The only things holding the United States together were duct tape, hope, and the postal service.
Or at least, that was what the Postmaster General said in nearly every speech. Probably this one too, for all Lee knew. Still trying to wake up from his pharmaceutically induced torpor, he didn’t have any attention to spare for platitudes.
“Are you ready for today?” Beside him, Jackie smiled, far too cheery for this early in the morning.
Lee grunted in reply. Returning his blank stare to the general’s podium, he caught the tail end of this morning’s canned speech. Finished, the general stepped off the stage, and each rank of the tens of thousands of postmen and postwomen marched off in alternating directions to receive this day’s packages.
Jackie trailed behind him, her steps slightly out of sync with the rest of the formation.
They marched through arterial and then capillary tunnels. All concrete, and poorly illuminated by dim, incandescent lights spread too far apart by some lowest-bidder contractor. The old capitol had been a thing of white walls and neoclassical architecture. This one was an underground bunker. The federal government would not be repeating the mistakes that allowed the monuments to seize Washington D.C. Even the indirect reminder made Lee shiver at the thought of Lincoln, awesome and terrible on his bloodstained marble throne.
It was a mere hundred postal workers that finally arrived in distribution room WYG-676. Mechanical exoskeletons lined the walls. Hollow soldiers laid down by vast, sorcerous factories, waiting to be animated. Racks of packages occupied the center of the room.
Tucked into a corner was a folding table, behind which two officers sat. From them, each of the postal workers ahead of Lee received their sealed orders.
“Get to the back, you have a special assignment.”
Lee grunted an affirmative.
“Get to the back, you have a special assignment.”
“Yes sir!” said Jackie.
Lee cursed under his breath. Jackie getting a different assignment was probably too much to hope for. And anyways, he thought, he had to conserve his hope lest the strategic hope reserve holding the United States together run dry.
When the rest of the line had passed, Lee approached the officers.
“Orders?” he asked. Jackie bounced in place behind him, probably too overwhelmed with excitement to speak.
“We got—” the officer yawned, revealing teeth stained by coffee and tobacco. “We got a high-priority pickup request radioed in from the frontline in North Dakota. Whatever’s getting shipped is above my paygrade, but is evidently small enough to fit in a backpack. Got that?”
“Yes sir,” Lee and Jackie chorused.
“Good.” The officer nodded, before handing Lee a sealed envelope. “Double check your weapons, you might be seeing combat.”
As Lee and Jackie walked away, Lee hid a smile behind a cupped hand. Jackie, he knew, had joined up because she truly believed in horseshit like “love of country” and “patriotism.” When asked, Lee always said he’d joined up because he liked the gear.
Aircraft had stopped working a decade ago, but exoskeletons were the next best thing. And this mission sounded like an excuse to reach the extremes of his kit’s performance envelope.
Lee reached his dock. With a gesture, he activated his exoskeleton’s repulsor inscriptions. Etchings of scowling faces, deliberately crude, glowed a soft purple. With one hand, he removed the exoskeleton from its hook. Like always, he marveled at the latticework of delicate aluminum his life would depend on.
“Isn’t magic great?” Jackie said. She grinned, sly, like she’d caught him dipping a finger into a jar of molasses.
Lee jumped a little, unpleasantly reminded that this wasn’t a solo operation. He coughed into a hand before composing his features back into a blank mask.
The exoskeleton was a little taller than he was. Its titanium-plated boots came up to his thighs as he put them on, slipping into the exoskeleton back first like a coat. He activated another set of enchantments, and stick figures holding measuring tapes lit up as the boots shrunk down to just below his knees. Wires snaked their way across his chest and friction locks engaged as the exoskeleton finished fitting itself to Lee’s body.
The flywheel on his back hissed gently as he tentatively walked a few paces.
Despite his best efforts to school his expression, Lee ran through his equipment checks with a grin.
“Are you excited?” Jackie asked, as she shadowboxed in her own exoskeleton.
Lee frowned, irritated at himself, and returned to his default, dour expression. Jackie smiled, and tapped her nose.
“Let’s go,” muttered Lee.
From lockers in the back of the room, the pair retrieved their helmets and halberds. Lee brought his halberd to his forearm and made a small incision with the halberd’s axe blade. He smeared the beads of blood over the halberd’s spike. Lines of stick figures glowed faintly as the weapon absorbed his blood. The halberd’s shaft folded inwards, telescoping into itself until it was the length of his forearm. He attached the weapon to his hip, fastening it to his exoskeleton.
Once Jackie’s own ritual maintenance was complete, they tested their radio connection. Mediocre, but acceptable. Soon, Lee knew, the radios would fail permanently, and then it would be time to say goodbye to the last piece of technology in his exoskeleton.
They grabbed rations from a crate stuffed full of vacuum-sealed silver bags, and then it was off to lineup with all the other postal workers at the staging ground. Yet another flat, blank surface of concrete, distinguished only by rows of red x’s marked in peeling masking tape.
A few minutes later, after all packages had been loaded, an indicator light on the wall turned from red to green. Above him, the ceiling opened up to reveal the blue of day advancing into the cloud-speckled sky.
The air thrummed as every postal worker crouched down at the same time. The noise of flywheels and capacitors reached a crescendo.
“First rank!” called an officer. Ten postal workers jumped, arcing forward and out of sight.
“Forward one rank!” Ninety postal workers stepped forward in unison.
“Second rank!”
This continued. Lee and Jackie jumped out with the sixth rank, as usual. Unused to their exoskeletons and not weighed down by cargo, they went farther and faster than the rest of their rank, touching down ten body lengths ahead of everyone else. Above ground, all that could be seen of the capitol was the occasional circular door set into a grassy field, and the openings of other postal service loading rooms. In the far distance, the heavily armored exoskeletons used by politicians were visible as red, white, and blue blobs.
They headed away from St. Louis at a loping, unhurried pace. Had Lee looked back, he knew that at the apex of each jump the city’s remaining skyscrapers would be visible. He didn’t look back.
They set off alongside a pockmarked, dilapidated road, alternating feet with each hop. Each step had to be chosen with care to dodge the road’s hazards. Tripping over a pothole probably wouldn’t kill him, but the mangled corpses of automobiles were more hazardous. Headlights and radiators made rictus grins that never failed to unnerve Lee, even if every car around these parts was nailed to the ground with iron rods through their engine blocks.
But his unease eventually faded and he settled into a rhythm. Lee and Jackie danced a stately waltz of jumping and landing and floating over the farmland and oak-hickory forests of Missouri. Neither bothered to talk. Radio batteries drained faster and faster with each passing month, and even the loudest yells would have been drowned out by the rushing of the wind.
The morning passed uneventfully. By noon they’d made it to South Dakota, having paused only to pay their respects at the ruins of Des Moines.
The pair stopped on the outskirts of Sioux Falls and took their lunch in the shadow of a fallen superheavy exoskeleton. Despite the rust and battle scars, enough paint remained to spell out its name. ‘Unstoppable.’
It hadn’t been.
But because of its pilot’s sacrifice, Sioux Falls still stood.
The sun began its retreat.
Late September in St. Louis had been almost balmy. But as Lee and Jackie made their way farther and farther north, the winds began to howl and bite. The sky was still blue and the clouds were still fluffy, but they began to see streaks of green and yellow out of the corner of their eyes. Clouds would change shape between one look and the next, forming increasingly complex and disturbingly recognizable shapes. Limbs, mostly. Faces, rarely.
Lee’s radio clicked on.
“Do you see that?” Jackie asked.
Lee’s heart sunk into his stomach. “Yeah.”
They bounced to a stop, shock absorbers working furiously to transfer their momentum to the flywheels in their exoskeletons. The rush of wind died down, replaced by the whine of their flywheels and the rumbling of a moving mountain.
“I hate South Dakota,” mumbled Lee. He clenched his teeth, distracted by long-buried memories of a townhouse in Rapid City. Memories of a little boy with missing front teeth and an intact family.
Jackie patted his back, sympathetic. Aluminum rattled as it hit aluminum. They flinched, and Jackie jerked her hand back. Reflexively, they looked toward Mount Rushmore. The presidents’ jaws opened and closed in a distasteful parody of eating. Teeth made of rock ground against the wreck of some unfortunate machine. Even from miles away, the sound of metal being chewed was unbearable.
Lee forced himself to laugh. “We’re being ridiculous, we’re like breadcrumbs to that thing. No way in hell would it go after us.”
Jackie nodded. Her cheery smile was back, but more brittle. “Yes. Of course. And it’s an ambush predator, so we could outrun it.”
“But better safe than sorry.”
“Better safe than sorry,” echoed Jackie.
They switched their exoskeletons to walking mode, and began skirting around the mountain. They made sure to duck low and use shrubs and trees for cover, keeping the mountain in their line of sight the whole time. Every postal worker had heard tales of Rushmore’s deceptive speed, and Lee had firsthand experience with it.
The walk took the better part of two hours. Stimulants injected by their exoskeletons kept them alert and energized, but the mental and emotional toll left them weary all the same.
Once on the opposite side of the mountain’s faces, they switched their exoskeletons back to jumping mode and launched themselves off the ground. It was miles of flat-out sprinting before either looked back.
They eased back from their top speeds. Combat speed was fine in short bursts, but neither could afford a damaged exoskeleton when they got close to the front lines. But to compensate for the delay, they flew lower and farther across the ground with each jump, sacrificing situational awareness for speed.
Eventually, snow began to cover the ground. First in isolated patches in the shadows of trees, then in a paper-thin blanket of pristine white. Only the furrows of harvested fields and the occasional hardy village, dug into the ground as protection against golems, broke up the desolate landscape.
The snow obscured the terrain, forcing Lee and Jackie to step with more care. But Lee couldn’t bring himself to dislike it. The satisfying crunch of his boots on snow buoyed his mood, and his exoskeleton’s climate control system kept him nice and warm.
Night fell, and they flicked down their visors. Arcane light projected a terrain overlay on the clear glass, outlining the world in monochrome blue. The wind stilled. Only their synchronized impacts filled the dark with noise.
But despite Lee’s mounting apprehension, nothing leapt out of the night.
Hours after sunset, they reached safety.
“You’ve got mail!” Jackie cheerfully quipped over the radio, repeating some inane, pre-Deluge inside joke neither her nor Lee really understood. She laughed at whatever response she received, and the citadel’s entrance dilated before them. Interlocking metal teeth opened just enough for them to jump through, one after the other.
Once they were through, the opening clanked shut, and the eerie silence of the night was replaced by the constant bustle of an active military base and the omnipresent hum of the citadel’s annihilator plant. Lee and Jackie switched off their climate control systems— even this far from the citadel’s core, it was plenty warm.
They didn’t ask for a guide. Neither Lee nor Jackie had ever been on this particular citadel, but they’d often made deliveries to others of its class making port calls in Chicago and Minneapolis.
Upon entering the mailroom, they announced themselves.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“We’re here on a high-priority pickup request,” said Lee. When that didn’t work, he tried again, louder.
The mailroom clerk started, probably so absorbed in his book he wouldn’t even notice the Citadel going feral. So long as it was polite enough to be quiet while it did so, anyways.
“Ah, yes— let me just—” With a grunt, he pulled an unmarked cardboard box, small enough to fit in one hand, out from under his desk. He held it out toward the pair. “Here you go.”
Neither Lee nor Jackie moved to take it. “We need to confirm that this is the right package,” said Lee, slow and deliberate.
The clerk snorted. “Only one person on this citadel makes high priority pickup requests on combat deployments, and that’s the Captain. This is your package, and you’re delivering it to the Postmaster General.”
Lee and Jackie traded an uncertain glance. Wordlessly, Jackie accepted the package and put it into her backpack.
The clerk returned to his book, and they walked out of the mailroom. The door behind them closed with a woosh and a clunk. Perhaps with that much metal between him and the outside world, the clerk could afford to ignore even a another Deluge.
They took a quick dinner on an out-of-the way metal bench. No sense going to the mess hall when all they had to serve were the same premade meals anyway.
“You know, my brother served on one of these,” said Jackie, unbidden. “One of the early models. The first model, actually. The USC Constitution.”
She went silent as Lee finished chewing on a cracker. “He fought Lady Liberty, then.”
“And lost.” Jackie’s voice was soft.
Lee jabbed her, not unkindly, with an elbow. “And won. Philadelphia can attest to that.”
“New York can’t, though.”
They finished the rest of their meals in silence.
Standing up, they ran checks over their equipment, making sure everything was still in working order. Lee’s worries proved unfounded. Every joint and spring remained in alignment, and the magic-momentum converter was still in proper working order.
On-schedule, they returned to the main hangar. “Opening! Diameter: seven feet,” said the door operator. Lee and Jackie crouched down, preparing for the jump.
“Hey!”
Their heads swiveled to look at the door operator, a heavyset woman in camouflage pants and a white t-shirt. “Be careful out there! Word is, the Canadians are planning an attack!” She bellowed each word, barely audible over the scraping of metal on metal as the teeth of the door unlocked themselves.
“Thanks for the heads up!” Lee yelled back. He had no confidence the woman had heard him, but she waved back, encouraging, all the same.
Then, they were off.
They hit the ground simultaneously, briefly obscured from each other by puffs of snow. Their jumps began short, barely tall enough to clear a house. But with each stride, they went farther and farther until eventually they reached their cruising speed.
It was back to howling winds and helmet displays. By now, however, the strain of their journey had begun to take its toll. Their eyes didn’t droop, and each step was as precise as the last. The stimulants made sure of that. But in flight, their stances were less than textbook perfect, and they didn’t scan their heads to the left and right looking for threats as often as they should have.
“Ambush!”
At Lee’s cry, Jackie flipped on her floodlights. Night turned into day, every surface illuminated by the harsh white glare emitted by runework inscribed on her exoskeleton.
Her quick thinking narrowly saved them. The figure bouncing toward them flinched against the light and botched a landing. Metal crunched as it bounced like a ragdoll against the bare terrain.
But two remaining ambushers continued undaunted, charging at them from their right flank.
Men, not golems.
Postal worker exoskeletons were utilitarian machines, but these were weapons of war: as tall as a house, covered in interlocking plates, and adorned by crenellations and engravings. One machine had a Canadian flag painted onto its chest. Two bars of red on the sides, and nine red swords on a white field in the middle, arranged to form a crude maple leaf.
“The pilot’s cabins— there are faces painted on them!”
Even from this distance, he could make out the fine detailing that had gone into the full lips, high brows, clear eyes, and draconic scales, all painstakingly rendered on opaque faceplates. So true to life, they were like photographs of people who’d never existed. Lee cursed. “Fanatics. Dabbling in dark magic. This can’t end well.”
They made a hard pivot, turning a sharp forty-five degrees clockwise with their first steps, and another forty five degrees with their second step, placing the assailants to their backs.
The ambushers began their pursuit. Rather than close in and deal killing blows, they stayed a comfortable distance behind Lee and Jackie.
“Shit. These guys know what they’re doing,” said Lee.
On their current heading, they’d end up in Saskatchewan. Even if they somehow avoided getting captured by patrolling Canadian janissaries, they were heading in the opposite direction from the capital. And regardless, neither Lee nor Jackie were fresh. They’d been traveling for close to an entire day already, and the stimulants in their exoskeletons would run out.
Over time, the pursuing exoskeletons synchronized their jumps with Lee’s and Jackie’s, timing leaps to happen just after Lee and Jackie left the ground. Lee would have admired the display of military precision if he wasn’t running for his life.
“Angle counterclockwise,” ordered Lee, taking command by marginal seniority.
“Affirmative,” said Jackie.
On their next jump, they made a slight adjustment to their heading. Two or three degrees, at best.
The air thrummed with power. Their assailants leaped explosively forward, reducing the gap between them by a dozen yards.
Lee tasted ozone and blood. Forewarning. “Black magic!”
Lee and Jackie slammed into the ground. Their hard stop left four miniature impact craters in the frozen soil. Flywheels screamed, a hair’s breadth away from overloading as they transferred all the lateral momentum built up by Lee and Jackie into rotation.
“Cover your eyes!”
An explosion. Heat washed across his face. Lee’s climate control system had overloaded. Through closed eyelids, he saw the bones of his arms outlined by purple light.
“Go!”
They launched themselves backwards, through air still sparking and hissing from whatever attack the Canadians had launched. Their assailants had overextended, Lee saw, as he performed a gentle half rotation in midair.
For a moment, he hoped the ambushers would desist. They didn’t.
Their maneuver bought them precious seconds as the much heavier Canadian exoskeletons painstakingly turned around, lumbering like buffalo. But the yards they’d gained were soon lost to the long stride of the Canadian machines.
Lee sighed. It was a long, drawn-out noise. Incongruously, he felt himself relax. He’d made his decision. He’d already spent too much of his life running..
“Jackie, go straight for Sioux Falls. They’re not dumb enough to follow you all the way there, and if they are, the local militia will fight them off. I’ll buy you time.” Lee unholstered his halberd, extending the shaft to its full length.
“But—”
“No whining. Go! You have the package. That’s the most important thing. Split from me three bounces from now.”
Jackie stayed silent through the next jump. “Fine,” she said.
Lee enjoyed his last jump of relative peace. He spun a lazy half rotation to face his opponents. The runes on the shaft of his halberd glowed a soft blue. The metal head, however, glowed a cherry red. He reached the ground going backwards, but left it going forward.
He bounced toward the attackers, screaming an inarticulate battle cry. His last coherent thought was that he must have looked ridiculous, like a bicycle charging a freight train.
After that came the battle fugue. On his command, the exoskeleton injected a specialized cocktail of exotic uppers and downers, tailored to combat. The world slowed down irregularly, like the always buffering films he’d watched from a refugee camp before the internet breathed its last.
The Canadians pulled out their swords, eager for a fight. He had enough time to be grateful that they hadn’t been equipped with guns before he passed beneath them.
He jabbed up toward a metal boot with his halberd’s spike, aiming for the machine without the flag. But as he reached it, it curled up into a fetal position while swinging its sword downwards at him, making use of the disparity in reach of their weapons.
The swing of its sword missed him by more than a body length. But if the heat he felt even from this distance was any indication, the attack itself had only missed him by a hair’s breadth.
He tried not to notice that someone had written ‘ANDY’ on the bottom of the boot. He couldn’t afford to humanize his enemy.
Both he and his enemy hit the ground at about the same time. Something went wrong with the enemy’s landing. They failed to gain much altitude, and even Lee’s low, forward dash easily went over their head.
He smiled, suddenly elated. Finally, a lucky break!
Like a bullfighter taunting a bull, he made several quick dashes around the machine, baiting sword swings and even scoring a gash across its arm with his halberd’s axe blade. With each bounce the enemy lost altitude, some mechanism breaking down jump by jump.
Lee prepared to go for the kill. The intensity of his weapon’s glow increased, and an ethereal projection extended the reach of his spike.
He went for a backwards landing, prepared for one final thrust.
But hadn’t there been two enemies?
Lee double checked his radio.
The battery still had juice, but the antenna wasn’t picking up anything, not even the background radiation of the universe. The principles underlying radio transmission had permanently failed.
The world snapped back into focus, the freezing metal of his exoskeleton stark against the bare skin of his neck and forearms.
His next jump was a half rotation, and the one after that sent him speeding toward Jackie’s last heading. He left his enemy behind; they wouldn’t survive long with a broken machine.
Lee arrived in time to see the Canadian shatter Jackie’s halberd.
With a flash and a bang, the enchantment on the halberd overloaded, thrusting Jackie into the ground like a hammer blow. She landed on her feet, but only just. Even from a hundred yards away, Lee could hear her flywheel all but spinning itself to pieces. Gouts of flame materialized from her back, thrusting far into the air, her exoskeleton taking emergency measures to bleed off its excess energy.
The Canadian made a hard stop and waited far below Jackie like a batter at plate, sword readied for one final blow.
Lee sprinted forward, so close to the ground his boots brushed against the yellow tallgrass.
He didn’t juke or maneuver. Pointing his halberd straight ahead he dashed directly toward his target.
The Canadian did the only thing that could counter Lee’s bloodyminded charge. They sidestepped.
Lee flew past them helplessly, hopelessly fast.
It took two more bounces before he could turn around. The Canadian had been distracted from its swing, and Jackie stayed alive. For now. But Lee could see she was hopping on one foot, the other having overloaded its springs.
She dodged backwards and forward, short hops putting her just out of range of the Canadian’s sword. But with no weapon and a broken exoskeleton, it was just a matter of time before she was hit.
Lee performed a hard stop, desperate to help Jackie. This time, something broke. The flywheel’s spin became irregular, rising and falling in pitch unpredictably. Lee forced himself to slow down. He could only hope Jackie would hold out long enough for him to get to her.
A feint—
The Canadian smacked Jackie with the flat of its blade and she tumbled backwards, head over heels. By pure chance, her first impact was feet first. This gave her enough time to activated her exoskeleton’s failsafe. Her feet didn’t touch the ground again, but ensconced by a transparent white shield she tumbled in relative safety.
But only in relative safety, because the Canadian was still armed, and still angry.
In the distance, a figure crested a hill. The machine Lee had downed. But it wasn’t bouncing. It was running, impossibly fast. And it had discarded its weapon.
“Fuck.” Lee slowed to a stop.
The Canadian turned its attention away from Jackie, and towards their former comrade. They readied their sword, and swung. But not fast enough.
One machine embraced another. Their collision instantly killed the remaining human pilot.
The two exoskeletons crashed into the ground. The unarmed exoskeleton’s helm split in half from its forehead to its chin, revealing a black pit between toothless metal jaws. It began to feast, tearing strips of metal off the other machine with its hands and sucking them down its blasphemous gullet.
Lee breathed deep and readied his halberd. A jump, and then another, following smoothly into the next. A final jump, just above the distracted golem.
He delivered the coup de grâce through the golem’s metal helm.
Jackie walked up to him. For a few seconds, they stared blankly at each other.
They started laughing, and didn’t stop. The joy of being alive was better than even the most powerful stimulants their exoskeletons could deliver.
Their laughter trailed off. Lee spat to his side, then slumped to the ground. “It was bad enough when the third covenant broke. With these fanatics running around, the fourth won’t last long at all.”
Jackie hummed in agreement. “‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.’ Easy in theory, impossible in practice.” She limped over to Lee and sat by him. The aluminum of their shoulder plates clinked together, and for a while, nothing was said. They stared at the sky and experienced the exhaustion artificial stimulants had distracted them from.
Lee stood. He held out a hand to Jackie. “C’mon, get up. We’ve still got hundreds of miles to go. There’s a repair depo nearby.”
By the time they reached the capitol, the sun had almost reached its midday peak.
Lee and Jackie cut through the red tape necessary to meet the Postmaster General, bearing their high priority papers like weapons against the multiple layers of ablative bureaucrats separating them from their destination.
Finally, after a round of saluting, the Postmaster General welcomed them into his office.
“Come in, come in!” The small, jovial man clapped his hands in excitement. He blinked rapidly, and his white mustache twitched like a cat’s tail. “You have my package? Excellent! Thank you for your hard work.”
In his excitement, the general seemed to forget to dismiss Lee and Jackie.
He tore open the box. Packing paper spilled out, scrunched up into loose balls. From the depths of the box, he retrieved an unmarked, white envelope. The general set it down on his desk to retrieve a letter opener. With a neat, practiced cut the envelope opened, and he retrieved a folded piece of paper. Lee tensed, wondering what could possibly be in it to justify sending a high priority request for a single page of paper.
The general unfolded the paper. He scanned down the page. Reaching the bottom, he grinned, and let out an involuntary chuckle. Then another one. Soon, the general was hunched over, laughing so hard he wheezed and gasped.
His laughter died down.
“If I may, sir—” Lee began, burning curiosity overriding adherence to protocol. “What was in that package?”
Still smiling, the general answered him. “Well, son, around the end of the fiscal calendar, government departments have to use up the rest of their budget so they don’t suffer budget cuts. My good friend the captain, here, likes to do that by buying up high-priority pickup requests. Of course it would be a waste to order a pickup and not use it, so if he doesn’t have anything he needs to ship he sends me these inane limericks.”