Gabriel’s Watch - Book One: The Scrapman Trilogy Read Free

down into the pit. And with a flip of the switch, the overhead lights flickered for a moment, then sustained luminosity, and doused the place with a beautiful golden sheen.
    Central to the underground room, at the base of the stairs, was a workbench. At that moment it was crowded with a collage of wiring, mechanical parts, and tubing. Dimly lit and a bit dusty, the shop had the appearance of some mad scientist’s lair—a place for creating life-altering elixirs or bringing back the dead.
    Neither of these were my aim, however. My agenda was purely mechanical. It was here that Alice and I constructed gadgets to occupy our minds, improve our lives, and pass the time ... until our time ran out. It sounds depressing when put that way, but there were others, many others, working hard in far more malevolent endeavors. At least we were being productive—at least we were being good.
    At the bottom of the stairway, I tapped a yellow plush giraffe hanging off a bookshelf to my right. It emitted a few musical notes as it swayed gently back and forth before returning to silence moments later—a generous lump swelling in my throat.
    Play it again, Daddy.
    Her voice filled my head, clear as day. She’d be ... fourteen this year, maybe fifteen. It was hard to imagine her that old. I started to drift back into that dark place—that place I’ve spent the last ten years trying to avoid. I shook the thought from my mind. Maybe that’s why I’d kept so busy in the shop, toying and tinkering. Perhaps I’d been running from what had been chasing me. One might ask why I didn’t just take down the giraffe—why I didn’t just remove the constant reminder of her death. Well, that would be the person I would punch in the face, right after telling him to mind his own business.
    Who knows? Maybe putting this in writing is grounds for some form of progress. I’m no shrink.
    I added my recently acquired bounty to the collection already on the workbench, placing the large metallic object I’d found at Zolaris at the end. Once connected with the rest of the equipment, it began to look very much like a human body—the metallic object being the head.
    It was time for the electrical connections and the hydraulics. I’d found a CPU at Zolaris which, according to the manual, linked up with its brazen skull to process images it picked up, along with its several other senses. This thing was supposed to be as close to human as science could get, without the aid of biological engineering, of course. But this one’s body was now a crude mixture of salvaged, retro-fit, and modified junkyard parts—surely a far cry from whatever shiny billion-dollar body it had back at Zolaris.
    I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Alice’s smiling face.
    “What did you find?” she asked, squinting a bit as her eyes adjusted. She liked the dark.
    “I got the head, another tech manual, the CPU, that thing over there—whatever it is, and ... this,” I said, purposely brandishing the chip last.
    Alice was just as pleased as I thought she’d be. “Miles, that’s incredible!” she said, grabbing me by the shoulders and squeezing tight.
    That’s my name, by the way—Miles, Miles Stone. Pleased to meet you.
    “Let’s get started then, huh?” Alice offered as she rounded the table and flipped open the tech manual. “Where to begin? ... Where to begin?”
    After tucking a length of black hair behind her ear, she ran a finger from one page to the other, gathering information and considering options, her lips moving without the slightest sound. She was magnificent.
    “I ... uh ... I ran into some trouble on the way outta there,” I said, disturbing her focus as she raised her head.
    “Trouble? What kind of trouble?”
    “I ran into a couple agents—three actually—on the way out.”
    “Agents” were what they called the members in their gang—“government agents”—they were a pompous bunch.
    “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah, I’m