"Lucifer is not the Devil."
The sky was a dark hue of purple. The first birds were starting to chirp. Not many of them, but that just made each voice stand out more clearly.
"What?"
A strange hum hung in the air. Not a sound, but a vibration. An energy. It felt personal, it felt very close, not like something that was carried on the dusty winds that clung to the barren waste that spread in every direction. It made the skin crawl, like a tuning fork struck on the side of a table. A hum. A vibration. An energy.
"No, really. It's a common misinterpretation of scripture. The name Lucifer refers to the morning star, the luminous one, but the person it calls out is the king of Babylon."
The man sitting there, on the rock, spouting these odd words, looked old. Not in years, but in body. An old man in a young body, the true age inside wearing down the skin on its outside. A lot of it was in his eyes. Green, with a speck of brown, but more than that, tired folds around them. Someone who had seen too much too soon.
"Is this... what is this?"
Raising a hand felt like lifting a boulder. The left one floated as it rose, swerving precariously around like a drunken fly. The right one rose like it was raised by a crane, slow, heavy, but steady.
"Well, it's just a theory, I guess. But the passage is literally aimed at the arrogance of the Babylonian king, for thinking himself to be... Uhm, are you okay there, buddy?"
Simple question, difficult answer. Everything felt both right and wrong, all at the same time.
"These are not my hands."
They were dark hands, tanned skin worn darker by phycial labor. They seemed completely wrong, the fingers to long, the palms too wide. From the rock nearby, the other man rose to his feet, slowly, almost carefully, as if he feared falling over. In truth, he seemed to more be looking, his eyes piercing through the dawn like beams of light.
"Well, they do seem to be very attached to you. Get it, attached, because..."
He smiled. A very friendly smile, warm, welcoming, as he gestured with his finger. A friend. He seemed like a friend, a close one at that. There were nobody else around, just the rocks and their shadows, the latter growing visibly shorter as the sun rose from below its horizon. He wore simple clothes, the man. A long, robe-like coat in dull colors, brown and grey with specks of black. Old, like he was inside his body. A few torn patches here and there, sewn up or closed with bits of wire.
"Where are we?"
His friendly smile faded, lips turning to concern, eyes squinting as his brows narrowed with worry.
"Six point twenty-two east," he answered, looking like that was a perfectly logical thing to say.
"What? I'm not sure..."
Slowly, the man knelt down, looking, head swaying from side to side for new perspectives. His hands felt cold against the forehead as he checked for a fever.
"Look, you did hit your head a bit hard, and I am starting to worry..."
"I did?"
He nodded, slowly, full of concern. There was something in his eyes, a deeper kindness than to be expected from a regular acquaintance. The frinedliness seemed genuine. He seemed to truly care.
"Do you remember your name?"
Thought leapt back and forth. Images, sounds, some of them in the form of letters or even numbers. None of them seemed to fit the shape of the question asked.
"No."
To no surprise at all, the concern in his eyes grew deeper. A sigh left him, seemingly against his better judgment, because he cut it off before it could fully finish being formed. A couple of patches on his shoulders looked like markers, or labels of some kind. Insignias that symbolized something completely unclear.
"Thor. Your name is Thor. Do you remember me?"
Like a wooden board in a hurricane, the name swept around and around amongst thoughts. It felt right, but also somehow wrong.
"Thor? Like the norse god of thunder?"
His eyes suddenly became less piercing, looking like he was trying to be serious while holding back a laugh.
"Yes. You are the living incarnation of the ancient god of thunder."
It took him a few seconds to realize that the joke was completely lost on the audience. This time, his sigh was deliberate, and was allowed to drag all the way to its finish.
"It's a name. Your name is Thor. I am Conrad. We went out here to check on a distress call, and you slipped and fell."
"Distress call? Is anyone hurt?"
Shaking his head, the man, Conrad, stood up again, stretching his knees a bit like an old man rising from a long sit in his chair.
"Turned out to be a minor crash, just dumb kids racing their bikes. Only one hurt seems to be you."
Blood. Dried blood. It felt like a bit of dirt on the forehead, like the crust of dried up mudsplatter. Not a lot of it, but it was there.
"Am I okay?"
In a surprising turn, the man laughed, although he immediately tried to suppress it. It seemed to be less a laugh of humor and more one of relief, however odd that thought might have been.
"No, clearly not, but you're getting there. We'll take you by the clinic on our way home."
With those words, he strolled over to something parked out of sight. Turning to look revealed two oblong boxes, edges smoothed to a soft round shape, various doodads adorning their surface. He, Conrad, walked casually over to one and swung his leg over it, sitting down on the thing and making it move slightly at his weight.
"We'll go slow. You remember how to drive, right?"
Stepping up to the thing, a barrage of images came flooding in. Memories. Knowledge. The skills related to this. A bike. More precisely, an old glider. White and blue patterns designated it a medical vehicle. The insignia on the side of its nose labeled it an emergency vehicle. It was the same insignia on Conrad's coat.
"I think it might be coming back to me as we speak."
Conrad nodded, still looking over in concern, a halfway fake smile on his lips as he tried to downplay his worries. As he started up the engine, his glider rose a bit off the ground and its support legs folded in. One leg folded poorly, sticking out slightly from its place in the underside of the vehicle, but he seemed to not care about that, as if it was a known issue that he had learned to live with. Placing his feet in the stirrups, he made it move slowly forwards before looking over again.
The machine was a strange assembly of little lights and dials, or so it seemed. The knowledge about using it, how to start it up and control it, stumbled through brain cells, trying to fit into an order that made sense and was useful. It failed, remaining a mess of thoughts and images in there. But enough of it shone through clearly. Enough to make the thing work.
As dawn grew and the purple was exchanged for red, which in turn began to hint at a dusty blue, the landscape floated by in a strange mix of haste and slow motion. The gliders slipped through the terrain with ease, taking low flight between large stones and over low hills, hugging the ground without ever touching it directly. Like boats through an invisible lake, they banked and swerved softly, keeping the speed low. Conrad stayed just a bit ahead, looking over again and again, making sure there were no more mishaps. There weren't.
Far ahead, over the approaching hills, it finally rose. Reaching into the sky, the imposing walls cut the horizon in two, the dusty blue daylight creeping over the top as the light brown fortification stood unchanged like a castle wall. The Seventh Eastern Enclave, as its official title read. People never called it that, though. Its true name was crudely marked on the old road signs bolted to anything that would go into the barren dirt around it, signs stolen from the ruins of the world that was now just a memory. One sign passed by in the distance as the gliders aimed for the nearest entry post. On the sign, the name of some long forgotten town had been erased, painted over with angry strokes, but beneath it, only part of the state name had been changed, turning the welcome greeting for New Jersey into New Jericho.
"How's the head?"
Slightly warped, Conrad's voice came in mostly clear through the headset inside the helmet. He was still a bit ahead, but kept looking over his shoulder, to the point that it would make anyone worried if he really kept his eyes on where he was going, too!
"Still a bit rustled, but otherwise doing fine!"
It was a truth with some modifications to it. Thoughts and memories still came up jumbled, some of them feeling like they should have been put away into some mental deep storage long ago. Everything still felt weird, wrong, misaligned. But everything that needed to seemed to work.
Even before they needed to, the doors in the massive wall reacted to the approaching gliders, cracking apart and sliding open to allow entry. Markings around the doors told a story, making it clear that this was not a path for common people to enter the city. This was official business only, an integral part of city operations, meant for emergencies and important work.
Lights came on as the gliders slowed to a halt inside the large parking structure. Vehicles of many different sizes and shapes lined the walls, some on the floor, some elevated above the ground to save space or let people move to and fro beneath. There was a strange mix of boarding area and mechanic's garage about it, as if everything existed to do both jobs at once, causing anyone inside to mix and mingle with people that were clearly doing very different work. The moment Conrad parked his glider, two people just casually started to look it over, before he had even gotten off the thing.
"We need to get you to Otis," he said, walking over. There was a serious tone to his voice, something he did not want to say, somethng hidden that worried him. He was fondlong his helmet in an unusual manner, giving his fingers something to do while he spoke. Finally having said what he had to say, he flipped the switch inside the helmet and it folded apart, then folded together into a small package, easy to store in his left underarm pocket.
"Why? I'm fine now."
The look in his eyes told a different story. As the world danced its frantic dance of people doing jobs with hasty precision, he stood still, eyes locked, barely a muscle moving.
"You hit your head hard. We both know that the worst patient is a doctor, so let's not fall into the trap of thinking that saving lives makes us immortal."
Sounds of whirring machines and interlocking components snapping open or shut filled the air, little sparks coloring the carefully crafted lighting in the place with streaks of sometimes blue, sometimes yellow. What he said made sense. It was easier to see the foolishness of others than the folly of oneself, especially when dealing with uncomfortable topics. He was thinking straight, being pragmatic, rational. He usually was.
The walk to the in-house medic was a short one, but not an easy one. Saving people from danger meant stepping into danger oneself, and the risks were painted on the faces, and even moreso on the bodies, of those in the internal medical wing. Broken bones, slashed skin, lost limbs. Room after room had field medics undergoing treatment or dealing with injuries in one way or another. The other medics knew the place all too well, most of them having visited friends and colleagues there while they got better, or while they waited and never did. A reminder of mortality, of how fleeting life could be.
"Thor Eccleston," said the attending doctor as the door closed shut. The short man looked up from his screen pad, trying to figure out whom to talk to. Conrad pointed.
"Him. He took a hard hit to the head out in the badlands, seemed... confused... afterwards."
No name tag. The short man could have removed it himself. Many of the medical staff hated being called by their name by patients. It felt too personal. This man seemed like someone who wanted to keep everything detached and professional. Without much fanfare, he took a small device from his pocket and pointed it like binoculars.
"Am I okay?"
Having the little looking device pointed at the forehead felt awkward, somehow intrusive without being physically intruded upon. The man seemed to not care much about that aspect of the procedure, simply keeping it pointed as he spoke.
"Seems okay. A little better than okay, actually."
"Better how?"
He finally put it away, taking out his screen pad instead and making some hidden notes, no doubt adding whatever the little looking device recorded to the file.
"The scan shows high activity in you brain. Like you're thinking a lot. I'd say that is a good thing, wouldn't you?"
There was an air of impatience to his voice, like the whole thing was bordering on becoming a waste of time. As he got the notes in order, he walked over to his desk chair again, snapping the screen pad into a grip on the desk, which seemed to connect it to his entire workspace.
"So am I cleared to go home?"
A casual look of bewilderment filled his eyes as he looked up from his desk.
"Did I ever tell you to stay?"
With Conrad looking on, clearly a bit upset at the casual dismissal, the man sat down and returned to his report, although it was hard to imagine he had much to put in it, considering the quick examination.
"You seem disappointed?"
Conrad shrugged at the question while leaving the room. All the way out, he kept looking back, as if expecting the doctor to suddenly add something important to the verdict.
"Do you remember falling, Thor? Out in the wastes, do you remember before and after you slipped?"
It should have been an easy question to answer. Yes or no. Remember or not. But thoughts fell over one another to push through, thoughts that had nothing to do with anything, or so it seemed at the time. A chaotic mess of memories, all vying for attention, not one of them caring to explain why.
"No. All I remember is you talking about... what was it, something religious? Something about the Devil?"
His eyes grew darker, uncomfortable. There was worry in them, a lot of it, but he tried to pretend that this was not the case. That he was calm. That everything was fine.
"Yeah. you said you could hear someone calling for you. Then you walked off, and when I found you, face down in the dust, you were talking about things that sounded very religious. I just quoted that old nugget of wisdom to snap you back."
The hallway had come to an end. The arrival bay, and all the offices and the great machine keeping it running, were left behind. The place was now open, a small plaza, emergency personnel walking back and forth, eating, talking, trying to put their work behind them for a few precious minutes. A young man in a fairly new uniform with a cut on it that had been hastily repaired, not yet given the full treatment to hide the damage. An older woman, no insignia on her shoulder, meaning she did office work, carrying her lunch on a tray, careful not to trip or bump into anyone. One man with several insignia and a lifetime of challenges marked across his face, having a very intense talk with one slightly younger than him. All people, all just living there.
"I thought I heard something. A voice, on the wind. Speaking in riddles."
"Hearing voices is not a good thing, Thor," he stated, looking nervously around for someone who might have overheard.
"Not voices. A voice. Singular."
A pause crept in, Conrad apparently needing a moment to ponder the new information. His eyes were still betraying a great deal of worry, although he still tried to keep that hidden.
"What did that voice... say?"
Hearing the question made something light up, some neural connection, brain cells talking to brain cells, reminding each other of what they had known and now needed to know again. It was buried deep, somewhere inside and behind flashes of the wasteland, glimpses of something beyond them, something unknown and yet somehow fmiliar.
"Come."
