by A. K. Meek
One of the mechs turned toward them and took a lumbering step that shook the ground. It raised one of its arms, but a massive barrel had replaced its hands.
“Get back!” Nate yelled, as the behemoth’s large gun fired.
Bullets chewed into the wall above and around them, crumbling brick and mortar. Dust spewed from the wall. “They know we’re here. Get the RPG.”
Tala pointed her rifle at the mech. “Do you want me to fire?” She looked back at Nate. “Do you know how to fire that RPG? Will it stop them?”
“I don’t know if it’ll stop them,” Nate said as he and Juan opened the case and pulled pieces out. “Charles showed me. An arrow points forward in the direction it fires. It was made so even Army men can use it. We’ll see.”
Tala popped off shots with her M-16.
The one mech, the one the soldier had been working on, took a step, then came to a shuddering halt. One of its legs moved forward then jolted still, shaking. The motor whine increased to a painful squeal, then became a loud grinding as it attempted another step.
Wisps of smoke came from the leg as the mech lurched, then toppled onto its side. The machine’s access door opened, then the soldier inside yelled as he fought to climb from the fallen beast.
His voice carried an Asian accent, but the fear in it was universal.
In his rush he looked to have snagged onto something inside his machine. He ripped at his shirt, tearing it away from his body.
With a loud pop his fallen machine ignited from inside. Bright, blinding, white light quickly overwhelmed it and the soldier that fought to get away.
The mech exploded.
Flash and smoke engulfed the second machine as it moved away from its downed comrade.
Nate crouched, transfixed by the burning machine. “Wow.”
“I think it’s ready,” Juan said. He handed the long tube to Nate.
Nate rested the grenade launcher on his shoulder as best as he could remember Charles showing him. He wiped his sweaty hand on his chempants, then gripped the handle.
Scooting out a little from behind the wall, he lined the crosshairs over the mech and pulled the trigger.
With a fizz the rocket flared and leaped from the tube. It flew toward the machine, then suddenly arced left and slammed into a sno-cone shack.
In the explosion, flavored coloring sprayed through the air.
Nate threw the tube aside and backed behind the wall.
“You really missed,” Juan said.
Nate nodded.
The mech sprayed more rounds. More walls crumbled.
Spent metal casings clinked on the concrete, an out-of-place jingle played in a war. Nate imagined Desiree dancing to it, always out of place, oblivious to the world. The smell of exhaust and gunpowder and pulverized brick carried on the wind.
He was out of place, or he should’ve been.
But he had been thrust into this leadership role, by some grand design. He felt he had sacrificed everything so that the enemy wouldn’t win, so that others would live.
He had done that with Marduk’s Herd. Nothing terrified him more than that day, but he was able to do some good there. He stopped a massacre.
But then there were those other things that he couldn’t comprehend, like the powered control panel.
The underground control panel.
The control manual Desiree had memorized was in the Ark.
Charles had said Shelter 1710 was established to control a large region of the southeast United States during the Cold War, when control was centralized, when the country would obliterate itself before falling under Russian control.
Obliterate itself, another way to say sacrifice itself, like Will sacrificed himself, but on a national level.
The control panel was old, old as the substation, its power buried deep underneath. It was a part of the national infrastructure, built during the height of the Cold War, when capitulation wasn’t entertained.
Captain Jordan’s map and Miriamville.
The Army knew it.
The Captain knew it and it terrified him, drove him to madness, just like it drove Parks to madness when he saw what it did to his hometown in Dothan, Alabama.
Control panels, areas marked in orange, field of effect.
The orange angels.
Parks had said he was safe in the water from the orange angel that rolled across the land like fog.
The scorched-earth policy the Vice President spoke of was one and the same as Parks’.
The orange angels weren’t from the machine gods, but meant to stop them, and whatever enemies invaded the land.
The government would destroy its own land before allowing invaders to occupy it.
Sacrifice everything to give the enemy nothing.
Safety was false as long as this thought prevailed. Safety could never be ensured when both sides were bent on absolute destruction.
He had felt that the moment Bruce wouldn’t let the others in the shelter.
Safety was a perception.
But water, lakes, rivers, the coast, they were safe from the gas.
The coast.
Will had wanted to escape to the coast long ago, since Bartel. He wasn’t sure, but he knew that was where they needed to be. He was right, even though he didn’t know why at the time.
Nate too knew what he needed to do.
Gunfire ripped through the air and bricks shattered. The machine lumbered forward, its steps shaking the ground.
He tore into his backpack and found the map inside. He unfolded it and shoved it into Juan’s hand. “Go back to Henry, have him take the group here, to the center.” He tapped at an area on the map. “Follow along the river. Find a boat. Get in the middle of the water, to this island. We’ll keep the mech distracted. If we join back up—”
“If?” Juan said.
Nate gave a weak smile. “We’ll go there and find you. Now go.”
Juan took a long look at where Nate had pointed, grabbed the map, and scrambled away.
Nate pulled out the scrap of paper he’d torn from his composition book earlier. He tapped Tala on her shoulder as she held her cheek to the rifle stock. “Do you remember the location of the substation, the control panel?”
“Of course,” she said.
He handed her the paper he held. “Here’s the code to it.”
“How?”
“No time. Go input this code on the buttons, press local and activate, then climb the transmission antenna next to the substation as high as you can.”
He shook his head as she started to ask him a question. “You’ll see why. Sure you can find it?”
“I remember passing the crossroad a couple blocks back.”
“How long you think it’ll take you to get there?”
“From here, sticking to the road, maybe ten, fifteen minutes.”
“This may be our chance to stop this thing before it finds the rest.”
Tala nodded and stood. “Here, take my rifle.”
“No, keep it, you may need it. I’ve got my nine.”
She nodded, and with one last glance she sprinted away, back down the road toward town. Nate was glad she had won the first annual Fallout Shelter 1710 Mad Dash.
He pulled his gun from his holster, charged it, and poked his head around the wall in time to see a missile launched from the mech’s shoulder.
It slammed into the wall feet above him, but enough for the explosion to throw him ten feet, until a sapling of an ornamental tree stopped him. He fell hard to the earth and tucked his head as shards of concrete rained onto his Kevlar helmet.
His ears rang as he jumped to his feet and fired a stray shot at the machine, running for a nearby bathroom under the cover of the dust cloud.
He stopped inside, his labored breathing echoing off the tiles. He imagined the mech too could hear every breath he took.
Was he delaying the inevitable?
He wasn’t sure how long he could dodge the bullets. And now missiles. He trie
d to slow his breath.
Bullets clattered against the building wall. One broke through, shattering a hanging fluorescent light that no longer worked. It crashed to the concrete floor.
That thing would level the building, with him in it. He didn’t want to die in a bathroom.
He peered around the door.
The machine thundered forward. For all that it boasted as weaponry, it lacked speed and mobility.
There was a trade-off, even with these technologically advanced, lumbering beasts.
The mech was obviously made to take on tanks and other large machines, head on. Only the foolish would think to have hand-to-hand combat with it.
Nate cinched his chinstrap, then sprinted from the restroom and fired another wild shot as he headed for his next resting point, a squat building that led to “The Mirrored Funhouse.”
Bullets followed after him.
He lost track of time as he sprinted among carnival rides and wooden shacks, making two more stops to catch his breath.
He paused behind a sloped garden, thick with shrubs and once-colorful flowers. As he gulped in air, he searched for the machine.
The mech couldn’t be seen, but Nate felt the thunderous footsteps as they reverberated through the asphalt and concrete. All of a sudden, footsteps paused.
“Attention.” A mechanically-processed voice, thick with an Asian accent, rang through the park. “You have been overwhelmed and defeated. You are ordered to stop resisting and surrender. You will not be harmed.”
Nate laughed at that.
It had to be kidding.
Taking another swallow, Nate darted from the shrubs to a kiosk that once sold the world’s best funnel cakes, according to its sign.
He scaled the five-foot wall next to the kiosk and stood for a moment on the narrow edge.
Forty yards away, the head of the mech faced in the direction opposite where he stood.
Now was the chance to get to higher ground.
Nate hopped off the wall and bore toward the Ferris wheel, the largest ride at the center of the amusement park. He needed to get higher.
The dead mech still burned with an intense heat. Asphalt underneath the burning heap had melted to slag and flowed. Nate ran past and hurdled a small railing but stopped when he ran into scaffolding.
Now that he was up close, Nate could see that the Ferris wheel was under construction, or renovation.
Metal scaffolding ran up one side. From a distance, it all blended together into a web of metal bars and wooden planks.
With one last check for the machine, he snaked his way into the tubes.
He swung exhausted arms and legs over bars and pulled himself up, higher and higher. His head throbbed with each effort and his face grew warm with the blood that pulsed through it.
After thirty feet upward, his arms began to quiver. Dangling by his armpits from a rusted metal bar, he stopped to gather fleeting strength.
From this vantage, he could see the mech turn toward the Ferris wheel. Its heavy footfalls again echoed through the quiet park.
That motivated him to start climbing again.
Gunfire erupted from the ground and bullets sliced through the rails and ricocheted around him. The metal clangings were deafening.
Nate sped up his ascent as another rocket exploded, intercepted by scaffolding, about ten yards away. The Ferris wheel shuddered and the scaffolding swayed.
A network of railing about twenty feet away collapsed in on itself. Metal bent and ground together as dust and debris swirled around the walking tank.
Nate held his breath and closed his eyes to avoid looking at the sky as the shuddering increased with the collapse of the scaffolding.
Blindly, he felt for the next object to cling to, in this case a threaded metal cable, and pulled himself higher into the sky, above the mech.
He reached the top and pulled himself onto a bench that rocked with his weight.
His stomach churned as he briefly glanced into the cloudy gray day.
At the bottom, metal pipes clanged as the machine tore its way free from the scaffolding spiderweb that had collapsed on it.
This was it. Nowhere else to go. Nothing higher, only lower.
If the rest had been able to make it to safety, away from the killing machine, the machine god, then it would all be worth it.
Another burst of gunfire, and the mech finally cleared itself from the wreckage. Nate leaned over his seat to watch.
In the distance, near the edge of the park, the ground took on a light haze, even though it was day.
Quickly the haze thickened into a dense fog, turning orange as it thickened.
The gas. The angel of death.
Nate was right, and Tala had turned on the gas. It actually worked.
He pictured it billowing from a fire hydrant near the exploded sno-cone shack, but wasn’t sure.
In minutes the gas billowed through the park, overcoming the lower buildings like poured jello, flowing and globbing to fill every space it could reach.
The countryside, as far as he could see, had been blotted out with orange. It also covered the mech.
Over a couple hundred feet high, Nate breathed a sigh of relief.
But then bullets erupted from underneath, exploding the Ferris wheel seat only feet away.
The fog didn’t affect it.
The Ferris wheel vibrated as footsteps sounded through the park. It still moved.
In the sunless sky he felt the warmth of tiredness, fear, and mortality sweep over him, so high above the ground. Had this all been worth—
A single shot rang through the air, but not from the mech. It was a different sound, not the massive caliber that the mech had mounted on its arm. He looked for the machine.
A loud hiss emitted from the mech as it vented a white gas. The two gases swirled, creating a sherbet-colored swirl.
The mech lumbered, running, if it could be called running, and grabbed hold of the Ferris wheel support legs with club-like arms, as if it wanted to climb the wheel too.
The park ride groaned and shifted as the heavy machine tangled itself in the legs and they bent under its weight. Several trusses snapped with a sharp crack and the wheel lurched inches to one side.
The mech staggered backward, then toppled, falling into the orange cloud of death.
In less than a minute it exploded in an intense white-hot ball of fire, like its brother.
Chemical smoke rose upward and Nate coughed and spit, trying to keep his mouth tight. He rubbed his stinging eyes, then searched for where the lone shot had come from.
Across the park, partway up the Puffy Parachute tower, above the orange, a figure waved. Nate blinked watering eyes and waved back to the blurry figure, thankful for whatever they did to the machine god.
05.05
SOUTHLAND
Both of the mechs had burned out long before the fog dissipated. Even though it roared in to blanket the area within minutes, it lingered long, dissipating within a couple hours. Nate waited until he saw no hint of orange fog before descending from the unstable Ferris wheel.
The fires had died; the two piles of slag radiated heat, still burning deep inside.
The machine gods were dead.
Nate steered clear of them as he ran to the tower where the single shot had come from.
By the time Nate reached the tower, Charles had already climbed down to about thirty feet off the ground. He struggled as he descended Puffy Parachute’s narrow service ladder. With one arm wrapped around a rung he looked down, a hunting rifle dangling from his torso like a pendulum.
“What are you doing here?” Nate said as he started to climb the ladder.
“Figure you needed some help. From the look of it I was right. Come take this rifle. It’s heavy.”
Nate crawled up the ladder and unhooked the rifle from Charles and maneuvered it over his shoulder, then helped him the rest of the way to the ground, stopping often so that Charles could jump-start his bad knee with rubs an
d curses.
They both dropped to the ground and rested against metal railings.
Nate lifted Lane’s hunting rifle. “I thought you wouldn’t fire a rifle again.”
“I thought I wouldn’t either. To be honest, I didn’t think I had it in me. I guess I’m not too old to amaze myself.” He half laughed, half coughed, and spit up phlegm.
“You didn’t go with the rest?”
“Once Juan told us what was going on, I lingered close to the rear of the group as we left. I knew someone would stop me, or at least try to. I’m sure you don’t mind me doing that. By the way, what was that orange stuff?”
Nate gave Charles the condensed version of his thoughts about the fog, the machine gods, and how the country had planned this as a last resort. Charles listened and nodded, like none of what was said surprised him in the least.
Examining one pile of slag from a distance, Nate scratched his head. “What did you hit to make it explode like the first one?”
“They both exploded?” Charles said. “I don’t think I made it explode. I hit what I thought was an air line. An oxygen supply line. I figured it had to have an enclosed air supply once that fog covered it. So I thought severing its air was a good way to attack. Guess I was right. You say the first one exploded the same?”
“Yeah, a white-hot fire.”
“It looked like magnesium to me. I saw its markings through the scope. Looked Chinese to me. They probably had a self-destruct mechanism. That way no one else could turn their own equipment against them. An enemy never wants their own equipment used against them. That’s the ultimate insult.”
Something tickled Nate’s nose, and for a fleeting second he thought the gas had come back, writhing from old pipes buried underground, as much a part of America’s infrastructure as sewers.
That horrible gas that America put in place at the height of the Cold War, from his estimation, at a time when nuclear attacks and foreign army invasions were on the tip of every man’s tongue.
It was real, made for a real time. Built as a final retribution of a dying nation.
But self-destruction was a false security.
The machine gods’ self-destruction supported that idea.
Safety couldn’t be measured in weapons.
It hinged on individual acts, selfless acts. A brother looking after a brother. That was safety.