Crucible: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 5)

by Scott Nicholson

  “Your eyes are still glowing,” DeVontay said, a little disappointed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Well, I was kind of hoping the juice would revive you, but that you’d come back as a human.”

  “I am a human, honey. I just have this…other thing going on.”

  “That’s cool. I signed up for a wild ride anyway. Let’s get out of here.”

  They headed toward the ruins to look for the hole Franklin had used. They reached the perimeter of the city and stepped into the dirt, where a lawnmower lay overturned in the sparse weeds and beer cans and plastic bottles lay strewn across cracked asphalt. A shopping cart was pushed against a sagging section of chain-link fence, a pile of rotten clothes in its basket. Rachel had only gone a few dozen yards from the border when she grew woozy and weak.

  DeVontay noticed and caught her as she swooned. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, suddenly unable to breathe. “Take me back.”

  DeVontay half carried her to the alloy and she sat again, instantly feeling better. “Did you notice the buildings?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t care about any of that. All I care about is you.”

  “When I left the alloy, they started melting again. But now…”

  They both watched as the center of town straightened and the angles of the buildings grew sharper. The outlines of windows and ledges began appearing on the sleek walls, taking on three dimensions instead of the previous smoothness. In the foreground, the smaller humps took on detail, squaring themselves and carving doors, foyers, steps, and storefronts.

  “There aren’t any Zaps left,” DeVontay said.

  “Well, just one.”

  “Rachel?” DeVontay whispered. “Are you doing that?”

  “Not on purpose.”

  The streets developed themselves, with sidewalks and curbing lifting up from the flat plain of the alloy. More features sprouted up: parking meters, benches, concrete planters, street signs, and landscaping borders. The landscape buffer along the base of the dome’s perimeter also grew, taking on colors and shapes like a park at the end of winter when spring lay sleeping just beneath the surface.

  “Stop it, Rachel,” DeVontay muttered under his breath.

  “I’m not doing anything!”

  “When Kokona read your mind, could you see how they were designing the city?”

  “Yeah, a little,” Rachel said. “I wasn’t involved in it, obviously, but it seemed to run on automatic. Like they just set the snowball in motion and let it grow into an avalanche.”

  “But their city was mostly bland and gray. Empty buildings, no colors, and hardly any features. The only time they bothered to enhance any details was when they were trying to trick us. Like they didn’t really care that much how it looked or functioned, they just wanted a city.”

  “Or maybe it was too much trouble and diverted too much energy,” Rachel said, trying to remember how invasive the telepathy had been. It resembled the pain of a toothache in that once it was gone, its intensity was truly difficult to recall.

  “I guess if they’re creating robots and drone-birds and dogs and monsters and all that shit, it’s a little hard to stay focused. And now you don’t have anything to think about but the city.”

  “That’s not true,” Rachel said, a sense of dread pressing down on her. “I’m thinking about getting out of here. I don’t give a damn about this city.”

  “Well, it sure gives a damn about you.”

  The buildings were now more fully fleshed out, with communications towers atop them and rows of windows thinning to transparent sheets. Rachel wondered if behind those windows, walls, floors, elevators, and desks were springing to shape, if carpets were unrolling themselves, and if computers, snack machines, filing cabinets, and water fountains blossomed in the rooms. Or perhaps there were beds, lamps, bookshelves, and televisions.

  DeVontay took her hand. “Let’s get off of this metal.”

  “Gladly,” Rachel said, although she dreaded the possible effects of leaving the energy source. Even though the city was busy assembling itself, the dome and the plasma tubes were largely unchanged. The sky beyond the dome had grown lighter in the east, the first peek of dawn appearing on the horizon and dimming the aurora.

  As they walked the twenty feet to the ruins, the sheet of alloy stretched out beneath their feet like a gentle tidal wave rolling along a beach. Their path took on an appearance like flagstones, with minute depressions and artistically arrayed patterns laid out before them.

  If Rachel weren’t so frightened, this would’ve been a delightful and surreal discovery. As it was, the faux nature of the emerging city was more abhorrent than anything contrived by the Zaps. If she was the one hallucinating this city into existence, she was as evil as Kokona had been.

  They increased their pace in order to move faster than the alloy glacier. By the time they reached the ruins, the alloy had encroached on the human neighborhood from all sides, leaving only a few streets, collapsed houses, and dusty vehicles. On the opposite side of the neighborhood, new shapes bloomed from the alloy—row houses with Colonial and Victorian designs, complete with picket fences and trees. The houses painted themselves in shades of white, blue, and brown, with gingerbread and stair rails and rocking chairs adorning the porches. Mailboxes popped up along the street, and lawns and flower beds took on healthy colors that made Rachel utterly sick.

  “This is like Millwood always says,” DeVontay said. “Science on drugs.”

  “I want to get clean and sober, then,” Rachel said. “Twelve-step the hell out of this place. Make it go away.”

  When they finally reached dirt, the colors began to fade and the edges of the structures softened again. Rachel fought a wave of enervation, determined to prove she wasn’t the cause of the city’s sudden evolution. But as the city shifted back to burnished metal, she couldn’t deny the evidence of her glowing eyes.

  Neither could DeVontay. “Are you doing anything to make that happen? Thinking about it, or picturing it in your mind?”

  Rachel vigorously shook her head, hair whipping across her face. “No. I’m trying to think of everything but this place. I’m certainly not thinking happy thoughts of Pleasant Valley Sundays and the like. Or some kind of Zap paradise where they can pretend to be humans.”

  But could anyone truly control their own subconscious, besides a mystic long trained in transcendental meditation? Even the act of not thinking about the city brought it creeping in from the far corners of her skull.

  She tried psychic shock treatment—forcing herself to relive the drowning death of her younger sister Chelsea. Rachel was supposed to be watching her at the lake when she snuck into the bushes to pee—why couldn’t she have held it?—and when she returned to the water’s edge, Chelsea was nowhere in sight. Despite all the horrors she’d faced since the solar storms, that moment was still the one that delivered the sharpest guilt, regret, and pain.

  She opened her eyes to find the city softening again, reverting to the primitive state as fabricated by the Zaps. She found herself leaning against DeVontay, her legs weak and trembling, her breath shallow.

  “Get me out of here,” Rachel said.

  “But…what if you drain away?”

  “I don’t care. I can’t stand this. Because…if the Zaps can build robots, what if I start building people?”

  “Don’t go there, girl. Things are too freaky already.”

  “Get me into those tunnels, then, and fast.”

  DeVontay led her to where he thought Franklin had descended into the underground. “Damn, I could’ve sworn it was around here somewhere.”

  “Maybe the alloy covered it up?” Rachel didn’t like the thought of being trapped here as the metallic substance closed in and a postcard habitat shaped itself around her. She grew weaker by the minute, but she wasn’t as bad off as she originally feared. Perhaps she’d recharged enough to make a clean break from the plasma fix, like a junkie going cold
turkey.

  DeVontay stomped on the alloy where he thought the hole should be. “Maybe we can just wait for the metal to retreat a little bit, and then we can find it.”

  They found an old ice chest in the weeds and sat on it side by side, with DeVontay’s arm wrapped around her. They watch the city skyline sag and deform as the dawn came and the sun blazed against the alloy shapes.

  “What if you could build a city with your mind?” DeVontay said. “A nice place, with gardens and schools and churches and restaurants and grocery stores. A place with a constant power supply and good weather. A place where people could live in peace.”

  Rachel understood what he was asking: was she willing to be a slave for the good of whatever humans ended up under her dome? Was she willing to sacrifice herself so others could survive?

  Could she play queen, or benevolent dictator, or God?

  “A place to raise a family,” he added.

  “It wouldn’t be real,” she said.

  “Why not? What’s the difference?”

  “I would know it, and you would know it, and if we had children, they would grow up in a lie.”

  DeVontay nodded, his face bruised, scratched, and worried.

  “You need to put something in your eye hole,” she said. “It looks really gross.”

  DeVontay walked to the edge of the metal, where the plain was shrinking back toward the city. He scooped some of it up and rolled it between his hands until he’d smoothed out a silver ball. He sized it against his eye, and then licked it and slid it into his skull.

  He smiled at her, his new eye glinting with sunrise and aurora and plasma. “Better?”

  “Not really.”

  “Hey, I can be a freak, too. If I could build a city for you, I’d do it.”

  Rachel ignored his guilt trip.

  Soon the hole was revealed, two great slabs of concrete slanted down into darkness, gravel and dirt pooled around the mouth of the opening.

  “Let’s get out of here before the city starts looking good again,” she said. “Otherwise you’ll start selling real estate.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Franklin had learned plenty from the last time he’d been in the tunnel, so he counted on the chunk of alloy as his main weapon.

  It was about two feet long, lightweight and thin, and more versatile than his trusty lead pipe. It also offered the benefit of illumination, its surface casting a weak radiance into the dark tunnels. Still, he was glad to have the Glock. He’d checked the magazine and found it contained five rounds.

  He discovered the deep channel Murray had told him about, and although he resisted climbing into the water at first, he knew it was probably the fastest way to find K.C.

  She’s probably found a dry place to hole up. Especially if she has Squeak with her, she’ll play it smart.

  He didn’t really have a plan. The tunnels were bound to discharge their effluence somewhere outside the city, possibly in several places, so once he found K.C. and Squeak, they could just keep moving in one direction and eventually emerge back into the real world.

  Maybe they’d take a stab at finding DeVontay before they left. He felt bad about abandoning the guy, especially since DeVontay was practically Franklin’s son-in-law. But now that he’d lost Rachel and everyone she’d collected into an unconventional makeshift family, maybe Franklin was better off without roots.

  Yet here you go, hunting for the woman of your dreams. You’re a goddamned fool. But maybe that’s not so bad. You’ve done worse for less.

  As he slogged his way upstream, alert for any aquatic creatures or structural changes that might indicate a collapsing city, his mind drifted to the compound on a mountaintop above the Blue Ridge Parkway. He’d been away for months, and his goats and chickens had likely been devoured by the beasts of the forest. But the solar panels and battery array should still be intact, and he was stocked up with firewood. A little time spent preparing the fence and he’d be ready to settle down again.

  But he had to admit K.C.’s large estate on a wooded hillside near Stonewall was a better stronghold. Hers featured a brick wall around the sprawling property, a greenhouse, fruit trees, and a fortified, two-story house in a milder climate. She’d be reluctant to give it up, and long-distance dating was out of the question without motor vehicles and gasoline.

  He realized these were just fantasies, and the reality was a million tons of city sat above him undergoing unknowable permutations. The city was out of control, and no one could guess what that meant. If it indeed had a sentience beyond what the Zaps instilled, then it could morph in a hundred different and dangerous ways.

  That was Murray’s problem now. If she wanted to bring the whole thing crashing down, good for her. Franklin wanted to be long gone before that happened.

  He glimpsed a dim glow far ahead, a reflection shimmering on the surface of the water. He cupped his hands and yelled, but only an echo responded. Once he saw a suspicious swirl in the water and thought some slimy thing was looking for meat, but it must’ve moved on before detecting Franklin’s presence.

  A patch of alloy showed through a gap of broken concrete, and the material bulged like a massive silver dewdrop. The metal appeared to be softening. Even the alloy weapon in his hand felt a little rubbery, as if its molecular composition was changing. He ducked under the swelling material and continued upstream, shouting into every tributary he encountered.

  He came to a section where pipes and cables ran overhead and recognized it as the route he and Millwood had used to escape from the bunker. He saw no need to retrace those steps, but it gave him a better sense of his location. He was somewhere near the center of the city.

  Fifty yards in the opposite direction, he encountered a rounded access well that led upward, angled metal rungs embedded in the concrete as a ladder. The ladder ended twenty feet up at an opening. Quick stitches of lightning flared, with the bluish glow indicating the dome high overhead.

  Something fluttered on a rung just out of reach. He climbed until he was able to pluck it free and examine it in the dim light. It was one of the pink feathers from K.C.’s fedora.

  He stuffed it in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, jammed the Glock in the instep of his left boot where his pants cuff would help secure it, and started up the ladder. He clung to the robotic arm until the daylight penetrated enough to allow him to see, and then he let it fall with a splash into the current below.

  As he neared the opening, he discovered alloy oozing down the sides of the well like cake icing, running as thick as cold molasses. A couple of buildings came into view, severely shadowed by the sunrise. The edifices leaned and sagged as if they were made of gray rubber. The heart of the city was unsafe, but if K.C. was here then he had no choice.

  When he dragged himself out of the well, he expected the alloy to be gummy and yielding, but it held firm. He could only compare it to a strange form of lava, hardening even as it flowed. Franklin knelt and drew the pistol, looking around the uneven streets and alleyways. He didn’t recognize any of the buildings, since all details had been wiped from their burnished faces.

  He tried to use the sun to orient himself eastward, but given the lightning, the persistent flow of the plasma through the tubes, and the reflections cast by the dome, he was as confused as ever. He wished the material yielded enough to allow footprints, but as it was, he’d just have to guess their location.

  At least you don’t have to worry about Z-Rex and his robot pals. You hope.

  He cupped his hands and called again. He didn’t expect to find DeVontay, who was probably burying Rachel somewhere in the outskirts. But K.C. and Squeak couldn’t have gone far.

  He conducted a reconnaissance of a two-block radius, shouting their names as he went. At one point he tried to climb one of the faceless buildings, but the material was too slick and firm to offer handholds. He decided to expand his search zone, first determining his position between the second and third plasma tubes in case he needed to beat a hasty
retreat to the access well.

  As he moved away from the city’s center, the buildings were in a more advanced state of decay. They slopped toward one another, creating curved channels in the streets. The air was somewhat thicker and more chemical-smelling than before, a sign of further degradation.

  He wasn’t much for poetry, considering it the arena of feckless liberal idealists, but he loved the apocalyptic vision offered by William Butler Yeats in “The Second Coming”:

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

  It turned out the rough beast didn’t slouch toward Bethlehem to be born, but instead arrived in an intense burst of solar activity. The beast had been sleeping here all along in the hearts of men, just waiting to be zapped into existence. Or maybe the beast was Bethlehem itself, an entire city turned monstrous by the betrayal of physics.

  As he walked its metal skin, he wondered if any of the Conglomerate’s memories lingered here. Did the city think and feel? Did it detect his footsteps? Was it aware that somewhere below, a human was working feverishly to destroy it? Did it even understand the concept of mortality?

  Kokona and the other babies certainly considered themselves omnipotent and infallible. Yet he’d killed two of them without breaking a sweat. That was hardly a testament to the superiority of Homo sapiens, considering untold thousands of Zaps still populated the world.

  He was several blocks from downtown when the central tower flopped over into its adjacent neighbor, triggering a domino effect that sent several of the buildings tumbling. They landed with a sodden thump, the material stuck somewhere in transition between liquid and solid states. Franklin picked up the pace, afraid of being caught in this canyon if the deterioration struck this part of town.

  Then a percussive sound shattered the hum of the plasma factories: Pak pak pak.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The burst of automatic gunfire came from Franklin’s left, probably a few blocks away. Despite his exhaustion, he started running, his knee ligaments grinding painfully. The buildings were now unrecognizable. They were like great silver-gray mud pies dropped from high above.