by Chris Capps
Part Three
The next thing I remember, I was staring into broken lips framed by a thick white beard. A hand was slapping my face, drumming an intense pain throughout my head. Every nerve in my body was screaming, and I could hardly breathe. The rope still around my neck was on fire now, rubbing abrasions earned on the long dragging trek to the elevator.
“Pay attention, boy,” that same familiar voice said, “I need you alive.”
“Thunfir,” I said, my vision slowly returning to normal. It was our leader, Thunfir. He smiled broadly as my eyes rolled around, trying to make sense of the situation.
“Did you see it?” he asked, pulling me up by the hand. Standing was not an option, and my legs quickly shuddered slack beneath me. Crassus grabbed my arm and wrapped it over his shoulder, steadying me. Thunfir grabbed my other arm, raising me up even as he slumped down. I coughed, the rope still hanging around my neck and stinging me with every movement,
“See what?”
“Thurrus got his rematch,” Thunfir said grinning as we huffed down the hallway, “This time I was only outnumbered three-to-one. Guess who the victor was.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, my feet barely touching the floor as they carried me between them.
“We’re leaving,” Thunfir said, “I thought it was obvious.”
Without resistance we made it from the elevator to the front doors of the complex. As we reached the glass doors at the front of the building, they slid open without complaint, and we stepped outside. With the first step I took onto the dirt, I felt my weight deaden, carried between Thunfir and Crassus. How heavy I must have been during that journey, I can only imagine. Thunfir hummed to himself one of his old drinking songs, a strange tune I hadn’t heard before. Crassus was staring ahead, deep in thought.
Freedom.
We were moving forward, closing in on the shadow that spread beneath the spider city, spreading outward like a great inky pool. When finally we reached the nearest leg, we sat down and rested in its ominous shadow, taking refuge from the sun’s harsh rays. I laid down in the dust and breathed. Strength was finally starting to return to me. Crassus stared down the path we had come from, studying the gleaming white hull of our former home. Finally, after a moment he spoke,
“I guess we left your rifle behind.”
“The lad’ll get another one,” Thunfir said, coughing wetly into his hand, “We could have lost much more than that.”
“You’ll need it soon,” Crassus said sternly, looking back at the old man, “The Thakka will notice we’re missing, and they’ll track us down. It’s inevitable.”
“We’ll be a few days older then,” Thunfir said groaning and pulling himself up, braced against the wall of a leg next to us, “Ebon, can you walk?”
I strained to stagger to my feet, pulling the noose off from around my neck and letting it fall to the ground. My legs buckled, rebelled. Somehow, I forced them to let me stand. I took a few shuffling steps forward, and nodded. Shortly after that I had stumbled and was resting on one bruised knee. It was nearly unbearable.
“The rest of the Plexis tribe will be well provisioned,” Crassus said, eyes still on that gleaming pearl in the distance, “At least for a few months. I made sure of it. They headed west. Probably get stuck for a few days at the first river they run across.”
“They’ll be easy to find,” Thunfir said, pulling a knife he found embedded in the dirt, “Especially if they’re not hiding their tracks.”
“Yes. They will,” Crassus said grimly. His hand was against the side of the city leg and he turned to me, a look of cold calculation on his brow, “They won’t find you, the Thakka I mean. I’ll make sure of that too.”
Realization came quickly as I saw the certainty he held with those words. Wordlessly, I was shaking my head. Thunfir looked between us both, and huffed once, coughing out weak laughter,
“So you have a final trick up your sleeve, then?”
“He means,” I said shuffling foot over foot toward him, “He’s going to use the 14 KT to kill himself. Put that right out of your head. You’re coming with us.” I reached out with both hands, grabbing him by the shoulders with a grip like iron, using the last of my strength to clutch to him and start shuffling, “Keep walking, dammit! We won’t follow the rest of them. Forget about the Plexis tribe. We’ll find a new path.”
“Remember what you said,” Crassus said stopping us both. There was a note of decisive serenity in his voice. It was the sound of gentle death. He put a hand on my shoulder, pushing me away with surprising strength, sending me clattering to the ground, “They’re our family too. You and Thunfir will have to walk six miles to avoid the blast. I’ll give you two hours to get there. I can’t give you more than that.”
“Crassus,” Thunfir said grabbing my arm to help me up, “We can figure this out together. If there’s a bomb in the city there’s lots we can do. Set some sort of timer, or launch it further away so that we’re just barely out of the blast radius. Encased inside the metal city, we may be alright.”
“That will be a problem,” Crassus said, “Euclid and I took a look at it after you left, Ebon. That’s another promise I broke. I told Euclid about the bomb. We ran diagnostics on the launching mechanism the very night we found it. The reason it was never used was because the gun housing it didn’t work. It’s stuck where it is, entombed within the city.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, “Or Thunfir. Or anyone else.”
“How would you do it?” Crassus said, “You don’t know how these things work. I’ve spent whole days at a time, weeks learning how to talk to machines. I know how to make a weapon like that work.”
“Never,” I said, “No. Not you.”
“When you get back to the others,” Crassus said, “Tell them it was just the reactor. Tell them it blew up. Don’t tell them about the rest. Please, Ebon?”
“Thunfir,” I said, “Talk some sense into him. Make him understand that we can survive without this madness. We’ll start a new tribe. We’ll find another way.”
Thunfir looked long at me, staring benevolently into my heart with his old tired eyes. And in that moment, against every wish I could possibly have, Thunfir became a leader. With a gentle nod, he finally came to understand the meaning of that most basic principle of leadership. Thunfir finally understood sacrifice.
“Crassus,” he said, “we promise they’ll never know.” He grasped me by the shoulder roughly, gripping my sleeve as he turned his head over his shoulder back to Crassus, “Six miles. We will make the journey in time, Crassus.”
“Let go of me!” I cried out, grabbing the knife he now held in his belt, “We’re all leaving together.” Thunfir easily picked me up like a rag doll by the arm, causing the knife to cascade and fall back to the ground. With his arm pulled back and his hand balled into a fist, he addressed me,
“Ebon, it is the only way.” His fist shot out and connected with my jaw, knocking my brains against my skull and spinning the world around me. With me incapacitated, Thunfir hoisted me up and threw me over his shoulder. I could hear him and Crassus talking as I tried to regain control of my vocal chords.
Thunfir was still weakened from the fever, but there was an understanding now, a temporary strength that would tear his muscles and leave him weakened for months afterward. Maybe forever. But for now, he would be strong. I could hear his voice behind me, “Crassus, good luck.”
“Goodbye, Thunfir. Don’t ever forget who you are. You’re a man of great strength. And, if I may say so, you’re a good friend. Look after Ebon.”
“You, Crassus,” Thunfir said, “You’re a strange sort.”
“Let me say goodbye to my brother,” Crassus said, and I felt Thunfir’s great bulk shift me down his arm. He held me by the armpits, his tremendous hands straining to carry me on my shuffling, useless feet. Crassus was blurry, waving from side to side. I saw the shape of him lean down and
pick something up off the ground, “These things really are indestructible.”
“That thing I said earlier,” I said, choking still from the blow Thunfir had landed, “You are my brother. It wasn’t true.”
He knew I was lying, and yet he smiled. And with that he placed my glasses back on my nose. He was calm, nearly grinning. He reached in his pocket and produced a small folded white paper. Handing it to Thunfir, he glanced back at me,
“Goodbye, brother.”
He walked over to one of the spider city’s corpses, an armored man stripped of his weapons and his gear. He had a belt still connecting him to the tether that had dropped him to the ground level. With a click of a button on the belt, Crassus released it, sending the corpse collapsing to the ground. He placed the belt, still connected to the rope around his own waist, and flipped another switch on it.
The rope leading up to the city began to ascend, pulling him upward into a solitary beam of light. As we watched him go up, the aperture he passed through slowly began to shrink, leaving only a pinpoint of light behind.
“Two hours,” Thunfir said, “We’d better get moving.”
“No,” I said in weak protest, “We could still stop him.” I was struggling. Struggling both to free myself from his grasp as he pulled my arm over his shoulders, and to keep my feet moving one over the other up the hill for the last time. As we reached the crest of the valley, I
