When he pulled himself out, the heat wave had passed.
The fields around him were burning. There was smoke and fire and embers in the wind. He dragged himself out of the water, pulling bits of gravel from his face and wiping blood and sweat and swamp water free.
He looked back in the direction of the complex and saw it.
He was on a flattened hilltop and he could see the blazing red outlines of the fortress, or the blazing firestorm where it had once been. The sky had gone from black to cobalt to a shimmering atomic green. The fortress had cracked open like an egg and given birth to a huge neon-orange mushroom cloud of energized particles, radioactive dust, and radiant smoke. It was connected to the jagged scar of the bomb site by a smoldering umbilicus. The landscape near it was glowing a phosphorescent yellow. As he watched, he saw something take shape dead-center of the mushroom cloud—a shimmering red grinning skull face that wavered like a heat mirage.
Then it was gone, fading away. Maybe it never was.
“Jesus,” he said.
Leviathan. Regenerated. And you made this happen. You were chosen and you were played. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
Bleeding, bruised, blackened and filthy, he stumbled down the road to the Boss Hoss and lifted it back up, every muscle and tendon in his body crying out. He worried that the electromagnetic pulse of the blast might have fused the wiring, but she turned over just fine.
Slaughter looked back once, feeling the pain of his dead brothers, then cracked open the throttle again, racing against the cloud of fallout that was coming. He opened her up, reaching for the big end, letting her roll on out. He was clipping at better than a hundred miles per hour when, grinning, he hit the button to release the Nitrox boost and the scoot took off like a rocket. The forks came right off the ground and he rode that wheelie hard for a hundred yards and by then nothing could stop him or touch him because he had reached the old fabled double-T, the 200 mile an hour mark.
He was free.
He was riding.
He was in the wind.
His feet up on the Easy Rider pegs, he cut a path deep into the black beating heart of the night and the destiny that belonged to him and him alone.
Maybe Leviathan would show himself again in a new form.
But it wouldn’t be today.
SPREAD THE INFECTION
MOTE TITLES FROM PERMUTED PRESS
Copyright
Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.
Copyright 2012 Tim Curran.
Cover art by Zach McCain.