Age of Mystics (Saga of Mystics Book 1) (17 page)

TWO WEEKS PASSED

“One group confronts another, their aims different, their cultures at odds. One comes out victorious and the other is lost to time.”

-Merritt Kelly, On Ancient Warfare

Smoke billowed into the sky above towering flames from the church. Kyle looked back at the burning buildings, wondering how they could have done things differently. The megachurch was so big that it burned high into the dawn’s waning darkness. They had a group of more than thirty now, and he and Nat would take the lead on their trek to the front range of mountains. These last two days had taught them that they needed a more defensible home.

It hadn’t started out that way. When the group had arrived at the church, they had been welcomed by the parishioners, who had made a tent camp in the courtyard between their three buildings. Everyone pitched in and it almost felt normal, more like a camping trip than a complete change in the way the world worked. It had actually been kind of fun, except for the part that the pastor thought their powers were “of the devil” and refused to let them practice in the camp. It didn’t really stop most of them and they would practice outside the camp whenever they had the chance. Even very religious people like Rich and Kim had found the prohibition just fear of the unknown. They had been there a little more than a week when the trouble brewed.

Two days ago, some young men who seemed about Kyle’s age, maybe a little older had come to the church asking for food. Max’s dogs had immediately sensed something was wrong. Nat had grabbed a broom handle and walked to the front of the camp, looking as demure as possible, but something in her told her she might be needed. Adam had watched the men and commented that it reminded him of some villagers from when he was in Afghanistan once, that the Taliban would come to town on friendly terms, but were looking for something. He said it often ended in some kind of bloodshed, and this was no different.

The men had come at the break of dawn the day before, armed with axes and machetes and tore into the camp. After all of it, Ted said he thought they were trying to take food and supplies. The pastor told them to put their weapons away, there was no need for them here, and he had been killed on the spot. Kyle couldn’t believe how quickly society had broken down, that in America people would act like that. The rest of the people in the camp must have been pretty delighted to see Kyle’s group jump into action. But they were stunned when the two most dangerous people turned out to be Nat and Maxine. Nat was like a person from a Kung Fu movie, she moved fast and brilliantly, but it was Max that had scared the “campers”. To see the little girl with rage on her face as she stood mid-camp and directed her dogs (there were thirteen of them now) into an attack of awesome force and brutality. The men had then taken hostages to use as human shields. Kyle had personally had to restrain his ten-year-old cousin to keep her from unleashing the dogs right into the group.

As the night turned to dusk, the men tried to get away, but Max’s dogs were on them. Not one survived. It was only then that he had seen that the men had lit all three buildings on fire and the fire took hold quickly. The camp had burned, and all his group could do was save those who remained and get them out. And now, their group of thirty plus survivors was about a mile away watching their camp, and church, burn. It was almost over now; it had been burning for hours. Most of their supplies were inside those buildings. Kyle had pulled the last shift of guard duty while most of the others rested. He couldn’t sleep anyway.

He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Jessica walking up with a piece of the jerky they had taken from his work. She offered it to him, but he just shook his head.

“You have to keep your strength up,” she said quietly, “come on, it is the breakfast of heroes.”

He laughed and took the food and began to chew it. “Is Ted up yet?”

Jessica nodded and Kyle walked back to where his Uncle and Aunt had laid down for the evening. He spoke quietly, so as not to wake anyone who was actually able to sleep.

“So, what now, Uncle Ted?” Kyle started, “You had a chance to rest. Still think the mountains are the best place?”

Ted nodded, “Your dad thought we should go to the Hillside, and I think I know why now. That restaurant is on a cliff that would be hard to scale. The entrance to it is a fairly narrow canyon from a secondary landing. We could set up a camp at the base of the road up to it, with another inner camp up at the restaurant. I doubt anyone is there, I think it has been closed for more than a year.” Ted looked down at the ground. “It will be hard for your mom. That was the restaurant they always went to for special occasions.”

Kyle remembered all the times his family had gone to the Hillside. They had enjoyed birthdays and holidays there, but mostly, until it had closed it was the place where his parents celebrated their anniversaries. The view was the best in town, because it looked out over most of the city. He had not really considered it, but it really was best for defending a position.

“I think in some ways,” he said, “it will be better for Mom. Plus, it has that little waterfall and pond, right?”

“Right,” Ted replied, “Good for drinking. We will have to forage and stock it up.”

Foraging was the word they used to describe how they collected their food and supplies. In the old world, it would have been called stealing. But the concept of personal property had been lost in the last couple of weeks. There were so many people who had died, or just never come home. They would forage through empty houses for useful items and food. Even in just two weeks, it was hard to find any store that hadn’t been looted down to its bare shelves.

“What about our abilities?” Kyle asked and drew up a small ball of light in his hand.

“We need to talk about that. Can you see if Rich and the others are awake?” Ted began gathering up his items from the ground and packing them into the backpacks he and Kayla and Max had brought. Kyle walked around and gathered up their group. It had not taken long for Adam and Erica to become more of an item, and they were nestled up together in a half open sleeping bag. Kyle woke them and the others and gathered everyone together. As they walked back to where Ted was, the whole camp seemed to follow.

“Hey, everyone. You can gather your things,” Kyle told them, “Our group will be talking over where we are going.”

“Don’t you think we should all talk about it?” a man said, Kyle thought his name was Tom.

“They are right,” Ted said from behind him, saving his from having to answer, “everyone gather around. Let’s talk about where we are going.”

Cliff’s feet hurt. They had been walking for over a week, seemingly to an endless list of unrelated places, but always leaving with something the Hermit seemed to want. Not that he was saying anything. Cliff wasn’t sure if it had been seven, eight or nine days they had been together, but the Hermit hadn’t said a word. He would communicate by gestures mostly. He would point to something and move out without comment, and Cliff would follow.

They had broken into the mall, taking survival supplies from the Sporting Goods store and some knives and swords (yes, swords!) from a cutlery shop. For some reason, they had also broken into every jewelry store and the jewelry departments of the big department stores, coming away with only diamonds and diamond-embedded items, hundreds of them. Cliff had no idea what value there would be for the gems now, but they had loads of them if they were valuable again. Cliff assumed that the Hermit was homeless and had attached the idea of wealth to the gems, but it was a guess. Two nights before, Cliff had woken to find the Hermit, huddled in a corner, rubbing the gems in his hands like Gollum with the One Ring. It was kind of creepy, but the next morning all had returned to normal.

Cliff was also now always hungry. Granola bars and trail mix aside, he hadn’t eaten a real meal since they had left his house. He had left as a twelve-year-old, pudgy, Asian kid and now was getting leaner by the day. He had stopped complaining about it, since the Hermit would only nod every time he said something and then move on to wherever he was going to go anyway. Cliff felt like he had to remind the Hermit to eat sometimes. Even then, he didn’t eat much. He just seemed on a constant search for something. Right now, they were on the far south side of town. Everything was burned in the area, every building, every vacant car had been burned at some point in the recent past. There were no people, only bodies. Almost from the time they had left Cliff’s house, when the Hermit had saved his life, they had seen the dead by the side of the road, or inside buildings they scavenged through. It didn’t seem to faze the Hermit, and Cliff was getting numb to it as well.

It was clear they were headed toward the Army base at the south of town. They had approached from the north a couple of days back, but some kind of battle was going on and the Hermit had stayed in the shadows, only moving at night, toward the west. They skirted the base, just out of sight and were now approaching it from the foothills of the Rockies, where the Mountain was. This was a very well-known military base, set up during the cold war to protect against nuclear attack. The idea seemed almost laughable now.

As they turned a corner on this back road, they were seen by a small group of men in military attire. The Hermit stopped, as though waiting for them, and the men obliged as they came in close, clearly cautious.

“You there,” shouted out the man in front, clearly their leader, “Everyone is required to move on to the base for their own safety.”

The Hermit shook his head to indicate he would not be doing that.

“We have orders. Now you have orders.” The man continued. This was not going to go well, as Cliff had seen at other times when other men had tried to force the Hermit to do things. “Now come over here so we can identify you, and then we will look for you at the base. If you do not present yourself at the base, you will be hunted as a fugitive. Am I making myself clear?”

The Hermit shook his head again. Even from behind him, Cliff could see the tension building in his shoulders, and his feet set into a stance. One of the men stepped toward the Hermit.

“Take your hood off and the sunglasses off,” the man reached toward the Hermit’s head and the Hermit opened his hand and pushed into the air between them and the man flew back through the air about fifteen feet and landed on his back. He immediately jumped up, as all of the others stepped back a few paces.

The Hermit shook his head again.

“Tiger, get up here,” the leader yelled out, “this one has power.”

A man from the back in camo pants and a black gi top with no sleeves jogged forward. “Okay,” he started, “this can go one of two ways. You do as the nice men say, or I turn you into a bloody pulp at the side of the road.” Cliff saw a look cross the man’s face of question, which turned to confusion and then almost to a mix of fright and anger. “You! Everyone attack now!”

He rushed forward, but he had no chance, nor did any of the other men. The Hermit whirled in a dance of power and pain, and the men flew in all directions. Those that could scrambled back up and rushed again, but that was the last chance they got. Two went down immediately, as his staff pulverized their skulls. Another three were cut where they stood, the Hermit slashing the air with his staff and the men’s necks opening like they had been sliced with a knife. It went on like this for only a few moments, but it seemed forever. As Cliff watched from a few yards away, the hermit dismantled a trained group of men in brutal fashion. At the end, there was one man left, who was trying to crawl away. The Hermit let him go, a few yards down the street, the man got up and limped out a run away from them as fast as his injured legs would allow.”

Cliff ran up to go after the man, but was stopped short when the Hermit held an arm out in front of him. “You let him go!” Cliff said to the older man. “he will tell the base and they will look for us.”

The Hermit nodded his agreement and then went to rifling through the pockets of the men who had died there. He took their jewelry, some identifying items, which he placed on the outside of their clothes, but he kept the jewelry, and the badge he ripped from the man who was called “Tiger”. Cliff saw the badge closer as the Hermit was holding it up, it had a picture of a Tiger circling a fire and the words “Fine Modern Karate Academy.”
I would have gone with Great Modern Karate Academy, but I guess fine was good enough for this guy.
The Hermit then stood as though he had been picking daisies, stretched his back and began walking. Cliff, ever the dutiful sidekick, ran up and followed him.

Jordan and Emma had watched the squad coming up the road from the growing hole in the wall. They were almost through, thanks to the vines Emma had grown into the crevasses. Watching the men slaughtered by the disheveled man, with a young Asian kid just standing there viewing the scene, was a little disconcerting. They were about two hundred feet above the road in the outside garden, so they couldn’t hear what was said, and they certainly weren’t going to shout once they saw the way the man had torn into the squad. It was a brutal display with which they wanted nothing to do.

“Holy Shit!” Jordan exclaimed quietly, “what is going on in the world?

Emma just shrugged, her mouth agape at the raw force of the seeming homeless guy. “All the more reason to get out and as far away as we can. Let’s get back to this.”

She concentrated, as she had done for a week, on the micro-crevasses that were in the cement. They had discovered that the bars only went a little more than a foot outside the openings themselves, and gave ample hold for the vines to pull. Interestingly, it was the inclusion of the bars that had made them able to dismantle the cement in a quicker fashion. After a couple more hours, Emma could feel the vines fully encase the bars and reach the other side of the hole as well. Now, she put all her thought into growth and expansion, and the vines responded.

Emma stepped back, exhausted, to let the plants do their thing. Jordan came up behind her and let her lean on him, while he gently rubbed her shoulders. For a man in his twenties, Jordan was a very thoughtful and affectionate person, and had quite the stamina in love. Emma had found this out after their initial embrace the week before. They were now having sex two to three times a day. Jordan was just always ready it seemed. This was very different from men of her own age, though since Mark had died, she hadn’t had a lot of opportunity to test that theory.

She could feel Jordan getting excited behind her and was ready for the next physical ecstasy she was about to embark on when a loud crack split the silence, and parts of the wall tumbled out of the opening. They watched with glee as the vines tore the bars free from the wall, leaving a hole roughly two and a half feet in diameter.

Jordan did not wait, but clambered about half way through the hole. It was sort of funny to see him half in and half out of the hole where he stopped, but she suddenly became concerned.

“Are you stuck on something?” She asked nervously.

Jordan pushed his way back the way he had come, until he was all the way back in the enclosure. “No,” he said, in a defeated way. “There is about a one-foot ledge and then a cliff that drops down about two hundred feet. I thought maybe there would be some kind of ladder or stairs, I don’t know. I didn’t think it would be impossible to get down.”

Emma looked at Jordan, at his clear disappointment, and wanted to help. She knew of nothing that could so she held him close and took his mind off of it, moving quickly to unbutton his pants. She always found it amazing that women in their forties and men in their twenties had about the same level of sexual drive. At the moment, it seemed very opportune.