Apocalypse Machine (42 page)

44

Barren brown stone stretches out around me. It looks like Arches National Park, sans the arches. There’s no life here. I can feel it. I can taste it. This is how I’ve pictured Mars, devoid of even a hint of life. On Earth, organic material litters everything, adding flavor, even in the remotest locations, whether still living or long decayed.

My mind has been kidnapped once again, thrust into a vision. Communion with the Devil himself. I should feel afraid, but I feel nothing, as empty as the landscape.

“Your future denied.”

I spin around toward the deep voice and find more rocky terrain.

My future?
I wonder, looking at the emptiness. But that doesn’t feel right. It’s not talking about me. This is Earth’s future. Or was.

“This is what you were preventing? This is why you had to wipe out the human race?” I turn in circles, addressing the emptiness.

When I receive no reply, I try to control the vision, to reform it. But this is still not a lucid dream. I’m not in control here.

“You are not in control, anywhere.”

The voice is right behind me. I turn with a gasp.

Nothing.

A light twinkles in the distance, flickering in the light of a sun that does not exist here. And yet there is daylight. And blue sky.

Because this isn’t real
, I think, eyes still on the blinking light, beckoning me forward.

I’m halfway there when I realize I’m walking.
When did I start walking?
I don’t remember deciding to start.

Control
, I think.
I’m not in control.
I’m just along for the ride.

“Your will is free,” the voice says, and this time I don’t bother looking for its source. “There are choices to make.”

“What do you want?”

“To walk with you.”

“I don’t see you.” I look back and forth, wondering if the black figure from my previous visions is going to make an appearance. “You’re not here.”

“I am.”

“Then show yourself, Machine,” I shout. “Speak to me plainly. Tell me what you need. Tell me how to save my people. My family.”

I scuffle to a stop, somehow crossing the great distance to the flickering light in just a few steps. A lump of stone juts from the ground. Beneath its shadow is a cave entrance, blocked by a door. A key, looped around a twine cord, dangles from the knob, glinting light with no source. It’s shiny, gold and new. Completely out of place in this primal, lifeless place.

“Life is not yours to give or take,” the voice says.

This statement riles something inside me. I scoff and say, “And it’s
yours?
”

“YES.” The reply booms across the land, shaking the solid stone beneath my feet.

I wait for more, but an all-consuming silence follows. Minutes pass, and my impatience grows. The key taunts me.

“Fine,” I grumble, taking the key and unlocking the door, making a show of my reluctance. “Let’s walk.”

The door opens to reveal a long, dimly lit tunnel carved into the stone. A smooth, stone staircase leads down. I look for the light source, but see none. It’s like looking at a movie. The scene is lit, but you can’t see the source.

It’s not real
, I remind myself, and I start down the stairs. “You usually don’t make me do this much work when we talk.” The echo of my voice is the only reply.

The staircase appears to stretch on forever, but I find myself at the bottom three steps later. The cave opens up into a tall cavern. The walls look like vertical waves frozen in time, like a photograph of a curvaceous woman dancing, intercut by horizontal lines of strata. Beams of light stab down through holes in the ceiling, illuminating airborne dust and a single figure seated at the center of the cave.

The hooded man’s back is to me, all features hidden by a black cloak.

“Here you are,” I say, and I realize my mistake without being told. The black figure from my previous visions was impossible to look at directly. And its body seemed almost immaterial. Flowing. Like smoke. This person looks very solid and present. I rephrase the sentence. “Who are you?”

“The first born.” It’s the formless voice still speaking to me, not the figure.

“What are you?” I ask.

“An offering.”

I point at the cloaked figure. “I wasn’t speaking to him.”

“Expiation.”

The word throws me for a moment. It was uncommon in the world before, and one I’ve certainly not heard in the past fifteen years. It takes me a moment to delve into my former life as a writer and recall the word’s meaning. “Atonement. For what?”

But there is no answer. None is needed. I get it. “Because this is what we would have made of the world. Lifeless nothing.”

“And yet you still expect to inherit it. To claim it. To take it.”

Oh, shit,
I think. It knows why we’re here. Why I’ve returned. Of course it does. It can probably see all my thoughts. What we’re doing. What the plan is. Is it offering expiation because it fears the plan will work? Or is it genuinely giving us—giving
me
—a chance to show we’ve changed our destructive ways? Could triggering the bomb doom us, or set us free? Is my response, here and now, the litmus test for the human race?

“Make your choice,” the voice says.

I consider the options, weighing the odds of our mission’s success against the odds that its offer is an honest one. Would a creature as ancient and powerful as this resort to lying or trickery? And what about our previous encounters? It showed me a future with my family, and I have seen the first generation of them with my own eyes. But how did it know I would survive? That
they
would survive? Coincidence or grand scheme? Why bother communicating at all? If its purpose truly is the complete eradication of mankind, the only reason to speak to me would be if it derived some kind of sadistic pleasure from my confusion. But again, that doesn’t make sense.

“I’ll do it,” I say, choosing what I think is the right path. Deep down, beyond my concerns for the people I adore, there is a scientist who knows that the world was dying, that humanity was responsible for the sixth great extinction, and who understands how the Machine’s actions have already spared the planet from the fate I’ve been shown.

“I’ll do it,” I say again. “Sacrifice.”

“Look upon the offering.”

I step around the seated figure, giving it a wide berth, not fully trusting the Machine, despite it providing a chance for redemption. Could it really be that benevolent? After destroying nearly all of humanity and replacing us with new life, could the Machine be willing to give us another shot, based on my actions? Granted, I’m pretty sure I’m the only human being it’s come into direct contact with on multiple occasions. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised it’s deemed me the sole representative of homo sapiens. What other choices does it have?

Standing in front of the hooded figure, I still can’t see his face.

“If you’re screwing with me...” I don’t complete the threat. It’s hollow, and the Machine surely knows that, even more than I do.

I reach out, pinching the loose hood between my index finger and thumb. The fabric is rough, and cold. With a flick of my wrist, I flip the hood up and over the shaved head.

“No,” I say, stumbling back and falling onto my ass. “No, God damnit.”

The man staring back to me, with striking Asian features and dark brown eyes, is my son, Ike. The wound on his cheek is a scar, like it was in the first vision, matching the wound now on his cheek.

How did it know?

“How did you know!”

Darkness flows down from the ceiling, flowing behind Ike. I divert my eyes as though staring into the sun itself, watching the flowing darkness spread out behind my son, dark tendrils wrapping around him, claiming him.

“Expiation,” the Machine’s spirit says. “Make your choice.”

The darkness surges at me. A black hand wraps around my face, shoving me down onto my back. It shouts again, in time with impact. “Eligo!”

I jolt upright and am accosted by peals of thunder, stinging rain, the pounding of firing weapons and screaming voices. In the distance, I see Ike, hunched over the bomb, setting it to explode. Edwards is already running back toward me, and the others are now fully engaged with grown-up Crawlers.

Eligo.
I don’t need someone to translate the word for me this time. I understand it easy enough.
Choose.

“Ike,” I say, knowing he can hear me over the comms.

“Dad!” He glances back at me. “Are you okay?”

“Fine.”

“You were speaking,” he says. “Latin, I think.”

“It happens,” Graham says, sounding calm despite the near constant din of gunfire. “What did it show you this time?”

“It?” Edwards asks. He’s nearly reached me and looks confused.

“The Machine speaks to him,” Mayer explains. “When he touches it. Did you touch it?”

I look down at my hands, still submerged, still in contact. “I still am.” Lightning cuts through the sky, reflecting in the water beneath me, forcing my eyes shut for a moment.

“What did it say?” Ike asks.

“That I need to make a choice.”

“What choice?”

“Whether or not to let you stay.”

The conversation falls silent. So do the guns. Even the storm seems to be contemplating my words.

Then it all starts back up again, like a bomb, like
the
bomb.

“What’s he talking about, Sergeant Major?” Gutshall asks.

“The bomb,” I say. “We can’t trigger it remotely, can we?”

“No,” Ike confirms.

Edwards arrives and offers me his hand. He pulls me up and then rushes to join the others, who have formed a defensive line, tracer rounds streaking across the glistening landscape.

I look back at Ike, hunched down beside the bomb, waiting to do his duty. Waiting to kill the Machine, and for it to allow him to do so. That’s the sacrifice. That’s the change in heart it’s looking for. The future it promises can only come if I sacrifice my son.

Plagued by doubt, I make my choice. “Cauldron, this is Science Guy. Do you copy?”

“This is Cauldron,” the Osprey pilot replies. “We have eyes on you.”

I search the chaotic sky and see the plane cutting a wide circle around our position.

I look at Ike again. He’s far away and hard to see through all the rain, but I see his nod. “You better be telling the truth,” I say to the miles-wide armored plate beneath my feet. I follow them by the hardest words I’ve ever had to say. “Cauldron... We are ready for Evac. Come and get us.”

45

“Negative, Science Guy. LZ is crawling.” The plane cruises past overhead, tilted to the side, so the pilot can look down at us. Lightning streaks above it, turning it into a silhouette. “Clear the area.”

I don’t like it, but he’s right. The Machine is moving forward, and hundreds of feet up and down with each step. Not crashing into the massive plates, while avoiding the towering spines sweeping back and forth, viewing the world through a rain spattered windshield and being blinded by near constant lightning, is already going to be a challenge. If the Osprey is attacked, we’re not leaving.

And part of me is content with that. I don’t want to leave Ike.

But he’s making this sacrifice for our family, and I should honor that by returning to them, and making sure that vision comes to fruition. He has two sons. His family will grow. And I’ll be there to protect them.

I free the XM25 assault rifle from around my back, chamber the first explosive round and shout, “All right, you heard the man. Let’s clear some room!”

I falter for just a moment, when I look up at the scene before me. Lightning flickers, giving us a strobe-light view of the incoming creatures, still visible in the moments of darkness because of their luminous undersides. White-hot tracer rounds zip away from Graham, Mayer, Gutshall and Felder, who have formed a defensive line fifty feet away. Most of the rounds deflect away from the bulletproof shells, but the rest of the explosive rounds perform as advertised, bursting on contact, or at a predetermined range. But they’re not even slowing the large creatures still barreling toward us, aiming beyond us, at Ike.

I glance back at my son, still working on the bomb, securing it in place and entering the passcode that will allow him to arm it. “Ike, if they get past us...”

“I’ll take care of it,” he says. “I just need another minute.”

I catch up to Edwards, who’s running to join the others at the defensive line. He looks afraid. Maybe because we’re in the worst possible situation imaginable, but I think it has more to do with leaving his team’s leader behind. Ike’s confidence fueled these men and kept them alive behind enemy lines for years. So I try to be that for them now. “Graham. Shock and awe!”

I see him reach to his chest and pluck away two small devices. “Flashbangs out!”

He tosses the two grenades at the oncoming wave. The closest of the Crawlers is just fifty feet away. It will arrive in seconds. I raise an arm over my visor to block the light, trusting distance and the helmet’s audio filter to protect my ears. I see the flash around my arm, and I hear the boom as a loud pop.

When I look up, nothing has changed.

“They’re not Scionic,” I shout. The strategies we’ve developed over the years for dealing with the new life forms evolving on Earth might not be effective against these creatures, which have evolved over billions of years, hatching and growing for generations with each rise of the Machine.

What can we do?

How do we fight them?

“You son-of-a-bitch!” I shout at the Machine. “I made my choice! Call them off!”

I take aim at the nearest Crawler, unleashing six rounds. I feel the heat and shockwave of each explosive round bursting against its shell, having no effect. I turn down in defeat, and that’s when I see the solution reflected in a puddle beneath the Crawler’s glowing underside. The orange light’s source is a twisting coil of loose flesh, reminiscent of the Machine’s belly.

I pull the trigger, firing from the hip, the recoil nearly yanking the weapon from my hands. Three rounds zip toward the creature, the first two exploding against the front of its carapace, the third sliding beneath the body, striking the Machine’s hard shell, and exploding.

The explosion tears into the creature’s softer underside just as the Machine begins a downward step. The combination of the explosion’s upward force and the ground dropping away propels the creature over our heads, trailing a luminous arc of gore.

“Aim beneath them!” I shout.

As one, the six of us redirect our explosive rounds to the gap between the Crawlers and the terrain beneath them. The battle shifts in an instant, as the creatures are sent spinning through the air, their insides hollowed out. But for each Crawler that falls, several more take its place. And our ammunition supply is limited.

Lightning strikes the Machine’s back just to our left. I turn away from the earsplitting crack and the blinding light to see that we’re being flanked. Five Crawlers are nearly upon us. I open fire, launching two of the creatures into the air, their guts spiraling away, and slapping against Felder’s visor, blinding him.

He stands and lowers his weapon, confused by the sudden blindness caused by the viscous, glowing gore blocking his view. “What the hell?”

I kill one more of the creatures and mortally wound another, now twitching and writhing in circles. But the fifth reaches Felder before I can shoot it. “Look out!” I scream.

Gutshall hears the warning and turns to fire at the creature, but his weapon just clicks when he pulls the trigger. He’s out of ammo.

The Crawler skewers Felder’s chest, the powerful limbs punching through his armor with ease.

With the dead man stuck on its limbs, the Crawler rears up, twitching its leg, trying to shake Felder’s body free.

“Felder!” Gutshall shouts, launching himself at the creature’s underside. He draws a knife from his waist and plunges it into the thing’s gut, swiping the sharp blade upward. A wave of innards spills out over his body, but he keeps cutting and pushing. The Crawler’s limbs jut out straight, gripped by pain and then death. With a final shout, Gutshall pushes the dead Crawler onto its back.

Covered in gore, he slumps down beside Felder, trying to pull him free, totally unaware that another Crawler has reared up behind him.

I take aim for the creature’s underside, but to hit it, I would have to put a bullet through Gutshall’s chest. I don’t even have time to shout a warning.

The Crawler’s mandibles close over Gutshall’s head, and with a quick bite, severs it from his body. I nearly vomit into my facemask as Gutshall’s callsign: Dim Reaper, shown in my visor’s heads-up display, slides into the monster’s gullet, following the helmet’s signal. But my horror turns to fear when I raise my weapon to fire and it’s knocked from my hands by one of the Crawler’s flailing limbs. It lunges over the bodies of Gutshall, Felder and its fallen comrade, two limbs raised, ready to plunge into my chest.

I stumble and trip, falling hard on my back, defenseless. I fumble for the knife on my side, but fail to pull it free, and even if I did, I don’t have the reach or speed to fend off the monster.

But someone does.

Three rounds punch into the Crawler’s exposed underside, exploding inside the creature. A wave of guts and shattered limbs fall atop me while the shell is launched back, slamming into the next Crawler intent on killing me.

I scramble back to my feet, wiping at my visor, letting the torrential rain help clean me off.

“You alright?” Ike asks, his voice clear in my comm despite the distance between us, the storm’s roar and the cacophony of gunfire.

I turn and see him facing me, XM25 raised to his shoulder.

“Thanks,” I say. “Felder and Gutshall—”

“Did their duty,” Ike says. “And I’m ready to do mine. You need to bug out. Now. Cauldron, what’s your status?”

“We can attempt a mobile pickup,” the Osprey pilot listening in says. “That’s the best we can do, and we’ll only get one pass. Incoming in one mike, half a klick east from your position.”

I look to the sky and see the Osprey banking toward us, the dual-prop rotors in their upward position, allowing the vehicle to fly like a helicopter.

“Frags out!” Graham shouts, as he and Mayer roll a half dozen fragmentation grenades at the oncoming Crawlers, now climbing over the bodies of their dead to reach us.

I turn and run with Graham, Mayer and Edwards, only to be slapped down by the concussive force of all those grenades. I’m yanked back to my feet a moment later and shoved from behind by Mayer. “Move it, old man!”

Did she not even fall?
And here I thought I’d been toughened up.

While the three soldiers take turns running, reloading and firing, I sprint ahead, weaponless.

A quick look back reveals the Osprey swooping down, a hundred feet above the action. Landing would be impossible. The Crawlers would set upon the plane before it could lift off again. Beneath it, the monsters continue their pursuit, slowed by the explosive gunfire peppering the frontline, but not stopped. A flash of lightning reveals a moving torrent of the creatures, stretching as far as I can see. The Crawlers haven’t just been growing, they’ve been multiplying.

Gunfire draws my eyes back to Ike. He’s far to the right, hunched by the ledge where one plate overlaps another, firing up into the gut of a Crawler that approached from the east. A fresh cascade of lightning, streaking through the clouds above, reveals what lies ahead. Crawlers. Hundreds more, rushing to meet the wave pursuing us like the two walls of Red Sea water that crushed the Egyptian army in Cecil B. DeMille's
The Ten Commandments
.

But we have something Ramses didn’t have.

“Here comes the ladder,” Cauldron’s pilot says.

I look up and back to see a rope ladder unfurl from the Osprey’s side door. It drops down, twenty feet above the horde. Several of the creatures leap for it, but they fall short, either not strong enough to make the jump, or beat down by the twin rotors’ wash.

The Osprey roars past me, still descending as the Machine reaches the apex of its step. “Go, go, go!” the pilot shouts.

The first rung of the ladder descends right beside me, and it’s about to pass me. I reach out, hooking my fingers around the bottom rung, and then suddenly I find it yanked tight in my hand.

My feet leave the ground.

They’re pulling up?

“What are you doing?” I shout.

“It’s not us,” the pilot replies.

It’s the Machine, dropping down as it takes another step, moving ever closer to the Yellowstone caldera.
How far away are we? How long has it been?
Time feels surreal and slow, but we must be nearly past the point of no return. I look down and forget all my questions. I’m hanging from a ladder now a hundred feet above the surface, and growing. The illusion is that we’re ascending, but the tug on my arms remains steady, and I’m able to pull myself up.

The gun battle shrinks away beneath us, but keeps moving.

“Maintaining speed and course,” the pilot says. “We’ll be here when you come back up. But that’s your last chance.”

I’m about to argue, when I get a good look at the scene from above. There are Crawlers incoming from all directions. The mass approaching from ahead will reach the others around the same time the now-ascending landscape reaches us. If the others don’t get on the ladder then, they never will.

The battle rushes back up, and my mind says that we’re going to crash, but the massive body slows at the top of its step, giving Graham and Mayer precious seconds to leap onto the ladder.

Graham and Mayer, but not Edwards.

I look for Edwards, expecting to find a torn-apart body, but instead I find him sprinting toward Ike and the bomb. “Edwards, what are you doing?”

“You need time to reach the minimum safe distance, sir,” Edwards says.

“He’s right,” Graham says. “Cauldron, you are good to go!”

I grip the rope ladder as the Osprey ascends and peels away. After looping my arms around a rung and linking my hands, I look down expecting to see Graham and Mayer clinging to the ladder below me.