Death Blimps of Doom!

by James Ivan Greco

  “It’s a demolition derby, remember?” Rudy reached under his t-shirt and gave himself a shot of extra THC-analog with a twist of his nipple. “They must think we’re a wildcard entry into the match. Or they guessed what we’re up to from our trajectory and they’re trying to stop us, loyal corporate drones that they undoubtedly are. Either way, I imagine they’re trying to demolition us,” he said with his usual stoned calm.

  “The bastards,” Trip spat out. “Go man the turret and open fire, teach the guy a lesson.”

  Rudy shook his head. “No turret—No guns. Lances, remember? Dirigible demos are an honorable sport, played by honorable men.”

  “Screw that,” Trip said, taking one hand off the yolk long enough to open the tiny window at his shoulder. “I’ll shoot him myself.”

  “No, that won’t look suspicious at all.”

  Trip’s head snapped around to shoot a raised eyebrow at his brother. “We’re we aiming at not looking suspicious?”

  “It’s always better if it looks accidental, isn’t it? Fewer questions from the cops.”

  With a grunt, Trip turned his attention back to steering. In the few moments he’d been inattentive, the blimp had veered way off target, but the badger dirigible was still bearing down on them, that long lance with its spiked ball getting closer and closer. Behind the badger blimp, the Acme Super Happy Frozen Foods Conglomerate circus clown looked like it was trying to take advantage of the confusion to go after the badger blimp, but it was too far away to catch up to the DinkyCorp blimp before the badger blimp would tear open their shark blimp.

  “Yeah, a third dirigible just happened to accidentally join the traditionally two-blimp match in the middle,” Trip said. “No, I think the ship, if you’ll excuse the pun, has sailed on the accidental thing.” Trip drew his elephant revolver out and cocked it. He thrust the gun out the window. “Time for Plan B.”

  “Why do we even bother making A plans?” Rudy asked, scrambling to secure himself into the co-pilot’s chair, pulling safety straps over his chest and fumbling to snap the buckles.

  “You got me,” Trip said, twisting his arm around and firing all five rounds into their own port-side turbo-prop. On the fifth shot, the engine blew up, showering fragments of burning, twisting metal over the cheering crowd of spectators below in the Bowl, and ripping a massive hole in the shark’s side, just below its functionally-useless decretive fin. “Eek! We’re spontaneously exploding!” Trip yelled out the window as he pointed the blimp straight at DinkyCorp’s VIP box. “Make way below!”

  The crash, Trip could only assume, had been truly spectacular to see from the outside, because from the inside, it had sure been a doozy: A lot of metal and plastic twisting, glass shattering, and the noise, all that rending and screaming, and some of it not even his own.

  When he awoke from a brief unconsciousness, he was pleased to discover he hadn’t lost any limbs, and he wasn’t bleeding to death. Just a few scratches here and there. And his shirt was torn. And there was a lot of shattered glass in his hair. And his ears were ringing, bad. But other than that, he felt just fine.

  He’d ended up on the twisted floor of the gondola—or the ceiling, he couldn’t quite tell—thrown out of the pilot’s chair during the impact. The air was thick with the acrid smoke of the shark blimp’s burning fabric skin. He didn’t bother holding his breath: The smoke wasn’t half as nasty as the stuff Rudy’s hashish gave off, and Trip had gotten used to that by the time he’d turned ten.

  Speaking of Rudy… “You okay, little bro?” Trip asked as he pushed himself off the floor and/or ceiling and got unsteadily to his feet.

  Rudy was still in the co-pilot’s chair, pinned there by a piece of gondola support strut. But still smiling his dumb, stoned grin. “Sure. Just a broken rib or two.”

  “Good for you,” Trip said. He ran his fingers through his hair to get some of the glass out and walked over to the jagged hole that had once been the gondola’s front window. “Excuse me a moment.”

  Rudy nodded, and gave his nipple a hard tweak. His face went sanguine as the extra THC-analog flooded his bloodstream. “If they have those little soy dogs in rice wrappers, grab me a handful, will ya?”

  “Will do,” Trip said, and climbed up out the window.

  The DinkyCorp VIP box patio looked like just this side of a bloodbath. Trip made his way through the chaos of injured, blowing off their pleas for help. He only stopped long enough to pause at an overturned buffet table and light a cig off the fire that was consuming it.

  He found Dinky on the periphery of the carnage, sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth, his arms hugging his chest. His left leg was bent all the wrong way. His right leg looked worse.

  “Doctor Modoro?” Dinky called out in a weak voice, staring straight ahead, focused on nothing. “Can you hear me? I think my leg is broken.”

  Trip stepped up to him. “Oh, yeah, that’s definitely a solid fracture there. And there. And… oh, there, too.” He held his cig down at the man, butt first, and gestured for him to take it. “Sorry about that.”

  Purely by reflex, Dinky took the cig. He held it up to his lips in a shaking hand without taking a drag. “Have you seen Doctor Modoro? He’s my physician… he went to see where the waiter with the bacon-wrapped shrimp had gotten to… and then… boom…”

  Trip crouched down beside him. “Yeah, no, sorry, don’t see him. Maybe he’s in the can. But hey, where are my manners? I’m Trip. I can call you Xavier, right?”

  “There was a boom…” Dinky’s voice trailed off and the cig dropped from his hand.

  “Snap out of it, man,” Trip said, and gave the man a solid slap across the cheek. “We don’t have much time before the fire and rescue brigade shows up. Listen, I can get you a whole shitload of guns—AR-15s. You know, for our friends,” he said, tapping the side of his nose with his index finger and winking.

  Dinky looked at him blankly. “Friends?”

  “Oh, for Shatner’s sake.” Trip glanced around him. No one was paying them any attention, what with all the crying in pain and the dying, but still he lowered his voice. “You know… the rebels.”

  That got a spark of reaction from Dinky, a quickly repressed fleeting flick of the eyeballs. “The rebels?”

  “Yeah,” Trip said. “Listen, you’re in shock. But all you need to do is remember I’ve got guns, and you’ve got money, and we are in business together, as of now. Okay?”

  “Why would I want guns?” Dinky asked. His voice was distant, but Trip detected a small hint of interest. And that told Trip he had him.

  Trip smirked. “Because you’re the goddamned Batman.”

  The distant look of shock vanished. “Bring them to the junk yard on East Glenoaks, tomorrow midnight,” Dinky said.

  Trip picked his cig off the floor and stood up. “And you bring lots of cash, partner.”

  Ten minutes later, using the confusion of the arrival of fire and rescue crews to their advantage, Trip and a limping Rudy returned to the parked Wound.

  “I love it when a plan comes together,” Trip said as he grabbed his beach chair, folded it, and loaded it into the trunk.

  “And with a relatively small body count,” Rudy said with a nod, handing Trip his own folded beach chair.

  Trip threw Rudy’s chair carelessly into the trunk, leaving half of it hanging out over the bumper. “Yeah, bonus.”

  “So, all these guns we’re going to sell,” Rudy said, rubbing the side of his ribcage and wincing, “where are we getting them again?”

  “Get them?” Trip tried to close the trunk, but only managed to bend Rudy’s chair. After three or four attempts, each time pushing the trunk down harder and deforming the chair more, Trip simply pulled it out of the trunk and tossed it to the ground. “More like make them.”

  Rudy scrunched his eyebrows at his chair sadly. “Make them?”

  Trip slammed the trunk shut. “To the retirement home!”

  “Hunt-R!” Trip called out as he strode into th
e lobby of the Happy Go Lucky Rest and Relaxation Long Term Care Facility that served not only as a functioning retirement home but the home base for his and Rudy’s various operations and schemes. His footsteps echoed in the large and, except for the old desk in the back corner, empty room. “Where the hell is that damned robot?”

  “I’m in the bathroom, Programmer Trip,” came the robot’s monotone from behind the door with PRIVATE marked on its door in letters made of electrical tape.

  Rudy headed for the desk. “Robots don’t take shits.”

  “No, but we do like passing the time by staging cockroach swim meets in the toilette.”

  Rudy opened a drawer and began fishing around in it for the first aid kit. “Noted.”

  Trip stopped in front of the door. “Come on, get out of there, we need to unfreeze the nanna-and-pop-pop-cicles. Plus, I need to piss.”

  “But it’s the medal ceremony for the 100-centimeter backflush.”

  “Don’t make me turn off the water again.”

  From the other side of the door, the Lithuanian national anthem began to play. “Oh, fine. I’ll be right out.”

  “What now?” the seventy-nine year old woman, frost on her wrinkled and age-blotched forehead and sagging jaws, asked as soon as Hunt-R had removed the feeding tube from her mouth. “Can’t a woman slowly die in peace around here?”

  Hunt-R stepped back from the upright deep freeze cannister, one of two dozen lined up in the back corner of the basement, and helped the old woman step down out of it and into the waiting paper slippers. “Please watch your step Mrs. Swartzbaum, you know how the thawing process leaves your equilibrium in flux.”

  “It’s my punctured eardrums. But nothing a sandwich wouldn’t fix,” Mrs. Swartzbaum said as she slowly padded towards the group of her two-dozen fellow retirees, huddled together at the end of the row of freezers in paper slippers and tissue-thin disposable surgical gowns. Mrs. Swartzbaum wrapped her thin arms over her sunken chest and shivered. “Maybe a nice little bit of pastrami and some toasted rye.”

  “Oh, with pickles,” said the silver-haired youngster of the bunch, sixty-eight year old Mr. Aberdini. “I want pickles.”

  “No pickles for me,” seventy-two year old Mr. Jackson said from the back of the pack. “They give me the gout.”

  Trip came walking up the aisle, lighting a cigarette. “You think we can afford to buy you sandwiches for what your kids are paying to keep you here? No, no sandwiches. Anyway, we work first, then eat. When you’re back in your pods. I hear we’ve got pulped soy-prunes to pump into you tonight. Yummy.”

  “Work?” Mrs. Swartzbaum asked. “Again you’re thawing us out to work?”

  “Yeah, what else would I thaw you out for?” Trip asked.

  “Maybe it’s Thanksgiving and our families are here to visit,” Mr. Jackson said, his wrinkled face bright with optimism.

  Trip huffed. “If your families cared enough to visit you — ever — they wouldn’t have dumped you here to begin with.”

  “That’s not true,” Mr. Aberdini said. “My granddaughter visited me last Tuesday.”

  “I’m afraid that was a rat that chewed through the power cord of your pod,” Hunt-R said.

  Mr. Aberdini frowned. “Explains why she looked younger than the last time I saw her. And less hairy.”

  Mrs. Swartbaum poked an arthritis-bent middle finger into Trip’s chest. “Look, bozo, there’s no way we’re doing any more work for you. This is a retirement home. The key word being retirement.”

  Trip blew smoke down at her hand. “Don’t let the sign on the front door fool you, you old bat. That’s just to make your families feel better about abandoning you. To refresh your Alzheimer’s-riddled brains, what this is, is a long-term human pre-cadaver cold-storage facility. Where you get to stay in peaceful frozen slumber until you die of natural causes. But until then, the agreement you all signed to get your families such super-low monthly rates lets us wake you every now and again to perform small tasks of physical labor, to help offset the enormous cost of your internment, with no additional compensation due you.”

  “You mean we’re slaves,” Mrs. Swartzbaum said.

  “When you’re not icicles, yes,” Trip said. “Tell you what, you do this job for me and before you go back into the pods we’ll order in some pizza. A small one. You can share it. We’ll even break your teeth out of the personal belongings lockers.”

  That brought tentative, and mostly tooth-free, smiles to their wrinkled faces. “With anchovies?” Mr. Aberdini asked.

  “Don’t be an ass, Bob,” Mr. Jackson said. “Nobody wants anchovies.”

  “As long as it doesn’t have bacon,” Mrs. Swartzbaum said. “What is it we’re making this time?” she asked Trip.

  “Hunt-R!” Trip called out.

  From where he was standing right behind his left shoulder, the robot quietly asked, “Yes, Programmer Trip?”

  “Show our pre-cadavers here how to build an AR-15.”

  The next morning, when Trip returned to Happy Go Lucky R & R he found Rudy in his usual spot, snoring, curled up on top of the desk in the lobby. Trip flopped down in the chair, swung his feet up onto Rudy’s head, and kept clearing his throat until Rudy stirred.

  “So, how was your night?” Trip asked as Rudy sat up.

  Rudy rubbed his eyes and smiled. “Got stoned.”

  “You’re always stoned.”

  “What’s your point?” Rudy pulled his fez from out of his back pocket and slipped it on, then gave his nipple three short twists to switch his stomach pharmacy from low-dosage trickle sleepy-time mode into full-dose I’d-rather-be-sleeping mode. “You hook up with that chick you met at Puppet Tarantino in the Park?”

  “Nah, I think she died or something. I mean, why else wouldn’t she show up for our date? Anyway, had some errands to run.” Trip spun around in the chair, and shouted, “Hunt-R!”

  “In the back, Programmer Trip,” the robot’s voice came over the intercom after a moment’s pause.

  Trip slapped the intercom transmit button as he spun past it. “You’d better have something to show us.”

  “That we do, Programmer Trip.”

  “What the hell are these?” Trip asked as he picked the three-foot long wooden dowel off the work table in front of Mrs. Swartbaum. It was painted, rather slip-shoddily, black, the unevenly lathed wood showing underneath.

  “What do you think?” Mrs. Swartzbaum, her eyes red from a night without sleep but wide from the coffee-and-amphetamine gum she’d been chewing to stay awake, smirked up at him. “They’re your AR-15s.”

  “Sixteen crates of them, thirty to a crate,” Hunt-R said, thumbing at the crates stacked up on the floor beside the worktable.

  “It’s a stick,” Rudy said.

  “And from two to three plastic shirt buttons,” Mr. Aberdini said, unjustifiably proud.

  “Oh, well, of course, that makes all the difference,” Trip said through tightly unamused lips.

  “You’re going to shoot me, aren’t you?” Hunt-R asked, taking a step backward.

  “Not you, no,” Trip said, smiling down at Mrs. Swartzbaum.

  “Well, what did you expect, bozo?” she asked. “You gave us a single night to produce 500 AR-15s. From scratch. Yet you didn’t leave us any raw materials, we don’t have any actual metal-working or gunsmithing equipment or experience, and most importantly, none of us actually know what an AR-15 is supposed to look like.”

  Trip tossed the stick-and-shirt-button AR-15 over his shoulder. “Little hint, it’s not supposed to look like a stick with plastic shirt buttons glued on it! That’s it, pizza’s off! Everybody back in the freezers.”

  “Yay!” Mr. Aberdini exclaimed.

  “Shut up, Bob,” Mr. Jackson said, while everybody else just moaned in resigned disappointment.

  As Hunt-R rounded up the retirees and herded them off to the basement, Rudy picked the discarded faux-AR-15 off the floor. “So, guess the sale’s off, then, right?”

  “
How you figure?” Trip asked, walking over to the crates. He opened a lid and peered in. It was filled with sticks. Maybe if the lights weren’t so bright—or on at all—the sticks might look like automatic rifles.

  “We can’t sell Dinky sticks and buttons,” Rudy said. “I mean, he’s gonna be able to tell they’re not guns.”

  Trip closed the lid. “You didn’t really think the nanna-and-pop-pop-cicles were actually going to produce working rifles, did you?”

  Rudy shrugged. “As a society we tend to marginalize our more senior members and discount their capabilities, but I didn’t want to be caught up in that ageist retro-thinking. So sue me if I gave them the benefit of the doubt.”

  Trip patted his brother on the top of the fez. “Sometimes I think you’re a better man than I am. Then I remember you’re an idiot, and I get over the thought. This was expected. In fact, they did better than expected. I mean, to be honest, I would have been happy with sixteen crates of sticks. Where the hell did they get all those buttons? Doesn’t matter… No, the sale’s still on.”

  “The second Dinky realizes we’re trying to con him, he’s going to kill us.”

  “Not with these sticks he’s not,” Trip said confidently. He took a can of spray pain out of one of the puffy pockets on the thigh of his shorts and shook it. “They’re not even sharp.”

  “He won’t be there alone. He’ll have other rebels. And they’ll have guns. Real working guns.”

  Trip crouched down in front of a crate and sprayed REAL AR-15s INSIDE on it. “Yes, but he’ll also have money. Real, spendable money. Money I really, really want. So we’re still going ahead with it.”

  “We’re going to get shot.”

  Trip started spraying another crate. “Don’t worry, I’ll be standing behind you, safe and sound.”