There Can Be Only One

After walking an hour along the two-lane highway, the young man stopped along the guardrail where the road crossed a small creek. He took off the backpack that contained a tent, a few clothes, a flashlight with spare batteries, several books and a journal.

His money was holding out pretty well. It wasn’t much, but it had brought him this far.

There was a wood just a stone’s throw from the bridge and the road where the creek flowed. He could just make out a carpet of old fallen leaves as the floor. It seemed to call to him as a place to explore. It may contain an ideal campsite that wouldn’t be visible to anyone passing by. He slipped into the trees and in a few moments the greenery muffled all traffic noise.

The ground was not flat in here. There were small hills and a gradual slope to the creek that ran through the center of the grove. It was dry for the most part if he stayed back from the water with his camp.

It wasn’t long until his tent was up and he was making sure his camp wouldn’t be easily spotted by anyone passing by. There were no walking paths or sidewalks here, so he was sure there would be few pedestrians.

It was September, but there was no sign of autumn yet. The young man drew off his t-shirt and used it for a towel for perspiration. He tossed it into the tent with his backpack and crawled in after it to take a nap.

As he lay there listening to the birds the events of the last couple of days came back to his mind. His friend had disappeared and had been missing for more than a day. This had been something his friend had tried to prepare him for. Money had been set a side in a coffee can in the kitchen for emergencies, and he had taken it as his friend had instructed, if he never returned home one day.

He never knew his friend by anything other than “Doc”. He could only assume it was short for “Doctor”, but Doc never told him how he earned the name. There had been too many other things that Doc wanted him to worry about.

The first thing was that Doc had pulled him out a car at the bottom of a lake out in the countryside of Illinois several weeks ago. His parents had been left for dead, and Doc had said he had died, too. So why was he not dead? Because he was immortal just as Doc had been.

The next thing was he wouldn’t die unless someone took off his head. There were other immortals out there seeking to do just that. Doc said there could be only one, and that one was destined to rule the earth. He needed to learn how to used a heavy sword to defend himself from any hunting him.

He and Doc had stayed in an apartment in the suburbs of Chicago those few weeks they had been together. His only task had been some beginning weight training and some very basic martial arts to hone his coordination.

The worst thing about the result of finding oneself an immortal was he couldn’t go back to any of his family because he was supposed to be missing, and there was no feasible story to give them or the authorities without his being perpetually 18 years old noticed over time. Another trait that hadn’t quite sunk in yet was the fact that he could never father children, but being young, that wasn’t the priority it could have become later in life.

Now that Doc was gone so soon from his life, he hadn’t even acquired a sword, not to mention beginning his training so he had a chance to survive. His sword may have been on the way from the Asian sword forger who provided the finest in sharpened blades for those who offered the right price, and the way Doc understood it, this Asian was an immortal himself. Now that he was supposed to disappear again, he would never see that sword.

His bus ticket had gotten him from Chicago into the state of Michigan. Now he found himself on the outskirts of some college town. He could possibly blend in here somewhere for a time posing as a high school student or even a first or second year college student.

Doc had been good for thinking of ways for him to have an identity without having to establish himself too extensively into public records. He could always keep the status of a minor and not have much in the way of public records at all except for maybe some high school or other. He did manage to have an Illinois driver’s license, but his social security card number wasn’t good anymore, so Doc had those documents altered for him.

The shadows of tree branches swayed back and forth on the walls of his tent. He wasn’t sleepy, but the rest had done him some good. It was time to go into town to find supplies and some sort of life for himself.

To be continued….