by Zac Strong
It was then I realized he was handing me something.
“That your shuttle back at the entrance?”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t have much time. They’ll be here any second. Take this grenade and grab one of those guns on the ground. We have to get the hell outta here.”
I swiftly do as he orders just as thunder from their rifles cut through the air at us. More Lethe droids approaching fast.
Dodging their gunfire, we both sprint towards the gate. A group, maybe five or six, of them race after us on all fours like metal animals. Their red eyes rapidly closing the distance.
They’re too fast. We aren’t going to make it, but we don’t stop running. There is no other choice.
Heart thudding, the buildings around me sway. Every thought I own is caged. Over the sounds of their blasting terror, a scream. I turn, fumbling the warm barrel of my new rifle, assuming the worst. Through the veil of darkness glows a dozen red eyes, like burning fires seven feet off the ground. Lying motionless in the dirt before them, the boy.
The gun weighs in my hands as I try to find the balance between myself and my weapon. Lifting the barrel in the direction of the approaching horde, I aim. My focus shifts to my target, and with a mind of its own, a virtual path of my bullet’s trajectory is highlighted within my upgraded eye. I didn’t even know it could do this.
I squeeze the trigger and the gun fires with a loud eruption, recoil slamming the stock back into my shoulder. The round tears through the air and lodges in its target. The first droid slides to a halt, face forward. Its eyes glow red no longer.
With every trigger squeeze, another one falls. Until they are nothing more than scrap on a city better left forgotten.
I rush to the still corpse of the little boy that saved my life just minutes earlier. Blood is soaked into his blouse and he’s not moving. I strip the fabric away to reveal the dark hole in his lower
chest. His breathes are shallow and weak, barely a pulse. Deep down I know there’s no way anyone can survive this.
“Don’t leave me here,” he whispers in agony. Blood pouring from his mouth, his words just able to reach my ears.
The first sign of morning peaks over the eastern hillsides as I wrap the boy in my arms. As he wanted, I carefully load his body in the shuttle and start the engines to leave this fucking hell hole and never come back.
The engines fail.
I try again as the cold heat begins to creep over me, squeezing me tighter with every passing second. This isn’t good.
My upgraded eye detects more hostiles approaching, attracted to the sound of my failing flyer. The engines must’ve taken too much damage. They're refusing to crank.
The side glass shatters. They’re closing in on me.
Come on, baby. One last ride. Don’t fail me now. My eyes close as I mash my forearm to the dash.
Nothing.
Swiftly, I move around to the side door swinging it open, rifle in hand. I’m not going down without a fight.
Inhaling deeply, time slows to a crawl. The wind reduces to a whisper in comparison with the beating heart in my chest. I hold the trigger, spraying death in every place my bullets touch.
Lines of droids collapse in rows at a time. Even more appear behind them. Iron beasts, sprinting without capacity to tire.
My gun runs dry.
I pull the grenade Athan gave me out of my pocket and release the pin.
I’m teleported to the server room.
Red and green lights from the machines flicker rapidly.
I’m choking.
I see Palin’s reflection in the shiny black shoe crushing the bones in my neck.
I’m not Palin.
The man with the metal arm pushes harder.
I can’t breathe.
No. This can’t be happening.
“I’m not Palin!”
My eyes open and I’m back. Like I never left. The unstoppable metal militia’s still charging. I look down still holding the grenade and I wind back. It flies through the air, landing in the center of the incoming horde.
The explosion throws smoke and metal high in the air, but there’s more of them. The Lethe droids keep perusing, too many to count now. A wall of red eyes glows as far as I can see.
Hopping back into the pilot seat, I give it one last go as bullets begin slicing into the side panels. A sigh of relief propagates throughout my body when I hear the engines roar, but shatters with the front windshield from incoming gunfire.
Over the others, a lone droid leaps into the air, crashing on the nose of my shuttle just as it lifts off the ground. Motionless, it glares at me. Its armored frame is like a black hardened liquid. Its legs, holding powerful hydraulic machinery, are wrapped in battered titanium with two metal plates for feet. It scans me in a glance and bursts through the remains of the broken glass windshield. It grabs the steering from my grip, far stronger than I imagined. Great iron claws immediately overpower me as the shuttle spirals just feet from the ground.
My fist lands solidly on what would be considered its chin if it were human, but it doesn’t flinch. I don’t even dent it. My hand goes numb, yet I swing again, harder this time. Then again. Using my elbow to beat its face into the dash as I feel the full force of its power fling me to the rear of the flyer as if I weighed nothing.
On all fours it crawls towards me like a demented animal as I hear the others latching on to the shuttle from underneath, pulling it from the sky.
Out-of-control the flyer clips the side of a timeworn building, capsizing, as the unwary droid is ejected out of the open side door, falling into the debris of the crumbling building.
Struggling to maintain equilibrium, I climb back into the cockpit and stabilize it. As they continue to hammer the remains of my shuttle with gunfire, I’m grazed in the arm from a ricochet. It’s bleeding, but my adrenaline dissolves the pain. I give her everything she has left, just narrowly escaping the death grip of 34.
“Or at least we thought,” utters an ominous voice, a voice I’ve heard before. “One of their missiles hit us shortly after. We did give it a hell of a run, though. Almost thought we got away. It was so close, flying straight up again, but Lethe always hits their mark. They picked us out of the sky and now we’re here.”
“Wait.. what!? Who are you??”
“You know who I am, Eros. I am you.”
Feeling the jarring warmth of a hand placed on my shoulder, I snap around the darkness, to see Jacee’s sapphire eyes just inches from my face.
“Will you be ready?” she asks. Her voice in frightening unison with the others.
Struck to the floor with terror, a stranger shouts from the shadows behind me, “The fight must continue. It’s not enough to simply preserve life. We must better it!”
Giant red eyes open overtop of me as wide as the sky itself.
“It’s our evolutionary duty!”
Their words echo, bouncing off the walls of my mind. The malevolent eyes above grow larger and glow brighter until every place that I look is them. They consume every crevice of my soul, picking away at what’s left of my feeble mind. I stare into them and they show me everything.
A black sickness wraps itself around my body like the second skin I neither want nor am I able to escape. Its smell rapes my lungs and singes at my eyes. The air is rotten. Dirty. Mountains of the dead pile around me. Their bodies, warped. Their heads, enlarged.
The sickness creeps around me slithering like a serpent, inching up my legs, squeezing me. My eyes envision colossal shuttles escaping a smoldering planet in hives. Clocks are ticking on every surface the light touches, and the places it doesn’t too. Tick. Tock.
The meteor strikes.
The pillars of earth collapse. Quakes swallow entire nations. Massive volcanoes spit fire, covering anything unlucky enough to remain. Oceans evaporate. Continents tumble. Then… the smoke clears, and all is quiet again. Everything is still. The sickness constricting me fades into ash. A blade of grass sprouts up
beside my feet. Then another. The world grows greener, so quickly. All around me, a forest rises. Alive and vibrant. Growing taller and taller. Racing faster. Thousands of meters in the air.
A twig breaks.
From under the arms of a dancing willow stands a deer. Majestic. Proud. Great powerful antlers hang above both ears. He looks up at me fearlessly. Takes a step closer and is caught at the hoof by the sickness. The buck yanks and pulls, but it’s no use. The sticky blackness inks up the hind of the deer and throws itself over, devouring all it touches. The sound of the buck’s cry is one you only hear in nightmares. It screams for generations until it falls to the floor. Its carcass decomposes into a sphere of oozing, cancerous death as it shrinks and powders into black grains of sand. The grains begin to multiply. Leaking in from everywhere. They flood in, little at first, but now in every direction. It’s all I can see for miles. The sand begins to turn, rotating slightly. Spiraling faster and faster with every rotation. Faster it spins. A whirlpool forms in the sand, sucking me to its center with a force that can’t compare. I claw and fight it, but it becomes steeper with every failed attempt. Faster it spins. It pours over me, crushing me deeper and deeper. Sinking further, I drift into the heart of darkness as it swallows me whole.
The pressure is too much.
I can’t breathe…
Seconds later, I burst out of the bottom landing on a much calmer pile of the same sand. A clear bright barricade surrounds me, perhaps, a glass wall contorted out of shape. I’m trapped within. Sand drops in from a tiny opening between the clear walls above.
I mash my face to the glass, peering through to the other side. To my horror, it’s my eyes that stare back. In a mirror the size of small skyscrapers in Olympia, on a cherrywood desk of equal proportion, rests a giant hourglass. Sand trickles from its top, under which I am imprisoned. No sign of life anywhere, or escape. Only a chilling promise is written in blood, dripping down the mirror.
The time is near.
Chapter 14
My eyes open. My lungs burn as they gasp for breath. The warm air is thick. It’s painful. Every bone in my body feels shattered. Every muscle, torn. Rays of sunshine pour through the open window painting the stale room lively shades of yellow and orange. Trying to claw my way back to reality I lift myself from a squeaky, metal bed. One I don’t remember seeing before. What is this place?
My sluggish brain struggles to distinguish between what I know has happened and what I think I know. Noticing the cuts and gashes buried deep in my bruised arms and legs, I attempt to inch myself to the edge of the bed. Those are real. A few drops of blood seep through a bandage on my arm where a droid bullet pierced me. I’m wearing clothes from Olympia, but they’re certainly not my clothes. Nothing around me looks familiar. The short walls appear to be adobe or some type of hardened dirt. There is no door, just a carved opening leading into the source of the chatter that fills my enquiring ear. People talking. Their words echo off the walls of this place in an accent I’ve never heard of.
“You’re probably wondering where you are,” asks a voice from outside the doorway, same accent. A short elderly man staggers into the room, hunched and wheezing. The sun has spotted his bald head, except around the sides where his thin, silver hair floats weightlessly. He is armed with a thick metal cane, repurposed pipe, but sturdy.
“Am I dead?” I ask vulnerably.
He laughs, shaking his head no. “The Taker will take you when He is ready. It is not yet your time, brother. Although, your aircraft… was not as fortunate.”
“Who are you?” I ask. The rhythm in my chest picks up tempo. Eyes dart left and right, scanning the room in search of anything I can use as a weapon. Always have a plan to kill everyone around you. The first lesson in banned Olympian literature, A Survivalist’s Guide to the Outlands.
“I am Elder Thestor, humble servant of the Giver and the Taker. You’re inside the temple of Cau, where we lay you after we dragged your unconscious body from the fire, saving your life. You should be grateful to the gods. Honored to be gifted with another breath from the Giver.” His tone’s scornful like my existence is offensive to him.
“We are extremely grateful,” interrupts the same little boy that I know I saw die in 34.
His words ring throughout my mind. The room narrows. Thoughts become hazy. I watched him die. I know I did. There was blood… and the gun.. and they shot him, but now’s he here.. he’s standing right there.. and–
“You look as if you’ve seen a spirit,” speaks the elder, but I don’t immediately hear him.
Is he a spirit?
How is this possible?
“Are you all right, brother?” asks the elder insistently. He must sense something isn’t right.
“He’s fine. He’s always been a little spacey,” chimes Athan wiping the sweat from a deep scratch across his forehead.
“You were dead. I saw you die,” I murmur, unable to shake the reality my eyes gaze upon. My words stumbling from my mouth. My orientation, gone astray.
The old man snaps to the boy.
But Athan replies, “He must’ve hit harder than I thought. We should probably let him rest,” and forces a nervous laugh like I’m crazy. I know I’m not fucking crazy. Am I crazy??
The skeptical old man dismisses himself from the room as the boy shoots me a threatening look behind the elder’s back. One that told me to keep my mouth shut or else.
As soon as the elder hobbles a decent distance away, Athan marches up and shoves me against the wall. He’s a little stronger than expected.
“What the fuck are you doing? Trying to get us both killed!?” the child whispers loudly. His sapphire eyes scorn unforgivingly as he looks up at me. “These people are fucking insane. If they find out what I am, they’ll kill us both.”
“You died.. I saw it with my own eyes. I.. What… are you?”
“I’m not like you. I’m.. something different. I’ve always been like this ever since I can remember. Can’t be hurt, well, not for too long anyway. Can’t die. Actually, tried to once. A long time ago, after the last of my people died. I was the only one left. Alone for months, hungry. I found some cable and picked out a good area for it. I went peacefully until I woke up a few hours later with one hell of a sore throat. Luckily, I had my knife, or I’d probably still be swinging there in that cave.”
“You have the mutation.”
“What?“
“The mutation Leon and Niko Lethe had. You’re an immortal, Athan.”
“Sounds about right.”
“How old are you?” I ask completely perplexed, fear slowly shifting to fascination.
“I don’t know.. I don’t age like normal people even if I did know. My biology is like, slower. Until today, I thought I was the only one like me. I think I was wrong.”
My stomach drops. “You think I’m like you?” I ask still trying to process the reality of what I am hearing. The gears within my brain begin turning, piecing together what I can, trying to make sense of all of this.
“No! Not you, idiot. Holy shit, are you always this stupid? Outside the temple.. there’s a guy tied to a post, looks like he’s been there for a long time.”
“Why do you think he’s like you?” I ask. “How can you be so sure?”
“I might have eavesdropped a little this morning, overheard one of the old, creepy guys mention something about the betrayer’s eternal punishment. It’s him. There’s only one dude tied a post out there. Talk about fucking coo-coo.”
“And, I thought my mouth was foul.”
The child fights to hold back a subtle grin, “Fuck you.”
“Is there any way to repair the flyer, anything left?” I ask trying to conjure an escape plan. This place isn’t safe for either of us. I’m not sure anywhere is, to be honest.
“I don’t think so. These guys are scavengers. From what I saw this morning, the entire place outside the temple is held together by old junk and stolen scrap. If there was anything left, it’s gone now; not
to mention, the crash is miles from here.”
Limping to the doorway, I peer into the heart of this holy place. Expecting more of the same dirt and adobe, I’m pleasantly mistaken. Grand pillars of chiseled stone rise high from their square foundations and flank the large hallways from the inside. The room I woke up in is one of many, all aligned in a rectangular fashion with the hall of pillars separating empty doorways from an open center of which they surround. Metal pews and makeshift benches rest in perfect symmetry in the middle of the temple, stretching from the outside door to the spectacular spiral mosaic of stained glass on the back wall. Running my hands down the pews I walk down the aisle towards a single podium standing valiantly between two alters. Ceilings made of repurposed gold and silver glimmer divinely from above.
“It’s marvelous isn’t it,” proclaims the crippled elder that welcomed me earlier. A peculiar old man. Odd shaped, and not very pleasant to look at. “And to think all of this was almost lost at one time.”
“What happened?” I ask resting my broken body in the first pew. Athan wipes the hair from his face attempting to hide his rapidly healing scratch and takes a seat behind me.
“The story begins a long time ago with a stranger that came to us, much like yourselves. His name was Rome. He was nearly dead when we found him wandering alone in the sand not far from here.”
Elder Thestor uses his cane to inch towards me, grunting with each step taken under his oversized robe, he continues, “We took in Rome, gave him a place to rest, food to eat. After we nursed him back to health, he worked tirelessly to repay his debt of mercy from the gods by tending the greenery and the few livestock we acquired from Olympian traders. The gods gave him a purpose for his life and that purpose he fulfilled superbly. He planted the crops, repaired any damages to the temple, some days going above and beyond his call to duty with his inventions. He used to be quite the engineer; always tinkering, creating new innovations. Without his work on the irrigation systems, we’d still be relying on a crank well and the mercy of traders. He was truly a gift from the gods. Then, one afternoon he was different.” The old man’s gaze falls to the stone floor as a look of disgust succumbs him.