Burn

by Geoff North

  “He knows. He’s been following ever since the cryogenics installation was sucked up into a black hole.”

  The Lawman nodded slowly. He had no clue what cryogenics and black holes were, but he had more than a good idea who the girl was talking about. “Eichberg. That som bitch made it out, didn’t he?”

  Jenny nodded and took his hand when he reached up for her. She slid back down onto the ground. “We have to run. We have to hide from him.”

  Lawson instructed the others to speed things up. “From what I’ve been led to understand, running and hiding won’t do us much good so long as you’re around. You saw him in them dreams of yers, didn’t you?” She nodded. “Then no matter where we go, he’s gonna know where we’re headed at all times.”

  Sara came to his side. “What’re you getting at, Lawson? Are you suggesting we leave the girl behind?”

  The big man shrugged. “It would make things less difficult.”

  “You can’t do that!” Willem yelled. “She saved all of us.”

  Cobe agreed with his brother. “We ain’t leaving her. No way.”

  Lawson grimaced at the girl. “I said it would make matters less difficult… but maybe having her stay with us could even things up some.”

  Cobe, Willem, and Sara looked at him questioningly. Only Jenny seemed to understand what was going on in the old Lawman’s head. She nodded and almost smiled. “He knows where I am, but I can keep an eye on him as well.”

  “We can take it a step further,” the Lawman added. “We can let Eichberg think he knows where we are.”

  Cobe was beginning to realize what they were planning. “The dreams… You’ll show him some place different, and then we’re gonna go somewhere else.”

  “Nope, not quite,” Lawson said. “The plan all along was to get to Victory Island, and them plans haven’t changed. We’re going to split up, and when that bastard least expects it, we’ll give him the surprise of his life.”

  Jenny watched the Lawman walk away to where the others were attempting to fish along the lake’s still shore. Something he’d said about least expecting it reminded her of Eichberg’s terrible warning. When you least expect it, you’ll become like us. The hunger will blind you to what’s real. She shivered in spite of the warm morning sun shining down.

  Lawson found Trot sitting in the mud between Kay and Angel doing his best to pull a fish in, and keeping the girls from tearing one another apart. He was failing at both. The Lawman grabbed the stick out of his hands and pulled the grass-woven line in slowly. The fish—a fairly big one—flopped in the water close to shore, splashing all four of them. Trot scrambled back, and the girls went at each other. Lawson stepped over Trot and pushed Angel back with his boot. Kay tried climbing on top of her, but Lawson pulled her away with one hand, the other still patiently pulling the fish in.

  “Let me at her!” Kay screamed. “She said I was homely.”

  Lawson let out a grumbling laugh. He couldn’t help it. If anyone had the right to judge another on their appearance, that person definitely wasn’t Angel. The Lawman had never seen a girl uglier in all his days. “The two of you stop it!” The line snapped and the fish swam back to deeper waters. “See what you made me do? Gawdamn breakfast just got away.” He threw the stick down and glowered at the two. “Both of you get back and help the others. We’re leaving in a few minutes.”

  “Do we have to?” Angel complained. “It’s nice by the lake. Nicest place we been yet. Can’t we stay a few more days at least?”

  Kay shook a fist at her. “Yeah, let’s stay a few more hours. Plenty of time for me to drown her.”

  “Enough.” The Lawman didn’t yell. He didn’t have to. They both knew from the sound of his tone the argument was over. Kay trudged off towards the horses, and Angel followed a few moments later. She glared back at the Lawman on her way. If anyone’s going to get murdered, it’ll likely be me for what I did to her pa.

  Trot stood up and tightened the rope-knot around his waist. Tears were rolling down his round face, but he didn’t complain about the fish. He would’ve likely lost it without the Lawman’s interference. “Them two girls sure do hate each other. I thought maybe bringing them down here would fix things up between them a bit.”

  “When two girls take to wantin’ the same boy, it’s best to keep out of it. May as well rub two howlers together. Effect would be about the same.”

  Trot nodded and giggled. He wiped the tears away with a dirty shirt sleeve. “Yeah, I’m pretty dumb, but that’s plain enough to see now. Why we heading out so soon? Angel was right… this is a nice place. It’s the first time any of us have felt safe in days.”

  “Lothair Eichberg’s still alive, and he’s comin’ for us.”

  Trot made a moaning sound and plopped back down into the mud. “Oh, this is bad.”

  “It could’ve been worse. Jenny warned us. Without her we wouldn’t have known shit. Now we can get ready, we can plan.”

  “I’m not scared. As long as we’re together, we can fight any old monster that comes our way. We’ve beaten howlers and rollers. We got away from Dirty Gertie and her kin… we can finish that old man off once and for all, too.”

  Lawson squatted down next to him. He spoke in the softest tone he possibly could, but it still sounded like tree bark rubbing against rock. “We ain’t staying together. I’m taking Jenny and we’re heading back the way we come. You and the others are going to keep going west.”

  Trot moaned again. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. We have to stay close, we have to be together. Please don’t leave me again.”

  Lawson rested a gnarled hand on the man’s shoulder. “It won’t be permanent, just long enough to get in behind him and finish this off. Once Eichberg’s finally dead, we’ll meet up again and keep heading for Victory together. I need you to be strong.”

  Trot looked up at him. Fresh tears were rolling down his face. “It’s a bad idea. I don’t want you leaving again.”

  “I said I need you to be strong. I want you to keep an eye on the kids, you got it?”

  Trot nodded feebly. “It’s a bad, bad idea. But I’ll do what you say… You know I will.”

  They were packed and ready to ride less than five minutes later. Sara kissed Lawson’s weathered cheek and whispered in his ear. “I can’t believe you’re leaving again. He’ll kill you.”

  “He’ll kill us all if I don’t try. This way we have a chance.” He led her to the black stallion their daughter was already seated on. Kay reached down and helped her mother up behind her. The Lawman patted the big handgun hanging in its holster at his side. “Eichberg ain’t human, but a bullet between the eyes will drop him like any other creature, I figure.”

  “Eichberg isn’t a normal creature,” the woman replied. She gave the girl standing next to Lawson an apologetic glance. “Don’t let him get inside your head.”

  “I won’t let him,” Jenny replied. “Lothair will still believe we’re all travelling west together. By the time he figures out the truth, it will be too late.”

  Lawson handed them two of their four rifles. He placed a folded piece of ancient paper into the bag hanging on the black horse’s side. “Don’t lose the map. Follow it west, and keep following it until we catch up. Keep riding every single day.”

  Sara nodded. They had worked on the map together the first night after leaving what was once Big Hole. It would guide them all the way west, through the bleak plains, and into the rugged sky rocks beyond. “Take care of yourselves, and don’t be long.”

  Lawson nodded back. He reached into a back pocket and gave Kay one last weapon—a small black handgun. “Rifles are fine at a distance. This is fer close-up fights.”

  Sara pushed him away gently. “I don’t plan on letting her get that close to anything.”

  Kay snapped the reins and the horse started west. Angel and Trot stopped in front of Lawson and Jenny next. They were riding the only other horse besides Dust that had been given a name. Trot had called her S
pot for the one black patch covering the left side of her face. The Lawman gave Trot a stern look. “Remember what we talked about.”

  “About how brain-dumb girls are when it comes to boys?”

  Angel and Jenny glared at Lawson. He lowered his head and closed his eyes. “No… the other stuff.” When he opened them again, Angel and Trot had ridden off. Cobe and his brother were in front of them now, sitting atop the small grey mare that had proven to be almost as fast as Dust in an open stretch. “You gotta go with them, boys. The less people doubling back the better. If Eichberg sees even a glimmer of what we got planned…”

  “Yeah, we get it,” Willem whined. “You don’t want us around. None of this would be happening if we hadn’t run away in the first place.”

  Lawson shrugged. “I took you to Big Hole. Trot was the one that opened Eichberg’s metal coffin. We can spread blame around all day long, but it ain’t going to change what is.”

  Cobe remained quiet. It had all started with him. He was the one that had decided to flee Burn after their parents were put to death. He had convinced his younger brother to go with him. Cobe was responsible for the entire mess they were in.

  Lawson could see the guilt in his eyes. He could see the weight of that burden pressing down on the boy’s shoulders. The Lawman extended a hand out and waited until the teenager grasped it. “You hear what I said to yer brother? We all got to stop thinking about the past.”

  Cobe released his hand and dug his heels into the mare’s sides. They galloped off to catch up to the others.

  “I don’t know about that kid,” Lawson muttered to Jenny. He climbed up onto Dust’s back. “Sometimes when he gets all quiet like that…”

  “Don’t worry about Cobe.” She climbed up behind him. “Let’s go settle things with my great-great-Grandfather.”

  “I thought you didn’t like referrin’ to him as family.”

  “I won’t have to much longer.”

  They rode off into the rising sun.

  Chapter 18

  George Washington had been decapitated. The remains of his head were spread around Lothair’s feet in a hundred-thousand ton pile of rocky rubble. The other presidential faces had fared much better over the last thousand years, with the exception of Lincoln’s nose. It had fallen away into half a dozen monstrous boulders a few hundred feet away. Travelling to what was once known as Mt. Rushmore had taken Eichberg five days. It was a diversion from his main goal—eating the Lawman’s brains and shitting them back out over the corpses of those he cared for—but a necessary one. Lothair needed to know more about the world he had awoken into. Things had changed drastically. Yesterday’s great cities were no more. All that remained was ruin. The ruins of that now ancient civilization were difficult to find, unless you knew where to search. Lothair’s descendants had made the search much easier.

  He touched the surface of the black tablet he’d taken from the Dauphin facility with the tips of his fingers, and the screen came to life. There were a billion terabytes of information stored in the device; an entire civilization’s history recorded into an indestructible piece of plastic no bigger than the palm of his hand. But Lothair wasn’t interested in the entirety of civilization. He only needed the last few decades—those years he spent frozen from the end of the twentieth century until halfway through the twenty-first. He tapped the ABZE icon and an image of the mountain he now stood in front of popped up. The US government had sold the entire park to Eichberg’s grandson—mountain included—for a trillion dollars in an attempt to climb out of the world-wide debt it owed. Edwin Eichberg had planned to rework Washington’s face into a likeness of Lothair. Jefferson would’ve been re-sculpted into Edwin’s father, Albert. Roosevelt would become Edwin himself, and Lincoln would’ve eventually been transformed into Edwin’s favorite—and only—niece, Edna.

  None of it had come to pass. Edwin’s attempt to immortalize the family name failed when the first transformative explosive set into Washington’s left nostril brought a good chunk of the mountain down. Eichbergs were famous for freezing the dead, not carving faces into rock. But none of that mattered to Lothair. He was more concerned with what lay under the mountain, not what was sculpted into the face of it.

  Lothair pressed the tracking icon represented on the screen as a small door opening and closing. The device displayed a map surrounding the area he was standing in. A small red beacon started to blink at the bottom right-hand corner. The tablet vibrated in his hand. He crossed the debris field, climbing over Lincoln’s nose, down into a narrow valley littered with more pulverized stone and dust. The vibration strengthened, and when he was standing directly over the buried entrance, the tablet made a single dinging sound like a miniaturized bell. It took another three hours to remove the seven feet of rocky dirt that had accumulated over the past ten centuries. When he had finished, Lothair stood in front of a steel door placed at a forty-five degree angle into the mountain’s base. He tapped the name Edna into the tablet’s onscreen keyboard and the heavy door slid open.

  The Rushmore facility was a fraction the size of the Dauphin location. The cryogenic chambers nestled eight hundred feet below the steel-rung ladder Lothair descended were a testament to Edwin Eichberg’s tremendous ego. Lothair’s grandson had planned it as his own modernized Valley of the Kings—a final resting place for his ancestors and eventual descendants.

  Lothair’s frozen body would’ve been transferred here if the world hadn’t gone to all-out war first.

  They would’ve discovered me already thawed in that canister. I wouldn’t have had to spend the last nine-hundred years awake and alone… and so very hungry.

  All of the security codes programmed throughout the Rushmore facility were instantly overridden by Lothair’s tablet. It reminded him of an ancient television remote; doors opened as easily as switching channels, stale atmospheric levels could be adjusted and cleaned like lowering or raising volume levels of a favorite program. Mankind’s technological achievements since his freezing in 1976 had been astounding. How much further would they have gone if they hadn’t destroyed themselves, he wondered?

  Lothair climbed down into a chamber not much larger than the room he’d been frozen in back beneath Dauphin. Three cryogenic canisters were built into the steel wall on the north side. He went to them and studied each in turn. The first was empty and powered down. No doubt it had been meant for Lothair. Despite his many faults, Edwin had adored his grandfather.

  Lothair placed his hand on the second canister and felt its cool hum through his fingertips. He rubbed the frost away from the small viewing window near the top and peered in at his grandson. “Hello, Edwin. You were a toddler the last time I saw you.” The frozen figure under the glass appeared to be around sixty-five years old, not much younger than Lothair had been when he was put to sleep. “You grew up to be a vain, egotistical spendthrift, didn’t you?”

  Edwin’s wife, Lucille, was in the third cryo-canister. “Good afternoon, daughter-in-law. I trust you’ve had a pleasant sleep?” She appeared healthy, Lothair thought. Some would say she was quite beautiful, frozen stiff and glowing blue, her life suspended indefinitely at the age of fifty-seven. Eichberg consulted his tablet again. Edwin had been stricken with Lou Gehrig’s disease and passed away in 2044. Kind-hearted Lucille—still head over heels in love and completely devoted to her husband—voluntarily had herself frozen the same year.

  A foolish couple, he thought. Arrogant and weak-willed. Lothair almost felt a sense of relief not having been buried with them.

  Lothair didn’t need to consult the miniaturized computer about his other grandson. Edna had told him the story of her father. Kelvin had developed the Quantum-Nano technology. He was the one responsible for Lothair’s superior intellect and strengthened body.

  Lothair wondered what Kelvin was doing at that very moment. “You’re still alive under that island, aren’t you?” If what Edna had told him was true, Lothair’s grandson had improved on the technology considerably. The remain
ing Eichbergs—or at least those Eichbergs deserving enough—could rule the world forever. He thought about the Lawman. “You’ll have company soon, Kelvin. I can’t wait until we all meet up.”

  He activated the quick-thaw controls on the canisters of his grandson, and his grandson’s wife. Edwin and Lucille hadn’t received any additional enhancements over the centuries. Perhaps Kelvin and Edna had decided he’d squandered too much company money on himself. Perhaps there just hadn’t been time with the world collapsing around them in the twenty-first century to pay him one last visit. They would be mindless, hungering creatures once they rose from their steel coffins. But family was family, and Lothair didn’t have the heart to leave any of his relatives behind.

  He listened to the hiss of the cryogenic tubes as temperatures spiked and fresh oxygen was released. Reviving his grandson wasn’t the only reason he’d detoured to the tiny Rushmore facility. In 2068, all twenty-one ABZE installations buried across North America had been equipped with an emergency thaw protocol. By pressing a five-digit code into a hidden keyboard, one person could bring every ABZE client back to life.

  Lothair punched a command into the tablet.

  LOCATE RUSHMORE-PHOENIX CONTROL

  A hidden wall panel slid open behind him. Lothair went to it and studied the Spartan layout of the single keyboard. The twenty-six letters of the alphabet, the numbers one through zero, and a big red button underneath reading ENTER. When his great-granddaughter had tricked him into her dreaming world, Lothair had turned the tables, and gathered information from Edna. One word—a five letter name—had been stored in her subconscious. She hadn’t even been aware he’d seen it.

  He heard the canister doors swinging open over his shoulder—struggled breathing, long fingernails clawing on metal. Edwin and Lucille were exiting their coffins. Lothair typed the name in.