Strike 2: Dawn of the Daybreaker (10 page)
Keplar laughed. “How is it?”
Tobin stopped coughing and tried to catch his breath. “It’s a bit strong,” he said, in a voice that barely escaped his throat.
The swinging doors of the saloon opened. Tobin heard the clanking of metal and turned around; a man was entering the saloon, about forty years old. He had a goatee and a bald head, and was wearing a tattered, black duster coat and tattered, brown pants. He was big and muscular, with a sneer on his face that clearly advertised:
The bartender approached the bald man. “What’ll it be, Junior?”
“Usual.”
The bartender grabbed a beer and put it down. The bald man drank from it and watched the television in the corner.
In the corner of his eye, Tobin saw a group of people stand up from their table in the shadowy saloon. He watched as they walked toward the bald man: they were three young men in their early twenties, and they were dressed in all black. They had tattoos on their faces and arms, and the shoulders of their jackets were covered in spikes. One of them had a Mohawk a foot high, while another’s long hair grew past his shoulders. The third punk, the one standing in the middle of the others, was the shortest of the group. He had mangy, black hair, and tattoos on his neck that ran up the side of his head, all the way to his ears.
“Hey,
Wakefield
,” the shortest punk said.
Tobin turned to Keplar at the sound of the name. The husky had also heard it, and was now watching the confrontation.
“Remember us?” the shortest punk said, stepping closer to the bald man. “We paid you last week to get our car back from the Warthog?”
The bald man never looked away from the TV. He let the punks talk to his back.
“Oh yeah, that’s right,”
Wakefield
said, taking a sip from his beer. “You’re welcome.”
The shortest punk shook his head. “Only problem is, you never got us the car.”
“Sure I did. Left it in your driveway.”
The punk stomped his foot. “It didn’t have any wheels! Or seats! Or an engine!”
“Well, let’s not be picky about it,”
Wakefield
said. “Come on, let’s have a drink and celebrate.”
The punk stepped toward a pool table. “Nah. I think you’ll be having something else.”
The punk picked up a pool cue and reared it back, holding it over his head.
After the TV changed to a commercial,
Wakefield
turned around. As soon as he did, the punk brought the pool cue down with all his strength, intending to smash it over
Wakefield
’s head. But,
Wakefield
caught the cue, snapped it in half with one hand, and tossed his half away. Then, the bald man stood up, grumbled in annoyance, and punched the shortest punk in the nose. The punk was knocked backward into his friends, and once they got back to their feet, they all screamed in anger and charged at
Wakefield
. The bald man waited for them, finished his beer, and then swung the empty bottle and cracked it across the Mohawked punk’s face. The longhaired punk then lunged at Wakefield from behind, so Wakefield swung his elbow back, whaled him across his jaw, brought both his fists down onto his back, and sent him to the floor.
Finally, without breaking a sweat,
Wakefield
grabbed the shortest punk by his jacket, lifted him off the ground, slammed his body onto the bar, and dragged him across it, shattering a dozen bottles and ten glasses of booze. Finishing the job, the bald man picked up the punk from the bar, held him over his head, and tossed him across the saloon. The punk crashed into the piano in the corner, causing the instrument to snap off its legs and fall to the ground with a dull
, its keys all loudly ringing at once. As the pianist and bartender looked at the ruined piano in shock, the punk lay silently in the middle of the broken wood and wires, his eyes closed.
Tobin and Keplar were stunned. The rest of the patrons in the saloon were now standing, anxious and readying themselves in case the bald man turned his fists on them. Unfazed and unhurt,
Wakefield
dusted off his hands, walked to the bar, and finished a drink that wasn’t even his.
“Sorry, Jesse,” the bald man sighed, putting a roll of money on the bar. “Won’t happen again.”
With his metal tools clanking against him,
Wakefield
pushed open the swinging doors and walked out of the saloon. Keplar watched him go, then turned to Tobin.
“Gee, I hope that guy’s on our side.”
Outside the saloon, Keplar and Tobin ran out of the doors just as
Wakefield
was getting into his black pickup truck.
“Hey,” Keplar said, “are you
Wakefield
?”
Wakefield
started up the truck. “Sorry, fellas. It’s my day off.”
Tobin stepped toward the open passenger side window. “But, uh, those guys called you
Wakefield
, and we’re looking for a guy named
Wakefield
. Are you him?”
“Yup, but I can’t help you. Sorry.”
Wakefield
put the truck in drive.
“We’re here with a guy named Orion,” Keplar said, stepping in front of the truck. “Maybe you know him?”
Wakefield
narrowed his eyes.
“Yeah, I know him. What’s he need?”
“It’s our friend Scatterbolt,” Tobin said. “He’s in trouble.”
Wakefield
pointed to the back of his truck with his thumb. “Get in.”
“Can you help us?” Tobin asked.
“No,”
Wakefield
replied. “But my father can.”
After a fifteen minute, bone-rattling ride in the back of the bald man’s pickup truck, Tobin and Keplar found themselves standing in the lobby of “Wakefield and Son’s,” a repair shop for robots, androids, transforming cars, cybernetic livestock…and the occasional vacuum cleaner. The wide, clutter-filled shop was in an area similar to the one around Jesses’ Place—with dimly lit dirt roads and a smattering of other wooden-planked buildings surrounding it—but there was one big difference: an elevated train track that ran through the middle of the area, curving by the back of the repair shop.
As he walked around the lobby of the shop, Tobin was inspecting all of the technological wonders and bizarre metal devices on display. In a work area toward the rear of the store, the boy could see Orion standing next to Wakefield Sr., the man that they had been looking for at the saloon. The short, white-bearded man appeared to be about seventy-five years old, with a round face and large head that was topped with a ring of thinning, white hair. At the moment, he was hunched over a table, wearing thick, black glasses and using a table-mounted magnifying glass to inspect Scatterbolt’s golden sphere.
“He doesn’t look like a wizard to me,” Tobin said.
Keplar picked up a tin sign that was resting on a table. The sign read: WAKEFIELD
“Ah,” Tobin said. “I see what they’ve done there.”
Keplar smirked. “A little play on words.”
“Very cute,” Tobin said.
Tobin picked up a small, shiny microwave with glowing springs and stepped to his right, but then bumped into something; Wakefield Jr. was standing in his way. Tobin looked up at him.
“Uh, I mean, not cute,” Tobin stammered. “I didn’t mean you and your dad were...cute. I just meant...that…”
Junior walked away.
Keplar laughed. “Nice work, Tobe.”
“I don’t think he likes me,” Tobin whispered, as he put the shiny microwave back on its table.
In the work area in the rear of the shop, Orion was standing over Wakefield’s shoulder as the short, goggle-wearing man inspected the sphere.
“So what do you think?” Orion asked.
“Well, it’s not damaged,” Wakefield replied. “If it was, we’d be in big trouble.” He picked up the sphere and showed it to Orion. “This is Scatterbolt’s brain, for lack of a better word. Everything that makes up Scatterbolt—his personality, his memories, his voice—it’s all on this sphere chipboard. It was incredibly smart of him to remove this before they took him.”
“So what they have is useless, then?” Orion asked. “His body? It’s just an empty shell?”
“Well, they might be able to get some random information from it, but that’s all. Anything they do to it won’t hurt Scatterbolt—for all intents and purposes, I’m holding Scatterbolt right here. The only bad news is that Bolt is currently without a body. It’s gonna take me a while to make a new one.”
“That’s okay, take as much time as you need. Just try and make it exactly like the old one. He’s become, uh, part of our team, you know.”
Wakefield looked for something amid the piles of tools on his workbench. “Yeah, I know, I know. Don’t get all emotional on me.” He found a transparent glass tablet and handed it to Orion. The tablet had a handle on each side, allowing it to be held like a map. “Lucky for us, Scatterbolt’s body also has a tracking device, so whoever took him, you can use this to find them.”
Orion inspected the glass tablet. There was a map on the screen, and a blinking light in the middle of a large landmass, marking the location of Scatterbolt’s body. “Thank you, Wakefield. You have no idea how much this will help.”
Wakefield checked his watch. “Hold onto something.”
Confused, Orion clutched the top of the workbench with both hands. Wakefield stood in a doorway and braced himself.
The repair shop began to rattle. A whistling pierced the air. As Orion’s brain vibrated in his skull and the metal devices and tools on the walls clanged and swayed wildly, a flying train zoomed by the shop, hovering above the train tracks outside and traveling at over 200 miles per hour. When it finally passed and the building stopped shaking, Orion let go of the workbench and regained his footing.
“Why did you move your shop to this place, Wakefield?” he asked, with his eyes wide and his hands on his ears. “I’ll never understand it.”
Wakefield returned to his workbench, as if the earthquake was only a minor delay. “Eh, it’s not so bad. I like being alone. Plus someone has to keep an eye on all these thugs and loonies around here.”
Wakefield began using a small torch to solder the sphere under the magnifying glass, so Orion walked around the workshop. A framed picture on a shelf caught his eye.
It was an old magazine cover. The colorful image showed Orion, Tobin’s father, and Wakefield, appearing to be in their early thirties, and dressed in costume. Wakefield, much thinner and with a full head of hair, looked especially young, with black welder’s goggles on his eyes and a belt across his waist with mechanical devices and tools hanging from it. The headline read:
THE INVENTOR HELPS THE GUARDIANS SAVE QUANTUM
“Fifty years ago we offered you a spot on our team,” Orion said, “and fifty years later, you’re still saying no.”
Wakefield shrugged off the memory. “I work much better on my own than I ever did with any team. Don’t know why, just do.” The short, balding man sat down at the workbench. “Ya know, it’s strange you coming to see us. I was just about to send Junior out looking for you.”
“You were? Why?”
Wakefield thought it over. “A bunch of friends of mine that work in the Never-World, they’ve been telling me lately that they’ve been seeing someone walking around in the city. Someone we both know.”
“Who?”
Wakefield looked up at Orion. It took him a moment to answer.
“Scott,” he replied. “Tobin’s father.”