Death Blimps of Doom!

by James Ivan Greco

  DAWN IN INDUSTRY CITY, and the Gray Market was in full swing. Thousands of southern Cali’s Occupation Zone Three residents milled around the hundreds of hastily set-up vendor tables, stacked high with second-hand—and third and fourth and on and on—junk of various by-gone ages, marginally legal drugs, hand-made weapons, and Holy Relics from the pre-Apocalypses.

  “What the hell is that?” Joe asked as Trip, long and skeletally lean, strode up to his table in a Hawaiian shirt several sizes too big for him and camo Bermuda shorts, a roughly-made plastic display case tucked under one arm.

  “This, sir,” Trip said reverently as he put the display case down on Joe’s table, right on top of a stack of ancient, dog-eared Asimov’s, “is the very same toupee William Shatner—forever may he be praised—wore in T.J.Hooker’s season two episodes thirteen, ‘Too Late for Love’ and fourteen, ‘The Decoy’, which, little remembered fact, was directed by his former Star Trek co-star, the noted pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock. By all rights we both really should be kneeling in awe and appreciation before it.”

  Joe looked at it dubiously. “It looks like a tiny rug made out of rat fur.”

  “That’s what they made them out of back then,” Trip said, his jaw working feverishly on a piece of chewing gum. The gum was infused with a concoction of pseudo-adrenaline and caffeine, cooked up by Trip in his lab back at the Home. “But this is more than mere rat fur. It’s over two hundred years old, this is. And right off The Shatner’s holy dome, stolen by his makeup lady during the after-party and preserved through the apocalypses at great personal cost to her descendants.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. Says so right on the certificate of authenticity,” Trip said, taking a crumpled-up piece of paper towel out of his chest pocket and unfolding it for Joe to read. “Signed it myself. In cursive. So you know it’s true.”

  “I don’t know, Trip,” Joe said as Trip affixed the certificate to the display case, just above the toupee, with his gum. “The whole Shatner worship thing’s kinda peaked. The kids these days, they’re all in to The Beiber. I can’t keep his crucifixes in stock.”

  “Peaked? The Shatner peaked?” And just like that, Trip’s five-shot elephant revolver was out of the waistband at the small of his back and in Joe’s mouth. “Take that back,” Trip demanded through gritted teeth, his eyes narrowed and all humor gone from his face.

  “Taken back,” Joe mumbled.

  Trip nodded curtly and tucked the pistol away as fast as he’d drawn it. His easy, arrogant smirk returned as if the he’d never pulled the gun. “Come on, Joe. You won’t find a better, more high quality relic. Do you not see this absolutely amazing display case? That’s real-ish wood. And check the mounting. Tacks, not tape. Real classy. And see how the rug’s being lovingly cradled by this extremely detailed, computer-generated relief of Saint Heather Locklear, in all her glorious and holy nakedness? That little monster fuck Beiber had nothing on those tits, Joe, even after he went trans-gendered.”

  “The naked broad is nice, and I’ll grant you the plastic does look a lot like wood…” Joe shrugged and sighed. “Okay, you sold me. How many can you get me?”

  “Four dozen gross, every three weeks.”

  “At five a unit,” Joe said, his voice dropping, something behind Trip distracting him.

  “Eight. And new scrip, not the old stuff…” Trip twisted around, expecting to see a hot chick—what else would distract Joe from negotiations? Instead of a hot chick, he saw, way down the aisle, a line of men and women in the uniform of the Chinese Occupation Force army come swarming into the Gray Market from the south end. “What’s the ruckus?”

  “Damn it,” Joe said, “it’s the fuckin’ Chinese again.”

  “What, the whole occupation army goes shopping at the same time?”

  As they marched up the aisle, the soldiers began flipping over vendor tables. One of the soldiers shouted orders to the throng of shoppers through a bullhorn to leave or be arrested. Behind her, soldiers carrying flame-throwers appeared, spitting fire at the overturned tables and upended merchandise. That did more to get the shoppers moving than orders shouted through a bullhorn ever could. The real panic began then, shoppers scrambling away from the flames and away from the soldiers, like rats scurrying to leave a sinking ship, trampling over each other to escape.

  Joe stood there watching the soldiers march closer and closer. “No, it’s that new warlord they just put in charge. Hu, or something like that. She’s a real ball-buster—this is the fifth time this month she’s sent troops in to shut down the market. Every time we move, she finds us, then in come the troops with the sledgehammers and flame-throwers.”

  Dark black smoke had begun to fill the air. “Yeah, wow, that sucks,” Trip said, turning back to Joe. “So, where am I delivering the first shipment, then?”

  Joe stared at the line of soldiers coming their way, the fire behind them consuming the Gray Market. “You know, the old warlord let us operate as long as he got a cut, but this new one… She won’t take money. How insane is that, right? People should shop in licensed stores, she says. Of course, just try and get a license for your shop if you’re not at least half Chinese.” He threw up his hands. “I tell you, I’m done. I can’t afford to keep losing inventory like this. —Martha, grab the kids, we’re going to Texas!”

  “Que?” came an annoyed voice from inside the covered pickup truck parked behind him that served as both warehouse and home.

  “You heard me, woman!” Joe yelled back. “And before you start, I don’t care if you and your mother aren’t on speaking terms. I told you, it’s a big territory, we probably won’t even run into her.”

  “What?” Trip asked. “You’re kidding, right? You can’t go out of business just like that. What am I supposed to do with all this inventory?”

  “Sorry, but I’ve had it up to here with the Chinese.” Joe grabbed the money box and the shotgun from under the table. “Martha’s people are Hispanic. That’s good enough for an entry visa and work permit. If I can keep from getting a tan on the way there, I can maybe land myself a job at a flea market as a janitor. Those Free Mexicans like their servants pasty.”

  The Gray Market slowly being consumed by fire, Trip marched sourly back out to the parking lot, chain smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and mumbling about injustice to himself all while avoiding the Chinese Occupation Force soldiers setting in to do mop-up. When he got back to the Festering Wound, their two-hundred-plus-year-old 1972 Dodge Swinger, Trip’s younger brother Rudy was sitting up on her armored hood in Lotus position, his eyes closed and a big stupid happy face grin under his leopard print fez.

  “Here I am working my ass off to get us some cash and you’re back here getting stoned,” Trip complained. “Remind me again what part you play in this little partnership?”

  “Moral compass,” Rudy said, his eyes remaining shut. “What put you in a foul mood? Joe didn’t want the toupees?”

  “Oh, he wanted them,” Trip said, leaning back against the Wound and lighting a cig. “And then he closed up shop for good.”

  “Interesting negotiating tactic.”

  “Not a tactic. The damned Chinese. They came in and wrecked the place.”

  “Did they?” Rudy asked, opening his glazed-over eyes.

  Trip jogged his head in frustration at the flames and black smoke that had once been the Gray Market.

  “Huh. Bummer,” Rudy said.

  “And if that wasn’t enough of a crime, it also was Joe’s last straw, apparently. He’s out of business, and we’re screwed.”

  Rudy’s hand went under his They Might Be Giants t-shirt to give his left nipple a sharp twist, releasing an extra jolt of THC-analog from his intestinally-implanted bio-chemic
al factory. “We’ll find another buyer.”

  “Not if the Chinese keep cracking down on the semi-illegal markets.” Agitated, Trip crushed his barely smoked cig out on one of the Wound’s depleted-uranium armor scales and immediately lit a new one. “Damn Chinese… Invade and occupy the West Coast, that’s one thing, but keep a man from pursuing his right to make a living selling fake relics at reasonable wholesale prices, that’s downright un-American. Even for California.”

  “Well, what you gonna do? They got more guns than the rebels, so they get to make the rules.”

  “Yeah, somebody should do something about that.”

  Rudy’s unibrow went up. “Oh, no, we talked about that. We don’t gun-run. The karmic debt from gun-running’s just too high, not to mention the Chinese hang people for that kinda shit.”

  “Well, as long as it’s just you who gets hanged…” Trip propelled himself off the Wound and walked back to the driver’s side door. “Nope, I’ve made up my mind. No more pussy neutrality. We’re joining the rebels.”

  Rudy’s broad shoulders sagged. “And by ‘joining the rebels’ you mean…?”

  “Selling them guns for only a two-thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine percent markup.”

  “Instead of our usual three-thousand?”

  “Viva la revolution!”

  Rudy shook his head and slid down off the hood. “Only one problem, bro…”

  “I know, we don’t have any guns to sell.”

  “Okay, only two problems… How do we find the rebels to sell these guns we don’t have to?”

  Trip reached for the door handle. “Ever been to the dirigible demolition derby?”

  Two dirigibles, each sporting a prow-mounted lance tipped with a massive spiked ball, wheeled around each other in the sky above the cheering crowd in the Hollywood Bowl Memorial Church and Stadium, looking for just the right moment to make their move. The one covered in DinkyCorp sponsorship logos was done up to look like some kind of snarling badger. The other, the Acme Super Happy Frozen Foods Conglomerate dirigible, was made up like that company’s mascot, a circus clown, complete with a rainbow wig draped over the top of its frame.

  They’d been circling each other for what, to Trip at least, felt like hours, although in reality the match—the first event of a scheduled day’s worth of matches—had only started two minutes ago.

  “Vishnu’s nipples, this is the most boring sport ever. When are they going to explode?”

  He was sprawled out on a beach chair in front of the Wound’s open trunk, gulping extra-caffeinated sun tea from an old plastic milk jug. Rudy was sitting next to him, taking long bubbling drags off an R2-D2 bong.

  “They don’t just spontaneously explode,” Rudy said between drags.

  “And why not?”

  “I think the idea is to snag each other with those gnarly lances and puncture the other guy’s skin so they fall out of the sky.”

  “Well they’re certainly taking their sweet time.”

  Rudy let a cloud of pungent smelling hashish smoke out through his nostrils. The smoke wafted around him in the warm Spring afternoon air like a blue-tinged halo. “It’s all strategic like. One false move and you could be the one crashing. Anyway, if it’s so boring, why are we here? You either never explained it to me or I mentally blocked it out, like I do most of the time when you talk.”

  Trip pointed the tea jug across the Bowl at the grandstand, and the VIP boxes that made up the top five floors. The entire penthouse box belonged to a single corporation, DinkyCorp. The box’s wide open patio was crowded with DinkyCorp big shots, their mistresses and manstresses, and invited guests, Occupation Government politicians and bureaucrats of mostly high rank, all drunkenly cheering on the DinkyCorp-sponsored dirigible circling above. “Him.”

  Rudy shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted. He couldn’t make out any one individual, but he knew whose booth it was. “Xavier Kinkaid Dinky?”

  “Xavier Kinkaid Dinky.” Trip drew a circle on the palm of his left hand and his right eye, the one with the cybernetic telescope implant, zoomed in. At the center of the revelers on the patio stood a tall, barrel-chested man, bald head and square jaw turned up towards the sky, a look on his face like he owned the world. Which he did, or least a good part of the Southwest Cali part of it. “Rebel head honcho.”

  “Xavier Kinkaid Dinky?” Rudy asked again. “Multi-billionaire industrialist and Chinese Occupation Government collaboration poster boy Xavier Kinkaid Dinky is the head of the rebels?”

  Trip dialed back his eye and took another gulp of tea. “Yup.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  Trip smirked at his brother. “Same way I know that on every third Sunday, he likes to dress up like Beetlejuice and run around the La Brea Tar pits with a small cadre of like-minded individuals yelling ‘I’m the Goddamned Batman!’ and stealing nuts from squirrels… look, never mind how I know. I just do. He’s the money and the brains behind the rebels.”

  “Okay, so what if he is?” Rudy asked, tamping a fresh load of hashish into R2’s dome. “But people like him, they’ve got entourages. Appointment secretaries. Bodyguards trained to shoot people like us. How are we going to get close enough to him to open negotiations?”

  Trip pointed the tea jug at the line of dirigibles docked along the side of the Bowl, waiting for their matches. “You can hotwire a blimp, right?”

  “Dude!” Rudy exclaimed. “We’re stealing a dirigible? Ooh, can we take the one that looks like a shark?”

  “That’s a shark? I thought it was a catfish.”

  “Either way, it’s got fins.”

  “All right, let’s get this thing air-borne,” Trip said as he returned from dragging the unconscious pilot, the man’s forehead bleeding where Rudy had elbowed him, out of the dirigible gondola. He closed and latched the gondola door behind him and slipped into the co-pilot’s chair. He snapped his fingers back at Rudy. “Chop, chop, we don’t have all day.”

  Rudy stood hunched-over in the back of the small gondola, wiping the pilot’s blood off his elbow with the tail of his t-shirt. “Why you looking at me?”

  “You’re always bugging me about letting you drive,” Trip said. He put his feet up on the dash and leaned back in the chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. “Here’s your chance.”

  “The Wound. I bug you about driving the Wound. I’m not a pilot.”

  “Pilot? Who says you need to be a pilot? It’s a blimp. It’s barely more advanced than flying a kite. Except instead of flying the kite from the ground, you’re in the kite.”

  “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “Then crank up the THC-analog until it does sound right and get to it.”

  “It’s already dangerously high. As am I.” Rudy shook his head. “You’d better drive.”

  “Fine,” Trip said, sliding over into the pilot’s chair, “but I’m warning you now, I am going to crash us.”

  Rudy sat down in the co-pilot’s chair. “Noted.”

  “Speaking of which,” Trip said, “if your whole I’m-a-pacifist-except-when-it-suits-me karmic deal-y is gonna cause you to object to the plan, tell me now. So I can mentally prepare a stunningly effective counter-argument.”

  “Corporate drones and ass-kissing politicians are right up there with serial rapists in my book. Karma practically demands we do them some major physical harm, any chance we get, regardless of whether they personally did us harm or not. For the good of society.”

  “You know, I’m pretty sure that’s not how karma works.”

  “That’s how it works for me.”

  “Good enough.” Trip grabbed the control yolk and stared out the gondola’s front window, expecting to see the airdock falling away as they rose off the ground. “Why aren’t we moving?”

  “Engines aren’t on,” Rudy said, leaning forward to push the ignition button. Along either side of the gondola, the dirigible’s huge turbo-props spun up to speed.

  “Gracias,” Trip sa
id. He plunged the lever marked throttle full forward. The dirigible surged upward thirty feet almost at once, then stopped dead. It bobbed in the air like a float on a fishing line, the props giving off a high-pitched while as they strained against whatever was holding the airship in place. “Oh, now what?”

  “Mooring line!” Rudy exclaimed, and he jumped out of his chair. He headed for the gondola door, flexing his right wrist as he went. A skin flap on the back of his hairy forearm popped open, his implanted buzz-saw springing out. “On it,” he said gleefully as he opened the door, and half-hanging out of the gondola, buzz-sliced through the mooring line.

  “Show off,” Trip yelled at him, reproachfully.

  The mooring line fell away, Rudy let out a cheerful holler, and the dirigible leapt into the sky, Trip scrambling to get both hands around the yolk.

  “Okay, so what’s the plan?” Rudy asked. He was leaned forward in the co-pilot’s chair, his chin resting on his arms, folded on the dash, and staring wide-eyed out the window at the expanse of the Bowl hundreds of feet below. Above them, the two dirigibles were still locked in their slow circle-dance of death.

  “This thing drives like a truck. Submerged in mercury. And with a dead fish as a rudder.” Trip was sitting straight up in the pilot’s chair, stiff-backed, eyes wide and unblinking, every fiber of his overly caffeine-and nicotine-jacked-up nervous system concentrating on piloting the overly-sensitive aircraft. Every time he moved the yolk even an inch left or right, the dirigible would make a wild, wide turn, forcing him to overcompensate in the opposite direction and make things even worse. He was barely able to keep the zigzagging dirigible on target for the other end of the Bowl. “Told you we’re going to crash.”

  “Well, at least it’ll be a slow motion crash,” Rudy said with a shrug.

  Trip nodded, jerking the yolk an half inch to the left, causing the blimp to veer madly to starboard. Which brought the circling DinkyCorp snarling badger dirigible into his line-of-site through the gondola’s front window. To Trip’s surprise, the badger blimp had abandoned its do-see-do with the other blimp and looked like it was heading their way. “What the hell is that idiot doing?”