Excerpt from Azimuth
AZIMUTH
Chapter One
2200 A.D.
Present Day
“Men have become the tools of their tools.”
- Henry David Thoreau
Five thousand bleeding feet and soulless eyes follow me day and night. Mysterious specters from afar, shadows on my trail, but never a sound, never any closer, only the distant ebb and flow of shuffling soles. Six months have I traveled the wasted landscape, a Moses of these monsters, but the worst monster is the man reflected back at me through the eyes of all my victims. Since the nanocide, I hunted down every living survivor, and now only two remained, this man before me, and the woman still ahead.
My gun leveled at the last man between me, and humanity’s future.
“Logan!” The lunatic yelled my name and grabbed fistfuls of sand, trying to anchor himself to the world of the living. “For God’s sake, can’t you see that you’re helping it!”
An archaic saying lost of meaning, God. I squinted, and the gun fired.
The man screamed, fingernails tearing at his chest as the micro-bullets spread across his skin, quickly going to work. Within seconds they reached his brain and what was left of him collapsed in a twitching mass of flesh.
The weapon materialized back into my liquid exo-skeleton as I turned away. My horse gave a snort as I walked over to him.
“Shhh,” I said, stroking his smooth black skin that rippled like dark oil under my hand. “Only two of us left now. Only two little monkeys jumping on the bed.” I laughed aloud at the one thing in the world that wasn’t funny; the fact that I could count on one hand how many living, breathing, humans still walked this planet. I laid my forehead on his neck. It felt nice to lay my head against his warmth even if it did smell like plastic with a dash of ions.
A sizzling noise caught my attention, though I knew very well what the sound was. The specialized bullets were disassembling the body molecule by molecule. Soon it would be like the body had never existed at all. Dust to dust. Atom to atom. Amber grasses rustled and I closed my eyes to better feel the breeze and smell the earth. Earth. That’s all we ever were and ever would be. Beneath my feet lay the bones of billions, the decayed bodies of many living things. Like morbid armor, the planet wore a crusted layer of death, a mesh of infinite interlocking links between our greaves of grief.
My only companion, Buckyball, shoved his large head against my chest and disrupted my poetic musings.
“All right. All right.” I smiled. “We’ll go find her.”
Unwelcome, but all too familiar, came the sound of skin scraping across ground. Raising my eyes to the nearest hill, I saw them stop, all five thousand of my ominous followers, and the shuffling tide became ragged waves of breath. Silently I suffocated under the weight of their empty stares, this gaunt garrison, this constant reminder of why the gun should be aimed at my own skull.
With effort, I tried to ignore the horde, and heaved myself up onto Bucky’s back. His skin-armor shifted and slid to adhere my armored legs to his sides. No amount of sudden maneuvering would dislodge me. We were like one animal. Soon as I was astride and secured, our minds synced up. Now we truly were one organism. Since I was the more intelligent species, and stronger minded, Buckyball trusted me. He’d go anywhere I told him to, even off a cliff if I so wished. Never would I find a more trusting and loyal friend, certainly not in a human anyway.
He could sense where I wanted to go, the distant abandoned city, so he threw his head high, black spikes protruding then retracting along the crest of his neck, and made for the crumbling buildings at a good clip. I thought of my purpose: the woman. She was the last one. Clouds of insects chattered and buzzed, clacking their wings, as we disturbed their private lives in the high-rise grasses. Bucky’s drumming on the hard-packed dirt was like a lullaby, the swaying of his stride soothing me into a rhythmic existence. Ahead stood the sinew of humankind’s ingenuity, while behind followed the ghosts of gods.
