Sci-Fi WIP #1

I awoke in the middle of the night to my phone loudly playing a message, "This is the Emergency Broadcast Channel, This is not a test. Please seek shelter immediately. Do not look outside, do not make noise, do not-", the transmission ended.

Ugh I thought, didn't I turn off those public warning alerts? as I reached over towards my nightstand in the darkness. With a practiced reach and minimal fumbling, I grabbed my phone and pressed the power button. Nothing. Hard reset, but still nothing. That's when I really noticed the silence of my room: no furnace blower, no computer fans or status LEDs on anything. Reaching back over to my nightstand I grabbed my ceiling fan remote and pressed the button that controlled the overhead light.

"Dammit..." I muttered in reflex at the apparent power outage. Immediately there was a muffled metallic groan off in the distance outside my window.
Living out in the desert comes with odd sounds in the weirdest times, but this time it was a little too odd. It was like metal being torn or sheared like I've seen on those awesome YouTube videos with the industrial grinders or the Jaws of Life taking a door off a Humvee in the blink of an eye... but it was like the metal was... wet? or rotting?

The emergency broadcast was still echoing in my brain, "Do not look outside, do not make noise, do not-" I pressed the overhead light button on the fan remote again and realized even the little red LED on the remote wasn't lighting up and the plastic casing on the back was noticeably cold. As silently as I could, I closed the heavy shutters on my window in the darkness and set the remote back down on the nightstand. Mind racing, body frozen still in the darkness, the seconds ticked by. Well, they didn't really tick since the clock on my bookshelf had stopped working.

I took painfully slow steps and movements around my inky-black room, slipping into a pair of heavier cargo pants and a fresh t-shirt as I made a mental checklist of what sort of things I had in my room in case the house wasn't safe. There's a big glass of water on the desk and my insulated water bottle on the nightstand and I could probably go a day with that, maybe two if I kept activity to a minimum. Not much food though. Half an apple from last night and a small bowl of peanuts... My internal monologue was deafening in this damn silence! Suddenly another thick, greasy, metal groan from outside. Closer this time but it sounded like it came from a different direction. At least my comforter is good and warm.

------

No more water and those damn salted peanuts didn't help any. Can they hear my stomach growling? I'm assuming it has been a little over two days since that warning message came through. Very little light makes it past those heavy shutters, but it is noticeably less dim in here than it was the last time I woke up. Those sounds from outside have come and gone and come again with no discernible pattern. One was very close to the house and it was just so... gross to my ears. Like old rusted and misshapen gears caked with dusty oil trying to turn and the ancient teeth slowly shear off under the pressure. So unnatural...

I haven't heard another person's voice in three days. Hell, I haven't spoken a word since the incident began and even though it has only been a short time, I wonder if I'm capable of speech. Keeping an eye on my bedroom door, I slowly pull the covers back and stand up, mouthing a few words of self-encouragement silently as I stretch my legs and slip my empty water bottle into a cargo pocket. The latch on my bedroom door opened silently but the papery sound of my dry lips meeting each other in the dark filled my ears.

After two slow steps into the hallway, I could see the dimly glinting sink in the kitchen. No metal groaning nearby, but a few low rumbling sounds way off in the distance seemed to echo in the empty house. The walls trembled and dust fell from the walls and counters and cabinets and I suppressed a cough. Why were the counters dusty after just a couple of days? And why would the walls be dusty? I tiptoed over to the sink and lifted the handle on the tap ever so slowly, keeping my hand under the faucet to keep the delightfully clear drops from splashing noisily into the sink. Quickly but quietly I filled my water bottle up and twisted the cap closed. I should have brought the cup too... my thoughts ground to a halt as a soft, cool breeze passed by my head. Looking up, I saw a gaping hole where my parents' bedroom used to be. The whole corner of the house was gone.

Chunks of the wall were still standing but were scarred with jagged slashes in oddly geometric shapes. The thick wood and stucco walls were cut clean through as if a skilled model maker was doing some serious renovation on a miniature project house. Beams and conduits sliced clean through. Pink insulation carved away without a tuft of fiberglass out of place. It was so startling that the destruction was both neat and chaotic at once. The room was gone, but not from a wrecking ball or an explosion... almost like a giant scalpel-wielding psychopath hacked it apart and intended the wreckage to be displayed as modern art.

The conflicting thoughts of my parents' death or possible capture and my desire to fill up my water glass and finally get a drink were both brought to a halt by another grotesque, tearing metal scream. Way closer than the others. I realized I had been staring blankly through the wrecked room into the dim late evening desert. "This is not a test. Please seek shelter immediately. Do not look outside..." I tore my eyes away from the scored and slashed concrete foundation that was once holding up my parents' bedroom and slipped back into my own room. The thumping grew closer and the grating, shearing metal horrors seemed to dance around the wrecked house for hours before I finally fell asleep, exhausted mentally and emotionally. The last few sips from my water bottle were salty as the anguish came late in the night.

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Seekers were the small, floating ones that were all over the desert now. Probably all over the country or the whole fucking world. They looked like a pair of dice connected at the corners that slowly rotated in opposite directions. A ring of some shiny metal sat just above the cubes, held up by thin struts coming from that corner junction and torn, jagged pieces of brown cloth hung in banners and pennants from that chrome ring. The "dice" had lines and large dots in varying patterns on each face but no distinct features that allowed us to tell one from another.

I had found a young couple and another man two days ago. It had been a week now since the incident and I have been moving slowly around my neighborhood from house to house looking for food and supplies. We're not sure if the Seekers came first, but they are definitely the threat behind the warning "Do not look outside." If you make "eye contact" with a Seeker for more than a moment, it calls in a Thinker. From what we've observed, there is at least one Seeker within a half mile from any human structure or vehicle. Out in the desert they are spread much more thinly and that makes us believe they are targeting us, or they don't think people can survive out there for long.

Thinkers. You know that sculpture of the guy with his fist under his chin? I jokingly said they reminded me of that sculpture when I first figured out their resting cycle. Seekers and Thinkers both completely stop moving once every fifteen hours or so. Not sure if they're actually resting or syncing data or reporting in to some other thing or recharging, but they stop and they aren't a threat for about two hours. Once the distant thumping starts again, they all wake up in a matter of a minute, maybe two, so we've gotten pretty good at moving during the resting cycles and doing noisy activities during those periods. Even opening the pull top can of tuna has to wait for a resting cycle because it is too loud. Sorry, back to the Thinkers... it's been a hectic week so forgive my rambling.

Thinkers are about twelve feet tall and are made out of some sort of metal or organic compound that looks and sounds a lot like metal. They are tripodal with multi-jointed almost insectoid legs, but they are quite thick and bulky. The majority of the body and limbs are made up of flat or almost flat blackish-blue bars or plates held together with braided or cabled bunches of dark brown metal fibers. Some of the Thinkers have scarred and dented plates on their legs, but they all look old. Like ancient and dilapidated and worn. Their legs make that awful metallic tearing sound when they move, but their heavy boot shaped feet hardly make any noise when they walk. Up from the triple leg joint is their "torso" I guess. Almost like a dog or cat's rib cage, the Thinkers seem to have a forward arching spine and a relatively narrow but deep upper body. Their arms aren't evenly spaced and I have yet to see a Thinker with an arm on the left and right side, perfectly in balance. Some have both arms almost coming out of the back of the body next to each other, but most have an arm somewhere on the right side and another somewhere on the left.

Their arms are terrifying. One is always flat and wide like an old shield or castle door torn off at the hinges. Those dark blue plates form up the bulk of that arm, but they aren't layered like scales or fitted together like panels. They're just... together. Sparse tangles of brown metal fibers hold clusters of panels in random geometric shapes. Sarah says she's seen one nicknamed "Triangle" crossing the desert behind the houses more than once. She can see the big triangular clusters from a distance. Her husband keeps telling her not to name them, not to humanize them. He's very afraid.

The other arm is almost entirely thick bands of brown metal muscle fiber. Like a bloated corpse found in a river, the banded arms vary widely in shape and thickness. Some have two joints, others seem to bend freely like a disgusting junkyard scrap snake. But they all drip. This greasy, oily, metallic smelling stuff leaks and drips from between the bundles of brown cabling every time they start walking. The cabled arm curls up under the torso like the Thinker statue in silent contemplation as the three legs begin to clumsily trod along... then that oily, clumping goo drips down the cabled arm between the bands and cords and bulges and falls silently to the sandy ground.
Arthur says it's the old blood of all the people they've killed.

------

Every flashlight or laptop or remote control or electric car we've found has been ice cold, even during the middle of the day. Computers and microwaves and fridges have been cool to the touch, but batteries seem to emit a dangerously cold aura. It gets stronger when Thinkers are around, so Mike has given each of us a heavy sock double wrapped around two AA batteries. He says if we keep it in a pocket, we'll feel the cold get more intense if there is a Thinker nearby when we're moving at night. Since the resting cycles happen about every fifteen hours, they don't always happen in the light or the dark.

We took down a Seeker yesterday morning and I think that might have been a big mistake. In a fit of rage, we slapped it out of the sky with some heavy conduit and pounded it with pipes and boards til the dice stopped spinning. It took a tremendous amount of effort to swing with any strength and not make a noise, especially since we could only glance for a heartbeat to see where the Seeker was before clamping our eyes shut again. But we got it It was hovering over a pile of naked human corpses about two miles away from the neighborhood we had left behind. Sarah has been trembling since, but she hasn't made a sob or a peep. Arthur is scouting ahead now so we don't get surprised by something like that again. Silent anger is replacing silent fear.

So. Many. Fucking. CHIPS! That gas station food mart was almost useless because everything was packaged in crinkly foil packages or plastic wrap. The milk was spoiled by the time we got there and we dare not open a carbonated beverage. Mike and Art both want a beer, but in a silent, mimed wail they settled on a few bottles of water and fruity beverages.

Sarah inadvertently saved our lives and gave us a huge leg up on the Seekers. She was trying on sunglasses in the food mart and a Seeker silently drifted past the windows. She was so caught up in the brief feelings of normalcy with the snacks and lighters and stocking up on jerky and pens and everything that she just stared at those mesmerizing dice... and it just floated past and out of sight. We were stone still for a minute. Two minutes. No Thinkers. The thumping was steady and distant still so we weren't in a resting cycle. Sarah turned to us, tears streaming down her face behind the mirrored shades.

We loaded up our backpacks with as much water and preserved foods that we could carry, pens and notepads enough to write this all down in case we found more people... or if someone ever found our remains. It was slow going but we had become accustomed to walking quietly past the groaning, tearing Thinkers even during the middle of the day. We were following the signs of survival before, even though more people means more risk for noises. That only lead to more piles of corpses, more streams of dusty crimson, more mounds of discarded pieces of people. There weren't many tears now since we started following the gelatinous smears of Thinker oil... towards that constant thumping.

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The desert sun was blinding after wearing my 90's chrome sunglasses for four straight days. I needed to see if the darkness to the south was from normal, Earth clouds or something alien. It was a storm. Generally, storms in the desert bring blessed rain, but it can be very heavy and intense and also bring strong winds and blinding dust. We were headed south across the desert and it was coming north. It would be upon us by sundown.

Mike's idea of avoiding the highway turned out to be a really good one. Confidently, we set out away from the town's broken buildings and scarred streets and set out across the sandy ground... hardly any Seekers out here at all, but noone dared speak. We had plenty of ice-cold water from restocking in a pristine strip mall ice cream shop. Even though the power was out, their freezer looked brand new and was well insulated: the ice inside was only half melted. The partially thawed fruit was refreshing and packed with precious calories and vitamins that jerky and canned tuna and stale bread failed to provide. I think Mike and Sarah actually smiled for the first time since we met. Arthur hasn't smiled in a long time...

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It's so hard to write. Shitty gas station pens on cheap travel agency stationery during a sandstorm means the ink doesn't stick well. Wind is howling bad so we wrapped extra t-shirts around our faces to filter the dust and sand. Better than nothing, I guess. Almost ran into a low flying Seeker, but it was at the tail end of a resting cycle. I said "Fuck" under my breath less than three feet away from the soulless metal dice and it didn't move at all. No way I'm telling the others that I slipped up. Too stressful trying to survive and lead these guys all while keeping our hopes up that we'll find other survivors. Arthur wanted to trash the Seeker, but I wanted to test something first.

When it came out of its cycle, I was still standing near the Seeker but I had Arthur, Mike, and Sarah go stand almost out of sight by the edge of the wash. I could barely see their crouched figures through the swirling, raging sandstorm. Sunglasses amplified the darkness. I took a slow, measured breath and threw the fist-sized rock as hard as I could, hoping I could hit the wrecked Jeep that was just out of sight. Just barely, the dull clang of stone on metal reached my ears. Glancing over to the group, I did not see any arms raised to signal they heard anything. All eyes but mine were on the Seeker. It turned a little... not even halfway towards the Jeep. No screeching or scraping came through the blast of sand and wind. One more toss and we confirmed what I had thought: they can't hear for shit in a sandstorm. We trashed the Seeker, and I think Arthur smiled. I could barely hear the thumping. South.

------

Storm ended with very little rain and only one of our water bottles and one loaf of bread got too sandy to use. As I set the small bundle gently down on the dirt, I beckoned Arthur to stop trying to pry the Seeker's cube open. His hands were calloused and sore, and the leaking oil from the Seeker's split cube seemed to roll down his forearms like paint or blood in slow motion. Sarah was concerned that it could be acid or something dangerous but Arthur wanted to make sure it was dead. I don't think he was trying to see what made the double-dice bastard tick at all.

We cleaned the dust and mud from our faces and sunglasses as the roaring dust storm moved northward. The thumping was clearer now, louder than before. I didn't think we covered much ground in that swirling hell but we were closer to the city than I had expected. That meant more Seekers. Mike spotted a gorgeous house with an actual grass lawn and a pool. It was gorgeous at some point. There were puddles of Thinker oil in the grass and the driveway and patio were crisscrossed with jagged gouges and claw marks. More pools around the back entrance to the house but those were swarming with flies. Mike gave the hand signal not to look and Sarah turned away. I patted her shoulder and we quietly walked on past the two sentinel Thinkers still on the roof. The one's cable arm was dripping with unctious, stinking grease.

Closer and closer to the center of the city we crept. Mike dared to test the noise detection again now that the thumping was intense and there was no wind to muffle the sound. He blasted the rear windshield out of a fairly expensive-looking BMW with one throw. I thought I could hear a high pitched keening coming from the two Seekers floating nearby, but nobody else could confirm it. Three Thinkers descended on the broken down luxury car after barely more than a 100-count and it was torn open and mangled after another 30. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up every time I saw one of those things and their lumpy, tendonous cable arms... just leaking and oozing like black rusty pus. But Mike stood still and just watched as all five creatures completely ignored him and went towards the sound. He even dared to lift his shades and wink at Sarah.

------

I think it's the sound that sticks with me. Every few moments I have to focus solely on keeping the vomit down in complete silence.

We had settled down in the waiting room of a little medical clinic barely outside of downtown. Arthur was on watch and it was almost pitch black--a little moonlight was reflected off the husks of broken and abandoned cars and into the ceiling length windows of the clinic. Mike and Sarah were cuddled up asleep on the sofa and I had drifted off to sleep sitting in a overstuffed vinyl chair in the corner. The thumping was background noise to everything now and the minutes of silence during resting cycles was almost jarring. My body was beginning to wake up as if it knew I was next on watch when I heard a soft, feminine moan. Swamped in drowsiness, my brain shook its old man fist at "those darned kids and their roaming hands" as I tried to grab a few extra minutes of sleep before Arthur would inevitably wake me.

The back wall of the clinic waiting room exploded inward, tossing file folders and cinderblock and office supplies all over. In a scramble we reflexively grabbed our bags and tried to quickly and quietly move toward the front door. Arthur was there in a flash, holding the glass door open and urgently pulling us through. But that Thinker was just a foot or two behind Sarah. Its thin, lumpy legs driving again and again, boot-feet scrabbling on the linoleum and tearing thick tiles up from the floor. Grasping at chairs and tables, that disgusting cabled arm flexed and extended, flexed and extended, splattering teal vinyl with greasy oil. We spilled out into the street as Arthur and I split up to look for a place for all of us to hide. Mike was frantically flinging stones and water bottles and bits of broken glass and concrete at any car or window he could make out in the blackness. I waved my arms wildly, trying to help him understand he was just attracting more Thumpers when everything seemed to just stop.

It was a sound I had never heard before. I stood, drenched in a cold sweat, and all I could hear was the sound of a person tearing. You or I shouldn't be able to tear a person, a body, like you can tear junk mail, or lettuce. But Thinkers aren't like you or me. Arthur slapped his hand over Mike's mouth and pulled him away before the first pieces of Sarah hit the concrete. It seemed like an eternity but I shook away the shock and slipped around the corner of the building. We met up behind the clinic and got away as quickly and quietly as we could. I had to get away. From that sound.

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Mike had been gone for two days now. He signaled that he needed to go back and see. Something about closure and revenge I guess. He took a sledge hammer and one of my spare water bottles with him, but never really looked me in the eyes before he left. Arthur gave him a nod and a half hug. I shook his hand after carefully making sure I didn't have any Thinker grease on mine. The meet-up place was at the corner of the city library and the canal bridge from the looks of the remarkably good map that Mike drew on the dusty hood of a pickup truck the day before he left. "One more night," Arthur's eyes spoke as he held up a single finger. "One more."

The screeching, grinding sound of a Thinker woke me out of a dead sleep the next morning. It was about five feet away, standing between where Arthur and I had settled down to sleep for the night. I slowly inched along the ground, leaving my pack and blanket as it tromped along. Those thick, undulating legs grating and crunching as they bunched up and moved again, slick with that rusty sludge. It must have been walking for a long time without stopping and it planted its blocky, heavily plated boot down right on top of my blanket before moving on without a care. Arthur jabbed a finger in my direction then slid it along his throat and shook his head. *Yeah, dont' die. I get it. Thanks for waking me up.* We gathered our things but I left the blanket. It was pressed a good four inches into the concrete; the footprint was almost in the shape of Austrailia. I wonder if they were all dead too.

I saw two more Thinkers walking down the next street over. Both were headed in the same direction as my wake up call--towards the business center of the downtown area, just across the canal. We moved slowly about twenty paces behind the pair of plodding monsters. One was leaving a thin line to the left of its odd, three-footed trail because the shield arm was hanging low. Arthur pointed up to the "shoulder" and we could see brown cables twitching and wiggling like a cut earthworm. Plates were slowly being pulled off the shield arm and onto the back of the Thinker, but some fell off along with bits of severed bands. After about a block of limp-walking, the shield was two-thirds smaller than it originally was and the majority of that material had migrated to the back of the Thinker's torso in a seeping, oily tumor of sorts. Occasionally a plate or fiberous spindle of metal fell from the beast into a slowly widening trail of sludge. I swear I saw a wooden pole or handle barely protruding from that Thinker's torso.

------

The bridges were all packed with Thinkers, so we found a smaller maintenance catwalk and inched our way along the narrow path. The bridge creaked under the weight of dozens of Thinkers directly above us and Arthur and I froze. Eyes darted around, looking for a way to escape without making a noisy splash into the canal below us. Could Thinkers swim? Arthur tapped my shoulder from behind and pointed to a dirty, torn up pair of sneakers hanging from a support strut. I pulled the shoes off the exposed rebar and handed them over. A deep sploosh echoed under the concrete bridge after Arthur tossed the ratty shoes clear to the other side of the tunnel and we waited for something to move. I pointed around us at the sky and put my fists together, just the middle joint of my thumbs touching, my eyebrows raising twice. Arthur scanned around us and held up one hand in a fist, shaking his head as he kept looking. *Seekers?* ... *Zero. No.*

I took a dozen steps down the catwalk, holding my hand open behind me and Arthur waited obediently. Looking around once more, I took a sip from my half-empty insulated water bottle and slipped it back into my cargo pocket. For the first time in almost a month, I whispered. "Can they hear us without any Seekers?"

My heartbeat was pounding louder than the thumping just a few hundred feet away. The shock on Arthur's face confirmed that I had just done something stupid. Shockingly stupid. After what seemed like a year of standing stock still, I heard the most beautiful thing in my life. "I don't think so."

------

It took a few minutes and some still-tense whispers for Arthur and I to piece together what we were seeing. The once bustling tech center of the city was swarming with Thinkers. Some of the stragglers still on the bridges were missing bits and limbs, or were leaking a considerable amount of that slimy oil and had slowed to a crawl. The able bodied ones were tearing down the office buildings and data centers. Tearing isn't really the best word for what they were all doing--more like disassembling. They were cutting through brick and steel and concrete and taking blocks of buildings and storage units apart one giant piece at a time. Each block was a little over eight feet tall by our best estimate and they were being stacked neatly in the streets.

Even though it was the middle of the day and the sun was pounding down on us from a clear, sapphire sky, we were cold. Not filled with dread, but physically cold. The Thinkers closer to the middle of the data centers and telecom switches and television stations were moving more quickly and fluidly than the tumorous ones on the fringes. Their plates and cables were dancing or vibrating as they worked on the millions of tons of electronic components and power substations and server racks and equipment. Arthur tapped my shoulder and tapped his thigh and I pulled out Mike's battery pack. It was almost too cold to touch for more than a second, so I slipped it back into my padded pocket.

Were the Thinkers eating the equipment? They weren't getting any bigger and the piles of computers and batteries and electrical and fuse boxes weren't getting any smaller. Bits of Prius and Tesla were everywhere near the middle of the block where Arthur and I had settled down to watch for the day. The thumping was still going on, and everything stopped for the resting cycle right on time. But the brown fibers and rusted blue plates of the centermost Thinkers never stopped twitching.

------


Mike never came back. I mean, we never went back to that clinic to see, but we could still see the corner of the library that was going to be our rally point. I even hung a spare green tshirt from Arthur's rebar spear so our spot could be seen from afar. I won't say that he's dead, but he's not here anymore.

The Thumpers were just beyond the tech sector where the canal curves around forming an oxbow. I almost couldn't believe these were here since the third or fourth day after the incident. If you can imagine a lopsided hexagon about eighty feet across made of that same chrome-ish metal that the Seeker rings seemed to be forged out of, you'd be looking at the "top" of the Thumper. Under the hexagon are smooth metallic stalactites in varying widths and random arrangement extending down about fifteen feet to the surface of the canal water beneath them, but only the longest, lowest point barely touches the water. Sinuous lengths of that muscular brown banding anchor the Thumper to the banks of the canal and the surrounding ground on both sides of the oxbow, making puddles of lumpy, wax-like blobs of Thinker oil in the sandy dirt. Every few seconds, the flat, rust speckled mirror that makes the hexagon top of the Thumper flexes like a freshly unsealed jar of pasta sauce. And the entire earth beneath our feet trembles. Thump. Thump.

------

He always seems to be perfectly alert, that Arthur. He firmly squeezed my upper arm late one morning as we were moving barrels across the crowded street and I stopped in silence and waited for him to let go when it was safe. He slowly released my arm and pointed up at a lone Seeker gliding slowly over the pulsing crowd of Thinkers. Too far up to grapple with our rubberized conduit, even too high to hit with a rock big enough to do damage. We rested our tired arms on the rims of the steel barrels we were slowly rolling and drank deeply as we watched the slowly rotating cubes progress towards the Thumpers. It slowed to a stop and descended towards the middle of the Thumper closest to us. That one was so lopsided, it almost looked rectangular, but I double-checked and counted six distinct sides. Each of the nine Thumpers were hexagonal.

The Seeker spent ten minutes or so sitting motionless about two feet above the shiny, smooth surface of that northmost Thumper before suddenly it touched down. The moment the edge of its cube touched the plane of the Thumper, it started to pass through somehow. It was almost as if the Seeker was melting or being absorbed into the wide, mirrorlike surface of the Thumper. I got Arthur's attention and motioned that the other Thumpers were thumping, but this one had stopped while it absorbed the Seeker. As soon as the last bit of the Seeker's ring disappeared into the Thumper, a large group of Thinkers to our left stopped moving as if they started their own resting cycle.

The Thumper that ate the Seeker gave two long, off-beat thumps before returning to thumping in sync with the rest. Those frozen Thinkers gave a shudder in unison and started to move away from the tech-feast before them and headed farther south, away from us. Now was as good of a chance as any, so Arthur and I began rolling the barrels of diesel fuel we found near a data center's exposed emergency generator. By the time the squad of Thinkers was far enough away that we couldn't hear the scraping and groaning of their triple-step gait, we managed to arrange seven barrels as close to the nearest Thumper as we could. The cluster of barrels held almost four hundred gallons of diesel fuel, but we honestly had no idea if Thumpers or Thinkers could even burn.

------

The screaming woke me up and the bile rose in my throat again. I looked to Arthur who met my gaze, wide eyed, and quickly shook his head. Quickly, but quietly we rose to our feet and peeked up over the cube of sliced building we had camped out behind to see what was still screaming... and moving.

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Although it only took twenty seconds or so, time was moving at a crawl from my perspective. A man was sprinting, noisy footfalls and huffing breaths in between furious screams, and he had just come across the canal bridge to our northwest. Weaving between slow, stopped, and presumed dead Thinkers he was getting close enough now to make out some details. His jeans were ragged and torn up to knee height, splattered with mud and concrete dust. I couldn't settle on what color his hoodie was originally but it was heavily stained with either blood or Thinker ichor... or both. His face bruised and bloodied, hair matted to his skull and dark with that oily mess. He approached the outer rings of still-laboring Thinkers at a dead sprint.

Hastily donning our packs once more, we were ready to move in case things got ugly. Arthur retrieved his crude re-bar spear and waved the makeshift green flag a few times before untying it and freeing the sharpened iron tip. We both had noticed four or five Seekers trailing the man and had reverted back to hand signals just in case. By now the man was only a hundred feet away or so, the closest he would be to us if he was going to continue straight on his current path, and I almost leapt over the building chunk we were hiding behind: it was Mike.

------

Since the group of Seekers were as close as we were used to seeing them in the desert, I refrained from yelling out to him. I don't think he would have stopped running though. His right fist and lower arm were wrapped up in a stained purple cloth and his left hand held a sledgehammer just below the head. Arthur pointed towards a decently clear gap between two groups of working Thinkers that would bring us on a curving path to meet where Mike was running towards. It would put us, unfortunately, on the side of the Thumper where we stashed the diesel barrels, but we moved as fast and quiet as we could in our panicked, excited state.

Just as we were about to descend down a ten-foot pile of rubble and make the last fourty foot straightaway to the edge of the Thumper, Mike arrived at the edge of the creature. I glanced over my shoulder to confirm that the Seekers were still moving towards us, but they didn't seem to be flying any faster than usual. Maybe they didn't hear Mike somehow, or they were set on returning to a Thumper. Either way, we still had no evidence that any of these things could panic.

Straining, shearing, awful sounds started up from a group of nearby Thinkers as their rusted and worn legs began to move... towards Mike. They were too far away and were moving slower than usual for whatever reason. I grabbed Arthur's sleeve and decided I would have more time to think about the why's and the how's later, if we survived. We slid down the last few feet of the rubble pile just as Mike leapt up onto a broken down car just beside the edge of the canal and jumped from the dented roof toward the flat, chromed expanse of Thumper in the canal below.

His sledge was extended up over his head in an awkward one-and-a-half-hand grip as he fell towards the Thumper. From my angle, it looked like he might not even make it on to the thing. I looked to Arthur but he had hidden behind another chunk of discarded office building and was pointing rapidly at the fuel barrels. Now there were Thinkers on both sides of the Thumper, moving steadily closer, and they had almost reached the cache of explosive drums on our side. Only twenty feet separated the group on the other side from the car and the group of Thinkers. Suddenly my head felt like it was being crushed in a vise and my chest compressed so severely that my breath was stolen from my body.

------

The steel head of Mike's sledgehammer had come down with his whole leaping body weight onto the rusted chrome top of that Thumper. Mike was knocked backwards onto the sloped embankment of the canal just as I felt my body struggle to survive and understand the intense pressure wave that came from the Thumper. I could see the surface of the Thumper curve inward, sunlight blinding me through my sunglasses for a moment as the angle was just right. Straining to blink through the flash, I focused on the Thumper again, waiting for the metallic bowl to snap back into shape when the other eight Thumpers thumped in unison.

Nothing has ever hurt me, physically, as much as the next few minutes as my reality came apart. The deep, echoing thump from the other, flat-topped Thumpers happened just as the concave flex of the near Thumper's top reached its deepest point and barely started to come back up. Instead of recoiling back to shape, the additional pulse of that fateful thump caused the entire top of the Thumper to shatter like a dropped glass. Dark red cracks appeared instantly across the surface which looked disgusting and beautiful at the same time. Then it exploded upwards.

I should have hidden underneath something, but I had to watch. Shards of chromed Thumper rained down in a slurry of deep red Thinker oil and rust. A car-sized piece stabbed halfway into a block of tv station over by Arthur at the same time as a sliver of silver lanced into my calf. Bright red blood welled up and wetted my dusty pants, but I knew that pulling it out would either shred my hand or just make the bleeding worse. Arthur took cover under a corrugated steel fragment but I looked over at the damaged Thumper again.
The waters of the canal rippled outward as the bulk of the Thumper's stalactites sank down farther and farther. Stinking, bubbling Thinker grease spilled over the ragged hexagonal edge of the damaged Thumper as it listed sharply towards us, continuing to sink and drift. Thick, heavy cords of brown muscle-metal supporting the far side trembled and snapped under the tension. By now the bits of the chromed top had all fallen and I hoisted myself up to lean agains the block and watch as the Thumper crashed down into the embankment where we had arranged the barrels of diesel fuel.

I clenched my teeth and waited, but the steel drums just crumpled and burst under the colossal weight of the fallen machine. Diesel fuel burst outward but was quickly mingling with the rush of water and spilled Thinker blood. Then the edge of that hexagonal shell collided with the concrete slope of the canal wall and the shifting forces traveling through the stalactites of the Thumper split it in two. Curving slowly on a dwindling number of support cables, the bulk of the dying Thumper crushed through the concrete wall and into solid desert bedrock. Finally it came to rest halfway submerged in greasy, oily, dirty canal water. And the Thinkers around us began to wail.

------

Arthur had tended to my leg wound rather quickly. The shard passed almost completely through but it was very close to the outside edge of my calf muscle. He pulled the piece of chromed metal through the back side and thoroughly rinsed both sides of the wound with extra drinking water. By the time we stood up it was barely bleeding at all. The thumping had stopped slowly with fewer Thumpers active for each random thump and the groaning, crying Thinker-noise had become a dull drone now. We moved down towards the canal but away from the group of remaining, twitching Thinkers that had congregated by the destroyed embankment. No sign of Mike. The waves from the crashing Thumper could have washed him into the canal since some of the dirt around the top of the concrete was wet. The dirty brown water was swirling around the wrecked husk of the downed Thumper and the rusty, oily Thinker juice seemed to be separating and settling below the surface as it dripped and oozed from the crumpled and cracked sides of the Thumper.

The other Thumpers started to crash into the canal a little over an hour later while we were searching for Mike. Arthur helped me scramble up the embankment and we sat there, watching the wave of dirty water pulse down the canal as the second and third Thumpers lost support cabling and drifted into the concrete walls. Their surfaces were cracked with deep red fissures, but neither exploded. Exhausted in every way, we drew up plans in the sand to move to a better vantage point and a safer place to bed down as the sun began to duck down behind the distant mountains.

When we awoke, the wailing had stopped. The thumping had not resumed, and there were only a few creaking, scraping sounds of Thinkers walking around. I saw two Seekers toppled over in the sand, one leaned against a block of building, the other upside down on its ring which was bent from the landing. Confidently but quietly I spoke to Arthur, "I think they're dying."

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At least half of the Thinkers had completely stopped moving. Even the ones near the center of the complex weren't even vibrating anymore. Arthur and I had crossed the closest bridge and checked the other side of the canal for signs of Mike when the first impact threw dust high into the air and knocked me off my feet. Run/limping across the dusty concrete, I got behind a partially deconstructed wall when another impact behind me showered my back with bits of dirt and rock and sticky oil. I lost Arthur in the clouds of dust and vaporized Thinker grease and I just had to hunker down and wait in the sandy darkness. It was at least a few hours until the heavy impacts stopped, and it wasn't til after sunrise the next day when the dust cleared enough for me to look around.


They looked like big mechanical crabs. Until you saw their hands, at least. Probably as big as four Thumpers, these giant things stuck out of the ground replacing all the buildings the Thinkers had dismantled. Each was near the middle of its own wide, shallow crater and some that had landed on buildings or roads had broken into pieces. The one closest to me was mostly intact, but was blackened and smoking. The heavily damaged ones had almost filled their craters with black tar-like Thinker oil, and the intact ones periodically spurted a blob of the stuff from a seam or port hole.

Very, very crab-like. Low oblong bodies with huge blackened plates across their top and bottom surfaces with clusters of charred and blistered cable-type metal scattered in the space between. Randomly spaced around the gap between the plated carapace were these "hands". More disturbing and ugly than intimidating, these appendages were like bat wings made from the same uneven bands of metal that composed a Thinker's arm. Some of them still had some sort of fabric or filiment between the jointed "fingers" but most were stripped, bare, and strangely skeletal. Only two of the crab things had moving hands, but by sundown they had gone still. Just before the last rays of sunlight disappeared, I found Arthur. He was banged up, but he was okay. And alive.

------

It was over a month before I heard a rhythmic noise in the distance off to the north. Up until then it was just the quiet conversations with Arthur, our yelling calls for Mike, and the crunch of our shoes and the desert. We had just resupplied in a completely wrecked Costco. Hunger was a stronger motivator than the disgust of walking past and sorting through dead bodies, and we had loaded up with fresh water, protien bars, and even some tins of Christmas cookies that at one point had been on sale. Arthur climbed up the shattered wall to get a better view of what was making that rapid noise while I made plans for a speedy retreat. A day and a night spent hammering away at a security door had gained us access to a small firearms store, so Arthur had a scoped rifle and I had opted for two compact pistols. The extra weight of the guns, plus two gorgeous machetes meant less food in our packs, but this mega-mart restock let us carry plenty of field ready food. I was thinking about the quickest way back to our basement safehouse that was about three miles east when I heard Arthur shout. "It's a fucking HELICOPTER!"

The ski resort-type town up in Colorado was fairly intact. Arthur said it was pretty remote, plus there weren't a lot of technology heavy companies or data centers up here. Turns out we were hit pretty bad back in Arizona. Southern California was almost completely wiped out just like the eastern seaboard. The military type people in town had just gotten communications back online the day before we flew in and Arthur and I spent about a week meeting and "talking" with them separately. After we were allowed to be in the same room again, we really started to piece the information together, with the help of the mountaintop survivors. As I sipped a cup of instant hot chocolate, I looked across the table at Arthur. He raised his paper cup of coffee to me and nodded. I nodded back.

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**EPILOGUE OF PT. 1**

*The Catchers were like a sort of energy relay device. They were detected in high Earth orbit just a few hours before the first Seekers arrived, shortly followed by squads of Thinkers. Scientists analyzing the crashed Catchers theorized their plating was more than sufficient to survive reentry not only in our atmosphere but in much denser gasses or even liquid planets and moons. Since Seekers and Thinkers were deployed from orbit, they too easily endured the fiery reentry period. The scarring and pockmarks that covered their leg and shield-arm plates were evidence that they were probably single use creatures and had no method of returning to the Catchers in orbit.*

*All of the spindly, large, bat wing hands of the Catchers had a brown cloth or filament web stretched between the fingers and we believe they acted as antennas of some sort, gathering the energy the Thumpers were collecting and broadcasting upwards with each thump. Bits of this filament hung from the rings of the Seekers, probably a sort of passive array designed to detect signs at a much closer range than the Catchers could achieve. Thinkers had no brown cloth or chromed metal parts at all, save for a small triangular prism of the stuff at the center of their torso.*

*Most of the survivors accounts agree that the creatures had sought out sources of both battery power, and high technology/high electrical power. Power stations, long distance lines, generators, power plants, data centers, even big box computer stores and electric car dealerships were focal sites for the Thumpers and Thinker work groups. It is not known whether the creatures emit some sort of EMP while they are active, or if they just absorb electrical power, but every survivor that saw the core worker groups emphatically state they saw Thinkers twitching or vibrating when they were near large sources of electricity.*

*Besides the mysteries of where they came from and why, the only thing we can't figure out is how the affected equipment no longer works. Batteries from Thinker sites will not recharge, computers will not power up, and even copper wiring from the dismantled buildings no longer conducts electricity in the labs. Somehow these creature machines not only harvested electrical energy, but the ability to use electrical energy. Most perplexing is that newly constructed batteries and computers work just fine, even in the invaded zones. Old devices from locations that were not hit function normally as well. This is an ongoing study with multiple international universities sending their greatest surviving minds to South America. Expect further statements in the coming months.*

"You have no idea how hard it is for me to say this, but I'm leaving for the Gulf next week." It was painful having to set and end date to our relationship, but I had met a charming young lady during one of our many extended debriefs, and I decided to follow her back to south Texas.
"Don't worry. You found your place and I'll keep looking for mine," Arthur said. "I owe you my life though. I won't forget you."

Six days later I shook his hand firmly and turned away to board the train, my female companion already up the steps and into the car. From my window seat, I leaned close to the glass and gave him the hand signal for "I'm going to sleep, you take first watch." Arthur smiled.