TWENTY-THREE
KVASIR
He came to, his head bumping up and down, banging against metal.
He opened his eyes, expecting to be looking straight up at the sun.
But the sky had deepened in color, and the sun had to be behind him, low. It felt cool.
He looked left.
Someone was sitting next to him, two gnarled hands on an oversized wheel. A man. He nodded as he steered, as if having some kind of internal discussion.
Then the man happened to casually look over at him.
“Oh! Oh, well. You’re up. Up is good. Eyes open. Sorry for the—” He slapped the wheel of whatever he was steering.
Wasn’t a buggy. Or a car.
More like … a tractor.
Raine started to sit up, and the move made his wounded arm ache. He groaned.
“Take it easy there. Just have that arm wrapped for now. Gonna need some real attention once we get to my place.”
Raine continued to sit up, taking care not to pull on his arm. Something wasn’t adding up. Wait …
“Where is …?” he asked, shooting his head around, looking.
“Your buggy? Towing it behind us. That will need some looking into as well. That the best they could give you? Come a hundred years—a hundred years into the future—and you’re driving a piece of garbage like that? No respect.”
The man laughed. A cackle. Sounded like something he would do whether he had an audience or not.
“No respect for their elders.” Another cackle.
Raine saw his buggy being towed by this … thing. Not completely a tractor, but most of it was. High seats. Big wheels. Moving so slowly.
“Thanks for—”
“Saving you? Seemed like you did a pretty good job of that yourself. Never saw so many muties just scattered around. Quite a mess. Though I imagine if I hadn’t seen you, others would have come.”
“Thanks, anyway.”
The man shot him a look and grinned through his bristly, wiry beard. “Yeah, well you might have held out. But—sooner or later—you’d be just another body in the desert. Be a shame, after you made such a hash of them.” The man went back to nodding, analyzing whatever it was going on inside his head. After a long spell of that, the old man finally said, “What’s your name?”
“Raine.” He remembered something the man initially said, which had been bothering him. “You said ‘a hundred years.’ You know—” He hesitated, not sure of the term. “—that I’m an Ark survivor?”
Another cackle. “Word gets around … word gets around, my friend. How many days you been here? Amazed you’re still alive.” The old man’s eyes narrowed. “Most don’t last long.” He sniffed the air. “I’m Kvasir.”
“Thanks, Kvasir.” A bump jostled Raine, and he winced. He looked at his shoulder. “How’s my arm?”
“Seen worse. Will have to unwrap it at my place. Got a real lab there. Be able to take a good look then. But you got those nanotrites. Probably why you’re still alive. Damn things can be useful. Sometimes.”
“You know about … nanotrites?”
The man laughed loudly, head back, a bark up at the desert sky.
“Know about ’em?” Another laugh. “You might say that.”
Kvasir shook his head at the private joke.
“I was headed to Wellspring.” Raine took a breath. “Or maybe you knew that, too?”
Kvasir took the sarcastic question in earnest. “No. Can’t say that I did. Not surprised, though. Out here, where else would you go?” The tractor hit another bump, moving through a ravine. On either side Raine saw a jumble of random chunks of metal that seemed to stretch the length of the pass.
“Not sure how long you would have lasted there. Still, I guess you’re thinking about what options you actually got.” He looked at Raine again. “Let me tell you, that’s the right thing to be thinking about: options, my friend.”
“If you say so. Where is … what is your place?”
“You’ll see, Raine. For now”—another grin—“just enjoy the ride. Getting dark. Don’t want to be out here in the dark.”
Raine got as comfortable as he could in the seat as Kvasir took him wherever he was taking him.
The ravine opened up to a huge, craterlike gash in the ground ahead. The sun was down, but the sky still had enough light for Raine to see …
A bridge with a gate at one end, leading across the massive hole in the ground, up to a stony hummock with a building on it. Like everything he’d seen in this world, the building seemed made of three or four different structures slapped together.
Kvasir stopped at the gate, pulling up to a device Raine hadn’t thought he’d ever see again. Out of a small speaker—like those from a fast-food drive-thru—a voice.
Kvasir’s own.
“Who’s there? Go away! Don’t want to see anybody.”
The old man calmly ignored his recorded self and said his name: “Kvasir.”
The metal barrier opened up, pulled by a rickety gear and pulley system. Raine noticed it wouldn’t be too hard to ram right through it, so he wasn’t sure how much security it gave Kvasir.
“That sounded like your voice.”
“It was. Works even when I’m not home. I call it ‘voice recognition.’ ”
Raine grinned. “Never catch on,” he said.
Kvasir caught the sarcasm.
“Oh you think that because you had everything in the past, that what we do—what we make—all means nothing?”
“No. I just meant—”
“You may have had all that. So much. And when you weren’t wasting it, you were using it to kill yourselves. And in the end, when the rock fell, what the hell good did any of it do for you?”
The bridge swayed with the weight and movement of the tractor.
Neither spoke for a moment.
Kvasir might have saved his life, but he also was pretty damn prickly. Raine wished the old man would start cackling again.
Then, like a cloud passing, Kvasir said, “Ah … who can blame you? It’s what makes us humans and not muties, hm?”
Finally they got off the swaying bridge, leaving the disturbing creaking of the metal braces behind, and Kvasir pulled up to his “place.”
Raine walked in, and immediately saw that Kvasir’s home was more like a science lab: tables with microscopes, a row of computer screens, a mechanical arm suspended from the ceiling ending in a series of pointed tools—something out of an operating room or a nuclear lab. Shelves with jars. The smell was of chemicals and machine oil.
Off to the side, in a smaller room, a cot-sized bed was just visible.
Kvasir threw a switch, and Raine heard the sound of an engine from outside.
“Gets cold up here. At night, at least. Got a heater. Uses my ‘special blend’ of fuel. Burns like gas, but I can stretch farther than I could with petrol. Even runs my tractor, but it’s useless for anything like regular buggies. I’m working on it, though.” He nodded to the sound outside. “The generator charges my batteries. And that’s the five-cent tour. Okay—lie down.”
“Hm?”
Kavsir pointed to a metal table. He went to it and cleared a microscope and metal trays.
“Go on. Lie down here. Can’t leave your arm like that, nanotrites or no nanotrites. Got to get something on it. Maybe sew it up a bit.”
“You’re a doctor?”
The cackle came back. “Not exactly. Research is what I do. But I have some of the Mendicants’ herbs. And I know how to sew.”
“Mendicants?”
“They grow the herbs. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t. We’ll see. Now come on, you’ve had that wound just wrapped up for way too long.”
Options, Raine thought. None now but to let this crazy guy look at his wound.
He lay down on the table.
“Well well,” Kvasir said, unwrapping the wound. “Yessir … the nanotrites are definitely doing their work. Almost hard to tell how deep the wound went. Pretty incredible things.” He spread a cream-colored paste on the wound.
It felt cool, and stung when it hit the wound. Other than that, Raine felt nothing.
Kvasir continued. “Those little bastard are good at rebuilding tissue and killing an infection. And I do mean kill.”
“In my eyes”—Raine wondered whether Kvasir knew that he could see his recovery appear in front of his eyes—“they show that they’ve still got work to do.”
Kvasir didn’t look up—so no surprise at that, either.
“Oh, sure. You need more time. And I do think you should let me sew it up. Take a long time for them to seal you up. Make new skin, and all that. Couple of days at least. The stitches will help that process—that’s the ticket.”
Kvasir leaned close. His hands still unwashed from their trip, wrinkled, covered with the dust of the desert.
“You know, I don’t really have a local anesthetic. Got something from the Medicants … takes you away a bit. But that’s all.” He sniffed. “It will hurt.”
“I’m okay. Go on.”
Kvasir nodded. He turned and put on plastic gloves, not a pristine pair but a pair he took from a nearby wall.
Then pieces of thread. A needle that looked too big.
Raine looked away.
More steps, and Kvasir was back with some leaves.
“Chew ’em. Chew, turn them into mush. Then swallow.”
Raine took the leaves with his good hand and put them in his mouth.
He started chewing.
In seconds, he seemed to be aware of more things: the sound of Kvasir moving things; the engine outside; the chemical smells, more intense. Then for a moment, he thought he wasn’t really there at all, but back on the desert floor, bleeding out.
Hallucinating that he had been rescued.
He felt the needle go in, except the needle was miles away.
The device with the long arm was above him, now holding a massive magnifying glass above his wound.
The needle began going in and under, then out, pulling its thread, weaving a line to lace the wound tight.
It hurt, but there were so many other sensations to pay attention to.
He barely heard Kvasir say, “Okay, it’s done. Ain’t pretty. But sealed up. The ’trites should have you in good shape by tomorrow.”
The words addressed to someone else. The room suddenly a warm, sheltering place. His eyes heavy. Sleep seemed irresistible.
He didn’t resist.
He woke up on the same metal table. The room was dark save for a light coming from the other room, the small bedroom he had noticed on his way in. He leaned up, the surreal feel of the room gone, now back to its reality. The pungent smells, but not so intense. The puttering of the generator, but not quite so loud.
He had no idea what time it was.
“Hello? Kvasir?”
Raine looked down at his arm. Definitely not pretty, but the wound was closed. And amazingly, it already had a scab forming down the line of the stitches. He touched it with his other hand.
A bit of a sting, but not bad at all.
He heard feet hit the ground. Kvasir getting off his bed.
Raine used his good arm to sit up.
Kvasir threw a switch, and the room lit up, painfully bright. The scientist frowned and blinked in the light.
“Thought you would sleep till morning.”
“Sorry. Feeling okay. It’s kinda—” He gestured at the table—“hard.”
Kvasir moved his head from side to side. “Yeah, well couldn’t exactly lift you, now could I?” He sniffed again. “I put a cot over there.” He turned away and started shuffling back to his room.
“Thanks, Kvasir. I owe you.”
Without turning around, Kvasir grunted.
“I know.”
As he disappeared into his room, he muttered as to himself, “Doesn’t everybody in this world?”
Nothing for a second.
Then: “Raine. Listen. I’ll tell you things. In the morning.”
Raine wondered what that meant. Things? His debt to him?
Or something else.
“I’ll be here.”
Kvasir made one last barking laugh, and Raine went over to the cot to sleep.