Cyberpunk Trashcan

by Randall P. Fitzgerald

  “Hahaha! You think you can just have tits around here, stupid… stupid uh… bitch? Yeah, these titties are mine for the grabbin’!”

  Probably not my best work, but I figured I might as well play along.

  “Hey motherfucker! What do you think you’re doing?”

  I heard the loud thump of boots against the floor and immediately turned to put my hands up.

  “I don’t know what came over me I—”

  I got a fucking shoulder to the stomach is what I got. At the very least my nugget didn’t bounce off the polished concrete that the rest of me landed on. Now, I’m not an interior decorator or whatever, and I get that carpet isn’t really “in” as such, but is polished concrete really the best we can do? Sure, I appear to be a rapist in the middle of raping in the middle of a police station, something this officer didn’t seem to have an issue with the logic behind, but I could at least hope to land on a fucking padded welcome mat or something, right?

  My assbone hit the ground first. That was a delight. A true delight. I don’t know how much damage assbones were meant to take, but probably not the amount I was working toward. Metal, concrete. Everything but something soft. The cop landed on top of me and he started wriggling around like he’d never tackled anyone before. I almost wanted to help him but he kept grabbing at my arms and moving his torso around and being fucking weird about it.

  “Backup! Backup!”

  What the fuck does he need backup for? I’m just laying here. I mean, my assbone hurts like hell, so maybe there was some wiggling involved on my part, but my arms were completely limp, he was just laying on them like an idiot.

  One of the female cops rushed up to Marine who was honest-to-god crying. Tears and the whole fucking nine. She threw a coat around her and rushed her off and another pair of cops came up and started screaming at my head. These were the real WorldGov kind, so they could get away with kicking me and I just laid there. I mean, I didn’t know what the right way to avoid police brutality was, so I figured my best bet was just pretend to be a piece of lumber. As it turns out, that’s wrong. I was kicked. Mostly in the arms they seemed to want me to give them and occasionally in the stomach. This had the fantastic side-effect of reminding me that my stomach was a gigantic blob of pain waiting to happen. Whatever Doc had given me earlier had worked really well for just about everything I’d done so far. Sitting. Standing. All the classics. Getting kicked with a giant cop boot was apparently beyond the writ of the medicine. I made noises. Shameful, girly noises. The screaming seemed to clue them in that the resistance they were perceiving was probably giving me more credit than I deserved. This revelation making us all, collectively, ashamed of ourselves earned me the privilege of being dragged to a room labeled “Interview 5” where I was handcuffed to a chair.

  I sat there for the better part of an hour, I think. Maybe it was fifteen minutes. Somewhere in there. A lady detective came in and sat down across from me. She didn’t say anything for a few minutes, just stared at me and then up at the clock on the wall behind me that I couldn’t see. Maybe she was waiting for me to start.

  “Hi.”

  Nope. She wasn’t waiting for me to start. In fact, that seemed to annoy her somehow. Seemed like an innocuous start to me. Maybe she was having her fruity time. I still like it. Maybe calling it an “occasional” for more professional settings like this. Keeps the meaning of period but without the visual. It doesn’t have to be a home run on the first try, I think it’s just important—

  “You’re a real sick pup, huh?”

  That saying makes no sense in context. People tend to want to help baby dogs with diseases, not kick them in and about the midsection. She didn’t seem like the sort of person who wanted to talk about that.

  “I mean… I don’t feel like a pup.”

  “So you feel sick then?”

  “No. I do feel like I got kicked a bunch.” I didn’t have a strong measurement on how many of a thing constituted a bunch, so I may have overstated that, legally speaking.

  “Well, my boys say you resisted arrest.”

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “How to—”

  I think she was starting to understand that I was fucking with her. She curled her lips, showing me an unimpressed face that left me feeling unimpressed with all the cop woman fantasies I’d ever had.

  “Listen you demented shit, we’ve got you on sexual assault, attempted rape, and possession of an illegal implant.”

  “Okay.”

  “O…” She stood up. “Are you hearing this, you little prick? We’re going to send you to jail. Forever.”

  “Jeez.” I made a face like “yeesh.” You know? The one where you show your teeth and make comedy eyes like “boy howdy, that sure sounds bad.” I did that face. “I mean… if you have to.”

  She slammed a hand down on the table, clearly having had enough of my shit. She looked past me at the mirrored wall where they were watching us have our chat.

  “Get him out of my face. I’m done.”

  She plopped back down into the chair, looking really stressed out.

  “Hey.” She looked up at me, likely against her better judgment. “If it’s any consolation, I think you did a really good job. I was really scared and stuff.”

  She jumped, not quite landing on the table, and swiped at my face. She was nowhere close. I frowned at her. The door opened and a pair of uniformed cops uncuffed me from the chair, taking me back out into the halls of the police station. Curiously, we skipped past the processing area. It seemed like there were a lot of people waiting around in the hall outside, all of them dressed in leather vests. Not sure who decided that was a scary piece of clothing to wear, but they were wrong. I guess there’s something about a lack of sleeves that really screams “I don’t even care if my arms get super cold” but that’s about it.

  I was taken to a cell. Not general holding. That made me slightly concerned. This seemed more like a short-term county lockup thing, maybe.

  “Hey, guys. This, uh… this ain’t general holding.”

  “Yeah, it ain’t. You’re a sharp one.” The first cop was fairly rude. There was a long pause and then the second one spoke up.

  “Sex offenders don’t go in general holding. Wouldn’t be safe.”

  I’m guessing they shared a knowing stare and maybe a quick thought of the secret love they harbored for one another because they started laughing together. The cell door opened and I was shoved inside with a guy who maybe wasn’t so bad. He was facing away from me, but he seemed to basically have his stuff together. Clean jeans, a cleanish looking t-shirt… shoes. Shoes was good.

  The door was called shut and it rolled closed, operated by some remote person. Jericho was probably kicking himself for not having that sort of deal installed. The cell itself had a bunk bed and a toilet and a sink. My understanding of crime shows told me that this was basically the standard. There were screens embedded in the walls beside the bunks which were both set to the same station. Whatever Marine had put me in this box for, it might not be so bad.

  I was unsure whether it made sense for me to try to get to know my new roommate or not. Surely he’d heard me being deposited in the cell with him, but he hadn’t bothered to turn around. That, I was slowly starting to feel, was not a positive thing. Maybe he was just really enjoying the look of the barred window he was staring at. That was fine. Outside seemed like a sane place to want to be when you were in jail. Fuck it, might as well.

  “So, uh… you birdwatching or just… starin’?”

  Nothing. Okay. That was another red flag. Two red flags wasn’t so bad. There was still plenty of room on the flag pole for extra colors. Some green ones maybe even. Still, he hadn’t really left me with anywhere to go from here.

  I turned my head for half a second to look at the bunk bed, trying to decide which bunk I was probably going to be
sleeping on when he started bobbing up and down in place. His hands were decidedly in front of his body. I was going to go ahead and throw this one in the red flag category as well. That’s not normal. He started doing a sort of weird nose kazoo thing where he made sounds as he bobbed up and down and that was when I decided it wasn’t a bad idea to back up to the edge of the cell and give myself plenty of room to be not-near whatever was going on.

  He spun around and I immediately had a host of questions that I felt would go unanswered for possibly the rest of my life. He had ripped his shirt open just over his nipples and had, as near as I can tell, used his hands to do the same to his jeans just over his crotch. A very turgid, very upsettingly purple cock was standing proud between the shreds of denim as though welcoming me to the nightmare I’d always known was going to come true. An alarm sounded and I thought for the whole of a second that it meant someone was coming to save me from being crammed full of priapism and a lifetime of night terrors.

  As if he had a fucking handbook of shit that I did not want to happen in this exact situation, he started whistling. Really awful, breathy whistling. I started thinking of things I could use to defend myself from a penis, but then I realized he probably had some kind of retard strength or something and that’s when I assumed a wide escape stance. Nimbly, like a rape-averse cat, I hopped back and forth.

  “Oh, yeah… which way’s he goin’? Too fast for you.”

  This seemed to enrage my cellmate and he charged at me. I dodged to the side, spinning myself so my back was against the bunk bed. I didn’t want to leave any of my enticing pieces facing him. He slapped against the cell door and turned. Perhaps expecting me to work my way to the far wall, where the window was, he moved back to the center of the cell. He gave a wide grin, showing rounded brown kernels where a normal human would have had teeth. He charged again, but I was cunning and moved myself back to the cell door. Still, it was not a move that was particularly hard to follow up. Worse, I lost my footing and slipped to the ground. I heard the first sound out of my new friend. A gleeful trill.

  I had made it to my knees— I know. Exactly what he wants— when he grabbed the back of my head. A hot, meaty stick rubbed against the back of my neck and I let out a sound that I have never been able to reproduce. A sort of guttural vomit noise that capped off with a high shriek. He put his hands firmly on my head and started trying to force it around. I batted at him with my hands, screaming, and flailing as best I could. I felt a weird electrical tingle run down my arm and I heard a sound I’d heard a few times earlier that day.

  The hands moved back from my head and I heard staggered footsteps. Finally deciding to look, I saw a face that had never known a deeper regret. He screamed, blood falling to the floor in gobs. Where his cock had been, there was now a distinct arc. The upper fifth of a circle and been carved out of his crotch by my finger laser.

  Behind me, I heard hurried footsteps over my would-be sex friend’s screaming. I turned to see Marine come to a stop in the door to the cell which had, at some point, rolled open.

  “Holy shit…” She looked past me to the gory pile of rapist that had crumpled to the floor.

  “He… he tried to put it in my mouth.”

  Marine looked wide-eyed between me and the maybe-corpse. “We… we have to go. It’s time to go.”

  I stood up, nodding. “I’m fine with that.”

  Chapter

  FIFTEEN

  Marine was in charge of guiding us out of the place. The cops were busy evacuating the building and mostly rushed from place to place without really noticing us at all. Really, that lack of attention to detail was the sort of thing that got me put into a cell with a chronically horny psycho. That guy really should have been strapped to a bed somewhere. Though, I guess it didn’t matter now. That problem was solved. I still had no idea how my finger laser worked. Maybe it had the ability to sense when I was in danger! That seemed… less useful. I mean, what if I was watching a particularly scary bit of porn. That could go all sorts of wrong.

  We weaved our way through rooms until we’d come to an area full of desks and screens. The cops had all left the room behind and we made for a back door.

  “They just leave a back door here? Just for anyone to walk through?”

  “Well, the room is usually full of cops, Laze.”

  “You know, I was almost mouth-raped. You’re not being very sensitive to my situation. Clearly the psychological trauma has made me unable to think reasonable things.”

  She ignored that bit and pushed open the door. It led into the auto pool garage. Police cars still had manual drive as an option most of the time but I’d learned from having spent a teensy bit of time in researching them that they required a near-field ID badge or fingerprints to start. Maybe both. They weren’t entirely unstealable, but it was enough trouble that you’d really only be likely to do it in the case that you desperately needed a police car for some wrongdoing. They were full with dozens of tracking sensors and automated notices sent when they stopped somewhere outside of standard patrol routes.

  Marine either also knew this, which was a reasonable assumption, or had no interest in using them to begin with because we ran past the entire line of cars and toward the door at the far end of the garage. She eased the door open and peeked out onto the sidewalk.

  “Alright.” She stood up pushing the door open. “Let’s go.”

  “Don’t have to ask me twice.”

  When we were out on the sidewalk and casually moving away from the bustling police station, I noticed that there was smoke pouring out of the building.

  “So… those alarms?”

  “Yeah, that was me. I figured setting a fire would make them less likely to look into the code on their little tracker box. How was jail?”

  I sighed. “Next time can I just hit you in the face or something?”

  She pretended to consider it. “Hmm, nah. Not nearly as good for me that way.”

  “So it was good for you.”

  “Well, which would you rather do? Grab some boobs or have a bruised fist?”

  “I… boobs? But then… but then the rape.”

  “Look, what are the odds of that ever happening again? You just have some sort of monumentally terrible luck. Normally it’d just be some elementary school teacher who got busted taking pictures of eight year olds peeing or something. You’d have stuff in common. And no gang members. Usually.”

  “I’ve never taught elementary school, though.”

  She laughed which helped calm me down. I was honestly still on edge from the whole rapey cellmate thing. Whatever self-destructive urges I’d started yesterday with were getting dragged slowly away and were being replaced by a frustration that things seemed to really be going gangbusters for her. I guess so long as she was smiling it was fine.

  “Where are we going now?” We’d come to an intersection so it seemed like a solid time for me to ask.

  “Gotta confirm the job’s done.”

  “Right, so they’re waiting in a limo in a dark alley somewhere?”

  “Nope. Coffee shop.”

  “Well… all my movie dreams have been shattered to pieces.”

  “You hanging around my shop being randomly handed drives and little hardware bits to fuck with rarely included gun fights.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t own a limousine. Why would you ever get out of a limousine, when you could crack the window and wear cool sunglasses and say cryptic, vaguely threatening things?”

  “Maybe she likes coffee.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Maybe there’s a no coffee in the limo rule. Gravy seems like he’d be into that.”

  She gave a small smile. “He’ll really kill you if you call him that, you know?”

  “Not once he sees my irresistible firebush. I know his weakness now.”

  That managed to get a laugh. The coffee shop was only a few bl
ocks away. Cincy was sitting outside at one of the tables on the patio. I say patio, but it was just a fenced in part of the sidewalk. Marine sat down so I did too.

  “You’ve completed the job?”

  “Yep. Everything was in the surveillance room. Fireproof case around the hardware, so I corrupted their camera feeds a bit and started a plausible looking electrical fire.”

  How did she know what plausible looking was? What kind of coffee did they serve here? Cincy had a really foamy looking thing. How is foamy milk an enjoyable thing to put inside of your mouth? It’s just bubbles. Milk bubbles, sure, but who can even tell? A whole mouthful of those bubbles is basically two drops of milk. Completely pointless.

  “Do they sell pastries here?”

  I was stared at by both of them for a second and then they went back to their conversation without answering me. Like, they felt so interrupted that they took the time to stare at me, but then they didn’t answer the question? Just “yes” would have worked. I’m hungry. I can’t get a fucking pastry?

  I stood up. They stopped talking again.

  “Where are you going?”

  As if Marine has any right to ask me that shit after giving me the stink eye.

  “Pastry.” I pointed at the coffee shop proper.

  Maybe I’m just lost as to what the big deal was with getting a pastry. I didn’t pick the coffee shop. If we’d been in an alleyway, then this wouldn’t have been an issue. I know for sure they don’t have pastries in alleyways.

  I went in and looked over the selection. Honestly, it was pretty sparse. They had chocolate filled croissants and some dry ass scones, but that was about it. It was people like this who gave scones a bad name. Dry and crumbly and awful. I bet most people never even get a fresh scone in their lives. That’s a real crime. So moist and delicious. I got the croissant. The slag behind the counter gave me a sort of pregnant pause when I said I wanted her to microwave it a little. Like ten seconds of her fucking day is the end of all happiness.

  I took a bite and headed back out. There were two black cars waiting there, the limo and a shorter town car. The chocolate was delightfully melty. Just right. Cincy was standing next to the town car with Marine and they were watching me.