War Zone Eden (eBook)

CHAPTER
ONE

Jaryl stumbled and fell, his sweat drenched body hitting the rocky slope hard, painting the ground with blood. He rolled twice before slamming against a sycamore. He stopped breathing. Across his field of vision something dark flew among the leaves and branches that danced with the hot winds from the plains. It soared like a bird but it wasn’t a bird. He didn’t know how he knew, he just knew.

His breathing resumed in short gasps at first, and with it came stabbing pain. He tried to sit up but the agony increased with each attempt. Finally, he lay still. Fear and confusion raced through his mind. He had been running, that much he knew. Running from what? To where? He couldn’t remember. Flashes of places he had been, places that had no meaning to him and yet did, burst in and out of his consciousness.

Forcing himself to calm down, Jaryl searched his thoughts for meaningful memories, there were none. He had no past prior to his hitting the ground, no memories of what had happened to bring him to this place and condition.

Gradually his breathing slowed, the aching in his ribs subsided. He sat up, leaning against the tree that had so brutally stopped his descent. Feeling his right foot and leg itching, he looked down and saw a swarm of ants moving steadily up his leg and onto the loin cloth that hung from his waist. In spite of the hurting in his chest, he reached down and brushed away the black horde now entangled in the blood-caked dirt and leaves acquired in his fall. He withdrew his foot from their nest, watching detachedly as the colony ran amok in the wreckage that was once their home. Absently, he felt empathy for these mindless creatures. Like them, his world too had been destroyed, with no understanding of what happened or why. Yet, as he stared at them, a glimmer of memory flashed through his thoughts.

He was running, running from an ant. Not like these tiny creatures at his feet but a stallion sized monster. At first, he recalled, it was he who was the hunter, trailing the giant through the forested hills. Then, having found them, he had rashly revealed himself and the hunted became the hunter. More memories came back now, flooding his consciousness. The bird thing had appeared as he ran, showing a single red eye. The eye flashed at him, and then nothing…nothing until he awoke on an unfamiliar bed in an alien cave.

“See anything?”

“Not yet,” answered the large black man at the console. “But the courier is still out there looking. There’s an awful lot of forest to search.”

“We’d better find him and quick,” whined the reedy red head behind him. “If Marz finds out what happened, we’ve had it.”

Jerome Mills turned away from his console and studied his co-worker through the prisms of thin rimmed glasses. Ethan Dixon was white, Caucasian of course, but scared beyond that. Nail-bitten fingers plowed through sparse auburn hair in unsuccessful attempts to arrange it in some semblance of order. A nervous twitch in his left eye characteristically revealed Dixon’s anxiety.

“Take it easy, Ethan,” Mills said. “There’s no way we could foresee a breakdown of the CONSHARE system. It’s a systems error, not a human one, Marz will know that.”

“But that’s his son running around out there somewhere and there’s a good probability that he has little or no control of the host. What if that crazy native falls off a cliff or drowns himself, what then?”

“That crazy native has a name, two actually,” said Mills. He turned his back to Dixon and taking control of the courier maneuvered it to a new tract of forest heretofore unsearched.

“Alright, alright, the native has a name, it’s Jaryl, ok?” Dixon replied. “But whatever happens to Jaryl also happens to Ryan Shepherd. And whatever happens to Shepherd makes a big difference to the success of this project.”

Mills did not immediately respond to Dixon’s distress, but concentrated, instead, on his search pattern looking, he thought, for a ghost in a fog. What had gone wrong, he wondered? Others had gone out before Shepherd, controllers and their hosts, mind-melded by the CON-SHARE process designed to join two consciousnesses into one, but always leaving the man from the caverns in control. With the malfunction of CON-SHARE the shared consciousness process now left doubt as to who was in control, Ryan Shepherd or Dixon’s “crazy native”. Had everything in the process of CONSCIOUSNESS SHARING gone as planned, the Ryan/Jaryl duo would even now be making their way down the mountain side to Jaryl’s camp where Ryan would begin to gather the much-needed information to make OPERATION SURVIVOR a success.

“Shepherd isn’t the first controller to experience difficulties after being sent out,” he mused out loud to Dixon. “Some made it, others didn’t.”

He went on, oblivious to the blank stare of Dixon who listened to the lecture not unexpected from the “professor” as he had become known.

“A lot of intelligence about the status of humanity had been gained over the last thousand years, knowledge needed to determine when to release our people from cyber-sleep to start the rebuilding of civilization. Losing another controller would be a setback. And yes, technically, if Shepherd failed, another could take his place. But if instead we can locate Jaryl with the courier, we can hypnotize him like we did the first time and bring him back here, even against his will, if necessary.”

“It’s beginning to look like a big if,” said Dixon. “I think we’ve lost him.”

“That may be a moot point,” Mills uttered in a low voice while pointing to the screen before him. A band of horsemen were slowly making their way through the woods. Mills programmed the courier to follow them, keeping the metal bird hidden amidst the trees.

“A search party?” Dixon queried.

“Undoubtedly,” Mills replied, “and if they find Jaryl before we do, control of the situation will be out of our hands.”

All but one of the men wore the leather skirts, hide boots and feathered hair adornments of Jaryl’s tribe. Across their bare brown backs were slung bows and quivers of long black arrows. Some of the riders wore colored shimmering capes, draped over their left shoulders. A lone rider was just as resplendently yet differently clad, but instead of a bow on his back, a sheathed long knife bumped against his thigh as he rode. The leader of the group, he was a tall man, slender of build and hard muscled, and his narrowed brown eyes searched the ground before them as they rode.

Talin pulled sharply on the reins of his mount, and jumping to the ground he threw his bright yellow cape aside and knelt to investigate the find. Behind him a half-dozen riders raced up and leapt from their horses before the beasts could stop.

“Kralni,” whispered one of the men.

Beside him another spoke the minds of all.

“The print is huge, how large must the creature be?”

“Our brother, Zeloran of the Mequahdin tribe has seen the beasts,” Talin said, turning to the sword bearer. “Do I remember correctly that you described them as the size of horses?”

‘Yes, and some larger,” Zeloran answered. He studied the imprint, for a moment then said, “The direction taken by the creature is difficult to determine since its six legs leave such an erratic pattern in the dirt. We must find more prints.”

The men spread out to find more tracks and soon the pattern became clear. The trail led downhill and then in the mud near the edge of a brook other prints appeared, those of a man.

“The beast stalks our friend, Talin,” one of the men said. “See, the ant’s tracks overlay Jaryl’s.”

“Pray to the gods, my friends, that the Kralni have not yet found him,” Talin implored the group, then leaping onto his horse called out to his troop.

“We must find Jaryl before the ant does.”

Jaryl felt better. The pain in his chest was only a dull ache now. Sitting on the bank of a river, he examined the extent of the damage his panicked flight had inflicted on his body. He washed away the dirt and blood and discovered that, except for his aching ribs, minor cuts and bruises were his only concern. Nearby, a small still pool, separated from the surging main currents, allowed him to see his face clearly. The image was deeply tanned and wind-hardened, crowned by thick raven hair falling to his shoulders. The set of his square chin and full lips bespoke a stoic disregard for misfortune. But the distress in his eyes belied the truth.

He stared, for a moment, at those piercing blue eyes, remembering how all his life he had wondered at the fate that had singled him out from all men to inherit such an anomaly. He had been one of two so gifted. The other, a girl, the adopted daughter of the chief of his tribe and Jaryl’s father. That the only two people given blue eyes should belong to the same tribe at the same time was a mystery he had pondered his whole life. He shook his head at the wonderment of it. True, his were the midnight blue of a winter storm, unlike Kalina’s silver blue color, which was reminiscent of a summer dawn. But still, unusual and unique, among the brown and hazel eyes of the tribe.

Turning from the pool he looked around, trying to guess which way he should go. Other than a gradual downward slope, which he had already chosen to follow, the landscape gave no clue. But then there was the river. Staying with the river would lead him down to the plains, and eventually to the camp of his people. His...