13 | Meeting of the Minds

Ally stares into the bleeding stranger's eyes. She's frozen in place until the scream behind her cuts her back into herself. Ally turned to see Esmeralda running over toward them, holding her dress up to keep from tripping.

"What happened? I heard shouting and large rumbling," She asked, then looked at the body. "Oh god..."

"He's...he's dying," Ally spits out. "We...we...where's Rembry?"

Johan Rembry was a doctor in the old world—a cardio-thoracic surgeon. Surgeons were specialized in their fields—which was unfortunate for general practice, however, there were a few nurses who found their way Home before Ally had ever arrived. Together they made up the Rembry Medical Station. Ally's fear heightened only when Esmeralda shrugged her shoulders to her question, and she turned around and yelled out—to nobody in specific, but just for anybody who could help.

Isaac Tanner and Yvi Ngami were the first two to come running. Isaac had shoulder length dark hair and was a shorter—stockier man. Yvi wore her dark hair in braids. She was about as thin as Ally was—but almost twice as old.

"What happened?" Isaac asked. He was a blunt man. Even though Ally had sort of gotten used to his way of asking questions so directly, it still caught her off guard.

"We need Johan." Yvi turned to Isaac. "You go grab him, we'll take him..." She looked around, frantically, then settled on Ally. "Old Ricky up?"

"I'm not sure, he wasn't when I heard him," Ally said. "We could probably move him there, though. Lots of space so he's not out here in the elements.

"Just what I was thinking," She nodded, then turned to Esmeralda. "You help her with the arms and I'll grab the legs, okay Emmy?"

Esmeralda nodded curtly. Her eyes shone like a cat's in the night. She and Ally got on either side of him and hoisted his body up in tandem with Yvi.

"Heavy mother effer, ain't he?" Esmeralda winced as she gathered a steady hold.

He dropped a bit on Ally's side, but Jace appeared by her side and he supported him alongside her.

"Where did he come from?" entered Ally's thoughts. She looked down at the man's now unconscious face.

"He...can see me?" Jace asked.

"I think the more pressing issue is that I can read his mind," Ally thought to him.

"Wonder what's so special about him. Can't read anybody else's thoughts, right?"

"Hmm..."

They made it all the way to Rickshaw's and placed him down on Ally's bed. She turned the light on and clearly they could see just how bad his wound was. It was a very dark patch just above his belly—a large shard of glass protruded from the entry-point.

Esmeralda backed away and held her fist to her mouth. Yvi winced but remained still. Ally stared at his face some more, prodding for more unconscious thoughts, but none came. She could tell he was still alive by the rising and falling of his chest, but how long that remained was anybody's guess. She heard footsteps coming from behind them all and knew that Rickshaw was awake.

"What the hell is all the commotion for?" He asked, groggily rubbing his scalp.

"Boy's been left at our doorstep bleeding half to death.," Esmeralda said, letting loose a braid and letting it fall. "Took all of us to get him back here."

"And why did you bring him here?" Rick asked, looking subconsciously to Ally, who backed down at the look.

"My idea," Yvi said. "Figured we could use your space and you wouldn't mind...or would be asleep."

"Well, one half of those was right," he mumbles, rubbing his face. "And I guess the other one doesn't matter so much now. Someone call for Rembry?"

"Yeah, Isaac went to—"

The front door burst open with Isaac and Johan Rembry filing in – scrambling gloves on. "This him?" He asked.

Yvi nodded, "Yes, he passed out on the way here. We know you'd need to work some magic, but maybe there's a little bit of that left from the old times."

Johan looked the boy over. Lifting his shirt reveals a silver shard embedded into the wound. It glistens as if threatening all of them crowded around him.

"Boy's lucky. If he tried to yank this out himself he most surely would have bled out." He reached into the pocket of the coat and brought out a small wrap up containing some instruments. "We're going to need some more light."

"I got it," Ally said, moving toward the other end of the room. She yanks the plug of the lamp on the table and grabbed it in a firm grasp. "I've got this," she returned and finds an open slot near the bed.

"Mighty lucky lemming we figured out electricity," Rickshaw muses. "Need anything else, Rembry?"

"No, I should be fine." He carries out a bottle of ethanol and rubs a scalpel through a cloth dosed with it. Shining it a few times over he bent down over the bed. The boy's eyes open slowly, as if he's trying to see as little as possible.

"Well, what a fine time to wake up," Johan said, turning to Ally. "Bring that light over here.

"I never slept. I..." he grimaces, "I've been focusing on staying up, trying to quiet everything out."

"Coulda fooled us," Esmeralda said.

"Well, I don't have any sedatives here, but thankfully I don't need to cut you too much. I'm hoping that the sliver there is smaller on the other side."

"I..." the boy thinks, his breath labored. "I don't think it is. It was...like a shank. I didn't get a good look at it...but I think that the handle snapped off..."

"Okay, well, I'll give it my best," Johan said.

"Not the most reassuring thing," Yvi said.

"Not the most reassuring case."

The boy cries out in pain as a trail of blood leaks from his wound.

"Okay, let's do this," Johan said, wasting no more time.

Ally looked close with a mixed feeling of fear and interest.

"God...Promise me you won't get stabbed like that. I couldn't imagine," Jace said, appearing beside her.

"It's not on my bucket list," she thinks back.

"I do not recommend it," the voice entered her thoughts again.

She looked over toward him, growing concern on her face. His eyes dart up to her and they're locked in a look of mutual confusion.

"So...that was you," Ally thinks.

"And here I thought I was just hallucinating. I—HKK" his eyes went wide as Johan made the first incision just above the base of the entry-point.

"Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck...hooooooooo fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck."

"Hey, you're doing good. I can see the end of it. You're going to be fine."

He tried to meet her stare again. The others' eyes were glued to the blade sliding out of his stomach. She stares at him and nodded slowly.

"C'mon. It's almost out."

"I've been around knives all my life. I used to be a chef in my settlement before this, you know? Never thought I'd catch one in the gut. I'm Felix, by the way."

"A chef, huh?" Ally thinks. "Then you definitely need to make it through this. We could always take in a new chef. My name's Ally."

The thought made her think back to Nassau. She'd talk this easily with the twins and...and...

"Who's Lilly?"

She shot him a glare—the humor gone from her face. "You stay out of there."

"Woah, sorry, sorry. I...I can't always control it. I'm like a radio sometimes. It's...why I got stabbed."

She looked at him, her worry lessens and she exhales slowly. "I'm sorry. I just...I try not to think about those things as much as it is, you caught me off guard."

"You're not the first. I am sorry."

At first she was unsure how much of a glimpse he got, but the tone he left on made her think it was more than she would have liked.

"Well, you're internally bleeding, but that much is to be expected. It's actually not as bad as I was thinking. You're going to have a shitty few weeks coming up, but I don't see why you can't make a full recovery. Then again, I'm not anywhere close to being in a professional setting to make that my official diagnosis. Just...don't be stupid and you should be fine."

"...sounds good to me," he coughs out, and he looked surprised at the hoarseness of his own voice.

"I'll say though, you took it well—thought you'd be a yeller."

"Guess I just wasn't focused on it much. Tunnel vision, you know?" He said.

He doesn't look at Ally, because it'd signal more obvious than anything else to everyone else in the room, but she knew it was pointed at her. Questions flooded her mind as the night progressed. She knew she was going to have to steal time to talk to him alone to figure out just how much he might know about those she's been fruitlessly searching so long for.

Not tonight, though. She was thinking too much about Nassau after her...what, mental connection? She hasn't even given herself the time to really react to the fact that someone like her made it through to the new world. Of course, it would stand to reason—the two people she had known that had abilities like this were...well, indisposed of would be one way of saying it.

Felix took the bed. That wasn't an argument in the slightest. She wasn't going to have him sleeping on the ground after what he'd been through. Rickshaw was hesitant to have him stay as well, but the feeling soon passed.

"Well, I understand you've got to take it easy, but if you're gonna stay here you're gonna have to work. If it ain't anything physical out of the gate that's fine. You can watch and pick up pointers for when you get up and move some more."

"That is...very kind of you," Felix said, a nervous laugh striding along. "I'll do my best to learn quickly."

Rickshaw eyed him suspicious for a moment and then walked across the room. Ally was lying on the ground investigating a large metal hunk that looked like it split off in ten different directions.

"I've looked at this thing from top to bottom. I've disassembled it, put it back together, pretty sure I've even taken it out for a drink," Ally said, flustered. "I still can't tell what this thing does."

"Have you tried turning it off and back on again?"

She side-eyes him a stern look, but she only finds a grin.

"You're incorrigible."

"You're thinking of it too laterally," Rickshaw said. "Think...what kind of use could a machine like this have?"

"It...sort of looks like one of those tiller things. You know, for farming? But I'm not sure why we'd be replacing them?"

A smile crosses Rickshaw's face. "You're almost there. It is for the farmers, yes, but it isn't replacing their tillers. It's for the swampland out on the edge of town—you know the marshy areas just past Bauten's shack?"

She has gone past them once before. When exploring the entirety of the community to get a lay of the land she shuddered at the thought of having to eventually expand past the marshlands. She's worked in enough swampy land back during the old community—she couldn't imagine it bringing back anything but terrible memories.

"Y-Yes..." Ally said, eliciting a concerned look from Felix.

"Stop." Ally thinks.

"Like I told you—like a radio. Can't control it sometimes."

"Well," Rickshaw interrupts his thoughts and draws both of their attention back to the machine. "If you got a few people to drag it you could probably operate it and cover some stretch of land over a day's work, probably wouldn't be too bad. Thing is, you'd need to stop every so often and toss in the nutrients. That's why we're gonna help them hoist it onto their pull "

"Nutrients? Without any crops?" Ally asked.

"Yep. The machine here'd be spinning all turbine style as it goes across the and. It's ripping up the ground underneath and spitting the nutrients underneath. These ain't just normal seed and feed you could pick up at any wally's back then. Grounds...different now.

"Almost...sour, right?" She remembers reading that in an old Stephen King novel a lifetime ago. She thinks it was Pet Sematary.

"Something close," Rickshaw said. "Not as nutritious for the plants as it used to be. We've got to nearly overload them to get 'em to stick the landing."

"I see. When do you think we'll have this one up and running?"

Another smile crossed his face, "Almost. We still need to fashion the connector. We'll need to weld it on, but that won't take us too long." He turned to Felix, "You might even be able to accomplish that one."

"If it'd help, sure thing," Felix said.

"Course it would. Would be some work for your arms there."

"Sounds good to me, maybe I could even try to stand? Get the legs moving and whatnot?"

"No, no you're not going to be doing that. Not tonight anyhow. Thing about taking a hit is to have the time to take the hit. Your body's young, but that also means it's fragile. It's not something you just come back swinging from the next day."

He sighs. "Yeah. I know. Just...feel like I could do more, y'know?"

"In due course. Now, you can help her polish the body here to get it looking nice. I need to go find us some scrap we can repurpose for the connector bit."

Finally, Ally and Felix are left alone.

"Who are you?" Was the first question she asked. She almost surprised herself with how quickly it came out, she moved to correct her intentions. "How long have you been able to read minds?"

"Well, coming right out of the gate. I guess I can't say I'm surprised, I had equally as many questions for you."

"I asked first," she said, impatient.

"I'm well aware. I've been able to do it for as long as I've been out here in the new world. Never much came up when I worked the line. People I ended up running with weren't the fondest of the idea of someone like me, though. I could tell right away if they knew they'd try to kill me or run me out some way or another."

"Leading to how we found you," Ally said.

"Right. No matter how hard one tried to hide their peculiarities, rumors have ways of spreading like a brushfire. Soon everyone seemed to know something was off about me, sooner still that they acted on their fears. I was tied up and beaten until I revealed what it truly was. Of course I held firm until they brought out the knives. I knew at that point no matter what I did or said I was at their whims. Thankfully, after they stabbed me the first time I started spouting off whatever I could clutch onto. It scared them enough that they questioned killing me. So, they decided to ditch me and let the elements take me."

"Pretty wild they dumped you so close to another settlement."

"Probably didn't cross their minds. Just wanted to get rid of me before anything bad happened to them."

Ally thought on this. These were people he'd been with since the start of the new world...how quickly they can let fear overtake them and nearly kill one of their own.

"That's my tale. It's not exorbitant or anything like that, but it's my own." He said. "What about you?"

Ally took up the rag by her side and applied some of the polish to one of the rotator blades. "Bit of a long story. Lot of it is still in the mental circus. I was involved in..." she began thinking of Nasseu. "...an incident at the school I used to go to. Someone I knew got killed and there was this...force...being? I'm not sure how I'd fully describe it If I'm being honest. They had powers unlike anything I've ever seen. They were like...and outsider intervening. Anyway, that's a long story to tell on a first meeting. I started...I don't know, noticing certain things I could do that I couldn't before. Telepathy seemed to be one of those things, but of course it was with people who were like me."

"So there was more than just you?"

"There were two, although I only communicated with one."

"You know where they are now?"

"Sore spot," Ally said. "Although...I am trying to find her."

"Ouch, okay, we can move off that topic. Got any plans here? Like," he moved his arms in a grand fashion. "...here?"

"Survive, mainly. Secondary course of action is to find out more about the Creatures of the Night."

"That what you're calling the...beings?"

Ally nodded. "There's more than one out there. I don't have a good feeling about them. I think they might be responsible for what happened to the world."

"Hm...odd indeed. What did it look like?"

"I...think it looked like a golden wolf. It didn't look like it was fully there, Like, almost smokey? But it could also like, enter people. If it did it could speak through them, their eyes would glow this reddish gold color."

"That's messed."

"It did that because it couldn't talk normally. At least, I couldn't understand it. The weirdest thing was how...almost friendly it seemed. Like, I wouldn't be so naive to believe everything it said, but I have to say, the entire incident was caused by my classmate. It was just trying to find the truth."

"Bit of an overarching take, though, isn't it? Bit vigilante."

"I guess so. And I don't wholly agree with how it turned out, but I don't...wholly disagree either. It's confusing, really."

"That is a lot to take in. If this were any other circumstance I don't think I'd even consider it..."

"Life is different, now," she said. And never more than now did she truly believe so.