by J. I. Greco
“Oh, that one. I ate it.”
Trip slowly turned his head, trained wild, twitching eyes on Rudy over the back of the front seat. “Did I mention I haven’t had a smoke in like four hours?”
Rudy’s eyes went wide and his lips pulled back over his teeth. “Eek.” He reached under the seat, grabbed the rumpled bag, and tossed it at Trip. “Here ya go, all yours.”
“Really?” Hunt-R asked. “I can sit in the car? The actual inside of the car?”
Trip opened the bag and sniffed, then reeled back. “Vishnu’s sinuses, where’d you dig this stuff up, Rudy? Smells like ass.”
“Sorta tastes like that, too,” Rudy said. “Start growing you own if you don’t like it.”
“Bastard.” Trip sat the bag on his lap and pulled a rolling paper off the bundle–the lower third of page 57 from a 1982 paperback edition of Fahrenheit 451. He glanced over at Hunt-R. “No, of course not. You’re a trunk robot, at best. Anyway, you’re not going with us.”
“You’re not sending us against the Warlord Hu’s army, are you?” Hunt-R asked, a frightened warble to his voice.
“Don’t think I didn’t consider it, what with your absolutely shameful performance out there, but no.” Trip flattened the rolling paper onto the top of the dash and scooped a handful of tobacco from the bag. He dropped it haphazardly onto the paper, making a high loose pile, then squished the pile down with one hand and started rolling the paper over it with the other. “You head back to Shunk, warn ‘em there’s an army in the vicinity. But it’s the Red army, so they’ll be overly polite and pay for stuff. Tell Morty he can probably get away with hiking beer prices by four-hundred percent. He’ll make a killing, even after my fifty-percent gross cut for the suggestion. Oh, and tell him I’m taking a fifty-percent gross cut for the suggestion.”
“As long as I don’t have to go to war, I’ll tell him anything you want.” Hunt-R straightened and clanked off towards the back of the Wound.
“We’re not heading back to Shunk yet?” Rudy asked.
“Nope.” Trip licked the edge of the paper and sealed the cig, then blew the spillover tobacco that hadn’t made it into the cig–fully two-thirds of what he’d dumped out–off the dash. “Coast, here we come. We’ll steal a boat in North Carolina and head to Europe.”
Rudy sat up. “Europe?”
Trip lit the cig and inhaled. The deep lines on his face faded and he relaxed back into the seat. “Yeah. I’m sure they’ve forgotten what we did last time we were there by now, but if not a name change and some plasti-genetic surgery will take care of that. Wonder if Tudyk’s still in Prague? He owes us one for helping him out with that cryogenic nursing home scam, can probably convince him to set us up with some starter cash until we get our legs under us. Might have to run a short con on him, maybe frame him for murder… you know, just to twist his arm, get him cooperative.” Trip glanced into the rear-view at Rudy. “How do you feel about foot-binding, and can you pull off a half-decent Japanese accent? Before you answer, you’ll also have to do a falsetto.”
Rudy glared back at him.
“Eh, we’ll practice on the boat.” Trip twitched his left eyebrow to start the Wound’s engine.
Only it didn’t start.
Trip growled, put his middle fingertip against his temple and twitched again, scrunching his eyebrows down.
The Wound didn’t respond. More than that, Trip became aware that he didn’t feel the Wound at all. No telemetry, no constant low-level hum of engine and tire diagnostic data dripping into his memory, no puppy-dog A.I. consciousness panting away happily in the corner of his own. Nothing. Like the Wound was dead. But it wasn’t dead–the GameGear control module in the dash was on, all lit up, short-range radar showing an 8-bit wireframe of the clearing and the cornfield surrounding it, and the row of indicator bulbs underneath were all green.
“Vishnu’s phantom limb, fucking buggy wireless connection piece of shit.” Trip banged his fist against the flap behind his ear. “Why did I ever let Rox talk me into it? Knew it was gonna be trouble the second she told me she wanted to experiment but there wasn’t gonna be another girl involved.” He reached down between his legs. “Where’s my old patch-cord?”
“Won’t help.” Rudy’s voice was calm and cold.
“Of course it’ll help,” Trip said, hand fishing around under the seat. “Sure, I can’t plug in anymore, but I can whip the wireless into submission. And if that doesn’t work, I can whip you–that always helps my mood, at least.”
“It won’t work because I installed a killswitch.”
Trip’s hand froze. “A kill-what now?”
“Killswitch over-ride on the engines,” Rudy said, slipping a pre-first apocalypse Motorola clamshell cellphone out of his bandolier. He held it up and smiled at it. “Put it in right after the wedding. For situations just like this.”
Trip sat up, twisted around. He sneered at the phone. “Aren’t we the clever monkey?”
“Bernie suggested it.”
“Of course she did.” Trip drew in a slow breath. “Unkill it.”
Rudy shook his head. “Only if we’re going back to Shunk.”
“Go back to Shunk? Are you fuckin’ serious? There’s an army scouring the Wasteland for us. Why in Shatner’s name would we want to go back to Shunk?”
“I dunno… Maybe because that’s where my new, very pregnant wife is. Not to mention Rox. And your daughter–”
“Pseudo-daughter.”
“Whatever. You just gonna leave Rox and Lock behind?”
“I’ll write, if I remember, have a spare moment, and my carpal tunnel doesn’t come back. Anyway, Rox and me are just casual, she understands that. –I’m pretty sure she understands that.”
“Yeah but are you sure you understand that?”
Trip brushed a stray strand of tobacco from the steering wheel. “And Lock, she’s done all right so far with minimal interference or concern from me. I hear she even joined a cult. Couldn’t be prouder.” He glared up at Rudy through the rear-view. “Now, start the car before I get annoyed.”
“No. I’ve got a life in Shunk. So do you, if you’d only admit it.”
“I admit nothing.”
“Way I see it, you’ve got two choices here, brother. You can get over yourself and drive us back to Shunk, where they’re gonna need our help dealing with the army that we’re responsible for bringing here. Or you can pop the door and get out, start walking in whatever direction you want. I don’t care where.”
Trip smirked into the rear-view. “Oh, I think I’ve got a third choice.”
“You already lost one fight today, you really want to lose another?”
“Lost? Bradley walked away. That’s a win.” Trip crossed his arms over his chest. “A draw, at the very least.”
Rudy reached over the back of the front seat and put his hand on Trip’s shoulder. “All our lives, first sign we’re getting close to making something permanent, we run away. I’m tired of it. Aren’t you? Isn’t it about time we stop running away?”
“Now that we’ve got something worth preserving?”
Rudy nodded.
“Melodramatic sappiness aside,” Trip said, “that’s exactly the best time to run away.”
“Dude.”
Trip dashed his cig out in the ashtray. “Fine. We’ll go back to Shunk. –But not because I’ve got a life there.”
Rudy climbed into the front seat. “No?”
“I left my other pair of socks back there, and damned if I’m gonna let those fall into Hu’s weird, extra-knuckle hands.”
Rudy plopped down into the passenger seat, flicked the Motorola open. Hey keyed in the sequence to deactivate the killswitch. 1. 2. 3. 4. “Right.”
The Wound instantly filled Trip’s head, a stream of familiar, welcome data. He closed his eyes and twitched. The engine purred to life. “So exactly what other little things have you done to my car that you haven’t told me about?” Trip asked.
“You mean besides the
driver’s side ejection seat?”
Trip’s eyes popped open. “The what–”
Trip’s jaw went slack as he stared out the windshield.
“Oh, hey, look,” Rudy said. He pulled his fez off and nodded at the two dozen Chinese soldiers pointing assault rifles in at them. “Scouting party…”
13
Who? Hu, That’s Who
“Have I mentioned today I hate you?” Rudy asked.
Arms bound behind their backs with heavy cast-iron cuffs and their feet linked together by too-short chains, Rudy and Trip were being led through the Warlord Hu’s camp by a three-man detachment of Hu’s red caped, golden helmeted personal guard.
Rudy briefly looked up from watching his shuffling feet to sneer over at Trip, shuffling along beside him. “Well, I do. And when we reincarnate, and you end up the bug you deserve to be, I will make it my new life’s mission to find you and see that you are stepped on.”
“What, you’re not going to step on me myself?”
“And ruin my karma for the next go round? Don’t think so.”
“So… looks like Delores is still doing pretty well for herself in the army department. Cali must be treating her right.” Trip craned his neck to look over a long communal barracks tent being efficiently, silently raised by a mix of men and women infantry, all Chinese nationals. “Are those tanks I see back there?”
“Yay, good for her.”
“Good for us, you mean.”
“Yeah, we’ll have our pick of executioners.”
“Executioners? What are you talking about?” Trip winked at the guard walking next to him. “Nobody’s getting executed.”
The guard stared back blankly at him.
“Well,” Rudy said, “I doubt she came all this way to let us suicide.”
“Nobody’s suiciding, either. Well, I won’t stop you if you want to.”
“You expecting some kind of rescue? You sent the warbots back to Shunk, remember? And even if by some chance they decide to double back and stage a daring recovery assault, they’ll just roll up into balls–”
“Defensive crouches.”
“–into defensive crouches the first time they’re challenged by a soldier pointing a finger at them.”
“You never know, the finger might be loaded. But no, not expecting a rescue. We don’t need a rescue. Not from our own army.”
“Our army?”
“Shatner, yeah. Me and Hu’s.”
“And what incredible stretch of the imagination has you thinking that? You sneak a half a beer while you were out on your runabout?”
“What? No… we both know she’s gonna forgive me.”
“Forgive you? You jilted her. At the altar.”
“Yes, but only the once,” Trip said.
They reached the end of the communal barracks. The guards kept them shuffling forward along the wide path between the motor pool and an area roped off for the still to be assembled mess tents towards a three-story tall tent. The Warlord Hu’s Fist-Choking-Vole banners flapped in the wind above the tall tent.
“Those are tanks back there,” Trip said, catching a glimpse of ZTZ20-79-Q turrets with their long 130mm railguns behind rows of parked half-tracks in the motor pool. Both tanks and half-tracks were painted in forest green camo, sharply out of place among the dominant browns of the Wasteland’s scrubland. “Ooh! I always wanted tanks. Especially the kind with legs. You think they have legs? Doesn’t matter. We can give them legs. Big beefy-thighed mech legs, three to a tank. That’ll be my first order as a warlord. Okay, maybe second order. A naked feast in my honor, that’ll obviously have to be the first order.”
Rudy shook his head. “Even for you, you’re pretty confident about Hu forgiving you. This is the woman who nuked San Jose just to teach San Francisco a lesson about not forgetting her birthday.”
“So she’s a little short-fused. But I’m very charming. And quite the looker. And when she sees my perfect hair and disarming half-smirk smile, and remembers exactly how special of a catch I am, the wedding will be back on, and this time, fifty-fifty I won’t run away.”
“Fifty-fifty?”
“Well, she might have gotten fat.” Trip turned to the guard walking next to him. “Hey, buddy?”
“Shénme?” the guard asked. What?
“So, the Warlord Hu… she didn’t put on any weight, did she?”
The guard didn’t respond, but the guard walking behind them jabbed Trip in-between the shoulder blades with the barrel of his QBZ-21-09T assault rifle, sending Trip stumbling forward into the back of the guard in front of them. After a moment tangled up in the guard’s cape, Trip recovered and settled back into a shuffling rhythm next to Rudy. “Well, that’s obviously a yes.”
“Will you shut up?” Rudy hissed. “You’re gonna get us killed before we can be executed.”
“It’s a serious question,” Trip said. “What if she ballooned? You know, from depression over me dumping her. I know I’d be sent into a morbid depression spiral if I dumped me. Oh, don’t give me that look. You know I don’t mind some meat on the bones, especially up top, but there are limits. Okay, maybe not limits on up-top, no holds-barred there, frankly, but you know what I mean.”
Rudy glared over at him. “You’d rather be killed than–”
“No, no. I just need to be mentally prepared,” Trip said, and pointed down at his hands with his eyes. Rudy looked and Trip showed him the grenade he’d plucked off the guard’s belt during his little ‘stumble’. Rudy grinned and Trip covered the grenade with his other hand. “Get myself into a Rubenesque headspace. You know, like you have to every night. Although with you and Bernie it’s more like having to get into triple Rubenesque headspace.” Trip again turned to the guard walking next to him. “They’re both getting plump, is what I’m saying. But at least his wife’s got an excuse.”
“Fuck you. Just fuck you.” Rudy tilted his head around Trip to ask the guard next to him: “Can you hit him for me?”
“Ānjìng.” Quiet.
Trip nodded at the guard. “Yeah, as your soon-to-be warlord-in-chief, you tell him.”
“Nín yě kěyǐ ānjìng, yángguǐzi.” You also be quiet, foreign devil.
“And maybe kick him,” Rudy suggested, grinning at Trip. “In the crotch,” he said with emphasis. “He loves that.”
They were almost at the big tent. Trip smiled at Rudy. “Especially when your wife does it.”
“Right, that’s it,” Rudy said, and with a guttural battle-cry flung himself back into the guard behind them, knocking the guard off his feet. Using the inertia of the impact to bounce, Rudy reversed direction, tucked his head in tight against his chest, and charged for the guard in front of them.
Before Rudy could get halfway there, the third guard stepped around Trip and bashed Rudy hard against the side of the head with the butt of his QBZ-21-09T.
Trip shook his head and clicked his tongue, disappointed and ashamed, as the guards wrestled Rudy to the ground.
“Wǒ de dàoqiàn, wǒ de xiōngdì, nǐ kěyǐ qīngchu dì kàn dào, yīgè zǔ'ài,” Trip said to the guards. He held up the grenade and didn’t resist when one took it from his hand. “Well, that almost worked.”
“No it didn’t,” Rudy said, his voice muffled by the boot heel on his cheek, pinning his head to the ground. “What the hell was that? You just stood there.”
“You did notice they have guns, right?”
“I signaled for you to go for his crotch.”
“Is that what you were getting at?” Trip asked. “I thought you were gonna grab the grenade and blow yourself up, creating a diversion so I could get away.”
“We have really got to work out our signals ahead of time.” The guards pulled Rudy to his feet. “No luck getting the Wound to respond?”
“No, they’re running some kind of signal jammer. Although I think I got a distress signal through to Radio Free Mexico City–”
“You have got to be kidding me,” said a husky female voic
e.
The Warlord Hu stood in the doorway of her tent, one fist balled up on her hip, the other holding the door flap open. Four foot five inches tall in combat boot heels, she was lean, with high cheekbones and higher hair–jet black, it fanned out above her head a foot and a half, an assortment of bejeweled hairpins keeping it erect and immobile. She wore the simple dull green uniform of a Chinese Home Government Regular Army infantry soldier, a warlord’s golden stars on her collar.
Trip raised his shackled hands and waved. “Hi, honey… I’m home?”
“For the record, it was Rudy’s fault.”
Trip knelt in front of a fold-up table in the Warlord Hu’s field command and control center, a vast room that took up the entire first floor of her tent. Supernumeraries bustled around the edges of the center, barking orders into shortwave phones while low-ranked technicians set up terminals, connecting them to the Home Government’s worldwide R.E.D. info-net. A iLenovo Mk XVII-S pad on the fold-up table projected a semi-transparent holographic map of the North American East Coast into the air. The Warlord Hu stood behind the table, coldly examining the map, her hands clasped behind her back. A rank of lieutenants arrayed behind her were at silent, rigid attention. A three-legged, one-eyed, lopsided-faced Calico nuzzled up against Hu’s combat-booted ankles quietly hacked up a hairball.
The guards forced Rudy down to his knees next to Trip. “My fault? How was it–”
Trip shook his head at Rudy and fixed his best I’m totally being sincere here smile on Hu, just in case she deigned to look down at him. “See, he woke up that morning feeling all depressed, you know, because here his brother was getting married to this absolutely stunning and powerful woman, and what prospects did he have? The bridesmaids had blown him off at the rehearsal reception, even your tranny cousin Wang, and of course that had made him all depressed, so he went and got so drunk he passed out cold in his own vomit. So when he woke up–in a pile of his own cold, sticky vomit–naturally, he was pining to see the Atlantic ocean.”
“Pining for the Atlantic?” Rudy whined. “How is that even related?”
