Blackjack Wayward (The Blackjack Series) (25 page)

“I don’t know. Maybe not.”

“The things we did,” he said. “They weren’t nice.”

“You did them too, Haha. Are you saying we belong in jail for all that stuff?”

Haha waited, giving the question full consideration of his limited processing power, before answering, “Yes.”

“And you think I should just turn myself in?”

“No.”

“Shit, then what do I do?” I asked him, but the answer was right in front of me, always right at the tip of my tongue. I knew what I needed to do, what I had to do. I just didn’t have the courage to admit it to myself.

“That’s for you to decide,” he said, always sidestepping the issue. “But staying here is not deciding.”

Regardless of what the stupid robot said, I wanted to stay here. I wanted to make love to her over and over, to forget the world, let them all burn. I wanted that more than anything, to live a new life, even if it was feeding an undead creature with little bits of my soul. She was beautiful and the best love I had ever had. And I had never eaten so well.

In a few moments, Claire would wake. We would eat and make love again, and the day would pass and soon be forgotten. I knew, staring hard at the early morning sun rising in the horizon, that I was living a lie. I was in another mind-dream, only this one of my own devising, and I’ll be honest: I didn’t really care.

We ate and made love, and slept and woke again and made love again, before I bothered to broach the subject with her.

“We need to go to town,” I said, and the silence that followed told me all I needed to know about what she thought of the idea.

“What do you need?” she said, her glare measured.

“Clothes, to start,” I said, motioning to the dirty overalls I wore. “But I also need to find out what’s going on.”

She stood from bed and walked naked to the faucet, looking at herself in the mirror.

“Worried for her?” she asked finally.

“And for him,” I admitted. “He won’t take his failure to kill me lightly. Besides, we need to know what’s happening, if they’re looking for us.”

“I could kill him,” she said, still gazing upon her own reflection, her face and tone of voice devoid of any emotion. “I could kill him right now. It would be easy.”

“He’s slippery,” I told her.

“He can’t escape my powers.”

“Claire, it’s something I need to do for myself.”

“I could fix everything right now, and you’d be done with him forever,” she said, turning to me and leaning against the sink.

I got up from the bed and came up to her, placing my arms on her waist, but her posture was defensive, almost hostile.

“Everything in my being is telling me that I have to be the one to stop him,” I told her, angling my face toward hers, though she refused to return my affection.

“You want to save her,” she said, pushing me off and trying to move past me. I grabbed her, held her in place. “You want to be her hero so she can fuck you for thanks, Suis je redresse?” At first, her eyes were filled with fire and rebellion, but I softened my grip, put my hand to her face.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” I said. “How I feel about her ... it’s not something you just turn off. Regardless of whether she felt it in return. But it’s something that can fade in time ... is fading already.”

She placed her hand on my chest. “Is there any room for me here?”

“Yes,” I said honestly, cradling her face in my hand.

Claire smiled.

“But I don’t know if I can rest until I’ve found him. Until I’ve killed him.”

She grew serious. “And if he kills you?”

I smiled. “You don’t have any magic that brings people back from the dead?”

“I do. But it’s not pretty. Pieces fall off.” She reached down and grabbed me. “Some pieces I would miss.”

She kissed me and eased me toward her, but I held back, and walked toward the bed.

“What is it?”

“There’s another thing,” I said, trying to find the right words.

“What?”

I pointed to my wrist. “I’ve been carrying Mr. Haha around with me,” I said, but from her facial expression, it meant nothing to her.

“Before Hashima, remember all that?” Claire nodded. “I had some companions.”

“Influx, that boy, and the robot. And Zundergrub.”

“Right. The robot is Mr. Haha. On Hashima, Zundergrub attacked him and Cool Hand – the kid, that was his name. He caught them by surprise, right when we least expected it, and he killed Cool.”

I paused, remembering my friend.

“Well, he also destroyed Haha,” I continued. “Most of him. Under this scar is what remains of him.”

“The rabbit man?”

“Yes. It was a sentient robot. That means he had his own mind, he controlled himself. Anyway, Haha helped me against Zundergrub in the end. Without him, I would have died.”

I walked over to her and showed her the knotted scar around my wrist.

“He buried himself in my skin and he’s been here ever since.”

She was still confused, unsure what it all meant, but she touched the mangled skin with her soft fingers.

“You owe him a debt?”

“Something like that. I want to rebuild him. Partially, at least. Mr. Haha is alive, Claire. He’s like a real person almost, and I’d like to get some parts to make him a new avatar. A new body.”

“He has been here the whole time?”

I nodded.

“And he and you talk?”

“Sometimes, but–” she slapped me and tore off, but I managed to grab her arm and whirl her back to me.

“Lâchez-moi!” she said, punching me in the face with all her strength but the blow was like a soft caress.

“No, I won’t,” I said, bringing her closer to me. “This is real,” I took her hand and placed it on my chest. “I am real,” I said, moving her hand to my face. “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“I don’t like lies,” she said, struggling against me.

“I didn’t lie,” I said, releasing her. “I was just waiting for the right moment to tell you.”

Claire shook her head and moved back, freeing herself of me.

“I remember when you were on the run, the first time. When you got into all the trouble. There was this place on the Internet where they would talk about you.”

I nodded. “That’s Haha’s blog.”

“Yes. This thing. At first it was you and that other woman. J’ai oublié son nom putain–”

“Influx,” I said, knowing she meant the leader from Retcon’s villain team.

“What?”

“Her name was Influx.”

“The fake blonde bimbo,” she spat and I nodded. “I bet you say you didn’t fuck her either, right? Then it was you and Apogee, playing lovebirds. I saw some of it.”

“It was Haha’s feed. He was recording everything and uploading it to his blog.”

She swallowed, suddenly vulnerable, her eyes wide in terror.

“He’s not doing that now,” I said, answering her fears. “He can barely even communicate. There’s little left of the robot.”

“Please promise me,” she asked, and I understood her worry, that the world would see her at her weakest.

“On my honor, Claire,” I said.

She just stared at me for the longest time, afraid that I might be lying, and finally reached out, grabbing my hand and rubbing the scar on my wrist.

“Do you trust him?”

I shrugged. “I think so. He might be a robot, but from my experience with him, Haha was an honorable soul.”

“A very big difference between honor and friendship.”

“He’s the only friend I have left in the world,” I said staring at the floor.

“So the three of us against the doctor and his army?” She smiled, “Or do you want me to wait for you here, like a good wife, while you go off to war?”

“No, that’s not–”

“I am more powerful than you, or than this stupid rabbit man or doctor and all his little men.”

“I know,” I said.

“And if my man goes to war, then I go to war,” she finished, pushing me back against the bed and coming closer to me, pressing her naked body against mine.

“How else am I to make sure you’ll come back to me?”

Claire kissed me and dug her hands into the hair on the back of my head, pressing me closer to her.

“Where else would I go?” I said.

Chapter Seventeen

By early afternoon, I was deep into my project.

I’m a tinkerer by nature; I like to work with my hands, fix things, build things. So when I saw a half-buried engine, my first instinct was to dig it out, clean it as much as possible, and see if any of the parts were still functional.

The thing was rusted tight, almost into a single piece of forgotten metal. It took two hours to dig it out, and four more to take it apart; when I was done, I sat in a sea of corroded metal pieces, with just a few items – a trio of valves, and two manifold pins – to show for my work. The rest of the engine was useless.

Claire brought me lunch and dinner, leaving me to work in the hot, arid sun. Lunch was an arm-length hero sandwich, just how I like it, with lots of mustard, lettuce, and tomatoes. No mayo. I ate the whole thing despite my grimy, greasy hands, and downed the pitcher of ice-cold lemonade that she placed inside the picnic basket. Dinner was a half a tray of meat lasagna, covered in aluminum foil, with a loaf of garlic bread and a bottle of red wine. The first sip of the wine revealed it to be exquisite, stopping me in my tracks as I shoveled the pasta into my mouth. I checked the bottle and saw it was Chateau Margaux from 2000, a thousand-dollar bottle of wine, probably the best rated in the last few decades. To enjoy the wine, she had placed a big bowled wine glass in the folds of the picnic basket. I took the glass and gently poured the fine liquid, studying the appearance and color. I dug my nose into the glass, enraptured by the aroma and finally took a mouthful, letting it slap me around a little.

I was thinking of what a ridiculous figure I must’ve made, a big sweaty, sunburned surfer-looking dude, sitting in the sand taking an engine apart out of boredom. Covered in grease and sand, yet I was going through the fineries of enjoying a good glass of wine. Looking over to the shack, I saw Claire leaning against the railing of the door, watching me as she, too, enjoyed some wine. I must have seemed like a crazy person.

As I walked over to her, she smiled.

“You broke the car?” Claire said, motioning to the scattered parts.

“Took it apart,” I said, revealing the few good items I had scavenged in the palm of my hand. “Why didn’t you come eat with me?”

She shrugged, “You looked so busy. I didn’t want to bother. You look happy.”

“You’re not a bother,” I said, drinking the wine and refilling both glasses.

“You trying to build a car?”

“Just messing around, really. Tinkering.”

Claire looked past me, ignoring the wine, staring long into the distance.

“I could take you there,” she said. “Or make you a car. Anything you want.”

I laughed and pulled her close to me, noticing how fragile she looked. “That would be no fun. I like making stuff. Imagine if I could put together a car out of all the junk out here.” Claire pushed me off and went back inside, but I was somewhere else. I had a project, something to do, and after another moment, I forgot about her and all her fears and went to work.

I stayed up all night going from shed to shed, checking out every damaged structure for parts that could help me. I could sense Claire’s concern; I was restless, and she was worried I would throw our budding happiness away on some foolish quest. She worried that nothing she could do would contain my urge to build a car, take Haha back to civilization, find out what was happening in the world.

She was worried I would walk into the nearest bar and see Apogee on TV, desperate for my help, and I would run off like some goddamned fool. Well, I wasn’t a fool. I knew I had been played. I knew Apogee had lied to me. But it didn’t suit me to be in the dark, not knowing what Zundergrub’s plans were for me.

We had a shortwave radio and a phone line, but I was afraid to use anything that might draw any more attention to us. Other than that, we were incommunicado. Rabbit Flat was as remote as you could get in an already sparsely unpopulated part of the Australian Outback. We were over 200 miles from the nearest outpost like ours, 500 miles from Alice, the nearest town, and almost 700 miles from Darwin, the closest thing you could call to a city in this part of the country.

Transportation should have been easy with a witch on your side, able to open a portal to any part of the world, but Claire was quick to point out that it didn’t work that way. Pinpoint transportation was a time-consuming and expensive spell, though she would grow morose and change the subject when I would try to find out just what she meant by expensive. The portal she had opened to the Outback back in Utopia was as a result of something she had been working on for a long time, at great personal cost to her. The way she explained it to me was that we had traveled through the Earth itself in order to be undetectable, and this spot in Australia was on the diametrically opposite side of the world from where Utopia lay.

Besides, I wanted to build a car. She had offered plenty of times, I have to grant her that, but I needed to be doing something, I needed a project to keep my mind busy. So I was left to my own devices, and I searched the outlying buildings for anything that would serve us. The shed had housed the outpost owner’s vehicles, some sort of 4-wheel drive, and the small motorcycle the woman had used. There were many parts in the dark and dusty enclosure, but the prize was a gutted out Toyota Land Cruiser, like the old ones from the Mutual of Omaha shows of the 70s.

“What do you think?” I asked Haha after reciting, part by part, what I had found in the shed. Of all the damaged vehicles we had encountered, this one showed the most promise of being the foundation upon which to build a new one. It was marginally superior to the others because the frame was undamaged, relatively straight, and mostly free of rust.

“Not good,” he responded. “How’s the engine?”

I reached over and popped the hood clamps to take a look. The engine block was missing.

“We need an engine,” I said. “And a trannie. It’s gutted.”

“And the tires?”

“Two rims and tires, but they’re flat,” I said. “The other wheels are missing.”

“Fuel tank?”

“Who are you talking to?” Claire asked, following me around the next morning, worried that I hadn’t slept all night. She shouted from her vantage point nearer to the shed, as the abandoned truck was in a field of high grass.

“To Haha,” I told her, lifting the truck on the two remaining tires, the front ones and peering into the back.

“Gone,” I said, noting the attachment brackets where the tank had once been.

“That’s not good,” Haha repeated.

“I can’t hear anyone,” she said.

“He’s here,” I said, but I could tell she was exasperated with me, unaccustomed to the awful smells of oil, gasoline, and grease from the shed, and from the haphazard construction of the place, and the hundreds of hanging tools and parts that made it seem like the little building swayed with the wind.

“Well, I don’t hear him.”

“You basically have a frame and axles, Blackjack. You have no drive train, no engine, and no fuel reservoir. You’re better off walking,” Haha said finally.

“It’s 500 miles, Haha. It would take us weeks. What about that tiller thing we saw in the shed, can we use that engine?”

“You can’t drive a truck with that little horsepower,” he said. “Walking would be faster.”

I moved back inside the shed, walking past Claire, whose glare could slice boulders.

“There’s at least four or five engines here,” I said. “Maybe more if those chainsaws are working.”

“Even if you had them all running and managed to chain them all to a jury-rigged drive train, I doubt you’d get more than five, ten miles per hour.”

I smiled. “Maybe. Maybe more.”

I turned the shed into a makeshift workshop, first clearing out a veritable mountain of garbage and useless junk, then going at the overgrown shrubbery and grass that sprouted from every corner and open space with a rusty pair of metal cutters that I’d sharpened.

The little outpost had just about everything needed for the project if you only knew where to look, and it wasn’t usually where you expected them to be kept. They kept spark plugs in the freezer, oil in the food pantry, wiring under the bed, and the actual tools in a satchel rather than the tool case, which was storage for dusty old fishing lures and fishing tackle. I reorganized the whole place, throwing out anything I wouldn’t need, adding them to the junk pile beside the shed.

Claire came in with bread, cheese, and wine, but otherwise left me to my devices. Like back on Shard World building the Retcon device, Haha and I were awful scary when we had a project. But he wasn’t his old ebullient self, lacking his accustomed and quite annoying wellspring of confidence. Instead, he was grouchy, negative, and contrary to every idea or concept I set forth. Instead of building everything to my specifications, as we had the Retcon device, I was doing everything, from concept to creation. He tossed around some excuse about being offline from his mainframe database, but maybe he was bitter that I didn’t really need him. Or maybe he didn’t like being useless.

When we were stranded on Shard World, he alone believed in me, trusted that I could replicate a machine I had studied for under a minute, in both appearance and function. And this was a complex Tesla device, modified by Dr. Retcon himself. Something built by two geniuses, and a particle accelerator to boot. Those devices utilized massive, room-sized super magnets to hurl tiny protons through the course of hundred-mile tracks at other elements to study the explosive emissions. Retcon had simplified the device, utilizing a highly efficient Tesla coil as a conduit for the hurled particle and as an accelerator by spinning it around the magnetized electrical charge, but building it from scratch took a special kind of imagination and engineering.

The more I thought of it, the more I realized that I had done most of the work back then, too. Sure, it was radical stuff compared to fixing a car, but I’d had Mr. Haha in full body and mind helping me out. With his internal furnace and the almost limitless ability to make materials for me, we built the device in just a few hours. Nonetheless, he had been offline as well, and everything came from me conceptually.

The more I worked, the quieter he got, and I figured he was just resigned to his fate as a cranky pile of wires and diodes embedded under the skin of my wrist. Haha had few ideas to contribute conceptually and even less to actually aid me in building the car.

The job at hand was quite unique. Rebuilding an engine was a simple affair, but building an engine out of several jury-rigged ones was not. They all had to be fitted to drive a crankshaft, and since there was different horsepower and torque coming from each engine, I had to invent a multi-tiered clutching device that allowed them all to contribute to the cause. That’s what eventually soured me on the idea of using several engines, having to design and create such a complicated piece of equipment. Given my old lab, tools, and machinery, such a thing would have been almost easy, but out here in the remote desert, it would take me days, even weeks to make it from scratch. Instead, I concentrated on using the most powerful engine I could find in the outpost, the water pump. It was a Burke two-stroke, air-cooled engine, used to spin a hand pump and draw water from a deep artesian well. The benefit of a Burke was that I wouldn’t necessarily need a crankshaft, which I was missing, nor a connecting rod, which I doubt I’d be able to build without a furnace. It would attach to the driveshaft via a Scotch yoke and that’s how it transduced linear to circular motion. The parts to make the whole thing were lying around the shed, waiting for me to find, modify, and construct.

I lost myself in the project, tooling and hammering away, soldering and rebuilding an engine to drive us back to civilization.

That night, Claire sat in a chair a hundred yards away from the shack we called home. She smoked cigarettes and drank wine, though where she had found the smokes, I had no idea. I came over to her, looking forward to a shower and shave, but she didn’t even acknowledge me beside her.

“Hey,” I said, hoping to rouse her.

Claire studied me with glazed eyes and took a long swing of her wine. The bottle was almost empty.

“You okay?” I asked.

She blinked a few times and forced a smile.

“How is your work coming along?”

I rubbed my sweaty scalp, suddenly feeling filthy next to her.

“It’s almost done,” I said. “The engine is functional, but I need to test it out. Then I have to finish the drive shaft.”

“You should get some sleep,” she said, shifting in her chair.

“Nah, it won’t take too long. If I had my old tools, I would’ve finished already, you know? But with the junk I have ... I don’t know. I’m tired,” I yawned, “but I want to push it. At my present pace, I’ll finish by tomorrow morning for sure.”

She nodded.

“The hardest part was the damned fuel line. I couldn’t find anything that would provide enough pressure, and stay strong enough to hold the fuel. All the ones that I could find were old and brittle.” I stopped, noticing that she couldn’t care less about what I was saying. “You a little drunk?”

Her head snapped to me, her eyes daggers boring through my skin. “I’m drinking wine,” she said, as if that were enough to explain it.

“I mean, you’re not very chatty.”

Those milky brown eyes studied me from head to toe, and a little grin slowly worked its way into her face.