Courtesy of the manly CPRM

Simon shouldered his backpack. “How far do you think?” he asked.

“The descent was steep and the sound of the impact was right on top of the flash, so I’m pretty sure it’s on the estate grounds,” Wartimus said, storing the counter and settling his own backpack in place. He pointed to the thin column of smoke.

“I got due east,” Simon said looking at his compass.

Wartimus consulted the luminous face of his own compass. “Agreed. Due east,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The two boys crossed manicured lawn of the backyard and entered the mature woods beyond. The red gels over their flashlights preserved their night vision as they rustled through last year’s leaves. A dry summer had kept the undergrowth down and they made good time.

The woods on the estate had been their playground since they had first met in second grade. Hieronymus had insisted that Wartimus attend the local public school for—in his words—“the sheer lumpen experience of it.” Nearly all of the parents of the children he went to school worked for his father. Simon’s parents worked in the biosciences division, riding the funicular every day to where the factory of Riesigmann Industries clung to the top of the mountain like the enormous claw of an eagle. Simon was the only boy in his class not terrified of Wartimus, the brooding 8-year-old with visible abs and a father that owned the entire town. Wartimus was just happy to meet someone not in awe of his father.

Playing with Simon gave Wartimus the semblance of a normal childhood, as long as a normal childhood involved raiding the estate armory to stitch machine gun fire across enemy trees or engineering a mistletoe blight to ruin Christmas that caused robins maddened by the mutant berries to attack his entire class while on a field trip. Simon loved to spend time with Wartimus, even if he could never tell his mother that their tree house had a number of deadfall traps dug around its defensive perimeter and Simon was expected to run a homemade mortar in case of attack.

The second compass check was made in a small clearing they came upon twenty minutes from the gate.

“Is this…” Simon began.

“Yes,” Warty said. He swung his flashlight over to a blackened stump.

“I told you napalm was a bad idea,” Simon said.

“We contained it.”

“Your father was so angry.”

“Not really,” Wartimus said, “The propane tank didn’t blow. And it wasn’t like Tree House Mark One was anything he had helped build anyway.”

Wartimus straightened and held his hand up in the starlit night.

“You hear that?” he whispered to Simon and the boy shook his head.

Wartimus tugged Simon back under the cover of the trees as a downdraft of air blasted the clearing and a helicopter blotted out the sky. It was nearly silent and moving slowly. Eventually, it went behind the tops of trees at the far end of the clearing.

“It’s moving due east,” Wartimus spat. “I’m going on ahead,” he said and took off running.

He immediately left Simon behind. Alone, Wartimus no longer had to pretend he needed the flashlight and tucked into the holster on his belt, his pupils dilating to drink in starlight. He leaped over obstacles he would have had to walk around with Simon in tow. His lungs shifted in his chest to better strip oxygen from the night air and his heart hammered away. Simon had seen some of the things Hieronymus had engineered into Wartimus, but small things that could be dismissed, like skin a little too resistant to cuts or landing on his feet from a fall a little too far to survive unharmed. His strength and inhuman grace as he moved through the forest would have frightened Simon.

Wartimus outpaced the slow search pattern of the helicopter and skidded to a stop at the rim of the crater ahead of it. It was three meters across and almost as deep. The trees around the crater were down, blasted outward, blackened and still smoldering. There was no way the helicopter would miss this, he knew he had to hurry.

Wartimus peered over the edge looking for an impactor. There was a faint Tyrian glow from the center of the crater. He backed off and got out the Geiger counter. There was only the slow tick tick tick of normal background radiation as he circled the crater. The glow faded as he made it back to his starting point and Simon came crashing through the underbrush, specimen bucket rattling, his flashlight bouncing wildly, the red gel lost.

“How… long… have… you… been… here?” Simon managed, holding his side.

“Less than a minute,” Wartimus lied.

“Radiation?”

“Nothing. I can’t see anything in the crater. I’m going down there.”

Wartimus took the bucket from Simon as the boy continued to catch his breath. He removed the safety gloves and put them on. Handing the still ticking Geiger counter to Simon, Wartimus took a pair of heavy-duty tongs out and practiced working them with the awkward gloves.

As they walked around the crater looking for a good spot to climb down, the helicopter passed close enough to send a cloud of dead leaves and pine needles toward them. Wartimus estimated they would be right over the crater on the next pass.

“We have to go now!” Wartimus shouted and jumped over the edge and rode the slope down in controlled fall. Simon followed less gracefully, the specimen bucket rolling ahead of him. Wartimus caught him before he fell face-first. The Geiger counter didn’t change as Simon waved it close to the center of the crater.

“It’s OK to put that away,” Wartimus said as he fell to his knees and began brushing back the fine dust that had gathered at the lowest point. There was no residual heat or shock geology.

“It didn’t come down very fast,” Wartimus told Simon. Something was just visible in the shaky beam from Simon’s flashlight. He scraped a channel all around it and lifted it carefully, grunting under the unexpected weight. It was purple and studded and looked to be covered in open sores.

“It’s some sort of…” Wartimus began to say but a towering pillar of light stabbed down from the helicopter as it slid in place over them.

“It’s a huge dildo!” Simon yelled in surprise.

 

Chapter One | Chapter Three