Gertie Milk and the Great Keeper Rescue

by Simon Van Booy

  Birdy shrugged. “The forest-dome techs seemed a bit off. And there was one who didn’t even look at us, he was too busy wearing some kind of helmet.”

  “A helmet?” Gertie said.

  “Yeah, waving his arms around like he was holding invisible guns.”

  Kolt shot Gertie a look. “Baa! Virtual reality video games, not something you’d expect a top-level scientist to be doing, baa.”

  “It’s true, they might be Losers,” Gertie said. “And they could know where to find more kidnapped Keepers.”

  “But we can’t baa,” bleated Kolt.

  “We can’t what?” Gertie and Birdy said together.

  “We can’t go, baa, to Skuldark without my baa.”

  “Without your what!?”

  “MY BAA DEE.”

  “That’s true, but Doll Head is most likely starting to dock,” Gertie said, looking over at the sheep in Kolt’s body near the crushed buffet table, still gobbling up spilled food. “How about we race over to the rain forest dome and confront the Losers face-to-face?”

  “Mush butter.”

  “Great,” Kolt protested. “This is just great, baa. The one time I get to meet my archenemy, baa, Cava Calla Thrax, and I’m a sheep with cake stuck to its baa.”

  “Stop being vain!” Gertie ordered, then broke into a grin. “On second thought, he might try and turn you into a sweater.”

  “Ha ha, baa,” the sheep that was Kolt said, stamping one hoof.

  “How long before those body-swap-bot things wear off?” asked Birdy.

  “I don’t baa.”

  “Well then, we have no choice,” Gertie pointed out. “We have to get over there now before they escape in Doll Head with whatever they have come for—maybe another bomb.”

  “I know where the magnetic monorail is!” said Birdy. “I think . . .”

  “Let’s take these floating couch things!”

  The sheep that was Kolt and Robot Rabbit Boy remained on their couch while Gertie and Birdy ran across the room to another one.

  They held on, barking out instructions to the giant cushions to take them to the rain forest dome.

  As they were squirted with watermelon “farewell mist” on the way out, Gertie and Birdy punched the cushions on their couch. “Faster! Faster!”

  From behind they could hear their fellow Keepers trying to do the same. “Mush mush,” and “baa baa.”

  The two couches were now flying through the abandoned space station so quickly that Gertie’s couch lost one of the bigger cushions. It flew up and tumbled back through the air, hitting the sheep that was Kolt in the face, resulting in a few muffled cries that sounded like . . . baaaaaaabaaaa.

  The transport furniture had not been designed for high-speed, competitive couch racing, and soon bits were flying off left and right. Some of the passageways were so narrow that Gertie and Birdy had to tuck in their hands and feet so as not to get them scraped or smashed against a corner.

  About halfway there, Kolt and Robot Rabbit Boy’s couch must have somehow understood it was a race, and decided to take a different route, losing sight of the other Keepers.

  Gertie felt she was ready for anything now—even seeing her brother face-to-face, which is exactly what was about to happen as they thundered toward the supply room outside the rain forest dome at top couch speed.

  * * *

  ‹‹ • • • ››

  DOLL HEAD HAD ALREADY landed, and a jubilant-looking Mandy Zilch, the two lazy technicians, and Gareth Milk were loading all the robot parts from their desks into boxes to take on board the ship. It was clear they had no idea a second major defeat had just befallen them.

  Suddenly, without warning, a giant couch smashed through the automatic doors and air-skidded to a stop— catapulting its occupants off the cushions into a stack of boxes. Bits of wire and robot parts went everywhere, including a robotic finger, which strangely went right into the nostril of a technician.

  “Aaargh!”

  “Keepers!!!” growled Mandy Zilch, as Gertie and Birdy rolled to a stop under one of the desks. “You’re supposed to not exist anymore!” Then she turned to sneer at Gareth Milk.

  “Don’t tell me you messed this mission up as well!”

  But the teenage Keeper was too shocked by the sight of his sister to reply.

  “Gareth!” Gertie cried furiously. “You wanted to blow up Skuldark and kill us?”

  “N-n-no, no,” he said, taking a few steps back. “My job was to program and modify robot hands, that’s all.” He spun around to face Mandy Zilch. “Which I did, I promise, I did loads, like eight hundred of them . . .”

  “Well, you must have done it wrong, you idiotic boy!” The circuits on one side of her head blazed with flashing lights gone wild.

  “The hands were sent to blow up Skuldark?”

  “Yes!” Birdy said, trying to get Gertie’s attention so he could wink. “They blew it up and killed Kolt.”

  “They what?” Gertie said, then realized Birdy must have some kind of plan.

  Gareth Milk went bright red and covered his mouth at the thought that he had killed someone. The anger Gertie had seen in him when they met in ancient China seemed to have disappeared completely. He was just a sad little boy at the mercy of bullies.

  “And you,” cried Mandy Zilch, suddenly recognizing Birdy from the Cherokee village, “will not escape this time!”

  But then something big, white, fast, and cushiony came hurtling into the supply room, knocking the two Loser technicians to the ground like bowling pins.

  Mandy Zilch and Gareth Milk stared in shock as Robot Rabbit Boy and a fully grown sheep bounced onto the floor.

  Mandy Zilch must have truly understood then what Birdy had said moments before, about Kolt being dead and the Island of Lost Things getting blown up.

  “Kolt is dead? That means Skuldark is destroyed! It worked! We’ve won!”

  “I’m not baa!” cried the sheep.

  “Yes, Kolt is dead!” insisted Birdy to the sheep that was Kolt. “He died when the Black Hole Muncher went off, remember?”

  “Baa?”

  “You were eating cake, I mean, grass . . .”

  “I baa?”

  “Mush room!” whispered Robot Rabbit Boy, pulling on the sheep’s fur, as though trying to alert Kolt to the fact that all this was part of Birdy’s cunning plan.

  “I killed Kolt!” said Gareth Milk, utterly horrified by what he thought he’d unknowingly done.

  Mandy Zilch was dancing on the spot. “And you blew Skuldark up! Yes! Along with all its boring, useless, stupid creatures, and that mattress-sized comic!”

  Then the sheep that was Kolt must have realized that Birdy and Gertie didn’t have dust in their left eyes, but were in fact winking.

  “Ooh . . . yes, baa, it was the saddest day, the worst baa in this young sheep’s baa, baa, to see an entire island get baa, just like that! Baa.”

  “Dollops, mush, butter.”

  “So I suppose you want to join us now you have nowhere to go?” scoffed Mandy Zilch.

  “You do?” said Gareth Milk, with a confused smile.

  “Yes!” said Gertie. “We have nowhere to go, and with two animals to look after, we need a real home and a strong leader, not just this spaceship we accidentally found ourselves on after the explosion.”

  “It’ll never happen,” Mandy Zilch told them, “but it will be nice to see you all beg. I only wish Kolt were alive to see the end of his kind.”

  “Yes,” Gertie said, “he was a good Keeper.”

  “Oh, baa!” interrupted the sheep. “He was a great one! So good at cooking, baa, baking, woodwork, baa, mechanics, welding, spice collecting, and also, baa, organizing, sewing, picking out clothes, garden work, singing, brewing moonberry juice, baa, and playing the xylophone, which he usually did in
private, baa, but which he now wishes he’d shared with others, baa, as it truly was a gift, oh what a shame such a great man is baa.”

  “The xylophone?” Gertie said. “Is that true?”

  “Oh yes, baa,” said the sheep. “Kolt used to stay up late into the night hammering away on the metal rectangles with his bobble.”

  “What’s a bobble?” asked Mandy Zilch. “And why is a sheep talking?”

  “It’s the thing, baa, on the end of the stick, baa.”

  “What stick?” asked Birdy.

  “Well, baa, let’s not worry about this now . . . I’m sure there’s a proper name for them, but Kolt always referred to them, baa, as his bobbles.”

  “Ach, who cares!” roared Mandy Zilch. “Idiots!”

  “So we want to join you,” Gertie said again. “As the last of our kind we’ll get special treatment from your leader.”

  “Well, you’re not the last of your kind,” Mandy Zilch said proudly. “We’ve scattered Keepers all throughout history!”

  Gertie shrugged. “But they’re not real Keepers?”

  “Oh yes they are!” Mandy Zilch said. “Which is why we had to place magnetic cuffs on them, so they wouldn’t disappear to Skuldark.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Birdy. “We are the last now that Kolt is dead, I’m sure of it.”

  “Butter cup?” said Robot Rabbit Boy, pointing to himself.

  “No, you’re not a real Keeper!” said Gertie. “You’re just an outdated rabbit droid who thinks he’s a Keeper. You could never be a real one like Birdy and me.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Mandy Zilch at Robot Rabbit Boy’s humiliation. “Put fools in their place! Grind them down with cruel words so they learn . . . ha! Maybe we can find a position in the Loser ranks for you after all. . . .”

  Robot Rabbit Boy’s eyes dimmed to dark brown, and he dropped his head in shame, but Gertie knew she had to sound convincing for Mandy Zilch to believe she could be a Loser.

  “We’re the last Keepers, and as such will join the Losers at the highest ranks,” said Gertie.

  Birdy agreed, and pointed at Mandy Zilch. “Yeah, soon we’ll be telling you what to do!”

  “Pish! But you’re not the last Keepers!” she went on, pulling a shiny card out of her hip pocket, then unfolding it slowly, until it was the size of a small tablecloth. The panel was dark blue on both sides, with a glowing web of lights and thin lines. White blobs drifted across the surface of the metal fabric, and reminded Gertie of small clouds.

  “What’s that?” she asked the smug Loser.

  “It’s a live pocket atlas, you idiot, proof you’re not the last Keepers in the world, and therefore not special at all.”

  “A map?” Gertie said, staring at a dozen or so flashing orange dots.

  Mandy Zilch smirked. “Each light is a Keeper of Lost Things. So while they’re alive, you’re not the last Keepers, and therefore not special.”

  Then the Loser turned to Birdy. “You were supposed to be the latest orange light,” she said bitterly, “blinking at me from a place called the Black Hole of Calcutta!”

  “That’s very interesting, baa,” the sheep that was Kolt said, “but I read that since 2093, the Black Hole of Calcutta, baa, has been a five-star hotel with three pools, a water slide, shopping, horseback riding, baa, cooking school, free airport shuttle, and a Michelin-starred restaurant, so you must be lying, baa baa. That’s not a map at all, it’s just aluminum foil with lights on it.”

  “You stupid animal,” Mandy Zilch said, “you don’t think Vispoth knows this? With such supreme intelligence, our super computer can tell exactly when each destination was at its worst, and that’s when we dropped those sad, pathetic Keepers into their lives of misery.”

  Gertie wished there were some way she could remember the position of each tiny light on Zilch’s live pocket atlas, but the evil Loser was already folding it back up into a shiny card. As she returned it to her hip pocket, one of the circuits on her head began to fizz and sparkle.

  “It’s Thrax!” she said. “He wants us back at headquarters pronto! He says it’s an emergency.”

  “Gertie,” Gareth said, reaching toward her. “I’m sorry for what happened, but I guess it was the only way. . . .”

  “You still believe in the Losers’ cause?”

  “It’s the only solution,” he said. “After what I witnessed during the Information War, the only way to help people is to limit what they can learn. . . .”

  “But what happened to us, Gareth?”

  “What happens to any children caught in the middle of fighting? They break inside.”

  “But I don’t feel broken,” Gertie told him.

  “That’s because you lost your memory.”

  “Well, could you lose yours?”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Gareth said. “Skuldark is gone, and we’ll always be together, working toward a simpler and brighter world, I suppose.”

  Gertie desperately wanted to tell him the truth—felt so close now to winning him over. But before she could say anything else, Mandy Zilch grabbed her brother’s arm and yanked him away.

  “They can stay here on I-8-PP until Thrax decides what to do with them. With the B.D.B.U. in ashes, their time machine is just a piece of wood with a hole in it.”

  “Can I stay too?” Gareth asked.

  Mandy Zilch thought for a moment. “Thrax said he wants us all back at headquarters for an emergency meeting, so you’d better come.”

  Then the half-girl-half-droid sneered at Gertie’s brother. “You’re probably going to be honored for the terribly wonderful things you’ve done, so you wouldn’t want to miss that, now would you?”

  “But . . .”

  “Stop sniveling, Doll Head is waiting!”

  “See you soon,” Gareth shouted to his sister hopefully.

  Gertie watched as her brother, Mandy Zilch, and the two injured Loser technicians shuffled off toward Doll Head.

  She felt like she should run after them, try and drag her brother away from his evil Loser friends, but when she started to move, Birdy and Kolt the sheep stood in her way.

  “It has to be like this,” Birdy said gently. “I took a good look at that map, so we’ve got at least some of the information we need to try and rescue other Keepers—but if they think it’s a trick then . . .”

  “They’ll find out eventually, baa,” the sheep that was Kolt said. “That might even be what their emergency meeting is baa, but knowing at least a few locations will give us a chance to make a plan, and get the B.D.B.U. on board with an ongoing Keeper rescue effort, baa.”

  “But what about my brother?”

  “He’s not ready,” Kolt said sympathetically.

  “But he might be someday,” Birdy added.

  “The poor baa is a slave to all the terrible things he’s seen—and so until he can get stronger than the things that have happened to him, he’ll be their prisoner, which is baa, very baa.”

  Gertie knew they were right, and tried to stop herself from sprinting off after the Losers.

  Watching Doll Head sail over the biosphere dome, then fizzle away in time to a flash of purple light, Gertie realized that Robot Rabbit Boy was still hunched on the floor, as if trying to make sense of what he’d been told, that he wasn’t a real Keeper of Lost Things.

  He had crawled in between some boxes, and was trembling with wet eyes.

  “Robot Rabbit Boy,” Gertie said, “please come over here.”

  The Series 7 Forever Friend got to his feet and dutifully loped over to the group of Keepers, his paws dragging on the floor, his head hung in shame.

  Gertie bent down and put her hand under his chin to gently lift his head.

  “Hey,” she said kindly, “I had to say those things for them to buy Birdy’s plan—but it’s not true, you
must know that, you’re a great Keeper.”

  “Mashed potato . . .” Robot Rabbit Boy whispered, his voice shaking as though trying to hold back a flood of rabbit tears.

  “That’s right,” Gertie went on, “and you’re the real hero of this whole mission. You saved the entire universe. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  “Butter, mashed?”

  “You’re probably the most important rabbit that ever lived,” Birdy said.

  “That’s right, baa,” agreed Kolt, “with quick thinking, baa, super-fast rabbit reflexes, and extreme baa, you saved us, the space station, the ball of rock we call baa, and every living creature on it, including Slug Lamps.”

  “Dollops?”

  “Yes, dollops,” said Gertie.

  “Without you,” Birdy went on, “we’d all be floating out there in tiny bits.”

  “Fly mush?”

  “Exactly,” said Gertie, “which is why I want to give you something.” She took out her Keepers’ key.

  Two ragged, shaking paws rose slowly to accept the most sacred of all a Keeper’s possessions.

  “We were born Keepers,” Gertie said. “But, Robot Rabbit Boy—you had a choice, and you chose the harder, more dangerous path because you wanted to keep us safe.”

  “Baa, baa, indeed,” said Kolt. “Most pets just lie around the house trying not to poo indoors, baa—but you managed to save the universe. I’d say that’s pretty special, which is why I also want to give you my baa,” the eldest Keeper went on. “When I’m back in my own body of course, and it’s not lost.”

  “If it wasn’t for you and your nose laser, I would have been eaten by wolves,” Birdy said truthfully. “And so I’m giving you my key too.”

  “You are without a doubt the most important Keeper of Lost Things there has ever been,” Gertie stated officially.

  At these final words, Robot Rabbit Boy looked at the keys in his paws. Then he stood up straight, trying to blink away the wetness.

  “Mush fly dollop butter lavender dollop-dollop mashed fly potato eggcup dollop eggcup fly, lavender, butter, room, fly, mush, dollop of butter, mush potato, lavender, egg butter, lavender. Fly, eggcup, fly,” he said poetically, “fly eggcup . . . fly.”