Hard-core Murder

by Paul Kenyon

  The Baroness gestured impatiently. "Take off that costume."

  Puzzled, Skytop began to unbuckle the leather bands of his scanty outfit. He unwound the knee-length sandal straps.

  "Give them to me."

  Skytop handed them over. "You want my jockstrap too?"

  "No, you can keep that. Help me make a sling out of these straps and leather bands. Sort of like a bosun's chair."

  Skytop's wise Indian hands got busy. In a few moments he had a leather swing that could be suspended from two straps. The Baroness tied the straps to the feet of the pantyhose she'd found among her equipment. She sat in the webbing of the seat, tucking her little gold-plated automatic beside her. She picked up the can of hair spray.

  "So long, Joe," she said, jabbing the nozzle of the can into the valve in the crotch of the pantyhose.

  There was a hiss of escaping hydrogen. She prayed there'd be enough left. It would take, she calculated, about 2000 cubic feet of hydrogen to give her the necessary lift.

  The legs of the pantyhose filled out. The atactic polymer kept its basic shape as it stretched. It was a beautiful pair of legs.

  The legs stood up and grew taller. The Baroness sat between them in her leather sling. She felt a definite tug. But there still wasn't enough lift.

  The hydrogen continued to hiss. The legs stretched. The feet were as big as sports cars on either side of her. She looked upward. The pantyhose had become a giant balloon, tall as a ten-story building.

  The Baroness floated out over the street, bobbing and swaying in her leather swing. The shadow of the enormous legs fell across her naked body. The wind was with her. She began to drift in the direction of Sully's dune buggy.

  It was a fantastic scene down there: a bedlam of Roman soldiers and slave girls and half-naked gladiators. The crowd surged first in one direction, then another, trying to avoid the wandering elephants and the more dangerous of the big cats. A giraffe, tall and grave, walked stilt-legged through the mob, its long neck bobbing. A lion stalked a terrified zebra that kicked up its hooves and fled, knocking people over. A dark-suited gangster with a machine gun skulked past the saloon, then whirled, firing at an unseen target. Down at the end of the street, flames and billowing smoke reached into the clear desert air. The fire was spreading from the general store.

  And over it all, a few hundred yards ahead of her, was a colossal brassiere floating in the air like a blimp.

  Down below there were shouts of wonder, upturned faces, as people saw the pantyhose balloon, a hundred feet from toe to waist, suspended above them. After a forty-foot brassiere, it was too much. The Baroness hoped that none of the mobsters with submachine guns would notice her.

  Sully hadn't looked upward. He was too busy maneuvering the dune buggy through the throng. The Baroness gritted her teeth. Her rate of drift was frustratingly slow. Sully was going to break through to freedom any minute.

  An elephant slowed him up. He had to stop and wait while the great beast crossed the street. The Baroness was directly over him now. The shadow of the giants legs passed over the dune buggy. Sully looked up in surprise. Then there was a sudden clear space in front of him and he gunned the motor. The dune buggy shot forward.

  Penelope watched the blue-and-white striped awning streak clear of the make-believe main street and out into the desert. But now she was clear of the turmoil too. She was past the last of the wooden buildings and out over the sand.

  The dune buggies were parked there. A half-dozen of them, neatly fined up in a row, each with a striped awning over it.

  She was directly above them now. She put the little golden gun between her teeth, said a silent prayer, and dropped thirty feet onto one of the blue-and-white awnings.

  Chapter 17

  Wharton tossed a grenade into the saloon and waited for it to go off.

  He was dressed in green fatigues and combat boots, slung all over with ammo pouches and equipment. The nine-pound Galil assault rifle was cradled in his arms like a baby.

  He hit the swinging doors now, firing from the hip, and immediately rolled sideways. His slugs tore through two dazed hoods who had survived the grenade, slamming them backward against the rickety tables. A third hood was dead on the floor, freckled with blood from grenade fragments.

  Wharton stood up slowly. Fiona came through the doors, her lush figure lost in oversize fatigues, carrying a light Enforcer machine pistol one-handed. When she saw the carnage, she let the gun drop to her side.

  Wharton turned to say something to her. But she was suddenly raising the auto pistol again, shouting, "Behind you!"

  He whirled in time to see the bartender pop up from behind the bar, aiming a 12-gauge shotgun directly at his tripes. There was a frozen fraction of a second when Wharton could see the man with the striped shirt and the sleeve garters and the brocade vest, his forehead bloody from a stray grenade fragment, and realize that he couldn't possibly bring his own weapon up in time.

  There was the awful roar of a shotgun, and Wharton wondered why he felt no pain, and then the bartender was falling into the shelves of bottles, his head — or what was left of it — turned into a red and gray mushroom.

  Joe Skytop stepped grinning from the rear of the saloon, wearing nothing but a jockstrap, a smoking shotgun in his hands.

  "I killed two of 'em in the alley," Skytop said. He gestured toward the bodies with his shotgun. "Is that the last of them?"

  Wharton wiped a sleeve across his sooty face. "I think so. Eric and Yvette nailed the guy who was playing hide-and-seek in the Colosseum. There was a guy trying to get across the desert on a bulldozer, but Paul brought him down. He's using the bulldozer now to knock down some of the smaller sets."

  Inga poked her head inside the door. "You'd better get out of there," she said. The fire's spreading this way."

  "Let's help it along," Skytop said. "The Baroness wants us to blow this place. Sully's equipment is upstairs. We can toss a couple of incendiaries before we leave."

  Inga looked disapprovingly at Skytop's jockstrap. "Joe Skytop, what have you been up to?" she said. "And where's the Baroness?"

  He looked past her through the door, past the flaming buildings and the refugees streaming into the desert.

  "She's somewhere out there," he said.

  * * *

  Rome was burning behind her. The Baroness looked back over her shoulder and saw the smoke reaching up into the clear desert sky. She could hear the dull thump of explosions. Wharton and the rest of her team must have finished mopping up the Syn's private army, and had started blowing the buildings with plastique.

  The dune buggy bounced over the sand ridges, jarring her teeth and jolting her breasts painfully whenever the wheels hit. She was glad of the awning over her. Without it her bare skin would have been fried by the sun.

  Sully's dune buggy was a quarter-mile ahead, a bright blue flea hopping over the sand. He knew he was being pursued. He'd attempted to lose her, a distance back, by dodging in and out of a labyrinth of ancient channels carved in a dry lake bed. But it wasn't really possible to lose her in this kind of country; the rising cloud of dust betrayed him. All he could do was travel flat out.

  The two dune buggies were fairly evenly matched; she had no advantage there. But she was a skilled race driver. She was making up the distance between them, inch by painful inch, by squeezing every possible aid out of the terrain. She kept her rear wheels on the ground fractions of seconds longer than Sully did, whenever the corrugated flats jounced them into the air. She kept the differential less busy than he did, not wasting rpm. She avoided the soft sandy patches. And her shifting was a virtuoso performance.

  She drew closer and closer. The dune buggy was only a hundred feet in front of her now, a thing of blurred wheels and metal struts, the exposed VW engine like the works of a disemboweled alarm clock. She bared her teeth in a savage grin and reached for the Bernardelli VB on the seat beside her.

  A naked figure stood up in the other vehicle and leaned far out to the side
, holding onto an awning strut. It was Iron Man. His great corded muscles stood out with the effort of holding on at seventy miles an hour, with the dune buggy leaving the ground entirely when it hit ridges. She was close enough to see the stony blue of his eyes, the flashing white teeth as his lips pulled back with the strain of keeping his grip.

  He was twisted around to face her. His hand came up with a peculiar object in it. She took it at first for a pink fencepost with a decorative acorn tip, and then she saw that it was an artificial phallus.

  She swerved the buggy and ducked. The dildo spurted fire. A bullet whistled past her cheek and ripped through the awning behind her.

  It was going to take him time to reload. The device couldn't possibly hold more than one shell at a time. She drew closer on a tangent and raised the Bernardelli VB.

  The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. She swore under her breath. Sully must have emptied the clip when he went through her things.

  Iron Man was leaning out again, pointing his weapon. He could keep her at a distance with it. Deliberately she closed with the other dune buggy, tempting him. The dildo jerked in his hand. A bullet rattled against the forward housing of her buggy.

  She pulled up abreast of Sully's buggy on the driver's side, at a distance of less than thirty feet. This was going to be dangerous, but it was the only way.

  She worked the heavy ring off her finger, steering with one hand. A touch separated the ring into three crescent-shaped segments. She palmed them.

  Iron Man was struggling to reload, the bouncing motion slowing him down. She could see Sully's piglike face, intent over the wheel, darting tense little glances in her direction. Iron Man leaned across him, poking the asparagus-shaped thing under his nose. The Baroness fell back slightly to the rear to make his aim more difficult.

  The plastic phallus banged at her. There was a burning streak along her upper" arm; the .45 caliber slug had just barely creased her. Did she have enough time before he could reload again?

  She combed her fingers through her thick hair, trying to separate the polymer strands. She found the end of one and plucked it from her scalp. Working by feel, never taking her eyes from Iron Man, she made one-handed surgeon's knots, fastening the three crescent-shaped weights to the three ends of the hair-fine bolas.

  She tore back the awning and stood up, her foot still pressing the gas pedal flat. The dune buggy pitched and bucked. She braced her legs and hung onto the wheel, somehow managing to steer.

  Iron Man grinned when he saw how she'd exposed herself as a target. He raised the phallus weapon and held it straight out, like a target shooter. Desperately, Penelope twisted the wheel and veered toward him. He flinched just as the weapon fired, spoiling his aim. His lips formed an obscene word. He swung back to his seat and scrambled to reload again. The Baroness veered to a parallel course again. That trick wasn't going to work twice.

  She whirled the bolas around and around over her head. Her brain was a computer, calculating the best moment for the throw. But Sully was driving with his chin hunched down. It wouldn't work unless he raised his head.

  If only he'd look up! It had to be in the next minute, before Iron Man could reload and aim. His next bullet would get her.

  Iron Man finished loading. She could see the box of shells on Sully's lap. Sully drove with furious concentration, his chin still down. Iron Man raised the phallus, an expectant, almost sensual, expression on his face.

  And then it was directly in front of them, floating twenty feet off the ground, a pale blue daydream against the deeper blue of the sky.

  It was the bra. A bra for a giantess, with cups as big as carnival tents. It trembled on the desert breeze, its ends streaming like banners. It had had two hours to drift all this way on its two hydrogen-filled globes.

  Sully's head snapped up. He stared at it in amazement.

  And the Baroness let fly with the bolas.

  It spun through the air, the hair-fine filament, invisible and only the metal weights making a shimmering halo. It wrapped itself around Sully's neck. He gave a squawk, a squawk that was suddenly cut short as the wheel spun out of his grasp and the dune buggy lurched out of control.

  The buggy rolled over, spilling the two men and sending a shower of film cans raining down on the sand. Sully lay motionless, amidst a fitter of cans and reels and unwound film.

  But Iron Man was still alive. He got groggily to his knees, shaking his leonine head. He'd lost the dildo. With a grunt, he raised himself to his feet. The powerful muscles rippled.

  The Baroness gunned her motor. The dune buggy's wheels spun in the sand. She'd lost control of the wheel during the bolas toss and dug herself into a dune.

  Iron Man trudged toward her, an elemental figure against the sky. Penelope switched off the ignition and climbed down into the sand to meet him.

  They faced each other across a patch of sand, a naked man and a naked woman. At some moment in the distant past, a male and a female had contended this way and fixed the fate of the sexes forever. The Baroness crouched as he rushed her, her eyes flashing and her breasts swinging.

  She grabbed his wrist as he swung a sledge-hammer hand toward her. It would have torn her head off if it had connected. She ran past him, still carrying his wrist, and wrapped his arm across his back.

  The wrist slipped out of her grasp before she could bring it all the way up. It was the damned oil he'd rubbed over his body.

  She jumped clear before he could strike, and stood facing him again. He gave her a smug, athlete's smile. He was a foot taller than she was, and had a longer reach. He could club her with those heavy hands, while she'd be unable to strike at any vital part of his anatomy. She had to get hold of him. And he was as slippery as an eel.

  She bent quickly and scooped up a handful of sand. She flung it at him, then another handful and another. The gritty particles clung to the oil. Iron Man stared down at his body in consternation, a look of distaste on his features.

  She rammed him with her shoulder. His abdominal muscles were rock hard. He grunted, reaching for her. But she was already embracing him from behind. Her arms snaked around his barrel chest, under his shaved armpits, her hands clasping one another behind his neck in a full nelson. Her breasts were flattened against his wood-hard back, her pelvis pressed against his buttocks. She bore down on his vertebrae. His powerful neck muscles tensed, keeping her from forcing his head down. The great biceps bulged as he strained against her forearms to break her grip. She could feel her interlocked fingers giving.

  "You ain't got a chance," he whispered hoarsely. "I'm stronger than you. You can't let go, and you can't hang on."

  Desperately she pressed on his neck, but the thick corded muscles kept his head upright. As long as he didn't relax, even for a second, he was all right. She grunted and strained, her cheek pressed against his spine, almost as if they were lovers.

  He laughed, and heaved with his shoulder muscles. She felt her feet leave the ground. She hung on, dangling. Her fingers were getting slippery with perspiration. Struggling for purchase, she wrapped both legs around his body, riding him.

  Like a man out for a stroll, he began walking casually toward a jagged boulder. He was going to dash her against it, dislodge her or break her back.

  She pressed. His neck muscles held firm. He was paying attention.

  Her bare heel, hooked around in front of him, encountered a dangling something the size of a large carrot. She ran the sole of her foot along it.

  "Hey, watch that," he said. He continued walking toward the boulder.

  She caressed it with her toes. Was it her imagination, or was it expanding?

  "Cut it out," he said.

  She continued rubbing with her foot. The carrot became a zucchini. It stood out in front of him like a bowsprit.

  She kicked sideways with all her might. He bellowed in pain. He forgot for a split second to keep his neck muscles tense. With a sob, she bore down with all the strength she had left.

  His neck gave a dr
y snap. The big head with its mane of yellow hair dangled at an impossible angle. He pitched forward into the sand, carrying the Baroness with him.

  She got up, covered with sand and mineral oil. Iron Man's muscles had suddenly lost their tone and become flaccid. It was one of the first things you noticed in a corpse.

  She turned around. There was movement over near the wrecked dune buggy. It was Sully. Miraculously, he hadn't died. He was crawling toward an object in the sand.

  She raced him for it, pounding a dozen yards over the sand. She got there just as he picked it up. It was Iron Man's .45 caliber dildo.

  She took it away from him almost gently. His little pig eyes looked up at her wordlessly.

  "It's The End, Sully," she said. "This is the scene where you get killed by a naked broad."

  She put both hands around his neck and strangled him. The giant bra floated over him like a guardian angel.

  She picked up Iron Man's dildo and examined it curiously. She could fit her whole hand inside it. She probed as deep as she could with her middle finger. There was some kind of a pressure-sensitive disc made of metal — the trigger mechanism. It probably reacted to the spasmodic expansion of the penis during orgasm.

  She pointed the turnip end at the bra in the sky. She pushed with her middle finger. A shot rang out, and the phallus kicked in her hand. The bra writhed in the air, its cups sagging. It fluttered to her feet like a punctured balloon. It was back to normal size. She lowered herself into the cups and hooked it in back. Then she stripped the blue-and-white striped awning off the wrecked dune buggy.

  By the time Wharton and Skytop found her, she was wearing a flowing caftan with blue-and-white stripes, nice enough to be on the cover of Vogue.

  Chapter 18

  "It wasn't suicide," Farnsworth said. "Mr. and Mrs. Secretary died in an automobile accident. A great tragedy for the nation."

  "What about the autopsy?" Penelope said. "How did they explain the bullet wounds?"