The Second Wave (18 page)

“We were, uhm…” Eugenia wouldn’t know any of
the words he was going to use, so he started anew, “He’s a…” and
almost said friend before he stopped himself; he wasn’t ready to
acknowledge that for now. So he decided on a more cryptic
description. “I was with him for a while once.” He sincerely hoped
protector Sheldon, who was accompanying them today, didn’t hear him
over the noise of the waterfall. The words sounded pathetic, yet
before he could amend and say something else about Peter, Eugenia
jumped backwards and disappeared beneath the surface to go for a
dive.

Unfortunately, Eugenia had spent the vast
majority of her life in a temple in the darkness. She knew about
the concept of swimming, but she had never learned it. She sank to
the ground like a stone, then floated helplessly up again, drifting
towards the surface but never reaching it.

When John saw a group of air bubbles
appearing in one spot on the water, he jumped in without even
taking his boots off. The water was usually clear, but Eugenia’s
uncontrolled movements stirred the mud on the bottom, making it
hard to see. Her body was nothing but a dark shadow in an opaque
fog. With half a dozen strokes he reached her, grabbed her around
the waist, and yanked her up again. They re-emerged just as Sheldon
was about to go in after them.

For a frightening second, Eugenia’s body hung
lifelessly in his arms. Then a violent spasm ran through her; her
mouth snapped open and she gasped for air.

“You can’t swim?!” John yelled at her, more
fiercely than he had intended. He swam back to the bank, hauling
her with him. Once out of the water, he sat down and dragged her
into his lap. She sagged against him, her skin cold, her heartbeat
hectic.

“You can’t swim!” he repeated, more out of
breath than a short dive should make him. He hugged her close; the
only thing that was clinging to her body more desperately than his
arms was the sand they were now both covered in. Sally Sheldon was
at their side immediately to check on both of them.

“That was fun!” Eugenia beamed between gulps
of air.

John stared at her in disbelief. “No, it
wasn’t!”

But she seemed to have caught up with her
heartbeat; she was radiantly happy. “I never swam before!”

“You didn’t swim, crazy girl,” he explained
with strained patience. “You sank. And if I hadn’t jumped in after
you, you would have drowned.”

“Let’s do that again!”

“No.”

But not even his firm refusal and his grim
expression could thaw the delight on her face. She couldn’t stop
grinning. And gladly, for the sake of his dignity, Sally nudged
John with the tip of her boot before the corners of his mouth could
treacherously twitch upwards. He opened his mouth to tell the
protector off, but she wasn’t even looking at him. When he followed
her gaze to the edge of the cliff, his mouth, conveniently open for
the occasion, formed an astounded O: where a few moments ago a
cascade of water had been whooshing down into the lake, there was
now nothing but a sad, dying trickle.

The waterfall was gone.

* * * *

You cannot run forever. Not even when you’re
a desperate twelve-year-old boy who has nothing more to lose. But
sometimes, when you step off one path, another one awaits.

As it happened, there was a cabin in the
forest. A ramshackle, old shed, not more than a pile of wood, more
or less randomly nailed together. But a storm was blowing and
John’s lungs were breathing ice, and if his feet weren’t frozen
stiff, he would have left a bloody trail in the immaculate snow. He
was hungry and desperate, so he heaved himself up the two steps to
the front door, where he collapsed into a heap of blue skin and
numb flesh.

When he came to, he found himself half
sitting on a chair in front of a fire.

“Finally.” He heard a smooth voice from
behind. It belonged, as he saw when its owner came into view, to an
earnest man with a haggard face and intelligent eyes.

“If it hadn’t been for the dogs howling like
the Lord almighty was coming down on them with a birch, you’d have
frozen to death on my doorstep, and I’d have broken my ankles in
the morning, tripping over your stiff leftovers.”

John was too hungry to say anything, and
almost too scared to be hungry.

“What? Dog’s got your tongue?”

“Thank you, sir,” he finally managed. His
lips were cracked, he tasted the coppery tang of blood in his mouth
when he forced them to move.

“Yes. Well. You had better make it up to me
and soon, because you’re bleeding all over my blanket, little
man.”

As much as John was intimidated by the man’s
looks and talks, he felt his face redden at this addressing. Little
man. That was very much what he felt he was now. He’d left the kid
he used to be in the cupboard, and had taken with him only the part
that was strong and manly.

“Where were you heading anyway in that storm
and with bare feet? Ran into a spot of bother?”

John shook off the fear that clung to his
body like the cold. He stared at the stranger with wild, daring
eyes. The eyes of a man. “I ran away so I can learn how to fight
and how to kill and do whatever I want.”

The man smirked. A distinct sparkle appeared
in his cunning eyes. “I like your spirit. Like a little wild
fang.”

“I am not little,” John bristled. He had
warmed up, and though he was still hungry, he tried not to think of
it. He was a man now. He needed to be tough and brave.

The stranger sounded solemn when he replied,
“You are now, but I know you will turn out a mighty strong man one
day. You are already tall, and there’s a fire in your eyes that
Hades himself must have kindled. I can teach you how to fight and
how to kill. And something else—I can teach you how to get anything
you want from anyone you meet. But you must always stick to my
rules, and any money we make together belongs to me.”

John nodded eagerly. He’d pay any price, he’d
stick to any rule. The man eyed him up and down; the sad little
mess he must look, John thought.

Then he laid down the rules, “You sleep with
the dogs in the kennel; the right to sleep in the house must be
earned. You do what I tell you when I tell you. If you begin to
feel attached to me, my free advice to you now is to walk away for
good and never look back. If you want to do whatever you want to
do, you had better not attach yourself to anyone, especially not
me.”

He stood there, glowering down on John after
he had finished his speech.

“Thank you, sir. What’s your name?“

“I have no name, and neither have you as of
this moment. One’s name is like a free pass to one’s soul, so don’t
go around advertising it. If you must give a name, use a fake
one.”

To John’s ears the bitter words were pearls
of wisdom; he clung to them as if for dear life.

Four dogs lived in the kennel. They were half
wild and they didn’t take kindly to strangers. They barked like
mad, howled at him when he entered their abode. They were used to
fight each other for the food the man threw at them. But at least,
John thought when he lay down in a corner far away from them, cold
and hungry and bleeding, at least he was out of the cupboard.

He stayed with the man whose name he would
never know for almost four years; he slept in the kennel for two of
them. The dogs got accustomed to him; they never harmed him again
the way they did on his first night with them. Life with the man
and his hounds wasn’t as bad as life had been in the orphanage;
John did indeed learn everything he wanted to know and much more,
while the two of them roamed Russia and Kazakhstan, tricking,
stealing, conning, and boondoggling everyone and everything, until
one day John felt the man was becoming something of a father to
him. So he stuck to the first advice he’d been given and walked
away without ever looking back.

But in his fiercest nightmares, John always
went back to his first night in the kennel. He saw the huge hounds
with their sharp teeth and fervent eyes approaching him, every
fibre in their bodies tense, the four of them appearing as one
solid wall of teeth and claws, coming closer to rip apart the
intruder. The stench of foul breath and wet fur hung in the air,
and something else, something he recognized in his dreams as the
scent of his own fright. In his dreams the dogs always won.

* * * *

The former subway station in the forest
didn’t stay hidden. Once Mandy Rett reported its location back to
Emily Eleven, the captain sent out a team immediately to check on
things. A few days later the place was crawling with scientists and
villagers, who all wanted to be the first one to come up with a
theory.

“It wasn’t
there
when we checked the
area for the first wavers,” Eleven insisted. She and the mayor
stood in the middle of the ruins, watching the others take notes,
draw sketches, and discuss theories.

“Well, it’s here now, and I doubt it grew out
of the forest overnight,” Rochester replied. He wasn’t implying
that Eleven and the other protectors had missed this on purpose.
But something had happened in the meantime. Something that none of
them felt able to grasp, let alone explain.

“Sometimes I think we’re not even on the same
planet anymore,” Eleven muttered, but Rochester couldn’t reply to
that last remark, as Selena Moralez approached them, holding up a
sketch pad.

“This is interesting, mayor!” she announced
when she had walked up to the two of them. She showed him the
sketch pad on which someone had transcribed some of the graffiti
from the walls. “Do you recognize this?”

Rochester frowned, not understanding the
point. “Sure I do. This one says ‘Timbob was here’, and what’s
that—‘Ana loves Trell’?”

Eleven shrugged it off. “Graffiti has been
around ever since caveman times. It was never high literature.
What’s the point, Mrs. Moralez?”

The librarian looked at them, annoyed by
their obvious thickness. “Isn’t it funny to find an exact copy of
our alphabet on an alien planet with a completely different history
than Earth?”

“That doesn’t look like one of our letters.”
Eleven pointed out, tapping her finger against something that
looked like a lower case i with a horizontal dash through the
middle.

“From what I’ve gathered, there are slight
modifications on the alphabet that’s used here. It’s almost like,”
Selena searched for the right words, “they took our alphabet and
used it as a grid to develop their own, slightly enhanced,
version.”

As far as Selena had found out so far there
were two versions of i, one representing it as heard in
light
, the other one, the one with the dash through its
middle, representing the one as heard in
intricate
.

“Enhanced?” asked Rochester. “But Doctors
Jones and Wagner told me those ruins were a couple of thousand
years old! Are you telling me that a few millennia ago, this planet
was populated by people who used the exact same letters we’re using
today?”

Selena didn’t have an answer to this; neither
did Eleven. Mayor Rochester grumbled in irritation. From across the
compound Timothy Niman gave a sharp whistle to catch Eleven’s
attention. He and Carl Gibson were standing next to a doorway of
sorts which seemed to lead downwards. He waved once, indicating
that he and Carl were going in. Eleven nodded her okay.

“In any case,” the librarian continued,
looking at Rochester, “I’d like your permission to study these
writings more deeply. It might tell us something about what
happened here.”

Rochester thanked her. He wanted to find out
anything they could about anything that was going on in this world,
and it more and more looked like this was a lot.

Fifteen minutes later they heard muffled
shouts from underneath, and then Timothy and Carl emerged from the
half-hidden doorway they’d disappeared into earlier, running at top
speed, hollering for everyone to get the Hades out of there right
now.

* * * *

The trip started out harmless enough: Timothy
and Carl followed a metal staircase down into complete blackness.
In the light of their two torches they recognized the stairs were
of the same strange metal as the inner walls above the ground.

“Do you think those were moving stairs once?”
Timothy wanted to know. He kicked at the banister with his boot;
the walls echoed the harsh clinking sound.

“Stop that. And to answer your question: yes,
I assume they were. It’s supposed to be a subway station, right?
Subway stations had escalators.”

“What do you think is down there, Carl?” Yet
again, Timothy clonked his foot against the railing. This time the
echo was different.

Carl gave an exasperated groan. “What do
you
think, Tim?! Another platform of course! And stop doing
that, you’re making me nervous.”

“If I’m making you nervous then there’s no
way I’m stopping this.”

They made their way downwards bickering,
Timothy trying to make as many sounds as possible. After a few
minutes they reached the foot of the futuristic escalator. They
found themselves indeed on another level. This one was intact, not
corroded and decayed like the structure on the surface. In the
light of the torches they made out two sets of rails to the right
and left. In the middle, where they were standing, was a platform.
Everything looked a bit dusty, but sleek and modern underneath.
Three pillars in the middle of the platform supported the high
ceiling. A large billboard in the middle had probably once been
used to electronically inform about train arrivals and departures.
It was black now; long shut down and forgotten.

“This is marvellous,” Carl whispered.

Timothy went to the end of the platform and
shone his torch into the tunnel where the tracks disappeared. “I
wonder where they lead to,” he asked himself more than Carl. Then
he yelled, “Hello?!”