Nick Cole - The Wasteland Saga

His first thought was that the ground had suddenly given way underneath them.

Soft sand.

But he could see crumpled tin and splintered wood in the optics and a wall of sandy dirt beyond.

We’ve fallen into a trap!

“Are you all right?” he asked his granddaughter over the intercom as he reached up and shut the turret hatch.

“What happened, Poppa?”

“I think we fell in a hole.”

The Boy, bathed in the red of the interior emergency lights, gripped his chair.

Rain began to fall against the sides of the tank.

Not rain.

Arrows.

The Old Man dogged the hatch.

Remember, be gentle with the right tread. We can get out of this like I did when I was stuck in the sand at Picacho Peak. But if you break the tread, we really will be stuck.

The Old Man switched on the night vision.

All around them, wild figures like white blobs against green and gray ran forward as torches flared too brightly in the night vision. The Old Man tried the left tread and the tank pulled forward. He could hear the snap of wood and rending metal above the whine of the engine. When the tank was almost at the top of the trap, the Old Man pushed the right tread forward and the tank popped nose upward as he gave it full throttle.

“Hold on!” warned the Old Man.

The tank slammed down hard into the sand and sped off, careening through a crumbling pylon that jutted from the riverbed.

The Old Man scanned the optics.

The figures were running back into the night, their torches burning angrily on the ground.

Did I just see the Fool?

Standing atop a small sandy hill, the gangly figure appeared for a moment, his wild fool’s crown springing in all directions, his claw waving a torch frantically forward at the retreating figures, urging them to turn back and attack the tank.

It’s him!

The Old Man backed away from the viewfinder in shock.

Don’t be afraid of him, my friend.

When the Old Man looked again the Fool was gone. He drove the tank to the other side of the wash and surged up onto the road at full speed.

Now the road entered a tight series of turns that wound through the hills where the Old Man saw an ambush in every bend, or at the tops of the small hills that loomed above them alongside the road. The gibbous moon had turned a sickly red from some distant dust storm. It rose through spindly barren trees above the desert plateau. It shifted wildly across the sky as the Old Man fought to keep track of the twisting road in the night.

It must be after midnight.

The Old Man felt himself sweating heavily, his shoulders tensed like iron bands as he drove the tank forward into the night.

The road twisted into a series of long curves that reversed themselves into still more curves and the red misshapen moon swung even more frantically across the sky.

It’s making me dizzy.

The clutching fingers of a dead orchard rose up all around them as they passed through the rubble of a town. Ahead, great piles of concrete had toppled onto the highway. Above them, the sides of cutoff mountains rose up into the darkness.

Are they forcing me off the road and into the town? Or are they forcing me to take the narrow opening ahead? Where is their trap?

The Fool is forcing you, my friend. It is the Fool who forces you into his trap.

I only thought I saw him. Maybe it was just a mistake or a trick of the light.

This must have once been a state checkpoint. The path looks too narrow for the tank to pass.

But if you get off the highway you could get lost in that abandoned town, and its streets are probably very narrow. A good place for a trap. There is no guarantee that there is a way around this obstacle or that the roads in the town are even any better.

No, there isn’t.

“Are you ready to drive?” said the Old Man over the intercom to his granddaughter.

“I’m on it, Poppa!” she almost shouted.

The Old Man tapped the Boy and motioned for the hatch.

“We’ll guide you through the rubble and make sure the path is wide enough,” he said to his granddaughter. “Don’t run over us, okay?”

“Okay, Poppa, I’ll try not to.”

Yes, please try not to run over me with the tank.

The Old Man took the left and the Boy the right and they walked into the dusty maze of rubble, waving the tank forward slowly. They crossed under a wide overpass and the Old Man spotted, with the moving beam of his flashlight, the words the Fool had left for him to read. They were written all the way to the end of the tunnel.

REPEAT A LIE AND IT BECOMES THE TRUTH.

POINTING OUT WHAT’S “WRONG” IS THE SICK HABIT OF DELUSIONAL PERVERTS.

RIGHT AND WRONG IS WHERE WE WENT WRONG.

REPEAT A LIE AND IT BECOMES THE TRUTH.

COMPROMISE MEANS SEEING THINGS OUR WAY.

WHAT OTHERS CALL INSANE, I CALL PERSISTENCE.

REPEAT A LIE AND IT BECOMES THE TRUTH.

WE WILL MURDER THOSE WHO REJECT PEACE.

WANT WHAT OTHERS HAVE. THE MANY SERVE THE FEW, THE TRICK IS MAKING THEM THINK IT’S THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

REPEAT A LIE AND IT BECOMES THE TRUTH.

IF YOU SAY YOU’RE GOD, WHO’S TO SAY YOU’RE WRONG?

MAKE FRIENDS OF YOUR ENEMIES AND USE THEM TO DESTROY YOUR FRIENDS.

REPEAT A LIE AND IT BECOMES THE TRUTH.

WHEN YOU ARE NO LONGER BURDENED BY INTEGRITY, THE POSSIBILITIES ARE BOTTOMLESS.

CONVINCE YOUR ENEMIES THE BATTLE IS SOMEWHERE ELSE.

CONVINCE YOUR ENEMIES THEY’RE JUST LIKE YOU.

CONVINCE YOUR ENEMIES.

HEAVEN, HELL… REALLY?

REPEAT THE TRUTH.

And at the final yawning exit lying on the open and blistered highway beyond lay neon-green-colored sheets of paper scattered about, as if debris from a bomb revealed in the pale moonlight above the eastern dust storm. The Old Man picked up a sheet and found crude printing and wet ink that smeared at his touch. He read.

Everything be Ok

We mean it.

So loot and murder to your heart’s content

Just make sure you got the strength to Take and Do

before anyone else does to you

Everything be getting better

Don’t believe the eyes

Or your stomachs holla

Or your lies,

Lies can be told about anything

Including the truth

There’s been a lotta bad done in the name of good.

So we’re done with that noise.

Religion and morals be all the same and only different ’bout who was right and wrong on everything.

So here’s how it be

Man be man alone

And the man be

King Charlie.

King Charlie be not wrong or right.

He just be.

After King Charlie be nothing.

Heaven = Hell, only the unlucky die and the dead like to tell some truth when they say nothing.

If there be a heaven, King Charlie imagine you’ll get there no matter what you do

unless you’re the Hitler or Stalin who gave everyone the aids.

We come so that all might live in prosperity.

And only the strong survive.

Get it?

We are an accident

Created by an accident,