Aadil was asleep.
“Wake up,” Haq ordered.
Haq used the key, and the door to this alien borough slowly opened.
“Remember, one hundred yards,” Haq said.
= = =
Aadil followed Haq through the downtown as they moved north to the smiling Tank Major’s location. This borough had been a city center, maybe a capital. The high rises, intersections, and old traffic lights contrasted with the uninhabited silence. It was now a morgue. They passed a pile of bodies so dry the flies ignored them. Down the road, they passed more bodies stacked neat like logs. All the bodies were jerkied, dried husks, mummified remains the desert heat had crisped like a kiln.
They came across a dead man in the middle of the road. He looked like he had been run over.
“This one’s different,” Aadil said. The others were sunken in and black from rot, their skin like burnt paper. This one was crushed but whole. Aadil could see metal and dirty white tissue visible from its wounds.
Haq knelt down for a better look. “That’s a Tank Minor. They’re bionic infantry used by the Coalition.”
Aadil hunched over the body. He had never seen a human-sized bionic. “What killed him?”
Haq glanced at the wounds. “I think the man we’re about to meet.”
They came upon more dead Tank Minors. All of them had been bludgeoned or dismembered as if an angry child had pulled apart his dolls. They were now three-hundred-pound breadcrumbs leading Haq and Aadil to their executioner.
“I’ve counted twenty-six Tank Minors,” Aadil said finally. “The Tank Major we’re meeting could do that?”
“Tank Minors are extremely strong and fast by human standards,” Haq replied. “But they’re no match for us.”
They approached another human wall full of eyeless sockets and howling mouths. Aadil shivered. The death around him was too much. He had always felt a bit guilty killing fish.
“Up ahead,” Haq said, distracting him. Aadil pulled his eyes away and saw a welcoming light. The smiling giant stood next to it.
This Tank Major was sane and friendly. And he was white, an American, which Aadil hadn’t expected. He introduced himself as Renfro and brought them to a large blue fire fueled by a propane tank. A wire strung with mystery meat hung over it, boiling and dripping fat.
“I can’t believe I’m meeting you in person after all these years,” Renfro said to Haq. “When I saw your hover-rover come over the side, I hoped you were a friendly, or at least, friendly enough.”
Renfro’s battle chassis was badly damaged. The whole left side was shorn off. Unlike Haq, he was not cut and chopped to fit; he was deformed. Exposed on the shorn left side was an arm the size of a baby’s, but with only a thumb and finger. On the right side, the Tank Major arm was intact.
Renfro saw them staring at his baby arm. “I convinced them to let me keep it. Good thing, too,” he laughed as he wiggled the baby thumb. “You guys hungry?"
Renfro lurched over to pick a string of meat from the fire with his tiny limb. Using a metal shard sticking from his body, he pulled the meat off the metal wire.
“What is it?” Aadil asked, nodding at the dripping meat.
“It’s better if I just say it’s safe and tastes pretty good.” Renfro walked it over to Aadil, who took a piece. Haq declined.
“What happened here?” Haq asked.
Renfro’s friendly eyes turned black. “About a year ago, the Coalition—or whoever they are now—came to our borough to take our kids. We fought them. I found a scout the day before and cornered him. He wouldn’t tell me what he was doing here. He cited my subservience.” Renfro smiled. “He didn’t know I’m from Texas.”
Renfro took a minute to take a bite of what Aadil had guessed, correctly, was rat meat. He continued. “I pulled the Tank Minor apart slowly, making sure it hurt, and finally he ’fessed up. He said they go into the boroughs to take the kids and test them. The kids that don’t pass are brought back. The kids that do pass are used as multiplier fuses for the Northern Star.”
“What’s that? A Coalition weapon?” Haq asked.
“I’m not exactly sure. He acted like it was a king,” Renfro said. “He said something about Lindo. Called him its Will.”
“Evan Lindo?” Haq said. The name had meaning to him, as it did to every bionic. Dr. Evan Lindo had created them.
“Yep. One and the same,” Renfro said with a nod. “Apparently he invented this other thing that he now runs or is part of . . . it was a bit confusing. I don’t think there’s a Coalition anymore. I think all that went bye-bye when this Northern Star came along.”
“What does that have to do with the children?” Haq asked.
“I don’t know that either,” Renfro said, tossing his giant arm in the air. “The multiplier fuse thing, I guess.”
“What is that?” Aadil asked.
“He couldn’t tell me.”
“It was a secret?” Aadil asked.
Renfro roared with laughter. “Nah, nah. If it was a pinky swear, I think this guy was compromised enough to talk. He was telling me what he knew, when suddenly something took control of him. He began to shudder and his eyes rolled up into the back of his head. He made a sound like—” Renfro made a machine gun sound with his mouth. “Not a great imitation, it was lighter, and then it wasn’t him. It was someone else. And he said he was going to kill all the villagers if I didn’t let them take the kids, and that he was going to kill the children that he didn’t need, too. And the weird thing was, I’d heard that voice before.” He turned to Haq. “And so have you. It was Evan Lindo. Talking to me through a dead Tank Minor.”
Renfro paused for a moment, staring at the fire. “My town was a pretty good bunch. We had some bad seeds early on, but come on, who’d blame them? They did the ‘for Allah’ thing, but I’m not a god kind of guy, so it all seemed silly to me. But I’d cleaned the place out of resisters quickly, gotten the residents to take charge, and things were orderly within a year or two.”
“So you told your people what was coming,” Haq said.
Renfro nodded. “We rounded up all the children and put them in my bunker,” he said. “We put the blowtorches near the door, and I spent all day dragging rocks, old cars, anything large to create choke points. I left a narrow path through the barrier so we could get to the bunker. And to squeeze them if they came for us. The bunker was our Alamo.”
Aadil and Haq didn’t get the reference.
“Alamo—it’s a Texas thing. Our last stand against the enemy.”
Renfro took another bite of rat before continuing.
“There were no hover-rovers we could see, so we rigged some explosives where it seemed appropriate. It wasn’t much, but it worked. We roasted the first wave of Tank Minors with those. They came through the entrance—a bad idea, cocky.
“After we toasted the first wave, more came, but this time over the walls. We couldn’t get them, so the villagers retreated. I followed behind, tearing up the Minors pretty good, but they wouldn’t die after I killed them.”
“I don’t follow,” Haq said.
“They’d pop up as Lindo! All of them. So I’d have to kill them twice, really cream them down. Sometimes there’d be five or six of these Minors calling themselves Lindo. It was fucking creepy. They didn’t move as well as before, but it was still a pain in the ass. You can’t really prepare for the dead to rise,” Renfro said.
“There were too many of course, and the fuckers that I killed, the ones that still limped along or crawled along as Lindo, didn’t help the situation. A lot of the villagers were getting picked off. They were in a situation beyond them, but what could you do?
“My people knew they were gonna die—I straight up told ’em. But you don’t hurt children. I’ve done a lot of questionable things, especially as a Tank Major, but you don’t hurt kids. The town agreed, and so we fought.”
Renfro became silent for a minute. He looked at the husks of dead, stacked like cords of wood around the
m, and nodded with approval at the memory. “We fought.”
Haq and Aadil said nothing, allowing the big man his memory. After a moment, he continued.
“We retreated to the bunker through the alley I’d made. The townsfolk that were left got inside. They welded the door like I told them to and I stood outside and waited.
“The Minors came through, and their eyes opened like big ol’ eggs when they saw what they walked into. Me and them in a thirty-by-thirty-foot space. I sent most of them to hell. I could barely open my fists from all the tissue packed into ’em. It got quiet. And I thought: against all odds I’d won. I’d staved off the atrocity, you know? I’d done good for my people.
“But then I heard a child laughing. A wicked sound, not what you’d think in your head. And I saw the wall of debris that had taken me a day to gather, big things, get thrown out of the way.”
“Was it the Tank Major from the ship-base, the advanced one?” Haq asked. “I’d never seen one like him.”
Renfro shook his head. “No. It was Kadir, the Tank Major from the borough against the sea.”
Renfro told the rest of the story in cleaved sentences, his long drawl soulless. Renfro and Kadir fought. Renfro was outmatched, and Kadir broke him. Then the Minors tied him down. Kadir got through the door of the bunker in spite of the debris barrier. Then, in front of Renfro, the Minors burned the villagers alive—just as the first Lindo had said they would. And then they took the children. After they’d left, the talking Lindo carcasses collapsed as if the puppet master had cut their strings.
“No child returned,” Renfro said, his voice still shy of human. “Apparently Evan Lindo is a man of his word.”
They sat quietly for a while.
“The ship-base Tank Major came through here about two days ago,” Haq said.
Renfro nodded. “His name is Chao. Like Chaos. I avoided him.”
“How did you know to do that?” Haq asked.
The Texan made a gesture toward the sky. “His hover-rover stayed over me for a couple of hours. It was a warning. And a Lindo spoke to me.”
“I thought you destroyed them.”
“I thought I did too,” Renfro said. “This Lindo didn’t look like much—it was smashed into a pile of metal—but it sparked back to life a bit.”
“What did it say?”
“Stuff,” Renfro said. “Things it shouldn’t know. I buried it.”
“Where?” Haq asked.
= = =
Aadil gagged as Haq exhumed the corpse from the shallow grave. The Tank Minor had suffered an extreme death. Its head looked like a grenade had gone off near it, and its body was a mashed string of spine and limbs. When Haq pulled it from the dirt, its legs made a meaty pop and snapped free of the body.
Haq propped the death dummy up on a nearby crate. One of its eyes stared at them vacantly. The other eye was gone. Haq didn’t know what to do next. Twenty minutes passed.
“Maybe Chao’s hover-rover did it,” Aadil said.
Haq looked to the night sky. “No. It came from up there. Dr. Lindo was based in America.”
“Satellites?” Aadil asked.
Haq nodded. “It’s the only way.”
Aadil was confused. “Why would he be a part of this over here?”
“That’s what I want to ask,” Haq said as he bent over and looked directly into the dead Minor’s eye. A fisheyed reflection of himself stared back. Haq’s hover-rovers erupted from his back and jetted up a half mile. They crisscrossed in a figure eight.
“What are you doing?” Aadil asked.
“If the real Dr. Lindo is watching from above, I want to give him something to see.”
Hours passed and nothing happened. Haq called back the hover-rovers and they made camp. Renfro came over and poked the death dummy with his finger. “Nothing, huh?”
“His lips are sealed,” Haq said. “It’s from overhead, isn’t it? Some kind of satellite surveillance.”
“That’s what I’d guess,” Renfro said, looking up at the stars. “I used to look up at these and wonder what was happening on other planets. Now I look up and wonder what’s going on here, on our own. You guys haven’t heard anything, have you?”
“No,” Haq said. All he knew was his own small borough, a five-mile grid.
“Something’s happened that we aren’t a part of. I think the world we know is gone. That’s why the rations are so erratic.” Renfro gestured toward the rotting bionic. “That’s why we’re dealing with creepy shit like this that doesn’t make any sense. There could have been a nuclear holocaust and we wouldn’t know. We could be the last people on earth.”
Aadil shivered, small beneath the two Tank Majors.
“I’m just talking. I’m sorry,” Renfro said.
“I need to speak to Dr. Lindo,” Haq said.
“Why?” Renfro asked. “What will it accomplish? He killed everyone in this borough—horribly—just because I had the nerve to stand up to him. He isn’t here to answer your questions or tell you a story, Haq. He serves himself.”
Haq’s expression remained unchanged. Renfro sighed. “There’s a fuel tank near my bunker. It’s almost empty, but there’s still enough to go boom. If you blow that up, I’m guessing he’ll come calling. But it won’t help.”
Renfro left them for camp.
= = =
Haq cracked open a hydraulshock round and Aadil used the gunpowder to make a long trail to the fuel tank, which was the size of a small bus.
“How are we going to light it?” Aadil asked.
“Little trick,” Haq said. He snapped his fingers over the gunpowder, creating a spark. It ignited into an orange ball that raced toward the tank.
They ran. The blast blew Aadil’s hair back and produced a mushroom cloud a mile high.
= = =
Eyes in space turned toward them.
= = =
They went back to the death dummy, but it remained still. An hour passed, and the weight of the day forced both the old man and the Tank Major to melt into the ground.
Yet neither could sleep.
Kadir hung in Haq’s mind. Vague notions of upcoming threats had turned from mental vapor into a known vessel. Haq and Renfro were the same model, and Kadir had torn Renfro apart. And now the dead were talking, and the man who had designed them all was the voice. Haq knew there were puzzle pieces he’d never uncover.
Renfro was right. What did he expect to learn if a Lindo came back to life?
Aadil tried to sleep, but the more he chased it, the more it eluded him. His eyes adjusted to the night, and Renfro was just close enough that Aadil could see his hulking silhouette.
“Could he have done something different?” Aadil asked.
Haq followed Aadil’s sight line. “The battle? No. He did very well.”
Renfro’s back was turned to them and his head was out of sight. Moans came from his massive shape as a night terror consumed his sleep.
“It still haunts him,” Aadil said.
“The things outside our control can haunt us the most,” Haq replied.
“Why?”
“They prove our insignificance.”
As Aadil drifted off to sleep, he wondered if Haq was thinking of his family.
= = =
Batrisyla stood in front of him. Her hair was down. The white, linen kafan she was buried in hung on the gentle slope of her shoulders. But she was young, the same age she had been when they first met. Except for her eyes. They were beautiful then, vibrant with life, but the age-gained wisdom had transformed them into a study of intelligence and beauty. They were together for so long, her glance held as much information for Aadil as her words.
“You can’t be here,” Aadil said. She turned from him and walked away. They were back in the park, near the pillar where he and Haq had prayed. It was past dawn, but the sun had never come. A line of pink edged the end of the world like a deep wound.
“The sun can’t rise,” the young Batrisyla said. Aadil couldn’t see her fa
ce, but he could sense in her voice a sadness.
She looked to the night sky. Stars poked through the vacuum black, littering the sky with flecks of diamond. But somehow they weren’t beautiful, and Aadil shivered at the sight of them. They were watching. They were Lindo’s eyes. They were what kept the dawn at bay.
She was in front of him. She put a soft, small hand to his face. She looked into his eyes and a tear rolled down her cheek. In her gaze, he saw his own reflection. He was old, the man that had fallen asleep an hour before. He saw the crow’s-feet, the brown teeth, the jowls that sagged from his face like a chicken’s wattle. In her eyes, he saw his mortality—the fate that all men and women share. The inevitable end. A tear spilled down his cheek, and their two tears hit the ground together. From the sand sprung two small vines. The vines intertwined and grew together, each supporting the other so they could both grow higher. So they could both become more.
“Aadil,” his wife said. He looked up at her just as two white flowers bloomed from the little green vines. Her face now matched her eyes—this was the woman he had loved for over fifty years.
“I miss you so much,” Aadil said. She nodded. She knew. “Is it better?”
She didn’t say.
“You need to be strong, Aadil. Stronger than you’ve ever been,” she said instead. He could feel her breath on his face. “Haq will need you; don’t think otherwise. The evil here has never been greater, and it’s up to you and Haq to make it right.”
She leaned into his ear. “Be significant. I learned your kindness. Now use my steel.”
= = =
A cold hand wrapped around Aadil’s mouth, and he woke up face-to-face with the reanimated death dummy. The smell of rot and worms filled his lungs. Even with its broken body, the death dummy was strong, and Aadil couldn’t move.
The hand muffled Aadil’s scream. The death dummy’s one good eye stared at him unblinking. The jaw, hanging, moved up and down as it spoke, mimicking the words poorly.
“Leave me be,” it said. The face was contorted in disgust.
Aadil struggled to scream again, but the death dummy gripped him even tighter. He might as well have yelled underwater. He saw Haq’s hulk nearby. He grabbed a stone and threw it at him. The Lindo appeared not to care.
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