(eng) Michael Armstrong by After the Zap

Author:After the Zap [Zap, After the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Nivakti was just another trader like us, on his way to Ship Creek to make his fortune, he told us. He was from Tikeraq, a village up on the Arctic coast. He said he had gone south after the Zap happened and he had been working his way back home since. He had a backpack full of carved ivory. “When I went south it was just tusks,” he said. “Had a lot of time on my hands.”

We piled snow on the bodies and dragged the dead dogs out on the frozen marsh. Max’s wheel dog died, saving us from having to shoot it. We put his dog with the other bodies. Come spring someone could give them a proper burial. The lodge took an hour to burn to the ground; it left a big puddle in the snow as it died.

There was a small cabin behind the lodge. No one home. Of course no one was home. On a dresser inside was a picture of Sherry and a man, probably the one at the front door of the lodge with his hands cut off. We ate their food and drank their whiskey and built a fire in their stove. There was a pie cooling in the mud room and we ate that, too.

“Who is this Devil’s Club?” I asked Max.

“Nasty suckers,” he said. “They’re like the storm troopers of the God Weirders. They believe that to conquer the devil they must eat the devil. So when they find what they think is evil . . .” He raised his fork.

“They eat it?” I asked.

Max nodded. “That’s probably why they cut out the heart of the child.”

I stared down at my piece of pie, then looked up at the wall opposite me. Sherry and her husband had rifles and shotguns hung on pegs on the wall. Hanging from one peg was a green thermos.

“I don’t think that’s why they cut out the heart of the child,” I said. I got up, took the thermos down, turned it over. At the base of the thermos was a small slot. “These folks had a nuke.”

Nivakti smiled. “Ah, yes, one of those. We had one in our village.”

I looked at him, stared. “Huh? You had a knapsack nuke?”

He shrugged. “We didn’t call it that. But before the War That Stopped Television—the Zap War, you white folks say—these army people came in and gave our village one of those nuclear weapons.”

“Wait a second,” said Rindi. “I don’t understand. That thermos is a nuke?” I nodded. “So what does that have to do with the kid? Why did they cut out the heart of the child?”

I pointed at the slot in the thermos. “There’s a code, what we call a football, that fits in here and arms the nuke. The football is a pattern burned into the heart of a child. In order to fire the nuke, you have to cut out the heart of whoever is carrying the football.” I smiled. “But the dumb Devil’s Club didn’t find the nuke.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.