Scale

Copyright© 2002-2003 Jay Chafin

Dedicated to, in alphabetical order:
Ayumi, for giving me a place to put this thing
Becca, for being the first to say it didn’t suck
Carrot-Sensei, for wanting to draw a cactus
The "Circle", for always making room for me
Kitty, for accepting the 1337 cameo
Kristi, who without her unwavering support I would have been unable continue with this.
Laura, who kept me writing
Lindsey, for gratuitous roll commentary
Mark: 1337 4r7z0r
Meg: JAAAAAAAAAAAYAYYAYAYYAY
Twelve: ...River?
Um... dedications to be added here later
And all my fans whom I haven't met yet

I, the author, may be reached for comment at and may be Imed on AOL and AIM as Chibibalder. I love hearing comments, so say hi or leave me a note!

Chapter One:
Turn Around

Primary

"Look," she added, "you can see it from here."

The girl turned sideways in her chair to face Dolan, her hair falling past her face and brushing across her shoulders. "It’s terrible, isn’t it?" She stared out the window into the blazing sun, across the sand and under the empty sky to the edge. "It isn’t even on the horizon any more... it must be a few miles closer than that."

"It’s only moving a few feet per day. Calm down, Ri, we’ll get out of here yet. We’ll head for the center."

Ri turned back to look at him, the anger in her green eyes unbefitting the peaceful color. "Why bother?" she snapped. "It’ll take the next town too! Moving’s a waste of time! ...face it... "

"Hey, at least we‘ll get a few more years out of it. No reason not to do that." Dolan’s voice was boyish, with constant enthusiasm unbefitting most residents of this dead-end world. He laid a pale hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently. She turned her head down angrily, unwilling to look at him. "Come on. It won’t be the last time. I’ve been planning to get out of here for years, you know that!"

"We’ve been here for years... I won’t leave it all."

Dolan turned around silently upon hearing her words, drawing his hand smoothly from her shoulder and facing the rest of the wooden second story that served as his home. It was spartan by any standards, little more than creaky floorboards and a slanted roof, which had a few holes of its own right. The dust hung thick in the air, refusing to settle. Of course, it had little to settle upon, as the room was furnished minimally- a four-post wooden chair by the window, and a rusted metal bedframe shoved into the only corner even vaguely resembling a right angle. Still, the empty room was filled with blinding sunlight beaming through the lone window and the gaps in the roof. The chair and the girl in it cast the room’s only shadow. Dolan matched the room; he was a plain boy, not particularly tall and quite average in size. His light brown hair, falling down his neck in back but cut short in front, stopped at the top of his forehead. The eyes some distance further down stared intently at the wall, their dark brown irises taking in the far lighter, sun-bleached brown of the walls. Dolan spoke with his back turned.

"You’ll have to. It’ll be dust in weeks, maybe days. We’re leaving. We‘ll move on to another town, where it‘s safe! We‘ll live there! We can-"

"I don’t want to leave."

"You’re.. attached?"

"No. I don’t want to leave because wherever we go it’s the same. We’ll just move again, and again, and again. Waste of time."

"Ri... we have to leave. You know how long I‘ve known I have to get out of here. I knew this day would come. We can see the Edge now- it’s time to go. We can go somewhere else, a city! Somewhere safe, where we won’t have to worry about how many days are left! I can pack up in an hour! Please, come with me!" This was not the first time he had pleaded with Ri to go with him. He didn’t have it in his heart to leave without her, and she was used to hearing his pleas. She ignored him. To her, it seemed that he gained a new desire to pack up and leave every other day at the outside.

"I don’t want to leave, Dolan."

"Then what’ll you do when the Edge comes? How will you-"

"Dolan, turn around."

Dolan turned and stared out the window, over the wastes, and looked head-on into the total inevitability of the end of the world.

Of course, it wasn’t technically the end, but it might as well have been. Beyond what the residents of Vesta called the Edge, there was as good as nothing. In a sharply defined line, the sand dunes suddenly flattened into an endless plane as smooth as glass. The sky beyond was devoid of clouds and presumably of wind. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, it had never experienced any weather changes. The more superstitious maintained that it was devoid of time and physics as well.

Well, that was true of nearly everywhere these days. When the world fell apart, it really did fall apart. Like an old clock finally going bad, time and space experienced abnormalities and sudden jumps that made living in the afterworld a nightmare. As the Edge closed in on the Center, even the heavens seemed false. Stars failed to twinkle, the sun neither rose nor set but only dimmed in its resting-place in the sky, and the map of the night heavens was the same from any vantage point. The celestial world was stuck in the sky as if painted on. Society wound down with the world-clock, and the few pockets of life that remained in the finite desert were pathetic, barely alive by any standards. Ri knew it.

"Look, it’s over. It was over years ago. Or decades. Or whenever it was. Gods, nobody can even tell now."

"You’d just resign to fate like this? Give up?" He shook his head softly.

"Got any better ideas?" She smiled wanly in a rare bout of humor. "Maybe you’d like to go build a dam, or prop it up with some boards? No, Dolan. The end of the world has long passed and we’re the cursed ones who survived."

"Cursed? Strong language. I prefer to think that we‘re-"

"There. Look outside. This is the society that’s left." In the distance a cloud of sand and dust floated skyward and the repeated backfiring of an internal-combustion engine echoed over the rolling dunes. "Probably the bandits again... they’ll steal anything they can, and they can have it for all it‘s worth. There’s nothing left for anyone anymore... but at least hoarding technology is a hobby."

"Come on, show a little life. You sound like you’re dead in there. Stay alive inside... but right now, there‘s work to do." He reached over his shoulder for his holstered shotgun, the mischievous child’s smile on his face revealing clearly that he was little more than a boy. "This is the fun part!"

For once, a smile at least considered crossing her face, but it stopped short. "You have too much fun with death, you know that? It’s dangerous. I don’t care what they take; let them go with it. We‘ll lose it all soon anyway. I don‘t see any cause to keep on..."

The floor suddenly shook with the sound of a thunderclap, which Dolan could easily have identified to be the discharge of a very particular man’s very particular high-caliber rifle. A screaming baritone voice rang out from below, edged with anger but ringing with enthusiasm.

"I’m gonna turn around, and when I do, y’all had better be gone!"

Dolan turned and nearly skipped towards the stairs, brimming with enthusiasm at having something, anything to do. His weapon’s sawed-off barrel gently dragged against the floor. "Well, it looks like Tand’s already out there." He waved a two-finger "V" over his shoulder to Ri with his free hand. "See ya in a few!"

Tertiary

Dolan stopped in the doorframe to eye his comrade in the street. Smoke rose from the massive rifle’s dented barrel as the man Dolan had called Tand reached to his forehead. A surprisingly pristine red silk bandanna supported a tuft of rapidly graying salt-and-pepper hair, became a knot behind his head, and then fell heavily to his waist under the weight of all the rifle cartridges tied onto it. Tand plucked one of these from over his left shoulder and reloaded. He raised his rifle to his eye and squinted, wrinkling a face that was on the verge of wrinkling itself.

The buggy was parked across the sand road, sitting rather incongruously next to an overturned wooden cart. Two of the bandits had left the vehicle and stood with guns raised, while one had elected to stay behind and man the vehicle for a getaway. It had been an unwise decision- he lay lifeless behind what few shards remained of the windshield, his face covered in blood and shattered glass. Tand’s bullet had clearly pierced his shoulder with sufficient force to induce hydrostatic shock, reducing the tissue to hamburger. It had left an equally unclean exit wound and exited the buggy through the rear windshield, painting it with random spiderweb cracks.

"I thought I said y’all had better be gone, ‘less you want a repeat of last week!"

Tand’s words echoed across the empty sand, heard only by the dilapidated wooden buildings lining the street on both sides in a mockery of any random settlement in a classic Western movie. Each was a patchwork, looking as if it had been constructed from patches of many varieties of wood. A few looked slightly more coherent; they were at least made of mostly the same wood.

Unperturbed, the two standing thieves held their handguns level at Tand. One, clearly little more than a boy, blinked unbelievingly at the middle-aged man that had felled their ally in one perfect shot. The other’s emotions were not so clear, courtesy of the heavy metal armor that sheathed his face. His body was similarly covered, with the singular exception of his hands, each of which held an oversized pistol. He was a monster of a man, no physical features clear under the thick metal plates that served as impromptu bulletproofing. Tand spoke to this one.

"Well hello there, Dean. Back for more after runnin’ yer ass away last time? That’s not very good business practice. Didn‘t you owe a fight to the Knight, anyway? I‘m really not sure where he‘d have gone, given as he’s defending justice and all that. Tavern, I s’pose."

Dolan thought this would be an opportune time to join his compatriot, and happily did so. Tand glanced condescendingly at his new partner, then at his weapon.

"You think yer gonna take anyone out with a boomstick like that, boy? Y’won’t hit anything farther’n a meter with that piece of junk. " He patted his rifle barrel happily. "Now, this here’s a real gunfighter’s weapon." As if to prove his point, he took a potshot at the robbers’ vehicle with a roaring thunderclap, the sheer force of his bullet shearing off the driver’s side mirror. It left behind the clean break characteristic of incredible force. "That’s how’s done, boy."

Dolan smirked. The younger bandit gasped. Dean was statuesque.

"Not bad for an old man. But here’s a real weapon!"

Tand cackled and took on a scratchy old man‘s voice. "Don’tcha be calling me that, sonny! I‘m barely past middle age!"

Dolan’s own weapon crashed, twisting the single hand that held it in the wake of the recoil. The pellets scattered wildly, putting tiny dark holes like raindrops into the body of the buggy, and more than a few into the cart next to it. Dean and his lackey stood entirely unscathed, each aiming his own shot. Dolan’s face contorted into frustration as he reached to his pocket for a shell. Tand found this uproariously funny, throwing his head back and howling laughter at Dolan’s weapon, a novice‘s sidearm by his standards.

Tand was barely able to control his laughter as he dropped to the ground on his stomach to avoid the volley of pistol rounds from his adversaries. Dolan chose the route of greater flashiness, hurling himself to his right in a clean shoulder roll as spurts of sand flew upward from the bullet impacts. Tand fired from his prone position, carrying the unarmored robber into the air and causing Dolan to wince from the weapon’s obscenely loud report. The sound of the body hitting the ground paled in comparison to such thunder. Dean, unmoved by the loss of his follower, merely assumed a shooter’s stance and exhaled smoothly from behind his armor plates.

"Even that gun’s no good here, Tand, and you know it. How ‘bout I get what I want now?"

Tand scowled at him, but said nothing. Dolan fumbled, finished loading his shell, and raised his shotgun to open fire on Dean, but was stopped cold by a strikingly dark look from Tand. Dean grunted and looked into the distance over both of their heads, then spoke.

"Aww, a Knight too? Bastard lunatics. Well, you’re wasting your time. I came prepared for this run." He tapped his huge chest with a heavy metal clank as a singsong male voice floated from behind the two defenders.

"Now now," the voice sang, "it’s not a very nice thing to do to hold up townspeople like that."

Dolan rose from his crouch and turned around to see who had spoken.

Quaternary

The beautiful voice rang out again in an unsettlingly happy tone. "Let’s just all pack up and go home and things will be much nicer."

The Knight stood comfortably in the middle of the road, leaning on nothing in particular with his elbow. He smiled captivatingly at nothing as stringy, dirty blond hair fell around his face and stopped short of his shoulders. It would have been beautiful, were it clean, which it was most decidedly not. Clear gray eyes shone from over his smile. He wore no armor. His robes, loosely draped around his tall but sticklike figure, were trimmed in silver-blue and stood impossibly white among the sand and dirt. They fully covered his arms, tied at his waist with a thin silvery rope-belt, and dragged the ground under his feet. His figure would have been thoroughly unimposing but for the two ammo belts hanging crosswise from his shoulders. Two misshapen hunks of metal inserted in them, forming an X on his chest. It was clear what they were intended to do, though they were twisted and resembled guns only slightly, and even then only if one did not look closely. An unadorned silver cross was stuck in his belt, a perfectly flat-faced object with no decorations and no imperfections. His free hand waved idly in circles near one of the guns. He would have been somewhat handsome, one might have said, were it not for the combined influence of being rather dirty and being a raving lunatic.

"Well, go on. Shoo. Go home." He waved dismissively.

Dean snickered a bit. "I’d heard the Foundation Knights were a bunch of lunatics, but I’d never heard that they were suicidal."

"Oh, I might say that there’s a reason you never would have heard that, sae." His odd title of address flowed cleanly from his lips, sahh-hey. It rolled off his tongue like a musical note.

Dean took a shuffling step backwards to the buggy’s rear door, keeping his eyes on the new enemy. He pulled on the handle and the door popped open with a rusty creak. He reached a hand inside, then pulled his body to the left, straining with the great weight. The buggy itself leaned to one side as something massive inside shifted, and soon the barrels of a massive gatling gun thumped heavily to the sandy ground. In response, the buggy’s suspension threw the vehicle’s body up, bouncing it a few times. Dean hefted the weapon into the air, grunting with the strain, while Tand and Dolan tactfully rolled away into cover. The Knight remained still.

"Well, aren’t you the one I owe a fight? Ah, is that why you came?" He bowed fluidly from the waist, sweeping one hand to his stomach and the other outward. "I am Ceal Karel, a lieutenant of the Foundation Knights. That’s C-e-a-l, sounds just like ‘shall.‘ Charmed."

"Dead." Dean muttered, and opened fire.

"Now now, such unreliable weapons as that ill befit noble warriors such as ourselves, sae!" Ceal looked at him disdainfully as sand flew up around the Knight‘s feet. "Certainly you’d like to trade that for something more... decent before we duel." He did not so much as reach for a weapon.

Dean silently maintained his fire, the ammunition belt rattling as it was fed through the ancient machinery. Bullets sprayed wildly, few even near their target, as would be the case with most automatic weapons. Still, Ceal did not so much as twitch in reflex, but only yawned lightly. Dolan and Tand exchanged incredulous looks, each lying prone in the sand on the far sides of the street.

"Well, what a disrespectful opponent you are. I had hoped for a modest challenge." Ceal brushed off the shoulders of his robes with exquisite care. "Very well then. I’ll make it fair and come closer. I have chosen my weapon." He reached a hand to his rope belt and plucked the cross from it, holding it vertically by the longest side, level with Dean‘s eyes. "I don’t suppose you’d like to start back to back, take ten steps and all that?"

"I thought you were technology whores, not religious fanatics." Dean spat.

"Ah, then I suppose we won’t, sae." Ceal began to walk steadily towards Dean’s pounding weapon, whistling a cheerful tune to himself as the bullets went wild around him.

"Any closer and this’ll perforate you!"

"Oh, no it won’t. Don’t be silly." As Ceal grew closer to him, the bullets went progressively wilder, soon spraying the bullets on opposite sides of the street. The Knight did not so much as flinch as he soon stood with his outstretched arm and cross less than a foot from the barrel of the gatling weapon. The bullets fanned out before Ceal as if in deference to his rank, many punching holes in the buildings lining the streets, some digging into the ground, some flying skyward, never to be seen again. Dean let go of his trigger and lowered his weapon to the ground in unadulterated awe.

"Well, I do think you lose this one. Go on, shoo." Ceal flicked his left wrist casually, the right one still holding the cross perfectly still.

"Is that... the power of God that they speak of?" His face flickered with sudden resolve, and Dean raised his weapon again, pressing it directly against Ceal’s chest. "Well... let’s see it save you now!" His finger flickered on the trigger as Ceal’s cross tapped his metal-sheathed forehead.

Dean hit the ground facedown with a thump, instantly rendered lifeless. With his collapse came a roaring wave of force, creating an explosion of sand as the houses lining the street creaked in their foundations. Dolan would swear to the end of his days that the flash of power was so strong you could see it.

Ceal laughed musically as the sand fell around him, although none seemed to fall on his immaculate clothing. "Power of God? Here? No, no, he left long ago." He grasped the cross’s top with his other hand and pulled hard. It came apart with a click and a spark of electricity, the long shaft separating from the body. "But I suppose it needs replacement now." He tapped the edge against his palm and a small blue capsule rolled into his hand. "Here’s the God I think you wanted, sae." He placed it gingerly in the dust next to the nearer part of Dean‘s body. "You can have it now if you like." He fished a hand under his robe, withdrew a similar pellet, and dropped it into the shaft. When he pressed the two halves together, a mechanical whirring ensued, then slowly faded. "Quite lucky, I think I was. A second more and one of those fool bullets really would have ruined my outfit. Quite a drain on the old batteries, so to speak." He dropped the cross into his belt and brushed a spot of dust from the brilliant white cloth above it. "Well, I’ll be at the tavern if I’m needed again. Good day, all!" He smiled and waved happily to Dolan and Tand, then turned around and walked down the sandy street, toward the local bar.

Dolan and Tand exchanged stunned looks, Tand mouthed Jesus, and both stood and walked quietly to their respective homes without saying a word.