Mutant Chronicles
Page 24
He drew his Bolter and fired his last few shots into the mutant. They did little more than slow the creature down. He’d lost his sword and rifle when he’d been strapped to the wheel, and he missed them sorely now.
“Kill him!” Mitch said. “Kill him!”
Mitch glanced back to where Duval stood, hoping they might find some help from that quarter. She had somehow lost his knife, but she fought on barehanded against the line of mutants.
The bridge pieces spun perpendicular once more. That cut off the line of mutants and left her with only one more mutant to face. Exhausted, she raised her hands to take the creature on. With a single kick, she knocked it off the small bit of bridge.
As the mutant went, though, it knocked into Duval. She lost her balance and fell off the bridge too.
Mitch peered down over the side of the control platform. Duval tumbled into the path of one of the spinning blades on the driveshaft, and it sliced her neatly in half at the waist. The two parts of her corpse tumbled into the murky, steam-shrouded distance below.
Mitch spun back to see Severian and Samuel rush toward each other. They slammed into a tight embrace that shook the platform with its force. Their faces were inches apart.
Samuel’s boneblade emerged from the middle of Severian’s back. He’d run her through.
For a moment, Samuel seemed to be a man again, not a mutant, and he looked at Severian with eyes filled with grief.
“Shhh,” she whispered to him. “You are Samuel. It’s all right.”
As she slid off the boneblade and into the abyss below, Severian flung her sword behind her. It clattered along the platform before coming to a rest near the control panel.
Mitch dived for the sword, but Samuel lunged at him, keeping him from it. Unarmed, Mitch spun away and rolled to his feet.
Samuel came after him hard and fast. Mitch dodged as best he could, but the platform was small: He had nowhere to hide, much less run.
He tried hammering at the mutant with his fists, but try as he might he could not find a hole in the monk’s defenses. His arms felt like rags hanging from his shoulders, whereas the mutant never tired. He knew it would only be a matter of seconds before he made a mistake.
A glancing blow from the boneblade knocked Mitch off balance, and he fell back onto a set of pipes at the platform’s edge. Grunting, Samuel raised his boneblade for a killing blow with every ounce of his weight behind it.
Mitch flung himself out of the way just in time. Samuel’s momentum carried him right past his target so that he buried the tip of his blade in the cluster of pipes. The mutant monk tried to pull the blade free but found that it was stuck.
Mitch removed the ring of dog tags from his belt pouch and wrapped them around his hand to protect his fist. As Samuel started to pull the boneblade free, Mitch stomped on his elbow, snapping the blade in two. Then he kicked Samuel in the chest, and the blade broke off entirely. Black goo fountained out of the wound.
Still Samuel showed no sensation of pain. Instead, he stared at the stump of his arm in utter fascination. Then he looked up to see Mitch standing over him, his metal-bound fist ready.
Mitch grabbed the monk by his robes and hammered him with everything he had left, a punch-drunk prizefighter giving it his all in the final round.
Smack!
“That’s for Nathan.”
Smack!
“That’s for El Jesus.”
Smack!
“That’s for Severian.”
Mitch growled at the pain in his fist as he hauled Samuel closer for one last blow.
“And this is for Samuel.”
The punch knocked Samuel backward, teeth flying and black blood spurting. The mutant staggered to his feet, but Mitch wouldn’t let up. He charged into him and smashed him back against the panels—against the detonator.
Samuel shoved Mitch back with his remaining arm, knocking him off his feet. As he fell, Mitch’s gaze landed on the tip of Severian’s glittering sword.
It was then that Mitch saw that the sword was the key he’d been hunting for, the last piece he needed to activate the bomb. He just needed to shove it in the detonator, which Samuel was lying on top of right now.
Mitch scooped up the sword, brought it into an overhand grip, and stabbed it straight down through Samuel. His aim was true. It passed right through the mutant monk and slipped into the slit in the detonator behind him.
Samuel hung there, impaled, though the life did not go out of him yet. Mitch grabbed the blade with both hands and twisted it to the right. Through Samuel’s body, he felt the detonator turn and then sink into the sphere of the bomb.
The mutant went limp, and the panel behind him lit up.
56
Mitch lifted his head and waited for some sign of the end. The entire Machine began to shake. The mutants lined up on the bridge sections fell off, and Mitch grabbed hold of the control panel to avoid sharing their fate.
He pushed himself to his feet. The entire chamber shuddered. He could feel energy pulsing beneath his feet, building up within the Machine, which now had no place for it to go.
Mitch blew out a long, tired breath. He knew this was it. Everyone else was dead, and he was about to die too. At least they’d saved the world. He looked down over the edge of the platform and saw that the blades that had sliced through Duval still spun below him. If anything, they now moved faster.
A bloody hand reached out and grabbed Mitch by the arm. He recoiled, then turned to see Samuel gazing at him, his eyes only half-filled with blackness now. His mouth moved as he tried to speak.
Putting his hand on the hilt of Severian’s sword, Mitch decided to risk leaning in to hear what the monk had to say.
In a cracked whisper from his broken mouth, Samuel spoke. “Have faith.”
Mitch stared at the monk. Hanging there, dying once more, he almost seemed human again.
The monk gave Mitch a weak but knowing smile. “Have faith,” he said.
Mitch spun toward the other side of the platform and walked to the edge. He looked down and saw the blades spinning still. Even if he made it past them, he had no idea what might lie beyond. There was no way to know.
And there was no other choice.
He closed his eyes and let himself fall over the edge. He felt the spinning blades scrape past him as he plummeted between a pair of them.
Mitch braced himself for the impact, wondering if it would break his spine or just his legs. Then he zipped through a wide hole—an open drain—in the bottom of the Machine and kept falling, now into nearly total blackness.
Hitting the surface of the lake of water, oil, and other horrible fluids shocked Mitch. He hadn’t known it was coming and so hadn’t taken a breath before he found himself deep under it.
He wanted to fight to the surface to grab a lungful of air, but just as the water finally slowed him to a halt, something flared hot and white above. At first the light blinded him, but then he saw everything. He recognized the building energy and the horrible roar it made that shook every ounce of the lake.
A spaceship. He was under a spaceship.
The Machine had been part of a spaceship.
The water above him began to get hot. Realizing that the surface of the lake he was in must have been burning and boiling away in the Machine’s exhaust, he swam for the bottom as hard as he could. His lungs aching for air, he kicked down, down, down, struggling through the water toward the coolest, darkest part he could find.
By the time he reached the bottom of the lake, the light had beaten him there. The place was littered with skulls and bones many layers deep, pieces of people that had fallen from the Machine’s giant wheels.
Hugging the bottom, Mitch looked up at the bright blue inferno above, the spaceship’s exhaust jet sinking toward him as the lake continued to boil away.
The light around him shifted from blue to red to black as the Machine and the blazing pillar of flame behind it finally lifted away toward the sky. The roar of the exhaust f
aded to silence.
Mitch’s lungs demanded air. Fortunately, he didn’t have far to swim, as the spaceship had boiled much of the lake away.
He broke the surface gasping for air and took in a huge gulp of the steam still rising from the lake’s lowered surface. It seared his lungs, but next to trying to breathe the water it felt like a cool breeze.
Mitch swam toward the shore. Soon the water became shallow enough for him to scrape his legs, and he crawled along on his hands and knees instead. He had been beaten and battered to within inches of death, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so happy just to be alive. The pain and exhaustion and the loss of his friends blunted the edge of that, but there would be time for remembering them later.
As Mitch came to the bone-covered shore, he fell down upon it and rolled onto his back. He lay there for a long time, looking up and breathing.
As the steam faded, the stars appeared in the night sky—first one, then another, and another, until a sea of tiny lights shone down at him. High above, the spaceship’s glowing exhaust crossed the sky like a shooting star heading for the darkest parts of the heavens.
Mitch reached into his shirt for the pack of cigarettes he’d carried with him since the day he’d seen his first mutant. He had one left. It was bent and nearly broken, but it was all he had.
He crumpled the pack and tossed it in the lake, where it sank to rest among the bones. Then he fished his lighter out of his pocket and flicked it open.
Bent as it was, the cigarette still lit.
“Christ.”
He gazed up at the sky and watched a circle of sparkling stars framed by the edges of the great pit that had for so long been the Machine’s home. He wondered where the spaceship might be headed. Back to wherever it had come from, he hoped.
That wasn’t his problem, though. He’d done his job. He’d fucked shit up. And after he finished this last cigarette, he’d get right back to doing that again.
Mutant Chronicles is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Del Rey Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2008 by Campfame Limited and Mutant Chronicles International Inc. MUTANT CHRONICLES and related logos, characters, names and distinctive likenesses are trademarks and registered trademarks of Mutant Chronicles International Inc. and/or Campfame Limited. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Mutant Chronicles International Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.delreybooks.com
www.mutantchroniclesthemovie.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-50975-8
v3.0