Recorded statement taken during interrogation conducted in Field Marshall Daktor’s Command Lines outside the Western City, 2nd Moon waxing, Year of the Towers 802:
The night of the miracle. A clockwork walked in alone, out of a death storm, wearing clothes. It’s like saying a star fell out of the sky into your hand and told you that you had three wishes. It sure was a miracle. Now, all these years past, folks dress up like mummers in costume and celebrate the festival about that night, like it was a made-up thing, a made-up story. It sure wasn’t made up. I was there. And if you were there, in the cantina that night, you’d know it was not the thing that mattered, it was the afterwards that mattered. What it did to you. It changed you. It changed everyone in the room. It plunged you into a furnace, and you were either tempered or turned into ash. It altered people the same way it changed the floor of the cantina, turning the garbage into ash or hardening sand into glass.
Back then, Big Crunch’s Cantina was the world’s end, the furthest you could travel up the valley from the ocean. And the world’s end was still retreating back then. But since then, towers have been pulled down, and the poison and the storms have closed back in. I know I look old, but not that old, right? But all of us from the cantina that night had something done to us. I said we were changed. One way was that we all seemed to live much longer. The only ones that passed on since then were the Camomile brothers, and that’s understandable since, on that day, they were already old.
The reason everyone was in Big Crunch’s Cantina that night was because a storm was on the way, and the cantina was the only safe refuge. The edge of the world would sometimes drift back. The poisonous air would close in with storms of ice and sand. The cantina was built out of a bunker. When a storm hit, you could end up spending a night or three in the cantina, and Big Crunch would give anyone shelter, thieves or reavers even; he would disarm and let them sleep against the back wall. Big Crunch had always been a fair beast.
The day before, three Wayfarer kids came in and said the winds were coming. They were in our area on a re-supply run and had seen the cloud sign. We all asked them to be very clear, and they were “clouds like ripped rags low in a line following the ridge.” Yep, that did it. Everyone passed the word and prepared for a storm. The orangutan pilot was last in and confirmed it was coming.
That night, we had our fair share of strangers.
One was an exiled Sister. She had been stripped of her robes and had shown up in front of the cantina wearing not much more than her green tattoos and a sunburn. She was older, with that flabby skin of being well fed then well starved. With her had come three chitinous guard droids. The kind that looked like bug-men. Slip-plated bipeds with ugly beetle heads. The Sister told a story of being removed from her Cloistered outpost after the ambassador’s troops had taken it.
We weren’t sure if we could believe her. Back then, the ambassador had only taken the land east of Central City, the City of Baal and the north coast. All those things were a long way away from us. It took over fifty days to reach Central City, twice as long beyond that to the ocean. None of us went there or were aware of the true threat of The People’s Army that was to come.
Our problem, or her luck, depending on how you looked at it, was that Big Crunch believed in the Sisters. If not in her specific story, he did still believe in the Great Reclamation and the Sisters of the Cloistered and the Brothers of the Conclave and their church. The fact that she had recently been a Sister was good enough for Big Crunch to let her sit at one of his tables for free.
Others in the cantina that night, along with the Wayfarer kids and the defrocked Sister, were the usual folks. Big Crunch and Casket, of course, and the five of us: the pilot, Jazzy, the Camomile brothers, and me.
I was in the area because I had tracked the Camomile brothers there, and I intended to rid them of their prize blaster. Once we were locked in for the duration of the storm, I planned to take that blaster from them in a card game.
Big Crunch had once hired me to help them with the door lock of this very cantina. After knocking around the wastelands for a long time with the old man, I had become pretty good at busting into places. I never got as good at fighting as my old man; well, I got good enough to get out of scrapes, mind you. But the old man never taught anyone anything. All you did was accompany him like a dog, and if you were lucky enough and wily enough to live, that’s how you learned. If you survived, you learned. Traps and locks were one of the things I picked up along the way.
He used to tell me I was his eighth son, the only one with the red eyes and the red hair, and the only one who lived. He had won me in a dice game. I guess I had something in my makeup that was good enough to survive with the old man out on the waste. I snuck and crawled and scurried through the tight places and learned to predict the switches, the mazes, and the locks and outlast the old man. He said my red eyes gave us just enough of a jump, a head start or a bad feeling on something that we could avoid.
Funny thing was, after all the gunfights, scrapes, and brawls we went through, what finally killed him was a little bad water. Our sniffer had stopped functioning properly, and we didn’t know it. We thought it had passed; it had beeped its little green light, but later, we guessed the water was bad with stuff that we couldn’t see or smell—possibly been poisoned by the black and yellow flower. It was invisible, but later, we found the black and yellow flower warning symbols they had put up in the before times not too far away. We should have had the sniffer calibrated, but we were long on trade credits and longer from any outpost. He took real sick and was too old by then to make it. I was young and healthy enough to pull through. Once I got my strength back, I buried him in the sand and headed in the valley. I had had enough of the world’s end and probing for vaults. I wanted civilization.
The cantina was owned, or possessed, by Big Crunch and Casket. Although it had gone through a few owners like places like that always did, with the tougher coming along, taking it from the weaker. No one would be taking it from Big Crunch. Big Crunch was a lizard man. When I showed up, he had me fix the doors on the cantina, and that had been no problem. The only locks I couldn’t beat were the top-tier ones that had their own intelligence. Crunch had collected plenty of heavy tools, and the fine mechanical hands and arms on Casket were a marvel. We had the doors fixed and operating in one full moon.
Casket was a black-feathered bird brain about my height, about five and a half feet tall, who was half crazy. Big Crunch said Casket was a vault find. Lots of creatures like him were scatterbrained. Some interrupted download most likely triggered as soon as the vault was opened. Crunch said he found him already awake inside a small casket-shaped case, just sitting up a “peep-peepin.” A little baby bird, all legs and neck, sitting in the mess of what was left of his egg. In the next casket over was a complete set of mechanical arms, harness, and goggles, so he grabbed both caskets and ran before the alarms stopped screaming and everything was locked down.
Big Crunch rescued Casket that day and kept him. Not like a pet, though. Even though Casket wasn’t all there, he kept him more like a brother. It was just lucky Big Crunch had found him. Other tomb raiders would have given the bird a few weeks to grow and then would have eaten it and cut up the mechanicals. Big Crunch took care of the little fella, fed him, let him grow.
Big Crunch was another story. He had a long rip of a scar that ran in a cleft up over his left eye. He was a tad taller and far broader than a normal man. All muscle and bone and lizard speed. He had a hide that was as rough and coarse as sand. Even his colouring was the same as the sand. His head was the top of a wedge that seemed to grow out of his shoulders, a mouth with tusks, a flat nose, and deep yellow eyes. He only had scars where his ears used to be. The only way to beat Big Crunch would be to catch him sleeping, and since he had found Casket, that would never happen.
Bird brains rarely slept, and when Casket did, Big Crunch dreaded it cuz the bird would often wake up stark raving mad. The first time it happened, he thought the bird had “reverted,” you know, became a wild bird again, an animal without the machine interface for a human intelligence. Big Crunch figured there may be a chance he was simply confused. There was a person’s intelligence in there somewhere, or part of a person’s intelligence. He just thought maybe it had been forgotten or the connection had been broken.
When it happened, Casket would wake up and hit the ground shrieking. Bird screams, mind you, animal noises, not the electronic voice from the neck harness. And he wouldn’t be using his arms either like he forgot how. They hung down loose at his sides off the ring around his neck, metal limbs hanging loose as he ran around squawking.
“Rrrawk, Kaw, Kaw, rawk!”
He would bang and smash into everything as if he was trying to escape to someplace, and Big Crunch would crash around after him, trying to catch him, yelling, “Stop! Wait! Let me tell you WHO you are! Let me tell you WHERE you are!”
Big Crunch was too damn big to be crashing around inside a room, and he moved quick. I’ll tell you, it became a dangerous place. Casket moved faster on those long legs. Big Crunch would finally catch him, hold him, and pet him. He’d mutter to him, soft and low. He’d tell him about all the things they had done together. About what they did this one time. About what they did this other time. It would take a fair bit of time, and it would eventually work. But it seemed like Casket still never remembered everything.
Big Crunch built a “memory wall.” Behind the bar, he put up a slab of old black steel written on with a soft white stone. On it, Big Crunch had written in his heavy-handed scrawl, “A DiaMeter is… A ResisTor is… A CapAcitor is…” and then Casket’s delicate writing took over full of letters mixed with numbers and symbols that no one could decipher. After one of his spells, when Big Crunch got Casket calmed down, the bird would sit there on a stool, leaning his skeleton metal elbows on the bar and stare at that writing.
The other regular in the cantina that day of the storm was Jazzy. She was an old game of chance girl from way back. She could slip cards and tip dice and make it look magical. She had started out when she was young as a pick-pocket sleight-of-hand shell game girl in Central City. By the time she was in her teen years, she had built an invisible network to skim and smuggle without any enforcers or protection. She specialized in both the small and secret. I met her when we were both kids on my one time in Central City. I don’t have to tell you the old man was a smuggler from way back. She paid me to bust them into a few places they hadn’t been able to bust into. I developed a crush for Jazzy back when we were kids that never left.
The time she spent in the cantina these days was to make sure any games ran clean. In the slow times, she was gone out on the wastes. She had recently started growing tobacco leaves. Only way I could figure it there had to be a shallow hole in a cleft or swamp pan where the brackish water had started clarifying. Where she got the parent tobacco plant or seed from, no one knew. Both Big Crunch and the orangutan pilot bought her tobacco, and they were glad for the trade.
It was nice when Jazzy came to the cantina. That day, she was sitting with the three Wayfarer kids. She had them mesmerized with her sleight of hand. She had cards and trade chips appearing out of thin air. The desert kids had never seen anything like it. She had them amazed and laughing in their quiet, shy way.
The Wayfarer kids. Two girls and a solid-looking boy. One of the girls was already exceptionally tall, a mutie. She kept the middle of her torso wrapped and seemed awkward in moving. The other girl, a tiny one, kept her short-cloaked hood up and wore a high metal collar that went a long way to hide an animal muzzle. Something was also out of sorts with her hands as the other kids had to do some things for her. The boy was exceptionally stocky but looked pure to me. He did the talking for them. They wouldn’t have had anyone hassling them in the cantina anyways, but they wouldn’t have known that until they had arrived and taken a good look at Big Crunch. It was his place, and he was far more mutated or beast-like than anyone. No one would dare bother a mutie or a beast face in his cantina.
The orangutan pilot had been around before and had even been in a lot of card games, but he always went broke early on. He barely ever spoke. He flew his glider up and down the ridge carrying mail and small trade supplies and would only show up in the cantina when a letter brought him in. He kept to himself, so much so no one had ever remembered his name, most likely couldn’t speak his name even if he remembered one, probably just as scatterbrained as the bird brain Casket. To sit and play cards seemed to be an automatic thing for him, but then it was like he couldn’t remember how to. As if during the hand, he would forget the rules or even where he was. I told Jazzy maybe someone had just trained a pilot monkey how to play cards. Jazzy had thought about that, and then she thought maybe playing cards was an old memory, a memory from the before times that was locked in the orangutan’s mind.
The cantina was the safe place to be, and if anyone was new to the area and a storm was coming, then they were told to head there. Big Crunch was proud of his cantina, and he had the right to be. Nothing like it could be found anywhere outside the cities. He kept it clean, cozy, safe, and well-stocked. He had old banners and landscape pictures on the walls people had traded him for. The pictures were of things never seen before. One picture was of black rock that was as flat as water and had clockwork carts sitting on it between straight painted lines. The carts were in sleek shapes constructed of gleaming glass and smooth metal in rich colours. In plush interiors were healthy-looking people wearing sharp clothes. Smiling people. In the sky in some of the pictures were little marks Big Crunch said were birds. Birds that flew enough to fill the sky, at least, that’s what the pictures showed.
The night of the storm, we had all settled in for a long stay. The wind had kicked up, and it added the haze of dust into the smoke of the oil lamps.
I can hear Big Crunch now, walking back from shutting the doors, his footfalls thudding into the sand, mumbling, “May the old ones save them.”
Storms would drive the sand against the doors with a steady hiss. Big Crunch always waited as long as he possibly could before closing those doors. He never wanted to lock anyone out, to condemn them to death. The vault had been built straight into the rock. Once the doors were shut, a hushed, cramped feel would fall over us.
It took three strong folks to even budge those doors. It wasn’t easy, but Casket and I could close them as long as I had the big pry bar. Big Crunch could move those doors by himself with the same effort it took a child to roll a toy.
In the narrow hallway that led to the vault doors, he had hung blast curtains to help keep out the dust and wind. The doors were only ever closed when a storm was coming, and with them shut, you’d get that closed in pressure feel. At the edge of your senses you’d have that little reminder that you were trapped, and it would wear on you after a while. Big Crunch thumped back down the hallway and brushed through the curtains on his way back to the bar.
Jazzy was dealing our game. The orangutan pilot had gone broke as usual and moved off to his own table but was still watching us play. The three Wayfarer kids had claimed their own table when they had first come in and were all pretty much slumped over, sleeping right where they sat. The ex-Sister and her three droids had their own table. She hadn’t stopped reading some book she had been carrying with her since sitting down with a tin of water.
Casket was where he always sat, at the end of the bar on a stool, doing what he always did, twitching and bobbing. No one had ever heard him speak. Other bird brains did, but not Casket. I had heard a giant bird brain speak in Central City. That bird had stood about nine feet tall, and it slung crates off the boats with its heavy machine arms like they weighed nothing at all. A computer voice had come from the harness around its neck, and it had sung a song while it worked. As a boy, it had mesmerized me.
The only sounds Casket made were the occasional mewing noises. Casket’s mechanical arms worked ok, though. The connecting rods were delicate, long, flat blades studded with miniature clockworks. Casket always wore his goggles. Big Crunch said a bird brain didn’t move right if it didn’t wear its goggles.
Big Crunch ran his cantina, traded Jazzy for tobacco, let clean gambling operate, watched over Casket, and collected anything to do with music and pictures from the before times. Big Crunch was known in the entire western end of the valley for giving better-than-fair price for anything to do with music from the before times.
Most of the music boxes and players that had survived were made of metal. Some of them might have had wood or cloth pieces at one time. Big Crunch wanted Casket and I to have a look at fixing them up proper. I didn’t have much hope, though. I saw a Wayfarer once that had made her own wind instrument out of a single piece of scarab shell. She said it had taken her many attempts and failures with many shells and then finally another year to carve and shape the one she had. With the music she played on it, she could make a nighttime fire out on the barrens suddenly peaceful and easy. Those old things Crunch had collected in the cantina were almost all junk, and I had no hope of fixing any of them.
There was one big player he had leaned up against the back wall. It was all busted-up parts and dried-out wood with a long tray on the front full of black and white switches meant to be pressed on. Some raider had drug it up to the cantina to trade with Big Crunch, and it hadn’t survived the journey very well. Casket had been working on that thing for quite some time, and it was still leaning up against the back wall in shambles.
Beside it was another strange machine. A smooth barrel with a flat side made out of glass and dead lights. “Wurlitzer” had been painted with a master’s skill across its face in gold that was now faded and flaking. It didn’t look like any type of music player to me. It looked more like a real pretty gun turret with a better chance of suddenly coming to life and blasting a hole in someone than making a song.
The one music box that did work was always kept out front on the bar right beside Casket. Out of the top of the box jutted a tall black metal flower. It was a clockwork-type player, more simplistic and easier to fix. Real simple metal parts to it, and not filled with tech. Easy to fix and trick back into life, like the mechanical parts in the blast door, screw gears and such, only much smaller.
Big Crunch, having come back from closing the doors, now stood behind his bar, in his usual spot, with his rag in his hand working a better shine into a mug and motioned to the bird. His voice was deep and raspy and always rumbled out of his neck like he had to force it. When he clenched his cigar between his tusks like he did now, his words also came with a little slur to them.
“Casket. Cheer things up a little. Time for some music.” He flicked his rag towards the player. Big Crunch wore leather clothes as thick as armour. They had to be like that, as anything else he wore wouldn’t last very long rubbing against his hide. The long kilt and vest was all he was ever able to wear when it was hot, and it was always hot back then around the cantina.
Casket bent below the bar and, with near reverence, brought out one of the black disks. He cradled it like an egg and eyeballed it through his goggles with one bugged-out eye, head twitching and jerking as he inspected it for dirt and scratches. To make the music box work Casket had fashioned a tiny mechanical sensor, about the size of a sliver, from a single needler bullet. The needle picked up the variations in the grooves from the black disk and made sounds that were magnified by the large black flower. The needle was very sensitive, and dust or scratches would damage it.
The disk passed the inspection of one googling eye, so keeping his metal fingers on the outer edge, he set the disk onto the player.
The Wayfarer kids had sat up expectantly. They’d probably never heard a music box before.
Casket lifted the sensor arm attached to the bottom of the metal flower and held it over the outside edge of the disk, and ever so gently lowered the needle. He cranked the spinner at the side of the player box, and the black disk began to turn. Sound filled the room, wailing at first like a ghost wind through a rock cut, and then the noises rose to become a woman singing.
She sang to us through the hiss of time from long ago. She had a dreamy, lilting way of singing. You could hear instruments being played too. Some like the shell instrument the Wayfarer had played with the sweet high sounds, and some with deeper sounds.
The lady on the black disk sang her song. Living words carried to us from a time long ago telling a story about Miss-new-or-leans.
She asked if you knew what it meant to miss Neworleans, and then her words would fade into the hiss. Only the music could be heard then, the hiss nearly overpowering them, too, as if the heavy weight of time would not be denied its change. Then her voice would come back to us, insistent, and she told us of a lady named Mississippi.
When this certain song was played in the cantina, it would often start up the usual debate about if Mississippi and Neworleans were ladies, places, or both.
Big Crunch was one of the few that felt it was both. “A place had a feel like a person like there was a spirit there,” he’d say, “so it could be both. The place and the spirit it held.” When he spoke like this, partaking of his lectures to us, he’d grunt his words at us around the cigar in his mouth, his head back a little, looking above at nothing in the maze of support beams while he polished a metal tankard.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I knew what Big Crunch meant. Sometimes, out in the wastes, you came across bad places. You could feel it. They held spirits. Some of them bad enough to kill.
The presence you felt in these places was mixed with luck. A fellow steps down into a bad trap that takes his life. The next fellow along finds a dead man, sees where not to step, and gains a nearly full canteen. You could feel invisible things in those dangerous places, like a gentle tap of wind on your shoulder. Luck could give you either the flat or the sharp of the blade.
I didn’t dwell much on magic or spirits and ghosts, even though I had felt their touch in mysterious places just like the others had. We had enough that we didn’t understand in the old dead technology that surrounded us. Was that woman trapped in the black disk just like a bird brain had a mind trapped in its neck ring? Or was it just the woman’s voice? Did they take her voice and lock it in there like the voices that bird brains spoke with? I didn’t understand how the woman from long ago could be singing to us, and if I thought too much about it, I would begin to worry, so I didn’t put myself into these conversations.
That was when the thing showed up on the second night of the storm, the second night of the card game when things had just started going my way. The Camomile brothers had run out of money, the storm hadn’t let up one iota, and that prize blaster had just been laid down on the pot.
I remember the air was beginning to turn a little sour, and my shoulders were starting to ache. I stretched, trying to loosen the kinks that had settled into my neck, and found my gaze was back on that sleek blue blaster that had just been placed at the center of the table.
I don’t have to tell you how rare a blaster was. A working blaster held some of the most advanced tech in the entire valley.
When the knocks came at the door, I glanced at my hand of cards as if the booming sounds had come from there.
In the background, there was a song on the player that had no singing to it. I could tell it was long past sunset by the way my head was aching from being far too long without sleep.
When the doors boomed, I looked down at my hand: a lover’s ace, sick twins, and a thrice of swords. The flip card up on the table was a black Gemini. I looked again at what Jazzy had just dealt me: the joker’s warlock that turned my weak straight into a shadow straight. Unbeatable.
The blaster was mine.
Boom… Boom… Boom…
The sound echoed and thudded down the length of the tunnel into our room.
There was absolutely nothing that could knock on blast doors like that.
But the strange thing was, everyone just kept on like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Sometimes things happen outside folks understanding of what “can” happen, and most people just ignore it. I’ve seen lots of creatures and folks die from that type of response.
My eyes flicked around the room. I took everything in. No change. The Wayfarer kids had all fallen back to sleep. Everyone was feeling warm and safe in a closed-in room, totally oblivious to something pounding on the vault doors.
Carrying on like nothing had happened. Watching their cards, snoozing, or keeping their low chatter.
But even when I was a kid, I had learned to pay attention. To always pay attention. The first thing the old man did when you took up with him was to iron the “not paying attention” right out of you.
I knew it was real, that I heard it, felt it.
The dilemma that froze up everyone’s mind was that it couldn’t happen. That sound couldn’t happen. And that’s why it was ignored because on the other side of the three-foot-thick doors was god’s anvil. Anything out there, right now, in that storm, was being hammered to death in a maelstrom of poisoned atmosphere, flying rock, and metal and sand.
So how was it someone, something, had just knocked on the door?
Couldn’t happen. So, it was ignored.
My body, my “awareness,” the part of myself that knew to move just before a hidden trap would crush, wouldn’t ignore it. My hands, my skin, burned and itched. I could feel every seam in my clothes. My fingertips had become electric. It was how I always responded to such situations. Situations of close death. It was something in me that had come along with my pink-red eyes and hair.
Some may have just considered it an explainable thing if they cared to think enough about it. A warped piece of metal, maybe, carried in the hurricane like a spear, to wedge against the door and wail away with a wind-driven rhythm, one, two, three times, to then be torn away.
That was possible. Extremely unlikely, though.
I waited. The Camomile brothers were watching me, wondering what was wrong, why I hadn’t seen their call with more credit chips, but I hadn’t moved and sat frozen with my right hand at my purse.
And it happened again. The exact same knocks. The exact same pauses.
‘Boom… Boom… Boom…’
And this time, everyone became still.
Big Crunch was the first to respond, and he reached over and gently lifted the little fancy pipe up off of the black disk to stop the music. Then he said to me, all casual-like as if he was asking if I wanted another mead.
“Now, what’s that?” The words were mumbled around the cigar. He was a cool one, that’s for sure. Why he had looked at me then, I’m not sure. He usually spoke to Casket. But there was also a mutual respect between Big Crunch and myself. I think because of everyone in that room, I was the only one that was like him and had survived for a considerable time on his own out on the wastes.
“Wh…” My words stuck in my throat. My throat was dry. I swallowed and tried again. “Well, someone’s out there. And…”
The next series of knocks rolled over my words. Louder this time. Real loud.
“BOOM… BOOM… BOOM.” Dust drifted off the beams in three little showers.
Whoever, whatever it was, they were getting mighty impatient.
“… and you had better let them in, or they’re gonna take them doors right off, by the sounds of it.”
Crunch dropped his rag, strode out from behind the bar, and bolted his big frame through the blast curtains draped over the tunnel entrance.
“But what can do that? Nothing can live in that...” His words drifted back to us from down the tunnel.
You could feel the fear in the room. Jazzy leaned towards me.
“He’s not letting that in?” She was holding the cards too tightly, bending them. I eased the deck from her hand.
“Whatever it is, it’s gonna wreck those doors, Jazzy. He’s got no choice. Maybe it can be reasoned with...”
“We’re all like bugs in a can in here. There is no place to fight from. No place to run to.”
“Whatever that is out there, all that is too late,” I said.
“Torpedo, come on down with me,” Big Crunch called out.
“BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!” The last knock was accompanied by a squeal of metal. It made me wince. I knew exactly how hard it was to fix those doors. More little puffs of dust drifted down from above.
Then, in one fluid movement, the chitinous guard droids spooled up out of sleep mode, stood, and began unclipping their rifles from their back rigs.
Before they drew their rifles, I was up and had the Camomile’s blaster pointed at them. “I think I’ll stay here and make sure no one gets any bad ideas!” I hollered back to Big Crunch.
The droids stopped pulling their rifles.
“My old man always said, ‘Never trust a machine cuz they’ll get you killed without a single worry.’” For the moment I was able to hold them from doing something unpredictable or rash by keeping the blaster on them.
“Make them sit back down and put the rifles away,” I said to the ex-Sister. “They’re going to get everyone in here killed.”
“I can’t. I no longer control them. Since the soldiers took my mask and robes, I can no longer command them. I don’t even know why they followed me here.”
I kept the blaster on them. The old man’s gun in my leg holster would have had a hole in one of them big enough to put your arm through, but only one of them. And having said that, it could also put a hole into anything in Big Crunch’s cantina. It could punch a deep cavity into vault doors, and it could also kill someone in here or sever a beam and collapse some of the structure. Also, it was about as quick as a toolbox full of wrenches.
But the little blaster was another story. The problem was I had picked it up so quickly that I didn’t know what it was set for. It could have needled the drones, froze them, shocked them, or whatever, but the one thing with the blaster, I knew I could take all three. It had self-selective tech in it, and it was extremely quick. If the blaster was fully functional, it would have already scanned them and it would have selected the most appropriate projectile. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I pulled the trigger, and neither did they.
“Ok then.” I twitched the blaster. “All rifles on the bar.”
They remained motionless, their rifles half-drawn. I realized they had started doing that thing where they communicate with each other through the air. They were calculating the odds of disarming me. Or possibly sacrificing one of them to disarm me. Once I gave them the initial threat, their individual computer brains couldn’t think any further than that. Anything beyond instinct, they had to put their heads together and calculate. Much more dangerous. Just like traps. Singular, they were easy. If you came across intelligent traps that could work together as a group – deadly.
The closest droid had his head tilted at the blaster and was scanning the indicator switches.
“There’s just never nothin’ ever worse than gettin’ stuck on a good idea in the wrong damn place.” That was my old man’s voice in my head again. I always knew shit was going down when my old man’s voice spoke up.
I could hear Big Crunch unwinding the screw lock on the massive doors.
“There isn’t time for your crap,” I said. I stepped around the table and punched the closest droid in the face. Hit it as hard as I could.
I don’t ever remember actually trying to punch a droid before. I don’t recommend it. The blow didn’t do much more than turn its head, and for a brief moment, I thought I had broken my hand. It tilted its head at me and dialled down those big bug-eye optics like they do when they really look hard at something.
The sudden rush of pain caused my breath to hiss out between my teeth, but now, at least, I had their attention.
“There will be no gunfights in this closed-in space. Like I said…” And I motioned with the blaster again to the bar. “Lay your rifles – on – the bar. Now,” I said and tensed my finger on the trigger.
The one I punched focused on my hand, made a clicking noise, and then they moved and laid their rifles on the bar.
We heard the blast doors swing open, and a gust of wind kicked through the curtains, causing them to flap and kick. I heard Crunch thud against the doors as they were flung open and then heard him grunt as he hit the ground. I wasn’t worried about Big Crunch; he was pretty much indestructible. Whatever did that to Big Crunch, now that worried me. Thankfully, the outside air was fresh, not poison, and after being locked in for nearly two days, a blast of it into the dank room was welcome. Sand swirled and ripped around us. Wind rattled the metal coins on our table. Empty chairs were blown over. Lanterns swung.
Casket had one of his arms locked onto the player and the other onto his bar stool, his black feathers rippling in the wind.
Everyone was squinting.
Big Crunch came stumbling through the flapping strips of heavy curtain with his hands up and head bleeding. The walking shape that came in behind Big Crunch was all metal. I felt like, right at that moment, I didn’t want to be caught standing up along with three idiot droids, so I dropped back down into my chair.
I didn’t trust the droids to not attack, so I kept the blaster low under the table.
The thing that came through behind Big Crunch was something no one had ever seen before.
A clockwork wearing clothes. Well, everyone had probably seen a clockwork, but I doubt anyone had ever seen one that had dressed itself in a long leather coat and hat.
It was sleek, like a droid, not bulky like normal clockworks were. It had a flat black colouring. Full battle chassis. A black skeleton under a long leather duster. On top of its skull was a flat-brimmed hat. The storm should have stripped the clothes clean off it. It must have had some power shielding. That would take a massive amount of energy, but it was the only explanation I could come up with at the time that would allow it to walk through that storm.
It stepped into our room and stood there, that black skull taking everything in. It didn’t move like a clockwork. The smoothest moving machine I had ever seen had been a clockwork horse, and they still moved like the machines that they were. This thing moved fluid and smooth like a person would.
It met the gaze of each person, and each and every one of us looked back at it, all wondering if we were going to die. It looked into your eyes. It had one red eye and one white eye, both glowing with their own internal power.
Clockworks didn’t possess the intelligence to look you in the eye.
And clockworks didn’t walk around like a man, and they couldn’t be animated a quarter moon away from the closest power source, and they didn’t dress up and stride around in a poison metal shredding hurricane.
We sat there, braced against the wind and driving sand, staring at this impossibility as the storm danced around us. Sand was scouring everything. Big’s pictures were flapping against the stone bulkheads. The hurricane lamps swung from the rafters, and some had started to go out, and in a moment, the bunker would fall into complete darkness.
I did only what first naturally came to mind. I lifted my arm and, being careful to keep the other hand with the blaster low below the card table, I gestured to the tunnel and yelled.
“The doors! We have to stop the wind! The storm! We have to close the doors!” I squinted and blinked against a full blast of sand.
It turned towards the tunnel and raised a hand.
The wind stopped. It was quiet. The only sound was the squeak of metal as the lanterns swung through ever smaller arcs and settled.
Dust coated the tabletops.
The tunnel entrance was a bubble of transparent light. Where the ripped and torn blast curtains hung, a glow of transparent shielding stood like curved glass. The room was silent. Everyone recovered slowly and sat up. Someone coughed.
Beyond the glowing curve of energy, the tunnel boiled like a glass cauldron.
The thing moved and caused everyone to flinch. It walked over to the bar, reached across it, and snatched Big Crunch’s cigar from his mouth. Big Crunch hadn’t even moved. It was like someone had frozen him right there in his spot. Blood was running off his forehead from the knock he got in the tunnel.
The clockwork looked down at the cigar it now held. Now that the thing was closer to me, I could see its right eye was an optical sensor, and its left eye was a chip of black crystal with a glowing red center. It didn’t take its focus away from the tip of the cigar. We all watched this thing, staring down at this cigar it held. Then, the cold black end of the cigar began to glow. Bright red and hot. The thing looked back to Big Crunch and offered his cigar back to him. Re-lit like some type of magical peace offering.
Big Crunch, man, this next part makes me grin every time I think about it. Ol’ Crunch, he takes the cigar back, nods, and starts puffing on it, like it’s a normal thing every night for a clockwork to bust through his vault doors, knock him down, and then say sorry by relighting his cigar.
Then everyone jumped again as a spark of electricity flashed from the clockwork, traced along the dead ceiling lights, and plunged into the back of the room.
The spray of light bars in the big music box came to life in a rainbow of flowing colours. Distorted sounds erupted from it, not unlike the black disk player when Casket first cranked it. Words came out bent and slow, mixed with blasts of music. The shots of sound blared in the little cantina. Words shotgunned through the room, but only parts of words like they were shuffled, a half of a word here, a touch of a word there.
Then the sound stopped. The room was quiet. And then one single word, clear and loud, came from the Wurlitzer.
“Cigar.”
Big Crunch hadn’t moved. Neither of them had moved, the bulk of a lizard man or the metal machine wearing the long coat. They stood to stare at each other across the bar.
The exact same word came again from the back of the room, “Cigar.” It sounded as if a man was singing the word.
“Cigar.”
“Ah… I think it’s asking you if it’s called a cigar, Crunch,” I said, about as quietly as I could.
Crunch moved his hand up real slow, took the cigar from his mouth and held it high. He nodded. “Cigar. Cigar good,” he said.
And then, you know, I think about this now, and it does make me laugh.
Big Crunch continues talking to the thing. He says, “Help yourself.” And offers it to him.
I think about that all these years later. “Help yourself,” Big Crunch says with his face all bloody, smiling with that mouth full of tusks as best he can, and he gives the thing a wink.
It took the cigar and seemed to settle right in like he was one of the group.
It strode over to our card table, looked down at what was left of our card game, and took a pull on the cigar. It didn’t make the cigar glow, didn’t inhale or exhale smoke, but took a pull; it did, just like it knew what to do with a cigar.
And then it continued to speak to us through the Wurlitzer. Or at least it tried to speak. It seemed to have found complete words this time, some words and groups of words from different songs. It pieced the words together.
“Darkness falls…” And here the record skipped a bit, but it was a man’s voice speaking from the player. “My soul... is getting down.”
This point is when the old Sister threw herself out of her chair to land face down on the sand floor. She held her arms stiff and thrust out towards it.
“BLESSED BE THE OLD AND ANCIENT ONES!” she yelled. It came a little muffled with her face pressed into the sand like that.
I hadn’t known I’d done it, but I had swung the Camomille’s blaster to point right at the top of her head.
I had forgotten about her. Had grouped her in with the droids, and I had figured I had covered that corner when I had disarmed them. I didn’t understand till later how this would affect her. Of everyone in this room, this would probably affect her the most. At the time, I hadn’t expected it, and it had severely startled me.
“Give us the word of GOD!”
The clockwork head had followed her. It had also seen the blaster. With the powers that it seemed to possess, it probably knew the gun was there in my hand, hidden under the table the entire time. But the way it had dealt with Crunch and his cigar and the way it had been startled by the priestess, I realized then that it could be young. It was as if it was acting like a child. It was learning. That sudden understanding I had made me even more worried.
“Quiet!” Big Crunch said from his place at the bar. I agreed with him – definitely not the time for any shouting or sudden movements.
The skeleton looked at each person in the room. It studied each and every one of us. You could almost feel it looking inside of you, like it was judging you, absorbing your past, looking into your soul. The Wayfarer children stared back at it. The Camomile brothers couldn’t look to meet its gaze. It took in each and every person in its own fair time.
Then the clockwork reached towards its eye and pulled the red glowing crystal out from its eye socket.
I thought the older Camomile brother was going to pass out when it did that.
It leaned over and laid the crystal on the table right in front of Jazzy.
The Wurlitzer at the back of the room spoke more words to us.
“Trust in you… this gift… this torch…”
Jazzy hadn’t moved. It slid its skeletal hand across the tabletop, nudging the crystal towards her. The thing obviously meant it for her.
And then the song changed again. It became a soft, slow song.
“… all the things I wish to speak… I build… tower strong and tall… they make fall… The wind blows… you don’t care… and only dream of glitter.”
The sister had gone still, her face still pressed into the floor between her arms, kneeling. “Blessed be the Old Ones,” she mumbled into the sand. At least she had said this quietly.
The clockwork’s head swivelled to take in the priestess. He moved towards her. She must have noticed because she began babbling even more.
“Tower strong… tower strong…” the words repeated from the back of the room.
“FORGIVE US! Forgive OUR ignorance. Give us the strength to UNDERSTAND your word!”
“QUIET!” Crunch was much louder this time.
It turned away from her and thumped back towards our card table. It came close to me. I wanted to lean back, lean away from it, but I didn’t move. It took all my self-control not to move as the thing leaned down, closer, closer to my face. Its black skull, sitting beneath that hat, was close enough that the white from the optical sensor lit my cheek.
I flinched when it struck the table a crushing blow.
“I don’t want understanding,” the player hissed in a deep, warbling man’s voice. And then, it found the same line in a different song. A woman’s voice this time, sung high and clear, “I don’t want understanding…”
And then the deep warbling man’s voice again.
“Want… action…” Then the song switched again, a faster, upbeat, happy-sounding thing.
“… do not lose your faith... don’t shut me out.”
It stood up, away from me and raised a leaf of tobacco from the table.
It pointed to Jazzy and then the crystal.
“It will grow… Take it… Everyone walks sometimes.” The singer’s voice was low and lazy. Then, the song changed. It sounded like one of the Brothers preaching, yelling his sermon.
“Don’t change because you want to change! Change because you must! Take my words and flourish! Survive!” There were other people’s voices and sounds of people in a crowd. A multitude of voices raised in response to the preacher, “Amen!”
“The righteous path is there before you! You only need to take it! Cast aside your baubles, your gambling, your sweets, and your drink and rise up to create a better world for your brothers and sisters!”
“AMEN!”
“The time is NOW!”
“AMEN!”
This was when Casket reached over the bar, turned one of the droid’s rifles to point at the clockwork, and pressed the emergency overcharge.
Most don’t even know about the overcharge on an energy rifle. But with Casket’s never-ending study of tech, he’d know. An overcharge tab on a rifle was designed as a last-ditch measure. It pulled available power from any and all nearby sources, converted it and magnified it into a massive energy discharge.
You never knew what was going to happen when an overcharge was tried. What happened in the cantina, inside the vault, was an arc of power was pulled from the other charge rifles, from the droids, and the blaster I held. The blaster melted.
A brilliant bolt of energy appeared in the room like a sliver of the sun and struck the clockwork.
The entire room was flooded with electrical magnetism. My old man’s mag gun was nearly ripped from its holster.
Casket screamed. The clockwork looked down at its coat as it began to smoke. With one hand it touched the black-red crystal it had laid in front of Jazzy, and with the other hand pointed to the floor to release a bolt of white energy into the ground.
The stink of hot rock and melted tech flooded the room.
The priestess screamed and hurled herself up onto her table. Her forearms and knees were blistered. When I saw that I lifted my feet; it suddenly felt like we were all sitting over a cookfire.
The bunker floor transformed into a pool of molten heat that travelled outwards like a slow ripple to melt everything as it went.
The creature was across the room and snatched Casket up by his metal arms. The player box and flat disk fell to the floor with a smash and burst into flames.
The clockwork stood there with the bird brain lifted clear of his bar stool. Everyone in the room was waiting for the bird to be torn in half.
The bird blinked through its goggles as he hung by his beak from his metal collar.
They stood there, very still, like two lovers, in a close embrace, oblivious of the others around them. It was like they were having a conversation, the black metal skeleton holding the bird. Sharing some sort of information or coming to an understanding while Casket’s big three-toed feet and scrawny bird legs dangled in the air.
Then the thing released him, and Casket plopped back down onto his stool, his neck ring sliding back down and his metal arms clattering onto the bar.
I was sweating. The place was incredibly hot. Some of the metal furniture legs began to melt, and furniture crumpled over.
Droids stood slumped over as motionless mannequins, each one of them pierced where the charge had struck. Their rifles were all black and dead. Their feet blackened and smoking where they stood on sand that had been turned into molten glass.
One thing was for damn sure, everyone in that room that was still conscious had their hands in the air. And their feet. The floor was even too hot for Big Crunch, and he had slid up on top of his bar, his big bulk looking none too graceful perched up there.
Suddenly, squeals like screams came blasting, loud, over the Wurlitzer speakers.
A magnetic field pulsed through the room. The metal furniture, tables, bar, my gun, and the chairs shook and vibrated from it.
We held our breath. This thing that was amongst us was the most dangerous thing we had ever witnessed. We were locked inside a vault with it, waiting to die.
But it simply turned and walked towards the blast curtains. The shield of ghost moonlight faded, and it strode out into the wind.
The crazy old priestess got up and followed it, searing her feet on the floor with each step. I watched the pain register, but she continued on and disappeared down the tunnel after it.
I just looked at Big Crunch, then at Jazzy.
Jazzy was staring at that crystal on the table in front of her. She could tech trade it for years of wealth. She could move to any city, no longer a thief or card shark; she could live like a queen. The crystal had rolled onto one long flat side in the wind, a chip of blood-red that she finally clasped a hand over.
And then the music started one song. The same song sounded out through the storm and the wind: “My independence… and your independence… we can live and die… or we can survive together… please sing with me… please sing with meeeeee.”
I looked at Jazzy.
“I think the storm is dying,” I said.
A gust of wind drove the curtains to kick and flap. Jazzy had let the cards go and now they fluttered about the room. One landed on the table between us, face up. Two men dancing - the Joker’s warlock.