Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition

by Matthew Howard

  The door slid open to reveal Celina wrapped in a sheet of cloth. “What in the name of sweet bleeding Christ do you—” Then she saw the horrified looks on their faces. “What’s wrong?” Behind her, Fuzzlow slipped on a pair of boxer briefs.

  “There’s something in the garden!”

  “And it’s mad as hell!” Suzi added. “Fucking came out of the ceiling and tried to kill us!”

  “What is it?” Celina looked up and down the hall. “Come in, come in.” She motioned the girls inside.

  Celina had adorned her room with tapestries on the walls and pillows for sitting on the floor. Oils dispersed their scents from a pair of oil warmers on her bookshelf. A candle in a glass jar cast a soothing glow below the dimmed electric lights. Tesla quietly napped on a padded chair. But the romantic refuge was about to be shattered.

  “I can draw it,” said Kala. She had dropped her pencil and pad of paper in the attack. “Do you have a tablet?” Her hands shook as she took a tablet and a stylus from Celina. “It was like some kind of robot,” she said, sketching on the screen. “But its face. Its face—” Kala drew quickly on the tablet.

  “You saw its face?”

  Suzi answered. “I smashed its fucking face with a shovel. And it didn’t do a damn thing to stop it!”

  “It had red eyes,” said Hyo-Sonn, “and it growled at us, and it came out of the ceiling, and there were sparks everywhere and—”

  Kala handed the tablet back to Celina.

  She stared in disbelief. “That’s its face?”

  “It had a face like Mags. Just like Mags. Only metal.”

  Fuzzlow looked over Celina’s shoulder. “What in the actual fuck?”

  “Look at that, Fuzz. Do those panels and circuit lines look familiar?”

  “Hell yes, they do. It looks just like those eels we tested. But that face…”

  “Is it still in the garden?” Celina set the tablet down and stepped up to an emergency panel by her doorway. Pushing a tapestry aside, she revealed a panel of screens displaying feeds from the club’s security cameras.

  “It was up against the door, clawing its way through the Plexiglas. Then it made these lightning bolts come out of its fingers!”

  Celina’s mouth fell open when she saw the video from the garden’s camera. The cyborg scratched madly at the door. Tendrils of electricity poured into the door frame and surrounding circuitry. Circuits tore loose from the wall. They flew through the air, attaching to the cyborg’s body. The monster assimilated the new parts, and it grew. Then the video feed went black.

  “Fuck me dead.” Celina picked up a handset from the panel on the wall. “I don’t know what that thing is, but we aren’t sticking around to find out.” She scooped up Tesla from the chair and handed him to Hyo-Sonn.

  “Mew?” Tesla asked, squirming. Hyo-Sonn held him close.

  “You girls get to emergency exit three right fucking now and do not stop for anything. Get everyone inside Mags’ private hangar and lock it down! I’ll sound the alarm. Fuzz, you stick with me.” Celina opened the door. “What are you waiting for? Go! Go! Go!”

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Sarah happily hammered her new keyboard in the room she shared with Kala. Meteor Mags had shown her a handful of chords. All week, she had practiced changing from one to the next without breaking her rhythm.

  She loved the promotional poster Mags had given her with the keyboard. Printed for the release of the Psycho 78s’ first album, it portrayed Mags viciously screaming Something to Destroy with the band backing her up. Mags gripped the microphone with one hand, snapping a bullwhip into a fierce “S” shape with the other. Silk-screened blood splattered the image and its bold text reading The Psycho 78s: HyperSonicHatred.

  Sarah’s parents had told her Meteor Mags was evil. They had told her all kinds of things were evil, even Sarah herself. She believed them for many years. But when her body began to change, Sarah prayed. Sarah prayed between the beatings and the other things she would rather not remember.

  In her prayers, she believed an angel talked to her. The angel said Sarah was made of light, the same light that powered the stars. When her family hurt her, and when they sent her to The Clinic where the hurt grew even worse, Sarah silently sang her favorite songs into the light. They made the pain go away, washed it from her mind, and made it fade to nothing. And of all her favorite singers, Meteor Mags was her most favorite of all.

  “Come on, Sarah. Sing it for us!” A few of her new friends sat on the chairs and beds in the room with her. Some of them were dancers at the club. Some of them helped staff the parties. Some of them just had nowhere else to go. But all of them loved Mags and Celina, and together they worked to make the club a home.

  “Okay, promise me you won’t laugh,” she said.

  “Sarah!”

  “Promise.”

  “Alright, we promise,” said one of the girls.

  “But what if it’s funny?” asked another.

  What would Mags say? “Fine!” Some of these young women were much older than Sarah and had been at the club far longer than the new arrivals in her group. Yet none of them had ever tried to make her feel bad about anything. “So, Mags showed me some chords, and I wanted to see if I could make a song with them.”

  Sarah picked out a D Major chord. Then she switched to an F Major, then back to D, then up to a G Major and back, all without hesitation. She sang.

  Fuckin’ bacteria

  Voices in my heard, I’m hearin’ ya

  You make me feel inferi-a

  When you colonize my exteri-a

  Get up off my planet, all you bastards

  Get up off my planet, all you—

  The laughter stopped her.

  “You promised not to laugh!”

  The laughter continued, then clapping. One of the girls spoke up. “Oh, Sarah! Don’t stop. That’s awesome!”

  “You really think so?”

  “Oh, my fucking god, Mags will love it. You have to play it for her.”

  Her frown relaxed into a smile. She laughed with them. “I thought you didn’t like it. I really don’t want to disappoint Mags.”

  “Sarah, believe me. I’ve known Mags for a while now, and the one thing your song will not do is disappoint her. Do you have a name for it?”

  “I was thinking about calling it Bastard Virus Plan—”

  Celina’s voice blared over the loudspeaker. “Emergency evacuation! Attention! Emergency evacuation! This is not a drill! Everyone to exit number three now. This is not a drill!” Klaxons rang out their shrill pulse. Red LED’s flashed on the walls of every room, and every few meters in the hallways.

  The young women looked to each other in shock, then leapt to their feet. They raced from the room, taking Sarah with them.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Next to the video screens for the security cameras, Celina’s tapestries covered the door to her gun safe. She punched in the combination. “We can’t let that thing get loose in the club.”

  Fuzzlow pulled on his shirt, pants, and boots in a flash. “Looks like it’s already loose,” he said. “If that thing came out of the ceiling, what’s to stop it from crawling wherever it wants through the ductwork? What if it fried that door?”

  “Damn it.” She handed Fuzzlow a laser rifle. “I knew those eels would be trouble.”

  “You think they’re to blame?”

  “Didn’t Mags say she got them from some genetics lab? Put two and two together, love. That bloody monstrosity is half machine, half Mags. Where else could it have come from?”

  “I’ve got an idea. Mags controlled the eels with that Faraday suit. If we can get that suit from her room, maybe we can control this—this Magbot thing!”

  “Magbot!” Celina laughed. “You have such a way with words, Fuzzy love.”

  He took a pair of holstered revolvers from the safe. “Hey, I don’t get songwriting credits for nothing.”

  “I can get us into her room. Even if your idea
doesn’t work, at least that suit will keep Magbot from frying us.”

  “Just in case, let’s take this bad boy with us.” He grabbed one more weapon from the safe.

  “Fuzz! We don’t want to shoot that bloody thing inside the club!”

  “You saw what those eels did in the trial run. I’m not taking any chances with Magbot.”

  “Word.” Celina quickly recorded a message to Mags and hit send. “We can’t wait to hear back from her. Let’s go.”

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  “What the hell? Mags told me she had all these cases locked up in her armory.” Fuzzlow stood over the black case in her room.

  “Looks like she made an exception,” said Celina. “Should we open it?”

  “Let’s suit up first. I don’t feel like riding the lightning today. That looks like Mags’ suit on the back of the chair there. It should fit you. Let me see if she’s hiding one of the spares in here.” Fuzzlow opened her closet. A pile of clothes a meter high slumped over and fell through the door. He found himself knee-deep in a pile of socks and panties. “Damn it, Magatha. Do your bloody laundry sometime!”

  Celina pulled Mags’ tailored Faraday suit over her clothes. “I think she’d rather steal new socks than wash the old ones.”

  “You say pirate, I say kleptomaniac. At least we’ve got a spare suit in this mess.” He pulled a Faraday suit from a hanger and got busy pulling it over his clothes.

  “Kiss me before we get sealed in, Fuzzy.”

  The two of them shared a deep kiss. Then they pulled the suits closed over their faces. Celina stood to the side of the black case, her laser rifle ready. Fuzzlow lifted the lid, slowly, ready to slam it shut.

  Inside, two of the three eels lay quietly in their molded housings. But one slot sat empty.

  “I guess that solves that,” said Fuzz.

  A red glow appeared in the eels’ eyes.

  “Fuck!” Celina aimed her rifle.

  He slammed the lid shut.

  “Doesn’t this thing have a lock?”

  “Got it, babe.” He set the locking mechanism. “But if it’s electric, couldn’t they fry the lock?”

  “Stand back. I don’t want those bastards getting out.” She took the butt of her rifle and smashed the lock’s keypad. Then she pulled on the lid. It refused to open. “There. Best we can do.” She picked up her tablet. A moving dot on the screen tracked the cyborg through the club’s security system. “Everyone’s out of the club except us, Fuzz. Magbot’s heading for the smaller concert room. If we get there fast, we can box her in.”

  Fuzzlow followed her into the hall. “Let’s go show this robot why you don’t fuck with the Psycho 78s.”

  Celina set the lock on Mags’ door. “Race you.”

  The two of them sprinted down the hall.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Magbot grew to full size after feasting on the metal and circuits in the garden. Now she sat on the piano bench where Meteor Mags enjoyed playing by candlelight late at night. Her fingers pounded the keys, making dissonant chunks of sound that more resembled a demolition than a song. An inhuman, guttural noise issued from her throat.

  Celina and Fuzzlow stood outside the entrance to the small concert room.

  “What the hell is it doing?” Fuzzlow whispered.

  “I’d say she’s trying to play piano.”

  “Then she’s not very good, is she?”

  “What a godawful racket.”

  Magbot grimaced. She felt something like a dim, forgotten memory, a compulsion to make this inert block of wood and wire do—what? Like metal sledgehammers full of fury, her hands beat the keyboard. Possessed by an uncontrollable urge her newly formed mind could not comprehend, she opened her mouth to do—what? Only a wild roar escaped.

  “That’s just fucking sad,” whispered Celina. “Are you ready?” She took aim.

  He raised his laser rifle to his shoulder. “Let’s take this thing down.” His finger squeezed the trigger.

  But the part of Magbot that was cybernetic eel sensed the control circuits in Celina’s suit. She felt them tug at her willpower, and she did not like it. She jumped to her feet. The bench flew back and tumbled across the stage. A barrage of laser beams assaulted her.

  Their bright bursts ricocheted off her body. The piano splintered as they smashed into it. Its wires snapped, filling the bandshell with a terrible din. The deflected beams burned smoldering holes in the stage curtains.

  The humans advanced, pouring on the lasers. “Don’t let her get away!” They pressed forward, firing round after round of searing light.

  Magbot howled. She grabbed the bench from the floor and hurled it at them. Celina ducked. Fuzzlow dropped to the ground and rolled away. Then he pulled a .44 Magnum revolver from a holster at his side. It blasted like a cannon.

  The round caught Magbot in the shoulder. The force spun her around.

  He fired again and again until the pistol was empty. The bullets smacked Magbot to the ground. “Damn,” he said, eyeing the weapon appreciatively. “Mags was right about this sucker.” He slipped it back into its holster and picked up his rifle. “Celina! She’s down!”

  Celina moved in closer to the stage. “How does this bloody suit work?”

  “I don’t know! Just think about what you want it to do.”

  She furrowed her brow in concentration. “I want it to stop.”

  “Rarrrgh,” roared Magbot. She felt the mental signals amplified by Celina’s suit. They tried to tell her what to do. They tried to calm her down. They tried to make her stop. Stop. Stop. The part of her that was eel felt itself submitting to Celina’s will.

  But the part of her that was Mags refused. “Eeeyaarrr,” she yelled. She forced herself to her feet. Her skin crackled with electricity. A seething mass of lightning took shape around her.

  Celina screamed. The mental feedback from the cyborg pierced her mind. The sharp blade of its resistance stabbed into her skull. She staggered backwards.

  “Celina!” Fuzzlow fired his rifle, but it was too late.

  Magbot leapt from the stage. Roaring, she fell on Celina, driving the woman to the ground. Her metal hands closed around Celina’s throat in a blaze of current.

  Fuzzlow’s boot bashed the side of her cybernetic head, but Magbot held on. She shook Celina like a ragdoll, trying to crush her windpipe.

  Celina tried to shout, but she only made a rasping, choking noise.

  Fuzzlow drew the other Magnum from its holster with his left hand. He fired it into the side of Magbot’s head, point blank. The force blew off a chunk of the cyborg’s metallic hair. An oily kind of blood spewed over Celina’s suit. He fired again. Magbot’s head snapped to the side. Fuzzlow kicked her in the face as hard as he could. Her grip on Celina broke, and she fell to the side.

  Fuzzlow fired a third round. “Get out of here!”

  Celina, gasping, scrambled to her feet. Nearly blinded by a migraine, she stumbled, turned, and ran for the doorway.

  Magbot bared her teeth and hissed. Fuzzlow shot another bullet into her chest. The force racked her body. Then a bolt of energy lashed out from her to engulf his revolver.

  It grew hot in his gloved hand. “Shit!” He flung it at the cyborg. The electricity exploded the powder in the remaining bullets. Fuzzlow ducked. In his crouch, his hand fell upon the chunk he had blasted off Magbot’s head. His fist closed around it and he ran.

  Dented, damaged, and bleeding, Magbot raised her arms to the sky. A scream of pure hate burst from her cybernetic lungs. The tortured sphere of electricity expanded all around her. It scorched the wooden dance floor in the concert hall. The stage curtains burst into flame. The scraps of the piano caught fire.

  Reaching the entryway where Celina stood, Fuzzlow asked, “Are you okay?”

  She merely waved her hand in the air.

  “I guess it was a good idea to bring this after all.” He swung up the AA-12 he had slung over his shoulder. “Auto-assault, baby!” Its magazine held e
ight high-explosive rounds, each with the force of a grenade. “Let’s see how eel face likes a fucking Frag-12!”

  The rounds punched through the lightning and exploded all around Magbot. Their concussive force smashed her backwards into a wall. Fuzzlow slammed a second magazine into the AA-12 and shot another eight rounds. The explosions battered her to the floor and cracked the wall. A section of it collapsed, burying her in a pile of rubble. A cloud of dust rose in the rays of light coming through the hole in the wall.

  Celina peeled back the helmet of her Faraday suit. “Bloody hell. Remember when I said we didn’t want to fire that thing in the club? I take it back.”

  As if in reply, a stone fell from the top of the pile of rubble. Then another.

  “Fuck,” said Fuzzlow. “Let’s get out of here!”

  They ran for the emergency exit.

  Moments later, a faint crackle ended the silence in the bandshell. One by one, chunks of broken concrete fell from the pile and onto the ruined floor. A cybernetic hand shoved its way through the wreckage. A hateful growl emanated from the pile of stone.

  Magbot pushed her way free. Her shiny body now blackened with soot, she staggered in the dusty beams of light. She kicked a rock out of her path.

  Then the daughter of lightning made her way out to the surface of Vesta 4.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  “Are we close enough to talk in real time yet, Donny?”

  “Close enough. Bringing up a channel right now.”

  “Celina!” Mags called into the microphone. “Celina! Are you there?” No response. “Damn it, Donny!”

  “Give her a minute,” said the sax player. “Who knows what’s breaking loose down there?”

  She fumed. Then Celina’s voice came over the speakers.

  “Mags? Can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear. What’s the situation?”

  “Everyone’s okay. We’re all in your hangar.”

  “Good,” said Mags. “We built it bloody nuke-proof. Have you got hostiles?”