[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 35 (the finale!)

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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17
Part 18
Part 19
Part 20
Part 21
Part 22
Part 23
Part 24
Part 25
Part 26
Part 27
Part 28
Part 29
Part 30
Part 31
Part 32
Part 33
Part 34}

It must’ve been in the final stages of preparation to get underway when we jacked it. Fully loaded with fuel and everything. The battery meter, however, sagged about a quarter of the way down. I knew those old lithiums never read correctly except under load, so I gave the throttle a bump to see how much charge was really in there.

The needle sank to about half of the way down, then slowly began creeping its way back toward 75%. While we had the chance and were busy loading it anyway, I ran the onboard diesel generator to bring the batteries back up to full charge.

The intake snorkel began rattling, the reverberations of the purring combustion engine traveling up through it. A blast of black smoke belched from the exhaust tube at the other end of the sub, followed by grey smoke, becoming less and less offensive after that.

“For shame! You’ve been letting that new gal of yours do all the heavy lifting!” Dad proclaimed. I hastily advised him that she and I weren’t involved in any romantic capacity. “Although, we did shower together…”

The chieftess, passing back into earshot as she effortlessly schlepped a full pallet of shrink wrapped MREs along on one shoulder, curtly added “It was a really hot day. There’s only one shower, and we have no nudity related taboos.”

Dad went silent for a moment, hand over his mouth. Then guffawed, setting his own stack of MREs down just to slap his knee. “Crazy shit happens in the jungle, right? Haha, and here I’ve been holed up in hiding, scarfing down imitation eggs while you were going native.”

The suit concealed my embarrassment as I elbowed past him, making a show of loading the last of the MREs into the sub by myself. Why? Why did I tell him that? Why do I ever say anything. “Right you two, that’s the last of it. Climb in and I’ll shove off.” My stomach growled.

I began climbing into the sub when Dad rebuked me. “Now hang on, don’t go ignoring your body like that. You won’t be much good at the controls if you’re hungry. Don’t just eat an MRE neither. Trust me, those things ain’t been kind to what little I got in the way of a digestive tract. Get one last solid meal in you before we’re stuck in there eating dehydrated lasagna and chicken fried steak for two weeks”

The chieftess backed him up. “A feast before a long sea voyage is good luck, and honors the spirit of the sea. It would be foolish not to curry his favor when so much could still go wrong on your way home.”

Dad chimed in: “There you go! Besides, what do I always say you need more of?” Organic meals in my belly, I mumbled in a rehearsed monotone. The chieftess nodded approvingly, then hurried off into the jungle to gather ingredients as Dad and I made a fire on the beach.

I don’t know how she managed it in the fifteen minutes she was out of my sight, but the chieftess returned with two mangos, a cluster of plantains, a guava, and a crab easily half my size with a bright red shell covered in prickly little spikes.

“Looks scary, but wonderful taste.” I assumed she meant the crab, as if she was instead referring to the plantains, it would be a bold faced lie. In my opinion, anyways. She set everything down next to the fire and went to work fashioning it into something appetizing.

She swatted my hand away when I tried to dig in. “Say something first”, she scolded. I asked why she didn’t do it on our behalf. “Because I don’t know what you believe in.” Fair enough. By that point, neither did I.

I climbed out of the mangled wreckage of a VTOL not too long ago with a very...metal view of the world. Countless separate little creatures, all of them existing in their own little worlds. Hustling, struggling to survive, pursuing their own unconnected ends.

But they are connected. Not in some supernatural way, but in a web of causal relationships. Each affecting many others in the course of a day, through every interaction, however small. Every conversation representing the partial equalization of a personality differential between those involved.

So I said that. More or less, I never was good at speeches. The chieftess seemed well satisfied though. “As it ever was. Gentleness is the final wisdom, and separation the most persistent and cruel illusion of them all. May the spirit of the sea bless you with safe passage, and may Asherah smile at you from every green thing which still grows in the world of metal.”

Was all that really necessary, I wondered. Does every meal have to be sacred? Then again, I don’t see why not. It was just alien to me, still acclimated to the customs of a world where the concept of sacredness died long ago.

There’s room for at least that much sacredness in my life, isn’t there? Surely at least that much. To give weight to things, a gravity by which I might mark the passage of events and get a sense of my goings. Doesn’t particularly matter what I attach it to, I suppose, so long as it’s present in my life.

Even were I to go live in a cave, carve figures out of stone and worship them, it would still be more meaningful than selling little plastic replicas of them in a gift shop. The metal world has little tolerance for the ineffable, unless it can be monetized.

“Wait. Wait just a-...hang on there!” I interjected, picking up from her wording that she didn’t mean to come with us. “If this is about how to fit all three of us in the sub, Dad’s fullmetal and can fold himself away into damn near three cubic feet.”

Dad animatedly insisted that in fact, he’d once flown for free from Honolulu to Las Vegas inside of a buddy’s carry-on. “I saved half a fedcoin that way! But lost it all at the tables a day later.” The chieftess smiled, a rare sight since the village.

“I have to seek out the survivors. We have a safe place down in the caves that everybody knows how to reach without being tailed. They took us by surprise that day, but a few still escaped, and will be waiting for me there. Even if it were only one, I-”

I fell all over myself assuring her that we understood, and were grateful she’d accompanied us this far. It still felt like a shame not to see it through to the end with her after everything we’d been through up to that point...but I knew well enough that the metal world has nothing she wants.

“There’s an encrypted satcom unit in the sailboat I used to stay in touch with my boy on the way out here” Dad pointed out. “It runs on a solar panel fixed to the mast, and should still work once the powers that be finish unfucking the satellite situation. Nothing to stop you from checking in now and again, just to let us know how you’re doing.”

I couldn’t even look at her right then. Didn’t know what to say, all congested with feelings I could find no way to express that would satisfy me. She saved me the trouble, pulling me by the wrists into a brusque embrace.

“Don’t you dare forget anything that she taught you” the chieftess whispered, eyes glistening in the setting sun. As if I would ever be able to forget any of this. I reflexively leaned in a little, lost in the moment. She furrowed her brow.

“You’re not gonna try to kiss me or something, are you?” I scoffed. “Wouldn’t dream of it. We both just had crab.” She laughed heartily and squeezed me once more, this time so tightly I feared some of my soft parts would rupture.

That’s when a barely audible droning wafted into our ears. Carried in by the warm coastal breeze, there was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was. “Has he spotted the dock yet?” He couldn’t have. We’d be dodging bullets if he did.

There well and truly was no more time for goodbyes. The last I saw of the chieftess, she was dashing off into the thick of the jungle, as though merging back into the same wilderness that she was only ever the human expression of.

The droning grew louder as I piled into the sub after Dad, shimmying down through the narrow opening before pulling the hatch shut. A few good spins of the wheel tightened it, and with a few flipped switches and key presses, the sub resumed its preset course...to Florida.

Dad took notice over my shoulder as I studied the glowing display. “I hear Florida is lovely this time of year.” I grimaced, folding away the controls until they next required my attention. “You heard wrong.”

Trusting our lives to remnant tech as the sub scooted along, only pitch black visible through the dome was a touch dicey. Neither Dad nor I slept a wink of that first night at sea. When at last there was a glimmer of blue visible outside from the rising sun casting its rays down through the surface, I uttered a prayer of thanks to the sea.

One thing I somehow forgot to factor in, back when I was loading all these MREs, is how smells accumulate in a confined space. Not just the samey, stomach turning smell of congealed fats and msg, but how they smell coming out as well.

It quickly got so bad that we surfaced prematurely, just to air out the interior. Dad took more convincing than I would’ve, still wary that the surviving enforcer could’ve followed us all this way. But the sky, upon opening the hatch, was once again as beautifully empty as I could ask for.

While we were topside, I ran the generator. The racket made it hard to have any sort of conversation until I closed the hatch, Dad and I sunning ourselves on the sub’s surface deck. “I’ve never come out this far before. Who all do we need to look out for?”

He took a minute to cotton to my meaning. “Oh, well. We’re traveling from South America to the mainland US in a stolen narcosub jam packed full of milsurp rations. So...Navy, Coast Guard...other narco subs...everybody, pretty much.”

Somehow, I dreaded more the prospect of explaining to the authorities why we appeared to be smuggling MREs than how it would go if we’d left the drugs onboard. A drug run? Sure we’d do hard time, but our presumed motives would be understandable from their perspective. A dude and his old man in a sub full of dried eggs, lasagna and peanut butter sandwiches? Less so.

An incoming gas storm drove us back down into the sub, the irony not lost on either of us. After sealing the hatch and submerging to a depth of 250 feet, I resumed course. Reclining against the hull, I reflected on the bizarre series of events which put me here.

Some of them lucrative. Others disastrous. But then, it’s not an adventure if nothing goes wrong. Dad asked what I was so preoccupied with. How could I answer that concisely? “All of it, I guess. The big come down. Hard to believe it’s all over now, after I learned so much. I’ve been through some fucked up shit before, but nothing that left me so...transformed.”

Dad remarked that it said alot, coming from a guy who’s body hopped twice in the past decade. I think he knew what I meant. He’s just as bad at articulating complicated emotions as I am. The tree doesn’t grow far from the apple.

After a minute or so of thinking, he actually did come up with something that fit the occasion. Dad cleared his throat. “No man steps in the same river twice. For it is no longer the same river, or the same man.” I smiled, inwardly trying it on for size. “Yeah, alright. I’ll take it.”

That wasn’t all I took, though. Safely nestled in a concealed pouch within my armor, there gently jostled a sack full of seeds that I lifted off the chieftess during our final embrace. No doubt she’d be hopping mad when she found out, having made big plans for those seeds...but I felt certain mine were bigger.

These little seeds don’t look like much, not the way they are now. But if planted in places where the conditions are right for them to flourish, they will put down roots in the world of metal. Roots from which a new, softer world will grow.

Still, I somewhat dreaded her first transmission. It had to wait until we surfaced so the radio signal could reach us, airing out the sub interior once again as the generator recharged the batteries down below.

To my surprise, there was nothing about the seeds in it. After selecting the notification and opening the message, it read simply “I am ok. Found 12 survivors in the caves, guided them safely home. Flying metal thing did not follow. Are you ok?”

I confirmed that we’d been underway for a day and a half without any sign of pursuit. Then added that I couldn’t stop thinking about everything Asherah taught me during my time in her care. I swore I’d carry those teachings with me back to a society in dire need of them.

It took a good long while before I got a reply. Maybe something to do with the unreliable connection at sea, or maybe she was just taking her sweet time to think it over. When it finally did come in, it read “They will hate you for the same reason that they hated me; because you tell them the truth.”

Then came an attachment. Without the benefit of a satellite bridge, downloading a color photograph was agonizingly slow. Worth every hour, in the end. It depicted countless bright eyes and big smiles. The happy faces of the villagers.

Nearly a hundred of them! Alive somehow, and in perfect health...though something was amiss. Their skin was a deep, rich green and their hair looked as though it was grass. Behind them, more could be seen busily digging at various spots in the soil.

“Was struck by an idea when I returned to the village” the caption read. “Found the womb still intact. Guess what else I put into it?”

---

^{The End.}