by Lee Bond
A prison break. What a laugh, that. As if there was anywhere else he’d rather be. Nicked Jimmy swung his knobkerrie at another head as he got close to a crusher.
It’d been a long time since he’d to kill any in his own gaggle to get what he wanted, and he’d make himself no friends amongst those who’d be able to remember what he’d done, but … Dark Iron did some crazy things to people. He’d just say the lust had gotten hold and those grizzled veterans in his crew would just nod and let it pass.
After all, didn’t everyone with crudey-crude in their veins simply come back? Them as wanted to have words wi’ him about his actions were more than welcome to come at him. But all that hardly matter right at the moment, did it?
The goal now was to help the King.
***
Stepping through into the light was like being born, for some. At other doors, that was the first thing fresh inmates were told by the smiling if vaguely hungry faces of the men and women who lived in one of the Estates surrounded the much-revered and cherished Geared Doors. It was like being born into Hell. The wondrous thing –madmen and fools claimed- about being born again was that you were given a second chance at life.
But that was in other Estates not plagued by the vengeance-mad Nicked Jimmy.
Those inmates were given fresh clothes, were filled in on how their new world worked, and the choices that were available. And there were many. The safe zones, or estates, as some of the older folk called where they lived, had King-sponsored schools wherein the newly reborn FrancoBritish citizens could learn their choice of trades. They could learn to be farriers, or blacksmiths, or farmers. They could become teachers, or preachers or doctors, though the last two were only good in the estates and along the trade outposts.
Or, if their mouths already hungered for the hot taste of Dark Iron, they could learn to be crushers and thumpers, launchers or pushers, bombers and lookers. They would be taught by the best of the best, or so they were told. The truth was, they were most often taught by aging, frail wardogs who’d burned out the last of their own Dark Iron or those who didn’t have it in them anymore to go King-hunting. For those old men and women, there was no more coming back and if they were lucky, they were given a bit of a taste by students who straggled in every now and then to pay homage to those who’d taught them how to swing a hammer or fire a launcher.
But that was in other places, by other doors, in other Estates.
Blackened Moor Estate, as it was called now –once upon a time, before Nicked Jimmy and his eternal revenge and bloody-minded hatred, it’d been called Sliver Hills because if you stood just right in the center of town and it was the right time of day, you could catch a sliver of the Armory glinting like a glass shard- wasn’t like other places. They had no greying old wardogs, they had no kind words to give the freshly born.
They’d made that mistake before. Once. To a short, fat, ex-accountant. They were gone now, hiding out, risking their lives by hunkering down in the hills outside of town, waiting desperately for Nicked Jimmy and the King to be done with one another.
No kind words for those coming out of the doors today, oh no.
***
Garth shuffled through the aperture, shielding his eyes with a hand. Prisoners around him gasped and fell to the ground as soon as they adjusted to the light source coming from somewhere overhead. He waited patiently for his own eye to adapt.
Ever since knowing his destination, he’d prepared himself to deal with the reality of finding himself under a dome covering so much land. Something like forty-three thousand square miles of Great Britain was under The Dome of Gears. The biggest structure ever built on Earth, not counting the megalithic city that was Zanzibar: that atrocity hadn’t so much as been built as aggregated.
No, The Dome of Gears held that distinction alone.
And it was … mind-blowing. Garth’s sense of location was immediately shattered. On the outside, he’d always known where he was in relation to some other thing, whether it was the moon, or a city, or even a ship, there’d been some landmark providing him with a spatial connection to … to … to everything else.
That was gone. He felt at once gigantic and perversely miniscule. Harrison Ford Guy and Gerard Butler Clone started crying, as did others, and there was no shame in it. Even though you couldn’t see very much of their Dome, you could feel it. It was all around you. It was there, curving ever so gently to a staggering height of very nearly thirty kilometers. And even though it was so high that most of it was obscured by the phenomenal distance, you could feel it bearing down on you, an invisible but formidable reminder that no matter what you did, no matter how hard you fought, no matter how even-keeled your life became in Arcade City, you would always be in Arcade City.
“So what now?” One of the men who wasn’t totally broken demanded once the wailing dropped into silence. “What do we do? Where do we go?”
For some reason, they all turned to Garth, who was busy surveying the lay of the land with a critical eye. Instinct gained from being dropped on hundreds of worlds told him they were in some kind of safety zone, that in theory, they were free from whatever madness happened inside Arcade City on a regular basis.
In theory.
“Something’s wrong.” Garth muttered aloud, kicking some debris out of his way as he strolled around the square. The place felt lived in. It felt archaic, to a degree, which was only natural, he supposed; if, as rumor and legend had it, Arcade City was a continual trial-by-fire where men fought men all day and all night, sooner or later you’d start running out of things. Then you dialed the quality of life down to a point where you could exist comfortably. The first things to in situations like that were big screen televisions and flying cars.
“What d’you mean?” Gerard Butler Clone demanded, pulling himself to his feet and wiping snot from his nose. “And what does it fucking matter? We’re in goddamn Arcade City now. Hell on Earth, as I hear it.”
All the men muttered their consensual agreement. To a one, that’s what they’d heard.
“Yeah, no.” Garth waved a hand, dismissing their point. Something was totally fucked. He continued looking, wishing his goddamn Eye was operating. What he really wanted to see was ten klicks out; he could just barely make out other structures dotting their local horizon, and there was enough raggedness to suggest that out there, in the wilderness of Arcade City, people fought like maniacs. He pointed rapidfire to the buildings nearest them, then to the cobblestones under their feet. “Look around you. These structures are well-built, show no signs of recent damage but have obviously been repaired in the last year. In the kinds of warzones we’ve been led to believe are here inside this Domed city, if it was truly widespread and non-stop, I can guaran-fucking-tee you that there wouldn’t be glass in the windows. You stop putting that shit in after the fifth or sixth time. No, gang, we’re in a violence-free zone. This is where people live, not die.”
Garth looked over his shoulder at the forty foot high doors they’d just come through. Unlike the other side, where they’d been relatively plain, these looked like doors straight out of a steampunk Emerald City. Just a great big old blackened iron collision of gears and cranks and cogs that’d be really damned inspiring to watch open. His mind’s eye spun that unmoving Rube Goldberg machine and he nodded appreciatively.
What he wanted to do was put his head against the wall of The Dome and listen to the gears some more. He knew they were ticking and tocking, grating and thunking. He could feel the tremors in the earth again.
“Where’s the people then?” Skinny Vin Diesel asked. The scary guy with one eye was right, sure enough. This was a place where folks lived.
“Do you hear that?” Garth tilted his head to one side, nodding when some of the other guys did the same. Not all of the people who’d been tossed through The Dome were complete idiots.
“Sounds like …” A rat-looking guy frowned as he tried to come up with the right words.
“What’s that, then, hey?” Harriso
n Ford Guy, who wasn’t FrancoBritish but a stupid NorthAMC who’d actually tried raping a King’s Son in a shower, had started imitating his peers’ speech patterns as a matter of survival, licked his lips. “Is that someone hammering on something?”
All hundred men looked around. That was indeed what it was, and it wasn’t too far off. Now that they were growing accustomed to the pressure on their senses caused by The Dome that was all around them, they were slowly keying into their environment.
A grievous bellow of tortured metal and animalistic tension split the air. A split-second later, an even greater racket filled the sky, a kind of rumbling that reminded Garth of Saturdays in the park with his dad, when they’d …
When they’d launched homemade rockets into the sky.
Garth started looking up and around, unsure whether he wanted to see what he was expecting to see. The men clustered in knots of six, ten, twenty, all of them following the tilt of his head.
“What in the fuck is that?” Someone in the crowd nearest Garth pointed.
“Fuck me sideways.” Garth groaned. This is what Meechy had meant about the Dark Iron King walking the streets day and night. This is what Meechy had meant when he’d said that the King was getting them all ready.
It was nearly inconceivable to imagine. Somewhere on the other side of the buildings where some kind of massive … massive robotic King had just launched himself from there had to be a crew of wardogs who’d spent who knew how long whaling away on the … the … whatever it was that was currently a dot in the sky.
The Mad Goth King Blake, or some kind of weird giant steampunk robot version, was shooting straight up into the air not six hundred feet from where they stood, rocketing towards the curvature of The Dome just above where they were all standing.
Everyone started screaming. Then, when the two hundred foot tall clanking nightmare that trailed fire, smoke and clattering bits of metal slammed into The Dome at rocket-powered speed and started falling right at them, everyone suddenly realized that where they were standing was stupid.
They started running. In all directions. With no plan or clue.
Garth was amongst them, because fuck that. He’d thankfully missed the giant meat soldiers who’d taken time out of their day to fuck the Latelian Natural History Museum up before blowing up and he was sure as shit going to miss out on the robo-King’s splash landing.
The ex-Specter picked a random direction and started running, intent on moving east, away from the action. He aimed himself down a narrow alleyway, reasoning that if the giant robot landed weird, the tall, high buildings on either side of the back lane would prevent death by –Garth grinned even as he was freaked out- death by falling robot.
Someone was coming the other way, brandishing a big stick with an even bigger knob of shiny metal on the end. For some reason, he was dressed like he was on his way to leather and metal fetish party.
Because … why the fuck not?
And behind the shiny-skinned knobkerrie wielder, a dozen or so weirdly-dressed men and women carting a bewildering array of homemade weapons ranging from axes the size of people to steam powered chainsaw swords and all kinds of shit that defied proper description at first glance. Like the man in the lead, they were dressed for a Hellraiser Comicon and they all had a black, hungry gleam in their eyes.
Garth grimaced. Of course. Because the goddamn King was behind him.
Garth stopped running and got himself ready.
7. All The King’s Horses and all The King’s Men
The trick to fighting a whole pile of people at once is to not do it. You’re asking for a lot of trouble in a very short amount of time, even if you’re one of those people who’s spent a lifetime learning one of the million or so hand-to-hand combat techniques that allow you to do precisely that. That sentiment had been true thirty thousand years ago and it was even truer now, in the far flung future, where everyone and his pet space goat was jacked to the gills on augments, enhancements and implants.
Garth didn’t want to fight the Mad Max Laff-a-Lympic Squad coming at him down the cramped alleyway he’d chosen for an escape route from the tumbling robot high above their heads, but neither did he have a choice; the moment they’d seen him, their eyes had glittered like novae, all full of terrible promise at the sight of fresh meat.
Of course, if you do have to fight a pile of weirdoes fresh off the Comic-Con trail, it was best to have the skills and abilities … the skills of a once-upon-a-time nearly invulnerable Kin’kithal Warrior on your resume.
The guy with the weird tribal tattoo work up and down his bare arms and legs –looked like he was keeping track of days or years as either penance or just because he liked cutting himself- swung a solid metal knobkerrie in a smooth circle, nearly beaning one of his own men in the side of the skull in the process.
Garth sidestepped the outstretched blow, slid in close to the nicked-up bossman while the heavy skullcrusher was still in motion, spun in place, drilled an elbow into the man’s neck using the advantage of surprise and then grabbed the mother-heavy bonker from a loose hand before it hit the ground. Then, because he was only human these days, took a punch to the back of his skull that bounced him painfully off a cobblestone wall.
“Son of a bitch!” Garth flipped over onto his back, whacked his broken hand on the wall, grabbed hold of the weapon and skittered backwards. “The fuck.”
Nicked Jimmy flicked his eyes upwards. The King was falling, plummeting, really, faster than ever. If they were seriously unlucky, the damnable thing would explode into a trillion gears and cogs when it struck and then no one in the crew was going to get themselves a taste of Kingsblood. “Now’s not the time, friend.”
“Oh?” Garth crawled to his feet. His ears were ringing from the blow to his head. Good Lord, that’d hurt. The last time he’d felt actual, true ‘holy shit I could die’ pain had been … had it been when he’d been shot by the sniper cannon? Sure, he’d been hurt after then, and quite badly, but ... he remembered being in the back of the cab and worrying that he was going to bleed out. “And you weird beards were just gonna let me run away?”
“King’s comin’ down, Nicked Jimmy.” Staunch Mel, a serious gal and one hell of a launcher in addition to being a decent crusher, jerked her chin at the fish. “Let’s just kill him and move on, yes?”
“You lot go on.” Nicked Jimmy pointed towards where the King was going to land with two fingers. “Me and the fish are going to have a quick word.”
Garth did his best not to flinch as the crew swarmed past, stinking as they did of hot metal and gunpowder. He eyed the collection of gruesome weapons they toted nervously; many of them had far more bits and pieces to them than traditionally expected, in, say, an axe or sword or hammer. The woman who’d wanted him dead strolled by at a casual pace, exuding hostility and an absolute desire to be wearing him for a skin suit. There was more to it than that, though, only Garth didn’t –couldn’t- spare the time to eyeball the Creepy Crew closer; the way they were all dressed, with odd pieces of heavy leather covering random body parts, suggested they were hiding … something … from casual inspection. It couldn’t be anything to do with the hypothetical Cloud the so-called Dark Iron King possessed.
Because that would be fucking madness.
He smiled pleasantly. Under the circumstances.
He was so far in over his head it wasn’t funny. How could Trinity not know what the fuck was going on under the fucking Dome? He’d been inside all of fifteen minutes, had discovered a huge secret about The Dome –still no answers why or how it was that way- and had come to the conclusion that the entirety of Arcade City was fucking nuts.
“Oy!” Jimmy shouted to Mel, who glanced over her shoulder. “Find them other fish, yeah?” He drew a ragged thumbnail across his neck, not worried for Mel’s reaction; she were a good girl and been around long enough to see what was what right quick.
Mel nodded, then hopped on to a roof.
Nicked Jimmy turned his attention to the
one-eyed man who’d so neatly nicked his knob. “I been comin’ here twenty years, fish, to drop the King on Peemes’ prisoners.”
“Ha. That’s funny. Because … y’know…” Garth jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the King. The ex-Specter wanted to rest the skullcrusher on his shoulder, but he was kind of embarrassed to admit there were serious concerns about getting it aloft one-handed. The damn thing weighed nearly two hundred pounds.
Nicked Jimmy nodded. That sounded like a joke, but he didn’t get jokes. He pressed on. “You took my bonking stick from me real smoothly, fish. That story’s going to make the rounds if those as saw it survive the King.”
“Nah.” Garth shook his head. “Falling at terminal velocity and weighing approximately … four, yeah let’s make it four hundred tons, your, um, ‘King’ is gonna explode into a bunch of robo-junk. Anyone standing around that center waiting … I guess that’s what you guys do for fun, right, hang around and kill these robotic King guys? Anyhoo, yeah, no. The King’s gonna burst apart at the metallic seams and shred everyone like a really big claymore mine.”
“You come up with those numbers on your own, then?” Nicked Jimmy stepped forward. The fish stepped back. He had training, this one, some kind of special training, that was sure; wandering through the various Estates, you came across ex-fish from other doors, and some of them walked the same way this fish did. Jimmy hadn’t walked like that when he’d come through. He’d learned the hard way.
“I build stuff.” Garth had been trying to ignore the blood on his chin and the scrapes on his forehead from where he’d bounced off the wall, but the warm trickles were hugely worrisome. Prior to strolling through the great dark between the walls, he hadn’t been overly worried about being exposed to Arcade City’s version of The Cloud; he’d been immune to Gorensystem’s Cloud, right? Why would he imagine things to be any different, here?
Without Eye-support … if this Dark Iron was in everything around him, from the food he’d eventually need to eat to the air he was already fucking breathing … he could end up thinking that wearing an old leather motorcycle helmet festooned with spikes and car insignias was a great idea. With open wounds … the fear of infection was a crawling thing, especially now the leader was getting closer; Garth saw in a grim flash that the marks weren’t tattoos at all but wounds sealed shut with something that looked suspiciously like blackened metal.
