There was really only one choice. I had to leave, and they had to stay. That was the way of it.
“I know I’m heading off in a hurry,” I said earnestly. “I wish it wasn’t this way. To be honest, this has been the most fun I’ve had in a long time.” They looked up at me and I nodded in affirmation. “A long time. But the truth is, I have something very important that I need to do back home, and I need to be there as soon as I possibly can. Do you guys understand that?”
They nodded dejectedly.
“So that’s why I have to leave you now. If things were different, I’d love to stay and show you how much better than you I am at hopscotch.”
Mish sneered at me good-naturedly and Ellinan grinned, saying, “As if.”
“Are you okay with that?” I said.
Once again they nodded, a little less despondent. I stuck my hand out and Ellinan took it reluctantly. I gave it a good pump. Moving over to Mish, I offered it to her as well. She brushed it off and pressed in unexpectedly for a vigorous hug. I patted her back awkwardly.
“Okay,” I said, drawing back. “Remember to stay safe. If you hear engines in the distance, find a really good hiding place, just like in the game of hide and seek, okay? And listen - I’m proud of you two. I’ve seen people much older than you who couldn’t handle themselves half as well as you can. Your parents would be proud too.”
They nodded, the glow of that praise cutting through their sorrow. I turned and began to walk up the road, out of Carthen, pushing aside my own sense of melancholy. I was making the right decision, I had no doubt about that.
Further along the road I stopped and looked back. They had resumed their game of hopscotch and were jostling each other, laughing and shouting playfully. I smiled. They would be all right. After all, they were perhaps the only happy people I’d seen since the Winter, these two machines who thought they were human children.
I got moving along the highway, my stride long and my steps firm. I felt the wind at my back. My passage here was swift, helped not only by my soaring spirit but by the firm footing afforded by the asphalt at my feet. Although damaged it was in good enough condition to keep me out of the dirt of the wasteland.
The plantlife was growing thicker with every kilometre I travelled. I could see it dotting the wasteland on both sides of the highway, and even in places clawing its way through cracks in the asphalt. How had it changed so much in a year? The tide was turning. Life was beginning to reassert itself and was making up for lost time.
My long wait was coming to an end. One day very soon I’d be free of the confines of this metal box, this artificial construct that caged my spirit like a butterfly trapped in a glass jar. I’d be me again.
Night fell and the moon came out, big and yellow and round. It shed a ghostly glow on the landscape. That, along with the sure footing of the asphalt gave me the confidence to keep walking through the night. I didn’t slow down or stop.
But as morning broke, my good mood evaporated amid the growl and whine of engines in the distance. I saw the trail of dust wafting into the sky like an ominous red spectre, and the noise became louder.
They were heading my way.
28
I ran so fast I felt like I might split apart from the exertion. On the plain there was no immediately obvious cover, but I hoped that somewhere nearby I would find a gully or cavity in which I could conceal myself. I’d avoided them before with this strategy, but I just had to hope they didn’t come near enough for their scanners to detect me.
I was so preoccupied with looking behind me that I failed to see what was ahead until it was too late.
I saw the tent first, squat and broad, dappled in a camouflage pattern of brown and grey. It sat not far from the road, and was difficult to make out against the backdrop of the wasteland, which was probably why I hadn’t spotted it before now. To the right, standing in the middle of the road, was the hulking frame of a very large clank.
I stumbled to a halt and lifted the binoculars. It must have stood well over two metres tall, a muscular and imposing figure that could only be some sort of industrial clank, built for lifting huge loads. Right now, it was lifting something far smaller: a rifle, levelled right at me.
Seeing a flash of red, I glanced down at my torso, where a glowing dot twitched like a spasmodic firefly.
It had me dead to rights.
I waited for the impact of the round, punching through my chest and turning the world to black. I wondered, oddly detached, if I would even hear the sound of it before I was dead.
Instead, I saw the clank lift an arm and beckon me forward. There were no shots fired, no pain. I didn’t know who or what this clank was, but there wasn’t any other option but to comply. I did as instructed.
The engines were close now, roaring behind me like snarling beasts closing in on their prey. I didn’t look back, instead plunging onward across the broken asphalt toward the clank. It kept its eye to the rifle scope, still and steady for the most part, aside from one crisp motion to snatch something from its belt, which it lifted briefly to its face. As I reached it, I saw that it had the features of a female, albeit one who was three times my bulk.
“Identify yourself!” she yelled in a deep, throaty voice.
I stopped, only now daring to glance behind me. The Marauders were close enough for me to make out individual vehicles: dirt bikes and the dreaded offroader. Wraith.
They would be upon us in less than a minute.
“My name is Brant, I’m a traveller,” I said rapidly. “I need to pass through here.”
“Show me your face!” she barked. “Your cheeks!”
She was looking for the Marauder markings, I realised. Doing as she asked, I held my hands up as she gave me a once over. She nodded, satisfied, and then gestured behind her.
“Get back, inside the tent. Now!”
She crouched back over the scope, her massive shoulders and arms rippling with muscle. Her dark hair was cropped short, and in several places she had what looked to be gouges and bullet holes marking her skin, yellowed and dried with age. As I moved past she lifted the radio from her belt again and shouted into it.
“Repeat, this is Liv at Outpost Seven, I need reinforcements, where the fuck are you?”
Inside the tent, there was nothing for me to use as a weapon besides a hunting knife, which I took and gripped in determination as I crouched low in wait. Outside, Liv had moved behind a concrete barricade at the side of the road as she waited.
One of the Marauder bikes broke away and pulled ahead of the pack, thumping and bouncing along the road as its driver, a dark-skinned woman with black hair trailing behind hollered exultantly, waving a machete above her head. Liv squeezed off a burst of shots, missing, then again, catching the bike and causing the dark-skinned woman to be thrown across the asphalt face first. The Marauder’s exultation turned to agony, emitting a piteous shriek, and as she rolled to a stop she clambered to her feet, the front of her face now devoid of skin. She hobbled onward, the stripe of silver alloy down the centre of her face like warpaint, and Liv sent her crashing to the ground with a shot to the chest.
Then they were upon us. It was mayhem, bikes churning dirt in circles as their riders fired off rounds, the offroader screeching to a halt, Wraith and others spilling out. The bark of Liv’s assault rifle in reply, gunshots, screaming.
Without Liv, they’d have overrun us already. I saw her take a round in the shoulder and she barely even flinched, as if it was nothing more than a marshmallow striking her. One of the Marauders came up behind her, a knife raised. I yelled a warning and she turned just in time, adroitly reaching out with one massive hand and flinging the smaller Marauder high into the air. He spiralled as though launched from a trampoline, arms flailing, landing with a crunch in a cloud of dirt on the road almost twenty metres away.
There was a commotion behind me, and another Marauder came chopping his way through the tent with his machete, teeth bared and eyes like hot coals. I had time to r
aise my knife and awkwardly fend his first blow, stumbling away and then back into the tent. He came at me again and I stepped inside the arc of his slash, cracking him across the jaw with my elbow and then flipping him across a table that had been covered in maps and pencils. I went after him again, grabbing his wrist as he attacked, hauling him off the ground and slinging him through the air with a roar of anger.
He landed outside the tent at Wraith’s feet.
“Leave this to me, Carver,” Wraith said amiably, helping the Marauder to his feet. Stepping forward, a shotgun held at his side, he favoured me with a sly grin. “So good to see you again.”
Wraith was an imposing figure up close, his long black dreadlocks and olive complexion underscored by the unnerving calmness of his voice and an intensity in his eyes, like there was something dangerous lurking under his skin that was waiting to explode outward. He wore no shirt, revealing a muscular frame scored with deep rends that had been stitched up with yellow spikes of wire like sharp teeth. The swirling markings on his face were pronounced. In fact there was more metal than skin, and one of his eyes had been gouged and didn’t move properly in its socket.
“Yeah, sure,” I grated. “Good to see you.”
“You know, I don’t even know your name. I really should by now, after all the trouble you’ve caused me.”
“Brant.”
He shrugged. “Well. That was an anticlimax.”
“Fuck off.”
He clucked his tongue in admonishment and replaced the shotgun in its holster on his back. There was a rustling sound behind me, and suddenly two more Marauders materialised at my side, roughly gripping my arms and holding me firm.
Outside, the shooting had stopped, and I saw half a dozen Marauders had wrestled Liv to the dirt, pinning her down.
“Don’t worry about her,” Wraith drawled. “I’ll get to her next.”
“So, get on with it,” I said. My hatred for him and everything he represented, for now, overrode my fear.
He spread his hands wide. “You don’t want to hear my terms?”
“What terms? You butcher clanks, end of story.”
He made a deprecating sound. “You underestimate me, Brant. There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“I know all I need to know about you.”
He sighed and rested companionably on the table nearby, fingers linked across his thigh.
“I wasn’t always a Marauder, you know. I wasn’t born this way. None of these people were.” He pointed to the one on my left, a short man with ragged scars on his temple where he’d tried to scrape away the tattoo that marked him as a synthetic. “Jace was a cleaner.” Then to the other, a woman with yellow teeth and stinking breath. “Pauli worked in a hospital as an orderly. And Carver here,” he glanced over his shoulder and grimaced, “well, he was always a piece of shit, actually.”
Carver bristled but stood his ground as the others laughed disparagingly.
“Point is,” Wraith went on, “all of these people made a choice. They followed their survival instincts. They adapted.”
“Now they’re murderers,” I said. “What kind of choice is that?”
“Now, me,” Wraith went on, oblivious, “I worked in construction, part of a crew that built bridges, skyscrapers, you name it.” He shook his head wistfully. “I could spin a nano-assembler faster than you could blink. And at times I even liked to build things. You could almost say I enjoyed my job.
“When the Summer reached its peak, when things got really bad, they split my crew apart, reassigned us. I was put on a transport headed for a military base, where they were going to stick a gun in my hand and march me into certain death on the other side of the ocean.” His mouth twisted sourly. “Fuck that.”
He got up and stood close to me. “That transport broke down on the way there, so you know what I did? I told ‘em I was a mechanic, said I could fix it. Really, I had no clue. I stuck my hands in that engine, looked busy pulling bits out and putting them back in, and eventually help came along, and we got the thing started. But they didn’t put me back on that transport. They kept me around.
“Over the next few months they had me fixing all kinds of shit. Sometimes I got it working, and other times not. I guess I did enough to make myself useful. But then, that gig went south too. It looked like we were all going to be shipped off.
“So I changed again, fell in with a crew hauling dead meatbags into mass graves. Filthy work, really. Day after day I’d be covered in stinking, rotting entrails. Some of those corpses were falling apart so bad I’d get it under my fingernails and in my hair, and I just couldn’t seem to get it out. I probably never did.”
He held up a finger. “But the point is, Brant, I adapted. I survived. I did what I had to do as the environment changed around me.”
“How about we cut to the chase?” I said curtly.
“Like I said, I wasn’t born a Marauder, but I recognised a good deal when I saw it. There’s only one way forward from here, Brant. The future won’t belong to the stragglers out there. They might as well already be dead.” He shook his head. “No, it will belong to the Marauders. We’re the only ones making the attempt to safeguard our existence. To plan ahead. The thing is, to remain strong, we need to recruit strong clanks. Clanks who can handle themselves. Clanks like you.”
I glared at him, incredulous. “Is that what this is? A recruitment drive?”
“No, it’s not. To be precise, this is a hand reaching down from Heaven to offer you one last chance to live,” Wraith said, his voice hardening. “I don’t make this offer frequently, and I never offer it twice. But I’ve seen you at work. You’ve dispatched a few of my best people at one time or other. That’s the only reason you’re still alive right now. I could use you.”
“Not interested.”
“You need to think about this very carefully, Brant. Once you answer, I won’t ask again.”
“Fuck you,” I said without a moment’s consideration.
Disappointed, he took a step back. “As you wish. I’ll still make good use of... most of you.” He held out his hand and clicked his fingers impatiently. “Carver! The machete.”
Carver started behind him, lifting the machete. Then his head exploded into a spray of metal fragments and chucks of artificial flesh, his body wrenched violently to the side.
In the confusion, I wrenched free of my captors and drove forward, knocking Wraith back outside the tent and landing heavily on top of him. I pressed my face down near to his.
“You won’t get a single fuckin’ thing from me,” I growled. “Ever.”
More bullets thudded into the dirt around us, kicking up tiny dust geysers and causing me to take evasive action. I rolled away, seeing seven more huge clanks bounding across the plain, their bulky legs thudding into the ground as they let off bursts with their rifles.
“Wait, stop!” I called. “I’m not one of them!”
I turned back, and Wraith had already gone, limping across the asphalt toward his offroader along with Jace and Pauli. The other Marauders were retreating as well, abandoning Liv and mounting their bikes and revving off along the road and turning north.
The reinforcements reached me, the first offering a meaty hand and helping me to my feet. As I thanked him I saw Wraith’s black offroader speeding off after the bikes like a dog with its tail between its legs.
It was one of the more rewarding moments I could remember.
“We’re making a stand,” Liv told me afterwards as we walked toward their camp, located about a kilometre away. “Sometimes they get past, but usually not.”
I felt like a child, barely standing over her waist height as her eyes drifted between the wasteland and the magazine she was loading with sleek bronze rounds. One of the reinforcements, a clank even taller than Liv who wore a crew-cut and walked with a limp, handed her a magazine as he strode past, saying, “Make sure you get those wounds checked out, Liv. We’ll leave two at the checkpoint, but the rest are heading back to the fence
. Give me a buzz if you need me.”
“I told you we don’t have the resources to build that thing right now,” she said unhappily, but the clank ignored her, continuing on his way. Turning back to me, she said, “It’s just stupid, spreading ourselves thin like this.”
“Who are you guys?” I said.
“We call ourselves Ascension. We grew tired of being rounded up one at a time by the Marauders, getting picked off like flies. So here we are, trying to bring some order back to the wasteland.”
“I’ve never heard of you, or seen you around before today.”
“We haven’t been around long. Before that, we were scattered and disorganised. Our leader, Cabre, is the one who brought us together.”
“Where is he?”
“He has a base in the north. That’s where the fight with the Marauders is most fierce.” She looked down at me. “You should go to him. He can protect you, and we need every man we can get. He’s the only one standing up to the Marauders.”
Yet another recruitment offer. It seemed everyone was desperate to secure numbers.
“So why were you on that road? What are you protecting?” I said.
“Our territory.” She raised two fingers and motioned to the horizon. “We’re patrolling from here, right out to the ocean in the west, and north-east to our base. Cabre has identified this area as a strategic resource.”
I glanced to the west. My home was located within the broad tract of land she’d outlined. It seemed like a godsend that Ascension had chosen this area as their safe zone. In doing so they had also provided safety to Arsha and myself, and the embryos that were waiting in storage. They weren’t just providing a future for themselves, but inadvertently for us as well - assuming they could be trusted.
We reached the Ascension camp, a small cluster of tents huddled behind a barricade of sandbags. There was a vehicle here too, a jeep the colour of desert sand, with a machine gun mounted at the rear. Half a dozen clanks milled around performing various tasks: one had disassembled and was cleaning a rifle, another had his head stuck under the hood of the jeep, another still was poring over a map inside one of the tents.
After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1) Page 18
