George Martin - Lowball

The gate creaked. Wally tiptoed into the deepening shadows of the junkyard with Darcy right behind him.

Within the warren of crushed cars and scrap metal, the sporadic breeze smelled like gasoline, mud, and the river. His feet clumped against the earth where the passage of heavy machinery had compacted bare soil. They kept to the shadows, slowly circling behind the trailer until he could approach it from the side with the fewest windows. Along the way, he did see a number of cars that hadn’t yet been crushed into boxes, but they were so banged-up anyway that the doors and trunks didn’t want to open unless he heaved on them or rusted out the hinges. He found no secret passages.

Darcy was light on her feet. He couldn’t even hear her footsteps and she was right next to him. She whispered something about misguided chivalry, but he still insisted she stay behind him. Wally figured he made a pretty good shield for her.

They crept up to the trailer and crouched beneath a window. Darcy was too short to see over the sill. The pane was too grimy and the interior too dark for him to see anything when he peeked inside. But if there was any evidence connecting the junkyard to the joker kidnappings, surely it would be in the office. Wouldn’t it?

Darcy whispered, “Wait!”

But the lock was flimsy, and Wally had already twisted the handle right off the door. Darcy crept back, pressed herself against the trailer. Wally eased inside.

It was even darker here than outside. A flashlight, he realized, would have been a very good idea. He was debating whether to go back for the one in the glove compartment of his car-did it have batteries? — when the click of a desk lamp replaced darkness with sterile white light. In the moment before Wally tumbled from the trailer, squeezing shut his dark-adapted eyes, he glimpsed a few cots.

Darcy had disappeared.

Wally tripped. There was a thud as somebody leapt on him and smeared Wally’s face with goo.

The darkness that swallowed him smelled like cough medicine.

He awoke outside. He knew he was outside, and not still in the trailer, because his face was coated with slime and dirt. His arms didn’t work right when he tried to roll over; he flopped around like a walleye gasping for air on the bottom of a canoe. Everything tasted like an overdose of cough drops. He almost managed to sit up, but then the ground shook with the rumble and rattle of heavy machinery starting up, so he toppled over again, head spinning.

Spotlights, like big construction lamps, now flooded the junkyard with silvery light. More dirt, he noticed, was caked into greasy handprints on his lower legs and ankles.

“Can’t believe he’s already getting up,” somebody said. “That dose would’ve put a rhino into a coma.”

“Yeah, well, better luck next time,” said a woman’s voice. “Let’s just get-” She was interrupted by the sound of sporadic gunfire. Wally knew that sound.

“Shit,” she said. “The Iron Giant brought friends. Screw this noise.”

Wally managed to lever himself up to his knees, swaying like a ship on high seas. He glimpsed a short woman with curly auburn hair sprinting toward a white van. But then a slippery foot on his back shoved him down again. A cloud of dust went down his throat. He coughed.

“Hey!” the other guy called after her. “You can’t take off until I’ve taken care of this.”

Somebody else was yelling now, too. It sounded like Darcy’s voice. She had a pretty voice.

The rumble of machinery grew louder. Shadows slid across the ground, dark tendrils skimming across oil puddles and weedy slabs of broken concrete. Then there was a clink, and the rattle of chains. The crane, Wally realized.

A weird but somehow familiar tingly sensation took root in his belly, spreading through his chest to his arms, legs, and head. It differed from the medicinal wooziness; this felt like somebody had pressed a tuning fork to the roof of his mouth and it was vibrating his brain to pudding. He tried to roll over to see what was happening, but his arms and legs refused him. He couldn’t think straight.

He’d felt this sensation before. Where?

For a moment he felt lighter … almost like he was floating. But then the ground fell away, all in a rush, and somehow he was falling up until his head and back and arms clanged against something large and flat. His body rang like a gong. Then he remembered.

Oh, yeah. When the kids stuck those magnets to my head. This felt the same, only times a million. Probably because they used this magnet to pick up cars. It made his brain feel cottony, like he had a bad fever.

The crane whined and whirred as the magnet retracted. Wally dangled high above the junkyard, splayed against the magnet like a fly on flypaper. His view of the yard bobbed back and forth, like the carnival rides he and his brother used to take on the midway at the Minnesota State Fair. Back before Wally’s card turned.

It took most of his strength merely to bend his elbow, straining and contorting just enough to press his fingertips to the surface of the electromagnet. But he didn’t touch metal. The working surface was laminated with a thin plastic coating. He couldn’t make it rust. His arm slammed back against the magnet.

Oh, crud.

The crane arm lurched. Wally left his stomach behind. And then he was soaring across the yard: over Darcy, who crouched behind a car, reloading her gun; over a half-naked man with a towel around his waist, running away from her; past the trailer and the van parked behind it. He remembered there was something important about a van … But the magnet scrambled his brain and made everything feel gauzy and surreal, like dream logic.

The woman he’d glimpsed on the ground leaped into the driver’s seat of the van. A cloud of exhaust coughed from the tailpipe. She must have floored it because the tires kicked up large clods of mud. The van spun around the trailer.

“You bastards!” screamed the little Gandhi guy.

Wally watched helplessly while somebody pulled him through the van’s open side panel.

Wally became aware of a new sound, a thrum and a whine, like the groaning of a giant hydraulic press. Wally wondered where they were taking him. The crane swept him past more stacks of crushed cars.

Crushed cars.

Oh.

But he couldn’t get smushed. Who would take care of Ghost?

The fright and worry hurt worse than any punch, any gunshot, any crocodile bite.

His struggles caused the magnet to swing like a pendulum. But each time he managed to wrench one arm or leg free of the magnet, it banged back when he went to work on another limb. He didn’t have any leverage.

The crane pivoted. The maw of a giant press came into view. It was large enough to hold a big car, like Wally’s Impala. The lid was a thick slab of steel on massive hinges, and the sides of the empty crusher comprised thick steel plates on massive hydraulic arms. That steel had been laminated, too. The whole thing stood on a pair of retractable legs, so that it could rock back like a dump truck to tip out the crushed cars. A generator rumbled off to the side. Wally caught a whiff of diesel fuel.

Another gunshot crack echoed through the junkyard. The crane jerked to a stop, which sent the magnet rocking wildly on its chain. Wally’s head spun. Between the magnet, the spinning, and the diesel fumes, he felt like he might puke.

The van picked up speed. But it wasn’t heading for the gate. Instead, it was barreling straight toward a wall of cubed cars. The magnet spun. Wally glimpsed Darcy again, now creeping to the other side of the crane. When his vantage spun around again, the van had almost reached the wall, but … Wally wasn’t sure because the magnet made his brain all fizzy and he really wanted to puke and also he was dizzy. But he watched while something that sure looked like a tunnel or hole opened up to swallow the van. He expected a big crash, but instead the van just disappeared as though the wall of cars was fake, like a hologram in a movie. The magnet spun. He blinked. When he opened his eyes again, the van was gone.