Chapter Two: The Anti-Hero
He had been watching her a long time. Waiting for her an even longer time. He hadn’t been there at her birth, he hadn’t been in this part of the world then, but he had been around. Had he? Yes, time ran like a river, faster in the deep rocky areas and slower in the shallow ones. For him, the two millennia he had waited had gone by swiftly. Wars, plagues, famine and drought had all passed him by. Like a stone in the river, a hardened chunk which forced the water around in waves, creating currents and stopping others cold in their tracks, whirlpools of strange events clinging tightly to him as he traveled .
Two millennia, he thought, has it been that long?
Music comes and goes with the tide of years, as do the faces of the people, all the while drawing closer to the end, to a demise both seen and invisible. A finishing. Last call for drinks. So many faces, so many languages. He could speak several, but rarely did anymore. He had traveled the length and breadth of the world a hundred times over, scouring the continents for the reason he still existed. Why did he still live when he should have died in the forty or more lifetimes he lived? Walking the hidden paths, seeking the shamans and witches and gypsies, riddling them as surely as they riddled him, questing for guidance among the wise ones. Fortune’s misbegotten promise. Alive but unloved, seen but unknown, the traveling stranger. He walked the lands of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, lands distant and far and reached only on foot, or by boat. None of the conclusions he had come to made sense any more, falling short while he continued his journey in search of knowledge. He wore through shoes and sandals, and walked barefoot, all the while passing ever-changing chapels and temples and capitol buildings, watching and listening as the politics and religions changed and moved ever forward, recycling, rehashing and reusing the same broken ideals. Broken, at least, to any who knew more than nothing.
He watched as the histories of entire nations unfolded, some gaining place in the records of mankind, to be pored over by historians centuries in the future, some swiftly fading into distant memory. He saw the same histories and stories become legend, before being rewritten to include past leaders of the nations currently in power. History is written by the victor.
Playwrights, poets, musicians and writers creating their life’s greatest works before being laid into their graves. Mathematicians and scientists poring into arcane works to reason their way into the future. Shakespeare, Galileo, Newton, Mozart, Michelangelo, Leonardo. All of them living and dying as he observed.
Papal authority handed down through the ranks as Pagans gave way before Catholicism, as Catholicism gave way to Protestantism, and as Protestantism gave way to Agnosticism and even Atheism.
All of which, of course, lead to the destruction of everything known, loved, and recorded. Swords and spears losing out to longbows and tactics. Black powder cannons, arquebuses and eventually musket balls eventually decimating any fair war even as rifling was eliminating them. Soon after came the handguns, the mortars, the bombs, all leading up to the culmination: chemical and nuclear bombs and missiles guided by live camera feed through transparent cones topping the rockets beneath. All of it had gone the way of the dodo as the plague of destrachan swept through their neat little cities of stone, wood, metal and glass. It was all my fault. Could he really be held responsible for the events that occurred by his mere presence? He had spread the disease, anything his hands touched, everywhere he’d slept, in every home, field and orchard grew rife with it. He brought out the worst in things, he supposed.
He was responsible, and the blame was his to bear. He was the carrier of the disease which had brought mankind to its knees in mere weeks; but even that wasn’t quite it at all, was it? That was just the role fate had dealt him. It was all in the cards. He couldn’t help but revel in his destiny, leading an army of destrachan to the battlefront, leading brother against brother, father against son, mother against daughter and vice versa. Raise an army of them to bring low that which was tall? He had, and he had loved it.
Some had once called him a savior, an apostle, a servant of God, yet they snorted derision as he passed. Those that called him friend had spat in his face and cursed him. Now their children’s children’s children knelt before him, worshiping the ground upon which he stood. Never again would he bow before any man, king or not, for he was called Menace, Destroyer of Worlds, and they kissed his feet. The sins of the fathers passing to be reckoned upon their children’s heads. He was a pauper before, and been made a prince.
The price is paid. Those had paid the price, as had he. A million times over. Even he was not immune to that rule, he’d had to pay, and pay dearly he had. Knowledge, the greatest of all burdens, gained and not lost, he felt the weight of it and would for the rest of his life.
Because innocence really is bliss.
How long since he’d felt the warmth of a woman’s touch, consumed with only love and not greed? It seemed that even as time passed, the good of humanity shrank, its evils extolled as virtues. No, he hadn’t been carefree in a great while. In fact, he could count the moments he’d felt satisfaction on one hand. One. Oh, he’d enjoyed his longevity without aging, tasting many wines and exotic dishes, and exotic women as well as seeing strange lands with customs that weren’t his own. Snow-capped peaks high in the Himalayas he’d climbed, ventured with Tibetans to see glaciers at the top of the world. Stone upon stone he’d been fascinated as the Chinese built their great wall. Laughed as the Catholics declared crusade after bloody crusade against the invaders of the Holy Land. Chuckled and then grimaced at the continual wars and strife that seemed to pervade the entire middle east as Islam gained its prevalence. He’d enjoyed his many years on the land, but he was not satisfied. Satisfaction lead to complacency, and that lead to denial. If one is satisfied with the way things are, how can he allow changes for the better to take place?
All change it seemed began in the same way. Anger and unhappiness with things as they are, where the tide of life is heading, persuasion, dissuasion, and then the conflict. Wars began in this manner. One man could be so dangerous.
If he’s the right man.
It was Ka, fate, destiny. All one and the same. Free will thrown out the window of a moving car and left behind in the swirling of dust. If it had ever existed in the first place, that is. The same question, repeating itself over and over until it maddened the one who asked it. Does anybody really know? Not the future, that was seen often enough, but the purpose. Any witch doctor or shaman of middling power could see the future. That was child’s play. Who in their right or even wrong mind could say exactly what the reason could be? Why even have a fate, a predestination for anything if the end outcome was all it accomplished?
Never once in his life had he actually believed in a higher power, a god of any sort, so Heaven and Hell were both out of the question. Far too easy to be true or believed. He didn’t believe for the same reason he failed to believe in dragons and unicorns. He hadn’t seen any proof that such did exist, so to believe would be pointless, wasted faith. But these things couldn’t concern him as much as the question. Lacking a belief in either of those places, he began his search anew for the answer, asking the question of every wise and holy man he’d encountered throughout his sojourn.
What is the purpose? Some said to feed the great machinations of the God of whom he’d been told. Others said the purpose was unknowable except for the one God himself. Yet more elaborated on what was called a Zoroastrian Circle of Duality, and though he had a feeling that this was perhaps the closest to reality, it still didn’t answer his questions. Question. The only real one, anyways.
Not caring to dwell for too long on the question, the feeling in his gut told him that he would learn it in time if it was necessary. For now, he watched the girl, and she was a part of the whole thing. His opposite, carrying in her blood the same potential that he had realized. Strength beyond measure cascaded through her veins, carrying knowledge both primal and historic through each and every cell. It permeated her being, saturated her to the hilt with the intangible static of a lightning strike waiting to strike. She was his destiny. To kill him or be killed in the manner of the gods. She was a weapon, a sword that flowed like water through dangerous stances and situations, dancing and tumbling out of harm's way, turning her foes' blows back upon them.
Like the wind.
Cat and woman fought with fury and speed, tumbled and rolling through the air and on the ground, trading blows, but the battle was finished before either knew it. The girl was victorious. How could it be any different? She was of the same blood as he–the blood of legends. Sera fought none before her, for the desert was a harsh place, and it bred harsh people. If harshness was what her destiny required, harshness was had.
Fate answers to none, he thought. Pray to whatever God you wish, but not even he can change the weave of destiny.
She had fallen to the ground beside her weapons and satchel. The cougar’s corpse had been left behind, and it reeked with the stink of time and disease. He had given it his blessing. A deadly diversion had drawn the girl past the point of no return, a decoy as his minions several miles to the south wrought destruction to the Brig, the girl's homeplace. A ticket to no place in particular without a return flight coupon. She’d have no choice now, but to give chase to intangible assailants who could so direct her demise.
Admittedly, it was an unfair test administered to an unwilling participant, but she would have been drawn out of her hiding place one way or the other. This way was his way, giving him time to prepare for the final showdown. It hadn’t been easy crafting the cougar into his pet, as the disease couldn’t normally be communicated to animals, but He was more than just a carrier, he was everything. He’d survived the past two millennia as a God, triumphing more than once over his opponents, crushing them beneath his heel like roaches. A pitiful resistance, really, without any real grasp of what fate had given them.
The Gift.
Perhaps the greatest, and aside from life itself, the only thing granted by the universe and its apparent master, fate. It was in and of itself a bounty and a curse, in existence as long as wars could be fought and differences sought. The ultimate prize, the ultimate gamble. The direction mankind would take in its social evolution, one that could increase or hinder the growth and development of every scientific advance, every technological wonder, and every literary, musical, and artistic masterpiece conceivable. The deciding factor in the argument between cultures and civilizations, between race and religion, it was the essence of mankind. Everything that it was to be human contained within. A connection to every member of the greatest and most violent species ever to propagate itself on the planet.
Every prayer, every thought, every emotion fed the unseen source of power available only to a select few, chosen to carry the burden to the grave. That was the common factor between the girl and himself, the thing he had both searched for and feared. His purpose. The full extent of that purpose hadn’t been evident until this very moment, when the cougar was slain at her hand. It hadn’t been chance that the largest, oldest and greatest cougar in the West, that had been fate. No mere man could have survived such a brutal beast as it had been, and most certainly not one which had been destrachan. The cat had drank of his blood, driving it insane with the hidden knowledge and truths contained within, and using its inherent instinct began with its designed purpose: hunting. The girl too was a hunter, that she had shown, and she knew also of the dark ways of the past, present and future. Bloodshed, death and destruction would surely follow in her wake.
The girl was a tsunami, directed by his own stratagem and scheme as well as the master of all life, Ka, towards her destiny, and his, and every surviving member of humanity as well. He had a notion that if paired with the wrong companion, were that even possible, she might destroy the world, his world, on a whim. It was no notion, wasn’t fair to call it such, not an inkling or a hunch, either. Primal, inherent knowledge or intuition, it might be called these things, but it was no notion. He knew it as surely as he felt his heart beating from within his chest, beating its steady rhythm, the same sharp staccato he felt in the girl.
Sera.
He wasn’t afraid of the old ways, of petroleum and bitter smoke, of vehicles that belched flame and ate fire. They did a job and had a purpose. Useful as anything, perhaps more than some things, but only provided with enough fuel. That was hard to get nowadays. He hated wasting it though, on a pleasure cruise as he’d thought this might be, but now he could see that bringing the vehicle had been more than that. He’d get more fuel if he needed it.
If it’s in the grand design.
He smirked at his own joke and wondered if the girl might remember his rescue. If she did, it would be dream-like at best–hazy, blurry and disorienting. He didn’t care, though, she wouldn’t make such a trip through the mountains back on her own, given her current state. He sipped a little water from his canteen, then closed the lid. Water had been scarce this season. A faint scent of burning sage wafted towards him. The fires started by the lightning were small at the present, but in the desert, with its unpredictable weather, it was best not to count on passing rain.
Leave that to Ka.
Like the wind.
It would only take a fast-moving gust to spread and fan the flames dangerously, and while he had no qualms about his own death, he wouldn’t stay like a common idiot might. Now he was glad of the El Camino, brought days before and left behind in a cave as he watched and waited for the cougar and its hunter following close. How much gasoline was left? A few gallons at most, but it would be enough, he felt. Where to leave her . . . it wasn’t a question, really. He’d leave her just outside earshot of the town, the fort. Too many nosy neighbors and not enough cover noise. A quick run, the final note on his sick test.
It was horrible to have done such a thing to her, and he did feel badly, but things had always seemed to work that way when he was around. If in the end she hated him for all of it, at least it would be him she hated, and not some blameless cully who didn’t know better. Yes, he decided silently, it would be better if she hated him, and he would revel in it. Not that he wanted that hate directed towards him, but to have any feelings at all for him, toward him, be they bitter and spiteful and malevolent or otherwise. For too long had he cast his lot in darkness, in the shadows of the world and the people he still loved. They were all dead of course, the people that he loved, and so were their children’s children, but that didn’t matter now either. He hadn’t felt anything like this in a long time, and all because of this girl. Like a daughter she was, and he had nearly killed her. The cougar was only the first of many snares set to bar her path, though her survival was assured. Merely obstacles, nearly half-hearted attempts at assassination, that had no chance of succeeding against her.
Guilty feelings crept up into his throat and choked salty tears from his eyes as they had when he’d first seen her. He knew what would come of it. The same thing always happened to the ones he loved. Horrible things they were, and that blood was still on his hands.
These hands.
The same hands he now wrung furiously together as she lay still in the dust. He was furious! The guilt, the same guilt that had jabbed him in the gut hundreds of times before was being overpowered by anger. She had lain waste to his carefully plotted plan without so much as batting an eyelash, without a care for her own life. It wasn’t a realization, not really, but an actualization. He had known that she would come and threaten his very life. His perfect (Well . . .) immortal (nearly?) life. She might even die along the way. At this, his mind gave what could have been a sigh of relief. Things left unsettled made it difficult to sleep. He had been preoccupied for years over his questions concerning the girl, and now he was sure. Long ago he’d set his affairs in order, could only wait for his schemes. All that was left was to watch and wait.
Which wasn’t at all what he was going to do. He’d always been a meddler, a dabbler in his and others’ affairs. It was his nature to not let anything lie for too long. To let things run whichever course they would, regardless of his meddling. Ignoring the slightest chance at prolonging the inevitable was suicide.
He was a fighter, a hunter like she was, and could not retreat. Pick carefully the fights to continue, and know when not to fight. Battle or not, he’d still come out on top. It was his nature. Yet even now, he could sense that in some way this would be his last, the end of all his battles, the end of his time. A finishing.
Smiling, he turned the ignition key in the El Camino and the engine roared to life. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to hold onto it forever, and this would be his last drive, the last time he would feel its power trembling beneath its feet, motor rumbling its and his anxiety through the exhaust as it burned the explosive vapors contained within. The shifter slid easily into drive and the ancient motorized car rolled forward, creeping down the hillside to the girl. His girl. Sera.
She had stopped the bleeding for the most part, and bandaged her wounds. Only her strength of will and character had kept her from passing out before she had taken care of that. She was strong, that was damned sure. Even though she now slept, her strength and power seemed to resonate from her, around her, through her and echoing the same from within himself. The blood of all her ancestors flowed in her, and her face showed that she recognized them, that she remembered the face of her father. Something familiar as well. Distant, faint, but familiar all the same. Her lovely face! Features he’d seen before. A girl from before his betrayal, from his relative youth. He hadn’t aged a day in over two thousand years, and the girl’s face flushed another from deep in his memory, flashing over hers a thousand times over. His mind’s eye, acute and sorrowed brought her voice and face.
She mouthed the words from visions unnumbered. Don’t leave. Stay with me here.
Sera, troubled in sleep, hadn’t stirred as the motor pulled the car closer, whispering the words of her heated, feverish dreams. Muttering a children's rhyme about Jack and Jill. In a sing-song voice of his own, he spoke along with her, and couldn't help but think of who she so closely resembled. He thought of his past, of the times when he had served Rome, the greatest nation on the face of the earth! How he had held the sword high over his head, leading those he commanded to victory. Ever-victorious, a never-failing captain.
He could see the forms in his head, wielding the bronzed blade with power, the deadly dance of a master of the sword. Swinging the blade upwards and stepping aside, elaborate twists and simple graces that kept many a Roman soldier from falling in battle. Though it was morbid, he remembered those glorious days, reminiscing upon the ancient battlefields with command of his own dragoons.
Reaching down to the girl’s limp body he felt her pulse–Ka thum, Ka thum, Ka thum–it lightened his heart. She wasn’t dead, might even live through the rest of this ordeal. It was almost an irritation, but the deeper more human part of his mind dismissed the irritation as he carried her to the car.
“Who are you?” The question was barely audible, and breathy. She was still very weak, and very much asleep.
She’s aware even though she isn’t, some survivalist subconscious, no doubt. “My name is Jack. At least, that’s what they call me.”
Her eyes were still closed, drift off, little one, he thought, trouble your mind no more with me. He laid her gently in the cab, stretched over just enough of the bench seat so he could still drive. It wouldn’t do to kill his ability to maneuver, wouldn’t do at all. With that, he pushed the door on the passenger side shut with a click, and walked to the other side without breaking his stride.
It wasn’t but two miles to ‘the Brig’ as it was called, but the road he traveled was in disrepair, having fallen into that state after two hundred years without maintenance. He wasn’t worried, as the car had been kept in a safe place for all that time. It was almost in good condition, and the tires had good tread. As long as the potholes he couldn’t avoid weren’t too large, they’d survive.
Even though the girl was sleeping, her presence was a unique thing; it had crept into his in a strange way, allowing her to probe deep into his memories, a distraction. It was almost like his suppressed memories had floated vividly into his conscious mind, and taken him back many years across both time and place. Visions of images, perfect in form and clarity, flashed in front of him.
Her quiet, nearly monotone voice called out the names, “Iris, Daniel, Michael.”
A piece of transparent gold, stretched taut and thin was connecting her to him, though on his end it looked silver. Drawn from that strangely detached pool of emotion, it seemed to have grown from inside her, come from her, and not that other place. He walled up his feelings and thoughts, thinking of a beach in Mexico, where white sand met azure sea and pale sky. She couldn't know what things he had done, wouldn't until she had to. He did not consider himself a bad man. Twisted and obscene he may have been, but his heart had been good, yet the dead haunted him still. Turning the wheel smoothly, he avoided a large, gaping maw in the asphalt without missing a beat. He shut the memories away, back in the place where they belonged–the deep recesses of his mind–and continued driving.
She could hear his thoughts purring, almost rambling in his head, and that meant only one thing. Her power was growing, allowing for telepathic connections from without as well as within, and possibly allowed far-seeing. She wouldn’t be the first for that, many had done so in the past, but she’d be dangerous were she awake, might even kill them both in her fevered state, but that seemed unlikely.
Sleep, child. She murmured a little, then quieted, sleep seeming to draw her further into the world of haunted dreams at this suggestion.
Jack. He chuckled to himself at this and stayed his course through the mountains. It was true, that some had called him this name, but it wasn’t his given name. That was one thing he’d lost through the ages. It wouldn’t help to be confused for someone you know longer were, especially if that person was dead.
Jack. It’s probably close enough, he thought.
The girl made no further noise, stilled, made no attempts to grasp his thoughts and shake loose the old memories. Those already loose, however, the ghosts from his past, were not quiet. Their voices, always accusing and always angry. Only one voice, one haunting figure from his past tormented his conscience. The girl. Not as she slept, here, in the quiet of the car’s cabin, but from a different time and place, far away from the wars and mayhem that followed him, hounded him constantly. Her name had been Iris. Flowing black hair to her waist, breasts small and high, looked like a goddess and humped like a whore.
(The girl, not Iris but Sera, flashed over the face in his memory for an instant.)
Noble-born features and complexion, skin tanned and hands callused like a farm girl, but cool and milky skin all the same, begging to be caressed. Iris had begged him to stay, begged him to love her once more, not to leave, but remain and tarry with her. Eyes pleading love and imploring his in return.
(Again, the girl who was not Iris flashed over that haunting spirit, face and body colliding with that dream girl from far away.)
He had only known her that one day. That one simple day had left him satisfied. The only time in his entire memory.
He had moved on. Always moving on, rarely keeping the same company. It was best never to look back. Ever forward, never dwelling in the past. Catch the future between your teeth so it won’t knock you off your feet. His thoughts, though, always drifted back to that dream girl, her name whispered by his own lips (Iris) never failing to haunt his dreams, dragging him back in time to that do or die moment.
“Come with me,” he had said.
“Stay with me, here,” she had responded.
Staying was not an option. Staying meant answering the hardest questions to answer, and give truth, for he had never lied to her, and likely couldn’t. No, it was for the best, or at least it was meant to be. Water if God wills.
They left the foothills of the mountains behind, and the fort, the Brig, stretched into view. The night air was clear and the stars were bright. The wind blew softly through the dried sagebrush and across the fields of grass and wheat. Slivered and silver, the moon cast its glow upon the buildings’ roofs and on the ground, slick and dark as oil it was–covered in blood. It was unmistakable. The fires of war and siege lay all about, and shrill screams of women and children alike filled and hung in the air, victims of his ruthlessness and greed. His plan, it seemed, had worked a little too well. He had set the destrachan on this path, not sending the command to fall back. It was only a distraction. How many destrachan had he called? The evidence would suggest that far more than he had thought possible. He sent the command now, to change direction, pointing them towards the first leg of the girl’s journey, towards Sallak. Just a distraction.
Ha! A distraction! What could a small outpost hope to do against the battle hardened horde of destrachan?
It had been a slaughter. The ones on the walls, whatever passed for guards, had fallen first, leaving the way open for the invaders, the once-men. The once-men whose emotions and higher thoughts had
Gone the way of the dodo?
been replaced with hunger or thirst, or whatever the doctors had decided when the first had been discovered. It was change, a slow and deliberate machination, the thwub, thwub, thwub of a coin-operated washing machine bending and twisting the mind until it was useless. Then the feeding began. Rending and tearing flesh from limbs and licking the blood from the corpses, they had fed, and had utterly wiped out most military forces within the first month.
Strange graffiti had begun appearing on walls, written in a tongue no longer spoken. The old tongue–Gan’destra. The holy tongue known by few and spoken aloud by fewer. His tongue.
He knew, of course he knew. He was the orchestrator of the whole thing! The director of the cacophony of tears and screams, of blood and destruction. He was the instrument of mankind’s demise, the tool, the keystone of it all. He was the carrier. Contagions, influenzas, diseases of all kinds spread through him and his hands. The sickness of shades, the plague of destrachan and once men that radiated from his fingers and ravaged the land. It was called the sickness of shades; it made men into sad and darkened reflections of their previous selves, shadows of the men they once were. He had given them the name. Destrachan. Holy ones. The chosen.
Jack knew because he was in charge, the big boss, granted control and power over them by what luck, chance, or fate had granted him. The dead language. Gan’destra.
He’d leave the girl in the city of flames, burning cinders rose from the ashes of it, the charred remnants of it. The Brig that was no more, and she’d be alone. Yet she would find her way to him again, follow the paths of the ages and perhaps even end him. The end, the finishing didn’t bother him. Death had always been a part of it, part of the bargain that was life. All that was unsure was certain, every thing after was a bonus.
I might enjoy the long sleep.
Even as he neared the city, the victorious destrachan were leaving, grisly trophies both taken and left, blood of the innocent and the guilty alike soaking into the dry earth. Guttural cheers and malicious howls, raucous as they were, whistled in the air and dissipated. They were leaving as he had commanded, not in retreat, but marching southward to the next settlement. Hill. The El Camino’s engine rumbled quietly in the night, deadened winds blew in mourning, and the grass rustled in its repose.
Copyright 2006