The Monster War

by Alan Gratz

  “Kaboom,” Clyde said.

  BWAAAAT!

  The massive red beam from Buster’s raycannon slammed into the magnetic man, blasting away tons of metal scrap and knocking him back. Clyde stepped over the Wichita aether tanks and punched Villarreal hard with Buster’s other hand across what passed for the criminal’s face. KRANK! More scrap metal went flying. Buster didn’t stick to him because he was made of non-magnetic brass.

  Villarreal hit him back—KERCHANK—and Buster spun. BWAAAAT! Two of the aether tanks blasted Buster with their twelve-inch raycannons, and he fell backward into Villarreal.

  “Hey!” Clyde called through his speaking trumpet. “I’m on your side, dang it!”

  Villarreal pushed Buster away, and the magnetic man reabsorbed all the metal scrap the steam man’s raycannon had shot away, growing back to his original size.

  “Okay,” Clyde told Buster. “This might be a little harder than I thought.”

  * * *

  Fergus flew through the hazy sky, wishing he’d thought to bring a bandana to cover his nose and mouth. The air right above the city was filthy, and he flew higher looking for clean sky.

  How could the people of Broken Arrow live like this, right in the middle of a poisonous cloud? The money had to be good—very good. But why build all the oil rigs in one place, right in the center of town? Why not spread them out across the plains?

  The oil had to all be in one place. But why? Why here and nowhere else? Fergus studied the oil rigs as he flew toward the bank Naalnish had robbed when it hit him. He stopped and hovered, flying higher to get an even better view.

  The oil rigs were all arranged in a recognizable shape.

  “Clyde—Clyde, can you hear me?” Fergus said.

  “Yeah. Little busy right now.”

  “Clyde, the oil rigs here—they’re laid out in the shape of a giant lizard.”

  “What?”

  “Hundreds of them, all filling the outline of a big lizard. And I mean big. I think it’s a Mangleborn.”

  “Why would they drill for oil on top of a Mangleborn?” Clyde asked.

  “Because maybe that’s the only place the oil comes from,” Fergus said.

  “Are you saying—are you saying the heating oil everybody uses is, what, Mangleborn blood?”

  “Yeah,” said Fergus. “I think they’re drilling down and sucking it out.”

  “That’s all kinds of messed up, and that’s a fact,” said Clyde.

  “Yeah,” said Fergus. “But Clyde, what it means is, if these guys have the lektric dynamo, they could raise that thing and destroy the entire city.”

  “Roger that,” said Clyde. “Gotta go. I’ve got a—” Clyde grunted. “I’ve got a scrap heap to send back to the junkyard.”

  Another alarm went off, and Fergus swooped down as fast as he could. Naalnish the locust man hopped out of the First Nations Bank of Wichita with another bag of money over his shoulder.

  Fergus landed in the street ahead of him as people fled.

  “Hold it, bug man,” Fergus said. “I don’t think that money belongs to you.”

  Naalnish studied Fergus with his big, compound eyes. He had the head, torso, and rear legs of a grasshopper, but his upper limbs were human arms. The hairy mandibles that sprouted from the bottom of his face moved in and out, and his antennae quivered.

  “It does now,” Naalnish said. His voice was scratchy like corn husks.

  Fergus thrust his hands out, firing bolts of lektricity at the human locust—Ksssssssh!—but faster than lightning he jumped. He leaped over Fergus’s head, ripping off his gyrocopter along the way.

  “Hey! It took me a long time to build that!” Fergus said. He thrust his hands out again. Ksssssssh! Naalnish leaped away down an alley.

  “I don’t need a gyrocopter to catch you!” Fergus said. He chased the big grasshopper down the alley, his rebuilt knee brace actually making him faster, not slower. Maybe I should build one for my good knee too, Fergus thought.

  Naalnish pounced on Fergus from the shadows, whacking him with the bag of money and knocking him to the ground. Fergus lektrified his whole body, and the locust-man leaped off him with an angry kss-kss-kss-kss!

  “Yeah! How’d you like that, huh?” Fergus called. He got up and came after Naalnish. The alley was a dead end. The locust-man was trapped. “Come here, you big ugly beastie,” Fergus said. “You can’t jump high enough to get out of this one. Time to—”

  Naalnish spread his thin, membranous wings and flew away.

  “Aw, crivens,” said Fergus.

  He’d forgotten that grasshoppers could fly.

  * * *

  Clyde wrenched on the controls to push Buster up off the ground, and the steam man climbed back to his feet. They were taking a pounding from Hector Villarreal, and that was a fact. Clyde watched as the magnetic man picked up one of the Wichita’s aether tanks, ripped off its raycannon, and added the wrecked hulk to its chest.

  “We gotta do something different to break this guy up,” Clyde told Buster, “or he’s gonna get so big we can’t break him up.”

  Buster growled deep down in his boiler.

  BWAAAAT. BWAAAAT. BWAAAAT. The Wichita aether tanks kept the magnetic man busy while Clyde converted Buster’s raycannon back into a hand. KRANK! KRANK! KRANK! Clyde pounded on Hector Villarreal, knocking off as much scrap metal as he could, then grabbed the magnetic man’s arm, twisted it over Buster’s head, and hurled Villarreal over his shoulder. The walking junkyard flew through the air and landed with an earth-shaking crash in the middle of the oil fields, scattering scrap metal for acres.

  “Ha! Take that!” Clyde crowed.

  Buster had just started to pick his way through the houses and shops that surrounded the oil field when Hector Villarreal began to pull himself together. First the scrap metal that had fallen off him slid back, attracted by the magnetic man at the core. Then the busted oil rigs twisted and turned and rolled into him. He grew bigger, and bigger, yanking the rest of the steel rigs from the ground. Black oil spurted up all around him as he stood, three times as big as he had been before.

  “Oh slag,” Clyde said.

  He was just rolling up his sleeves for what he thought would be his and Buster’s last fight when the steam man bent his head to the street. Fergus was down there waving madly at them, and Buster opened his mouth to let him inside.

  “Looks like you did better with yours than I did with mine,” Clyde said as Fergus climbed onto the bridge.

  “Nae, I didn’t,” Fergus said. “I can’t catch the blinking bug. He’s still out there robbing banks and scaring people.”

  “Well, I just made Hector Villarreal three times bigger,” Clyde said. “I think we’re beat.”

  “Not yet,” Fergus said. “I’ve got an idea. I’ll help you with yours if you help me with mine.”

  “No offense, Fergus, but how are you gonna help take down that thing? It’s gotta be thirty stories tall! I can barely reach past his knees!”

  “Well, I’m not going to be hitting him. That’s your job,” Fergus climbed down to the balloon deck. “Keep him busy for me while I get inside him!”

  “Inside him?” Clyde called.

  The giant scrap heap raised a foot to step on the steam man, and Buster leaped out of the way. The foot came down on an empty house, smashing it to pieces and picking up even more metal.

  “We gotta get this guy outside of town,” Clyde said. “Let’s go, Buster! Play chase!”

  Buster sprinted happily down the street, turning back every few blocks to whistle at Hector Villarreal and make sure he was still chasing them. Clyde’s control panel told him that Fergus had launched one of the aeronaut suits, and soon he saw Fergus floating away, hanging from one of the one-man red, white, and blue balloons. Fergus steered around behind the big magnetic man and disappeared.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Clyde told him through the shell in his ear.

  “Me too,” said Fergus.

 
* * *

  The big magnetic man wasn’t paying any attention to Fergus. And why would he? Fergus was a fly compared to Hector Villarreal now. The farther this guy walked, the bigger he got. If they didn’t stop him, he’d get as tall as Cahokia in the Clouds. Taller.

  Fergus aimed his one-man balloon for the tangle of scrap metal on Hector Villarreal’s back and grabbed hold of something thin and shiny.

  “I say, hello?” the shiny thing said.

  “Gah!” said Fergus. He let go and almost floated away before scrambling to grab hold of an old rusted bed frame. “Who’s there?”

  “Mr. Toggle, sir,” said a musical voice. A shiny face swiveled to look at him through an old radiator coil. It was a titanium Mark IV Machine Man, sucked up by the magnetic man like so much junk!

  “How’d you get in there?” Fergus asked.

  “I was working as a porter for Apache Airlines in Albuquerque, when suddenly I was swept up by what I at first took to be a tornado,” the machine man said.

  “Yeah, it’s not a tornado,” Fergus said.

  “Have you come to rescue me, sir?” Mr. Toggle asked.

  “You and everybody else in this thing’s path.” Fergus hooked himself to the magnetic man with an anchor from the aeronaut equipment belt he wore and rubbed his hands together. “Let’s see if this works.”

  The black lines on Fergus’s skin rearranged themselves, and he took hold of the radiator coil. Fergus hummed with lektricity, and the radiator coil disengaged from Hector Villarreal with a clink.

  “Yes!” Fergus cried. He slid the radiator coil up his arm, hummed again, and disengaged the bed frame. It tumbled down the scrap heap on Villarreal’s back and fell all the way to the ground, where it stayed.

  “What are you doing, sir?” Mr. Toggle asked.

  “Demagnetizing the magnetic man, one piece at a time,” Fergus said. Another piece of metal fell away. “By generating a reverse, decreasing lektromagnetic field, I can strip each piece of its magnetic properties!”

  “I’m sure I don’t understand,” said Mr. Toggle.

  “That’s all right,” Fergus said. “Just trust me—it works.”

  But slowly, he told himself. He couldn’t take Villarreal apart one piece at a time. There was only one thing for it: he was going to have to demagnetize the magnetic man himself.

  Fergus demagnetized another piece and chucked it away, digging straight for the heart of the scrap heap and disappearing inside.

  “I’ll just wait here then, shall I, sir?” Mr. Toggle asked.

  * * *

  Buster turned and whistled, baiting the giant magnetic man. It batted at him with an arm as big as the Emartha Machine Man Building in Standing Peachtree, just missing Buster’s brass head.

  “Don’t stop, you big bucket of bolts!” Clyde said, torquing the controls. “He’s almost got us!”

  Buster swung back, whistle-barking, and Hector Villarreal’s big metal paw caught them. KRANK! Buster went spinning head over heels into the plains outside of town. At least they’d got the magnetic man outside of town before he’d caught them. Clyde was desperately trying to right the steam man when the magnetic man picked them up off the ground like a child.

  This is it, Clyde thought. Brass wasn’t magnetic, so Hector Villarreal couldn’t add him to his increasing mass. But that’s not what the magnetic serial killer had in mind for him.

  Villarreal reared back to throw the squirming Buster across the city when a tiny red toy wagon came loose from his chest and clattered twenty stories down to the ground. Villarreal’s giant scrap heap face looked down at it in confusion, and then every piece of metal on him let go and fell at the same time like an avalanche.

  KerrrrrrrrWHOOM!

  Buster crashed to the ground with a jarring crunch and was quickly buried by a mountain of junk.

  “Clyde! Clyde, you okay?” Fergus called.

  Clyde felt like he’d gone ten rounds with the magnetic man himself, but he was okay. He hung upside down from the pilot’s chair, held in by his seat belt.

  “Yeah. Give me a minute,” he told Fergus.

  Clyde tried the controls, and found that Buster was strong enough to lift the scrap heap piled on top of them. Buster pushed his head up through the pile of metal and shook himself from head to foot like he was shedding seeds and burrs from a tromp in the woods.

  Fergus hung in the air on his balloon, holding the limp body of Hector Villarreal in his arms. Villarreal still wore his black-and-white-striped prison uniform.

  “All right,” said Fergus. “A deal’s a deal. I helped you with yours, now you help me with mine.”

  * * *

  Fergus chased Naalnish into another alley.

  “I think we’ve been here before,” the locust man told him, his hairy mandibles flexing.

  “Aye, but I’ve got you this time,” Fergus told him. Lektricity crackled from his fingertips.

  Naalnish shook his head. “What’s different this time?”

  Kshoom. Kshoom. Kshoom. Buster the ten-story-tall steam man leaned down over the alley.

  “This time, I brought a friend,” Fergus told the thief.

  Naalnish’s compound eyes grew wider. He spread his wings and leaped into the air, but Buster was faster. The steam man with the soul of a dog sprang into the air and caught the grasshopper in his teeth. Chomp! Buster landed and shook the locust man like a rag bone, growling deep down in his boiler.

  “Good dog!” Clyde said. “Good boy, Buster. Now leave it.”

  Buster dropped Naalnish’s sagging body on the cobblestones and whistled happily.

  “That’s two,” Clyde told Fergus.

  Fergus called Hachi on the shell in his ear as he climbed back inside Buster.

  “What?” Hachi said. “I’m busy.”

  “So lovely to hear from you too,” Fergus said. “We’re done. The dynamo’s not here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Aye. If she sent it here, it would have been in all the junk on the big magnetic man. It wasn’t.”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” Hachi said. “Moffett has it. She’s always had it.”

  “You beat yours then?” Fergus asked.

  “No. We just got here. But I’m sure Moffett has it. Why would she give something like that to one of her minions when she could use it herself? But we’ll take care of our two just to be sure.”

  “Yeah,” Fergus said. “Okay. We’ll head back, then.”

  “After you run that errand,” Hachi told him.

  “Nae. I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t care if you like it or not. Just do it. We’re going to need it, and you know it. Hachi out.”

  Fergus growled as he climbed the last ladder to the bridge. Slag Hachi and her slagging sneaky plans.

  “Time to regroup?” Clyde asked.

  Fergus huffed. This was a bad idea, and he knew it.

  “Nae,” he told Clyde. “Hachi wants us to pick something up first.”

  “Pick something up? What? Where?” Clyde asked.

  Fergus sighed. “I need you to take me to Dodge City.”

  18

  Standing Peachtree was burning.

  Buildings roasted like coals in a locomotive’s firebox. Red-orange flames rippled from the rooftops, their thick smoke blacker than the night sky. A blazing foundry crumpled in on itself. A boiler exploded, hurling red-hot steel. Everywhere, on every street, people swarmed away from the scorching city on steamhorses and airships and by foot.

  Standing Peachtree was burning, and Fergus was arguing ethics.

  “I don’t care if you like it or not,” Hachi told Fergus. “Just do it. We’re going to need it, and you know it. Hachi out.”

  Hachi threw a pile of maps to the floor of the little airship. Slag Fergus. He’d better do it. This wasn’t the time to get all sentimental. The world was ending one way or another, and she wanted it to be her way.

  “There,” Hachi told Martine. She pointed to a burning building on the north e
nd of town.

  Martine tilted her head. “The source of the conflagration is clearly midtown,” she said. She didn’t have to point. William Tecumseh Sherman, the burning man, stood out like a bright lilac star in the center of town.

  “We’ll go there next. But first there. That white building with the columns.”

  Martine steered her little airship, The Jellyfish, away from Sherman and toward the burning building on the north end of town. Away from the water, she had changed into tall black boots and a weather-beaten old black coat. Tall, gray, tattooed Martine was a steamhorse of a different metal, that was for sure. She didn’t understand emotions, or sarcasm, or humor, and rarely spoke. And when she did speak, it was usually to say something so blinking strange that it stopped you in your tracks. But none of that mattered to Hachi. What mattered was that when Hachi told her they had to go north to Buckhead before taking on Sherman, she didn’t ask why. She just did it. She and Hachi were going to get along just fine.

  Martine piloted The Jellyfish over a lacrosse field next to the square white building. Smoke clouded the airship’s windows, and flames licked out of the square white building’s windows and doors.

  Lady Josephine’s Academy for Spirited Girls was on fire.

  “I need to see if anybody’s still left inside,” Hachi said.

  Again, Martine didn’t ask questions. Instead she steered The Jellyfish directly over the building, set the autopilot to hold station, and took control of the strange tendrils that hung from the underside of the airship. Ptoom! One of them rammed straight down into the roof like a grappling hook, burying itself in the wood and tiles. Another of the tendrils glowed with aether and carved a slow circle in the roof around the grappling hook. The round roof piece separated with a tug on the airship, but The Jellyfish righted itself and rose, lifting away the circular section of ceiling.

  “Brass,” said Hachi.

  Martine handed Hachi a harness, helped her get strapped in, and clipped the harness to a winch in the ceiling. Martine stepped away and the floor irised open, leaving Hachi swinging in space over the hole in the burning building. Heat and smoke assaulted them.