Traveler trilogy Book 2, updates every Friday!
Five years after killing Levi Cornwall, Arthur Morgan is happy. He has a wife who loves him, an honest job he enjoys, and two beautiful children named Sadie and Hiram. All of it is turned on its head, h...
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This is gonna be a two-part chapter. This thing was already monstrously long, I only got halfway through the mission, and I realized I still needed to switch back to Arthur's perpective. That's a lot of head hopping in this chapter, which is another reason I decided to break it up. Part II will come out next Friday, and I hope you guys like this one in the meantime!
~Alex
Arthur felt uneasy as he rode Cheyenne down the road towards Clemens Point. At his side was Charles, and were it not for him, Arthur wasn't sure he'd have the balls to do what they were about to do.
They'd caught up with the past version of Arthur as he hunted deer out in the woods. Charles managed to distract him while Arthur clobbered him over the back of the head and injected him in the neck with a dose of some sort of anesthetic drug Francis had brought with them from the future. Side effects of this particular drug included memory loss and feeling intoxicated upon regaining consciousness, so Charles and the future version of Arthur had left the past version of Arthur in the woods with an empty whiskey bottle in his hand, in hopes he'd just think he'd passed out drunk.
It was such an idiotic and convoluted plan that Arthur was astounded it had worked.
On the other hand, Charles had simply convinced the previous version of himself that the future version of him would be better suited to this task. He knew all about the future version of Arthur, after all, and the less his past self knew about the future, the better. He'd simply convinced himself to sit out for a bit and babysit the unconscious Arthur.
As they peeled off into the trees near the camp, Arthur could feel his heart pounding in his chest, and he coughed slightly. His hands were tight on the reins to the point where he could see his knuckles turning white, and not even the sun setting in a beautiful inferno of colors over Flat Iron Lake could make him feel more confident.
"Relax," said Charles calmly. "If you're too tense, you might slip up."
"How can I relax?" Arthur hissed. "I'm about to see Dutch again. And Hosea and John and... and the others." He sighed deeply and raised an eyebrow at Charles. "How can you just sit there like that? Ain't you scared, too?"
Charles nodded. "I'm terrified."
"Good to know I'm not the only one then," Arthur sighed.
Charles only smiled.
As they broke through the trees and into the clearing with a giant oak tree at its center, Arthur's breath whooshed from his lungs. It was exactly the way he remembered it. His wagon with Cerberus tied up outside looked exactly the same, as did Dutch's tent, the campfire, and all the other tents. Even the chuck wagon was the same, familiar shade of blue.
It was almost like a dream. The longer he sat and stared at it all, the more unreal it felt. Along with these feelings, however, came the feelings of dread and unspeakable terror. It was almost as though Arthur was visiting Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius. Things might look tranquil now, but in a matter of months this way of life would be nothing more than a smoking crater situated atop Beaver Hollow.
