Death From Above!

by J. I. Greco

  “I sense a small amount of concern in your voice, but I wouldn’t worry my sexy little head about it, if I were you. For either of them to achieve their goals, they’ll have to take the other side out of the picture first. So, with any luck, they’ll kill each other off. Problem solved.”

  “Just hope you’re proud of yourself. Refugees have been swarming into the Wasteland for months, now. Every day there’s more than the last day. Thousands. And all of them needing food, water, shelter. Stuff the Wasteland isn’t exactly overflowing with in the first place.” Roxanne’s eyes go all thousand-league, a whole-world-on-her-back stare. “We’re strained to bursting already, and it’s just going to get worse as the war spreads out of the mid-West into the South. Hundreds of thousands more people are going to be displaced, and where are they gonna come? The Wasteland. And it’s not just the refugees. The war’s eventually going to come here, too. Didn’t think about that when you set things in motion, did you?”

  “Au contraire, mon frère.” Trip fishes a Bugs Bunny Pez dispenser out of his smoking jacket pocket and holds it up to his lips. He bends the head back and pops the last of his home-made stim pellets onto his tongue. “I’ve got a cunning plan.”

  “To stop the war?”

  “Stop it?” Trip tosses the empty dispenser onto the dash. “Why would I want to stop it? There’s too much money to be made.”

  “Of course. How silly of me.”

  “Yes, but I still love you.” The pellet dissolves almost instantly on Trip’s tongue, the special quick-acting blend of iguana urine-laced caffeinated bug spray pretty much instantly banishing the fog of sleeping off a stun-gunning curled up in the back seat of a car. “Granted, the plan got derailed just the tiniest bit when I spontaneously decided to get heavily into meditation and rustic living—”

  “You mean when I told you we were pregnant.”

  Trip leans back, lacing his fingers behind his head, careful to avoid touching the cast-iron inflicted welt. “It may have coincidentally been around that same time, yes.”

  “Coincidentally? We were lying in bed, I told you we were pregnant, we cuddled for a minute, maybe a minute and a half, then you excused yourself to take a piss. And poof, you never came back.”

  “You wouldn’t think to look at it, but the outhouse at the trailer, you will never take a more comfortable piss. Anyway, this couldn’t have worked out better for us. With all these refugees I’ll have my pick of good, cheap, desperate labor. And an exploitable workforce is one of the cornerstones of a profitable business.”

  “What do you need a workforce for?”

  “Two words: Mechwarbots.”

  “That’s one word,” Roxanne says. “Haven’t you learned your lesson where warbots are concerned? The last batch you made turned tail and ran for the hills the second a simple unarmed angry mob came knocking at the city wall.”

  “That was a bug in their limited AI systems.”

  “Seeding them with your personality and your inherent predilection for fleeing at the first sign of responsibility was a bug?”

  “The new 2.0 Mechwarbots, they’ll be dumbed-down task-specific combat and defense expert system models. They’ll take orders, execute them, all without personality—mine or anybody else’s. And they’ll be pretty straightforward to manufacture. I figure with a good assembly line and enough cheap marginally skilled labor we’ll be able to churn out two, maybe three bots a day once we’re fully ramped up.”

  “Ambitious.”

  “Oh, I know what you’re thinking, but you said it yourself, this war is just gonna get bigger and bigger. There will be plenty of buyers.”

  “Yay?” Roxanne asks without enthusiasm.

  “Hey, don’t worry. I’ll give a special two-percent Wasteland discount to the city-states, and as Shunk’s Minister of Defense and Morale, I think I can confidently state Shunk will be buying the first batch off the assembly line—”

  “It’s not going to be that easy.”

  “I know, I know. Your dad has final say on all capital expenditures, but let’s be real, all I need to do is get Morty slightly more drunk than he normally is and he’ll sign anything I put in front of him.”

  “Look, Trip, there have been some changes while you were gone. We should probably talk about them before we get back—”

  “Yeah, sure, let’s talk.” Trip puts his hand on Roxanne’s thigh. “But first, it has been a while. And unlike my brother, I’m not a chronic masturbator. So I got a lot of juices backed up.”

  “What, now?”

  Trip jogs his head at the back seat and wags his eyebrows. “Car can drive itself.”

  “Well, what you waiting for?” she asks, pulling off her boots. “Go on, hop on back.”

  Chapter Four

  Leaned back on the salvaged 1983 Impala back seat that serves as Rudy’s front room couch, Trip swings his Converses up on the cinder-block and wood plank coffee table. “So, how was it? Comfy?”

  “What are you talking about?” Rudy comes through the tattered Empire Strikes Back bedsheet hanging in the doorway to the back room, zipping up his stomach. Shirtless, his chest hair is matted with sweat and his usual five-o’clock shadow looks more like ten PM shadow, practically a full beard. The circles under his eyes are dark and puffy. “How was what?”

  “The doghouse. I’m just presuming that’s where Bernie had you sleeping last night.”

  Eyes bloodshot and bleary, Rudy grabs a T-shirt from the waist-high pile of clothes in the corner of the room and shrugs into it without bothering to turn it right-side out. “I did not sleep in the doghouse.”

  “It’s because you don’t have a doghouse, isn’t it? I keep telling you, you need a dog.” Trip pulls a rusty cough drop tin out from one of the dozens of pockets sewn into the lining of his tux jacket. He cracks it open and plucks one of the hand rolled cigs out. For this batch, he’d used a newspaper bartered from a landfill-turned-supply-post outside of Montoursville as paper. The fragment of story on the cig tells of a rash of genetically-modified cornstalks menacing Harrisburg in the aftermath of the third meltdown at Three-Mile Island, a hundred and fifty years ago. Trip pops the cig between his lips and fishes a big Zippo out of another pocket. “Then you could sleep in its house instead of the couch,” he says, lighting the cig.

  Rudy glares at the cig. “You can’t smoke in here.”

  “You can’t smoke in here,” Trip says, slipping the lighter away.

  Rudy looks around for something, his nose twitching. He idly twists his left nipple through the T-shirt to prime the pump of his internal pharma factory. His stomach lets out a sputtering whine as the factory comes online, pumping calming THC analog directly into his bloodstream as fast as the implant can make it. “That coffee I smell? Please say you made coffee.”

  “I made coffee.” Trip nods his head at the Franklin stove in the center of the room and the twelve-cup percolator sitting on top of it. “But it’s a small pot, so I don’t think there’s going to be any left for you, to be honest. So you slept in the Bug, then. Same difference.”

  Rudy grabs a random half-empty mug from the collection of dozens on the folding card/dining room table, dumps whatever it is that’s in it down his throat, and pads over to the stove, his bare feet pushing baby toys and stuffed animals out of the way. “My house, my coffee.” He fills the mug, hands that to Trip, then takes the percolator with him as he plops down in a chair, the driver’s seat from a 1999 Mazda Miata. “And, I wish I’d slept in the Bug,” he says, slugging down coffee straight from the percolator. “Bernie slept in the Bug.”

  Bernice slips sideways through the Empire sheet, a sleeping baby in each arm. “And super glad I did. First full night’s sleep I’ve had in months.” She steps in front of Rudy. “Okay, here you go. —Little help here, Trip?”

  Trip puts his mug down on the coffee table, and leans over, prying the percolator away from Rudy. Rudy’s hands now free, Bernice lays Finn in Rudy’s lap, then puts Jake down next to his brother on Rudy
’s knee.

  Rudy looks down at his sons. Finn’s eyes flutter like he is about to wake up. And start crying. “What am I supposed to do with these?”

  Bernice purses her lips. “Be a dad.”

  “I was a dad last night,” Rudy says, rocking Finn. The baby’s eyes stop fluttering, crying wake-up averted. “Today I was hoping to catch up on the sleep I missed being that dad.”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before you let this idiot here drag you to Florida.” Bernice adjusts the leather corset of her Sisters of No-Mercy uniform, shifting her breasts to stress her cleavage as proscribed by Holy Edict. “Now, I gotta go. Sergeant-at-Arm’s business to attend to. I should be back by dinner. I’m expecting steaks. And cow this time. I’ll know if you try to pass off mutant cockroach again.”

  “Do we have any cow?” Rudy asks.

  Bernice grins. “We don’t have anything. I left the grocery list on the ice chest.” She bends over Rudy, kissing each baby on the forehead, then pecks Rudy on the cheek. “Laters,” she says, and she’s gone out the front door.

  Trip smirks after her. “Have I mentioned I am so glad you married her?”

  “I did kind of leave her in the lurch,” Rudy says. “And the boys… I should never have left them. Should have never have let you talk me into going in the first place. Damn fool idea.”

  Trip shrugs, picking up his mug and blowing into it. “Speaking of damn fool ideas, time we got the ‘bot factory up and running again.”

  “What factory? It’s a corner in a warehouse where we pieced together a dozen warbots out of junkyard spare parts.”

  Trip takes a sip of the coffee. “And after you build us a proper assembly line, it’ll be a factory.”

  “While I’m building the assembly line, what will you be doing?”

  “What else? Drumming up business and making deals. And meditating. Mostly meditating.” Trip knocks a knuckle against the side of his head. “I gotta find out what’s locked in here. So, we going or what?”

  “Yeah, hold on,” Rudy says, shifting the babies around in his arms and standing, moving slow to try to keep them asleep as long as possible. “Just let me get the stroller.”

  “Do we have to take them with us?”

  “You are gonna make such a great dad.”

  Chapter Five

  “What the hell is this, Shemp?”

  At the warehouse on the southern side of the walled city-state of Shunk, Trip strides through the open loading bay and up to the tall man with the Mohawk standing with a clipboard in front of stacked barrels of beer.

  Shemp glances up from his clipboard. “What is what, Trip?” he asks, making a check on an inventory control form with a nub of a pencil.

  Trip waves his hands out at the stacks, stretching deep into the warehouse, barrels five high to the ceiling in some places. Workers move in and out of the stacks pulling low-slung wheeled carts, some bringing more, some taking barrels away. “All that.”

  “Beer.” Shemp looks lovingly at the stacks. “As far as the eye can see. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Yeah, sure, wonderful,” Trip says with a sneer. “But what’s it doing in my factory?”

  Shemp lowers his clipboard and slips the nub of a pencil away behind his left ear. “Your factory?”

  “Robot factory, yeah. Says so right on the door. Or it was supposed to. I put it on Rudy’s to-do list to get a logo painted, but you know how lazy that bastard is. Seriously, how hard is it to get through a four-thousand item to-do list, I ask you?”

  “You haven't been around for months. We thought you’d abandoned it.” Shemp waves over Trip’s shoulder. “Hey there, Rudy!”

  Rudy stands framed in the open loading bay door, standing on the ramp behind a twin-pod wicker pram with mismatched wheels, adjusting the complex feeding armature over the left pod so that little, crying Jake can reach the suspended bottle. Rudy waves back at Shemp absently, then returns to adjusting.

  “I did,” Trip says. “But I’m getting the band back together.”

  “Sorry, dude,” Shemp says. “Need the space.”

  “For what?”

  “Um, the beer.”

  “For the beer?”

  “Yeah, for the beer. We’ve about run out of places to make it, let alone store it. Shit, I’m storing fifty barrels at my house. You got any room at your place for a couple dozen barrels?”

  “No. When did this happen?”

  “It’s the war, dude. Demand’s gone through the roof, from both sides. You know what they say, armies run on booze—courage for the troops, and fuel for the tanks. Not to mention all the refugees. All they’ve got is sorrows to drown. We’re producing four times what we were before the war, and more every day. Pretty soon we’re going to have to start importing wheat—we can’t grow the stuff fast enough ourselves, especially now that the refugee camps are encroaching on what little farmland we have.”

  “Yeah, that’s great. Rah-rah for the local economy—and you’re welcome, by the way.” Trip pauses to light a cig. “Okay, so, you’re using this place. Where’s my new place?”

  “New place?” Shemp asks.

  “Yeah. You did find me a new place to set up shop, didn’t you?”

  “Was I supposed to?”

  “Vishnu’s nipples. Was he supposed to? Of course you were supposed to. It’s just common courtesy.”

  Shemp rubs the back of his neck. “Oh, sorry… I didn’t—”

  “Don’t worry about it, it’s not too late to make things right.” Trip thumps Shemp on the shoulder with an open palm. “Now, two-o’clock this afternoon, that would be too late. Okay, tell you what. I’m not an unreasonable guy, and I was gonna have a long lunch, anyway. So you’ve got until, let’s say two-thirty.”

  “To find you a place to set up shop?”

  “Yep. With enough space for an auto-lathe, polymer injection molder, 3D-printer, laser die-cutter, computer-controlled quality assurance testing rig, Cerebro Mark Two, and 1:1 scale model of the Millennium Vulcan, be-sainted patron of giant-headed cultural icons.”

  “Do you have any of that stuff?” Shemp asks.

  “No, but I have a robot who can slowly build other robots by hand. That’s a start. The rest we’ll import from So-Cali. Assuming my credit’s still good with the Chinese… yeah, probably shouldn’t count on that. You know anybody with good credit we can use as a front?” Trip scans the warehouse. “Speaking of my robot, where is Hunt-R, anyway? I distinctly remember telling that over-rated clockwork to guard this place while I was gone. A job he’s done about as spectacularly as I assumed he would. He is so not getting that second eye he wanted for National Consumerism Day.”

  “You mean that robot of yours? He high-tailed it right after we moved in. He said the beer was keeping him up at night. I see him hanging out in the square every now and then.”

  “Okay, well, I’m gonna go get him, publicly dress him down for dereliction of duty, and have lunch.” Trip raises an eyebrow and smirks at Shemp. “And you will be?”

  “Finding you a place to set up shop?”

  “Finding me a place to set up shop, yep, that’s a good man.”

  “I’d love to help you out, Trip—I feel bad about taking this place over, I do, but it ain’t gonna happen.” Shemp pauses while a whistle from the adjoining loading bay announces the arrival of an oxen-drawn truck ready for loading. “Look, I’ve gotta go,” he says, and walks off.

  “Oh, I see, right.” Trip follows him. “I thought you and me were beyond that sort of thing, Shemp, but if that’s the way you want this to go, we can let blatant greed and corruption deal a death blow to our burgeoning friendship. So how much is this going to cost me?”

  Shemp stops and turns around. “I’m not looking for cash, Trip, I’m really not. Even if there was any place in Shunk left for non-beer manufacturing, I couldn’t get it for you. The Sorta Council nationalized everything in the name of beer production once they realized we were heading into the biggest beer boom-
time the Wasteland’s seen since the Kochite-Murdockian war of ‘76. They’ve got first and final say on that sort of thing now.” He shrugs apologetically. “It’s out of my hands.”

  Chapter Six

  “Alms, alms for a poor blind robot?”

  Hunt-R sits on the ground at the base of the junk-parts fountain in Shunk’s town square, nestled between a booth selling fried cockroach balls and a much busier one selling beer, waving a rusty soup can in front of him at the people standing in line.

  “Since when are you blind?”

  The robot pushes the dirty rag up off his single large, unlit eye. “Since it makes good business,” Hunt-R says, the yellow light in his eye snapping on. The robot tilts its flat face up at Trip, smirking down on him, then over at Rudy and his progeny in their pram. Oh, look, idiots and crying babies. Better off ignoring the lot of them. Hunt-R shuts his eye off and waves the can in front of him again. “Alms, alms for a poor, blind robot?”

  “What’s an alm, anyway?” Rudy asks. “Anybody actually know?”

  “Isn’t it a tree?” Trip asks. “I’m pretty sure it’s a tree. Which begs the question, what does a robot need with trees? Okay, maybe one tree, but any more than that, they’re just going to get underfoot.”

  “I think you’re thinking of Oak trees,” Rudy says, twisting his nipple through his inside-out T-shirt.

  Trip nods. “Right. Always get those two confused.”

  “Is this how it’s going to be until I acknowledge you?” Hunt-R turns his eye back on. “Idiot banter while you block potential suckers from being charitable?”

  Trip lights a cigarette and smirks at Rudy. “Don’t know about you, but I do feel a lot of pent-up idiot banter in me wanting out.”

  “Yeah, I could banter all day,” Rudy says, gently shoving pacifiers into both baby’s mouth simultaneously, quieting them. “All night, even. Lack of sleep brings out the banter in me.”