“I will tell you when it is safe,” I say, picking up a stubby spear fashioned out of a stake of sharpened rebar. The handle is made of plastic that has been melted onto the shaft and then wrapped in twine and cardboard. It fits the groove of my fingers perfectly.
Others are starting to stir. It won’t be long before the panic spreads. Today, the shanties will burn.
I reach into the cool hollow and touch Chima on his bony shoulder to reassure him. Give him a grin and a wink. Then I prop his bedding loosely over the hole. Smack the supports out from under our makeshift roof and let the warped plastic shield fall against this one good wall, draping itself over my brother’s hiding spot. Going around the side, I climb the wall’s broken tail. I balance on top and squint at the horizon.
Two Helmets advance down the distant hill. They are man-shaped, but made of metal armor. They bound ahead, sometimes half a kilometer at a leap, leaving behind swollen mushrooms of fire with their flame-makers. That which isn’t concrete burns. Wood and plastic and paper turn to ash. As does flesh.
Especially flesh.
Concrete walls are our only oasis. I fought for this half-demolished wall I am perched on. Memory of the fight is in the weal of knotted scar tissue that arcs down my chest. Even now, those slum dwellers who dart past below see my spear and they know better than to make a challenge.
The Helmets’ direction is hard to gauge, but their silhouettes are growing larger.
I drop flat onto my stomach, hugging the wall. More runners are heading this way down the hill. They flee like rabbits, blindly. There are more ways to die than the flame. Breaking a bone or ripping your flesh are invitations to meet death. The wise among us have prepared hiding holes. Our fortresses to defend.
My breath comes in even and slow. My eyes do not blink. Sweat tickles my brow. I wipe it away, and then my breath catches. I have lost sight of the lead Helmet. I crane my neck, and that fat old bastard in the sky beats down on my eyes, blinding me. A flicker of shadow crosses my face, and the earth lurches.
I cling to my wall, spear held tight.
The Helmet has arrived. It stands in the alley, six feet tall and sheathed in iridescent plates of armor. As the Helmet walks, each elaborate metal sheath flexes with its own mind. Its limbs move like an insect, in a series of sudden precise gestures. The Helmet inspects the area with quick jerks of its head. When it turns its gaze on me, I see it does not have a face.
Just the gold sheen of a reflective visor.
I lie still and feel the grit of my wall stinging my flesh. If the machine takes another step closer, I will try and kill it. To attack is a death sentence. I know this. But I have let my brother down once before. And I will never let Chima be hurt again, no matter what.
The Helmet steps into our clearing and lifts its flame-maker.
In one fluid twisting movement, I fall from the wall and use the momentum to sling my arm. The spear flies true, tassel fluttering behind it. It strikes the Helmet in the faceplate and bounces away, leaving a wicked crack snaking across the golden visor. The Helmet does not react.
I have failed to kill it, and now my own life is forfeit.
I circle slowly around, leading the Helmet away from my brother. I see my reflection in the thing’s visor, my face shining and split. The thing leaps and closes the twenty feet between us. It clamps a hand over my forearm. Holds me with the dead final weight of a fallen tree.
Faintly, I think I hear someone screaming. From far away.
With all my strength, I resist looking back at my wall, resist checking on my little brother. If he is not roasted alive, he will likely survive. He is resourceful and doesn’t eat much. After I am dead, those few people who remember the young face that used to grin beneath his eyes will watch out for him.
The Helmet lifts me high and I hang by my savaged wrist, watching my own hazy reflection. Gold-sheathed fingers grab me and I am thrown over the Helmet’s shoulder. An arm lowers and presses me into place. Metal shoulder plates writhe under my belly. The Helmet does not kill me.
Instead, it carries me away.
Just before the Helmet leaps, I catch sight of Chima, watching with angry, tear-filled eyes from behind our wall. I shake my head and he stays hidden.
* * *
—
The sun glares murderously through a barricade of clouds. I can almost picture heaven above the glowing haze. But I know it’s a nightmare of raging light.
I lose consciousness somewhere over the dancing hills. My face blisters with the cold heat rising off the poisoned land. I do not think to struggle. The world is too bright, white on white on white. The Helmet’s skin bites my side with every movement. My strength is gone. I flop like a rag doll.
When I wake, I do not recognize this place. I have never been outside Ukuta. No slum dweller has.
Tall blank buildings loom under low dirty clouds. The Helmet carries me down a narrow street, its walls crowding in. The gray surfaces are sprinkled with rain, gleaming dull and strong in the cloud-diffused sunlight. My mind balks to imagine it. In Ukuta, each of these walls would be worth fighting for. They make my humpbacked wall seem grotesque and sad in comparison.
“Helmet,” I gasp. “Where are you taking me?”
The Helmet does not react in any way. No pause, no glance, no small nod of the head. We continue walking, the Helmet’s armored boots clinking off the empty street. The staccato sound plinks off the walls with the regularity of a metronome. Like a clock ticking down the seconds of my life. Until it stops.
The wall beside us is studded with coffin-sized, rectangular doors.
A bronze carving of a helmet rests in the center of each door. A bronze handle emerges from the mouth-section of the carving. The Helmet reaches out and locks gauntleted fingers to the handle. With a prehistoric groan, the Helmet flexes its armored might and drags a shining metal slab from the wall. It takes a long time to pull it all the way out. Finally, the slab of metal hangs there fully extended, like a tombstone.
The Helmet throws me onto the slab and I am too exhausted to resist.
I count my breaths as the Helmet pushes the grinding slab back into the wall with me on it. Arms by my sides, the ceiling of the tomb nearly scrapes my bare heaving chest. Darkness eats my body, and inch by inch, my face sinks into blackness. My breath echoes in my ears.
Buried alive.
For ten breaths, I lie in the darkness unable to move. My palms are flat against the cold sweating metal, pushing, fingers splayed. I try to crane my neck and a chilly dot of ceiling presses against my forehead. A humming vibration swells around me, inside me.
The ceiling explodes into light. Things I have never seen before streak overhead, numbers and letters and images. My eyelashes pulse with their blue glow. Then an outline of my own body hovers overhead, a mirror reflection. I pant faster, breathing my own carbon dioxide.
The slab beneath me is heating up.
Overhead, the stark blue outline of my body is starting to turn red around the edges. I spread my fingers and scream out in pain as my thumb is burned. Quickly, I realize that I’ve got to match my body to the outline. The red is pain, and it is closing in. Hunching my whole body, I shuffle to match the silhouette. I whimper once, when the heel of my foot strays into fire.
The tomb whines mechanically, begins to shiver.
I blink away tears of pain and focus on the image. Sweat is pooling in the hollow of my throat. I can feel beads of it tickling my ribs and thighs and calves. But the pain of disobeying is so intense that I have no choice.
The lights above me blink out.
In the darkness, the warm metal around me begins to rise up like dough. The sudden overwhelming heat of it crushes the breath out of my lungs in a silent gasping scream. Before I can take another breath, the metal is over me, burying me, rising up around my neck like crushing water. A finger of liqui
d metal pokes into my belly, piercing my skin. If I could scream or kick or struggle I would. Instead, I lie paralyzed, drowning in this cube of space as my taut, bony body is swallowed by flowing metal.
I try to breathe in and I cannot. I try to move and I cannot. I try to live, but I cannot.
* * *
—
The Helmet is my living tomb.
Cooling metal encases every inch of my body with cascading sheaths that flex and coil like a python. Only the surface of my face does not touch metal. Inside the Helmet, I am free to curl my lips in anguish and scream into the two inches of space between my eyes and the visor.
And scream I do.
The Helmet holds me fast. I cannot move anything. Not a finger. I am trapped inside a human-shaped prison cell. The horror is not that I cannot move. The horror is that the Helmet moves itself, and me with it.
The machine bends its knees and stands up. Struggling, I flex against its movements. I grunt and curse and whimper, throwing every ounce of strength into resisting the will of the machine. But metal is stronger than flesh. The Helmet mechanically forces my limbs into position.
After only thirty seconds I am too tired to resist.
Beaten, I watch through the visor as my body slides off the slab. Walking down the narrow street, I realize I can hear my clinking footsteps on the pavement. A speaker inside the Helmet is transmitting sound from outside.
Another Helmet approaches from the other direction. We do not pause or acknowledge each other in any way. In its visor, I see the gleaming reddish armor that has replaced my skin.
We both turn to enter a squat cement building. Inside, rows of narrow corridors stretch beneath a crushingly low ceiling. Each row is illuminated every few feet by a flickering overhead light. And in each row stand hundreds of identical Helmets, each a precise distance from the other, postures identical. Their faces are only inches from the wall.
In a rush of sickening horror, it dawns on me that every Helmet has a person trapped inside. I wonder how many of them are screaming right now, struggling against unstoppable metal. My Helmet walks me down the row. Only now do I notice subtle differences in the Helmets’ armor, nicks and scars. Faded patches and burned spots. And some of the Helmets are shorter than others.
Those must be the women.
I walk past a shorter Helmet and take an empty space at the wall. I only glimpse at the girl next to me for an instant. I assume she is a girl, anyway. She is very small. Her armor is finer than mine, intricately layered together and burnished orange.
“Doli,” I say to myself. “She is like a doll.”
My voice echoes loudly inside the Helmet. Somehow it is reassuring. A relief to know that, even if I cannot make a fist, at least my voice is my own, however silent it may be to those outside.
My stomach cramps and I groan. Spasms rip through my gut and I want to fall and curl up in a ball. But the Helmet stands firm. Rolling my eyes, I make out an umbilical arm reaching out from the wall. It must be connected to a port on my stomach. Delivering sustenance. Removing waste.
The Helmets are feeding.
I begin to silently cry. The wall before me is flat and empty and huge in my visor. It is made of cold hard cement. A spiderweb of tiny fissures runs through it. Nothing changes. Nothing moves. After a few moments, the wall loses perspective. I feel as though I am looking down at a map. Each crack is a wall back home in Ukuta. I can imagine Chima sleeping safely. Thousands of other villagers around him. He can hear the barking of a far-off dog. The cool night breathes on his skin.
My crying stops.
One by one, the overhead lights snap out. The wall before me drops a shade darker with each snap of the light. Snap, snap, snap. It is the only sound until finally we Helmets stand together in twilight. Utterly alone in our multitudes.
“Chima,” I say it out loud and it feels good. “Good night, brother.”
* * *
—
My own walking wakes me.
Instead of the wall, my visor displays a long tunnel. The passage is the width of a single man, the ceiling but a few inches overhead. The short Helmet, Doli, marches ahead of me. Others are in front of her. I imagine still more are behind me, but I cannot turn to look. Staring hard at Doli, I think I catch a trace of femininity in the way she walks.
And the tunnel disappears. Opens up into a huge empty room. Cement floors lit by a skylight, glowing with smoky sunlight. A thousand Helmets stand in sweeping formation, meticulously spaced. As I march into my own position, I realize that we are all oriented to face one point.
A towering judge’s bench across the room, made of ancient wood. Three wrinkled, scowling faces peek over the top. I recognize the Triumvirate.
In the propaganda posters, these men always seemed identical. But standing before them, I see the First has a sharp nose and birdlike eyes. He hunches forward, his great bald head hanging between narrow shoulders. The Second is ancient. Age spots mottle his brow and his thin shaking fists are visible. The Third is a piggish monster. He licks his moist lips and stares down at us through a wet sneer. His face is nearly lost in the waddle of flesh around his neck.
The man-things speak together, finishing each other’s sentences. A three-headed monster perched at the top of a wooden wall.
“War criminals,” says the First, shrilly.
“Are you not ashamed?” howls the Second.
“Murderers, know that your path leads to death,” mutters the Third, with a shapeless lisp.
Standing at attention, arms by my sides, I can only swivel my eyes to witness the rage-filled faces. They deliver their speech by rote, as they will every morning from now on.
“Your grisly work benefits the Triumvirate. Your wicked deeds further the Cause. Yet we sit apart from your crimes. For you are not innocent,” spits the First.
“Criminals responsible for atrocity,” says the Second.
“Killers, poisoners, usurpers,” mutters the Third.
“You have turned your hand to evil deeds. And you will be punished with death,” says the Second.
“When your term expires, so must you,” adds the Third, staring blindly.
The First continues, intoning the words like a prayer: “The responsibility for what you have done sweeps through your metal skin like a foul wind through the branches of the tree of death. It sinks its barbs into your flesh. And it will be set free by the purifying flame upon your skin.”
“For the wages of sin…,” intones the Third.
“Death,” they say together, solemnly. “Death. Death.”
In my peripheral, I see six Helmets draw their flame-makers and walk forward. The rest of us reorient our faces to follow. The six walking Helmets have chipped armor. Their visors are dimmed and faded with sunlight. Forming into three pairs, they stop at the base of the wall and raise their weapons to each other. No hesitation. Flames spurt out, coating each Helmet in an inferno. The golden metal shells stand firm, each continuing to pull the trigger.
The Helmets burn.
Finally, one falls to its knees. Still, it keeps flaming its partner. Another falls, and another. Mercifully, it ends. The chemical flames gutter and evaporate into nothing. Six charred Helmets lie on the ground, frozen in their last positions, visors stained black with soot.
By some twisted logic, we are being punished for the Helmets’ crimes.
I wonder how long the people inside lived. I wonder if they were even alive when they entered the room. Were they scared in those last moments? Or maybe they were relieved. Some part of me senses that the execution was merciful.
* * *
—
We Helmets. Baby killers. We always come at dawn.
I can only observe, locked in my shell. Through my visor I see there are many slums beyond Ukuta. Each area is isolated by a dead zone of old radiation.
These tracts of land keep the people separated and weak. Ignorant of each other, the slums vote constantly, always reaffirming the control of the Triumvirate.
My Helmet guides me, and the Triumvirate guides the people.
Our raids are conducted in pairs. Little Doli is my permanent companion. Short and squat, she is nonetheless powerful. I have seen the streak of her burnt orange armor arcing high above the nameless, faceless slums. A twinkling morning star, she falls through the sky trailing a jet of cleansing flame.
The days come and go as a waking nightmare. Weeks pass in which I cannot bear to open my eyes. I feel the lurch of my body as it leaps through the dead zones. The disturbing tickle of radiation seeps through the armor. The inevitable sound of Doli, always a few seconds behind me. My faithful echo. I hear the desperate curses of our victims. Their lamentations. Their begging.
And in the end, their silence.
I accumulate sin. Cement crumbles beneath my boots. My gauntleted fingers rend flesh. Flames spew from my weapon and then speak to me in guttural whispers as they eat their fill of innocent flesh.
My lips are the only thing I can control.
“Good morning, Doli,” I say at the feeding station. “Did you sleep well, my dear? Of course you did, how could you not?”
Together, Doli and I stream out of the city, along with a thousand other Helmets. We break into a steady trot and I begin to talk. I know that Doli cannot hear me, but I leave in the pauses and imagine her responses.
“Doli, do you want to hear a story?” I ask.
I suppose.
“Did I ever tell you the one about how Chima claimed our wall?”
Only a hundred times.
“The Ajani wall, as it came to be known, was controlled by a fat brute called Cleaver.”
Why’d they call him Cleaver?
“He was dangerous enough with his weapon to be named after it. No way to get near his wall. But it was the finest, safest wall in all of Ukuta.”
How did little Chima claim it?