Donald “Donny” Cohen…
Obedient son…
Loving brother…
Loyal friend…
‘…and utter schmuck,’ Donny thought as he considered what would be written on his tombstone.
He let go of the left door as he exited the building where he and Frank operated their lacklustre agency from, a small part of him hoping that the idiot behind him would walk into said barrier as it swung back.
As Frank walked into view—depressingly unscathed—the man stretched his arms out wide, the trench coat in his right hand nearly brushing the pavement below him as he did so. Donny’s long-time partner then smiled from ear to ear as he let his face bathe in the afternoon sunlight.
Frank took in an exaggerated breath, then, releasing it out in a near laugh, he asked, “You smell that, Donny? …you know what that is?”
Donny just rolled his eyes. There were a hundred and one things that his partner could have been refereeing to—the most noticeable of which being the prevalent amount of faeces scattered along the road in front of their building, horse and…other varieties, but he had been on his feet all day and was just too tired to be snarky.
“Money,” he answered, the sigh of surrender in his voice exaggerated.
“Damn right!” Frank replied, not listening to him at all.
“Smells more like horseshit,” the boy walking behind the two of them bluntly commented.
Frank turned, but rather than barking at the kid, he paused a moment, then, realising he had no way to retort the accurate observation, especially not with the oppressive heat making everything more…evident, the man merely nodded his head to the side as he admitted, “…yeah, that too,” before turning back around to remerge himself in whatever delusion he had been awoken from.
The trio then made their way to the right, walking around to the back of the building hosting their office to a rather unkempt storage facility. One of the reasons they had set up so far from their home ground and not in some more business-friendly local was thanks to this area of the city having such services. With the limit on available land, it was a rare thing that some of it would be spared just for people’s things, even with the money involved—and there was money in it, sure enough, their monthly rent evidence enough of that—but their need was such that they were held hostage to that need.
Hostage to the Beast, to be more specific.
It required the effort of both he and Frank to pull open the large wooden doors to the makeshift outbuilding, though rather than revealing horses or anything that would be pulled by such creatures, inside the building lay the large monstrosity of a mechanised vehicle that he and Frank used in their profession.
Theirs as in belonging to Frank and him, but really, it was Donny’s alone. His partner, the overgrown child that he was, would have all the vigour and interest in the world when it came to matters that excited him, but when it came to the actual effort involved in seeing out his infatuations, it would ultimately be left to Donny to ensure that the real work got done. The maintenance, the repairs, the constant need for cleaning—Donny also had to drop more than a fair share of what money they brought in on various bribes to what military engineers would even bother to give him the time of day just to teach him how to care for the blasted thing, the knowledge normally restricted to them, the government, and the more established agencies.
Donny cast a look to the boy, then. Much like him, the Beast had been another of Frank’s bright ideas. And just like the kid, it had proven itself, for the most part, a good one, despite how much it annoyed Donny to admit such, the machine at least having long ago payed for itself and the troubles it brought. Not enough to change their lot in life, not by far, but enough so that to not have it and the convenience it provided was near unimaginable now.
Still, as Frank clapped his hands together to remove the ever-present grime that seemed to permeate the area, a self-satisfied grin plastering itself across his face as the man no doubt envisioned the piles of money that he always promised would one day begin rolling in, Donny could not help but to once again question why he had ever thrown his lot in with the perpetual child.
“Nice truck,” the boy said.
“It is, isn’t it?” Frank agreed as he gave Donny an even wider grin. “Won’t find anything like it outside of the army. Got it from a mad bastard years back; retired vet.”
Donny mentally corrected his partner’s gross abbreviation; it had been said bastard’s kids that they had bought it from, the brother and sister quick to rid themselves of it the first chance they got. Donny had no idea how their father, a retired veteran and former military engineer, had managed it, the military rarely allowing any amount of resource to slip through their greedy fingers, but the man had managed to leave with one of their large supply trucks, a vehicle meant for transporting troops and ammo to the field of combat and over long distances with surety and speed.
“Normally, the thing would be an eight-metre long, rolling mass of wood and metal, but the old vet had apparently gone mad as a loon,” Frank explained as he walked around to the passenger’s side, ‘ripped out…you going to be driving?”
Donny looked at his partner, confused by his question. Seeing that Frank was not looking at him, he looked over to the boy who had gone around to the driver’s side for some reason.
“Oh,” the boy started, “you drive on the left?”
“There a reason we wouldn’t?” Donny asked.
“Americans drive on the right. My world’s Americans.”
“Any particular reason why?”
“They hate the British.”
“And that relates to driving how, exactly?”
“How would I know, I’m Irish.”
“No one likes a braggart,” Frankie Sullivan quipped, the man’s pride in the shared racial heritage another of his traits that eternally annoyed Donny. Sure, prizing one’s history was one thing, but there were limits. It was not as if Frank really did anything to be Irish—‘other than drink himself rotten every chance he got and chasing after anything in a skirt, and even the Irish could not lay claim to that habit,’ Donny thought as he felt the flask within his inner pocket jostle—so it was pretty much the equivalent of him being proud of having blue eyes or ginger hair.
But, despite the man’s humorous tone, Franky and Donny shared a serious look, that odd bit of trivia the kid offered beyond the both of them and further antagonising his discomfort at the kid’s…whatever he was trying to pull with these insane stories.
The boy crawled into the back seat of the large cab before the two moved to take their own seats up front—Donny behind the wheel, because he would be damned if he let Frank and his child-like nature drive them all straight to the nearest hell, and Frank in the passenger’s side because the man would be damned if he offered to put in any form of effort without being assured of getting something in return for it, the man immediately assuming the snooze position as soon as his backside hit the leather, pulling his hat over his eyes to complete the image.
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“The old vet had gone mad from some event,” Frank continued. No doubt a survivor of one of the of the military’s many glorious and absolutely not cocked-up engagements, at least that was their guess given what Donny and Frank had been able to dig up on the man, a madness that had inspired him to not only wrest the vehicle from the military’s grasp but to then also augment it almost beyond recognition.
“The man’s kids had claimed that their father had some strange idea of turning the machine into a home…no, a castle on wheels. ‘For when the towers crumbled’, they had said.”
Both Donny and Frank had heard of and had seen stranger things in their lives, but the Beast, a full metal automotive, was definitely on the list. Not near the top, but definitely on it.
Gone were the wooden panels, a standard practice to both save on costs and a way to ensure the vehicle’s lightness and speed, each replaced by a small fortune in precious steel. The front cab, originally meant to seat two, now having been replaced with a larger design meant for a family of six, with a small door in the back of it that would allow entry to the rear of the vehicle, a rear that would only ever have sported a large tarp for cover over a fixed trailer meant to bear a dozen soldiers to and from the battlefield, normally, now likewise covered in that valuable metal.
Frank had been in awe when they had first looked inside of it, a small lodging having been made within. All Donny had felt upon seeing the tiny bunk bed, kitchen and jury-rigged toilet was that the entire scene all seemed rather depressing in its desperate innovation.
All that time and effort just so the man and his family could run away from everything.
The engine was more or less the same as it had originally been, its complexity and rarity ensuring that its replacement or modification would remain limited if not outright impossible. Donny did not know enough about the technology to confirm anything, one way or the other, the device nearly more mysterious than the fantastic things he often dealt with. The six wheels supporting the whole thing had then been modified to now sport two, thick, military-grade tires each, side by side, their support and the vehicle’s weight ensuring that it could withstand even the most extreme of forces attempting to knock it over.
And all of that now covered in a slathering of Frank’s favourite Irish green.
He and Frank had initially planned to try and return some of its original form, possibly reselling some of that unneeded metal back to the army in the hope of somewhat filling the hole that buying the damnable thing had left in their then-near-empty combined pocket, but an unfortunate encounter with a Matagot shortly after their acquisition had convinced them to keep it as is, their lives having only been spared thanks to the nearly not thick enough walls of the rolling fortress.
Even now you could still see the poorly repaired gashes where the thing had raked its unnatural claws across its frame.
Donny winced as Frank slammed his side’s door unnecessarily as the man entered the vehicle. He had warned Frank time and again not to do so, but it was like trying to get through a wall by headbutting it. Sure, it could be done, but not without giving yourself a massive headache in the process.
Closing his own door, quietly, Donny righted himself, then reached for a handle located next to the steering wheel and twisted, pulling it out then ramming it back home, repeating the action several times more as he roused the machine into waking, the engine roaring to life a moment later, inciting several hounds within the surrounding area to begin barking as it did, the creatures far from used to the unnatural sound despite having heard it regularly over the past several years it had been in their possession.
“You want me to close the garage’s doors,” the boy spoke out from one of the back seats.
“The what doors?” Donny asked, never having heard that word before.
“The door’s outside,” replied the kid.
“Oh, uh, no.”
There was no need to close the doors as they departed, their small partition of the large storage facility only ever containing their vehicle.
With that final note, and with a manoeuvrability that one would not attribute to the large machine, they pulled out into the road, turning left twice before they reached the main thoroughfare that would lead them to their faraway destination. They rode like that for a while in silence, with only the sound of Frank lighting a cigarette for both himself and Donny as they did.
Eventually, having grown bored, Frank asked, “So, kid? How you finding our fair world?” further entertaining the boy’s strange story.
“Tell you when I see it.”
Sensing the snark in his response, Frank shot back, “Our city, then?”
“Very nineteen-twenty slash forty-ish,” the boy responded nonchalantly, having now mimicked Frank in opting for the snooze position, only doing so by laying himself fully down along the seat he was occupying.
Though long enough to accommodate his height, the seat was barely wide enough to accommodate a normal person’s girth let alone the boy’s and Donny heard the kid thrusting out his hand whenever the truck had to slow to prevent himself from falling off of it.
“Meaning?” Frank asked.
“Nineteen-forties? Mobsters and stuff.”
“Gonna need a little more, Kid?”
“Honestly, that’s all I know. Movies rarely tend to focus on anything more than set dressing and grizzled detectives where that period’s concerned.”
“Movies being?”
“Television, moving pictures.”
“Yeah, kid, you’re really gonna have to start replying with more than single sentences,” Donny chided.
“We’re more advanced than you lot, we can capture pictures and sounds onto…thin films of…chemical stuff…”
“Chemical stuff?” Donny asked. He had some clue of what the boy was talking about, the city’s record keepers having such technology, but the things they produced never moved. Not without involving the unnatural.
“Film; A strip of material allowing for the capture and storage of very small pictures. Shining a light through one of them allows for the projection of a large picture onto a screen. Combine that with motion…about thirty-ish frames a second, I think it was, and you get the illusion of movement. Each of those pictures being slightly different than the one before it, I meant to add.”
Though Frank was the more open of the two, Donny could see even he was having trouble digesting what the boy was telling them. Not because of what the kid had said, but in how he had so casually said it. The story of being from another world was laughable at best, but the sheer confidence and ease with which the boy continued to offer up such confusing tidbits of information to add to his fable started to wear away at Donny and his partner’s incredulity while also, contradictorily, further inciting it.
Admittedly, of the two, Frank was also the one handling it the best, but only because the man would accept that the moon was made of cheese if he thought there was enough money involved in doing so. But Donny would say this much, at least: If the kid was a nutter, he was a creative one.
“Tell me…Goodie was it?” Donny began, “I take it that means your world is supposed to be more advanced than ours?”
“Literally just said that,” the kid muttered, then replied,” About a hundred years about, yeah. But again, that’s comparing you to the nineteen-whatevers; if I bothered accounting for all the inconstancies I’ve seen so far, then who knows?”
“Okay…well, tell me, what with you lot being so privileged and all, why’d the Department of Higher Understanding let you go? You said you were with them, right? And that’s not the type of opportunity that even those idiots would let slip them by.”
“They didn’t. I gave them all that I had to offer, which was next to nothing on account of my balls having only dropped yesterday and me getting out of diapers the day before. I don’t know shit, to put it simply,” the kid explained, his voice still maintaining that apathetic tone he had kept since meeting them. “Well, no, I know a lot of shit, just not how any of it works. And like you, they treated most of what I said as being a load of bull, even though they were the ones to bring me here in the first place, so it wasn’t like there was much reason to keep me around. Couldn’t even do the isekai thing what with you lot already having water pumps and gunpowder.”
The cigarette between Donny’s lips drooped as he took in the last of the boy’s nonsensical words. “Gunpowder? Now you’re beginning to stretch things,” he stated disdainfully.
He saw the kid give him a dismissive look before stating, “Charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre; hardly….”
The boy’s words were cut off as the truck came to a sudden halt, the sound of swearing issuing from the other side of the road from a pair of carters as their horses nearly bolted from the sound of the truck’s screeching response to the unexpected action.
Of everything the boy had ever said, his carelessness in revealing the secret of gunpowder was the most damning; while hardly proof of him being from another world, no one from this one, in their right mind or not, would have ever dared to do so, especially so casually.
Humanity’s grasp upon the new world was questionable at best and one way the powers that ruled over them ensured that the common man did not compromise that tenuous hold was by keeping anything that could promote dissent and rebellion among the masses away from said masses. Weapons, questionable entertainments…hell, even medicine and food if it came to it. Gunpowder was one such element. One at the very top of that long, long list.
That said, the more people who knew a secret, the harder it was to keep said secret, and over the years he and Frank had gotten enough hints to be able to guess at to the contents of that surprisingly simple recipe, enough to know that the boy knew something that he should not have.
“I assume there was a reason for that?” the boy asked as he picked himself up from the floor, the still careless tone in his voice indicating he did not really care one way or the other.
“Reason?” Frank barked, “You bet your damn boots there’s a reason! Kid, do you have any idea of just…”
A bright flash lit up the cab, blinding all within, to disappear just as suddenly as it had arrived.
Frank swore up a storm while asking, ‘Where the hell did that come from?! Donny?!”
“To the right; the towers?!”
“Ya sure?! It seemed more to the left?!” Frank Questioned.
“I don’t know, I can’t see a bloody thing! The kid?! He was looking at it?!”
“Yeah, straight at it! I’m blind as a bat!” the boy yelled as he pressed the palms of his hands into his now useless eyes.
It took several minutes before any of them properly recovered, the sounds of the world outside little better than those inside as horses neighed, people screamed and cursed, and chaos abounded in consequence to the sudden flash.
Following those minutes was a moment of determined silence as Frank and Donny tried to locate the origin of that unexpected light.
“It must have been the towers,” Donny said.
“You sure? It looked as if it came from the left?”
“Yeah, your left, my right...must have been the towers? Yeah, it came from over there,” Donny declared as he pointed off into the distance, though the insecurity in that assumption was noticeably present in his voice. Both men then turned back to address the kid, the importance of what he had revealed to them too dangerous to ignore.
“Listen, Kid, what you told us…”
“Gunpow…,” the boy tried to interrupt.
“DON’T!” Frank screamed, “Don’t say it, don’t think it, don’t…”
Another, more muted flash bathed the area, reigniting the spark of chaos despite it blinding far fewer than before.
“GODS DAMNIT! I told you it was to the left,” Frank screamed.
“I know, I know!” Donny answered as he yanked on several levers and the large stick between him and his partner, the vehicle letting out a pained squeal as it began to reverse.
People around the truck began to shout at those inside it in a multitude of languages as they each pointed towards the source of the second flash.
Rolling down the window, Donny Screamed, “Yes, yes, we see it! Get out of the way!”
His reply did not go down well, but the people acquiesced, opening a space between the various carts around them enough that the large truck could squeeze through, the Beast then roaring out a metal cacophony as it began to race towards whatever lay ahead.