“Is the whole museum made from nano-crystal?” asked Samuel.
“Heavens no. Just the reception hall and the windows for the display cases.”
“How did your master build this place?”
“He didn’t build it. The museum itself is an aquifer that ran dry decades and decades ago. My master stumbled across it before the war during a vision quest in the desert. Under the divine influence of the peyote cactus, he fell in love with the place and realized its potential. He purchased seven hundred acres of land above the aquifer and began making the underground chamber habitable.
“You see, initially, this wasn’t supposed to be a museum,” admitted Tines.
“No?” asked Samuel.
“My master originally built this place as a refuge. In his vision, he saw that a catastrophe was looming on the horizon. A worldwide calamity, he called it. A paradigm shift. A redefining of human consciousness. He planned to populate this refuge with like-minded friends and family, as well as other scientists and artists and craftsmen. They would preserve the best technologies available to humans and then emerge after the catastrophe and help remake the world.
“But the end came much sooner than he’d anticipated. The bombs fell while he was here alone, making final touches. How lonely he was, then! How often he contemplated killing himself—just another corpse among the millions, this one courteous enough to have had himself pre-buried.
“But his nature wouldn’t allow him to take his own life. He was disgusted by the idea of unnecessary waste. And so he conceived of the museum. I think it was just a project to help keep him busy—he never really expected to have visitors. But his hope was that someday, if civilization arose again, his work might be discovered, and perhaps serve as a warning against folly. ‘We must preserve the past,’ he would cry. ‘Mr. Tines, we must preserve the present. We must never forget.’”
***
The elevator came to a halt. The door slid open. It was night, and the crystal hall was translucent. Stars were strewn across a clear black sky, and a waning moon illuminated the landscape with silver light.
Samuel stepped out to find Teddy cowering in a corner with the mules.
“Teddy,” he shouted.
Teddy looked up and, seeing Samuel, he cried out with joy. He sprang forward and scooped up Samuel in his arms and swung him around. But when Mr. Tines stepped out of the elevator, Teddy stepped backward and shielded Samuel with his body.
“Don’t worry,” said Samuel, gasping slightly in Teddy’s powerful grasp. “This is Mr. Tines. He lives here. He’s going to take us to the others. To your brother.”
“To Der-Der? Where is he?”
“We have to go in the elevator,” said Samuel. “In that room there.”
Teddy looked suspiciously at the elevator. “I don’t like it,” he said, chewing on his lip.
“It’s the only way down,” said Samuel soothingly. “You’re too big for the stairs. It’s very safe, and not dark at all, and when we get down we’ll see Derek and John and Leggy and Magdalena. And we can bring the animals with us.”
Teddy let himself be convinced, though reluctantly. They herded the mules into the elevator, and descended. Teddy nervously bit his lip, and the mules were unhappy to be confined in such a cramped place. But Mr. Tines was delighted. He ran his hands lightly over the beasts.
“Oh, these will do nicely. Yes. Quite nicely. This one is the best specimen, I think,” he said, pointing to Minna. “The other seems to have some kind of…mutation.”
“True,” said Samuel, “but it wasn’t all that uncommon where we lived.”
“Hmmm,” said Tines. “I shall have to weigh the aesthetics and the authenticity. As you know, my master was a stickler for veracity.”
The elevator came to a gentle stop. The doors slid open. Mr. Tines exited, followed by Samuel. Teddy coaxed the mules out into the workshop.
“This way,” said Tines, heading to a far corner where a large steel cabinet stood. “My subjects will be coming around soon. It’s time to administer another soporific.”
Samuel and Teddy watched as Mr. Tines opened the steel cabinet. A half dozen shelves contained an impressive array of medical supplies. “My master wasn’t sure how long he and his companions might be underground—possibly for several generations. So he planned for just about every conceivable situation. He even stocked embalming fluid. Lucky for me!”
Samuel watched with horror as Tines prepared a sickly green solution in a decanter, and then filled two long syringes with it.
“Is that to embalm them?” he said.
“This? Heavens no. This is another soporific, one the subjects won’t wake up from. Once injected, the heart, the lungs, and the other organs will continue to function, but the higher functions of the brain will shut down. Eventually, the bodily mechanisms will cease as well, but this way I will have the time I need to embalm them without worrying about….” The robot mimed holding his nose. “Putrification.”
Mr. Tines placed the syringes on a small metal tray, and turned to regard the donkeys. “I’d like to use the same solution for the beasts of burden, but I’m unsure of the dosage. Well, let’s worry about that later.”
The robot picked up the tray and looked over his shoulder. Its blue eyes glittered cheerily as it addressed Samuel.
“Come then. Let’s get to work!”
***
“Oh. My. God.” Leggy’s eyes were fixed on the long needle.
Mr. Tines approached the legless old man, who scrambled backward on his hands, until the lascivious robot had walled him into a corner.
Leggy clinched his eyes shut and desperately pushed his thoughts out toward Samuel, unsure if the boy’s strange talent worked in reverse, not knowing if Sam could pick up on thoughts directed this way.
SAM DO SOMETHING, Leggy’s terrified brain screamed. DON’T LET HIM NEEDLE ME SAMUEL
Samuel looked frantically up at Teddy and Mr. Tines.
“Your companion seems distressed,” noticed the robot. “I do believe he has fainted.”
“He’s afraid of the needle,” said Samuel.
“This?” asked Mr. Tines in surprise, looking at the long hypodermic. “But it’s not for him.” The robot moved closer to Leggy and reached out a hand to the side of his throat, feeling for the old man’s thready pulse. “He seems to be convulsing. I believe he needs medical attention.”
Leggy clenched his eyes shut as the robot approached. The old man had not had an injection, Hell, he’d not even seen a needle, in well over two decades. And for good reason—they tore open deep, painful memories he’d worked hard to bury, a desperate time of needles and pain that he never wanted to revisit, but now had been exhumed. He remembered the cold leather straps binding his arms and his legs—oh god, his legs!—and he could almost still feel the needles, dozens of them, hundreds it seemed, poking and prying, gouging and sticking and bleeding him until—
Thin, cold metal touched his throat and he screamed. Even the blurry memory of that unspeakable agony was more than he could bear. His heart threatened to burst as adrenalin surged and his brain cramped in singular, atavistic terror. That needle—oh god that sharp, stinging needle, venom-spewing needle—was on his skin. It was on his skin! It was searching for his eyes, his veins, the crook of his arm, the soft, sensitive weakness behind his knees. He held his breath in anticipation of the bite and the spreading fire.
“Teddy,” he screamed aloud. “Teddy, get him. Don’t let him stick me. Kill him, Teddy. Kill him!”
***
Teddy hit the robot at a full run. Mr. Tines, who’d put a finger to Leggy’s neck to feel his pulse, was body-slammed at full-force against the harder than steel nano-crystal window. The cavernous hall echoed with the fury of the impact.
The syringe fell from the automaton�
��s hand and skittered across the floor, stopping at John’s feet. Leggy cowered against the wall, whimpering and trembling uncontrollably.
The giant and the mechanical man rebounded from the window and rolled together on the floor. Each desperately groped for a hold, for purchase, for some advantage or weakness in the other. Despite his thin bodice, Mr. Tines proved more than equal to Teddy in strength, easily flipping the gigantic man off him and onto the floor.
Quick as lightning, the robot stood.
He touched a large dent where his head had impacted the floor with a sharp, metallic clang. One of his eyes no longer glowed, and the other momentarily flickered before resuming its steady burning light. His immoveable etch grin somehow now evoked an air of menace and mechanical rage.
Teddy sprang to his feet. His fear had turned to anger. He lunged. Wrapping his huge arms around Tines in a bear hug, he lifted the mad robot off the floor.
There was a creaking of metal and Tines moaned. In a slurred mechanical voice, the robot demanded, “You…let…me go! You let…Mr. Tines go…right now!”
Teddy did not let him go. He continued to squeeze.
Mr. Tines slowly raised one mechanical arm. The palm of his hand glowed with a dangerous red energy.
Leggy saw it, but saw it too late. “Teddy,” he screamed. “Teddy! His hand….”
The robot pressed his glowing palm to Teddy’s temple. The giant screamed in pain and went limp. The robot slipped from his grip. Teddy slumped to the floor, his arms and legs flailing in violent convulsions.
Mr. Tines wobbled on his feet. “Such behavior…is not tolerated…in this museum,” he croaked. His one good eye located the syringe at John’s feet. The robot reached down, shuffling toward it. “Let us…proceed…with the installation.”
Samuel stepped forward. He hoped the panic and desperation he felt wasn’t evident in his eyes or voice. “Mr. Tines,” the boy began, “it’s just occurred to me that something very important is missing. You’ve left a key display out of your timeline.”
The robot stopped. His good eye flickered, grew dim, and then brightened. “Surely, you are in error, young man. Our display is the best, most accurate depiction of the war and the…” his eye briefly dimmed, “and the events leading up to the present day that exists. Anywhere. Period. In the Wasteland or anywhere else. Nothing…is missing.”
“Why yes, Mr. Tines, there is. I’m sorry, sir, I don’t mean to be critical, but I have studied your display and there most certainly is something missing....”
The robot turned and took a step toward Samuel. “You are in error.” His voice took on a meaner, impatient edge.
“But the Dogs of War—” Samuel started, only to be cut off by Mr. Tines.
“We have three displays depicting the dogs of war, and another devoted to them,” Tines seemed annoyed. “You really must…pay closer attention.”
“Yes, but their power armor and weaponry,” Samuel said.
“What of it?” queried the robot.
“Well, where did it come from?”
“What do you mean, where…did it come from? It came from a factory... From…Boeing Industrio-Complex C, to be specific. A subsidiary of the Axel-Fax Corporation.”
“Yes,” Samuel said. “But who made it? I mean, not who designed it, but who specifically mass-produced all the armor and gear for the animals? Who actually made it?”
“Well…” the robot stumbled, “factory workers, I suppose. I really don’t…have time…for this….” Mr. Tines reached for the syringe.
“Oh,” said Samuel. “There were people working in the factories? I didn’t realize that.”
“Not people!” snapped Mr. Tines. “Machines. Robots…. Metal workers and automatons at the lower levels…and managerial models and maintenance engineers at the higher levels.”
“Like yourself?” asked Samuel.
“No, not like myself. I am…the cutting edge…of robotic AI integration! I…I represent…I rep—” Mr. Tines suddenly stopped speaking. His one blue eye flared impossibly bright—for a moment it seemed as if it would set fire to the inner working of his mechanical head. And then it fluttered, and went dark.
***
Leggy’s eyes were fixed on his reflection in the nano-crystal plate glass window. The scruff of white beard that covered the lower half of his face did little to hide the deep lines that the Wasteland had burrowed in his skin.
The Wasteland, he scoffed. Hell, they’d barely even entered the Wasteland. This strange museum was likely to be the last place even halfway civilized that they’d see for a long, long time. Civilized, he thought bitterly. It was that. If nothing else, for all of the robot’s flaws, Mr. Tines had, at the very least, conducted himself civilly, with a sense of duty and a respectful, albeit delusional, devotion to his cause.
The robot had had a purpose. The machine had only been trying to do its best under difficult circumstances. That was more than Leggy could say for a lot of the souls he’d encountered in his travels. More than he could say for his own weary band of travelers, if he was to be honest.
The dark memories of needles and pain still lingered in his mind, stirred by the metal curator. Leggy squeezed his eyes shut and tried to force those memories back into the deep well he’d sunk for them all those years ago.
He swallowed and took a deep breath, using his diaphragm, and tried once again with mental palms to push those memories down into calm, unthinking stillness. He felt his body begin to relax as he slowly let the air from his lungs. The bad memories—just balloons floating in his mind, easy to pop or send drifting away on the current of the wind. It was an old trick, something he’d picked up from the Bedouins.
He knew what lay ahead, or at least he had a sense of the vast, growing danger of the deep wastes. And more importantly, he knew that the others did not. Sure, they realized that their road—Ha! Soon enough, there’d be precious few roads—was a dangerous one. But did any of them truly understand just how dangerous?
How could they when this had all been their idea, hatched in the paranoid, tormented mind of Derek. It wasn’t anymore about going, so much as it was about running away. And the entire fantastical adventure was really only old Leggy’s mission. His final mission. His suicide mission. They were just along for the ride.
Leggy knew that they would soon see the true madness of post-nuke America—not the bugs and the radiation poisoning and the muties and starving throw-down grovels and shit-towns, but true evil. Only in the deep Wasteland had the mind of man been so utterly corrupted, so maddened by isolation, the sun, and the nuclear fire, that it had actually turned in on itself. Much like the tattoo on the belly of a whore that he’d once seen in Santa Cruz. A serpent swallowing its own tail, eating itself. To Leggy, that image, more than anything else he’d ever laid eyes upon, truly captured the stark, inhuman reality of the Wasteland.
Jesus H. Christ! Leggy shook himself from his morbid thoughts. That metal fucknut really did a number on me.
***
“We done looking?” Derek demanded. “I’ve had about enough of this crackpot museum.”
For once, everyone agreed.
Leggy gazed one last time through his own reflection in the glass. A factory diorama had been constructed in the display case. The rear wall had been painted with the logo of the Axel-Fax Corporation, an unclosed circle with an arrow tip bridging the gap.
Kinda like a snake eating itself, thought Leggy.
Inside the circle was the corporate slogan: EXCELLENCE IN EXECUTION!
In the foreground ran a conveyor belt, fed by the museum’s enormous supply of spare parts. The parts were attended to by Mr. Tines, who hunched with purpose over the conveyor belt.
The robot’s hands moved in a blur of motion, grabbing parts as they came, binding them together with strange, electronic tools
. Twisting and screwing, soldering and wiring. The robot, with great attention to detail and authenticity, assembled faux gasmasks and rebreathers, guns, flame-throwers, ammunition. He would do this until the end of time—or until his arms rusted and fell from his body.
Or until his master returned to save him.
Chapter Twenty-Six
As they passed through the motor pool to the elevator, Samuel pointed to the massive sand crawler. Leggy and Derek looked at the machine, and then at each other.
The two men strode over to investigate. Derek boosted Leggy into the passenger seat then walked around to the driver’s side. He climbed in and tentatively put his hands on the steering wheel.
“You ever drive somethin’ like this?” asked Derek, eying the control panel.
“Sure,” said Leggy. “I mean, not this kind of vehicle exactly, but I think we can figure it out.”
“Assuming it still runs,” said Derek.
“Right,” said Leggy. “Now then. See them pedals at your feet? The right one’s probably for go, and the left one’s probably for stop.”
Derek tentatively pushed down the right pedal. Nothing happened. He looked up at Leggy.
“Well, we got to start her up first.” The old man pointed to a green button that stuck out slightly from the steering column. “Try that one.”
Derek held down the button. The engine whirred and squealed, a long high note that made his companions clap their hands over their ears. Then it stopped. Derek moved to push the button again but Leggy stayed his hand.
“Hold on,” said the old man with a grin. “Feel that?”
Derek sat still. His seat was vibrating almost imperceptibly, as was the steering wheel in his hand.
Wasteland Blues Page 24