by J. I. Greco
A wholly ineffectual protective shield.
The mace struck with a thunderclap, sparks flying as shining tempered blue steel crashed against rusty salvaged steel. Hunt-R’s arms were knocked back into his chest with enough force to not only bend the roll-bar cage around Trip inward, but send Hunt-R airborne.
Trip flailing and helpless inside, Hunt-R went flying, arcing ten feet through the air to land flat on his back with a massive thud. The impact drove Hunt-R two inches into the soft ground, and knocked the air out of Trip.
A cheer of squid warbling and tree-tank branch rustling rose from the Cthulist’s side of the clearing.
A slightly louder cheer of laughter rose from the warbot side.
“Owwwww...” Trip moaned.
“I have experienced an operational malfunction,” Hunt-R announced. Smoke poured from his joints.
Neck bent and chest pinned tight by the bent-in roll cage, Trip smirked at the sky. “I can see that.”
“Can I run away now?” Hunt-R asked.
“I dunno… can you even stand?”
“I think crawling’s still possible. If you can manage to roll me over.”
“No, we’re not running away. Not while there’s money to be made, and we’ve still got a secret weapon.”
“Secret weapon?” Hunt-R asked.
Trip lifted his arm. Hunt-R’s arm thrust upward, index finger pointed at the sky. “Unleash the Death Blossom!”
“For the last time,” Rudy yelled from the edge of the clearing, “he is not a Gunstar!”
Trip huffed, lowered his and Hunt-R’s arm. “No Death Blossom, then?” he asked Hunt-R.
“No,” Hunt-R said.
“Not even a tiny one? A Stun Blossom, perhaps?”
“No.”
“Okay… how about a nuke?”
“No.”
“Come on… you at least have to have a comedically oversized sixteen-ton weight to drop on his head?”
“That would admittedly be cool, but alas, no. I do not have a sixteen-ton weight.”
“Do you in fact have any offensive systems of any kind?”
“Depends,” Hunt-R said. “May I borrow your pistol?”
“I had to leave it in the Wound, wouldn’t fit.” Trip drummed Hunt-R’s fingers on the ground and sighed. “Vishnu’s Monday morning quarterbacking… You know, on second thought, we really should have gone through that system checklist.”
“Lesson learned?”
“Making a mental note for next time, yup.”
A squid-shaped shadow fell over them. Brad looked down at them, his beak curled and his eyes squinted almost apologetically. “Do you yield?”
“Do I yield?” Trip tried to sit up. Hunt-R budged, but only barely, his back suctioned to the wet ground and his spinal servos whining in protest. “Do I yield…? ’Course we don’t yield.” Trip growled and extended Hunt-R’s hand out at Brad. “Little help?”
Brad slithered two tentacles out and wrapped them around Hunt-R’s wrist. An effortless tug and Hunt-R and Trip were lifted off the ground and into the air. Brad gently eased them down.
“Thank you,” Trip said, planting Hunt-R’s unsteady feet carefully. Brad withdrew his tentacles and Trip looked up at him, then past him, pointing Hunt-R’s hand over the Cthulist’s shoulder. “Hey, look, it’s the flaming, floating disembodied head of Lucille Ball–and she looks pissed!”
Brad twisted his bulbous head around to look behind him. “What?”
There was nothing there.
“Run, Hunt-R!” Trip yelled. He spurred Hunt-R into action, whipping him around and getting his legs pumping. “Run like the wind!”
And the robot did. Straight for the nearest line of trees, as fast as his creaking legs could take him.
“He’s following us, isn’t he?” Trip asked, leaping Hunt-R from fallen tree trunk to fallen tree trunk. They’d been running for two hours, and maybe seven miles, and were now making slow, laborious progress up one of the mountains bordering the Cthulist enclave’s valley. It was old forest here, or had been long ago. Now it was old forest debris, thick-trunked trees felled by time, industrial disease, and cycles of war, all tangled together in a random jumble.
“Why wouldn’t he?” Hunt-R swiveled his head one-hundred and eighty degrees around to look behind him down the mountain. There was Brad, astride a muimuipouritan, the tree-tank scrambling gracefully over the carpet of fallen trees on a nest of writhing roots. Moving faster than Hunt-R ever could over this terrain, and getting closer. “And hey, look, he even had time to grab one of those tree-tank things. Man, they can move… You know, I think he’s going to catch us.”
“Then run faster,” Trip urged, trying to pump his tired legs and arms harder.
“Hop out and I will.”
“Always with the snark.” Trip vaulted Hunt-R over a large tree trunk that obscured his cramped, bent-neck view up the mountain. “–Ackhh! Mountaintop!”
Hunt-R spun his head back around just in time to see that the mountain had stopped, just like that. He let out a yelp and locked his hydraulic joints, skidding to a teetering stop at the edge of the sheer, glassy cliff.
The robot’s toes dangled over the edge where the mountain had been shorn clean away in some long-ago and forgotten war by a small-yield tactical nuke, leaving a shiny black crater in its side.
Trip flailed his and Hunt-R’s arms to keep them from toppling over the edge, and looked down into the valley below. His eyes went wide.
An army marched through the valley below. And not a Cthulist one, either. Thousands upon thousands of soldiers, a line of infantry stretching back down the valley out of site. From the backs of every tenth row of infantry flew bright red banners.
“Vishnu’s ten-scrollar hair cut,” Trip said. “Are those Chinese colors they’re flying?”
“It appears so, yes,” Hunt-R said, taking a step back from the edge. “But only, I imagine, because they appear to be the Chinese Occupation Force.”
“Huh.” A quiet rustle of leaves and Brad and his muimuipouritan drew up alongside Trip and Hunt-R. “What are they doing this far East?” Brad asked.
“I could venture a guess,” Hunt-R said.
“Shut up,” Trip said.
“Wow. Dad’s going to want to hear about this.” Brad thumped his muimuipouritan’s trunk with a tentacle and reigned the tree-tank around. “Later.” The giant tree moved off, its roots easily finding firm purchase on the fallen trees as it made its way back down the mountain.
“I’m counting this as a win!” Trip twisted Hunt-R’s torso around to yell at Brad’s departing back. He twisted back around and looked down into the valley. He squinted, focused on those long red banners. The golden cash register and stars emblem of the Chinese Home Government was prominent at the top of each, but the lower half was dominated by another emblem: A feminine fist, with its triple-jointed fingers and two-inch long fingernails wrapped around the throat of a well-groomed vole. Trip’s victorious, smug smirk vanished. “Shit.”
“Why do I recognize the design on those banners?” Hunt-R asked. His Cyclops eye whirred as it zoomed in. “Oh, yeah. That’s the Warlord Hu’s symbol. Huh. You remember her, right? Nice lady, a little vindictive. You stood her up at the altar, or so I heard–I wasn’t invited to the wedding. I wonder… you think that’s her army down there?”
“Shut up.”
11
Come For The Beer, Stay For The Witch Burning
“And another thing, have you seen the way they dress?”
Lock paced the length of the stage she and Brenda had assembled out of beer barrels and corrugated iron sheets in front of the fountain in Shunk’s town square, the heels of her kicker boots clacking with every sharp step. A banner made from three dirty sheets sewn together with twine hung above the stage. It proclaimed, in hand-scrawled lettering:
Sisters = Witches = Evil = Die In A Fire
Next to the stage was a ten-foot burning pole surrounded with loose piles of hay and kind
ling.
“I mean, come on, it’s the twenty-second century, why are they wearing clothes at all?” Lock asked into the rolled-up, two-hundred-year old Time magazine she was using as a megaphone. “Shouldn’t they simply be wearing efficient, transparent spray-on coatings to protect themselves from the elements? What are they hiding underneath all that excessive, possibly tucked-away penis concealing leather? Spiked vagina man-traps? Why not show off the goods?”
Lock paused. It was an applause line, or should have been. None came.
She glared out at the square. The empty square, at least in front of the stage. The vendor booths on the other end of the square–they were busy. Townspeople milled around, lined up, bought food and had their free lunch beers–and conspicuously went out of their way to avoid looking at the stage while they were at it.
Lock lowered the magazine megaphone, thumped it against her side, and growled.
The pleats of her plaid miniskirt swaying, Brenda came skipping up to the stage from her father Stan’s booth, a fried rat on a stick clenched in one fist.
“What did your father have to say? He’s jumping at the chance to join the cause, isn’t he?” Lock asked from the stage. “Go tell him there are some torches and oil behind the stage–if he promises to hit Roxanne’s house first he can be mob leader.”
“Nah.” Brenda bit the head off the rat, spit it at the ground. “He passed. But he did say you’re kinda spooking his customers… so…”
Lock’s silver eyebrow went up. “So?”
Brenda stopped sucking at the rat’s severed neck. “So can we keep it down?” She swept the rat’s neck at the empty square around her. “Or better yet, pack it in for the day? It’s not like anybody’s paying attention.”
“I must admit, I was expecting a larger crowd.” Lock collapsed the magazine-megaphone, stuck it under her armpit, and jumped down off the stage. “I would have thought the proles would jump at the chance to turn on their sexy betters.”
“I told you, people like the Sisters.” Brenda crunched into the rat’s belly, squirting oil and juices over her chin and cheeks. Giggling, she wiped it away with the back of her hand and nibbled while she talked. “We… I mean, they… they do good deeds. They run the elementary school. They raise money for the hospital–just last year alone the used dildo and bake sale raised enough for a new wing. Plus, they appease the gods.”
“Fake gods.”
“Still.” Brenda hopped up to sit on the edge of the stage. She crossed her legs, bounced her foot, and nibbled fried rat. “The people aren’t going to turn on the Sisters just because you ask them to.”
“Why not? My voice carries the weight of law. Thousands obey my every command, without question–”
“Carried the weight of law,” Brenda said, punctuating her words by jabbing the headless fried rat at Lock. “Obeyed your every command. And that was only because the All-Mart’s nanochines had turned them into zombie slaves. All-Mart’s shut down, all those zombies freed, and you’re just you, now. No more nanochines to take over people.”
“Well, not as many…”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Lock crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against the edge of the stage. “Okay, I will admit, it is an adjustment I’m having the slightest bit of trouble making. I’m used to being in charge. How do you do it?”
“Do what? Not being in charge?”
“Yes. Being powerless sucks.”
“Have you seen the looks the boys and the creepier men are giving us thanks to the new outfits?” Brenda jogged her head at the fountain. A pair of boys, no older than thirteen, and a bald sixty-plus year old man with his hands jammed deep inside the pockets of a ratty pink raincoat were staring around the edge of the fountain at them. Brenda shot them an unamused smirk and the boys instantly retreated behind the fountain. The old man lingered, leering–his pockets fluttering–for a few uncomfortably long seconds before doing the same. Brenda shivered, then shrugged her eyebrows at Lock. “That ain’t powerless.”
“I see where you’re going,” Lock said. “Forget this Reverend Paris persecuting the Sisters routine…”
“Thank the gods–”
“…we’re going to raise an army of boys and perverts by enthralling them with our not-even-barely-legal sensuality, then use their pent-up sexual frustration to power our takeover of the Wasteland.”
Brenda’s head drooped. “That’s not exactly–”
Lock snapped her fingers. “You’re right. We should stick to concentrating on taking over the coven first. We’ll go after the Wasteland come spring, when we’re rested.”
Brenda tore the last bit of meat from the fried rat with her fingers, tossed it into her mouth, then licked her fingertips. “And what are you going to do when this horny army of yours takes one look at all the Sisters and defects?”
“They wouldn’t dare.”
“One word: Boobs.” Brenda looked down at her own chest. “The Sisters have a lot more of them then we do.”
Lock grabbed the flesh-stripped rat-on-a-stick from Brenda. “I can make mine bigger, but point made.” She raised the rat to her face, her eyes shooting out tendrils towards it.
Brenda cleared her throat. “What did we talk about?”
“Oh, yes,” Lock said. Her eye-tendrils retracted and she slid the rat-on-a-stick, stick and all, into her mouth. She swallowed it whole, her throat expanding, undulating, working the rat down into her body to be torn into its constituent raw molecules discretely out of sight. “But without an army or an angry mob, how am I supposed to take over the coven? I guess there’s always Plan B, but that’s almost like cheating.”
“If you really want to take over the coven, just do it the old fashioned way.”
“Rig an election?”
“Or win an election legitimately. You know, do the same thing Mother Rox did. Work hard, earn the respect of your fellow sisters, and when the time comes and the Mother Superior retires–”
“Or dies tragically under mysterious circumstances.”
“–Umm, sure. Whatever, when the time comes, make a run for the post and trust that everything you’ve done for the coven and community is recognized.”
Lock took her chin in-between thumb and forefinger. “There is a certain logic to that approach, I suppose.”
“Good. So, can we forget all this and beg Mother Rox to let us back in the coven?”
“Logic, yes, but who has the time for all that? I’ve got a planet to conquer, can’t spend ten years laying the groundwork for an election I may end up losing. So, no… If it’s all the same to you, I think I’m going with Plan B.”
“And Plan B is?”
“Assassinating Roxanne, of course. Now, you swear you didn’t sneak one of those cookies, right?”
12
Killswitch
“So, Hu’s in the Wasteland, then?”
Trip settled into the Wound’s driver seat, yanked the heavy door closed behind him. “Yup. Looks that way.”
Laid out in the back seat, Rudy stuffed loose tobacco from a paper bag into the bowl of his Calabash. “What you suppose she’s doing out here?”
“Well, obviously, the Chinese are invading the Wasteland.” Trip leaned over to slap the glove compartment open with his palm. Its contents, kept under pressure by the compartment door, spilled out. Atlas, spent shotgun shells, commemorative Karel Capek bobblehead with missing bobblehead, a ring of a couple hundred random car keys, a half-eaten jar of strawberry-flavored All-Mart baby food, a sheaf of a hundred loose index cards all with the word “Smeg” written on one side and “Head” written on the other. All of it fell into the already ankle-deep with junk passenger side well. Trip reached in, ran his hand through what little hadn’t spilled out. “Shatner damn it, where’s my spare tin of cigs?”
“Invading the Wasteland? Really?” Rudy put his pipe between his teeth and folded up the paper bag, stuffed it away into the crack under the seat cushion. “Not like there’s a lot of
resources out here. Why would Hu want to–”
Trip slammed the glove compartment closed and sat back. “She wouldn’t want to. You know what she’s doing out here. She’s come after me.”
“Come after us, you mean.” Rudy slid his lighter from his bandolier and lit his pipe. “Bounty’s on both of us, remember?”
Trip took his own head in both hands, gave it a light tug left and right until his spine cracked, then stretched out the rest of the kinks left over from spending half a day inside Hunt-R. He glared into the back seat through the rear-view. “Well, congratu-fucking-lations.”
Rudy hid a smile behind a thick exhale of smoke. “Just saying.”
Trip huffed, looked out over the dash at the empty clearing. Brad’s squid and tree-tank army was long gone, the sun sinking below the mountains bordering the valley. He yelled out the open window. “Yo, robot.”
Hunt-R, back in his usual compact form, clanked up to the driver’s side door. A gap ran down the middle of his dented chest, the panels bent out of shape and no longer capable of interlocking smoothly. Oily black smoke poured from his elbow and knee joints. He leaned down and put his hands on the door windowsill, the pinky on his left hand pointing straight out, immobile. “Yes, Programmer Trip? We’re ready to go when you are.”
Trip smirked at him. “Great.”
“And I was wondering, considering the shape I’m in, could I maybe ride in the car this time? You know, in the back seat, for once? I could really use the downtime to make repairs–”
Trip rooted around in his various inner jacket pockets. “Sure, sure. –Damn it, I could have sworn I brought the spare tin along. Wait a tic–” His hand came out of a pocket with a rubber-banded bundle of rolling papers made from cut-up book pages. “Rudy, give me that tobacco, will ya?”
“What tobacco would that be?”
“The bag of tobacco you just had.”
