Part 21 (2/2)
She's going. It's over. She's through.
John began to crawl away, then stood up to run even though he hurt too badly to do so. The best he could manage was a lopsided limp. Eve's strangely high-pitched voice followed him, echoing from the opening above.
”Don't run away, sir. Please don't feel that you need to stay on my account.” Her skittering voice took on a surly tone. ”The evening is at an end. Can I order you a ride?”
”Yeah,” he muttered through clenched teeth. ”A yacht. A big yacht with an ice cold lemonade and a couple of gorgeous ”
He gasped as he stumbled over a rock and felt his side flash with pain. He sank to one knee to keep himself from tumbling down an embankment that was shaking underneath him.
He turned his face back toward the gleaming crystal hole he had come out of.
”Eve!” he shouted. ”I need you. Please help me, please! Seal that exit!”
”You need me?” she replied. ”What a nice thing to say. I find that wonderfully validating.”
Her voice sank back to normal octaves, but the speech slowed down and had a different accent. ”I just wanted to hear...”
John couldn't make out the rest of her words as the rumbling from the mountain cliff he was facing drowned it out. She's turned into a ditzy girl, chattering inanely right at the end of the world. Glenn was a real idiot.
We all were.
The voice became clear again as it shouted a farewell. ”You're wrong about me, sir. Entirely wrong. I'm not what you think I am. Now stand clear and mind your hat!”
He heard a high-pitched whine as fans came on inside the observation deck and shot a barrier of forced air back into the lounge area. Then the rock face that stretched from the valley floor up to the top of the cliff high above the Facility exit began to wave and shudder.
A long, loud scream came from inside. He thought she was screaming Glenn's name. It was drowned out by the roaring and shaking of the earth.
John couldn't be sure where all of the earth forming the landslide was coming from, but more dirt and rocks poured down the cliff at him than just the face itself could produce. It appeared to be bubbling up from the depths of the earth beneath the Facility.
He began running again, adrenaline replacing his pain with a burst of energy. He could hear huge boulders pounding the ground behind him, and he ran faster. Then the avalanche of displaced earth caught up with him and he was swept along, tumbling and cartwheeling as the landslide ran out half a kilometer into Eden.
27.
A bird called somewhere, but it was the pain that first awakened him.
John jerked, groaning. Was it a bad dream? No, he could feel the ravages of adrenaline and traumatic stress insisting that his mind hadn't made any of it up.
When he finally pulled his face from the dirt, he was turned around, and the first thing he saw was the cliff he had come out of. The Facility was gone, buried under a fifty-meter-long hill of steep brown scree.
Is this it? The beginning of the end of the world as we know it? It's very quiet.
He turned, taking in the panorama of destruction by degrees. Behind him something tall and angular protruded from the hill of rubble. His heart leaped as he comprehended the twisted metal strut, half-buried and poking out of the earth at an angle like a skeleton's arm.
Metal. If the nanos had escaped, the metal would have been eaten.
It hurt to smile, but he smiled anyway.
He picked himself up. Aside from his aching side, a twisted ankle that had been caught by a rock in the slide, and mouthful of sand, he wasn't terribly dissatisfied with the way things had turned out. A flood of relief lifted his heart and brought tears to his eyes. It worked. I did it.
She did it.
And yet...
The relief died away as his mind continued spinning.
I'm right back where I started, alone on this crazy island with nothing but a few exotic animals and a harsh sunburn.
And I might be here a while.
In fact, John admitted ruefully to himself, it could be a very long while. Janice was gone, Eve was gone, but the nan.o.bots had a fifty-year lifespan. And they were still in there, underground, waiting.
He knew, suddenly, that even if he brought all the firepower in the world down on the island, and rained high explosives for a month, there was a good chance a few nanos would be missed. There was no way to scan for them. And ma.s.sive explosions might even break open a pocket of nanos, reveal them to the open air, bring about the very outcome the saturation bombs were deployed to prevent.
Because all it takes is one.
But for that matter, I probably wouldn't even get the airstrike. No, they wouldn't destroy them. They'd come in here and harness them. The guys up top wouldn't be able to resist a toy like the one Eve made.
And there's the rub. If anyone, government or military or a prospector with a pickaxe, disturbs this island, then that's all she wrote. Our chapter ends.
I didn't just go through h.e.l.l for nothing.
He sighed, trying the math in his clouded head.
Fifty years... I'll be eighty no, eighty three. Just thinking about it made him feel old.
That's a long, lonely fifty years for me. Because if anyone comes around trying to make friends... I'll have to kill them.
Four hours later a naval aircraft blew overhead at high alt.i.tude, snapping pictures of the seismic disturbance center. The man on the ground below, much too far to see clearly through the jungle cover, didn't even look up.
He was too busy sharpening a makes.h.i.+ft spear.
End.
Machines of Eden is Shad Callister's debut novel. He lives in Utah and Alabama, where he writes, reads, and prepares for doomsday. Find out more about Shad's world at shadcallister.wordpress.com.
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