Staring around wildly, the hunter swung his gun from tree to tree, searching for her.He moved closer to a trunk and stumbled when roots boiled out of the ground.“What the hell?”he shouted, trying to yank his feet free.
“Now,” Oaklie said to herself, then triggered her power again.It flowed into the tree she was focused on and a branch suddenly sprouted from the trunk.It punched through the hunter’s back, destroying his heart and killing him instantly.He dropped his rifle and hung limply from the branch with blood dripping from his mouth.
“Maybe this time they’ll get the idea and stop trying to hunt me down,” Oaklie said, already knowing her hopes would be dashed.
She left the body where it was for now and crossed to the sculpture.A foot taller than her five foot three inches, the statue was a naked man with the muscular body of a Greek god.She’d blushed as her hands had shaped his well-endowed nether regions even though her eyes had been shut at the time.So far, his face was still blank, but every other detail was perfect.
“Who are you?”she murmured as she finished the carving on his chest.It was a sword with an intricate pattern on either side that almost looked like wings.It was the first human she’d ever sculpted and it was her finest work so far.
Chapter Two
––––––––
ARKAS WOKE FROM HISlong slumber in the Void when he slammed into water.Dazed as usual, it took a few seconds to come to his senses.He figured out which way was up and swam to the surface.No one was within his immediate range as he peered around.It was strange, but he felt as if something had shifted inside himself, yet he couldn’t figure out what it was.Neither humans, nor his brothers were showing up on his radar.
“What the hell is a radar?”he muttered as he swam towards the nearby shore.Knowledge about the current era began to surface in his mind.It was snowing lightly as he strode barefooted and naked away from the small lake he’d landed in.Too tiny to be a tourist attraction, it seemed to be on private land.
A huge pale blue house stood a few hundred yards away.No lights were on inside, but he approached it cautiously anyway.His first course of action was to find some clothing.
More buildings were nearby.The largest was a barn, but he couldn’t see or hear any animals inside when he drew closer to it.The fields were empty, but he didn’t think it was because of the weather.Some vegetables could grow in winter if they were hardy enough.
“Something wiped out the crops,” Arkas figured when he caught a whiff of old rot.
Vehicles were parked inside a gigantic garage.The ones closest to the entrance had snow, dust and dirt sitting on their hoods.They hadn’t been used in weeks, if not months.Someone had left the door that slid upwards to lie flat against the ceiling open and had forgotten to shut it.
“What happened here?”the knight mused when he spotted a corpse lying on the gravel driveway.Still wearing the remnants of clothes, animals had torn it apart and had scattered the bones.A bullet hole was in the front of the skull.A far larger exit hole was in the back of it.
Arkas looked around and saw a few more bodies lying here and there.It seemed the humans had killed each other in a gunfight.Their weapons were beginning to rust from exposure.
He couldn’t sense anyone inside as he moved closer to the large house.Another body lay half inside the front door.The tattered clothing on the skeleton had been a dress.Even the womenfolk had been murdered.From the squeaking noises coming from within, rats had moved in.
Entering the house, the warrior’s eyebrows rose at all the hunting trophies that adorned the walls.Animal heads had been mounted all over the place.He strode into a huge living room and saw a grizzly bear rearing up on its hind legs.“Humans are even sicker now than they were in the past,” he said, shaking his head at the idiotic things people collected.
Rats had set up camp in the kitchen when he took a quick look inside.They’d chewed their way into the pantry and had eaten everything they could stomach.He entered a hallway and walked through an open door into a library.Religious books were lying on a table to the right.Arkas moved closer to take a look at a notebook someone had been scribbling in.
“Something called the Rapture wiped out half of the population,” the knight surmised after scanning the first few pages.Things had rapidly gone downhill after that, it seemed.Disease had ruined the crops and killed wild and domesticated animals.That had occurred two days before God had decided to trigger the apocalypse.“Plants and animals died and the people in Tennessee turned on each other,” he said.There was no longer enough to go around, so neighbors had become enemies and raiding parties had tried to rob each other.
