Apocalypse Machine (22 page)

Those are jets exploding,
I think. The Machine has just defended itself, decimating warplanes and probably everything in front of it for miles, with soundwaves.

There’s a tap on my shoulder, and I turn to Graham. He’s shouting at me, but I can’t hear him.

“What?” I shout back, but I can’t hear myself, either. My ears ring with a droning high-pitched squeal.

He shouts again, and I try to read his lips, but I stop seeing his mouth when his face lights up as though the sun has suddenly burst through the ash. I start to look back, but Graham grasps my face, shoves it forward and then pushes my head down between my knees.

The nuclear shockwave strikes us a second later.

The SUV is lifted off the ground and tossed end-over-end. I feel the powerful force slam through my body, but I don’t hear a thing. I see the ground below and the gray sky above several times. We land on the roof, which folds in and nearly strikes my head. The SUV spins several times, stopping so the front end faces north. It gives me a clear view of a mushroom cloud, rising forty miles into the atmosphere, from the back of the still standing Apocalypse Machine.

24

“Why are we landing?”

I look out the helicopter’s side window. The land beneath us is dry and barren, dust billowing out around us. There are homes in the distance, and people standing outside them—the men wearing scarves, the women dressed in hijabs. They’re watching us, but not moving.

“One doesn’t simply fly into Israel,” Graham says.

“Did you just web meme your reply?”

He smiles.

“You know that just about every character Sean Bean plays gets killed, right? And the character you just meme-quoted was turned into a pincushion.”

His smile fades. “We made it this far.”

He’s right about that. Neither of us believed we’d make it out of the Ukraine alive. While I did suffer some mild radiation sickness, it faded faster than the lump on Graham’s head. He’d been knocked unconscious when the SUV flipped. I dragged him out of the vehicle, and then for several miles on gelatinous legs, watching the mushroom cloud billow upwards and to the east, mingling with ash and the radioactive fallout plume rising from the nuclear power plant’s remains. And within that death cloud, the undaunted Machine lumbered on its way, headed for Russia.

I can only guess where it is now. The few people we came across on our journey—most of whom didn’t speak English—knew far less about the Machine than we did, but they revealed that entire populations, including border guards, were migrating south. Our drive to Bezmer Air Base in Bulgaria was mostly uneventful. Most towns were deserted. Those that weren’t, were occupied by unsavory people who’d made themselves kings without subjects. A few tried to stop us, but not one of them was prepared to face down an Army Ranger.

The most poignant moment in our trip was our arrival at Bezmer. No guards at the gate. No planes in the hangers. No one home. The base had been evacuated. Everything capable of making the long flight home was gone. Despite the power being out, we tried to make landline and satellite phone calls, but couldn’t get through. The short range radios in the vehicles picked up a lot of people talking, but no one was speaking English. Alone in the wrong part of the world, we absconded with a Bell UH-1Y Venom utility helicopter that had been left behind. We also took several containers of fuel, a dozen MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) and several gallons of water. We flew during the day, landing only to refuel or to eat and sleep. Sometimes we had to fly out of our way to find a safe place to land. Once we reached Turkey, the land below us was filled by an endless sea of refugees, all headed south.

We flew low to avoid radar detection, but that also meant I was able to look into the haunted eyes of millions of people who would never see their homes again, and were likely to perish on their journey into foreign, probably hostile lands. We saw evidence of battles and mass killings along the way, but if Turkey had tried to keep people out, they’d failed. The country had been overrun.

And after all of that, we arrived here. “Where are we?”

“Lebanon,” he says, as the skids touch down on the hard earth. The already slowing rotor blades are casting dust into the air around us.

“Lebanon,” I say. “Great. Nothing bad ever happens here.”

“Much closer and Israel would shoot us down. Remember, the country we’re trying to enter is the one nation in the world that excels at keeping people out. When all those refugees we flew past reach Israel, they’re going to bounce off her border and go right around.”

“And what makes you think we’re going to have any more luck?”

“We have the golden ticket,” he says.

“Your dry wit and charm?”

He looks at me, deadpan, so I know it’s not a joke. “You. We have you.”

With the chopper set on firm ground, Graham unbuckles and reaches into the back, recovering two backpacks that we filled at the air base. Next he recovers two M4 assault rifles and two M9 Berettas, also recovered from Bezmer. I’m about to comment that the weapons seem like too much for one man to carry when he hands one of the rifles to me.

“What’s this for?” I ask.

“We’re in Lebanon, remember?” He pushes his door open, letting in a blast of dry heat. “Even when the rest of the world is kicking up its feet, the Middle East is a volatile place.”

“I’ve never shot a weapon like this.”

He reaches over and yanks back the slide, chambering the first round. “Just point and shoot. If you don’t intend on shooting, don’t put your finger on the trigger. Now gear up. It’s about four klicks to the border.”

Klicks are 1000 meters. Four thousand meters works out to about two and a half miles. My legs still ache, but I should have no trouble covering the distance, and I guess that, with our gear, we’ll reach the border in forty minutes.

I’m tossing my backpack around my shoulders when I see Graham go rigid on the far side of the chopper. He’s like a dog who’s suddenly caught a scent. “What is it?” I ask through the chopper’s two open doors.

“Engines,” he says without looking back.

I follow his gaze to the distant hillside, which is covered in several single-story, flat-roofed homes. The people who had been watching us are now gone. A dust cloud rises up on the side of the hill, moving down, the vehicle still unseen.

Graham slides the chopper’s side door open the whole way, revealing our half-used supply of fuel. He unscrews a single container and tips it on its side. Pungent fuel glugs out, covering the floor and filling every crevice. Then he steps back, draws his M9 sidearm and fires a single round onto the fuel-soaked floor. The resulting spark ignites the fuel, the blaze melting through the remaining containers, which erupt with a
whump
. I step back from the inferno, and when Graham runs past me, I turn and follow him.

I’m about to complain about running when I hear the incoming engine revving louder. Graham leads us downhill and around a rise, turning toward the border and running only a few steps before shouting, “Lose the pack!” He sheds his backpack, which contains food, water and survival gear. I do the same, and I’m able to double my pace. This is a Hail Mary play. If we don’t get past the border, we’re going to be a couple of Americans, with guns, in the Middle East.

Despite this do-or-die tactic, I feel strangely calm. I’ve survived an erupting volcano, landed on the back of a living mountain, been pursued by oversized mites, been cooked by radiation and walked away from a nuclear detonation. A couple of guys in a truck seem almost boring.

But it’s not
a
truck. It’s three. And one of them is a ‘technical,’ meaning it has a very large machine gun mounted on the roof. The other two are pickup trucks, the backs holding six men each, all wielding AK-47s, the most common rifle in the world.

Graham ducks down behind a large rock and motions for me to do the same. I’m about to ask why we’re stopping when he says, “They haven’t seen us yet.”

All three vehicles turn for the blazing chopper, engines roaring as they approach the scene. When they’re no longer in view, Graham breaks from our hiding position like an Olympic sprinter. I do my best to match his pace, but he puts a little distance between us with each long stride.

After a few minutes, I start to gain on him again, but not because he’s getting tired; he’s stopping to look back. His brow doesn’t furrow until his fourth stop, when I’m within twenty feet of him.

“Here they come,” he says, and then he takes off again. “Just keep moving!”

When he leaves me in the dust, I realize he had actually been holding back.

The sound of engines grows loud behind me. They’ve definitely seen us, and they’re probably a little upset about Graham torching the chopper, which had clear U.S. markings, including a flag.

I nearly dive to the ground when Graham spins around, drops to one knee and raises the M4. But he waves me on and then takes aim. I nearly fall when he squeezes off a three-round burst, and then again when I look back to see the lead pickup truck tilt to one side, its suddenly flat front wheel digging into the hard-packed dirt. The technical swerves around the disabled vehicle and barrels toward us. When the man behind the machine gun takes aim, I turn forward again and push myself faster. The loud clatter of machine gun fire tears through the air behind me. A line of pock marks explodes in the desert, ten feet to my right, tracing a line heading for Graham. But the Army Ranger doesn’t flinch, not even when the line of rounds scores the earth beside him. He calmly adjusts his aim and fires again.

The machine gun falls silent.

Graham aims and fires one more time. An engine roars. I glance back to see the machine gunner slumped over. The windshield has three holes, the inside of the cabin splattered with blood, the driver nowhere to be seen. The way the vehicle swerves to the side and speeds away uncontrolled makes me think he’s fallen over the steering wheel, the dead weight of his foot on the gas.

“Move it!” Graham shouts, waving me on before standing up and running to the top of a steep rise. Bullets tear through the air behind us, fired wildly by the men now standing in the truck bed. But Graham doesn’t fire back. Instead he holds out his M4 and drops it. He draws the M9 next and drops it as well.

“Lose the weapons,” he says as I draw near.

I shed the weapons, happy to have not fired them, and I join Graham at the top of the rise. I nearly charge down the other side, but Graham catches my shoulder, stopping me in place, ignoring the bullets buzzing past us. He raises his hands, and I do the same.

“Slowly,” he says, and he approaches the thirty-foot-tall, concrete wall three hundred feet ahead.

“A little closer than four klicks,” I say.

He nods, but says nothing, his eyes flicking back and forth, watching the men standing behind the wall, aiming an array of weapons straight at us.

The truck engine roars loudly behind us, close enough to run us over, but the sound is quickly replaced by the grinding of locked tires on the hard earth. Most of the Israeli soldiers guarding the wall adjust their aim at the vehicle. I don’t turn to look, but I hear frantic Arabic shouting and hands slapping against the metal roof. The engine revs again, but this time fades. The relief I feel is soured when the men on the wall redirect their attention to us.

“Are those flamethrowers?” I ask, seeing several men with distinctive fuel tanks on their backs. They really are prepared to fend off hordes of refugees. Not even desperate people will allow themselves to be set ablaze. Given the surprised expressions on the faces of the men on the other side of the wall, we’re the first ones to risk it.

When a stream of flame jets down ahead of us, setting a patch of brush on fire, Graham stops. “We’re Americans,” he shouts. “U.S. Army. We’re seeking safe passage to—”

“No,” one of the men shouts. “No passage. Border closed.”

“We’re allies,” Graham says.

“Your military left you,” the man says. “Left all of Israel. Returned home.”

“Damnit,” Graham whispers, glancing at me. “We bugged out. No wonder they’re on edge. Apocalypse Machine or not, they’re still surrounded by enemies.” He looks back up at the soldier. “We’ll be killed out here.”

“You’ll be killed if you come any closer.”

“We have a sample,” I shout, and Graham gives me the biggest ‘what the fuck’ face I’ve ever seen. Apparently, he wasn’t ready to play that card yet.

The soldier looks confused for a moment, and then asks. “Sample of what?”

Graham’s face is still warning me to stay quiet, but the Apocalypse Machine isn’t a U.S. problem. It’s a global problem. “Golden ticket,” I say to Graham, and then turn to the soldier. “The creature. My name is Abraham Wright. I’m a scientist sent by President McKnight.” I point my finger at Graham and myself, waggling it back and forth. “We’re all that’s left of—”

The soldier turns away, consorting with one of the other men. He picks up a radio and has a conversation we can’t hear.