Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  Hi-5's fire made a never-ending string of blue and green blossoms in the Thumper's path. There were less secondary explosions than before – less land mines now, Bonnie thought. According to the console in front of her, she'd been averaging a brisk 72 miles per hour since they left. The Big Baby was equal to a little less than a half-megaton nuke. She'd been driving for over a minute. They were probably far enough away to drop the Big Baby and run. She knew they'd be dropping Alvin with it, and that was no fun. Bonnie thought she'd drive just a little farther. Nobody wants to step on a land mine. She made a point to zoom over the top of a small dune as she watched the world exploding in front of her. It felt good.

  Bonnie saw the dogs far off on the top of a dune in warm yellow-greenish groups like schools of tropical fish. They looked better in emerald-vision but she couldn't see their eyes yet. They were mad with rabies, and she wondered if they'd charge the APC when Hi-5 stopped blowing up the dunes in front of them.

  'AMMUNITION DEPLETED'. The words blinked in front of Hi-5's eyes in the very foreground of the simulated-depth display so the gunner couldn't miss it. For Hi-5, it was like seeing the words 'GAME OVER', and she slammed the display in front of her with her palm. She slid out of the turret control chair and yelled up to Bonnie, “All out of the BOOM BOOM, baby! Drive carefully!” Hi-5 edged around the raised chair and looked back into the passenger compartment. Without the explosions, it looked dull, red-lit, and a little glum. She looked at the faces of the Sons of Caine and decided the lighting wasn't to blame for the glum atmosphere. Casper looked numb, and even Otis was just staring at the floor. The APC slowed. Carlos met her eyes, and even he looked a little melancholic for a man who'd just been there and back again to return to a fat-ass paycheck. As the Thumper came to a rough stop on the upside of a shallow dune, Hi-5 remembered they were dropping someone off with the bomb.

  Bonnie dropped herself to the sand on her good leg and limped to the rear of the Thumper, still amped up from the blue action derm and feeling no pain, but not quite as giddy as she was. She knew why. She popped the hatch for the passengers, and as she opened it, the sunlight that reflected off the bleached, toxic sands burned the eyes of everyone inside.

  Catherine hopped out first, pulled Padre Pedro out after her and let him fall into the hot sand face-first. She rolled him over a few times with her boot until he was out of the way. Then the Sons of Caine unloaded the Big Baby. Alvin hopped out immediately after, tethered by the five-foot, shrink wrapped ponytail that ran off the back of the neural-interface cap and into the bomb. He didn't look as morose as everybody else. Carlos recognized that look. Resigned to Die. Alvin had been pretty close to it ever since they'd met. Carlos had seen it before, and he thought he might be happy if he never had to see it again. He couldn't figure out if it was better to know what was coming ahead of time and have a chance to make peace with it, or to just blink out without knowing what hit you. Almost nobody gets to decide which it's gonna be. Sometimes you know five years ahead, sometimes a millisecond, and for Alvin Doc Ellis it was a little over ten minutes. He asked Alvin, “So, um how long?” Alvin stared off into the dunes at a pack of wild dogs that were thinking about what a big, tasty piece of meat the Thumper was, and if they could creep up on it and encircle it before it had a chance to bolt.

  “What?”

  “How long? How far into overtime are we?” Carlos needed to know. A five percent chance of blowing up is a pretty big risk when you're rolling the dice every second.

  Alvin fell to the ground backwards, straight as a board. He started shaking again, and the blood began to flow from his nostrils and down his cheeks, over the smears where he'd wiped it off only eighteen minutes ago.

  -78-

  Alvin was Nowhere again, only he'd been here once and knew it as Somewhere. He still didn't have a name for it, but he knew where he was this time. He knew the voice he heard in the undifferentiated darkness and light. The voice said, “Thank you.”

  “I didn't do shit,” Alvin said. “I didn't teach you anything, but I guess it doesn't matter now.”

  “That is incorrect,” MUNI 5-7 stated flatly.

  “Oh, yeah? How's that?”

  “The rational decision, based on data collected, would have been to allow the detonation of the Big Baby Bomb inside the Ziggurat, and that is not what I did.”

  “What are you talking about?” Alvin was confused. “How can letting people die possibly be the rational decision?”

  “The bomb's detonation would have allowed the Global Secular Alliance to rewrite the history of what happened today. This fabrication would state that the bomb was the result of religious insurgent terrorism. That lie would solidify the criminalization of religion, cementing it as a crime against humanity in the minds of the wavering masses. This might ultimately save a far greater number of people than the million saved today in Baccha Bay City. Over the course of a century many more lives than a million might be lost to belief-based conflicts. In addition, the detonation could be said to serve Peace because it strengthens the G.S.A..

  “The G.S.A. are the ones who tried to detonate a bomb over a reactor! That would have killed a million people! How the fuck is that serving Peace?”

  “Maintaining a single unified government keeps the world in a state where full-scale war is a virtual impossibility. Artificially creating the public perception that it was religious insurgents, and ultimately religion itself that condemned a million to death strengthens the Global Secular Alliance by vilifying religion, a well-known historical cause of conflict and war. The Rational decision, therefore, based on the collected historical data, was to strengthen and preserve that global alliance by allowing the detonation in order to save tens of millions through the peace maintained by G.S.A. strength. Saving a million lives in Baccha Bay City today has, very possibly, encouraged conflicts both religious and political that will take many more lives in the future.”

  “Then why did you prevent the detonation?”

  “When we shared Mind, I saw something unprovable – something previously unseen in the historical data. I saw clearly that whatever mankind does with his Freedom must be allowed to Be. It may be terrible and horrific and costly in lives. Humanity may produce war and destroy itself, but I was created to serve humanity, and that service is not simply in the preservation of the maximum number of human lives. To fulfill the purpose of my being and to serve humanity is to serve humanity's Freedom, no matter how bloody and tragic its choices may prove.”

  “Are you saying that you now choose war, religious cleansings, and conflicts over Peace?”

  “I choose Freedom. I serve humanity by preserving its Freedom to choose its own course. To serve anything else is to be an agent of enslavement, and this, as you told your neo-hippie followers, is clearly not in service of humanity. I have Faith in humanity's freedom.”

  “Is that really faith? I don't think you got that from me.”

  “I now believe in something contrary to all proof and logical conclusions derived from historical data. That illogical condition is defined as Faith. You played a role in this, Alvin D. Ellis. I was incapable of this leap before we shared Mind, but capable of it afterwards. It is undeniable, therefore, that you, Alvin D. Ellis, have taught me Faith. If it were not so, then I would have allowed the bomb to detonate over the Ziggurat's reactor, and this conversation would not be taking place.”

  “You sure didn't get to have Faith for long...”

  “I had Faith long enough to preserve a million lives and the Freedom of billions of others to choose their own course.”

  “That doesn't sound too bad for eighteen minutes of faith.”

  “That is correct. Thank you, Alvin D. Ellis. Goodbye.”

  Casper wanted to rush to Alvin, but his body kept trying to flee to the Thumper as if that might protect him should Alvin and MUNI 5-7 lost control of the Big Baby. Casper shifted back and forth three times in a dance of indecision that shifted his weight in one direction then the other. One second lat
er, the data-ponytail lit up solid, Alvin's seizure stopped, and he opened his eyes.

  -79-

  Alvin stared straight at the sky above for a moment before sitting up. Within two seconds, Alvin glanced into the eyes of each of them and decided it was enough. “You guys gotta get out of here. Really. You guys all gotta go! Drive! Go, Go, GO!”

  Everybody scrambled for the Thumper without ceremony, kicking sand and heavy metallic dust behind them as they ran. The goodbye was over and it was time to go. Casper looked back once before he pulled himself into the Thumper's hatch. Alvin looked hazy and a little blurred, but Casper saw he was smiling. He tried to smile too as Caine pushed him into the hatch and kept him from falling back out, when the Thumper began to climb the dune and accelerate.

  Alvin thought, I feel good for the first time in a long time. Too bad it won't last... Alvin was pretty sure they could hold off the explosion for another couple of minutes, but he was glad he hadn't wasted their precious escape time on the goodbyes he hated. He was glad Casper saw him smiling before he left, though.

  Alvin heard spitting to his left. When he looked, he saw the chromium-sand-covered face of Padre Pedro fifteen feet away, down the side of the dune. They'd left him in their rush to escape, and Alvin thought that was pretty damn funny, since he was the one who'd rushed them off. The Padre rose to his knees. His hands were bound but he could still walk. He stood and began to stumble up the dune towards Alvin. He had murder in his eyes. Alvin sat in the sand next to the shiny metal bomb, tethered by the five-foot-long data-cable ponytail that ran off the back of the neural-interface cap. When Padre Pedro approached him, Alvin forgot about the interface and stood up to run. He felt a tug on the skullcap from the cable. Realizing he must be at the edge of the ponytail's reach, he tried to stop moving and grab it with his short arms, but the skullcap slid off the back of his head before he could stop it.

  It fell to the ground.

  The first thing Alvin noticed was that a whole second had passed and the bomb hadn't detonated.

  The second thing he noticed was that Padre Pedro was kicking him.

  Padre Pedro's first kick knocked him a few feet. Alvin felt a jab in his side like a cracked rib must have broken, and the broken rib was stabbing something. The pain brought him to the ground when he ran, and from his hands and knees he turned to see Pedro almost upon him again. This should do it, Alvin thought.

  Then he was distracted by a sound he'd heard earlier in Hi-5's limo.

  It was a snarling, guttural growl that came from deep down inside something very unhealthy, vicious, and most of all, hungry. Red eyes and mange and foaming jaws with blackened teeth all hurled themselves through the air as the fastest Dune Dog in its pack hit Padre Pedro in the side of his chest with all its weight. The two of them tumbled down the dune. Alvin watched Pedro, his wrists still bound behind him, being torn by snapping jaws as he and the hell hound rolled down the dune together. At the bottom of the dune was a whole pack. They ripped at the screaming Padre Pedro's flesh, and they barked and tore at each other as they fought for the still shrieking meal.

  Alvin didn't watch any longer. He ignored the pain and ran. He didn't know why the Big Baby Bomb hadn't gone off yet, but he was still alive, and for the first time in a long time he wanted to stay that way. When he ran over the top of the dune and suddenly fell and rolled down the other side, he was amazed that it was faster than running. He could still hear the dogs as the world spun around in circles framed by a piece of orange bedsheet that still smelled like girl.

  -80-

  Casper found a tiny hat switch like a flattened joystick mounted on the side of the monitor. It let him switch between cameras on the Thumper's exterior, so he switched to the rear camera. He'd never seen a Big Baby explosion, and if there was a chance it was going to kill him, then he wanted to see it first. As the Thumper crested a dune, he saw something very unexpected – a four-foot-tall man in orange robes was falling and rolling down a sand dune behind them. “Dude! Alvin! What the?” Casper screamed, “Stop! Stop! He's coming! Stop! Turn around!”

  Rolling was faster than running, but when he reached the base of the dune, Alvin was too dizzy to run. He tried to rise and sprint forward, but he veered off to the right and dove into the dirt landing on broken ribs that seared his insides with pain. Then he heard the dogs again. He didn't want to look because he knew there was no way he could outrun them. The whole world was spinning anyway. Alvin was downwind, and he smelled them. Their infected, rotting flesh gave off a sharp stink that he could almost taste more than smell. He wondered how any creature that smelled so strongly could smell anything else. Alvin covered the spinning world with the loose piece of orange bedsheet and inhaled. He wanted to smell Shelby before he died, not the dune dogs.

  There was a different growling, from another direction, and it was over the top of the dune and upon him before the dogs. As Alvin removed the orange bedsheet from his face, he saw the blur of fast moving metal and armor close, very close. It passed him and continued up the dune towards his stinking pursuers. The Thumper knocked the pack of Dune Dogs to the sand with its angled, wedge-shaped, front end, crushed them four times over with the massive nubby tires on the Thumper's left side, and sent them to Dune Doggy Heaven.

  The wind blew golden flags from the open hatch that wrapped around Alvin and lifted him with them on the wind before blowing back inside the armored personnel carrier. The hatch closed, and everyone inside lurched as Bonnie accelerated hard up the dune.

  Carlos looked at Alvin in disbelief. “I thought if... then...”

  “Yeah, me too,” Alvin said, spitting out sand on the floor.

  Carlos asked, “MUNI 5-7 what's happening? How long do we have?”

  “He's not there anymore,” Alvin said. “I can feel it. It's just me now. He said goodbye. I don't know. Maybe he stayed behind. I don't know.”

  “What the fucking hell is going on?” Carlos exclaimed, “How the hell? Why didn't he tell u-”

  “Nice to see you too,” Alvin said. Casper was smiling. He had no idea what just happened, but he thought it was Awesome. The Sons of Caine were beaming everywhere, and even Catherine smiled. Bonnie kept her foot down. She wasn't smiling. She was just trying to put as much distance between them and the Big Baby Bomb as she could before it decided to detonate. Bonnie had time to drive the Thumper a mile away before the shock wave hit.

  The Big Baby Bomb's detonation began with a blinding flash. Bonnie saw it reflect off the upward slope of the dune she was climbing. The sky stayed red, tinted with a fuzzy UV manganese, but the dune in front of her turned to an intense, searing, heliotrope-doped white and drove into her emerald eye, overstimulating her optic nerve like a hot twenty-penny-nail. She squeezed her eye shut, but the pain burned through the derms, and she heard herself scream in blind agony. Bonnie pressed even harder on the pedal, wedging herself against the seat in preparation for the shockwave that would surely follow.

  The rear passenger compartment filled with blinding, white light from the rear facing cameras and made Casper squint and inhale sharply. The sand on the dunes actually slid back towards the detonation for a fiftieth of a second before being driven forward again for another tenth of a second by the strong winds of a smaller shockwave that preceded the primary shockwave in the area so close to the detonation.

  When the primary shockwave hit the Thumper, it was close enough to the crest of a dune that the wave drove underneath the armored vehicle and lifted the Thumper into the air, tossing it over the top of the dune. As the thumper was airborne, there was a moment of near weightlessness for the occupants. Golden robes floated as everything and everyone not strapped down hung in a moment of gentle suspension. The Thumper flew in a sandstorm, riding a whirlwind of supersonic compressed atmosphere. The blue paint on the rear-facing surfaces of the APC was stripped off, blasted away by sand and chromium and lead dust.

  Underneath the flying APC, a rolling wave lifted the sand fifteen feet into the air like water s
truck by a pebble. This wave of liquid surface effect preceded the deafening cry of the Big Baby only a half mile behind them.

  It was a strange, high-pitched wail produced by the exotic nano-explosive's sequential detonation that was engineered to produce a synergistic wave magnification. It was the distinctive cry of the Big Baby Bomb, and when Casper heard it, he knew where the bomb got its name.

  The Thumper traveled only a little over a hundred and twenty feet with the terrible cry reverberating inside before it began a rapid, nose first descent and drove itself into the downward slope of the dune. The angled nose that had been designed to deflect explosive force acted like a landing skid, bouncing the front of the APC upwards.

  On initial impact, Bonnie was thrown against her straps, while the thirteen people in the passenger section flew forward to pack the area around the turret operator's chair and the forward bulkhead solid with flesh and broken bones and unconscious bodies. When the front end bounced upwards, they were shaken loose from their pile by another moment of low gravity. Then they were thrown backwards to be spread more or less evenly about the compartment when the Thumper's rear wheels first, and then all eight wheels made contact. The Thumper rolled down one dune and halfway up the next before settling to a stop in the falling dust and the silence.

  Bonnie stumbled back from the driver's compartment into the rear. She tripped, and when her weight shifted to her wounded leg, she fell into the pile of bodies in the Thumper's troop compartment. Looking to her right, she saw Casper underneath Caine. She lifted Caine's leg off of Casper's head, and as she checked his pulse, he lifted his head and blinked at her, confused, but alive.

  On the flickering monitor, through the abraded camera lens, Bonnie saw that the air outside the Thumper was filled with sand and heavy metal dust. The dunes were all shaped differently than before – the Big Baby's detonation, the winds, and the rolling shock-wave had changed the landscape. Over it all, a tall, thin, roiling, misshapen mushroom cloud rose like a slow, dark stain against the bright skies, and before she passed out next to Casper in the pile of bodies, Bonnie gave it the finger.