David Gatewood: The Robot Chronicles

Micah regained his bearings and hopped back into his cart. To his relief, it started, and he drove the couple of miles to where the Beast dwelled in the heart of the Boneyard. He shut off his cart and walked the rest of the distance, about fifty yards, to the edge of the clearing.

Another thwomp shook the earth, accompanied by the screech of shredding metal. Mounds of junk around him rattled. Instinctively he ducked behind a stack of I-beams.

Looking up, he saw a crane, several stories high, suspending a massive, sharpened metal wedge from steel cabling. The wedge was known as the guillotine, the teeth of the Beast, a technological carryover from the Cold War. Its sole purpose during those dark days had been to chop strategic bombers into quarters so they could be viewed from satellite as visual evidence of disarmament.

Scavengers enjoyed using it to slice up scrap into bite-sized pieces.

Yards behind the crane and the guillotine, smoke billowed from brick and metal stacks, the Beast’s belly. The old factory ran only at night because of the heat it generated.

Micah rubbed his arms, sure the forge fires were singeing the hair on them.

Across the way, he saw them. Four scavengers punched, pulled, and kicked Skip, dragging him to the ground with ropes and cords.

Skip was brave and wouldn’t fight back.

This reminded Micah of the war footage, the Battle of Tallahassee—the vultures, the scavengers, clawing and ripping into the dead.

Just like what was happening to Skip.

Bile burned the back of Micah’s throat and his stomach convulsed.

Margaret would have called him a fool for getting himself into this. She’d always known the right way to handle situations. Not like him.

“Hey,” the nasal scavenger said, “let’s cut this thing in half. I’ve never seen anything alive get cut in half.”

The rest agreed, and one of them ran to the crane. A moment later the machine pivoted its arm, swinging the guillotine over the struggling group.

Those long nights when Kitpie had refused to interact, Micah had always been able to rely on Skip. He was almost like a son.

Micah squeezed his eyes shut. Margaret would’ve loved Skip.

He loved Skip.

What would Thomas Cole, the variable man, do? He faced a similar situation when he was running from the Security police. He improvised a protective force field from a junk generator to protect himself, much like the field Nikolaevna built.

Micah leaned against a crumpled refrigerator, running his hands over the rough and jagged edges of twisted metal. Then his left hand plunged into the nearest pile, searching. He pushed aside the pain as his arm scraped against unseen serrations.

At last he pulled out an old electric motor, ripped off the cowling, and yanked out a transformer. His hands moved without him, on another level, using his hot pen and multi-tool like an artist’s brush. They worked, rewiring the primary fields, altering the component. He took one of the portabatteries from his backpack and fit it into his homemade device. The power circuit hummed.

Micah unbuckled his belt and dropped it onto the cart, the metal buckle clanging against the hood. He unslung his backpack and tossed it onto the seat. He wouldn’t need it either.

Grasping his device, he ran faster than he imagined his tired body could ever run, jumping over piles of scrap, sidestepping others, darting out into the clearing, headed straight for the guillotine.

The scavengers had Skip on the ground; they were strapping his arms and legs to a makeshift table of railroad ties. Thirty feet above them, the large blade dangled from its braided cable.

The homemade device in Micah’s hand hummed louder.

He hurled it. The hum increased to a squeal, and with a solid thunk it stuck to the side of the steel guillotine. The ruckus underneath quieted as the men looked up. The device reached a crescendo for one painful second, then went silent.

Nuts, bolts, light pieces of metal—they all zipped up from the ground, past Micah, and clinked against the guillotine. Two metal drums yards away started a leisurely roll toward the blade. Crushed cars and waded rebar near the guillotine shivered in electromagnetic anticipation.

The nasal scavenger, the one with the breastplate, also rose from the ground. His feet churned wildly as he launched upward and stuck to the guillotine. The arms of another scavenger jerked into the air, lifted by his steel armbands. He left his feet and slammed against his cohort.

“Let’s go.” One of the remaining scavengers tried to scramble away, but he and his buddy were already caught in the expanding magnetic field, caught by their scrap armor. They, too, flew upward and violently banged into the guillotine magnet, sticking.

Metal scraps buffeted them, covering them. A hanging disco ball of twisted metal.

Micah ran to Skip. “Come on.” He burned through the bot’s bonds with his hot pen and helped him from the ground.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Skip said. “I couldn’t resist. Look at me, I’m a mess. An absolute mess.” He brushed dirt off his legs.

“I know, your programming. Come on.” Micah grabbed his arm and they ran to the cart and sped into the night, beyond the Beast.

The portabattery on Micah’s electromagnet died and the bloodied group dropped to the earth in a crashing heap, cursing Micah and his bot.

Through the dust, through the nighttime heat, they exited the metal mountains into the oldest section of the Boneyard: the aircraft graves.

Silent, wide-eyed, and wary of ambushes, Micah and Skip motored along between a row of retired F-16s spaced evenly in immaculate rows, sent here to dwindle away, to be used for spare parts. Some had their wings removed, others were bandaged in white to protect them from the sun. After the F-16s they moved past an acre of Apaches, their long propellers drooping to the ground.

All abandoned.

After several peaceful miles of winding through F-4s and tankers, they reached the northern hangars. These looked no different from any of the other numerous hangars in the junkyard, but Micah knew what they hid inside.

When Machine X arrived from Wright-Pat, the Air Force had squirreled it away, never to be seen again.

The three northern hangars, imposing, yards away, were able to house the largest jetliner or military aircraft with plenty of room to spare. The beige paint and brown hangar trim hadn’t been refreshed in years. Maybe the plan was to let them fade and weather so they would be uninteresting. Nobody would pay them any attention.

A high fence formed a perimeter around the hangars, and every few yards, a yellowed light shone from a toothpick of a utility pole.

They parked the Easy-Go at a safe distance and walked to a section of fence where a couple of the lights had died, leaving the area darker than the rest.

Micah scanned the chain link, checking for any sign of booby traps or guards.

“Sir,” Skip said, “what are you going to do?”

“Shhh. We’re going to cut through it.”

“But isn’t that illegal?”

“That’s why you’re going to do it.”

Skip backed up. “But sir, me?”

Micah pointed. “Open this section of fence.”

“I can’t—my programming.”

“Don’t give me that. There’s nothing stopping you. Remember what McCray told us about the coming war.”

Skip moved forward. He looked back at Micah then at the fence. Grabbing hold of a section of links, Skip peeled them apart as easily as if he were opening a bag of chips. The snap of each wire echoed against the corrugated metal hangars.

Micah hurried through the opening, his partner in crime following closely behind. They scurried across the asphalt taxiway, heading for Hangar Echo 021. This was the one nearest them, and the one that Douglas (the fixer with the lisp) had said contained Machine X.