Yes. It had all started at a concert, and it would again.
The Scumbags concert was about to start, and the musicians were either tuning their instruments or practising a song. It was hard to tell. The band was composed of phallus-shaped electric guitars and a drumbeat that shook the marrow out of your bones, all covered by so much distortion that trying to decipher any actual lyrics was a futile exercise. The mosh pit in front of the stage was roughly the size of Fiji, and it was hard to believe that the crowd was mostly made up of people who were technically classed as human.
“Scumbags,” Tuesday said slowly, recognising a multitude of logos identical to the one that starred in his Dad's whole-back tattoo. “I know about these guys. Dad never shut up about them.”
It took a few seconds, but Jeeves eventually responded.
“Mister Fell used to own this band,” Jeeves growled. “Some suit bet above his reach one time, and all of a sudden Mister Fell is managing a bunch of musicians. Had them all shot, if I remember correctly.”
Groupies were engaged in lewd acts in every direction, others were fighting with rocks and beer cans, and even more were dancing to the tune-up, or at least having severe full-body seizures brought on by a Shatter overdose. The sun was only minutes away from setting into the distant sand dunes.
Over a few hills, alarm lights flickered at an illegal military genetic engineering laboratory as a large and hairy experiment broke loose...
“I was conceived here,” Tuesday said in horrified recognition. “Right by the speaker stack! My Mum and my Dad met, and then they had sex in front of everyone. People were throwing beer cans at them, but my Dad was quick enough to...”
“Are you implying we've travelled through time?” Jeeves sneered.
Tuesday shrugged.
“It's possible. Far as I can tell, we both fell out of the Universe after I...”
“After you shot Mister Fell,” Jeeves snapped.
Tuesday chose his next words carefully. Getting killed by Jeeves once today had been quite enough.
“Ah. It was a heat-of-the-moment sorta thing, you see. Sorry about that.”
Jeeves looked about. “Whatever. Look, Tuesday, we could be at any Scumbags gig in the galaxy. There have been plenty of incarnations of this band, and from what I remember, they all sucked as much as this one. What makes you think that we've gone back in time?”
Jim Tuesday picked that very moment to appear. Pushing past his own son without a hint of recognition or so much as a pause, Jim continued for the front of the fifty-metre-tall stage. Jim deftly avoided a crowd surfer who made the unwise choice of jumping all the way from the top of the looming platform. Medics pointlessly tried to revive the patch of red human-flavoured jelly.
“Was that...” Jeeves managed.
Reality clicked for Jeeves. Common sense disappeared from Jeeves' brain so that his grey matter had more space to compute all the ways he could profit from going back twenty years. Like any worthwhile time-traveller, Jeeves realised that his knowledge of the future could assist him in making some serious cash...and perhaps some serious power, too. For instance, he knew that an alien species of intelligent asparagus was due to begin its conquest of most of the solar system in a fortnight, and telling the right people could change the course of history. Imagine the rewards he could gain from an entire grateful planet! If this was a cartoon, Jeeves’ eyes would have rolled like poker machine reels and his pupils would have turned into dollar signs.
Tuesday had no such epiphanies, as he was busy watching his Dad make moves on a beautiful woman dressed in, well, very little, actually. Laughing hysterically in his face in return, the woman poured a beer cup half-filled with soggy cigarette butts over Jim’s head and walked away. Equal parts toothless and dateless, Jim Tuesday walked further into the crowd as he looked for some more action. His son went to follow him.
“All right, great, you go have fun, slugger, but look, I'm just going to go and hang out with my Dad for a while, and wait for my Mum to arrive.”
Jeeves gripped Tuesday's arm painfully tight and raised a finger. It went without saying that interfering with the past in such a major way could result in a cataclysmic event occurring, such as Tuesday never being conceived or, worse, that MacDeaths might not bring back those strange deep-fried apple pies. Jeeves shook his head.
“I realise that this is an unfair thing to ask of you, Tuesday, but...think, damn you.”
Tuesday stopped. His expression was blank.
“Guh?”
Jeeves closed his eyes and rubbed his brow in pain.
“Tuesday, every single movie that's ever involved time travel contains a scene where the time traveller accidentally kills their own Dad before they're born, or they sleep with their own Mum and become their own Dad, or they step on a single butterfly and jeopardise the safety of the entire Universe. To make my point even sharper, I must point out that you are a lot more stupid than any of them. Get my point?”
Tuesday caught all of Jeeves' words except for the insult at the end, as a gorilla-like monster was barging her way through the crowd just a few metres away. Ruska, his long-dead Mum, picked up one guy by his sideburns and threw him into a speaker in an explosion of sparks and screams. Tuesday felt hot tears skittering down his cheeks as he watched his Mum in action.
And then Tuesday had a thought. His dormant brain cells, which were rusty from lack of use, flared in a rare moment of insight to provide a solution to the whole “End of the Universe” situation. He turned back to Jeeves and hopped up and down like a toddler needing to go potty.
He actually had an idea. Tuesday had always wondered what it felt like.
“I know how to fix everything!” Tuesday blurted to the thug. “Hurry!”
It took some time, but Tuesday eventually convinced Jeeves to follow him along a series of floating signs that indicated the concert's main exit. Running for the taxi rank with a confused Jeeves in tow, Tuesday mumbled along the yellow line until he came across a familiar sight: it was a human-like robotic driver with a name tag that stated DRIVER 100101. Its beige plastic face was arranged in a bored way behind a protective barrier. That barrier was destined to offer absolutely no protection against Ruska’s simian rage roughly fifteen minutes from now. The robotic driver raised an eyebrow in a wordless question.
“What are we doing?” Jeeves demanded.
“Fixing stuff,” Tuesday snapped.
“Stuff? What stuff?”
“Just keep up.”
Quite a few robotic drivers looked out of their windows at the sound of Tuesday's voice. Far as he could tell, they were all identical. Most of them hastily wound up their windows at the sight of Jeeves.
Tuesday suddenly ducked out of sight, which only served to make him look even more suspicious, and motioned at a nearby van. It wouldn’t look out of place in a Scooby-Doo cartoon.
“Help me steal it.” Tuesday ordered.
“A half-eaten beef kebab would be worth more than that junker,” Jeeves huffed at the ridiculously archaic vehicle. “I don’t get my tools out for anything less than a Beamer. And there are dozens of taxis just there…”
“No! No taxis! That'll only make things worse. If that's possible. I think,” Tuesday paused in thought for a second. “Right, we need to break into that van, hotwire it, and wait for that taxi over there to leave.”
Jeeves turned. “Which one?”
“The one with one-zero-zero-one-zero-one on the side. See?”
“Sure.”
“Aren't you going to ask me why?” Tuesday wondered.
Jeeves shrugged. “You obviously don't want to tell me, which must be for some good reason. And I tend not to ask too many questions. Mister Fell gets annoyed with questions.”
Tuesday slinked for the van and slid out of sight again when a face appeared in a side window. Tuesday cursed at his bloody, freshly-skinned knees. Jeeves, though, simply put on an innocent expression. It must be noted that he was very, very good at looking innocen
t. Jeeves could be standing in a bank with a loaded shotgun and holding a bag with a dollar sign on it, and the police would walk straight past him. He was that good.
The van’s inhabitants got out with quite a lot of effort. As they were stoned beyond words and the sliding door always stuck until it was pounded on precisely twelve times, this took a while. They finally emerged in a huge black cloud and staggered towards the pumping concert. Slipping past the groupies, who were so high that they would have missed a piano-playing green elephant swing-dancing atop a falling nuclear bomb (which one of them actually could see after indulging a little too much), Tuesday and Jeeves hopped inside the wreck.
Looking at each other, they both had the same thought.
“Who's doing the hot-wiring?” Tuesday asked casually.
“You ever hot-wired before?” Jeeves asked.
Tuesday nodded proudly.
“It work?” Jeeves clarified.
Tuesday deflated a little. “Well, no. But my mate found the keys.”
“Like this one?” Jeeves asked, pointing at a notched line that was already jammed in the ignition switch.
Jeeves looked out of the bug splattered windshield and coughed as some lingering black smoke worked its way into his lungs.
“Crack a window, Tuesday. This stuff is thick as your Dad’s head. Looks like the owners aren't coming back any time soon, though.”
Jeeves nodded at the curb on the other side of the road. The groupies hadn't even made it through the entrance to the Scumbags concert before they passed out on the sand. While they were looking at the motionless forms, the familiar gorilla-like shape of Tuesday's Mum came knuckling past the groupies.
Tuesday smacked Jeeves on the shoulder.
“Hey, start the van! There they are!”
Jeeves sighed, watching Ruska carry Jim Tuesday into the taxi they’d scouted out just minutes ago. Jeeves looked at Tuesday almost pleadingly.
“Please tell me we're not following them. I have no interest in knowing what happens next.”
“Drive, drive!”
“Yes, sir,” Jeeves replied instantly, cursing at his instinctual urge to obey orders. Having a name like “Jeeves” meant that obedience had been seared onto his soul at a cellular level. Jeeves glared at Tuesday and tried to start the van.
It turned over. Nothing happened.
“Hurry up!” Tuesday snapped.
Jeeves tried again. The engine refused to do anything more than chuff. Meanwhile, the taxi containing Jim Tuesday and the soon-to-be Mrs Jim Tuesday began to pull away, and the speed that those things could reach had to be seen to be believed. In a matter of seconds it would be too far away to see, as the average modern taxi was safely capable of a velocity in excess of five hundred kilometres an hour on a straight stretch, while the van looked as though it couldn’t out-race a three-legged sloth.
Jeeves pumped the accelerator as the taxi skidded off. Gunning the engine until it finally caught and roared, Jeeves calmly switched into gear and hit the juice. Gradually speeding up, they followed the robot-driven vehicle down the open stretch.
“We're losing them!” Tuesday wailed. “If we lose them we're stuck here!”
“What have they got to do with anything?” Jeeves growled.
“They're our ticket out of here! I know that this can work, but you have to trust me. Do you trust me?”
Jeeves laughed. “You? I wouldn't trust you with a wooden dollar, Tuesday. Don't patronise me.”
Tuesday curled up into a ball of misery on the passenger seat. He sobbed.
“We need to catch them!” Tuesday wailed.
Jeeves ground his capped teeth together. In an attempt to get more speed out of this crate, the hired thug hit ninth gear and stalled. The van died and began to drift slowly to a halt.
“What are you doing?” Tuesday complained, watching the yellow and black dot disappear on the horizon. “You're meant to be a professional driver!”
“Hey, I am, first and foremost, a thug and a bodyguard, who occasionally does a spot of driving, yes,” Jeeves snapped. “That does not mean that I can stop an aging hunk of late-21st Century crap from dying on me. Push me, Tuesday, and I will unleash, understand?”
“Do you want out of here?” Tuesday demanded as the van coasted to down to zero.
Jeeves looked in the rear vision mirror in a surly way. These particular years of his life had been spent as a total lackey with no power or respect. It had taken a long time for him to build a life for himself and Jeeves didn’t want to throw it all away just yet.
“Yes.”
“Then drive!”
Jeeves turned on the van and revved the engine, only for it to die again. Tuesday started hitting his forehead on the dashboard. There was no other traffic out here in the desert, as Old Vegas was a further ten minute stretch into the middle of nowhere.
They were doomed to relive the days of the past forever. There was nothing they could do if Tuesday couldn’t pull this off, and Jeeves slowly realised that he couldn’t remember a single Lotto combination or specific horse race that had come through, as he didn’t gamble. Besides wrestling, which he watched religiously, Jeeves hated sports of all kinds. Stupid things they were, all for something that didn’t even exist: points. Now, a bank robbery, that was a real sport. The shotguns, the scared cashiers...
“What are we going to do?” Tuesday sobbed.
Jeeves shrugged. “Rob a bank?”
“Maybe later,” Tuesday kept on banging his head for a while. He stopped, glancing at the rear vision mirror, then stood up and turned around. With the top of his head brushing the metal ceiling, he grinned broadly and pointed into the rear cargo area. “Know how to use these?”
Thirty seconds later they were both riding rocket bikes.
As the name insinuated, a Harley-Kawasaki rocket bike is covered in flaming jets and self-adjusting wings, and they were designed to be more aerodynamic than a peregrine falcon. These ones were still misty from a recent cloud flight, but other than that they were heavily waxed and in amazing condition. Decorated by silver skulls and golden swords over glossy black paint, the words Life & Death had been applied with decals.
Tuesday crowed as he reached the local speed limit. Then he went beyond it. Then he passed a radar gun so quickly that it didn’t even register him. Then he passed the taxi. Then he realised his mistake and chucked a U-turn.
Tuesday effortlessly caught up with Jeeves, who was flying just fast enough to keep up with the taxi at a careful distance. The taxi was far off from their position - at least a kilometre or two - but it was open road until the Old Vegas stretch and the quickie Star Wars-themed Jedi Temple wedding centre where his parents would soon get married.
Tuesday wisely put on his helmet, even though it wouldn't do much to prevent him becoming a thin stain on the pavement at these speeds. Taking hold of the handlebars again, Tuesday threw a huge wheelie, accidentally flipped over in the process, and gave Jeeves a shaky grin as he righted the rocket bike. It was a miracle he hadn’t just died.
“Amateur,” Jeeves muttered.
The huge man turned in a tight circle, kicked off a passing cactus, did a full loop-the-loop, tipped over sideways into a smooth barrel roll, and righted his rocket bike with zero effort.
“That's how it's done,” Jeeves mumbled over the Link that wirelessly connected the two helmets.
Tuesday was silent for a minute.
“How...”
“My first owner was a Life & Death chapter captain. I was sold to him at the age of twelve, and I served as his bodyguard until the entire club went bankrupt and he had to cancel my contract. You know, I actually used to own a couple of bikes that looked just like these ones until they got stol...” Jeeves gaped for a second, putting five and five together, and he shouted his next words. “Hey, wait a sec, these are my bikes! Damn it! Do you have any idea of the terrible things I did trying to find the thieves?”
“You cried until they changed your nappy and gave you a
wolly pop?”
“Suck a toad, Tuesday.” Jeeves looked over his shoulder. “You know, those junkies better have regained consciousness and cleared out, or I'm going to give them a very, very rude awakening...”
They entered the neon-painted grime of Old Vegas from far, far above, and watched the yellow-and-black cab as it skidded to a halt far ahead. As it was going the better part of the speed of sound on the outskirts of the Old Vegas strip, it took a hundred metres and some badly skinned tires to stop. If his driving was any example, that robotic driver was already a nut-case.
Scum of the Universe Page 33
