Graduation took place in a church. All the priests carried guns
“Victory rides a red horse!” the deacon sang. He was an ancient construct, clothed in red and covered in metal sores. A mini soul forge powered his body. “Today, you are his red horse.”
“Victory rides a red horse,” the students repeated. Most of them believed it, too.
Lights flickered in the church, not new tech but old. Even the small, thankless ceremonies required tradition. Caleb had spent all morning getting the lamps to work. He was the only person in his congregation who knew old tech. Wires and batteries. Gasoline. Everyone else preferred souls and bullets.
He closed his eyes. His body felt clammy all over. The wind howled through cracks in the church, filling the building with a faint smell of stomach acid. Mildew grew where metal wasn’t. Outside, a blanket of dirty clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon. No one had seen the sun in hundreds of years. Caleb only knew about it from references he found in old-tech manuals.
“Those who have passed their final exam will go to do great things,” the priest continued. His eyes were so bloodshot they looked red. “Those who do not will be still be blessed. Victory rides a red horse.”
Heartbeats thundered with the flickering lights and the smell of gunpowder. A light tremor shook the church. The earthquakes were getting worse.
The priest approached the first student. “Anthy,” he said to the woman, not a day older than 18. “You have passed, child. What will you do?”
“Fight,” Anthy said. She spoke in an already-dead voice. Tomorrow, her reproductive organs would be removed and given to the birthing factory. In life’s place, she would be given a gun.
“Good, good.”
The priest approached the next student, and the next. Both offered to fight. Caleb was fourth. He squeezed his hands and told himself it would be okay. He was smart, and he was capable. War needed him. No one else could work the old tech like he could, so if he joined the sciences, he could keep learning. Keep working. Old tech had air purifiers and generators and lamps that could grow crops. Electricity. All he needed was a chance. War was destined to win, but he didn’t need to. Neither did Pestilence or Death.
The sun could shine again.
“Caleb,” the priest said. His sore-covered lips twisted into a delighted frown. “Oh my child, I’m so sorry.”
Caleb’s heart skipped with fear. “What?”
“You have not passed your exam.”
Caleb shook his head. Darkness closed around him. “No. No you must be mistaken. I can fight. I can do whatever you need.”
“Yes child, yes you can.” The priest got in close, his lips a breath away from Caleb’s ear. He smelled like an engine. Another tremor shook the church. “Fear not child. Fear not. You are still blessed.”
“No,” Caleb whispered. His mind screamed to run, but his body couldn’t move. “No you don’t understand.”
“It’s not because you are wrong, Caleb. It’s because you are kind.”
The priest shot Caleb twice in the stomach. Pain would make the transformation faster.
Ten minutes later, Caleb’s corpse rose to a standing position. To War, the only way to change the world was to end it.
*
Souls experience the world not with pain or pleasure, but in color. Caleb’s world flashed with bright pinks and strange, washed out blues. Sometimes he found coherent thoughts, and those cried in searing, white-hot shame. He had failed. He wasn’t smart or capable but dead, and now his body would kill and kill and kill until there was nothing left to kill but himself. Then the world would end, and the apocalypse would be over. God would come next. It’s what the priests said.
Caleb was placed in a weapon of war. A tortured soul produces more fuel than one at ease.
*
Sasha approached the tank with a surprised whistle. Life rarely gave her good things, but today was one of those lucky ones. Maybe she’d even get to kill something.
“She’s a beaut,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and phlegmy. Her smile featured burnt lips and missing teeth. “The most perfect thing I’ve ever seen.”
“The rest will die,” Zeke said in his best priest voice, though he was too excited to hold it. They were marching to war! “It’s almost over. For real.”
“Victory rides a red horse.” The prayer was automatic, but Sasha meant it. She would die a thousand times for War, if the horseman let her.
Zeke gave Sasha a hard poke on the shoulder. He smiled, whispered: “Keep this a secret, but we’ll meet him. War.”
Sasha’s eyes went wide. “Do you mean it?”
The priest-in-training nodded. “I can see it.” He tapped his right eye, which was made of rusted metal. “He’ll appear in South America. After we win. Then we’ll follow him to victory.”
“You and me,” Sasha said.
“Me and you,” Zeke agreed. “We made it.”
Sasha looked the tank up and down. As far as the new technology went, the stuff made after the sun disappeared, it was gorgeous: Bulky enough to bulldoze cities into rubble and armed with more cannons than she could count. Even Death himself would balk, and the pale rider was rarely surprised. The tank stood over thirty feet tall on legs thicker than her. It could jump; it could run; it could stomp. It was armored like a knight, with thick sheets of bent steel, and each plate was as red as War’s sword.
“Get in,” Zeke said. “And I’ll see you when we get there.”
“Really?”
Zeke wiggled his index fingers. They flashed with little bits of red magic. “I’ll be raising the dead. Leave the bodies intact, if you can.”
Sasha laughed. “Never.”
Before Zeke could leave, Sasha pulled him in for a quick hug. “Stay safe,” she whispered.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Zeke hissed, pushing her away and glancing all around to make sure no one saw. He blushed redder than the fire of his magic.
“You too,” he mouthed.
“Yes sir,” Sasha barked. She gave him a salute. Zeke returned it with all the awkwardness of someone who doesn’t know how to boss his friends around and is now expected to.
Sasha scaled the tank, hand over hand because new tech wasn’t made for ease or comfort. Her hands worked the controls, pushing buttons and spinning dials. The tank’s engine roared to life, and while Sasha was delighting at how quickly the guns reached 100%, Caleb’s world went from blue to bright pink. His soul screamed in ways his mouth never could.
“Come on,” Sasha said. She used her fist to persuade the computer monitor to life. “Show me victory.”
The cameras flickered. They were old tech, which meant they worked better than her eyes—like magic. The monitor showed a full view of the hanger, with its thousands of little movements. Soldiers climbed into cockpits and loading bays. Engines thrummed to life. Priests barked orders and watched them followed with a mad fervor. Souls screamed in silent agony.
The monitor flashed information, most of which she couldn’t read or understand. Caleb could though. He knew how to work the old tech, and that information was stored in his soul, not his body. The tank was operating at max efficiency. It had enough power to fire its plasma cannon thirteen times, two dozen missiles, six thousand armor-piercing rounds, and if all else failed, its entire body doubled as a hammer. He hated everything about it.
“Alright,” Sasha said, happy with what she was seeing. “Let’s go.”
Caleb shifted in and out of consciousness as Sasha led her tank into the diseased world ahead. Heat lightning turned the distant clouds from black into grey mist. People screamed, and explosions popped like bright thunder. The air smelled like poison because it hadn’t been truly safe to breathe for over a hundred years. The armies of War marched south. They wore red, black, and blood, and on the outskirts, the failures—the murdered and the victims—shuffled as zombies, controlled by Zeke and those like him.
The apocalypse was almost over.
The army marched. The details were lost on all of them. Countries, boarders, history, it all stopped mattering when mankind crossed the threshold from life into death. Now the Horseman reaped, what the priests called Revelation. There was no going back. Caleb had his hopes, but Caleb powered a tank. He was more guns than person. His corpse marched with the rest of the zombies, carrying a gun and waiting to be told when to shoot. Miles crumpled into ash and salt. Not even weeds bothered to grow now, because Pestilence controlled this area of the planet. She killed the plants first.
Tremors followed them. Sasha barely understood the numbers, but Caleb did. Little earthquakes slithered underneath the entire planet, vibrations so small that only the oldest of technology could read them. Blue and pink swirled until Caleb settled on a white thought:
C:\> There’s something underneath us.
“What?” Sasha said. She tapped at the screen, but instead of more information, the message vanished. “What’s underneath us?”
C:\> Something.
Caleb’s soul stretched from one end of the tank to the other, but it was like oxygen filling a room. He existed, but passively, just enough for the tank to breathe. It was more alive than most of the planet. He thought of air purifiers, and he thought of the sun.
“Hey!” Sasha pounded at the computer. “What’s underneath us?”
But Caleb’s soul had already retreated into the washed-out blue of incoherent thoughts. The army marched on.
*
It took four, agonizing months to reach the heart of Pestilence territory. A green tint formed over the clouds, and boils covered what few roads hadn’t been washed away in disease. Every puddle overflowed with radioactive mud. Empty homes withered in the hot weather while the skeletons of giant trees threatened to topple. There was no food; there was no clean water. The air stank so bad it kept the army from sleeping. Those out front caught a bad cough that soon spread to every living person and even a few zombies. It killed, and quickly.
War’s army thinned with every step. Those that didn’t die of sickness either killed themselves or someone else for food. Zeke and his fellow priests were hard at work to keep the dead marching.
“Here,” Zeke said as he slipped Sasha a stale bread roll. He looked for priests with his good eye, and he looked into the future with his mechanical one. “Eat it quickly.”
Sasha didn’t need to be told twice. She was starving. “We should have brought more food.”
Zeke shrugged. “War wanted death. That meant bombs and guns.”
“I can’t kill if I’m dead.”
“Yes you can.” Zeke snapped his fingers. Little bits of red magic flashed at the tip of his thumbs. He tried a smile, but there were too many worry lines around his eyes. He was afraid. “We all can.”
“Victory rides a red horse.”
“We’ll win,” Zeke said. He put his hand to his mouth to cough but stopped himself. His fist was red from all the blood. “I know we will.”
Sasha ate, coughed. She poked at one of her teeth and felt it wiggle. Sometimes her gums bled for no reason, and sometimes her back itched so bad it was like someone had lit it on fire. It made piloting the tank uncomfortable. But she was one of the lucky ones, because she had a roof over her head and metal walls to keep her safe. When the clouds rained their acid, she was protected.
“Hey Zeke. Can the tanks talk?” she asked.
Zeke blinked his good eye. “What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
Zeke reached into his robes and pulled out a flask. Instead of wine, it held water. “Here. Don’t get sick on me, okay? We need you tomorrow. We’re almost there.”
“I’m already sick.”
“Well, don’t get sicker.
Sasha took the flask. “Then what?”
“Not sure.” Zeke closed his good eye and stared with his mechanical one. He saw them flying over a vast horizon, where roiling grey water met a thick, grey sky. “But far from here. I think we’ll fight Death next.”
Sasha pocketed the flask and climbed back into her tank. She watched Zeke wander back to his fellow priests, his head down, his hands in his pockets. She couldn’t wait for the world to end, to see the last life vanish for War, but she also hoped Zeke would be okay. He was the only friend she had.
*
Caleb came to when Sasha forced one of his dials to 100%. His plasma cannon charged with pink screams. His sensors picked up earthquakes, gunfire, and death. All around him, war raged.
“Go, go, go!” Sasha screamed. She pressed buttons and flicked switches, shifting power from Caleb’s legs into his weapons. “Fire!”
The tank launched a bolt of blue plasma at an ugly skyscraper of a building. For a brief moment, it stood tall, a dark factory cutting through an even darker sky. Smokestacks spewed green slime. Pistons the size of houses moved up and down as they pumped the apocalypse into the planet. It was a familiar building to everyone—they had all been born in such a place. It was Pestilence’s birthing factory. It housed infants, children, nurses, priests, food. Then it was on fire. All its windows shattered at once, and the green slime turned crimson.
C:\> No!
“Yes!” Sasha roared.
She fired again. And a third time. The building wobbled, its steel structure giving way. Caleb’s cameras zoomed in on flaming bodies as they jumped from the windows. The ground did not put out the fire.
While the building fell, Sasha took aim at the rushing soldiers of Pestilence. She flipped more switches, and Caleb screamed energy into the tank’s Gatling guns. They revved with a loud whine that made his hull shake. Sasha grinned a smile that was more blood than teeth.
Bullets tore into the poisoned army. Pestilence’s soldiers arrived leaking blood and acid, and they died in little pops of it, sending clouds of poison into the sky. Any foot soldier that touched it melted. A few returned fire, but Caleb’s hull was strong. The bullets pinged off. He tore people to shreds and rent zombies into ash.
C:\> Stop!
“What?” Sasha slapped the computer. “Shut up and shoot!”
C:\> I don’t want to kill people.
“Well I do!”
War’s soldiers rushed with no regard for their own lives. With his cameras, Caleb had a clear view as they died by toxic bullets and poisoned knives. When he found a brief flash of red up ahead, Sasha zeroed in on it. The priests had split, with half moving forward to bring the enemy dead back to life, the other falling back to direct.
“Zeke!” Sasha hissed. He was a novice priest. They wouldn’t keep him in the back. He was too expendable.
She drove Caleb into the fury, using his massive body to batter anything that got in their way. Soldiers crumpled, and jeeps flipped over. Poison burned holes into his armor panels. Caleb screamed. A helicopter that looked like it was made of old swords spun overhead, launching missiles into Caleb’s midsection. They exploded in more poison. Alarms flashed red in his cockpit. Caleb fell back a step, and his soul spun with pink and blue. Steam flushed from his back.
“Don’t you fall over!” Sasha ordered. “Don’t you dare!”
She took aim at the helicopter and opened fire. Her bullets tore harmlessly through the air. The helicopter closed in and fired another set of missiles. Caleb felt his leg buckle.
“No!”
C:\> It didn’t have to be this way.
“Help me!” Sasha ordered. She punched a crack into the computer monitor. “We have to win! We have to!”
C:\> I don’t want to fight.
C:\> I want to see the sun.
“If I die, then no one will protect Zeke.” She smashed at the button that would power Caleb’s plasma launcher. “So help me!”
Caleb understood wanting to protect someone. And despite hating his new body, he also didn’t want to die. His cameras could still see the sun. In a way, the cameras were better than his eyes. They were made with old tech; they had computers and nutrition and real doctors who healed the sick instead of killing them. They could calculate a thousand equations in a simple blink.
C:\> Switch to missiles.
“How?”
C:\> Third button from the left.
“The red one?”
C:\> They’re all red.
Despite herself, Sasha smiled. “Yeah. Victory rides a red horse.”
She readied the missiles, and Caleb worked the tank’s targeting system. Circles appeared over the helicopter, trailing it left and right. When they beeped green, Sasha pushed fire. Two missiles erupted from the back of Caleb’s shoulders, soaring into the sky as white-tipped javelins. The helicopter swerved, but old tech was better than new. The missiles followed the movement. The helicopter exploded into a shower of shrapnel.
“Yes!” Sasha hooted.
Caleb’s left leg barely worked, but his torso could spin in a full circle. It gave Sasha enough movement to rain more death onto the diseased soldiers that remained. She searched for pinpricks of red magic and gave the priests cover fire.
True to Zeke’s word, War showed up near the end. He carried a red sword, and he rode a red horse. When he swung his blade, thousands fell over dead.
Sasha and Caleb didn’t see it, but Zeke would tell them later that he witnessed the final strike. Pestilence slid from her white horse, knelt, and handed her older brother her crown and bow. Then War split her in half, from shoulder to thigh.
South America belonged to the cult of War, and the apocalypse marched on.
*
They loaded Caleb onto a monstrous fusion of old tech and new. A hundred souls suffered to power the warship across the salt-water desert, working in consort with circuit boards and computer programs no one truly understood. The cargo bay alone was the size of a birthing factory. Caleb’s sensors picked up and categorized everything, the tanks, jeeps, trucks, and weapons. It was War’s final push to consume the planet. Pestilence was gone. Famine had died hundreds of years ago. That left Death.
While the ship lurched through the water, Caleb drifted into a blue sleep. It let him hate himself without pain. The longer his soul stayed in the tank, the more he became it. He couldn’t remember what it was like to have hands or a voice. Talking through text commands came as naturally as firing weapons.
C:\> I am not supposed to be a weapon.
C:\> I want to die.
No one was around to read the statements. The lights in the cargo bay were off.
Caleb lived in his blue world for seven months as the ship traveled, and the more his soul thinned, the more cracks and crevices it found. There were bits of text locked within his new computers. Documents and books. The first was the tank’s manual, but he didn’t need it. He knew his new body better than the people who made it.
The rest though. Those were landscapes worth visiting. A dictionary with ten thousand words, letters written during the first years of the apocalypse. The priests of War did their best to burn everything, but they didn’t know about hard drives or the cloud. Caleb slept inside words, and just as the tank became him, so did history.
Mankind had a choice, those hundreds of years ago. They could fix the planet, or they could die. Good intentions lost to better deals. Riots swept cities. By the time humanity was ready for change, it was too late. Cancer was up, and the sun shined through a bleary film of pollution and heat. The Horseman arrived when the first explosions went off. Under mushroom clouds, they reaped.
But at some point it turned into a game. Each Horseman wanted to win in his own way. They established rules and kingdoms. Doctrine. Humans worshipped them because they had nothing else to live for, and the earth died because it had no more life to give. Armies formed, and when humans died by the tens of thousands, the priests built birthing factories. Souls replaced electricity as a power source. Corpses became a currency.
The apocalypse could last forever, if everyone just let it.
*
“What do you see?” Sasha asked.
Zeke shrugged. He looked haggard, with veiny streaks of blue under his eyes and in his cheeks. His red robe floated around a body that hadn’t had a proper meal since they graduated from the birthing factory. Sasha didn’t look much better. Pestilence may have lost, but she made sure to give everyone a parting gift. The lucky just had a bad cough.
“I don’t know,” the priest said. He lay on Sasha’s bed. Sasha stood to block the door, in case anyone saw. “My eye stopped working once we left South America.”
“Oh.”
Sasha coughed thick phlegm into her first. She had lost more teeth since taking the continent, as well as most of her fingernails.
“I don’t have any more food, either. The deacons are keeping a watch over it.”
Now it was Sasha’s turn to shrug. “It’s okay. Guy two bunks down is sicker than me. Worse comes to worse, I’ll survive.”
“I didn’t hear that,” Zeke said.
“You can’t make a zombie pilot a tank! We can’t win if we all die!”
Zeke sat up. “What I did hear,” he said, hoping to replace a bad conversation with a safe one, “is that we’re heading to Africa.”
“Yeah?” Sasha knew a bit about Africa. It was where Famine took hold. Word was that Famine got a little too apocalypse hungry and slaughtered the entire continent. It was a wasteland, uninhabited of everything but skeletons. “Why?”
“To build a base. We can regroup, restructure, and then take Europe.”
“Death’s home.”
Zeke smiled. “The pale rider himself. But victory rides a red horse.”
Sasha coughed. She tasted flecks of blood. “Red’s a lot of things these days. Not all of them are victory.”
“We’ll survive,” Zeke said. “There are supplies in Africa. Famine was too quick, and he didn’t salt the earth like War and Pestilence did. We’ll build an army, and then we’ll win.”
Sasha reached for Zeke’s hand and squeezed it. It was metal now, a gift for doing so well. She liked it. It felt strong. “Do you see that? With your eye?”
Zeke shook his head. “No. But I feel it. And I trust that more than my metal eye.”
“Survive, Zeke. For me.”
“We’re supposed to die.”
“We will. But not yet. Not until we win.”
*
Caleb stomped his way onto Africa with Sasha in his cockpit. Those that survived the trip followed, the foot soldiers marching with less life than the zombies. There were more dead than living people. Jeeps and trucks spilled along the front lines, their guns pointing north, their drivers hunting for signs of life. They had the infrastructure to build a base, but not the power. The priests promised that would change. They promised a lot—the world—because victory rides a red horse.
“God,” Sasha muttered. She coughed into her hand and looked at it on reflex. Still bloody. “What happened here?”
C:\> Famine.
“He did a good job.”
Instead of deserts and jungles, villages and cities, Famine left dust. There were no hills, no rivers or streams; there no gullies or broken homes. Just dust. It stretched from one horizon to the next, blacker than the poisoned clouds overhead and too flat to be real. It did not move. As they marched, Caleb found that nothing did. The sky did not get darker with night, and the clouds did swirl or threaten rain. Famine left even the weather starved.
*
The first bullets came from behind. Caleb’s sensors picked up the pops. Sasha heard the screams that followed. The army ground to a halt, guns pointed every-which way. Something exploded into red fire.
C:\> The tremors are back.
“What?” Sasha forced herself awake. Her heart thudded too fast for her starved body. Her vision wavered in and out. She flipped dials and turned switches, powering Caleb’s cannons to 100%. “What’s going on?”
C:\> War.
“We need to head back. To help.”
Sasha spun the tank around, doing her best not to step on anything important. Caleb’s new body wasn’t made for fineness. People rushed to get out of her way, and a few even took aim and fired, but the bullets were half-hearted. No one had the strength for war today.
C:\> I want to see the sun.
“Not now.” Sasha scanned the world with Caleb’s eyes. Zeke was in the back. Zeke was in danger! She had to save him.
War’s army parted for the tank like a rip. Soldiers waved weapons, and soldiers yelled. Zombies fell over by the dozen. Soon more gunfire ripped through the air, but not from Death’s army. Sasha watched people she knew open fire on each other, spilling blood into the famine-worn dust. A jeep drove into a crowd of people before exploding. The wounded crawled out to lie on the ground and die.
“Why!” Sasha roared. She blinked at a grey fog forming around her senses. Part of her wanted to sleep. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this.”
C:\> Yes it was.
C:\> War doesn’t care who is fighting as long as there is war.
Sasha spotted Zeke running towards them, waving his hands and shouting something. They were no longer red with magic. Soldiers followed, their guns drawn. Zombies crumpled into dust.
“Zeke!”
Sasha tried to take aim, but the screen was too blurry. Caleb understood though, and his cameras didn’t need food or water to work. He targeted those chasing Zeke. Red circles formed over each. When Sasha pressed fire, the soldiers turned to pulp.
Zeke reached the tank with a scream on his lips. “They stole the food! The priests took the rest, and now they’re dead! Everyone is killing—”
Then a stray bullet clipped his skull. He slumped over Caleb’s foot. Caleb could see the body, but he couldn’t feel it. He was made of metal now. Tremors rumbled beneath them all.
“Zeke!” Sasha screamed.
C:\> I used to think the apocalypse would happen to everyone but me.
C:\> I used to think I could stop it.
Sasha fell into the controls. She was so tired. Tears blurred what was left of her vision, so she slapped at buttons and yanked random switches hoping something would happen. Caleb’s weapons fired in starts and stops, not caring who they hit. Soldiers returned fire. A truck barreled into him and flipped over. Red war overtook black dust.
C:\> If you fire my plasma cannon at the sky, I think we will see the sun. The clouds are not as thick here. I can see the math.
“Zeke,” Sasha sobbed. “They killed him! Why did they kill him?”
C:\> It will be over soon.
“Why can you talk?”
C:\> I don’t know.
C:\> But I am sorry.
Sasha licked her lips. They tasted like blood. The tank around her felt cold and lifeless, yet it was warm too. It didn’t love her because death couldn’t love, but maybe it cared, in its own way. She found the button that would lock its legs. Caleb ground to a halt. Soldiers opened fire on him, and the few zombies still moving turned on their masters. They had Africa’s first real meal since Famine took hold of the continent.
“I hope it’s worth it.”
C:\> Me too.
Almost blind now, Sasha found the buttons through muscle memory. Caleb’s weapons charged to 100%, and when she pushed the fire button, his soul screamed with pink and blue. A bolt of plasma split the sky. The war stopped long enough for everyone to look up.
Bright lights shined from above the clouds, beautiful with blue landscapes. The sun stared at the planet as a ball of yellow flame. It was gorgeous. Healing. So bright it could make all the shadows go away. It could grow food and raise spirits, let people laugh and sing. The sun was everything despair was not, and Caleb’s soul collapsed into white-hot sobs of joy. Inside her cockpit, war starved and dying, Sasha screamed.
Because all around the sun were monsters, creatures made of wings, eyes, and fire. They looked down at the last war humans would ever wage, and they waited. They waited with greed.
Underneath the ground, tremors swam towards the surface with chitin movement and black teeth.
Victory rides a pale horse.
Nonsense 