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NOTE: This story is based on a Five Card Flickr draw of five random images. The challenge is to combine all five images into one story. 

Where Warriors Fall Out of the Sky

Once upon a time I lived alone in the midst of unpeopled landscape and that was my fault. I hadn’t been able to save them. Every day I went in search of those who had passed this way before me and those I had loved. My parents and husband, who had been like gods to me, had gone ahead of me to the next town down the river to see who there might have survived the virus, and I had failed to catch up with them.

My little girl who we had sent to a distant school when the trouble came was on the other side of a world that no longer had planes to bring her back to me. I hadn’t trusted the vaccine I had given her and had sent her away. This was all my fault--this empty world. It was as if some force had picked up my world and shaken all the people out of it like the last of the peppercorns, leaving me alone in a world of salt and abandoned mercury mines.  

I was a doctor, one of those rare ones who had been able to afford palm chips in a medical practice long ago from a future I had almost forgotten by now. I had been left behind to help where I could, but nothing I could do saved any of them.

I had become nothing but a grief-stricken, guilt-addled forager in the ghost towns of the doomed. I lived on pilfered canned goods and vowed to the dead grocer in my heart to pay him back. He was...I tried to remember all of them...Mr. Song. Mr. Song, I remember you, the jingle of the bell as your screen door banged open and shut, your head thrown back in a moan and last frozen rictus of death. I held my palm chip on your heart to ease your passage, but some doctor would have had to come from a lot further in the future than I did to save you, to save any of you.

Was I angry that I had been dropped off here and so far nobody had come to take me back? Had they picked up the rest of the medical team, my parents and husband and the others, and left me behind? I had spent a week underground in that mining village a mile beneath the surface where the cinnabar laced through the pluvial stone. To chase the elusive mercury took jigging, shaking, screening, elutration and flotation, and it was all done in this underground world where some people lived out entire lives without coming to the surface. But the virus only needs to enter with one person down one elevator shaft, and pouf!

On a day to day basis, grief and guilt fade, and to survive, curiosity is eternal. One day as I was investigating a side street that dwindled out into the playa, I came across a rusty sign on a chain link fence pointing the way, it said, to “The Beach.” It may have been pointing ironically out into the vast, sun-hammered alkali flats. I sheltered my eyes and stared out across that desert. This was an ancient battlefield, and in the heat of the day, I could almost see the clashing armies in the shimmering heat. I took a second look at the beach sign, and now I saw it pointing more directly at a steel pipe or culvert.

I made my way over to the pipe. When I stood in the mouth, hands and legs spread like the Vitruvian Woman, and yelled, my voice boomed and bounced and circled and echoed and ran away to the far end of the tunnel where I could see a dim and distant light. I took a stick and banged a few times to chase out any rattlesnakes taking a nap in the hot shade. All seemed clear, so I climbed on in.

I thought I had my eye firmly on the light at the other end of the pipe, but about halfway through a kind of mist gathered, and it seemed for a moment like there were paths going off in every direction, as if I had a choice. My brain felt scrambled--wasn’t there only one pipe I was crawling through, hunched over?

I floundered in the unexpected mist, but then the main pipe seemed to flare a little brighter at the end than the options, which faded, so I set out confidently in that direction. The mist faded, and I clanked my way on through to the other side.

When I emerged into the light at the end of the tunnel, I seemed to be fairly high up off the ground.  I really was at a beach, high up over white sand, coral reefs and turquoise water. The mist seemed to have come with me because when I looked down at my feet, they were lost in a cloud swirling around my ankles. I was pretty sure I had gone in wearing blue jeans, but now I wore a long green cape with stars printed on it. I thought I recognized it as a medical cape from a certain planet...I couldn’t remember. Was it my world or some other I had encountered at medical school where we had all worn the capes of our local guilds?

Now I realized I was moving easily toward the beach far below, and it didn’t occur to me to freak out. We had been trained for such anomalies.  I just put my hands out as if I were skateboarding and put my face up to the sun to catch rays on the way down.

As the earth came closer, I saw a little village and a little church with a small crowd gathered around picnic tables outside. A little girl was pointing at me, getting the attention of her parents. She reminded me of my own little girl, and I smiled at her as I completed my descent. Who knows what they thought about a woman in a green cloak coming down on a cloud with her hands outstretched as if in a blessing, her face radiant with the sun and a beatific smile on her face? It was just me, of course. Plain Jane, not-a-real-doctor-apparently, me. They stared at me curiously but not with any hostility. I’d almost say it seemed as if they had seen something similar before.

As I touched down, a woman of authority approached me. She had her black hair in a topknot and wore large, colorful jewelry. She spoke to me in welcoming tones but not in a language I recognized. Then her voice changed to one of question and anxiety. All I could do is smile at her like an uncertain dog trying to figure out what she wanted me to understand.

She gestured at me, and the little girl took my hand and tugged me to follow. My feet seemed to me mist-free, so I followed the little group away from the church and out through the gate--outside hallowed ground, I noted, although I wasn’t and never had been a Catholic. My people pre-dated and post-dated them by forever, but I noted it as a place marker that I was still on Earth.

The people at the picnic followed us, mostly silent but with some low murmuring. I was led to an out building, a goat barn, I soon saw. The door hinge creaked as the older woman opened it, and the hot sun shafted into the gloom, dust motes dancing.

I saw right away that an old door had been placed across a couple of sawhorses, and a man lay stretched out on his back. He was dark, like an African, and wore a uniform I didn’t recognize. I saw he wasn’t dead, only unconscious. His pant leg was torn open and a rudimentary bandage had been applied and tied tightly to his femoral artery. I knew immediately I could do somewhat better for him, but then the woman gestured me further back in the barn, and I saw more bodies on more makeshift cots and beds--two men and a woman, each in a different uniform, mixed races, all injured.

I moved back to the man with the femoral artery tourniquet. It needed to come off immediately. This was basic first aid where I came from. “I can do this, at least,” I thought, and in my own way fought like a warrior to save him.

Every morning I would wake up certain my warrior patients would die like the dead who walked through my dreams pointing their fingers and asking why. When would I learn I had been outwitted by a virus. A virus. The most powerful force on earth. I hadn’t been able to do more because there was nothing more I could do.

I tried to grow into that understanding as I tended that first warrior who fell out of the sky. It felt like a kind of penance for all that I failed before. For all I thought his case a simple one, I still almost lost him. Day after day I stretched out my hand over the wound and activated the palm chip. It couldn’t do all the work, but it had given all the doctors of my age that so-called healing touch.  I went to work finding and using the resources of the land and my own gifts of healing learned from the Ancient Ones to save his life and the lives of the others if I could.

And I could. One by one, they healed and the families took them in as their own. Strong young people, the warriors added their backs and their brains to this little isolated village by the side of the sea.

But they were not to be the only ones. Warriors kept falling out of the sky, some dead, some terribly wounded, others came screaming with their hands over their ears.

The little girl who first greeted me grew up to be my apprentice. She married one of the warriors who had fallen out of the sky, and my adopted grandchildren, too, learned my ancient and future ways of healing.

It was a long time coming, but one night my husband located me and called to me from orbit. My heart leaped in my chest to hear his beloved and nearly forgotten voice. “Time to come home,” he whispered in my mind as I held my palm chip over my fluttering heart. “Oh yes,” I said, “oh yes.”

When it was time for me to go, my family gathered around my bed as I drifted upward, and then like a mist I escaped through the smokehole. I knew that later they would build a shrine by the beach where I first appeared. I knew they had always mistaken me for someone I wasn’t.