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Warlock takes its last shambling steps at the very edge of the petroleum fields.
If it was a poor facsimile of the MOTOR GOD before, it is truly woeful now. Its head is long gone, lost in a scrap weeks ago, and what remains of its left leg drags behind it, catching on the rough and uneven ground.
The sorry machine’s long pilgrimage, from the tarred and pockmarked wastes far out east, ends with a stumble and a crash against the ashen earth. The engine doesn’t stop — motor engines burn forever — but Warlock’s body is too broken to move any further.
Oline takes a minute to crawl out of her companion’s metal corpse, a little battered from the fall and the long journey beforehand. She’s carrying light; her respirator, one spare canister of breathable air, two packs of dirty drinking water, one nutrient capsule for the injector on her thigh, and a hood for the black acid rain. No weapon, not for lack of choice. There’s no need for those any more. There’s nothing alive here, not for miles.
The real danger is far more subtle.
Her eyes adjust slowly to the light outside her cockpit. Behind her is pitch black as far as she can see. Before her is the same, but for the columns of fire and smoke that hold up the sable sky. Here is the end of the world.
Oline keeps a wide berth from the fire when she can. It rises from the earth in vast pillars, out of bottomless pools of black oil blood. She navigates between and around them, clambering over mounds of ash and carbon and blackened rock as the rain falls heavy against her back and the acid in the air burns what skin isn’t covered by her hood and respirator. None of it slows her down. There’s much further yet to walk.
As she treks further into the fields she feels something in the back of her head. Not a conscious, needling presence like the uniformed hunter women back home in the wastes, but quite the opposite. She’s grazing something colossal, unaware of her presence, dangerous nonetheless. Same feeling as looking at Warlock’s engine. It is coal, benzenes, smog and death. It is the Dragon, the Balrog, the Devil. It is the MOTOR GOD.
Under its sun-surface heat, reason frays and begins to collapse. If she’s not careful, she could get lost in it, slip into one of the creases in the air and disappear like a mirage. Best not to think about it. Best not to fear it. Better still not to be here at all, but it’s far too late for that.
Oline tells herself it’s fine. Dwelling on it is the danger, and she’s good at not dwelling on it. She came this far with Warlock’s screaming heart ever-present beneath her feet, and she still has her wits about her.
Nothing but her goal on her mind, Oline walks for hours, then hours more. A day passes, perhaps. The sky is too dark under the smog to see the sun. Hunger, exhaustion, and the weight of her air tanks and respirator turn her careful, steady strides into slow, lumbering steps. Her legs aren’t as strong as Warlock’s, and she falls a few times, but she always gets up.
As she approaches the wheel of fire’s hub, a thousand uneasy steps at a time, the gasoline pit fires that are its spokes grow hotter, denser, closer. The compass on the back of her wrist is useless here, but she can still feel which way is forwards, inwards.
The blazing eye above, below, behind her, unaware of her, does not shift or close. Its flames lick at the corners of her mind when she glances at it. Poor discipline. That hunter — what was her name, again? — would be disappointed. She taught Oline how not to think, how not to fear, how to keep her machine’s petroleum engine from eating her alive.
Those little slips are costly. She forgets the taste of food, and the sound of voices.
The smog becomes thicker, blacker, hotter. She forgets the sand, and the sky, and the sun, and the touch of skin.
Her legs shake weakly, and she imagines herself a machine. One foot before the next. Mechanical. Purposeful. Motor engines burn forever. It keeps her moving. She forgets Warlock, and her own name. Tar drips and splutters down the walls of her home.
The hours blur into each other. She can’t count her steps. The petroleum fields seem to stretch out forever. She forgets all the time before she came here, all ideology and reason. It all sinks into crude black oil and burns away.
She keeps walking. She does not forget what she came to do. She has enough discipline to hold on to that, at least.
When she can’t walk any more, she takes her nutrient injection, and then she keeps walking.
The pilot falls to her knees for the final time under the iris of the MOTOR GOD’s lidless eye. It still does not see her. It is elsewhere, dreaming, adrift in the petroleum nightmare that choked the world to death.
She starts to heave suddenly, then vomits motor oil. It fills her respirator, then overflows and drips down her neck, thick and black. She drags herself forwards on her hands and knees.
Not done yet.
Her flesh-and-blood heart is a motor engine. Motor engines burn forever.
Not done yet. Have to kill it.
Oil snakes through her deepest veins. It eats through her, bleeds through her pores and ignites, but it doesn’t stop her.
Motor engines burn forever.
Don’t think. Don’t fear. Motor engines burn forever.