Apocalypse Machine (21 page)

My hobble turns into a jog, and then a run. “Did you hear that?”

“Thirty minutes is plenty of time,” Graham says, walking backwards ahead of me.

“I’ve only got fifteen minutes,” I say, my legs already growing numb from the run. “My suit’s torn.”

“Copy that.” Graham turns away from me and breaks into a sprint.

Is he leaving me?
I nearly shout to him, but he quickly dispels my fears. “I’ll see what I can do about transportation. Try not to slow down.”

As I look at the open green field ahead, factoring in distance, my current speed and how fast I’ll probably be running in a few minutes, I calculate that I’ve got just under fifteen minutes to live. Or, at least, fifteen minutes until I’ve been sufficiently irradiated to suffer a slow, agonizing death.

22

Running through the endless field, I glance back at the Machine as it wades through the gray ash cloud, the front of its body now a silhouette, the red-orange glow of its underside diffused to a dull pink. A massive segmented tail trails the ancient creature, covered in spikes. It sweeps back and forth through the sky, stabilizing the Machine’s enormous body and leaving cyclones of ash in its wake, the way a whale’s movements through the ocean create flat ‘footprints.’
That’s how we can track it,
I think, and then I realize that both Graham and I forgot that part of our mission was planting a GPS tracker on the monster’s back.

Tears form in the corner of my eyes, and I tell myself it’s from the wind or the stinging dust and grit in the air, but I know that’s not true. It’s not even the physical pain wracking my body, as I once again run for my life. It’s because I left them. Again. And I wonder if they know why. The idea that I might die out here, away from my family, with them believing that I am ashamed of our situation, of them, breaks my heart.

I need to get back home.

I need to be with them, and never run away again.

I’ll do anything,
I think, unsure of who I’m mentally conversing with.
Anything.

Aching pain from my thighs clears my thoughts.

I’m not going to make it.

I try to wipe the blurring tears out of my eyes, but my bare hand slaps against the facemask I forgot I was wearing. I nearly take it off, but resist the temptation. The gear weighing me down is also postponing my death from radiation poisoning.

I focus on my legs.
Faster
, I will them.
Faster!

Instead of obeying my will, my knees buckle, and I fall to the ground.

Shit.

I crawl, and I find even that difficult.

Shit!

A roar lifts my head. Two glowing, angry eyes bear down on me. Has the Machine spawned smaller versions of itself to scour the countryside? The eyes are bright enough to make me squint. I sit on my knees, hands raised to block the light, and wait for death.

There’s a grinding of earth mixed with a deep growl. I don’t even flinch as I wait for the end. I’m too tired.

“Get in!” It’s Graham.

I lower my hands to find a red Mazda CX-5 skidded to a stop in front of me, the passenger side door open. Graham is behind the wheel, waving at me to get in. I can’t see his face behind his mask, but his body language conveys all the urgency that’s needed. And I feel it, too. The trouble is, my body is no longer playing along.

I’m about to explain this when Graham is suddenly at my side, hands under my armpits, hoisting me up.
Did I black out?
I’m shoved into the SUV, sitting sideways. The door bangs hard against my butt, as Graham slams it shut. Then he’s beside me again, and we’re moving. I’m tossed back and forth. Unbuckled and lacking the strength to hold on, I’m at the mercy of Graham’s driving, which at the moment has everything to do with speed and nothing with comfort.

A crunching crash and a jarring impact sends a surge of adrenaline through my body and spins me around, so I’m facing forward. There’s a ruined, short, stone wall outside the window, and then we’re beyond it. Tires shriek over pavement and we’re off, racing through the ash-congested Ukrainian countryside.

I glance in the side view mirror, looking back. The giant silhouette is still there, its underside luminous, but as it moves northwest, and we race southwest to escape the radiation, it slowly—very slowly—shrinks in size, fading over the horizon. Normally, at ground level, the average human being can see three miles to the horizon. That distance increases significantly with height, like from the top of a mountain. Miles tall, a walking Mount Everest, the Machine would be able to see a good two hundred miles to the horizon, which also means we will be able to see it rising above the horizon from nearly the same distance. On a clear day. Sans Icelandic ash.

I don’t know if I passed out, or if we’re simply driving near light speed, but the radiation detector chimes happily and declares, “Radiation levels within safe limits.” We’ve moved beyond the invisible killer cloud following the Machine. At least for now.

Graham reaches up and pulls his goggles and helmet away from his head, letting them fall to the floor in the back seat. He then unclips his mask, which falls to the side, but remains attached to his armor. His tan skin glistens with sweat and hints of a Central American lineage—probably on his mother’s side with a surname like Graham. He looks over at me, eyes appropriately wide. “You okay?”

I follow his lead, removing my gear and freeing myself from the mask. “I’m alive.” I glance in the side view mirror again. The Machine is still there, and will be until we’re hundreds of miles away, or it’s fully swallowed by the ash, which is less dense on the ground.

Graham adjusts his side mirror, looking back. “We got lucky.”

His compatriots are still up there, dead and burned on the back of an impossible monster, never to be buried, and possibly being consumed by giant mites.

“Sorry about your friends.”

Graham drives in silence for a minute, absorbing my apology. Then he turns to me and says, “You did good. Just…tell me they didn’t die for nothing.”

“We learned a lot,” I say. “And we have this.” I remove the gelatinous sample from my pocket, holding it up. “It could tell us a lot about what the Machine is.”

“And how to kill it?”

“Let’s hope.”

Tires screech, and I’m pressed against the door. When we come to a stop, I’m surprised to find the rear end of an abandoned car just inches below my window. Ahead of us is a line of vehicles filling both sides of the road, their doors opened, their drivers gone.

Why did all these people give up their vehicles to move on foot?

Graham pulls the SUV onto the shoulder of the road and turns into a driveway. It’s a small house with a well-manicured yard—trimmed bushes, potted flowers and bark mulch—giving off a strong retiree vibe and looking surprisingly American.

“Why are we stopping?” I ask.

“Landline,” he says. “I’d rather call for an evac than try to drive to the nearest U.S. Military base, which is in Bulgaria, a good six hundred miles south of our current position. It would require crossing two, or three, currently closed borders. And that’s assuming your Machine doesn’t turn south. There’d be no outrunning it.”

“
My
Machine?”

“You named it.”

“It was in a—” I shake my head and sigh. I don’t feel like arguing semantics. “It’s not even a good name.”

“We’re all machines,” he says. “Aren’t we? Organic machines.”

I shrug. I’ve met more than a few people that I would describe as robotic, and the Machine certainly carries out its...what? Duty? Function? Purpose? With the same emotionless efficiency of an actual machine. It’s as good a name as any, but I decide to add a little flourish. “Apocalypse Machine.”

“Fuckin’ A.” Graham opens his door and steps out. He looks over the roof of the car, toward the distant hulking silhouette. Now that we’re stopped, I can feel its footsteps vibrating through the ground, each one an earthquake, tripping seismographic sensors around the world. “If your Apocalypse Machine starts getting bigger, honk the horn.”

I still don’t like that he’s identifying the Machine as being mine, but I don’t bother arguing. Instead, I offer a warning. “Try to be quick. When the power station suffers a meltdown—”

“We need to be gone.”

“I was going to say that the landlines might not work either, but yeah, I think I’ve been exposed to enough radiation.” As I say the words, the back of my leg starts to sting, like I’ve been sunburned. I may have been exposed to too much radiation already.

With that, Graham heads to the front door. He tries the knob, finds it locked and with a sudden, fast motion, kicks it in. Then he’s inside and out of view, leaving me alone to ponder whether or not I’ve already been exposed to too much radiation and am already dead—a bona-fide zombie at the actual apocalypse.

23

I sit in the SUV, which has a new car smell mixed with ash and something metallic.
Is that blood?
I check myself over. My legs and ass
are
bleeding, but the wounds are shallow, and the scent in the car smells...rancid, like spoiled beef. The driver’s seat is clean. I swivel around. The backseat is coated in a crusty brown layer of coagulated blood. Someone was killed in this vehicle, but not recently. Probably during whatever chaos led to the traffic jam. I wonder if Graham got rid of the body, or if—

“Hey!”

My head snaps to the house. Graham is standing in the shattered doorframe, waving me in. Before I can complain, he slides back inside the home.

Knowing our lives hang in the balance, I open the door and slide down onto my feet. My calves cramp up and I nearly go down, but I manage to take a step and then another, pausing at the SUV’s hood for a moment. I perform a few quick stretches, which hurts like hell, but limbers me up. A little. My journey from the vehicle to the front door feels like I’m taking the first steps on a planet with twice the gravity, but I make it to the door. And from there, using every wall and surface for support, I make my way through the house to where I can hear Graham cursing under his breath.

When I enter the kitchen, he’s seated at a kitchen table and tearing at a loaf of bread. He munches on it and points to a laundry basket sitting beside a closed door. “Might be something in there that fits you.”

The clothes are a crumpled pile, like they were either headed for the washing machine, or fresh from the dryer. Either way, it would be nice to not have my bloodied ass in the wind. So I dig through clothes, and dirty or clean, I feel relieved when I find a pair of jeans. They’re covered in old, dry paint—a working man’s pants—and they’re two sizes too big, but there’s still a belt in the loops. Definitely dirty.

While I’m changing, Graham dials the phone. He then listens to the phone for a moment and hangs up. “Damnit.”

“No power?” I ask, cinching the belt tight around my waist. The house has no power, but phone lines often have their own power source and continue working even during blackouts. I didn’t see any above-ground phone lines, so they’re underground and maybe still connected.

“I’m having trouble reaching anyone,” he says. “We don’t use phones on mission. And when I call anyone, it’s from my cell phone.”

I wrote an article about the phenomenon just a year ago. With the emergence of cell phones, people are no longer memorizing phone numbers. While most people could recall the numbers of childhood friends, girlfriends and pre-911 police stations, they couldn’t recall the number for their present-day spouse, friends or workplaces. After writing the article, I made an effort to memorize a few important numbers—work, Mina, Bell—but since I never have to actually dial them, I’m not sure I’d remember them. “Have you tried the operator?”

He extends a finger. “One, we’re in the Ukraine. I couldn’t understand the operator, even if someone picked up.” He extends a second finger. “Two, no one is picking up.”

I sit down at the kitchen table and take the phone, as he slides it to me. It’s an old, yellow, plastic phone with oversized buttons. At least it’s not a rotary. I pick up the receiver and start dialing.

“You have to hit zero twice first,” he says.

“Right,” I say. “Ukraine.” I punch zero twice, followed by a one and the area code. Then I freeze up.

“Who are you calling?” Graham asks.

“My wife.”

“Which one?”

“I’m only married to one woman,” I say, wracking my brain for the digits. “I remember the last four digits, but not the first three.” I take a guess, punching in 923, followed by the rest of the number. I wait through a series of clicks and then hear an answering machine. Definitely not Mina. I hang up the phone. “Good news is the phone is working.”

I pick up the phone again and dial, trying 932. I get an automated disconnected message. I hang up and start to dial again, but stop five digits in. I can suddenly see the notebook page that I wrote Mina’s number on. I close my eyes, letting the memory sharpen. “Three, nine, two.” I hang up and redial, using the new numbers.

It rings three times without a pick up. I start to feel discouraged, but then remember that I’m calling a cellphone. The first few rings are phantom rings, while the cell networks on the other side of the planet route the call. They’re designed to make the caller think the connection went through immediately. There’s a click and the ringing resumes, this time for real.

After the second legitimate ring, I hear Mina’s voice, soft and a bit shaken, say, “H-hello?”

“Mina!” I shout.

“Abraham?” My name is followed by a deep breath and then, “You’re alive?”

“You thought I was dead?” My chest constricts, as I picture my sons’ reaction to the news.

“They
told
us you were.”

I nearly explode. We’d been given up for dead and the news delivered to my family in the same time it took Graham and I to escape said death, find a phone and call in. “Mina, listen. You need to tell them. Tell them we’re alive and on the ground in Ukraine…” I look at Graham, and he sees the question in my eyes.

“Fifteen miles south of the LZ.”

“Fifteen miles south of the landing zone. We need an evac, now.”

I hear a sniffle and know she’s crying, something I’ve only seen a handful of times during our marriage. “I don’t understand. You’re still in the Ukraine? Still near…it?”

“We can see it from here.”

“Oh, God,” she says, going from sad to hysterical, which is truly unheard of for Mina. “You need to get out of there. Now.”

“What?” I ask, but I figure she must be thinking of the nuclear reactors not far from here. “We’re far enough from the reactor that we can—”

“It’s not the reactor,” she says. “Russia is attacking. They’re inside Ukraine already. They want to kill it before it reaches Russia. Abe, they’re going to throw everything they have at it. Everything.”

While Russia’s military might is significant, it still pales in comparison to the U.S. in all but one category, which certainly falls within the realm of ‘everything’—nuclear warheads. The largest nuclear warhead, Tsar Bomba, or King Bomb, has a fifty megaton explosive yield, 1400 times greater than ‘Little Boy,’ the bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. The minimum safe distance for King Bomb is twenty-eight miles. At that distance, we won’t be vaporized or immediately exposed to lethal radiation, but when King Bomb was tested, the shockwave still leveled entire towns up to thirty-five miles away. We are well inside the effective kill zone for a weapon like that, and if conventional weapons don’t slow the Machine down—and I don’t think they will—I have no doubt Russia will escalate things faster than the Kardashian family’s bank accounts. And that means a ride is not coming.

“Listen, Mina. Tell them we’re alive. We’re heading south. We’ll try to reach one of the bases in Bulgaria. Tell them we have a sample.” Graham gets up from his seat, taking the loaf of bread and a bowl of fruit with him. He heads for the door, understanding our situation without the need for an explanation. I haven’t given him the details yet, but the expression on my face and the quiver in my voice says enough. He knows that help isn’t coming and that our time is short.

“I love you,” I tell Mina. “Tell Bell and the boys the same.”

“I will. And I love you, too.”

“I’m sorry I left,” I say, and her silence breaks my heart.

“Just come back,” she finally says.

“I’ll find a way.” I don’t mean it to sound dire, but it does, and it is. Getting home is not going to be easy. And who knows what state the world will be in when I do make it back. “Do you know how long we have? Before Russia—”

The roar of a jet answers for her. If it’s a Russian fighter, moving faster than the speed of sound, that means it’s already passed and is closing in on the target. It’s not a bomber, but it won’t be long before Russia figures out that missiles are useless. And if we hear a bomber, it will already be too late.

“Love you,” I say again, and I wish I could somehow tack on a thousand more. “We’re leaving now.”

“Go, Abe,” she says, knowing I’m having a hard time putting down the phone. “Go now.”

“I—I—”

I’m about to say something else. I have so much to say. But then there is a click, followed by a dead line.

She hung up on me?

She
hung up on me!

She’s trying to save your life, idiot
, I tell myself, and then I hobble for the door, following Graham’s lead and grabbing a container of cashews and bag of chips. I’m sure there are more and healthier options in the kitchen, but it’s going to take me long enough to reach the SUV. I hear the engine turn over and for a moment, I fear that Graham is leaving me.

Then he appears in the doorway. “We’ve got company.”

“They’re Russian,” I say, knowing he wouldn’t be able to see, let alone identify, the jets through the ash hovering above us.

“Shit,” he says, clearly understanding that this is bad news for us. He gets up under my left arm and helps me to the SUV. The sound of more jets fills the air with a painful shrieking.

There’s a flare of light above us, followed by a new kind of rushing howl.
They’re launching missiles
, I think, and I watch two bright orbs slide through the ash cloud, closing in on the Machine, its body still tall over the horizon, rising up into the ash. A moment later, more missiles fire—more than I can count—all following the first pair.
How many jets are up there?
I wonder, but I don’t bother considering the answer. I slam my door shut, buckle my seatbelt and then grip the door handle as Graham slams his foot on the gas, tearing from the driveway and into the long field lining the congested road.

We bounce across the field, moving fast enough to make the most seasoned soldier clench. When I relay the information gleaned from Mina, and mention the details of King Bomb to Graham—news to him—he drives even faster. A mile from the small house, we reach an intersection and come across a still smoldering accident involving dozens of cars. The road headed north, which we’re driving alongside, is blocked, but the other directions are clear. The cars no doubt turned around and headed back the way they came, not that anyone would have had a reason to head north. The field ahead ends in a five foot incline that leads to the road. We hit it hard and fast, but at an angle that carries us up and onto the road. Tires shriek as we tear across the pavement and accelerate down the now empty road, heading south.

The sounds of explosions chase us, echoing across the landscape and thumping against the SUV, each shockwave giving us a little jolt and reminding us we’re not yet far enough away. I watch the action in the rearview, hoping that each flash of light will be the last, that the Machine will keel over and die. But it never flinches, and its pace never wavers.

Miles later, we can still hear the battle, but the monster’s silhouette has faded into the ash. I take some comfort from this until I look at the odometer that Graham tripped after I told him about King Bomb. Converting kilometers to miles and then tacking on the roughly fifteen mile distance we started out at, and tacking on another ten for the Machine’s movement, we’re close to thirty miles. Not quite enough to unclench yet.

I’m about to tell Graham this, when a sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard before rolls past us. It’s like a symphony of instruments, amplified to ear-splitting volume and unleashed in a five second blast.

That’s what it sounds like
, I think, realizing that we’ve just heard the Machine’s roar. We’re thirty miles away and facing the opposite direction of its head—assuming it has one. We never saw it, if it does. Flashes of light burst in the sky, some close to where I think the monster is now, many further away, the light barely visible thanks to the ash.