Travis's Journey Through the Apocalypse

Chapter 15

Doctors orders

I followed after Janet and left the dead child's mother crying on the ground, muttering kill me under her breath with a far-off, crazed look in her eyes. I caught up with Janet, and we continued on in silence. The dead child in Janet’s arms caused people on the street to give us a wide birth until we were stopped by a guard. One of the few that we saw walking the slums.

“Ma’am, um, excuse me, but is that your child?” Janet was somewhere else when the guard stopped us, so it took her a moment to register what the guard wanted.

“What was that?” Janet asked the guard.

“Ma’am, the child you are carrying, is it yours?”

“Oh no, she's not mine.”

“Ma’am, you can't just carry a dead child through the streets. especially one that's not yours.” The guard drew his sword as he said this, and his attitude shifted from concern to wary caution. The guard continued once his sword was fully drawn.

“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to put the child down and put your hands in the air.” Janet blinked at the man a few times, registering what the guard had said, and then she started to get angry. I could see the shift in her eyes, and I knew I had to step in, or the situation might turn south quickly. I stepped forward and placed a hand on Janet’s shoulder.

“Sir, please wait. I believe there has been a misunderstanding. We came across this child begging and gave her a coin, but as she was walking away from us, another child stabbed her and then robbed her. We tried to save the girl, but it was too late. We’re just trying to find out what to do with the body.” The guard listened to my story and began to relax. It seemed to be an all too common story in this district. When I was done, the guard had a knowing and sad look.

“Ma’am, if I may.” The guard made to take the child from Janet. She hesitated but inevitably handed the child over to the guard.

“Thank you, ma’am. I hate to tell you this, but that is not an uncommon tail in this area. Things like this happen every day, unfortunately. Most of my fellows say good riddance. That these people aren’t worth the life they have been given, but I was almost one of them when I was a kid, so I have a soft spot for the youth of the slums. The ones who were born into this shithole. I’ll take her to the crematorium. They will help send her off properly. This I promise you, ma’am, truly, and thank you for trying to help. Not many would do as much for one such as her.” Janet looked at the man almost as if she was going to say something, but eventually, it seemed the willpower left her, and she just nodded at the man, who gave Janet a slight bow of the head before heading off.

We watched the guard leave with the child until they were out of view. At that point, I turned to Janet and pulled her into a hug. She taught me a little at first, then gave in and hugged me back. After a little while of us standing there holding each other, Janet said something I missed because her face was buried in my shoulder.

“What Was that?” I asked her. Janet lifted he face away from me so I could hear her properly, then repeated herself.

“I don’t want to talk about it, okay? Let’s just keep going and find this dam trainer. My mood is totally fucked. All I want to do is hit something right now.” I chuckled at Janet’s words, then smiled at her.

“Sure, I think hitting something really hard sounds like exactly what the doctor ordered.” Janet punched me softly, and I saw a few more tears fall from her eyes. She wiped them away, and we were back to looking for the crazy trainer once more. When we found the tanneries, they were pushed against the wall surrounding the entire city. A river passed through a grate into the city and then back out again. It almost looked purposefully diverted to the sole purpose of supplying the tanneries with fresh water.

We ended up just looking around until we found what could have been a training yard once. Now, it looked like a mud pit that collected runoff from the chemicals used in the tanning process. The smell was the first thing that hit me, however, and oh my god, it was awful. Like, holy shit, it was literally burning my nostrils with each inhale. Then there was the mud. It was thick and sticky. The water that formed in puddles between mud peaks in the right light made rainbows appear that looked like straight chemical runoff. Everything about the spot seemed disgusting and literally hazardous to your health. As we looked over the fenced-in area, I spotted a shack in one corner of the yard, and sitting passed out in a rocking chair was the pile of rags we were looking for.

We found a gate that was slowly disintegrating on one side of the yard and, from there, made our way over to the sleeping pile of rags. When we were finally standing in front of the crazy trainer, it was a bit anticlimactic. We had actually found the fucker in this big ass city, and he was asleep. While I was still thinking of a way to wake the man without being too abrasive, Janet just leaned forward and knelt down till she was mouth to ear with the trainer, and then she yelled.

“Hey! Wake the fuck up!” She woke the man, but there was a whole lot of spluttering and cussing, and then the trainer was on the ground.

“Magnars left nut, Are you crazy woman? Who the fuck wakes a person up from a dead sleep like that?” The trainer looked around to see who had come to visit, and it took a second of the man stairing at us intently before something clicked, and he seemed to remember us.

“Oh, haha, it’s you. Well, I see you decided to take me up on the offer of training. Hmm. Good, good. Shall we begin then?”

It took about ten minutes of dealing with the crazy trainer’s giggles and random tangents before we were on the training field.

“So, haha, you want to learn what old man Eikman has to teach you, yes? Haha, well, fear not. Eikman is here. Now you won't suck anymore. I will show you power, yes. Eikman is the best trainer. They said Eikman was shit. They said Eikman was trash and weak. Well, now we will show them. We will show them all, Eikman, yes, yes.”

Eikman had started mumbling the last bit to himself under his breath. I figured it was best to try and keep the man on track.

“Hey, Eikman, come on. What’s going on? We're here to train. You gonna train us or what?” My interruption seemed to pull the man back into the present from his mental wonderings.

“Hum? Ah, yes, of course. Of course, Eikman will train you. Eikman will train you well, yes. Eikman swears it.” As Eikman finished his odd statement, he began to fiddle with his fingers anxiously.

“Yeah, I’m sure you will, Eikman. I said as I shot Janet a “What the fuck have you gotten us into” look that she completely ignored.

“So… what now?” Janet asked Eikman. At this point, Eikman was just staring off into space, and it took Janet snapping her fingers at the guy before he came back to Earth.

“what? Oh right. Well, I need to see where you're at, what you’ve got, the power you hold inside. Show me, show me, haha, yes.” After Eikman finished, he quickly jumped back and away from where Janet and I stood about twenty feet. It caught me off guard and made me rethink my preconceived notions about the trainer. Maybe he wasn’t just a fucking lunatic.

“Now, haha, spar, fight, go at it. Come on now, I haven’t got all day. Haha, that’s a lie. I do have all day, haha. Come on, stop gawking at me like fools and fight already.” Janet and I looked at each other like what the fuck? But we were here to train, so, fuck it was all that came to mind. I looked over at Janet and shrugged.

“Let’s do this?” I said. Janet only shrugged in reply, and we got into position for a spar. Janet and I usually started our practice matches about twenty feet apart. We took our position. To make our spars fair, we had made it a practice of throwing a knife into the air in between the two of us, and when the knife hit the ground, the match began. We treated this like any other spar, so I pulled a knife from my bag and asked Janet if she was ready. She nodded, and I tossed the blade a good forty feet in the air. As the knife fell, we readied ourselves for the fight to come.

The dagger hit the mud, and I moved. The clash of mine and Janet's first attack shocked the ground. Eikman actually fell onto his ass laughing the whole way down. We went all out. Nobody was in this part of town that wasn’t busy working. The smell was so bad that even the beggars avoided the area. So there wasn’t anyone around to hide their moves from. That made going all out much easier and less worried that we might be exposing our secrets.

When the spar ended, Janet had a large cut running down her face, and I was missing a few fingers. Eikman, who had started laughing with our first clash that had knocked him to the ground, had just continued laughing as our spar progressed. By the end, he was hugging himself and rolling around on the ground, laughing hysterically.

Janet and I made our way over to Eikman, who was lost to his laughter, and waited for him to calm down. I don’t know how long it took Eikman to stop laughing, not because I wasn’t paying attention. No, Janet had just gotten sick of waiting for the guy to get his shit together. Janet bent over, lifted Eikman up, and placed him on his feet.

Eikman stopped laughing for a moment and started again when he realized what had just happened. Janet then slapped him across the face and told him to pull it together. A few chuckles later, Eikman was wiping tears from his eyes and breathing slowly and with intention. When the laughter was finally out of Eikman, he let out a breath and then spoke.

“What a show, what a show. Good to see young people with such vigor and drive. Excellent, just excellent.”

“Okay, that's great, but…” Janet started talking but was quickly cut off by Eikman.

“I wasn’t finished, child. As it is, you still have much to work on. Oh my, so so much. Sloppy, very sloppy, but Eikman sees. Oh, haha, Eikman does. Your foot work so sloppy, haha. Your movements are so, so wasteful, haha. A good base to work from, yes, but much to be done. Yes, much.” I thought about what Eikman was saying, and he was right. Neither Janet nor myself were formally trained in combat. We had just thrown together what we could with the resources available at the time. While I was left thinking about what Eikman had said, Janet had taken it the wrong way and looked like she was ready to kill the fucker.

“You little shit. We just busted our asses while you sat there laughing your ass off. So fuck you. I’d like to see you step into the ring with me. See what the fuck happens.” Janet was pissed off, and before I knew it, the laughter was gone from Eikman, and a feeling of dread started to spread from the trainer. The next second, Janet, who had been all up in Eikmans personal space, was gone.

Now, she hadn't vanished like teleportation, although it initially seemed like that. No, Janet had been hit so hard and fast by I was assuming Eikman that she had been sent flying and only stopped when she hit the wall that surrounded the city and got stuck there. Eikman had just hit Janet so hard that she had been embedded into the wall. I turned from looking at where Janet had landed back at Eikman with a newfound respect. Holly shit, this Eikman guy was crazy strong. Only seconds after dispatching Janet, Eikman was back to his usual giggly self.

“Oops, did I do that? Haha.” Eikmans words brought me back to earth, and I realized it was probably a good idea to check on Janet. In the next minute, I had Janet free of the wall and lying in the least muddy area of the training yard I could find. She seemed to be okay just knocked out cold. I pulled a shirt from one of my bags and placed it under Janet’s head before I walked back over to Eikman. He had returned to sitting in his rocking chair while waiting for me to finish attending to Janet. I dusted off my hands as I sat on the porch beside Eikman.

“So, how long did you fight in the Coliseum?” I asked Eikman. Neither of us was facing the other. We were looking out over the training yard and taking in the serenity. Eikman sighed at my question, and it was as if a moment of clarity washed over the man as he answered me.

“Travis, was it? Well, whatever, look, I don’t look it, but I’m over two hundred years old. In my two-hundred-plus years of life, I have fought countless matches in the Coliseum. I’ve had it all, and I’ve watched it all slip away. Friends you thought would be by your side forever, casting you aside like trash. Prostitutes and drug addiction become the closest thing to family you have, and then to watch even that get ripped away. I have seen my fair share of the hells, so I will tell you this once and only once. So listen well.

There is only one thing in this life that is given freely, and that is pain. So learn pain, live pain, make pain your world, and no one will ever hurt you again. Pain is your ally. reminder that young man.” I sat there for a second, thinking about what Eikman had said. I could understand his point to some extent, but there was a tragic tail somewhere in Eikmans past.

`It didn’t seem like a topic he was fond of talking about, but I just needed to know more. I mean two hundred years. That was crazy. The guy didn’t look a day over, well, I guess rags wasn’t an age. He could have totally looked his age under all that mess, but I had a feeling he didn’t. I turned to ask Eikman about the craziest fight he’d been in, but as I turned toward the man, he let out a loud snore, and I realized he had passed out. I guess he is an old man after all, huh?

Twenty minutes later, Janet woke up and was very confused until I explained what had happened. Janet almost laughed at me when I first said that it was Eikman who had hit her, but then the fact that I couldn’t fucking do that, and if I didn’t, then by process of elimination, it had to be Eikman. Then Janet's laugh turned into a gulp, and she stared at Eikman with a mix of confusion, aww, and fear. It was honestly a bit hilarious, but I managed to keep my mirth under control, for Janet’s sake.

I pulled a bottle of water from one of my bags and passed it to Janet. It took a few slaps of the water bottle against her arm before she took it, but she drank half the bottle before she passed it back. I figured that was a good sign. I don’t really know why the fact she was drinking water after she had literally been cartoon-slammed into a wall was something I found reassuring, but It did. Five minutes after that, Janet and I were sitting on Eikmans porch. Porch would be one word you could use to describe it. You could also say it was a pile of random wooden planks barely hanging together, or you could call it a pile of trash. You could really take your pick, but I was leaning toward the pile of rubbish.

Eikman was still passed out, and Janet was kind of excited now. It was odd as if she was convinced that Eikman was some hidden sage from some story. She was sure this was when we would go through an incredible training montage. We would get super strong and roll into the Coliseum like, what's up bitches. I thought Janet was being a bit silly, but part of me was right there with her. If it was that easy to become a powerhouse, everybody would be doing it. I was starting to worry a little about what this “training” was going to entail.

Janet and I sat there for another ten minutes before we decided it was probably time to wake up Eikman. We could let him sleep, and no one else would be making any more wall angels, but where was the fun in that? We woke Eikman, and there was a bit of sputtering and arm flailing before he was up and ready to work again. Minutes after Eikman was awake, Janet, Eikman, and I were back in the middle of the training yard. Janet and I were both weary about what was to come, and the devilish grin on Eikmans face didn’t help with my trepidation.