The gruff-voiced man said, “Who would be stupid enough to do that? We’re in the middle of bloody nowhere. If the boss catches ‘em, they’re gonna get strung up by their balls.”
“She thinks it’s a stowaway; someone from that village we hit yesterday.”
There was a brief burst of laughter from the gruff-voiced man. “I wouldn’t want to be them when the boss catches ‘em.”
“Yeah, it’s going to—“
The gruff-voiced man suddenly interrupted his friend with a sharp, “Hey! You! Stay right where—“
The sound of a brief struggle was followed by a couple of short, painful-sounding gasps, two thuds... then nothing. I smashed my ear to the door, trying to hear what was going on. Something metal jingled just beyond it, and I skidded back to where Freuchen sat.
After the sound of a key being slid into the locked door, it eased open a crack, then swung wide. A figure dressed all in white backed into the cell dragging the body of one of the guards who had been stationed outside our cell.
“Chou!” Freuchen and I said in unison.
“Obviously,” Chou replied matter-of-factly, turning and nodding at us. “Please, help me with the other man.”
Freuchen and I jumped to our feet and grabbed the body of the second guard who lay sprawled across the floor, his eyes staring sightlessly toward the ceiling. As we dragged him inside, I tried not to pay attention to the way his head lolled unnaturally from side to side. We dropped him next to the body of the first guard while Chou stuck her head back into the corridor, before closing the cell door behind her.
“You are a sight for sore eyes,” Freuchen said. “But how in God’s name did you get on board?”
“Later,” Chou said. She accepted the hug I offered, then took a step back.
“Wait, if you’re here, where’s Albert?” I asked, concerned that the boy might have found himself alone if anything had happened to Silas.
“We instructed him that if we did not return, he was to approach the people of the village when he thought it safe to do so.”
“New Manhattan,” I said. “The woman who’s in charge—her name is Emily Baxter—seems like she has a good head on her shoulders, so I know he’ll be okay. My main concern is how they will react to Silas, especially after the attack.”
“The tin-man is more than capable of looking after himself,” said Freuchen.
“I know, but I have his slate. It’s still in my backpack, which the Red Baroness’ people took when they captured me. Without the slate, Silas isn’t going to remember anything or anyone,” I said.
Freuchen exhaled a sharp, “Damn!”
“Do you know where they took it?” Chou asked.
I nodded and quickly described where they’d tossed my bag.
“Stay here,” Chou said. She moved to the door, cracked it open, then disappeared. Several minutes later, she slipped back into the room with both Freuchen’s and my backpacks, my sword and armor, and Freuchen’s ax.
I took my stuff from her and breathed a sigh of relief when I pulled out Silas’ undamaged slate, then slid it back in again.
“Now, ve at least have a fighting chance.”
“Let’s get to the exit now,” Chou said.
“Wait!” I said. “Shouldn’t we wait until we’ve landed. What if we’re seen?”
Chou shook her head. “They’ll have the crew ready to set the mooring lines as soon as we land, especially in this weather. Come on.” Chou moved to the door, checked the corridor for movement, then the three of us moved out of the cell, closing the door behind us. We jogged quickly to the exit Freuchen had used to try to escape.
“It’s impossible to see anything through this damn rain,” Freuchen said, straining to see beyond the rain-slicked porthole. “Vait a second… get ready… here ve go.” He slid the door open, and we were instantly buffeted by a sheet of icy wind and rain. Freuchen leaped through the doorway a second before a long shudder ran through the deck that was followed by a gentle thud as the Brimstone landed.
Freuchen stood outside, beckoning me to jump. “Come on, be quick about it.”
I leaped to the ground, Chou right behind me. I had an instance to take in my surroundings; the Brimstone had landed in a large clearing. Tall grass, a good three feet or so high, grew everywhere. It swayed and rustled, battered by the downpour. Within seconds, we were all soaked.
My breath caught as from within the Brimstone, I heard the sound of approaching voices.
“Keep low,” Chou whispered. Single file, we followed Chou, hunched low so the grass would help camouflage our escape. We headed toward the edge of the clearing, which was nothing but a vague watery mirage barely visible through the sheets of falling rain. I’d expected to see the usual forest that seemed so ubiquitous to this future Earth, but instead, as we approached the edge of the clearing, I saw a jungle. Creepers hung between the branches of huge trees, creating a spiderweb effect. Monkeys, hiding from the storm beneath broad leaves, chattered in the tree limbs, stunned by the strange invaders that had descended from the sky like some ancient god.
We’d almost reached the jungle when a loud yell from behind us cut through the thrum of the rain. I turned back toward the Brimstone in time to see several vague human shapes descending from the gondola, pointing at us and shouting. There was a bright orange flash, then what sounded like a bee zinged past us and hit a nearby tree. Several scale-like pieces of bark exploded from it.
“Run!” Chou hissed, and we plunged into the jungle.
Ten
“This way,” Chou yelled, grabbing my hand and dragging me off to the left. I looked back toward the clearing where the Brimstone rested and saw ten or so of the crew moving through the forest toward us.
“Eyes forward,” Freuchen said.
We continued to run for another minute, then Chou pulled me again, directing me to the base of a steep embankment that led up to a hill. She paused for a second and looked back.
“If ve can get higher, ve might be able to break our pursuers line of sight and double back behind them,” Freuchen said.
I was panting heavily, and my back and my leg muscles had begun to take on that heavy feeling of fatigue.
“Won’t they be able to follow our tracks?” I gasped as I took three deep breaths.
Freuchen shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. The floor of the forest is so cushioned vith leaves ve aren’t leaving much in the vay of tracks.”
“Now’s not the time to talk,” Chou said. “We need to keep moving.” Without another word, she began to power up the embankment at a forty-five-degree angle. I followed after her, trying as hard as I could to keep up.
Someone yelled behind us, and I turned in time to see a man step into view between two trees. He beckoned to some unseen other behind him, then raised his rifle and let off three quick shots. The rounds zinged past us, kicking up spouts of dirt and leaves in the embankment that separated me from Chou.
An angry woman’s voice shouted, “Stop firing, you idiot. We want her alive.” I saw the Red Baroness step into view and deliver a vicious blow to the man with the butt of her pistol. He dropped to one knee, his hand cradling his head as the Baroness and the rest of the search party streamed past him in our direction.
The embankment grew steeper, and I began to slow, almost entirely depleted.
“Here,” Chou said, reaching a hand to me. I grabbed it, and she pulled me up and onto a four-foot-high wall of earth, then continued to drag me stumbling along with her, heading straight up now, trying to put as much space between us and the Baroness and her crew as she could. “You must keep going,” Chou said over her shoulder. “The summit is close.”
“Not… sure… I… can,” I panted back at her.
“I will carry you if I must, but I’d prefer not to.”
“Under… standable… I… guess.”
“Almost there,” she said, her grip on my hand tightening. I looked up in time to see Chou reach the rough rolling plateau that was
the top of the embankment. She turned, beckoned for my other hand while her eyes searched the forest below us. “Quickly,” she said.
I grabbed her outstretched hand and allowed her to pull my exhausted body up next to her. Dropping to my knees, ignoring the rain pounding at my head and the cold streams running down my back, I somehow resisted the urge to simply lay down and not move.
“Come on,” Freuchen urged. “Ve must keep on.”
I pushed myself to my feet. I had time to suck in a huge gulp of the cold, wet air before we were off again. We side-stepped our way down the opposite side of the embankment. When we reached the bottom, Chou said, “This way.”
Rather than simply running into the woods, she followed the bottom of the embankment to the left, leaping over roots and boulders, pushing her way through bushes as though they were nothing.
But now, even Freuchen was starting to tire. While whatever process had brought us to this version of Earth had certainly made us healthier than we’d ever been on our original Earths, it hadn’t given us superpowers. We were still human—even Chou, who had been bred to be fitter than any human that had ever existed in my time. On top of it all, Freuchen and I hadn’t had a thing but the measly chunks of bread and a few sips of water for the past twenty-four hours.
“Ve need… to find somevhere… to rest,” Freuchen said a few minutes later, his breath coming out in great clouds of steam.
Chou looked back, slowed, then came to a stop. I could see that she was frustrated that we couldn’t keep up with her, and once again, I was thankful that she didn’t simply abandon us to fend for ourselves. She scanned the trees for a second, then said, “Come on. This way,” before taking off at a ninety-degree angle into the woods. She slowed her pace to more of a fast jog, enough that Freuchen and I could keep up with.
For the next ten minutes, we zigzagged our way between trees, doubling back, then heading off in a totally different direction. Their voices had faded, so I knew we had at least put some distance between us, but I didn’t know if we’d managed to throw our pursuers off our tracks. My eyes were fixed on the ground most of the time, trying to avoid tree roots and anything else that might cause me to trip or break a leg.
Chou stopped suddenly, and Freuchen and I pulled up alongside her, my hands resting on my knees as I tried to catch my breath.
Ahead was a large clearing easily as big as the area the Brimstone had landed in. Very little lived here; what few trees left were either nothing more than broken trunks or blackened and dead. Younger trees had sprouted up, but they were sickly, wilted.
But that wasn’t what had made Chou stop.
It was the enormous rusted and broken robot that lay just ahead of us. I could see more huge, vague shapes through the mist-like rain, scattered around the clearing.
“What happened here?” Freuchen whispered, his voice low out of either respect or fear.
Perhaps it was Edward’s recent influence on me, rekindling my old love of poetry and the sense of melancholy which inevitably came with it, but when we passed the first metal behemoth, its rusted verdigris-covered skin hidden behind decades of growth of moss and vines and thicket, I was struck with the most profound sense of abandonment.
This first rusted hulk stood thirty feet tall, with a squat box-like body sitting on two articulated tree-trunk-thick legs. Two equally large arms hung from either side of the body, one with a claw-like hand, the other with some kind of corkscrew tool that could have been used for mining, perhaps. That may have been the original intention of those tools, but not how they’d last been used—judging by the hundreds of broken and dismembered parts of other machines that lay scattered all around it. This machine had done a lot of damage before it, too, had finally succumbed to whatever madness had overtaken it.
“There’s another over here,” said Freuchen, pulling at a clot of thick brown vines that had grown over another relic.
“And over here,” I said, parting a sickly bush to expose the back of yet another mechanoid lying face down in the forest’s detritus.
“There are more there,” Chou said, pointing to a group of three machines frozen in a violent embrace.
“It’s almost as if they ver in some kind of a battle,” Freuchen said.
I guess Howard Carter must have felt the same range of emotions when he broke the seal on Tutankhamen’s tomb and felt the dead breath of three-thousand-year-old air exhaled from within. This place held a power in the frozen metal statues hidden behind the vegetation that had grown around it. It was a glimpse into some distant cataclysm, and this robot graveyard still held a deep resonating power.
“Listen!” Chou said, throwing up a hand. “They’ve found us.” From somewhere in the jungle behind us, I heard the voices of our pursuers drawing closer.
“Damn it!” Freuchen said.
Wordlessly, Chou took off again, and Freuchen and I ran behind. We passed by more and more machines. Some were little more than rusted metal skeletons, decayed beyond ever being recognizable, others had fared a little better. But it was evident that the fifty-or-so machines we found in that short time were only part of a much more extensive collection of dead robots. And they had been there for a very, very long time. Perhaps longer even than Silas had been trapped beneath the rockfall at the tower back on Avalon before we had found him.
We ran between the machines, looking for somewhere to hide.
“There!” said Freuchen, pointing at a massive machine with thirty-plus articulated legs. It lay on its side and looked like its design had been based on some kind of beetle.
We ran toward it, and that was when I spotted something even stranger. Across from the giant mechanical beetle, floating several feet off the ground was a giant ball of what looked like oil. It was perfectly spherical, opaque, but a translucent outer skin gave it a wet sheen that partially reflected its surroundings. I felt a shiver of unease rattle down my spine. Staring at it, I couldn’t help but feel like it knew we were there, like it saw us. We weren’t even close to it, but I felt something gathering around it, an invisible energy, dense and electric. I shook off the feeling of unease and managed to splutter, “What on Earth is that?”
Both Chou and Freuchen stopped momentarily and looked to where I pointed. The ground directly beneath the levitating sphere, and for twice its circumference beyond it was dead, leaving nothing but mud that looked as black as the sphere itself. Not a single thing grew within that semi-circle.
“Is it… rotating?” Freuchen asked, leaning toward it as if he might see through the sheets of rain that still fell.
“I think so,” I said.
Chou looked back the way we’d come. “They are coming,” she hissed. “We must hide.”
We sprinted to the back of the huge beetle-like machine. Its legs seemed to be pointing toward the weird rotating sphere as if in warning. The main body of the juggernaut was now nothing but a mass of torn and jagged shards of metal that faced outward as though something had exploded deep within it. Or something had opened it up like a rusty-can, judging by the mass of broken wiring, gears, and other unidentifiable stuff that hung from the hole like spilled guts.
“Inside,” Chou said, parting a curtain of vines and pointing to the cavity within. We climbed in, carefully avoiding the sharp edges and pointy bits. Chou followed us in then let the vines slide back into place, obscuring us completely.
Inside the dead machine, it smelled like cut grass and motor oil. The outer shell was sliced and torn in multiple places, but the wounds were small enough that no one outside would be able to see us huddled together in the darkness, but they were also big enough that if we stood close to them, we had a pretty good view of the area.
“What is that thing?” I whispered to Chou, as I stared at the slowly rotating ball of blackness. Chou’s reply was to lightly touch my arm and with a subtle nod, direct my attention toward the path we’d taken through the robot graveyard.
Five men walked cautiously into view, and I felt my anger rise when I re
cognized Tommy Two-Thumbs amongst them. The men were dressed in shiny yellow rain slickers that covered their uniforms. They didn’t look happy. One of the men stopped suddenly and pointed in the direction of the black orb. The rest of the group came to an abrupt stop alongside him. A full minute passed as they talked amongst themselves, obviously debating what they should do next. Then Abernathy started toward the slowly rotating orb. One of the men—a big muscular guy, who stood a full six inches above the rest—stepped forward, obviously trying to dissuade Two-Thumbs. But Two-Thumbs just waved him off and continued to cautiously advance through the mud. As Abernathy got closer to the orb, I saw a ripple, like a wave, pass over the ink-black surface.
“Is he mad?” Freuchen whispered.
Yes, I wanted to say, yes, he is.
Two-Thumbs stood less than ten feet away from the orb. He turned to look back at the other men, nervously shuffling their feet in the pouring rain. He gestured for them to join him.
This time I clearly saw the ripple pass over the orb’s skin. Two-Thumbs, his back to it, saw nothing and continued to angrily gesture at the men to join him. Reluctantly, they began to edge closer.
A third wave, this one tsunami-like compared to the first two, washed over the orb’s surface. Then another and another. The advancing men saw it and stopped in their tracks, but Two-Thumbs still had his back to the orb. He yelled something at them I couldn’t hear. The big man yelled something back and pointed at the orb. Two-Thumbs slowly turned. The orb’s surface was a mass of movement now, wave after wave pulsing across its oily surface.
Two-Thumbs took a single step away from the orb… and froze as a shiny black tendril extruded from its surface and snaked through the air toward him. His face was frozen in a mask of shock as the tendril moved first from one side of him then to the other, as though it were drug dog sniffing him. Then, it drew back and with a whip-like crack, flew at Two-Thumbs. He tried to dodge out of its way, but he was simply too slow. The black tendril struck him on the right side of his abdomen, attaching to it like some kind of glue.
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