Piper cried out like the wounded animal he was. The first time was out of shock. The second time was when his brain registered the pain shooting up his leg. He grabbed his thigh and held on, clamped down on the wound, as he clamped down on his mouth to stifle the third outcry.
“Is that your mating call, honey?” Cliff said, still concealed somewhere in the trees. “You calling out for me?”
“Screw you. Get this bullet out of me!”
“Can’t do that, friend. He’s trying to draw me out,” Cliff said. Piper saw his muzzle scanning for a target. He averted his eyes to avoid giving away Cliff’s position.
Piper took another hit, this time to the shoulder, slamming his back to the ground. Once again he cried out in agony.
Then he started laughing. “Hey, send some more bullets my way. I love playing catch with you.” That comment earned him a third slug to the opposite shoulder, sobering him.
Then, slowly, his laughter resumed; it crescendoed from an impotent chuckle to a lion’s roar. “Calm yourself,” he shouted to Brimley. “Don’t want to shoot your load all at once.” He chuckled some more, halfheartedly, before changing tack. “Hey, Cliff, I remembered to tell you where the wife and daughter are buried alive, right? If not, better hope he doesn’t shoot out my tongue next.”
Brimley charged out of the woods, screaming, his automatic rifle set to discharge as many rounds per second as it was capable. The bullets pattered the front of Piper like heavy rain. He shook violently under the pelting, like a man being electrocuted.
Cliff waited until the clip was empty before emerging out into the open. “I figured the sound of the clip emptying would draw you out,” Brimley said. “That and your dead friend.”
“Dying, you fuck, dying,” Piper exclaimed, bleeding from his mouth, “present tense, you grammar-challenged prick!”
“What about, ‘You kill him, you never find out where your wife and daughter are buried alive,’ didn’t you understand?” Cliff said.
Brimley confessed, “I’m reconciled to the fact we can only be together again in joy and peace on the other side. In the meantime, they have their love of one another to shield them from men like you and me.”
“And what do you plan to do with an empty clip?” Cliff asked. When Brimley simply smiled, his eyes went to the business end of Brimley’s rifle. He saw the rocket launcher tucked just beneath the upper barrel, ready to vaporize him with one shot. “Funny, I didn’t see one of those in your collection.”
“I keep it under my pillow for the tooth fairy,” Brimley said.
“That’s the problem with everyone today—trust issues,” Piper blurted through pain and a punctured lung.
Seeing Brimley’s finger start to depress the trigger, Cliff cajoled, “Let me do the countdown, will you?”
Brimley hesitated. “Sure.”
“Three. Two. One,” Cliff said. He watched the log swing from its upheld position, and bore a hole with a three-inch diameter clear through Brimley’s chest, back to front. The shaft skewered his heart, and ripped it out of his chest in one smooth stroke.
Cliff bit into the still-beating heart, offered Piper a piece. Piper stood to take it. Cliff clearly figured he’d put Brimley out of his misery, considering his mystified expression as he stared at the resurrected Piper. “Kevlar. From your personal collection. That I did see.”
“Nice,” Brimley said. And then died.
“See that? He complimented you,” Piper said. “I told you they all secretly want to be killed. All we’re doing is answering their prayers. I guess that makes us a couple of saints.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Archer aimed his rig at the gunner aboard the whaling ship they were dogging. Both of them leaned back in an effort to counterbalance the weights of their harpoon-guns. They were situated far enough over the bow of their boats, built with an extended nose, to feel like they were being made to walk the plank on a pirate ship. Cristo supposed he and his crew were modern day pirates of a sort. They were Greenpeace. They protected whales at all costs against forces (largely but not exclusively from Japan) with any means at hand.
Not one of those means was supposed to include a whaling gun.
But Archer liked the irony of skewering those who would spear his beloved whales. And so he let the harpoon fly. It soared through the air, landing in the gunner’s chest. “How do you like it, asshole? Feels like shit, don’t it?”
“That may have been a little over the top,” Cristo said, nonetheless feeling Archer’s exhilaration and triumph. But he, unlike Archer, also felt like shit. Like maybe they were getting carried away. Then he stared at the whale languishing in the water, over a half dozen harpoons buried in him, emitting the anguished screeches of the damned, and he was back to feeling conflicted.
“Ooh, I think we pissed them off,” Archer said.
The Japanese vessel, about twenty times their size, was lined with machine guns along both sides. Their marksmen were settling into position for the turkey shoot. Only, Archer’s vessel was small and maneuverable. Like Mohamed Ali, it could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
Archer and Cristo shuffled below deck, took up their secondary positions.
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Balansaur said. Unlike Archer’s steely hardness spanning an otherwise average frame, with muscles spun like hemp rope beneath leathery sun-drenched weathered and wrinkled skin, and Cristo’s lithe youthful physique, still largely unetched with inordinate character, Balansaur was a giant, taking up the space of two men on a ship with no room to spare. When he spoke, his voice sounded as if it was pumped up from a subterranean cave, adding to the whole giant mystique, and made him that much more intimidating and hard to ignore. “We’re low on fuel. Running circles around these guys won’t impress anybody, won’t even slow them down, but it will cost us our diesel. By the time someone finds us out here, we’ll be frozen solid.”
“Comes to that,” Archer said, “I’ll blow the ship. We can be an artificial reef habitat for my beloved sea creatures.”
“Tell Jacques Cousteau over there, we have incoming,” Maelstrom declared. He was Japanese—go figure—and scant of frame, meek as a mouse, polite, and deferential, except when killing his own kind, then he was merely dry and impartial, and a larger-than-life force. He fired his World War II sniper rifle that had to be hand cranked like a damn Model T every time he fired off a shot. Archer got pissed off every time he looked at Maelstrom playing David and Goliath against their automatic weapons. But he couldn’t complain about Maelstrom’s results. He’d dropped three of them already.
“Nice shooting,” Archer said. He peered through the eyelet just big enough to shoot out of and just small enough to discourage, if not eliminate, incoming bullets.
“Our mandate indicates we stop short of creating international incidents.” Cristo felt a need to put things in context for the increasingly overzealous crew, who didn’t take particularly well to getting their asses shot off. If they were pissed at Archer for putting them in this predicament a moment ago, they had forgotten about that, too busy being furious at the Japanese captain and crew to have any more room in their heads for further considerations. That left it to Cristo to do what he could to, under peer pressure, pull back on his own rage, which wasn’t easy.
Capuera, a Brazilian black man who rounded out their international crew, took a bullet to the thigh. Seeing Capuera wrapping a tourniquet around his own leg to stop from spurting blood over the crew, Cristo lost it along with the rest of them. He took up his station, fired his automatic rifle, and screamed like a madman.
When Cristo came out of the fugue minutes later, everyone was staring at him, including Maelstrom, who had stopped firing his precision shots. Why bother? With the amount of ammo Cristo was expending with the automatic .50 caliber, there wasn’t much need for accuracy. He glanced down slack-jawed at the impressive termite mound of empty shells.
Archer, steering the boat around the whale of a ship (no pun intended) t
wice, was both delighted and appalled at the results. “Fuck me. The next time I lose it, Cristo, punch me to hell unconscious, before things get this out of hand.”
Cristo gulped.
“Or turn the guns on us,” Maelstrom said.
When Cristo glanced around, he could see they all looked pretty self-pitying, Capuera most of all. He’d completely forgotten about the bullet in his leg. So much so, Cristo had to attend to him fast.
He dug out the bullet. Doing surgery in less than sanitary conditions, Cristo stitched him back up, and bandaged him. His military background as a field medic was the primary reason they had brought Cristo along in the first place, since he wasn’t nearly as seasoned at sea as the rest, and that could cost the others their lives.
The wound-mending seemed to transpire in slow-motion for Cristo, a time-dilation effect secondary to all the adrenaline pumping through his veins. The others were still staring at him when he glanced up, looking for some place to put their minds other than on what they’d done. Archer snapped them out of it.
“Let’s get that whale freed,” Archer shouted, just callously enough to slice through the sentimentality. Cristo appreciated the nudging into an emotionless state of mind. Numbness right now was just the ticket he was looking for out of this hell.
Above deck, Tivo had already slipped into scuba gear. He was a pure-blooded Portuguese man-of-war, like the sea creature after which he was nicknamed. There was nothing slowing him down, no trauma over the sight of dead guys on the Japanese whaling vessel, titled in calligraphy, Destiny. (Cristo’s fluency in the language was the second reason he’d been allowed aboard despite his inexperience at sea.) Tivo only cared for his whales; human life meant nothing to him. He didn’t celebrate the deaths of the Japanese whalers any more than he mourned them; they were simply irrelevant.
With its motors idling, they nudged the vessel closer to the whale, and jumped onto it. Then they hauled ass as if running the deck on a submarine about to submerge.
With two men per harpoon, they worked the spears out, one attending the shaft as the other attended the point. The one at the point dug his hands in up to his elbows, as if assisting with a breech birth. The whole time, they were adding, ironically, to the bloody mess.
This whale didn’t look good. Either it knew what they were up to, and was only too happy not to put up a fuss (this was the case sometimes), or it was already half-dead (which was sadly the more common situation.)
It would be up to Tivo to patch the holes more thoroughly with an anti-clotting formula of his own invention. He was already at it.
Finished swimming around the whale, checking for additional leaks, satisfied, Tivo stuck the whale with three injections. A couple liters of fluid filled the plungers above the needles. Another of his inventions, an immune system boosting cocktail, though he refused to give specifics, for fear the animal rights people would be all over them. Cristo suspected his fear might be on account of introducing genetically modified whales into a non-GMO whale population; something purists would not stand for, even if it boosted the mammals’ survival chances.
They jumped off the whale, climbed the ropes up to their ship. Once aboard, they watched the solemn ritual as the pod continued to nudge the whale to the surface to help it breathe. They had done all they could do.
“What are we going to do about the Japanese whaling ship?” Cristo asked.
Archer readied the torpedo tubes by way of an answer, turning the knobs. A hydraulic mechanism, installed in the craft just below the waterline, went through its robotic moves.
Archer gave the pod just enough time to get a safe distance on the pending fireworks. He hesitated, looked back at Cristo to see if this was one of those moments that called for a little more distance on himself. When Cristo said nothing, he decided it wasn’t, and flipped the switches.
They watched the torpedoes take out the vessel in an eruption of flames that was comforting against the arctic cold in more ways than one.
The crew basked in the glory of the fire from the Japanese whaling vessel for quite some time. “Makes a much better fish sanctuary than our small tub,” Archer said finally, watching it sink.
Cristo said, “A totally sober, big picture thinking assessment of the situation, and not one of your usual emotionally overwrought responses.”
“Why, thank you,” Archer replied, and chuckled. He handed him a cigar to celebrate the occasion.
“I’m not sure I should,” Cristo said.
“No ship, no international incident,” Archer said.
“Since you put it that way.” Cristo took the cigar, allowed Archer to light it for him, sucked on it, and coughed. He didn’t smoke. With any luck, moving forward, they’d have enough causes to celebrate that he’d be addicted before their work was finished.
FORTY-EIGHT
“Sister Gretchen, looks like we have our own congregation.” Mort observed the men in black closing in from all angles. “I think it only suitable that holy people like ourselves have some sort of following.”
They surveyed the Renaissance Faire attendees with their glib clueless expressions, cavorting about mindlessly and happily. My, those were the days, Mort thought. He looked to Santini, who nodded, as if thinking the same thing. It was good to share a moment with him. Nice to feel this in sync heading into battle; it wasn’t much, but it was something.
“We can’t do anything here. Too many people could get hurt,” Santini said.
“Are you kidding?” Mort surveyed the steampunk arsenal of weapons, the battle axes, swords, knights’ armor, bows and arrows, and that wasn’t the half of it; it wasn’t even the heavy artillery. “The only people more prepared for war are those Civil War reenactment guys. Maybe we can try there next. I’m growing rather partial to these places out of time.”
“Hold on to me,” Gretchen said. When they didn’t respond fast enough, she took each of them by the hand.
“Now’s no time to be contemplating a ménage aux trois,” Mort said. “Though it’s damn decent of you to empathize with my being the odd man out.” His eyes hadn’t left the men in black during his latest volley of smart ass remarks. They were now close enough that avoiding conflict was all but impossible.
Gretchen squeezed their hands, and—
Poof! No more Renaissance Faire.
Mort blinked twice to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.
No doubt about it—this was Times Square, New York. His jaw dropped like a garbage truck dumping its refuse of spent ideas regarding the nature of reality. “How did you know we could teleport?”
“I didn’t,” Gretchen confessed. “Figured it was worth a try.”
“Well, don’t do it again,” Mort protested. He added feebly, “I’m determined to get the last of my frequent-flyer miles out of my credit card. At twenty-four percent interest, the bastards owe me that much.”
They watched as a street performer, dressed in futuristic armor, appearing more robot than man, turned toward them. Previously concealed weaponry popped out of his bodysuit. The circle of people admiring his robo-walk, parents with little kiddies, widened at the sight of the very realistic-looking weapons. Though the little kids wanted to touch them and the frantic mothers had to pull them back.
Robo-Dude opened fire on Mort and Gretchen and Santini. Their unprovoked attacker spared no expense at their elimination, and showed no reserve in the matter; he expelled machine gun fire, mortars, and smart-guided missiles at them.
Before Santini and Mort could react, Gretchen threw a force field around them. Mort uncharacteristically raised his hand to protect his eyes from all the explosions going off just a few feet from his face. Santini reached out for a pair of shades from the street vender’s display-wheel within the cover of the energy shield, and donned them, sour-faced. When they proved not dark enough, he tried another pair. He continued to test models under the battery of explosives. “I can’t argue the merit of field-testing those things,” Mort said.
Pushed back to th
e far side of the street by the explosions, the audience clapped. Ironically, it wasn’t because they were convinced the light show was just part of the street theater. Recognizing things had turned all too real, they were applauding the hyper-reality games. People were strange.
“You getting the feeling they knew we were coming?” Santini said.
“How could they know!” Mort protested. “We didn’t even know.”
“The AI in charge of the game play is capable of running billions of scenarios a second,” Gretchen explained, from that now familiar unblinking state she was wont to sink into from time to time, indicating the seer had emerged. “It figures out what we’re going to do next long before we do. Giving it time to deploy its assets.”
To Mort, it seemed like just yesterday they were eavesdropping on Robin and Milton, a.k.a. the coma guy, and the engineer of Fabio’s time machine, discussing self-evolving algorithms that had coalesced into “Mother,” their nickname for the now sentient Internet.
“I don’t know what’s creepier,” Mort said, “coming up against an all-powerful all-knowing AI, or having you tell us about it like it was no big thing.”
“What, our sudden superpowers don’t creep you out?” Santini said. He pulled out The Judge.
Mort looked at his piece and made a sour face. “I think we’re way past that, Sherlock. And for the record, I find it strangely calming I can suddenly play god with the best of them. It’s certainly my turn.”
“Only, we don’t know how far we can go before we’re played out,” Santini said. “And the AI can go forever.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Mort admitted. “Sorry if my puny brain isn’t as good at prioritizing the horrors as it used to be. Then again, it has never had so much to juggle.”
“Maybe an urban setting, where the AI has more assets at its disposal, wasn’t such a good idea,” Gretchen confessed. She took their hands again. This time she squeezed, nothing happened.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 158
