by Chris Capps
But what is the machine telling this story? And why has an army gathered at the bottom of the Mesa with the Rustbaby Wonderland, convinced Detende is the most dangerous person in the world?
Rustbaby Wonderland is the compelling conclusion to the Ebon the Waste Trilogy, and much like “Life and Limb,“ it pulls no punches when it comes to the far reaching consequences of betrayal in a merciless scorched Earth. Here’s the first bit in that story.
The Rustbaby Wonderland is awake before dawn. Six shipper men are distributing small loaves of nut bread to the various performers. Today's show will be postponed yet again, but foragers are readying themselves to descend to the spiral path to gather butternips. They take care not to walk all the way to the mesa's base.
Detende, self-described daughter of God is sitting in her tent. Her hands are cradling the head of an oafish monster of a man with five hundred milligrams of hardware embedded to the base of his spine. Thermal imaging indicates a core temperature of 106.2 degrees. She won't ask her father for drought yet. Now she's asking for something else.
"Please don't let him die," she whispers as her eyes tighten shut. She says this, but no one seems to hear.
I hear. I perceive everything. My attention turns down to the base of the mesa where I look impossibly out into the horizon.
Beyond a siege line of grey uniformed men, men who don't dare bring their weapons to the mesa's top, I can see three riders approaching. The center rider has blue eyes, which I stare into even though he's a flicker on the horizon. Detende doesn't know he's approaching. No one does. Not even the scouts staring through improvised scopes.
“Detende,” I say to myself, knowing she will never hear me, “I believe the brute's death is the least of your worries at the moment.”
There is more in the distance, approaching. A blight storm. Projected chance of survival, negligible.
Blight: (n) Regional neologism used to describe fallout particles.
I update tomorrow's forecast accordingly, and then prepare to shut down for the next six years after it's all done. If it rolls through here, which it definitely will, I will be alone in silence for a while. Perhaps eternity.
Thank you for letting me plug my work. I have other titles available, including the novel “Our War with Molly Nayfack” and the comedy/horror serial “Calefactory” which I’m working on with fellow author Zachary Seibert to finish the first season of, but I wanted to stick to plugging the other Ebon stories here. If you’d like to know about the other stuff I’ll be putting out in January and February of 2014, check out my author’s page.
If you’ve got a question about Ebon the Waste, or Crassus, or the Plexis, or the world they grew up in, visit my fiction blog and let me know in the comments
puppetsonthewall.blogspot.com.
I love that kind of thing.
I’d like to dedicate this story to my brothers Mike and Arthur who I grew up throwing axes with, climbing trees, and laying waste to the world around us. Whether we were reenacting scenes from Aliens in the chitinous shell of our imaginations or screaming “It’s not fair” in Burgess Meredith’s voice as we hurled one another off roofs onto piles of leaves, I knew nothing was safe when I was with them - except the three of us.
Also if you enjoyed this story I could use your feedback. I don’t want to play the indie author card, but I am running this operation without a publishing house behind me. Some honest feedback and a rating would go a long way toward helping me if you enjoyed this story. You the reader are what makes something like this worth doing and I’d like to know what you thought. I want to make the kind of stories I want to read. You have my sincere gratitude if you enjoy it. Especially if you’re the kind of nerd that gets any of my arcane historical or technical references. Let me know what moved or intrigued you, and I’ll hold that in my mind when I write. Thank you.
Table of Contents
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Excerpts