This is a serial story.
Scene: The Ocala People’s Forest in which lies Alexander Springs. Prosby tries to get to the portal in his efforts to go Underground to rescue Burneese. But dangers, such as lightning fast gators and the killer Abe Lincoln robot await.
Prosby was on high alert now. He’s was lucky to get out Boybando, even though he believed he could have killed Justy with two well placed blows. He was walking the old 441 highway under a misty dark day. It was always a dark day these days, but this one was particularly dark. He passed Zellwood. He got close enough to Lake Apopka to smell it.
And hear the gators.
The gators over the decades had adapted to the algae choked body of water full of bones and submerged cars. They were smaller than the 10-footers you used to see there. But they were twice as quick and had more endurance when running.
A good 5 or 6 -foot gator could top out at 25 mph for about 40 yards. The old way to escape a running gator was to serpentine, run side-to-side while continuing to go forward. The old big -300-pound-beasts beasts couldn’t follow the cuts and wore out after about 15 yards. But over hundreds of years there were fewer of the slower, big birds to catch and gators evolved to catch the smaller faster ones. Also squirrels, racoons, wild dogs and the occasional stupid human.
These new ones could catch you at about the 15 or 20-yard mark, bite off your foot so you couldn’t go anywhere, and drag you by your remaining foot to the lake . There they would submerge you in the water and let you rot for a few days in the pea-soup of a lake until the flesh fell off the bone – kind of like a cross between pulled pork and rotten sushi.
Prosby scanned the dark wooded area near the lakefront for the orange orbits that signal shiny gator eyes Seeing none, he kept walking.
The Ocala People’s Forest was no place to let your guard down as he passed by the towns of Eustis and Umatilla. On the fringes of the forest in makeshift shacks lived drug makers who constantly fought each other, the meth makers versus the psychedelics producers who had a symbiotic relationship with the forest people, the descendants of generations of Hippies, societal dropouts who have camped in the forest for hundreds of years — and always stayed one step ahead of the law, both local and federal. They lived deep in the enormous forest and at any given spot they were watching you – you couldn’t see them, but they could see you.
Prosby heard a voice, deep, forceful, robotic.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field …”
It was Abe Lincoln the DIzney Bot. The killer Dizney bot walked like Frankenstein out of a dense wooded area into the clearing about 20 yards from Prosby. The Lincoln bot droned on.
“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground.‘
Prosby noticed the bot didn’t really have hands – but at the end of one arm was an 18-inch dagger, and on the other was a small whirling circular saw that he kept turning off and on. WHHHRRRR WHRRRR.
The bot was walking at quite a pace toward Prosby.
Prosby tried engaging. “Hey Abe, whassup? Nice morning to recite the Gettysburg Address, no:?’
Honest Abe didn’t appear to be lying when he said, “I am programmed to kill you and I will kill you.”
Prosby knew the portal – Alexander Springs — was about 100 yards into the thick wooded area where the bot had just emerged. He figured better now than ever and decided against running away. He would run, taking an arc around the bot, dive into the spring and make it to the portal. Getting inside the portal required a rather deep swim downward. You have to able to hold your breath for at least a minute to break on through to the other side.
Prosby ran.
The bot followed, stiffly but swiftly still speechifying:
“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
Prosby saw the still waters of the spring and heard the WHHRRR behind him. There was little pain as the circular saw sliced into Prosby’s back like an electric knife carving a Thanksgiving turkey. It was a non lethal wound Prosby thought. Defense was on his mind. He turned about 10 feet from the water to face the fake Abraham Lincoln who was running and winding up to do more carving. With the whirring buzzsaw advancing swiftly toward Prosby’s face, he dropped to the ground on his sliced-up back and placed both feet firmly in the 250-pound life-sized robot’s midsection and pushed. Using the bot’s momentum against him, he pushed his legs like a squat sending Abe catapulting through the air. The bot completed a spectacular full flip before landing feet first in the spring.
Oh yeah. Prosby remembered with a smile, you never see Dizney bots swimming. In fact full submersion fries the bot’s circuits. Sparks shot out like Fourth of July fireworks. Abe thrashed around before slowly sinking like a melting witch.
The robot died gurgling the words of a long ago president who dreamed a dream for America. That the evil of killing, brothers and sisters, will be somehow turned to good.
’… that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, (gurgle) under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the (gurgle) people, for the people, shall not perish from ..(gurgle) …(silence) …..”
“The earth.”
Posby finished the last two words as the robot sank into the springs like just another stolen car into Lake Apopka.
Prosby drifted into unconsciousness.
This is the 11th in a series. Meant to be read in ascending order from 1 to 11 ….
To be continued …