by Ben Stevens
“I was in the presence of something. I’m not sure what. It was intelligent, of that much I’m sure. I may be wrong. But I believe it was the Drop. Or something behind it.”
“Something behind it?” Jon asked, puzzled.
“Yeah. Like there is an intelligence of some kind behind the Drops. Their function. Somehow. He spoke of our adversary. Upon awakening, I knew immediately what he was talking about.”
“Vampires?” Carbine asked, unfamiliar with the word.
Maya nodded. “I’m familiar with the term, from crypto-mythology from pre-Storm Earth.”
“Except it’s not just mythology,” Ratt said, raising one outstretched index finger to the sky. “Only thing I don’t get. The voice, the presence. It was a voice, but I still can’t shake the feeling that—”
“Ratt, we get it,” Jon interrupted. “The point?”
“Right.” Ratt dipped his head and shrugged his shoulders. “He said he—not him, but the adversary—he said he, no, it—”
“Ratt!” the whole party shouted.
“Okay! He said that it was old and had been on Earth before. Something about Enki not being the only prisoner in Hell.”
At Ratt’s words, Jon spied Maya visibly stiffen. She appeared to be trembling, but the morning sun had already begun its preheat setting of the dry land.
“What is it?” Jon asked her.
“I don’t know… but I wonder. Things I heard. Stories. A long, long time ago.” This time, she shuddered so that no one could miss it, and wrapped her arms around herself.
Jon turned to Maya, hoping she could shed some light of a different kind on the mystery, but her face remained expressionless, although she looked to be deep in thought.
“What’s with your eyes?” Carbine asked the other question on everyone’s lips.
“My eyes?” Ratt asked, looking up, frowning. His eyes, now quite alien in their appearance, were magnified as usual through the thick lenses of his goggles. “What’s wrong with my eyes?”
“They, uh…” Carbine started. “There are two of them.”
Ratt looked as if he might say something smart-ass to Carbine, his mouth pulled to one side wryly.
“What he means,” Jon interrupted, “is that each of your eyes contains two irises and two pupils. They are overlapped a bit on top of each other. It’s uh… a little weird, kiddo.”
“Unsettling!” Ratt exclaimed and brought his hands up to his goggles as if they were somehow mirrors that he could use to examine himself.
“I’ve seen that before, one other time,” Maya spoke up, her voice soft and laced with something Jon couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“Huh?” They all turned to her.
“Where?” Jon and Ratt asked.
“A long time ago. Someone that I… someone that used to be a friend,” Maya said, lowering her gaze to the desert floor.
Jon squinted one eye and thought to press her, but decided against it.
“It’s from the Drop. It has to be. From his contact with whatever he met. The other person who, uh, who had eyes like that also came into contact with this place,” Maya continued.
“This place?” Carbine asked.
“This place. Hell. The pocket dimension. One of my crew, someone… close to Enki, he uh, he helped us free Enki from this place, just before the Storm. Afterward, his eyes… they… they looked like that.”
“I see,” Ratt muttered, straightening his goggles and seeming satisfied with the explanation without further detail. “As long as they still work, which they do, I am quite content.”
For himself, Jon wasn’t so sure, but decided that further information could wait for another time. Maya had said she was tired. It had been a long night for all of them and they had much ground to put between themselves and this place before nightfall. He had no doubt the pack of savages would try their hand a second time. Without any further questions into the matter, they all chalked it up to a mystery and focused on things they could influence, like what to do next. Lucy’s temporary absence was never brought up.
They organized into two teams—Lucy and Carbine went out in search of Ratt’s hoverboard and the ruined ATVs, one of which Jon and Maya could assist Ratt in repairing and then fabricate a makeshift sled with which they could drag as many supplies and tools as they could fit on it. The decision to leave camp was unanimous. Their destination: the gold pillar of light beyond the hills, calling to them with its destiny song like a candle in a darkened window.
8
“Well? Is it safe?” Carbine asked as he belly-crawled up to his friend.
“I can’t tell yet,” Jon replied, without taking his eyes from the binoculars.
“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the farmhouse, and what can happen if we rush in. There is no hurry. Let’s just watch and learn.”
In the valley below, several klicks from where Jon and the others hid among the rocks and patches of paddle cactus, lay a city.
Surrounding the clearly occupied city was a wall, its footprint somewhat circular in shape.
Along the top of the wall’s perimeter, pacing back and forth, walked several dozen armed men and women. From what Jon could see, their weapons were somewhat substandard compared to the plasma launchers and Lawnmowers of Home. They also lacked any uniformity. Like the clothes these sentries wore, it would seem that they used anything at hand. The overall feeling that Jon got was more akin to the East Side Lords of Underground than the armies of the Human Republic.
The wall itself was every bit as ragtag as the people who defended it. Constructed from what Ratt called “urbanite,” it was built from the crushed, fragmented, and broken remains of a previous, pre-Storm city’s structures. These chunks of a dead city lay stacked into a rough wall, the gaps between them plastered and reinforced with what looked like cement, mud, rebar, wood, clay, and rope.
Ugly or not, Jon surmised that the wall did its job well enough, keeping unwanted people and things out. The sheer height and thickness alone convinced him that anything short of a Mech would have an impossible time breaching it.
Unlike the wall, the rest of the city’s construction was new. It was as if the builders had swept up the old city to build the wall and started fresh. The architecture was unlike anything Jon had seen before; the strong majority of the buildings constructed from some red ocher-stained earthen brick, with flat roofs and square windows and doors. Some were one story tall, with others towering several stories. Ratt had told him that it was called adobe and had suggested, based on its presence as well as the climate and vegetation—what little of it there was—that they had come out of the Drop either slightly west, in flying ship relative terms, or south of where they had crossed over the Southern Sea.
Shortly after the run-in with the savages, they’d watched the sun rise and set and cross-referenced its motions with the pillar of gold light. They had concluded that Xibalba must be southeast of their current location, and Ratt had ventured to guess that there would be no sea standing between them, assuming the shapes of the continents hadn’t changed too much from the Storm. He had studied pre-Storm maps of Earth-That-Was, and based on their original course as well as the physical appearance of the child Wyntr, had expected their destination to be either in Central or South America, but he also knew that during the Storm, the seas had raged like never before, altering the coastlines forever. Stories abounded in the days of his parents that had told of entire cities like Houston-That-Was being swallowed by the drink. A place once called Panama, might be an issue, if Xibalba were that far south.
For two days and nights, they had followed the direction of the pillar into the rising hills, every step haunted by the worry that they would encounter more of the savages. However, on the morn of the third day, unmolested, they had crested the summit of a small mountain and discovered the city below.
From their vantage point, high up in the hills that embraced and sheltered the valley and city below, Jon, Lucy, and Carbine studied the city. T
hey had diligently performed their duty in shifts, day and night, for the last three days. After trekking through the desert, they welcomed the respite, having picked out a good location with plenty of rocky cover and a few paddle cacti, and set up their stakeout. But now their supplies were running low. Food and water were in short supply. Jon, of course, offered to refrain from eating anything again, but Maya insisted that he keep his body strong, despite his lack of hunger, if only to ward off the growing fire of death that was burning in his blood.
They were running out of time, but all were in agreement that they needed to ascertain the disposition of the city before simply strolling up to its gates. The first night, Carbine had seen what he swore was a glint of glowing red eyes on the face of one of the sentries that patrolled the flat, wide walkways atop the wall. To confirm his suspicions, he’d called Lucy over and asked her to use her robotic eyes to zoom in and switch to thermal vision. Ratt had educated them all as to the ins and outs of the undead during their journey, which was otherwise uneventful. Lucy had confirmed that the sentry was ambient temperature, just like the savages.
The walking dead.
And yet, most of the city was not. An easy nine out of ten of the city’s occupants gave off heat signatures, just like normal walking, talking, living humans. Nor did the sentries behave anything like the animalistic savages they had met earlier. It was a puzzler, and it was the source of their prolonged caution.
Over the last two and a half days, they’d watched and studied, and prepared. Carbine assisted Lucy with a deeper analysis by using optics mounted to his railgun. Using these, he was able to see through solid walls and control how “deep” he went by turning a dial on the side of the makeshift scope.
When they weren’t using the railgun’s scope to make observations, Ratt insisted that he be allowed to modify the weapon so that Carbine might still be able to use it.
“You aren’t going to break it, are you?” Carbine asked, offering the weapon to the whiz-kid, but unable to let go of it, prompting a sort of tug-of-war. “I love this pea-shooter.”
“Don’t be silly. But if I don’t change it a bit, it’ll rip you in two. You aren’t in the Mini-Mech anymore.”
Carbine frowned at that thought. In his final battle with Colonel Taylor, the Mechanized Infantry Sniper Suit, or MISS, had been shredded by Taylor’s Heavy Mech’s guns. Carbine himself had suffered damages from that exchange, damage from which he had nearly bled out, ultimately resulting in his having to receive a prosthetic leg, much like Sgt. Miller’s. Ratt had managed to rebuild the power armor once, but the efforts had proven to be in vain, for the sum of his hard work was now a scattered smear of metal on the desert plain, three days’ march behind them.
“I’m thinking that if I add a spike here,” Ratt gestured to the rifle’s underside, “you can drive the gun into the ground, which will not only serve as a uni-pod, but will also absorb some of the recoil.”
“Please don’t call it a gun…” Carbine muttered, more to himself than to Ratt.
“Then, I will add a hydro-pneumatic recuperator, like Artillery uses. It will further reduce the recoil.”
“A what?” Carbine asked.
“If all else fails, I can machine bore a second barrel in the rear and put a single extremely dense projectile on a second firing mechanism and tether it to a heavy-duty spring. The mass of the rear-firing projectile will slow it down considerably. I can buffer the end of the new bore with shock absorbers and the spring will pull the lump back into place… hmm… gonna have to whip up some kind of latching mechanism too. Anyway, the rails in the barrel will help a lot too. If I have the parts, maybe I can extend the darn thing. You see, a chemically powered weapon feels all the kinetic energy of the shot right away, but that process is elongated, slowed down in a rail gun. The electromagnets in the rail speed the projectile up to its full speed as it passes down the barrel, not reaching top speed until it leaves! That means a serious reduction in felt recoil. Combine this with the modifications I will make, and you should be able to shoot this again without knocking yourself over.”
“Egghead, I have no idea what you just said, but if it works, I’m happy.”
Ratt went about performing his work on the rifle while the rest of them continued their reconnaissance.
They observed what for all intents and purposes appeared to be a normal city. There was a market, an oasis, a large plaza where the adobe bricks were made and set out to dry. Livestock, gardens, clean streets. Life appeared to be productive and pleasant. In the central eastern portion of the city stood a palace of ornate splendor, a miniature version of the Ziggurat, its stepped adobe walls whitewashed and its balconies generously graced with flora of every imaginable variety that thrived in this climate. The city, despite the fact that it seemed to be guarded by the undead, looked convincingly like a pearl in the dustbin—a sample of juicy, ripe fruit in an otherwise barren wasteland, as alluring to the hungry and forlorn as a carnivorous plant to a thirsty fly.
There appeared to be no savagery; if the cold, moving humans down there amongst the warm, moving figures were indeed vampires, they behaved very differently from the ones they had already encountered. They needed more information as badly as they needed fresh supplies.
Plagued with indecision, Jon and Carbine watched the comings and goings of the city below until the sun was nearly set and twilight brought the chill of desert night with it.
“I’ve seen enough,” Jon said. “Come on, let’s get back to camp.”
“I don’t like it. Not one little bit,” Jon said, his arms crossed in front of his chest.
“Well, I didn’t like it when she insisted on being captured by the goddamn Scrubbers. Or that I had to rescue you two twats,” Lucy responded, not bothering to even look up from cleaning her pistol.
Maya, who was wrapped in one of the sleeping bags for warmth against the cold night—they couldn’t risk a fire, as even at this altitude, its light was sure to be spotted by someone on the wall or in the city it surrounded—shot her senior guardian a disapproving glance. The look was not lost on those whom it had been intended to defend. In the last couple of days, the new moon had come, and the cloud cover had dissipated—both a blessing and a curse.
“This is different,” Jon protested.
“Oh yeah? How so?”
“Stop arguing. Please.” Maya saved Jon from having to answer Lucy with the inevitable stutter of frustration. Jon and Lucy had been arguing ever since Maya had proposed her plan for getting into the city.
The guardians had returned from their scouting post with news and shared it. The silent mulling over both the lack of real information and their dwindling supplies had been interrupted when a look of cheerful determination suddenly possessed Maya.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I do believe it’s time for Lily Sapphire to perform again,” she’d announced.
Now, thirty minutes later, Jon was still protesting.
“Listen here, Maya,” he started to explain again.
“For a new guardian, you sure are informal. It’s ‘my lady’,” Lucy spat at him.
“No deberías ser tan cruel, mi amiga jaguar lucha.” Maya looked at Lucy, exhaustion on her face.
“Me disculpo,” Lucy responded softly, her eyes cast down.
Jon hesitated a second, watching the two women, then continued. “Maya. I mean no disrespect, and I don’t mean to argue with you. But there is no way I’m going to let you waltz into that city where you may be hurt, or worse! I didn’t put my life on the line just to watch you throw yours away!” He looked to Carbine for some backup, but his friend had chosen earlier to agree with Lucy, no doubt in the hopes of earning some brownie points. “Lucy, you fought the savages with me. You saw what those things are like, what they are capable of! And we don’t even yet understand the dynamic of the city, what it’s like down there…” His voice trailed off.
“Oh, Jon.” Maya smiled at him in the moonlight. “We have no choice. We only have a few days’
worth of food and water left. Only having one ATV and Ratt’s hoverboard is slowing our progress down. We need fresh supplies, and maybe horses if we can get them. The longer we wait here, the stronger your fire grows. I will be fine because Lucy will come with me.” Her child-like moon face ran the gamut of emotion from deep affection to determination to sympathy to sudden bouncy happiness.
“Wha—?” Jon arched one eyebrow.
“And Ratt too.” She beamed.
“Hey, hey wait. What about us?” Carbine said, apparently finally finding the nerve to object. Ratt also looked slightly concerned.
“Well, if my sworn guardians would stop arguing, I will explain my plan.”
After going over the details, the team set to work preparing everything they would need. Maya opened another portal to her suite in the Ziggurat, and they delivered a second message to Miller and To-Kan, explaining their situation. She told them of the finding of the city, and their dual hope in both finding supplies where they were, and in establishing a time to initiate a two-way conversation with their friends in Home, hopefully planning out some kind of rescue operation.
At one point during the construction required for the execution of Maya’s plan, Carbine had spied Lucy struggling with bent bars intended for the frame of a caravan they meant to build. She was clearly attempting to juggle more things than she had hands to hold.
She’s not used to only having the two arms. He paused in his work, secretly watching her for a minute. He couldn’t help himself; there was something mesmerizing about the warrior woman. He didn’t mean to be a creep about it; he was simply fascinated by her, and furthermore, a small ember of sympathy had begun to smolder within him. What a cruel, sick joke they played on her.
After abusing her for years, the brutal men that had broken her body had then aimed to possess it fully, trapping her mind in a robotic shell, a caricature, a sculpted body, a misogynistic mockery of who she was and who they’d wanted her to be. Plainly put, she was unrealistically sexy—a robot fantasy from the perverted mind of a chauvinist; a mechanical playmate crossed with the painted Saint of Death. Carbine didn’t have to ask to know that parts of her were non-existent. She had never known, and would never know the bliss of making love by her own choice and free will. Cruel indeed.
