Abney Park's The Wrath Of Fate (25 page)

Then a young man ran through the center of the square with a panicked look on his face, waving his arms to try to get everyone’s attention. When he reached the musicians, they stopped playing, and in the absence of the huge drum beats we heard it: the dogs were all viciously barking!

Immediately the whole town was in motion, running to their tents, and vehicles; swinging onto horses, kicking motorcycles to life, jumping onto the sides of dune-buggies. The dogs were let loose as the families took down their tents, and the beasts all ran to the northern edge of the town and stood in a pack barking into the darkness. I grabbed Chloe by the hand, and took Isabella under my arm and ran back to our Bandersnatch. They were scared, eyes wide and tearful. It didn’t help that they were utterly exhausted. Placing the girls in the sidecar, I half-turned the ignition key to check the fuel.
Shit!
Less than a quarter tank. This was going to mean trouble.

I looked to the northern edge of the town, where the dogs were barking, and could see a glowing cloud of dust was building in size and growing closer. I began the bike’s starting ritual; prime carb, turn throttle once, kick, wait, et cetera. As I did this, I could see what was happening past the dogs. Low flying airships were stampeding beasts towards us. What kind of creature didn’t matter much, as there were thousands of them, and anything cow-sized or larger would trample this town flat. From what I had seen, there were lots of different beasts in the prairies big enough to trample this town to dust. Carnivores would strip the place clean like meat from a bone.

Scarred men and women in their twenties and thirties were strapping long split blades to their forearms. These were the “beast dancers”, and they trained since birth to fight hand-to-hand with the likes of tigers and wolves, and hyenadon. They stood stoically in the midst of the pack of dogs, while the less combat-capable nomads threw the last of their camps onto their hauls and started heading south.

Seeing this heroic last-stand, I felt the familiar tightening of my chest, and steeling of my resolve. I pulled my shot gun from the holster that held it to my front fork, and turned the bike toward the oncoming stampede. I gunned the throttle, and the bike leapt forward, but this caused the girls to scream. Every foot towards the stampeding beasts increased their horror. I looked into the sidecar. They were terrified, clutching each other, wet wild eyes reflecting the fires and torches around us.

Here is where I realized something that had never occurred to me before. My heroic responsibility was no longer for this “the town”, or any strangers who needed saving. My responsibility was for these children. I was
their
hero, now, and no one else’s. If I plunged into battle, and died, they would shurly die. If I left them here, I would likely not find them again. If I took them into battle they would die. Heroics is not a game for parents. Or say, parents are heroes daily, but only for their kids; they can’t be spared elsewhere.

So I spun the bike around and headed south with the rest of the caravan, while the warriors met the beasts head on. I’m not sure how that ended for them, I was not around to see it.

REUNIONS

I decided it was best to drive all night, and being agitated as I was, staying awake wasn’t hard. The girls slept peacefully in their side car. Sometime just before noon on the last day we arrived at the designated crossroads just south of Tucson, Arizona.

Chloe saw it first. The
HMS Ophelia
hanging in majestic splendor fifty-feet off the ground. To an eight year old girl it must have look like the flying pirate ship from the end of
Peter Pan.
Actually, it kind of looked like that to me as well. She gasped, and woke her sister, who let out an “OOooo”. The two of them started squirming with excitement, since they had been told they were going to live aboard this magnificent flying ship.

We waited in its shadow, as Jean-Paul lowered the hook to hoist the motorcycle and sidecar. As we waited, up lumbered Gyrod. Around his neck was a rope, and on the rope hung one small gear.

“Is that the old one, or the new one?” I asked, nodding to the gear.

“It is the new one,” he said. “I was too afraid to remove the old one. I will, when I know nobody is dependent on me. But you need me to guide you into the city to find Father.”

The hook interrupted us at that point, as it swung close to our heads. “Watch it!” Jean-Paul warned from above.

I grabbed the hook, looped it around the bike. Soon, bike, girls, and I were hoisted. Up we rose, with Chloe, the eldest girl, getting more and more nervous as Isabella, got more and more excited. Finally, we were above the ships railing, and the small wooden crane swung us on to the deck. There was a crowd of sailors gathered as I unhooked the biked and tossed the rope back over for Gyrod.

Daniel stepped up and said, “What is this?”

“This is Chloe and Isabella.” Chloe and Bella smiled up at him. But seeing the sternness on his face, and then looking around at the scarred and dirty faces of the rest of the sailors, they started to look scared.

“Yes,” he said. “How long are they staying?” he added in a slow monotone.

“Well, they…” I began, but Kristina then walked up to us.

Upon seeing her, Chloe stepped out of the side car and curtseyed. Then Bella ran to her, and hugged Kristina’s legs. That was it, that was all it took. Kristina had that look on her face now, the look of a girl who just found a soon to be put-down kitten at the “humane” society. The kitten mews as if to say, “love me now, or I die”. That small hug said all this, and Kristina melted.

Next we hoisted up Gyrod, and he stood stoically over the crew, looking around. He was at least a foot taller than the tallest of us, and all the sailors looked back at him reverently. When he finally spotted Timony he strode over to her, and scooped her up in his arms. She giggled like a little girl should when hugged by a big brother – but it was still odd to see, as he was only vaguely human shaped, with she was perhaps
too
human shaped.

That night we sat around the dining room table, discussing what had happened on my trip to find Gyrod, and what needed to happen next. Gyrod and Timony told us with disgust about the cities, and they way the treated their captive population. They told us of their father, a master inventor and craftsman who had been imprisoned in a tower in one of the cities. If anyone could repair our ship, it would be him.

Each city was build like a fortress, walled and well defended. Flying this massive airship over the wall would be suicide. We’d be seen and shot down. The cities were not self sufficient, however. Huge armored trains came in from all over the countryside, bringing in supplies, and occasionally officials from other cities.

So we planned to jump a train, and ride it into town. Gyrod would accompany me, and together we would free his father, and in return hopefully the scientist could fix our ship.

The “jumping the train” proved surprisingly easily. Gyrod and myself waited in the bushes by a bridge a few miles from the girls’ shack. The train had to slow down to cross the old and fragile bridge. As the train lumbered slowly by, we stepped out of the bushes, and climbed aboard. Nobody was inside the one and only passenger car, so we took seats at a table and looked out the window as the train ambled back up to speed on its way into the city.

If I had to guess why it was so easy to jump a train into town it would be this:
nobody wanted into the city.

THE CHANGE CAGE

The iron giant rattled heavily down the tracks. Every bump was bone-jarring. The view out the window gave a distinct sense of arriving in a land of oppression and control. The beautiful foliage was slowly replaced with dry cracked, mud fields, strewn with rock. It was as if nature itself was staying as far away as possible.

The first thing I saw of the city was immense clouds of black twisting up from a hundred chimneys like huge vines. The sky was darker here, because of the smoke, and I wondered how the emperor justified that pollution.

Then we saw the city. We came over the top of a hill, and for a moment we were looking down at its huge labyrinth of walls. Each city block was contained in a fifty foot high wall, creating an uneven grid like pattern as the blocks stretched out across the city. On top of the walls were roads and tracks, with a few obvious police trains on them, pointing their searchlights to the city below.

In each walled block were buildings, twisted, old and blackened from the coal fires. Some of the ‘blocks’ were very large, and had hundreds of buildings in them, while others were tiny and crowded, holding just one or two massive tenements. In either case, the walls were high enough that the windows of the buildings either looked at another building, or at the walls themselves, but not a one could view out into the wastelands.

“They keep the people segregated inside the city,” Gyrod said. “Each block contains a different race of people, and they aren’t allowed to wander from block to block. One block might be Japanese, another Pakistani, another Scottish, et cetera. The theory is that if all those cultures blended, there would be no way to control the cultural and technological advancement. By keeping people segregated, he keeps them from working together, and learning from each other. Segregation is safe storage, if you don’t want a people to advance.”

“He doesn’t want people to advance?” I asked.

“No,” Gyrod replied. “He wants to keep everyone as they were in the 1900’s. Impoverished, but employed. Unhappy, but controlled. Technology breaks people out of
the system.
It makes them independent and gives them little need for governments, or corporations.”

“These people are slaves to this city, although not all of them see it. They are employed all their waking hours, cogs in a massive, oppressive machine. They are led to believe that they choose the work they do, but in most cases they simply take what’s available, and what is available is typically horrible or demeaning, since no one would willing give up any good position,” Gyrod said.

“Since it takes a huge work force to maintain this much control,” he went on. “Everyone must work long hours to maintain this life. They work long works to maintain a life they hate.”