by Lee Bond
Thus, launching himself into the sky with a repurposed pneumo-fist. Which, in retrospect, was actually way fucking worse.
Once at the top of this mobile, metallic mayhem-causing mountain, it’d be time for a little brain salad surgery.
“And me without my trepanning gear.” Garth fed the impromptu plan to DarkEye, keeping the core concepts as simple as possible. While he’d been told by people who thought horses were the coolest fucking thing in the Universe –not to mention totally awesome and smart-, he couldn’t help but think the exact opposite.
It didn’t take long, because at base, the plan really was super simple. It also checked off boxes labeled ‘moronic’, ‘stupid’ and ‘really dangerous’.
“You get all that, shortbus?” Garth waited a couple seconds, but DarkEye didn’t respond.
The plate he was roosted on grew suddenly and especially hot, threatening to melt the skin from knees, feet and shins.
“This is some serious bullshit right here. Fuck you, Nicked Jimmy, for not pausing during your goddamn Cockey-addled monologues for one minute to say ‘oi, right, yeah, I is forgettin’, right, when you is tryin’ to do for a Big’Un, yeah, they fucking grow murderous shit out of their bodies and that is total bullshit’. Gah!” Garth reluctantly yanked his fists loose, sliding down until he found an unheated overlay. Halting his downward progress was simply a matter of rinsing and repeating the task he’d already done.
“At least something’s going right.” Dangling there, Garth watched Deezy Cue’s gang hanging out, just outside swat range. “Assholes.”
Garth banged his head against the thick iron plate behind him. “Any time at all, DarkEye, any time at alllll. No, no, it’s totes cool. I’ll, like, hang out and make friends with this giant metal robot king and then we’ll wander around Arcade City having fucking adventures and shit.”
In response, DarkEye showed him a picture of metal horses grazing.
The Kingkiller laughed.
If Apple could use a stupid stopwatch to tell people to wait, if Windows could use a ridiculous hourglass, then the eye of a steampunk horse could use grazing animals to relay the interminable boredom of ‘wait a goddamn second’.
Without the brute computational power of Zippy the Wonderhorse’s Mildly Retarded Eyeball helping him get up to the brain for some smashy-smash, Garth decided it was high time to fine tune Operation Kill this King Without Getting Pulped, Prodded or Otherwise Really Hurt.
Getting inside the King’s head had to be the easy part. Hopefully. If the King was anatomically correct - then climbing inside the ear canal for a little Fantastic Voyage action until something important broke would be a breeze. Cue Operation Explosive King Syndrome.
Getting out once the steampunk superbot went explosively offline was the moment when the last few pneumo-punches would come in handy; making his way gingerly out through an earhole -while lots more safer- was also time consuming.
“And thus,” Down below, Deezy Cue’s gaggle was growing visibly upset that nothing awesome was happening, “We come back to you, dear moronic computerized eyeball. Without you to give me a better id … ah. Finally. Ass.”
DarkEye replaced the image of horses grazing with a flipbook-style animation of it’s ‘plan’. It consisted of using two of the three ‘safe’ megapunches in a manner the manufacturer deemed unsafe and a violation of warranties –not to mention totally invalidating Escape from Exploding King Plan Alpha- but Garth opted to wait patiently until the grand scheme was fully revealed before flying off the handle.
The first of three punches –according to DarkEye- was needed to launch him from his nice, safe and not meltingly hot metal plate hangout directly onto Kingzilla’s remaining –if mangled- megafist. Punch number two’s sole purpose in life relied on far too much luck and the supposition that magic was a real fucking thing, because DarkEye seemed to believe it was totally possible –and not at all batshit crazy- for the Engineer of Reality 2.0 to launch himself straight into the air, whereupon he would execute a flawlessly performed and Olympic Gold winning tuck and roll, following which he would then land right in the middle of King’s Crown with a perfect three-point landing. Just like in the movies.
“No.” Garth shook his head. “No. No fucking way. I bet I need at least two punches to get out through an eye, and you’re completely fucking bonkers if you think I can do all that flippy shit. No one, in the history of anything, has ever done that. Not really. That’s nuts. I don’t have a stunt double trained in Wire-Fu or a year to practice!”
DarkEye indicated it would be able to eke another punch from the armature at the cost of extensive repairs. Then it reminded Garth through highly provocative and insulting pictures focusing on various activities that farm animals got up to when no one was looking about the nature of the situation he was in, and that it was only going to get worse –through the addition of some ‘helpful’ farmhands- the longer he lingered.
“My fucking DarkEye just told me I’m fucked. How awesome is that?” Garth nodded, giving the lens permission to start tracking the King’s thrashing fist.
The ex-Specter pulled his right hand loose and made a fist. He watched the pressure plate mechanism move on it’s own, then put the fucking thing behind his back as best he could, praying all the while that not only did the harebrained scheme work but that he didn’t punch himself in half in the process.
The punch-fist was ready. Now all that was needed was for the King’s mangled hand to come closer.
***
“There he goes again! This man is ridiculous.” Moxy handed Cue’s glasses back to their looker, tracking the tiny dot of a man as he launched himself at the King’s broken fist. “And why ain’t the King’s busted up hand healed itself? Why hain’t he grown himself another one neither, now I think about it?”
Deezy Cue pursed his lips. He figured he had the man’s plan in mind now, and it were a brave one. He supposed it was the only way a single non-gearhead could do for a King, really, but –as their golden-armed man was learning- there were reasons for thumpers and crushers and shooters and lobbers, reasons that their lunatic hero obviously had not known.
“No metal bits.” Cue explained. How could the man not know that you needed to keep the King completely and fully distracted by delivering large amounts of damage to the King’s extremities so he couldn’t spare the time to make things like buzzsaws and hotplates and half a dozen other things that caused those that felt like climbing inside all sorts of discomfort? It were almost like this man had never bothered talking to a single gearhead afore trekking out into the wilderness, which were the daftest thing he’d ever thought inside his own brain before.
And even then, even if you had yourself a solid crew of thumpers and all making sure the King was more worried about losing an arm or a leg, even if your climbers could get inside, them as did it swore it were like climbing through hell itself, with all sorts of pinching and grinding and hissing things that took off arms and legs as easy as you pulled the limbs off a bug.
When Moxy shot him a look of confusion, Deezy explained further. “It’s why we come out here lookin’ for the point our lad used. No metal bits out here for the King to fix hisself with, right? Makes for a tougher King overall on account of, well, I reckon I don’t really know, but all’s I know is, your suburban-type Kings can rebuild themselves and these foresty types apparently can’t. Also,” Deezy changed his tone so no one would interrupt, “also out here, there ain’t no other crews looking to steal our kill, all right? We could of done … crikey! Straight up inna air lookit that!”
***
Flipping end over end through the air, Garth ordered DarkEye to record as much of the land as possible whenever land popped into view. The Kin’kithal suspected that if he survived and made it back to camp that Barnabas might very well decide to end their traveling arrangements sooner rather than later; if the old caustic bastard had issues with a broken circuit board being monkeyed with, Garth was one hundred percent positive that
the fucker would go all sorts of mental over a summoned King so close to camp. There was also every chance that whatever mystery was allowing the Eye to work again would stop again just as quickly, making any data it recorded inaccessible. For a change of pace, though, he was trying to think positively.
Just to see what it felt like
Though, Garth reflected as his stomach did that thing that stomachs did when your rollercoaster started that first long drop and every bit of you was convinced death waited with greedy carnival clown eyes just there at the bottom, the case could be made that everything was the blacksmith’s fault.
Refusing to even idly discuss what the bloody fuck the King was up to? Part of the problem. Refusing to speculate on the weird crashing Dome noise? Check on problem-causing … problems. Being a double-ended douchebag spaz when it came right down to admitting that –for all his claims- he had zero fucking clue how to fix what was ailing a poor old Reality Engineer?
Mega-check. With added check marks and exclamation points to make it truer.
Garth wiggled a bit in the air and managed to get his feet pointed the right way then waited to crash land in the middle of the King’s Crown. From there –in highly speculative and not at all factual theory-, he could scamper quick like a monkey around the side of the head, down the crown, in through the ear, smash the shit outta the brain and jump out an exploded eyeball, whereupon he would land graceful as an angel descending to the earth, if angels had wicked nanotech arms and outstanding taste in music.
At which point, while walking towards Deezy and Friends, Kingzilla the Mad Metal Monarch would explode in a billion fiery bursts of pyrotechnic awesome. If he had sunglasses, he’d say something cool like ‘All Hail the King, baby’ while pretending nothing was happening behind him. And then the two creepy looking women in Deezy’s crew would turn into sexy women and they’d have an impromptu …
DarkEye issued an apology via a hi-res picture of a sugar cube, the image momentarily filling the HUD and ruining Garth’s pre-victory fantasy, right when the sexy gearladies were getting…
“The actual fuck?” Garth looked down past his feet. “Come on! How is this fair? This isn’t fair at all. This is total bullshit. I swear to Christ, when I’m in charge of the Universe, nothing is going to be bigger than six and a half feet. Nothing! Sure, I’ll have to figure out a way to make things that, like, do what whales do and stuff, but this is … goddamn … ridiculous!”
***
“King swallowed ‘im.” Obese Patterson said from his spot on the ground. He didn’t feel like moving; one of his mates had yanked out yon King’s fingernail and the healing had used up the last of his Kingsblood. He were really quite sad about the whole thing. “He’s done for.”
“Nah,” Criss squatted down and patted the poor fat man on the head, noting that –while the gash from the metal bits had healed up fully- there wasn’t any hint of Iron in the scar. Poor bastard. “Nah. He’s going to be fine.”
***
“I am never going to be fine again.” Garth shouted angrily. “Never.”
Raw frustration boiling out of him, Garth looked around and started punching things. He’d already been attacked by well over a dozen weird-looking robotic arms with pincers –which had disappeared quickly on after proving fairly ineffectual from the start- so, for the moment, the only thing available for needless punching were iron girders framing the inside of the King’s head.
The stink was awful; the rotten stench of hot metal and dissolving flesh oozing from Barnabas’ melter had seemed to be the worst thing inside Arcade City, but as he was rapidly discovering, inside a King smelled worse than ass. It was hot metal combined with … well, his sense of smell was shutting down so there wasn’t any real way to pinpoint every smell percolating inside the body of the giant roboKing, but … it was bad. If he got out alive, he was going to bathe.
Forever.
Moving forward, all of his Arcade City missions would be dispatched from a mobile steampunk bathtub. It would have the local, fucked up version of rocket launchers and saw blade launchers and by God, since Trinity wasn’t around, he was going to figure out a way to make heavy metal music play out of speakers carved from purest titanium. And … and … everyone would follow him around and sing his praises and all that would be super rad.
“I’m losing my goddamn mind.” Garth took a deep breath and oriented himself properly; somewhere no more than twenty feet above him, the King’s brain did whatever giant steampunk robot brains did when they were at home. So there was probably tons of electricity zapping all over the place and Tesla coils and great big lights and stuff doing … robot things. There would also be beeping. Because that seemed like something that a crap steampunk robot would do just because. “Oh man, it better fucking be up there. If it’s in his ass or something, I … I … I just don’t know.”
Garth hopped up, grabbed hold of a horizontal girder, and then chinned up to the next level. This was gonna be easy. All he had to do was Super Mario his way to the top.
Right?
Right.
***
“Well, if something doesn’t happen soon, I say we go up and start hammering on the King anyways.” Large Ronald felt this were quite reasonable. It were well eerie, standing there, watching the King stand there, doing nothing except scream every now and then. Occasionally, the giant machine monarch would bash at one side of it’s head with the lone, mangled hand it possessed, but mostly it just stood there, stock still.
“Be reasonable.” Deezy protested. “That fella is still alive in there somewhere, else the King would come after us or bugger right off.”
Moxy Molly picked at a mark on her face. “You’re scared.”
“Think of Obese Patterson.” Deezy said hastily, wincing at the look on Molly’s face: her comment had struck too close to home. The looker pointed at the fat man, who was now sitting upright, gingerly touching the nearly-healed wound in the top of his head. “He hain’t got no Iron left in him no more, and he were our backup crusher.”
“Leave ‘im.” Molly snapped, drawing guarded nods from Ronald, Smitty and Criss. “We can figure out a way to do this King without a second crusher. I think it’s mental, anyway.”
“Who? What?” Deezy flinched when the King blatted out a mangled roar of fury and took a few lumbering steps in their general direction. “Who’s mental? What’s mental?”
“I am right here.” Patterson figured –if he could survive the journey- he’d head down to one of the Estates to the very furthest south. He’d always liked the landscape South. The people down there seemed a lot nicer, too.
“Yeah,” Molly sniped, slapping Pat on the side of the noggin, “but you’re useless now, so what’s the point of even talking to you?”
Everyone including Obese Patterson jumped out of their skin when the King’s roar –loud as ever- suddenly … cut off amidst a tortured cacophony of sounds that reminded everyone all too keenly of The Noisy; that mind-numbing, soul-crushing experience not too long ago’d been the beginning of their bad luck, and if it was happening again … the crew wordlessly prepared themselves for the end.
The King opened his mouth to roar once more, got about a quarter of the way through the process, then …
“… we go! Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, hello and welcome to Jesus Fucking Christ What a Shit Day, starring your host, Garth ‘I am an Idiot’ Nickels!”
Obese Patterson shrieked –shrieked- like a little girl, wet himself and passed out. Large Ronald, who’d always been a really tough character, took one look at Deezy Cue, nodded politely, then took off towards the campfire smoke they’d seen a while ago. Coralline Criss, Moxy Molly and Riddled Smitty grabbed hold of Obese Patterson and started dragging him after Ronald, who was already a dim vision down the path.
Deezy Cue pursed his lips, utterly nonplussed. He stared up at the King, who … who was still talking to himself.
“… can’t believe this place or you people, you know that? The inside
of this fucking King is like a goddamn haunted factory. It’s like Maximum Overdrive in here! About the only thing that hasn’t happened is me, being hit by a poltergeist-driven Mack truck! I’ve been burned, attacked with robo-fists, cut, stabbed and generally beaten bloody! My punch-fist is completely friggin’ ruined now, too. No one said nothing about King’s being full of weird little … what the fuck is this noise? Come on! Autodestruct? Jesus! This place is total bullshit. The fuck!?”
Deezy Cue looked longingly towards the path his crew had taken, a path surely leading to a blacksmith. Memory told him this area was one of the routes that Barnabas generally took, and though the old codger was less than pleasant and charged more than was fair for everything he did, the crew leader found himself rather looking forward to the displeasure.
“Screw it.” Deezy waved farewell to the King who was somehow possessed by the spirit of the madman who’d so obviously met his grim end within the massive monarch’s body; there was no other end for a man who fought a King without Dark Iron in the blood. He turned tail and started hurrying after his friends.
Maybe he’d go South. South had fine looking women and lax attitudes towards employing washed up gearheads.
Deezy Cue paused to listen to the King’s final words.
“Autodestruct sequence countdown. Destruction in ninety seconds.” The King laughed, and the neutral sounding voice was replaced once more by the spirit of Garth … Nickels. “Hah! I don’t think so, you asshat! Take this!”
The last thing Deezy saw before refusing to look back anymore was the King, bashing in the side of it’s own head, one-handed, as it ran back towards the treeline.
Made sense. Wherever possible, Kings that were successful in destroying their summoners returned whence they’d come, all to ensure that the next time they were summoned from wherever they lay in rest, it was with all their armaments.