The Circus of Machinations

by Chris Ward

  ‘Got no choice, boy,’ the other man spat. ‘You stay here, you’ll die like the rest of us. You leave … he’ll find you. Embrace the darkness. It’s the only way.’

  The man sighed and looked away for a moment. Victor saw his chance. He dug into the snow and kicked off hard, making an angle across the street towards the others, then turning on his heels and heading back the other way. Shouts came from behind him, but there were no signs of running feet. He had sprung the trap, and they were too weary to give chase.

  The last thing that he heard before he turned a corner sent a trickle of horror down his back:

  ‘Embrace the darkness before it embraces you! Its arms are everywhere, in every shadow, and he’s starting to come back into the light!’

  10

  Secret Weapons

  ‘He’s back.’

  The voice popped up out of the radio, making Kurou jump. He’d been resting, lying atop a pile of dirty blankets with the fire burning a few feet away. His back felt hot and feverish, while his front was chilled and tight from facing the rest of the freezing room. Not for the first time he considered just rolling over into the flames and letting it end him. After all, having dived into a lake of fire once before, there was no amount of pain that he feared. The only thing that kept him up at night was the thought that while there was life left in him there was creativity, the darkest of all kinds, and the chance to dance to its sinister tune one last time would forever turn him away from thoughts of suicide.

  He had wired up the radio to replay the surveillance robot’s reports in a language he could understand. The robot’s batteries were running low, but it seemed the section of road where the old café stood didn’t receive much traffic, and its sensors were set to activate with motion.

  Kurou sat up. The knife wound in his side still ached, but the infection was fading away. All he had to do was keep it clean and it would heal, adding another scar to the great patchwork of his body.

  ‘Give me details. Are you sure it’s him?’

  The receiver translated his words into binary and relayed them to the robot. A few seconds later a confirmation came back as affirmative.

  ‘Wait until he’s gone and then go inside.’

  Kurou propped up some blankets and sat up to wait. He had been hoping the inventor would come up with the last items on his list, but the young man was taking his time about it. With them he could finally build himself something of note, but he wondered if the inventor knew that. Perhaps he was holding them back as bargaining tools for some unknown deal he was yet to serve.

  Years ago, Kurou wouldn’t have considered such a scenario. He would have had the man gutted, either by his own hand or by that of one of his creations. Now, though, he was in less of a position of power. It might be prudent to let the young inventor think he was ready to strike a deal.

  ‘Follow him this time. Make sure he knows you’re there.’

  The robot gave him an affirmative. Kurou closed the line and stood up. His body was aching from a thousand wounds, most old, some new. He stretched as best he could, wishing he could do to himself what he had done to so many others: create a new from an old. The years had not been kind, and time had added its own weight too. He was no longer a young man, even inside the leathery ruin of a coat of skin that covered him. He suffered from the same aches and pains that everyone did, a thousand times over, a constant drum beating in the back of his skull, reminding him over and over again that it might have been better to die in that lake of fire he had himself created and been done with it.

  Thanks to the young inventor he had enough food for a few more days, but he needed some fresh air. He went out of his rooms and began the long arduous climb up a service staircase at the building’s rear. Signs warning of collapse and unstable masonry kept most of the few tenants to the front stairways and the single elevator that worked intermittently, so he found himself the sole passenger up through the freezing levels towards the roof.

  By the time he had climbed the nine flights of stairs and stepped out through the rusted door on to the open roof that gave a bleak, foggy view of a winter-shrouded town and the lumpy hills that broke the haze all around, he was sweating, and the chill air was a relief on his burning skin.

  He hobbled to the very edge and sat with his legs dangling off, looking out over the barely hospitable little hovel he had called home for the last five years. Like a boil on hell’s asshole, Brevik sat discontented and angry, a cesspit of hate and failure. If and when whatever army that was coming rolled through here, it would be a beautiful thing to watch the town’s total and utter annihilation, its erasure from existence.

  It was dark when he went back down. His legs ached from the cold, and for someone with more human skin it might have been fatal to sit in the biting wind for so long, but Kurou’s deformities had their uses. He felt no better, but the pain in his side had reduced to a dull ache, almost enough to blend in with the rest of the clattering background music of agony that accompanied his every step.

  When he got back to his rooms a light on the radio was flashing, indicating a recorded message.

  ‘He left you a note,’ the robot’s recorded voice said.

  Kurou tried to activate the command for the machine to restart, but the robot’s battery was dead. Controlling his anger until he found something whose value wouldn’t be missed, he flung a screwdriver hard against the wall.

  He had lost his way to communicate with the young inventor. He would have to go out to the café himself, but it was a couple of miles through snow and freezing temperatures, and he was still too weak.

  Still, he had enough food for a couple more days. If he lay low for a while, he might build up enough strength to make the trip.

  And if he didn’t? Well, he would worry about that then.

  Victor stared. His own surveillance robot stood motionless in the road behind him. It had been following him for some time judging by the tracks in the snow leading back down the street, but he would never have noticed it was there if the alarm warning of low battery hadn’t blared.

  He went up to it, feeling a little uncertain about touching it. Even though he had built it with his own hands, it now seemed tainted, alien.

  Part of him wanted to leave it behind. Just the way it looked now made him feel uncomfortable, especially coming so soon after his brief conversation with the drug addict in the Lenin District. Another part knew it might be his only way to find out where the stranger lived. The robot had memory chips that would have stored location data. If Victor could access them, it would display where the robot had been during the last few days.

  Whatever he did, he couldn’t leave it out in the middle of the street. Within hours wolves—the human kind—would have found it and it would be gone.

  It was too heavy to lift. He would need to bring the cart to transport it.

  He dragged it to the side of the street, surprised at how heavy it now felt, as if someone had filled up the cavities behind its casing with sand. He pushed it behind a pair of trashcans and partially covered it over with snow. It wasn’t perfect, but if he was quick it might work.

  He ran most of the way back to his house, slipping several times in the snow in his eagerness to get home. Returning with the cart took a while longer, the tracks of the machine only able to maintain a steady walking pace in the snow. When he arrived at where he had left the robot, he had a shock because the trashcans had gone, emptied or moved back inside, but the robot was still standing back against a wall, looking like a heap of scrap metal poking out of a pile of snow.

  He opened out the cart’s back section, folding it down into a ramp. Then he pulled the surveillance robot up on to the carry platform and secured it with ropes.

  It was nearly dark. He was like a sitting duck, a warship waiting for an airstrike, a blind rabbit waiting for a fox. There was no way back to his house apart from the most open way, straight through the streets.

  And by now the wolves would be out.

 
; The whirring of the cart’s little motor seemed to fill the stillness of the night. Victor kept as best he could to the side of the street where there were no concealing alleyways, but it was only a matter of time before the cart attracted someone’s attention. He thought about finding somewhere to hide it as he had the surveillance robot, but he had got lucky once and didn’t expect his luck to hold twice.

  He was able to skirt around the edge of the Lenin District, and as fog draped itself over the snowy landscape—what Victor often called zombie weather—he found himself thinking he might make it.

  He was only a couple of streets from home when a voice shouted out of the shadows, startling him.

  ‘Hey, you! Where do you think you’re off to with that?’

  Victor scowled. He turned to the cart and urged it to move quicker, but the machine was already struggling beneath the load of the powerless surveillance robot. With every shift of its caterpillar treads, more shards of ice got jammed into the mechanisms, making their passage slow and tiresome.

  A shadow fell across the snow in front of him.

  ‘Look who it is.’

  Victor gulped. It was Isabella’s brother, Esel, dressed up in a thick Russian coat, only his cherubic little face boiling like a roasted cherry at the centre of a fur-lined hood.

  Two others stepped out of the shadows behind him. Both were taller, but seemed more diminished in the glow of authority emanating like radiation from the fourteen-year-old boy.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What have you got there? Don’t you know there’s a law about hoarding stuff like this?’

  Esel began to stroll in a lazy arc around the cart. Victor waited, keeping one eye on the boy’s henchmen at the same time. This was not a situation he could win. In a simple fist fight he would struggle to beat Esel alone; he had no chance against three. With the threat of war hanging over Brevik there was murder in the air, Victor could practically inhale it. It had turned the discontented into thugs, and thugs into killers.

  Esel suddenly took a step in towards Victor, pushing him back against the cart.

  ‘You fucking thief,’ he said, voice low, menacing. ‘I haven’t forgotten what you did. Where’d you get this stuff? Steal it as well?’

  Victor clenched his teeth together until he was as confident as he could be that they wouldn’t chatter. ‘These things are mine,’ he said. ‘All of them.’

  ‘Liar,’ Esel said, spitting into Victor’s face. ‘You’re a thief and a loser and it’s bringing shame to my family that my dumb whore of a sister is hanging around with you.’

  Victor felt it was better to say nothing than aim a retort that would bring a fist into his face. Esel stood facing him, even at fourteen a few inches taller, and thick enough at the shoulders to not need his henchmen to cause damage. Victor tried to look around him for a possible escape route.

  ‘Gonna run away, are you?’ Esel said, when Victor’s eyes strayed too far. ‘Like a coward with his tail between his legs? You wet fucking blanket. You’re so pathetic I can barely find the words to describe you.’

  ‘Then don’t try,’ Victor muttered under his breath. ‘Just let me go on my way.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Esel said, stepping forward, right into Victor’s face, the lips of their hoods touching. ‘What did you fucking say?’

  Victor tried to duck away, but Esel pushed his shoulder, spinning him around. Victor’s foot caught on a corner of ice and he fell, his hands landing on the ground, sending stabs of pain up through his shoulders. He looked up as Esel swung a kick into the side of the cart, a sadistic grin on his face.

  A fizzing boom sounded and a light flashed. Esel cried out and fell—no, flew—backwards, slamming hard against the wall of the nearest building, a puff of smoke exploding out of his chest. He hit the ground and rolled, coming up quickly, but another blast of light burst out of the cart’s casing and this time struck him square in the face, sending him cartwheeling backwards to land face down in the snow, his legs bent up to his neck, his back broken.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Victor spotted the two henchmen dashing off down the street. The cart fired one last shot which caused a bank of shovelled ice to explode in a cascade of red and yellow flame, then it went silent and still.

  Victor climbed slowly to his feet, brushing the snow off his jacket. The street was silent now, the cart sitting motionless, still laden with the surveillance robot.

  Victor looked around him. Except for himself and the cart, the street was empty. There were lights in some windows further up the wide, snowy boulevard, but no cars moved, no people walked beneath the few working streetlights.

  He hadn’t recognised either of Esel’s two companions, but if they took their testimonies back to anyone with a running mouth then it wouldn’t take long for his own identity to come out. He could hear them now: foreman’s son murdered in cold blood by crackpot local inventor.

  The truth, as always, was largely irrelevant. Esel was dead. Nothing else was of any great concern.

  The cart hadn’t moved. Victor looked down at its casing, wondering where the blast of light had come from. He hadn’t installed any kind of defence weaponry, so it had been done by the stranger. It had all happened so fast Victor had barely seen what it was. Some kind of incendiary device, something that exploded on impact.

  ‘We have to get away,’ Victor said, concerned by the tremble in his voice. The last thing he needed to do now was panic. He had to keep a level head above all else. His life might hinge on it.

  He crouched by Esel’s body, pulled off a glove and held out a shaking hand to what was left of Esel’s mouth, feeling for breath, but there was nothing. Strangely, the thought rotating on a loop was that Isabella would be angry that he had killed her brother. That it would spell the end of their relationship seemed more important than that it would find him rotting in a jail cell in the frozen basements beneath City Hall.

  Esel was a dead weight of muscle, bone and furs. Victor dragged the body into the shadows of the nearest alleyway and piled some snow over it. It would be easy enough to find, but having it out of immediate sight eased his conscience, as though he had temporarily erased his association to the crime. While it might be discovered tomorrow, in a best case scenario it would go unnoticed until the spring thaws.

  With the deadly cart trundling at his heels, he headed for home, shoulders weighed down by the fear of what might soon happen.

  11

  Going Underground

  Robert Mortin put one large hand on the wooden banister pommel and squeezed, feeling the whole trellis frame shake under his grip. He thought about tearing it off and breaking it into firewood at his feet, but it would just waste valuable energy, and it wouldn’t hurry these fucking kids up.

  Isabella appeared at the top of the stairs, a bag held in one hand and a dress of some lace description in the other.

  ‘Are you sure I can’t take more than one bag, Father?’

  ‘One,’ he growled, barely loud enough for her to hear, but the look on his face must have been enough, because she threw her eyes back over her shoulder, huffed, and fled from sight.

  Patricia slinked in from the kitchen. Compared to Isabella she was diminutive, barely five feet tall. She had an oval face that was all her mother’s, but the cold, unforgiving eyes were Robert’s alone. He refused to let her know, but Mortin was proud of his younger daughter to a point that it almost hurt. She was everything her older sister was not: intelligent, calculated, ambitious. He knew what she did around the station at night, but he also knew why; she was a taker, like her father. Not a single finger was lifted without her willing it so, and she would make a great woman one day, fearsome and unflinching. Before the war, he had planned to ship her off to Moscow to a state university, where she could go into management and perhaps even politics.

  She watched him like a fox and he met her gaze, refusing to be the first to look away. Esel should have been the one made in his father’s image, but while the boy
shared his father’s callousness, his cruelty wasn’t controlled like his twin’s. He was erratic, destructive, a bomb rather than a trigger.

  ‘Where is he, Father? He should be back by now.’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Patricia shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen him since this morning. Perhaps he went to school?’ The corner of her lips turned up as if it was an inside joke.

  ‘He knows to be ready. He’ll be here. I’ll leave him if necessary.’

  ‘I know you will.’

  Isabella, stumbling and clattering to the top of the stairs, gave them both an excuse to look away. She held up two bottles of perfume. ‘I know I can only take one, but I can’t decide.’

  ‘You’ll take neither,’ Robert said. ‘This is not a joke, Isabella. Our lives are in danger.’

  ‘But we have to leave so much behind!’

  Patricia scoffed. ‘Why don’t you stay then? It’ll make your precious boyfriend happy.’

  Isabella opened her mouth to reply, but the wit required didn’t come quickly enough. She gave a trembling shake of her head, then stormed back into her room, slamming the door.

  ‘Don’t tease her,’ Mortin told Patricia. ‘You know how she is.’

  ‘She’s an idiot.’

  ‘Don’t speak ill of your sister.’

  ‘I don’t hear you defending her, Papa.’

  ‘Your time would be better spent looking for your brother than talking back to me, girl,’ Robert said, taking a step forward and lifting his hand from the banister in warning. He’d struck her before and would do so again, as his own father had done to him. Discipline and love were branches of the same tree, swaying to the same tune, and if you offered too much of one and too little of another, the tree would fall.

  She held his gaze another moment, then turned away, stalking back into the kitchen.