Emergency Transmission

  EMERGENCY TRANSMISSION

  Toxic World Book Four

  By Sean McLachlan

  For Almudena, my wife

  and Julián, my son

  Copyright 2019 Sean McLachlan. All rights reserved.

  Cover courtesy Andrés Alonso-Herrero. Public domain photo courtesy U.S. Coast Guard.

  Characters in this work of fiction are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  David Nimitz trudged near the head of the column as the Righteous Horde made its way across a dry, seemingly endless plain. Little grew here, not because it was toxic like so many patches they had passed through in their long journey, but because the plains lay in the lee of the mountains that loomed close by to the west. The rains from the sea beyond got caught by the peaks, leaving precious little to hit the plain. Only a few creeks trickled down from the slopes. Each time the column came across one of these creeks, The Pure One, in his bottomless generosity, would pull back the white drapes of his palanquin and call a halt so the faithful could give up a prayer of thanks to God and drink their fill. David would mouth the words without feeling them. There was no point in praying. God had stopped listening.

  David had become accustomed to thirst, and hunger, and weariness. It had all become a dull ache that he barely noticed anymore. In the past few days, however, a new feeling had come through, a nervous racing of his heart and a sudden cold sweat. It had taken some time to figure out what it was—fear.

  It had been a long time since he had felt fear or, indeed, anything else. The march, the massacres, the constant frenzied sermons of The Pure One, it had been such an orgy of emotion for so long that it had eventually all guttered out. David hadn’t felt anything in months, not even when they had been decimated in the attack on New City, or when he had helped slaughter the machete men after they rose up against The Pure One. The retreat across the mountains and to the south had been one long dull nothing, the frequent executions of traitors barely noticed, the cuts in rations just another burden.

  Then he had woken up. One morning a couple of weeks after the failed siege, their leader had come out of his tent to give the morning sermon before breakfast. David had been at his usual post a few feet away, watching the crowd of “faithful” for any trouble. Hundreds of traitors had been executed in those early days of the retreat.

  A flash from a nearby hill caught his eye. A sniper!

  David had whipped his head around to check on his leader, just in time to see The Pure One flinch and a strange shell of blue light appear around him like some magical cocoon. For a moment David had been awestruck, until the leader recovered from his initial shock and checked the dials on that strange little black box always he wore on his belt. The blue light disappeared. The Pure One adjusted a dial and then raised his arms to the multitude.

  “The Lord has protected me from an infidel!” he had screeched. “There, on that hill, is the one who tried to kill me. Go! Go and kill!”

  David had done as he was bidden, chasing down the band of assassins from New City. They had failed to catch them, but David’s mind hadn’t been on the chase, his mind had been on that little black box. He had always wondered about it, always wondered why The Pure One constantly wore it but never spoke of it. And it got David to thinking.

  Most others saw it as a miracle, but he knew some of the Elect, those who stood as close to the leader as he did, had started thinking as well. He could see it in their eyes.

  David knew little about technology from the Old Times. He wasn’t a techno like Harold or Graham. Before all this he had been a fisherman. But he knew that the devices of the Old Times could do almost anything. Hadn’t people in those days flown like birds, and even built a village on the Moon? Hadn’t they destroyed entire cities with a single bomb? Surely they could make something to stop bullets.

  So as the Righteous Horde retreated south, abandoning most of the porters and comfort women since there wasn’t enough food, David started paying attention when the technos talked. Although he didn’t understand all they said, he learned valuable things. Things like “battery limits” and “recharge time”.

  During the day, at rest times, The Pure One would set out a small solar panel attached to a box he had heard the technos call a battery, something that stored the energy that machines used. At night after the evening sermon, The Pure One would retire to his tent until the next morning. David, being one of the Elect, often stood on guard duty outside. After a few minutes, David would hear a low hum coming from inside the tent. It lasted about half an hour. David thought maybe this meant that He was using this battery to recharge his blue shield of light, and that it would be shut off during that time like other machines had to rest.

  God had not saved Him. It had been a trick. A lie.

  It had all been a lie.

  David had so wanted to believe. He wanted to think that the world really could get better, that this man whose words sent a thrill through the hearts of so many really did have the answers, that He was leading them on a righteous crusade to cleanse the Earth.

  But no, it had all been a lie, and David had come to a decision.

  He would kill The Pure One.

  And so he felt fear, not fear that he would be killed, for he knew that would certainly happen, but fear that he might fail. To have sinned so greatly and not have a chance to make amends—that would be too much. If David had to spend all eternity in hellfire, he should at least have a chance to make amends. He knew God would not forgive all the things he had done, should not forgive them, but at least David could balance things a little.

  He remembered a story his mother used to tell about the Virgin Mary. Mom kept a little statue of her in their hut by the shore. The Virgin Mary wasn’t pale-skinned like white people thought, but black like David and his family. Mom used to tell him that one day the blessed Mother of God had visited Hell and seen the sufferings of the damned. She had interceded with God and asked that the suffering souls be given one day of reprieve a year in order to rest. God had granted that, and so even the damned received a bit of divine mercy.

  David liked that story. He had never heard it in all The Pure One’s countless sermons. The leader never spoke of the Virgin Mary. He didn’t talk about Jesus much either. He only talked about God the Father, and his wrath.

  But maybe God really did show mercy to the damned.

  Or maybe God didn’t care. There didn’t seem much proof that the Lord did. Perhaps it was true what some said, that God had abandoned the world after the fall of civilization. Or perhaps the unbelievers were right and there was no God at all.

  It didn’t matter. David would kill The Pure One, and when he died in the attempt, he would get eternal hellfire or eternal darkness. Either one would be no better than what he deserved.

  Days passed. The executions tapered off as the last of the malcontents were killed or escaped. The Righteous Horde, which once numbered more than ten thousand, had been whittled down to a couple of thousand true believers. At least David assumed they were true believers. Perhaps many people now only followed The Pure One because they had nowhere else to go. Word had spread of the “miracle”, and now some of the machete men had returned, begging forgiveness. There were even some new converts from among the scavengers, who used to hide at their passing. Despite their terrible defeat and the short rations, the Righteous Horde looked like it might come back to life.

  David couldn’t let that happen.

  He had to plan this right. He was one of The Pure One’s oldest followers, and had become a leader among some of the Elect. Some, but not all. There were factions and mistrust, and He knew of this and made sure that there were always two gu
ards at the entrance to His tent, and took care to pick them from rival factions. David could always shoot the other guard and then rush into the tent, but what if He could turn the machine back on and stop David’s bullets? No, he had to kill Him first, without warning.

  But then who would kill the other guard? David wouldn’t have time to unzip the tent and fire before getting killed himself. All of the Elect were too quick on the draw for David to manage that.

  The Pure One always pitched his tent a good two hundred meters from the tents of the Elect, and even further from the lean-tos and bedrolls of the few remaining machete men and camp followers. David’s support would have to be someone who could be alerted at a moment’s notice, and fire from long range with an assured hit.

  The answer was obvious—Aaron. He was David’s most trusted ally, almost a friend in this friendless army, and as good a shot as him. There were others who could be trusted to do it and who could make the shot, but only Aaron had an extra something that had always made David trust him a little more—he was a brother.

  The thought made David smile with the irony. Back in the Old Times, he knew, his and Aaron’s black skin would have been held against them. Even in this fallen age there were white people who looked down on anyone different, not that they would be dumb enough to say anything to David or Aaron’s face. There was a time, though, when David wasn’t a killer, when he was young and weak and survived by fishing with his mother and father. They plied the coast far to the north, several long day’s sailing north of New City, and sold their surplus catch to the scavengers or in the little hamlets that dotted the coast. Most settlements were mixed, while some were all Latino or all black or all white. They never stayed at the all-white settlements longer than absolutely necessary.

  “You just can’t trust white people,” his father used to say.

  David always thought Dad was exaggerating. Sure, he had been called names, he had been bullied by whites bigger than he was. The world was full of hate and life was always safer with one’s own kind, but hadn’t it been a black bandit who had stolen their boat? And in the Old Times, black people had polluted the world too. There was evil everywhere, and it did not have a color.

  And then, some years after the cancer had taken both his parents, he had heard of The Pure One.

  David’s faith had been shaken after his parents died. It rekindled again when he heard of the miraculous man from the north, the man who had lived with a big band of scavengers. They had stumbled upon a terrible spill of toxic waste that had killed them all, all except for The Pure One. He hadn’t been touched. No cancer, no rashes, nothing.

  David felt intrigued. He had traded his boat and nets for some food and marched inland to find this man.

  The gathering was modest compared to what the Righteous Horde later became, but even then it was more people than David had ever seen all in one place, at least three hundred. They sat in a small, round valley. Atop a boulder in the valley’s center stood the most stunning man David had ever laid eyes on.

  He looked just like Jesus in the drawings of the Old Times. He had flowing, golden hair, a tidy beard and moustache, and the bluest eyes David had ever seen. He wore a robe of the purest white, and his skin was pure and white too. Of course Jesus had been black, with skin of brass and hair of lamb’s wool like the Bible said, but David could not help make the connection between this man’s appearance and all the images of the white Jesus he had seen.

  He looked so pure. While even the healthiest person had scars or rashes or little deformities, this man was perfect.

  The Pure One had spoken a message of hope, of how God had allowed the world to fall into ruin because those in the Old Times had forgotten their maker. He had spoken of how if they bent their will to the Lord’s, and worked to clean the world, God would purify the earth and civilization could begin again. The unclean were the enemy. No one else. No man or woman, no matter the color of their skin or their station in life, was to blame for how the world had turned out, only the unclean. The Pure One called on everyone to create an army of the pure, a Righteous Horde, to sweep away the bandits and tweakers and those who preyed on the innocent.

  And then he had done something remarkable. He had called up an Asian man who stood nearby. He had told them the man’s name, and said the man was Chinese.

  The crowd gaped, stunned.

  The Pure One embraced him, saying, “All are equal in the eyes of the Lord. This man is as pure and as righteous as any man here.”

  David had joined the Righteous Horde that very day.

  The Pure One had been a white man David had trusted with all his heart, and He had turned out to be a liar. His vision of cleansing the Earth had turned into genocide. His message of hope had become a nightmare. While He did not judge people by their color, He ordered the death of anyone who did not offer total obedience, and that made Him more twisted than the worst racist David had ever met. The Pure One had taken racism and perverted it into something a thousand times more evil. The one white man David had trusted turned out to be the worst white man of them all.

  After all these years, David had discovered Dad had been right all along.

  The night they planned to kill Him, David and Aaron sat together and talked. The mountains to the west had broken into rough hills, and to the south they could see clear to the sea, where the sun had turned the water a brilliant gold. It reminded David of his childhood. The sea was still beautiful if you didn’t get close enough to smell it.

  They built a fire for their evening meal. Even longtime comrades couldn’t be seen talking together without doing some sort of work. That would arouse suspicion.

  “So you’ll do it?” David asked in a low voice. Others sat close by.

  “Yes,” Aaron replied, squaring his massive shoulders. “He’ll lead us all to our death. There’s nothing down this way. If we had conquered New City things would be different, but …”

  Aaron let his words trail off. In a normal conversation he would have shrugged or given some other gesture to emphasize his hopelessness. Here such a gesture could be seen as a lack of faith, so he and David kept a serene, optimistic expression plastered on their faces.

  A breeze picked up from the south. David’s gaze darted in the direction of a skittering sound. Only a bit of Old Times plastic blowing in the wind.

  “If the pattern stays the same I’ll be on duty tonight,” David said. “The other guard will be Bill or Sam.”

  “I’ll be ready,” Aaron reassured him.

  Two more bits of plastic blew along in the dusk. David saw they were old bags. They hit the tent of one of the Elect and the man kicked them away.

  “Must be a dump nearby,” Aaron said.

  They finished making their fire. There wasn’t much to use as fuel, just a few sticks and heaps of grass. The plain here was gritty, with bad soil and discolored, half-dead grass. They had not seen a farm for three days. They hadn’t even seen a scavenger in that time. It wasn’t only the proximity of the sea that made people avoid this area; it was the soil itself, soaked with old toxins. Any sane man would avoid such a place. Supposedly the Righteous Horde had nothing to fear because their holiness made them immune. Of course the toxins did make people fall sick, even some of the best, most loyal men from among the Elect. It was sad, their leader said, when one so trusted had an unfaithful heart. Why else would they have fallen sick?

  And there was only one thing to do with the unfaithful.

  David and Aaron shared a quarter of a rabbit, freshly caught by one of the scouts. They’d stayed close to the mountains so the scouts could hunt. Even though the game was plentiful on the slopes, there were too many mouths to feed and other than some stale bread they’d looted from a farmstead a week ago, this was all they had gotten to eat today.

  After dinner, they attended the evening sermon. David stood among the ranks of the Elect, each man with an M16 at the ready, facing the assembled crowd. The words rolled over him mostly unheard. It was the same thing o
ver and over again these days—how the many infidels in the ranks had made the Lord wrathful and led to their defeat, how the Righteous Horde had been cast out into the wildlands to purify itself.

  Now there was hope. The scouts had found richer lands to the south. There would be farms to loot, and perhaps the fabled Southern City that so many spoke of. The Lord would look upon them with favor now that the Horde’s ranks had been cleansed.

  “Purity! Purity! Purity!” the ranks chanted. David chanted too. Not to chant would mean instant death. He wondered how many in that crowd of sunken, sallow faces actually meant it anymore.

  He’d find out tonight.

  The Pure One stepped down from the rock on which He had been standing and made for His tent. As he passed through the Elect, He motioned to two of them.

  “David, Bill, you’re with me,” He said.

  “Your word is the Lord’s word,” David and Bill repeated automatically.

  They fell into formation, flanking their leader, eyes roving for any possible assassination attempt. David glanced at the little black box on His belt. There were two lights on it. The red one was lit. During most of the day the green one was lit. Red had often been a warning color in the Old Times, so perhaps that meant the box had grown tired and needed energy.

  David tensed as the realization came over him that this entire plan hinged on his scanty knowledge of technology. The only items from the Old Times he knew how to use were guns and radios, and He had banned radios.

  Bill was a lean, hard-eyed white man with a shock of red hair. Even though he was one of the early converts, joining only a couple of months after David himself, David found it hard to read him. He’d always been a quiet one, quick to obey orders and a good man in a fight, but he was part of a group of the Elect that rivaled David’s own. David couldn’t remember how this rivalry had started and doubted Bill could either. It probably hadn’t been anything personal. Both groups competed for their leader’s favor, and for the increasingly scarce resources of food, clothing, tents, and women.