Wine of the Gods 1: Exiles and Gods (3 page)

He got his elbows under himself and sat up.

Jamie hustled over, and talked to him. He looked around a bit, and spoke. "It looks like a nice place. And it smells free." He sank back down and his eyes closed.

There were thin wires, hundreds of them, it looked like, running from helmet to scalp. Chris's stomach twisted. "Do they have things stuck all the way into their brains?"

The redhead was back. "Yes, or at least, laid out on top of the brain, in contact with it. They do that to monkeys, to rats. Not
people!
Can you kids keep an eye on them? I'll get my hospital set up as quickly as possible."

Chris let out a relieved breath at that.
A hospital. A doctor.

"Sure. Can we move them into the shade?" Mallory glanced at the man, then looked away, blushing.

"Certainly. Try to not wiggle the helmet, and don't let them pull on any of the wires." The doctor hustled away.

The cattleman snorted, climbed back into this doolie and started it. Chris grabbed the naked man's shoulders and hauled him a bit further away from the trailer. It wasn't easy, with the goo.
And he was heavy. Muscular as well as tall.

Ariel came out with blankets, but hesitated. "Will that slime wash out? We don't have many extra blankets."

Chris shrugged. "Use mine. I packed a sleeping bag."

They s
hifted the other unconscious people over closer.

Chris and three other boys heaved the last man onto the b
lanket, and they carried him into the shade of the bus.

One Black, three White. One woman, three men. Political correctness falling from the sky.
He shivered, the spurt of humor fading.
All treated like experimental animals. Where are they from? What's going on?

Other people started shifting their vehicles, and Chris heard people talking about staking claim to land.
Most of them were heading off to the right or straight ahead along the rough line of vehicles. West? North? Chris walked around to the back of the bus and climbed up the ladder. The top wasn't flattened, he had no idea why it had a ladder. But it gave him a wider view. They were in the middle of a rolling grassland, with a few trees here and there. On the horizon to the right of the bus he caught the gleam of light on water, the blue of deep water. A line of darker vegetation probably marked the shoreline, or a forest along the shore.

It looks like a nice place. And it smells free.
Chris wasn't sure what free smelled like, but like the man below, he was free now.
All I have to do is decide what to do with all this freedom.

"Is that the ocean? Or a really big lake?" Jamie had climbed up behind him. "If it's fresh water we should claim land on the shore, don't you think?"
She was another of the blue eyed blondes, but tall and, umm, with a well developed figure.

"Maybe. We'll look at the ground and see if we can tell if it
floods." Chris turned and took a slow survey. "There's a stream that way, see the line of trees? The other way looks pretty dry. And rocky, maybe sandy. "

"Yeah, all the people who landed over there are driving this way
, and over toward the lake." Jamie looked down. "Here comes the doctor. I wonder if she needs an apprentice?" The girl scrambled down the ladder. Chris followed, and was promptly drafted to help set up an Army surplus mobile hospital in a big canvas tent. And transport the four people with their weird helmets. He fled before the doctor started doing anything.

From the top of the bus he looked around again.
He looked down, to judge how the shadow of the bus was changing.
Should have kept a compass in my pocket
. He decided the lake was north, the dryer lands east and the stream, west. To the south, the rolling grassy hills added trees as they rolled out of sight.
Lots of room, no need to rush to claim land until we find out what the climate, and especially the drinkable water situation is.
No more people were coming from the east, and just a few dozen vehicles were in sight, spread out. People wandered about.

Like lost puppies, wondering what to do.

What do we do?

After a
couple of hours, Jamie came out, looking excited. "The doctor said I was very steady, and that she'd help me study to at least be her assistant, and maybe a doctor myself, depending on how we eventually accredited things like that. She said they'd probably have a college, and a medical school eventually."

Chris nodded. "Umm, those people?"

"The doctor said they'd probably be all right. She said the implants were organic, and would dissolve, so she just clipped them off below the skin. She said there's no ongoing trauma that she can see, without CAT scans and so forth. They're starting to wake up." She flapped a hand in farewell, and trotted back into the hospital.

He was in a tent.

Harry frowned, wondering how that had happened.

"Awake finally, are you?"

"Gisele!" Harry frowned. Beyond that instant recognition, very little stirred.

"Do you know your name?" She stooped over him, petit and shapely.

"Harry, and you are Gisele, aren't you?"

"Am I? I haven't been too certain." A big bandana covered her head, all her hair concealed. He couldn't remember what color it was. Her facial bones were excellent, the bright blue eyes, superb.

Another woman bustled up, a young one with green eyes and red hair in a pony tail. "Now, here's another one of you awake. Thank goodness. Really, we hadn't thought you gods were going to be coming with us. Did they exile you, too?"

"I, I suppose so."
Gods?
Harry looked around. "Where are we?"

"We're calling it
Exile, because, well that's why we're here. They called it Extension, from some geologic thing they spotted with a satellite. I heard the lake to the north is fresh water, so maybe it's one of the Great Lakes, except we don't know if the geography is the same or not."

"Oh?" Harry lay back shakily.
What is a great lake, other than big? And who are "they?"

"Only three more of you still unconscious." The redhead burbled on. Was it nerves or did she just talk constantly? "Goodness, we were hoping we wouldn't need to set up the hospital so quickly." She looked around. "Army surplus M.A.S.H. unit, you see?"

It didn't
look
mashed. Harry turned his head and saw more cots beyond his.

“I don’t know why they didn’t remove the implants and helmets before they sent you, but someone said they thought you h
ad to have them to control the gate even as you went through.” She flashed a light in his eyes and nodded, apparently satisfied with whatever she saw there.. “That sounds an awful lot like they were shutting down the gate, but maybe they can do it with regular people now, or computers, so they got rid of every last one of us.”

Harry couldn’t keep up with the rush of words. He blinked, lost.

"Do you know these men? Do you know their names? This one keeps fading in and out of consciousness. The other fellow hasn’t so much as twitched yet. I don’t know what those implants did to you."

She helped Harry up, and steadied him as he staggered over to the next cot.

"I, I. He's always in trouble. I don't . . . I don't know his name. He looks drowned. Puffy and nasty. Was he bald? I don't remember bald." He looked over at the other man. "Romeo, but that was a joke. He looks funny bald. All his girlfriends are going to complain. Rom Eww? Oww?"

"That's it!" Gisele said from behind him. "Romeau. It has been on the tip of my tongue all day."

"All day? How long have I been here?"

"We all arrived yesterday about noon, and it's nearly
sunset today. The days are a few minutes longer, our watches are practically useless."

He remembered watches. Yes. He looked at his wrist. "Good grief!"

"Yes, they depilated all of you for the immersion tanks. If you’d been in longer, your skin would have adjusted." The redhead looked at the unconscious men in pity. "At least they aren't screaming any more. I think something interfered badly with the contact circuits in your brains. Maybe passing through the gate. At least they were organic conductors, they'll dissolve gradually over the next year or so. I cut the connectors off at the outer skull surface."

Harry looked at the man on the bed. Tiny dots of scabs
were scattered across forehead and scalp. Harry refrained from feeling his own head. What he could see of himself looked like he'd been immersed in water for days, his dark skin was splotchy and peeling in damp thin sheets. He didn’t look quite as chapped and drowned as the other two. He touched a loose flap and pulled carefully.

"Don't do that. It'll make sores."

"Yes, Ma'am." He snuck a sideways peek at Gisele. Yes, under makeup she had the same skin . . . mess. The bandana was explained, then. He felt his own smooth scalp, and hoped to hell it wasn't permanent. Yep, little bumps from . . . contact circuits on his brain? His stomach roiled and he shivered.
Brain damage. That’s why I’m not remembering right.
He looked out at the bright sunshine at the end of the row of beds and thought about running away, as far he could travel, and wondered what he would find.

"The old shortwave radios work. We'
ve gotten reports in from up and down the line. From here to the end of the line, there are three other clumps of you guys. These two and a fellow at the very end are the last ones left unconscious."

"Who?" Harry wondered what she meant by the end of the line. What line? "Err, Miss?"

The woman blushed. "Ginny Wacolm. Doctor Wacolm. I had just started my residency when all this . . . Let me get my list. I wrote them all down, figured you guys all knew each other . . . They don't all know their complete names. Dr. Mercy Green and Ms. Abram and Martie Branson are all at the furthest east location. Then someone called Chance and a teenaged boy named Richie are a bit closer.  Michael, Edward Virtue and Barry Virtue are about a thousand miles to the east of us. We think, calculating from the time their sun rose this morning. Those last two are pretty sure they are brothers. The other unconscious man is young, maybe a teenager, blond with very strikingly colored eyes, gold in color. He's in the far east."

Harry shook his head. The names didn't seem to mean anything to him. The nice Dr. Wacolm led him back to bed, and he slept and had dreams about moving, going, traveling far away and always finding new things, new people.

In the morning they fed him and put him to work. He followed orders, and dug holes where required. Tamped in fence posts and stretched rolls and rolls of barbed wire.

He gradually picked up information. They had just arrived here from somewhere else, and were scattered in a long line across the prairie. Instead of all getting together, they were instead coalescing around favorable spots every few miles.
The nuclei of a hundred towns. And the people who didn't want to coalesce were going north or south, away from the roughly east-west line of arrival.

“A new world” they called it.
No mention of rockets or spaceships. Apparently everyone had driven here with their families and possessions stuffed into their cars and trailers.

Harry whimpered and gave up trying to understand.

Romeau staggered out to join him at dusk. "That last fellow is sort of awake, too. Gisele asked if you could come take a look at him, after we scrounge something to eat. Why didn't we bring any food? Everyone else did."

"I, wasn't there a bubble?" The thought fled as quickly as it had come.

"Oh, yes, my Temple of Love." He looked around baffled. "I had a dream about putting it up on top of a hill somewhere. Fully automated kitchen."

When Harry thought about looking for a bubble, his head hurt. He accepted a bowlful of beans from the rancher he'd been helping all day, and split them with Romeau. He wasn't very hungry.

Back at the mashed hospital, the last man was sitting up in bed. "Wolf something." He looked up and frowned. "I should know you. I'm something Wolf, maybe."

"Old." Harry said suddenly.

The young man lit up. "That's it. Old." He lay back with a sigh of relief. "I hated not knowing my own name." He drifted off to sleep.

"Hmph. Old Wolf? He doesn't
look
like a Native American." A woman he hadn’t met, frowned down at the man in the bed. “I suppose he’s a bit tan, like an Italian or something. But then all you highly engineered people are tannish.”

"What's a native american?" Harry
glanced at his arm.
That's a heck of a tan. I think I'm . . . black? That's not right either. I'm obviously brown.

"Why it's someone from one of the Indian tribes. You know, Cowboys and Indians?" She looked hopeful, but Harry had to shake his head.
A chunk of knowledge, gone. Maybe it would come back, like a lost cat.

It was warm out
side, and he and Romeau withdrew from the other people, with their families and neighborhood groups, with their cars and all their possessions. Their thoughts and emotions. They lay in the long grass and stared at beautiful bright stars, millions of them. A falling star streaked across the sky.

Whatever had happen, had happened. They were alive, and the stars were bright.

Sometime later Gisele and Old Wolf joined them.

"It's too noisy," the man said. "They all get mad and yell in my head. I dare not relax."

Gisele nodded. "I have trouble shielding too. Every time I relax and almost fall asleep I hear weeping."

"We need to . . . go away." Harry said. "Far enough that we can't hear anything."

Romeau sighed. "Can we start now? I can't sleep."

Old Wolf stood up, st
retched, then staggered. Harry felt the faint jolt and froze.

"Earthquake." He cleared his throat and straightened. "Just a little one. I grew up in California."

Old Wolf straightened from his crouch. "Yeah, it was too brief to be a big one far away. The bigger, the longer it shakes. California . . . I think I've been there." He leaned and peered into the darkness.

Harry followed his gaze. Something large and dark
moved toward them. Wolf made a squeezing gesture and tossed a small fireball that direction.

The lion was huge.

Flat to the ground as it stalked, it froze in the light for a moment, then accelerated up the hill toward them. As the fireball fizzled out, Harry spotted other moving patches.

He threw a fireball of his own, but missed. A
bloody line erupted across the lion's face and it collapsed.

"Sl
ice them." Wolf made a hacking motion. "Like cutting metal."

"Metal?" Harry didn't remember cutting anything, and tried another fireball.

A lioness the size of a small horse flinched away as the fireball fizzled and died. Harry backpedaled, gathering power in his hand, trying for more time to get enough power compressed. In the confused darkness, the power, the fire, gleamed off a mouthful of teeth. He threw the glowing handful as the beast reared in front of him. He ducked, the weight knocked him flat, and claws raked.

Pain like an electric shock shot through his body. He frantically fought his way out from under four hundred pounds of lioness. The animal twitched, stilled. It was quiet and dark. Another fireball burned briefly, as Gisele tossed it upward.

Six dead lions. Four shocked and bloodied gods.

Harry collapsed, trying to slow his descent. The pain was focused on his right leg. The dim light mercifully dulled the colors. That dark fluid didn't look nearly as frightening as blood . . . 

Gisele hunched like an old lady and crept over to him. "Let me see your chest Harry. And your leg. Damned reflexes, she got you good. Lay back down."

"Chest?" He looked down. More dark fluid.

Wolf produced a medical kit of impressive size and a flashlight from thin air.

All the fluids turned suddenly red.

Harry closed his eyes, shivering. "Damn. Have we even forgotten about predators? Are we insane, just walking around out here?"

He heard the snip of scissors. Jumped as a burning liquid added an all new layer of pain to his leg. Then tight wrappings. Then the painful liquid hit his chest.

He gasped, and opened his eyes, tried to concentrate on Wolf.

"I guess we should have been more alert. Has everyone else forgotten too? Or . . . did they just arrive?" Wolf
scanned out into the darkness, with his eyes closed. "There are other predators out there. We'd better warn people."

Harry looked at the lioness, close enough to touch. He eyed the faint drift of smoke from her mouth and empty eye sockets. He propped himself on one elbow, to see more. Romeau
examined another lioness with a burn through the chest. The other four lions were laying about in parts.

Slice? Like an invisible sword?
Harry sank back down, woozy.
I'll have to learn how to do that.

Wolf produced a stretcher from nowhere, or possibly a bubble, and he and Romeau carried Harry back to the Mashed Hospital. And abandoned him there as a horse's scream and many running hooves broke the night's silence.

It was a long night. Harry could only listen. Any attempt to help would just get in healthy people's way.

By dawn the animals that hadn't bolted straight through fences were tightly corralled and guarded
. Everyone had slept in their cars.

In the morning, after a quick consultation, everyone agreed to move to the western side of the pastures already fenced and barricade a small valley with a sizable stream.