The Doomsday Brunette

by John Zakour

  This was the first time that Tony had ever seen the food-spewing fountain in person and he was a little awestruck by it (awestruck or disgusted, I’m not really sure, either way he froze at the sight of it).

  “What in Gates name?”

  I was on the ground, still stunned by the lasagna hit I had taken to the head but I was coherent enough to know that we were still in trouble. I cast a quick glance around the courtyard but saw no sign of the hovercraft.

  “HARV, where’s the hover?”

  “I’m at the northeastern corner of the courtyard, boss. I can’t get any closer without creating a scene. The crowd’s too heavy.”

  I turned back toward the alley that we’d come from and saw the hookers, the accountant and the two Elvis bouncers emerge and scan the crowd in search of us.

  “Tony,” I yelled, shaking his arm to get his attention away from the fountain, “HARV and the hover are in the northeast corner. Let’s go.”

  We got to our feet and, keeping our heads down as much as possible, started making our way through the crowd. Unfortunately the thin Elvis spotted us (we were the only ones in the area not wearing raincoats) and he and the hookers started after us.

  “Tony, hurry!”

  We pushed our way through the throng more desperately but the accountant came at us from the side. He jumped on Tony’s back like an angry squirrel on a hard-to-crack nut. I pulled him off and threw him into a small gathering of Japanese tourists who were feasting on the cascade of udon noodles that were spewing from the fountain like a silly string fireworks display.

  The two hookers were on us next, one came at my knees like a football chop blocker, while the other hit me square in the shoulder with her purse. I went down hard and lost track of Tony. I tried to get up but one of the hookers kicked me in the face with a stiletto heel and sent me back down to the pavement.

  “We can do the rough stuff if that’s what you’re into, baby.”

  She kicked at me again but I caught her foot this time and tossed her backward smack into the other hooker and their garter belts got tangled up together as they fell. I almost stayed to watch them as they rolled around on the pavement trying to get unhooked from one another but I had more pressing matters at hand.

  “I hate Vegas.”

  I turned to look for Tony but instead saw only thin Elvis. Well, all I actually saw was his fist, which hit me square in the face and sent me staggering, but I assume that the rest of him was attached to it. I fell back down to the pavement and looked up just in time to see him aiming his blaster at me.

  “You should know, mister, here in Vegas, we don’t like people who don’t like Foraa,” he said, as his finger tightened on the trigger.

  Suddenly, he was side-swiped by what looked to be a few hundred kilos of flying ravioli. The airborne deluge knocked him over and covered him, neatly immobilizing him in a pile of tasty pasta, zesty sauce and a tempting melange of spicy cheese and meat-substitute fillings. I turned and saw Tony standing by the fountain. He had commandeered one of the feeder hoses and had used its victual output to drop the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee bomb on my would-be killer.

  “And you should know, mister,” Tony quipped, “that I never liked Elvis.” Then he helped me up and motioned in the direction of where HARV and the hovercraft, waited just a few meters away. “Come on, let’s get to the roof.”

  We jumped into the hover and HARV brought us quickly to the hoverport which was about two-thirds of the way up the casino. After the chaos of the fountain buffet, the quiet of the high altitude was refreshing, but as we climbed out of the hover and looked at the city spread out before us, we felt anything but refreshed. Pitch black storm clouds encircled the Oblivion like an atmospheric smoke ring. The lightning and driving rain they created stood in stark, startling contrast to the calm immediately surrounding the building. The Oblivion was an island in a storm.

  “I don’t like this,” I mumbled.

  “And don’t ask me to explain it scientifically,” HARV said. “Because I can’t.”

  “Zach,” Tony said as he pulled a laser rifle from the trunk, “where’s the entrance?”

  “Over there,” I said, pointing to a small elevator booth that at the edge of the hoverport. “Ditch the hover, HARV. We don’t want it drawing attention. But keep it close by. We may need a fast escape.”

  “Gotcha, boss.”

  The hover took to the air, leaving Tony and I alone. I popped my gun into hand and we walked quickly toward the elevator.

  “Thanks for the save back there,” I said as we walked.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “You were kidding when you said you didn’t like Elvis, right?”

  “Let’s not go into that now, Zach.”

  “Oh, man, you mean really don’t like Elvis?”

  Tony pressed the button on the side of the booth and we heard the elevator start to rise.

  “He’s just not my style, that’s all?”

  “But everybody likes Elvis.”

  A bell sounded as the elevator arrived.

  “His music’s too simplistic for me,” Tony said, turning toward me. “And it’s derivative.”

  “Derivative of what? The man was a pioneer.”

  “He was reliant on the work of the bluesmen of the era,” Tony said. “All the good rock and roll singers of the day were.”

  “So you admit he was a good rock and roll singer.”

  “Don’t start with me Zach.”

  The elevator doors opened and I saw Fat Elvis, in the car. He held a laser rifle in his hands and it was leveled directly at Tony. His fat lip curled into a sneer, his hips swiveled just a little and I saw him mouth the words “thank you, thank you very much” as he pulled the trigger.

  “Tony, look out!”

  I dove and pushed Tony aside as Fat Elvis fired. The blast hit me point-blank, full in the chest and I felt my armor surge as it tried to absorb and disperse the energy. A few of the circuits overloaded and blew out, sending sparks right through my coat. It was a near thing, but my armor withstood the deadly blast. The problem was that it couldn’t absorb the sheer force and that sent me right off the edge of the hoverport.

  “Zach,” Tony screamed.

  I felt the damp air rush past me, slapping my face like an angry wet hand, as I did the thirty-two feet per second, per second back flop toward the street, thirty-three stories below.

  “I’m maxing up the armor, boss,” HARV yelled frantically. “And I’m pulling electricity from your body to create a force field to cushion your fall. It’s just like that time in the duck pond. This won’t be a problem.”

  I knew he was lying, of course, but I appreciated the sentiment. With or without armor, thirty stories of falling followed by pavement meant only one thing; that my epitaph was about to become “lived fast, died young and left an ugly smear.”

  “Boss, are you listening to me?”

  All I could do was smile as the pavement grew closer like the fat doorman of death waving me past the velvet rope of the hereafter entrance. Then, suddenly, a warm glow swept through my body. I saw a white flare erupt before my eyes that I first thought was my life flashing before me, and then a tunnel of brilliant white light unfolded. Admittedly, this all seemed a lot more new age than I imagined it would be, but when one is so close to death, you tend to go with the flow.

  “Boss?”

  Then I was engulfed in darkness.

  50

  I awoke to the low hum of engines and the feeling of cold, hard floor beneath my back. I opened my eyes and found myself in a large, barren room, lit only in spots by tiny purple lights.

  “If this is heaven,” I mumbled. “It is highly over-rated.”

  “Don’t be silly, Buttlebug,” a familiar voice said. “You’re not in heaven.”

  I turned my head and saw my Mom kneeling beside me.

  “Oh that explains it. I’ve been sent to hell.”

  She smiled and slowly helped me into a sitting position.


  “Now is that anyway to greet the person who just saved your life?”

  “Where are we?”

  “A space ship, dear, fully cloaked and in geosynchronous orbit three hundred and ten kilometers over New Vegas.”

  Needless to say that there were hundreds of questions swimming through the morass of my confused brain at that nano. The first one to reach my mouth was…

  “What are we doing on a space ship?”

  “Having a tender mother-son nano.”

  “Yes, this is hell,” I said, rubbing the aching joints in my back. “How did I get here?”

  “Teleportation beam. We locked on to you the nano you entered Vegas. We just needed to wait for a time when your disappearance wouldn’t be noticed.”

  I closed my eyes and sent a quick thought to HARV.

  “HARV, get a fix on our position and let me know what the DOS is going on here?”

  There was no answer.

  “Your cerebral interface with HARV won’t be functional aboard this ship, Zach,” Mom said, pointing to the ceiling. “You’re under a nullifier.”

  “How do you know about HARV?”

  “Please, Buttlebug. A mother can tell when her son has a super-computer wired into his brain.”

  “Mom, you thought HARV was my boyfriend.”

  “I was just having some fun with you,” she said. “I do have a sense of humor you know.”

  “This is too weird. Where did you get teleportation beam technology? Where did you get a space ship? For that matter, when did you learn the meaning of the word geosynchronous?”

  “Zach, dear,” she said. “There isn’t a lot of time to waste now, so you’re going to have to understand and accept some things very quickly in order to get through this. Do you understand that?”

  “Mom, you’re scaring me.”

  “That’s a good start,” she said. “They brought you here as a favor to me.”

  “They who?”

  On cue, three tall, thin forms stepped out of the darkness and into the purple haze of the tiny spotlights overhead. They were pale, hairless, and very large of forehead. Their huge dark eyes were pupil-less and the sound they made as they approached was that of a dozen whistling tea kettles.

  Gladians.

  The planets Glad-7 and Glad-9 are two of Earth's three inter-planetary trading partners. Together the two planets supply earth with roughly sixty-five percent of the energy it consumes. In exchange for this energy, we give them dirt and I don’t mean that metaphorically. We literally give them dirt, hundreds of kilotons of it every year. We don't ask what they do with it. Frankly, we don't really care, so long as we get the energy we so desperately require.

  Needless to say, Earth-Gladian commerce is vitally important to all three planets but, even though our societies are so dependant upon one another, relations between Earth and the Gladians have always been at arm’s length and contact between the races, by design, has been kept to a minimum. Everyone on earth, for instance, knows where our energy comes from, but very few people have ever seen an actual Gladian. There are no diplomatic envoys, there’s no free exchange of ideas and there’s no tourist trade. They’re aliens, after all, with customs, biologies and beliefs that are radically different from our own. So the World Council’s philosophy has traditionally been to keep a tight leash on interplanetary mingling and study it from all angles before going forward. The fear is that unchecked intermingling could ruin relations, or create environmental and/or biological disasters. Truth to tell, I’ve heard they’re most afraid of Gladian pop music becoming popular here on earth (it’s rumored to sound uncomfortably like Yoko Ono Ska – but that might just be a myth made up to scare young children).

  The official line on the Gladians is that they keep to themselves. There are rumors, however, that they have planted a number of agents within our society to study our ways and monitor our actions. None of that’s been proven though so most discussion on the topic tends to take place in the Oliver Stone/Chris Carter Memorial Full Immersion Conspiracy Chat Room and Sushi Bar (still, the folks there have been right before).

  In all my travels I’d only seen a Gladian once. I hit it with my car a few years ago (long story). My car was confiscated (as was that particular stretch of road) and I’m told that the World Councils of Earth as well as Glad-7 and Glad-9 still have open files on me.

  “Mom, what’s going on?”

  “Foraa Thompson is a threat, Zach. The Gladians have been monitoring the situation for some time and they feel that she needs to be taken out of commission.”

  “How could Foraa pose a threat to the Gladians?”

  “They rely on our dirt, dear. They need to protect their interests,” she said, helping me to my feet. “They had hoped that earth would be able to handle this situation internally. At the nano, that doesn’t seem very likely, so they’re stepping in, covertly of course.”

  “Stepping in?”

  “With a very large shoe.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “This ship is twenty-five kilometers long and weighs approximately twenty-four million kilotons.”

  “And…?”

  “And they plan to drop it on top of Foraa.”

  “They’re going to crash the ship into Vegas?”

  “That’s the ‘big shoe’ that I mentioned earlier.”

  “It’ll destroy the city.”

  “Actually, it will destroy most of the western portion of North America, what with the fault lines and all,” she said. “It will also create a cloud of dust in the atmosphere blotting out much of the sunlight for the foreseeable future. Crops will die, leading to global starvation. There will be radical shifts in climate, which will create environmental catastrophies on a global scale. It could possibly bring on another ice age but I’m not certain of that. I can have them check if you like.”

  “I thought they were trying to protect their trade interests.”

  “Earth’s dirt will still be here,” Mom said. “We’ll probably be even more eager to sell it to them than before.”

  “Earth won’t give them anything after what they’re about to do.”

  “Earth won’t know, Zach. This ship is composed almost entirely of organic material. It will seem to the world at large that the devastation was caused by a meteor crash.”

  “They’re going to make it look like an accident?”

  “The Gladians pride themselves on their subtlety.”

  “No one’s going to believe that.”

  “You don’t hear anyone complaining about the meteor crash in the Yucatan a few hundred million years ago, do you?”

  “That was them?”

  “Apparently, the dinosaurs were getting a little uppity.”

  “Mom, we have to stop them.”

  “No,” she said. “We have to stop Foraa Thompson.”

  “But…”

  “Trust me, Zach, if she gets the chance Foraa will do more harm to earth than the Gladians could dream of causing.”

  “How do I stop her?”

  Mom shrugged. “You mean other than dropping a space ship on her? I don’t know, Buttlebug, that’s for you to figure out.”

  One of the Gladians stepped forward from the others and let out a series of high-pitched whistles. Mom turned, rolled her eyes and whistled back to him.

  “He says that they’ll be monitoring you closely. And that you’re not to tell anyone about their plan. They feel that would ruin trade relations. Gladians are such worry warts.”

  The Gladian whistled again in agitation.

  “Well, you are,” Mom said. She turned back to me. “Bottom line, if you tell anyone about their presence here, they’ll crash the ship immediately.”

  “You speak their language?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be much good here if I didn’t, would I?”

  “When did you learn Gladian?”

  “Don’t you remember me whistling around the house when you were younger?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t
know that was Gladian. I just thought you were tone deaf.”

  The Gladian whistled at us again. Mom replied.

  “There’s not a lot of time, dear. You’ll have two hours from now to stop Foraa. If you can’t do it by then, the Gladians will crash the ship.”

  “Why are they giving me this chance at all?”

  “Out of deference to me,” she said.

  “Don’t take this personally, Mom, but why would they listen you?”

  “I have some pull.”

  “Pull?”

  Mom sighed and shrugged her shoulders a bit. “Think of me as a consiglieri.”

  “What?”

  “You know, in the Mafia stories, the person who advises the family?”

  “I know what a consiglieri is.”

  “Well, that’s me. Whenever there’s a problem between the Gladians and us, the Gladians sort of, come to me first.”

  “You’re their earth liaison?”

  “Yes, that’s a good way to describe it.”

  “Why would the World Council hire you for that?”

  “I don’t work for the World Council, dear. They don’t even know I exist. I work for the Gladians.”

  “You what? How long have you been doing this?”

  “Almost forty years.”

  “Forty years? And you never told me?”

  “They made me sign a non-disclosure agreement. Honestly, I thought you’d just figure it out. The equipment was right out there in the open.”

  One of the Gladians let out an angry high-pitched whistle at Mom which jogged my memory a little.

  “Wait a nano. The tea kettle?”

  “It broadcast interspace audio on an encrypted frequency. It did visuals too when you weren’t around.”

  “You spent the past forty years talking to aliens through your tea kettle and you never told me?

  “Oh, don’t make it sound so sinister.”

  “How could that not sound sinister? DOS, Mom what else have you been keeping from me?”

  “Isn’t this enough?”

  “This is more than enough.”

  “I’m sorry I kept this from you,” she said. “But I’m telling you now. That should count for something”

  “Yes, thank you for coming clean with me two hours before your friends destroy North America.”