by K A Riley
With what appears to be an infinitely large army advancing before our eyes, whatever “distance” Kress was talking about is about five minutes away from being completely gone.
There’s no avoiding it anymore. Angel Fire is right. It’s here.
But so are me and my Asylum.
Six unarmed teenagers, a raven, and a vulture with the Army of the Unsettled all around us, the Cult of the Devoted closing in, and the fate of what’s left of a broken nation hanging in the balance.
Staring forward into the distance, Matholook takes my hand in his.
It feels almost comforting.
Almost.
This time, though, I don’t think simple comfort is going to be enough.
35
Devoted
I didn’t know there were so many Devoted in their Cult. Hell, I didn’t know there were so many Devoted in the world.
When I visited their compound, Matholook gave me what I thought was a pretty thorough tour. We walked around the town, and he told me some of their history, introduced me to some of their members, and showed me the buildings where they lived, went to school, cooked, relaxed, and trained. I got the feeling he wasn’t showing or telling me everything, and I suspected there was more to the Cult of the Devoted than met the eye.
But I never suspected this.
Before my eyes, what I always thought of as a fringe group of a few hundred reclusive brainwashers has morphed into a dense army of thousands of armed soldiers. Even from here, I can make out their arsenal of guns, swords, spears, and a wide variety of very unfriendly bladed weapons.
It’s a maddening moment. The Army of the Unsettled, with us swept along with them, is still moving forward, right toward the Cult of the Devoted. At the same time, the Cult of the Devoted continue their own march toward us.
It’s two armies playing a game of chicken, and we’re about to be barbecued right along with them.
As the Devoted continue to advance along the valley floor in front of us and take strategic positions on the walls of the canyons on either side, it occurs to me what an odd-looking army they are.
I’m used to London’s Royal Fort Knights and the clothes they pilfered from various museums and costume shops around the city. They were deep into the Medieval esthetic. And then there were the Banters and their cobbled-together gear from their raids on every sports and athletic equipment store left standing. Here in America, I’ve seen the pastel kit of the Outposters, and, of course, there’s the Unsettled with their hodgepodge of mushroom-colored cloaks, drawstring pants, tuxedo tops, and scruffy hiking boots.
But the Devoted army…I’ve never seen anything like it.
Rank after rank of men and women (and some children, too, I think), all dressed in crisp, dark blue dress pants, white button shirts, red ties dotted with white stars, and navy blazers—all under what looks from here like American football gear: shoulder pads and body armor, spray-painted bright red, highlighted with spatterings of bright white stars.
They look like they’re dressed more for a board meeting—or possibly an old-style American football game—than for a war.
“Are they in suits?” Arlo asks.
“And body armor,” Matholook explains. “It’s the battle gear of the Devoted. Eighteenth-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz said, ‘War is the continuation of policy by other means.’”
“And what does that mean, exactly?” I ask, my eyes locked onto the encroaching army.
“It means,” Matholook says with stern gravity and with a flick of his hand toward the legion of his own people marching toward us. “That the Devoted see business, commerce, and negotiation as just other versions of war. And they dress for it.”
“So…,” Arlo drawls. “They’re insane.”
Matholook shoots Arlo a vicious glare but then takes a breath and holds his hands up in an “I’m sorry” gesture, even though it’s Arlo who’s the one out of line.
Matholook’s voice goes slow and measured, and, from the mouth of the boy he is, I can hear the voice of the man I know he’s going to become. “It’s not complicated,” he says evenly. “Horrible, maybe, but not complicated. Everything everyone has ever done in the course of human history—from relationships and trade to exploration, politics, and murder—is built on the idea of trying to convince others to think like you. War is no different.”
“Yeah,” Ignacio sneers, his eyes swinging from the advancing army and then back to Matholook. “But that kind of ‘convincing’ out there comes at the end of a weapon.”
“Whatever it takes,” Matholook says, and I can’t tell if he’s sad or proud.
“They’d look nice,” Libra offers, planting her hands on her hips and gazing out at the assembly of deadly soldiers in their armored red, white, and blue business suits. And then with a blush and downcast eyes, she turns and adds, “I mean if they weren’t about to kill us and all.”
Haida belts out a few urgent gurgle-clacks to get my attention. I whip around and, sure enough, there are even more of the Devoted behind us and on either side. Lined up in tight rows hundreds of yards deep, they have troops stationed on every slope, hill, cliff, outcropping, and rocky ridge running along the sides of the valley we’re in and in a huge crescent around the cratered field in front of us.
But the scarier part is what happens next.
By the hundreds, all around us, the tractor-trailer gears grind down. The excavator arms fold back. The chalky scratch of bulldozer and crane treads softens and fades. The skinny dirt-bikes sputter to a stop in the lanes and alleys branching out behind and to the sides of us. The RVs, campers, cube-vans, pickups, dump trucks, and the rest of the smoke-belching vehicles go quiet and still as a cemetery stone.
And, for what Angel Fire tells us is the first time in nearly a decade, the perpetual motion of the Army of the Unsettled comes to a dead stop.
As large and as unstoppable as the Army of the Unsettled is, the Cult of the Devoted have somehow both surrounded them and stopped them.
It’s an impressive, baffling, and terrifying accomplishment.
We’re surrounded by the Unsettled, who are surrounded by the Devoted. And just when I thought the shite we’re in couldn’t get any deeper…
With all of us frozen in our tracks, Ignacio swivels his head around to the sides and glances over his shoulder to take in the hundreds of eerily still vehicles. I’m sure he wants to say something profound, maybe offer up some inspirational bluster. But all that comes out is, “Ummmm…”
I know the feeling.
“You seem pretty relaxed,” Sara says, her voice laced with accusation as she swings toward Angel Fire. “I mean, for someone who just led his troops into a full-on ambush. What happened to all of your high-tech navigation and communication systems?”
Staring out at the Cult of the Devoted, Angel Fire doesn’t answer, and I think maybe he’s gone catatonic from fear.
Without turning around, he flicks his thumb backward over his shoulder. “Grace and Reece…they’re two of our Heralds. They said our navigation system’s been infiltrated.” I can barely hear him when he adds, “They say there’ve been deaths.” Shaking his head, he adds, “There’ve already been deaths.”
Libra repeats the word out loud. “Deaths?”
Angel Fire nods. “There’s not much in the world that’s more relaxing than inevitability,” he mumbles, his eyes riveted on the enemy army, half of it positioned in ominous attention on the top of the steep escarpments on either side of us, half of it marching confidently forward through the open valley ahead.
I find myself staring at him. He just found out the safety and security of his whole world have been compromised, and he’s not even breathing hard?
With a shake of his head, Angel Fire rouses himself from his daze and snaps back into the decisive leader we’ve quickly come to know. After apologizing to us, he barks out orders to the nearby boys and girls of his crew, who suddenly don’t seem nearly as intimidating—or as competent—as
I once thought.
In their wide eyes, Angel Fire’s panic is magnified and multiplied.
Some of the kids around us form a cluster to defend Angel Fire. Others dash down laneways between trucks or leap into the larger construction rigs, even though nothing is moving anymore.
From every window of every vehicle in the now-stopped and gridlocked fleet, the heads and torsos of the Unsettled appear.
Wielding some very old looking rifles, they start firing into the distance at the swarming masses of the approaching Devoted.
Too soon, I think. Let them get closer!
But in their fear and caught by surprise, the Unsettled seem to have given up on anything resembling military strategy.
With fearless intensity, other squads of Unsettled soldiers—mostly adult men and women—burst out of large transport carriers. Brandishing makeshift spears and with raging battle cries, they swarm around and past us, sprinting at top speed toward the Devoted attackers who are now sprinting at top speed toward us.
A company of Unsettled troops, dressed in matching brown and green camouflage hunting gear, bursts past us, and we have to leap to the side to keep from getting trampled.
The churn and grind of engines, wheels, and treads has been replaced by wails of agony, shouted orders, and blasts of gunfire coming from behind us, deep within the Army of the Unsettled.
Startled, Haida and Jeff—the white raven on my arm and the purple-and-cream spackled vulture on Matholook’s shoulder—rise as one. They beat their wings with frantic desperation as they surge up and bank on a steep ascent away from what’s instantly turned from a motorcade into a battlefield.
I call out, “Hey!” but I can’t blame them for leaving. If I had wings, I’d probably be long-gone, too.
The two birds fade into the soot-filled sky, leaving us on the precipice of the chaos and in the literal middle of a war.
36
Climb
The Cult of the Devoted are relentless. They’re also unending. There are literally enough of their army up on the flat clifftops to surround the entirety of the Army of the Unsettled with a ring of troops twenty-soldiers deep.
I want to ask Matholook where they all came from—how did they manage to turn a small compound of eccentric historians into…this?
I want to ask, but the question twists into a spiky burr that lodges in my throat.
Is that because I don’t want to know the answer? Or is it because I’m afraid Matholook has known the answer all along?
In orderly rows now, the Cult of the Devoted are pressing forward.
At the same time, the members of the Army of the Unsettled continue to pour out from every door on every RV, camper, motorhome, tractor-trailer, pickup, cube van, excavator, bulldozer, dump truck, and construction rig in their fleet.
The metallic screech of steel on steel vibrates through the air as van doors—hundreds at a time—slide open on rusty, dirt-crusted rails.
Soldiers in the Army of the Unsettled—mostly kids but some adults, too—spill out from the laneways and clamber down from ladders, their boots touching down like thunder and kicking up clouds of red dust.
The contrast between the two armies couldn’t be more stark.
These are two rivers—one crisply clean and red, white, and blue; the other choppy and shadowy brown—on a collision course, with me and my friends about to be swept up in the resulting rapids.
Overhead, a distant whistle grows louder, and we all look up in unison. Wavy spirals of silver exhaust streak in huge arcs through the sky.
I can’t speak for Angel Fire or the Unsettled, but everyone in my Asylum knows exactly what we’re looking at.
It’s Libra who says it out loud. “Synaptic Atomizers.”
We learned all about them—and the havoc they caused around the world—in Granden’s World History class and in Terk’s seminar on Demolitions and Explosives. Harnessing electrical impulses from the earth’s natural magnetic fields, these weapons disrupt synaptic signals in the human brain. A much more powerful version of the Unsettleds’ own Systems Diode Dampeners, they are dangerous and unstable, which is why Krug stopped using them after they kept wiping out entire companies of his own Patriot Army before they could even transport them off their military bases to be deployed against the invented Eastern Order.
Horrific, unpredictable, based on incomplete science, and built on dodgy technology, they are a last resort weapons of war
So why are the Devoted deploying them as a first resort?
Whatever their reasons, the impact of these weapons is an apocalyptic level of deadly.
The sounds of the huge desert caravan, now frozen in place, has been replaced by the screams of the Unsettled—somewhere behind us and deep in the middle of the armada—being dismantled on a cellular level from the inside out.
“The eyes are technically part of the human brain,” Granden once explained. “Which is why they go first when an atomizer is deployed.”
He went on to show us archival footage of Cyst Plague survivors living in slums around one of the country’s big cities as Krug’s walls and the arcologies of the Wealthies were being built up. By the hundreds and all at the same time, those people in the holo-projection pressed their fingers to their temples as if in the throes of a communal headache. Only, instead of squinting in pain, their eyes opened wide, and it was like they were being forced to stare into the sun. The glossy wet of their eyes crystalized and went veiny and gray before shattering like glass and cascading down their faces in powdery clumps.
“Their brains literally turned to dust,” Granden told us through a choked-off whisper and leaning heavily on his glass-topped podium at the front of the classroom.
The physical damage he described didn’t happen in an instant, either. The whole process took a few seconds. For me and my appalled Asylum, watching the writhing spasms second-hand from the safety of our classroom, it felt like an eternity. I can’t begin to imagine what it felt like for the victims.
Here, out in the distant middle of Angel Fire’s army, a wall of crackling silver-blue flame surges skyward, only to collapse back down and spread out in a rolling blanket of dust and heat.
We can’t see the results of the detonations from here.
I can barely stand to imagine it.
Because the Devoted now have their own soldiers flooding the area, they’re unlikely to deploy any more of those horrific atomizers. But that’s small consolation for the hundreds of the Unsettled who just died.
Ignacio cries out, “Our weapons!”
Angel Fire points to where a cyclone of electric blue fire is swirling over a dozen armored trucks, their chunky, gunmetal gray bodies smothering under a storm of sparks. “They’re in there!”
“We’ve got to get them!” Ignacio shouts and starts to bolt toward the conflagration.
Arlo grabs his arm and hauls him to a stop. “We need to stay alive!”
Barking out his agreement Angel Fire shouts out for us to follow him. “I can get you to a safe spot!”
Hypnotized by the appearance of so many Devoted, by the resonant rumble of so many boots vibrating the ground, and by the sudden burst of chaos around us, I’m stunned into a state of complete immobilization.
So much for fearlessly leaping into action.
Matholook grabs my hand and tugs me along as Libra, twenty feet ahead, whips her hand around in a blurry circle and screams at us to hurry.
“We’re right behind you!” Matholook shouts out as he and I duck a volley of gunfire. “Keep going!”
Scrambling and dodging, we all break into a top-speed sprint and follow Angel Fire down a laneway of smoking, paralyzed pickups. Almost musical, the ping of bullet-fire riddles the exterior steel plating of the vehicles around us.
Angel Fire calls back over the blast of a concussive explosion that tips over a yellow and rust-colored road-grader parked in a line of similar, thick-tired construction vehicles only about twenty-five yards away.
Normally,
the graders are menacing-looking machines with six wheels—four under their huge cabs and the other two extended forward at the end of a curved, steel prow. They’ve got a row of indestructible teeth that are designed to drag along behind them for purposes of leveling out stretches of dirt and stone to pave the way for the rest of Angel Fire’s city-sized army.
In motion, they look like a horde of monsters grinding through the shared nightmare of a bunch of terrified kids.
Upside down—its wheels slowly spinning while it coughs up black smoke from its shattered underside—this one looks like a wounded animal that can’t get off its back.
After another full minute of sprinting, Angel Fire slides to a stop at the base of what’s got to be one of the tallest vehicles in the Unsettleds’ army. Its treads are over ten feet high, with interconnected plates of steel linked together with rivets as long and as big around as Ignacio’s arm.
“It’s a Lattice Boom Crawler Crane,” Angel Fire explains, catching our collective, open-mouthed stare. “Bullet and shock-proof glass up there in the cab.”
His words avalanching out, he rushes us to mount the narrow, towering steel ladder leading up to the cab of the crane.
When no one moves, he adds, “You’ll be safe up there.”
“What about you?” Libra asks. Only Libra could be standing here in the middle of a war and be wide-eyed and worried about a boy like Angel Fire.
In less than half a day, he’s been our captor, judge, executioner, pardoner, protector, and tour guide. And now he’s become our…savior? Or, even more incredibly, our friend?
