When Jessie left Lakota, he didn’t go back to the lodge, people knew where to find him there and he didn’t want to be found. If Bastilles boy had tracked him down his enemies could too. He wanted to be left alone and he was getting tired of the snow. He thought he might go back down south and spend his retirement on the beach.
The remnants of the Anubis Cult were still up in Canada and they had grown big again. They had strongholds dotted all across Canada and were slowly expanding their influence. They weren’t attacking other cites but they took what they wanted and it would take everyone banding together to stop them. That hadn’t happened yet and probably wouldn’t.
He saw airships tethered at the airfield and learned that Takeo and his Hell Drivers had given up running the roads when the fuel went bad and the asphalt started buckling. Now they delivered supplies by dirigible. It wasn’t as fast but the slow-moving zeppelins were a lot more dependable than the wheezing old supply convoys.
He traded his truck for a good river canoe and gave Bobbie three to Slippery Jim. He was better known as Mr. James Jones now, the Governor of the city-state of Lakota.
He asked about Doug, the boy he’d escaped high school detention with but no one had ever heard of him. Even Eliza had no record of him in her spreadsheets.
This world was close, very close, but not the same one he’d left.
Jessie disappeared in the early morning fog coming off the river and there was no one to watch him go.
Years passed as he wandered further and further south. He had another sailboat for a time but it broke up during a storm on a sandbar in the Bahamas chain. He lived alone on a small island that had once been a rich man’s private paradise. He became known as the hermit. He knew women occasionally but nothing lasted very long. He didn’t go into the fishing village for supplies very often but when he did, he always had interesting ship wreck treasure to trade. He was venerated and legends grew around him. He adopted the people as his own and was savage in his fury when they were threatened by slavers or others who came to rob or plunder.
It became a custom to slip over to his island in the night and leave gifts on his dock. Sometimes with requests, sometimes as thanks for good fortune. He was ageless and could do things young men couldn’t accomplish. Sometimes when he paddled over to the town he would stay for a few days and help where he could. Occasionally he would pay someone a visit, a bully or a drunk who liked to beat his wife or children, but mostly he bent his back and helped with construction projects. Sometimes when he was a few bottles deep into the local rum he would crush a coconut with his bare hands or stick his face in the lobster tank and stay under longer, much longer than their best diver.
He had been able to hold his breath for long minutes since he had the injection but he’d trained himself over the years to hold it longer. He could dive deep and stay down for eight or nine minutes.
Pirates and raiders learned to avoid the chain of islands unless they came peaceably to trade or resupply.
More years passed and when Jessie thought his time should be over, he should be old and aching and decrepit, he kept on living. Everyone he knew died. He watched village children grow up, grow old and be buried. The serum had made him more than human and the healing pods had removed any imperfections, any traces of cancer or disease.
He was content and the islands were a safe haven. Traders brought news of the world and he learned the new Confederation of States had grown from a hundred thousand survivors to a few million. The big walled cities and towers were still where most of the population dwelled and two million wasn’t very many but humans weren’t on the edge of extinction anymore. Civilization hadn’t been able to get back to where it was before the fall, not even close. It had been a century and a half and the wars that had happened between city states had been a constant once supplies became scarce. Nobody was making sports shoes or two-ply toilet paper or ink pens anymore. His fathers’ dream of pulling all the walled cities together and rebuilding better than before never happened. Greed and corruption found their home again in the hallowed halls of government. Knowledge was lost and the world slipped back into feudal strongholds with alliances of convenience between cities. Monarchies and fiefdoms replaced a democratic form of governance. In most places it was dangerous to travel very far from the fortified cities unless you were well armed and with a strong group.
This wasn’t one of the better futures he had seen but it wasn’t one of the worst, either.
50
Jessie + Maddy
In his one hundred and sixtieth year she came walking up the shell path leading from the beach. The men in the outrigger canoe that delivered her bowed to Jessie then paddled away quickly and didn’t look back.
She looked exactly like he remembered. Blonde hair at the roots, black hanging down her back. Pale skin and emerald eyes. The three scars across her cheek were present and her smile was hesitant. Maddy hadn’t aged a day. Her clothes were well worn, her gear well used. They looked weary but she was as fresh as the day they met.
He smiled a broad, toothless grin and waved her up to sit in the shade, to get out of the sun. He hobbled
