by Brian Cody
He perceived that initial motion—the unlocking of that joint and the inception of a jab—but the longer he looked, the faster it rushed, the more space was cleared, and the further past his own reaction it moved. Nate stopped his gasp as the machine’s fist cleared the equidistance between it and the side of his head, but, as Nate willed himself to tense, he felt his feet leave the ground. His eyes widened as he found himself arching backwards. He blinked. At the same moment, he felt a portion of his hair swiping in front of him. He focused and found that mechanized fist cutting through the tips of his follicles.
Nate glanced to his right and, scanning the ground, found a lane of Bryen’s shadow extending under him and forming a frictionless surface. He hit the ground, back-first, and the machine landed alongside of him, but, before it could turn, a bullet slammed into its chest and diverted it to Turrisi charging with pistol aimed. The machine lifted its arms and covered its chest, and, as Turrisi opened fired, Erik rushed beside him and pitched a concentrated blaze.
The alabaster phantom lunged backwards, while a pale-white chain latched around Nate’s waist. Nate spun to find Shawn with one hand over the fifty-foot length, and he watched as David clasped the item halfway down its strand and pulled to yank Nate under his teammates’ barrage, and over Bryen’s kneeling form. Nate landed in a tilting slide and reared up in front of David and Shawn as Bryen stood, retracted that oily streak, and re-launched it as a speeding limb.
“Are you kidding me?” Nate growled as he spun. “It was right next to the detonation!” He formed an electric glow around his fists and stepped as the machine evaded in distancing leaps. However, before he, David, or Shawn could augment that offense, the machine rocketed into a curving flight, ascending and jolting over an adjoining rooftop, deactivating its flames to run across the open space, and leaping down the opposite end. “Do we follow it?” Nate asked.
“If not, we’ll probably just be messing with it later”, David sighed. David looked down the road and locked eyes with the group to view their staid expressions and the increased extensions of their breaths. With no mass enemies for them to focus upon, the adrenaline which once drowned their frames and suppressed their tire was waning. Then, only one machine remained, still active but damaged and devoid of two of its primary weapons. David nodded with the unspoken but shared understanding that their task, though not slight, would not take long. He rushed into the air to pursue that machine, and Shawn and then Erik followed, while Nate, Turrisi, and Bryen rushed through an alley. They turned onto the main road—the central passageway where they had first beheld that automaton, and the location of its courier, the black jet. As they turned and rushed, Erik landed beside them, then Shawn, and then David. The alabaster machine moved ahead of them, sprinting for that downed craft, then rocketing into the air, deactivating its exhaust, and plunging to the gape in the obsidian jet, from where it had fallen.
The four tubes which had, before, held it in place, reached from the opening’s side as the machine fell, and caught its hands and legs. A second after the automaton was caught, a hum emanated from the black jet. Nope! resounded in the six’s minds as they concluded that they wouldn’t allow it to escape. With each closing step, they readied their weapons and their forms for what was going to be the final charge, but, as they closed in, the hum deepened into droning pulsations which rattled their insides. They stopped as that utterance rose in volume, and, as they waited for the jet to skyrocket, the wings, still arching to hold the craft above the ground, collapsed and curved upward. Hisses of pressurized air followed as bolt-like objects, three per wing, were ejected from the chassis.
The group watched those objects ascend, and, supposing them to be weaponry, stepped back as they crashed. The bolts were inert. The six turned to the craft, while the wings folded until they were vertical straits. Then, the top halves of the wings angled downward to become parallel with the bottom halves, and, simultaneously, points and nooks jutted out of their sides and were pressed into the bottom portions to lock them in place. A sharp clang followed as those limbs were cut down by half of their heights, but, as the group looked on, trying to discern some purpose for the reformation and the apparent loss of flight, the wings, instead of lowering to the ground, flung backwards, then turned to the left, then, in two flashes, split in two shapes that rolled away, rolled back in, and reconnected in a different formation.
The body acted in simultaneity, rearing up and writhing; then, it expanded its length, with its chassis spreading apart and being held together by wires along its perimeter. The cockpit and the tail reared up and, as the group looked on, that black form was shrouded in a haze of smashing and clanking movements that blurred its once avian shape, stripped it, and transmuted it.
Thirty seconds after the commencement of those motions, the mechanical tones diminished, and an appendage twenty feet in length and two yards in angular width, at its thickest, was stabbed into the ground. Five yard-long toes, slender, bladed, and curved like raptorial talons, cut through the road as weight was pressed upon them, while the leg holding them bent to form the knee joint. An identical limb touched down to the first’s left, stomping into the road and then kneeling. A third limb, a more slender and more elongated length—forty feet from its jagged fingers to the top of its shoulder—slammed into the top of a car and imploded the vehicle as weight was placed upon it, and, following suit, the left arm slammed onto the opposite side of the road and folded at the elbow.
With their eyes widened and their heads tilting after each motion, the group of six watched as the legs bent, and the feet pushed off, and they watched as the broad, triangular torso heaved into the air. The arms, once the wings, hovered ten feet off of the ground; the legs, once the tail, spread apart in two grating slides, and the head—once the cockpit but then a flattened, triangle marked with the expressionless slits of the lesser machines—stood as the zenith of that mechanical prominence as it jutted from the top of a diminutive neck and hung fifty feet in the air. Colored obsidian, the majority of its frame appeared hollow, with the arms and legs filled with scores of interlocking tubes. Dotting the tops of the arms and surrounding the bulging torso were hundreds of circular nooks; and, in the center of the chest was the circular gape, the holding place of the white machine, and the heart of its gargantuan frame. The colossus, then standing across from that group of six and glaring at them with its lifeless face, knelt, reared back, and flung its head. An earsplitting wail—an electronic stridence that drove the six to cover their ears—pulsed through the atmosphere.
“Oh…” Nate muttered as he stumbled, bowed, but forced himself to his feet, “oh s***.”
“Klinge, watch”, David coughed as he glared at that obsidian form, his face pale and his fingers quaking, “watch your language…I think.” A tremor sounded as the colossus stepped back, and a flash of azure light zoomed from the alabaster machine and raced across the obsidian machine’s form. The blue light, instead of persisting as a momentary glow, increased in radiance and then flashed. The group tensed, expecting an eruption or some form of attack too swift for them to prepare against, but, as they lowered their arms and found the colossus in place, they turned to one another.
“Hey.” They looked to Nate as he lifted his left and charged a small but visible glow that danced between his fingers and jounced towards the enormous form. “B-money, remember that really specific wavelength I told you about?”
“The magnetism one?” Bryen asked.
“Yeah, that one”, Nate replied. “It’s being discharging.”
“Wait, for_?”—Bryen looked back, stepped, and called out, “duck!” Nate spun and then bowed as a metallic blur hovered past him. He spun and watched as the severed torso of one of the lesser machines hovered through the air before locking into one of the nooks along the colossus’s right shoulder.
Nate then looked about, and, with arms lowering, watched as hundreds of mechanical parts and the remnants of mechanical parts hovered through the air and rolled across s
urfaces. Spare arms and heads were detached as the torsos twirled, spiraled around that standing, black humanoid, and, in a symphonious wave, latched onto the colossus’s frame. Seconds passed, and fifty had latched onto the tops of its arms; thirty seconds, and the shoulders were layered by the gleaming forms of dozens of spare parts; then, a minute, and the metal portions ceased, with the remaining forms aligning into a breastplate over the colossus’s torso.
“All of them”, Shawn chuckled as he stepped back, his face locked into an uneven smirk and his arms swaying from front to back, “it used all of those machines; all of the ones we fought, all of the ones we killed, all so it could have…?” Shawn pointed towards the colossus, “a suit of armor? Us surviving that explosion, bringing down the jet, and fighting for our lives against those robots—was this entire day in preparation for that thing?”
“That’s why their magnetic attraction was so weird”, Nate remarked, “I never would’ve thought of that.”
“So, not only is the white one attached to it, perhaps driving it”, David began, “but all one-hundred-odd robots are being used by it as well?”
“No, not all of them”, Nate replied. Simultaneously, the colossus, adorned in the corpses of its lesser kin, lifted its right arm into the air.
“Yes, Nate, all of them”, Shawn replied as he turned to Nate, “I mean, not the arms and legs, just their bodies, just_”
“No, wait”, Nate began, “when it was rising up, I counted all of the openings on that thing’s body in case they were housing projectiles. I counted one hundred and seventy-nine.”
“Okay, you’re good at mental math; we’ve gotten that point, so am I”, Shawn replied.
“Adding our tallies, my missing total of thirty-two, and the others that were killed when we were rushing to stop that white robot from annihilating us, brings us to one-seventy-nine.”
“Bud, I’m struggling to understand your point in all of this. What exactly is the problem?” Shawn asked as he lifted his arms.
“Lamback said there were one-hundred and sixty-seven machines converging towards us; before then, we had defeated thirteen; that equals one-hundred and eighty.”
“The white robot”, Shawn replied.
“No, the white robot made one-eighty-one; it wasn’t moving when Lamback called, and therefore wasn’t picked up by radar”, Nate asserted. “One is missing!”
“Okay”, Bryen averred, “where is it?”
“No offense, guys”, Erik interjected as he lowered his goggles and stepped back, “but I thing we’ve got other things to worry about.” Nate, Shawn, and Bryen turned to the obsidian colossus as its right arm convulsed and as sparks crept from its shoulder and towards its hand. With a sonant clap, the right forearm dispersed into six different parts which imploded upon one another, turned, twisted, and connected in a matrix of interlaced pipes. Those pipes connected to the ends of each of the fingers to form a spherical outline. A drone followed as a wave of azure light travelled up the machine’s forearm, concentrated within that spherical mass, and erupted in a flash. A globular amassment of azure energy took form, flame-like in its unnatural radiance, and yet aqueous in its tempestuous motions as it surrounded the end of the automaton’s arm and formed a mace.
The colossus lowered its mace in a gradual sway, a tail of the azure ether bleeding behind it. The six, their eyes still locked onto that luminous mass, noticed not the colossus as it knelt, and they perceived not its first lunge—an uneven, almost waddling, bound. They weren’t torn from their trance until the strident, clawing stomp directed them towards the colossus. It rushed. “Go!” Turrisi roared as he spun, the machine having cleared three bounds and two-thirds of the distance.
“No, no time!” David called as he jumped back and watched the colossus raise its mace. “Shields, now!”
“Which one!?” Nate asked as he charged his hands, while the colossus leapt.
“All of them!”
The colossus stepped as Nate expanded an electric barrier; the colossus pivoted as Bryen flared and then expanded his shadow behind Nate’s formation, and the colossus swung as Shawn conjured and combined several hundred papers into a rectangular shield behind Bryen’s formation. They wanted to tense, they wanted to kneel, and they wanted to shield their eyes, but long before they could the gain the opportunity, the top of that mace plowed into the earth a few yards in front of them, and, before they could register the strike, a dissonance and a blinding, azure flare obliterated Nate’s, Bryen’s, and then Shawn’s shields. They inhaled to cry out, but their own exclamations were stifled as the ground they stood upon was pulverized and impelled.
They tumbled, spiraled, and flailed, their bodies speeding through a deluge of launched and smoldering debris. At once, their bearings returned—the pull of gravity, the lack of solid ground, and the howl of passing wind. They gasped as they opened their eyes, and they looked ahead and then back as they spiraled fifty feet above the road. A chunk of debris several yards in diameter plowed through a skyscraper to their left. An enflamed vehicle crashed to their right. As they looked on while moving at near-triple-digit speeds, they watched their altitudes, after only a few seconds of haphazard and maniacal flight, decrease at a steady rate. Could the armor take it? Some of them were invulnerable; some of them invulnerable enough; Turrisi was the only one who would have to rely on that technical garb for survival, but, for the remainder, and save for one, the possibility of debilitating injury remained steadfast. Nope—Bryen stabilized, looked down, and searched for the gradual darkening of his silhouette. The moment he could perceive it from the asphalt, he thrust.
His silhouette erupted in a gaseous cough, expanding and bubbling and stretching to both ends of the road. The six, in unison, bounced, slid, and rolled across it for one hundred yards. Bryen then stood and slid to a halt as he retracted his silhouette, and, behind him, his teammates ascended, swaying and gasping as they looked to the debris still flying one thousand feet overhead. They turned and looked down to the road, and to the plume of dust rising from where they had stood before the colossus assailed them—an eighth of a mile away.
“How!?” Bryen gasped as he reached to his forehead to push up his glasses, but found them absent.
“What?” Erik coughed as he adjusted the strap holding his katana, but felt the string snap in his hands.
“How aren’t we dead?” Nate interjected as he looked at his arms and his legs. “How aren’t we dying? Why are we intact?” He spun to the nearest building and looked to the glass pane in search of catastrophic injury, but found only a bloodied visage.
“The shields?” David suggested as he looked at his hands.
“The armor?” Turrisi suggested, his fingers holding his M16, his legs shaking as he flung his head, and his mouth agape.
“Or both!” Shawn howled as he flung his arms and grabbed his mask. “Maybe the shields were just strong enough to keep the blast from annihilating us, maybe the armor was strong enough, or maybe the hand of God cradled us!” he rattled as he flung his mask over his head and squeezed his forehead.
“Shawn, you okay?” Erik asked as he looked around, his right hand slinking over his goggles and yanking them from his head.
A tremor passed underfoot as Shawn inhaled. He jumped and then looked down the road—towards the gargantuan frame ambling through the dust. “Okay? Yes, I’m okay!” Shawn wailed. “But let me ask: what do we do when it swings at us again? Will our shields hold? Will our armor last? What do we do, Dave!?”
“Albert, no”, David called as he lifted his arms and turned to Shawn, “out of the question, we signed up for this; we started this_”
“No, we didn’t start this! We have nothing to do with this!” Shawn roared. “We can’t fight that thing! It just launched us, what, a quarter of a mile down the road!? What if our shields hadn’t been up? What if our armor hadn’t protected us!? Dave, it launched rubble into the atmosphere! That one hit could’ve killed us! It’s out of our league. We need to pull back, and the
military needs to bomb that thing!”
“And level the city?” David continued. “We can’t leave yet; we can still do something! We can still stop it_”
“How!?” Shawn exclaimed. “We don’t have the training; we’re all exhausted, and we’re all bleeding, and we’re bruised, and none of us are like you! We can’t get run over by a train and walk away with a bad knee! We just somehow survived beating an army, and we somehow succeeded without losing a limb or taking a bullet! We were unprepared for this; we were already pressing our luck, but this—we can’t do this! We can’t fight that!”
“Well we need to do something!” David exclaimed, another of the machine’s stomps occurring in the backdrop, “We don’t know how far away the military is or how prepared they are! We have none of that information, and we’re in the dark without any chance of back-up! I don’t know about any of you, but I don’t sit well with flying away into the sunrise, hoping that the military is able to help, and not looking back as that thing tears through Lynchburg and comes to populated areas! We’re the only thing stopping it right now; and if we’re not stopping it, then we need to give everything it takes to hold it in place until someone who can stop arrives!”
A harder stomp sounded as David finished, directing him towards that cloud of smoke as the colossus bounded towards them. It lifted its mace after a few of its steps and let the edge of its weapon scrape across buildings, causing combustive flashes as concrete and rebar were shredded and glass was pulverized. “Even if I die trying”, David continued as he looked to Shawn, “I’m going in.” He looked to those five, with the stomps increasing in vigor behind him. “The way out is…any direction but forward; you can come with me and do something that just might make a difference, or you can turn and say you lived another day because you took the easy way out.”