The above paragraph sums up nicely why I enjoy Aaron Dembski-Bowden's portrayal of Space Marines the most out of all the authors in the Black Library's repertoire. He makes them so inhuman yet so human at the same time it's nothing short of intriguing to read about them.

The writing in The Emperor's Gift is similar to what he has done in his Space Marine Battles novel, Helsreach, which to this day remains my favourite of the Battles novels (although supposedly Rynn's World is pretty great too, one which I have not read). A large part of the greatness seeps from the fact that the novel is written in first person, making lines such as that above more personal and interesting. But largely because Hyperion is a great character, too.

Space Marines struggle with few things, so it's funny to read about one struggling to comprehend humans.

I can say little about the story itself other than the fact that it is not your usual Bolter Porn. This is not a Space Marines Battles novel, and thank whatever pantheon of gods for that shit, because some of those that I have read were pretty terrible, while this piece of textual artistry is decent, to say the very least. It doesn't feel like a Warhammer 40k novel, and that's the best thing about it, or at least one of the best things about it. Perhaps because I actually know quite a bit of the lore, that I found what the Grey Knights were doing so interesting, but the other part is how the book is written. It is simply well done, the pacing could not be better. There are some points when you think, nonono, not a battle, give me something more interesting, and that's what happens. Don't get me wrong, battles can be pretty great, but after one has read the whole Horus Heresy, a myriad of space marines novels and another bunch of other novels, you tend to start looking for things that are fresh, and not descriptions of how things are blown apart. Although I still have a weak spot for horizontal storms of lead.

The length of the book is perfect, even if it is rather short. Any more and it would be unnecessarily drawn out, any less and it would be too short. I'm pretty sure this is meant to be a standalone novel, which is rather rare for black library, but it works. There is excellent closure and things never go quite as expected. For those who liked Helsreach you get to revisit it for a while, but not for too long, since Aaron is a heathen who knows that would be pretty redundant.

I got exactly what I expected from this book, an entertaining read filled with great writing and something completely different for a change.

And the Inquisition are some real fucking bastards.



9/10

CHAPTER 17

Morning paints the world in gold as we reach the end of our trek. Our wanderings have taken us before the very feet of the fortress. The shadow of its bulk surrounds us and a wind blows down its construction, so immense it seems to breed its own microclimate. Cooler air near it smells of old, stagnant stone, as though passing from an unseen cave system. I cannot see the tip of it as I gaze up, it seems to merge in dark unity with the sky. The gate barring our entry is titanic. Almost as wide as it is tall, standing inlaid with mosaic depictions and gothic symbols of an age forgotten.
There are places in this world where you can feel the pulse of history within the very space surrounding you. Places where you can taste the ancient wind borne to hidden knowledge left behind in a bygone time. This is one of those places, but also not. Here history waits laid out for you, etched into the very front gate and depicting secrets of forgotten eons. Each carving and epic figure upon the metal is inlaid with text. A language I had never heard a word of and can’t hope to understand. It feels that even when the language had been used, it wasn’t spoken. Its very syntax seems to suggest a language of secrets, of knowledge kept and guarded.
In the center of the gate, alloyed with it, there are two words; Illuminatus Arx. The ‘I’ alone is bigger than any gate I have seen, taller than ten men standing on top of one another.
“How do we get in?” I ask. “Where have you taken my friend’s father?”
“Illusions are a part of this world,” says Awir behind me. “Some would say our very world is an illusion.”
His words feel familiar and they pain me in a way I cannot explain in words. “Where is the man you have stolen?”
“Stolen?” asks Bain. “We have stolen nothing. He has come to us freely.”
“Where is he?”
No answer.
I have come to understand Awir likes to talk in riddles. But there is something in his voice. It sounds aged sure enough, old, yet bares a youthful vigor as though everything he says is something to be met with enthusiasm.
None of the others had so far spoken to me, save Awir and Bain. During their conversations, I’ve since been able to name them. Ezar, Unas, Ia, Huron and others whose names I have forgotten. They all sound alike, booming voices and clipped speech with little room for missed interpretation.
“You and your word-spirals, Awir,” says the one I have come to know as Ia. “You’ll tire the boy before he even gets to see the thing.”
For all intents and purposes, I am their prisoner. I do not feel immediately threatened, but something tells me they would not hesitate to end me.
“Loregar, do you dream?” asks Bain. His question surprises me. It comes as sudden as his turn to face me. The gate’s depictions match those of his armor. He is like a statue, unmoving and cast in the spire’s shadow. The gatekeeper.
“I dream,” I nod.
“What do you dream about?” This question… I have been asked before. It feels less of a coincidence that not only the question’s wording is the same, but the pronunciation of it as well.
Recollection sometimes hits you at the most inappropriate of times. A sudden clarity, an instant realization of truth and the subsequent feeling that you have known in tall along. You want to keep such a truth, grasp it, store it in your mind. But you forget… only to be reminded it later, probably at an equally inappropriate time. The time for my truth, however, is very much appropriate, it seems. It hits me and doesn’t let go, as though the mere words of Bain had somehow summoned it from where it had hidden itself, forgotten and out of reach. A recollection tingles its way over my skull. I remember a dream and it suddenly seems as though I had never dreamed of anything else.

A ripple and a sound, faces drawn into the sky. The sun-sphere shakes, sheds its crystal form into all themes of composition. Formations of infinite complexity spin out of simplicity, grind into all the corners of reality. A blue sound bursts out of nothing and vanishes back into nothing. Something plucks the cosmic string and the dance begins. Liars become truth-tellers and form music consisting of revelation and enlightenment. Shattered perceptions delete all reason as forms of pure vibration feed upon themselves, upon their own desires. The great serpent bites its tail, smelting the universe into a loop of fire and life, sin and desire, life and more fire. The Sun is born into a fierce union, coloring the sky with madness.  

The significance of the dream eludes me and its truth seems distant again.
“The past. Today you will dream of the future,” says Bain.
“Your mind is a conduit,” adds Awir.
They say no more and begin to walk ahead. It is Bain who disappears first. The gate is there, and he simply walks through it. There’s momentary disruption of image around the Templars as they move through, one at a time. They leave me behind, standing, staring, dumbfounded and baffled.
I move only when I feel Bain again, scraping around in my head. “Move.”
Light blinds me for a moment and I feel as though I have passed through a veil and into the very pages of history.
The hall is immense, lit by light streaming towards us from up ahead, silhouetting the thick shapes ahead of me. High pillars like in the times of the Greekians support a vaulted ceiling bearing depictions and writings much like those upon the gate, colored in fine detail. 
I remember the books father kept. Actually, it was just one book, worn out, with its pictures barely visible. But I remember the distinct pillars of stone, they had an air of history about them and had stuck in my mind.
“Our gates are ever open,” says Awir. “All it takes is the courage to enter them.”
“What happens to those who do?”
I didn’t really need to ask, for the answer lay at my feet. A path had been made between shriveled corpses and dried remains. I am met with empty eye sockets and gaping maws, teeth still white. They all have long fingernails and beards, some of those fingernails still on triggers and some of those beards graying. There are no wounds or signs of what had killed them.
“Courage to pass through the gate, and what then?” I ask. “Courage to die?”
“The right answer.” Bain’s words have a kind of malevolence to them. A finality; ‘Get this right, or join the corpses at your feet.’
“Where do the water and the waterfall meet?” he asks.
Again, the sense of fate. Inexorable. It is like a finger pointing away to some sight in the distance. You concentrate on the finger and lose view of the glory surrounding it. Fate is like that. Inexorable. You think about it and try to examine it and its destination, and you lose sight that such things are not truly the point. There are, however, definite moments in time where you feel the finger had been pointing towards. Where you find yourself there, in the very nexus of it, you can feel it. And a sense of wonder intermixes with a strange, mystic sensation of unreality.
I feel like I’ve known the question before I knew the answer, and knew the answer before I knew the question.
“They don’t meet, because they’ve never been apart. The two are one.”
Bain lunges towards me. His first punch throws me back and I crash into Huron who catches me in his hands. He pushes me away and back on my feet.
“Fight, Loregar. You are stronger,” I hear him, his voice is younger.
Bain’s thrusts and faints are expert. Each hit I attempt he seems to easily dodge only to land his own attack straight into my face. By the time he hits me for the fifth time, I can no longer hear the droning in my head. By the time he hits me for the seventh time, I can no longer feel the punches, rather, it feels like I am being punched without pause. The meaning of this is lost to me. All I can think of is his intent to kill me – with his fists no less. I see an opening and I take it.
“You are one with Bain,” Awir tells me on a private channel indicated by a visual cue on my retinal display. “Do not attempt to beat him, simply be him. Become him.”
Shut up! I grind my teeth.
I understand only when I realize an opening wasn’t an opening, but a trick. This time, the return punch throws me from my feet, an uppercut that echoes in the great hall as though a bell had been struck. It might have just been in my head.
I’m on the floor, a fist about to hammer down on me as Bain hangs in the air for the briefest moment. I kick him in the groin just before he lands on me. A low blow, but rules are not something one abides in an unprovoked attack. And whoever thinks a weak point shouldn’t be exploited in a fight has never been in a real one. Bain lands his blow as my own attack seems ignored, and I shield myself using my forearm. He staggers back. I see my chance and grab his arms, then put my helm to his with all my strength. A bad idea. Probably the worst I’ve had in a while. For a moment the world is black.
They say the world is full of wisdom and that fools yet die from the want of it. I had hoped something would stay with me, a lesson when my sight should return. But all I get with the return of my sight is a glimpse of Bain’s fist as he punches me in the face.
One step back, two, then another punch. I don’t remember getting on my feet. A third step back, a fourth, a punch intercepted. A fifth step back, a sixth forward, a punch delivered and blocked, another received in the gut and a third in the face. It seemed for every blow I half-land, I am awarded with two. Yet there are no lessons more well learned that those we learn in pain. Well, most of us at least, although such a notion would prove false should you look upon the state of the world. In any case, in the span of one breath – and my breathing is rapid indeed – I decide to give up for a time. I focus on defense. I meet every punch with a block, I move aside to every kick, I parry every backhanded swing of his massive arms. I do this until he no longer seems able to sustain his tempo, then land my own punch. His movements become slower after that, slower with each kick and slower still with each sweeping strike I manage to land. When a first, direct hit connects, hitting him full on, he falls on his ass and doesn’t get up for a while.
He grunts and slowly stands up, offers me a hand.
“Well fought.” He takes my right hand, plants his left into my forehead and I forget I exist.

 
A fusion of energies and a golden spiral. Its tendrils climb the sky and merge with the infinite ocean. Light breaks through from the creative source, illuminates the hidden passages of time and blends reality into a coherent whole. Vibrations of sound form colors and light up the universe. All things begin their spin, from mountains of liquid fire to the depths of granite oceans. Planets twirl into alloys of brutal, seemingly unbreakable force. Yet they break still, shatter to form new planes and moons forever in motion. Explosions mark the beginning of conscious existence, send out sleepless thoughts from their energetic centers. Beings emerge to entice reality with senses uncontrolled. Color hits their eyes and flesh feels the touch of cosmic dust. Winds speak and implant thoughts - new wonders within burning cognition. Cerebral flames paint the skies with projected images and ideas. Life takes on a different meaning for each mind. Matter becomes an illusion as beings grow and embrace a hive, a collective buzzing of opportunity and hidden spheres yet to be explored. The scepter spins in the grip of time, the pendulum shifts and slingshots from place to place into all places at once. Minds become omnipresent, neither here nor there, neither alive nor dead, but All, forever seeking refuge in all the pleasures of existence.


Shaking off remnants of the dream, I awake to a world where I am incased in a suit of armor pressing down upon me. It feels like dead weight and before its systems activate, I am panicking. The state of dread leaves me almost as soon as it had come. In my confusion, I had called upon Calyx, I had pictured her helping me, tearing the suit off with her bare hands. The brain can be weird like that. All the image did was remind me she is gone and that I’ll probably never see her again. But at least I have learned a lesson. That’s always good, right? The lesson was simple. You never stop until your opponent is down. Preferably dead. I am not dead, which is good at least.
“The day is not yet over,” says a familiar voice beside me. I turn to see Bain, his helm off, sitting on a chair. His hands rest on the arms of his seat. His face is lined with age and crested with a full set of grey hair. A beard runs down his armor to the point where I wonder how the hell he managed to put it all in that helm of his. Like the walls around him, Bain’s face is covered in writing, the ink upon his face is black.
“Are you alright?” another asks me, standing on the other side of my bed. His face is much younger, bright-eyed and full of cheek. But his face too is tattooed and darkened by ink.
“Ia will tend to you, teach you how to remove your armor. Then you will come meet me. Our time is running short. They are coming.”
“Who is coming?”
“Eat.”
This time, his words have no effect, as though his punches had knocked some sense into me, or out me. I don’t see any food. Bain gets up from his chair, picks up his helm and walks out of the room.
I take a moment to familiarize myself with the surroundings and realize there’s not much to familiarize with. A bed and two chairs surrounded by stonework walls and a gap where a door could have once been. The room is lit by a window on my right, its light cresting the bulk of Ia.
“Brute force, is it?”
It takes me a moment to realize he’s referring to the fight between me and Bain.
“It’s what the wasteland thought me,” I answer.
“I’m not sure brute force is what’ll help us in the coming fight. But it just might, you never know.” “What is the coming fight? What am I suppose to know that I don’t?”
“I think it best if you see it for yourself,” he says.
I eat better than I have eaten all my life. Ia brings me food I didn’t even know existed, with a claim that they ‘breed’ it in their vaults. Whatever the hell that means.
He leads me through areas of the fortress that look pristine. I have never seen such smooth surfaces. I’m sure not even blood would stick to it. We wade between passages no wider than a man, parsimonious light bathing us from each.
“You seem distracted,” says Ia. “Perhaps this place will help. In all likelihood it might just make it worse.” He flashes a smile.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You already have. But yes, you may” he smiles wider.
“They told me my friend’s father has come here by his own free will. Why? Why is he here? Where is he?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know.” I have no idea why, but I believe him. It must be his eyes.
“Will you help me find him?” I ask.
“I’ll do what I can.”
We arrive at the corridor’s end, having met none of the Templars.
“How many of you are here?” I ask.
“Three-hundred.”
We walk into a wide and tall area filled with shelves filled with more books than I have seen.
“You were right. I thinking this may prove a bigger distraction even,” I murmur.
Books have always fascinated me. There aren’t many left and those that are, remain jealously guarded by their keepers. I have once come across a tome that spoke of dragons and knights slaying them. A laughable idea. Within a safe, I once found one which read “Quantum Theory.” I understood none of its contents and managed to sell it for enough credit cards to last me a whole year. When leaving town the next day, I found the person who bought it dead, his grave a dumpster, his hand clutching a bloody page of the book. The page talked about probabilities and I suppose he never considered the probability of someone wanting the book more than he did.
The lighting within the library is poor and the titles of each book stand eaten by age. We are surrounded by bookshelves two times our height and a sense of age permeates our existence, the smell of old paper tickles my nostrils. The ceiling is lost in shadow. Ia leads me between what seems like two random bookshelves.
“I like this one,” he says and pulls out a small, brown-faced and yellow-paged book from a shelf about his height. The book rests on his outstretched palm as if it were some precious gem, one of a kind. “This book is the last one left,” he says. “It gives insight into our minds. Careful,” he pleads as I take it from him.
In golden, winding letters, it reads, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud’.
I flip the pages, I look, but am drawn to something else. Something catches my eye at the end of the corridor, behind Ia.
I walk to it. “What’s this?”
Ia’s footsteps follow mine.
“Mind bank,” he says. “The Ancients possessed many ways of placing books into your head. They could stream images on any surface, on what they called ‘screens’ and even directly into your mind.” 
“Show me.”



Chapter 1 Sample


Read the book here.

I'm somewhat annoying. Or rather, my mind is. Allow me to explain...

I love writing. I enjoy doing it and enjoy reading my own work when I feel like I've edited it down to something resembling proper (yeah right) form. However... there's something about the beast that is the first paragraph that always irks me. No matter how many times I read it, write it, reread it and rewrite it, it's never perfect. It always feels like there's something missing and I find myself perpetual hunting for a certain mythological creature called the perfect opening. I realize there's damn well no such thing, but I can't be the only one who has ever closed a book never to read it again, just because I didn't like the first few sentences??

Maybe it's because every time I see the word document again, those first lines are always there, staring me in the face. Challenge accepted! So I think about how to change them. Then consider rewriting them. Then doing it or staring at myself doing it yelling for me to stop. Then I'm probably taking a frustrated break and considering placing my hands in a fire so I could no longer change anything even if I wanted to...

The thing is, I always know there are better ways to start a book than what I'd written down, but by the time that feeling sets in, I already like what I've done enough not to want and change it (as it feels almost like I'm about to rearrange the face of my own kid with a sledgehammer), or I hate it enough to want to change it simply out of spite, out of sheer malice and contempt.

I'm currently writing something I've been wanting to write for a year but was bogged down by other projects, and while I've written roughly half by now, I always return to those first few sentences and can just feel my hairs slowly going greyer each time I do it.

As it is, I would love to hear someone else's (anyone's) opinion about this and how one might go beating the crap out of those first few sentences.

It’s funny how people have to die for a story to get interesting. At least that’s how it was for me and this particular tome; one I’ve wanted to read for a while but never seemed to get around to actually doing it. I regret that decision almost as much as I regret not buying the second part of the series along with the first.

Let me explain my opening statement a bit more in detail. While I thought the book was entertaining, it wasn’t really what I’d expected. The beginning was rather boring, and none of the characters really fascinated me in the least. But I kept reading and the previously mentioned trend of slight boredom persisted. The characters were ‘meh’, and the tale was somewhat mehy.

Then something else happened. I was hooked and I didn’t even know why. The truth is, nothing really happens in this book. Ok, that’s not entirely true, a lot of things happen, but nothing really that would make you go “wow, that just happened!” The Name of the Wind is simply this: A guy tells a scribe his story because he’s supposedly some kind of a legend. After some persuasion from the said scribe, or ‘Chronicler’ (who was coincidently the one person I found interesting at the beginning of the book) the guy tells his story. And it goes something like: His family was killed and he was poor and he wanted to go to the university. He later goes there and does stuff and discovers girls. That’s it. Basically. No really, that’s it. Does it sound interesting to you? If it does than you are not like me. If someone would have told me that before, I probably wouldn’t have bought it, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t enjoy reading it none the less!

One thing this book really shows is how people are inherently nice if you take just a little time to talk to them. I liked that a lot and soon enough I was rooting for Kvothe for reasons I can’t really begin to guess. Is it because his family and his troupe had been murdered? Is it because you too wish to know what the Chandrian are up to? Is it because you like the main character? I don’t know. It may as well be a combination of all of these things. It’s like Harry Potter, only different, and I realize I may have just spoken some heresy there, but really, that’s what it’s like. It’s pretty much the same formula, and who cares if it is when it works, eh?

I think it’s the writing that’s the chief culprit here. It’s good. It flows. It shows. And it strikes your heart strings enough times to make you care just a little bit, just enough. And Patrick is a bastard for doing such cruel things to me. But hey, I brought it on myself for plunging into the pages of this beast.

Hmmm... I just realized another reason why I kept reading... because I had expected something REAL and truly remarkable to happen and so kept at it. But nothing did and that was a tad disappointing, to tell you the truth. Hopefully next time.


8/10

CHAPTER 1

“The world’s dead, and we killed it,” says the Bartender.
Cliché bastard, I think and gag on my second shot of Absinth. If I hadn’t paid for the damn thing I would’ve been convinced someone was trying to poison me.
“Not dead yet,” I say to him. “Not while we’re still dying in it.”
He smirks at that. Smirks the way men do when they don’t agree but have nothing to say. The so-called barkeep had deluded my drink with purified water and made the point, “It’ll cost you extrah,” quite vigorously. The cost of it didn’t matter, I had enough creditcards left to squander and wished for something which may take my mind off the ache in my feet. The alcohol never helped with that; when I drink enough of it, I realize the ache is actually in my head. I throw a card in the bartender’s outstretched hand. He checks the stamping on it with his good eye, the other looking past my shoulder. He sees the Mastercard logo and flashes his crooked teeth into a grin, then jams the piece of plastic in his coat pocket. I can’t help but imagine how easy it would be to rob the guy blind.
Apparently, he had come across a cache of the green, alcoholic spirit a while ago and had decided, of all things, to open a bar. I find it ironic how the only establishment of such kind serves drinks which look more radioactive than the sky. I toss him two more creditcards, both belonging to some long gone, local bank and tell him to bring me a bottle of water instead. He inspects each of the cards and nods.
Despite how it may seem, the bits of plastic are not easy to come by.
I had run into a bit of luck a few weeks back and the lady herself seemed to look upon me with grace as she lead me to a dead body. I had always thought the bitch to be a morbid one, but when I had taken note of what the dead currier had been hauling, my heart leapt. The brown bag was full of creditcards of all manner and design. Some were almost fully bleached. Whatever horde of fingers had groped them before my own, made sure the logos remained visible, intact. For the most part at least, so that value could be extrapolated from each. Mastercard and VISA cards held the most worth and could be traded handsomely for all manner of things. They were also the most difficult to obtain. I am told there had once been other ways to pay. But who would use something as fragile as paper must have never expected the world to burn.
I shift my eyes from the drink before me and look around the makeshift bar. I came to understand – for the guy sitting on my left wouldn’t shut up – that this place was as much an inn as anything else. Built inside a run-down and crumbling building – the only building for miles which still held any semblance of shape – the inn sported shady faces and people that, with their manner and posture, looked more like wet dogs than human beings. I knew each of them had a story to tell. I wasn’t interested in any of them. What I was after was the rumor that a bank, or more precisely its vault, still awaited intact, somewhere in this town. Buried under a landslide of some kind, the vault had evidently been waiting for anyone brave or stupid enough to try and dig through all the rubble to get to its presumably buried treasure. Some had already tried and, as the rumor went, a tunnel had been dug more than half-way to it. Why the digging had stopped no one knew, or as I have found to be the case in most instances like these, they simply didn’t want to say. Everyone I had talked to about the subject had a hopeful expression in their eyes. Someone even told me what they were all thinking, “That’s right, boi,” I took offense at being called boy despite being taller than anyone I’ve ever met, “you go and take that vault and we’ll be waiting for your body when you fail. That coat looks mighty fine.” I understand that desire.
I sip some water and look at the bottle. This thirst… it is a test like so many before. A test I am growing more tired of with each passing day. Thirst, my friends, is an ever-present thing, an unyielding reminder that I truly am alive in this world gone to shit and ruin.
It takes all of my resolve not to jug down the whole bottle.
The midday sun hammers on, its crude outline hiding behind the radioactive dust groping the air. A white sheen reflects off the building’s walls around me, chafing them with brightness.
The part of the “inn” where the rooms are located still has some roof left, but where the bar stands and where I sit, the building above looks like it had been bitten off by some vast beast. I smell more of the wind than I feel, and here, sitting behind the bar on top of a hill overlooking the wastes of what had once been a town with a population of no more than fifteen thousand, I think, “How did I end up here?” I wish someone could make me disappear.
How the war happened I have no idea. I wasn’t alive back then to witness the spectacle. I am what they call a rad-child. Born after the world had already gone to hell. I never got to see the planet as it once was. Blackened trees, broken ruins and broken people are all I know. Once in a while, I come across a picture or a half-burned photo of someone holding a fish or standing behind a beautiful vista. Such things are all that remind me rivers once snaked over the soil and that all manner of green had flourished in this world. A world that might as well have been another planet. The Ancients have built many wonders, but what they apparently failed to build was something to protect them from themselves. We forgot most things they had to teach, but what we didn’t forget and apparently never will, is how to kill each other.
The year lay somewhere in the thousands. Never did I discover the actual date, since everyone I ran into gave me a different one. Time flows strangely in places. The year was a number between some millennium most people wished they were never born in. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Nothing would change for me, or anyone else, if I knew the actual date. I found dates important only when they hold meaning, and in this world, everything was as pointless as the people living in it. But my life isn’t. I feel there are things I must do, and this is what drives me.
Most that I have met couldn’t even tell me the season, since everything remained perpetually veiled in a golden twilight. Only in times between noon and three o’clock, a light behind the clouds comes that may resemble what the sun had once been. And if the date proved elusive, I know one thing, at least. I know I am not the only one who would give much to have its rays touch my face.
I had been told it would take generations still for humans to see the stars again. And to travel beyond and into the dark… probably never again. The Ancients have done it, I am told. Escaped. I never believed that. But if they did, the bastards are probably laughing down at us from their accursed vessels.
As for my story, I came from far up north; from a land they once called Norway. I had trekked for half my life, and found no one like me. Everyone else stayed put, no one wished to go places, see things. In their words, “It is all wasteland, boi, head for the sea down south if you’re intent on seeing the world, I hear good life can still be found there.” I imagined none of them even knew what ‘a good life’ might look like…
My name is not important, you wouldn't like it anyway, nor do I wish to remember my life when people still called me by name, but I am told people like me, even though we are rare, are called nomads. Never content in one place, always searching for a home. I liked the title the first I heard it and, in a strange, inexplicable way, it spoke to me, so I kept it. Some of the old gizzers I’ve come across who were kind enough to offer me shelter – which I figured had mostly been due the fact I carried an MP5 – had told me I look like a Viking.
As for my journey and its purpose, it is as much a spiritual search as it is a material one. Lately, however, circumstances have forced me to shift my priorities to a more basic kind of being, one centered around survival and the procuring of credicards. I loathe such a base existence, yet find I cannot escape the inevitability of it.
The first time I looked at myself in the mirror was when I was eighteen years old. I imagine my beard is even longer now. The old guy with whom I have spent a weekend with, helping him rebuild his shack – an act for which he was more grateful and happy than I had ever seen anyone since – had told me people of my kind are a rare sight.
About a week ago, I had passed a hill and its winding, half crumbled road to a town whose name everyone seemed to have forgotten. It took me almost a year to cross over the Eastern Alpines and arrive into a sub-alpine country, which I was certain had once been beautiful to gaze upon. I traversed its valleys, hunting what I could, making sure that every shot from my MP5 hit a bird or some animal which I could cook over a fire. They all tasted terrible. Everything did. I only had one and a half cartridges of ammunition left, and always slept with the weapon hugged over my chest.
Sometimes I dreamt the gun was a woman.
Many had told me, “That’s no way to live, son.” But it felt perfectly natural to me. I wouldn’t trade it for their static existence even for a whole sack of credicards. Perhaps I would trade it for a woman. But who would want me?
I halt in my introspective musings as a pang blips inside my head.
I like to think I had developed a sense about when someone is watching me. Such things tend to happen when you’re perpetually paranoid for most of your life.
A look at the bar’s far end reveals a man wearing a heavy overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat, looking, staring at me underneath the brim of it. His jaw and nose are covered by a brown rag stretching over his face in a downward triangle tied behind his head. His coat looks like something that would look better on me.
I elbow the chap to my left. His Central-Engleshe is bad, but good enough for me to make sense of his jabber.
“Who is that?” I ask, nodding to the guy on the other side of the bar.
“Dey call em Ty,” he grumbles, his face like something men should by all rights die from, “com in town last monthsabout, lookin’ for something. The vault is wut iz after.”
Movement catches my attention and I turn my head. Ty stands up and walks over to me. He doesn’t look at me or acknowledges me. He simply sits down on the stool to my right, the wood crackling under his weight, his leather coat swishing.
“I hear you’re here for the vault,” he says, his voice gruff but not wholly unpleasant, muted behind the rag on his face.
I figured it wouldn’t do much to try and deny it. I have been asking about the vault around town for a good part of the week. Not the best way of doing things incognito, if I’m honest. I nod, “Aye.”
“That’s a fine firearm you got there,” he notes, looking straight ahead. He subtly lifts the right side of his jacket to reveal a silenced pistol hidden underneath the heavy coat. No way of knowing if the gun actually has any bullets, or if it’s just for show. In any event, if the gesture was intended to intimidate, it had failed miserably. I snort a laugh. “I think you may have mistaken me for someone who cares about your weapon,” I say.
His reply comes laced with a subtle layer of venom. “Just a precaution, friend. I am not without protection should you decide to do something.”
“We have a thing in common,” I say.
“Good, then perhaps I can interest you in a quiet place to talk.”
“About what?” I ask.
“A partnership.”
I see I have met someone like me.
“You wish a fellow wanderer then?” I ask.
He laughs at that. It is a coarse but sincere thing. “I think whoever coined that phrase had never wandered in an apocalyptic wasteland full of people who wish to kill you and take your gun.”