by Oliver Higgs
“You don’t think they’ll be back?”
“We can’t count it out,” she says, shrugging.
When we’re done drinking and refilling, we find a quiet spot to camp. We decide it’s best not to risk a fire, though that’s not as easy as it sounds. The night has grown cold and we’d both appreciate the heat. It’s remarkably hard to get a good night’s sleep in the cold, even when you’re exhausted. Jackets only help so much. We end up lying back to back. Minutes or hours later I wake to find Echo’s arm around me.
The weight of her arm brings an alien sensation. I can’t get used to it. Eventually I have to change positions, but that presents its own problems, because when I turn toward Echo my arm ends up around her too, and then her eyes are open and gazing into mine. I should say something, but I just lay there. Finally, she closes her eyes again and leans her head forward into the space beneath my chin. Stray wisps of hair tickle my face. It itches but I refuse to move. Sleep just got the middle finger. Eventually it comes regardless.
When I wake, she’s still drooling. I get up and find a place to use the bathroom. When I return, I’m in a strangely good mood, though I can’t see why. My home is gone, I’m starving, there are people who want to kill us, and we’re likely heading to our deaths–yet for a little while none of it matters. I’m like a kid again, just being in the moment.
Part of it is the hope that Cabal’s duty to the army will prevent him from returning. His presumed departure is like a shadow lifted from my eyes, and when it’s gone I can see the whole world is suddenly open to us. I mean, I guess I could have left the Library any time, and travelling will be hard and dangerous, but the morning’s clear blue sky fills me with a sense of freedom I haven’t felt in–ever. Is this how Conan felt when he first left Cimmeria?
Then there’s the fact that there is an us. Excluding Lectric, Toyota was the closest friend I had in three years, and I only talked to him a few times a year. Sure, I like being alone and I’m not entirely positive travelling with Annabel-Echo is a good thing, but at the very least it’s an interesting thing, an unusual thing, a thing I’ve never experienced, and there’s something to be said about that.
I spend a few minutes sitting against a crumbling stone block, watching Echo sleep, feeling flashes of desire … tempered by thoughts of Ballard and how quickly she turned on him. Do I even know this person? Not at all. She’s incomprehensible. But do I have to know her to hold her down and–
No. She doesn’t want that. Annabel used to be my friend. She’s the girl who waits in the desert. Then why the arm in the night? She was cold, no doubt.
While waiting, I take out Volume Seven and, very slowly, read a few pages, trying to ignore the gnawing question of whether or not the rest of my collection survived the fire. But of course it survived–I won’t believe otherwise. I’ll go back for it one day. I can’t bear to face the alternative. Still Echo sleeps. I drink and desalinate more water. Finally she wakes, does what’s necessary, and it’s time to move on.
Echo is in a better mood too. Maybe the disaster, the killing, the hiding is behind us. In the daylight, I can almost believe it. The sun infuses her hair with a brilliance bordering on absurd. It’s like she’s giving off the light. Lectric trots happily alongside us, his solar cells absorbing all they can.
Past noon, the ruins thin out. We move into a desert sparsely covered with knee-high shrubs. With this much plant life, there’s bound to be game. I miss the first kill–something squirrel-like that darts into a hole as my bolt skids in the dust–but the second chance comes soon, and I nail a fox through the ribs.
The fire is easy to build–I keep an electric sparker in my bag. The meat fills our bellies. Echo becomes more talkative. She tells me about an older woman who helps manage the supplies for Foundry’s army; a woman frail in body but iron in will. She had a soft spot for Echo, and Echo misses her.
As we continue north, she talks about Fin and Ballard now and then, though nothing with any direct connection to our fatal encounter. I don’t talk much. Toward dusk, we bag a snake and a large scavenging bird. After walking all day within sight of Big Road, there’s still no sign of Cabal. Maybe he really has moved on. Again we camp. Again Echo cuddles up to me. It’s weird having someone this close. I’m hyper-sensitive to every movement. I can’t get used to it.
After our morning drink at New Sea, we decide it should be okay to walk along Big Road again for the time being. As we do, I keep an eye on passing debris, shrubs and other potential cover, just in case we hear the bikes. I haven’t tried to persuade Echo to turn west again but I’m thinking it’s probably about time we did. I’m about to broach the subject when something catches my eye.
We’re still in shrub-desert. To our right, maybe ten feet ahead, is the rusted wreck of a long-dead car. We’ve seen a number of its brothers along the road. The part of my mind monitoring potential cover has already noted it. There’s not much else around. The car, however, is not what has caught my attention.
Just left of Big Road, at the top of a slight hill about two hundred feet ahead, sits an odd boulder about as tall as my waist. I can’t say exactly why my mind identifies it as “odd.” It’s just a sand-colored rock. But the paranoid part of my brain knows something doesn’t fit. The boulder is a bit too cylindrical, perhaps, or the surface too smooth.
Then the top shifts.
I have a split second to react. By all rights, we should be dead. But I’ve seen this thing on some other level. Listening for the bikes with constant paranoia, I’ve synced with our environment, and I act before I know what’s coming. There’s no thought at all.
My arm catches Echo beneath the ribs as I tackle her toward the car. A staccato of bright red flashes burst from a recess in the top of the boulder. A feather brushes my left ear, tickles my left bicep. Echo makes a sound of slight surprise. We hit the ground hard, crashing through a shrub behind the abandoned car. She grunts as the air is pushed from her lungs. Lectric scurries around us, barking madly.
Echo’s eyes go wide. There’s a fresh four-inch burn running along her left collarbone. Two tiny holes are not far from the scar, in her upper left shoulder.
“Your ear,” she says.
“Stay down.”
“What’s happ–”
“There’s a mine up there. Pulse laser. I saw the barrel pop. Don’t look out, it’ll put holes through your eyes.”
Echo nods. I recovered a mine like this once–a dead one, in the desert. I brought it back to my grandfather, and he disassembled it for parts. He told me about them as he worked. They can kill at a distance and operate on a low-power standby mode for years at a time. The notion has terrified me ever since.
We crawl right up to the car, keeping low. Cabal must have left the mine. Carried it on the back of his bike. He didn’t need to find us. We’re in for it now. The thing has us covered. I’m amazed we survived the first barrage. If it had waited until we were just a little closer, we’d already be dead. Something wet leaks down the back of my pants–Crom, is it blood? But my hand comes back with water. Something was hit in my pack, the canteen or desalinator. Great. Not that we’ll need water much longer.
Tin popping sounds reach my ears. A hot metal shard bursts from a hole in the car beside me. Echo yelps. The thing is trying to shoot us through the vehicle. Most of the shots don’t fully penetrate. Most.
Echo’s face grows pained. She pulls up her pant-leg and stares. Her left calf is swelling up around a small hole in the muscle. Little metal shards have peppered her skin. Blood is leaking out of the hole, though not much, as the flesh is mostly cauterized. Her shoulder is having similar issues. Her hands tremble uncontrollably.
There’s a growing throb in my left ear and bicep, but my immediate concern for survival leaves no room for such worries. The pinging stops. The car is no longer under fire. Another sound grows in the silence, however. The ominous whir of a small motor. Wheels rumble over the crumbling road, crunching pebbles beneath the treads.
The mine is mobile.
I wriggle out of my pack and check the crossbow to make sure it’s loaded.
“Echo, your gun loaded? Echo!”
Her pain distracts her. She un-holsters the machine-pistol and slides it over to me. The wheels are still moving. I lie down and peer under the car. It’s low to the ground because the tires are flat, but I manage to see the robot wheeling toward us. It’s going to come around my side of the car soon. We have about ten seconds to live. Lectric is low to the ground, growling terribly. His metal claws are out.
Can we hide in the car? No. We’d just die inside. We can’t run, obviously. It’ll hit us the instant we’re visible. I’ll have to risk shooting the robot as it comes into view, but I’m pretty certain it will kill me before I can do much damage. It has to have cameras for sensors. If I could only blind it …
But I can–maybe.
I whip off my jacket. The mine is on the other side of the car. It’s coming around. I motion to Echo–go that way! But she can’t push off her left leg. There are tears on her cheeks. Great. We’re going to die here.
Lectric pounces forward with a demonic sound. He rounds the front bumper and attacks. I’m shouting, or trying to shout. I’m springing onto the hood and throwing the jacket, but I know it’s too late. Lectric is peppered with invisible packets of high-energy light. His hull sparks and leaks fluids as his claws rake the faux boulder once without effect. Once–and he collapses. Yet he’s drawn the thing’s fire just long enough for my jacket to land.
The robot wheels backwards, blinded. It rotates one way, then the other, trying to free its sensors. I dive to the ground and snatch up the pistol and crossbow. The robot fires at random. The heat lights my coat on fire. I spray the thing with bullets. I put a heavy bolt right through the fire. Something shatters in a shadowy recess. I drop the crossbow and grip the gun with both hands, emptying almost a whole clip into the top of the machine, where the barrel came out. Then I run around to the back of the mine and shove it hard with my boot. The robot topples forward. The wheels spin, stop, spin, stop. It may still have battery power, but it’s effectively dead.
Unfortunately, so is Lectric.
When I drop to my knees, he’s twitching uncontrollably, making soft whining sounds. A capacitor blew somewhere in his flanks and smoke leaks through small holes in his hull. A puddle of coolant spreads beneath him, seeping into the parched earth in a singular parody of his carbon-based cousins. Perhaps it’s just a universal rule: things leak when they die. Worst of all are the holes in his head, where my grandfather helped me implant his Spark 2100 neural embryo in some other life.
This can’t be happening. It happens anyway. Lectric’s twitching slows. I cradle his head. He won’t look up at me. He can’t.
“You’ll be okay,” I tell him.
Lies are better than pain. He twitches again. And then he doesn’t.
His hull can be repaired. His Spark 2100 cannot. Not even the people who designed neural embryos fully understood how consciousness arose from the complexity within. They had simply experimented, modeling electronic subsystems on studies of the human brain until a working model was achieved. My grandfather had books about it. As the host develops, the embryo’s complexity is gradually nested to a deep level, interwoven throughout the electronic brain as it learns and relearns and adapts to the chaos of life. Once functionality is lost, it can never be restored.
I’m aware there will be pain now. I wait for it to come. But the speed of these events has confounded my brain’s adaptive processes. I know Lectric is dead now–here he lies with his head lolling in my lap–but the knowledge is so strange as to feel unreal. Certainly this didn’t just happen? The universe doesn’t work that way. I’ll forget about it and things will be the same as always. A piece of me probes the real knowledge from a great distance, spying on it as through a telescope, but there is a roiling sea of anguish there, so I cover the view back up and set it aside.
Echo, unheard, has been shouting my name. She comes crawling around the side of the car, her face pale and scared. She crawls close and rests her head on my shoulder, but I wince away because she puts pressure on my injured bicep. She’s shaking badly.
“I thought you were dead,” she says.
“Lectric …”
“I’m sorry, Tristan. I’m so sorry. He saved our lives. He saved us. God, your ear. We need to bandage you. We need to bandage me. Do you think there’s another one? They might have left another …”
She talks aimlessly, non-stop, almost in a whisper. Words just tumble out, and suddenly it’s intolerable. Doesn’t she understand? I want to yell at her. But she’s close to fainting. For the first time I touch my left ear, using my right arm to avoid bending the left. An electric pain stabs out from my finger and radiates through my head, as if I shocked myself. My entire earlobe has been burned away. Now that I’m aware of it, the pain is worse. In addition, squeezing the muscle in my left arm brings instant wooziness. Still, I made out better than Lectric. Better than Echo too, who has the two holes in her shoulder and an injured calf.
Now we do what must be done. Gather the pack, prepare to leave. But I can’t leave my old friend lying in the desert. I haul up his body. Echo can’t walk on her left leg. She supports herself on my right. I’m not conscious of the journey to New Sea. I only know that it’s hell.
Chapter 7.
I don’t sleep so much as roll around in a web of dark memory, and whenever I roll to my left, there’s a sharp pain from two places. When I’m conscious again, Lectric is the first thing on my mind. The way he sprawls happily in the morning sun. The fact that he whimpered and comforted me while I wept in those early days after the fire. All the times he sniffed out treasures in the ruins or alerted me to small game. For three years, my constant companion. My only companion.
Gone, just gone.
The weight of his absence is immense. It brings on the rest. The Library, Farmington, my Conan novels–everything’s gone. Life is sorrow and ruin. I want to smash things. I couldn’t raise a fist. Dark thoughts have a magnetic effect. They draw in others. They reinforce each other until the darkness is all you can see. Depression crushes me like a weight from above.
There was a church in Farmington. My grandfather never went there, but Annabel’s mom would take us. The pastor said God wanted to punish us for the way we’d lived in the World Before. Problem was we’d never lived there. Those people were dead and gone. Punishing us for their mistakes didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t figure out why everyone listened to the pastor
After the village burned, however, I came to understand belief. How could my grandfather be gone? He had to be somewhere. I talked to him while I walked in the desert. I felt he was watching over me. Was he? I don’t know, but it was what I needed then, and when I think of Lectric running around in some other realm, I want to believe it again. Let someone say he wasn’t really alive, that he was just a machine. We are machines, in that case–organic ones. Lectric was more alive than most people, worth more than Ballard and Cabal. If they have souls, his was twice as pure.
Echo moans, still asleep. She sounds terrified, but I don’t wake her.
We’re in the shadow of another half-standing building down by the shore of New Sea. I buried Lectric late last night. I said some things in my head, and Echo stood and hugged me from behind, though she shook and the movement pained her.
It’s not long after dawn. Clouds have gathered overhead. There’s an ominous rumble in the distance. We need food. I should move, but I’m paralyzed. My ear feels strange, hot and cold at the same time. When I touch it, there’s less pain. My arm still throbs, but it could be a lot worse; the shot caught only the outer layer of the muscle. I lay back down but sleep doesn’t come. It’s a miserable morning.
Finally Echo wakes, only to moan more pointedly, her face contracting in pain. She reaches out and puts a hand on my good arm. When she takes a breath, her fingers dig in.
“It hurts, Tristan. God,
it hurts,” she says.
There are two holes in her shirt around the left shoulder, where the mine hit her. The surrounding flesh is red and swollen. Her calf has had similar reactions. I tried taking out the metal splinters from the car last night, but I don’t know if I got them all. Some were so tiny I could barely pinch them between my fingernails. Afterward, we washed her calf and wrapped it in a strip of cloth torn from her shirt.
Now each breath brings Echo fresh pain. Literally every one. As her lungs expand, the flesh and muscles surrounding the shoulder-wound inevitably shift. Her body is warning her to stay still, even while forcing her to move. She closes her eyes hard, and tears leak out, and she opens them and looks at me, desperate for help I can’t provide.
“It’ll get better,” I say.
She closes her eyes again.
At first, I try to help. I say all kinds of things. Nothing works. She’s still in pain. I grow angry. I was injured too, after all. Her refusal to heal is frustrating. She’s not doing it on purpose, yet that’s how it starts to feel, and her constant complaining wears on my fragile nerves–can’t she just shut up for a while? If she and the others hadn’t come, I’d still be in the Library with Lectric. So yeah, maybe she deserves some of that pain. But then she’s Annabel Lee again, the girl who waits in the desert, and the anger turns to shame.
I go into the desert, more to get away from her than to hunt, though food is my excuse. I need to do something. And of course there’s no game. Nothing whatsoever. The ruins were never well-populated, but now they’re completely destitute, devoid of even the smallest rat. Fate conspires against us in all forms, on all levels. The sky rumbles and turns a slow, strange, purplish color. The warnings have been growing all day. You don’t have to be a rabbit to know something terrible is coming.
I return empty-handed. Echo is hungry and pained, and when she sees I haven’t caught anything, she actually weeps. I can’t take this. My fists clench and unclench on their own. Walking down the shore, I desalinate more water. Even this proves a trial. It was the desalinator that leaked in my pack yesterday. The mine put a hole through it. The filter still works, thank Crom, but it won’t hold the water once it’s through, so I have to rig the canteen to catch what spills out. I’ve just finished filtering a few liters and my wrist hurts from turning the pressure-top … when the canteen slips and spills into the sand. Such a simple thing. It breaks me completely.
