Iron Man
A short story
By
Tyler J. Vitt
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Published by
Tyler J. Vitt on Smashwords
“Iron Man”
Copyright 2012 by Tyler J. Vitt
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He awoke with a start. His head throbbed and agony was laced within every inch of his body. With an effort he sat up, but a sharp pain in his head told him to lay back down. He eased back on the ground.
Hollis opened his eyes cautiously and blinked, letting them adjust. Sun shone down on him, but its light was obscured by haze. From this view, all he could see was a sheet of pale yellow covering the sky. He tried sitting up again, this time more slowly. Why was the sky yellow? He had seen the sky a similar creamy hue before but never so sallow and unhealthy. It was strange; unnatural.
As the world around him came into view, however, Hollis’s interest in the sky quickly diminished. The husk of what looked like it had once been a gas station stood a dozen meters from him, its windows shattered, its paint peeling, and its walls crumbling. The gas pumps were all toppled, and the roof that stretched from the building to cover them was filled with holes and looked as if it could fall apart at any moment; the whole building looked like it could. The asphalt lot around the station was pocked and cracked, its darker hue the only difference between it and the surrounding arid and bare ground. An old pick-up truck that seemed as if it had come from a scrap yard sat near the toppled pumps. Amber dust coated everything. Merging with the asphalt was a dirt road, little more than a line of shallow ruts on the ground, which is where Hollis sat.
He tested his arms and bent his neck slowly. His limbs felt like they had been stretched much too far for far too long, his muscles cramping and aching steadily. A constant throb surged in his head, each pounding of the skull matching the beat of his heart. Ignoring the pain, Hollis carefully lifted himself to his feet.
Standing on the road, Hollis looked down and saw he had been sitting in a groove in the hardened dirt. A man-shaped groove, and the earth in and around it was scorched and hardened. Some of the dirt seemed to have crystallized. He frowned, but the pain in his head wouldn’t let him even begin to wonder about it. The mystery of his burnt, glassy bed in the ground would have to wait.
Hollis swept his gaze over his surroundings. The gas station he examined first, deciding it warranted a closer inspection, then followed the length of the road with his eyes, first one direction, then the other. There was nothing but the horizon, a straight line between the yellow sky and amber ground; a separation between two flat and equally featureless plains.
He sighed. Gas station it was. Hollis made his way towards it, his legs—each one feeling like a hundred pounds—protesting with each step. As he moved, though, his muscles softened and the soreness eased. By the time he came to the old pick-up truck, only a dull ache remained.
It was a red Dodge. Up close, he realized it wasn’t old—at least not by his standards. Patches of rust coated the sides, the tires were dilapidated heaps of rubber, the windows were shattered, and the windshield was a web of cracks. But the style was modern; Hollis guessed it was no more than five or, at most, ten years old. Yet it had fifty years of damage on it.
He ran a hand along the box of the truck as he moved towards the gas station’s front door. As he did, there was a sharp crackling noise and an icy, painful tingling flared on his palm. Hollis pulled it away with a cry and both the sensation and noise stopped immediately. Frowning, he leaned close to the vehicle to see what he had touched. The paint had crumbled and there was a shallow furrow where his hand had been drawn over the metal, but there didn’t appear to be anything harmful he might have grazed; nothing to cause such a peculiar sensation and sound. Must’ve just been the roughness of the rusty surface, he told himself. He flexed his hand and continued to the building.
The interior was like the aftermath of a tornado, one that had come through a hundred or two hundred years ago. Glass and debris littered the floor and counters. Shelves were tilted or toppled, fridges and coolers were smashed, and the front door was missing. An opening in the ceiling and a gaping hole in the rear wall let sickly light in from outside. A musty odour filled the air and the amber dust had crept in to coat everything.