“Never mind. Just fire the damn thing.”
“Firing in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1.”
Zach yelled the coordinates: “x – 0.0207, y 2.4414!”
The three-headed monster, the mechanical mini-A bomb, shot off Zach’s back and roared toward Mal. It targeted with perfection, moving left and right, up and down with each evasive move executed by Mal. Two seconds away from contact with three ear canals, one on each of the three stacked heads, Mal sucked all three heads inside his torso, turtle-like. The A-bomb rocketed past. The coordinates were set impeccably for impact, but there was nothing there for the bombs to hit, merely the space where the heads used to be.
Once again, Borgy initiated the self-destruct protocol for the bomb and it imploded harmlessly, neutralized into the air above New York City.
“Hell!” Zach yelled. “Where did that move come from?”
“Seems these beings are a bit more—what is the word? Fluid? Plastic?—more elastic, more malleable than previously suspected.”
“What does that mean?”
“They can change their shape at will.”
“That’s new.”
“Yes. No indication of this ability to date. Perhaps they are evolving? Perhaps more of their natural abilities are returning the longer they stay on our planet. Something to do with acclimation, maybe. Or the interplanetary equivalent.”
“I guess . . .” Zachary said. “They are almost on me now.”
“Well then, shall we give it another go? What do you say? This time, I have taken into account the big one’s ability to ‘turtle.’ The bombs should just pierce the top of the first head instead, and dig down in so the bombs find one brain each.”
“Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
“Here goes,” Borgy said. “On one. 3 . . . 2 . . . 1!”
Zachary hollered out the coordinates as a second triple header blast off of his upside-down, backward-flying body: “x – 0.0211, y 2.4611!”
One three-headed monster made a beeline for the other. The demonic one ducked and covered. But this time, the bomb followed, inserting one of its three heads into each one of the demon’s.
Each mini-A exploded, as if they’d practiced it.
Mal dropped to the ground, spinning head over heels, screaming. His three heads had all reappeared, blood streaming from the ears of each of them. All heads screaming, even, inexplicably, the dead-baby head. Def C, meanwhile, spun off like a ricocheting basketball, into the distance.
Zachary smiled. “Well done, everyone. High five.”
“I am not following. Which five items need to be raised up?”
“Don’t worry about it. You did great.”
Zachary, floating along on his back for a moment, relaxed and enjoyed the triumph and took the opportunity to regain some strength.
What he hadn’t counted on, nor Borgy either, was how quickly Rocks Manzer, already forgotten where he was left on the street curled up like a baby, would recover from his wounds.
Or how fast he’d fly up, grab Zachary by his carbon-fiber-encased ankle, and hurl him against the side of the nearest building, smashing him through into the living room on the tenth floor—interrupting Dave and Delores relaxing at home—out into the hall, and straight into the room across the way.
MAN DOWN
Zachary lay on his back on the ripped carpet of the empty apartment he’d been unceremoniously flung into, bits of drywall and lumber landing on top of him, gypsum dust fluttering around him like snow. He was unconscious. Not so much because of being thrown through brick, cement, and wood, but because some of his nano-circuits busted in the process.
Unfortunately, the design for his robotics required that a couple of sensors be placed outside of the armor, Zach’s Achilles’ heel. When he had smashed through the building, one of the devices scraped across a live wire in the wall, which had been exposed when Zachary broke through it. This flash of high-voltage electricity had burned out the nano-circuits closest to the sensor antennae. The rest of his system had armed to protect itself in less than a second, but not fast enough to shield the circuits located at Zach’s ground zero. This problematic scenario had been foreseen by the team who assembled Zachary. But the likelihood of this exact scenario playing out was astronomical: 10100,000 against it.
To compound the problem, this particular fried circuit was the same one that had controlled RoboZach’s sleep functions. It acted as a kind of super-melatonin in the brain and was immune to changes in light or in day and night. So, in effect, Zach was not knocked out, he was just sleeping. A sleep from which he did not have the power to awaken himself. In fact, without replacing the damaged nano-circuits with working ones, no one and nothing at all could wake him up.
So here lay the hero, napping, while the world needed saving, while the world looked its own death right in the eyes. The hero snoozed as Atrōx “Rocks” Manzer regained his bearings. The hero dozed while Mal’s heads healed, one by one. The baby head mended first, the hideous, oversized, baby head. In a reverse miracle, the mini A-bomb somehow had not destroyed this grotesque head. Instead, it had reanimated it, brought it back from the dead.
The head sat atop its two blacked-out brethren. It screamed and cried, as you’d expect a baby to do, but it could find no succor.76 The other two heads below it remained passed out. Rocks crawled in through the outside wall of the apartment where Zachary slumbered in dreamland. Rocks broke the hole in the wall wider, to accommodate his larger bulk.
All the while, Zachary dreamed of being on a beach. The sun was warm and bright, the sky blue. Zach’s short dreads were wet, and Mallory’s blue-black hair soaked. They splashed in the ocean, close to the shoreline. The occasional wave knocked them about when it crashed against the shore. Zachary and Mallory laughed; he pulled her close. Her face was damp with seawater, even her long eyelashes glistened with sea dew. He leaned in to kiss her, and as he did so, her face morphed to a demon’s face with cruel fangs, harsh horns, and miserable wings opening behind her back.
Zachary gasped. He was terrified and wanted to wake up, but he couldn’t. He needed to leave this place of demons, to return to the real world, but his own body, wired with nanotechnology, wouldn’t let him.
Zach was talking in his sleep, muttering a woman’s name, as Rocks strode in—his ears still ringing from the blast that took down their leader, General Mal. This “champion” would be his victim, finally. This would be over for good, this interference by this insignificant bug, this insect, this dull worm. Rocks picked Zachary up off the floor with only two fingers on one hand. Zachary didn’t stir. The beast heaved Zachary straight through the ceiling above, the ceiling that was supported by steel crossbeams. Zachary hit the beams hard, crumpling some of his armor.77
In his latest dream, Zachary was on a train and the train was crashing. Outside the window, as he sensed himself dying, a demon flew along with the train, laughing, its horrible lips pulled back to show its rows of shark teeth and its warty tongue.
Its face, however, was familiar. It was a demon mutation of Mallory’s face.
Zachary plummeted to the ground, his outer metal shell dented, but his internal metal ribs, bones, and other artificial but super-strong materials still intact and working. Atrōx Manzer grabbed Zach by his head/helmet and raised him up again, to twirl him in the air by his head like a whip. This move alone would kill an ordinary man, but Zach’s spine had metal bearings that rotated his spine as needed as force was applied, much like the bearings in the handles of a jump rope. Zachary remained, for the moment, relatively unharmed.
Next, Atrōx Manzer hurled Zach into the floor below. Zach crashed into the downstairs apartment, luckily avoiding any of the steel I-beams this time. Atrōx Manzer leaped down through the hole he created with Metal Zach’s body, landing hard enough on Zachary’s back so the two of them rammed through three more floors before stopping, Atrōx Manzer surfboarding on Zach’s back.
This last extreme fighting move from Hell initiated a crack in Za
chary’s armor. As strong as his armor was, it wasn’t built to withstand the equivalent of being hit by a speeding jumbo jet. Still, the damage was reversible if Zachary could get back to the Department of Neurological Surgery at Columbia University Medical Center and New York-slash-Presbyterian Hospital for repairs and a tune-up by the remaining members of the experimental, worldwide team.
But that was not an option at the moment, and might never be, ever again. Regardless, RoboZach could not take too much more of this punishment without the integrity of his armor being compromised. It would only be a matter of time before his systems would shut down permanently—both robotic and human systems.
Unable to defend himself, Zachary was a human punching bag, a victim of a sadistic demon from another dimension. It was only a matter of time before the rest of the wounded monsters recovered and joined Rocks in the torture and “fun.”
Sensing Zachary’s weakness, Rocks kicked him over and over again in his chrome-titanium ribs. These held up against the onslaught well, but now that the armor was cracked, the destruction started to have an effect, little by little, and Rocks would soon break through to the inner material, where real damage could be done.
In his sleep, Zach was conscious of someone pounding the train with a pile driver. The car he rode in collapsing, the seams splitting. The nano-circuits seconds from complete failure.
Zach in the demolished apartment, back in reality, couldn’t move, couldn’t lift a finger, as the thrashing continued. Inside Metal Zachary, another intelligence lived. A wasp robot by the name of Chief Borgnine. All this while, while Zachary had been taking the pounding of his life, Borgy had been working to repair the destroyed nano-circuits using ARRP78 technology.
The team that had designed RoboZach had come to the decision that even odds of 10100,000 were too tight. That if he were to lose consciousness at a critical moment, it would be as if he never existed at all. Therefore, they included redundancy for all near-surface systems, embedded right in the metal framework of Zachary Zemeritus himself. Bits and pieces scattered here and there could be harvested and used to rebuild damaged systems by a SPLIFF79 unit.
Now that the circuits had been repaired—functioning, and back online, like Sleeping Beauty awoken with a kiss—Zachary Zemeritus was awoken with this:
“GET UP, YOU STUPID HUMAN!”80
Zachary Zemeritus, glad to be awake after trying hard over and over to awaken himself from his unending nightmare, sprang to his feet and launched a volley of laser bullets at Rocks. Even though they were military-grade lasers, most struck the demon with inconsequential results. A few pierced the membranes of a couple of its eyes, but they appeared to have only affected Rocks not much more than a sharp winter wind does us, with a few embers from a chimney tossed in.
This was not the effect Zach anticipated. These lasers cut through steel, concrete, whatever. Why wouldn’t they slice through demon flesh? These creatures must be made out of something different, something not of this world, stronger than weapons developed on Earth.
Taking Rocks’s stunned delay to his advantage, Zachary zoomed back up through the hole in the ceiling, out the wall, and into the sky again. Within microseconds, Rocks followed him.
Now, all four demons were back, healed, and hell-bent for revenge.
“Borgy, you there?” Zach said.
“Of course I am here, citizen. Who do you think got you up and running?”
“I have no idea. Let me guess. Was it you?”
“That is correct. How may I help you now?”
“Seems you can’t keep a demon down these days,” Zachary said. “They are already on my ass again.”
“None of them stayed down after being hit by the mini-A’s.”
“Not a one. And they are pissed.”
“Okay. Hang on, Patient Z. I am searching your blueprint database for information right now,” buzzed the Borgnine brain bug.
“The faster the better,” Zach said.
For a minute, Borgy didn’t respond. Then he said, “Got it. You were equipped with something a bit more powerful than a matching set of mini-A’s.”
“What would that be?” Zach asked.
“Liquid Deuterium II.”
“What the hell is liquid doo-tear-ium two, and why should I be rejoicing now?”
“It is a neutron bomb in super-heated liquid form. It is based on discoveries made in recent years that neutron stars have molten cores. It was a further advancement and perfection of knowledge, discovered way back in the previous century, in the early 1950s, to be exact. Look it up. Anyway, to use the liquid deuterium, you spray it from the funnels in your wrists—”
“Ah! Like Spiderman. . .” Zach said.
“What?” Borgy said.
Zach imagined the little robot’s wasp face grimacing.
“Anyway, as I was saying, when it hits the air, it turns gaseous.”
“I’m listening.”
“It should, in theory, infect the demons’ bodies like a radioactive virus. It should kill cells. Even their alien, outer space, demon cells. If it does not kill the cells, it should at the very least mutate them in an interesting way. Basically, this stuff will wreak havoc on their bodies.”
“In theory . . .”
“Well, it has never been used before outside the lab.”
“Oh.”
“Even then, only on creatures native to this planet, not on aliens.”
“I see. Well. I’m game for anything,” Zach said. “We’re losing real badly in this battle.”
“This is all we got, Z,” said Borgy. “This has got to work or we are finished.”
“Well, let’s get it going,” Zachary said. “Don’t want to keep our friends waiting.”
“Give me a minute to set this up. Can you keep them at bay for about ninety seconds?”
“Tell you what: I sure as hell am going to try.”
With that, Zachary the Robot Man skyrocketed up and over a high rise, around the Flat Iron building, through a back alley, and under the Roosevelt Island Bridge. He couldn’t shake his demon pursuers completely, but then again, but he didn’t have to. He only needed to keep them from catching him for thirty more seconds.
“Ready,” Borgy said.
“Ahead of schedule.”
“The ninety-second estimate was only a SWAG.”81
“I’m not complaining. What do you need me to do?”
“Unfortunately, you are going to need to stop.”
“Wait. Are you serious? You mean stop in midair? They’ll kill me.”
“The only way we can do this right is for you to remain still. Yes, they may collide into you,” Borgy said. “But by then, we will have the Liquid Deuterium II discharged. It really comes down to a matter of timing. You need to get the LD II out and on them before they get on you. In other words, get the hell out of the way.”
“Oh, the best laid plans of mice and men. . ..” Zachary said. “Didn’t you ever hear about Murphy’s Law?”82
“Hear about it? I wrote the corollary, Borgnine’s Theory. ‘No matter what horror you can possibly imagine, there is a worse one out there.’ Look it up.”
“Will you please stop saying, ‘look it up’? Like I have the Internet here and some leisure time.”
“Well, you do have the Internet built in. Snap your fingers three times—”
“We’re in the middle of a life-and-death battle here.”
“I am just saying, for the sake of accuracy, you do have the ability to surf the information superhighway built into your fiber optics.”
“Um, far be it for me to say anything, but first: Nobody, and I mean nobody, calls it ‘the information superhighway’ anymore. At least not in the past forty years. I forgot the expression ever existed. Second: Can we drop this? I’m about to be permanently destroyed by the foulest, maddest mob of monsters ever seen.”
“Fine. We will pick this discussion up later.”
“No, we won’t. Just give me the signal to start blasting thes
e monsters.”
“Okay. You may proceed.”
“How??”
“Stop. Point your palms at them—yes, Spiderman-style, if you insist—and squeeze.”
“Squeeze what, my forearms? My biceps?’
“Your sphincter, I’m afraid.”
“My what?”
“Use your asshole.”
“What?”
“Squeeze your asshole. I apologize, but that is how you are wired. Remember, I did not design this, I am only telling you how this works.”
“Jeez. Okay, okay. Stopping. Pointing. Squeezing.”
With that, liquid shot out of Zachary’s wrists, spraying the demons with what looked like massive amounts of bug spray.
The creatures plummeted to Earth once again, coughing and gasping. But they were not going down alone. Before the Liquid Deuterium II could take full effect, the demons all piled into each other and then crashed into Metal Zach, taking him tumbling down with them to 50th Street.
VERMES MUS BASILEUS
Zachary couldn’t even call this chaos. He couldn’t call this mayhem. It was beyond any word found in the dictionary. The demons were melting, their DNA (if that’s what demons have) was totally being messed with. They liquefied in a second, popsicles in the summer sun.
Mal and Rocks were fusing into each other, as Angie absorbed Def C right into her body. The demons bubbled and boiled, troubled and toiled, forming and reforming into new shapes and configurations.
But it was not the Liquid Deuterium II that was doing this; LD II was only the catalyst.
As Zachary crawled away from the wreckage on his back, using his elbows for oars, something occurred to him. The triple heads, the multiple arms, the extra eyes. Of course! Why hadn’t he thought of this before?
These demons were already many demons in one. The two biggest, anyway, Mal and Rocks, looked to be formed from multiple demons all squished together. Multiple body parts fused into one bigger demon monster.
DEMON DAYS: Love, sex, death, and dark humor. This book has it all. Plus robots. Page 16
