The next morning, Sebastian was recuffed and brought back into the van. This time, at least, they let him go unblindfolded.
There were three vans total, six people in each. They were all quite similar, rough in manner and build, wearing black fatigues and armor vests. Like the day before, they ignored him except to order him into one place or another. Any delay was quickly rectified by a gun to the back.
As they prepared to leave, Sebastian kept an eye out for the person who had visited him last night, not entirely convinced she was real.
Just as they were about to pull back onto the highway, at last Sebastian caught a glimpse of her. In the daylight, she seemed no more remarkable than any of his other captors: broad-shouldered, medium skinned, unsmiling. As he watched, she spoke a few words to the man beside her, then closed her eyes, asleep.
So the strange encounter had not been a dream then. Sebastian settled in to wait.
The view from the window had long since lost any interest to him. Endless fields of corn had filled the landscape for several hours and had every appearance of continuing for several hours more. The radio, too, had fizzled away to static. His captors, too, grew antsy and bored.
Sebastian shifted uncomfortably. The new wound on his leg itched and stung. He was still wearing his torn blanket bandages from the previous night. They had done a poor job of stopping the bleeding, but his captors had either not noticed or not cared.
The irritation built up slowly, spreading along avenues of newly healed cuts and old scars until every one of Sebastian's cuts burned beneath their bandages. He gripped hard at his knees as the sensation welled up at the base of his neck.
"Hey, hey, there's something wrong with him."
Blood welled up at the newly opened wound at the top of his spine. The driver swore and radioed the others to say they were pulling over.
Someone's spare uniform was sacrificed to keep blood off the car seats. Sebastian was hastily dumped onto the asphalt while others went to find a first aid kit.
The other two vans pulled up behind them as someone pressed a bandage into Sebastian's neck.
"What's going on?" the driver of the other van demanded, hopping out.
"He just started bleeding out of nowhere!" said the man with a hand on Sebastian's back. At the driver's skeptical look, "Swear to god, we didn't touch him."
The other members of the van murmured repeats of the oath.
"Just get it cleaned up and let's get back on the road. We're nearly there."
The driver made to go back into his van, but the back slid open. The person from last night, Erika, stepped out.
"There's trouble," she said. She threw the driver a pair of binoculars. He looked down the road, in the direction they had been headed.
Sebastian did the same. All he could see was the suggestion of a shimmer of heat over the asphalt, some black specks on the horizon.
The driver swore. "Shit, how did they know we'd be here?"
"Is it that hospital?"
"No, dumbass. We shot the fucking doctor. Do you think some nurses are gonna chase us half way across the country? It's probably that damned Foundation again. Probably after the kid,” he said, gesturing to Sebastian. "Now come on. Take him and get off the road. You, go with them." He nodded at Erika, who climbed into the van without another word.
They took the van and ran it off the road into the cornfield. Sebastian’s stomach plummeted as they dropped from the asphalt down into the mud of the field. Rows of plants thwacked into the windshield as they drove blindly into the cornfield.
They only got a little ways away when the evening was cut with the crack of gunfire. The man in the passenger seat demanded to know what was going on over the radio while the driver, white knuckled, steered them further into the cornfield.
Static on the radio. They continued in tense silence. Another crackle of gunfire exploded in the air above them. Some of the men started to mutter quiet prayers under their breath.
Sebastian looked over to Erika. She was wearing an expression of intense concentration, as if listening to something in the distance.
No one was prepared when they hit a ditch and veered wildly into the mud.
Sebastian’s stomach churned as the van teetered dangerously on two wheels. Just as he thought for sure they would roll over, the car slammed back down into the field, lodging itself deep into the muddy earth.
The wheels spun them deeper into the mud. The driver swore and jumped out. The rest followed.
Someone yanked Sebastian out of the car and dragged him down into the drainage ditch where they were taking cover.
The man in the passenger's seat was whispering frantically for some sort of response from the other vans, but there was only silence.
Another bout of gunfire made them all flinch. Sebastian wasn't sure if it was his imagination or if it was closer this time.
The driver had taken command and was trying to regroup the others, though Sebastian could hear the uncertainty in his voice.
"No one panic! The others can take care of the Foundation. But just in case, we will take defensive positions. Find cover and..."
Sebastian reached to the back of his neck, still damp with blood. He tried to feel out what was written there but only in making himself wince as he reopened the wounds.
Most of the men were crowded around their leader, still listening to his orders. One of them wandered off back towards the direction they had come. It was Erika.
"They're coming," he heard her say quietly. Then louder, "They'll be coming from the north and west."
The rest of the group stopped to listen.
"The majority are coming from the road, through the path we took. Twelve men, more or less. A smaller group is flanking us from the west. Six-ish."
Sebastian looked down the direction where she had wandered, but saw nothing but rows of corn. How did she know?
"What about ours?"
"They got past them. They might catch the ones coming from the north, but they don't know about the group in the west."
The leader's face hardened. "We’ll have to rely on them to hold them off. Line up along the trench and catch the westward group."
The men dispersed to carry out his orders. Erika moved to take her place in the line but Sebastian pulled her aside.
"What does it say, on my back?"
"Now's not the time," she said, pushing past him.
"No, it's important. What does it say?"
She stopped, looked down and read through the smear of blood.
"Neither shall bring freedom, neither shall bring death."
She looked at Sebastian oddly, as if she wanted to ask him a question, but the driver was issuing orders and there were more pressing matters at hand.
As they assembled, readying weapons and preparing for battle, Sebastian stepped backwards in the trench.
Normally he paid the words on his skin little attention, but occasionally they could be somewhat useful. If Sebastian was reading this one right, neither outcome of this battle would matter, neither to his freedom or his well being. If he was wrong, well, then, that didn’t change the fact it was still a prime opportunity to escape. Just as Sebastian was about to climb over the bank of the trench, Erika spun around to see him clamber out away from them.
“Hey!”
The man beside her turned. “You said he wouldn’t run--”
Before he could finish his sentence, he collapsed with a ringing bang, dead.
Like shadows, their enemies were emerging from between the stalks of corn. Sebastian didn't stick around to see the inevitable carnage. He disappeared into the field behind them.
He ran through the cornfields, barely noticing as the thick leaves struck at his face and shoulders. His bare feet dug into the soft ground and he fell hard, unable to catch himself with his hands cuffed. His open wounds stung against the mud, but he forced himself to his feet and began to run again.
Behind him gunfire continued, cracking like lightning. Though exhaustion and pain caught up to him quickly, he refused to let his steps falter. Then, suddenly, it was silent. Sebastian fell to his knees. He heaved for breath, trying to hear any signs of pursuers over the thundering of his heart. But there was nothing. Sebastian caught his breath. He stood.
It was hard to say exactly how far he'd run. But hopefully it was far enough that the cornfields would do the rest.
It wasn't his best escape plan. The handcuffs were a problem, and so were the lack of shoes. In earlier years, fresh wounds would have been a good excuse to delay any grabs for freedom, but Sebastian had long since run out of patience to wait for another opportunity.
All this was workable, he thought. If he could find a phone, then...
A wave of rustles pulsed through the corn field. Sebastian looked back in the direction he had come. He couldn’t tell if he could smell blood on the wind or if it was only his imagination. Probably it was just his own.
Sebastian began to walk. Eventually if he continued in this direction he should find the road. From there, civilization, and then freedom.
A small part of his mind whispered doubts into his ear. It was miles and miles since they had passed as much as a gas station on the drive here. And they had said that their base was nearby. Any passing cars were more likely to belong to his captors than not.
Infection, the voice whispered. Blood loss. Hunger, thirst, exposure.
Sebastian ignored it. He’d deal with those problems when they arose.
Sebastian walked further. The sun began to sink beneath the horizon. He should have hit the road by now, but there was no sign of it. His feet grew numb, then achy again. It had been a good hour since he'd escaped. By now they must think he'd been captured by the Foundation, or whatever they had called that other group. Maybe they'd left. Maybe it was better to retrace his footsteps and find the road that way.
Sebastian was still weighing the benefits of each when a noise in the cornfield caught his attention. A rustling, the rhythmic snapping of corn stalks. It was coming from the same direction he had.
That made his decision for him. He began to run.
"Wait!" A voice called. Female. Probably that one mercenary then. She had been kind enough, but not enough to persuade him to stay. He forced his protesting legs to push him farther through the cornfields.
"If you don't stop, I'll shoot," she warned, voice further back now. Sebastian wasn't concerned. The cornfield was the perfect cover--there was no way for her to know where he was.
But, as he recalled, there was no way for her to have known where the armed men were coming from either--
An explosion, and then a strike of lightning pain in his thigh. His leg immediately gave way underneath him and he stumbled to the ground. The bullet had passed straight through his thigh, right through the message written only this morning.
Erika emerged from the cornrows, holstering her gun. Sebastian writhed on the ground, eyes clouded with pain. He heard someone screaming, realized it was him. He swallowed the screams, heaving for breath.
"Are you an idiot?" she said, standing over him. "You'll die out here. Infection's already set in." She rolled him over his side, toeing his thigh. He tried and failed to muffle his agony. She flinched. "Rolling around in the dirt won't help. Neither does shooting you, I suppose."
She knelt beside him to stanch the bleeding.
"You were only a few hundred feet from the road, too. You know, you didn’t care when we took you from Dambel House. I didn’t think you’d run. But,” she said, glancing at the wounds on his back, “I suppose that one prison is the same as any other.”
Sebastian was quickly losing consciousness as his body shuddered into shock. He barely noticed as she tightened her belt around his legs and wrapped his hands around the ends.
“Hold on tight,” she said. “I’ll be back with the others soon. Don’t pass out.”
She paused a moment to make sure his grip did not loosen before standing and leaving him alone to grit through the pain.
“I’ve got him, but he’s in bad shape. Patch him up quick, there’s someone waiting for him.”
Thunder echoed dully in his ears. Some of the crashes reverberated, resolving slowly into what his muddled mind eventually recognized as words. But others remained as great roars, trapped high in the sky above him.
“Wake him up properly. He hasn’t got long.”
Someone slapped him awake. The movement shocked him into wakefulness, but the sensation itself was dull and far away. Sebastian could not hear the sound of rain.
“The thunder,” he murmured. “Do you hear it too?”
“It’ll have to be good enough. Get him to the prophet, quick.”
Gravel skittered beneath his feet as he was dragged outside. He watched his legs dangle loosely beneath him, one splinted and wrapped heavily with bandages. Each touch to the ground beneath him made it convulse with agony, but it seemed to pass through him, leaving no trace or memory.
But the wounds on his thigh, on his neck and back burned like fire.
Beneath the roar of thunder, the rumble of voices, the grating sounds of footsteps on the broken stone, Sebastian’s mind caved. He nodded from consciousness and into a blankness that was almost but not quite like sleep.
They shook him awake again, and they were indoors. They were in a darkened room, blue with evening light. Sebastian was cold, but found he could not shiver.
There was a man lying on the bed in the corner of the room. Lightning lit the small room and Sebastian could see the hair extend from his skull like white wires. His eyes bulged in dark hollows beneath his brow. If not for the rolling puffs of vapor from his labored breaths, Sebastian would have thought that death had already taken him.
His finger, like leather stretched over bone, beckoned closer. Sebastian was dragged to his bedside and made to hang limply over the man’s skull-like face. His eyes rolled wildly in their sockets to find Sebastian’s.
The plumes of his breath grew tall and thin, accompanied by slow and strained pants. A dying man’s laugh.
“You tried to run, did you? But she caught you, didn’t she? That’s how you catch a runner--set a runner.”
The old man’s voice was a maddeningly thin whisper, fading in and out of hearing, losing itself among the distant sounds of thunder.
“Who are you?” Sebastian murmured. His lips wouldn't move, as sluggish as his mind.
“I was young once,” he said. In the darkness, the center of his eyes were huge, hollow pits. “But even then I knew I was not to play a part in the great unfolding of fate. But I thought I might bear witness--that I might guide it.
“But now I am old--dying. I have guided, but I will not witness. Instead, some young, ignorant, unwilling , thing has taken my place!”
His fingers grasped limply, too weak to exercise the old man’s rage.
“I don’t want to be here,” Sebastian tried to say. “Let me go.” His voice left his throat in a strangled whisper, too much like the old man’s.
“It’s not me you have to beg,” he cackled. “No mortal soul can set you free. The roots of fate are wound tightly ‘round you, and will not wither ‘til after the bloom.” The pits in the center of his eyes grew. “‘Til its petals fall into the rot.”
“Please,” said Sebastian. “I just want to go home.”
“Not until after the storm. Not until after its thunder, its fall, its flood. Not until your duty is done! Do you hear that?” The old man’s arms twitched, his fingers shook. If he had had the strength, he might have grabbed Sebastian's shoulders. Thunder crashed a single syllable, illuminating the madness in his eyes. “Thunder now--but where is the rain?”
A sharp pain struck Sebastian’s shoulder. He writhed in the guard’s grasp. A single drop of blood rolled from his shoulder. To Sebastian’s passive horror, the man’s sunken chest thrust itself off its bed, propelling the head upwards behind it. The blood splattered on his lips, and a tongue, gray and dry, stole it into the man’s mouth. Gleefully, his eyes spun over to the wound.
“‘...waiting for the seeds to settle, for one to reach for the skies...’ Good, good.” he said, wheezing. Slowly, his eyes began to close. “There will be time later for answers.”
His captors held him over the man’s body until no more breaths fogged the cold air. Sebastian gasped, realizing that he had slowed his breathing along to the dying man’s. The guards pulled him upright. The blood rushed from his head, and at long last he fell blissfully unconscious.