Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

The cracking again, a branch giving way, maybe an entire tree. And a new sound, a grinding, like machinery that had seen better days. In the woods, a shape, a big shape, backlit by the ship’s red and green and blue lights.

George slipped back down. He looked to Arnold. Shivering Arnold, old Arnold. “ Why ?” George hissed. “Why didn’t we run?”

“IR,” Arnold said. “Like The Terminator. ”

“ Predator, ” Bernie said. “Like Predator, Dad.”

Arnold’s body trembled horribly, like an invisible hand had him between giant fingers and was rattling him like some child’s toy.

“Heat . . . our heat,” he said. “If we hide behind a big log . . . they won't see us.”

George stared, dumbfounded. They had followed this man here, because of that reasoning? They could have been a hundred yards down the road by now. Instead, they were closer to the oncoming threat.

Arnold—the man he’d once known only as Mister Ekola— had been their rock once, but now he was just a scared old man who had made a shitty decision based on a movie he couldn’t fully remember.

“Hey,” Jaco said. “Couldn’t Terminator see in infrared, too?”

Toivo and Bernie thought, then nodded. George wanted to punch them all right in the nose.

Over the wind’s scream, the cracking and grinding drew closer. George had a flash memory of a summer campfire some thirty years earlier, the night stars above, skin on his face and his toes and knees nearly burning because the closer you sat to the fire the less the mosquitoes and black flies bothered you. Mister Ekola, a flashlight under his chin casting strange shadows on his cheeks and eyes, telling a story of a killer with a limp. You knew this killer because of the sound, the thump-drag sound, a good foot stepping forward, then the slide of the bad foot following behind.

Thump, drag . . . thump, drag . . .

George had told that same story to his sons. It had scared the hell out of them just like it had scared the hell out of him. And now, a version of that sound had him damn near pissing his pants, a version with the added tones of snapping branches and broken gears.

Thump, drag, crack-crack, snap . . . thump, drag, whir-snap, crack, whine . . .

George’s friends huddled down lower to the ground, pressing into the log like they were newborn pups nursing from their mother.

Someone had to look; someone had to know what was coming.

George forced himself to rise up, just enough to see over the snow-covered log.

Thump, drag, crack-whine, grind-snap . . .

The thing broke through the tree line just thirty feet from the cabin. A robot, a big-ass robot maybe fifteen feet tall. Two legs . . . the left stepping forward, the right dragging along behind, functioning barely enough to position itself so the machine could take another step with its left. Broken branches jutted out of tears in the metal shell, or plastic, or whatever it was made of. Bipedal—no arms George could see—but cracks everywhere, breaks and tears and dents, smoke-streaks . . . the thing was trashed. Part of the shell was ripped free near the top. Hard to see in the darkness and snow, but George could make out a yellow shape . . . a form that moved . . .

Sweet Jesus.

An alien.

Thump, drag . . . thump, drag . . .

The robot paused just past the tree line, big feet hidden in the snow. Something fluttered open near what George could only think of as the machine’s hips. Then, a flash, and a rocket shot out, closing the distance in less than a second.

He was already dropping behind the log when the cabin erupted in a fireless explosion that launched a hailstorm of broken-board shrapnel into the woods, knocking free chunks of clinging snow that had withstood the blowing wind.

George’s ass hit the ground. He stared into the dark woods, mind blank.

A hand on his shoulder: Jaco, leaning in.

“Georgie, was that the fucking cabin that just blew up?”

I have to get on that road, get to Milwaukee, whatever it takes to reach my children, find a way—

“Georgie!”

“Yes, goddamit! It was the cabin!”

The sound again, thump, drag . . . thump, drag . . .

“Shit!” Jaco said, said it with such ferocity that it contracted his body, made his head snap forward. “Screw that! Everyone, shoot that thing on one, okay?”

Thump, drag . . . coming closer.

“Three,” Jaco said.

Counting? Why was he counting? It was a damn robot-thing that blew up buildings, it—

Thump, drag . . .

“Two!”

Holy shit! Jaco was going to fire at that thing out there?

Thump, drag . . .

“Jaco, no, you—”

“One!”

Movement all around, George’s friends rising up, the crack of rifles firing followed by the sound of bolts sliding back, then forward again.

George ripped off his gloves, held the rifle tight as he rose to his knees and turned, all one uncoordinated, lurching movement. He swung the barrel of his Remington 700 over the top of the log, knocking aside clumps of snow. The hand cupping the forestock pressed down on the log, snow instantly melting from the heat of his skin.

The big machine turned sharply, swiveling at the hips like the turret of a tank, the motion herky-jerky and halting.

George fired instantly, without aiming, had no idea if he’d hit.

Gunshots from his left and from his right. He popped the rifle’s lever up and pulled it back, heard the faint ring of the ejected shell, shoved the bolt forward but it stuck; his hand slipped off, his momentum lurched him forward into the log.

The guns kept firing.

I’ve never even shot a deer what the hell am I doing I should have gone to the range more should have—

He slammed the bolt home; the sound of it locking into place seemed to slow time from a mad explosion of a volcano to the slow creep of its lava flow. He looked through his scope at the fifteen-foot-tall machine only twenty feet away, sighted through one of the tears in the shell at the yellowish form.

He pulled the trigger. The Remington jumped. He saw the yellow thing inside twitch, then fall still.

It didn’t move.

Neither did the machine.

“ Stop firing, ” he shouted.

The rifle reports ended like someone had unplugged a TV in the middle of an action movie. No gunshot echoes, not with the snow-covered trees eating up all sound save for the wind.

George stared. They all stared. No one knew what else to do.

Slowly, like a top-heavy bookshelf with one too many knickknacks, the thing tipped forward: Fifteen feet of alien machine arced down and slammed into the ground with a billowing whuff of snow.

The top of it was only five feet away.

They stared at it. It didn’t move. Somewhere under there, hidden by all that bulk, was the alien who had been driving it.

“Holy shit,” Jaco said. “I think we killed it.”

George hoped so. He looked to his right, to the cabin; or what was left of it. Shattered, destroyed, blown apart with such force that there were only a few stumps of broken wood and a snow-free patch marking the place he and his friends had come every year for almost three decades.

“Told ya bullets would kill it,” Toivo said. “Who’s the physedicist now?”

The wind kept howling. The wind didn’t care.

“Guys,” Bernie said, “we gotta get moving. I’m freezing, eh?”

Those words might as well have been boiling oil thrown on George’s hands. The cold smashed them, ground his fingers. He set the gun against the log, almost fumbled it in the process, then grabbed his gloves out of the snow and pulled them on, only to find snow had somehow gotten inside of them.