The Lightning Lords

by M C Rooney

  Who would have thought that one little girl could cause so much damage? Sure, she had one of the electrical suits the professor had created, but Hockey had two, not to mention over a thousand warriors he’d originally had with him. But tracking her down over such a large territory had proven nearly impossible, and she would only attack sporadically.

  Sometimes he wouldn’t hear about her for ages, especially during the time when he had recently had the professor turn off the tower for two months. He thought that without the power of the suits she would be easy to kill, but all she did was hide, and in the end, Hockey thought that bringing her out of her hideouts and into the open was the only way they would ever be able to kill her.

  In the last three years, he had lost over two hundred warriors to her lightning and her traps, and over a thousand of his tribe had decided to leave him and head back home, including his rivals, the Martins.

  Why leave? The constant stream of zombies that were attracted to their activity and smell in the first year of their arrival had stopped, and nobody had seen a zombie nearby for two years now. Carter advised him that he had sent his youngest son, Flynn, to see what the Martins were up to in the west, but Hockey found it hard to care. He just wanted this land for his son, but that girl was ruining all his plans.

  “Perhaps your little shit of a girlfriend is finally dead,” he growled at the professor.

  “I hope not; she is my friend,” the professor replied in honesty, as he turned off the electricity switch and began to put his tattered clothes back on.

  He doesn’t care whether I know that he is loyal to her instead of me, Hockey thought angrily. He knows that I need him to keep this tower operational, and I can’t force the secrets out of him due to his old age and the complexity of actually learning this new technology. It would take years to learn how this tower worked.

  Hockey thought back to the strange conversations of his youth. He wished McKay was still around. He would know how the tower worked.

  “Maybe I should destroy this tower for good,” he growled.

  “Perhaps you should,” the professor agreed. “It was meant for houses and businesses to run electrical equipment for free. There are maybe fifty houses within the hundred kilometre-radius, but you don’t want to use them, and …” Seemingly out of energy, he trailed off.

  “The old world is dead,” Hockey finished for him.

  People’s knowledge was placed into an electrical computer, and when the electricity was stopped, the knowledge was lost. Oh, there are books on this sort of stuff, but they are only kept in libraries, not in people’s homes. And the only libraries that were known to him were way in the south or in the north. The libraries to the west had been destroyed years ago.

  “You should have built this thing closer to Hobart or Launceston,” he said now.

  “Agreed,” the professor replied. “But this was an experiment only. Not a new brand of energy to replace the old. Anyway, this is free energy, you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand,” Hockey grunted out; he remembered the way things worked. He also remembered their conversation when he first arrived in this land.

  Another explosion went off to the east, then another, then another. The battle was on.

  “We will see whether your fifteen-year-old bitch survives this one,” he snapped at the professor. He could not believe it when the professor had told him it was just a little girl in that suit.

  “Eighteen now, Hockey; you have been chasing her for three years now, remember?” said the professor with a small smile.

  “Careful, Professor,” Hockey told him in a menacing tone. “I promised not to kill you, but a good punch in the mouth is what you are asking for.”

  The professor slunk back under his prototype and proceeded on his daily maintenance of the tower.

  Hockey wondered whether he should just destroy the tower and go back home. But he wanted desperately to leave something behind for his son Buzz. And once Lord Feral, as they liked to call her, was dead, Buzz truly would rule a large part of this island. He really didn’t care if the Martin family had reclaimed the west. They could have it, as far as he was concerned. That place was only full of bad memories for him.

  He had also pieced together the recorded message on the radio from the Governor-General of Australia. He knew the old danger that was coming from the mainland.

  So, unbeknownst to anyone but himself and his son Buzz, he had sent men, including older men who remembered the old days, to the south to find some of the old computers. Perhaps they would contain knowledge as to how this tower worked, and then, if he had that knowledge, he would be able to take the professor up the ladder to the top of the tower and throw him off.

  The professor considered switching the prototype on and killing the bastard. But something in his mind would not allow that. Plus, one of his so-called warriors would then kill the professor in retaliation, and where would that leave the tower and its technology? And where would that leave poor Molly? He had been worried sick when Hockey told him to shut the tower down. For two months, she was out there on her own without a renewable energy source for her protection, and for two months, the professor went without his morning showers. How was he to climb to the top of the tower if he didn’t have his morning pick-me-up? He must have been approaching seventy now, he guessed. Or was it eighty?

  And what is age but just a number? the voice in his head said.

  “Your body listens to your thoughts,” he said in agreement to the voice as he climbed the east side of the tower. He stopped when he saw another large flash of light and explosion off to the eastern hills.

  “Take care, little one,” he said. “Your luck cannot last forever.”

  Maybe it can.

  “Shut up, you’re not Nostradamus,” he said to himself.

  Nostradamus never predicted anything correctly, the voice argued. He just wrote obscure poems that only meant what you thought it meant. Does August 1999 and the King of Terror ring a bell? the voice finished smugly.

  “What happened then?”

  Nothing!

  “Who was the King of Terror?”

  Nobody! the voice said. But I’m sure some people made a nice little earner at the time.

  “Beware the money trail,” the professor whispered.

  Always the money trail, the voice agreed in his head.

  “Well, some people have been known to predict the future for individuals.”

  True, but they shouldn’t do that.

  “Why?”

  Because of the butterfly effect, you idiot.

  “Ah, of course,” the professor replied, “by telling someone of their destination, you may indeed prevent that someone from reaching the destination through the subsequent actions of them trying to reach that destination.”

  What?

  “Oh, just be quiet and climb,” the professor said.

  You climb; you’re the body. I am just the voice in your head.

  “Oh, yes, I forgot,” the professor said. “Please, forgive me.”

  That’s quite all right.

  “Are you sure we can see the tower from here?” said a tall, dark-haired man called Jeremy, who wore dyed purple fur clothing that the Easterners wore. They all seemed to love bright clothes over there. But he carried a longsword, shield, and bow for protection, as most Tasmanians did. Jeremy had found the story of the lightning tower fascinating and was frustrated that he could not find any references to the tower in the libraries or in what could be recovered from the local computers. So, wanting to know more about it, he decided to journey with his short-statured friend.

  “Yes, we can,” Roland replied, walking up the hill. “If we can get to a certain height, we can see miles and miles of the Midlands.”

  Roland was still wearing his robe, metal hat, and carried his quarterstaff, but his dark hair was now long and in a ponytail. So he was still a hermit looking for enlightenment, but the stereotype of his hairstyles knew no bounds.

  �
�Kilometres,” said Edward, who was a tall, handsome man with long brown hair, whom the women absolutely loved, and he loved them … often. He wore a blue jacket of the Eastern Diggers defence force and carried both a longsword and a rapier to be used however the mood took him.

  “What?” asked Roland.

  He really wasn’t sure about Edward. Nobody was. He had sort of insisted on coming on this journey, and nobody could think of any reason to say no, but he wasn’t exactly a welcome addition, either.

  “Kilometres,” replied Edward, as strait-laced as ever. “We haven’t used the ‘miles’ terminology in over a hundred years.”

  “It was just a term of phrase for fuck’s sake,” replied Roland testily.

  “No need to get rude,” Edward insisted prudishly.

  “He’s rude all the time, trust me,” replied Michelle, who was a short-statured, pretty blonde-haired girl. She wore a slightly cleaner green robe than Roland. She was carrying a short sword, a bow, and an unborn baby in her belly, which she hadn’t told Roland about just yet.

  “Sweet Jesus, or whatever his name was, is this Pick-on-Roland Day?”

  “Week,” replied Michelle with an impish grin.

  “Look, I didn’t ask you to follow me here,” said Roland in exasperation.

  “Well, I wanted to see the tower,” replied Jeremy.

  “I enjoy the walk in Mother Nature. Hmm or should that just be simply nature,” mused Edward, who was probably now wondering whether calling nature purely by the female term was sexist.

  “It wasn’t just a walk for you, Edward, and you know it,” replied Roland. Edward was to report what he saw back to his father. That had to be the reason.

  “No. I apologise,” replied Edward. “I just wanted to confirm your story about where the electricity came from.”

  “Well, where did you think it came from?” Roland asked.

  Edward looked up into the sky, but not in a way that meant purely the clouds.

  “What?” replied Roland with a laugh. “You believed The Infinite thought, ‘I’ll keep everybody in the dark without power, except these guys from the east of Tasmania; they look like a fine bunch of human beings.’”

  “Well, Father thought so,” Edward replied stoutly.

  Edward’s father was the governor of the eastern lands.

  “As the Southerners say, ‘Can you prove that?’” replied Roland. He loved the Southerners. He couldn’t wait to get there one day.

  “Then why do we have electricity without any known power source?” replied Edward.

  “That is what I am here to show you,” Roland answered.

  “You could have told us years ago,” Jeremy said, exasperated. “I need to know if I can replicate this technology or not.”

  “Sorry; I didn’t put two and two together before now,” Roland replied sheepishly. And Roland was genuinely annoyed with himself. For months, he had wandered the eastern lands in disbelief as to how they had lighting and heating, never realising that their homeland was within a hundred kilometres of the tower. It was only when he saw a young child get electrocuted that he realised the tower may have been the source of energy.

  “Well, I just wanted to make sure you didn’t run out on me … I mean us,” Michelle added with a stern look at Roland.

  “Well, just remember the mantra. You don’t need to follow me; you don’t need to follow anybody,” said Roland to all three of them.

  “I know, I know, you’ve said this many times before,” Jeremy agreed hurriedly. “‘You’ve got to think for yourselves,’” he quoted.

  “You’re all individuals,” Edward chimed in, knowing what was coming next. “Hmm, I’ve never heard of that philosopher. What did you say his name was? Brian or—What’s that noise?”

  All four of them were now looking westwards. There was a humming noise coming from not far beyond the nearest tree line.

  Edward then looked over his shoulder as ten or so zombies came out of the trees and walked westwards, groaning for flesh and blood. They had killed one of those pale zombies on their travels, who were next to useless, but the red ones, who no longer existed on the East Coast, needed to be treated with respect, unless, of course, your name was Edward.

  In three long steps, Edward produced his longsword and proceeded to decapitate every last one of them. A strange man he may be, but he was the finest swordsman Roland had ever seen.

  “Aren’t you going to brain kill them?” Jeremy called out.

  Edward just stood there, looking down at the bodies.

  “Hello, earth to Edward,” said Jeremy.

  “They weren’t walking towards us,” Edward suddenly said.

  “No, they weren’t,” said an entity walking out of the tree line where the humming had come from. Whoever he or she was, this person was completely covered from head to toe in a silver material and looked at them with blue eyes covered by large goggles.

  All three of Roland’s companions brought forward their weapons as if to attack, but Roland stood still in shock.

  “I thought you were a vision,” Roland said, rather awestruck.

  “Well, the Professor said I was pretty, but I wouldn’t go that far,” the silver entity that stood about thirty metres away from them joked.

  “Must be a girl,” Michelle whispered.

  “Or a man who thinks he’s pretty,” Jeremy whispered back.

  “No … I mean,” mumbled Roland, still in shock, “I saw you a few years ago when I was trying to travel south. But a large number of half-naked men showed up, and I ventured east,” he finished in a dejected voice.

  “Don’t sound so depressed,” Michelle snapped. “You met me—us, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I remember that day,” the silver suit said. “They took my family land and hold my dear friend, the Professor, at the tower.”

  “Does he know how the tower works?” Jeremy said with excitement in his voice.

  “He built it with my grandfather,” the entity replied.

  “Really?” Jeremy said in delight.

  “Yes,” she replied. “He built these suits as well.” Then she produced a little bit of lightning from her fingertips.

  Michelle and Edward stepped back, but Jeremy and Roland stood still in fascination.

  “You said suits, as in there is more than one,” said Edward.

  “Yes, there are three,” she replied cautiously.

  “So … are you Feral?” said Roland.

  “How do you know that name?” the Lightning Lord asked. Roland was relieved it was asked in a curious way, not in anger.

  “I have heard stories of Lord Feral and the battles that have gone on here with a Lord Buzz and Lord Rodent,” Roland said.

  “Lord Feral, how funny,” she said, laughing. “Is that what the others are called?”

  Roland nodded his head in confirmation.

  She thought for a moment as she looked at the four strangers and decided to take a chance. She hadn’t had a conversation with anybody in three years, and she was tired of the fighting. Taking off her helmet, she smiled and said to their stunned faces, “I’m Lord Feral, but you can call me Molly.”

  “My lord,” one of the warriors called out.

  Rodent could not describe the joy that being called a lord gave him. Unfortunately, in moments like this, the title was always directed at his little brother.

  The professor’s silver suit, helmets, and the goggles were the same size, but the body was designed for medium-sized people, so Buzz looked like he was about to stretch his open, and Rodent’s suit had a crumpled look about it. But who cares, it worked just fine, and that was the main thing.

  “Yes, Sam?” replied Buzz, who always referred to the warriors by their first names because he took the time to learn them.

  What a toolbag he is, Rodent thought. Warriors were expendable. Rodent had lost over one hundred fifty under his command, and he never bat an eyelid at their deaths.

  “We’ve spotted her just over the nearby hill,” Sam
said. “She seems to be talking to four strangers in colourful clothing, three men and a woman.”

  Clothes in this weather! Piss-weak, Rodent thought in his usual anger.

  “Were the strangers carrying any weapons?” Buzz asked.

  “Yes, my lord,” the warrior replied, “but just swords, shields, and bows. One even had a quarterstaff.”

  At the mention of the quarterstaff, Rodent felt his heart rate increase with excitement.

  “Was he wearing a green robe?” he asked.

  “Yes, my lord,” whatever his name was replied.

  You beauty, thought Rodent. Finally, I will get to kill him.

  He didn’t know who he was, nor did he have any grievances with him. But three years ago, a killing was denied by his father, so this was just the balance of the wild as far as Rodent was concerned.

  Buzz looked around at the fifty warriors they had with them and frowned. “She usually lays traps for us,” he murmured, “but perhaps today we can catch her by surprise.”

  “Sam,” he said in his commanding voice, “take half of our men with Lord Rodent and take her by the right flank. My men will attack from the left.”

  Rodent ignored the grimace on the warrior’s face at the order of being placed under his command and gathered his twenty-five.

  “Rodent,” Buzz said in an authoritative tone, “you will not turn on your suit until you are within striking distance. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Buzz,” he replied.

  “She will hear us if you power up too soon.”

  “Yes, Buzz.”

  “You will not engage the enemy until after I attack.”

  “Yes, Buzz.”

  “Now, let’s go,” Buzz said as he turned to his men.

  Fuck you, Buzz, Rodent thought as he watched his brother and his men move off to the left. He waited where he was until his brother had disappeared from sight.

  “We are going straight up the middle,” he ordered.

  “But Lord Buzz just ordered—” Sam stopped as Lord Rodent turned on his suit.

  “What did Lord Buzz order?” Rodent said as electricity coiled around his outstretched hand.

  “Nothing, my lord,” Sam replied meekly.