Kombat Carl

By Henry Stevens, aged 19

A dog snarled at another dog. There was enough meat for each, but the larger kept snapping at the smaller. They lashed out. One dog squealed, throat caught in the other’s teeth. Then a bullet killed that dog too.

Kombat Carl picked up his prey. He cut a rough figure  living out of a suit of military-grade power armor that he’d looted from a corpse, especially since he’d had to ditch parts of it as he’d outgrown them.  But the armor wasn’t his only shell. He’d become a hard-eyed beast stalking these rubble-strewn streets with a sawn-off shotgun and a backpack’s worth of survival supplies, his only home. But he was still young enough to believe in hope, for he had been raised on myths of that legendary country called Justice where peace and law still reigned, though he’d never left this wasteland, once a city called Dazka.

He sat down to cook the dog and saw a billboard jutting out of a collapsed building. It showed a beautiful sunset over a perfect Caribbean beach where happy people frolicked together. He squinted at the board, letting his eyes roll across the scribbled text. After he guessed that he’d looked at it long enough, Kombat Carl had only made out two words: “good” and “life.” He wanted to live that good life, so when he had eaten, he got up and set off for where he’d heard there was a temple. Maybe someone there could help him learn.

Once the temple had red walls to seclude its courtyard, but air raids had leveled them many years ago. Kombat Carl scanned the open space around the temple. No one home, so he tossed his backpack. Nothing shot it. He sprinted to cower next to one corner that still stood upright. Inside, he found nothing but a few craters and twisted heaps of metal; the cobbles were nearly lost in weeds. But he saw a stone archway still standing at the back of the site. His armor’s sonar test detected a staircase burrowing into a larger vault below the structure. He stole toward it, but froze. A tent hid against the wall, carefully camouflaged like a spider. He didn’t breath again until another scan told him there were no heat signatures, just a half-empty jar of pickles. Kombat Carl ignored the pickles and crept underground.

Peaceful was the vault with its timeless night punctuated by occasional beams of sunlight drifting through imperceptible gaps in the ceiling. The suit’s night vision showed bookshelves drawn in hues of green and blue, columns too. He picked up a book, flicked on his flashlight, but put it back. He picked up a book, flicked on his flashlight, but put it back. He picked up another one, and flipped it upside down. He put that book down too. He could feel that this was a place of wisdom. In the center of the library, a book lay upon an altar. It was small with ragged edges on its red leather jacket. The pages were flecked with gold. Kombat Carl figured if something could tell him about the good life, it would be this book. He put it in his bag, then left.

Kombat Carl scurried into the daylight and wondered why the pickle smell was so strong now. He made it four steps before something slammed into his shoulder plate. He heard a loud bang. Instantly on the ground. Three heat signatures. He’d been a fool not to check. One closing fast, and two more holding back. He rolled and snapped a shot at the guy. For a second he saw a shocked, unarmored teen, but then buckshot shredded the raider. He kept rolling.

Another shot, this one in his gun arm. The shotgun clattered on the cobbles. Kombat Carl sprinted for cover. Safe for a moment, he realized he was dead without the weapon. Another sonar test told him there was some kind of small vehicle parked near the tent. It was just one hard sprint away, and the raiders were taking cover, but he’d probably be shot dead before he got to it, and yet, they’d just arrived, so it was possible they’d left it running. Just one hard sprint separated him and life. Not the good life, but life at least. Kombat Carl took the book and put it under his chest plate. Then he ran.

The third shot missed, and the fourth tore through his bag, but the fifth caught Kombat Carl in the side of his helmet as he swung himself onto a hoverbike gently levitating near the wall. He hit the gas and blasted out of the ruins into the open wastes, the bike so fast that by the time they could get another shot off, he was gone. He ran the bike until its little bit of fuel gurgled out, then ditched it, and at last he crawled into a shadowy place to nurse his wounds. He’d survived, but he wanted more. He wished he could live.

Adrenaline gone, his arm was useless. It was mangled from the shoulder down. His head was spinning too, maybe a concussion. That was fine since he hadn’t been doing much thinking anyway, except maybe pursuing the good life required some thinking. He needed to find a medic’s shop.

Once people went to hospitals, but once people formed governments and didn’t shoot each other in the streets for food and ammunition. Back then, nearly all the medics had been specialists working in the hospitals, and practical medicine had treated every disease but cancer. Now medics were the repairs shops of the human body, generalists who could diagnose tuberculosis and amputate gangrenous arms. Actually, most medics seemed a little gung-ho on amputation, offering to replace the limb with a cybernetic prosthetic, but machines built by and for poor folks could never hold up against flesh and blood. Maybe the rich had that kind of quality, but they lived in a different world from Kombat Carl.

He searched four other spots before he found “Ma’s Doc-in-a-Box,” a medic’s shop that still had a living medic in residence. Her shop was a storefront between the ruins of a bank with three Corinthian columns remaining and the brick and metal corpse of another anonymous building. Effectively, the shop was the tallest thing in this neighborhood. The others were overgrown with weeds. He opened the door.

A woman (he assumed she was Ma) was listening to a radio, crunching on a pickle. She slumped on her stool the way an old bear does when it lies down for its last hibernation. One of her legs had been replaced with a pneumatic prosthetic. The shop had a clean tile floor, white tiles, and a collection of less clean implements lying on a tray next to a leather recliner where the rips let some of the cushioning escape. It had several dark stains.

“Shut it about Toni,” Ma told the radio, “Just bring him home tonight. I got a customer.”

She switched off the radio and turned to face Kombat Carl.

“Yeah?”

“I need some, Doc,” he said.

“What you want? And what you got?” she asked.

He traded her a few dollars. She agreed to extract the bullet from his shoulder and clean up the wound. He didn’t have enough to cover the concussion. Ma had him take off his armor and lie down on the recliner. She picked up his book.

“What this?” she asked, thumbing through it.

“Dunno. Just found it,” he said.

“Huh. This is an old prayer book. The sages had it. You just found it?” she asked, putting the book down and picking up a needle.

“It looked special, but I can’t read. Looking for someone to help me read it,” he said.

“Bite this,” she said.

She gave him a rag, then a shot of painkillers.

“Eh kid, where you from?” Ma asked as she washed her scalpel.

Scalpel in her hand, Ma’s pickle stench seemed overwhelming. Did she look like the guy he’d shot? He tired to remember the face, but it was gone so quickly. Maybe it was true, but he was in the chair and out of his armor, and there’s no replacing what a medic does.

“Um, pretty far west. Different city.”

“I’m old. Tell me the name,” she said.

She twirled the blade in her left hand and picked up the tweezers in her right.

“Justice,” he said.

“Bite down.”

She sliced open his bicep; he screamed into the gag.

“Er.. yeah. You’re right. Never heard of it. What’re you doing in Dazka?” she said.

He wept and screamed, but in between he managed to say, “I’m looking for the good life.”

Ma laughed and dug, deaf to his howling and somehow managing to cut under the painkiller’s numbing effects. Then it was done and he just felt a dull throbbing. Once his vision cleared, Ma took out his gag. She showed him the slug.

“My son’s girlfriend shoots these. It’s a good gun. Whoever was shooting you won’t as good as her,” Ma said.

She cleaned the wound.

“Let me tell you about that good life. Dazka used to be the city of sages. We had the Grand Temple and the Sage of Dazka–she lived there–and she was one of the wisest people in the world, or so they say. Then the climate changed and the government went down and you know the rest. No one acted right anymore, and then the killing and the cleansing and the ‘resource protection program,’ that ended in us living here like beasts. There is no good life,” she said.

She started stitching.

“My son became a raider so he could feed me and a few other folks,” she said as she tied off the last knot, “But I got word he’s dead.”

“How’d he die?” Kombat Carl asked.

“Shotgun to the face. I need some help burying him tonight, so his girlfriend and her brother are coming. You gonna be around?” she asked.

“Oh, um,” Kombat Carl said, “No. I need to move on. I’m searching for that sage.”

“Not with that arm you’re not. Stay here. The sage lives out on the top of the skyscraper across the river anyway, so it’s not hard to find her,” Ma said.

“Can’t,” he said, “Just gotta go right now.” He tried to get up to leave, but Ma pushed him down.

“Son, there’s no good life out there. It’s a constant war of all against all, and you have two choices: attack or peace. If we were all peaceful, we could live a good life and be good people, but if one person rests and another attacks, well we know what happens. You best always attack if you have the time, but then you can’t be a good person,” she said.

“I guess you’re right,” Kombat Carl said, “But I wanna try to live, not just survive.”

“The sage went out so she could retreat from this evil world. That’s not living a good life. That’s just hiding from the truth. You’re young and dumb, so I’m gonna help you,” she said.

Ma jabbed him with another, heavier dose of tranquilizer, and Kombat Carl drifted off into a panicked sleep.

In his dream he was standing on sand, but when he picked it up and let the grains dribble through his fingers, they fell away clean, no blood and oil making them sticky. The air was fresh too, and tinged with salt. There were people all around him, but none of them were shouting or hitting him. No guns, no knives, no teargas. No pickles either. But it was silent on the beach; Kombat Carl had never heard music. He felt wrong, his scarred body next to theirs, so flawless, bathing in sunlight as the warm ball descended to the sea. He smelled pickles. Why do I smell pickles, he thought. Then he realized and woke up.

Darkness, but he was thinking, so he wasn’t dead. Was that line of light near the floor the doorsill? The smell of pickles was much stronger now. His hands found something long and metal, but his right arm couldn’t move. And he had no power armor. He got up and stood by the door.

Footsteps outside the door, shadowy feet in the sill light. A pistol cocked. The door opened slightly, but toward him, so the assassin never noticed him standing in wait. A candle in the left hand and a handgun in the right, the man approached the bed, but Kombat Carl bashed his head, and the candle and the gun and the man collapsed to the mattress. He grabbed the gun and left the room, and the fire from the candle spread across the man and the bed.

He was at the top of a flight of stairs, but as he descended, a woman stuck her face around the corner to say something. He shot her before she could even scream. Unless there were new raiders, that should be all. He stepped over the woman’s corpse into the room with the tattered leather recliner. Her blood flowed out like a red sea on the white tiles. The room smelled so strongly of pickles that he wondered if that’s what death smelled like now. Something moved behind him, so he shot it on instinct. He turned to see Ma leaning against the recliner, clutching her stomach. His own shotgun lay next to her.

“Sorry Ma,” he said.

“Kill or be killed, kid.” She looked at the shotgun. “You’re lucky.”

“I didn’t mean to kill nobody. I just, I just have to. It’s like you said, ‘I have to attack or I’ll die.’ I didn’t go out looking to kill your son, but he rushed me, just like you did, and the girl, and the guy who tried to shoot me,” he said.

Tears streamed down his cheeks, but Ma laughed. She reached up to the table, grabbed the pickle jar, and offered one, but as he bent to take it, a crack, heat, and suddenly the burning ceiling collapsed around them. Kombat Carl jumped back, but Ma screamed. Dazed, he couldn’t help but watch her burn, but the ceiling creaked again. He scrambled for the door clutching the pistol.

“Kid,” Ma said from the fire, “Take the book!”

It was lying next to the pickle jar. He hesitated.

“Take the book.”

He dropped the gun and took the book.

Kombat Carl ran out the door just as the second floor collapsed into the first and the sign went up in flames. He crept into the night, feeling his way along dark and poisonous streets. There was no one left to notice the young man or hear him sob. He crossed an iridescent river and found his way up the titanic heap of rubble and refuse that once scraped the sky. He crawled on warped steel beams and cut his hands and feet on blades of glass until he was on the peak. As he watched sun rise through clouds of smog to color the world in gold and red, he saw a figure huddled on the peak, looking out over the crater that once was a city.

“Hey!” Kombat Carl yelled.

But the sage was dead. Someone had stabbed her.