Gabriel’s Watch - Book One: The Scrapman Trilogy (7 page)

“Lovely night for a stroll, huh? Care to tell me what you’re doing here?”

The intruder’s body stiffened. He rose slowly and lifted his hands to shoulder height, keeping his gaze toward the vehicle. “I’m ... nobody ... no one ... I didn’t mean anything by it ... no harm ... ” he sputtered. “Be on my way ... sa-sa-sa, Sir.” His voice trembled violently—his hands shook—his body swayed.

“Take a seat, will ya?” I grabbed him by the elbow and helped him to the ground. “What are you doing here?”

The man turned, took the hood off his head, and revealed a curly bulb of blond hair. His face was damp and sweaty. His cheeks grew increasingly bright under the night’s moon. He was just a boy, no older than eighteen, and certainly a far cry from the demonic creature with which I’d so eagerly presented myself. I recognized him immediately.

“I ... uh,” he began. “I ... wanted to come back ... for that.” The kid pointed toward the hubcap on the old Monte Carlo. “My dad used to have a car like this ... ”

“He used to take you to ball games in it,” I finished for him.

“Yeah!” His eyes lit up. “And I just wanted to take something ... that would remind me of him.”

The gun I’d been holding was already facing the floor. There was no threat here and Alice would be able to see us on the monitors. She would know I was okay.

“Knock yourself out, Kid.”

The boy obliged. Spinning back to the car, he started to dig his knife into the hubcap’s center, trying to wrench the bluish emblem free. Judging by the force with which he chose to drive the object and the shaking of his hands, it appeared to be a challenging task.

“So, where are the rest of your buddies?” I asked, finding it odd—and foolish—that he’d come alone.

“Oh, them? They don’t know I’m here.” The kid struggled a bit more. The sounds of intense scratching brought a twitch to my eye as a cold shiver shot up my spine. I found my arms to be knurled with goosebumps.

“Yeah, they seemed like a fun bunch,” I scoffed.

“No, they’re a bunch of assholes!” he shouted as the knife slipped from his grip and went flipping through the air, just after slicing his palm clean open. The kid cursed extensively, ripping the sleeve free of his shirt and wrapping the frayed cloth around his injured hand.

I picked the blade up off the ground. “Do you mind if I give it a shot?”

“Knock yourself out,” the kid mimicked as he tried to shake the pain free, making whistling sounds through clenched teeth. I put the sharp end of the knife against the emblem’s edge, lifted my other hand, and gave the hilt a solid smack. The symbol dislodged with the cracking of metal to metal.

I tossed it to the kid. “There ya go.”

He caught it in his good hand before studying it a bit. “Thanks, Mister.”

I nodded slightly before regressing the conversation a tad. “So, they’re assholes, huh?”

“What?” He seemed lost for a moment, already sinking deep within a memory. “Oh, yeah—they’re assholes.”

“I never would have guessed,” I said with optimum snarkyness. “Why do you let them push you around like that?”

The kid shook his head. “You don’t know what they do to people who stand up to them.”

I caught a mental glimpse of the old man flopping around behind their white SUV—bloodied, broken, and brutalized. It was something I would not soon forget.

“I think I have an idea.”

The boy continued to disagree, becoming increasingly adamant. “No, what they did to you—no offense—that was nothing. They went easy on you.”

“I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about that dusty ol’ timer. What was the deal with that guy, anyway?”

“Oh ... him.” The kid slouched down a bit, letting himself fall back onto the vehicle’s driver-side door, “Yeah, he got the worst of it.”

“What did they do to him?”

My question seemed to bring a ton of weight with it. The kid’s knees buckled. He slid down to sit on the back of his heels. “God, what didn’t they do to him?”

I gave him a moment to collect his thoughts as the sides of his face seemed to collide with one another. With eyes squinting he started to recap the final hours of the old man’s life.

“All I could hear was the screaming,” the boy revealed. “Those terrible screams.”

He took a deep breath as I urged him further, “Go on.”

The kid lowered his voice to a near whisper, looking off into some invisible pocket of consciousness, “They broke his legs first ... ”

“Then?”

“Then they broke his arms.”

The kid’s fingers began to clench, each appearing to be on the verge of snapping in two, as they dug deep into his shoulders.

“He told them everything he knew ... but it wasn’t enough.”

There was a slight pause when I noticed the rhythm of his lungs growing irregular—not exactly operating in a controlled sequence, but rather a jolt and jostle within his chest.

“And when they finally beat him to death ... I ...I was happy ... Oh, God, I was happy.”

The boy seemed to be split right down the center, half of him in some stage of grief, while the other was set deep in anger and even guilt. I reached out to rest a hand on his back. Whatever comfort that may have brought him, I will never know. “And guess what my dad did for a living,” the boy said, lifting the emblem and regaining a portion of his composure.

I shook my head and shrugged. “What?”

“He was a cop. He was the best cop. Always teaching us to do the right thing—to be brave.”

I could sense the heart of his internal conflict as it writhed within his words. The kid’s voice quivered further. “And now I can’t help but feel like I’ve let him down. I can’t help but feel like he’s disappointed—ashamed.”

I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “He’d be proud that you made it this long—that you survived. That is enormous strength in itself. You did what you had to do in your situation. You were just a kid. You
are
just a kid.”

He wiped a single tear from his eye before running a finger over the emblem in his hand. It left a wet smudge— almost poetic in retrospect.

“You know, my brother was a cop also,” I added honestly, “probably just like your dad. I thought he was the best, too, but you have to take the memory of them and keep them close.” I tapped myself on the chest, right on the fleshy patch surrounding my heart. “They live through us ... every single day they live through us.”

As thoughtful as my words may have been, I couldn’t help but feel like a fraud. Just knowing that the very memory of my own family, once the pillar of my being, was now something I kept tucked away—it made me sick. And as gruesome an image as it depicts, or as horrific as it now sounds, there was a time when it was all I could do to keep from unearthing their bodies, just to hold them again. I’m disturbed to even say it.

There was a sudden shifting of weight as the kid rose to his feet. I sensed a bit of uneasiness on his part. Maybe he realized he’d been gone for too long, or perhaps it was the heart-to-heart he’d found himself having with a complete stranger, an act that never ranked high on the masculinity scale, but he’d kept his eyes trained to the floor.

“Thanks,” the kid said as he plucked a busted lock out from his pocket. “And sorry about your gate.”

“I’ve got more locks. Don’t worry about it.”

He took a few steps away from the vehicle and back toward the entrance before stopping again. “You know, you’re taller than I remembered.”

My brow furrowed at the offering of this random remark. “Well, we’re all taller when we’re not being punched in the ribs, Kid.”

“Good point.”

“So, who was that steroid-abusing agent, anyway?” I asked, hoping to get some free info on the guy who just might have a little something coming to him.

This is what I like to call “karma,” but Alice would have referred to it as “revenge.”

“Oh, you mean Crayton?” the kid asked. “He’s one of the leaders, not an agent—a governor.”

I chuckled, “A governor, huh?”

I continued to be amazed by the audacity of these individuals. Al Capone may have felt similarly, had he lived long enough to see all the hoodlums, thugs, and sociopathic punks walking around with the ego-driven ignorance to call themselves gangsters.

That term had been dragged through the mud for so long that the only prerequisites necessary for obtaining such a title was owning a firearm and not fully comprehending the basic fundamentals behind a belt. For God’s sake, there were children in grade school calling themselves gangsters.

I used to weep for the future. I guess I still do—just for different reasons.

“Yeah, if there’s anyone you should be afraid of—it’s him,” the kid added.

“Was he the one who ... ”

The boy nodded before I had a chance to finish, seeming to know I’d been leading to the old man’s killer. “Look, you seem cool,” he started. “When I heard those guys got their asses handed to them, I was ecstatic. They’d kill me if they knew, but it was time for a reality check.”

“Sounds like they got what they deserved.”

“They sure did,” he agreed as he slipped through the gate. I closed it behind him.

“What’s your name, Kid?”

“Tim.” He’d turned to quickly toss the name over his shoulder as he started to run back in the direction of town. “Thanks a lot,” he blurted before vanishing from sight.

“Timid Timothy,” I muttered to myself. The name had popped into my brain for no apparent reason.

Did he run all the way out here? No way he ran all the way out here.

It was then that I heard the ignition of a small engine some distance down the road, and the whine of his departure.

I
opened the door to the cavern and started down the first few steps before I stopped dead.

The hair on my neck and arms was standing on end. But why had my body gone into high alert so abruptly? Having learned to trust these instincts—as they’d proven useful in a great many situations—I crouched low and scanned the darkness beyond.

There were two things that could have sparked my internal reaction. The first hadn’t been triggered by anything within the blackness at the bottom of the stairs, but rather the blackness itself. It was as if the darkness had somehow gained consciousness and threatened to swallow me whole. The place was undoubtedly darker than I had left it just a few minutes earlier. And even more disturbing, as the moonlight spilled in and cast its glossy glow down the stairwell, I shivered at the absence of its luminosity reflecting back from Alice’s green eyes.

She was not there.

Her face, after all, had been a constant presence upon my returning home—especially a return such as this. Alice did, however, have an affinity for the dark. Along with the many other impressive attributes she’d been given, Alice had also been created with the eyes of a nocturnal creature. In the right light and angle, her eyes appeared to be fixed with rounded mirrors at their centers. Despite the fact that she occasionally preferred to dim the lights, it wasn’t right that she wouldn’t be waiting at the bottom of the stairway just then. It wasn’t like her.

At that moment a third factor entered my mind and clattered about like a marble in a tin can. The robot was gone.

First the darkness, then Alice’s absence, and finally the missing robot. If Alice was gone, that
thing
was the only acceptable explanation. It had taken her—somehow forced her to comply—I was sure of it. Had it taken her hostage until we agreed to let it go? Perhaps it had a default mission to return itself to Zolaris. Or maybe, without a war to wage or any real objectives to follow, it had turned
us
into enemies out of sheer boredom.

The possibilities were piling and piling, each seeming more probable than the last, when I discovered a metal object glistening before me. It was my pistol, held out and solid in my own two hands. Trained down the stairs and toward the vacant workbench below, it seemed to have a mind all its own. I could have sworn it had leapt from my jeans and into my greasy palms by some miracle or black magic. Either way, I was glad to see it. I took another step down.

“Alice?” I heard myself say. There was more worry and concern apparent in my voice than I would have liked. I was waiting for an answer when I realized I’d been holding my breath. I cleared my throat and took in some air.

“Alice?” I spoke again, more firmly this time.

But there in the dark ... there was still no answer.

The churning force within me only grew stronger— now a slippery and limbless reptile, it began to slither its way between my lungs. I fought to keep the gun steady, struggled to keep myself in the moment, and fought desperately to keep the vision of a very dead Alice out of my mind’s eye.

She’s safe. She’s fine. She’s alright.

A fire was burning at my heels, climbing my back and shoulders, and stretching my scalp taut over the back of my skull. I could feel adrenalin coursing through me like acid, heating my flesh, burning through pain receptors, and melting away whichever side of the brain was responsible for self-preservation. I stormed down the remaining steps, slapped on the lights, and shouted at the top of my lungs, “Alice!”

I heard the sound escape my mouth, but could barely detect which fraction of it actually sounded like me. Being a horrific mixture of anger and panic, I’d never heard anything quite like it—emitted with such rage and contempt as it shot out of my voice box.

I soon found I wasn’t the only one in a frantic state as Alice rounded the corner in nothing short of a sprint, her black hair whipping around her neck as she skidded to a stop, her eyes wide with the emotion I’d just released.

Surprise. Relief. Fear. Each emotion tore at my chest.

“Jesus, Miles, what’s going on?! Are you okay?!”

I looked beyond Alice, half expecting Zeke to round the corner in pursuit. It came, but with no malice in its intent.

I let out a sigh of relief, feeling those internal chemicals spilling back to their designated cavities as the robot clanked to her side.

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong,” I fibbed poorly. “I just ... didn’t know where you were.”