by Steven Bohls
“You shot one of our dreadnoughts out of the sky!”
More explosions boomed, and the dreadnought began to descend more quickly. With a sinking feeling, Jed suddenly realized which dreadnought this was. His heart clenched in his chest.
Captain Bog. What have I done?
The massive ship speared into the barge’s surface. A ball of orange fire swept over its hull.
Lyle’s face shook with rage as flames consumed the ship.
You have to go, a voice said in Jed’s head. Go now!
Jed turned and ran.
Lyle shouted through the air. “Stop him!”
There has to be another raft. Find it!
Jed ran the perimeter of the Galleon until he spotted one. Dread clattered all around him.
Before he could reach the raft, three dread barricaded the way. Jed grabbed the handle of a shatterkeg and spun it around. He fired, and the blast blew a crater into the deck.
Metal showered over the debris. As Jed skirted around the new crater, a wooden plank creaked and buckled under his feet. The floor beneath him fell away, and he tumbled onto the deck below. The shatterkeg he’d just used rolled after him and crashed through the planks near his feet, opening yet another hole to the lowest deck.
He squeezed through the hole and dropped into a long corridor.
“Jed. Stop this,” Lyle called from above.
Jed scrambled to his feet. The shatterkeg had fallen on its side next to him. It was nearly as tall as him and probably weighed twice as much. He gripped the copper tubing on its barrel and heaved. The shatterkeg lifted a few inches but dropped again.
Lift. You can do this.
Jed looked at his hands, imagined the metal gears spinning under his skin.
He squatted and took a breath, then grabbed the tubing again. The muscles in his back—or whatever they were—tightened.
Lift! Jed yelled to himself.
Inch by inch, the shatterkeg lifted until it flipped upright.
Lyle’s voice taunted him in his head. I don’t die.
We’ll see about that.
Jed dragged the shatterkeg down the corridor. A crunch sounded from the debris behind him. Jed turned around.
Lyle shook wood chips from his coat sleeve. “Put that thing away and stop acting like a child.”
Jed lined up the shatterkeg and fired. An explosion cracked from its end. The shot clipped Lyle’s shoulder. His body spun through the air and smashed through a wall.
As the black smoke settled, Lyle climbed to his feet and brushed off his clothes. “This is completely unnecessary.”
The blast had torn away the last of Jed’s grandfather, leaving only a gleaming machine.
Jed fired again, knocking Lyle to the floor. Again he stood. Jed wheeled the shatterkeg backward and opened the heavy oak door to the garden. He hauled the shatterkeg inside and took position behind the lemon tree.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Lyle called.
Jed fired again.
“I can do this all day,” Lyle said, rising from the floor.
“So can I.” Jed blasted Lyle through the wall of his kitchen.
Frosting still smeared the wood floor.
“Actually, you can’t. I’d bet you don’t have more than two shots left. I suggest you make them count.”
Jed looked at the shatterkeg.
He then tilted the barrel and aimed at a patch of soil not more than three feet in front of his toes.
The gears in Lyle’s face slowed and nearly froze. “Stop—Jed—what are you doing?”
Jed yanked a lever. The shatterkeg fired, ripping through the ship’s hull. Soil drained from the room like sand in an hourglass.
“No!” Lyle bolted forward and scooped armfuls of soil into the corridor.
Jed held his breath as he lined up the next shot. He yanked the firing lever, and the shatterkeg blasted the deck below Lyle’s feet. Lyle looked up with sorrow in his golden eyes.
And then the floor around him fell away.
Lyle slipped through the hole without a sound—without a shriek, or a scream, or even a gasp. He tumbled through air toward the barge until he was too distant to see.
Jed sighed and leaned against the lemon tree.
At least for now, it was over. He was safe. His father was safe.
But as he pressed his shoulder into the tree, it began to lean with him. The deck splintered and creaked with its weight. He clung to the trunk as it began to sink.
Something snapped, and the tree fell onto its side. The deck collapsed under him. Jed grabbed a tree limb. His feet dangled in open air as planks of wood fluttered to the barge.
Another plank of flooring snapped, and the tree fell into the sky with Jed still holding its trunk.
Jed held tight to the trunk of the lemon tree, and together they crashed. Branches tangled around his face. A hand reached through the leaves and gripped his. A familiar hand. His father’s hand.
Jed clawed through the lemon tree’s branches, swatting at clumps of soil that showered around him.
“You…you came back,” Jed said.
His father shrugged. “I was in the neighborhood.”
Jed scrambled free and wrapped his arms around his father. “He said you didn’t care about me. That you’d abandon me.”
Shay jammed the accelerator. The raft shot forward, shaking more soil into Jed’s hair. “Where to?” she asked no one in particular.
Jed’s father stared deeper into the fog. “Lawnmower Mountain.”
Shay lifted an eyebrow.
“What’s Lawnmower Mountain?” Jed asked.
“A hidden city that not many people still know exist.”
“Why are we going there?”
His father squeezed Jed’s shoulder with one hand. “To find your mother. She was supposed to pick you up from the steamboat. But something happened. We planned to use relics to keep in touch, but shortly after we separated, they stopped working. I haven’t heard from her since.”
“She’s…she’s missing?” Jed knew that his father had just said as much, but the words came out anyway. “How do you know she’s at Lawnmower Mountain?”
“If she’s out of reach, it’s the only place she would have gone.”
“What about the relic? Can’t you fix it?”
“Mine isn’t the one that’s broken.”
“Isn’t there something else you could use? Some other relic?”
His father shifted and avoided Jed’s eyes. He nodded and scratched the side of his neck. “There is one.”
“And it can find Mom?”
He nodded slowly.
“Then we’ll get it. We’ll do whatever it takes. Where do we start looking?”
“We don’t have to look anywhere. It’s already here.” He glanced at the bandages around Jed’s chest.
A lurching feeling turned Jed’s stomach on end. For a moment—the briefest of seconds—he’d forgotten what he was. Forgotten about the spinning gears under his skin.
“I can find Mom?”
“You can do more than you know. You found Lyle. You found me.”
“How?”
“You read the note we left? All of it?” Jed nodded. “Then you brought the key?”
Jed wiggled his toes against the metal lump. He pulled off his shoe, and the key clattered to the floor. “Is this what Lyle was looking for?”
His father picked it up and nodded.
“What does it do?”
He set it in Jed’s palm and closed his fingers around it. “Unlocks potential.”
Jed stared at the key. “What do you mean?”
His father removed the bandages around Jed’s chest and traced the golden keyhole. “Lyle made you with the potential to do almost anything. Anything—but not everything. It’s up to you to choose who you want to be. How you want to grow. What you want to do. This key”—he patted Jed’s hand—“unlocks your first choice. You are not gears and gold. You’re a boy with his own choice. His own life.
>
“The moment you turn that key, your world will never be the same. You will never be the same. And there’s no going back.”
Jed’s mind yelled at himself to think about consequences—to ask his father more, to find out what the key would do to him. But all he could think about was home. If this was the key to that, to home, then nothing else mattered. A word floated into his memory: SPLAGHETTI.
It was time for a little insanity.
Jed lifted the dented shaft of metal to his chest and slid it into the golden keyhole.
He turned, and a click echoed in his ears.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to all those who helped make this a reality. A special thank-you to:
John Robert Marlow, for undeserved patience, and for teaching me how to tell a story. To Rob, for being my biggest fan—even when my writing didn’t deserve one. To Tim, for honesty. To Emma, for believing in Jed when I didn’t. To Tracey and Ella, for believing in Jed when I did. To Jo, Kimberly, and Marion, for having faith in me. To Brenda and Derek, for slogging through awful writing. To Mom, for cultivating dreamers. And to Andelyn, for notes on bathroom mirrors written in bar soap, assuring me that one day, this would be.
STEVEN BOHLS lives inside a head of fairy tales and magic. He is a dreamer first, a thinker second, and a writer last. He also sculpts, illustrates, builds, creates, and designs. Steven has a BA in English from Brigham Young University and an MBA from American Public University. Jed and the Junkyard War is his debut novel. He lives in Daybreak, Utah, with his wife and two daughters. Visit JedandtheJunkyardWar.com to learn more.