Koko Takes a Holiday

by Kieran Shea

  Flynn flicks his eyes down at his Beretta in his right hand. Koko gave the Beretta back to him to keep Jot and Hoon in line, but the gun is useless because she removed the weapon’s power chip in the off chance Flynn might have a change of heart and try to stop her or even shoot himself. The gun is now as effective as pointing a box of dried pasta at the two pilots, but Jot and Hoon are clueless.

  “Like the woman said,” Flynn says, “nobody needs to die here. Trust me, Koko knows what she’s doing, and this should all be over in a few minutes.”

  But even as he assures the two pilots, Flynn’s mind is taken with an awful precognitive vision. A nightmare string of scenarios, actually. What if Hoon is right? What if it all didn’t go as Koko planned? What if Delacompte isn’t even here? Koko might have miscalculated Delacompte’s response; maybe she dispatched a whole army and they are waiting inside the building to kill them outright. What if Koko gets killed first? Flynn pictures Koko being cruelly blazed to the stubs of her boots by pulse fire and he sees himself, Jot, and Hoon being dragged off by SI security. He imagines the pilots’ pleas of innocence going ignored and unanswered. With an abrupt shake of his head, Flynn snaps his concentration back in line.

  On his left, Jot carries on in his soft, Hindu-laden tones.

  SHOWTIME

  Koko takes off from her position behind the bow wheels and charges for the right side of the hangar.

  Flynn sees her clear from beneath, and he orders Jot and Hoon to swing the craft hard around and to port. The pivot is sluggish, and from the cockpit Flynn sees that Koko has successfully closed the distance. Elbow cocked and gun grip parallel to her right ear, she flattens her back flush to the hangar’s outer siding and turns her head just as the heavy flow from the starboard engines pummels her chest. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Flynn sees something terrible.

  A black, silver-haired spider descending from above.

  Futilely Flynn cries out to warn Koko, but she has already opened up on the falling spider—her marksmanship nothing short of miraculous. Two quick rounds sever the spider’s arm in a grisly pop of meat, and by some far-out marvel of physiological physics the detached arm’s hand holds fast to the weapon still in its clutch. As both the arm and weapon plummet end-over-end toward the ground, the trigger trips and the gun begins to fire. Searing blue streaks slice the air—full-bore, deadly auto.

  Flynn’s eyes jump right as Koko dives for cover. She unloads more rapid bursts in mid-air and one of the rounds cleaves the out-of-control weapon from the severed arm before it hits the ground. On impact, the weapon clatters away, and Koko forward-rolls. When she comes up, she aims higher on the spider’s line—her gun spitting rapid blue light.

  Jot and Hoon duck as pulse rounds from the out-of-control weapon zoom past the cockpit windows. Jot begs Flynn to tell him this is the signal, but Flynn yells at Jot to wait. Flynn prays that Koko will be out of the way when the frigate finally labors into its final position. He can’t be sure, but Flynn believes the spider has just jumped from the rope.

  Jumped?

  Holy sh—

  The frigate completes the turn.

  Damn it, Koko. Do that crazy bitch and get out of the way.

  Still crammed beneath the controls, Jot bumps his head on the helm’s cusp and knocks his red wool hat loose. The tight tuber of gray hair on top of his head unravels.

  “Did she get her? Did she get her?”

  Flynn looks at Jot incredulously and then over at Hoon.

  “Get who?”

  “Your girl!”

  Flynn starts to answer that Koko is not his girl, but his words are eclipsed by a huge explosion.

  MISSED

  Even as the shattered ground lifts her off her feet and hurls her ass-over-tit backward, Koko can’t help but admire Portia Delacompte’s aim.

  Got to hand it to the woman. A free jump from a rappelling line, one arm completely shot off, and still Delacompte manages to chuck a pulse grenade with pinpoint accuracy?

  If Koko lives, she might actually applaud.

  When Koko finally crunches to the ground, a whole host of skeletal bones snip clean on impact. Both her collarbones. A chipped ulna. Her right shoulder blade fissured apart in a cracked, inverted V. Bits of broken rock lash through Koko’s clothes like falling daggers and she begins to skid. Her face burns, and Koko fears it may be her own cooking blood.

  Her sprawl across the ground is agonizing and endless, but when she finally comes to a rest Koko quickly realizes that the pulse grenade’s blast has knocked her gun free. Blindly, she slaps the ground at her sides, searching.

  Given the height, Delacompte’s leap from the rappelling line might have snapped one of her ankles or even knocked her out, but Koko can’t see her to be certain. Even if she is hobbling and missing an arm, if Delacompte manages to roll a second pulse grenade in Koko’s vicinity that will be it. Game over. Koko knows she is supposed to squeeze off a tracer round to signal Jot, Flynn, and Hoon to char-broil Delacompte with an engine hot start, but Koko figures that part of her big plan is in the shitter now.

  A shout to her left.

  “Koko!”

  The shouting voice sounds hollow and tinny, as though it has wound its way to Koko’s ears through pools of thick, ringing water. She attempts to roll her head toward the voice, but a poleaxe of unbearable pain sledgehammers her vision white. Stabbing, wracking breaths. Through the drifting smoke, Koko catches a glimpse of something. Someone running toward her.

  Oh, God.

  No. Not like this.

  Delacompte coming to finish her off.

  Eat her fucking eye.

  As the figure nears, Koko finds herself questioning what she’s seeing. The grayish figure, blurred against the morning sky, bends and picks up something from the ground. From the hazy outline it looks to Koko like her missing gun. The Sig 1-9Z.

  Oh great, Koko thinks. After all this, the quasi-religious, infanticidal cunt is going to execute me with my new gun? Just perfect.

  Koko closes her eyes and waits for the end.

  “Koko! Talk to me! Koko! Can you hear me?”

  …Flynn?

  As if from a dream, the figure above her comes into focus. The beard. The sad and sleepy eyes and hangdog face. Koko blinks. It is Flynn. Flynn, staring down at her.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Battery-flavored slop leaks from the edges of her lips as Koko manages a spellbound smile. With a sprained arm she numbly reaches out to Flynn as he lowers his body to her side. She struggles to hear her own scream.

  “Delacompte!”

  * * *

  Flynn’s head jerks up in the direction of the fallen spider. Across the radiating tarmac, the broken doll of Portia Delacompte wrestles with a shoulder holster still strapped to the good side of her body. Delacompte has managed to get herself into a sitting position, and the ugly stump of her left arm pokes out at a bizarre, snapped-branch angle and pumps a ridiculous arc of blood.

  Flynn sweeps Koko’s gun across Koko’s field of vision as his other hand rises up to cup the butt in a two-handed grip. Flynn aims, squeezing the trigger just as Delacompte clears her backup Browning 70 sub-compact from the shoulder holster.

  All those years of law enforcement, never once discharging his weapon in a tactical situation… Flynn, to his astonishment, doesn’t hesitate. The weapon whelps blue once—then twice. Flynn, the poor, depressed doofus, misses completely.

  Flynn’s third shot tags Delacompte on the edge of her squashed pelvis, spinning her backward. It’s like crimson and pink streamers twirling on a maypole, a long section of guts following her around and around until she stops. Delacompte screams, drops her gun, and braces her remaining arm against her stomach.

  Flynn looks behind him and up at the cockpit windows just as Hoon and Jot raise their heads. He drags a hand across his throat and shouts at them to shut down the engines, and a moment later the frigate’s engines start to slow and grow quiet.

  Flynn rises to his feet.
As he plods forward, Delacompte’s face becomes a study of chalky, gore-splattered rage. A widening puddle of blood spreads out around her, and a glistening bulb of intestinal tract gleams in her fingers. Flynn doesn’t relax his aim.

  “It’s over, Delacompte,” he says.

  A range of confused looks hiccup through Delacompte’s fury. Moaning, she struggles to turn around on her ravaged axis, looking for her dropped weapon.

  “This isn’t your fight!” she screams. “This is… this is a CPB security matter. That woman is… she’s… wanted for… f-f-failure—Fuck! This hurts!”

  Flynn moves closer. “You’re bleeding out.”

  Delacompte almost laughs and spits up an alarming wash of blood. “Bleeding out?” she says slushily. “I am not.” She glances down at the open ruins of her stomach and briefly over at her missing limb lying on the ground like a discarded drumstick. “This is nothing,” she says dismissively. “But you. You’re interfering with official CPB directives—I’ll have you executed, I’ll have you sent to a re-civ penal camp, you-you’ll—” Delacompte stops and screams at Flynn with all her might.

  It takes a dozen seconds for Delacompte’s tantrum to subside. Flynn hears the distant, approaching sirens of the SI emergency vehicles streaming their way across the landing fields as he inches closer.

  “It’s over, Delacompte. I know everything. What you’ve done to Koko. To those poor people up on Alaungpaya with your hired thugs, to your own flesh and blood back in Finland.”

  Delacompte’s face skews. “My own flesh and what?” A large bubble of pink-tinged saliva pops messily on her lips. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Flynn says. “Your selective memory treatments took care of that.”

  Delacompte’s eyes flutter. “My what? My selective memory treatments? How do you know about my—”

  Then it’s as though a great light crashes through Delacompte’s eyes. She shivers with a rattled breath, and her face slackens. Flynn wonders if at last the unbearable demons of her own repressed memories have savaged their way to the surface of her mind. Delacompte teeters woozily for a moment before she flops back. As she rolls her head from side to side in her own blood, an anguished wail unwinds from her throat and slowly becomes a tormented howl. Her remaining hand leaves her stomach and she frantically pats her chest.

  Flynn finally sees the pulse grenades on Delacompte’s bandolier.

  Oh, shit.

  “Don’t—” Flynn says.

  Finding the outline of a grenade, Delacompte flicks the device’s armament button. With her last ounce of strength, she lifts her head and bares her teeth.

  Flynn squeezes the trigger. The suppressed blast from Koko’s gun vaporizes Delacompte’s skull in a thick red spew and throws her backward, but he’s too late. The armed grenade spools out onto the ground like a top.

  Flynn turns and bolts toward Koko. It feels as though he has an eternity stretched out before him, and somehow he believes he can actually beat the grenade’s countdown. But, of course, he’s wrong. The protracted moment peels away in an ineffable wallop of noise and heat. Flynn is raised up—up and up and up. To his continued amazement, Flynn’s legs keep pumping through the air. He feels light as a feather, finally an angel in a world all afire.

  Flynn wonders if he’ll ever come down and imagines he’s already dead. But reality comes with a terrible jolt when his feet brutally strike the ground.

  His legs buckle beneath him. His ensuing tumble and spill scrapes skin from his body as he draws his hands over his head. Oh, God… are my arms still attached? Hair. Flynn thinks he feels hair. That’s good, that means he’s still—oh shit, I’m still alive? Broken ground strafes all around him. He can’t breathe.

  When the worst passes, grayish dots cloud Flynn’s vision and it takes all his effort to inhale. Smoky air and a cough. No sound now except for the swooning tolls between his ears, an ache worse than any migraine he’s ever experienced. Flynn’s gut goes cold as images beat through his vision.

  Smoke. Blackness.

  Humid morning sky. The swirling red and electric blue lights from emergency craft pulling close.

  More blackness.

  The open hangar. Jot’s and Hoon’s septic ship.

  Black, black, black.

  Then the sour whiff of roasted human flesh, and Flynn snaps to consciousness. Strange hands fall on his chest, his shoulders. Groping.

  Flynn pushes the hands away and rolls to his side. Using his elbows to fulcrum his legs, he drags his body forward. It turns out Koko is much closer than he thought. A mere meter and a half later, Flynn collapses by her side.

  The strange, groping hands continue in their attempts to draw him away, but Flynn fights them. He leans his body over Koko and warm droplets roll off his face and plink on her battered, upturned cheeks. Is it his own blood? His tears? Flynn can’t tell, and he doesn’t care anymore because Koko is smiling up at him.

  He leans in close.

  Flynn kisses Koko’s bloody mouth.

  GIMME, GIMME… MORE AND MORE

  THE SIXTY ISLANDS PROMO “HOT STUFF/PF SPOT”—0:30

  CLIENT: Custom Pleasure Bureau—The Sixty Islands

  PRODUCTION ENGAGEMENT: 2516 All Seasonal Hemispheric Cycles

  AUDIO: GURGLING OCEANIC SOUNDS, SHIFTING SAND

  [FADE IN] VISUAL FEED 1: UNDERWATER, THE ROLLING BACK OF A BREAKING REEF WAVE. AS THE WAVE TUBES, A NUDE SURFER IS SILHOUETTED IN THE WAVE’S MOVING SURFACE. THE NUDE SURFER DRAGS HER/HIS HAND ACROSS THE WAVE FACE AS A CYBERNETIC TIGER SHARK CRUISES BEHIND IN PURSUIT. CAMERA TRACKS UP, BREACHES THE WATER’S SURFACE, AND MOVES FORWARD ACROSS THE BREAKWATER TOWARD LAND. ON THE BEACH AHEAD, A SIMULATED EXECUTION IS IN PROGRESS ON THE SIXTY ISLANDS. A GUILLOTINE PLATFORM TOWERS ABOVE A THRASHING, HALF-NAKED CROWD OF SUNTANNED SPECTATORS.

  AUDIO 2: AGGRESSIVE, LOUD MUSIC. DRUMS.

  [CUT TO CLOSE-UP] VISUAL FEED 2: GUILLOTINE BLADE AS A HOLDING PIN IS JERKED FREE. THE BLADE FALLS.

  [CUT TO CROWD SHOT] VISUAL FEED 3: CHEERING EXECUTION SPECTATORS FROM BEHIND THE SHOULDERS OF A BLACK-HOODED EXECUTIONER HOLDING UP A BEHEADED SKULL BY THE SCALP. CAMERA PANS OVER THE CROWD AS THEY HOIST SPEARS AND ROAR.

  [FADE IN] VISUAL FEED 4: GORGEOUS, MONTAGED IMAGERY OF EXECUTION SPECTATORS* DANCING. THE DANCE MOVES OF THE SPECTATORS SOON MORPH INTO SOME OF THE MOST DEPRAVED, INGENIOUS SEX ACTS IMAGINABLE. QUICK-CUT MONTAGE BUILDS AND VISUALS ARE INTERSPERSED WITH RANDOM SIXTY ISLANDS DEBAUCHERY AND VIOLENCE. FACES BEYOND THE CREST OF DESIRE. EXPLOSIONS—EVERYTHING MOVING FASTER AND FASTER TO A FRENZIED, ANIMALISTIC CLIMAX. [*NOTE: Not actual SI patrons, models preferred for montage.]

  [CUT TO] VISUAL FEED 5: BLACK

  AUDIO 3: WHIMSICAL MUSIC—STEEL DRUMS, SLACK KEY GUITAR, ETC.

  [FADE IN] VISUAL FEED 6: THE SIXTY ISLANDS logo.

  VOICEOVER: What are you waiting for?

  (BEAT)

  VOICEOVER (CONT.) The Sixty Islands—paradise found.

  LET’S HEAR IT FROM THE NEW BOYWHORE

  Oh my, our Koko-sama be flying truer than true now. Yes-yes. Jump-up proper, she be on all freaky and high-happy these days. And we be new-fresh recruits for her, and all of us, we got lotsa, lotsa work to do.

  Hey, big re-opening coming up a week out no less. Oh, we creamy with excitement, but we sweat plenty to get ready.

  Me love my new boss, Koko-sama. Some of the other boys and girls and tranny rae-raes not so much. Koko-sama be big sugarhoney and take care of us all on the kind, right-right? Not that we ungrateful tummyachers ’cause we on The Sixty, man! Drong! The Sixty! Big dream come true even if we all be whoring for the credit ching-a-ching-a-ling.

  Koko-sama still be limping with the great white cane like when she done come down to Melbourne to recruit me and me mates. Koko-sama say her stumpy walk and stick soon be gone with all the physical pump and jump we all do. Koko-sama, she be big bad on keeping us all fit, you bet. Customers like the lovey talent prime, she say, so all of us, we get up at
first light and run forever in the beautiful island jungles. We lift fallen trees and heavy stones and even chase them syntho-piggies for bacon and barbecue. Like the last of the old fish in the big salty, we even swim every day a bunch too. Beats mining rock and dodging hook and claw back in Oz, but The Sixty chiefs also want us all healthy-planned whores now.

  Master Flynn be waiting on two more shipments of good liquor before he say we got us a full bar. Me, I like Master Flynn. Good boss. He go on proper like how customers on SI need tasty options, so a full working bar is a must-y. Got us a purification still for refining cheap liquor for big parties too. Handy thing, that. Keep all the bad liquor on the yum-yum.

  Master Flynn, he a funny one. Don’t mess with any of Koko-sama’s whores ’cause he and Koko-sama be special lovers like. Hear he used to go big boo-hoo up top, and me done seen them bodies fall from the clouds on the feeds a few times. Sad stuff, but Master Flynn, he be much high-happy now too.

  Yeah-yeah. We all got lots and lots of work to do.

  INTO THE GREAT, NEAR FUTURE

  Koko lifts a hammer from a nylon tool belt secured around her hips. Her pink T-shirt is saturated dark with perspiration, and the muscles beneath her camouflaged shorts shine brown.

  She steadies a four-inch carpenter’s nail against a large, carved wooden sign on the siding above the tin porch roof and readies herself to drive the nail home. Her mirrored goggles flash with the sun as she twists her head back.

  “You’re sure it’s even?”

  In rolled khaki cargo pants and an unbuttoned white linen shirt, Flynn squints up to check the sign’s alignment. Even with Flynn’s own pair of sun goggles the potent light on The Sixty is so fierce it makes him feel like he’s getting punched in the face over and over. Hell, the sign looks even enough, Flynn supposes. Why Koko can’t wait until the much cooler dark to hang the final touch on the new building is beyond him. It’s a modest, purlin structure. Eleven rooms with a bar and café area and a small winged alcove arranged with tables of chance. It looks just like one of those airy tropical places Flynn remembers seeing on the history feeds. Tall open windows with slatted hurricane shutters and lazy ceiling fans fashioned to resemble round palm fronds. The rear of the building opens up onto a large grass-plotted patio sliced down the middle by a stone-lined lap pool with a regenerative spa on the far end in the shape of a heart. Heavily scented citrus trees surround the patio area, and just beyond the area an electrified wire fence corners off the property—a measure to keep the islands’ half-and-half synthetics from disturbing the guests.