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Three days later
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For three days after waking up somewhere far away from a mall in Ohio, I had blundered through a wilderness of high desert mountains, a place of high-flying buzzards, low-crawling snakes, thorned bushes, and horned toads. Everything seemed to either bite, cut, or irritate, and sometimes all three. Hot and dry in daylight, cold and dry at night, with no people, no cell signal, no cars, trains, or planes—not even contrails in the sky. I could have been in the twenty-first century or the Paleolithic Era.
Oh, I was not happy. I was so far from happy, I would have needed to take the Starship Enterprise at warp nine across three galaxies to get to the planet of Mildly Content, in the universe of Cautiously Optimistic. There wasn’t a song sad enough to reflect how unhappy I was. Well, maybe “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” I hated that song.
My memory of the time prior to regaining consciousness was spotty. I recalled entering the mall, fighting the werewolf and the orcs, and some of the battle with the Rancor. After that, all I had were random images that made no sense, a dream that crumbled even as I tried pulling up the memories.
So there I was, through the looking glass, in a land of rocks, sand, lizard shit.
And very damn little magic. What the hell have I done now?
In all my travels, never had I seen a place so devoid of magic. By the end of each day, my amulet had charged enough to light a campfire, but that was about it. I avoided freezing by rotating like a chicken on a spit, turning first one side then the other to the fire. More than once, I cursed my decision to toss away my sheepskin coat because of a few rips, tears, and a bit of werewolf slobber.
I found myself touching my amulet a dozen times an hour, like a man waiting for a date who checks his watch. I had to take it off and put it in my pocket.
I maintained hydration by following trickling streams until they dried up then navigating to the next-most-likely water source by examining terrain and vegetation, scouting the flight of bees, and studying tracks. Deer were everywhere, along with raccoons, rabbits, squirrels, opossums, and birds beyond counting. When an animal was close enough for communication, I queried them directly about water or invited them to dinner with a .45 bullet—rabbits killed by frangible rounds were no good. I supplemented my food and water by roasting the spines off prickly pear cactus and eating the fruit.
Physically, I had endured much worse during the mountain-training phase of Ranger school, and if I was being honest with myself, this latest jaunt was a shady walk in a manicured park compared to Camp Merrill. I had to face some cold, hard facts, though. I’d gone soft in the last six years of relying on magic rather than muscle. Why climb a fence if I could freeze a hole through it? Why lift a heavy case if I could simply will it to go up? With magic almost unavailable, my body paid the price for years of neglect. My ankle had swollen to the point where I couldn’t get my boot off, and I suspected I’d blown at least one eardrum with the flash-bang at the mall. The smaller scratches and achy muscles, I ignored. If pain was weakness leaving the body, I should have been the strongest man alive.
And mentally... yeah. That. I stayed about one minute shy of running in circles and gibbering at the moon only by twisting my focus knob way, way down. Eat food. Drink water. Hike. Sleep. Perform bodily functions as necessary. Beyond that, running the speculation track was doing nothing but wearing me out. I needed my brain to disengage from higher thinking. I needed to be more like an animal. I could do that.
The terrain had varied from high-desert mountains to valleys of thick forests. On my third day of dumbed-down existence, I had been following a natural trail downhill when I realized what I had been seeing for the last however so many minutes—shod horse tracks, as in, horses shod with horseshoes. It would make the first sign of civilization I had seen since waking up in the mountains. My higher brain cells woke up. Maybe you should follow the tracks.
Thank you, Albert Einstein. Come up with that on your own?
The horse tracks led me downward, through a growth of the ugliest evergreens I had ever seen, twisty trees with needles instead of leaves, and then deeper into a forest of other skinny, white-barked trees. Yes, I slept through botany, even more than I did through physics.
In a clearing at the base of a jutting rock, I found a camp. And in the camp, there was a horse, bedroll, canteen, saddle with bags, and the remains of a very violently dead human male.
This can’t be good, said my higher brain, providing more evidence of my fucking genius at work. I squatted on the overhanging spur of rock and studied the campsite.
The dead man wore an overcoat of blue-bottle flies and nothing else. Something or someone had flayed the skin from his torso, leaving nothing but an ugly, raw, black-and-red carcass that had been burned to char in some parts. Long sections of the man’s thighs were missing, and by the odd way his body dipped at the waist, I suspected chunks of his butt were gone as well.
I wondered whether one of Dustin’s creations had followed me there—wherever there was—or if animals had been at the dead body, tearing away neat strips of meat. A charcoal ring marked where a fire had burned. The dead man’s left foot rested next to the circle, blackened and blistered from heel to toe.
A Colt Peacemaker revolver lay in the dirt, too far away for me to see if it held live rounds or not.
Tied to an elm on the far side of the camp, the horse cropped at the few sparse bits of greenery remaining within his reach. I fixed the ragged, hairy buckskin gelding with a concentrated gaze. “What’s your name?”
Four-legged creatures spoke to me in a combination of pictures, scents, and sounds rather than words. Practice and guesswork allowed me to interpret the results into concepts that I mentally filtered into English, all in the blink of an eye. It was a talent I’d possessed from the age of six, at least, which was when Mom caught me telling the family dog, Gunner, to sneak a box of Frosted Flakes out of the kitchen cabinet.
An animal’s emotions came through stronger than images, and the horse projected a sense of despair and self-loathing so strong that a field of summer daisies would have wilted and died if exposed to his level of melancholy.
I translated his response as Who cares?
“What killed your previous rider? This guy here?”
Who cares?
“Is it still around?”
The horse volleyed a mental shrug.
“All the horses in the world, and I get Eeyore.” A nagging thought surfaced and demanded attention. Everything in the camp had the look and feel of the Old West. The Colt, the Western saddle, the scattered cooking utensils... There was no modern camping gear at all.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
Shut up, higher brain. You’re not helping. I focused on the horse. “You wouldn’t happen to know what year this is?”
Who cares?
Wherever I was, I wasn’t spoiled for choices. Walking away from transportation, clothing, and camping gear would have been more stupid than... well, than venturing into a camp where a man was ripped to shreds and cooked over an open fire.
I scrambled down off my rock and entered the camp. First, the canteen. It had been some hours since my last water, and that hadn’t been much more than a mud puddle. I sniffed the contents before swigging a mouthful. What I wouldn’t have given for some purification tabs. It would be a miracle if I avoided a gut full of bugs, leading to dysentery, tapeworms, and creatures shoving out of my abdomen over the breakfast table.
Saddlebags were next. Inside, I found three heavy law books and, to my delight, a long, black frock of sturdy wool. The inscription on the books read Judge T. L. Moorcock.
“You’re shitting me.” I tilted my head. “A fellow judge. Different jurisdiction, though. What’s the T. L. stand for? Too long?” Below the inscription in one book was a date. Even though I half expected it, the news slugged me hard, and my blood turned to ice. “Eighteen eighty.” I took a deep breath. “Oh, this sucks. What the hell do I do now?”
The horse lifted his weary head and regarded me with sad eyes.
Who cares?