by GM Gambrell
Seventeen
Duncan eventually moved to the front seat, leaving Sir Dog in a wad of blankets and sleeping bags to sleep as comfortably as he could in the bouncing Jeep. It crawled through the ruins, along a path that had been cleared over the thousands of intervening years since the Last War. He wasn’t sure why someone would bother clearing a road through the rubble, and even with it, it was still a slow ride out of the city. He was shocked when he realized how much larger Old Dallas was than the city of his birth. He could easily walk across New Dallas in a few minutes but it had taken them the better part of a day to exit the ancient metropolis by Jeep. The scope of the city was simply mind-boggling, and he couldn’t begin to imagine the amount of people who’d lived there. There was so much destruction, as well. Everything was blackened and charred, and the ancient scars of battle by magic were everywhere.
Seeming to read his thoughts, Jim said. “There were millions of us here, then. Billions throughout the world. Now we’re but a few thousand scattered to the four winds.”
The city finally gave way to what was, once upon a time, countryside. There were the remains of a vast forest, grassy plains, and riverbeds, their water long gone. He had no idea what sort of magic was responsible for preserving the vegetation in the state it was. They looked just as they had when they were alive, yet every single part of them was black. As the Jeep rushed down the old asphalt road, the slight wind of its wake rustled the grass and leaves loose, turning them to ash and dust. He imagined that a strong wind could blow the entire former forest away.
“How did we manage to do this to our world?” Duncan asked.
“We didn’t. This forest was alive and vibrant just ten years ago. I spent many summers here, camping by tent under the stars.”
“Then what happened to it?”
“The Creeping Death. We don’t know what it is, exactly, but it’s spreading out from the Magician cities like a plague. I wish that we had the time for me to show you those places, each Magician city, just so you’d know. It will eventually take over the entire world, rooting out all life and leaving nothing but those infernal floating cities.”
Out of the clutter and rubble of the city they began making better speed on the ancient blacktop road. The road, in places, had once been covered by grass, but with the Creeping Death the grass had died and been blown away, showing the road beneath. It was gone in places as well, and several times they had to detour around large cracks in the road. The bridges over the dry rivers were long gone, destroyed either in the War or through simple age. The Creeping Death stretched out for an eternity from Old Dallas, and soon, as the sun began to set in the West and darkness set in, Jim finally pulled over to the side of the road.
He laughed. “I don’t know why I pull off the road. We’re quite likely the only ones with any sort of vehicle in thousands of miles. They used to pull over, back before the War, so they weren’t run over by other vehicles. We could camp in the middle of the road for years and never see another vehicle.”
Duncan was silent as he helped Jim set up the camp. Everywhere he stepped a little cloud of black ash shot up, showing the bare ground beneath. He helped Jim put up a small canvas tent, refill the Jeep’s gas tanks, and start a fire for dinner.
“What is this?” he asked, pointing to the red cans with the vile liquid that powered the Jeep.
“The Ancients called it Gasoline. Unless we find more stores of it, out there somewhere, that’s among the last stocks in the world.”
“Do you know what it’s made of? I had engines running on vegetable juice, but I could never make one big enough or get enough power out it to do anything large.”
“I had the same trouble, as a child. I finally got around it by distilling the essence of the vegetables. You end up with a lot less, but it’s a lot more powerful. Gasoline, however, comes from the ground. It was, at the time of the Last War, a great debate. People were convinced that pumping it out of the ground and fueling their life with it polluted the air, the ground, and the water.”
“Did it?”
“Yes.”
“So why didn’t they do something else?”
“They were working on it. Our ancestors had found ways to harness the sun and the wind to power machines. But they never got a chance to fully implement those alternative energies. The Magicians relieved them of their problems.”
Dinner consisted of a food that he wasn’t familiar with from rusted looking cans. It was a mush, at best, but it was filling, and soon he found himself leaning back near the fire, staring up at the sky. He’d seen stars, of course, but nothing in the city had been as vibrant as what he was looking at now. The sky positively sparkled.
“The shield around the cities keeps the sky from seeming so beautiful,” Jim commented. “I never saw this sky until I left New Boston, and that was worth leaving the city in itself. And to think that our forefathers, the Ancients, flew among them, walked on the moon, and some say still live on Mars.”
“Do you think that’s true?”
“There isn’t really any way for us to know. The Magicians destroyed most books and records that were left by our kind after the Last War. What survived in the underground complexes that protected us during the long dark years after the War were, eventually, used as fuel for simple fires, like this one. We just don’t have enough information about our past, especially those last days of the War and the time after. It’s nice to think, though.” He stared up at the stars. “Maybe out there, somewhere, our kind are living in freedom and happiness.”
“You are free, Diamond Jim,” Duncan heard from the edge of camp. It was a deep and guttural voice, the hint of an accent present that he’d never heard before. “You are as free as any man can be, in this world.”
Jim sprang to his feet, a pistol in each hand, and Duncan reached for his two steel bars. “Come forward, into the light, friend.”
The creature stepped forward and Duncan gasped. It’s upper half was a muscular human man. Its lower half, however, was horse. Having never actually seen a horse except in the picture books in the library, he’d certainly never seen a horse with the body of a man. Jim, on seeing the wild-haired Centaur, smiled.
“Gregory, my friend, it is a pleasure to see you.” He holstered his guns and stepped forward, hugging his apparent friend and leaving Duncan staring at his steel bars and wondering what he’d have done if they had been attacked. He had to find a better way to defend himself in the Wastes.
“Duncan, this is my friend, Gregory. He’s of the Northern People, their home north of the Great Plains, in the Lands of Snow.”
“It is my honor, Duncan, to meet a friend of Diamond Jim’s, Friend of the People of the North,” the Centaur said, bowing. “I take it that your young friend is not of your people? Judging from the expression on his face he’s not only never seen a Centaur, he’s never heard of one. Yet I cannot smell magic upon him, in his soul, so he is not a Magician.”
Duncan tried to correct his expression as Jim explained. “It’s a complicated story, Gregory. He is of my people in the sense that he isn’t magical, but he’s lived his entire life among the Magicians. Up to now, that is. Now he is a creature of the Wastes like you and I.”
“He is much like you, then.”
“More than he’s willing to admit.”
“So he would not be familiar with the evil stepchildren of the Magicians. We’re not discussed much among their kind, I’m told. We’re an embarrassment to them.”
“No,” Jim said, and then turned to Duncan. “The Centaurs were created by the Magicians to fight in the last war. They were a readymade cavalry.”
“The fiercest soldiers this world has ever known and ever will know,” Gregory added.
“Indeed. But the Magicians didn’t count on them having a will of their own, like many of the other creatures that they conjured into this world. The Centaurs rebelled shortly after the Last War and have lived as a free people ever since. You won’t learn about them in the Magic S
chool, and I’d never known about them until I met Gregory here outside New San Antonio.”
“And what an adventure that was,” the Centaur exclaimed. “I was sure you were going to shoot me on sight.”
“But you exist without magic, away from the cities,” Duncan observed. “I thought it stopped working the further away you go.”
“We are not magical creatures by nature,” Gregory told him. “We were simply created by Magic. We don’t perform any magic.”
“I understand,” Duncan said, though he had a hard time getting a handle on what the creature was saying. A beast created by magic could exist away from it? He wondered if that meant the dogs and cats, always at battle with each other, could carry their battles into the Wastes. Would that mean that their pups and kittens, born away from magic, would continue to have the ability to speak?
“I take it your visit is no chance happening. You didn’t just happen to wander upon us in the Creeping Death,” Jim said, referring to the area of death surrounding New Dallas. “I thought your people found the land this far south…well…distasteful.”
“We find the Creeping Death distasteful, if that word is strong enough to describe our feelings of the land of Magicians. But events warrant our finding and communicating with you, even if that means traveling into the land of death.”
“What could be so important?”
“The Creeping Death is on the move, Jim. It is spreading north at a far greater rate than ever before observed. It is spreading as if driven, the death being herded even over the great mountains that split the land and into the Valley.”
Jim looked speechless. “The Valley? That can’t be…not the Valley. We’d hidden it so well.”
“What’s the Valley?” Duncan asked.
“It’s where our kind are trying desperately to grow enough food to store for when the Creeping Death overtakes the entire world. That’s our grand plan, you see, what the council of elders has decided best. We grow and store as much food as humanly possible and then return underground,” Jim told him. “All of the colonies are in overdrive, trying to improve the underground conditions they emerged from a hundred years ago, but the Valley…that’s the largest of all the colonies, the largest of our farming communities. I hope to take you there, one day, but it’s far from here, along the Western coast and near what was once called the Pacific Ocean.”
“The Pacific Ocean,” Gregory said in awe, “the home of the USS Barak Obama, isn’t it?”
“If you could say that great ship and her crew had a home, then yes, you could say it was the Pacific.”
As usual, there was so much said that he had no idea what any of it meant. “What do you mean return underground? How did we survive underground?”
“The child knows nothing of your own history, does he?” Gregory asked.
“No, it’s not something they teach in the Magic Schools. It’s not important now, Duncan, but suffice it to say that our kind survived the end of the Last War by hiding underground in massive ancient military installations, mines, and caverns. We call those nine hundred years we spent hiding from the Magicians the Dark Years. I hope to show you some of them someday. What will your people do, Gregory, as the Creeping Death pushes north?”
“We will push further north, over the top of the world, and hope that we find grazing lands on the other side. There is nothing left for us here. The Creeping Death will, at some point, destroy this world entirely until all that is left is the Magicians and their cities. My brethren have accepted our fate.”
“You could come underground with us, Gregory. The Council’s offer is still open to you.”
“We would perish without the sun on our back and the wind in our hair. We do appreciate the offer, but it simply is not an option for us.”
“You will perish from the Creeping Death,” Jim observed.
“I know. It is a great debate among out kind. I think that, secretly, we are hoping that your kind will find a way to stop it.”
“There has to be a way to stop this,” Duncan said, only grasping part of the problem but understating completely the consequences of inaction. “You can’t just give up and hide.”
“Duncan,” Jim began, “we’ve tried to figure out the cause of the Creeping Death since we first came back above ground. I’ve even posed the problem to the best minds in the Magic Schools. Well, at least the best minds that were willing to listen. They don’t know what it is, either, though it seems to start around their cities and work outward from there. We’ve even used ancient scientific equipment to examine it, as best we can with our limited understanding of how that equipment works, but it’s no use. The lands the Creeping Death has touched are simply dead. There is no life there at all, from the smallest blade of grass to the largest tree…everything is simply dead.”
“Then it must have something to do with the Magic,” Duncan insisted. “Maybe the source.”
Gregory laughed aloud, “My people have searched for this Source of Magic for a thousand years. We have been to the ends of this earth in its pursuit. Our hope has always been that if there were one source and it was destroyed, there would be no more Magicians. To use an ancient human phrase, ‘The playing field would be flat.’”
“Level,” Jim corrected.
“Yes, level. I guarantee you, young Duncan, if there was a source, we would have found it by now. We have been at war with the Magicians, in one form or another, for nearly a thousand years. We have attacked their cities and destroyed their pipelines. If there was a source, we would know it.”
“And you searched New Atlantis?” Duncan countered. “It only makes sense that the Source would be in the homeland of the Magicians.”
“Well, no, of course we haven’t. You cannot even step foot on the island of New Atlantis without magic coursing through your veins. And to even attempt to do so is to guarantee certain death. It is the most well protected place on this planet. There is no way for us to search there.”
“He makes a good point,” Jim interrupted. “And a point I’ve often brought up to the Councils. The Creeping Death spreads out from the cities, as if the land is rejecting the magic. If there was no magic to reject, things could return to normal. New Atlantis would be the likely place for the source of magic, if there is a source, simply because no human has ever stepped foot there. We really don’t know anything about the place.”
“But if you ended the magic, those cities would plummet to the ground, killing all those people,” Duncan observed, taking the other side of the argument. “You might very well end the Creeping Death, but hundreds of thousands of people would die in the chaos that followed.”
“And that, if the myth of the source was true,” Gregory began, “would be a price my people would be willing to pay. It is not, however. There is no source. Concern yourself with protecting your people and escaping into the ground.”
Jim nodded to his friend. “You will stay with us this evening?”
“I cannot. I must return to my people as they are already on the move. Good luck, old friend. May your people survive.”
“And yours,” Jim said, returning the Centaur’s handshake.
“It was a pleasure meeting you, young master Duncan. I wish we could have had the opportunity to get to know each other better.”
Duncan watched as the half man, half horse galloped away into the night. He could hear his hooves on the payment for a long, long time.