Chapter 37: Legends Never Die
Kyle tore down the hillside, a child of no more than eleven summers, wind rushing through his dirty blonde hair, his friends, Lisa and Sam which was short for Samson given that his mother belonged to the Cult of the Man Jesus, running down after him hot on his heels. Still at a full gallop Kyle pointed at an object in the distance next to what had once been a great road of the Old People and later rebuilt by Arthur Eld himself, made of black stone which soaked up the heat of the sun like a sponge. The children were not aware of the word asphalt, and if you had said it to them they would have thought you were speaking gibberish.
Kyle came to the object, hands on his knees while he tried to catch his breath. "Told you it was here!"
"No so loud," Lisa pleaded in a whisper. They were not allowed to go this far towards the city which could be seen across the flat plain perhaps a dozen wheels away, its tall sky scrapers reaching up like daggers of glass and steel. It was a city of the dead. A forbidden place. Once all those that had lived there had been struck down by the gods themselves who had used a white poisonous cloud to kill them all, or least that was what the old stories said. Now it had slowly been repopulated by harriers and brigands looking to mine the city for its vast resources of ancient technology. Devil's work as Sam's mother might have put it, and she did quite often.
Sam silently agreed with Lisa's request to be silent, by Kyle merely shook his head, grinning. "Were too far away for anybody to hear us." He approached the plane, marveling at the wide sweeping wings and the metal propeller which was attached to the nose of the plane. What appeared to be machine guns, mere rusting hulks of their former selves, where attached to the underside of both wings, and Kyle thoughtfully put his finger in the muzzle of one of them. "I told you that the Old People could fly."
"They were fairy tales," Sam argued.
Kyle shook his head. "Next you'll be telling me you don't think that the Ka-Tet of the Nineteen was real."
"They weren't," Sam huffed. "They're just stories for little kids."
"Like you," Lisa said giggling. Sam glared at her.
Kyle ignored Sam's misgiving and looked up into the cockpit, his eyes wondering in the peculiar mixture of fear and wonder. "Look at this."
Sam and Lisa moved to stand beside him, similar looks also appearing on their faces. Inside the cockpit was the bleach white skeleton of a giant, a man who must have been at least seven feet tall, with bones thicker than that of an oxen, and even though he was long dead the children could almost feel the strength that the man had once possessed.
"Thus fell Lord Perth," Sam muttered. "And the countryside did shake with thunder."
"Shhhh," Lisa said. "That story is bad luck."
Sam shrugged his shoulders, "No such thing as luck, and besides that is only suppose to be true for harriers."
"Still," Lisa said, pouting. She returned her attention to the skeleton. "He was as big as the Spartan wasn't he?"
"Nah," Kyle said, shaking his head vigorously. "The Spartan was ten feet tall. This guy is short compared to him."
Lisa frowned. "Well maybe this man was a Spartan. I mean, there were suppose to be more of them in other worlds."
"All dead, just like the gunslingers. Don't you know anything?"
Lisa stuck her tongue out angrily. "You don't have to be right all the time."
"Not my fault that I am," Kyle retorted. "Say Sam who is your favorite in the ka-tet?"
"I don't like those stories," Sam said. "They're no fun. Everything bad always happens to them. No happy endings."
"Yeah," Lisa agreed. "But my momma told me they were supposed to teach you a lesson. Like never anger the gods. That's why the Warrior was killed."
Kyle shook his head. "No it was because of the prophesy." He cleared his throat and began to recite. "She who ends the Line of Eld shall conceive a child of incest with her brother, and this child shall be marked, by his red heel shall you know him. It is she who will take the last breath of the Warrior."
Lisa furrowed her brow. "But they weren't brother and sister."
"Yes they were," Kyle insisted. "They had the same mother."
"Oh," Lisa said, putting a hand on her chin. "Momma never told me that part. She told me that the Intellect during her palaver with Maerlyn…"
"Walter," Sam said, looking upward towards the top of the plane. "It was Walter, not Maerlyn."
"Walter," Lisa repeated. "Anyway during the palaver the Intellect said that the Spartan was above ka, and so the gods punished her for her arrogance and struck the Warrior down dead." Her hand left her chin and Lisa's voice became solemn. "No one can defy ka."
"Doesn't make sense though," Sam said. "I thought that the Intellect was a goddess who took mortal form because she fell in love with the Spartan."
Lisa shrugged, "Maybe that was part of the reason the gods punished her. Mortals shouldn't mix with immortals. That's what momma says."
"You're both wrong," Kyle insisted. "She was a computer. Like the ones they have in the city, and she became human after she fell in love with the Spartan. The Gunslinger fell in love with her too, and so did the Boy, but while she loved all of the ka-tet her heart belonged to the Spartan."
"Which was part of her punishment," Lisa continued where Kyle presumably was leaving off. "Ka hardened her heart so that she could only love him, even after he died. They are cursed to always be separated from one another but neither can give their heart to another person. It's all part of what the gods will."
Kyle rolled his eyes. "It told you it was the prophesy, not the gods. The gods don't give a damn about humans anyway. They strike us down for the fun of it."
"Diana cares," Lisa responded. "And Gan. Oh and Bessa too."
"Okay three," Kyle said, holding up his fingers.
"The Man Jesus," Sam added.
Kyle sighed and added another finger to his count. "Okay four. Four out of how many?"
"Well I never said the gods were fair," Lisa said. She looked up at the machine guns mounted on the wings. "Is it true that the gunslinger could shoot as fast as one of those?"
"Mayhap," Kyle said shrugging. "He was faster than the Spartan, and the Spartan was almost as fast as the god Raf." He turned to the others, "Who do you think would have won in a fight?"
"The Gunslinger," Sam said almost immediately. "He had Excalibur, and Excalibur beats everything."
"I don't think so," said Lisa doubtfully. "They say the Spartan was strong enough to cause earthquakes by punching the ground. Roland Deschain was fast, but the Master Chief was a whole lot stronger, and he had his armor."
"Have to agree," Kyle said. "The Master Chief was a bit like Lord Perth though. So strong yet he was killed by a low level soldier."
Lisa covered her ears and whined, "I told you not to say that Kyle."
Kyle frowned, but kept his mouth shut.
"I want to climb it," Sam said suddenly, and both children looked at him as if he had just declared he was setting off on pilgrimage to The Dark Tower itself.
"Why do you want to do that?" Kyle asked, genuinely curious. As far as he was concerned there was nothing on top of the airplane that they could not see just as well from where they were standing.
Sam shrugged. "Don't know." He looked at Kyle, "Give me a boost." Kyle hesitated a few moments, then bent down on one knee and laced his fingers together. Sam put his foot into the laced fingers, and was immediately boosted up, his small hands gripping tightly onto the wing. After some struggle Sam pushed himself the rest of the way up. The wing groaned angrily, as if the plane was a wounded beast preparing to bite at the person who had dared to approach it, and for a moment both Lisa and Kyle thought it would come crashing down on their heads. It did not, and Sam carefully stood up, looking down. "There's a sigul," he said, smiling as a boy his age does when a sliver of intuition is given affirmation.
"What sigul?" Lisa asked, covering her eyes with her hand in an effort to block out the punishing rays of the sun overhead.
Sam continued to look at the black swastika beneath his feet. "Not-sees"
"Not-sees?" Kyle asked. "What is a Not-see?"
"Not completely sure," Sam said. "But my dad told me about them. They were at war with the Americans long ago."
"What's an American?" this time it was Lisa who asked the question.
"Don't know that either," Sam said. "I think they were an empire, or something like that."
Kyle, his thoughts still a few steps behind the other two, asked, "Where they called the Not-sees because they didn't have any eyes?"
"Mayhap. I don't know. My dad said that they were in a book his grandpa had. They came from the same where and when that Jake Chambers was from."
Kyle frowned. "I thought you didn't believe in the ka-tet."
"I don't," Sam assured him. He was just about to contemplate how to get down from his lofty perch, when a sudden blast ripped through the air. All three children looked around, ears straining, when the horn, or perhaps a trumpet sounded again. It filled the sky with its thunder, and placed fear into their hearts, Sam in his youthful imagination suddenly giving credence to what his mother had told him about how the end of the world would be heralded by trumpet blasts such as the ones they were now hearing.
The horn sounded a third time, mournful in its call, and Lisa, who was now clutching tightly to Kyle's arm, asked in a small voice, "Where is it coming from?"
Sam peered into the horizon, his eyes, far keener than any other boy in their ramshackle village, sweeping the horizon. A shape appeared, hazy in the distance, and as it drew closer Sam suddenly realized what it was, and that was when true terror gripped his heart with pointy fingertips. "Its…"
9:03 A.M., September 6th 2013 (Gregorian Calendar) Dark Tower Building, Tet Corporation Headquarters, New York, New York
Dr. Halsey woke up, a sharp red mark on her forehead where it had rested on the desk. She blinked several times, attempting to get her vision back to normal. The blurriness went away, but a single black dot in the left hand corner of her left eye remained. She ignored it the best she could, knowing full well that it would never go away. Her head was pounding, and Halsey struggled to remember the dream, but the headache spitting her head in not two but what seemed like half a dozen pieces prevented her from doing so.
Even in her pain Halsey could not help but to chuckle a little at her predicament. Her she was, a woman who was heralded as a genius in her own time, and had gained every advancement through the strength of her mind alone, was now slowly dying of a brain tumor. Ka indeed, she thought. Halsey never could get herself to fully embrace such concepts as gods and ka, even when the evidence demanded that she accept on an intellectual level that they did. Perhaps this was her atonement. To spend nearly three decades attempting to right the wrongs she had done in her past life, and then quietly wither away as the disease which rots took her.
Halsey shook her head, forcefully willing the headache to go away. She would not die, at least not easily. Not when there was still a chance, a chance to recreate the UNSC's method of treatment. Not when she still wanted so much to see Jack.
Jack.
Her mind went off on a tangent. There were so many forces at work, surrounding the boy with their own agenda in mind. North Central, Tet, ka, Gan, Diana, Cortana, the U.S. Government; so many with different ideas about who the child should be when he was older. To Halsey it was no wonder that John and Cortana wanted to keep their son's identity a secret from him for as long as they could. Any child his age could easily break under the strain, especially since Halsey was sure that Jack was not the only entity who was inhabiting his young body.
When the low-men had come and killed Rosalita something had awoken inside of Jack. Something dark and ancient. A being that cared nothing for creation and nothing for the child it was inhabiting the body with. Halsey had theorized that it was a possible split personality that was mostly dormant until the right stressful triggers came along, or perhaps a being like Mia which was just bidding its time and waiting for the right moment to take over, but the good doctor had eventually decided that it was neither of those two options.
The Doctor cradled her head in her hands, the migraine slowly returning, when a single gust of wind blew across her face. She looked up, and was suddenly met with the pale blue eyes of a young blonde haired woman clothed in a dress of leaves and flowers, her body purposefully curved in order to exhibit all the signs of hyper fertility.
"Halsey." Diana spat out the name as if it had left a foul taste in her mouth.
Dr. Halsey's headache ebbed, her mind at once realizing what kind of danger she was in.
The gods punished, and Halsey watched as Diana stretched out her hand, preparing to strike down the woman who had taken her son away from her.