The Last Warriors
A short story
Julia crouched behind the building’s rubble. She gripped her pulse rifle tightly, and her finger tightened on the trigger, a hair’s weight away from blasting the android into oblivion.
She steadied her body with a deep breath and opened her mind to a sunny beach she had once visited, syncing her heart with the ocean waves.
The only sounds were the hiss and pop of dying embers among the burned-out tanks and fallen buildings.
She checked her rifle’s power. There was enough for two shots, and then it was game over. She needed to hit the android in its one vulnerable spot, three-quarters up the neck. Anywhere else and she might as well be throwing Jell-O cubes.
Julia tapped the side of her night-vision goggles: power at eighty-five percent. If she missed, Julia would at least see the android coming. She hated being snuck up on.
The android lumbered toward Julia. It was neither fast nor stealthy, but it didn’t need to be. Its plutonium-powered, recrystallized titanium hands could crush her skull as easily as she could break open an egg against a skillet.
Julia counted to three and stepped from behind the fallen bricks. She squeezed the trigger the rest of the way, letting loose a blue-green pulse, a projectile of pure energy carrying a million volts and heated to 5,000 degrees Celsius, close to the temperature at the sun's surface. Her eyes tracked the plasma charge in slow motion to the android, where it impacted its forehead.
She missed.
One shot remained. The heads-up display in Julia’s goggles estimated that the android would reach her in twelve seconds. Time to run again, but she couldn’t run forever. Glowing red eyes, eight feet tall, a supersonic tail that could slice a human in half, the android was relentless. It never stopped; it never slept.
Like her, it was the last of its kind. The war was down to two.
“If you’re the only person left, with one shot remaining, it will be time to make the final stand,” Billy had said moments before he died. Those weren’t the most romantic words her husband had uttered, but they were honest. “Destroy the reactor, kill its power source.” Androids are powered wirelessly by a single power plant.
“That will also destroy Earth’s ozone layer.” She squeezed Billy’s hand. “But I will, I promise.”
“It may take millennia, but the ozone layer will return and so will life one day.”
Julia snaked through the city of the dead, leaping over fractured mounds of concrete and steel, as the android barreled through the same skeletal rubble. She sighted the reactor in her rifle’s scope and pulled the trigger. The reactor exploded.
The android stopped.
Julia’s eyes faded to black. The blast ripped off the skin on her arm, exposing a network of dimming circuits, wires, and tubes. Surprise painted her face.
Two frozen monuments to a war now ended stood facing each other.
If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like my story The Lost Explorer.
That WAS a surprise.
The first Santa 🎅?