Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  Casper didn't feel sick after taking Delvaux's life.

  He didn't feel anything until a three round burst from below caught him in the side and chest and lifted him off his feet. He landed hard on his back on the rooftop and stared at the sky, unable to breathe. Everyone was there now. He could see them out of the corners of his eyes, and hear the brief staccato bursts from their weapons. Casper had never been shot before, and he didn't know he was mostly unharmed from the burst of weak machine pistol fire that he'd taken. The guard that recovered from his daze and fired up at Casper had been packing a clip full of flesh-bursting hollow-points that spread flat on Casper's top notch vest and left him with only painful bruises and two cracked ribs. Otis had to tell him he wasn't dead. “Get off your lazy, stoner ass,” he said, upside down in Casper's field of view. Otis dragged him back away from the hole by his vest and dropped his bag next to Casper. He began to fish out the Hammonds.

  Nobody could see Alvin at first, but Bonnie was a wreck. Casper found a pulse, but she'd taken more than a few rounds and was bleeding everywhere. It looked like she'd been trying to pull herself across a pile of bodies. They found Alvin underneath her, shaking in a pool of foreign blood. He didn't look shot, just too freaked to do anything but shake. The Sons of Caine lifted the bodies off of him and rolled him over on his back. Bonnie and Alvin lay side by side on the floor, and while the Sons of Caine wiped blood off Alvin, Casper crouched over Bonnie and shook with helplessness and adrenaline.

  Bonnie's right eye was a mess. Casper thought the bullet had gone straight back into her brain until they'd swept the remains of breakfast off Delvaux's service table and put Bonnie on it to bandage her. Then he saw the bullet hadn't gone into the socket. It had grazed her cheekbone and cruelly torn across her eyeball to ricochet outwards off the top of her occipital ridge, taking a small chunk of bone with it. Casper knelt over Bonnie's body feeling powerless. His gun couldn't fix this. One arm looked broken. It was a good guess that most of her ribs were broken, since there were six of Delvaux's Luger bullets lodged in her vest.

  Crane Caine helped Casper tie golden cloth bandages that he tore from his robes around the hole in her arm and the two bleeders in her thigh, but Casper didn't know what to do about her eye. Hi-5 fished around in a wallet that looked like it was made for postage stamps. “She'll be happy about this derm if she comes around,” she said, as she pressed a purple, translucent, square transdermal patch on the side of Bonnie's neck that wasn't fully bloodied. Casper felt protective. He'd never been protective of anything or anyone ever before, and it threw him off balance.

  “What the fuck is that?” Casper asked Hi-5 sharply.

  “Pain killer...” she said. Hi-5 grinned and added, “It's the good stuff.”

  Casper checked Bonnie's pulse again. It was still there, and he checked it once more to make sure he hadn't screwed it up somehow. It was still there. He looked to his left and saw the Sons of Caine lifting Alvin to his feet. When they released him to see if he fell, he didn't. His short legs held him, and after a moment of shaking in place he toddled towards Bonnie. Only Alvin's head and shoulders rose above the table. His head was level with Bonnie's. He stared at the ruined eye. It was oozing a mix of blood and a fluid that he'd never seen before. Alvin looked up at Casper and said, “Pack it.”

  “What?” Casper didn't understand.

  “We gotta pack it with bandages,” Alvin explained, “and pump her full of anti-biotics... a painkiller wouldn't hurt.”

  MUNI 5-7 filled the room with its voice.

  “Twenty-four minutes, thirty-six seconds,” the AI said in calm monotone, “until Big Baby detonation.”

  “Fuck That!” Otis barked. “What the fuck is it talking about?”

  “A Big Baby device has been armed and time to detonation is now twenty-four minutes, thirty-one seconds,” MUNI 5-7 explained, adding, “There is still time to complete the Job for which you were hired and reach minimal safe distance afterwards.”

  “Fuckin' Fuckity Mc Fuck-all,” Otis exclaimed. Then he asked Carlos, “Is he fucking serious?”

  “Our client,” Carlos answered, “has no sense of humor.”

  “Yes, I am serious,” MUNI 5-7 confirmed. “Please bring the Buddha to the DjiniSys Core in the sanctum immediately. Failure to comply is not advised.”

  “What the shit does that mean?” Otis asked, “Is it gonna think us to death or something?”

  “Something like that,” Carlos said flatly.

  “Accounts used for payment will be cleared of all funds unless you comply. Twenty-four minutes, twelve seconds until detonation.” MUNI 5-7 requested that Team Buddha, “Please comply.”

  -71-

  Delvaux came with them in the elevator. They needed the chips under his skin and the blood vessels under his face. It was easier to take the whole Delvaux with them than just the parts they needed, but he was heavier than he looked. Otis held him up in front of the elevator's stand-alone, biometric authorization system with his arms locked and clasped over Delvaux's chest. While he contracted the chest in his best imitation of a heartbeat, Catherine gripped hair and held the lolling head up for the biometric scanners.

  Voice was one biometric element the system didn't authenticate, and since the threat of vaporization had raised the general level of tension, Otis couldn't resist adding a voice to the Director's body. “I am Oskaaar Delvaux, take me down to zee Sanctum... quicklee befurr zee Goddiesss git heere!” The elevator chimed. None of them knew what it meant exactly, but it sounded affirmative enough so Carlos risked pushing the button at the very bottom of the seemingly endless line of buttons, and they felt a fractional and fleeting reduction in their perceived weight as the elevator started to drop and accelerated on its magnetic rails.

  Casper had managed a chuckle at Otis' macabre puppet show, but when he looked down at Bonnie on the rolling service table his mirth disappeared again. The blood was soaking through the folded strip of golden cloth that he'd tried to bandage her eye with. It was truly awful to look at and the bandage would come off if she moved her head too much since he'd been afraid to tie it tightly. Well, shit, he thought, she's already got an eye patch, and she'll really freak if she wakes up blind. Casper reached down, lifted her eye patch, and moved it over the bandage he'd used to lightly dress the ruined right eye.

  The emerald eye's lid opened and flitted around in its socket with a panic that was plainly evident even in the deep green crystal that had replaced her ruined left eye. “Whoa!” Casper exclaimed. He hadn't expected that, and he jumped back into Caine who somehow set him back exactly where he'd jumped from.

  Shit, I thought I was dead, Bonnie thought. Oh, well. The room was a cool red and there were people in it... people she knew. They looked excited. She could see it in the blood rushing in green veins under their yellow-orange skin. Casper had a particularly blue-green set of veins in the center of his face. Bonnie thought, Oh, Casper, were you crying? That's so cute. Did I just even think that? “Fucking A',” she said out loud. “What the hell did you guys dope me up with?” She tried to move, and it didn't hurt, but limbs weren't going where they were supposed to so she thought she'd just try again later. Suddenly she realized she was using the emerald eye and it didn't hurt. That's new. Can't say I mind. “No, really, guys what did you...” Bonnie saw Hi-5 on the other side of her, and she still didn't know what they'd doped her up with, but she had a pretty good idea where it came from. “You. You know. I know you know,” she said to Hi-5. She thought she was pointing at Hi-5, too, but when she lifted her head to look, her arm was just sitting there on the wood table. She giggled. Goddamn, that sounds stupid. Was that me? She'd never seen Hi-5 with the multi-spectral emerald eye, and when her head rolled all the way to the left, her line of sight was level with her Hi-ness's codpiece, and Bonnie was impressed. “Wow, baby, you got a license for that thing?”

  Casper glared at Hi-5 and asked, “What the hell did you hit her with?”

  Hi-5 just shrugged and said, “I
told you she'd be happy about it.”

  “How long is she gonna be like this?”

  “That shit loves you Longtime, baby. Maybe five, six hours, maybe more. She's kinda peaking now.” Hi-5 fished in her tiny transdermal wallet and came up with two more purple and an electric blue one. You know what the purple ones do. The blue is... some pure Action shit, lift a car kinda shit. It comes straight outta a pituitary gland... a human one, none of that pig crap. You'll know when she needs it.”

  “You guys are so sweet...” Bonnie imagined her arms rising and rubbing Hi-5 and Casper both affectionately on their chests. Her arms lifted six inches and fell back to the table while she grinned at them.

  “How long,” Carlos asked Crane Caine, “and don't give me any of that 'How long is a piece of string?' crap.”

  “Twenty-two minutes and five seconds.” Crane Caine smiled. He liked counting down. Carlos wondered if he'd been into Hi-5's derm collection, and if maybe he should bum one just in case MUNI 5-7 was wrong and they didn't have enough time. He had no idea how long whatever MUNI 5-7 and Alvin were going to do together was going to take, and MUNI 5-7 had limited its responses as they left to, “Please comply” and “Compliance is Advised.”

  Bonnie noticed Otis holding Delvaux. His skin was deep maroon and the veins in his body were faint, only a slightly more reddish-yellow tone. That, she thought is one dead Director. She saw herself waving but her arm just flopped around. “Hell-oooo Mr dead Director, Monsieur Dead-Guy.”

  Alvin was standing, gently supported by two Sons of Caine, and Carlos squatted down and said, “So, Alvin.” Carlos spoke in a level just loud enough to be heard around the elevator and just soft enough so everybody knew it wasn't really their B-I-D-N-E-S-S. “What happened? I mean how'd you two end up in Delvaux's office?” Carlos was pretty sure he knew what happened, but he wanted everyone to hear it from the Buddha's mouth. Alvin was silent long enough for Carlos to know there was more to the story than he was going to let on. When he explained, Alvin spoke loud enough to be sure everyone in the elevator heard him.

  He said, “Those auto-descenders were screwy... Bonnie fell real fast and hit Caine and Caine too, I guess. She grabbed me, took me back up, and we got nabbed by Monsieur Dead-Guy. Bummer trip, but the bottom line is that she saved my ass and took a lotta bullets meant for me. It sounds weird, but if it hadn't gone that way, I mean, if we hadn't ended up in Delvaux's office like we did, then I'd doubt her sense of loyalty. As it stands, I trust Bonnie Levi-Mei with my life. 'Nuff said.” Carlos didn't ask any more questions. That was good enough for him.

  -72-

  When the doors parted, they were in a huge spherical chamber lined with the glowing vines. The pulsing, light-filled rice noodles that had lined the walls of the Central Shaft all led here and covered the inner surface of the gigantic chamber, curving downwards until each left the spherical inner walls of the room and connected in a long, luminous path to a fifty-foot-wide, shining ball in the very center. The ball was at the center of a web of light, casting hypnotic, ever-scintillating rays. It was the Sanctum, and it contained within its shining walls the DjiniSys artificial intelligence MUNI 5-7.

  A narrow path led from the elevator to the double doors awkwardly cut into the Sanctum's sphere. They were a concession to the physical needs of the humans that had not entered in the seven years since MUNI 5-7 had become operational and self-aware. The walkway to the doors was lined with blocky consoles and computers that didn't seem to fit the rest of the room. There were wires and bulky cables everywhere connecting the clunky consoles and cabinets on the walkway to the sphere's surface. All of this hardware had been hastily imported and installed in the last day to read the pulses along the glowing web of data lines coming in and out the Sanctum and MUNI 5-7.

  Hiding among the hardware were six panicky G.S.A. techs who had been monitoring the progress of the efforts to disengage the Ziggurat's AI from the fusion reactor's systems. They weren't trained soldiers. They were scared men in blue jumpsuits, armed with pistols, who knew they were some of the last G.S.A. personnel left alive in the Ziggurat. None of them had ever seen an insurgent, but when the elevator doors opened they decided that Team Buddha looked very much like Goddie insurgents who had come to kill them and they raised their pistols to fire.

  The blue jumpsuits with the pistols were only scant yards away, and Casper had done his best to move out of their sight, just like he had in the elevator on the roof, but he couldn't roll the table with Bonnie on it out of their line of fire. She was waving to them, shouting, “Hi, geekers!” That didn't help.

  Golden cloth was everywhere at once.

  The Sons of Caine sprung out like whirling, fluttering golden flags, suddenly released from their poles in a strong wind. Casper heard shots, and one of the flags dropped to the floor as if the wind had died for that flag. Catherine and Carlos had sub-machine guns leveled and ready to fire, but there was no clear shot for them. Caine was blocking their shots; this fight belonged to Caine.

  Casper caught glimpses of the blue jumpsuit-wearing techs through the fluttering flags and heard two more shots. Catherine was knocked backwards by a tiny pistol bullet that tore through whirling cloth three times and impacted high on her vest. She coughed and swore. The golden cloth was wrapping around the blue jumpsuits, and Casper saw it whip one of them up into the air, to descend to the floor and land on his head. The wind blew a gold flag on top of him, and Casper heard bone cracking. Another blue jumpsuit doubled over where a golden flag blew by and brushed his stomach, and the wind sent another flag blowing up into his face. A scant moment later the wind blew the man up into the air. He was tangled in another piece of gold that wrapped around him and brought him crashing to the ground to lie still. There were no more gunshots outside the sanctum, just the sound of whipping, snapping robes and audible impacts of bone on flesh. The wind settled, and seven Sons of Caine stood over six unmoving blue jumpsuits, unconscious and twisted on the floor.

  One golden robe did not stand, and Casper saw it was Crane Caine. His robe was turning deep purple red with arterial blood that spread in an alarmingly quick-blossoming stain. Donnie Caine rushed to him in a movement that was neither graceful or practiced. He was weighed down with grave worry and heavy-hearted sorrow. He pressed the wound in the side of Crane Caine's neck with his own robe in futility. The blood, once it had begun to flow, would not stop, and Crane Caine's skin turned ashen even before the Sons of Caine could kneel to look into the eyes of their brother.

  Donnie filled the void for his friend.

  “That rocked.

  And it rocks now,

  Shall always be so.”

  Smiling Crane Caine spoke before he died:

  “I was Crane.

  Staring at snake eyes,

  Ooops, crapped.”

  Casper cried and so did Alvin. Bonnie smiled for Crane Caine and waved goodbye as her emerald eye watched the colors of Crane Caine changing.

  The doors to the Sanctum slid silently open behind the seven Sons of Caine. They rose, turned slowly from the empty vessel that was Crane, and entered.

  The elevator emptied slowly, and they walked around Caine's body, but they stepped over the blue jump-suited techs. Casper saw their chests rising and falling. They were broken and battered, to be sure, but Casper noted that each and every one of them was still alive. He wondered for how long. A voice in his head asked, 'How long is a piece of string?' Without Crane's happy countdown, Casper guessed it was about twenty minutes. He'd forgotten to look for the data-pad with the countdown on it – Dead Jack Haan's data-pad, dead Crane Caine's data-pad. Casper suddenly didn't want to be its next owner, and was glad he'd forgotten to look for it on the walkway.

  Inside the crinkled foil globe, was another globe, sitting on a pedestal that rose from the floor and tapered in the middle. It met the golden ball about a foot up its curve and held it securely. It was beautiful, perfect, and at the center of everything around them, at the center of everything that had happen
ed. All Casper could think of was pushing it off and watching it bounce and roll. Bonnie didn't like it much either. “Somebody,” she demanded, “give me a gun. I'm gonna put a bullet in that little sun... of a bitch.”

  “Nineteen minutes and forty-seven seconds remain until detonation,” MUNI 5-7 informed them, from a single crude speaker in the pedestal.

  “He's making it up,” Bonnie said, “there's no Big Baby Bomb in the Zig.”

  “Case Thunderbird provision seven alpha calls for the covert installation of a one half-megaton Big Baby device above the underground nuclear reactor. Protocol twelve alpha calls for detonation of said device in the event of a G.S.A. Ziggurat falling into enemy hands. Provision nine charlie, section 1, specifically states that, “if need arises, the device must be armed and triggered without notification of any residual, on-site G.S.A. personnel.” The purpose of these provisions is, “to ensure ambiguity of actual occurrences that may have led to the defeat of G.S.A. forces and occupation of a G.S.A. Ziggurat installation, allowing the opportunity for plausible revision of said occurrences in the public record without the existence of conflicting accounts that might discredit or detract from the apparent verity of the official G.S.A. record of events.”

  “Well, shit,” Bonnie sighed, “that sounds like G.S.A., alright.”

  Alvin stood in front of the golden ball, staring at his own funhouse reflection on its polished surface. “Well, I'm, uh... I'm here,” he said, “I'm the Buddha so, uh... Hello?” Then he turned his head and asked Carlos, “What the fuck am I supposed to do? Give it a hug? Wha-”