Kyle West - Evolution

It wasn’t a “no” of disagreement — it was a “no” of disbelief. Raider Bluff was gone. It was all Blight, now. While we had been gone two months, somehow the virus had infiltrated what was going to be our chief ally in the Wasteland.

“Char…” Makara said.

She rushed off the bridge, leaving the rest of us to run after her.

“Makara, wait!” Samuel said.

She was out the door and into the Wasteland. The air was bitterly cold, harshly dry — worse than I could have ever imagined. I was still dressed for the south — but now, it was late December. Of course it was going to be cold.

Makara walked forward a few steps. She gazed at the lost city, her black hair whipping sideways in the wind. It was as she believed walking forward could reverse time and return the city to its former state. Anna ran up to stand beside her, holding a hand to her eyes to keep the dust out.

I ran to stand beside them. The fierce wind howled, throwing dust that threatened to obscure my vision

“We have to go up there,” Makara said. “There might be survivors.”

“Anyone who’s up there is probably dead,” I said. “Or…worse.”

On the top of the incline leading to the city, I could catch some movement, running out of the city at a run. There were at first dozens…then hundreds…then thousands. They came from the gates, running and screeching and screaming. There were crawlers, and the human forms of howlers. Flyers shot out of the buildings, taking to the skies in clouds of thousands. And they were all heading this way.

“To the ship,” Samuel said. “Now.”

But an ungodly bellow stopped us in our tracks. Rising from the ruins of the town was the largest xenodragon we had seen yet, colossal in size and dwarfing every other one we had seen in Nova Roma. Those had just been grunts compared to this one. This dragon was the soul of Ragnarok itself.

No raider had survived this attack.

As the monsters swarmed toward us in an unending tide, we ran back to the ship. The dragon did not chase us — it only watched, as if curious, as we lifted off into the air, as the crawlers occupied the space we had just vacated, jumping up into the air and snapping their jaws futilely at Odin’s retracting landing struts. The flyers pecked at the ship’s sides and windshield, their maddened white orbs disturbing, their lack of feathers revealing sickly pink flesh that dripped purple ooze.

Tears still in her eyes, Makara blasted upward, for the sky.

Once we were safely above the clouds, at an altitude of fifty thousand feet just to be sure, we didn’t say anything. Char, the others…they were probably all dead. Many were probably Howlers, now.

I didn’t want to ask, “What now?” There was no “now.” Char had been a source of vision and wisdom for us before our journey to Bunker One. Now, he was probably dead.

Makara held her head down on the dash, her shoulder shaking with sobs.

Samuel reached for the transceiver. Makara grabbed his hand before he could pick it up.

“Not yet,” she said, her voice shaky. “I have one more idea.”

Samuel turned to her. “What do you mean?”

Makara sat straight, dried her tears, and steered Odin east.

“Where are we going?” Samuel asked.

“There is only one person I know who might be able to help,” she said. “And one person only.”

At first, I had no idea who she was talking about. Then, it came to me.

“He said there was a time where all would seem lost,” Makara said. “He said to, at that moment, fly to the desert and seek those to whom injustice was dealt, and give them justice.”

“The Wanderer said this,” Samuel said. “But who are we going to see, Makara?”

“They will be first of the New Angels,” Makara said. “This is where we begin.”

“East takes us to the Great Blight,” Samuel said, still confused.

“You mean Marcus,” I said. “You’re going to find the Exiles. They’re in the Boundless, right?”

“Yes,” Makara said. “They were kicked out of Raider Bluff, years ago, for going against the will of the Alpha. They wandered the desert, for years. And Marcus was right. One day, Char was going to need them. We need them now. If Char is anywhere, he’s there .”

As we sped across the sky, I hoped that this wasn’t a dead end. I thought of the Wanderer, and how each of the prophecies had so far come true. Lisa was told she would have to give her life. Samuel was told he must remain true to himself. Makara was told to seek help with the Exiles, if her interpretation was correct.

That left me and Anna. I knew what mine was. The Wanderer told me that it all depended on me, somehow. That the mission would fail without me. For a moment, I remembered the Wanderer, and wondered just who he was, with his clouded, alien eyes that couldn’t see one foot ahead of him but could somehow pierce the mists of the future. Had he been friend, or enemy? Would we ever see him again?

I didn’t know what answers, or questions, awaited us in the Boundless, or among the Exiles. All any of us knew was that we had no other course. And Makara was now the leader of the Lost Angels, by our own admission.

So, for now, all we could do was follow her.

Kyle West is a science fiction author living in Oklahoma City. He is currently working on The Wasteland Chronicles series, of which there will be seven installments. Books 2 and 3 are already available. Find out immediately when his next book is released by signing up for The Wasteland Chronicles Mailing List. Stay tuned for a preview of the fourth installment, Revelation…

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It’s been three months since the fall of Bunker 108. In that time, I’ve survived raiders, gangs, empires, cold, hunger, and monsters. By all rights, I should be dead. We all should be. It seems impossible that we aren’t. Impossible that we are still fighting this.

I just wonder how much longer we can last.

The odds are stacked against us. At every turn, the xenovirus gets more deadly. The number of Blights in the Wasteland has tripled. The monsters it creates are more dangerous. Crawlers roam the dark, cold nights in packs, killing any they find. Anyone without a wall, without a home, is as good as dead.

The Great Blight has expanded one hundred miles further west over the past two months alone — a rate which will see the entire Wasteland covered by this time next year.

And, somehow, we are expected to stop all this. The four of us are expected to be the world’s saviors. We are all too young for this job. I’m sixteen. Makara is nineteen, Samuel twenty-three, and Anna is seventeen. That’s too much weight to rest on our shoulders — hell, too much weight for anyone’s shoulders. Maybe, we aren’t kids anymore. Responsibility is enough to make an adult of anyone.

As leader of the New Angels, Makara is now in charge of the group. Samuel still leads the mission against the Great Blight, but as far as building the group, Makara calls the shots. First on her agenda is finding the Exiles, Marcus’s gang, somewhere in the Boundless. After we find them, they can lead us to the Raiders. Or at least, that’s what we hope.

With the fall of Raider Bluff to the xenoswarm, we could only hope that’d been Char’s thought process. Overrun by crawlers and Howlers and worse besides, we could only hope he had laid down his pride to seek the help of the brother he’d exiled over a decade before.

This is no longer a time for enmity and blood. The power of the Great Blight grows by the day, and the Great Dragon of Raider Bluff has yet to make his next move.