There was a small sign some distance off. Somehow, the wind had missed tearing it off and carrying it away. There was a diamond design on it. Her eyes were so dry she couldn’t focus. She walked closer until she could read it.
Mystic River Bridge
Express Exit – 2 mi.
Tabatha stared at the sign, slowly churning the words around in her mind.
‘I know where I am!’ she suddenly realized. ‘The voice! It’s taking me home!’
She knew now that the voice in her head was completely imaginary. Somehow, the part of her mind that always knew where she was had invented a vocal illusion to tell her how to come home. She was surprised at the pain in her dry throat as she laughed. She was even more surprised at the gurgling dry rasping sound it made. She walked on, more briskly than she had for many days.
In the afternoon, the clouds vanished and Tabatha realized that she would have to leave the easy passage of the expressway. The afternoon sun was too hot and the wind was too fierce. She was badly dehydrated and needed to find water. The expressway didn’t cross the riverbed, anyway. It had collapsed, destroyed either by man or nature, many years ago.
An hour later, she was walking across the dried, caked river bottom. There were only a few patches of mud. Tabatha checked a couple of them out only to discover that she couldn’t dig far enough down with her bare hands to find drinkable water. She kept walking, following the riverbed, now.
Another hour and another bend in the dry riverbed led her to a fork. She turned west toward the late afternoon sun and kept walking. It was beginning to get dark. There was no moon, but the northern lights danced their brilliance across the sky, illuminating even the darker parts of the riverbed.
Some time later she actually found a stream that emptied into the dried up river. She found it by accident, falling face first into the muddy streambed when her right foot suddenly sank into it halfway up to her knee. Crawling and half-walking, half-insane with thirst and forcing herself not to try drinking the mud she found herself in, she followed the muddy flow to the edge of the riverbed and a trickle of comparatively clean water. She drank until she was sick, threw up, and then drank again.
Once revived, she wallowed in the mud, luxuriating in the feel of it on her scorched, cracked skin. She was covered with it, now, as she continued her journey along the desolate riverbed. Except for an occasional crack of what sounded like thunder, the only sound was the howling wind. Even the demanding, driving voice in her head had vanished once she realized where she was. But, it had been imaginary, after all, and had served its purpose.
The moon showed itself, large and swollen on the horizon, its light dull and pale compared to the brilliance of the intricately colored waves of light dancing across in the sky, eerily lighting the landscape around her.
Tabatha kept walking. The constant, dizzying motion as the waves of light swept over her enforced the stark reality of nothing moving on the ground except her. Everything else, every one else, was dead and dust.
She doggedly put one foot in front of the other. She just kept doing that. After some time, a large structure loomed above her. She looked up, almost falling over from her change in perspective.
‘That must be the Washington Street Bridge,’ she thought to herself. ‘Even walking, I should be home in an hour!’
She turned left toward the riverbank and followed the bridge out of the riverbed and into the ruined city.
Remembering her way around on foot was a lot different than crossing the city in an airbus. When she didn’t simply teleport where she was going, the airbus was generally how she got around. She wished fervently for one now as she walked through the dead, burnt-out, debris-filled streets.
Eventually, she came to what she believed was her own residential area. Tabatha realized that she was either a lot more exhausted than she thought, or she’d completely lost her way. She should have been home an hour ago, but nothing looked familiar.
What was left of most of the housing structures were burnt out walls, shining eerily white in the pale light of the moon. The Boston skyline was unfamiliar now, with many buildings completely missing. It hadn’t looked like that when she’d left.
“Where the fuck am I?” she asked herself, out loud, looking around.
Something old – an ancient intelligence brushed against her mind. The hairs on her neck stood straight up right through the soothing layer of dried mud.
“Who’s there?” she cried, looking around wildly, her voice cracked and hoarse from disuse and dehydration.
‘Who are you?’
She distinctly heard something that time. She tried to answer it mentally, but cried out as the agonizing energy in her mind erupted to prevent her from using her powers to visualize anything.
‘There is someone still alive,’ she heard it in her mind.
Tabatha suddenly realized she could still receive telepathically – she just couldn’t send!
“I have to talk out loud,” she said, raising her voice so that (whatever it is) would possibly hear her. “They did something to my mind so I can’t answer you. Can you hear me?”
That last bit was starting to sound frightened. Tabatha realized she actually was frightened. She was scared she was losing her mind.
‘I can hear you,’ the voice responded. ‘What is your function?’
“My what?” Tabatha cried out. “I’m lost. I’m trying to go home.”
‘Your home is not in this place, nor in this time. Why do you disturb me? My energy runs low. I must conserve what remains while I wait.’
“Who are you?” she called out. “How do you know where I live? You don’t even know who I am!”
‘You are recorded in history, Time Walker. You are far from where you belong. Why are you here?’
“I can’t leave!” Tabatha cried out. “I’ve been exiled here! Who are you? Why won’t you tell me?”
An image appeared in her mind. She recognized it, having seen it before. It was Béla’s Praetor. The ruined, dead structure she was staring at had to be Jake and Béla’s home. She cried out in sudden grief as the death of her blood sister and benefactor struck home to her soul. She felt tears running down her muddy cheeks. Her body had enough moisture to provide them, now.
She entered the remnants of Béla’s house, climbing over a half-crumbled wall. After searching for some minutes, she found the Praetor, half buried in the rubble. Triumphantly, she dug it out and placed it in the middle of the destroyed room. Exhausted, she curled around it protectively and went to sleep.
Chapter 8 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She was walking along the beach, admiring the lights dancing across the northern horizon. This was Lisa’s first official day of freedom. She had teleported here yesterday afternoon from her home on the opposite coast, choosing a random spot on the West Coast to push herself back into the physical universe.
She watched and listened for most of the first evening and then realized, as others left for their homes, that she didn’t have a place to stay yet. So, like hundreds of other homeless people, she spent the night on the beach. Last night, she’d slept alone in the brush and awoke this morning, cold and shivering. She was glad of the nuclear fire she kept banked in her mind as she released a molecule of it to heat up her shivering, damp body.
As she stretched and scratched, she decided that, this night, she was going to seek out company. There were hundreds of people out here. It should be easy to find at least one willing to share his warm body with her.
She trotted down to wade in the crashing waves in the early morning light. There was no one around that she could see or feel with her mind. If anyone was around, they were still asleep. She pulled her soiled shirt off and dropped it on the sand. He shorts quickly followed, then she splashed around in the foamy surf, cleaning the sand and dirt off as best she could in the sandy water.
Wading back to her little pile of clothes, she picked them up and grimaced.
Jeez! I can’t put these back on, she realized. They’re filthy!
She formed an image of her closet and tossed the used garments into her clothes hamper for Mom to wash, then grabbed a colorful T-shirt and another pair of shorts. To anyone watching, it would appear that she was reaching into an invisible space and trading dirty clothes for clean ones, magically pulling them out of thin air.
She pulled her hot-pink T-shirt on over her head and was forced to drop her dark brown shorts in the sand as a seagull tried to take it away from her. As it realized she didn’t have any food, it squawked angrily at her and, flapping its wings noisily, flew off, still in search of its breakfast.
Swearing to herself, Lisa picked up her shorts and brushed the sand off. There were only a few spots of water on them, so she slipped into them anyway. They were a favorite pair, but she’d grown a bit since she got them and they clung tightly to her butt and squeezed around her upper thighs almost too much.
‘Wow! I could orgasm just walking in these,’ Lisa thought, smiling to herself. ‘Good thing I’m not wearing panties, these would never fit!’
She walked along the beach a ways, just listening to the lapping waves as the tide went out and watching the seagulls and other birds she didn’t recognize as they flew search patterns over the receding waves. Occasionally some stranded, unlucky creature would be spotted in the surf by the militant gulls and quickly, if noisily, devoured.
A motor roared in the distance and Lisa cast out with her mind to see what made the noise. A pickup truck was pulling a boat trailer up the road. She could see in the mind of the driver that he would be stopping very near to where she was right now.
‘I think I’ll wait,’ she decided. ‘Maybe he has food. If not, maybe he’ll take me for a ride on his boat.’
In a few minutes, the truck pulled up and circled down onto the beach. Lisa stood at the edge of the splashing waves, staying out of the way as he maneuvered his rig around and backed the boat down to the edge of the ocean and right into the water.
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