The old man assumed it was the thunderstorm, and the three lightning strikes hitting his junkyard one right after another, that had caused the miracle. God knew there was some weird stuff buried out in those mountains of crap, – goin’ all the way back to when he’d started the place, almost 40 years ago. That first big contract had been to haul off the rubble caused by that crashed alien ship back in ’85. As to be expected, the government had claimed all the fancy alien stuff… or at least all they could find. America or Russia, governments were much the same when it came to such matters, as he knew from experience.
But that fairy superhero had really done a number on the ship, across a great stretch of countryside… who knew what bits and pieces had been mixed in with the normal, human junk? Certainly in the years since there’d been plenty more weird shit dumped out here in his great mountains of rubbish… more than he could keep track of these days, truth be told…
Whatever the cause, this morning, three days after the thunderstorm, he stood in the southeast section of his salvage yeard, staring down at a little animated pile of junk as it inched along like a worm. He was wary at first – he hadn’t survived the Bolsheviks and the Red Scare both by being a fool – but the thing didn’t seem aggressive.
Actually, it seemed scared of him. The little thing stopped its steady crawl and he had the feeling, somehow, that it was “looking” at him… despite having no eyes that he could make out. They stared at one another for a moment, and then it began to change! In seconds it had reorganized itself into a tiny little man-shaped figure, about 18″ high, made entirely of junkyard scraps!
The old man had stepped back when the creature – and he didn’t know how he knew it was a creature, but he did and it was – had begun to change. When, after it showed no hostile intent, just standing and looking up at him, he stepped forward again. The little figure cowered back several steps, then stopped, crouching now. The old man raised his hand, cigarette entirely forgotten, and waved. After the briefest hesitation, the little creature waved back.
Irascible loner that he knew himself to be, the old man nevertheless found himself wholly charmed. He squatted down, and held out his hand… slowly the little homunculus stepped forward and reached out to touch his finger. The old man grinned, showing yellow, nicotine-stained teeth.
“Well, are you not the cutest goddamned thing ever, you little junk pile?” he said in his gravelly, Russian-accented voice.
“ssshnnnk pllll!” the tiny thing had squeaked…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
It was a nice day for mid-October and JJ had had plans to be out in it, hiking up in the Wikiup State Forest, south of the city. But with the departure of Phantom Ace that morning for a sabbatical of unknown duration, the duty rosters had been knocked out of whack. Gideon had been scheduled for monitor duty alongside the still-in-training Prometheus today; Scion hadn’t felt right upsetting any of the others’ plans, and so he’d taken on the extra duty himself.
He didn’t really mind – he enjoyed the synthetic man’s company, and Seth seemed to feel the same. Aside from a number of shared literary and scientific interests the two men shared a certain sense of being outsiders. Certainly Seth felt it more acutely, but even after 13 years JJ still occasionally felt disconnected from the American culture in which he lived. However much this country was his birthright, more than Atlantis had ever been, certainly, he was still a century out of synch from the world his grandfather’s stories had painted for him. In another two years he will have lived in this surface world as long as he’d lived beneath the waves – maybe then he’d finally start feeling like he belonged. In the meantime, he found himself sympathizing greatly with the struggles the younger “son” of Victor Frankenstein faced as he acclimated to his own brave new world.
They were in the Assembly Room, going over the legal precedents set, over the last 50 years, by American courts regarding meta-human crime and punishment, when the call came in. A 911 call had sent local paramedics to a junkyard in a suburb east of Sea Haven, responding to an apparent heart attack. They were now reporting that they could not (or would not, it wasn’t clear) get near the patient due to the presence of a gigantic animated pile of garbage in a vaguely humanoid form. The injured party was an elderly man, believed to be the owner of the salvage yeard, one Anton Chekovik.
Scion flew under his own power, tempering his speed so as not to outpace Prometheus on Phantom Ace’s looted HUSH sky-cycle. It still took less than five minutes for them to reach their destination. Chekovik’s Salvage Yard was in the Knappton district of Onedia, on the tip of Seldon Point. It’s 60+ acres were covered in great mountains of every kind of debris imaginable, from construction materials to the skeletal remains of cars, boats and even a few airplanes.
They found the paramedics hunkered down behind a towering stack of old semi truck cabs and trailers just inside the main gate. Maybe 50 meters away, in a relatively clear space between four large piles of trash, was the thing that had brought them there – as advertised, it appeared to be a giant heap of mixed junk in a vaguely humanoid shape, towering almost six meters over the still form of an old man. And quite animated – as it moved, the debris of its “body” shifted and seemed to move about, save for a few features which remained stable – it’s former-traffic-lights “eyes” for one.
“Every time we try to get near the old man, it just goes berserk and starts throwing shit at us,” the heavyset Latino paramedic explained, holding a gauze pad to a gash on his own forehead. “Otherwise it just mills around, sort of agitated-like, and occasionally pokes at the old guy. God knows how much more damage its doing.”
“Yeah, and it seems to be trying to talk, I think,” the female paramedic added. The purple streak in her blond buzz-cut glowed in the afternoon sun. “I feel like I should be able to understand it, but I can’t quite… and I’m sure as hell not getting any closer to hear better!”
“First priority is to get the man out of there,” Scion said to his teammate after they’d debriefed the paramedics. “So you go in first and try to distract the thing, while I come in from the side. Damn, I wish my invisibility module was ready for action, it would make this so much easier.”
Prometheus dashed forward, until he was about 5 meters away from the looming… construct? For a moment he felt a brief flicker of kinship, but as it swung around to “look” at him, he nevertheless let loose with a powerful blast of kinetic force. The violet-tinted beam of white energy flashed from his chest gem and blew a meter-wide hole through the creature’s torso. Rubble, car fenders, rebar, concrete chunks, a broken doll and part of a hula hoop flew out its back… and the creature hardly seemed to notice. New garbage simply flowed into the wound, absorbed from the mountains of junk around it. In seconds it was whole again, if of slightly different composition.
Scion used those seconds to put himself between the injured man and the monster, but before he could gather Chekovik up it turned and lashed out at him. He took off, nimbly avoiding the massive fist, and sent a barrage of elctro-bolts into the creature’s neck and chest… they punched through the amorphous mass of garbage, but to even less effect than his teammate’s blast.
Then the thing spoke. Its voice was a grinding shriek of metal and stone and glass, but the words, blurred and crude as they were, seemed intelligible enough, at least to Scion. “Leave Junkpile ‘lone!”
Prometheus, perhaps taken aback by the words, was surprised by Junkpile’s other arm, which swung at him almost simultaneously with the attack on Scion, stretching out five meters to strike him in the chest. Prometheus barely had time to realize he was flying before he blacked out. It was only for an instant, fortunately, because as consciousness returned he was almost 400 meters from the junkyard, only just past apogee, and still going strong.
As his arc began to bend downward he twisted around to fire downward with his kinetic blast, smashing three cars into twisted wreckage but slowing his speed to almost nothing. He touched down almost lightly, crouched, turned and fired off another blast of force at the ground, sending himself upward. He’d absorbed so much kinetic energy from that blow he almost felt he could fly. In three prodigious leaps Prometheus covered the half a kilometer back to the fight in less than a minute.
Scion was shocked by the power of the savage blow that sent his friend flying out of the salvage yard. He was torn between flying after to catch Prometheus before he hit, and staying to protect the old man; but even as he turned to hurl himself after his friend he saw him recover and drop to a controlled landing, wincing only slightly at the thought of the claims they’d be paying out for those cars.
Then, in a fury, he turned back to Junkpile and hurled his largest and most powerful tangle field at the behemoth. The glowing net covered its head and arms, pulsing out paralyzing waves of energy… but the field simply sparked and sizzled before sinking into the creature’s mass, to be absorbed and vanish.
As the armored hero buzzed around it, distracting Junkpile from the old man, the monster reached out to snatch up a refrigerator, hurling it skyward. Scion had no trouble dodging the massive missile, and it crashed down with a crunch several hundred feet behind him. In frustration, he considered his next move… nothing seemed to even be slowing the thing down. How was it animating the garbage? Was there someone, or something, at the heart of the mass, controlling it? Maybe a…
At that moment Prometheus returned. Racing past the paramedics, he grabbed an old cargo container, lifting the rusted metal box like it weighed nothing, and hurled it straight at the monster. Scion just had time to shout “No!” and dive down to try and cover the old man, firing off a Brain Tickler blast at Junkpile’s head as he did.
Junkpile caught the old container with both its massive hands, not even staggering backward a single step, and threw it back toward Prometheus just as Scion’s blast hit it. That seemed to stagger the creature, if only slightly. The re-hurled container missed Prometheus and tumbled away to his left. The paramedics barely dodged the twisted mass of metal as it came crunching to a stop, and they beat a hasty retreat out of the yard altogether, for the relative safety of their rig.
Scion realized there must be a mind of some sort in there, if his mental attack had actually had some effect. As Prometheus cast about for some other weapon, Scion turned up the juice on his related, but stronger, brain weapon – the Magnetic Seizure Field. He hit the monster with a bigger charge than he’d ever dared use before… and was shocked at the result.
The massive creature went suddenly ridged, a plaintive wail of “Papa!” escaping from its gaping mouth, its face twisted in a rictus of apparent pain. Then it shuddered, went silent, and simply fell apart, collapsing into an inert pile of apparently ordinary junk.
Although nonplussed by the thing’s final cry, Scion shoved the matter aside to tend to the injured Chekovik. While Prometheus probed the collapsed “corpse” to make sure both that Junkpile was really dead and that there was no operator buried inside it, Scion knelt down by the old man. He was semi-conscious, and it quickly became obvious that he was upset that the heroes might have killed “the poor child.”
“Why? He was just a child… he didn’t mean… to hurt me… he just didn’t understand… the frailty of…” He gave a last ragged breath, and then stopped breathing all together.
Scion summoned the paramedics, and immediately began performing CPR. With his electrical powers he got the old Russian’s heart going again, and the paramedics got him breathing, if shallowly. He had numerous broken bones and obviously some internal injuries, but they did their best to stabilize him. They were pessimistic of his chances of making it to the hospital, however.
“Can you get him prepped for flight?” Scion demanded. “I can have him to the nearest hospital in less than two minutes… or at the best trauma center in the region in about four minutes.” Agreeing it was the man’s best chance, they strapped him down tight, made sure the oxygen was secure, and stood back.
Scion lifted the old man and, telling Prometheus to finish up the investigation and then meet him back at the Tower, rose gently into the air. He could make Isobel Dixon Memorial in less than a minute at his top speed, but the paramedics had insisted that Chekovic precarious grip on life couldn’t withstand the g-forces. So (relatively) slow and steady it was. He headed south over the river, picking up speed at a gentle pace, and the setting sun glinted off his bronze and silver armor…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Three days later Anton Chekovik was moved out of the ICU, although it would be at least six weeks before he’d be released from the hospital. JJ arrived to see him that afternoon to find him complaining in a thin, querulous voice that he had no insurance and he couldn’t afford to stay here.
“There’s no need for concern, sir,” JJ said, pulling up a chair next to the man’s bed. He’d come in his civilian persona for several reasons, not least of which was because he was personally paying for the old coots medical bills. “All of your medical and rehabilitation costs are being covered. You just focus on getting well and–”
“Who the hell are you?” the old Russian interrupted, glaring suspiciously, if somewhat weakly, at his visitor. “Do I know you?”
“We’ve met, yes… I’m John Astor. But I was wearing my Scion armor that day at your salvage yard during, um, when the–”
“When you kilt my poor boy!” Chekovik would’ve raised himself up then, if he could’ve, but he lacked the strength. All he could do was lay there and glare. “Yeah, I remember you now.”
“I’m sorry Mr. Chekovik,” JJ said with a sigh. “I’ve been thinking about it since that day, and about what you said to me before you… collapsed. I’m afraid we may have made a terrible mistake, and I’m hoping you can help me understand what was really going on.”
It took some doing, but JJ‘s obvious sincerity and contrition eventually broke down the old man’s hostility. With a rattling smoker’s sigh he shook his head and waved a tremulous hand at the hero.
“I suppose I’m being unfair, it’s not like you could have known… and it musta looked bad enough… he really didn’t mean to hurt me. He was trying to hug me, truth be told…” He seemed almost embarrass at the admission.
“The night before we’d watched The Iron Giant… I had set up a projection TV out back of the house… been tryin’ to teach him, help him grow… anyway, we was talking about it the next day, and he got sad… he’d seen hugging, and I guess, well…”
Once the dam had broken, the old man seemed eager to talk to a sympathetic listener about his adopted “son” – and the real son he’d lost during the military action in Kuwait years earlier. It was obvious to JJ that, whatever the creature’s origin, it really hadn’t been malevolent, only a child’s mind in an immensely strong body. He really regretted having destroyed that mind, however necessary it had seemed at the time.
“But are you sure you really kilt him?” Anton asked, when JJ expressed his regret to him. “I mean, I ain’t even sure how he was alive, even though I know, inside, he was. What exactly did ya do to him?”
“It’s hard to explain, exactly… I have a device that scrambles the electromagnetic impulses in the brain, and I used that at full power. I know it would have killed any organic organism at that level, but with Junkpile… who knows?”
“Yeah,” agreed Anton, suddenly looking pensive. “Maybe he’s like that snowman fella… on TV… Frosty… maybe he’ll come back some day! But then, I’ve really gotta get out of here! What if he comes back and I’m not there? He won’t know what to do –”
The old man was getting agitated, and a nurse came in, giving JJ a suspicious frown. “I think it’s time you left, sir, Mr. Chekovik needs to rest now.” Before he allowed himself to be chivvied out, the hero assured the old Russian that he would set up an around-the-clock watch on the salvage yard, and if Junkpile returned he’d personally make sure he wasn’t harmed. This seemed to calm the patient down, for which the nurse looked grateful – but no less adamant that visiting hours were over, thank you very much.
JJ headed to the roof, and as his armor flowed around him and he took to the air he began to think about exactly what kind of sensors he should deploy… not just visual, but something to capture whatever electromagnetic fields might be involved. Assuming he hadn’t really destroyed it, of course… he tapped his forehead and heart in unconscious Atlantean gesture for luck…