“What kind of relics are you talking about, Preacher? Like pieces of the One True Cross, or saints’ fingerbones or something? I thought all that stuff was Catholic, anyway. What’s it doing in a Baptist church?”
The minister took a long drink of his sweet tea before answering. “It is a matter of some shame to the church hierarchy, but before the last of Creek Indians were evicted from Georgia some forty years ago, several holy items were taken from the tribes and confiscated. These items do have a certain mystical energy about them that the church leaders at the time felt would better off in the hands of holy men than savages.”
“You mean white men.” Bubba said flatly.
“Yes.” Preacher Mason didn’t look up from his plate.
“You know our Granny was Cherokee, don’t you?” Bubba asked the minister.
“Yes.”
“And you know the white men tried to run her off this land right here and send her west, even though she was married in a white church?”
“I know that.”
“Then you know that I ain’t gonna be too inclined to return these Creek holy items to a bunch of white men who ain’t done nothing but steal ‘em and lock ‘em away in a bank vault.”
“I understand that sentiment, Bubba. And part of me agrees with you. But the larger part does not want these relics in the hands of a band of criminals, no matter who they ultimately belong to.That’s why I’ve come. Bubba, Octavia, I need your help. Bubba, you’re the staunchest man I know in a fight, and I think it’s very likely we will end up in a fight before this is over. And Octavia … well, you’re one of the brightest people I know, and your innovative creations have proven helpful more than once.”
“Wait a minute, Preacher, let’s don’t go talking crazy now. Her ‘innovative creations’ as you put it have proven helpful exactly once. And all the other times they’ve come real close to killing somebody, usually me. Now I hate to be the one to say it, but I don’t know of anything Tavvy’s got cooked up that would help us find your relics, so unless you know where the asses are I need to be kickin’, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”
“I have just the thing!” Tavvy announced. She ducked back into the house and returned moments later wearing a bizarre helmet fitted with a chinstrap and a series of round lenses on arms that could be dropped down in front of the wearer’s eye by use of a flipper lever on the side of the helmet. A quart jar set atop the helmet with a thin tube running through a square box on the front of the helmet and down to what looked like a perfume spritzer. “This portable chemical analyzer will allow me to trace unique chemical signatures used in the robbery back to their source, and thusly, to the church’s money.”
“What the hell does that thing do, Tavvy?” Bubba asked.
“Using the purest grain alcohol, I burn it to a temperature that will atomize its particles and allow the alcohol vapors to directly coat surfaces at the crime scene using the applicator.” She gestured to the jar, then the box, then the spritzer. “Using the lenses I can filter out the alcohol vapors and see any other vapors permeating the crime scene, like machine oil, gun grease or diesel fuel. Once I pick up a trail of those vapors, I can trace it to the source.”
“So you’re burning moonshine in a jar on top of your head, then spraying it around a crime scene onto machine oil or gun grease?”
“Or diesel fuel, or anything else that may have left a vapor trail.” Tavvy smiled, apparently pleased that Bubba understood the concept.
Bubba stood looking at his sister for a long moment, then sighed and said “Well, can we at least eat before we get on the road to Atlanta? No offense, Preacher, but that old truck of yours is a rough ride and I’m feeling a little delicate this morning.”
The minister smiled and let out a deep breath, looking at the siblings in turn. “Thank you both. I am in your debt. The church is in your debt.”
“Aw hell, Preacher. I could use another check mark in old Saint Peter’s book anyhow.”
*****
After breakfast the trio loaded up into the minister’s Reliance truck and headed down to Atlanta. Bubba rode in the bed along with the luggage, Tavvy’s oddball helmet, and his Dervish. The Dervish was Tavvy’s first successful creation, a moonshine-powered steam-driven automatic shotgun that converted to a flamethrower by burning the moonshine after it ran through its regular ammunition. Bubba had almost decided that the Dervish wouldn’t blow him up, but he still packed the thing on the other side of the truck and kept all the suitcases between him and it. It took the rest of the day to travel the hundred miles from Bubba’s home in Rock Spring to Atlanta, and the sun had long since set by the time Preacher Mason pulled the truck up to the sidewalk in front of a Baptist church in the middle of the city.
“Why we stoppin’ here, Preacher? Let’s get on to the inn and get us some grub.” Bubba said, leaning out of the bed to look in the driver’s window.
“We are staying here, Bubba. The church provides lodging in the dormitory for traveling clergy, and as the two of you are working for the church, you are counted as missionaries for the purposes of your stay here.” The preacher opened the door and stretched his back. Bubba hopped down out of the bed, looked around the sleepy neighborhood and let out a sigh.
“What’s wrong, Bubba?” Tavvy said, taking the preacher’s hand to get out of the truck.
“I don’t get down the mountain too much. I was kinda lookin’ forward to some big-city mischief tonight, but it don’t look like that’s gonna happen around here.”
“Well I would be lying if I said I was upset about that. We may need you to be at your best tomorrow. Heaven only knows what we shall face when we get to the scene of this dastardly crime.” Tavvy said, then turned and walked into the dormitory, leaving a dejected Bubba to carry in her luggage.
*****
What they found at the scene of the robbery was a studiously unhelpful policeman who refused to allow Mason and Tavvy access to the vault.
“You don’t understand, sir. I must examine the crime scene.” Mason demanded.
“I understand, sir. I just don’t care. No one is allowed in the bank until my sergeant tells me so. Where do you think you’re going?” The policeman asked Bubba, who was walking toward the bank with Tavvy right behind him. Tavvy had her Hat of Detection on her head, with the moonshine already bubbling. Steam was starting to leak from her head, giving her a strange and otherworldly appearance.
“I’m going to look at the vault.” Bubba replied, looking down on the significantly smaller policeman.
The little man’s moustache fairly writhed across his upper lip as the man became more agitated. “Now see here, my good man! I have just told this other fellow that no one is to be allowed into the bank by orders of my sergeant, and here you go trying to barge in there! What do you think you’re doing?”
“Doin’ what the bossman told me. You don’t like it, you can call the bossman.” Bubba said, a blank look on his face.
“Are you mentally defective? Have you not heard what I’ve been saying?”
“I heard you. Still gonna do what the bossman told me.”
“And who is this bossman of yours?”
“I serve my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Do you know his word and salvation?” Bubba replied. His voice was mechanical, as though he had a script to follow and couldn’t deviate from it if he wanted to. He reached into his back pocket and held out several crumpled scraps of paper. “Could I interest you in some literature on our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the peace that he can bring into your life? You look like a man who needs some peace.”
“I need some peace for damn sure! Now get the hell out of here or I will be forced to arrest you.” He drew his pistol, and Bubba just stared at him.
Bubba looked back at the tracts in his hand, then at the gun, then at the tracts. He finally folded the tracts, stuffed them in the policeman’s shirt pocket, and turned to walk away. Bubba grabbed Mason by the elbow and took him with him as he left. “See you at
the Pearly Gates, my brother.” He walked down the block and turned the corner, collapsing in laughter at the stunned look on Preacher Mason’s face.
“Bubba, what in the world was that? Are you absolutely out of your mind?”
“Crazy like a fox, Preacher. You get what you need, Tavvy?” He asked as his sister rounded the corner and joined them.
“Yep, got a vapor trail I could follow in the pitch dark. That idiot flatfoot got so caught up with you and your tracts that he never noticed me sneak into the bank and take my readings. Good job, Bubba.”
“All I had to do was act like a big ol’ country bumpkin. Wasn’t hard.”
“I can’t imagine it was, big brother.”
“Don’t push it, Tavvy.” Bubba grumbled. “Can you track this thing?”
“Oh yeah, I’ve got a lock on the vapor trail. It’s still strong. Go get the Dervish, let’s go bring those artifacts home!” She was off like a shot, flipping her odd little lenses down in front of her eyes and spraying superheated moonshine on the sidewalk in front of her.
“Let’s go, Preacher. We’ll figure out what home those holy things go to when we get them out of this robber’s hands.” Bubba and Preacher Mason followed Tavvy through the streets of Atlanta for almost an hour before they came to a halt in front of a low, nondescript warehouse near the railroad station.
“This is it. The trail ends here.” Tavvy said. She took off her helmet and carefully hid it behind a bush my the front door. Then she bent over, in the middle of the sidewalk in broad daylight, and grabbed her skirt, pulling the back of her skirt forward and up, tucking it into her belt and making her very proper skirt into a pair of exceedingly less-than-proper pants, which pulled up at the bottom to show a daring amount of ankle. Preacher Mason looked shocked at her garb, and Tavvy broke into laughter.
“Oh goodness, Reverend, it’s not as though you haven’t seen me wear pants before! Bubba, give me my Winchester.”
Bubba handed over Tavvy’s 30-30 lever action rifle, and she cocked the lever to make sure the gun had a round in the chamber. Bubba flicked off the safety on the Dervish, then reached behind his head to flip the ignitor switch on his moonshine reservoir. It always made him nervous carrying ten gallons of moonshine behind his head and next to an open flame to boot, but he couldn’t argue with the effectiveness of the weapon.
Preacher Mason looked down at the Colt .45 in his hand and grinned. “I somehow feel the least armed of any of us.”
“Don’t worry Preacher. You’ve got the best backup.” Bubba said, pointing up. Then he reared back with one huge foot and kicked the warehouse door open. It flew inward with a crash of splinters, and Bubba charged in, looking for something to shoot. Nothing immediately presented itself, so he waved the others in.
A deep voice, accented like the Russians Bubba had seen in a traveling circus bear-wrestling act trumpeted through the warehouse. “The door was open, you big oaf.”
“Ain’t no need for name-calling. Now get on out here with them Indian relics and I won’t burn your warehouse down.” Bubba hollered back.
“You won’t do that regardless. You won’t risk starting a fire that would send Atlanta up in flames. Again.” The voice laughed. “Kill them, my pets!”
Bubba stepped further into the warehouse, a huge building nearly twenty feet high inside. It was almost completely empty, except for a car at one end of the long, narrow building, and several crates near the vehicles. As Bubba approached the crates, the lids flew off and dozens of spiders crawled out. Huge spiders, nearly two feet tall, each one made entirely of metal. The brass spiders flowed out of the crates in a glittering, shimmering carpet of clicking legs and waving mandibles. Each spider had a pair of nasty-looking fangs sticking out of its mouth, and walked on six legs, not all eight. The front two legs waved in the air, and Bubba could tell even from twenty feet away that they had been sharpened to razor edges.
Wave after wave of the clockwork beasts roiled out of the crates, and the voice echoed laughter from one end of the warehouse to the other. Bubba felt his blood boil as the unnatural creatures scurried forward. “Oh yeah?” He yelled. “Let’s see how funny you think this is!”
Bubba squeezed the trigger on the Dervish, and hot lead and death poured forth in a roar the likes Atlanta hadn’t seen since Sherman left her in tatters. The moonshine burned, producing steam which spun the three shotgun barrels, accepting a new shell from the spring-loaded feed mechanism and firing the round in a fraction of a second. Bubba swept the front of the Dervish across the moving carpet of brass spiders, and they blew apart into springs, coils and strange silvery rocks. He kept the barrage of lead flying for almost twenty seconds until he ran out of ammunition, then he flipped the small bypass switch by the trigger and ignited the fuse at the tip of the barrel. The raw moonshine flowed down the tube that seconds before had contained scalding steam, and burst into a gout of flame at the end of the Dervish. Bubba bathed the remaining spiders in flaming moonshine, and in less than a minute had turned the hundreds of mechanical arachnids into so much molten brass.
“How you like, that, Mr. Laughing Man?” Bubba hollered. He shrugged out of the empty Dervish and set the device gently on the floor. “Good gadget, sis.” He grinned at Tavvy, who gave him a fierce smile in return.
“I put a lot of work into those spiders, you stupid hillbilly.” The same voice as before came, but it was closer this time, and behind them. Bubba turned, and there was a big man standing between them and the door. He was almost as tall as Bubba, right around six feet, but much thinner. He wore wool pants and suspenders, with a white dress shirt. His right sleeve was torn off, and that’s where Bubba saw one of the relics stolen from the bank. The man’s right arm was gone from the shoulder, and he had built some type of clockwork arm for himself, a brass contraption with springs and gears to make it bend right. But in the center of the arm, where the big bone should be, was a glowing animal bone covered in carvings. Bubba recognized it instantly - the leg of a black bear carved with Creek holy symbols. More of the strange silvery rocks were set into the bone and the mechanical arm, and the whole thing glowed with an unnatural green luminescence.
“Nice arm.” Bubba said. “Shiny.”
“You simpleton. This arm is my greatest creation. It is a fusion of magic and science. Using the earth magic harnessed by the Indian holy objects, and the sky magic from this blasted rock that fell from the sky last year, destroying my locomotive and crushing my arm, I have rebuilt myself, better than before!” The man stepped forward and wrapped his mechanical hand around the barrel of Tavvy’s rifle. He squeezed, the gears groaned, and the barrel of the gun crumpled like cheap sheet metal. Tavvy dropped the useless rifle with an oath.
“So you broke into the bank to steal the bone to make yourself a new arm?” Bubba asked.
“Yes! And to take what was stolen from me. When the silver rock fell from the sky last year out west, I was simply, Reginald Kitner, railroad engineer. The asteroid destroyed my train when it landed, and my arm was torn off in the crash. The railroad company did nothing to help me, just put me out in the cold. So I came east, to find the bastards and hit them where it hurt! All their money was in that bank, and now it’s mine! And now that my arm is complete, nothing will stop me from exacting my revenge on those railroad bastards and all their families!”
“Nothin’ but us. Preacher, shoot this jackass so we can all go home.” Bubba said.
Preacher Mason stared at Bubba, then looked at the robber. “I can’t just shoot a man, Bubba.”
“You heard Reggie there say he’s gonna kill them railroad men.”
“Well, yes.” The minister at least managed to raise his gun and point it at the man.
“Then shoot him, and we can be done with this by lunchtime. I’m getting hungry.”
Kitner’s mechanical arm flashed out faster than anything of flesh and blood could move, and snatched the pistol from Preacher Mason’s grip. He passed the gun to his human hand, and leveled it at
Bubba and the minister. “Any last words, interlopers?”
“Yeah,” Bubba said. “What’s an interloper?”
“Fool,” the tall man lashed out with his mechanical arm and caught Bubba on the point of his jaw. Bubba managed to roll with the punch as he saw it coming, so he only spun around twice before he hit the floor with a heavy thump. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs and looked on as the man stepped forward and picked up the Dervish.
“You think you can defeat me with your stupid whiskey and fire? I am born of fire and magic! I am Kitner the Unstoppable, master of might! I am the new world order! I am-“ His eyes bulged out as Tavvy caught him solidly between his legs with one pointed boot.
“You talk too much.” Tavvy said. She reached down to Bubba and helped her brother to his feet.
“Good job, Tavvy.” Bubba said. “That guy might have been a real problem if you hadn’t raised his voice an octave or two.”
“Anytime, brother of mine. Any-“ Her words cut off and her eyes got big.
“He’s up, ain’t he?” Bubba asked. Tavvy just nodded. “And he’s about to knock the crap out of me again, ain’t he?” Tavvy nodded again.
Bubba turned and once again caught the metal fist solidly across his face. He flew back about six feet, landing spread-eagled on the floor and kicking up a cloud of dust and broken spider bits. Bubba lay there for a minute listening to the sound of the pretty birdies, then shook his head to clear it. Once his eyes focused again, he saw Tavvy unconscious on the floor six feet in the opposite direction, a welt already rising on her cheek. Bubba’s vision ran red and he struggled to get to his feet, but fell twice trying to get the room to stop spinning beneath him.
Kitner stalked toward Bubba, flexing his mechanical fist. A sneer crept across his dark features, and his accent was heavy when he spoke. “You’re just like the rest of them. Just like the railroad men that didn’t believe Kitner when he said the track failed. Just like the union bosses who took the railroad’s side and said Kitner was drinking on the job. Kitner didn’t cause that crash. Kitner never crashed a train. It was the rocks from the sky that bent the tracks and crashed the train.” Kitner raised his glowing arm for a crushing blow on Bubba’s skull, but froze when a distinctive click echoed through the warehouse.
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 37
