One Crazy Machine (Apocalypse Paused Book 9)

by Michael Todd

  “It’s in the trailer,” Peppy said. “Along with our water, explosives, and way too much fuel. Don’t crash this thing, okay?”

  “Me? Crash? Inconceivable! This thing’s not even airborne. How am I supposed to crash without a ground to come up at me?”

  “I’m sure if anyone can do it, it’s you,” Ava interjected with her most winning smile.

  “Aw, shucks. Do you really think so?” He actually blushed like a schoolgirl.

  “Let’s hope not,” Peppy said.

  “And you’re sure this thing can get us back to where we started?” Gunnar said.

  “I may not know my alphabet as well as you blokes, but nobody knows how to get us from point A to point uh…B?…as well I do. I’ll get us there. Now, who wants to sit on top of the arms? I gotta drive, so don’t worry. If you fall, tuck and roll and I’ll come back for you. But, well, once we really get going, try not to fall off—you know, broken neck, broken arms, all that noise.”

  “Dibs on the mounted cannon,” Gunnar said before either Peppy or Ava could say anything.

  Ava looked at the other woman, who clenched her jaw but only nodded.

  They mounted up. Manny took pride of place behind the controls of his desert cruiser, Gunnar sat at the gun, and Ava and Peppy perched on steel beams that dangled over the desert below them, their rifles in hand. Peppy had disassembled Ava’s carbine, cleaned it, and given it back. Somehow, Ava didn’t feel entirely confident as she climbed out onto the steel arm connected to nothing but a helicopter’s landing gear on its secure end. Thankfully, his disclaimer about missing safety equipment hadn’t been entirely correct. He had somehow managed to attach straps to the metal which provided at least a sense of security, although the rough workmanship made them precarious, at best.

  Still, she soon felt silly at her nervousness to sit on the spindly arm and wait for the Li’l Bastard to move. Once they set off, she realized that being afraid of sitting still was like a kid afraid of monsters under the bed. It simply didn’t compare to the terror of facing one in motion.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At first, the ride was thrilling but the sensation lasted for about a minute.

  “All right, the fuel lines seem a go. We haven’t lost any power, which means it’s time to motor,” Manny shouted over the roar of the huge engine in front of him. Ava didn’t really know how he could see around the thing and she tried not think about it.

  “I thought we were motoring,” Gunnar yelled from the front of the Li’l Bastard.

  “Nah, we’ve only got up to maybe fifty kilos an hour. This thing should be able to go triple that, maybe more. It’d be a rough ride, of course, but the Li’l Bastard should make it past these monsters before it rattles apart. If it rattles apart.” He frowned as if considering the possibility with unhealthy interest—like he actually hoped it might happen so he could study it.

  Peppy looked at him from the top of the stabilizing arm and clenched her teeth. “What are we waiting for? I’d rather die falling to my death in the sand than being eaten by some monster.”

  “That’s the spirit,” the pilot concurred and unleashed the full force of the Li’l Bastard’s giant engine.

  As a kid, when Ava had first learned to ride a bicycle and inadvertently gone down the neighborhood hill—Armbreaker, the local kids called it—she’d marveled at how much faster it felt to be on a bike than in a car. In the vehicle, the incline felt like nothing special. There were speed bumps to make the descent even more painfully slow. But on a bike, the wind whipped her hair and blew through the gap in her teeth. Her handlebars had rattled, and her brakes released great plumes of smoke that smelled of burning rubber. It had been a rush and utterly terrifying, and only stopped when she crashed into the grassy field at the bottom of the Armbreaker. She dearly hoped this ride didn’t end in the same way because the sensations were uncomfortably familiar.

  She knew the Flying Bastard had gone much faster. It must have, obviously, yet she hadn’t felt anything like she did in that moment.

  Her stomach seemed to remain in place as the Li’l Bastard rocketed forward. She clutched the bar the seat was mounted to, but her hands felt like they would shake free from the rattling frame and take her with them. Her hair whipped in the wind while her cheeks stung as they caught air and shook a little like a basset hound’s. Fortunately, Manny had given them all goggles, so at least her eyes didn’t have to endure the sting of tiny grains of sand that poked at her like angry needles.

  “Yeaaaaahhh!” Manny shrieked from the driver’s seat as he willed the Li’l Bastard faster and faster. He barely steered but still managed to keep them on a direct course toward Wall Two at what felt like ever-increasing speeds. Ava hadn’t thought to ask how he knew which direction to take. Maybe he’d salvaged the Flying Bastard’s navigation equipment as well. She could only hope it worked on the ground as well as it did in the air.

  He adjusted course slightly—away from a larger hill of sand, Ava thought, until he steered back into it.

  “We’re like a damn manta ray,” he exclaimed as they struck the hill with the runner at the front of the vehicle and launched into thin air.

  This was the only part of the voyage that seemed to slow for Ava. She had no idea how the hell they got so high, but she immediately missed the jarring that came from the runner bouncing over the sand.

  They landed with a whump and the rattle returned with such force that Ava actually bit her tongue.

  “You crazy son of a bitch,” Gunnar protested.

  “Dingo, mate. My mama was a diiiingo,” Manny sang as he steered into another bump and launched them into the air.

  This went on for an hour. Manny drove at speeds that seemed ever-increasing and deliberately ramped jumps with no apparent reason. The three passengers simply held on for dear life while he whooped and hollered and cursed.

  Finally, they stopped.

  Ava didn’t question it. She scrambled off the elevated arm and fell to her knees on the sand. Gunnar stepped off and his hands shook as he lit a cigarette. Only Peppy seemed anything but thankful that they’d stopped

  “I thought we’d agreed to die at the wall, not out here in the desert. Why did we stop?”

  “We’re out of gas!” Manny said and slapped his knee like it was the funniest damn thing he’d ever heard. “Did you ever see that old cartoon where Doug Bunny crashes an airplane and plays cards and all that and then it runs out of gas and they don’t crash? Oh, man, comic gold!”

  “Doug Bunny?” Ava questioned with a frown. “Do you mean Bugs?”

  “Can we not mention those things right at this moment? We’ll face them in numbers beyond comprehension soon enough,” Gunnar said. He’d finally managed to light his cigarette and looked marginally better.

  “Let’s fill it up.” Peppy scanned the desert quickly and made for their reserve of fuel on the sled behind them. Ava, who hadn’t looked behind her for the entire duration of the insane ride, considered it a small wonder that the trailer was still there at all.

  Peppy and Manny filled the gas while their companions scanned the horizon. The sun would set in an hour or so. Already, a dull shadow had spread over the desert and the heat had eased a little. Ava realized that if they didn’t make it to the wall, their ride would be far less comfortable. The desert cold mixed with the wind from their speed would be more than a little unpleasant.

  “All right, we’re ready,” Manny declared.

  “And not a moment too soon.” Gunnar climbed back on to the Li’l Bastard, started the rotary cannon, and immediately fired at the sand.

  “Huh. I always thought I’d be the one to go crazy first. I guess not.” The pilot scratched his head. “Peppy, you owe me money.”

  Ava froze. Scorpion trails were visible under the sand directly ahead of Li’l Bastard. They’d caught up. What would have happened if they’d have pushed on for even another mile?

  She then realized that she didn’t have to think about such an outcome. The r
eality of it was already in progress.

  “Damn it, Manny, go!” Gunnar bellowed from his forward position on the Li’l Bastard. He fired from point-blank range and a mess of sand and whitish guts sprayed from the sand in response to his bullets. Still, the scorpions seem undeterred.

  “Shit, they’re over here too!” Peppy cursed as she scrambled along her metal arm, unclipped a grenade, and threw it in a long arc. It exploded and that part of the desert went still.

  Around them, however, the surface roiled and rippled ominously.

  “Holy shit. You weren’t kidding about a hundred thousand of the little bastards,” Manny said.

  “Why don’t you sound scared?” Ava asked from her perch. She strapped herself in and aimed her carbine. Not that she needed to as there were too many of the damn things. Every shot she took either killed a scorpion or drove them back under the sand. With this many, the distinction was irrelevant.

  “Because there ain’t no way these things are as fast as the Li’l Bastard.”

  Manny thumbed the ignition and the vehicle roared to life. He gunned it and the front of the ATV-turned-drag-racer lifted slightly and raised Gunnar along with it. From her vantage point, Ava could see dozens of the creatures directly below him. He’d killed many already—twenty, thirty?—but despite that, dozens more crawled over the bodies. These weren’t like their mother. They were the size of dogs with a milky white exoskeleton that cracked like eggshells when the soldier sprayed them with bullets from his sawed-off canon. That there were still more crushed when the front runner and wheels returned to the sand was a terrifying indication of how many of the damn things there were.

  They raced forward and Ava made the mistake of looking behind them. Hundreds of arachnids gave chase—no, thousands. The entire desert seemed to converge on them, for the creatures moved beneath the sand and breached every now and then like sharks hunting gulls. Only their tails remained above the sand, a lovely reminder that even one sting from these monsters would be enough to send any of them into agony.

  The pilot seemed unperturbed, though, and rapidly increased speed despite the fact that even more of the monsters writhed and twisted beneath the sand ahead of them.

  Peppy too, seemed unfazed—or perhaps more suicidal than normal. She ceased firing at the sea of angry scorpions, unstrapped herself from her perch, and shuffled cautiously along the arm.

  “Are you gonna do a dance to ward these suckers off?” Manny yelled over the wind.

  “Yeah. A fire dance. A fire dance of death,” Peppy hollered back and clambered awkwardly to the sled at the back of the Li’l Bastard. She crouched and managed to open the box of grenades. Every five seconds, like clockwork, she pulled a pin and tossed the grenade. Their wake was no longer a line in the sand and an army of pissed-off scorpions. Now, it included explosions that exploded great plumes of sand and arachnid guts into the air.

  It was too bad they couldn’t do anything about those in front of them. Some had made it past Gunnar’s cannon and now crawled down the length of the Li’l Bastard. The soldier screamed and cursed and kicked at them as they passed. Despite the distraction, he managed to maintain his steady stream of fire.

  Ava aimed at the unwanted passengers and knew she had only a split second to shoot before they made it to the engine.

  She fired and splattered guts that sizzled against the massive engine block. One of the scorpions simply scuttled to the other side of the engine. It reappeared at the top of it and stuck a claw in the air intake, and they began to lose speed.

  “You fucking animal,” Manny yelled and shoved up from his seat to rip the scorpion from the engine with his bare hands. He snapped it in half over his knee like it was a branch instead of a deadly creature and threw it into the desert sand. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  He tried to yank its claw out of the air intake, but it was too late. They had lost speed and all but stopped. The engine sputtered. Peppy scrambled off the sled and back onto the Li’l Bastard.

  “I think we’re fucked,” she said, but to Ava’s surprise, she pointed to the horizon instead of the seething mass of baby scorpions that swarmed toward them.

  Another storm approached rapidly.

  “Maybe they’ll hunker down, wait it out, and eat us in the morning when we’ve already been drowned in sand.” Gunnar abandoned his post at the front of the Li’l Bastard. He took his assault rifle with him and fired as he retreated. He had no reservations about shooting their ride. It was obvious to all of them the vehicle had served its purpose—or tried to, anyway. Ava had hoped to make it to the wall before they were eaten but as always, the Zoo seemed to be able to fuck with even the best plans.

  The three of them stood back to back in a triangle while Manny fiddled with the engine with a wrench, but when he whacked it as if he held a hammer, Ava recognized desperation in the strikes he rained down upon the engine. They weren’t going anywhere. That left Peppy, Gunnar, and Ava to act more rationally and fire at the waves of scorpions spewed out by the writhing sea of sand.

  The two soldiers really were an amazing team. They balanced one another’s shots with thrown grenades, gave each other enough time to reload, and seemed to have a sixth sense for when Ava would run out of bullets. Peppy tossed a grenade at the attackers and told her to reload the moment her carbine clicked.

  “We don’t have enough bullets to kill all these damn things,” Gunnar said. “We need a plan.”

  “We don’t need to beat them,” Peppy said, her teeth clenched. “We only need to last long enough for the sandstorm to kill us.”

  She was right about that. The wind had already picked up, but their adversaries didn’t seem to mind at all.

  “Look at the desert!” she said.

  “That’s the last thing we need to focus on right now,” Gunnar snapped.

  “No, I think this wave is almost gone. The sand’s stopped moving. There’s only…a thousand left?” She immediately wished she had lied and made the number seem even smaller.

  Peppy held her weapon up. “Too bad I’m already out of ammunition.”

  “Being eaten alive will be better than being taken to a hive, right? Seriously. I’ve already been to a hive and that fucking sucked. Being eaten alive will be fine, right?” he stammered. Fortunately, he still had bullets, at least. Ava didn’t want to think what he’d be like without them.

  She frowned and shook her head as she wondered if she’d maybe lost her mind as well. Over the click and snap of the scorpions, the ever-increasing wind, and Gunnar’s fire, she heard another sound.

  A helicopter.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was supremely unnatural to see the aircraft actually fly into the growing sandstorm, but that was exactly what it did. Stranger still, the helicopter extended a protuberance of sorts and rained hellfire down into the desert. There was a point in her life when Ava might have freaked out at being surrounded in a ring of fire that seemed to burn the sand itself. Now, however, she was merely thankful. And excited. It was entertaining to see the murderous little scorpions blacken, swell, and pop in the heat.

  The ring of fire completed, it hovered over them and lowered a bag on a rope. The two soldiers pounced on it like kids at Christmas and crowed over the fresh weapons. They immediately released a relentless fusillade at the last of the arachnids with these, splattered goo over one another, and grinned the entire time.

  A gust of wind buffeted the helicopter and it rocked back and forth before it landed outside the ring of fire.

  A gap appeared in the blazing wall where a soldier had thrown sand to smother the flames. Lieutenant Cort stepped through with two soldiers behind him.

  “Does this make us even?” he asked with a grin.

  “Not on your life, mate. Not on your life. I wasted my first stage dive on you!” Manny said and laughed.

  “I can take my chopper back to base if that’s how it’ll be,” the lieutenant said, but he motioned for the two soldiers to secure it against the increa
sing winds.

  “No, no. I was only saying the ring of fire thing totally trumps the old stage dive,” the pilot added hurriedly.

  “Definitely,” Gunnar agreed.

  “So you all agree I’m the hero this time and killed all those weird…what were those, exactly?”

  “Scorpions,” Gunnar said with a shudder.

  “Baby scorpions,” Manny yelled over the strengthening wind.

  Cort’s expression faded from a braggart’s smile to a condemned man’s look of dread upon seeing a hangman’s noose. “It’s a good thing we killed them all…right?” He managed a beggar’s look of hope.

  “Haven’t we had the discussion about underestimating the Zoo?” Peppy responded when no one else did.

  “We didn’t see any on the way out.” Cort looked through the shrinking ring of fire at his soldiers securing the helicopter. “Did you boys see anything weird on the way out?”

  One of them shrugged, but the other clenched his jaw.

  “Get over here, Mathis,” the officer said with more confidence than he’d ever shown Ava and her friends. “Explain yourself.”

  “Sir!” he replied stiffly. “The sand undulated strangely, sir.”

  “Elaborate.”

  The soldier looked at Ava and her goo-covered friends atop their bizarre ATV with a helicopter’s engine in the middle of a ring of fire and a growing sandstorm. They all grinned. Obviously, the poor guy had signed up for other reasons, and he now prioritized following orders over figuring out weird-as-hell situations.

  “I…uh…the sand definitely looked weird on the way out here. I thought it was the wind and…uh, well I might’ve had a drink before we came out here.” He turned an extremely bright red and shuffled awkwardly. “But after seeing those er…baby scorpions…well, I think it might have been more of them, sir!”

  Ava almost pitied the man. Obviously, he’d never thought he’d be in the desert discussing anything except enemy combatants and the tactics of insurgents. At least when she’d signed up to come to the Zoo, she’d known it was a weird ecosystem.