The Monster War

by Alan Gratz

  “Ain’t that somethin’,” he said.

  “If you want, I could show you where we are all the time,” Kitsune said.

  “Gracias, señorita. But no. I’m used to the darkness. Unless you see fireflies. I would very much like to see a firefly.”

  Buster awoke with a start, startling them all.

  “What is it, big guy?” Clyde asked. “You have a nightmare?”

  “How can a steam man have a nightmare?” Hachi asked.

  “The soul of a little dog got blasted into him,” Archie told her.

  Buster hopped to his feet, which in a ten-story-tall steam man was a scary thing. Everybody took a step back. Buster whistled once and looked around.

  “He’s got the scent of something,” Clyde said. “He got this way when he smelled Archie in Houston. What is it, Buster?”

  Buster whistle-barked again, and tore off toward the city.

  “Whoa! Heel! Buster, heel!” Clyde yelled, but the big steam man with the soul of a dog kept chasing whatever it was he was after.

  “I hope he’s not after the monorail,” Kitsune said, remembering their time in Don Francisco.

  Gonzalo put his fingers in his mouth and whistled, and Alamo came galloping up. Gonzalo swung onto the steamhorse’s back and pulled Clyde up with him. “Follow that steam man!” Gonzalo said. “Ándale!”

  “Take The Kraken!” Clyde called back to the rest of them as they rode away. The Kraken’s tentacles were already picking them up and pulling them back inside the submarine, and soon Martine had the submarine gliding up the Mississippi into town.

  Clyde and Gonzalo found Buster bouncing around the outside of a warehouse on the outskirts of town, whistling and wagging his exhaust-pipe tail. Clyde still hadn’t brought him to heel by the time the others caught up to them.

  “Dang it, Buster! What’s got into you?” Clyde called to the steam man. “He’s usually much better behaved than this! Buster, sit. Sit!”

  Buster finally thunked his big brass bottom down on the ground long enough for Clyde, Archie, and Hachi to climb inside. Clyde hurried up to the cockpit, followed by Archie and Hachi.

  “Let’s see what’s got him all fired up,” Clyde said. “Okay, Buster! Get to work!”

  Buster hopped to his feet again, and Archie and Hachi held on to not fall over. Buster sniffed around the warehouse doors, then stood straight and leaned out over the roof of the one-story warehouse, peering inside through the cantilevered windows at the top. He spotted something and whistled happily, sticking one of his big brass hands straight through the glass to grab it. Krissh! His hand came out with a wiggling brass Tik Tok, and brought it up to his face to “lick” it.

  He was an odd-looking Tik Tok, to be sure. He looked more like a human being made out of brass, and wore human clothes: brown leather pants, a white shirt, a long black jacket, and a brown cowboy hat.

  “Okay, okay, Buster,” the Tik Tok said, putting his hands up in surrender. “You got me.” He petted Buster’s head. “Hey, boy.”

  Archie recognized the Emartha Mark III Machine Man right away. “Jesse James!”

  “Jesse James the outlaw?” Hachi asked.

  “We met him back at Dodge City,” Archie told her. “He’s the one who made Mr. Rivets a FreeTok, and helped us pull Sings-In-The-Night from the blue amber where she was frozen.”

  “Blue amber?” Hachi asked.

  “All right, Buster. Put him down already,” Clyde told the steam man. “Buster, leave it!”

  Buster put the Tik Tok outlaw down, and Clyde, Archie, and Hachi went outside to join the other Leaguers.

  “Mr. Rivets,” Jesse James said, greeting his fellow machine man. “Or have you ditched your factory name?”

  “Mr. Rivets I was, and Mr. Rivets I shall ever be,” the Dent family Tik Tok said. “But it is good to see you, Mr. James.”

  Gonzalo pulled Señor X from his holster and aimed him at the outlaw.

  “Whoa, hold on,” Archie told him. “Jesse James is a friend.”

  “Jesse James is wanted in five territories for Tik Tok rustling, train robbery—”

  “Six,” James said proudly. “We hit Sioux territory two weeks ago.”

  “—and murder,” Gonzalo finished. Señor X hummed with aether. “Jesse James, by the authority of the Republic of Texas you are hereby under arrest.”

  Jesse James put up his hands. “Now hold on, lawman. The only meatbags we killed had it coming.”

  “Tell that to their families,” Gonzalo said.

  “Gonzalo, we have bigger problems to take care of,” Clyde told him.

  “Like that monster army that’s headed this way?” Jesse James said.

  “You’ve seen them? You know where they are?” Kitsune asked.

  “I can tell you all about it—including where they’re headed,” Jesse James said. “But only for immunity from your Texas Ranger here.”

  “No deal,” Gonzalo said.

  “Gonzalo—”

  “The law’s the law, Archie,” Gonzalo said. “He’s probably got a warehouse full of stolen Tik Toks in there right now.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Jesse James said. “Want me to show ’em to you?”

  Gonzalo waved Señor X at him, and Jesse James led them inside. The warehouse was full of Tik Toks. There were a few wind-up brass Emartha Machine Man Mark IIs like Mr. Rivets, and a few of the newer platinum, steam-driven Mark IVs like Archie, Fergus, and Hachi had fought in Atlantis Station. But the rest of the Tik Toks were a kind of machine man Archie had never seen before. They were big, industrial Tik Toks, with five thin caterpillar treads like tanks spaced every few feet, and rake-like scoops like pointy combs on their fronts. Their bodies were round brass tubs, and giant gears with interlocking chains stuck out their sides.

  The only heads Archie could see on the things were small and flat, about midway up the front of their bodies, with long, wide eyes and small, thin mouths.

  “Waquini cotton gin Tik Toks,” Fergus said. “Saw one or two of these back on the farm in Carolina.”

  “Slaves,” said a small old black Afrikan woman who joined Jesse James. She wore a black wrap dress and shawl, and covered her short woolly gray hair with a red bandana with white flowers on it. She was joined by another Tik Tok, a Mark IV with his factory nameplate removed, just like Jesse James, marking him as one of James’s FreeTok brethren. The Mark IV had remade his body some the way many of the FreeToks did, this one choosing to refit his face with a platinum guard that hung down from his chin like a metal beard. Like Jesse James, he too wore human clothing—a black suit, white shirt, and black bow tie.

  “They’re not slaves,” Gonzalo said. “They’re property.”

  The Mark IV pointed an oscillating rifle at Gonzalo. “Same thing,” he said.

  “You won’t shoot me,” Gonzalo said. “You’re a Tik Tok. Your programming won’t allow it.”

  “Uh, Gonzalo? That machine man’ll shoot you dead, and that’s a fact,” Clyde told him. “He’s a FreeTok. He’s had all that stuff taken out of his programming. He can lie and cheat and steal and kill.”

  “Just like you,” the FreeTok said.

  “Ladies and gents, may I present my fellow compatriots and partners in crime,” Jesse James said. “Ms. Harriet Tubman, meatbag, and Mr. John Brown, FreeTok. Not his factory name, of course.”

  “Young man, these Tik Toks are slaves,” Tubman said. “They aren’t free to choose their own path in life.”

  “Of course they’re not,” Gonzalo said. “They’re machines. Machines don’t choose anything.”

  “Mr. Picker, a word if you please,” Jesse James said.

  The nearest cotton gin Tik Tok’s head spun around toward them on its round body and clicked into place.

  “Yessir,” Mr. Picker said.

  “I told you, you don’t have to call me sir,” Jesse James told him.

  “Yessir,” Mr. Picker said.

  “You see? He couldn’t call me Jesse if he tried. H
e’s been programmed to talk and act and think a certain way. But even so, this Tik Tok dreams. Don’t you, Mr. Picker?”

  “Yessir.”

  “What do you dream of doing, Mr. Picker?”

  “Playing music, sir.”

  “Playing music?” Fergus asked.

  “Yessir.”

  “Would you care to play for us now, Mr. Picker?”

  “Oh, yessir,” the big mobile cotton gin said.

  Mr. Picker’s machinery clanked and clicked and whirred, and he shuddered like he was about to mow down a row of cotton plants. Then, subtly, surprisingly, the machine’s random clanking and bonking turned into … a symphony. A song emerged from the cacophony and rose above the din, a song Archie recognized: “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” a popular vaudeville tune. It was magical—a machine that was designed to pick cotton playing music with its spiked cylinders and hooked bailers and comb teeth.

  Mr. Picker played the entirety of the song, then shuddered still again. All around him, the other Waquini cotton gin Tik Toks rattled and bonked.

  “What are they doing?” Gonzalo asked.

  “They’re clapping,” John Brown said.

  “Amazing,” said Kitsune.

  “Very colorful,” Martine said. She was staring at the air above the cotton gin, as though she could still see the notes hanging there. Maybe she can, thought Archie.

  The floor shuddered, and the warehouse was filled with a sound like a locomotive coming into a station. Pistons slowed, brakes squealed, and gray-black smoke poured from a hole in the middle of the warehouse’s floor.

  “All aboard!” Harriet Tubman cried, and the Tik Toks began to move.

  “All aboard?” Clyde asked. “All aboard what?”

  “The Underground Railroad,” John Brown said.

  Jesse James smiled. “Stole us some tunneling machines off some Paiute digger pirates last year, and we built ourselves a subterranean network for taking Tik Toks to freedom. Runs from Standing Peachtree clear all the way to Acadia, and as far west as Dodge City.”

  FreeTok porters swarmed up from the hole in the ground, welcoming the newly freed Tik Toks and helping load them onto the Underground Railroad.

  “Hold it!” Gonzalo said. “Nobody’s going anywhere!”

  “Let ’em go, kid,” Señor X said.

  Gonzalo deflated. “What? But … Señor X, the law says they’re property.”

  “The law’s wrong, Gonzalo,” Señor X told him. “Tik Toks may not look like you, but they’re living, thinking beings like you. Six thousand years ago, the Lemurians almost destroyed their own civilization fighting each other over whether robots should be free. The same thing’s going to happen here and now unless people start to think differently. People like you.”

  “But … I don’t make the law, Señor. That’s not my job. I just enforce it.”

  “Seems to me you gotta decide whether you agree with a law before you decide to enforce it,” Señor X said.

  The FreeTok porters went on loading the stolen Tik Toks onto the Underground Railroad, and Gonzalo lowered his raygun.

  “Thank you, Brother Raygun,” Harriet Tubman told Señor X, and she hurried off to help load the train.

  “You’re all right for a meatbag,” Jesse James told Gonzalo. “Just like your friends. Mr. Rivets, care to join us?”

  “Join you, sir?”

  “We can always use another good machine man on the railroad.”

  Mr. Rivets was taken aback. “I’m … I’m flattered, sir. But my place is with Archie.”

  Archie felt pride swell up in him again at Mr. Rivets’s loyalty, even when he had the choice to live a different life.

  Jesse James shook his head. “Well, being free means being free to make the wrong choices too, I suppose.” He grinned. “First our freedom—then the vote.” Jesse James tipped his hat. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’ve got to clear this lot out to make room for tonight.”

  “Why? What’s tonight?” Archie asked.

  “What’s tonight? Just the opening of the Memphis Centennial Exposition!”

  Archie looked around at the other Leaguers, confused.

  “You’ll recall your studies, Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said. “This is the hundred-year anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. The centennial is being celebrated in a number of cities across the country.”

  “Rides, games, entertainment, exhibit halls—and a million people and their Tik Toks,” Jesse James said. “You know I do like an audience.”

  “You intend to rob the Centennial Exposition,” Gonzalo said coldly.

  “That I do, Ranger,” Jesse James said. “If I can beat that monster army to it. It’s headed this way.”

  14

  Buster stepped over the low concrete wall around the Memphis Centennial Exposition onto a wide lawn filled with picnickers. They snatched up their blankets and baskets and food and scrambled out of the way as he churned across the yard toward one of the wide pedestrian pathways.

  “We’ve got to find whoever’s in charge of this thing and tell them to send everybody home,” Clyde said. He sat in the pilot’s seat, carefully steering Buster so he didn’t step on anybody.

  Archie stood to Clyde’s side, and Martine examined maps at the navigator’s station. Hachi was in the drummer’s chair high above Clyde, scanning the fairgrounds through Buster’s big glass window eyes.

  “There,” Hachi said. She pointed at a big statue of Hiawatha, the man who founded the Iroquois Confederacy and laid the foundation for the United Nations. It stood at the center of the exhibition above a wide, round bandstand.

  “Buster, give me magnification,” Clyde said.

  Click-click-click. Magnifying lenses fell into place over Buster’s right eye, and they could see the statue of Hiawatha closer and closer each time. With the final click it was like they were standing right over the bandstand, where Chickasaw men and women were busy setting up chairs and hanging blue bunting everywhere. Pacing around in between them was a gaunt Chickasaw man with dark, bushy hair practicing a speech he was reading from a piece of paper. He wore a black tuxedo with five silver armbands high up on his left sleeve and a red sash over his shoulder. A gray eagle feather stuck up from a red ribbon around his tall black top hat.

  “Guess it’s like Mrs. DeMarcus used to say,” Clyde said. “‘You want to find the most important man in the room, you look for the tallest hat.’”

  The Centennial Exposition was laid out in a spiral shape popular among the Chickasaw. A curling paved road spiraled out from the statue of Hiawatha at the center, passing square, pyramid-roofed Chickasaw buildings, Iroquois-style longhouses, and columned Yankee mansions. Along the outside edges of the spiral stood the three giant step pyramids that dominated the Memphis skyline.

  “It’s a Fibonacci sequence,” Martine said. She traced a spiral in the air with her finger. “Like a fern.”

  “A what?” Hachi asked.

  “The path is a golden spiral created by plotting points according to a mathematical sequence. Each distance is the sum of the previous two distances,” Martine explained. “Someone laid out the Memphis Centennial Exhibition mathematically.”

  Archie and Hachi shrugged their shoulders. They didn’t understand at all. Not that it mattered.

  The spiral path didn’t matter to Clyde either. He stepped right over it, working his way around the exhibit halls, food stalls, and carnival rides as he headed straight for the bandstand at the center. The passengers on a Ferris wheel as tall as Buster stood in their seats and pointed at him as the giant steam man passed, and people all along the paths and in line for the exhibitions stopped and marveled at him.

  And there were so many people. Archie had never seen a million people together in one place before. There were Chickasaw and Cherokee, Muskogee and Seminoles, Pawnee and Shawnee and Illini. There were Yankees too, both black and white, and even a few Mestizos from Texas. Men, women, and children filled the walkways and the lawns, rowed along the
park’s man-made lakes in gondolas, soared above the fair in hot air balloons. There were lines of people waiting to get into the Arts Pavilion and the Horticultural Hall, the Steam Exhibition and the Penny Arcade, the Raycannon Stand and the Clockwork Midway. And each of the United Nations’ ten tribes and territories had exhibit halls of their own, including one for the Yankees, who belonged to every territory, and to none.

  “If Moffett attacks this place before we can get all these people out of here, we’re in a heap of trouble,” Clyde said. “And that’s a fact.”

  Clyde ran Buster right up the bandstand and leaned him over. Everyone stopped working and gawked at him.

  “You have to call off the exhibition and send everybody home!” he told them through Buster’s speaking trumpet, magnifying his voice outside. “They’re all in danger!”

  “What?” the man in the top hat said. “Who are you?”

  “Outside,” Hachi said.

  Clyde lowered Buster’s head so they could climb out the mouth, and Archie called down for the rest of the League to follow them. Mr. Rivets stayed inside, but Gonzalo had his steamhorse lowered down with them. Clyde told Buster to sit when they were all on the bandstand, and the giant steam man thunked down onto the circular lawn, his tailpipe wagging.

  “What in the name of Hiawatha…?” the man in the top hat said.

  “We’re official representatives of the United Nations,” Clyde lied. Archie supposed it was easier to explain than telling them they were a league of superheroes, and Buster did, after all, still have all the markings of a United Nations Steam Man. “Who might you be?”

  The Chickasaw man in the top hat stood straighter. “Winchester Colbert. Chief of the Chickasaw.”

  Clyde shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, Chief,” he said, sliding so easily into the leader role he’d been born for. “I’m real sorry to tell you, but you have to close down the Centennial Exhibition and send everybody home.”

  Colbert was incredulous. “What? Send a million people home? Why should I?”

  “There’s an army marching this way,” Clyde told him.

  “An army? What army? Louisiana? Wichita? Pawnee? Not the Sioux—”