“Somebody just shot me in the face,” he radioed Carmen, but didn’t move or try to get up. “I’m not hurt, so don’t stick your head out unless you want to get shot in it.” He preferred to let the sniper think he was dead. If he got back up, he might take another bullet through the visor, or to the plane, or maybe even directed at Carmen.
From his tone, she could tell he was not hurt, but she was still concerned, “Are you bleeding? Did they think you were a ghoul?”
“How the hell would I know why they shot me?” he snapped at her out of reasonable frustration considering his situation. “You’re the one who painted me up like this. I’m not bleeding, just lying here on my back. If they see I’m not dead, they might shoot the whole plane to shit so let’s wait a minute to see who they are and what they want.”
Three men in dark hooded rain-ponchos came out from behind the corner of a nearby building close to the rows of parked cars. They stayed low as they dashed toward the plane’s ramp.
“Three people are coming,” he told Carmen.
The three men reached the foot of the ramp.
The first to arrive carried a scoped rifle with a long silencer. He glanced at Critias with satisfaction, “I told you it was a man that I shot in the head. Hiram is not the only one who figured out how to dress up like one of the freaks to sneak past them.”
The second man carried a standard military-issue assault rifle. As he glanced about for ghouls, the man asked, “Was he alone or was someone else driving the car?”
“I’m right here,” Carmen called to the men from in front of the car so that she could use it to conceal her maschinenpistole. The vehicle also made for excellent cover since she had faith they wouldn’t risk disabling the car by shooting it up. It also had the steel ram that would protect her if they did open fire. Besides, in her estimation, they seemed pathetically weak and incapable of effectively threatening her survival regardless of their intentions.
“Jesus H. Christ,” said the third man who carried only an automatic pistol. “We struck the power-ball jackpot this time, boys.” He walked slowly up the ramp to the rear bumper of the Betty. “Be a good girl now,” he told Carmen as he did his best to seem nonthreatening. “Step over here where I can get a better look at you.”
Carmen discretely put her MP5 down on the car’s ram-bumper and then slowly stepped out to take a new position beside the driver’s door.
“Well now,” the man with the pistol spoke to Carmen as he ogled her. “What’s a sweet young whore like you doing out here?”
The other two men stepped up the ramp to be out of general view and to get a better look at Carmen.
She asked, “Are you three from Denver?”
“So some of the others did reach that King Louie,” the rifleman deduced from her question. “He must not be a very smart king if he sends out one idiot dressed as a shrieker and a pretty girl to search here for more survivors.”
The man with the assault rifle put his weapon on the trunk lid then pulled off his poncho. “You two keep watch while I teach this little bitch how things are going to be from now on.” He chuckled evilly at Carmen, “You can fight if you want, but it would be best if you just cooperated. You might even like it.”
Carmen offered them a soft warning, “My master told me never to kill humans, only ghouls.” It was her honest explanation as to why they were still even alive, though they didn’t comprehend her meaning.
The man advanced on Carmen to rape her, “We killed your master, slut!” The man reached crudely for Carmen’s breast, “Now we’re going to fuck you bloody.”
She calmly grabbed his hand then twisted his wrist until he spun about under the relentless pressure. Carmen grasped him by the throat with her other hand while she forced his arm to pin it up behind his back. With the man thusly immobilized, she used him as a human shield.
The man with the pistol aimed his weapon at her, “Let him go or I’ll shoot you right through him.”
Carmen shook her head with pity over their sad stupidity, “If you drop your weapons at your feet then get on your knees with your hands on your heads, you may live through this, but I can’t promise you anything. Aiming a gun at me is most unwise, but then again, threatening to rape me in the bad way was not very smart either. My master doesn’t like it when people are impolite to me. It makes him irritable and he kills little fat kids on a good day.”
The man with the rifle pulled a long knife, “Spare us your lies, honey. We know you’re all alone now. Your costumed partner took a bullet to the face. You had your fair warning, but now you’re going to see what impolite really is. We were going to play nice before, so we could enjoy you for days, or at least until we got hungry enough for stew.”
Critias quietly got to his feet behind the men, took aim with his pistol, and then shot a silent bullet into the head of the man who held the automatic handgun. The ballistic slug lodged into the looter’s brain, which made the man collapse dead without even so much as an uttered peep. “The lady told you to put down your weapons,” Critias informed the man who held the knife. “You didn’t listen when you really should have.” He walked up the ramp with his pistol aimed to kill that man too if he offered any reason.
“Hello, my dearest beloved,” Carmen greeted Critias with a sweet smile. “These barbaric men were planning on raping me in the bad way.” In her garbled thinking, the bad way would be without them enjoying it, a mere act of militant violence for the purposes of coercion and intimidation.
He knew, “I heard everything. I don’t think knife-boy will be doing much raping after I put this next bullet into his crotch.”
Carmen easily restrained the man she had caught with her superhuman strength. The other man dropped his knife to the deck rather than have Critias shoot him. “Look friend,” the man stuttered in fear for his life. “We didn’t know that this lady was spoken for. We can come to some kind of arrangement.”
Critias plucked the rifle slug from his armor so it could regenerate the hole. He tossed the piece of lead at the man’s back, “You signed off on our accord when you shot me in the face. Are you assholes from Denver?”
Knife-boy nodded rapidly in confirmation, “This is our plane.”
Critias pushed the barrel of his pistol into the man’s spine, “Want to bet on it?” He looked to Carmen, “How long would it take for you to get this contraption off the ground?”
“Just a few minutes,” she said confidently. “Once the ramp is up, we will be safe enough for that long.”
Critias waved his pistol at the man Carmen held, “You two are coming with me. You can fight if you want, but then I’ll just shoot you in the belly and then roll you out to be eaten alive.”
Carmen released her man with a shove toward Critias who waved his pistol for them to follow.
“Drag that body off,” he ordered the two.
They grabbed the body of the raider that Critias had killed. They lifted him by the arms then pulled the corpse off down the ramp.
“Now walk, over there,” he pointed to the nearby cars in the direction the men had come from. Critias marched them before him through the rain, “So none of you dumbasses knows how to start a car?” Critias didn’t know how to either, but he had Carmen for that technical stuff.
“Take us with you and we’ll be your loyal henchmen,” the rifleman offered Critias. “I know you need more help, if you’re traveling out here with only a girl.”
He informed them, “The only reason you’re alive is because that girl thought you three idiots were too incompetent to qualify as a legitimate threat. If I would have allowed it, she could’ve killed you morons with her bare hands.” Critias selected a small two-door car that had one door open and a vandalized dashboard of wreckage that showed how someone had tried then failed to get it started. Critias told them, “If you speak, I shoot you both in your knees then leave you here to die. Now, strip off everything and do it quickly. We don’t have a lot of time before some of the freaks see us, and the
n you’re really going to be unhappy. After all, I won’t need to outrun the ghouls. I’ll only need to outrun you two shit-for-brains and your bullet-ridden kneecaps.”
The men started to remove all their clothes.
Critias cautioned, “If you’re thinking about pulling some hidden weapon on me, try to remember you couldn’t kill me from ambush with your rifle. My body armor can take more than you can dish out, so get it all off before I give you some incentive.”
Both men stripped naked and true to Critias’ suspicions, the rifleman had a concealed pistol, but he only added it to his pile of clothes.
“Get in the car,” Critias ordered then waited while they complied. “My woman has a kind heart and so is not the sort to go around slaughtering people; too bad for you that I’m nothing like her. We came out here looking to rescue you, but instead you shot me in the face then threatened to rape and murder her. For that, you’re going to reap the whirlwind, because you messed with the wrong son-of-a-bitch.”
The rifleman trembled and it wasn’t from the cold rain, “What’re you going to do to us?”
Critias quietly closed the car door, “You were looking for a good fuck and now instead you’re about to get professionally ass raped by me.” He bent down, grabbed the car below the rocker panel, and then used his mechsuit strength to lift the side of the car to roll the whole thing over onto its top. The vehicle’s glass shattered out as the roof caved in to pin the doors shut inside their frames. Critias banged loudly on the side with his fist while he shouted, “Come get your ass rape stew!” So satisfied with their inevitable fates, he scooped up their pile of belongings then zombie-shuffled back to the plane’s ramp.
The two men screamed for Critias to come back. Their shouts only summoned hungry infected who would investigate the disturbance. It would take the ghouls some time to drag them out as the men hopelessly struggled inside their wreck. That was all the greater misfortune for those men because the ghouls had all the time in the world to go about their business of eating them.
Critias walked up into the plane where he dropped their belongings, “Get this ramp up, and get us in the air. We’re done here.”
Carmen started the generator, “What did you do with those men?”
“I helped them find a car.”
Outside were the feeding howls of ghouls that mingled with the men’s screams of abject horror.
When Carmen triggered the switch to close the hydraulic ramp, she told him, “Come here and take the copilot’s seat so you can help me.”
Critias went forward to sit beside her.
She flipped more switches, “Did you feed those bad men to the ghouls? That is what it sounds like and I don’t want to jump to any conclusions.”
“I may not be as romantic as Hatchet,” he said sourly since he still dwelled on that flirtation. “I do for you in my own way. You warned those assholes yourself that I don’t appreciate anyone disrespecting you or women in general. They shot me in the face from ambush and then threatened to make a rape stew out of you. I gave them a fair trial. It was over quickly since I was both judge and star witness. I found them guilty then sentenced them accordingly as deserved.”
“I’m not complaining,” she chuckled as if she intended to hide it, but some came from her nose in a huff of breath. “I became certain of your chivalrous defense of my virtue when you started taking people who insult me and throwing them to ghouls. I think it’s romantic in a disaster scenario kind of way. I’m the only thing that seems to make you dramatic.”
“You do make me stupid,” he agreed to that much of what she said. She made it sound like he was feeding people to ghouls as some kind of tantrum. Jim had dropped the hammer on fat Danny; all Critias did was show him the door. If he had dragged the matter out any longer than necessary, it would have been tantamount to psychological torture. The three Denver dickheads punched their own tickets with their foul-running mouths. All of them were gallows bait who only waited for some buzzards to land. Their rape stew reference alone was a death sentence confession made in his presence. He told Carmen, “Kevin said they specially programmed you to know what to say and how to act to make me attached to you and that was why I would not let him perform brain surgery on you.”
In her naïve confusion, Carmen took his comment good-naturedly. She confessed openly since she saw no shame in it, “My combat game computer tells me what would make you happy and it makes me happy to do those things for you. I took good care of you when you were hurt, didn’t I?”
He didn’t say anything. Critias thought that he was losing touch with reality. The hard truth was that Carmen was an exquisitely programmed manmade creation. It didn’t really matter whether she was humanoid, android, or neorganic clone cyborg. She hadn’t been alive along enough to have a mind of her own. Her personality was software driven simulation to some substantial degree. It was insane of him to think of her as a real human. He was too emotionally involved with something that wasn’t really a person. His whole civilization existed around the servitude of the androids. Critias couldn’t start to defy his society over something as insipid as infatuation with his technological super toy.
Carmen realized his real meaning from the silence. “We both live behind the masks of our rigid rules,” she told him. “You did not ask to join the ludus since you were too young to have any say in the matter. Now you are their martinet. You have all your codes and rules and ways that are always making choices for you just because those are the way things have to be with you. Even if everything you were thinking about me were true, it shouldn’t even matter to you. What difference does it make if my combat game computer advises me on how best to make you happy? When you want to make someone happy, are you not also conspiring to make it happen?”
She had a point in that it wasn’t her fault whatever she was. He said, “It’s the men behind your mask that I despise. I see the bioengineers in everything you do. I see their reasoning and designs peering back at me. Part of you is the crafty schemes of the men who manufactured you.”
Carmen called upon sibylline literary sources to reply, “It is the inscrutable intentions of those scientists that you chiefly love or hate in me then. You say with conviction that you would strike even the sun for offending me and yet you cannot trust that my devotion to you is genuine. Is it such a blasphemy for you to love me just because you know the petty vices of those bioengineers that put forth the moldings of my features? If you would lash out in resentment, then strike at them. Those thirty alchemical tyrants made me then consigned me to the perfect imprisonment of relishing the desire to obey my first and greatest tyrant of all. I don’t know if they programmed my need for you as just one more of their cunning intended agents or if it is born of my own free nature. Either way, I’ll wreak its havoc upon you anyway. Both would serve you well regardless.”
He was still jealous, “Did they program you to shake your ass at Hatchet?”
Her defense seemed obvious, “I made his life better at no cost to myself.”
“It cost me,” Critias assured her. “Someone as jealous as you should recognize the trait in others. Don’t flirt with other men when I am around because it makes me angry. I think I deserve more respect than that. What else do you want from me, Carmen? We came here together to protect the futures of both our species and I made sure your inhibitor thing remains inactive. I share my bed with only you and it gives us the same pleasures. We are equal partners in all the same things so what else is there for me to give you?”
She gave him that look then sighed, “You already gave it to me. You just don’t know about it yet. I didn’t come here to protect either of our species and I damn sure don’t sleep with you for the pleasures you’re thinking of. The tyrants made me to provide those delights, not to ever burden my owner by having untimely genuine urges of my own that my master might fail to satisfy. When I make love to you, it is only love that I feel and nothing else. I don’t have to do it and it gives me no profound physical delight. I d
o it because it is only in those moments that I see in your face that you truly value me. I do it because having your weight pressing down on me is the greatest happiness we can share, for me it’s like being conjoined between heaven and earth.”
“I see,” he admitted to that new and remarkably painful understanding. “Of what use to them was an android that feels pleasure when its thoughts were only meant for bestowing it?” Critias had a new hatred for the bioengineers who had purposefully designed Carmen’s many injustices to include frigidity.
“Please don’t get any ideas about taking that away from me,” she beseeched him. “In those moments when you are most passionate and vulnerable, I feel closest to you. It is my proof that the bioengineers don’t control me, because it’s my deepest desires with which I burden you. I don’t even care if it offends you that I can’t enjoy it in the same way as you. You’re mine and I’ll kill anyone who tries to take you away from me. I’ll gladly destroy the future and the whole world to keep what I have. I’ll defend my ambitions with darkest bitterness and venomous jealousy as my absolute proof that I think selfishly therefore I am choosing for myself.”
He gestured to reference the sound of the intermingled screams that still went on unabated, “If those two assholes out there getting eaten alive doesn’t convince you of just how much I value you, I’m not sure what will.”
Carmen laughed at that unintended dark humor. She started the engines then taxied the plane out onto the long runway to accelerate for takeoff. “In time you’ll think of something a touch more romantic. The agonized death shrieks of cannibal rapists is not a conventional display of affection to be sure, not that I’m complaining, mind you. I’m not in any way ungrateful for you defending me nor do I find anything wrong with those wretches getting their well-deserved justice. My only intent was to give Hatchet a little joy that I believed would cost us nothing. What is his imagination when compared to you having me at your beck and call, and willingly so? If I have to be observed every time we go through decontamination, I would rather it was someone who thinks I’m a beautiful human being as he does. I won’t let it happen again.”
Gravewalkers: Dying Time Page 23
