“You fuck,” I whispered, turning on him. “You fuck!”
“Now that’s the spirit,” Wraith said, tossing his shotgun to the bald clank. He hefted the machete and began to circle me. “I’m not going to do you the dishonour of just blowing your head off, Brant. I’m going to give you a warrior’s death. One cut at a time.”
“Then get on with it.”
“Y’know, Brant, the other Marauders had given up scouring these parts. They don’t like tussling with Ascension, you see. There’s easier marks to be had further north and east of here. But not me. I kept coming back. Took a lot of scars in the process, but it was worth it all to see you like you are now. A broken man. And to think, you almost got away with it.”
The hate was rising inside me. I realised that perhaps the only thing I had left was to kill this fuck, to end his life before his cronies put a bullet in my head. To see that stupid smile slide off his face as he died at my hands. Maybe that would give me a moment’s satisfaction before I perished.
“You’re pathetic, Wraith.”
“Call it what you want. We all cope with this world in our own way, right?” He darted in at me and swung the machete, barely missing my thigh as I dodged out the way. “The thing is, I realised a long time ago that there’s nothing left in this world to create anymore. The world is dying, Brant, whether you like it or not, and the only thing left to give meaning is destruction. It’s the only way we can influence, the only way we can mould anything around us. Destruction.”
He lunged again, and I moved too late, the machete raking across my ribs like a hot poker being thrust into my side. I cried out and clutched at the wound, and Wraith smiled exuberantly.
“That’s the first of many.” He spun the machete in his hand extravagantly. “Where was I? Oh yeah. Some of the other Marauders, even those higher up the food chain than me, believe they can find a way to lengthen our lives, to endure.” He feinted at me and I stumbled backward, gasping. The other Marauders laughed. “Not me. I know they’re deluded. I know the little reservoir of life we have is dripping away. There’s not much left. I just want to suck as much out of it as I can before the well runs dry.
“That’s why I came after you. Not for revenge. Just to feel alive again for a little while.”
He came at me again, and I evaded the slash, striking out with my heel and connecting with the inside of his knee. He screeched in pain and hobbled backward, teeth bared. He reached down with his oversized hand and tried to massage the muscles inside his thigh, but the fingers didn’t seem to close properly and he quickly gave up.
“Yeah, that’s it. Make me earn it. I like that,” he said. The spiral carvings on his cheek bunched together as he grinned.
I’d seen Wraith dispatch adversaries far more quickly and effectively than this in the past. Either he’d begun to lose his edge, or he was toying with me, dragging out the fight to maximise his enjoyment of the conquest. I suspected the latter. After all, he’d waited a long time for this moment.
“Getting slow in your old age, Wraith,” I said. “You’d have finished me by now back in the old days.”
In response, he danced closer, slashing my chest diagonally, and then with blinding speed backhanded the butt of the weapon into my cheekbone.
I went down, my ears ringing. Wraith loomed over me.
“Disappointing,” he said, shaking his head. Then he dropped and pushed the blade at my face. I caught his hands in mine, struggling and straining against him, but he was so strong. His power was irresistible. The machete dipped closer and closer to my face, and Wraith pressed down upon me. One of his eyes bulged slightly from its socket, damaged and gouged in some previous battle, and it filled my vision, grotesque and huge.
“Feel it,” he said through gritted teeth. “Feel the blade.”
The machete pressed against my cheek, and I turned my head into the asphalt as I tried to avoid it. I felt like I was in a vice. The blade brushed my cheek, and then I felt it bite, felt the skin part, felt it begin to slice into the synthetic flesh beneath.
I screamed.
“Yes!” Wraith hissed.
Sharp bits of gravel chewed at the other side of my face, and the asphalt stretched out like a great desert plain, ending finally at the grey hump of the curb, beyond which I could still see Atlas’ prone form lying on the ground.
We were leaving this world together. Maybe there was a kind of poetry in that. And maybe this was for the best. I couldn’t imagine going on without him.
The blade dug deeper, the pain immense, but I bit down on the cry in my throat. I wouldn’t give Wraith the satisfaction of hearing me scream again.
There was movement in the shadows, over by Atlas. At first I thought it was a trick of my mind, my thoughts being warped by the pain and by my imminent death. Delusions. But no, it was real.
Atlas was stirring. His head wobbled slightly, and his shoulders shuffled back and forth. He wasn’t dead after all, not yet. As I watched, he struggled and twisted, then shakily lifted his head off the ground. Trembling, he got to his knees, blood all over his face, his right forearm drooping at an unnatural angle. It was broken.
But he was alive.
My little fighter.
“Ahhhht,” I said, trying to say his name, trying to tell him to run, but the pain was too great, the force pressing down on me unrelenting. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t warn him.
The pain lanced from my face down into my chest and through my spine. It felt like hot lava being poured down my throat, like my head being ripped apart.
Once they’d dispatched me, they’d go back for Atlas.
My little fighter.
He wasn’t giving up. In his short life he’d already overcome more hardships than most would face their entire lives. He’d battled the odds time and again and come out on top. He always found a way through. And that was what I had to do right now. I had to find a way.
I felt Wraith’s grip shift as my hands clasped around his, trying to gain the leverage to ram the machete home, to end it. That replacement hand of his was ungainly and difficult to hold, but its fingers didn’t possess the death-like grip of his natural hand.
Maybe that was my only chance.
Altering the angle of my exertion, I allowed the machete to scrape downward across my face. The pain was excruciating, unimaginably acute, but I didn’t cry out. I forced the blade to my right, Wraith’s left. I felt him attempt to adjust his grip again, grasping with his oversized fingers.
As the machete edged away from me, I turned my face, looked him in the eyes. We glared at each other, each imposing his will on the other. As the seconds passed, I began to forget about the pain, and for the first time I saw apprehension in his eyes. And in turn, he witnessed a newfound conviction in mine.
I roared, a sound of rage and exultation and defiance. Wraith flinched visibly at the suddenness of it, the primal ferocity that it conveyed, and I no longer felt like the one against whom the odds were stacked. The one in the vice. I thought of Atlas, about the future he would never have without me, the world he’d never experience, and suddenly I had the strength of ten men. A hundred men. I was fury personified, and I would not be denied.
My fingers dug into his replacement hand and I levered it upward, away from my body, and now the machete began to rise toward Wraith’s face, like a pendulum that had reached the limit of its swing and was not heading back inexorably in the other direction. His disbelief turned to panic and he tried to lurch away from me, but I was like a spider that had sunk its fangs into its prey and wouldn’t let go. I went with him, knocking him sidelong onto the ground, and then thrust the machete downward at his face, and his impaired fingers unable to prevent me from carving a gouge out of his forehead.
It was his turn to scream. He kicked out at me, missing on the first two attempts before dealing me a sidelong blow to the hip. He rolled away, stumbling to his feet, turning away, but I was off the ground with the speed of a panther. My hand snaked out and gripp
ed his flailing dreadlocks, and with a short thrust I rammed the machete through his back, scraping through ribs two, three, and four times, and with one of those strikes I must have penetrated his power core, for he dropped to the asphalt like a stone and lay there, inert and silent, his hateful words finally ended.
I stood in the street over his body, and the two Marauders watched me, stunned, as if they couldn’t believe what they’d just seen. The bald male looked back and forth between Wraith and me, as if this was all some illusion that would dispel itself in due time. But it didn’t, and slowly realisation sank in.
He raised his rifle at me. Over by the side of the road, he was too far away for me to reach.
“You dirty mother–”
There was a deafening blast, and the Marauder’s chest exploded outward. He tumbled forward and thumped onto the asphalt as Wraith had done moments before.
Behind him, Ellinan sat crouched in the long grass, the shotgun I had earlier discarded clutched in his hands.
I turned back to the blonde Marauder, but she was already lining the boy up with her own shotgun. She had him dead to rights.
“No…,” I shouted, diving at her, but I was too far away. She squeezed off a round.
Ellinan spun away, torn aside by invisible hands, disappearing beneath the grass as if he’d been swallowed up by a hole in the ground. He didn’t make a sound.
I scrambled toward the Marauder but she danced out of my reach, pumping another round into the chamber and glaring at me down the barrel. I lunged but couldn’t reach her.
“For Wraith,” she said.
Gunfire crackled again, two, three, four rounds, and the Marauder fell away to the side, wounds opening up in her forearm and abdomen. With a final shot, part of her head came away and she fell back into one of the dirt bikes, knocking it over, her eyes staring off into the distance, unseeing.
As the echo of the reports faded across the suburb, I looked back behind me along the street. Arsha stood not far away, the handgun held trembling in her fingers.
“Couldn’t let them take you,” she said shakily.
30
I checked the Marauders to make sure they were dead, then went straight to where Atlas lay in the dirt. He’d sunk back down again, and for a moment I feared the worst. As I reached him he blearily looked up at me, blood streaked and crusted on his eyebrows and on his cheeks. I could tell that he was groggy, and it seemed likely that he had suffered concussion, but the fact that he was conscious allowed me to hope that everything might still be all right.
“Hey, you,” I said, cradling his head in my hands to stop him moving about. Blood still flowed from a gash on the crown of his head, and there was so much of it mingled in with the soot that his face looked like something out of a horror show at an amusement park. My hands were stained crimson already, and I felt revulsion to think all of this blood had come out of my little boy. I pulled my shirt off and wrapped it around his head to see if I could staunch the flow.
“What happened?” he said through unfocused eyes. He reached up a hand to my face but it missed its target and waved in the air.
“Whoa, hold on there,” I said, taking his hand in mine. I didn’t want to move him in case he had sustained spinal injuries, but he was already squirming his arms and legs and attempting to get up.
“It hurts,” he said, circling his good arm around my neck. His voice was still thick and it was evident he was struggling to maintain consciousness.
“You just rest, buddy,” I said, turning him gently and cradling him in the crook of my arm. As softly as I could, I lifted his broken right arm up onto his tummy, wrapping it in his shirt. He cried out and sobbed until I’d stopped.
“Hurts,” he said again.
“Where does it hurt, Atlas?”
“Here.” He lifted his free left hand to his head. “And here.” He indicated his right side.
“Along the side of your tummy?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s okay, we’ll get you sorted out. We’ll have you back as good as new in no time.”
“I need something to make me feel better.”
If only I had something, I thought. There were no medicines or painkillers in this new low-tech world of ours. Our ability to manage the pain of the children was, in reality, quite poor. We’d been lucky that, up until this point, none of them had ever sustained an injury this severe.
“I can get a teddy for you. Will that make you feel better, buddy?”
“No.”
“What would you like, then?”
“Honey.”
I smiled down at him. “Oh, really?”
“Yes. Because it’s yummy,” he said groggily. He sounded as though he were half-asleep.
“I’ll see what I can do, okay?”
“Brant?” Arsha’s voice came softly from the other side of the road. I looked over my shoulder at her, and her face was disconsolate. “You better come.”
I scooped Atlas up with slow, deliberate movements, keeping his limbs from slipping or dangling outside the cradle of my arms, and shuffled across the street. The headlights of the Marauders’ dirt bikes were harsh and glaring and I had to turn my face away from them as I crossed.
Arsha knelt in the long grass, forlorn, and as I neared I saw Ellinan lying there on his back with his arms splayed out as if he were about to make a snow angel. My initial thought was that he was dead, and it made me cold inside, extinguishing the flame of joy that Atlas’ survival had so recently ignited. Then I saw his eyes move, lock onto me, and his mouth opened.
“Brant,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
“Ellinan,” I said, dropping beside Arsha. I tried to inject some levity into my voice. “I don’t know whether to hug you or throttle you for what you just did.”
“Couldn’t let them do it again,” he said. “Couldn’t let them drive off with you and Atlas.” He blinked slowly, looked up at the dark sky, then back to my face. “I can’t move, Brant.”
“Just rest, Ell. You’re probably in shock.”
My eyes dropped from his face to his torso, and I could see a great cleft there just above and to the right of his sternum.
Dammit.
“Is Atlas okay?” Ellinan said.
“Yeah, he’s okay. I’ve got him right here. He needs a bit of patching up, like you do, but he’ll make it.”
“I can’t move,” Ellinan said again.
Arsha leaned over and whispered in my ear. “I think his core has been fractured. It’s draining away.”
Our eyes met. We both knew what that meant. The process was irreversible, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. The power core would continue to drain until it was entirely depleted, and then Ellinan’s life would be over.
“Take Atlas,” I said, gently lifting the boy toward her. “Send Mish back up here.”
“Brant, I–”
“Do it. You have to go now, Arsha.”
She took Atlas in her arms, silently imploring me to offer another alternative, to come up with some idea that would solve the problem, but we both knew there was no solution. There was nothing to be done but to accept what was about to happen.
She got to her feet and looked down at Ellinan. “I’ll see you soon, Ell,” she said sadly, and then turned and started down the slope.
Ellinan had closed his eyes again, and I shifted closer, hunkering over him.
“Ell?”
His heavy eyelids dragged open again, and he stared straight upward without focussing on me.
“Feel numb,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, it’s okay. You’ll be all right.” He didn’t respond. “Hey, you know what? That was incredibly brave, what you just did. That was so gutsy, I don’t think I’d have even tried it.”
He smiled wanly. “They never saw me coming, did they?”
“Nope. Not a chance.”
“I did it,” he said, and he looked at me again. “I stopped them this time.”
“Yeah.
You did it.”
His eyes closed and a peaceful look came across his face. I wanted to say something else, something to comfort him or to keep his mind active, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. He was quiet so long I thought perhaps the end had come, but as Mish’s rapid footsteps approached a short time later, his eyes opened once again.
“What’s that?” he said weakly.
“It’s Mish. It’s your sister.”
Either Arsha had related the events to Mish, or she’d figured it out herself, for when she arrived she was weeping. She crashed down beside us and reached out to touch Ellinan’s face.
“Ell?”
“Hey, little sister.”
“Little?” She smiled through the tears. “You know as well as me that I’m the oldest. Mum and Dad always said so.”
“Where are they?” he said. “Why isn’t Dad here? Where’s Mum?”
Mish glanced at me, confused.
“They’re not here, Ell,” I said. His memory seemed to be draining away along with his power core. “But it’s okay. Mish and me are here.”
“I want to see Mum and Dad.”
“Just hang in there, okay? They’ll be along soon,” I said.
“Can you move?” Mish said. Her fingers trailed along down his arm and grasped at his hand, but his fingers did not respond.
“I don’t think I can.”
She brushed his hair away from his forehead and bent down to kiss him.
“You’re crying,” he said.
“A little bit,” she sniffed.
“Why?”
“Because you’ve been my best friend for a lifetime, and now I’m losing you.”
“But what a great lifetime, huh?”
“Yeah.” She linked her fingers together and held them to her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Ellinan’s eyes fluttered shut. “Look after her, Brant,” he said, and some clarity seemed to have returned to his voice.
“Sure, Ell.”
The Seeds of New Earth Page 25