The boy slept fitfully beside
Chrissy and Jerry. None of them slept
well. She wasn’t sure how he had come to
be with them. They were all walking
north out of Florida and he just sort of took up with them and they with him. He had quite an arsenal in his backpack –
mace, strings he used for snares, a small hatchet, two knives, a fold-up and expandable
fishing rod, reel, line and hooks, a compass and a first aide kit. Strapped to the bag was an array of water
bottles, sunscreen and mosquito spray.
To balance the boy’s supplies, the
Troughtons had food – dehydrated vegetables and fruit, jerky, teabags, sugar
and bouillon cubes. Jerry carried the
kettle and the pot.
The road they traveled beside,
Highway 301, hadn’t been scoured by city-eaters. That’s what the invaders were called – city-eaters. They were alien machines made up of
one-hundred and forty four mechanical monsters in a twelve by twelve linked
grid. It did exactly what its name
implied – it ate entire cities, one forty-eight foot swatch at a time. The Troughtons had to watch out for
individual mechmon (mechanical monsters became mechmonsters became mechmons over
the six months since they arrived) but mechmons were easily evaded because the
metal aliens made so much noise and traveled in packs of three. As long as humans didn’t congregate too much
metal together, they were pretty much ignored.
The highways were empty. When the mechmons first landed (actually,
they were dropped off along the arctic tree line by the mother ship in thousands
of bunches of one gross – like a factory spewing out one-hundred-forty-four four
foot by four foot sized cubes at a time), humans stood and gaped in amazement.
They went viral on the net, and people looked on them as harbingers of hope and
a new alliance with whatever was “out there”.
The mechmons, however, totally ignored their adoring fans and opened
their mandibles, unfurled their appendages, and began to eat. Humans watched in
disbelief as their world changed. The mechmons joined together into twelve by
twelve masses – the city-eaters, and the ones left over joined into groups of
three by three – the roadsters, or just stayed single. The mechmons were the
scouts and moved in triplets, dashing around the countryside with their three
appendages: the concave-shaped one hunting for metal, the spatula-shaped one
communicating with each other, and the net-shaped one – the horrible net-shaped
grabby-thing absorbing and infiltrating anything it came in contact with --
eating. Roadsters also moved in triplets; as scavengers attacking anything
larger than a mechmon could handle in less than an hour – which actually and mind-numbingly
– was a great deal of metal. The
roadsters traveled from the mechmons to the city-eaters and back again, like
secret agents couriering the where-abouts of precious metals. Once the mechmons discovered roads, to be
specific – cars on roads, the roadsters dashed back and communicated the
information to the city-eaters, and humanity watched as the bulks moved at a
slow pace to the roads, which led to small towns, which led to highways, which
led to major cities. Humans were
resistant to the idea that they were not, in fact, masters of the roads, and
continued to use them as pathways of escape, clogging them with trucks, cars, motorcycles,
busses and vans. Each city-eater would
plod along the highway, scooping up every vehicle in its path. Cars disappeared inside it whether there were
people in them or not. People
disappeared inside the machines and were spewed out along with rubber and
plastic and cloth and glass as great globs of gelatinous machine-generated
excrement. The stench of a fresh pile
was horrific for up to four months. Ants and roaches flourished, scouring
sustenance from the minutia.
If the people got out of the
vehicles and ran off the road, they were generally left alone. Occasionally, an alien – a four-foot by
four-foot cube with black tentacles – would bear down on a flock of survivors,
confiscating metal coins, jewelry and glasses and any body parts that might
still be attached to them.
Chrissy shuddered and rolled over,
refusing to think about the poor soul yesterday. The old woman had had a metal replacement hip
and thigh bone: surgical steel – too rich for a mechmon to ignore.
The boy sat up, looking around first
in terror and then in resignation.
“It’s almost dawn, Doug,” Chrissy
commented.
“I’ll go check my snares.”
“Would you teach me how to do that?”
Doug shrugged and then smiled, “Sure,
Chrissy.”
In Doug’s four snares were a rabbit
and a rat; the other two had been yanked away from their anchors. “I guess in
time, we might need to think of rats as food, but not yet. Right?”
She nodded.
“You can make a snare out of any
type of string or wire. But, I don’t use any type of metal. I started out using
shoe strings, but then you had that yarn. And you could use any type of string
or rope, too. I read about snares made from grass woven together into a rope.”
“That makes sense, since grass
fibers were the first kind of yarn.”
“You make a loop, like a slipknot on
one end. Then feed the other end through the loop. Tie the noose a little above
the ground and anchor it to a branch or shrub.
Sometimes you need to hold the noose open with two little twigs. The
noose has to be small enough for the head but not too big for the shoulders.
See, the animal goes through the noose head first and gets caught. It struggles
and strangles.”
Chrissy tried not to show how
squeamish she felt. Hunger took priority to the thoughts of cute little
bunnies. So she nodded again.
Excerpt from
Troughton
Company
© Evelyn Rainey
Available for publication.
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