Tourist - 13

Title: Tourist (Part Thirteen)

After a certain amount of time, lack of sleep turns into insomnia. Insomnia turns into paranoia. Paranoia keeps you from sleeping much more effectively than insomnia. I mean...there’s only so much a man can take before he goes around the bend. And oh, that bend was coming up fast.

I had turned into a bit of a zombie. A twitchy, bug eyed, sleep deprived zombie - it had been two days now since those last two precious hours of sleep in the hallway outside Darren’s room. Exhaustion had been passed a day ago, and now motor functions were merely automatic.

I was no longer sure if I needed sleep.

Lee walked beside me, steadying me with one pale hand, his face bare to the sun of a nearby city. We walked in desert, soft steps sinking into the diamond sand.

“Do you ever miss the sun?” My voice, from yards away. Everything about me seemed almost blurry. Smudged. I knew the lack of sleep was getting to me.

“Of course I miss the sun,” Lee answered, turning his face upward and squinting. “Everyone misses the sun. Our bodies need it. The first generation of my race was fairly messed up because of it.”

“First generation? I’ve only been frozen for fifty years. Not that much could have gone wrong.”

Lee smiled and Ben gave a wry, crackling laugh.

“First of all,” Ben said, “things were going bad for a long time before you were even born. My first home was in hiding, Daniel. You and your kind are the ones we hid from.” He sounded detached, but his face was suddenly stormy. “Try waking up running for your life. Try starving. Try not being able to trust your closest friend!”

Lee grabbed his arm, silencing him with a glare. We all glanced toward Darren, trying to gauge if he had heard Ben’s outburst. But he and Karl walked undisturbed ahead of us.

“Second of all,” Ben whispered harshly, “what are you talking about, ‘fifty years’? What year do you think this is?”

“2299?” I estimated, and Lee turned away, sighing. Ben stared at me. Apparently even he hadn’t thought I was that far off. “What?” I growled, nervous. “That’s that the doctors told me.”

“Daniel, it’s 2549,” Lee said quietly, in a pitying voice.

That woke me up. Three hundred years. Jesus Christ. I walked in a stunned silence while Ben stormed forward to walk just behind Darren. He jabbed his staff into the sand viciously with each step.

“It must be hard to walk so quickly with your injured leg,” cajoled Karl in a soft voice.

Ben spared a glance back at me before answering. “I’ll manage.”

Lee observed me warily. “You removed his spell. Does he know yet?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied distractedly. “Lee, where are we?”

“The Pacific Ocean bed. Stay focused. Are you sure you removed the spell?”

“Then what happened to the Pacific Ocean?”

Lee sighed, giving up the line of interrogation. “What Pacific Ocean?”

“The Pacific Ocean! The one that used to go between America and Asia!”

“It’s gone,” Darren called back from where he walked up front. I looked at him blankly. “Gone,” he repeated, talking with his hands, flickering them up into the sky. “Evaporated.”

“Not entirely, of course,” Lee consoled me. “There’re still the Pacific Lakes. And the Atlantic is much, much bigger.”

“Bigger how?” I demanded.

Lee frowned. “Maybe you shouldn’t be hearing this, in your state-”

“How?!” I barked.

He sighed again. “America eroded away from the East coast. The British Isles were flooded. Western Africa is underwater.”

“The British Isles?” I echoed.

“Ireland. Scotland. Great Britain.”

“Let me recap,” I said quietly to Lee. “I am 300 years in the future. I am walking in the Pacific Ocean, my homeland is under water, and it’s illegal to be an artist of any kind. There are people living underground, magic is real, and I’m following a mad doctor.” I turned to the pale man. “Right?”

“Right,” he responded. The others had crested a small dune and were temporarily out of sight. “Now, would you care to tell me, once again, if you are sure that you removed Karl’s spell?”

I shook my head. “This is crazy. Yes, I’m sure. Ben’s strong, anyway. He can take this.”

“Not for much longer,” Lee replied.

I hefted myself up the small hill to keep the group in sight, then turned back to pull Lee up. “What do you mean?

“He’s falling apart.”

“I noticed. So am I.”

Lee brushed off his dark robes and we continued on. “That’s not what I mean. What I mean is, he’s going to need you very soon. Some bad things are going to happen, and he’s going to need to trust you.” He leveled me with piercing, white eyes. “Can he trust you?”

Lee paraphrased Darren-or Karl’s-words from last night. “I hope so,” I answered after a moment, staring after Ben.

~*~*~*~

“I don’t like this,” I growled, my dry eyes straining out over the desert. My thighs burned, trying to push up farther onto the sand dunes. “We’re exposed.”

“We’ll be okay,” Darren insisted. Too quickly. He was frightened, and it was starting to bother him. He scrambled up the dune to stare out across the waves of sand. With one narrow digit he pointed out toward the horizon: “That’s where we’re headed. It’s in sight, at least.” He turned to Lee, who was gazing solemnly out into the distance. “Which way is the fastest?”

Lee opened his mouth to speak, when Karl cut him off. “The fastest way is straight down, of course,” and he began sliding down the sand dunes. Darren slipped down after him, almost automatically.

“No!” called Lee, clambering down the sand. “Stay out of the low spots!” The pale man began to slip too low and he backpedaled quickly.

“Why?” demanded Ben, pulling his planted staff out of the sand.

“They’ll sink under. There’re holes into the lower levels-” he rushed the words just as Karl disappeared with a SHOOMP into the sand. Darren screamed, tried to reverse his journey, but the sand carried him downward into its bottomless depths.

Ben was already halfway down the dune after him, ready to dive in. I tackled him, hauling him back up with Lee’s help.

“Let me go,” he panted half heartedly as I held his arm securely, locking him down. I sat beside him, my as iron as my gaze.

“No,” I insisted.

“There’s nothing you could do if you went in that way.”

We both looked up at Lee, whose pale brow was furrowed in concentration.

“They’re suffocating in there!” Ben declared, making another try at shaking my embrace. I held him fast.

“They’re not suffocating. I’m afraid that it’s much worse than that.” Lee began stripping down, pulling off his dark cloak and folding it carefully into a small square. He removed a black shirt to reveal another, identical, underneath. Lee’s race dressed to conserve, and to travel at any moment’s time. His entire village, though they considered where they dwelled home, were prepared to abandon with all they held on their bodies.

“What do you mean, worse?” Ben asked.

“There’s a community under there. I’m not sure how they’ll react to people dropping down through their hunting holes.”

“Hunting holes?” My voice went quiet and all three of us regarded the sink hole that Karl and Darren had fallen through.

“Which is why we should probably go in through the front door,” Lee explained, sitting in the sand. I noticed for the first time that he wore no shoes. “And I’ve got to disguise myself. These people don’t care much for my kind.”

“You’re both from underground,” Ben reasoned. “Why fight?”

“They want our water. They have learned to survive on very little because of it,” Lee explained. “And they use dark magic.”

Ben and I exchanged a glance that we had both come to recognize as Karl. Perhaps the mad doctor had been trained with these mysterious underground people. I realized then that I was still gripping Ben’s hard arm, and I relaxed my fingers. His gaze flickered down to my hands. I smiled, brushed my fingers down the length of his arm and gave his hand a squeeze. A warm rush filled me, but I made myself turn my attention back to Lee.

“And we want to go down there?” I asked. “Into the hands of black magic?”

Lee was rubbing sand between his hands. “Absolutely.” He let the sand fall through his fingers in a glitter of light, my eyes drawn away from his face to the flashes.

“What-” started Ben.

I looked up, distracted, but what I saw surprised me. Lee had changed. He was no longer pale, no longer bleached out. He sported a deep tan, unruly brown hair, and deep chocolate eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he assured Ben. “It’ll fade back after a few hours. Which means we’ve got to get Darren out before that.”

Ben simply stared.

Lee stared back. “It’s what I used to look like.” He examined his palm. “I think.”

I stood, breaking the moment. “Which way to the front door, Lee? We’re wasting time.”

tbc...