by Chris Capps
scream, clenching his shaking fists in front of him. It was the sound a canyon would make if it had the heart for screaming.
Finally, with the sound echoing back to us off the city's steel belly, lights began blinking on one after another. Though it was still well into the day, beneath the girth of this tremendous structure it was as dark as twilight.
The lights emerged, swiveled, and focused on us. Far above, in the heart of this beast, there was a sound like cranks and gears whirring to life. From the white aperture opening above, a figure emerged. He descended, hanging from chains.
"My friends!" the jovial voice called down to us warmly. It was a man, suspended from a harness wrapped around his body and to every one of his four corpulent limbs. The man's heft was prodigious, a sight even more alien to us than the walking city. The folds of his dress swirled and billowed over every bloated cleft and slope of his beaming face. He turned his head from side to side as he looked down at us like a god.
It was the smiling face of a man who would never know suffering.
His hands twisted at thick wrists in excitement as the harness dropped him toward us. Shortly before his feet would touch the ground, however, the harness stopped. He was floating a foot from the cracked Earth with his knees bent, and cooing childlike laughter escaping from his red nose at some unspoken delight. He repeated, with his hands outstretched affectionately, "My little dirtwalking friends!"
Thunfir's steely gaze dwelled long on the swaying figure suspended slightly above us before he spoke,
"Are you master of the city that stands above us?"
"I am one of them," the man said, giggling benignly, "And you must be the leader of this wondrous item we see before us. Thunfir is it?"
He had spies. The revelation was well calculated.
"Thunfir," our tribe's proud leader said, "Leader of the tribe of Plexis. Beside me are Ebon the Builder, Crassus the Operator, and Euclid the Mather. What is your name?"
"My name is Kitchains," the fat man said, "You'll notice there is no entourage here to harass you."
"I was wondering about that," Crassus said, "I've heard of cities like this before. I thought they all had followers."
"For your convenience," Kitchains said, "They were destroyed six days ago, before we began the journey here. We won't be needing them any longer, and they would have made this whole process nearly impossible."
Destroyed. I looked to Thunfir, but his grim eyes were still on the suspended man dangling in front of us. If Kitchains intended to show malevolence through his prolonged giggling, it was lost on us. He seemed somehow naively unaware of what he had just said.
"You killed your followers," Thunfir said, "Why?"
"For you, of course!" Kitchains said once again spreading his arms, "You would have been chased down by those scavengers the moment you all left the Plexis if we hadn't made arrangements for your safe departure." He was still floating there, swaying gently in the wind. Thunfir finally broke his gaze from the strange man and turned to address us through the corner of his mouth,
"Leave the Plexis. He means to take it from us."
"It's not yours," Euclid said with an oddly dismissive smirk, as if confused by the audacity shown by Kitchains, "You can't truly believe we will hand it over."
"No," Kitchains said, his head coming to rest in his hand. There was a sudden boredom creeping into his voice. He winked, and continued, "And so you do have the option of being enslaved or killed. If you find that preferable, I do understand. It makes no difference to me."
Rage was welling up in Crassus. He had reached down to the ground and picked up a hefty rock, and pulled back to hurl it at Kitchains. Before I could stop him, he let the rock fly, and as it soared through the air I watched every chance at peace we may have dissolve. Just before the rock actually struck Kitchains‘ uppermost chin, time seemed to stand still. I decided in that moment that it was unlikely we would have ever gotten along. With a sickening thud, Kitchains let out a revolted scream and held his face with trembling hands. Inarticulately, he started shrieking at my brother, but was cut short by Crassus,
"It doesn't belong to you!" Crassus screamed, "You know nothing about it. You don't understand how it works - how it thinks. Fly back up to your city and tell them that you've seen your last day of peace. The might of Plexis tribe will come down on you like a hammer forged by the gods!"
Crassus had flown into a rage fierce enough to stagger all of us. With tears in his eyes and spittle flying wildly from his lips, he reached down and grabbed a clod of dirt and hurled it at the fat man.
Both of them were screaming now, pouring hatred out at one another in a dizzying display of animosity. It was the kind of unbridled hate only wielded by those unaccustomed to its bite. Crassus picked up handfuls of dust, gravel, and anything else he could find in the ground’s arsenal. Kitchains was bleeding from his chin all over his dress. The harness began pulling the fat man up as several lines descended from still more apertures opening up above us like a starry night sky. Ropes were pouring all around, and thudding to the earth. Men were emerging now.
"Run," Thunfir said pulling his sword from the ground, "This could have gone better."
The four of us began sprinting from beneath the spider city back to the Plexis. The sprint was long, and the popping behind us signaled the outbreak of wild gunfire. Our advantage was the distance we reached by the time the gunfire erupted. Also of considerable help was the fact that no one was actually trying to kill us. This was a warning, a show of power. The real extermination was yet to begin.
That night a massive canvas extended in front of the spider city on hydraulic arms. Images began pouring across the canvas, utilizing what I'm to assume was a projector on the other side. The canvas showed images of death and dismemberment across a wide period of time, each from a high up angle - approximately the height of a man standing at the edge of the spider city holding a camera. Occasionally the shots would become more intimate, showing the dismemberment and burning of whole families on a massive scale. It was ordered - technologically assisted implementation of man's most basic savagery.
As we sat on the 19th floor of the Plexis looking out into the sprawling spider city, Thunfir, Crassus, Euclid, and I spoke in darkness in the same windowed department store as before. For the first time in a while, I found it difficult to stop myself from shivering. There were no sounds to accompany the video feed sprawled across the screen, but our imagination was ample enough to supply the screams of burning villagers.
Thunfir had spoken little, and he hadn't dared look at the prescient projection screen in the distance, showing everyone in the Plexis tribe the fate that awaited them thanks to their leader's inability to cooperate. Perhaps it was an attempt to demoralize the Plexis inhabitants, or to catalyze a bloody coup against its leader. Regardless, most of the tribe was now deep within the facility, arming themselves with simple weapons and preparing to die.
"Ebon, I'm sorry," Crassus said for the fifth time that night, "I'm so sorry. I don't know how I lost control."
I did. This was his home. He had never had one before.
I hadn't comforted him up until that point, instead letting silence heal the wound his ego now bore. It had worked well for a time, but now his voice was starting to crack again. I've never wanted to coddle my brother. Never wanted to take something important away from him that might help him survive. I simply looked at him with an eyebrow raised and said,
"Do you question my loyalty to this place? You said quicker what we were all thinking."
It would be enough. Crassus sniffed from the cold draft on the 19th floor and smiled faintly, returning his attention to the improvised rifles he was loading. Of course it was a lie, but it was the right lie. It was the lie that would keep him going through the night, the one that would allow him the sleep he needed to keep him sharp tomorrow. Writing between the lines of an advertisement pamphlet, Euclid looked up momentarily,
> "Your brother's right, Crassus. We're not going to lose this fight."
That wasn't a lie. At least it didn't sound like one when I heard it then.
It rang true, like he had just diagnosed the walking city with a terminal illness - an illness that would save our lives.
"Why does that sound true?" Crassus asked, glancing over at our tribe's mather.
"Because it is," Euclid replied, surprised at the question, "Why are they attempting to negotiate? Why the intimidation? They know they can't kill us without destroying the Plexis itself. Every bit of damage they do to this facility will severely jeopardize its continued usefulness. They might even know more about it than we do. They probably know exactly how fragile it is. Certainly their city has large guns, but those guns are useless when the target is exactly what they're trying to acquire."
"What about those soldiers?" Thunfir called over from the window, "How many troops do you think they have?" Euclid chuckled,
"If I had to guess, I’d say certainly more than enough to break in and kill us all. But that's not going to matter. Not when we drop that city to the ground." He shuffled through his scratch papers and pulled out a simple hand drawn diagram, "It's leaning a bit, if you ask me. I made some marks on the window to gauge just how far it's leaning off its center of gravity, and determined it was pushed