Chapter 26
I caught myself as the ground under my feet dropped half an inch.
I stood, arms out for balance, in pale dawn light.
I had emerged from the jump onto a dirt and pebble road that ran roughly where the riverbed had been.
I was on the edge of a town or village. To my left and right were sagging wooden structures, heavily weathered, the boards gnarled and gray.
A battered, rusted-out pickup slumped off to my right, sitting against one structure as though for support—or lending it.
The pickup was ancient, the design, so far as I could tell, dating roughly back to when Lyle was in his fifties.
It sat in the dirt on rusting axles, the tires missing.
It was disconcerting seeing something so familiar.
A pickup, here, after the Machine War chaos in the ruins of Fresno.
I faced a high, roughly hewn stone wall a half dozen yards away. Atop the wall ran two rows of angled, jagged metal spikes. Each spike was three feet long. One row of spikes pointed away from the town; the other, toward it, as though the wall was meant to keep residents in as much as intruders out.
How long had that jump been? One hundred and eighty-something years?
There was a bang of a wooden door closing.
I spun, the motion reflexive, coming around to face the rest of the town.
A woman stood on the sidewalk to my right, having come out of the nearest building.
She looked at me, her eyes growing wide.
A burlap sack fell from her hands and clattered to the wooden sidewalk.
She screamed.
“Wait, it’s okay,” I said, holding up my hands.
Shouting something—words in a language I didn’t recognize—the woman turned and ran, feet pounding on the boards.
I moved to follow her, not thinking clearly.
I wanted to show I wasn’t a threat. I only took two steps before I froze.
Other people, hearing the woman’s cries, had come out of buildings along the dirt street.
They took one look at me and ran, scrambled away.
I couldn’t understand anything they were saying, although I thought I heard snatches of English-adjacent words, or what might have been bits of Spanish.
An evolution of the mixed language of Miri’s time.
“Jesus,” I said as the street emptied around me.
I took a breath and started to take off the helmet when a group of men ran around the corner of a nearby building.
They headed toward me, jumping off the wooden sidewalk and into the dirt street.
They were dressed in black canvas-like pants and stained shirts, reminding me of black-and-white photos I’d seen of French coal miners from the 1950s.
These were working men, hardened, with slabs of muscle on their arms and necks.
I pulled the helmet back down with a snap.
“Koin-ah-na!” one of them shouted, pointing at me with a metal bar. All the men—eight in total—carried metal clubs or short-handled shovels.
I held up my hands and took a step back. “Hold on, I’m—”
The nearest man, the one who shouted, covered the distance between us with surprising speed.
He raised the metal bar like a baseball bat and swung it at me with the combined force of both arms and his own running momentum.
I barely managed to bring my left arm up to catch the blow.
The bar slammed into the forearm section of the exoskeleton.
The impact drove my arm to one side and shivered through my whole body.
The bar clipped my side and back with the remainder of its inertia, spinning me around.
I took a stumbling step back. My left arm went numb, and I grabbed it with my right hand, hissing.
Another man hit me with the flat of his shovel across the helmet, screaming as he did so. My view sluiced sideways, and the metal of the shovel rang like a cymbal. The previously cracked visor of the helmet didn’t break, but the blow nearly drove me to my knees.
A third man joined his comrades, raising a crowbar.
I finally reacted. I brought my right hand down to my side.
Yanked the remaining pistol from its holster: the pistol Lyle had given me, so long ago.
The SD-4. I pointed it in the vague direction of the incoming man and pulled the trigger.
The pistol coughed and jumped in my hand.
The man before me exploded.
His chest disappeared in a flash of misting blood, fragments of bone, skin, and flaming bits of shirt. His arms fell to the dust behind him, still holding the bar. His head flew up and sideways, surprise frozen on his face. His legs flopped to the ground, twitching, spewing blood.
The men stumbled backward, their weapons raised.
I pushed myself upright. “Now fucking stop, okay!” I jerked the pistol around at them. I expected them to run. I hoped they’d run.
They attacked, screaming.
I got off one more shot. The SD-4, still loaded with alternating explosive and armor-piercing rounds, fired one dagger-tipped AP bullet into a man’s stomach as he rushed toward me.
The bullet went straight through him, drilling out his back to whine off down the road.
The shot didn’t slow him. He hit me in the ribs with his shovel, driving the air out of my lungs in a whoosh.
Another man hit my right wrist with his bar, driving it down with practiced precision and power.
The damaged exoskeleton took most of the impact, but the pistol flew from my nerveless fingers, skittering across the hard dirt.
Another blow struck the faceplate of my helmet, snapping my head back and dropping me to the ground.
I tried to roll over, to push myself up, but a hit to my right shoulder drove me back down. Bars and shovels rained down, again and again, hammering into me. I curled and brought numb arms around my head.
There was a fractional lull, an odd congruence as the men all reared back to strike, and I kicked out with both feet.
My boots connected, powered by whatever energy remained in the exoskeleton.
Bones crunched. A man twisted away and fell, screaming and clutching at knees now bent the wrong direction.
Fresh shouts and commands came from behind the men surrounding me.
There were a few more quick blows, and the men fell back.
I rolled onto my chest and got my shaking arms under me.
I managed to lever myself onto my hands and knees.
Someone slammed a running kick into my midsection.
Whoever it was broke his foot on the exoskeleton, but the force of the kick still tumbled me onto my back again.
The kicker fell away, gasping, clutching his foot.
New men, dressed in dark blue uniforms, came forward.
The unmistakable end of a rifle barrel pointed down at my face.
A determined-looking man, feet planted on either side of my legs, held the rifle.
There was a split second when nothing moved.
Then he pulled the trigger. The white flash burst in front of me, inches from my eyes, the sound like a thunderclap.
My head slammed against the ground, and the visor, already cracked from my fight with the tank, made a sharp crunching sound as the tough material turned foggy from the sheer number of splintered cracks running through it.
My vision swam and the world tilted around me.
Dazed, I watched with bleary eyes as the man above me leaned down, frowned, then reversed his rifle and plunged the stock down in a quick, vicious thrust. The visor gave way, shattering and spraying fragments into my nose and mouth.
I tried to move, but the men held me down, piling on and using sheer weight to keep me still.
The guard or soldier brought the rifle back up and looked me in the eyes. His were gray and wide with adrenaline, but fearless and cold. I opened my mouth to speak, maybe to beg, maybe to curse him. Then he slammed the stock into my face.
The pain from my broken nose brought me to consciousness.
I didn’t open my eyes at first. I sat with my arms tied to a hard chair, my chin at my chest. Blood dribbled from my nose, over my open lips, and down my chin to my neck and chest. My nose screamed in pulsing agony. My arms, legs, chest, pelvis—everything hurt.
Something else felt wrong. It took me long searching seconds to realize the helmet was gone. My head was bare and exposed.
I forced my eyes open, peeling the sticking lids apart and squinting against the light.
The first thing I saw was my own chest and stomach, still covered in the black suit but missing the crisscrossing bars of the exoskeleton.
“Shit,” I croaked. I blinked and saw the slight bulge of the flat disk Miri had given me tucked under the suit against my chest.
Quick footsteps. Someone grabbed my chin and levered my head up.
I was in a stone room, lit by a flickering lantern hanging from the ceiling.
A table sat along the edge of one wall. On it were sliced-up pieces of the exoskeleton alongside heavy power tools, the kind used to mine rock and cut steel.
A blowtorch, a circulating saw, and other equipment, all covered with rust spots and layers of brown and gray dirt.
The man holding my chin stared down at me. The muscles in his jaw worked. His fingers dug into my jaw. His eyes were bright blue. His face seemed carved from granite; every line sculpted.
He pulled his free hand back and slapped me.
Pain exploded from my broken nose, stabbing back between my eyes. I gagged and coughed, blood flecking from my lips. My chin dislodged from his grip with the blow, and he grabbed it again, shaking. He forced my face back up. He yelled words I couldn’t comprehend.
“Christ,” I mumbled, blinking hard against the pain.
He shouted again and backhanded me.
Blinding, white-hot agony. I passed out.