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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 29: Kondor 265
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Previous chapter: Slade 260
Kondor blinked, lying flat on his back with his body limp. There was a snake, tongue flickering, who was climbing up his body. Looking up, he saw thick, dark green leaves and many trunks blocking out the sun above. The sweat on his arms and the muggy air let him know that he was probably in a jungle, so a snake long enough to reach from his chest to past his boots deciding to climb up on an apparently sleeping human was not unreasonable in the scheme of things. It was not a low probability event. However, it was vastly inconvenient.
“Shoo,” he murmured, otherwise staying still. The snake continued upward, not at all impressed. Hoping he was not about to brainburn, he reached for a light TK push, and shoved the snake back a bit. It grew agitated, and coiled up, and its hood spread.
King cobra? It now had obvious fangs, and was eyeing him with displeasure. But it did not know he had pushed it as it was an invisible force. Its head flicked about to the right and left.
Kondor looked to his right, and began telekinetically to nudge a log a few feet away. It shifted as he psionically pushed it a few times. The snake fluttered, and then fled in the face of the inexplicable. Relieved, Kondor sat up. The grass on which he had lain and everything else had a sheen of water on it. A screech of a monkey let him know that he was well and truly in the jungle.
Picking up his M-16, he wondered what jungle it was. He could be in Vietnam in the Sixties, or in the Philippines as McArthur was famously about to return. It could be he was just miles from an Aztec ziggurat with blood from human sacrifices waterfalling down the sides, or among a more enlightened people like the Cambodian Buddhists around Angkor Wat. For all he knew, he might be on an alien planet in an alien jungle. He might even be in the Age of Dinosaurs.
Looking to his left, he saw Zeke’s boots poking out of a bush. Walking over there, he saw his friend twitching in the aftermath of a verser dream.
“Hey, Zeke, wake up.”
“Huh, what?” Zeke’s eyes fluttered open.
“Wakey wakey, we’re in the jungle, Eltee.”
“Just as long as it's not the Amazon Campaign of 1894.”
“What?”
Zeke took the offered hand and pulled himself up to his feet before replying to the question.
“Before my time in my homeworld. But it was bad. They sent a hundred thousand troops to conquer the Amazon, and between the enemy, the animals, the diseases, the sea wrecks, and the starvation only twenty thousand made it back, and most of them were wrecked.”
Kondor figured ‘wrecked’ probably meant a mix of PTSD and disabled.
“I’ll be happy to find a shower if they have one in this world. So unless you’ve got a better plan, I figure we hike downhill, look for a river.”
Zeke shook his head.
“I’m with you, Cap’n.”
As to the old stories that have long been here:
