La Donna meets the flames of Armageddon.
Chapter Thirty One: War Machine, Full Tilt
"Can't see a thing but comin' in hot!" Milkman and Jack add fire to the eruptions. They nosedive toward Pea Patch Island, a locale fast becoming a series of sand levees and craters of steaming water. The intermittent glow of tracer fire offers a hint of what they're up against.
Limbs.
Mortars.
Rolling Wheel of Death.
"Is that a spider?" Parks completes his first pass alongside Benny. "Please God, let that not be a giant spider!" He's grateful. The mists of devastation keep the thing obscured. Great for his nerves. Bad for--
"Visibility is zero! How the heck can it be so big but we can't hit the darn thing?!" Milkman has chugged along on the dive and circled back for more, every panel along the fuselage wobbles from the hardest bank Benny has ever pulled off. "Bad enough we're held together by spit an' bubble gum! Low on ammunition from the start of this!"
Barely on the flyby does he spot the treads of their M2, Wilkes piloting, dispersing dust clouds only to vanish again into the blight. "Haskins! ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ---Skins! ZZZZZZAting's the problem! Repeat! PlatingZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ---"
"Was that our guy?"
"Roger that, Parks! It's Wilkes, hanging in there! Plating, huh? If it's thicker than on a tank or like the stuff the tower's made of, we don't stand a chance!" Milkman adds to Benny's woes. "Oh, thanks a lot!" The final round from the machine gun spouts off into the chaos. He stomps the floor of the cockpit. "Stupid machine! After all we've been through! Parks! Where's Crank!"
"I can't see her, or anybody else! Even the fort is shrouded!"
Five more stomps. "We gotta get Crank. The peri-dimensional whatsit's the sole bomb left in our arsenal. Either it works, or we're done for!"
Crank has never seen so much smoke, so many small fires, glassy sand or confusion in one place. La Donna bounds up and down, her speed reduced to a crawl from innumerable craters. Her eyes bulge. Stress, the battlefield, this ominously cool cat in the passenger seat have her rattled.
"It's like trench warfare," she whispers. The radio spins out of control, a cacophony of signals and intermittent voices she can't decipher. Every few seconds between almost banging her head on the roof and careening to dodge the latest detonation she thinks she hears-- "Benny?" Crank fumbles for the receiver. "Benny? Is that you? Wilkes! Delvin!" Hyperventilation kicks in. She can't see where to drive to, can't get a feel for what to do next. More than just dust closes in on her. She feels a tightness, a tidal wave of anxiety as La Donna roves about in a massive hole.
She feels the cold tinge of metal against her gut.
Crank reacts. Hit the brake! She braces with her arms, while Vue goes face first into the dashboard, his hand, grasping a knife, cuts open Crank's shirt. The Stylemaster rocks back and forth like the war is rocking her to sleep. No time to think. Crank and time pause, both to gaze at the loopy mess named Vue. He slides his blindfolded head along the dashboard as booms and bangs go off outside. He's grinning a missing tooth, bloody, uneven grin fit for a straight-jacket.
"Che cosa...?"
"You..." Vue spits blood and saliva on the dash. Blood and saliva tainted by black spots, moving spots, like black flies in rotten meat. "You lack faith." He lunges.
So does Crank. His knife, the folding kind with a wooden handle, grazes her hair, bypasses the flesh and taps the driver's side window, making for a nasty shriek. Crank's lunge brings up the crowbar from the floor, point first. Vue wastes time on maddened glares. Crank taps his wide open Adam's apple with the crowbar's end, introduces him to the wonderful world of choking. He gargles blood. She taps his temple but hard, once, twice, good solid pings, but the nut rushes her anyway. Vue gets over her, minimizing the effectiveness of the crowbar. Crank leans back and is lying down before she knows it, amazed by his speed, startled by the insanity. The booms get closer as Vue bears down.
"Motherville just wants to bond. Needs to bond!" He cough-laughs.
Blood droplets rain on Crank's face along with sweat. She blocks sharp jabs with the bar, but the position she's in, against the door, feet under the dash, is breaking her back. She shifts. Slink. Block. Evade. Crack! She cracks her back on the turnaround and brings her booted feet up just in the nick of time.
Ensanguined, toothless Vue brings down the knife again as Crank gives him the heel. Whack. Whack. Whomp! The third is straight heel to nose on up, lifting the blindfold up. Just enough. He drops his head down. An eye of lifeless emerald. One of murderous red.
The kicks fly up like bullets out of a Tommy gun, rapid fire at this new remodulated's face until he is forced off of her. But that's not good enough. Crank keeps up the attack, powered by fright and rage, pummeling his jaw and skull until first the knife drops. Then, a second barrage until his head is bouncing off the passenger side window. Wave three of the assault uses his skull as a battering ram. Crash. The window gives. Blood soaks the glass. Dust and embers filter in, choking both combatants. But Crank, Crank rolls on. She rams the crowbar into Vue's gut and charges him. In a hot second, she has the handle to the passenger door and lets it fly open, coughing, gagging, scared, a warrior born. Vue is stomped right out of the car and onto the dirt. She has the door shut, locked, and is back in her seat, clutching the bar, gasping for the next breath.
Boom. Boom. Boom!
To her unbelieving eyes, tank treads roll toward La Donna in slow motion. She stares, as if she has all the time in the world. The M2. Armor plating is missing. The turret is bent more than thirty degrees downward. it drives lopsided, something is missing. Charnel smoke comes around and behind it. The Beast. The beast in the fog is right behind it, all arms or legs or whatever and lenses coming at the tank and her, mechanized Grim Reaper.
Shrapnel cracking the windshield revives her survival instinct.
Pedal to the metal. Reverse!
La Donna backs up, her ample bumper slamming into the edge of the crater, spraying dirt high before she rears up and out. Vue, stubborn to the last, rises from the pit to grab onto the front. Screeching. Gurgling. "The Mother! I'm a better version! A be--"
As the front end dips down on the reverse, Vue goes from panicked lividity to scarlet explosion. Wilkes' tank, in the retreat, comes down on his trunk, dragging the body under, missing La Donna, game of inches. A red, granular mist hits Crank and the dashboard as she hauls tail. La Donna leaps over the crater, the M2 hot behind, the Beast almost over their heads. Whomp!
"Whoa!" Crank barely holds on for dear life. Every direction she takes, the other vehicles are right up on her. She's got no time to about face and drive forward. Death's staring her in the face, in the form of her own ally. "Wilkes! Wilkes! WILKES!"
Either her radio is shot, Motherville is jamming the signal or Wilkes is deaf. She keeps the pedal to the metal, looking where she's going.
There's nowhere else to go. La Donna strikes the edge of the river. The force sends the old girl sideways, a wet salvation. The M2 thunders by, misses the hood by a centimeter. Wilkes is still fighting as he goes into the drink, machinegun reverse to fire, the treads spraying foam and heat as robotic mode shifts into gear in sync to the crash. The Beast. It barrels into Wilkes before the transformation is complete, before he can face his enemy. Water displaces, drenching La Donna and Crank, even as she swerves her baby from of the river's fingertips. Boom. The Beast lands right on top of the M2, making waves, crushing waterlogged treads, grinding the plates. Water plumes. Limbs that hold down the M2 and pluck limbs off and toss them far off to the Pennsville shoreline. More limbs berate the hull, over and over as the Beast rotates, waterwheel of doom.
Crank doesn't stop making waves until the car strikes a muddy bank and slithers instead of drives. She loses control and glides into and out of the crater. La Donna hops, lands sideways, knocking open the passenger door, the hood, the driver's side tire right off the axle. She tilts, hangs in space, and then falls. Axle digs into soft, battered ground. Cra
nk pulls herself from the seat where she was laid out flat. Tongue bitten. Bloody mouth. She sits up just in time.
As the Beast pummels the tank deeper into the river bed, almost out of view, Turner runs in. Out from the passing, multi colored fog he charges, in a machine bereft of wings and paint. he fires at the Beast and, when that fails yet again, he charges into the water and rides it, rodeo style. The Beast ignores the addition, a tick on its impervious hide. Turner satisfies himself blowing out lenses. Even at point blank, nothing else works.
Crank is dizzied. Crank is gobsmacked. The battle is their last, the sight before her tragic. Pea Patch Island is becoming a sacrificial altar, and their funeral pyre. Crank sees not the dust on her and her car, tastes the acrid sting of her own blood nor does she smell the concoction of diesel fumes and explosive powder. All she understands is Death. Death is at the ready.
In her stupor, she misses the call of Hope.
A continual mist from the water battle sprays her. Wilkes, uncannily alive, washes up on the beach, coughing up blood. Turner keeps hammering the Beast. No results.
The night sky lights up, a sun beneath one of the Beast's arms. The arm spins off and away from the body, digs into the island a dozen feet from La Donna. A yell, the old rebel kind, comes from inside the fog.
A G-505 truck arrives with all the energy of a frozen caterpillar. Fog and bad ground have kept them away, but at last, they come bearing gifts.
And yet, Crank still doesn't hear the call.
"CrZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ--Crank!ZZZZZZZ"
The truck angles left to meet up with Crank, Roy hanging off the side, screaming. Crank is living dead.
"Crank!"
"Crank!" Benny is now getting clearly through on the radio, his voice near to breaking. Milkman and Jack resort to robot forms at five-hundred feet. "Parks, you ready to do this?"
"Die? No! But here we are!"
The plan was entertained several seconds ago, while Crank was driving for her literal life. Unable to contact her, Benny radioed Fuse, ordered him to reach Crank and get her prepped with the alien engine. Make it go boom. In the meanwhile, Benny and Parks would keep the Beast busy with an up close, suicidal, melee.
"Thurman took an arm off! There's hope after all!" Parks flutters down first, cutting back on the speed, propeller shifted forty-five degrees down to cushion the drop. Clang! He rides side-saddle next to a beleaguered Turner, a mighty feat, for the enemy has never stopped its rotational assault. Benny lands on the beach, far from Crank and Roy but a hop, skip and a jump from the next disaster. For the cantankerous Beast is rolling backward, its many eyes have seen Milkman touch solid ground. The tank bludgeoned to death, it alters course.
Roy kicks the car on his way across the beach. "Crank! Snap out of it!" He wants to open the door and shake her, but time is critical and he catches sight of the vomiting Wilkes. "Crank!"
She stops gazing into the End. "Fuse?"
He attends to Wilkes, picks him up.
"Water...in my...in..lungs on..." He hacks, body seizes up.
"Don't talk, just move!" Roy is fast on his feet, dragging his brother as the waves increase. "Come on, Corporal! Crank, you have to activate the engine!"
Crank is up and out of La Donna. "What? How? Car’s wrecked--"
"Figure it out? We've got seconds before it's too late!"
She shoves the hood the rest of the way up. There it is. Peri-dimensional engine, coiled up, purring, illuminating. She drags the thing out as Roy sits Wilkes against La Donna. In a hurry, Crank unrolls it like a great scroll from beyond the stars, gawking at its black edges, luminous white cylinders. In the center are tiny black caps, barely visible due to the light show. Crank looks back, sees the frothing fury of the Beast rise up against Milkman, the slight shift of its charge as another explosive launched by Thurman blows off a pincer. Hope is fleeting, a single thread within this entire tarp made of maelstroms and misery. At her feet it lays, if she can figure out how to pull on it, unravel the tarp.
Crank pushes the caps, pulls on them. Nothing. She sweats and starts crying. Roy rushes over and scans the object.
"Any ideas?"
She shakes her head.
"Can we pull out the cylinders at their ends?" He tries but they're wedged in tight.
Crank has a heart palpitation. "Oh!" She races and slides on sand until she reaches the trunk. Pop! Tools go flying. Wilkes gets himself together and manages to stand up. Crank finds it.
Alligator clip cables. Crank attaches positive to positive, negative to negative on her car battery.
"You're going to give an alien battery more juice? The lever in the car--"
"The lever in La Donna put a fraction of the battery's electricity into it, and look what happened in Salem! She needs all of it!" A final look back to where Benny went, him and his machine kicking up sand, his life on the line. He's buying all of them, her, more time. She feels him thinking it, a true connection in the quagmire. Maybe it's the engine before her, or fate or love but time stands still for her then. She knows he's the one.
The others turn on hearing the carnage. Milkman is backed up after running to Fort Delaware. The fog of war lifting, the destruction of the fort is clearly visible. Milkman runs in. Jack and Turner have leapt off. The walls come tumbling down and blowing out and being mowed down. The Beast proves it will give Milkman no coverage as it drives right into its weak fortifications. The ground trembles.
Crank drops to her knees. "Get ready to meet Death!" She attaches the clips to this bizarre device. "Come on. Come on! Take all the juice and--"
WHITE
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Age of Mother
"Sono morto?"
Surely the ringing in her ears, the absence of feeling, equates to death. Right? Everything is different, a hazy muddle of configurations. Noises jostle about the ringing, moving parts without form, cylindrical pumping. Crank sees WHITE. WHITE.
She forgets time, has no concept of space or fields, war or life. She simply is.
A million years congeal into four seconds of instantaneous eternity. Had she the mindset to consider that, it would engender an epic migraine. But Crank has nothing but the White.
Nothing lapses.
Then.
A miasma of fluids ripple overhead, taking on shapes. Solidification. Parts to match the sounds. Passing light. Engines. Chemistry. Motion. Time. Self.
The cage is the sky. It takes her some time to realize the difference, but there it is. The cage, a megalithic forest of barbed pipes and cross-hatched bars, forms a semi-circular enclosure far above her head. She tries to estimate how high it is. One thousand feet? Two? Her ears catch the pings and pangs made by minuscule mechanical things that scurry over the ground where Crank is lying. On her back, watching the cage and passing false suns of lights like an upside down train of stars. Hiss! Oxygen escapes from a dozen vents in every size and dimension.
It's the overpowering odor of diesel fumes which prompts her to sit up. Owie! Lightheaded? I only sat up. Her eyes adjust somewhat to the jaundiced air. Everything has its tint, not unlike an old photograph. It, however, pales in comparison with the overall view.
"Mio Dio..."
Crank sits on a road, of sorts, anyway. It has the texture, the apparent visual of tarmac, the undulations of the barriers from Pea Patch. But it bends down off to the right and to the left, parallel to the caged ceiling. She gets it right off. A circle. Rising up on either side of the road, mechanical skyscrapers. Not buildings per se. Machines. They match a skyscraper seen in New York City, the Flatiron, but every floor possesses moving parts, thousands upon thousands of them. Pulleys and levers in the millions. Blackened gears. Crystalline girders in cerise and magenta. Black springs extending, larger than tanks stretching and contracting from roof to roof, dropping condensation on the metropolis. It splashes on Crank's jacket. Petroleum and water? Heh. She sees a harsh grass on a ground of gray soil. Coarse, silicate grass. The machines and the plants drink as one around the pinkish crystals
scattered here and there.
Wow.
Crank rises, wipes her jacket off. "Motherville. I'm inside Motherville. Un altro mondo! Oh...wait a minute." She clutches her body. "I'm inside of Motherville! Oh, diavolo no!"
"Nothing to brag about, Mechanic," Wilkes gags out some sarcasm. He is only a dozen feet from Crank, coming up out of a ditch with Roy, Thurman and Goldman. All appear well, albeit shaken. Serpentine machines slither away from them leaving petrol trails.
Fuse helps Wilkes out. "Crank. I see--" He pulls himself and Wilkes back just in the nick of time. A machine, a long train of a thing leaking fuel, huffing at a mean speed, roars down the road. It bears flames along the top. It is not ferrying supplies, but wounded, crying. Crank two-steps off the road, holding her hat on her head.
"Crank!"
"I'm here!"
Roy sees her hands waving up in the air, just high enough over the machine to be visible. The thing rolls on and one without end, a continuous serpentine contraption of pollution, of errant, discordant noises.
Wilkes hacks up a lung. "We can't get over to her!"
"Look!" Thurman points and whoops to their right. Way down where the road curves, two other machines are poised to come their way.
Goldman reaches for his gun. He doesn't have one. "Where--? She's robbed us! Stuck in this place and unarmed!" Sweat runs out of his pores by the quart.
"Calm down, Private." Fuse rubs his eyeballs. "This discoloration is bothersome, to say the least. Is anyone else having this problem?"
"We got the enemy coming and Crank trapped on the other side of...wherever we are, and you're worried about being nearsighted?" Goldman forgets rank, and gets up close and personal with Roy Fuse.
Thurman pulls him back. "We can't be fightin' each other!" The roar of the train machine increases exponentially as the other machines lumber closer.
Fuse blinks. Blinks some more. "Wait a minute! Those are our guys!" No one hears him over the audio carpet bombing. The four men experience a nerve-wracking bout of pointing and yelling 'I can't hear you' as this world drives them into a panic.
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