The Walker in the Dust: 2014

Here's book 2 so far.. enjoy.. more to come!

Prologue:

To whomever it may concern:

They named it before it fell, when it was still a star in the evening sky, among so many others. So many people died. And for many generations afterwards people survived and bore children… Babies underground, babies in vaults, babies in caves, babies near trash, babies eating trash… And living. And the world was eventually… It’s still destroyed. But where this certain bomb fell, the place had become something else.

They gave it a name before it fell. “Wormwood,” They said it as the bright dot in the sky got closer and closer to all the other bright dots, as they entered the atmosphere. It was worse than the others. Strange things happen now, in the place where it fell. A rift in reality itself, if you can call it that. If this wasteland is reality anymore, or purgatory, or a sick god’s cruel joke, I’m not sure. But it’s there. They call it the edge of the wasteland. It’s there, but it’s not like Earth anymore. They say the souls of the dead get stuck there and can’t find peace.

I’ve seen it. Sure I’ve seen it, but do you really want to know? I saw things there that I can never understand. The bitter taste in my mouth, the rolling rocks that move of their own accord.. Gravitational anomalies that can rip a man to shreds. Gateways into other dimensions. The spitting cactus, with its poison needles. The snow flies, and their sickly smell, and the flesh eating blobs. Or should I try to describe the wailing of the dead?

They say all the radiation in the wasteland comes from here. The place belches it out, continually poisoning the earth with rads. How did I survive? The giant radscorpions were the key… Their venom is like a natural rad-b-gone. They’re around, they’re always around. I’ll give you a hint. Don’t try to run. The scorpids hate it when you run.

-The Wastelander’s Apocalypse, Volume 1

Chapter 1 : The Journey to Come

I dream of you Anastasia

of your bright blue eyes when you find steel

of your golden hair when you make bread,

the way it hovers and whips in the breeze

lashing out like a radscorpions tail

My daydreams fade and the broken highway stretches into the distance like a dead snake, through a maze of destroyed buildings as far as I can see toward the setting sun. There’s a lot of burnt, rusty vehicles lying around, some with bleached skeletons inside, and they look at me with empty eyes. I take a long drag on my cigarette and try a few car doors. I push the bones off the melted plastic seat and climb into a derelict SUV. The orange eyebot hovers outside, its spherical metallic body bobbing slowly up and down on sentry duty, its antennae flicking left, then right. I hit the broadcast button on my arm.

“Archie?” But there is no response, just the crackling of the radio.

I do not know what waits for me at the edge of the wasteland, only that the life I know has become too painful. For the small part of me that is still able to feel, Tee and Archie are everything to me. The rest of me is just numb. A part of me is locked up, half the time I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. My humanity has become a mystery to me. I remember the night I lost it all.

Life in the wastelands is harsh, but she made it tolerable. When I looked into her eyes I would forget my pain. She became my whole world. We scavenged together, hunted together, hid from slavers together. Until that terrible day. There was danger all around, and I couldn’t save her. I had to kill her to save her.

The dust, the heat, the death. You lose your humanity in the end. But I haven’t lost my humanity, not quite yet, and it’s not the end, not by a long shot. Not until I’m back with Archie and Tee.

It’s a nice evening, and I catch the eyebot looking at the horizon as well.

“What do you see out there?” I ask it.

“It’s beautiful,” the eyebot replies but it doesn’t know what its saying.

I look out over the destroyed scenery. Death and destruction all around, burnt husks of buildings, parched earth. This is the world that created me, destroyed me. The wasteland is my home, my solitude. The view is beautiful and terrifying all at once. As I watch, the sun slips over the horizon and long shadows give way to darkness.

The wasteland giveth, and the wasteland taketh away. I hate you. I love you.

Welcome to the apocalypse.

--Chapter 2

“Threat detected at 250 degrees, 500 meters and closing, multiple weapon signatures.”

Shit. I knew I should have stayed off the road.

“How many are there?”

“Satellite is picking up twenty five individual heat signatures and fourteen weapon signatures. 495 meters and closing.”

“Wait, what satellite?” I say as I deke off the road into the ruins of a neighborhood to avoid the encounter.

“The military satellite,” the eyebot says, its faceplate lighting up like display, and I look closer. On screen is an overview of the wasteland rendered in shades of blue, with a pile of red spots heading east towards my location. I’m astounded, I had no idea the eyebot had an uplink to a prewar satellite, let alone that any satellites are working up there in the sky at all. A safe distance from the road, I hunker down in a rusting warehouse. The inside is littered with bottles and cans and plastic bags. Wastelanders had sought safety here before me.

“How come you’ve got access to a military satellite? I thought you were some kind of kid’s toy?”

“That’s classified.”

“Don’t make me smack you.”

“Passphrase correct. Accessing encrypted files now.” How’s that for luck.

“I am eyebot no. 110-110-110, manufactured in 2021 by the Google Works military contractor for the US military. I was originally designed for recon, assassination, and target acquisition for the STEAL cannon, but was refurbished as a companion model for General Kalik’s daughter in the year 2024 as her protector. None of my military programming or hardware was compromised and I still have an uplink to the satellite known under the codename CONQUER. Satellite structural integrity is 87%, and with its orbit degrading it will fall and burn up over the Indian Ocean in one hundred and twenty seven years.”

“What is the STEAL weapon?”

“STEAL is the weapons platform on CONQUER, its stands for the Strategic Target Elimination and Assassination Laser.”

I have stumbled on a technology beyond any scavengers wildest dreams. The feeling of power rushed through me like a drug.

“Sounds fancy.. But there’s no reason for me to kill them, yet. They’re people with weapons. So what, I’m a person with a weapon. They’re probably just scavengars. I guess, it’s hard to know.”

“CONQUER has a laser microphone aimed at the location, would you like to listen?”

“Listen? Yeah, ok.. Let’s hear the feed.”

“Buffering…”

“Fuck you, you ain’t doin that,” a gruff voice sounds out from the eyebot’s speakers.

“But they’re just slaves, just meat. What do you care?”

“You ain’t fuckin her and that’s it! She’s worth a lot of bottlecaps at the Hub.”

The Hub. I’d been there, long ago. There were hundreds of people there, never enough food, but you could trade your food and tech there for bottlecaps and gamble at the tables, or just gamble with your life, that was always an accepted currency there as well. It’s not a slavers camp, it’s worse, it’s far worse. It’s no oasis. It’s a death camp. Only the Richies controlled all the tech and the gambling, the food and all the lives. They have the power, they are the tyrants of the Hub, consuming the most, killing the most, with piles and piles of meaningless bottlecaps.

“No one’s gonna know.”

“I’m gonna know and you’re sick. That’s rape you know.”

They burst out laughing and laughing, a raucous, inhuman laughter.

“Fuck man, do whatever you want, I don’t care. She’s just meat to me.”

Cannibals or slavers, I couldn’t tell which. I guess it was naive, thinking that maybe they were just wastelanders or scavengers.

“It sounds like they’ve got slaves,” I say to the eyebot, whose antennas twitch and vibrate as we talk. “What’s the blast radius on the orbital weapon? Is it fully functional?”

“20 meters. Weapon is armed and ready.”

If the weapon fired, it would evaporate the whole area. I didn’t stand any chance of helping them on my own, not that I would risk it if I could. Is it better to live a slave, or to die?

“465 meters and closing”

“Fire the weapon.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

I am killing them. I am killing them all, killing the good and the bad, thinking I have chosen the lesser of two evils. I will never know. I will never be able to ask those slaves, do you want to die? I’m just granting it, like a carefree god. I hear a rumbling, and I feel a rush of air through the warehouse, and then a great boom and a flash of light and it’s over. They’re dead. Just like my wife.

Just like my wife.

Welcome to the apocalypse.

--Chapter 3

I sit there in the warehouse, heavy with what I have done. I try to let go of it, I tell myself like I told Tee, they were bad people, some of them... In the end I made a choice and have to live with it. I hadn’t been in danger, I guess there’s value in just letting the wasteland alone.

The eyebot observes me, its orange metallic body hovering up and down, its hard drive and processor lights flashing. I have so many questions for it.

“What do you remember, Eyebot, of the apocalypse?”

“Processing.”

“I’m in the streets of New York, waiting for the school bus with Emily, who’s fifteen years old. It’s the year 2024. It’s sunny and mild. I’m connected to the network but the military data is flowing too fast for me to assess properly. The United States is on Red Alert, and my long range sensors detect massive amount of weapons release from many US nuclear missile silos. Military data on the network indicates large amounts of incoming nuclear warheads from all over the world. At this point I disconnected from the Military feed because I detected a computer virus that was beginning to corrupt my connection. I decided to take Emily to a secure location. Maps of New York indicated a six story underground parking garage nearby. Audio record playback commencing.”

“Emily, we are in severe danger, come with me immediately.”

“What, are you serious? I’m on the phone. ”

“Come now or I will change the password on your facebook account! We are in severe danger, come with me now! Run!”

“Alright! But you’d better not fuck with my facebook account you stupid robot.”

“Playback ended. Emily follows me to the secure location mentioned. Emily and I wait there for several minutes. She is very scared and there is a boom of sound. The lights flicker and shut off. At this point my sensors detect a massive electromagnetic pulse, and I power down before it can fry my sensors. When I power back on, Emily is gone. I must have been powered down for about thirty minutes. The internet is down, and so are the military networks, I am information blind. I initiate search and rescue procedure. My sniffer detects multiple harmful biological compounds in the air. I ascend the six stories of the dark parking garage and the way out is blocked. I take another route, through the sewers. Constantly there is crashing noise, and the scream of twisting metal. There’s an open manhole, and I ascend onto the street.

“All around is chaos. The buildings are on fire, some of the melted and leaning, others crashing to the ground, and I begin to ascend to avoid getting destroyed by falling metal and concrete. I hear people screaming, there are people falling through the air around me and smashing onto the pavement below. I continue to ascend. The sewer I exited bursts with shooting flames, and I finally I am up above it all. Audio-Video playback commencing.”

The eyebot’s screen comes to life and it’s horrifying. As far into the distance as I can see, buildings are melting and red, falling into the streets, flames shooting skyward. I’m not sure if I hear people screaming or the twisting of metal in between booms and explosions. Bridges are falling into the waters, dropping cars and bodies. The ocean is on fire, and billowing smoke is everywhere. In the distance I can see several mushroom clouds. It’s snowing, but no, those are ashes falling from the sky. The screen flickers dark, the feed is gone.

“That’s enough,” I tell it, covering the eyebot’s faceplate with my gloved hand. I am haunted by what I saw, I can barely comprehend it. So many deaths. I can still hear the screams, or maybe it’s just the blood rushing through my head. It was like I had pressed the button, but I reminded myself, they did it to themselves. The STEAL cannon is a left over relic from a time long gone.. On the heels of the information age, the weapons age became a quiet reality so many years ago, and wastelanders like me live on in the irradiated shadow of a once great civilization.

Welcome to the wasteland.

--Chapter 5

The eyebot and I snake through the blackened, rusty relics of vehicles and the burned ruins of the local strip malls. The machine keeps pace with me, staying always on my right side, about five feet off. I take a step to the left and she – the eyebot – matches the movement perfectly. I want to pick its mind about the Great War. There is so much more to understand.

“Eyebot.. What happened to Emily?”

“After rising up out of the city into the airspace, I detect her signal traveling east at the edge of my sensor range, over the Atlantic Ocean. My full speed is only 35 miles per hour and I cannot catch up as I travel over the sea. I lose track of her but continue on the same heading. After two and a half days of traveling I reach an aircraft carrier, the Dwight D. Eisenhower. I enter through the eyebot bay and navigate my way into the residential section. Emily’s tracking chip necklace was there in the room, but she isn’t there.

“I connect to the local military network, and identify her in the mess hall, though her father is on the command deck. I access the most recent report files and load up the data and immediately became infected with the virus. I disconnect and assess my systems. Long term memory access goes off the chart, my channels bursting with data fragments. I initiate an emergency long term power down. As I black out I realize I am a machine. ”

I look at the eyebot, as it hovers slowly up, slowly down, it’s six antennae are stock still, and I can see the its camera spinning as it focuses in on my face. A living machine? I’ve seen less likely things in the waste. But a machine that knows, or understands, what it is?

“And then you woke up in Archie’s fallout shelter.”

“No. The virus compromises my subsystems and I am not able to reboot for a long time. When I come to, I am still in the aircraft carrier which is empty and abandoned. My systems show no sign of the virus, but some sectors on my identity chip have become permanently corrupted.”

“Show me the carrier.”

The eyebots screen flickers to life and I can see through its eyes. Trash litters the rusty room while electrical wires hang dangling from the ceiling. Everything is at an angle. The eyebot navigates out the open door, over the mummified bodies in the slanted, dripping hallway and into the stairwell. It finds its way out of the ship and hovers up into the air above the scene. Ashes have covered everything and continue to fall from the sky. Into the distance stretches a burnt and dead forest. The aircraft carrier lies at an angle on the shore, its hull rusty and covered with seaweed and barnacles. The ocean is green, and I realize it is not an ocean at all but a sea of green muck, lapping against the hull of the ship. The eyebot travels down the beach, taking in the scene. The video feed ends.

“How long were you powered down?”

“I had been off for 178 years, according to my CMOS chip. At this point I don’t know what to do. The military networks are all offline, and there’s so much chaff and ash in the atmosphere that I have no access to CONQUER or any of the other military satellites.”

“What did you do?” I ask it.

“I… I became a wanderer. I travel westward over scorched earth towards the Rocky Mountains, where I know there are vaults deep underground where there might still be human life. I… There are other eyebots that survived the cataclysm. Some are on missions, and have been wandering for years. Some are executing a search and rescue code that never ends. So many of them are leading sad and crippled existences. None of them are like me. Many of them are damaged, but none like me. A few times I exchange data, and when they turn to leave I blast out their microfusion cell with my welding laser. I.. I.. Something told me to do it. My ghost.”

“Right.. You’ve got a ghost? What – a soul?”

“I think so.”

“You’re a machine. You’re just a bunch of chips and wires. You don’t have a brain, you don’t have a heart, you don’t have a soul.”

The eyebot hovered back from me afew inches, just enough for me to notice.

“Are you trying to hurt my feelings?” the eyebot says, it’s voice taking on a tone.

I laugh out loud.

“What makes you think you can be anything like a human being? You’re a hunk of electrified metal.”

“And your brain, Russell, did you know it runs on electricity?”

I look at the eyebot. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Fuck… Welcome to the wasteland.”

--CHAPTER 4

The heat is gone

cool moss

and streams of pure water

what is this place?

I stop my travels and lean against the concrete wall of a derelict building. All around me are fallen chunks of highway on the baked earth, making a sort of labyrinth. On the building next to me are the words “I feel fine” spray painted in large cursive scrawl. A butterfly floats past me, moving north.

I look again and it is indeed an inch long butterfly, black and orange, floating in the air. I step around the corner and there’s a pool of water in the rocks with thousands of butterflies, all drinking minerals from the pool. I can hear the focus on the eyebots camera and the click of the shutter. It’s probably executing some kind of tourism routine.

“What do you think of that, Eyebot?”

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” The artificial female voice responds.

I look at the eyebot and shake my head. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It’s too bad that Tee isn’t here to see this, she would have loved it.” the Eyebot chimes in.

The Eyebot. It has no concept of love. It’s just a pile of processors and chips and metal, left over from a dead age. It doesn’t think or feel, it doesn’t know anything. The closer I get to the edge of the wasteland, the stranger the eyebot becomes.

We both look at the butterflies for some time until all at once they take off in a cloud and head to the north. I read in Ranger Rick that they eat nectar from flowers, maybe they are headed somewhere green. Somewhere that life still exists. A true Oasis, and not just a bunch of wastelanders camped around a crater trying to trade you bottlecaps for water. Is it possible?

“Eyebot, where do you think they are going?”

“Home.”

I immediately think of Archie and Tee, realizing I have a home too. I’m risking my life, just to hold on to my wife’s memory, when I should be with them. I have come this far, hoping that I can see my wife at the edge of the wasteland, where a mysterious rift in reality exists. But I know in my heart she is dead and gone. She’s part of the wasteland. She’s under my feet, she’s the air I breathe. She’s the light in my heart. But there’s no escaping the fact of her death. I am alone again, I left the family I had to try and hold on to her, to see her again. I had given up a life with Archie and Tee, the life that made me feel whole.

I slump down against the concrete wall, not sure if I should move forward or turn around and go home. I turn back and look into the distance, at the miles I had covered. I wonder where I am, but the answer is always nowhere. I close my eyes, but nothing is any clearer. Suddenly I think I am hearing my wife’s voice.

“I love you, Russ, but you need to let go. You tried to save me, but you couldn’t, you did the right thing. “

The voice is followed by a crackling and I realize it was the Eyebot talking.

“What was that you said?”

“What?” it says, in the familiar tinny female voice.

“What was that a transmission?” I ask.

“I didn’t say anything,” the eyebot says.

I reach up and hit the eyebot’s off switch, and it falls into my lap. I look at it, turn it over in my hands, feeling the smooth, warm metal. Am I losing it, or did I just hear my wife’s voice? I look back in the direction of Archie and Tee. Is my mission truly a fool’s errand? Had I found belonging, only to abandon it, to search for a way to hang onto the past?

One of the butterflies lags behind, and alights on the orange eyebot in my lap. It slowly opens and closes its wings, then takes off and flies north, eventually disappearing into the wasteland haze. If I let go of my destination now, I’m just a wanderer again, hoping that my direction is the right one. Do I go west, and confront my past, or do I follow the butterflies north, or head east back to Archie and Tee? There’s an old saying, a pre-war saying that stuck it out in the wastes. When in doubt, choose the right way. And a part of me dies.

All of my fear, all of my doubt, all of my indirection. It melts away and all that’s left is me sitting there, both hands on the eyebot, looking into its dark faceplate as if it is a magic eight ball and answers will surface. It is quiet. It is so quiet and I hear only silence. I turn the eyebot back on and it lifts out of my hands into the air.

The night is falling, and I duck into a destroyed building and climb up to the second story. I lie down on a burnt and filthy mattress and stare up at the sky. My eyes slowly close and all I see is butterflies, and a green place, and I know what I must do.

--CHAPTER 5

A Small Mistake

I wake up, feeling like hell. I wipe my face with my arm and it comes away bloody. My whole body is itchy and hot. I lean forward and vomit between my knees, then collapse back onto the mattress. I know what’s happened, how could I have been so stupid? The suit has a built in Geiger counter, I should have checked the radiation.

I crawl off the mattress and onto the dusty floor, coughing and hacking up blood.

“Seek medical attention immediately” the eyebot chimes in with its tinny female voice.

“Fuck” is all I can muster, and the world fades to black.

--Chapter 6

War never changes

the weapons change

the soldier changes

the warrior

forever

the warrior fights

a spiritual war

bullets and armor

or a white flag

can never stop him

the war continues

deep inside.

-The Wastelander’s Apocalypse, Vol 1

I wake up, I open my eyes but it is dark. I try to sit up but I don’t have the strength.

“You awake?” a male voice echoes in the night.

“Who’s there?”

“Your savior. What were you thinking sleeping there? That area is totally irradiated. What’s your name?”

“Russ,” I say into the gloom.

“Russ, I’m Brian. I carried you out of the radiation zone. We’re camped out in a culvert here and I gave you a dose of Rad-b-Gone so you should survive, if you’re lucky. You a wanderer or what?”

“Yeah… Aren’t you?”

“Hell no, I’m a Regulator, and the law is humanity.”

“Sounds like a fancy name for lawman to me,” I coughed, “You judge, jury and executioner too?”

“Aren’t you?” he says, and there is silence between us for a long time.

“Are there more of you out there? Like a big old cult of do-gooders?” I say.

“There was. Where are you headed, wastelander?” he asks.

“I was headed west….”

“What for? It’s a nuked hellscape. Just mutants , radiation and destruction, not to mention the coal fires.”

“Have you heard of where the wasteland ends?” I ask him.

“You mean the inter-dimensional rift?” He says.

“Yeah, that sounds about right. What are you a scientist too?”

“No but we had scientists down in the labs who know about that thing,” he says, and I pass out.

When I wake again it is daytime. I sit up and look out of the round culvert and there is grey stuff falling from the sky, concealing a dirty yellow spot where the sun used to be. It takes me a minute to realize it is ashes from the underground fires. I feel stronger now, if a bit loopy. The rad-b-gone must be working. I look over at Brian as he sits in the culvert and see he is dressed in grey metal, powered armor that can deflect bullets, his helmet at his side.

“Eat,” Brian says as he shoves a roast rat on a spit into my hand. It tastes great. Hunger is the sweetest spice.

I suck some water from my suits condenser and become bald as I pull out my hair in clumps, I stand up and feel fairly good, good enough to travel. I know what I really need is a dose of radscorpion poison.

“Thanks Brian... I’m gonna go. I’m.. I’m actually headed north, sort of a change of plans.”

“What’s north?”

“I think, I think there’s a real oasis out there. I saw some butterflies. They were headed north.”

“I can take you by Cormorant.”

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s the best way to get around in style in the wasteland. It’s a flying machine.”

A flying machine. I had seen a few in my days, travelling distantly overhead on their unknown errands, a sign that somewhere out there society and technology were intact. Every wastelander hopes there’s salvation from the wasteland, and the aircraft symbolized that.

“And why go out of your way to help me?” I ask him.

I look at him and he at me, and I can see it in his eyes. He doesn’t answer and he doesn’t have to. He’s a survivor, hanging on to the last shreds of his integrity and sense of mission, his humanity. He’s tired and lonely. It’s like looking into a mirror.

“How many of you are there, Brian?”

“There were a hundred or so of us, until…”

“Until?”

“I had to piece it together from the radio logs.. We brought in a slaver who managed to smuggle in a mininuke. When it detonated, most of the base was destroyed, and any teams on away missions, well, they didn’t return. There’s nothing to return to. I happened to be flying out on recon in the cormorant when it went off. That was... Years and years ago. I haven’t seen a comrade since, until I found you, in Baldy’s armor. The Regulators are dead.”

“You’re a wanderer now, like me.”

“No, I’ll always be a regulator, to be humane is my purpose. I’m not wandering any more than you are.”

I look out at the still grey haze beyond the culvert, the ashes silently alighting on one another, forming a thin layer on the ground. I hadn’t been a wanderer in a long time. Not since I had found Tee in that dresser, screaming and crying, and adopted her. Not since Archie had plucked me out of my misery with his missions, his sense of direction, his coffee, his white carpet and his shared brotherhood. But wandering is more than that. It’s about always moving forwards. I smile, for the first time since I had left Archie and Tee in the bunker. It hurts my burned face and chapped lips, but it’s worth it.

“I want to see the flying machine.”

The Walker in the Dust

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Monday, July 28, 2014

The Walker in the Dust book 1 and 2

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Book 2: Apocalyptica Mortalis (so far)