Blaze (The High-Born Epic) Read online

  There was one pair of overalls hanging in it.

  He’d hoped to hold on to them until he could make a good trade for them, but that was gone now. He swiftly changed into them. Harold shook his head as he pulled and tugged at them. He hadn’t worn them in almost two years. He managed to get them on, but the bottoms were just below his knees, and the sides were ready to tear.

  “They’ll have to do until Aunt Nean can make me some more or until I can trade for another pair. I’ll never hear the end of this.”

  He didn’t have a clue as to what he was going to tell her had happened to his other overalls. While he was waiting on the others, he lay down on his mattress and looked at the picture of his parents. He wondered who they were, and whether or not they would be proud of him and what he had just done. How did I do that? Harold wondered. He closed his eyes and laid there for a moment.

  The next thing he knew Ollie was shaking him awake.

  “Sarah and Scott already left, but she told me to tell you she said ‘bye.’”

  “I needed to talk to her before she left,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Cooper replied as he walked into the room. “Her and Scott will be at Colonel Foxx’s speech tonight.”

  “Oh, I forgot that was tonight,” Harold replied as he yawned. “Y’all wake me up when it’s time for supper.”

  He turned away from them and closed his eyes.

  Just as Harold started to dream, he heard Aunt Nean calling him. He hadn’t been asleep for very long, but he felt somewhat refreshed. He walked into the kitchen to the smell of baking cornbread and boiling turnips. He thought he smelled ham too.

  “Scott Smithee is the most loose-headed young ‘un I’ve ever seen in my life, Harold,” Aunt Nean said.

  “Why?” Harold asked while his heart beat fast. “What did he do?”

  “That young ‘un was running around like a lunatic, blabberin’ on about tiger-men and fire-men,” she shook her head. “He was swingin’ that infernal stick of his like they weren’t nobody around, and makin’ all kind of fire noises. He nearly hit me and a half-dozen other town folk with it while he was running down the street hollerin’. I’m so glad that he didn’t hit poor old Judy, ‘cause he nearly did. He’d have killed that old woman. And his poor sister, Sarah, she was just a’ cryin’ comin’ down that road. I felt so sorry for her. I reckon she was cryin’ ‘cause she knew her fool brother was a pure idiot. I reckon that somebody went and told Willie that his boy had done lost his mind, because he showed up, and busted the seat of Scott’s britches, just like that crazy young ‘un needed.”

  Harold just looked up at the ceiling, hoping that Scott hadn’t said anything.

  “Did he calm down?” Harold asked.

  “Looked to me like he did,” Aunt Nean replied.

  “What else was he sayin’?” Harold asked, but he was almost afraid to ask.

  “Nothin’, except that craziness he always blabbers about those tiger-men,” Aunt Nean said as she eyed Harold. “Why, what happened at the river?”

  Does she know? Harold thought.

  “Him and Coop just played, and then we played with them too. Me and Sarah, that is,” Harold finally answered.

  “Well,” Aunt Nean said. “If he don’t quit acting like Jim’s dog when it’s off its leash, I don’t know if I’ll let Cooper play with him anymore.”

  “Ahhh,” Harold sighed. “He’s just a young ‘un, Aunt Nean.”

  She thought for a moment as she stirred the pot of boiling turnips.

  “Yeah,” she paused. “Coop does really like him, so maybe I’ll give him another chance.”

  It was bothering Harold why she’d even been uptown, “Where did you go?”

  “I took Ollie’s old dress to Phil,” she replied. “I could tell you were upset about Maggie, and I wanted her to have something to wear.”

  Harold smiled, “Thank you, Aunt Nean.” He paused. “What did Phil think about it?”

  “He wasn’t home. So I left it just inside his door,” she said.

  Harold’s heart sank. Phil and Maggie should have been at home. Phil may have seen what happened. Harold thought.

  “He’ll probably like it,” Harold said and tried to hide his nervousness.

  “I’m sure he will,” Aunt Nean said. “Cooper! Ollie! Time to eat!”

  “Aunt Nean,” Harold said. “You’re a great cook and all, but I’m glad that we’re getting our rations tonight, ‘cause I’m about ready for something other than all these turnips.”

  “Me too, sweetie,” she replied with a smile. “Me too.”

  Supper went well. Cooper and Ollie acted well enough that Aunt Nean didn’t seem suspicious about anything. She was usually pretty good at catching anything funny, but she seemed fine. When they finished supper, they cleaned the kitchen and washed off at the well. Then, as a family, they walked toward the town circle for the weekly address and the monthly Vista.

  As they made way down the dirt road, Scape padded along beside them in his typical nervous fashion. Harold looked down the road ahead of them and saw that it was filling up with people. All of them were heading towards the town circle and the Kristall. As they passed many of the houses, people were walking out of their doors onto their porches. Even the older folks, and sick young ‘uns were filing into the road. Harold had heard that Colonel Foxx was serious about attendance to the weekly speeches. The town folk said that he had made some examples of people who didn’t show up many years ago. Harold had even seen people with pneumonia come to the meetings.

  Before long, the entire road in front of them was full of Foxx Hole’s subjects making their way to the circle.

  Chapter 6

  About half of the entire village was in the circle now. At the twelve points where the roads intersected the town circle stood six High-Born soldiers, three on each side of the road. So there were 72 soldiers total. In each of the twelve squads, two of the soldiers stood on either side of the road’s end. These two were holding up a rectangular piece of something that looked like glass.

  One time, a few years earlier, Harold was pretty sure that he’d heard a guard call it a data-pane. As people walked by it, he could see a lot of small green boxes make their face bigger on the reverse side of the data-pane. Green text would flash and then the box that had recorded them would seek out another person. It was very fast; in fact, it seemed like it could record dozens of people all at the same time, and then dozens more the very next second. It would’ve taken a mad rush of people to get by the data-panes and not be recorded.

  On either side of each profiler were two more guards, machine guns at the ready. They always seemed grouchy to Harold, and sometimes gave people a light push if they got too far out of line. The squads were funneling the incoming flow of people into a relatively narrow line as they entered the town circle.

  High-Born soldiers were almost completely covered in a dull, metallic armor, and their helmets had a tinted visor that slid up and down as needed. The armor had been designed to fight at night, and it did not reflect light. It gave them a very dark and deadly look. The only spots on them that weren’t completely covered were their joints, but the armor was fashioned in such a way that it often hid the joints when the soldier moved in a certain way. All High-Born were large. Most were well over six and half feet tall, and many of the upper ranks towered over seven feet, and Harold had heard that many High-Born elite were over eight feet tall. Most of these guards were in between six and a half feet to seven feet tall, and the guns they carried looked like they weighed as much as a grown child. The profilers also had guns, but their weapons were dangling by their slings.

  Harold walked through the narrow point and tried to remain casual. To his relief, the guards gave him no special attention, and just kept waving more people into the circle. As the town circle continued to fill, Harold looked for Sarah. He looked around the circle several times, but didn’t see her. Something in his peripheral vision caught his attention.

&
nbsp; Phil.

  He was standing there staring at him and he had a very serious look on his face. Maggie was standing by him holding his hand. She was wearing Ollie’s old dress and her hair was bouncing up and down as she playfully moved her head from side to side. Phil lightly tugged on her hand and she looked up at him. He pointed at Harold.

  Maggie saw Harold and when her eyes met his, she grinned widely. Phil motioned for her to go to Harold.

  She ran up to him, “Do eww ‘ike my dwess?” She held out the sides, and looked down at them.

  Harold looked at Phil, and noticed that he nodded. Then, he looked back at Maggie.

  “I do like it,” Harold said as he bent over, careful not to tear his own overalls. “It is very pretty.”

  “I ‘ike it too,” Maggie’s dark hair bobbed, and her blue eyes lit up. “I fink it ith vewy pwetty too.”

  She looked back at her father.

  “And,” she looked up at Harold, cocking her head to the side. “Fank eww for my new dwess.”

  “You’re welcome, sweetie,” Harold said as he rubbed her head.

  Phil walked up to Harold, and extended his hand. Harold shook it in return.

  “Y’all young ‘uns have fun at the river today?” Phil slyly grinned as he looked Harold in the eyes.

  “Yes, sir. We sure did,” Harold replied, trying to keep his voice steady.

  “Cooper and Scott were sure makin’ a bunch of racket down there this afternoon,” Phil said. “You should tell them boys that they ought not make all that noise about tiger-men, wolf-men, and...” Phil paused. “And fire-men.”

  Harold’s heart skipped a beat.

  Phil clapped Harold on the arm and said, “These High-Born folk don’t like racket such as that,” Phil winked and walked away with Maggie in tow.

  Phil leaned down and whispered something in Maggie’s ear.

  Maggie turned, ran to Harold, and gave him a hug as she said, “Bye, Hawold. Fank you.”

  He smiled and said, “Bye, sweetie.”

  Harold looked around. If Phil does know something, then I think he’s on my side. The High-Born were noted for giving lavish rewards to those with useful information about dissenters. It had been so long since there had been any talk of resistance that Harold couldn’t even recall if he’d even heard any in his lifetime. Aunt Nean had told him that many years ago, the person who had been killed for trying to learn Calculus often talked about fighting the High-Born. Ever since his death, no one had said a word in defiance of the High-Born.

  Harold sauntered around for a few minutes, walking to and fro in the ever-increasing crowd of villagers. Eventually, he saw Sarah, Mr. Willie, Mrs. Annie-Jane, and Scott. Scott looked like he’d been crying, but he saw Harold and his eyes lit up. He waved at Harold and ran to him.

  “Hey, Fire-Man,” he whispered into his ear. “I swear that your secret identity is safe with me.”

  Scott winked at him.

  “Okay, Tiger-Man,” Harold winked back. “You have got to be calm from now on, okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” Scott walked away with his finger over his lips.

  Harold waved at Sarah, and she smiled and waved back, but quickly turned her head. He walked over to her.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she replied, but avoided eye contact.

  “I forgot to pick up those nails,” he said. “You think I can get them after Colonel Foxx’s speech tonight?”

  “I’m sure that you can,” she replied. “I’m tired and I’m just going home as soon as the Vista is over. My dad can take you.”

  Harold took a deep breath.

  “Fine,” he said, trying to clear the sudden lump in his throat. “I’ll ask him.”

  Sarah made eye contact, and he thought they looked a little misty. She wiped her nose and turned and walked into the crowd.

  As she started talking to another one of the girls in the crowd, the humming of a High-Born gunship and the rush of air behind it brushed across the crowd. Harold looked up and saw Colonel Foxx’s transport come to a hover in the center of the circle. It always amazed Harold at how quiet it was because despite its size, it didn’t make a lot of wind or noise. It had a pointed nose section and several rail cannons underneath its wings and rocket launchers too. Off to his right, he saw Scape lied down and put his ears over his eyes.

  Harold had heard that the gunship was used mainly to fight ground forces and that it wasn’t designed to take on air targets. Sometimes, after Colonel Foxx gave a speech, he would order the crew to engage its stealth drive and it would all but disappear. He would say that it was for the children, and generally, they seemed to like it. But Harold was beginning to suspect that it was to intimidate the villagers. Even when the stealth drive was active, Harold thought that if you looked close, you could still see the gunship’s outline, and the air didn’t look quite right. It reminded him of heat rising from a fire.

  Colonel Foxx himself was large, even for a High-Born because he was over eight feet tall, and covered with muscle. He often didn’t wear combat gear, but he did carry a very large pistol on his hip. He wore a High-Born military dress uniform, a pressed black, button-down shirt and pressed black trousers and shiny black boots. The left side of his shirt was covered with medals. He had brown hair with flecks of gray in it, and eyes that were almost sea-green. He was flanked by two more soldiers in full combat gear, and he had a female High-Born attendant next to him. She was holding her data-pane in front of her furiously pressing lit symbols on the front of it.

  Female High-Born were generally also large in comparison to normal women. Though Harold had not seen many High-Born women, the few that he had seen always struck him as being beautiful. They were proportioned very well, and their hair always looked nice. Harold had never heard this woman’s name or rank, but she always accompanied the colonel. It seemed to him that she organized the information that other soldiers fed to her data-pane. Then she would give it to Colonel Foxx for him to review.

  After a few more minutes of rapidly pressing symbols on the data-pane, the woman handed Colonel Foxx her data-pane and he studied it for only a few seconds. Then, he gave a thumb’s up to the squads at all of the crossroads. Harold had figured out several years ago that meant that all villagers had been accounted for by the profilers’ computers. Somehow, all of those data-panes were linked together and fed information back and forth to each other.

  Colonel Foxx walked to the base of the pyramid and motioned to his gunship. The entire southern section of the elevated platform around the pyramid shuddered and lowered itself to ground. Colonel Foxx stepped up on it and it rose to a height of about ten feet. Once it had stopped, the colonel tapped the piece of equipment in his ear that ran to his mouth.

  The speakers in the pyramid did not make any noise, and he looked back at the pilots in the front of his gunship and pointed at the microphone. The pilots moved their arms around, flipping switches, and pressing buttons. After a few seconds, they gave the colonel a thumb’s up. He tapped the microphone again and you could hear the strikes coming from all around town. The Kristall above him suddenly stopped and the rotating image of him that always floated above it flickered from view. Just as soon as it disappeared, four images of him shimmered into sight. Each likeness faced one of the four directions and mirrored him exactly. The crowd became quiet and Colonel Foxx cleared his throat.

  “Citizens of Foxx Hole,” his deep and authoritative voice echoed around the town circle. “As always, we gather once a week to commemorate the sacrifice that the High-Born have made on behalf of you. As always, electricity will be left on until midnight tonight, so that you may celebrate the blood that the High-Born have shed so that you may live in peace and security.”

  Colonel Foxx spoke about the importance of hard work, and the upcoming planting season. He also talked about how villagers could earn some coins to trade for High-Born merchandise if they wanted to learn about the Low-Born trade initiative. He also spoke about giving the High-Born the
proper respect they deserved and how a citizen should always comply with High-Born orders.

  The speech lingered for about fifteen minutes before Colonel Foxx queued the pilots.

  The icons of him sputtered out of view and the Kristall began rapidly spinning. Sounds began clicking all around town and the Kristall glowed a bright blue. The Vista always started this way, but the realistic images that the Kristall made never ceased to amaze Harold. A gloomy and ominous bit of music slowly rose in volume as dark storm clouds seemed to gather just above town.

  “The Forgotten Nations brought war to their many and varied peoples,” a deep voice echoed from all around.

  The roar of jet engines blared and the washed out images of fighter jets appeared on the eastern and western sides of town and flew towards the crowd. They fired guns and missiles at each other and looped in and around one another seeming to dogfight just above the town circle. Harold looked to the north as it turned into a beach full of breaking waves. Soldiers began surfacing from beneath the water, seeming to walk toward the crowd. As they advanced on the town circle, none of Foxx Hole’s citizens even flinched as they fired their machine guns. Harold turned and looked to the southern part of town as the transparent images of tanks began rolling out of the buildings. They started firing and the faded likenesses of explosions detonated in and around Foxx Hole.

  As the ghost-like images fought all around the crowd, the speakers boomed:

  “The Forgotten Nations could not easily overcome one another, and believed that more advanced fighter aircraft could solve their problems. The development of artificial intelligence gave rise to horrible machines that turned on the Forgotten Nations. And so began the Artificial Intelligence Revolt... And a new... more terrible war began.”

  The music darkened and several sleek fighter jets screamed from the north and south toward the other fighter jets. The sleek jets made amazing maneuvers around the original jets as the transparent images of missiles and bullets flew all over the sky. A couple of the first jets exploded and the new fighters sped all around the remaining warplanes. They quickly outmatched them and in just a few moments, nothing but the sleek planes were flying above Foxx Hole.