Spanner City

 

At the start of last year I was thinking about dieselpunk and sent this to my Patreon subscribers. Now it's this year and I'm not thinking about dieselpunk so I can't tell you any more about this. You can subscribe yourself if you want more timely flash fiction etc.

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Spanner City

You don’t stumble onto Spanner City. You can’t get there by accident.

I was young when I first saw it. We knew we were getting close. A hundred kilometres out there were patrols, bikes and trikes of Spanner City Rangers, keeping an eye on all the approach routes. Our tractor caravan was too small to be a serious danger, too slow to be raiders. We saw them, sitting on their machines on look out ramps and hillocks.

We had spent an hour at the checkpoint, offering papers and passes to unimpressed guards, then another hour rumbling up the road through the hills. Smooth and black it was, better than any I could remember seeing. Then Old Janus called out, and all the kids climbed on top, up the cargo racks, on top of the chicken coops, swarming up the lookout mast.

Spanner City. A great mass of black roads, dark towers and smoking factories, hunched by the river. And around it were parked great clusters of vehicles. From fast speedsters in red and blue, through to great lumbering tracked-villages, and between them bikes, trikes and scooters, like minnows amongst the sharks. Chaos it seemed to us, who had never seen a gathering like this. We didn’t know the signs, understand the guides and guards that kept everyone moving, and separated them when they parked.

That was Spanner City, home to the greatest engine works in the world, port city and gateway to the Southern Wilds. We all know what happened to it, and the darkness and terror it spread. But it was glorious too, when I saw it that first time.

You don’t go there by accident and when you do it changes you.