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James Axler – Zero City

Bending his knees, Harold slid his thick sausage fingers underneath the rock and grunted slightly as he lifted the quarter ton of polished granite to his chest.

“Where?” he asked in an embarrassed tone. “Forgot.”

Open mouthed, Felix could only stare as Ben directed Harold to the wall. Gingerly, so as to not hurt the puny wall, Harold placed the slab on top and stepped away quickly. Sometimes when he moved things they fell over, and he didn’t want to get hurt. For a split second, there flashed through his mind a kaleidoscope of images—a ladder, a push from below, falling toward the wall…but then they were gone and forgotten.

“Good job, Sarge,” Ben said, slapping the giant on the shoulder. “Get along. Dinner is waiting.”

“Yar,” he said, drooling. Tenderly retrieving his box, Harold ambled away, so very pleased to have helped a friend in need. Softly, the voices in his head started to whisper that they really weren’t his friends, but he covered his cauliflower ears and shouted until they stopped. Everybody in the ville was his friend. Didn’t they always ask him for help? He was as important as the baron! And today was a special day. He clutched the canvas bundle in his arm even tighter. Harold was going to get married today!

Watching the broken goliath shuffle away, Felix fanned himself with a battered cloth cap. “Son of a bitch. I ain’t never seen nothing like him!”

“Strong as a machine,” Ben agreed, finding his shirt and pulling it on over his head. “And just as dumb. We get him to do a lot of our work for us.”

“Doesn’t the foreman know?” Felix asked suspiciously.

“Naw, he does it, too. We all do.”

Unwrapping the rags from his hands, Felix privately smiled at the news. That was important information to file away if he ever decided to rat to the baron on laziness in the construction crews. Might become foreman himself that away. “If that thing ever goes insane, be mighty hard to stop.”

“Crap,” Ben scoffed, reclaiming his own hat, a battered baseball cap with the letters removed from on the bill. Only a few loose threads showed where the embroidered logo of some predark company had once been. “A bullet in the head will stop anything.”

Felix scowled deeply and cast his eyes to the cloudy sky. “No,” he said. “There are some things a blaster can’t stop.”

Fully understanding what the immigrant was referring to, Ben felt a rush of fear and turned up the wick on the lantern as high as it would go. The area was filled with brilliant light for several yards in every direction.

“Come on, let’s get inside,” Ben suggested. Staying near the lantern, they hurried toward the barracks and a meal long overdue.

THE TINY GRAY HOUSE stood alone on a cracked parking lot, the single plastic window solid white from the sandstorms that occasionally swept over the ville from the desert. The roof was tough plastic and withstood the acid rains in the spring just fine. Although kind of small, it had been comfy for two, tight for three, and now was too damn big for just him alone.

When Philip Arnstein and his wife first found the place, there had been a chart posted on the exterior listing the prices for the privilege of parking in the lot. But he had found a rusty can of paint decades ago and used half to paint the exterior twice, giving it a new look that pleased his wife greatly. She had shown him how much that night, by doing things she had only hinted about earlier. He still remembered that night and always would.

Naturally, the other half of the paint was given to the baron. Sex was nice, but not even the wolves scared him as much as the thought of going to the Machine.

Sitting in a lawn chair by the open door, the old man shook off those thoughts and lit a corncob pipe with a piece of smoldering oakum. In his withered hands was a whole fresh corncob, nicely dried and completely devoid of anything edible. Smoking contentedly, the oldster started to whittle a new pipe. This one was getting a bit oily in taste and was soon for the mash pot of the brewers. The baron didn’t let anything go to waste. It was his only good point, the bloody bastard.

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