The Hero of Varay by Rick Shelley

… your uncle is really that old?”
    “He’s probably a lot older than that even.” I took a deep breath. There was something I hadn’t planned on mentioning to Joy just yet, but … “Down below the cellar of Basil Castle, there is a crypt with the remains of all the kings and heroes of Varay. But there aren’t any wizards buried there, not a one. The other tombs go back a couple of thousand years beyond what Parthet admits.”
    “You think he’s been around that long?”
    “I don’t know. He never gives me a straight answer, and nobody else around here is old enough to remember a time when he didn’t look the way he does now. The king is only one hundred and twenty-eight.”
    “Only?” Joy got up and we shared a too-brief kiss.
    “Only. I’ll go get Aaron,” I said again. “We can have breakfast back in Illinois.”
    Joy sat on the edge of the bed again to wait until I got Aaron. Aaron was still sleeping, so I just picked him up and carried him down from the sixth floor. Timon woke, but he’s always been a light sleeper, afraid I’ll want something and he won’t hear me call the first time. Aaron didn’t make a sound. I needed both hands to open the doorway to Chicago, but Joy held Aaron for the few seconds that took. Aaron was quite a load for her, though.
    As soon as we were through the passage, I took Aaron back. He still didn’t wake. I laid him on my bed in Chicago. Joy beat me to the bathroom in the master suite, so I went out and used the other bathroom for a quick shower. Joy hadn’t come out yet when I finished, so I turned on the television in the living room, volume low, to check out the morning news before we got too far away from the escape hatches to Varay.
    The Coral Lady was obviously still the main topic, and the damage done to western Florida. Main topic? It was the only story anyone was talking about. It was the traditional off-season for tourists in Florida, but traditional seasons don’t mean as much in Florida as they used to. With the Disney complex not all that far away at Orlando, tourism wasn’t nearly as seasonal as it had once been. There were still so many visitors around that it might be weeks before anyone could make an even halfway accurate estimate of onshore casualties. The Air Force had a lot of planes in the air checking radioactivity levels and the direction of drift of the radioactivity. Two full divisions of the Army had been moved to the perimeter of the affected area to deal with refugees, to try to cut down on looting, and generally to try to restore order. Many of the medical people who had gone to Chernobyl a few years before were gathering to help in Florida—except for one doctor who had been on the Coral Lady . Casualties were being airlifted to hospitals as far away as San Antonio and Baltimore for treatment.
    The press were getting frustrated at their inability to get camera crews into the area on the ground, and most of their aerial footage had to be shot from a distance as well. But there was finally some tape of the devastation: the missing span of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, the wreckage of the remainder, the ruins and ashes ashore. Fires were still burning out of control around much of the perimeter of Tampa Bay. The “conservative” estimates predicted a minimum of sixty-five hundred dead, fifteen thousand injured or exposed to immediately dangerous levels of radiation, perhaps millions facing long-term health problems as a result, and two and a half million people displaced, either permanently or temporarily. The monetary cost had only the vaguest estimates yet, but they started at fifty billion dollars and climbed to over a trillion.
    “That wasn’t a dream either,” Joy whispered. I hadn’t heard her come into the room.
    “No, no dream. It’s going to take forever to clean up after this one.”
    Joy put her hands on my shoulders. “This world will never be the same.” I think she was talking about the nuclear bomb, but maybe she