by Wol-vriey
She smiled seductively, pointing to the blue Lincoln’s number plate. “Your car’s right, Posh honey—let’s go fuck. You’re a prostitute, a little more sex today won’t hurt you.”
She nodded at the car door. “Open it and get in. Remember, any tricks and you’ll wake up in Hell.”
Disbelieving what was happening to her, Posh opened the car door and got in. She didn’t doubt that Beth would carry out her threat to shoot her if she made a fuss.
Beth shut the passenger side door. “Now drive. Calmly and coolly. Do not attract any attention. My place, you know the way.”
She stroked Posh’s face, trailing fingers down her spittle-slobbered ear to her pale throat. “My chickens are waiting for you.” She sighed with lust. “It’s strange, honey, but in the months since I screwed you last, I’ve found no other cunnilinguist of your stellar quality.”
Posh had no reply. She gripped the wheel tight and drove.
CHAPTER 47
Malone
Malone discovered the Forks had been telling the truth. The inner door to his office now opened into a previously non-existent ascending stairwell.
He stared in confusion at the spiraling stairway, then peered up at the landing.
He shut the door again, stood scratching his head in his office.
His bafflement passed. He accepted the stairwell’s sudden intrusion on his reality with the same equanimity with which he was coming to terms with his blood-solid arm and hand. Just as he accepted that the rest of his bungalow—everywhere the inner office door had previously granted access to—had somehow gone missing.
Malone sat down in a gorilla-chair to collect/collate his thoughts.
There’s no great rush to leave, he reasoned. Frank clearly wanted his—not the dead president’s—liver.
And Frank, equally clearly, was in no hurry. The psycho will wait however long it takes for me to reach him; else why would he set up this stupid obstacle course?
Except . . . Malone smacked his forehead at the realization, except of course, he’s scared of me and is planning . . . no, counting . . . on me being killed by something else along the trail. Then he’ll come eat up the pieces.
Malone thought and thought. For all their power, the Forks don’t know where Frank is. But they clearly know some things. They knew Posh was addicted, for instance.
But—the thought occurred to him suddenly—they could have read my mind to know that.
Malone had never considered the possibility of the kitchen gods being telepathic before. The thought scared him. He seriously hoped they weren’t.
***
Malone tried plotting for eventualities un-fathomable. Finally, unable to form a plan, he gave up trying.
He was tense beyond relief. Too much didn’t make sense here.
He decided to go investigate the new upper floor.
He swore on remembering that his gun was in the mouth of the dead T-Rex that had attacked him.
The only weapon in the office was a pocketknife. He stuck this in a trouser pocket and re-entered the stairwell.
***
Had Malone been in a less preoccupied state of mind, he’d have noticed something odd about the inner door he’d just walked through—it shimmered faintly all around its frame.
The opening was actually an Otherworld Door—an OD.
***
The stairway ascended to a solitary supervisor’s kiosk standing in the middle of a large warehouse full of packing crates, machinery and forklifts.
There were no staff anywhere in sight.
Malone peered through the kiosk window out the warehouse door. Outside, a solitary Condo he knew wasn’t resident on his street was busily uprooting itself, preparatory to walking off to trangels knew where.
Malone had no time to ponder the impossibility of this huge ground-level building existing atop his office.
Immediately as he stepped out the kiosk door he spied a motion of something white in the corner of his eye.
Next, he caught the glint of light on metal.
Malone immediately threw himself flat down onto the warehouse floor.
An arc of bullets fanned over him. The slugs slammed the kiosk door shut, cancelling any chance of retreat.
The firing stopped, then resumed. The bullet arc descended in jagged left to right swings, leaving a pocked tattoo of its trajectory in the kiosk wall.
Malone rolled sideways. Slugs kicked up stone fragments beside him. He leapt up and zig-zagged a path towards the closest stack of packing crates on his left.
He made it to safety.
Bullets peppered the crates hiding him for a few moments, then ceased.
Malone waited to ensure the shooting didn’t resume, then peeped out to see who was attacking him.
Machine corpse, my ass, he thought, silently cursing Frank.
The shooter was a white human-shaped robot with a T-slot in its face in which two red dots blinked. Malone instantly recognized it as one of Rachel Fischer’s upgraded machines.
The white robot dropped its automatic rifle and picked up a pump-action shotgun. It checked the weapon’s cartridge clip, then strode purposefully across the warehouse towards the stacks of crates concealing Malone.
Malone’s knife was useless now—he needed something heavy to attack the robot with.
The knife wasn’t that useless, however. Malone began using it to force a crate’s slats open.
“Give it up, Malone, you can’t escape,” the robot called to him. “Just hand your liver over, and we’ll call it quits.” Its voice was Frank’s, but bleached of emotional coloration.
Malone got the side of the crate off. It was packed with cans of baked beans. He groaned.
He ran down the aisle between the crates, away from the approaching machine, looking for either a weapon or an exit.
The robot quickened its steps to match his. Gun raised and firing, it spun into the passageway as Malone reached its end.
Buckshot blew a crate apart beside Malone’s head. He ducked as the air filled with splinters. Moments later, another crate exploded above him, showering him with rice.
He turned the corner, ducking sideways into another aisle.
This aisle was a duplicate of the one he’d just exited—two walls of stacked cartons with a three-feet-wide walkway between them. The cartons were ‘MOM’ sardine boxes, each sporting a pretty mermaid logo.
“Give up the liver, Malone,” the robot said. For emphasis, it let off a shot.
Malone knew he couldn’t keep running from it. In addition to being impossible to reason out of a pre-programmed course of action, robots were indefatigable.
This damn machine will keep after me for as long as it has ammo.
As long as it has ammo. The thought built the framework of a plan in his head. The plan fleshed out, became workable to Malone.
Acting with desperate speed, he ripped apart the nearest sardine carton. After stuffing his pockets with cans, he pulled the carton out of the stack. Its being dislodged set off a mini-avalanche of sardine cartons. With Malone assisting the carton-fall, soon the aisle was half-blocked with cardboard boxes.
He settled in the excavated hole in the box-wall and waited for the robot to turn the corner.
It did, to be immediately hit in the head by two sardine cans Malone threw at it.
Caught off-guard by the attack, it let off two blasts from its shotgun. While it stopped to figure out how to navigate the blocked aisle, Malone stepped into clear view.
“Hey, Tinhead! Catch!” He pelted three more cans at it. The robot fired at him as he ducked back into concealment. Carton fluff and sardine oil showered Malone.
He stepped out of hiding and performed the maneuver again, with the same response from the robot. The damage to the cartons flanking him was now so great that there were fish chunks in his hair.
He ducked out into the aisle again and hurled a further fusillade of cans at the robot. A single blast followed his leap back into hiding. This was f
ollowed by a series of resounding clicks.
“This won’t take long, Malone.”
Malone smiled grimly. The machine was out of ammo—it needed to reload.
He leapt out of concealment and charged the robot, scaling the sardine carton pile like he was a mountain goat; leaping off it like a leopard vacating a tree branch.
The robot was pulling cartridges from a plastic pouch attached to its waist when Malone came at it. It looked up in surprise, then attempted shifting its grip on the shotgun so it could wield it as a club.
Malone torpedoed into it before it completed the maneuver.
They went down in a heap.
Malone was up again in a flash. Ripping the gun from the startled machine’s plastic hands, he proceeded to bash its head in as violently as he could.
He stopped only when there was so much smoke and sparks spurting from its shattered braincase that he feared setting the stacked cardboard boxes afire if he damaged it any more.
The robot kept jerking, however. Malone got out his knife and cut all the wires connecting its head and body. Its jerks subsided to intermittent twitches.
He sat down on a spilled crate to consider Frank’s puzzle.
He now clearly had his ‘dead machine upstairs.’ All he had do was find the clue hidden in it.
***
After an hour of dismantling the robot—when its gears and circuit boards were strewn around like he was building it from scratch—he located Frank’s message, secreted in the middle joint of the robot’s right thumb.
It read:
‘Overweight women need sex too.
Go to Club House and fuck Blubber.
Ensure she comes or you won’t ever.
Eat you soon,
Frank.’
CHAPTER 48
Malone
Carrying the dead robot’s shotgun, Malone stepped outside the warehouse.
He’d emerged into a main street outside The Grid. The area was a vista of wide open air spaces, burnt buildings, and lots of freshly-laid skyscrapers.
Close by, a family was moving their belongings into a skyscraper.
A house sign read 54 Newbury Street. That meant Back Bay, well west of Chinatown.
Malone was instantly on guard. But there were no dragons in sight, hopefully no dinos around either.
He needed transport. He decided to ‘borrow’ the moving family’s truck when they were done unloading it.
***
“Malone?” the voice was soft and flutelike.
He spun round, shotgun at the ready. Then he froze, stood gaping at the speaker.
It was a horse. A very odd horse.
The horse was totally transparent. Like looking through water, Malone could see through it to the street on its other side. Its body had a slight blue tint.
Its saddle and bridle were transparent too, and seemed part of its body.
“Wh . . . what?” he sputtered at the see-thru beast.
“I am Glass Horse, Malone. Lord Tav and Lady Yaz sent me to help you on your quest.”
Malone was still gaping at it. “Eh?”
The horse shook its head. Its glass mane fluttered like hair. It regarded him with clear eyes. “What is wrong?”
“I’ve never seen a transparent horse before.”
“Few people have.”
Malone decided one didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, even if it was made of glass. “Horse, do you know a place called Club House?”
“Certainly. That is Blubber’s place.”
“Take me there, I’ve an appointment with her.”
“Climb on.”
Malone mounted it and they set off.
***
Riding Glass Horse felt like riding a normal horse. The only difference was that Malone could look through it at the ground they galloped over.
Glass Horse suddenly ducked through a shattered doorway.
“What’s the—”
“Ssshhh. A dragon is coming!”
The dragon walked into sight. It was twelve feet high at the shoulder, and moved with a lumbering tread on feet unfamiliar with the ground. Its body glimmered in the afternoon sun like a rock concert lightshow.
‘Fiberglass jaws framing fiberglass maws, fiberglass claws making fiberglass laws,’ so the folk song went.
The dragon was beautiful and deadly. It looked like a condensed rainbow, each of its transparent scales lit up with a different band of the visible spectrum.
Beneath them, its muscles and viscera also glittered their own rainbow pulses.
Malone had never seen anything so breathtaking.
The huge synthetic carnivore tramped past them, gazing from side to side and gnashing its teeth. Occasionally it scoured the side of a nearby building with a massive spurt of fire.
It passed so close by Malone that he could have reached out a hand and touched the metal screws holding its jaws together, run his fingers over its rainbow scales.
“That is a very terrible sight,” Glass Horse whispered with admiration as the glittering behemoth trampled off towards a parked truck.
“Very terrible,” Malone agreed.
“They say it comes from the Afterwife, that the trangels are its parents.”
Malone snorted. “The Afterwife’s nothing but a myth created by an unhappily married man with pseudo-gay tendencies. Transsexual Heaven . . . the Breast Milk Sea with the floating breast hills? Utter nonsense—someone watched too much anime porn . . . and now you’re saying dragons originate there too? Wise up, horse.”
“The Afterwife is real, Malone. I’ve been there.”
“Yeah, fucking right. I’ll believe in it when I see it.”
“Don’t mock the supernatural, Malone. It may be-come angry and haunt you.”
“C’mon, horse, you don’t honestly believe that nonsense.”
The transparent horse’s voice held quiet conviction: “No need to believe—I’ve see it.”
Malone kept quiet, convinced that Glass Horse was bullshitting him. Together they watched the dragon savage the truck, ripping it apart and satisfying itself it was empty before lumbering off.
CHAPTER 49
Malone
They reached Club House five minutes later. The club was at the south end of Newbury Street, just before the Massachusetts Avenue intersection. It was a small blue building stuck between a condo and a dead skyscraper-bug that had toppled over while trying to take off too early.
“This is the place,” Glass Horse said, its voice calm and serious. “I will wait out here until you are done.”
Malone thanked it. After tucking the shotgun out of sight under his shirt, he walked over to the front door, besides which an asbestos-shielded Pontiac was parked.
***
The club interior was dusty. There were a few customers, a few waitresses, and an off-duty hooker.
Everyone stared at Malone when he entered. His bloody shirt with its missing right sleeve instantly caught their attention. Several people raised eyebrows at his exposed red arm.
Malone ignored their enquiring glances. He studied their faces to ensure Frank wasn’t one of them.
(Malone wasn't taking Frank for granted. It wasn't just his recent clash with the white robot that had him cautious. He remembered Sara's angry words—the sheer audacity of Frank's stealing Rachel Fischer's head showed the man's resourcefulness.)
The drinkers lost interest in Malone and resumed drinking. He made his way over to the bar.
The barmaid, a once-pretty woman with a stressed-out look, smiled at him. “Are you Malone?”
He looked at her sharply. “You’re expecting me?”
“Guy called up, said his name was Frank. He said you might come around, booked time for you with Blubber.”
Malone relaxed a bit. He shed his apprehension that this too was a trap. He studied the drinkers again. No one was acting suspicious.
“What drink will you have, Malone?” the barmaid asked.
He read the labels off t
he shelved bottles. “What do you recommend?”
She winked. “Have some BBW, Malone, you’ll need it.”
He nodded, she poured, he drank.
The BBW tasted like he thought piss would taste if he ever decided to taste it. “What’s in this shit?”
“Blubber’s concentrated pee—it’s proven to put you in the mood.”
Malone spat what he hadn’t already swallowed onto the barmaid. He glared knives at her, then exposed his concealed shotgun and rested it on the bar top.
“My reputation apparently didn’t precede me here,” he said. “You ever try nonsense like this with me again, and I’ll feed you to a dragon. You dig?”
She flinched. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“Just don’t do it again. Where is Blubber? I need to get this over with now.”
He realized the bar patrons were watching him again. He turned and glowered at them, tapping the shotgun barrel for emphasis. They resumed their previous activity of not watching him.
The barmaid stared at him, her spit-covered face twitching nervously, like she wanted to say something, but didn’t dare.
Malone groaned. “What is it now?”
“Mr. Frank didn’t pay, sir.”
“For this stupid drink? You should be glad I’m not charging you for making me drink it.”
“No, sir . . . for your time with Blubber. Mr. Frank said you would meet all expenses.”
Malone first looked like he’d have a fit, then he burst out laughing.
“Mr. Frank is a degenerate cheapskate. How much is it?”
“Two thousand dollars for an hour, sir.”
“That much?—I could rent four hookers for that long for that much!”
The barmaid’s smile made a shy comeback. “Blubber is a lot of woman, Malone. Much more even than four prostitutes rolled into one.”
