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After the apocalypse rains and holocaust nights the Autumn Man walked on. His stride was a broken limp-skip now, his guns twisted by the acid that fell from the sky, but his hands were still capable of doing what they had been built for. When the survivors, winter people, bent and mutilated and angered came at him, he could still snap there spines. No, it was the wound in his plastisteel thigh that worried him–the slowly leaking coolant that poisoned the ground and killed the trees that twisted up from the irradiated soils. Slowly he was dying.

He sought the Autumn engineers, but they were sparse now. They had been first against the walls, bullets punching chakra marks in their foreheads.

And so he limped on, until finally he came to a place where the children stood on straight limbs, where the trees bore edible fruit. And there the Autumn Man found another of his generation, found an engineer, met his Maker.

“Give me life,” he railed. “Heal me.”

And his Maker said not a word.

“Heal me or I will end you,” screamed the Autumn Man, and he stretched his metal fingers around the old man’s neck.

And his Maker did not lift a finger.

And because the death of his Maker would be the death of the knowledge he needed, the Autumn Man had to wait for his Maker to change his mind. But no matter his words the old man would only walk silently by. And as the Autumn Man’s batteries died, the he simply sat by the berry bush his Maker loved and waited. And he watched the straight limbed children, the Spring Generation. And they did not beat him, did not fear him as their parents did, they did not know of the death he brought with him. And he knew they were weak, but there was something else in his thoughts to, that he could not identify.

And then one day one of those girls sat beside him and ate a berry and grew sick. For his leaking leg had poisoned the tree, poisoned the berries. And the Maker tried to heal her, to fix her, but his skills were with metal, not flesh and so she passed. And the Maker wept. And the Autumn Man found, looking at the stiff straight body that he had no love of this moment, that in this place new emotions had twisted their vine limbs around his wires and neurons.

And the Maker looked up from the girls body and finally spoke, saying, “Now I shall heal you. Now, so you no longer poison this land, so that you take your death elsewhere.” But the Autumn Man looked at the dead girl, the first he had killed in many years, and he shook his head. There would be only one more death caused by the Autumn days. And, so with his slow limping stride, he used the last of the power to walk away in silence.

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