Tin Fingers: Book 2 in the Arachnodactyl Series Read online

  “Hold on,” Ikey said. He stepped up to the stamp machine and examined it as Gavril swept out the leather pieces and Philip hustled back and forth, trying to deal with the excess of ragged bits.

  A small hand grip used to pull oneself up onto the top of the machine presented itself as a useful tool. Ikey gripped it with his flesh hand and rattled it. Vibrations and neglect had left it loosely attached to the machine. He switched to his mechanical hand, gripped the handle, and pulled. He put his weight into it, and after a few seconds, the screws snapped. Ikey stumbled back, the handle clutched in his fist.

  After making sure The Alligator wasn’t watching, Ikey approached David and fed the flat edge of the handle into David’s thumb. After a bit of prying, he felt the rod he was after snap into place. He then used the handle to push a gear back into alignment, then told David to give it a try.

  David lifted his thumb as he spread his fingers. His face widened in surprise to match.

  “Bloody hell!” David said.

  Ikey tucked the handle into his arm, among the two rods that formed his forearm. There, it appeared to be a component of his augmentations. He turned around as one of the mechanical asses stopped and reached for David.

  “He doesn’t need to go,” Ikey said. “He’s fine.”

  The automaton clutched its club-like fingers around David’s arm and yanked him to his feet.

  “It’s all right,” David said. “The thing is too daft to understand. I’ll give old Rolfe your regards, then be right back, I will, my good man.”

  As the automaton ushered David away, the man cast a finger at Philip. “And you! Don’t you bloody dare stop moving again until we sit in the grub hall.”

  Philip nodded and struggled to his feet. Tears rolled down his cheeks like sweat, and he jogged off to the cart, passing Gavril as he went. The Russian man stared at Ikey, his face blank and gaunt as weathered stone. By every appearance, the man had no opinion on recent events whatsoever.

  He’d be one to keep an eye on. Especially when it came time to take out The Alligator.

  The press clanged. Ikey turned back to his work.

  Chapter Eleven

  The noise of the factory washed itself into a monotonous roar as Ikey went on, sweeping out his half of the tray, and then stretching his back and lunging forward to sweep David’s half of the tray. On occasion, Gavril stepped into David’s place and helped keep the tray swept until the pieces piled up around their feet. Gavril spoke not a word, but stared with intent at the tray, the roll of leather, the flashes of the blades as they peeked through the holes punched in the strip before it advanced past and ascended back into a slot in the ceiling.

  Philip stumbled a few times in his efforts to keep up, but after twenty minutes or so, he appeared to sink into a resolve where he didn’t think or feel or do a thing more than exist. He moved as if under a puppet master's strings. It was a familiar look, like spying someone in a coat identical to one Ikey had once worn out.

  David returned before long, marched ahead of the mechanical ass until they reached the bottom of the stairs. The automaton released his shoulder. He hurried across the floor as The Alligator glared after him, his expression writ large with irritation and a sense of personal failure for not sending David back to The Old Chopper.

  “Clean bill of health,” David said with a grin to them as he stepped up to the press. “If not a little worse for the wear.” He patted at his ribs and smiled through a grimace. The flesh around his left eye socket was puffy, red, and darkening into a bruise.

  “Thank you,” David added as he and Ikey reached into the tray. “I owe you.”

  “Gavril—“ Ikey began.

  “Gavril did the smart thing.” David looked into the press. “I would beg him to do it again should the situation repeat itself.”

  “What? How can you say that? If I hadn’t been here to fix—“

  “Men die here,” David said, his face flushing. A twitch jiggered at the corner of his swollen eye. “Don’t provoke The Alligator. Don’t provoke anyone. You only make it worse.”

  Ikey looked up and down the line. In addition to The Alligator, six mechanical asses stood at the ready. Before them, a man sat on a stool and read a paper. A hundred men at least labored under their watch.

  The press hissed as the piston bled out its steam and the tray fell back, baring its black tongues of leather.

  “There are so many more of us, though,” Ikey said. “And many of us are augmented. If we stood up to them, they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  David barked a short laugh, then stifled it. “And then what?”

  “We leave.”

  “And go where?”

  “Home. Anywhere.”

  David’s jaw flexed, as if what he wanted to say pressed against his teeth and he struggled to contain it.

  “This is home,” he whispered to the machine. “Some of us have nowhere else to go.”

  Ikey joined David’s silent stare and watched his mechanical hand sweep the tray. His shoulder and chest ached with the strangeness of the labor.

  “Is anything really worse than this?” Ikey asked.

  David glanced back at Gavril, then at the tray before them. “There’s solitary.”

  “Solitary?”

  David nodded. “They lock you in a dark room for a week or more. Reduced rations. No one speaks to you. It’s cold as bloody hell.”

  Ikey’s mind softened at the thought of it, of being locked inside a dark room. It called to him in a siren’s song that whispered of peace and release.

  He shook his head as he swept leather pieces away. “Solitary. Really? And how much work gets done in there? It sounds like a bloody holiday.”

  David glanced at Ikey, then back to his work. “You have no idea.”

  Ikey watched David’s face become stone, pale. His jaw tightened and his eyes half-shut themselves. He appeared to want to crouch low and hide from something.

  “The problem with reconciliation,” David began, “is that men can only owe so much before they reach a point where they will never outlive their debts. Piling more years onto a lifetime sentence becomes meaningless. At that point, the only option left is to break a man’s spirit.”

  Ikey had no idea how to respond. He turned to the machine and swept its tray out in silence. After a few minutes, he cleared his throat and said, “Once I find my friend, we’re leaving.”

  “Best of luck to you.”

  “Won’t you come along?”

  David watched Gavril crouch at their feet and sweep up an armful of pieces. Once he scurried away, David said, “I have my own friend to look after.” His gaze remained on Gavril as he moved away, and it lingered until Ikey felt he ought to avert his eyes.

  As the alternate shift relieved them, David bid Gavril and Philip to save them bunks, then he herded Ikey over to two of the automatons, which escorted them and a few other men back to the infirmary. There, they stood in line while Rolfe and Nurse Luca examined the junctions of their flesh and iron in the new and recent arrivals for signs of trouble.

  David turned back to Ikey. “How was your first full day?”

  No sooner did the words leave his mouth than the doors of the infirmary burst open. In rushed a man who skidded to a stop, then reached back and grabbed the door before it swung into the face of the mechanical ass following in his shadow. It dragged behind it a man on a litter. His breath came fast and rapid through clenched teeth, hissing like a loose valve on a steam engine. Sweat plastered his dark hair to his forehead. The man’s body was stiff, rigid. His back arched against the litter. His one flesh arm, held against his side, was tight with such tension that it curved backwards slightly.

  Rolfe and Nurse Luca hurried to the man. Rolfe pulled a small cone from his pocket, crouched down, and held the bell of the device to the man’s chest while Nurse Luca bid the mechanical ass to be still. Rolfe lowered his ear to the other end of the cone.

  “Lockjaw,” David whispered over Ikey’s shoulder.
“I bet you Sunday’s bread.”

  Rolfe stood and pocketed his listening device. He motioned at Nurse Luca, then pointed at the back of the infirmary. She led the automaton to the farthest end of the infirmary where she and the automaton placed the litter on the bed. As the automaton clanked away, Nurse Luca pulled privacy screens on aluminum frames around the patient before rejoining Rolfe.

  “Aren’t you going to help him?” Ikey asked of Rolfe.

  David gripped Ikey’s sleeve. “Nothing can be done for him. It’s lockjaw, I tell you.”

  Rolfe continued to examine the stump of arm on the patient at the head of the line. He gave no indication that he’d heard a word of Ikey’s challenge.

  Ikey turned to David. “But this is the infirmary, is it not?”

  “It’s the infirmary at Marlhewn, it is. No one comes here to get better. We come here to get assessed.”

  “What are they going to do for him, then?”

  “They’ll wire The Old Chopper. He’ll reclaim his hardware.”

  David glanced at the privacy screens, then made a point of casting his attention elsewhere.

  “But what of that man?” Ikey asked.

  “What of him?”

  The words curled up inside of Ikey as he searched the queue of men waiting for their assessments. Each man either stared forward, or studied the scuffed toes of his boots or clogs.

  When Ikey had helped his dad harvest chickens, he purposefully hadn't thought about the fluttering struggle, the cackling in his hand. But among these men, as his belly gurgled and groaned with hunger, he had an idea of what the chickens might have felt like. But these men were not chickens. Why didn’t they rise up?

  As Ikey stepped up to Rolfe and Nurse Luca, he asked of Cross and whether or not they had seen him.

  Rolfe shook his head as he lifted Ikey’s mechanical arm. “Any pain?”

  Ikey sighed. “Not in my shoulder, no.” He watched Nurse Luca unbutton his shirt, her face lowered more than need be. Ikey wanted to reach up and run his fingers over the scars that covered the left side of his face, to feel their contours and shapes. Neither a mirror nor a reflective surface of any kind was to be found in the room. He turned back to the nurse and studied the bun of auburn hair piled atop her head and thought of Rose’s dark hair, how it contrasted against the pale flesh of her neck as it rose up under the hat she wore at all times.

  If he had remained blind, would she have ever removed her hat and veil? Might the day have come where she would sit in the room with him, her secret bared for the blind man?

  Ikey closed his right eye. A needle pricked his heart at the cruelty of his sight. Closing his eye made the world sharper, clearer, harder to slip away from.

  What a fool. If he could only pluck the glass eye from his head, tell Rolfe to keep the arm, and send the lot of it back to The Old Chopper. To hell with Cross, with Uncle Michael, Philip, and David. Blast them all. His chest quivered and threatened to collapse like a retaining wall with the thought of heading back to Whitby and being with Rose, knowing her touch, the mantle of darkness that made everything outside of their world obsolete.

  Nurse Luca pushed the shirt off his shoulders and exposed the canvas yoke. Ikey looked away as she undid the straps on the yoke, and Rolfe removed the arm.

  Ikey wanted to tip to his right, fall lopsided to the floor without the weight of the arm to hold him down. As the nurse and doctor peeled the yoke from him, Ikey felt like a disassembled machine. Incomplete. As Rolfe prodded at the hooks emerging from his shoulder and chest, Ikey eyed the simple brutishness of the arm. How naked he was without it.

  A throbbing started in his shoulder. A burn and an itch. The old sensations from the ghost of his flesh arm grew bitter at the suggestion that it could be replaced. But its complaint came from someplace far off.

  “Everything appears to be in fine shape,” Rolfe said as he stood up straight.

  As soon as they replaced his yoke and reattached the mechanical arm, the throbbing, burning, and itching vanished. Ikey watched as the fingers of the mechanical hand drew themselves into a fist with a series of clicks.

  Himself.

  After the examinations, a pair of automatons escorted the lot of them to the bunk hall. As David stepped over to Gavril and Philip, Ikey continued down the aisle. He peered among the other men as they claimed bunks for their own. As he reached the end of the hall, several men stared at Ikey like wolves watching him pass through the woods.

  Ikey made sure Cross was not among them, then returned to his bunk. Philip lay atop, wrapped in the blanket. David and Gavril had stripped down to their knickers and were lying on their bunk. Gavril lay on his side and watched Ikey. The crucifix rested on the bunk, the twine limp around the man’s neck. The tips of his fingers touched the bottom of it.

  “Find your friend?” David asked as he peered over Gavril’s shoulder.

  Ikey shook his head as he undid his shirt.

  A coughing fit shook Gavril. He clutched the bottom of the crucifix as he tried to swallow the spasms, but soon he bucked with the effort as something inside him kicked at his chest with terrible force. He dropped the crucifix, sat up, and hacked into his fist.

  David reached over. His hand hovered behind Gavril’s back. The tin-plated fingers curled like a flower withering as the man’s gaze flicked up to Ikey.

  Ikey turned away and finished undressing. He heaved himself onto the top bunk and lay down with a thud. Gavril’s cough grew ragged and peppered with choking before the man spat several times, then gasped, panting for air.

  The handbell rang, and darkness fell over the hall. Ikey rolled onto his side and peered over the edge of the bed. Gavril sat on the side, hunched over. Spots of bloody mucous spattered the floor before him. His bony chest heaved. The knots of his spine stuck out between the undulations of the ribs. He looked like a thin, worn skin stretched over mechanism, no more human at his core than the iron and tin fingers rubbing small circles into his back.

  The bunk creaked as Ikey rolled back over. As Gavril’s panting and wheezing returned to normal breathing, it was like a setting sun, and as it diminished, the whispering and half-mad singing and the constant throat-clearing of the other inmates poked themselves out of the night until Ikey lay beneath a galaxy of anxiety and discomfort.

  “I can’t keep up,” Philip whispered.

  Ikey pulled some of the blanket away from Philip and wrapped himself in it. “You can.”

  Philip turned onto his back. “I can’t.”

  “You did fine today.”

  After a few seconds, Philip sighed. “I can’t keep it up. Not like this. It took everything I had. And when I lose my hand—”

  “You’re not going to lose a hand.”

  “The Alligator is going to step on it. Like he did David’s. And you can’t fix that. You can’t. I’ll have to go see The Old Chopper. And I won’t…”

  Ikey rolled over to face Philip. “I saw how you were getting by towards the end of the shift. How you shut off your head and just kept moving. That’s how you do it. Don’t think. Just move. Keep moving. That’s all there is to it. Don’t think about how tired you are. Don’t think about how scared you are. Don’t think at all.”

  Philip shook his head a tiny bit and shuddered. “I’ll trip.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. You are going to be fine. And if The Alligator gives you any more trouble, I’ll take care of him.”

  Philip raised his face to Ikey. “You can’t take care of The Alligator.”

  “I can.”

  “I’m going to die,” Philip whispered.

  “Oh, bloody Nora, you are not going to die.”

  “I want it to be quick. I can’t stand thinking about it.”

  “Don’t.”

  “But I want to see my parents again. And they’re waiting for me, you know. And that’s what bothers me beyond anything. It’s like they’re standing on the other side of this wide ditch, and I need only to hop across to see them again. And I wa
nt to. But I’m scared. I’m really scared.”

  Ikey rolled onto his back. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the dark shapes flitting through the rafters. A soft moan drifted like a cloud over them.

  “Do you think your parents want you to join them now?” Ikey asked.

  “They wouldn’t want to see me suffer. They wouldn’t want to see me so scared. And I know I’m not supposed to be scared. I know that. But I can’t help it. And I don’t care. I’m going to die. I don’t care what you think. Or any of the others.”

  “I’m scared,” Ikey said.

  Philip didn’t respond.

  The moan lifted in pitch. Someone called out to knock it off.

  Ikey rolled back onto his side. His back ached and throbbed, and the bunk offered no comfort.

  “I’ll get you out of here,” Ikey said.

  “You can’t,” Philip said.

  “I will. Once my friend shows up.”

  “They won’t let you out of here.”

  “I’m not seeking permission.”

  Philip did not respond.

  The moan grew into a groan. Several people called out to knock it off, to shut the bloody hell up, or to go bugger himself.

  “You can’t leave,” Philip said. “Not if you’re scared. You can’t feel fear and get out of here because if you feel fear, you’re a coward.”

  “I’ve been through worse. I can make it through this.”

  “What’s worse than this?”

  “Fire. Being on fire. Being blind. Lying in the hospital. It was the worst thing I’ve ever been through, and compared to that, this is nothing.”

  “Then why are you scared?”

  The groaning rose in a sudden pitch to screaming. Men shouted and called for the watchmen. Footsteps clipped down the aisle followed by the clanking of iron feet on wood. Ikey pushed himself up onto his elbows. Two of the mechanical asses passed by the foot of the bunk and trailed the clipping steps of the watchman.

  The lantern flared to life at the head of the hall. The other watchman picked it up and stood at the head of the aisle and held it aloft. The shifting light gave life to the shadows of the mechanical asses stationed against the far wall. Even when still, their ghastly, unreadable faces made them look ready to grab a person without notice.