Nuclear Knights

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Book excerpt

Chapter One 

                The dust blew across the land, the same as it had done for ages. Ryan sighed as he watched the deep yellow sun just start to break the horizon through the small opening in his wall he called a window. Another day in the wasteland, another day trying to live.  Ryan rubbed an old injury on his arm, long since healed but that phantom pain still persisted. He did his best to ignore it.

He walked through his house that looked like it was going to fall over at any minute to his clothes of which he didn’t have many.  An old black shirt, jeans and a worn-out pair of shoes that had seen better days. It only took a few minutes to get dressed and a bit longer to fasten his gun belt.

The shack was nothing more than rusty sheet metal attached together in the shape of living quarters.  The walls were much the same. Brown, rusted metal separating him from the outside. On the shelves were cans of food and bottles of water and he moved to the equally excuse he had for a door to his shack.

He shut the patchwork door behind him, turned and tied it shut with his frayed rope. Security around here was all for show, the only thing of value he owned was the blaster in the old leather holster on his hip. He took a breath of fresh air, at least as fresh as it got. There was always a slight metallic scent on the air. It was the best way Ryan could ever describe it. In a life of constant change and potential for it, this was one thing that never changed. It comforted him, he almost smiled.

Ryan walked down the path to the side of his shack, this early in the morning was the best time to be out and about. The heat didn’t get bad for a few more hours and he needed to do his part to refill the town’s water supply. It was a job, everyone had one if they wanted to live anywhere.  Thankfully he happened to like his after about five years of doing it.

He walked to the side of his house and picked up the end of a net that was filled with gallon buckets. With a grunt he dragged the end of the net on to a metal trailer and quickly fastened the ends down on the side with the same old cable he’d been using for a couple of years now.

Then he walked to the front, picked up the dust covered cable and hooked it around the hitch on the back of his small hoverbike. It only took a few seconds to make sure it was secure before getting on the bike. He flipped a switch and the old machine hummed to life, lifted off the ground. Ryan put on his goggles and eased the thing away from his stitched together shelter.

There were other people here in town and most of them didn’t bother getting up before the sun came up. Ryan didn’t care if the hum of his bike was going to wake anyone up or not. He got to the wall in just a few minutes and slowed to a stop at the gates.

“Why are you going on a water run this early?” a man on the wall asked him. He was wearing brown pants and a white shirt, both covered in dust and frayed around the edges.  “I don’t know, I just want to beat the crowd is all I suppose,” Ryan replied and there was a second of silence. “We haven’t had a report of a beast in weeks, so I guess it’s okay to go out,” the man said, put his tattered glove around the metal switch and pulled it. Ryan nodded at the information.

“You don’t say? I haven’t seen one of those things in almost a year now, and D-class don’t count,” he replied. No one counted the D-class as a threat. Matt just laughed in response as the gates slowly started to open.

The lights on the metal gate flashed green then swung open with a slow squeak. “Hey, if you find a box of Twinkies in the city, can you bring one back?” Matt asked and Ryan sighed. “I’m not going to the city, the place has been picked clean, you know this,” he replied and Matt laughed.

 “I know, I just had a dream about them last night is all,” Matt replied and Ryan tilted his head. As far as he was aware, the only time either of them had ever seen a Twinkie, was in an ancient advertisement that a trader caravan brought on the rare occasions. He shook his head and got to the task at hand and the realization of what Matt just said.

“You’re on the night watch, you’re not supposed to be dreaming about anything,” Ryan said as the gate finished opening. Matt just nodded, smiled and motioned him to go through. “Yeah, yeah, just come back in one piece and if you meet one of those things out there, please don’t lead it back here, please,” Matt said and Ryan shook his head. “I live here, so yeah, not a problem,” he replied sarcastically and moved through the gate into the desert beyond.

He pushed his hoverbike down the dirt path and into the desert towards the river. Ryan heard tales of the before time. The older people often told tales of green lands, water and paradise that were passed down to them from generations past. Ryan couldn’t imagine that much green could ever exist in one place, or water, or anything else like it.

 He was born in this wasteland and this was all he knew. The quiet was always relaxing. The way the old timers described the world in the before days always sounded like noise and constant chaos. Ryan liked this world, it was his world. Dangerous, but fair, usually.

It wasn’t long before he made his final turn and saw the bright green river flowed in front of him. the rays of the sun glinting across its water. This river might have had a name once, but now everyone just called it the river. No one he knew had ever seen where it started, or where it ended. All anyone knew was that it was constant and if it ever went away, they would too.

He pulled up to the muddy shore and turned his bike off, it slowly moved down to the sand and he got off the bike. He walked to the back, untied the net to bring his plastic jugs to the water. He looked up and down the shore. Sometimes predators liked to hang out in the early morning hours like this and being too careful was never a bad idea.

Today, nothing. Maybe they had a good night eating, he didn’t worry about them and he hoped they didn’t want to eat him. It worked out fine so far. He started to pull the jugs out of the net and started to kneel near the edge of the river when suddenly he heard a deep noise but he felt it in his chest. The ground beneath him shifted a little.

“No,” he whispered to himself and stood up. This was the telltale sign of a beast. Every kid was taught that from the beginning. Shaking earth, silence and the smell of ozone. That last one wasn’t always reliable. The earth shifted again, this time he was sure something was close, but he still didn’t see anything.

Then in the middle of the river, the green water bulged up. “Oh,” he said and backed off. The thing rose out of the river and stared blankly ahead. It had long floppy ears, a brown shell on its back. Its skin was dark green and it stood on two stocky legs, its arms were just long enough to be useful. They ended in long claws.  The thing stood one hundred feet tall. Ryan sighed with relief and a smile.

 “You’re just a D class,” he said and knew he was relatively safe. D class beasts were big doofs, harmless mostly. It took a special kind of stupid to get killed by a D class. “You must be my good luck charm for today,” he said to the beast in the middle of the river. He was sure it saw him, too, but neither one was a threat to another.

Ryan kept an eye on the beast as he continued to unload his plastic jugs on the shore when the thing turned its head in his direction and its pale green eyes went wide. Ryan wasn’t sure what he did to anger the nameless thing, but a second past and it was easy to realize that it wasn’t looking at him at all, but past him, towards where he lived. With a high pitched bark of fright, the D class beast wasted no time in diving into river in a panic.

 “No,” Ryan said in a hurry and ran to his hover bike as the large wave of water created by the sudden diving thing threatened to destroy the second most valuable thing he had. He turned it on as the wall of water was getting closer. The machine came to life, the second it lifted from the ground Ryan spun the bike around. He floored it seconds before the water washed over the shore line.

He sped away and didn’t care about the jugs, they could be replaced. Something spooked that thing and the only thing capable of doing that, was a higher-class beast. He sped down the dirt path and stopped after that last turn. The sight he was seeing, it didn’t make any sense. Mere minutes ago, the place was fine. Now a three hundred foot beast was wading through the center of town. He could hear the alarms still blaring in the distance.

The thing had dark purple skin and like most of the beasts wandered blindly ahead on two, thick and powerful legs. It had one row of black spines running down its back. Its arms were long, thick and powerful, but they were bent with its hands hanging limp. Ryan looked up at the thing’s dinosaur head. The first thing he noticed were the eyes, they were closed.

“What in the hell?” he asked himself. He’d never seen anything like it, but then again, the last time he was in an attack, he didn’t have time to study the monster from a distance either. These days monster attacks like this rarely happened, not since the knights took down the last walking nightmare five years ago.

Ryan looked ahead of the beast and he could see the crowd of people fleeing from the monster as it slowly lumbered through the village with no effort at all. Then he looked to his left and on a hill, in the increasing light, he saw a someone dressed in silver and it looked as if they were holding a strange device in his hands.  There was no way the two events weren’t connected. He spun his hoverbike around in the stranger’s direction and rode as fast as he could.

He didn’t really think about what he was doing rather than thinking that this was something that had to be done. If someone was somehow using the monster to attack where he lived. He needed to figure out how, why. So many questions and things that didn’t make any sense.

The stranger lowered the device as Ryan sped in his direction and looked right at him. Ryan knew there was no running, he was going to find out who this was. Then the silver figure disappeared right before his eyes in a flash of green light before he was close enough to see anything else about them. “Damn it,” he said and stopped the bike. Just another thing that didn’t make sense. He’d never seen anyone disappear before.

Ryan turned around and watched. The beast in the middle of town stopped in its tracks. It shook its head as if it was just waking up from a dream. Not only from a dream but the eyes opened, it looked around at where it was. The beast was clearly confused, maybe even nervous. The expression changed at once and it turned around as slowly as it could, as if to not do any more damage than it already had and began to walk away.

He’d never seen a beast do that before, usually they were, well, much more vicious. Then he looked to the opposite end and thankfully there was a crowd of people evacuating town. He accelerated the bike in their direction kicking up a trail of dust behind him.