Unbound

Chapter 10

Hayden woke to the sound of voices, low and hushed. His back protested as he sat up in the recliner, stiff from the way he'd slept. He tried to do it quietly, but the chair creaked and squealed when he pushed the leg rest down. Zareen sat at the desk with a laptop in front of her, Simon and Jesus standing at either shoulder.

"So, the map is in the box?" Jesus was asking, face scrunched up slightly. He'd washed the streaks of blood away at some point. He looked like some displaced Viking, even in the black pants and shirt. Maybe it was the sword strapped between his shoulder blades. Even with half of it missing, the thing was still massive.

"No, not really," Zareen said. She looked back at Simon. "How do you explain Google to Jesus?"

"It's something like the Hive Mind, where all this information is out there, and things like this, this computer, can gather it and show it to us," said Simon.

"Hive Mind? Ysaera?" Jesus asked.

"Like that, but not so evil." replied Simon.

Jesus shook his head. "It doesn't matter. This Google, it will show us what we need?"

"Yep," said Zareen.

Hayden pushed out of the chair and stepped over the snoring form of his dad. He took up a position beside Jesus, noting that warrior looking or not, he wasn't all that tall. Only an inch or so above Hayden's own five-foot ten inches.

"What are we looking for?" He asked.

"I dreamed," said Zareen, as if that was the only explanation needed.

Hayden waited.

"About?" He asked finally.

"Where we need to go."

"Where's that?"

"Dunno," said Zareen.

Hayden sighed and leaned in, watching as Zareen manipulated a map of America, zooming in and out, then moving to a different state and doing the same thing.

"Any landmarks or anything?"

"Very boring, flat."

"We know that, but what kind of landmarks are we looking for?" Hayden said, laughing. No one else laughed. Maybe they didn't get it? "Uh, flat, so Midwest?"

"Maybe... a city of gold? Watched over by a witch?" Zareen mumbled, searching through the Texas panhandle.

Something tickled the back of Hayden's memory. He remembered thinking almost those exact same words, the city of gold, once not too long ago. He'd went with his dad on a revival trip to one of the big churches in... "Wichita! Kansas," he said.

Zareen zoomed in on Kansas, then Wichita, then began panning around. It didn't take long to find El Dorado, KS.

"Wow," she said, sitting back in the chair. "You're not completely useless. Guess I owe you ten bucks, Simon."

"That's where he is?" Jesus said, leaning in to get a better look at the map.

"Probably. There's a probably a ley line running through that whole region, and someone's tapping into it to block the area from me." Zareen said. She squinted at the map of the town glowing on the screen, then tapped it. "There's a prison on the edge of town... that feels right. Good place to hold people against their will, and to recruit."

Simon slowly nodded. "What did you dream, exactly?"

Zareen folded her arms across her chest. "Busses full of kids, heading up the highway. They would hit a certain spot in the road and just vanish into this black mist. I'm betting they were all first-borns."