Free New Title 1 by Andersen Prunty Page B

their bombs. While my survival may have at one time been a secret, my invincibility certainly wasn’t. The smoke continued to clear and I saw Baxter in the bottom of the hole, rising up to his knees. Perhaps he had been invincible much longer than I had and his regenerative powers were greater. I could practically see the skin and bone reforming around him. He hoisted up a rocket launcher and fired it at the robot. The robot exploded into a million sticks and shards and motes of rust, many of them penetrating me. I was now sure of my theory. If he hadn’t ingested the water, he wouldn’t have been able to see the robot.
    I was tired of fighting.
    I hadn’t really wanted to kill Baxter. I just wanted him out of my house. And if I killed him now, what would it matter? Someone would be there to come along and either vaporize me or take me away to some prison camp. And that, I figured, was how this new army was recruited. If you have anything, someone will take it. And they will keep taking until you have absolutely nothing left. They will reduce you to the point where you can’t do anything but fight. And if it’s a choice between fighting or going to a prison then, well, isn’t that fighting for freedom?
    “ Saul Dressing! Drop your weapons!”
    I didn’t have any weapons to drop.
    I didn’t want to surrender but I didn’t really see any other choice. To continue fighting would have been suicide.
    It would take me forever to die and the army would just keep coming with its guns and its bombs. They would level everything. It wouldn’t matter who lived in the houses. It wouldn’t matter that they had never done anything wrong, anything to deserve this. And I would have been the cause. They would kill many to get to me.
    I began to raise my arms and felt something grab them. It was a powerful grip. I was yanked into the darkness. I was being pushed toward a wall. On the wall was written: NOWARE.
    I collapsed through the wall as they opened fire, shells entering my back before the wall closed again. Hopefully the shells obliterated the wall so no one else could come through. But I wouldn’t know because I wasn’t in my neighborhood anymore.

 
    Conclusion
     
    Even though I should have been used to fire, the sunlight scalded my eyes. Gradually adjusting, I took in the panorama. I was in a place that looked very much like Grisnos. A person who looked very much like Bob Weathers stood beside me, clutching my arm.
    “ Bob.”
    “ Saul.”
    “ Why are we back at Grisnos?”
    “ This is not Grisnos. This is Nowhere. They’ll never find us here.”
    “ I’m sure you thought the same thing about Grisnos.”
    “ Grisnos had the water. The special water. You know about the special water. I led you to the special water.”
    I nodded.
    “ Nowhere has nothing.” He waved his arms expansively and smiled, as though desolation was the greatest thing in the world. “But it has everything.” He tapped his temple with a finger. “Right here. Me. You. We make everything. Now we need to think.”
    He bent down and began scrawling on the dirt.
    THEENKING TABEL
    And there was a table. It was a small table, one that looked designed for no purpose other than thinking. He wrote CHARE on either side of the table and there were two chairs. We each sat down. Two men sitting at a table in a vast desert under an endless blue sky.
    We sat and we talked and we planned. When I told Bob my theory about the army sending potential soldiers to Grisnos as recruits, so they would each become invincible, he told me I wasn’t wrong. That was the way it had been. Bob as some sort of mediator. But that wasn’t enough. The army had wanted to own the “special water.” They wanted to know what made the village around them, how the people of Grisnos were able to build things without any raw material. Bob was prepared to sell the water to them even though the money would have been useless to him. He refused to tell them about his own charred body