by Amy Field
Seth listened to him in silence. The sun coloured the sky orange once more, and another day had ended.
When Seth woke the next morning, Jonesy was gone, and so was the carriage wagon. Seth assumed that he went to town to fetch supplies, and thought nothing more of it. He sat in the chair in Charity’s room, dozing off occasionally, only leaving the room to fetch her water or have a bite to eat. Sometimes she would moan softly, but when he said her name, she didn’t respond.
Seth started preparing himself for the worst.
By evening Jonesy had not returned, and Seth started to worry. He stood on the porch, peering into the darkness, preparing to give his right hand man a verbal thrashing when he returned. But he was worried – had something happened along the way? It wasn’t like Jonesy to just disappear.
The clock in the dining room had just struck twelve midnight when Seth heard the sound of horses approaching. He was dozing in the chair by Charity’s bed, but in an instant he was awake and rushed out to see who it was.
As he reached the doorway, two tired-looking people came up the porch staircase.
It was Jonesy and Lilian Steadman.
Seth couldn’t believe his eyes. The speech he had been preparing to give Jonesy was forgotten.
“Good evening, Seth,” said Lilian. Jonesy had come to fetch me, he’s told me about what happened. The poor girl! I must see her at once!
Seth led Lilian to the bedroom where Charity lay. Talking in whispers, Seth explained her condition to Lilian. Physically there wasn’t anything more Doc Winters could do – she’d lost too much blood because of the shooting.
Seth stood by the window watching the night sky as he listened to Lilian softly singing lullabies as she huddled over Charity. A shooting star crossed the sky, and he said a silent thank-you prayer for Lilian, the angel. He had faith in her to change Charity’s condition.
They all waited by Charity’s bed through the night. Twice Lilian asked Jonesy to prepare hot herbal preparations in which she soaked cloths and lay on Charity’s forehead, and held under her nose to breathe the healing vapors. “I’m also a midwife, so have some knowledge about this condition,” she said quietly.
Then she started humming a tune again quietly, and this time both men joined in, in deep, mellow tones.
Suddenly Charity gave a deep groan and turned in her sleep. Everyone held their breath. Then she slowly opened her eyes, and looked at Seth.
“I love you, Seth,” she said softly, before falling into a deep sleep, but they all knew she’d turned the corner.
The next morning was brighter than normal for Seth. The sky was powder blue and the birds were singing in the sunshine. For the first time in almost a week he and Jonesy did chores around the house, happy in the thought that Lilian was taking care of Charity. Seth thought about the horrendous events of the past few days, and he made up his mind.
By noon Charity was sitting up in bed and starting to eat again. She was still weak, but the rosy glow in her cheeks was slowly returning and her blonde hair was regaining its shine. She smiled brightly when Seth entered the room, went up to her bed and knelt down on one knee.
‘Charity, I feel I need to do this right now,” he said. “I almost lost you, and there was still so much I wanted to share with you, and talk to you about. I thank the Lord you’re becoming well again. But there’s one thing I need to say right now.”
Charity looked at him with her eyes wide open. “What is it, Seth?”
“Will you marry me?”
In an instant Charity began laughing and crying at the same time, unable to speak.
Seth looked flustered. “Of course, you don’t have to say…”
“Of course I will!” Charity exclaimed. This is the first place where I’ve felt really at home! You’re the gentlest, noble man, I mean, you could have killed Robert on the spot, but you didn’t. I know we’ll be happy together, forever,” she said through her tears of happiness.
He takes her hand in his and kisses it.
“Charity, you make me so happy. You’re like a breath of fresh air in my life. I’m going to make you queen of the Bar S. When we go into town people are going to say,“That Seth Bernstein is a lucky man. Look at that beautiful woman he’s married to.”
Charity leant forward and hugged him.
“Oh I think you’ve got that wrong that they will be saying, it will be more like, how did that Charity Carver get that handsome Seth Bernstein to marry her. She must have used some magic powers.” They both laughed.
Jonesy entered the room with two bowls of soup. “So,” said Seth, “I’m happy to tell you that…”
“I know,” said Jonesy, and set the bowls out for them.
Well now, have you been standing at the door listening?” said Seth.
Jonesy looked at him with half a smile.
“No,” he says. “I just knew, all the time.”
Chapter 9
Six months had passed, and the day had finally come for the wedding of the year. Seth Abram Bernstein and Charity Angel Carver were going to be married at the church on Saturday afternoon by Reverend Claypool. Rose and Sam Jacobs are to be the matron of honor and best man. The bride will be given in marriage by Doctor Winters.
The day had finally come. Charity’s dream since she was fourteen years old was all coming true this afternoon. After dreaming of this man she was going to be his wife, to bear his children and mistress of the Bar S. If only her dad was alive, he would be so proud of her.
Five years had passed, and Charity was still the prettiest girl Seth had ever seen and still his only love. The four bedrooms are now filled with precious little Bernsteins Grace, Faith, Ruby, and Hope.
At night Seth and Charity sit on the porch and watch the sun set as they hear Jonesy and the kids inside. Seth takes her hand and holds it tightly never wanted to let it go. This young woman had captured his heart and his soul, and together they would be all their days. For their love is what dreams are made of, and those are the dreams that never die.
THE END
The Supershifter Trilogy (Sci-Fi)
Part One
It was the same dream as always. The one where Vanda was stuffed down in one of the spice mines of Kessalon 5, shortly before the accident.
He stood in his mining suit, sweat dripping down his face, condensation on the inside of his helmet, with a spice drill in his hands battering away at a large mineral deposit that sat in a small cave some twenty miles below the planet’s surface. The thermostat in his suit was bust, as always, and his body radiated with heat, but his shift was nearly over, so he could bear it for a few more minutes.
He was chipping away with his drill when he suddenly noticed the guy some fifty feet to his right jump back in a startled reaction and dropped his drilling tool. The man turned and began running towards Vanda, a panicked expression on his face through his helmet. Vanda looked beyond the guy and noticed lots of small creatures running along the floor and walls behind the guy. They resembled giant ants made out of pink glass. Kessalon spice ants. These bugs were known to drag grown men off to their nests so that the queen could eat the unfortunate victim alive.
Vanda dropped his drill. He then saw the man suddenly taken from behind by the creatures and, in a flash, he got dragged to the ground. Hundreds of the huge ants were crawling all over him until they covered his whole body, the guy still writhing and struggling underneath them.
Vanda turned and quickly ran towards the open door of the mine lift that stood at the far end of the platform that he had been working on. The lift door was open and, inside, men in mining suits were gesticulating for him to hurry. But as he got a few meters from the door, he tripped and fell forwards, landing with a bump flat on his face.
The screen of his helmet instantly cracked and then imploded. Vanda held his breath as the spice-filled air began to fill the inside of the helmet. With his eyes and mouth tightly closed, he got up and started running blindly in the direction of the lift. He felt a hand grab h
im and escort him inside, the door slamming behind them, followed by the sound of hundreds of little creatures scrambling all over the entrance.
“Should be safe,” came a reassuring voice out of the darkness.
But Vanda was too busy on the floor to pay any attention. Another suited miner knelt down beside him, trying to recompress his space helmet, the toxic atmosphere slipping into Vanda’s lungs. He was being exposed to the spice. He just lay there, choking on the air until he lost consciousness.
Vanda awoke, his head aching, a thin sheet of frosty sweat covering his anemic skin and his vision blurred, as it always was when he awoke. His time lapse needed to adjust itself to the temporal field. Only in his dreams was he able to live within the current moment and even then it was always a flashback or flash forward of some kind.
That day in the spice mine, Vanda had been exposed to one of the universe’s most unstable minerals: Kessalon spice. It was used to fuel the space gates that dotted the known universe and transported cargos and people from planet to planet, solar system to solar system, galaxy to galaxy through wormholes.
Vanda had left school with only a class four education, so it was either picking up trash on Earth or taking his chances on the colonies, where the prospect of big money was just as great as the possibility of death.
Hell, it nearly did kill poor Vanda.
After his exposure, he spent damn near four years in an off world institute being treated for temporal distortion. He had become a ‘shifter’ the doctors at the institute told him and would probably never be able to see the present temporal moment again. The spice had distorted his temporal field and from now on he would always see the future as opposed to the current moment. So if he looked into the corner of a room, he would only see what happens in that space in the future, not what was going on in the current moment.
At the Institute, doctor Kelvin taught Vanda how to meditate to get his times lapses down. With careful focus, he could get himself back to seeing around three or five seconds into the future. A man could live a normal life seeing just three seconds into the future. They also gave him medication for his lapses.
Vanda got up and walked over to one of the walls in his four feet by eight feet closet of an apartment.
“Medication, please,” Vanda muttered.
The wall opened up into a mini bathroom, complete with large cracked mirror, small medical cupboard and water basin. Vanda took his pill and washed it down with a glass of water. He then checked his lapse measurement from a little device that was stitched into the skin of his right forearm. He was currently thirty seconds ahead. “Not bad,” he thought. “The pill should kick in in half an hour and then I should be down to a cool ten or so seconds.”
Vanda decided to meditate. Through meditation, he had brought his temporal field down to around two seconds before, which was magnificent, and regularly got it down to around three. When he had first been admitted to the Institute, having been pulled out of that mine on the precipice of death, Vanda was three hours ahead. He couldn’t even walk and spent his whole time staring into space in his room. He wore a padded jacket for a full year while his temporal field calmed down, and the majority of the spice left his cells.
It was impossible to communicate with him because he was always living in the future; he could only ever answer the questions that you hadn’t yet asked. How would you go about striking up a conversation with someone who can only hear, at that moment, the things that you’re going to say in three hours time?
But over the course of four years, Vanda got his lapse down to around fifteen seconds maximum with his meds and regular meditation. With his improved condition, he was able to apply successfully for release back on Earth as an official ‘shifter’. This meant that the government would always keep tabs on him and keep him under surveillance, but he was free to live amongst society. He was chipped with a monitoring tracker and legally obliged to take his medication and regularly visit his contact, doctor Kelvin. His apartment was under constant surveillance, with every aspect of his private life recorded, but then again whose apartment wasn’t under surveillance in 2589?
He was also obligated to do certain favours for the government — ‘contracts’ they were called — and these involved helping the government to look into certain matters for them, help out, in particular, with issues. He mostly worked alongside the military on operations involved in taking on The Cause.
The Cause was a terrorist organisation that was trying to take on the government of Earth and bring about a socialist revolution that would see an end to the awful poverty that existed in the lower levels of the giant sprawling cities of the world. Even with all the minerals and resources coming back from the colonies; people still felt the need to uphold inequality. The Cause had aimed to shake up the world in helter skelter. But Vanda had seen destruction in them too. Death seemed to follow The Cause around like a dark spirit and while working with the military, he had seen, firsthand, several attacks by the organisation. In fact, he had prevented several of their attacks by seeing where they would take place and then relaying the information to the government.
Vanda worked in a large military complex designed primarily for shifters. They would have him adjust his lapse to one hour and simply sit him in front of a television screen with the news on. He, of course, would see the news an hour in the future. Once a news report came on the telling of an attack, he would simply have to write its time and location down on a piece of paper. This gave the military about an hour to stop the attack. Often he would sit for eight hours, and nothing would come on, a good day, as he called it. He worked two days a week, any more and he could stress his time lapse too much, doing nothing more than sit in front of a screen waiting for the news to announce a forthcoming atrocity.
He would see the scenes of future horror playing out on the channel; explosions; lines of bloodied bodies; masked men and woman running around with automatic pulse rifles. They were blasting innocent people as well as military forces; he saw plasma charges exploding, the blast field sending out a wave of chemical fire that decimated anything in its path, whether that was a crowd of people or a line of transports. He saw the anti-gravitation pods that the government forces used in retaliation, the things going off and creating a field of anti-gravity that reversed the Earth’s core gravitational field. It threw everything within it into the atmosphere; people were screaming as they flew up into the air, great big pieces of buildings flying up there too, people at the windows, screaming, jumping out. Carnage is what Vanda saw in The Cause; not freedom.
Today, though, he felt good. If he could get his lapse down to three seconds, then he would get to go out on his electromagnetic pulse bike (EPB). Those three seconds would give him a great advantage out on the slipstream of traffic that careered through the skies of the mega city, Neo York. With three seconds he could zip in and out of the other vehicles always one step ahead of their movement. It was the only real exhilaration that he got from his ‘abilities’, although he had received several warnings from the government for his careless riding skills. He wasn’t allowed to use his time shifting for any personal advantage other than those offered him by the government.
But it didn’t stop him.
He sat on his bed in the lotus position attempting to clear his mind and rein in his time lapse, ready for his ride. But this morning he found it difficult. His mind kept drifting forwards into the future. He hoped that his meds would kick in soon, but for now, his mind was racing forward. He felt something pulling his thoughts into the future and suddenly he was hit with a vision.
He saw a massive explosion coming out of the side of a building made up of lots of neon pictures— advertising. People were screaming and running for cover. He was standing in some open courtyard suspended between two large buildings. He thought that he recognised it as Neo Time Square. The building that had just exploded appeared to be one of the stock exchange buildings on East Wall Street. People began running past him, panicked expressi
ons on their faces. Behind them were masked figures: The Cause. Military police shock troopers, who were setting off anti-gravitational devices, people blasting up into the air, screaming, were chasing them. The Cause was firing back with photon blasters and pulse rifles. All around droids fought with each other and with people on both sides. Innocent people were being hit in the crossfire and going up in pink flames, their whole body ionised.
But then in the midst of the carnage, Vanda spotted a woman. Her red hair shone and sparkled in the electric sun which ordained the building behind them. Her face was covered with hundreds of red freckles, and Vanda wondered whether he had seen her before somewhere. She was beautiful. He suddenly realised that he didn’t know her personally, but had seen her in several of his visions over the past few weeks. The redhead had become a regular feature of many of his dreams and visions of late.
She was running from the shock troopers, but would stop and turn now and then to fire back at them, her hair flitting around as she did so. She was clearly a member of the Cause. There was something about her, though, like a halo of light existed within her and threatened to break loose any moment and incinerate the world.
She ran past Vanda, who just stood and watched everything nonchalantly, fully aware that it was naught but a vision to him. As she passed him, the girl turned to look back at Vanda and in the expression that she gave, she appeared to recognise him. She stopped just past Vanda and began shouting something to him that he couldn’t hear over the sounds of the general screaming, gunfire and explosions. She appeared to want him to go with her.
But suddenly she was hit in the upper torso by a photon collider, her chest splitting open as the beam shot through her entire body, bursting out of her back. Her face instantly went dead.
Vanda screamed out.
He opened his eyes. Still on his bed.