“There’s not much time. He won’t be happy when he learns I saved you.”
“How? How did you save me?”
The disembodied voice again ignored his inquiry. “You are the Chronicler.”
It was a statement, not a question. “Chronicler?”
“He’s coming.” The voice was full of urgency now, as if the speaker were already taking flight. “You must find Falcon. Only Falcon can stop him.”
“Wait!” Dodge’s restraint was slipping. “You have to tell me who you are.”
The last whisper was barely audible: “Find Falcon.”
“Who are you?”
Then from the depths of the darkness, incandescent energy of the lightest shade of violet, began to burn and a different voice, one Dodge knew all too well, cut through the still. “Who am I, intruder? I am that which you fear the most.”
CHAPTER 14
GOD IN THE MACHINE
“It is well that you grovel before your god.” The hooded figure glided closer to where Dodge still lay on his belly.
Suddenly feeling very defiant, Dodge tried to rise, but a swift blow from the sparkling staff hammered him against the floor. He remained there, clinging to consciousness, and still trying to put the pieces together.
He won’t be happy when he learns I saved you…
Who? Who saved me? Where did he go?
A battered metal canteen lay on the silvery floor, mere inches from his face. He absently reached out to touch it, but a booted foot knocked it out of reach. So that much of it was real.
“I know you, intruder. You are the Chronicler.”
Chronicler? He called me that, too.
“You are the keeper of Captain Falcon’s victories. I have studied these writings. You would make me believe that this Falcon is a worthy adversary. Why then does he continue to cower behind his minions?”
Dodge tried to rise again, and again was forced down. His spirit however refused to kneel. “You poor fool. You’re afraid of a pulp magazine character. A figment of my imagination.”
The dark god pondered this as he paced a circle around Dodge. “Your words have no meaning. Where is Falcon?”
“There is no Falcon. He’s a bedtime story; a myth.”
“You do not lie well Chronicler. If Falcon is only a myth, why do his minions hunt me?”
Dodge rolled onto his back, and then tried to spring to his feet, but the hooded one was there and struck him down yet again.
You must find Falcon. Only Falcon can stop him.
The plea of his anonymous benefactor was as much a mockery as the torment meted out by this villain. Find Falcon? Zane Falcon was just a man; Dodge’s father would have said about him: “He puts his pants on one leg at a time, same as you.”
“What’s so special about Falcon? Why are you so afraid of him?”
“Afraid!” A sudden sphere of light erased Dodge’s vision as surely as had the darkness. “Falcon is the one who cowers in the darkness. He will not even fight me to save his king. This is America’s champion?”
Dodge grimaced as he defiantly stared up into the brilliance. “You didn’t answer my question.”
The light from the staff gradually dimmed. “You don’t know where he is either. He hides, even from his chronicler.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Dodge repeated, successfully getting to his feet. “What do you want?”
The light continued to shrink. Dodge caught a glimpse of the dark god, no longer hooded, his robe thrown back to reveal a very human figure. The face was that of a wild prophet, clean-shaven, but with an unkempt mane of white hair. His eyes blazed with supernatural intensity, but below the sharp jut of his chin, he seemed supernaturally ordinary; a skid row Rasputin. He wore a tattered shirt and heavy denim trousers, hardly the attire of a mythic deity. Then Dodge saw the talisman lashed to his very ordinary leather belt and the final piece of the puzzle slipped into place.
Abruptly the light vanished altogether and Dodge was left alone in the maddening dark.
He gradually reconstructed the events missing from his memory. Concern for his friends was uppermost; he vividly remembered fixing the exoskeletons in place, but had Molly been successful in landing the big aircraft? Images of a fiery crash flooded his brain, and he tried to force himself to think about something else.
His solitary imprisonment did not last long. It seemed only a few minutes had passed when a wedge-shaped line of illumination split the unseen walls of his cell. As the light grew larger, becoming a pie shaped gap in what he now realized was the flying disc he had first glimpsed above the skies of Washington DC, he saw a green line of distant trees on the horizon. A few feet below was a field of scorched barren earth. The gap continued to widen as the strange metal peeled back, and Dodge was faced with the choice of retreating or jumping down to the ground. He chose the latter and hopped lightly down to the trampled cinders. He knew where he was even before he glimpsed the towering baobab trees.
As the flying disc reduced to almost nothing, Dodge became aware of a gathered throng of pirates. He saw Marten, towering above the rest, and at the head of the assemblage was the mask wearing figure he had earlier assumed to be the pirate king Johannes Krieger. The group shifted to surround him, and while no weapons were bared, they collectively exuded menace. As he turned to take in the situation, he found the dark god, hooded once more, standing directly behind him.
Krieger’s mask hid his scowl, but could not conceal his irritation when he spoke. “Why have you returned?”
“I was forced to sacrifice my aircraft. I require the one you captured from the priest.”
“The Hell you say. That plane is worth a lot of money to me.”
“I will not barter with the likes of you. The gift I have given you is of greater value than any amount of gold.” As he spoke, the god seemed to swell from beneath his robes, an angry volcano about to erupt. He thrust out the staff, once more wreathed in a halo of static electricity.
Krieger kept his defiant posture, but he knew when to cut his losses. “Take the plane. But if you darken my doorstep again, your threats will not save you.”
The man in the cowl ignored Krieger’s posturing. “This is Falcon’s chronicler. I have no further use for him, but he may be of some value as a hostage. He is an American of some notoriety.”
Krieger regarded Dodge with eyes barely visible through the slits in his carved demon face, then the turned to one of his lieutenants. “Put him with the others.”
Dodge got a glimpse of his former captor striding toward the amphibious biplane floating in the harborage, before a quartet of rough men hustled him into one of the fortress-like hollowed trees.
The pirates were needlessly rough with him, shoving him forward so hard that he stumbled and randomly hitting or kicking him for their own amusement. To his own amazement, Dodge felt none of the dread he imagined they hoped to instill. While he knew better than to think that he was invincible, his recent experiences, walking in the shoes of his literary creation, had taken the edge off the fear that so often shocked and paralyzed the unready. He did not resist his captors, but let their punishment wash over him like an ocean wave. He could almost picture the Padre doing the same thing; weathering the storm of abuse, while focusing his energies on the task of planning an escape. He observed everything — memorized the guards’ appearance and mannerisms. Which among them seemed just a little bit slower than the rest, or physically weaker? Which were too large and powerful to be dealt with man-to-man? He drew a mental map of the compound, noting places where he might find temporary refuge or lose, if only briefly, a pursuer. And he thought about where he would go once he escaped the fortress…not if, when.