Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  Bonnie tugged at Casper's arm saying, “C'mon, twitchy bitch, we got some ass to kick.” It wasn't a perfect rhyme, but it surprised the hell out of Casper to hear Bonnie say it. He liked the fact that she'd touched him, too. As Hi-5 continued to hold the first floor, the team cautiously descended below a projected sign that hung in mid-air over the stairs and declared that this was the way to the 'Specialized Orgy Environments'.

  The main hallway of POP's first sub-level had open shower stalls every few yards and the floor of the hallway was wet. Blood from three fallen Morituri gunmen mixed with puddles of water, making patches of bright pink on the concrete floor. They quickly oxidized to rust-water from the disinfectant that was everywhere.

  Bonnie stepped over a bullet-ridden Morituri gunman at the bottom of the stairs. Nearby, the naked bodies of two clubbers lay on their backs without any visible wounds. Bonnie guessed they'd slipped trying to flee the firefight and concussed themselves on the concrete floor. The hard-on pills they sold here must be pretty powerful, she thought, trying not to stare at the surgically augmented, porno-scaled, elements of the fallen clubbers that pointed defiantly skyward despite their unconsciousness. Shelby extended her leg and poked one with the tip of her AniLux, swirling smoke boot. She giggled as it twitched and throbbed. “Now that,” she said, “is some impressive shit.” As the absurdly large appendage continued to dance, she added, “I gotta get out more.”

  Irving waved to the snatch team from down the corridor, and then Irving and Fritz both disappeared down the stairs to the next sub-level.

  The Morituri at the base of the stairs was pumped up on a cheap crank variant known as Jitterthug, and instead of camping the bottom of the stairs as he'd been ordered, he decided to creep up and ambush the armored figures as they came down the gently curving staircase. He had just enough time to affix a RemDet grenade low on the wall of the stairwell, where he was pretty sure the walking tanks wouldn't notice it.

  As they rounded the gentle curve of the stairs down, Fritz and Irving didn't see the soda-can sized grenade stuck to the wall. When it detonated, none of the anti-personnel fragments or pieces of tiled concrete wall came close to penetrating their assault suits, but the force of the explosion knocked Irving into Fritz, and Fritz into the wall, and they both lost their balance and rolled down the stairs.

  They tumbled out of the curving stairwell like boulders and landed in a small ante-chamber with molded, synthetic cave walls and dim, orange-pink lighting. A disinfectant mist filled the air, sprayed from invisible micro nozzles in the ceiling. That was all they had a chance to notice before they felt small caliber, armor piercing rounds trying to burrow into their suits.

  Irving was on his back, and when he tried to raise his weapon, he found it was held fast to the floor by five hundred pounds of Fritz and armor. Fritz had landed face down over Irving's right arm and was well-nigh helpless. Three gunmen emptied their thirty-round clips into the downed duo at point blank range.

  Inside the suits, Fritz and Irving felt like they were getting worked over with jackhammers. The burrowing bullets would eventually find their way in if the gunmen kept the armored behemoths literally pinned with fire until they could pour enough rounds on one area to weaken it to the point where it gave way.

  Halfway through the Morituri's second clips, neither Irving or Fritz could manage to right themselves, but Fritz's hand found the shoulder bag he wore and the grenades inside it. Groping blindly under the non-stop gunfire that hammered him, Fritz gripped a grenade. He had no idea what kind, and it didn't matter. He gave it a sharp tug, and the cotter pin that had been tied to the bag itself came free, arming the grenade and igniting its fuse. As the gunmen standing above them frantically attempted to change their expended clips for fresh ones, Fritz counted to five in his head. Halfway between 'two' and 'three', the gunfire began again, and now it was beginning to hurt. The first layers of their suits were compromised. Fritz lobbed the grenade away from his prone body on 'four', and he didn't see where it went.

  Fritz's blind selection had been a concussion grenade and after he lobbed it away from him, it bounced off a wall and detonated five feet behind the crown of his head and a foot off the concrete floor. The Morituri who'd been standing almost on top of Irving and Fritz saw him throw something, but had no chance to react before the grenade exploded, filling the tiny room with blinding light, deafening noise, and a wave of concussive overpressure. The pressure wave didn't make too much difference to men in sealed-helmet, armored assault suits, but was absolutely devastating to the three, comparatively naked, Morituri gunmen.

  They brought their hands to their faces instinctively. Two dropped their submachine guns before trying to cover their faces and one didn't. His involuntarily convulsing finger caused his weapon to spray bullets wildly across the room, knocking his two brother Morituri back against the wall, jerking as the armor piercing rounds easily cut through their light vests.

  Fritz managed to do a slow, painful push-up to bring himself to his knees, and Irving, lying on his back, found he could now lift his weapon. He couldn't see the remaining gunman but it was a small room, and when he lifted his arm and aimed blindly behind and above where he lay, it was difficult to miss. The modded machine gun sprayed everywhere. Fritz couldn't possibly control it at that angle, and the only aim or direction it had was given by the large caliber weapon's recoil that jerked and spasmed the aim point all over that half of the small ante-chamber.

  The remaining Morituri caught rounds all over his body, before slumping to the floor. Gravity won its battle with recoil for the direction in which Fritz aimed, and the gun's muzzle lowered to the floor while Fritz continued to fire. The Morituri's body was blown apart in several pieces, torn by point-blank range, large caliber bullets.

  Irving managed to right himself first, and he was able to get Fritz up. They were both shaken, but neither would admit it. After they finished checking each other for weak spots and made sure their gear was functional, they stood staring at the double doors that led out of the ante-chamber, into the larger grotto. “The second we go out those doors,” Irving said, “the rest of 'em are gonna open up.”

  “It won't matter.” Fritz said it like he believed it.

  Fritz was right.

  He and Irving burst through the double doors, side by side and instantly received well-aimed, incoming fire from three points on the other side of the room. In the dim light, the muzzle flashes from the Morituri submachine gunners made it easy to see where they fired from. Fritz and Irving took many more hits, but nothing that scared them. Fritz talked shit through his suit's loudspeaker while being peppered with ballistic impacts “I-i-i-s-s... tha-a-a-at... i-i-t-t?” The Morituri were firing from behind boulders in three separate positions, but the boulders were fake, foam-covered, styrene props. When the Morituri exhausted their clips and ducked behind them to reload, Fritz's loudspeakers boomed, “My turn, bitches!” He and Irving shredded the lightweight, synthetic boulders, sending high-caliber rounds tearing through, right into the gunmen. One by one the Morituri fell in heaps. Their bodies were pushed backwards by the force of the impacting bullets, sliding across the lube-slickened floor into clubber-filled pools of gooey liquid where they floated on the surface.

  The Grotto was an alien place with wide walkways that snaked through pools of thick, viscous, liquid. There were fake stalactites hanging from the molded plastic cave ceiling, and they glowed, pulsing orange-pink from within. AniLux cave paintings were everywhere – Lascaux styled, charcoal drawings of animals. Every animal Fritz and Irving could think of was represented there in pairs, and they were all fucking.

  Irving bent slightly, looked down and to his right, into one of the shiny pools that reflected the animated animals fucking on the ceiling, and staring back at him, with dinner plate-sized pupils, were six entwined, heavily narco'd clubbers floating unnaturally in the primordial ooze. They were one undulating, freakish, fucking human mass. Irving had heard of this before. The pools were filled wi
th neutral-buoyancy lube, and it was made for two things – floating and fucking.

  Irving warned Fritz, “Watch your step...” Pointing down, he added, “Slippery shit.”

  Fritz's face screwed up in disgust inside his helmet. “If I fall in,” Fritz said, “Burn me in the suit.”

  A small minority pulled themselves out of the pools and padded away in fear. Most of the floating clubbers were so wasted that they thought Fritz, Irving, the dead Morituri, and the whole firefight were unfortunate hallucinations. The ones that didn't flee and didn't take the noisy armored giants for imaginary simply looked away. They preferred to concentrate on what they came here for – the slimy, primal, libidinous action of the Grotto.

  -27-

  Padre Pedro hurled his phone against the wall and it bounced back at him. He could hear the gunfire outside in the Grotto. He'd been calling and calling for help from his brother Morituri ever since his men had reported seeing an armed incursion in progress. Every call he'd made had been rerouted to random numbers across the city. Then the security monitors went dead along with the elevators, and the men he'd sent upstairs to see what was happening hadn't returned. He knew he was trapped, and Padre Pedro began to taste real fear. He had no idea who was attacking or what was going on. Barricaded inside the storeroom with one bodyguard and the abominable little Buddha, he tried to name the threat.

  There were plenty of groups who didn't get along with the Morituri and just as many individuals who wanted to see Pedro himself dead. The only thing he was sure of was that it wasn't the Security Service. G.S.A. Security might put a missile on the hood of your car or zap you from orbit with a concentrated beam of sunshine, but they didn't bust into clubs like the Power of Pleasure in the shitbox vans his men had reported seeing just before all the monitors went dead. No, Pedro thought, this is someone's personal vendetta. He wondered if the mob was trying to make a comeback.

  Padre Pedro's mobile phone lit up and chimed at its highest volume in a tone he didn't remember hearing before. It was face down, and he had to pick it up to see the images that someone was going to great trouble to pull off the POP club's security cameras and force feed through the Network onto the four inch, holographic screen of his mobile phone. He recognized the scene on his phone as the painted white cinderblock hallway of the maintenance area outside. It was around the corner and down the hallway.

  He watched in three-dimensional horror as the doors to the perverse Grotto area slid open to reveal two armored men in full-body assault suits. They entered, and as they did, they revealed a larger group of armed intruders. Some of them he didn't recognize, but as they entered the maintenance area, he saw three he did recognize. There in his hand, on the screen of his phone, in tiny three-dimensional hi-resolution, holographic clarity, was Catherine Whitman holding a submachine gun. The one-eyed Angry Angel recruit was there, and that skinny car thief was there, too. These were the people he'd tried to kill in the woods, and they were here either for revenge or to rescue the abominable little Buddha. It was probably, he thought, almost certainly both.

  Padre Pedro turned to Alvin, who still sat in the open-bottomed chair. “Mr. Buddha, it seems you made quite an impression on your friends,” Pedro said, “because they've come to fetch you.” Alvin lifted his head, and stared at Padre Pedro with a confused expression that pleased him. “Yes,” Pedro continued, “the only one who hasn't come to plague me is that attention-addicted, media-affliction of indeterminate gender.”

  Immediately after the words left his lips, the image on the screen of Pedro's phone changed. Now, it was the feed from the security cameras on the first floor of the POP club. There, on the main stage, gyrating her hips like a madwoman with a jet of flame shooting fifteen feet out over the cheering crowds from what appeared to be a ridiculous, jeweled codpiece, was none other than her Hi-ness, her 5-ness, Hi-5.

  Padre Pedro stared at her incendiary gyrations then he screamed with rage and hurled the phone against the wall. This time it shattered.

  -28-

  The snatch team let Fritz and Irving go first, and the walking tanks went down the painted white cinderblock hallway back to back, like a pair of rooks. At the first intersection, Casper saw Fritz take fire from an unseen gunman. Fritz extended his arm and loosed a long burst while the loudspeakers on the outside of his suit broadcast the mantra he chanted inside his helmet as he fired, “Die, mutherfucker, die.”

  A second unseen gunman made a noise Casper recognized as the flat and hollow boom of a shotgun, and Casper was surprised to see Irving actually double over and drop to the ground. There was another flat boom, and Fritz stumbled forward from the force of a slug hitting him high in the right side of his back. The impact pushed him forward, but spun him around to his left. Fritz winced inside his helmet, but used the energy imparted by the slug to help him spin and face the shotgunner who had just downed Irving. “Die, mutherfucker die!” Casper heard, as Fritz fired over the fallen Irving.

  Fritz turned to face the next attacker, but there weren't any more. The speakers on Fritz's suit said, “Cover, cover, cover!” and everyone moved up the hallway to face down the corridors that intersected there, ready to shoot anyone that appeared.

  Fritz dropped his gun, stripped off his gloves, and unclasped his shoulder-mounted helmet. He lifted it off, let it drop to the floor, and began to remove Irving's helmet. Casper couldn't see any blood, but he didn't bother to look too closely. He was more worried about the fact that he now bore the responsibility of shooting any more Morituri that might now appear. The walking tanks were behind him, and Casper heard Irving's voice so he knew Irving wasn't dead, but he didn't sound good.

  The twelve gage slug from the last gunman hadn't found its way through the suit, but the jackhammering they'd taken had weakened Irving's armor, pushing several scales out of place and had reduced its ability to disperse the force of the slug. The massive wad of lead had broken several ribs, and one of those punctured a lung. Irving was wheezing.

  While Fritz assessed the damage, Casper risked a backwards glance, and the look on Fritz's face surprised him. It wasn't just concern. There was something else there more like fear. Fritz hadn't been hurt, Irving was the one who was hurt, and this was why Casper was so confused by the fear he saw in Fritz's face. He wasn't sure because he only looked for a second, but he could have sworn he saw a tear.

  Fritz's voice was shaky, and it didn't match his words. He said, “Bitch, stop faking it, I don't see any blood so you gotta be faking.”

  It took a long couple of seconds for Irving to manage a thin voiced, “Yeah, I'm faking it.”

  Fritz continued the joke, “Let's fake getting you to a fucking doctor. Can you fake walking too, you pussy-ass faker?”

  Irving raised his head to look at Fritz and laughed, then winced, and with his face all screwed up in pain he managed to say, “As long as you stop faking that crying, you fucking pussy.”

  Casper listened to the dialog behind him and the tone of their voices, and he thought he was beginning to understand the nature of the relationship between Irving and Fritz. He'd never imagined two machine-gun-toting, assault-suit-wearing, badass, mercenaries who shot shit up for fun and profit would be boyfriends, but now he didn't have to imagine it because they were right there behind him.

  Bonnie, Carlos, Otis, and Catherine dragged Irving back down the hallway so he'd be less exposed. Shelby went with them to slap a painkiller on Irving's neck, leaving Casper alone with the tear-faced Fritz.

  Casper felt like he should say something so he stammered, “I... I'm uh... I'm sorry about your boyfriend, man.” Fritz's massive fist approached Casper's face so quickly he thought he'd be pummeled to death right there in the hallway, but the huge, dark-skinned fist stopped six inches away from Casper's head. When Casper opened his eyes, he realized Fritz was showing him something. There, on Fritz's ring-finger was a gold band.

  “That's my husband,” Fritz barked, adding, “We got Family Values, bitch!” Then Fritz grinned at Casper
, and Casper's heart started beating again.

  When Bonnie returned, she couldn't figure out why teary-eyed Fritz had his arm around Casper's shoulders, half crushing him, while repeating over and over, “Skinny little fucker's alright, yeah, the skinny little fucker's alright, alright.”

  Carlos pulled a phone out of his pocket, stared at it for a moment, then he looked down the hall at a pair of white double doors that were only ten yards away. He pointed and said, “There. He's in there.” Carlos turned to look behind him and asked, “Fritz?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you mind walking down the hall and knocking on that door for me?”

  “You want me to knock on it or do you mean, like, that you want me to shoot the shit out of it?”

  “I mean knock,” Carlos clarified. “But put your helmet on first.” Fritz lifted the massive helmet over his head, set it on the shoulder mounts, and latched it in place. “Everybody around the corner,” Carlos suggested. “There's probably gonna be some more shooting.”

  Carlos handed Fritz what looked like a homemade grenade crafted from a can of shaving cream. It had gaffer's tape on the bottom half and a key chain with a three-inch yellow rubber duck swinging on the end of a short chain that was clipped to the top of the can. “I know this sounds weird,” Carlos said, “but when you knock on the door two things are going to happen. One, someone inside will probably shoot at you through the door. Two, the door's electronic lock is gonna open, and when it does, I want you pull the duck off the can, open the door, and throw the can inside the room. You got that?” Fritz just stared at him through the helmet's slit.

  “Yeah, sure, whatever,” he said over the suit's speakers, adding, “I'm cool with that,” before he walked slowly down the hall to the white double doors.