Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  Bonnie could feel someone peering at her when she looked up at the camera lenses above the door. What the fuck is he waiting for? When she heard the faint hissing noise of gas being pumped into the elevator and saw the walls twist and warp with her narcotized perceptions, Bonnie had her answer. Slumping against the elevator wall, she had a painful, semi-conscious realization that her Loyalty had always been the defining element of her identity. Her need to be loyal to someone, the need to be the Bonnie she'd wanted to see, the Bonnie she liked, was a need she had and a need that Delvaux exploited.

  Before she lost consciousness, the elevator went dark, and she saw a gold coin spinning in front of her face so quickly that it was almost a blurry sphere. She couldn't see what was on each side of the coin, but she heard Alvin's voice, and it said, “The Coin's name is Vanity.”

  -59-

  Another elevator, this one filled with gold-robed monks, was descending through the sub-levels of the Ziggurat when it suddenly came to a halt, throwing all six men inside to the floor. It reversed direction and began to climb upwards. Caine looked confused until Jack Haan's bloody personal data pad blinked and buzzed in his hand. Then it played the theme song from a nearly forgotten TV series. It flashed a message. 'GO TO TOP LEVEL ROOF.' Caine smiled at Caine because they were already on the Way.

  -60-

  The sanctum was only a few feet below them, through a sliding access panel in the bottom of the shaft. The Client was supposed to open it. So far, he hadn't.

  “Well, what the Fuckity McFuck are we supposed to do now?”

  “He might not open the bottom of the shaft without Alvin here,” Carlos said. The whole job was to bring the Buddha.

  “What the fuck,” Otis asked Carlos, “are we gonna do?”

  The question didn't bother Carlos nearly as much as the fact that he didn't know the answer. They were hanging by thin cables that went up eighteen hundred feet of a twenty-four hundred foot shaft. Carlos didn't claim to know anything about leadership, but he knew enough to know that he couldn't show his irritation at either Otis or himself, so he said nothing except, “I'm thinking.”

  Casper just hung in his harness staring at the lights pulsing inside the vines lining the shaft. He knew what he wanted to do, he was just scared to do it. He was surprised to see his hand moving over the push-button controls of the Hammond auto-descender. It goes up too, he thought, right? There was a button marked, 'UP' and he watched his hand like it was somebody else's as the thumb slid over the button and pushed with resolve. The Hammond made a different noise than it had on the way down and began to retract and spool the ultra-thin cable inside it, pulling Casper up the shaft.

  “Casper, what the fuck?” he heard Otis say below him. He mashed the button a few more times, but it wouldn't go any faster. He really didn't know what he was doing except keeping his hand away from the Big Red Emergency Nut-Smack Button.

  Casper felt like something Very Important was happening, and he was missing it. He was still scared, but at least he was going in the right direction. He was thirty feet above Carlos, Otis, Caine, and Caine when he realized he didn't even know where he was going and he'd be a helluva lot safer hiding at the bottom of this half-mile hole. Otis's voice was getting further away. Casper heard him yelling, “Dude! Fuckin', Dude! Where the fuck are you going?”

  Up, baby, up with the mummy souls, UP! Ten seconds, a hundred and fifty feet later, he'd already figured out where he was going: he was going to find Bonnie. Alvin too, he reminded himself. He noticed that he'd thought about Bonnie first and told himself, Casper, you gotta be seriously Fuct In the Head.

  Carlos just laughed. Once the field of battle changes, he thought, so must the battle plan. He dropped himself a few feet to the unconscious Caine, and after making sure the monk was leaning forward, he pushed the 'UP' button on Caine's Hammond and watched him rise up the shaft. Carlos was thankful, as Bonnie had been earlier, that the Sons of Caine wore underwear beneath their golden robes.

  Carlos leaned his head back to look at Otis above him and said, “I don't know about you man, but I think Casper's got the right idea.” Carlos pushed the 'UP' button on his own auto-descender and began to ascend. As Carlos passed Otis, he grabbed Otis's feet and flipped him inverted so that Otis's straps caught him in the yabos. Carlos laughed as he rose and yelled down to the soles of Otis's feet, “C'mon, dude, I'll race your dumb ass to the top!”

  Donnie Caine's grasshoppers hurt a little less after seeing that, and Otis had to listen to him laugh most of the way as they ascended together back up eighteen hundred feet of the half-mile deep, glowing, pulsing rice-noodle-lit Central Shaft.

  -61-

  Hi-5, her camerawoman, and a soused Catherine Whitman were in an empty lot in the middle of a burned out, half-collapsed block of the Hobo Jungle. Every surface was worn smooth by heavy metal sandstorms and weekly acid baths from the rain-wetted dust.

  The trio was not alone.

  Fifty yards away, watching them nervously from a distillery defined only by the pickle jars amassed inside the foot-high walls, were the sixteen burliest, meanest Hobos in the Jungle. From their direction came the smell of yeast they'd extracted from scavenged dinner rolls, the sweet smell of fruit rot, and the lung-searing fumes from burning garbage. Even more powerful than the smell of their combined, unwashed, aggressive humanity, was the smell of socks. The guards looked left and right frequently to spot anyone creeping up with larcenous intent because this was the Hobo Jungle version of Fort Knox.

  The economy of the Jungle was based on things that made you forget you were in the Jungle, and the cornerstones of this anti-mnemonic economy were moonshine, Pruno, and a form of resilient ditch weed that absorbed dangerous amounts of toxins from the soil and transferred them to whomever was bold enough to smoke it.

  This was the Pruno factory. It doesn't take sixteen men to make Pruno, but in the Jungle it takes one man and his alchemical expertise to make it and fifteen men to guard him and the liquid gold he made from lead. In this case the lead was socks, yeasty dinner rolls, and rotting fruit. The guards were the toughest, most grizzled men in the Jungle, and they were staring hard at Hi-5's Camaro and its occupants.

  When they arrived, Hi-5 fired off a clip into the air just to let them know she was packing, and the Pruno factory guards hadn't flinched.

  They didn't flinch when they saw a G.S.A. Wasp unmanned autonomous drone hover over the lot either. They saw the turret-mounted weapon that it waved back and forth, but they held their ground, squinting at the machine in the bright sky. The most grizzled of the factory's guards flipped a middle finger at the hovering Wasp, and even inside the Camaro they heard him yelling from his toothless maw, “You want the Pruno? Come and git it, you flying metal bastid!”

  Fortunately for the Wasp, it had no interest in Pruno and neither did the AI who had commandeered it. The Wasp flew itself, but MUNI 5-7 directed it through a networking hack that was sweet enough to induce diabetic coma because it used no less than twelve pirated data-links that started with a dead G.S.A. administrator's data-pad and wound through several phones and personal media appliances across Baccha Bay City and the Network, wending its way to a bridge toll booth and its vestigial telephone wire that connected to a painted-shut switching box that connected to a forgotten civil defense radio transmitter overlooking the city from the very top of one of the Bay's five bridges.

  The Wasp landed vertically, and underneath the descending drone's fan blades it was louder than a stadium full of stimulant-crazed PornoPop fanatics. No amount of computer modeling had been able to guide the Wasp's designers to an understanding of the chaos that was atmosphere beaten by fan blades so that they might make the blades vibrate the air with any less din and volume than the Day of Judgment or the hundred million screaming zombies that would undoubtedly accompany it. As the Wasp screamed with the noise of the hungry undead, it lowered itself in front of Hi-5's Camaro, and its downward vectored, single jet turbine and its twin sets of wing-mounted fans ki
cked up a storm of toxic dust and urban detritus that filled the block and covered the muscle car in a layer of ashen powder the color of crumbling mummies and spent fuel rods.

  Hi-5, Catherine, and Coco waited for a full minute until most of the dust cloud had blown clear, and then they exited the car. Coco and Hi-5 opened the Camaro's trunk and withdrew three vintage, real leather, Western saddles. They set them down next to the Wasp drone, still humming with power. It swiveled its cannon an inch to the left and then to the right as it tested the feel of the Pruno factory guards in its sights. Coco, as Director and Camerawoman for today's shoot, fixed several small imagers and cameras to the Wasp's body with duct tape. Some pointed forward, some pointed down, but most importantly, two imagers were fixed to the nose to point up and back at Hi-5. Satisfied that coverage was in place, Coco, acting now as Hi-5's driver, readied the Wasp by mounting the three saddles to its long, blued gunmetal body.

  As Coco tightened the straps underneath the Wasp's belly, Hi-5 ran her hand over the warm, blued metal length of the drone in a consciously sexualized manner that made Catherine roll her eyes. Hi-5 couldn't let the opportunity pass. As she stroked the blatantly phallic shape of the Wasp's fuselage, Hi-5's eyes turned to Catherine and she said, “Now, Girlfriend, I'm used to having something this powerful between my legs, but we can rig some sort of side-saddle arrangement for you if that would make you more comfortable.”

  -62-

  Casper found that the area just outside the hole they'd cut into the Central Shaft was suddenly a lot bloodier than it used to be. There were bodies there. Angels of Badur. Their wounds were all the same, bullets to the back of the head, and Casper could tell immediately that these weren't victims of any combat. These were executions. With a chill, he remembered what Carlos had said about what would happen when they won, when the Goddies ran out of Global Secular Alliance personnel to kill. Either they'd already won the battle for the Zig, or they'd started early, but it was clear from the bodies at his feet that the Cleansing had begun. If it was possible, the Zig had just become an even more dangerous place than before.

  When Casper heard the noise behind him, he panicked. His Korean MP-9 had been hanging neglected, pointed at the floor. When he tried to spin and bring it up and level, he panic-gripped the weapon and fired off a burst into the floor. Then he saw Carlos inside the shaft. Carlos looked pissed and was shaking his head and muttering, but he was busy holding out an arm to halt the ascending Hammond that carried an unconscious Caine. The abrupt stop bounced Caine up and down enough to bring him to semi-consciousness, and by the time Otis and Donnie Caine caught up and helped him out of the shaft, Caine was able to stand. He looked wobbly and glazed, but he was standing.

  “Casper man,” Otis asked, “Was that you shooting?” Carlos glared at Casper.

  “We need a terminal... and access,” Carlos said.

  The open offices nearby had plenty of terminals, but they'd all been shot to hell or taken grenade fragments. One office down the hall looked like it might have escaped catastrophic damage. The door was shut. They found it was locked with an old-fashioned bolt that didn't respond well to kicking. Carlos emptied half a clip, and the bolt ceased to be an issue once the plastic door jamb that surrounded it was gone.

  He pushed the door open with his left hand and a round hit him in the chest like a sledgehammer, throwing him back into Otis. They both flew backwards against the wall of the corridor and bounced to the floor. Casper fumbled with his weapon again, but this time he had better control and he managed to not shoot into the whirling golden robes that suddenly filled his field of view.

  The golden cloth was everywhere at once, and Casper heard another shot and then another, and when Donnie Caine stopped moving, Casper saw him holding a woman's arms and hands extended, pointing them and her weapon at the ceiling. She fired twice more. Donnie's thumbs pressed into her arm and her hand, and the pistol tumbled from her grip and fell to the floor. The golden cloth whirled again, and when it settled, a quarter second later, the woman was sitting in a desk chair two yards away and Donnie stood next to her. He stared down at her astonished, terrified face, wearing his stupid grin again.

  “Fuck,” Carlos said, “fucking, fuckity, Fuck! I hate getting shot.” The small pistol bullet hadn't penetrated his armor, but Carlos's face was screwed up in pain and shock. “Fuck!” He tore at the straps that held his armor in place and slid his hand underneath, rubbing the area where he'd been shot. “Dammit, I hate that.” Otis rubbed the back of his head in the spot where it had impacted the wall. Somehow he looked more scared than Carlos, who was preoccupied with his pain. Carlos glared at the woman who'd shot him, and she stared back at him with the empty look of someone who'd expected to be dead, and now, finding herself alive, didn't know what to do about it.

  She was a blond woman in her thirties, and she wasn't dressed like the Peacekeepers. Casper thought she looked like a clerical worker. She even wore a skirt and heels. It was a G.S.A. uniform alright, but she was no soldier. Her office was small and windowless. Her computer screens all showed procurement orders for vegetables. “What,” Carlos asked in a thin voice, “do you do around here when you're not shooting people?”

  “I... I'm a nutritionist,” she said, as she regained some composure. “Aren't you going to kill me for... for your god or something?”

  “We will not harm you,” Caine said. Carlos glared at him.

  “Dude, way to undermine my leverage.”

  “Sorry,” Caine said, “I just... I always wanted to say that.”

  Carlos propped himself up against the wall next to Otis, sighed, looked at the nutritionist, and said, “It's obvious you're not afraid to die. How do you feel about living?”

  “What?”

  “Help us, and maybe we can get you out of here. Almost everyone else wearing a uniform is dead. We're your best chance to get out of here alive.”

  “You're not insurgents? You look like insurgents,” she said.

  “No,” Casper said, “we're...um...we're just along for the ride.”

  “So, you're not going to kill me?”

  Carlos held out his open hand, palm up, gesturing to Donnie Caine that his cue had been given. With a broad smile, Caine looked down at her and took the opportunity Carlos offered. “We will not harm you,” Caine said. He added, “Thanks, Carlos.”

  Carlos picked himself up and walked inside the tiny office. He picked the pistol up off the floor and stared at it. Carlos felt connected to it, and he said, “This is mine. I'm keeping this.” As he approached her computer the screens all began to blink a message.

  'GO TO TOP LEVEL... ROOF'

  Then the screens showed a map of the level they were on and a red line that snaked through the floorplan, showing the way to the elevators where a large red dot blinked twice per second. The screen changed to a three dimensional view of the zig, and the red line continued upwards, straight to the top.

  “Is that...” Casper began to ask.

  “The Client, yeah,” Carlos said. “Must be cameras in here.”

  “There are cameras everywhere in the Ziggurat,” the nutritionist volunteered. Carlos paused for a moment then he addressed the empty air, as he looked slightly upward, “So where are Bonnie and Alvin, I mean, the Buddha?”

  The message blinked again. 'GO TO TOP LEVEL... ROOF'

  Casper asked, “They're on the roof?”

  “I doubt it,” Carlos replied. Then he asked, “Where are Bonnie and Alvin?” The screens paused, then a new message appeared.

  'IN DIRECTOR DELVAUX'S OFFICE... GO TO TOP LEVEL... ROOF'

  Carlos asked, “Where is Director Delvaux's office?”

  The screens replied, 'BELOW THE ROOF'.

  “The Director's office,” the nutritionist volunteered again, “is on the top level of the Ziggurat, right below the roof.”

  “So you decided you want to live?” Carlos asked.

  “Delvaux's office is a fortress. You'll never get in,” the nutritionist said. “T
he blast doors are a foot thick... And yes, I want to live.”

  'GO TO TOP LEVEL... ROOF'

  'GO TO TOP LEVEL... ROOF'

  'HURRY'

  “I guess,” Carlos said, “we're going to the roof.” He looked at the uniformed G.S.A. nutritionist and asked, “What's your name?”

  “Hannah Van Rijn”

  “Hannah, you aren't dressed right... not for someone who says they want to live.”

  -63-

  As the Wasp carried Hi-5, Catherine, and Coco out over the chromium-laced sands at a dune-skimming height, the noise of the vectored jet engine's high-pitched whine spooked the packs of wild dogs below, driving them to panicked flight like herds of animals on the African plains chased by a film crew's helicopter. Coco captured them on holographic video, zooming in for dramatic closeups of their bloody, fear-filled eyes and the lolling tongues that hung out the sides of their mouths as they ran. Just like the African plains animals, it was their observers who drove them to panic and flight and made it seem, since it was the only footage presented, to be their natural state of being.

  Wraparounds are okay, but if I had goggles, Hi-5 thought, then it would be easier on the eyeliner. Hi-5's eyes were beginning to tear up in the wind. She could still see well enough to make out the twisting paths of paw-beaten sand that wended around and through the pockmarked areas of subtle depressions and starburst patterns in the dunes. Hi-5 guessed these were the marks left by explosions from the air-dropped land mines that increased in density as they approached the Ziggurat.

  A pack of bone-sack curs below them twisted too close to a suspicious convex, foot-wide rise in the sand that was obvious from the air, but well-nigh invisible to a panicked animal. Another dune dog turned into Parts. Coco filmed its death and its ghostly dust cloud wafting across the dunes.