Evil Machines Read Online Free PDF Page A

ever since then he had been sitting in that rocking chair on the stoop of his shack thinking about the only interesting thing that had happened to him in his life. As a result he remembered every little detail of that important occasion as clear as daylight.
    ‘That’s Juan Gonzales! The leader of the Dos Hombres Gang!’ exclaimed the elderly man. ‘Quick! Call the sheriff! Arrest him! The others got twenty years and twenty five years apiece, but Juan Gonzales got away scot-free! Now he can pay for his crime!’
    Well, Montague Du Cann, or Juan Gonzales as he used to be, turned and banged on the doors of the elevator, which had brought him to the last place on earth he wanted to revisit. But the lift doors were firmly closed and the elevator wouldn’t open them again no matter how many times Montague Du Cann pressed the ‘Call Lift’ button.
    Eventually a small crowd gathered around Montague Du Cann and stood there gaping at him. They were, of course, equally curious about the elevator that had suddenly appeared on the outside wall of the only department store in Española – despite the fact that the building had only one storey. Montague Du Cann gave up pushing the elevator button, and started to push his way through the crowd, as he did back in his department store in Swindon during the Winter Sales, shouting, ‘Make way, there! Come along!
    There’s plenty of room! Let me through I am the Head of this Department Store!’ And the crowd simply fell back and allowed him to walk through.
    ‘Arrest him! Stop that man!’ yelled the chief cashier, who had leapt out of his rocking chair, and was now jumping up and down on the stoop of his shack. ‘He’s a notorious bank robber!’ But none of the people in the crowd had lived in Española long enough to remember the great day of the bank robbery, and in any case none of them knew what the old man was screaming about because he was yelling in Welsh, and the inhabitants of Española all spoke mostly Spanish with a little bit of English but not a single word of Welsh.
    The elderly man, you see, came originally from Dolgellau just north of Machynlleth, right in the middle of Wales, and always relapsed into his native tongue whenever he got excited.
    Meanwhile, Montague Du Cann, formerly known as the desperate bandit Juan Gonzales, strolled round the corner and walked into the saloon.
    Now it was, to be precise, exactly twenty years, three months and seven days ago that Juan Gonzales had escaped from the police and abandoned the Dos Hombres Gang to their fate. Fernando Salvador, the second-in-command, and Pedro Del Camino, had been released from jail earlier in the year, having served their sentences. Antonio Gabriel Bernardino Martinez, otherwise known as The Kid, had also been released around the same time, having had his sentence reduced for being polite to the prison guards.
    The three of them, having no other friends or relatives
    still living, had met up again, and Fernando Salvador, the second-in-command, had proposed that they carry on robbing banks as they had done in the past.
    ‘But it got us twenty years in jail!’ exclaimed Pedro Del Camino. ‘I don’t want to risk the same thing happening again.
    ‘I was known as The Kid, when I went into jail,’ said Antonio Gabriel Bernardino Martinez. ‘Now I’m a middle-aged gentleman and I’ve got a beer belly.’
    ‘Listen,’ said Fernando Salvador, the second-in-command, who – you will remember – was not very bright. ‘We only got caught the last time because Antonio Gabriel Bernardino Martinez got drunk, and started boasting about how we’d robbed the bank. All we have to do this time is avoid getting drunk and we’ll be OK.’
    The other two, who were also, by the way, not very bright, thought about this for some time, and then Pedro Del Camino said, ‘But which bank shall we rob this time?’
    ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Fernando Salvador, the second-in-command. ‘I’ve given this a lot of thought