Smithy needed Chaz to come at him right now. He leaped up to stand on the seat of his mower and raised his lance above his head as if in triumph. This received an ovation from the crowd, because even the worst people enjoy an unexpectedly good fight. More importantly, it had the desired effect. The dragon started to accelerate towards him.
Smithy nodded at Muroe, who zoomed off in the opposite direction. He hopped back into the mower’s seat and slammed it into gear, heading straight for the oncoming dragon. It was like a game of chicken, only one of them was several tons of speeding metal, and the other might as well have been an actual chicken.
Fifty feet.
Forty feet.
Thirty feet.
Being careful to keep his lance pinned under his left arm as he kept that hand on the steering wheel, with his right hand Smithy grabbed the thing clenched in his armpit that he’d nearly died retrieving.
In the background, Smithy heard a crash. Presumably that was Muroe kamikazeing her mower into the base of the scaffolding supporting the viewing platform. He had no time to look. Assuming their luck hadn’t improved, her move wouldn’t be enough to bring the structure down, but hopefully it would at least distract those on top of it, which was the whole point.
Twenty feet.
Smithy held out the mirror and moved it around to catch the sun. He twisted it in his hands, hoping against hope that it was hitting the light right. Chaz should be staring right at him and be temporarily blinded right about …
Ten feet.
Smithy dropped the mirror, leaped up in the saddle and rammed the end of his lance into the ground in front of him.
The mower wasn’t going that fast but it gave him the forward momentum he needed. He flew through the air, pole-vaulting towards the oncoming robot.
He felt the flush of flames over his head as he hurtled under the dragon’s jet of fire. The whirring buzz saw passed within inches of his face, but he kept his eyes forward.
Smithy crashed messily into the body of the robot, landing on the protective plates above its tracks as it collided with his mower and annihilated it, sending pieces of shattered mower flying. Smithy scrabbled for a handhold. His momentum was in danger of carrying him off the dragon’s smooth body. He found one – an actual handle. There to allow engineers easy access as they climbed the massive body.
Above him, the torso spun round and round and round. The flames whooshed and whooshed from the beast’s head, as if it were incensed. Smithy was too close for the dragon to scorch him now. He’d been banking on this, but he still needed to keep himself pressed to the floor to avoid being thrown off. More than in any other fight he’d ever been in, if Smithy hit the ground in this one, he was all kinds of dead.
He looked around him. Desperate to find …
There!
He pulled himself to a control box attached to the Dragon’s central shaft. Damn it, the thing was locked.
The dragon stopped suddenly, like a bronco trying to unseat its rider. Smithy’s shoulder thumped into the main shaft, jarring it, but he held on, screaming from the excruciating pain.
He wrenched the helmet off his head. Sweat was pouring down his face, mingling with the dust that the tracks threw up as they tore up the ground, reversing direction.
He slammed his helmet into the padlock on the control box.
Once.
Twice.
On the third attempt the padlock didn’t break, but the metal on the control box buckled just enough. Smithy dropped his helmet and pushed his hand into the gap, the jagged metal slicing it. He felt around and found something hot and metallic. He pulled at it. Then he found some cabling and wrenched it with all his might.
For a second, nothing happened.
And then, the engine spluttered and died. The whirling torso coming to a stop. The dragon made an odd whining noise and juddered to a halt.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Reginald Wilkins did not want to be here. In this desert, at this camp, on this viewing platform. He didn’t want any of it. Now into his sixties, he wasn’t ashamed to say he enjoyed sitting by the fire in a climate that suited such an extravagance, drinking a fine port and reading a good book while enjoying the earlier works of Metallica, before they went all soft and commercial.
Master Charlie Breddenback was at least consistent; from an early age he’d been an ungrateful yet grating little shit, and he’d duly grown into a big one. That the man was undoubtedly losing his mind was irrefutable. This is what happens when terrible children are told they are wonderful. Charlie’s mother had a great deal to answer for. Mind you, his father was such a monumental arse that Wilkins couldn’t entirely blame her for doting on the boy. She wasn’t to know she was enabling a continuing and rapid decline in the standard of Breddenback men.
Wilkins had been their butler, a role he had slipped into by accident after a rather “colourful” early life. His cousin Bernie had been working for a friend of the Breddenback family when they’d caught their original butler with his hand in the cookie jar. Wilkins had no idea how to do the job. He’d been a squaddie from Oldham, outside Manchester, and thanks to getting involved in some extracurricular activities beyond the traditional remit of the British army, he was technically AWOL and a person with whom Her Majesty’s forces were very keen to have a chat.
Bernie had laid it out for him – just fake the accent, learn the made-up backstory, and mind your Ps and Qs. The Yanks aren’t able to tell who is proper posh and who is some grunt from Oldham looking to hide out for a bit. That had been all the job was supposed to be – a temporary place to lie low – but he’d discovered that the more he did it, the more he liked it.
He had soon relaxed, realising that all his masters wanted was someone who could say, ‘Very good, sir’ and ‘Will that be all, sir?’ in the right accent. He was protected by something better than a watertight backstory. He was staff, an underling, and they didn’t ask because they simply didn’t care. They weren’t interested in getting to know you, because it is weird to ask someone to clean up after you when you see them as a fully rounded human being.
Beyond his all-important looking-like-a-butler duties, his other main role was managing staff and, in all honesty, the housekeeper Mrs Jacobs did that without his interference. Some women are just born to be in charge of things, and once you get out of their way, life becomes easier for everybody. Early on, he’d realised that she was from New Jersey but putting on an Irish accent – again, for the look of the thing. He kept her secret and she, if she had any inkling, kept his. He also consistently miscounted the house’s supply of whiskey in her favour.
He had played the part for over forty years now, and at some point the act had become who he was – the grunt from Oldham disappeared into the background. That wasn’t to say that he hadn’t retained some skills. When a former associate of Breddenback Senior had sent a team of four men to steal the collection to use as leverage, the butler had dealt with it in an unexpectedly brutal manner. Senior had asked no awkward questions, recognising an asset when he saw one.
From that moment on, Wilkins had become the keeper of the collection. His collection. Nobody else called it that, and he had never dreamed of speaking those words aloud, but that is how he thought of it. He liked the role a lot more, not least because dealing with mewling irritations such as little Charlie Breddenback had become someone else’s problem. At least, until now.