AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She lifted her lantern and let it light the room. Ezekiel came to stand beside her.
“Where is it?” he asked.
The rays of her lantern illuminated a mostly empty room scattered with stray sheets that once covered machinery or other equipment. “Not here. This isn’t the laboratory. This is only the basement. This used to be where he stored all the things he was working on while he waited for someone to buy them, or while he waited to figure out what he was going to do with them. ”
“What happened to it?”
“I’m guessing Minnericht made off with everything he could carry. Most of what I saw there in the station—well, a lot of it, anyway—came from here. Those beautiful lights—did you see them? Powered by electricity, generated from I-don’t-know-what. Did you see the gun he had? That triple-barreled thing? I never saw one down here, but I saw some drawings for it. They were on that desk. ”
A squat, long piece of furniture was pushed against the wall. It was naked, without a single piece of paper or the smallest scrap of pencil left upon it.
“Minnericht, or Joe Foster, or whoever he was… I reckon he took everything that wasn’t nailed down. At least, he took everything he saw. Everything he could move. But he couldn’t move that goddamned Boneshaker, even if he knew how to find it. ”
She opened the top right desk drawer and slipped her fingers underneath a hidden panel, where she pushed a button.
With a pop and a crunch, a shape like a door appeared in the wall.
Zeke squealed and ran to it.
“Watch out,” his mother warned. “Let me show you. ” She went to the rectangular shape and ran her hands along the depression where the door had been revealed. She pushed the panel at a certain spot and it withdrew, sliding back with a squeak to reveal another set of stairs.
“Well,” she said. She lifted the lantern up high and held it out into the room. “It looks like the ceiling’s held. ” But not much else had.
Part of one wall and all of the floor was totally lost, ground up like meat. Wires as fat as fingers dangled broken from the ceiling and lay scattered across heaping stacks of rubble that had been pushed up and back, shoveled aside as easily as snow by the giant machine that jutted out from the subterranean depths of the hill, and into the old laboratory.
The Boneshaker was intact, covered by the debris it had so efficiently generated. It was planted in the very middle of the room as if it had grown roots there.
The lanterns weren’t enough to push back all the darkness, but Briar could see the machine’s scratched steel panels between the slabs of fallen masonry, and the enormous drilling grinders still jabbed into the air like the claws of a terrible crab. Only two of the machine’s four grinders were visible.
The drill engine had not so much broken as crushed to dust three long tables that glittered with shards of glass. It had knocked down and demolished rows of shelving and cabinets; everything it had brushed against even lightly was shattered to splinters.
“It’s a wonder it didn’t bring the whole house down,” Briar whispered. “I tell you, at the time I thought it was going to. ” Even through her mask, the air was stuffy and cool, and clogged with the mold, dust, and Blight of sixteen years.
“Yeah,” Zeke said, agreeing with anything she felt like saying.
At a glance, it appeared that the machine was on its side, but this impression was only a trick of the room’s proportions. It was nose-up, a third of the way out of the cellar’s floor. Its grinding drills—each one the size of a pony—had twirled and twisted around everything near them; Briar remembered thinking of giant forks twirling at a bowl of spaghetti. And although rust had take
n the biting edges off the grooved, bladed drills, they still looked nastier than a devil’s dream.
Briar swallowed hard. Zeke crouched like he was going to jump, but she put out an arm to stop him. She said, “Do you see, on the top of it—there’s a thick glass dome, shaped like a bullet?”
“I see it. ”
“That’s where he sat to drive the thing. ”
“I want to go sit in it. Can I? Does it still open? Do you think it still works?”
He jumped before she could stop him, leaping across the gap and landing lightly on the stairs at the edge of the litter-clogged room.
Briar said, “Wait!” and she came after him. “Wait, don’t touch anything! There’s glass everywhere,” she admonished. The lantern in her hand was still swaying from her jump, so it looked like the dusty, half-collapsed room was filled with stars.
“I’ve got my gloves on,” Zeke said, and began a scramble that would move him across the floor, past the drills, and up to the driver’s bubble.
“Wait. ” She said it with urgency, and with command. He stopped.
“Let me explain, before you demand that I explain. ”
She slid down the stairs and crawled up beside him, onto the stacks of rubble and rocks and what was left of the cellar walls that coated the Boneshaker like a lobster’s shell.
