The Age Atomic es-2

by Adam Christopher

  Rad frowned, wondering how hygienic this establishment was. He decided to go for something safe.

  “Coffee. Lots of sugar.”

  The barman’s smile widened and his nod this time was different, the nod of a man appreciating a fine choice. He even said the same as he straightened up and vanished through a door behind the bar.

  Rad reached into his pocket to retrieve his wallet and his hand found the metal rod. He pulled it out and peered at it in the low light.

  “Hey, where did you get that?”

  The barman had returned, steaming cup of coffee in one hand. He was frozen in the doorway, his eyes wide, locked on the object in Rad’s hand.

  Rad held the thing up by one end but before he could say anything, the barman dumped the coffee on the bar, spilling nearly half of it, and reached across to push Rad’s hand away. Rad snatched the rod close to his chest.

  “Hey!”

  “Put that damn thing away, Jesus,” said the barman. He kept his hands out, his eyes scanning the empty bar behind his single customer. He was breathing heavily and quickly.

  “You know what it is?” asked Rad.

  The barman leaned across the bar, his face an inch away from Rad’s. Rad grimaced; the barman’s breath was hot and smelled of acetone. As he leaned back, Rad saw the barman’s eyes were bloodshot. The man was either sick or high on something.

  “It doesn’t matter what it is,” said the barman. “It belongs to him, to one of his machines.”

  “Who?”

  The barman was very still, his eyes on Rad’s. Rad raised an eyebrow and the barman nodded.

  “You don’t want nothing to do with him,” he said.

  Rad shook his head and slid off the stool. Enough was enough. As he moved, the barman jerked forward again and grabbed Rad’s forearm tightly. Rad shook it off.

  “Bud,” said the barman, “you wanna watch yourself. It’s not safe.”

  “So I’ve been told,” said Rad.

  The barman flicked his head at the object in Rad’s hand. “You’re not from round here, are you?”

  “Downtown,” said Rad.

  The barman pursed his lips like he was going to whistle appreciatively. He leaned in to Rad, like a conspirator. Rad found himself getting closer to the man, his nose assaulted by the acidic smell of his breath.

  “I heard things were rough, downtown.” The barman said it like it was another place altogether. As far as Rad had seen, that seemed to be exactly the case.

  “That so?”

  The barman nodded, his eyes glazing over, almost like Rad wasn’t there. He chewed and swallowed and spoke.

  “Yeah, man, I heard there were riots, and that they’d tried to storm the Empire State Building.” The barman tried to whistle but his lips did nothing but pass a narrow current of air through them. The tang of acetone was strong and Rad couldn’t stop his nose crinkling.

  “I heard there was a hijack,” the barman said. “I heard the police tried to come down on a crowd in an aerostat, but the people, they stormed the ship and took it over and were flying it around the place.” He moved his hands in the air, clearly impressed.

  Rad said nothing. The barman was right; since the cold had set in and Carson had abandoned his post, the city was full of disturbances.

  There was a light in the barman’s eyes. “I heard there were others, in the city. Y’know? From the other side. Infiltrators, all secret-like, on the down-low. Coming in and stirring things up, right? Trying to overthrow the Commissioner, get their own kind in.”

  “The other side?” asked Rad.

  “Yeah.” That fire again, fighting its way out of the barman’s bloodshot eyes. “I heard they were called ‘Communists’. From New York.”

  Rad frowned. “Com-you-what-now?”

  “The Reds…” The barman almost whispered it, and let it hang in the air along with the stench of his breath.

  The man was deranged, whatever the hell it was he was chewing pickling his brain. So he’d heard the news from downtown, about the riots and protests, but infiltrators from New York? The Fissure had closed.

  Time to change to subject. Rad pulled the metal rod out again but kept it close to his chest. As soon as it came into view, the barman’s eyes widened again and they darted around the empty bar.

  “Jesus, mister, you gonna give me palpitations, I’m telling ya.”

  Rad’s eyebrow went up again. “You know someone called Geiger?”

  The barman shook his head, quickly. “Never heard of no Geiger, but then I don’t know his real name.”

  The mystery man. Rad’s caller, he had no doubt about it.

  “Who?”

  The chewing paused, and this time the barman ran his hand through his greasy hair.

  “Either you’re playin’ me, or you’re about to walk into the spider’s parlor with a clue, mister.”

  “I came here because I was asked to,” said Rad, raising the tube to his eye line. “Someone wants this back. Sounds like you know who.”

  “Oh, mister, mister,” said the barman, backing away and holding his hands up like Rad was asking him to open the register and start counting bills. “You gotta turn around now. Go back downtown.”

  “What’s so bad about uptown? Who lives up there?”

  “Mister, everyone knows. Maybe not downtown, but around here, nothing goes on that doesn’t have something to do with the King.”

  Rad sniffed and placed the rod on the bar. The barman’s eyes were glued to it. Rad watched the barman as he slowly spun the rod on the damp wood top.

  “Who’s the King?”

  “Come on, mister!”

  Rad stopped moving the rod and waited until the barman dragged his eyes from it to Rad’s.

  “Who is the King?” said Rad with more force.

  The barman shook his head and dragged the towel off his shoulder only to slap it back across the other. He folded his arms and nodded again. “You must know who he is, if you said he wants that back.”

  “Can’t say I caught his name.”

  The barman shook his head again. “King isn’t his name. King is what he is. The King of 125th Street.”

  Rad smiled. “Seems a funny place to be king of.”

  The barman didn’t seem to like this. His eyes hardened and the thin smile vanished. “But that’s where he told you to go, right?”

  Rad held his breath for a moment, then let it out slowly. The creepy barman was right. The instructions had been simple: come to 125th Street, come at night. That was all Rad had got. He’d looked it up on a map back in his office but the map hadn’t shown anything except a street like any other, running across the upper part of the city, west to east, at a bit of an angle.

  “The King of 125th Street…” said Rad, mostly to himself, but his words elicited more vigorous nodding from the barman.

  “Lives in a castle.”

  Rad glanced up from the bar to the barman. “Lives in a… castle?”

  “There’s a light on the top sometimes, green one.”

  “Huh,” said Rad. He was getting closer. Whoever this King was, he was involved with something fishy involving robot gangsters and a warehouse full of strange equipment and an army of tin soldiers. He could pay the King a little visit, find out more, and take the information to Jennifer Jones.

  “But, mister, come on,” said the barman, pleading. “You gotta go home. Toss that thing in the river and forget you ever came to Harlem.”

  Rad smiled and pocketed the rod. He lifted his hat from the bar and placed it on his head. The hat was still cold from being outdoors, and Rad could felt the moisture on the rim against his scalp. Rad patted the pocket of his trench coat, feeling the dead weight of the pistol in it. “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

  The barman sniffed. “You don’t know what’s out there,” he said. Then he stood back and folded his arms. Rad watched as he chewed, and he saw that the man’s saliva wasn’t black, it was green. He thought back to the antif
reeze in Cliff’s hip flask. Suddenly a reason why the barman was interested in the metal rod came to mind. Rad gasped.

  “You a robot?” he asked.

  The barman’s thin lips split into a lizard grin and he slurped a mouthful of green saliva before leaning back in across the bar. “What, are you crazy? I’m as real as you are.”

  Rad retreated from the bar, transfixed by the man’s chewing. The man wasn’t as big as Cliff, and while he wasn’t exactly a perfect human specimen there was a certain handsomeness hidden behind the grime and grease.

  “What are you eating?” Rad asked, peering at the barman’s ever-moving mouth. “You chewing a battery or something?”

  The barman stopped chewing and sniggered. “Trust me, you don’t want any of the green.”

  Rad’s eyebrow went up. Green? “I guess not”, he said. Then he lifted his hat. It was time to go. “Sir, it’s been a pleasure. I’ll be sure to pass my regards on to the, ah, King.”

  He turned and made his way to the door, the barman not saying anything but chewing, chewing, chewing.

  When the door closed behind Rad, he thought he heard the barman say “good luck” or “go home”, but he wasn’t sure which.

  SEVEN

  Harlem was quiet and sharp, the sound of Rad’s shoes on the ice-clad pavement the only noise as he walked onward. The street was lit in a dull orange from the clouds above, and ahead Rad could see the black conglomeration of buildings merge into something much larger, a squat skyscraper of the sort more common to downtown, the shouldered setbacks outlined against the dull sky behind. There was no light, green or otherwise, but the building had to be it. He was on 123rd already. Maybe the King of 125th Street was watching his progress, and would put the light on when he was nearer.

  Rad stopped. He hadn’t seen anyone since leaving the tavern, and the trailing footsteps hadn’t reappeared.

  Except… there they were. But they sounded different now: not just one set of footsteps but several. They shuffled rather than stepped, a group moving slowly and far away, at least at the moment. Rad thought again that the King might have invited him into an ambush.

  Rad ducked into an alleyway that was just a tiny gap between two buildings. The brickwork was rough and layered with ice perfectly clear and perfectly smooth. Rad slid his back along it until he was in the shadows, then ducked down and moved forward to peer around the corner, his hand already reaching for the gun in his pocket.

  “They’re following us.”

  Rad jumped at the whisper in his ear, turning his head sharply to find a face-full of fur. He spluttered and tried to brush it away, before realizing it was Jennifer Jones’s hat. Rad hissed, and Jennifer shushed him.

  “What in the hell are you doing here?”

  Jennifer raised an eyebrow. In his fright, Rad had pulled the gun from his pocket and was pointing it right at her. Jennifer moved the barrel to one side with a finger, then raised her other hand. In it she held a gun, something large and silver that shone in the night, looking more like a hair dryer than a weapon.

  Jennifer smiled. “Your little pea-shooter isn’t going to be much good around here, detective.”

  Rad sighed and hunched his shoulders, allowing the upturned collar of his trench coat to touch the rim of his hat. His breath plumed in front of him as he spoke. “You been following me too?”

  “All the way from your office,” said Jennifer. Then she laughed. “Don’t look so surprised, Mr Bradley. You’re not the only detective in the city.”

  Rad looked Jennifer up and down. She was wearing the heavy overcoat, this time topped with the fur-trimmed hat.

  “You’re not made of metal too, are you?” asked Rad, not sure if he was serious or not.

  Jennifer smiled again. “I’m as real as you are.”

  Rad opened his mouth in surprise, but Jennifer looked up sharply, her free hand waving Rad to keep quiet.

  She leaned across Rad to see out into the street. Rad raised himself up to see over her hat.

  The black buildings around them looked like theater flats, the streetlight casting a circular pool of dull yellow light.

  Something appeared in that light. Rad held his breath and shrank back, but Jennifer edged forward.

  It was a man, a big man, walking with a limp so bad he was dragging his left leg behind him. In fact his whole body was stiff, the arms locked straight, the man’s back so rigid it was like he was made of…

  Rad ground his molars together. The man’s torso was flat and shone in the streetlight, a seamless, rounded thing of metal. His arms were metal too, but the boxy forearms ended in human hands. The bad leg was human, except for the foot, which was nothing more than a rectangular shape from which rigid pipes sprang, traveling up the entire limb in parallel before turning at a right angle and connecting to the man’s pelvis. The other leg was entirely mechanical, as artificial as the arms and torso.

  The man didn’t have a head. There was a short metal stem, a neck, with thinner pipes waving about six inches out from the end of it as the creature moved.

  Rad recognized enough of the creature to feel the adrenaline pump through his body, making him dizzy and nauseous.

  It was a robot sailor, one of the human-machine hybrids manufactured from the citizens of the Empire State to crew the Ironclads that sailed off to war. The thing was incomplete, the human and mechanical parts badly mixed, the whole thing fragile and broken and twisted.

  Rad felt his mouth fill with a sour taste. He glanced down at Jennifer, but before he could speak she pulled back into the alley and raised her hand for silence. Rad gulped and risked another look out to the street.

  The broken machine was just the first. As it limped forward, others followed, each a twisted mix of human and robot, none complete, all moving with difficultly and perhaps, Rad thought with a growing sense of unease, pain. They were silent, the only sound the shambling, shuffling of their problematic movement.

  Rad counted an even dozen, exactly the crew complement of one of the great Ironclad warships. The last Fleet Day had been two years ago, six months before everything changed. Rad knew the naval shipyards down near the Battery were still in existence, but he also knew that they were empty, abandoned by the navy once Wartime ended. They didn’t make Ironclads anymore, nor did they make any more crews.

  The group on the street was not an ordered rank of robots. They looked like a collection of spare parts, both mechanical and human. Rad suddenly wondered what had happened to all of the crews that must have been prepared for the last great sailing, the one that had been close to happening before Wartime ended.

  He had a feeling he was looking at it, and his stomach churned.

  “What are they?” he asked. He knew the answer but he wanted to hear it from someone else. The robot gang had stopped under the streetlight, and a couple of them — one with a big square metal box for a head, attached to a very human neck and chest, and another that was the exact opposite, the human head looking ridiculously small on top of the wide rectangular body — seemed to scan their surroundings.

  Looking for them.

  “I’m hoping your friend will be able to tell us,” said Jennifer. She pulled back into the shadow of the alleyway and pointed with her gun towards the north, towards the vast black building that loomed over the whole area.

  Rad followed her gaze. “You think the King has something to do with this?”

  Jennifer glanced sideways at Rad, then her eyes were back on the street. “That what he calls himself?”

  “So I’ve been told. King of 125th Street.”

  “Which matches the directions you were given.” Jennifer nodded. “It’s all connected — our friend Cliff and the army of robots; these poor creatures in Harlem. Something big is about to go down.”

  “So what’s your plan? Follow me to this King character?”

  “You bet. You got an invite.”

  Rad pursed his lips. “Guess you tapped my phone?”

  “You guessed right.” />
  Rad sighed. “I’m not sure the invite came with a plus one. And I was planning on bringing you any information I found.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Thought I’d save you the effort.”

  Rad frowned and glanced back around the lip of the alley. “Damn,” he said.

  Jennifer peered around his shoulder.

  The robots — those with heads — were looking right at them. The sound of twelve semi-mechanical bodies jerking into motion was loud in the otherwise silent night.

  Rad realized Jennifer’s appraisal of his handgun was accurate. He’d bought the thing to shoot people, not machines, and only if he was really in a squeeze. He glanced at Jennifer’s gun, the giant silver thing she still had raised up, balancing its weight like she couldn’t really lift it.

  “You gonna point that thing at them or what?” Rad asked, not bothering to lower his voice.

  Jennifer hissed through her teeth. “Last resort only.” She glanced towards the north, to the big building. It was hard to tell, but to Rad it looked at least three blocks away.

  “We’re gonna have to run,” said Jennifer. “On three.”

  The robots were slow but closing. They didn’t appear to be armed, so Rad imagined the general idea was to tear them limb from limb.

  Rad and Jennifer locked eyes. Then she nodded.

  “Three!”

  Rad pushed at the ice-covered brick of the alley wall as he sprinted forward, away from the robots. He instinctively reached one hand behind him to grab onto Jennifer, but his hand met empty air. He half-turned and saw the robots stagger as they caught proper sight of their targets and adjusted their own course. He turned around and saw Jennifer had a good ten yards on him, the shiny leather of her knee-high black boots flashing in the low streetlight from beneath the flapping edge of her coat.

  “Hey!”

  Rad clenched his jaw and stepped up the pace. Jennifer Jones wasn’t going to slow for him, not at all.

  He checked over his shoulder. The robots were gaining, their ramshackle, almost random movements making Rad feel ill. He turned again, focusing on outpacing the robots without slipping and breaking his neck on the icy street.