Deathlands 090 - Prophecy by James Axler

Author:James Axler [Axler, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

FOR A MOMENT, Doc felt that he was back home again. The skies were blue with a smattering of white cotton that carried none of the taint that he was now so used to; rather, it had a purity and beauty the like of which he had not seen for many a year.

The land around him, as he stopped and looked, casting a gaze all around as though seeing for the first time, was lush and verdant—pasture with grazing horse and buffalo, trees waving in a distant breeze, the speckle of faraway birds in flight. It was as though the recent times were nothing but an insane nightmare from which he just awoken, fully refreshed.

He heard a cry from behind him and turned. It was a woman’s voice, and he expected to see his beloved Emily coming toward him, perhaps with the children playing happily around.

What he saw told him that this was not real. It may seem that way, but it was far from being concrete and actual. Doc was familiar with hallucination and madness: so much so that he was able to almost detach a part of his fractured mind and view from two angles. So, although everything seemed to be as real and as beautiful as the world he had so long ago left behind, he knew it was artifice because of the glaring anomaly that now confronted him. It was not his Emily who came toward him, but the vacuous blond Lori Quint, whose childlike demeanor had so enchanted him until she had bought the farm, and left him alone. Like all the others.

She was not dressed as he remembered her. Gone was the miniskirt, the high boots…gone, too, was the mane of blond hair. Still the color of ripe corn, it was now hacked short. She was dressed like the Pawnee woman that he had been around until…recently? How recently? That part of Doc’s brain that could detach started to wonder what was happening to him. A curiosity that was crushed rather than piqued when he looked down at himself for the first time and realized that he was dressed not in his usual frock coat and vest, but in skins and furs. He felt the side of his head; his hair was in long braids.

Still feeling outside the situation, he yet knew that he had spent all day farming, tending to the crop that was growing around him. And that his wife—he knew somehow that Lori was his wife—had come to fetch him.

“Good day, husband?” she asked. Her voice was the same as he remembered it, but her words sounded strange and out of character.

“Tolerable,” he answered. Ah, at least he was still himself. “What have you been doing, my dear, while I have been out here?”

“I have made your meal. Also fed and tended the horse you gave to me.”

Doc was aware of an irritation as she said that. For a moment he did not know where this feeling came from; then it seemed as though he could remember.

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