The Overlord: A Post-Apocalyptic Novel (23 page)

"Humanity will want to know the truth," I countered. "The people deserve to know who preserved their lives this day."

Deadstock demanded in return, "Then don't speak of me in terms of good or evil, a hero or a villain. Tell humanity I was a choice, and the choice to love was made this day."

Revving up the jangling engine once again, the Low Atmo bike hovered off the deck of my ship. Deadstock then flew out through the hatch into the ominous distance beyond. Into the murky sky of crimson, he rode. It was like a cowboy of old, riding off triumphantly into the sunset toward a new adventure. Only it would be Dr. Deadstock's last ride. He wasn't coming back or going anywhere new. It was the final sunset.

A tear flowed as I watched him leave. It was the first physical emotion I had allowed myself over the past three days. A single tear. It held everything, all the equations and all the answers.

"Goodbye, my husband," I softly spoke into the whirls of the wind. "Farwell, Overlord."

My tears blurred the outlying panorama and I soon lost sight of him. Into that abysmal distance, he was gone. All I could do was wait for any sign of success.

I was back in the infirmary with Sentria when a sign finally came. The distant purple fire of the laser beam suddenly shut off, ceasing in one instant and dissipating into all directions. The hovering pyramid groaned out, giving pause to a levitating balance. Hesitating in its own weight, the glassy panes compressed and shattered as the colossal structure lost its place in the sky.

The Overlord's task was complete. His creation, destroyed. The reign of the Blood Tech was over.

It was a glorious downfall as the pyramid descended to the earth below. My crew was cheering at the brilliant display of obliteration, but beside me, Sentria sat in silent peace. With "Old Glory" in her arms, she pulled the flag just a little closer toward her heart as she looked out into the distance.

As the lava flow settled and the volcano went back to sleep, I noticed that the adjoining shoreline beyond the Lair had moved in a little closer. The upset of the terrain had sunk the level of the ground. The ocean had taken its place as a result. Its arrival had been hidden in steam, only recognizable when the molten lava began to solidify. It was a new shore, a messy destruction where water and land were coming to meet.

In its emerging beauty, though, I found that I could not look upon that stricken beach for very long. I closed my eyes to the devastation upon the burning sands. It was not out of regret or loss, sadness or hardship. I had closed my eyes in thanksgiving. Triumph had been reached and I needed not look upon destruction any longer. When I reopened my eyes, at last, I saw only a new creation.

20

THE CHILDREN

In the bedlam of the lava's terror, the Thralls had taken refuge throughout the labyrinth of the forest. Those that survived were met with a new terror. The guns of the United Corps had come to seek them out.

The Blood Tech had been destroyed and the remains of the upturned Lair had stabilized. The air space was relatively clear, allowing the Corps to hunt us down with a vengeance. A mandate had been given to find every surviving Thrall and subsequently eliminate them without mercy. In the eyes of the Free World, we had lost the right to exist on this planet.

The waterfalls had run dry and every cave had collapsed. The trees and cliffs were no more, leaving most of us out in the open. Without cover, we'd be easy targets. Fossil and I were among a handful of refugees when the Corps ships descended from the darkness above. Raining down their fire upon us, we hid behind whatever we could find. Taking shelter behind overturned stumps and rubble, we fought back with what little hyper rounds we had left. Our assailants then deployed from their shuttles to move forward in a ground assault. All too soon, we were outmaneuvered, outnumbered, and outgunned.

The whole area was cloaked in a sweltering fog and our vision was becoming more and more obscure in the heat. There was no time to clean our faceguards during the firefight. I took off my helmet so I could see and found a shortness of breath. The air was hot and full of fumes.

Breathing slowly, in and out, I watched as my fellow brothers and sisters of the Thralldom fell. One by one, these fallen were good people. Some were barely even adults, like me. They'd just been caught on the wrong side of fate. I guess nobody had the luxury of innocence anymore. In that moment, the whole world had grown old as youth was slowly being killed off.

Through it all, Fossil took several hits for the sake of others. He made it his duty to safeguard whatever Thralls he could help. In the repercussions of the firefight, I was counted among the lives he protected. Fossil was the kind of man that would give his life for another, dying a happier soul than any living you'll ever meet.

He shouted back to me as he charged toward the incoming assault, "See you on the other side, mate!"

A shot into the head and he was down. No last words. No dying wish. No emotional embrace as he left that battlefield to wherever his spirt was sent. There was no goodbye. He was just gone, plain and cold.

"I'll be right behind you," I swore to him in my grief as his body dropped to the charred earth.

It then came down to me. I was the final Thrall, all alone against the United Corps. The only thing I had left in my arsenal to fight back with was a mere three shots that sat in the chamber of my hyper pistol. I counted down the rounds.

"Three," I missed.

"Two," I overshot it.

"One," I began to press the trigger.

That last shot wasn't pointed toward any inbound targets. It was aimed under my chin. Crouching down, I decided to reserve the concluding round for myself. As the hot barrel singed the skin of my neck, I found it difficult to follow through. My forefinger was pressed against the prompter, but I couldn't find anything in me to pull that trigger. I eased my hand and decided to try again, a fresh attempt. My finger pressed once more.

"Wait!" A cry came from the fiery fog.

Despite what it seemed, the cry hadn't been directed toward me. The ground assault of the Corps had me pinned, prepared to finish me off before I could. The unexpected voice gave pause to both parties. It was a woman's voice, revealing to be an imperative order directly from the President. Ember Nightwood, in the flesh, had appeared on site.

"Stand down and hold your fire," she barked as she stomped through her ranks. "Bring the boy up to me, but do not dare hurt him."

With the violence at a standstill, I was quickly surrounded and captured. I didn't know what to make of it all, but thought it best to fully cooperate with them. Maybe I wanted to stay alive, if only for a little bit longer, or maybe I thought it'd mean I'd get to see Sentria one last time. In all honesty, I was probably just scared.

My wrists were tightly clamped in a pair of inflexible cuffs. I had never felt the restraints of metal before. In the Thralldom, we had electronic bindings. They were only rarely implemented during times of insubordination. The Thrall bindings were more comfortable than these archaic and demeaning chains. Perhaps they were less effective, but the restraints found in the Thralldom reassured whoever found themselves tied up in them that they weren't really in any kind of big trouble. Usually, their use was the result of a night of reckless activities. Nothing was ever more serious than that.

I remember when a few buddies convinced me to join them on a midnight flight. They had commandeered a transport and had planned to return it the next day. It was just a little recreation, but the excursion proved brief. We were quickly caught and subsequently reprimanded. After only a single day in the brig, we were released with a slap on our wrists and we all went on with our duty.

Being arrested by the United Corps was no wrist slap like the good old days, if ever those existed. I was being bound as a criminal. My captors truly believed I was something evil and there was no way to convince them otherwise. The elimination of the Thralls had been put into effect and I was now their final subtraction.

Beckoned into a United Corps shuttle, we were on our way back to Nightwood's ship, the "Beast of Burden." The transport was quiet inside. Nobody spoke. Nobody even looked at each other, let alone at me. Not that I could really tell. My head could barely turn to either side in the constraints of my seat.

The imprisonment somehow reminded me of arresting the Overlord. Only three days had gone by since his arrival, but it already seemed like it'd been years. If ever I desired to know what it might've felt like to be him in that instant, that desire had become more than fulfilled.

President Nightwood was seated directly across from me in the shuttle. The Chinese descendant was shorter than I expected a leader to be, but there was an authority in her posture that I wouldn't want to reckon with. Her elegant, slanted eyes were at rest. The look on her face was that of a warrior having just won a hard victory.

The last few days had to have been brutally exhausting for her. She certainly looked the part with her body deprived of sleep, beaten by the very conflicts going on in her mind. Through it all, she seemed at peace.

Nightwood slowly creaked open her eyelids and our glances met. The opportunity then arose to confront the President on why exactly she had chosen to spare my life. Upon asking, she turned about to see if anybody else in the shuttle was listening. It turned out, they all were. Clearly, she didn't want to talk about it in front of her crew. For whatever reason, though, she chose to respond.

"It was a promise," Nightwood admitted. "I gave my word to someone I cared about very much."

She then let out a sigh and I suddenly felt like I was looking upon somebody else. It was no longer the face of a politician or battle tactician before me. It was a simpler face, a sentiment hidden in time, forgotten until that very moment.

"Call it a woman's instinct," she continued, softer. "I have seen your face many times in my daughter's reports, but when I saw you in person, I did not see the face of the enemy. I saw the face of a boy, but don't take it the wrong way. Even Sentria, as formidable of a soldier as she may be, is still just my little girl. In my eyes and at my age, you both are as children to me."

A severe tone than surfaced from her lips, "Speaking of my daughter, do not let it get into your presumptuous head that sparing you was some kind of sympathy concerning your relationship with her. I do not sympathize whatsoever. Her love for you was always out of my control. I never agreed with Sentria's decision to form an emotional bond with anyone within the Thralldom, let alone fall in love with one. It was unsafe to have any stake in matters behind enemy lines, but I suppose it was unavoidable anyway. She was an insurgent, which meant that her role as a Thrall was a performance, but only to certain extents as I have come to learn. Much like her forbidden love with yourself, her allegiance to the Overlord revealed to be no act at all. Her loyalty will always be with those she sees as family, never the empires that surround them."

"How is she?" I asked in genuine worry.

It wasn't much. Just a simple question, but it was one she didn't expect. It must've been the way I said it that took her off guard. It became clear to her that I truly cared for Sentria and wasn't just some causal lover. My exposed feelings for her daughter were found real with all sincerity. The President stared at me for a few seconds, half in disbelief and half in remorse. Like one who has just realized they were wrong, Nightwood's aura unexpectedly changed.

"Ma'am?" I added in the quiet.

"She is well," Nightwood promised. "She will recover from her injuries in due time. Even in these barbaric circumstances, this is still a world of unequaled medical advancement. Recovery can come speedily without complication. Sentria is a fighter and she is in good hands."

I couldn't help showing some happy teeth. A grin popped out onto my face as I thought about Sentria. With my mind and heart at ease, I then offered a change of subject, "You know, Ma'am, this isn't the first time we've met."

Nightwood pondered, "Really? I have no recollection of any previous experience."

"I don't expect you would," I theorized. "It was a long time ago, but not to me."

Unconvinced, she questioned, "Just how is that?"

I remembered for the both of us, "I was a little boy and you'd only just become the President. Raids had broken out in the settlement I was growing up in. The Echoes of the wasteland were attempting to overturn your government. Attacking innocent civilians, it wasn't exactly a peaceful protest. I don't like talking about it, but my parents were among the victims. I was an instant orphan, lost in the desert that I once called home."

"I remember the post-war politics," Nightwood nodded. "It was complete disorder. The Last War was over, but sanity was still nowhere to be found. No one was ready to sing, for all had only just found their voices again. There were many orphans in those early days. Too many. Even one orphan proves too many for my heart."

"You and your troops were doing their best with what you had to work with," I encouraged. "The United Corps didn't yet have the arsenal to fully keep order like it has now. Still, you came to intervene. You came to fight back and reclaim my home. I was caught in the middle of the ensuing battle's crossfire. I remember the volleys of hyper bullets as they flew all around me. Frozen with fear, I squatted down low with my eyes closed shut and my hands over my ears. I tried to block everything out, but I couldn't escape the smell of that burning settlement. Right then, a woman came and picked me up off the ground. She had this kind, warm face like my mother always had. In her arms, she carried me out of danger. For the rest of that day, she never let go and I didn't either. I never could forget that woman's face. I hadn't seen it again until just now."

"I should have known it was you, Solomon Boone," she regretted with astonishment. "Of all people, I had no idea you were the boy from all those years ago."

I nodded, "And why would you? I'm a Thrall, and I guess Thralls aren't considered people that have a place in your world. You said Sentria and I are like children to you. Well, today, you just killed a whole lot of children just like us."

"I wanted to take you with me," she glumly switched the subject, avoiding her convictions with the murder of my fellow Thralls. "It was not my choice to leave you. The United Corps made me. They argued that if I took in one orphan that many more would expect the same treatment. They could not allow me to favor one child over another. The Corps assured me that they would place you somewhere safe and that you would be taken care of for the rest of your life."

"They put me to work in a neighboring farming settlement," I disclosed. "As your current prisoner, I think you can see how well that worked out."

She reasoned, "It is my unfortunate circumstance to be bound with obligations to the people. There is a painful difference in serving the people as a whole and serving the people as individuals. They do not go hand in hand as much as I would like, but never would I have wished to make an enemy out of you as a result of my duty to others."

I respectfully corrected, "I'm not your enemy, Ma'am. I never was. Most of my friends in the Thralldom weren't either. In the end, those who served the Overlord were betrayed by those who served Zero. The Commander and his thugs were your enemy. They were just as much our enemy as they were yours. Not that it makes much of a difference now. All the Thralls are dead. Extinct, except for me. One last remaining piece to the pyramid, that's all I am."

We then both just stared at the floor of the hull as we respired as silently as we could manage. I wasn't expecting Nightwood to apologize. I wasn't even trying to make her. I just wanted her to know that things weren't exactly what they had seemed. I needed her to know that the ghosts which I once called my friends hadn't died as enemies to the Free World, but tragically became causalities in its struggle to live.

After that, she put a lid on our little talk for the rest of the trip. It didn't matter if she felt any remorse or anything at all, for she took the role of my advocate from then on. Nightwood became a friend. Fate had taken a handful of companions from me that day and the last thing I expected was for their killer to be the one to take their place.