Crawler's Log — Day 1, Run #16

  I never used to write things down.

  Paper burns. People die. Rigs break.

  But Grim handed me this journal last night like it was a loaded mag. Said,

  "If we don't make it, someone should know how the wheels kept turning."

  So here it is.

  Leviathan pulled out of Shardpoint at first glow. Hatches clamped, engine growling low like it was angry about waking up. Route's mapped out across the Endless Flats — straight through storm country.

  She's heavy this run.

  Six tanks of reclaimed water. Fuel drums strapped three deep, Crates of protein wafers stamped a year past safe. One livestock pen containing mostly goats.

  Vault Two's stuffed with settlers. Thirty bodies, give or take. Heading west to New Vire with everything they could strap to a duffel. Most look too soft for the road. Hope they packed light, extra weight burns fuel.

  Ruck says the engine's drinking more than it should. Gauge blames the altitude. I blame the fact that the old girl's been running longer than any of us.

  Already had to crawl under the belly twice this morning. One valve was leaking heat like a split jug. I used resin and three belt straps to stop it screaming. It held.

  For now.

  We don't stop. Not out here. Not even if we break. Its suicide.

  — Patch

  The rumble beneath his boots was steady like a rhythm he knew better than his own heartbeat.

  A young man called Patch clipped his harness to the side rail of the Leviathan's outer spine, swung out, and let the wind take the weight of him. His feet hovered over two stories of thundering steel, smoke, and welded armor panels smeared with the grease of twenty lifetimes.

  The rig was moving fast, faster than it should over terrain this cracked and uncertain but speed kept raiders away, and this world stopped believing in mercy long ago.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Patch adjusted the strap on his left gauntlet and dropped lower, hands trailing across the heat-bloated metal of the midshaft coolant pipe. He found the vibration he was hunting, it was the shudder of a loose bracket. Patch wedged his boot into a rivet crease to hold position.

  Then he heard it.

  A metallic shriek from deep below the undercarriage. Not surface noise. Not armor drag.

  This was internal. It was bad.

  "Crawler to Throttle," Patch spoke into the mic headset he had on, voice calm despite the grinding below him. "We've got friction in the rear drive sheath. If I don't tighten it, we're peeling axle by dusk."

  Ruck's voice spat static in return: "We're climbing grade. You got two minutes Crawler, after that, you're part of the terrain." "And do me a favor, don't die messy," Said Ruck after a beat of silence. "I just repainted the undercarriage."

  Typical Ruck Patch thought.

  Most folks thought a Crawler was just a mechanic. But this job wasn't about tightening bolts in a safe bay. Crawlers fixed the Leviathan while it moved. They would swing off her hide like steel barnacles, tightening burning pipes, rewiring systems before they sparked out. If they stopped, the rig stopped. And if the rig stopped out here, everyone died.

  Patch didn't plan on dying today.

  He drew the magnet torch from his tool rig, swung to the side, and pressed his back flat to the rig's skin as sand whipped around him like knives. He worked fast not because of fear, but because every second the Leviathan ran hot, it aged a year.

  Two bolts locked. One jammed. Torch heat flared. Resin hissed.

  He felt the temperature in his spine, a low burn that meant just under fatal.

  Then it was done.

  He pounded twice on the panel and climbed back up the harness line as the great machine roared forward over bone-white dust and endless ruin.

  Ash gave him a look from her gunnery nest as he passed. "That noise stop on its own?"

  "Nope," Patch said, tugging off his gloves. "I told it to shut up."

  She smirked, one eye still on the horizon, the other on the heat shimmer rising off the Flats.

  "Guess you scared it straight," she said, thumb tapping the side of her scope. "Next time just glare at the drive axle and save us both the noise."

  Patch slung his harness onto its hook, rolling his shoulders. "Next time, you climb out there and charm it yourself."

  Ash snorted. "Please. I don't talk to machines. I shoot at things until they stop being a problem."

  They shared a quiet moment as the Leviathan rumbled beneath them, the hull groaning like it was remembering something painful. Wind cut sideways over the rig's spine, dry and bitter.

  Below the land unrolled, litterd with broken cities half-swallowed by sand, twisted highway bones, and the occasional rusted out wreck with nothing left to scavenge.

  Patch pulled out a rag and started wiping the grease off his fingers and the soot from his face. The wind carried a sharp, electric tang, the scent of a storm.

  "Flick said we've got a storm cell three clicks ahead," Ash said, eyes still on the shimmerline.

  Patch didn't look up. "How bad?" Ash responded. "The red kind."

  A crackle from the hull. A long, groaning shudder from the engine bay. The Leviathan pressed harder into the Flats, picking up speed like it knew what was coming.

  Patch tucked the rag into his belt and stood still for a second, listening to the machine breathe.

  Grim's voice barked over the speaker system : "Lock it down if it ain't bolted or breathing, it better be tied down. We got a red one incoming!"