Gabriel’s Watch - Book One: The Scrapman Trilogy (2 page)

Locked.

I snapped the lock-breaking mechanism to the pneumatic device on my forearm. Retracting the slide-bar, I pressed it against the locked knob. Once released, I heard the locking cylinder skip across the ground within the office, along with an unsuspecting yelp from a startled occupant.

Still harnessing that priceless element of surprise, I kicked in the door with one swift, wood-shattering motion, only to find an inferno blazing a hole through my night vision. Cursing, I tore off the goggles and dropped them to the floor, discovering a sickly, old man, clenching a blanket in his weathered hands.

“Take anything you want!” he cried. “Please don’t hurt me again!”

There was a candle flickering just beside him, the cause of the former inferno. I seemed to have interrupted his reading.

It was truly a pitiful sight, and I couldn’t help but feel the empathy building within my gut.

“I’m not gonna hurt ya,” I said. “I’m just looking for something in here, okay? Calm down, Ol’ Timer.”

The man nodded drastically, his straggly white hair whipping back and forth, but the force with which he clung to the blanket belied his fear.

“I won’t hurt you,” I repeated.

We were inside the vice president’s former office. Once a symbol of organization and cleanliness, he would surely be turning in his grave if he could see it now—serving as a dingy refuge for this nomadic survivor. I pointed toward the back of the room, to a painting at the far wall. There had been a safe beyond that painting; but now the picture was ajar, the door opened, all the contents removed. This looked bad.

“Did you take anything out of that safe?” I asked him. “Anything that might be of value to me?”

The man turned to view the wall-box, but jerked quickly back to keep a cautious eye on me.

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like a small black disc ... about yay big.” I offered him an approximate size with my thumb and forefinger as he took it into consideration.

“What is it?” he continued.

“You ask a lot of questions for someone so fidgety,” I said sternly. “If you know something, it’s best you spit it out.”

The man retreated within his blanket again, scooping up something and holding it out to me, his hand shaking uncontrollably. He presented me with a folder bearing the words: “Confidential” and “ZEKE.” I’d found one just like this on my previous mission.

“Where’s the disc?” I asked, snatching the folder from him.

The man picked up a worn Western novel beside him, letting the pages flop open naturally as something dropped to the floor by his feet.

“I was using it as a bookmark,” he admitted with a bit of embarrassment.

I picked it up and inspected it. The disc was still in good shape and I could only hope the contents within were still intact.

On the desk behind the old man I noticed a large metallic object along with various pieces of hardware—possibly parts of the ZEKE. I took everything I thought would be of use—
jackpot.

“Thanks, Old Man,” I nodded.

“You’re the most polite thief that’s ever had the honor of breaking into my home,” he announced in a way that was meant for flattery, completely missing the delivery in the process.

I stared at him, bewildered. It’s amazing how a daily dose of real human contact can be an anchor for one’s personal sanity. This lonesome fellow looked as though he’d been taken to rough seas a while back, leaving a few loose bolts rattling around that scraggly skull. I was suddenly very thankful for having Alice in my life; she was nothing short of a godsend.

“Thank you?” I said, not exactly sure how else to respond.

The man’s face fell from a pleasant smile to an awkward kind of focus or concentration. He stared at me for a moment before speaking.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

I stopped to listen. I couldn’t hear anything, but another sense of mine did detect an abundance of vomit and urine, giving me the intense urge to bid him farewell and vacate the room.

“I don’t hear anything, Mister,” I said honestly.

The man shook his head and pulled the blanket closer.

“They’re here,” he whispered.

“Who’s here?” I asked, half expecting him to introduce a set of imaginary friends to this already bizarre conversation.

“The government,” he revealed.

Taken out of context this may sound crazy, but it was actually quite sane. His senses had been heightened during this time alone; I’d only just begun to hear them as well, shuffling up the stairs, banging something metallic on the rails as they ascended in our direction. There were two of them—no— three of them, shouting and taunting all the way up. They must have broken in through the lobby, or maybe they’d been the ones keeping it locked up.

“Dammit,” I muttered, trying to pull out whatever I could use as a weapon. “Are they armed?”

The old man nodded and opened his mouth, revealing a scattered array of missing teeth as he punched one fist into the palm of the other.

“They did that to you?”

The man nodded again.

The government was a local gang, hell-bent on keeping their version of death and taxes alive and well, even after humanity had driven itself to near extinction. It seemed they’d been visiting this poor guy regularly, using him as their own personal punching bag.

“Where are you, Old Man?!” one of them shouted as they entered the hallway.

I took the man by the arm and tossed him into the closet beside the desk, closing the door after instructing him to be silent.

God, I should carry a gun.

A few close-combat techniques had served me well in the past, but I couldn’t continue to rely on them.

Someday, some lucky punk’ll get the better of me.

Blowing out the old man’s candle, I removed my shoulder bag and set it down quietly. Pressing my back to the wall behind the door, I clung to my lock-breaking mechanism ... and waited.

I could hear them clunking loudly and obnoxiously through the hollowed structure. They were clearly under the impression they ran this building. The government believed it owned the entire city—fancying themselves the lions of this concrete and steel Serengeti—all because no one told them anything different.

Their voices grew louder by the instant, and soon they were right on us. One of the men, slicing the darkness with the beam of a flashlight, entered the room. I seized him quickly by the wrist, yanked him forward, and twisted hard. The flashlight was released with the sound of his snapping bone, free to chase away the shadows as it skipped across the floor. I gripped the lock-breaking mechanism, lowering myself to the ground, as the second man entered directly behind the first.

This one was carrying a pry-bar, which had probably been the instrument he’d been clanking up the stairway. Taking his weapon in one hand and pressing the cylinder to his leg, I blew out his kneecap and sent him flailing. With the confiscated pry-bar in one hand and blood on the other, I emerged from the doorway, swung it upward, and connected with the third man’s jaw. His head wrenched violently as he collapsed in a grungy heap of unconsciousness.

Letting the pry-bar slip from my fingers, I scooped up my bag and stepped over the last man, leaving the other two clutching their wounds and howling like animals.

“You’re safe to leave,” I shouted back at the old man in the closet, “or you can do what you want with them!”

I added that last part with complete sincerity. If the old man came out with the sole intention of carving them into gruesome trophies, I couldn’t have cared less. As far as I was concerned, they weren’t worth the scum scraped off my boot at the end of the day. I got what I’d come for and was able to help out a fellow human being in the process—a goddamned Good Samaritan.

The double doors of the lobby were no longer bound by chains and other members of the government remained blissfully absent. Once free of the building, I took an immediate right and disappeared into the nearby alley where I’d stashed my ride.

Vehicles used to be made purposefully loud, as though one’s manhood was proven by the roar of his engine, but no more. Being an older Kawasaki, my ride wasn’t incredibly earsplitting to begin with, but I still made some serious modifications to keep it as quiet as possible. In this place, and in these times, the less attention the better.

Pulling my bike from within deep shadows, I hopped on, engaged the whisper-quiet engine, and took off toward the outskirts of the city. Beyond the urban chaos was where I’d made my home, where I’d set up shop and where I’d surely spend the remainder of my days, just me and Alice.

And I looked forward to the wry smile that was sure to curl her lips when she saw what I was bringing home.

T
he junkyard wasn’t much to look at—a seemingly random stack and assembly of motor vehicle parts and products towering up at the center to complete its unsettling arrangement of ugliness—but it was my home and I loved it dearly.

Unlocking the barbed-wire fence and killing the bike, I made my way into the junkyard. I used to think of this place as an iceberg, how it’s said that only ten percent of it is above water, or something like that. Well, the same could be said about this old junkyard.

Turning a rotary-combination lock hidden beneath the off-white handle of a refrigerator, I heard the mechanism click free with the final number and pulled open the door. Revealed behind the portal was a staircase descending beneath the jumbled heap of junk on the surface. Shutting the refrigerator door behind me, I clutched my prize with childlike anticipation as I made my way down into the pit. And with a flip of the switch, the overhead lights flickered for a moment, then sustained luminosity, and doused the place with a beautiful golden sheen.

Central to the underground room, at the base of the stairs, was a workbench. At that moment it was crowded with a collage of wiring, mechanical parts, and tubing. Dimly lit and a bit dusty, the shop had the appearance of some mad scientist’s lair—a place for creating life-altering elixirs or bringing back the dead.

Neither of these were my aim, however. My agenda was purely mechanical. It was here that Alice and I constructed gadgets to occupy our minds, improve our lives, and pass the time ... until our time ran out. It sounds depressing when put that way, but there were others, many others, working hard in far more malevolent endeavors. At least we were being productive—at least we were being good.

At the bottom of the stairway, I tapped a yellow plush giraffe hanging off a bookshelf to my right. It emitted a few musical notes as it swayed gently back and forth before returning to silence moments later—a generous lump swelling in my throat.

Play it again, Daddy.

Her voice filled my head, clear as day. She’d be ... fourteen this year, maybe fifteen. It was hard to imagine her that old. I started to drift back into that dark place—that place I’ve spent the last ten years trying to avoid. I shook the thought from my mind. Maybe that’s why I’d kept so busy in the shop, toying and tinkering. Perhaps I’d been running from what had been chasing me. One might ask why I didn’t just take down the giraffe—why I didn’t just remove the constant reminder of her death. Well, that would be the person I would punch in the face, right after telling him to mind his own business.

Who knows? Maybe putting this in writing is grounds for some form of progress. I’m no shrink.

I added my recently acquired bounty to the collection already on the workbench, placing the large metallic object I’d found at Zolaris at the end. Once connected with the rest of the equipment, it began to look very much like a human body—the metallic object being the head.

It was time for the electrical connections and the hydraulics. I’d found a CPU at Zolaris which, according to the manual, linked up with its brazen skull to process images it picked up, along with its several other senses. This thing was supposed to be as close to human as science could get, without the aid of biological engineering, of course. But this one’s body was now a crude mixture of salvaged, retro-fit, and modified junkyard parts—surely a far cry from whatever shiny billion-dollar body it had back at Zolaris.

I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Alice’s smiling face.

“What did you find?” she asked, squinting a bit as her eyes adjusted. She liked the dark.

“I got the head, another tech manual, the CPU, that thing over there—whatever it is, and ... this,” I said, purposely brandishing the chip last.

Alice was just as pleased as I thought she’d be. “Miles, that’s incredible!” she said, grabbing me by the shoulders and squeezing tight.

That’s my name, by the way—Miles, Miles Stone. Pleased to meet you.

“Let’s get started then, huh?” Alice offered as she rounded the table and flipped open the tech manual. “Where to begin? ... Where to begin?”

After tucking a length of black hair behind her ear, she ran a finger from one page to the other, gathering information and considering options, her lips moving without the slightest sound. She was magnificent.

“I ... uh ... I ran into some trouble on the way outta there,” I said, disturbing her focus as she raised her head.

“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

“I ran into a couple agents—three actually—on the way out.”

“Agents” were what they called the members in their gang—“government agents”—they were a pompous bunch.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just thought you should know. We might be hearing about it later.”

“And they didn’t follow you back here,” she said, more of a statement than a question.

“Not a chance,” I smiled.

“Oh ... good.” She began to return to her work.

“I think it’s time we get some guns,” I added.

She looked back up at me. “Guns?”

“Yeah, guns. The government is getting stronger, more and more people are joining, and they’re reaching farther toward the edge of the city—toward us.”

Alice nodded. “If you want to get some guns, then get some guns. Believe me—I’m the last person in the world you need to convince; you’ve just wanted to stay away from them for so long, that’s all.”