Here’s a story for you,” Meg said.
“I don’t like where this one’s going, Meg.”
“Well, it has to be some kind of miracle.”
Across the street, a car that had landed squarely on its nose tipped over and crushed an already broken security cog. It was the same cog who’d frightened Meg away from the wicket at the entry to Deck 21. He split in two, just below his bubbling, seeping rib cage. Then his upper half crawled away, dragging a trail of goo across the street behind his two cog hands.
“This place is falling apart. Get me out of here,” Jeffrie said.
It was a miracle that Jeffrie Cutler and Meg Hatfield survived the Tennessee’s lapse in gravity on Deck 21. When Captain Myron shut the system off, the girls were out on the street, making their way back to the Memphis Hotel after running away from the Bank of Tennessee.
For a few seconds they floated upward, helpless, along with a dozen or so mid-fifties-model automobiles and the thirty or forty Deck 21 cogs who were parked offline and sleeping on the street. And when the system kicked back on, all those tons of useless machines and the two equally useless human being stowaways that drifted in a slow-motion tornado of flotsam came smashing back down to the floor of Deck 21 in an unbelievable commotion of destruction.
Some of the cars tumbled through storefronts, knocked down lampposts, and demolished porticos. Broken cogs spewed their gooey mess in the street and from ledges on buildings where they’d been impaled on gargoyles.
But the girls came through the calamity unmarked.
Meg and Jeffrie walked through the wreckage of Deck 21. They tried to stay as near to doorways and buildings as possible, so they could grab on to something or find a safe place to hide if the Tennessee lost gravity again.
Nearly everything was damaged or entirely destroyed.
Inside the lobby of the Memphis Hotel, wall screens played an endless loop of the Rabbit and Mooney emergency video. The cogs that had been parked there were strewn like corpses all over the place. Some of them had broken into grotesque pieces, the floor slick with cog glop. There was no telling how many of them would ever be able to function again.
“This is so disgusting,” Jeffrie said.
For some reason, the crash had woken a few of the cogs. Severed limbs flexed and relaxed, fingers opened and closed, detached heads moved their eyes and mouthed curses and exhortations.
Every step the girls took through the lobby made soft squishing sounds from all the jellified ooze that burbled out from the rents in the broken cogs.
And Mooney sang to them:
“I’ll bet you’re all wondering a big ‘What the heck?’
Don’t worry, we’ll explain it on the lifeboat deck!
Time for all on board to get our EV suits.
Does this make me look fat? Rabbit’s makes him look cute!
In case you haven’t heard, everybody else knows,
To put on your suit, first take off all your clothes!
Don’t get embarrassed, and don’t be shy,
Unless you really happen to be dying to die!
The zipper goes in front, in case you couldn’t guess.
Next, press the two green buttons on the sides of your chest!
Then hurry up and snap your helmet down tight,
And just in case it’s dark, there’s an automatic light!
If you put it on right, you’ll hear a little beep,
Like a Grosvenor Weasel, Cheepa-Yeep, Cheepa-Yeep!
No time to lose! You’ll need to take a breath!
Oops, I waited too long—Now I’m choking to death!
Oops, I waited too long—Now I’m choking to death!
Oops, I waited too long—Now I’m choking to death!”
Then Mooney died, which was dumb, because he was a cog, and cogs can get along just fine in the vacuum of space, without air or a reasonably maintained core temperature.
“We should probably get those suits on,” Meg said. “Maybe the door will be open now, after whatever the fuck that was that just happened.”
And Jeffrie said, “I’m scared.”
“So am I, Jeff.”
Jeffrie followed Meg to their room. The door pushed open only about one-fourth of the way because it got caught up on all the junk that had been tossed around behind it, but the gap was wide enough for the girls to squeeze through.
The same emergency video that was playing everywhere on the Tennessee was running on their wall screen.
Mooney was alive and singing, and then he was choking to death again.
“I wish we could shut this thing the fuck off,” Jeffrie said.