The Dark Shore (Atlanteans)
Read The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) Online
Authors: Kevin Emerson
For Bryan, who would make a great partner when
roaming future wastelands in an ancient flying machine
After the fracture and the flood
The masters and their magic consumed by the ravenous earth
There was a journey
Through aeons of dark, as the world healed
The refugees seeking a new home but lost, so lost
And when the seas calmed and the land quieted
And the stars could bear to watch once more
The memory descended in ships of blue light
To rise again
Hoping this time to reach the heights of the masters
Without resurrecting their horrors
.
PART I
Call:
Listen! Listen for the song!Response:
Where has that sweet music gone?Call:
She’s gone with the river, gone with the trees
,Response:
Gone and left us on our knees
.Call:
Listen! Listen! What’s that you hear?Response:
The wind of change, the drum of fear
.Call:
Hear our footsteps, hear our hearts
,Response:
Is this the end, or just the start?—
TRADITIONAL
G
REAT
R
ISE
M
IGRATION
C
HANTThese bones are old, older than you know
,You remember me like yesterday
,But that was years ago
.—
THE
TRILOBYTES
, “S
ONG FOR THE
C
RYO
”
IT WAS DAWN WHEN WE DESCENDED OVER THE FIRST city of the dead: Gambler’s Falls, in what had once been South Dakota, at the western reach of the Great Mississippi Desert. We’d flown over other towns during the long night. They’d all looked the same: ghostly geometric sketches in moonlight, the buildings intact, the cars in orderly lines along streets or neatly parked in driveways. You could almost imagine the people still sleeping peacefully, except for the dark streetlights, the open car hoods and gas tanks, and on everything, the thick crust of blown sand.
What made Gambler’s Falls different was the wall.
And the corpse.
We were dropping out of a vacant blue sky. The sun had just risen behind us, orange and fiery, and though the wind on my face was still the hollow cold of night, I could already feel the lethal heat on my back. Lilly was asleep, curled beside me. Leech sat in the front of the triangular craft.
We’d been going for fourteen hours since escaping from EdenWest, and we needed a place to hide from the sunlight and EdenCorp. I’d spotted a narrow canyon on the far side of town that might work.
As we lowered, I cast a glance behind us, looking for any sign of Paul’s forces, but as it had all night, the horizon kept its secrets. At first, I’d thought that Eden would be right on our tail, but Leech and I had discussed it and figured that actually it would take Paul some time to get a team together to come after us. His hover copters would need modifications for the real sun, and fuel and supplies. They were probably on their way by now, but we had a head start, and I figured we could afford a few hours of rest.
“You sure we have time for this?” Leech asked skeptically as we flew over the outskirts of town. “We’re already so far off the bearing.”
“I’ve got to sleep,” I said. It had been more than twenty-four hours since I’d slept at all, and days since I’d had anything more than a few meager hours. “Otherwise, there’s no way I’m going to get us to your marker.”
As the night had gone on, this had become the latest tension between me and Leech. He’d been sketching maps, and, using the lines we’d seen etched in the top of Mount Aasgard back in EdenWest, he’d come up with a bearing that pointed southwest. Leech believed that this bearing would take us to some kind of Atlantean marker, the next stop on our way to the Heart of the Terra, the place we had to get to before Paul.
I trusted Leech’s idea. He was the Mariner. It was his job to plot our course, and my job as the Aeronaut to get us there. But instead of following Leech’s bearing, I had been flying due west, toward Yellowstone Hub, where I was from. All through the night, Leech had noted that we were getting farther off course and adding to our time. My point was that going to Hub made more sense as a first move, because we knew we had my dad there, and we could get supplies to stock up for the longer journey.
“I get that you need your beauty sleep,” said Leech begrudgingly, “but— Whoa . . .” He leaned over the side of the craft. “Check that out.”
I looked down and in the shadows between buildings, I saw the wall. It was maybe ten meters tall, an uneven pile of stacked furniture, sandbags, bricks, and chunks of concrete, all stitched together with barbed wire and telephone lines. Its spine was lined with jagged shards of glass. It undulated like a serpent through the streets, past the overturned, blackened hulks of cars and trucks, the spills of furniture and trash, and sometimes right through collapsed buildings.
“Dude, look out!” Leech shouted.
I’d gotten distracted by the scene, my exhausted brain in slow motion, and now we were too low. Directly in front of us, the wall crested to a high point. Perched at the top was a cockeyed lookout tower, a square wooden platform with a blue plastic tarp over it. The tarp had been shredded by wind, but the aluminum poles were still standing, including the one sticking up through the middle.