Thud thud.
“Yeah it’s stuck up there alright.”
“We told you it would be. Several times, in fact.”
“It’s different to see it for myself.”
Zach earned an annoyed sigh. Servos whirred as he stepped back from the floating truck. Floating wasn’t really the right word, more ‘pinned in the air.’ The thing didn’t budge a millimeter when he gave it a good, solid nudge. Wasn’t like he wasn’t strong enough, any more force than he was using now would crumple the truck like an aluminum can. The thing hung at an odd angle, it was rolled a bit to the left and with it’s front end facing downwards. The green canvas over top of the rear bed was torn, probably ripped up by flying debris, or maybe some wildlife that reshaped the material to be their home for a time. Likewise, the windows of the cabin were all shattered, blasted violently inwards. The whole body bore dents at regular intervals, but they didn’t appear to be what held the thing aloft. About 4 of the 6 tires were flat, and all the hubcaps hung out at odd angles. Cap, waiting indignantly, stared Zach down for the whole of his investigation.
“Are we going to move on, or are you too infatuated with your new toy?”
“We’ve been here all of maybe thirty seconds, Cap. Have some patience.”
With one final push that dented its body, Zach finally stepped back from the aerially pinned vehicle. He’d only been outside the walls for a few minutes, but it was already the most interesting experience of his life. Certainly worth all those waivers he’d skimmed, then signed. Deciding the young man was quite finished with his investigation, Cap wordlessly started to move on. Alerted by the thunderous sound of his footsteps and little else, Zach turned to catch up.
Sunlight filtered through the leaves as they traversed the overgrown forest. They followed a dirt path on the forest floor, the trees having been carved out of the way by older expeditions. They still hit some of the higher branches that grew from trees on either side, though. Stealthy they were not.
“Forest floor’s a bit harder than that asphalt you’ve been training on, eh?” Cap jabbed when Zach briefly stumbled.
“Laugh it up, old man.” He replied simply, not doing as good a job of hiding his peevishness as he thought.
They trekked in silence for awhile, Zach quickly becoming more attuned to the rough terrain. They’d be on higher alert if they went by the books, but this area wasn’t far from the walls and there was plenty of cover from the ‘new’ emplacements along their tops. Anything untoward in that area would probably get turned to ash and embers before it got anywhere close to the duo. They both knew this, but neither would say it out loud. The after action report would list them as being near perfectly vigilant, with negligible lapses in attention. Even the less than personable relationship between them wouldn’t stop their shared interest of keeping the brass off their backs.
Eventually the tree line thinned, and they came to a large clearing. The brush was a bright and healthy green in the strong sunlight, and there were very few clouds in the sky. Zach wished he could’ve popped out right there to enjoy the weather and scenery. It’d be pretty difficult to cover up an unauthorized hatch opening in that after action report though. Damned thing was the biggest buzzkill he’d ever met. Plus, if he turned around the looming black mass of the walls would rather spoil the illusion of peaceful wilderness he so wished to cultivate. There were even some flowers and small wildlife here. They’d been protected by proxy, their proximity to the walls meaning that nothing dangerous ever reached this little grove. Zach watched his footfalls to try and keep from disturbing the peace any more than he had to.
They continued on, through and out of the clearing, returning to the treeline. There was little here to betray the state of the world, other than the truck they passed earlier. Wilderness survived in the vague no-man’s land that sat between the city and the Intruders. Zach felt a brief swell of pride at being part of the thing that kept this beauty alive, before remembering how quickly it’d get paved over should the need or even simply the desire to do so arose. ‘Bit of a mixed bag, we are’, he thought. And then they reached their destination, and his philosophical musings were unceremoniously cut short.
A gaping Wound sat in the middle of another clearing, perhaps a couple hundred meters across. It did not emit any sort of mundane radiation; nothing across the entire EM spectrum, no detectable matter, and yet it made its presence very clear. Everything picked it up, all sensors. Even the tactile feedback started to trigger within a certain range. The only reason Zach was still conscious was the buffer of machine and code that meticulously scraped and filtered the data that reached his mind. It was interpreted as a sort of perfect black by the visual software, scrubbed data filling in for actual input. The fringes of the Wound were just visible, and colors seemed to dance atop one another there. A cacophonous vibration, pus on the fringes of reality. Zach got a searing headache whenever he looked in the direction of the Wound with his biological body, as if its malign presence was seeping through the thickly armored form of his machine to reach the delicate fleshy form within.
Cap’s voice was almost level when he called over the coms. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Zach replied, the bantering and rivalry gone now.
Simultaneously, jets of strange white-black fire leapt from the nozzles of the cauterizers mounted upon the machines’ great shoulders. That color barrier vanished among the flames, and then that splotch on reality too began to recede. After only a couple minutes of dousing, the Wound was gone. Even then, they kept firing for five minutes. The ground was seared now, and some normal fire burned around the periphery of where the Wound once was. Cap wordlessly moved to stomp them out, and Zach followed suit.
Their trek back home was a lot quieter.