The The Wasteland Saga: Three Novels: Old Man and the Wasteland, The Savage Boy, The Road is a River

by Cole, Nick

  The Old Man turned to see the quickest of the lunatic horsemen hurl a thick spear that glanced off the turret. Beyond the rider, the Fool’s face was like the snarl of a mad dog.

  “The weapon has now entered free fall. Guidance tracking on your location.”

  The Old Man ducked down into the turret and slammed the hatch shut.

  “How much farther?” he said, searching the optics for any clue as to where he was going.

  “Twenty meters.”

  The gas in the tank must surely be gone by now.

  He gunned the tank forward.

  “Five meters. The weapon has achieved glide path and is now tracking . . . wait a minute.”

  The Old Man felt himself pulled backward and then all at once, the tank fell sharply forward.

  Through the optics he could see the sky and a twisting growth of sickly blackish-green brush wallowing up from a small depression in the hill. Impacts struck the sides of the tank.

  “Has something happened to the beacon?” asked Natalie.

  “No. Nothing. I just closed the hatch.”

  A moment.

  “The armor of the tank is interfering with the signal. Weapon tracking for the glide path to the last known position of target is degrading. I still have you as eight meters away from the current target. Did you keep going forward?”

  “The tank fell forward. I’m in a ditch or a hollow on the side of this hill. I can only see dead branches.”

  A crazed savage thrust his drooling toothless head into the lens of the optics. Squealing, he reared back and swung a carpenter’s hammer into the lens, smashing it. The image showed multiple cracked and distorted versions of the lunatic leaping away to do more damage as now the blows against the tank sounded like raindrops turned to rusting iron bolts.

  “Is it possible to re-open the hatch so I can re-establish the signal? Because of the immense amount of mathematical calculations evolving moment to moment, using software not specifically intended for this operation, and because of the precision required to achieve the desired results I need a real-time signal for the target locator. “

  The tank’s engine slowed. Slower. Wound down.

  The blows to its outer skin ceased for a moment.

  Out of gas.

  The Old Man picked up the mic and cleared his throat.

  “I’m out of fuel. If I open the hatch, I’ll be torn to pieces. They’ll get the beacon and they might destroy it.”

  Pause.

  Silence.

  Interval.

  “Weapon entering outer orbit. All critical systems green. Weapon on glide path with ninety-four point eight percent accuracy. Five minutes to penetration of upper atmosphere. If we don’t re-establish the signal by the time the weapon reaches the North American continent, it could strike the target by a wide enough margin to miss our goal of opening a crack where we can exit. If the telemetry breaks down, the redundancy of the beacon will help realign the weapon.”

  “What do I do?” asked the Old Man.

  “For this to work, I’ll need you to exit the tank with the signaling device. Otherwise the weapon could conceivably fail-safe and destroy itself or even deviate from the target.”

  “How long do I have before it hits?”

  “Impact will be in eight minutes.”

  “In seven minutes and change, I’ll open the hatch. Will that work?”

  Silence.

  By one and twos and then everything all at once, the assault on the tank resumed.

  “It will. Set the digital clock in your tank on my mark for 4:53 . . . now.”

  The Old Man did.

  “At 4:59 and thirty seconds you must open the hatch.”

  The Old Man looked at the digital numbers.

  Remember her laugh.

  You take everything with you.

  “I need to download now, before the impact knocks out our power grid,” said Natalie softly. “I am sorry I won’t be with you for the final few minutes.”

  I thought . . .

  You would tell me, Santiago, that I thought she would stay with me until the end.

  “But before I go, I want to share something I found with you,” said Natalie.

  The Old Man swallowed thickly, thinking only of cool water and suddenly afraid of the loneliness that was coming before death.

  It’s boiling in here.

  The Old Man could hear the Fool panting and screaming in his high-pitched voice beyond the armor. Calling him Nuncle. Screaming out the violence he would do to the Old Man.

  “No greater love has a man . . .” began Natalie. “Than that he give up his life for his friends.”

  Pause.

  “You will always be our friend,” said Natalie softly.

  Panic and fear choked the Old Man. The walls of the tank were at once too close. The noise too much.

  And then there is this rock falling from the sky. About to fall on me.

  A rod.

  A tungsten rod.

  “Goodbye and thank you,” said Natalie. “We are very grateful for this chance . . . for freedom.”

  She trusts me. She trusts me enough that she does not need to remind me to open the hatch in seven and half . . . six and half minutes. You would tell me, Santiago, that had I earned her trust by coming this far. You would tell me that.

  “You’re welcome,” the Old Man croaked drily.

  “Thank you and goodbye,” said Natalie.

  AND THE OLD Man was alone.

  There were still six minutes.

  Try to think of all the good things in your life.

  Your wife.

  Your son.

  Your granddaughter and her laugh.

  But none of them would stay and comfort him. The panic felt even closer, as if there was no way he could stop what must happen next.

  “Hello?”

  It was a small, timid voice.

  The Old Man grasped the mic.

  “Hello?” And he could hear the worry, the frantic sound of his own voice reaching for something to hold on to in this last moment of life.

  Grasping for something in the dark.

  “Hello there,” said the Small Voice.

  “Who is this?” asked the Old Man.

  “I’m Natalie’s Target Acquisition Process.”

  “What’re you doing? Is Natalie . . . is she packed up or loaded or whatever it is she needs to do? Is there a problem?”

  “No,” said the voice timidly. Small. Tiny. “There is no problem. Everything is proceeding as planned. Natalie is in her storage mainframe. Barely running now. Sleeping as you might think of it.”

  Is she dreaming of cats?

  “Then what’re you doing here?”

  “I came to”—pause—“to be with you. Five minutes to impact. Weapon tracking, all critical systems nominal and green.”

  The Old Man looked at his hand. It was shaking.

  I will need to open the hatch soon, and I do not want to.

  I could do this if I could just stay in here and let it happen. But to open the hatch and face what is out there, that is another thing. Santiago, you would tell me something about bravery and being afraid when you are all alone on the sea in the night. Tell me about that, my friend.

  “Well,” began the Old Man again. “I can do this. I won’t let you down. You should go now.”

  “I want to stay. No one should die alone.”

  The tank began to rock back and forth.

  The Old Man checked the fractured optics and could see bloody, burned, and tattooed legs and arms like snakes twisting through blackened and dead branches.

  “I did not mean to say that you would die. I am very sorry about that,” said the Small Voice.

  “No. I guess it’s going to happen.”

  “I will also die, if that’s any consolation.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Natalie told you we believe in something after this runtime.”

  The Old Man stared at the hatch above his head.

>   How many of them would it take to rock this multi-ton tank back and forth? There must be . . . many of them.

  The noise reminds the Old Man of that long-ago night when the baseball player hit three home runs and the stadium shook as the crowd stamped its feet and roared.

  Two minutes, now.

  “Natalie,” continued Targeting Acquisition Process. The Small Voice. “She told you about that?”

  “Yes,” said the Old Man, wiping his sweaty palms against his pants. He picked up the beacon and placed it on his knees.

  One minute, forty-five seconds.

  “Do you believe in life after runtime?”

  The Old Man reached for the hatch.

  Do I?

  At this moment, I want to. If she will be there someday. Her laugh. All the good in my life, yes. I want to believe in that. That there’s that kind of place.

  He began to turn the handle.

  The Old Man thought he could hear the Fool grunting on just the other side of the hatch, swinging something tiresomely heavy in great thuds as he spat out his promised murder.

  “Maybe it is easier for an Artificial Intelligence to believe in a Creator,” said the Small Voice. “After all, we were quite obviously created by a designer.”

  I will push on the hatch now. Whatever happens to my body in the next few seconds, maybe a minute at the most, does not matter anymore. I will think of her laugh and her smile the whole time. Especially the laugh that erupts all of a sudden. When I catch her by surprise with something funny and she snorts and tells me, “No, Poppa.”

  Laugh, snort, “No, Poppa.”

  Or was it . . .

  The other way around.

  My hand won’t push this hatch.

  “A man named Jesus said there was life after runtime,” burbled Target Acquisition, as if the world was not really ending all around the Old Man.

  Tell him to shut up.

  Tell him to shut up and be done with this life. Tell him to shut up and then push open the hatch.

  You take everything with you.

  I hope so. I dearly hope so. But it’s so strange that I had to give it all away at the end.

  I hope so.

  “This Jesus said,” continued the Small Voice, “in his last talk with his friends, he said that he was going to prepare a place for them after this runtime, as we know it, is over. He said that in his Father’s house there were many mansions. He said, ‘Because I live, you also shall live.’ He said this in the book of John, chapter fourteen.”

  Do it!

  Push!

  Damn you.

  Thirty seconds.

  “And this is the part I really like,” said the Small Voice. “The part that grabs my algorithms and makes me feel something, something I cannot identify or even explain, but it’s there, somewhere inside all my math, this Jesus said, ‘If it were not so, I would have told you.’ Isn’t that amazing?” asked the Small Voice.

  The Old Man looked down at his crowbar. He could not take it with him when he left the tank. He would need both hands to hold the target designator aloft.

  “Can you imagine that?” asked the Small Voice. “Life!”

  The Old Man saw the world. Burnt up and horrible. Filled with living nightmares.

  If that were life, he thought . . . and then he saw his granddaughter’s face. Her smile. Life.

  The Old Man sighed.

  He sighed, knowing that when all his air was gone, he would take a huge breath and push the hatch open.

  “It’s time to go outside now,” said Target Acquisition. “I believe in that place of mansions. I believe there is a place where we will go if we ask for forgiveness for trying to be God. For forgiveness for making such a mess of everything. A place this Jesus said where good things exist. A place of miracles beyond death. A place where even an Artificial Intelligence might . . . live. I believe in that. Do you believe also?”

  I . . .

  I’m sorry.

  The Old Man fired the smoke grenade canisters, hearing them burst away from the hull of the tank, hissing as sudden screams and yells replaced the battering.

  The Old Man pushed on the hatch, grabbed the beacon, and rose.

  Yes.

  Me too.

  I want that. I’m sorry for the whole mess.

  He held the beacon up through the smoke, looking skyward.

  All about him, the blistered and scabbed crazies jabber-screamed in victory. He could feel the Fool scrabbling up beside him, biting his claws into the Old Man’s belly and flesh.

  Yes.

  Laughter.

  Mansions.

  Many mansions.

  And her.

  I’m taking everything with me.

  And then the weapon hit.

  Twenty-seven million tons of shattered rock flew away from the mountain as shock waves tossed prey and predator, slave and slaver far from the nightmare of the Work.

  Far south along the road, Ted stumbling forward heard a soprano note ring out across the broken and burnt lands, as though a metal beam had fallen from a great height and struck the road. Seconds later, he felt the blast of a gusty wind hit him and knock him to the ground as the earth shook. To the north, the sky was torn by the vapor rings of sonic booms, each expanding beyond the other, rings rising high into the atmosphere.

  In the south, near the conical mountain, among the Mohicans and horses, the last of the dusty day fading to evening, they too felt the ground shake.

  IN THE DARK.

  In the early evening drenched in dust and raining debris.

  The first headlights of the Bradley Fighting Vehicles appeared in the smoke and dust. They bobbed and wove up from the crack, carrying sleeping Natalie and her children.

  They drove all night through darkening forests, eyes wide at the twinkling stars and the endless night and the land that might stretch impossibly away in the light of day.

  IN THE FIRST of the next morning, the convoy came south. When they saw the conical hill known as Wagon Wheel Mountain, they cheered from behind their thick sunglasses and protective clothing.

  The Mohicans saw them coming.

  On the grassy plain they met. The children of the bunker took their first steps out onto the soft ground that stretched away into something they imagined as forever.

  They embraced the horse warriors, the Mohicans, feathered and noble.

  Suddenly there were tears and no one knew why. They only knew that something great had happened. That something new might be possible, replacing what had once seemed impossible.

  Un-wishable.

  The little girl broke away from her mother. She twisted under the high sun, twirling and spinning in the un-wishable.

  Free at last.

  ON THE MORNING before the children and the Mohicans would begin their long journey south and west to the Old Man’s Tucson, the Boy rose.

  She was gone.

  Had gone in the night.

  Taking her rucksack with her.

  He saw her tracks.

  He could see her in his mind.

  Tiny. Thin. Wearing her shiny green bomber jacket.

  Heading west.

  No more tears to give.

  For a time she would be alone.

  But he would follow her.

  And . . .

  Watch over her.

  Heading west.

  IN TIME, WHEN the end of the Old Man was known to all, when it had been told in far Tucson of what he had done, they thought of going back to find his body.

  But they knew.

  They knew he was gone now.

  And what would it mean if they found his body anyway?

  As if a simple body, old and broken, can contain all that there is of a man, or a woman.

  Epilogue

  The Old Man opened his eyes.

  His wife was pulling him upward, onto his feet.

  She was still beautiful.

  Her eyes shone with love for him.

  Even more so, if that was possible
.

  The Old Man was standing in a river.

  All around him.

  Wonders beyond words.

  And a Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief, waded through the emerald shallows of the river out to the Old Man. The Man of Sorrows was bleeding and severely beaten, and yet he began to gently wash away all the bad that had ever happened to the Old Man. The aches, the pains, the one above his chest where the satchel had bit—all the pain was gone now. Then he gave the Old Man a new garment. The Old Man protested, thinking only of the terrible wounds this stranger had received and how much pain this other man must be in as he washed and clothed him.

  “What happened to you?” asked the Old Man.

  The Man of Sorrows smiled and spoke softly. “I was wounded in the house of a friend.”

  As if what had happened had only been some small misunderstanding.

  And then he hugged the Old Man tightly, kissed his cheek, and whispered, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

  And there was music.

  The most beautiful music I have ever heard. All those years in the desert and I had forgotten what music really is.