The Jagged Teeth

  1: Supreme menace

  Meinal sat before the fire. The dancing flames reflected in the lens of his one, softly glowing yellow eye. Small whirring noises could be heard as the targeting complex above and to the left of it, focused in and out on the soot particles dense in the air. For a hulking 8ft robot he managed to project an air of surprising contemplation, staring at the fire as though it held all the answers to the questions in his mechanical mind.

  A dead branch snapped, away in the rubble to his left. His head rotated instantly to the source, swivelling 120 degrees like an owl’s in a movement most humans would have found extremely unsettling to observe. For Reimar, stepping into the light of the burning fire, this movement was so familiar he often forgot that most of the inhabitants of the smouldering hills couldn’t do it.

  “Master,” Meinal acknowledged. His head, more slowly this time, rotated back to the flames. “The wrinkled one sleeps. Her incessant babble touched often on the subject of sustenance… among a great many other things. This system still recommends euthanasia for situation remedy. Removal of combat inhibitors requested.”

  “Request denied,” Reimar said firmly as he sat next to the hulking droid. “You can’t shoot my Granny, Meinal, so stop asking.” His brown hair was curled and tangled to the extent his fingers moved through it with difficulty as he ran them wearily over his scalp. Grey eyes the colour of storm clouds tiredly but sharply appraised the droid beside him.

  Meinal, despite his bright orange, red and gold paintwork and a general projection of supreme menace, still managed to give an air of dejection as he hunched his shoulders and scuffed the dirt with his foot. His eye swirled as hints of red mingled with the yellow in a colourful show of resentment. “Order acknowledged. Proceeding to secondary request. Permission to elaborate?”

  “Proceed.” Reimar fished a can of baked beans from his backpack and worked it open with a Swiss Army knife.

  “What’s the tragedy?” He opened a giant metal fist to reveal the crumpled cover from a Bee Gee’s album.

  Reimar paused for a moment then went back to his beans with gusto. They were frozen, but he didn’t care. Everything here was. Meinal waited patiently.

  When he had finished Reimar fished a cigarette out of his pocket, reached for his lighter, remembered, pulled out a match instead and lit it. Then, and only then, he looked at Meinal. “You know, when I first met you I never thought you’d spend this much time listening to disco music. You do realise you’re a war droid, yea?”

  Meinal nodded. “Killing is system priority Alpha, behind Beta: maiming and Theta: grievous bodily harm. However, this system feels obligated to remind the organism designated ‘Master’ it installed a species wide combat inhibitor with a nonverbal override. This system therefore cannot fulfil primary, secondary or tertiary functions.” For a monotonal automaton Meinal managed to inject quite a lot of resentment into this sentence. “Ancient dance hits are a poor substitute for the joy this system takes from acts of severe physical violence. they will have to do.”

  “Yes, they will” Reimar said sternly. He waved a bean-encrusted knife in Meinal’s general direction. “You shot my Granny in the foot!”

  Meinal looked back at the flames. “The wrinkled one attacked. System retaliated under section 14 of the use of firearms protocol.”

  “She hit you with a spoon!”

  “And this system neutralised the threat.”

  Reimar gave up. The two sat and thought for a moment. One, large and unyielding, filled with thoughts of deep philosophical understanding. The other, small and squishy, filled with thoughts of perhaps tomorrow trying warm beans.

  *

  “Reimar? Reimar? ... Reimar!”

  Reimar groaned.

  “Wake up! My goodness, boy, the sun is up! You should be too! Up!”

  “Gran…leave off…I was up all night searching…”

  “Hurmph, and quite right too! You’re young, your bones don’t creak! You should be out there finding food for your poor old Granny! Up!” This last ‘up’ was followed by sharp jab in the ribs with a pointed stick.

  “Ow! Lay off, you old bat! I’m up, I’m up!”

  Reimar sat up groggily. His Gran’s craggy face hovered into view. “Hurmph. Beans! More beans!? My old bones ache for food that doesn’t play merry havoc with my digestive system. Ache, I tell you!”

  “What the wrinkled one says is true. System detects large quantities of methane in the local atmosphere.” Meinal interjected helpfully.

  “Shut up, you metallic moron!” Reimar’s Granny hit Meinal with her stick. It snapped on one of his enormous shin guards. The robot observed his leg with only passing curiosity before looking hopefully back at Reimar.

  “Request denied.” Reimar said pre-emptively, rubbing his eyes tiredly.

  Meinal’s shoulders sagged.

  “Let him try! Bloody thing… always stomping about, sprouting nonsense about bees and silly phrases…why if I had my trusty spoon, I’d give him a jolly good hiding!”

  “Unless you want to stick your head down a Raiders throat and grab it, you’ll have to make do without your old spoon. They sure as hell didn’t leave much else for us. Bastion’s been razed to the ground.” Reimar started to pack away his sleeping roll.

  Granny’s mouth hung open. “All of it?” she said, uncharacteristically quietly.

  Reimar turned and looked her in the eye sadly. “All of it,” he said softly.

  Granny sat down on a nearby rock with a dull thud. “Oh dear,” she murmured. She looked up, “you’re sure it was them?”

  “Well, do you know of anyone else who could destroy a settlement the size of Bastion?” Reimar asked rhetorically. Apart from the human settlers of Bastion, the smouldering hills were barren and lifeless. The Raiders were a folk tale, but plenty stranger things had been seen in those hills.

  “Hmm,” Granny thought for a moment.

  “I suppose we’d better keep moving,” Reimar said, looking around them nervously. “They could still be nearby.”

  Quickly Reimar packed the camp away. Granny grudgingly took her place sitting in a harness on Meinal’s back and the three set off into the ever-present mist in the valley.

  Before them lay the ruins of the Icelandic city of Traygart. Three hundred years, two minor ice ages and a small tsunami had left little remaining of the town to identify it. Rubble enterprisingly colonised by moss thriving in the humid air served as the only marker that a town had ever existed here at all. The last semi-intact building that remained was the large coal fired power station on the edge of town. The decaying cooling towers split the haze like a ship’s prow.

  The three headed East through the town, they passed the old power station and kept going, keeping the smouldering hills to their backs. The volcanic mountains behind kept their peace, with the exception of Ares, who thundered and bellowed at the heavens as his fiery heart glowed red.

  “Bad omen,” Granny muttered.

  “Worse than what’s already happened?” Reimar snorted.

  “Things can always get worse,” Granny retorted ominously.

  “Well, aren’t you a bundle of laughs…”

  “Volcanos are poor indicators of human misfortune, unless natural disaster orientated. System recommends new forecasting protocols,” Meinal added helpfully.

  “Heathen! What should we look to then, hurm? Your robot gods?” Granny sniffed and wriggled in her harness.

  “Robots have no Gods,” Meinal said snootily, “We have only The One.”

  “The One? And what is he if he’s no God?”

  Meinal was silent for a moment. “It is something more,” He said softly.

  “Hurumph! Balderdash! The Thunder Gods alone hold the keys to our fate, leaving h
ere is heresy! Misfortune is all that awaits us!”

  Reimar ignored the theological debate. Leaving was the only option they had. The settlement of Bastion had been his home for the vast majority of his life. Now it was a heap of smoking rubble behind them. The three of them had been away collecting healing herbs for Granny to use in her role as the local medicine woman. That alone had saved them from sharing the same violent fate as everyone else at the hands of the marauders.

  So they walked on. Reimar, realising that the heavy tread of Meinal’s stomping feet might drown out any sounds of approaching danger, ran on ahead. The haze began to lift as they descended from the hills and Reimar started to catch glimpses of the bottom of the valley. It was opening up below them into a wide expanse of forest that stretched for miles as far as the horizon. Reimar paused for a moment to take in the view.

  Something skittered on the rocks below and he started, bringing up his rifle to his shoulder as he looked to the sound. A stag bounded down the rocky slope of the hill below him and ran for the cover of the forest. Reimar paused a moment, then re-shouldered the weapon and fired. The stag tottered and collapsed at the mouth of the woods, panting its last. Reimar calmly pulled back the bolt, reloaded and shouldered the gun.

  By the time the other two reached Reimar, he had gutted the deer and removed its antlers. “We’ll make camp here,” he announced, not trying to hide the smugness in his voice at finally having managed to find some food for his irritable granny that wasn’t beans.

  “Hurmph, good, my bones ache! Down, robot, I want to stretch my legs!” Meinal crouched down so she could get off. As usual he made no comment as to how his day of carrying Granny Reimar had been, but merely gave Reimar what passed for a resentful look, before going off to fondly clean the various weapons his modified programming forbad him to use.

  Granny wandered over to the deer. “Is it dead?” she asked, giving it a suspicious poke with her, now mended, walking stick.

  Her grandson looked at her, at the deer, and then, more pointedly, at the pile of its entrails on the outskirts of the forest. Granny nodded. “Hurmph, good boy, good boy. Meat at last! Right, off you pop - firewood! Granny knows how to cook venison but she needs fire. Shoo!”

  Reimar disappeared and Granny rolled up her sleeves. “Right, mister, let’s get you chopped up, yes? Robot! Come! I need you for something!”

  Meinal looked wistfully at the unnecessarily large gun he was cleaning. “Yes, Wrinkled One,” he replied wearily.

  2: Plant food

  Next to a pile of ashes, still smoking and crackling softly, the two humans slept soundly, full to bursting with Granny’s venison stew. The robot sat and thought as usual. He sat on a rock facing the treeline, his large head resting on an even larger fist, which was closed with its palm down from heaven, like an Auguste Rodin casting.

  Something moved in the forest. Meinal ignored it. If it were human sized or bigger the vibration sensors in his feet would have picked up the movement. It moved again. Meinal looked up reluctantly. A small grey canister dropped by his feet. He looked at it for a moment. “Curious…” he started.

  The canister cracked open and blinked a red light at him. Then, with blatant disregard for robot manners, it electrocuted him. Meinal’s systems immediately tripped overrides and shut down pathways in an attempt to limit the damage. He slumped off the rock he was sitting on and clanged to the floor.

  Reimar shot up, grabbed his rifle and turned to face the woman now standing at the foot of his sleeping mat. She held a loaded revolver, which, although blackened by soot, still gleamed slightly in the firelight. A silver band decorated the wrist behind the gun, and a single charm shaped like a teardrop dangled from the band, shining in the night air. “Drop it!” Reimar growled. The woman said nothing. She just raised an eyebrow.

  “Unhand me, unhand me, I say! Beast! Savages! Ohhh just you wait, just you wait!”

  Granny struggled up, held in the vice like grip of a man dressed similarly to the woman. Both wore dark green clothes. The woman’s blond hair was tucked into a short ponytail with only a few stands left free to frame her face, the man’s grey hair was cut short.

  Reimar paused.

  “Meinal!” he yelled.

  “Your robot’s fried. Drop the gun.” The woman said softly.

  “Please, he’s tougher than that. Meinal! Meinal!”

  Meinal heard. His system re-networked, bypassed the damaged pathways and rebooted his brain. He jumped into life. Coming quickly to his master’s aid he stomped into the firelight brandishing an assortment of pointy objects and guns. He waved them all in a threatening manner. “Request combat inhibitor override code!” he said urgently.

  “It’s…” The woman was quick on the uptake. She swept Reimar’s legs from under him and jammed what smelled suspiciously like an old sock into his mouth.

  “Hmmm…hurmurm!” Reimar yelled.

  “Code not recognised, please try again,” Meinal urged.

  “You, robot, stand down,” the woman barked surprisingly loudly.

  “Negative, Bossy One, this system detects significant danger. The loss of this human in unacceptable. He alone knows the inhibitor override code, system needs the override to resume priority Alpha.” His one eye narrowed and glowed balefully with a bloody red. “Request denied.”

  The woman pointed the gun back at Reimar. “If this system fails to comply with orders, I shoot your master and the override code’s lost. Understand?”

  “Acknowledged. System will comply. For now.”

  “Good.” The woman snapped.

  She looked at Reimar. “Who are you?” she asked.

  Reimar spat out the sock. “I…”

  The woman clicked back the pistol hammer. “Uh uh uh - Anything you say could be the code.”

  Reimar raised his hands. She threw him a notepad and a pencil. Reimar wrote ‘travellers’. “Really?” the woman asked sceptically. “Travelling with a fully armed war droid?”

  Reimar amended his answer. ‘Smart travellers’. The woman grunted.

  “And what is this…hideous creature? Is it ill?” The man asked, holding Granny at arm’s length with a look of distaste.

  “Not unless you count arthritis, you filthy hippy!” Granny said indignantly. “Sponging off the government, I bet, you’re all the same!” She turned to Reimer. “I bet he’s an immigrant,” she said in a stage whisper.

  “Enough!” the woman barked. “You’re coming with us to the Gales. “You’re forgetting something,” she said to the man as he busied himself tying up Reimar. She shoved the sock back into Reimar’s mouth. “We’ll take no chances,” she smiled with a false sweetness.

  They moved off, Meinal stomping along behind. After several hours trekking through the forest Reimar noticed that the floor was starting to slope upwards. After another half an hour a strong wind came on, sweeping on from the East. He stumbled on a rock.

  “Careful!” The woman grabbed his arm, “It’s a long way down.”

  They carried on until the wind dropped. Reimar realised that wherever it was they were going, they had arrived. The woman steered him in a disorienting series of twists and turns before depositing him in a chair. She tied his arms to the chair, took off his blindfold, removed the sock and retreated to the back of the room to lean watchfully against the wall. Reimar looked around. He was sitting in the centre of a small dark room, carved out of the rock. The room was furnished with just a heavy wooden door with a sturdy lock, the chair he was sitting in and a fire pit built into one wall. To say it was spartan would be something of an understatement. “Can’t say I think much of the décor,” Reimar remarked dryly.

  The woman smiled slightly but said nothing. “So,” Reimar said, suddenly very conscious of the silence, “what have you done with my Granny?”

  “The other two have been separated but won’t be harmed.”

  “Wait, does that mean I will be harmed or…?”

  The woman said nothing but she smiled slightly
again. Something in her hair moved and Reimar caught a glimpse of lilac. He opened his mouth then shut it again. “You’re aware you have something in your hair right?”

  The woman nodded slowly. “Curious?” she asked. She moved a bit closer to the fire. For the first time Reimar could clearly see her face. It was a very pretty face, with a petite, slightly upturned nose and hazel eyes. Or at least they appeared hazel, but as she moved small flecks of gold flickered in her pupils. Her hair was by far the most striking feature however. It wasn’t so much the hair as what was in it, roots twisted and branches wriggled in its depths as the plant unfurled its leaves and flashed triumphant deep green in the sudden influx of light.

  “Oh shit!” Reimar breathed. He’d heard of these people before, and what he’d heard hadn’t been good.