The Second Dark Ages Boxed Set Read online

  They really didn’t want anyone in here.

  Tossing the chunks of wood behind him, he grabbed a few more pieces and pulled, yanking them off. He found a metal crossbeam and smiled. Something he could really get a grip on. He set his feet, his eyes glowed red, and he pulled, the strain on his muscles felt good, felt warm, felt like…

  CRACK!

  A massive, ten foot high by a four foot wide chunk of the wood was breaking out of the protective surrounding. Michael frowned. He felt both stronger and weaker at the same time. It was as if his energy was deeper, like his connection to the Etheric was beyond his previous ability.

  But his muscles didn’t work nearly as well. He flexed his arms, rolling his shoulders to test his body.

  “Now, this is damned embarrassing.” He was out of shape for the first time in over a thousand years. “Can’t let Bethany Anne see me like this. I’m hairless, and in desperate need of some serious exercise,” he huffed in exasperation.

  He took a step to the side and yanked three more times on the steel beam, and finally, a huge chunk of the wall cracked, and he tossed it to the side, dust coming up from the ground where it made a resounding crash.

  Behind the opening was the door that led into their apartment.

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” he checked the doorknob, and it was locked. “Of course it is,” he kicked it open. What was inside surprised him.

  The living room had the couches removed. There was a round table, with two chairs.

  The table stood in the center, a piece of paper in the middle. Michael walked past the table and went to the bedroom.

  It held their bed, made up. He looked around, but there was nothing else in the room. It seemed an empty room one might find at an old motel, it was so devoid of anything personal. He opened the closet, but it was empty.

  “No clothes. Couldn’t you have at least left behind some clothes, baby?” he muttered. He stepped into the bathroom.

  Clean.

  He stepped out and made his way into the brighter main room, heading straight for the table and the note. It was time to see what this was about.

  “Dearest Michael,

  Your clothes, if you should need them, are in the locked area near the Team BMW workshop. You should be able to Myst through the opening we left you at the top. I didn’t know what you would want to wear, so I left you everything from suits to jeans and a few items in between.

  John and the team left you a surprise.

  There are weapons for you as well.

  I leave you these things because you made me a promise, one I expect you to fulfill.

  You had better return to me, or when I am done with the Kurtherians, I will figure out how to go back in time and kick your ass.

  All my love and my heart,

  Bethany Anne.”

  Michael stood there for minutes, reading and re-reading the note. She expected him to return and she was waiting. He folded the note and put it in the pocket on his chest. The outfit he had on might be ugly, but it had a lot of pockets.

  He turned and walked out of the suite and took a slight left. He needed to go about a half mile around the front and to the other side of the airplane hangars where Team BMW’s garage used to be. Apparently, his love had taken the fight out into space. And by the look of things, something must have happened here on Earth either before or after she left.

  Something that had caused them to leave Earth, and apparently for her to lock up their base and make it look like it was dangerous to explore. He suspected they had washed it down with radioactivity sometime in the past.

  Nothing he could feel, anyway. He sure hoped he wasn’t wrong and didn’t glow in the dark. That’s all he needed to see in the mirror.

  A bald head that reminded him of a light bulb at night.

  South of Douglas Mountain, Old Colorado (United States Post-Apoc)

  The seven men decided to camp away from the main house that evening. Two of them nodded to each other and the first, the one with dark hair, walked out away from the fire to guard against the chance of someone trying to sneak up on them.

  It wasn’t likely to happen, but this evening, it was as much to protect against those from their own people coming up to the fire and listening to the talk as it was to protect from others who might wish them ill.

  The second man, David Tellison, waited ten minutes to make sure his friend was properly down the path. Once the time was up, he walked beside the fire that the other five guys were sitting around, drinking a form of coffee that they made out of bark off some tree and clapped his hands to get their attention.

  He looked around at the men eyeing him. “Okay, I know the rumors have been heard by everyone. So, I’m here to figure out what you guys are going to do when Boss Childers’ men attack Sarah Jennifer. I’ll tell you this straight up. She’s been good to me, but she ain’t been good enough to me so that I take bullets for her. I ain’t waiting to be stuck there, guns in front and guns in the back of me.”

  Jackson spit behind the log he was sitting on. “I figure he has what, forty guns?”

  David nodded. “That’s the low count, he can afford more.”

  Jackson chewed on a bit of jerky. “Wouldn’t be right to leave Sarah Jennifer and run over to Childers’ group.”

  “I’m not suggesting we go join Childers, even I know that would be a dick move,” David retorted.

  “Dick move or not,” Buddy spoke up from his log next to Jackson, “it’d be easy money.”

  David nodded to Buddy. The man was strictly out for himself, and David figured if the best he could do was make sure six out of the seven here didn’t join Childers, then that was something for Sarah Jennifer.

  That night, five more decided to leave the employ of Sarah Jennifer and seek their fortune somewhere else.

  Somewhere that didn’t have thirty or forty men gunning for them.

  The small town was less town as much as it was a stronghold. Men and women came in-some left again, others stayed. Either they were persuaded this was a safe location… or they remained, as slaves.

  The young woman, attractive, used her sense of touch to grab the next plate.

  Others asked the boss why he kept an obviously deficient girl in the camp.

  Too many thought that a blind girl couldn’t listen and think for herself. But in that, they would be wrong. She hadn’t always been blind, that was a new development that had happened when her people had been attacked. She had left her pack against her dad’s wishes and decided to travel the Fallen Lands. Seeking her fortune, he told her, was a damned fool’s journey.

  She had yelled back that she would just be a damned fool then.

  Now, she couldn’t see. For her kind, it was almost unheard of. She should have healed from the damage by now, or died.

  She wasn’t dead. The hours in front of a tub of water washing dishes and occasionally in front of a tub washing clothes, was proof she was still alive.

  But she could hear, much better than normal humans, and she had heard the boss’s answer.

  He was just waiting until she was old enough so he could bed her. Didn’t the rest of them see how beautiful she was going to be? He was waiting, he told the men, for the flower to be as beautiful as she would ever be before plucking it.

  Jacqueline always kept a knife secreted on her body.

  This flower, she had decided, was going to have thorns.

  Deep Under the Base

  The E.I. woke up.

  It had been in a passive mode for almost eighty-two years, by the records it kept. The typical intrusions into the base had been logged, and it had obediently uploaded the information to the E.I. resources in outer space, placed there by TQB Enterprises when they had used this base.

  Well over a hundred and fifty years before.

  The base E.I. was hidden behind tons of rock that had been dropped before the old government could try to force their way into this hidden server room.

  But the E.I. was still con
nected, still recording, and still updating the files to the E.I.s in outer space.

  It logged the human who had found the supply closet. Then, the person left for a couple of hours before it triggered the alarms that brought the E.I. online.

  It was in front of Storage Location D.D.2. The E.I. watched, patiently, as the human stayed in front of the door for three hours before it seemed to disappear off of its sensors.

  The E.I. remained on full alert for another twelve minutes, then it changed its parameters required to wake up and went back to sleep.

  Never realizing the human had gotten inside a secured room within the base.

  Chapter Three

  South of Douglas Mountain, Old Colorado (United States Post-Apoc)

  The three men ate sitting around a small fire. It was a little chilly, but they dared not build anything larger. The stress up at the main house was tense.

  The size of the fire matched the size of their spirits. Small and not much help warming them up.

  Jeremiah looked out at the landscape and blew out a heavy breath. He turned back and nodded to the others. “Todd, Dirk, I got to ask, and I’m going to lay it out right up front, I’m staying.”

  Todd, about six foot two inches and thin as a sapling tree snorted. “You know it’s our deaths, right? Sarah Jennifer ain’t going to go down for any man. She’ll take her size whatever the hell they are boots and shove them up Childers’ ass, guns blazing before she takes any of his deals.”

  “Seven,” Dirk answered. Both men looked at him. “What?” He shrugged. “Common size for women, it isn’t strange or anything.”

  “She had you clean them, right?” Todd asked. “Caught you cussin’ around her?”

  “Damn right she caught me cussing,” Dirk admitted, smiling at the memory. “I slipped and popped myself in the mouth trying to pull some leather. It hurt. So, I go off and say shit or something like that. I turn around and there she is, glaring at me like my mom or something. I figured, what the hell, so I went ahead and let loose with everything I could remember.”

  “Got them all out of your system?” Jeremiah asked.

  “Yeah,” Dirk said.

  “So, did you screw up again?” Todd asked. “Just curious, took me three times to start looking around, myself.”

  Dirk smirked. “One other time.”

  Todd turned to Jeremiah. “You?”

  “Oh, no.” Jeremiah shook his head. “My mom was hell on wheels about cussing. So I learned early to treat all women as ladies.”

  Todd nodded in the direction of the house. “That why we all making our last stand?”

  Jeremiah turned in the direction of the house. “No, not for me. Sometimes you realize that when civilization cratered, morality took a beating. Justice died, and ethics took a sabbatical.” He turned back to the two men with him. “Ain’t ever gonna come back unless someone is willing to take a stand.”

  Dirk pointed to Todd and then Jeremiah and finally at himself. “So, the three of us against thirty… or more right?”

  “Well, say it like that, and you make me want to tell Childers he needs to bring another twenty or so. Don’t forget Sarah Jennifer is worth probably ten of those sad sacks.”

  “And her armament.”

  “Have you ever seen it?” Dirk asked.

  “Her guns?” Jeremiah asked.

  He never got to answer, a call came out of the night.

  Michael had been walking for a day already. It had taken him three solid hours to figure out how to Myst again and go through the damned hole up at the old base.

  At least he had decent clothes again.

  Bethany Anne had left money. While he kept some, he figured it would probably be useless. He had on jeans, a black shirt, and for some insane reason, her guards had left him a black leather trench coat.

  It did help hide his two pistols, apparently Jean Dukes Specials. He read the instructions carefully before locking them to his palm print. With over five thousand rounds, he figured he would be good for a while. But he had no idea how often this new world would require… attitude adjustments.

  He practiced with the pistol, turning up the kinetic kick from one to ten and back down. Ten had impressive destruction. John’s note to him explained how the gun used Etheric generated magnetic something or other and how the rounds were made to replace them.

  Basically, he realized, he had a tiny railgun in his hand. Technology ahead of its time and probably still ahead of this period, as well.

  Well, he sure hoped so. He was sure that railgun technology would be pretty nasty stuff to deal with if it was pointed at him.

  Finally, she left two Wakizashis and one Katana. He left the Katana behind as being too impractical and kept one Wakizashi, the two pistols, two sets of clothes and scrounged for soap and other stuff, pushing it into a leather bag he slung over his shoulder.

  He had no shampoo. He spent an extra hour looking for any damned shampoo, but the base was dry. He passed a mirror at the hour mark and saw his reflection.

  Making a face, he realized the soap was sufficient. He still had no damn hair.

  It took him another two hours to once again attain his Myst form and make it back up and out of the base. He was pushing himself, flying fast, and had made it halfway down the mountain when he suddenly dropped out of Myst form. This resulted in an ass over appetite, arms and legs flailing, tumble down the slope. He traveled more than a hundred yards, introducing himself to hundreds of small rocks and stones and bouncing off of one damned large rock in the process.

  He lay for a minute, just muttering “OOOOwwwww” over and over again.

  Finally, he turned over and stood up, trudging back up the hill, grabbing his bag and thinking about why he was having trouble with skills he had honed over a thousand years.

  “Focus,” he muttered. “It’s got to be the focus.” Some time later, he saw the campsite, the tiny fire burning like a lighthouse beacon for him.

  “Helloooo the fire!” a strange voice called out.

  Jeremiah, Dirk, and Todd all turned towards the voice, Dirk sliding out about twenty feet into the trees off to the side.

  “Not looking for trouble, guys,” the voice called to them. “Just looking to make a difference and get some questions answered. May I approach?”

  Jeremiah called back, “Who you with, stranger?”

  “Just myself, I recently landed in these parts,” the voice replied.

  “C’mon in, but behave yourself,” Jeremiah allowed. “We ain’t got much, but what we got, we’ll share.”

  The man entered the dim light of the fire, and Jeremiah’s eyebrows went up. He was damned handsome, even though didn’t have a lick of hair on his head. Nor could he see any scars on the man.

  And he carried himself like a warrior.

  “You can come out of the trees, Dirk,” Jeremiah called out. “If he was here to harm us, I imagine he would have already done it.”

  Todd looked over at his friend. “And you say this because why, the black coat?” He turned back to the stranger. “No offense, the black leather is impressive. But Jeremiah here,” he threw a thumb back at his friend, “is way too impressed with clothes. He was indeed born in the wrong age.”

  “No, jackass,” Jeremiah replied, and pointed at the stranger. “Because he balances like a cat, he’s got at least one pistol I’ve seen and something else underneath that coat. I’d guess a sword. He knew where,” he pointed to the trees where Dirk was just appearing, “Dirk went, and he wasn’t bothered by coming right up to us. So,” he turned back to the stranger, “is it just you, or do you have another out there waiting to come in?”

  “No,” the stranger said, “it’s just me. I overheard what you were talking about, so I have a basic understanding of what you’re up against. So... I thought I might see if it’s a fight I care to join.”

  “Let me get this right.” Dirk scratched his nose. “You, mister, want to join the three of us,” he pointed to his friends, “and one lady you
haven’t met against thirty to forty guns?”

  “You said she was worth ten herself, right? Doesn’t that leave, at best, ten for each of us?” the stranger asked in a no-nonsense voice. “I don’t know about you guys, but in my time, we tended to pride ourselves on being better than the ladies.”

  Todd’s mouth dropped open and he butted into the conversation. “Stranger, you got a name?”

  He turned towards the man, his calm eyes seeming to bring the temperature down a moment. “Yes. It’s Michael.”

  “Well, Michael,” Todd said, a little less boisterous, “unless you’ve been in the FDG, you might have a small problem with Sarah Jennifer. I’ll be willing to bet you a boot cleaning…”

  “Excuse me, a what?” Michael interrupted. “A boot cleaning?”

  “Ahhh,” Jeremiah tried to explain. “It has less to do with money and more to do with embarrassment. No one likes to lose a bet and be made to clean boots, it’s humiliating.”

  “And the FDG?” Michael prompted.

  “You from another country?” Dirk asked. “You never heard of the FDG?”

  “Can we pretend I’m from another time and leave the real history out of it?” Michael asked, pushing a little soft velvet over steel tones into his voice.

  All the men agreed that was a splendid idea.

  Michael mumbled as he looked around the campsite, “Glad to know one damned thing still works.”

  “The FDG,” Dirk answered, “is Force de Guerre. They started over a century ago. They come in, they kick ass, they leave. Made up of a lot of damned impressive people. Many are really strong, or really fast. They try and keep a little normalcy out here in the Fallen Lands.”

  Michael bit his tongue, he would follow up on that later. “So, they’re the police force?”

  Todd and Jeremiah both snorted. “I wish,” Jeremiah answered. “If we had a police force, the three of us wouldn’t be rushing forward to die.”

  Michael’s eyes narrowed. “And why do you think you’re going to die?”