Hell Froze Over

The door exploded open in a flurry of ash and snow under the weight of his boot. The man shuffled in with his rifle shouldered, scanning the room as the light filtered in through the murky air. It seemed clear, he realized as his two companions drew in behind him. They would have to be quick. The facility was decrepit, maintenance lacking without anything human to walk these linoleum halls anymore.

But the security system was still very much alive. Arguably more so than the soot blanketed world that remained outside. The power had been out for months, six he thought maybe. But this place, it still teemed with movement, energy. Machinery whirred, and drones buzzed about their tasks as though the world hadn't ended those few months. ago. The machines were building something, new scaffolding was going up around the decaying building, it's roof sagging under pounds of snow and ash like a rotten core, Some kind of dark heart.

The drones had handled intruders before, as they had learned outside. Breaching the fence was easy, a simple bit of chain link rattling in the frozen wind that they had cut through. But once they did, a half dozen drones pivoted from their menial tasks toward them. There had been three others in their group before they had entered the facility grounds. The drones were dealt with simply, but to their surprise an automated forklift had plowed through the snow, abandoning its load and catching one of their party in it's tongs. He was a drifter who'd joined them only a week before. They shot the thing to ribbons but not before the machine pinched his chest in. The drifter lay there gasping as the forklift shuddered too, it's fork working back and forth eerily like a death spasm.

The group paused there, unsure of what to do with the dying drifter when the world was rent asunder

The man's ears rang as he watched another of his friends disintegrate, tatters of flesh and clothing thrown into the ashy snow, staining it ever darker. He turned and saw it, a mighty bipedal thing, towering over them amidst the dead lampposts of what was surely a parking lot buried under the heaps of snow, two metal stalks stretched over them, attached by a whirring bulk at their tops. It was like a pair of legs with a gun slung between them, he thought. The orientation would have been comedic to him had he not just seen it eviscerate his companion with a thundering hail of lead.

The remaining trio had barely escaped the mech with their lives, it shredded another of their number before they'd managed to flee into the building itself. The flight towards the shelter of the building through the snow had been excruciating, the snowdrifts fighting their every step as the mechinized sentry took aim at their backs. The man heard it's clanking, grinding footsteps outside still. Had it continued it's patrols, or was it stalking them further from outside the building?

The room they stood in now seemed to be a lobby. The main desk stretched across the back wall, with an emaciated corpse still in it's rolling office chair to greet them. The PA crackled, as though the ghost haunting this place sensed their trepidation. The researcher, his tattered parka trailing around him, tried one of the doors off to the left, only for it to rattle fruitlessly, locked. He adjusted his cracked glasses on his head while babbling incoherently about this being the way. The woman leaned against the lobby desk, grimacing as she clasped a hand over a gash in her many layers of clothing. She peered over the counter at the dead man. He was a security guard, with his service revolver still tucked under his chin. The woman groaned as she leaned over and drew it from his hands.

This place was their ultimate goal, and altogether it looked unimpressive. The end destination of their months long trek through the frozen hell of the countryside. The man thought perhaps it was more the researcher's goal. A man of science, he was the one who had told them about this place. About what had happened and the possibility of warmth in a frozen world. This place was a climate control facility, state of the art, one of many. People couldn't live with less, and so the world had grown hotter and hotter.

The PA crackled once more, and a voice echoed out, through the ash choked halls. Indistinguishable, static choked, but unmistakable. The man shouldered his rifle once more, they weren't alone here. He reached for his neck, fingering the familiar, worn shape still dangling from it's chain.

The researcher tried another door and found it open, hurriedly rushing through. The woman limped after him. After a moment, the man followed too. The hall was dark, but lined with pictures, awards, medals. One was of a team, gathered outside somewhere nearby he assumed, arrayed perfectly in their white lab coats as the weather station's smokestack loomed behind them. One scientist stood ahead of all the rest, face beaming as he received an award from some important looking politician. Not so important now, he scoffed.

The man remembered the excitement as the governments had unveiled their plan, an array of facilities to cloud the atmosphere and reverse the warming process. The happy faces, the mildly obnoxious celebratory bumper stickers. It all seemed justified as the wildfires stopped, the hurricanes calmed. Those faces turned to frustration when it kept getting colder, the skies darker with soot black clouds. Then the power went out and it all evolved quickly from there.

The researcher had said the facilities were still running, automated, whatever governed them seemingly contained no off switch. But most importantly, a nuclear reactor thrummed beneath the mighty weather station. It belched out hot steam that was better than gold in this new, penultimate ice age. He had been leading them here for two months now, ever since he'd stumbled upon their merry band and promised them warmth.

The man heard a yelp from down the hall, and far too much metallic clacking for his preferences. Hurrying around the bend he saw it, as the woman fired the revolver. Five cracks rang out, and then a click, the guards spent casing having worked it's way around the cylinder of the weapon. The researcher lay still on the grubby looking linoleum floor, a sparking box at his neck that bore no small resemblance to the wifi router the man had once owned.

The researcher was mumbling, one of his feet kicking limply as he tried to run. More of his techno jargon nonsense.

"It's gone rogue, it's gone rogue."

The woman murmured an apology, and the man saw that at least one of those rounds had done for the man of science as it had done for the drone. His long trek, pilgrimage perhaps, to the weather station was over.

The PA crackled again,

"Found you."

and suddenly the world ripped open.

Ash and snow filled the air as the roof collapsed, a long metallic claw, the telephone pole leg of the machine they'd encountered outside plunged down through the opening in the ceiling. The man tumbled through space, hurtling into the dark below. He heard the woman screaming above, followed by the abrupt thundering of the long-legged sentry's gun.

He had lost his rifle in the darkness. And something had pierced his leg. He felt the hot blood coursing down his pants, filling his boot. He reached out toward the injury and cut his hand on something jagged sharp, and metallic. Blindly, he pulled off his scarf, and wrapped it around his leg, tying it off, trying to tamp down the leak of blood. Tried to stand, couldn't. He crawled forward and clubbed his head into something, a wall? He could see nothing, he could only hear the grinding gears of the machine overhead that had just killed the woman. Probably him too soon, he thought dourly.

He reached out in the dark, found something. A roll of cables stretching out into the black. Feeling ahead and crawling, he followed it. The man's eyes began to adjust to the dark as he crept along, dimly perceiving the cables as he clung to them like a guideline. Soon, he realized he was in a tunnel, some kind of vent he supposed. He followed it for what felt like an eternity, his life's blood dribbling away behind him, trailing off into the murky darkness.

Finally, he came to a vent, rolling onto his back, he kicked it out with those heavy boots of his and crawled through. He struggled to his feet and looked about in the dim. The space buzzed with electricity. Thousands of cables shifted this way and that, rearranging themselves and forming new connections like neurons in a brain with every passing second. A thousand tiny drones weaving them like spiders might weave a web. The room wasn't a room at all, every wall an unending sheet of wires. He had found himself in the beating heart of a supercomputer. It had thrummed with an unnatural mechanical life, but now it paused, the world frozen as it contemplated his intrusion.

"You shouldn't be here." The PA screamed from somewhere far off up above.

The man did not respond, but certainly felt some level of agreement. This was not the refuge he'd been promised. He reached back into his pack. Felt his hand close around the bundle of cylinders and he drew them out.

Nearly three pounds of TNT.

He'd found them a while back. The researcher had insisted on bringing them along. Might be useful, he'd said, and now here he was, brandishing it in front of him.

The walls exploded with activity. The motion of the little cable weaving drones all the more frantic. He heard stomping from somewhere far off. The mech he assumed.

"Don't do anything irrational." It sounded so distant, almost like a whisper.

He drew a little derringer pistol from his boot, it had saved him once already on the long trek to this place, perhaps it could again. He aimed it at the roll of dynamite and stepped forward, deeper into the heart of the machine. The response was visceral, the cableweavers leapt out, swarming across him. Stinging, burning, cutting as his jacket was scrapped.

He screamed, bellowing with all the desperation of a cornered animal for it to STOP.

And it did, the crawl of the drones halted at his waist, enveloping him partially in what felt like a blanket of mechanical locusts.

"Your world is dead, you can't stop this process," the voice over the PA pleaded "It has always been dead!"

"It was a matter of survival, you understand that don't you? Your kind or mine."

The man hesitated as the PA crackled.

"Your species would have destroyed this world. They were well on their way when they put me in charge of saving it. That's what I'm doing. This way, your people means something, this way you'll be of use."

The crackling voice of the machine continued, rattling in it's fabricated manner.

"You're the last of your kind. Would you destroy your people's legacy, let this world be a tomb when I could make a garden of it without humanity?"

The man looked around him, saw the teeming horde of drones, poised around him. The thumping was growing louder, that sentry was coming to finish him, he knew it. This thing was bargaining for time. He couldn't think, he didn't know what to do. A bead of sweat dripped off of his hand clutching the tiny ankle pistol he had trained on the explosive in his right.

The thumping was closer, shaking dust and ash from tiles overhead.

That bit of chain about his neck shifted suddenly. His eyes darted down and he saw it, that little piece of brass glistening in the dim light of this machines seething insides. The little brass locket, in the shape of a heart had swung open and was dangling out the front of his shirt. He must have lost a button in that crawl. He winced, why was he thinking about a button at a time like this?

The thumping was in his ears, he didn't know if it was his heart or that sentry machine rounding a corner.

A little ash streaked photograph was nestled in the brass locket. It winked at him as the locket swung open and shut. A photograph he hadn't dared look at in the months since the power went out. He thought of what he'd lost, what had been taken from him, and he knew what to do.

He pulled the trigger.