by Duncan Long
Blinded by the blood pouring into my left eye, I turned toward the navigator and then looked away from the headless corpse that sat in the chair, arms hanging limply to the sides.
The plane staggered once more with a wrench of metal and the floor below my feet canted as the tail ripped away. Wind streamed through the cabin and threatened to sweep me through the gaping hole that had appeared behind me.
Fighting to maintain my balance, I forced my arms through the parachute straps and latched its main harness around my chest. Then I pulled myself toward the bomb bay that was now at an impossible angle inside the falling plane.
I paused for only a moment at the breach, gazing morbidly at the earth spiraling upward toward me. Closing my good eye, I half leaped, half kicked away from the plane, my scream lost in the banshee cry of the wind.
Ralph Crocker
My trip home proved somewhat less than comfy. I’d hoped Death’s merry men would give me a lift back since they’d snatched me practically on my front stoop in the first place.
No such luck.
They had picked me up just around the corner from my apartment where a Ja-Ja parade passed. I took advantage of the distraction the boogying dead attracted to jumpstart my empty smart card with a “loan” from a hot-wired ATM coupled with my fake DNA thumbprint.
“Whatcha doin’, Ralphy?” one of Death’s three goons crooned, placing my arm in his vise-like grip, a tidal wave of pain splashing through my shoulder.
“Just trying to withdraw some bucks, man,” I replied, trying not to wince at the bone-crunching squeeze of the genus, homo breakboneis.
“Lucky we ain’t cops,” Death’s henchman on my right said as the three of them hustled me toward their limo, my feet no longer touching the pavement. “ATM surfing is a felony, and DNA spoofing is a capital offense. You’d be in big trouble if —”
He stopped in mid-sentence, interrupted by a damp plop. Simultaneously, a red mist of bone and brains erupted from his face, an expanding bullet imparting enough inertia to hammer three of the Mohawk spikes out of his skull. A fraction of a second later, the report from a distant rifle arrived the same moment the lifeless thug’s corpse tumbled face down on the ground, the spikes from his scalp chiming on the pavement around him.
Death’s two remaining henchmen yanked me higher into the air and dashed madly for the safety of the car. Once there, they tossed me through the open door into the vehicle and then dived behind me without a backward glance. A second bullet glanced off the armor plate of the vehicle, skinning the advertisement grid to send a shower of sparks dancing across the hood as we sped away, heading straight to Death’s lair for our meeting.
Now that the meeting with Death was consummated, I was headed home.
Only Death’s two henchman found themselves in a bind. He had ordered them to get me home, but their cowardice proved stronger than valor, and so they pooled their meager servings of gray cells with an eye toward devising a plan that would keep them out of sniper crosshairs while still obeying the spirit of his command.
“We go back there,” one grossed, “we might as well have targets painted on our backs.”
With the sweat of fear oozing from their pores like a goat on a spit, they discussed other possible options, first reasoning that since the police didn’t bother to replace CS boxes anymore, the chance the area would ever be safe from sniper fire any time soon was slim to none. “Waiting’s not an option.”
And even though their vehicle had armor plating, “Depleted uranium, anti-armor rounds are on the street.” It was anyone’s guess whether Snipe might have a few of these deadly rounds in reserve for special occasions, such as the return of the limo. The two mesos finally came to an alarming solution: They’d mail me home, cramming me into a plastic box and delivering me to the post office.
“I don’t think that’s the best idea,” I protested as one returned my weapons and then the two lifted my squirming frame and unceremoniously dumped me into the mailer. If they hadn’t pulled the subphone from my ear, I might have called for help. But they had and so I did not.
“Guys!” I yelled as they sealed the plastic top over me, trapping me in the dark. “Let me out!”
I beat on the package as they addressed it. My only ray of hope was that they would express mail me; then I’d only be trapped for hours rather than days or months normally needed for a package to arrive at its destination. I might survive a few hours, but it was going to be close at best.
I was dropped off at the automated postal system. Then mechanical paws upsided the box several times, despite its “this side up” notice. Fortunately I was finally stacked so I was lying on my back. Standing on my head all the way home would not have been all that fun.
Within minutes, I entered that mysterious conveyer belt that is the mechanized postal system; I bounced around inside the package until I became totally disoriented. By the time I’d recovered from that amusement ride, crates were stacked over and around me, their weight pressing in on my container from all sides, its plastic shell groaning ominously. I fought back feelings of claustrophobia in my plastic womb that threatened tomb, trying to conserve my air and praying my delivery would fail to be stillborn.
I’m uncertain whether I napped or the rarefied air in my container made me prone to delirium. But somewhere during my gestation within the bowels of the post office, I found myself in an ethereal Houdini mode, escaping from the box through a purple doorway, struggling to regain my balance as I breathed the intoxicating aroma from the riot of flowers that surrounded me.
I blinked in the sherbet sunlight, seeking some signal of civilization. Have I been borne to some far away and exotic locale?
Or was this a near-death experience?
Or maybe a death-death experience?
“Crap!”
Squinting upward, I realized an impossibly massive dome encompassed the sky, covering the distant mountain with an iridescent curve of ever-changing soap bubble greens and pinks. High and to my right, above the bloom-covered valley spreading before me, a distant fairytale metropolis of chrome and white crystal floated in the clouds like a jellyfish piloting the sea of heaven.
“I’m either dead,” I muttered. “Or seriously hallucinating,”
“Hallucinating?” a British-accented voice said.
I searched for the speaker, and saw only a meter tall, rabbit-like creature that added, “How delightful to be hallucinating.”
I eyed it, now certain I was delusional. “What are you supposed to be?”
Shiny black eyes scrutinized me a moment. “I’m an entertainer, of course,” it said very matter-of-factly, standing on its hind legs and combing its long whiskers a moment before continuing. “Want to see a card trick?”
I gazed into a furry poker face that a card shark would have been proud of. “Not right now.”
“A little juggling then.”
Before I could protest, the entertainer produced five red balls from a pouch hidden in its fur and tossed the spheres upward where they moved almost in slow motion, weaving intricate patterns as the creature caught and tossed them.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
The balls broke pattern, so two flew high while the others went through their own formation between its paws. “I hearken from the genetic factories on Lunar VI.” The creature gracefully dropped onto its back to employ hind legs to juggle three green balls it added to the five red ones already in the air.
“Never heard of Lunar VI.”
“An amateur comedian, sir?” it chuckled. “You humans are always joking.” The balls changed directions and went into a high figure-eight pattern. “As you must know, Lunar VI is the largest colony, second only to the Mars III and Titan II. Next you’ll probably ask about the underground cities.”
“No, not today.” I glanced downward, calmly noting my feet had vanished.
“It appears you are leaving.”
“Little by little,” I agreed. Soon my legs and lower abdomen were
gone. Then my hands. “Thank you for the show, it was very good,” I said, taking advantage of my ability to talk before my jaw followed my chest into oblivion.
“My pleasure,” the animal said, scooping up the balls and dropping them back into its pouch. It rose to hind legs, “Would you like to see another trick?”
“Sorry to be rude, but I really must be going before I’m all gone.”
“Joking to the end.” The Entertainer bowed, a mournful look on its face. “Farewell.” As I vanished, he started a soft shoe routine while humming, I Ain’t Got Nobody.
I awoke in the cramped shipping box, giddy but thankful to be more than a Cheshire cat’s grin. I’d apparently been jostled back to consciousness as the package containing me was loaded into a deliv bot. I wished I could stretch; the air was dense and I had a foul taste in my mouth.
The last leg of my journey proved eventful. As is often the case with automated drivers, we hit two pedestrians and scraped a small vehicle of some sort (as near as I could tell from the crunching and screams I heard as I traveled inside the box). Finally I felt myself lifted from the back of the bot and dumped onto the pavement somewhere in the general vicinity of my apartment building, I hoped that approximations of addresses would prove sufficiently accurate for the government express mailing system. If I were really lucky, I’d be in front of my apartment building.
As the autodriver sped away, the armored exterior of the package started its slow nano-melt. Soon I was able to cut my way out of the box. As I waited, I prayed I was somewhere close to home and that Snipe wouldn’t put a bullet through the box just for the sheer hell of it. I started cutting through the shell with my knife. Once free, I quickly crawled out of the box, blinking in the bright sunlight as I stood on rubbery legs.
I felt disoriented at the sight of the decrepit storefronts and piles of stinking trash that surrounded me. With a sinking feeling I realized that I definitely was not in front of my apartment. I wasn’t even in my neighborhood. The gang tags were a mystery. I recognized nothing.
Turning toward the box I’d escaped from, I checked the address scrawled on the package, deciphering the thug’s kindergarten script. Death didn’t hire men known for their address-writing abilities; it just doesn’t appear on résumés alongside “bone breaking” and “face smashing” in the job skills column.
And so the problem.
The hired muscle had screwed up, just as I had worried they might. Even though it was technically only a small mistake, it was an all-important one. They’d left the “Dr.” for drive off the address. The lack of those two insignificant characters caused grave repercussions. Because the gov’s computerized delivery system apparently defaulted to street when it had to make a choice due to the lack of a drive, avenue, or similar designation. No doubt the programmer that devised the default routine had figured he’d concocted an elegant solution. Heck it probably worked most of the time.
Only not today. Feeling like the Titanic going down for the third time, I realized I’d been dumped halfway across town, on 3038 Fremont Street, rather than at my own address of 3038 Fremont Drive.
Which put me right in the middle of what? I tried to think… Demon Twenty-Two Skidoo country. The only place worse in this part of the planet was the Valley of the Shadow, and even then not by much.
I was in deep, deep whatchamacallit, right in the middle of Demon country.
I glanced around nervously. The stench of rotting garbage draped the air like a shroud does a ripening corpse. But, except for piles of trash and junk here and there, the streets seemed oddly deserted.
Or so I thought.
Because what I had mistaken for a pile of junk received the spark of life, becoming animated to stand with a clatter not unlike what might be produced by a collection of tin cans dropped down a garbage chute. A tubular arm with a human hand on its end pointed a bony finger toward me. “We claim yer bod,” announced a voice like a poltergeist wailing through the thin wall of a whorehouse.
I snatched my pistol from its concealed holster in my armor, covering the pile of metal and plastic rubbish that rolled in my direction. “Stay back,” I warned, finger tightening on the trigger. “You can’t claim me. I’m free body.”
“Yer box is on our turf,” the junk creature facing me said, exposing a toothless mouth that was nearly hidden by the plastic bottle encasing its head. “Anything delivered here belongs to us. You were in our box.”
“Only I’m not in that box now.”
“You were. And now you’re on our street. Either way that means your ass and ass-sets are ours.”
It was obvious from his lack of original parts and by his claim on my body that I was facing a “Harvey,” a harvester of human organs. I had no desire to donate my body to anyone, let alone to a walking refuse dump, nor see my parts sold to some rich guy wanting an eternal job. I’d — quite literally — become attached to my sundry organs and wasn’t interested in telling even one of them “so long” just yet.
“Back off,” I said, pointing the muzzle of my automatic at the Harvey’s head since I knew that was one place that a flesh-and-blood organ still resided, overseeing the junkyard body below it. “Let’s just be cool. And tell your friends, too,” I added, hearing the telltale squeak of another Harvey trying to flank me, just outside my peripheral vision.
“You’re ours,” a third Harvey rasped, materializing from a pile of junk beside the curb. It straightened itself up, a human arm and face appearing in the middle of the rubble of makeshift appendages. “Don’t make yourself damaged goods, man. We won’t make you suffer. Surrender and we’ll do you quick.”
There was another squeak of metal in need of oil to my left. I whirled toward the harvester that I sensed must be nearly on top of me. I swallowed hard when I discovered it was not one, but five more Harvey’s, all with fewer human parts than the two I’d been facing.
With a sinking feeling in the pit of my soon-to-be stolen stomach, I realized I was in the middle of a freaking Harvester convention.
“Back off,” I warned. “I’ve got armor-piercing that can ace your tin skulls. I won’t be worth the price you’ll pay.”
The nearest of the four pointed a stainless steel finger at me. A wicked blade exuded from its tip as he warned in a metallic voice. “We do easy or we do hard. “
“Your choice,” another grated.
With faintly whirring servomotors, they spread out around me with practiced precision, blocking all possible escape. The guys were experienced and it was only a matter of time before one of them nailed me.
I knew I’d have to act quickly to escape this jam.
So I aimed my gun at the nearest one’s cranium and pulled the trigger.
The hammer fell on an empty chamber with a resounding click.
For a long moment, everyone froze. Sweat broke out all over my skin despite the cold. I manually recycled my pistol, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
Another click, this time inspiring rusty laughter that rattled through the animated collection of rubbish around me, and chilling my heart like a grasshopper frozen by an early autumn ice storm.
I checked the indicator on my weapon. Empty. Death’s mesos must have emptied my gun before returning it to me, leaving me with the false sense of security only a useless weapon can inspire. I patted my ammo pouches. Empty as well. I silently cursed Death’s thugs for leaving me defenseless.
The Harvies needed no further invitation. They charged, metal claws snatching at me and glancing off my armor as I back peddled toward the individual that I hoped was the weakest link in the steel and plastic ring of cyborgs encircling me.
He proved as steady as a concrete wall encased in brick.
My teeth jarred as I bounced off him.
I beat away a blade aimed at my left eye, dodged, and weaved, and cursed, stumbling into one of the Harvies just as he twisted and became off balance, somehow bowling him over in the process. I then half fell, half leaped over his junkyard body and for a moment found
myself free of my attackers.
A junkyard on wheels scooted to block my escape, his body oscillating back and forth as he attempted to anticipate which way I would duck.
Terror inspired my adrenaline-fueled legs to move in a blur of motion that still felt nightmarishly slow. I fought my way through the snatching appendages and blades, clearing the last of the gang while suffering only minor cuts along one of my arms.
Three giant steps sped me toward the curb. I knew their wheeled feet would have trouble stepping up onto the sidewalk without pausing to shift wheelbases. I hoped that would buy a few precious moments to get ahead of the pack that pursued me like hounds after a rabbit.
As I leaped onto the sidewalk, I holstered my pistol and executed a long-practiced twin kick of the toes of my boots; the in-line wheels embedded in the thick soles of the shoes snapped down and locked into place beneath my feet. In another fraction of a second, I was skating for my life, jumping over dead rats and piles of trash to keep from stumbling as I fled.
Behind me, the Harvies, servos groaning, climbed the curb. Having apparently skipped their last lube job during maintenance cycles, they squeaked forward in hot pursuit. Once on the straightaway, they made up for the lost time climbing the curb, the wheels that replaced their legs speeding down the concrete just a terrifyingly short distance behind me.
Our raucous parade of the defenseless and the dented sailed down the street, navigating plastic garbage cans and sending trash careening in our wakes wakes like garbage barges on methamphetamine. For thirty seconds I pumped and pushed, traveling faster than I ever had before.
I reached a relatively uncluttered stretch of sidewalk and chanced glancing backward over my shoulder, half hoping the Harvies would have given up the chase.
They hadn’t.
I had attained a faster speed than they could, gradually putting distance between us. But I knew, just as they did, that it was only a matter of time before flesh and bone would grow tired and my lead would dwindle.
