by M C Rooney
“Buzz, what did you see?” his father said in his usual angry manner. But Rodent could hear the undertones of affection.
Rodent’s twenty-two-year-old brother, Edwin, who was nicknamed Buzz for reasons he never understood, came running gracefully towards the main group.
“There is an old man sitting beneath a small thunder tower, Father,” Buzz replied, sweeping his thick black hair out of his handsome face. “One of our scouts lies dead in front of him with the zombies,” he finished while adjusting the sword on his hip, which he liked to use, and use well.
“Enough with the old ‘hey Buzz’,” Carter said with a smile.
“Sorry, Elder,” Buzz replied with a grin.
Thunder tower? What a dickhead, Rodent thought with a jealous glare.
“Father,” Buzz continued seriously, “there are two silver suits lying on the ground nearby.”
Everybody froze. This was very serious, Rodent thought with anticipation. If they could somehow claim these suits, they would rule … Rodent looked around at the vast, empty space of the former farmlands. Well, perhaps there were people to the east and south that they could kill and pillage?
“Lead us the way, Son,” his father said in a quiet tone, which meant he was close to violence. He watched as Hockey and Buzz both flexed their massive shoulders in preparation for battle and ran towards the tower with Carter and his five sons at the front. Rodent gave a sigh from his sunken chest and tried his best to keep up with the two hundred men his father had brought with him, but as usual, he ended up being the last to reach the tower.
The Mad Professor watched as a large horde of bare-chested men ran towards him. He wished he could remember his name. Sumner something he thought it was. But all he remembered now was Molly. Not the tower and the lightning it generated. Not the power or electricity it generated. Nor the visions it gave him. All he remembered was his old friend and colleague’s granddaughter. His friend, his only friend. He hoped she would be safe from the zombies as he hit a switch and removed a simple power board, which made the whole tower come to a complete stop.
The small tower he sat under would be useless against two hundred men. It would kill a lot of them, but if they fired their arrows at him at one time, even the powerful lightning bolts could not stop them all. So he didn’t turn the defensive switch on.
The mad horde—I mean who would wear hardly any clothes in the Tasmanian weather?—came to a halt and looked up at the lifeless tower. He placed the power board on the ground and raised a rock as if to smash it.
“Who here has the brains to negotiate?” he cackled.
The big old one leads, but he is a broken man, the voice in his head said. But the son next to him has the brains and the real potential.
“How do you know these things?” he whispered.
Experience, intelligence, good looks, you know how it is, the voice said.
“Well, yes, I do,” the professor replied with a grin.
The huge elderly man at the front of the tribe stepped forward.
“I guess that would be me,” he announced.
Told you.
“That you did,” the professor whispered.
The professor then looked the leader up and down.
“He looks vaguely familiar,” he whispered to the voice.
At our age, most people do.
“Agreed,” the professor replied.
“You seem to have seen a few decades,” he said in his normal voice, now addressing the man before him. “Do you remember the old days?”
“Yes. I do,” he replied and looked up at the tower. “I heard of a tower similar to this through the history books.”
“Really?” the professor replied in astonishment. “The Master of Lightning was written out of the history books.”
“Not completely,” the leader replied.
“So you cared, then,” the professor said.
“I used to,” he replied. Hockey had, in the distant past, cared about the people and the world around him. He took a keen interest in the progress of the world politics and the wrongs he thought he could fix. But that young man had died years ago in blood and pain.
“This tower is almost two times the size of his, a slightly different shape, material, a modern renewable energy plant and based on my own and McLaren’s design, but the original idea was, of course, his,” the professor said.
A travesty he was treated the way he was, the voice raged.
“Indeed,” the professor whispered back to himself.
I mean, he invented the Twentieth Century! the voice still raged, affronted by those who had decided to treat him so poorly.
“Please, be quiet,” the professor whispered. “You’re preaching to the choir, you know.”
Oh, yes, I apologise.
“That’s quite all right,” the professor whispered back.
Hockey looked at the professor, waiting for the madman to get back to the subject at hand. He had seen so many of his like, that insanity on whatever level no longer fazed him.
“We were still only testing it, as we knew so little about how it worked to begin with,” the professor continued. “We were financed by an eccentric billionaire, of course, who wanted to leave a positive legacy, not by the government.” He snorted at the very idea. The billionaire was also a computer genius who hacked into any government department he could. But the professor could not remember who he was, as was the case with most of his past.
“Bankers called the shots for centuries,” said Hockey. “That’s not what they used to call a conspiracy theory; that was just the plain truth.”
“Quite right; it was history,” the professor replied with a nod of his head. “Banking clans give orders, and governments obey.”
“It was even written in their autobiographies,” Hockey continued, “but people didn’t care.”
“No, they didn’t,” the professor said in agreement. “They never even questioned it.”
Hockey was about to say more but decided to just grunt in reply. He was getting too much into the past. He didn’t want to remember his youth. People were sheep, but the term had changed in his mind from concern at people’s indifference to a feeling of relief that they were so easily led.
“We made so much progress on this tower,” the professor continued as he looked up at the huge construction, “and then the world suddenly ended.” The sadness in his voice was obvious as the professor finished speaking.
“A bad day. I remember it well,” the big man agreed as he tried to convey his sadness but couldn’t. That emotion had been beaten out of him many years ago.
“Did you study how to maintain these towers?”
“No,” the leader replied with a grimace.
“Then why did you race up here to kill me?” the professor replied in confusion. “Do you have no thought for the future?”
“I wanted those suits,” he replied as he looked at the dead zombies on the ground. “I thought attack was the only way some of us would get them.” He gestured to the small tower under which the professor sat.
“And you didn’t think about what powered those suits or what would happen if that power suddenly stopped?”
Hockey just shrugged his big shoulders, but the son looked a bit embarrassed by his father’s lack of vision.
“So you wish to kill zombies like Lord Feral?” The professor hoped Molly didn’t mind him calling her that. Where the ‘Lord’ title came from he didn’t know. It just sounded more ominous than Molly McLaren. God help her when they found out she was just a young girl.
“Maybe,” the huge leader replied.
“Ah, so you wanted the power to rule as well?”
The leader didn’t say anything, but did glance over at his son.
So is it another power-mad tyrant, then? the professor wondered.
No, I think he may care for his son, the voice said thoughtfully.
Perhaps he wants to leave something for him and the future, like our old billionaire friend
did?
“Are you sure?” the professor whispered.
Not really, the voice replied, just a hunch.
“Well, looking at the situation, I don’t think we have much of a choice,” he whispered.
No, I am afraid we don’t.
“So here are my terms,” the professor said to Hockey in a normal voice and with a smile. “You leave me alive to do my work and maintain this tower on the proviso you leave Lord Feral alone. Then you can have the two suits over here, and I will show you how to use them.”
The leader turned to his son the voice had mentioned as having potential and conferred for a few moments. A skinny, ratty-looking man had also joined them and called the big man father.
Um, when I said the son had brains and real potential, I didn’t mean that son, the voice said.
“No, I agree,” the professor whispered, looking at the ratty one. “What was the phrase? Couple of cans …”
Short of a six-pack, the voice replied with a cackle. Or was the professor cackling? He never could tell who was who nowadays.
“The son looks familiar,” the professor suddenly whispered.
I know he does; you know who he looks like?
“Who?” the professor replied.
His father, the voice cackled.
“Oh, shut up,” the professor replied and went on to wondering where Molly was.
“Deal,” the big man said, turning to face him. “However, if Lord Feral should show up, then Lord Buzz and Lord Rodent have the right to defend themselves. This is our land now.”
The man who was obviously Lord Rodent looked ecstatic. The younger son looked at his father with a thoughtful expression.
The professor sighed. Please don’t get all stubborn again, Molly, and come back here looking for a fight. Please don’t let me watch you die. He had a bad feeling, though, that the battle of the Lightning Lords was about to begin.
“Deal,” he replied and reentered the power board, and with a simple turn of a switch, the massive tower began gathering in the clouds again.
A one hundred-kilometre radius, Molly, remember that; please remember, little one, the professor begged in his thoughts.
The voice entered his mind again as the lightning began to spread out amongst the clouds. They watch us, you know. They have for millennia, it said.
“Who?”
The ones who keep us safe from the meteors of space; the ones who stop us from flipping over. New civilisations do require protection in order to flourish as outer space is so dangerous.
With that, the voice provided him with a startling computer-type vision from his past.
“You’re completely mad,” he said to the voice nervously.
We are, but we both know how close they really are. Light refraction and water lie to our eyes, the voice cackled back.
Hockey looked at the professor, who was now laughing to himself, so intelligent one moment and completely troppo the next, a typical scientist.
“Just keep this thing working, old man,” he said, even though they were close in age. “If this dies, you die.”
His sons, Lord Rodent and Lord Buzz, then came forward to try on the suits.
Carter came forward to talk to his old high school friend. Just like Hockey, he was still a physically fit man, as all elders were nowadays, but he had reached the stage in life where he just wanted to find a home and stay there.
“Why are we here, you old bastard?” he said.
“I didn’t ask you to come,” Hockey grunted back.
“You know I go wherever you go,” Carter replied.
Hockey sighed. He and Carter went back such a long way that he couldn’t remember what life was like before they met.
“Why did you bring the five fingers?” he asked.
Carter’s sons were named, Frank, Fred, Fergus, Fraser, and Flynn, all named by their bitch-faced mother, Freda.
“They wanted to come,” Carter replied. “I think they get a bit bored with just farming.”
Hockey grunted; didn’t they all.
“So, I ask again, why are we here?”
Hockey would have normally said fuck off to anyone who asked his plans, but Carter was like a brother to him.
“Buzz,” he replied.
Carter’s eyes widened, but then he nodded in understanding.
“I care about my boys,” replied Carter, “even Frank and Fred, who take after their mother,” he finished with a sad sigh.
Thank the Maker, that woman was now pushing up the daisies, Hockey thought with a grimace. Poor Carter should have left her when he had the chance, but being loyal was his way, and being loyal made him into such a good bloke. But loyalty is such a hard word for you isn’t it? Hockey thought sadly as his wife’s beautiful face drifted into his mind.
“I have my own bad son,” Hockey said as he glanced at Rodent, who was trying unsuccessfully to put one of the professor’s suits on. “It’s not your fault, mate. The three younger ones are top fellas.”
Carter nodded his head at that, and Hockey was pleased to see a proud look come across his face.
Proud.
Hockey looked at his youngest son. Yes, he was proud of his boy. He never said it, as saying anything nice about anybody apart from Carter seemed beyond him, but yes, he was proud of his son.
“Buzz has potential,” Hockey whispered to his friend.
“What do you mean?” Carter asked quietly.
“He can be what I couldn’t,” he replied. “He could be a good leader.”
“You led us through some tough times, mate,” Carter replied.
“A different time,” Hockey said. “I led people only because I was forced to. Buzz cares about his people, and I just can’t.”
“That’s why you came here,” said Carter. “It’s not just about this tower; it’s a new start.”
“For him,” Hockey said and nodded towards Buzz, who was now taking instructions from the professor. Rodent was still trying to get into his suit.
“Send the scouts out, mate,” he said to Carter. “Tell all of our people to come here.”
“Even the Martins?”
“Yeah, even them,” he replied with a grimace.
Lord Feral looked on from the eastern hills. She was angry, she was stubborn, but she was patient. When combined, these three things provided a very worthy adversary, and tracking down just one person in a hundred kilometre-radius would take some doing, especially when it was in that one person’s own backyard.
This is my family’s land, she thought stubbornly, as she turned and headed in search of a hideaway.
Hobart, Tasmania, Year 2091, Mayor’s Office
“Congratulations on the vote, Mayor,” Tom said to his aunt.
“Thank you, Tom,” Lily replied kindly.
The Hobart people, who now numbered over two thousand, had come out today to vote for the mayor for the next year. Anybody over the age of fifteen could vote, and to avoid any corruption—which basically never happened anyway—voting took place in an open area where names were ticked off from the electoral rolls and red or blue markers were placed in two piles to indicate who people wanted as mayor. If the piles looked close in size, counting would need to be done. But as the standing mayor’s pile of votes was significantly larger than the opposing person, there was no need.
Tom wouldn’t say it aloud, but he was very proud of his aunt. She led the people so well and deserved another year as the town’s leader. A great organiser and thinker, she had become a good role model for him. Another thing he wouldn’t say aloud. His confidence had grown, but he was still shy about expressing his thoughts and feelings.
“You still looked worried, though, Mayor.”
His aunt looked up at him with that thoughtful expression of hers, as they walked along the library corridor.
“It’s not the vote, Tom,” she replied. “Families are having many babies to increase our numbers, but due to the lack of medical care in our society, the mortality rate is too high.
I fear that we will never build a population big enough to survive.”
That was true, Tom thought with sadness. His joy at seeing his mother on her last visit had been overshadowed by the news of his brother Jack’s death from a cause that was unknown. All they knew was he wasted away within a few months and died in a lot of pain.
“How did they cure things in the old days?” he asked his aunt.
“They had equipment to help cure most illnesses,” she said as she stopped next to one of the library’s decades-old machines.
“You see this machine, Tom?” she asked.
“Yes, Mayor,” Tom replied as he looked at a large cream-coloured box with the name ‘photocopier’ written on it.
“This machine would copy a book page in five seconds.”
Tom looked at his aunt in shock. It took the scribes half an hour to properly copy one page of their books.
“How?”
“It had a power source,” she said with a sigh. “All the useless equipment we see in this town had a power source, which is now long gone. There is a huge building on the eastern side of this town. It is called a hospital, and it has all sorts of equipment for treating sick people. And we can’t use any of it.”
Tom was stunned that his aunt looked so dejected. She looked almost defeated. He understood, though. Maybe the equipment could have saved his brother somehow.
His aunt was still looking at the machine when she said, “My Nan told me about a thing called the Internet. It was a technology that contained all the knowledge of the world.”
“The people in the olden days must have been so smart,” Tom replied in awe.
“Well, she didn’t say that,” his aunt answered with a small laugh, but the sadness in her eyes was still there.
“Don’t worry, Aunt Lily,” he told her, placing a hand on her arm and not noticing that he had called her by her family name. “We will get through this somehow.”
His aunt smiled up at him with genuine warmth. “Well, well. The boy with no confidence is telling me not to worry. You have come a long way, my boy,” she murmured.
She then looked at him with that thoughtful frown she sometimes had and which often made Tom worry. “It’s time for some sword training,” was all she said.