Battery Man

The colony was freezing tonight. The central heater had been on the fritz for some five months now. It had “coughs”, as the mechanic put it. The heater coughed, and the heat stopped coming. Wires came loose. Nuts and bolts came undone. Things fell out of position.

“The coughs” was a terrible thing for an appliance to develop. Sometimes they went away on their own. Sometimes a special, more advanced mechanic would be brought in to deal with the problem. Sometimes, there was nothing anyone could do about it. The heater had been a strong one; it had lasted for about ten years. It had been acquired new and unused. Too often the things were hand-me-downs: already too beaten and tired to get more than a few winters out of them. No, this one had been fresh. But like all appliances, it didn’t last forever.

The colony had called in several mechanics from other colonies, ones more advanced than the few mundane ones that had taken residence there. They said the heater was getting old. It had spent twelve years in production and ten years as a good, strong appliance, but it had almost run its course. “I’d be inhumane to keep it around for longer than a year,” one mechanic had said jokingly.

The colonists were dispirited. It might take years to find another one as efficient and powerful as this one had been, and that was only if the scavengers were lucky. The scavengers had stolen this one in the midst of production. The appliance could have done with a few more years of testing and modifying, but they figured twelve years was long enough for it to give a decent run. So they’d stolen it from the Krawl. They’d stolen it right from the manufacturing plant a local tribe of Krawl had set up twenty or so miles eastward. And you didn’t often steal from the Krawl without some sort of backlash. They’d killed many of the scavengers, ripped them to shreds, and they they’d moved out of the area, never to be seen again.

The Krawl had mastered the art of preparing appliances well before humans had. Strange, some thought, considering the species had been at the bottom of their evolutionary scale not three centuries ago. The Apocalypse had happened, and these mutant creatures were the residue left behind, that hell had forgotten when it had sunk back into the ground. Three centuries ago they were nothing more than mindless, man-eating, ape-like creatures, with spidery movements, spindly limbs and short fur as black as midnight. Humans didn’t know what to call them. Were they demons? Were they monsters? They were crawling things, that much they did know. At first humans called them Crawlies.

And then the unspeakable had happened. Inbreeding. Cross-species reproduction. An unholy union between the two created an entirely new sort of creature. It wasn’t mindless. It wasn’t ape-like. Now they were man-like. Sentient. Capable of higher thought. They formed colonies like the humans had, banding together and reproducing amongst themselves as soon as there were enough, and the threat of incest was no longer present. They called themselves the Krawl. And they were smarter.

Perhaps it was the millennia of ancient, infernal knowledge their Crawly ancestors had come with, combined with the intelligence and cunning of humans. They were smarter. They were stronger. They were faster. They appeared as large, muscular humans with short, black hair covering their bodies. Their eyes were red as the flames of hell. They had claws and fangs.

They saw themselves as sophisticated. When humanity’s genetic strain attempted to match and surpass their level, they learned to harness it and suppress it. They learned to live in luxury while humans scraped together a meager existence in the ruined, razed world. The Krawl learned how to process appliances. They learned how to use appliances. They made telephones, generators, heaters, air conditioners, pumps, and, on extremely rare occasions, televisions. The humans could only look on in horror. That horror slowly grew into wonder, and then turned into desire. Mechanics arose: people who dedicated themselves to figuring out the inner mechanisms of appliances. Humans began to steal the appliances, trying to regain what they once had.

Because, in this dead, decimated world, there was no such thing as electricity. There was no running water in a home. There were no readily available heating and cooling systems. Humans scraped by like cavemen: scavenging for a chance at a better life.

So, naturally, when the heater began to cough, the scavengers were called together.