Escape (The Piña Colada Song)

[Proto Man]

He limped.

Warnings said that the joint would give out soon, but he had to push it for all it was worth. Energy levels were at a critical low, but he had to keep moving forward. Yellow had turned into white long ago. White had given way for blue, but despite the change in the background noise, the shadow remained the same.

War shouts cut through the buzzing in his head. The dent in his helmet had collapsed part of his skull, impacting a series of processors that dealt with audiovisual functions. When the ailing joint failed, he would have to drag it, but the gyroscopic balancers were failing with every labored lurch. Bolts of heat sliced at him, but he had stopped feeling the individual sensations miles ago. Temperatures had hit critical levels long ago in the yellow.

Up ahead, the solid gave way into bobbing, wet blue. Was there enough to maintain buoyant force?

No time.

He stumbled and jumped as the left leg joint let out a final sigh as it snapped and went all-red. For a moment, everything was the bluest blue.

Then everything was black.

The red and gray figure was half-buried in sand. Every now and again, a wave would wash over top of it before receding back into the ocean.

Bursts of energy slammed mercilessly against the chunk of aged stone. The small figure crouched behind the fallen obelisk winced as flecks of sandstone whisked over his head.

“Come out and play!”

Proto Man grimaced as he glanced down at his half-smashed hand. Sparks of electricity still skittered across the three crushed digits anytime he tried to make his index finger or thumb move. The damage had rendered the appendage offline, which prevented him from shifting it into a Proto Buster.

His other hand?

The preteen machine scowled at the broken remains of the other limb. He knew that ‘phantom limbs’ was a human thing brought about by some sort of psychological issue relating to lost arms or legs, but he had enough sapience to at least feel a great deal of discomfort at the loss. Anytime he tried to move what was left of his left hand and forearm, his system would provide him with a polite reminder that the area had sustained ‘Severe Avulsion resulting in Primary Systems Failure.’ In robot parlance that was the equivalent of ‘You F**ked Up.’

Another punishing blast hit the toppled sandstone, shuddering the massive slab and threatening to reduce it to a pile of dusty chunks rather than a semi-comfortable wall of cover. In front of him, he could spot what seemed to be a gate. Had he somehow circumvented Carrefore and the Town during his haphazard flight from the interior of the Dunes?

His GPS and scanners had gone offline half a day ago. Even so, his ears worked well enough to tell him that there was still two dozen heavily armed marauders ten yards behind him. If he made a run for it, he’d have to hope he could juke them well enough to avoid being torn to shreds by their weapons.

All he had to do was get into the Nexus. They weren’t after him for a bounty… just to humiliate him and drive him from their domain. If he could just get another fifty yards, he’d be okay…

Two fingers clenched tightly into the wet sand as their peers feebly tried to do the same. The tide has receded for the day, which meant this section of the beach would be bone dry in an hour or so. After that, there’d be a few hours of blistering heat before the sun dropped down below the horizon once again.

The deliberate movement by the seaweed-coated body was the first in a few days. Partially rusted fingers that were more orange than red squeezed through the loose beach. The motion appeared less about finding balance and more about proving that the willpower remained to move the derelict mass.

Nippur was a distant memory, but the shark had smelled the blood.

Proto Man had been one his way back toward the Town with No Name when the Tsartan and a horde of his technologically mutated slaves fell upon him. Many of them simply emerged up out from the sand with ill-intent in their glassy, cyborg eyeballs. The first wave had been easy to dispatch. They didn’t fight back as hard after Proto Man started to chop out knees and smash a few of their jaws with a quick series of closed fists.

As the last of them stumbled back, the preteen machine thought he’d avoid another bizarre little run-in with the troupe.

Unfortunately, two dozen more had been lurking in the periphery. They all came uncloaked just in time to release a hail of bolter fire at the red robot, who managed to block away part of the onslaught with his shield. His lack of a 360 defensive mechanism made it a little hard to deal with the other 350 degrees.

In desperation, the machine threw his shield forward and charge for the opening he had created. He bulldozed through the two masked marauders, smashing the chest of one as he used it for a jumping pad to create more distance between the others, who were fanning out to find new angles of attack.

The red robot tucked his head and sprinted, but he only managed to get ten yards before the ground exploded from underneath him. Thrown thirty feet into the air by the blast, Proto Man landed on his left knee first and felt the joint buckle and crunch inside of his organic exoskeleton. Unable to stick a vertical landing, he crashed down onto his right shoulder. He quickly threw out his left hand to steady himself, but the moment it smacked down onto the sand, he heard the ting of steel on steel and saw the flashing light between his two fingers.

There was flash of light as the mine blew up beneath Proto Man’s extended limb.

From the dried sand, a face lifted itself up from its personal world of blackness.

Through it saw little more than shapes, the visage, which had just enough flesh and muscle left to resemble the corpse of a child caught in a meat grinder, fixated on the green and brown that lay off the beach.

A rusted hand reached out, and with every inch, the exposed servos in its shoulder and elbow whined in outrage.

The broken heap of metal and flesh shifted a little more deliberately as fingers dug into the sand—this time with intent. Dragging itself forward, the tortured mass willed itself from the beach.