Manic Monday: (Dane Monday 1)

by Dennis Liggio

  She smiled too. “Good, now I can finally have a heart attack.”

  Dane placed his foot on one of the robots' chests. He leaned forward. The robot tipped and fell to the floor with a clatter.

  "We should write down this frequency,” said Abby.

  “Sure,” said Dane, “but Honnenheim will likely change it. Again. Still, you did good. I was beginning to think we weren’t going to make it.”

  “Don’t tell me that!” she said. “I was assured there was some Dane Monday Backup Plan.”

  “In this case,” he said, “all I had was Haunt Honnenheim From The Grave!”

  “I’m not really fond of that as Plan B,” she said.

  “No, me neither,” he said. He tipped over another robot with the fireaxe, then tossed it down. He had cleared enough of a path to get out and his arms were tired.

  They wandered around the warehouse, looking for an exit, but found only the large automated door the car drove in. Honnenheim had truly designed this place to be a deathtrap with no exits except the one they came in.

  Dane touched the button next to the door and it slowly began rising. The adrenaline in both of them had died down, so they felt tired and weak. They smiled at each other, but did not feel like small talk.

  “I am annoyed by your continued persistence, Monday,” said a familiar voice that made them both cringe.

  They turned, seeing one of the robots standing behind them. It was the one whose plasma cannon Dane had destroyed with the axe. The siren was now a yellow color and spun more slowly. Honnenheim’s annoyed face was on the screen.

  “After your previous jamming attack on my poor minions, I decided I needed a better failsafe,” said Honnenheim. “So I rigged this particular R-37 with a second activation frequency. In the case you jammed one frequency, this could still be activated.”

  Dane sighed but didn’t respond.

  “Unfortunately, I see that you have already defaced the weaponry on this unit,” continued Honnenheim. “No matter. We can exchange precision for something more powerful. Robot, code Omega Delta Six Five One Romeo.”

  “Calculating…” intoned the robot.

  Everyone sighed, including Honnenheim.

  “Complete. Payload armed. Self destruct sequence initiated.”

  Abby was the first to gain her voice. “Oh. Crap.”

  Dane continued to jam on the Open button for the door control, as if that would make it go quicker.

  There was a whirring from the robot. An audible siren started up. “Warning siren activated. Attention: If you can hear the siren you are in the blast zone.”

  “That’s never good,” said Dane.

  The door was barely three feet off the ground. Dane grabbed Abby and pushed her down under it before stumbling through it himself. Outside they could still hear the siren.

  They weren't free just yet. There was still the fence which surrounded the entire building. Dane considered looking for the switch, but he remembered how slowly it opened last time.

  “Climb the fence!” shouted Dane.

  Abby might have had a response, but it was lost as they ran for their lives. They leapt onto the fence, climbing as if their lives depended on it, which in this case was true. At the top they tossed themselves over. They had barely hit the ground when they heard the explosion.

  They were thrown forward by the shockwave. They were pressed to the ground, all sound disappearing for the second time in the day. A cloud of gray ash and dark soot swept over and past them. A second later debris started raining down. Luckily no large pieces of building fell in their immediate area. The shower of pebbles which fell on Dane was pretty typical based off his experience. But for Abby, it was a reminder of how close to death they were. Again.

  Contrary to the robot’s message, the explosion did not nearly have as large blast area as the siren's audible area. Even with this underperformance, the explosion took out a significant portion of the warehouse. What was left of the warehouse was now on fire. Dark smoke billowed up from it.

  Dane and Abby watched from the ground, staring at the second building in one day that had exploded behind them.

  Abby spoke first, spitting ash off her lips and wiping her face, which just smeared the soot on it. She wasn't even sure if he could hear her, but she said it anyway. “I hate you, Dane Monday.”

  Time for a Break

  Dane watched the news footage of the smoking wreckage of Honnenheim's deathtrap warehouse on the television above the bartender. News anchor Tug Johnson was on hand with a panel of experts. After two buildings exploded in a single day, they were now suggesting the actions were a large scale terrorist assault on New Avalon. The only reason the news wasn't a bigger feeding frenzy of sensationalism was the fact that there were no victims. Both buildings were empty. Even still, the networks were getting the most out of the limited information available. For example, they were spending a great deal of time talking about the "strange electronic parts" found in the rubble of the warehouse. Tug Johnson held a tenuous grasp as ringleader in a strange circus of talking heads with even stranger theories, often specialists trotted out for informal on-air questioning. Even the news ticker at the bottom of the screen seemed more urgent than usual, the writer using a preponderance of exclamation marks.

  After fleeing Honnenheim's warehouse, Dane and Abby had made their way on foot through the Husks neighborhood to the highway. It was somewhat of a long walk, but they didn't want to stay near the smoking wreck that was the warehouse. Usually Dane was unconcerned about the explosions left in his wake, but even he agreed that two in the course of a day would make him a prime suspect for police questioning if anyone actually had a way to connect him to both locations. He didn't think they left evidence at either, but the last thing they needed was to appear on some overzealous onlooker's uploaded phone footage.

  Though they were fleeing the area, they weren't enthusiastic about getting in another cab. Luckily, that wasn't a concern for the beginning of their walk, as they would not be able to get a cab so deep in the Husks. Some of the squatters had come out to see the smoke, but otherwise it was a desolate area, long left unused. The Husks and the Ville had once been one large unified area. When the Avalon mine had gotten big, developer Ellis Husker and his partner Javier Armand had the idea of cutting into the Avalon trade. The ore would travel down to Avalon, cross the river, get processed, then stored, then it was shipped down the river. Husker decided to cut out the middleman and the Avalon taxes by building his own town right next to Avalon on the other side of the river, closer to the mine. It was a constructed town. On the north east side were warehouses, processing plants, and factories to receive and work the ore. On the west side near the river, there were warehouses and docks to ship the ore out. And on the south side, the greater mass of the town, there were lower cost suburbs to house all the workers.

  It was a great business... for a while. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Avalon used its power of imminent domain to annex Huskerville as part of the Avalon metro area. Nominally a suburb, it was subject to Avalon's government. The second blow came in the 1920s at the hands of Roger Carmichael. As he was planning highways for Avalon, he wanted a large highway which went out east, to what is now the Avalon airport. Carmichael, never a fan of Husker or Huskerville, decided the highway would take the most direct route - straight through the middle of Huskerville. The industrial side and a small amount of the residential area were cut off on the north while the rest of the suburbs ended up to the south of the highway. The unity of Huskerville was shattered, and the crime rate that was rising from the mining slow down was now skyrocketing as the community was divided in two.

  Nobody but historians called it Huskerville anymore. North of the highway, past the strip malls and a smattering of rundown housing was the Husks - all the old warehouses and factories that were now left empty and silent. It was an obvious nickname that seemed more appropriate every year. To the south of the highway was the low income suburb called The Vi
lle. The south side had fared better, because housing was always needed. But those that had lived there long - the grandparents and great grandparents - had never forgiven Carmichael for that highway.

  Dane and Abby ended up at this highway. Though there were strip malls on both sides, in an unspoken agreement, they walked under the highway to the safer Ville side. In one of those strip malls, they found a corporate bar-slash-bistro that catered to airport travelers and some of the residents of The Ville.

  Abby returned from the bathroom more composed that when they entered. When they had entered the quiet bar-slash-bistro, she had immediately fled to the ladies room, needing time to wash her face and stare at herself in the mirror. Dane still had soot on his face and was not self conscious about it at all. He had put in a drink order for them and then settled in for the news report.

  As she sat down, Dane poured her a glass of beer from the pitcher and pushed it in front of her. Abby's nerves were still rattled from the robot attack and getting nearly blown up for a second time in one day, but she didn't immediately reach for the glass.

  "It's three in the afternoon on a weekday," she said, nodding at the beer. It was probably around two hours since the explosion. When you've nearly been blown up twice, life doesn't seem quite so urgent and you take your time.

  "Trust me," said Dane, "you need it."

  Abby reluctantly took a drink of the beer. Though not usually a beer drinker, she admitted that it helped. The taste was terrible, but after the alcohol hit her, she could relax a little easier.

  Dane pushed toward her a tray of jalapeno poppers he had ordered off the appetizer section of the menu. "They're not bad," he said. "And you should eat something."

  Abby took a tentative bite, but most of the filling fell out the side of the popper. She put it down on her plate. She looked over to Dane, who was happily sipping a cup of coffee he had ordered in addition to the pitcher of beer.

  "I thought you promised me no more explosions," said Abby.

  "I said probably no more explosions," said Dane. "And there probably wouldn't have been... except that there was. I can't control these things! And... and the good news is that this means that it's extremely unlikely there will be any more! Two random explosions is unlikely, but three is like, infinitely more unlikely! Probability, right?"

  "That does little to console me," she said sourly.

  "But think of it! You've seen robots! Magic ceremonies! The whoosh of an explosion! The death of a building! Plasma cannons! Even an attempt on your life!"

  "Two attempts on my life," she interjected.

  "Two attempts on your life!" said Dane enthusiastically. "And yet you live to tell the tale! Don't you feel alive? Doesn't food taste better, the air smell cleaner?"

  "This food is terrible," she said, indicating the sadly gutted jalapeno popper on her plate. "The air in here smells like smoke and beer. The only way I feel alive is I am tired and my back hurts."

  "Mine too, actually," he said. "Explosions are exhausting, to be honest. Exhilarating, yes, but also exhausting. Right after you feel great and there's a buzz! But not long after, everything crashes. I miss the adrenaline."

  "You seem to live on adrenaline."

  "Yeah, isn't it awesome?"

  Abby simply rolled her eyes, not wanting to follow that conversation to its inevitable conclusion. They lapsed into a short silence staring at the televisions that hung around the bar, all of which were turned to Channel 5's speculation of the two explosions overlaid with footage of the smoking wrecks.

  "It was somewhat exciting," admitted Abby.

  "And what a story you will have to tell!" said Dane.

  "But we still need to be alive to tell the stories," she said. "A good story is useless if we go up with the building."

  "We'll just need to be more careful! From now on, we'll check all our drivers for robot-like features!"

  "I don't think that will be enough," she said. "Still, if someone is trying to kill us, we must be onto something with that statue."

  Dane chuckled. "Funny you should say that. I know why you say that. It's like in the old private eye films - Bogart would only get beat up when he was on the right track. So unfortunately, I'm going to have to burst your bubble."

  "What? So people just randomly try to kill you? Is this part of your weirdness nexus thing?"

  "Not randomly, no. What I do know is that Honnenheim and his robots have nothing to do with Avalon's Hope. Honnenheim is just a mad scientist type and strictly a no-magic guy. He doesn't think magic exists. 'Only science!'" said Dane, in a decent imitation of Honnenheim's voice. "So all that was just a revenge thing, not the statue or Avalon's Hope."

  "Revenge?"

  "Well, I did blow up his death ray yesterday," said Dane.

  Abby shook her head. "I'm beginning to wonder if any of this is about saving people. I think the story here might be better titled Dane Monday: Serial Arsonist."

  "I'll point out that in none of these instances did I actually cause the explosion," he said.

  "But what about the death ray?"

  "In neither case today did I cause the explosion," Dane corrected. "Besides, that was for a good cause! I was helping the world! We don't want anyone having a death ray! It's against the Geneva convention!"

  "The Geneva convention has a clause about death rays?" Abby asked.

  “If the Geneva convention acknowledged the existence of death rays, it would have a clause about them.”

  Abby rolled her eyes. "Does this revenge thing happen often? Because that's what's making your job so dangerous."

  "Honestly, revenge is rarely a motive for any of my enemies," said Dane. "We might have a brisk back and forth of words and hostilities, but it's never knock-down-drag-out revenge. I'm beginning to wonder if Honnenheim is off his meds. Maybe he's taking the death ray thing too seriously. I'm not sure. But none of the enemies on my list spend much time on revenge."

  "The fact that you even have a list of enemies kind of shows the danger you work with," Abby pointed out.

  "I think you may be blowing it out of proportion," said Dane. "And maybe that's my fault. Maybe I... exaggerate things a bit."

  "Oh you think so?" said Abby sarcastically.

  Dane shrugged. "Here's the thing. I'm not James Bond. I'm not a superhero. I'm not Batman. I'm just a guy who happens to be in the right place at the right time with the right skills to deal with a problem that most of the world is neither equipped for nor even wanting to deal with. Nobody wants to deal with sorcerers or mad scientists. Nobody except me, so I get the job by default. Which is great, because I love it! But in the interest of reasonableness, I acknowledge that there is the possibility of getting in over my head. So in the rare cases it gets beyond what one man can do, I hand it off to the authorities... or I try to. Whether they listen to me is another factor. But there's less danger than you might think. It's not like I'm parachuting into volcanic lairs with squads of CIA agents in wetsuits."

  “Not even once?” teased Abby.

  “Haven’t worked with CIA, haven’t dealt with volcanic lairs,” said Dane. "That's not saying I wouldn't want to see a volcanic lair..."

  “What about parachuting?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “...but it's a long and involved story I don't like rehashing. I was dealing with the ghost of D.B. Cooper and I hated that guy.”

  "What? A ghost?" she said.

  "Yeah," said Dane. "What, did you think magic and killer death robots are real, but not ghosts?"

  "I guess I hadn't thought of it... this stuff is new for me," she said.

  "True," said Dane. "I have the advantage of having grown up with this. Well, and I have robots shooting at me on a regular basis."

  "I still can't believe you don't carry a gun," said Abby. "Not even a ray gun or something."

  "I get by on my wits and what's here in the satchel, which helps more often than not. Today was an off day. And it's not usually even so dangerous! Sometimes my job is to go to an ant
ique shop and buy something before someone else. Just to get it out of circulation."

  "Out of circulation? Why?"

  "Oh you know, they have movies about this! Some antique is possessed by demons, it unleashes the apocalypse, vaporizes random bystanders, and so on. Typical Pandora's box stuff. It's basically the equivalent of old WW2 grenades ending up in a second hand shop and nobody knowing that they're still live. So I show up and grab them - the magical artifacts, not the grenades. Grenades are someone else's job. Occasionally I get a new toy out of it."

  "How do you afford all your stuff? How do you even pay rent? Do you have another job? Do you get mysterious cash payouts in the mail? Or are you just fabulously rich? Are you Tony Stark?"

  Dane chuckled. "None of that. In the same way that whatever force in the universe puts me wherever I need to be, I have good enough financial luck to get by. I find myself winning sweepstakes I didn't know I entered or having bank errors in my favor. Friends I haven't seen in years show up to buy my dinner. That keeps me from being homeless, but to keep myself in coffee, I do have to sell some stuff."

  "What do you have to sell that anyone would even want?" Abby asked.

  He grabbed the strap of his satchel and wiggled it. "Salvage! Random monster parts, robot pieces, computer boards, magic artifacts, rare pieces of impossible technology! People pay money for that stuff!"

  "But..." said Abby, her mind racing with the idea, "how do you know you're not basically selling it back to the person you got it from? These evil... people, I guess, got their stuff from somewhere. What if you're just taking it from one bad person and selling it to another?"

  "And that's why you probably have much more common sense than me!" Dane said with a smile. "That actually took me more than a year to realize! I really only learned it when I was shot by the same laser gun I had sold months before! It even had the same nick in the barrel from where I knocked it out of the henchman's hand! After that, I started paying more attention to what I sold. I've been focusing on selling just harmless things or just single pieces of something bigger. I'd like to think that the nonlethal technology I sell eventually trickles down into mainstream science and ultimately makes the world a better place. The magic stuff? Well, I hope someone is using it and wishing for world peace."