Deadsweep, page 15
part #2 of The Return to Erda Series
As soon as we heard it, we started running. The closer we got to it, the worse it got. It sounded like the three men we had first heard coming into Dalry, multiplied by one-hundred.
Every hair on my body stood up, and I could feel pulses of energy rushing through me. With my hand on Cahir’s back, I could feel the same thing was happening to him.
Niko called a halt while we were still out of sight of Dalry. He tapped his ears reminding us to keep our earplugs in. As if we would forget. I was continually scanning my body looking for those ugly little worms. No worm was going to get on me. Ever. So disgusting in so many ways. Abbadon certainly knew how to push buttons. He could have made any kind of little machine to spread his Deadsweep infection. No, he chose a worm because of how most of us would feel about it—crawling into our brains. Yuck!
Cahir’s ears perked up, and we all listened for what he heard. Footsteps were coming through the forest. Depending on how many people were coming we knew what to do. Zeid was carrying a supply of nets which he would shoot from what looked vaguely like a crossbow. Then Ruta would subdue them with a spray of the gas. Spraying gas in the open like that was tricky because we didn’t want it blowing back on any of us. We chose Ruta to do the spraying because the gas didn’t appear to affect him at all. Good thing worms didn’t seem to like his kind either. If necessary, I wondered if we could get an army of Rutas.
Ruta looked at me as if I was crazy. “No army,” he projected to me. “Got it,” I responded.
We had all crouched behind trees so that whoever was coming wouldn’t see us. Niko was ready with the nets and Ruta with the gas. Just as Niko was drawing his bow, I yelled, “Stop!”
I could see who had stepped out into the clearing. Hearing me yell, she screamed and pulled her children closer. It was Letha, the wife of the man that had been killed by his friends.
When I stepped out from behind the tree, she burst into tears. “Oh, zut, you scared me so much. We are trying to get further away from Dalry, and I didn’t know what else to do but head towards the Castle and hope they let me in.”
We all exchanged looks, and I invited her to sit on one of the always nearby rocks. Niko took out a container of water and offered it to them, along with one of the food bars we had with us. She took both but looked at them suspiciously.
“Are you worried they are infected?” I asked.
She nodded. “I decided to stay away from everyone after you all left. How did my husband get sick? I couldn’t figure it out, so I decided not to do anything we normally did. We left the house, and we ate and drank only when necessary, praying each time that the food wasn’t where that awful disease came from. But we are so tired and hungry.”
They looked it. I wondered where Letha and her children had been sleeping, but whatever she did seemed to have protected her. After assuring her that the food and water were safe, they ate what we gave them. The children were barely moving. Their father had died, the town was in chaos, and they were tired, hungry, and terrified.
My hatred for Abbadon flared up, and a fireball flew out of my hand and landed by a pile of stones. This display of uncontrolled anger only served to scare the woman and her children so much they started crying again.
To me, Niko said, “Get a grip, Kara Beth. To them, you look infected. Besides, that kind of lack of control could get us all killed.”
He was right. I scared the ziffer out of the people I wanted to help.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the three of them huddled together trying to protect themselves against me.
“I haven’t quite got a handle on my skills yet, and the idea of what Abbadon is doing to my people made me angry.”
They nodded as if they understood, but I could see that they were still afraid of me. Who could blame them? I was afraid of me.
Niko spoke to the woman and explained that we had a device that would determine if she or her children were infected. Could we use it?
Her nod was tentative. Of course, she wanted to know, and at the same time, she was afraid. What would happen if they were? Thankfully, none of them were, and when we told them, they all sagged in relief.
All of this was happening with the backdrop of screaming and yelling going on in the village, which was keeping us all on edge. But Letha had information we needed, and we weren’t sure anyone else in the town would be free of the infection and could answer our questions.
Zeid knelt and put his arms around the little group. “You’re safe now. We’ll get you transportation back to the Castle where you will be taken care of. But before you go, could you answer a few questions for us? It would help us figure out how this is happening, and since you kept your family safe, what you did might be what we need to know.”
She nodded and smiled. Probably the relief of not having the Deadsweep infection and knowing they would be safe, had just begun to dawn on her. She answered all our questions but didn’t know as much as we hoped. Mostly she told us that right after we left, one by one people starting getting irritable, then grouchy, which rapidly progressed to violence.
She and her children had watched from a little hut that her husband had made as a playhouse for the children, not letting anyone know where they were. As the situation got worse, she stopped letting the children watch.
When we asked her what the three men had in common, at first she just stared at us. It was obvious. They were friends. They hung out together.
So, Niko changed the question. What had the three of them done a few days before that no one else had done yet in the village?
Again, she said there was nothing. It was just a regular day. Of course, it was an ordinary day to her, but what did they do?
Niko asked her to walk through what her husband had done right before he started getting grouchy. We were hampered by the fact we didn’t know how long it took for the thought-worms to take over. Should we be looking back a day, or two, or a week? We didn’t know.
Then she said something interesting, and we realized we might be on the right track.
Forty-Two
The moment we heard the noise coming from the village, the Priscillas had flown off. It would be nice to think that I have some control over what they do, but I doubted that anyone could control a fairy. I had to believe that they knew what they were doing, and were safe. Maybe they went off to get their secret weapons.
In the meantime, Letha had remembered something. When we asked her to tell us what her husband and his two friends did a few days before they started getting sick, she told us about the traveler.
“A few days before the sickness, my husband had gone for a walk before dinner. He often did that. He loved watching how the seasons changed, and he said a nice walk through the countryside helped clear his head.
“He walked the roads rather than through the meadows and forest because he didn’t like having to watch where he was stepping. He preferred daydreaming or meditation while he walked. He would return home at times having stepped in a hole or have little burrs sticking to his pants that had to be picked off.
“A few days before he got sick, he met a man on the road who was selling some beautifully carved walking sticks. My husband loved the trades that happened between our villages. The walking sticks were lovely really, and I understood why he bought them. But we had enough walking sticks, so he gave them as gifts to his two friends.”
Niko stepped in. “To be clear about this. Your husband bought two walking sticks, but then he gave them to his friends as gifts right away? He didn’t leave them in the house for any length of time?”
“No, he just popped his head in, showed me the sticks and then took them over to his friends, and came back for dinner. The next morning he was grumpy, which was so unlike him.”
“Did he say what the man looked like?” Zeid asked.
“Ordinary. Just a tradesman walking between villages. We get them all the time. We even have a few who live in our village and trade some of the things we make or grow with other villages. So meeting someone new wasn’t unusual at all,” Letha answered.
Turning pale, Letha asked what we were all thinking. “Was it something in the walking sticks? Did my husband bring this infection to our village?”
I put my arm around Letha. I could feel how thin she had become. She was shaking, and her children were huddled in her lap. “We don’t know. No one knows. But even if it was in the walking sticks, your husband didn’t bring the infection to Dalry. That man did. On purpose.”
We hadn’t proven that, of course, but it seemed pretty obvious. Somehow this man brought the worms with him. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was carrying. But if that was true, why wasn’t he infected?
“Do you know where those sticks are now, Letha?” Niko asked.
“The last time I saw them they were in the tavern. The men had them when they started fighting.”
While we were talking, Niko must have summoned the Sound Bubble because I heard the sound of hundreds of notes playing in harmony coming towards us. I didn’t think that I would ever tire of hearing that beautiful music. So opposite from what we could hear coming from Dalry.
I hugged Letha one last time, told her we would see her back at the Castle, and stepped away. I knew the three of them had never been in a Sound Bubble before. The joy on their faces was what I was sure I looked like the first time it descended over me and whisked me away.
We all waved to Letha and her two children and then turned to each other to discuss what to do next. Pris chose that moment to come flying out of the woods. She landed on my head, without even trying to slow down first, which meant her foot got tangled in my hair. As she righted herself, she pulled a few strands out.
I started to say “ouch,” but then I saw her face. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen Pris that upset before. La and Cil were right behind her, so I put my hands out for them to land on so that they wouldn’t do the same thing on my head.
After taking a few deep breaths, Pris said, “You can’t believe it. The town is almost gone. Buildings are burned down. People are lying in the street. Some of them look dead. There are even …”
When Pris couldn’t finish, La took over, “There are even children lying in the streets and fields. You have to stop it, but you can’t go in there while all that is going on. People are ripping each other and themselves apart with their teeth.”
“There is probably no one left there to save, but if they are, they are hiding somewhere, and you won’t be able to find them with all those crazy people. They are like walking dead, no longer people,” Cil said through her tears.
Niko took command. He told Link to broadcast across the Kingdom that under no circumstances was any villager to trade with a tradesperson of any kind until further notice. Niko told Link about the walking sticks. They decided to have any walking sticks acquired in the last few weeks carefully collected and burned immediately, or at the very least quarantined.
After he finished talking to Link, Niko turned to us as if looking for answers. We didn’t have any, but I did have a question.
“Dalry appears to be the worst village so far, doesn’t it?”
“What are you getting at, Kara?” Zeid asked.
“This is the closest village to the Castle. Do you think he came from there?”
Forty-Three
“Why didn’t the Mayor alert us as to what was happening in the village?” Zeid asked. “We gave him a communication device, but he never used it, did he?”
Niko shook his head. “No, he didn’t.”
The implications of what that could mean silenced us all for a beat. Either Mayor Tom had gone crazy right away, or he had been targeted and killed.
One other idea occurred to me, though. “Maybe he couldn’t contact us for other reasons. Maybe he found a place to hide like Letha and her children did, and then he was afraid to make any noise. Or maybe someone took it from him, or he lost it.”
Professor Link was ahead of me. “I think you could be right, Kara. I tracked the signal back to where the device is. You might find Mayor Tom there too. I don’t want to break in and talk to him in case he is in hiding.
“And before you rush off to save him, it’s possible someone else has it and is waiting for you.”
That was a sobering thought. It meant some of the people in Dalry, knowing that we would return, were lying in wait for us. It was hard to believe that we had been there just a few days before and were warmly welcomed.
Things had changed quickly. Abbadon’s plan to destroy all life would not take long at this rate.
After listening to what the Priscillas had seen, we decided we needed a different way to get into town. We had no intention of marching down the road to get there, but finding the perfect entry point was going to be tricky. We couldn’t let ourselves be seen.
Even if we were not being purposely targeted, everyone who was alive was in danger from the people infected with the Deadsweep virus.
We still planned to rescue anyone who was not yet infected, starting with the Mayor. That was our priority. Once that was done, our next priority was to find and remove the walking sticks without contaminating ourselves. We didn’t know for sure that it was the way Abbadon was transporting the worms, but we had to act as if it was.
We also had to assume that the worms were everywhere. Watching for them was going to be difficult while trying to avoid getting killed by a villager.
However, there was another possibility which eased our minds a little bit. It was a terrible thought, but one reason we might be safe from the worms was that they were all already in everyone’s brain. We knew the thought-worms stayed inside the body even after the host died.
We knew that because before we left the Castle, the two men we had captured with Letha’s husband had died, and until Pita froze the room, the worms did not come out.
We assumed that in the end, the worm’s activity in the men’s brains killed them. It didn’t matter how it killed them because the result was horrible. The last few days had been a nightmare to watch, and we couldn’t imagine what it felt like for the men.
The other reason we might be safer than it might appear we were was also morbid. If so many people were dead, how many were there left to come after us?
None of these scenarios made us feel any better. We might be safer because of the extent of the Deadsweep infection in Dalry, but that was a high price to pay.
*******
It was Ruta who came up with the idea that none of us had thought about. However, given that Ruta knew how to travel by tree, it made sense that he was the one that suggested it. Traveling by tree was just what it sounded like, even though I didn’t understand how it worked.
Ruta, Mr. Block-Of-Wood himself, traveled that way all the time when we weren’t around. When he was with us, he chose to travel our slower way. On his own, Ruta would somehow merge with the tree and then pass through the roots, trunks, and limbs to get where he was going without being seen.
That’s not what he was proposing for us to do, though. Good thing, because no one but Ruta could turn himself into some form of energy that traveled through the trees.
When he had first explained that process to me, it reminded me of the transporters in Star Trek, but instead of turning into energy that traveled through space, he moved through trees. When I first tried to explain the beam concept to Ruta, he looked at me as if I was an idiot.
“It was just a TV show,” I tried to explain. It didn’t help. TV shows didn’t mean anything in Erda, and since no one could beam themselves places in real life, Ruta was not impressed. In Erda, people just left one place and arrived in another. Ruta had once tried to explain that one to me too, but what he said sounded like gibberish to me.
If all of us standing outside Dalry could do the leap-to- another-place thing, then we would have done it. However, none of us could—except for Zeid. But Zeid didn’t know where he would leap to that would be safe, so after exploring Ruta’s idea of using the trees, we decided it was the best plan that we had at the moment.
The forest we were in came to the edge of a meadow that extended all the way to Dalry. However, a grouping of maple trees meandered through the meadow all the way from the forest to the center of Dalry. With the trees’ help we would use what I used to call the squirrel highway.
In the Earth dimension, I loved watching the squirrels travel across the top of the trees, leaping from branch to branch, never touching the ground. We would do the same. Even though we were much bigger and nowhere near as nimble in a tree as the squirrels, the trees would help. The trees would make sure a branch was close enough and strong enough for us to move through the tree canopy into town without being seen.
That was the plan anyway. We hoped that being in the trees would also make it easier for us to see places that people could be hiding without letting the other villagers know that we were there. The Priscillas planned to dart around without being seen and look for people who didn’t appear to be infected with the virus.
If we found any, we would extract and test them. If they were free of Deadsweep, we would send them back to the Castle. If they were infected, we had another problem on our hands. How to round them up and where to keep them. The rounding up part was something that my bracelet was supposed to help with.
Given how dangerous the mission had become, I didn’t think I could leave things to chance.
I asked Niko if I could practice with the bracelet now. I thought he would say yes. He didn’t. He said it might attract attention, and I was going to have to do it right the first time. Then he added that he trusted in me to get it done.
