Days of Future Past - Part 1: Past Tense

by John Van Stry

  While what Sarah had said made sense, none of us stopped glancing up at the sky every few minutes, and we all kept our rifles in our hands as we rode. The horses were also nervous, whether from what had happened, or because they could sense our own discomfort, but in either case we moved faster than we normally did and made it to the gates of Opal more than an hour prior to sunset.

  Opal was really more of a fort than a town. The walls were all made of rock, and they were at least fifteen feet high. There was only one set of gates to get inside, and they were steel clad wood. There was even a moat around the outside.

  The size of the place was larger than I would have expected, given the height of the walls, but there were two fairly large inns, both with stables, to either side of the gates, three taverns that I saw almost immediately, and more than a dozen shops. There were quite a few people about, apparently the people who worked here, also lived inside the walls. But there was more than enough open rooms at one of the inns for us to stay the night.

  "So, now what?" I asked Sarah as we rubbed down our horses in the stable.

  "We go have dinner," she replied.

  "No, I mean about Dean," I said in a lowered voice. "Do we have a funeral? Say some words? Pay our respects?"

  Sarah stopped and sighed, putting her forehead against the side of her horse as she stood there.

  "I do not know, Paul. I just do not. That is Jack's call as the one in charge of the expedition."

  "But you're the boss," I pointed out.

  "I know, I know. I did not know Dean all that well, most of the expeditions I go on is with a different group. I'll ask Jack about it, when we are done here."

  I nodded, and by the time I'd finished up with my horse, she was already talking to him. Then she came back over to me.

  "He is going to say a few words over dinner tonight."

  I said 'okay' and got my things as well as both of the girl's and took them inside to our room. I was having a hard time getting the image out of my head of Dean being incinerated like that. It was just so surreal, and the look of shock on his face, just as he realized he was dead. Then exploding in a cloud of ash as the air blast hit.

  No, it wasn't pleasant, it wasn't pleasant at all.

  And there was nothing I could have done about it.

  I went down to join the others in the dinning room, we were all seated around one long table, and everyone was rather subdued. Jack stood up them and said a few brief words about Dean, my mind wasn't on it all that much, I hadn't known him at all, I think I'd only spoken to him the few times we'd relieved one another during watches. I could see Terry was quietly crying again, I guess she had known him pretty well.

  When Jack finished he raised his mug, and we all stood and picked our mugs up.

  "To Dean, our friend and compatriot. To his memory!" he called out.

  We all said 'To Dean!' and drank, then sat down.

  Dinner was fairly quiet after that; we were all starving, not having eaten since breakfast, the attack having interrupted our attempt at lunch, and no one being very interested in eating after it had happened.

  As we were nearing the end of our meal, the innkeeper came over with the serving girl as she refilled our mugs.

  "I heard you lost a man on the trip here?"

  Jack nodded, "Yes, we lost him this morning."

  "I'm sorry to hear that, how did he die?"

  "Dragon," Jack said looking up at him.

  I'd heard the expression about 'all color drained from his face' and read it in books. This was the first time I'd ever actually seen it.

  "You got attacked by a dragon?" he asked and Jack nodded.

  "Where?"

  "We were crossing the sea, on a boat from Glamis. Thing must have seen us from the north end of the lake and decided to go for an easy meal. It killed our man, and took one of our horses to eat."

  "I, I better get the chief," he said. "He'll want to hear about this! We haven't had a dragon around here in forty years!"

  "Fine, I'll wait here to talk to him," Jack said, then turned to the rest of us. "You all may want to head to your rooms now. If they're superstitious here we may very well find ourselves on the road first thing in the morning."

  We all got up and left the dinning room, I followed Sarah and Heather to our bedroom, and after closing the door, I pulled them both close and kissed them rather deeply, then hugged them as they kissed each other. We tumbled into bed almost immediately and sleep was the last thing on any of our minds for some time.

  It was late, and I was having trouble sleeping. Our lovemaking had definitely taken my mind off of what had happened, as we all just celebrated the simple pleasure of not being the one who had died. But a combination of survivor's guilt and the memory of the expression on Dean's face was making it hard for me to sleep.

  I kept seeing it when I closed my eyes.

  "You okay, Hon?" Sarah whispered.

  I sighed, "I keep seeing the expression on his face, every time I close my eyes."

  "First time seeing someone die?"

  I nodded, "Of violence, especially like that. It was almost instant."

  Sarah leaned over and kissed the side of my face and cuddled up a little closer. "I've never seen anyone killed by a dragon before. I've heard people say that it is not something you want to see, but at least it was quick, and hopefully painless."

  "Have you seen people die before?" I asked.

  I felt her nod her head against me, "Yes. Though most of them were because I killed them. However I have seen people I knew or were responsible for, like Dean, die. I always ask myself 'what could I have done to stop it' and sometimes I have an answer. But," she sighed heavily, "it was a dragon, and there is little you can do to stop one."

  "Where do they live?"

  "All over. There are a couple in the Nev wastes, though most of them prefer to stick to the mountains, where they can find better game."

  "Why hasn't somebody killed them all?"

  "Because they are tough, they are very smart, they are crafty, and they know magic. Plus they are not all bad."

  "They know magic? How does an animal know magic?" I asked surprised.

  "Animal?" Sarah gave a soft laugh, "Dragons are not animals, they are smart, educated, intelligent creatures. Many of them view us as animals. That is why so many of them do not think twice about killing us."

  "Intelligent? As in they think, they can reason, they talk, and they do all the things we do?"

  I felt her nod again, "Yes, they are just as intelligent as we are, maybe a little more so."

  "And yet they still kill people, even though they know better."

  "Know better? How many bandits kill people? They know better as well."

  "But I can defend myself against a bandit. But a dragon? We're no threat to them, how the hell do you kill a dragon?"

  "With a very nasty weapon, that's how," Sarah sighed.

  I hugged her close and kissed her as I thought about that. A very nasty weapon. When all this was said and done, I was going to ask Coyote to help me find a 'very nasty weapon.' And then I was going to hunt dragons.

  - 19 -

  They didn't make us leave early, but we didn't stay much pass sunrise anyway. We had a long way to go, and Jack wanted to get us on the road again. Which as much as I would have liked to have taken a day to get used to what I had seen, I had to agree with him, Coyote would probably not appreciate me dallying after having helped us cut several days off of our trip.

  "I talked with the town's leader and several of his guard's captains," Jack was telling me, Sarah, and Heather as we rode out the gate that morning.

  "They gave me what information they had on how things are heading up towards the area south of the LA ruins and gave me a new map as well. They also suggested a route, based on what they've learned from the miners and the salvagers like us who work in those areas."

  "What does this route look like?" Sarah asked him.

  He pulled a folded map out from the ins
ide of his vest and passed it to her.

  "I marked it out on the map. We'll be heading west along this route for the next two days, it has a lot of steep grades on it, but once we're into the mountains, we'll turn north and skirt the area by staying up in the mountains, until we get to this spot," he leaned over and pointed on the map Sarah was looking at.

  "Then we'll take that route and drop down out of the hills."

  "That takes us north past our destination a fair bit," Sarah said.

  "Let me see that, please?" I asked and took the map as Sarah handed it to me. The route Jack had marked out had us starting on this road, which was still marked on his map as highway eight, until we hit seventy-nine, which we took north, then onto seventy-six, which made a long arc around the outskirts of the area. I was actually a little familiar with these roads; it had only been about two years ago for me since I'd been here, after all.

  Taking seventy-eight down to the old freeway would be shorter, distance wise, but we'd be going through the heart of Escondido, which would either be choked with rubble, or maybe full of things I'd rather not experience.

  "This will work," I told them, looking up and passing the map back to Sarah. "It avoids two large towns that I don't know if we want to go through."

  "You know the area?" Jack said, looking at me rather curiously.

  "I know what the area used to be like. What it's like now," I shrugged, "no idea."

  "And just how did you come to learn that?"

  "Through great pain and physical suffering," I said remembering what it was like for a twenty year old air force ROTC cadet to get dropped in among a bunch of very physically fit marines, who just loved to torture the zoomie.

  "Still, I would like to know," he pressed.

  "He is funding this expedition," Sarah said. "He does not have to tell us how he came by his information."

  "I would still like to know," Jack pressed.

  "I trust him, which is all that you have to know."

  "Still," he persisted.

  "Once I know for sure that what I'm after is there, and we have it, I'll tell you," I said.

  "Why not tell us now?"

  "Because I'm superstitious," I lied, "I'm afraid if I talk about it, it won't be there." I also felt that if I told them the truth, I'd be riding the rest of the trip on my own as they turned around and headed back towards Havsue and saner people who didn't hallucinate about talking coyotes and Indian gods.

  Jack sighed, "Fine, we will do it your way. Even if we don't find what you're looking for, we could divert through one of those towns you mentioned on the way back. I'm sure we'd find more than enough stuff there to make this trip profitable for all of us."

  "That's the spirit, Jack!" Heather laughed, smiling.

  "I thought we wanted to avoid the ruins of the big towns?" I said to her, looking a little confused I was sure.

  "The cities, the ones that got hit, yeah. But the map here doesn't show that one as being a bad place, so we can check it out on the way back. It probably won't be all that dangerous."

  I shrugged, once I got whatever it was Coyote was sending me after, I'd probably get some new orders from him to go with it. Until then, I had no idea what I would be doing next, so I really didn't care what plans anybody made.

  That day and the next were slow. We ended up walking a good deal of the way, because the grade of the road was steep enough that the horses pulling the wagons got tired going up it after an hour and slowed down. It also got colder the higher we went into the mountains, and while there wasn't much snow on the roads, there was ice and you could see snow in the shade off the side of the road where the sun didn't reach.

  On the second day the two spare horses were added to the team pulling Lisa's chuckwagon, and Sarah's and Keri's were added to Tim's. While they weren't as big as the draft horses were, it still helped. It continued to get colder as we climbed; I just hoped we didn't get another late winter storm.

  The road itself was in surprisingly good shape. While the surface was shattered and too rough for the cars of my former home, the horses didn't have any problems with it, and the big fat rubber tires on the wagons really didn't have issues with it either. Plus we were going maybe two miles an hour, rather than sixty-five.

  We made our camp on the second day at the spot we'd be leaving the remains of highway eight. According to the map, a few miles further up the road had collapsed, where it had once been elevated over a deep gorge. So we were switching to a different route that would run up to seventy-nine. According to the people back at Opal, there were several small towns that used to be along this route. All of them had been heavily stripped of everything valuable years ago however, so no one came up here to salvage anymore.

  The next day we got started at sunrise, with Sarah and Keri back on their horses as we all bundled up against the cold, our breath steaming in the cold morning light. Things started off fairly typical, we were just riding along the road up here in the mountains, there were patches of snow scattered across the ground, there really wasn't much cover here, just scattered bushes, some pine trees, mostly scrub, what we'd been expecting after the last two days.

  And then I saw it.

  A Pizza Hut.

  I stopped my horse and just stared at it, in shock. The building was in ruins, the walls collapsed, any sign or markings were long, long gone, but the roof, that iconic shape, and even though it was heavily faded, you could still tell it had once been painted red.

  Pizza Hut. I looked around the ruins slowly; they were everywhere, now that I was taking the time to look really closely, though most of them had been reduced to piles of rubble with ice and snow sticking to them. I saw what looked like an archway to a Taco Bell; another building was a heap of red and white tile. We were riding down the main street of a town off of an interstate. This had been fast food row.

  It was gone, it was all gone.

  "You okay, Hon?" Heather asked bumping her horse against mine. I looked at her, and then everyone else. They were all staring at me.

  "You look like you've seen a ghost," Heather said chuckling.

  I nodded slowly and gave my horse a nudge to get it going again.

  "I have," I said and instead of looking for threats in the shadows, I started to look at the ruins around me and tried to image what had once been; a gas station over there, a fire department, was that over there maybe a restaurant? It was all so destroyed. A lot of it looked burned, some of it, just looked like it had fallen in on itself.

  When we finally rode out of town I felt relieved, but an hour later we came into the next town, a smaller town, but I could see where the trailer park had been, even if there wasn't a single trailer left.

  Not long after that, we came to seventy-nine and turned north. This road was in worse shape than eight had been with a lot more ice and patches of snow in the shade of the trees that grew close to the road. We had to skirt several rock falls, stopping to clear one that was blocking enough of the road to almost cut it off, so that the wagons could pass.

  It was getting late when we finally came to a lake. The map had it as Cuyamaca, and dusk was falling as we started to ride along the shores of it.

  "Shouldn't we be looking for a place to camp?" I asked Sarah.

  "We are better off finding a building that is not a complete ruin, and setting up camp in there," she told me.

  "You sure about that?"

  "Yes, we are starting to approach areas where monsters roam. So we need something a little more defensible than two wagons can provide, this many horses will attract even regular predators."

  "Keep your eyes open for fires, or lights," Jack said, "if there's anyone living up here, we'll be able to see it from quite a ways off."

  "Sure," I mumbled looking around. It was getting darker by the minute, and if we didn't find something soon, we'd be stuck out in the open I was sure.

  We came around a bend at the west end of the lake, and as the road straightened out, Jack stopped.

  "Glenn
, Geoff, come with me," he said and the three of them rode over to a structure that was about a hundred feet off the road. They circled it slowly a couple of times as I watched, then they dismounted, and rifles at the ready in their hands, they went inside. Five minutes later they all rode back to us.

  "Okay, I found us a spot, let's go."

  "Did someone tell you about this back at Opal?" Heather asked Jack as we all rode up to the building.

  "Yes, they said it was fairly solid, and would be a good place to stop."

  "Ah, good. Because I was going to smack you one if we got stuck out in the open," Heather said.

  "Just cause you're the boss's girlfriend, don't think you get special treatment, Heather," Jack warned.

  "Special? Hell, I'd have done it even if I wasn't. You should tell us these things, just because Paul doesn't like to share, it doesn't mean you shouldn't either."

  I sighed as they continued to bicker at each other, I was surprised Heather was acting nervous, but then, maybe she had a reason too.

  The building was obviously an old garage and it had been built rather solidly out of concrete. There were three bays in it, and someone had blocked up the openings to two of them. Whatever had been parked in here, it must have been long, because the building was deeper than would have been necessary for a car.

  Jack had us lead the horses in, and put them all on a line at the far end behind the doors that were blocked off. From the looks of things, it had been used for that before. The wagons were arranged to block the remaining entrance. Terry and Keri set up two portable electric lights that were battery powered to shed some light as the rest of us cleaned up an area to set up our tents inside the building and Lisa made dinner.

  "So, what's our plan for tomorrow?" I asked Jack as we sat down, eating. Without a fire to huddle around, we were all still bundled up heavily, with the sun now down the temperature had dropped well below freezing. Geoff, Glenn, and Terry were eating their dinners in the wagons, as they were taking the first watch. Jack had set up three watches, three hours long, with three people on each watch.