Apocalypse Machine

by Robinson, Jeremy

  When a blade flashes, and the nylon cord is severed, I know he's come to the same conclusion as me. Better to fall out and parachute down. But that's not what happens. He flips, head over heels, falling back. Before tumbling from the plane, his head strikes the hard metal ceiling. The blow saps the life from him. The blade falls from his hand. He spirals from the back of the plane, body lax like he's sinking in a pool of water. If he's not dead already, he will be when he hits the ground.

  I scream, first for the man falling out of the plane. And then for myself. My feet leave the floor, and I nearly lose my grip, as my wrist twists around. I reach up and grasp the handhold with all ten fingers. Looking up, I see the other nine members of our squad doing the same.

  Some of the men are screaming like me, which is good for my ego, but not very reassuring. Others are shouting commands and questions. There’s too much at once to make any sense of it.

  The plane shakes violently in time with an explosion.

  We start spinning.

  A long, massive spear of darkness sweeps past the open hatch.

  My hanging body turns sideways as the plane continues to twist, the centrifugal force overpowering gravity.

  “Reapers!” Graham shouts over the noise. “We are hit! Deploy in three…”

  The plane shudders. I feel a sudden drop in speed. We’ve lost an engine, I think. That’s why we’re spinning. That’s why we’re slowing down. In seconds, we’re going to fall back down, and then exiting this plane through the open hatch might be impossible.

  “One!” I shout over Graham’s ‘two’ and relinquish my grip. I fall from the open hatch, twisting as the line attached to me snaps taut, deploying my parachute. I fall into the ash-laden daytime twilight and see the plane above me. It’s missing a wing, still spinning, but its climb has stopped.

  Graham and three other Rangers drop from the back, but then the 69,300-pound C-130—129,300 pounds fully fueled—with the rest of Reaper squad and two pilots, careens over and falls behind them, plummeting toward the ground.

  Toward me.

  17

  I lose sight of the falling cargo plane and four Rangers when my chute snaps open. My body is flung around so all I can see is what’s ahead of and below me, which right now, looks like endless sunlit gray snow. Then I see the ground, rushing up at me, and I don’t mean that in the cliché sense of the term that actually means I’m rushing toward the ground. I mean, the surface of the Earth actually appears to be rising up below me, swelling and ready to burst, like a frog’s vocal sac. As much as the parachute has slowed my descent, the rising ground will still greet my body with enough force to crush my bones.

  And then, just as I’m sure I will never see my family again, a wave of pressure, thrust up by the massive shape, shoves against my parachute, lifting me higher, until I match the flat surface’s momentum. Boot tips reaching, I try to touch down, but the ground below me falls away.

  I look up, expecting to see the plane falling, ready to swat me from the air, but all I can see is my parachute, billowing out hard as the pressure wave becomes a vortex, sucking me down.

  I flinch as feet swing into view just over the top of my parachute. Graham swings around ahead of me, controlling his descent.

  “Next time you get close, detach the chute,” he says.

  He sounds calm. How can he sound calm?

  The other two Rangers drop down into view. One of them is ahead of us by a hundred feet. The other is to our right.

  A line of black, rising up from below and stretching in the sky high above, slides out of the gray mist, swinging toward us. It’s massive. Comparable in scale to the Eiffel Tower, but taller, its height indeterminable. “Look out!” I shout, like there is something any of us can do to avoid it.

  The black tower—for lack of a better word—cuts through the sky. When I see its trajectory, I scream. Not for myself, but for the man ahead of us.

  The streak of black, emitting a red-orange glow through crisscrossing seams, passes just fifty feet in front of me. It collides with the Ranger, sweeping him out of existence. Before I can feel revolt or sadness, or even shock, the wind generated by the massive tower pulls me and the remaining two Rangers hard to the right. Feeling like a kid on a carnival swing-carousel, I’m pulled sideways and given my first glimpse of the sky since leaping from the plane.

  I scream again.

  The plane is there.

  Right there.

  Nose down.

  Falling toward us.

  I see the pilots in the cockpit, fighting for control, despite missing a wing. The plane pinwheels downward as I’m pulled to the side, just out of range of its rotating wing and still buzzing propellers. The C-130 plummets past.

  “Give the devil his due, boys,” Graham says a moment before the plane reaches the shifting ground below and erupts into a ball of fire.

  The heat from the explosion hits me at the same time as the concussive force, which slaps into my parachute and shoves it up, slamming me back into an upright position.

  “This is it,” Graham shouts. “Get ready to detach!”

  The ground rises up once more, the pressure wave leading it pushing the chute higher and keeping me from slamming against it. When the rough, ruddy surface slows to a stop three feet beneath me, I yank the ‘three-ring release’ dangling from my right shoulder strap, cutting away the parachute and letting the breeze snatch it away.

  I hit the ground hard, bending at the knees like I was landing with a parachute attached. The surface beneath me is unforgiving and jagged, like I’ve just landed on a large chunk of beachside granite. I roll once and come to a stop on my back, coughing and groaning. An “oof” turns my attention to the side, and I see Graham rolling beside me, much more gracefully. He gets back to his feet in one quick movement. The Ranger off to the right is nearly close enough to drop, but the ground starts moving away from him. A twisting sensation fills my gut, like I’m in a fast moving elevator, dropping down.

  The Ranger detaches.

  The ground falls away, and we fall with it.

  For a moment, it appears the soldier is flying, his downward momentum matching that of the descending surface. But he’s not flying. He’s falling. And when the ground begins rising again, if it does, he’s going to impact at terminal velocity.

  “Pull your reserve!” Graham shouts.

  The Ranger grips the small handle hanging over his chest and pulls hard. The pilot chute pops out, catches the wind and snaps upward, pulling the reserve parachute.

  Fabric expands, billowing out with hope.

  And then the ground slows to a stop, reverses direction and erases all hope. The partially deployed parachute does little to slow his descent. I close my eyes when the Ranger collides with the ground head first, but I can still hear the crack of his armor and his bones slamming into the solid ground.

  Silence follows.

  I catch my breath, clinging to the moving ground, trying not to throw up as the constantly shifting world twists my gut with nausea.

  “This is Supernatural. Anyone copy?”

  “I copy,” I say, and then I realize he already knew I was fine.

  I’m the only one who replies.

  “Beehive, this is Supernatural. Do you copy?” he says, using the current codename for the command structure above us, monitoring the mission. He takes a moment to crouch by the fallen Ranger, but doesn’t bother checking for a pulse. I can see from here that the twisted heap of a man is dead.

  The Beehive stays silent.

  “Comms are local,” he says, looking at me now. “Take a moment. Get your bearings. But then I want your assessment as to what the hell just happened, what killed my men, and where the hell we are.” Before I can reply, he starts walking away, struggling to stay upright as the world shifts directions again, tilting to the side. I’m about to ask where he’s going, terrified that I’m being abandoned, when I see he’s heading for the only real landmark in sight: the flaming wreckage of the C-130 a qu
arter mile away.

  Kneeling on the rough surface, I’m thankful for the body armor protecting my knees and the gloves over my hands. Without them, I’m sure my injuries would be far more substantial and bloody. The ground beneath me is covered in a thin layer of volcanic ash that falls from the sky. But it doesn’t stick like snow. The light flakes shift with the breeze and lift away as the ground drops down once more. I brush a section of the ash clean, revealing an obsidian surface, marbled with streaks of bioluminescent red light, giving the impression that the surface is also somehow transparent.

  I’m struck by a sudden lightheadedness, and it has nothing to do with the movement. I recognize the texture and color. The spike jutting from the Icelandic glacier. We haven’t landed on some kind of quaking landscape. We’ve landed on the aberration’s colossal back.

  I look left and right, seeing no end to the barren living world we’ve dropped onto. If visibility wasn’t reduced by the endless ash floating about, maybe I’d see some end to the creature’s back, but right now, my whole world is gray sky, this black-and-maroon streaked shell and the orange fireball now silhouetting Graham. His figure warbles from the heat, and for a moment it seems to disappear, like he’s been teleported onto the starship Enterprise.

  “Graham,” I say, blurting out the name, and then correct myself too late. “Supernatural.”

  “No one can hear us,” he says, sounding grim. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I know where we are.”

  His silhouette shifts as he turns back to me and starts walking. “Spit it out.”

  “We’re on top of it.”

  “On top of what?”

  “The aberration.”

  Graham stands motionless, his head scanning the terrain around us. He sways as the landscape shifts again.

  “It’s walking,” I say. “We’re feeling its footsteps.”

  “This is its…back?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “But…” He twists around, scanning the area. “I can’t see the end of it.”

  “I know.”

  I see the faint shadow of a looming tower rising up to our right. It stretches up into the sky, fading away long before reaching any kind of terminus. It’s what struck the Ranger out of the sky. Maybe even what hit the C-130. But it’s not a tower at all. It’s a spine, rising up at an angle from what looks like a hill, but what I suspect is something closer to a massive pore. I point to it. “Look.”

  “This is FUBAR, Science Guy.”

  “Very.”

  “Can we do anything here?”

  I take a small kit out of my hip pack. Inside are several sample bags along with a sampling of collection tools, including a battery powered core drill and an old school hammer and chisel. “Maybe.” I start with the drill, attaching the diamond tipped core blade and placing it against the hard surface. The drill bit can chew through most any hard stones, steel reinforced concrete and cemented gravels. Aside from the strongest metals, there isn’t much it can’t chew through. I pull the trigger. The blade spins and slips to the side so fast that I nearly fall over. There’s not even a scratch on the surface. “Okay…”

  With the drill clutched in both hands, I position the blade on a rough patch. No chance of it slipping here, and once it digs into the rough surface it will keep on going. I pull the trigger again. Sudden sharp pain tears through my fingers, wrists and arms. The diamond tips caught the rough surface, but instead of chewing through, the drill spun free of my hands, nearly breaking my wrists.

  Guess I’ll try the old fashioned tools.

  I discard the drill, place the chisel on the hard surface and give it a solid whack with the hammer. My hand holding the hammer stings from the blow, but once again, I don’t even blemish the surface. I place the chisel against a small imperfection, aiming to chip it away. I slam the hammer down with all the strength I have left. The impact sends a jolt of pain from my already aching wrist to my shoulder. The small lump remains intact. I lift the chisel and look at the blade. It’s as clean as it was the moment I lifted it from its carrying case.

  My mind flashes back to a similar moment in time, two days ago, when I held an ice ax rather than a chisel. The ice ax failed to break a piece away, but it wasn’t clean. It was covered in a thin layer of black. I doubt the ice ax was any sharper or more powerful than the chisel and hammer, but maybe, after sitting in the ice for so long, the shell was softer? Or perhaps it was because it struck the very tip of such a thin spike.

  My eyes turn back to the distant tower, and I see it in my mind’s eye, rising high into the sky, a mile or more, tapering down into a spike thin enough to prick a toe. Is this what Kiljan stepped on? What I grasped in my hand?

  “I already have a sample,” I say to myself.

  “What?” Graham asks.

  When I look up, he’s standing above me. I flinch back, falling onto my ass with a shout of surprise. “A sample. I think I have one.”

  “You chipped this with a hammer?” He taps his foot on the solid floor and sounds dubious.

  “An ice ax. In Iceland. Before all this started.”

  “Where is it?” he asks.

  “If the Secret Service is true to their word, delivered to my front porch. In New York.”

  “New York? If you tell me this whole mission was a waste of time…” The threat lingers, but is never finished.

  “We need to look around,” I tell him. “There could be more to learn.”

  “Including a way off of this thing.”

  “That…would be good.” I tug at my glove, removing it from my right hand. It’s a tight fit because of the bandage covering my scorched skin, and it hurts as I remove it, but I manage to free my hand a moment later. My fingers tingle as blood rushes back into the digits. I hadn’t realized how tight the gloves were.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “I want to know if it feels similar to what I touched in Iceland.” My bare hand stretches out for the rough, black and red surface. “Things like texture and temperature might not seem important now, but—”

  My skin makes contact.

  “But what?” I hear Graham ask, but his voice sounds funny.

  Distant.

  Spoken through a wall or a tin can.

  I blink, and in the micro-moment of time, the hard black shell sprouts a layer of lush green grass.

  My hand snaps up, the tickle of the thin blades still on my skin.

  What the…

  I look up.

  The aberration is gone, and Graham with it, replaced by a sweeping mountainous landscape worthy of Yellowstone Park, but totally unrecognizable.

  It’s happening again, I think. Another vision.

  And then I feel it. A presence, rumbling through the very air itself, filling the valley below with the sound of a waterfall. There is either a flood behind me, or the figure in black. I remain locked in place, quivering, not wanting to confront either possibility, despite the fact that I know this isn’t reality.

  Then something grips my shoulder, and the rushing water voice says, “Let it burn.”

  18

  “I don’t want it to burn.” This shred of defiance feels like the opening salvo of a battle. But nothing happens, to me, or to the forest spread out before me. The pressure on my shoulder is gone. The weighty presence is gone.

  I spin around, confirming that I’m alone, standing atop a gray stone cliff, framed by trees all around, the scent of pine and earth tickling my nose. Despite the physical relief I feel at the smoky figure’s absence, I’m struck by a strange sense of profound loss.

  What’s the point of it all? I think.

  Pebbles beat out a rhythm as they bounce down the cliff, knocked free by my feet, shuffling closer to the edge.

  I want to jump.

  I’m an emptied vessel.

  Without purpose.

  “This isn’t real,” I tell myself, forcing thoughts of Mina, Bell and the boys into my head. They’re real. My family is r
eal.

  But you left them, my inner monologue says, mirroring the sentiment of the now-deceased Army Ranger who questioned me on the C-130. And like that man, who I did not know, my inner monologue’s painful accuracy cuts deep.

  As hope leaves my heart, the world around me changes. Pine needles brown at the fringes of several trees, spreading steadily upward. Dead limbs crack and fall away. The brown spreads through the forest like a disease, consuming life, both plant and animal, rotting the ground and then the very air itself, once fragrant, but now death-scented.

  The world is dying.

  I’m letting it die.

  I’m killing it.

  Burn it, I think. Let it burn.

  A sudden heat blossoms in my right hand, burning my flesh.

  The glowing orange rod is there once more.

  “Remove your disgrace from the Earth.” The rumbling voice shakes my insides with its sudden and insistent return. But it also fills me again, returning purpose and focus. “Make things anew.”

  “How?” I ask without turning around, still afraid to experience the presence directly.

  The voice is silent. I already know the answer.

  “Let it burn,” I say, hefting the rod up like a javelin. “Burn it to the ground. Burn it all.”

  Two quick steps take me to the cliff’s edge. I lean my body forward, thrusting my arm out and loose the spear with all my strength and best intentions. The orange rod reminds me of the glowing-hot tracer rounds used to track the trajectory of fired bullets. Following its course through the air is easy. Despite the distance, it soars out over the valley, descending toward the dried out, rotted land below.

  The rod pierces the earth, stabbing into the dead land. The brown debris surrounding it smolders and then bursts into flames. The blaze spreads quickly, sliding out in all directions, leaving a ring of charred black in its wake.