This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?
The war raged outside as I stayed indoors and away from windows. I didn’t look a day over fifty, but I felt every year of age that I was that day. I sat, eating takeout, the cartons and containers of which were scattered about my darkened one-bedroom apartment. Only the light from the video wall illuminated anything. It reflected in my glasses the devastation that lay outside.
Everything was on fire. Everything smoked and burned and shriveled. Outside, low robot fliers made deliveries to shut-ins on small hoverbikes that whipped in and out of the remains of the buildings. One zipped by my window and waved at me. That was the signal that the coast was clear. It was safe to go outside for a while, but I could still hear them in the distance making their steps forward. Large military walkers towered over the skyline and took steps across the landscape with giant iron feet that swung in the air a good half mile before they landed again, either smashing a car flat or creating a small crater that would fill up with frogs and water after the next rainfall.
I passed a portrait of my family on the wall next to my front door. The glass was cracked as if from a fist punch, and it hung there at a slight angle. I straightened it on its nail and rubbed what was left of the glass with a hand covered in a fingerless glove.
I stepped through the door and looked out across the field and at what was left of the interstate that I could see from my apartment. Out in the hazy distance stood one walker. Five giant legs carried a disk-shaped body aloft. Sitting atop the disk were two heads that craned around, each one crewed by several people. There was a driver seated in a separate command post lower down where they guided the walker around, but the crews in the two heads had slightly different duties. Each head and some walkers had four, would have a captain, a scanner, and a weapons officer. The scanner used piercing equipment to scan the area for offenders, and the weapons officer, well, they were there to destroy those targets.
These days, everyone had their apartments lined with aluminum foil, and whatever else it took to jam the signals. This method continued to change, and every once in a while they’d alter the walkers and target differently, and you’d have to redecorate all over again.
I wrapped a blanket around myself and stood there. The city was on fire, but the weather was still bitter. It had gotten progressively colder over the last twenty years. Before long, I figure they’d all be hiking across the ice every day. It was probably time to go south, to pack up. This old apartment had served for a long time, but it was hardly a house anymore.
The smoke was clearing in the distance, and the hoverbikes were coming out more and more often. Some of them were already zipping through the trees below me. The streets were useless and destroyed. If you wanted to get anywhere, it was hover bikes, cars, and the big walkers. The roads were destroyed through neglect or stomped into a pock-marked wasteland by the walkers, so it was getting up off the ground with a hover bike or hike, and that wasn’t safe because of the coyotes. Sick with rabies and various stages of radiation sickness, a bite from one of them, and, well, you wanted to stay off the ground if you wanted to live.
I turned the knob and went back in. The video wall was giving me totals and counts of all the offenders ‘rectified’ in the area over the last twenty-four hours. It was a series of pictures next to lists of crimes and bomb camera video of their houses and apartment buildings being destroyed in high definition resolution.
A picture appeared on the bottom right of the wall. It was a scrambled channel that only came up when the walkers had gotten far enough away that they couldn’t detect it. Merely having a connection to the channel was an immediate death sentence for the walkers.
A woman’s face lit up on the screen. She had wind-blown red hair, an eye patch, and a skin-tight leather outfit on. “Calling all freedom fighters, can you hear me?” she said.
I put on a small headset that fits into my ear, the possession of which was also an immediate death sentence, an order for condemnation and destruction of his entire building with me in it. I tapped a small triangular button now at his ear, and a small spherical camera floated up from its accustomed place on the shelf and floated over to me. As if it were a person, I looked at it.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Good, Andersen. Nice to have you with us. I thought we’d lost you during that last raid.”
“I thought I was dead, too. Thank you. It’s good to be alive.”
“We need you on the move.”
“This place isn’t safe anymore?”
“Not just that. Your orders have changed. It’s no longer a role of observation. We’re moving as many of our forces to Old Mexico as possible, and you’re next on the list.”
A list of names appeared on the display. Additional people were on the call.
“All of you coming online, that’s good to see,” she said. “We’re moving to Old Mexico. It’s time to get everything together before they do another sweep.”
“But it looks like the walker is still heading south,” I said.
“We’ve got someone inside, a small team actually, and they report the walker is about to double back.”
“But they never…”
“We know. They are changing their tactics again.” Pretty soon, they are going to be within range, and we’ll have to cut the signal off again. We need you to gather your essential kit and get on a hoverbike as quickly as you can. We’re going to meet at the old baseball stadium by the river, and go from there.”
The picture fizzled out, and then she appeared again, but she was looking the wrong way. She turned back again.
“They’re on the way. It’ll take them half an hour to turn the walker around. At least that’s in our favor. Now go. We’ll see you there.”
She fizzled one last time, and I was left with the compulsory wall of death, facing him again. If only he could turn the channel on it, but it was fixed.
On the table near the kitchen was a birthday cake, with a plastic 100 on top of it. I didn’t feel a day over thirty-five or forty, but it was my hundredth birthday today. I passed the leftover cake, which I’d largely eaten by myself without another thought, and went to the bathroom, into my bedroom, and then into the closet. In there, I rummaged through my clothes, pulled down shirt after shirt, looking, then just pulled down the entire bar and let everything fall to the floor. Behind it, was a small alcove cut into the wall, a crack in the sheetrock. I picked at it with my fingers and a crack split down. Another pull and I pulled a fist-sized chunk from the wall and threw it into the clothes. More wall, more mess, and I’d pulled free a large hole. I reached in, pulled out a medium-sized backpack, and put it on. It was already packed. I reached in again, and pulled out a motorcycle helmet, a rifle, already loaded, and a pair of thick boots.
I pulled them on.
I left the apartment with my rifle under one arm, and my helmet in the other, and holding the rifle under my arm, I locked the apartment with a little copper key and looked out the back of the stairwell. There was a sheer drop of about fifty feet off the back of the apartment complex. I reached out with the keys and activated a button on one of the key fobs.
There was a roar of an engine underneath him, and then it calmed down to a small whispering growl, and the hoverbike floated out from underneath the stairwell.
It rose, and I straddled it. Slipping the rifle into a small compartment on the side, and pulling on his helmet, I got on board. I gunned the engine, allowed the hoverbike to float out into the woods behind the apartments, and then flew it low and slow, and out of town. There were plenty of people on the road, and they dressed of them about the same as I was. Some of them were packing, and some were not, but the only thing true was that no one traveled on the ground anymore. I kept mostly to side roads, and small stretches of wood, but when I had to get on what was considered the highway, I was in such similar company or all by myself to where no one noticed me anymore.
I slid under a bridge and out into the country beyond, well out of the reaches of the road. Every once in a while I turned and would come near the road again, and one time I saw another walker slowly lumbering back towards town, and then the flash went off.
I shut my visor and brought the bike to the ground, which was already rumbling. Behind me, the mushroom-style tower of smoke rose above what I used to call home, or rather the city I used to call home. There was a rumble and a roar, and the ground shook underneath me. I revved up the engine and gunned it. I flew as trees around me fell and the ground opened up like a great crack unzipping and eating all the rocks and the vegetation like some insane and ravenous beast.
I dodged a pine tree on its way down, which, when it landed, created a bridge across a fresh crack in the ground for a moment before being swallowed itself.
I turned a corner and avoided another small bridge, collapsing behind me right after I flew under it, and could hear the walkers on the move again, trudging along. I pulled to a stop and revved the engine down so I could hear better.
Stomp.
Stomp.
Stomp.
Would they send out the drones?
I revved the bike up again and slid through a small grove before they caught up with me. They were about a foot across, spherical and covered in spikes and other whirling protrusions, and little red and blue lights in a pattern that made little sense.
A small swarm of flying drones was right behind me. They darted this way and that outside and inside the trees. One of them took to shooting off limbs, trying to get one to fall right in front of me, but I was already twitching in the other direction to avoid them.
I flew over a small gorge with them following me, and then through the spray of a waterfall, the power of which took two of them out. They were caught up in the water and dashed against the rocks below.
I swung around and through a series of trees at an ever-increasing speed, and nicked one tree, sending myself spinning. I could right myself just as another couple of drones hit the tree and exploded.
I pulled out the rifle, cocked it, and fired at the last two. One of them went down in a blaze of light. The other headed right for me.
I fired again and missed. It careened into me and knocked me to the ground. Limbs sprained or just plain broken, I flopped to the ground and lay there, breathing shallowly. The drone stopped in front of me.
It aimed.
It confirmed its target from a database back at the office.
All its little lights went red, and there was a hollow whining noise as the kill cannon aimed at me lit up with vibrant energy.
Then it exploded. There was a streaming blaze of energy from the ground to my left side.
The drone was overloaded with power.
It lurched and fell to the ground.
Then the three of them, all dressed in camouflage and grease paint, with leaves in their hair, stood up and fired again.
What was left of the drone was completely blown away?
The three of them, a woman, beautiful with deep black eyes and silvery hair, and two men, each a little worse for the wear, stood over me.
I tried to speak, but the pain was just too much. I tried to clench my sprained wrist with the hand on my broken arm and vomited into a small puddle filled with frogs.
“Who is he?” said the woman. “Do we take him with us?”
“I don’t know. He looks like one of us. He’s got the bike and the gear,” said one man.
“Let’s scan him,” said the woman.
She pulled a small circular scanner, and the men pried my eyes open.
She waved the little wand over my eyes and got a retinal scan.
“Oh God,” she said. “Get him on board.”
They pulled me into their craft, which was a modified old Jeep Wrangler with hover plates for tires, and they flew through the trees.
“I hope he’s worth it,” she said as I slowly lost consciousness.
When I awakened. I was sitting in a bathtub, naked, and covered in a viscous translucent jelly up to my neck.
“Where am I?”
“Safe,” said the woman from before. Her hair was now out of its helmet. Her jumpsuit was clean. She wore two pistols on her hips and a shotgun over her back.
“Right,” I said.
“Do you know where you are?”
“At the base, I assume, wherever that is.”
“Yes.”
She coughed and then continued. “We all thought you were dead.”
“Wishful thinking I suppose.”
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“One of what?”
“One of the men who can’t die.”
“Yeah well, they don’t do it anymore do they?”
“Not since the walkers, no.”
“I suppose I could be killed. Hasn’t happened yet.”
She couldn’t have been over sixteen.
My eyes were coming back into focus.
People were milling about. The others who had found me were close by, but there was another group gathering around an acrylic board just a few feet away. They were pointing at different places on the map, and crossing off cities across America, each with a big letter X.
“What about my arm?”
“It’s almost healed,” said the one with the silver hair.
“Good.”
I pushed out of the tub of slime, which splattered everywhere.
“Hey, you’re not done yet!”
“I think I am.”
I stood up and slung off the healing slime, and reached out for the towel I was already being offered. I wiped the slime from my body and wrapped the towel around myself. Since the shot, I’ve always been a quick healer and that slime only makes it that much faster.
The men over by the acrylic board had heard the commotion, and their meeting had already broken up. They were watching me, and I was shambling toward them, my hair still wet from the slime. I stood before them.
“Any others like me?”
They shook their heads.
“How old are all of you?”
They murmured to themselves.
“How old? Come on now.”
I whipped my hand around at one of them and sent a sheet of slime their way.
They answered. Numbers from ten to twenty, but no higher. There was no one else. No one else still remembered it the way it used to be.
“Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“The serum keeps you young.”
“It kept many people very young, well, it just kept us from aging anymore.”
“How old are you?”
“A hundred today. Now, what’s going on?”
They pointed out the board. It was a representation of the world. Everything was in a grease pencil or dry-erase marker. There were little electronics around. Less to trace. Most of the major cities were destroyed. They were orange, with circles around them notating the radiation levels. There were also green triangles all over the place.
“What are the green triangles?”
“They are where we think the walkers are.”
“Let’s go take one down.”
“You’re serious.”
“Yes. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of all this. It’s all drones these days, anyway. Let’s take one down.”
“How do we do that?”
“They’re slow.”
In half an hour, they were all out and riding back toward town. I took the lead. On the way out of the city, I saw the walker that I passed.
An old mill that was broken down and in ruins was the place I led them through.
The walker stood over a lake, its feet completely submerged.
I made a hand gesture, a fist in the sky to get their attention, then motioned to the left and the right, and they circled the legs. They were usually upon three legs, tripod style with two off the ground, but this time the walker was still, with all five down. They split off into groups and started attacking the knees. They didn’t have lasers, they only had bullets, explosives, and old-style dynamite, but it was worth it. They lobbed dynamite into all the cracks and crevices they could find, and then, while the walker’s heads were trying to search for them, the knees exploded all the way around. The walker’s disk-shaped body fell into the lake, and the remains of its legs all stood around it.
A fog of steam flew up over them as they regrouped in search of their next target.
