The Boy at the End of the World

by Greg Van Eekhout

  I’m going to die, he thought with dread calm. They are the stronger animals, and I am their food.

  In panic, Protein was rocking the raft, sending river water rushing over the logs. Click clung to the tiller, no longer steering, just trying to keep from washing overboard, and Fisher struggled to keep his own balance. If he fell into the water the piranha-crocs would reduce him to bones in less than a minute.

  Maybe that’s what had happened to the Stragglers. Maybe they’d never survived the Whale Road. Maybe the human species had gone down screaming in the bloody waters.

  “Fisher. Catch.” Click lobbed Fisher’s knife.

  Snatching it out of the air, Fisher wasted no time. He stabbed. He sliced. He cut and thrust. Blood flew, much of it Fisher’s own, but not all.

  Once he was finally free of the crocs, he rushed over to the mammoth. Protein stomped and flailed with his trunk, trying to reach the crocs climbing up his back.

  “Easy, don’t step on me, I’m trying to help.” Fisher skewered crocs and flung them over the side.

  Breathless, Fisher’s chest heaved. The raft was eerily quiet. The attack was over, the marauding little reptiles defeated.

  And now Fisher collapsed in a heap of pain. He was soaked with sweat and blood and couldn’t get enough air in his lungs.

  Click loomed over him. “Fisher? What is your status?”

  Fisher stared at the sky through a veil of blurred vision.

  “I think my survival is in imminent jeopardy,” he murmured, just before passing out.

  My poor pants! thought Fisher. They were shredded and sticky with dried blood. Then he saw the condition of his legs: pretty much the same as his pants. The entire lower half of his body throbbed and burned.

  Strips of cloth were tied around his legs: bandages, poorly knotted and soaked with blood.

  He rose up on his bare elbows to find himself lying on a sandy strip of riverbank. The raft had fetched up on the shore nearby.

  “I advise against moving, Fisher. You are badly damaged.”

  Fisher squinted up into Click’s face.

  “Did you tie these bandages?”

  “Yes. I reasoned it would help stop the bleeding. I used fabric from your sleeves. I did not know what else to do. I am programmed with even less medical knowledge than you are imprinted with.”

  “I didn’t know you could tie knots.”

  “Of course I have knowledge of knots. It is only skill that I lack.”

  The knots were loosely fastened and wouldn’t last long, but they were knots.

  “And you managed to land the raft by yourself.”

  “Yes. It was a somewhat rough landing.”

  Protein passed Fisher a short, skinny stick.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” he said, accepting it from the mammoth’s trunk.

  “I share your puzzlement,” said Click. “He has been offering me useless items for some time now. My theory is that he is socializing.”

  Protein blinked.

  Fisher set the stick down and forced himself to his feet. His head swam. It felt like a thousand fishhooks were tugging his flesh. But he didn’t topple.

  “Again, Fisher, I advise you to remain still. I will bring you water and food. Perhaps I can catch a fish. Can you instruct me how to build a gas-propelled harpoon gun?”

  “You might be surprised to learn that, no, I do not know how to build a gas-propelled harpoon gun. Actually, wait—yes, I do. Huh.”

  But what were the odds of finding a fully intact air compressor around here?

  “Really, Fisher, I think you should stay immobile.”

  “I’m fine.” He gritted his teeth against the stabbing pains in his legs. Dizzy and weak, he stiff-walked over to the raft.

  Click had run the raft right into a beached tree stump. The pole supporting the left-front stabilizer was nearly snapped in half. Worse, the ropes binding the logs together had unraveled down to no more than a few threads.

  Fisher looked around the little patch of beach. There was the raft. And there was Protein, busy digging up a bush. There was a solid tangle of gnarly, thorny brush on the land side of the beach and croc-infested waters on the other. And there wasn’t much else. He couldn’t see anything he could use to make repairs, let alone build a gas-propelled harpoon gun.

  This was a disaster. Without the raft, they’d be stuck here. And Fisher had to face facts: his legs weren’t simply hurt. He was injured. It would take him days to heal, maybe weeks. Just the act of standing was wincingly painful. Long days of marching and running and climbing weren’t possible.

  And the word infection gnawed at him.

  Infections made you sick. Infections made you fail to survive.

  Fisher had to deal with it.

  “What do you know about infection?”

  Click whirred. “There are medicines that combat infection. We do not have any.”

  “What about plants and stuff? Can we make medicine?”

  “Of course. But I have no idea which plants or how to use them. I advise you to make sure your wounds do not become infected.”

  “Thank you, Click,” Fisher said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Was infection the same as rotting? From his store of fishing knowledge, Fisher had already figured out how to use salt to keep meat from rotting. Could salt help preserve his own leg meat? It seemed unlikely. But the word antiseptic scratched at him. He could at least clean his wounds.

  Fisher built a small fire. Then, with plastic sheeting from the raft’s sail, he made a water bag, which he hung over the fire on a tripod constructed of sticks. His deadfall traps never worked, but at least now he knew how to make tripods.

  To the water he added the last of the rock salt. When the salt dissolved he removed the bag from the fire and waited for it to cool from boiling to merely hot.

  He used this time to summon his courage.

  It didn’t feel like he had any.

  “Oh, well,” he said. And he poured the hot brine over his wounds.

  He howled. Protein snorted in distress and sympathy. He padded over and nuzzled the top of Fisher’s head with his trunk. Click watched silently.

  Weeping, Fisher kept pouring until every last drop had gone into his croc-bitten flesh.

  Then he curled and shuddered and used every last bit of his profanity.

  But he didn’t keep at it for very long. There was still a lot of work to do.

  It took a great deal of pulling and stretching and grunts and tears of frustration and effort, but by nightfall, Fisher had bound all the logs back together. He had less rope, so he used fewer logs, but the raft actually felt more solid than it had before the croc attack. After all, he now had experience to go along with his imprinted boat-building knowledge.

  There was no way to repair the pole connecting the stabilization pontoon to the raft, so he modified his design and tied the pontoons directly to the sides of the raft.

  Maybe the raft would float.

  Maybe not.

  “We’ll rest up and leave at first light,” Fisher told Click.

  But Fisher couldn’t rest. His legs hurt too much. And without the strength to gather wood, he managed only a dwarf fire fed by the stray sticks Protein brought him and Click (but mostly Click). Sleep came in brief fits.

  Sometime before dawn, Protein squealed an alarm.

  Fisher snapped awake. Darkness still blanketed the beach. His fire had burned down to ashes.

  “Click, what’s going on?”

  But the robot didn’t answer.

  Instead, Fisher heard noises. Little scritching sounds. High-pitched whirring. Mechanical noises. And a rasping sound, like something being dragged across sand.

  Fisher rose painfully, spear in one hand, knife in the other.

  “Click? Where are you? What’s happening?”

  “I believe I am being abducted, Fisher.”

  “I can’t see you, keep talking! Abducted by what?” Using his spear to f
eel his way around, Fisher tried to follow Click’s voice.

  “I cannot make visual identification. My night-vision unit is housed in my broken left eye. I regret that I was not constructed with a backup system—”

  Click’s voice was coming from the shore. And there were other noises as well: mechanical movements, different from Click’s.

  Fisher stumbled his way toward them. His foot struck a rock and he went down, his legs flaring with agony. He made himself get up.

  “Click? Keep talking! I’ll find you!”

  “I believe I am being dragged into the river, Fisher. I advise you to abandon me in the interest of ensuring your own survival.”

  The next thing Fisher heard was a splash. Then, some gurgling bubbles.

  Fisher tromped into the river, ignoring the fresh sting of water on his wounds, and peered into the darkness. “Click? Click?!”

  But it was no use. He was blind, and Click didn’t answer his calls. There was just an odd sound, a wet sort of buzzing. The word propeller formed in Fisher’s mind.

  Fisher thrashed through the water and kept calling for Click. Too quickly, the propeller noise faded.

  He stood in the river for just a few more seconds, listening to nothing, then stumbled back to shore. Holding out his hands, he moved toward heat to find his dead campfire. He blew on the coals until their glow returned, and after a few moments of tending them, he was able to light a stick.

  He raised his modest torch. Protein’s enraged eyes gleamed orange. He was standing on something.

  Fisher laid a gentle hand on the mammoth’s shoulder. “Let me see what you’ve got there,” he said in a soothing murmur. “Come on, step off. There you go.”

  Protein moved his foot away to reveal a smashed machine. There were wires and metal bits and a three-bladed propeller.

  Fisher’s brain and hands automatically calculated what he could make from the junk: fishhooks and arrowheads and small, fine cutting tools.

  But he also knew what the machine really was: a gadget. One of the things the Stragglers had written about. One of the things that had destroyed his Ark.

  More than ever, he felt himself called to the Southern Ark, to find the Stragglers, or their descendants, and the people they’d gone down the Whale Road for. Getting to his destination quickly seemed like his best defense now.

  But not until he got Click back.

  Fisher scooped up the debris and gathered his spear and knife and loaded them on the raft.

  “Hop aboard, Protein. We’re on a rescue mission.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The river churned. More eddies. More whirlpools. Along the shores grew tangle-brush and bamboo and trees hung with webs of moss. Fisher leaned against the mast and watched for a sign of Click.

  He could be anywhere. Fisher wasn’t even sure he was steering the raft in the right direction. Maybe the gadgets had taken the robot upriver instead of down. Fisher couldn’t possibly search every inch of the entire Mississippi.

  And maybe he shouldn’t try, just keep going and resume his search for the Southern Ark.

  Something large passed beneath the current, its wake rocking the raft. Protein snorted, ears flapping. Planting his feet, Fisher gripped the mast for support. He caught a glimmer of something just below the surface, at least twice as long as the raft. Not a whale. More serpent-shaped. An eel of some kind. He badly wished for that gas-propelled harpoon gun and let out a breath of relief when the half-seen creature dove for deeper waters.

  Every moment he spent on the river exposed him to new dangers. That’s what Click would have said.

  Shapes loomed in the distance. At first Fisher thought they were strange islands, like massive slabs of rock rising from the widening river. But as the raft drew closer, he saw they were the tops of skyscrapers.

  Vines and creepers draped from the rusty skeletons of the buildings. Sleek black birds, like ravens crossed with pigeons, perched on the spindly finger of an antenna. Wind whispered through the corpses of the buildings.

  Protein rumbled nervously. A nervous mammoth was a restless mammoth, and a restless mammoth was a danger to the raft, so Fisher put a hand on his shoulder. “Easy, Protein. It’s just the breeze.”

  Protein grunted, apparently unconvinced.

  Fisher wasn’t convinced either.

  They rounded a bend in the river and came upon a massive sign of green-stained plastic mounted high on the riverbank, flat and tall and shaped like a colossal cuttlefish bone. Etched into it were letters. Words. A message. It was a towering sign, intended for anyone coming down the river.

  Fisher’s lips moved as he read in a hoarse whisper:

  “The waters rise and the skies take vengeance. Summers burn hotter. Winters blow colder. And the storms hammer us in all seasons. Things are out of balance, and this is why we die.”

  The Stragglers’ message back in the salt cave mentioned the City of Ghosts. Maybe this was it. Which was good news, because it meant Fisher was on the right course to find the Southern Ark.

  On the other hand, this meant he was in a ghost city, and that didn’t sound good at all.

  He continued reading: “Earth was not put here for humanity. It was not created for us. The Earth will go on and on. But it will do so without us.”

  This didn’t sound like the language of the Stragglers. The people who had written these words weren’t huddling in caves when they wrote them. These were a people who lived in the ruins before they were ruins. These were a civilized people, and they knew they were dying.

  A reflection winked from the top of a building. Protein shifted and growled, dipping the raft and sending little waves washing over Fisher’s feet.

  “Relax,” Fisher said. “It could be anything.”

  He brought the raft up close to the building and tied it down to a protruding girder.

  “Wait for me here,” he said to Protein, as if the mammoth had any choice but to stay put. Protein snuffled and dropped some dung.

  The building was a jungle stuffed into steel gridwork. Fisher had a lot of tough climbing ahead of him, and for that he needed two free hands. That meant he’d have to leave his spear behind. Just him and his knife, then. With a piece of frayed rope, he strapped the knife to his leg before climbing onto a girder and slipping into the green shade.

  Buzzing insects mingled with fungal aromas. Moss and spiderwebs hung in curtains. Fisher shouted Click’s name. Nothing answered back but rustling in the deep vegetation. Probably just small animals. Walking down a girder, he pushed through vines, hoping his knife would be enough to handle whatever he encountered.

  Something slithered near his feet. Fisher jumped back and nearly lost his balance on the narrow girder. When a tiny green lizard darted back into the green, Fisher almost felt bad for having scared it.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. He knew what it felt like to be hunted by a bigger animal. He just hoped he was the biggest animal here.

  Craning his neck, he looked for a way up. His legs still stung and ached, and he wasn’t looking forward to a climb. One night, as they made camp, Click had told him about the elevators in the Ark, little rooms that brought you up or down to bigger rooms. If this building had an elevator, it had surely been swallowed by jungle centuries ago.

  Well, there was no avoiding it. If he was going to find the source of the reflection he might as well get started. He found a vertical beam wound with enough vines to provide good hand- and footholds. He climbed.

  By the time he’d made it half a floor up, pain gouged his shaky legs. Blinking sweat from his eyes, he kept on.

  Up he went, until he reached the top floor and broke through the jungle ceiling. He immediately surrendered to pain and fatigue and sank onto a girder to catch his breath.

  After a few minutes, Fisher got back to his feet and looked out across the ghost city. The river spread out like a lake, studded with ruins like stubby thumbs. Would he have to search every one of those thumbs for Click?

  Six silver bumblebees t
he size of Fisher’s fist emerged from under the ledge of the roof. Sunlight glinted off their mirror-bright surfaces. Their wings beat in a blur. Fisher ducked, ready for the attack, but the bees ignored him. They elevated over his head and dove into the dense growth in the middle of the roof.

  Fisher stared into the green, where the bees had disappeared.

  They weren’t real bees.

  They were machines.

  Gadgets.

  He picked his way across a girder toward the middle of the roof. Really, it wasn’t so much a roof as just a big open space with trees and stuff hiding the gaps that plummeted straight down to the river. More of a death trap, really.

  But gadgets had taken Click, so he followed them. He shimmied down a slender tree trunk, to the green shadows one floor down. Guided by the muffled buzzing of the mechanical bees, he threaded his way through hanging vines. Almost by accident, he found Click. The robot was strung up by black cables. His head lolled to the side. An abdominal panel was missing, exposing wires and circuits and actuators. Some of the wires were cut, and there were some electrical connectors that no longer connected to anything.

  Fisher shook his shoulder. “Click,” he whispered. “Click, wake up.”

  The robot lifted his head. His voice box emitted static. “Fisher. Run.”

  A buzz loud enough to rattle Fisher’s teeth came from behind. Fisher spun around and saw silver bees aiming for his face. On reflex, he swung out with his knife and made contact with a bee. The blade sliced through one of its foil wings and sent the crippled machine tumbling into the rest. They tangled and fell through the jungle, down into the lower floors of the building.

  “The bees are merely unarmed scout-drones,” Click said. “They are not the threat. Your weapons will be of no use against the strikers.”

  What was a striker? Fisher didn’t plan on sticking around long enough to find out. He began hacking through the cables binding Click. The robot admonished him all the while: “Rescuing me is a bad plan, Fisher. To achieve your ultimate survival objective, you must abandon me and run.”