A Perfect Machine(11)

Henry gained control of himself, leaned against the car he’d bashed up, near the front-right wheel well. He examined his hybrid hands, moved them around in front of his face, rubbing them, clinking together fingers nearly the size of screwdriver handles. He held them up to his ear as he clinked, as if trying to figure out what they were made of.

What he was made of.

He knocked his deformed knuckles on the car’s panelling. Metal clanged loudly, reverberated off the wall. He tilted his head to one side, positioned one knuckle to stick out farther from his hand than the others. He raked it across the panel he’d just rapped against. A thin strip of paint curled under the pressure, flaked off, fell to the ground beside him.

Milo watched as Henry’s face contorted. Metal grating against metal. A Frankenstein’s monster of steel, patched together, forgotten before it was complete.

Move on, Henry, Milo thought. You can’t stay here forever. Someone’s gonna come down here and see you. Come on, brother, let’s go.

But Henry was fascinated with himself. Intrigued by his transformation.

He opened his mouth. A thin gray sliver about the width of a watchband slipped out from between his serrated lips: pink tongue mixed with gray metal. Henry bit down gently with iron-tombstone teeth, grimaced. Snaked his tongue back into his mouth.

A few minutes passed with Henry just staring ahead, breathing, perhaps feeling the power, the efficiency, of his new lungs. Milo heard doors slamming shut in the stairwell nearby.

Henry, please…

Henry stood up slowly, back bent. He opened his mouth again, this time looking as though he were trying to speak. He fish-gaped for a few seconds, then clamped his lips shut, closing his eyes, defeated, when nothing came out. Then he put one foot in front of the other – just like in his old life – and shuffled toward the exit ramp clumsily, nearly falling over several times.

Milo followed his friend out into the cold white of the storm. Followed him as his balance improved, his step became surer, his footing more solid. Followed him when others would run in the opposite direction. But Milo believed that a friend is a friend is a friend. And he soon saw that Henry had a purpose, a direction.

Henry stuck close to the sides of buildings, hunkered behind cars, dumpsters, anything big enough to hide him when people came into view. Though it would be hard for them to see him through the blowing snow, Milo knew Henry realized what he was – or if not what he was, he knew what he certainly did not appear to be: human. And yes, people somehow forgot their encounters with his kind, but how much of that was tied to the fact that they looked human? Would this mysterious force continue to work when people were confronted with a giant metal/human hybrid bumbling around their streets? Probably best not to find out.

The storm picked up, dumped layer after layer of crisp, crunchy snow under Henry’s feet. The sun dipped below the horizon. Gas lamps flickered on. Henry moved carefully down back alleys, crossed nearly deserted streets with special care not to get caught in the pools of thin yellow light from the lamps above.

As deeper darkness fell, Milo caught sight of a large blue “H” limned against the swirling white.

Where are you going, Henry? Milo thought, drifting above the snowy ground. What’s drawing you here? But then it hit him: Of course. The hospital. Faye.

Henry trudged across a muddy field, ducked under several trees with low-hanging branches as cars in the hospital parking lot drove by, their lights cutting conical swaths through the curtain of snow. Light shone out of one of the rooms on the first floor of the hospital. It bathed a patch of sidewalk a well-defined white, as if cut with scissors.

Without understanding where the thought came from, Milo found himself repeating, Henry, I’m here, I’m here, over and again in his head.

Henry moved away from the last tree he’d stuck himself against, headed toward the light from the room on the hospital’s first floor.

Milo followed Henry across the remaining patch of field, the snowflakes feeling colder than ever where they passed through him.





S I X





The day after Faye left Henry’s apartment, she walked to work through the new storm that had started the previous night. A squat man in an ill-fitting suit and overcoat approached her, stopped her before she crossed the street to the front entrance of the hospital.

“Excuse me,” he said.

“Yes?” Faye replied, glancing across the street, reflexively checking that she was in plain view of other people.

“Do you know Henry Kyllo? I believe you do,” the short man said, speaking quickly; his words meshed into one another to the point that Faye wasn’t quite sure she’d heard him correctly.

“Pardon me?”

“Kyllo,” the man said, took a step back, perhaps to ease Faye’s obvious discomfort at being stopped in the street by a stranger. “Do you know him?”

The little man had squinted eyes, which were not helped by his horizontally thin glasses. His close-cropped helmet haircut only added to the severity of his other features – hawk nose, thin lips, pointy chin – and Faye found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on his words rather than his off-putting appearance.

“Um, sorry, who are you?” Faye glanced nervously across the street again. Gerald Haines, a co-worker, was out front having a smoke. She unwound a little, knowing someone she knew was within view.