The Fires of Yesterday (The Silent Earth, Book 3)

by Mark R. Healy

  “What’s going on?”

  She pushed me ahead, out toward the exit, scooping up my backpack on the way.

  “Just move.”

  She jostled me along the corridor, and we blundered back out into the light of the spire, the aperture in the wall sliding shut as we passed. With a firm hand on my back she continued to shove at me, directing me down the slope, but then stopped abruptly.

  “Goddammit,” she said. Out in the distance I could see a patch of yellow flame surrounded by several shapes moving about. “They torched the fuckin’ transport.”

  She pulled roughly at my sleeve and we made an about-face, hurrying back past the spire and down the slope on the other side.

  “Hurry it up,” she barked.

  “Hey, it’s not easy running like this. If you want to cut me loose…”

  “If you don’t run, you’re gonna end up in their hands. Have it your own way.”

  We plodded heavily down the hill, thumping our way across the sand until the terrain evened out. The noise of vehicles echoed across the plain, but it seemed they were heading for the spire, not for us. I still didn’t know who ‘they’ were, or even if they might be friend or foe, and wondered if I should even be running at all.

  “Who are they?” I said.

  “Who do you think?” the woman replied with a glance over her shoulder. “Marauders.”

  Moments later the spire winked out, and the landscape was plunged into darkness again.

  “Keep going,” she said, gripping the fabric of my jacket and propelling me onward. “We need to put more distance between us and the spire.”

  In the poor light I stumbled across the uneven ground, going down on numerous occasions and thudding into the dirt head-first without my hands to brace my fall. It was an uncomfortable experience to say the least, and after a few minutes my body was aching from the repeated collisions with the unyielding ground.

  Eventually I fell into a ditch and cracked my head on something even firmer – probably concrete – and I just lay there dazed and in pain, not wanting to move.

  “Good idea,” the woman said, sliding down next to me. “We’ll stop here for a bit. Nice hiding spot.”

  I rolled over and worked my aching jaw. In the distance, pinpoints of light were appearing around the fading afterglow of the spire, and I thought I could hear voices as well. As I lay there, I worked away silently at my bonds, trying to see if I could loosen my hands.

  “So who are you? You’re not Ascension,” I said.

  “You’re right. I’m not Ascension.”

  I sighed, tried to sit up slightly. “Okay, I get it. You don’t want to tell me about yourself. Can you at least tell me what I did wrong? Why am I tied up?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Look, about the spire. It opened up during the firefight. Must have been the explosion. I came to see if there were any survivors, found the entrance, and decided I’d take a look at what was inside. And then you showed up. That’s it.”

  “Enough of the bullshit, man. I’ve seen plenty of spires before in my time, but I’ve never seen anyone get inside one like that. You know how to work the goddamn thing, don’t you?”

  “No, I really don’t.”

  “All right, just keep it down, will you? I don’t want those guys beating a path down here because of your noisy whining. Lay low, and when there’s more light we’ll get moving again.”

  “Where?”

  “And don’t try anything stupid,” she said by way of an answer.

  In the light of morning we proceeded on our way. The woman had been rummaging about in my backpack for some time, examining the things I had brought with me, and ended up clipping the compass onto her belt next to the knife. She smiled with mock sweetness at me.

  “Quite the bag of tricks you’ve got here, man.”

  I said nothing, instead preferring to imagine that smile being wiped off her face when I had her under the heel of my boot and took my possessions back by force. Unfortunately I hadn’t made any progress with loosening the bonds on my wrists, so that eventuality was still unlikely at this point.

  “Glad you’re impressed,” I grated.

  “You’ve been collecting stuff for a while, huh?”

  “A while, yeah.”

  “So many come out here unprepared. They have no idea what they’re doing. Really, they don’t. They’re clueless. They just don’t understand. It’s no wonder they get swallowed up by the Marauders.”

  “Yeah. Look at where all of that great preparation got me.”

  “There we go!” she said merrily, clapping on my shoulder and sending a cloud of dust into the air. “A sense of humour! There’s hope for you yet.”

  “So if our positions were reversed, you’d be a barrel of laughs, right?”

  She cast an eye back toward the spire, now disappearing into the distance.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I guess we’ll never know.”

  I stepped over a bent iron railing and proceeded across what once must have been a road. Over to the west a clump of dark shapes were vaguely outlined, possibly houses.

  “Keep going this way,” she pointed, snapping the compass shut and replacing it on her belt.

  “How about you?” I said. “If you’re so prepared, why don’t you even have your own compass?”

  “Well, I guess things didn’t go down the way I thought they would.”

  “You mean it wasn’t your plan to tie up an innocent clank and haul him off into the desert against his wishes?”

  “Innocent?” She laughed. It was a surprisingly pleasant, musical sound, at odds with the gruffness of her voice. “I don’t know exactly what to make of you, man, but I’m pretty sure you aren’t innocent.”

  “And how did you come to that conclusion?”

  “Well, for a start, you were fiddling around in places you weren’t supposed to be. I don’t know exactly what you were up to in that spire, but you weren’t there by accident.”

  “I told you–”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “You just bumbled your way in. I’ve heard your bullshit story enough times to know it off by heart now.”

  “Whatever.”

  She opened her shoulders and turned to look at me as she walked by my side. With her hood down, her hair blew across her face, clinging to her nose and the corners of her mouth. She made no move to brush it out of the way.

  “How about the scar?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “The scar. That huge rip down the side of your face. Looks like someone put you through a meat grinder.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Nice patch-up job, too,” she said sarcastically. “You had that done by a blind man with no hands, right? I mean, don’t get me wrong, if you’re going for the Frankenstein look, you’ve done a bang up job. Real nice, man.”

  “You finished?”

  She smiled. “So who was it that did that to you?”

  “The usual. A Marauder. A particularly nasty one.”

  “And wandering around the wasteland, aren’t you scared he might come back and finish the job?”

  “Oh, he isn’t coming back,” I said. “There’s no coming back from where I sent him.”

  She pursed her lips, impressed. “Killed yourself a Marauder, huh? I guess I should watch myself around you, then.”

  “Nah. I’m harmless.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I turned and looked her in the eye. “Listen, you sound reasonable enough. Can we please talk about this? Can I explain myself?”

  She turned away. “To be honest, I’m not really interested in that. Nothing personal, y’know, but this is something I just have to do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I have to bring you in.”

  I scowled. “Bring me in to what?”

  “Listen, man, you don’t need to know anything about me or where we’re going. All you have to do right now is walk.”

  I decided to
try appealing to her emotions – assuming she had any.

  “There’s a reason I’m out here, okay?” I said. “A very important reason.”

  “And what is that?”

  “There’s people depending on me.”

  She smiled sardonically. “There’s people depending on you.”

  “Yes.”

  She shrugged. “That’s not exactly special, y’know. We all have someone depending on us. What other reason would there be to traipse out here in the first place and go toe to toe with the Marauders?”

  “What, you have someone who needs you?”

  “Matter of fact, yeah. I do.” She waved the gun at me casually. “Who’s depending on you, then?”

  I didn’t for a moment consider revealing information to her about the children. She didn’t seem the type to care about such things, and who knew how she would use knowledge like that once she had it?

  “People I care about,” was all I said.

  “Okay. You couldn’t be more vague, man. You’re gonna have to do a lot better than that.”

  “There’s nothing else to tell.”

  “Well, that’s a shame.”

  “Screw you.”

  She placed a hand on her chest in mock offence. “That hurts my feelings, man.”

  I said nothing. There seemed no point talking to her if she wasn’t going to listen to reason. I’d just have to do this the hard way, the way I’d learned to deal with other threats out here in the wasteland – through force.

  “What about the other little mystery of yours?” she went on. “You gonna tell me about that?”

  I set my jaw firmly, keeping my eyes straight ahead. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do. You’re a cleanskin. Why is that?”

  “Cleanskin?” I hadn’t heard that term in a long time.

  “Yeah. There’s no tattoo on your skull. Unless you found some way of getting it off.”

  I ignored her.

  “Come to think of it, I don’t think there is a way to get one of these things off,” she said, rubbing the tattoo on her temple. “So why don’t you tell me your story?”

  I looked away, sullen.

  “Well, let’s look at the reasons for cleanskins,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers with the barrel of her gun. “Someone wanted you to integrate into human society without being detected, so you were – what? Some kind of spy? A replacement?”

  “A replacement?”

  “Yeah. It’s where they killed someone and built an exact synthetic replica to take their place.” She scowled at me. “Do you really not know this shit, or did you have your memory blanked or something?”

  The mention of gaps in my memory hit a little too close to home, but I brushed it aside.

  “I’ve heard of it happening, yeah,” I said. “But I’m not a replacement.”

  “Maybe some sort of sexbot, then?”

  “What are you talking about?” I spat.

  “Yeah. Maybe that’s it. I heard that rich people sometimes paid to have a clank built on the black market without the tattoo so they’d seem more human, and then use them as sex slaves. I guess there was a stigma about having sex with clanks, and they figured that might make it less obvious.”

  “Uh, yeah. That’s not me.”

  “So what’s the reason, then?”

  “Does there have to be a reason? I was manufactured without a tattoo a long time ago in a world that no longer exists. For purposes that no longer have any meaning. What the fuck does it matter?”

  “I’m sensing some bitterness here,” she teased. I said nothing, and she went on. “I only ever saw one cleanskin in the flesh – if you could call it that. He was being chased down a street by a bunch of cops, must have been five or six of them, at least. The guy was built strong. Fast. He leapt over cars and knocked people aside like they were made outta paper.

  “At first I thought he was human. There was no tattoo, no markings to show that he might be a clank. I figured he was just another crim that they were rounding up to haul off to the lock-up. But then they got him cornered. Boxed in with nowhere to go. He had no weapon. I was watching and waiting for them to yell at him, tell him to get on the ground.

  “But then they just opened up on him. Started squeezing off rounds like they were trying to take down a fuckin’ rhino. Everyone was kinda shocked and outraged that they would kill someone in cold blood like that, but when they saw what came out of him… what was inside him, they just went on their way. Just a clank shot to bits. A machine being taken offline.”

  She looked at me again. “Whatever the reason, they didn’t want this guy alive. They didn’t ask questions or try to reason with him, they just put him down. Cleanskins weren’t tolerated, man. They weren’t liked much by the law.”

  I thought about M-Corp and their many illicit activities: the storage of human embryos, the biotech that crossed the line of societal ethics, the creation of cleanskins. They were able to do all of this because they were an organisation that controlled so much of the Grid, who possessed so much wealth and power that they had nothing to fear from the police.

  “I’m pretty sure the people who made me were above the law,” I said.

  “And that was who?”

  “Why does it matter? Some dead corporation that sank under the fires of the White Summer.”

  “Well, whenever you want to open up about it, let me know,” she said. “I’m all ears.”

  We kept walking, and I continued to pull and twist at my bonds, hoping that before long I’d find a way to shed them and take back control.

  7

  Tucked away behind a cluster of boulders, we watched the blaze light up the wasteland far below. Dozens of shapes moved about in its near vicinity, spots of black casting lengthy shadows across the valley.

  “Goddammit,” the woman said as she pressed my binoculars to her face. “This can’t be happening.”

  She’d been staring at the scene below for several minutes, pausing periodically to make sure that I was behaving myself. Eventually she let the binoculars drop and just sat there staring at me as she considered what to do.

  She’d set an unrelenting pace during the day, and I was somewhat exhausted after slogging across the desert with my hands bound behind my back. Without the ability to use my arms for balance on the uneven terrain, my leg muscles had begun to throb with the exertion. Despite my enervated state, I kept alert and ready, awaiting my chance to turn the tides on my captor when the opportunity came.

  That in itself was proving to be a more difficult undertaking than I’d envisioned. Even though the woman carried herself with an almost casual air, underneath she was exactly the opposite. She watched me with a palpable vigilance, never lowering her guard or leaving her back exposed even for a moment. A couple of times I’d steeled myself as she scanned the horizon or sat watching the compass, preparing to make a move, but she’d reacted instantly, glaring at me and levelling the gun. Her perceptiveness bordered on telepathy. It almost seemed as though she were reading my thoughts.

  “Marauders messing up your plans?” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said noncommittally, tapping her finger on the eyepiece as she considered me. “How well do you know them?”

  “The Marauders? Well, I’ve spent plenty of time fighting them or running from them, depending on the situation.”

  She leaned across the put the binoculars up to my face so that I could view the fire more closely.

  “Do you know him? The big guy?”

  “Hold it still, will you?” I said, wriggling at my bonds. I wondered what would happen if I shoved at her now, tried to get on top of her. With my hands still secured behind me I would probably still be at a disadvantage.

  “Here,” she said, pressing one hand to the back of my head and forcing my eyes painfully against the eyepieces of the binoculars to keep me steady.

  “I don’t–” I began, seeing only blackness, but then the fire came into vi
ew. I saw a row of figures on their knees, facing the fire and with their backs to us, their arms tied behind them, much like mine were. Marauders moved around them or watched with weapons at the ready.

  One figure in particular caught my eye. He was tall and thickset with short white hair, towering above all others as he strolled along the line in an almost casual manner as he addressed the prisoners. From this distance I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the intensity of his words was still evident.

  He adjusted his stance and I saw that his right arm was massively oversized and inhuman, not made of synthetic bone and flesh but instead some sort of metal framework that operated on what appeared to be hydraulics. It was angular and cumbersome looking, but there was also something unsettling about it.

  As if to confirm my thoughts, he suddenly lunged forward, thrusting the arm at the nearest prisoner and making him spasm violently. It took me a moment to realise what I was witnessing, but then I understood – he had punched through the prisoner’s chest as if he were made of sand. The prisoner’s body lurched, his legs flailing pathetically, and then he went still. The Marauder withdrew his arm viciously and the prisoner’s body seemed to come apart, arms and legs and head all going in different directions. He stared down at the remains impassively for a moment before continuing along the line.

  “I’ve seen enough,” I said, sickened.

  “Some piece of work, huh?” the woman said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Thankfully, no.”

  “I’ve never seen him, but I think I’ve heard of him.” She looked at me worriedly. “It’s Doust.”

  “Doust? You mean the supposed Marauder leader?”

  “That’s him.”

  “I heard he wasn’t even real, that he was part of some kind of spook story.”

  “He looks pretty damn real to me,” the woman said, lifting the binoculars again.

  “In any case, that’s not him. In all the stories I heard, he never left the enclave. That’s assuming he’s real.”

  “Times are changing, man. Things are not the same as they used to be. You better get used to that idea.”

  “So what are you going to do, then?”

  “I’m going to wait,” she said, settling with her back to the boulder. “And after those bastards are gone, I’m gonna see if there’s anything left.”