The Beautiful Land

by Alan Averill

  “Shit on me,” mutters Tak as he grabs the lighter and cranks the window. “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”

  Before the birds even realize that his window is down, Tak tosses the lighter toward the spilled gasoline. It spirals in the air, around and around, a tiny circle of red against the blackness of the station, before landing directly in the middle of the siphon’s stream. The moment it touches down, a blue flame whooshes to life and begins racing back along the concrete and toward the plug vent.

  “Hang on, Sam!” cries Tak. He slams the pedal down and backs up, running over a couple of birds with a satisfying crunch. Then he grabs the emergency brake and pulls, whipping the car around until it’s facing the road. He can hear the birds shrieking and cawing behind him, but at the moment he’s much more concerned about the flickering fire he sees in the rearview. He throws the cruiser into gear and peels out of the station and back onto the Hi-Line, hoping that whatever gods are listening will grant him time to get the hell out of there. Twenty seconds, he thinks as he speeds down the road and watches a small stream of fire expand behind him. Just gimme twenty seconds, and we’re all good. I’d even settle for fifteen. I’m not picky.

  Six seconds later, the station goes up in a massive fireball. Tak sees an enormous cloud of orange death lift into the air behind him as night turns to noon. Samira screams and claps her hands over her ears at the sound of the explosion, a teeth-rattling boom that leaves Tak deaf in one ear. Hot, sticky air suddenly floods through the car, thick with the stench of gasoline and burning feathers. For a horrible moment the cruiser threatens to stall, but then it somehow manages to find enough oxygen to keep the engine firing.

  Tak pushes the car as fast as it can go as twisted pieces of metal begin to rain across the highway. Something large flashes in the corner of his eye, and when he turns his head, he sees a huge chunk of shrapnel spiraling toward the cruiser. He cranks the wheel hard to the left; the car skids into the oncoming lane and kicks up dirt from the side of the road as the bottom half of a gas pump crashes to earth where they had been half a second before.

  “Oh yeah, this was a REALLY bad idea!” screams Tak as he yanks the wheel back to the other side and avoids what looks to be the crumpled bed of an old Ford pickup. It hits the ground and goes bouncing off into a field, where it explodes in a miniature version of the gas station inferno behind them. All along the sides of the highway, wheat fields spring to hellish life as falling debris lands amidst their neatly groomed rows and sparks them to flame.

  Tak can feel his eyebrows beginning to singe. He takes one hand off the wheel for a moment and shuts the vents, but he might as well hold back the ocean with a sandbag. The air inside the car gets hotter and hotter until every breath is fire and Tak’s vision is a swimming, teary smudge of orange and red. Pieces of the station clatter all around them. Debris patters off the roof like heavy rain. One particularly large piece of wood smashes through the back window of the cruiser, missing Samira’s head by inches. The world becomes a terrifying mass of screaming and heat and thunder as Tak races along the Hi-Line like he’s trying to outrun the devil himself.

  And then, slowly, the sounds begin to diminish. The falling debris slows. The air becomes slightly cooler. The metallic tang in their mouths and noses fades. Tak eases his foot off the gas and allows the car to slow. He tries to pull his shaking hands off the wheel and finds that they won’t obey. For a moment he thinks he’s gripped the wheel so tightly that it’s become part of him, but then he realizes the plastic has melted slightly, trapping his fingers in a rapidly cooling web of goo. He rips his hands away and leaves behind the first layer of skin, but considering that he’s still breathing, this strikes him as a very fair trade.

  He pulls the car to the side of the road and lets the engine idle as he turns around to check on Samira. Some of her hair is singed at the end, and the skin of her face and hands is cracked and peeling, but otherwise, she seems unharmed. Her eyes, wide as saucers, are locked on the chunk of wood embedded in the seat next to her.

  “You okay, Sam?” asks Tak.

  “Eggs,” she replies without taking her eyes from the missile that nearly ended her life. “We have to remember the eggs.”

  Tak takes this as a yes. Moments later, they’re speeding off into the dark Montana night, leaving a quickly growing pillar of fire and smoke behind them.

  chapter thirty-five

  Hundreds of windmills line the small country road, towering over the nearby trees and power lines. Samira stares at them from the broken rear window with an expression of pure joy. Her mental condition has faded badly over the last two hours, and Tak isn’t sure she’s aware of what she’s seeing. But something about the huge structures has grabbed her attention, and for that, he’s grateful; it’s proof that at least a tiny spark of her mind is still in working order.

  “We keep running into windmills, eh, Sam?” says Tak as he drives slowly down the road. The gas station explosion blew out both of his headlights, and the moon isn’t providing much in the way of illumination; as much as he wants to reach the Machine, he’s more concerned about running into a cow.

  “Nothing ever goes that way anymore,” says Samira from the backseat.

  “Yeah, I know,” replies Tak, who has decided to respond to all of her rambling with a show of good cheer. “It’s a bitch, right?”

  “When he measured the table, it all came out fine. But those people were just liars. I can’t eat hamburgers anymore, you know?”

  “No kidding.”

  “Optimal capacity is fading.”

  “Wow, Sam. That’s…That’s really something right there.”

  The car makes a slow turn around a bend in the road and glides to a stop. In front of them, perhaps five hundred yards away, stands a long building topped by a round glass dome. The entire structure is ringed by a metal gate and barbed wire, a “keep out” sign if there ever was one. Mounted spotlights move back and forth across the ground in front of the entrance, causing the entire building to glow with an eerie white light. Tak stares with growing excitement until the lights burn his eyes and force him to turn away. For the next minute or so, he continues to see a ghostly afterimage of the building, almost like it’s taunting him.

  “We made it, Sam,” he says, reaching one hand into the backseat. “We did it. It’s actually here.”

  She takes his hand in her own and rubs the fingers slowly before uttering two simple words: “Almost home.”

  The response is so expected, so normal, that for a moment, Tak thinks she’s somehow broken free of the two timelines floating inside her. But then he looks back into her eyes and sees nothing but hollow emptiness and knows it was just a lucky response. “Yeah, Sam,” he replies as he puts the car into gear. “Almost home.”

  Tak wipes a smudge of soot from the top of the windshield and drives forward. When he moves within range of the spotlights, he fully expects them to lock onto his car while alarms ring out in the still Montana night. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, the lights keep sweeping in their aimless back-and-forth as the car rolls up to the gate. Leaving the engine idling, Tak grabs a shotgun from its mounting bracket between the seats and steps out of the car.

  The building seems remarkably undamaged. In addition to the building having power, Tak can see small tufts of grass sprouting up in neatly landscaped patches. Here and there he spies small groups of yellow wildflowers with gnats buzzing lazily around them. He secretly feared arriving at a place that was utterly destroyed, and instead it just appears to be closed for the night. The experience is so odd, he’s not exactly sure what his next move should be.

  Tak is eyeballing the gate’s locking mechanism when he hears a door open in the distance. He tightens his grip on the shotgun and looks for a place to hide, but the spotlights make disappearing impossible. He briefly considers running back to the car but then rejects that option as well—whoever is coming, it’s probably best just to have it out and see where things go from there. Approac
hing footsteps crunch on gravel, and moments later a young man rounds the corner and screeches to a halt.

  Christ, thinks Tak. He’s just a kid.

  The kid, who Tak would bet good money isn’t even of legal drinking age, holds a rifle in a pair of trembling hands. He’s wearing a dark black uniform and matching baseball cap emblazoned with the word axon. Pimples dot his upper lip, where a few rogue hairs are trying and failing to form a mustache.

  “Halt!” screams the kid. “Drop your weapon now!” His voice is high-pitched and squeaky, as if puberty isn’t done with him yet. He raises the rifle and points it at the area around Tak’s head although his shaking hands make it impossible to tell quite where he’s aiming.

  “Hey, hold on—” begins Tak.

  “I said drop it!” screams the kid. His hands are sweating, and one of them slips off the muzzle of the rifle, causing the entire thing to dip toward the ground. Tak raises his left hand in the air and extends it out in a gesture of peace but keeps the other one firmly gripped around the trigger guard of the shotgun.

  “Listen, man,” says Tak. “You need to listen to me. I’m not going to hurt you, but I have to get inside.”

  “This is private property!”

  “Yeah, have you seen what’s going on out here? I don’t think your employer gives a fuck who comes into the building anymore.”

  “I’ve got orders not to let anyone in.”

  “Christ, dude. You’re kidding me, right? The world’s about to end! You should be off smoking a joint and getting laid, not guarding a building in the middle of fucking nowhere!”

  The kid’s mouth twists back and forth as he considers this point. Tak takes the opportunity to approach the gate, but gets only a step closer before the kid raises the rifle again.

  “I said don’t move!”

  “Actually, you said halt. And then you said drop the weapon. But yeah, I get you.” Tak forces a smile onto his face and shrugs. “Look, man, you got a name?”

  “Percy,” replies the kid.

  “Okay, Percy. I’m Tak. The girl in the car is Samira, and she’s really sick. I need to get her inside.”

  “Why? There’s nothing in here but offices. Most of the staff left last week, and the rest cut and ran once all that crazy shit started going down.”

  “I need to use the Machine. I can fix this, I can—”

  “What machine? What are you talking about?”

  Tak blinks a few times. “Fuck. You don’t even know what you’re guarding, do you?”

  Percy shakes his head angrily. “Look, just…turn around. Turn around and leave. When all this gets settled, the people will come back, and you can do whatever you need to do.”

  “She’s going to die, Percy. Everyone is going to die unless you let me inside.”

  “No. Now get out of here before I put a bullet in you.”

  Tak feels fear clench his stomach. He looks over his shoulder at Samira, who is now lying against the seat with her head lolling back. He can see her chest rising and falling, rising and falling, as her breaths become shorter and more intense.

  “Percy?” says Tak without turning around.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m coming in. The two of us are coming in.” He turns his head back to the young man with the rifle and the cheap uniform and tries to project a confidence that he doesn’t really feel. “If you try to stop me, I’m going to have to kill you.”

  The kid jerks the rifle up and fires a single wild shot about three feet over the top of Tak’s spiky hair. He moves the barrel back down and tries to steady it, but his hands are positively earthquaking now, and the gun looks like it’s doing a chaotic dance to music only it can hear. “I’ll shoot you!” he screams. “I’ll fucking do it!”

  “We don’t have to do this,” replies Tak quietly. He runs his thumb over the cold metal of the trigger and briefly wonders if shotguns have safeties or not.

  “This is your last warning!” screams Percy again. “Turn around and leave now!”

  “I can’t do that, man.”

  “Turn around!”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “Drop the weapon and turn—”

  Tak raises the shotgun and fires. It roars in his hand like a wounded animal as the top of Percy’s head suddenly vanishes. The kid blinks a couple of times and makes a croaking sound in his throat before taking two steps forward and falling facedown into the dirt. Tak grips his weapon tightly enough to leaves an indentation of the manufacture’s name in his palm. A small wisp of steam rises from the missing forehead of Percy’s body, and for a wild moment, Tak thinks he’s seeing the young man’s soul rising up and escaping the world.

  “It’s not happening,” whispers Tak. His shoulder begins to scream in pain from where the gun kicked back when he fired it. Red and white spots dance in front of his eyes, and he feels like he might be sick on the spot. But the mechanics of sickness would come as a relief, and his mind has decided that Tak is unworthy of such a thing. Instead, he simply stands in place and stares as the body of a stupid young kid who is now dead because of him.

  “It’s not happening,” he says again, taking a step forward. He slides one skinny arm through the wires of the gate and hooks a finger around Percy’s shirt collar, dragging the body over to him. Something warm and wet clings to the hand, and he has to wipe it on his pants before reaching into the pockets and searching for the gate key he hopes is there. “It’s not happening,” he repeats desperately. “It’s not happening. None of this is happening.”

  His hand settles around a small plastic object and pulls it free—it looks like a garage-door opener with a single red button. The moment Tak puts his thumb on the button and pushes, the gate rumbles to life and begins to retract. Something along the bottom catches the sleeve of Percy’s black uniform and pulls him a few feet across the road before the material finally tears free. The body rolls once and ends up on its side, where Tak can see a pair of surprised, open eyes.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he says as he drops the shotgun to the ground and stumbles backward. “None of it matters. Gonna reset everything. He’ll be alive. He’ll be fine. You didn’t kill him. None of it matters.”

  He bumps the hood of the cruiser with the back of his knee and barely feels it. He moves around the side of the car and slowly climbs into the driver’s seat, unable to tear his eyes away from the cooling sack of flesh and bone that not a minute before housed a scared young kid named Percy. “We’ll fix it,” he tells himself as he releases the emergency brake. “We’ll fix it. Amends. We’ll make everything better. We’ll make amends, then everything will be all right.”

  Tak creeps the car forward and through the gate, taking special care to stay as far away from Percy as possible. Another thirty feet or so find them gliding up to the front entrance of the building—a plain steel door with the words axon corporation stenciled in small blue letters. The door is slightly ajar, as if the last person to go through didn’t have time to shut it behind him.

  “This is going to be okay,” says Tak as he climbs out of the car and opens the rear passenger door. “We’re going to make everything better.”

  “I got fruit from the little store,” says Samira, as Tak reaches inside the car and wraps his arms around her frail, thin body. “That’s what Mom would have wanted.”

  Tak throws his friend over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Shock has turned his mind into a blank slate capable of holding only one thought at a time. For a moment, that thought is Samira, but then it fades and is replaced by a skinny young kid with pimples on his lip. You killed him, thinks Tak in a moment of near-perfect clarity. You shot him in the face, and he died. Now you owe amends for that, too.

  He feels bile welling up inside him and forces it back down. Turning to the door, he reaches around it with a single foot and pulls it wide. Bright yellow light spills into the yard beyond, illuminating the courtyard in a cheery glow. “Gonna fix it,” mutters Tak. “Gonna set this all to rights.”


  He passes through the doorway and down the hall toward the Machine. As the door shuts behind him, a single bird begins to caw from somewhere in the nearby dark.

  chapter thirty-six

  My legs are cold.

  This is the first coherent thought that passes through Samira’s mind since Tak inserted the fail-safe nearly twenty hours before. It doesn’t appear the way most of her thoughts do: one instant flash of idea leading to another before flying off on a tangent that sprouts new life of its own. This thought simply pops into her head and stays there like a lazy houseguest, refusing to lead to anything other than itself. Her legs are cold, the cold is unpleasant, and for a long time, this is as far as rational thought will take her.

  I’m cold.

  Eventually, with painstaking slowness, other parts of her mind click back to life. Thoughts begin to stream through her head: random images, jumbles of sound, names without meaning. And as the neurons slowly spark from their recent slumber, a new, coherent thought finally makes its way into her mind:

  What happened to me?

  Memory begins to work its magic, but the mental slide show is random and chaotic. She sees a dark police station with a woman lying on the floor. This is followed by the smell of gasoline, the crunching sound of wood crashing through glass, and an image of Tak holding a long gun in trembling hands.

  …Tak? Tak, wait. Where are you?

  The thought of Tak releases the floodgates, and suddenly her mind is filled with a million thoughts, all vying for attention. The stimulation is immediate and overwhelming, and she hears herself whimper as she moves her head back and forth.

  “Easy, Sam,” says a voice somewhere near her left ear. “You’ll pull the wires out.”

  …Wait. I know that voice.

  She lassos her mad thoughts together long enough to gain some kind of control, then focuses all of her energy on getting her eyes open. It’s a tough slog, far harder than she would have thought, because both body and mind are in weakened states. But eventually, one eyelid slowly flutters wide, followed quickly by the other.