Wastelands

by Jack Porter

  He just kept plodding steadily along, one foot in front of the other, the reins of the cow beast firmly gripped in his hand.

  It was an odd-looking arrangement. There was an empty seat at the front of the wagon.

  “What happened to the driver?” I asked.

  The troll’s head swiveled my way, and he peered down at me from a great height. I wondered if he could even understand me, but then he gave an answer.

  “Dead,” he rumbled.

  Of course, I thought. Lady Gamma had said as much. But at least I now knew that this creature, this Ash, could understand me. And, if you didn’t count his tusks, armor, and the great club sheathed at his back the same way I’d sheathed my sword, he seemed far more approachable than Lady Gamma. This was someone who might answer my questions.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  He looked at me again, this time with a frown.

  “Wastes,” he said.

  Well, that was helpful.

  I wanted to ask where we were in relation to the hospital where I’d faced the goblin. But how could I even ask that?

  In the end, I settled for something less extreme. “Yes, but where? Where does all this fit with everywhere else?”

  “Did you hit your head?” he rumbled.

  I admit it. His size and troll-like looks, combined with his monosyllabic responses, had already convinced me that he was simple. Yet his answer showed a deeper appreciation for what was going on than I would have guessed.

  I barked a laugh. “Something like that,” I said, surprised. “I don’t know a damn thing about what’s going on, and our Lady DeLeon in the wagon didn’t deign to help. So, yeah. Think of it as if I did hit my head. Basically, I have no clue where I am, how I got here, or what the fuck is going on.”

  The troll-like creature paused to look at me, bringing the whole caravan to a halt. “You know nothing?” he rumbled.

  “As near as,” I said. “I know that the lady in the wagon is on some sort of pilgrimage across the Wastes, and that I’m bound to her as her protector. That’s about it.”

  The troll–Ash–gave a snort, and lumbered back into motion. “What else is there?”

  This was getting frustrating. First Lady Gamma had failed to answer my questions, and now this giant lump of flesh seemed disinterested in doing so as well.

  Before I could stop myself, I reached out and grabbed him by the wrist.

  It was like grabbing hold of a stone statue twice my height. Ash’s wrist was as thick as my thigh, if not more. I was sure he could have flung me through the air as casually as you like. So it was with some surprise and considerable relief that instead of doing just that, he paused once again.

  “Look,” I said, deciding to put it all out on the line. “The last thing I remember was getting shot down in a plane and spending the last few minutes of my life in a desperate panic as I tried to save a woman from an alien invader. The next thing I know, I’m spitting dust out of my mouth, and Lady Gamma is ordering me to stand and fight against human half-breeds that seem intent on killing us all. I would really like to know how that happened. Is this real? Am I dreaming? Or what?”

  The monstrous creature looked down at me, and his fearsome visage somehow grew kinder.

  “Rogan Ward,” he rumbled, “I do not understand half the things you have spoken out of your mouth. But I do not think this is a dream. This world is all that I’ve known throughout my whole life. It is very real. But I don’t understand how you do not know where you are. We are on a quest to deliver Lady Gamma to the Hidden Temple, which requires us to cross these wastelands we find ourselves within. You have been with us since we left the Forgotten City. You are Rogan Ward, known as the Whirling Blade, Martial Warrior, and Famed Swordsman of the South. You have been with us every step of the way since we left.”

  It was exasperating. He said so much but told me so little. How could I get the answers I was looking for?

  “Just tell me this,” I said, latching onto a possibility. “Is this Earth?”

  “Where else would it be?” came the reply.

  Good question. I thought about the broken spaceship and the AC lens I currently wore. At the same time, I thought about the strangeness I’d seen. The broken sky, the hybrid man-beasts. Ash himself.

  “When is it?” I asked. “What year?”

  The troll-like creature looked at me as if I was mad. “It is the year six hundred and thirty-eight after the Cleansing,” he said.

  Six hundred and thirty-eight?

  Yet the question I blurted was different. “The Cleansing?”

  The troll nodded. “When the gods came, and man burned their own civilization to the ground.”

  Gods?

  “What do you mean, ‘gods’? What do you mean man burned their own civilization?” I asked. But even as I asked the question, my heart began pounding in my chest.

  Could it possibly be true? Had the final, last gasp solution been used?

  “They came from the sky,” Ash replied, completely unaware of my growing sense of panic, and a little baffled that I didn’t know the answer. “Bringing with them the seeds of magic and melding. If it weren’t for them, it is said, the races of man as they exist would never have been. They enabled the merging of species, and without it, we would not have survived.”

  14

  Gods. Magic. Melding.

  I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, but the implications were clear.

  “Six hundred years?” I managed. In a moment of clarity, I realized that everyone I’d ever known, every memory I had of my previous life, was gone. It didn’t exist anymore. It was in the past… to the tune of six hundred and then some. And the only thing that remained was the wreckage of the alien spaceships, the wreckage of humanity itself, and the AC lens I currently wore.

  Given the timeframe, it was a wonder that anything had survived at all. That the AC lens still existed at all was some sort of miracle.

  Especially as I now understood an awful truth.

  I couldn’t breathe, and the ground was starting to tilt in a weird way. I staggered in place, tried to stop myself, and then collapsed onto my ass in the dirt.

  “They did it,” I muttered. “The crazy bastards. They actually did it.”

  The final solution. Humanity’s last-ditch attempt to defeat the invaders. The powers-that-be had blown the fuck out of everything with every nuclear weapon at their disposal.

  No wonder the sky was broken. No wonder everything looked so different. In fact, it was more of a surprise that there were people left at all, regardless of what they might look like.

  “Rogan?” The huge troll-like creature asked, and I could hear the legitimate concern in his voice. He stood where he was, looking down at me, but he didn’t approach. “Rogan, are you okay?”

  It was all I could do to shake my head. Six hundred years! I’d read more than my share of science fiction novels. Arthur C Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, a few of the classics, but more of the pulp, entertaining stuff you could get online. Fast-paced adventures filled with violence and sex that the traditional publishers tended to overlook but guys like me inhaled.

  In most of those stories, six hundred years in the future had given rise to spaceships traveling at light speed, intergalactic empires, and humanity on the brink of galactic domination.

  Instead, it seemed that the worst had happened. Destruction and death on a global scale. Instead of reaching for the limits of technology, we had gone backwards, relegating ourselves to a pre-technological age.

  I’d woken up six hundred years in the future only to find myself back in the Middle Ages.

  “Rogan?” Ash asked again. But I was barely aware he’d spoken at all.

  I didn’t know how I was alive. Hadn’t even considered it as a possibility of survival when facing the wraith. But I knew that instead of reading science fiction stories filled with hope and possibilities, I should instead had been reading the post-apocalyptic horrors filled with tales of grim surv
ival.

  It was overwhelming, and too much to process all at once.

  How the fuck was I even alive?

  Perhaps it was the result of the wraith’s magic. Perhaps it was Fate, or the will of the gods.

  Or perhaps it was no more than chance. Some weird, cosmic mistake.

  In an infinite universe, I’d heard someone say, anything you can imagine is not only possible, but guaranteed to exist. Was I the one spark of life in all of creation that found itself conscious once more, so long after death?

  Or did it happen to everyone?

  Too many questions, none of which had any direct relevance to me at that moment. All that mattered was that I was alive once again, and that everything I had ever known was history.

  And, as far as I knew, I was unable to return to it.

  Unbidden, the words I’d heard in that eternal moment between my two lives came back to my mind.

  “You can save them. You can save all of them.”

  15

  I might have sat in the dirt wallowing in despair for the rest of the day. Ash didn’t seem to know what to do or say to reach me. He just stood there looking down at me with a puzzled expression on his huge face.

  But Lady Gamma had apparently had enough of the delay, and before too long, she poked her painted face out of the wagon.

  “Why have we stopped?” she demanded. “There’s still plenty of daylight. Why is he sitting there like that?”

  Ash turned to her. “I do not know. I answered some of his questions and he just sat down. Perhaps he is still weakened from his use of chi.”

  Lady Gamma’s beautiful, painted face turned toward me. I thought again that she was a pleasure to look at, a work of art made flesh. Even if her nature was a little too grating for my tastes.

  “Rogan Ward. Is this true? Are you still too drained to walk?”

  I shook my head, only belatedly realizing she would probably interpret that as more rudeness. So I summoned the will to speak out loud. “No, Lady Gamma, it isn’t that.”

  Instead of following up by asking me what the problem was as Ash had already done, she gave another order.

  “Well, in that case, get to your feet. There is still a long way to go, and I have no intention of delaying our progress any longer than absolutely necessary. Get up so we may continue.”

  She remained in view just long enough to make sure I was doing as she said, then disappeared within the wagon once again.

  It wasn’t like I had any choice. I felt the compulsion this time as I’d done before. With growing resentment at the woman’s control over me, I hauled myself back to my feet, and within just a few moments, we were back, plodding along next to the cow-beasts.

  I was done talking, at least for the time being. The realities of my new existence left no room for further questions, and Ash seemed more than comfortable with walking in silence.

  I resented the hell out of being Lady Gamma’s slave. At the same time, I had a long way to go to even begin coming to terms with a six-hundred-year passage of time, let alone my strange resurrection. And, with every weary mile we trudged, I began to loathe this strange, desert landscape and its broken sky.

  Where in the hell were we, even? The vast emptiness of the place, the spiny, desiccated plants that clung to life even here, the ongoing heat. It reminded me of the Mojave Desert, but that was before this ‘Cleansing.’

  More than once, I glimpsed startled creatures scampering away as we approached. Most were small, but I usually couldn’t tell what they were—a rabbit, some kind of lizard, or a weird sort of mutant that I would never be able to classify. Up in the sky, dark shapes flew around. They could have been birds but seemed to be considerably larger. Fortunately, they kept their distance.

  Too bad the AC lens wasn’t functional. It might have been able to tell me something. But it was dormant.

  If these people had any form of electrical power, I could try to connect to it. I’d pulled apart more than my share of dead computers and other tech, and knew my way around a circuit board. Maybe I could figure out something as simple as that, if I got the chance?

  Then I laughed at myself. The chances of the internal circuitry of the AC lens having survived intact for so many years was slim.

  Still, it would have been nice to try. It still felt comforting to have it on my face, the one bit of my world with which I could still connect.

  The nuclear blasts had changed everything, forged a new Earth. And I felt very alone. Everything I had known was gone, replaced by this new primal world. There was no point in asking about the cities I used to know. And what did it matter?

  They would have been nothing but dust for more than six hundred years.

  And then I realized something else and laughed out loud. If all this was real, then I hadn’t been laid in over six hundred years. But then I felt a bit sad that I had somehow survived the war but would never get to go back and ask that redhead for her number.

  Ash grunted at me in confusion. To him, I must have looked a bit unhinged.

  16

  In addition to the small scurrying creatures and the birdlike things, I felt the presence of something else out there in the wasteland.

  More than one something else, in fact.

  Several times, I caught the sound of movement that I couldn’t attribute to the wagons or to Lady Gamma inside them. And when we passed near outcroppings of rocks, my hands twitched as if to reach for my sword. I never saw anything, not exactly, but I could sense something there.

  Once, that sense of was enough to make me turn around to look. I knew there was a presence, but all I could see was the wasteland we were traveling through, punctuated by the occasional small puff of dust caught in a gust of wind.

  Muttering, I turned back around and caught up with Ash.

  “I sensed it, too,” the troll rumbled quietly, and that was enough. I didn’t draw my sword, but I shifted the muscles in my back, feeling its weight to reassure myself it was still there. I was ready to reach for it in a moment should it be necessary.

  “More of those we fought before, do you think?” I asked, finding that after a couple of hours of silence, I was ready to speak once again. “Those hybrid creatures by the spaceship. Have they followed us all this way?”

  Ash gave a casual shrug. “The bandits? They are not known to track those who pass through their territories, preferring to ambush passersby at chokepoints like where they caught us. And besides, the cost they paid to face us was high. I doubt they would be willing to pay that cost once again.”

  “And anyway,” he continued, “those who watch us from afar seem different. The bandits are from the fringes, hybrids that stand closer to humanity’s core. These appear to be more feral. Likely, they are sand walkers, revenants. Denizens of the wasteland, and as far removed from the hybrids as they are from original human beings. Untamed, scarcely sentient, more beast than not.” He paused again, looking thoughtful. “The one that follows us, however, is different again.”

  I had to say, I was impressed. I hadn’t known that this creature beside me was so perceptive. I hadn’t once seen him pause to glance around, thinking him solely focused on the ground ahead of us.

  “What do we do?” I asked.

  The huge creature turned to me and raised a thick eyebrow. “You, the great Rogan Ward, are asking me?”

  I bit back a snarl. “I told you. I don’t remember this world. So just tell me.” This was the second time Ash had implied I was something more than an ordinary fighter.

  Ash turned back to the road ahead with equanimity. “We wait. See what they do. And prepare ourselves for a fight.”

  Despite the fitness of my new body, I was weary. That chi blast or whatever it was had taken a lot out of me. If another fight was in the cards, I would do my best, but I would have liked the chance to recover first.

  Meditate.

  The thought came unbidden, and at first I wondered what it meant. Then, without knowing quite how, I found that I alrea
dy knew. Meditation would help me regain my strength far quicker than anything else. I just needed a few minutes of peace and a quiet spot.

  Or did I?

  In my old life, meditation was something that other people did. The spiritualists and other weirdos. Those who practiced tai chi in the park, and maybe the Buddhists. Taoists, maybe. I didn’t really know.

  So perhaps it was possible to meditate while walking at the same time.

  With that thought in mind, I tried to recall all I knew of the practice. Clear the mind. Seek balance. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had, and perhaps it was enough to give me a start.

  And anyway, the landscape, while majestic and slightly alien because of the sky, was also repetitive and a bit dull. And as Lady Gamma had said, I was there to protect her. How could I do that if I was weary to my bones?

  Instead of trudging on alongside Ash, I moved to the other side of the cow-beast and rested a guiding hand on its flank. Then, still keeping pace, I shut my eyes and drew a deep breath.

  There was a quiet voice in my mind telling me that I was an idiot, and that this would never work. I did my best to quiet that voice as well as all the others. All that mattered was finding a fragment of balance, a moment of tranquility, a point in my mind where everything became clear…

  I kicked something, and let out a curse as I stumbled, staggering a couple of times to stay upright.

  “Rogan, you stupid fuck,” I said to myself.

  Yet as soon as I recovered, I tried it again. There had been a brief moment just before my toe had betrayed me when I’d almost had it. And hey, if it worked, it would be worth a little discomfort.

  Three more times I tried to reach that point of balance. Three times I failed, twice because of another stumble, and once because I thought I heard something. Each time, I recovered myself, made sure of my grip on the cow-beast, and tried once again.