Gertie Milk and the Great Keeper Rescue

by Simon Van Booy

  “Yes,” Kolt said, then shouted down into the room, “Don’t forget to blow the candles out, George, and try and run a broom through the place from time to time, eh?”

  They heard a faint squeak as the stone door closed behind them.

  “We should come back and visit,” Gertie said, cheerful since the mouse was certain Robot Rabbit Boy had escaped the tapir stampede.

  “We’re many miles from the cottage, Gertie. It would be a whole day’s excursion back here, unless I find more of those Golden Helper bicycles.”

  “I’m fine with that,” Gertie said, thinking she might fly over in the Spitfire and drop a block of cheese through the sliding hatch. “How long has the Lodge been empty?”

  “Well, apart from mice and robot hands, it’s been eighty-eight years since there were feet going up and down these steps regularly.”

  “And was it tapirs that ruined the village?”

  “No, it was the weather—with nobody living in the houses, water rotted the wood roofs and they fell down.”

  Light was creeping back into the world. It had been a long night.

  In the distance, Gertie could see the hairy, cream-colored tapirs chewing on thick prairie grass. One tapir was close. It turned its giant head. White mist unfurled from its black nostrils. The head was big and slow. The curious eyes reminded Gertie of the Chinese water buffalo Robot Rabbit Boy had ridden through the jungle in ancient China.

  “For some reason, they’ve grown hairy coats since coming to Skuldark, which I don’t quite understand,” Kolt said. “I’ll have to ask Charles Darwin, if we ever meet again on a mission to Victorian England.”

  Gertie stared at the enormous animal, which looked like a cross between a hairy pig and an anteater.

  “C’mon,” Kolt whispered. “We’d better keep going.”

  With the door closed, the entrance to the Gate Keepers’ Lodge turned back into a giant rock. Without going too far, they could see what remained of their Golden Helper bikes. The frames were broken and twisted, with bits of plastic spread across a wide area.

  But Gertie wasn’t worried about the bikes. Even though he hadn’t been smushed by hairy tapir feet, Robot Rabbit Boy was still lost, and it was their fault for being too engrossed in the film.

  As if sensing her despair, Kolt spoke. “If he made it to the Ruined Village, there would have been places to hide, places that protect Keepers from harm. The village is a sanctuary for our kind, Gertie, and also where the enchanted trees used to grow.”

  “Isn’t the B.D.B.U. made from enchanted tree paper?”

  “Exactly—from the last tree, which had all the power of the others.”

  They plodded quickly now through the wet grass. The sky was growing lighter. Soon they could make out the glistening, snow-capped Ravens’ Peak.

  “How far to the mountains?” Gertie asked.

  “Six more hours walking.”

  Then Gertie had an idea. “When it gets lighter, maybe I should go back to the cottage and get the Spitfire? I might see more from the air.”

  “Without Golden Helpers, it’ll take us a good day to walk back. We’d best keep searching on foot.”

  After stepping over a short, moss-covered wall that Gertie couldn’t believe was the famous Line of Stones, they stopped to survey the ruins that appeared before them. Gertie sat and rested on a fallen tree trunk. It felt good to not be walking. Her legs ached, and her feet were wet and numb. They had both been awake all night with nothing to eat or drink.

  “There’s no way Robot Rabbit Boy made it through the village toward Ravens’ Peak,” Kolt said, “unless he has four-wheel-drive paws we didn’t know about.”

  “So he’s here somewhere?” Gertie said, feeling a rush of positive energy through her exhausted body.

  “That’s what I’m guessing.”

  The tall grass had now given way to stubby green pasture. Tiny yellow wildflowers and weeds with purple thistles carpeted the ground before them.

  The two Keepers walked on in silence toward the ruined buildings, hoping with all the strength they had left that some force in the universe had spared their little friend from a nasty fate.

  But then they stopped suddenly.

  In the distance was a ball of shimmering golden light hovering several feet above the ground.

  “I hope that’s not what I think it is!” Kolt cried fearfully. “Robot Rabbit Boy’s doomed soul.”

  “It can’t be!” Gertie said, trying to get the words out as quickly as she could. “It’s exactly what we saw from the Spitfire, the bright light on the ground!”

  “It really is bright, you weren’t joking.”

  “Do you think it’s dangerous?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before on Skuldark.”

  They crept toward the eerie glow with slow, fearful steps.

  “It could be a Loser trap, Gertie.”

  “But what if Robot Rabbit Boy needs our help?”

  “Let’s hope he had the good sense to steer clear.”

  Part

  2

  10

  Outlaws

  A HOT WIND BLEW through a small North American town nestled snugly in a mountain valley.

  Shard Pinch, a wiry man with a hard face and heavy black eyebrows, moved with deliberate slowness down Main Street. He had on a black wool frock coat, brown buckskin pants, and black riding boots.

  For years, Morrisville had bustled with travelers, carpenters, cooks, tailors, saddle makers, coopers, and gentlewoman gamblers.

  The busy Main Street shops, built from both wood and bricks, once sold everything from felt hats to hot buttered rolls to playing cards decorated with mythical creatures.

  When Shard Pinch took over the town, the people of Morrisville had two choices: either leave with what they could pack on their horses—or stay and live under the rule of the new sheriff, self-elected judge, and mayor, Shard Pinch. He probably knew the law would catch up with him one day, in the form of soldiers sent from the capital, but until that happened, he would enjoy wielding power mercilessly over those townspeople foolhardy enough to remain.

  To be despicable in North America in the early 1800s was not terribly hard. Large parts of the country had already been stolen from the native inhabitants, who would never recover their lands or their numbers. There were laws, but not everybody had the same freedoms or rights—such as the men, women, and children bought and sold as slaves.

  The only business left in Morrisville that Pinch wasn’t interested in stealing from was the funeral business—which wasn’t really business at all, but simply a matter of measuring the client, getting the body inside a wooden box, then dropping it into a hole with a few words of comfort for whoever was listening (which was usually no one, unless circling turkey vultures count).

  The local undertaker was a man named Moses Franks, who lived with his wife, Wendy Franks, and their son, Max, in a log cabin just outside the town.

  Max Franks was no ordinary nine-year-old boy. He read complicated books on mathematics, when he could get hold of them. That’s not to say arithmetic was easy for Max—it was very hard at first and took a lot of practice. Max tended to mess up simple calculations that ruined his chances with the bigger and more interesting problems. But the unique thing about this boy was that he enjoyed doing sums. He played with them the way most people play with puppies. Algebra didn’t make him feel sick like it does for most people, and the major questions of philosophy—such as the meaning of life, or what happens to us after death— occupied his nine-year-old mind for hours and hours.

  But for Shard Pinch, Max was nothing more than the stupid, clumsy son of an undertaker.

  “Faster, boy!” he snapped as Max Franks’s hands smoothed the jet-black polish over the cracked leather riding boots. “Have you forgotten what happens when you’re slow?
”

  Max had not forgotten. There was a scar to prove it.

  “That woke you up, didn’t it, you little fool?” said Pinch. The last time Max polished his shoes, the evil sheriff had thought it might be funny to snap his leg up and catch Max in the chin with the edge of his heel.

  “You got blood all over the boot leather from your stupid face,” Pinch went on. “What an idiot you are.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Pinch.”

  They were in his office at the town jail. The cells were full of valuable things from oil paintings to silk dresses that Pinch had stolen from the local people of Morrisville.

  “It’s Sheriff Pinch! Not Mister, you complete imbecile. Or should it be Lord Pinch? Or President Pinch? Yes, that sounds important. The whole world, I mean town, will have no choice but to worship me even more than they do!” he snarled as the small boy rubbed his boots furiously with a ragged cloth.

  “From now on, I’ll be President Pinch. Remember that!” he roared. “No need for elections, of course. Anyone who doesn’t see how great I am is simply stupid or evil—because I’m always right—even when I’m wrong, which is never, by the way.”

  “I’ve finished, Mister—I mean, President Pinch.”

  “Well then, what are you still doing down there? Go back to your pathetic family and wait for somebody to die!”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  The child got up and ran outside into the bright sunshine.

  * * *

  ‹‹ • • • ››

  WHEN MAX ARRIVED HOME, his mother was cooking red beans in an iron skillet. There were only three rooms in the house, one for the bodies that came in, one with a pot-bellied stove for cooking and eating, and a tiny room at the back just big enough for a boy’s bed. Since Mr. and Mrs. Franks couldn’t afford a bigger home or a normal bed for themselves, they slept in the empty coffins beside their customers.

  “Hungry, Max?” Mrs. Franks said weakly. She was worn out from another sleepless night. Pinch’s drunken gang had been out shooting through people’s windows for fun and beating horses.

  Max sniffed the air. It was the 168th straight day of beans. He never wanted to see another bean for as long as he lived, but he knew he couldn’t blame his parents.

  “Sure, ma,” he said. “You know how much I love beans.”

  “Then go get cleaned up and let your father know to come eat.”

  Max’s mother had once been a schoolteacher. But with no children (except her son) left in the town, she had learned to help her husband make the coffins and dig the holes to put them in.

  Max pumped some water into a basin and washed the black boot polish from his hands.

  “If only the bad parts of people could be washed away,” he said, rubbing his fingers under the shimmering stream.

  When his hands were free of the black polish, Max went into his tiny bedroom to look inside the little wooden box under his bed. The box was actually a small coffin his father had made for someone’s cat, but the old lady who had ordered it died herself before she could pick it up.

  Max kept all the objects that were valuable to him in the box. There was a lucky bullet, a spinning top, a spool of silver thread, a wooden horse toy, a dozen different fish skeletons, and a Cherokee arrowhead found in a dry riverbed. A large group of Cherokee lived above the town in the mountains, but unlike other villages, this one kept to itself, and didn’t trade with the people of Morrisville.

  A recent addition to Max’s small coffin box was a large key he had discovered not long ago in his pocket. It didn’t look like any key he’d ever seen before, and he didn’t remember picking it up. It just appeared in his pocket one day. It had twirls in the handle, and there were four letters engraved on the long barrel: K.O.L.T. He tried to guess what the letters could mean, “Keep Only Little Turtles”? or “Kidnap Old Ladies’ Tongues”?

  Max had never shown it to anyone—even his parents. But sometimes at night he thought he heard it moving under his bed, scratching against the wood of the box, as if trying to get out, as if trying to get closer to him.

  11

  Not All Cupcakes Are Innocent

  DESPITE VISPOTH (THE LOSERS’ evil genius supercomputer) being able to get the Losers to any year in history it pleased (and brew hot chocolate so good anyone who tasted it was instantly addicted), the giant machine found it incredibly tricky (just as the B.D.B.U. did) getting its loyal evildoers anywhere near their intended targets.

  After hours of wandering through swarms of mosquitos in the North American woods, the two Losers who had been out searching finally found Morrisville. They had two very important missions in the town. One involved a little boy named Max Franks, and the other was to save the life of their leader, Cava Calla Thrax, who (according to Vispoth)had only three more days to live.

  On discovering Morrisville, the Losers made detailed notes about where everything was. Then they returned to their ship, Doll Head, to tell their leader they had located the targets, Shard Pinch and the boy.

  The Losers spent the afternoon in Doll Head, triple-checking the tiny machines hidden inside two red velvet cupcakes.

  When the sun began to set and the trees around them darkened, Doll Head’s rotted teeth parted, and three figures stepped into the cool evening air.

  Leading the group was a fifteen-year-old from the twenty-sixth century, who was part girl and part droid. Her name was Mandy Zilch, and she was one of the most destructive children who had ever been born. Anything she touched, she broke—not out of clumsiness, which can be forgiven and even viewed as charming—but out of sheer spite. The droid part of her had been implanted by her crazed parents, who had wanted a son instead of a daughter. They had foolishly thought that installing aggression circuits from a fighting bot into their daughter’s brain might turn her into a feisty boy. But the robot part made Mandy not only want to constantly argue, but destroy anything she encountered that wasn’t a robot. The human part of Mandy Zilch was so enraged by her parents’ selfish actions that it thought the best thing in the world was to destroy all robot life. She was a person of total opposites, united by a single impulse to destroy.

  For the Losers, this North American excursion was so important they had dressed for the occasion. Instead of wearing her usual silver overalls and aluminum helmet with yellow visor, Mandy Zilch had put on a tartan day dress along with a matching tartan bonnet, which covered the robotic part of her head (a steel plate of tiny flashing lights and wires).

  Cava Calla Thrax told Mandy Zilch never to take her bonnet off in the presence of locals—at least until the second red velvet cupcake had been eaten by the local sheriff known as Shard Pinch. The first would be eaten by Thrax himself.

  The second figure to emerge from Doll Head (also dressed for the time in brown pants with a tapered navy blue coat with puffed shoulders) was a muscular giant of a man named Roland Tubb. He had once been an ordinary shoe salesman in 1980s Wales—but somehow lost his mind looking at cheap soles all day. The shoddier and more plastic shoes became, the more insane Tubb got. Then, at the height of his rage over mass-market footwear, he was scooped up by Doll Head on his morning walk to the dismal shopping center in Swansea where he worked.

  Tubb had been a loyal member of the Losers for so long now, he functioned as chief advisor to the third figure, that frail Roman politician Cava Calla Thrax, supreme leader of Losers everywhere.

  They had found Morrisville while on the trail of Max Franks—a very dangerous child who would have to be disposed of in the usual way. In a book on Franks’s location, Roland Tubb read a few sentences about a local rogue sheriff named Shard Pinch who fancied himself a Roman Caesar—even going so far as to wear a toga and to eat lying down. Then, after just over one year as a local official, he disappeared without a trace.

  This dense volume of history was mostly about how families of the Cherokee Nation had been cheated out of their rig
hts by corrupt government officials in Washington, but the chapter about Shard Pinch really caught Tubb’s eye.

  Thrax had agreed it was too much of a coincidence for the boy to be living in the same town as an evil villain who behaved like a bona fide Roman leader. Somehow, the man described as Shard Pinch in the book had to be Thrax in disguise.

  But even the greatest scientist wouldn’t be able to explain how a person could be in two places at once.

  It was a question for super machine Vispoth, who took a full two days to formulate a response. The answer was then incorporated into the most wicked scheme ever devised by an out-of-control hot chocolate machine. If everything went as planned, not only would Cava Calla Thrax be given a new body so that he could continue living—but the Keepers would be destroyed forever. Completely eradicated from existence. The only difficult part of the plan was keeping the latter part secret from Gareth Milk, brother to that traitorous Keeper child—Gertie Milk.

  * * *

  ‹‹ • • • ››

  THREE FIGURES, MANDY ZILCH, Roland Tubb, and their dying leader, moved slowly through the darkness toward the faint lights of Morrisville. Their first target was the self-appointed sheriff himself.

  While the innocent slept (or tried to), Shard Pinch and his gang were wide awake in Tara’s Tavern, drinking whiskey, playing cards, shouting, not cleaning up after themselves, arguing about who got to use the bathroom first, and trying to start fights (but like all bullies—only with people they knew they could beat). This was how they enjoyed themselves. It simply wasn’t a good night without teeth on the floor and the toilet overflowing.

  Suddenly the tavern doors flew open. The piano player looked up from his instrument. Not a single person spoke. All eyes turned to Shard Pinch, who stood quickly, hands on his mother-of-pearl-handled dueling pistols, stolen years ago from an English sea captain.

  His eyes blazed with delight and menace. “Well, look here! Looks like we got some surprise guests!”