least there were stone stairs leading up to the outside basement door. I wasn’t sure that there would be enough clearance for our chargers to get through easily, but options were rather scarce.

  Four riders, two spare horses loaded with provisions. We wouldn’t have to eat as heavily in the other world as we would in the buffer zone or Fairy, but we couldn’t count on finding much along the way. Game would have been sparse even without World War Three through most of the area we had to cross.

  Joy and I said our goodbyes in private, but she came to the doorway to watch us leave—after Aaron assured me that he would be able to keep any radiation from leaking through the doorway while we left. Parthet was there to add a spell or two of his own if necessary.

  “We’ll stay with this as long as we can,” I said—a sort of general announcement. “When the elflord calls, we’ll pop straight back here.” I looked at Joy. “We may be running against a tight deadline”—a real deadline—”by then, so that will have to take priority.” I shrugged, gave Joy another kiss, and told Aaron to start spreading his shields.

  There was another green shimmering over the door, a deeper green than before. The four of us who were going through, and our six horses, were covered with a similar twinkling, something closer to aqua, that settled on us and in us. We had to be protected inside and out, covered from everything, including the food, water, and air we would consume. The shield seemed to tighten my skin, like a strong astringent. I had a moment of doubt. If the shields didn’t work, we might be in deep trouble very fast.

  “We’re ready,” Aaron said.

  When I opened the doorway to Louisville, I couldn’t help thinking that this ridiculous quest was a properly adolescent way for a certified Hero to go out in a blaze of glory. And the song started to echo in my mind.

  I stood with my hand, my ring, on the sea-silver while Aaron, Lesh, and Timon went through with all of the horses. I stepped through to the basement in Louisville after them, then looked back through the green-turning-orange shield over the doorway … for what I hoped wouldn’t be my last sight of Joy and Varay. And then I turned loose.

  The basement was in pretty bad shape. The others had led the horses straight out into the main cellar room. Dad’s private little retreat wasn’t large enough to hold more than two horses at a time. Their stalls back in the Castle Basil mews were each as big as the “secret” room.

  There were no real windows in the basement. When Dad built the place, it wasn’t that many years past the time when the federal government was actively encouraging people to build home fallout shelters. There were no windows, but there were a couple of light wells walled off with glass blocks, several feet underground, that let in just enough illumination to keep the cellar from being pitch-black.

  There was more light in it now. The kitchen door was gone, off its hinges, broken in pieces and blown down into the cellar. The door leading straight to the backyard was metal, though, and it was still intact.

  “We’d better go up and have a look around before we start maneuvering the horses upstairs,” I said.

  Lesh and I couldn’t raise the outside door together—one of those angled bulkhead doors—so we went up through the kitchen to see what the problem was.

  The house was still standing, though a lot of the interior was scorched. Everything that wasn’t bolted down had been hurled toward the northeast corners. All of the windows and doors were gone, either splintered or completely lost. But from the odds and ends that were still sitting around, I guessed that no looters had been through.

  Looters would have been an encouraging sign, evidence that there were still some people around.

  “I’m going up to the second floor for a minute,” I told Lesh. I felt silly when I realized that I was whispering. “I want to see how much more damage there is. And that’ll give me a better vantage to see what the rest of the neighborhood looks like.” Lesh nodded and followed me to the stairs.

  The steps were shaky, as if there wasn’t much holding them up but habit. I went from room to room upstairs. Big sections of interior walls had been destroyed. There wasn’t a trace of sea-silver left around any doorway. There wasn’t much of anything recognizable up on the second floor. The place had been gutted.

  “I don’t think we should be here,” Lesh said.

  My danger sense agreed. Aaron’s radiation cocoon had kept that from going berserk when I opened the passage and stepped through, but it recognized that a spell against radiation wouldn’t keep us from falling through a floor. Lesh and I went back down to the first floor and then outside.

  All of the greenery, the carefully cultivated pseudo-wilderness that Dad had arranged around the house, was gone. The whole neighborhood was a wasteland, charred and empty except for ruined foundations and our house. None of the other houses in the development were standing. Of course, the others had all been simple frame houses. Ours had been the only one built like a fortress, with thick blocks of limestone instead of wood or aluminum siding.

  “I’d never have believed this,” Lesh said. He walked away from the house, turning slowly, looking around once, and then again. He knew the neighborhood from previous visits, most recently from the time he waited for me to get out of the hospital after Wellivazey’s attempt to kill me.

  “And this has to be some distance from the nearest explosion,” I said. We were more than thirty miles
from Fort Knox, closer to forty miles. The Naval Ordnance plant and Ford were closer, over by the airport, but still some seventeen or eighteen miles in a straight line. “We’ll see worse before we see better.”

  Some of the ruins in the neighborhood were still smoking. I wondered how long it had been since the rockets hit. All I could do was guess, but I doubted that it had been more than a day or two, maybe not very long before I discovered that the doorways to Chicago didn’t work.

  If Joy and I had been a little quicker to take off, we might have been in the middle of it, I thought, which caused blood to drain from my head.

  “Let’s get around back and see what’s blocking the cellar door,” I said.

  Part of the chimney, tumbled, crumbled, was piled over the bulkhead door. The stones were shattered, so it was just a matter of lifting and shoving about a ton of rubble to the side, about twenty minutes’ work after Aaron and Timon came around to help.

  The garage wasn’t as badly damaged as the house. Some of the rafters had fallen, but the roof had held and even the aluminum doors were intact, though dented. Of course, if the explosions had all been to the west and southwest, the house would have sheltered the garage from the worst of the force. The Citroën and the van were both inside, but damaged. The rear end of the van had been slammed sideways into the Citroën. I didn’t think that either of them was drivable. But the engines worked on both cars. I turned on the van’s radio and searched through the bands for some kind of working signal.

  It’s a good thing I was patient. I needed twenty minutes to catch anything, and then it was just a brief announcement giving the time and a frequency to turn to for news on the hour—fifteen minutes off.

  “Timon, you’d better keep watch over the horses. We’re going to wait for the news,” I said. The horses were up out of the cellar and tied along the north side of the house, in what little shade there was early in the afternoon. I sat half out of the van with the door open. I couldn’t have sat all the way inside without taking off my elf swords. Lesh and Aaron stood close. There was a lot of static on the radio. I switched over to the frequency mentioned in the announcement, then turned off the radio to save the car’s battery. But I didn’t have a working watch with me, so I turned the radio back on almost immediately. I was afraid to miss even a single word of the broadcast when it came.

  “It is now two p.m. central daylight time,” an anonymous voice said. “Here is the news we have. Yesterday, the United States and the Soviet Union exchanged a considerable number of nuclear warheads.

  “There are no numbers yet, but damage in this country is extensive and there is no way to even begin to estimate casualties. There is no contact of any sort from any of the nation’s thirty largest metropolitan areas.

  “All members of the Reserves and National Guard are immediately activated and directed to take charge of local rescue efforts and emergency requirements. It may be days before any real help can be organized.

  “There are major rural areas of the country that have not been touched by the bombs and missiles. Power and other utility services appear to be spotty everywhere, though.

  “To the best of our knowledge here, the fighting has stopped, but international news is almost impossible to come by. We will be on the air every two hours, dawn to dusk. I’m sorry, we don’t have much solid information yet. There is no telephone service, little power, and only scanty radio contact with other parts of the country. We can’t even guess how long it will be before we have any of those services.

  “We will return to the air at four o’clock.”

  “That’s it?” Lesh asked when the voice stopped and the static took over the frequency again.

  “That’s it,” I said. “The war was just yesterday.”

  “St. Louis is one of the thirty biggest cities, isn’t it?” Aaron asked.

  “Easily. Well, no use sitting around. We’d better start riding. We’ve got a long way to go.”

  “They said some of the rural areas are okay,” Aaron said.

  “Those may be the areas we have to be most careful of.”

  I didn’t have a map, but I had a decent idea of the route we had to take. I figured that the natural hazards that would pose the most trouble were the rivers. No matter how we went, to get from Louisville to St. Louis we would have to cross at least two major rivers, and I wanted to hold it to just two. That meant that we had to head southwest along the Ohio River, and find a place to cross it between the Wabash coming down along the Illinois-Indiana line from the north, and the Cumberland River coming up from the south. Then we had to head across southern Illinois to find a place to cross the Mississippi.

  We would look for intact bridges, but I wasn’t ready to hold my breath. Even bridges that hadn’t been too close to a mushroom would have to stand up against debris and raging water being hurled downstream from other areas. Many of the backcountry bridges, and even some of the main-road ones, had all they could do to support their own weight in the best of times.

  We started riding.

  Aaron surprised me. Although he looked awkward in the saddle, he didn’t have any trouble staying aboard.

  “I managed a few lessons in Varay,” he told me.

  Obviously, he had absorbed enough.

  “You’ll have time to get a lot better before this trek is over,” I told him.

  Aaron nodded. Then he said, “You agreed to try this even though you think it’s impossible.”

  “It makes looking for a needle in a haystack as easy as finding the ground when somebody kicks your legs out from under you,” I said. “Even if any of them are alive, there’s almost no hope of finding them.”

  “If that’s the way you feel, why did you agree? Just to keep your wife from trying?”

  “Mostly. But even if I had been willing to take away her rings and keep her under guard to make sure she couldn’t try to find her family for herself, I think I would have welcomed the excuse. Sitting around Basil for who knows how many weeks waiting for the elflord to find something, playing king and trying to act as if there was any point to it, that would have driven me completely out of my skull. I operate close enough to the edge without that.”

  “If it helps ease your mind, the search may not be as hopeless as you think,” Aaron said. I turned to look at him. “If her parents and her brother are alive, I may be able to home in on them. The brother’s wife and kids, that’s something else, but if we get within—I’m not sure—maybe a hundred miles of the others, I think I’ll be able to guide us the rest of the way.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s a stretch for me, as they say, but yes, I think I’ll be able to. I’m not positive.” He shrugged. “A hundred miles may be a bit far. The distance is all guesswork. But, whatever, the signal should grow stronger as we get closer to them.”

  I thought about my first ride to Castle Thyme, back when I was trying to rescue my parents, before I knew that Dad was already dead. Parthet had homed in on Mother finally, but at that point we were only about five miles from her. Of course, Parthet had said that he was vaguely aware of her for quite a while before that. Maybe it was possible.

  “If they’re alive,” I said. “That’s still a long shot.”

  When we left the house, we rode due south. I wanted to avoid as much of the Louisville metropolitan area as possible. Grass would be easier on the horses than pavement, and I wasn’t sure how close to a ground zero I wanted to get, even with Aaron’s magic shields. Going south, all the way around Fort Knox, would add miles to an already long trip, but we might have a month to spend if we needed it. Or not.

  There was destruction all around. For the first hour or so, I was strangely drawn by the havoc the war had unleashed. The ruins, the broken and smoldering trees, all might have been from the mind of an artist with a particularly vivid—and gruesome—vision of the Apocalypse. There were hills that looked as though they were modeling clay that someone had smashed a fist into. We saw bodies stripped of flesh, little mor
e than bones with just a few shreds of muscle and meat attached.

  But after that first hour or so, my mind went numb. I simply couldn’t absorb any more. Blank. There were the four of us and our six horses, the only living creatures around—no people, no dogs or cats, not even any birds. The vultures hadn’t even gathered to pick the bones yet. Maybe there were no vultures left to perform the office.

  It must have been six o’clock before we saw anyone at all. By that time, we were well south of the city, about due east from the northern portion of Fort Knox, almost to Highgrove on US 31W. Three men were standing in front of a little country grocery and gas station. If the building hadn’t been badly burned and ready to fall, I would have thought that they were looters, but they couldn’t have gotten much from that wreckage. They were armed. I wasn’t looking for trouble, so we gave them a wide berth. Since we were mounted and they were on foot, that was no trouble.

  “We might be safer staying close to the hot spots,” Aaron said. “Less chance of having to fight off people.”

  I nudged my horse, Electrum, a little to the right, southwest instead of south, and the others followed my lead.

  “You ever get down this way with your folks, Aaron?” I asked.

  “Naw. We used to go to Florida or California every year for vacation. I think I had a whole closetful of Mickey Mouse stuff at home. Don’t think I ever touched most of it once we got back from whichever Disney place we’d been to last. But my dad couldn’t get enough of it. He used to say that Mickey was a soul brother.”

  It didn’t get much of a laugh.

  We rode until sunset and used the shortened twilight to make camp and eat supper. The sun was a muddy red as it got close to the horizon, and the red seemed to bleed all the way across the western sky.

  At a guess, we might have been eight miles from the Federal Gold Depository, fairly close to the edge of the Fort Knox reservation, but there was no way I could be positive of our exact location. We had crossed Interstate 65 well north of where I killed the dragon, and had angled more to the west. I was navigating by dead reckoning, but if I had our location approximately correct, all we had to do then was ride due west until we ran into the Ohio River, somewhere near Shawneetown, Illinois, a few miles downstream from the Wabash. The only population center we would approach in that stretch was Owensboro, with maybe sixty thousand people … before the war.

 

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