by Chris Capps
Within moments I had stumbled and was being dragged behind Thurrus with Euclid in tow. The rope around my neck was already strangling the life from me. I could feel the beating of my heart in my ears, the thickening of my tongue and every vein in my eyes.
I gasped once, but the movement was enough to send electricity through my whole body. I saw Crassus walking behind me, terrified. Another Thakka Cluster attendant was escorting him, walking behind with my hunting rifle poking him in the back. He forced himself to watch as I grasped the air toward him, dragging by the rope around my neck as we reached the elevator and it hummed open, indulging us with gentle music. My shoes squeaked on the floor as they dragged me in.
Inside the elevator our captors jeered, and Thurrus lifted my whole body up by the rope with only one of his arms. I dangled with my feet too weak to actually stand.
“Careful, Thurrus,” the other said, laughter nearly incapacitating him, “He’s about to black out. Can’t have that.” Their laughter gave way to a steady rushing hum. Consciousness fled, and I heard something else.
“Thurrus,” a familiar voice said as the elevator doors opened, “Incredible.”
Part Three
The next thing I remember, I was staring into broken lips framed by a thick white beard. A hand was slapping my face, drumming an intense pain throughout my head. Every nerve in my body was screaming, and I could hardly breathe. The rope still around my neck was on fire now, rubbing abrasions earned on the long dragging trek to the elevator.
“Pay attention, boy,” that same familiar voice said, “I need you alive.”
“Thunfir,” I said, my vision slowly returning to normal. It was our leader, Thunfir. He smiled broadly as my eyes rolled around, trying to make sense of the situation.
“Did you see it?” he asked, pulling me up by the hand. Standing was not an option, and my legs quickly shuddered slack beneath me. Crassus grabbed my arm and wrapped it over his shoulder, steadying me. Thunfir grabbed my other arm, raising me up even as he slumped down. I coughed, the rope still hanging around my neck and stinging me with every movement,
“See what?”
“Thurrus got his rematch,” Thunfir said grinning as we huffed down the hallway, “This time I was only outnumbered three-to-one. Guess who the victor was.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, my feet barely touching the floor as they carried me between them.
“We’re leaving,” Thunfir said, “I thought it was obvious.”
Without resistance we made it from the elevator to the front doors of the complex. As we reached the glass doors at the front of the building, they slid open without complaint, and we stepped outside. With the first step I took onto the dirt, I felt my weight deaden, carried between Thunfir and Crassus. How heavy I must have been during that journey, I can only imagine. Thunfir hummed to himself one of his old drinking songs, a strange tune I hadn’t heard before. Crassus was staring ahead, deep in thought.
Freedom.
We were moving forward, closing in on the shadow that spread beneath the spider city, spreading outward like a great inky pool. When finally we reached the nearest leg, we sat down and rested in its ominous shadow, taking refuge from the sun’s harsh rays. I laid down in the dust and breathed. Strength was finally starting to return to me. Crassus stared down the path we had come from, studying the gleaming white hull of our former home. Finally, after a moment he spoke,
“I guess we left your rifle behind.”
“The lad’ll get another one,” Thunfir said, coughing wetly into his hand, “We could have lost much more than that.”
“You’ll need it soon,” Crassus said sternly, looking back at the old man, “The Thakka will notice we’re missing, and they’ll track us down. It’s inevitable.”
“We’ll be a few days older then,” Thunfir said groaning and pulling himself up, braced against the wall of a leg next to us, “Ebon, can you walk?”
I strained to stagger to my feet, pulling the noose off from around my neck and letting it fall to the ground. My legs buckled, rebelled. Somehow, I forced them to let me stand. I took a few shuffling steps forward, and nodded. Shortly after that I had stumbled and was resting on one bruised knee. It was nearly unbearable.
“The rest of the Plexis tribe will be well provisioned,” Crassus said, eyes still on that gleaming pearl in the distance, “At least for a few months. I made sure of it. They headed west. Probably get stuck for a few days at the first river they run across.”
“They’ll be easy to find,” Thunfir said, pulling a knife he found embedded in the dirt, “Especially if they’re not hiding their tracks.”
“Yes. They will,” Crassus said grimly. His hand was against the side of the city leg and he turned to me, a look of cold calculation on his brow, “They won’t find you, the Thakka I mean. I’ll make sure of that too.”
Realization came quickly as I saw the certainty he held with those words. Wordlessly, I was shaking my head. Thunfir looked between us both, and huffed once, coughing out weak laughter,
“So you have a final trick up your sleeve, then?”
“He means,” I said shuffling foot over foot toward him, “He’s going to use the 14 KT to kill himself. Put that right out of your head. You’re coming with us.” I reached out with both hands, grabbing him by the shoulders with a grip like iron, using the last of my strength to clutch to him and start shuffling, “Keep walking, dammit! We won’t follow the rest of them. Forget about the Plexis tribe. We’ll find a new path.”
“Remember what you said,” Crassus said stopping us both. There was a note of decisive serenity in his voice. It was the sound of gentle death. He put a hand on my shoulder, pushing me away with surprising strength, sending me clattering to the ground, “They’re our family too. You and Thunfir will have to walk six miles to avoid the blast. I’ll give you two hours to get there. I can’t give you more than that.”
“Crassus,” Thunfir said grabbing my arm to help me up, “We can figure this out together. If there’s a bomb in the city there’s lots we can do. Set some sort of timer, or launch it further away so that we’re just barely out of the blast radius. Encased inside the metal city, we may be alright.”
“That will be a problem,” Crassus said, “Euclid and I took a look at it after you left, Ebon. That’s another promise I broke. I told Euclid about the bomb. We ran diagnostics on the launching mechanism the very night we found it. The reason it was never used was because the gun housing it didn’t work. It’s stuck where it is, entombed within the city.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, “Or Thunfir. Or anyone else.”
“How would you do it?” Crassus said, “You don’t know how these things work. I’ve spent whole days at a time, weeks learning how to talk to machines. I know how to make a weapon like that work.”
“Never,” I said, “No. Not you.”
“When you get back to the others,” Crassus said, “Tell them it was just the reactor. Tell them it blew up. Don’t tell them about the rest. Please, Ebon?”
“Thunfir,” I said, “Talk some sense into him. Make him understand that we can survive without this madness. We’ll start a new tribe. We’ll find another way.”
Thunfir looked long at me, staring benevolently into my heart with his old tired eyes. And in that moment, against every wish I could possibly have, Thunfir became a leader. With a gentle nod, he finally came to understand the meaning of that most basic principle of leadership. Thunfir finally understood sacrifice.
“Crassus,” he said, “we promise they’ll never know.” He grasped me by the shoulder roughly, gripping my sleeve as he turned his head over his shoulder back to Crassus, “Six miles. We will make the journey in time, Crassus.”
“Let go of me!” I cried out, grabbing the knife he now held in his belt, “We’re all leaving together.” Thunfir easily picked me up like a rag doll by the arm, causing the knife to cascade and fall back to the ground. With his arm pulled back and his hand balled into a fist,
he addressed me,
“Ebon, it is the only way.” His fist shot out and connected with my jaw, knocking my brains against my skull and spinning the world around me. With me incapacitated, Thunfir hoisted me up and threw me over his shoulder. I could hear him and Crassus talking as I tried to regain control of my vocal chords.
Thunfir was still weakened from the fever, but there was an understanding now, a temporary strength that would tear his muscles and leave him weakened for months afterward. Maybe forever. But for now, he would be strong. I could hear his voice behind me, “Crassus, good luck.”
“Goodbye, Thunfir. Don’t ever forget who you are. You’re a man of great strength. And, if I may say so, you’re a good friend. Look after Ebon.”
“You, Crassus,” Thunfir said, “You’re a strange sort.”
“Let me say goodbye to my brother,” Crassus said, and I felt Thunfir’s great bulk shift me down his arm. He held me by the armpits, his tremendous hands straining to carry me on my shuffling, useless feet. Crassus was blurry, waving from side to side. I saw the shape of him lean down and pick something up off the ground, “These things really are indestructible.”
“That thing I said earlier,” I said, choking still from the blow Thunfir had landed, “You are my brother. It wasn’t true.”
He knew I was lying, and yet he smiled. And with that he placed my glasses back on my nose. He was calm, nearly grinning. He reached in his pocket and produced a small folded white paper. Handing it to Thunfir, he glanced back at me,
“Goodbye, brother.”
He walked over to one of the spider city’s corpses, an armored man stripped of his weapons and his gear. He had a belt still connecting him to the tether that had dropped him to the ground level. With a click of a button on the belt, Crassus released it, sending the corpse collapsing to the ground. He placed the belt, still connected to the rope around his own waist, and flipped another switch on it.
The rope leading up to the city began to ascend, pulling him upward into a solitary beam of light. As we watched him go up, the aperture he passed through slowly began to shrink, leaving only a pinpoint of light behind.
“Two hours,” Thunfir said, “We’d better get moving.”
“No,” I said in weak protest, “We could still stop him.” I was struggling. Struggling both to free myself from his grasp as he pulled my arm over his shoulders, and to keep my feet moving one over the other up the hill for the last time. As we reached the crest of the valley, I dared look back down onto the plate city, but couldn’t see Crassus. He was deep within the machine by that point, working to set up the 14 KT for detonation.
We made the journey with some difficulty, straining every weakened muscle to keep pace with our projected march. As the sun set, we approached an old ruined building, an adobe structure with thick walls. Night fell quickly, and the ripper dogs were starting to howl in the distance.
By this point, my weakened legs were failing to take steps more often than they were working and I was all but being dragged the last bit of our journey. With his free hand, in the cascading glow of moonlight, Thunfir slammed his fist against the old door of the building.
Inside we found two cots, a table, and two chairs. The old man set me down on the cot further from the window and took one of the chairs for himself. All was silent, all was dark as we waited and rested.
And then night became day as a tremendous man-made sun rose on the opposite side of our house in the distance. I shut my eyes and held my hands over my ears to keep out the tremendous distant blast, but nothing could contain it. I bellowed, screamed to shut out the sound, a scream in that small house set to rival the one Thunfir had let out when he first summoned Kitchains. It was a scream that never stopped, one that would always echo deep within me. And then the blast ceased.
We emerged from the house, just as broken as before, noting a thin black shadow covering everything that the light had touched. In silence we returned inside. It was so quiet. No ripper dogs, no howls of contempt from the wilderness. They had all been silenced. Everything was hiding. This was a new world, one that no longer belonged to them. The sun had risen, and in a flash it was gone. For the rest of the night I heard nothing except my own breathing.
In the morning I noticed the piece of paper sitting on the table where Thunfir had placed it. With shaking fingers I unfolded it, looking down to see the same pyramid of rats Crassus had given me all those months ago in our little apartment over shaped potatoes and black algae noodles. Beneath the lowest column of rats there were words. I read them aloud, awakening Thunfir,
“So many came from one.” Thunfir rose, rubbing a thin layer of dust from his eyes and sat up,
“What is that, anyway?”
“It’s from Crassus,” I said, “It’s about the Plexis. The drones that built it are still up there. It took a long time to make them, but they’re up now, and nothing told them to stop building.”
Thunfir looked long at me, leaning up weakly and groaning as his muscles screamed at him to stop moving. Leveling his tired eyes at me, he asked,
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “I think Crassus believed there would be more things like the Plexis. Things that will start coming to Earth.”
“A second one?”
“And a third, and more than that in time. The legacy of the architects.”
Thunfir rose, taking the piece of paper from me and scrutinizing it,
“So many came from one. Are you sure that’s what he meant?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t expect I could speak for him. Not after all of this. It’s a thing to do with numbers, and numbers aren’t my language. It could mean anything.”
“Ebon,” Thunfir said, leaning his shoulder heavily against the cool wall and staring into my hands, “Given that you’ve lost Crassus, I think it’s likely that you would want to go on a hungry walk alone out there. You don’t know where you’ll end up, and that will tempt you. It should. You can forget about everything, leave us all behind.” He steadied his hand against the wall, pulling himself up with a nearly feeble grunt, “But I would advise against that. I could say we need you, but it would be a lie. I could say you need us. But I don’t know that. The truth is, it will be at least a three day journey to catch up with our little convoy. And I don’t want to spend three days walk without talking to someone. If you are going to head out on your own, make the decision in a few days. Not now.”
One day I will go to my grave never having been baptized. But I do remember when it all started, the morning I awoke and looked down to see the Plexis Shopping Center. I don’t know what’s there now, as I never could bring myself to return. I suppose after so many years, with the radiation dispersed, it now is like it was when we first spied the valley. And if someone hasn’t found a way to tame the fires there, you may still find a field of burning wheat.
The End
Thank you for taking a chance on checking out an indie series. If you enjoyed this first Chronicle of Ebon the Waste, it will soon be followed by two more where I stay true to the aesthetic and humanity of this first one, but plunge characters headfirst into a world of action, peril, and intrigue.
Life and Limb
“What Do You Suppose the Horses Know?” That's the question the insane cigar smoking man asked Adon Still before they tossed him on the back of a modified horse and sent him into the wasteland. His mission is simple. They want an object from before the war. Something that's been building onto itself in the deep heart of space. And if he doesn't do it, they take his bride away.
Adon Still isn't some unstoppable war machine. He's not a hero destined to save the world. And as far as scruples go, he's a cold blooded killer. But when a bullet knocks him down in a world without doctors, he's forced to ask himself how far he's willing to go to beat the clock and save the only bit of decency he's ever seen in this world.
What would you do to save the person you loved? Would you tear yourself apart? Would you kill
a man? Would you descend into a nightmarish world that had evolved beyond the need for reason? For Adon Still, the answer is yes.
Life and Limb is the next gripping installment of the Ebon the Waste series as told by a man who has nothing to lose as he wages war on the savagery of the waste around him, and within himself. And if he succeeds, he might discover what’s behind the rumors of an object that impossibly started crafting itself in space. Here’s a quick excerpt I think you’ll enjoy.
My broken leg was out, weighted down by the steel rebar pinning the weakened appendage. With my other leg sliding across the sawdust and the sweat clinging to my hands, I locked eyes with her. I knew she was terrified, but her hand slowly closed around the lever Cyril had used before to push the blade along, to rip into wooden planks as if they were twigs.
"Adon," she said.
"Do it!" I screamed through thick spittle, contorted tension flooding my reddened face, blurring my vision. I gripped the steel chain behind me, wrapped around the back edge of the table. My heart was thumping in my ears, beating like the drums of a death cult in the throes of ecstasy. My fingers were stretched above me, tracing the chain's rivets and locks, trying to focus every bit of my awareness far away from what was about to happen. Locked in that moment I screamed again, "Do it now!"
In a single sickening crack I lost all capacity to form memory.
They say my screams woke up everyone in town. They say it went out into the waste, woke up an army that had been sleeping for nearly a generation in the dust. They say, the storytellers, that the army rose from it with weapons in hand, mistaking that single sustained cry for the sound of a whole war being fought inside one man.
They're all liars.
Also, available on Amazon
Rustbaby Wonderland
Her name is Detende, and she is the master of the Rustbaby Wonderland. It is a doomed place, but one which lives in an uncharacteristic harmony thanks to her. But as the mysterious - and possibly omniscient - narrator describes the events happening around him with the cold humor of a machine, it becomes clear that this perfect peace she has managed to enforce will soon be disrupted by an unstoppable clash of wills.