Drillbot glanced up to see the new mist-tentacle creeping down over him. He panicked and reversed out of the tentacle’s reach, still holding Ginny Rex’s left side in his arms. The tentacle, however, merely changed course to dip down over the right half of Ginny Rex’s corpse, spraying the gore with mist. Drillbot cursed.
The blood clouded over with a thin layer of pink. Then the broken bones mended themselves in a flash of pink, and before he could even emit a clank or a whir, half of Drillbot’s mate stood upright, digging her toes furiously into the grass as she made ready to pounce.
Drillbot looked down at the skull and the pieces of Ginny Rex in his arms. They remained unanimated, and he said a silent thanks to his robotic deities for that mercy. His drill flew back into view and reattached itself to his arm. Drillbot gingerly placed the portion of his true love’s body that had not been reanimated upon the ground and rolled in front of it, putting himself as a shield between it and danger.
The blob and the half-corpse loomed over him. He activated his drills, and their lonely whirs sounded out across the field of battle.
Chapter 4
FLIP THE BOARD
Regular-Ginny grinned maniacally as she watched the dinosaur’s reanimated tail twitch. She glanced from it over to the robot. She formed two semi-truck sized spiked balls from the ends of a pair of tentacles and began swinging them round and round in the air, a pair of enlarged medieval morning stars ready for further acts of grotesque violence.
The robot aimed its drills at her and said, “[whir] Release Drillbot’s – CLACK – Drillbot’s – CLACK – Drillbot’s lady from your foul control, and Drillbot will – CLACK – will show mercy to you.”
Regular-Ginny guffawed. “I’m powered by a cosmic entity. You’re just a robot who has only succeeded in distracting me when you’ve taken me by surprise. Give me the other half of the beast so that I can make my new puppet whole, and I will show mercy to you.”
The robot’s engines roared, and then it replied, “[whir] Drillbot would die a thousand deaths before Drillbot – CLACK – before Drillbot – CLACK – before Drillbot would hand Drillbot’s love over to you. Drillbot, too, is – CLACK – is cosmically powered. You are not quite as special – CLACK – as special as you think you are.”
Regular-Ginny guffawed once more as the pink inside her tickled the back of her brain. She had not considered that the robot was anything other than a mindless killing machine, especially after watching it decimate so many of her puppets over the years. But to know that the robot felt love for the tyrannosaur filled her with a sense of excitement, for the tickle in her brain indicated to her that this information was something she could exploit.
“Your love, hmm?” said Regular-Ginny. She stretched a tentacle off into the distance, past the edge of the clearing that had served as housing for the shield generators and between a few skyscraper husks to where a brigade of demolished B.I.T. tanks lay on their sides. She grabbed one and yanked it back over to her side, holding it aloft in the air. She curled one of her pink tentacles inside of the metal weapon and wrapped the tentacle’s tip around the trigger on the tank’s turret. Like all the other B.I.T. tanks on the battlefield this day, this turret was modified to fire whatever B.I.T. disintegrating technology allowed the bureau to permanently eradicate members of the pink and blue armies. She aimed the barrel of the tank at the half of the beast that she had turned into a puppet, because she could not get a clear shot at the half that lay protected behind the robot. “You must know what kind of weapon this is. Now surrender, or I’ll kill the beast in a more permanent fashion.”
The robot lowered its drills.
“[whir] Fine. You – CLACK – You – CLACK – You win. Drillbot surrend-” said the robot, only to be interrupted by a giggling that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
The robot and Regular-Ginny glanced up to see a bright blue light zoom past overhead, the blue bear at its center. Its giggles transformed into words formed from solid light that spelled “Teeheehee!” in its wake, and these words broke apart into blue raindrops that fell upon the battlefield like a spring shower. Less than a second later, the blue bear crashed into the pink bear in midair. Pink and blue lightning exploded out from them as they crashed, reversed direction, and crashed into one another again. They snarled and bit and clawed at each other, and the world shook below them.
When Regular-Ginny and the robot returned their attention to each other, they found that tiny white flowers had sprouted across the ground between them where the blue bear’s raindrops had landed. Regular-Ginny was about to make a snide remark about them, but then she noticed an inconvenience: the left half of the dinosaur—the portion that she had not turned into a pink puppet—had been resurrected. It now stood upon its foot, and its exposed organs pulsated as it breathed heavily. This half of the dinosaur stroked the robot’s shoulder and licked the side of the robot’s head. In a raspy, barely audibly whisper, it said to the robot, “I’ll handle myself, my love. You stop the bitch who killed me.” And then the tyrannosaur roared in primal rage at the half of itself that had been transformed into a pink puppet.
The two resurrected halves of the dinosaur sprang forth and began fighting one another, the right half whipping its tail into the left half’s leg and tripping it, the left half sinking its teeth into the right’s tail and tearing it apart. They tumbled together onto the ground in a pile of teeth and claws and gore, ripping each other to shreds.
As Ginny parried the robot’s drills with tentacles—which she regrew over and over as the robot severed them—another noise in the sky distracted her, this one the cacophonous roar of an engine blasting at full speed. She glanced toward the sound and saw a black B.I.T. ship that was shaped like a banana with the wings of an eagle. It was careening toward the warring bears. She reacted on instinct, instantly growing a new tentacle the size of a sequoia and swiping at the ship with it. The ship barely dodged her attack. The hateful tickle in the back of her brain told her to pursue the ship at all costs.
But she resisted. She would pursue it soon. She needed only moments to rid herself of this damned robot once and for all. And if she could rid herself of the robot, she would be removing the one opponent that seemed to constantly hold her at a stalemate, and she would thus be creating for herself the slack to do her job as the Pink One’s Right Hand of Destruction without worrying about constant surprise attacks that resulted in continuous near-death scenarios.
As she twisted her head back down to face the robot, she stopped short when she noticed something in her peripheral. A whole new set of problems hovered in the air around her: The Death Cavalry. Its members must have been resurrected by the blue bear’s overhead flight, and its members were no longer pink puppets. They were floating toward her, their considerable murderous power ready to be unleashed on her pink blob from the flanks while the robot attacked her from the front.
She sensed the potential checkmate. However, she had always despised chess, ever since her stepfather had beaten her at it over and over and over as a kid. So, she decided to metaphorically flip the board, and metaphorically punch her opponent in the robotic groin while doing so.
She pulled the trigger on the tank, firing the disintegration bolt point blank into the tyrannosaur’s right half. Her blob wiggled slightly at the tank’s kick, and the vibration tickled her tummy, a feeling like riding a roller coaster. She giggled. The robot screamed in rage and agony. She fired again, this time at the tyrannosaur’s left side. Its head whipped over at the robot. Its red and bloodied lips attempted to mouth something to the robot, but it disappeared before it was able to finish.
The robot screamed once more, and amid the scream, something cracked and seemed to break inside of it. It leapt at her, and the robot’s rage and heartbreak shredded the hateful pink cocoon around her heart. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, she felt a sense of shame at her actions.
And then the pink inside her swirled, and once more, all emotions other than
hatred withered and died.
Chapter 5
THE RAGE OF DRILLBOT
DRILLBOT WATCHED GINNY Rex disintegrate. The image burned into his memory banks, and he would never forget it. Within fractions of a second, he experienced loss, shame, and grief, but as the ones and zeroes fired through his system, they flushed out everything but rage.
The liquids inside him boiled, and hot steam screamed as it sprang forth from every one of his orifices. Drillbot shrieked in anger, a noise so loud that the speaker behind the grates on his mouthpiece cracked. But that did not stop him, and his loud shriek transformed into a gurgling flash of electric energy two octaves lower than the pitch of his normal voice.
Time seemed to slow to a halt. His systems recognized every sound around him as though it were happening right on top of him and registered every tiny movement on the battlefield at a speed his processors had never experienced. All colors but an angry, spiteful red disappeared from his telescopic eyes. The ones and zeroes inside him spelled out in binary: RAGE and FURY and VENGEANCE.
He leapt at the hag inside the pink blob. She attempted to aim the B.I.T. tank at him and shoot him with its disintegration bolt, but he was too quick for her. He sliced through the machine and then severed the tentacle that held it aloft. Ginny then tried to block him with tentacle after tentacle, but he sliced them all away as soon as they appeared, and within milliseconds, he penetrated the pink blob itself. He drilled through it toward the meatbag at its center, his spiked wheels churning the pink while his drills bored through the solid blob.
The woman screamed something at him and swam backward away from him, but he slowed not at all, and in less than a second, he reached her. He shoved his right drill through her lower abdomen and his left drill through her empty eye socket. She went limp, but he ripped her in half, anyway, just like she had done to Ginny Rex. He shook her corpse from his drills.
The corpse sank toward the bottom of the blob. The pink blob began to melt from solid into liquid and flood the ground around the corpse of this horrid Ginny. The sudden loss of friction should have slowed Drillbot, but he instead fired out of the top of the blob like a bullet from a pink gun.
Though he had killed the woman in the blob, his rage subsided not at all. If anything, distance and time from the disintegration of his love only fueled his anger. His momentum as he left the blob carried him up into the air, where he stabbed his drill into the underside of a passing B.I.T. fighter jet. He climbed up onto its top and stabbed the pilot. As the jet shifted direction and dove toward the ground, Drillbot jumped from it and landed atop a nearby skyscraper.
A version of Art who was being carried through the air by seagulls flew into Drillbot’s view. This Art was one who had been passed back and forth between the blue and pink armies multiple times, and up until mere moments ago, had been a pink puppet that had been stomped to death by Ginny Rex. But he was now resurrected and once more a member of the Army of Life. Drillbot watched the Art’s mouth ask something about what he could do to help, but Drillbot saw only another target, only another meatbag who reminded him of his dead love. He leapt toward the meatbag and ripped him to shreds, afterward landing atop the skyscraper across the street.
Drillbot looked out across the smoldering battlefield. The bears continued fighting in the distance. Halfway between this building and the next, a black B.I.T. ship shaped like a gigantic banana with the wings of an eagle dropped something from its cargo hold. Drillbot growled and leapt toward the ship.
His drills stabbed into its side just as a white flash erupted on the ground, and just as white lightning engulfed the ship. Drillbot glanced down to find that he was no longer attached to the ship as it hovered above the battlefield, but rather was now attached to the ship as it jetted through the barrier between realities.
He dug through the ship’s hull and found himself in a small hold surrounded by B.I.T. marines. He hardly heard their screams as he used his drills to mine the life from them like it was some terribly insignificant commodity buried within their flesh. He heard voices drifting down at him from an open hatch at the top of a nearby ladder. He raced up it, and when he found the hatch too small to fit through, he ripped it open wider with his drills.
Drillbot emerged onto the bridge of the ship. A man sat bound to a chair facing away from Drillbot. His hands were encased in plaster. Wrathful steam whistled from Drillbot as he pierced the meatbag in the back with his right drill, stabbing through the entire chair to rip through the man’s torso. Meanwhile, a woman who looked identical to the hag in the blob—only dressed in a B.I.T. agent’s uniform—turned to face him.
He saw the fear in her eyes. But instead of giving in to her fear, she nodded in acceptance of her fate and acted before he could kill her. She twisted a dial on the ship’s control panel as hard as she could. She then slapped her eagle across its back. As it fired a bolt of lightning into a short metal pole sticking up from the control panel, she simultaneously shot the metal pole with her disintegration pistol.
A loud squelch erupted from the pole. The pole blurred out of existence. Then it appeared back in place. And then it turned black. The control panel around it melted. Drillbot rolled over to the woman, dispatching both her and the eagle with a single swipe of his drill. He stared at her face as she fell to the metal floor. Her face looked identical to the woman who had killed his love. Rage roared through his internal processors, demanding to be satisfied. He stabbed her corpse. And then he stabbed it again. And again. Over and over.
On about the dozenth stab, time seemed to catch up to Drillbot. Overwhelming grief wedged its way into the forefront of his processors, overpowering his rage and cramming it back into the recesses of his internal code. He shuddered and wept, and tiny bolts fell from the edges of his telescopic eyes as he cried. They clanged to the metal floor.
He looked up at the view screen. Reality after reality appeared and disappeared on the screen in front of him. He plugged in to a panel on the side of the bridge and communicated with the ship’s CPU. He nodded when he understood the now-dead B.I.T. woman’s tactic.
As her final act, she had caused the ship to continuously jump from one reality to another, staying in each for only a fraction of a second before jumping to the next. Her shot fired into the metal pole on the control panel warped reality in such a way that the Multiverse understood every jump all as a single jump. Thus, the single lightning bolt from the eagle would be power enough to send Drillbot careening from one reality to the next for eternity.
He sighed. He turned to get the lay of the ship now that he was calmer and no longer felt like a machine built only for shredding flesh.
Shame then overcame him as he recognized the dead man in the cabin, the man who he had killed via enraged back-stabbing. The corpse was his former master—his creator—lying splayed out on the floor, the constraints that had bound him to his chair ripped apart during Drillbot’s attack.
Drillbot let out an anguished shriek and fell onto his side. He allowed the cold grip of despair to fill him. He stared out the view screen and let his mind wander to fond memories of Ginny Rex. But every memory transformed into a twisted vision of her corpse next to his former master’s, and he cried.
Chapter 6
DEATH’S NOT ALWAYS FAIR
Regular-Ginny sighed as the pink within her veins pulled her dismembered body back together. When it had become clear that the robot had reached her and that she would be unable to escape or fend it off, she prepared herself mentally for the worst.
It had actually been less painful than she had expected. It hurt when the drill entered her abdomen, sure, but when the other drill entered her brain, it must have cut away all her pain receptors or something, because she did not even feel herself get ripped in half.
She had at that moment decided to play dead so that she could return to fight another day. As part of this ploy, she willed her pink blob to transform from a solid gelatinous state into a liquid state. It flooded unceremoniously onto the g
round as though the battlefield had abruptly entered some sort of weird, pink monsoon season. The tactic seemed to have worked, for the robot left her body where it lay broken and shattered upon the ground. Without even a second glance, the robot dashed away to continue its carnage-spree elsewhere.
The pink that filled her veins had then gone right to work. It set her bones and pulled her two halves together. It filled in the now-missing gray matter in her brain. She realized in a flood of sadness that she could no longer recall much from a ten-year span of her childhood. These memories must have been drilled away when the spike entered her skull. However, the pink within her kindly replaced any now-missing memories with recollections of hatred and grotesque imagery of genocide. After a couple moments, Ginny no longer remembered that any memories were missing at all. She instead longed only to continue her spiteful duties.
However, just as she formed some new tentacles to pull herself up onto her feet, and just as she began regrowing her blob, and just as she was preparing to kill the resurrected Death Cavalry all over again and turn them once more into pink puppets, an explosion rocked the battlefield and a bright white light filled her vision.
Regular-Ginny found that she could not move. As a matter of fact, nothing around her was moving, either. She tried to sigh, but she could not. She tried to call for help, but she could not.
An image of the Pink One appeared in her mind’s eyes. It said, “Right Hand of Destruction, the B.I.T. has used a weapon with extra-powerful hoodoo. Now Me and Ginny and everything here be unable to move.”
What was this weapon? How do we stop it? Ginny thought back at the image of the Pink One.
“It be a bomb that freezes time.”
Ginny felt a pain in her chest, but she could not look down at it, could not touch it to find out what was wrong. The Pink One tsked at her in her brain. “Freeze time means pink no longer be flowing in Ginny’s veins. Pink in veins be staying still. Me hoodoo work in Ginny because of flowing, and no flowing means me hoodoo no longer work. No flowing means Ginny can’t be kept alive by Me, and if Ginny no alive, then we deal no longer intact.”
The Endless War That Never Ends Page 23
