by GM Gambrell
Sixteen
Duncan awoke to bouncing and music. The music was strange, unlike any Magician music he’d ever heard. It had a mechanical quality to it, as if much of it was produced on something other than woodwinds and stringed instruments. There were no vocals, and the music was haunting, yet it was very relaxing. Quickly deciding he wasn’t, in fact, at a school dance, he hazarded opening his eyes.
The sunlight blinded him, brighter than anything he’d ever been used to back home. The field not only sheltered New Dallas from the extremes in weather, but the extreme sunlight. He remembered stories from the old library of the condition of something called the Ozone Layer during the Last War, and how its weakness had led to a strengthening of sunlight, though he didn’t understand all the details. The light was warm on his face and felt good. It was just so very different than anything he’d experienced at home. There was a licking at his hand and he moved it, soon discovering it was Sir Dog licking him. He rubbed the dog between the ears as he struggled to sit up.
He was in the backseat of some sort of open-air contraption similar to the descriptions of Diamond Jim’s original All Terrain Vehicle. It was old, though, and obviously of Ancient design. He’d seen similar vehicles in the old books, and they’d been called Jeeps. This Jeep was packed with supplies, everything from rusted red fuel cans to clear bottles of water. There were packages strapped to the hood as well. Sir Dog crawled into his lap as he sat up. The little dog was covered in fresh white bandages and its left eye was puffy and swollen shut.
“He wouldn’t leave your side,” Diamond Jim told him from the front seat as he slowed the Jeep and then stopped. “It was the weirdest thing. He was very injured and I was sure he was bleeding to death, but he got between you and me and wouldn’t move until he was sure I wasn’t going to hurt you. Then he crawled into the Jeep after I put you in. I didn’t have any choice but to bandage him up to. You brought him from the city with you?”
“No,” Duncan said, his voice crackling and weak like he hadn’t spoken for some time, “we met here.”
“You befriended a feral dog?”
“We shared food.” Duncan was unsure of how much to tell the man, unsure of how far to trust him. He still didn’t know who to trust, who was lying to him, and who was telling the truth. He half suspected that everyone was lying, to some extent, but whether it was to protect him or to hurt him, he had no idea.
“That will do it every time,” Jim said as he rubbed Sir Dog’s head. “They aren’t like the dogs we had in the city. They don’t talk, as I’m sure you’ve seen, but they aren’t stupid. Sometimes I think having to survive out here, in the Wastes, makes them smarter and stronger.”
“He’s pretty strong for a little dog,” Duncan agreed.
Diamond Jim stared at him for a long time, their eyes locked. Duncan didn’t look away, and finally, Jim smiled. “I can’t believe how much you look like her when she was younger. Your eyes are just as striking.”
“My mother? You knew her?”
“They never told you, did they?”
“To be honest, Mr. Diamond…” Duncan said, not quite sure on how to address the older man.
“Just Jim is fine, Duncan.”
“Okay, Jim. To be honest, I’m not sure anyone ever told me the truth, and, to be honest, I’m not sure you’re going to tell me the truth, either.”
He expected some sort of backlash for speaking out to the man, but instead Jim laughed. “Yep. You get that from your mother as well. She was always a demander of the truth, even when it didn’t suit her, and even when it didn’t suit the Magician’s idea of how the world worked. She was such an explorer, an inspiration.”
Duncan wondered if they were talking about the same woman. “How did you know her?”
“We grew up together in New Boston. We were very close.”
“And my father?”
“Do you really want to get into this ancient history here and now? I mean…I understand your curiosity, but are these really the first things you want to know?”
“Yes,” Duncan said. “Please.”
“Okay. Your father, mother, and I went to magic school together. I, just like you, didn’t have magical abilities, but my parents made me go anyway. Our lives were a lot alike, in that respect, Duncan. You and I have much in common.”
“I don’t know about that,” Duncan said, but left it at that. There would be time, he knew, to pursue the accusations about the man later. He was pretty sure Jim hadn’t had anything to do with the courthouse bombing, but there were all those other charges. No matter how much he took to liking the man and how much he wanted to trust him, he had to be sure.
To his credit, Jim didn’t react to the slight and again laughed. “Oh, I think you’ll come to find out how wrong that is. We do have a lot in common, Duncan, not the least of which is a burning desire to know exactly what happened to our world. Anyway, your parents and I attended school together. Albert and I spent much of that time vying for the attention of young Helen Wadsworth.” He laughed again, obviously fondly remembering parts of his childhood. “It was a constant contest, Duncan. If I grew flowers for her, Albert would conjure an entire garden. If I’d serenade her at her window, Albert would summon an entire orchestra. That was the highpoint of my childhood, back before I knew anything about the Last War.”
Jim was quiet a moment and Duncan wondered if he were in retrospection.
“So how did my father win my mother’s affection?”
“Well, there is no way to compete with the Magicians, as you know, and there was really nothing I could offer her. My life was dedicated, at the time, to the Restorers. At best, I could give her endless days of living in tents and on rations in the middle of the Wastes. I couldn’t give her the magical home or the life that she deserved.”
“Living out here doesn’t seem so bad, yet,” Duncan said. “Well, besides the dogs, maybe.”
“Anything non-magical would appeal to our kind, Duncan, even this desolate Wasteland. We’re drawn to it, propelled away from Magic. But this is no place for a Magician woman. There was no way to teach her to live here. They’ve grown so accustomed to living with the magic that living without it will kill them. The further they travel away from the cities, the faster it fades.”
“Why is that?” Duncan asked, changing the subject. He wanted to know more about Diamond Jim’s relationship with his family, but there was so much to learn. “I noticed it when the Magistrates where chasing me. Their fireballs got weaker and weaker the farther we got away from all those pipes running up to the city.”
“We have no idea, Duncan. We don’t even know what’s running through those pipes. Every time we’ve cracked one open it stops glowing blue and there’s just nothing.”
As Jim went on about what they didn’t know, it hit him like a ton of bricks. Jim had said we. There were more of them. “We, Jim?” Duncan asked, interrupting. “There are more of us?”
Jim laughed harder than he had at any point since Duncan had been awake. “Of course there are, kiddo. You don’t think we’re the only ones of the old race in existence, do you? My God, son. Do you know what it would mean if we were the only ones? There would be no point in fighting then, would there?”
“My father said there were non-magical humans in the Wastes, but that they were like that dog pack, nothing more than feral animals.”
Jim laughed aloud. “That’s what most Magicians think. If they knew the truth, they might have to look at their own lives and examine where they’ve been and what they’ve done. If they admitted that there were actual humans left, they ‘d also have to realize that, one day, there will be another war.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Are you fighting the Magicians?” Duncan asked, all the cards laid out on the table. Jim would either confess to Duncan or join the ranks of the other adults in his life who, for his own good or not, had lied to him.
“No…not like you’re thinking. I’m not trying to destroy the Magicians, thou
gh based on what they’ve done to our people…” He paused, quiet. “You’ve seen a glimpse of that, haven’t you? Though I’m sure their school’s library was just as lopsided in its view as ours was in New Boston, but I’m also guessing you found the other, secret libraries. And though it doesn’t paint the whole picture, it gives you enough to know what the Magicians have done.”
“Yes,” Duncan said simply. There was no point in denying it. He knew, from the Magician’s point of view, the history of the Last War. “They say they were saving the world from us.”
That he’d automatically lumped himself in with the other non-magical beings didn’t even register with him. He was one of them, whether he liked it or not.
“And that’s what they told themselves, when it all happened. But look around you,” Jim said, pointing to the burnt and ruined cityscape around them. “Have they saved anything?”
“But we destroyed it first,” Duncan insisted. “The world was already ruined when the Magicians stepped in.”
“Look there and tell me what you see,” Jim ordered, pointing to a shattered and burnt brick wall.
Duncan followed his gaze and, at first, saw just another ruined wall in a city of ruined walls. As he looked closer, though, he noticed the telltale scorch marks left by fireballs. It didn’t really prove anything, but he understood what Jim was trying to say. The Last War had been hard on the world, harder than anything else it had ever experienced in the past.
“I see marks left by fireballs, but I don’t know what that proves. We know there was a war. The Magicians freely admit that.”
“Of course they do. Their history books make the Last War sound so noble, but all over the parts of this world that I’ve been, it’s the same as that wall. Everywhere there are signs of magical destruction. I’ve seen the remains of dragons scattered about the plains, mixed up with the rusting hulks of jet fighters and attack helicopters. I’ve also seen the mass graves of hundreds of thousands of humans. I…” It was obviously a hard thing for the man to remember. “They didn’t even bother burying them, Duncan. There are just great pits with bones as far as you can see. They wiped us, as a species, from this planet in the name of saving it, yet everywhere you go there are signs of the damage they inflicted upon it. They’re like the great wave of locusts that still, to this day, inhabit the Great Plains north of here, where they now feed off the very dirt because, over a thousand years, they’ve eaten every other living thing. They’ve crossed this world and devoured its life.”
“You don’t think the Ancients did anything wrong?” Duncan asked. “You don’t think they polluted and did their own very best to destroy the planet?”
“No, of course I don’t believe that. I’ve seen enough Ancient literature to know that they indeed had their own problems. They were warring in nature, always finding new ways to kill each other. They did pollute and rendered great swaths of the planet useless for generations. They were, to a fault, greedy, violent, and destructive. But none of that warrants them becoming nearly extinct.” Jim was passionate, even angry.
“So you are fighting the Magicians. You have done those things they said. You blew up the courthouse.”
Jim stood and walked outside the Jeep, coming around to the rear end of it and standing next to Duncan. “I don’t know how you’ll ever believe me, but no. That’s not how I’ve ever operated, though I won’t lie to you. I can’t count the number of times I wished their destruction, wished I had an army mighty enough to defeat them. But if our forefathers, at the height of their technological prowess, couldn’t do it, how could we hope to with only the dying remains of their science?”
Duncan shook his head. “I don’t know how.”
“Exactly. So the only thing I’ve ever tried to do was to show them what they’ve done to the world and begged them to fix it. There are at least one of us in each of the great Magician cities, trying to work from the inside, trying to change the system so that the few remaining survivors of humankind can come in from the dark. I’ve never meant to harm anyone, Duncan, not in those cities. Sometimes I wish I could have, though. I’ll freely admit to wishing their entire species gone from the world.”
“But if you didn’t cause those explosions…or kill those people…” Duncan left the question hanging. He couldn’t begin to fathom why the Magicians would kill their own.
“Your father tends to think it’s so that the Magistrate and the Lord Probates can instill fear in a people that, otherwise, have none. It’s the only way to justify their existence. Why do you need a standing army against a threat that disappeared a thousand years earlier?”
His father had said exactly the same thing to him, and it mostly made sense. He still doubted Jim, though. “I don’t know. I…I don’t really know anything anymore.”
“I understand that. You were to be our champion in New Dallas, but the way things have worked out, I think we’ll be pulling all of the few remaining non-Magicians out of the cities. It’s just too dangerous. We have to gather our resources and fight the Creeping Death. We might even have to go back underground.”
“Creeping Death?”
“We don’t know what it is, Duncan, and the only way to explain it to you is to show it to you. If you’ll come with me I’ll not only guarantee your safety, but I’ll guarantee you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to.”
Sir Dog slept peacefully in his lap and didn’t look in any shape to travel. He didn’t feel like walking, and even if he did, he had no idea where he would go. Jim was, if nothing else, interesting.
“I’ll go with you,” he said. “For now.”
“Agreed,” Jim said as he leapt back into the driver’s seat of the Jeep, smiling ear to ear. “Let’s start our adventure then.”
The engine fired up under extreme protest and Duncan sat back in the ancient seat and watched as the wasted city rushed by in a blur of browns and blacks.