Nick Cole - The Wasteland Saga

Two minutes, now.

“Natalie,” continued Targeting Acquisition Process. The Small Voice. “She told you about that?”

“Yes,” said the Old Man, wiping his sweaty palms against his pants. He picked up the beacon and placed it on his knees.

One minute, forty-five seconds.

“Do you believe in life after runtime?”

The Old Man reached for the hatch.

Do I?

At this moment, I want to. If she will be there someday. Her laugh. All the good in my life, yes. I want to believe in that. That there’s that kind of place.

He began to turn the handle.

The Old Man thought he could hear the Fool grunting on just the other side of the hatch, swinging something tiresomely heavy in great thuds as he spat out his promised murder.

“Maybe it is easier for an Artificial Intelligence to believe in a Creator,” said the Small Voice. “After all, we were quite obviously created by a designer.”

I will push on the hatch now. Whatever happens to my body in the next few seconds, maybe a minute at the most, does not matter anymore. I will think of her laugh and her smile the whole time. Especially the laugh that erupts all of a sudden. When I catch her by surprise with something funny and she snorts and tells me, “No, Poppa.”

Laugh, snort, “No, Poppa.”

Or was it…

The other way around.

My hand won’t push this hatch.

“A man named Jesus said there was life after runtime,” burbled Target Acquisition, as if the world was not really ending all around the Old Man.

Tell him to shut up.

Tell him to shut up and be done with this life. Tell him to shut up and then push open the hatch.

You take everything with you.

I hope so. I dearly hope so. But it’s so strange that I had to give it all away at the end.

I hope so.

“This Jesus said,” continued the Small Voice, “in his last talk with his friends, he said that he was going to prepare a place for them after this runtime, as we know it, is over. He said that in his Father’s house there were many mansions. He said, ‘Because I live, you also shall live.’ He said this in the book of John, chapter fourteen.”

Do it!

Push!

Damn you.

Thirty seconds.

“And this is the part I really like,” said the Small Voice. “The part that grabs my algorithms and makes me feel something, something I cannot identify or even explain, but it’s there, somewhere inside all my math, this Jesus said, ‘If it were not so, I would have told you.’ Isn’t that amazing?” asked the Small Voice.

The Old Man looked down at his crowbar. He could not take it with him when he left the tank. He would need both hands to hold the target designator aloft.

“Can you imagine that?” asked the Small Voice. “Life!”

The Old Man saw the world. Burnt up and horrible. Filled with living nightmares.

If that were life, he thought… and then he saw his granddaughter’s face. Her smile. Life.

The Old Man sighed.

He sighed, knowing that when all his air was gone, he would take a huge breath and push the hatch open.

“It’s time to go outside now,” said Target Acquisition. “I believe in that place of mansions. I believe there is a place where we will go if we ask for forgiveness for trying to be God. For forgiveness for making such a mess of everything. A place this Jesus said where good things exist. A place of miracles beyond death. A place where even an Artificial Intelligence might… live. I believe in that. Do you believe also?”

I…

I’m sorry.

The Old Man fired the smoke grenade canisters, hearing them burst away from the hull of the tank, hissing as sudden screams and yells replaced the battering.

The Old Man pushed on the hatch, grabbed the beacon, and rose.

Yes.

Me too.

I want that. I’m sorry for the whole mess.

He held the beacon up through the smoke, looking skyward.

All about him, the blistered and scabbed crazies jabber-screamed in victory. He could feel the Fool scrabbling up beside him, biting his claws into the Old Man’s belly and flesh.

Yes.

Laughter.

Mansions.

Many mansions.

And her.

I’m taking everything with me.

And then the weapon hit.

Twenty-seven million tons of shattered rock flew away from the mountain as shock waves tossed prey and predator, slave and slaver far from the nightmare of the Work.

Far south along the road, Ted stumbling forward heard a soprano note ring out across the broken and burnt lands, as though a metal beam had fallen from a great height and struck the road. Seconds later, he felt the blast of a gusty wind hit him and knock him to the ground as the earth shook. To the north, the sky was torn by the vapor rings of sonic booms, each expanding beyond the other, rings rising high into the atmosphere.

In the south, near the conical mountain, among the Mohicans and horses, the last of the dusty day fading to evening, they too felt the ground shake.

IN THE DARK.

In the early evening drenched in dust and raining debris.

The first headlights of the Bradley Fighting Vehicles appeared in the smoke and dust. They bobbed and wove up from the crack, carrying sleeping Natalie and her children.

They drove all night through darkening forests, eyes wide at the twinkling stars and the endless night and the land that might stretch impossibly away in the light of day.

IN THE FIRST of the next morning, the convoy came south. When they saw the conical hill known as Wagon Wheel Mountain, they cheered from behind their thick sunglasses and protective clothing.

The Mohicans saw them coming.

On the grassy plain they met. The children of the bunker took their first steps out onto the soft ground that stretched away into something they imagined as forever.

They embraced the horse warriors, the Mohicans, feathered and noble.

Suddenly there were tears and no one knew why. They only knew that something great had happened. That something new might be possible, replacing what had once seemed impossible.

Un-wishable.

The little girl broke away from her mother. She twisted under the high sun, twirling and spinning in the un-wishable.

Free at last.

ON THE MORNING before the children and the Mohicans would begin their long journey south and west to the Old Man’s Tucson, the Boy rose.

She was gone.

Had gone in the night.

Taking her rucksack with her.

He saw her tracks.

He could see her in his mind.

Tiny. Thin. Wearing her shiny green bomber jacket.

Heading west.

No more tears to give.

For a time she would be alone.

But he would follow her.

And…

Watch over her.

Heading west.

IN TIME, WHEN the end of the Old Man was known to all, when it had been told in far Tucson of what he had done, they thought of going back to find his body.

But they knew.

They knew he was gone now.

And what would it mean if they found his body anyway?

As if a simple body, old and broken, can contain all that there is of a man, or a woman.

The Old Man opened his eyes.

His wife was pulling him upward, onto his feet.

She was still beautiful.

Her eyes shone with love for him.

Even more so, if that was possible.

The Old Man was standing in a river.

All around him.

Wonders beyond words.

And a Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief, waded through the emerald shallows of the river out to the Old Man. The Man of Sorrows was bleeding and severely beaten, and yet he began to gently wash away all the bad that had ever happened to the Old Man. The aches, the pains, the one above his chest where the satchel had bit—all the pain was gone now. Then he gave the Old Man a new garment. The Old Man protested, thinking only of the terrible wounds this stranger had received and how much pain this other man must be in as he washed and clothed him.