by Ryan Husk
“With what?”
“We don’t know! Nobody knows what this is! We don’t even know which fucking country bombed us!”
“Calm down,” said Wade, holding up his hands in a placating manner rehearsed from countless interrogations. “We’re just trying to get some answers here. Please understand, we were also fired at, just like Mr. Marler here, by boys in uniform. We’re all a little on edge.”
“You don’t think I’m on edge?” Lopez shouted.
“I’m sure you are. And I understand your predicament. I know you’re in a lotta pain, and we’re gonna help you. We just have to make sure we all know each other here. Right, fellas?” Everyone nodded. Wade noticed Colt kept glancing up at the sky, expecting. “So, let’s all be friendly. We’re gonna get you seen to. Ain’t we, Ed?”
Edward looked over at him, then back at the two strangers. “Sure. Long as you boys don’t mind a quick search.”
Jake Marler’s smile wavered for the first time. “Search?”
“To make sure you don’t have radios or other GPS equipment that can help them track us.”
Lopez scoffed. “Almost all satellites have been eaten by that thing, so GPS doesn’t meant shit these days. But sure, go ahead, knock yourselves out.”
Edward signaled Wade to conduct the pat-down. Wade did so, and came away with just the sergeant’s standard-issue SIG Sauer with two rounds left in the clip, one in the chamber. The Marler guy had nothing besides his sword and a few items in a gym bag. “They’re clean, Ed.”
Edward looked at Jeb. “Watch them for a minute, will ya?”
Jeb shrugged.
Edward waved Wade over to confer with him by the Chevy. In a low voice, he said, “What do you think?”
“I think they need our help, Ed.”
“It’s two more mouths to feed.”
“We got plenty o’ food.”
“For now. The caves were never fully stocked and when it runs out, we’re in trouble. You heard what they said about all the vegetation being eaten up? That’s the ecophage at work. The nanites come down and eat every biological life-form, leaving nothing. That means, eventually, there won’t even be any deer or squirrels to eat, no carrots, no corn, nothing. You understand?”
Wade nodded. “I know you want to conserve, but…” He glanced over his shoulder at the two newcomers. “Well, Lopez is military an’ he may know more. He can fill us in on things that can be of use.”
Edward nodded sagely. “And the other guy?”
“Marler? He seems a little strange, but…fuck, aren’t we all a little weird right now?” He sighed. “I’ll keep an eye on ’em, if it’ll make ya feel better.”
“There’s no lock on that elevator,” Edward reminded him. “If they’re trouble, and we kick them out, they’ll be able to come right back. We can’t keep them from returning once they know where the cave is.”
Wade sighed, nodded, and hiked up his pants. “I know.”
Edward started to say something else, but then Marler hollered out, “Uh, hey guys? We might want to continue this discussion somewhere else?” They looked at him, and he was pointed west.
They all turned and looked. One red Eye was just coming into view, peeking out from behind swirling gray clouds.
“Let’s get moving. You take the sergeant in your truck, I’ll take Conan the Barbarian in mine. Split them up, in case they’re trying to coordinate anything. The sergeant looks legit, but he could’ve stolen that uniform off of a dead soldier.”
Wade nodded. Unlikely, but possible. Edward’s paranoia had gotten them this far, might as well listen to it. “All right.”
They all piled in their vehicle. Lopez was eased gingerly into the cab of the F-150 and squeezed between the two large men. They cranked up and got moving fast north, splashing across the muddy field.
“Helluva time to enlist, eh, Sarge?” Wade said.
Lopez snorted. “You can say that again.”
Jeb said, “Say, what was all that you said back there about a New Agent?”
“That’s just what military intelligence calls it. The new player in town.”
“New player?”
“Yes,” Lopez said. “The Clockwork Man.”
IV.
The infirmary that Joshua Collinsworth had first envisioned for the Silvid Valley Sanctuary was perhaps ambitious in the beginning. The area was in a particularly large, bored-out area of the cave, with sixteen beds with steel supports but no cots. The ceiling was twelve feet high, and there were large steel tables which Edward thought rather looked like they might have been meant for future operations by whatever doctors had come to live here. There were two adjustable beds with cots wrapped in plastic, but those cots had been taken and used by Janet and Margery, the two that needed the better rest. There were plenty of blankets, thank God, as well as cabinets filled with medicines that had largely expired. So, yes, Collinsworth’s idea for an infirmary had been ambitious, the sheer size of it was testament enough. But it hadn’t been realized, not by half.
When he eased Sergeant Lopez onto the edge of the bed, Edward could see the man’s uncertainty, even fear, highlighted by the glow of the electric lantern Jeb was holding up. Edward could tell that the man had not expected to be taken almost two hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth and inside a cold, dark limestone cave, with walls and floors denuded of anything reminiscent of civilization. He had been expecting an infirmary, perhaps based off of Jake Marler’s promises. They both seemed disappointed.
Atlas was walking around the bed, sniffing at Sergeant Lopez’s hands and uniform and boots. Occasionally, he wandered by Edward to get a pat on the head, or limp over to Wade or someone else to have a lick of their hands. Then he would return to inspecting Lopez.
“Easy with his leg there,” Edward directed Colt. “Lay back, Sergeant.”
Lopez did as told, wincing all the way down. “Jesus, you people live down here?”
“We do now.” He looked over at Jake, who had taken a seat on a metal stool and laid his giant bastard sword across his lap. “How are either of you fixed for water and food?”
“Got some in my bag,” Jake said. “I shared some of my water with the sergeant there. If you’re offering as hosts, I’m sure neither one of us would say no.”
“Hey, Colt? Would you run get some waters for these guys? And some bread and energy bars?”
“Can do, Ed. Can do.”
As Colt was walking out, Margery and Marshall were walking in. Marshall led the way with a flashlight. “Thought I heard the elevator comin’ down. What’ve we…?” He paused when he saw the two newcomers. “Oh. Howdy. What’s all this?”
“Got some visitors.” Edward looked over at Margery. Her right hand was in Marshall’s left. For support. She looked ragged. One eye was squinted permanently shut. “You okay?”
Margery nodded. “Don’choo worry about me. I’ll soon be in heaven with Jesus an’ all you dumbasses will be stuck down here.”
Edward smirked, and looked back at Lopez. “Sergeant. You comfortable?”
“I guess this will do.”
Wade had gone to fetch some ibuprofen from Edward’s go-ready bag and handed a few to Lopez, who swallowed them dry. Colt arrived with the water and both Lopez and Jake guzzled them down.
“Where’s Greta? And Gordon? And Janet?” asked Edward. He liked to know where everybody was.
“Gordon’s continuing the inventory on the stock,” Marshall said. “He’s counting up all those Campbell’s soup cans and MREs, lookin’ fer expiration dates, tossin’ the bad ones in a bin.”
“Greta’s sitting in with Janet in her room,” Colt said. “Said the girl’s a little rattled.”
“Another spike?”
“Don’t know. Maybe. She said she saw something.”
“Saw something where? Down here?”
“Yeah. Said she also found some boxes with military labels, down one o’ the corridors we haven’t checked out. Sounds like she went pretty far d
own F Wing.”
“What did she say she saw?”
Margery chimed in, “It was probably one of her sugar spikes, or whatever. A bad one. Maybe she got too deprived an’ hallucinated.”
“What did she see?” Edward repeated.
“She didn’t know. Said it looked like a shadow or somethin’, steppin’ out of a hole in the air.” Margery shrugged. “And it said somethin’ to her. Loud. I never heard nothin’. Nobody else did, either.”
“She okay?”
“Just a little rattled,” Colt said. “She seems fine with Greta right now.”
Edward nodded, and looked back at Lopez. He pulled up a metal stool, the legs scraping loudly against the rock floor and echoing throughout the halls. He sat beside Lopez’s bed and looked down on him. “Okay, Sergeant. We’ve got some questions that need answering. Back up top, you said something about the ‘New Agent.’ Wade here tells me you two chatted in the truck and you said the New Agent is the Clockwork Man.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What is it?”
Lopez reached down to massage his leg. “Shouldn’t someone take a look at this first?”
“Later. Right now I just need some answers.”
“Do any of you actually know how to deal with a broken leg?”
“I know a bit about combat medicine. But right now I’m asking about the Clockwork Man. What is it?”
Lopez looked at the others for help, but all of them just wore either faces of indifference or vague deference to Edward. Lopez sighed, rubbed his eyes, and said, “I don’t know what the fuck the Clockwork Man is. I just know he’s big, he’s slow, and he’s not from around here.”
Edward leaned in slightly. “He?”
Lopez nodded. “Others took to calling it a he. It’s…I’ve only heard partial reports from the intel guys we were talking to in the 101st Airborne, currently deploying E Company across the East Coast. They’ve been talking about it…him…whatever.”
“And what are they saying?”
“He’s large. Something like eight stories tall. Looks like a jumbled mess of Lego blocks and gears. They say it looks like a shit-ton of clockwork mechanisms all tangled together, with this blue light coming out from its joints. They say it lumbers along like a man. On two legs. Sometimes three or four. Slow as fuck. With big-ass arms that sway like a gorilla’s.” Lopez looked at each of their disbelieving faces. “Hey, I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.”
“You said your regiment was on its way to monitor him?” Edward said.
“Yeah. The upper echelons want to know what CM is doing. Where he’s going. The working theory is, he’s not a fan of the Face. Intel suggests he’d at odds with it.”
“What, you mean like they’re enemies?”
“That’s the theory.”
“Why is that the theory?”
“Because wherever he goes, the Face, the swarms, they all clear the fuck out. Like the sheriff’s come to town, you dig? Like cockroaches when the lights come on. It seems pretty clear to the brass.”
“What does?” Jeb asked.
“That he’s the fucking exterminator.”
Edward glanced over Lopez’s head at Wade, who gave the even look of a detective who knew how to listen patiently and accept nothing at face value. Edward made a slight gesture that he was only barely conscious of, but Wade picked up on it, and knew what Edward was suggesting. He was inviting Wade to take part in the interrogation. The two of them had developed a kind of shorthand, communicating often in unspoken commands, slight looks—heads up, check your six, watch Janet closely, things like that.
Wade stepped around to the other side of the bed so that Lopez could see him. “Your regiment had orders to monitor him. For what reason?”
“Just intel-gathering and monitoring, and perhaps defense.”
“Defense?”
“Well, yeah. If he’s the only thing that can fight the Face, we want to be on his side.”
“Where is the Clockwork Man now?”
“Last known CM spotting I’m aware of was Savannah, Georgia.”
Wade glanced over at Edward, then back down at the sergeant. “We heard on the ham he was at Daytona Beach not too long ago.”
“CM moves slow, but has long strides. From time to time, he’s been known to jump.”
“Jump?”
“Yeah, or leap forward. I don’t know how it all works. All I know is he’s big as fuck and slow-moving but sometimes takes a leap forward a couple hundred miles.”
“Do you have any pictures of him?”
“Nah. People’s cellphones haven’t been working, so no cell pics. A few drones were flown nearby to take video. They were destroyed by swarms on their return, but my CO said he saw the videos before we lost contact with Command Post. Said CM’s the biggest fucking construct he’s ever seen.”
“So it’s definitely machine,” Wade specified.
“It’s not organic, that’s what I hear.” He added, “And he’s got a following?”
“Following?”
“Yeah. A caravan of crazies that follow the Clockwork Man wherever he goes now. Something like forty or fifty cars, a bunch of fucking weirdos who are like nomads. They’ve started following CM wherever he goes.” He snorted out a laugh. “Like a fan club.”
“Any idea where the Clockwork Man is headed?”
Lopez winced, massaged his knee. “The thinking is, Kansas.”
“Why Kansas?”
“Because every couple days, the Face comes down from space—that great big humongous cloud just comes down—and congeals over all of Kansas, which is just a sludgy wasteland now.”
Edward watched Wade’s posture remain casual, his head tilting to one side or the other curiously. He did not goad or intimidate or bargain, he just kept an even pace. Just a chat. Yet somehow there was formality to everything he said, and Edward saw that Lopez had unconscious taken on the demeanor of a man facing a committee. He now saw the united front that Edward and his group had, that they were not just a bunch of backwoods yokels that he could order around, and he could not, without their permission, receive treatment for his leg.
“What about the Face? What does the government make of it?” asked Wade.
“It’s a swarm of something, we don’t know what. It’s able to create illusions. The Face is believed to be some kind of scare tactic. Psychological warfare. It’s not from around here, but it knows us well. It’s a conglomerate of trillions and trillions of nanomachines. We think,” he added with a shrug. “Nobody who’s near enough to get a sample of them ever survives. Or, at least, very few do.”
“And what is the government doing about it?”
“Honestly? Just crowd control. That’s it. NATO was trying to coordinate but…the swarms are all over the place, sometimes many different places at once. By the time you try to deploy joint fleets to Barcelona, they’ve moved on and an hour later they’re devouring Beijing. And China and Russia aren’t helping because they’re all convinced it’s the U.S. doing this, or that we made the Face and it got out of control, and everybody’s blaming everybody else for firing the nukes first.”
“The POTUS? Congress?”
“POTUS is dead. Vice president’s been sworn in, but he’s in hiding. Congress is mostly gone. V-POTUS is basically an emperor now, just one man calling all the shots. But this thing’s devouring whole swaths of land, hundreds of miles every day, just leaving gray sludge in its wake. And it’s getting bigger.”
Edward nodded. “Converting all the biomass into new nanites.”
Lopez looked at him, like he wondered how Edward knew all this stuff. “Yeah. That’s right. That’s the theory.”
Wade said, “Has there been any attempt to communicate with it or destroy it?”
“Communication’s a no-go, we have no idea how to talk to it, and even if we did we’re pretty sure it just needs to feed. As for killing it…there are some theories. The Chinese sent five nukes i
nto space when the Face came back around. Only one detonated. It had little effect. The other four were lost, believed to be consumed by the Face-swarm.”
Wade looked over at Edward and gave him an almost imperceptible nod that somehow conveyed Let’s step outside the room and chat. Edward looked down and said, “Get some rest, Sergeant. We’re going to fix that leg in a bit. Could be uncomfortable, so if you need something to take the edge off, we have quite a few bottles of wine down here that Jeb can fetch for you.”
When they were out in the hallway, Wade said, “Jesus.”
“What do you think?”
They started walking slowly away from the infirmary. Atlas joined them, licking his master’s fingers as they went.
“Fuck, Ed. This shit’s beyond me. All of it.”
“You think he’s telling the truth, or is it disinformation?”
“My gut instinct? He’s on the level. Whatever he told us is all he knows.”
“And the Clockwork Man? And his ‘fan club’ following?”
Wade shrugged. “I have lived to see strange things. Things I’ve never even read about in books or seen in the goddamn Twilight Zone. There’s a thousand-mile-wide Face that’s grinnin’ down on us half the day. He says there’s a giant with a fan club following, I have no warrant to be callin’ him a liar.”
Edward scratched his chin, thinking. The stubble was growing thicker. He only shaved once a week now, but when winter came, he might just go ahead and join Wade and the fellas in growing out his own soup-catcher. He looked around at their confines. The dark was always not far away, always barely pushed back by candle or flashlight or lantern. It was dismal, and that’s how it was likely to remain. The sun would become a stranger to them, maybe eventually something only seen once a year, like Christmas. And then what? They would all die down here? Or wait till Janet got old enough and she mated with one of these much older men, begin propagating the species again as cave-dwelling morlocks? What would they eat? Could humanity survive, like they did after the Toba eruption 70,000 years ago? Could Janet even survive that long? Could she survive childbirth?
