by Lee Bond
Furtive movement fifteen feet away grabbed Garth’s attention. Expecting anything from those previously alluded to gearheads to fresh game on the hoof or paw, Garth’s right hand flicked outwards, a gauntleted steampunk blur. The sharpened brass flywheel he’d been cupping in anticipation of attack or the arrival of food spun wickedly through the air. There was a brief, piteous squeak.
Not gearheads. Food. Awesome. Mutinous bellies would be sated and Barnabas had yet to find a way to bitch about anything with his mouth full, though it wasn’t unrealistic to expect the smith to tinker up a metal mouth to do just that if things continued on the way they were.
“Be vewwy vewwy quiet.” Garth whispered to himself as he clambered off the rock towards his kill. The heavy hammer he left right where it was because he really goddamn doubted anyone else could even lift the fucking thing; if his Kingsblood forged musculature found it difficult, it’d be a damn Thumper-clone and no one else who’d be doing any theoretical stealing. “We’re hunting wabbits.”
A few quick steps and Garth was looking down at the rabbit carcass. The makeshift shuriken had damn near decapitated the wee beastie. Bright red blood turned the ground an upsetting shade of murky brown. He stared at the wound for a long time, waiting patiently for the minute tick and pulse of the small rabbit’s heart to give out, to witness that last, final push of life.
Barnabas claimed it was impossible for a ‘natural born animal’ to fall under the spell of Kingsblood. Which was a good thing. Images of Bugs the Gigantor terrorizing the neighborhood in search of humungous carrots and large, talkative ducks was too much to even imagine.
Giant killer steampunk rabbits and their enemies. Garth laughed at the absurdity of it all, then felt immediately guilty, then felt weird for feeling guilty. It was just a rabbit, and they were hungry. Well, Barnabas was hungry, and that was more than enough.
Arcade City and Kingsblood infections had him twisted up inside, had him second guessing every thought, every emotion. It was exhausting.
If only he’d thought to include scenarios in the Goreene HIM concerning possible human interference in the Cloud’s operation! It would’ve been simple enough; tell the pan-dimensional, semi-intelligent machine to keep an eye out for human beings becoming infected with Cloud particulate, command it to find a reasonably intelligent, non-infected human being, use that person to handle the infection properly. Properly here meaning ‘kill everything infected until everything infected is dead’.
The infuriating part was this King –whoever he was- had accomplished something he, the self-styled Engineer for Reality 2.0, had failed to even consider. That he’d been rushed, that the Armies of Man had been hounding him literally non-fucking-stop for answers and assistance and new ways to kill the enemy were all excuses.
A few fucking seconds. That’s all it would’ve took to consider the implications of Cloud particulate going awry and maybe a minute to come up with the proper protocols.
Part and parcel of that initial failure was the King’s perversion of that oversight; not coding the Cloud to ignore or otherwise dismiss organic tissue was a giant gaping backdoor and the King had swung on in with his heinous Kingsblood, warping anyone who came into contact with it into foul caricatures.
The citizens of Arcade City were suffering because he’d been in a hurry. Too hurried to code things properly, too hurried to make sure all his scribbled notes had been destroyed. Too hurried to care.
“Sometimes I hate myself so much I could barf.” Garth bent down to scoop up the flywheel and Bugs.
Garth stuffed Bugs moodily into a bag and trudged back to the rock.
Garth lay down, putting a metal-encased hand on his stomach and the other one across his forehead. It was a beautiful day, with the kind of clouds that begged you to forget all the miserable shittiness in your life.
Only…
The sky still bugged the shit out of Garth almost as much as Barnabas. The blacksmith had zero problems with the lack of an appreciable light-source or the lack of proper weather and the goddamn lack of birds and flying things because for the irascible smith, that was how it’d always been.
Which was weird.
Oh, Barnie admitted he’d heard stories from other convicts coming through one Geared Door or another that other worlds had suns and meteorological explanations for things like clouds or even fucking blue sky, but then he’d grin and shrug his shoulders, saying ‘but Arcade City hain’t like other worlds, now is it, my son?’.
Yes, there were large bodies of water under The Dome. Every single river and lake and other form of ‘water on land’ you could’ve found in any ancient historical text concerning Great Britain still existed –and here, Garth refused to even think about how that could possibly be, rad nanotech Cloud powers notwithstanding-, which, in theory, gave explanation as to the blue of the sky. But there was no rain.
The clouds were … window dressing. Permanent puffs floating idly through the sky, doing dick all except looking fluffy.
All those lakes and streams, rivers and swamps … just persisted. The same, Barnie had insisted one night around the campfire, as it was up North with the snows as didn’t melt or down South, were the deserts never faded nor took over more land. They just were. They would always be.
Frustratingly, neither Barnabas or Nicked Jimmy or any of the other metal-tainted bozos spared one single iota of their rapidly diminishing intelligence on being curious. Outside, it was impossible to imagine a world without sunlight and rain and stuff. Here, under The Dome, people thought you were either being weird on purpose or too stupid to live whenever you brought those particular oddities to light.
“None of this makes any fucking sense.” Garth wanted to bash his head against a rock. The King didn’t ‘like weather’ so there was no weather. The King didn’t like things that flew, so no birds or bees or butterflies or anything like that, which was monumentally bothersome.
If you could goddamn well engineer a Cloud system to turn a man’s brain into a motor and still have that fucking guy be able to talk like a normal person –excluding steam dribbling out his nostrils- putting things like ‘weather’ and ‘shit that flies’ on autopilot was way more efficient and practical than engineering an ecosystem that didn’t rely on any of those elements. More energy had to be expended on replenishing snow and making trees grow without rainfall than the infinitely more simple –and tried- method.
“Fuck me, this place is ridiculous.” Garth moved back to a sitting position, though he knew he wouldn’t be sitting much longer: a single rabbit wouldn’t feed more than Barnabas’ ego.
The blacksmith had mentioned that this particular area was occasionally home to much larger game like deer or even boar, tasty notions that’d gotten those old saliva glands watering like mad. Garth reckoned he could do with a nice haunch of roast deer.
Hopping lithely from the rock, Garth wrapped a hand around the hammer’s shaft and hoisted it onto a shoulder. The pistons and gears on his right arm hissed and popped and spun, eating the strain of moving the four hundred pound sledgehammer to his shoulder and bearing the weight with ease. Sight of the flexible tubing curled carefully around the continually moving machine parts filled Garth with a stab of worry; the thick black liquid seemed to glitter spitefully at him through shiny metal skeleton, almost as if it knew it’d been circumvented.
Garth wrinkled his nose at the thought of lugging the heavy hammer over hill and dale in search of fresh game. Should he encounter something fast on the hoof, the unwieldy pneumatic skullcrusher would be a terrible nuisance.
“Fuck it. Barnie says this area is hardly ever traveled so. Fuck it.” Slogging back to ‘his fucking rock’, Garth wedged the hammer’s haft deep into the earth beneath the heavy stone until all that was visible was the head itself.
Any gearheads in the area would damn well have to trip over the thing to even see it, and then they’d have to be strong enough to get it loose. Garth flicked a couple loose leaves overtop, thinking half-assed cam
ouflage was better than not at all. Then he resumed his trek deeper into the forest in search of better and bigger game.
The hollow, needle-like barbs dug into his skin itched. Or, Garth thought as he trudged quietly onwards, he believed they itched. They didn’t, though.
He could no longer feel his arms.
All he could feel was the tight, cold embrace of metal.
A small price to pay, if it kept the Kingsblood in –hah- circulation.
It was a worthy price, too, if it kept Specter little more than a quiet, dark hum in the back of his mind.
***
Barnabas ran a hand lovingly over the eroded circuit board. No one else in Arcade City could know it, but the antiquated brass and copper panel was one of the very first ones ever built. Everyone assumed that the Kings had been summonable since The Dome had cost them the sky, but they were wrong; the tech in his hands was only seven thousand four hundred thirty two years old. Kings Cloud hurried to inform him that the Kingspawn point this particular board had been part of had, in it’s time, summoned well over forty thousand Kings of varying size.
And ever more varied forms than the great clanking Kings that were all anyone saw nowadays; gearheads today, them that still bothered to hunt properly, thought their Kings were the harshest, the most difficult. So wrong, they were. Old Kings had owned lasers and missiles and all and held within their cavernous geared pates fearsome intelligence. Old Kings could have conquered the entirety of Arcade City in under a year, had it not been for them truly talented lads and lasses from long and long ago.
Aye, it were true. Certainly, gearheads today were brilliant and had the art of warfare seared right into their very DNA, but the strength and weirdness they so flaunted made them more monster than man. Them olden times warriors … they’d fought with nowt at all save bravado and mad plans.
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only did sometimes miss them old times, but Kingsblood had needed to flow…
An antique. A relic. A physical representation of history so long in the making that entire civilizations had risen and fallen while this … this wondrous slab of copper and brass with just the tiniest hint of platinum and gold … had endured. Thousands of Kings, with three to four times that many gearheads slapping their metal-tainted hands atop the summoning surface, chanting their names, waiting excitedly for the earth to dance, the King roar, their blood to sing.
Barnabas didn’t want to do what he knew needed doing. He could throw it away, have one of his minions come by and pick it up so that it could be put somewhere safe, play mute when Nickels came back –if he came back- from his hunting trip.
Alas, the King knew it weren’t possible to lie effectively to Nickels, not after all the haranguing he’d ladled onto the other man concerning his ‘ill-feelings in mucking about with the King’s property’. Even if he were to change his mind and the Kingspawn point board was somehow lost later on, Barnabas knew Garth would blame him and be right for doing so.
“Bollocks.” Barnabas cleared his throat and started pulling on the King’s Will particulate that Arcade City literally seethed with. The air thickened until he was surrounded by a swarm of interested gnats and the King directed a funnel of them onto and then into the liberated circuit board, willing the atomic-sized machines to make a series of changes.
The work was over in a matter of seconds. King’s Will disappeared and Barnabas Blake tucked Garth’s rucksack back the way it’d been. Then, because he was no fool and Nickels was an untrusting sport, spent several long minutes arranging the scene so things would appear as if he’d tripped or otherwise crashed uncaringly into his traveling companion’s stuff.
“There.” Barnabas said cheerily, wiping his hands theatrically. “All done. Now,” here, his tone turned truly excited, “Now to see about my upcoming guests. Can’t have the same thing happening the next time they come knocking, oh no I can’t. Nickels would find meaning in it and God help me, I think I’d kill him right there on the spot.”
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only vanished in a blackened squib of light.
***
Garth hooted and hollered in mindless enjoyment as he chased after the buck galloping and snorting his way to imagined freedom. The damn thing was making him work for his supper, that was for certain. Hunting the monster deer with anything less than a fucking bazooka was making for a serious workout; though the beastie currently scrabbling it’s way up a very nearly sheer wall of rock, moss and trees like it did this kind of shit all day and all night had thirty points on it’s rack of horns, making it a venerable veteran in these here parts.
Garth’s keen eye put the huffing, puffing slab of meat upwards of five hundred pounds.
Lugging that fucker -along with his hammer- back to camp was going to be a sonofabitch. By the time he made it back, Garth wagered he’d be hungry enough to eat everything down to the horns and tail, leaving Barnie with that hilarious bent out of joint expression he got on his mug all the damn time.
“So worth it, though!” Garth huffed and puffed and snorted and swore up and down that the very next time he had time, he was going to institute a really frickin’ serious regimen of cardio, because fuck feeling like a fatass.
Garth cursed as his latest swarm of gear-shuriken sank deep into trees, missing the animal as it disappeared over the rise. “Sonofabitch!”
The ex-SpecSer captain let out another whoop of excitement and clambered up the mossy rock wall skillfully. With all the impending crap waiting to drop down on him from on high, hunting this majestic animal truly was shaping up to be a lot of fun. Another burst of happiness on his lips, it was quickly stolen from him as an unfortunate placement of his right foot at the top of the wall sent him tumbling ass over teakettle down the other side of the embankment.
Garth absorbed the sounds of breaking tree branches, letting out the usual assortment of ooofs and ouches as he tumbled merrily to the ground, worrying more about the deer than himself; if that monster of fresh barbecue was gone and all he had to show for his efforts was a pile of bruises, a single, slightly pulverized rabbit and some bent-to-shit metal arms …the dour look on Barnabas’ face was too easily imagined.
Just as easily imagined was him punching that look right off the blacksmith’s ugly mug.
Garth picked himself up off the ground, taking a deep whiff of the ancient forest’s earthy aroma as he did so.
Yeah, no one’d been this way in a long, long time. The place felt like Mirkwood, all gloamy and quiet save for trees creaking in an unseen wind. Reminding himself to keep an eye out for Nazgul and orcs, Garth took a minute to check out the condition of his gear; though the arms had been crafted using King’s Will and the finest copper, brass and iron a gearhead corpse could ever hope to provide, he had fallen thirty feet through a copse of trees. Luckily, they were in fine working condition, which was a happy occasion; again, Barnabas’ smug disposition should he come back to camp with busted gear would be unbearable.
Taking stock of his location, Garth’s eyes fell on a naturally made ramp of fallen trees. Four massive oaks had collapsed at the top of the wall, allowing safe passage for anyone looking to not bounce their way down like a dufus. Uber-Bambi had hit that natural-made ramp like a champ, undoubtedly using this go-to method of escape from predators on a regular basis.
“Crafty.” Moving to clean the thin shirt he wore free of dirt and … foresty-gunk, Garth decided to chuck the damn thing away.
It wasn’t like there was anyone around to catch sight of the mobile tattoos on his upper body and besides all that, odds were solid the thing’d come off one of Barnabas’ melter-bound corpses. Already clad as he was in the inner workings of dead gearheads, wearing a dead man’s clothes might seem like a terribly small distinction to make, but dammit, it was one he was gonna make today.
Dappled sunlight glinted sharply off the burnished metal arms. Garth closed his eyes and breathed deep, feeling the forest around him. In a place like this, it was too easy to forget … everything.
It was calm and peaceful and so bloody quiet you could literally hear the trees whispering to themselves in droning Entish.
If only it were possible to forget that there was no sun, there was no rain to make all the trees grow to the majestic heights they’d achieved and there was no feasible explanation for the breeze in which they swayed, it was almost perfectly serene.
“Now would be the time for a Nazgul to show up on a skeletal horse. Or maybe Ash, running from a possession-cloud.” Garth chuckled, then took another deep breath, straining to catch even the faintest and most tentative of secretive ‘don’t look this way, I’m totally not your food’ motions; Big Bad Bambi had to be still around, and dammit, if that fat bastard took even a single step, he’d be ready. It’d be gear-shuriken zipping through the air like no one’s business and then dinnertime!
God, the forest was quiet. The ex-Specter was willing to bet his right nut and at least half of his ridiculous fortune –which he’d probably never have a chance to spend a single another dime of - that there wasn’t an old-growth forest like this anywhere else on dirty Old Earth. If only there was some way to let the rest of Humanity thrill to this ancient wonder!
“Hell,” Garth whispered to himself as he drank in the bone-jarring silence, “I bet there’s nothing like this anywhere else in the Universe anymore. At least, no human world.”
Another deep breath and even the gentle whirring sounds of his mechanically-clad arms faded. There was just the slow, steady susurration of wind blowing through the trees, the occasional creek of wood, the relaxing scent of old earth rising up from the ground…
Beneath it all, a whirring, a sharp, nasty whirring nothingness that shredded his sudden peace and calm to bits, flinging him against the wall in abrupt, shocked fear, eyes wide. The ex-Specter gasped, pressed his face against the cool stone.
What in the fuck was that shit? That … sharp-toothed, razor-edged nothingness had cropped up a few times when he’d closed his eyes, and it was … relentless. It wanted to grind him into nothing. It was the thing that’d … frightened The Eye so long ago, frightened what was supposed to’ve been an emotionless program so badly that it’d either erased itself or shut itself down.
