dared look back down onto the plate city, but couldn’t see Crassus. He was deep within the machine by that point, working to set up the 14 KT for detonation.
We made the journey with some difficulty, straining every weakened muscle to keep pace with our projected march. As the sun set, we approached an old ruined building, an adobe structure with thick walls. Night fell quickly, and the ripper dogs were starting to howl in the distance.
By this point, my weakened legs were failing to take steps more often than they were working and I was all but being dragged the last bit of our journey. With his free hand, in the cascading glow of moonlight, Thunfir slammed his fist against the old door of the building.
Inside we found two cots, a table, and two chairs. The old man set me down on the cot further from the window and took one of the chairs for himself. All was silent, all was dark as we waited and rested.
And then night became day as a tremendous man-made sun rose on the opposite side of our house in the distance. I shut my eyes and held my hands over my ears to keep out the tremendous distant blast, but nothing could contain it. I bellowed, screamed to shut out the sound, a scream in that small house set to rival the one Thunfir had let out when he first summoned Kitchains. It was a scream that never stopped, one that would always echo deep within me. And then the blast ceased.
We emerged from the house, just as broken as before, noting a thin black shadow covering everything that the light had touched. In silence we returned inside. It was so quiet. No ripper dogs, no howls of contempt from the wilderness. They had all been silenced. Everything was hiding. This was a new world, one that no longer belonged to them. The sun had risen, and in a flash it was gone. For the rest of the night I heard nothing except my own breathing.
In the morning I noticed the piece of paper sitting on the table where Thunfir had placed it. With shaking fingers I unfolded it, looking down to see the same pyramid of rats Crassus had given me all those months ago in our little apartment over shaped potatoes and black algae noodles. Beneath the lowest column of rats there were words. I read them aloud, awakening Thunfir,
“So many came from one.” Thunfir rose, rubbing a thin layer of dust from his eyes and sat up,
“What is that, anyway?”
“It’s from Crassus,” I said, “It’s about the Plexis. The drones that built it are still up there. It took a long time to make them, but they’re up now, and nothing told them to stop building.”
Thunfir looked long at me, leaning up weakly and groaning as his muscles screamed at him to stop moving. Leveling his tired eyes at me, he asked,
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “I think Crassus believed there would be more things like the Plexis. Things that will start coming to Earth.”
“A second one?”
“And a third, and more than that in time. The legacy of the architects.”
Thunfir rose, taking the piece of paper from me and scrutinizing it,
“So many came from one. Are you sure that’s what he meant?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t expect I could speak for him. Not after all of this. It’s a thing to do with numbers, and numbers aren’t my language. It could mean anything.”
“Ebon,” Thunfir said, leaning his shoulder heavily against the cool wall and staring into my hands, “Given that you’ve lost Crassus, I think it’s likely that you would want to go on a hungry walk alone out there. You don’t know where you’ll end up, and that will tempt you. It should. You can forget about everything, leave us all behind.” He steadied his hand against the wall, pulling himself up with a nearly feeble grunt, “But I would advise against that. I could say we need you, but it would be a lie. I could say you need us. But I don’t know that. The truth is, it will be at least a three day journey to catch up with our little convoy. And I don’t want to spend three days walk without talking to someone. If you are going to head out on your own, make the decision in a few days. Not now.”
One day I will go to my grave never having been baptized. But I do remember when it all started, the morning I awoke and looked down to see the Plexis Shopping Center. I don’t know what’s there now, as I never could bring myself to return. I suppose after so many years, with the radiation dispersed, it now is like it was when we first spied the valley. And if someone hasn’t found a way to tame the fires there, you may still find a field of burning wheat.
The End
Thank you for taking a chance on checking out an indie series. If you enjoyed this first Chronicle of Ebon the Waste, it will soon be followed by two more where I stay true to the aesthetic and humanity of this first one, but plunge characters headfirst into a world of action, peril, and intrigue.
Life and Limb
“What Do You Suppose the Horses Know?” That's the question the insane cigar smoking man asked Adon Still before they tossed him on the back of a modified horse and sent him into the wasteland. His mission is simple. They want an object from before the war. Something that's been building onto itself in the deep heart of space. And if he doesn't do it, they take his bride away.
Adon Still isn't some unstoppable war machine. He's not a hero destined to save the world. And as far as scruples go, he's a cold blooded killer. But when a bullet knocks him down in a world without doctors, he's forced to ask himself how far he's willing to go to beat the clock and save the only bit of decency he's ever seen in this world.
What would you do to save the person you loved? Would you tear yourself apart? Would you kill a man? Would you descend into a nightmarish world that had evolved beyond the need for reason? For Adon Still, the answer is yes.
Life and Limb is the next gripping installment of the Ebon the Waste series as told by a man who has nothing to lose as he wages war on the savagery of the waste around him, and within himself. And if he succeeds, he might discover what’s behind the rumors of an object that impossibly started crafting itself in space. Here’s a quick excerpt I think you’ll enjoy.
My broken leg was out, weighted down by the steel rebar pinning the weakened appendage. With my other leg sliding across the sawdust and the sweat clinging to my hands, I locked eyes with her. I knew she was terrified, but her hand slowly closed around the lever Cyril had used before to push the blade along, to rip into wooden planks as if they were twigs.
"Adon," she said.
"Do it!" I screamed through thick spittle, contorted tension flooding my reddened face, blurring my vision. I gripped the steel chain behind me, wrapped around the back edge of the table. My heart was thumping in my ears, beating like the drums of a death cult in the throes of ecstasy. My fingers were stretched above me, tracing the chain's rivets and locks, trying to focus every bit of my awareness far away from what was about to happen. Locked in that moment I screamed again, "Do it now!"
In a single sickening crack I lost all capacity to form memory.
They say my screams woke up everyone in town. They say it went out into the waste, woke up an army that had been sleeping for nearly a generation in the dust. They say, the storytellers, that the army rose from it with weapons in hand, mistaking that single sustained cry for the sound of a whole war being fought inside one man.
They're all liars.
Also, available on Amazon
Rustbaby Wonderland
Her name is Detende, and she is the master of the Rustbaby Wonderland. It is a doomed place, but one which lives in an uncharacteristic harmony thanks to her. But as the mysterious - and possibly omniscient - narrator describes the events happening around him with the cold humor of a machine, it becomes clear that this perfect peace she has managed to enforce will soon be disrupted by an unstoppable clash of wills.
But what is the machine telling this story? And why has an army gathered at the bottom of the Mesa known as Rustbaby Wonderland, convinced Detende is the most dangerous person in the world?
Rustbaby Wonderland is the compelling conclusion to
the Ebon the Waste Trilogy, and much like “Life and Limb,“ it pulls no punches when it comes to the far reaching consequences of betrayal in a merciless scorched Earth. Here’s the first bit in that story.
The Rustbaby Wonderland is awake before dawn. Six shipper men are distributing small loaves of nut bread to the various performers. Today's show will be postponed yet again, but foragers are readying themselves to descend to the spiral path to gather butternips. They take care not to walk all the way to the mesa's base.
Detende, self-described daughter of God is sitting in her tent. Her hands are cradling the head of an oafish monster of a man with five hundred milligrams of hardware embedded to the base of his spine. Thermal imaging indicates a core temperature of 106.2 degrees. She won't ask her father for drought yet. Now she's asking for something else.
"Please don't let him die," she whispers as her eyes tighten shut. She says this, but no one seems to hear.
I hear. I perceive everything. My attention turns down to the base of the mesa where I look impossibly out into the horizon.
Beyond a siege line of grey uniformed men, men who don't dare bring their weapons to the mesa's top, I can see three riders approaching. The center rider has blue eyes, which I stare into even though he's a flicker on the horizon.