Free Peace in an Age of Metal and Men by Anthony Eichenlaub Page A

a mess. He spoke a little louder than was strictly necessary—probably a side effect of his ears getting messed up so badly. It was a little surprising that he could hear at all, really.
    “Sorry about your ears.”
    “The war messed up the town something fierce,” he continued. “It was bad before that, though. I wasn’t big enough to understand, but lots a folk didn’t come back after that. Nobody visited after the war. Nobody.”
    A stray hunk of asphalt tripped me up and Keith kept me from falling. It was getting harder to focus. The road ahead doubled in my vision for a moment, but I aimed for the middle and kept walking. Abi wasn’t far. I’d make it. I had to.
    “Folks fell to subsistence farming. My family’s pigs made me popular. A man has a lot of friends when he’s the only source of bacon in town. Life was good for a time. Comfortable.” A pained expression crossed his face. “Hardly anyone ever left for a while. The few goods we needed from outside were delivered by automated systems.”
    “Sounds nice.”
    “It was peaceful. That’s all we wanted after the war.”
    That’s all anyone wanted after the war. Any war, really. After all that sacrifice, aren’t we owed a little peace? “You pay for peace,” I said. “You pay hard for it.”
    A time passed with the only sound being the tap-tap of my makeshift cane on the broken road. The story of Swallow Hill saddened me. The thought of a small, peaceful town existing after the war sounded like a dream come true. Most towns had been forced into servitude to one degree or another. We in the outlands provided resources that the city consumed. Here was a town that didn’t do any of that. Here was a town that was left alone. But what did they sacrifice to gain that independence?
    I stopped walking and turned to Keith. “You killed kids, Keith.”
    “I know.” His lower lip trembled. “I figured it out once you wrecked my headgear.”
    “You didn’t know what you were doing.”
    “I should have.” His voice was barely a whisper. “Everything looked so perfect through the tech. Sounded perfect too. I should have known something was wrong. I just didn’t think…” His voice choked off in a sob.
    A hundred questions swam around in my head, but I couldn’t make much sense of them in my current state. “You’re following because you want to make up for it?”
    He nodded.
    “Good.” I pointed to the spot not far away where Abi was silhouetted against the glow of the night sky. “That girl’s going to take us to a place in Dead Oak. Trust her. Do anything she says.” Dizziness was nearly too much for me. Bracing against my cane, I was barely able to keep myself up. My chest felt tight and breath was hard to come by.
    “Sure,” Keith said. “What are you going to do?”
    I gasped a few breaths. “Nothing,” I said. Without trying, I dropped to one knee. “Nothing at all.”
    The last thing I felt was Keith catching me as I collapsed the rest of the way to the ground.

Chapter 11
    “Honey,” Josephine said, “you look like you let a butcher operate on you.”
    Keith was doing his best to shrink into the corner. I lay on the steel table in the center of Josephine’s shack. Jo prodded me with tools that I didn’t even try to identify.
    “Might’ve,” I said.
    “Well, you know that was dumb, right? Nobody knows a body like a mechanic. Butcher’ll just cut you up into pieces.”
    I tried to say something clever, but it came out as a pained grunt as Josephine dug a three-pronged device into my sore ribs.
    “Not broken, you wuss.” She put the tool down and looked me right in the eyes. “And no, you don’t need no doctor. You’re half metal anyway, boy. What’s a doctor gonna do for you? A mechanic is what you need.”
    “I’m getting tired of waking up on people’s tables,” I said.
    “Always thought you were too soft, anyway. Little more tech will toughen you right up.”
    Keith stepped up and helped me into a sitting