Through the Night

Through the Night chronicles Hunter’s childhood, from his abandonment by his father, to his admission to Gudersnipe. It’s not a complete history, just part of the back-story. Here's a small part from clsoe to the middle:

In the middle of a city, on a busy street, on a hot day, a man walks swiftly carrying a child.

He holds the child as though it is the only thing left to him in the world.

He walks as though he must get some place very quickly.

He halts suddenly, still clutching the young boy, and walks through the door he has stopped in front off. Inside it is cool and comfortable, the air-conditioned front of a government building. He looks around to see that there are people there, and that they see him, and then very slowly, he sets the infant down in a padded chair. Someone approaches him to ask him what he is doing, but he says nothing. He takes a last breath of the cool air, and then runs back out onto the street.

He is not seen, nor heard from ever again.

On the young boy they find a note, explaining his name and the barest information about him, and with that they find a letter in a sealed envelope. The note says the letter is for him, when he gets older, and that it should not be read until then.

The workers in the building nod as they gather around and read the note again and again. The man was the boy’s father, and the boy has just been abandoned. The workers in the office understand this, because they are social workers, and this happens all to often.

* * *

Fourteen Years Later… Hunter Jusenkyou sat before the computer screen, the only light in the darkened room. His fingers flew across the keyboard, and his mind raced as he read.

“The Last Dynasty of Morgain, Last Dynasty of Chow, Last Dynasty of the Star, The Moon, The Chicken,” he whispered as he read, and grunted angrily.

Across the room a body stirred and looked up at him from one of the beds.

“Finding anything?” Jonathon asked groggily.

“There are like a thousand ‘Last Dynasties’!” Hunter tapped the screen angrily. “But they’re all the last dynasty of something.”

“Have you tried just ‘dynasty’?”

Hunter shifted the screen to another search window.

“Dynasty Motors, Dynasty Real Estate,” he read. “Dynasty Cars, Dynasty Fortunes, Dynasty Project, I get even more with just ‘dynasty’ but its all crap!”

Hunter folded his arms and glared at the computer screen angrily, as if his hatred could somehow make the machine give him the information he wanted. He was fairly new to computers and the Internet, but he had learned quickly. Some creative porting had gotten him to an extra dimensional server and a good search engine, and now he was looking for the information he sought with the entire Multi-Verse at his fingertips.

But it wasn’t going well. While the search engine was easy to use, it brought up literally anything it could find with the key words he entered. That meant finding something very specific meant sifting through thousands of pages of garbage.

“Wait…” he said slowly. “Maybe… the last dynasty, -of.”

Enter.

The search engine went to a loading screen. It took almost five minutes, and when it finally listed the results, there were only two, and neither had his terms in the title.

The first was in another language, and the characters wouldn’t even display on the old computer.

He clicked on the second link.

“‘The Temple of Mendalla’,” he read quietly. “Is a devotion to the worship of the god Mendalla, one of the four kings of The Last Dynasty!”

He scrolled down the page, reading as fast as he could.

“The Temple of Mendalla is part of the greater Order of Mendalla, but the temple itself also has very close ties with the Show Lyn Temple—”

The screen checker boarded suddenly and split into lines, then went blank.

Hunter screamed and started smacking the monitor back and forth, rocking it on its unsteady base until it fell of the desk and shattered on the floor. The heap of glass and plastic began to pop and smolder angrily as the room filled with acrid smoke.

Other boys stirred and sat up and the lights were soon turned on. As Hunter stood cursing and kicking at the wreck of the computer, boys from other rooms woke up and soon the entire group home was alive with activity.

* * *

“This royally blows,” Hunter grumbled over breakfast later that morning. “Just when I make a break through that peace of crap crashes, and Russon says he won’t pay for a new one!”

“Mr. Russon’s a cheap bastard,” Jonathon replied as he filled his bowl with cereal. “He won’t pay for anything.”

Jim Russon was the man in charge of the group home where Hunter now lived. It was a run down old building that housed twenty-four boys varying in age from five to almost eighteen. Once you turned eighteen you had to leave, but up until then there was almost no way out.

This was the last refuge, short of a juvenile detention facility. This was where they sent all the boys nobody wanted, but who just weren’t bad enough to throw in jail. Hunter was bad enough, but somebody somewhere had decided he deserved a second chance, or maybe he had just slipped through the cracks. Either way he had wound up in a hellhole, awaiting the sweet release of age, with plenty of time to ruminate on the events that brought him here.

It was Saturday, and Hunter was having a last meal before spending yet another day locked in the basement. That was how Russon punished those boys that misbehaved. It wasn’t all that inhuman, there were windows that let in some sunlight, and it wasn’t to damp, plus you got out for meals and school.

The cereal box reached Hunter’s end of the table. He grabbed it and turned upside down over his bowl and watched as three peaces rolled out.

“Perfect,” he sighed and tossed the empty box on the floor.

“Hey, cheer up,” Jonathon said. “Its your birthday right? Today can’t go all bad.”

“Yeah, seventeen,” Hunter said sarcastically. “One more bloody year in this hell-hole.”

“That’s something to look forward to.”

“How?” Hunter asked angrily. “How can I look forward to that? This place may suck, but at least it’s a roof over my head. I’ve got nowhere after this.”

“Well, maybe something will change.”

Hunter grunted again and got up from the table. “Maybe.”

It felt very hard to look to the future just then. He was in his fourth year in high school and over a hundred credits behind. Right now he was stuck in this group home where he slept in a room with six other boys and never had any time to himself. He spent most of his time locked in the basement, for fighting or failing classes or just mouthing off. It was hard to behave in a place like this.

After what was sadly referred to as breakfast, Hunter walked willingly into the basement and sat on one of the old cots. Everything was old in this house; the building was old, the furniture was old, the clothes and things were old, and the boys were old past their years. Each boy in this house was experienced beyond his age; each knew great sorrow, each knew he had no future.

Hunter leaned back on the cot and starred up at the moldy ceiling. He’d snuck a book down here once, to read while he was being punished, and had learned well what a mistake that was. He’d spent an extra month locked down in the basement for that.

One week, out only for meals, school, and work if he’d had a job. That was all he had, one week for destroying the computer and Mr. Russon wouldn’t get another one. That meant the end of Hunter’s research, because the school computers couldn’t reach outside the dimension, and the local library had no extra-dimensional books. His only connection to what he needed was that computer, and now it was gone.

It was four years ago, almost to the day, he remembered it well now. It was this day exactly four years ago he’d gotten off the airplane and met Ms. Trebell. Now he shed a single tear for the old woman, who he’d received word had died peacefully in her sleep a year ago, after coming home from a days work at a local youth center.

His mind drifted slowly back to that magical couple of hours, and the time that came after, he remembered it all. He remembered all happy times, for he had none any longer.

* * *