SCAR
This time it wasn’t a dream. Jamie was sure of that much. There was no sea and no island, no seven foot tall man waiting to deliver a cryptic message. And anyway, the world he now found himself in was too real. He wasn’t just seeing it: he could feel it and smell it too. And it was cold. He rubbed his hands together and found himself shivering. It wasn’t possible to feel cold in dreams – was it?
He looked up. Wherever he was, it certainly wasn’t Nevada. The desert sky had been an intense blue by day, the deepest black with a scattering of stars by night. The sky here was a strange mixture of colours, as if someone had spilled a dozen different pots of paint – but it was predominantly grey and red with dense, writhing clouds and no sign of any sun. Jamie took in the ancient trees, which could have been carved out of stone rather than wood; the wild, swaying grass; the twisted rock formations. Not only was he not in Nevada, he wasn’t even in America. Even the breeze was wrong: slow and sluggish and smelling of cinders, wet mud and… something else.
Where was he?
He tried to remember what had happened. He had been standing in the back of a truck which had managed to break through the prison fence, but then he had been shot. He remembered the searing pain as the bullet entered his back, just next to his shoulder. He had felt his legs fail him and had collapsed onto the floor of the truck. That was all. He had thought he’d heard someone shouting, but then the darkness had closed in.
Until now.
He looked around and saw that he was surrounded by corpses. There were dozens of them, lying broken and twisted as if some unstoppable force had scythed through and killed them all in the same instant. With a growing sense of horror, Jamie stumbled to his feet and limped over to the nearest. They were all men, dressed in the same shades of brown and grey. Soldiers. He could see that now. But not modern ones, not like the soldiers he had seen on the TV news, waving and putting their thumbs up on their way to some faraway war.
These men were wearing strange clothes: long jackets that came down to their knees and loose-fitting trousers. Some were hooded, the dark material sweeping round their heads and over their shoulders. They didn’t seem to have any guns. Instead they’d been armed with swords and shields, but even these were like nothing he had ever seen before. The shields were small and round with a single spike sticking out so they could be used either for defence or to stab anyone who came close. The swords were different shapes: some straight, some curving, some with multiple blades. There were arrows all around but they were made of metal, not wood, and with some sort of black leaves taking the place of feathers.
They had all been mutilated. Some were almost unrecognizable as human beings. As the smell of the freshly spilled blood rose in his nostrils, Jamie turned and threw up, then staggered away, desperate to hide himself, to try and make sense of what he was seeing.
He had woken up near a ruined building perched on a hill. It loomed high above him, built out of red bricks and shaped like a giant thumb with a curving terrace where the nail should have been. There was a wooden door hanging off its hinges and, inside, a spiral staircase leading up from what had once been a circular entrance hall. The fortress – for that was surely what it was – had recently been set on fire. Parts of it were still smouldering and it was obvious that the men in front of him had died trying to defend it.
Still nauseous and disorientated, Jamie stumbled over the rubble until he reached the entrance, resting his hand against the door frame. He winced. The wood was too hot to touch. Rubbing his palm, he continued round the back of the building, away from the dead bodies. He found a patch of grass and sat down, forcing himself to keep control. His heart was beating twice as fast as it should have been. There was a foul taste in his mouth and his head was spinning. He wanted to be sick again but there was nothing left in his stomach.
It was now that he realized he was no longer wearing his own clothes. Someone had re-dressed him in a coarsely woven grey shirt that was buttoned up to the neck without a collar. There was a leather belt outside the shirt, above his waist. His feet were bare. He looked very much like all the dead men around him.
Except he was alive.
Or was he? It suddenly occurred to him that he might have been killed trying to escape from Silent Creek and that this might be the result. Jamie had read bits of the Bible. He’d been to church a few times. Marcie had forced it all on him and Scott as part of their home-schooling. He knew about heaven and hell, although he’d never believed in either of them. Now he wondered if maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe this was hell. There were no flames and no devils with horns, but hellish was exactly the word to describe where he was right now. This could be the place where bad people went after Judgment Day.
But he knew it wasn’t true.
He reached behind him and tried to find the place where the bullet had entered his back. But there was no sign of any wound, and even as he moved he knew he wouldn’t find one. He wasn’t in pain. It was as if the gunshot had never happened.
“I’m alive!” He whispered the words to himself as if hearing them could somehow prove them to be true. He turned his hands towards his face and flexed his fingers. They obeyed him. His stomach felt hollow and his throat was raw, but otherwise he was fine.
So if this wasn’t a dream and he wasn’t dead, could he be suffering some sort of hallucination? He’d seen that sort of thing on TV, in science-fiction programmes. A woman in a car accident hits her head and wakes up somewhere weird. She thinks it’s real, but in fact she’s just imagining it and she’s really in a coma in a hospital bed. That was more likely. Jamie lowered his hands and gazed around him again. The great tower did not look like a hallucination. There was one way to make sure. He gritted his teeth, counted to three and slammed his fist into the brickwork. He yelled out loud. It hurt! He looked down and saw blood on his knuckles. Well, surely that had to prove something. He swore quietly to himself and licked the wound.
Was it possible that he had been knocked unconscious on the way out of the prison? Could it be that Colton Banes or Max Koring had captured him again and brought him here as a punishment? No. That didn’t work either, because “here” was too different. The bullet wound had gone. And what about all these dead bodies, lying there in their strange clothes? Some sort of war had taken place. And he had just woken up on the losing side.
There was no simple explanation. Jamie realized that he had to accept the situation as it was and try to make the best of it. After all, his entire life had been completely insane, from the day he’d been abandoned in a cardboard box and left on the edge of Lake Tahoe to the time he’d found himself being chased across America for two crimes he hadn’t committed. He was a freak. A mind-reader. He’d learned to live with all of that, so why not this? Somehow, in some impossible way, he had been transported to another place… maybe even another planet. And it seemed that he was on his own, the only living person for perhaps miles around. He could stay here, cowering in the corner, or he could move on.
There was no choice really. It was time to go.
He wiped his mouth on his arm, then stood and began to make his way down the hill. The further he went, the more bodies littered his path, until he found himself stepping over them, doing his best to avoid treading on them while at the same time trying not to look too closely. The wounds were too horrible.
The battlefield stretched on all the way down to the bottom of the hill and beyond. Jamie saw more broken swords and shields. He came upon a young, fair-haired man pinned to a tree by a spear that had gone straight through him. The man was holding some sort of flag – a blue five-pointed star in a circle set against a white background. Jamie began to understand. This was like one of those battles he had seen at the movies. All these dead men could have been warriors. But who had they been fighting? Their enemies, whoever they were, had been utterly ruthless. It was possible that they had taken prisoners, but they had left nobody alive on the field.
Jamie looked further down the hill. The field stretched on towards the horizon, which formed an almost invisible line between the darkening sky and the grass. Even though he had moved away from the fortress, the smell of burning was growing stronger and he realized that the clouds were actually smoke, that something huge – a town or a city – had burned a short while ago and that although the fire might now be out, it had left a pall that had smothered the sky. If so, this battle was probably one of many. And the carnage might stretch on for miles.
He came to a muddy lane that gave him a choice of two directions, although neither of them had much to offer. Jamie was tempted to continue across open country. He might be safer away from the beaten track. After all, there was a victorious army somewhere in the area and he didn’t want to go blundering into it until he knew which side he was meant to be on.
