Peace Keeper

by Greg Prado

  “Not your people, my dear,” William replied as he picked up the pace. “But you are correct. The beast is most definitely close.”

  “But they could be, next,” she gasped. “We have to go back!”

  “Mieke, please!” her mother quietly exclaimed, motioning for her to be quieter. “We need to move quickly. Can you lift me?”

  “Like old times?” Mieke would have smiled, if she could at that awful moment. “Sure. Get on my back.”

  She carefully loaded her mother onto her back and shimmied to adjust the weight.

  “Comfortable, mutter?” she asked.

  “Yes, mein Mädchen,” the frail woman smiled.

  Rapid footfalls from behind the group prompted William to spin on his heels and draw his holstered taser. A surprised Friedrich raised his palms as he slowed. A scraped up black carbine and several magazines were slung over his shoulder.

  “Don’t shoot, Doctor!” he pleaded. “Do no harm, am I right?”

  “You are not my patient, Mr.—” William cocked his head as he kept the taser trained on his target. William wasn’t one to be overly suspicious, but the idea of Friedrich leaving his friends seemed unlikely.

  “Schmidt,” Friedrich answered. “It’s Friedrich Schmidt. Now can you please lower your weapon?”

  “What are you doing here?” Mieke asked, slowing only slightly from her forward momentum. “What about the others?”

  The sharp hiss of a recently fired rocket drowned out their conversation as the growing bundle of survivors retreated further from the menacing threat at their rear. The explosion impacted within eyesight this time, only two hundred meters or so to their rear. Bits of an already fragmented building crumbled down into the alley as a new crowd of refugees poured from Mieke’s temporary home. They jumped as it landed just down the alley behind them and coated the panicked crowd with dust and debris.

  “Run!” Friedrich ordered with a forceful forward gesture. “Move! Quickly as you can!”

  William obeyed and led the charge. His mind pondered how this mission that was supposed to be a long but uneventful trek was shaping up to become anything but the latter.

  “We split up because of the peacekeeper’s errant behavior!” Friedrich informed William’s party. “Three groups of survivors in order to maximize the chance of someone’s escape. They all set off in opposing directions and I was assigned to join you for fire support.”

  Mieke was able to keep a surprisingly quick pace thanks to her gazelle-like athletic form. Her thick legs reminded William of the hurdlers he’d seen at Oxford. She ran as though her mother weighed almost nothing. He shook his head slightly, breaking free of the mesmerizing movements of Mieke, and looked over his shoulder to address Friedrich.

  “Do we have any more ordnance than that,” William asked, pointing to the rifle that bounced around Friedrich’s chest.

  “I was actually—” Friedrich yelled back.

  He was cut off by an awful groaning noise. Much like a foghorn on an ocean vessel, it was followed by four rapid clangs of metal onto something hard like pavement. William’s gut instincts flared up like a fighter jet’s thrusters moments before takeoff.

  “It’s firing the main gun, get down!” he hollered.

  The doctor almost slung Mieke’s father behind a waste container as he slid into cover. The doctor covered his head as a high whine filled the air. After the advent of fusion and quantum capacitation technology, the amount of power that could be stored and released at one time skyrocketed almost exponentially. As a result, hideously powerful magnetic rail guns dotted the battlefield as simplistic, but devastatingly effective, weapons. The signature trill was sharp and preceded what sounded like a thunderclap.

  Eight kilograms of depleted uranium were propelled with such unimaginable velocity that they cut through buildings as though they were paper mache. What this looked like on paper and what it sounded like in person were two entirely different things.

  William kept his head down as the slug shot through three separate buildings, tugging a wake of debris behind it. The sound was unbearably loud as the projectile shattered entire floors of the already damaged cityscape. Mieke’s mother screamed and struggled to remain strong. Even her father jolted at the sound which seemed to echo on in reverie for several seconds after the blast.

  “Let’s go!” Mieke shouted after the largest building chunks fell in colossal thuds all around them.

  William placed a powerful hand on her arm to keep her steady.

  “The bastard isn’t done!” he called, urging her to stay put.

  As though called out by his words, a second shot tore through the building from which the screaming seemed to be originating. It ripped upward through the first floor and flew in an invisible line down the alley. The shot impacted the building directly in front of where William and the others had taken cover and seemed to distort the air as they saw the crash before they heard the shockwave. The stalwart William Rutger fell back at the impact, as did everyone crouched over his shoulder.

  Seeing the blast firsthand was unimaginably awful. The tiny shell collided with the third floor of the cream-colored apartment building and clearly hit the structural supports of an already weakened structure. The fourth floor collapsed down onto the third and began to slip sideways toward the alley.

  “Shit!” William screamed as he watched the demolition in slow motion. “Back! Get back!”

  Metric tons of broken building pieces plummeted down onto the very area Mieke and the others would have occupied had they continued on forward. Unfortunately, their path was now blocked.

  “I owe you on—” Mieke began as she stood upright after scrambling backward away from the falling building.

  A third shot annihilated the remaining structural integrity of the building at the far end of the alleyway. The shot passed harmlessly westward of the five survivors, but they all watched in a trance as the structure began to fold in onto itself. The entire building, all five stories, fell in place as though a planned demolition had been orchestrated.

  “All those people,” Mieke almost yelled through ringing ears. “What about our—”

  She stopped a moment later, her words snatched by a force beyond her control.

  Mieke couldn’t imagine what she was seeing. A mechanical monstrosity, the size of which was more unreal than the destruction she’d just witnessed, walked past the alley on six tree trunk-like legs. If it could have stood on a pair of imaginary hind legs, it would have towered as high as a battle tank. Resembling some gigantic hexagonal prism which rounded only slightly at the top, the peacekeeper strolled on like an overly-content spider. It was as if it hadn’t just extinguished dozens of lives. Suddenly, it stopped.

  William yanked Mieke downward with almost a little too much force. She felt the cold pavement impact her shoulder roughly as her skull clapped to concrete. She moved to whine slightly and felt a hand press itself tightly over her mouth. Friedrich’s palm was planted firmly over her mouth as she looked upward at the crouched man. His eyes were wide with worry. Mieke finally understood.

  Did it see me? she worriedly thought. Have I killed us all?

  Her frantic thoughts were interrupted by a pop and hiss from the street directly adjacent to their alley. A green flare soared upward and hung in the midday sun for an eternity. Everyone was silent as they watched the signal fall downward. No one moved an inch, their eyeballs glued to this mysterious symbol in the sky.

  William knew exactly what it was. He also began to wonder who, exactly, the Fishers were. Who might be willing to sacrifice their life for them?

  The flare was a distraction.

  Like a herd of rushing buffalo, the inky-black painted peacekeeper charged away from the alley. They heard it round the corner from the building it had just flattened, and the unmistakable sound of the gatling cannon whirred to life.

  “No!” Mieke screamed, putting two and two together. “They can’t! Why are they—”

  “Move, now!” F
riedrich ordered. “They are putting their lives on the line to save you. With the alley blocked, we must make a detour to my apartment or what is left of it.”

  “We need to keep moving!” William reminded harshly as he added a detour to their navigation. “We can’t afford to waste a second!”

  Friedrich exhaled in frustration as the group entered the rear of a blown-out department store. Dust-coated clothes were strewn about the collapsed single-story building. William walked carefully as Friedrich yelled from behind.

  “My wife and I have motorcycles!”

  William turned around to face him with a look of suspicion.

  “They’re old Triumph models, kick-started. No internal computer to blow. Even if they were hit by an electromagnetic pulse, they’d start up without issue.”

  William tensed his jaw. As much as he hated to admit it, motorbikes would make their journey smoother. Most vehicles had been disabled by numerous electromagnetic pulse strikes. The modern world was being bombed back to the industrial age. Even as Friedrich spoke, William couldn’t believe he was pondering the mysterious man’s request.

  “How far?” William groaned.

  Friedrich subsequently informed the group that nine city blocks was all that stood in their way. They would have to dodge enemy patrols, peacekeepers, and God only knows what else for nine blocks. The group jumped as the peacekeeper’s cannon roared once more. For better or for worse, the route deviation would take them in the opposite direction of the gigantic robot. In William’s mind, that was the deciding factor.

  “Fine,” he grunted. “We move quickly and quietly, and we don’t stop for any reason. I take the lead. Autocannons have been deployed by enemy forces. I don’t need you getting cut to shreds because you haven’t seen the same things I have.”

  “How long have you been in the war?” Mieke asked as they crouched under the collapsed sign at the front of the store that lay at an awkward half-supported angle.

  “How long?” William repeated in bemusement. “Well, since the beginning: since Hong Kong. Those bloody Chinese bastards blamed us for the movements of terrorists. They claimed it was our bombs that flattened their city. Russian investigators seemed to have found incontrovertible proof of their origin, but I found that quite difficult to believe. You see—”

  William stopped. This was neither the time nor place to propagate his personal conspiracy theories about the beginning of the war. It wasn’t his place to wildly assert that the New Soviet Republic had bombed Hong Kong and blamed the act on UK sloppiness. Deep down, William knew that there was absolutely no way the United Kingdom government would lose a nuclear warhead, let alone four. He had heard the rumors that seemed to resonate back through his mind every so often. He listened to the whispers that the nuclear weapons were stolen by something far more organized than a simple group of terrorists. Armored soldiers were purported to have stormed one of their missile facilities and—none of that mattered. William pressed on despite Mieke’s protestations. Frankly, William didn’t care to reminisce about that part of his past.

  He was so distracted that he hardly realized when Friedrich began to report that they had arrived.

  “It’s just up here!” Friedrich smiled, pointing to the two-story dwelling with pleasant light-blue painted facade.

  By default, he slid his keycard along the door panel. Mieke began to gently lower her mother to the ground.

  “It will be a very fast trip. In and out, three minutes,” Friedrich assured, slipping a lockbox out from the center of the shrub beside the door. He punched in a code and pulled out an old-fashioned key which he subsequently slipped into the base of his door lock.

  “You seem to have prepared handily for the lack of electricity,” William noted. “I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who just happened upon so many fail-safes designed for a modern war.”

  “Well,” Friedrich smiled. “Paranoia has its benefits, I suppose.”

  William didn’t believe his minimally informative explanation. For that matter, he was becoming more frustrated by the seemingly willing ignorance of the entire party. Where had the other survivors gone? Why had they all been so willing to lay down their lives to maximize the five individuals’ chances of success?

  Mieke followed briskly and couldn’t help noting the relatively unscathed look of the home. Most citizens hadn’t been so lucky. As she entered the dwelling, the light covering of dust filled the room with an ethereal aura. It was as though she walked through a dream, kicking up clouds of memory with each footfall. Suddenly, she had a distinct feeling of deja-vu. Her parents had a home just like the one she was trodding through. She was drawn to what looked to be a basement door at the far end of the living room, standing between the kitchen and the living space.

  William gestured to the woman who stood outside the home and waved for her to enter.

  “Friedrich, what is her mother’s name?” he asked.

  “Amelie Fisher,” the man replied curtly as he searched the adjacent study for supplies.

  “Amelie?” William smiled. “Now that’s a coincidence! My wife’s name is Amelia.”

  He turned back around and saw Mrs. Fisher unable, or unwilling, to move. Her eyes were terrified. William’s heart began to thunder away in his chest.

  He turned to Friedrich and whispered softly, “Get the others to safety right away. I am going to retrieve Amelie.”

  Friedrich nodded affirmatively. Despite the power struggle between the two men, he’d been in the war just as long as William and knew the importance of remaining calm in disastrous situations.

  “The motorbikes are just down here!” Friedrich called, pointing to the basement as he threw open the door.

  Mieke immediately noticed that the tight stairwell seemed to wind farther down than a single story warranted.

  “How far down?” she wondered aloud, following her father. “Wait, Papa. Where is mutter?”

  Mieke turned her head back and looked out across the floor from eye level. She saw an unbelievable spectacle that appeared almost like a Renaissance painting. William Rutger stood with outstretched arms toward the open doorway from which light poured into the hazy room. In the highly contrasted, blinding sunlight, her mother stood silently, eyes clamped shut. Wrinkles folded up along her forehead as her veins popped outward along her neck. She was terrified, more so than Mieke had ever seen before.

  She watched Doctor Rutger fold his palm inward, telling Amelie to drop the crutches and leap. Suddenly, her mother’s eyes flew open and Mieke took in a shaky breath trying to make sense of what was going to happen next. She began to spin about as the scene unfolded, desperately trying to do something, anything, to help her mother. Friedrich caught her shoulders and roughly forced her down, but she fought like the devil himself. She clawed forward, and for a split second, saw her mother’s eyes meet hers.

  The dust around the room twirled as something large shot down the street.

  Amelie’s nose flared as she gave a half smile before leaping back and out of sight. Mieke had never seen her mother move with such purpose. Just before she witnessed it, she heard the hiss of something small rushing closer to the home.

  William stretched out his body and vaulted inward toward the basement with as much vigor as he could summon. The rocket streaked by like a miniature torpedo just as he clawed his way into the stairwell. It chased her mother like an undeterred predator closing on its prey.

  Mieke watched the events unfold in slow-motion as her senses numbed and the missile terminated its journey. The shockwave entered the building slowly, kicking up all surrounding dust in an unstoppable tsunami of force. As the front window shattered, she felt a pair of hands clap down over her shoulders and tug her body backward. Her form careened down the stairwell as her father worked to pull William into the shelter. The explosion finally met her ears and she let out a guttural howl. Her body ached and debris rained down after William, but her mind could only focus on one thing:

  Her mother was dead.<
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  3

  Effiges

  “What did you do? What did you do?” Mieke screeched like a broken record. She pounded forward, swinging her fists toward Friedrich wildly like a drunken boxer. “What did you do!”

  “I saved your life!” he barked back. “I followed Amelie’s wishes because—”

  “Is what she wanted,” Mieke’s otherwise silent father finally spoke. “Is our job. We help Mieke safe.”

  The man’s few words were broken English, but their meaning was clear. Amelie’s husband had tears in the corners of his eyes as he gazed protectively at the girl.

  “Mieke is everything. Without you—” Mr. Fisher sighed, contorting his face into one of heartbroken frustration. “We take you. We die for you, for Deutschland.”

  William exhaled as he moved slowly between Mieke and Friedrich.

  “Your mother saved us. Had she allowed me to rescue her, the missile would have easily leveled the structure before we could have descended—”

  “What?” Mieke fussed. “Where in the hell are we?”

  She gestured wildly at the ancient brick walls surrounding them and the dust that fell from the ceiling as the house apparently disintegrated above them.

  “Truthfully?” Friedrich sighed. “It is ugly and most definitely not something that we Germans brag about.”

  “These were built during the last war, weren’t they?” William said, connecting the dots as he looked around.

  The aged red brick was laid meticulously in careful columns and archways that looked almost like it could have been an Underground station terminal with unfinished flooring. It stretched along well past the reach of Friedrich’s flashlight and had a few sprays of similarly old graffiti, clearly left by someone long forgotten.

  “When Hitler was desperate, in his most paranoid state, he dug tunnels underneath our fair city. They served as both a means for escape from the allies and for secret weapons’ testing,” Friedrich answered. “They were largely ignored by the municipal authorities, as demolishing them would have been far more expensive than simply sealing off all the entrances. It was quite simple for an enterprising mind to reopen a few of those access points.”